Gerald FitzGerald: My times and travels with JFK

Historical marker for the Texas School Book Depository. The word "allegedly" was highlighted by vandals.

We never met. Never even saw each other. Yet looking back I know that my high school evolution was shaped largely by the most renowned Catholic sinner in America.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected president in November of my freshman year. He was murdered in November of my senior year. And all those frail clergy who inundated my life like Niagara, those Dominican nuns, LaSalle Christian Brothers, those parish priests and Jesuits who purport to speak for God himself, stood stuttering between fractured sides of the man who lifted the spirits of millions but could not keep his trousers up.

We embraced him even as we fell to the wayside. His advocacy for the fitness effects of a fifty-mile hike blazed through the boys of Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School. Yes, I continue to insist I would have completed the hike from Brooklyn had the very route not gone by the front door of our home in Nassau County after roughly 23 miles on a hot day.

It was a mystery the scope of Transubstantiation how me own Dad from Limerick preferred Richard Nixon. Here’s a story of Dad’s fellow CIA employee very early in the Kennedy administration. The friend had drawn duty as the nearest warm staff body to the newly confirmed CIA director, John McCone, overnighting at a Washington, D.C., hotel. Turning in, McCone directed the agent: “Do not wake me for anyone but the president of the United States.” 

Wouldn’t you know the telephone rings a little later. On the line is Dwight David Eisenhower, who, until a few days earlier, had been president of the United States for eight consecutive years. In a sweat the agent takes the briefest of moments then decides to gently wake McCone. To the agent, the ensuing conversation sounds smooth, quiet, respectful. After replacing the phone in its cradle, an icy McCone turns to the agent and says: “I told you not to wakeme for anyone but the president of theUnited States.” According to Dad, the poor guy spent much of his following career stationed in some place like Boise, Idaho.

By the way, forget all that baloney about the FBI being limited to investigating domestically and the CIA to scrutinizing internationally, Dad’s CIA office, disguised as a Treasury space, was on Wall Street in the Sugar Building near the East River and his beat was mostly New York City. No one, including my mother, knew he was in the CIA until he was out. If he were away for a few days, I’d check the top drawer in his bedroom high boy to see if his revolver was gone with him; I thought he was some kind of Treasury cop. He assumed many false names and guises to interview subjects. He targeted for search the luggage of travelers he considered to be suspicious before allowing it to be claimed; he facilitated bench “drops” in Central Park, and, prior to the advent of electronic eavesdropping, he planted a waiter to serve (and overhear) visiting Soviet dignitaries as they dined. The planted server was not only fluent in Russian. He lipread Russian.

When Kennedy launched the luckless Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, in April 1961 my dad was working security for the government set to replace Fidel Castro– including support staff—being housed at the Waldorf-Astoria, in Manhattan. He drove with them to Idlewild Airport (later renamed for JFK), in Queens, to be flown to Cuba until he was tipped to abort and take them all to Philadelphia and then contacted again to take everybody back to the Waldorf. That fiasco apparently triggered Krushchev to site missiles in Cuba which spurred Kennedy, when the attempt was discovered 18 months later, to trigger the Cuban missile crisis. That brought us twelve days of the closest we’ve yet to come to nuclear war.

The only reason I know all this is that when Nixon apparently created a mandatory retirement age of 65 instead of 70. Dad applied for the higher covert-level pension stream and Nixon’s people denied him. My old man was like a manic dog on a trouser cuff and he appealed by creating a hand-written litany of everything he’d ever done covertly. He was denied again anyway. He kept a copy and when he died, I found it in his home.

He and my mom had divorced after 33 years. Therefore, she was not his widow; she couldn’t draw any of his CIA pension. Then she got a call from a friend of Dad still working who tipped her to special one-day window legislation being drafted by Congress to benefit the ex-wife of former CIA director William Colby who had just died in a canoe accident. Family tradition says thanks to that info my mom and the former Mrs. Colby were authorized to receive pensions closed to others in similar straits. 

