Two hours before dawn on Friday morning, the faithful began to gather on the fringes of the parking lot across from Fort Worth’s Hotel Texas. Drifting up Commerce Street in small groups, they lit cigarettes and leaned against the shabby store fronts, smoking and yawning. It was a marvel that they were there at all. The rain had continued to fall, and they had no assurance that the speech here would not be called off. But this speech had been scheduled as a concession to the working-class supporters of Yarborough, and Kennedy’s reputation for hardiness was part of his charisma, so they came in increasing numbers, until the lot had begun to fill up like a parade ground before roll call. There were only a few feminine umbrellas, only a scattering of pretty secretaries; it was largely a masculine crowd: union men in waterproofs and stout shoes who swapped friendly shoves, called jovially to the mounted policemen in yellow rain gear who were watching over them, and craned their necks for some sign of the legendary Secret Service. By daybreak over five thousand spectators were staring up at the banal brown-brick facade of the hotel. Occasionally you heard a hoarse, lusty cheer.
Inside, early risers whose accommodations faced the lot became aware of the teeming below. At six o’clock, with an hour of darkness left, Bob Baskin of the Dallas News staggered sleepily to the window of Room 326 and glanced down at the rain-slick streets. Baskin decided to stay put; he could hear the speech from here over the public address system. Five floors above him and a half-hour later, Rear Admiral Dr. George Burkley heaved himself out of the bed in 836 and dialed room service, ordering breakfast. Like all members of Kennedy’s staff the chunky, shy physician had learned to function on the road with a few hours’ sleep. It was important to be up before the President; you never knew when to expect an urgent call from him, and several men had routine tasks which must be finished before he awakened.
Master Sergeant Joe Giordano had been dressed fifteen minutes before the doctor rolled out and was now supervising the affixing of the Chief Executive’s seals to the flatbed truck in the lot and the podium of the hotel’s Grand Ballroom. Ted Clifton tapped on the door of 804 and asked the bagman if he had packed. Gearhart had, and his roommate, Cecil Stoughton, was loading his camera with fast film and cleaning lenses. Bill Greer and Henry Rybka, the Presidential chauffeurs, had already left the hotel. They were in the Fort Worth police garage, fetching the President’s temporary car and his Secret Service follow-up car. On the floor below Kennedy, the communications center had begun to stir. Colonel Swindal was reporting from Carswell. His crews had checked out of the motel, his aircraft was ready to go. A teletype machine in the center came to life with a sprinkle of bells. The keys chattered out the CIA’s daily intelligence précis for the President. A Signalman sealed them in twin envelopes and handed them to Godfrey McHugh, who signed for them, trotted up a flight of stairs, and stood respectfully outside Suite 850, awaiting the familiar voice of command. He would have to sign again, noting the precise time the Commander in Chief received the secret reports, and Godfrey liked a tidy record.
These were the technicians. In theory they would have followed identical routines if the President had been named Bert Lahr. In practice, as several of them were to discover that day, their loyalty to the man in Suite 850 had become surprisingly personal, and could not be transferred to anyone else. Officially, however, they owed their allegiance to an institution, the office of the Presidency. The politicians, with whom they coexisted, were a different breed. Political fealty was completely individual. As a group they were more colorful, more convivial, and less efficient than the technical staff. On principle they distrusted clockwork procedure, but they, too, were obliged to operate on tight schedules, and the baying from the parking lot gave them a special incentive. They had to rouse themselves and find out what was happening, and once they saw all those voters yesterday’s exhaustion was forgotten; they were ready to go.
They were going to need a lot of inspiration. Charcoal would be highly mobile today. In 835 Ken O’Donnell, the man most likely to receive an early Presidential summons, ran his eye over today’s itinerary as he shaved. It would be another backbreaker; two speeches here; the hop to Dallas; the long ride to the Trade Mart; another speech; a flight to Bergstrom Air Force Base outside Austin, where the head coach of the University of Texas Longhorns would present the President with an autographed football; a motorcade through the city; a series of receptions; a valedictory speech at the Austin fund-raising banquet; a final motorcade; and a helicopter ride to the LBJ Ranch. There was enough for any appointments secretary to worry about. But O’Donnell’s cup hadn’t quite passed. He now had to cope with a politician’s most exasperating problem, inclement weather.
Not all Texans were as rugged as the workmen in the square below. If the skies really opened, today’s crowds would dwindle, raining out the President. Furthermore, at any moment Ken would be expected to make a decision about the Lincoln in Dallas. Buckling the unwieldy plastic bubbletop on the convertible took time. It would be absolutely necessary in a thunderstorm. Suppose the clouds vanished, however. In a closed car Kennedy would be almost invisible to the waiting multitudes. O’Donnell squinted out at the gray drizzle. It was exasperating, and there was no way of telling which way it would turn; yesterday McHugh had shown how unreliable forecasts could be.
Jacqueline Kennedy presented another complication. Alone, the President would shrug his way through a storm, but his solicitude yesterday suggested that he would object strenuously to a wet wife. Neither a technician nor a politician, she was an unfamiliar member of the team, a new cog in the apparatus, and they were all adjusting to her. Obviously she was worth it; San Antonio and Houston had convinced everyone with political awareness that she would add tremendous zest to the coming campaign. From their windows six stories above the lot the Connallys were discussing her as they studied the swarming square below. Nellie argued that she had seemed stiff on arrival; John countered that she had been enjoying herself by evening; both agreed that she was a priceless ornament.
Her presence had other implications. Under peripatetic circumstances a First Lady inevitably creates plights for other ladies. None of them, for example, had been told what she was going to wear or which public appearances, if any, she would be making here this morning. Clint Hill, her own bodyguard, didn’t know until he reached the hall outside Suite 850. Learning that she would not be going to the lot, Clint settled down with a mug of coffee and a roll. Nellie and Lady Bird lacked even that information, and they were in a quandary. As the Governor’s wife Nellie felt that she must make an appearance. (At the breakfast, to her dismay, she would presently find herself wearing a pink wool suit, a twin of Mrs. Kennedy’s.) If Nellie was going, Bird decided she should, too. It was a matter of duty. She wasn’t in the mood for public appearances. The Second Lady felt out of sorts this morning. Dallas was very near now, and the thought of it oppressed her. She was a loyal wife and a staunch trouper, but this was one stop she didn’t relish. Dressing in the Vice Presidential suite, she noticed that her hands were trembling with anxiety.
Others remained preoccupied with Big D. Down the hall from the Johnsons, Tiger Teague was calling colleagues from 1302, taking soundings and expressing his misgivings about the city. Roy Kellerman phoned Agent Lawson at Love Field and asked, “Are we going to be all right in Dallas?” “Oh, yes,” Lawson assured him. “It is a good program.” With Dallas in mind, Rufe Youngblood inquired of another agent, “Anything new from PRS?” The Service’s Protective Research Section, which, in response to a request from Lawson on November 8, had spent ten minutes checking the city in which Adlai Stevenson had been assaulted less than a month before, had nothing to report, but the agent wordlessly handed Youngblood a copy of Friday morning’s Dallas Morning News, turned to page 14.
The entire page was devoted to an advertisement, ominously bordered in black like an announcement of mourning. Under the sardonic heading, “WELCOME MR. KENNEDY TO DALLAS,” an organization styling itself as “The American Fact-Finding Committee”—a local coordinator of the John Birch Society and Nelson Bunker Hunt, the son of H. L. Hunt, it later developed, were the committee’s most prominent members—asked the President twelve rhetorical questions. He was accused of responsibility for the imprisonment, starvation, and persecution of “thousands of Cubans.” The ad declared that he was selling food to Communist soldiers who were killing Americans in Vietnam, hinted strongly that he had reached a secret agreement with the U.S. Communist party, and asked, among other things, “Why have you ordered or permitted your brother Bobby, the Attorney General, to go soft on Communists, fellow-travelers, and ultra-leftists in America, while permitting him to persecute loyal Americans who criticize you, your administration, and your leadership?”
It was another “Wanted for Treason” broadside. But there were two differences. This denunciation was reaching a vast audience through the pages of a respected newspaper. And it was appearing within hours of the President’s arrival.
“Mr. Kennedy,” the ad concluded, “we DEMAND answers to these questions, and we want them NOW.”
In her drab quarters at 2220 Thomas Place Marguerite Oswald settled down for her daily six-hour television bout. She began, as usual, with NBC’s “Today” show, and at 7:08 A.M., as the first olive light of day brightened her damp windows, she saw Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry appear on her tiny screen, describe the elaborate precautions he had taken, and warn that immediate action would be taken against anyone who attempted to spoil the President’s visit.
In Dallas Father Oscar Huber, C.M., a gentle, bespectacled priest, had risen as usual at 5 A.M. in his modest room at the rectory of Holy Trinity church, three miles from Parkland Hospital. After morning prayers and meditation he had begun his regular routine of parish activities, but he was keenly aware that the motorcade of America’s first Roman Catholic Chief Executive was going to pass within three blocks of the church. He tried in vain to interest his fellow priests in making the stroll. They intended to stay here and watch it on television. “Well, I’m going,” he told them. “I’m seventy years old and I’ve never seen a President. I’ll be hanged if I’m going to miss this chance.”
U.S. Attorney Barefoot Sanders had also been up early, distributing the last twenty-five luncheon tickets allotted to Dallas Democrats. At this late hour they would have to be delivered by messenger, and some wouldn’t arrive until noon. Their elated recipients would be on the streets, fighting their way through the traffic around the Trade Mart as the motorcade reached its climax.
Democratic National Committeeman Byron Skelton, lacking an invitation, was still feeling rather left out. As a loyal member of the party, however, he had bought two gold-colored, $100 tickets to tonight’s testimonial in Austin, and after lunch he planned to drive down with his wife Ruth, wearing black tie in the hope that he would be seated at the head table. To make certain that his desk would be clear, he was making an unusually prompt start for his paneled law offices in Temple’s First National Bank Building. As he strolled down the city’s main street he saw a young Republican storekeeper motioning to him through his plate-glass window. The man was holding up a copy of the Dallas News ad and grinning.
Joe Dealey, the son of the publisher of the News, was far from delighted. Joe had returned home from Miami late the day before. He opened his copy of the newspaper to page 14 and felt stricken. Normally the copy would have been submitted to him or to the paper’s advertising director. But the director had been out of town, too, so it had gone all the way to the top and had been approved there by Ted Dealey. Joe immediately called his father and reproached him. It was, he said, “like inviting someone to dinner and then throwing tapioca in his face.” Ted was unmoved. He had read the ad meticulously, and he argued that it merely “represented what we have been saying editorially.” That wasn’t the point, Joe countered. “The timing is bad,” he said. He thought of the time he and other conservative young businessmen had spent in their eleventh-hour attempt to polish up the blemished image of Big D and hung up, bitterly discouraged. It was too late now. The thing was in print.
At the indoor birdhouse of the Trade Mart the last spoon had been laid at the President’s place, and outside workmen were erecting two flagpoles, for the Stars and Stripes and the flag of Texas. It was slow going. They had to vie with a group of youthful anti-Kennedy pickets carrying placards reading “YANKEE, GO HOME” and (in red letters) “HAIL CAESAR.” Appropriately they looked indignant; they were members of the Dallas Indignant White Citizens Council. They also looked out of breath. They had plastered their mouths with adhesive tape, “to show,” one scribbled on copy paper for a Times Herald reporter, “that we are being muzzled.” A policeman watched them narrowly. Backstage in the Mart a White House phone had been plugged in; beside it stood a rocking chair with a hand-quilted cover. Everything in the main hall had gone smoothly, with one trivial exception. Flowers had been a problem. Because of Texas pride in yellow roses, the hosts in the four other cities Kennedy was visiting had exhausted the supply of state florists. The Trade Mart had imported five hundred yellow blossoms from California, and two dozen of these now graced the head tables. None had been left over for the welcoming ceremonies at Love Field, however, so substitute bouquets were being prepared—white roses for Lady Bird, red roses for Jacqueline Kennedy. Mrs. Earle Cabell was to hand Mrs. Kennedy the red bouquet. Dearie hoped the First Lady wouldn’t notice the difference.
Marina Oswald awoke before the bedside alarm rang at 6:30. She had been up twice with the baby, and her temper of yesterday evening had not improved. She nursed the child while her husband stood at the foot of the bed, dressing in a work shirt and gray trousers. He spoke; she looked up drowsily. His slender shoulders framed against the solid blue-green walls, he told her to stay where she was. He would fix his own breakfast. This could only have been an attempt to open a conversation, for she never rose for him anyway. Then he declared that he really wanted her to buy everything she wanted—clothes for herself, and especially shoes for little Junie. Marina made no response. Returning the baby to the crib, she closed her eyes and instantly fell into a deep sleep. He knew that they were through, and apparently he wanted her to know it, too. Before departing he slipped off his wedding ring and left it in the little china cup that had belonged to her grandmother. Yet he was as good as his word, or as good as his meager hoard of cash would permit. This was the day the chronic failure was going to demonstrate that he could succeed at something, that he was a man, and did not deserve contempt. In the bedroom he left $187 in bills. He kept $15.10. That wouldn’t take him very far. But he knew he wasn’t going far.
In the kitchen he made a cup of instant coffee. Leaving the cup for Ruth to clean, he walked a half-block eastward on Fifth Street, carrying the rifle and telescopic sight in the brown paper wrapping he had brought from Dallas the previous afternoon, and thrust his thin balding head in the kitchen window of the corner house where Wesley Frazier, who lived with his sister’s family, was having breakfast. The young Alabaman’s mother had never met Oswald. Startled, she asked, “Who’s that?” “That’s Lee,” her son said. “Well, I guess it’s time to go.” After hurriedly brushing his teeth he donned his coat and joined Oswald outside. Frazier had a habit of glancing over his shoulder as he slid behind the wheel, and this morning he noticed the strange bundle on the back seat. “What’s in the package, Lee?” he inquired. “Curtain rods,” Oswald replied curtly. “Oh, yeah,” said Frazier. “You told me you were going to bring some today. Where’s your lunch?” “I’m going to buy it,” Oswald said. Frazier nodded, turned the ignition on, and shifted gears. There was grime on the windows of his old Chevrolet, and the drizzle was making it worse. “I wish it would rain or just quit altogether,” Frazier muttered irritably. “I wish it would do something to clear off the windshield.” The drops were growing larger. Forgetting about the buff-colored parcel behind him, he hunched forward and concentrated on the road ahead. He hoped they wouldn’t be late. They were supposed to be in the Book Depository at 8 A.M. It was now 7:25.
Five minutes later in Fort Worth, the Chief Executive’s leisurely valet entered the Hotel Texas’ Suite 850 and tapped on the door of the master bedroom. “Mr. President,” George called gently. He heard a stirring of covers and crossed the threshold. “It’s raining out,” he murmured. “That’s too bad,” Kennedy said groggily. He thought about it a moment and then groaned.
While he showered and shaved, George laid out his clothes: a blue-gray, two-button suit, a dark blue tie, and a white shirt with narrow gray stripes. The shirt was striking, the gem of George’s footlocker. During a conference with Ambassador Alphand the President had noticed that the French diplomat was wearing one like it. “Nice,” he had remarked with a puckish grin. “From London?” Alphand, springing to the honor of Paris tailors, replied that it was from Cardin’s, and the White House had placed an order with Cardin’s the next day. Kennedy counted on his wife to show Dallas what real style was, but he intended to prove that he knew something about good taste himself.
While dressing he decided to have a look at the parking lot. It couldn’t be seen from where he was, so he impulsively crossed into Mrs. Kennedy’s room.
“Gosh, look at the crowd!” the President cried, peering down. “Just look! Isn’t that terrific?”
Excitedly telling his wife he would see her later, he darted back to George. A waiter had brought him a light breakfast. He hurriedly sipped coffee, chewed half a bun, and was knotting his tie when Dave Powers came in. The President greeted him with relish. “Have you seen the square? And weren’t the crowds great in San Antonio and Houston?” Dave acknowledged it. “Listen, they were terrific!” said Kennedy. “And you were right—they loved Jackie.”
