The Death of a President

Lee Oswald, watched by the stupefied Brennan, steps back into the shadows in the deliberate lock step of a Marine marksman retiring from the range.

The plaza resembles nothing so much as a field which has just been swept by a mighty wind. Charles Brend has thrown his son to the ground and is shielding him with his body. From his station behind the right fender of SS 100 X Officer Clyde Haygood rams the north curb with his motorcycle, overturns, leaves the wheels spinning, and scrambles up the grassy side of the overpass embankment, pistol in hand. A man, thinking to save a woman, tackles her from behind. Bob Jackson, a photographer for the Dallas Times Herald, has just seen the rifle barrel being withdrawn. He gapes, unbelieving, at the open window. Motorcyclist Marrion Baker, riding right beside the Lincoln, is staring up at the pigeons. A policeman near Roy Truly mutters hoarsely, “Goddamn.” Abe Zapruder screeches over and over, “They killed him! They killed him! They killed him! They killed him!”

From the rear of the follow-up car Agent Hickey raises the barrel of the AR-15 and points it about aimlessly. In the jump seats Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers have heard the sickening impact of the fatal bullet, and Dave has seen it. O’Donnell crosses himself. Powers whispers, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph…” Sam Kinney, seeing the back of the President’s head erupt, stamps on his siren button with his left foot to alert Kellerman and Greer; Halfback’s fender siren opens up with an ear-shattering wail. Simultaneously, Sam swerves to the right to avoid Clint Hill. Clint is in the street between Halfback’s front bumper and the rear bumper of SS 100 X. His head is low, he is about to leave his feet.

The Lincoln continues to slow down. Its interior is a place of horror. The last bullet has torn through John Kennedy’s cerebellum, the lower part of his brain. Leaning toward her husband Jacqueline Kennedy has seen a serrated piece of his skull—flesh-colored, not white—detach itself. At first there is no blood. And then, in the very next instant, there is nothing but blood spattering her, the Connallys, Kellerman, Greer, the upholstery, Clint running up behind, the curb alongside. Gobs of blood as thick as a man’s hand are soaking the floor of the back seat, the President’s clothes are steeped in it, the roses are drenched, Kennedy’s body is lurching soundlessly toward his wife, and Motorcycle Police Officer Hargis, two feet from her, is doused in the face by a red sheet. To Kellerman it appears that the air is full of moist sawdust; Nellie wonders if she is being sprayed by spent buckshot; but John Connally knows, John suddenly recalls his boyhood in the Model T, in a flash he remembers his father and Carlos Estrada, and as he slides bleeding into Nellie’s lap he fills his lungs and screams again and screams again and screams again in agony; in terror she begins to scream, too; and they are overwhelmed by matter, saturated in Kennedy’s bright blood; and one fragment, larger than the rest, rises over the President’s falling shoulders and seems to hang there and then drift toward the rear, and Jackie springs up on her stained knees, facing toward the sidewalk, crying out, “My God, what are they doing? My God, they’ve killed Jack, they’ve killed my husband, Jack, Jack!” she cries and sprawls on the sloping back of the car, defeated, tumbling down toward the street and Halfback’s approaching wheels and Kinney knows he cannot stop.

Incredibly, the tawdry Hertz clock overhead still reads 12:30. The motorcade has retained its fishhook formation. All the birds have departed. The sky is again the same faultless blue. Everything beyond the immediate scene looks as it did. Dallas, the country, and the world have not had time to respond. But they are not the same, they can never be; the thirty-fifth President of the United States has been assassinated; John Kennedy is gone, and all he could do for his country is history.

By now there had been a reaction in the front seat of SS 100 X. “Move it out,” Kellerman told Greer. To the microphone he said, “Lawson, this is Kellerman. We are hit. Get us to a hospital.”¹

The back of the Lincoln was equipped with metal grips on the trunk for agents and a step on each side of the spare tire. Clint had his fingers in the left grip and his toe in the left step 2.6 seconds after the last shot; he had just begun to surge up when Greer rammed the accelerator to the floor. The Lincoln’s 8,000 pounds of steel sprang forward, dislodging Clint’s foot. He was dead weight and dragging. Desperately he tightened his fist on the grip. His other arm flailed at nothing. Mrs. Kennedy pivoted toward the rear and reached for him; their hands touched, clenched, and locked. It is impossible to say who saved whom. Neither remembers,² and the Zapruder film is inconclusive. She drew him up, and he, vaulting ahead, pushed her down until she tumbled back into the car. The window beside her had been raised a few inches. Clint anchored his left hand there, hooked his right foot on the opposite side of the car, ³ and spread-eagled his body across the back of the Lincoln. With his powerful muscles he could hold on now, whatever the speed. It was small consolation to him; from the street he had seen Kennedy’s head wound. He knew it was mortal, knew the Secret Service had failed; and in anguish and frustration he hammered the trunk with his free hand.

Chief Curry’s Ford was equipped with a souped-up engine, but it couldn’t match the powerful machines of SS 100 X and Halfback. Kinney was plunging after Greer, and in the darkness of the underpass the three cars nearly collided. Curry careened to the left, Kinney slewed to the right. They were nearly abreast, with the white-faced motorcycle policeman frantically competing for the little space left. The police chief hadn’t heard Kellerman’s mayday to Lawson, and he shouted to a motorcyclist, “Anybody hurt?” “Yes,” the man shouted back. Curry radioed his headquarters dispatcher, “Go to the hospital—Parkland Hospital. Have them stand by.”

The motorcade was disintegrating. Curry, Greer, and Kinney had scarcely untangled their jam when Hurchel Jacks came hurtling into the underpass with Lyndon Johnson. The Vice Presidential backup car had momentarily dropped behind; as the echoes of the final shot reverberated in the plaza Lem Johns had shouldered his door open and pounced into Elm Street. Pumping his legs to keep from falling, he drew up by the long crack in the gray asphalt which marked the place of Kennedy’s sacrifice. He looked ahead and saw the procession was speeding up. “Go ahead!” he yelled, waving Varsity on. The pool car raced past him. He flagged the first photographers’ convertible. “How about a ride?” he called. Most of them were Texans. He was a stranger to them. They were veering by when a Washington photographer shouted, “Hey, stop—it’s Johns.” The driver braked, Johns hurdled the door. The wheels hardly stopped rolling, but the pause was enough to break up the procession. The first five cars, bound for Parkland, had skidded right in racing turns and vanished up the ramp to Stemmons Freeway. The rest of the drivers were left on their own. Except for the Signals car, which was at the tail of the parade, they lacked White House radios. Unaware that the party’s destination had changed, they headed for the Trade Mart.

Parkland Memorial Hospital, four miles away on Harry Hines Boulevard, was as pedestrian as its name. From a distance it was easily mistaken for a drab apartment complex. Dun-colored, rambling, thirteen stories tall, it was situated on a low rise overlooking the plain that stretched westward toward Fort Worth. Outside on Harry Hines Boulevard the traffic rushed by feverishly day and night, and now and then a driver miscalculated, bringing the ambulance service a high profit for a short haul. Inside were 607 beds. Parkland specialized in mass production. The emergency area of any major hospital is its slum—a warren of offensive odors and numb-faced men and women whose work has hardened them—and Parkland’s was especially unattractive. Nevertheless it was efficient. It did its work, and there was a lot to be done. Each day the emergency area treated an average of 272 cases—one every five minutes. At the instant of John Kennedy’s murder twenty-three people were receiving attention for automobile injuries, animal bites, delirium tremens, infections, and suspicious discharges. The twenty-fourth, a woman, was admitted at 12:31. Now the two most famous patients in the hospital’s history were approaching at top speed, sirens squalling, from the underpass four miles away. Accompanying them were their stricken wives, the thirty-sixth Chief Executive of the United States, the Secret Service, and the White House press. Presently the distinguished passengers in the rest of the motorcade would be searching for them, and in an astonishingly short period of time the switchboard would be the helpless victim of inquiries from all over the world. Until today any Dallas police sergeant had carried enough rank to clear the board. In a few minutes an incoming call from a Cabinet member would be swept aside as insignificant.

But Parkland didn’t know that the blow was imminent. According to the Dallas police log, Curry’s first alert—“Go to the hospital, Parkland Hospital; have them stand by”—was received at 12:30. Actually dispatcher No. l’s microphone button was stuck, his transmissions were garbled, and three minutes elapsed before Parkland was notified. The first word there was received by Mrs. Anne Ferguson, the operator on Parkland’s switchboard position No. 2. She heard the dispatcher say, “601 coming in on Code 3, stand by.” This was an alarm of the very highest priority. “601” was the call number of the President’s motorcycle escort. “Code 3,” rarely used, meant extreme emergency. The time was 12:33 P.M. Mrs. Ferguson requested details and was told, “The President has been shot.” The Lincoln reached Parkland at 12:36, three minutes later. The hospital wasn’t ready.

The van of the motorcade was approaching Harry Hines Boulevard at frightening speed. Bill Greer’s palms were clammy, he took a fresh grip on the wheel. But he had been a professional chauffeur for thirty-five years. There wasn’t a road trick he didn’t know. As they passed the Trade Mart the way seemed to be blocked by two slowly moving six-wheel trucks. The trucks were nearly abreast. Bill watched Chief Curry thread his way around them; then, as the trucks moved closer to one another, he swiftly measured the distance. He spun the wheel left, spun it right, and passed between them.

Greer at least had something to do. Roy Kellerman wasn’t so lucky, and his inactivity was a torment. Kellerman was a physical giant. Ordinarily he moved and spoke slowly—he was so soft-spoken that other agents had sardonically christened him “Gabby”—but he was an active man. He was aroused now, yet he couldn’t act. In the back Jackie and Nellie were holding their wounded husbands. There was no way he could help them. If he leaped into the rear, he would be worse than useless. The best he could do was to make certain, in his words, that “they were comfortable, if there was comfort in this. Mr. Hill was taking care of Mrs. Kennedy. Mrs. Connally was over the Governor; there was no action.”

There was a little motion, though Kellerman couldn’t see it, because each individual’s range of vision was extremely limited. The Connallys didn’t know that Clint was on the trunk, and Clint was unaware that the Governor had been shot until, halfway to Parkland, he saw blood on John Connally’s abdomen. Till then he had thought that all the blood spilled had been Kennedy’s. The splotch on John’s shirt was too large for that, however. In fact, it was huge. The Governor had lapsed into unconsciousness, and as his eyes closed he had believed he was dying. So had his wife. Putting her mouth to his ear, Nellie whispered, “It’s going to be all right, be still.” Yet she didn’t believe it. She doubted that anything would ever be right again. For a while she thought he was already dead. Then one of his hands trembled slightly. Quickly she put her own over it.

Nellie heard a muted sobbing from the backseat. In a strangled voice Jacqueline Kennedy was saying, “He’s dead—they’ve killed him—oh Jack, oh Jack, I love you.” There was a pause. Then she began again. Nellie and Clint could hear her, but Mrs. Kennedy could not hear herself. In shock she was nearly as comatose as the Governor. Reality came to her in dim flashes. She had heard Kellerman on the radio and had wondered why it had taken the car so long to leave. Next, in her red daze, she had become preoccupied with the President’s head. Huddled on the ruined cushion, cradling her husband’s shoulders in her arms and his head in her gloves, she crouched over him. Trying to heal the unhealable seemed to be all that mattered; she couldn’t bear the thought that others should see what she had seen. The Lincoln flew down the boulevard’s central lane; her pillbox hat, caught in an eddy of whipping wind, slid down over her forehead, and with a violent movement she yanked it off and flung it down. The hatpin tore out a hank of her own hair. She didn’t even feel the pain.

During the frantic six-minute race to the hospital—up the ramp from the underpass, north on Stemmons Freeway, and northwest on Harry Hines—certain patterns of behavior began to emerge which were to endure throughout the coming weekend and beyond. Most were vivid forerunners of the patterns which were about to appear all over the country. Some are obvious: incredulity, outrage, grief, distraction. Others are more subtle. Like Abe Zapruder and Jacqueline Kennedy, no one could credit the tragedy to a single assassin. The President was always described as the victim of “them,” never of “him.” The crime seemed too vast to be attributed to a single criminal. Ford’s Theatre was remembered as the building in which one man shot Lincoln, but Dallas became the city where “they” killed Kennedy.⁴

There were also the beginnings of irrationalism. Mrs. Kennedy’s tragic attempt to heal the wounds and Zapruder’s astonishing performance in continuing to photograph the Lincoln until it passed out of sight—even as he was screaming, “They killed him”—were instinctive. The widow and the garment manufacturer were responding to the law of inertia. Life, one felt, must continue, even though life had clearly ended. Chief Curry’s shout to the motorcycle policeman is less comprehensible. The underpass at that moment was no place for conversation. The chief had forgotten the uses of radio, and when he did remember, his headquarters didn’t relay his message for five minutes. The normal processes of thought had been severely ruptured. Certain people had literally taken leave of their senses. Later that afternoon there was to be much more of this sort of thing, at Parkland, aboard Aircraft 26000, and in Washington.

The most stable mind can absorb just so much. The fate of the President, of his constitutional successor—who was riding a few feet away—and of a gravely wounded Governor kept everyone fully occupied. Furthermore, no one in the Presidential party had heard the name of Lee Oswald. It was impossible for them to define the dimensions of the plot against the government. Where were the plotters? Who were “they”? The reputation of Dallas as the center of American fascism led men to assume that the shots in Dealey Plaza had been the signal for a rightist uprising, or, at the very least, an outburst of immeasurable segregationist violence. Yarborough, Gonzalez, and Teague believed themselves confirmed. Those who had deprecated them became instantaneous converts. Lyndon Johnson, almost alone, blamed international Communism. But it didn’t really matter. Whoever “they” were, they could be lurking anywhere. No precautionary measure could be too great. Later the smog of ignorance would clear and perspective would return, but in those first hours visibility was zero. Every concern not directly related to Kennedy, Johnson, and Connally became superfluous. Even wives were expendable. Nothing could be done to remove Jackie, Lady Bird, and Nellie during the headlong dash to Parkland. The moment brakes were applied and tires stopped whining, however, they would be treated as women who were in the way and left to fend for themselves.

One of the earliest consequences of the catastrophe was to become one of the most searing: a schism among those who were close to the Presidency. Later in the capital Arthur Schlesinger would note the deep division between those whom he thought of as “loyalists” and “realists.” The loyalists, mourning John Kennedy, could not adjust to the death of the President. Realists accepted the succession. Schlesinger, a loyalist who admired the flexibility of realists, had the Chief Executive’s official family in mind. But the split was evident everywhere. It affected the military—General Clifton became an advocate of realism, while General McHugh forfeited his career to his loyalism—and it tore the Secret Service asunder. Indeed, the first realist was Agent Emory Roberts, a graying, round-shouldered former Baltimore County policeman who made a tough but necessary switch in allegiance while Kennedy’s heart was still beating.

From his seat beside Kinney, Roberts had seen the last shot strike Kennedy’s skull. He was certain the wound was mortal, and he had assessed the implications at once. Like every other agent, he carried in his pocket a commission book directing him “to protect the President of the United States.” Since a dead man could not serve as President, the Vice President, Roberts had reasoned, was already the new Chief Executive. Further guarding of the Lincoln would be wasted effort. Roberts’ decision had come too late to stop Clint Hill, but when Jack Ready had poised to leap after him Roberts had shouted, “Don’t go, Jack!” Ready had hesitated, then he drew back. As the car picked up momentum Roberts had said to Agent Bill McIntyre, who had been standing behind Hill, “They got him. You and Bennett take over Johnson as soon as we stop.” In the light of duty, Roberts felt, his responsibility was clear. He had to think of Johnson, and of him alone; the Service’s professional obligations toward the body in the Lincoln had ended.

The safety of Lyndon Johnson was, of course, the immediate concern in the Vice Presidential car. The sequence of events there is unclear, however. According to Johnson, Rufus Youngblood hurled him to the floor before the fatal shot. Youngblood himself doubts that he moved that quickly. Ralph Yarborough goes further: he insists that Youngblood never left the front seat. It is the Senator’s recollection that the agent merely leaned over the seat and talked to Johnson in an undertone. He contends that there was insufficient space in the rear for Youngblood. Dave Powers, who glanced back, confirms the Senator. But Powers was in another car, and Yarborough, by his own account, was agitated. The reason he was watching the Vice President was that he didn’t want Johnson to appear to be braver than himself. He kept reminding himself that he was a Senator from Texas, that he mustn’t seem cowardly in an election year, and that it would be bad form to duck out of sight. Lady Bird and Hurchel Jacks—Jacks could see the back seat in his rearview mirror—agree that Youngblood’s head and shoulders were in the rear, with Johnson beneath him.

“Get down!” the agent kept shouting in his Georgia drawl. Lady Bird leaned to the left, against Yarborough. She was thinking, There isn’t much down to get.

Clutching the shoulder strap of his portable radio, Youngblood wriggled his hips, forcing himself farther back. He was grateful that Johnson, long-legged, had told him to slide the front seat to its forward position. They were going to be cramped enough in the rear as it was. Swiveling around, he saw Halfback swinging after the Lincoln. He called to Jacks, “Follow that car.” Then he signaled Varsity over his set: “Dagger to Daylight”—Daylight was Agent Kivett’s code name—“I’m shifting to Charlie. Do the same.”

Tuning in the Presidential wavelength, Youngblood heard Emory Roberts’ voice: “Dusty to Daylight. Have Dagger cover Volunteer.”

“He’s already covered,” said Kivett, who could see the commotion in the back of the Vice Presidential car.

Youngblood listened to the staccato exchanges between Dusty, Digest, and Daylight. He heard that Lancer had been critically wounded, that they were going to a hospital, that Dandy (Lem Johns) had been left stranded, and that Halfback and Varsity were each assigning two agents—with Johns gone, Varsity had only two—to the Vice President. Adding Youngblood himself, that would make five bodyguards. Breaking in, he requested a sixth agent for Victoria when things settled down.

Lady Bird was bewildered. Wedged between burly men she wondered, What on earth are they saying on that talking machine? Yarborough, equally curious, shouted at Youngblood and Johnson, “What is it?” There was no reply. In reality the Vice President knew as little as the Senator. The code was gibberish to him, and Youngblood had decided that it was pointless to spread panic. To Johnson he merely whispered, “An emergency exists. When we get to where we’re going, you and me are going to move right off and not tie in with the other people.”

“What is it?” Yarborough shouted again. Everyone ignored him. Frustrated, he yelled once more, “They’ve shot the President!”

