shot at—look at the president, lifting his arms. They were in the line of fire—a third shot—and the fiendish bar mitzvah gift: a view from thirty feet of JFK’s brain exploding onto Elm Street in a decorative shower of blood. “Get down! Get down!” But some people had to escape the motorcycle coming right at them, heading up the hill toward the picket fence. Unable to get safely through the embankment crowd, the officer dropped his Harley right at Arnold’s feet and scrambled the rest of the way, pistol drawn. A second trooper dropped his bike onto the sidewalk below and ran to catch up with his partner at the fence, while the presidential car sped ahead through the underpass with the president now invisible except for his right foot and Jackie on the trunk, with a Secret Serviceman sprawled on top of her in some confounding fusion of sex, loyalty, love, and death. For the rest of his life, Arnold would remember where he was when Kennedy was shot.
He and three of his friends sprinted up the hill toward the fence. The puffs of smoke were just beginning to dissipate into the tree branches. “Get back!” the first policeman roared, stopping the boys in their tracks. The two cops jumped the fence abutments on either side. After several seconds, Arnold signaled his crew of three over and around the wall to the packed parking lot. Footprints in the mud at the fence. Mudprints on adjacent car bumpers. It looked like two or three different snipers. Then the lot filled up with police. The four boys were taken into custody and locked in a squad car at the edge of the parking area. An hour later, two cops appeared with Mr. Thomasen, who identified the boys as being students from his group and assured the officers that they had been spectators only and had bravely jumped the fence to try to identify the assassins. The police took statements from the boys about hearing the shots, running toward the smoke, and finding the mudprints. They were never called to testify before the Warren Commission, which concluded that all fire had come from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, high up and far to the left.
The class trip from hell—at least from Mr. Thomasen’s point of view. But oddly enough, for many of the students, an experience that helped shape and deepen their lives—a pedagogy of great price. On the short ride home, Arnold was anointed to speak at the school assembly to be held on Monday. During the short bus ride home, sixteen eighth grade students heard that the president was dead.
Arnold and his parents spent the weekend glued to the TV, sucking in every minute of this hingepoint of history. They saw the new president—a Texan—being sworn in on Air Force One. They saw the great bronze casket being offloaded at Bethesda. They saw interviews with the Dallas police chief, who declared himself convinced that Oswald was the lone assassin. They saw Jack Ruby step from the crowd in the police station and murder Lee Harvey Oswald before he could go to trial. They saw the flag-draped casket being drawn down Pennsylvania Avenue by a black horse. They saw Jackie in mourning at the other Arlington.
On Monday at nine, Mansfield High School convened in the auditorium. It was unusual for an eighth grader to be the featured speaker, but Arnold had been there, and he captivated the high schoolers, faculty, and staff alike with his eloquent, detailed report and eyewitness criticism of the early speculation concerning the crime. He was confident that the investigators would sort things out, would take his deposition and that of others into account and correct the prevailing lone-assassin assumptions. About Oswald and the Book Depository he didn’t know. But about the shots from just over his shoulder he did.
As the weeks wore on and the drumbeat for the “lone, crazed Communist assassin” story strengthened, Arnold’s new manhood was tempered and annealed. The violent death of a father figure is a mere dip into the fire of darkest maturity. But the settling-in of context, the slowly seeping marination in the world-to-be-inhabited, the swelling of some parts and astringent contraction of others—that is the more profound and lasting formative process. Arnold grew quickly in those early months of 1964—physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually—and his annus mirabilis received its ultimate nudge in September, with the release of the Warren Commission Report. As the acknowledged Mansfield High scholar and expert on the assassination, he had already given two short talks to packed school assemblies.
In the first, at the end of January, he wondered about the surprise change of route, which had brought the presidential procession closer to both the picket fence and the Book Depository, and the altered order of vehicles, which had removed the photographers’ car from its usual place immediately in front of the president (the better to photograph him) to twelve cars behind him, thus depriving investigators of potentially crucial evidence. Did someone in charge of these arrangements know something? The high schoolers were quick to pick up the plot; the faculty resisted its implications. He ended with a minilecture on Newton’s Second Law of Motion, to wit, “when an external force acts on a body, the acceleration of that body is in the direction of the force.” In other words, that the president’s head snapped backward and to his left as his skull flew apart indicated that the bullet must have come from the front, right—exactly where he had heard shots—and not from the rear, as most of the press had been insisting. “This will all come out,” he assured his audience.
At his second talk in May, he enumerated the list of strange deaths of potential witnesses he had been collecting from local papers and journals subscribed to by the Rawsons. Already, in addition to Oswald, eighteen material witnesses had died—six by gunfire, three in motor vehicle accidents, two by suicide, one from a slit throat, one from a karate chop to the neck, three from heart attacks, and two from “natural causes.” An actuary hired by the London Sunday Times had calculated that the odds against such a fatal procession were in the order of 100,000 trillion to one. Something to think about. Again the faculty protested, and Arnold was called into Principal Pigg’s office for a little talk.
Just before his ninth grade Christmas vacation and fourteenth birthday, Arnold was invited as (pointedly) one of a panel of speakers to discuss the Warren Commission Report, which had been released two months earlier. In spite of the fact that the other panelists were the chair of the social studies department, a distinguished town lawyer, a reporter from the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, and the editor of the Mansfield News Mirror, Arnold stole the show as easily and naturally as he did the chess tournaments he had once again begun to play. In the ten minutes he was allotted, he demonstrated how the commission had continually failed to meet commonly accepted investigatory standards, how it had ignored many witnesses who might contradict the lone-assassin theory, and how it had suppressed evidence and testimony reported in public media. He detailed the substantial differences between the Dallas coroner’s report of the body delivered to Parkfield just after the murder and the autopsy report from Bethesda, differences that suggested major forensic medical fraud. And finally, if briefly, he reported the strange associations between Oswald and government intelligence operatives—despite the fact that Oswald supposedly was a Communist enthusiast of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. No other speaker had such command of the material or provided such provocative analysis. His two-minute summary alleged that the assigned function of the Warren Commission had been to close the case, no matter the truth, and “put it behind us.” The alternatives were too threatening.
Arnold’s conception of chess during this period was clearly connected to his emerging sense of national plot. As if to cement its contemporary ramifications, and perhaps indicate to others the relationships with which he was playing, he chose to dress his queen in a tiny pink pillbox hat adapted from the top from a small bottle of vanilla extract and painted with his mother’s nail polish, a close enough, even eerie, match. So powerful a gesture was this that he was prohibited from tournament play unless he would use only standard pieces. That this little costume did not materially affect either the game or his own play seemed immaterial to club officials.
As Whitehead so astutely observed, “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”
Nine
Tomorrow the day of the stone will break.
Edmond Jabès, Book of Yukel
High school! Emancipation (some)! Adulthood (almost)! By now Arnold Hitler was more than six feet tall and sang low tenor in the school chorus. In two years