“About a quarter of an hour before the assassination,” she said in 1978, “I went into the lunchroom on the second floor for a moment… . Oswald was sitting in one of the booth seats on the right-hand side of the room as you go in. He was alone as usual and appeared to be having lunch. I did not speak to him, but I recognized him clearly.”
Arnold had some reason to remember having gone into the lunchroom. She was pregnant at the time and had a craving for a glass of water. She also recalled, in 1978, that this was “about 12:15. It may have been slightly later.”15
Should we believe Arnold’s 1978 recollection or the FBI account of what she told them back in 1963? Memories do blur, not least when much time has passed. One might think the FBI’s contemporary report more trustworthy than Arnold’s. FBI agents, however, are as fallible as other mortals. Mistakes in their reports, seen during research for the author’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover, ranged from spelling errors to outright distortions.
Agents in Dallas after the assassination, we know, worked under intolerable time. “Hoover’s obsession with speed,” former Assistant Director Courtney Evans recalled, “made impossible demands on the field. I can’t help but feel that had he let the agents out there do their work, let things take their normal investigative course, something other than the simple Oswald theory might have been developed. But Hoover’s demand was ‘Do it fast!’ That was not necessarily a prescription for getting the whole truth.”
Other former FBI agents recall having been virtually ordered to avoid leads that might indicate a possible conspiracy, to follow only those that would prove Oswald was the lone assassin.
Let us, then, allow for the possibility that Carolyn Arnold’s 1978 memory is correct, that she did see Oswald downstairs at 12:15 p.m. or later. It is, of course, possible that Oswald scurried upstairs to shoot the President after Arnold saw him in the second-floor lunchroom. Yet, as we have seen, bystander Arnold Rowland said he saw two men in sixth-floor windows, one of them holding a rifle across his chest, at 12:15. Rowland’s wife confirmed that her husband drew her attention to the man, whom he assumed to be a Secret Service agent. There was, of course, no such agent, and no other employees were on the sixth floor at that time.
The time detail—12:15—is the vital point here. It can be fixed so exactly because Rowland recalled having seen the man with the rifle just as a nearby police radio squawked out the news that the approaching motorcade had reached Cedar Springs Road. The police log shows that the President passed that point between 12:15 and 12:16.
Carolyn Arnold’s given time for leaving her office—12:15 or later—is corroborated by contemporary statements made by her and office colleagues. She told the FBI she finally left the building, after visiting the lunchroom, as late as 12:25 p.m. If Arnold saw Oswald in the lunchroom at 12:15 or after, who were the two men, one of them a gunman, whom Rowland said he saw in the sixth-floor windows?
There never was any reliable eyewitness identification of Oswald in the sixth-floor window after he was seen downstairs. The Commission, however, set store by the evidence of Howard Brennan, a spectator in the street who stood directly opposite the Depository. He said he saw a man moving around at the famous “sniper’s perch” window between 12:22 and 12:24 and that, at the moment of the assassination, he looked up to see the man fire his final shot. Later that day, Brennan was taken to a police identity lineup that included Oswald. He failed to make a positive identification of Oswald as the man he had seen in the window—even though he had seen Oswald’s picture on television before attending the lineup.
A month later, however, Brennan told the FBI he was sure the man he had seen was Oswald. Three weeks on, he was saying he couldn’t be sure. And many months later, Brennan told the official inquiry that he could have identified Oswald at the lineup but had feared reprisals from the Communists.
Brennan’s testimony was replete with contradiction and confusion. He claimed to have been watching as the last shot was fired, yet saw neither flash, smoke, nor recoil. Testimony showed that, in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, he did not at once draw attention to what he claimed to have seen in the Book Depository, but joined others hurrying toward the grassy knoll. Questioning suggested that Brennan at first stated he had seen smoke in the area of the knoll. The Commission was able to conclude only that “Brennan believes the man he saw [in the Depository] was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald.”
In 1979, the Assassinations Committee Report did not use Brennan’s testimony at all. Brennan was less consistent than many a witness discredited or totally ignored by the official inquiry. He may have seen a gun, or a man with a gun, but his testimony does not put Oswald in the sixth-floor window.
Nor does the physical evidence support that notion. When caught, Oswald was wearing a long-sleeved rust-brown shirt with a white T-shirt beneath it. He said he had changed his clothing since the assassination and that he had worn a long-sleeved “reddish-colored shirt” at work that day. This may have been true. A policeman who saw Oswald after the assassination, but before he left the Depository, said on seeing him under arrest that “he looked like he did not have the same clothes on.” The policeman explained that the shirt Oswald had on at work had been “a little darker.”
Whether Oswald changed or not, neither shirt fits with the clothing described by those who noticed a gunman on the sixth floor between 12:15 and 12:30 p.m.16 Rowland, who made the earliest sighting, remembered a “very light colored shirt, white or a light blue … open at the collar … unbuttoned about halfway” with a “regular T-shirt, a polo shirt” beneath it. Even Brennan, the man who inconsistently claimed to be able to recognize Oswald as having been a gunman, described the man he saw in the window as having worn “light-colored clothes, more a khaki color.” The two clerks from the county building, who also noticed a man in the sixth-floor window, spoke of an “open neck … sport shirt or a T-shirt … light in color, probably white” and of a “sport shirt … yellow.”
