Killing Kennedy

18

OCTOBER 24, 1963

DALLAS, TEXAS

EVENING

Jacqueline Kennedy has no clue. If she could see the hell her good friend Adlai Stevenson is enduring in Dallas this balmy evening, she might not be so optimistic about making the upcoming Texas trip with her husband.

Known as “Big D,” Dallas is a dusty, dry town, miserably hot in the summer and annoyingly cool in the winter. It is surrounded by some of the most unremarkable scenery in all America. It is a hard city, built on commerce and oil, and driven by just one thing: money. The television series Dallas will one day be seen as a caricature of this fixation on garish wealth, but the real Dallas is not that different.

Fifty years from now, Dallas will be a cosmopolitan metropolis, home to a diverse population and a wide range of multinational corporations. But in 1963 the population of 747,000 is overwhelmingly white, 97 percent Protestant, and growing larger and more conservative by the day, as newcomers flood in from rural Texas and Louisiana.

Dallas is a law-and-order town. Sort of. It’s the kind of city where heavy fines on sin have driven the prostitutes to nearby Fort Worth, but one where murders are on the rise. Dallas is full of Baptist and Methodist churches, but it’s also home to a place like the Carousel Club, a downtown strip joint owned by a fifty-two-year-old suspected mafioso named Jacob Rubinstein—aka Jack Ruby—where cops and newspapermen often drink side by side.

But most of all, Dallas is a city that does not trust outsiders or their political views—–particularly those of liberal Yankees. And the local citizens are not passive in their disdain. Jewish stores are sometimes defaced with swastikas.

On this particular night, Adlai Stevenson is experiencing what some have called Dallas’s “general atmosphere of hate” firsthand. He is a devoted Democrat who ran against, and was defeated twice by, Dwight Eisenhower. Texas is decidedly not Stevenson country, even though a big crowd is now seated at the Memorial Auditorium. The occasion is United Nations Day. Last night, the right-wing zealot General Ted Walker spoke at the same venue, delivering a rousing anti-UN speech that was attended by the man who once tried to kill him: Lee Harvey Oswald.

Now, as Stevenson tries to speak, he can barely be heard. Time and again he is heckled and booed by a fringe group known as the National Indignation Convention. They intentionally mispronounce the stately diplomat’s name, calling him “Addle-Eye.”

Stevenson patiently tolerates the abuse, standing still at the lectern, hoping calm will take hold. But this proves impossible. So he finally confronts one heckler: “Surely, my dear friend, I don’t have to come here from Illinois to teach Texas manners, do I?”

Then things get worse.

Twenty-two-year-old Robert Edward Hatfield races up to the podium and unloads a violent gob of spit into Stevenson’s face. As police seize Hatfield, he spits on them as well. Adlai Stevenson has had enough. Wiping his face, he walks out of the auditorium. But the chaos doesn’t end. A waiting crowd of anti-UN protesters confronts him. Rather than let Stevenson walk back to his hotel peacefully, the protesters block his path and jeer at him. One agitator, forty-seven-year-old Cora Frederickson, actually hits the ambassador over the head with her picket sign.

Still, Stevenson tries to be diplomatic. The sixty-three-year-old politician waves off the Dallas police rushing over to make their second arrest of the night. “What is wrong?” Stevenson asks the woman who hit him. “Can I help you in any way?”

“If you don’t know what’s wrong, I don’t know why. Everyone else does,” she shoots back with an angry Texas twang.

John Kennedy does not like Adlai Stevenson. But the president is shaken when he hears of the vicious attacks. Now the many negative reports he has heard about Dallas are being confirmed. Trusted friends are warning him to cancel this leg of his Texas trip. As far back as October 3, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas confided to John Kennedy that he was physically afraid of entering Dallas, calling it “a dangerous place.”

“I wouldn’t go there,” he told JFK. “Don’t you go.”

Evangelist Billy Graham is also warning the president to stay away from Dallas. Henry Brandon of London’s Sunday Times is so sure Kennedy’s visit will be volatile that he himself is making the trip just to chronicle the tension. Texas congressman Ralph Yarborough’s two brothers live and work in Dallas, and both make a point of telling him that the city hates Kennedy. And in early November, Byron Skelton of the Texas Democratic National Committee will have a premonition that JFK may be placing himself in grave danger by coming to Dallas. Skelton will repeatedly warn the president to stay away.

But John Kennedy is the president of the United States of America—all of them. There should be no place in this vast country where he has to be afraid to visit.