He had already discounted the rain and was eager to head downstairs. A President, however, can rarely move from A to B. The several hats he wears—the toppers of Chief Executive and Head of State, the shako of Commander in Chief, the bowler of political leader—are forever piled on his head in a giddy pyramid. Already Godfrey had entered the suite; it was time Kennedy turned aside for the CIA report. Spectacles in place, he swiftly read the situation estimates on Saigon, Cyprus, and Korea. At his direction, casualty reports from Vietnam were included each day, and there were precise accounts of formal and informal statements by Charles de Gaulle and Nikita Khrushchev. These were always a matter of intense interest. A Chief Executive’s major problem, George Washington had said, is “seclusion from information.” Reliance on the press was inadequate; heads of state, Kennedy had learned, are occasionally misquoted.
Nevertheless the press was vital. It reached a somewhat larger audience than CIA summaries, and a President should know what his people are reading. Unlike Eisenhower, who had ignored newspapers, Kennedy scanned the leading metropolitan dailies every morning. Since he was on a political swing, he was naturally alert to reactions to the tour’s first day. He found them, and he found them dismaying. The Chicago Sun-Times was comforting: “Some Texans, in taking account of the tangled Texas political situation, have begun to think that Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy may turn the balance and win her husband this state’s electoral vote.” But that was exceptional. Overnight the strife between Connally and Yarborough had become the biggest political story in the nation. Texas papers were giving it special prominence, and the Dallas News led the pack with two abrasive stories on the front page: “STORM OF POLITICAL CONTROVERSY SWIRLS AROUND KENNEDY ON VISIT” and “YARBOROUGH SNUBS LBJ.” A third, inside, was headed: “PRESIDENT’S VISIT SEEN WIDENING STATE DEMOCRATIC SPLIT.”
Kennedy angrily thrust the paper aside, missing, for the moment, the inflammatory ad on the next page. (He also overlooked a dispatch from the local soft-drink conclave: “NIXON PREDICTS JFK MAY DROP JOHNSON,” and a story on today’s Dallas schedule reporting that “the motorcade will move slowly so that crowds can ‘get a good view’ of President Kennedy and his wife.”) The bloodletting had become serious. Seizing the phone, Kennedy told O’Donnell that he wanted Senator Yarborough in the Vice Presidential car, and no excuse would be accepted. Maybe the Senator had been more sinned against than sinning, but enough was enough; the whole expedition was in danger of coming a cropper. Ken and Larry O’Brien must spell out the alternatives for Yarborough: either he rode with Lyndon today or he walked.
Stepping into the hotel corridor to join Congressman Wright’s party, the President was still frowning. He spotted Clint Hill and Muggsy O’Leary in the Secret Service post and stepped over to them. “Mary Gallagher wasn’t here last night to help Jackie,” he said tartly. “Mary hasn’t any business in motorcades. She’s supposed to reach hotels before we do, and so far she’s batting zero. Get her on the ball.”
His flash of temper was over. He saw an elderly woman in a wheelchair, a resident of the hotel, and paused to speak gently to her. A few doors beyond, he paused again outside Evelyn Lincoln’s room. Evelyn, after breakfasting with three Texas friends, had lined them up outside in a stiff, self-conscious, Sunday-best rank. “More of your relatives?” he asked with a twinkle, gracefully giving her an opening for introductions.
In the lobby his entourage swelled until, as he crossed the red-brick paving of Eighth Street outside, it included Lyndon Johnson, John Connally, Ralph Yarborough, several Congressmen, and Raymond Buck, president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. The President waded happily into the crowd, disregarding the drizzle, which had now become a fine mist. Bill Greer had brought a raincoat for him and held it aloft on his arm. Kennedy shook his head. Laughing exultantly, he mounted the flatbed truck. Yet not everyone there felt so enthusiastic. Hugh Sidey of Time was struck by the difference between the President’s mood and the Vice President’s. Sidey wished Johnson a good morning. Johnson’s answering greeting, he noted, was “dour, mechanical, perfunctory.”
“There are no faint hearts in Fort Worth!” Kennedy cried into the microphone. The union men cheered, and there were scattered shouts of “Where’s Jackie?” He pointed to her eighth-floor window. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” he said, smiling. “It takes her a little longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”
Larry and Ken had moved into Dr. Burkley’s room to watch the speech. Both looked grave. They had already made their first pitch to Yarborough, and they had struck out. The Senator had argued that his behavior wouldn’t affect the Presidential party—that the desire of so many thousands of people to be near the President was solid proof of his popularity. The two veteran pols knew their boss wouldn’t buy that. Then they looked up. As he paid tribute to Fort Worth’s work on the TFX fighter plane, they studied the ragged, scudding clouds on the far horizon and prayed that they would go away.
Organizing herself at her dressing table and listening to her husband’s voice booming over the PA system below, Jacqueline Kennedy was pleased that it was raining; she hoped the top would be on that car. She was concerned about her hair becoming disheveled. She knew she looked tired. She glanced into the mirror. To Mary she moaned, “Oh, gosh. One day’s campaigning can age a person thirty years.”
The rain lifted as Wesley Frazier entered the outskirts of greater Dallas, and before parking two blocks north of the Book Depository he switched off his windshield wipers. The Hertz sign overhead revealed that he had arrived in good time, so he let his engine idle for several minutes, on the theory that he was charging the battery. Then Oswald impatiently got out, carrying his package. Frazier followed, but in the manner of youth he became diverted by the switching of locomotives on the railroad tracks which lay between his parking place and the back of the warehouse, and by the morning traffic whizzing past on Stemmons Freeway, to the west. He straggled farther and farther behind. By the time he reached the building Oswald had climbed the loading platform and vanished inside.
Oswald’s movements in the next few minutes are a matter of conjecture, based solely on circumstantial evidence. Superintendent Truly later recalled meeting him by a book bin, saying, “Good morning, Lee,” and receiving the customary reply, “Good morning, sir.” But Truly was vague, and he had no recollection of the package. It is quite possible that he was thinking of another morning—that Lee had already ascended to the sixth floor, using either one of the two freight elevators or the enclosed stairway in the northwest corner of the Book Depository, to conceal his weapon near the site he had already selected.
There, as in so many ways, blind chance had played into his hands. The old flooring had become oily. Truly, observing that books which had been stored there frequently became stained, had ordered it replaced with battleship-gray plywood. Half the floor was to be redone at a time. In preparation for the work, the rear, or northern, area had been largely cleared of cartons by doubling up in front. Thus the southern side, which would face the passing motorcade, was a crowded jungle of cartons and wheeled book trucks. Concealment was easy, and it was there, sometime during the morning, that Oswald built his sniper’s perch of boxes in the southeast corner, from which the President would be seen approaching dead ahead and then departing to the right front. One pile of boxes hid him from snoopers in the Dal-Tex Building on the opposite side of Houston Street, which would be to his left as he fired. Others would serve as props when he aimed; still others would be used to provide a backstop against which ejected shells would bounce as he worked the bolt for each fresh shot.
It was a squalid roost. The old floor was especially filthy here. The white-brick walls were chipped and scarred and covered with a patina of thick dust. Even after the window had been opened the interior was gloomy, and the naked 60-watt bulbs overhead merely washed the cramped scene with a sickly glow. But that was of no consequence to Oswald. He would be firing outside, not in. His bead would be drawn on a figure moving down Elm Street, to his right front. And by noon the daylight there would be broad as broad.
Across Houston Street, Abraham Zapruder strode into the office of his garment business on the fourth floor of the Dal-Tex Building.
“Sunshiny!” he chirped to his secretary in his stage Yiddish.
“Where’s your camera?” she demanded severely.
“At home,” he said timidly. They were good friends and often played this private game, pretending that she henpecked her boss.
“Mr. Z., you march right back there. How many times will you have a crack at color movies of the President?”
Zapruder fingered his bow tie and protested weakly, “I’m too short. Probably I wouldn’t even get close.”
“The crowd’ll be light downstairs,” she shot back, and when he hesitated she said firmly, “Hurry up! You can make it in twenty minutes.”
It wasn’t a bad idea, he reflected. He turned back to the elevator on his short legs, grumbling, “Chased home by my own girl. It looks bad.”
She feigned impatience, and he said, “O.K., Lillian, O.K.! So I’m going!”
“We are going forward!” the President cried vibrantly, concluding his speech in the lot. As the union men whistled and stamped he descended from the truck, shook hands with the mounted policemen, murmured to Henry Brandon, “We’re doing better than we thought,” and re-entered the hotel. The formal breakfast was next on the schedule. In the elevator, however, Mac Kilduff persuaded him to make an unscheduled stop. Kilduff had read the papers and shared Kennedy’s concern. He had persuaded Connally to hold a press conference, and he thought the President should discuss it with the Governor first.
In the Longhorn Room, down the mezzanine corridor from the ballroom, Kennedy reviewed Connally’s prepared statement. It was bland and rather meaningless. The Governor had always stood four-square for harmony in public. His own jarring notes were sounded backstage, and Ralph Yarborough’s present stonewalling was a result of them. Nevertheless the statement was something. Kennedy endorsed it and returned to the hall, where he ran into Yarborough himself and bluntly told him to ride in the Vice Presidential car. “For Christ’s sake cut it out, Ralph,” he snapped. The Senator, taken aback and upset by Yankee forthrightness, remonstrated that he had ridden to this very hotel with Johnson. Kennedy shook his head. It wasn’t good enough. That had been in the dark. If the Senator valued the President’s friendship, he would stick to Johnson like Duco. Nothing less would do; the President had no intention of being fobbed off with evasive action. Leaving the dismayed Senator, who had been searching for new evasions, Kennedy stepped into the kitchen of the Grand Ballroom, from which he would make his entrance. He glanced over his shoulder, the commander checking his troops. Behind him his entourage was wedged in a solid phalanx between stainless steel sinks and gigantic kettles. One member was missing. To Agent Bill Duncan he murmured, “Where’s Mrs. Kennedy? Call Mr. Hill. I want her to come down to the breakfast.” In a louder voice he inquired, “Everybody set?” There was a murmur of assent, and at 9:05 A.M.—the precise moment that American Airlines Flight 82, bearing Richard M. Nixon, departed Love Field for what was then called Idlewild Airport—he said, “All right, let’s go.”
Jacqueline Kennedy did not appear for another twenty minutes. The opening formalities droned on. The Texas Choir sang “The Eyes of Texas.” Toastmaster Raymond Buck presented all the other guests, and in the back of the block-long hall there was a minor disturbance when a local panjandrum challenged General McHugh’s credentials. (“Do you know who I am?” God asked indignantly.) Now and then an agent glanced furtively at his wristwatch. Liz Carpenter, shifting impatiently, concluded that the President must be annoyed. Mrs. Kennedy knew what she was doing. Her husband wanted her to be elegant in Dallas, and she meant to be. But it did take time. Ultimately she came to the choice of gloves. She wavered over two pairs, long white and short white; she decided the short gloves were more restrained, and held up her wrists while Mary Gallagher buttoned them. Now she was ready for the Belle Starrs. In fact, she had become so preoccupied with Dallas that she had completely forgotten the ceremony downstairs. When the elevator stopped at the mezzanine floor, she was confused. “Aren’t we leaving?” she asked Clint Hill. “No, you’re going to a breakfast,” he said.
In the kitchen the chief chef, Otto Druhe, ogled her while Clint awaited a signal from the head table. Raymond Buck provided it. Like a ringmaster he called, “And now—an event I know you have all been waiting for!” Buck swept his arm toward the kitchen door. The introduction lacked only a stentorian roll of snare drums. She appeared smiling tentatively, and was greeted by pandemonium. Two thousand cheering Texans were standing on their chairs. The klieg lights and the fake candles in the ballroom’s huge candelabra were blinding, and for a moment she was really frightened; she had never been through anything like this alone; she felt sure she would stumble. Then she saw her husband smiling at her. He seemed far away, but he was beckoning reassuringly, standing steadfast as she moved toward him through the strange valley of clamor, her hand outstretched, her eyes on his. Their hands touched. The tumult subsided.
It was time for presents. Their hosts had boots for her, a five-gallon hat for him. In O’Donnell’s suite, where Ken and Larry were watching the ceremonies on television, this was a moment of high mirth. They knew how the President always avoided queer costumes, how he had never forgotten the pitiful photograph of Calvin Coolidge in an Indian headdress; and they wondered how he would get out of this one. He sidestepped it deftly by announcing that he would put it on in Washington Monday. But his wife was hoping he would wear it sooner. As he began his address—“Two years ago I introduced myself in Paris by saying that I was the man who had accompanied Mrs. Kennedy to Paris. I am getting somewhat the same sensation as I travel around Texas. Nobody wonders what Lyndon and I wear”—she thought ahead to tomorrow at the LBJ Ranch. Lady Bird had asked her to ask the President if there was anything special he would like there. “I’d like to ride,” he had replied. She remembered now what a good rider he was, and how, during the summer of their engagement, he had galloped bareback through the fields of Newport on a work horse. That Stetson would be decidedly becoming when he mounted an LBJ horse, she reflected. She thought he looked silly in ordinary hats, but anything picturesque—his naval officer’s cap, the silk hat at his inaugural—was splendid on him.
Although she had not seen the ranch, she vividly recalled her husband’s account of his visit there eight days after his election to the Presidency. It had been a singular experience, and in one respect a distressing one. The afternoon they arrived the Vice President proposed a dawn hunt the next day. To Kennedy shooting tame game was not sport, and he had tried to bow out gracefully. To him all killing was senseless. But how do you explain such scruples to a gracious host? You don’t. He would never understand. He might even think you squeamish, and that was the crux of Kennedy’s problem. As a national leader he was obliged to resolve any doubts about his mettle.
Besides, Lyndon had been dogged. He was determined to be cordial, and this was the finest treat his ranch could offer. All that day he had gone to great lengths to assure Kennedy of his fidelity. Johnson lieutenants had been called in and told firmly that their personal allegiance to him must be forgotten. The Austin-Boston axis was about to be replaced by the capital in Washington. Starting now, they all had but one leader. They must obey his commands, anticipate his needs, please him in every way. He thought he himself was doing precisely that. Had he dreamed that his hunting invitation might give offense, he would never have mentioned it. To Johnson, Kennedy’s reluctance seemed a polite gesture, like demurring at a second drink or a second helping. It needed cajoling. This was a local custom, he explained, taking the new chief’s arm in his tactile way. This was something you just did. An eminent guest was expected to join in the ritual.
So at 6 A.M. on November 17, 1960, they had turned out, yawning, by the ranch’s field-stone façade. Johnson wore the uniform of the occasion: a stained, shapeless cowboy hat and a weather-beaten leather jacket. Kennedy had donned a checkered sport coat and slacks—a fellow guest, peering at him sleepily, thought he looked like a football fan. As the dawn shadows withered away they piled into a white Cadillac and tooled along under a flawless sky to a site of breathtaking natural beauty, and there the guest of honor did what was expected of him. The mechanics were relatively simple. Hitting a bull’s-eye isn’t much of an accomplishment. You kiss the stock with your cheek, line up the sights, take a deep breath and let a little out, then hold the breath to keep an even strain, and gently squeeze. Changing a tire requires more skill.
Only in hunting animals that isn’t all. There is one other matter, one fraction of a moment which to this hunter was anguish. It is the confrontation, when the killer faces his prey. In that instant, in the season before his inaugural, John Fitzgerald Kennedy had squinted down the barrel of a high-powered rifle and looked into the face of the life he was about to take. He had committed himself; he couldn’t flinch. He fired and quickly turned back to the car. Yet he couldn’t rid himself of the recollection. The memory of the creature’s death had been haunting, and afterward he had relived it with his wife, vider l’abcès, to heal the inner scar.