Lady Bird still refused to believe it. This is America, she was thinking. There are no assassins here. She peered over the front seat. A grassy traffic island lay ahead. In the middle of it stood a metal sign, white letters on a green background: PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL NEXT LEFT. She couldn’t make it all out. Had it said Southland or Parkland? She had seen the word “hospital,” though. It was, she thought, “one more nail pinning down the lid”; something dreadful had happened, or could have happened. Hoping against hope, refusing to think the unthinkable, she consoled herself with the argument that this was merely a precautionary measure. There had been some sort of accident. They were going to this hospital—Southland or Lakeland or Parkland or whatever. Well, what could be more natural? she asked herself. They were just going to stop and see whether or not anyone had been hurt.

Dagger, Dusty, Daylight, and Digest continued to mutter over the Charlie circuit in their strange tongue. Elsewhere they might have maintained their conspiracy of silence successfully. But Lady Bird’s wishful dreams were ill-starred. Here—even here—there could be no sanctuary from mass media. As the car drew up the dominant sound in the car continued to be the squawky commercial radio on Hurchel Jacks’s dashboard. After an interval of utter pandemonium, with studio furniture toppling in the background and technicians calling to one another in hysterical stage whispers, a breathless announcer had pulled himself together. He was beginning to fit together bits of information. It was still piecemeal. But there was no mention of backfires, firecrackers, cherry bombs, or railroad torpedoes. He was talking about gunfire.

The announcer’s source was Kilduff’s pool, fifty feet behind Lady Bird. Earlier the correspondents there had been even closer. The pool car, the sixth and final vehicle in the aborted motorcade, had hugged Varsity’s rear bumper as they shot up the freeway ramp. Since passing the Trade Mart it had begun to lose ground and was now weaving dangerously. Actually, the chauffeur was doing well to keep the road. He was driving in the middle of a furious scramble.

Merriman Smith had seized the radiophone while they were still on Elm Street. His Dallas UPI bureau heard him bark: “Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.”

Smith was not as astute a reporter as he seemed. Despite extensive experience with weapons he had thought the sounds in the plaza were three shots from an automatic weapon, and in a subsequent message he identified them as “bursts.” But his speed was remarkable. That first bulletin was on the UPI printer at 12:34, two minutes before the Presidential car reached Parkland. Before eyewitnesses could collect themselves it was being beamed around the world. To those who tend to believe everything they hear and read, the figure of three seemed to have the sanction of authority, and many who had been in the plaza and had thought they heard only two reports later corrected their memories.

Of the driver’s five passengers, Kilduff, Baskin, and Clark of ABC could do nothing until the car stopped. Smith and Jack Bell of AP were a different breed. They were wire service reporters; they dealt in seconds. Smith’s seniority had given him a clear beat, the greatest in his career, and the longer he could keep Bell out of touch with an AP operator, the longer that lead would be. So he continued to talk. He dictated one take, two takes, three, four. Indignant, Bell rose up from the center of the rear seat and demanded the phone. Smith stalled. He insisted that his Dallas operator read back the dictation. The wires overhead, he argued, might have interfered with his transmission. No one was deceived by that. Everyone in the car could hear the cackling of the UPI operator’s voice. The relay was perfect. Bell, red-faced and screaming, tried to wrest the radiophone from him; Smith thrust it between his knees and crouched under the dash, and Bell, flailing wildly, was hitting both the driver and Kilduff.

The buff brick entrance was illumined by two red neon signs: “EMERGENCY CASES ONLY” and “AMBULANCE ONLY.” Of the three parking bays which led to its loading dock only the first was occupied, by one of the fleet of white dual-purpose vehicles which served Vernon B. Oneal, an enterprising Dallas undertaker, as both hearses and ambulances. SS 100 X skirted the bays, swerved left, and drew up on a diagonal outside them, its trunk toward the building. The other five vehicles skidded into odd angles of repose on the circular driveway beyond.

Smith, swarthy and piratical, dashed inside. On the left of the corridor a clerk was sorting slips in the emergency room’s cashier’s cage. He burst in on her and snatched up her telephone. “How do I get outside?” he demanded. “You—you dial nine,” she stammered. He dialed it, dialed the local UPI number, and quoted Hill.

Clark of ABC had found a second phone in the blood bank office, and Bell was looking for a third. He had jumped out of the press car and run toward the Presidential limousine. Upon seeing the President’s body, he asked an agent, “Is he dead?” The man had replied, “I don’t know, but I don’t think so.” Speeding down the corridor, Bell found a line at the admissions desk, seventy-five feet beyond Smith, and reached the Dallas Bureau. He said, “Flash—President Kennedy shot,” and began rapid-fire dictation. However, the information he did have was hopelessly garbled by a grief-stricken operator. On the machine “KENNETH O’DONNELL” came out “KENNETH 0’;$9„3)),” “BLOODSTAINED” was translated “BLOOD STAINEZAAC RBMTHING,” and “HE LAY,” in a tragic stutter, as “HE LAAAAAAAAAAA.”⁵

Outside in the Vice Presidential car Youngblood had extricated himself. Johnson alighted, rubbing his arm (that gesture, witnessed by a spectator, became the basis for the report that he had been injured), and found himself being borne firmly along by the five agents, the nucleus of the future White House Detail. Momentarily Mrs. Johnson was unescorted. She hurried along behind. From the loading dock she peered over the heads toward the Lincoln and saw what appeared to be a graceful drift of pink falling toward one side—her first glimpse, as America’s thirty-second First Lady, of her predecessor. She fled inside.

Everyone else had converged on the Presidential car—everyone, that is, except litter bearers. There wasn’t an attendant in sight. Kellerman, Sorrels, and Lawson looked at one another, aghast.

The failure of the police radio—for it was the dispatcher’s stuck button which was largely accountable for this appalling situation—played no role in the passion of John Kennedy. Had his injuries been less grievous, the delayed alarm would have become a proper matter for a searching inquiry. So would the decision to put Dr. Burkley at the end of the motorcade. But the Chief Executive was past saving, and had been now for six minutes. Burkley, gowned and masked and supported by the entire staff of Parkland, could have done nothing for him after 12:30. In fact, had he been anyone but the President of the United States, the first physician to see him would have tagged him “DOA”—“Dead on Arrival.” There was no discernible respiration. His pupils were dilated and fixed. His brain was quite destroyed.

As Lawson vanished within the building, Powers and O’Donnell bounded toward the Lincoln. Powers heard Emory Roberts shouting at him to stop but disregarded him; a second might save Kennedy’s life. He wrenched open the right-hand door, expecting to hear the familiar voice say, “I’m all right.” They had been through so much. There had been so many crises. It couldn’t be, Dave was thinking; it couldn’t be. Then he saw the staring eyes and knew it was.

O’Donnell drew up by the left fender, erect and rigid, a figure in stone. His hands were by his sides. He was at attention.

Emory Roberts brushed past O’Donnell, determined to make sure that Kennedy was dead. “Get up,” he said to Jacqueline Kennedy. There was no reply. She was crooning faintly. From this side Roberts couldn’t see the President’s face, so he lifted her elbow for a close look. He dropped it. To Kellerman, his superior, he said tersely, “You stay with Kennedy. I’m going to Johnson.” He followed Lady Bird.

Greer was helping Lawson arrange the stretchers in tandem. The Kennedys and Connallys lay entangled in their abattoir. The others stood about, limping a little, like casualties. Shock had disabled them, and ignorance. Seven minutes ago they had been en route to a luncheon. Now they were milling around in the driveway of a nameless hospital. Few knew who had been hurt, or how badly. One man saw the blood on Mrs. Kennedy and gibbered, “My God, they shot Jackie!” The remark was heard and passed along to patients in the building. Yarborough and Kilduff simultaneously observed a clot of blood on John Connally’s head. They assumed that it was his, that he had been shot in the forehead. His face was yellowish-gray. Each of them separately concluded that he was dead.

Meanwhile the Governor, who had been reconciled to death, was recovering consciousness. The jarring of brakes had roused him. His lids fluttered open. He became aware of the movement around the car, and the thought occurred to him—it was occurring to several others at the same moment—that no one could reach the President until the jump seats had been cleared. He tried to heave himself up. His wife, misunderstanding, restrained him. Since the car had stopped Nellie had become visibly agitated. As long as they were moving her self-discipline had been admirable, but now a pendulum was swinging within her. To her the situation here seemed obvious. The man behind her was dead. She had seen the gore; no one could live after that. Yet everybody was fussing over the backseat. They were fretting over a corpse and paying no attention to her John. They were just letting the Governor of Texas lie there, leaving him to bleed while they poked and fooled around, and it was outrageous.

The focus of attention was, in fact, the President, but no one was ignoring the Governor. They couldn’t; even if they had been indifferent to his suffering, the stark fact remained that he was in the way. Therefore attendants, who had appeared at last, were leaning over Nellie from her side while Dave Powers, choking back his tears, was lifting out Connally’s legs. The transfer was easily accomplished. His condition was far less serious than it then seemed. The Governor’s muscles were tense; he could brace himself, and being conscious he could help his bearers. They placed him on the first of the two stretchers and carried him inside, Nellie stumbling after them.

Mrs. Kennedy hadn’t budged. It would seem that in the pitiless exposure of the open car, surrounded by eyes, nothing was left to her; nevertheless she was trying to preserve a cantlet of privacy. Bowing her head, she continued to hold her husband. If she released him, the harrowing spectacle would reappear, and she couldn’t endure that. Avoiding the faces around her, she crumpled lower and lower, pressing her husband’s stained face to her breast. There was a strained hush. The men could hear her making little weeping sounds.

Clint and Roy mounted the steps on either side of the spare tire, Clint directly behind her.

He touched her shoulders, and they trembled convulsively. Four seconds passed, then five. Ralph Yarborough had an inkling of what was happening. He didn’t understand the crux of it, for he hadn’t seen the wound, but he sensed that she was determined not to let the mob see her anguish. The Senator was part of that mob. He was gawking with the others. He couldn’t help it. Yet he admired her defiance of him and those around him, and he stepped back involuntarily as she stifled a final sob and controlled herself with a single, violent spasm. Her proud head rose, the face a mask. Still she didn’t move.

Suddenly he realized what was troubling her—because he had seen the back seat in those first moments he was the only other person there who could know it—and rearing up he ripped off his suit coat and laid it in her lap. Tenderly she wrapped the President’s head in the lining as Clint, Roy, Dave, Greer, and Lawson drew him toward the second stretcher. She had another, brief moment of panic; they were moving too fast, the coat was slipping away. Scrambling along the wet seat, she seized it in white-knuckled fists while they grappled with his hips and thighs. It was a formidable struggle. Unlike Connally, his body lacked tension. It was rubbery, and as a former practicing lawyer Yarborough recognized the signs. Horrified, he thought, His legs are going every whichaways.

Now the President was on the litter, and they were rapidly wheeling him past a black “NO LOITERING” sign, through scuffed double doors. Beyond lay another world. There was no sunlight. The air reeked. The corridor was walled in dreary tan tile, the floor was a dingy brownish-red linoleum, and on either side lay a maze of cubicles assigned to Pediatrics, Triage, O.B., Gynecology, X-Ray, Admittance. Emergencies were guided by a broad red stripe in the center of the floor which swung left, then right down a long hall, to a wide single door in the right-hand wall bearing the meaningless digit “5.” Inside 5, after a short break, the red stripe was replaced by a green one. This was the surgical subdivision of Major Medicine. White sheeting hung on either side, partitioning booths. A final left, and they were in a passage scarcely wider than the rear of the Lincoln. To their left was Trauma Room No. 2. John Connally was inside, groaning. Nellie stood silently in the doorway, her face swollen, her eyes averted. The President was wheeled right, into No. 1. An arm seized Jackie, and there, on the threshold, she relaxed her grip on Clint’s coat and stepped back. Her hopeless vigil had begun.

Grief has no single shape. Some men—among them the most deeply affected—weep within. Ken O’Donnell was of these. He had the appearance of a deaf mute. Next to Jacqueline Kennedy, perhaps, he bore the deepest scars there, and his response was total withdrawal. Never voluble, he had now become catatonic; he wandered from the trauma area to the nurse’s station and back again, a dark little man with a peculiar, hammered look. Questions were put to him. He didn’t reply, but no one thought that remarkable; he had always been terse. Enmeshed in their own distress, they didn’t grasp the profound change in him. O’Donnell had been the most dependable of Kennedy’s squires. Now that he had lost his knight he was bereft and helpless.

12³⁵ I carried my President on stretcher

ran to Emergency Room #1 (10 × 15 ft.)

Jackie ran beside stretcher holding on

Ralph Yarborough had been bred in the fulsome tradition of Southern oratory; he thought in rolling phrases, and they were as genuine from him, and as moving, as the silence of O’Donnell. When the first reporters encountered the Senator, he began brokenly, “Gentlemen, this has been a deed of horror.” He filled up and turned aside, whispering, “Excalibur has sunk beneath the waves.…”

But it was too early for most people to react. Jack Price, Parkland’s administrator, was accustomed to mayhem, and as a conservative Republican he had not been bewitched by the Kennedy aura, yet even he could not fashion a meaningful link between the present horror in his halls and what had been, until this moment, a remote, immaculate concept of the American Presidency. Price had been helping with Connally. Standing in the corridor, trying to organize his staff, he had seen the second stretcher fly past with roses on the body’s chest. Litters were part of his trade; he dismissed this one, and since the patient’s head was swaddled in a suit coat he saw nothing striking there. “Oh, my Lord, they have shot President Kennedy,” someone moaned. It didn’t register. Price simply couldn’t absorb what had happened. Then he glimpsed the girl hurrying behind. He recognized her from her pictures, and as her crouched figure darted through the doors that led to Major Medicine he whirled for a second look. But something was wrong. In the photographs he had seen she had always been faultlessly dressed. Now she was blotched and disheveled. And he couldn’t imagine how her stockings had become coated with thick red paint.

Parkland was still recoiling from this first invasion when the second, denser wave arrived from the Trade Mart. The interval was bound to be brief because the buildings were so close, and two circumstances virtually eliminated it. The first was the motorcade schedule. Drivers had been told that the procession would pick up speed after leaving Main Street, and in the excitement which followed the shots they accelerated so rapidly that during the twelve seconds of Officer Clyde Haygood’s pistol-in-hand ascent of the overpass embankment every vehicle in the caravan, including the Signals car, swept past him. The second factor was communications. Curry’s alarm had been intercepted by all Dallas police radios at the Mart. The men there who had heard it were preparing to escort any member of the Presidential party who could establish his credentials.

Thus Agent Lem Johns, who had broken the motorcade chain by debouching on Elm Street, never stopped moving, and since he felt indebted to the photographers who had picked him up he started a stampede. Outside the Mart he flashed his commission book at a motorcycle policeman. The officer pulled him into his sidecar. “Can we come?” called one of the photographers. “Sure,” Johns called back. “Turn on your lights and follow us.” Captain Stoughton, in the other cameramen’s convertible, was sitting beside a Dallas News man. As they hesitated outside the Mart Stoughton shouted at a policeman, “Where did they go?” The reply “Parkland” meant nothing to the captain, but the News man said, “God, that’s a hospital—let’s take off.” The stars on the shoulders of Ted Clifton and Godfrey McHugh attracted an honor guard with sirens and flashing red lights. The first Congressional car executed a U-turn and roared in their wake; it moved so quickly that Henry Gonzalez was alighting in the emergency area driveway while the President’s body was being removed from the Lincoln.

There were some stragglers. The two press buses unloaded as scheduled between the Furniture Mart and the Apparel Mart, on Industrial Boulevard; the bulk of the White House press corps showed their Polaroid identification cards, entered the Trade Mart, and heard the news either from officers or luncheon guests who had picked up Merriman Smith’s flash over transistor radios. Among the last to learn that anything had gone awry were the passengers of the hapless VIP bus. They had been instructed to go directly to the rear of the Trade Mart. But there were no Dallas policemen at the rear entrance. The guards were Texas state policemen who weren’t tied into the radio network and didn’t know what had happened. None of them, moreover, had ever seen a White House pass. They had been told that Secret Service agents would vouch for bona fide Kennedy people. But most of the agents had left for Parkland after picking up Kellerman’s distress signal over the Charlie network. The result was an icy reception for Dr. Burkley, Evelyn Lincoln, Pam Turnure, Mary Gallagher, Jack Valenti, Liz Carpenter, and Marie Fehmer. A Ranger who knew Barefoot Sanders offered to admit him. No one could go with him, however. As a Texan Liz was mortified. “This is Evelyn Lincoln, the President’s personal secretary,” she said indignantly, thrusting Evelyn forward. The guard inspected Evelyn’s pass and handed it back to her. He said impassively, “I’m sorry, lady.”

Suddenly Dr. Burkley vanished. Burkley had never deserted Evelyn before, but he sensed that something terrible had happened. The atmosphere was ominous. Strangers were reeling around in circles. Doug Kiker of the Herald Tribune was sobbing passionately, “The goddamned sons-of-bitches.” With his chief pharmacist’s mate in tow, the doctor flagged Agent Andy Berger, who was about to leave in a police cruiser. The physician had just tossed his black bag on the floorboard when Chuck Roberts of Newsweek ran up. “Let me go with you,” Chuck begged. Burkley, usually gentle, slammed the door in his face; the cruiser skirred into Harry Hines Boulevard and dropped the doctor outside Parkland’s emergency entrance minutes after the President’s disappearance within.

That left Valenti with five women, all of them approaching hysteria. He himself was becoming highly agitated. His face flushed, he sprang at Ranger after Ranger, demanding information. No one would tell him anything. Where was the President? Inside. Why couldn’t they enter? No Secret Service. Where was the Secret Service? A shrug. Then, from the corner of his eyes Valenti saw a luncheon guest in a business suit emerging from a telephone booth. The man appeared disabled. His arms hung slackly, his legs were wobbling. He addressed them as a group. “Are you White House people?” he asked in falsetto. Without awaiting a reply he said, “The President’s been shot,” and wobbled off. “What a bad joke!” Marie Fehmer gasped. Liz laughed—a high-pitched, mirthless laugh. “Why should anyone start a rumor like that?” she asked Evelyn. Valenti, damning all Texas Rangers, fell on a passing Dallas policeman. The officer nodded gravely; it was true. All the cruisers had gone, but a deputy sheriff was parked nearby. He was off duty, driving his own car. Moments later Valenti and the deputy were transferring tools, toys, and a stack of dry cleaning from the rear seat to the car’s trunk. They wedged themselves and the five women inside and rocketed away. Mary Gallagher was plucking wildly at rosary beads and whispering, “If I ever needed them, I need them now.” Marie, a Catholic herself, had no beads. She squeezed her eyes shut and recited Hail Marys.

