Lee Oswald abandoned his three spent brass cartridges where they fell and, still gripping his rifle, ran the 96-foot diagonal length of the sixth floor, heading for the back stairs. He shoved the weapon—horizontally, scope up—into a narrow space between two stacks of boxes. Now, as he raced down the stairs, he possessed no evidence that would link him to the shooting. Oswald descended the floors—fifth, fourth, third—and encountered no one coming up. When he reached the second floor, he must have heard someone below him ascending the stairs because he ducked into the lunchroom.
A Dallas policeman, the first one to enter the Depository after the shooting, found the building manager, Roy Truly, and together, they hurried up the stairs. When the policeman reached the second floor, he spotted Oswald through a window in the lunchroom door, ordered him to stop, and asked the manager if Oswald worked there. When Truly answered yes, the policeman let Oswald go and continued racing to the roof.
Oswald was lucky. It was a spectacular error for the officer to assume that the assassin was not an employee at the Depository.
MRS. REID had hurried back to the front door of the Depository after the third shot. “It was just a mass of confusion,” she said. “I saw people beginning to fall, and the thought that went through my mind, my goodness, [was that] I must get out of this line of shots. They may fire some more.” So she sought shelter: “I ran into the building . . . I ran up to our office.”
She passed through the lobby, went up the stairs, and, within two minutes of the last shot, Mrs. Reid entered the front door to her second-floor office. That office had two doors—the one she had just entered and another in the back.
Oswald was still in the building. He continued his descent. He had just had a close call with Officer Baker and Mr. Truly. More policemen would rush up the stairs soon. He needed to get out of the building fast. Within a minute or two, the police and Secret Service might seal off all the exits.
As soon as Mrs. Reid walked several feet past her desk, a man entered the office through the back door. She and the man faced each other. It was Lee Harvey Oswald.
“Oh, the President has been shot” she told Lee, “but maybe they didn’t hit him.”
Oswald mumbled something unintelligible to her.
She did not regard her coworker as suspicious. “I didn’t pay any attention to what he said because I had no thoughts . . . of him having any connection with it all because he was very calm. He had gotten a coke and was holding it in his hands, and I guess . . . I thought it was a little strange that one of the warehouse boys would be up in the office at the time, not that he had done anything wrong.”
Oswald strode past her, walked out the front door of the office, and descended the stairs to the first-floor lobby. He was headed for the first-floor exit onto Elm Street.
OSWALD COULD have chosen to escape via the back door, the one through which he and Buell Wesley Frazier—and the rifle—had come in to work that morning. A man with something to hide might have preferred to sneak out the back way and run. But evidently Oswald shared Frazier’s philosophy—if you run, people will just think you are guilty. To avoid suspicion, Oswald decided to walk out right through the front door.
At that moment, a man grabbed Oswald—the assassin thought the man was a Secret Service agent—but he only asked Oswald where he could find the nearest telephone. It was just a reporter, Robert MacNeil. Oswald gave him directions.
Then, as policemen and citizens converged near the front door of the Texas School Book Depository, and as Dealey Plaza devolved into the chaos of sirens, police radios, shouting, and people running in every direction—Lee Harvey Oswald strolled away from the scene of his crime. He had shot the president, and he had, at least for now, escaped. Seven months after his failed attempt to slay General Walker, his second attempt to shoot a man had proven more successful.
In the press-pool car, Merriman Smith of United Press International, a news service that distributed reports to media outlets all over the world, grabbed for the radiotelephone mounted near him in the front seat. Another reporter sitting behind him, Jack Bell from the rival Associated Press news service, grabbed for the phone too. The two newshounds struggled over their only link to the outside world. Neither would give it up. Each wanted the credit for transmitting the first news of the shooting to the world. The men almost came to blows. Smith won the struggle and wrenched the phone away.
Just four minutes after Oswald’s first shot, at 12:34 P.M., Smith communicated a brief message to his employer: “THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED TODAY AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.”
Bonnie Ray Williams remembered that after the gunshots, he and his two coworkers “got kind of excited . . . we all decided we would run down to the west side of the building.” He said they saw policemen and others, “running, scared, running—there are some tracks on the west side of the building, railroad tracks. They were running towards that way. And we . . . know the shots practically came from over our head. But since everybody was running . . . to the west side of the building, towards the railroad tracks, we assumed maybe somebody was down there. And so we ran all that way, the way that the people was running, and we was looking out the window.”
Hank Norman said, “Man, I know it came from [above our heads]. It even shook the building.”
Then Norman said to Williams, “You got something on your head.”
James Jarman spoke. “Yes, man, don’t you brush it out.”
Then Jarman added, “Maybe we better get the hell out of here.”
Williams concurred. “And so we just ran down to the fourth floor and came on down.” Why didn’t they run up to the sixth floor? “I really don’t know. We just never did think about it . . . going up to the sixth floor. Maybe it was just because we were frightened.”
