CHAPTER 1: THE MIRROR CRACKS (Part 1)

Written by Harry Turtledove & Bryce Zabel  

    Nobody ever took a job at the Washington Ledger intending to get famous.  Walter Lippmann didn't start here.  Neither did Walter Winchell, or even Walter Cronkite.  You took a job at the Ledger for two basic reasons:  you knew something-–or thought you knew something-–about the newspaper game, and nobody else in town wanted to hire you.  As consolation, D.C. was still the best news beat in America.

    First in boos, first in shoes, last in the American League wasn't just about the Senators.  With better-heeled competition from the Post and the Star-News, with TV news starting to cut into every paper's circulation, the Ledger was hurting.  Get famous?  By November 1963, you were happy if your paycheck cleared on the first and the fifteenth.

    Chuck Duncan was the Ledger's White House correspondent.  That was what they called him, but around the time Lee Harvey Oswald shot Governor Connally and Special Agent Hill, Duncan was in the paper’s Washington, D.C. newsroom drinking strong coffee and eating an already stale morning doughnut.  The big boys were all in Dallas, probably having BBQ ribs for lunch.  Not Duncan; he had no travel budget to get there.  Whatever happened in Texas, the paper would pick it up off the wire services.  That’s what his desk editor, Andy Callahan, had told him last week.  You could tell it made Callahan sad to say so, but that was the business. 

    So, today, sitting at his desk during a presidential trip, Duncan fumed.  He would have enjoyed writing on the road just for the change of pace.  And he enjoyed hanging out with the competition, seeing how they worked, and it pained him to get stuck here. 

    The icing on the cake of his disappointment was that he’d turned forty-six three days earlier.  That made him six months younger than the President he covered less thoroughly than he would have liked.  Duncan had a lot less hair than JFK and could not imagine how the chief executive looked so good.  People were always saying how young and vigorous the President was.  They never said that to Duncan. He thought if he could sleep more it might help but, he knew he was no Kennedy.  So he still wore a fedora to cover his bald spot and strongly believed hats were making a comeback.

    Sometimes Duncan looked like he’d been through a war, which he had.  Former Marine Sergeant Charles Duncan served for two years in the Pacific during World War II.  He’d lost the last joint of his right little finger on Iwo Jima, and thanked God that was all. It made him type funny, and his copy sometimes had missing “P”s, but otherwise it didn’t change his life.

    Going to school on the GI bill did.  Without the war, he’d probably never have gone to college or caught the writing bug.  He’d published a few short stories, but the lure of newspaper work--and a steady paycheck--was stronger.  Divorced, with two sons he didn’t see often enough, even he had to admit some of the thrill was gone from his life.

    That was what was on Chuck Duncan’s mind when city reporter Alan Lefkowitz came up to him.  “This company is so incredibly cheap.  You shouldn’t be here.”  Lefkowitz punctuated his words with jabs from his latest story, rolled tight and clutched like a sword.

    Duncan didn’t like having paper stabbed in his face any more than he liked Lefkowitz, who covered everything from the local school board to DAR meetings.  It wasn’t just that forty-six will always suspect, sneer at, and envy twenty-six.  To Duncan, Lefkowitz’s hair was unkempt, his pants were too tight, and the electric guitars that came out of the transistor radio on his desk were too damn loud. As far as the older man was concerned, music had reached its peak with Rodgers and Hammerstein.  He proudly claimed to have never heard of Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, let alone the Beach Boys or the band everybody in England was going gaga over, the Beatles. 

    “No sweat.  But if he takes Jackie back to Paris, I’m on that plane for sure,” Duncan said, hating how embarrassed he felt for this kid to offer condolences!  Desperate, he decided to change the subject, by force if necessary.  He reached out and grabbed Lefkowitz’s story.  “Can I read it?”

    Lefkowitz tried to pull the papers back.  “I’m not done.  It’s the garbage kickback piece.  But, like I say, I’m not done.”   

    Duncan didn’t let go.  “Everybody needs a new set of eyes on a big one.”

    Yielding the paper, Lefkowitz remembered why he thought Duncan was everything that was wrong with the Ledger. He kept doing things the way he had for years because that was the way he always did things.  And he was always coming across like I paid my dues and you haven’t so who cares what you think? Lefkowitz thought Duncan always acted as if he’d seen so many more important things than you had.  Even if it was true, he was such a pain in the ass about it.  Couldn’t he see the times were changing?

