End of Days

The Assassination of John F. Kennedy

James Swanson

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780062083494
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062300201
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In End of Days, James L. Swanson, the New York Times bestselling author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, brings to life the minute-by-minute details of the JFK assassination—from the Kennedys' arrival in Texas through the shooting in Dealey Plaza and the shocking aftermath that continues to reverberate in our national consciousness fifty years later.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, has been the subject of enduring debate, speculation, and numerous conspiracy theories, but Swanson's absorbing and complete account follows the event hour-by-hour, from the moment Lee Harvey Oswald conceived of the crime three days before its execution, to his own murder two days later at a Dallas Police precinct at the hands of Jack Ruby, a two-bit nightclub owner.

Based on sweeping research never before collected so powerfully in a single volume, and illustrated with photographs, End of Days distills Kennedy's assassination into a pulse-pounding thriller that is sure to become the definitive popular account of this historic crime for years to come.

CHAPTER 1

“SUCH DANGEROUS TOYS”

He had been planning the assassination even before he bought the rifle. He had chosen his victim, scouted the location, written detailed notes in his journal, drawn maps and diagrams, even photographed the building. By the time he was ready to do it, his notebook bulged with all the information needed to carry out a successful political murder—black-and-white surveillance photos, ideas on where to hide the rifle before the attack, the best spot for his sniper’s nest, estimates of the range to the target, the distance between the building and some railroad tracks nearby.

He had also planned his escape. After the shooting, he would conceal his rifle in a hiding place near the tracks and then flee on foot. He had little choice about the method of escape. He did not own a car. He did not even know how to drive. But the notebook contained all the vital information necessary to make a clean getaway on public transportation—the location of bus stops in the vicinity and, most important, the exact times that the buses would make those stops. Yes, he planned to coordinate an assassination with a bus schedule. He would have to kill his victim, run away, hide the rifle, and arrive at the stop just before the bus approached. Timing was everything. It would be too risky to stand at a corner for several minutes, waiting for the next bus. He would be the first assassin in American history to try to escape the scene of the crime on a city bus. It was crazy. But it was crazy enough—and so unexpected—that it might work. He figured the police would never suspect or even look for an unarmed passenger riding a bus.

His target was famous but vulnerable. Aides or bodyguards could not protect the man from a clean shot with a rifle. The murder was sure to cause a national sensation and create headline news not only in Dallas, Texas, but throughout the country. The shooter had always wanted to make big news. If he could just get the target in his telescopic sight, it should work.

At first, he had thought he might use a pistol, the assassin’s traditional weapon of choice for slaying an American politician. He had already bought one by mail order more than two months ago. Back on January 28, 1963, he sent an order form and a $10 down payment to Seaport Traders in Los Angeles for a $39.95 Smith & Wesson .38 special, a double-action, six-shot revolver with a five-inch barrel cut down to a stubby two and a quarter inches. The shortened barrel made the weapon easier to conceal in a pocket or a shoulder holster. He had signed the form with the false name A. J. Hidell, and he would owe the balance of the purchase price upon delivery.

But a handgun was a dangerous and even suicidal choice. You had to get close to the victim to use it, and his target was a combat veteran who had served in the military. He might fight back. He thought better of it. No, using a handgun was out of the question. Six weeks later, on March 12, 1963, he mailed a postal money order to Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago and, under a false name, ordered an Italian, World War II military surplus 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano bolt-action rifle mounted with a 4-power telescopic sight.

By coincidence, the revolver and the rifle both arrived in Dallas on March 25, 1963. He picked up the rifle at his post-office box, which he had also obtained under a false name. When his wife saw the weapon, she was afraid. “What do you need a rifle for?” she asked. “What do we need that for?” Her husband told her a woman like her was incapable of understanding why a man like him needed to own a rifle.

A few days later, on the last weekend in March, he had her take photographs of him in their backyard brandishing his new rifle and wearing the pistol on his belt. “I was hanging up the diapers, and he came up to me with the rifle, and I was even a little scared, and he gave me the camera and asked me to press a certain button.” She had never taken a photograph, and he had to show her how to operate his cheap Imperial Reflex camera. “I asked him then,” she said, “why he dressed himself up that like, with the rifle and the pistol.” He was wearing all black—black shirt, pants, and boots. He had never dressed like that before. He assumed a few different, jaunty poses. “I thought he had gone crazy,” she recalled.

