H. B. McLain
Solo Motorcycle
Officer
Dallas Police Department
“Unfortunately all their accusations that it was my microphone that was stuck open and the shots were heard on it were printed in the newspapers, and it’ll be that way from now on. They’ll never be convinced otherwise, regardless of what I say…”
Born in the piney woods of East Texas in Nacogdoches County, H. B. McLain moved to Dallas in 1942, attended high school for six weeks, then joined the Merchant Marines during the Second World War. After joining the Dallas Police Department in 1953, he worked in the Patrol and Burglary and Theft Divisions until he became a solo motorcycle officer in November 1955. McLain was one of the escort officers in the motorcade on November 22, 1963.
*****
It was a hazy morning as we went out to Love Field to wait for the
President to come in. When we arrived, we parked our motorcycles on the outside
of the fenced area until he arrived. Then, as the motorcade began, we met it at
the gate and came on out.
The escort route had been picked out for
him by the Tactical Group. Normally we had done our own scheduling, but they
took it upon themselves this time. It was rather unusual because they had people
working in positions they didn’t normally work. We usually rode side by side
with the senior man riding on the left and the junior man on the right. In this
case, they had it reversed.
My assignment was to ride alongside the
procession mostly behind the President’s car and the press buses five or six
cars behind the President on the left side. There was nothing extra special
about the escort as we had done many of them. It was routine.
Our job was to keep the pedestrians back
out of the way so they didn’t get run over. We’d just ride alongside, and if
anybody was too close, we’d tell them to move back. If that didn’t work, we
might bump them.
There were a lot of people along the
motorcade route, especially in the downtown area from Akard to Houston Streets.
When I made the turn onto Houston on the left side, we had caught up with the
cars in front of us, and I had stopped right by the side of the entrance to the
old jail, which is about midway between Main and Elm Streets on Houston. I heard
one very clear shot. Evidently I must have felt like it was coming from straight
ahead because at that instant I was looking down, and when I heard the shot,
threw my head up and it appeared that about 5,000 pigeons flew out from behind
that building (the Texas School Book Depository) straight ahead. In fact, I
thought to myself, “Somebody’s shooting at the pigeons!” But I could see
the limousine off to my left on Elm and saw Mrs. Kennedy crawling on the back of
the car. I had a good idea that somebody had been shot at but didn’t know
which one.
About that time the chief came on the
radio and said, “Get to Parkland Hospital!” and the race was on.
As I sped through Dealey Plaza, the only
thing I noticed was Hargis with his motorcycle laid down crawling on his hands
and knees across the grassy knoll. I didn’t have any idea what he was doing.
You think maybe he might have fallen or that he lost his footing when he stepped
off and slipped on the grass.
In any case, I caught up with and got in
front of the limousine on Stemmons somewhere around Continental. The ride was
wild! You know in your mind that you’re going way too fast, but if you slow
down or fall, the cars behind are going to run over you. But you don’t think
about those things, though, at the time; it’s all instinct.
We had to slow down when we got off
Stemmons at Industrial. Along Industrial there was a railroad track which was
located on a small incline some twenty to thirty feet before we were to hit
Harry Hines Boulevard. Chaney, myself and another officer went airborne up the
incline, hit the ground, and made the sharp left onto Hines.
When we arrived at the hospital, I parked
my motorcycle and came back to the limousine about fifteen feet away. As the
hospital orderlies approached to take him out of the car, Mrs. Kennedy was still
laying over him, covering his head, and wouldn’t get up. So I took it upon
myself, reached over and caught her by the shoulder, pulled her and said,
“Come on, let them take him out.” Somebody threw a coat over him just as she
raised up, and they took him out on the right side of the car. She then stepped
out on the left, stunned, and walked with me in a daze into the emergency room.
I figured at the time that the wound was
fatal. Part of the skull was laying on the floorboard. Blood and brain material
was splattered all over as if a ripe watermelon had been dropped. It was a
pretty gory scene.
As I left the emergency room and was
walking down the hall, one of the Secret Service agents told an FBI agent to get
out of the building. “I’m with the FBI,” and he started to ask him
something. “I want you to get out of here!”
“But I’m with the FBI,” he said.
“I don’t give a goddamn who you’re
with! Get out of here!” The Secret Service agent then grabbed him by the nape
of the neck, carried him to the door, and told the officer on the door,
“Don’t let this man back in here!” As a result, the FBI agent became
belligerent. He seemed to think that because he was with the FBI that he could
butt in and do whatever he wanted. Other than that and with everybody moaning
and crying, the general scene at the hospital was under control. Later the
motorcycle officers were then assigned to City Hall to control the turmoil there
while Oswald was in custody. All I did was to stand in front of Homicide’s
door and keep people out. The following days, Saturday and Sunday, all of the
solo motorcycle officers were off duty.
We tried to put most of this behind us as
much as possible until it all came up again in 1977 when the House Select
Committee on Assassinations began re-investigating all of this. The best I can
figure is that the people doing it didn’t know what the hell they were doing.
They were jumping to conclusions. They sent one investigator down here to talk
with us, and he began telling us what had happened and how it happened. We said,
“To hell with you; we ain’t telling you anything!” So he left and the next
thing we knew the acoustics stuff was coming out.
The police department recorded on tape all
radio transmissions on the two channels operating that day. We used Channel 2
for special assignments such as the motorcade and Channel 1 for regular
assignments. We were all tuned in to Channel 2. At the time of the
assassination, a mike on one of the motorcycles was stuck in the on position on
Channel 1. Somehow the investigators concluded that one of our mikes was stuck,
even though we weren’t on that channel, and therefore the sound and number of
shots would be recorded on the tape.