    But with the news soon to come from Dallas, none of that would matter much longer.

        #

    As the presidential motorcade turned into Dealey Plaza, Secret Service Agent Clinton J. Hill did not like what he saw. To the left of the President’s car was an open, landscaped area at the western end of downtown Dallas.  Hill, riding on the left running board of the follow-up car, felt his stomach tighten.  No way in hell to cover that much open space.  On the right, Hill saw the Texas School Book Depository, toward which the President was waving.  Hill glanced up to the building’s higher floors.  The bodyguard’s reflex changed the course of history.

    Hill saw a momentary glint of metal in the midday sun from a window on the sixth floor.  It is not clear whether he saw only the rifle barrel or also spied the man who was holding it.  Either way, there was no time to look, only to act.  He leaped from the running board of his own vehicle, sprinting toward the President’s car, screaming, “Go!  Go!”

    In the President’s car, the driver, Secret Service agent William Greer, responded immediately, mashing his foot down on the gas hard and swerving out of his lane.  At the same instant, a shot was fired, seemingly from the sixth floor.  It caught Hill in the upper back, shattering his spinal cord and dropping him to the asphalt as blood poured from the wound.

    Accounts vary as to how many shots followed. Whether it was two or three, and even where they came from, will be debated for centuries.  But when the shooting stopped, Hill was down, Governor John Connally had been hit and critically wounded, while the President had escaped unharmed.

        #

    Inside the open presidential vehicle, Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman, riding in the passenger seat, began to climb over the jump seats Governor Connally and his wife, Nellie, were using.  Connally was bleeding badly.  But the Governor wasn’t his concern.  He looked directly past him to Kennedy.  “Mr. President, are you hurt, sir?”

    Kennedy seemed dazed.  He began to pat himself, taking a self-inventory.  “I’m okay.  What about...?”       

    Kellerman turned back to Greer with the status of their charge:  “He’s okay.”  Kellerman tried to push the President down.  “Duck, sir!”  But Kennedy’s body was stiff; it wouldn’t bend even under Kellerman’s muscle.

    “I can’t,” said Kennedy. 

    Kellerman instantly readjusted, climbing onto the back of the car, so he could move both President Kennedy and his wife into positions where they were lying across the seat.  He supported his body over them with both arms.

    Meanwhile, Greer was on his walkie-talkie.  “We have the President.  He is okay.  Repeat, he is okay.”

    From the walkie-talkie came the command:  “Proceed to Air Force One immediately.”

    The Secret Service’s job is to protect the President--at all costs.  It says nothing about the Governor of Texas. And so the agents’ first instinct was to head for Love Field and get the President the hell out of Dallas. 

    Kennedy slammed his hand on Kellerman’s chest. “No!  Get the Governor to a hospital now.”  Kellerman began to argue, to explain the priority, but Kennedy interrupted.  “I’m alive and I’m the President of the United States.  That is an order!” 

    No Secret Service training trumps an order from the Commander-in-Chief.  The Lincoln zoomed toward Parkland Memorial.

        #

    When the first flash out of Dallas came over the teletype, Alan Lefkowitz announced it to the newsroom.  He’d been waiting for the afternoon sports roundup.  “The President’s car’s been shot at in Dallas!”  Time nearly stopped. 

    Lefkowitz handed the copy directly to Andy Callahan, who passed it to Chuck Duncan.  Everyone who looked at it searched for the extra meaning in those first words:  SHOTS FIRED (DALLAS).  The body of the story was terse in the extreme.  Governor John Connally and a Secret Service agent had been shot.  Maybe others.  No report about the President or First Lady being hit, so the lack of information was the news there. 

    Lefkowitz spoke to Callahan, knowing that speaking directly to Duncan was a losing proposition.  “Listen, Andy, I can back Chuck up on this one...”

    Duncan was sarcastic:  “You think you get the story because you ripped the wire copy?”  He headed back to his desk, but not before assuring Callahan, “I got it.”

    Callahan nodded to Lefkowitz.  “Look, I don’t know where this story’s gonna go but, for now, drop the garbage kickbacks and watch his back.”  Callahan leaned in to Lefkowitz and spoke like a conspirator: “He doesn’t have to know that officially for now.”  Callahan had a habit of using “for now” the way others did “you know.”  He thought the hesitance kept things fluid around the newsroom.

    Lefkowitz nodded and slapped him on the arm.  “I’ll be my usual charming self.”

    “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Callahan said.