Jarman reminded Hank, “That shot probably did come from upstairs, up over us,” and Hank said, “I know it did, because I could hear the action of the bolt, and I could hear the cartridges drop on the floor.”
If they had quickly run across the fifth floor and bounded up the staircase, they might have encountered Oswald on his way down. Even if Oswald had already descended below the fifth floor, they would have been close enough to him on the staircase to have heard him running down it. Again, luck was with Oswald this day.
HOWARD BRENNAN watched as law enforcement officers started to run west past the Book Depository. They were going the wrong way! “They were directing their search,” he observed, “toward the west side of the building and down Houston Street,” toward the underpass and the railroad tracks.
He decided to do something. “I knew I had to get to someone quick to tell them where the man was.” He walked fast or ran across the street and found a police officer standing near the corner of the Book Depository. “I asked him to get me someone in charge, a Secret Service man or an FBI. That it appeared to me that they were searching in the wrong direction for the man that did the shooting.”
Brennan said that the gunman was definitely in the Depository.
“Just a minute,” the cop said. Then he took Brennan to a car parked in front of the building. Inside was agent Forrest Sorrels. Brennan told Sorrels what he had seen. As Sorrels discussed the information with some other law enforcement officers, two of the three men that Brennan had spotted looking out the fifth-floor windows emerged from the front door of Book Depository and ran down the front steps, close to where Brennan was now standing. “That’s them!” exclaimed Brennan. “Those were the two colored boys that was on the fifth floor . . . on the next floor underneath the man that fired the gun.” They got no farther and were brought in for questioning.
THE ROUTE to Parkland Hospital would take President Kennedy right past the Trade Mart, where a thousand people awaited his arrival. Ron Jenkins, a reporter for Mobile Unit 6 at station KBOX, was in position outside the Trade Mart. He saw that the limousine was approaching too fast. It should be slowing down to pull up to the building.
“The presidential car is coming up now,” he reported. “We know it is the president’s car. We can see Mrs. Kennedy’s pink suit. There is a Secret Service man spread eagle on the top of the car.”
As Jenkins watched the motorcade speed past him, the wail of multiple sirens almost drowned out his voice. “Something is wrong here,” he warned, “something is terribly wrong.”
BACK IN Dealey Plaza, Arnold Rowland and his wife already knew something was terribly wrong. He regretted his silence about the man in the window.
“I never dreamed of anything such as that,” that the man he saw in the window could be an assassin. “Perhaps if I had been older,” the eighteen-year-old ruminated, “and had more experience in life it might have made a difference. It very well could have.”
Many things might have made a difference. If Lee Harvey Oswald had succeeded in assassinating General Walker seven months ago in April, perhaps his thirst for blood would have been sated. And if Marina Oswald had reported that attempted murder to the police, perhaps on November 22 her husband would have been languishing in jail instead of lurking in a sixth-floor window. At least the police would have confiscated his rifle.
If Lee Oswald had obtained permission that fall to return to Russia or enter Cuba, perhaps he would not have been in Dallas this day. If Ruth Paine and Linnie Mae Randle had not helped Lee get a job at the Texas School Book Depository, perhaps he would not have been working in a tall building along President Kennedy’s motorcade route. If Marina had disposed of her husband’s rifle when she had discovered it in Ruth Paine’s station wagon after her trip back home from New Orleans to Texas, perhaps Lee would not have bought another one. If on the night of Thursday, November 21, Marina had agreed that she and the girls would move to a new apartment in Dallas with Lee, perhaps that gesture of love would have turned his heart away from murder. If Marina had just moved the rifle from its hiding place in Ruth Paine’s garage, perhaps Lee would not have found it in time to bring it to work on the morning of Friday, November 22.
There were other ifs. If on that morning the weather forecast for cloudy skies and precipitation over Dallas had proven true and the Secret Service had installed the rainproof plastic bubble top on the president’s limousine, perhaps it would have deflected any bullets fired at the car. If John Kennedy had not been so stubborn about his habit of riding through cities in a convertible, perhaps Oswald would have never tried to kill him. If Kennedy’s agents, the “Ivy League Charlatans,” had disobeyed their boss and had stood on the back of the open car during the motorcade, perhaps Lee Harvey Oswald might never have had a clear shot at the back of JFK’s head. If Oswald had never enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, perhaps he would have never learned the marksmanship skills he needed to shoot JFK. If Junior Jarman had peeked behind the boxes in the southeast corner when he went up to the sixth floor to eat his lunch, perhaps he would have surprised his coworker hiding in his sniper’s nest. If Bonnie Ray Williams and Harold Norman had gone up to the sixth floor to watch the parade with Jarman, perhaps they would have stopped Oswald from ever firing a second shot—or a third one. If Arnold Rowland had told someone that there was a man with a rifle in the window, perhaps the assassination might have been prevented. And if Special Agent William Greer had swerved or accelerated the limousine after the second shot, perhaps the president would have survived his wound and Oswald would have missed the third shot, just as he had the first.
