Nation: The Assassination

To President Kennedy, popularity was the breath of life—and now he was breathing of it deeply. Texas was supposed to be a hostile political land, but for 23 hours he had been acclaimed there. Conservative Dallas was supposed to be downright dangerous, but he had just come from a warm airport welcome and along much of his motorcade route in the downtown district he had basked in waves of applause from crowds lined ten and twelve deep. What was about to happen must have been the farthest thing from his mind.

Next to him sat Jackie. In front of them, on jump seats of the President’s Lincoln, its bubbletop off, were Texas’ Democratic Governor John Connally, 46, and his wife Nellie. As the President’s car approached an underpass near the intersection of Elm, Main and Commerce Streets, Nellie Connally turned to Kennedy, said laughingly: “You can’t say that Dallas isn’t friendly to you today.” The President started to reply . . .

That reply was stilled by a shot. It was 12:30 p.m. C.S.T., and in a split second a thousand things happened. The President’s body slumped to the left; his right leg shot up over the car door. A woman close by at the curb saw it. “My God!” she screamed. “He’s shot!” Blood gushed from the President’s head as it came to rest in Jackie’s lap. “Jack!” she cried. “Oh, no! No!”

John Connally turned—and by turning, probably saved his own life. There were two more shots, and a bullet pierced his back, plowed down through his chest, fractured his right wrist, and lodged in his left thigh. A photographer looked up at a seven-story building on the corner—the Texas School Book Depository, a warehouse for textbooks—and caught a glimpse of a rifle barrel being withdrawn from a window on the sixth floor.

There was a shocked, momentary stillness, a frozen tableau. Then Kennedy’s driver cried: “Let’s get out of here quick!” He automatically pulled out of the motorcade—the set procedure in emergencies. The Secret Service agent next to him grabbed the radio telephone, called ahead to the police escorts, and ordered them to make for the nearest hospital. Jackie bent low, cradling the President’s head in her lap, and the Lincoln bolted ahead as if the shots themselves had gunned the engine into life. Spurting to 70 m.p.h., it fled down the highway, rounding curves on two wheels. A Secret Service man, who had jumped onto the rear bumper of the car, flung himself across the trunk, and in his anger and frustration pounded it repeatedly with his fist.

The next car in line, an open touring sedan containing agents bristling with weapons, followed swiftly. In the third car, an open convertible carrying the Lyndon Johnsons and Texas’ Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, security agents yelled for the passengers to duck low, and that car followed in wild pursuit.

Five minutes later, the cars arrived at the emergency entrance of Parkland Memorial Hospital on Harry Hines Boulevard. The agents ran inside to get stretchers. John Connally was still conscious. The President had never known what hit him. Jacqueline Kennedy, even then proving that she had courage enough for a dozen, calmly continued to cradle her husband. Stretchers were brought out and both men were placed on them. Jackie, her skirt and stockings blotched by blood, helped get the President out of the car and, her hand on his chest, walked into the hospital beside him. Lyndon Johnson walked into the emergency clinic holding his hand over his heart, giving rise briefly to rumors that he had either been wounded or was suffering from a heart attack. Neither was the case: Lyndon was simply, profoundly stunned.

Policemen surrounded the entrance as the crowds thickened. A guard was set up around the Lincoln as Secret Service men got a pail of water and tried to wash the blood from the car.

They left the sprays of red roses and asters that Jackie and Nellie Connally had been given at the airport lying forlorn on the floor.

The Hunt. At the assassination scene, meanwhile, that first moment of stillness gave way to frantic, confused movement. At the sound of the gunfire, bystanders grabbed children and fell over them to blanket them. Newsmen aboard the press bus far back in the procession yelled for the driver to stop, while others told him to keep moving. The bus jolted ahead, past horrified faces, frantically running figures, huddling women. A cop dropped to the ground and drew his revolver. A man fell on a grassy knoll, beating the earth with both fists in mindless fury. A heavy-set policeman began running, tripped, fell, scrambled to his feet, lumbered on. Police cars and motorcycle patrolmen stopped dead in their tracks. The officers got out, guns drawn, to search aimlessly. For what? For anything.

They surrounded the schoolbook warehouse. Dozens of them poured inside with shotguns and began a room-to-room search. And near the fifth-floor landing, half-hidden behind crates of textbooks, they found an Italian-made kind of 6.5-mm. rifle fitted with a fourpower telescopic sight. One flight above, near a sixth-floor window only 75 yds. from the point where Kennedy and Connally were shot, they discovered remnants of a chicken dinner in a bag, an empty pop bottle, and three spent cartridge cases. The assassin was gone.

But a Negro boy gave police a description of a man who had been seen leaving the building a few minutes earlier. At 12:36, an all-points pickup went over the radio to watch for a “white male, about 5 ft. 10 in. tall, weighing 160 to 165 Ibs., about 30 years old.”

“This Is It!” In the 400 block of East 10th Street, about four miles from the warehouse, Patrolman J. D. Tippitt, 38, driving alone in a squad car, heard the call. He saw a man on the sidewalk and stopped his car to question him. The fellow’s height and weight corresponded to the description. He had kinky brown hair, a prominent forehead, thick eyebrows, a crimped, tight mouth, and a defiant air. Tippitt and the man exchanged a few words. Then the policeman got out of his car and walked around to the sidewalk. The man pulled a .38-cal. revolver, shot and killed Tippitt with hits in the head, chest and abdomen. Then he fled. It was 1:18 p.m.

