Lefkowitz was still standing by the teletype when Duncan returned, out
of breath. The clattering 1955 AP wireless receiver seemed to be the
only place to get anything out of Dallas on this story. No--by this
time, Walter Cronkite was broadcasting on CBS. But a lot of what he
was reading was AP copy anyway. TV guys can’t handle a story like
this, Duncan thought, even as some Dallas reporter named Dan came on
the screen talking to Cronkite.
Lefkowitz approached Duncan, waving a piece of wire copy. “Your
lead’s back to Connally. He’s dead.” Duncan thought, My lead always
was Connally, but didn’t play journalism professor about it.
He walked over to his desk, fed a sheet of paper into the
typewriter, and wrote from his notes: Governor John Connally of Texas
was assassinated in Dallas this afternoon. Connally is the first
governor ever to be murdered while in office. Also slain was Secret
Service agent Clinton J. Hill. The Secret Service was present because
Connally was riding in a motorcade with President Kennedy. The
President was not injured in the attack on Connally.
As Duncan finished, he felt Lefkowitz’s eyes on him. “What?” Duncan said. This city reporter was one of those guys who read over your shoulder. They were as bad as kibitzers at a poker game. Worse.
Lefkowitz held out his hand. “I’ll look it over for
you.” He watched Duncan’s face redden. “Come on, Chuck, everybody
needs another set of eyes on the big ones.” Duncan, his own words
coming back to bite him, handed over his copy to Lefkowitz.
Lefkowitz held it, or so it seemed to Duncan, much too long. Still, thought Duncan, he’d be damned if he spoke first. Finally, Lefkowitz said, “Facts are all in here. Does the job. Story’s exciting enough to carry it.” He handed the page back to Duncan.
Duncan couldn’t believe what came out of his own mouth next: “You think it buries the lead. You think it needs more punch.”
“Yeah,” Lefkowitz said. “Even though it’s got to be the lead, nobody really cares if he was the first governor murdered in office. There’s fifty of them. There’s one President, and he was in the car.”
“But he’s alive,” Duncan said, but only to give his position a final look.
“But the man a foot away from him is dead,” Lefkowitz countered. “Your last sentence needs to come second. The facts from the library are background, not foreground where you’ve got them.”
Duncan steamed. He’d thought the same thing minutes ago in the morgue, but he hadn’t trusted his gut, and now Lefkowitz of all people was correcting him!
When Duncan finally looked up, Lefkowitz was already on his way back to the teletype. Duncan forgot about him and went back to the story.
Another flash from Dallas came across the wire. “Start over!” Lefkowitz called to Duncan as he read it.
“I’m listening!” Duncan yelled, fingers poised on the typewriter keys. He loved the rush of a breaking story and the deadline pressure.
“A cop just got shot in Dallas,” Lefkowitz hollered. “They don’t know that it’s got anything to do with the Connally shooting, but. . . .”
“Yeah. But,” Duncan agreed. When two strange bad things happened in the same place inside of an hour, chances were they were connected. He tore the piece of paper from the typewriter. “Lookin’ like a shoot-out in Dallas.” A popular Governor. A Secret Service man. And now a Dallas cop.
In went a fresh piece of paper. Duncan banged away without notes. Governor John B. Connally of Texas was assassinated today while riding through the streets of Dallas in a presidential motorcade. Although sitting just behind the Governor, President and Mrs. Kennedy appear to be uninjured.
#
At Parkland Memorial, chaos reigned. The Governor was dead, and Agent Hill didn’t look like he’d make it out of the OR either. Police officers, FBI agents, and Secret Service agents were everywhere, most of them with guns drawn.
In the middle of this, President Kennedy, Kenneth O’Donnell, and David Powers commandeered Trauma One as a temporary Oval Office. Finally, the President heard what he wanted to hear: “Your brother is on the phone.”
“I want the son-of-a-bitch who tried to kill me,” the President told Robert Kennedy, based on the testimony of a nurse on the scene at Parkland. She later said, “It was odd. He acted so sure, but he was standing there, and the Governor and that poor agent were dead or almost.” She never thought of it again until asked later, because, “People lose all sense in there. They say things they don’t mean. I’ve heard it I don’t know how many times.”
But the Kennedys had not taken leave of their senses. They had, in fact, begun the search for suspects. Over the secure phone line, RFK responded, “I want to know if Sam Giancana is behind it. I need to know right now. Can you say yes or no?”