Ten minutes after the shooting, at 12:40 P.M. (CST), at the New York headquarters of CBS News, the television network interrupted its regular programming and displayed its company logo on television screens across the nation. CBS did not possess the technology to interrupt scheduled, pretaped programming and get a reporter’s face on the air immediately. The television camera needed twenty minutes to warm up, and it was not even in the vicinity of the news desk. At first, CBS could broadcast only a voice. Walter Cronkite, one of the most important journalists on television, spoke in an urgent, clipped tone: “Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.”
Marina Oswald, knowing that the president was in Dallas, had been watching television all morning. The black-and-white images flickering on the screen were a poor substitute for the full-color, live, and in-person sights she would have enjoyed if Lee had granted her wish to see the president’s motorcade. She had not even gotten dressed yet.
When Ruth Paine left the house earlier in the morning to take her children to a doctor’s appointment, she had left the television on for Marina. When Ruth returned home not long after one P.M., she joined Marina in front of the TV. She told Marina, who could hardly speak English, that the announcer on TV had just said the president had been shot. Marina was stunned.
“It was hard for me to say anything,” Marina said. “We both turned pale. I went to my room and cried.”
Ruth told Marina there was more news: “By the way,” Ruth said, “they fired from the building in which Lee is working.”
Right away her instincts made her suspect him. It could not be. But if the shots had been fired from the School Book Depository, how could it not have been him? There was only one way to know.
“I then went to the garage to see whether the rifle was there, and I saw that the blanket was still there, and I said, ‘Thank God.’ ”
She did not try to pick up the blanket. “I didn’t unroll the blanket. It was in its usual position, and it appeared to have something inside.”
Seconds after Cronkite announced the news, another printed bulletin was thrust into his hands. Listeners could hear him shuffling papers as he spoke. “More details just arrived. These details about the same as previously. President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy. She called, ‘Oh no!’ The motorcade sped on. United Press says that the wounds for President Kennedy perhaps could be fatal.”
The nation waited in suspense. Would the president live or die? Everyone knew the story of PT-109 and John Kennedy’s close brush with death during the Second World War. Maybe he would beat the odds again. Millions of people began to hope and pray that Kennedy’s wounds were not fatal. Only a handful of people—Clint Hill and some of the Secret Service detail and Merriman Smith and a few other journalists—knew the awful truth. But Smith was reluctant to report it without official confirmation from the White House staff.
Once the CBS network was able to broadcast both image and sound, Cronkite appeared on camera for the first time and continued to read news bulletins. It was the beginning of four unprecedented days of television coverage on all the national networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC. Within one hour of the shooting, more than three quarters of the American people knew what had happened.
AS LEE Oswald walked down Elm Street, the driver of President Kennedy’s car raced to Parkland Hospital, and Dallas police officers radioed ahead to advise the emergency-room staff to stand by to receive the victim of a severe gunshot wound. On the hands of a clock, it was a brief ride. In the minds of the five unwounded passengers, it seemed to go on forever.
The two Secret Service agents in the front seat could do nothing to help the president other than get him to the hospital as fast as possible, reaching speeds of more than 80 miles per hour.
In the jump seats behind the agents, Nellie Connally tended to her stricken husband. His wounds were painful, he was losing blood, and he lapsed in and out of consciousness. As Nellie held him in her arms, she promised him that everything would be all right.
Behind the Connallys, the backseat was a tangle of intertwined arms and legs and bodies. After Clint Hill had saved Jackie from falling to the street and pushed her back inside the car, she grabbed the president and held him close. Hill sprawled on top of Jackie and the president to shield them from any further gunfire. In his awkward, spread-eagled position over Kennedy and his wife, it was hard to hang on as the car reached top speed. The wind blew the sunglasses off Hill’s face.
As the car sped on, Jackie cried out, “They’ve shot his head off! I have his brains in my hands.”
Then she was heard speaking to her husband: “Jack, Jack, can you hear me? I love you, Jack. Jack, Jack, what have they done to you?” He did not answer.
Under Hill’s human shield, the Kennedys rode to Parkland in contorted, sideways positions, lying partly on the backseat and partly on the floor. Blood pooled in the footwells of the floor.
Jackie tried to close Kennedy’s gaping wound with her hands. “I tried to hold the top of his head down, maybe I could keep it in . . . but I knew he was dead.”
She remembered the puzzled, astonished look Oswald’s bullet had frozen on the president’s face. “His head was so beautiful,” she said.
LESS THAN ten minutes after the third shot, the presidential limousine careened into the emergency-room driveway at Parkland Hospital, followed by the Secret Service trail car and the vice president’s vehicle. Agents leaped out with guns drawn. One agent brandished an automatic rifle.
