The final line of defense, which was to become crucial on November 22, 1963, was the individual agent’s reflexive speed—his capacity to respond swiftly to an emergency. There were standardized tests to measure this ability. A red light flashed, the subject hit a brake pedal, the result was clocked on a dial calibrated in tenths of a second. Periodic examinations were required of jet pilots, among others.4 Unfortunately the others did not include Presidential bodyguards. Agent Clint Hill, for example, had never heard of the tests, and at this writing they remain a mystery at Secret Service headquarters. Even to experts physiological reaction is mysterious, but there are certain constants; a man’s reflexes slow down as he ages, and the pace at which he lives may slow them still further. The Secret Service pace was furious. Congress encouraged an agent to drive himself. Under Public Law 763 he received no overtime pay whatever unless he had exceeded his shift schedule by seventy-eight hours during a three-month period. In 1963 there was no need to invoke the law. Men assigned to the White House Detail were married to their jobs; they were averaging between fifty and eighty hours of overtime every month. They didn’t complain. Indeed, they had come to depend upon the additional pay to support their families. It increased agents’ incomes by over $1,000 a year; they were earning as much as FBI men. There was one serious drawback. The strain was taking its toll, and they knew it. “At forty,” they said among themselves, “a man on this detail is old.” The calibrated test dial would probably have agreed. Yet Service tradition dictated that the posts closest to Kennedy should be reserved for senior men. Bill Greer, who was to be the President’s driver in Dallas, was fifty-four; Roy Kellerman, who would sit beside Greer, was forty-eight. Younger, more agile agents were relegated to advance assignments or, at best, to the follow-up car.
Legally, Douglas Dillon was answerable for any threat to John Kennedy’s life. Congress had assigned the responsibility to the Secretary of the Treasury after McKinley’s death. The Secret Service had continued to be part of the Treasury Department, but over the years agents had become indistinguishable from the President’s personal staff. O’Donnell used them as messengers, and at airport stops they distributed PT-shaped tie clips among spectators. Campaigning was stimulating, they enjoyed it. As bodyguards, on the other hand, they sometimes felt frustrated. Kennedy, like Lincoln, refused to live in a cage. “How do you protect this man?” an exasperated agent had asked Cardinal Cushing at Patrick’s funeral. The young President was more active than Eisenhower, more anxious to be among the people, and, as O’Donnell once told Agent Jerry Behn, “Politics and protection don’t mix.” Yet one way not to protect him was to harry him with so many needless precautions that he bridled. Both Kennedys felt that the Service was overzealous at the wrong times—sitting on a placid stretch of beach, Mrs. Kennedy had been dismayed to see agents in a Coast Guard cutter roaring down on a fisherman’s rowboat. A consequence of such churlishness was that the President was inclined to overrule the Service, which meant that good advice was apt to be tossed out with the bad. It was a good idea, for example, to have agents perched on the broad trunk of the Presidential Lincoln when crowds threatened to grow disorderly. The trouble was that they were always there. Kennedy grew weary of seeing bodyguards roosting behind him every time he turned around, and in Tampa on November 18, just four days before his death, he dryly asked Agent Floyd Boring to “keep those Ivy League charlatans off the back of the car.”
Boring wasn’t offended. There had been no animosity in the remark. The President liked the men on the detail, and they knew it. They were, in fact, an extremely attractive group. “Ivy League charlatans” may have been a trifle sharp, but it was descriptive. They were bright, lithe, virile, outgoing. Unfortunately, they were inclined to be tactless, and when President Kennedy had visited Venezuela the Attorney General had personally supervised his protection. Security on that trip had been airtight, with no unpleasant aftertaste. Venezuela had been a special situation. There had been real concern about the Chief Executive’s safety there. Caracas had been, and continued to be, a notorious trouble spot. President Betancourt could be shot any day, President Kennedy told Hubert Humphrey the week before he took off for Texas.