Parkland’s grounds had begun to resemble an automobile graveyard. Marooned cars were strewn along its driveways and lawns, some with motors running, most with at least one door open, all of them parked at random angles. Inside, the emergency area had been overwhelmed. Aesthetics aside, a metropolitan hospital is better equipped to handle a panic than almost any other public place, but no institution in the world could have weathered this one satisfactorily. There were too many people with too much rank, and there was an almost total collapse of discipline.

The press, surprisingly, was the most docile group there. Their presence frightened Jack Price; he signaled Steve Landregan, the hospital’s public relations man, who led them to classrooms 101–102, on the other side of the building, where most of them patiently awaited a briefing. (They weren’t being selfless. They had their pool, and experience had taught them that if they stuck together until a press secretary appeared none of them would be left out.) A greater cross for Price was his own staff. He found himself begging them to return to their own wards. They argued, with some logic, that they were needed to control patients. Ambulatory cases were hobbling in every door, deaf to entreaties to turn back. One man told a nurse, “If the President’s dead, why can’t we see him? A dead body won’t know the difference.” Unwisely she suggested that Mrs. Kennedy was entitled to privacy. “Jackie’s here?” he cried. “Where?” He had to be restrained.

The Secret Service should have thrown up a security screen. But the disaster had exposed a hidden weakness—the allegiance of individual agents to a man, not an office. As long as Kennedy had been in command the lines of authority were clear. Now the old order had been transformed into hopeless disorder. Theoretically Roy Kellerman was still the agent in charge. Emory Roberts had already defied him, however, and when Roy issued instructions that all the agents who had been riding in Halfback were to guard the hospital’s entrances, nobody bothered to point out that Roberts had undercut him by reassigning them.

In fact, few agents bothered to tell Roy anything, which was probably just as well, inasmuch as a showdown would have led to no real decision. Since Presidents pick their chief bodyguards, and since Kellerman was a stranger to Lyndon Johnson, Kellerman was already a lame duck. The identity of his successor was not so clear. Roberts was with Johnson, but Youngblood had been there before him and was a Johnson protégé. Thus the Secret Service, which should have been a symbol of continuity, was riven by disunion. The agents were as leaderless and perplexed as the rest of the Presidential party. A few (Kellerman, Hill) remained near Kennedy. Others (Youngblood, Roberts, Johns) went with Johnson. Most were following personal loyalties. There was no overall plan, no design, and the inevitable consequence was anarchy. The impressions of Shirley Randall, a nurse’s aide, are instructive. A few moments after 12:35 P.M. she found herself surrounded by strangers “barging in with big guns.” Her first thought was that she was in the hands of “some underworld characters.”

The atmosphere of tension was heightened by what appeared to be a communications crisis. Parkland’s switchboard operators saw their lines pre-empted—apparently by people dialing 9 on hospital extensions—until all twelve switchboard alarm lights were ablaze, indicating an absolute overload. The implication was that demand had completely outstripped facilities, cutting off the emergency area from the outside world. This was untrue. During the first half-hour, when pressure was at its greatest, members of the Presidential party repeatedly placed calls to Washington and elsewhere. The telephone in the nurse’s station, which became the Secret Service command post, was in constant use. At no point was the Presidency threatened by isolation.

After leaving President Kennedy’s stretcher in Trauma Room 1, Kellerman, Hill, and Lawson entered the station, a glassed-in office just across the green line from Mrs. Kennedy. An attendant secured an outside line for Kellerman. Roy asked Lawson, “What’s the Dallas White House number?” “RIverside 1-3421,” said Lawson. Hill dialed it. Kellerman identified himself to the Sheraton-Dallas board as Digest and said, “Give me an instant circuit to Washington, and keep this line open—don’t pull the plug.” The White House Signals board relayed Digest to Duplex; in the East Wing of the executive mansion Jerry Behn picked up his office phone. “Look at your clock,” Roy told Jerry. “It is now 12:40 here.” (Behn’s clock read 1:39 EST—that is, a minute earlier.) “We’re in Parkland Memorial Hospital,” Roy said. “The man has been hit.” Dumfounded, Behn asked, “What do you mean?” “Shot,” Roy said. “He’s still alive in the emergency room. Both he and Governor Connally were hit by gunfire. Don’t hang up. This line should be kept open, and I’ll keep you advised.”

The line was even kept open when Behn moved downstairs to the larger office of Jack McNally, Special Assistant in charge of staff administration, for the first of the ad hoc sessions which were to begin in the East Wing, end in the West, and continue all weekend. Behn, chalk-faced, was at one end; Kellerman and his group of agents were at the other. Furthermore, the White House Communications Agency was capable of expanding this single connection into a conference call at any time. While Clint was listening to Behn’s breathing (which grew progressively more irregular), he heard a click, followed by a familiar feminine voice saying, “Wait a minute.” It was Ethel Kennedy in Virginia. A moment later she was followed by her husband, inquiring for details. The interruption was so unexpected, and the Attorney General sounded so much like the President, that Clint grabbed a clipboard hook for support. At another point Godfrey McHugh entered the nurse’s station. He wanted to talk to the west basement Situation Room. “O.K., but don’t hang up when you’re through,” Kellerman warned. Godfrey thoughtlessly did. Yet when Roy snatched up the receiver the connection was still intact. Signal’s operators were listening, and although discreetly silent they were very much on the job.

For the most part the virtuosity of the Signal Corps was unappreciated.⁷ Parkland’s switchboard girls didn’t realize that they were being unobtrusively knocked out of action by a single individual, Chief Warrant Officer Art Bales, who didn’t have time to explain what he was doing or why. He was racing through the hospital with a hastily assembled posse of policemen from the Trade Mart. He would keep dialing 9 until a dial tone broke flatly. Then he would establish a direct circuit to the Signals board in Washington through the Sheraton-Dallas, hand the open receiver to a waiting officer, tell him to guard it, and systematically move on to commandeer the next instrument. Meanwhile he had alerted Colonel McNally and Jack Doyle of American Tel & Tel, who was the company’s liaison man for the trip, at Love Field. Bales’s fellow technicians were on their way from the airport. They were under instructions to relieve the policemen and set up a second switchboard, three additional dial trunks, and four new long-distance trunks. Because of the ingenuity of Tel & Tel, Doyle could avoid the presently overloaded trunks that linked Dallas with the capital by routing Parkland-to-Washington calls through Chicago and Los Angeles. Bales, on the spot, was aware of all this, and he knew that should all his other emergency measures fail he would have recourse to the motorcade itself, four of whose vehicles—SS 100 X, Halfback, and the pool and Signals cars—were capable of contacting the White House through radio patch.

So the switchboard crisis was largely illusion. But under certain circumstances appearances are more important than reality. Parkland’s operators, who never laid eyes on Bales, couldn’t know that they were being by-passed for a reason—that there was a method in the madness which confronted them. They saw only hubbub and chaos. Their outgoing lines were mysteriously vanishing one by one, and incoming calls were forming a composite nightmare. Already UPI bulletins were stimulating cranks all over the world. In the next two hours one girl, Phyllis Bartlett, would log conversations with England, Canada, Australia, Venezuela, France, and Mexico. She wrote: “Every call coming in long distance is urgent and everyone seems to have a title that demands priority.”

Some of the titles were legitimate. Most weren’t. Genuine insiders went through Signals, as Ethel Kennedy had. The bulk of the direct-dial long-distance calls came from the curious, the disturbed, the downright demented. A woman in Toledo identified herself as “The Underground”; she asserted that she had occult powers which would keep Kennedy alive. A man said, “You nigger lovers, you killed our President.” Another man threatened an operator: “I know who you are, and you’d better be careful when you start your car.” Most disquieting was a young boy who called three times, talking to a different operator each time. His approach never varied. “I want to talk to my Daddy,” he would begin plaintively. Asked who his father was, he would say, “My Daddy—President Kennedy.” Then he would giggle and ring off.

Perhaps all these grotesque calls were placed in mental wards, but during that first hour hysteria was far more widespread than men could bring themselves to acknowledge. In retrospect many later constructed accounts of how they felt they ought to have behaved—with emotion, but with control. The facts are more jagged. There was little control, and there were many aberrations which made no sense whatever. It is not necessary to trace anonymous telephone calls for proof of this. Abundant evidence lies in the conduct of those who were present in Parkland’s emergency area. All were able. All were accustomed to strain. Yet nearly everyone, in the minutes before or after one o’clock, acted in a fashion that on any other afternoon would have been considered most odd. None of their quirks deserves ridicule, yet a few examples are useful; otherwise an understanding of the general mood is impossible. Those who would pass judgment on the demeanor of any individual should remember that singular behavior was endemic—that it was so commonplace, indeed, that it briefly became the norm. Even when it wasn’t, it seemed so to others.

Consider Ted Clifton. He was a general officer, a combat veteran, the President’s senior military aide. Of all the men there, Clifton should have been the likeliest to grasp the capabilities of the Signal Corps. However, he was under the impression that those facilities were not immediately available. Instead, he presented a priority card to a Parkland operator and told her that he wanted to make a long-distance call to the White House. Miraculously he got through to the National Command Center, briefed them, and then switched to the Situation Room in search of intelligence. A later, second call, in the presence of Godfrey McHugh, the second aide, who apparently hadn’t heard the first call, was placed to Clifton’s own office. He asked that Mrs. Clifton, Mrs. O’Donnell, and the other wives be informed that their husbands were uninjured, and then inquired as to further intelligence. The order of precedence seemed unusual to McHugh, but he raised no question about it. A bachelor himself, he concluded that husbandly solicitude was correct at a time like this.

Or take Clint Hill, a man of exceptional presence of mind who had just demonstrated it on Elm Street. Roaming the emergency area, he realized that he was without his suit coat. It suddenly seemed important that he be properly dressed, and he approached Steve Landregan, who was just his size, and asked to borrow his coat. The public relations man promptly surrendered it, though he wondered—quite reasonably—what possible difference shirt sleeves could make at a time like this.

Dave Powers, like Clint Hill, was preoccupied with clothes. Leaving the stretcher in Trauma Room No. 1 he noticed bloodstains on his sleeve. He remembered telling his wife that when you travel with the President it doesn’t matter what you wear; everyone will be looking at him. So he had worn this cheap brown suit, and it was vaguely comforting to realize that only an inexpensive garment had been ruined, that it could be easily replaced.

Outside the trauma room, Sergeant Bob Dugger was scowling fiercely. The bespectacled Sergeant was a towering bullock of a cop, with a beefy face and piercing eyes; to Jacqueline Kennedy he looked rather ugly. She had no way of knowing that he was worried sick about an automobile. He had heard the news at the Trade Mart and had driven here in the deputy chief’s car. There hadn’t been time to acquire permission, and now anxiety was gnawing at him. What would Chief Batchelor think? Would he report a stolen vehicle? Would charges be filed? This was a serious matter. The Sergeant glowered. Mrs. Kennedy, observing him covertly, wondered what his thoughts about the President had been, whether he could be a Bircher.

A message for the wives; a clean coat for Clint; a chief’s borrowed car—thus men turned from the unwieldy central event and seized upon details with almost pathetic gratitude. One by one they could be wrapped with understanding and tucked away on the narrow shelves of the mind, postponing that awful moment when all the wrapping and tucking would be done and the enormous fact that would not fit must be faced.

Almost any diversion was welcome. Mac Kilduff strolled outside and saw that Halfback was deserted. Here was an opportunity for two chores. He would use the dashboard radio to inform the White House that the President had been shot. (Kilduff, it will be remembered, had been sitting beside Merriman Smith when Smitty dictated his account in the pool car.) First, however, he must run the engine. He recalled the dead battery yesterday in San Antonio. That mustn’t happen again. The pointless message to Washington concluded, Kilduff noticed SS 100 X. Suppose photographers took pictures of the bloody back seat? Presidential press secretaries were supposed to prevent that sort of thing. Kilduff briskly summoned Bill Greer and Sam Kinney and briskly ordered them to put up the bubbletop at once.⁸

Individual conduct varied wildly in situations that were virtually identical. Jacqueline Kennedy and Nellie Connally stood a few feet apart, awaiting news of gravely wounded husbands. Both knew that the President’s injuries had been mortal, and if there is such a thing as decorum in these circumstances, the Governor’s wife should have been the first to speak. She wasn’t. Jackie gently inquired about Connally. At first Nellie said nothing. She was thinking that this woman was almost a total stranger to her. She replied abruptly, “He’ll be all right.” And that was all.

Ralph Yarborough started yelling and couldn’t stop. He was taken into the office of the blood bank director on the other side of the main corridor. Over and over he kept screaming, “He’s dead! What a terrible thing! What a terrible thing!”

Mayor Cabell of Dallas, on the other hand, became almost as quiet as O’Donnell, and when he did speak he denied reality. To those who could hear him he was whispering, “It didn’t happen.”

Hugh Sidey took furious notes, half of which, he later found, were illegible. Bob Baskin, after reporting to his editors over a two-way radio in a photographer’s car, on instructions left the press pool. He rode downtown to the city room of the Dallas News, tried to drink a cup of coffee, spilled some of it and stood trembling. He composed himself while an assistant managing editor continued drafting a first-person, I-was-there story under Baskin’s by-line.

The absence of an effective security screen invited intruders. Luckily, Parkland’s bewildering floor plan insured the privacy of Lyndon Johnson. He was so far back in Minor Medicine that when the time came for him to leave a guide would be needed. Major Medicine, the trauma area, was nearer the corridor, and the most spectacular incursion occurred at the wide door which separated the red line from the green line. Nurse Doris Nelson was just passing through it when a tall man in a light gray speckled suit shouldered his way past her, shouting, “I’m FBI!” He appeared violent, and Andy Berger, the closest agent, knocked him down. Sprawled on all fours the intruder gurgled, “You’re not in charge now. What’s your name?” “What’s yours?” demanded Kellerman, moving in. Credentials and commission books were whipped out; it turned out that the man really was from the Bureau’s Dallas office, though his presence in the hospital was unauthorized. Dragging himself away, he protested, “J. Edgar Hoover will hear about this!” Hoover did, and the unfortunate agent vanished into the limbo reserved for FBI men whose blunders embarrass the Director.

He was wrong. Berger was right. Nevertheless both had been spurred by the same impulse: the need for action. To active men immobility was literally intolerable; therefore they issued fatuous orders, placed or attempted to place unnecessary long-distance calls, bellowed (Yarborough), abandoned posts (Baskin). If an excuse for action didn’t come to mind, they invented one and persuaded themselves that it made sense. This was largely a male reaction—Evelyn Lincoln, Pam Turnure, and Mary Gallagher sat helplessly in the cubicles of Major Medicine—but it was a vigorous woman, Liz Carpenter, who achieved a pinnacle of rationalization. Liz and Marie Fehmer had been left in Parkland’s administrative offices with aspirin and water. They had no idea what was happening and were growing increasingly restless. A passing employee called out that Kennedy had been shot. Liz thereupon jumped to an extraordinary conclusion. The President had been scheduled to address a luncheon at the Trade Mart. If he were wounded, he obviously couldn’t talk. Therefore, she explained to Marie, the Vice President would have to speak in his place, and as members of the Johnson staff they should be present. There wasn’t a moment to spare; he might be at the lectern already. Marie, impressed by Liz’s logic, ran after her. At the hospital entrance they explained the situation to a traffic policeman. He looked doubtful, then beckoned to a cruiser, which careened into Harry Hines Boulevard at terrifying speed—the driver himself may have welcomed the chance to act—and deposited them at the Mart’s front door. To their amazement only a handful of people were wandering about. All looked dazed. It looked as though the Vice President’s remarks would be poorly attended. Liz began to have second thoughts.

The epidemic of irrationalism wasn’t confined to the Presidential party. Parkland’s staff was also affected. A telephone rang in the emergency area. As nursing supervisor, Doris Nelson—who would presently demonstrate her own lack of immunity—picked up the receiver. To her surprise, a Parkland physician on the other end asked her what she wanted. “The President has been shot,” she replied, and he said, “Yes. What else is new?”

Governor Connally felt fingers plucking at his clothing. A voice said, “I’ve got his coat and shirt off.” Another muttered, “I’m having trouble with his pants.” The Governor felt a painful jerking around his hips. Exasperated, he groaned, “Why not cut them off?” There was a silence. Without realizing it he had just reminded them of the hospital’s established procedure.

The Parkland employees least in touch with reality were the clerks. The importance of paperwork had been drilled into them, and now, seeking a haven from the general disarray, they fell upon the familiar rituals of routine. “Kennedy, John F.” was neatly logged in at 12:38, identified as a white male, and assigned the emergency room No. 24740. His “chief complaint” was described as “GSW”—gunshot wound. “Connally, John,” No. 24743, had the same problem, and he was entered three spaces below, after a white female with a bleeding mouth and a colored female with abdominal pains. (The Governor, of course, had been admitted before all of them.) This sort of thing went on all afternoon. Price, enraged, threatened to fire one zealous clerk. It solved nothing. Everything had to be recorded and filed; there could be no exceptions. Larry O’Brien entered the hospital with Congressmen Albert Thomas and Jack Brooks. Taking a wrong turn, he found himself alone, facing a counter. On the other side was a bespectacled woman. “Just a minute!” she said smartly and handed him a form and a ballpoint pen. In a stupor he laboriously began to print “O’Brien, Lawrence F.” Then he came to a dead stop. Suddenly the idiocy of the whole thing struck him. Dropping pen and form, he blundered down strange corridors, searching blindly for his President.

The body of John Kennedy lay at the center of the storm, insulated from it by the magnitude of the task which preoccupied everyone in Trauma Room No. 1. There was no need for sham activity beyond that threshold. The men and women who were gathering could not doubt the urgency of their work, and discipline invested it with a kind of peace. Blades and catheters were lifted automatically, dials spun instinctively; rubber-gloved hands reached, clenched, and moved in rhythmic pantomime. This was an old battle for them, fought with familiar weapons and with every stratagem they could summon even when they knew they could not win.

They could not win now. The throat wound—which was then assumed to be an entry wound, because there was no time to turn him over—was small, and it exuded blood but slowly. The damage to the posterior cranium, however, could scarcely be exaggerated. That was the origin of the massive bleeding, which had begun on Elm Street, had continued throughout the ride to the unloading dock and the trip down the corridor, and which was unstanched even here. Doris Nelson was smeared; so was everyone who had been near him. By now, one would think, Kennedy would have been bled white, but his great heart continued to pump; some 1500 cc. of blood—three pints—had flecked the aluminum hospital cart, its sheeting, the floors, the walls beyond. And mingled with it were vast amounts of fine tissue.

