Reclaiming History (346 page)

^*
Actually, only one other of the boys was missing: Charles Douglas Givens (CE 705, 17 H 419; CE 1974, 23 H 873), who went to the corner of Main and Record (two blocks from the Depository) to watch the motorcade. When he returned to the Depository sometime after 12:40 p.m., police wouldn’t let him back inside (7 H 382, 385–386, WCT Roy Sansom Truly; 6 H 355, WCT Charles Douglas Givens). Givens, who had a prior police record for narcotics violations, was spotted in the crowd an hour later by Dallas police lieutenant Jack Revill, who recognized Givens from his past dealings with him. Givens was subsequently taken to police headquarters, where he was questioned and gave a statement (5 H 35–36, WCT Jack Revill; 6 H 355, WCT Charles Douglas Givens; CE 2003, 24 H 210).

^*
The Tippit murder occurred at approximately 1:12 p.m. and the murder scene at Tenth and Patton is not even quite seven blocks from the shoe store and Texas Theater. Also, we know Oswald was running at least part of the time after he shot Tippit, yet Oswald doesn’t reach the shoe store until close to twenty to twenty-five minutes later. Even given the somewhat circuitous path he must have taken to reach the shoe store area, the likelihood is that although the area was swarming with police officers searching for him, Oswald succeeded, along the way, in secreting himself from human view, where he most likely stayed hidden for several minutes at a time.

^*
The almost reflexive belief was that a southern segregationist had shot the president. “A lawyer in Riverdale commented: ‘We have allowed certain factions to work up such furor throughout the South with fanatic criticism [of Kennedy] that a demented person can feel confident that such atrocious action is justifiable’” (
New York Times
, November 23, 1963, p.5).
The terrible irony is that the man who killed the president was not the product of that segment of the South that despised the president for championing civil rights for the black population, but someone who admired the president for it.

^*
On the evening of Monday, November 25, 1963, a quarter of a million West Berliners crowded into newly dedicated John F. Kennedy Square, where just five months earlier Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner) speech, to mourn Kennedy’s death, thousands openly crying. The Associated Press reported that “never in memory has this tortured city grieved more than in the last four days since the death of the President.” (
Dallas Morning News
, November 26, 1963, p.16)
Earlier on Monday the
Telegraph
, a conservative London paper, said that “few of the 35 American Presidents have touched the minds and hearts of British people as have Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy.” The paper opened a fund drive to build a statue of Kennedy in London with a contribution of one thousand pounds. (
Dallas Morning News
, November 26, 1963, p.15)

^*
The venom was flying both ways. Republican Senator John Tower of Texas, regarded as a right-wing conservative, had always been highly critical of Kennedy. When he was informed at a Republican conference in St. Louis that his office in Washington had received about a dozen anonymous and threatening phone calls and a number of similar telegrams, he arranged to have his wife and three daughters stay at the home of friends in Maryland until he returned to the capital. Republican Representative Bruce Alger of Dallas was also reported to have received a number of threatening phone calls and telegrams. (
New York Times
, November 23, 1963, p.7)

†One such story about Roosevelt became a favorite of Roosevelt’s, and he delighted in telling it to friendly Democratic audiences. It seems there was a wealthy businessman commuting from heavily Republican Westchester County in New York who would hand the newsboy at the train station a dime every morning for the
New York Times
, glance at the front page, then hand the paper back as he rushed out the door to catch his train. Finally, one day, the newsboy, unable to control his curiosity any longer, asked the man why he always only looked at the front page.
“I’m interested in an obituary,” the man said.
“But the obituaries are on the back pages of the paper, and you never look at them,” the newsboy retorted.
“Son,” the man said, “the son of a bitch I’m interested in will be on page one.”

^*
The presidential cabin located toward the rear of the plane consisted of three rooms: the stateroom—the president’s “office” on the plane—and an adjacent bedroom and bathroom.

^*
Barnes told the Warren Commission that after he took the prints he had “lifted” from the right side of Tippit’s car back to the crime lab, “no legible prints were found” (7 H 274). Contrary to popular belief, this is typical. In working with the Los Angeles Police Department when I was with the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, I learned that approximately only 30 percent of the times that fingerprint experts are dispatched to the scene of a crime are they able to secure clear, readable, latent prints belonging to anyone. In most cases the prints found are just too fragmentary, smudged (the Tippit car), or superimposed with other prints to be used for comparison with a fingerprint exemplar of someone (here, Oswald) taken at a police station. (To compound the problem in the Tippit case, Barnes testified that the exterior surface of Tippit’s car was “dirty,” making it much more difficult to lift a readable print.) Indeed, even in those cases where readable prints are secured, only 10 percent of the time do those prints match up to those of a suspect. The rest belong either to the victim or to some third party. A simple equation: 10 percent of 30 percent equals 3 percent. Hence, in only 3 percent of the times that fingerprint experts go to a crime scene are they able to secure the latent prints of the accused. Ninety-seven percent of the time they are unsuccessful. As a prosecutor I would present this “negative fingerprint testimony” from my expert, and I found it to be a powerful statistical rebuttal to the common defense argument that since the defendant’s prints were not found at the scene, he was never there.

