The Cellar
In 1980 I graduated from the Ft. Worth police academy and began training in the field. When my training officer took days off, I rode with regular officers as a trainee. One night my training officer took off and I rode with an old veteran who was getting ready to retire. His name was Charlie, and he gave me a lot of good information as we answered calls. When things slowed down, he started telling me about his experiences. It was fascinating.
He told me about his time in the vice squad. It was 1963 and he was working downtown trying to arrest hookers. There was a red light district in Fort Worth and one of the clubs where prostitutes and Nare do wells gathered was the Cellar. It was a popular place and crowded most of the time. The particular night he was telling me about was special. John F. Kennedy was in town and staying at the Texas Hotel a few blocks away from the Cellar. It was November 21, 1963. Charlie was plain clothes, and no one knew he was a police officer. There were a group of men in business suits drinking and talking to women believed to be prostitutes. Charlie mingled in with the men and discovered they were Secret Service agents assigned to the presidential detail. They were supposed to be guarding the president! Charlie finally told the men who he was, and they welcomed him into their drinking party. The agents had left one junior agent at the president’s room and decided to partake of the finer things Fort Worth had to offer. They were drinking hard liquor and had young women sitting on their laps. The Cellar was an old musty bar, from earlier days. It was dark and seedy. It smelled of alcohol and cigarette butts. At the time they called it the red-light district but a few years earlier it was called hell’s half acre. A lot of drunkenness, prostitution and crime went on there. The agents didn’t seem to care.
Charlie told me the agents became falling down drunk from the alcohol. They also became involved with the prostitutes in the club. The agents told Charlie this was normal operating procedure. They went into a town and go partying while one of the new guys watched the president. They said on some occasions the president would go with them. The agent said it didn’t happen often because the president didn’t want to get recognized. Charlie was shocked but enjoyed partying with the agents into the wee hours of the morning. Charlie never even checked back in with the department as he went home. He was bombed.
The next morning was the president’s speech in front of the Fort Worth Hotel just blocks from the Cellar. The president was crisp from a good night’s sleep knowing the secret service was outside guarding him. The speech was brilliant from a political point of view. He mentioned all the Fort Worth contributions by the companies and people to the United States. He told the story of his brother fighting in World War ll who was on a B-24 Liberator bomber built in Fort Worth and the pilot was from the same. Everything was about the city, and the people loved it. Charlie was still home in bed sleeping it off.
The secret service agents were hungover. They stayed behind the president at the hotel where there was no threat until the speech was over. Eventually the entourage left and headed for Meacham airfield in north Fort Worth. Everyone boarded the plane for the short flight to Dallas Love Field. The flight took about fifteen minutes.
They landed and formed up a motorcade to go through downtown Dallas. The motorcade weaved through the downtown area at a slow pace with the agents trying to keep up by running alongside the car. If you watch video, you can see the strain in their faces. They jumped on the running boards of other limos whenever they could. They finally came around the corner to Deely Plaza. The agents were trying to keep up and were getting ready to get on a vehicle because they were almost to the freeway. I’m sure this was foremost on their mind. Suddenly an ambush of the worst kind broke out. Shots rang out from what seemed like everywhere. The sluggish agents moved in quickly, but to no avail. The president was shot, and the damage was done. No one could’ve seen the ambush coming, but one has to wonder, if the agents would’ve been sharper and more focused maybe they would’ve seen something. A flash, a movement in a building, anything. Instead, they were scrambling just trying to react to the situation, which was over.
Ambushes are the worst because you can rarely see them coming. Which to me was another intelligence failure. Those guys did have themselves a time though in Fort Worth. We’ll never know what could’ve happened the next day, but it was an interesting story about one of the biggest events in American history.
