CHAPTER 4

“A BRIGHT PINK SUIT”

The Kennedys were staying in suite 850 of Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas. The president had just been handed a copy of the November 22 edition of the Dallas Morning News, and he was irate. It contained a full-page ad about his visit. At first glance, its boldface headline, WELCOME MR. KENNEDY TO DALLAS, seemed to be a friendly greeting. But the ad was bordered in black, the way a newspaper might announce a tragedy or a death. As the president read further, he saw a long list of complaints attacking him and his administration. The ad demanded that Kennedy answer twelve defamatory questions that accused him of being soft on Communism and unpatriotic. “Why is Latin America turning either anti-American or Communistic, or both, despite increased U.S. foreign aid, State Department policy, and your own Ivy-Tower pronouncements?” it began. Then the ad claimed that “Thousands of Cubans” had been imprisoned, starved, and persecuted as a result of Kennedy’s policies. The ad even accused the president of selling food—“wheat and corn”—to communist enemies engaged in killing American soldiers in South Viet Nam. Attorney General Robert Kennedy did not escape attack. “Why have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby . . . to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?”

“We demand answers,” the ad concluded, “and we want them now.”

The charges incensed JFK. Was this the kind of welcome he should expect when he flew from Fort Worth to Dallas later this morning?

There was more. Unbeknownst to Kennedy, last night in Dallas someone had printed several thousand leaflets headlined WANTED FOR TREASON. The handbill resembled an Old West–style reward poster with front and side mug shots of the “criminal” on the loose—in this case the thirty-fifth president of the United States. To ease tensions, the Dallas police chief had already gone on television to ask his fellow citizens to receive the president with respect.

Kennedy warned his wife, “We’re heading into nut country today. But Jackie,” he added, “if somebody wants to shoot me from a window with a rifle, nobody can stop it, so why worry about it?”

Kenneth O’Donnell—JFK’s longtime aide and a trusted member of the “Irish Mafia” trio that had guided his political career for years, and who was with the president in Texas that morning—agreed with that sentiment. “The President took a fatalistic attitude about the possibility of being assassinated by a fanatic, regarding such a danger as being part of his job, and often talked about how easy it would be for somebody to shoot him with a rifle from a high building.”

Then JFK said an eerie thing to his wife. He reminded her of their harried, late-night arrival at the hotel. There were a lot of people pressing near them, and some of them had gotten too close for JFK’s comfort. “You know,” he told Jackie, “last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president. There was the rain, and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase and melted away into the crowd?”

The president had already survived one assassination attempt. In 1960, when he was president-elect, a madman had plotted to blow him up with a bomb in Palm Beach, Florida. But that plot had been thwarted.

Perhaps JFK recalled a letter he wrote in 1959, the year before the election. Kennedy replied to a man who wrote to him about the “thought-provoking . . . historical curiosity” that since 1840 every man who entered the White House in a year ending in zero had not lived to leave the White House alive. JFK replied that “the future will necessarily answer” what his fate will be if he should have “the privilege of occupying the White House.”

John Kennedy was a fatalist who lived with a sense of detachment and ironic humor. He had an intuition that he might not live a long life. One of his favorite poems was one written by a fellow Harvard graduate, Alan Seeger, who had been killed in the First World War. “I have a rendezvous with death,” Seeger had prophesied. Kennedy often asked Jackie to read the poem aloud to him.

But he also believed he was lucky and that luck had taken him all the way to the White House, where, at age forty-three, he was the youngest man ever elected to the presidency. On November 22, he was forty-six years old. He had been president of the United States for two years, ten months, and two days.

As John Kennedy spoke in the safety of his Fort Worth hotel suite about rifles and assassins, a man who wanted to kill him was already waiting for him in Dallas. That man had a rifle, and he was in a tall building.

ON THE morning of November 22, Lee Harvey Oswald woke up early and was out of bed before Marina. He told her not to get up. He went to the kitchen and made himself a cup of coffee. She did not see what he did next. He placed $170 in cash, almost all the money he had in the world, on the top of the dresser for Marina. He had less than $20 in his wallet. And in a porcelain cup she had brought with her all the way from Russia, Lee Oswald left his wedding ring.

He told Marina he would not be back tonight. Sleeping on the idea had not changed his mind. He left the house, went into the garage, and emerged with his package.

Oswald walked the half block over to Buell Wesley Frazier’s house. Buell’s sister, Linnie Mae Randall, lived there too with her husband and three daughters. Last night, Linnie remembered, her brother told her “that Lee had rode home with him to get some curtain rods from Mrs. Paine to fix up his apartment.”

Friday morning, after Linnie made breakfast and while she was packing Buell’s lunch, she saw Oswald cross Westbrook Street, then cross her driveway, and walk toward the carport. She noticed that Oswald had something in his right hand. “He was carrying a package in a sort of heavy brown bag, heavier than a grocery bag it looked to me.” Oswald held the bag in a vertical position. “It almost touched the ground as he carried it.”

Linnie watched Oswald go to Buell’s car, open the back door, and lay the package down. She could not see if he had laid it on the floor or the backseat. Then Oswald approached the house and peered through the kitchen window while Buell was sitting down eating his breakfast.

Frazier’s mother saw him and asked, “Who is that?”

“That is Lee,” her son replied.

It was the first time Oswald had ever walked to Frazier’s house and peered through the window. Usually Frazier just picked him up on the street while Oswald was walking to his house.

Frazier rose from the table and said, “Well, it is time to go.”

Oswald waited for him a few feet outside the back door. They walked together toward the car and got in the front seats. When Frazier turned his head, he saw the long paper bag. “I noticed there was a package laying in the backseat, I didn’t pay too much attention and I said: ‘What’s the package, Lee?’ ”

And he said, “Curtain rods.”

The blanket that Oswald used to hide the rifle in Mrs. Paine’s garage, the brown paper bag he used to carry the rifle on his way to work, and the disassembled Mannlicher-Carcano.

(courtesy of the National Archives)

Frazier replied, “Oh yes, you told me you were going to bring some today.”

