1 p.m.

It is doubtful that Earlene Roberts ever knew a great joy. She was fat and unpretty and middle-aged, a housekeeper who wheezed when she walked. Even the small pleasures—a gumdrop—were denied to her because she had diabetes. She wore oversized house dresses and spent a great deal of time alone in the little house at 1026 North Beckley, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. If she lifted a curtain from the front window, she saw a few struggling shrubs and a sign: “Bedroom for Rent.” If this was not enough, Mrs. Roberts could look diagonally across the street at the filling station.

She maintained the little house for Mr. and Mrs. A. C. Johnson. They had a small restaurant which kept them busy all day, so Earlene took care of the dusting and cleaning and counted the towels and face cloths the roomers turned in. Mr. Johnson seldom had much to say. He worked hard and kept his mouth shut. “Mizz” Johnson was alert and in her middle years and could look through a person if she had a mind to. The roomers were mostly men who worked for a while in Dallas; then, one at a time, they dropped off and new ones saw the sign on the lawn.

It was exactly 1 P.M. when Earlene Roberts heard the phone, and she got herself up from a chair by degrees and went to it. There was a girlfriend on the other end. “Roberts,” the voice said with the pretentious tone of one who has a secret, “President Kennedy has been shot.” The housekeeper was never short of words. She had lots of them if there was only someone around to use them on. And yet all she said was: “Oh, no.” The woman said: “Turn on your television set.” To Earlene Roberts nothing bad could happen to the mighty. “Are you trying to pull my leg?” she said. Her friend had no patience. “Go turn it on,” she said and hung up.

The legs were slow, and Earlene had to walk around the curving couch in the living room, because the furniture was grouped around the square opaque eye of the television set. She turned it on and backed up to sit and then, when the sound came, it was all a babble of excitement as though too many people were talking at the same time. She stepped forward to adjust the volume and the front door swung open and one of the boarders came in.

She seldom saw one in the middle of the day, and she never saw this one in such a hurry. His name was Mr. O. H. Lee and sometimes she said hello and he said nothing. She backed up to the couch and glanced at him and said: “Oh, you are in a hurry.” Mr. Lee didn’t look at her. He strode swiftly across the living room area to the left, where he had a small room. The picture came on the set and the camera kept switching from a hospital to people who were babbling about what they saw, and a young woman and a baby got on and Earlene could see that the woman was excited as she told about shots and where she had been standing and how awful it was.

The roomer had double doors leading into what once must have been an alcove. He opened one and disappeared inside.

The space was five feet by twelve, and an iron bedstead occupied most of it. The walls were pale green. Four windows adjoined each other. They were screened by venetian blinds and lace curtains. The bed had a chenille spread. One window held an air conditioner; the floor had space for a small heater.

There was a pole for hanging clothes, but the roomer didn’t have much apparel. He yanked a white zipper jacket from the pole and put it on over his work shirt. On the wall was a solitary naked electric bulb. A fresh towel was lying on a chifforobe. He took his revolver and jammed it down inside the belt of his trousers. It was a .38 caliber snub-nosed weapon, seven and a quarter inches from barrel to butt. He thrust a few extra shells into his pocket.

He came out of the tiny room and closed the door. Mrs. Roberts looked up from the television and might have spoken, might have communicated a fragment of the mass shock radiating out of Dallas, but, as Earlene thought, Mr. O. H. Lee “zipped” out the front door. She had never seen this particular boarder move so fast, so, a moment or two later, she got up, walked to the front window and drew the curtain back. There he was, down on the corner where Beckley, Ballard, and Elsbeth meet, standing at the bus stop. Mrs. Roberts was inquisitive, but the shooting of the President was much more exciting than watching Lee, so she returned to the set. She kept thinking that she never saw him come in and go out so fast.

The lean and pale face of Maude Shaw pulled itself up into a smile when she heard the voice of Nancy Tuckerman on the phone. Like Earlene Roberts, Miss Shaw felt lonely at times, especially when the Kennedy family was away. Her job involved the care and feeding of Caroline and John, and what made it bearable to this British nanny was the innate good manners of the youngsters.

She left both of them in the family sitting room on the second floor of the White House to answer the phone. “Yes,” she said when Mrs. Kennedy’s secretary said: “Miss Shaw?” There was a silence on the phone, as though Nancy Tuckerman was trying to think of a way of saying something. “I have some bad news for you,” she said. “I’m afraid the President has been shot.” Sometimes, when words induce horror, the mind refuses to accept and assimilate and, like an overloaded fuse, it shuts down all service. “Will you repeat that, please?” Miss Shaw said quietly.

It was repeated. “Oh, dear,” Miss Shaw said. “I do hope it isn’t serious.” Miss Tuckerman, who was in the East Wing, said: “That’s all we know right now. I’ll call you back as soon as I hear how he is.” Maude Shaw put the phone on its cradle and stood. She walked back down the long corridor with the uneven floor, passing the dimly lighted portraits of past Presidents and their ladies, and walked through the double door to the living room. Her eyes swept the array of odd chairs, the couch, the end tables with silver-framed portraits of the great men of the world, the small cathedral window, and, under it, Caroline, the prim, willful child who was just learning how to ride a pony. At the moment, she was reading a small book with big block capital letters and small words. On the floor, John was on his stomach. Before him he had a crayon book and an assortment of penciled pigments.

He had the patience to begin placing the right colors on the right flowers and the docile animals, but, if the crayon slipped outside its appointed place, he tended to scribble carelessly. The woman watched the children for a moment. She knew something they didn’t. The eyes blinked, and she thought that a nap would be a good thing. It would be a good thing in any case, because Nurse O’Dowd had just left, taking with her the children of Senator and Mrs. Edward Kennedy—Teddy and Kara.

“Come along, children,” she said. “It’s time for your rest, now.” They were not the type to plead for clemency or an extra minute. Caroline smiled and kept her place in her beginner’s book. John began to round up the crayons from the floor. Miss Shaw had never had an occasion to feel sorry for them before. They were wealthy, they were handsome, they were “as good as gold,” and their father was the President of the United States. Suddenly a sorrow welled in her heart as she watched them smile and hurry to obey.

She took Caroline’s hand, and John danced on ahead, the little white shoes skipping in the dark corridor. In her room he received a little assistance in undressing, and he talked as volubly as ever, the flame-red little mouth busy with excitement. He loved helicopters and John was at his finest when he received permission to stand on the South Lawn and watch one come in or take off with his father and mother. Sometimes—on very rare occasions—his father permitted him to get on the helicopter and sit next to him and look out the window as the overhead blades slashed the air and the grass drifted away and the big White House grew smaller and smaller. When this happened, John squealed with delight and pressed his knees together. Caroline asked if she could rest “on top of the bedspread” and Miss Shaw said yes.

The nursemaid went to her small room, between those of the children, and waited for a second phone call which never came.

The clock hesitated between 1 P.M. and 1:05 P.M. as though, realizing the horror it had perpetrated, it desired to stand still so that it would not entertain fresh regret. The drag of time was so pronounced that, around the world, hundreds of millions of people heard the stunning news and consulted the time—for no purpose at all. Some would recall with clarity everything that was done or said at this moment; many who could not re-create the moment of marriage would recite this moment as though their powers of absorption had been speeded enormously and the second hand had begun to beat time in milliseconds.

A mile east of the White House, the Senate was in session under the big dome of the Capitol. The House of Representatives, except for two clerks studying their notes, was empty and dark. Senator Edward Kennedy had left the upper chamber. The Democratic leader, Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, as thin-lipped as Kenny O’Donnell, contained his emotions and leveled the tone of his voice and asked that the august body of the United States Senate “recess at once, pending developments.” There was no dissenting voice from the other side of the aisle. There was no voice anywhere. The gentlemen left their desks in twos, like aging schoolboys, whispering that there must be some mistake, a damned big mistake.

Nobody in an elightened century shoots at Presidents and Prime Ministers. Senator Wayne Morse, the mean, mustached maverick of the West, stared almost scornfully at the clock over the President’s rostrum. “If ever there was an hour when all Americans should pray,” he intoned, “this is the hour.” It was a wry irony of politics that a body so powerful a moment ago could be reduced to the mystique of prayer as a means of sparing the life of one citizen.

In Wall Street, the Friday wave of selling was in full flower and the pale sun of a chilly day seeped to the street. Brokers in linen dusters crumpled bits of paper and dropped them to the floor. The bell clanged and there was a stunned silence, as though a hive of bees had been enclosed in a glass bell. The greatest tribute the Stock Exchange could ever accord to any man was to close. It closed.

The huge octagonal building on the Virginia side of the Potomac kept its hard face neutral, but, inside, men of rank were running. The vast Department of Defense was like a deadly snake touched. With the first news came reaction. The Army, the Navy, the Air Force reared back into a coiled position. No man knew whether this was an opening shot in a plot by a foreign power to assassinate the ranking ministers of the United States as a prelude to attack. It could hardly be accidental that, at this moment and this moment only, the President and the Vice-President were both out of Washington and the Secretary of State and other ranking dignitaries were on a plane westbound from Hawaii.

Who was left, not merely to direct the burden of defense but to grasp the reins of power? Who? Secretary of the Treasury Fowler? Who? Robert McNamara of Defense, who was barely back in his office from a trip to Honolulu? Who? House Speaker John McCormack, the old party wheelhorse who had devoted a lifetime to getting the proper legislation out of the proper committees to the floor for a vote?

The power was not in Washington, nor was there any man who could command it. If the President was injured, where was The Bagman? No one knew. Had anyone told Mr. Johnson that, should the wound render Mr. Kennedy unconscious, the frightful decision to launch a nuclear counterattack was now his? Had General Clifton told the Vice-President that it was now within his power—with that Bag—to dial any one of several types of attack? Did he know? Was he aware? Had anyone ever briefed this big, burly man in the matter of awesome and irrevocable decisions?

No. As the clock hung silent, the United States of America stood, for a little time, naked. As the radicals of the Republican Party had kept Abraham Lincoln from briefing his Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, on matters of war and peace, so, too, the men around Kennedy had kept the doctrines of power from Lyndon Johnson. He knew there was a Bag. He knew there was a man several booths away, standing with a Bag. But, if this shooting was a particle of a larger threat to the security of the United States, Mr. Johnson had neither the combination to The Bag, nor the exact knowledge of what to do with it.

McNamara ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to send a signal to all American military bases, domestic and foreign:

“1. Press reports President Kennedy and Governor Connally of Texas shot and critically injured. Both in hospital at Dallas, Texas. No official information yet, will keep you informed.

“2. This is the time to be especially on the alert.

“JCS.”

