12 noon

The sun was high and steady and the few remaining edges of gray in the sky changed to snow-blinding white. This was a day to match the springtime of a man. All the threats of the heavens had been dissipated by a band of light which warmed the concrete of Dallas. The welcome had been hesitant; a little stiff, like offering the courtesies of the house to a policeman. From Inwood Road on, the faces old and young, stern, senile, congenial, analytical, and apathetic became infused with warmth and the smiling eyes all blinked the same message: “Hello, Mr. President. Glad to see you.” It was cordial and a little more than that. They looked upon him with favor. Their sound, provincial judgment told them that he was a handsome young man with a friendly grin and blue eyes that drifted from face to face, laughing and glad to be alive.

His little woman was perky, too. Bright and sweet, a girl who didn’t have her hair all frizzed and was not so made up you couldn’t tell what she was like. Liked horses, too, this one. Rode some good hunters when she wasn’t busy having babies. And lookit that pink two-piece suit with the little collar and cuff trim. Couldn’t cost more than forty or fifty dollars down at Neiman Marcus. The President’s wife—nothing put on about her. Nice couple with no scandal running their marriage into the ground. Almost too young—wouldn’t you say?—to be the First Family of the entire United States. Like a couple of zippy kids ready to kick up their heels at the Grange.

Dallas, slow to admire, to enjoy, to give affection; quick to suspect, to indict, to distrust; this giant of Texas which was the end of the South and the beginning of the West, which was neither and was both, this multiphrenic city sitting alone on a hot prairie like an oasis spouting a fountain of silvery coins gave its elixir to John F. Kennedy. The decision was made somewhere along Lemmon around Mahanna and the throats began to open with a continuous roar which spread from street to street and ran ahead of the motorcade. It swept over the sound of the motorcycles and made them run, as it were, silently. None of it affected the men with offices high up in the Southland Life Building or the oil men in the mahogany chambers with the deep pile rugs, the men with the cowboy boots and the pendulous bellies; none of it altered the opinion of the monarchs of Big D. They watched Kennedy on their color television sets and snapped him off. They had millions of dollars and they wanted additional tax breaks and write-offs and they wanted offshore oil drilling, too. They recognized the face of the man who would stop them.

The people did not matter. Dallas could buy and sell people. The metropolitan area had a population of 1,125,000 and the cheapest, meanest millionaire had more money than that. The city was so new it squeaked. One hundred and twenty-two years earlier, John Neely Bryan had built a log cabin on the confluence of three forks of the Trinity River. It wasn’t a good choice, but the settlement was named after George M. Dallas, Vice-President of the United States. Dallas became the runt of the northern plain.

It was a stop for pioneers; a railhead; a haven for wholesalers; a cotton broker. The state government, in 1908, passed a restrictive law making it mandatory for all Texas insurance companies to make their headquarters in Dallas. The city grew at once. Oil companies followed the insurance organizations. Banking followed both. The biggest commodity in Dallas to buy, to sell, to exchange or trade was cash. With riches and growth Dallas developed a constitutional inferiority complex.

Everything it did had to be civically bigger and better than anywhere else. For the advancement of poetry appreciation, five Browning Societies were organized. It had more air conditioning per cubic foot than any city in the world. The rich women dressed richer; the Neiman Marcus store featured “His” and “Her” planes. The Symphony Orchestra, the Civic Opera Guild, the Museum of Fine Arts were oversubscribed annually.

The city wasn’t crude. It was isolated. It was a wealthy hypochondriac looking away from himself; a kept woman living in a florist shop; a sultan with a hat full of diamonds begging for a glass of water; a tower in a tunnel. Dallas consists of five main sections, but North Dallas, lying between downtown and Love Field and Highland Park, was worthy of special attention.

To a Dallasite, the ideal was always to narrow everything to the ultimate. The best country is America; the best state is Texas; the best city is Dallas; the best section is North Dallas. Across the Trinity River to the south were the 280,000 people of Oak Cliff. One of them, in a rooming house on North Beckley, was Lee Harvey Oswald. Oak Cliff was used car lots and movie houses, supermarkets, filling stations, and unpainted porches; it was clerks, cops, and warehousemen; crooked flagstones, bargain stores, and buses. The damp dark bed of the Trinity might as well have been the Great Wall of China.

West Dallas and South Dallas are slum areas. Shacks and unpainted tenements abound; automobile cemeteries line the expressways. Religion is fundamental Protestant; the churches of North Dallas are more sophisticated, but for old-fashioned Bible-whacking and brimstone, the outlying districts are preferred. Oak Cliff supported 215 churches. Sin was the secret pleasure of the rich. The ladies of North Dallas were expected to flirt with their friends’ husbands, but this was cocktail polo. The men all knew a motel clerk on the Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike who specialized in keeping his mouth shut; each one knew an eager stenographer or an airline stewardess; the rich men exchanged gifts five feet five inches tall; a welcome stranger was always asked: “Want me to take care of you?” The question was asked of John F. Kennedy on his first visit to the area in the presidential campaign of 1960. Many men recalled the question; no gentlemen remembered the answer.

Downtown Dallas supports all the others. The money is here. It consists of three parallel avenues: Elm, Main, and Commerce, which run from east to west, ending at Dealey Plaza. They are crossed by a dozen side streets. From the sky it looks like a broken banjo. Within this small embrasure are the tall office buildings, the courthouse, city hall, the library, the airlines offices, banks, insurance companies, county jail, hotels, smart shops, and fine restaurants. The freeways and viaducts lead into and out of Dallas within these three avenues and the power downtown is almost absolute. Any notions which are not approved by the powers are denounced as “creeping socialism” or “communism.” Here, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Mr. Earl Warren, was a traitor. The living thing, the treasured spirit was the frontiersman with his Conestoga wagon, his mules, his woman, his horse, and his rifle. The enemy, once the hostile Indian and the rattlesnake, was now the government in Washington.

Physically, downtown Dallas is as clean and unpolluted as any business area in the country. The leaseholders are rich in natural gas, and everything but the sewers are air-conditioned.

Old, sunbaked buildings come down and edifices with tinted glass go up. Dallas will decline a government loan for downtown improvement but accept $50 million or $100 million from one or two of its own families, such as the Murchisons and the Hunts.

Nightlife in Dallas is superficial. There are three choices: a cultural binge at the symphony in a black tie and strands of pearls; a private party at a palatial home where husbands and wives mingle only at dinner; strip joints, where the biggest thrill is amateur night and the moist-eyed customers sit at darkened tables pouring drinks from a bottle which remains in a brown paper sack. Of the latter, Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club was one of the poorest. By midnight, downtown Dallas is dead, except for the lights used by the women who scrub the office floors and the drunks who stagger along the dark walls looking for a taxi.

Dallas is out of bed early and to work early. The executive and the elevator operator are often in that skyscraper before 8:00 A.M. and the men work hard to find new ways of forcing money to make more money. Nor are the giants of industry above quarreling over the price of a steak or a tip to a waiter. The desire not to be swindled forced one man to buy eight automobiles for his family so that he could postpone trading the vehicles in at a loss. The same man would donate a million dollars for a new laboratory at the University of Dallas or buy a $100,000 ranch house as a wedding present for his daughter.

The group he represented, The Establishment, built two small cities within Dallas—Highland Park and University Park. They abut influential North Dallas and have their own taxes, police departments, and fire departments. No Negro lives among the 35,000 residents, but Negroes commute to Highland Park and University Park as servants. Separating the two communities is a boulevard called Lovers Lane.

The Establishment could be vague, but the Dallas Citizens Council never is. It has been denounced as the political instrument of the rich, but it works hard and unselfishly for a bigger, better Dallas. A long time ago, men who could make decisions without recourse to corporate stockholders or to voters took over. These men could fire a lax police chief or allocate funds to an opera company. Each man had to be powerful enough in his own right to win the endorsement of the Citizens Charter Association, which is the political body which selects candidates to the council.

It is easy to refer to the Citizens Council as the rulers of Big D, but they are individually and collectively responsible for maintaining the pride and the self-respect of a community which is defensively egocentric. The membership comes to about two hundred men, and there are no doctors, clerics, writers, or lawyers among them. All of them are corporate heads and their hobby is Dallas. Once, when Chance Vought Aircraft was contemplating a move from Connecticut to Dallas, it was found that Love Field’s runways were too short. Mr. D. A. Hulcy called a special meeting of the Citizens Council the same afternoon, voted $256,000 to lengthen the runways, and the aircraft company moved to Texas and employed twenty thousand Dallasites.

The city government, oriented around the dollar, must, to be consistent, be conservative Republican. It was anti-union, anti-centralized government, anti-liberal, anti-welfare state, anti-foreign involvement. The political pendulum swung so far to the right in Dallas that the city symbolized conservative extremism in the eyes of the nation. Actually the description was inaccurate but the Birch Society members and the adherents of Major General Walker—small in numbers—were loud in public relations. The Dallas Council, which thinks of business first in relation to politics, was annoyed when Adlai Stevenson, Democratic liberal and nominee for the presidency, was hit on the head by a woman holding a rightist placard.

The story hurt Dallas. Too late, the Citizens Council tried to dam the extreme right. The community was alive with thirtyish to fiftyish couples who were hospitable but who, once the topic of politics was introduced, became hysterical fanatics. They shouted intemperate extremist doctrine and would not listen to a dissenting voice. The women, as Warren Leslie pointed out in his book, Dallas City Limit, were louder and more violent than the men. To them, the enemy was Washington, D.C. When they paused for breath, they decried and denounced any conversation which might support another view. These were the scores of thousands of voters who infused fascist hysteria throughout Dallas in 1963. This is what John F. Kennedy meant when he said: “We’re in nut country.” The council endorsed the extremists with the left-handed animadversion: “They go a little too far.”

The cloistered attitude of Dallas, which makes its citizens feel alien and separate even from Fort Worth, extends indeed to its legal values. Here drunken driving can be most reprehensible, but murder is often condoned. Some European countries do not average a hundred homicides per year, but Dallas sustains more. A stripteaser was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for possessing marijuana; several murderers won suspended sentences.

It is legal for a Dallas husband to kill a rival if he believes the other man “is about to commit adultery on his wife.” And yet, in comparison with other communities, Dallas is a law-abiding city. Crooked policemen are few and are dealt with mercilessly. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer did not violate any law, but it was never sold in Dallas because the authorities requested the bookshops not to sell it.

One must return to the Dallas News to capture the metropolitan conscience. The news columns cover the same stories as the evening Times Herald and both are as fair in the treatment of national and local news as can be expected from writers who know that the publishers are conservative. It is on the editorial page that the News becomes cutting, sarcastic, inaccurate, and unfair. Here the drums beat in unison. Warren Leslie, who once worked for the paper, said: “Its editorial page has been not just dissenting, but insulting.”

At a publishers conference at the White House, most of the owners of newspapers accorded respect, if not admiration, to the President. Only E. M. Dealey of the News criticized Mr. Kennedy face-to-face. He said that the country was looking for a man on a horse to lead it but that Kennedy was trying to do the job “on Caroline’s tricycle.” Kennedy seethed. Later, he asked government agencies to “check up on Ted Dealey.”

A perusal of News editorials discloses another facet of its Dallas character: the writers seldom approve of anything or anyone. Their motif is negation and anger. The United States Supreme Court is a kremlin; the State Department harbors “perverts”; the White House plays the Soviet game; this morning, it published the full-page hate advertisement: “Welcome Mr. Kennedy to Dallas . . .” The Times Herald spurned the same ad.

An exultation began to take hold of John F. Kennedy. The crowds grew heavier, street by street. All along, the Texas receptions had been bigger and friendlier than the predictions. San Antonio had been great; Houston was greater. But Dallas—Dallas was incredible. In the backup car, O’Donnell and Powers turned on a pair of Gaelic grins to match the sun. They knew that, if this continued, one million Texans would have seen the President by the time he reached the LBJ Ranch. One million persons who left home or business to see JFK. And this, of course, not counting the other millions who would see it on television or hear it on radio.

The motorcade was at Craddock Park when the President saw a long, limp sign held by little boys and girls. It read: “Mr. President, Please Stop and Shake Our Hands.” Mr. Kennedy leaned between Governor and Mrs. Connally. “Let’s stop here,” he said to Bill Greer. The car stopped. The motorcycle cops braked down and swung away. The President leaned out and shook a lot of little hands. The bigger boys, yelling: “Our sign worked! It worked!” followed the little ones, and then the police tried to step in between. The Secret Service men on the backup car got off the running boards to herd the children away.

Curry, who was at the junction of Lemmon and Turtle Creek Boulevard, received word of the unexpected stop and brought his vehicle to a slow walk. He asked if there was any problem and a voice said: “No.” The motorcade started again. Once, near Reagan, the President tried to turn around, probably to see whether O’Donnell and Powers were reacting to the welcome. Powers was standing, half crouching, making home movies. O’Donnell was racking up votes mentally.

The bank clocks flicked to 12:08, Temp: 68. 12:09, Temp: 68. 12:10, Temp: 68. In Washington, D.C., the clocks read: 1:08; 1:09, and John F. Kennedy, Jr., was not interested in them because time means little to a child who will enjoy his third birthday in three more days, and whose sister Caroline will be celebrating her sixth the day after tomorrow. Their British nanny permitted a great deal of birthday talk at lunch because their cousins, Teddy and Kara, the children of Uncle Ted Kennedy, were luncheon guests.

Miss Shaw made certain that the children ate well, then she slowly turned down the lamp of excitement so that little heads might nap on downy pillows. There was no nap for J. D. Tippit this day. He was alone in a squad car, touring Post 78 in Dallas. He had Fruitdale and Cedar Crest to himself. It was a quiet sector, with two country clubs, some sparsely settled streets leading to Trinity River, and a veterans hospital.

So quiet that Officer Tippit reported on Channel One that he was going to drive home for lunch. If he had any interest in Kennedy, Tippit was sure he could be seen on television in the house. But this assumption was mistaken, because local television coverage did not include the major portion of the motorcade; the sound portion described the welcome to the President, but the camera remained rooted to the interior of the Trade Mart.

In thirty-five minutes, Tippit was back. He moved across Kiest Boulevard toward Illinois on his lonely vigil. Tippit was the good cop—big, duty-conscious, a robot who put in his time without complaint, listened to the dispatcher, and was seldom reprimanded. His boss, Sergeant Owens, thought of Tippit as a reliable policeman who would not advance in position. The rumor had gone around that Tippit may have taken the tests for promotion to sergeant more than once, but lack of sufficient formal education tripped him in the written examination.

Tonight, after supper, he would go to Stevens Park Theatre and work a part-time job keeping order among the youthful moviegoers. At other times, he put in hours at Austin’s Barbecue to make a few extra dollars. Mrs. Tippit and the children needed everything he could bring in. The rest of today’s schedule was monotonous: keep patrolling 78, keep a lookout for stolen cars. If more patrol cars were needed for the downtown festivities, a few outlying patrols would be called in closer to the city. Other than that, keep the car moving slowly along the curbs until 3:50 P.M. Then turn in to Oak Bluffs substation and report off duty.

Others were disappointed in the television coverage of the parade. Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine, in Irving, sat watching, but there wasn’t anything to see. They listened to the vocal report, and Mrs. Paine translated the substance of the story into Russian. Mrs. Oswald felt excited about this because, as she said, her husband was a chronic critic of all things American, but he had read several favorable articles about Kennedy, aloud and translated them in his pidgin Russian. When the rare mood to read was upon him, young Mr. Oswald was fond of reading a section and then giving his wife what he called the “real truth” about the story.

Now, as she waited for the Trade Mart speech, Mrs. Oswald recalled that, when speaking about the President of the United States, her husband had once observed that eliminating him would do no good, because the American system was so devised that the man who took his place would continue the same political policy. Marina’s interest was not in Mr. Kennedy’s politics. It was in his family.

Jack Ruby had a similar interest. Politics, at its simplest, consisted of top dogs and underdogs. Mr. Ruby had an inordinate interest in any “underdog.” He had been one, a ghetto Jew from Chicago, as he described himself, and Mr. Ruby became emotional when an underdog was hurt. President Kennedy was an underdog. He was Roman Catholic and a regular guy with a nice wife and two youngsters, but the Dallas News had insulted this wealthy and powerful young man. Ruby would like to have fought someone with his fists to protect the President’s good name, but he was not interested to the point of watching a parade.

He was in the advertising department of the Dallas News and he had told his sister Eva that he was going to repeat what he had said on the phone to someone at the News: Were they hungry for the money that dirty ad brought in, and who was this Bernard Weissman? Don J. Campbell, salesman, returned from early lunch and conferred with Ruby. Somehow Kennedy was forgotten. Business was a more imperative topic, and Ruby told Campbell that, for his information, business was lousy.

The space salesman listened. The account wasn’t big, but it was regular. Ruby showed Mr. Campbell the copy for two ads, one for the Carousel Club, the other for the Vegas Club. Ruby wrote a check for $31.87 on the Merchants State Bank (leaving a balance of $199.78) and began to boast about the fistfights he had engaged in to keep obstreperous customers from his nightclubs. He told Campbell that, when he saw trouble coming, he always carried a gun.

The President’s car was at Reagan, and the crowds bulged from the building line to a point off the curb. The President held his right hand up and out, kept grinning at the crowd, and flexed his wrist in a gesture half flirty and part benediction. Softly, he kept saying: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” Governor Connally could barely hear it from the back seat, and he wondered if the people knew what the President was saying. Back in the crowd, the small figure of Father Oscar Huber hopped up and down as he strained to look over many shoulders to see the President of the United States. So many people were waving back to Mr. Kennedy that the task became impossible. After the President had passed, Father Huber jumped once more and saw the back of the familiar head and the right side of the face. The priest waved, but he felt ridiculous because he knew that the President could not see him, so he turned away from the crowd for the walk back to the rectory. Father Huber reminded himself that he had not seen Mrs. Kennedy at all.

At Hood, the cars made a slow right turn onto Turtle Creek. The Kennedys were now in the section of North Dallas where greenery and parks and a statue of Robert E. Lee created a different and aloof world. Some people lined the righthand side of the street, but they were neither deep in numbers nor loud in enthusiasm. They watched; they squinted in the hot sun. Some waved. Some did not.

Mrs. Kennedy foraged in her purse and withdrew sunglasses. She put them on and smiled. The President, without losing his smile, said: “Jackie, take your glasses off.” She seemed surprised, but they came off, and rested on her wool skirt. Nothing, the President felt, masks a face and its individual personality more than sunglasses. He never admonished the Secret Service men, who were addicted to them, but they were not present to be seen in any case. A few moments later, Mrs. Kennedy absentmindedly slipped the glasses over her eyes. Her husband did not notice it at once, but when he did, he turned to her and said: “Take off the glasses, Jackie.”

