Prelude to Tragedy: Nov. 22 Began as a Good Day in Fort Worth

For the occasion of breakfast at the Hotel Texas on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, officials of the host Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce summoned a Catholic priest for the benediction of the event in honor of the country’s first Catholic president.

And, so, Msgr. Vincent J. Wolf of St. Alice Catholic Church — soon to become Holy Family on the city’s West Side — rose and took his place at the makeshift pulpit that on this day included the presidential seal on the front. The good father pulled out a copy of his planned remarks and proceeded. 

“Oh, God of might and wisdom, assist with thy spirit of counsel and fortitude the president of these United States, that his administration will be eminently useful and fruitful to thy people over whom he presides.

“May we, with him, be thine instruments in establishing divine harmony throughout the world so that thy sons and daughters from one end of the earth to the other may be free to join the glorious hymn of worship, ‘Glory to the Highest, Oh, God, and Peace on Earth.’”

As it turned out, prayer was the only hope on this day, one of the worst days in U.S. history. Sixty years ago this month, Fort Worth was a prelude to tragedy. The murder of the president was committed by a sad sack nobody with delusions of grandeur and benefitting from a bizarre twist of fate.

It required providence — and presidential influence — to even stage these four days in November. Gov. John Connally, who was tasked with planning it, didn’t want it at all. First, he stalled as long as he could. Then he argued against it. 

The governor lost out because President John F. Kennedy wanted the trip. He needed to negotiate a peace — or at least a degree of harmony — within the state’s Democratic Party. Feuding conservatives and liberals, represented by Connally and U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough, hampered Kennedy’s election efforts in 1964. 

Plus, the president wanted to fundraise in the state. The president initially wanted four, possibly even five, fundraisers. Dinners in Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, and Fort Worth would do the trick, the president thought. Connally was aghast at the thought of the appearance that would leave Democrats: The president merely coming here to pass around the hat. 

To win again in 1964 required the same Boston-Austin axis of four years earlier. “If we don’t raise funds in any other state, I want to do so in Massachusetts and in Texas,” the president said. “If we don’t carry any other state next year, I want to carry Texas and Massachusetts.” 

Connally successfully argued against it. The only place the president would ask for checks would be Austin in a trip that would include stops in San Antonio and Houston on Thursday, Nov. 21, and Fort Worth and Dallas on Nov. 22. 

Two years ago, I introduced myself in Paris by saying that I was the man who had accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I am getting somewhat that same sensation as I travel around Texas. Nobody wonders what Lyndon and I wear. — John F. Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963

Austin was scheduled for Nov. 23, where guests would be treated to Fort Worth barbecue empresario Walter Jetton’s fare. A visit to Lyndon Johnson’s ranch would conclude the trip. Fort Worth almost didn’t happen. 

Connally wanted to do something distinguished for the president in his hometown. Connally lived here while working for Sid Richardson. The governor wanted TCU to confer an honorary degree on the president. According to The Lone Star, a Connally biography authored by James Reston, TCU President Ellis Sadler “liked” the idea.

The Kennedy people loved the idea. The honor, they believed, bestowed by a “bedrock Protestant university,” would further bury the South’s concerns over a Catholic president. 

As a matter of scheduling, the event fit snugly. The degree ceremony would be in midmorning. Afterward, the presidential caravan would travel by car the 30 miles to Dallas for the president’s speech at the Trade Mart. 

Under this plan, there was likely no time for a motorcade through downtown Dallas. Or, if there was, the motorcade would follow a fairly direct course. 

A seeming done deal at one point, it ultimately never made the itinerary.  

TCU had decided against the degree. The university’s reasoning was a matter of protocol and tradition. The normal process for conferring a degree included deliberations and approval by the faculty senate and the student senate. There simply was not enough time for such a process — a process that made no exceptions, even for a sitting president. 

There also was now no reason to come to Fort Worth. 

Connally had another plan. The Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce would like to give the president a breakfast. 

The presidential traveling party would fly to Carswell Air Force Base around midnight of the new day, Friday, and spend the night at the Hotel Texas.

“We drove into Fort Worth [from Carswell] and got to the hotel a little after midnight sometime,” says Clint Hill, Secret Service agent assigned to Jacqueline Kennedy, best known to history as the agent who climbed aboard the presidential car on Elm Street. We spoke by Zoom. “There was a big crowd outside the hotel waiting to see President and Mrs. Kennedy. They were crazy to see and hear the president of the United States.