Diana Bowron, S.R.N., and Margaret Hinchcliffe, R.N., undressed him swiftly, removing all his clothes except his undershorts and brace and folding them on a corner shelf. Nearly nude, his long body, unmarred below the head, lay on its back across a three-inch black leather pad. The fixed eyes—dilated and divergent, deviated outward with a skew deviation from the horizontal—were raised sightlessly toward the solitary fluorescent lamp glaring overhead. The first physician to arrive, Charles J. Carrico, a second-year surgical resident in his twenties, examined him rapidly. There was no pulse, no blood pressure at all. Nevertheless he was not quite gone. His body was making slow, agonizing efforts to breathe, and an occasional heartbeat could be detected. Carrico commenced emergency treatment, inserting a tube through the mouth in an attempt to clear the airway. Lactated Ringer’s solution—a modified saline solution—was fed into the right leg via catheter. In a hurried undertone the resident inquired about blood type.

A nurse darted out. “What’s the President’s blood type?” she asked Hill and Kellerman. Clint started to reach for his wallet. Roy said, “O, RH Positive.”⁹

Returning, the nurse discovered that Trauma Room No. 1 was filling rapidly. Although Doris Nelson stood in the doorway, screening the staff, fourteen doctors surrounded the cart. That was too many. The place was less than twice the size of Kennedy’s private bathroom on the second floor of the executive mansion. Only three of the physicians were absolutely necessary: Malcolm Perry, the thirty-four-year-old surgeon who had just stumbled down the flight of steps from Parkland’s cafeteria to relieve young Carrico; Burkley, because he was acquainted with the patient’s medical history, carried his special drugs in his black bag, and knew the proper dosage levels; and Marion T. Jenkins, chairman of the hospital’s department of anesthesiology. The rest—neurosurgeons, internists, urologists—had come because they were determined to be there if needed. As it turned out, their most useful function was to mask the stark surroundings.

The room was singularly plain. Its gray tile walls were as impersonal as IBM, which had actually manufactured the wall clock. Entering from the passageway in which Mrs. Kennedy was just now sitting down—Sergeant Dugger had found her a folding chair—one encountered a solid door, which swung to the right. Within, the initial impression was of utility and durability. This was a chamber of suffering, but it had been designed for doctors, not patients. To the layman’s eye it had the brutal functionalism of a stockyard. There wasn’t an inch of softness, nor a mote of subdued color. Apart from sheets and cotton every item was noncombustible. The pedal-operated waste can was of stainless steel. The floor was black rubber. Cabinets and drawers were gray metal. There were many electrical outlets in the gray tile walls, but there was no window, no natural light, no gentle shading; wherever one looked, only the harsh, efficient, unsubtle, bland, monolithic apparatus of modern medicine could be seen. The sterility was absolutely necessary, of course, but it made No. 1 an impersonal crypt, and the physicians, simply because they were alive, were a relief.

Mac Perry dominated them. Like his patient he was a bold figure of a man, and with him he occupied the center of this toneless stage. Angular, big-boned, the grandson of a Texas country physician, Perry was still chewing croquette from the hospital cafeteria when he entered, yet he was already at work. He flung his lightweight blue plaid sport coat to the blood-puddled floor and thrust his big hands into rubber gloves. There was no time to scrub in. There was scarcely time for thought. Two impressions danced across his mind: The President’s bigger than I thought he was and He’s the most important man in the world. Then everything kaleidoscoped for him. He saw the bleeding first, of course, and noted “a rapid loss of great magnitude.” Next he observed that Kennedy’s chest wasn’t moving. He felt for a femoral pulse, and his strong, probing fingers encountered only Kennedy’s rigid back brace. Blood transfusion leads, he saw, were under way. There was one venesection on the President’s right leg, and Nurse Bowron was removing the President’s gore-encrusted gold wristwatch to clear a space for another on the left arm. Burkley had produced three 100-mg. vials of the Solu-Cortef from his bag, murmuring, “Either intravenously or intramuscularly.” Everything that could be done with fluids was being done. The great need, however, was for some sort of breathing passage. The tube the resident had inserted wasn’t working, apparently because of the wound in the neck. Analgesics were unnecessary. Kennedy was in a coma. “Scalpel,” Perry muttered. A nurse slapped one in his rubber palm. Incising the President’s throat just below the mediastinal wound, he began a five-minute tracheostomy (“a mouth in the throat”). Meanwhile the tube between Kennedy’s lips had been connected to a respirator in an attempt to start him breathing again.

It was at this point that Jacqueline Kennedy decided to enter the room. She had been in the drab hallway for approximately ten minutes, each worse than the last. Bull-necked Dugger had stared at her, Nellie Connally had drawn away, Doris Nelson had tried to take her gloves off, passing orderlies had attempted to persuade her to rest in one of the sheeted cubicles. The enormity of what had happened had just begun to hit her, but she had already determined that she would not leave here. Parkland’s staff didn’t understand the strength of the will behind that decision. They knew only her reputation, and like Robert Kennedy she was a very different person than the public imagined. He was gentler and more sensitive than he was thought to be; she was far firmer than people believed. Inevitably both had been overshadowed by the President. Until this hour that hadn’t mattered. In the void he was about to leave they would emerge, however, and for Mrs. Kennedy the time to assert herself was now.

During the first few minutes she had been quietly watchful. She couldn’t understand why all the doctors were running in; she was certain her husband had been killed. Then she had heard the early talk about fluids. Physicians assume that laymen are awed by medical terminology. Usually they are right. This time they were wrong. The President had been ill since marriage; his wife had spent much time in hospital waiting rooms. She knew what a saline solution was, and when she heard a voice from the trauma room say “resuscitation,” she understood that, too. He’s still alive, she thought in amazement. It made no sense. She was convinced that he had been killed. Could there be a chance that he could live? she thought; and: Oh, my God, if he could, I’d just do everything all my life for him. The words “If only” crossed her mind, and “Maybe,” and “Just anything.” “Hope is a thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “that perches in the soul.”

Jackie glanced up at Larry and Ken, a few feet away. She whispered, “Do you think…?”

They said nothing. There was nothing to say. They drifted away among cubicles, and O’Donnell, stirring from his trance, whispered to O’Brien, “God, it’s a thousand-to-one chance he can live.”

For her it had been a fleeting wish. It was followed by an impulse. She said, “I’m going in there.”

Doris Nelson heard her and barred the way. The nurse was a starched white dragon with strong muscles, and she had been imbued with the doctrine that relatives should be kept as far as possible from patients. One purpose of the policy was to prevent the very sort of false encouragement which had just been aroused in Mrs. Kennedy. Doris said sharply, “You can’t come in here,” and set her rubber-soled shoes. Unintimidated, Jackie said, “I’m coming in, and I’m staying.” She pushed. Doris, much stronger, pushed back.

Each time her husband had been sick Jacqueline Kennedy had been turned away by doctors. At Columbia she had heard him calling for her after his back operation; she had tried to go to him then, but no one would admit her. Then, when one specialist’s treatments had begun to fail, she had wanted to bring in a consultant. She had been persuaded to change her mind, and the President had suffered through four months of intense pain and discouragement. Until then she had bowed to medical advice. She had been young and deferential; the doctors, she had thought, must know best. But after those four months she had sworn a private vow. Henceforth she would at least be at his side when he needed her; never again would she let doctors or nurses cow her. Now, struggling harder, she whispered fiercely to Doris Nelson, I’m going to get in that room.”

It seemed unlikely. She was much frailer than the nurse. But the commotion attracted Burkley’s attention. He came over.

He nodded understandingly, then ran interference for her. “It’s her right, it’s her right, it’s her prerogative,” he kept saying, leading her past the woman in stained white, who reluctantly stepped aside under the impression that he was a Secret Service man. Inside Burkley held an arm on either side of Mrs. Kennedy to prevent anyone from dragging her away.

The room had become even denser with people. Cramped by the pressure, Kennedy’s wife and his doctor were forced into the corner immediately to the left of the entrance. Behind her ranged trauma room hardware: gray tile, a green oxygen tube, a steel cabinet packed with gauze. She leaned forward and rested her spattered cheek on Burkley’s shoulder. Then she dropped briefly to the floor, knelt in the President’s blood, and closed her eyes in prayer. She rose again and stood erect, her eyes intent upon the weaving hands of Mac Perry.

It seemed impossible, but another doctor had shouldered his way in. He was William Kemp Clark, the hospital’s tall, bald chief neurosurgeon. Clark had rank; the other physicians made way for him. He and Perry exchanged desolate looks. Both knew there was no chance of saving the patient. They were merely going through the motions. Clark saw Jacqueline Kennedy and asked her, “Would you like to leave, ma’am? We can make you more comfortable outside.” Her lips moved almost soundlessly, shaping the word “No.” Perry had just finished the tracheostomy when Clark arrived; he was inserting a cuffed tube in the windpipe. Jenkins attached it to an anesthesia machine, the controls to which were more delicate than those of the respirator. Clark stood vigil over the electrocardiograph. Perry, nearly at the end of his repertoire, desperately opted for closed chest massage. He had to do something to stimulate the chest. But he couldn’t get leverage. He stood on his toes, and still the President’s chest was too high. “Somebody get me a stool,” he panted. Somebody did, and perching on it he began ten minutes of hunching and kneading.

Everything Parkland had was going for Kennedy now. Ringer’s solution, hydrocortisone, and the first pint of transfused blood were entering his vessels through the two catheters. A nasogastric tube, thrust through Kennedy’s nose and fitted behind his trachea, was clearing away possible sources of nausea in his stomach. Bilateral chest tubes had been placed in both pleural spaces to suck out chest matter through the cuffed tube and prevent lung collapse. Now, in a treatment older than the invention of the most primitive medical device, predating even William Harvey—a technique no more sophisticated than the shaking of a stopped watch—Perry was stroking and palpating the tough, well-muscled flesh over the President’s rib cage, trying to coax a single beat from the heart until his own sinews ached and begged for relief.

It wasn’t working. The spasmodic respiration had ceased. The gushing from the huge laceration on the right side of the head had ended only because he had no more blood to give. The new liquids excepted, his veins were empty, his skin shockingly white. The brief flutter on the electrocardiograph had ended; the squat EKG machine stood by the hospital cart, gleaming dully. Mac Perry crouched lower, his face clenched. He was breathing harder.

Outside the murmur of voices rose and fell in undulations. Twice before going in Jacqueline Kennedy had beckoned to Powers and said, “Dave, you better get a priest,” and over the telephone the Attorney General had made the same request of Clint. Agent Jack Ready had made the call. Twenty minutes had passed, however, and no pastor had appeared. Pointing at his watch, Dave kept pressing Ready: “What’s the story on the priest? Listen, we’re not going to make it!” Nor did it seem that they could; a cardiac pacemaker machine was being wheeled into the trauma room and prepared for use, but no one was under the illusion that it would be needed. Roy Kellerman, who had been lurking outside the door, crossed to the nurse’s station, where Clint was holding the open line to the White House. In a whisper Roy said, “Tell Jerry this is not official and not for release, but the man is dead.”

Sergeant Dugger, standing alone by the empty metal chair beside the trauma room threshold, heard everything. The Sergeant had forgotten Chief Batchelor’s car. He was thinking of Mrs. Kennedy, and of his own inadequacy. Dugger was far more sensitive than he seemed. He was painfully aware of his appearance—big, red-necked, tough, unfeeling; a poster of police brutality. His incongruous horn-rimmed glasses didn’t help. They gave him the look of an angry owl. He had never been able to correct the impression, partly because he was so inarticulate. Repeatedly he had stood in this hospital with stricken relatives in need of a word of comfort. He had none to give. He didn’t know what to say. Afterward he would explain to his Episcopalian minister, “I was all left feet.”

He wished now that he had been able to murmur a word, just one word of solace to Jacqueline Kennedy. He wanted her to know that he was a Kennedy Democrat, that he didn’t share the segregationist opinions of so many of the other green-shoulder-tabbed men in Dallas’ elite Patrol Division. He wanted to tell her that he had been in the Navy in the Southwest Pacific in World War II, and had once served on a PT boat. Most of all he was thinking: Why not me? Bob Dugger had been born in Waxahachie, Texas, thirty miles south of Dallas on Route 77; he was forty-three years old, and the most spectacular thing in his future was likely to be a plainclothes desk job. So he was wondering, Why couldn’t they have killed me? The Sergeant felt certain that his death would have been little trouble to anyone. Despite his big body, he was sure, he didn’t have that much blood to spill.

These were only impressions, unexpressed and, because he was the man he was, unexpressible. Dugger stood rooted by the door in his green tabs and polished badge, his visored cap (he had forgotten to remove it) squarely on his head. To all outward appearances he was impassive and unmoved, a great long gallows of a man with thick, stiff thighs. Behind the horn-rims his eyes were hard and unblinking. Yet he was suffering. Over and over the medley rang through his mind, The President of the United States. The President. The President…

It was 1 P.M. on the IBM clock. The EKG needle was still motionless, and Kemp Clark heaved up from it and said heavily, “It’s too late, Mac.” Perry’s long hands crimped in defeat. He slowly raised them from Kennedy’s unnaturally white breast, slipped off the stool, walked blindly from the room, and slumped in a chair, staring off into space and absently worrying the nail of his little finger with his teeth. From the head of the hospital cart Dr. Jenkins reached down and drew a sheet over the President’s face.

Clark turned to Jacqueline Kennedy. He said, “Your husband has sustained a fatal wound.”

Burkley reached over to check Kennedy’s pulse—they were that close—and felt nothing. He swung back, bracing himself on the tile walls, and held his square, florid face next to her face. He had to be sure she understood. He tried to tell her, “The President is gone.” But his voice was indistinct. He had treated a thousand Marine Corps gunshot wounds in the Pacific, he was a Regular Navy admiral, yet he couldn’t control himself. He swallowed hard and in a clotted voice managed to say, “The President is dead.”

There was no audible response, but she inclined her head slightly and, leaning forward, touched his cheek with her own. The doctor began to weep openly. Embarrassed, he turned to the others and lapsed into navalese. “Clear the area!” he commanded hoarsely. “I want this area cleared!”

Doris Nelson took him literally and began a clean sweep-down. Elsewhere in Major Medicine new cases had been accumulating. A boy named Ronald Fuller was bleeding from a fall. A man, Carl Tanner, had severe chest pains which required diagnosis. One Ada Buryers complained that she was nervous, and a newcomer suffered from the inability to void. Subordinate nurses were dispatched to fetch a plastic shroud to Trauma Room No. 1 and two paper bags, which looked much like shopping bags, were brought for John Kennedy’s belongings. Outside, Doris asked what arrangements should be made for the disposal of the body. Then she prepared a death certificate for Kemp Clark, who, as senior physician in attendance, would have to sign it.

Ken O’Donnell sleepwalked past Pediatrics to tell Lyndon Johnson. Powers scrawled:

1⁰⁰ Mr President pronounced dead by Dr William Clark

By 1 P.M. Dallas time, according to a University of Chicago study conducted the following winter, 68 percent of all adults in the United States—over 75 million people—knew of the shooting.¹⁰ In that first half-hour information was meager, imprecise, and distorted, but it was clear from the outset that the crime on Elm Street was the most spectacular single American disaster since Pearl Harbor. An entire nation had been savaged, and the nation realized it; before the end of the afternoon, when 99.8 percent had learned that the elected President had been murdered, the country was in the grip of an extraordinary emotional upheaval. Over half the population wept. Four out of five, in the words of the report, felt “the loss of someone very close and dear,” and subsequently nine out of ten suffered “physical discomfort.”

The discomfort—deep grief—followed confirmation of the President’s death. In those first, indecisive thirty minutes there was a dissonant medley of response: dread, hope, prayer, rage, and incredulity. Parkland’s disorder and distress were being repeated in every community with a television set, a transistor radio, a telephone, or a primitive telegraph, and virtually no one was beyond reach of one of them. America, at the moment of the President’s death, was one enormous emergency room, with the stricken world waiting outside.

The swiftness of the blow intensified the national trauma. There is no way to cushion the shock of an assassination, but the knowledge that fantastic events were in progress at that very moment, coupled with the maddening uncertainty, had created a havoc which had swept up tens of millions of Americans. The immediacy of a running account, however piecemeal, outstrips any report of an accomplished fact. If a thing is done, it is done; if it is being done, the spectator feels that the outcome may be altered—may even feel that he himself may alter it. Audiences are under the illusion that they are on stage. In a sense they are. Their yearning puts them there.

Friday’s boundless national audience had begun to gather six minutes after Lee Oswald ceased firing. At 12:36 CST Don Gardiner of the ABC radio network cut into local programs with a relay of the embattled Merriman Smith’s first precede, torn off teletype machines two minutes before. At 12:40—when Kellerman was telling Behn “Look at your clock”—CBS interrupted “As the World Turns,” a soapland daydream. Viewers beheld Walter Cronkite announcing that “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade. The first reports say that the President was ‘seriously wounded.’ ” At 12:45 NBC, the champion of news coverage, became the last of the three to reach the public. NBC was relying heavily upon the Associated Press, that bumbling giant, and to make matters worse the network was “down”—there were no national programs at the moment; local stations were in control.

This was the hour of David Brinkley’s private ordeal. With every teletype hammering out history, the monitor in his office was continuing to present a fashion show. The manager of NBC’s Washington affiliate was out to lunch. No one knew where he was, or would assume responsibility for bouncing the models. In New York Chet Huntley had scuttled “Bachelor Father,” WNBC-TV’s marshmallow, but Brinkley’s hands were tied, and when he finally reached the air he was in a state of what another NBC newscaster described as “controlled panic.” British television approached the news more soberly, regularly interrupting programs to announce the shocking news, but not immediately giving the mass of detail that was to follow.

During the first critical hour in the United States the ratio between the public and its true informants was roughly 38,000,000:1. The Cronkites and Huntleys were as out of touch as their demoralized listeners; the best they could do was pass along details from Smith, at Parkland’s cashier’s desk, and Jack Bell, in admissions. As commentators the television newscasters would normally have commented. At the moment any gloss would have been highly inappropriate, and their chief contribution was to realize that and remain unruffled. Since most of them had known the President personally, their impassivity that afternoon was no small feat. Even for men with training and long experience it was difficult, and composure vanished off camera. Bill Ryan and Frank McGee dissolved when relieved. Cronkite, taking his first break, numbly answered a studio phone. A woman on the other end, not recognizing his voice, told him, “I just want to say that this is the worst possible taste to have that Walter Cronkite on the air when everybody knows that he spent all his time trying to get the President.” He replied, “This is Walter Cronkite, and you’re a Goddamned idiot.” Then he flung the receiver down.