In the archiepiscopal residence in Boston, the aged, asthmatic Richard Cardinal Cushing heard the news as a father might hear an ugly rumor about a promising son. To His Eminence, it was unthinkable. He had christened Kennedys; he had married them; he had buried them. To him they were not to be viewed as a rich or powerful Catholic clan; they were his children. At a dinner with them, he could raise his codfish voice in louder dissent than old Joe or young Bobby or laugh more heartily at the antics of the family than they could.

One, through some strange transmutation of baser metal, had turned to gleaming gold and was now leading the nation as the first Roman Catholic President. The Cardinal did not subscribe to all of “young Jack’s” measures, but it was a benevolent blessing to have lived to see this boy run the country, not as a partisan Catholic, but as a patriotic President. The news that he had been shot and wounded was unfair and—please God—possibly untrue.

His Eminence, wearing the long black cassock which made him seem so much taller, led the nuns of his housekeeping staff into the little chapel. He was ready to sink his bone-weary frame onto a prie-dieu, when he called his secretary. He ordered the word to be sent out to all Catholic parishes in the New England states at once: “Pray, pray for the President.”

For Mrs. Kennedy, the unbearable had to be borne. She sat. She stood. The pitifully whispered words of friends and strangers had to be acknowledged. She sat. She stood. At one time or other, the word death must have reminded her of Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. He had died last summer, thirty-nine hours old. His father, sleepless, had stared through thick glass into a pressure chamber as the infant fought valiantly against the fluids which seeped into his lungs. When the baby died, the young President pounded his fist against the metal chamber because he had not been able, in his strength, to breathe for his flesh and blood.

The impotence of his grief robbed Mr. Kennedy of his disciplined control. He broke down and cried. Alone he had knelt beside the small casket in the chapel of Cardinal Cushing, alone to pray for a son who, in the faith of his fathers, was in the serene company of heavenly hosts. The President had tried hard to reach that baby, to touch his hand. From his neck he had taken the gold St. Christopher Medal his wife had given him and thrust it inside the white casket beside the newborn.

A similar thought must have crossed Mrs. Kennedy’s mind in the lonely cruelty of grief. She stepped back into Trauma One and walked around the contoured sheet and lifted it. She took his left hand and kissed it. Then she removed her wedding ring and put it on his dead finger. It could be worked up only to the second knuckle. She placed the hand back at his side and pulled the sheet down.

In the corridor, she saw Ken O’Donnell and told him what she had done. “Do you think it was right?” she said. “Now I have nothing left.” The impassiveness of Mr. O’Donnell’s face broke a little. “You leave it where it is.” Silently he reminded himself to get that ring back later and return it to her.

The short trip was swift. The door to Trauma Two opened and the carriage came out, making the short turn on its casters, and the man under the sheet was whisked down the hall to the elevator, pushed by doctors who were taking him to the second floor, to Operating Room Five. The elevator was small. Some ran the stairs. Governor Connally’s right lung had collapsed. In the operating room, the talented minds and hands and eyes of the doctors blended to their duties. At one time, twelve hands were over the patient. Orderly R. J. Jimison helped lift him from the carriage to the operating table and pushed the table outside, soiled with bloody sheets and the medical impedimenta of an emergency.

Dr. Robert Shaw established anesthesia and pushed an endotracheal tube into the patient to ensure positive pressure. The bullet, in traversing the downward plunge across the axis of the fifth rib, had lacerated the right lung and induced a pneumothora. Another pair of hands was busy shaving the chest and belly. The entrance wound in the area of the right shoulder was small and elliptical and looked like a black wart.

Dr. Gregory had the most difficult of the assignments. He was going to take a compound comminuted fracture of the right wrist and put all those small bones, and all the little pieces of them, back together again. The work of salvaging a life and restoring the full use of the body was under way by 1:05 P.M. Shaw was surprised to find that the intercostal muscle bundles, between ribs, appeared to be undamaged. Jagged ends of a fifth rib were cleaned with a rongeur. Two hundred cubic centimeters of blood and clot were pumped from the pleura; there was a tear in the right lung, but all the major blood vessels had escaped damage. Running sutures were employed and, on pressure from the anesthetic bag, the lobe of the lung expanded well with little peripheral leak.

The lower lobe sustained a large hematoma from a flying rib fragment. Bit by bit the repairs were made. The Governor’s executive assistant, Bill Stinson, stood in surgical gown, watching. The patient had a strong, lean, well-nourished frame and, unconsciously, he was initiating a part of the fight to return to life on equal terms. Jane Carolyn Webster, a registered nurse, had her people ready with instruments and types of sutures before the doctors called for them. She had the Governor’s clothing—all of it—placed in a bundle and put under the cart at the elevator. It was going to require a couple of hours of work before Connally would be ready for bed. When he was, Stinson asked that guards be posted and that the room next to the Governor’s be reserved for the use of Nellie Connally.

The wound on the left thigh, where the bullet stopped after passing through the President and the Governor, was about the size of an eraser on the end of a pencil. As Doctor Gregory examined it, he surmised that the energy of the bullet was near exhaustion because the injury was barely surface deep. Dr. Shaw, assisted by Doctors Boland and Duke, spent considerable time on the exit wound in the chest. It was under the right nipple, about five centimeters in diameter, and the torn edges had to be snipped away. Dr. Giesecke, who monitored the anesthesia, had also worked on President Kennedy.

On the first floor of the big hospital, Trauma Two was being scrubbed by Audrey Bell. When she got to the nurses’ working table, she found a group of bullet fragments and turned them over to police. Outside the door to the elevator, where the cart of Governor Connally was parked, a bullet bounced on the floor and was handed to Security Officer O. P. Wright. He put it in his pocket to be given later to the Secret Service or the Dallas Police Department.*

Admiral Burkley opened the door of Trauma One and edged inside. The place was clean and gleaming; the rows of instruments on sterile napkins sparkled. Only the contour of the sheet on the table spoke of another presence. The clay of John F. Kennedy was cooling. The admiral glanced across the floor and saw a wastebasket. In it were the bent and broken roses which the wife of the mayor had given to Mrs. Kennedy—how long ago? Eighty minutes ago at Love Field.

Two flowers had fallen out of the basket. The admiral-physician picked them up and placed them tenderly in his jacket pocket. Perhaps later, he would give them to Mrs. Kennedy. She might want to treasure the flowers on which the President had fallen and died. In the corridor, Mrs. Kennedy kept the vigil over the door to the room. Doris Nelson asked the Secret Service men what arrangements would be made for the body, and they told her that an undertaker and casket were en route to the hospital. She began to fill out the blanks in the death certificate. It would be signed by Dr. Kemp Clark, the neurosurgeon; the patient died of a brain injury.

Men began to do things by rote. Landrigan phoned Norris Uzee and asked him to lower the hospital flag to half-staff. It was done at once, but no one waiting outside noticed it. Dr. Clark gave the signed death certificate to Dr. Burkley, and the doctor tried to place it in the pocket with the roses. An FBI man grabbed hospital administrator Price by the arm and whispered: “Don’t let anybody know what time the President died—security.” Senator Ralph Yarborough, stunned by the situation, began to realize that a President had been assassinated and he moaned loudly and staggered to an upright column. He required treatment for hysteria and kept muttering: “Horror! Horror!”

In Washington, the tragic, secret word went from Jerry Behn’s office to Secret Service Headquarters to Robert F. Kennedy. The phone rang. The voice of J. Edgar Hoover informed the Attorney General that his brother was “in critical condition.” Robert Kennedy listened politely and said: “You may be interested to know that my brother is dead.” Then he called his brother Ted and asked him to please break the news to “mother and our sisters.” It could not be told to the President’s father: Joseph P. Kennedy was convalescing from an extensive cerebral hemorrhage.

Mrs. Joseph Kennedy, as small as a vase of violets, took the news standing. “We’ll be all right,” she said. Then she put on her coat and walked out of the Kennedy compound on the Massachusetts shore, and paced the beach. The November winds were coming east and the breakers climbed up out of the green troughs white, falling in thunder on the sand. She walked, hands in pockets, the gusts tearing at her hair, with time to dwell on the hardships which can be imposed on a family by the will of God.

The city and the nation was in a daze. The President had been shot. It was not known that he was dead but the shock spread like mist along a shore. Lyndon Johnson was President but did not know it. To keep him secure in that little cubbyhole, Congressmen and Secret Service agents kept reminding the tall Texan that the assassination could well be part of a much bigger day of terror. Johnson began to believe it. Emory Roberts suggested that Johnson leave at once for Air Force One. Johnson said he would not leave, and would not board AF-1 “without a suggestion or permission of the Kennedy staff.” Roberts asked Kenny O’Donnell and he said: “Yes.” Johnson refused to move. Roberts returned to O’Donnell and asked again: “Is it all right for Mr. Johnson to board Air Force One now?” “Yes” O’Donnell said, “Yes.”

Mrs. Johnson asked if she could stop a moment and see Mrs. Kennedy again, and Mrs. Connally. Agents formed an advance guard for her. The new First Lady had a cast-iron gentility. She was opposed to violence of any kind, even in speech. She was surrounded by marching men, marching through corridors of silent men and, when the ranks broke, the young widow was standing before her. Mrs. Johnson’s opinion of Mrs. Kennedy had been summed up in a sentence years before: “She was a girl who was born to wear white gloves.” Mrs. Kennedy’s opinion of Mrs. Johnson had also been summed up long ago: “If Lyndon asked, I think Lady Bird would walk down Pennsylvania Avenue naked.” No one spoke. There was nothing worth saying. No miracle could repair the personal wound, the epicenter of which stood in silence, clasping and unclasping the bloody gloves.

Mrs. Johnson began to weep. She grabbed the young woman and said: “Jackie, I wish to God there was something I could do.” The dazed expression was on Mrs. Kennedy’s face. It was on Mrs. Johnson’s face. In an hour, it would be on the face of the world. Lady Bird Johnson walked away, looking back and shaking her head and wiping her eyes. She went upstairs to Nellie Connally and the women hugged each other. Mrs. Johnson said: “Nellie, he is going to get well.”

The dark, intelligent head of Malcolm Kilduff was also in the swirling fogs of bewilderment. He met Evelyn Lincoln, Mary Gallagher, and Pamela Turnure near the emergency area entrance. The face of Evelyn Lincoln was stricken. “Mac, how is he?” The three women stared at him, waiting. The assistant press secretary wanted to tell the truth, but the words hung in his throat. He couldn’t even say them to himself. He waved his hands feebly and left them.

He walked dazedly in the opposite direction and met Kenneth O’Donnell. “Kenny” said Kilduff, “this is a terrible time to approach you on this, but the world has got to know that President Kennedy is dead.” The presidential assistant looked surprised. “Well, don’t they know it already?” To him, it was as it was to so many others: President Kennedy seemed to have died a long, long time ago. The horror-stricken mind, racing at top speed, seemed to have lived with this melancholy truth for a long time. The assistant press secretary was saying that the world did not know.

