Reclaiming History (10 page)

Dallas is a “dry” town, meaning that hard liquor cannot be sold in a public bar. So Jack’s profit is in beer and champagne. His beer is the cheapest money can buy, and it is served in a glass with a bottom that works like a lens to magnify the modest quantity inside. His bartender also sells “setups,” nonalcoholic beverages to which the customer may add his own liquor from the bottle he brought to the club in a paper bag, which is legal but not very profitable. The real dough is in champagne. Jack sells his champagne, which costs him $1.60 a bottle, for $17.50, and the waitress usually gets the change from a twenty as a tip. The champagne girls get $2.50 for each bottle they persuade their customers to buy. There are over a dozen of Jack’s girls—waitresses, champagne and cigarette girls, and strippers. The strippers work under the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA) contract, but the others live on their tips and the commissions on the champagne.
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The champagne or cocktail girls are called B-girls, companions to the male customers to induce them to buy drinks, but Jack is proud of them. They aren’t hookers. He’s hell on any girl he suspects of making dates with the customers. His girls have class. He really cares about that. So what if most of his customers think his B-girls are hookers and keep buying Jack’s rotgut champagne for them, while the girls keep pouring the stuff into bar towels and ice buckets to avoid drinking it. They are provided with “spit glasses,” frosted tumblers ostensibly filled with ice water, really just ice, that they use to spit the champagne in their mouth into. Jack doesn’t want the girls to drink any more than they absolutely have to. He doesn’t like drunks any more than hookers. Jack’s girls are a major preoccupation. He is always flying off the handle at them, browbeating, bullying, firing them. Diana Hunter, a veteran, reckons Jack has fired her two hundred times. But he’s good to them too, always there with a bit of cash or even a pint of blood when they’re really in trouble. They scream back at him when he loses his temper and turns cruel and mean, but they also know that a short time later he will have forgotten all about it. The girls love Jack in some odd way. Jack is a mensch.
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Jack Ruby lives in a low-rent district south of downtown, Oak Cliff. Though he is a neat dresser and his personal hygiene is high—taking two or three showers a day—he lives in an apartment full of litter, dirty clothes, unread newspapers, unwashed glasses—an apartment as implacably disordered, out of control, and marginal as his life.
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Jack has troubles. His rock-and-roll joint out on Oak Lawn in North Dallas, the Vegas Club, which his sister Eva runs for him, is in trouble. With Eva out sick, he has to get the kid, Larry Crafard, to look after things out there, but who knows how long that’s going to last—Crafard is a drifter. He was working as a roustabout with Bob Craven’s carny show, “How Hollywood Makes Movies,” until it folded in Dallas last month. Jack lets Larry sleep in the room down at the Carousel and gives him a buck or two for his meals at the Eat Well Café in return for doing odd jobs around the Carousel. So who knows how long Larry will last? Larry’s a good kid, but no way is he going to get back together with that ballsy wife of his, and Jack knows he won’t be around Dallas long.
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Not only is Eva sick, but Little Lynn is too—that’s one of his strippers, out the whole damned weekend, probably. Drank too much champagne and passed out over at Nichols Brothers garage, but wouldn’t let Jack drive her to the hospital.
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He’ll probably have to send her a couple of bucks, wire it to her over in Fort Worth. She’s most likely pregnant, and that salesman boyfriend of hers is out of work because his car broke down.
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Jack has his own problems. Like recently with the stripper Jada? He goes to all sorts of trouble and expense to bring her up from New Orleans because she’s supposed to be such a class act, and he’s paying her way over scale, and then she gets out of line, starts doing front bumps and other kinds of things that could get his club shut down in a place like Dallas, and Jack has to douse the lights when it gets too raunchy. Jack screams at Jada and, she says, threatens her. Her agent calls the cops, and Jada files a “threats warrant” for Jack’s arrest. At the peace-bond hearing, Jada tells the judge that Jack was trying to get out of paying her on the rest of her contract by threatening to cut up her wardrobe if she gives him trouble. Her wardrobe, she says, is worth $40,000. Jack’s own arresting officer tells Jada, “Young lady, how in the world could you have $40,000 worth of G strings because that’s all I’ve ever seen you in?”
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And where’s Jack going to get the dough to pay if old Judge Richberg ends up giving him a stiff fine when he’s way behind on the union welfare payments for his dancers?
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—particularly with the feds after him for delinquent income taxes,
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and the competition, the Weinstein brothers, beating him to death with their fake “amateur nights” at Abe’s Colony Club and the Theatre Lounge? They have pros there pretending to be housewives and working for ten or fifteen bucks a show,
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way under scale, and you can’t get the AGVA to do anything about it, probably because someone’s paying them off or something. Jack spends his whole time trying to get the AGVA off the dime and start protecting its artists the way it should, but that bunch is so crooked they’d cheat God. In the meantime, Jack has just paid the rent on the Carousel, five hundred bucks, by certified check,
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so he can breathe easy for another little while anyway. People go and tell you show biz is the life, but listen to Jack. Jack knows—it’s tough, really tough.