A nun in black habit stood on a corner with some small children, and the President ordered Greer to stop the car again. He didn’t get out. The long arm reached, the smile was polite and deferential, and he said a few words to the nun and waved the motorcade into motion. For Mrs. Kennedy, it was a long, hot ride, made a bit more aggravating by the fact that the breeze was out of the northwest at ten miles per hour, which matched the speed and direction of the car and left the occupants in a breezeless vacuum. Unless the honored guest feels a kinship for the people, a motorcade can be fatiguing, and the incessant need to smile becomes an aching monstrosity.

Someone held up a homemade sign that spelled: “Kennedy Go Home!” The President nudged the Governor. “See that sign, John?” he said. “I see them everywhere I go.” The voice became tinged with bitterness. “I’ll bet that’s a nice guy,” he said. Riding through the Turtle Creek area, Greer moved the car up to twenty-five miles per hour and a cool breeze curled around the corners of the windshield. The First Lady held one hand on her hat. The spectators were sparse.

Mr. Kennedy said: “John, how do things look in Texas?” He did not expect an optimistic response because he knew that the state had been split into three political entities: Republican; Democratic conservative; Democratic liberal. The President was also aware that John Connally, in spite of a Kennedy appointment as Secretary of the Navy, was not an ally. The Governor turned to his right, and squinted back toward the President. “There will be a Houston Chronicle poll out tomorrow,” he said. “That should give us some ideas.”

It was a noncommittal reply, neutral at best. Mr. Kennedy was in a mood to press Mr. Connally. “What’s it going to show?” he said, aware that if the Governor placed any credence in the poll, he would have advance knowledge of its findings. “I think it will show that you can carry the state,” the Governor said guardedly, “but that it will be a close election.”

The President seemed to be pleasantly surprised. Knowing that Connally was also running for reelection next year, he said: “Oh? How will it show you running?” The Governor grinned. “Mr. President,” he said, “I think it will show me running a little ahead of you.” Kennedy said, “That doesn’t surprise me” and closed the conversation. The President did not address the Governor again.

From the sixth-floor window, Bonnie Ray Williams had seen the people collecting on the green below and had known that the excitement would begin soon. He had finished his soda pop and his bony chicken sandwich. The remains were on the windowsill. It was strange, he felt, that the fellows had talked about coming upstairs and watching the parade from the window, but where were they? Billy Lovelady had said he was coming up. And that Spanish boy—what’s his name?—Danny Arce said he was coming up. Bonnie Ray saw a wall of cartons stacked around the easternmost window, so he leaned against them and finished a bag of Fritos while watching and waiting.

Once, he thought he heard some conversation below. The floors were so worn that cracks of daylight could be seen between the ribs. Mr. Williams crumpled the empty bag and took the elevator down to the fifth floor. If no one was there, he would try the fourth. As he emerged from the elevator on the fifth, he spotted two Negro co-workers, Harold Norman and James Jarman. They had a whole array of windows to themselves, and there was a lot to see.

If you leaned out far enough, you could see the people directly below, on the Elm Street sidewalk. Billy Lovelady was down there. So were Wesley Frazier and William Shelley, the foreman. Frazier didn’t know where Oswald was, and Wes was too keyed up to ask. Lee wasn’t too friendly driving to and from Irving, so there was no use chasing him to ask if he wanted to see the President. Frazier did, and he kept moving up and down the front steps of the Depository as the time of the motorcade approached.

Roy Truly left for lunch with his boss, Ochus V. Campbell. They stopped on the sidewalk and decided to watch, hoping that the motorcade wasn’t too far away. They saw the people gathering, as family groups and couples might at a picnic on the green. Some sat on the grass. Others stood with arms folded watching the late traffic move up and down the three streets which funnelled into the underpass: Elm, Main, and Commerce. Still others were involved in the complexity of threading fresh film into balky cameras. On the opposite side of the square, prisoners in the county jail gathered at a window, like caged birds on a perch. In a post office building window, an inspector used his seven-power binoculars and leaned on a fifth-floor windowsill to bring the individuals up close.

As the Hertz sign on the depository roof clicked to 12:15, the pigeons jumped in flight and circled Dealey Square, a peerless view unencumbered by people.

Channel Two was busy. Captain Souter called Deputy Chief Stevenson at the Trade Mart: “Advise three that the ambulances have arrived and are standing by.” Chief Curry: “One. Just turning off Turtle Creek.” The conversation was almost incessant and, on the loudspeakers of the cars, it sounded strident and flat as it cut through the surging sound of the people on the sidewalks. Channel One was busy with a report from Detectives J. R. Leavelle and C. W. Brown. They had been looking for a man named Calvin E. Nelson, who was wanted for armed robbery. At 12:15 P.M. Leavelle said that they had arrested “this subject” at 2421 Ellis Street and were bringing him into headquarters for questioning.

Patrolman Chance came on. He was at Fairmount and Cedar Springs. The parade had passed, but he had a problem: “There is a V-shaped piece of land out here,” he announced, “with no improvements on it. Someone during the parade backed over a water faucet and it is shooting water into the air. Wonder if you can contact the water department and have them come out here and turn it off.” Dispatcher McDaniel came on: “Ten-four,” he announced as a token of compliance.

“Come on. Come on. Get out of there.” The policemen in front of the Trade Mart had orders to keep the canopied entrance clear. The 2,500 guests had been told to be in the Trade Mart at noon, and some were still coming up the feeder road from Harry Hines Boulevard. Police cars were standing around, parked awkwardly, their speakers still on broadcasting the voice of Chief Curry from the motorcade. Time was running out here and the guest cars had to be hurried to a position behind the Trade Mart at once.

“Come on. Come on. No, I got no time for questions. Get that car out of here.” Superior officers of the Dallas Police Department watched from the curb and ordered all traffic cleared away when the President reached Dealey Plaza. Deputy Chief Stevenson wanted no problems, and if a few latecomers missed lunch, let them steam. It was no fault of his. Inside, the huge arena buzzed with the indefinable sound of mass conversation. Byron Melcher, the organist, was warming up a special symphony organ, which had been brought in from California, by playing “Hail to the Chief.”

Special dispensation had been given to the Catholics present to eat steak. The fruit cup and the tossed green salad, along with the sprays of flowers, already adorned all the long tables which stretched across the width of the Trade Mart like stripes. In the kitchen, white-hatted chefs perspired over the green beans amandine and the twenty-five hundred broiled steaks, which flamed and subsided sporadically. The Crotty Brothers firm of Boston, who had catered the affair, supervised the waiters who streamed in one door and out another laden with small plates of rolls and butter. Others were cutting up huge apple pies and spinning them away to make room for more. An array of stainless steel percolators chuffed steam, permeating the kitchen with the odor of hot coffee.

The city of Dallas had announced that the carrying of placards “peaceably” would be permitted, but the Texas State Police had not heard of it. Without rancor, they picked up three youths by the neck and trousers and carried them and their signs off in squad cars. In the lobby, Dallas police officers checked the last of the guests heading inside, and Secret Service men stood by, watching the checking. Others patrolled the catwalks with walkie-talkies. Captains of waiters pleaded with the guests to please take their places. Overall, there was an elite atmosphere throughout the room. The best of Dallas had been invited and, with only twenty-five hundred tickets to satisfy all, there had been some belated scrambling to buy them. The best of Dallas society, Dallas civic welfare, the leaders of the Dallas County Democratic conservative wing, the rich, the leaders of the arts were all present. Many of them may not have been in sympathy with Kennedy, but none had come to jeer. He was about to be accorded the hospitality of the house. Deputy Chief Stevenson asked a lieutenant to check with the dispatcher on Two and find out where the motorcade was.

The parade was off Cedar Springs, heading slowly across Harwood toward Main and the center of the city. Deputy Chief Lumpkin, now a third of a mile ahead, radioed back to Curry: “One. Crowd on Main in real good shape. They have them back off the curb.” Curry, driving his Ford slowly, studying the crowds which now spread up walls to pop out windows and off rooftops, picked up the microphone and murmured: “Good shape. We are just about to cross Live Oak. Curry, speaking to the motorcycle escort: drop back. We will have to go at a real slow speed from here on now. One to escort—hold up escort. O.K. Move along. . . . Check and see if we have everything in sight. Check with the rear car.”

The crowds, with whole sections screaming “Jackeeeee!” began to close in on the limousine. Greer knew what to do. He turned the car toward the left side so that motorcycles could come up on the President’s side and protect him. The Secret Service men dropped off the running board of the follow-up car and trotted beside the President and First Lady. Two helmeted policemen on motorbikes moved up with roaring engines to drive the people back from the President’s side.

In a moment, they were at the head of Main Street. On the left stood Police Headquarters. Duty officers stood in the windows, waving. Prisoners on the top floor strained to look down. Chief Curry made a right turn and could see Lumpkin’s car far ahead. Greer turned the President’s car behind the Chief. For the first time, the Kennedys could see the real welcome that Dallas was tendering to its Chief of State. Except for a center lane of pavement, the entire gourd of skyscrapers was covered with people. The heads were solid for twelve blocks straight down and up the sides of the buildings. It was as though all the rest had been prelude; now the curtain had been raised and, in a flash, the big uninvited part of Dallas was ready to tender its respects.

Governor Connally saw it and thought: “They’re stacked from the curb to the walls.” Paul Landis, agent on the follow-up car, saw a boy leave the crowd, evade the policemen, and head for the President. He nudged Agent Ready, who dropped off. The boy had a big smile and held his hand before him to be shaken. Ready ran and headed him off. He pushed the boy back into the crowd. A reporter in the press bus made a note that there were “a whale of a lot of people.” Lawrence O’Brien, squeezed between Congressmen in the wrong car, heard the representatives say that the crowd was large, but too reserved. Congressman Walter Rogers leaned out of his car and shouted to the people to “smile and look perky.”

Malcolm Kilduff, the press secretary, looked up in time to see three letters pasted in three windows. They spelled “BAH.” Kenneth O’Donnell, adding and subtracting an election a year ahead, thought: “They are not unfriendly nor terribly enthusiastic.” Still, he was pleased. The President’s domestic political expert was glad that the congressmen who had been reading in Texas newspapers how unpopular Kennedy was could be along to see the size of the cordial crowd. Greer, driving, thought: “They are very close to us. And very large crowds.” As he favored the left side of the street, the motorcade slowed. Greer always allowed four or five car lengths between himself and the lead automobile so that, if an emergency occurred, he could depress the accelerator and swing to left or right. The maneuver is called “getting the hell out of here.”

On the press bus, Charles Roberts of Newsweek listened to the conversation of other reporters. He felt that there was a consensus that “John F. Kennedy would be unstoppable in 1964. . . . He has everything working for him, including his wife.” In Curry’s car, Secret Service Agent Winston Lawson listened to the Channel Two chatter and swung his head back and forth over the crowds, looking for an unusual sign, an unusual movement. Forrest V. Sorrels, a fellow agent, looked out the rear window of the sedan and said: “My God, look at the people. They are even hanging out the windows.” He and O’Brien, in separate parts of the motorcade, felt that the welcome had changed character suddenly. It was now bigger than ever, more boisterous, more enthusiastic. A shock wave of sound roared down Main Street like a bowling ball down an alley.

Lawson, besides looking dead ahead, had to look backward at Greer because the speed of the motorcade was controlled by the President. This requires swift and certain eyes. As the advance man on this trip, Lawson worked well with Chief Jesse Curry and he kept murmuring: “Move the escort up a little, chief. There. Hold them there. Now, back a little. A little more. Right.” When the crowd bulged out toward the center of the street, Lawson requested the chief to use the motorcycles as a wedge.

The President was at Field Street. He was halfway down Main, in the center of a canyon roaring greetings. In the crowd stood an Army intelligence agent and James Hosty, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Both were pleased with the big turnout. Hosty, who had worked on the Lee Harvey Oswald case, never gave the sullen young man a thought as the glittering cars swept by. The President had eight more blocks to go, then a right turn on Houston, a left on Elm, and down through the underpass to the luncheon.

He had won the endorsement of the people in spite of their masters.

The sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository was dead quiet. Some of the windows were up about a third from the bottom. Black pipes and naked electric bulbs marred the gray ceiling. The beige boxes were stacked like small forts in a child’s game. A remnant of the breeze puffed lightly through the windows. The sills were only four and a half bricks from the floor so that, if a man stood behind those glass frames, he could be seen clearly from his head to his shinbones.

A man sat there. He was thin-lipped, brown-haired, a flat-bellied man with a permanent pout to his mouth. At the easternmost window, he sat on a small carton, screened completely by a brick wall and two heating pipes near his back. He could look diagonally westward, down the slope of Elm Street from where he sat. He could see all the way down to the underpass and could see the people collecting on the tracks above it. This was a patient man who was compelled to do the thing he planned to do. It is doubtful that he asked himself why. Twice before he had hoped for immortality, aspired to it by plotting against the life of Major General Edwin Walker, an extreme rightist, and again by telling his wife that he would kill the Vice-President of the United States, a Texas liberal.

Now he had the whole sixth floor to himself. He had erected a small enclosure of book cartons, although there was no one to look over them, no one to challenge him. He was alone with his curtain rods, and he and they were about to make history. Never again would he be regarded as a human cipher; a dollar-an-hour book clerk; a U.S. marine with a dishonorable discharge; a baby whose father had died two months before he saw light; the lonely kid who slept with his mother; the renegade who slashed his wrists in Moscow; the hero who had rescued a Soviet maiden from despotism to earn her contempt in Texas; the non-hero in Russia who hadn’t even been asked to broadcast his hatred of the United States of America; the boy who at sixteen told a friend he would like to kill President Dwight D. Eisenhower; the silent, sullen psychotic.

The rifle was across his legs. The man and the rifle made a combination. Neither was quite accurate. The Mannlicher-Carcano Italian military rifle fired a 6.5-millimeter jacketed shell. This one, serial number C2766, had been manufactured and tested at an Italian army plant in Terni. It was twenty-three years old; he was twenty-four. On top of it, the man had bolted a four-power scope. The crosshairs were a bit high—not too much—but a little bit. The gun, when fired, had a tendency to bear slightly to the right. The young man knew this; it was like windage. All he had to do at, say, three hundred feet, was to aim a bit to the left of the target. Not much. A little bit. A foot. No more than two.

Lee Harvey Oswald got up, rifle slung under his right arm, and stood near the window. He did this when he wanted to see behind his position, to look at Houston Street, which crossed between Main and Elm. Below, there was a knot of people around a sergeant’s three-wheel motorcycle. A spectator had fainted. The sergeant had called for an ambulance some time ago. The man was lying near the curb. Bubbles were coming from his lips and a spectator had tried to stick his crooked finger down the man’s throat. An Oneal ambulance came down Main and stopped. The epileptic was rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

As the ambulance raced down Elm and beneath the triple underpass, some of the spectators at Main and Houston looked up and saw the blinking red light of Chief Lumpkin’s advance car. The motorcade was coming. Policemen began to blow warning whistles. Automobiles were diverted. Traffic was stopped. Citizens were ordered to get back on the curb. The word was passed. A thrill passed through the thin rime of people. Up in the county jail, Willie Mitchell, known to the Dallas deputies as “a colored boy,” pressed his face against the bars in a silent shouldering battle with other prisoners.

They had read in the papers that the motorcade was going to pass here, and some had asked permission to congregate in the big tank on the north side to watch the parade. Mitchell was serving a sentence for driving while intoxicated. He had big eyes and excellent vision. The dark eyes, with a shading of brown in the whites, roamed Dealey Plaza. These were the free people; free to watch; free to ignore; free to roam or stop or say no to somebody. Willie Mitchell, elbowing and being elbowed, kept his hands on the bars and saw the array of citizens on the grass; the pencil line of pedestrians lining Elm Street; the cops pushing cars back and making them disappear against the will of the drivers. Mitchell missed very little.

At the head of Dealey Plaza stood an ornate white memorial pavilion. It was low along the curving edges, around a shallow pool and a fountain. Here, on the Elm Street side, Howard L. Brennan sat. He was forty-five, a good family man, a steamfitter by trade, and a cautious human being who was easily frightened. He had finished his lunch in a nearby cafeteria and had some extra time. Mr. Brennan staked out the low white wall and knew that, when the motorcade came by, he could stand on the wall and look over the people in front.

He was only a few feet from Elm and Houston. Facing him was the front door of the School Book Depository, one hundred and seven feet north. There, had he known them, stood Wesley Buell Frazier, Danny Arce, Billy Lovelady, and, fifteen feet to the left, near the lone V-shaped oak tree, Mr. Roy Truly and Mr. Ochus Campbell. Farther down, on a slight rise of grassy knoll, stood an elderly manufacturer, Mr. Abraham Zapruder, who was nervously focusing his 8-millimeter zoom lens camera, warning the secretary behind him: “If I back up to you, don’t think I’m being fresh.”

Brennan knew none of them. His gaze flitted across the faces and back to the School Book Depository several times. He crossed one leg over the other and studied the fire escape on the Depository. It wasn’t much. Then he saw faces at the windows and his eyes conned the floors and the windows, roaming without pattern. On the fifth floor he saw three Negroes leaning out, chatting in the bright sunlight, and laughing. Over them he saw a youngish man at a partly opened window. The man held a rifle.

Brennan saw nothing unusual in this. “He is just sitting there,” Brennan thought, “waiting to see the same thing I’m going to see, the President.” Brennan studied what he could see of the man. He appeared to be sitting. He might be, thought Brennan, in his early thirties, a slender man of perhaps a hundred sixty-five or one hundred seventy pounds. His clothing was light colored but not a suit. The steamfitter noticed that the man with the rifle was on the floor under the top floor, whatever number that might be. Mr. Brennan was a man for looking and minding his own business.

Around the plaza were twenty-two persons with cameras. Ten had motion picture cameras. Six found vantage points halfway down Elm Street, near the grassy knoll. Mary Moorman, with her friend, Mrs. Jean Hill, paced up and down the center triangle of grass, swinging a Polaroid camera. They reminded each other that, with an automatic one-minute developing process, they would be able to shoot one photograph, no more. Miss Moorman would aim the camera and shoot it as the President’s automobile went by. Mrs. Hill would yell “Hey!” or something if Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy weren’t looking toward the camera. The two friends had been making photographs ever since the sun came out. But this one would be important.

Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Rowland stood close together on the grass. They were a very young couple; Arnold was eighteen, a high school student. To them, it was an enormous thrill to see the President, to be able to say that they had seen him. The young husband was busy glancing everywhere. He studied the Hertz clock on the roof of the Depository, watched the last freight train inch across the trestle, and saw a man in the Depository with a gun.