Mrs. Walther, who saw two men in the window only moments before the assassination, said, “The man behind the partly opened window had a dark brown suit, and the other man had a whitish-looking shirt or jacket, dressed more like a workman that did manual labor. It was the man with the gun that wore white [author’s emphasis].” None of these statements about light-colored clothing fit either the rust-brown shirt Oswald was wearing when arrested or the red shirt he said he had been wearing at the time of the assassination.
The fact is that Oswald could not be placed on the sixth floor either at the time of the shooting or during the half hour before it. The last time he was seen before the assassination was apparently by Carolyn Arnold—in the second-floor lunchroom. The next time Oswald was firmly identified was immediately after the assassination—again in the second-floor lunchroom.
When the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, one motorcycle policeman, Marrion Baker, thought they came from high in the Book Depository. He drove straight to the building, dismounted, and pushed his way to the entrance. Joined by the building superintendent, whom he met in the doorway, he hurried up the stairs to the second floor. Just as he reached it, Baker caught a glimpse of someone through a glass window in a door. Pistol in hand, the policeman pushed through the door, across a small vestibule, and saw a man walking away from him. At the policeman’s order, “Come here,” the man turned and walked back.
Baker noticed the man did not appear to be out of breath or even startled. He seemed calm and said nothing. Though reports conflict, it seems he may have been carrying a bottle of Coca-Cola.17
At that moment, as Baker was about to start asking questions, the Depository superintendent arrived and identified the man as an employee. He was, of course, Lee Oswald, and the room was the second-floor lunchroom, exactly where Oswald had been last seen—at most, fifteen minutes before the assassination. Baker let Oswald go, and hurried on upstairs.
The Warren Report reckoned the policeman con
fronted Oswald one and a half minutes after having heard the shots. It calculated that Oswald, as the gunman on the sixth floor, took slightly less than that to reach the lunchroom door. Other apparently competent reconstructions have suggested that Baker took less time and that Oswald, if he was a sixth-floor gunman, would have taken longer to clear up and get downstairs.
The Warren Report just succeeds in getting Oswald downstairs in time to be confronted by Patrolman Baker. After making its own tests at the scene, the Assassinations Committee in 1979 said merely that the available testimony “does not preclude a finding that Oswald was on the sixth floor at the time the shots were fired.” Alternative, independent calculations say that, had Oswald really been a gunman, he could not have reached the lunchroom in time for the meeting with the policeman. The best evidence seems to be that Oswald was down in the lunchroom fifteen minutes before the assassination, and just two minutes afterward.
The fresh look at Oswald’s whereabouts becomes even more significant in the knowledge that the President was late for his appointment with death. He was due to arrive at his first Dallas appointment at 12:30, and that was about five minutes’ drive beyond the Book Depository. Had the motorcade been on time, it would have passed beneath the windows of the Depository at 12:25 p.m. This was clear from from the President’s published schedule for the day, and would have come into the calculations of any would-be assassin. A killer planning the assassination would hardly have been sitting around downstairs after 12:15 p.m., as the evidence about Oswald suggests, if he expected to open fire as early as 12:25.
It may be argued that the alleged assassin was merely trying to assure himself of an alibi. If so, it was a curious and unreliable way to go about it, and the lunchroom an odd spot to choose. That room was deserted at all relevant times, and Lee Oswald was seen there only by chance observers. On the other hand, it is hard to understand why Oswald, known to be interested in politics and politicians, would stay in the lunchroom when he knew the President was about to pass by. We know he was aware of the President’s visit, because earlier that morning he had asked a workmate why the crowd was gathering outside. Told the President was coming and which way he was coming, Oswald had said merely, “Oh, I see.” Supporters of the official story say, of course, that this was another attempt to establish an alibi, by professing ignorance of the very fact that President Kennedy was in town. Oswald’s wide-eyed question does not ring true.
The evidence does cast enormous suspicion on Oswald. Aside from the evidence linking him to the rifle, his own statements—above all, the implausible “curtain rod” tale—leave him looking guilty of something. The evidence does not, though, put him behind a gun in the sixth-floor window. Some information, indeed, suggests that others manned the sniper’s perch. “We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle,” former Police Chief Curry said in 1969. “No one has been able to put him in that building with a rifle in his hand.”
If Oswald was as he claimed “just a patsy,” it looks as though he realized his predicament the moment the hue and cry started in Dealey Plaza. It was from then on that the Oswald who had behaved so coolly in the encounter with the policeman gradually began to behave like a man in a panic.
Oswald’s account of leaving the scene of the crime goes like this: He told his interrogators how he had gotten his Coca-Cola in the second-floor lunchroom, how he had met the policeman and then gone downstairs. In the uproar, said Oswald, he heard a foreman say there would be no more work that day, so decided to leave—by the front door. Outside the Depository, he encountered a crew-cut young man whom he took to be a Secret Service agent because he flashed an identity card. Oswald had directed the “agent” to a telephone, then traveled home to his lodgings by bus and taxi.
