Authors: Jim Lehrer
She spent a lot of time researching the Kennedy assassination.
Back in Texas, the St. John’s library had a good collection of Kennedy magazine and newspaper articles as well as books that had been written, many of them focusing on the fact that San Antonio had been a pre-Dallas stop on the Kennedy trip to Texas. The library had the Warren Commission’s written report and twenty-six accompanying volumes of hearings and evidence. She supplemented her reading later with relevant and more recently published assassination material she found at the Penn library.
Marti had gone over everything she could find about what her dad was asked and how he answered the questions of his official interrogators. She concentrated on what he had gone through that day and those that followed, paying special attention to the Warren Commission’s conversations with “Special Agent Martin Van Walters, U.S. Secret Service.”
Now, in her apartment, she laid out for me several pieces of paper, including this summary of her father’s Kennedy trip activities that she had gleaned from the Warren transcripts:
• He had assisted the Dallas special agent in charge in pre-visit preparations, including checking out possible luncheon sites at the Texas State Fairgrounds and the Dallas Trade Mart, the latter eventually selected because of its closeness to Love Field.
• He had been told there would be a public motorcade through downtown Dallas on the way to the luncheon, according to a decision made by White House staff and various political entities in Washington and Texas. There was never a discussion
to his knowledge of any Secret Service objections or reservations.
• He had, with other agents and Dallas police officials, driven the proposed motorcade route from Love Field and then, east to west on Main Street, through downtown Dallas several times. The main purpose was to clock running times and potential traffic problems.
• He was present when the decision was made to turn the motorcade one block north to Elm and then proceed west because there was no direct entrance ramp on Main to the freeway that led to the Trade Mart.
• He was certain that there was no reason other than the route considerations for taking the motorcade in front of the Texas School Book Depository on Elm.
• He did not have the authority to speak to reporters on the two Dallas newspapers about the exact route of the motorcade ahead of time but he was aware it had been done at the insistence of local Democratic leaders and others who wanted to generate a large crowd to see the Kennedys.
• He was assigned to sit in the rear seat of the first lead car and keep his eyes on windows of buildings and other possible danger spots.
• He was not ordered to arrange or to participate in pre-event floor-by-floor searches of any buildings on the motorcade route. As far as he knew there were no such searches.
• He was not ordered to arrange or participate in the positioning of armed law enforcement personnel on rooftops or other high-visibility locations.
• He did not participate in any discussions about the need for special security vigilance when the motorcade had to slow down to make the left-hand turn back west on Elm immediately in front of the Texas School Book Depository.
• He was never informed of the presence of Lee Harvey Oswald, a returned defector to the Soviet Union, in Dallas. Oswald was not on any “threat potential” list he ever saw.
• He did not know and had never heard of Jack Ruby until he shot Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station.
• He was aware of the recent incidents in Dallas at which right-wing demonstrators attacked UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson and, before that, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. He also knew that a shot was fired through a house window at retired army general Edwin Walker, an outspoken critic of the Kennedys, among others.
• He had glanced at a black-bordered advertisement in
The Dallas Morning News
that welcomed President Kennedy to Dallas with words of hostility but he had not had time to read every word in it.
• He had coordinated with Washington-based Secret Service personnel assigned to the Dallas visit to have guards posted in the out-of-sight area where the presidential X-100 open Lincoln Continental limousine and other motorcade vehicles would be held overnight after their arrival on a transport plane from Washington.
• He left his Dallas home on the morning of November 22, met other Secret Service officers at the Sheraton Hotel downtown,
had breakfast with them, and then proceeded by car to Love Field, arriving there at approximately nine o’clock.
• He assisted the presidential detail agents from DC arrange the order of the motorcade vehicles, inspect them for absolute spotlessness, double-check all seating assignments, and look around for potential security hazards.
• He received notice by handheld radio when Air Force One was airborne from Fort Worth for the twelve-minute flight to Dallas.
• He was ordered to help guide the various Secret Service agents and other drivers as they moved the vehicles up the ramp to their positions on the tarmac to one side of where the White House press plane and Air Force One would be parked.
• He, with other agents, maintained visual protective surveillance of members of the public and others behind a fence observing the arrival at Love Field of the presidential party.
• He took his seat in the lead car, directly in front of the presidential limousine.
Marti’s summary detailed what Van Walters saw and did after the shots were fired at the motorcade. Marti said she remembered some of that from the conversations she overheard between her mother and father at home that late night after the assassination.
She had searched the Warren papers and everything else for an answer to the simple question: Did her dad feel there was
anything he could have done as an agent of the U.S. Secret Service to have prevented the death of President Kennedy?
None of the many official interrogators raised it, at least according to her own readings. She said also nobody even asked him—just for the record—if he believed the assassination was the work of a conspiracy.
In my conversation with her at the apartment, I did some follow-up questioning of my own. I picked up on several of her references to “Oswald or whoever fired the shots.”
“Do you think there was a conspiracy?” I asked her directly.
“Do you?” she shot back.
“No, and, trust me, I spent months trying my best to prove one, as did every reporter who ever worked on the story,” I said. “There were no Pulitzers to be won by just confirming the official findings that Oswald acted alone.”
I pressed her for her own answer.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the future, maybe as much as fifty years from now, there was a deathbed confession of some kind from somebody who helped Oswald in some way. Drove a car, made a phone call—did something to get the assassination show on the road. A co-conspirator, of even the lowest grade.”
I let that stand without comment. Maybe she was right. There might have been somebody else involved. But based on my hours of crawling through culverts and over grassy knolls, interviewing hundreds of witnesses who ended up seeing nothing,
and reading hundreds of documents that ended up saying nothing I hadn’t already read, I didn’t think so.