No one, including Byron Skelton, dreamed that Kennedy’s own plight was far graver than Betancourt’s, though there were many who feared that he might be embarrassed in Dallas. Skelton’s persistence sets him apart, but his anxiety doesn’t. Even as he was calling at National Committee headquarters in Washington, Evangelist Billy Graham was attempting to relay his own foreboding to Kennedy through Senator Smathers, a mutual friend. The Dallas mood was no secret. That same week Presidential assistant Fred Holborn called Henry Brandon of the London Sunday Times twice, advising him to make the Texas trip on the ground that there might be trouble; because of this tip from the White House Brandon was to be one of only two foreign correspondents in Dallas on November 22. (The other was Stephen Barber of the London Daily Telegraph.) In the United States the announcement that the President would visit there had provoked a widespread reaction. The most casual newspaper readers—even those who couldn’t place the city on a map—knew that it had a history of ugly incidents. In the 1960 campaign a mob of Dallas housewives had sprayed the Lyndon Johnsons with saliva, and now, when Lady Bird thought of returning there, her hands made nervous fists. More recently, UN Ambassador Adlai E. Stevenson had been assaulted on UN Day, October 24. The following day Presidential Assistant Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. telephoned the Ambassador in Los Angeles, forwarding Kennedy’s congratulations for calm behavior under stress. Stevenson remarked that he had been shocked by the current of hatred in Dallas. He seriously wondered whether the President should go there and asked that his doubts be passed along. Schlesinger hung up, then hesitated. Would it do any good? He doubted it. The trip would proceed as planned; O’Donnell would merely believe that his view of Stevenson as a fussy old man had been sustained. Relations between the President and his Ambassador would have been damaged, to no purpose. Schlesinger was still undecided when Stevenson called back to withdraw his objections. Since leaving Dallas, Schlesinger concluded, Stevenson had regained his perspective.
Perhaps it was just the other way round. Adlai’s judgment may have been more acute when he was on the scene. Evaluation now is difficult, for the recollections of all who had sounded the tocsin were soon to be colored by events. Yet one thread binds every one of them. The closer an observer was to Dallas, the graver was his concern. Bill Greer, the Chief Executive’s chauffeur, was tranquil. A native of Ireland, Greer regarded inland motorcades as safe; seaports, with their large foreign populations, seemed riskier to him. The Secret Service generally regarded Dallas as a tough town, and the Vice Presidential detail thought their man might be the target of a demonstration, but it was the experience of veteran agents that local communities feel honored when a President visits them, and partisan feelings are put aside. Presidential advisers who knew Dallas by reputation—Douglas Dillon, Special Counsel Theodore C. Sorensen, Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff—thought that there might be a few boos. To Texas Democrats living in Washington—Congressmen Gonzalez, Olin Teague, Jim Wright—the prospects were more ominous. They looked for placards or eggs. The state’s small GOP delegation on the Hill scurried for cover. Senator John Tower declined an invitation to appear in Dallas on November 22, and Congressman Bruce Alger canceled a banquet which was to have been held in the Marriott Hotel that evening in his honor. Texans in Texas were still more nervous. Connally told Kennedy he thought people in Dallas were “too emotional,” and that the stop there should be reconsidered. An Austin editor, contemplating Dallas, predicted that “He will not get through this without something happening to him.”
Perhaps the most clear-cut warning to the President himself came from Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, a liberal from a state which borders Texas. During his re-election campaign the year before Fulbright had been the target of violent attacks by the Dallas News. Because of the city’s history
of political violence he deeply distrusted it. Although he had friends there he had declined several invitations to visit them. He was afraid—physically afraid—and he readily admitted it. On October 3, the day before Kennedy’s final planning conference with Connally, Fulbright pleaded with the President to bypass Dallas. The Chief Executive and the Senator spent the better part of that Thursday together, flying to Little Rock in the Presidential aircraft and then by helicopter to Heber Springs for the dedication of Greers Ferry Dam. Both during the trip down and the luncheon which followed, Fulbright repeatedly declared, with all the emphasis he could command, that “Dallas is a very dangerous place,” that “I wouldn’t go there,” and “Don’t you go.”
