Reclaiming History (48 page)

Within a few minutes, Henry Wade gets phone calls from his first assistant, Jim Bowie, and U.S. Attorney Barefoot Sanders—both of whom have gotten very concerned calls from Washington. Wade assures both of them that he will check into the rumor.
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Wade immediately decides to take “charge” of the matter and goes down to the police department to make sure that no such language appears in any complaint against Oswald. His man down there, Bill Alexander,
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denies to Wade that he had anything to do with the rumor, not telling Wade that his own loose lips had given birth to it.
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I
n Richardson, Texas, Gregory Olds, editor of the local newspaper and president of the Dallas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), reaches for the telephone ringing on his nightstand. The caller is one of the ACLU board members, who tells him he just got a call from the president of the Austin affiliate. Lee Oswald has been seen on television complaining that he’s been denied legal representation and they think that someone should check into Oswald’s complaint. Olds agrees and tells him that he will do it.

In a moment, Olds has the Dallas Police Department on the line and asks to speak to the chief of police. He’s told that Chief Curry is busy. Olds then asks to speak to one of the deputy chiefs, but no one seems to know where they are. When Olds is asked if he would be willing to speak to a detective, he informs the officer on the phone that he is the president of the Dallas Civil Liberties Union and that he will speak with the man in charge of the investigation and no one else. An officer eventually comes to the phone and tells him, “Captain Fritz isn’t available, but you can tell me.”

“I’ll wait,” Olds tells them through clenched teeth. He has learned to be persistent when dealing with the police.
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When Captain Fritz finally comes on the line, Olds explains to him that the ACLU was deeply concerned over Oswald’s apparent lack of legal counsel and stands ready to provide him with immediate assistance. Fritz blithely tells him that the suspect had been informed several times of his right to representation and offered opportunities to contact a lawyer, but he declined them. Olds thanks the captain and hangs up.
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The situation is nothing new for the ACLU chapter president. He knew that every city had prisoners who refuse the services of an attorney on the assumption they don’t need one, deciding to represent themselves in court. Most of them pay for their mistake in prison. It would be easy for Olds to accept the word of the police department that Oswald’s legal rights have been safeguarded. Instead, he rubs the sleepiness from his eyes and telephones a few ranking members of the ACLU, telling them to meet him at once in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, across the street northwest from City Hall.
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10:40 p.m.

After having just left police headquarters about ten to fifteen minutes ago, Detectives Guy Rose and Richard Stovall park their car in the basement garage of City Hall and walk back into the basement entrance with Wesley Frazier, his sister, and the Reverend Campble in tow. After taking an affidavit from Frazier, they were driving the three of them back to Irving and were halfway there when they received a call over the radio to return to City Hall with Frazier and contact Captain Fritz. When Detective Rose telephones upstairs, Captain Fritz tells him to take Frazier to the fourth-floor Identification Bureau and give Frazier a polygraph test. Fritz wants to know if he’s telling the truth about the curtain rod story. Did Oswald really tell him he was bringing curtain rods to work? Or is this some kind of cover story Frazier has cooked up?

“Okay, Cap’,” Rose replies.
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H
orace Busby, LBJ’s longtime aide, speechwriter, and confidant, is waiting for President Johnson to arrive at Johnson’s home, the Elms, a large brick home in the Spring Valley section of Washington, D.C., Johnson had purchased from well-known society figure and political hostess Perle Mesta. In the past sixteen years Busby had been through the highs and the lows and everything in between with LBJ, and knew him, he said, better than he wanted to know any man. Yet he knows he is not now waiting for any man he had ever known. He was waiting for the president of the United States. The Elms is being overrun with Secret Service agents and telephone people installing new lines. After LBJ arrives and has a meeting with his close aides, friends, and Mrs. Johnson, he retreats to the sunroom with Busby. A large portrait of LBJ’s mentor, former House Speaker Sam Rayburn, looks down on the room. LBJ raises his hand to the portrait, saying quietly, “How I wish you were here.” Settling in a chair, he asks Busby to turn on the television set, saying, “I guess I am the only person in the United States who doesn’t know what happened today.” When he hears talk out of Dallas about a possible Communist conspiracy being behind the assassination, he says, “No, we must not have that. We must not start making accusations without evidence.”
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11:00 p.m.

