Top Down (4 page)

Rosemary lunged at the television, switching the knob from channel to channel in a fury, trying, Marti knew, to find something about that Secret Service agent.

Suddenly, as if she realized what was really going on, Rosemary sent Marti to her room.

“Mom! Please! For God’s sake, I’m a junior in high school!”

But Rosemary couldn’t bear the thought of her daughter hearing from some television reporter that her father was dead.

Marti’s thoughts were a frantic jumble. She raced through them knowing that she had ignored, until now, the obvious fact that being a Secret Service agent could be dangerous work. She had seen only a comic book and movie world where her hero father and his fellow hero agents got their man—or protected their president …

And then came the magic words from a television newsman—not Walter Cronkite—speaking behind a table:

“This just in. Earlier reports that a Secret Service agent was also killed have turned out to be erroneous. A Secret Service official said all agents are accounted for. The only other shooting victim besides President Kennedy and Governor Connally may have been a Dallas police officer. A report from the Associated Press says that a shooting of a uniformed officer occurred
in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas, several blocks from the assassination site at Dealey Plaza.”

Rosemary, hearing those same words, threw her arms around Marti, picked her up, and twirled her around and around like she did when she won the spelling bee at Dealey school.

T
HERE WERE SEVERAL
more calls from concerned friends and family before the one that mattered finally came.

“There you are! Thank the Lord, there you are!”

Her mom yelled it one, twice—a third time. Marti could only hear one side of the conversation, but it wasn’t hard to figure out what was coming from her dad on the other side.

“I understand, I understand,” her mom said, probably in response to her dad saying something about being sorry for not having called before now. “I can only guess how busy you’ve been.”

He must have said something about the earlier false report about a Secret Service agent casualty.

“Thank God, Van. Yes, we heard it all.”

She told him that his mother in Kinderhook and her relatives in Albany had called, as had several other relatives, friends, and Secret Service wives in Washington and elsewhere.

“Everybody knows you’re safe, honey. You are safe. That is what matters. Don’t talk about all of that at the hospital … it doesn’t matter … put it out of your mind …”

It sounded like Van kept interrupting her. “Think about you being physically safe. Don’t even think about any of the
rest—whatever you saw. Remember … my mother used to say to us kids, ‘Just close your eyes and throw it away,’ if there was something we saw that was bad. Well, you do the same, honey. Please, please just close your eyes and throw it away.”

After a few more seconds of listening to her husband, Rosemary looked over at Marti and said into the phone, “She’s being a real trouper, Van.” She paused. “No, no, she’s fine. She’s so proud of you … Please, honey, please. Marti’s fine. I promise. All she cares about right now is that you are safe.”

After another pause to listen, “Yes, I’ll tell her. It’ll make her so happy … No, not happy because of Kennedy, no, no, that would be crazy. Because you are alive and you are fine—that’s why she’s happy. I can only imagine what it was like for you, darling. What you saw …”

The conversation was coming to an end. “I’ll get it all ready whenever you come. It’ll be great to see you … even if it’s just for a few minutes. Be careful.”

Then, after another bunch of words from Van, Rosemary said:

“Don’t even think that, honey, much less say it. You did everything you could. All of you did. No, no, no. Never ever think that. Never!”

Rosemary kept the phone at her ear. “No, Van, please, don’t cry. Please don’t cry. Are there any of the other agents around?”

Van said something else quickly and Rosemary hung up the phone.

“One of the agents is going to drop your dad off at the
house sometime late this evening so he can sleep for a few hours,” she said to Marti, suddenly brisk and efficient even though the tears on her face were still wet and shining. “He needs some clean shirts, razor, toothbrush, and things. You know how your dad and the agents are—spic and span at all times, no matter what.”

“What did he tell you to say to me?” Marti asked.

“He said to tell you not to give up on the Cowboys. Someday they’ll make you proud.”

