CHAPTER 2: DUCK & COVER (Part 1)

Winter of Our Discontent: The Impeachment & Trial of John F. Kennedy
Written by Harry Turtledove & Bryce Zabel

    Trumpeted by television, radio, and the press, Lee Harvey Oswald’s reaction to Connally’s death and Kennedy’s survival rocketed across the country.  The first reaction was often shock.  Then it expanded into a national parlor game, pondering whether his words proved he’d aimed at the President.  Finally, for most Americans, came fury.  Only the old remembered McKinley’s murder, though a few commentators did note that FDR was the target of an assassination attempt.  But that anyone should try to snuff out the life of the young, vital President struck most Americans as particularly outrageous.

    This was true in Dallas perhaps even more than elsewhere.  Police operators lost track of the number of telephoned death threats against Oswald.  They did note that almost all were for trying to kill President Kennedy, not for actually killing Governor Connally.

    The threats rose dramatically following Oswald’s reaction to discovering the President survived.  Some were explicit enough to alarm Dallas Police Chief Jesse E. Curry.  For the first weekend, the suspect stayed in a maximum-security cell on the fifth floor.  Fearing a possible lynch mob, Curry also called back off-duty policemen to help protect Police Department headquarters.

    When Lefkowitz arrived on the night of November 22, traffic in front of the gray stone building was heavy.  The first time he left was on the morning of the twenty-third to find something to eat; the lieutenant in whose office he was squatting had recommended the closest decent hot food, within walking distance, where you could get it to go and take it back to your desk.  Lefkowitz discovered that television had spread his blurted interview with Oswald all over the world.  Angry people were coming from near and far to stand in front of the Dallas Police Department, demanding that justice be done on the man they assumed to be the killer.  They shouted curses and shook fists. One man threw a stone.  A flying squad of police waded into the crowd, billy clubs swinging, and arrested him without challenge.  Their bold action, and the implicit promise of more if necessary, squelched a potential explosion.

    Lefkowitz was coming back from the local eatery when that happened.  He was swallowed by the angry crowd, and lost the precious bag with a cheeseburger with bacon, fries, and a milkshake.

        #

    Back at the Ledger, Duncan had almost convinced himself that he wasn’t mad that Lefkowitz was in Dallas while he was stuck in Washington.  Duncan was the best wordsmith on the staff, and couldn’t, he told himself, effectively write this story from the chaos Lefkowitz was describing.  And the President was here.  Duncan covered the President of the United States.

    Lefkowitz had called in right after his encounter with Oswald, dictated some ragged prose, and then lost his phone connection. Callahan worked with Duncan to include Lefkowitz’s vivid account with Duncan’s research.  They merged the two into the page-one headline: JFK TARGET?  Callahan insisted that the byline read, “By Charles Duncan & Alan Lefkowitz for the Ledger.”  (Even today, the opening words of their coverage appear in journalism texts.)  The presses literally stopped at 1:42 am on November 23, 1963, to include their report:

    (Dallas/Washington, D.C.)  The nation awakens this morning to a nearly confirmed fear that the true target of Friday’s gun attack in Dallas was President John F. Kennedy, not Governor John B. Connally.

    Ironically, because personal journalism had not yet taken root in America, this first joint by-line included two key moments where the writers themselves became, if not principals, then actors in their own story.  First came Lefkowitz’s question heard round the world.

    Asked to comment on Connally’s death, accused gunman Lee Harvey Oswald replied with his own question: “Connally?  What about Kennedy?”

    Yet Lefkowitz hardly trumped Duncan who, prickly grammarian that he was, first mentioned the conspiracy theory by dissecting the plurality of an object of a preposition.

    Reacting to the arrest of Oswald, President Kennedy inadvertently raised the question of whether Oswald acted alone by saying justice would be “done on all guilty parties.”