“Well, you are going to have to make the announcement.” O’Donnell thought about it. He became conscious of a new order of things. “Go ahead, but you better check it with Mr. Johnson.” The press man nodded, and shuffled off through the rabbit warren of passageways, wondering why he could not say the words: “President Kennedy is dead.” As he approached Johnson’s hideaway, Mac Kilduff found himself walking behind Mrs. Johnson.

The new President was sitting on an ambulance cart, his legs dangling. He nodded to Mrs. Johnson and returned to a moody look at the floor. Kilduff swallowed hard and said: “Mr. President. . .” Johnson brought his head up sharply; Mrs. Johnson turned as she was about to sit, and held a hand against her mouth. This was the first time Lyndon Baines Johnson had been so addressed; it was the first time he knew that he was the thirty-sixth President of the United States.

“Mr. President,” the young man said, “I have to announce the death of President Kennedy to the press. Is it all right with you?” Johnson hopped off the cart and jiggled a hand in his trouser pocket. “No, Mac,” he said. “I think we had better get out of here and get back to the plane before you announce it.” Kilduff had not thought of the assassination as anything more widespread than the death of Kennedy. “We don’t know whether this is a worldwide conspiracy,” Mr. Johnson said, quoting Emory Roberts and Clinton Hill, “whether they are after me as they were after President Kennedy, or whether they are after Speaker McCormack or Senator Hayden.” He looked up and saw the fresh shock in Kilduff’s eyes. “We just don’t know,” the President said.

Johnson looked at the Secret Service agents. “I think we had better wait a minute. Are they prepared to get me out of here?” Kilduff thanked the President and went back to discuss the matter with Roy Kellerman. The Secret Service began to lay its plans. If this was a plot, a conspiracy of some dimensions, Kellerman said he would feel better if they got Johnson back on the plane. Roberts and Youngblood wanted him to get aboard AF-1 and fly at once to the White House. In that building, he could be given the utmost protection. Until then the craft was a sealed edifice with wings. It could be isolated from the rest of the field, from the world, and protected. It also had direct communication with Washington. Air Force One—or 26000—had brand-new, highly sophisticated equipment, some of which was directly related to The Bagman and his “football.” The Vice-President’s plane did not have this equipment; neither did the third presidential 707, which was en route home with Rusk aboard.

Kennedy’s lieutenant, Kenneth O’Donnell, was not a man to quarrel with the political dice. He was sickened, but not to the point of misunderstanding the shift of power. He was a Kennedy man all the way, but there was no Kennedy. It seemed to him that at one minute he was sitting in a car tallying votes along the curb, and that of the next he was chief usher at an Irish wake. He went to visit Johnson.

The new President, the man who had assured Mr. Rubin, the restaurateur that his face would never be among the chased glass squares of the Chief Executives, was frightened. He had assimilated the doleful counsel around him, and believed it. In a trice, he became the only President who ever witnessed the assassination of a President, and it was too much for one set of shoulders to bear: at times his ideas had been treated with contempt by Kennedy’s palace guard; now the palace guard attended him and called him “Mr. President.” He thought of Harry Truman who, on an April day in 1945, chatted with old Senate colleagues and planned late-night poker games, who was asked to report to the White House and, in the blink of an eye, found that he was President of the United States. He thought of another Johnson named Andrew, who was Vice-President to a weary President named Abraham Lincoln, and who found himself at 7:22 of a Saturday morning the new Chief Executive. And Teddy Roosevelt, inaccessible in the Adironack Mountains when McKinley lay dying of a bullet wound; Calvin Coolidge being sworn in beside a kerosene lamp in his father’s house in Northampton . . . Johnson knew American history.

The President asked O’Donnell if it might not be better to get to Carswell Air Force Base. It was military; security would be easy. No, it would not be better. Carswell was thirty-one miles away. No, Mr. President. The safest course would be to traverse those two miles from this hospital to that airport. Two miles. O’Donnell also pointed out that the short trip should be all the safer because it was not scheduled. No one knew about it.

Part of Johnson’s political philosophy was to seek intelligent help with the utmost candor. He knew O’Donnell was a “take charge” man and the new President looked him in the eye. “I am in your hands now,” he said. O’Donnell misunderstood. He thought that Johnson was asking for a pre-endorsement of his actions by the Kennedy group. To the contrary, Johnson was as dazed as any of the others and was in urgent need of good counsel.

“Well,” Johnson said, “how about Mrs. Kennedy?” The small, thin smile adorned O’Donnell’s face. “She will not leave the hospital,” he said, “without the President.” There was no doubt about which President. Mrs. Johnson nodded approvingly when her husband said that he would not go back without Mrs. Kennedy and the body of her husband. The smile disappeared and O’Donnell said that he still thought the best move would be for President Johnson and his “people” to get aboard that plane now. “I don’t want to leave Mrs. Kennedy like this,” Johnson said. Perhaps, he conceded, it would be just as well to wait for her on the plane.

Had O’Donnell been clearheaded, he would have recognized that, even though Johnson automatically assumed the burden of the Presidency the moment Kennedy was incapacitated by a rifle shot, he had none of the executive powers until he was sworn in. He was President but could not act as one until that oath had been taken. It was printed in almost all almanacs and could be administered by a notary public. This lapse cost the nation the services of a Chief Executive for two hours and five minutes. All Johnson had was the title.

Congressman Homer Thornberry of Texas came into the little room. The silence had thickened. Congressman Jack Brooks stepped inside and thought he was intruding. Someone took his arm and told him to stay. Johnson asked if he could see Mrs. Kennedy for a moment. Agent Clint Hill shook his head negatively. “You should not leave this room, Mr. President.” Kenneth O’Donnell excused himself and left. He would like to get Mrs. Kennedy away from Trauma One before the casket arrived. He needed a good reason.

The Secret Service was, to a man, unsentimental. Their work consisted of protecting the life of the President. Officially they would not be involved in tracking an assassin. The agents were told that, if necessary, they were to place their bodies between a potential assassin and the President. They had lost one today. It was a dark and dismal thing for them to contemplate, and they were going to go “overboard” to protect the new one. They advised Johnson to get aboard Air Force One at once and to take off for Washington. Johnson was shocked. He asked where Mrs. Kennedy and the casket would go. “Air Force Two,” they said. Emory Roberts repeated this “suggestion.”

Morally, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson could not consider the proposal. They would not fly back to the capital alone, with a dead President and a grieving widow on a following plane. Johnson said that he would agree to get aboard Air Force One, but he would wait “for President and Mrs. Kennedy.” That settled it. Agent Youngblood filled a gap of conversational vacuum by announcing that the Secret Service had located one Johnson daughter, Lynda, in a Texas school and that she was now protected. The younger one had been found in a Washington, D.C., school and an agent was at her side.

The Johnsons, sickened and frightened, realized the country was certain to interpret a quick return to Washington as “fleeing” and leaving the widow alone with the body of her husband. The President solicited advice from everyone around him. He received none from his congressional confreres, plenty from the Secret Service, some from Cliff Carter, his assistant, but no one thought of the oath of office. If it occurred to the President, he did not mention it, for the same reason that he would not depart alone on Air Force One—it would look like a precipitous power grab. No one recited the substance of Article 2, Section I (7) of the Constitution of the United States, which is explicit: “Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation . . .”

Legally Lyndon Johnson was no longer Vice-President and had none of the powers of that office; he was now President of the United States, with none of the powers of that office. He could not have protected the country if, as some surmised, the death of Kennedy was part of a much larger plot to bring the government to its knees.

One Secret Service agent returned to the scene of the crime. Forrest V. Sorrels of the Dallas office had an intuitive feeling that this case could be solved and closed out quickly if the police and sheriff’s deputies sealed the Dealey Plaza area and endured the tedium of interrogating everyone. Someone, he was certain, saw something. That someone could be lost within minutes unless a clearing house for affidavits was set up. He had worked with Chief Curry and the Dallas police and with Sheriff Decker and the county officers. Sorrels, respecting both, feared a fatal division of authority or, worse, a conglomerate mass of law officers working without direction.

He was back in the Texas School Book Depository building within twenty-five minutes. Carefully, he had walked on the overpass, down through the parking lot and grassy knoll, and around the railroad yards behind the building. He saw a Negro standing at the loading platform and said: “Did you see anyone run out the back?” The man glanced up from his reverie and said: “No, sir.” Without challenge, Sorrels went into the building at 12:55 and saw groups of officers sifting and questioning employees. The Secret Service agent, who had no police power in a Dallas County homicide, watched for a few minutes and then walked out the front entrance, still without being asked who he was or why he was there.

He saw more policemen on the lawn and more citizens babbling and pointing. Sorrels, raising his voice, said: “Did anyone here see anything?” A man pointed to another in a tin hat. The Secret Service agent was not in communication with Brennan, who had watched the assassin from the low wall in Dealey Plaza. This was an accident because Sorrels did not know where the shots came from and had walked through the Texas School Book Depository only because he thought that one of the employees may have seen gunfire.

Brennan glanced at the Secret Service identification which was flashed at him. “Did you see anything?” Sorrels said. The pipe fitter pointed to an upper window of the building. He began his story all over again. “I could see the man taking deliberate aim and saw him fire the third shot.” Brennan said that the rifle was then pulled back into the window slowly, as though the rifleman was studying the effect of the shot at his leisure. Brennan pointed to the Negro boy Euins and said that he too had witnessed the shooting.

Sorrels began to feel a little better. He had leads. The police had the same ones, but this agent was going to ensure that these witnesses would be interrogated at length in an office, with a stenographer taking notes. Forrest Sorrels was sure that he wanted to question every employee of that building. As he crossed the square and walked into the sheriff’s office, an officer pointed to a young couple, waiting patiently on a bench, who had also witnessed the shooting. Somewhere around was a man with pellet holes in his cheek, a man who stood in a direct line with a shot which ricocheted from the pavement beside the President’s car. Mr. Sorrels began to feel encouraged.

The building was being shaken down for the second time. Policemen and deputies were on every floor, like armed treasure hunters, studying each step on the stairwells, examining the roof, on hands and knees in the small attic spaces above the seventh floor, shouting to each other across the dusty barn-like spaces, overturning cartons and standing on boxes to study the areas over the ceiling sprinkler system. Sheriff Decker was on the sloping lawn below the front windows, listening to Captain Will Fritz.

Some witnesses were escorted across the square to the sheriff’s office; others were incoherent. Fresh groups, alerted by radio and television, were cluttering the square, listening to the police, offering suggestions, and conducting interrogations of their own. Motorcycles were on their sides in varying attitudes of disarray. Cops in helmets tried to maintain the flow of traffic on Elm, Main, and Houston. The squawk of police radios scattered metallic words across the lawn. An airliner, making the turn for final approach to Love Airport, emitted a subdued scream as the pigeons, in fatigue, gave up and stood along the roof edge watching policemen.

