“Don’t get up,” he tells her. “I’ll get breakfast myself.”
She’s exhausted and has no intention of getting up. Audrey fusses, and Marina reaches for her to nurse her. Oswald softly lets himself out of the room without saying good-bye.
The assassin fixes himself a cup of instant coffee in the kitchen, then steps into Ruth Paine’s crowded garage to retrieve his rifle. He unrolls the blanket lying next to his olive-green Marine Corps seabag, revealing the 6.5- millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano infantry carbine. He lays the gun in the brown paper wrapping he stole from work yesterday.
Holding the “curtain rods” by the barrel, he steps out of the garage, forever leaving his old life behind.
By 8:00 A.M., Oswald and Wesley Frazier are pulling up for work at the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald is out of the car before Frazier cuts the engine. He has grabbed his brown package and raced inside the building before Frazier can catch up and ask him why he’s in such a hurry.
* * *
“It’s raining,” says George Thomas, stepping inside John Kennedy’s Fort Worth hotel suite. The president’s valet rouses him at precisely 7:30 A.M. A crowd is already gathering in the parking lot eight floors below, waiting to hear Kennedy speak to them from the back of a flatbed truck. The audience of nearly five thousand is mostly male, and primarily union workers. Many have been standing in the rain for hours.
“That’s too bad,” Kennedy replies to his valet. He rises from bed and heads for the shower. Rain means that the bubble-top roof will be buckled onto his limousine for the Dallas motorcade. Not only will the local citizens be upset by having to wait in the cold and rain for hours until he passes by, but their inability to get a clear glimpse of the president and First Lady inside the bubble will do little to sway their votes come next November.
The president wraps himself in his back brace, tightly adjusting the straps. He then dresses in a blue two- button suit, a dark blue tie, and a white shirt with gray stripes from Cardin’s in Paris. He reads the CIA situation reports, paying close attention to the casualty count from Vietnam. After that, he scans several newspapers. The
The people of Texas screamed and cheered for JFK on the first day of the Texas trip. But as big as his ovations are, and as intently as the audiences hung on every word of his speeches, the reception John Kennedy received was nothing like what his wife is experiencing. Jackie is the talk of Texas, and bringing her along may just be the smartest political move the president has ever made.
By 9:00 A.M., John Kennedy is standing on the back of the flatbed truck, looking upbeat and triumphant. “There are no faint hearts in Forth Worth,” he says approvingly to the crowd. He has a well-deserved reputation for not giving in to the elements. The union workers knew their waiting in the rain would be rewarded and that the speech would not be canceled.
“Where’s Jackie?” someone shouts.
“Where’s Jackie?” yells another voice.
John Kennedy smiles and points up to her hotel room. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” he jokes. On the eighth floor, sitting before her vanity, Jackie can hear the speech rising up from the parking lot. She enjoys hearing her name and how easily her husband banters with the crowd.
“It takes her a little bit longer,” the president adds. “But, of course, she looks a little bit better than we do when she does it.”
The crowd roars in laughter, as if the president is their coolest drinking buddy and he’s sharing some juicy tidbit about his personal life.
But the truth is that, today, Jackie doesn’t just need a little extra time to get ready—she needs a lot of time. The First Lady looks visibly exhausted as she primps before the mirror. Campaigning is hard work. Yet she is determined to stick this out. There is to be another swing through California in two weeks, and she wants to make that trip, too. In fact, Jackie Kennedy is determined to be at her husband’s side from now until he is reelected next November.
But all of that is in the future. What matters now is that the Texas trip is halfway done. All Jackie has to do is make it through this day, and then she can relax. “Oh, God,” she says, looking at her frazzled image in the mirror. “One day’s campaigning can age a person thirty years.”
The First Lady has no idea that today will age her like no other day in her young life.
* * *
The energy in the Fort Worth parking lot fuels the president, who delivers a powerful and impassioned speech. “We are going forward!” he exclaims in closing, reminding his audience that he is keeping the promises he made in his inaugural address less than three years earlier. The cold war is behind us, he’s saying, all the while implying that the future is a Camelot for all Americans.
The earsplitting cries of approval from those thousands of hardened union men is all the proof John Kennedy needs that Texas really isn’t such a bad place after all.
The president rides a wave of adrenaline off the stage and back into the hotel. Campaigning revitalizes him, even in an early-morning Texas drizzle.
But as good as he feels, the president knows that the rest of Friday, November 22, is not going to be easy. From both a political and a personal standpoint, he must be at the top of his game if he is going to win over the hardened people of Dallas.
Or, as the president warns Jackie, “We’re heading into nut country today.”
24
NOVEMBER 22, 1963
TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY, DALLAS
9:45 A.M.