Nor had that been the end of it. Early in the new administration Lyndon had had the trophy mounted—not just the antlers, but the head, too—and one morning after a legislative leadership breakfast he came loping across the South Lawn of the White House, lugging it under his arm. The President of the United States had felled this quarry on his ranch. That made him proud, and he assumed that the President was proud, too. After all, it had been a magnificent shot. Why not display it on the wall of the Presidential office? he suggested. Kennedy, feigning interest, was inwardly appalled. After the Vice President had departed he ordered the head put away and forgotten. It wasn’t forgotten, though. Lyndon telephoned a jovial inquiry from his suite in the Executive Office Building, just across West Executive Avenue from the White House. Where was that deer? When was it going up? Later he mentioned it again, and then again. Eventually the trophy, like any other gift that has been repeatedly declined, became an issue between them, and once more Kennedy acceded. A great man must walk softly. Presidents must yield little points to win big ones, and really, this point was very small, a half-forgotten fico. The specimen was hung, not in the oval office, but in the nearby Fish Room. The President had granted a favor—how great a favor only the First Lady knew—and his Vice President had been genuinely pleased. Give and take; win a few, lose a few; that was the strategy of public office. In one version of his pet joke, the last line of which could be adapted to the occasion, he used to tell his friends that “The three most overrated things in the world are the state of Texas, the FBI, and hunting trophies.” Nevertheless the memory of the incident was distasteful.
Gesticulating emphatically at the audience in the Hotel Texas’ ballroom, Kennedy finished his breakfast remarks. “A ripsnorting political speech,” a reporter commented to Ted Clifton, who was sitting with the bagman in an improvised lobby behind the last line of tables. Three New York newspapermen accosted Powers there. “Wasn’t Jackie sensational?” he asked them. “Did you ever see a greater ovation?” Doug Kiker of the Herald Tribune asked back, “Are you going to use her much in the campaign?” Dave was vague. He couldn’t be sure. Anything could happen. He wasn’t going to commit himself. But Al Otten of the Wall Street Journal pressed the matter. Like several other White House correspondents, Otten’s feelings toward Kennedy were ambivalent. He liked him as a man, yet resented him as President, and a Kennedy triumph disturbed him. He asked sourly, “When are you going to have her come out of a cake?” Powers looked him up and down. Sounding every vowel in his Boston accent, he snapped back, “She’s not that kind of bunny.”
Dave’s vagueness had been unnecessary. The First Lady, whose nerve was stronger than anyone in the Irish mafia then suspected, was quite recovered. She felt buoyant, and back in the suite she decided to reassert her determination to make every political trip between now and next November. The President was on the phone, summoning O’Donnell. Hanging up, he told her they wouldn’t have to leave here until 10:40. “Do you mean we have a whole hour to just sit around?” she asked incredulously. “Oh, Jack, campaigning is so easy when you’re President. Listen, I can go anywhere with you this year.” As Ken came into the drawing room Kennedy said, “How about California in the next two weeks?” “Fine. I’ll be there,” she promised, and was rewarded with one of Ken’s rare smiles. She had always been in awe of this Celtic Calvinist, with his taut face, sardonic manner, and quiet, almost fanatical devotion to her husband. She really didn’t know him very well. The President lived his life in compartments and kept the walls between compartments virtually airtight. Ted Sorensen, for example, was even closer to him than O’Donnell, yet Sorensen was remote to both his wife and O’Donnell. The only man who spanned all aspects of the President’s life was the Attorney General. Sorensen had been called the President’s alter ego. John Kennedy’s true second self was Robert Kennedy. But even his brother, who had been O’Donnell’s teammate on the Harvard football team, sometimes found Ken silent and forbidding. O’Donnell was ascetic, tough, and inscrutable. He had only one passion, President Kennedy, and his devotion was inflexible. Unlike O’Brien, he wasn’t one of the merry Irish. This was the first time the First Lady had seen him beam. Startled, she burst into laughter. The President chuckled, and O’Donnell grinned openly.
Today was the ninety-fifth birthday of John Nance Garner, and at 10:14 A.M., while her husband called Uvalde, Texas, to wish the former Vice President a pleasant anniversary, she strolled through their rooms. She returned with an astounding discovery. In the fatigue of last night and the haste of this morning neither Kennedy had noticed that they were surrounded by a priceless art exhibition. On the walls and tables were a Monet, a Picasso, a Van Gogh, a Prendergast, and twelve other celebrated oil paintings, water colors, and bronzes. A catalogue, which had also been overlooked, disclosed that the exhibit was in their honor. “Isn’t this sweet, Jack?” she said as he hung up on Uvalde. “They’ve just stripped their whole museum of all their treasures to brighten this dingy hotel suite.” He knew it had been for her, and taking the catalogue he said, “Let’s see who did it.” There were several names at the end. The first was Mrs. J. Lee Johnson III. “Why don’t we call her?” he suggested. “She must be in the phone book.” Thus Ruth Carter Johnson, the wife of a Fort Worth newspaper executive, became the surprised recipient of John Kennedy’s last telephone call. She was home nursing a sick daughter. She had watched the ballroom breakfast on WBAP-TV, and when she heard the President’s voice she was speechless. He apologized for not phoning earlier, explaining that they hadn’t reached the hotel until midnight. Then Mrs. Kennedy came on. To Mrs. Johnson she sounded thrilled and vivacious. “They’re going to have a dreadful time getting me out of here with all these wonderful works of art,” she said. “We’re both touched—thank you so much.”
O’Donnell had a far less agreeable surprise for the President. While Kennedy was speaking in the ballroom Kilduff had leafed through the Dallas News, found the ugly advertisement, and brought it directly to O’Donnell’s rooms. Now Kennedy saw it for the first time. He read each word, his face grim, and handed it to Jackie. Her vivacity disappeared; she felt sick. The President shook his head. In a low voice he asked Ken, “Can you imagine a paper doing a thing like that?” Then, slowly, he said to her, “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.” O’Donnell took that paper to a window and reread it. The President prowled the floor. Abruptly he paused in front of his wife. “You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a President,” he murmured. He said it casually, and she took it lightly; it was his way of shaking off the ad. He had what she called “a Walter Mitty streak.” Like a little boy he would watch a passing jet from the fantail of the Honey Fitz, wondering aloud if he could fly it, picturing himself wrestling with the controls. “I mean it,” he said now, building the daydream. “There was the rain, and the night, and we were all getting jostled. Suppose a man had a pistol in a briefcase.” He gestured vividly, pointing his rigid index finger at the wall and jerking his thumb twice to show the action of the hammer. “Then he could have dropped the gun and the briefcase—” in pantomime he dropped them and whirled in a tense crouch—“and melted away in the crowd.”
Lyndon Johnson came in immediately after this 007 caper. His sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Birge Alexander, were with him; they wanted to shake hands with a President. Lyndon introduced them, and then, respectful as always, he quietly withdrew, motioning them to accompany him. But his visit had reminded Kennedy of the party’s fratricidal tendencies; the President ordered Ken to call Larry immediately and tell him Yarborough must ride with the Vice President even if the Senator had to be picked up and thrown into the backseat. At the end of the call he snatched the phone from O’Donnell and said deliberately to O’Brien, stressing each word, “Get him in the car.” Ken left to join Larry, and Jacqueline Kennedy examined the still uncertain sky. She hoped it would darken. It would be ridiculous to spend all that time getting ready and then ruin everything in a forty-five-minute ride in an open car. “Oh, I want the bubbletop,” she said wistfully.
The issue was being resolved against her at that very moment. The President, anticipating the result, was changing to a lightweight suit in his bedroom. He had a hunch they were heading into more hot weather. Down the hall O’Donnell was on the phone with Roy Kellerman. On another line Kellerman was holding Agents Sorrels and Lawson, who were standing by in Dallas. They were at Love Field with the top. Should it go up? Ken asked how things looked over there, and Roy relayed the question. The weather bureau had hedged and the Dallas News had predicted rain, but Sorrels felt positive the wind would blow the storm eastward.
“If the weather is clear and it’s not raining, have that bubbletop off,” O’Donnell said. Then they all crossed their fingers.
But not for long. Awaiting Yarborough in front of the hotel, O’Donnell and O’Brien anxiously scrutinized the clouds, and as they watched their spirits lifted. In the distance a thin ribbon of lemon-colored light appeared. The phenomenon had become familiar when they were barnstorming the country in 1960. Repeatedly the Caroline, the candidate’s private plane, had battled through a thunderstorm which had turned to bright sunshine as they touched down, and once in Louisville a Caroline landing had ended three weeks of steady rain. O’Donnell took a deep breath. It was going to be a day with a halo around it, a glittering lacuna of a day. There would be no bubbletop. O’Brien winked at him and said, “Kennedy weather, Charlie.”
The motorcade to Carswell was ready. There were three lines of cars in the street outside—Congressional convertibles on the far side, staff Mercurys in the middle, and Lincolns, for the most eminent, at the curb. Some vehicles were already occupied. The press buses had filled early, because none of the reporters wanted to miss Ralph Yarborough’s exit, and in one of the Mercurys young Marie Fehmer was reading the News ad. Dallas was Marie’s home town. She felt suffused with a sense of shame. Like most members of Johnson’s staff, she had never met the President. A University of Texas coed until June of 1962, she had watched John Kennedy from afar, and this morning she had braved the rain to see him in the parking lot. The vicious slanders in the News had nothing to do with politics, she thought. The paper was entitled to dislike Kennedy and criticize him, yet decent Americans respected the office of the Presidency. Uncivilized, she kept thinking; this attack was uncivilized. As a Dallasite she understood the incivility. Dallas Democrats had learned to live with such outrages. The outsiders around her wouldn’t make allowances, however. They would be just furious, and she couldn’t blame them. Marie huddled behind the newspaper, wishing she could hide and wishing she had a nobler shield.
Governor Connally had just held his press conference in the Longhorn Room. He was standing on the sidewalk, waiting for the Kennedys and talking to Bob Baskin. Baskin was looking forward to a ride on Air Force One with the press pool. He hadn’t read his own paper yet; the blow would fall after he had boarded the plane. They were just finishing their chat when Yarborough trudged out, deep in thought. O’Brien darted to his side. “We wish you’d reconsider, Senator,” he began. “The President will be very pleased if you ride with the Vice President.” Yarborough, dogged, was about to shake his head. O’Brien scanned the press buses. He said swiftly, “They’re watching us, you know. This is their big story.” The Senator planted his legs and intoned, “I’ll be proud to talk to them about proof of the President’s popularity, Larry. The multitudes who have thronged the streets of Texas’ greatest cities in an unprecedented outpouring of affection offer far more ample proof than anything I can do.” He glanced up. It wasn’t taking. Larry was just standing there stolidly. “Look,” Yarborough said. “I’ll issue a statement.” Impassively Larry replied, “You can issue a statement of ten thousand words, but nothing will be as effective as you getting in that car.” Out of the corner of his eye he observed the Johnsons emerging from the hotel. It was 10:40. They were ready to go. Unexpectedly, Yarborough then capitulated. “Well, if it means that much—” he began resignedly. “It does,” said O’Brien, cutting him off. Turning to Johnson he muttered, “The Senator is riding with you and Mrs. Johnson.” In an undertone the Vice President replied, “Fine.”
An incident of opéra bouffe followed. O’Brien escorted them to the car. Yarborough was behind the driver, Lady Bird in the middle, Lyndon on the right. Just as Larry was about to close the Senator’s door in muted triumph, a National Committee advance man appeared on the other side with Nellie Connally. The five-passenger Lincoln assigned to the President for the drive to the airfield would accommodate only the Kennedys, the Governor, and Kellerman and Greer of the Secret Service. The Governor’s lady had to go elsewhere. To the advance man this seemed the logical place, and he started to put her in the back beside Johnson. But this was a five-passenger car, too. There was room for just three people in the rear. As the Vice President and Mrs. Johnson slid over to make room for the new arrival, Yarborough, on the far side from Nellie, was being inexorably squeezed out.
Recognizing a blessing in disguise, he began edging off the seat and back toward the sidewalk. Larry was aghast. He thought bitterly, There goes the old ball game. In desperation he resorted to physical force. Blocking the Senator’s broad shoulders with his own stocky hips, he flapped his hand frantically at the advance man, who got the message. Without explanation—there was really nothing he could have said—he plucked Nellie out and escorted her to the front seat. Puzzled, the Governor’s wife found herself riding between the police driver and Rufus Youngblood. What made it all doubly awkward was that the Johnsons would be flying to Dallas on the backup plane, which meant that she must board Air Force One with Yarborough. As they drew away there were cheers outside the car and a deathly silence inside. Lady Bird, however, was the essence of tact. Like a charming guide, she commented gaily on the passing scenery, the highlights of which were the Allright Auto Parts emporium, a wasteland of parking lots, the Greenwood Cemetery and Mausoleum, and, after they had re-entered Carswell, a row of stark sheds housing nuclear weapons.
O’Brien, in another car, dried his forehead. The temperature was creeping toward the eighties, and the humidity remained high. But so far everything was in control. It was 11:08. Unless a crowd had gathered inside Carswell they should be able to hold to the schedule. Another throng here was unlikely. This was a maximum-security area. Nevertheless the instant they stopped they were mobbed. Every mechanic and grease monkey had turned out to see the President off. For fifteen minutes they milled around, shouting lustily and holding out rough hands while Colonel Jim Swindal, in his cockpit high above them, studied his watch. The other official aircraft, 86970, was fully loaded. The Johnsons, Marie Fehmer, Liz Carpenter, Cliff Carter, Colonel George McNally of the White House Communications Agency, and the Congressmen there had fastened their seat belts and were squirming restlessly, for they couldn’t take off until 26000 did. From the Presidential plane’s staff area John Connally stared down at the turmoil. Nothing in Texas newspapers had prepared him for these tumultuous receptions. Kennedy was a controversial Easterner. Why should Air Force enlisted men go into such a frenzy over him? They couldn’t all be from Massachusetts.
The President and Mrs. Kennedy mounted the ramp at 11:23. Evelyn Lincoln photographed them with a new Polaroid and followed, brushing past Mac Kilduff. Kilduff was lost in thought. “I’ll be glad when this next stop is over,” he said under his breath. “It’s the only one that worries me.” Sitting beside Mary Gallagher, Evelyn suggested to her, “Why don’t you come along on the Dallas motorcade?” Mary shook her head. “Can’t! I’ve already missed two hotels.” Evelyn persisted: “Remember Adlai Stevenson? We may run into some demonstrations.” “Demonstrations?” Mary asked skittishly. Yet it sounded exciting, and she decided to take a chance and go. After all, she had worked for the Kennedys for nearly eleven years. She was entitled to a little fun. She just hoped the President didn’t find out.
Aboard the backup plane Henry Gonzalez opened a copy of the Dallas News to page 14. “ ’Welcome, Mr. Kennedy,’ ” he read aloud. His round face brightened. “Say, somebody must’ve got the word! Dallas is joining the union!” He read a few lines and gave a little leap, bucking against his seat belt. Beside him Congressman Mighty John Young of Corpus Christi said dryly, “That’s right, Henry. Read it. Read all of it.” Tiger Teague, on the other hand, was enjoying a false dawn. Teague had been the chief Cassandra of the Congressional delegation, but outside Carswell’s operations office Connally had told him that they were going to go to the Trade Mart directly upon arrival. Misunderstanding, Teague thought that meant no motorcade, no exposure to cranks, and he had written off most of his anxieties.
O’Brien watched the President’s embarkation. “Flying to Dallas?” asked the driver. Larry looked over his shoulder and nodded. With Fort Worth chauvinism the man called, “That’s the hell hole of the world.”
Ted Clifton wondered why they were flying at all. On so short a hop Aircraft 26000 would rise no higher than five thousand feet. The moment Swindal finished climbing he would enter his glide pattern. The flight itself would last only thirteen minutes, but counting the rides out to Carswell and in from Love the Fort Worth–to–Dallas trip was going to take nearly two hours. Even with liberal allowances for parades on both ends, a city-to-city motorcade on the toll road could easily beat that. Presidential time was precious, and the General raised the point with O’Donnell. “I’ve been over that with the Secret Service,” Ken said. “It’s good logistics but poor politics. With two fields we have two landings, and for a politician nothing except weather is more important than a good airport arrival.”
He gave the clouds a final reading. There weren’t many left to read. Each passing minute vindicated Agent Sorrels’ forecast. There were still a few rain showers on the horizon, and the cloying, muggy air here was giving them a bumpy ride. But it was the storm’s dying spasm. When Pamela Turnure leaned over and peered down at the dull, flat plain below, she saw the last of the overcast rise “like an awning,” revealing a translucent sky. Shafts of sunlight traced cheerful patterns on the deep blue carpeting, and in the communications shack Ralph Yarborough jubilantly clapped O’Brien on the back. “That’s all we need,” he chortled. “By the time the President leaves Austin a million people will have seen him. That’s one Texan in every ten. Why, Larry, he’s going to sweep this state next fall!” O’Brien made a fast calculation. The Senator was right, it was impressive. He said, “I believe you.”
