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what-if guilt. A guilt that would stay with us forever. Van Walters and I shared the burden with political and White House staffers, Secret Service agents and other law enforcement officers, and all kinds of other people involved in Dallas and elsewhere.
    “
What if I hadn’t pushed for a motorcade or for going to Texas or Dallas at all? What if I had argued harder to have the lunch at Fair Park instead of the Trade Mart? What if I’d seen a rifle sticking out the sixth-floor window? What if I had reacted faster when the first shot was fired?
    “These were the questions being asked aloud and silently in the minds and hearts of people everywhere.
    “What if, what if?”
    I began folding up the papers and said, “I went on—to a few laughs in the audience—to tell the story of how I ran out of gas in the middle of the next two nights while going home from the Dallas police station … but that’s pretty much it.”
    Marti was looking right at me, but her thoughts went through me to somewhere and someone else.
    “So he really did do it,” she said finally. “Dad really did make the decision to take off the bubble top.”
    “But it wasn’t a real decision,” I said quickly. “The rain stopped and that was it. The weather made that top come off.”
    Marti, as if a plug had been pulled, sank back limp in her chair. She said nothing for several seconds, digesting, it seemed to me, what I had said and if there was any truth to it.
    Her rigid tension abated right before my eyes. She seemed defeated. “I had hoped that your story was such that … well, that you knew for a fact that somebody else in the Secret Service, somebody on the White House detail or somebody in Washington, somebody anywhere … had made that decision. Not Dad, not Dad all by himself. So many agents and other people have made all kinds of conflicting statements aboutwho did what that day. I have read them all. They’re very confusing, and today … Well, I wanted you to tell me something that I could take back to him that would make it absolutely clear to him what happened and make his guilt go away forever. I understand from my mother that all kinds of people, doctors and shrinks, have tried and tried with no success. But I was hoping, hoping, hoping …”
    I very much wanted to take another break for a much-needed smoke. I wanted time to think about what I might be able to give her to take to her dad. But the cigarette could wait.
I
could wait. I decided to open up the conversation and see where it might lead. Perhaps I was stalling, but suddenly it seemed very important—essential, in fact—that I ask her that same universal question.
    “Where were you, Marti? Where were you that day?”
    At first she frowned, and for a moment I thought she would not answer me. But I was wrong. She very much wanted to talk. And she talked—and talked and talked for hours there in and around the Washington train station and then later in Philadelphia and elsewhere over the next couple of weeks about that day and the days afterward that had led to where she and her father were now.

Marti remembered every detail of her November 22. Her memories were remarkably vivid and precise.
    I had begun immediately taking notes in the reporter’s notebook I had brought that day to our meeting. Marti did nothing to stop me from doing so, a fact that signaled that off-the-record might, in fact, be only a short-term restriction. I was delighted.
    She began her story with football. It had been noon, and dissecting the Dallas Cowboys was what Marti and some of her boy classmates always did over lunch at the George Bannerman Dealey High School in East Dallas.
    “Dandy is never going to make it—never,” Marti had declared.
    “Eddie, Eddie,
he’s
the one!” a boy had agreed.
    Dandy was Don Meredith, the recently anointed co–starting Cowboys quarterback. Until a few weeks earlier Eddie LeBaron had been the starter but now he was sometimes alternating with