A light rain was falling in Fort Worth that Friday morning, November 22, 1963. Shortly after President John Kennedy rose at the Hotel Texas where he'd spent the previous night he descended with his wife to give a short speech at a breakfast hosted by the Chamber of Commerce. Kennedy's entourage had flown in the night before from San Antonio, the second leg of a campaign trip to the state that had also included stops in Houston in advance of the coming year's election. Next on the itinerary was a trip to the Dallas Trade Mart for a luncheon at 12:30 co-sponsored by three local civics groups, an occasion for another speech. Kennedy and his running mate Vice President Lyndon Johnson had narrowly won Texas in 1960, thanks mostly to the Texan Johnson, and didn't intend to lose it in 1964. So against the advice of some advisors who were concerned about how it would look if his troubling poll numbers in the state and Dallas's reputation as a hotbed of some of the most regressively right wing politics on the spectrum were manifested in the crowds, Kennedy had proceeded with plans for an open limo motorcade through downtown via Main Street on the way to the Trade Mart on Stemmons Freeway.
The visit had been in the news for a week, and both Dallas papers had maps of the planned route in their morning editions. In the Dallas Morning News, whose headline read "Storm of Political Controversy Swirls Around Kennedy on Visit", someone named Bernard Weissman of "The American Fact-Finding Committee" had placed a full page ad headed "Welcome Mr Kennedy to Dallas" which then verbosely proceeded to decry Kennedy's softness on communism and enumerate acts of treason in the form of why questions (sample bullet point: WHY have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the "Spirit of Moscow"? Tag line: "MR KENNEDY, as citizens of these United States of America, we DEMAND answers to these questions, and we want them NOW.") It was not an isolated sentiment.
The source of much agita around the administration was Cuba, the site of the embarrassing failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion two years before. The invasion had been planned by the Eisenhower administration, who had run out of time to implement it when outgoing Eisenhower's vice president Richard Nixon (an architect of the plan) unexpectedly lost to Kennedy in 1960; it was disowned by the Republican planners before it had had a chance to fail. The invasion was largely responsible for driving the unaffiliated and not especially ideological Fidel Castro under the Soviet umbrella as a means of protection against future US aggressions against the country that Castro had only so recently wrested from the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista-- a brute more to the US's liking, whose absence was also felt by big money interests that so much of US foreign policy served and by the intelligence apparatus that increasingly engaged in an ad hoc and rogue form of foreign policy itself. Since the Bay of Pigs fiasco, repeated attempts to eliminate Castro had failed, and everything had come to a head with the Cuban missile crisis of the prior October when the US had discovered that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles from US shores, without the knowledge of the US. The tensions had brought the world literally to the brink of nuclear war.
Kennedy's record with Cuba raised the ire of a number of groups. Anti-Castro Cubans and the CIA operatives actively plotting with them for one. For another, the military which partisans felt Kennedy has misused in both the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis, and sold down the river by signing a non-proliferation agreement with Russia in the aftermath. Big Business and the mob had reason to be frustrated with the way things had gone in Cuba-- the closing of casinos and brothels in Havana when Batista had been pushed out had cost them over $100 million a year. And of course the virulently Anti-Communist right wing ideologues of the John Birch Society (which was well represented by members of the Dallas Police - who had purposely been given limited security responsibilities for Kennedy's visit by the Secret Service) hardly needed an excuse. It wasn't the prospect of nuclear annihilation that vexed the right-- it was communism winning the day right beneath the nose of the US. And it was threatening to happen again in Southeast Asia.