Until their elaborate staffs began to function they were marking time. America’s multimillion-dollar communications empire had been reduced to a crude, truncated megaphone with two-thirds of the nation at the listening end and, at the shrunken mouth, two wire correspondents clutching commandeered hospital telephones. Smith and Bell shared the same desperate plight. They weren’t learning much where they were. Yet should either surrender his outside line, the chances of finding another were negligible. They were dependent upon the cooperation of colleagues and tolerant passers-by who, hopefully, would be reliable. It is a fact, and it is something of a miracle, that the megaphone worked. Fellow reporters were exceptionally generous, scrupulous, and resourceful; most of the groundless rumors circulated in the country that afternoon came from viewers and listeners who heard correct versions and embellished them in the retelling.

Here speed was an asset; before the deceived could spread the deceptions, they themselves had joined the great audience that was forming. Lacking that celerity, lies could have been sown beyond hope of uprooting. Even as it was, most of the 76 million first heard of the tragedy through hearsay. It was a workday. The reputation of daytime television was low; for every housewife who enjoyed the pablum of “Bachelor Father” or “As the World Turns,” there were perhaps a score who were occupied otherwise, and who were therefore alerted by her, sometimes at second or third hand. Word-of-mouth was the initial form of communication nearly everywhere, including the White House, whose private news agency was the U.S. Secret Service.

In theory the executive mansion had access to more complete information than any other house, not because agents are better reporters than correspondents, but because they were better situated—Smith, twenty-five yards away from the closed wide door of the emergency area, couldn’t compete with the Kellerman-Hill team inside. As a publisher, however, the White House Detail was inept. Its service was, after all, secret. The scraps Smith and Bell did pick up and dictate were rephrased by professionals, beamed across all fifty states in even, well-modulated tones, and received by sets which were familiar furniture at every American address, including 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The voice of the Secret Service was the rasping cop’s accent of Jerry Behn. First from his own desk, and later, after his office had grown hopelessly overcrowded, from the conference table in the larger office of Jack McNally, Behn would repeat aloud everything he heard over the open line from the nurse’s station. Volunteers would then dash down corridors repeating it again, much as their predecessors, on August 24, 1814, had rushed about shouting that the British were on their way from Bladensburg with torches.

In this haphazard fashion the Chief Executive’s home had learned that the head of the household lay gravely wounded in a Texas hospital. The butlers polishing tableware heard it from a government carpenter; a guard told the agent on the south portico; a White House Police sergeant shouted it across the west lobby; Jack McNally told Clark Clifford in the staff mess; a Navy yeoman blurted it out to Taz Shepard, who then thrust his head into the East Wing office where Nancy Tuckerman was putting the finishing touches on the seating plan for the Erhard dinner. Like so many women of the New Frontier, Nancy had led a genteel, sheltered life. Now, because of her position as social secretary and her twenty years of friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy, she had to serve as a grim courier. Among others she telephoned Maude Shaw, upstairs, and Mrs. Auchincloss, on O Street; and she dealt with a bewildered inquiry from Lee Radziwill in London. Nancy’s approach, like Nancy, was gentle and thoughtful. “What are you doing?” she would begin cautiously, and then she would proceed in stages, explaining that the President had been hurt, that he had been badly hurt, that his condition was critical, that it would be wise to prepare for the worst. It was a valiant attempt at tact, though the enormity of what had happened crushed it; in two instances the result was hysteria.

Since the first UPI bulletin had preceded Kellerman’s call by six full minutes, and since every government communications center was equipped with wire service machines, powerful officials who were in their offices had known of the shooting before Secret Service headquarters. The ragged yellow strips of paper—“Dallas, Nov. 22 (UPI).—Three shots were fired…”—were handed to George Ball at the State Department and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI; to Ted Sorensen, just returning from lunch after a stop at his apartment; to Walter I. “Bill” Pozen, who was minding the store at the Department of the Interior during Secretary Udall’s absence on the Cabinet plane; to Dean Rusk, the senior minister aboard that plane, nine hundred miles out of Honolulu; and to Robert McNamara at the Pentagon. Simultaneously the Pentagon’s command center sounded a buzzer, awakening General Maxwell Taylor, who was napping in his office between sessions with the Germans. McNamara had a tremendous reputation, and he deserved it. Despite his deep feeling for the President—the emotional side of his personality had been overlooked by the press, but it was very much there—he kept his head and made all the right moves. An ashen-faced aide came in with the bulletin. Jerry Wiesner studied the man’s expression as the secretary read it. Wiesner thought: The Bomb’s been dropped. McNamara quietly handed the slip around—Wiesner felt momentary relief; anything was better than a nuclear holocaust—and then the Secretary acted quickly. Adjourning his conference, he sent Mac Bundy back to the White House in a Defense limousine and conferred with Taylor and the other Joint Chiefs. Over the JCS signature they dispatched a flash warning to every American military base in the world:

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

By every readable signal the situation was very red. Assassinations generally precede attempts to overthrow governments, and General Taylor issued a special warning to all troops stationed in the Washington area. At Interior Bill Pozen had assumed that this was the first stage in a coup. Never within his memory had the capital been so wide open. Six Cabinet members were over the Pacific, and both the President and the Vice President were in Dallas. There was another chilling aspect, which struck Pozen with special force: The President’s daughter had just left the mansion. She was somewhere in the District of Columbia with Pozen’s own daughter and his wife. Trying number after number, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate them. Then all lines went dead. The Department of the Interior was cut off.

Secretary Rusk, standing in the stateroom of Aircraft 86972, fingered the two-line bulletin and asked all ladies to retire to the rear of the plane. Beckoning to a steward, he ordered him to summon Dillon, Freeman, Udall, Wirtz, Hodges, Salinger, Heller, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Manning, and Mike Feldman of the White House staff. Rusk waited until all were present, hoping that his face wouldn’t betray him. It did. Orville Freeman decided that some momentous international development had caused the President to cancel their Japanese visit. Douglas Dillon’s thoughts were more specific. Like Wiesner, the Secretary of the Treasury concluded that a thermonuclear device had exploded over an American city.

By now three bulletins had arrived. All the men were present, and Rusk said quietly, “We have just received a ticker report, which may or may not be accurate, that the President has been shot in Dallas, possibly fatally.”

“My God,” Freeman said. Luther Hodges began to sink toward the floor; he grabbed the table top with a flapping motion and swung himself into a chair. Pierre Salinger, still holding his briefing book open to the section on Japanese economics, leaned over Rusk’s upper arm, reading. Wordlessly he took the bulletins from him and read them again. Willard Wirtz, stepping beside Salinger, spoke up. In his opinion, he said, the messages were “quite garbled.”

8⁵⁰ Jean Davis of State just whispered in my ear that word has come over [word indecipherable] that President Kennedy has been shot. Suddenly notice that all the Cabinet members & Manning & Salinger are in forward cabin with Rusk & Dillon.

It is true. Terrific, stunned condition up here. No one knows how badly President is. Scty Rusk apparently has a news ticker up in his forward cabin. We are 2 hrs out of Honolulu. Gov. Connally has been shot too. Manning & Salinger running back & forth to Rusk’s cabin & to us. President shot in Dallas.

Confirmation of a press report was clearly Pierre’s job. He entered the communications shack, and it was then, as he confronted the Signal Corps sergeant on duty, that he missed his small code book.

“Get me the White House,” he said. As an afterthought he added, “See if you can get me Admiral Felt at CINCPAC, too.”

In less than a minute the mansion came through. Commander Oliver Hallett, in the Situation Room, was on the other end. The only code name Pierre could remember was his own, so he said, “Situation, this is Wayside. What’s the word on the President?”

Hallett was receiving relays from Behn through the Signal Corps operator. He said, “We are still verifying. The President has been shot, we believe in the head.”

Pierre, like Behn, was repeating each sentence. In the stateroom Rusk turned to the group and asked, “What shall we do?”

There was a twenty-second discussion, then everyone agreed. The word was passed to the pilot, and Wirtz, looking out, saw the southern wing dip in a 180-degree arc. Josephy scrawled, “Sudden sharp bank—wing turning…” Tokyo was no longer their destination. The new destination, however, was uncertain. “Word is we’re going to Dallas,” Josephy wrote. In the shack Rusk called George Ball: “We got the flash. We’re coming back. Should we go to Dallas or Washington?” he asked him. Ball didn’t know. “We’ll be at Hickam Field in forty-five minutes,” the Secretary said. “I’ll call you from there.” Pierre, beside him, was connected to CINCPAC. He arranged to have a jet on a Hickam runway with full tanks to fly himself and Rusk directly to Love Field. The more the Secretary of State thought about it, the more sensible this plan seemed. But it was pure improvisation. He had no concept of the situation in Dallas and didn’t even know that the Vice President had accompanied the President there.

Salinger, switched back to the Situation Room, was hanging on. Like Sorensen at lunch, he recalled, and nervously mentioned, the twenty-year cycle of Presidential deaths. It didn’t hold, one member of the Cabinet objected—they were actually taking the coincidence seriously—because Roosevelt’s four terms had disrupted it. Suddenly everyone was talking at once. The tone was one of strenuous optimism. Freeman, especially vehement, insisted that a head wound wasn’t necessarily fatal; as a Marine officer he himself had survived one on Bougainville.

“Wayside, stand by on this line,” Commander Hallett said. “We are trying to verify information.”

Pierre was remembering all the crises in which he had stood at Kennedy’s side. Now, when he was needed most, he was eight thousand miles away. Rusk’s thoughts were almost identical. He had never felt so helpless. His President and his country were in agony, and he was locked in a sealed tube 35,000 feet above the ocean.

On the fifth floor of the Justice Department Building at Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, J. Edgar Hoover had picked up his direct line to the Attorney General’s office. It was answered by Angie Novello, who was staring across a desk at a frayed UPI page held aloft by a weeping press office secretary.

“This is J. Edgar Hoover.” His delivery, as always, was staccato, shrill, mechanical. “Have you heard the news?”

A White House operator connected him with Extension 163, at the end of the swimming pool behind the Virginia mansion. In response to the ring Ethel Kennedy left the men. The operator told her, “The Director is calling.” Ethel didn’t have to ask which one. In official Washington there were many directors, but only one Director. She said, “The Attorney General is at lunch.”

At the other corner of the pool her husband had just glanced at his watch. It was 1:45 P.M. They had been away from the office over an hour. He picked up a tuna fish sandwich and said to Morgenthau, “We’d better hurry and get back to that meeting.”

Robert Kennedy knew something out of the ordinary had happened; the Director never called him at home. Dropping his sandwich, he crossed to the phone, and as he took it Morgenthau saw the workman with the transistor radio whirl and run toward them, gibbering.

“I think it’s serious. I am endeavoring to get details,” said Hoover. “I’ll call you back when I find out more.”

The Director hung up. The Attorney General hung up. He started back toward his wife and his two mystified guests, who were just beginning to understand the workman’s babbling. Midway toward them Kennedy stopped. It had hit him. His jaw sagged; to Morgenthau it seemed that his every muscle was contorted with horror.

Ethel ran over and embraced him, and Morgenthau and his assistant hurriedly withdrew into the house. Their instincts were correct; leaving him alone was the most that anyone except his wife could have done for him. Unfortunately, solitude was impossible. His obligations were too great. Grief was an indulgence which must be postponed, or, more accurately, restrained, for absolute control was impossible. He nearly brought it off. Like the President, he disapproved of public displays of private feeling, and none of the friends who were about to gather in the yard at Hickory Hill saw him break. Nevertheless there were intervals when he had to turn his back and look away toward the bathhouse, the tennis net, the gnarled trees, the tree house—to wherever there were no eyes to gaze back.

These intervals were brief. His first thought was to fly to the side of his wounded brother, and after alerting McNamara to the need for immediate transportation he darted upstairs to change his clothes. Meantime telephones were ringing incessantly; during the first quarter-hour calls were received or placed at the pool, the court, the upstairs study, and the downstairs library. Taz Shepard offered help in informing members of the family. Kennedy politely thanked him; that was his own responsibility. While instructing Clint Hill to make sure a priest reached the hospital he asked, “What kind of doctors do they have?” and “How is Jackie taking it?” He held several subsequent conversations with McNamara (who had been told that his own information was coming from the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and who in the confusion thought that the source was the CIA), and once he took a call from John McCone of the CIA (who was actually watching Walter Cronkite).

The CIA building was a five-minute drive from Hickory Hill. Kennedy asked McCone, “Jack, can you come over?”

In his limousine McCone, the governmental director immediately concerned with international plots, wondered, as he had been wondering since a breathless assistant broke the news to him, whether this could be the result of one. He had received no intelligence; he could reach no judgment. All he could do was speculate over the bigotry which had been cropping up in certain American cities, notably Dallas.

Wandering from extension to extension, Robert Kennedy murmured to himself, “There’s been so much hate.”

At the Republican end of the Senate lobby the UPI ticker, ignored, had clattered out its lengthening page of historic bulletins. The AP machine stirred and clanged. In the torpor induced by the federal library debate it, too, would have been overlooked had not Senator Wayne Morse’s hunger for news been insatiable. Phyllis Rock of his office was maintaining a vigil near the AP teletype. At 1:41 she checked it and cried out. Richard Riedel tossed down his newspaper, came over, and read:

… AP Photographer James W. Altgens said he saw blood on the President’s head.

Altgens said he heard two shots but thought someone was shooting fireworks.…

In the half-century since he had come to the Senate as a nine-year-old page boy Riedel had never before committed the breach of running out on the Senate floor. Now he raced up to Senator after Senator, spluttering, “The President has been shot—the President—he’s been shot!” Holland of Florida gaped at him, Dirksen of Illinois sagged. His face empty, Riedel looked up to the rostrum for help and saw Kennedy of Massachusetts. In a cloakroom the strained rumors had just reached the Majority Leader, Mike Mansfield. Mike remembered that Ted had been presiding when Patrick Kennedy died, and he moved toward the chair. Riedel beat him there. On the dais he began, “The most horrible thing has happened! It’s terrible, terrible!”

The Senator had been signing correspondence. His pen wavered. He asked, “What is it?”

“Your brother.” Riedel remembered that Ted had two brothers. “Your brother the President. He’s been shot.”

The Senator stared at him as though through a veil, then looked at Holland, who was deftly approaching from the other side to relieve him of the gavel. “How do you know?”

Ted hastily gathered up his papers, and Riedel put his hand on his shoulder. “Maybe you can take a jet to Texas. Is there anything I can do?”

Behind him he left pandemonium. Parliamentary procedure fell apart. Morse asked Prouty to “yield for a quorum call for an emergency,” and on the other side of Constitution Avenue quorum buzzers sounded in every Senator’s office. (Through this extension of word-of-mouth, supplemented by a secretary’s phone call, Church of Idaho was informed while attending a formal luncheon on the eighth floor of the State Department. He then made the announcement to Averell Harriman and the assembled diplomats.) Morse’s move should have prepared the way for an adjournment motion from the Majority Leader. But Mansfield was overcome, he couldn’t speak. Dirksen made the move as Minority Leader. He forgot to provide a reason for the record, however, and so, with Holland presiding, the Senate just stopped.

In the lobby Ted Kennedy broke his stride between the teletype machines. It was impossible to see anything. Crowds had thickened around both. He swerved toward Lyndon Johnson’s office and dialed the Attorney General’s office from there—government code 187, Extension 2001. Nothing happened. There was no dial tone, no sound at all. He dialed again and received a busy signal. Unaware of his direction, he reeled into the street. There a legislative assistant who had been listening to his own car radio recognized him and drove him the half-block to his suite in the Old Senate Office Building. On the sidewalk Claude Hooten of Houston, a Harvard classmate of Ted’s, was waiting. Hooten had arrived for the Senator’s anniversary celebration. The first reports had reached him, and he led the Senator into the suite, where, it seemed to Ted, countless portable radios were squawking in horrid concert.

The telephone crisis was growing queerer and queerer. Calls could come in—Martin Agronsky of NBC was inquiring whether the Senator planned a flight to Dallas—but when Ted retired to his private office and tried again to reach his brother, either at Justice or through the White House, all the lines were dead. After a pause one did briefly come to life. The White House switchboard, however, told him that the Attorney General was talking to Dallas, and since Ted Kennedy, unlike Bob, didn’t have an executive mansion extension, there was no way of splicing him into the call. The conversation was with Clint Hill, but Ted didn’t know that. He didn’t even know that the President was in a hospital. Like Bill Pozen at Interior, he was left with a useless black plastic receiver and the task of trying to assess the scope of the calamity. In retrospect its boundaries are clear: there was an assassin at large in Dallas, two victims at Parkland, and reaction everywhere else. That clarity did not exist then. The wounding of John Kennedy was the largest cloud in the sky, but it did not exclude the possibility of others, and the Senator thought of his wife. He wanted to be sure Joan was safe. He asked for his Chrysler. It was unavailable; an aide was using it to run errands. Milt Gwirtzman, another Harvard classmate and a member of his staff, offered his Mercedes, and in it Ted, Milt, and Claude streaked down Pennsylvania Avenue, around the White House on South Executive, out E Street, Virginia Avenue, and the Rock Creek Parkway, into Georgetown. Milt ignored red lights. Beside him Ted pointed warningly to onrushing cars with one hand and, with the other, clutched a transistor radio he had borrowed from a secretary. Claude sat in the back, his head in his hands. As they threaded their way past a jungle of construction outside the State Department, the radio reported that the President was still alive. Milt breathed a prayer of thanks. Claude said, “My God, my God, the President shot—and in my state!” Ted said nothing.

Twelve minutes after leaving the Hill the Mercedes skidded against the curb outside 1607 Twenty-eighth Street, and the Senator, searching his house for his wife, learned from a maid that she was having her hair done. Milt volunteered to get her. Careening off again, he reached Elizabeth Arden’s Connecticut Avenue studio before anyone there told Joan. They knew. Preparing to pay her bill she had become aware of a sudden quietness around her. Then, before cashier or customers could speak, he appeared. “Why, Milty, what a surprise!” she said. She really was taken aback; it was so odd to see a man in a beauty parlor. She kept glancing at him expectantly until, as they sped away, he explained that the President had been hurt. “It’s a shooting,” he said carefully, trying to keep his voice even. “We have no news except for that.” Thinking of Patrick—it was inconceivable to her that her brother-in-law would not recover—she said, “Oh, they’ve had so much trouble this year!”

On the Twenty-eighth Street threshold Ted awaited them. His face was taut and drained. “All the phones are gone,” he said. He and Claude had been going through the house, picking up extensions. They had been unable to get a dial tone. The Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company was deaf and dumb. It was as though Alexander Graham Bell had never been born. They began to wonder whether the failure of the system could be more than an accident; Joan, scared, said, “There must be some national reason.” Ted decided to conduct a door-to-door search, asking permission of strangers to test instruments until they found one that worked. It seemed to be the only solution. He had turned on his television set, but despite their many excursions since he left the Senate rostrum the commentators were still exasperatingly vague. He had to reach Hickory Hill. Bob had talked to Dallas; he would know something. On the sidewalk Ted said to Claude, “We’ll split up. You try the doors on the right. I’ll take the left. If you get something, let me know.”