“Want to see a Secret Service agent?” he said. Mrs. Rowland, turning, said, “Where?” He pointed. She looked. She was nearsighted. She saw no one. Arnold said he must have stepped back, because he saw a man with a rifle. He said the man appeared to be thirtyish. Arnold knew that there was protection all over the city for the President. It didn’t surprise him that there was a Secret Service man up in a window. He even noticed that the man had the rifle sloping across the front of his body, pointing downward toward the left foot. It was bigger than a .22 rifle, Mr. Rowland said. He knew.

Some saw the man in the window. Some did not. Some looked up. Some held transistor radios to their ears. A group stood in front of the statue of Mr. Dealey, looking up Main Street. The motorcade was plainly in view now, because it was coming down a slight grade. The stomachs of some tickled with the approaching vision of the President and the First Lady of the land.

The President was close to the new County Courts Building, a steel skeleton reaching for the sky. Lamar Street, then Austin. Two clerks from the county auditor’s office, Ronald Fischer and Robert Edwards, had been given permission to remain out—“at lunch”—until the motorcade passed. They were excited and could hear the approaching phalanx of motorcycles. Edwards elbowed his friend. “Look at that guy there in that window,” he said pointing. “He’s looks like he’s uncomfortable.” Fischer looked. The only thing he found interesting about the man in the window was that he appeared to be a statue. He never moved his head or his body.

Fischer thought the man was lying down, facing the window. The man had light, close-cropped hair. He wore an open-neck shirt. As the motorcade came closer, Mr. Brennan glanced up again. He had done this several times, and sometimes he saw the man with the rifle, at other times he wasn’t there. This time he looked up and wondered why the man seemed to be crouching in the bottom part of the window. Suddenly, the crowd’s attention was diverted to Deputy Chief Lumpkin. His pilot car had paused in front of the Depository, and he warned the policemen working traffic that the motorcade was only two minutes behind him.

Someone, anyone, might have approached the car and asked: “Say, who’s the man up there with the gun?” Someone, anyone, could have asked the question—no matter how ridiculous it seemed—of any policeman. The deputy chief left the scene and headed swiftly for the underpass, then up onto Stemmons Freeway for the Trade Mart. He warned Captain Lawrence’s men that the President was right behind him and to clear traffic from the freeway.

A few minutes earlier, Mrs. Carolyn Walther, who worked as a cutter in a dress factory, walked to a point opposite the School Book Depository with Mrs. Pearl Springer to watch the parade. Mrs. Walther saw a man at the end window of the fourth or fifth floor. Both his hands were on the ledge and in his right hand he held a rifle, pointed downward. The stranger was staring across Houston, toward the edge of Main, where the parade was expected momentarily. Mrs. Walther was sure that she saw another man “standing” in the same window. Because the window was dirty, she could not see the head of the second man.

Traffic was stopped in the area, and the streets were clear. Commerce Street, with inbound traffic, was still open. A few cars and trucks began to slow down, the drivers hoping to catch a glimpse of the President. The police did nothing about it, so some additional cars stopped in the left lane. James T. Tague’s car, half under, half out of the underpass, stopped. He put on his parking brake and cut the switch. He got out. He would spend a few minutes watching, even though he was standing next to the Commerce Street abutment, farthest across Dealey Plaza from the turn at the Depository. A couple of deputy sheriffs and a policeman stood near Mr. Tague. They, too, were watching.

The lead car popped out of the foot of Main Street onto Dealey Plaza as a cork might leave a bottle. Suddenly, there were no dense crowds, no tall buildings, no diffused roar of throats. Chief Curry edged the car well out into the open and turned slowly to his right. He saw a panorama of fountains and green lawn, clusters of friendly faces, and some buildings, old and new, forming a square horseshoe.

The chief squinted through his glasses and caught sight of the President’s car coming down Main directly behind him. The motorcade was over. One more block along the foot of the horseshoe to the right on Houston, then a slow left onto Elm, and a downhill run to the underpass. Curry could afford to breathe easily. There had been no incidents of disrespect to the President. To the contrary, staid old Dallas with its ironclad politics had taken the Kennedys to its heart. The chief could not recall any political event in Big D which matched the hospitality of this one.

Forrest V. Sorrels sat in the back seat on the right-hand side. His job was to study crowds and buildings. The Secret Service agent needed a convertible to do his work correctly. From Love Field onward, he had been straining, swinging, gawking, sticking his head out of the open window in an effort to look up at windows. He sat on the edge of the back seat, and he saw the knot of people to the left, around the statue of Mr. Dealey, then the head swung to the right, along the sidewalk of Houston. No unusual activity anyplace.

He glanced up and down the sides of buildings, moving farther and farther ahead until he spotted the last edifice on this trip. His eyes fanned the old red brick façade of the Texas School Book Depository. Sorrels saw some Negroes leaning out of an upper window. No unusual activity there. The eyes moved up to the roof. A Hertz Rent-a-Car sign indicated 12:29 P.M. in electric lights which could barely fight the sun. Then quickly down to the people ahead who lined Elm Street, and Sorrels saw nothing untoward.

Not many, even in the plaza, noticed the group of girls squealing with anticipation on the fourth floor of the School Book Depository. They clasped and unclasped their hands with delight as the lead car approached. The office belonged to Vickie Adams. She had invited her friends, Sandra Styles, Elsie Dorman, and Dorothy May Garner to watch with her. The girls were thrilled because of the exceptional view, looking downward into the car, and the possibility of seeing the youthful, attractive First Lady and what she was wearing. The girls were prepared to discuss Mrs. Kennedy’s shoes, gloves, hat, coiffure, even the roses.

The big Lincoln swept out into the top of the plaza, sunbeams spangling off the fenders and sides. From Elm to Commerce, from the old courthouse to the overpass, attention was on that automobile. Greer was down to eleven miles an hour and he made the turn wide, into the center of Houston. Kellerman, at his side, glanced from side to side, noticing the sudden thinness of numbers, and looked ahead to the Depository. The car could have gone straight down Main, which would have kept it in the middle of the plaza, but it could not have made the turn up onto Stemmons Freeway without inching over an eight-inch concrete curb that separated Main from Elm. It was easier to turn right to Elm, and go under the trestle and up onto Stemmons Freeway.

In the jump seats, the Connallys maintained the crystal smiles to left and right. Mrs. Kennedy, looking left and finding few people, was waving to the right side. So was her husband. He did not know where he was in Dallas, but he knew that the motorcade was at an end, that this was a small thread on the edge of an impressive piece of fabric. He maintained the shiny smile and ran his left hand back across the thick brown hair. The eyes were sailor’s eyes, cracked in Vs along the edges. He must have seen the old gray turreted courthouse on his left as Greer made the turn, and he could not have avoided seeing the faded old Depository above the windshield.

Somewhere on the retina of disinterested eyes the images of the four girls jumping with excitement, the “colored boys” leaning and watching, and the crouching figure of the stranger and the rifle may have appeared between blinks. They were present and visible. The blue eyes, which had seen so much that was flattering in the past forty minutes, would hardly have paused on one building, one assortment of faces. Like an infant in a perambulator, John F. Kennedy had been the center of attraction of all the faces which leaned over the sides to look, to approve, to adore. The moment of approval is important to infant and President. For Mr. Kennedy, it was a smashing triumph because, if he could earn the plaudits and the endorsement of the people in the camp of the political enemy, then the fight for other states next year was bound to be easier than he thought.

The car glided noiselessly across Houston. In the sixth floor window, the mediocre marksman could have had Mr. Kennedy in his sights and probably did. From Oswald’s perch, the President of the United States was coming directly toward him. He could fix Kennedy in the crosshairs so that, at four hundred feet, the victim appeared to be one hundred feet away. There was one shell in the chamber; there were three more in the clip below, ready to jump to duty.

Oswald could have fired all four into the face of the President at this moment. The target moved neither right nor left as Greer came down the middle. It just grew larger in the sights, the tan, smiling face growing bigger in the telescopic lens with each fifth of a second. Why not fire now? No one knows. No one will ever know. Is it possible that he feared that a missed shot would cause Greer to slam the car into high speed, running out of sight straight on Houston behind the Texas School Book Depository? It is possible. Then, too, if he fired now, from in front and above, all heads in Dealey Plaza could easily turn back up the trajectory of the shell to the window and see the assassin. Those Secret Service men in sunglasses faced him; he was facing marksmen. If he missed, would he have time for a second shot before Greer could make the heavy car leap out of sight? This, too, is possible.

But suppose a patient man could afford to decline the head-on shot in favor of the cul-de-sac? Suppose, just suppose, the President could be placed in a position from which he could not back up in time to save his life and, if he moved ahead, would become a more exposed target? This would be an improvement for a man who permitted himself four shots. He had at least thirty minutes to crouch in this window and study the aspects of murder. As a result of his military training, Lee Harvey Oswald understood the components of ambush. Surprise is a necessity, and the victim must be caught in a position from which it is impossible to escape. In this instance, the car could not back up into the Secret Service car behind it. There was insufficient room on Elm to make a U-turn; the forced move was to continue ahead toward the underpass, exposed to the rifle with the telescopic sight.

Greer watched the pilot car make the left turn onto Elm, but he misjudged it. The Secret Service driver thought of it as a left turn, but it was more than left, curving more than ninety degrees. Instead of getting in the middle of the three lanes, the big car was now edging into the righthand lane, close to the people on the curb. The driver, swinging the heavy car toward the middle, saw the overpass ahead and people on it. Kellerman saw it, too, and so did Lawson and Sorrels in the pilot car. There was a policeman on the trestle in the middle of the group of people. Some of the Secret Service men waved to him to get the people away, out of a position where they would have the President directly below them as the car went into the underpass. The policeman didn’t see the arm-waving.

In the back, there had been a long silence. Mrs. Connally flashed a smile over her shoulder and said: “Mr. Kennedy, you can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you.” The President glanced at her, wearing his crowd smile, but said nothing. In the lead car, Sorrels said to Curry: “Five more minutes and we’ll have him there.” Someone said: “We have almost got it made.” Lawson called the Trade Mart and gave the Secret Service the five-minute warning. Mrs. Kennedy, sweltering in the sun, kept waving and smiling to the thin knots of people, but, looking ahead to the dark of the underpass, she thought: “It will be so cool in that tunnel.”

The clock on the roof clicked to 12:30. Cameras were clicking, too. A schoolboy, Amos Lee Euins, sixteen, was impressed by the friendliness of the President, so he waved. The President waved back and Amos Euins, standing opposite the Depository, rolled his eyes upward with pleasure and was surprised to see a piece of pipe hanging out of an upper window. From where the schoolboy stood, it seemed to be hanging in midair, pointed toward the car. He looked back at the automobile. A ninth grader rarely gets an opportunity to look at a President. The pipe was unimportant.

Diagonally down from the sixth floor window, the gleaming car moved toward an open V in the branches of a piney oak on the sidewalk. The curved windshield and the metal trim picked up flashes of sunlight and cast it to the sky. The man in the window followed the man in the car and perhaps led him a little. Then the crosshairs of the telescope sight and the smiling face met, for an instant, in the space between the big branches.

The pigeons on the roof lifted in fright to swing in an aerial covey. Tiny chips of concrete sprayed upward from the right rear of the car. On the sidewalk, Mrs. Donald S. Baker saw the spray and pulled back. A jacketed bullet, striking the pavement at 1,904 feet per second—almost three times the speed of sound—was deflected slightly upward, headed diagonally across Dealey Plaza, hit a curb and broke the shell into fragments, and the spent grains peppered James Tague on the cheek. Then the sound spread across the plaza. It was like dropping a board; like snapping a bullwhip; a sharp intrusive sound; a sound to make every being within range pause in its pursuits, every mind to ask the same question: “What was that?”

Time froze, as though an eternity of things could occur between this and the next second. Faces, still smiling, turned apprehensive eyes on the President. Some hands fell on breasts while the minds murmured: “A motorcycle backfire.” “A salute.” “A firecracker.” “A railroad torpedo.” Some cameras kept whirring. Some stopped. The sharp sound slammed around the awkward billiard railings of the buildings on Houston, Elm, Commerce and the railroad trestle and, to some who listened, it came from here, from there, from behind, in front. There was one sound. There were two. Royce Skelton, on the trestle, saw grains of concrete arc upward from the right rear of the big automobile. Tague felt a burst of sand hit his cheek. The President of the United States, feeling the tiny grains hit his face, began to lift both hands upward in fright. He, perhaps better than anyone in the Plaza, understood the import: he had felt the sandy grains on his skin and he had heard the sound he feared. In slow motion, a stunned expression replaced the boyish grin. The hands kept coming up, up, and the face began to turn slowly, an eternity of time, toward his wife.

Governor Connally, a Texas hunter, felt no grains of road concrete, but he knew the sound. His head, his body, began a slow-motion swing to the right. The stern expression under the pale cowboy hat began to change to openmouthed disbelief. His mouth was forming words not yet on his tongue: “Oh, no, no, no.” Howard Brennan’s mind tripped; it said: “Backfire. No, firecrackers.” On the fifth floor of the Depository, Hank Norman had an instantaneous reaction, almost as swift as the pigeons: “Someone is firing from upstairs right over my head.”

S. M. Holland, a signal supervisor, standing on the overpass, heard what he thought was a firecracker and saw a puff of smoke come from the grassy knoll parking lot at his left. James R. Worrell, 20, heard the crack of sound and looked straight up at the Depository. He saw part of a barrel of a rifle sticking out of a sixth-floor window. In the Vice-President’s car, just turning at the top of Elm, Agent Rufus Youngblood heard the loud pop, sat up in the front seat, saw the uncertainty of the crowd, and yelled, “Get down!”

Roy Kellerman, in the front seat of the President’s car, thought he heard Kennedy speak and turned to see both hands coming up toward the face. He said to Greer: “Let’s get out of here. . . .” Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the Lincoln continued on past the piney oak and out the other side. Perhaps three seconds had elapsed. Mrs. Kennedy, not sure whether to be disturbed by the sudden sound, turned slowly toward her husband as he held his hands up, pulling the jacket up a little with them and turned his eyes toward her with a dazed, uncomprehending expression. The Governor in the jump seat began to turn the other way, left, to see the President, whose right hand began to come up in front of his body.

The young man in the window had the car in plain sight now. The tree was behind his quarry. The bolt action was turned, the spent shell was ejected onto the floor, and a new one was in the chamber. The crosshairs held the back of the President of the United States in fair focus. In the telescopic sight, Kennedy was about eighty-five feet away. This time the trigger was squeezed with more care. The car was moving away at eleven miles per hour and the bullet overtook it at 1,300 miles per hour. It was aimed diagonally downward and it went through the clothing between the bottom of the neck and the right shoulder, separating the strap muscles, cutting through the trachea, nicking the bottom of the knot in the tie, moving out into sunlight, drilling through Governor Connally’s back, coming out the front of the rib cage just in time to shatter itself against his raised right wrist and deflect downward to furrow the left thigh and die against his leg.

“We are hit!” Kellerman said. Greer, bewildered, slammed on the footbrake and the car slewed slightly to the right and almost stopped. The Governor, fearful of that explosive sound, had a sensation of being punched in the back. President Kennedy, with hands no farther than his chin, reacted by trying to clutch his throat. He was conscious and he heard both shots. Slowly, almost sedately, he began to collapse toward the roses and his wife. With the hole in his throat breathing as he breathed, it is doubtful that he could have uttered an articulate sound.

Rufus Youngblood hopped from the front seat of the Vice-President’s car, yelling, “Get down!” and shoved Mr. Johnson’s right shoulder, pushing him toward Mrs. Johnson and Senator Yarborough and jumping up high enough to sit on his man. The men on the follow-up car turned backward toward the door of the Depository, as though, without consultation, they knew the sounds came from there. The faint scream of a woman came from somewhere. A man yelled, “Duck, for Christ’s sake!” One of the drivers hit a siren, and the wail started low and moved up to a pitch to terrify bystanders.

Tague, farthest away on Commerce Street, put his hand against his cheek and saw blood. Governor Connally looked down at his shirt and saw a massive amount of gore and was sure he had been killed. He began to sag toward the car door. Mrs. Connally, alarmed, reached quickly and pulled him toward her. Agent Hickey, in the follow-up car, got to his feet with the AR-15 rifle. He had no target. He was staring wildly at the green of sweet grass and the blue of a warm sky.

The final horror is always reserved for those least prepared. Mrs. Kennedy, the sheltered person, turned to see the agony on her husband’s face and she screamed: “What are they doing to you?” He could not tell her and, with his last conscious effort began to slump toward her—who knows?—maybe to protect her from what was still to come. He was conscious and there was time to fall forward, between the jump seats—seven seconds to be exact.

The man in the rough work clothes and the gray steel helmet, Mr. Howard Brennan, looked up in time to see the rifle being made ready again. On the fifth floor, Jarman heard a second empty shell drop. He and his friends began to look uneasy. On the street, a policeman roared: “Oh, goddamn!” Spectators who had struggled to approach the President began to flee. Like the pigeons now circling the plaza, they had been frightened and each moved awkwardly and precipitously away from danger. In the center of the plaza, some ran. Others fell and cupped their hands behind their heads. On the sidewalk near the grassy knoll, those in front knocked down those behind in the scramble to reach safety at the top of the knoll.

The aged Abe Zapruder kept the film in his camera moving, though he had heard the sharp reports. The policemen on the motorbikes flanking the presidential limousine turned their gleaming hard helmets this way and that, looking like inquisitive monsters behind the giant sunglasses. Off to the left, Postal Inspector Harry D. Holmes kept his binoculars on the car. He was sure someone was throwing firecrackers at it because he distinctly saw dust fly up from the street with the first crack. Then he noticed the car pull to a halt, and Holmes thought: “They are dodging something being thrown.”

Sorrels yelled: “Anybody hurt?” and a motorcycle policeman, pulling up on the lead car, nodded. “Get us to the hospital.” Curry picked up his microphone and said: “Surround the building!” He didn’t tell Channel Two what building. The Secret Service saw the President’s car pull up to a stop behind them and Lawson yelled: “Let’s get out of here!” They would trap the President if Curry’s car blocked the Lincoln. S. M. Holland, frozen with fright on the overpass, heard three more shots after the solitary puff of smoke and saw the President slump.

The terror spread. A man on a bench got up, picked his wife up, and slammed her onto the turf. Then he protected her body by falling on her. Officer T. L. Baker slowed his motorcycle and began to run it toward the curb with his feet dragging. Agent Clinton Hill left the running board of the follow-up car and began to run toward the back of the President’s car. William Greer hit the accelerator as Kellerman roared into a microphone: “Take us to a hospital, quick!”