Frazier didn’t think any more about it. “I asked him did he have fun playing with them babies, and he chuckled and said he did.” Buell noticed Lee did not bring his usual small paper sack containing his lunch. “Right when I got in the car I asked him where was his lunch, and he said he was going to buy his lunch that day.”

They did not discuss President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas.

Frazier had no way of knowing it, but Oswald did not need curtain rods. His small room at the boardinghouse was already fully furnished with blinds, curtains, and curtain rods.

President Kennedy, Governor Connally (second from right), and Vice President Johnson (far right) outside the Hotel Texas.

(courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

The men got into the car and drove to Dallas. Unbeknownst to Buell Wesley Frazier, he was chauffeuring an assassin—and his murder weapon—to the scene of a crime that had not yet happened.

Oswald and Frazier arrived at the outdoor parking lot located several hundred feet behind the Texas School Book Depository at around 7:52 A.M. They were early, so Frazier stayed in the car for a minute: “I was letting my engine run and getting to charge up my battery.”

Oswald jumped out of the car, reached into the backseat for his package of “curtain rods,” and began walking fast toward the Depository, getting as far ahead of Frazier as he could without breaking into a run. It was the first time Lee had ever walked ahead of Buell. They usually walked to the Depository together, but not this morning: “Eventually he kept getting a little further ahead of me,” Frazier noticed.

Frazier also noticed that Lee carried the package in an unusual manner, vertically, with one end tucked under his right armpit and the other end in his cupped hand. The billowing sleeve of Oswald’s jacket almost concealed the package, so that it was almost invisible to anyone—including Frazier—walking behind Oswald. By the time Lee neared the Depository, he was well ahead of Buell: “[He was] I would say, roughly 50 feet in front of me but I didn’t try to catch up with him because I knew I had plenty of time so I just took my time walking up there.”

Oswald opened the back door of the building and slipped inside. Then he went to the sixth floor, using either the staircase at the rear of the building or one of the two freight elevators. He probably took the stairs to avoid riding in an elevator with any curious coworkers who might ask questions about his package. Once he was sure no one was watching him, he hid the bag containing the still-unassembled rifle between stacks of book boxes on the sixth floor. No one knows for sure when he assembled it. It is possible he assembled the rifle that morning before hiding it, in case something later prevented him from doing so during the critical moments before Kennedy’s motorcade arrived. With a screwdriver it would have taken between two and two and a half minutes to assemble the weapon. But Oswald did not need a tool to remount the barrel to the stock—a thin dime would turn the screws and transform the rifle into firing condition.

With his rifle concealed from view, Oswald picked up his clipboard and began filling orders for books, just as he did on any other normal day at work. At least for the next three hours until the presidential motorcade approached Elm Street, he would earn his pay.

JOHN AND Jacqueline Kennedy were still in their suite at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth when Lee Oswald walked into the Book Depository with his rifle. The president dressed first. He was scheduled to go downstairs soon to deliver brief remarks to a crowd that had assembled in a parking lot across the street. He looked outside. It was a gloomy, rainy day. The Secret Service worried about the weather in Dallas. The president’s limousine had already been sent there ahead of Kennedy, so it would be in position when he landed at Love Field. The car was a convertible, and the agents wondered if they should install the plastic bubble top to protect the president from the rain. John Kennedy preferred to ride in an open car so the people watching the motorcade could get a better look at him. It created an intimacy with the crowd. Jackie did not like the open car—the wind would play havoc with her stylish hair.

While in Fort Worth, Kennedy would travel in a rented convertible. It was unarmored. If a madman jumped from the curb and fired shots, the bullets could penetrate the metal doors of the car. During Kennedy’s trip to Berlin, two women had broken through the security cordon and ran right up to his car in a motorcade. They turned out to be overenthusiastic but harmless fans.

The president went downstairs without Jackie at 8:45 A.M. to speak to the cheering crowd standing outside in the rain. “There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth,” he complimented them, “and I appreciate your being here this morning.” Some people began chanting “Where’s Jackie? Where’s Jackie?” JFK could tell they were disappointed at not seeing her, and he used wry humor to soften the blow and explain her absence: “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it. But we appreciate your welcome . . . here in this rain.”

President Kennedy greeting the crowd outside the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on the morning of November 22, 1963.

(courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

President Kennedy speaks to the crowd outside the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth. Note the open windows in the background.

(Cecil Stoughton, courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

Back in their hotel room, as Jackie got dressed, she was able to hear his voice over the loudspeakers.

At 9:00 A.M., the president returned to the hotel to speak at a public breakfast in the ballroom. But Jackie’s seat at the head table was empty. The disappointed guests wanted to see her. Kennedy told one of his Secret Service agents to call her room and tell her to get down to the breakfast as soon as possible.

“Where’s Mrs. Kennedy,” he said. “Call Mr. Hill. I want her to come down to the breakfast.”

She had forgotten. When Secret Service agent Clint Hill escorted her downstairs in an elevator, she thought he was taking her to the car. “Aren’t we leaving?” she asked. “No,” Hill replied, “you are going to a breakfast.”

On the podium, JFK stalled for time. Then he joked with the crowd: “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.” Then a commotion began at the back of the room. Jackie had arrived, and the crowd shouted its approval as she marched to the podium.

Wall Street Journal reporter Al Otten took cynical amusement in Jackie’s service as a political prop. “When are you going to have her come out of a cake?” he wisecracked to Dave Powers, JFK’s Irish longtime top political operative.

Powers was not amused. “She’s not that kind of Bunny.”

She did not need a cake. Jackie did not disappoint. She was wearing a bright pink, nubby wool jacket (Jackie called the color raspberry) faced with dark blue lapels, with a matching pink skirt and a pink pillbox hat. She wore short, bright white cotton gloves, a fashionable accessory for women at that time. It was one of the most flattering outfits in her wardrobe, and she had worn it on several prior occasions. The colorful suit seemed almost to glow and created a striking contrast against her rich black hair and pale white skin. She looked radiant.