“The people in Fort Worth were extremely friendly. They did everything they could to make this visit of President and Mrs. Kennedy jubilant. They went all out to really show them that they cared and that they enjoyed their time in Fort Worth.”

In addition to the president, on the VIP dais at breakfast that morning included Connally, Lyndon Johnson, Yarborough, U.S. Rep. Jim Wright of Fort Worth, Texas Speaker of the House Byron Tunnell, and state Attorney General Waggoner Carr. Wright was already doing what he did best, securing defense contracts for Fort Worth-based General Dynamics. The city was still basking in the afterglow of GD securing a contract for a tactical strike fighter. 

“And in the not-too-distant future, a new Fort Worth product … the TFX Tactical Fighter Experimental will serve the forces of freedom and will be the No. 1 airplane in the world today,” Kennedy attested during his remarks at the breakfast.

It was a beautiful morning, even with gray skies and a persistent drizzle. Roughly 2,200 attended the event. The only awkward moment was the gift of a Western hat from Peters Bros. The president clearly did not want to wear it.  

All in all, Fort Worth had pulled off a very nice presidential visit. That is perhaps the greatest irony of all on Nov. 22: It started off so well. 

As one man remembered, “It was such a good morning.”

*  *  *  *  * * 

The one person not in attendance, at least initially, was first lady Jackie Kennedy. She was the best political asset on the trip, the one who transcended all the politics. JFK knew it and so did Connally, who specifically asked that she make the trip. 

However, she had no plans to attend the breakfast that morning. 

“[Those in attendance] all assumed that she was going to come to this breakfast, but the indication on her schedule, which I still have a copy of, in red pencil was ‘do not plan to attend.’ The reason was she assumed this was a total political thing,” says Hill, who, with his wife, Lisa McCubbin Hill, this fall is rereleasing their best-seller Five Days in November. “And she really wasn’t into politics.

“I was up there [with her] on the eighth floor. The president realizes people are wanting to see her. So, he summons the agent who was the advance agent for that trip, Bill Duncan was his name. He called him over and said, ‘Bill, call Clint to bring Mrs. Kennedy down here right now.’

“I answered [Duncan’s call]. I said, ‘Gee, Bill, Mrs. Kennedy wasn’t expected to be at the breakfast.’ He said, ‘Clint, you didn’t get the message. The president wants Mrs. Kennedy down here. Now!’”

In the ballroom, Hill and the first lady very likely passed Fort Worth Police Lt. Stanley Pruitt, who also spent the night — awake — on the eighth floor. Stanley Pruitt was a U.S. Marine in WWII. His war service included the Guadalcanal campaign of 1942-43.

This city has been a great Western city, the defense of the West, cattle, oil, and all the rest. It has believed in strength in this city and strength in this state and strength in this country. What we’re trying to do in this country and what we’re trying to do around the world, I believe, is quite simple and that is to build a military structure which will defend the vital interests of the United States, and in that great cause, Fort Worth will play its proper part. — John F. Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963

Pruitt, then 39 in 1963, called his role the morning of the breakfast the most memorable in his career, which spanned 27 years. By then a 10-year veteran and a lieutenant who had gained the trust of Chief Cato Hightower, Pruitt was put in charge of the department detail at the hotel that morning. 

“Chief Hightower called him in and said, ‘Hey, Stan, I want you to take care of the presidential detail,’” his son Mike Pruitt recalls. “And Dad said, ‘Are you mad at me or what?’”

Stanley Pruitt, then head of the department’s burglary and canine teams, both of which he formed, selected 30 men for the job. In preparing, Pruitt took a floor plan of the hotel and scribbled the names of each of the officers and where they were to be. Mike Pruitt found the document after his father’s death in 1998. Mike Pruitt provided a copy to Fort Worth Magazine. 

Pruitt was attended to the detail all night until the presidential party left for Dallas. Pruitt stayed on the president’s eighth floor the entire night. The next morning, he walked with Kennedy outside for the president’s impromptu address to an adoring crowd waiting to see him. Later, there is a photograph showing Pruitt with the first couple as they are exiting the Hotel Texas. 

Mike Pruitt, himself a retired Fort Worth police officer, who joined the department in 1972, knew many of these guys. They included Tom Hollis, Harvey McMahan, both lieutenants, and Sgt. Dick Yaws.

Yaws, Stanley Pruitt said years later in an interview with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was the officer who directed Secret Service agents going to The Cellar. For years, speculation centered on the agents’ not being their sharpest on Nov. 22 because of a late night at The Cellar, a somewhat colorful, eccentric night spot in downtown. 