The hard-boiled O’Donnell began to bless himself. Powers murmured: “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph . . .” On the sidewalk, Charles Brend, holding his five-year-old son up to see the President, fell on the little boy. Senator Yarborough thought he smelled gunpowder. “My God,” he said, “they’ve shot the President!” Mrs. Johnson, the sensitive one, the apprehensive wife and mother, shook her head negatively and said: “Oh, no. That can’t be.” In the press pool car, assistant press secretary Malcolm Kilduff straightened up and said: “What was that?” The young Negro student, Amos Lee Euins, was still watching the man in the window. He told himself it was a white man and he didn’t have a hat on. Euins could see some boxes behind the man. Mrs. Earle Cabell, wife of the mayor, was in a car still on Houston Street. She heard shots and jerked her head up toward the School Book Depository. She could see something sticking out of one of the windows.

Mary Moorman was on the grass. She had taken the one Polaroid shot. She pulled at Mrs. Jean Hill’s leg, screaming: “Get down! They’re shooting!” Brennan, on the low wall in his steel helmet, watched the rifle pull back into the window before the next shot. In the press buses, men were asking each other if that could be rifle fire. A driver said: “They’re giving him a twenty-one-gun salute.”

The great head was slumping slowly to the left. It came up in the rifle sights big and steady. The trigger was squeezed. As before, the rifle jumped, the bullet split the air, and the slower sound swelled through the plaza, tumbling in its echoes. Mrs. Kennedy was staring at her husband. The shell entered the right rear of the skull. A large portion of the head left the body in two chunks. One flew backward into the street. The other fell beside the President. Dura mater, like wet rice, sprayed out of the brain in a pink fan.

This one the President did not feel. The light had gone out with no memories, no regrets. After forty-six and a half years, he was again engulfed by the dark eternity from which he had come. For good or evil, his work, his joys, his responsibilities were complete. The heart, automatically fibrillating, pumped great gouts of blood through the severed arteries of the brain, drenching the striped shirt, blending on the petals of the flowers, puddling the rug on the car floor. It would stop in a few moments, when blood pressure dropped to zero.

Shock froze the mind of Mrs. Kennedy. She saw a flesh-colored piece of her husband’s head turning in air to drop behind the car. Jack’s expression reminded her of when he had a headache. Her voice sounded stiff and unnatural and she said: “They have shot his head off.” Mrs. Kennedy began to climb out on the trunk of the automobile. “I have his brains on my hand,” she said.

The heavy car leaped. “Bill,” Kellerman shouted to Greer, “get out of line.” Connally felt the car jerk. The Governor was sure he was dying; he was conscious and he was certain that the party had been ambushed by two or three marksmen. As he breathed, the wound in his chest sucked air. “My God,” he screamed, “they are going to kill us all!” He heard the sound of the third shot, heard the shell hit something soft, and he knew, reposing on Mrs. Connally’s lap and unable to see, that it had hit the President of the United States. His wife, as protective and determined as the Texas frontierswomen of old, cradled his head in her hands and murmured: “Don’t worry. Be quiet. You are going to be all right.”

The prisoners in the jail strained to see it all. Willie Mitchell, the “colored boy,” shouted that the President had been hit from behind by a bullet. “His head burst,” he said, excitedly. “It was like throwing a bucket of water at him.” Channel Two came on loud and clear:

Henslee: “12:30 P.M. KKB three six four.” Chief Curry in the lead car: “Go to the hospital—Parkland Hospital. Have them stand by. Get a man on top of that triple underpass and see what happened up there. Have Parkland stand by.” The voices were becoming strained, unnatural. Sheriff Decker picked up a microphone: “I am sure it’s going to take some time to get your men in there. Pull every one of my men in there.” Dispatcher Henslee: “Dallas One. Repeat. I didn’t get all of it. I didn’t quite understand all of it.” Sheriff Decker: “Have my office move all available men out of my office into the railroad yard to try to determine what happened in there and hold everything secure until Homicide and other investigators should get there.” Henslee: “Ten four. Dallas One will be notified.” The dispatcher hurriedly addressed Chief Curry. Henslee: “One. Any information whatsoever?” Curry: “Looks like the President has been hit. Have Parkland stand by.” Henslee: “They have been notified.” Deputy Chief N. T. Fisher came in: “We have those canine units in that vicinity, don’t we?” Curry: “Headed to Parkland. Something’s wrong with Channel One.”

Lumpkin (now up on Stemmons Freeway in the pilot car, using motorcycle policemen to divert traffic): “What do you want with these men out here with me?” Curry: “Just go on to Parkland Hospital with me.” Patrolman R. L. Gross: “Dispatcher on Channel One seems to have his mike stuck.” Curry: “Get those trucks out of the way. Hold everything. Get out of the way.”

The Lincoln was bucking with too much acceleration and Agent Clint Hill barely got a foothold and reached for the small handrail. The car swung hard left and then split the clear air as it picked up speed. Hill felt the forces try to pull him off the car. He hung on, reached forward with one hand, and shoved Mrs. Kennedy backward, into the seat. Agent Ready, jumping off the other side of the follow-up car, was called back. The word, the ugly, shocking news, was in each official car on Channel Two. It was rifle fire. The President has been wounded.

Hill pulled himself forward as the car hit the cool darkness of the underpass. He kept pulling up and up. The agony in Mrs. Kennedy’s face turned full upon him. The wind whipped her straight dark hair back and forth across her forehead. The agent at last stretched over the seat and she shouted: “They have shot his head off.” Hill looked down. The President was on his left side. His head was in the roses. A large part of the right side was missing. The eyes, wide open, stared at the back of Mrs. Connally. One foot was lifted and hung over the door on the right side. Brain tissue was scattered. Governor Connally, down between the jump seats, began to scream louder and louder, and Mrs. Connally began to wail with him.

Agent Hill held onto the back seat and beat the trunk with his hand. The President’s wife was looking up at him as the car moved up onto Stemmons for the race to Parkland, four miles away. Pathetically, she held up an arm. “I have his brains in my hand.” Hill saw a piece of the President’s head lying beside him. The agony on his face was screened by the big sunglasses. He looked back and shook his head no, and turned a thumb downward.

Agent-in-Charge Emory Roberts, in the follow-up car, picked up the phone: “Escort us to the nearest hospital,” he said, “fast but at a safe speed.” Roberts repeated the words. The President had been lost. Mr. Roberts did not want to risk the life of the new President. He waved the Johnson car closer and yelled, pointing ahead: “They got him. They got him.” He pointed to Agent McIntyre: “You and Bennett take over Johnson as soon as we stop.” It was the cold intelligent move to make.

Dealey Plaza was quiet. The running had stopped. People sat up on the grass. Policemen were at the School Book Depository door. Some were up the incline, as ordered on Channel Two. In a press car, Bob Jackson pointed: “Look up in the window,” he said. “There’s the rifle.” Tom Dillard, chief photographer of the Dallas News, raised his camera at once and took two shots of the red brick façade. The man in the window remained long enough to make certain that his victim had convulsed, then slumped to the left. He had seen the people run; he had heard the screams.

Slowly, the rifle retreated through the window. Euins watched it; so did Brennan. Jackson saw it clearly; then he saw nothing. The automobiles in the motorcade began to pick up speed. From the sixth floor, they looked like derailed cars in a toy train set. The new President was under the crushing weight of his bodyguard. The assassin’s heart must have leaped with excitement because he had dared to do a thing which no boy, dominated by mother, sneered at by wife, would have the nerve to do: Lee Harvey Oswald had killed the most powerful man in the whole world; he had done it as casually as a boy might shoot a tin can in an empty lot.

He looked over the little fortress of cartons. The sixth floor was still empty. He stepped over the empty shells, ran diagonally across the big, dusty room and set the gun down between rows of cartons. The fourth shell was still in it. If one of the “colored boys” had remained on the sixth floor, the fourth shot might have become a necessity. Quickly, Oswald walked down the steps toward the second floor. There were eighteen steps to each floor and the young man was sure-footed. All he had to do was to get in that commissary before the wave of excitement came up from the street. Seventy-two steps—one at a time or two?

At the front of the building, Roy Truly was elbowing his way through a group of shocked people. At the first step, he met officer T. L. Baker, who had jumped off his motorcycle with revolver drawn and had run to the entrance of the School Book Depository. Truly, trotting, announced breathlessly that he was the manager. Baker waved the gun: “Then come with me.” Reporters were asking to be let off the press bus, but the driver picked up speed and headed for the Trade Mart. Some photographers dropped off another bus, spinning with their equipment, and ran back toward the School Book Depository to cover the story—if there was a story.

It required all of seven seconds for Howard Brennan to get off the wall—having watched the rifleman get off three shots—and become sufficiently frightened to run to the Houston Street side of it and crouch for protection. Jean Hill kept saying: “His hair stood up. It just rippled like this.” Wesley Buell Frazier, the boy who was worried about his weak automobile battery, had watched the panic and he remained stock-still. In his mind, he was thinking: “When something happens, it is always best to stand still because if you run that makes you look guilty sure enough.” Ronald Fischer, who had seen the gun in the window, ran down the grassy center of Dealey Plaza and back up again. It seemed to him that many policemen were running up toward the tracks.

On the fifth floor, Bonnie Ray Williams’ face worked itself toward fear. He and Harold Norman and James Jarman had heard all the shots, had watched the windows rattle, had listened to the empty shells bouncing on the floor above; now dust and plaster was sifting down. Harold pointed to the ceiling and said the shots came from there. Bonnie Ray blurted: “No bullshit!” Norman said: “I even heard the shell being ejected. . . .” Jarman began to edge toward the staircase. “You got something on your head,” he said, pointing. “Somebody was shooting at the President.” Bonnie Ray began to edge away, and he said again: “No bullshit!” The three dashed for the exit.

In the middle of Elm, Officer B. J. Martin was sickened. He had been riding left front of the limousine. He was wiping blood and brain tissue from the right side of his windshield and his helmet. Another policeman, on the grassy knoll, bent downward in nausea. James R. Worrell, the young man who watched each shot fired from the sixth floor and had glanced at the car to see the effect, realized that he would never forget the screams of so many persons saying, “Duck!”

In the press pool car, Merriman Smith of United Press International took a calculated risk. He lifted the pool phone from between his knees, got the Dallas bureau and said: “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.” Jack Bell of the Associated Press, sitting in the back seat, knew that this terse message would be heard around the world in a few minutes, and that the world would be waiting to know the destination and fate of those three bullets. He was sitting with Baskin, chief of the Dallas News Bureau, and Clark of ABC.

Jack Bell demanded the phone. He stood. Smith began to dictate additional material in “takes.” Over the scream of sirens, he jammed a finger in his ear, squinted his eyes, and asked that his words be read back to him. Each ticking second gave UPI an additional exclusive lead over AP. Bell reached across his adversary for the phone. Smith tried to yank it loose. Bell, swaying in a speeding car, took a swing at Smith and hit the driver. Kilduff, the President’s press representative, tried to pacify the journalists. He didn’t know where the car was going or what had happened. But the word was out.

On the first floor, Roy Truly led Officer Baker to the shaft. “Turn loose the elevator,” he shouted up the well. Baker could not wait. He asked about stairs. Truly led him across the ground floor and up the steps. The policeman, a big dark man with crew haircut and cleft chin, followed holding his gun downward. At the second floor, Truly made the turn to the third. The cop thought he saw a movement out of the perimeter of his eye. He stopped. Through the glass door, a man stood empty-handed near a soft drink stand. The officer went into the commissary. “Come here,” he said.

The young man walked toward Baker. Truly, halfway up the flight of stairs, returned. “Do you know this man?” the cop said, holding the gun close to the belly of Lee Harvey Oswald. “Yes.” “Does he work here?” Truly nodded impatiently. “Yes,” he said. “He works for me.” They left. Oswald dropped a coin in the soda machine. He got a Coca-Cola. This was nervousness because he invariably drank Dr. Pepper. Truly and Baker worked their way up to the fifth floor, found an elevator, ran it to the seventh, examined the roof, and came back down overlooking only one floor: the sixth.

The police dispatcher moved more patrol cars to the School Book Depository, and inched others forward from the outlying districts to protect the city. From the sheriff’s office across the street, unassigned deputies poured in to help. The word from Chief Curry and Sheriff Decker had mentioned the overpass; as a consequence, much of the running was up the grade. On top stood Patrolman Earle V. Brown, a fourteen-year veteran. He had screened the men sitting on the overpass, making certain that they were railroad personnel. He knew that no shots had come from his area, but, still carrying his yellow raincoat, he met the oncoming rush of policemen and deputies and helped them to scour the area. No one on the overpass tried to run. Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman, running up the grassy knoll, heard someone say the shots came from the parking lot behind. At once he hopped the wall, but no one and no automobile was seen leaving the lot. Weitzman canvassed the parked cars, sitting in cool dead rows.

Behind the lot, the railroad towerman, Lee E. Bowers, Jr., could see the parking lot, the railroad tracks, the overpass, and the back of the Depository, without moving from his big window. He had heard no shots, seen no smoke, seen no one leave the area. As the police flooded the trestle and backlots, Bowers threw red-on-red block signals from the switchtower, effectively stopping all trains.

On Mr. Johnson’s right shoulder, Agent Rufus Youngblood sat awkwardly, his dark walkie-talkie chattering the code of the secret service. “Dagger to Daylight. Shift to Charlie.” “Dusty to Daylight. Have Dagger cover Volunteer.” “Lancer may be critically wounded.” “Dandy still back on the street.” Senator Yarborough, wedged in the left corner of the seat, became fretful. “What is it?” he shouted. Rufus Youngblood tried to stretch his legs to the floor. He leaned toward the big figure of Lyndon Johnson, crushed beneath him and bent toward Mrs. Johnson. “When we get where we’re going,” he said against the whip of the wind, “you and me are going to move off and not tie in with other people.” Johnson, who didn’t understand but who recognized the voice of authority, said: “O.K. O.K., partner.”

Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, tilted toward the frightened face of Senator Yarborough, was afraid that the President might have been hurt. She, who had always felt that Texas was the finest state, felt a crushing weight. Her stomach began to cramp with visceral anger. The wind of speed whipped at her head. “This can happen somewhere else,” she thought, “but not in my country.”

Mrs. Robert Reid was emotionally wrung out. She was a clerk on the second floor of the Depository and had hurried down to Elm Street to witness a pleasant and rare scene: the President and his lady moving past in an automobile. She heard the shots, heard the bedlam, and, without thought, had hurried back in the front entrance and up the stairs to her office. It was an orderly refuge from madness. As she opened the little gate enclosure to her desk, she saw Lee Harvey Oswald coming out of the glass commissary, a bottle of soda in his hand. For a moment, her mind told her that it was strange to see a warehouse boy in that room at this time. Then she shook her head sorrowfully, and said: “Oh, the President has been shot, but maybe they didn’t hit him.” Oswald kept walking. He mumbled, but she did not understand what he said, nor did it interest Mrs. Reid.

He passed her station, walking diagonally across the floor to the front. Then he went down the steps, still holding the soda, and, at the entrance, a man accosted Oswald, flashing an identification card, and said: “Secret Service.” Oswald paused in the doorway. This could have been the end of the road. The man said: “Where is the phone?” Lee Harvey Oswald pointed inside the little half-gate. The “Secret Service” man was Robert MacNeil of the National Broadcasting Company.

The time on the roof clock stood at 12:33. The pigeons were still swinging broad circles over the plaza as Oswald brushed through the excited groups, heading east up Elm Street. There was time to think. Of what? Escape? In all the things he did, Oswald was a rational plotter. At each crisis of his life, the surly young man seemed to know what he wanted to do, and how best to do it.

Escape? He had left most of his money with his wife. In this gesture of generosity, he must have known that he had severely limited his chances of ever getting out of Dallas. He had thirteen dollars. He had left the empty shells on the sixth floor. The gun was up there, hidden between packing cases. They could be traced to him. He had purchased them and had used an alias: “Alex Hidell.” The signature was in his handwriting. The rifle and a revolver which now reposed in his room on North Beckley Street had been mailed, prepaid, to his post office box in Dallas.

Then, too, when the police began a head count at the School Book Depository, Oswald would be the missing man. He would be the missing man from the sixth floor. His logical mind must also have told him that some of the people in Dealey Plaza had seen his rifle, partly out of the window. When the cops got out to Irving, would Marina stand by him and say that he had never owned a rifle? Would she? Oswald knew that in a crime of this magnitude, he could expect loyalty only from his mother. The rest, he must have known, would ally themselves with the law.

No one in the warehouse could swear that Oswald had been seen, here or there, while the shooting was going on. Everyone saw him some time before the crime, or two or three minutes afterward. He had no credible alibi, and he knew this, too. No money, no alibi, no sanctuary—is it possible that this young man wanted to be caught and tried? It is not only possible, but probable, that the most important circumstance, to Oswald, was that the world must know the name of the doer of the deed. For years, he had fought against the anonymity of the human cipher. What good would it do the ego to escape into additional anonymity? Oh, no. The world must know. The world must appreciate. The world must debate—while he remained silent in the prisoner’s dock—whether he did it or didn’t do it. And, could the world prove he did, to the exclusion of all doubt? His best course lay in getting caught in a manner of his own choosing and starring in a propaganda trial.

Supreme cruelty is reserved for the defenseless. Mrs. Kennedy was imprisoned in a speeding car with her personal horror. There was no way out, no one to help. Bending low, she cradled her husband’s head on her right thigh. The handsome face, once tanned and buoyant and alive with ideals, was blue-gray. The eyes, which had once belonged to a young Senator who had fastened them on a Georgetown society girl and never released her again, were wide open, seeing nothing, never to see anything again. The mouth, which had tenderly sealed a wedding vow in Newport, hung open. Now and then, a snore of sound escaped from it and startled her. She could look down into his brain through a hole big enough for her fist. His right leg, hanging over the door of the speeding car, twitched. The wound in the throat made an irregular, sucking sound, bubbling.

The agony was not John F. Kennedy’s. It was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s. He was serene in the cool darkness of death. She, the least prepared for violence, sat with it, prayed over it, crooned at it on her lap. Agent Hill, off the edge of the back seat, could not help her. He hung on, the gun in his right hand, and he saw the knots of people on the street corners; the joyriders pulled to one side and parked with people leaning out. The faces were beaming; the people waved; they saw the pink of Mrs. Kennedy, and they yelled greetings.

They didn’t appreciate the high speed of the motorcade, and some said, “Where was the President?” and others said, “Didn’t you see him, sitting up there like a king?” There was a blur of buildings, street corners, fuzzy faces, and mouths forming cheery greetings. The sustained moan of the siren was ahead of the car, telling the world to get out of the way; it was weeping for a sturdy young giant who had been shot in the back while his hand was outstretched in greeting.