I recall once coming into the kitchen of our home from working out back on a hot Saturday when the only telephone in the house rang. I answered to the voice of a stranger asking for Tom Somebody. I was a moment away from replying that we had no Tom when the hands of Dad rushing in from pushing the mower grabbed my shoulders and tossed me out of his way.

“This is Tom ___ with Bishop’s Service,” said Dad. I paused but knew better than to linger and listen despite having no clue what was happening.

My brother inherited the sterling silver cigarette case engraved and given to Dad by an aide to the Shah of Iran after Dad helped to fulfill the guy’s secret desire to eat an American hot dog. Dad drove him out to Jones Beach to try some.

President Kennedy was assassinated on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963. Two days later my sisters and I were sprawled on the Sunday noon floor watching the black and white television which had barely been turned off since the trigger was pulled. We watched the police moving Lee Harvey Oswald through the bottom floor of the station alongside adjacent underground parking so that the accused killer could be taken to county jail. Then we watched Jack Ruby shoot Oswald to death at point blank range.

By the time three more years passed there was something else appearing regularly on TV-- the Vietnam war. This was of particular interest to me as a male turning 20 who’d flunked out of college, was unmarried and who’d passed his draft physical. (During the physical the doc scribbled something on his clipboard so I stretched to read it over his shoulder: “flat feet.” Before I could smile, he looked at me and said: “Not flat enough.”) So, near the end of 1966 I phoned my local draft board to ask when I might be called up. They answered: February 1967. I gave notice to my employer figuring I’d take a month or so vacation thumbing across the nation before getting drafted. The only mandatory stop I scheduled enroute to California was to visit Dallas to see where President Kennedy was killed.

I left New York City with $50 and longtime English friend Keith Aitken. But we were busted for hitchhiking by state troopers somewhere near Albany. They took us to their barracks and sat us down on a bench inside while they watched us from another room. Shortly, Keith took something from his wallet and slid it into his boot. Turned out it was a Social Security card which he shouldn’t have possessed since Keith’s visa did not permit him to work in the country while visiting. Within minutes the staties put Keith on a bus back to New York, likely after flagging Immigration, and they released me alone somewhere in Albany to figure my own way out. I hitched on to Cleveland to spend a couple of nights with friends and reconnected with Rich Hollows, with whom I had roomed in New York. Rich was up for joining me on the trip to San Francisco, a place being checked out by other mutual friends. I still had a chunk of my $50. Rich was broke but carried a Shell credit card good for gasoline and Sheraton Hotels which he’d been issued while working in the mail room at Shell Corporation when we roomed together. Hitch-hiking we made pretty good time nearly as far as Memphis, Tenn., where we found ourselves in a farmer’s plowed field as night broke across the east bank of the Mississippi.

In the morning we rolled up our sleeping bags and found a diner within walking distance.  Within the diner we sat down at the counter on either side of Walter Brennan. No, not the Caucasian elderly actor who’d won three Academy Awards before becoming one of The Real McCoys, but the African-American trucker, perhaps early 30s, with postcard biceps highlighted by a green sweatshirt with sleeves cut off at the shoulders above a paratrooper’s large tattoo pledging “Death before Dishonor.” He drove a blue White Freightliner hauling an Air Force missile launcher bound for Viet Nam via the Los Angeles docks.

I have no memory of asking Walter for a lift west but I would not have let that opportunity pass. He must have turned us down, probably citing regulations. What I do recall clearly is experiencing one of my very worst days of hitchhiking ever which, by 9 p.m., had brought us only to another plowed field on the other side of both Memphis and the river. Next day our luck revived and we made it all the way to Dallas, where we checked into a Sheraton downtown and ate like kings on Rich. Next morning we started at Dealey Plaza and hiked past the Texas Book Depository staring up at the sixth-floor window where Lee Harvey Oswald had fired down at the president in the open limo. Then we continued to hoof Elm Street a little past downtown where I snapped a photo of Uncle Sam’s Pawn Shop’s sign showing an oversize caricature of the mythical Sam pointing right at us saying: “I want to sell YOU a gun!”  This on the same Elm Street where Kennedy had been shot. After seeing these points of interest, we started to hitchhike out of Dallas. Almost immediately we were busted by city cops who took us into custody and brought us down to the Dallas police station. Incredibly, they brought us into the parking level adjacent to the station and through a door into the hallway where Ruby murdered Oswald. Hell, I couldn’t believe the cops were taking us through the same hallway. I half-expected to see bloodstains on the linoleum floor. I looked but there were none.