The gripes were numerous. The Kennedy administration had sided with Martin Luther King Jr on issues of Civil Rights that would not be deterred, whether the American South was ready for it or not, and some thought Kennedy had taken an especially heavy hand in the integration of the University of Alabama. Anti-Catholic bigots feared the influence of the pope. Even monetary policy zealots were outraged over a Kennedy proposal to have the government withhold interest payments from Federal Reserve Bank lenders when paying back loans. It was nothing out of the ordinary to have bitter hatred engendered in every corner of the woodwork by a fledgling Administration. But it might have been unusual to have landed on the wrong side of vodou. Yet President François Duvalier of Haiti whose insistence on flouting the Haitian constitution to remain in office in that country just this past May had caused Kennedy to respond with warships in Port-au-Prince harbor-- and whose brutality and unwillingness to just go along with US foreign policy in the hemisphere in the effort to restore Cuba to the fold of US influence had inspired Kennedy to turn off the tap of vital aid to the country for more than a year by November 1963-- had invoked a curse, officially pronounced in a ceremony only last month. The story went that a vodou doll of Kennedy had even been stabbed 2,200 plus 22 times, as an invocation of Duvalier's most powerful number. Dolls not really being a part of Haitian vodou, there may have been nothing to the story, but Duvalier had so cultivated an association with his loa (spirit), the vodou lord of death-- the dapper, cigar smoking, cane or umbrella toting rogue, Papa Gede-- that he may have been channeling him when he confidently predicted, "The big man in the White House isn't going to be there much longer." And today was the 22nd.
The flight from Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth to Dallas Love Field on Air Force One was short. The president's jet landed at 11:30 AM. At Love Field, Kennedy was greeted by a large and enthusiastic crowd. He and first lady Jacqueline Kennedy spent several minutes shaking hands with the crowd before climbing into the back seat of the dark Blue Lincoln Limousine behind Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie. In the suddenly warm and clear weather the bubble top with which the limousine was normally fitted had been removed. Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird were one car back in the lineup. At 11:45 the procession of autos left for the Trade Mart via downtown Dallas. The motorcade had been scheduled for noon to maximize attendance from those on their lunch breaks. The weather assured a huge crowd lining the route-- it was estimated at 150,000. On the way, the motorcade stopped twice, once so Kennedy could shake hands with a group of Catholic nuns and again for a group of school children. As it approached downtown via Main Street, the motorcade took a right turn on Houston Street and then a very sharp left turn a block later onto Elm Street. At 12:29, the motorcade reached Dealey Plaza (named for the founder of the Dallas Morning News whose namesake was the current mayor and no fan of the President). Lining the plaza were tall buildings that made the Secret Service on detail nervous, among them the Texas Schoolbook Depository, current employer, since October 15th, of the ex-marine Lee Oswald who had returned from a "defection" to the Soviet Union a little more than a year ago with a Russian wife and a baby on the way, and who, after a separation had been renting a room in the city by himself (under an assumed name by some accounts) since September, following a summer in New Orleans.
Meanwhile, the crowds on the route were enthusiastically cheering the president. Secret Service contacted the detail at the Trade Mart to let them know the motorcade was 5 minutes away. The noonday sun was becoming hot, but just ahead, the Triple Underpass with the ramp leading to the Stemmons Freeway was visible. Jacqueline Kennedy later remembered thinking the underpass would provide some relief from the heat. Nellie Connally turned to the president and said, "You can't say that Dallas doesn't love you." The last words Jacqueline Kennedy later remembered her husband speaking was his reply to Mrs Connally's comment: "No, you certainly can't."
As Kennedy's motorcade approached Dealey Plaza, a man dressed in black suddenly opened a black umbrella over his head. By some accounts he twirled the umbrella or swung it in an arc from left to right. Others have said he pumped it up and down several times. In the home movie that Abraham Zapruder happened to be taking which captured events as they occurred, Kennedy's limousine drives from the left of the frame to the right down Elm Street. It is momentarily hidden behind a sign for the Stemmons Freeway. When it emerges at frame 206, an open umbrella is captured and is recognizable at the bottom of each frame until frame 233. In the same length of time, close analysis of Kennedy reveals that he was hit while the limousine was obscured by the highway sign. A look of distress is on his face and his arms raise to his throat. The time was 12:30. A few seconds later, at least one more shot hits the President in the head causing the head to jerk back and a burst of blood and tissue to erupt from the back of the skull. Jacqueline Kennedy stands up and climbs onto the back of the limousine where she is met by Secret Service Agent Clint Hill (in Dallas at Mrs Kennedy's request) who has climbed onto the trunk from behind. He sprawls over the trunk in an apparent effort to protect the President and First Lady from further shots and Mrs Kennedy turns back to her seat.
Within moments of the shooting a motorcycle in front of the president's car began to lead it at high speed to Parkland Hospital nearby. The president was in the operating room by 1:00 pm. Doctors later described Kennedy as moribund on arrival. Priests were called; last rites were administered. At 1:33 PM Dallas Time, an hour and 3 minutes after the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, President Kennedy was officially pronounced dead.