The kaleidoscope of thought moves swiftly and aimlessly in shock. Often it leaves no footprints. What are its capabilities in six minutes—360 seconds? Would the dark, tearless, shocked eyes see only the hole in his head? Or would it scramble through the files searching for all the tender moments? Would it balance the sheer terror of sight with visions of the children, growing up in his image and hers? Would it encompass those domestic arguments, when her will was opposed to his, when she defied him? Would the mind block all of it out and go back five minutes in time to watch a triumphant President waving to his Texas constituents, the mouth saying: “Thank you, Thank you.” The mouth saying: “Take off the glasses, Jackie.” The mouth saying . . . It would say no more. “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .” The hair still had that reddish brown thickness, the jawline had the fighter’s bulge. But the mouth hung open, and small strings of saliva hung from it. “We’re in nut country now. . . .”

The roar of the onrushing wind, the speed of thoughts wanted and unwanted, the omnipotent sight of the sturdy oak felled—by whom? for what reason?—had to be lived and faced squarely by a sensitive young lady unprepared. The last of his blood was running down her stocking.

Gordon Shanklin read the accumulation of reports from his FBI agents. The office was quiet, and the pages on the desk were turned, one at a time, by thumb and finger at the lower left-hand edge. There was a knock on the door and Mr. Shanklin said, “Come in.” His secretary said that the young clerk who had been monitoring the Dallas police frequencies would like to see him. The boss nodded.

“Some shots were fired at the President’s car,” he said. “They’re headed for Parkland.” Shanklin is a man who thinks fast and speaks slow. He picked up a phone. “Tell Vince Drain to come in here,” he said. Then he dialed the private number of the Director, J. Edgar Hoover. He waited a moment, his eyes on the clerk. “Gordon Shanklin,” he said. “Dallas office. Let me speak to the Director.” In a moment, he heard the familiar voice. “Gordon Shanklin,” Mr. Shanklin said. “The President has been reported as shot in Dallas.” There was a momentary sucking of breath on the line. “He’s on his way to Parkland Hospital. The first word we have here is by police radio. . . .”

Hoover, always under emotional control, asked a few crisp questions. The personal protection of the President was not his business, nor the FBI’s. He had a good working arrangement with James Rowley and the Secret Service and no desire to tip the tactical boat. “Offer the full services of our laboratory,” he said. “Find out how badly he is hurt and call me back.”

Hoover hung up. His secretary dialed the home of the Attorney General in McLean, Virginia. No matter how painful the news, Robert Kennedy should hear it first and, even though no one knew whether the President had been hurt, it would be the Attorney General’s function to brace the rest of the Kennedy family against the explosive impact of press and radio.

In the Sante Fe Building office, Shanklin stared at the forgotten reports. He looked up at the bulk of Vincent Drain. “Get to Parkland at once,” he said, “and offer our laboratory facilities if we can help.” It did not occur to Shanklin, of course, that he had another agent, Jim Hosty, who, in a few hours, would turn out to be the man with a knowledge of the suspect. The only man.

The microphone on Dallas Channel One became unstuck. It was 12:33 and Mrs. Kinney, a dispatcher, ran to the office of Captain W. R. Westbrook to tell him that shots had been fired at Kennedy and the limousine had just passed the Trade Mart on its way to Parkland. Westbrook, in charge of personnel, staring at Mrs. Kinney. If this was another joke . . . Her face began to lose complexion. The eyes were disbelieving. Westbrook asked no more questions.

She had notified Parkland. Mrs. Kinney had also called all patrol craft on the route to the hospital, asking that they seal off traffic and permit the big Lincoln and its wildly swinging satellites to get through. Channels One and Two now were handling Kennedy traffic. They were asking everyone else with routine Dallas business to please keep off the air. Westbrook was dazed. He stood and then walked away, still listening but no longer hearing, no longer digesting the words. The President had been shot at in Dallas. Shot in Dallas. Right here.

He left the office, meeting patrolmen and detectives and uttering the same words. “If you’re not busy, report down to the Texas Depository building. Chief Curry has been on Channel Two, asking for help down there. If you have no big assignment, drop it and go down right away. Sergeant Stringer—yes, you. Joe Fields. Carver. McGee.” They saw the deep shock, and they said, “Yes sir,” to the captain and hurried to the basement to get into cars. When Westbrook got to the basement, there was no car left. Mechanically, he walked up the ramp to the street, and out into the bright sunshine. His shoulders were squared and he began the long walk to Dealey Plaza, his stride bucking the tide of pedestrians who had witnessed the motorcade and were still talking about what a handsome couple the Kennedys were.

The motorcade, careening wildly and approaching eighty miles per hour, passed the big Levitz Furniture Store on the left, the P. C. Cobb stadium, the Trade Mart, brilliant with snapping flags, and was passed by the big jet airliners letting down slowly to Love Field, two miles ahead. In the convertibles, the wind snapped the eyelids shut. A billboard proclaimed the “Smart Smooth Way to Go.” Some of the trees along the edge of Stemmons held onto their leaves even though the season was over the long sleep had arrived. Red berries, like holly, confettied the bushes bordering the lawns.

The grass had turned off its chlorophyll and adopted the beige of the lion’s mane. Some boys in empty lots played with kites, getting them aloft and paying out white cord from a stick of wood. A sign said: “Roller Skating Time.” There was a shimmer of heat haze on Stemmons Freeway, so that, looking back, the skyscrapers, standing alone on the big plain, shivered a little.

Mr. Stemmons and Mr. Crow, who were co-owners of the Trade Mart, stood with David B. Grant, a Secret Service agent, and asked how to greet the President of the United States. Mr. Grant took them out front, under the canopy, and told them to wait until both the President and the First Lady alighted, and then to present themselves as co-owners and to bid the Kennedys welcome to the Trade Mart. Then both men would please step aside to permit the Secret Service to escort the President and Mrs. Kennedy to the head table.

Agent Grant had received his five-minute warning from the White House switchboard in the Dallas Sheraton. Three of those minutes had gone by. Then he had heard the faraway sirens, getting closer, and the Secret Service man shaded his eyes to look at Stemmons Freeway, immediately behind the Trade Mart. He saw the motorcade disappear at high speed. It was not turning off for the luncheon. And who was that lying across the trunk of the car?

Kilduff, in the press pool car, said to the driver, “What’s that large building?” and the man said: “Parkland Hospital.” This was the first real clue. Everyone knew that rifle shots had been fired; all hands were aware that the motorcade had pulled away from the plaza at high speed. Now they knew that someone had been hurt. It didn’t have to be the President. It could be almost anyone in that head car.

The nurses’ station in major surgery was ringing. It was picked up by a plump dimpled woman in starched white. “Nelson,” she said. One of the telephone operators at Parkland Hospital, Mrs. Bartlett, said that President Kennedy had been shot and was on his way to the emergency entrance. Doris Nelson, R.N., said: “Stop kidding me.” Mrs. Bartlett, almost weeping, said: “I have the police dispatcher on the line.”

The nurse, in charge of the extensive emergency section of the hospital, asked Dr. Dulaney, resident surgeon, to report to Trauma One at once. She called Miss Standridge, who said that Trauma One was already set up. A “stat” call was placed for Dr. Tom Shires. Mrs. Nelson inspected the green-tiled room referred to as Trauma Two, directly opposite Trauma One. She opened a bottle of Ringer’s lactate. In the hospital restaurant, Dr. Malcolm Perry listened to the emergency call for Dr. Shires.

He also studied the salmon croquettes on his plate. Strange, nobody ever called Tom Shires on “stat.” He was the hospital’s chief resident in surgery. Another thing: Shires was not in Dallas today. Dr. Perry walked to a phone and picked it up. “President Kennedy has been shot,” the operator said. The croquettes began to chill as Perry ran through the long warrens of the hospital to the emergency area. Young Dr. Charles Carrico, a specialist in gunshot wounds, was examining a patient for admission to the hospital. He got the news, left the patient, and hurried to Trauma Two.

Some, out on the emergency dock, could already hear the sirens. Within two minutes, the hospital was going to be a busy place. The Oneal ambulance which had brought the epileptic from Dealey Plaza had dropped him for admission. A policeman came up on a motorcycle and requested that no vehicle move. “Stay right where you are,” he said. All of them heard the approaching sounds now, but few knew what they meant.

In newspaper offices across the United States, a small bell began to tinkle. In the wire rooms, the UPI machine was chattering about a murder trial in Minneapolis, Minnesota:

DETECTIVES WERE THERE AND THEY “ASKED HIM TO LOOK IN THERE (THE BRIEFCASE) FOR SOMETHING.”

THE CASE WAS OPENED AND AN ENVELOPE WAS FOUND CONTAINING 44 $100 BILLS, THE WITNESS SAID. THE STATE HAD SAID IT WOULD PRODUCE THAT PIECE OF EVIDENCE BUT IT HAD NOT LISTED IT AS ONE “OF THE SEVEN LINKS.” THE DEFENSE HAS IMPLIED IT WILL TAKE THE LINE THAT CAROL’S DEATH AFTER A SAVAGE BLUDGEONING AND STABBING IN HER HOME WAS THE RESULT OF AN ATTEMPTED

MOREDA 1234 PCS

UPI A 7N DA

PRECEDE KENNEDY

DALLAS, NOV. 22 (UPI)—THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS

JT1234PCS

The walk across Commerce and Main wasn’t much for James T. Tague. His car was still dead, half in the underpass at Commerce Street and half out. No one seemed sure of what had happened, and he saw a man near Elm, on the grass, speaking excitedly with a policeman. Tague walked over, still feeling the sandy spray on his cheek. He heard the man say that he had been watching the President and it “just looked like his head exploded.” The policeman, Clyde A. Haygood, tried to calm the man down. The man said he had seen a piece of the President’s head fly off behind the car. Tague joined the conversation and pointed to his cheek. He had been hit by something, probably bits of a bullet or grains of concrete from a curb. The officer observed flecks of blood on Tague’s face. The other man insisted that he had seen the shots and he was certain that they had come from the end window of the School Book Depository.

Howard Brennan, who had watched all of it, was dismayed to see the police “running in the wrong direction.” He convinced a policeman, speaking almost desperately, that the whole thing had come from that window up there. The pipe fitter pointed. Quickly, the policeman counted from the ground floor upward, and decided that the shots had come from the fifth floor. Mr. Brennan gave him a description of the man behind the gun. Officer W. E. Barmett wrote the words: “White male, approximately 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighing 165, in his early thirties.”

It was the first “make” on Lee Harvey Oswald. Brennan, slow to become aroused, was now nervously communicative. Sergeant D. V. Harkness, who had been studying the area behind the Depository, stopped to listen. Harold Norman and James Jarman, Jr., walked up to listen, and Brennan pointed at them excitedly and said he had seen both of them leaning out a window on the fifth floor. The people who had not been frightened away from Dealey Plaza were now trying to draw the attention of policemen and sheriff’s deputies to individual versions of what had happened. Everyone, it seemed, had a story to which he would swear.

Haygood got on Channel Two and said: “I just talked to a guy up here who was standing close to it and the best he could tell it came from the Texas School Book Depository building here with the Hertz renting sign on top.” Dispatcher Henslee said: “Ten four. Get his name, address, telephone number there—all the information you can get from him. 12:35 P.M.” A few moments later, Sergeant D. V. Harkness was on Channel Two. He had been approached by a “little colored boy, Amos Euins.” The student was appalled when he saw all those policemen—fourteen was his estimate—running toward the overpass to find the rifleman when he, Amos Euins, had seen him plainly in the Depository building. “He was a kind of old policeman,” Euins said of Harkness, “so I ran down and got him and he ran up here.”

The schoolboy convinced the sergeant. Harkness was reporting on Channel Two, not realizing that he was corroborating what Officer Clyde Haygood had just concluded. “I have a witness,” Harkness said, “that says it came from the fifth floor of the Texas School Depository store.” It was at this point that Harkness began to seal the Depository building. He went to the back of the building, near the freight loading platform, and saw two men lounging. They identified themselves as Secret Service agents. Harkness did not ask for identification. He acknowledged their authority and went deeper into the railroad yards, where he found some hoboes on freight trains. The sergeant arrested all of them.

Police cars pulled up all along Inwood and on Harry Hines Boulevard to clear the way. The dispatchers had done a good job, pulling them in from nearby areas to open the two vital roads to Parkland Memorial Hospital. They stood awkwardly, at crossroads, their red blinkers flashing, their men in the middle of the road flagging the lead car and the presidential car onward at top speed. Rubber squealed as the cars made a right turn and then another, now heading back toward downtown Dallas. Off Butler Street, Curry swung in onto the service road, and Greer followed, tipping the big car. The follow-up was directly behind them, then Johnson and the press pool car. Merriman Smith handed the phone over to Jack Bell of the Associated Press, and, at this moment, the line died.

At the little emergency overhang, the cars skidded to a stop in attitudes of disarray and men began to tumble out, all running toward the Kennedy automobile. As the car slammed to a stop, Governor Connally hung between the jump seats, his head on his wife’s lap, his feet on the other seat. He felt a twinge of pain and, for the first time, hoped he might live. He looked across at the other jump seat and saw on his leg a piece of the President’s brain about the size of a man’s thumbnail.

Men were running and yelling everywhere. Emory Roberts, agent in charge of this shift of Secret Service, ran from the follow-up car to the Kennedys to learn whether he still had a President to protect. He opened the door on Mrs. Kennedy’s side, saw the President face down on her leg, and said: “Let us get the President.” Mrs. Kennedy, bending over her husband’s head, said, “No.” It was firm and final. He turned to Kellerman, nominally his superior, and said: “You stay with the President. I’m taking some of my men to Johnson.”

This was the second time in one day that many things would happen swiftly, and yet, in retrospect, they tumbled over each other in slow motion. Sometimes, as the men of government and law sped this way and that, they seemed to stop, frozen in flight. Two men hopped on the Oneal ambulance and ordered the driver to remain where he was. Three agents—McIntyre, Bennett, and Youngblood—hustled Vice-President Lyndon Johnson through the emergency door. He was flapping his arms and trying to get back to the Kennedy car. Youngblood said, “No,” and kept pushing. “We are going to another room and I would like you to remain there. . . .” Other agents surrounded Mrs. Johnson, who was looking at the Kennedy car and saw a blur of pink and the edges of some red roses.

The moment was hectic, hysterical, and historical. The nation had a new President, but he did not know it, although the men around him did. Two Secret Service men ran up the hall, with its arrow in the center of the floor to point the way to Trauma One and Trauma Two. The nurse at the triage desk didn’t know the situation—no one had told her—and she winced as she saw the men with the guns. They demanded to know where the hell the carts were. Chief Jesse Curry had asked that the hospital be alerted; now where were the carts?

Outpatients sat on benches in the chocolate-tiled corridor, or limped on their way in or out. They were rudely pushed aside and told to stand against the wall. There was no time to explain; just get the carts and clear this damn hall. Greer, who had been within six feet of the President all the way, slid out of the driver’s seat and got his first look at the carnage in the back. The tears came and he looked at Mrs. Kennedy and kept mumbling: “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

To die so suddenly; to die at the peak; to die in an alien place. William Greer looked up and saw the vast array of medical and surgical buildings, new and bright like the rest of Dallas. He knew that things would never be quite the same here again. There was a man in the back seat with a chest that seemed, every few moments, to convulse. He was dead, just as Mrs. Kennedy and Clint Hill had said, but some of the parts of the body fought the inevitable without any brain to direct them.

The loudspeaker called for ambulance carts. The call was repeated. In the emergency section, doctors by ones and twos got off elevators, bounded down and up stairways, all heading for Trauma One and Trauma Two. The only patient waiting for treatment was Julia Cox, 14, who was admitted for an X-ray. Others were resting after treatment, or on their way out of the numberless little sheet-covered cubbyholes against both sides of the wall. Jack Price, hospital administrator, had heard the ugly news and rushed down from his office to expedite matters and to lend a hand if necessary. In the long corridor, as he passed personnel, he issued orders calling for additional skilled assistance. The call for carts was heard by Diana Bowron, a young British nurse, and she asked orderly Joe Richards to help her run one out to the ambulance port. The press pool car was parked, and Merriman Smith jumped out to take a look. Baskin and the others followed. They saw the carnage, the huddled pink suit, the Governor sagging between jump seats, the moans from the mouth of Mrs. Connally, and the whispered sibilations from Mrs. Kennedy to her husband.

David Powers hurried to the automobile, gasped, and cried: “Oh. Mr. President!” and burst into tears. O’Donnell, the general of the palace guard, did not come. He went inside, looking for carts, came out and ordered the police to cordon the area off, to keep everybody out unless they could present White House credentials, to put special guards over the Lincoln and permit no one to touch it. Senator Yarborough was weeping. Mayor Earle Cabell beat his fists against a wall, roaring: “Not in Dallas! Not in Dallas!”

The cart was beside the car but no one could get over Governor Connally to reach the President. Mrs. Kennedy did not want anyone to take her husband. Clint Hill whispered to her, “Please let us remove the President.” She said, “No,” Hill removed his jacket and dropped it gently over President Kennedy’s head. A security policeman, with his radio on, patrolled the front entrance of Parkland and heard ABC’s Don Gardiner cut into another program to say: “Dallas, Texas. According to United Press International, three shots were fired at President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade today.”

Inside, Mr. Johnson was being hustled to a remote part of the emergency area. He followed the phalanx of Secret Service agents without question. He kept rubbing his sore right shoulder, which had sustained Youngblood’s weight, and passing nurses saw it and spread the rumor that the Vice-President had sustained a heart attack and was in the emergency area for treatment. In downtown Dallas, people were saying that two Secret Service agents had been killed in Dealey Plaza.

Outside, police officers were roaring: “Clear this area!” On Channel Two, other patrols were assigned to Harry Hines Boulevard to keep automobiles off the service road. Roy Kellerman snatched the first phone and dialed White House-Dallas, and asked for Jerry Behn, agent in charge of the White House detail, in Washington. He started his conversation by saying: “Jerry, look at your clock. . . .” CBS was rushing a flash to Walter Cronkite in New York, while officials were calling for a cut-in on all CBS affiliates throughout the country. Cronkite hadn’t seen it yet, but the announcement read: “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade. First reports say that the President is seriously wounded.” In Washington, David Brinkley saw the teletype flash, but was powerless to use it. His boss couldn’t be found.

At the hospital, men ran at top speed for precious telephones, to have and to hold. Merriman Smith, after a long heartrending look into the back of that automobile, had skidded inside, found a man hanging up a phone, and said: “How do you get outside?” He was told to dial nine. Smith said: “The President has been hurt and this is an emergency.” This time, in a couple of sentences, he dictated a bulletin which said that the President had been “seriously, perhaps fatally, injured by an assassin” in Dallas.