Lots of stories swirl about concerning The Cellar, known to some as a “beatnik pad.” Jack Ruby was said to have recruited waitresses there to work at his Carousel Club in Dallas. One of those was Karen Bennett, the employee Ruby wired money to just minutes before he stepped into the basement of Dallas police headquarters to kill Oswald. “Little Lynn,” as she was called, lived in east Fort Worth at the time.

At any rate, that the agents went over there in the earliest morning hours of Nov. 22 and allegedly stayed has become legend. And not only is it said they got into their cups, but they were indulging in The Cellar’s special: Everclear grain alcohol. 

Hill, the Secret Service agent, disputes that agents were out carousing the night before. Rather, they went out looking for food. They hadn’t eaten since lunch. It was now after 11 p.m. A member of the media recommended the Press Club. 

When they got there, however, there was no food. Hill says he had a scotch and soda and bought a couple of packs of cigarettes before planning to head back to the hotel. Someone else, though, suggested the possibility of food at The Cellar, at 10th and Main Street. 

“We went down there, and it turns out they didn’t have any food, either,” Hill says. “We were not out partying the night before. We were in search of something to eat. We couldn’t find it. I went to bed. There was only one guy who stayed up later.”

The Warren Commission report concluded that the agents had not been drinking but acknowledged they had committed a “breach of discipline.” Stanley Pruitt, though, stood guard on the eighth floor not far from the first couple’s room No. 850. 

Following the breakfast, JFK and the first lady were to be escorted to waiting vehicles to drive the party through downtown to Carswell for the short plane trip to Dallas. Kennedy’s vehicle was a 1963 white Lincoln. (A story persisted for years that the car belonged to Ben Hogan. It did not, at least at the time of JFK’s use of it.) 

Stanley Pruitt recounted in the Star-Telegram: “On the morning the picture was taken, we were informed that when President Kennedy came out of the hotel, it would only take a few seconds for him to depart. Instead, he came out of the hotel, looked at the crowd across Eighth Street and suddenly walked across the street to the roped-off area. 

“Of course, the people in the crowd began to push forward, all wanting to shake hands and greet President Kennedy. Needless to say, we had our hands full.”

According to Mike Pruitt, the president also stepped on Pruitt’s foot as he was reaching across the rope to shake hands, a sin for which the president apologized profusely. There was no need to apologize, Pruitt replied, “Let’s just get you out of here.”

Stanley Pruitt continued: “Right before President Kennedy’s car left from in front of the Hotel Texas, he said to Assistant Chief of Police Roland Howerton, ‘You look like Harry Truman.’ I always thought so, too.”

*  *  *  *  * * 

Despite earnest pleas to attend the breakfast with his father, Roy Charles Brooks was not allowed. He was told he would do as ninth graders at Morningside Junior High were expected to do on a typical Friday in November: Go to school. 

“He said no,” says Brooks, a Tarrant County Commissioner representing Precinct 1. “He said, ‘These tickets are for people who have led the struggle for freedom. We’re not going to use them for our family or our children.’”

In Tarrant County in 1963, the African American population in Tarrant County was about 70,000. Fort Worth was still mostly segregated. For the breakfast, officials with the chamber had made two tickets available for Black residents, inviting Dr. and Mrs. Marion J. Brooks, the parents of Roy Brooks.

Dr. Brooks, a Fort Worth Civil Rights icon, had no intention of taking the two tickets to attend. Roy Brooks recalls: “He said, ‘We will take 50 tickets, or I will not be there.’ They said to him, ‘Well, Dr. Brooks, you don’t understand; this breakfast has been sold out for weeks. He said, ‘I understand perfectly. We will take 50 tickets, or we won’t be there.’ 

“They found 50 tickets. Fifty African American Fort Worth leaders attended that morning.”

The White House was also curious. Officials there quizzed organizers here about how many Black residents would be in attendance. When told none, the White House said “tersely” that there would be no breakfast in Fort Worth without Black representation. 

I am glad to be here in Jim Wright's city. … He speaks for Fort Worth and he speaks for the country, and I don't know any city that is better represented in the Congress of the United States than Fort Worth. — John F. Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963

Only two months earlier, in August 1963, Dr. Brooks had led a march in Austin in harmony with the history-making events that same day in Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in front of more than 200,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial.

Roughly one-third of the 5,000 who showed in the parking lot to see the president’s speech were made up of Black residents, according to reports from that day. The band from Dunbar High School, then an all-Black school, played music while waiting for the president. The Dunbar students earned their right to play by winning a coin flip with I.M. Terrell. 