Marti agreed about the Cowboys. And then she thought about how wonderful it was that both her dad and Coach Landry wore felt hats. What a very strange thought.

But really, the important thing to her was that her father was not only alive, he was crying.

Not only had Marti never seen or heard her brave father, Secret Service special agent Martin Van Walters, cry. She had never imagined such a thing could happen.

W
HEN HER DAD
came home late that night, Marti couldn’t see or touch him.

She was in bed, dreamily trying to imagine Eddie LeBaron, alive and throwing a long forward pass, instead of what President Kennedy might look like dead in a coffin with his head shot to pieces. The television reports had said over and over that Mr. Kennedy had been shot in the head and with those words careening on a loop in her mind, closing her eyes and throwing it away was definitely not working.

The sounds of the car in the driveway and then of doors opening and closing in the house snapped Marti wide awake.

Once the house was quiet again, she crept out of bed and down the hall to a stealth position outside the closed door of her parents’ bedroom.

Marti could only hear what her dad was saying to her mom—much of it in frantic, incomplete bursts. Her mother, perhaps packing Van’s suitcase facing away from the door, was inaudible.

Marti heard her father begin to describe what had happened that morning. He said he was in the lead car, right in front of the Kennedys with Akins, the Secret Service’s lead man from Washington. The sheriff and the Dallas police chief were also with them in that car.

“We had just turned left onto Elm … still moving very slowly. I heard something that sounded like a gunshot … I wasn’t sure … but I said it out loud, ‘That was a shot.’ Then came another … and then another … I looked up at windows up and behind us … all of us did … I thought I saw a guy with a rifle … maybe I didn’t … the angle was down … like from that tower at Lindenwald in Kinderhook … what a crazy thing … to think about Lindenwald.”

And then Van’s voice got louder as he talked about how somebody said on the two-way car radio to “floorboard it.” They sped on to Parkland Hospital.

“It was like a dream … going a hundred miles an hour, maybe faster … Kennedy … was he dead? … in the backseat
of the limo … was he dead? … we didn’t know … the limo was right behind us … I could see Clint Hill back there in the backseat down on the Kennedys … Mrs. Connally was holding Governor Connally down to her … that’s all I could see.”

Then they were at Parkland. Now the words came like shouted shots.

“Kennedy’s head was blown apart! I saw his brains! His hair! His skull! Blood! Blood! Everywhere there was blood! Bits! Bits of Kennedy’s head! Pieces and blood.”

Then Van repeated everything word for word even louder: “His head was blown apart! I saw his brains! His hair! His skull! Blood! Blood! Everywhere there was blood! Bits! Bits of Kennedy’s head! Pieces and blood! You could hardly tell it was him!”

Marti could hear only a few words back from her mother.

“Please, Van, it must have been awful … I can hardly imagine. Try to take some deep breaths. You’re going to make yourself sick.”

Van repeated his line about the president’s head being blown apart, and her mother murmured something comforting in response.

And then he said something Marti would never forget.

“I let somebody kill him!”

At that moment, still eavesdropping from the hallway, Marti wanted to put her hands over her ears so she wouldn’t have to hear any more. But her arms wouldn’t move.

There was a sudden silence. Was her mother hugging her father? Was he crying again? Maybe his head was against her
shoulder? Was she patting him on the back? Maybe stroking his head? Wiping tears off his cheeks?

Then, again in a normal voice, Van started talking about Clint Hill, the Secret Service’s White House protection detail agent who was in charge of the First Lady. At the hospital, Hill took off his coat and draped it over Kennedy’s head. He didn’t want anybody to see that awful sight any more than they already had.

“But it was too late for that … we all saw it. We all saw it. I saw it. Everybody saw it. Cops, hospital attendants—everybody saw it. The blood, the skin, the hair. Mrs. Kennedy was there, blood all over her … along with Clint. Clint had run onto the back of the car after the shooting … I saw him back there afterward, holding on … he did it in a couple of seconds … amazing what he did. Mrs. Kennedy had crawled up on the back of the car. I think people seeing the blood on Clint started the story about one of us being shot, too … who knows?”

