CHAPTER 5

“SOMEONE IS SHOOTING AT THE PRESIDENT”

If Oswald shot now, as Kennedy drove toward him, he would have very little room for error. To hit a passenger in a vehicle moving at so close a distance, Oswald would have to lower the barrel of his rifle in a dipping, continuous motion to keep his target sighted. His aim would have to be perfect. If he shot too low, he risked hitting the windshield or the metal horizontal crossbar above the middle of the car used to attach the top. If his aim was a little better, he might hit Governor John Connally, who was sitting in a jump seat in front of the president.

Only if Oswald’s aim and timing were perfect would he hit Kennedy. And he might get off only one shot. To fire a frontal shot, the assassin would have to step forward and poke his rifle through the open window. Even before he aimed and fired, he would be visible, in plain sight, to anyone in Chief Curry’s car, in the presidential limousine, or in the Secret Service trail car. Kennedy’s driver might take evasive action, swerving or accelerating to disrupt Oswald’s aim. Agents might open fire on him, forcing him to duck for cover. The assassination would most likely fail.

And if Oswald got off a shot, the sound of gunfire would draw eyes to the upper floors of the Book Depository. If the police or Secret Service were quick to pinpoint Oswald’s location, he risked capture or death before he could even run down the stairs from the sixth floor to the first. No, the risk was too great. Oswald held his fire as he watched the president’s limousine drive straight at him, until it reached the corner of Houston and Elm and slowed to make its hairpin left turn onto Elm.

A radio reporter in Dealey Plaza described the scene: “The president’s car is now turning onto Elm Street, and it will be only a matter of minutes before he arrives at the Trade Mart.”

In the Secret Service car behind the presidential limousine, Dave Powers looked at his watch and spoke to Ken O’Donnell: “It’s just twelve thirty. That’s the time we’re due to be at the Trade Mart.”

“Fine,” said O’Donnell. “It’s only five minutes from here, so we’re only running five minutes behind schedule.”

By now, the president was passing right below Oswald. If he leaned out of the window now, aimed down, and fired as the president’s car slowed to almost a stop to make the turn, he could hardly miss. But that would expose his position to the rest of the motorcade and to the people in the street. It must have been difficult for the impulsive Oswald to restrain himself. Kennedy was so close that if Oswald had wanted to, he could have thrown a hand grenade out of the window and it could have landed in the president’s lap.

Six floors below Oswald, standing on the front steps of the Depository, Buell Wesley Frazier—the man who had driven Oswald and his rifle to work that morning—got a great view of the president too.

Oswald readied to take full advantage of his well-chosen sniper’s nest. Now the shiny Lincoln entered Abraham Zapruder’s field of vision, and the amateur cameraman started filming again.

Jackie Kennedy shifted her eyes away from the crowd and looked ahead a few blocks to the spot where Elm Street merged into the triple underpass. “We saw this tunnel ahead,” Jackie said. “I thought it would be cool in the tunnel . . . the sun wouldn’t get into your eyes.”

Amos Lee Euins, a fifteen-year-old high-school student, was in Dealey Plaza standing at the corner of Houston and Elm directly across the street from the Depository. Late that morning, about eleven thirty A.M., he was excused from school to watch the motorcade: “The teachers called us and told us the ones who wanted to go downtown to see the President could come down to the office and get an excuse and they could go.”

Euins’s mother drove him from Franklin D. Roosevelt High School to a spot near the motorcade route. She had to go to work, so she left him there alone.

The boy did not even look for a street sign that would tell him what road he was on: “I was just trying to keep an eye on the President.” Euins never forgot what he saw next: “I was standing here on the corner. And then the President came around the corner right here . . . and I was waving, because there wasn’t hardly no one on the corner right there but me. . . . He looked . . . and waved back at me.”

Then Euins looked at the Book Depository. He saw something protruding from a window on one of the upper floors.

It was a long, thin, horizontal object.

At that moment, the boy continued, “I had seen a pipe, you know, up there in the window, I thought it was a pipe, some kind of pipe . . . right as [President Kennedy] turned the corner.”