Inside Trauma One, watched by both O’Donnell and Powers, the President of the United States replied, “I honestly don’t know. But we have to consider all the possibilities.”
The President and the Attorney General agreed to meet that night in the Oval Office, as soon after JFK came back to Washington as possible.
#
Forty-five minutes later--it was after three, and Duncan’s stomach was growling like a bear because he hadn’t had anything for lunch except that doughnut--one more Dallas story came in.
“They got him!” Lefkowitz and three other people said at the same time. The chorus continued: “The shooter. ‘Lee Harvey Oswald, age twenty-four, arrested for the murder of Governor John Connally, Secret Service Agent Hill, and Dallas police officer Tippit. Oswald is employed at the Texas School Book Depository Building, which overlooks Dealey Plaza, where the shootings of Governor Connally and Agent Hill took place. He was arrested in a movie theater not far from the site of the shooting of Officer Tippit. He attempted to draw a gun, but was subdued before he could fire.’”
Duncan didn’t go down to the morgue this time. Things were moving too fast. He phoned instead. “You have anything on Lee Harvey Oswald, twenty-four?” he asked. “They’ve arrested him for shooting Connally and a Secret Service agent and a cop.” Before Markham could ask, he volunteered. “They’re checking the President out, but he wasn’t hit. At least that’s the word now.”
“I’ll get back to you,” Markham said.
One of the secretaries was dispatched to bring back food from the greasy spoon across the street, Johnny Boy’s. Duncan, still banging out ever-evolving copy from his desk, was in the middle of inhaling a hamburger, fries, and a Coke when the telephone rang. “Yeah?” he said with his mouth full.
“Lee Harvey Oswald. Ex-Marine. Lived in Russia from 1959 to 1962--claimed to be a Marxist. Tried to renounce citizenship, but didn’t. Came back in June of ’62 with a Russian wife, Marina.” The archivist spelled the name. “Lived in New Orleans earlier this year--there’s a photo of him passing out leaflets for something called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. That’s it.”
“Plenty to go with there,” Duncan said. “Great work!” As he hung up, he decided Markham had some chops after all.
Lefkowitz heard Duncan halfway across the noisy, crowded room and moved straight to his desk. “You got something?” he asked.
Maybe it was the way he asked, as if he were entitled to know, but it rubbed Duncan the wrong way. “What?” he said. “We workin’ together now?” Then, before Lefkowitz could scream back, or worse: “Oswald’s a Red--or a pink, anyway.”
“Why would that make him want to shoot Connally?” Lefkowitz wondered out loud. “Connally’s a Democrat--he’s one of LBJ’s fair-haired boys.”
“Sounds like the guy’s got a screw loose, or maybe two or three. Fair Play for Castro . . .”
“Never heard of them.” Lefkowitz left it there. He didn’t want to get into a political argument right now. It would turn into a screaming row--he could see that coming. He was a liberal, and Duncan damn well wasn’t. You just knew. Most people in the newsroom liked Kennedy, but Duncan was a contrarian, claiming he’d seen it all before, and politicians were all alike. He talked like a Republican.
Duncan was sorry he’d told Lefkowitz anything. If Lefkowitz wanted to find out about Oswald, he could check with the morgue (or the goddamn library) himself. Now the kid was liable to take what he’d got from Duncan and run with it. There was a word for reporters who did things like that. It was not a word Duncan would have repeated in polite company.
The bell over the teletype clanged again. Lefkowitz, feeling like a ping-pong ball, started back to the machine. “What’s the latest?” he asked, thinking that people must have felt like this right after Pearl Harbor and Sarajevo (he’d read The Guns of August not long before). This time it was only an update from Parkland that was no update but a simple restatement: President’s okay, Governor and Secret Service agent critical.
Lefkowitz always maintained that rivalry with Chuck Duncan had nothing to do with what he did next, and that his motivations at the time were purely journalistic. He marched up to Callahan at his assignment desk. “Andy, this paper cannot afford to not be in Dallas. Now you can send Duncan, but he covers the President and the President is going to come back to Washington. And me, I’m a city reporter. I know how city bureaucracy works. Dallas is just another city. I can be on the next flight out.”
Callahan looked up at Lefkowitz and swiftly calculated the potential to get fired over this. “Okay,” he said. He took out his wallet and without counting gave Lefkowitz every bill inside.
Lefkowitz was gone before Duncan even knew what happened.