In the noise and confusion of Dealey Plaza, and of America in 1963, the accounts of what had transpired began to differ.
First reports indicated smoke and shots came from a grassy area that was forward and to the right of the president's car as it approached the Triple Underpass, which UPI reporter Merriman Smith apparently was the first to describe as a "grassy knoll" in reports issued within 25 minutes of the shooting. (Walter Cronkite conveyed the UPI reports of shots from a "grassy knoll" less than 20 minutes into CBS's coverage of the assassination, which interrupted the soap opera As the World Turns at 1:40 PM in New York.). Before long, a story began to emerge (attributed to a small "colored" boy in Cronkite's first description of it) that the shots came from a second floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository to the rear of the caravan. Officially, as determined by the Warren Commission and the 1978 US House Select Committee on Assassinations that took it up again 10 years later, the shots came from a single gun, from the 6th floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, from one lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Although Oswald had left the depository by 12:31, it did not take long for the lone 6th floor window gunman version of what had happened to come together and a description of the person of interest to be broadcast to Dallas police. Oswald, found by police at the Texas Theatre during a showing of the movie War Is Hell, was arrested at 1:45 PM for the death of Dallas Police Officer JD Tippitt who 30 minutes earlier had recognized the suspect from a description over his radio (although Oswald had taken a bus ride home after he'd left the depository to change clothes), and been shot to death as he got out of his car to arrest him. After more than 10 hours of rough interrogation, Oswald was charged also with the murder of the president at 11:28 PM. Oswald's shooting the morning of Sunday, November 24 by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub operator with police, mob and (of course) Anti-Castro connections, in the parking garage of the Dallas Municipal building as he was being escorted from a court appearance to armored transport back to jail, ensured that there would be no due process. Oswald was dead of his wounds barely 48 hours after Kennedy.
The events of the day in Dealey Plaza have been scoured ever since for truth, and for meaning regardless of the truth. Details that might go unnoticed and that might have had no significance otherwise were amplified and magnified, frequently distorted to make them fit a narrative. Mysteries invited conjecture. Conjecture invited mysteries. What was the long black object being held by the canine-like "black dog man" seen standing behind the pyracantha bush on the grassy knoll? Who were the three hoboes walking calmly in a line along a fence at the edge of the knoll just after the shooting, one of whom bore a striking resemblance to E Howard Hunt of Bay of Pigs fame? What happened to the film that a woman in a babushka was seen taking? Why was a man on this beautiful day in November suddenly brandishing an umbrella? Some of the questions answered themselves. Two theories evolved about Umbrella Man. One was that the umbrella was actually a weapon which was designed upon being opened to shoot a flechette tipped with a paralyzing agent into Kennedy's throat, immobilizing him for the Dealey plaza shooter or shooters to finish him off. Less thrilling but possibly at least somewhat more plausible, others surmised that the opening of the umbrella was a signal to the assassins to commence fire.
Years later, Louie Witt of Dallas was invited to speak before the US House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) investigating the Kennedy Assassination for the second time in 1978. He was an insurance salesman at the time of the assassination, a man "of conservative mind." He was there at the chairman's request to confess that he was the infamous "Umbrella Man" in Dealey Plaza November 22, 1963. The umbrella, he said, was still in his attic unused for the 15 years since the assassination.Within moments of the shooting a motorcycle in front of the president's car began to lead it at high speed to Parkland Hospital nearby. The president was in the operating room by 1:00 pm. Doctors later described Kennedy as moribund on arrival. Priests were called; last rites were administered. At 1:33 PM Dallas Time, an hour and 3 minutes after the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, President Kennedy was officially pronounced dead.
In the noise and confusion of Dealey Plaza, and of America in 1963, the accounts of what had transpired began to differ.