The stretchers were going by, almost at a run. First there was Governor Connally; behind him was President Kennedy, on his back with a coat over his face. On his chest were a few bloody roses and a pink hat. Kellerman told Behn in Washington: “The man has been hit. He’s still alive in the emergency room. He and Connally were hit by gunfire. Don’t hang up. This line should be kept open, and I’ll keep you advised.” Mrs. Kennedy, as forlorn as the bloody roses, trotted beside the cart, her fingers trying to maintain contact with her husband, while visitors leaving the emergency area bumped into her. Her head was back, her dark hair swinging behind from side to side, the mouth was open in anguish, and the eyes begged for the assistance no one could give.

A nurse found an emergency room to satisfy Roberts and Youngblood. It had one patient—a Negro. He was taken out at once. The room, closer to the emergency entrance than Traumas One and Two, had a small window. The shades were drawn. It could hardly be called a room. There were a dozen or more cubicles in one blue-tiled room. This was the one remotest from the door, and it was screened by sheets on poles. Roberts told Rufus Youngblood to remain with the Vice-President, and guards were posted at the door.

Revolvers were drawn there and outside. Roberts convinced Youngblood and the Vice-President that, at the moment, no one knew whether this was a widespread plot to assassinate the leading men in the United States government. It could be. If it was, they would be after Johnson as well as Kennedy and the Governor. No one knew the ramifications of the plot—assuming there was a plot—and no one knew whether anything had occurred in Washington or in Hawaii, where a big part of the cabinet was. Under the law, Lyndon Johnson was next in line for the presidency; Speaker of the House John McCormack was next. The Vice-President was entreated to please do as he was told, promptly, until the matter could be cleared up. He said: “Okay, Partner.” He began to understand that this could be a broad plot. For awhile, he understood fear. Youngblood and Roberts agreed that perhaps it would be best to get Johnson out of the hospital at once and hurry him off to Air Force One at Love Field.

The smooth continuation of government depended on Johnson. They had to keep him alive. The stark reality was that, apparently, they had lost their man in spite of the most extensive precautions. Even if he lived, could he reassume the burden of the presidency? When, if ever?

Those who saw the head wound, who looked inside at the scooped-out brain, were doubtful that Kennedy would ever be President again. No matter how they looked at it, the burden reverted to Lyndon Baines Johnson, a huge, rough-tough master politician from this state. The republic was in his hands, and, no matter how, they had to protect this man from all harm and get him back to Washington. Kenny O’Donnell came in, head down, took a look at the Vice-President and the guards around him, and nodded. “Not good,” he said.

Lyndon Baines Johnson’s guards told him little. He kept asking for the President, and asking if it was all right to go see him, and he received suggestions in reply. Emory Roberts said, “I do not think the President can make it. I suggest we get out of Dallas.” Youngblood asked Mr. Johnson to “think it over. We may have to swear you in.” The Vice-President held his wife’s hand, trying to infuse her with a courage he no longer had. Only she and Cliff Carter, his executive assistant, knew that Lyndon Johnson, in spite of his 1959 speeches to the contrary, never really expected to be President. He heard heels clicking in the corridor, and saw the SS men run. Mrs. Johnson saw the runners, the frantic faces, and they seemed to her to be frozen motionless.

At the triage desk, the nurse asked both carts to stop. She wanted a history of the injuries and at least the names of the patients. The Secret Service paused for a moment, then went on. The arrow in the floor seemed endless, pointing past scores of people on their way out, swinging left and then, a little way farther, to the right. The stripe went through a door, changed color, and stopped in front of two square-tiled rooms which faced each other across four feet of hall. The one on the left said “Trauma Two”; on the right, “Trauma One.”

The coat had slipped off the President’s head. His eyes were askew, and the jacket hung over the bottom of his nose. Mrs. Kennedy looked smaller than she had. She kept her hand touching her husband’s side, and her eyes appealed mutely. She did not beg or scream. The last words she had said had been addressed to Clint Hill, out in the car: “You know he’s dead. Let me alone.”

The hat was on her husband’s chest. The flowers looked soggy. Damp blood penetrated the white gloves and dried in the tiny swirls of her fingers. The pink wool suit was soaked blackish down the right side. The stockings of the impeccable First Lady were wrinkled, and blood matted them to her skin. The utmost in cruelty had assailed her, and more awaited her.

The Governor was wheeled into one room, the President into the other. Dr. Charles J. Carrico, two years a physician, was ready. Nurses Diana Bowron and Margaret Hinchcliffe looked at the doctor and saw his nod. At once they took surgical shears and began to cut the clothes from the President. Carrico reached down for a pulse. There was none. The doctor tried a blood pressure cuff. There was no pressure. A huge inverted soup bowl of a lamp stared down at President Kennedy, and the young man stared back at it.

The tie was snipped off adjacent to the knot which had been notched by a bullet. The jacket came off in sections. Each item was thrown on a chair in the corner. The striped shirt was plastered with blood from the edge of the collar all the way down the right side to the shirttail. Dr. Malcolm Perry, surgeon, hurried in. He saw a blood-spattered young woman kneeling inside the door. His impulse was to tell her to leave, but as the socks were peeled from the patient, the snowy skin, the cyanotic face, the dura mater leaking out of a massive hole in the head told him to do something and do it quickly.

Dr. Marion Jenkins, anesthesiologist, came in. Two student nurses came in. It was a small room, pale tile, a sink in the floor, a cabinet for sterile instruments, a clock which showed the time to be 12:37. Other doctors hurried in to help. Some were directed across the hall to help the Governor. He was screaming: “It hurts! It hurts!” and he could be heard down the hall. It was the only healthful sound in the hospital wing.

Dr. Fouad Bashour arrived. Dr. Richard Dulaney was working Trauma Two. Dr. Gene Akin rushed into the room. Dr. Kemp Clark was there. There had been no carts waiting outside in the hot Dallas sun; now all the medical help possible was jamming the two small rooms to a point where some must volunteer to leave. Dr. Don Curtis; Dr. A. H. Giesecke; Dr. Jackie Hunt; Dr. Kenneth Salyer; Dr. Donald Seldin; Dr. Jones; Dr. Nelson; Dr. Shaw; Dr. White; Dr. Robert McClelland; Dr. Paul Peters.

The President was down to his shorts and his back brace. The Ace Bandage he wore was permitted to remain between the thighs. One doctor was making a cut down on the right ankle; a nurse was doing it to the left arm. The skin was cool to the touch. The work was professional. Doctors, when necessary, mumbled requests or orders. The electrocardiogram had shown a faint palpable heartbeat, hesitant, irregular, and weak. Then it stopped and the automatic pen behind the glass on the wall began to trace a steady straight line. A doctor tried to assist breathing by doing a tracheotomy and found that a bullet hole was in precisely the right spot. He enlarged it and thrust a cuffed endotracheal tube through and down into the bronchial area.

Hunt had the President on pure oxygen. Nobody stopped working. Everybody knew he was dead, but the work went on in silence as though something magnificent was about to happen. Dr. Burkley, on the wrong bus and taken to the Trade Mart against his will, came into the room. Someone said that this was the President’s physician. Burkley had skin which matched his graying hair. Now it seemed paler. He had a black bag with him and he took out the hydrocortisone used to correct the President’s adrenal deficiency.

The voices were soft and unhurried; priests at a White Mass, responding acolytes; the sacrifice prone on the altar. Science was trying to impose its will on God.

Agent Lem Johns, the thin man with the basso voice, arrived at the hospital. He had been dropped off in Dealey Plaza, and the motorcade had left without him. Now he was bumping into people in a long corridor, and one he bumped was Art Bales. “Are you The Bagman?” Johns said. Bales said no, Gearhart was. Lem Johns found him and ordered him to hurry to the side of the Vice-President. It was ironic that, in the past eight minutes, no one knew where The Bagman was or who he was; and The Bagman didn’t know where the President was, or who he was. If there was a time when the United States could not retaliate instantaneously to a nuclear attack, these were the minutes.

The Bagman hurried to Mr. Johnson in Booth 13, but the Secret Service men didn’t know him and couldn’t identify him. They saw him with the satchel and shoved him into Booth 8, where he remained under the watchful eye of an agent until Emory Roberts came in and okayed him as The Bagman. All day long, he—Warrant Officer Ira Gearhart—would be lost and found and lost again. Four Congressmen had more luck getting to the Vice-President. Thornberry, Brooks, Thomas, and Gonzalez, all of Texas, walked in glumly, studied the Vice-President awhile, and walked out glumly.

Miss Doris Nelson asked Mrs. Kennedy to leave Trauma One. She led the First Lady out, obviously against the woman’s will as the surrender of her husband’s body had been against her will, but she left the room, the door closed noiselessly, and someone got a chair for her and for Mrs. Connally. The two women sat with their hands in their laps, studying their fingers. There was no conversation between them; no mutual commiseration. Mrs. Connally was embittered, feeling that the Secret Service was eager to climb over her husband to get to a dead President.

The Governor had been nearest the car door. They should have taken him first. At last they did, but only because they could find no way to reach Kennedy. Mrs. Connally felt that she, too, was a First Lady and was possessed of the feeling that she was the only one in that car who wanted to help John Connally. Now her man was inside. Sometimes, when the door of Trauma Two opened, she glanced up beggingly at a doctor or a nurse for a good word, a kind word. William Stinson, administrative assistant to the Governor, came out and said that Connally had said: “Take care of Nellie.” This was worth more than all the medical opinions. If John said that, then for sure he was going to recover. Someone handed her one of her husband’s gold cuff links. She turned it over in her lap, and the tears came. They rolled down freely. They were good ones.

She studied the cuff link and put it into her pocketbook. Then she looked up, and saw Mrs. Kennedy staring at her dry-eyed. The women averted their glances and looked down again. An hour ago, they had been pleasant companions, both eager for the gala ball in Austin tonight. Now they had only two things in common: both wore pink suits, both were bloodstained.

It was fish again. Father Oscar Huber did not relish it. He sat in the downstairs dining room in the rectory alone. His curates weren’t lunching with him. They were upstairs in the “rec” room watching the Kennedy welcome. The pastor had been the only one with the initiative and energy to walk up to Lemmon and Reagan and hop on tiptoe to wave to the first live President he had ever seen.

He was pushing the shreds of fish from one side of the plate to the other, thinking about all the affluent Roman Catholics at the Trade Mart who had been given a dispensation from fish today. They—la de da—were dining on filet mignon, no less. Father Thompson stood in the doorway. “There will be no dinner for President Kennedy today,” he said. The old priest didn’t care for riddles. “No?” he said with asperity. “Why not?” Father Thompson sucked in a long breath. “He’s been shot, Father.” “I don’t believe it.” The pastor was hurt, personally hurt. He had never seen a live President. Now his triumph was marred by news which no sane person could credit. He was outraged. Father Thompson’s voice became soft, coaxing: “Come on upstairs and see.” Father Huber, yanking the black trousers up a little, started up the steps. He could hear the voice on television; he could catch the excitement in it: “Several shots . . . No one seems to know . . . Parkland Hospital . . . The Governor fell. . . Bulletins as quickly as they come in . . .”

Father Huber tugged at his young confrere. “Get the car,” he said. “Get the car, Jim. You drive. Parkland Hospital is in our parish. Come on, now. Hurry.”

The organ music was soft, the tunes were sweet. Sometimes the deep timbre of the tones caused the parakeets to fly off the overhead railings, squeaking as they swooped over the waiters, a half dozen steaks steaming darkly on each platter. Over two thousand diners chatted across the tables, and the steady decibel of conversational noise could be heard over the songs. A few diners brought out bottles of bourbon or Scotch and mixed the liquor in half-empty water goblets.

Captain Fritz and his men of Homicide made a final inspection of the head table, lifting the drapes to look underneath. The lobby was cleared. The ladies were pleased to see a huge spray of Yellow Roses of Texas at the head table. Some of the politicians said that, as the steaks were being served now, this meant that President Kennedy would not eat; he would come in at dessert, wait for the tables to be cleared, and get to his speech. Others assured each other that he wouldn’t dare, in Dallas, to make a pronouncement on civil rights or the welfare state all of them feared. “If Lyndon and John have any influence, that boy is going to be moderate today,” they said.

Deputy Chief Stevenson had heard something vague on Channel Two about shots fired in Dealey Plaza. One of his men reported that the motorcade was going to Parkland Memorial Hospital; there was a story that President Kennedy had been shot. Stevenson got on the radio to ask the dispatcher what the story was. He wanted to know if the President had been wounded. If he had, would he be coming back to make the speech at the Trade Mart or was he going to send someone to make it for him? All those people were sitting around, waiting.

The big press bus waddled onto the grounds, and thirty-five reporters hopped off and ran pell-mell into the Trade Mart. They knew that something had happened—something. They ran, not knowing where the temporary press room might be, but realizing that they would have to get there quickly to find the story about Dealey Plaza. The diners saw them, and laughter spread through the vast edifice. This was what the public saw in motion pictures: reporters running. An official grabbed one writer by the wrist and said: “Hey, you can’t run in here.” The man broke loose and ran. Other diners shook with laughter. One yelled: “Somebody get shot?”

They headed for an escalator. A police officer told them that the press room was on the fourth floor. The escalator was sedately slow. They hurried and, at the fourth floor, they scrambled looking for the proper desks and the right phones. Marianne Means of Hearst Headline Service found one, talked into it a moment, and hung up staring like an alabaster statue. She stood looking vacantly at a wall. “The President has been shot,” she said matter-of-factly. “He’s at Parkland Hospital.”

The scramble reversed itself. None of them could believe it, but all of them ran. They ran downstairs, knowing that they had no car, no taxi, to get to Parkland, and most of them didn’t know where the hospital was. If Kennedy was shot, even superficially, it was going to be the biggest story Dallas ever saw. They ran and ran, and when they got to the ground floor they broke for various exits, and the hearty laughter of the diners began again, louder this time, as might be expected when a ridiculous situation is seen for the second time. A waiter, carrying a tray of steaks and vegetables on his fingertips, was caught and spun by a reporter and the dishes clattered and the steaks skidded across the floor. Outside, the journalists begged rides from anyone. Some were lucky. Some were not. The hospital was one mile west.

Inside, the diners moved on to dessert. The handsome head of Eric Johnson, president of Texas Industries and chairman of the luncheon, was alone at the head table. There was a rapping of a spoon for silence. The music faded in mid-tune and the chatter eased until silence prevailed. Mr. Johnson stared with controlled shock at the waves of faces and then began: “Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to inform you . . .”

Dealey Plaza was no-man’s-land. The police stopped running. The sightseers began to gather. Little groups told over and over, with succeeding amendments, what had happened. Listeners retold the stories to policemen who grabbed witnesses who, in turn, denied their boasts. Deputy sheriffs, whose duties were not related to the Dallas Police Department, interrogated witnesses who had already been interrogated. Sergeant Harkness was the ranking police officer at the scene for seven minutes. Uniformed men with drawn guns searched the building, rooted through the parking lot behind the grassy knoll, ranged over the underpass, and questioned citizens waiting on the grass for something to happen.

Inspector Herbert Sawyer, who had been a mile north of Dealey Plaza, heard Chief Curry and Sheriff Decker order men to search the railroad trestle, and, without orders, Sawyer inched down through the crowds until he parked his car in front of the Texas School Book Depository. When he found that there was no one present who outranked him, the inspector, a veteran cop of the old school, took charge. He saw that witnesses were being questioned and turned loose. A deputy sheriff volunteered to make an office available across the street in the county building for interrogation, typing of affidavits, and holding prisoners.

Sawyer took advantage of it and started a chain of command, so that cops who found persons with something tangible to contribute could escort them over to Commerce Street. He asked Harkness if the Depository had been searched and sealed. It had been searched and was being searched by new groups of officers as they arrived. No one had ordered it sealed. At 12:37 P.M. Sawyer ordered two guards posted at the front door and guards at the loading platform behind the building. The orders were simple: “No one is to enter; nobody is allowed to leave.”

Someone put in a call for fire engines, and they fought their way downtown—hook and ladder and pumpers—to further block traffic in the plaza. The firemen raced around, uncoupling hose lines, but Sawyer told them they were not needed. Deputy Constable Weitzman saw a man lift something out of the gutter of Elm Street. It was the missing part of President Kennedy’s head. The deputy constable was mystified, because he did not know that anyone had been hurt.

Officer Clyde Haygood, at the rear of the Depository, saw a Negro standing near the loading dock. “How long have you been here?” the cop said. “Five minutes or so.” “See anyone come out this door?” “No, sir. Nobody has come out that door.” Out front, Sawyer called to newly arrived detectives and ordered them to go to the sheriff’s office to type the statements of witnesses. In all, there would be thirty-seven in the first group. Sergeant Gerald Hill arrived and he asked Sawyer: “Are you ready for us to go in and shake it down?” The inspector said: “Yes, let’s go in and check it out.”

This time the search of the building would be done floor by floor, counter by counter, box by box.

The daily run was not difficult until Cecil McWatters left St. Paul. Coming down from the Lakewood section, he had kept his bus on time all the way, but now he hit a cloud of cars and pedestrians who appeared to be choking Elm Street. All he saw ahead of his Dallas Transit Company bus was a field of red lights. Pedestrians were filtering through them like lava on a bed of coals. Mr. McWatters, an eighteen-year veteran, was headed for Oak Cliff. He had four or five passengers, and he moved his bus slowly down Elm, the brakes sighing, McWatters leaning over the wheel.

He could see the policemen in the middle of the street, whistles blowing and arms waving like symphony conductors. They weren’t getting much music. In time, the Marsalis bus made it to Field Street. He was seven blocks from Dealey Plaza, but it might as well have been seven miles. The density of cars and people was like the end of a game at the Cotton Bowl. McWatters got to Griffin, and the bus stopped halfway across the intersection.

Someone rapped on the front door. There is a city ordinance against picking up a passenger anywhere except a bus stop, but traffic was stalled, so the driver opened the door. He didn’t pay much attention to the passenger. He watched him drop the coin in the box, and McWatters saw that he was young and wore “work clothes” and sat next to the window in the second seat on the right.

Lee Harvey Oswald looked out at the people passing. The man with the enormous tolerance for silence was heading back into the danger zone. The bus would eventually negotiate the few streets to Dealey Plaza, and then make the fast run across the Trinity River to Oak Cliff. No one would stop the bus, of course. He was safe, even if the bus paused at Houston, and Oswald stared out at the excitement around the Depository.

The time was 12:40. The assassin was interested in time. Wherever he was going, whatever he planned for himself, time was a factor. It would appear that he was heading to his little room on North Beckley. It would not be a refuge, because, within an hour or two, the police would either discover the rifle and bullets or discover that one employee had not returned from lunch. Either way, the fragments of evidence would be sifted and resifted until someone said: “Now that Oswald fella. Lemme see. That Oswald boy he lives at 1026 North Beckley. Yep.”