At the Paine house in Irving, the rumblings of a long day are coming to an end. Ruth and Marina talk quietly as they prepare for bed. Marina tells her that just the night before Lee had said to her that he hoped they could get an apartment together again soon. She is hurt and confused, wondering how he could say such a thing when he must have been planning something that would inevitably cause their permanent separation. For an instant, Mrs. Paine’s politeness was overcome by her curiosity.

“Do you think he killed the president?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Marina answers.

There is an awkward moment, and then Marina says that she doesn’t think she’ll be able to sleep anytime soon and asks to borrow Ruth’s hair dryer. She wants to take a shower, which she has often said renews her spirits. Mrs. Paine hands her the dryer and bids her goodnight.
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Alone, later, in her own bedroom, Marina runs across June’s baby book, which the police had failed to confiscate. She suddenly remembers the pictures Lee had given her from the set he had her take of him in the backyard when they lived on Neely Street. She peels the book open. There they are, pasted into the album, two small snapshots of Oswald wearing a pistol and holster strapped to his waist, a rifle in one hand, two left-wing newspapers in the other. On the back of one he had written, “For Junie, from Papa.” When he had given them to her, Marina was appalled and asked, “Why would Junie want a picture with guns?”

“To remember Papa by sometime,” Oswald had said.
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She realizes now that they will only hurt Lee. She carefully removes them from the baby book and calls Marguerite into the bedroom. She shows them to Mrs. Oswald and tries to explain to her that Lee shot at General Edwin Walker in early 1963
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and that he might have been shooting at the president too. But her thoughts only come out as a series of gestures and very broken English.

“Mama,” she says, pointing at the photographs. “Walker…”

Marguerite doesn’t seem to understand what she means by “Walker” but understands the significance of the guns in the photos. “You take, Mama,” Marina says.

“No,” Marguerite resists.

“Yes, Mama, you take,” Marina says, shoving the photos at her.

“No, Marina,” Marguerite whispers. “Put back in the book.”

Marguerite then places a finger across her lips, points toward Ruth’s room, and shakes her head, warning Marina, “Ruth, no.” Marina understands that she is not to show the photos to Mrs. Paine, or anyone.
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After Marguerite leaves the room, Marina makes another discovery that takes her breath away. The police, in their hasty search, also overlooked a pale, translucent, blue-green china cup with violets and a golden rim that her grandmother had given her. Inside it she finds Lee’s wedding ring. Lee had taken the ring off at work before, but this was the first time in their marriage that he had ever taken it off and left it at home. Marina immediately realizes that the shooting was not a spontaneous act, but that Lee had intended to do it when he left that morning. Apparently, he didn’t expect to return.
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Marina didn’t sleep that night. She knew little about American law. She thought it would all be over in three days and Lee would be strapped in the electric chair and executed. Would she be found a criminal too for her knowledge of Lee’s involvement in the Walker shooting? Would she find herself in prison? She lay awake wondering what would become of her children.
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H
enry Wade plows his way through the field of reporters lined up in the corridor outside the Homicide and Robbery Bureau.
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Inside, Assistant DA Bill Alexander, FBI agent Jim Bookhout, and Captain Fritz await him. At Wade’s request, Fritz begins to outline the considerable amount of evidence the Dallas Police Department has impressively gathered so far—the gun, the witnesses, the arrest, and the fingerprints and probably false statements by Oswald during his interrogation. It all looks pretty good to Wade.
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F
or nearly the past five hours, thirty-five-year-old Richard B. Stolley, the Pacific Coast regional editor for
Life
magazine, has been ringing the home telephone of Abraham Zapruder every fifteen minutes or so without success. Stolley flew into Dallas from Los Angeles earlier in the afternoon with
Life
reporter Tommy Thompson and photographer Allen Grant. The team had set up headquarters at the Hotel Adolphus in downtown Dallas, and within hours Stolley learned from a local correspondent that Zapruder had reportedly taken amateur movies of the shooting.