All this is rather well supported by other witnesses. A clerical supervisor returning to her second-floor office said she saw Oswald, Coca-Cola bottle in hand, within a couple of minutes of the assassination: “I had no thoughts or anything of him having any connection with it all because he was very calm.” The foreman in question was indeed on the ground floor. The “Secret Service agent” Oswald directed to a phone was probably one of two reporters who rushed in looking for a phone on which to call their newsrooms—and recalled being pointed to one by a young man.18 Oswald’s story of how he got home is corroborated by the bus ticket found in his pocket when he was arrested, and by a Dallas taxi driver.
Would a wholly innocent man have gone home within minutes of the assassination of the President of the United States just because he “didn’t think there would be any more work done that day”? Would not the natural thing, for a politically aware person like Oswald, have been to linger awhile in the excited atmosphere outside the Depository? Moreover, the decision to take a taxi home, which Oswald himself admitted he had never done before, also suggests flight. Once he did reach his lodgings, much became mysterious—not least the shooting of a policeman that led to his arrest.
* References to specific floors of the Texas School Book Depository are rendered in the American style. The American first floor is equivalent to the British ground floor. British readers should subtract one floor to understand to which location reference is made.
Chapter 6
The Other Murder
“There is still a real possibility that Oswald was on his way to meet an accomplice at the time of the Tippit murder. I led the Dallas investigation of that aspect of the case and was never satisfied on that point.”
—Assistant District Attorney William Alexander, 1977
It was just before one o’clock, half an hour after the assassination, when Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper at Oswald’s rooming house in the Oak Cliff district, answered the telephone. A friend was calling to tell her what had happened, and Mrs. Roberts turned on the television to catch the news. Just then—at 1:00 p.m.—her lodger Lee Oswald came bustling in. Roberts said, “Oh, you’re in a hurry,” and went on watching TV. Oswald went to his room and, as he himself later acknowledged, changed his clothes and armed himself with a .38 revolver. He was out of the house again within five minutes, and Roberts—who recalled looking out of the window—last saw him standing at a bus stop. In those five minutes, Roberts was to say, she had noticed something else, something that seemed inexplicable.
While Oswald was in his bedroom, she said, she had seen a Dallas police car come slowly by the house and pull up. As it did so, its horn sounded several times. Mrs. Roberts later described the incident under oath.
Commission Lawyer: Where was it parked?
Mrs. Roberts: It was parked in front of the house … directly in front of my house.
Lawyer: Where was Oswald when this happened?
Mrs. Roberts: In his room… .
Lawyer: Were there two uniformed policeman in the car?
Mrs. Roberts: Oh yes.
Lawyer: And one of the officers sounded the horn?
Mrs. Roberts: Just kind of tit-tit—twice.
After the police car’s horn sounded twice, the housekeeper said, the vehicle moved slowly away. She did not remember clearly the police number on the side of the vehicle. In statements in the days to come, however, she would repeat that she had seen the car stop and heard what sounded like a signal on the horn. This was a problem for the official inquiry, as checks with the police suggested there was no patrol car at that point at one o’clock. There was, moreover, no known reason for any police car to visit Oswald’s address so early in the case. He had not yet been missed from the Book Depository. The official breakdown of the day’s events shows that Oswald’s name did not crop up at all until just before 2:00 p.m.
According to the record, nobody in authority knew about his rented room until after two o’clock, when he volunteered it at the police station. The Warren Report dealt with the mystery the way it often did when the evidence failed to fit—by burying the police car horn-sounding incident in an obscure section of
the Report and implying that Mrs. Roberts was mistaken. The matter of the signaling car, however, may be pertinent to Oswald’s movements in the ten minutes after 1:00 p.m., ten minutes that were to end in the murder of a policeman about a mile away.
The police radio log showed that at 12:45 p.m. patrol car driver J. D. Tippit was ordered into the Oak Cliff area. At 12:54 p.m., when he reported that he was in the area, he was instructed to “be at large for any emergency.” At 1:00 p.m., as Oswald reached his rooming house, police headquarters called Tippit on the radio, and he did not reply. At 1:08 p.m., Tippit did call headquarters again, and this time the dispatcher failed to reply. The officer never called in again. Instead, eight minutes later, at 1:16 p.m., came the call from a member of the public using Tippit’s car radio: “We’ve had a shooting here … it’s a police officer, somebody shot him.”
J. D. Tippit—just J.D. to his friends—was lying dead in a puddle of blood beside his patrol car. He had been gunned down on East Tenth, a quiet, tree-lined street about a mile from Oswald’s lodgings.
The Warren Report decided on the following probable scenario. Tippit, cruising slowly along East Tenth, it was thought, had come upon Oswald walking on his own. The policeman pulled up and spoke to him, probably because he looked something like the broadcast description of the suspect in the President’s assassination. After a brief exchange through the car window, Tippit got out and began walking around the vehicle to approach Oswald. Oswald then suddenly pulled a revolver and fired four times, killing the policeman instantly. He ran off, noticed by a dozen witnesses, scattering shell cases as he went.