CHAPTER 3: DAMAGE CONTROL (Part 1)

    Tuesday was raw and chilly, with a biting wind blustering down from the north.  It reminded Lefkowitz how shabby his overcoat was.  One of these days, when he could afford it, he needed a new one.  On what the Ledger paid, that day was liable to be the twelfth of Never.

    As he drove his old Ford across the Potomac to Arlington, he thought it was odd how Robert E. Lee’s mansion and grounds had become the chief military burial ground for the country Lee fought so hard to defeat.  Up until 1961, the incongruity never once crossed his mind.  He wasn’t sure how he’d known Arlington was Lee’s old estate.  The Civil War centennial was more insidious than he’d thought.

    Other reporters’ cars and television trucks in front of the mansion showed he’d come to the right place.  He had a fresh notebook for the occasion.  He’d labeled it “Lefkowitz and Duncan, JFK” on the front cover.

    A lot of the mourners--the real mourners, not the professional vultures of the press--were Secret Service agents.  They were easy to spot, and not just because they sat together.  They were fairly young and tough and clean-cut.  From the pictures he’d seen of Clint Hill, the dead man fit right in.  Would they have taken a bullet the way he did?  A lot of them would have, unless Lefkowitz missed his guess.

    A minister came up to the lectern--or was it a pulpit? Lefkowitz frowned.  He’d never had to worry about a distinction like that before.  He wanted to get things right.  The clergyman preached about courage and self-sacrifice and duty.  It could have been inspiring; he said all the right things.  But the way he said them would have put Sominex to shame.  Lefkowitz almost dislocated his jaw fighting not to yawn.  Several reporters and a couple of Secret Service men lost that fight.

    At last, after much too longer, the minister said, “And now it is my great honor and distinct privilege to introduce the Vice President of the United States, Mr. Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

    Johnson stepped forward and took the preacher’s place.  He looked like he’d been ridden hard and put away wet.  He looked like he’d tied one on last night and tried to put himself together with black coffee this morning.  And that, Lefkowitz realized, was probably just what he’d done.

    “Thank you, Reverend,” Johnson said.  “All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.”  How did he mean that? Was he saying he would rather be in Texas?  Or did he mean he didn’t want to speak at anyone’s funeral?  Both, most likely.  But he made it sound the way it should have:  “A good man is dead--three good men are dead--because a miserable, rotten coward picked up a rifle and pulled the trigger.

    “Clint Hill knew there were dangers when he joined the Secret Service.  He’d known there were dangers when he went into the Army, too, and he came through those the way a man should.  No one made him jump up on the trunk of the car that carried the President and Governor Connally and their wives.  Nobody would have thought less of him if he didn’t do it, because something like jumping up onto a moving automobile that is under fire is plainly above and beyond the call of duty.  But he did, and because he did it he took a bullet meant for. . . .”  Johnson’s voice trailed off.  He had clearly veered off his prepared remarks.  Finally, he finished:  “. . . for someone else.

    “Now he’s gone--and if God ever needs a bodyguard up there in Heaven, He knows just where to look, because Clint Hill proved he could do the job right.  He didn’t think of his family first.  He thought of what he’d signed up to do, and he went and did it.  I hope that’s some consolation to those he leaves behind.  Chances are it isn’t, not yet. But one day, maybe, you’ll be proud, because Clint Hill made the whole country his family in Dallas Friday afternoon.  God bless him, God bless you, and God bless the United States.”

    He saluted the flag-covered coffin--he’d served in the Navy during the war--and then, moving as heavily as if he were wounded himself, sat down again.

    Lefkowitz nodded to himself.  LBJ might not want to be here--he plainly didn’t want to be here--but he did right by Clint Hill, and he did right by the slain Secret Service man’s family.  He said three times as much as the preacher, and in a lot less than a third the time.

    A couple of Hill’s colleagues came up and praised the dead man. Lefkowitz couldn’t tell how much that meant to his widow.  It obviously meant a lot to the other Secret Service agents.  They had to be thoughtful for all kinds of reasons now.  What had been above and beyond the call of duty wasn’t any more.  What Clint Hill did in Dallas made sure it wasn’t.  They had to be wondering, Can I measure up?