As he is fond of saying before attempting a hard golf shot: “No profiles, only courage.” So it is with Dallas. JFK has decided to visit Big D. There is no backing down.

Half a world away, it is All Souls’ Day in Saigon. This is a time of prayer in the Roman Catholic Church. So it is that Ngo Dinh Diem, president of Vietnam, receives Holy Communion alongside his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu.

But there is another reason the brothers are praying, and John Kennedy should know why. A U.S.-backed coup has overthrown the Diem government. As the military action was unfolding, JFK met with his top advisers to discuss the future of Vietnam—and the fate of Diem and his brother. The meeting dragged on so long that Kennedy even sneaked out halfway through to attend Mass, before returning for the meeting’s conclusion.

In a far more frantic manner, President Diem and his brother sneaked out of the presidential palace during the coup, literally running for their lives. Like JFK, they went to Mass. Now the brothers are taking refuge inside the sanctuary of Saigon’s St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church.

Shortly after 10:00 A.M. they are recognized, and the president and his brother prepare to be arrested and deported from the country. Diem has readied himself for this moment by stuffing a briefcase with U.S. banknotes.

General Mai Huu Xuan of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) leads a convoy consisting of an armored personnel carrier and two jeeps into the church courtyard. Diem surrenders, asking only that the convoy stop at the palace before taking him and his brother to the airport. General Xuan refuses and orders that his captives be immediately taken to army headquarters. Soldiers then tie the hands of the president and his brother behind their backs, and the two are placed inside an armored personnel carrier—ostensibly for their own protection. Two ARVN officers join them in the back of the vehicle before the heavy steel door is closed.

The convoy stops at a railroad crossing. One of the ARVN officers then calmly places his finger on the trigger of his semiautomatic weapon and fires a bullet into the back of President Diem’s skull.

19

NOVEMBER 1, 1963

IRVING, TEXAS

2:30 P.M.

It is Friday afternoon, and a weary James Hosty Jr. rings the bell at Ruth Paine’s home. The burly thirty-five-year-old FBI agent has spent the day investigating cases in nearby Fort Worth. He is juggling almost forty investigations right now, taking small bites out of each one. But any case involving J. Edgar Hoover’s battle against communism gets top priority, which is why Hosty is stopping at Mrs. Paine’s rather than driving straight back into Dallas to start his weekend. The agent is looking for Lee Harvey Oswald. The bureau has received a tip from the CIA about Oswald’s visit to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City last month, and the Feds are now anxious to find him.

Mrs. Paine opens the door. Hosty flashes his badge, explaining that he’s a special agent of the FBI, and asks if they can talk.

These are hard times for Ruth Paine. Her husband of five years has left and is filing for divorce. Perhaps to mitigate her loneliness, Ruth invited Marina Oswald to live at her home, despite knowing that the young mother has no money to contribute. But the minor financial burden is nothing compared with the quirky behavior of Marina’s husband, Lee Harvey, who comes to visit on the weekends. Ruth Paine refuses to let him live in her house. She doesn’t trust him.

Yet Mrs. Paine is very warm to James Hosty. She invites him inside and gushes that this is the first time she’s ever met an FBI agent.

But Hosty isn’t just any agent. He’s a Notre Dame graduate and former banker who has worked in the Dallas branch office for almost ten years. He knows his way around Dallas and its growing suburbs. He is also a diligent investigator and thinks nothing of going out of his way to visit the home of Ruth Paine even as his Friday shift comes to an end.

But most of all, Special Agent Hosty is the FBI’s expert on Lee Harvey and Marina Oswald. Back in March, he opened a file on Marina in order to keep tabs on the Soviet citizen. Later that month, Hosty requested that Lee Harvey’s file be reopened due to Oswald’s obvious Communist sympathies. The agent has tracked the Oswalds from apartment to apartment, from Dallas to New Orleans and back again. The New Orleans FBI office has kept Hosty apprised of Oswald’s arrest and pro-Cuba behavior. But now the Oswald trail has grown cold.

Hosty asks Ruth Paine if she knows where he can find the man.

Paine admits that Marina and her two girls live in her home. After a moment’s hesitation, she puts forth that she doesn’t know where Oswald lives, though she does know that he works at the Texas School Book Depository in downtown Dallas. Paine gets a phone book and looks up the address: 411 Elm Street.

Hosty writes all this down.

Marina wanders into the living room, having just awakened from a nap.