Luke Mooney, deputy sheriff, was on the sixth floor. He was one of many. In the southeast corner, he noticed that the boxes were piled higher than elsewhere and, to squeeze between them, he had to turn sideward and hold his breath. Once inside the little “fort,” his breathing stopped automatically. At his feet, he saw three empty rifle shells. His eyes saw some low-lying boxes which could be used as a rifle rest. There was a diagonal crease in one which pointed out the window.

The first thing that Luke Mooney decided was not to touch anything. He leaned out the sixth-floor window and saw his superior, Sheriff Decker, and Fritz of Dallas Homicide, standing below. Mooney shouted, but no one heard him. He whistled between his teeth and shouted again. Both men looked up. “Get the crime lab officers,” he shouted. “I got the location spotted.”

Mooney kept the other policemen away from the area. In time, Fritz arrived. The Crime Laboratory, a mobile unit, had been summoned from headquarters on Main Street. The deputy sheriff was excited. Having made his find, he observed everything. The pile of boxes was high enough to serve as a private screen against prying eyes from anywhere on the sixth floor. The small boxes which had been placed inside, on the floor, were just high enough, with the window one-third open, to serve as an assassin’s roost. A man could sit on the one nearest the heating pipes, while resting the gun on the one near the window, and looking diagonally down Elm Street toward the overpass. He would have an open, commanding view everywhere except as the motorcade passed the broad tree below. The only open space in the tree was furnished by the “V” of two main branches. Mooney was still dwelling on the subject when ranking officers and their entourages descended on him.

Channel One was busy with traffic about the “find,” but Channel Two remained mystified. At 1:11 P.M. Assistant Chief Charles O. Batchelor, at the Trade Mart, asked once more: “Find out any further information at Parkland about the condition of the President, whether he can be here or not. Mr. Crull is standing by and needs to know immediately if you can find out so we can do something to these people out here.” One minute later, Inspector Sawyer came on with a bit of misinformation: “On the third floor of this book company down here, we found empty rifle hulls and it looked like the man had been here for some time. We are checking it out now.”

Lieutenant J. C. Day, with twenty-three years of police work behind him, was on the scene with his Crime Laboratory within a couple of minutes. He and his men had a Speed Graphic camera, dusting brushes for fingerprints, an array of technical equipment in the “bus,” and the acumen to preserve a chain of evidence intact. The majority of witnesses to the assassination had insisted that there had been three shots. Day now had three empty shells to support this contention. Across the street in the sheriff’s office, three Negro employees began to tell the story of how they had been watching the parade from the fifth floor, when they heard those shots and listened to the empty shells drop on the floor.

Will Fritz said that he was going back to headquarters to check up on a man named Lee Harvey Oswald. He stood in an area of the sixth floor, the cowboy hat back off his forehead, watching Lieutenant Day and his men photograph the empty shells, lift them by the ends, and dust them for fingerprints. There were none, and Day initialed the hulls and placed them in a container. The cartons around the window were examined, and palm prints were made.

Other policemen were working the sixth floor. The remains of a chicken sandwich had been found. Someone else found a roll of brown paper, fashioned as a long slender cone. It could have been used to hold a rifle or something like curtain rods. Deputy Eugene Boone yelled: “Here is the gun!” The others ran to him. He was near the staircase leading down, farthest away from the window where the shells had been found. “Here is the gun!” When policemen reached Boone, some could not see the rifle. It was standing upright between two triple rows of cartons, squeezed tight.

Captain Fritz watched Day’s men photograph it, then lift it from its position without marring the chance of obtaining fingerprints. Day knew, after a glance at the roughness of the wood in the stock of the cheap gun, that it would not hold fingerprints. However, the barrel might. It had a canvas sling on the underside and a cheap four-power Japanese scope on top of the barrel. When the Crime Laboratory finished its work, Fritz pointed the rifle at the ceiling, pulled the chamber open, and a fourth shell rattled to the floor. Some of the policemen, studying the contour of the gun, murmured: “Mauser.” Boone nodded. “Mauser,” he said.

Fritz was becoming increasingly interested in the “boy” who worked on this floor—the missing one. He wanted to start by checking the police records on Lee Harvey Oswald. Then he would send officers to Oswald’s home at 2515 West Fifth Street, Irving. The captain could have lifted a phone and asked the police of Irving to pick up Oswald, provided, of course, that he was home waiting for police.

The assassin became aimless and languid. He walked south a few streets, then east a few, then south, then east. It was not a way to get back to downtown Dallas; it was not a way to get a bus to leave Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald had passed Davis, the last street which might have brought him back to Marina at Irving, Texas. He was now in a rundown area of clapboard houses, faded roofs, weedy lawns, and used car lots.

The flagstone sidewalks were tilted and broken. The sun was high and hot and there were few people on the street. He walked down Crawford, turned left onto Tenth, and went toward Patton. Oswald was still on Tenth, crossing Patton, when he sensed a car in low gear behind him. Behind the wheel was Officer J. D. Tippit, the policeman who “moonlighted” two jobs. He was a dark-haired, good-looking man with a strong jaw and a slow, genial manner.

The cop was off his own beat—78—because Channel One had pulled so many Oak Cliff police cars into downtown Dallas. They were looking for a 25-to 30-year-old male wearing a work jacket and slacks, medium height, slender, black hair or brown. The nearest Tippit had seen to anyone of that description was this man walking ahead of him. Tippit had spent enough years on the force to know that the chances of nabbing the right man in a sprawling city of over one million persons will always be small. In truth, having stopped some persons in error, Tippit had long since become accustomed to opening such conversations politely. Had he been a trigger hysteric, he would have pulled to a stop behind his man and left the car with his gun drawn.

The right front window was open. Patrolman Tippit pulled up to the curb as his quarry completed crossing Patton. Whatever he said caused Lee Harvey Oswald to bend down on the curbside and respond to Tippit’s questions. The conversation may have been unsatisfactory. Oswald seldom cared to converse with anyone. Tippit decided to get out of the car, possibly to ask additional questions and maybe to frisk the man. This one had a gun in his belt.

The few people abroad in the area became interested in the police car and the pedestrian. A hundred feet behind them, parked on Patton, William Scoggins, a taxi driver, watched them from across an empty lot. Helen Markham, on the opposite corner of Tenth and Patton, turned to watch. Domingo Benavides was driving his pickup truck in the opposite direction on Tenth and slowed it to a walk, twenty-five feet in front of the police car.

Tippit was in no hurry. He got out on the driver’s side. Oswald watched from across the hood. J. D. Tippit made two steps. The assassin yanked the snub-nosed revolver from his belt and fired rapidly across the car. There were little flickers in the sunlight and a succession of explosive sounds rolled through the neighborhood like tumbling bowling pins. Patrolman Tippit was hit four times. He began to crumple slowly, and, as he fell on his belly beside the front wheel of the car, he managed to get his gun from its holster. He fell on it face down and his head hit the macadam. The uniform cap rolled off his head. He had about fifteen seconds to live and he spent it trying to say something. The mouth kept whispering to the pavement but nothing could be understood.

The cab driver was eating a sandwich behind the wheel. At once, Scoggins got out and crouched on the left side of the vehicle as he saw Oswald turn back across the open lot, coming his way. Mrs. Markham began to shriek and ran across the street to the policeman. The woman became rigid with hysteria. She held her fists against the sides of her face and roared: “He shot him! He is dead! Call the police!” There was a small frame apartment house facing the police car. Inside, two young sisters, married to brothers named Davis, had adjoining apartments. They were having a nap with two small children when the shots were heard.

They got up and stared in wonderment through a screen door. Lee Harvey Oswald was cutting across their lawn, going back toward Patton, holding a gun pointed upward and yanking empty shells from it. He dropped them in the weedy grass. He was reloading as he passed Scoggins, and the taxi driver heard him mutter: “Poor dumb cop.” Oswald’s marksmanship at close range was good. He had hit Tippit in the temple, in the middle of the forehead, drilled two shots into the chest, and missed with the fifth shot. One hit a uniform button and carried it inside the body. Vaguely Domingo Benavides remembered that he was out in his pickup truck to help a man whose car had a damaged carburetor. It seemed mad to be sitting in the truck trying to think of the type of carburetor when a policeman was dying in his own blood, a woman was shrieking, and people were running. He just couldn’t remember the make of that carburetor.

Mrs. Markham, a waitress due to begin work at the Eat Well Restaurant at 2:30 P.M., found she could recall nothing about herself but everything about the shooting. She saw great gouts of dark blood pumping rhythmically from the policeman’s forehead, but she couldn’t hear her own screaming. A used car dealer and his helper watched Oswald loping down Patton toward them and they said: “What’s going on?” The assassin kept trotting down the sidewalk toward Jefferson. He was not running, and his gun was no longer in his hands. One salesman, Ted Callaway, watched Oswald go by and he told another man, B. D. Searcy: “Keep an eye on that guy. Follow him.” Searcy watched Oswald make a right turn on Jefferson, a main shopping street. “Follow him, hell,” he said. “That man will kill you. He has a gun.”

Callaway ran to the dead policeman, got the gun from under his body, and rode around Jefferson with Scoggins, the taxi driver, looking for the killer. Channel One, using the services of dispatchers Hulse and Jackson, was almost back to normal traffic when, at 1:16 P.M., they heard a voice say: “Hello, police operator . . .” Hulse said: “Go ahead, go ahead, citizen using the police . . .” Citizen: “We’ve had a shooting out here.” Hulse said: “Where’s it at?” There was no answer.

The citizen did not know how to use the police radio. Hulse called again: “The citizen using police radio . . .” Citizen: “On Tenth Street.” Dispatcher: “What location on Tenth Street?” Citizen: “Between Marsalis and Beckley. It’s a police officer. Somebody shot him.” There were voices in the background. Citizen, correcting himself: “What’s this? 404 Tenth Street.” Dispatcher Jackson knew at once that it had to be J. D. Tippit. He had last heard from this man eight minutes ago, less than a half mile from the place of a shooting. Jackson: “Seventy-eight.” This was Tippit’s number. He did not reply.

Citizen: “You got that? It’s in a police car numbered ten.” Jackson: “Seventy-eight.” The citizen was becoming hysterical: “Hello, police operator. Did you get that? A police officer, 510 East Jefferson.” This was another incorrect address. Jackson: “Signal 19 (a shooting) involving a police officer, 510 East Jefferson.” The citizen heard it. He said: “Thank you” and was advised to remain off the air. Within two minutes, the police had the correct location—Tenth Street and Patton—and squad cars roared into the area from all directions.