I talked to them several times to pinpoint
where I was sitting, where the mike was on my motorcycle, and which way I was
headed. I was surprised that I was being accused of being the one with the stuck
mike because if mine was stuck, I couldn’t have heard any of the other stuff
that was going on.
To operate the radio, you had to press the
button to talk on it. As a result, you couldn’t hear anything and most of the
others couldn’t hear anything either other than what you were saying. Once you
let off the button the channel was open again. But you wouldn’t necessarily
know if your mike was stuck open until you began to notice that you were hearing
nothing on the radio. You could still transmit but you couldn’t hear anything.
Eventually I was called to Washington.
When I got up there in the late afternoon, they whisked me over to the hotel and
asked me a bunch of questions. They told me what they were going to do, what
they were going to ask, and what they were trying to prove. Something was said
about the tapes and they said, “No, you don’t need to hear the tapes.”
The questions they asked couldn’t be
answered with a yes or no answer. They worded the questions so that the answers
I gave fit their way of thinking because they were trying to reopen the
investigation. The questions were hypothetical like: “Could this have
happened?” or “Is it possible?” The only way I could answer was, “It’s
possible. Anything’s possible.” But I don’t think I answered them with a
yes or no. In fact, I really didn’t know at the time what they were getting
at.
When I got back from Washington, J. C.
Bowles, who was the chief dispatcher and who had studied the tapes, called me
and asked if I’d heard the tapes. When I told him no, he said, “Can you come
by my office when you get off work?” So I went by there and was told to take
two tapes into the other room. He set up a cassette recorder and told me,
“Play this one; listen to it; then play this other one and listen to it.”
When I came out, he asked, “Is that your mike that’s stuck?” and I replied
that it wasn’t. “Why?”
I told him, “It’s a three-wheeler
that’s stuck.”
You can tell very clearly the difference
between the sound of a solo motorcycle that we rode and a three-wheel
motorcycle; it’s like daylight and dark. The solo engine has kind of a thump
to it: CHUKE.. CHUKE.. CHUKE.., while the three-wheeler has more of a thrashing
sound.. AAANG.. AAANG.. AAANG! You could hear this all on the tapes, but the
people in Washington didn’t listen. They were trying to tell us what it was.
While in Washington, they commenced to ask
all kinds of questions: “Well, did you hear Curry say this, or did you hear
that?”
‘Yeah, I heard it!” I said.
“Well, how can you hear it if your
mike’s stuck?”
“My mike ain’t stuck,” I responded.
If they’d have let me listen to the tapes before I went up there, I could have
told them right quick that it wasn’t my motorcycle but that it was a
three-wheeler. In fact, that three-wheeler was three miles away at the Trade
Mart, thus they didn’t hear any shots on the tapes and their theory was not
valid.
The noise they heard was the radio
popping. Those old radios popped all the time. Sometimes it sounded like a gun
going off. But their investigator didn’t listen to any of that; he didn’t
listen to the motors running.
Basically I didn’t think they were
honest with the whole situation. They sent some guy down here to investigate
something, and he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. You don’t start
investigating by telling people how it happened; you ask them how it happened.
We tried to tell him but he said, “No, it happened this way!”
So we told him, “To hell with you! We
ain’t telling you anything!”
Unfortunately all their accusations that
it was my microphone that was stuck open and the shots were heard on it were
printed in the newspapers, and it’ll be that way from now on. They’ll never
be convinced otherwise, regardless of what I say. “Well, sure that’s the
first thing he’s going to say; he’s going to deny it.” To hell with them!
Bowles, who is now the sheriff of Dallas
County, and I have met several times and talked about it. On the tapes, some
investigators have made a big deal out of a sound that they claim is a church
bell. It wasn’t anything but a loose manhole cover in the street. One day when
I’d left his office and was walking across the street, just as I stepped up on
the curb on the other side of the street, I heard a BONG… BONG sound. I turned
around and noticed a pickup truck making a left turn onto Jackson Street. The
front wheel ran over the manhole cover, then the back wheel. It was loose:
BONG… BONG! So I went back to Bowles and told him what I’d heard, and he
said, “That sounds logical.” After a period of time, we figured out where
the motorcycle with the stuck mike was and who was on it because the tapes
indicate the rider whistled. We only knew one officer who whistled all the time
that rode motorcycles. After doing some checking, we found that he was assigned
to the Trade Mart at that time, three miles from Dealey Plaza. Also you could
hear the sheriff’s car radio on the tapes. There was only one sheriff’s car
radio, and it was also assigned to the Trade Mart, so the stuck mike couldn’t
have been anywhere else. So, if the investigator from Washington would have
listened to us, the whole matter would have been cleared up without all the
controversy.
As a result of adverse experiences like
that, most of the motorcycle officers don’t want to get involved any further
in the subject. I don’t dwell on it; I just let it go and keep going. It’s
similar to someone in your family dying: you grieve for a while, then eventually
you get to where it gets a little further back in time. It’s always still
there, but you don’t think about it near as much as you do the first two or
three years.
Officer McLain, after 27 years, retired from the police department in 1980. The following year, after J. C. Bowles was elected sheriff, McLain then joined the sheriff’s department and eventually was promoted to sergeant in the Warrant’s Division. H. B. McLain retired from the sheriff’s department in 1996.