#
Out at Love Field, Air Force One was a hotbed of paranoia; jammed full, speculation of all manner underway. President Kennedy was already on board. He was getting a security briefing when Vice President Johnson arrived. Agitated by Johnson’s presence, the agent-in-charge repeated that Dealey Plaza “cannot be dismissed as a successful assassination attempt on Governor Connally. It may be a potential assassination attempt on the President of the United States.”
The President asked, “Are there foreign powers involved?”
“It’s that goddamned Khrushchev,” Johnson shouted. “We may be at war!”
The agent-in-charge did not respond to him, but went on speaking to President Kennedy: “We need to separate the President from the Vice President to assure continuity of authority in case of attack.” Looking between the President and the Vice President, the agent made his case crystal clear: “You can’t fly together. One of you has to leave now.”
President Kennedy gave it a moment, then nodded to Johnson. “Lyndon, stay in Texas. I have to get back. People will need to see that.” Within seconds, Secret Service agents lifted a humiliated Lyndon Johnson off his feet and escorted him off the plane.
Using a long-distance lens, AP photographer Ralph Philpott captured the scene. It was a necessary moment to secure national leadership but, to Lyndon Johnson, it always looked as if he was being treated like “a two-bit poker cheat.”
#
Lefkowitz took his seat inside a crowded plane cabin on a flight into Fort Worth. Love Field was still closed, and all traffic that could go to Dallas’s sister city was being diverted there.
It was the first time all day that Lefkowitz had a chance to think. You couldn’t phone anyone from the air. You weren’t going to bring a phonograph or transistor radio and put on music. And you sure wouldn’t haul out your Smith-Corona typewriter and start working. The best thing you could do on an airplane was read.
Lefkowitz, however, had no book, so he had to think. As his mind circled around the day’s events, his main feeling was relief. In the bustle of the newsroom, he hadn’t realized how glad he was that the President was alive. When JFK spoke in his inaugural address about the torch being passed to a new generation of Americans, Lefkowitz knew the President was talking about him--and to him.
#
On another day, Lefkowitz would have been right about Dallas. It would have been just another city. Tonight, Dallas might have gone crazy when Lefkowitz stepped off United #372 in Fort Worth. Even so, he needed only thirty-seven minutes from landing to walking through the main door of the Dallas Police Department.
He’d never seen anything like it. There was no decorum, no rules and no plan. Reporters, photographers, TV crews–-everybody had the run of the place. And every few minutes another five howling newsies swarmed in.
Finally, as Lefkowitz was getting shocked at how easily he could move around, Dallas Police began taking somebody out of the building. There, led through the crowd by two Dallas cops, was the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald. When the officers realized they were taking Oswald through a sea of reporters from which he might never emerge, they turned and pretty much ran over a surprised Alan Lefkowitz. Seeing the alleged assassin up-close, Lefkowitz thought Oswald looked smaller than he’d hoped. He wanted his assassins big and threatening.
He managed to choke out the first thing that came into his head: “Did you do it?”
Oswald stopped, and the officers didn’t hustle him along. He looked straight at Lefkowitz and said, “I didn’t do anything except go to work today.”
Lefkowitz loved to bend a question so it came out of his interview’s last statement. “Did work include shooting Governor Connally?” Today, it worked.
By then, a CBS TV camera had a live shot of Oswald talking to Lefkowitz. Back at the Ledger, a cheer went up, although Duncan didn’t join in.
Oswald looked as if he’d just been told his pants were unzipped at a big society party. The split second of surprise and blank dismay was palpable to everyone who saw it. “Connally?” He spat the name out, as if doing so would prove how he had no use for it. “What about Kennedy?”
Lefkowitz knew he would trust his gut from then on. And Americans knew their President had barely escaped Dallas with his life.
#
Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade was never known to miss much, with the possible exception of his office spittoon. For one hour in the afternoon, with commotion all around him, Wade sat at his sloppy desk, flipping through one law book after another, telling his secretary he would take no calls.
Then Wade rose, put on his jacket, straightened his tie, and went out to the press area, where reporters and photographers and TV crews were standing mob vigil in the hallway outside. He started by acknowledging that there were already calls for turning the whole thing over to federal authorities. That was what the FBI wanted.
“This crime may or may not have national implications, but it took place in Dallas. We know how to prosecute murder down here, and I expect we can handle this case, wherever the facts take us,” Henry Wade declared.