The president’s assassination just a few hours later was devastating to American Blacks. He was a hero to them. 

“We had great hopes for John Kennedy. He was a different kind of man from previous presidents of the United States,” says Roy Charles Brooks. “He was young; he was well-educated. He was Catholic, which in many ways made him as unacceptable to the power structure as Black folk were. We all felt a kind of kinship with John Kennedy, and we rooted for him. It was a tragedy in the Black community especially that he was assassinated, that his life and his dreams of Camelot were cut short. Camelot was, in our eyes, and I believe in his, an inclusive place so all could rise to the level of their abilities, unencumbered by the strictures of Jim Crow.”

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was a champion of equality, beginning with the end of Kennedy’s term in 1964. Unbelievably, without concern for his own election hopes in 1964, LBJ pushed through the most sweeping Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction, prohibiting discrimination in public places and in employment. The next year, in 1965, by his sheer will, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. 

What JFK couldn’t get done in Congress, LBJ did. 

“We were skeptical, but Johnson proved himself to be a statesman,” Brooks says. “His message to the people of the United States was that we’re going to do this because it’s the right thing to do.” 

Brooks was at school that day. He and his classmates learned of JFK’s shooting while in class after lunch, he remembers. 

“We wanted to do something,” he recalls. “So, we went to the principal. I was vice president of the student council, and the president and I went to the principal and said, ‘May we lower the flag to half-staff?’”

The principal, Troy Sparks, told the boys that they could not, not without a declaration from either the president or the governor. “So, we sucked it up and went back to class, and when we got home that evening, all of our family gathered around the television and sat in rapt attention for the next several days.”

*  *  *  *  * * 

John Sparks played the trumpet in the 80-piece Eastern Hills High School band. Eastern Hills was the newest high school in town, opening its doors in 1959. The school’s principal was a gentleman named Roy Johnson.

Sparks, then a junior, says that Johnson got on the PA system during sixth period to instruct the band to meet in the band hall immediately. It was a strange request considering that football season had just passed. And, anyway, the band knew its music backward and forward.

“We all sit down with our instruments and they’re passing out music to us and our band director, Ronnie Martin, tells us that tomorrow morning we are to meet at the school at 6:30 a.m. We’re going to play at the breakfast for President Kennedy.”

Martin, who passed away at 82 in 2018, said later that he wished he’d had a camera. “Eighty mouths just dropped.”

Martin was a Paschal High School guy, where he graduated in 1954 before moving on to TCU for college. Over the course of a career in music, he was said to be a prolific writer and arranger. At the time of his death in 2018 at age 82, he had written more than 1,000 arrangements for the Ronnie Martin Orchestra, as well as others for Ted Weems, Les Elgart, and the Miss Texas Pageant. 

During his years at TCU and after, Martin was also politically active in the local Democratic Party. So much so that he had involvement as a “gofer” to help plan the Fort Worth portion of the JFK visit to Texas. In that role as gofer, he had met a Secret Service agent, Bill Duncan, during an advance trip here to scope out things. 

Martin, it was said, knew how to make friends, and he had made many connections through music. But it was that connection with the Secret Service that, he said, helped him land the biggest show this version of Eastern Hills’ band ever played. 

On the Wednesday before Kennedy’s arrival late Thursday night, Martin made a visit to TCU to see his former band director, Jim Jacobson, who just happened to jump on a phone call when Martin arrived. The TCU band was slated to play at the breakfast. 

Three years ago last September, I came here, with the Vice President, and spoke at Burk Burnett Park, and I called, in that speech, for a national security policy and a national security system which was second to none. … That city responded to that call as it has through its history. And we have been putting that pledge into practice ever since. — John F. Kennedy, Nov. 22, 1963

Eavesdropping slightly, he could tell that it was someone — a higher-up — at TCU. 

“I could tell [Jacobson] was upset,” Martin said in an interview with the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. As best as Martin could tell from his side of the phone call, some officials at TCU didn’t want the band to be associated with the JFK event in Fort Worth because “it was too political.”

If the story is true, it wasn’t the first fuss involving TCU and the JFK visit. There was also the honorary degree.

However, through his connection with Duncan, the Eastern Hills 80 were on-site to play “Hail to the Chief”; “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” a tribute to Jackie; and “The Yellow Rose of Texas”; among others. Martin had a full program set up.