^*
The Warren Commission never pinned down what row or seat Oswald was in, and the arresting officers were all in disagreement. McDonald said Oswald was in the “second seat” over from the “right center aisle” and mentions no row (3 H 299); Hawkins said “three or four” seats over from the right center aisle as you face the screen, and “three or four rows from the back” (7 H 93); Walker: “fourth or fifth” row from the back, “third seat” in from where McDonald was (7 H 38–39); Captain W. R. Westbrook: “third or fourth row from the back,” seated “in the middle” (7 H 112; see also Sneed,
No More Silence
, p.314). Hutson not only seemed to be the most precise, but on a trip I took to Dallas on September 22, 2004, Ken Holmes, a Dallas student of the assassination with an emphasis on historical detail, said he was very confident, from his studies, where Oswald was seated in the theater, and he pointed out the seat to me. In Hutson’s December 3, 1963, report to Chief Curry, Hutson said that Oswald was “sitting in the third row from the back” in the “fifth seat” of “the center section,” which he later told the Warren Commission. In his Commission testimony, however, he didn’t say fifth seat from what side, but in his report to Curry he did. It was “the fifth seat north of the south aisle [from the stage looking toward the audience, the north aisle is on one’s right, the south aisle to one’s left] of the center section.” (Report from Officer T. A. Hutson to J. E. Curry, Chief of Police, December 3, 1963, p.1; 7 H 31, WCT Thomas Alexander Hutson) That’s the same seat Holmes pointed out to me. Holmes, a member of the Dallas Historical Society, has run a popular tour of JFK assassination sites for several years under the name Southwestern Historical Inc.

^*
“We were sort of in a bind,” Air Force One pilot Colonel Swindal would later recall, “because there was no place on Air Force One for a casket, and we sure didn’t want to put it in the cargo hold” (
Los Angeles Times
, May 2, 2006, p.B11).

^*
It has to be noted that this is Mrs. Kennedy’s version of what happened. Although President Johnson never addressed himself directly to the matter, his brief statement to the Warren Commission suggests a different version from what Mrs. Kennedy told author William Manchester. He says that when Mrs. Kennedy and President Kennedy’s body arrived, “Mrs. Johnson and I spoke to her. We tried to comfort her, but our words seemed inadequate. She went into the private quarters of the plane” (5 H 564). Mrs. Johnson’s version is more directly at odds with that of Mrs. Kennedy. She told the Warren Commission that “we had at first been ushered into the main presidential cabin on the plane, but Lyndon quickly said, ‘No, no,’ and immediately led us out of there; we felt that is where Mrs. Kennedy should be” (5 H 566).

^*
Dallas district attorney Henry Wade, a law enforcement power in his own right, would later tell the Warren Commission, “Fritz runs a kind of one-man operation there where nobody else knows what he is doing. Even me, for instance, he is reluctant to tell me, either,
but I don’t mean that disparagingly
. [But, of course, it
is
disparaging.] I will say Captain Fritz is about as good a man at solving a crime as I ever saw, to find out who did it, but he is the poorest in the getting [of] evidence that I know, and I am more interested in getting evidence” (5 H 218). Without further explanation, unless Wade was speaking loosely, it is difficult to know how one “solves” a crime without a successful gathering of evidence, unless Wade meant that Fritz’s intuition was usually accurate.

†There would eventually be three more interrogations of Oswald. All four, totaling approximately twelve hours, took place intermittently between 2:30 p.m. on November 22 and 11:10 a.m. on November 24, 1963. (WR, pp.180, 633)