After the Chamber of Commerce breakfast, the Kennedys went upstairs to their suite to rest before leaving Fort Worth. Jackie offered to do more campaigning. “I’ll go anywhere with you this year.”

“How about California in the next two weeks?”

“I’ll be there.”

“Did you hear that?” the president asked his aides and laughed. They had an hour until their departure.

President Kennedy’s motorcade left the Hotel Texas for Fort Worth’s Carswell Air Force Base. It would be a short flight—just thirteen minutes—to Dallas. It was such a short trip that they could have driven. But that would have eliminated the ceremonial glamour of a presidential arrival of Air Force One at Love Field. The landing of the beautiful jet, the emergence of Jack and Jackie from the rear door, the welcoming committee, the crowds, the photographers, and the television cameras—all enhanced the excitement and appeal.

The president boarded the plane at 11:23 A.M. Air Force One took off from Carswell at 11:25 A.M. (CST) and touched down at Love Field in Dallas at 11:38 A.M. It was an hour later in the nation’s capital, and most officials in Washington were at lunch. Several members of the cabinet were out of the country, aboard a plane flying to Japan for trade talks with government officials.

At Love Field, reporters and television cameras prepared to cover the president’s arrival. While JFK’s jet taxied off the runway and slowed to a stop, one journalist, Bob Walker of WFAA-TV (Dallas channel 8), the ABC affiliate, broadcast a live report: “Security precautions at this luncheon they are going to attend range from the distance from the president’s car door to the Trade Mart entrance, and to how many doors and windows there are in the building, and even to the method of choosing the steak that the president will eat.”

But the reporter failed to mention how many windows—more than twenty thousand—the motorcade would drive past on the way to the Trade Mart, before the president would have the opportunity to be protected there from chewing a piece of poisoned steak. The Secret Service planned to select John Kennedy’s plate at random from among the two thousand meals that the kitchen prepared. To kill the president, an assassin would have to outdo the legendary poisoner Lucrezia Borgia. He would have to poison all of the steaks served that day.

The reporter glanced at the crowd at Love Field: “Handkerchiefs are being waved, the placards are being held high, and hundreds of tiny American flags are now being waved toward the presidential jet.”

The plane parked near a reception committee of dignitaries standing on the tarmac. The reporter, making no effort to conceal his obvious excitement, continued his broadcast: “And here is the presidential jet, U.S. Air Force Number 1 . . . the doors fly open and the loading ladders are being wheeled to the plane. . . . This is a split second timed operation for the Secret Service . . . nothing is left to chance, every possible precaution has been taken.”

But it was not true.

None of the people at Love Field had been searched, not even the suspicious ones displaying unfriendly signs. Anyone in that crowd could have been carrying a concealed pistol. All that separated the spectators from the president was a hip-high chain-link fence.

At the Texas School Book Depository, the lunch hour would begin soon. Most of the employees would start their noontime descent from the upper floors to congregate in the lunchroom on the second floor or the “domino room” on the first floor, or to go outside and watch President Kennedy drive by on Elm Street. The biggest crowds waiting to see the president—tens of thousands of people—had already gathered downtown, choking the sidewalks several bodies deep before Kennedy had even landed. Hundreds of people had perched in windows and now looked down on the route. The Secret Service and the Dallas police did not have the manpower—or the desire—to search every building, to scrutinize every window, or to analyze every face. It was impossible. “Every possible precaution” had not been taken. On the contrary—almost none had.

But here, in Dealey Plaza, where the motorcade would cover the last leg of its ten-mile route before it picked up speed and took the highway to the Trade Mart, the crowds were much thinner. It was easier for the scattered spectators to stake out a spot right at the edge of the curb and stand just a few feet away from where the president’s limousine would soon pass.

Indeed, people standing on the right side of the car would be closest to Kennedy, in some cases less than six feet from him. Things were much calmer and quieter in Dealey Plaza, in the vicinity of the Texas School Book Depository, than they were downtown.

AT LOVE Field, the president looked out one of the plane windows and saw the enthusiastic crowd. He told Ken O’Donnell, “This trip is turning out to be terrific. Here we are in Dallas, and it looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine for us.”

Jack and Jackie stood by the rear door of Air Force One, waiting for it to open. Dave Powers told them, “You two look like Mr. and Mrs. America.” The president and First Lady exited Air Force One and descended the portable stairs that airport workers had rolled out to the plane. Jackie came down first.

“There is Mrs. Kennedy,” exclaimed the reporter, “stepping off the plane, wearing a bright pink suit . . . and a matching pink hat.”

Mike Quinn, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, was taken by Jackie’s outfit: “[I]t was beautiful, and the color seemed to reflect the sun. As she stepped out ahead of the president the crowd seemed awestruck, then started applauding and . . . squealing.”

Jackie and JFK disembark Air Force One in Dallas.

(courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

Waiting for them on the ground were a number of local dignitaries and politicians, including Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had flown to Dallas ahead of the Kennedys. Protocol dictated that LBJ, a Texan, would welcome the president at each stop within the state.

The wife of the mayor presented Jackie with a big bouquet of flowers. The yellow rose was the official state flower, but so many of them had been ordered for the various events the Kennedys were attending in Texas that local florists had run out of them. Instead, the mayor’s wife gave Jackie roses of another kind. “Mrs. Kennedy has been presented her bouquet of brilliant red roses,” the reporter told his listeners, “and they make a lovely contrast to the bright pink suit she’s wearing.” He was right. The bloodred crimson petals looked striking against the pink fabric. The combination of colors seemed to intensify the hue of each, rendering them almost fluorescent.

While the Kennedys greeted the members of the airport reception committee, the journalist encouraged listeners to throng the motorcade route. “The weather couldn’t be better, we have a brilliant sun. . . . Now those of you who are waiting along the parade route, just to be sure that you find yourself in the proper location, let’s give it to you again.”

Lee Harvey Oswald was not listening. He already knew he was in the proper location. He had not brought a portable, battery-powered transistor radio to his window perch. He did not need one to tell him when the president was coming. The crowds would do that for him. When the spectators one block away at the far end of Houston Street saw the motorcade coming up Main Street, they would begin to wave and cheer. Oswald would know the president was nearing Dealey Plaza.