    Following the first story with a shared byline, a loose “area of influence” plan guided their work.  Duncan “followed the football”: the President of the United States.  That usually meant Washington, D.C., but included a--very--modest travel budget.  Lefkowitz followed up, filling in blanks.  By the end, it was hard to tell who was responsible for what, but that was how it started.  And on November 23, it meant the two would soon pass in the air.  Duncan flew to Austin with the President to cover John Connally’s funeral.  Lefkowitz, meanwhile, came back to Washington to cover the funeral of Special Agent Clint Hill.  Word was that Lyndon Johnson would attend that one, returning to D.C. from Dallas.

    For the next two years, three months and three days, all their work at the Washington Ledger carried the Duncan and Lefkowitz byline.  At the beginning, insiders around town knew Duncan; Lefkowitz got a big boost from his moment of truth (?) with Oswald.  Together, these newly minted partners would together be responsible for bringing down a President for whose survival most Americans were thanking God.

        #

    Inside the Dallas police building, Oswald was advised that anything he said could be used against him, and that he was entitled to an attorney.  He made several telephone calls seeking representation.  He also spoke with the head of the Dallas Bar Association, who offered to find a lawyer for him.  He declined, saying he preferred to secure one himself.

    Under questioning, Oswald denied shooting Governor Connally, Agent Hill, and Officer Tippit.  He claimed he was eating lunch when the Dealey Plaza gunfire took place.  When he was placed in a lineup, several eyewitnesses identified him as the man responsible for killing Officer Tippit.

    Captain J. Will Fritz, the lead interrogator, also asked Oswald about the statement he made after his arrest in the Texas Theater. “Lots of people, they’re saying they believe you planned to shoot the President, not the Governor.  Now, Mr. Oswald, I’m asking you straight.  What’s the truth in that?”

    “I didn’t shoot anybody,” Oswald replied.

    “You were surprised to hear about Governor Connally,” Fritz said. “We have the statements of the police officers escorting that that was their interpretation.”  Fritz didn’t mention that the whole world seemed to share that view now that replays of the incident were on all three networks.
 
    “I don’t know anything about that,” Oswald said.  “I was out of my head.  I thought people were going to kill me.  Everybody was acting crazy.”

    “Maybe it would be smart for you to come clean, Mr. Oswald.  Maybe you don’t understand how much trouble you’re in,” Captain Fritz said. “We’ve got witnesses who saw you shoot a police officer.  We’ve got strong evidence that you shot the Governor and the Secret Service man, too.  Those are all capital crimes.  If you’re convicted, you’ll go to the electric chair.”

    Although no stenographer was present at those early interrogations and no tape recorder was used, police officer Dan Selkirk took notes. These were later compared to a report written afterwards by Captain Fritz, who noted that Oswald, already pale, turned “white as a sheet” when the death penalty was mentioned.  Nevertheless, the suspect repeated, “I didn’t do any of that stuff, so what can I say about it?”

    “Why would you want to kill the President of the United States?” Fritz asked, ignoring his plea of innocence.

    “I don’t feel anything about the President one way or the other,” Oswald said, adding, “I like his family, though.”  A pause ensued. Fritz states that he was about to ask another question when he sensed that Oswald had not finished.  He waited, and after a minute or so the younger man spoke again in a barely audible voice:  “I can’t do anything right.  I’m nothing but a fuckup.”

    “What do you mean by that?” Fritz inquired.

    “What I said.  Hell, it’s true.”  Oswald showed emotion for the first time during the questioning.  Captain Fritz described it in his report as bitterness and self-reproach.
 
    “Why do you say that?  Do you say it because you hit the Governor and not the President?” Fritz persisted.

    “Why?  Because it’s true,” Oswald answered.  “Would I be in jail if it wasn’t?  I should have stayed in Russia.”

    “Everybody’s in jail in Russia,” said Captain Fritz, a staunch anti-Communist.  Lee Harvey Oswald refused to answer any further questions during that session, and was returned to his isolation cell.