There were no medical carts awaiting the stricken president at the entrance. Some Secret Service agents ran inside and yelled for a cart. Hospital staffers rolled two to the car. They lifted the broken body of Governor Connally from his seat, and his wife exited the vehicle.
The president’s bodyguards wanted to snatch him from the backseat as quick as they could and rush him inside. Time, they believed, was of the essence. Once Clint Hill got out of the car, the other agents got a clear view of the backseat for the first time. Other cars from the motorcade arrived at Parkland. Dave Powers ran up to the limousine, looked inside, and gasped: “Oh, my God, Mr. President, what did they do?”
Jackie told him, “Dave, he’s dead.”
Agents bent over Kennedy to lift him out of the car, but Jackie would not let him go. She had wrapped her arms tight around him and cradled his head in her lap. She curled over him in a protective embrace. She ignored the agents’ request. Please, they told her, they needed to get the president inside so the doctors could treat him. Clint Hill, the agent she trusted most, beseeched her to release her husband.
“Please, Mrs. Kennedy,” he said.
She would not budge.
“Please,” Hill begged, “we must get the president to a doctor.”
Jackie said no. “I’m not going to let him go . . . you know he’s dead. Let me alone.”
Lyndon Johnson arrived at Parkland. During the wild ride from Dealey Plaza, the Secret Service had already assigned some of the president’s agents to Johnson. Emory Roberts said to agent Bill McIntyre, “They got him. You and Bennett take over Johnson as soon as we stop.” In the car, Johnson’s agent Rufus Youngblood told him, “An emergency exists. When we get to where we’re going, you and me are going to move right off and not tie in with the other people.”
Johnson replied, “OK, partner.” As soon as the vice president’s car arrived at the hospital, Youngblood and other agents hustled him inside. JFK was still in his limousine, and the agents did not allow Johnson to approach the president’s car. They feared other assassins might be after Johnson. Lady Bird glimpsed a splash of color—a pink suit—as she was rushed into Parkland. Youngblood asked a hospital staffer to lead the Johnson party to a quiet, out-of-the-way room. When they got there, LBJ leaned against a wall and gazed into Lady Bird’s eyes. “Lyndon and I did not speak. We just looked at each other, exchanging messages with our eyes.”
Ken O’Donnell came to the room. “It looks pretty bleak. I think the president is dead.”
When the first reporters arrived at Parkland, the president had still not been removed from the limousine. Merriman Smith was the first journalist to see the wounded John Kennedy. “We skidded around a sharp turn and spilled out of the pool car as it entered the hospital driveway.” Smith ran to the side of limousine. “The President was face down on the back seat. Mrs. Kennedy made a cradle of her arms around the president’s head and bent over him as if she were whispering to him. . . . I could not see the president’s wound. But I could see blood splattered around the interior of the back seat and a dark stain spreading down the right side of the president’s dark gray suit.”
Bob Clark joined Smith beside the car. “They simply let us go up and stand as close as we could. We were standing literally a couple feet from the car, starring down at Kennedy. He was stretched out in the back seat. He was lying with the side of his head exposed and his head in Jackie’s lap. I was not conscious of any wound to the head, so that part of his head was hidden, probably deliberately by Jackie. It was just a frozen scene. Jackie was sitting there, saying nothing.”
Smith spoke to agent Hill, who was still leaning over the back seat. “How badly was he hit, Clint?”
“He’s dead.”
CLINT HILL’S intuition and close relationship with Jackie told him why she was covering her husband’s head with her arms and her body. She did not want anyone to see him that way. Hill showed her he understood. O’Donnell knew too: “She did not want strangers looking at her husband’s broken and bleeding head.” Hill removed his suit coat.
“Hill threw his coat over Jack’s head,” Jackie remembered, “and I held his head to throw the coat over it.” Now no one standing there would see the president’s horrible wound or his eyes fixed wide open in a stare.
Jackie released her hold, and Secret Service men lifted John Kennedy’s unconscious body from the backseat. They brought him inside the hospital at 12:38 P.M. (CST). It was eight minutes since he had been shot.
KBOX reporter Ron Jenkins had chased the president’s limousine from the Trade Mart to Parkland. By the time his mobile unit got there, police officers had blocked the entry. Still on the air, Jenkins reported that a policeman was shouting “No. You cannot come in here! You cannot come in here!” Jenkins tried to find a back way into the building.
Back in Dealey Plaza, just a few minutes after the assassination, another local reporter broadcast his report: “This is Pierce Allman from the Texas School Book Depository building for WFAA News.” Allman summarized what he had just seen and heard: “Just a few minutes ago, the president of the United States turned from Houston Street onto Elm Street on his way to a scheduled luncheon appearance at the Stemmons Trade Mart.”
The journalist sounded out of breath, as though he had been running. “And as he went by the Texas School Book Depository, headed for the triple underpass, there were three loud, reverberating explosions. Nobody moved. Everyone seemed stunned. A few seemed to look around, wondering ‘who has the firecrackers?’ Then suddenly the Secret Service men sprang into action. The convertible bearing the president and Mrs. Kennedy sped away and officers, both plain clothes and uniformed, seemed to spring from everywhere at once, guns drawn, ordering people to lie flat.”
