Reclaiming History (78 page)

11:00 a.m.

At police headquarters, Jim Leavelle, the lead detective in the Tippit murder case, is sipping coffee in the squad room with a couple other detectives, waiting for Captain Fritz when Fritz calls.

“Are you in a position to talk?” Fritz asks.

“No, not really,” Leavelle says.

“Well, go into my office and pick up the phone in there,” Fritz tells him.

Leavelle quietly saunters to the privacy of Fritz’s office.

“What’s up?” he asks.

“I’m down here at the Greyhound bus station with Graves and Montgomery,” Fritz says. “We’ve cased the county jail and it looks clear. I’m going to make a suggestion to you, and if you don’t think it will work, I want you to tell me.”

“Okay,” Leavelle replies, wondering just what Fritz has up his sleeve.

“Go get Ruby out of jail any way you want to, and bring him down in the elevator to the basement,” Fritz says. “We’ll pull through the basement at a prearranged time, load him up, and whisk him right on down to the county jail with another squad car following us. Do you think it will work?”

“Yes,” Leavelle agrees. “I think it will the way you’ve got it set up.”

“I haven’t called [Sheriff Bill] Decker or asked the chief about it,” Fritz admits.

“Well, all you can do is get bawled out,” Leavelle says, “but a bawling out is better than losing a prisoner.”

The two homicide men set about conspiring to move Ruby in secret.

“How many men you got there to help you with him?” Fritz asks.

“Three or four,” Leavelle answers.

“Okay. Don’t tell anybody where you’re going,” Fritz orders. “Just get them like you’re going after coffee and get downstairs or somewhere and tell them what you’re going to do. I’ll meet you in the basement at exactly eleven-fifteen.”

The two men synchronize their watches.

“Okay, Captain,” Leavelle says, and hangs up. He walks out into the squad room and without a word motions to Detectives Brown, Dhority, and Beck to follow him. The men follow, their curiosity piqued.

A reporter squares off with Leavelle the minute the detectives step into the third-floor hallway.

“When are you going to transfer Ruby?” the newsman asks.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Leavelle says coyly, and keeps walking.

When they get downstairs, Leavelle outlines the plan. He tells Brown and Beck to get another car out of the garage and get it in position to go out the ramp. He and Dhority go up to the fifth floor and check Ruby out of jail. They bring him down to the basement in the jail elevator, the same elevator Oswald rode on his fateful journey. Leavelle, who has known Ruby and been friendly with him (though not friends) since 1951, says to Ruby on the way down, “Jack, in all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never deliberately caused any police officer any trouble that I know of [but] you didn’t do us any favor when you shot Oswald. You’ve really put the pressure on us.” Ruby replied, “That’s the last thing in the world I wanted to do. I just wanted to be a damned hero and all I’ve done is foul things up.”

“Wait here,” Leavelle tells Dhority, who has a tight grip on Ruby’s arm, as they reach the basement.

Leavelle slips out of the elevator, letting the door close behind him. He looks at his watch. They’re only two minutes early.

“Don’t let anybody ring for this elevator,” he tells the unaware lieutenant standing behind the booking desk. “We’re going to have it tied up.”

Detective Brown talks casually with one of the jail officers just outside the jail office door, his eyes glancing at the top of the Main Street ramp every now and then. A few feet away, Detective Beck sits behind the wheel of an unmarked squad car, its motor running.

Brown spots Captain Fritz’s car, with Detective L. D. Montgomery driving and Fritz in the passenger’s seat, pulling into the Main Street ramp. Brown turns and nods toward Leavelle, who opens the elevator door so Dhority and Ruby can step out.

“I don’t want to have to push or shove you,” Leavelle tells Ruby, whom he hasn’t bothered to shackle himself to. “But I want you to move.”