The radio announcer continued: “The party is now ready to depart Love Field. It will go Mockingbird Lane to Lemmon Avenue, then travel south on Lemmon to Turtle Creek, Cedar Springs, through the downtown area to Main. West on Main to Houston, through the triple underpass to Stemmons Freeway, then on to the Trade Mart.”

But JFK’s car did not leave Love Field just then. The reporter said there was some kind of delay, but he could not discover its cause. Then he saw what was happening. “The president is not in his limousine. This is the moment where the Secret Service has its point of tension. As we have talked with many of these Secret Service men in the past few days—they say, when the president stops moving, that’s when we are concerned because that is when the possibility of trouble comes to the forefront.”

JOHN KENNEDY saw that a few thousand people had turned up behind a chain-link fence at Love Field to greet him. Some carried flags and signs, most of which were friendly. Someone brought a Confederate battle flag, a possible sign of protest against the president. Kennedy, who was treating the whole Texas trip like a campaign stop in preparation for the November 1964 election, made an impulsive decision to work the fence line. Jackie, cradling the red roses, followed him.

At that moment, a news photographer named Art Rickerby, who had gotten ahead of the Kennedys, turned around and took a series of color photographs of the couple as they walked side by side toward his lens. The president’s trim blue-gray suit and blue tie and Jackie’s bright pink suit and red roses saturated the camera’s color film. Behind them was the big red, white, and blue American flag painted on the tail of Air Force One. The decorative blue highlights painted on the fuselage of the plane matched the color of the bright blue Texas sky. When the people in the crowd realized the president of the United States was coming over to visit them, they went wild.

“And here comes the president now,” radio listeners were told. “In fact he’s not in his limousine. He’s departed the limousine. He is walking.”

Kennedy strolled right up to the crowd and plunged his hands and arms over the hip-high fence. In response, hundreds of hands grabbed his. “He is reaching across the fence, shaking hands, shaking hands, with many of the people who have come to see him. He is closely accompanied by Dallas police officers and of course the Secret Service.”

Jackie, having just been presented a bouquet of red roses at Love Field in Dallas.

(courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

As Jackie walked the line, women begged to touch her and shrieked with delight if they succeeded. Jackie, who could be timid in crowds, smiled and shook hands with people too. Her big, genuine smile suggested that she was enjoying herself. Charles Roberts, White House correspondent for Newsweek magazine, asked Jackie how she liked campaigning. “It’s wonderful, it’s wonderful,” she said, and seemed to mean it. The limousine crawled along behind the president.

The Kennedys and Texas governor Connally smile at the crowds as the motorcade makes its way from the airport. Agent Clint Hill, in sunglasses, is visible behind Mrs. Kennedy. Nellie Connally is on her husband’s left.

(© by Tom Dillard Collection, The Dallas Morning News/The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza)

“Security is tense at this time but is going beautifully,” gushed the radio reporter.

AFTER KENNEDY shook a last hand, he and Jackie turned to their car. The bubble top was off. They would ride through Dallas in an open car. Earlier that morning, the agents gambled that the gray skies and rain would disappear by noon. Their bet paid off. It was a bright, gorgeous, and sunny fall day.

The president sat in the right rear passenger seat. Jackie took the seat to his left. In front of the Kennedys, sitting at a slightly lower level in folding jump seats that also faced forward, were the governor of Texas, John Connally, and his wife, Nellie. In the front seats sat the driver, Secret Service agent Bill Greer, and the head of the Secret Service detail, Roy Kellerman. Two other Secret Service agents trotted alongside the rear fenders. Behind the president’s car, the Queen Mary convertible was filled with Secret Service agents.

Following behind them were several other vehicles, whose passengers included Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, several Texas politicians, members of the press, and White House staff, including the president’s personal secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. As the motorcade got under way, preceded by a pilot car that drove ahead to spot any trouble, and followed by police motorcycles and a white car carrying the Dallas chief of police, Jesse Curry, a television news camera filmed the Kennedys’ departure from Love Field. Everything was in order. Then the camera caught something odd.

It appeared that Secret Service agent Don Lawton, trotting behind the presidential limousine, was about to reach for the handholds on the back of the car and step up onto the footholds attached to the rear bumper. In that position, he could stand behind the president as the car moved at a slow speed through downtown Dallas. It would be an extra precaution that placed an agent closer to the president. If a spectator rushed the car, Lawton could leap off and intercept him. And if the agent stood erect on the bumper, he could stand between the president and anyone who might try to take a shot at him from behind.

Then a Secret Service agent in the trail car, Emory Roberts, stood up and shouted to Lawton. He motioned him to back off from the president’s limousine. Lawton appeared to object to the order by shrugging his shoulders three times and waving his arms in the air, as if to say, “what are you doing?” But then he walked away from the car.

The television camera captured it all. But this brief vignette was not what it appeared to be. It was just a joke between Lawton and Roberts. Lawton was not even assigned to ride in the motorcade through Dallas. He knew that JFK did not want any agents riding on the limousine, and Lawton thought it would be funny if he pretended to defy the president’s order. It was too bad that it was just a joke. The camera continued to track the limousine until it vanished from sight.

The president and First Lady were on the way to downtown Dallas. The route was ten miles long, and it would take about forty-five minutes to drive it. They were scheduled to arrive at the Trade Mart lunch by 12:30 P.M. Kennedy’s impromptu visit with the crowd at the airport had put him a little behind schedule. If the motorcade experienced no more delays, they should arrive at their lunch by around 12:35 P.M.

THE PRESIDENT’S speech was ready. He would not deliver informal, off-the-cuff remarks as he did that morning in Fort Worth when he stepped outside into the rain to speak to the crowd. No, this was an important stop on the trip. Like the breakfast speech he gave inside the Hotel Texas, his words for the lunch at the annual meeting of the Dallas Citizens Council—his third talk of the day—had been prepared in advance.

