If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: AnAlternate History Read Online Free PDF Page B

could hold 4,000 people—twice the capacity of the Trade Mart—it could easily accommodate the Kennedy supporters from the liberal-labor-minority wing of the Texas Democratic Party. That was precisely what Governor Connally and his allies in the State Democratic Party did not want. On November 18, Kennedy’s top political aide, Kenny O’Donnell, called advance man Jerry Bruno and told him, “We’re going to let Dallas go. We’re going to let Connally have the Trade Mart site.”
    So the Trade Mart was selected as the luncheon site; invitations went out on behalf of the Dallas Citizens Council, the very embodiment of the conservative white establishment.
    And there was one more consequence of that site selection. Had the Women’s Building been chosen, the route from Love Field to the site would have taken the motorcade east through downtown Dallas—on a more southerly route hundreds of feet farther away from the Texas School Book Depository on the corner of Houston and Elm Streets. And because the President always sat in theright rear of the presidential limousine, anyone looking at the motorcade—say, from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository—would have found Mrs. Kennedy between him and the President.
    •   •   •
    Just after 11:00 a.m. central standard time, a twenty-nine-year-old reporter for the
Dallas Times Herald
walked to a fence at Dallas’ Love Field and picked up a telephone linked by an open line to the paper’s downtown office. Normally, Jim Lehrer covered the “federal beat”—the FBI, IRS, courts, that sort of thing—but with the President coming to Dallas, and with the tight deadlines of an afternoon paper, all hands were deployed for the visit. Lehrer was to follow the motorcade through downtown to the Trade Mart, cover Kennedy’s speech, and follow the motorcade back to Love Field, where Air Force One would depart for Austin and the big fund-raising dinner.
    On the other end of the phone was Stan Weinberg, the rewrite man who would turn Lehrer’s observations and notes into the finished story.
    “Look,” Weinberg said, “I’m going to be writing this story under a lot of pressure later. Do they have the bubble top on the President’s car?” The rain that had been falling all morning in the Dallas‒Fort Worth area was on the minds of more than just the President.
    “Well, I don’t know,” Lehrer replied. “I can’t see his car. Let me go look and see.”
    He walked down the ramp where the President’s limo, a highly modified deep-blue 1961 Lincoln Continental SS-100-X, was parked, and where Forrest Sorrels, the Secret Service agent in charge of the Dallas bureau, was standing. The bubble top was still on the car.
    Lehrer and Sorrels were familiar to each other, so the reporterapproached the agent, saying: “Rewrite wants to know if the bubble top’s going to be on or not.”
    “Don’t know,” said Sorrels, and called out to a subordinate. “Why don’t you check downtown, see if it’s still raining.”
    It was a matter of the purest chance. On another day, a small, insignificant shift in pressure of wind would have moved the bad weather out, and sunshine would have broken out over Dallas. “Take off the bubble top,” Sorrels would have told his men, and the President and Mrs. Kennedy and Governor and Mrs. Connally would have been driving through downtown Dallas at high noon in an open car, waving to the cheering crowds that lined the streets, crowds pressing in, slowing the motorcade down, the open convertible giving everyone in the crowd—anyone looking out a building window—a clear, unobstructed view.
    But on this day the weather did
not
change. On
this
day the answer that came from downtown was: “Still raining here, and no sign of clearing. Better leave it on.”
    “All right,” said the chief. “It stays on.”
    And Jim Lehrer walked back up the ramp, went over to the fence, picked up the open line, and told Stan Weinberg what he’d