As Oswald peered out the sixth-floor window and looked to his right, he was facing the president’s back. A single tree partially obstructed his view. Oswald positioned his body in a shooting stance—he was either standing or kneeling before he took his first shot—and thrust the barrel of his rifle through the open window. He might have rested it on a cardboard box of schoolbooks to stabilize his aim. He pointed down and aimed for the back of John Kennedy’s head—the only sure kill shot.

By now several eyewitnesses on the ground had seen the barrel protruding from the window. Amos Euins still thought it was a pipe. Another person spotted a man at the window with a sneer on his face. It was too late for either of them to stop Oswald. The president was now in the crosshairs of Oswald’s scope.

A re-creation of Oswald’s view of the presidential limousine.

(courtesy of the National Archives)

This was it.

Oswald had not lost his nerve.

He was really going to do it.

He squeezed the trigger. Never jerk the trigger back with a quick pull, he learned in the Marine Corps. Squeeze the trigger slowly, apply gradual, increasing pressure. When that pressure reached a few pounds, his trigger released the firing pin. It struck the rear of the bullet in the chamber, instantaneously igniting the gunpowder in the brass cartridge case.

The rifle spit a 6.5mm conical, jacketed lead bullet traveling at 1,700 or 1,800 feet per second at the president of the United States. John Kennedy was close—less than one hundred feet away.

The Book Depository clock read 12:30 P.M.

Abraham Zapruder’s finger maintained constant pressure on his camera’s RUN switch, and he continued filming.

Through his telescopic sight, Oswald expected to see the evidence of his deed. But the president’s body displayed no reaction to being hit by the bullet. He did not recoil from the impact, slump in his seat, or even twitch.

Oswald had missed!

Not only did he fail to shoot Kennedy, he was not even close. He did not hit Jackie, who was sitting a few feet to the president’s left, nor did he hit Governor Connally, who was sitting in front of Kennedy. The shot was so off the mark it had even failed to hit the car, which, at this close range, was a huge target in Oswald’s scope.

But those in the motorcade certainly heard the gunfire. In the car, John Kennedy heard the shot. At that moment he stopped waving to the crowd and lowered his right arm. Jackie heard it too. She had been looking to her left at the people standing along the curb. At the sound of the gunfire, she spun her head to the right and looked to her husband’s side of the car.

“They were gunning the motorcycles,” she remembered. “There were these little backfires. [Then] there was one noise like that. I thought it was a backfire.”

Witnesses heard different things. Some people traveling in the motorcade—and many bystanders along Elm Street—thought it sounded like a firecracker. What kind of jerk would play a joke like that, they wondered. Jack Bell, a reporter for the Associated Press wire service riding in the press-pool car, thought to himself, My God, these Texans don’t ever know to quit . . . they are shooting off firecrackers and cherry bombs.

Others thought it sounded like a car or a motorcycle backfiring. To the pigeons atop the roof of the Depository, it was a sound of danger that caused them to flee to the skies. To others—some of the policeman, Secret Service agents, ex-military men, or hunters in Dealey Plaza that day—it sounded like something else.

It was a rifle shot.

“After the President had passed my position,” steamfitter Howard Brennan observed, “I really couldn’t say how many feet or how far, a short distance I would say,” there was a sound. “I heard this crack that I positively thought was a backfire.” Brennan thought it was a motorcycle.

“Then something, just right after this explosion, made me think that it was a firecracker being thrown from the Texas Book Store. I glanced up.”

The man he had seen earlier in the sixth floor window was back.

He was holding a rifle.

Abraham Zapruder heard it too. It caused him to jostle his camera involuntarily, almost imperceptibly. Through his viewfinder, he, like Oswald, observed no signs of distress to the president or the other passengers. He continued to film the car, keeping it in his sights as it moved slowly in front of him from left to right.

Arnold Rowland also heard the first report. “This I passed off as a backfire, so did practically everyone in the area because gobs of people, when I say gobs, I mean almost everyone in the vicinity, started laughing that couldn’t see the motorcade . . . a lot of people laughed.”

James Worrell, a high-school senior, had decided to cut class to see the president. At around eight A.M., he had hitchhiked a ride to Love Field to watch John Kennedy’s arrival. He got there early, about nine A.M., “and just messed around until the President come in.” But Worrell did not have a good vantage point—“I didn’t get to see him good at all.”

Abraham Zapruder’s Bell and Howell camera.