Lee Harvey Oswald poses with his rifle, pistol, and left-wing newspapers.

(courtesy of the National Archives)

He told her he wanted to send the photographs to a newspaper. He held two newspapers in his hand while she took the photographs—copies of the left-wing journals the Worker and the Militant. She could not understand why he would call attention to himself that way. He said that he wanted to show that he was “ready for anything.” Then he told her it was not her concern—that it was “man’s business.” After he had developed photographic prints—for privacy he did the work himself at the printing company where he worked—he gave one to his wife and said that she should keep it for their infant daughter, June. “Of course,” she thought, “June does not need photographs like that.”

She hoped that he was just “playing around” and that this was just another example of her husband’s immaturity. “If I had known these were such dangerous toys, . . . ” she mused, after it was too late.

She had an intuitive sense of foreboding. After her husband acquired the rifle, she “knew that [he] was preparing for something.” He ordered her to keep out of his private room, a little home office he had set up in their new apartment. He did not want her to find his secret notebook. He threatened to beat her if he ever caught her in there. “This is my own little nook. I’ve never had my own room before,” he lamented. It wasn’t much of a room, measuring less than four by five feet.

For a man who had shared a bed with his mother until he was ten or eleven years old, the nook, no matter how modest, represented the privacy and independence he craved. “I’ll do all my work here,” he boasted to his wife, “make a lab and do my photography. I’ll keep my things in here. But you’re not to come in here and clean. If I ever come in and find that one single thing has been touched, I’ll beat you.”

She knew he meant it—he was an unpredictable and violent man who had beaten her up before. He was twenty-three years old, she was twenty-one, and they had been husband and wife for only two years. But he was not the same man she had met and married in her native Russia. Now he felt free to insult, humiliate, or hit her at will. Not long before, he struck her so hard her nose bled. When he left the house, she bolted the locks. When he returned and found that he could not get in, he smashed a glass panel, reached in, and unlocked the door from inside.

“You know I am a terrible character,” he had admitted to her recently. “When you see I’m in a bad mood, try not to make me mad. You know I can’t hold myself in very long now.”

She was furious and wanted him to know he had not beaten the pride out of her. “You weak, cowardly American. What a fool I was. I was afraid to marry a Russian because Russian men beat their wives. You! You’re not worth the soles of their feet. How I wish I had woken up sooner!”

He threatened her. “I’ll make you shut up.”

She was not cowed. “Of course you can shut me up by force. But you’ll never change my mind. It’s better to be a drunkard than what you are.”

His rage had climaxed the previous month, on February 23, 1963. In the morning, he made a special request for dinner that night. He told his wife to make him a meal of Southern beans and rice. She had never cooked that dish before and could not find a recipe. After he got home from work, he blew his top when he discovered that she had prepared the beans and rice together in the same pot. Didn’t she know, he demanded, that she was supposed to cook the two ingredients in separate pots and then pour the beans on top of the rice? What difference, she asked, did it make? He was going to mix the beans and rice together on his plate anyway. He ordered her to start over and make the dinner a second time.

“I won’t.”

“You will.”

“I won’t.” Then she threw the dinner she had made into the trash can.

“I’ll force you to.” He raised a hand to strike her.

“You have no right.”

He hit her anyway. Then he turned his back and began to walk away. She retaliated by throwing a small wooden box at him. It grazed his shoulder.

He turned, charged, and threw her onto the bed. His hands encircled her throat. His eyes and face froze into a cold, murderous expression. “I won’t let you out of this alive.” She was sure he was going to strangle her. Then their baby began to cry.

“Go get her,” he told her, as he released his grip from her neck.

“Go get her yourself.”

This attack had broken her spirit. Now she felt ashamed and worthless. She went into the bathroom. She took the clothesline she used to dry her daughter’s diapers. She tied the rope around her neck. He wouldn’t have to kill her. She would do it for him.