He would speak about American exceptionalism—the nation’s role in the world, national defense, foreign aid, and the strength of American science, industry, education, and the free-enterprise system. He planned to criticize naysayers: “There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.” There was more. “But today,” he warned, “other voices are heard in the land—voices preaching doctrines wholly unsuited to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties, doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons . . . and that peace is a sign of weakness.”

The text of the speech echoed many of the themes from his Inaugural Address: “Our adversaries have not abandoned their ambitions, our dangers have not diminished, our vigilance cannot be relaxed. But now we have the military, the scientific, and the economic strength to do whatever must be done for the preservation and promotion of freedom.” Kennedy promised that America’s strength “will never be used in pursuit of ambitions—it will always be used in pursuit of peace.” The speech ended with a full-throated appeal for peace through strength.

“We in this country, in this generation, are—by destiny rather than by choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of ‘peace on earth, good will toward men.’ That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For it was written long ago: ‘except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ ”

THE PRESIDENT was scheduled to deliver another speech that night in Austin. Its text focused more on domestic issues: “For this country is moving and it must not stop. It cannot stop. For this is a time for courage and a time for challenge. Neither conformity nor complacency will do. Neither the fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed. . . . So let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our Nation’s future is at stake. Let us stand together with renewed confidence in our cause—united in our heritage of the past and our hopes for the future—and determined that this land we love shall lead all mankind into new frontiers of peace and abundance.”

At least these were the words he planned to say today. He was in the habit of revising his typewritten speeches with his undecipherable handwriting, often at the last minute. Later in the day, before he gave them, he might look them over once more at the Trade Mart, and on the trip to Austin.

The cover of the glossy dinner program promised John Kennedy an unforgettable “Texas Welcome.” Inside, the brochure printed Governor Connally’s eerie introductory remarks: “This is a day long to be remembered in Texas.”

BACK IN Dealey Plaza, the electric digital clock on the big, yellow Hertz-Rent-a-Car sign atop the Depository roof flashed the time. It was past noon. Buell Wesley Frazier had skipped lunch, and he was already standing near the top step of the Elm Street entrance to the Depository.

Frazier was eager to see John Kennedy: “He was supposed to be coming by during our lunch hour so you don’t get very many chances to see the President of the United States and being an old Texas boy, and [he] never having been down to Texas very much, I went out there to see him just like everybody else.”

While most of Lee Oswald’s coworkers came down from the upper floors for the lunch hour, he proceeded to the sixth floor. A few asked him if he was having lunch or planning to watch the president with them. He lingered behind and gave vague answers. According to what the newspapers said, Kennedy’s car should be in front of the Depository by about 12:15 or 12:20 P.M.

Lee Harvey Oswald was now alone on the sixth floor. He retrieved his rifle, either in pieces from inside the brown paper bag, or already fully assembled. He walked to the southeast corner of the building and settled into his position at the window, behind stacks of book cartons. If anybody came up to the sixth floor, they would not see him now. If the lower window pane was not already open, he slid it up now and secured it in position. He inhaled the fresh, crisp fall air. The breeze hit his face. It was about sixty-five degrees.

If he had looked down Houston Street, he would have heard no sounds nor seen any signs that the motorcade was near. No police motorcycles were in sight yet, and people on the street were not fidgeting or craning their necks the way excited crowds do when a president approaches.

Perhaps Lee adjusted some of the boxes to ensure that no one who came up to this floor could see him as he hid behind them. He still had a few minutes. He checked his rifle. It was ready to fire. One round was already in the chamber. Three more rounds waited in the clip, if Oswald needed to use them.

If he heeded the warnings drilled into him by his Marine Corps training, he would have switched the safety mechanism of his rifle to the on position. That device would prevent the weapon from firing a round accidentally if the shooter dropped and jarred it or snagged the trigger. As long as the safety was engaged, squeezing the trigger would fail to release the firing pin, and the rifle could not fire the chambered round. Once the president came within sight, Oswald could, by disabling the safety with the flick of a thumb, render his weapon lethal in an instant.

He waited in silence. The only sounds were the occasional voices that floated up from the street below before they faded into nothingness.

MINUTE BY minute, President Kennedy’s motorcade drew closer to the Book Depository. The journey through downtown Dallas was more of a parade than a motorcade. On the nation’s streets and highways, the president of the United States traveled at two speeds: fast and efficient to save time and minimize danger, and slow and leisurely to show himself to the crowds and wave to people as he drove by.

On November 22, John Kennedy did not want anyone in Dallas to miss seeing him because his car was traveling too fast.

Accordingly, the Secret Service had slowed the limousine to parade pace of ten to fifteen miles per hour. This made the agents nervous. When the car was topless, as it was today, the agents preferred to ride the running boards—retractable metal shelves protruding from the side of the car. They would also stand on the two steps at the rear of the limousine. Metal bars mounted to the body of the car provided handholds. Having agents stand on the Lincoln gave the president at least some protection. They could try to intercept any objects thrown at the president.

Once, on another trip, someone tossed a bouquet of flowers into the car. It was harmless, but what if had concealed a hand grenade? And the agents’ bodies could block gunfire. This was especially true of the two men assigned to stand on the back steps behind the trunk. The presence of these agents would make it almost impossible for a sniper to shoot the president from behind. Had a Secret Service man been standing on the right rear step when John Kennedy drove through Dealey Plaza, and had Lee Harvey Oswald chosen to shoot the president from behind, the agent’s body would have obscured Oswald’s sight line. The assassination attempt would have failed.

But President Kennedy did not like having his bodyguards ride on the car because he thought it made him look less approachable to the people. On a number of occasions, he complained when agents did so. He often told his “Ivy League charlatans”—his affectionate nickname for them—to get off his car. Today in Dallas, all the men in the security detail knew they risked irritating the president if they rode on the outside of the car during the trip from Love Field, through downtown, through Dealey Plaza, and to the Trade Mart.

The Secret Service hated that open car. But the president and the people loved it.