(courtesy of the National Archives)

So he caught a bus from the airport to downtown Dallas with the hope of intercepting the motorcade as it drove through town. “I just, I don’t know, happened to pick that place at the Depository, and I stood at the corner of Elm and Houston.” When President Kennedy’s motorcade drove by, Worrell was standing with his back to the building, about four or five feet from the wall, facing Elm Street.

When the president’s car had moved “oh, at least another 50, 75 feet on past me,” Worrell heard the sound too. “I heard the first shot, [and] it was too loud to be a firecracker . . . there was quite a big boom . . . just out of nowhere, I looked up . . . just straight up.”

The student tilted his head up at a ninety-degree angle and looked straight back over his head, toward the sky. That’s when he saw it, protruding from a window above him. “I saw about 6 inches of the gun, the rifle. It had . . . a regular long barrel but it had a long stock and you could only see maybe 4 inches of the barrel.”

Buell Wesley Frazier heard the noise too. “Just right after he went by, he hadn’t hardly got by, I heard a sound, and if you have ever been around motorcycles, you know how they backfire, and so I thought one of them motorcycles backfired.”

It did not take Frazier long to realize that it was something else.

Amos Euins had a better view from across Elm Street: “I was standing [there], and as the motorcade turned the corner, I was facing, looking dead at the building. And so I seen this pipe thing sticking out the window. I wasn’t paying too much attention to it. Then when the first shot was fired, I started looking around, thinking it was a backfire. Everybody else started looking around.”

From inside the Book Depository, the three men on the fifth floor knew exactly where the shot had come from—right above their heads, one floor up. Bonnie Ray Williams remembered, “After the President’s car had passed my window, the last thing I remember seeing him do was—it seemed to me he had a habit of pushing his hair back. The last thing I saw him do was he pushed his hand up. . . . I assumed he was brushing his hair back. And then . . . [there] was a loud shot—first I thought they were saluting the President . . . even maybe a motorcycle backfire.”

Williams was not sure where the first shot—if it was a shot—came from. “I really did not pay attention to it, because I did not know what was happening.”

Lee Harvey Oswald had botched the first shot. The same man who had failed to assassinate General Walker had just failed in his attempt to assassinate the president of the United States. But how had he missed? Lee was too good a rifleman and the limousine too close for him to have missed it completely. Even if, in his excitement, he had rushed the first shot, he should have hit someone or something in the car. Chance had played a role in saving General Walker, and it had just saved President Kennedy from the assassin’s first bullet.

At the moment Oswald had trained his scope on JFK, the presidential limousine had driven under an oak tree on the Book Depository side of Elm Street. For a few seconds, the tree’s branches had acted as a semitransparent screen that stood between Oswald and Kennedy. Looking between the branches, Oswald could still see the president, so he had fired that first shot. But before it could find its target, the bullet had probably nicked a tree branch, which deflected its trajectory and probably stripped it of its outer metal jacket. Instead, the bullet struck a concrete curb beyond the limousine on the far side of Elm Street. It is also possible that the bullet had glanced off the horizontal beam of a traffic signal light. The impact showered fragments into the air that hit a bystander in the face and made a small cut in his cheek.

ANYTHING MIGHT happen next. If Kennedy’s driver hit the gas and accelerated the car from its present speed of 12 to 15 miles per hour to just 25 or 30 miles per hour, he could carry the president away from further danger. It might have been enough to just swerve the car violently from right to left. But the driver did not react. The leader of John Kennedy’s Secret Service detail, sitting in the front passenger seat, could have ordered the driver to race out of Dealey Plaza. But he did not. The president himself—a decorated World War II navy veteran who had heard gunshots before—could have shouted orders to get him out of there. But he did not.

What would Oswald do now? He could run away, just as he’d done that night at General Walker’s house. If he stepped back from the window right now and withdrew his rifle, he could hide it between the boxes and return to work and pretend that nothing had happened. If no one on the ground had seen him, he might have reasoned, and if witnesses convinced themselves that the sound had been nothing more than a firecracker or engine backfire, then police might not even investigate the Book Depository. He might escape. Lee Harvey Oswald could go home that night and scold himself for yet another failed attempt to become part of history.