Allman chased down and interviewed motorcade spectators. “There are two witnesses who were near the president’s car at the time of the explosions who say that shots were fired—from which upper window we do not know. We do not and cannot confirm the reports at this time that the president has been shot. One witness says that he definitely was shot—that he was shot twice—that he saw the president slump in his seat. As I say, this is not confirmed at this time. From where I am the police have two witnesses. They are bringing them in now.”
The journalist had managed to slip inside the building before police sealed it off. “I am in the Texas School Book Depository. . . . We will try to learn more and relay word to this station.”
LEE HARVEY Oswald was on the run—and he did not have much of an escape plan. If he had owned a car, he could have driven himself out of the city and as far away from Dallas as he could get, possibly fleeing the country to Mexico. But he did not even know how to drive.
Lee Harvey Oswald was no John Wilkes Booth. After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Booth had a fast horse standing behind Ford’s Theatre, a planned escape route, and the names and locations of sympathizers who might help him during his escape south from Washington.
Oswald had no one. He walked seven blocks on Elm Street, then at 12:40 P.M. (CST), he flagged down a passing city bus that was headed in the direction he wanted to go. Although Oswald was not standing at a scheduled bus stop, the driver opened the door and let him board anyway. Its route would take Oswald past the Book Depository, back to the scene of his crime. He might have enjoyed witnessing the chaos he had created. But before the bus could get near the Depository, heavy traffic slowed its pace to almost a standstill.
Did he recall the last time he had tried to escape on a bus? The night he tried to murder General Walker, it was dark, and traffic was light. He had enjoyed a smooth ride home. That would not happen today.
It was absurd. The man who had just shot the president of the United States was stuck in traffic, trying to flee on a public bus. Realizing the ridiculousness of his position, Oswald stood up, walked to the front of the bus, took a transfer, and asked the driver to let him off. Within a few minutes, at about 12:47 P.M. (CST), he caught a taxi to his rooming house. Oswald did not want the driver to know where he lived, so he did not give him his numbered address but had the taxi drop him a few blocks away from his rooming house. From there Oswald walked to 1026 North Beckley Street. When he arrived, the proprietor of the rooming house was watching news of the assassination on television.
She told Oswald that Kennedy had been shot. He said nothing. He hurried to his room, changed jackets, picked up his revolver and some ammunition. Then, after a couple of minutes, he left at 1:03 P.M. (CST) without saying a word. No one knows what Oswald planned to do next. Perhaps he hoped to get to the bus station and buy a ticket to Mexico—he still had enough money on him for that, although not for much more. If he hoped to escape capture, he needed to flee Dallas.
Soon a roll call of employees at the Book Depository would reveal that only one man could not be accounted for—Lee Harvey Oswald.
AT THE Trade Mart, a rumor spread from table to table that President Kennedy had been shot. New York Times reporter Tom Wicker witnessed it. “It was the only rumor that I had ever seen; it was moving across that crowd like a wind over a wheat field.”
AT PARKLAND, the Secret Service agents and hospital staffers rushed the president into trauma room one. Assistant White House press secretary Malcolm Kilduff watched as Jackie Kennedy, “her hair flying and dripping with blood,” helped push the stretcher through the halls. They lifted the president from the cart and laid him on his back upon the examination table. Nurses cut away his clothing. Doctors looked for his vital signs. He had no blood pressure. He was not breathing. His heartbeat was sporadic and weak. The pupils of his eyes were dilated and fixed. The doctors inserted tubes into his veins. They gave him blood transfusions. They cut a tracheotomy in his throat to improve his breathing.
From throughout Parkland Hospital, doctors rushed to the emergency room. Some thought they could help. Others were unneeded voyeurs who wanted only to lay eyes upon the president so that one day they could say that they had been there.
Jackie spoke to Powers and O’Donnell. “Do you think he still has a chance?” The longtime, faithful aides knew better but could not say it. “I did not have the heart,” O’Donnell recalled, “to tell her what I was thinking.”
Merriman Smith found a telephone inside the hospital, called his office at 12:39 P.M. (CST), and dictated another bulletin: “FLASH FLASH KENNEDY SERIOUSLY WOUNDED . . . PERHAPS FATALLY BY ASSASSINS BULLETS.”
Without official confirmation, Smith did not want to report what Clint Hill had told him—that the president was already dead.
A radio station interrupted a program of music with this announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, here is a bulletin from the WQMR newsroom. An unknown sniper has fired three shots at President Kennedy in Dallas. Repeating this bulletin . . . received from the United Press. A sniper has fired at President Kennedy.”