In Dallas itself there was genuine alarm. Ralph Yarborough’s two brothers, both Dallas lawyers, sent him almost identical accounts of widespread local hatred for the President. A Dallas woman wrote Salinger: “Don’t let the President come down here. I’m worried about him. I think something terrible will happen to him.” U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes dreaded an incident, and U.S. Attorney H. Barefoot Sanders, the ranking Justice Department official in that part of the state and the Vice President’s contact man in Dallas, told Johnson’s Cliff Carter that the city’s political climate made the trip “inadvisable.” Civic leadership had been jittery from the outset. The tide of local animosity toward the federal government had crossed the breakwater, and they knew it. They were openly concerned that crowds might become uncontrollable. “I think we ought to see whether or not we can persuade President Kennedy to change his mind about visiting Dallas,” Stanley Marcus told his top executives. “Frankly, I don’t think this city is safe for it.”
Steps were taken to keep the turnout minimal. Ordinarily a Presidential visit is the occasion for a school holiday. If elections aren’t imminent, and especially if a Chief Executive hasn’t passed through a city recently, the proclamation of such a holiday can almost be assumed. Dallas decided to make an exception. Superintendent W. T. White stated that no pupil would be allowed to welcome the President unless his parents appeared and escorted him from the classroom. Indeed, members of the host committee didn’t want many adults to see him either. They had opposed the motorcade. Inasmuch as they had packed the hall in which he was to speak with conservatives, this would have meant that the twelve hundred Dallas Democrats who had worked for Kennedy’s election in 1960 wouldn’t even have seen him, so they were overruled there. They had succeeded in preventing any formal stops (the small but hardy band of Dallas liberals wanted him to pause and dedicate something, anything), and their choice of the hall itself had been accepted. The possibility of any intruder crashing the luncheon seemed remote. It was to be a small, polite, catered affair in the arboreal Trade Mart, with the President surrounded by the architectural pride of Dallas: balconies, an indoor pond, live trees, a fountain that could shoot clear up to the ceiling, and parakeets flying around wild. In what passed for wit in Dallas those days one entrepreneur told another entrepreneur that he would try to arrange a few parakeet droppings in Kennedy’s soup.
This, however, was a very private remark. The public thrust was toward the creation of a favorable atmosphere on short notice. The Mayor asked Dallas to redeem itself and shed its reputation as the “Southwest hate capital of Dixie.” The president of the Chamber of Commerce and the chairman of the Citizens Council requested citizens to refrain from demonstrating. Both newspapers ran editorials calling for restraint; the Times Herald hoped “both the world and John F. Kennedy will like what is seen here,” and even the News, the bonfire of the right, conceded that “another incident similar to the one involving Stevenson could deal Dallas a deadly blow on the national level, particularly from a political standpoint.” On November 18 the City Council rushed through an ordinance outlawing attacks on visiting speakers. Two days later Jesse Curry took action. Almost any step was a giant step for Curry. The police chief in the city which was to become the scene of the crime of the century was bland and ineffective. Still, the more incisive leaders of the business community had impressed upon him that these were exceptional circumstances. Accordingly, he publicly put Dallas on notice that his department would take “immediate action if any suspicious conduct is observed” on Friday. He went further. If uniformed officers were inadequate to protect this guest, he declared, private individuals were entitled to make citizen’s arrests. A police chief who reminds the public of the right of citizen’s arrest is fingering the panic button. He is, in effect, designating each individual a deputy. Yet Curry’s forces were hardly understrength. He had drawn on every available reserve, canceling all departmental leave and marshaling seven hundred policemen, firemen, sheriffs, state police, Texas Rangers, and agents of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Governor’s FBI. The city glittered with badges. Dallas had never seen such rigid security.
The occasion for these unprecedented precautions was a visit by the President of the United States.
There was a chorus of warnings: And then there was a catastrophe. Between the two lies an abyss which can never be adequately explored—
Between the idea
And the reality…
Falls the shadow.5
Ten months after the tragedy the Warren Commission found “no evidence” of any connection between the crime of Lee Harvey Oswald and the city’s “general atmosphere of hate.” It should be noted that the finding was a consensus. Individual commissioners had strong reservations. The verdict was influenced by expediency. The Commission’s members hoped their report would receive the widest possible acceptance. A majority believed that conjecture about Dallas might tend to discredit their other findings. Therefore they hedged. They acknowledged that the assassin had known of Dallas’ political tension, but they concluded that there was “no way to judge what the effect of the general political ferment present in that city might have been, even though Oswald was aware of it.”
