Reclaiming History (13 page)

“Oh, I see,” Lee says, and walks off.
⁸⁸

10:15 a.m.

The president and his wife don’t make it back to suite 850 until after ten o’clock, but find they have nearly an hour before the flight to Dallas. Kennedy takes time to call former vice president John Nance Garner to wish him a happy ninety-fifth birthday while Jackie spends a moment looking around the suite. She discovers something they were all too busy to notice until now, that the paintings aren’t the usual by-the-yard hotel-room art, but real paintings—a Monet, a Picasso, a Van Gogh, a dozen others, and some bronzes, all borrowed from the local museum for the pleasure of America’s First Couple. From a specially prepared catalog they find the name of the woman who made it all possible, Ruth Carter Johnson. The First Couple telephone Mrs. Johnson, the wife of a newspaper executive, and thank her for her kindness. Mrs. Johnson is both flabbergasted and touched by the graciousness of the gesture, one she will never forget.
⁸⁹

Ken O’Donnell shows the president what is at best a disrespectful advertisement in the
Dallas Morning News
. It’s a full-page ad draped with a funeral black border, and headlined “WELCOME MR. KENNEDY TO DALLAS.” Placed by the “American Fact-Finding Committee,” chaired by one Bernard Weissman, the ad, with twelve questions for Kennedy, rapidly moves from inane innuendo—“WHY has Gus Hall, head of the U.S. Communist Party, praised almost every one of your policies and announced the party will endorse and support your re-election in 1964?”—to outright accusation of treason—“WHY has the Foreign Policy of the United States degenerated to the point that the C.I.A. is arranging coups and having staunch Anti-Communist Allies of the U.S. bloodily exterminated?”
⁹⁰

“Can you imagine a paper doing a thing like that?” Jack says to O’Donnell, and then, making light of it to Jackie, who is sickened by the hate behind the ad, he adds, “Oh, we’re heading into nut country today.”
⁹¹

Of course, Jack Kennedy knows that the presidency is a vulnerable position, just as every chief of state is aware of the special hazards he faces, but he simply refuses to accept the notion that an American president can’t go into any American city. He prowls the room restlessly.
⁹²

“It would not be a very difficult job to shoot the president of the United States,” he says to nobody in particular. “All you’d have to do is get up in a high building with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight, and there’s nothing anybody could do.”
⁹³

10:30 a.m.

The motorcade that will take the presidential party to Fort Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base—long lines of limousines, cars, and press vehicles stacked three abreast—is clogging Eighth Street. O’Donnell and O’Brien are lying in wait outside the hotel, determined to make sure Senator Yarborough gets into the car with the vice president, as the president has ordered.
⁹⁴
They are relieved to see that the drizzle is finally clearing, and O’Brien even hopes for what he likes to call “Kennedy weather.”

Vice President Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, emerge from the Texas Hotel to a smattering of applause. O’Brien escorts them to the waiting convertible, with a grumpy Yarborough walking closely behind. The political orchestration pays off. When the motorcade finally pulls out just after eleven o’clock for the short drive to Carswell, a bit behind schedule, Senator Yarborough and the vice president are seen smiling and riding together by the media. Although neither man may be happy about the close contact, the needs of the Democratic Party have been served.
⁹⁵

11:00 a.m.

It usually takes Jack Ruby a good while to get going in the morning. For one thing, he is really meticulous about his physical appearance. In addition to his morning shower and shave, he takes care to dress in a good suit, tie, and hat. He tries to keep in shape too, exercising every day at the YMCA and working out with weights he keeps both at his office and in his apartment. Keeping up his appearance is a daily struggle. He worries about creeping baldness and his weight. He is five foot eight (five foot nine inches by some accounts), weighs 175 pounds, and is brawny in the arms and shoulders. He is always dieting, usually with the help of pills.
⁹⁶

It is around eleven before Ruby gets to the offices of the
Dallas Morning News
at the corner of Houston and Young streets.
⁹⁷
The building is only five blocks from the Texas School Book Depository.
⁹⁸
Since there are no high buildings on the west side of Houston, one can actually see the Depository Building from the northwest corner windows of the advertising department’s second floor.
⁹⁹