The announcer continued: “Now the remainder of the bulletin just clearing says that a sniper has seriously wounded the president in downtown Dallas. Repeating, the United Press says that a sniper seriously wounded President Kennedy in downtown Dallas today, perhaps fatally.”
While doctors worked on the president, some of the Secret Service agents worked on the car. To prevent curiosity seekers from peering into the backseat or news reporters from snapping photographs of the blood and gore, agents mounted a top—a hardtop, not the clear plastic bubble top—to the convertible. Then they got steel buckets filled with water and towels and began to wash the backseat and the floor. Time magazine reporter Hugh Sidey watched. “It was an eerie scene. A young man, I assume he was a Secret Service man, with a sponge and a bucket of red water . . . was trying to wipe up the blood and what looked like flakes of flesh and brains in the back seat. The red roses were in the front seat.”
The president’s limousine at Parkland Hospital. Secret Service agents attached a hardtop and tried to wash away the president’s blood. Note the bucket on the ground.
(Cecil Stoughton, courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)
It was a stupid thing to do. The car was a crime scene and full of evidence. Everything in it, including possible bullet fragments, should have been left as is and preserved for the investigation that was sure to follow the assassination. It was as though they believed, through some faulty logic, that if they could just wipe away the evidence of the crime, they could turn back the clock and pretend it had never happened. Try as they might, the agents could not wash away all the blood. It was like a scene from Macbeth, Shakespeare’s violent play of murder and revenge, when “all great Neptune’s ocean” would not “wash this blood clean from my hand.” Jackie recalled what else lay in the car. “Every time we got off the plane that day, three times they gave me the yellow roses of Texas. But in Dallas they gave me red roses. I thought, how funny, red roses—so the seat was full of blood and red roses.”
JACKIE KENNEDY approached the trauma room and tried to enter. “I’m not going to leave him. I’m not going to leave him,” she told Dave Powers.
A burly nurse tried to block her way. It was against hospital policy for family members to enter the room. Jackie told her she was going in and pushed the nurse. The nurse pushed back. “I want to be with him when he dies,” Jackie insisted.
A navy admiral on the president’s staff rushed to her aid.
“It is her right,” he commanded, “it is her prerogative.”
The nurse shrank away. Jackie walked into the room where desperate surgeons worked to save her husband’s life.
The appearance of the president’s wife, a haunting pale figure in the bright pink suit, shocked the doctors. One of them suggested that she might want to leave and wait outside.
“But . . . it’s my husband,” she said, “his blood, his brains are all over me.”
Blood streaked her face, saturated her white gloves, and stained her suit and stockings. She nudged one of the doctors, and without speaking she held out her cupped hands. She was holding a part of the president’s brain. Dazed, in shock, perhaps she thought they would need it. Maybe they could put it back inside his head. She handed it to the doctor.
If John Kennedy had been any other patient, the doctors would have already pronounced him dead, perhaps even dead on arrival at Parkland Hospital. But this was the president of the United States—they had to try everything. As a last resort, one of the surgeons began to massage the president’s heart, hoping to stimulate a rhythmic beat. It was too late. He was dead.
“I am sorry, Mrs. Kennedy,” said one of the doctors, “your husband has sustained a fatal wound.”
“I know,” she whispered.
THE DOCTORS recorded the time of death as 1:00 P.M. (CST). One by one, members of the medical team left the trauma room. A nurse handed two paper bags to one of the Secret Service agents. They contained John Kennedy’s suit coat, pants, shirt, tie, and other garments. The agent was also given Clint Hill’s bloodstained suit coat. As the room emptied, Jackie Kennedy approached the table on which her husband lay dead. She pressed her cheek against his still warm face. She kissed his body. Then she removed her wedding ring and slipped it onto one of his fingers.
Assistant White House press secretary Malcolm Kilduff needed to find Vice President Lyndon Johnson to tell him that John Kennedy was dead. Kilduff went to the holding room where the Secret Service had hidden Johnson from view. LBJ’s bodyguards had kept him far from trauma room one, so he had no personal knowledge of the president’s condition. Kilduff spoke. “Mr. President . . . ”
Stunned, Johnson did a double take. That was the first time he was called that.
Now he knew. The president of the United States was dead.
Kilduff asked Johnson if he should make an announcement to the press. No, LBJ told him, it would be better to wait until after he had left the hospital for Love Field and returned to the safety of Air Force One.
“I think I had better get out of here . . . before you announce it. We don’t know if this is a worldwide conspiracy, whether they are after me as well as they were after President Kennedy, or whether they are after Speaker [John W.] McCormack, or Senator [Carl] Hayden [the two men who, after LBJ, were next in the line of presidential succession]. We just don’t know.”
Agent Rufus Youngblood decided he should escort the new president to the plane with as little fanfare as possible. There would be no entourage, no big motorcade accompanied by police cars and motorcycles with their screaming, attention-getting sirens. And Youngblood dared not put Johnson in SS-100-X, the presidential limousine. How could he? The backseat was still wet with blood and brains.