But Oswald did not have a faint heart in Dallas that afternoon. He did not release his grip on the rifle. At the limousine’s present speed and direction, the president would be within range for the next ten to twelve seconds. The clock had started ticking with Oswald’s first shot. Now he prepared to fire a second one.

With his right hand, Oswald grasped the bolt, raised it, pulled it back, and ejected the empty brass cartridge casing, which popped into the air and made a hollow ping when it landed on the wood floor. The ejection of the cartridge caused a spring in the clip to push another round into position in front of the bolt. Oswald slammed the bolt forward, chambered the round, and turned the bolt handle down. He had practiced this movement countless times and had distilled it into one quick, fluid motion.

On the floor below him, Junior Jarman, Harold Norman, and Bonnie Ray Williams had heard the first explosion a few feet above their heads. They heard the brass casing hit the floor. The loud shot sent a vibration through the floorboards and produced a shock wave that rattled the windows.

It was easy for Oswald to track the president in his scope. The car was traveling at a slow speed in almost a straight line down Elm Street away from the sixth-floor window. Thus Oswald did not have to swing his rifle from left to right to track a target moving horizontally. The car’s speed and direction created for Oswald the advantage of an optical illusion in which the car seemed to be almost a stationary object that was slowly getting smaller. All he needed to do was make a small vertical adjustment. He raised the barrel of his rifle a few degrees.

James Worrell watched the rifle barrel: “I looked to see where he was aiming.” It was pointing up Elm Street, tracking the president’s car.

Almost 2.7 seconds had elapsed since Oswald had fired the first shot. No one in the presidential entourage had reacted to it yet. For the second time, Oswald took aim at the back of John Kennedy’s head. Abraham Zapruder continued to film the motorcade. For a few moments, Kennedy disappeared from Zapruder’s viewfinder—a large Stemmons Freeway roadside sign temporarily blocked his view of the limousine and President Kennedy. For the second time, Oswald squeezed the trigger. Three seconds. The president was 190 feet—a little more than 60 yards—away.

3.4 seconds.

The rifle fired.

To Bonnie Ray Williams: “The second shot, it sounded like it was right in the building. . . . And it . . . even shook the building, the side we were on. Cement fell on my head.”

Through wide cracks between the floorboards above their heads, loose debris drizzled down on them. Williams saw it come down: “Cement, gravel, dirt, or something, from the old building, because it shook the windows and everything. Harold [Norman] was sitting next to me, and he said it came from right over our head.”

“No bull shit!” Williams replied, “and we jumped up.”

Then Hank Norman confirmed it came from directly over their heads. “I can even hear the shell being ejected from the gun and hitting the floor.”

Junior Jarman moved toward Williams and Norman and said, “Man, somebody is shooting at the President.”

“No bull shit,” Williams said a second time.

WITH HIS second shot, Oswald missed the president’s head, but the bullet struck Kennedy in the upper back, to the right of his spine, bored a tunnel through his body at a downward angle—because Oswald was shooting from high above the car—and exited through his lower throat.

John Kennedy’s tissue absorbed some of the bullet’s energy, and it exited his body at a slower speed—1,500 to 1,600 feet per second—than it had entered it. Upon exit, the bullet, still deadly, tumbled and struck Governor Connally in the back, exited his chest at 900 feet per second, hit his wrist, and then, its speed reduced to 400 feet per second, lodged in his thigh. Oswald’s bullet had traveled through the bodies of two men and had inflicted serious wounds to both. These multiple impacts had flattened and deformed the bullet’s shape, but it was still in one piece.

Although they had just been shot, President Kennedy and Governor Connally were still alive and conscious . . . and might survive.

For the second time, the sound of gunfire had echoed in Dealey Plaza. If the president had heard this shot, his auditory senses did not register it until after he felt the bullet’s impact. And if he had heard it, he would have known it was a rifle and he was in the process of being assassinated. No one could doubt the sound now.

Side view of the bullet that struck President Kennedy and Governor Connally. Rear view of the same bullet, showing how it was deformed from impact.

(courtesy of the National Archives)

Tom Dillard, chief photographer of the Dallas Morning News, was riding in one of the motorcade’s press cars, and he warned the other passengers: “It’s heavy rifle fire.”