After the furnished room, what? A change of clothes, a chase leading to where? To Irving? To the arms of Marina? To get there he would have to get on Davis and hitch a ride all the way to Loop Twelve and then make a right turn and get out to Walton Walker Boulevard. No, this would be a long chase for nothing. By the time Mr. Oswald arrived, the police would be waiting. He could remain on the bus and go south out of Dallas along Zangs Boulevard, but wouldn’t the word be out, wouldn’t the police perhaps have roadblocks out of Dallas, wouldn’t they be at the airport soon and the bus terminal? Where to?

Could a man continue to hide in Dallas? Yes he could for an hour or two. Once the identity of the assassin was known, and the police put a photograph on television, the task of remaining free would square itself with difficulty. A day, perhaps? Two? Then what? Then the assassin might have to make a choice: go out in a blaze of glorious gunfire, or contact a left-wing attorney and walk into police headquarters saying: “Are you looking for me?”

McWatters stopped the bus between Poydras and Lamar, four blocks from the School Book Depository. A woman with a suitcase got up from her seat. She had to make a one o’clock train at Union Terminal. She was fretful about missing it. Would the driver give her a transfer, please? She could start walking from here and, if the bus caught up to her, she could reboard. McWatters said he was sorry he couldn’t make it any faster, but she could have a transfer. A man got out of the car ahead and walked back and knocked on the bus door. The driver opened it. The stranger was excited. “I just heard over the car radio that the President has been shot,” he said.

Oswald moved up behind the harassed woman. “Transfer,” he said. Cecil McWatters looked up and gave it automatically. The assassin got off the bus, crossed in front of it, but there was a flaw in his anonymity. Mrs. Mary Bledsoe was one of the five passengers on that bus. Before he took the room on North Beckley, Lee Harvey Oswald had been a roomer in Mrs. Bledsoe’s house.

She was a woman with strong feelings for and against people. Within two days, she knew that she did not like Lee Harvey Oswald, although she could not put her dislike into words. She permitted him to finish out his time and then she put it to him bluntly: “I am not going to rent to you anymore.” The slender young man with the icy eyes and the pout had stared at her without rancor, and then he left. Now, from a front seat, she had watched him board the bus and her venomous assessment began anew: “He looks like a maniac. His sleeve is out to here . . . His shirt is undone. Is a hole in it, hole, and he is dirty, and I won’t look at him. I don’t want to know I even seen him. . . .”

The little bells in the wire rooms tinkled again. This time editors—not copy boys—came running. They had seen Merriman Smith’s first flash, and it could be a mistake. Editors scanned the Associated Press machine, dreading to place credence in one wire service against the other, but while the AP was rippling through run-of-the-mill stories. . . .

UPI A8N DA

URGENT

1ST ADD SHOTS, DALLAS (A7N) XXX DOWNTOWN DALLAS.

NO CASUALTIES WERE REPORTED.

THE INCIDENT OCCURRED NEAR THE COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE ON MAIN STREET, JUST EAST OF AN UNDERPASS LEADING TOWARD THE TRADE MART WHERE THE PRESIDENT WAS TO MA

FLASH FLASH

KENNEDY SERIOUSLY WOUNDED

PERHAPS SERIOUSLY

PERHAPS FATALLY BY ASSASSINS BULLET

JT 1239 PCS

In the same minute, the Cabinet plane was fleeing the morning sun over the Pacific Ocean. Far below, the men of Kennedy’s government could see the white fleece of clouds and the occasional inky glimpse of the sea. Breakfast was over. Some of the wives changed seats and talked of shopping in Tokyo. Some of the Cabinet ministers sat together and chatted; others, like Pierre Salinger, studied the briefing manuals so that they would better understand the functions and purposes of the trip. Robert Manning, Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, came out of the forward cabin and told Salinger that Mr. Rusk would like to see him at once.

He looked up from his reading to find that only the wives were still in their seats. Udall of Interior was with Rusk; so was Agriculture’s Freeman, Commerce’s Hodges, Labor’s Wirtz. Salinger required time to leave a comfortable seat. He went forward and was told that they were waiting for Myer Feldman of Kennedy’s staff and Walter Heller, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Pierre Salinger did not understand why anyone was summoned, but he bent over Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s polished head to read a sheet of paper which appeared to be badly scrambled in transmission. It was a teletype bulletin but the operator who sent it must have been confused or upset:

UPI—207

HANNOVER, GERMANY. NOV. WW (UPI)-THE STATE PROSECUTOR

BUST

BUST

QMVVV

UPI—207

BULLET NSSS

PRECEDE KENNEDY

X DALLAS. NTEXAS, NOV. 22 (.708 LAS THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED AT PRESIXENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS

HSQETPEST

VVU PLF208

HANNOVER, GERMANY NOV WWKVUPI)-THE STATE PROSECUTOR TODAY DEMANDEJ AM QIAMONTH PRISON TERM FOR WEST GERMANYSJS ZSTZRILIZATION DOCTOR.”

X.X.X.X X,XNXLKDN, VOGEL TOLD THE THREEJU THAT HANDSOME DR. ALEL DOHRN. %% WAS N IDEALIST BUT BROKE THE LAW IN AT LEAST IP OF THE QNEPP STERILIZATION OPERATIONS HE HAS PERFORME ON LOCAL WOMEN

MORE

HS137PEST

RV

SSSSSSSS

FLASH

KENNEDY SERIOSTY WOUNDED PESTSSSSSSSSSS

HS 138/

SSSSSSSSSSS

MAKE THAT PERHAPS PERHAPS SERIOUSLY WOUNDED

HSQEOPEST

SSSSSSSSSSSSSS

GJ OWHL W WOUNDED BY

HQ139PESTXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

KENNEDY WOUNDED PERHAPS FATALLY BY VASSASSINS BULLET

HS139PESTSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Mr. Rusk glanced up and saw Feldman and Heller come into the cabin. In his crisp, flat baritone, he read the last two bulletins. Salinger, who had worked as an investigator when John Kennedy was a member of the McClellan Rackets Committee, felt the shock race across his mind, numbing it. Orville Freeman gasped and murmured: “My God!” Luther Hodges grasped the edge of the desk and began to sag to the floor. Hands helped him to an easy chair. Empty faces stared at empty faces. The tragedy was so enormous, so unexpected, so fraught with danger to the country, that the role of these gentlemen became obvious to all. We . . . have . . . got . . . to . . . turn . . . back . . . right. . . now.

Rusk entertained a small hope. “We have to verify this, somehow,” he said. “Get us in communication with the White House and see if you can get Admiral Felt at CINCPAC.” The communications men on the presidential special were Sergeant Darrel Skinner and Sergeant Walter Baughman. Within forty seconds, they had the Situation Room in the White House. Salinger, his voice breaking, took the phone and said: “Situation Room, this is Wayside. Can you give me the lastest situation on Lancer?” The voice was clear: “He and Governor Connally have been hit in a car in which they were riding.”

That was it. The last doubt died. It was official. The President had been wounded. The White House didn’t say he was dead. The fat, jolly man of the Kennedy group said: “Please keep us advised. Secretary Rusk is on this plane headed for Japan. We are returning to Honolulu. Will be there in about two hours. We will need to be advised to determine whether some members should go direct to Dallas.” The heart began to drag a little. Salinger had been a clever and adroit jester for John F. Kennedy; he had been a buffer between the President and the press; he had been a good cigar smoker, a poor poker player, a moon of a man who beamed on the Chief Executive he had helped to create. Now, in a matter of two minutes, high over the Pacific Ocean, all of it was swirling down the drain in Dallas.

Salinger started out of the communications shack. One of the operators said: “AP bulletin is just coming in. President hit in the head. That just came in.” The Secretary of State made the decisions. He instructed Admiral Harry D. Felt at Pearl Harbor to have a fueled 707 jet ready when this plane got back to Honolulu. The other plane would take Salinger, Rusk, and Manning nonstop to Dallas. That is, if the President was alive. The plane they now were using would refuel at once and take the members of the Cabinet back to Washington.

Now, someone would have to go back into the other cabin and tell the ladies.

The body on the table was stripped of dignity. It was supple, nonresistant. There were eight doctors left in the small room, two registered nurses, and two aides. All of the proper medical procedures had been dutifully instituted and exhausted. Dr. Kemp Clark, slipping in the watery blood on the floor, tried manual chest manipulation, pressing down hard, holding, releasing, pressing down hard. He asked for a stool. The table was too high, the patient was almost out of reach. A stool was placed under his feet and the doctor worked desperately to preserve life.

Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee

There was a tube sticking in the throat. There was one in the right ankle. Another one was in the left arm. The doctor’s strong hand depressed the chest cavity and, when he lifted up, the dead man breathed a loud sigh. The other doctors, busy with their individual functions, quit silently one by one. No one said he was dead. It was as though everything had been tried, and nothing had worked, just as each man knew all along that nothing would work.

and I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven

A nurse slipped a watch off his wrist. It went into her uniform pocket. His blood had congealed in the bracelet. Outside, Mrs. Johnson stooped over the withdrawn figure of Mrs. Kennedy and found herself beyond tears as she clasped those hands in hers. Mrs. Kennedy looked up, the drawn, dead expression still on the features, the dark eyes searching Mrs. Johnson’s face for something. The new First Lady began to tremble violently. Two men took her arms. She turned to an old friend on the other side of the tiny hall. “Oh, Nellie! Oh, Nellie!” The women embraced, as women do when grief is too dark and deep for expression, or when happiness bubbles in the throat.

and the pains of Hell, but most of all because they offend Thee

The cruelty continued for Mrs. Kennedy. Somehow, she contained herself when it was beyond forbearance. He was dead. She knew it. She said it. Twenty interminable minutes ago she had said it. They could do nothing, none of them. All she asked was to sit in the car with his head in her lap—where surely he would want to be—to say her own farewell in her own way. To say prayers for the repose of his soul. To feel the final communion of man and wife before sturdy hands lifted him away forever.

My God, who art so good and deserving of all my love;

She had pushed that young nurse away rudely. The girl had stepped into the car, speaking in a clipped British accent, and had tried to lift his head. Mrs. Kennedy had looked up, glaring, and shoved those alien hands away. She had said “No” to Emory Roberts. When Clint Hill had dropped his jacket, Mrs. Kennedy had folded it tenderly around her husband’s head—tenderly and slowly because she, above all, knew that there was no reason to hurry. Now she sat waiting for a priest. A priest had been requested. It would be unthinkable to permit his soul to leave for an unseen place and an unknown judgment without absolution.

I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to confess my sins,

They came to her, sitting demurely on the little chair, and they murmured the sympathetic words, and sometimes, in kindness, she roused herself to respond. Mostly she sat in silence and nodded. The gloved hands manipulated the fingers and she watched them lace together and part. She saw doctors leave the room where her love lay dead, and she looked up to get a word, a report. Failing all else, Mrs. Kennedy would have settled for permission to step inside and hold his hand. They had nothing to say. They swept out, glanced briefly at her, and fled with the dignity of busy men. She arose and moved to go into the room. Mrs. Doris Nelson, the supervisor, said: “Please, Mrs. Kennedy.” It did no good. Mrs. Nelson’s hands were pushed away, and Mrs. Kennedy leaned against the door and went inside.

to do penance, and to amend my life.

She looked so small. A nurse was bunching the bloody sheets on the floor. She made a mopping motion, saw Mrs. Kennedy, and hurried outside with the bundle. Dr. Burkley moved over and took Mrs. Kennedy’s arm. The doctors who remained in Trauma One retreated toward the back wall. There was nothing more that science could do or say; the shocking scene could not be softened; they stood under the clock. One moved forward, as though he sensed an indecency. He took a fresh sheet from the pile and drew it over the body of the President. He stopped a moment, and, with his thumbs, he tenderly closed the eyelids and patted the jaw closed under the chin. Like putting a baby to sleep. The sheet was pulled up over the head. It wasn’t long enough. The shinbones and feet of John F. Kennedy gleamed white under the overhead light.

The unhurried hands of the wall clock were at 12:46. The dark head of Roy Kellerman came into the room. He studied the backs of Mrs. Kennedy and Dr. Burkley, looked at the doctors against the back wall, and the white-hooded body on the table. He went out into the hall and ordered Clint Hill to get back on the phone with Jerry Behn at the White House. “Clint,” he said, “tell Jerry that this is not for release and not official, but the man is dead.”

He had served as the thirty-fifth President of the United States for one thousand thirty-six days. John F. Kennedy had sought the post because “that’s where the action is.”

The fat man was getting just enough warm sunlight into the left side of his taxicab to induce a half doze. The huge belly was almost imprisoned by the wheel. Mr. William Whaley edged his taxi driver’s cap off his forehead and, for a moment, took in a haze of sight and sound. He was parked at the Greyhound Bus Terminal at Lamar and Jackson, and the big buses were pulling into Dallas and pulling out for the long hauls.

He could hear the scream of sirens around Dealey Plaza, a few blocks away, and Whaley vaguely wondered why they made so much noise. Then he saw the young man walking toward his cab and, with the instinct of the veteran operator, reached over and began to open the back door. To Whaley he was “this boy.” The boy shut the back door and asked if he would take him to the 500 block of North Beckley. The driver told him to hop in. The boy didn’t want to get in the back. He went around the taxi and hopped in beside the fat man.

Lee Oswald might have taken a bus. Any bus to anywhere. They were pulling in and pulling out and roaring across the north Texas plains to other states. He could have bought ten or twelve dollars worth of geography and been out of Dallas with ease. This was the place to do it. Instead he chose the fat man’s taxi and chose to go to a furnished room.

Whaley was ready to pull away from the curb, had pulled the meter down, when a woman looked in and asked if she could take this taxi. The fat man said there would be another one right behind him. The vehicle made its turn and headed for the Houston Street viaduct. The driver was a veteran and had adopted the conversational ploy of taxi drivers and barbers: if the customer wants to talk, talk; if he doesn’t, keep quiet.

He asked Oswald what all the sirens were about. There was no response. Whaley turned to look at the profile beside him. “The boy” kept looking straight ahead, as though he had heard nothing. The fat man swung left and passed the Dallas News and began to creak and squeak his way across the viaduct. On the other side, he turned up Zangs, swung onto Beckley and, in the 500 block, the fare said: “This will do.” Whaley pulled to the curb. Oswald dug into his trouser pocket and brought out a dollar bill. The meter read ninety-five cents. “Keep the change,” he said and slammed the door. He started walking south, away from his room.

Oswald was four blocks beyond the little white cottage. Whaley, in a burst of blue exhaust smoke, started out again for the Greyhound Bus Terminal. Oak Cliff was quiet. The array of small homes, lopsided flagstones, young mothers with baby carriages, the high-crowned roads with intermittent traffic were familiar to Oswald. Looking around, it was as though nothing had happened. No sirens could be heard; no running policemen with drawn guns; no screaming citizens falling on lawns; not even a puddle from the morning rain.

The word was out. The shattering news snapped and crackled around the world. No one knew the man was dead except the privileged few at the hospital. The word said that shots had been fired at the President; there were additional flashes of information: he had been wounded; it was thought that he was wounded; he had a head wound; it was alleged that he had a head wound; he might not live; he probably would not live. The shocks met the preceding shocks on the far side of the world and men, great and venal, paused. The sun was down in Berlin. Tokyo waited for dawn.

The sturdy men in the Kremlin sat in bowls of office light not believing. It was almost 2 P.M. in Ossining, New York, and the young woman driving south on Route Nine would not walk again. She hummed with the music on the car radio, and then the flash came and the road spun in gray dizziness and her car tried to climb the front of a building. She was paralyzed from the hips down, a permanent memento of the day.

The news swept through Boston like a breathless hurricane; in Baltimore, shoppers began to weep. In the nation’s capital, the antidote to shock became the telephone. All the circuits were tied up. Much of the majesty of the United States government was at the mercy of a busy signal. At the Trade Mart, the Texas politicians decided that, on account of the shooting, their women had better be sent home, but the men would get on that bus and drive down to Austin for the presidential ball. A commitment is a commitment.

New York stopped dead. It came to a stunned pause, as though the subways would not run roaring through the bowels of the metropolis; as though Wall Street would not take the economic pulse again; as though buses and elevators and private cars and jet planes and traffic lights had frozen. The city, lying under its charcoal blanket of smoke, stopped breathing. Everybody told everybody else that it could not be; not in this enlightened century, this cultured era of cocktail party sophistry.

The powerful transmitters of the world picked up the news and city editors everywhere called for reporters to drop everything and get on the next plane to Dallas. In the newspaper morgues, the filed obituaries on “Kennedy, John Fitzgerald” were yanked and updated. The picture editors demanded everything on the motorcade from the wire services in Dallas. Two women on television were discussing fashion in front of a curtain and a man with a drawn, frightened expression came up behind them and they kept glancing at him, trying to keep the conversation in motion, and he was trying to say: “I’m sorry, ladies, but the President has been shot” and the words kept coming out across their discussion of necklines and hemlines, so that neither could be understood.

The phone near the swimming pool at McLean, Virginia, had rung and Robert Kennedy had heard the first word from J. Edgar Hoover. In the United States Senate, the strong jaw and good face of Edward Kennedy sat at the rostrum as president pro tem until someone edged up to him and whispered. Senator Kennedy’s world of opulence and politics cracked like old ice, and the voices below, pompous and pedantic, rose and fell like separate sounds not to be hooked together to make a measure of sense. The Senator excused himself. The polished mahogany gavel of authority was placed on its side, tenderly, and the clerks below turned faces up to the young Senator to ascertain what had happened.

The bedlam was worse at the hospital emergency entrance. In the warmth of the early afternoon, windows were open in the several buildings, and patients in pajamas and robes pressed pale, inquisitive faces to the glass. Below, a broad stream of automobiles, the sun glinting off hundreds of windshields like spangles on a stream, were heading for the hospital. The police, on Harry Hines Boulevard, at Inwood, at Butler, became testy and shrieked their whistles of authority and flailed their arms to turn the tide away from the hospital. A good part of Dallas, which had bid the President a warm welcome, now had its automobile radios on loud and had come to the deathwatch.

Deputy Chief George Lumpkin managed to squeeze his car into the emergency area, and Curry ordered him to report at once at the School Book Depository and “take charge.” Captain Fritz, not required to examine the President’s table at the Trade Mart, reported in, and Chief Curry sent him on to Dealey Plaza with his Homicide detectives. It was a homicide. There was no federal law against killing a President, but there was a local law against killing a person, and this was the law which would apply.