Marti told me she wrote nothing about the assassination in her brief “Dear Moms,” sticking almost exclusively to happy-sounding and irrelevant bits and pieces of her school life in Texas.
Her sister students in San Antonio—the 200 boarders as well as the 450 day students—were mostly from Texas. She had chosen St. John’s over any of the more prominent girls’ schools in the East partly because it was in Texas. Portland was great but there hadn’t been enough time to make it seem homey to her the way living in Dallas had done for Texas. Texas was known for having a lot of writers, and she was also thinking she might really try to work toward being a writer or, at least, a writer who wrote about writers. She did write to Rosemary that a St. John’s teacher, as good as Miss DeShirley in Kansas City, had praised her work in the English and composition classes.
Most critically, what she did not write to her mother was that she was working on a master plan to run away from school and San Antonio. She was going to be a literary runaway. The day before Christmas she would pack up a notebook and a ballpoint pen along with a few clothes in a pillowcase and a cache of saved allowance money, walk the twelve blocks to North Broadway—which was U.S. Highway 81—and take out hitchhiking to wherever a life of letters took her. Some of the inspiration came from her having just read
Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
in her Contemporary American Literature class. But there was more to it than that.
She would start by going to Kyle, the small Texas town where Katherine Anne Porter lived as a child, and then maybe move on to Indian Creek, the even tinier Texas place where Porter was born. Marti knew from a map that Indian Creek was more than a hundred miles west near Brownwood, but Kyle was barely thirty miles up Highway 81 from San Antonio toward Austin. Marti had only read in a biography about Porter’s Texas beginnings and had no idea if either place was publicly noted. Maybe Marti Van Walters would be the first to create some kind of “It was here that the author of
Ship of Fools
and other great works of fiction was born …” placard. Eventually Marti, living off the land of experience and adventure, would go to Concord, Massachusetts, to commune with Emerson and Hawthorne. Maybe she’d hunt down J. D. Salinger in New Hampshire or wherever he may be, hit the road to Catfish Row in California to visit with John Steinbeck, double back for a few days in the North Carolina country of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Carl Sandburg, and even go over to Georgia to sample the flavor of Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, and then to Jackson, Mississippi, to search for at least a glimpse of the great Miss Eudora Welty.
The literary stuff aside, Marti admitted that she figured suddenly disappearing into the unknown would get everybody’s attention. Maybe even the U.S. Secret Service would keep a lookout for a retired agent’s missing daughter—“a gorgeous,
brilliant young woman of nearly eighteen destined for the pages and places of greatness.”
Despite the urgency of our mission that day in Philadelphia, I was delighted she took the time to go off-message about herself like this. I loved listening to Marti talk, and I had been one of those young newspapermen who bought into Hemingway’s advice to anyone who wanted to be a writer: Get a job on a newspaper. It’ll keep food on the table, force you to deal with the English language in a semi-coherent way, and, if you pay attention, give you material and characters to use later in your short stories, novels, or plays. The
Dallas Tribune
newsroom was populated by Hemingway wannabes. Our hero was Jerry Compton, a political writer who authored a funny satirical novel about the modern-day retaking of the Alamo by a small band of renegade Mexican soldiers. It was made into a movie with Anthony Quinn and Richard Widmark. Jerry had made enough money to quit his job and become a full-time writer.
I must admit that it was with no small amount of embarrassment—and, yes, even a hint of shame—that I had already begun to think that the story of Van and Marti Walters might eventually make for a book as well as a good story in
The Dallas Tribune
for
me
to write. I hadn’t gone as far as deciding who should play me in the movie, but maybe Audrey Hepburn would be perfect as Marti? Glenn Ford as Van Walters?
Meanwhile, on Marti’s runaway literary future, she said a “fix-up” fall prom date with a cute guy from a nearby private
boys’ school jarred her back to reality. She stayed right there at St. John’s and after graduation went on to Penn for the next three years.
After our nostalgic digression, she moved our conversation back to what mattered to her now. She showed me a Xerox copy of the one pertinent exchange about the bubble top that she could find in the entire Warren transcript. It was an exchange between Special Agent Van Walters and an investigator for the Warren Commission named Arlen Specter:
Q: Who made the decision to take the bubble top off the car at Love Field?
W
ALTERS
: I did.
Q: What caused you to make that decision?
W
ALTERS
: We had word from our agents downtown that the early-morning rain had definitely stopped.
Q: So it was on the limousine originally only as a protection from the rain, not from a gunshot or a similar violent attack?
W
ALTERS
: That is correct.
Q: Was the bubble top bulletproof?
W
ALTERS
: No, sir. Some thought so, apparently, but it was not.
Q: Describe its material.
W
ALTERS
: One-quarter-inch clear unreinforced Plexiglas.
Q: Bulletproof or not, what effect do you believe the bubble top’s being there might have had if those same shots were fired at the presidential limousine?
W
ALTERS
: It is impossible to say, sir.
Q: Could you speculate?
W
ALTERS
: No, sir.
Marti handed me more portions of transcripts from the commission, the press, and other sources about who actually was responsible for the bubble top being off or on the Kennedy limousine. They included those from Secret Service agents who were there at Love Field.
The only mention of Van Walters’s involvement was a statement from a fellow agent that “Agent Walters was one of those at Dallas Love Field who put up the bubble top and then, later, took it off.”
There was even a former agent who was adamant in several statements that the bubble top was never put up and that he—and he alone—was the one who made that decision.
“That didn’t make sense, of course,” Marti said to me. “Besides yours, I found statements from many other eyewitnesses who saw the car with the bubble top up earlier while it was still on that Love Field ramp.”
There was one in Marti’s stack from a Secret Service agent assigned to then Vice President Johnson who spoke in the jumbled way real people often do when they are nervous: