Books by Bryan Woolley
Fiction
November 22
Sam Bass
Time and Place
Some Sweet Day
Nonfiction
The Wonderful Room
Texas Road Trip
Where I Come From
Mythic Texas
Generations
The Bride Wore Crimson
The Edge of the West
The Time of My Life
Where Texas Meets the Sea
We Be Here When the Morning Comes
For Children
Home Is Where the Cat Is
Mr. Green’s Magnificent Machine
© 2013 Bryan Woolley
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
November 22
Brown Books Publishing Group
16250 Knoll Trail Drive, Suite 205
Dallas, Texas 75248
(972) 381-0009
A New Era in Publishing™
eISBN 978-1-61254-144-0
Library of Congress Control Number 2013941023
Printed in the United States
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For more information or to contact the author, please go to www.November22Novel.com
For Isabel
Author’s Note
ALTHOUGH THE TRAGEDY at the core of November 22 actually occurred, this story is fiction, and most of its characters are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance between them and any real persons, living or dead, is coincidental. However, a few of the secondary characters are persons who lived in Dallas on that fateful day. They are Stanley Marcus, Barefoot Sanders, Jesse Curry, Will Fritz, and M. N. McDonald. I owe it to them and to the reader to emphasize that although they are real, the scenes in which they appear and the words they speak in November 22 are fictitious.
On the other hand, the events taking place within the presidential party—related here in the italicized passages between the chapters—are history, and I have tried to be accurate in my description of them.
The author of a story of this nature necessarily owes debts to those who have written before him, I wish to acknowledge my larger ones. They are to the reporters of the Dallas Times Herald, whose coverage of the assassination of John Kennedy and its aftermath is preserved in the newspaper’s files; the report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy; Warren Leslie’s Dallas Public and Private; and William Manchester’s definitive history, The Death of a President, which is the source of most of the italicized passages here. The editorial attributed to Byron Hayes in “The Twenty-first Hour” actually was written by A. C. Greene and appeared in the Dallas Times Herald on November 23, 1963.
I also wish to thank several friends who helped me in various ways with my task. They are Charles J. Sopkin, Gloria Safier, A. C. Greene, the late Preston Jones, Elaine Walden, and my wife, Isabel Nathaniel.
In addition to those who helped me deliver the first edition of November 22 in 1981, I offer this additional note of gratitude to those who have helped bring this new edition into being. They are Bob Mong, Lisa Kresl, Tom Huang, and Michael Merschel at the Dallas Morning News, where I spent many of the happiest and most productive years of my journalism career, and Milli Brown, Cindy Birne, and the other amazing, creative people at Brown Books who gave my book its new life.
The Trents lived in a house on Pleasant Avenue that was the finest street in Dallas that was the biggest and fastest growing town in Texas that was the biggest state in the Union and had the blackest soil the whitest people and America was the greatest country in the world and Daughter was Dad’s onlyest sweetest little girl.
John Dos Passos, USA
November 22
When Air Force One dropped below the clouds, its landing gear was whining and clunking into place. It wasn’t until then that the lights of the two cities became visible. Off the tip of the starboard wing, the skyline of Dallas protruded from the dark prairie. Thirty miles to the west, at the other end of a line of smaller towns, the fewer towers of Fort Worth shone through the rain. It was toward these that the big plane banked and descended onto Carswell Air Force Base, an outpost of the Strategic Air Command on the outskirts of the city.
The First Hour
JAKE
BYRON HAYES UNFOLDED THE PAPER and handed it across the table. Jake had seen the pictures in Time, but not arranged as they were now in the full-face and profile of a post office poster, nor with WANTED FOR TREASON in heavy black across the top. He refolded the leaflet and handed it back.
“You didn’t read it,” Hayes said.
“Does it say something new?”
“No. A guy in front of the Baker Hotel handed it to me at lunchtime. Real class, huh? On the day before he’s coming?”
“Probably one of Colonel Byrd’s men.” Jake reached for the brown bag containing their bottle and pored bourbon over what remained of his ice. There was too little left to cool the liquor, but he was beyond the need of ice anyway.
“Maybe,” Hayes said. “Or one of Bruce Alger’s men, or Barry Goldwater’s men, or a Bircher. Maybe he belonged to them all. What does it matter?” He set his glass as precisely as he could on the wet ring it had made on the table and waved the bottle toward him. Jake poured him another. Donnie, the bartender, saw it.
“Hey! It’s closing time!” he said. “You want the cops on me?”
“Fuck you,” Jake said. He corked the bottle and twisted the brown bag around its neck. “Sick,” he said. “Fucking sick town. Why do we stay here, Byron? Why don’t we go someplace healthy? Some part of the United States?”
Hayes lifted his horn-rimmed specs to his forehead, a sign he was drunk. His pale eyes were sentimental. “I’ve always been here,” he said. “I was raised in Oak Cliff, went to SMU, went to work for the paper and never left. I’d be scared, going out there at my age. What’s different, anyway?”
Jake shrugged. “Better papers.