J.D. Tippit, Ordinary Hero

BY DALE K. MYERS

 

It’s been one-hundred-years since a boy named J.D. Tippit was born in northeast Texas, in a small farming community near Annona. He would never live to see his fortieth birthday.

 

That small-town farm boy was the Dallas cop who was gunned down on an Oak Cliff side street in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Tippit’s murder subsequently led to the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald who was later charged with killing Tippit and the president.

 

For the extended Tippit family, the anniversary of those four dark days in November is personal. The murder of one so loved was devastating beyond words.

 

Particularly painful for J.D.’s family and friends are the obsessive and relentless allegations that Tippit was somehow involved in a conspiracy to kill the President or to murder Oswald. Even today, sixty-one-years after his death, ridiculous claims built on fantasy and innuendo continue to plague the Internet

 

 Of course, anyone who really knew the 39-year-old father of three knows that such claims are preposterous and couldn’t be proven whatsoever for one simple reason – they are not true.

 

Many of those family members – J.D.’s father, Edgar; mother, Lizzie; brother, Don; sisters, Christine and Joyce; brother-in-law and life-long pal, Jack; wife, Marie; son, Allen and a large assortment of cousins and friends – have since passed on to join J.D. in that eternal sleep.

 

In their absence and honor, we take a moment today to remember J.D. Tippit on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birthday.

 

Beginnings

 

The shy country boy was raised in the depression-era farming community of Clarksville, Texas, in Red River County. J.D. wasn’t afraid of hard work. The long days in the field planting cotton behind a team of mules was tough and exhausting. You were up before dawn and worked a twelve-hour day every day except Sunday. And no one had to rock you to sleep at sunset.

 

During World War II, at age nineteen, J.D. volunteered for the parachute infantry and jumped into France with the 17th Airborne Division earning a Bronze service star. After the war, he married his high school sweetheart, Marie Frances Gasway, and tried to make a go of farming. But drought and floods took their toll on the young family and in 1952 he sought employment with the Dallas Police Department.

 

J.D. had a keen eye for police work. He was a good judge of people, compassionate, and dependable. Away from the force and the odd jobs he held to make ends meet, J.D. was a devoted family man. He liked Clark Gable movies, the country-swing music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, bushy Christmas trees, and clowning around with friends and family. He was the funny brother, the favorite uncle, the lovable guy.

 

His last day

 

At 1:15 p.m. on Friday, November 22, 1963, Officer Tippit spotted a suspicious man walking near Tenth and Patton in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. An alert had been broadcast over the police radio for officers to be on the lookout for a white male, about thirty, slender build wanted in connection with the shooting of the president two miles away.

 

Tippit, part of the police drag net that day, stopped his squad car alongside the pedestrian and got out to investigate. The man, identified by multiple eyewitnesses as Lee Harvey Oswald, pulled a gun from under his jacket and shot Tippit four times in the chest and head, killing him instantly. Forty-minutes later, police pounced on the cop-killer at the Texas Theater.

 

Late that night, Tippit’s body lay in state at the Dudley M. Hughes funeral home in Oak Cliff, just two blocks from the scene of his murder.

 

He had been planning to attend the South Oak Cliff High School football game that night and watch his niece Linda perform at half-time as a member of the South Oak Cliff HS Debs. Instead, he lay in a coffin, the pages of his life ripped away.

 

“I don’t suppose you could imagine what it was like to see your best friend laying up there,” boyhood pal and brother-in-law Jack Christopher told me, his voice choking with emotion. “His life was gone,” he said, snapping his fingers, “just like that.”

 

Three days later, seven hundred policemen in dress blues joined as many mourners at the small, red brick Beckley Hills Baptist Church to say goodbye. An organist played The Old Rugged Cross as broad-shouldered lawmen openly wept.

 

Few historians have considered the consequences for Dallas and the country had Oswald, an avowed pro-Castro Marxist, escaped the city. The President’s assassination had lit the fuse of a Cold War powder keg that might never have been snuffed out. In that sense, Tippit’s showdown with Oswald had a momentous impact on our nation’s history.

 

I spoke to and grew to personally know many of J.D.’s family and friends over the course of nearly fifty-years of research into Tippit’s life and death – all of it documented in my book With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit.

 

I hoped that the book might put an end to much of the speculation surrounding the shooting in Oak Cliff that took J.D.’s life. For many readers, it has done just that.

 

But sadly, for those who favor a more sinister role for Officer Tippit in the events of November 22, 1963, there will never be enough truth or evidence to outweigh their illogical and unverifiable imaginings.

 

J.D. Tippit, was one of those ordinary men who, through extraordinary events, had the moniker of hero thrust upon them. And although his pivotal role in America’s darkest days will forever be remembered it is his likeable spirit that has left the deepest impression on those who knew and loved him.

 

Duty, honor, and love – essential ingredients of a hero of the ordinary kind. [END]

 

[Adapted from a 50th anniversary tribute written by the author and published in the Detroit Free Press in 2013. For more about the true facts surrounding the life and death of Officer Tippit go to: jdtippit.com.]