Then he awaited Yarborough’s pitch. He knew one was coming. In politics no one sacrifices a rook for a pawn. Outside the hotel the Senator had yielded to Presidential pressure (and a little Irish muscle). Now he was entitled to lay an arm on Larry. O’Brien had written the textbook of Kennedy politics; he knew. Since Yarborough himself would be running for re-election next November, he was bound to exercise his option. He did. “I’m in the dangedest pickle,” he confided. “Anything I can do?” O’Brien asked solicitously. “It’s about tonight,” said Yarborough. He signaled to birdlike Albert Thomas in the aisle, inviting him to join the huddle, and poured out his Austin problems to both of them. Texas voters had a way of scorning men who turned the other cheek. And Austin would make the wounds crueler because it was Yarborough’s home. If anyone could solve this one for him, the Senator vowed, he’d be everlastingly grateful.
“Let me have a crack at this, Judge,” Thomas said to O’Brien. Thomas frequently addressed men as “Judge” (a lawyer became “Mr. Chief Justice”). The Congressman was at least as honey-tongued as Yarborough. Today, as yesterday, he was the ideal conciliator, and in his square-toed, old-fashioned shoes he walked spryly toward the rear of the aircraft, where the President, still smarting from his perusal of the Texas press, was holding forth in the little tail compartment. “It’s bad,” he said, holding one newspaper aloft to Kellerman, Hill, and McHugh. “What’s worse, it’s inaccurate.” He had come to the state as an umpire, not as an antagonist. Godfrey said, “If you think that’s bad, Mr. President, wait till you see the Dallas News.” “I have seen it,” Kennedy said heavily. He paced forward along the corridor outside his bedroom and paused in the doorway. On a narrow bench outside, O’Donnell was sitting with Connally. Taking no chances, he and O’Brien were keeping the Governor and the Senator at opposite ends of the plane. Ken hadn’t made an inch of progress. Logic, even wheedling, was wasted on the Governor. The real factional bitterness was between Johnson and Yarborough, Connally insisted; as Johnson’s protégé he had been caught in the middle.
“I’ve got problems in Texas you don’t understand,” he was saying, “just as you’d have problems I wouldn’t understand if I came to Massachusetts.”
Kennedy didn’t enter the discussion. He had left that to his lieutenants. Besides, his mind was still on the morning papers. “What kind of journalism do you call the Dallas Morning News?” he fumed at Ken. “You know who’s responsible for that ad? Dealey. Remember him? After that exhibition he put on in the White House I did a little checking on him. He runs around calling himself a war correspondent, and everybody in Dallas believes him.” The President added a highly derogatory statement about the publisher.
He saw Thomas approaching and motioned him into the bedroom. Sergeant Joe Ayres entered with a dish of fresh pineapple and a cup of coffee; the plane heaved, and Kennedy, shifting his weight, ladled in four heaping spoons of sugar. “What can I do for you this morning, Congressman?”
“Mr. President, it’s the other way round. If I can’t win after what you did for me in Houston, I don’t deserve to get elected.” There was a tap on the door. Dave Powers handed Kennedy his Trade Mart speech. Thomas added gravely, “But if I were you, I’d be careful what I said in Dallas. It’s a tough town.”
Kennedy let it pass. Nothing he had seen this morning had encouraged him to soften a word. The Washington correspondent of the Dallas Times Herald, who had seen an advance copy of the speech, had warned his office that it was “a withering blast at his right-wing critics.” The President intended it to be just that.
“Why don’t you give Kenny a hand?” Kennedy said, glancing at the door.
“That’s why I’m here,” said the Congressman, and went out.
Assaulted on two fronts, Connally began to thaw. He conceded that he had been dazzled by turnouts for Kennedy. That was a language any politician could understand. Minutes before they landed he slapped O’Donnell on the back. “All right,” he boomed. “I’ll do anything the President says. If he wants Yarborough at the head table, that’s where Yarborough will sit.”
It was an uncertain victory. Nellie’s reception had been discreetly bypassed. Her vow stood; she wasn’t going to have the Senator in the Governor’s mansion. And neither O’Donnell nor Thomas was aware of the Governor’s plan for a two-tiered head table. If Connally meant to stick to that, they had won nothing. Nevertheless they believed they had won, and when the President emerged in a fresh shirt, combing his hair, Ken exultantly told him Connally had surrendered.
“Terrific!” Kennedy grinned. “That makes the whole trip worthwhile.”
From his burrow of brightly colored knobs and switches Jim Swindal blinked out through 26000’s plastic nose and watched the ribbon of shining concrete race under his landing gear. Air Force One touched down, and he noted the time for his log: 11:38. Taxiing to the left of the green and red terminal building, he crept toward a building marked “International Arrivals.” They were to park there, where, penned behind a cyclone fence, the welcoming crowd leaped and jumped. Obviously security was tight. You could see it from here. Armed policemen stood on every rooftop of the airport’s eastern concourse, and an elderly, hawk-faced agent (it was Sorrels) was chasing a photographer back behind the barrier. But to Swindal it looked like another viva throng. Maybe Dallas had been libeled. Viewed from this cockpit the people seemed to be typical Texans, ready to give Kennedy his most boisterous reception since San Antonio.
It wasn’t that simple. In San Antonio the President had been greeted by an entire city. Here the greeters were members of the local underground. Unquestionably that underground was out in force. Liberals were making a valiant showing, here and all along the route. A row of school truants held an American flag and a brave “WE LOVE JACK,” and a little Negro boy waved a square of cardboard reading “HOORAY FOR JFK.” In numbers and noise the libs were anxious to outshout Kennedy’s audiences in Houston and Fort Worth. The very fact that they were swamped in Dallas elections, estranged from the majority, and scorned by the city’s most powerful men seemed to have kindled a new spirit in them. It wasn’t easy to be a liberal in Dallas, or even a moderate. Loyalty to Kennedy demanded courage, and the Kennedy supporters of Dallas had poured into the streets to prove their fiber. The effort was gallant. From a window in 26000 it seemed to eclipse everything else. But they weren’t the voice of Dallas. Love Field was a new kind of country. There were differences here, and perceptive Texans spotted them.
Henry Gonzalez noticed how people would start to wave, then jerk their hands back and glance nervously over their shoulders. Ronnie Dugger, editor of the Texas Observer, saw a Confederate flag held high above the crowd, and he noted that here and there spectators who hadn’t come to applaud were standing grimly with “braced stance, a pipe that was being puffed too rapidly, brows knitted in frowns.” Liz Carpenter thought that the signs that were hostile were the ugliest she had ever seen. “CAN THE CLAN,” read one. “HELP KENNEDY STAMP OUT DEMOCRACY,” read another. A man whose face was contorted with some inner emotion held a placard which simply said, “YOUR A TRAITER” (sic). A board fastened atop a small foreign car declared, “MR. PRESIDENT, BECAUSE OF YOUR SOCIALIST TENDENCIES AND BECAUSE OF YOUR SURRENDER TO COMMUNISM I HOLD YOU IN COMPLETE CONTEMPT.” Others were: “IN 1964 GOLDWATER AND FREEDOM”; “KENNEDY—GUS HALL, LEADERS OF COMMUNIST PARTY WANT YOU RE-ELECTED,” “LET’S BARRY KING JOHN,” and “YANKEE GO HOME AND TAKE YOUR EQUALS WITH YOU.” A large group of hostile teenagers was here despite the school ruling; an entire delegation from Thomas Jefferson High School had come to hiss the President.
The twelve-man official reception committee reflected the peculiarities of Dallas. Not a single representative of organized labor was present, which for a Democratic President was extraordinary. The local unions had been eager to participate in the ceremonies here and at the luncheon, but after a series of exasperating encounters with the Republicans and right-wing Democrats who dominated the host committee they had given up. The delegation waiting to greet the President consisted of nine Republicans, two Dixiecrats, and a lone liberal, Barefoot Sanders. Appropriately, they had assembled an hour earlier outside the Republic National Bank and driven to the field in long black air-conditioned limousines, and it was equally appropriate that the first man to bound through their reception line should be, not the President, but Governor Connally. The Governor was violating protocol, but this, after all, was his hand-picked team, just as he was their man. Kennedy couldn’t carry Dallas. It was doubtful that he would even make a respectable showing here next November. The Democratic Governor, however, was a local hero. Archconservative Dallasites could find no socialistic tendencies in him. They knew he wasn’t a traitor to their values, and they were prepared to push a Goldwater-Connally ticket in ’64.
Awaiting the ramp, Kennedy bantered with his valet. George Thomas came from Berryville, Virginia, a tiny crossroads. In the tail compartment the President said quizzically, “You know, George, I think this is a bigger town than you come from.” He winked and stepped out on the top step, narrowing his eyes as he sized up the crowd in one sweeping glance. Mrs. Kennedy appeared beside him, and the underground roared its approval. Dave Powers, the inveterate note-taker, scrawled, “They look like Mr. and Mrs. America.” At the bottom the Johnsons had been waiting patiently for five minutes. For the fourth time in less than twenty-four hours they were welcoming the Kennedys to a new city in their best nice-of-you-to-come manner, and both couples felt slightly silly. Moreover, there would be two more such landings today, at Bergstrom Air Force Base and at the ranch. Lyndon looked up at Jackie, shrugging comically at the absurdity of it all, and she laughed. But ludicrous or not, Johnson never left a job half done. The geyser of energy within him wouldn’t permit it. If being Vice President meant pumping hands, he would greet every passenger to leave Air Force One, and he did just that. Kilduff, at the end of the line, said, “Sir, I’m sure if you shake my hand one more time you’ll be ill.” Johnson squeezed his shoulder. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mac.”
Yet once the reception line broke up, the Vice President’s Dallas work was done. His next scheduled performance wouldn’t come until 3:15, when they reached Bergstrom. The massed cheerers on the other side of the chain fence were for the President. Johnson made a token appearance there, but when he saw that the hands were straining toward the Kennedys he led Lady Bird to the gray four-door convertible which Sorrels had borrowed from a local Ford dealer for his use. Hurchel Jacks of the Texas Department of Public Safety was behind the wheel. Joining Jacks in the front seat, Rufe Youngblood tuned his DCN hand set to Baker channel, the Vice Presidential wavelength; with it, he could maintain contact with Agent Lem Johns in the Vice Presidential follow-up car. Apart from Signalmen, Rufe and Lem were probably its only listeners. Everybody else with a set was tuned to the Charlie frequency, the radio link with the Presidential car. That was where the excitement would be, and those familiar with Secret Service code could follow the progress of Lancer and Lace from the dialogue between Roy Kellerman in the car’s front seat and Art Bales in the Signals car at the end of the parade. Bales was methodically checking out all networks. The high points here were the Lincoln and the two Secret Service follow-up cars. In transit there would be a constant link with Jim Swindal on Air Force One and the small Signals switchboard in the Sheraton-Dallas, which had twenty extensions and ten trunks binding the Presidential party to the Fort Worth board and thence to the Secret Service field office in Kansas City, Andrews Field, the Pentagon, and the White House and its thousand extensions.
Ordinarily Art Bales would have been a mere passenger. Radio frequencies were normally the domain of Colonel McNally. But the Colonel wanted a break. Like many other members of the party, he had decided to skip the trip into town and have lunch in the terminal restaurant. Muggsy O’Leary was there; so were the baggagemen and the aircraft crews, except for Colonel Swindal, Sergeant Ayres, and the guards posted around 26000 and 86970. The Colonel asked Ayres to make him a roast beef sandwich and stepped into the aircraft’s communications shack, turning on the Charlie frequency there. In the staff area Kilduff’s two secretaries had stayed behind to type press releases. Aft of them, George Thomas was sorting out clothes. On the inboard bunk he laid out a complete change for Austin: shirt, socks, shoes, and a lightweight blue suit. Then, reflecting that the President would be tired when he returned to the plane, he thought it would be nice to leave a reminder that tonight at the ranch there would be a respite from speeches and parades. Beside the shirt he put a pair of khaki pants, a light sweater, and a sport shirt.
Beyond the plane’s left wing the Kennedys were ducking puddles left from the night’s rain. By Love Field’s Gate 28 the President leaned over Annie S. Dunbar, an eighty-five-year-old loyal Democrat and an arthritic who had come in a wheelchair; then he and Mrs. Kennedy walked about fifty yards of fence, smiling and touching fingers. Both had turned away when, on impulse, he turned back. “There he goes,” his wife said fondly, adjusting Dearie Cabell’s bouquet of red roses in the crook of her left arm. “How do you like campaigning?” Chuck Roberts of Newsweek asked her. “It’s wonderful!” she said. The crowd surged toward her. “Where’s my husband?” she asked quickly. Then, relieved: “Oh, there he is.” To her inexperienced eye Dallas seemed unexceptionable, but those who knew and distrusted the city remained on edge. With a half-smile Gonzalez said to Young, “I sure wish somebody had invented a spitproof mask.” He looked at the Confederate flag and added, “And I forgot my bulletproof vest.” At the fence tall Roy Kellerman remained inches behind the President, studying faces and cameras. A local reporter told Roberts, “The Dallas police have learned their lesson. After Kennedy leaves here they won’t let anybody within ten feet of him.” Hugh Sidey, who, as a rule, disregarded airport crowds, left his press bus seat to join them; he felt a general air of tension. Still the Chief Executive continued down the line; he had wandered so far from the main party that Bill Greer moved the Lincoln toward him, shadowing him in order to save time when he decided to quit. The President lingered at the fence for another five minutes. Ronnie Dugger wrote in his notebook: “Kennedy is showing he is not afraid.”
To Greer the big blue convertible was like 26000, a flagship, and he liked to make the arrival of the captain on board an occasion for ceremony. On the right front fender he unhooded the small American flag. Kellerman held the door for the President, and Greer removed the cover from the blue Presidential flag on the left with a flourish. He always made a ceremony out of it, and it always irritated the younger agents. In their judgment this was a time to be especially vigilant. The driver should be behind the wheel when the President slid in, ready to take off in case of trouble. Somebody else could unfurl the tiny flags. They regarded the chauffeur with affection, but felt that he was too fussy. He ignored them. The Chief of State was entitled to full honors, and his driver intended to make certain that he got them.
The captain was aboard, Greer was at the helm; they should have cast off all lines and sailed for the Trade Mart at once. Unexpectedly, there was a lot of last-minute running around. The pool car wouldn’t start, and for a sickening moment Kilduff thought he had another dead battery. Then the engine turned over. In the interval Dave Powers had appeared beside the Lincoln. “Lunchtime,” he told Kennedy merrily, “we’re going to hit that captive audience again.” He reminded Mrs. Kennedy, “Be sure to look to your left, away from the President. Wave to the people on your side. If you both wave at the same voter, it’s a waste.”
On the plane word had been passed that since the flight was so brief no new plans would be issued for the Dallas motorcade; it would be identical to the motorcade in Fort Worth. If a passenger had ridden in the ninth car there, say, he would be in the ninth car here. It didn’t work. The vehicles were unfamiliar, and there was an undignified scramble for seats. Ted Clifton and Godfrey McHugh found an empty station wagon and jumped in. Gonzalez saw Congressman Wright Patman’s son in the crowd and thrust him in the second Congressional convertible. The losers wound up in the lowly VIP bus, and Dr. Burkley and Evelyn Lincoln were again among them. They had talked their way into the Secret Service follow-up car jump seats in Fort Worth, but since O’Donnell and Powers wanted to ride there now, they had been bumped to the end of the line.
“It’s not right,” Dr. Burkley kept repeating in a shaky, indignant voice.
The doctor wasn’t concerned about status. He was perhaps more anxious to avoid notoriety than any man there. His code name was Market; it should have been Modesty. The White House press corps, which had dwelt at great length on Dr. Janet Travell’s treatment of the President’s back injuries, was scarcely aware of him. Very few people realized that he was a rear admiral. On social occasions he didn’t even identify himself as a doctor. He preferred to be introduced as plain George Burkley, and the details of his private life—the fact, for example, that he was a devout Roman Catholic—were treated by him as though they were state secrets. Sensitive, introverted, and self-effacing, he would have been delighted to leave all limelight to O’Donnell and Powers. But even on a political trip, he felt, politicians should remember that John Kennedy was more than the leader of a party.