Officer Nick McDonald, a moon-faced man with dark skin and a high forehead was listening, almost absentmindedly, to the radio traffic at the School Book Depository building. He was working with his partner, T. R. Gregory, and they watched the Traffic division try to keep the curiosity seekers out of Dealey Plaza. The day now was summery and the patrolmen in the street were hotter than the weather, blowing whistles, diverting drivers, trying to prevent family cars from parking. McDonald had looked for an assignment at the School Book Depository, but the building was seething with cops.

The radio came on and Channel One announced, in the flat, toneless manner of police dispatchers, that word from Parkland was that President Kennedy had just expired. A moment later Nick McDonald heard the excited voice of a stranger announcing that a policeman had been shot. When he heard the area of the crime, he said to Gregory: “That’s Tippit. We’re not doing any good here. Let’s go up to Tenth Street.” On the way, they heard an additional report: that a suspect had been seen running into the basement of the public library at Marsalis and Jefferson. “Let’s go to the library,” said McDonald. In the back of the car, the two men had a loaded shotgun. They brought it up front.

Lyndon Johnson ordered the Secret Service to get him “and my people” to the plane. He still wanted endorsement for his actions, and he ordered Rufus Youngblood to go up the hall and ask Kenneth O’Donnell if he should use Air Force One. The agent returned and reported that “O’Donnell says yes.”* The President suggested that the party leave in unmarked cars. Whether the assassination plot was large or small, he did not want to have his wife risk her life with him, so he ordered her to ride in another vehicle. The Secret Service got in touch with Chief Curry and asked for unmarked cars. Kilduff said: “After you leave, I’ll make the announcement.” Rufus Youngblood had sent Agent Lem Johns out front to requisition some automobiles. He said: “Mr. President, if we’re leaving now, I wish you’d stick close to me.” Johnson was pressed between Youngblood and Kilduff. He kept glancing over their heads to his petite wife to reassure her that it was going to be all right. Agent Youngblood also had asked Johnson to keep his head below window level when he got into the car.

The President said, “Let’s go,” and the party whirled out of the area at top walking speed. To keep up, Mrs. Johnson had to run between Secret Service agents. Out front, Agent Lem Johns had three unmarked cars and three drivers with rank: Police Chief Curry, Captain Lawrence, and Inspector Putnam. There is something profoundly humiliating to see a President of the United States emerge from a building in an American city running in fear. Some people, lounging at the bottom of the huge hospital building, became alert and shouted: “Tell us something!” “What the hell is going on?” “What happened?”

The party kept walking at top speed, the Secret Service agents fanning out ahead and some walking backward. The President jumped into the back seat of Chief Curry’s lead car and slouched as low as a big man can. Youngblood was beside him. Malcolm Kilduff hurried back to the emergency entrance to make arrangements for the death announcement. Congressman Thornberry jumped into the front seat beside Curry. Mrs. Johnson was shoved into the second car. Another group was in the third.

Lem Johns had not told the motorcycle cops whom they were going to escort or where. The cars started out, spinning stones behind them, and a male voice said: “Stop!” Youngblood ordered Curry not to stop. The President asked who it was. Someone said: “Congressman Albert Thomas.” “Then stop,” Johnson said, and the Congressman was literally hauled into the front seat, and Congressman Thornberry was dragged over the back of the first seat to a spot outboard of the President.

The ride amounted to flight. No one dared to trust anyone. Single-mount motorcycle policemen pulled ahead of the little caravan and asked, on Channel One, where they were going. Youngblood told the chief to tell them Love Field. The cars of the curious were parked askew all over the hospital grounds, and the three automobiles followed each other over curbstones, sidewalks, across open fields, to Harry Hines Boulevard. There the police escort started the sirens, and the President, with his face squeezed in the back seat between the arms of Thornberry and Youngblood, said: “Tell them to shut those sirens off.”

Curry did it. Still the wailing shrieks could be heard for a mile. It required two or three requests before they shut down. Then the motorcade began to run a series of “pink lights.” As they approached red ones, the phalanx of cycles had to ease out onto the intersection and wave motorists to a stop. Then the three cars, slowed for the moment, hit speed until the next “pink light.” The last part of the run was made at dangerous speed. At the airport the cars skidded through a hole in the fence and ground to a halt.

The Boeing 707 never looked so big, so friendly and so impregnable. It sat on the apron, a proud blue and white bird whose home was not Dallas, but rather the blue vault beyond the runway. There was no time for a farewell to Dallas nor a wave of gratitude for the hospitality. People behind the fence saw some dignitaries get out of three cars and they cheered. The officials hurried to the ramps and ran up into the plane without looking back.

The most forlorn figure left on the concrete was Chief Jesse Curry. Once, a long, long time ago, he had been a truck driver. Then, by study and application, he had become a policeman, a good one who was rewarded by Dallas with promotion. Now he was the chief of police, with no ambition for higher office. His sole desire was to “keep his nose clean” and retire with honor.

He sat behind the wheel, a man alone. He had worked hard and earnestly with the Secret Service, preparing for this day. All of it, including his career, died in an instant at Dealey Plaza. Someone—he didn’t know who—had disgraced Dallas in the eyes of the world. It didn’t matter, Curry knew, whether they found the guilty man or punished him—Dallas was going to need a goat.

Curry picked up the telephone and called Channel Two.

In any situation, there are usually two ways to turn. Lee Harvey Oswald, dogtrotting down Patton, reached the main street of Jefferson and turned right. The police turned left. They had an urgent call from Officer C. T. Walker that a suspect fitting the description of the man who had shot Patrolman Tippit was seen entering the basement of the library at Jefferson and Marsalis. It didn’t require much time to surround the building. Red-blinking squad cars winked all over the thoroughfare. Shotguns and revolvers were at the ready.

Oswald kept trotting along Jefferson in the opposite direction, toward Crawford, Storey, and Cumberland. He was in no panic. Pedestrians and car salesmen saw him run by, and he turned into a filling station, trotted into the parking lot, unzipped his white Eisenhower jacket, and tossed it under a car. Whatever description had been given of him, he was now a slightly different man. He wore a burgundy plaid shirt. To hide the gun in his belt, he pulled the tails out, came out of the filling station, and continued trotting on Jefferson.

Nick McDonald and the other policemen at the library ordered everybody in the library basement to come out with their hands up. The door opened, and a few frightened people came out. They came out slowly, including the young man in the white Eisenhower jacket—the suspect. It required only a minute or two to ascertain that this was the wrong young man. He had been spotted running at top speed into the basement of the library—true. But what had impelled him to do it was that he had just heard that President Kennedy had been shot in downtown Dallas, and his friends were in the library. He wanted to tell them. Also, he worked there.

The police scattered. A half dozen squad cars began to comb the side streets of Oak Cliff. How far can a man on foot run in three minutes? Four minutes? Five minutes? Six minutes? How far? Which way? Often a car swung into a little street and found another police group already prowling the sidewalks and alleys. C. T. Walker, who had seen the young man run into the library, was now cruising slowly up a narrow thoroughfare. Ahead he saw a man in a white shirt and long sleeves walking behind a low fence. Walker, who had a newspaper reporter in the car with him, could only see the man from the thighs up. He placed his revolver on his lap and approached slowly.

When he was within thirty feet of the man, Walker stopped the car. White Shirt kept approaching. Walker’s nerves were taut. He fingered the revolver and said: “What’s your name?” The man looked at the police officer and bent down behind the fence. Walker swung his revolver out the window. The man slowly raised up, with a small dog in his arms. “What did you say?” he asked.

In a radio shop on Jefferson, the loudspeaker was turned up loud and some shoppers stopped to listen. On NBC, Robert MacNeil in Dallas was speaking to Bill McGee in New York: “Last rites of the Roman Catholic Church have been administered to President Kennedy,” he said. “This does not necessarily mean that his condition is fatal. Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson walked into the hospital where the President is being treated. Mrs. Johnson said that her husband is all right. She did not want to say anything about the President; she is in a state of shock. A blood transfusion is being prepared for President Kennedy. . . .”

The press was told, in groups outside the emergency room, that a conference had been called. The White House chief of records, Mr. Wayne Hawks, asked them to go to a nursing classroom on the ground floor of an adjacent wing. Kilduff would make an announcement. “What announcement?” the reporters demanded. “Is he badly hurt?” “Is he dead?” “We have deadlines.” “If I leave this spot, I lose the only telephone.”

No one noticed the hospital flag at half-staff. Kilduff came out, tough and businesslike, but inwardly unstrung. He strode across empty lots and the journalists followed like disenchanted apostles. In the doorway, a nurse was sobbing. The assistant press secretary was looking for classrooms 101 and 102. Tom Wicker of The New York Times was loafing in the rear of the group when he heard the radio in the limousine which had been used by the Vice-President. “The President of the United States is dead,” the voice said. “I repeat—it has just been announced that the President of the United States is dead.”

It was untrue. It had not been announced. The death story had started when a reporter insisted that the two priests had said that Kennedy had died. Father Huber said Mr. Kennedy had been “unconscious” when the last rites of the church had been administered. Still, to Wicker, instinct counted for something. The announcement lacked authority, and yet it carried the same stinging reality as those loud cracking sounds in Dealey Plaza. Wicker hurried a little and caught up to Hugh Sidey, of Time magazine. “Hugh,” he said, puffing, “the President is dead. Just announced on the radio. I don’t know who announced it but it sounded official to me.”

Sidey paused. He looked at Wicker and studied the ground under his feet. They went on. Something which “sounds official” meets none of the requirements of journalism. The press did not know the story. The nearest anyone had come to it was Smith’s UPI phrase, “wounded, perhaps fatally . . .” In Washington each man had “sources” through which he might check a supposition. Seth Kantor was the only one with connections in Dallas and he had no more information than the others. All of them were first-rate reporters, men accustomed to the respect of the White House, men who not only recorded the news but who often tried to analyze it, shading the story a little this way or that, depending upon their inner beliefs and confidential opinions from their “sources.”

They filed into the nurses’ classroom, with its desk and chalkboard, shouting for the announcement. They wanted it now. Some were demanding telephones. Jack Gertz of American Telephone and Telegraph Company was installing instruments as fast as he could. A few of the writers interpreted this as bad news. Why would they require special installations unless they were going to be stationed at this hospital for some time? And why would that be necessary unless President Kennedy was dying—or dead?

Kilduff walked from the back of the room to the front and stood behind a clean greenish desk with the blackboard behind him. The reporters sat at desks or lounged against the walls. The folded sheaves of copy paper, the pencils and pens were ready. The assistant press secretary appeared to be flustered. His eyes were red. On his cheeks there was a hint of tears or sweat. Before him he had the sheet of paper with the precisely worded announcement.