Jack’s favorite dachshund, Sheba, snuffs and begins to snore, but Jack sleeps on. Jack really loves Sheba. He tells some people she’s his wife. Sheba is always with Jack, goes everywhere with him, even sleeps in his bed. The four dachshunds he’s now keeping in a room off the kitchen at his club (he’s had as many as ten dogs at a time) he calls his children. He gets really pissed off if you take that as a joke, tilting his head in a menacing way.
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7:30 a.m.

In Fort Worth’s dowdy, brown-brick Texas Hotel, George Thomas enters the small foyer of suite 850 and raps lightly on the door of the master bedroom. He hears a stirring beyond the door and then the word “okay,” a communication from the president that the First Lady had not slept in her husband’s bedroom that night. If she had, like at the White House, the president’s response would have been a cough if he didn’t want to disturb her in her slumber.

“Mr. President,” the portly black valet calls gently, then pushes the door open and steps across the threshold.

“It’s raining,” Thomas says.

A voice, with a distinctive Boston accent, groans from under the covers, “That’s too bad.”
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President John F. Kennedy throws back the comforter and swings his legs over the side of the bed, planting his feet on the icy floor. His first appearance of the day is out of doors, and later, several motorcades are planned—useless for vote-getting if the president and his wife have to be driven past sodden, disgruntled crowds, hidden beneath the limousine’s plastic bubble top. While the president showers, Thomas lays out his clothes—a blue-gray, two-button suit, a dark blue tie, and a white shirt with narrow gray stripes.
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If, for a few moments in this blandly impersonal hotel room, he seems like just another American head of a household getting up to go to work, that’s an illusion, for Jack Kennedy is the chief executive of the most powerful government on earth, the commander of its most powerful military machine, the most powerful man alive. Even the impression that this nondescript eighth-floor suite
*
in Fort Worth is far from the White House is an illusion. The White House is there, in the hotel with him, in the suite, never beyond the sound of Jack Kennedy’s voice. To make sure that none of the far-flung people and agencies of the American government are out of range of that voice, an elite group of Signal Corps technicians from the White House Communications Agency travels ahead of the president to install a jungle of special telephone circuits, relays, and networks that are tied back to the key switchboard in the east basement of the executive mansion, and Jack Kennedy is never allowed to be more than five minutes away from that network.

Many of his enormous entourage are already awake and waiting for him to emerge from the shower. Some who watched through the night, like the nine Secret Service agents of the White House detail
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on the twelve-to-eight shift, will sleep only after passing their responsibilities on to the next shift. John F. Kennedy’s presidency is in fact a collection of special teams that never sleep, teams with code names: an S team for communications, a D team for the Secret Service, a W team for the president’s staff, a V team for the vice president’s staff. The L team is the president and his family—Jack is Lancer, Jackie is Lace, their children Lyric and Lark, and they all live in the Crown (or Castle), a code name for the White House. There are political advisers, medical men, the military, secretarial pools, and a luggage crew, and every individual has a precisely worked-out itinerary and schedule specifying his transportation, accommodations, and duties for every moment of the three-day trip through Texas.
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A peculiarly inconspicuous but nonetheless vivid symbol of the president’s power is Warrant Officer Ira D. Gearhart, the man with the “satchel,” or the “football.” The football is a locked metal suitcase jammed with thirty pounds of codes and equipment that Kennedy can use to launch America’s nuclear strike force. In the event of a missile attack on America or Europe the president will have only fifteen minutes to make up his mind on how to respond. Kennedy’s military aides will actually operate the equipment, but it is Gearhart’s lugubrious duty to be there with the football—and to remember the combination of the lock—if Kennedy decides to push the button. Gearhart, known to the president’s staff as “The Bagman,” is never far from the president.
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7:52 a.m.