Rowland heard the shot too. “After the second report, I knew what it was. . . . I knew that it was a gun firing.” And it was not a pistol. “It gave the report of a rifle.” “It appeared to me he was standing up and resting against the left window sill, with the gun shouldered to his right shoulder, holding the gun with his left hand and taking positive aim . . . as I calculate a couple of seconds.”

Howard Brennan noticed the direction the barrel was pointing. It was “at somewhat 30 degrees downward and west by south.” In other words, down Elm Street, away from the Depository, in the direction of the railroad underpass.

The rifle was pointed at President Kennedy’s limousine.

Now Brennan lost sight of the presidential limousine. It had gone too far down Elm Street for his eyes to follow. It did not matter. “I knew what he was firing at.”

WESLEY FRAZIER knew it too. “It wasn’t just a few seconds that . . . I heard . . . the same type of . . . sounds, and by that time people was running everywhere, and falling down and screaming. . . . I knew something was wrong . . . somebody was shooting . . . I figured somebody was shooting at President Kennedy.” Frazier froze. “People were running and hollering so I just stood still. I have always been taught that when something like that happened, . . . it is always best to stand still because if you run that makes you look guilty sure enough.”

But Frazier had already done something that would soon make him a subject of suspicion. Five hours earlier, as he drove to work that morning, the rifle that was shooting at the president was lying flat in the backseat of his car. And the man who would fire it had been sitting in the front seat next to him. Frazier would have a lot to explain that afternoon.

SECRET SERVICE agents standing on the running board of the trail car turned their heads and looked over their right shoulders at the Book Depository. The shots sounded as though they had come from behind them. A moment after the second shot, a news photographer, James Altgens, snapped a picture of the front of Kennedy’s limousine and of the Secret Service trail car, freezing the agents in position with their heads turned back to the Depository. The photograph shows something else.

The impact of the bullet propelled President Kennedy’s elbows and forearms up, parallel to the ground, and pushed his clenched fists, thumbs in, toward his throat. He could not move his arms from this position—they were locked in place by nerve damage. In the photo, a white-gloved hand—Jackie Kennedy’s—touched the president’s left forearm.

Dave Powers, riding in the Secret Service car just a few feet behind the president’s, turned to Ken O’Donnell. “Kenny, I think the President’s been shot.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Look at him. He was over on the right, with his arm stretched out. Now he’s slumped over toward Jackie, holding his throat.”

Abraham Zapruder did not capture on film the moment the president was shot. Kennedy was uninjured when he disappeared behind the Stemmons Freeway sign. When he emerged from behind the sign, he had already been hit and had raised his arms. Zapruder kept filming.

Jackie Kennedy knew something was wrong. Governor Connally, an experienced hunter, already knew. He shouted “No, no, no!” and “They’re going to kill us all!”

A Secret Service agent riding in the trail car saw the bullet hit the president and tear a hole in the back of his suit coat. Jackie rotated her body toward her husband. She held his left forearm in her hands. Puzzled, she looked at Governor Connally, who was twisting strangely in his seat. Then she faced her husband again. The startled, wide-eyed expression on his face frightened her. She leaned in closer. Their eyes were just inches apart. Then she seemed to ask, “What’s wrong, Jack?” He did not answer. He could not speak.

Lee Harvey Oswald operated the bolt of his rifle and ejected a second brass cartridge onto the floor. He chambered a third round. He elevated the barrel a few degrees. He took his time. This shot might be his last. Yes, he still had a fourth and final bullet in the clip. But he would probably not have the opportunity to fire it before Kennedy’s car drove out of range, especially if it sped up to interfere with his aim. More time elapsed since the first shot. Seven seconds now.

Secret Service agent Clint Hill, riding the left-front running board of the trail car, knew what was wrong. He leaped off the car and sprinted for the presidential limousine. Fellow agents rooted for him to close the distance before the sniper could fire a third shot. Hill ran as fast as he could. The thirty-one-year-old agent had been with Mrs. Kennedy from the beginning and had protected her on trips all over the world. He had to help her now. She was sitting so close to the president that another rifle shot might blow her head off. If only Hill could get between the Kennedys and the sniper before he fired another shot.

Hill, who was not wearing a bulletproof vest, could block the bullet with his own body and save the president. It was a sacrifice he would be happy to make. He was an excellent athlete and closed on the president’s car fast. Just a few more yards, and he could grab for the big handle on the trunk and yank himself up on the rear foothold. If he could do that he would be a human shield—the assassin would have to shoot through him to get the president. Only Jackie’s agent could save John Kennedy now—the president’s own Secret Service agent had not yet left the trail car. Seven seconds.