He was going to say: “Well, this is really the first press conference on a road trip I have ever had to hold.” What he heard himself say was: “Excuse me, let me catch my breath.” He was rolling an unlighted cigarette in one hand. The faces confronting him were familiar to him; some were his friends. They waited patiently now. Some were afraid that Kilduff was going to faint. There was an uneasiness in the room. General Chester V. Clifton, the President’s handsome military aide, took a silent stance near “Mac.” Flashbulbs were going off; a camera crew was trying to plug in some “frezzy” lights. Kilduff lifted the piece of paper and spoke mechanically: “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1 P.M. Central Standard Time today here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot in the brain.” A reporter roared: “Oh, God!” Some scrambled for corridors and telephones. One said: “Give us the details, Mac.” Kilduff began to breathe heavily. “I don’t have any other information,” he said.

A cameraman glanced at his watch. The time was 1:33 P.M. A few of the writers did not move from the desks. They had just acquired the dazed, stunned expression which was spreading outward from Dallas. Good writers do not permit a story, not matter how heartbreaking, to touch them. Some of these men were re-creating the days of repartee with the President, the barb of Irish wit, the lucidity of his thoughts, the short era of youth which had permeated the White House with laughter, sweeping out the ghosts of solemn men of affairs—the Boston-accented words when the President said: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”

This was a time for a clear, unsentimental head. Few of the writers could muster one. Any one of them could have thought of a dozen things he had postponed saying to President Kennedy, and time had run out. This morning there was nothing but time. Some of them, to keep the trip on the front pages, had to dig for the Yarborough intraparty fight. Until then, the journey through Texas had been small-town political huckstering on the fundamental level, praising each city, promising it more federal funds for more projects, endorsing its local Democrats, waving the flag of local patriotism, and closing with the hackneyed You-and-I-will-march-forward-together.

Each of these men knew, better than most, the permanence of the word “dead,” and each riffled through his mental files for memories and unfinished business. The story was so monumental in size that they would be writing all day and half the night, trying to sew a literary crepe. A man in surgical white walked into the room. It was Bill Stinson, aide to Governor Connally, and he wanted to report on the condition of the Governor. Kilduff almost pinned him to the blackboard. “One o’clock, one o’clock,” he whispered loudly. The Governor’s public relations expert, Julian O. Reed, came into the room and, in answer to a reporter’s question, began to draw on the blackboard the seating in the President’s limousine. This became confused, corrected, and redrawn, until at last all hands agreed that this was where the Kennedys were sitting, and here, in the jump seats, the Connallys sat.

One of the writers started to ask a question and burst into tears. In the hospital hall, a woman married to a United Press International man dropped a dime into a public telephone. In one minute, teletype machines chattered everywhere:

FLASH

PRESIDENT KENNEDY DEAD

jt135pcs

“We must get her out of there,” O’Donnell said. “If she sees that casket, it’s going to be the final blow.” Mr. David Powers, small and bald and close to tears, said that he would give Mrs. Kennedy some kind of a story to get her away from Trauma One right now. It would help, O’Donnell said, if they could both get her into a room on a pretext that they had to talk over something confidential. Then let the Secret Service sneak the box into the room and it would spare her an additional shock.

It would have to be done quickly, because Oneal was expected at the emergency entrance. The plotters decided to do it together. They sauntered over to Trauma One and started the little whispers about the need for a private chat. At first, Mrs. Kennedy stared at her husband’s dear friends, the mouth still half open with shock, the dark eyes pooled with grief. Suddenly she shook her head negatively. “No,” she said firmly, “I want to watch it all.” She spurned the easy way.

Vernon Oneal and two assistants rolled the four hundred-pound bronze casket down the long corridors, between the rows of faces awaiting medication or treatment and around the narrow corner to Trauma One. It was on a carriage and, as they passed Mrs. Kennedy, the three men glanced at her and mumbled their sympathy. Inside they turned it over to Nurse Hutton and offered their assistance. The casket, as Kenneth O’Donnell said, may have been the final blow to the widow, but she did not whimper. She saw the gleaming bronze sides and the silver handles and the huge convex lid, but she didn’t flinch. She studied it.

Miss Hutton had a problem. The brains of the President were still oozing from the massive hole in his head. She had lifted the body by the neck, and wrapped four sheets around it, but it was still leaking through. Obviously it would stain the casket, with its white satin shirring. She asked Supervisor Doris Nelson for instructions. “Go up to Central Supply,” she was told, “and get one of those plastic mattress covers.”

The cover was placed in the casket, so that the edges hung over the sides. Then the nude body of the President, covered with sheets, was lifted inside. The plastic was folded over him and the lid was closed. Nurse Bowron sighed. The British girl had never been to America before, but this was a day she would never forget.

The mayor’s wife wished to be sympathetic. “Mrs. Kennedy,” she said softly, “I am Elizabeth Cabell. I wish there was something—” “Yes,” Mrs. Kennedy said, “I remember you gave me the roses.” The tone was soft and musical, but the mind retreated from reality. “I would like a cigarette,” Mrs. Kennedy said. Mrs. Cabell looked for her purse. When she glanced up again, the young widow had disappeared. She was in one of the trauma rooms. Mrs. Kennedy found her pocketbook on a carriage and dug into it looking for cigarettes. The mayor’s wife said: “I have a cigarette for you.” She held them out but Mrs. Kennedy did not see. When she found her own, she stuck one in her mouth and stared at Mrs. Cabell as though seeing her for the first time. “I don’t have a match,” she said.

They were back in the chairs, waiting for the casket to come out of Trauma One, when a priest came around the corner. He was the Catholic chaplain at the hospital, too late to be of any assistance, but not too early to irritate Mrs. Kennedy with pious platitudes and hand-patting. It is possible that she wanted to ask him where he was when her husband needed him so desperately; it is possible that the man was not in the hospital at the time, or, if he was, no one informed him that a Christian was expiring. It is even possible that his approach was too unctuously friendly. Mrs. Kennedy needed some assistance to break the conversation.

In the outer hall, a Negro preacher arrived and said that he had been called to comfort a dying President of the United States. No one asked him the name of his church or who called him. He was ushered out by the Secret Service, who assured him that the matter had been taken care of. Mrs. Kennedy, hostile to the living, stamped her cigarette out and went into Trauma One and sat in a chair with her head leaning against the cold side of the casket.

The forward door on Air Force One was closed by Clint Hill. He turned the handle inside and locked it. A Secret Service man was stationed there and another at the rear ramp. On the concrete below, Secret Service men stood quietly, facing away from the aircraft. City police details patrolled the airport, and detectives walked from counter to counter, looking over young men who were departing from Dallas. Uniformed policemen patrolled the fence and Gate 24.

When Lyndon Johnson got aboard, he ordered all the shades drawn. The interior was hot and stuffy. The air conditioning had been shut down when the engines stopped. Mr. Johnson and his party threaded the aisle through the communications shack, where sergeants with headsets crouched, looking up in wonderment as their new President passed. The group went through the galley and the crew’s quarters, all forward of the wing, then into the staff and press area, where the seats faced the back of the plane. In the middle of the silvery wing was the door to the President’s private stateroom. An attendant held the door open, and the Seal of the President shone in white.

The first sound inside was from the television set. Lyndon Johnson looked up to see the face of Walter Cronkite, in New York, discussing a dark deed in Dallas. The President shhh’d everyone, hoping to hear something new about the extent of the assassination plot. A commentator in Dallas told Cronkite that Mr. Kennedy had been pronounced dead; the shots came apparently from a school book building near the end of a lively motorcade; the police had clues and were looking for a suspect; Vice-President Johnson had left Parkland Memorial Hospital but no one knew his whereabouts.

The big stateroom with its wall-hugging couches and ornate desk and rug was just as John F. Kennedy left it, except that the Texas newspapers were now crumpled in a rack. Mrs. Johnson walked aft to the bedroom with tears in her eyes. She alone had noticed the hospital flag at half-staff and it had crushed her with its finality as the sight of the bronze casket had Mrs. Kennedy. The bedroom has a walkway on the port side of the plane. Outside the bedroom another Secret Service agent stood. In the tail of the plane was a small area near the ramp door for the President’s staff and Secret Service men. There were two lavatories, a small galley, and a breakfast nook.

The President left the television set and walked toward the back of the plane. He instructed the stewards to hold the private bedroom for Mrs. Kennedy’s use. However Mr. Johnson quickly discovered that there was no other place from which he could make a private phone call, so he removed his jacket, tossed it on a clothes tree, and signaled the communications crew that he would be using this phone for a while.

There were many phone calls; the shocked man had to know that, beyond this little hell of terror, there was a normal, sunny world which was still official and still functioning. One of the first calls was to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. This one required some thought. Words of sympathy sound superficial no matter how well intended. Johnson wanted to convey the depth of his personal loss as well as offering his hand to the Kennedy family; he also wanted to ask the Attorney General for a legal opinion on when to take the oath of office as President.

Neither of these was easy to say. Robert Kennedy, on the phone, was less emotional than the President. He had no report from the FBI or any other government agency that there was a broad plot against the leading officers of government; he knew that Governor Connally had been hit, but it could be an accident, because he was in the same car with Robert’s brother. So far as the oath of office was concerned, he wasn’t sure when it should be administered or by whom. He promised to have Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach call back with the correct answers.*

Officials at the Pentagon were calling the White House switchboard at the Dallas-Sheraton Hotel asking who was now in command. An officer grabbed the phone and assured the Pentagon that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff “are now the President.” Somehow, in the flight from the hospital, the new President had overlooked The Bagman and Major General Chester V. Clifton, who understood the coded types of retaliation. If, at this time, the Soviet Union had launched a missile attack, referred to in the Department of Defense as a “Thirty-Minute War,” it would have required a half hour for The Bagman and General Clifton to get to Johnson’s side.

Jefferson Boulevard between Zangs and Bishop is a Friday night shopping area. The street is broad, and cars on both sides park in parallel rows. It is one of the brightest, busiest parts of Oak Cliff at night, but this was Friday at 1:30 P.M. The only parked cars were owned by store clerks. A couple of women chatted and studied the windows. A bus on its way out to Cockrell Hill took its time. One or two shop managers, with no customers inside, stood along the curb in shirtsleeves, absorbing warm sun.

At 1:15 P.M. the box office of the Texas Theatre had opened. Julia Postal, the long-time cashier, had a little radio on and she looked through the slotted window at fourteen customers lined up for the first show. The marquee, jutting out over the sidewalk, proclaimed:

CRY OF BATTLE

VAN HEFLIN

WAR IS HELL

She took ninety cents apiece from each of them. Mrs. Postal was not discouraged. There would be plenty of customers before the day was over. The Texas Theatre had a one-price policy: ninety cents no matter what time the customer arrived. The war pictures always attracted the men. The manager, Mr. John A. Callahan, was inside. He was excited about the shooting of the President. He was talking to Butch Burroughs, who handled the hot buttered popcorn and the candy inside the lobby. It was a small movie house, part of a chain, but Callahan and Mrs. Postal and Burroughs kept it clean.