He caught her in the act before she could finish. He carried her back to the bedroom. “Forgive me,” he pleaded. “I didn’t mean to do what I did.” Then he mouthed the classic wife beater’s defense. “It’s your fault. You saw what a mood I was in. Why did you make me so mad?”

She said she had only tried to do what he had just tried to do to her. “I’m sick of it, Alka.” That name, along with Alek, was one of the names she called him when they had lived in Russia. His American first name sounded very odd—Asian—to Russian ears.

“Every day we fight, and for no reason,” she complained. “We fight over things so tiny, normal people wouldn’t speak of them at all.”

“I never thought you’d take it so hard,” he replied. “Pay no attention to me now. You know I can’t hold myself back.” It was not his fault, he was suggesting, that he could not control his temper. “Try to understand, you’re wrong sometimes, too”—as if blaming her justified the slaps and punches and choking. “Try to be quiet when you can. For God’s sake, forgive me. I’ll never, ever do it again. I’ll try and change if you’ll only help me.”

“But why, Alka, why do you do it?”

“Because I love you. I can’t stand it when you make me mad.”

And their neighbors could not stand him when he got mad. One of them once reported him to the building manager, Mahlon Tobias, complaining, “I think he’s really hurt her this time.” On another occasion a neighbor predicted, “I think that man over there is going to kill that girl.” The building’s owners showed up to confront him with an ultimatum. Cut it out, or get out, they told him. He did not tell his wife about the warning. Instead, a few days later, he told her they were moving. He claimed he had found them a better apartment at 214 West Neely Street. They moved there on March 2, 1963.

Now, in their new apartment, not long after he had promised to never hit her again, he threatened to beat her if she ever intruded into his tiny private room.

SHE KNEW he had been practicing with the rifle. She had never seen him fire it, but when he went out by himself, he would sometimes say, “Well, today I will take the rifle along for practice.” He had bought at least one small cardboard box of 6.5mm bullets manufactured by the Western Cartridge Company. He knew his way around a rifle. His training in the United States Marine Corps had taught him all he needed to know about that.

On one occasion, she had discovered in their apartment photographs of a strange house. What could it mean? “I asked him what kind of photographs are these?” He refused to answer.

He could never hold a job for long. On April 1, he was fired from his current one at the Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall printing company. He had hurried through his assignments, made careless mistakes, and had to redo too many jobs. He was brusque with coworkers, refusing to sit with them at lunch and often shouldering them aside in the darkroom. When his supervisor gave him his notice, all he did was stare at the floor, listen without protest, and reply, “Well, thanks.” Then he just walked away.

He needed the money, but he did not beg to keep his job. He did not even seem to care. He had already gotten what he wanted—he had used the office equipment to make himself fake identification cards and had developed prints of the photographs of him posing with his rifle. It was as though his mind was distracted by something more important than holding a job. Saturday, April 6, was his last day at work. Within the next four days, he would cross the line from malcontent to madman.

On the morning of Wednesday, April 10, he put on a gray suit and white shirt, the kind of outfit a man looking for a job might wear. After waiting a week and a half to tell her, he admitted to his wife that he had been fired. “I don’t know why,” he whined. “I tried. I liked that work so much.” He did not reveal that he had been let go for poor performance and a bad attitude. He offered a grander excuse that shifted the blame from himself to others. “But probably the FBI came and asked about me, and the boss just didn’t want to keep someone the FBI was interested in. When will they leave me alone?” She accepted his explanation. She knew the government had had an ongoing interest in them since they had moved from Russia to the United States.

When he left the house that morning, his wife assumed he would spend all day looking for work. Whenever he needed a job, it wa...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• List of Illustrations
• A Note To the Reader
• Prologue
• 1. “Such Dangerous Toys”
• 2. “The Glow from That Fire”
• 3. “Show These Texans What Good Taste Really Is”
• 4. “A Bright Pink Suit”
• 5. “Someone Is Shooting at the President”
• 6. “They’ve Shot His Head Off”
• 7. “I Haven’t Shot Anybody”
• 8. “We Had A Hero For A Friend”
• 9. “Lee Oswald Has Been Shot!”
• 10. “One Brief Shining Moment
• Epilogue: “All His Bright Light Gone From the World”
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Source Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Books by James L. Swanson
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher