Top Down Read Free

agent was Van Walters, the assistant agent in charge of the Dallas office, a man in his early forties, quiet-spoken but pleasant, friendly. Among
Tribune
and other federal beat reporters, Walters was not known to volunteer much information for a story—but he also, when questioned, never seemed to hold back. His regular work, like that of all Secret Service agents working out in the field, mostly involved counterfeiting, government check theft, and similar cases under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department, the Secret Service’s parent agency …”
    I paused and glanced up at Marti Walters. Her eyes were closed, her hands folded in front of her. She had calmed down and was listening intently.
    “Thanks for what you said about him,” she said to me without even opening her eyes.
    “I didn’t just make it up for … you know, for you to hear now, if that’s what you might be thinking.”
    Her eyes popped open. “No, I was not thinking that. I assumed you, as a newspaperman, told only the truth.”
    “Where are you at college?” I asked, realizing suddenly that we had gone so quickly into what mattered, this question about her father’s guilt and health, that there had been no exchange of biographical small talk.
    “Penn—the University of Pennsylvania,” Marti responded.
    “Your major?”
    “English.”
    “A special interest?”
    “American literature.”
    “What kind?”
    “The good kind—mostly the kind written by women.” This, she said with some shortness.
    What a great 1968 answer, I thought. A woman—a kid—of the times.
    She motioned her head toward the papers in my hand.
On with it, please. Enough small talk
was the clear message.
    I continued reading.
    “Walters glanced up at the bluing sunny sky and then hollered over at another agent who was holding a two-way radio in his hand. ‘What about the weather downtown?’ he yelled.
    “The agent talked into his radio, listened for a few seconds. ‘Clear!’ he hollered back.
    “Van Walters yelled to the five or six other agents who were at get-ready positions in and around the cars: ‘Lose the bubble top!’
    “I watched as the agents began the process of unsnapping the several pieces of plastic from the car.
    “I returned to the phone, reported to rewrite, and went on with my business covering the Kennedys’ arrival and then, over the next many hours, various aspects of the tragedy that had occurred. I was sent first from Love Field to Parkland Hospital, where I was when Kennedy’s death was formally announced by a White House press spokesman.
    “Next, I went downtown to police headquarters where I became part of the chaos along with hundreds of other reporters from all over the country and the world and law enforcementofficers at all levels of government. There was a mix of sadness and disbelief that was beyond anything I had ever witnessed—or even imagined. I felt like I was an actor in a slow-motion horror movie about chaos and grief …”
    I stopped again and said, “Sorry about the purple prose.”
    Marti waved me on, which I took as an English teacher’s absolution.
    “Around midnight—nearly twelve hours after the shots were fired at Dealey Plaza—I went to await the breakup of a closed-door meeting in the chief of police’s office at the end of a hall on the second floor.
    “After a while the door opened and out walked several men in suits. I recognized one as Secret Service Agent Van Walters.
    “He came over to me. Tears in his eyes, he mumbled slowly, deliberately, as if speaking in a trance: ‘If I just hadn’t taken off the bubble top.’
    “The words blew me backward. And for the first time, I wondered: What if
I
hadn’t asked Walters the bubble top question in the first place? What if I had ignored the rewrite man’s request? What if the rewrite man never asked the question?
    “And so, I, too, became one of the many people connected to the Kennedy Texas trip who were plagued by varying levels of