Ruby is shaking, afraid another vigilante is lying in wait for
him
. Captain Fritz’s car glides to the bottom of the ramp and stops. Detective Graves, in the rear seat on the far side, leans over to open the rear door and when he does, Ruby dashes away from Leavelle and Dhority, as astonished jail officers look on, running to the open door where he crawls on his hands and knees onto the floorboard in the backseat and lies on his stomach.
*
Leavelle follows Ruby into the backseat and places his feet on Ruby’s back. “Jack was frightened and that’s where he wanted to stay,” Leavelle said, referring to Ruby’s prone position on the car floorboard, which he would stay in all the way to the county jail. The car leaves the basement garage with Dhority, Brown, and Beck in the backup car. The two-car caravan catches every green light en route to the county jail. When they arrive, the detectives in the lead car get out and cover the jail entrance. In a matter of seconds, Jack Ruby is safely inside the county jail.
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11:18 a.m. (12:18 p.m. EST)

At St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, the cameras inside pick up the last of the mourners as they crowd into the church. Admission is by invitation only, but in spite of the planners’ best efforts, the green-domed edifice is overflowing with a thousand people, many uninvited. The casket rests at the foot of the altar as Cardinal Cushing, in the Pontifical Low Requiem Mass, prays “for John Fitzgerald Kennedy and also for the redemption of all men…May the angels, dear Jack, lead you into paradise.” First Mrs. Kennedy, then Robert and Ted Kennedy and hundreds in attendance receive Holy Communion from the cardinal, and Bishop Philip Hannan gives an eleven-minute sermon in which he quotes liberally from the late president’s speeches.
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New York Times
reporter R. W. Apple describes his city as being “like a vast church,” where schools and businesses are closed and four thousand people stand silently in Grand Central Station to watch the funeral rites on a huge television screen, some of them genuflecting or making the sign of the cross. At anchor at Bayonne, New Jersey, the aircraft carrier
Franklin D. Roosevelt
fires its deck guns twenty-one times, once a minute from 12:00 noon to 12:21.
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“For those who are faithful to You, Oh Lord, life is not taken away; it is transformed,” Cardinal Cushing says solemnly. He blesses the casket with holy water.
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Outside the cathedral, after the one-hour funeral service, John-John stands hard by his mother as the casket is brought out, still clasping a pamphlet he was given as a distraction while sitting out the main body of the mass with a Secret Service agent in a cathedral anteroom. As the coffin is returned to the caisson, Jackie bends to her young son, takes the pamphlet from his tiny hand, and whispers something. In a heartbreaking gesture, the president’s son, who turned three today, cocks his elbow and salutes his father’s casket. Spectators standing across the street almost buckle at the sight. Of all the images burned into the consciousness of America, nothing comes close to the power of that tiny salute.
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As the caisson starts to roll, the heads of state and other dignitaries stand about waiting for their cars—the distance to Arlington National Cemetery is much too far to walk. Two former presidents, Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman, passionate political enemies only a few years earlier, walk to their car together. The muffled drums begin again, a constant rumble that nonetheless fails to drown out the spirited clack of the hooves of Black Jack, the magnificent sixteen-year-old riderless horse with a sword strapped to the empty saddle and stirrups holding empty boots pointed backward, a part of an ancient tradition in the funeral procession of a fallen leader, symbolizing that he will never ride again. The family cars roll slowly in behind the honor guards, followed by President Johnson’s automobile and the ever-present Secret Service. One by one the other vehicles fall into position in the one-hour, three-mile-long procession, which snakes along Connecticut Avenue to Seventeenth, and then Constitution to the Lincoln Memorial, where it crosses the Potomac River on the Memorial Bridge to Arlington National Cemetery, where only one other president is buried, William Howard Taft. David Brinkley muses that the first cars are quite likely to arrive at Arlington before the last cars depart St. Matthew’s Cathedral. The cameras mark time by showing faces from the crowd of ordinary Americans: a young priest, a soldier in dark glasses, a college boy holding a radio to his ear, an older woman clutching a large purse, and a family eating their lunch on the curb.
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As the cortege starts across the bridge, the cameras catch stunning shots from the heights on the Virginia side, the Lincoln Memorial perched majestically in the background. Waiting at attention at the bridgehead, facing the memorial in the far distance, are members of the army’s ceremonial Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps in their blazing red tunics and tricorn hats, a colorful reminder of the country’s revolutionary origins.
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The matched gray horses begin to labor as they pull the caisson up the winding roadway that leads to the 420-acre, one-hundred-year-old cemetery situated on land once owned by Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Last spring President Kennedy stopped here to relax and enjoy the view of the sparkling city across the river. “I could stay up here forever,” he remarked.
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Just fourteen days ago, November 11, the president, himself a decorated navy veteran of World War II, had driven here with his son John Jr. to lay a Veterans’ Day wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which is close to his grave site.
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As the procession nears the site of the open grave on a sloping hillside, the Irish Guard, a crack drill unit President Kennedy admired on his recent trip to Ireland, stands at parade rest. The casket advances slowly to the wail of bagpipes. As it reaches the grave site, a flight of fifty jet fighters, one for each state, thunders overhead at a speed so fast they precede their own sound. One position, in the otherwise perfect V-formation, is left empty, in accordance with air force tradition. The last plane to fly over, at a terrifying altitude of just five hundred feet, is the president’s personal jet, Air Force One, dramatically dipping its wings in tribute.
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The roar of the jet engines soon gives way to the silence of a hillside of somber faces. Cardinal Cushing intones the final prayer: “Oh God, through Whose mercy [the] souls of the faithful find rest, be pleased to bless this grave and…the body we bury herein, that of our beloved Jack Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, that his soul may rejoice in Thee with all the saints, through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
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The network pool camera sweeps over the line of military graves to the Custis-Lee Mansion on the hill above the ceremony, then cuts to Mrs. Kennedy. As each fusillade of the twenty-one-gun salute from three 76-millimeter canons is fired over the grave by the riflemen of the Old Guard, she shudders.