Aboard Air Force One at Love Field, Dave Powers had given the Kennedys advice on how to behave during the journey: “Mr. President, remember when you’re riding in the motorcade downtown to look and wave only at the people on the right side of the street. Jackie, be sure to look only at the left side, and not to the right. If the both of you ever looked at the same voter at the same time, it would be too much for him!”

The ride through Dallas was a triumph. There were no ugly incidents, and people cheered extra loudly whenever the president drew near. Jackie put on her sunglasses. “The sun was so strong in our faces,” she recalled. But her husband told her to take them off—the people wanted to see her face, he said.

Ken O’Donnell was impressed. “We could see no sign of hostility, not even cool unfriendliness, and the throngs of people jamming the streets and hanging out of windows were all smiling, waving and shouting excitedly. It was by far the greatest and the most emotionally happy crowd that we had ever seen in Texas.”

Kennedy was happy too. O’Donnell noticed that “the President seemed thrilled and fascinated by the crowd’s noisy excitement. I knew he had expected nothing like this wild welcome.”

People waved and clapped. Many snapped photographs or took home movies, which in that era did not record sound. At one point along the route, JFK turned around and looked over his right shoulder in the direction of someone making a home movie. The president smiled, and with a playful hand gesture he beckoned the cameraman to follow along. “Come on!” the president seemed to tease as his car drove past the bystander.

The motorcade made two unscheduled stops. Children held up a homemade sign that asked the president to stop and greet them. When Kennedy spotted the sign, he shouted to his driver to step on the brakes. In the middle of a motorcade surrounded by thousands of onlookers, the gleaming Lincoln limousine halted. The Secret Service agents went on high alert, fearing the president was about to get out of the car and stand up. Kennedy was famous for plunging into friendly crowds and leaving nervous bodyguards behind in his wake. If he did that now, then thousands of excited people would rush forward to try to shake his hand. At Love Field, at least there was a fence. On this street, no barrier separated the president from the throng, just feet away.

The motorcade proceeds through downtown Dallas.

(courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

It was dangerous to stop a motorcade. In 1958, when Vice President Richard Nixon visited Venezuela, an anti-American mob intercepted his car, smashed the windows, almost tipped it over, and came close to murdering him and his wife. Kennedy had the good sense not to leave the car. In Dallas, the children were allowed to approach him.

Then the limousine drove on. At a couple of points, Secret Service agent Clint Hill hopped off the trail car and stepped onto the back of the presidential limousine, assuming a crouching position behind Jackie. From that location he could leap off the car to intercept any pedestrian who rushed the Lincoln, and if he stood up straight, his body would shield her and absorb any bullet fired at her from behind.

But Hill did not stand up, perhaps to avoid an admonition from the president or the head of the Secret Service detail. After a short time, agent Hill stepped off the car and jumped back onto the running board of the trail car. Farther along the route, JFK spotted some Catholic nuns standing curbside. He ordered his driver to pull over for the sisters. A fellow Catholic, the president wanted to pay them his respects. Kennedy remained in the car and soon bade farewell to the delighted nuns.

LEE HARVEY Oswald was not able to see any of this. He never indicated later what was in his mind while, for the second time in his life, he prepared to kill a man. His sniper attack in April on General Walker was an absurd failure. That night he was certain he had his target fixed in the center of his telescopic sight, but his first shot struck the framing of the window screen and that deflected the bullet’s trajectory.

The morning after the Walker shooting, Oswald wondered how he possibly could have missed. He believed his aim was perfect. It was not his fault, he told himself and Marina. Fate had thwarted his plans. He had no time to fire a second shot.

Lee had hidden his rifle and run away into the night. Now, alone in the quiet of the sixth floor, did he think about the ridiculous, failed attempt on General Walker’s life? Did he think of Marina and his two little girls one last time? Did he reconsider? Did he ask himself what on earth he was doing at this window with a rifle in his hands? Oswald left behind no journal, diary, or manifesto, no last-minute letter of explanation or justification to his wife or to the country.

Oswald waited by the window. Whenever his eyes searched Houston Street for the first signs of the motorcade, he had to be careful to not hold the rifle high in his hands. Someone on the ground might spot a man with a rifle and warn the authorities.

Map of Dealey Plaza.

(by Nick Springer/© 2013 by Springer Cartographics LLC)

Finally, the police motorcycles, their red lights flashing, trailed by the lead car carrying the Dallas chief of police, reached the corner of Main and Houston and then turned right onto Houston. The Texas School Book Depository stood one block ahead. Oswald could see the motorcycles first. Then the police chief’s white car. Then he could see what he had been waiting for—the big, gleaming, midnight-blue limousine carrying the president of the United States. (Today, presidential motorcades travel with as many as three hardtop limousines—two decoys, plus one occupied by the president—to confuse potential assassins. In John Kennedy’s era, there was only one.)

From the moment Oswald saw that car turn onto Houston Street, he knew that one of its six occupants had to be John F. Kennedy. Even from a distance, if Oswald fixed his gaze on the car, he must have noticed what appeared to be an unusually bright pinpoint of color toward the right rear of the vehicle. It was Jacqueline Kennedy, her pink suit and pillbox hat glowing like a signal beacon. Indeed, he probably saw her first, before he spotted the president.

Inside the limousine, Nellie Connally was delighted with how well the day had gone. The motorcade had passed through the cheering crowds in downtown Dallas without incident. As the car drove closer to the Book Depository, she turned around to congratulate JFK: “You can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you today, Mr. President.” Kennedy looked at her and smiled.

FROM THE moment Oswald saw the presidential limousine, he knew the odds that he would be able to successfully assassinate President Kennedy had just tipped in his favor. Luck was with him that day. First, Kennedy had come to Dallas. Oswald would have never stalked him on a presidential trip to another city. But now the president had come to him.

It was pure chance five weeks earlier, on October 16, before the details of Kennedy’s Dallas trip had even been planned, that Oswald would start a job at a building that would turn out to be on the motorcade route. Even President Kennedy’s itinerary proved lucky for Oswald. At any other time of day, the Book Depository employees working on the upper floors might have discovered Oswald hiding in his sniper’s nest. But JFK would drive by during lunch hour, when the employees would vacate the upper floors and go down to eat or leave the building to watch the president pass by. By a little after noon, Oswald could expect to have the entire sixth floor to himself. But even this advantage offered no guarantee of success.