On the same side of the street, Johnny Calvin Brewer managed Hardy’s Shoe Shop. Mr. Brewer was only twenty-three years old, but he was ambitious and industrious. He had been entrusted with his own shop for fourteen months, and the big bosses did not regret it. At the moment, there wasn’t a customer in the store, and Johnny Brewer, neatly dressed in a nice suit and tie, listened to a radio telling the awful events going on in downtown Dallas. A moment ago another flash had come on: some policeman—no name was given—had been shot at Tenth and Patton, right here in Oak Cliff.

The youthful manager wondered what the heck the world was coming to. He was listening and facing the open front door when he heard the shrill scream of a siren. It was approaching the store seemingly at top speed. Mr. Brewer was waiting to see which way it was going when a young man in a flappy shirt turned in toward the store. The windows were recessed from the sidewalk in a “V.” The stranger appeared to be studying the shoes in one of the windows. The police car whizzed by and the stranger walked out on the sidewalk and continued on his way.

The manager thought that the man seemed suspicious. He couldn’t say why, and perhaps if a customer had been in the store he might have paid no attention to the matter. But the store was empty, and the radio was full of flashes of terrible deeds, one of them only eight blocks away. Johnny Brewer stepped out on the sidewalk and shaded his eyes.

He looked toward the Texas Theatre and saw Julia Postal—now free of customers—out at the curb. Mr. Callahan was hopping into his car and she was talking to him. The stranger with the dirty-looking sports shirt and the slacks turned into the Texas Theatre, without buying a ticket, and disappeared. Callahan was telling Julia Postal that he was going to follow that police car to find out what the excitement was.

Johnny Brewer approached the cashier as she returned to her post, and he asked her if she had sold a ticket to a man “wearing a brown shirt.” She said she couldn’t remember one. Mr. Brewer, who is not easily dissuaded, said that a man had ducked into the movie while she had been out talking at the curb. The shoe store manager insisted that this was a most suspicious person because, as the police car approached his shop with the siren at its loudest, the man had pretended to look at shoes and then had walked on to the Texas Theatre and was now inside without purchasing a ticket.

She hadn’t sold a ticket in the past ten minutes. The movie was just starting, so Brewer walked inside and asked Butch Burroughs if he had seen a man in a brown shirt passing through. No, the candy butcher said, he had been busy and he wanted to know why. “I think the guy looks suspicious, that’s why.”

It seemed like a lot of trouble for one ninety-cent gate crasher, but Brewer was going to follow his lead all the way. He reminded himself that the cashier’s booth is flush with all the storefronts on the street and, if the man had stopped to buy a ticket, he would have been in plain view from the shoe store. Besides, Julia Postal wasn’t in the booth. And another “besides”—why didn’t the man look up to watch that shrieking police car go by? Who looks at shoes at a time like that? Brewer thought the stranger looked “messed up and scared.”

The cashier was excitable, but she thought that Butch Burroughs was more excitable, and she warned Johnny Brewer not to look for the stranger but to check the exits to make certain that he was still in the theater. The exits were properly locked from the inside. Julia Postal could not contain herself any longer, so she dialed the operator and asked for the police.

They were busy with two homicides. Mrs. Postal told the officer that she thought “we have your man.” He said, “Why do you think it’s our man?” and the woman gave him a description of a floppy sports shirt and a young man of medium build. “All I know,” she said, “is this man is running from them for some reason.” The policeman asked why, and she said, “Every time the sirens go by he ducks.” The policeman asked casually what kind of a complexion the man had, and Julia Postal said she had not really seen him but it was “ruddy.” She heard “Thank you” and a dial tone.

Mrs. Postal then phoned up to the projectionist. He didn’t understand the request, but the cashier asked him to look through his little peephole to see “if he could see anything.” She said she had called the police. “Do you want me to stop the picture?” he said. He looked out at the screen. Audie Murphy, an American war hero, was explaining why “war is hell” as a prologue. “No,” she said. “Let’s wait until they get here.” She didn’t have long to wait. A moment after she hung up, police cars began to pile up in front of the theater in awkward parking postures, and men were running toward the lobby with guns drawn. Julia Postal pointed inside and said: “He’s upstairs,” although she was surmising.

Johnny Brewer had finished checking all the exits except one. That was a door behind the stage. He opened it slowly and found himself staring at a gun. A policeman said: “Who are you?” It was not a time to hesitate. Brewer said that he was the one who had spotted the suspect. “I’m the one who told the cashier to phone the police,” he said. Four cops, including Nick McDonald, turned Brewer around and they went back into the theater. As they got onstage, in front of the screen, the house lights began to go on. They weren’t bright. Policemen were in the balcony; others, with shotguns, sealed the aisles at the rear of the theater.

The customers, scattered thinly over the orchestra, began to look around in surprise. Nick McDonald heard young Brewer tell a policeman: “He’s not in the balcony. There he is,” and he pointed to a man sitting alone between aisles near the rear of the theater. McDonald took officer C. T. Walker offstage and up the left-hand aisle. The others—T. A. Hutson and Ray Hawkins—started up the right side.

McDonald was pretty sure that he saw the man he wanted. The officer ordered two customers down front to stand, and he frisked them as Walker stood behind him with his gun out. His eye was on the target, and he noticed that the eye of the target was on him. The stranger did not move. The house lights were up, but the projectionist forgot to shut the movie off, and the screen danced with pale figures. There was the crack of rifle fire and the whistle of bullets.

Hawkins and Hutson, working the other aisle, stood behind two seated customers and said: “On your feet.” The men were frisked for weapons and told to sit and remain seated. Nick McDonald moved out of one row of seats to the right-hand aisle. His target was in the second seat off the edge toward center. The two men locked eyes for a moment and McDonald walked toward the rear at a leisurely gait. There was a man and a woman sitting behind the stranger, and McDonald kept looking at them, so that he could keep his quarry within the perimeter of his vision.

The police officer almost passed the target. He kept walking back and, at the last second, swung in quickly and shouted, “On your feet!” Lee Harvey Oswald stood, bringing both hands up and said: “It’s all over.” Nick McDonald reached from the row in front, to slide his hands down the sports shirt. Other policemen began to come in from both aisles, front and rear. It was at this moment that Lee Harvey Oswald had a change of heart. He had known, from the moment the house lights went up, that the Texas Theatre was full of policemen. There were sixteen—outnumbering the customers by two. There was no possibility of escape. If he had no plan to flee Dallas—and barely the means—this should have been an ideal way to achieve a public surrender. He did not know, of course, whether they were taking him in for the Kennedy murder or the Tippit, and this may have made a difference to him, although it is difficult to follow such a line of reasoning. Either one, on investigation, would lead to the other crime.

Suddenly he brought both hands down a little. With the left, he punched Officer McDonald and knocked his uniform cap off. The right went to his belt and he withdrew the Smith and Wesson revolver. The policemen began to react by instinct. All of them recognized the danger, and each knew that if this was the man who had killed Tippit, killing one or two more policemen would hardly alter the issue for him.

Some dove at him from behind. McDonald swung hard and punched Oswald over the eye. The other hand grabbed Oswald’s right hand and both came up with the gun. The nose of it gouged Nick McDonald’s cheek and he and other officers heard a click. There was no explosion. Oswald and McDonald fell down between the rows of seats. The cop yelled: “I’ve got him!” but he didn’t. Hutson was directly behind Oswald and he caught the young man’s neck in the elbow of his right arm and squeezed. C. T. Walker grabbed Oswald’s left arm and Hawkins, on the opposite side, fell on the pile of writhing humans and kept pawing for the hand with the gun.

Detective Bob Carroll hurried into the aisle in time to see McDonald bring the revolver up by the butt. He grabbed for the wrist as two other cops, down in the pileup, tried to force the prisoner’s hands behind him. In a moment there was a snap and one of Oswald’s hands was handcuffed to a policeman’s. The cop hollered that they had one wrong hand, and there was additional confusion as they tried to free the policeman and secure both of Oswald’s hands behind his back. Carroll got the gun and put it in his pocket.

The prisoner was lifted up like a submerged object. His pouting mouth was framed in a painful “O” and he called the policemen “Sons of bitches!” and “Bastards!” A policeman brought his fist up hard and caught the defenseless prisoner in the head. McDonald, chubby and perspiring, was still down between the seats, looking for his cap and flashlight, both of which had rolled under the seats.

“Don’t hit me anymore!” Oswald shouted as he was dragged out into the aisle. The customers down front turned to watch, but they remembered that they had been told to remain seated, so no one moved. The cops were not sympathetic. All of them had heard, on Channel One, that Officer 78 had been DOA at the hospital and had heard the dispatcher ask a sergeant to please stop at Tippit’s house at once to break the news to Mrs. Tippit before she could hear it on radio.

“This is police brutality!” Oswald shouted as he was half dragged, half carried through the lobby. Butch Burroughs, nervous in normal situations, watched the big group go by and saw Oswald’s hands being brought up high and tight against his spine. Oswald shouted “Ow!” and called upon the theater patrons to witness this violation of his rights. “Just get him out,” said Sergeant Owens. As they passed the lobby clock, the hands pointed to 1:50.

Trade people and passing motorists had stopped to see the excitement and, as Oswald was shoved toward a police car at the curb, fifty or sixty men began to shout: “Kill him!” “String him up!” without bothering to find out the charge or the guilt or innocence of the prisoner. Sergeant Jerry Hill pointed to a sedan and said: “Put him in the back seat.” Oswald, sensing alienation from the crowd, shouted: “I want a lawyer. I know my rights!” An excited middle-aged man in the crowd shouted: “That’s the one. We ought to kill him.” The prisoner was hustled across the sidewalk, protesting: “This is typical police brutality. Why are you doing this to me?” It amounted to more words than most acquaintances had heard from Lee Harvey Oswald at one time.

The car pulled away from the curb and Sergeant Hill got on Channel One and said that the suspect in the Tippit homicide had been arrested, after a struggle, in the Texas Theatre on West Jefferson. They were now bringing the prisoner to headquarters. Carroll, driving, got the revolver from his pocket and handed it to the sergeant. The car turned into Zangs Boulevard and moved at good speed across the Houston Street viaduct into downtown Dallas. As the sedan turned onto Elm Street, the School Book Depository flashed by on the left side. No one in the car gave it more than a glance.

“Why don’t you see if he has any identification?” the sergeant asked Officer Paul Bentley. In the back, the policeman began to go through the pockets. “Yes,” he said. “He has a billfold.” Oswald, trying to bring his wrists down behind him into a more comfortable position, said: “I don’t know why you are doing this to me. The only thing I have done is carry a pistol in a movie.” Another policeman said: “You have done a lot more. You have killed a policeman.” The net effect of this exchange was that Lee Oswald now knew which crime had led to his entrapment. “Well,” Oswald said quietly, “you can fry for that.”