Stolley dials the number again, and this time a sleepy voice answers, “Hello?”

Zapruder had been driving around the last few hours trying to shake the gruesome images from his mind. Stolley explains that he represents
Life
magazine and might be interested in Zapruder’s film. Zapruder says Stolley is the first journalist to contact him and confirms that he does have a film that shows the shooting. Not wishing to lose an exclusive, and knowing others will soon be hot on the trail, Stolley tries to talk Zapruder into letting him come out to his home now to view the film and talk. Zapruder replies that he is too tired and distraught to discuss it tonight. He tells Stolley to come by his office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, and hangs up.

Stolley decides to show up an hour early, just in case.
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I
t’s just after midnight on the East Coast as the three pathologists near the end of their autopsy of the president’s body at Bethesda Naval Hospital, when three skull fragments recovered from the floor of the presidential limousine during a Secret Service examination at the White House garage are brought into the morgue.
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Interest in the three skull fragments grows when the three pathologists note a distinct crater on the outer surface of the largest fragment, characteristic of an exit wound.
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Their suspicions are soon confirmed when X-rays of that fragment reveal minute metallic particles embedded in the margins of the crater.
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There is no doubt about it. The fragment contains a portion of the exit wound.
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FBI agents Sibert and O’Neill, eager to submit a report on the autopsy findings, ask Dr. Humes what his findings will be?

“Well, the pattern is clear,” Humes tells them. “Two bullets struck the president from behind. One bullet entered the president’s back and probably worked its way out of the body during the external cardiac massage at Parkland Hospital. A second bullet struck the rear of the president’s skull and fragmented before exiting.”

“Is that then the cause of death, Doctor?”

Humes nods, affirmatively. “Gunshot wound of the head.”
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As the autopsy team removes its equipment from around the examination table, a group of morticians from Gawler’s Funeral Home move their portable embalming equipment into position to prepare the president’s body for burial.
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Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman signs for the photographs
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and X-rays
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taken during the autopsy, which will be delivered to Secret Service special agent-in-charge Robert I. Bouck at the White House in the early morning hours of November 23.
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Though most in attendance at the autopsy quietly leave the room, for the weary doctors the night is not over; they stay to assist the morticians. No one seems to know whether the coffin will be open or closed while the president lies in state. Although Mrs. Kennedy has expressed her wish that the casket be closed, the issue has been left unresolved. Neither Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, the president’s air force aide, nor Admiral George Burkley, the president’s personal physician, can assure the morticians that the body will not be viewed. McHugh decides that it would be better to be on the safe side and have the body fully prepared and dressed.
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For the next three hours, the men from Gawler’s are absorbed in the tedious task of putting as good a face as possible on death. The president’s cranium is packed with a combination of cotton and plaster of Paris to provide the support necessary to reconstruct the head. After the hardening agent dries, the scalp is pulled together and sutured.
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The organs from the thoracic and abdominal cavity, preserved in formaldehyde, are placed in a plastic bag and returned to the body cavity, which is then stitched closed.
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The tracheotomy wound is sutured up and a small amount of dermal wax is used to seal the wound. Restorative cosmetics are used to hide some bruising and discoloration on the face.
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At the conclusion of the embalming process, the body is wrapped in plastic, then dressed in a blue-gray pinstripe suit, a white shirt, a blue tie with a pattern of light dots, and black shoes, which have been picked out and brought to the morgue by the president’s friend and aide, Dave Powers. The president’s hands are folded across his chest and a rosary laced through the fingers.
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When they are finished, the body is lifted into a new casket—made of hand-rubbed, five-hundred-year-old African mahogany—lined in white rayon
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that has been brought in to replace the Britannia casket damaged in Dallas.
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Those who might look upon the president’s face now will never know the brutal condition of his head just a few hours earlier.