The cops seemed like they were just killing time. They asked us each a few questions and then decided to drive us out of their jurisdiction to the Fort Worth city line. That was fine by me. I had welcomed the inside view of the Kennedy-related tour. It was getting on to dusk and I worried about the heavy, fast traffic on the connector where the police dropped us. I carried a big duffel bag that I should have left at home or traded for a knapsack. Dark was coming upon us nearly as fast as the traffic. All of a sudden, I looked up at a semi drifting quickly off the highway onto the shoulder coming right at us with no sign of slowing. I yelled to Hollows and we jumped out of the way. Before it rolled past us, I looked dead into the cab and saw nothing at all but white teeth smiling, like something out of Disney. With much squealing the rig burned to a stop. We ran abreast of it and recognized Walter Brennan behind the wheel still wearing his sleeveless green sweatshirt. 

Walter greeted us heartily and waved us into the capacious cab, including its sleeper. Restrictive regulations appeared to have evaporated and, as it turns out, continued to do so. By the time we cleared Texas into New Mexico Walter told us he would stop at a rest area to replace the mandated Interstate Commerce Commission authority signs taped to his cab’s doors, to gas up, and to call the Air Force to send out a Military Police escort to be certain he made it to L.A. in time. Or maybe he didn’t have the proper authority posters and figured a military escort would help to blow him right by state police who usually checked such things. I don’t know.

I remember that Rich floated the full tanks of diesel on his Shell card charging Walter only half-price for cash in return. Walter made his call and fiddled with his signs and then gave us a choice: since the coming military escort would not allow Hollows and me to ride illegally in the cab either we could leave at the truck stop or conceal ourselves under the tarps covering the missile launcher on the steel flatbed to ride the last 800 miles or so to L.A. There were no sides of any kind to the flatbed and no padding. Foolishly, we accepted Walter’s invitation to continue.

The MP escort arrived in the form of two cruisers with flashing lights after Hollows and I had crept beneath the tarps and looked for something to hold onto. We each found a rope long enough to grip while seated on the flatbed but not enough to tie around ourselves. The cruisers apparently took up positions fronting and backing Walter’s vehicle. Their supposed purpose for being there was to add speed to the delivery. They did so. Walter drove out of that rest stop like there was no tomorrow and he never slowed down. Hollows and I started screaming and we never stopped. No one heard us. Or no one cared. We slammed up and down, bouncing on the flatbed or, with every shift in direction, bounced off the insides of the steel frame of the missile launcher. We screamed and cried and clung to our ropes every second of every hour in a titanic whirl of fear and bruising as the Freightliner hurtled in darkness through the freezing desert night. We were thoroughly battered long before we saw L.A. It was a ride I would relive periodically in nightmares or fever throughout my life.

We arrived late that night and checked into a Sheraton on Wiltshire Boulevard  with
Walter, who remained dubious of our ability to glide through luxury on a gasoline credit card. I think it took a couple of hours before either Rich Hollows or I could stop shaking even with full tilt room service steaks and a bottle of Chivas Regal scotch which we promptly killed. The next morning, I could tell Walter was still nervous about departing with his wallet intact. We got on an elevator containing a bellhop. Walter couldn’t help himself. He actually asked the bellhop if there was some way we could leave the hotel through the basement or at least without passing reception! The bellhop said nothing but leaned forward to press “lobby,” thus ensuring that the door would open in front of the reception desk. Happily, the Shell card went down like ice cream.

Rich and I stood outside waving goodbye as Walter turned his rig onto Wiltshire Blvd. in the wrong direction to find the docks, then made an illegal U-turn pulling his horn full blast in farewell, with that big smile on his face, still wearing the sleeveless green sweatshirt.

Gerald FitzGerald is an essayist based on the Massachusetts South Coast. He has also been a newspaper editor and reporter, prosecutor and defense lawyer.