In Dallas, the drizzle from a gray sky has stopped by the time Wesley Frazier and Lee Oswald exit Stemmons Freeway. The Pacific cold front that rolled in from New Mexico last night is moving faster than predicted and is already on the way out of central Texas, taking its scattered thundershowers with it. The air behind it is cold, but it looks as though the day will turn fair after all.
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Wesley circles around up Record Street to McKinney and down to the wire-fenced parking lot reserved for employees at the corner of Munger and Broadway, across the street from the Texas School Book Depository Warehouse. It’s about a twelve-hundred-foot walk back to the Depository’s rear door, but they’ll be able to get there for the workday, which starts at 8:00 a.m. and ends at 4:45 p.m., with a forty-five-minute lunch period starting at noon.
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Lee gets out, takes his package from the backseat, and starts toward the rear of the Depository Building. Wesley stays in the car for a minute or so to rev the engine so his car battery will have a good charge when they quit work. Trains are switching back and forth in the train yards off to the west. Lee waits for him at the end of the cyclone fence, and Wesley notices that Lee is carrying the long, paper package in his right hand.
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When Wesley cuts the engine and gets out, Lee starts off toward the Depository again. As Wesley begins to follow, Oswald quickens his pace, keeping an ever-increasing distance between them. It’s the first time that Lee has walked ahead of him; usually they walk together.
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Wesley doesn’t bother to catch up. They’ve got plenty of time and he likes to watch the switch engines shunting freight cars around the yards. He stops to watch some guys welding a section of track. You have to be careful crossing the tracks here, because you never know when a string of boxcars might be bearing down on you. Wesley steps over the rusty rails, avoiding the puddles, and spots Lee, fifty feet ahead, still carrying the package, as he goes in the back door of the Depository, the one near the Houston Street loading dock. By the time Wesley gets there, Lee is nowhere in sight. Wesley goes downstairs, hangs up his coat, puts up his lunch, and goes to work filling orders for schoolbooks.
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8:00 a.m.

In a Fort Worth hotel bathroom, the president can hear the murmur of the crowd awaiting him eight floors below as he drags a razor across his face. In the mirror he looks good. He has to. Americans want their president to be the picture of robust health. They will never know how much it costs him to give them that image. Although muscular and well developed, the president has been bedeviled all his life by an endless series of debilitating illnesses, starting in his early childhood when he had all the traditional childhood illnesses, including scarlet fever, as well as high fevers and allergies. “Jack was sick all the time,” a boyhood friend would say. He was thirty before the doctors figured out that most of his health problems stemmed from Addison’s disease, an extremely grave disorder of the adrenal glands that weakens the immune system, leaving the victim unable to fight off infection. The first crisis occurred on a trip to England in 1947. The British doctor who first diagnosed the disease in Kennedy gave him a year to live. He was taken off the ship that brought him home, the
Queen Mary
, on a stretcher, so near death that he had to be given the Catholic Church’s sacrament of extreme unction—the last rites.
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Even though the disease has been brought under control by a relatively new (1939) hormone derived from the adrenal gland, cortisone, the hormone causes odd fat deposits, such as a slight upper-back “buffalo hump” and full cheeks, both of which the president exhibited, and he is forced to keep himself well tanned to hide its typical brownish discoloration of the skin. His frequent bouts of fever are explained away as recurrences of the malaria he caught during the war. In fact, he is extremely prone to infection and takes various medications, including painkillers, every day—including some that had never been prescribed by his White House doctors
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and might earn anyone else a stretch in jail.