“The President’s personal physician should be much closer to him,” he told Evelyn. “I don’t see why they can’t put me in that lead car. I wouldn’t mind sitting on an agent’s lap.”
Of course, there was only an outside chance that he would be needed. But that chance was Dr. Burkley’s sole reason for being here. He wouldn’t be in the way. At the very least, he thought, he could perform little personal services for the President. Kennedy had lost countless pairs of dark glasses; people were forever pinching them for souvenirs. The doctor carried several spares in his black bag. He contemplated the sun, now blinding. This was a day when a man in an open car might need occasional shelter from the glare.
Evelyn glanced around disconsolately. Most of the faces in the bus were unfamiliar to her. Barefoot Sanders was pacing up and down the aisle. Valenti, whom none of the President’s people knew, was rubbernecking. Liz Carpenter had led Marie Fehmer and two Dallas women to seats; with irrepressible gaiety she was directing their attention outside to the famous Larry O’Brien.
As they watched, O’Brien broke into a run. Larry had assumed that the Yarborough problem was solved. Suddenly he realized that the Senator had mentioned nothing about riding with the Vice President here. Simultaneously he saw the President staring at him and cutting his eye meaningfully toward Yarborough, who appeared to be looking for another car. It was the Hotel Texas all over again. Larry grabbed the Senator’s arm, shoved him onto the seat beside Lady Bird, and slammed the door. The motorcade was beginning to move; O’Brien was about to be left. He looked around wildly and jumped into a convertible with Congressmen Mahon, Rogers, and Thornberry.
All the morning the floor-laying crew had been working on the cleared section of the Texas School Book Depository’s sixth floor. Now it was time for a midday break, sandwiches, and, afterward, the spectacle at the front door. Their feelings about the motorcade were mixed. There was little sympathy among them for the President’s uncompromising stand on behalf of equal rights for Negroes. Roy Truly, who didn’t believe the races were meant to mix, later doubted that “half my boys would have gone out to see the parade if it hadn’t been lunchtime.” He explained, “Except for my niggers the boys are conservative, like me—like most Texans.”
Still, a parade was a parade. Fifteen minutes before noon the men used both of the building’s antiquated elevators to go down to the street level. As they passed the fifth floor, Charles Givens, a thirty-eight-year-old former Navy steward and senior Book Depository employee, saw Lee Oswald standing by the gate on the fifth floor, watching them go. Their departure left the top stories unoccupied. In effect, the upper part of the warehouse had now met the Secret Service’s definition of the classic sniper’s perch—it was a deserted building.
Yet no gunman can be certain that he will not be interrupted by a casual intruder whose memory will later place the killer at the scene. It happened to Oswald. Someone—it was Givens—came back. Downstairs he discovered that he had left his cigarettes in his jacket pocket. Returning, he encountered Oswald on the sixth floor. “Boy, aren’t you coming downstairs?” he asked, surprised. “It’s near lunchtime.” “No, sir,” replied Oswald, respectful as always. Possibly to allay suspicion, more likely to prepare the way for his escape, he said, “When you get downstairs, close the gate to the elevator.” He meant the west elevator, which could be summoned from above only when the gate was down. “O.K.,” said Givens, turning away.
Now Oswald was alone, with over a half-hour for his final preparations. His own movements excepted, the only sound in the upper part of the building came from the roof above. They were innocent and familiar: the scratching of birds. On the rear of the roof stood a fantastic structure resembling an enormous, deteriorating boxcar. Once it had been a boiler. After the building had abandoned steam heat it had been left to rust, and now it served as home for upwards of a thousand band-tailed blue pigeons who hopped around, preening themselves and blinking sightlessly at the activity in the plaza below. They were ignored here and, though naturally jumpy, they were serene. The traffic below was too far away. Only a sudden, sharp noise very close to them would create a stir in this forgotten flock.
Charles Givens rode downstairs and discovered that he couldn’t close the west elevator’s gate. The elevator wasn’t there. It was stuck upstairs somewhere. Givens strolled away, thinking no more about it. It is his recollection that the time was 11:55 A.M.
At 11:55 A.M. the van of Kennedy’s procession moved through a section of Love Field fence which Forrest Sorrels had ordered removed for the occasion. Two motorcycle policemen cleared the way for:
The lead car, an unmarked white Ford driven by Chief Curry. Agent Lawson sat beside Curry. In the rear, Sheriff Bill Decker was on the left, Sorrels on the right. Three more motorcycles trailed the back bumper and led the rest of the procession by five car lengths.
SS 100 X, the Presidential car, District of Columbia license number GG 300. Its six passengers were in their usual places: Kellerman beside Greer; the Connallys in the jump seats, John to the right of Nellie; the Kennedys in the rear, with the roses between them. Four motorcycles, two on each side, flanked the rear of GG 300.
Halfback, the follow-up convertible, District license number GG 678. Agent Sam Kinney, at the wheel, kept his eyes on the back of the President’s head. Emory Roberts, Halfback’s commander, was next to Kinney. Clint Hill stood on the left front running board. Agent Bill McIntyre was behind him. John Ready was on the right front running board, Agent Landis behind him. Dave Powers was in the right jump seat, Ken O’Donnell in the left. Agent George Hickey sat in the left rear, Agent Glen Bennett in the right rear, and on the seat between them lay an AR-15 .223 automatic rifle, with a muzzle velocity so powerful that should a bullet strike a man’s chest it would blow his head off.
The Vice Presidential convertible. Two-and-a-half car lengths separated it from Halfback, to indicate that the appearance of the Vice President was a separate event. Ralph Yarborough, who loved parades, was under the impression that Lyndon Johnson wasn’t enjoying the distinction. The Senator, in the left rear, was waving jubilantly. Johnson stared glumly ahead.
Varsity, the follow-up hardtop, was driven by a Texas state policeman. Cliff Carter was in the middle of the front seat. Agent Jerry Kivett was on his right. Agent Lem Johns was in the right rear, Agent Taylor in the left rear.
The pool car was on loan from the telephone company, and the driver came with it. Kilduff and Merriman Smith of United Press International were in front, Kilduff on the right. As the senior White House correspondent Smith always rode in the middle. Thus he was the newspaperman closest to the radiophone on the transmission hump under the dashboard. Jack Bell of the Associated Press, Baskin of the Dallas News, and Bob Clark of the American Broadcasting Company were in the back. In a crisis they could report nothing from this car unless Smith surrendered the phone, and Smith, with his hard, pocked face, was one of the most competitive men in journalism.
The photographers’ convertibles came next. The bulk of the motorcade trailed them.
They passed the airport’s “Spirit of Flight,” a graceful statue of a figure whose arms stretched upward, and turned northeast, or left, at Mockingbird Lane.
On a map the Love Field–Trade Mart–Love Field motorcade route resembled a crude bottle. Mockingbird was the base. Lemmon Avenue, which ran perpendicular to it, became the left side. Turtle Creek and Cedar Springs sloped inward and then straightened at Harwood, forming the left flank of the neck. The mouth comprised twelve blocks of Main Street, where the heaviest downtown crowds would be. At the end of Main the cars would avoid an awkward traffic island by jogging a block north—here, at the Book Depository, the mouth was chipped—and then cruise westward, on a gently descending incline, into the triple underpass. A sharp right up a ramp here brought them onto Stemmons Freeway, which was the opposite side of the neck. The Trade Mart was at the junction of Stemmons Freeway and Harry Hines Boulevard. After the luncheon the procession was scheduled to move down the boulevard, the bottle’s right side, picking up speed as it passed the straggling, yellow-brown brick buildings of Parkland Hospital. At Mockingbird it would turn right, re-entering the base of the bottle, closing the geometric figure, and returning to Love Field for the hop to Austin.
At the beginning there wasn’t much to see. John Connally hadn’t expected any people here, however, and there were some. Barefoot Sanders recalled that when Kennedy and Johnson drove down Lemmon Avenue on September 13, 1960, it had been deserted. It wasn’t now. But Kennedy had been only a candidate then. As President he was bound to be a greater drawing card. To O’Donnell and O’Brien the spectators outside the low, flat, automated factories—Haggar Slacks, IBM—looked like curious but indifferent white-collar workers. Nevertheless there were many blank stretches. Mrs. Kennedy found herself waving at billboards advertising “Stemmons Freeway, Market Place of the Southwest,” “Real Sippin’ Whisky,” “Home of the Big Boy Hamburger,” and a raffish sign inviting her to twist in The Music Box.
She began to wilt. The reading on a thermometer outside a Coca-Cola bottling plant was dismayingly high, and the sunlight was so bright that she instinctively closed her eyes. She slipped on her dark glasses. The President asked her to remove them. People had come to see her, he explained; the spectacles masked her face. Nevertheless she toyed with the lenses in her lap, sneaking them up when the sidewalks were barren of spectators. On Lemmon Avenue the Lincoln passed beneath an underpass. She liked that; the brief bar of shadow was a relief, a chance to catch her breath.
Twice the motorcade halted at Kennedy’s order. At Lemmon and Lomo Alto Drive a line of very small children stood behind a placard: “MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE STOP AND SHAKE OUR HANDS.” “Let’s stop here, Bill,” Kennedy called to Greer. He stepped into the street and was nearly swept off his feet by a surge of shrieking youth. The scene was affectionately watched by a loyal couple named Gaudet. Toward the end of it, Mrs. Gaudet had an unsettling recollection: that morning she had heard a local radio program devoted to details of the Lincoln assassination, and now she told her husband about it, saying, “President Kennedy ought to be awarded the Purple Heart just for coming to Dallas.”
Kellerman and his men gently broke up the demonstration of children. So far the city seemed harmless enough to them. In the lead car Lawson murmured a word of commendation to Chief Curry. Lawson had suggested that underpasses be cleared of everyone except uniformed policemen, and the first underpass indicated that his advice had been followed. Everything, indeed, appeared to be on schedule. When the President dismounted the second time, the agents, though vigilant, avoided a show of force. He wanted to greet a group of nuns. He was always alert for a glimpse of Sisters, and it was a familiar scene. Only a tactless bodyguard would have intruded upon it.
In the Vice Presidential car Lyndon Johnson abruptly leaned forward.
“Turn the radio on,” he ordered, indicating the dial on the dashboard. Hurchel Jacks did, and a local station blared strongly, broadcasting an account of their progress.
At Reagan Street, three blocks before the bottle began to narrow, Father Oscar Huber was standing with some young men from his parish. “I know why you’re here,” he was teasing them. “Don’t kid me—you don’t care about him. It’s Jackie you want to see.” Just then he heard the drone of motorcycle engines. Leaping up and down, the elderly priest saw Kennedy’s head. But it was turned the other way. He wanted to see his face, too. The young men were jumping all around him, however, and he sensed defeat; the Lincoln had slowly drawn abreast of them and was passing on. Then—perhaps he had seen the reversed collar in the corner of his eye—the President spun in his seat, looked directly at Father Huber, and smiled. “Hurray!” shouted the priest, completely carried away. He continued to bound until the boys grinned at him. He didn’t care. He trudged back to his rectory, short of breath but contented. At last he had seen a President, and he could scarcely wait to tell those lazy Fathers lounging around the rectory television set.
Around the corner, in the neck of the bottle, Ted Dealey was watching television in a corner room on the nineteenth floor of his exclusive apartment building at 3525 Turtle Creek. Ted had just returned from a physical checkup and changed into a sport shirt. He was boycotting the Trade Mart luncheon; his son could represent the News. Below him he heard a sputtering of engines. He looked down. The motorcade was passing through Oak Lawn Park. Squinting, he made out a flash of color. Pink, he thought. Some woman wearing a pink hat.
In the park the lead car passed the statue of Robert E. Lee. Forrest Sorrels felt nostalgic. He thought about the day that statue was dedicated by Franklin Roosevelt. Sorrels had been a young agent then; he had never been charged with the protection of a great man before, and he remembered his anxieties. Now it had become routine. All the same, he wished there weren’t so many open windows today.
The crowds were thickening now. Every inch of curb was occupied, and up ahead there was a flurry of excitement. On the west side of Cedar Springs Warren G. Harding, the six-foot-one, 225-pound County Treasurer, was standing outside Dallas County’s Democratic party headquarters. The President passed within four feet of Harding, who was struck by what he thought was a preoccupied expression in Kennedy’s eyes. He had just asked a nearby judge whether he had the same impression—the judge confirmed him—when he observed two young men on the opposite side of the street holding a large Goldwater sign. Infuriated, Harding shook his fist at them, and after the motorcade had passed he crossed over and demanded to know why they were injecting partisan politics into a visit by a President of the United States. The men felt equally belligerent. In a few ugly phrases one gave a profane description of this President. Harding stepped forward, crowding him. Then he heard a call. The judge was pointing at his watch. It was 12:15. They were due at the Trade Mart in fifteen minutes; even taking the back way, they were going to have to hurry if they expected to beat the President there. Harding glared at the men, glared at their sign, and turned on his heel.
At Live Oak Street, two blocks north of Main, the roaring began. People were standing eight, ten, even twelve deep on the sidewalks, and secretaries were hanging out of windows overhead. Every Kennedy voter in the county seemed to be there. Barred from the luncheon, they were paying tribute in the only way left to them. A dense mob to the left, many of them with dark, Mexican faces, surged into Harwood Street. In the crush Greer decelerated from twenty miles an hour to fifteen, then to ten, then to seven. The overflow crowd forced Motorcycle Policeman B. W. Hargis, riding two feet from the left rear fender of the Lincoln, to drop back. It was on Mrs. Kennedy’s side—each time she lifted her white glove her fluttering fingers evoked an undulating “Jackiiieee!”—and Clint Hill, the most active agent in Dallas that day, leaped off Halfback’s running board and dashed up to replace Hargis, shielding her with his body.
They were at Main. Diagonally across the intersection, to their left, loomed the gray stone pile of the Dallas city jail, Chief Curry’s headquarters. The chief turned right, and as Greer pivoted behind him John Kennedy looked ahead down a twelve-block-long human canyon. This was the mouth of the bottle, fifteen hundred yards of baying office workers, fluttering bunting, and incredible heat. Far above the din the eight skyscrapers of downtown Dallas raised their mammoth shoulders against a stainless sky. Atop the Republic National Bank Building a revolving searchlight, now still, jutted into the blue like an oversized cherry picker. The clock on the glittering new spire of the Mercantile Bank read 12:21 P.M.
That was Central Standard Time. The qualification is significant. A century earlier, on April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln had died in the Tenth Street Washington house of William Peterson, a tailor, at 7:20 A.M., and though Eastern Standard Time as it is now understood was nearly four years old, no one observed the distinction. It would have been irrelevant. Men elsewhere lived in separate worlds then. Time and space had genuine meaning. By the time distant communities learned of the assassination and grasped its implications, local conditions and individual circumstances had altered, and they viewed the President’s death with perspectives quite different from those of Washingtonians.
By November 22, 1963, all that had changed. Few thought about it, for in the absence of shattering developments people were insulated from events on the other side of the horizon by work, families, and friends. Yet the potential for simultaneous experience was there. Television alone had shrunk the dimensions of the globe until the impact of a great tragedy would be felt coinstantaneously by hundreds of millions of people in the Western Hemisphere and, through Telstar, the relay satellite, by remote Russians for whom Central Standard Time’s twelve o’clock noon was twelve o’clock midnight.
The age, moreover, was an age of unprecedented mobility. The average nineteenth-century American never left his native state. Often he died without ever having traveled farther than thirty miles from his birthplace. Everything he saw he saw over his harness reins. His great-grandson of a hundred years later had very likely grown up in one part of the country, married a girl from a second, and was employed in a third. During the early 1940’s he had fought in Africa, Europe, or Asia. Now he could easily fly from Boston to New York, say, on the hourly shuttle, or span the entire country during a short summer vacation. Some careers made a man a virtual nomad, and the more powerful and affluent he was, the more he resorted to air travel. Because powerful individuals have strong feelings about any President, and because President Kennedy was a man of great personal wealth, it was inevitable that many whose lives and thoughts were linked with his should have been on the move that Friday noon—in airports, or aloft, or on distant continents which, to them, were scarcely more than overnight stops.