The policemen thought that their man was in a talking mood, and they decided to take advantage of it. They didn’t know that he had already taken advantage of them. “What’s your name?” one asked. “That,” said Oswald, “is for you to find out.” Another cop said: “You’ll fry.” The prisoner shrugged. “They say it only takes a second.” “Here’s his name: it’s Lee Oswald.” The sergeant said: “You Lee Oswald?” The prisoner had lost interest. “No,” the policeman said, “I have another card here. Are you Alex Hidell? Hidd-ell, or High-dell?” There was no response. The sergeant asked Carroll: “Is this gun yours?” “No,” the driver said, jerking his head toward the rear of the car. “It’s his.”

Walker and Bentley, in the rear seat, tilted Oswald this way and that to get to his pockets. In one they found a handful of .38 cartridges. Sergeant Hill opened the chamber of the gun in his hand and found that one bullet had a dent in the back. The concern of the five policemen was to drive the sedan into the basement at police headquarters, get this man Hidell or Oswald up to Captain Fritz’s Homicide division on the third floor, deliver him intact, and book him on suspicion of homicide—to wit, the slaying of Police Officer J. D. Tippit.

Back on Jefferson, young Johnny Brewer suddenly remembered his shoe store, open and unprotected. As he skipped along the sidewalk, he wondered how long he had been away. The total time was eight minutes.

The shock was now universal. It was as real among those who disliked or disagreed with John F. Kennedy as among his friends. Dark of night had descended on Munich, Germany, when the flash arrived at 7:44 P.M. At once, Radio Free Europe beamed the tragedy to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria in several languages. At Parkland Hospital, the sun was still high and hot as an irritated student held a sign aloft which said: “Yankee Go Home.”

Secret Service agents drove the President’s car back to Love Field, and Dallas citizens who saw the bubbletop flash by paused to stare unbelievingly. It could not have happened. It did not happen. It would all go away. At a fashionable school in Dallas, a teacher sat forlornly at her desk, head down, hand clasping forehead. She knew that she could not teach these bright little faces anything more today. Weakly she said: “You may have the rest of the day off.” The next few words were drowned in a mass cheer: “The President of the United States has been shot!”

A. C. Johnson and his wife were in their little restaurant at 1029 Young Street when a policeman friend phoned and said, “The President’s been shot.” They had no radio, so they went out in the parking lot and sat in their car listening to all the excitement. A. C. and his wife worked hard. They had the little sandwich place and they had bought a small house over at 1026 Beckley and rented rooms. One of the roomers was Mr. O. H. Lee.

The demise of the President had an effect everywhere, but not the same effect. Jack Ruby announced in his Dallas News advertising that he was keeping his two small nightclubs closed. He could, in a breath, phone his sister Eva and weep emotionally over the President; in the next breath he would ask a friend casually: “Well, what do you think? Will it have any effect on business in Dallas?” Secretary of State Dean Rusk, coming in to Hickam Air Force Base with his diplomats, had difficulty trying to convince himself of two items: one was the fact that President John F. Kennedy was indeed dead; two, there was a possibility that this was part of a plot by a foreign power. Neither of these appeared to be true. Sorrowing, he ordered the plane refueled and flown directly to Washington.

In Fort Worth, Marguerite Oswald had finished her lonely lunch. The mother of Lee sat on a couch and stared at her talkative friend, the television set. A commentator said that the President had died in Parkland Memorial Hospital, and Mrs. Oswald thought that she would like to continue to watch, but she had the three-to-eleven shift at a rest home, and she liked to be there early.

The Secretary General of the United Nations made the solemn announcement in New York and asked the General Assembly to stand and observe one minute of silence. The American Ambassador, Adlai Stevenson, said, “We will bear the grief of his death until the day of ours.”

At Fort Myers in Virginia, Captain Richard C. Cloy had his state funeral section pretending to lift an American flag from a casket, folding it properly, and tendering it in triangular form to the next of kin. For a week, Cloy’s spit-and-polish group had been rehearsing a state funeral with caisson and three teams of horses. Until now, the rehearsals had been for ex-President Herbert Hoover, who was reputedly near death.* Within an hour of the tragedy in Dallas, Cloy’s ramrod-straight outfit was undergoing serious funeral rehearsals, this time for Kennedy.

There was a basket of baby clothes and they had to be hung. Marina Oswald was in the back yard at 2515 West Fifth Street, working with clothespins in her mouth. Mrs. Paine came out and used a second clothesline for her wash. “Kennedy is dead,” she said. There was no response from Marina. Mrs. Paine said that a television commentator said that the shots came from the School Book Depository on Elm Street. Ruth said she hadn’t known they had a place on Elm; she thought that Lee worked in the warehouse. Mrs. Oswald said nothing; she had been out in the garage and was satisfied that the rifle her husband owned was still inside the blanket. “It was not my crazy one.”

The district attorney of Dallas County hurried back to his office. Henry Wade was a big tough Texan who was never known to miss much except his office spittoon. He sat at his disorderly desk, thumbing through law books. His graying hair was damp as he studied precedents in the murder of federal officers. He was shocked to learn that, while it was a federal offense to threaten a President of the United States, it was not a federal offense to kill one. And yet, in the hope of ridding himself of all the complexities of the case, Wade phoned his friend, United States Attorney H. Barefoot Sanders, and said solemnly: “It’s your baby. . . .”

The flash had been filed. Now the press demanded the story. At Parkland Hospital they asked Wayne Hawkes and Steve Landrigan to summon the doctors who had attended the President. All over the United States and Europe, editors were calling airlines, booking seats for reporters and photographers who were headed for Dallas. Phone calls to the hospital, to police headquarters, to the White House, to District Attorney Henry Wade, to Love Field, to the Texas School Book Depository were coming in from all over the world, tumbling in their urgency so that operators from Australia were asking operators from Berlin to please get off the line. A communications mob scene began at 1:40 P.M. Central Standard Time and it would last for fifty hours.

On the stage in the nurses’ classroom stood Dr. Kemp Clark, Dr. Malcolm Perry, Dr. Charles Baxter, and Dr. McClelland. One hundred journalists with deadlines and no time for tact began firing questions. It was agreed that they would be answered by Dr. Clark and Dr. Perry. Neither had experience in these matters; neither had turned the body of the President over to examine it for wounds; neither had autopsy experience. The questions flashed from scores of strange faces; sometimes two or three were in air as the doctors tried to respond to one.

Clark and Perry at once began to sound poorly equipped. “Where did the bullets come from, doc?” “We don’t know.” “How many bullets?” “It is possible that there were one or two, or more.” “Could it have been one bullet?” “Yes, it’s possible.” The doctors began to talk about a wound in the neck and a massive one in the back of the skull. The reporters wanted to know how they could accommodate the one bullet theory if there was a hole in the front of the neck and one in the back of the skull? Well, a bullet could possibly have been fired through the front of the neck, hit the spinal column in back, and deviated—or caromed upward—through the back of the skull. This would make the neck wound an entrance wound, which would mean that at least one assassin was in front of the President. If Governor Connally, as Bill Hinson had explained, had been shot in the back, the hypothesis lent itself to two assassins—at least.

Some of the writers began to ignore the word “possible.” Television blinded the doctors with big white lights. Tape recorders were thrust before the team of physicians at the nursing desk. The faces beyond the light beams appeared to be bathed in talcum. The questions were being fired like Roman candles; Clark and Perry were trying to respond to one, or two, when questions three and four and five were coming at them.*

Outside of Trauma One, Roy Kellerman waited for the death certificate. He wanted to get the body on Air Force One as quickly as possible. Mrs. Kennedy was still inside, leaning her face, or her hand, against the side of the bronze casket. A man of professional appearance approached Agent Kellerman. He introduced himself as Doctor Earl Rose. “There has been a homicide here,” he said. “You won’t be able to remove the body. We will take it down to the mortuary for an autopsy.”

Kellerman, tall and dark and often humorless, looked down at the officious man and said: “No, we are not.” The doctor acted as though he had expected this attitude. “We have a law here,” he said, “and you have to comply with it.” At this moment, Admiral Burkley approached, and Kellerman said: “Doctor, this man is from some health unit in town. He tells me we can’t remove this body.” Burkley, who had been losing patience with Dallas, became enraged and shouted: “We are removing it!”

Dr. Rose tried to say something, and Burkley, his voice rising, said: “This is the President of the United States; you can waive your local laws.” Rose kept shaking his head negatively as he listened. “This happened in Dallas County,” he said. “We have our laws, just as you have yours. Under the law, an autopsy must be performed.” Kellerman, who felt himself to be in a position of strength with all his Secret Service agents up and down the corridors, said quietly: “Doc, you are going to have to come up with something a little stronger than yourself to give me the law that this body can’t be removed.”

The shouting started. Kellerman did not know that Burkley had the signed death certificate in his pocket. The strident voices could be heard in the halls. Any passing personnel whom Earl Rose called to bear witness that, in a death by violence, an autopsy is mandatory, said: “Yes, that’s the law.” O’Donnell, O’Brien, and Powers heard the call to battle and they tried to tell Rose that, no matter what the law, Mrs. Kennedy was not going to wait one more minute to claim her dead husband. It was as simple as that. Kellerman kept saying: “I’m going to need somebody bigger than you . . .”

Rose said he would get someone “bigger.” He began to call justices of the peace. In some areas of the United States, a person with that title is an elected official of consequence. In others, it is a small and appointive post with few prerogatives beyond the power to conduct a marriage ceremony. A justice of the peace, in Dallas, is a fully empowered judge. The men of the President’s entourage did not know this. Earl Rose left the area for whatever reinforcements he could find. General McHugh joined the Kellerman forces at a momentary reduction in rank.

Bill Greer, the driver, was walking back and forth with two bags laden with the clothing of the dead President. O’Donnell nodded his head. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

The car turned in off Main Street, braking down to a walk, and then dove into the narrow ramp under the gray eminence of Dallas Police Headquarters. Sergeant Hill turned in the front seat and told Oswald that there would probably be some reporters and photographers waiting in the basement. “We can hold you so that they can’t get a picture, if you want. Also, you don’t have to answer any of these guys if you don’t want to.”

There was no response from Oswald. He was leaning forward to ease the ache of the handcuffs behind his back. It also gave him his first good look at the basement of Police Headquarters. The policemen got out of the car in the southeast corner and formed a wedge around the prisoner. The sergeant saw local reporters and photographers and he knew that the word was out that this man was being taken in for questioning in the Tippit murder.

“You can keep your head down,” the sergeant said. If Hill only knew how long this unhappy young man had been forced to keep his head down . . . “Why should I hide my face?” he said loudly. “I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.” Hill nodded for his men to proceed and they formed a wedge and almost half-ran their man across the basement and up the step* into the jail office.