    Duncan didn’t even look up as Lefkowitz approached.  “Some other time.”

    Lefkowitz let that sit a moment, then said what he’d come to say: “My girlfriend has a friend in the White House.  I think she said there was a lot of talk about not going to Texas in the first place.  Guess they had reason to be worried, huh?”   

    “I never heard that,” Duncan said.   

    “Yeah,” said Lefkowitz, “but you ask the bosses questions and she hears stuff while she’s working.  She’s a solid source.”  Lefkowitz nodded in Callahan’s direction.  “For now anyway.”

    Even Duncan had to hide a smile.  “Well, for now, I appreciate the tip.”  Duncan started back to work; if only Lefkowitz had left for his own, he might have started to like him.  But Lefkowitz didn’t.

    “The thing is, Chuck,” Lefkowitz began, “what’d they know then that they were worried about?  That’s what I want to find out.”

    Duncan nodded, taking it in, but mentally working his checklist for the story.  “While we’re thinking about that, we need to make a run on the morgue.” 

    The morgue, Lefkowitz thought sourly.  To anybody who wasn’t ready to be put out to pasture, it was the library.  “What do you need from the library?”  Lefkowitz stressed the word a little.

    “For starters, when was the last time we had a governor shot?” Duncan looked at the younger man as if he had just said, Checkmate.

    Lefkowitz shrugged.  “Beats me.”  The teletype alarm interrupted him.  “Christ, that’s four bells.”

    As the coarse paper stock emerged from the machine,  Duncan and Lefkowitz craned their necks to read it word by word.  Neither President Kennedy nor his wife--then an eternity waiting for the next line to punch out--are believed to be injured.

    “Should be ‘is believed,’” Duncan said automatically.  Gotta be a kid writing it, he thought.  Nobody learned grammar any more.

    Lefkowitz almost threw his hands in the air.  One of the biggest stories of the year, and Duncan was pissing and moaning about subjects and verbs!  “What if the guy was aiming for JFK instead of, uh . . .” He had to check the copy to remind himself who the Governor of Texas was, but Duncan beat him to it.

    “Connally,” said Duncan.  “Governor John Connally.” 

    “Right, right.  But when’s the last time a President got shot?” Lefkowitz returned.

    “McKinley, in 1900,” Duncan said.  “No, 1901.  That’s what made Teddy Roosevelt President.  But Kennedy’s alive, so it doesn’t matter.”

    I’ll decide what matters to me.  Lefkowitz hated Duncan’s habit of telling people what to care about. 

    I’ve been doing this for a while, so pay attention.  Duncan couldn’t stand how Lefkowitz, still wet behind the ears, acted like forty-six was the downhill side of the slope.  But with a big breaking story, he kept those thoughts to himself. 

    “I wonder how close the bullet came,” Lefkowitz said.

    “Could be a good angle.”  The reporter in Duncan wanted to hear what was on the kid’s mind.  Lefkowitz was quick, no doubt about it. Was he smart?  That was probably a different story. 

    “A Secret Service guy got shot, right?” asked Lefkowitz.

    “That means it was damn close."“They stick to the President like glue,” Duncan agreed.

    Lefkowitz volunteered to visit the morgue, but Duncan said he’d rather do it himself.

        #

    Parkland Memorial Hospital’s Margaret Hinchcliffe, working the emergency desk, had not heard about the attack on the motorcade.  She first learned of it when the President’s appointments scheduler and close friend Kenneth O’Donnell and two Secret Service agents approached.  “Where are the carts?” they shouted. 

    Hinchcliffe had no answer, and winced when she saw Agents Rufus and Youngblood with revolvers drawn.  O’Donnell looked around the hallway where outpatients, like fourteen-year-old Julia Cox, sat on wood benches in the corridor.  He ordered the Secret Service agents to “get this hallway cleared!”  An arrow pointed in the direction of “Trauma One” and “Trauma Two.” The men went in that direction.  Julia Cox recalls breaking into hysterical tears even though, at the time, she had no idea what had just happened.

    In the months after the Dallas attack, November 22, 1963, came to be known as “The Day Kennedy Wasn’t Shot.”  The first person to verify that was Doctor Robert Shaw, senior ER physician then on duty at Parkland Memorial.  When Kennedy entered the emergency room, accompanied by his wife and a cadre of Secret Service agents, Dr. Shaw took one look at the Commander-in-Chief and said, “Sir, lie down on this gurney here.  Immediately.” 