In London, where it was 6:21 P.M., Jacqueline Kennedy’s sister Lee was in her home at 4 Buckingham Place. Her husband, Prince Stanislaus Radziwill, an exiled Polish nobleman, was at the St. James’s Club. The Radziwills were stationary for the moment. But they also had a home in Manhattan and were accustomed to crossing the Atlantic almost as casually as the Prince’s grandfather had crossed the street. The clock in the lobby of Rome’s Eden Hotel stood at 7:21 P.M. There the Most Reverend Philip N. Hannan, Auxiliary Bishop of Washington, who had flown over for the Council at the Vatican, was chatting with an American Catholic layman. In the United States, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican most likely to lose to President Kennedy in 1964, was flying to Muncie, Indiana, for the funeral of his mother-in-law. The idol of the Dallas Right, retired Major General Edwin Walker, was in another airliner halfway between New Orleans and Shreveport, Louisiana, and Democratic Chairman John Bailey was approaching Austin on his Delta flight.
Friends and antagonists alike, they were far closer than they realized to the intersection of Harwood and Main, and in a crisis all could move to Dallas, to Washington, or to any other point in the United States in a matter of hours. The most isolated was Mrs. Paul Mellon, a gentle patrician who watched over the executive mansion’s Rose Garden at the President’s request. Bunny Mellon was in the British West Indies. She had gone down to confer with the architect of a new estate she was building. Conditions were primitive, communications were by runner. There were no telephones on the island, and no telegraph. American radio stations were out of range. A rising storm was about to ground the nearest commercial airline. Yet even Bunny Mellon could not escape the rule of twentieth-century concurrent experience. Her radio set could pick up French-language broadcasts from Martinique, which could relay Paris bulletins. And as a Mellon she had her own private plane and pilots in New York.
At Love Field itself Candy McMurrey, sister-in-law of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the President’s younger brother, was awaiting the 12:45 departure of American Airlines Flight 58 to Washington. The gigantic wing span of Air Force One was clearly visible from the gate, and Candy, who had flown with the Chief Executive last summer, was describing the lovely interior to her husband, a Houston attorney. He listened attentively; as a Texan he would feel somewhat strange at Ted’s and Joan’s anniversary celebration in Georgetown tonight, and this would serve as a conversation piece. The celebration was to be an elaborate affair. At that moment the Caroline was over New Jersey, winging southward from New York with most of the Senator’s twenty-six guests. In the morning the Caroline would again be airborne. The entire party had tickets to the Harvard-Yale game and were going to spend the remainder of the weekend at Hyannis Port with Mr. and Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy.
Hawaiian time, as Bill Greer spun the wheel of the big Lincoln, was 8:21 A.M. The Cabinet plane, Aircraft 86972, had left Hickam Field and was bulling its way through strong headwinds toward Japan. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman was finishing his breakfast and talking to his wife Jane. Rusk of State, Dillon of the Treasury, Hodges of Commerce, Wirtz of Labor, and Udall of the Interior were poring over their black briefing books. Pierre Salinger gazed absently out the window at the endless blue-gray seascape. In the cockpit the pilot took a reading and made a calculation. The results were annoying. The wind was holding them below 450 mph. He had planned to make Tokyo in one jump; now he realized he would have to refuel at Wake, 1,874 miles away. The change of plan meant little to his distinguished passengers. In Washington each of them was a prisoner of his appointments secretary; if a Cabinet member stepped into the hall for a word with a subordinate, the fact was carefully noted in his official diary. Here they could read and daydream. It was a rare luxury, and they were enjoying it. Even Salinger forgot the silent AP and UPI teletype machines in the communications shack. A White House telephone stood beside it, but there seemed to be no reason why it should ring. In fact, no one had remembered to bring a code book.
Five thousand miles to the east, in Washington, half the men on the streets wore topcoats, half did not. The decision was a tossup. In the capital November 22, 1963, was a day out of season, filled with echoes of summer and warnings of fall: a day of musk, tang, sunlight, and sudden chill, for the wind had a slight bite. The White House had enjoyed one of the quietest mornings in memory. It was 1:21 P.M. in Washington, and the mansion’s outstanding event of November 22 appeared to be the logging in of 1,339 tourists. The East Gate had been closed on the last of them at noon. With the President and Mrs. Kennedy away, J. Bernard West, the chief usher, was spending the afternoon at home with his children. Provi Parades, the First Lady’s maid, was Christmas shopping in Silver Spring, Maryland. In the State Dining Room Charles Fincklin, the maître, had mobilized his six butlers to clean the gold vermeil tableware for Monday’s Erhard dinner, and on the second floor of the East Wing Nancy Tuckerman and Sandy Fox were frowning over the dinner’s seating plan. Protocol on such occasions was thorny, and Nancy, with the last dozen cards in her hand, was worrying over where they should go. At the opposite end of the mansion, in the west basement’s staff mess, Captain Taz Shepard and Dr. Jim Young, George Burkley’s assistant, were eating alone. The room’s big round corner table was more noisy. It had been reserved for Kennedy’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and Clark Clifford, salad fork in hand, was presiding over an intense debate.
There were perhaps a thousand similar colloquies in progress, each of which would be a subject of official interest to the handsome young President now making the slow turn into Dallas’ Main Street. In Washington—indeed, along the entire Atlantic seaboard—this was the hour of the working lunch. Nearly every Kennedy appointee, ally, or adversary was leaning over a plate somewhere, canvassing a matter of policy. At 1:21 Acting Secretary of State George Ball was on the telephone with Acting Secretary of the Treasury Henry Fowler, discussing the wheat sale; Fowler hung up and entered the Treasury dining room to review fiscal reports with his aides. In State’s eighth-floor dining room, the Ambassador for Indonesia was Deputy Under Secretary U. Alexis Johnson’s guest at one table while Under Secretary Averell Harriman, at another, entertained a Congressional delegation. Across the Potomac John McCone, Director of the CIA, was eating with several spies. The Chilean Embassy was host to Senator Hubert Humphrey, whose aspirations for national office had been crushed by John Kennedy in the West Virginia primary of 1960, and to Ralph Dungan, one of Kennedy’s ablest aides. On the Hill John McCormack, the second man in line of succession to the Presidency, had just entered the House restaurant with a group of cronies.
Most of the luncheons weren’t official. Whenever possible men liked to get away from the office early in the afternoon and hole up for an hour or two in a club, a hotel, or a private home. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Former Ambassador to Russia Llewellyn Thompson were in the Metropolitan Club. Fred Holborn was at the Statler, Ted Reardon at the Continental, Chief of Protocol Angie Duke at the Carlton. Nick Katzenbach, the Deputy Attorney General, ate in a cheap seafood restaurant on Pennsylvania, between Ninth and Tenth streets. At O’Donnell’s, Washington’s seafood shrine, Secret Service Chief James Rowley had begun speaking to a class of new agents. Ted Sorensen, at 1:21 P.M., had just left the hotel suite of Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star. Roberts, though a Republican, was an admirer of John Kennedy. He had pressed Sorensen about the rumors that Lyndon Johnson would be dropped from the ticket. All month Presidential aides had been denying this gossip; it was becoming something of a bore. Ted emphatically told Roberts that Johnson was Kennedy’s choice. Then, in the back of his mind, he remembered something. Once Kennedy had pointed out to him that beginning in 1840 every President elected in a twenty-year cycle—Harrison, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, and Franklin Roosevelt—had died in office. It was an historical freak; Kennedy had laughed at it. That was one tradition, he had said, that he intended to break. Sorensen didn’t take it seriously either—it was merely a striking series of coincidences—but Roberts’ mention of the Vice Presidency did trigger a flickering, peripheral recollection of it.
That world of 12:21 was astonishingly uniform. A Telstar camera poised in the sky with a magical Zoomar lens would have photographed identical patterns of behavior in men who thought they had nearly nothing in common. It was almost as though society, in contracting, had mysteriously imposed a rigid conformity upon its leaders. As Dwight Eisenhower, a critic of the administration, lifted a spoon at a “UN We Believe” luncheon in New York, Steve Smith, meeting with an Ohio politician who had become convinced that Kennedy was going to carry the state next fall, was laying down a knife in La Caravelle restaurant a few blocks away. Fidel Castro had no use for either Republicans or Democrats. He would cheerfully have sent both Smith and Eisenhower to the wall. The mere reminder that he shared the same time zone with them would have irritated him. Nevertheless, there he was, and as a North American executive he was entertaining a visiting French journalist at a business lunch seventy-five miles from Havana. They were talking about President Kennedy.
An exception to the culinary rule was Richard N. Goodwin, the New York Times Man in the News that November 22. Goodwin was the victim of last night’s Latin-American party. He had awakened with a hangover and elected to stay home, drafting the announcement of his new appointment. Goodwin was among those Presidential advisers whose memorandums and aide-mémoire would require executive action today, over the telephone, or shortly after Kennedy’s return to the capital. They were a large company. In the Georgetown house of Bill Walton the host had spread sketches for the President’s proposed renovation of Pennsylvania Avenue on a luncheon table and was inspecting them enthusiastically with Charlie Horsky of the White House staff and Assistant Secretary of Labor Pat Moynihan. Walton, about to leave on a cultural mission, had booked a 5 P.M. seat to Moscow; in his absence he expected Kennedy to approve this triumvirate’s decision. In the E Ring of the Pentagon the indefatigable Robert S. McNamara, his ball-point at the ready, was advancing resolutely on a fifty-billion-dollar defense budget. Around him Mac Bundy, Kermit Gordon of the Budget Bureau, and Jerry Wiesner, Kennedy’s scientist-in-residence, were loading adding machines and checking fields of fire in their special sectors. By Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, they had to be in Hyannis Port with final proposals.
Some men, of course, were eating simply because they were hungry. David Ormsby-Gore, the British Ambassador, was dining alone on Massachusetts Avenue; so were the French Ambassador and Madame Alphand, on nearby Kalorama Road. Hale Boggs, famished after a grueling House Ways and Means session, and Walter Jenkins, Lyndon Johnson’s right-hand man, were on their way to quick meals. George Reedy, the Vice President’s aide on Capitol Hill, was still in his office. He thought he would take a break in about a half-hour. (It was to be twenty-four hours before he could spare a minute for a sandwich.) Other Washingtonians were using the lunch hour for personal affairs. Mary McGrory of the Washington Star and Frank Wilson, Roosevelt’s retired Secret Service chief, were in doctors’ offices for checkups. Ben Bradlee, Newsweek’s chief capital correspondent and a close Kennedy friend, was browsing in Brentano’s book store. Angie Novello, the Attorney General’s private secretary, had decided to clean his office. It had, she thought, become altogether too junky. Every paneled wall was adorned with the crayoned drawings of Robert Kennedy’s children, and Angie was carefully peeling off their Scotch tape and filing them away.
Another Kennedy, the President’s sister Eunice, was savoring an unexpected delight. She was actually lunching with her husband. Eunice, expecting another child in February, had come downtown with her four-year-old son Timmy; she had just left the office of Dr. John Walsh. On a sudden whim she called Sargent Shriver. Shriver rarely had time for a break, but today he made the time, and they were sitting quietly with Timmy in the dining room of the Hotel Lafayette. Eunice was wearing a black knit suit. She always wore black during pregnancies; she thought it slimming.
In Washington men of power tend to do everything at least an hour after everyone else. They come to work later, eat later, quit later. Lesser men live by different timetables. Occasionally they even take a day off during the week. Joe Gawler, Washington’s most prestigious undertaker, was cutting the grass in his backyard. Sergeant Keith Clark, the bugler who played taps in Arlington National Cemetery on important occasions—the last time had been Armistice Day, before President Kennedy—was home going through his collection of rare books. Jack Metzler, Arlington’s superintendent, was about to leave for a long weekend. He was checking Monday’s funeral list. It looked like a normal day: twenty-three burials.
At 1:21 Army and Navy posts around the capital had already messed. In Anacostia a young seaman named Ed Nemuth was decorating a hall for an enlisted men’s ball. At Fort Myer a husky blond private named Arthur Carlson, who had been told that he would lead a riderless horse behind a caisson when the next distinguished general died, was stuffing his soiled uniforms into a coin-operated laundromat, and behind the great gates of Arlington itself First Lieutenant Sam Bird was conducting a colonel’s funeral on a plot in the cemetery’s Section 35, near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers. A lean, sinewy Kansan, Sam Bird was the kind of American youth whom Congressmen dutifully praise each Fourth of July and whose existence many, grown jaded by years on the Hill, secretly doubt. The Lieutenant was a square, unsophisticated patriot. The strains of the national anthem still thrilled him. He had joined the Regular Army because he wanted to serve his country, and he considered it an honor to be stationed in the national capital. As a tourist he had visited the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the White House, and he had gazed down reverently at the original copy of the Constitution in the National Archives. The routine of a military burial was never routine to him. He treated each one with gravity and solemnity, and as taps sounded and the clock crept toward 1:30 he watched the colonel’s elderly widow slowly descend the slope beside his grave. Her two sons were assisting her. In her arms she carried the flag from the coffin, folded in its traditional triangle. One son, thinking to lighten her burden, offered to take the colors from her. Wordlessly she shook her head and hugged the banner to her breast. Lieutenant Bird was proud of her.
Not all executives were dining. Some preferred to eat early and plunge quickly into the afternoon’s work, which, for key men, often extended until nine or ten o’clock in the evening. J. Edgar Hoover had been back at his desk for twenty minutes. The U.S. Supreme Court had moved into the long, paneled conference room in the rear of its marble temple behind the Capitol. The justices were pondering ten reapportionment cases. Since 1 P.M. they had been in their high-backed green leather chairs, each with a brass nameplate on the back. At the head of the baize-covered table sat the Chief Justice. Arthur Goldberg, the newest member of the Court, was nearest the door. No outsider was permitted to intrude upon these conferences under any circumstances. If an urgent message arrived, it would be written out and brought to the door by a page. Goldberg would answer the knock.
Tight security was also enforced in the Pentagon’s Gold Room, down the hall from McNamara, where the Joint Chiefs of Staff were in session with the commanders of the West German Bundeswehr. General Maxwell Taylor, the Chiefs’ elegant, scholarly Chairman, dominated one side of the table; opposite him was General Friedrich A. Foertsch, Inspector General of Bonn’s armed forces. Everyone was dressed to the nines—the Germans out of Pflicht, the Americans because they knew the Germans would be that way—and the meeting glittered with gay ribbons and braid.
For sheer color the generals would have put the Supreme Court in the shade; in pageantry the military takes second place only to the Church. There, however, the brightest martial baubles are hopelessly outclassed, and at 1:21 P.M. that afternoon a Prince of the Church was preparing to make precisely that point. Richard Cardinal Cushing was waiting to receive the new naval commander of Boston. The admiral was about to make a courtesy call, and His Eminence was going to receive him in full splendor. Surrounded by golden holy statues, ornate prie-dieux, and oil paintings rich in medieval imagery, the Cardinal stood erect in his magnificent robes. With his warrior’s shoulders, square jaw, and penetrating eyes, he looked more like a Cherokee than a saint. He carried himself like an ancient Hamite chieftain, and he spoke in the imperious tones of command. He only hoped he didn’t have to talk too much. He suffered much from asthma and emphysema, and had to sleep with two tanks of oxygen in his bedroom. “Don’t tell me. I know,” he growled to a lay sister. “I sound like Lazarus after four days in the tomb.”
Of all the Kennedy acquaintances who were toiling at that hour, the man with the least ostentatious office (and the most mellifluous voice) was David Brinkley of NBC. Brinkley’s workshop wasn’t much larger than a washroom in a filling station, and he was bowed over an old-fashioned rolltop desk. He wasn’t on the air; there were no network programs at that hour. The local NBC station, whose manager was out to lunch, was running what Brinkley regarded as a remarkably silly fashion show. Unlike Cardinal Cushing, General Taylor, and Chief Justice Warren, Brinkley was not a maker of history; he merely commented upon it. His presence on the job is worth noting because eighteen years earlier, as a twenty-five-year-old correspondent, he had been alone in NBC’s Washington office when word arrived that Franklin Roosevelt had died in Warm Springs, Georgia. He still remembered mispronouncing the word “cortege” during the Roosevelt funeral and being reprimanded for it.