    Some of the reporters headed off to file their stories instead of going out to the newly dug grave not far from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  Lefkowitz almost did himself.  He listened to more long-winded speechifying from the preacher, and to the farewell volley fired by veterans.

    Johnson presented Mrs. Hill with a folded, cased flag, the kind any veteran’s widow was entitled to have.  “Thank you,” she said from behind her veil.  “You did real well for me and for Clint, and I know you’d rather be somewhere else right now.”

    “Ma’am, it’s nothing personal, not as far as you and your husband are concerned,” LBJ said.  “Somebody else, maybe, but not you.”

    Lefkowitz wondered if he should use that in the story.  He decided not to.  It wasn’t what the day was about.  But he remembered.

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    Duncan had wondered if he would get one of the press seats aboard Air Force One, or if the President would take his revenge on the Ledger by making him pay his own way to Austin.  His bookkeepers grumbled enough about the cost of renting a car, getting a room, and feeding his face while he was out of town.  Airfare might have tipped them over the edge.  If Kennedy were punitive, it was better than even money that Duncan would have still paid his own way. 

    But he got the invitation, which he hadn’t for Kennedy’s trip to Dallas the week before.  Maybe Lefkowitz’s story made the administration decide to invite him, to show it was above little games.  If so, he owed the younger man a drink or three.

    The 707 took off much too early in the morning.  But there was plenty of coffee aboard, and Danishes for breakfast.  “The care and feeding of the press,” David Brinkley observed, sticky sugar on his lower lip.  His budget didn’t make coffee and a sweet roll mandatory most of the time.

    When the airliner touched down at Austin, the security at the airport astonished Duncan, and he’d expected it to be tight.  Secret Service agents and Texas Rangers were everywhere.  Some carried pistols, some Tommy guns, and some scope-sighted rifles.  They all wore don’t-tread-on-me expressions.  Evidently there was no unified chain of command, because every so often they would start screaming at one another.

    Preston Smith, the new governor of Texas, met the President on the tarmac.  He was a little bald man who wore glasses and a black bow tie with, God help us, white polka dots.  “Thank you for coming back to our state, Mr. President,” he said.  “I only wish we were meeting under happier circumstances.”

    “So do I,” Kennedy answered.  “But this is the last chance I’ll ever have to pay my respects to Governor Connally, and nothing could keep me away.”  He spotted Duncan in the crowd of reporters and photographers and cameramen.  If the look on his face didn’t say, So there, Duncan had never seen one that did.

    He didn’t need to rent a car to get to the state Capitol, where Connally’s body had lain in state since Saturday.  Governor Smith had a motorcade laid on.  The President and First Lady traveled with the governor and his wife in a Lincoln convertible with a weird transparent plastic bubble on top.

    “Is that thing bulletproof?” Duncan asked the driver of the much less elegant sedan into which he was shoehorned.

    “No,” said the man, who looked and sounded like a plainclothes cop.  “But if there’s some nut with a gun along the route, we hope he’ll think it is.  And we didn’t publicize which route we’d use, either, so if there is a nut, he may be waiting in the wrong place.” He paused to light a Tareyton, then added, “I wouldn’t tell any of you this shit if you could get it out fast enough to make a difference.”

    “Do you think we’d endanger the President’s life for a scoop?” one of the other reporters in the crowded car asked indignantly.

    “Why take chances?” the driver said. 

    The Texas Capitol was modeled after the one in Washington, though its walls were red granite, not marble.  Governor Connally lay in the rotunda, surrounded by portraits of former governors and also--unique touch--of Presidents of the Republic of Texas.  Texas Rangers served as his honor guard.

    Duncan and the rest of the press crew were searched before being allowed up the stairs to the balconies overlooking the
flag-draped coffin.  They were searched twice, in fact--once by Rangers and once by Secret Service men.