A bystander jumped into the patrol car, called headquarters. Seven blocks away, the cashier at the Texas Theater telephoned police to report that a suspicious-looking man had entered the movie house, was constantly changing seats. At 1:35, four cops entered the theater, where the movie, War Is Hell, was just starting. The lights went up. The cop killer rose and cried: “This is it!” He aimed his revolver at one police man and pulled the trigger—but the weapon failed to fire. The cops jumped him and there was a fierce, brief struggle. Hauled bruised and kicking to police headquarters, the man was booked as Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, 5 ft. 9 in., 160 Ibs.

“Terrible, Terrible.” At the hospital had gathered the spirit-spent remnants of the presidential party. Outside the emergency entrance stood Senator Yarborough, who had had his political differences with both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Now he was weeping. “It didn’t sound like a firecracker; I knew it wasn’t right off,” he said. “It was too loud, and there was a sort of concussion. Then all of a sudden they speeded up in front of us, and we tore right away from there as fast as we could. I saw an agent in front of me pull out his machine gun and look up at the building. The shots were like explosives, horrible explosives. I knew right away that something terrible, terrible, was wrong.”

Inside, John Connally was quiet and calm in his pain as surgeons prepared to operate. His aide, Bill Stinson, blurted, “How did it happen?” Said Connally: “I don’t know.”

“Where’d they get you?”

“I think they shot me from the back. They shot the President too. Take care of Nellie.”

For four hours the doctors worked, cleaning the wounds, removing bone splinters from the Governor’s chest cavity, stitching a hole in one lung, treating the wounds in his thigh and wrist. At week’s end doctors said his condition was satisfactory.

“To No Avail.” But the President never regained consciousness. In Emergency Room No. 1, Dr. Kemp Clark, 38, chief of Parkland’s neurosurgical department, examined a large wound in the President’s head and another smaller wound—from the second of the three shots—in his throat. Clark and eight other doctors worked over him for 40 minutes, but the President was already as dead as though he had fallen on a battlefield in mortal combat. The doctors gave him oxygen, anesthesia, performed a tracheotomy to help breathing; they fed him fluids, gave him blood transfusions, attached an electrocardiograph to record his heartbeat.

When heart action failed to register, they tried closed-chest massage. But, said the doctors, “it was apparent that the President was not medically alive when he was brought in. There was no spontaneous respiration. He had dilated, fixed pupils. Technically, by using vigorous resuscitation, intravenous tubes and all the usual supportive measures, we were able to raise a semblance of a heartbeat.” There were some “palpable pulses,” said one doctor, but “to no avail.”

While the doctors worked, Jackie waited. The look in her eyes, said a young medical student who saw her, “was like an animal that had been trapped, like a little rabbit—brave, but fear was in the eyes.”

At 12:45, two Roman Catholic priests went swiftly into the emergency room. A policeman came out. “How is he?” a reporter asked. “He’s dead,” came the reply. Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff appeared. To a deluge of questions, he screamed, “I can’t say, I just can’t say!”

Last Rites. But he was dead. It was about 1 p.m. The Very Rev. Oscar L. Huber drew back a sheet that covered the President’s face, and anointed John Kennedy’s forehead with oil. He gave him conditional absolution—tendered when a priest has no way of knowing the victim’s mind or whether the soul has yet left the body. In Latin, Father Huber said, “I absolve you from all censures and sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. If you are living, may the Lord by this holy anointing forgive whatever you have sinned. 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 Spirit. Amen.”

Then he covered the President’s face once more with the sheet and in English offered the prayers for the Dying and for the Departed Soul: “May the most clement Virgin Mary, Mother of God, the most loving consoler of the afflicted, commend to her Son the soul of this servant, John . . . Jesus, Mary and Joseph, assist me in my last agony. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, may I sleep and rest in peace in your holy company . . . Grant, O Lord, that while we here lament the departure of Your servant, we may ever remember that we are most certainly to follow him. Give us grace to prepare for that last hour by a good life, that we may not be surprised by a sudden death but be ever watching, for when Thou shall call that soul, we may enter eternal glory through Christ, Our Lord. Eternal rest grant him, O Lord and let perpetual light shine upon him. Amen.”

Jacqueline Kennedy stood next to the President’s body, and with a clear voice, prayed with the others: “Our Father, Who art in Heaven . . .” and “Hail, Mary, full of grace. . . .”

Burnished Bronze. Lyndon Johnson, guarded by contingents of agents, was hurried away from the hospital to the airport. Press Aide Kilduff came out at 1:36. His eyes red-rimmed, his voice barely controlled, he said: “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1 p.m. central standard time here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot wound in the brain. I have no other details of the assassination.”

Soon, a white Cadillac hearse drew up before the entrance and a simple bronze casket was taken inside the hospital. Jackie removed the wedding band from her left hand and slipped it on the President’s finger, and then the casket was closed.

Mrs. Kennedy wanted to return immediately to Washington. The casket, with Jackie walking alongside, her hand on its burnished surface, was carried outside. At Dallas’ Love Field, the presidential plane was waiting.