The weekday lives of most women had nothing to do with offices and working luncheons. They were busy with housewifely chores—feeding children, shopping—or amusing themselves. Mary Ann (“Andy”) Stewart, in Washington, and Pat Kennedy Lawford, in Santa Monica, California, were changing dresses with the help of their maids. Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother, Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss, had just returned from the Chevy Chase Country Club and was seated at her desk in her golf clothes, catching up on correspondence. Joanie Douglas was packing; tonight Justice Douglas would address New York’s Yale Club on the eve of the game. Metzler’s wife, in Arlington; Nina Warren, in the Chief Justice’s Washington apartment; and Rosemary Kennedy, in a Wisconsin home for the retarded, were watching television. Jean Kennedy Smith was with Lem Billings, who had been the President’s roommate at Choate, in downtown Manhattan. Jean had just selected three Christmas presents, identical paintings of the Kennedy boat Victura, for the President, the Attorney General, and the junior Senator from Massachusetts. The Senator’s wife Joan was in the Elizabeth Arden beauty parlor on Washington’s Connecticut Avenue, putting on a face for tonight’s anniversary dinner. In Hyannis Port a cousin, Ann Gargan, had just put Joseph P. Kennedy down for his afternoon nap. They had watched the one o’clock news together—though an invalid, the tough old Ambassador wanted to know which of his children were making headlines—and Ann was about to leave the Cape for a visit with her sister in Detroit. The President’s mother was also lying down. Ann was being zipped up by the Ambassador’s nurse, Mrs. Rita Dallas.
Four hundred miles to the south the United States Senate was dozing through a soporific debate on the need for federal library services, and the floor, at present, belonged to bespectacled Senator Winston L. Prouty of Vermont, who looked a little like a librarian himself. Occasionally he glanced up from his gleaming mahogany desk toward the great chair of the President of the Senate, which, framed dramatically against a background of red Levanto marble pilasters and a heavy blue velvet drape embellished with a gold embroidered border, stood beneath the white marble motto “E Pluribus Unum.” Since the President of the Senate was also the Vice President of the United States, he was out of earshot. At the moment he was hunched in the convertible on Harwood Street, listening to the Dallas radio as Hurchel Jacks prepared to make the ninety-degree swing into Main Street. In his absence his seat on the rostrum was occupied by President Kennedy’s younger brother, Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
Just off the fluted Senatorial chamber was the President’s Room, so called because Chief Executives from Lincoln to Hoover had come there to sign bills into law. Under Franklin Roosevelt the room had fallen into disuse. Then individual Senators began using it for private meetings with members of the press, though some demurred; when Jacqueline Bouvier, then a reporter for the now defunct Washington Times Herald, interviewed Senator-elect John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts in 1952, for example, he talked to her elsewhere. (She asked him what he thought of the Senate pages. He told her he thought they ought to change places with the Senators, because they were more distinguished-looking and, in his case, older.) Today Richard L. Riedel, a press liaison officer, sat alone in the President’s Room reading the Washington Post. Riedel was admiring a cheerful spread of pictures showing the Kennedys in San Antonio and Houston. Now and then he would stride into the Senate lobby and glance at the AP teletype there. A partisan, Riedel preferred the AP machine because it was at the Democratic end of the lobby; he avoided the UPI ticker on the Republican side.
Sitting in the Vice President’s chair was regarded as an honor, but Ted Kennedy, like his brother before him, regarded it with mixed feelings. The Kennedys were active. They all liked rough games, competition, challenge; and Attorney General Kennedy was undoubtedly more serene than Senator Kennedy at that moment. All day Thursday and throughout Friday morning the Attorney General had been holding marathon meetings in the Justice Department on ways to combat organized crime. The sessions were to resume in the afternoon. Meanwhile he had brought two luncheon guests to his McLean, Virginia, home—United States Attorney Robert Morgenthau of New York and Morgenthau’s assistant. Robert Kennedy had taken a quick dip in the backyard swimming pool, changed to dry shorts, and joined his wife and their two guests around a table by the shallow end of the pool. As they ate chowder Morgenthau idly watched a man in overalls working on the mansion’s new wing, which had become a necessity with the Attorney General’s growing family. The workman was hanging shutters with one hand and holding a transistor radio in the other. His painter’s hat was jammed over his ears; he seemed completely divorced from reality. Few men were closer to reality than his employer. Because of Robert Kennedy’s unique position in the government the Signal Corps had installed a battery of White House phones in and around his house. NAtional 8-1414 reached Robert Kennedy as quickly as John Kennedy. While Lyndon Johnson had only one line to the mansion switchboard, this yard alone had two: Extension 163, housed in a small green wooden structure at the foot of the pool, and, in another box by the tennis court on the far side of the rolling lawn, Extension 2324.
In one sense the Kennedys were an anachronism. The mobile society of the 1960’s loosened familial ties more and more each year, but their clan remained tightly knit. Intimacy with cousins began at a very early age, and John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s playmates at 1:21 P.M. were little Edward M. Kennedy, Jr. and his sister Kara. Teddy and Kara were busy with a fire engine. Young John had flung his legs over the brown rocking horse in his second-floor room. He was shouting lustily and whacking its already battered head. Maude Shaw looked wistfully at the clock. In nine minutes Teddy and Kara’s Irish nurse would take them home to Georgetown. Miss Shaw could then tuck John in for his 1:30 nap and hope he would drop off. Sometimes she felt she was getting too old for such a vigorous child. As often as not he would writhe beneath the covers for a quarter-hour and then come charging out, a toy plane in his hand, ready to pursue her. Caroline was so different, quiet and pensive like her mother. Miss Shaw was going to miss Caroline tonight. Momentarily she hoped the girl would miss her, too; then she dismissed the thought as selfish.
The White House school had ended its daily session at 1:15. Downstairs on the South Portico the President’s daughter was standing in a powder-blue coat and new red lace-up shoes, patiently holding her suitcase in one hand and her pink bear in the other. With her were Agatha Pozen and two other classmates. They were awaiting Agatha’s mother, the Friday car pool driver, who was about to become Caroline’s overnight hostess. It was a familiar social ritual for girls approaching their sixth birthday, and in most ways it resembled thousands of similar partings on other, less imposing American porches. There was one conspicuous distinction. As a member of the First Family Caroline had to be guarded. Tom Wells, a dark young agent, would follow Mrs. Pozen in a black Ford linked by radio to the White House network. The Ford was ready to go, Wells was ready, and so was Betsy Boyd, the school’s kindergarten teacher. Miss Boyd had to catch a train, but she wanted to see Caroline off first. Alice Grimes, the head of the school, and Agent Bob Foster urged her to go ahead. “Mrs. Pozen’s always late,” Foster said. “Why don’t you just take off?”
A few minutes later Liz Pozen’s Country Squire station wagon swung through the White House Southwest Gate. A guard in the sentry box called a friendly greeting, but she couldn’t hear him; she was listening to station WGMS on her car radio.
In Texas 12:21 crept toward 12:22 as Dean Gorham, director of the state’s Municipal Retirement System, raced westward along Route 71 in his blue Buick. Gorham was fighting the clock. Last evening he had attended the Albert Thomas testimonial and registered at a Houston motel. He had intended to sleep late. This morning, however, he had been awakened by a frantic call from a fellow Democrat. Through an oversight the programs for tonight’s dinner in Austin had been left in the shop of the Houston printer. People paying $100 a plate were entitled to souvenir menus. Could Gorham pick them up and deliver them to Austin’s Municipal Auditorium in time?
He was doing his best, but the rain hadn’t slacked until he reached the junction of Routes 90 and 71 at Columbus. He was still east of Smithville, and he knew the expected arrival of Air Force One at 3:15 P.M. would snarl traffic for miles around the state capital. To keep posted on the progress of the Presidential party, he was listening attentively to his car radio. He wished something would delay it for a few minutes, just enough to take the pressure off him. So far it was moving along smoothly on schedule. Gorham had stopped for a vanilla malted and was sipping it as he drove, substituting it for lunch. On the seat beside him lay the bundled programs, each with a welcoming message from Governor Connally to the Kennedys which ended, “This is a day to be remembered in Texas.”
The President’s advance man for Austin, Bill Moyers, Kennedy’s brightest young Texan and Sargent Shriver’s Deputy Director of the Peace Corps, was lunching after having double-checked preparations there. The programs excepted, Moyers had found everything ready for tonight. Places had been set, a ton and a half of tossed salad had been mixed, and fires were being banked for eight thousand steaks. (Steak is not what Catholics usually eat on Friday, but it was too late to do anything about that.) Ticket sales had brought $350,000 into the Kennedy-Johnson war chest, and since midmorning the ticket holders had been converging on Austin from all over the state. Most were still on the road. A few hadn’t left home, among them National Committeeman Byron Skelton, who had just slipped into his tuxedo in his Temple home and was peering into his mirror, adjusting his black tie.
The tempo at Volcano, as the Secret Service called the LBJ Ranch, was also beginning to quicken. Agents from the White House Detail had set up their advance post in a Johnson City motel. At 8 P.M. they planned to seal off Volcano; after that no one would be allowed to enter without a pass. On the banks of the river Bess Abell was now supervising a final dress rehearsal of the whip-cracking and sheep-herding entertainers. Hundreds of freshly baked pies were cooling on a long wooden table outside the kitchen. Inside, Helen Williams, a maid, followed the progress of the Dallas motorcade over the radio as she worked.
In Fort Worth Marguerite Oswald was watching her sixth straight hour of television; during commercials she had bathed and changed into her white practical nurse’s uniform. Marguerite had forgotten the President’s visit. She was wholly engrossed in her favorite programs. Marina Oswald was similarly intent upon the Zenith television screen in Irving; Ruth Paine was in the kitchen preparing lunch. Kennedy’s visit was very much on the mind of Ruth’s husband Michael, however. Michael Paine was eating with a student named Dave Noel in a restaurant between Fort Worth and Dallas. It seemed to Paine that he had heard nothing except malicious assassination jokes for the past two days. They oppressed him, and over sandwiches he and Noel—afterward he couldn’t remember which of them had introduced the subject—talked about the emotional makeup of assassins. After a few false starts they dropped the topic, agreeing that neither knew enough history to discuss it sensibly.
Friday is payday in Dallas, which, to Parkland Hospital, meant an exceptionally large number of patients injured in drunken brawls. But the tide of casualties wouldn’t hit the emergency room until late evening, and the noon-hour atmosphere was relaxed. The chief surgeon was in Houston; the chief nurse had driven to a nursing conference fifteen miles away. Jack Price, Parkland’s administrator, was standing at the window of his office, admiring the golden weather on Harry Hines Boulevard. He was trying to decide whether or not he should allow some of his employees to step out and watch the passing motorcade. In an adjoining room an assistant had been working all morning on Parkland’s budget for the coming year. He stepped in and tossed it on Price’s desk. “It’s in balance, Jack,” he said.
At the Trade Mart, within walking distance of the hospital, an organist was warming up with several choruses of “Hail to the Chief.” Agent Stewart Stout’s four-to-twelve shift—so called because those were their working hours at the executive mansion; when traveling they were on call around the clock—had taken up their stations there, preparing to relieve Emory Roberts’ eight-to-four shift when the motorcade arrived. Two hundred Texas law enforcement officers had ringed the building. They were in a no-nonsense mood; Sergeant Robert E. Dugger of the Dallas Police Department watched plainclothes men carry away three of the men with anti-Kennedy placards. Chief Curry’s decision to concentrate his heaviest force in and around the luncheon sheds some light on the Dallas leadership’s self-distrust. The invitation list consisted largely of powerful civic leaders. The President should have been entirely safe with them. But many belonged to extremist organizations—the editor of the Dallas Times Herald was standing with an avowed member of the John Birch Society—and the Trade Mart had been made one of the two strongest links of the local security chain, second only to the airport.
The weakest link in downtown Dallas was Dealey Plaza. East of there, on Main Street, the police had anticipated a crowd; every block was under the surveillance of an inspector. To the west of the plaza, beyond the triple underpass, the speed of the motorcade on Stemmons Freeway would assure safety until the President reached the embattled Trade Mart. There had been 365 Dallas policemen at Love Field, there were 60 at the Mart. In the two blocks from the Main-to-Houston turn to the underpass there were scattered patrolmen, but both organization and speed would be absent. The gap had been justified because there would be few spectators along the Main-Houston-Elm zigzag.
Certainly the lines of onlookers were thinner around the Book Depository than in the shopping district. Nevertheless it was a large gathering for the neighborhood. Abraham Zapruder’s secretary, looking down from the Dal-Tex Building, was impressed by the number of people crowding the curbs and shouldering their way to the edge of the plaza grass. Some had brought children. Charles Brend, a young Dallas father, kept repeating to his five-year-old son, “Be sure and wave at the President, and maybe he’ll wave back.” In front of the Depository Roy Truly and his boys were listening for the growl of approaching motorcycles. To their right a tall live oak spread its branches up to the fourth floor, and thirty feet to the right of the tree, above a cluster of route signs, stubby Abe Zapruder crouched on a low concrete abutment between the Depository and the underpass. He had snapped a telephoto lens on his camera and was explaining jovially to a stenographer behind him, “Hey, Marion, if I feel around, I’m not trying to play with you. I’m just trying to get my balance, understand? This Zoomar distorts things, it’s hard to see.”
At that moment an alert policeman, scanning windows, could have altered the course of history. For Lee Oswald was in position now, clearly visible to those below. A youth named Arnold Rowland, who knew guns, had been watching from below with his wife since 12:14 P.M. (The Hertz sign, so conspicuous, made possible the establishment of exact times.) He saw Oswald silhouetted in the window, holding what appeared to be a high-powered rifle mounted with a telescopic sight. One of Oswald’s hands was on the stock and the other was on the barrel; he held the weapon diagonally across his body at port arms, like a Marine on a rifle range. A police officer stood twelve feet from the Rowlands, but it never occurred to Arnold to speak to him. Assuming that Oswald must be protecting the President, he said to his wife, “Do you want to see a Secret Service agent?” “Where?” she asked. “In that building there,” he said.
On the west side of Houston Street Robert Edwards and Ronald Fischer of the county auditor’s office had been waiting since 12:20 P.M. They had been told they needn’t return to their desks until the President had passed, and they were enjoying the warm weather. Suddenly Edwards pointed and said, “Look at that guy.” Fischer followed his finger. The weapon was below their line of sight; what had attracted Edwards’ attention was Oswald’s stance. Fischer agreed that it was peculiar. He was transfixed, staring to his right, away from Main. To Fischer it seemed that “he never moved, he didn’t even blink his eyes, he was just gazing, like a statue.”
The closest known eyewitness, Howard L. Brennan, the frail pipefitter, had headed for the plaza at 12:18 P.M.—again the Hertz sign on the Depository roof pinpointed the moment—and settled down on a three-and-a-half-foot-high white cement wall on the edge of the plaza, directly across from Roy Truly’s group at the warehouse entrance. There, at the intersection of Houston and Elm, Brennan was forty yards beneath Oswald. Waiting in the sun, he dried his forehead on the sleeve of his khaki work shirt and then peered up, hoping Hertz would tell him the temperature. But that part of the sign was obscure from here. His eyes dropped to the warehouse’s sixth floor, to the pinched face of Lee Oswald, now in profile. He, too, wondered why the young man was standing stock-still.
There was a sound of distant shouting from Main Street. Brennan, Rowland, Edwards, and Fischer forgot the strange figure in the open window and pivoted. Edwards said excitedly, “Here it comes.”
To Jacqueline Kennedy it was Mexico all over again—hot, wild, loud, with the blazing sun strong in your face and the cheers washing over you like a brighter light, the waves of affection engulfing you until you forgot this rather ordinary street and the faded red, white, and blue convention bunting strung overhead and the advertisements for Thom McAn Shoes, Hallmark Cards, Hart Schaffner & Marx Clothes, Walgreen Drugs—giving yourself to the spectators as they gave themselves to you: beaming, laughing, greeting strangers who at the moment of greeting were strangers no longer, who in their ardor became close friends for a fraction of time as the glittering blue convertible, its fender flags fluttering, breasted the breakers of noise and moved steadily ahead past the police barriers marking each intersection.