Cardinal Cushing asks the Holy Father to grant John Fitzgerald Kennedy eternal rest, and bugler Sergeant Keith Clark steps forward to play taps. His lips are chilled blue—he has been waiting in the cold wind on the exposed hillside for three hours—and one note cracks, adding an unexpected poignancy to the mournful air.
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The flag folding begins. The camera moves in for close-ups of the white-gloved hands rapidly creating the traditional triangular bundle of the great flag, which has until now draped the casket. The flag is rapidly passed through the honor guards from hand to hand until it reaches John C. Metzler, superintendent of the cemetery, who turns and places it in the hands of the young widow, whose lips, for the first time in public, visibly tremble. The Cardinal sprinkles holy water on the coffin, and Mrs. Kennedy, touching a torch to a jet of gas, lights the eternal flame.
*
Their hands locked in embrace, Bobby Kennedy then leads Jackie from the grave.
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Although the rites are concluded at 3:15 p.m. EST,
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television lingers at the scene, giving the commentators a chance to recall special moments from the four-day ordeal. Somehow television itself, improvising blindly to cover a unique event in the history of the medium, has become a major component of the larger historical event, and those who constructed that effort are already beginning to realize that some of them are inextricably woven into the texture of the experience—the sad eyes of Walter Cronkite, the poetic irony of Edward P. Morgan, the righteous anger of Chet Huntley. The television images have also conveyed the feelings of a nation, something that was impossible to adequately express in words.

Jacqueline Kennedy has one further official duty to attend to, and despite her mental state, it is of her own choosing. She will receive the foreign dignitaries who had come to the funeral from more than one hundred countries at the White House. “It would be most ungracious of me not to have all those people in our house,” she says, and manages a smile and thank you for each of them. JFK had once said of Jacqueline, “My wife is a shy, quiet girl, but when things get rough, she can handle herself pretty well.”
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Approaching midnight, Bobby Kennedy, alone with Jacqueline on the second floor of the White House, says quietly, “Should we go visit our friend?” After gathering up lilies of the valley she had kept in a gold cup on a table in the hall, they arrive at the cemetery at 11:53 p.m. in their black Mercury, followed by a car with two Secret Service agents. In the presence of only Secret Service agent Clint Hill, two military policemen, and the cemetery superintendent standing at a distance, and the only light being that from the flickering eternal flame, blue in the night, the attorney general and former First Lady drop to their knees and pray silently. Rising, Jackie places the spray of lilies on the grave. Together, they turn and walk down into darkness and into lives that would never be the same.
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