    Having been frisked, Duncan got to watch JFK and Governor Smith come up to the coffin.  Kennedy saluted it.  Then, as if that didn’t seem enough, he set a hand on it, under the flag.  He said something to Preston Smith; Duncan had heard a local reporter call the new governor “Presto” with mixed affection and scorn.  Smith, who looked more like a small-town pharmacist, nodded.

    More dignitaries came out to pay their respects:  Senators Yarborough and Tower, Texas Congressmen, governors from other states--Duncan recognized Rockefeller of New York and Pat Brown from California--and some men who had to be important or they wouldn’t have been there.

    Duncan thought Preston Smith was the only man wearing a bow tie. He was damn sure Smith was the only one who’d broken out in polka dots.

    “No, it’s not disrespect,” the Texas reporter said when he asked. “That’s the only kind of tie old Presto’s got.  It’s his trademark, like.  Connally would drop dead all over again if he wore an ordinary one.”

    “Okay,” Duncan said.  “A character, is he?”

    “Well, if you see him in one of those things, you don’t forget him,” the Texan answered.  “You may go, ‘Who’s the damn fool in the polka dots?’ but you don’t forget him.  A politician could do worse.”

    Nellie Connally and her three children came out.  She embraced the President and Jackie.  She and John had had another daughter who’d died five years earlier.  How do you go through so much sorrow? Duncan wondered.  Mrs. Connally carried herself like a queen--or maybe that was just the eerie calm of shock.

    Someone brought a wheeled cart up to the catafalque on which John Connally lay.  The Rangers lifted the coffin onto the cart.  They wheeled it out of the Rotunda, and. . . . Duncan lost sight of and for a little while as he and the rest of the press crew scrambled down the stairs.

    When he got outside, the Texas Rangers were putting the coffin on a wagon drawn by six black horses.  A wooden ramp had been set up over the Capitol stairs to let them guide the cart down safely.  Another black horse stood close by, this one riderless, with tall black boots reversed in the stirrups.  The wagon started down the path that led south to Congress Avenue.  A Ranger led the riderless horse after it. Governor Smith, the Senators, and most of the other dignitaries walked behind it.  The President and First Lady went back to the bubble-topped limousine.  Reporters scrambled into cars to follow.

    The procession made its slow way past the Texas Ranger monument and the Alamo monument beside it, past monuments to volunteer firemen and to the Confederate dead.  It turned right on to West Eleventh Street, right again on Colorado, and right once more time on Fourteenth.  Then it turned left up Congress on the way to Nineteenth and the City Cemetery to the east.

    People lined the streets to say their last goodbyes to John Connally--and, no doubt, to stare at the President and the other prominent people.  Some wore mourning, others ordinary clothes.  Many carried U.S. and Texas flags.  Texas Rangers kept the crowd on the sidewalks.  All the same, they and the Secret Service men had to be getting ulcers.  If another nut with a gun was out there, would he see whether that bubble really could stop a bullet?

    Riding in a car at a slow walk felt surreal, as if Duncan were moving in a dream.  It wasn’t quite a mile from the Capitol to the cemetery.  It should have taken five minutes at most.  It was somewhere close to twenty-five instead.  He smoked three cigarettes before they finally got there.  The other reporters in the car were puffing away, too.  When he got out, his throat was raw and his eyes stung.

    Most of the leaves were off the trees at the cemetery.  The grass was starting to go yellow.  The waiting grave stood open, a new wound in the earth.  Duncan shook his head.  He had his reporter hat on; he wasn’t supposed to think like a novelist or poet here.

    By the grave, they’d set up a portable lectern with a glass shield in front.  More glass--Duncan hoped this stuff really was bulletproof--formed a square around the lectern.  A minister stood there now, but the protection wasn’t for him.  It was for John Kennedy.

    They couldn’t put bulletproof glass around the folding chairs the President and Jackie sat on.  They did surround them with Secret Service agents close by and Texas Rangers out a little farther.  The agents and the Rangers looked jumpy as hell.  A sniper could pop up from anywhere.  Duncan knew the feeling.  He’d had it on Iwo.

    The minister said whatever ministers say.  Duncan took notes on it, notes he’d boil down into a sentence--two at the outside.  Then Governor Smith came up.  The Texas Rangers grew particularly alert.  It was, after all, their former boss who’d stopped a bullet.  The assassin might have wanted to kill Kennedy.  He had killed John Connally.