Instead, Johnson got into an unmarked car that gave no outward clue to the identity of its precious passenger. It was not a convertible.
AT 1:27 P.M. (CST), Walter Cronkite broadcast an update: “We just have a report from our correspondent, Dan Rather, in Dallas, that he has confirmed that President Kennedy is dead. There is still no official confirmation of this, however.”
At 1:32 P.M. (CST) Cronkite made another announcement: “This is the bulletin that just cleared from Dallas, that the two priests who were in the emergency room, where President Kennedy lay after being taken from the Dallas street corner where he was shot, say that he is dead. Our man, Dan Rather in Dallas reported that about ten minutes ago, too.”
At Parkland Hospital, at 1:33 P.M. (CST), Mac Kilduff walked into a room to make a statement to the journalists who awaited him there. His hands trembled. Then he spoke: “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1:00 CST today here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot wound to the brain. I have no other details regarding the assassination of the president.”
Merriman Smith transmitted to UPI a three-word report: “PRESIDENT KENNEDY DEAD.”
In the KLIF radio newsroom in Dallas, station owner Gordon McLendon handed off the microphone to a colleague: “Bob, do you have more?” He did: “The President is clearly, gravely, critically and perhaps fatally wounded. There are strong indications that he may have already expired, although that is not official. But the extent of the injuries to Governor Connally is a closely shrouded secret at the moment.”
Then he coughed and cleared his throat. The sound of papers rustling in his hand—the latest bulletins from United Press—went over the air. Then he spoke: “President Kennedy is dead, Gordon.”
Now the announcers spoke simultaneously over each other’s sentences: “This is the official word” and “Ladies and gentlemen, the president is dead.” Then one voice alone speaks: “The president, ladies and gentlemen . . . is dead.”
WITHIN MINUTES, news of Kennedy’s death flashed across America. At 1:38 P.M. (CST), a visibly shaken Walter Cronkite appeared on CBS television and made this announcement. “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1:00 P.M., Central Standard Time, two o’clock, Eastern Standard Time—some thirty-eight minutes ago.” Cronkite removed his eyeglasses, shook his head and paused. He was on the verge of tears.
Just a few weeks ago he had enjoyed the privilege of conducting a one-on-one, sit-down television interview with President Kennedy. Cronkite pulled himself together and continued. “Vice President Lyndon Johnson has left the hospital in Dallas, but we do not know to where he has proceeded; presumably he will be taking the oath of office shortly and become the thirty-sixth president of the United States.”
THROUGHOUT THE nation, people at home that afternoon sat in their living rooms, riveted by television and radio alerts. Others gathered in quiet groups around office televisions sets and radios. Millions of people working that day were out to lunch when Kennedy was shot, and they heard the news when restaurants tuned their TVs and radios to news broadcasts. On the streets, many people gathered in front of appliance stores and watched the silent televisions on display behind plate-glass windows.
Drivers stopped in traffic and got out of their cars to talk to other drivers. When newspapers started publishing special editions that afternoon, frantic customers snapped up the copies as soon as they were delivered to newsstands, drugstores, and other outlets. In Chicago, one man ripped an outdoor, red metal news box for the Chicago American right out of the ground and drove off with a stolen stack of papers announcing the assassination.
In Nashville, Tennessee, the way that word of the assassination came to David Lipscomb High School was representative of how the news arrived at schools across the nation. A telephone rang in study hall. A teacher answered the call. She looked at her students, wondering what to do. “I don’t know whether I should tell you this or not,” she said. “I just don’t believe it . . . President Kennedy has just been shot in Texas.” A student shouted, “It couldn’t have happened!” Another said, “I don’t believe it.”
Tommy Ingram, editor in chief of the school newspaper, the Pony Express, reacted fast to the breaking news. “By this time,” he wrote later, “the intercom was on and the horrible message was being heard by the entire student body as it was by the entire world.” In the corridors and classrooms, students spoke in hushed tones. Ingram deployed cub reporters to interview classmates and teachers. Randy McLean, a senior, said that he was “stunned” and that he couldn’t “believe that anyone as alive as Kennedy was, is dead.” Senior class president Bill Steensland confided, “I haven’t yet, but I’m going to go home and cry.” Patty Pettus, a junior, had several reactions: “Russia, Mrs. Kennedy, and the children. It’s like a dream. I couldn’t believe it.” Lola Sue Scobey, secretary of the student body said, “We don’t realize how historical this day is. Even if we were not a fan of Kennedy, it was still tragic . . . what will happen from this point on?”
Principal Damon Daniel summoned his stunned students to an assembly program. “We consider ourselves free men, yet in this country of freedom of speech and freedom of worship,” he told them, “cruel tragedy still strikes.” He encouraged them too. “We will lie down and bleed a while, but then we will rise again and fight.” Until then, he continued, “a son, a brother, a father, and a husband has been lost, and it is our duty to weep with those that weep.” Ingram had one of his staffers take photographs in the halls and at the assembly, and those reaction shots captured weeping teachers and dazed students.