The President had been shot, had been raced to Parkland, and had been in Jacqueline Kennedy’s arms outside the ambulance ramp when, at 1:37 P.M. Washington time, Liz Pozen had drawn up outside the South Portico of the executive mansion. She had switched off her radio as the children jumped in, squealing. Caroline and Agatha climbed toward the rear of the station wagon. “We’re going to sit in the very backest seat,” Caroline called, stowing her suitcase and pink teddy bear there. Counting the children, Liz watched her covertly. Caroline was a sophisticated child; in many ways she carried her emotions as easily as an adult. Obviously she was a trifle nervous about her first night away from home, but she seemed game.

Behind them Agent Tom Wells switched on the ignition in his Secret Service Ford. Unhooking the microphone under the dashboard, he radioed headquarters control, “Crown, Crown. This is Dasher. Lyric is en route to her destination.”

The exact route to that destination was up to Liz Pozen, and she was pondering choices. Usually her house on Raymond Street was the first stop on the car pool route. Her first thought was to drop Caroline and Agatha off there and let them play while she continued on with the other children. There was an alternative. Because the school was in Caroline’s house, she had never ridden in the pool before, and she might enjoy the entire circuit. Entering the Rock Creek Parkway, Liz was still debating with herself when she noticed that the giggles and chatter behind her had begun to die down. Caroline and Agatha were no longer babbling excitedly about the prospect of having tea with her this afternoon at Lord & Taylor’s, and the other first-graders had exhausted their small sources of gossip. A pall was settling over the station wagon. Motherly instinct told Liz that this could be the silence before a storm of quarreling. Music might divert them. Remembering that WGMS had scheduled a musical program for this hour, she switched on her radio.

Watching traffic, trying to decide whether to turn toward her house, Liz heard the voice of an unfamiliar announcer coming on:

She instantly switched it off. To the best of her later recollection, the volume was low and those were the only words spoken. The children, she was convinced, heard nothing. Caroline’s subsequent remarks to Tom Wells suggest that there may have been more to the broadcast than Liz thought, but at most it would have been hazy; all bulletins were hazy then. Certainly the President’s daughter could have had no grasp of what had really happened; Liz herself did not know.

“War of the Worlds,” she thought, remembering the realistic 1938 radio drama of invading Martians. She looked wide-eyed into her rearview mirror and tried to read Tom Wells’s expression. From here it was unfathomable.

The agent’s commercial radio was on, but he heard nothing from his station until they had left the parkway and turned north on Connecticut Avenue. They were passing the National Zoo when the program to which he was tuned was interrupted for the nebulous flash, “We have an unconfirmed report of a shooting in the area of the Presidential motorcade in Dallas.” In the year since Wells had joined the White House Detail the possibility of such a situation had never been far from the surface of his mind. Through his windshield he rapidly scanned the station wagon, but Liz, dark and petite, was too small to be seen from here, and the children, below window level, were invisible. It was as though all the occupants had been mysteriously spirited away, leaving the station wagon to cruise madly toward Chevy Chase Circle under its own power.

Liz Pozen was out of touch. Switching her set on again was unthinkable; she had to remain in the dark until every child, including her own, had been settled down. At the same time, the question of which route she would take had been resolved for her. She would have to pass Raymond Street, keeping Caroline and Agatha with her. The only risk in remaining on the road was that a stranger in a passing car, hearing the news on his own radio, might see Caroline, recognize her from her pictures, and act rashly. She peered out furtively at southbound drivers. Like Wells, they were impassive.

His station had resumed its regular program. Four blocks beyond the zoo there was another break—the network was speculating that some members of the Presidential party, perhaps even President Kennedy himself, had been shot. Nothing was firm. Station routine was abandoned for a running account of developments in Dallas, but the announcer was being exceptionally guarded.

Stopping did not occur to Liz, and in the absence of any sign from her Wells could only cling to her rear bumper. They passed through a half-mile of green lights before one turned red; then, braking together, they flung open their doors and met between the two cars.

The traffic signal changed; they drove on. Using his microphone, the agent called: “Crown, Crown from Dasher. Request immediate instructions regarding Lyric in view of the present situation in Dallas. Over.”

The Ford’s commercial radio was describing how a policeman had chased two people up “a knoll”—the overpass. The announcer interrupted to confirm the shooting of the President.

“Crown, Crown from Dasher. Request immediate—repeat immediate—instructions in connection with my previous inquiry. Get in touch with Duplex or Dresser. Over.”

Crown was stunned. On account of UPI’s speed, Liz Pozen and Tom Wells, cruising toward Maryland, knew more than those who should have advised them. Jerry Behn’s lines were tied up because he was talking to Roy Kellerman, and Agent Foster, for whom Wells was standing by, hadn’t a clue to what had happened. He had just strolled into Post F-5 after an admiring inspection of the new rug in the President’s office, and he was preoccupied with the design of a small flight jacket for young John.

In Chevy Chase, near the intersection of Connecticut and Western, Liz let off the first child. In the street she and Wells held their second conference. Since he had no “procedural instructions,” he told her, they would continue with the pool.

His own thoughts were beginning to jell, however, and by the time Crown connected him with Foster, who had merely been informed of “an emergency in Dallas,” Wells had convinced himself that he must spoil Caroline’s visit to the Pozens’. His next task was to convince Foster, his superior.

“Dasher to Dresser. I feel the danger has grown. We don’t know whether this is an isolated thing, a plot, or a coup. If it’s a coup, Washington is sure to be a part of it, and I want Lyric back in a secure setting.” Raymond Street, he remembered, was a dead end, a kidnaper’s dream. “We’d be primed for a snatch, and in lieu of anything to the contrary from you I’m taking Lyric back to Crown.”

It was not an easy judgment, nor would it be popular. Nevertheless it made sense to Foster. He agreed that “They might be trying to kill the whole family.” Upstairs he conveyed the decision to Maude Shaw, who was skeptical of it. The greatest skeptic, however, was going to be Liz Pozen. Wells, expecting her to be difficult, reached a second judgment; to avoid discussion he would say that he was acting under orders.

In letting out the second child she made a U-turn. He turned off his commercial radio and waved her down. Their third huddle, which followed, was both distressing and hectic. He was so distracted that he forgot his emergency brake, and halfway toward her he caught a horrified glimpse of the Ford slowly rolling downhill. He caught it after a sprint, set the brake, and returned.

She was even more stubborn than he had anticipated. In their two previous talks she had been more agitated than he was. But now that they were out of heavy traffic, she reasoned, the chances that Caroline might be spotted had diminished. Liz very much wanted to keep her. She had a case; it was inconceivable that an outsider could have discovered these arrangements, and this was no time to upset Caroline.

“It’s not my decision,” he said. “I have no alternative.” Stepping past her, he put his head in the station wagon and said, “Caroline, you have to go back to your house. You better bring your overnight bag. Maybe you can come out a little later.”

His nervousness heightened the tension. To Liz he seemed needlessly brusque and businesslike. The girls, she thought, looked like two fish—their mouths were open, and they were ready to cry. Caroline shrank back. She said, “I don’t want to go.”

He opened the rear door and picked up the suitcase. “We don’t have any choice. Something has come up, Miss Shaw will probably tell you.”

“Yes, I know what it’s about,” she said. He gathered that she had heard a broadcast.

Hugging the bear and fighting back tears, she climbed over the seat toward him. Liz kissed her; Wells put her on the front seat beside him and left. At the first intersection he started to make a right turn. Preoccupied, he had lost his sense of direction. Liz saw his indicator light flashing and shouted, “Are you sure you know where you’re going?” Through his open window he shouted back, “I want Connecticut Avenue.” “Then turn left,” she called.

A quarter-mile south of Chevy Chase Circle Caroline looked up at him. “Why do we have to go home?” she asked. Before Wells could reply she said again, “Never mind. I know.”

She couldn’t know much. Still, his first explanation, he reflected, had been inadequate. She was entitled to something better than that. “Mummy has changed her plans and will probably come back to the White House tonight,” he said. “She wanted you and John to be home.”

Caroline again fell silent. She withdrew into her own thoughts, which was not unusual for her. Wells observed that she had become very quiet, but he had no time to coax her into conversation. Re-entering the Rock Creek Parkway—which Caroline’s Uncle Ted and his two classmates had left a few minutes before—the agent became absorbed in a new, frightening complication. The specter which had plagued Liz Pozen became a reality: Another motorist recognized Caroline. They were passing a light green sedan when the driver glanced over and started visibly. He was a burly man in his early fifties, wearing a hat and what appeared to be a lumber jacket. The agent’s description is sketchy, because he immediately began trying to shake him; once the man had recovered he decided to give chase.

He was taking a chance. Tom Wells was one of the finest marksmen in the White House Detail, and he was in a dangerous temper. Yet the anonymous driver is a sympathetic figure; his response was courageous and understandable. The black Ford carried no official markings, and anyone seeing the President’s six-year-old daughter speeding away with an unidentified man (Wells may have looked burly to him) in the minutes after the shooting might easily have concluded that she was being abducted. The agent, on the other hand, had no way of determining the motives of his pursuer. In taking Caroline from Liz Pozen he had inherited the obligation to keep his commercial radio silent. He couldn’t even ask specific questions of Crown without alarming the child beside him. Perhaps his fear of a coup was being vindicated at this very moment; perhaps the strange sedan was part of it. Wells damned the White House garage for failing to provide him a car with a Secret Service “fireball”—a red light under the car frame—or with a portable, pistol-grip flashlight that illuminated the black-on-red letters “POLICE.” In its absence he was left with but one choice: flight. Driving his accelerator to the floor, he swerved to the left. His pursuer also accelerated, and was at one point a few feet from his right rear bumper. Gradually Wells drew away. He cut in and out skillfully, allowing other traffic to filter between them, and when he reached the parkway’s Virginia Avenue exit there was no trace of the green sedan in his rearview mirror.

Even that was enough to awaken Caroline’s curiosity. She asked, “Why are you telling them we’re coming home?”

He concentrated on driving; there was no satisfactory answer. But he had to be sure that the south portico and Miss Shaw were alert.

At 2:13 Washington time, thirty-six minutes after their departure, Tom Wells swept Caroline, her overnight bag, and her stuffed bear past the pallid guards at the Southwest Gate.

For all who had been tuned in between 1:36 and 1:45 Washington time, automobile and home and office sets had provided the first spark in the firestorm. Dean Gorham, still slowly sipping his vanilla malted, had heard it on Texas Route 71. He kept speeding toward the Austin auditorium to deliver the souvenir programs for the great banquet which would never be held. Helen Williams had heard in the kitchen of the LBJ Ranch. She flung her apron over her face and ran out blindly past the hundreds of pies which had just become garbage. Bernard Weissman, the young right-wing salesman who had signed the full-page advertisement in that morning’s Dallas News, had heard while driving in downtown Dallas with a friend. According to his testimony, fearful that he would be blamed he had been holed up in a bar for four hours, saying of the assassin, “I hope he is not a member of the Walker group—I hope he’s not one of Walker’s boys.” H. L. Hunt had heard over the large console television set in his office. He left the set on and vacated the room for those members of his staff who might be interested in subsequent developments.

Ted Dealey and Marguerite Oswald had both been tuned to Ted’s Station WFAA. An announcer, evidently out of breath, ran in front of the camera and gasped, “I’ve got some terrible news. The President has been shot, I don’t know if fatally.” Dealey was offended by the man’s unprofessional conduct. His television reporters, he felt, should be more suave. Marguerite was interested. This was real news. Tomorrow it would be all over the Fort Worth papers, like Lee’s defection to Russia in 1959, and she could read about it while watching the “Today” show. She felt no personal involvement. “I wasn’t upset emotionally—I’m not that type of person,” she said afterward. “I have this ability of accepting things. I never let my sleep or eating habits get disturbed.” In Irving Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine had heard it over the Zenith set Lee had been watching the evening before. Ruth translated for her friend and lit a candle. “Is that a way of praying?” Marina inquired. “Yes, it is, just my own way,” Ruth replied. Marina went into the yard to hang some clothes. The newscaster reported that the shots had come from the Texas School Book Depository, and Ruth went out to translate this, too. Marina said nothing, but she furtively checked the blanket roll in the garage. Seeing it there, not knowing it was empty, she whispered to herself, “Thank God.” Ruth did not connect Lee with the shots, though she thought it gripping to know someone who was downtown and could give a firsthand account of what had happened.

In Washington J. Bernard West, the White House Chief Usher, had heard the first bulletin over his home radio, which he had just turned on two minutes before. He ran into his bedroom to change his clothes. Traphes Bryant, President Kennedy’s dog handler, had heard it on his car radio on West Executive Avenue. He stopped, put his head on the steering wheel, and prayed. The wife of Arlington’s superintendent, seeing one of the first television bulletins that interrupted soap operas, called her husband. “Just as the doctor was about to operate we saw it on TV,” she cried. He had no idea what she meant. Mrs. Earl Warren had also seen the bulletin, on the Warrens’ apartment set at the Sheraton-Park. She also phoned the office of her husband, whose secretary, Mrs. Dorothy McHugh, rapidly typed on a blank slip of paper: “There is a report that the President and Governor Connally have been shot in Dallas and taken to the hospital.” She gave the slip to a page, he rapped on the conference room door and handed it to Arthur Goldberg, and Goldberg gave the message to the Chief Justice, who rose, his eyes bright with tears, and read it aloud. The other justices rose together. They stood paralyzed; then Potter Stewart stirred and murmured that there was a transistor radio in his office. It was brought to the room and placed on the huge baize green table top, where it lay, tiny and incongruous, a flat plastic box from which assorted voices swelled and faded in concert while nine clay-faced men in dark suits bowed over it.

Nina Warren had obeyed the universal impulse of the moment—to tell someone, preferably someone close, but, lacking that, anyone who had not yet been told. Dick Goodwin, holed up with his typewriter, and Sergeant Keith Clark, browsing over rare books, remained uninformed only because they had departed from their normal routines and their whereabouts were unknown. The breakdown of the telephone system, which seemed so menacing, was an inevitable consequence of this compulsion to spread the word. It is impossible to estimate how many of the 1,443,994 phones in service in the Washington metropolitan area on November 22 were snatched up in that first half-hour, but the Chesapeake & Potomac’s Friday record of over a quarter-million long-distance calls is staggering, and locally the phenomenon of what communications engineers call “the slow dial tone,” a result of overloaded exchanges, became frightening.¹¹ Lines would go dead, return to normal when a sufficient number of people had hung up, and go dead again and return to life, over and over. The pattern was repeated throughout the country. It became obvious that in a national emergency this would be the first link to snap. The phoners likeliest to get through immediately were those who called as soon as they heard the first flash; Byron Skelton’s daughter, knowing that he was about to leave for Austin, dialed him at once and caught him at the front door. After that it was a matter of persistence and luck, because remote acquaintances, distant relatives, and estranged friends were searching for one another’s numbers by the millions. Even total strangers called—in Georgetown a ghostly voice told Bill Walton, “Turn on your radio, the President’s been shot.”

Strangers were the most frequent source for those in public places. A fellow shopper stopped Provi Parades in Maryland, a fellow American drew Bishop Hannan aside in Rome, a passing neighbor called to Joe Gawler in Gawler’s backyard, a New York policeman approached General Eisenhower and his aide in New York. Fred Holborn, who was wondering why motorcycle policemen should be roaring down West Executive Avenue at breakneck speed, heard from a sobbing woman in Lafayette Park. Ben Bradlee glanced out Brentano’s window and saw pedestrians stumbling around “like penguins, or a gaggle of geese.” His first thought was that there had been a terrible automobile accident in the street just outside; he hurried to the sidewalk to find out whether anyone he knew had been hurt and learned that someone he knew had been—a thousand miles away. Taxi drivers told Richard Nixon, in downtown Manhattan, and former Secret Service Chief Frank Wilson, in suburban Washington. Washington waiters, ordinarily taciturn, babbled excitedly to Hale Boggs, Ted Reardon, and Nick Katzenbach. (Reardon had patronized the same place for three years because he was confident that no one there could identify him as a Kennedy aide. At 1:40 on November 22 he discovered that everyone there could. Katzenbach, like many others who were dining, was never again able to bring himself to enter the same lunchroom.) A waitress in Dallas’ Alamo Grill whispered to FBI Agent Jim Hosty that shots had been fired from the Book Depository, where, Hosty knew, a certain Lee Oswald was employed. A captain at La Caravelle restaurant whispered it to Steve Smith. Jean Kennedy Smith, his wife, on a New York street overheard a girl shrieking, “Haven’t you heard the news?” Jean encountered a friend who was parked nearby. They listened to the car radio together, and then, hearing that her brother was in critical condition, Jean turned away and walked through twenty blocks of Manhattan to her home on upper Fifth Avenue.

Hearing an announcer, or reading a teletype bulletin, nearly always guaranteed acceptance of the fact as a fact. There were exceptions. At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Sergeant Leon Bodensteiner had answered the UPI flash bells, looked at the White House Communications Agency’s wire service monitor, and concluded that this was an operator’s prank. But Bodensteiner was in the Signal Corps. He knew how such things are done. Laymen are more trustful of devices, less trustful of other people. Ben Bradlee believed the news the moment he was told. Not many did. The assassination was so fantastic that the general reaction was utter incredulity. “George, I’ve just heard something wild,” a colleague called to George Reedy on Capitol Hill, and Reedy agreed that it was absurd. He rose to check only because it was his duty to telephone Lyndon Johnson’s Walter Jenkins if anything unusual had happened in Texas. When Bill Moyers was told in Austin, “The President has been shot and the Vice President will want to see you immediately,” he at first dismissed it as a bad joke. So did Llewellyn Thompson, at Washington’s Metropolitan Club; Seaman Ed Nemuth, in Anacostia; and Arthur Schlesinger, who was attending a Newsweek luncheon in New York with Kenneth Galbraith and Kay Graham; Schlesinger concluded that the report was “some repellent form of intramural humor.” In Texas Michael Paine thought it was another anti-Kennedy quip, though when Paine heard the Book Depository mentioned he, unlike his wife, thought of calling the FBI about Lee.