Speaking in Russian, Ruth Paine informs her that Hosty is an FBI agent. Marina’s face takes on a wild, fearful look. Hosty commonly sees this sort of behavior from people raised in Communist countries and knows that Mrs. Oswald thinks he’s some sort of secret police who has come to take her away. He immediately instructs Paine to tell Marina that he’s not there for the purpose of “harming her, harassing her, and that it isn’t the job of the FBI to harm people. It is our job to protect people.”

Ruth Paine translates. Marina smiles and calms down.

Hosty stands to leave. The interview has lasted almost twenty-five minutes. Hosty has a couple more cases he wants to follow up on before going back to Dallas. But even as he writes down his name and phone number for Paine, just in case she has any more information about Oswald’s whereabouts, Special Agent Hosty now mentally assigns a low priority to the Oswald investigation. He’s concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald is just a young guy with marital problems, a fondness for communism, and a habit of drifting from job to job.

There’s no need for urgency. Lee Harvey Oswald is bound to show up sooner or later. Special Agent Hosty is sure of that.

On November 11, the Monday after Hosty’s visit to Ruth Paine’s home, Special Agent Winston G. Lawson of the Secret Service’s White House detail is informed of the president’s upcoming trip to Dallas.

Lawson, a Korean War veteran in his early thirties, specializes in planning Kennedy’s official travels. As with all such visits, his primary responsibilities are to identify individuals who might be a threat to the president, take action against anyone considered to be such a threat, and plan security for the president’s speeches and motorcade route.

There is still discussion over whether there is to be a motorcade through downtown Dallas, which will be a security nightmare, thanks to the more than twenty thousand windows lining the city’s major thoroughfares. The more windows, the more places for a gunman to aim at the president’s limousine.

But Lawson temporarily sets that question aside. He begins his investigation of potential threats by combing through the Secret Service’s Protective Research Section (PRS). These files list all individuals who have threatened the president or may be potentially dangerous to him. A check of the PRS on November 8 by Lawson shows that no such person exists in the Dallas area.

Lawson then travels to Texas from Washington and interviews local law enforcement and other federal agencies, continuing his search for individuals who might be a threat to the life of John F. Kennedy. Of particular interest are the protesters involved in the Adlai Stevenson incident just a few weeks ago. Lawson obtains photographs of these people, which will be distributed to Secret Service and Dallas police on the day of the president’s visit. People who resemble those individuals will be instantly scrutinized should they come anywhere near the president.

Lawson’s diligence is soon rewarded when the FBI comes forth with the name of a Dallas-area resident who might be a serious threat to the life of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Special Agent James Hosty Jr., however, does not provide that name, and it is not that of Lee Harvey Oswald. Instead, it is of a known local troublemaker who has absolutely no plans to kill the president of the United States.

Back in the nation’s capital, November 11 is a brisk day, marked by pale sunlight and a wind that straightens the many flags flying at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from the District of Columbia. A crowd of hundreds of soldiers and civilians looks on as the president of the United States celebrates Veterans Day by placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns. John Kennedy, a decorated war veteran himself, stands at attention as a bugler blows taps, traditionally the final musical movement at all military ceremonies. The bugler’s name is Sergeant Keith Clark. He is the principal trumpeter of the U.S. Army Band and knows this sad song all too well. Clark plays the solo beautifully, the lonesome notes echoing mournfully across the sea of white tombstones and green grass.

President Kennedy is touched by the history and drama of this setting. Arlington was once home to the family of Robert E. Lee and was turned into a cemetery during the Civil War by Union troops so that the Confederate general might never again be tempted to live in the family mansion that still dominates the grounds. Kennedy can see why this was such a great loss to Lee, for the rolling hills look out over the river to Washington, where the fast pace and backroom deals are a drastic contrast to the quiet and peace of the cemetery.

“This is one of the really beautiful places on earth,” the president later tells Congressman Hale Boggs. “I could stay here forever.”

That thought is not fleeting. Kennedy repeats the sentiment to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. “I think, maybe someday, this is where I’d like to be.”

20

NOVEMBER 13, 1963

THE WHITE HOUSE

LATE EVENING

The man with nine days to live admires Greta Garbo as she takes off her shoes and lies down atop the mattress in the Lincoln Bedroom. There is a dinner party in Camelot tonight, and the famously reclusive Swedish actress is the guest of honor. Jackie Kennedy is self-admittedly “obsessed” with Garbo, in whom she sees a kindred spirit. But it is the president who has offered to take the fifty-eight-year-old beauty on a tour of what his schedulers simply call “the Mansion.”