        #

    Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy did not go home the night of November 22.  Instead, he slept on a couch in Kenny O’Donnell’s office, covered by a crimson Harvard blanket that last saw duty at a frigid football game against Yale two years earlier.

    On Saturday morning, November 23, Kennedy met with the President’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, in the Oval Office at the heathen hour of eight A.M.  According to Mrs. Lincoln’s testimony, Bobby Kennedy was highly agitated.

    “They’re going to look at everything that ever happened,” Mrs. Lincoln quotes Kennedy as saying.  (Robert Kennedy’s own recollection of these events remains a mystery, as he cited executive privilege and attorney-client privilege and refused to furnish investigators with any information despite ultimately being cited for contempt.)

    Mrs. Lincoln asked who “they” were and why they would do such a thing.

    “Snoops,” the younger Kennedy answered.  Mrs. Lincoln vividly recalled the word, and the scorn with which he used it.  “Goddamn snoops.”  He went on to explain his fear that, if Lee Harvey Oswald had aimed at his brother and not at Governor Connally, there would be a wide-ranging investigation into how and why he did it.

    “But you’re making that kind of investigation yourself, aren’t you?” Lincoln asked, not sure what the Attorney General’s point was.

    She remembered the way a loose lock of hair bobbed down over his forehead as he nodded.  “Yes, but we know which questions to ask-–and which ones not to,” he said.  “The wrong questions could be . . . embarrassing.”

    “I see,” Mrs. Lincoln replied.  She had distinguished herself by her discretion.  “Can we review the files of particular urgency?”

    Kennedy agreed to give her a list within the hour, and she did not ask any more questions.  She has testified that she thought the answers were none of her business.  How much of this lack of curiosity was genuine and how much politic and expedient is a question historians will debate well into the next century.  Robert Kennedy continued, “We have to clean things up around here.”

    Before the JCAAP committee, Evelyn Lincoln would later testify that she was confused at first.  If any room in the world was clean, the Oval Office was.  She understood when the Attorney General took the telephone log and President Kennedy’s appointment book.

    “Who’s got the rest of these?” he asked.  “Who’s got the records that show who went upstairs?”  The President’s living quarters are on the second floor.

    “I have the logs and appointment books,” Mrs. Lincoln told him. “Mr. West handles the other things.”  J.B. West was the chief White House usher.

    “Then I need to talk to him, don’t I?” Robert Kennedy said.

    In earlier administrations, these lists of who went up to the second floor were considered public records.  J.B. West has testified that he was surprised when the Attorney General asked for them, and that he asked why the President’s brother wanted them.

    “For safekeeping,” Robert Kennedy replied.

    “Where will you put them?” asked West, who thought they were safe enough in the White House.

    “In a secure place,” the Attorney General said.  Then he asked, “Shall we talk to Jack about this?”

    The chief usher did not want to confront the President.  “If one brother said it was okay, I assumed he did it on the authority of the other,” he stated under oath.  He surrendered the logs to Robert Kennedy.

    Evelyn Lincoln was not at the meeting between the Attorney General and J.B. West.  Robert Kennedy understood that what no one else overheard, no one else could testify about.  Thus, the chief usher did not stay to listen to the younger Kennedy’s conversation with Secret Service agent Robert I. Bouck.

    Bouck’s testimony is that Kennedy, as usual, came straight to the point.  “Bob,” he said, “we’ve got to take it all out.”

    “Take what all out?” Bouck recalls asking.  He testified that the events of the previous day had left him unnerved.  He had known the late Agent Hill for some time, and he was shocked that a “no-account loser”--his own words--could come so close to shooting the President of the United States.  Had Oswald succeeded, it would have been not only an even worse tragedy than the one the country already faced but also a permanent stain on the record of the Secret Service.

    “The recording system, that’s what,” Kennedy answered.  However he felt about what had happened the day before, he was all business now. “It’s got to disappear.  Vanish.  Go away.  It never existed--you understand me?”