The key word here is “judge.” Obviously, it is impossible to define the exact relationship between an individual and his environment. One might as well try to photograph nostalgia or submit passion as an exhibit. Honor, integrity, and love—and hate—cannot be pierced with thumbtacks and displayed on bulletin boards. Yet all exist. Some motives lie beyond the rules of evidence. Like the shadow
Between the emotion
And the response…
Between the desire And the spasm…6
they are elusive. If we discuss them, we are speculating. But legitimate speculation is one of the duties of historians. Their sources cannot be confined to fingerprints, ballistics tests, and spectrographic examinations. The Dallas assassin did not belong to a conventional criminal conspiracy. This is conceded. It may also be beside the point. Lee Oswald was called “a loner.” Nearly everyone seized upon the word to describe him, and also to explain him. They were all wrong. It is true that he had a one-track mind. The mind of every assassin runs on a narrow-gauge track. But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society. John Wilkes Booth was not an agent of the Confederacy. Despite early assumptions, he had acted on his own. But his victim was murdered at a critical hour in our history, in a city swarming with Southern sympathizers and hardened by seditious talk. Establishing the precise link between deed, era, and locale is a hopeless task, yet to suggest that there was no relationship—that the crime in Ford’s Theatre could have been committed in a serene community, untroubled by crisis—is absurd.
Like Booth, Oswald was to be slain by a vigilante who thwarted interrogation. Nevertheless the stage he had chosen survived him, and a great deal is known about the community which worried Byron Skelton, Senator Fulbright, and so many others. On November 15 the Department of Justice had sent O’Donnell a confidential, comprehensive report on Dallas. Most of the 747,000 residents, it noted, were native Americans of “Anglo-Saxon, Scotch-Irish stock,” and lately the population had been growing rapidly, the largest group of newcomers arriving from rural Texas, Louisia
na, and Arkansas. In the metropolis these transplanted Southerners remained “conservative politically and socially,” for their new community shared their outlook: “Dallas’s political conservatism stems from a fundamentalist religious training and years of conditioning.” Recently this viewpoint had sharpened. Attitudes had become “overtly active” and “politically militant” with “the maturity of independent oil wealth, and the recent industrialization.”
Dallas money was new money, and there was a lot of it. In the South Dallas outranked all other cities in manufacturing, wholesaling, insurance, and banking, and each October it was the site of the largest state fair in the nation. The older families, whose wealth had come from cotton, were overshadowed; power had passed to the new men. In many ways they used it admirably. Wherever racial integration threatened to become a problem, they yielded quietly. Status-conscious and civic-minded, they presided over a clean city, free of corruption and relatively free of commercial vice (heavy fines had driven professional prostitutes thirty-two miles away, into neighboring Fort Worth), and the city fathers displayed a resolute interest in the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Dallas Civic Opera, the Museum of Fine Arts. They were frankly image-conscious. Culture and learning contributed to a pleasing civic façade; O’Donnell had a surfeit of facts about Dallas Baptist College, Bishop College, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and its many clinics in an institution named—a knell—Parkland Memorial Hospital.
Images are greasepaint. The truth about a city cannot be gleaned from its advertisements about itself. Other indices are more reliable, among them local voting patterns. In 1963 Dallas was a Republican stronghold. Its occupational profile alone would have cinched that. A phenomenal 53.5 percent of its wage earners were professional men, managers, salesmen, or clerks. White-collar, 97 percent Protestant, and swollen by thousands of small-town former rustics who had been freed from traditional Democratic allegiances, the city had been acclaimed in a local editorial as “a center of resurgent Republicanism.” Actually, it was more of an enclave. The surrounding countryside remained unconverted. Thirty miles north of “Big D,” as the city liked to be called, lay the Fourth Congressional District, 220,000 voters strong. The district, which had been Sam Rayburn’s domain, was still solidly Democratic. In 1960 Kennedy and Nixon ran neck and neck in seventy-one of northeast Texas’ seventy-two counties. Big D, the spectacular exception, rejected Kennedy overwhelmingly (by 62.5 percent), while re-electing a Republican Congressman and eight Republican legislators. Dallas had become the despair of Byron Skelton. He had long ago conceded the lion’s share of its 1964 vote to the opposition.