Secret Service Agent Forrest V. Sorrels was the first federal man to return to the Depository building. The police and the sheriff’s department had worked closely with him in all the advance work; now he wanted to work with them to clean up the tragedy. He drove back, listening to Channel Two all the way:

Patrolman L. L. Hill: “Get some men up here to cover this School Depository building. It’s believed the shot came from, as you see it on Elm Street, looking toward the building, it would be the upper right-hand corner—second window from the end.” Dispatcher Henslee: “How many do you have there?” Hill: “I have one guy that was possibly hit by a ricochet from the bullet off the concrete and another one saw the President slump.” Henslee: “Ten four.” Patrolman E. D. Brewer: “We have a man here who says he saw him pull the weapon back through the window from the southeast corner of the Depository building. . . .”

The Oneal ambulance was still impounded at the emergency entrance. A nurse’s aide promised to mop the blood out of the presidential limousine and forgot it. Two Secret Service men put the bubbletop on the big car. Inside the door, an FBI agent was phoning Gordon Shanklin and rubbing his jaw at the same time. Doyle Williams had hurried into the emergency area, and two overwrought Secret Service men, one with a machine gun, punched him against a wall before Mr. Williams had time to reach for his government identity card.

Father Huber and Father Thompson arrived. Reporters, held back by police, saw the two men, their stoles folded between their fingers, escorted through the emergency entrance. Did this mean that the President was dying? Or do Catholics call a priest in any case? Some said it might mean he was dying. Others rushed back to radio cars to report: “Two priests arrived at Parkland and hurried inside. 12:49 P.M.” Father Thompson had parked the car and run to catch up with his pastor.

The little black bag was in Huber’s right hand. It contained everything but the Blessed Sacrament. A wounded man, the priest reasoned, is in no condition to swallow a desiccated wafer. The press relations man, Steve Landrigan, broke a path for the two priests through a trail of weeping children with dressings on hands and on eyes, running nurses, and Secret Service men who fringed the long corridor with weapons, examining everyone who tried to pass. They turned right, walked another long corridor, swung right again into the trauma section, and, as Landrigan held the door open, Father Huber stepped inside. Father Thompson was behind him.

The priest lifted his eyes and saw a long table under a diffused glare of light. On it was a figure covered to his knees. Father Huber looked at the snowy feet and thought: “There is no blood in this man.” He crouched to open the bag and remove the holy oils, the cotton batting, a prayer book, and to put the thin stole around his neck. He glanced around and saw Mrs. Kennedy standing with a gray-haired man. “Mrs. Kennedy,” the priest whispered, “my sincerest sympathy goes to you.”

His eyes lingered on her face a moment. It was beautiful and empty of expression. It was the face he had missed when the motorcade went by. Father Huber stepped toward the body. The floor was slippery with blood. He peeled the sheet back from the head to the bottom of the nose. The eyelids were closed. For the first time he thought of the sheet covering the head, the closed eyelids, the doctors against the rear of the room. Father Huber had seen his first live President an hour ago. Now he was staring at his first dead one.

The face appeared to be tan and peaceful. In Latin, Father Huber said: “I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.” The priest lifted his eyes and saw that a large part of the back of the head was missing. The violence of it brought its own compensation: this man died instantly; he felt no pain. Roman Catholics have always concerned themselves with the rhetorical question of the soul leaving the body. Does it leave at the moment of death? Or does it remain a few minutes? What is death? Is it the moment the heart stops, even though other organs—liver, bladder, intestines, brain—may go on in reduced function until they stop?

The Church maintains that the sacrament of Extreme Unction is not valid if the soul has departed. The thumb of the priest dipped into holy oil and traced the sign of the cross on John F. Kennedy’s forehead. “Through this holy anointing,” he said softly, “may God forgive you whatever sins you may have committed. Amen.” With the power he had, Father Huber gave the departed Chief of State a special blessing: “I,” he said, louder and in English, “by the faculty granted to me by the Apostolic See, grant to you a plenary indulgence and remission of all sins and I bless you. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” The priest remained standing because, had he knelt in the blood on the floor, the body on the cart would have been too high for him. Mrs. Kennedy and Admiral Burkley and Father Thompson stood, their voices repeating part of the prayers.

Someone said, “Please pray, Father,” so he began to recite the prayers for the dying, although this was pointless. However, it gave the widow and some doctors an opportunity to respond in English, to be a party to the pious adieu, and so he went through the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the “Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord . . .” Then he tapped the oily forehead with cotton, placed the sheet back over the head, and turned to leave, as depressed as he could remember. Mrs. Kennedy bent over the corpse, as though kissing her husband. She hurried after Father Huber and took his arm.

“Father,” she said, obviously frightened, “do you think the sacraments had effect?” “Oh yes,” he said. “Yes indeed.” Out in the hall, where the brown metal chair still waited for her, the once dauntless spirit of the woman was crushed by the finality of death. “Father,” she implored, “please pray for Jack.” Father Huber agreed. He had already decided to have a Solemn Requiem Mass in his church that evening, before the President’s body could return to Washington.

Two Secret Service men took the priest by the arms. “Father,” one of them said, “you don’t know anything.” He understood. No one pretended to know why the death had been kept secret this long, but he promised not to tell. As he and Father Thompson emerged into sunshine, walking toward their parked car, the reporters engulfed them. “Is he dead?” “What time did he die?” “Tell us what he looked like.” “Who was the doctor who took care of him?” “Did Mrs. Kennedy say anything?” Father Huber rubbed his mouth and begged God’s forgiveness. “He was unconscious,” he said, and hurried into the car.

The voice on Channel One, that of Sergeant G. D. Henslee, carried an unusual pitch of excitement: “Attention all squads,” it said. “Attention all squads. At Elm and Houston reported to be an unknown white male, approximately thirty, slender build, height five feet ten inches, weight 165 pounds, reported to be armed with what is believed to be a thirty-caliber rifle. Attention all squads, the suspect is believed to be a white male . . .” Henslee repeated the description slowly. All over the city, men in prowl cars repeated it to themselves or took notes.

“No further description or information at this time,” he said. “12:45 KKB-364, Dallas.” An unknown voice came on: “What is he wanted for?” Dispatcher Hulse replied: “Signal nineteen (shooting) involving the President.” A great deal had occurred within the span of fifteen minutes and Henslee’s announcement that there was a suspect lifted the morale of the men patrolling the far reaches of the city. A policeman can, in an emergency, move up closer to the scene. In Dallas, it is the custom not to report these moves because it would clutter the radio channel with men moving out of assigned areas.

John Tippit, cruising the quiet streets of Fruitdale in area 78, swung his car northward to Area 109 and parked at Eighth Street and the Corinth Street viaduct. This was solid thinking on Tippit’s part because he had effectively sealed off one of the seven ways of getting out of downtown Dallas to the south. He remained at the last street in town before one crosses the Trinity River. Then, hearing no additional alarms, he turned west into the big Oak Cliff section. He was now in Patrol Area 109, which embraced Zangs, Beckley, and the Houston Street viaduct.

He put his car into low gear and cruised the curbs.

The hiatus arrived. The energies of the protagonists flagged. The fight was lost; the battle was over; there was time to think of next things next. In the little corridor between trauma rooms, William Greer stood guard over Mrs. Kennedy as Clint Hill phoned the White House. He held the wire open. The operator cut in. “The Attorney General’s office wants to speak to you.” A small, tense voice came on. “What happened, Clint?” “There has been an accident.” “How is the President?” Hill knew the President was dead. “The situation is bad,” he said, “we’ll get back to you.” Mrs. Kennedy sat again on the brown chair. Her grief was consumed in flames of bitterness. Doris Nelson asked her to wash, and Mrs. Kennedy said “No.” Someone else asked her, and she looked at the bloody gloves, the soaked skirt, the mixture of brain and blood on the stockings and said: “No. I want them to see what they have done.”

Who is they? The world? The nation? The city of Dallas? A young man now walking back to a rooming house? Who is they? Within the grief, there was rancor. The Secret Service could have summoned a change of clothes from Air Force One. The hospital was less than two miles from the airport. She would not change, no matter who suggested it. The world was about to get a shocking view of the defenseless widow, bedraggled, bereft, bloodied all day and all night so that they could see what they had done.

For a moment, she roused herself and looked at Mrs. Connally. The eyes of the two women met. Mrs. Kennedy asked softly how the Governor was doing. The hard stare was in the eyes of Mrs. Connally. “He’ll be all right.” Four words. No more. She did not ask how the President was—she knew. Nor was there any sympathy to offer, not even a hand clasp. “He’ll be all right.”

In spite of the roars of pain, Governor John Connally did well. Dr. Jackie Hunt attended him; so did Dr. Duke; others hurried into Trauma Two and, on orders, some left quickly for additional equipment. The clothes were cut away and the work of restoring the patient from the ashen skin of shock to a pink of resistance began. The room was less disorderly than the other; the procedures were buttressed by optimism. This one was going to live.

There were cutdowns and X-rays and sutures and the injection of intravenous fluids. The cries of the Governor were encouraging. He was neurologically alert; he could feel pain and could protest. The doctors agreed that, after the first emergency procedures, Governor Connally should be taken upstairs to an operating theatre. Dr. Giesecke made the arrangements and hurried back to help with the cart.

The duty of all doctors in both trauma rooms was to determine the extent of injury and to repair and preserve life. None were detectives; none were acting as pathologists. Each, in his work, had his individual opinions of the wounds he saw, but they would have no weight in law. Most doctors who saw Kennedy’s head wound thought that it came from the rear. The same doctors, studying the exit wound in the neck, thought the bullet came from the front. The Governor might have been hit at least twice: once through the back along the frame of the fifth rib, which was partially shattered; once in the wrist.

The doctors at Parkland stuck to their primary province, the preservation of life and the restoration of health. Carrico and Clark remained in Trauma One for a few moments. Professionally, they had no right to feel depressed, but they had lost a President and they had seen the stricken face of his widow. They could have examined the body at their leisure, but as Carrico said: “No one had the heart.” The State of Texas, under law, must perform an autopsy in all homicides. They ordered Miss Hinchcliffe to clean up the body.

The police herded the School Book Depository employees on the ground floor, back between the elevators and the order box. Roy Truly was at a trot, trying to assist by rounding them up and counting them off. Some police were on the roof and these men established that the wall was too high for anyone to fire over it and down. The pigeons, fatigued from taking wing as shots were fired and as police popped out onto the roof, were still circling the plaza. Other policemen were on other floors, looking up among the sprinkler pipes, delving between book cartons.

Truly told the police to check off the name of Charles Givens. He was a Negro employee who was absent. The manager walked around, looking at faces, and he said: “Where is Lee?” Police were taking names and addresses, and no one turned when he asked the question. The foreman, William Shelley, was asked the question: “Have you seen Lee around lately?” and Shelley said no. The manager did not want to get an innocent employee in trouble, so he asked his boss, Mr. Campbell, about it. “I have a boy over here missing,” he said. “I don’t know whether to report it.” Campbell threw the question back at Truly. “What do you think?” he said. Truly picked up a phone and got the warehouse. He asked for the Oswald address and telephone number. The warehouse gave him Fifth Street in Irving and Mrs. Paine’s telephone number.

The manager was aware that “Lee” might not be involved in any trouble, but he relayed the “missing” data to Deputy Chief Lumpkin, who took Truly upstairs to Captain Fritz. The Homicide division was fine-combing the sixth floor. Fritz, still wearing his cowboy hat, said: “What is it, Mr. Truly?” The name Lee Harvey Oswald was given to him as missing. “Thank you, Mr. Truly,” the captain said. “We will take care of it.”

At the little house in Irving, Mrs. Paine was making lunch for the children while Mrs. Oswald sat in the living room facing the television set. Ruth could hear the commentary in the kitchen, and kept shouting brief Russian translations. When the shooting was related, Mrs. Paine wiped her hands and came into the living room. The news was as incredible as it was in homes all over the world. As soon as it was verified, Marina went into her bedroom and wept. The unexpected violence, the possible loss of a Chief of State so near home developed into an emotional wrench.

A few minutes later, Marina came into the living room, wiping her eyes, holding the infant. “By the way,” Mrs. Paine said, translating as she listened, “they fired from the building where Lee works.” For a moment, Mrs. Oswald’s heart seemed to stop. Without a word, she put the baby on a couch and went through the kitchen into the garage. She switched on the overhead garage light and started to breathe again. The blanket roll where her husband kept his rifle was intact. She could see the contours of a long object inside. For Marina, it was a great relief.

When she returned to the house, Mrs. Paine was placing candles on a table and lighting them. “Is that a way of praying?” Marina asked. Her friend nodded. “Yes,” she said. “My own way.” Did Mrs. Oswald think of FBI Agent James Hosty? She didn’t like this man; she felt that his sporadic visits to Irving were badgering. Her husband had done nothing wrong. Sometimes, when the FBI man arrived, Lee was not at home and Marina resented the sly questions coming from the calm man with the pencil and paper, then listening to Ruth’s translations, then replying curtly in Russian, and hearing Ruth retranslate to English and watching the man write something.

Hosty was eating lunch downtown. He had watched the motorcade go by and had felt the pleasure of seeing an obviously delighted President. A waitress came to his table, scribbling the bill on a pad, and said: “Just came over the radio. The President and the Vice-President has been shot.” James Hosty didn’t wait for verification. He stopped eating, paid his check, and dogtrotted back to the Sante Fe Building, one block away.

He was ordered out again, told to get in his car and listen for radio instructions. The seconds on the clock were both precious and hectic. Hosty was ordered to Parkland. As he arrived, the radio ordered him to return to the office at once. He was out of breath when his supervisor saw him come into the outer office. He was told to go over the Dallas files carefully and see if he could develop any possible leads in the assassination.

Jim Hosty started on the file immediately. The name Oswald never came to mind.

At Idlewild Airport, in New York, a group of reporters and photographers had been waiting for the American Airlines plane to come back off the landing ramp. It waddled back up the apron strip, whistling like a banshee, and, after some delay, pulled up to its blocks. The ramps were adjusted and passengers disembarked from Dallas. Among them was the briefcase-swinging former Vice-President of the United States, Richard Nixon.

He had a lucrative law practice; he was an officer of a soft-drink corporation. He had been close to the seat of power in Washington once, and he was young enough to think that he would live down the narrow defeat by Kennedy in 1960 and try again. His personal plans were to assist the Republican Party in 1964 by assisting in the nomination of someone else—preferably Barry Goldwater of Arizona—to oppose Kennedy. At the same time, Nixon would run against Pat Brown of California for the post of Governor. If Nixon won his race and Kennedy won his against Goldwater, then Nixon would reach for the presidency again in 1968.

His mood was to keep his political future alive, but not to the point of being nominated in 1964.^* As he got off the plane, he thought that he would give “the boys” basically the same interview he had granted to the reporters in Dallas. He wore his smile of camaraderie, related a few facetious opinions about John F. Kennedy and the Kennedy administration, and closed on a note of division. “The President may have to drop Johnson as his running mate,” he said. “In the fight for civil rights, Lyndon Johnson has become a liability to the ticket. He may be more of a hindrance than an asset.”

Nixon posed for a few pictures, then kept walking, the microphones under his nose. He walked out front, waved good-bye and got into a taxicab. He was barely out of the airport when one of the reporters got a message: “The President has been shot in Dallas.”

President Kennedy’s death was a secret. It was known to a select few, such as Jerry Behn, in the White House fifteen hundred miles away. It was not known to Lyndon Johnson, thirty-five feet away. A brace of doctors and a few nurses knew it. The Secret Service agents whispered the information to each other. In the corridor, Chief Curry saw Stephen Landrigan and said bluntly: “Is he dead?” The press relations man said: “Yes, chief. He’s dead.”

A few minutes before, Kenneth O’Donnell had peered inside the drapes of the small cubicle in which Lyndon Johnson and Mrs. Johnson huddled on orders of the Secret Service and said: “It looks bad. Perhaps fatal. I’ll keep you informed.” O’Donnell was issuing the orders. The chieftain had fallen; the palace guard took charge. O’Donnell saw Clint Hill. “Order a casket,” he whispered. “Find some place nearby. We want to take him back to Washington.”

Clint Hill found Landrigan. He said he needed counsel on the matter of a casket for the President. The press man said that Oneal was reliable and nearby on Oak Lawn. They couldn’t get an outside line. In time, they went upstairs to the office of C. Jack Price, administrator of the hospital, and used his private line. Steve dialed LA 6–5221. He got Mr. Vernon B. Oneal Sr. and turned the phone over to Hill. “This is the Secret Service calling from Parkland Hospital,” Mrs. Kennedy’s bodyguard said. “Please select the best casket you have and put it in a coach and arrange for police escort and get it here as quickly as you can.” He listened. “Yes,” Hill said, “it is for the President of the United States.”

He handed the phone back to Landrigan, who talked to Mr. Oneal. “Wait a minute,” said the press agent. Hill was leaving the office. “He wants to know what kind of a casket you want.” Hill was still walking. “Tell him to send the best he has and to send it right away.” Landrigan relayed the information, and Mr. Oneal started to say he had a bronze casket for $3,900, but he was talking to a dead phone.

Downstairs, Trauma One was a quiet room. Nurse Margaret Hinchcliffe was given a depressing assignment. She was told to wash the President’s body and prepare it for travel. Miss Hinchcliffe got the assistance of Nurse Bowron and Orderly David Sanders. All of the clothing, sheared off, was placed in a paper bag and given to the Secret Service. In the jacket pocket was a Mass card given by Monsignor Wolf in Fort Worth four hours ago. It was for the health of the President and his family. Nurse Bowron forgot to include the watch she had in her pocket.

The body was sponged carefully, the legs and arms still pliant. The cart drapes on the right side were heavy with brain matter. This was cleaned up and the edges of the massive wound in the head were wiped. The brown hair was slicked back. The body was lifted off the carriage and white sheets were placed underneath. Enough loose material was allowed to hang off the left side so that, when the President was placed in the box, his head and neck wounds would not soil the white satin interior.

In the hall outside, O’Donnell and the Secret Service and Mrs. Kennedy conferred. Malcolm Kilduff was told he would have to announce the death. He wanted to know the time, the exact time. Mrs. Kennedy and O’Donnell wanted to know what time it was now. It was a minute or two before 1 P.M. The widow wanted the time of death to come after the time the priest had given her husband conditional absolution. The heads began to nod. Dr. Malcolm Perry was called. He was asked if 1 P.M. would be all right. Yes, that would be all right. The death certificate would so state.

At 12:59, Mrs. Kennedy went back into the room. She kissed her husband’s ankle and reached under the sheet for his hand. Miss Hinchcliffe and her assistants stood back. They watched. They were professionals, and professionals are not supposed to weep.