The Day Kennedy Was Shot by Jim Bishop

Author:Jim Bishop
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

4 p.m.

The cold night wind swept the face of Europe. It came strong and steady out of the northwest, combing through the hedgerows of the Scottish moors, swinging the street lamps in Antwerp. There was a chill in it and pedestrians walked the Ring of Vienna with heads down and collars up to find that the opera had been canceled. The shops along the Champs-Elysées were bright with light, but the doors were locked. Under the Arc de Triomphe the eternal flame was whipped by a night wind which had no gusts but which pulled steadily at the crisp leaves along the Bois de Boulogne.

Radio Eireann canceled its programs as though anything more frivolous than Brahms would be sacrilegious. A Dublin commentator said: “It’s as if there was a death in every family in Ireland.” In the little Wexford town of New Ross, Andrew Minihan remembered that John F. Kennedy stood in the square and said: “This is not the land of my birth, but it is the land for which I have the greatest affection, and I certainly hope to be back again in the springtime.”

Out in the hills beyond Dublin, Sean O’Casey, eighty-three and finished, the eyes dim beyond repair, sat under a bright light, the blue-brooked hands trembling, and wrote: “Peace, who was becoming bright-eyed, now sits in the shadow of death; her handsome champion has been killed. Her gallant boy is dead. We mourn here with you—poor sad American people.” In London, the great bell of Westminster Abbey began the solemn bass tone which reverberated across the bridge and up toward The Strand. No one paid much attention until it passed the count of ten. It would toll for a solid hour, a tribute reserved for royal dead.

In Burdine’s store in Miami, Mrs. Christine Margolis sobbed on the phone behind the cosmetics counter. Her daughter was trying to tell her what had happened, and Mrs. Margolis moaned: “Honey, don’t cry. Don’t cry.” A Marine sergeant in Caracas, Venezuela, had an hour of daylight left. He strode smartly to the flagstaff in front of the United States embassy, saluted, and pulled the halyards until the banner was at half-staff. A Greek barber in New York said: “I cry.”

Richard Nixon reached his home in New York and dialed J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI Director said that the Dallas police had picked up a suspect named Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and a self-proclaimed Marxist, Mr. Hoover said. Nixon sat thinking of his Texas statement that Lyndon Johnson might be dropped from the Kennedy ticket. In the East, three race tracks closed—Aqueduct, Narragansett, and Pimlico—“in memory of President John F. Kennedy.” Many of the bettors did not know that he was dead.

At Andrews Air Force Base the order went out to don “dress uniforms.” The Air Force posted a ceremonial cordon of honor guards on the hard stand where Air Force One would stop. The Army sent three squads of men from Fort Myers, men properly drilled in a deathwatch.

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