First reports indicated smoke and shots came from a grassy area that was forward and to the right of the president's car as it approached the Triple Underpass, which UPI reporter Merriman Smith apparently was the first to describe as a "grassy knoll" in reports issued within 25 minutes of the shooting. (Walter Cronkite conveyed the UPI reports of shots from a "grassy knoll" less than 20 minutes into CBS's coverage of the assassination, which interrupted the soap opera As the World Turns at 1:40 PM in New York.). Before long, a story began to emerge (attributed to a small "colored" boy in Cronkite's first description of it) that the shots came from a second floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository to the rear of the caravan. Officially, as determined by the Warren Commission and the 1978 US House Select Committee on Assassinations that took it up again 10 years later, the shots came from a single gun, from the 6th floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, from one lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Although Oswald had left the depository by 12:31, it did not take long for the lone 6th floor window gunman version of what had happened to come together and a description of the person of interest to be broadcast to Dallas police. Oswald, found by police at the Texas Theatre during a showing of the movie War Is Hell, was arrested at 1:45 PM for the death of Dallas Police Officer JD Tippitt who 30 minutes earlier had recognized the suspect from a description over his radio (although Oswald had taken a bus ride home after he'd left the depository to change clothes), and been shot to death as he got out of his car to arrest him. After more than 10 hours of rough interrogation, Oswald was charged also with the murder of the president at 11:28 PM. Oswald's shooting the morning of Sunday, November 24 by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub operator with police, mob and (of course) Anti-Castro connections, in the parking garage of the Dallas Municipal building as he was being escorted from a court appearance to armored transport back to jail, ensured that there would be no due process. Oswald was dead of his wounds barely 48 hours after Kennedy.
The events of the day in Dealey Plaza have been scoured ever since for truth, and for meaning regardless of the truth. Details that might go unnoticed and that might have had no significance otherwise were amplified and magnified, frequently distorted to make them fit a narrative. Mysteries invited conjecture. Conjecture invited mysteries. What was the long black object being held by the canine-like "black dog man" seen standing behind the pyracantha bush on the grassy knoll? Who were the three hoboes walking calmly in a line along a fence at the edge of the knoll just after the shooting, one of whom bore a striking resemblance to E Howard Hunt of Bay of Pigs fame? What happened to the film that a woman in a babushka was seen taking? Why was a man on this beautiful day in November suddenly brandishing an umbrella? Some of the questions answered themselves. Two theories evolved about Umbrella Man. One was that the umbrella was actually a weapon which was designed upon being opened to shoot a flechette tipped with a paralyzing agent into Kennedy's throat, immobilizing him for the Dealey plaza shooter or shooters to finish him off. Less thrilling but possibly at least somewhat more plausible, others surmised that the opening of the umbrella was a signal to the assassins to commence fire.
Witt had brought the umbrella to Dealey Plaza that day to taunt Kennedy with it he said. The protest could be understood as it related to the President's father, Joseph Kennedy's support of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement stance toward Adolph Hitler in the 1930's, taken as a means of keeping Britain out of the brewing World War in Europe. Chamberlain had a habit of carrying an umbrella. The attribute had been used in political cartoons critical of his stance, and by extension, per Witt, umbrellas had been used to taunt Joseph Kennedy. It wasn't even Joseph Kennedy's stance that Witt was protesting, he said. He had just understood that Kennedy's son John would see the umbrella and understand it as an insult, which was all he had intended to convey. The umbrella as anyone would be able to see was not a weapon as fanciful conspiracy theorists had elaborately surmised. It was no signal to assassins to commence firing on the president at the precise moment that the umbrella opened. It was just a dumb protest of one very sorry man, a troll before his time. For no one was more shocked and saddened by John Kennedy's assassination occurring at the very moment that the umbrella was opened than Louie Witt. If anything could be learned from the incident it was that Louie Witt's opening of the umbrella was a case of the wrong man in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time.
Witt's story completed the official version of events in Dealey Plaza. But one spiritual being had to laugh as he lit his cigar. Papa Gede had foretold the day. Invoked by François Duvalier, he saw the human chain that ran from Duvalier to his scheming banker Clémard Charles, from Charles to his amoral partner in business and in anti-Duvalier conspiracy, the Russian born Texan George de Mohrenschildt, from de Mohrenschildt to his CIA babysitting project in Dallas, the angry young cipher Lee Harvey Oswald. What Louie Witt did not know was that he was just a horse that day, just a vehicle for one loa to mount. All Papa Gede had needed that Indian Summer Friday in Dallas was an umbrella. The serviteurs had done the rest.
*****
Umbrella Man:
Part 1: Ayiti
Part 2: Bèl Gason
Part 3: The Émigré
Part 4: The Opening
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