^*
Although the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has provided since 1791 that an accused has the right to counsel to assist him in his defense, in Texas in 1963 the police did not have to
advise
a suspect or person arrested of this right. In this case, Oswald asked Fritz if he had the right to counsel and Fritz told him he did (4 H 215, WCT John Will Fritz; WR, p.602). However, Texas statutory law at the time
did
require that someone under arrest be advised that he did not have to make a statement, and if he did, it could be used against him. Although there is nothing in the report of Captain Fritz on his interrogation of Oswald (WR, pp.599–611) that he advised Oswald of this right against self-incrimination, Dallas assistant district attorney Bill Alexander, who sat in on many interrogations of arrestees by Fritz through the years, said that Fritz always would comply with Texas law and he assumes the reason this was not in Fritz’s notes is that it “went without saying” that he gave Oswald this admonition (Telephone interview of William Alexander by author on February 17, 2002). In any event, once FBI agents James Bookhout and James Hosty joined in Oswald’s interrogation, the agents advised Oswald of both rights (WR, p.619; 7 H 310, WCT James W. Bookhout; see also 7 H 353, WCT, Forrest V. Sorrels).
In the landmark cases of
Escobedo v. Illinois
(378 U.S. 478), a year
after
the assassination, and
Miranda v. Arizona
in 1966 (384 U.S. 436), it became a federal constitutional right that a suspect (and certainly an arrestee) has to be advised at the commencement of questioning of his right to have counsel during his interrogation, and if he doesn’t have funds for a lawyer, one will be appointed. He also has to be told he has a right to remain silent, and anything he says can be used against him, and if this is not done, any statement made by him thereafter that was elicited by the police during the interrogation cannot be introduced against him at his trial.
It should be noted that even before
Escobedo
and
Miranda
, the widespread practice, particularly by
federal
law enforcement agencies like the FBI and Secret Service, was to tell a suspect or arrestee of these rights and help him get a lawyer by allowing him to make a phone call for this purpose, as Captain Fritz allowed Oswald to do in this case. It’s just that there was
no legal requirement
to advise arrestees and suspects of these rights before they were questioned.

^*
Author William Manchester wrote that JFK’s Bible, “his most cherished personal possession,” was found on the plane, and LBJ had rested his hand on it (Manchester,
Death of a President
, pp.324, 328). But Lady Bird took the “Bible” off the plane with her as a memento, and later inquiry revealed it was not a Bible but a Catholic prayer book or missal, which, to all appearances, had never been opened (Holland,
Kennedy Assassination Tapes
, p.310).

†Johnson’s elevation to president from vice president marked the fourth time in American history when an assassin’s bullet has elevated a sitting vice president. Andrew Johnson was the first so elevated when John Wilkes Booth, a fierce proponent of the Confederate cause, shot Abraham Lincoln at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. Lincoln died the next day. Booth was shot to death during his capture on April 26, 1865. Next was the elevation to the presidency of Chester Alan Arthur, when Charles Julius Guiteau, a self-styled “lawyer, theologian, and politician” who claimed he had worked for President James A. Garfield’s election and was entitled to a prominent foreign service post in payment for it, which he never got, shot Garfield as he was walking to a train in the Baltimore and Potomac Station in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1881. Garfield did not die from his wound until September 19, 1881, and Guiteau was later hanged, on June 30, 1882. The next vice president to be elevated was Theodore Roosevelt when President William McKinley was shot by Leon F. Czolgosz, an anarchist who said McKinley was “the enemy of the working people,” on September 6, 1901, at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley didn’t expire until September 14. Czolgosz was electrocuted on October 29. (McConnell,
History of Assassination
, pp.310–312, 314–317; WR, pp.504–510)
That the job of the president of the United States is the most dangerous elected job in the world cannot be too vigorously contested. In addition to the two attempted assassinations of President Gerald Ford in 1975 (by Lynnette “Squeaky” Fromme in Sacramento on September 5, 1975, and Sarah Jane Moore in San Francisco on September 22, 1975), the attempted assassination of President Richard Nixon by Samuel Joseph Byck on February 22, 1974, and the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan by William Hinckley in Washington, D.C., on March 30, 1981, two other presidents were attacked before Kennedy, but the attempts failed. Additionally, attempts were made on one president-elect and even one former president. On January 30, 1835, an English-born house painter, Richard Lawrence, fired two pistols, both of which misfired, at President Andrew Jackson. Like William Hinckley, Lawrence was found by a jury to be not guilty by reason of insanity and died in a mental hospital sixteen years later. On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, attempted to shoot their way into Blair House, where President Harry Truman and his wife were temporarily residing while the White House was being repaired. Torresola was shot to death by White House guards in a hail of gunfire (one of the guards was also killed). Collazo was seriously wounded and sentenced to death, but Truman commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt was shot at in his car five times at a political rally in Miami’s Bayfront Park on February 15, 1933 by Giuseppe Zangara, a thirty-two-year-old bricklayer and stonemason. All five of Zangara’s shots missed Roosevelt. However, one of them hit Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who was riding with Roosevelt. Cermak died of his wound on March 6, and Zangara was electrocuted on March 20, only thirty-three days after his attempt on Roosevelt. The former president who escaped was Theodore Roosevelt, who was running for president again as the candidate of the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party. On October 14, 1912, a German-born New York bartender, John Schrank, fired one shot at Roosevelt as he entered his car outside a hotel in Milwaukee. The bullet hit Roosevelt in the chest, but a folded manuscript of the speech he was about to make and the metal case for his eyeglasses absorbed part of the bullet’s thrust, and he survived. Schrank was found to be insane and died in a mental hospital in 1943. (WR, pp.505, 509–513)
So starting with Lincoln in 1865, approximately one out of every three American presidents either has been assassinated or had an attempt on his life.