He said the hospital was bedlam. Secret Service agents, local and state police officers, doctors, politicians, White House staff, the vice president’s people … everyone was running around trying to make it go away, to undo what had happened.

“Half the people were crying, the rest yelling. Everybody was in charge but nobody was in charge … there was screaming about who was taking responsibility for the body … we, the White House, the local cops, the hospital … what about the autopsy … what about everything … was there another
shooter out there … aiming at somebody else, Johnson maybe … from across the street. Was he still out there?”

He talked about how a local medical examiner was going nuts, shouting that nobody was taking the body until there was an autopsy. But the Secret Service said forget that and they took the body because that’s the way Mrs. Kennedy and the White House wanted it.

“I helped get the coffin and everybody out of there … I rode with them afterward … just a hearse and a couple of cars … with the Johnsons and the body and Mrs. Kennedy back to Love Field. They made us stop at every red light. No sirens, no lights … didn’t want to make a big to-do because they were afraid to call attention in case there were still gunmen out there looking to take out Johnson, too.”

Marti said she could barely hear her father then. He was speaking words but she couldn’t make them out clearly. When she pressed her ear against the door as hard as possible, she could hear most of what he said. There were pauses between his sentences.

What she remembered specifically was:

“I helped carry the coffin into the back of the plane … God, I’ll never forget that … Jesus … Jesus, darling … I was told to stand guard outside of Air Force One—while a judge came to swear in Johnson. I and some others of us stood out there on the tarmac and watched that big blue-and-white plane fire its engines, taxi, and then fly away with the body of a man who we were supposed to have kept alive at all costs, at all risks.”

Then after another long few moments of silence came:

“He died because of me! I killed him! I failed! It was my fault!”

Those words crashed out from behind the bedroom door, Marti told me, like window-rattling bombs.

Another eternity or two went by before Van Walters could be heard speaking again in his normal voice.

He’d gone downtown afterward with some other agents and local police detectives to look at a film of what actually happened. Some guy on the street had taken it with a Super 8 movie camera and
LIFE
magazine had already offered to buy the rights for a hundred thousand dollars, maybe even more.

“How can somebody be so sick? To make money on John F. Kennedy’s bloodied head? On my failure …”

Rosemary interrupted her husband to say a few words, but again she was speaking too softly for Marti to hear.

Van continued.

He had never seen anything like that film and he hoped to hell that nobody ever saw the final frames, especially Marti.

“The man’s head just blew up in a spray of red … and it’s all there in the movie. Kennedy’s head just blew up in a spray of red … a spray of red … red … a spray of red … just like that. A spray … of red. Red, red, red. Red of the president’s blood, sprayed up into the air like from a nozzle of a paint can. A spray of red …”

Marti shook with each of those words. Every time he said
red
, it was like a gunshot.

Van started complaining about there being no federal law
against killing a president so the locals were investigating the thing—so far at least.

He told Rosemary that he and other agents had been ordered to review in formal written statements everything they did that day, from the smallest detail to the most obvious reaction after the gun went off. He guessed he would probably be sent to Fort Worth and San Antonio for three or four days to backtrack those earlier stops in the Texas trip.

Van also predicted that J. Edgar Hoover would find a way to make it a federal case and turn it into an FBI investigation of the Secret Service.

“Somebody said we’re probably all going to be busy the rest of our lives being interviewed … interrogated … harassed … accused. Some of us may even be fired. Maybe we should be. We failed …

“
I
failed.
I
should be fired. I should have
my
head blown to bits!”

Then came a shout with a force that caused Marti to throw her hands to her ears, burst into tears, and run to her room and close the door on everything behind her.

But it didn’t matter that she had put a door between her and her father’s last words. She couldn’t get them out of her head:

“It was
my
decision to take it off! I did it! I killed Kennedy!”