Oswald’s second shot was not necessarily fatal. It had not struck Kennedy’s head, spine, or heart. His other vital organs—lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen—were undamaged. The chief danger to the president was shock and loss of blood. But it was a survivable wound. Many soldiers in World War II and the Korean War had survived worse injuries. If the driver gunned the engine and increased the car’s speed to 80 miles per hour, the president could be in the emergency room of nearby Parkland Hospital in less than ten minutes.

Eight seconds. Oswald began to squeeze the trigger. The Newman family, two young parents and their two small children, were standing just a few feet away from the president. Abraham Zapruder kept filming. Nellie Connally held her husband in her arms. As he lost consciousness, he believed he was dying. Bystander Mary Moorman raised her Polaroid camera and prepared to click the shutter. Clint Hill knew he would make it in just a couple more steps. The president remained upright in the backseat. He had not spoken a word. The driver did not race away to escape the gunfire. Instead, the limousine seemed to slow down. Jackie Kennedy gazed into her husband’s uncomprehending eyes. They had been married ten years that fall.

Howard Brennan could see most of the rifle now. “I calculate 70 to 85 per cent of the gun.” And he could see most of the man. “I could see practically his whole body, from his hips up.” He looked to be “a man in his early thirties, fair complexion, slender but neat . . . possibly 5-foot 10 . . . from 160 to 170 pounds.” He was a white man, and he wore “light colored clothes, more of a khaki color.”

Amos Euins watched too. After he heard the second shot, he did not take his eyes off the Depository. “I was still looking at the building. . . . I was looking where the barrel was sticking out.” After the first two shots, the teenager was afraid he might get shot too. For protection, he ducked behind a water fountain. “I got behind this little fountain,” Euins said, but he kept the sixth floor window in sight. “Then he shot again.”

“I could see his hand, and I could see his other hand on the trigger, and one hand was on the barrel thing.” Euins saw that the barrel was tracking JFK’s car as it moved farther away from the Depository. As the distance grew, the gunman thrust more of the rifle out of the window. “After the President’s car had come down the street further . . . he kind of stuck it out more.” When Euins first saw the barrel, only the tip protruded from the window. By the time Oswald was ready to fire for the third time, it looked to Euins like three feet of rifle was visible. “It was enough to get the stock and receiving house and the trigger housing to stick out the window.”

There was nothing Euins or Brennan could do. There was no time to shout a warning. There was no time to find a policeman. Or to stop the man in the window.

Brennan could only watch as the man “fired his last shot.”

8.4 seconds.

The rifle fired.

The president was less than one hundred yards away. The Marine Corps had taught Oswald to shoot at targets with fixed, iron sights—without the aid of a telescopic sight—at distances of two hundred, four hundred, and even six hundred yards.

The accuracy of Oswald’s third shot would determine if the president of the United States lived or died. For Oswald, everything depended on this last bullet. The first two bullets had already guaranteed his infamy. The third would determine whether he was remembered as a failure who missed his chance or as a man of history who changed the future.

AT THE third shot, Bob Jackson, a photographer riding in the same press car as Tom Dillard, glanced at the upper floors of the Depository. “There’s a rifle,” Jackson said, “in that open window!”

Dillard’s instant conclusion was that “they’ve killed him.”

Euins watched Oswald fire the third shot: “I had seen a bald spot on this man’s head. I was looking at the bald spot. I could see his hand, you know the rifle laying across his hand. And I could see his hand sticking out on the trigger part. And after he got through, he just pulled it back in the window.” But the boy could not see Oswald’s face. He did not get a very good look at him. “The cardboard boxes near the window were throwing a reflection, shaded.”

Bob Jackson saw two men on the fifth floor “leaning out and looking up.” Then he saw Oswald’s gun. “[M]y eyes went up to the next window, and I could see the rifle on the ledge and I could see it being drawn in. I could not see who was holding it.”

Jackson’s camera was out of film. That caused him to miss what would have been one of the most dramatic and important pictures in American history—the assassin’s rifle shooting at the president, and possibly an image of Lee Harvey Oswald firing it. In the days ahead, Jackson would have a chance to redeem himself.