The morning visit to the
News
is a regular Friday event for Jack, one he looks forward to. He takes particular pains composing the weekend ads in the classified-ad office of the
News
for his two clubs, because the weekend is “very lucrative,” and Jack has a way of making his ads, as he says in his strange way of talking, “where they have a way of selling the product I am producing or putting on the show.” It’s not always easy to figure out what Jack is saying. “It’s been a lovely, precarious evening,” he might say, or, to an attractive woman, “You make me feel very irascible.” A favorite expression is “In lieu of the situation, let’s do this.”
¹⁰⁰

On his way to the elevator in the lobby, he spots a
News
employee he’s always friendly with and has recently dated, Gladys Craddock, who works in the classified-ad department on the first floor, and cheerily shouts out to her across the lobby, “Hi, the president is going to be here today.”
¹⁰¹
He gets a quick breakfast in the building’s cafeteria on the second floor
¹⁰²
—part of his Friday routine.

Jack then saunters over to the advertising and promotion department, also on the second floor. He could walk around the department blindfolded. He knows its big bullpen for the ad-space salesmen, and the cubicles along the sides for the executives. He knows every employee, and he knows the routine: how to leave his ad copy in the box if John Newnam (not Newman), his designated salesman, isn’t there and how to get help if he needs it in preparing his ad.

Newnam isn’t there today. This morning a lot of the twenty-six ad salesmen are adjusting their schedules to take in the presidential motorcade when it cuts through the downtown on Main Street a few blocks away.
¹⁰³

The fact that Newnam isn’t there is no problem for Jack. It gives him time to go up to Tony Zoppi’s office on the third floor of the building.
¹⁰⁴
Zoppi, the paper’s nightclub editor, is one of Jack’s preoccupations. He has known Zoppi for a dozen years—Zoppi will never forget being introduced to the audience in one of Ruby’s clubs, the night they first met, and hearing Ruby explain how “superfluous” it was to have Tony Zoppi there.
¹⁰⁵
Ruby is always trying to get Zoppi to mention his clubs in his daily column or his television show. That’s worth far more than any amount of advertising, and what’s more, it’s free, while the ads have to be paid for in cash. At least Jack’s ads do. His credit with the
News
, in spite of the fact that he’s a steady customer, is not terrific. In fact, it’s nonexistent.

Zoppi isn’t there either—someone tells Jack he’s in New Orleans for a couple of days—but Jack sees the brochure he left for Zoppi a few days before about the emcee at the Carousel, Bill DeMar. Jack is annoyed with Zoppi, who promised him a story, which amounted to a “build” of one or two lines. Picking up the brochure, Jack meanders back to Newnam’s desk to work up the copy for his weekend ads when Don Campbell turns up to distract him.

Campbell is not just another ad-space salesman, but a friend and a colleague, so to speak. Campbell operates and manages the Stork Club, a supper club out on Oak Lawn across from another club called the Village, and they often talk shop. Jack particularly wants to apologize for the other evening, when Campbell came over to Jack and his friend, Ralph Paul, as they were having dinner at the Egyptian Lounge to invite them to come along with him to the nearby Castaway Club. Jack, still seething over the way the Castaway Club had once pirated his whole band from the Vegas, turned down the invitation, and now wants to be sure Campbell’s feelings weren’t hurt.

Jack has a lot on his mind: his troubles with Jada, the crazy stripper from New Orleans who’s going to get him closed down if she doesn’t clean up her act; the struggle to keep his two clubs afloat. Campbell has known Jack for three or four years, and it’s not the first time he has heard Jack’s complaints about the lousy business they are in, running nightclubs. Jack moans about the fights he gets into with what he regards as undesirable customers, “characters” or “punks,” as he calls them. Fortunately, Jack is, he tells Campbell, a very capable fighter. Also, anytime he is fixing to have trouble with someone, he gets a gun and keeps it on his person.

Neither Campbell nor Ruby mentions the presidential motorcade, which will be passing within four blocks of the
News
building in a few minutes. When Campbell goes off to see another client about 12:25, Jack is still sitting at Newnam’s desk, working on his ad copy.
¹⁰⁶

11:25 a.m.