    “I don’t want to be here,” Preston Smith said, his accent heavy and sweet as cornbread.  “I wanted to be governor one day, but not like this.  John Connally wasn’t done using the job.  He was good at it, too.  I learned from him every single day.  I wanted to go on doing that till John decided to turn his hand to something else.  Then I’d take what I had learned and try my best with it.  Well, one of the things I learned in a hurry is that John Connally would be a tough act to follow.  Now I have to try, and I feel horribly unprepared.  I wanted John around for many, many years to come.  He should have been. It’s a crying shame that he isn’t, and I’ll just have to carry on instead.  With God’s help, maybe I can do some of what he would have.” He bobbed his head and sat down, a decent little man who suddenly found himself in a bigger role than he was ready for.

    John Kennedy took his place.  As soon as the President stood behind the lectern, you forgot about Preston Smith.  Kennedy might have come from some different and superior species:  taller, handsomer, more self-possessed, and better dressed.

    “Governor Connally was taken from us too young,” he said.  “He had much to live for, much yet to do.  He would have gone far had he lived--no one can doubt that.  He’d already come a long way, serving his state and his country with courage and with wisdom.”

    He looked around at the dozens of men protecting him from another assassin’s bullet.  When he continued, “Why would anyone want to take the life of such a man?” the question didn’t sound rhetorical.  He might have asked, Why would anyone want to shoot at me? Then he answered himself:  “An assassin tries to lift himself to the level of the man he slays.  A little man thinks he can make himself big with the squeeze of a trigger.”

    His voice hardened.  “The harshest punishment we can give an assassin, then, is to forget him.  Once Governor Connally’s killer is tried and convicted and punished, let us never speak his name again. Never.  The Greek historian Herodotus tells of a man who burned a great temple to win everlasting fame.  ‘I know his name,’ Herodotus says, ‘but I will not set it down here.’  And that man who wanted to be remembered forever has been forgotten for twenty-five hundred years. Let us do the same today.”

    Duncan wondered which of Kennedy’s speechwriters knew about the ancient Greek.  It was no great secret that JFK hadn’t done all the writing on Profiles in Courage, even if his was the only name on the spine.  But whoever came up with them, Kennedy made the lines his own when he delivered them.  That talent he had in abundance.

    “Let us forget the wretched assassin and recall the man he stole from us,” the President said.  “As an attorney, as a naval officer, as a public servant, as a husband and father, John Connally showed everything that was best about the United States of America.  Let us remember him for what he was and for what he might have been.  Let us mourn his loss to Texas, to the United States, and to his wife and children.  And let us vow to do everything in our power to make sure such a tragedy does not, cannot, happen again.  May that too form part of Governor Connally’s legacy.”

    He stepped away from the lectern.  A few people hesitantly clapped their hands.  Were you supposed to applaud a funeral oration, even from the President?  Duncan didn’t think so.  Most of the audience must not have, either, because the clapping was sparse and quickly faded. Secret Service men bunched themselves around JFK so no one could get a clear shot at him as he went back to his seat.

    A Texas Ranger in a uniform tunic and a kilt played “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipe.  Duncan couldn’t decide whether it was beautiful or the most tasteless thing he’d ever heard.  Somebody behind him whispered, “It’s a catfight with a tune.”  He looked back over his shoulder.  No, that wasn’t a reporter.  Duncan lifted the line for his story.

    He didn’t know what Kennedy would be doing during the evening, or with whom.  Maybe nothing, maybe not with anybody.  Jackie was along, after all.  Whatever the President would be doing, he’d do it in a nicer hotel than the one where Duncan was staying.  When Duncan got there, he discovered that the Ledger’s travel office had found what was surely the cheapest joint in Austin.

    He also discovered several other newspapermen were staying there. That made him feel better about the world.  Misery, like anything else, did love company.
      
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[Christian Kellum]

Does Oswald get killed by Jack Ruby? And if he doesn't, does he get convicted? Please answer this.