#
When President Kennedy landed in Washington, he felt compelled to respond to the rapidly changing story. Reporters had gathered near Air Force One, buzzing with the day’s news, oblivious to both the temperature and the chill wind. That group included Duncan. He covered the President, dammit. And, like the others, he could not help but wonder for a moment (for now, he thought wryly) how this story would have changed if the President were coming back in a casket.
Emerging from Air Force One, shrugging up his own jacket, Kennedy was uncharacteristically terse with the freezing press corps: “The government is secure. Our prayers are with the Connally, Hill, and Tippit families. Justice will be done on all guilty parties.”
Duncan remembered Lefkowitz, of all people, talking directly to Lee Harvey Oswald. He waited a millisecond for an acceptable pause, then sliced into the silence with a question said just the right way to get Kennedy to answer him and no one else. And he got had his moment of perfection, one to match Lefkowitz’s in Dallas: “Mr. President! You said guilty parties. Does that mean you think someone besides this Oswald was involved?”
Kennedy paused as if he hadn’t quite heard the question, buying time to decide the exact tenor of his answer: “No. I simply meant that if this gunman--this lone gunman, apparently--is guilty, then a jury will make that decision. Pierre will talk to you at the White House soon.” He moved to the waiting limousine and stiffly got in, helped by a Secret Service agent.
Within two hours, Lee Harvey Oswald had spoken through Alan Lefkowitz, and John F. Kennedy had spoken through Chuck Duncan. Without knowing it, the team of Duncan & Lefkowitz was writing its first story.
#
President and Mrs. Kennedy arrived at the White House at 8:39 PM, EST. The Attorney General was waiting to speak to the President in the Oval Office. Kennedy kissed his wife goodnight. His secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, overheard him saying, “I’ll be up late.”
As the President entered his office on that cool evening, he went on with the conversation that had started over the phone with his brother less than an hour after the shootings in Texas. He fired out a string of expletives and speculation. Bobby Kennedy listened, then picked up a pencil from his brother’s desk. He scribbled on a notepad--“We can’t talk here!”--and held the message up for the President’s eyes. JFK stopped in midsentence and nodded; Bobby balled up the paper and tossed it into the wastebasket.
That single piece of 24-pound, antique laid paper with a Presidential seal watermark would be collected the next morning by Francis Mullen of the White House janitorial staff and kept as a memento of the day the President was nearly killed. Although neither Kennedy brother knew it at the time, Bobby had created Exhibit 3C, so described and numbered by the Senate and House staff lawyers for the Joint Committee on the Attempted Assassination of the President, or JCAAP.
Bobby Kennedy’s written exclamation raised a compelling question. What did the President of the United States and the Attorney General have to talk about that was so secret it couldn’t be discussed in the Oval Office?
The answer could end a presidency.
#
As the Kennedy brothers left the Oval Office, Alan Lefkowitz laid his head on a desk and closed his eyes. He’d used his brush with celebrity to talk his way into some work space. He was sharing an office with five other reporters and a Dallas Police lieutenant who was clearly overwhelmed. They had a working telephone.
Lefkowitz couldn’t sleep that night. But as his head lay on that desk, he told himself he would find out who, besides Oswald, was behind this attempt to take John Kennedy’s life. He would go wherever the search took him. And he would make sure the guilty paid for their crimes.
Swich to wordpress, make your blogger nicer. -My 2 cents
Posted by: rc helicopters | December 07, 2011 at 09:02 AM
What was so secret that it couldn't be discussed ? This premise could go so many directions (does Marilyn have a failed suicide too). This is definitely "appointment reading !"
Posted by: nancy boreham | March 29, 2007 at 09:21 PM
In addition to the interesting idea, I have to make the observation that the characterization so far has been excellent. One minor criticism --- which may not be completely appropriate for this medium anyway --- I believe there may be a little much foreshadowing. Still looking forward to the whole book.
Posted by: Andy Linman | March 29, 2007 at 04:51 PM
While I wouldn't normally consider this my particular cup of tea, its a very interesting concept. I'm a big fan of Stirling, and about to start reading Turtledove's Timeline 191 series, so I decided to check this out, even though I was negative 19 when Kennedy was assassinated. Pretty interesting stuff so far, looking forward to the full novel. I'm fairly certain you'll get picked up, guys. Keep up the good work.
Posted by: Josh McBroom | March 27, 2007 at 05:40 PM
Very interesting. I look forward to reading the entire book.
Posted by: Gunnard Fredrickson | March 27, 2007 at 12:15 PM