The flight from Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth to Love Field, Dallas’s airport, is just thirty miles and takes but thirteen minutes. The presidential party could easily have driven the distance in half an hour, but presidential aide Ken O’Donnell vetoed that. It would cut out the welcome at the airport for the president and Jackie, and O’Donnell knows that the airport arrival, with the inevitable cameras recording the enthusiasm of the crowd, is as important to modern political campaigns as all those whistlestop appearances on the rear platform of the cross-country train were to Harry Truman’s astonishing upset victory in 1948.

Short as the flight is, O’Donnell and the president use the fleeting minutes to put the squeeze, as O’Donnell puts it, on Governor Connally, who is aligned with LBJ against Yarborough in the state’s Democratic bloodletting. The president motions at Texas congressman Albert Thomas from the doorway of his cabin and asks him to “give Kenny a hand with Connally.” Thomas is glad to oblige, and the governor begins to wilt under their pressure.

Senator Yarborough was particularly incensed about a deadly slight Governor Connally had in store for him—after selling $11,200 in tickets to tomorrow night’s dinner in Austin, there was no place for his wife. Worse, he hadn’t been invited to the Connally’s formal reception for the Kennedys.
¹⁰⁷

“It was my wife who didn’t want the senator at the reception, not me,” Connally tells O’Donnell and Thomas, taking advantage of Nellie’s temporary absence. “She said she wouldn’t let that man in her house, and when your wife says something like that, what can you do?”

At a strategic moment O’Donnell nudges the governor and the senator into the president’s cabin, and watches his boss expertly wield the overwhelming Kennedy charm to solve the problem in three minutes. The governor finds himself agreeing not only to invite Senator Yarborough to the reception at the Governor’s Mansion, but to seat him at the head table for the dinner.

The president, who has already changed suits once that morning, excuses himself to change his shirt. The governor mutters to the smug O’Donnell, “How can anyone say no to that man?”

“So we land in Dallas with everybody on the plane in love with each other and the sun shining brightly,” O’Donnell thinks. The day is looking up.
¹⁰⁸

11:40 a.m.

Air Force One, code-named Angel, touches down at Love Field, just north of downtown Dallas, and rolls across the puddled tarmac to the red and green terminal building.
¹⁰⁹
*
The last U.S. Weather Bureau temperature reading at Love Field, at 10:55 a.m., was fifty-seven degrees. But by the next reading, at 11:55, sixteen minutes after the president arrived, it had risen to sixty-three degrees.
¹¹⁰
The president is pleased at his first glimpse of the waiting crowd from the plane’s window. He says to O’Donnell, “This trip is turning out to be terrific. Here we are in Dallas, and it looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine for us.”
¹¹¹

T
he stage directions for the airport welcome call for the vice president’s plane to land ahead of the president’s by a minute or two, enough time to allow Johnson and his wife to position themselves to greet President and Mrs. Kennedy at the foot of the ramp, as though they hadn’t just left them a quarter hour earlier in Fort Worth.
¹¹²

Aura, though a reality, cannot be adequately described. It just is. And JFK’s aura was legendary. Reporting live for radio KBOX in Dallas, reporter Ron Jenkins waits for the door to Air Force One to open. When it does, no one emerges for several moments. “And then all of a sudden President Kennedy appeared,” he would later recall. “And he had a way of doing this like no one I had ever seen before. And it was a presence bigger than life. I never knew how tall the man was, or anything else, but he looked about 7 feet tall when he came out of that door all by himself.”
¹¹³
Unwittingly, Jenkins’s words contained their own validation. He was so struck by Kennedy he had forgotten that Jackie Kennedy, someone few overlooked, had emerged from the plane door ahead of the president.

Texas governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie, followed Kennedy and Jackie down the stairs of Air Force One in the dazzling sunlight. “We were two couples in the prime of our lives,” Nellie Connally recalled. “We were two women, so proud of the men we loved…That day, November 22, 1963, the autumn air was filled with anticipation.”
¹¹⁴

11:45 a.m.

Police Chief Jesse Curry, waiting in the open door of the motorcade’s lead car, checks on communications with Deputy Police Chief George L. Lumpkin. A few minor problems are solved.