The staff scrambled to get out an issue. On November 27, the day before Thanksgiving, the Pony Express published an ambitious, large-format, two-page extra headlined LIPSCOMB MOURNS KENNEDY. STUDENTS STUNNED AS NATION’S LEADER DIES.
Later, the National Scholastic Press Association honored the Pony Express by giving the paper its coveted All-American rating and naming it a Medalist, the association’s highest award. “The extra edition of your paper covering the events of November 22, 1963, gave excellent, timely coverage of student reaction plus coverage of the assassination and events immediately following. Congratulations on mobilizing your staff.”
Editor in chief Ingram also received a letter from the editor of the Nashville Tennessean, John Seigenthaler: “Dear Tommy: I have just read your Pony Express ‘Extra’ of Nov. 27 . . . it was a thoughtful and professional piece of journalism. You and your entire staff have my congratulations.” Tommy did not know it, but Seigenthaler was a friend of John and Robert Kennedy.
In DALLAS, it was time to send for a casket. The Secret Service ordered one from a local funeral home. While it was on its way, hospital staffers washed the president’s body and wrapped his head in towels and sheets of plastic so his blood would not stain the silk lining of the coffin. Then they wrapped the entire body. Mrs. Kennedy did not watch this. When the coffin arrived, funeral-home workers wheeled it into the emergency room. They lifted Kennedy’s corpse from the table and laid it in the coffin. Then they closed the lid. The president was ready to go home.
BACK IN Washington, a telephone in the office of Attorney General Robert Kennedy rang at 1:45 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. It was the direct line that linked the offices of the attorney general and the director of the FBI. Robert Kennedy had insisted on setting up the line so that J. Edgar Hoover could not avoid taking his calls. Hoover had great antipathy for all the Kennedys, but he disliked Bobby most of all. The director judged the Kennedys to be hypocrites and moral failures, and Hoover knew all about the president’s indiscretions with women, going back to the young naval officer’s World War II affair with a probable Nazi spy, the beautiful Danish blond journalist Inga Arvad.
The director, a veteran of decades of Washington intrigue and turf battles, bristled at the presence of the special phone on his desk. But the attorney general was his superior in rank, and Hoover had to submit to what he believed was a humiliation. But the phone worked both ways. This time, it was Hoover who called Kennedy. Robert Kennedy’s assistant, Angie Novello, picked up the receiver.
“This is J. Edgar Hoover. Have you heard the news?”
She had. The attorney general was not in his office. Novello knew what Hoover wanted her to do, but she could not bear it.
“Yes, Mr. Hoover, but I’m not going to break it to him.”
“The president has been shot,” Hoover said. “I’ll call him.”
Robert Kennedy was in McLean, Virginia, having lunch at his expansive home, Hickory Hill, on the outskirts of Washington, less than a half-hour drive from the Department of Justice at Ninth and Pennsylvania Avenues. Bobby, his wife Ethel, and two Justice Department lawyers, United States Attorney Robert Morgenthau and his assistant, were sitting by the pool and eating sandwiches. Ethel walked away to answer the phone.
A White House operator told her that J. Edgar Hoover was calling.
Ethel tried to deflect the call. “The Attorney General is at lunch.” The operator told her it was urgent. Ethel told her husband, “It’s J. Edgar Hoover.”
Bobby came to the phone.
Hoover spoke. “I have news for you. The president has been shot.”
Kennedy asked for details.
“I think it’s serious,” Hoover said. “I am endeavoring to get details. I’ll call you back when I find out more.” Then he hung up.
Horrified, Bobby cried out, “Jack’s been shot!”
AT THE United States Capitol, press liaison Richard Riedel walked onto the floor of the Senate and said, “The president has been shot. The president—he’s been shot.” JFK’s brother, Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, happened to be presiding over the chamber. Whenever the president of the Senate—Vice President Lyndon Johnson—was absent, senators took turns wielding the authority of the gavel. Riedel approached the rostrum.
“The most horrible thing has happened! It’s terrible, terrible!”
“What is it?” Kennedy asked.
“Your brother, the president. He’s been shot.”
“How do you know?”
Riedel told him, “It’s on the ticker. Just came in on the ticker.” Edward Kennedy fled the Senate chamber.
AT HICKORY Hill, Robert Kennedy hurried to leave. He assumed he would be flying to Dallas to be with his brother. Then a call came from the White House. Bobby listened. Then he cried out.
“Oh, he’s dead!”
“He had the most wonderful life,” he told Ethel. Then he walked out to the pool and broke the news to his guests.
“He died.”
Soon the phone rang again. It was J. Edgar Hoover with more details. He did not know that Bobby had already heard what he was about to tell him.
Bobby interrupted him. “It may interest you to know that the president is dead.”