    Kennedy refused, pointing to Connally and Hill, who had both just been wheeled in on gurneys of their own, blood staining the crisp white linens; both unconscious.  “They need help first.”   

    Kennedy and Shaw could see into Trauma Two, where Texas Governor John Connally was fighting for his life.  After a quick examination, Dr. Charles J. Carrico, only two years a practicing physician, and Nurses Diana Bowron and Hinchcliffe, took surgical shears and began to cut the clothes away from Connally.  What they saw was not good; he had been hit two, maybe three, times, most grievously through the neck. Carrico checked for a pulse and found none, nor any blood pressure. 

    Shaw stood his ground.  “We have three teams, sir.  The Governor is in the care of Doctor Carrico, and agent Hill has already gone straight to the OR.  You may have been shot.  I need you to lie down and let me examine you.”   

    Kennedy looked around at the pale tile, sterile instruments, and the clock that read 12:37.  Then he flashed his famous charm.  “Well, Doctor, I can assure you I would like very much to lie down on that gurney, but I can’t right now.”  Kennedy began to unbutton his shirt, which had been splashed with drops of blood from Connally and Hill.

     As Shaw watched, President Kennedy took off the dress shirt and tie, revealing an unusually constrictive shoulder-to-groin brace. “Tore a muscle, shoveling dirt in Canada this month.  I can barely move.”  In subsequent interviews, Shaw remembered being startled--the image was so out of character to the physically active President he was used to thinking of.

    Shaw then removed Kennedy’s brace and began to examine him visually.  Shaw’s initial conclusion:  “I see no entry wounds.” Although the President was under more or less constant observation until his return to Washington, D.C., that evening, for one hour after Shaw’s clearance, President Kennedy was watched continuously by medical personnel. 

     Twenty-two minutes later, Governor John Connally was pronounced dead of his wounds by Dr. Carrico.  Three hours and seven minutes after that, Secret Service Agent Clint Hill died in the main OR of Parkland Memorial Hospital. 

        #

    More bells clanged as another flash came over the teletype.  This one was datelined Parkland Hospital, Dallas.  “Connally’s dead!” shouted Lefkowitz, who got his his hands on it first.  By then, a dozen people crowded around the machine behind him.  Lefkowitz looked to see if Duncan was back at his desk, but it was still empty.

        #

    Three flights of stairs below, in the basement, Duncan squinted at the notebook in which he was scribbling.  These forty-watt bulbs are hell on your eyes, he thought.  He inhaled the musty, dusty smell of pulp paper slowly giving up the ghost. 

    More than a hundred years of the Ledger were stored down here; the morgue went back before the Civil War.  It was a rag then, too, Duncan thought.  But what newspaper wasn’t in those days?

    He started to light a cigarette, then decided not to.  What flame could do to all that ancient paper!  There was no place to sit down, so he stood drumming his fingers on the countertop that separated petitioners from newspapers. 

    The archivist returned shortly.  Adrian Markham was tall and skinny and favored dark suits.  He could have been a moonlighting undertaker. “Found two, Chuck,” he said.  “Is the President all right?”

    Duncan assured him that the President was supposed to be unhurt, but the press hadn’t talked to him yet.  “You said you had two,” he went on.  “Tell me.”

    “Both of these were right around the turn of the century,” Markham said.  “One was William Goebel, who was elected governor of Kentucky in 1900--or the Democrats said he was.  The election was disputed, to put it mildly.  He got shot, they administered the oath, and then he died. The other one was Frank Steunenberg, the governor of Idaho.  Some labor-union radicals blew him up with a bomb in 1905, but that was after he was out of office.”

    “Okay.”  Duncan scribbled furiously.  “So if Connally dies, he’s the first no-doubt-about-it governor to get murdered while he’s governor, right?”

    “Right.”  The archivist nodded, but his mind was elsewhere.  “When they know for sure President Kennedy is okay, call me, okay?”

    For Chuck Duncan, that should have been a moment of revelation--and warning.  Markham doesn’t give a rat’s ass about Connally, Duncan thought.  But instead of appreciating how the President, to many people, was the story, Duncan found himself thinking it was no wonder Markham was stuck down here.  He has no feel for news.

    “I’ll let you know if anything changes,” Duncan promised, “but pull everything you can find on attempts on the President, too.”  He pocketed his notebook and headed back upstairs, thinking he would use what he found to get back the White House angle after he filed this piece.  After all, it was his beat in the first place.