    Bouck could not misunderstand the Attorney General, and said so.

    “Okay,” Robert Kennedy told him.  “Get rid of it, then.  And I want all the tapes for safekeeping.”  Less than a day after the incident in which his brother might have been endangered, the Attorney General showed what has often been called his ruthlessness in protecting John Kennedy’s Presidency from the slings and arrows of outraged investigators.

    When asked if he felt any hesitation in obeying the Attorney General’s order, Robert Bouck replied, “Hell, no,” and then apologized for his profanity.  He continued, “When the President’s brother, who’s also the chief law-enforcement official in the country, tells you to hop, you ask, ‘How high?’ on the way up.  I figured anything Bobby Kennedy said came straight from Jack. And that’s what the Secret Service is for--taking care of the President and doing things that need doing for him.”

    Bouck did ask where Robert Kennedy intended to store the recordings he was collecting.  According to his testimony, “Kennedy looked at me with the coldest expression in the world.  He said, ‘That’s my worry, Mr. Bouck.’  You can bet I didn’t ask any more questions.”

    In fact, Kennedy took the tape recordings and the logs he had obtained from Chief Usher West to the third floor of the newly constructed Executive Office Building, not far from the White House. That floor also headquartered the Special Group for Counterinsurgency, a bureau dedicated to finding ways and means of defeating Red guerrillas in South Viet Nam and elsewhere around the world.  Because of its highly secret operations, armed guards patrol the third floor around the clock.  Robert Kennedy could not have chosen a more secure depository for those vital records.  One question, however, seemed to occur to no one at the time:  why did the Attorney General think he needed to sequester these documents and recordings?  What was in them that could not stand the light of day?

        #

    Chuck Duncan liked to sleep late on weekends.  No such luck, not this time around.  He spent most of Saturday at the White House, where he got a glimpse of Bobby Kennedy going out in the company of a couple of large, hard-faced men carrying briefcases and wearing jackets that bulged from the shoulder holsters they didn’t conceal well enough.

    The place looks like it’s under siege, he thought as he looked around at the gate.  Snipers on rooftops, extra security guards, D.C. police in record numbers, and rumors that National Guard troops were massing on the outskirts of town.

    Later, as if feeding the penguins at the zoo, Pierre Salinger came out to speak to the press.  “The President is studying the situation in Dallas.  When things there become clearer, he will hold a press conference.  One day next week, probably.  Until then, he doesn’t see how he can have any comment except to repeat that he is shocked and saddened by the loss of Governor Connally and Agent Hill, and also by the loss of Officer Tippit.  And, if you’ll permit me, so am I.”  The press secretary’s jowls wobbled.

    “How’s Jackie doing?” Duncan shouted.  This gentle question, was calculated as the best way to get recognized in the pack.

    And Salinger chose to answer it.  “Mrs. Kennedy is shaken but recovering,” he said.  “It’s not easy for anyone to be around gunfire and bloodshed.  And unlike her husband, she never saw combat.  This was the first time anything like that ever happened near her.  Her thoughts and prayers are with the victims’ families.”

    “Do you think this attack will increase support for gun control legislation?” somebody else called.

    “Do I personally think so?  I wouldn’t bet anything I care about losing,” Pierre Salinger said, which drew a few dutiful chuckles.  He went on, “The President and the Attorney General will probably sit down at some point and see if they think they can do anything within the limits of the Constitution.  They respect the Second Amendment, of course.”

    Of course, Duncan thought sourly.  They respect the NRA, too.  He was a registered Republican, but big-city reporters saw and heard about too many handgun horrors to be happy with things as they were.  Sure, Oswald had used a rifle, but to Duncan firearms were firearms.  And he’d seen too damn many of them.

        #

Comments

[J.A. Russell]

Did anybody ever eat a bacon cheeseburger in 1963? I never heard of anybody selling, cooking, or eating one.

[Magnus]

That last point about the NRA is quite salient given the events of the past few days at VT.