Tom Dillard brought his camera up in an instant and snapped a photograph. But it was too late. All he got was a picture of the empty sixth-floor window and of the Depository employees still in the windows one floor below. Oswald had stepped back just in time to avoid being photographed.

Malcolm Couch, a cameraman for WFAA-TV, saw it too: “I looked up and saw about a foot of the rifle going back in the window.”

Brennan kept his eyes on the man in that window. “He drew the gun back from the window as though he was drawing it back to his side and maybe paused for another second as though to assure hisself [sic] that he hit his mark, and then he disappeared.”

WHITE HOUSE reporter Merriman Smith, riding in the front seat of the press-pool car, said out loud that “those were gunshots.” To Bob Clark from ABC News, who was riding in the same car, the three shots sounded “equally loud and equally clear” and were “clearly fired from almost over our head.” Clark was sure that someone “was firing from almost directly above us.” Pierce Allman from WFAA-TV and radio heard it too. “There were three shots. They were very distinct.”

Mrs. Robert A. Reid, a clerical supervisor who had worked at the Texas School Book Depository for seven years, was standing on Elm Street in front of the building: “I was . . . watching for the car as the President came by. I looked at him and was very anxious to see Mrs. Kennedy, I looked at her and I was going to see how she was dressed, and she was dressed very attractive, and she put up her hand to her hat and was holding it on, the wind was blowing a little bit and then [they] went right on by me.”

A few seconds later, Reid heard the three shots. She turned to Mr. Campbell, who also worked at the Depository, and said, “Oh, my goodness, I am afraid those came from our building.” It seemed to her that the shots “came just so directly over my head.” Then she looked straight up. She saw “three colored boys up there, and I only recognized one because I didn’t know the rest of them so well.” It was James “Junior” Jarman. Then she said, “Oh, I hope they don’t think any of our boys have done this.”

THIS TIME Lee Harvey Oswald did not miss.

The third bullet hit John Kennedy in the back of the head and sliced through his thatch of thick, reddish brown hair. It tore a neat hole through his scalp and punched a round hole through the back of his skull. The velocity, the pressure, and the physics of death did the rest. The right rear side of the president’s skull blew out—­exploded really—tearing open his scalp, and spewing skull fragments, blood, and brains several feet into the air, where they hung for a few seconds, suspended in a pink cloud. It splattered the motorcycle windshield and face of a police officer riding close to the left side of the car.

To Clint Hill, the impact resembled the squashing sound of a melon being smashed on cement.

Artist’s depiction of Kennedy’s second wound, the fatal head shot.

(courtesy of the National Archives)

The president of the United States never heard this shot. He lost consciousness the moment the bullet hit him. His wife’s mouth opened wide in shock as his limp body began to tip toward her. “Oh no!” she exclaimed. She was so close to her husband when Oswald shot him in the head that her hair, face, white gloves, and pink suit were all stained with gore. “I could see a piece of his skull coming off,” she said. “It was flesh-colored, not white . . . I can see this . . . piece detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap; his blood and brains were in my lap.”

Powers and O’Donnell watched it happen from just fifteen or twenty feet behind Kennedy’s car. “While we both stared at the President, the third shot took the side of his head off. We saw pieces of bone and brain tissue and bits of his reddish hair flying through the air.”

O’Donnell was horrified. “He’s dead,” he said to Powers. It would be impossible for a man to suffer a wound like that and live.

OSWALD, HIS eye glued to his rifle scope, must have seen the spray of red mist. Then he lowered the stock from his right cheek, operated the bolt, ejected the third cartridge case, and chambered the fourth round. He was ready to shoot again. If he wanted to fire a last round, he had to be quick. He could not take as much time as he had between the second and third shots. He would have to aim this shot by instinct, and maybe even use the iron sights and not the scope. Locating the car in the telescopic sight might take a fraction of a second too long. And Kennedy was slumping over, about to disappear into the backseat. Jackie and Clint Hill presented finer targets, and by now Oswald had a better chance of hitting them than the president. Would he fire his fourth and last round?

He paused, and then he stepped away from the window. His work was done. Now it was time to escape.