Martin said he had set all of this up without bothering to receive approval from Johnson, the principal. He needed to do that. Johnson was excited but cautious at the same time. Martin remembered his boss throwing caution to the wind: “Wait. Is this a political event?” Martin replied that, “Well, there will be a lot of Democrats down there.” Johnson said he better get approval from the superintendent’s office.

Martin painted the scene: Johnson picked up the phone and began to call downtown. He paused and asked rhetorically, “He is the democratically elected president, right?” Martin said that, having answered his own question, Johnson put the phone down and said, “We’ll go.”

One of the members of the band who didn’t show up at 6:30 a.m. to get on the bus was William Cravens. His mother and father had a seat at Marvin Leonard’s table. Cravens’ father, Travis, handled the Leonards’ mineral interests. He arrived closer to the 9 o’clock kickoff. 

“I thought, ‘Why do I want to get my ass up at 6 o’clock in the morning and come down there where I’m not gonna play until 9,’” Cravens says with a wry smile. “‘I’ll meet you boys.’”

Martin recalled for the Sixth Street Museum what a “good morning it was,” not only for the band but for all in attendance. Just a joyful occasion. Before boarding the bus to return to school, the band director permitted his charges to go outside and watch the parade down Main Street.

Martin said he remembered getting back to school and everybody was walking on air. 

“And then it just stopped.”

Some 46 years after the morning of Nov. 22, Cravens found the trombone he played that day in the house of his then recently deceased mother, who lived in the same neighborhood. 

“I thought, ‘What am I gonna do with this thing?’” Cravens says. He decided he would take it to Eastern Hills. “Surely, they got somebody who needs an instrument, and I’ll give it to them. And that’s what I did.”

More recently, he began to wonder if the trombone was still over there. Eastern Hills didn’t know where it was. As it turns out, the horn was at Southwest High School, having had at least one stint at I.M. Terrell. 

The story had followed the horn. Most everyone knew of its historical significance. 

The district-wide director of the bands had found it and returned it to Cravens. In January, he donated it to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas. The trombone had earned retirement finally to a display cabinet.

One of Sparks and Cravens’ classmates also had an intimate connection to the JFK visit. 

“Daddy got a call in the middle of the night, the same night Oswald was murdered. It was the Fort Worth police,” says Pat Groody Enstrom. The police officer said they had gotten a call from the FBI looking for a funeral home to get Lee Harvey Oswald to. No funeral home in Fort Worth-Dallas would take him. 

That is, with the exception of Paul Groody, the funeral director of Miller Funeral Home on Camp Bowie, who embalmed Oswald and buried him at Rose Hill Cemetery. 

“He said, ‘Oswald has a family. He has a mother, a wife, children. It is what it is,’” Enstrom says of her father’s thinking at the time. “He can’t turn the family away no matter who the body is.”

The authorities wanted to expedite the process. 

Groody woke up his daughter in the middle of the night to see if she wanted to go with him. This was history, after all. 

“He said that I couldn’t go with him, but I could follow him over there,” Enstrom says. “I wanted to go, and I called one of my friends to go with me. We followed Daddy and went right to Parkland.”

She never saw Oswald’s body, but she did see him moved, under the strictest security, from the hospital with a sheet over his body to the hearse. “There were about four with rifles and they came out first, and then Daddy came out wheeling Oswald.” 

The Dallas police led an escort to the Turnpike booths near Nolan Catholic High School. The Fort Worth police picked up the escort from there.

“We couldn’t keep up with him,” she says of the hearse her father was driving. “Daddy was well over 100 mph coming back. When we got to the toll booth, he just threaded that needle and kept going. The Fort Worth police picked him up there and followed him to Miller. From then on, they had FBI and Fort Worth police stationed at the funeral home 24/7.”

Paul Groody, who died in 2010, would recall in later years about the concern he had in taking the job: “We already had two nuts [Oswald and Ruby]; I didn’t want a third nut to shoot the undertaker.”

The undertaker’s $710 bill for services rendered was paid by Oswald’s brother, Robert. That likely did not include any of the costs of transport. 

Groody’s job on the Oswald case wouldn’t end in 1963. He was also involved in Oswald’s exhumation in 1981. Officials discovered that the body buried at Rose Hill was indeed Oswald and not a Soviet spy, as conspiracy theorists suspected. 

Enstrom, who lives in Rockport, says Oswald’s wife, Marina, “was so grateful” to her father. 

“She kept up with Daddy for years,” Enstrom says. “It was almost tearful how much she appreciated him. And, of course, that was the kind of guy he was. Very loving, almost kind of a minister, you know?”