    Duncan hadn’t gone on any fifty-mile hikes, the way President Kennedy urged.  Still, he took the stairs two at a time.

        #

    At his Hickory Hill estate in suburban McLean, Virginia, the President’s brother, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, was lunching with Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.  They ate outside, even though it was too cool for that, wearing jackets, eating hot beef-and-barley soup.  The outside phone rang.  It was J. Edgar Hoover.  Never much of a conversationalist, he said simply:  “There’s been an accident.”

    The Attorney General nearly screamed into the phone:  “How is the President?”  When given a two-sentence precis of the news, RFK bid Hoover a curt goodbye.   

    He asked Morganthau to excuse him, telling him only that the Governor of Texas had been shot, the President appeared to be unhurt, and he himself had to attend to urgent matters.

    Morganthau left immediately.  Bobby Kennedy’s first telephone call was not to his brother but to national security advisor McGeorge Bundy.  “Have the combinations on the President’s locked files changed right away,” the Attorney General said.

        #

Look for "Chapter 1: The Mirror Cracked" (Part II) on this website on Monday, March 26, 2007.

Comments

[Timothy-Allen Albertson]

RFK would not have been eating beef and barley soup, or for that matter, beef of any kind, on a pre-Vatican II Friday. I believe
Manchester's book said he, and his companions, were eating clam
choweder.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

I'm curious about the remark referring to the newspaper's morgue as a "library." In all four my years of working at a newspaper, I've never heard it referred to as a library, and I'm wondering what that's based on. I'd also like to say that I absolutely love the fact that you're using the name Washington Ledger. If it's an intentional nod to the semi-fictional (It went out of business in 1898, but has since been used in Law and Order and as the basis for the television series Deadline) New York Ledger, then I definitely give you credit for a big inside reference.

[Andy Linman]

Excellent beginning. I will also be interested in the ramifications of Connally's death, since as I recall he was active in politics (after a party switch) into the Reagan years. He also had a bankruptcy that got him another 15 minutes. I can't wait to see how it plays out, and I want the book now.

[Alex Lella]

A very good start. I personally would have skipped the introduction, but never mind that. Does anyone know how many chapters there are going to be?

[Jonathan Schattke]

Harry, you old dog... first chapters are always the easiest to write. But I think you can keep this humming through 300 pages, no problem!

Looking forward to it.

[Don Roberdeau]

Interesting. Will look forward to your next chapter.

Having studied the assassination micro-details since the Zapruder film's first showing in motion to the general public in 1975, and spoken with dozens of pre/during/post assassination witnesses (including 39 Dealey Plaza witnesses) I have to ask.... was there a Julia Cox in the Parkland emergency area? (I do not show her on my list of 5,526 persons)

Personally, I would have definitely let SS agent Clint Hill live in your alternative history.... he was the only agent who took pro-active actions during the attack....and Hill still feels badly to this day about being just a few seconds too late (in one of the only movie scenes in his solid career where he cries, Clint Eastwood portrayed Clint Hill's true feelings, exactly, in the Los Angeles "Westin Boneventure" presidential suite scene, near the end of "In the Line of Fire")

Two other SS agents----including President Kennedy's SS agent, John Ready----jumped from the SS car just after the president's head first exploded, but they were immediately ordered by SS Agent In Charge Emory Roberts to, "Hold!," and return to the SS followup car, the 1956 "Cadillac," nicknamed the "Queen Mary"

Connally dying....well, all I can say is if you know about Connally's early November 1963 angry comments and the Big Lies he told Texas trip advanceman Jerry Bruno after Connally stormed from the table and phoned the White House during a luncheon about finalizing the motorcade route and the 11-22-63 luncheon site....then you know why Connally dying in your alternative history is no big deal to me.... among several other things, recall what Connally excitedly uttered during the attack.... "They're going to kill us all!"

Best Regards in Research,
Don Roberdeau

[Gary Thomas]

WOW!!!!! and we have to wait for this story to be written??? Where can I buy the book???

[Scooter]

Love the conceptual potential for alternate history visions.
Tweaking our memories, pre-conceived notions and the truth as we know it is scrumptious food for thought.
I look forward to the author’s next excerpt.
Piercing a sacred cow like the Camelot myth, simply delicious.
Waiting a week will be akin to the anticipation for a flaming dessert; delicious, gooey and all together too fattening to eat but too tasty turn down.

Bravo