The disappearance of the shooter from the window did not convince Brennan that no more shots would be fired in Dealey Plaza. What if there were other gunmen? He did not want to get shot. He jumped off the retaining wall and took cover. “It occurred to me that there might be more than one person, that it was a plot which could mean several people.” He feared that “there were going to be bullets flying from every direction.”

THIS WAS not a suicide mission for Oswald, despite his ritualistic behavior that morning at Ruth Paine’s house. Leaving behind his wedding ring and almost all of his cash symbolized a shedding of worldly things, a fatalism that suggests that Oswald believed he was about to undertake a dangerous—even suicidal—task from which he might never return. At the Book Depository, once he shot the president, he could have surrendered himself to the police as a political prisoner. Once upon a time, he had fancied the romanticism of that. “If I am taken prisoner . . . ” he had written last April in that frightening note of instructions to Marina before he went off to assassinate General Walker. But this morning, although he had left his ring and cash, he left no note, letter, or political manifesto on the bedroom dresser.

No, Lee Oswald was not ready to give up. His heart raced. Adrenaline pumped through his system. His survival instincts kicked in and whisked him away from the sixth floor window. He had done it. He had summoned all the will and the discipline buried inside him to shoot John F. Kennedy. And he had done what no man had ever done before—he had become the first presidential assassin to ever commit the act from long distance, with a rifle. But this was no time for self-congratulation. He had to get out of that building.

Photograph taken moments after Oswald fired the third shot and disappeared from the sixth-floor window.

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

JACKIE KENNEDY panicked. She saw that something had fallen onto the dark blue, mirrored finish of the limousine trunk. It was a piece of her husband’s skull. She rose from the backseat, turned around, kneeled on the blue upholstery, and reached for the top of the trunk. She was fully exposed to the assassin now. If Oswald had lingered in the window and desired to fire a fourth shot, he could have used his last bullet to kill Jackie. Still kneeling on the backseat, she stretched her body toward the skull fragment. The president, she might have convinced herself, would need that piece of his head when the doctors fixed him at the hospital.

Clint Hill could not believe what he was seeing. If the car accelerated now, Jackie might be thrown onto the trunk, slide off it, fall to the pavement, and get run over by the Secret Service car. He lunged forward and caught the left handle mounted on the back of the limousine. He’d made it! But at that moment, the car lurched forward, and Hill lost his footing. Unless he released his grip, in another second the car would drag him down to the pavement. The “Queen Mary,” traveling just a few yards behind SS-100-X, would run him over and kill him.

But he would not abandon Mrs. Kennedy. He mustered all the strength he had and pulled hard against the handle, yanked his body up, and caught a tenuous foothold on the step. Then he launched his body across the trunk, gathered Jackie in his arms and pushed her back into the car. He used his body to cover her and the president.

Later, Jackie had no memory of this terrifying scene. Clint Hill never forgot it: the president was lying faceup in her lap, and she shouted, “My God, they have shot his head off!”

Hill looked at the president, appalled at what he saw: “The right rear portion of his head was missing.”

As the car sped away, other agents saw Hill pound his fist on the trunk and shake his head in despair. Then he signaled them with a thumbs-down. The president’s car accelerated and, along with the trailing Secret Service car, reached the shadows of the triple underpass and disappeared from the view of the dumbfounded witnesses in Dealey Plaza and the rest of the motorcade.

Abraham Zapruder was so shaken by what he had just seen, he lost the ability to speak coherently.

In Vice President Johnson’s car, Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood yelled “Get down,” climbed from the front seat into the back, pushed LBJ to the floor, and covered him with his body to protect him from gunfire. The car raced after the others. Inside, Lyndon Johnson had no idea whether President Kennedy was dead or alive.

The radio reporter in Dealey Plaza described what he saw: “It app . . . It appears as though something has happened in the motorcade route. Something, I repeat, has happened in the motorcade route. There’s numerous people running up the hill alongside Elm Street. Several police officers are running up the hill. . . . Stand by. Just a moment please . . . Parkland Hospital—there has been a shooting—Parkland Hospital has been advised to stand by for a severe gunshot wound. I repeat, a shooting in the motorcade . . . the president’s car is now going past me. The limousine is now traveling at a very high rate of speed . . . it appears that someone in the limousine might have been hit by the gunfire.”