12:22. Main and Ervay.
A dozen young people surged into the street; from his curbside command post Dallas’ husky Inspector Herbert Sawyer gave a signal and a clutch of patrolmen closed in, pressing them back. The Secret Service showed signs of activity. Clint Hill jogged alongside the First Lady, and Jack Ready had leaped off Halfback’s right fender to block an enthusiastic amateur photographer. In Varsity Lem Johns cracked his door, holding it open a few inches so he could break out quickly if anyone rushed Lyndon Johnson.
On the left loomed the Mercantile Building and the Neiman-Marcus department store. Lady Bird, wedged between Lyndon and Ralph Yarborough, looked up at a Neiman-Marcus window and recognized Mary Griffith, a dressmaker who had fitted her in that store twenty-five years before. The two women exchanged frantic feminine wigwags.
The seventh floor of the Mercantile Building was the headquarters of H. L. Hunt, Dallas’ billionaire. Flanked by two secretaries, Hunt stared down as the President gaily saluted the mob in front of Walgreen’s.
12:23. Main and Akard.
Forrest Sorrels, in the lead car, heard shouts of “The President’s coming!” He craned his neck and muttered to Lawson, “My God, look at the people hanging out the windows!”
Clint Hill was watching the windows. So was Yarborough, and he didn’t like them. The Senator was delighted by the throngs on the sidewalks. Next to the President, he was the most exuberant campaigner in the motorcade. Ignoring the raucous radio and the Vice President, who continued to appear saturnine, Yarborough kept bellowing lustily, “Howdy, thar!” He searched for familiar faces and spotted a surprising number of friends from rural east Texas. But there were no friends in the office windows. The men there, he noticed, weren’t cheering at all. He squinted up, trying to read their thoughts. To him it seemed that their expressions were hard and disapproving; he had the impression that they were outraged by the display of Kennedy support on the sidewalks.
The spectators at Akard were ten deep, and among them, in the rear row, stood Managing Editor Jack Krueger of the Dallas News. Krueger wasn’t working. For the first time in his life he was on federal jury duty. He could have offered a professional excuse, but he considered jury service a civic responsibility and had been absent from his desk for six weeks. If a big story broke, the paper would have to cover it without him; he couldn’t leave the courtroom unless the elderly judge dismissed him. Now, during the noon break, he had slipped over to his bank. Unlike Ted Dealey, Krueger was tall and physically impressive, yet in this jam he could catch a glimpse of the President only by standing on tiptoe.
12:24. Main and Field.
Jim Hosty, the local FBI agent in charge of Lee Oswald’s file, had his wish. He saw Kennedy from the curb and then stepped into the Alamo Grill for lunch. His day, he felt, was made.
12:26. Main and Poydras.
Marie Fehmer saw her mother standing on the left, semaphored to her from the VIP bus, and wondered whether she had been seen. Liz Carpenter, listening to the echoing roars, crowed, “Well, this pulls the rug out from under the Dallas News and Barry Goldwater!”
Not everyone was so sure. Henry Gonzalez, like Yarborough, continued to be skeptical of the city. But the Congressman and the Senator were exceptions. Mac Kilduff decided that his fears had been unfounded. This was turning out to be one of the best receptions Kennedy had had all week, including Florida. The street had begun to remind Larry O’Brien of New York’s Broadway. The canyon of buildings was the same, and so was the feverish tumult. Ken O’Donnell was on his feet, taking a professional reading. Maybe these were the only Kennedy backers in Dallas, but their fire was real enough, and as people on the President’s side called pleadingly, “Jackie, over here! Over here, Jackiiieee!” O’Donnell’s instinct told him that the First Lady was going to become increasingly valuable in the months ahead.
In SS 100 X the President waved again. The roar swelled, rising and rising, and Nellie Connally heard him saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” They can’t hear him, she mused. Why does he bother? She supposed it was habit. He had been brought up to be gracious.
Clint was on the running board, back in the street, on again, off again. He had lost track of the number of times he had hit the pavement. He began to breathe heavily. Ready, after his one foray, clung to the running board. None of the other agents left the car.
Lamar Street, Austin Street…
12:28. Main and Market.
The neighborhood began to deteriorate. They were entering a seamy section of bail-bond shops, bars, a public gym. It occurred to Yarborough that anyone could drop a pot of flowers on Kennedy from an upper story. It will be good to have the President out of this, he thought, and then he saw that they were nearly at the end. Two blocks ahead on the left lay the ugly Gothic sandstone courthouse, and, on the right, the dingy county Records Building. Beyond them the green of Dealey Plaza was visible. My, that open sky looks good, the Senator thought. He remembered that he had some friends among the county bailiffs and squirmed around, looking for them. Then he saw the lead car ahead was turning right at the Records Building. Mistakenly he believed they could reach Stemmons Freeway directly from Main. Unaware of the traffic island ahead, which made the detour to Elm Street necessary, Yarborough gaped. Why right? It was the wrong direction. What was over there?
12:29. Main and Houston.
The crowd around the corner was smaller. After the zig off Main and onto Houston, Clint hopped back on the running board and took a deep breath. Yet even here the people were clapping hard, and Nellie, surprised and delighted at Dallas’ showing, twisted in her jump seat. “You sure can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President,” she said jubilantly. Kennedy smiled and answered, “No, you can’t.”
Chief Curry spun the wheel of the lead car left, entering Elm Street, the sharp zag after the zig. It was easy for him. He had done it a thousand times. But the turn was 120 degrees. Bill Greer, swinging the Lincoln around, nearly had to stop in front of Roy Truly. Sam Kinney in Halfback and Hurchel Jacks in the Vice Presidential car would have the same problem. “Hell,” Jacks said under his breath, sizing it up, “that’s going to be practically a U-turn.”
12:30. Houston and Elm.
The motorcade now resembled the figure Z. Curry, at the top, was approaching the overpass. Three drivers—Greer, Kinney, Jacks—trailed him on Elm. The Book Depository was situated at the point of the sharp angle. The second section of the procession was proceeding toward it on Houston. The third section—a station wagon, the VIP bus, and the Signals car—was still on Main.
Sorrels was saying to Curry, “Five more minutes and we’ll have him there.” Noting that there was only a handful of spectators ahead, Lawson alerted the four-to-twelve shift. He radioed the Trade Mart that they would reach there in five minutes. Then he automatically scanned the overpass. There were railway workmen on top, a security breach. Through the windshield he motioned urgently to a policeman there in a yellow rain slicker, indicating that he wanted the area cleared. The officer was unresponsive. He didn’t understand.
Greer, recovering from the difficult turn, started to relax. The strain was over. Then he, too, noticed the workmen. Puzzled, he studied the unfamiliar street to see whether he could veer at the last minute if necessary and take the President beneath a deserted part of the span. The Lincoln was now passing the live oak, which momentarily screened John Kennedy from the muzzle in the sixth-floor corner window. Abe Zapruder, hunched over his Zoomar lens, was photographing SS 100 X as it approached him. Nellie pointed to the underpass and said to Jackie, “We’re almost through. It’s just beyond that.” Jackie thought, How pleasant the cool tunnel will be. Everything seemed very quiet here. She turned to the left. Charles Brend held his son aloft: now was a good time to wave at the President.
Kinney, hugging the bumper of SS 100 X, was still keeping his eyes on Kennedy’s head. Ken O’Donnell returned to his jump seat. “What’s the story on the time, Dave?” he asked Powers. “I’ve got 12:30,” Powers replied. “That’s not bad, considering the crowd. We’re only five minutes late.” In the front seat Emory Roberts radioed the Mart, “Halfback to Base. Five minutes to destination.” He then wrote in his shift report: “12:35 pm President Kennedy arrived at Trade Mart.”
Rufe Youngblood, fingering the leather strap of his portable Secret Service radio, was also aware of the time. The Hertz sign told him, and he remembered that 12:30 was their estimated time of arrival at the luncheon. Behind Youngblood, Lady Bird had been gazing idly at the red brick of the Dal-Tex Building and then the rust-colored brick façade of the Book Depository. Lyndon was still listening to the car radio. Yarborough, now that they had changed direction, felt reassured.
Varsity was making the 120-degree turn.
The pool car was approaching it. Kilduff, misreading the sign on the front of the warehouse, said to Merriman Smith, “What the hell is a Book Repository?”
Back on Main Street Evelyn Lincoln was saying, “Just think—we’ve come through all of Dallas and there hasn’t been a single demonstration.” One of Liz Carpenter’s local friends laughed. “That’s Dallas,” she said. “We’re not so bad.”
The Lincoln moved ahead at 11.2 miles an hour. It passed the tree. Zapruder, slowly swinging his camera to the right, found himself photographing the back of a freeway sign. Momentarily the entire car was obscured. But it was no longer hidden from the sixth-floor corner window. It had passed the last branch.
Brend’s five-year-old boy timidly raised his hand. The President smiled warmly. He raised his hand to wave back.
There was a sudden, sharp, shattering sound.
Various individuals heard it differently. Jacqueline Kennedy believed it was a motorcycle noise. Curry was under the impression that someone had fired a railroad torpedo. Ronald Fischer and Bob Edwards, assuming that it was a backfire, chuckled. Most of the hunters in the motorcade—Sorrels, Connally, Yarborough, Gonzalez, Albert Thomas—instinctively identified it as rifle fire.
But the White House Detail was confused. Their experience in outdoor shooting was limited to two qualification courses a year on a range in Washington’s National Arboretum. There they heard only their own weapons, and they were unaccustomed to the bizarre effects that are created when small-arms fire echoes among unfamiliar structures—in this case, the buildings of Dealey Plaza.1 Emory Roberts recognized Oswald’s first shot as a shot. So did Youngblood, whose alert response may have saved Lyndon Johnson’s life. They were exceptions. The men in Halfback were bewildered. They glanced around uncertainly. Lawson, Kellerman, Greer, Ready, and Hill all thought that a firecracker had been exploded. The fact that this was a common reaction is no mitigation. It was the responsibility of James J. Rowley, Chief of the Secret Service, and Jerry Behn, Head of the White House Detail, to see that their agents were trained to cope with precisely this sort of emergency. They were supposed to be picked men, honed to a matchless edge. It was comprehensible that Roy Truly should dismiss the first shot as a cherry bomb. It was even fathomable that Patrolman James M. Chaney, mounted on a motorcycle six feet from the Lincoln, should think that another machine had backfired. Chaney was an ordinary policeman, not a Presidential bodyguard. The protection of the Chief Executive, on the other hand, was the profession of Secret Service agents. They existed for no other reason. Apart from Clint Hill—and perhaps Jack Ready, who started to step off the right running board and was ordered back by Roberts—the behavior of the men in the follow-up car was unresponsive. Even more tragic was the perplexity of Roy Kellerman, the ranking agent in Dallas, and Bill Greer, who was under Kellerman’s supervision. Kellerman and Greer were in a position to take swift evasive action, and for five terrible seconds they were immobilized.
However, three shots may well have been fired. Indeed, three could have been fired within the crucial time span. Afterward it was argued that this was impossible, since fewer than six seconds elapsed between the first shot and the third, and tests demonstrated that at least 2.3 seconds were required to operate the bolt on Oswald’s rifle. The arithmetic went: 2.3 + 2.3 + 2.3 = 6.9. It was a trick. A correct calculation would run as follows: the first shot is fired, 2.3 seconds pass; the second shot is fired, 2.3 seconds pass; the third shot is fired. Total elapsed time: 4.6 seconds.
Hill, though mistaken about the noise, saw Kennedy lurch forward and grab his neck. That was enough for Clint. With his extraordinary reflexes he leaped out into Elm Street and charged forward.
Powers, in Halfback’s right-hand jump seat, shouted at O’Donnell, “I think the President’s been hit!”
In the Vice Presidential car Yarborough thought he smelled gunpowder. “My God!” he yelled. “They’ve shot the President!”
Lady Bird gasped, “Oh, no, that can’t be!”
Above the car radio Lyndon Johnson had heard what he knew to be an explosion. Before he could define it further he saw Youngblood coming over the front seat toward him.
Youngblood was less positive than he seemed. In the back of his mind he was thinking that if he was wrong this was going to be very embarrassing. But his voice was firm. He snapped at Johnson, “Get down!”
Kilduff, in the pool car directly under the gun, asked, “What was that?”
Bob Baskin, in the seat behind Kilduff, knew what it was; he was an infantry veteran of the 85th Division, and he looked around wildly for cover.
Captain Stoughton automatically reached for his telescopic lens.
“Is that a motorcycle backfire?” asked Congressman Young. Henry Gonzalez, who had been hunting only last Sunday, cried, “No, it’s gunfire!” The policeman driving their car immediately said, “You’re right,” and Gonzalez, remembering that day in Congress when Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the gallery, thought, Can this be another Puerto Rico?
On Main Street Ted Clifton said, “That’s crazy, firing a salute here.” Godfrey McHugh said, “It is silly.”
In the VIP bus Dr. Burkley was staring out absently at store windows. The President’s physician had heard nothing. He was too far back.
The President was wounded, but not fatally. A 6.5 millimeter bullet had entered the back of his neck, bruised his right lung, ripped his windpipe, and exited at his throat, nicking the knot of his tie.2 Continuing its flight, it had passed through Governor Connally’s back, chest, right wrist, and left thigh, although the Governor, suffering a delayed reaction, was not yet aware of it. At the moment, in fact, Connally was glancing over his right shoulder in the direction of what he had recognized as a rifle shot.
As the Lincoln emerged from behind the freeway sign, it reappeared in Abe Zapruder’s line of vision. Abe saw the stifled look on the President’s face and was stunned. Continuing to train his camera on the car, he wondered whether Kennedy could be pretending. It was as though he were saying, “Oh, they got me.” Abe thought, The President is to joke?
Nellie Connally twisted in her seat and looked sharply at Kennedy. His hands were at his throat, but he wasn’t grimacing. He had slumped a little.
Roy Kellerman thought he had heard the President call in his inimitable accent, “My God, I’m hit!” Roy looked over his left shoulder—Greer, beside him, was looking over his right shoulder; the car, wobbling from side to side, slowly veered out of line—and they saw that Kennedy was hit.
At this instant the impact of John Connally’s wound hit him. It was as though someone had jabbed him in the back with a gigantic fist. He pitched forward, saw that his lap was covered with blood, and toppled to the left, toward his wife. Both John and Nellie were aware that the Lincoln was slowing down. Huddled together, they glanced up and saw the astounded faces of Kellerman and Greer, inches from their own.
Suddenly the Governor felt doomed. He panicked.
“No, no, no, no, no!” he shrieked. “They’re going to kill us both!”
Jacqueline Kennedy heard him. In a daze she wondered, Why is he screaming?
Already she had started to turn anxiously to her husband.
Greer turned back to the wheel. Kellerman, hesitant, glanced over his shoulder again. Neither had yet reacted to the crisis.
And now it was too late. Howard Brennan, open-mouthed, saw Oswald take deliberate aim for his final shot. There was an unexpected, last-moment distraction overhead. The first shot had alarmed the birds. As the sound ricocheted in the amphitheater below, the band-tailed pigeons had begun to depart, first in twos and threes, then in swarms, until now there were a thousand wings flapping overhead, rising higher and higher until they had formed a great ragged fluttering fan overhead, a deep blue V blending into the gentler blue of the overarching sky.
Crooking his arm, Oswald drew a fresh bead with his Italian rifle. Ready on the left, ready on the right, all ready on the firing line, his Marine Corps instructors had shouted on the San Diego range, signaling the appearance of rapid-fire targets. He was ready now. They had also told him to hold his front sight at six o’clock on an imaginary clock dial. It was there, and steady. His target, startlingly clear in the cross hairs of his telescopic sight, was eighty-eight yards away.
He squeezed the trigger.
The First Lady, in her last act as First Lady, leaned solicitously toward the President. His face was quizzical. She had seen that expression so often, when he was puzzling over a difficult press conference question. Now, in a gesture of infinite grace, he raised his right hand, as though to brush back his tousled chestnut hair. But the motion faltered. The hand fell back limply. He had been reaching for the top of his head. But it wasn’t there anymore