As the limousine got closer, Oswald could see that the bubble top was off. This plastic top was not exactly bulletproof, but it would have been protective because a bullet would have needed to penetrate it at a perfect angle in order to get through without being deflected. But this wasn’t something Oswald would have to worry about anymore.

He could also see that no Secret Service agents were standing on the back of the Lincoln. That meant Oswald would have a clear line of sight to John Kennedy’s back once the limousine turned left onto Elm Street and drove past the Texas School Book Depository. Nothing would block his view of the president.

At this moment Oswald was also in imminent danger. Three other men who worked at the Book Depository—James “Junior” Jarman, Harold Norman, and Bonnie Ray Williams—were heading to one of the upper floors to get a bird’s-eye view of the motorcade.

Williams remembered that they had planned to watch the parade from the sixth floor. He had gone downstairs to retrieve his lunch—a chicken sandwich, a bag of Fritos, and a soda. Then he went back up to the sixth floor, sat by a window along the Elm Street side of the building, and ate his meal while he waited for his friends to come back up.

Visibility on that floor was limited: “I couldn’t see too much of the sixth floor,” Williams said, “because the books . . . were stacked so high. I could see only in the path I was standing . . . I could not possibly see anything to the east side of the building. So far as seeing to the east and behind me, I could only see down the aisle behind me and the aisle to the west of me.”

What Williams could not see, concealed just a few dozen feet away from him, behind stacks of book cartons, was Lee Oswald hiding with his rifle. The men were almost within spitting distance of each other. Lee didn’t make a sound, and Williams never realized that someone was lurking near the corner window.

Williams finished his lunch and, impatient for his tardy friends to join him, he took an elevator down to the fifth floor to search for them. If he did not find them there, he planned to go to the first floor and watch the motorcade from street level, in front of the Depository. But there were Norman and Jarman standing along the windows facing the Elm Street side. Hank Norman was right below Oswald’s window, Junior Jarman was two or three windows over, and Williams took a position between them.

They had staked out the windows closest to the far southeast corner of the building, knowing it would give them a great view straight up Houston Street as the president’s car drove toward the Depository and then turned left onto Elm right under their window.

Their perch there gave them a commanding, unparalleled view of Dealey Plaza, better than anyone else waiting for Kennedy that day. Only Oswald—on the sixth floor, right above their heads—could see the president better. Oswald was lucky that the men did not ride the elevator up one more floor, where they might have discovered him hiding with his rifle in his little fort of book boxes.

A man on the street had noticed Jarman, Norman, and Williams looking out the fifth-floor windows. Arnold Rowland was an eighteen-year-old newlywed high-school graduate, taking classes in preparation to attend college and working part time as a pizza maker at Pizza Inn. Rowland and his wife, who was still in high school, finished their classes early and went downtown: “I had to go to work at 4, so we were going downtown to do some shopping. We went early so we could see the President’s motorcade,” Rowland recalled.

They arrived about 11:45 A.M. and spent the next fifteen minutes walking five or six blocks to find a good vantage point. Frustrated, they tried out several locations but could not find one that suited them. They noticed a lot of policemen and commented on the security precautions being taken. By about 12:15 P.M., they had settled on a spot near the Book Depository. Arnold’s watch read 12:14, but when he looked up at the Hertz clock atop the Depository, he observed that his timepiece was running one minute behind. He reset it to quarter past.

More than most people in Dealey Plaza that afternoon, the Rowlands took an unusual and keen interest in presidential security. “It was a very important person who was coming, and we were aware of the policemen around everywhere, and especially in positions where they would be able to watch crowds,” Arnold noted. “We talked momentarily of the incidents with Mr. Stevenson, and the one before that with Mr. Johnson, and this being in mind we were more or less security conscious.”

Then Rowland noticed several people in the windows of the Book Depository: “My wife and I were both looking and making remarks that the people were hanging out the windows . . . the majority of them were colored people, [and] some of them were hanging out the windows to their waist.”

Mrs. Rowland began watching a “colored boy” in one window. Her husband continued to scan the Depository facade. “At that time,” he continued, “I noticed on the sixth floor of the building that there was a man [standing] back from the window, not hanging out the window.” It was then, Rowland explained, that “I saw the man with the rifle.”

Rowland stared at the open window. “He was standing there and holding a rifle. This appeared to me to be a fairly high-powered rifle because of the scope and the relative proportion of the scope to the rifle, you can tell what type of rifle it is. You can tell it isn’t a .22.”

The man stood still, grasping the rifle with both hands, and holding it in front of his body at a forty-five-degree angle, with his right hand near his waist and his left hand near his left shoulder.

The man was light complexioned with dark hair, and “he was rather slender in proportion to his size.” Rowland guessed he might weigh 140 to 150 pounds. The man looked to be “either a light Latin or a Caucasian.” His hair was “either well-combed or close cut.” He was young: “I remember telling my wife that he appeared in his early thirties.” He was wearing, Rowland observed, “a light shirt, a very light colored shirt . . . this was open at the collar . . . it was unbuttoned about halfway, and then he had a regular T-shirt . . . under this . . . he had on dark slacks.”

Rowland thought that the man was standing three to five feet back from the window to avoid being seen but still close enough for the sun to shine on him.

Rowland asked his wife if she wanted to see a Secret Service agent.

“Where?” she asked. He pointed at the Book Depository.

“In that building there.” But he was mistaken. No Secret Service agents had been deployed to the Book Depository.

At that moment, the Rowlands noticed a man in Dealey Plaza who was suffering an epileptic fit. They watched policemen come to his aid and call an ambulance. Then Arnold told his wife to look at the building again, and at the open sixth-floor window at the southeast corner of the Book Depository. But the man was gone. “He is not there now,” he told his wife.