The very vehemence with which people scouted those early reports is suspect. It was almost as though they hoped that if they denied it with sufficient vigor, it would go away. “Don’t be ridiculous!” Justice Stewart’s wife snapped at her maid, and in the basement of the Supreme Court Building Joanie Douglas, who had driven down to meet her husband, raged at a guard, “Don’t you ever tease about such a thing!” On the West Coast an officer tried to break the news gently to Acting Secretary of the Navy Fay by saying, “I think the President’s been shot.” Fay whirled on him. “Don’t tell me what you think, Captain,” he snapped. “Tell me what you know.” In the Justice Department Barney Ross, hearing almost identical words, replied, “The president of what?” Across the Potomac Lieutenant Sam Bird said, “Oh, really,” took two steps, and asked indignantly, “The who?”

One form of rejection was to ignore unimpeachable sources, or to assume that Kennedy’s recovery would be painless and swift. Justice Douglas, finding that the rest of the Court had lost interest in the conference, shut himself up in his office and buried himself in legal briefs; he wouldn’t even come out to see his wife. Aboard American Airlines Dallas-to-Washington Flight 58 the captain switched on the public address system and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have just intercepted a radio broadcast from Miami, Florida, saying that President Kennedy has been assassinated and Governor Connally seriously wounded. We do not have any further details at this time.” Candy McMurrey wondered aloud what “assassinated” meant—was it killed or wounded, or was it merely an attempt?—and her husband said, “Oh, well, Miami, they have all those kooks and Cubans; you can’t trust what they say.” In Cuba itself, Fidel Castro greeted the report that Kennedy had been wounded with the cry, “Then he’s re-elected!” In the Lafayette dining room Sargent Shriver was summoned to a phone and told by his secretary. He returned to the table and said to his wife, “Something’s happened to Jack.” Eunice asked, “What?” “He’s been shot,” Shriver said. She asked if her brother was going to be all right. “We don’t know,” her husband replied. Eunice thought a moment and then said, “There have been so many crises in his life; he’ll pull through.” Here were two people in conspiracy against reality. They calmly studied the menu and ordered lunch; it arrived, and Eunice ate the bread and drank a cup of soup before a second telephone call destroyed their fragile façade.

There were other façades. Although the facts were set forth in a few stark words, a handful managed to misinterpret them. Joe Dealey and Warren Harding at the Dallas Trade Mart independently decided that “The President’s been hit” meant that he had been hit by rotten fruit. Reardon and Mary McGrory thought another plane had opened fire on Air Force One. Angier Biddle Duke took “shot” to mean “shot at”—in other words, a miss. In her Dallas classroom Marilyn Dailey, one of the schoolchildren who had held the “MR. PRESIDENT, PLEASE STOP AND SHAKE OUR HANDS” sign at Lemmon Avenue and Lomo Alto, heard the principal’s announcement over the loudspeaker and thought, Oh! He’s only wounded! Marilyn didn’t react until the principal’s voice had been followed by organ music; then, in a matter of seconds, she developed a splitting headache. Even after repeated verification there was a tendency to work and rework the concise sentences, looking for the hole that, people felt, had to be there somewhere. This disposition was strongest among those who, like Eunice, remembered the many times the President had cheated death in the past; Arthur Schlesinger recalled PT 109 in the Solomons and felt “an insane resurgence of hope.”

In Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s Hyannis Port home the maid, Dora Lawrence, shouted up from the first floor at Ann Gargan, “Ann, Ann! Did you hear? Did you hear?” Ann, about to leave for Detroit, turned from her uncle’s nurse with irritation. The maid was always panicking. If the poodles slipped outdoors, she would wring her hands. But this was too much—her shrillness was apt to waken Uncle Joe or Aunt Rose. Hurrying to the head of the stairwell, Ann asked crossly, “What is it?” Dora gave her own version of the first flash: “Someone has taken a shot at the President!”

Back in her room with Rita Dallas, Ann switched on her television set. The bulletins were pouring in, and in her own panic she committed the sin for which she had been about to reproach the maid: she increased the volume to an alarming pitch. The President’s mother appeared in the doorway. “Please turn the TV down, Ann,” she said. “I’m taking a rest.”

Her niece and the nurse gestured at one another and reached for the knob, too late; Rose Kennedy had heard that her son had been hit by gunfire. She sank into a chair, trembling. Yet at most she would have been spared no more than a few moments. The telephone rang. It was Bob Kennedy in Virginia. He told his mother that “It looks bad”—that “As far as I know Jack can’t pull through.”

Rose hung up and hugged herself, as though to ward off the coming chill. She looked haggard. “I can’t stand it,” she said. “I’ve got to keep moving.”

Two doors away they heard her pacing up and down, pivoting at each corner and returning deliberately. Ann remembered the President’s father, asleep down the hall, and began to cry softly. The nurse puckered. Since girlhood she had been told that her face was a map of Ireland, and it was; it was as Celtic as the Sinn Fein. But now she was preoccupied with her name. “Dallas… Dallas… Dallas,” the hideous set kept saying, and as her pucker deepened she thought in astonishment, Why, that’s my name.

The name had another significance in Washington’s F Street Club, where Senator Fulbright and Gene Black, former head of the World Bank, had been finishing their lunch. Black was among those with appointments to see Kennedy immediately after the President’s return from Texas. He and the Senator were drinking coffee and discussing economics. Elspeth Rostow, wife of the State Department’s counselor, entered the room moments before a man appeared and blurted out what had happened, and where it had happened. Mrs. Rostow saw Fulbright throw down his napkin and jump to his feet. “Goddamn it!” he shouted. “I told him not to go to Dallas!”

Just as water piles up behind a keel in a typhoon, baffling the screws and forcing the helmsman to violate every principle of seamanship to avoid broaching to, so anguish foils the human mechanism. In their struggle to preserve sanity that Friday men and women suspended the laws of normal behavior. In the White House a member of the President’s staff blacked out for two hours. Afterward he had no recollection of where he had been, but since no one saw him he was probably one of those for whom privacy was an absolute necessity. Rose Kennedy had to go to her room. Jean Kennedy Smith had to walk those twenty blocks. Dave Hackett, who had known Bob Kennedy since boyhood, couldn’t bear to be among friends; he left a meeting and scoured the neighborhood for a taproom where he would be unknown and where he could down a stiff shot unnoticed. In Dallas, Judge Sarah Hughes, hearing of the shooting, quietly walked out of the Trade Mart and drove home. In Washington a lady in Lord & Taylor’s suddenly realized that there were no other customers, no clerks, no floorwalkers; she could have walked off with the whole store.

She didn’t become a shoplifter, but had she acted queerly she would have been in a large company. Eisenhower’s secretary was talking long distance from Gettysburg to a woman at Twentieth Century–Fox who was idly watching a teletype machine beside her desk. The keys rapped out the first flash; without explanation the woman filled her lungs and screamed into the receiver. She kept shrieking—the secretary re-placed the call an hour later, after she herself had learned what had happened and had collected herself, and was again greeted by hysteria. On the Pennsylvania Turnpike a filling station attendant was making change for a driver with Texas license plates. A radio beside the cash register broadcast the bulletin, and the attendant returned to the car and flung the fistful of silver in the driver’s face. Mary McGrory, in the middle of a physical checkup, submitted to a routine blood-pressure test immediately after her doctor’s nurse had told her the news. She was in excellent health, and there ought to have been nothing unusual about the reading, but under these circumstances it was so appalling her physician wrote her a prescription for hypertension.

After the initial blow had been absorbed, after the first bruises had begun to darken, broadcasts from Dallas were unquestioned. The difficulty was that not everyone had immediate access to them, and it was during this period that trespassers slipped into unoccupied automobiles and turned on dashboard radios, or invited themselves into strange homes with muttered apologies, or entered raffish bars because bars were known to be equipped with television sets, or polled fellow workers to determine who had transistors. The radios turned up in unexpected places—desk drawers, pockets, purses. Afterward this was a source of embarrassment for some owners, who would go to elaborate lengths to point out that ordinarily they were never brought to the office, just as educated housewives, telling how they happened to call their husbands, would carefully preface their accounts by explaining that usually they didn’t look at such soporifics as “As the World Turns”; it was pure chance that they had tuned in on November 22. At the time, however, no questions were asked. If a set was available, it was used. In the staid Metropolitan Club television was never watched except during the World Series. The rule was ironclad, and when the screen there flickered to life, members who didn’t understand the reason tottered to their feet with outraged splutters. Then Dean Acheson stepped into the room, his eyes brimming, and silenced them with a glance. Ted Kennedy’s expedient of temporary confiscation from a member of his staff was widespread. Chairman John W. Macy, Jr. of the U.S. Civil Service Commission appropriated a portable radio belonging to one of his 230,000 employees in the Washington area and charged around his office propping it on desks and tables until he found a narrow ledge where it emitted a faint signal. At the British Embassy David Ormsby-Gore retired to his bedroom with another portable and lay there alone, wrestling with private agony. The phantom voice which had advised Bill Walton to turn on his radio assumed that he had one. He didn’t, so he and his two guests moved into the maid’s room to watch her television set.

In another bedroom at the executive mansion Maude Shaw, a nondriver, worriedly asked Agent Foster, “Oh, dear, what will I do now without White House cars?” Like Sergeant Dugger, fretting at Parkland about his unauthorized use of a cruiser, she was genuinely concerned. The majority focused upon the central tragedy immediately. A minority, of whom Miss Shaw was typical, seized fetishistically upon an insignificant corner of it, and seen in that light her question is entirely understandable. Her next move was to stand watch over the door of the President’s sleeping son, but if she had ordered a car and taken him for an afternoon drive through Montrose Park, that, too, would have been explicable. She might even have glimpsed familiar faces there. Nicole Alphand, intently studying the expression on her husband’s face as he heard the news over a telephone at the other end of their luncheon table, leaped to the conclusion that President de Gaulle had been assassinated. Set straight, she sent for the embassy chauffeur and drove off to call upon the Robert Kennedys. Nicole was the wife of the French Ambassador and was accustomed to paying her respects; to her, at that moment, it was as simple as that. On O Street the wife of the Peruvian Ambassador, second in seniority in the diplomatic corps, similarly called upon Jacqueline Kennedy’s stricken mother. Countless others also took refuge in habit. Two designers at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, feeling utterly lost, neatly laid out their tools and doodled away at a John F. Kennedy commemorative stamp. (Though meant to be tentative, those Friday sketches were flawless; four days later they were in the hands of the Postmaster General, and the stamp was issued the following spring.) Writers wrote tributes. Composers fingered keyboards. Doctors—e.g., Mary McGrory’s—methodically met their patients. A petty functionary at the Library of Congress, clinging to a pet prejudice of librarians, refused to believe a word until it had been confirmed by the New York Times. He tried to call the Times Washington bureau, found he could not get through, and prickled with the sense of alarm which was terrifying telephoners elsewhere.

The devout prayed. On his way back to the White House, Reardon bowed his head in the rear seat of a taxi and chanted over and over, “Dear God, just let him be wounded.” Mrs. Auchincloss crossed to a quiet Episcopal church on the other side of the street and was amazed to find every pew full and the minister at the altar. The desk of Acting Secretary Joe Fowler became an improvised altar; he shut the door of his Treasury Department office and fell to his knees beside it. And in Boston Cardinal Cushing, the priest closest to the President, was mobilizing his every ecclesiastical resource. The aged prelate sent word to the four hundred parishes of his archdiocese to “Pray, pray, pray for him.” He shepherded the nuns who attended him into his private chapel, and while they said their beads he himself mounted his golden prie-dieu, faced a golden statue of Christ, and begged God to spare the life of America’s first Catholic President.

His prayers continued. The nation’s suspense continued. So did mute phone lines, official fears of a plot, and, through the Joint Chiefs’ global alert, the quick knotting of the Pentagon’s awesome fist. Erratic reactions also continued, triggered by unsuspected inner quirks. The pathetic refusals to accept the facts persisted, though they were being defeated as each passing minute eroded individual defenses of denial and misunderstanding. Those who needed solitude paced their lonely rooms and streets, those who required company forged intimate friendships with strangers they would never encounter again, and those capable of speculation wondered about the source of the shots. Nearly all the conjecture led in the same direction. There was little doubt about the political convictions of the sniper. It was assumed that he and his accomplices, whose existence was also assumed, were agents of the Radical Right. This was true even of the surmises of members of the John Birch Society, and next morning thousands of communities would be retelling the story of the local rightist who had been indiscreet enough to express his elation in public. Elation was unwise, anywhere. America was in no mood to tolerate its haters. Men were assaulted, or at the very least insulted, for less than he had done—driving home from the Trade Mart, Treasurer Warren Harding noticed a riflemen’s association sticker on the windshield of the automobile behind him; swerving around, Harding blocked the street and placed the driver under citizen’s arrest.

On Washington’s Massachusetts Avenue Hubert Humphrey, listening to the radio of his parked car, was swept by alternate waves of anger and pity. The targets of his anger were the “refined Nazis” of Dallas, as he thought of them, and his pity was for the rest of the city, which needed so much “sympathy and understanding.” Liberty, he wrote in a memorandum to himself the following day, had become license. Freedom of expression had been “perverted and abused”; it had been converted into a “vehicle for vicious propaganda and hatred that inspired people to do such things as happened in Dallas to our President.” Humphrey was still among the incredulous as he listened to his car radio, but he was beginning to gather the fragments of fact together with perception. He felt sorrow for the Kennedy family, and especially for the widowed First Lady, and in his Saturday memorandum, while events were still fresh in his mind, he recalled his anxieties about the Vice President’s health: “I knew that this would be a terrible blow for him, and I was deeply concerned lest it literally overwhelm him.”

Within a few minutes of 1 P.M. Dallas time, when Kemp Clark pronounced John Kennedy dead, the set in Humphrey’s car, like those everywhere, reported that “Two priests have gone into the hospital where the President is.” The announcement that the President had been shot in the head had been somber, but this was the first concrete sign of what was to come, and because of the peculiar nature of the communications megaphone the country outside knew it before the emergency area toward which the clergymen were headed. Dr. Clark’s words had been inaudible outside Trauma Room No. 1. Members of Kennedy’s staff in the surgical booths a few yards away were unaware of what had happened, yet the audience of 75 million heard that the clerics had arrived at the entrance of the building. No names were available. They would have been meaningless anyhow. Unlike Cardinal Cushing, Father Oscar Huber and Father James N. Thompson were not towering figures in the Church. Neither had presided at a pontifical Mass or knelt upon an ornate prie-dieu. They were just parish priests in Dallas who had been summoned because their church was closest to the martyred President, and now, as Clark stepped away from his mutilated scalp, they had finally reached Parkland.

Jacqueline Kennedy moved silently forward, brushing past Dr. Burkley, and looked down on the hospital cart. There had been some difficulty with the white sheet. The cloth was too short for the President’s long body. The face was visible. From her the skull wound was hidden. His eyes excepted, she couldn’t see that anything had happened to him. Below the forehead he was almost entirely natural, and there was no fear in his expression, no indication of agony; on the contrary, his features seemed to convey compassion. It was all in his mouth. The sight transfixed her. Elsewhere in the room there were new sounds—the rolling out of equipment, the clatter of the pedal as used gauze was stuffed into the waste can, the sticky rustle of the transparent winding sheet, the thud of soggy clothes in the shopping bags, Burkley’s strangled sobs—but beside the cart the widow was utterly still. To Sergeant Dugger she appeared to be as quiet as her husband. Standing by his broad shoulders, his hand clasped in her hand, she gazed down on the face she had loved and continued to love; and she was there, steady and poised, when the first priest entered.

He entered with a priestly problem. Si capax, “if possible,” is often heard when extreme unction is celebrated in emergency rooms. It connotes conditional absolution. If possible, if the soul has not left the body, the priest grants the forgiveness of sins. He can do no more; at the instant of death his authority ends. The cruel issue is: when does a man die? It is a vexing theological question, and Father Oscar Huber had given much thought to it. Long ago, when he administered the last rites to his dying parents, he had decided that it was preposterous to leave the answer in the hands of secular physicians. The needle on an electrocardiograph had little meaning for him. The soul was more durable than that. In his own mind he had worked out a complicated formula which measured the endurance of each soul by the stamina of the body which had sheltered it. If a Catholic succumbed after a long malignancy, for example, the soul left within thirty minutes of the pronouncement of death. Had the man been in the full flush of health, it could linger anywhere from two to three hours. Like many other Church propositions, this one is deceptive. It seems fatuous at first, but on contemplation it grows in wisdom, and the events of the next three days were to vindicate the judgment of the elderly pastor who, at a few minutes past one o’clock Central Standard Time, was convinced that the soul of John Fitzgerald Francis Kennedy had not yet fled.

Si capax—the Latin phrase might have been written across that entire day in Father Huber’s calendar. The pastor had come as quickly as he could. Before Agent Ready’s call Father James N. Thompson, a six-foot, middle-aged priest, had heard the UPI bulletins in the recreation room of Holy Trinity’s rectory. Information was fragmentary, but it was enough: the President had been shot and was being taken to Parkland. Shouting out the news, Father Thompson sprinted to the garage, and he had backed out Holy Trinity’s black Galaxie—“Built in Texas by Texans,” read the rear-window sticker—when Father Huber arrived.

The three-mile drive would have tested Job. Both priests had been awed by legends of the labyrinthine security precautions surrounding the Presidency, and they suspected that their reversed collars would be insufficient identification. Father Thompson raised the subject. “Maybe Monsignor Brady will phone ahead and take care of it,” Father Huber said hopefully. “Oh, no, he won’t,” said Father Thompson. The Monsignor was responsible for Baylor Hospital; Parkland was beyond his jurisdiction. Holding the wheel with one hand, Father Thompson fished out his wallet, extracted his World War II ID card, and laid it on the seat. Father Huber regarded it dubiously. It was dog-eared; it looked counterfeit. That it would impress the Secret Service seemed most improbable. Then he looked at the street. They had driven only five blocks, yet they were in a suburban neighborhood he scarcely knew. “Which way are you going, Jim?” he cried. “I have a secret way,” Father Thompson said.