She asked what he looked like. Her husband gave her a brief description of the man, including his clothing—“open collared shirt, light-colored shirt, and he had a rifle.” Mrs. Rowland said she wished she could have seen him, speculating that he had gone to another part of the building to watch the crowd.

The young couple continued discussing the rough treatment that Adlai Stevenson had received in Dallas a few weeks ago. “This was fresh in our mind,” Arnold recalled.

Rowland could not take his eyes off the window. “I [looked at it] constantly . . . I looked back every few seconds, 30 seconds, maybe twice a minute . . . trying to find him so I could point him out to my wife.”

But Rowland never saw anything else in the window.

Another man standing in Dealey Plaza had noticed the epileptic man near the Book Depository too. He was Howard Leslie Brennan, a forty-five-year-old steamfitter employed by the Wallace and Beard construction company. That day he was working on a fabrication for pipe at the Republic Bank Building. At noon he ate lunch at a cafeteria on the corner of Main and Record Streets. When he finished, he glanced at a clock—it read 12:18 P.M.

“So I thought,” he recalled, “I still had a few minutes, [and] that I might see the parade and the President.”

He walked over to the Southwest corner of Houston and Elm, across the street from the Book Depository. It was about 12:22 P.M. A couple minutes later, about twenty yards away from the corner, he noticed the man having an epileptic fit.

Then Brennan walked over to a retaining wall of a little park and jumped up on the top ledge. He sat down on the top of the wall. It was between 12:22 P.M. and 12:24 P.M. Soon another bystander making a home movie of the motorcade captured an image of Brennan sitting atop the wall, wearing his dark gray construction worker’s hard hat and gray khaki work clothes. From here Brennan could survey Dealey Plaza.

“I was more or less observing the crowd and the people in different building windows, including the fire escape across from the [Book Depository] on the east side of the [Depository], and also the [Depository] building windows.”

Then Brennan scanned the upper floors.

“In particular, I saw this one man on the sixth floor [who] left the window . . . a couple of times . . . at one time he came to the window and he sat sideways on the window sill. That was previous to President Kennedy getting there. And I could see practically his whole body, from his hips up.”

Brennan did not see anyone else at any of the other sixth-floor windows.

He did see men in the windows on the fifth floor. “There were people on the next floor down, which is the fifth floor, colored guys.” Brennan had just spotted Junior Jarman, Bonnie Ray Williams, and Harold Norman. Brennan got a good look at them. Later, he was able to recognize the faces of two of the three men.

Just then the motorcade approached Dealey Plaza, and Brennan turned his eyes to the parade. “I watched it . . . as it came on to Houston” and headed to Elm and the Book Depository.

THE CARS following the president copied the turn onto Houston. Oswald could see a whole line of them now—the Secret Service car bearing eight agents—four in the car and four standing on the side running boards—plus longtime JFK aides Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell, then the car carrying Vice President Johnson, then the other vehicles filled with the reporters, White House staff members, and others.

All of the passengers in Kennedy’s car could see the Texas School Book Depository now, looming only one block ahead. And Oswald had a clear view of the president, who was now within range and getting closer with every passing second. Soon Oswald could raise his rifle, place the crosshairs of his scope on Kennedy’s forehead, and squeeze the trigger. One well-aimed shot through the head would be sure to kill him.

Arnold Rowland was eager to see the motorcade too. “As the motorcade came along, there was quite a bit of excitement. I didn’t look back [at the Book Depository] from then. I was very interested in trying to see the President myself. I had seen him twice before, but I was interested in seeing him again.”

Rowland did not realize he had seen something much more important than John Kennedy. A few minutes before the president was about to drive past the Book Depository, Rowland had spotted the man waiting inside to assassinate him.

Oswald was in jeopardy now. He and his rifle had been spotted. What if Rowland found a policeman and told him of what he had seen. Or what if he shouted a warning to the crowd? “There’s a man with a rifle in the window of that building!” Police officers might have run into the street to stop the motorcade in its tracks. It was a historic but fleeting opportunity to save the life of the president of the United States.

“We thought momentarily that maybe we should tell someone,” Rowland admitted. “But then the thought came to us that it was a security agent. We had seen in the movies before where they have security men up in windows and places like that with rifles to watch the crowds, and we brushed it aside as that . . . and thought nothing else about it.”

Rowland remembered films he had seen about the failed attempts on the lives of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt: “Both of these had Secret Service men up in windows or on top of buildings with rifles, and this is why . . . it didn’t alarm me.”

Mrs. Rowland was more interested in looking at Jackie Kennedy than the mystery man in the sixth-floor window. “My wife,” Mr. Rowland remembered, “remarked on Jackie’s clothing.” The pink suit was having its desired effect. “We made a few remarks on [her suit] and how she looked, her appearance in general. . . . Everyone was rushing, pressing the cars, trying to get closer. There were quite few people . . . trying to run alongside the car.”

The couple was still discussing Jackie’s outfit as President Kennedy’s car drove away from them. “My wife likes clothes,” Mr. Rowland explained.

IN DEALEY Plaza, another man waited to get President Kennedy in his sights. He was Abraham Zapruder, a dress manufacturer whose office was nearby. He owned a portable color 8mm Bell & Howell movie camera, a popular compact recorder that served as the unofficial memory maker of the 1960s.

Zapruder walked over to Dealey Plaza with one of his female employees, after another one had encouraged him to bring his camera and film President Kennedy. Zapruder selected an optimal vantage point along Elm Street in the middle of the plaza, on the same side of the street as the Book Depository.

To get a better view above the heads of people gathering to see the president, Zapruder stood on top of a low concrete pedestal. He asked his employee to hold his legs and steady him once the president’s car came into view. It was the perfect spot. From here, Zapruder would enjoy a panoramic vista of the limousine from the time it turned onto Elm Street until it disappeared below the Stemmons Freeway underpass and out of sight.

When the police motorcycles leading the motorcade turned onto Elm Street and came within sight, Zapruder held down the RUN button of his camera and started shooting. But the president’s car had not yet made the turn. To save film, he stopped after a few seconds to wait for John Kennedy.

LEE OSWALD waited too. He was still waiting to get the president in his sights.