Actually, there was nothing wrong with the route. Though narrow and meandering, it terminated within a half-block of Parkland and should have been a splendid detour from the great volume of traffic building up outside the hospital. But their luck was bad. They were blocked by a truck trying to negotiate a tricky driveway. Back and forth the driver maneuvered, easing in, stopping, easing out, stopping again. Undaunted, he repeated the approach, his hydraulic brakes hissing while the time drew later and Father Thompson flushed a deeper and deeper red. The truck made it, the Galaxie rocketed into Harry Hines Boulevard, and the Father signaled for a left-hand turn. A policeman waved him on. Rolling down his window, Thompson gesticulated urgently. “You’ll have to move on,” said the officer. “Look, officer,” said the priest, forgetting his ID card, “I’m Father Thompson and this is Father Huber, the pastor.” The patrolman shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir,” he replied mulishly. “Look,” Thompson said between his teeth. “The President is in there, and he’s either dead or dying. One of us has to go.” Determined not to budge, he reached down and switched off the ignition. He had just taken his fingers off the key when another policeman ran up, shouting, “Are they priests? Let them through!” But now the car was stalled. Maddened, Father Thompson flooded the carburetor. He waited and prayed. The engine turned over, they wheeled left—and found themselves confronted by the biggest traffic jam either had ever seen. It was 12:57. “You go ahead,” said Thompson. “I’ll park somewhere and follow.” Father Huber, springing toward the hospital as fast as his septuagenarian legs would carry him, lost his direction and arrived, not outside the ambulance bays, but at Parkland’s main entrance. There, at last, he was met. Convoyed by patrolmen, then by agents, the pastor was escorted into the emergency area by General Clifton.

For most people there his arrival was the prelude to the finality of the tragedy. Major Medicine was so constructed that vision was limited to a few feet. Policemen had formed a cordon in the red-striped corridor; the eminent few inside were isolated in the chopped-up booths. Lacking definite word, they had been sitting or standing about in helpless attitudes, in an atmosphere of utter unreality. Severe shock had distorted their senses. One woman, hazarding the guess that the time must be at least 4 P.M., glanced at a clock and was flabbergasted to find herself three hours off. In the absence of hard fact they had drifted along on hope or supposition. Now nearly all saw the black habit of a priest, the universally recognized chevron of death. Its significance swept hall and cubicles. Clifton’s eyes met Captain Stoughton’s; both officers’ eyes filled up. This is it, Henry Gonzalez thought, staring at the stocky little pastor. Mac Kilduff whispered to Albert Thomas, “It looks like he’s gone.” Kilduff crossed to Pam Turnure. “They’ve called a priest,” he said brokenly. Only Mac Perry didn’t notice. He was still sitting in the passage, and the Father walked right past him, but Mac was unaware of it. His brown eyes glazed with exhaustion, his features screwed up in a curiously lopsided cast, the surgeon was concentrating intently on a perfectly blank patch of tile wall.

Father Huber went directly to Jacqueline Kennedy. He murmured his sympathies—he was breathing hard—and took up a position next to her. Uncovering the President’s head completely, he drew the purple-and-white ribbons over his own shoulders and chanted:

“Si capax, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

“If it is possible, I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

He opened the cloth container, unscrewed the vial of holy oil, and pressed it to his thumb. Anointing John Kennedy’s pale forehead in the sign of the cross, he lifted the moist thumb up and down, back and forth, touching the President at each station:

“Per istam sanctam Unctionem, indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid deliquisti. Amen.”

“Through this holy anointing, may God forgive you whatever sins you have committed. Amen.”

“Ego facultate mihi ab Apostolica Sede tributa, indulgentiam plenariam et remissionem omnium peccatorum tibi concedo, et benedico te. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

“I, by the faculty given to me by the Apostolic See, grant to you a plenary indulgence and remission of all sins, and I bless you. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

The priest stepped back, finished. In cases of sudden death he had always used the short form of the last anointing, and here he had mechanically followed custom. He hadn’t referred to his prayer book once. Dr. Burkley blurted out, “Is that all?” The doctor had never challenged a priest before, but the brusque ceremony offended him. It bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the rapid by-the-numbers procedures of the nurses. The passing of a President, he felt, ought to be a more solemn occasion. “Can’t you say some prayers for the dead?” he asked.

Father Huber hurriedly chose several in English. Ordinarily he would have knelt, but the floor, he saw, was one vast bloodstain; he didn’t know that Jacqueline Kennedy had already been to her knees here, so he merely folded his hands, inclined his head, and began by murmuring the first half of the Lord’s Prayer. The widow and the physician, the only other two Catholics present, responded with the second half. The nurses bowed in silence.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus,” the pastor then recited.

The two replied, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

A black shoe shuffled on the threshold. Father Thompson, having abandoned Holy Trinity’s car, entered hesitantly. He saw Jacqueline Kennedy’s apron of blood, and stepping to the side of the pacemaker machine he started to bless himself. His arms were unaccountably heavy. Bewildered, he hunched and strained and offered a lame sign of the cross:

“Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,” the pastor was saying, wiping away the oil from the President’s head. The cotton came away stained crimson. Burkley faltered, but the voice of the President’s wife was firm. She answered, “And let perpetual light shine upon him.”

Father Thompson genuflected. He put down a hand to steady himself; it came up wet. Once again he crossed himself in crippled slow motion, forcing his disabled muscles to move. He couldn’t imagine what was wrong with his arms.

Mrs. Kennedy turned and left; the others followed her. Dr. Burkley, near collapse, wandered across the green line, saw Evelyn Lincoln’s familiar back, and moaned, “Oh, Evelyn, he’s gone!” Jacqueline Kennedy returned to her folding chair, watched over by the stolid Sergeant Dugger and, briefly, by the pastor. Father Huber had been fine during the rites. They were rote to him. Once he had anointed a child who had been horribly mangled in an accident. The body had been in shreds, yet he had maintained a stoical bearing. In the narrow passage between trauma rooms, however, he started to tremble all over. To the widow he said shakily, “I am shocked. I want to extend my sympathy and that of my parishioners.”

Her eyes were haunted, but her face was expressionless. “Thank you for taking care of the President,” she said, her voice a clear, dry whisper. “Please pray for him.”

Since he had anticipated her most pressing concern, he said swiftly, “I am convinced that his soul had not left his body. This was a valid last sacrament.”

Her head dropped, then tilted forward. Father Thompson signaled a passing nurse for help, and Father Huber asked, “Do you want a doctor?” She straightened and smiled vaguely. “Oh, no,” she said. She did, though. She was at the point of fainting. The nurse brought her a cold towel, and leaning over, she held it tight against her forehead until the giddiness passed.

From the doorway of Trauma Room No. 2, vacated since Governor Connally had been moved upstairs, Father Thompson beckoned to Father Huber. They had a professional problem. Physicians could change into mufti and quietly slip out of the hospital. Priests couldn’t. Beyond this sanctuary they would be recognized and asked about the President’s condition. The wiser course was to wait here as long as they could. Unfortunately, that was not long. The emergency area was resuming its high pitch of activity. Every facility was needed. There could be no exceptions. Everyone who could must leave, every useless article had to be removed. Even Mac Perry was obliged to come back for his sport coat. He asked a nurse to retrieve it from the floor beside the hospital cart, and it was then, at 1:10, that he saw Father Huber for the first time. The two priests were reluctantly emerging into the passage. They brushed against a hatted Franciscan, Father Peter H. Azcoitia from Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The Franciscan, a Mexican, was among the many pastors who had heard news bulletins and hurried to Parkland on their own. In broken English he stammered, “Glad it was you—not me.”

Father Thompson hovered over Jacqueline Kennedy. He intended to offer his condolences. Like the Sergeant, the priest became conscious of his own clumsiness. He marveled at her tranquillity and couldn’t quite believe in it. No one could be that composed, especially a woman so young. Perhaps, he thought, he should volunteer to return to Washington with her as a silent companion. He dismissed the idea; surely there were others here who were closer to her. Then he wished that he could pick her up and tell her that all this hadn’t happened, that it was just a frightful dream.

“Mrs. Kennedy,” he began, and ended right there. He lunged back into Trauma Room No. 2 to collect himself.

Father Huber led him out past the cubicles. At the door into the corridor an agent stepped in front of the pastor. He said meaningfully, “Father, you don’t know anything about this.”

Both priests nodded. Yet it wasn’t that easy. In the corridor they managed to be as imperturbable as deaf mutes. At the car, however, a group of reporters on the way to the improvised press room sighted their inverted collars. Hugh Sidey led the chase. Father Thompson was behind the wheel, and the old pastor had opened the door, when the correspondents surrounded them. Father Thompson refused to give his name. “Is he dead?” Sidey asked. Father Huber took a deep breath. He said, “He’s dead, all right.”¹²

He spelled his name for them, and they scurried off. For a long moment the priests sat motionless, the unused Navy ID card between them. Then Father Thompson attempted to shift a leaden wrist. His left palm was sticking to the wheel. Absently he yanked it free and examined it. He said under his breath, “The blood of a President. My God.” He started to bless himself once more and checked the motion. His hand had tightened in anger; it would be sinful to cross himself in such a mood. More to himself than to Father Huber he said, “Why, you can’t even wash blood off a closed fist.” With his right hand he pried the fingers loose. It was difficult. The knuckles were rigid, the fingernails locked underneath; the tendons in his wrist throbbed painfully. Gradually the cramped coil of rage relaxed, and he drove back to the church massaging the joints. To himself he prayed, “Lord, never let me close my fist again.”

In Holy Trinity’s rectory Father Huber opened a shabby black leather volume whose spine bore the gold lettering, “Sick Call Register.” The pages were ruled and labeled, like a ledger. Under “Date” he wrote “11–22–63”; under “Name,” “Pres. John Kennedy”; under “Residence,” “Parkland Hospital.” Ministrations were “Cond. abs., cond. ex., Last B.”—conditional absolution, Extreme Unction, last blessing. The last column, on the far right, was headed “Remarks.” Usually it was left blank, but he felt this occasion required at least one remark. He thought and thought and then made the simple entry, “Assassinated in Downtown Dallas.”

No one had thought to switch off the radio in the Vice Presidential convertible, and as Tom Wicker of the New York Times walked past the unoccupied car he was startled by a mechanical voice declaiming from its dashboard: “The President of the United States is dead. I repeat—it has just been announced that the President of the United States is dead.” Wicker vaulted a chain fence and called to Sidey, “Hugh, the President’s dead. Just announced on the radio. I don’t know who announced it, but it sounded official to me.” Sidey hung his head. He couldn’t talk. Wicker ran on to the press room.

There had been no official word, and a report from an unknown priest was not conclusive. Nevertheless a statement could not be postponed indefinitely. It was 1:15 P.M. Death had been pronounced a quarter of an hour ago, and while Father Huber’s indiscretion was unknown in the emergency area it was hardly surprising. The secret could not be kept long. Too many people had been in the trauma room.

“This is a terrible time to have to approach you on this,” Kilduff said, “but the world has got to know that President Kennedy is dead.”

“Well, you are going to have to make the announcement. Go ahead. But you better check it with Lyndon Johnson.”

An agent guided Kilduff through the white jungle of Minor Medicine. At the end of the last right turn Kilduff saw the broad back of Kennedy’s constitutional successor. He cleared his throat and said, “Mr. President.”

It was the first time that anyone had so addressed Johnson. He turned and, according to Kilduff’s later recollection, “looked at me like I was Donald Duck.”

Kilduff asked permission to make a statement. Johnson shook his head. “No. Wait. We don’t know whether it’s a Communist conspiracy or not. I’d better get out of here and back to the plane. Are they prepared to get me out of here?”

The Secret Service was prepared, and he knew it, but he wanted to be certain he had left Parkland before reporters were informed. After a flurry of conferences with agents Kilduff understood. At 1:20 he approached Johnson again and told him, “I am going to make the announcement as soon as you leave.”

Kilduff walked out the emergency entrance with him. As soon as they reached the sunlight, reporters bayed, “What can you tell us?” Lowering his head, Kilduff bulled through them and plodded off across the grass, toward classrooms 101–102. He thought he was alone. He wasn’t—Ted Clifton, who hadn’t regained his stability, was stalking him with the hazy notion that he might be needed as a witness—and on re-entering the far end of the hospital Kilduff was hailed stridently by Merriman Smith and Jack Bell. The wire service men had just relinquished their precious phones. Now, learning that fresh news was imminent, they hopped around, demanding answers. Kilduff declined to be goaded. He kept shaking his head doggedly, repeating that he would say nothing until the conference began.

Until an hour ago classrooms 101–102 had resembled a double study hall in a modern high school. The walls were paneled with bright green chalkboards. Desks stood in tidy ranks, and the sole incongruity, a hospital bed in the left front corner, was covered with a sanitary canopy of plastic. Across the front board someone—perhaps a member of the staff who had heard garbled references to “Lakeland” and “Southland”—had neatly written the name “Parkland.” On other afternoons the chalked words were more clinical. Student nurses sat primly behind the desks and learned hospital drill. Now the hall was crowded with agitated reporters. A few seconds ago Hugh Sidey had told them of his carside interview with Father Huber. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind about the nature of the coming announcement. Still, it wasn’t official yet, and as Kilduff slowly mounted the dais scattered voices yelled “Quiet! Quiet!”

There was quiet. And then Kilduff, red-eyed and tremulous, was unable to speak. Incoherently he thought, Well, this is the first press conference on a road trip I have ever had to hold. He started to tell them that and held his tongue. It really wasn’t news. Instead, he said, “Excuse me, let me catch my breath.” He caught it. There was another, longer pause. A full minute had passed. Clifton, scrutinizing him with hooded eyes, was of the opinion that he would never be able to talk, that no statement would be issued, that they all might sit there forever. Kilduff, like Father Thompson, was fighting a cramp. Puckering and rocking slightly, he thought, All right, what am I going to say, and how am I going to say it?

The words were framed. They would not be eloquent, but they would do the job. At 1:33 he moistened his lips. “President John F. Kennedy—”

“President John F. Kennedy died at approximately one o’clock Central Standard Time today here in Dallas.”

There was a rush toward the hall. The wire men were off again. Peter Geilich, a Parkland administrative assistant, leaped aside to avoid being trampled. They reminded Geilich of movie reporters rushing out to grab the nearest telephones. Unluckily for them, it wasn’t that pat. The nearest phones were useless. All outgoing lines had been snared by Bales; Smith and Bell battled the ensnarled switchboard in vain while a woman outfoxed both. Virginia Payette, a former reporter who had married the local UPI manager, dropped a dime in a second-floor pay phone. At 1:35 UPI bells chimed on teletype machines around the world:

FLASH

PRESIDENT KENNEDY DEAD

JR135PCS

“He died,” Kilduff had meantime continued, “of a gunshot wound in the brain. I have no other details regarding the assassination of the President. Mrs. Kennedy was not hit. Governor Connally was hit. The Vice President was not hit.”

Wicker started to ask him about the swearing in of Johnson and broke down. Kilduff, grasping the sense of the question, tried to answer it. He began to cry. Nevertheless the subject seemed too significant to be dropped, and another correspondent rose.

He stepped aside for a break. In a show of bravado he lit a cigarette; his lighter flame quivered violently. He yearned for an excuse to adjourn the meeting. It was impossible. Reporters were clamoring for a medical briefing. He saw Sidey’s face and hoarsely called to him, “I can’t do it.” Yet he thought it logical; like them he was remembering Eisenhower’s heart attack. Actually, the precedent wasn’t valid—Eisenhower had survived—but putting a doctor on this platform seemed to be the next step. He nodded listlessly and promised to do what he could. Unhappily, he didn’t know the names of any of the physicians who had treated President Kennedy. He couldn’t even find his way back through the building. Taking a white-coated attendant aside, he asked directions, and the man led him through the long halls like a keeper.

In the emergency area he explained the situation to Dr. Burkley. Burkley, like Clifton, was still adrift. He asked vapidly, “Did you tell the press I was with the President when he died?” Taken aback, Kilduff replied that he had. Burkley bobbed off erratically and fetched Mac Perry. Three other physicians later joined Perry in 101–102, but he bore the brunt of the briefing, and it was harrowing. The scene was bedlam. Several correspondents were hysterical. A question would be asked, and the doctor would be halfway through his answer when another reporter broke in with an entirely different question. Misquotations were inevitable. Had the scene been calm and orderly, the results would still have been unfortunate, however, for none of the doctors, Perry included, had thoroughly examined the President. Because they had failed to turn him over—in Carrico’s later words, “Nobody really had the heart to do it”—they hadn’t seen his back. To them the throat wound suggested that one of the shots had come from the front. Reporters who drew that conclusion weren’t to blame. They hadn’t seen the body. Perry, who had, was their source.

Under any circumstances the possibilities for muddle in gunshot cases are almost infinite. Abraham Lincoln, like John Kennedy, was shot in the posterior part of the head. Because Booth’s nineteenth-century weapon was low-powered his victim survived for nine hours and the .44 caliber derringer ball of Britannia metal did not shatter his head; a one-inch disc of bone was driven three inches into the brain, and the ball lodged in his skull. In other respects the fatal wounds of the two Presidents are similar though, and the medical reports of April 1865, like Perry’s, were baffling. Lincoln’s assassin had approached him from the right side, yet the derringer ball entered his head from the left. Perplexity and unfounded rumors persisted until the conspirators’ trial, when one of the witnesses testified that the President, attracted by something in the pit of the theater, had twisted his head sharply leftward and downward at the last moment. Medical briefings are supposed to quash such misunderstandings. The one at Parkland did exactly the opposite. Perry was asked whether one bullet could have struck the President from the front. He replied, “Yes, it is conceivable.” Sidey, realizing the implications, cried, “Doctor, do you realize what you’re doing? You’re confusing us.” It was too late. By the following morning millions were convinced that a rifleman had fired from the top of the underpass, and in many parts of the world the conviction is established truth today.

The press rightly divided the bewildering montage of events into two main stories: the assassination and the succession. During Kilduff’s trip to the emergency area and again after the briefing they speculated about where Johnson would take the oath. According to Robert Donovan of the Los Angeles Times, “The consensus immediately prevailed, of course, he would take it in Dallas, because in the kind of world we are living in you can’t have the United States without a President, even in the time it takes to get from Dallas to Washington.” Here the reporters must be faulted. There is no evidence that any of them challenged the assumption that the office of President of the United States was vacant. In perspective this is amazing, for the seasoned White House correspondents in 101–102 had covered the inauguration on January 20, 1961. They should have recalled that the correct answer to the question “Has the Vice President taken the oath of office?” was affirmative; he had sworn that he would, to the best of his ability, “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” that frosty noon on the Hill nearly three years before. Indeed, he had, in accordance with custom, done so before John Kennedy.

In 1963, when the warning time for nuclear missiles from the Soviet Union had been reduced to less than a quarter-hour, any Presidential hiatus was intolerable. There ought to have been no interregnum. That one existed must be traced to men’s minds, not to the law of the land. The most brutal murder in American history seemed to be the paramount fact that Friday afternoon. It overwhelmed everyone, and the stunned nation demanded to know the identity of the assassin. No one at the press conference thought to ask the identity of the man who, at that very moment, occupied the mightiest office in the world. Yet there was an answer. The Presidency, like an immortal heart, never stops. America had a new Chief Executive. His name was Lyndon Baines Johnson, and although even he did not realize it, he had been in power for over an hour.

Three

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