At dinner, a nervous Garbo has knocked back glass after glass of vodka. But the president has been the picture of abstinence, neither smoking a cigar nor taking a sip of alcohol. “I felt like one of the damned when I lit a cigarette,” Garbo will later remember.

John F. Kennedy is enchanted by Garbo, as she is by him. Rather than sneak away from the party right after dinner to enjoy a few quiet moments alone before bed, as is often his habit, JFK lingers for “longer than I have ever done since I became President.”

Kennedy and Garbo have never met before tonight but have quickly become fast friends, thanks to a practical joke at the expense of Kennedy’s roommate from his teenage years at Choate prep school. Lem Billings is JFK’s best friend in the world. The two men are as close as brothers, and Billings spends the night at the White House so often that he keeps a set of clothes in a third-floor bedroom. In 1960 the forty-four-year-old advertising executive voluntarily took a sabbatical from his career to help Kennedy run for president, asking nothing in return. But JFK offered him a job anyway, as head of the brand-new Peace Corps. Billings declined, fearing it would alter their friendship.

Billings met Greta Garbo over the summer, while vacationing in the south of France. Upon his return home, the unmarried Billings boasted so frequently about how well he and Garbo had gotten along that even Jackie told him to stop talking about the movie star.

The president couldn’t resist. A friendly practical joke at Billings’s expense would only add to the thrill of Garbo’s visit. He called the actress, making her a proposition: “My friend Lem boasts how well he knows you. So when he comes in, pretend you’ve never met him before.” JFK persuaded Garbo to arrive early to the White House dinner party in order to rehearse her lines for Kennedy’s elaborate ruse.

“Early” in Camelot usually means sometime around 8:30 P.M. Tonight is no exception.

This is because the president has worked yet another typically exhausting day. His schedule began with a 9:45 A.M. meeting with columnist Ann Landers about the 1963 Christmas Seal campaign and ended with a 6:30 P.M. meeting with John A. Hannah, head of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In between there was a meeting with the president of Czechoslovakia; a South Lawn pipe and drums performance by the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment), from Great Britain; a fifteen-person meeting about the poverty in eastern Kentucky; and a smaller foreign policy meeting with Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and former secretary of state Christian Herter in the early evening.

The president took his usual midafternoon swim at 1:10 and had lunch at 1:40, but otherwise the pace never slackened. Meeting followed meeting, with Kennedy expected to be not just in attendance, but also knowledgeable about and decisive on each of the many varied subjects presented to him. All the while, in the back of the president’s mind, was the thought of next week’s trip to Texas.

When JFK hit the pool for his second swim of the day, it was 7:15. By the time he toweled off and went up to his bedroom, it was 8:03 P.M. Garbo had already arrived. Kennedy took his time showering and changing, knowing Jackie would explain to the actress that he’d been delayed.

Lem Billings was ecstatic when he saw Garbo. “Why, Greta! Oh, my gosh. How are you?” he exclaimed.

Garbo stared at him with a blank expression, then turned her gaze to Jackie. “You must be mistaken. I do not recall that we have ever met before,” she said.

When the president arrived, Garbo repeated her assertion that she didn’t know Billings. The president’s old friend grew more and more dismayed, ignoring JFK to remind Garbo over and over about where they’d met and some of the same people they knew. The more Billings talked, the more obvious it seemed that Greta had never met him before. Throughout it all, JFK unwound, setting aside the cares of the office as he reveled in the easy banter of this lighthearted dinner and his practical joke. Lem Billings will not realize he’s been had until tomorrow morning.

Soon after dinner ended, JFK took the entire group on a private tour of the White House. Now a tipsy Greta Garbo doesn’t want to soil the bedspread in the Lincoln Bedroom, so takes off her shoes before lying down atop the mattress. The tour ends in the Oval Office. Unbeknownst to most Americans, JFK has a habit of collecting scrimshaw and often bids anonymously for these pieces of inscribed whale’s teeth. They are on display in a case in his office. When Garbo admires the collection, the president opens the case and offers her a piece as a gift. The actress gladly accepts.

This is life in Camelot: a day spent solving the world’s problems, two therapeutic nude swims, celebrities at the table for a late-night dinner, and a tour of America’s most famous residence with a glamorous former movie star. Where else would such a thing happen?

But the evening ends abruptly. “I must go. I am getting intoxicated,” Garbo proclaims before disappearing back to her hotel.

Thus ends the last dinner party ever held in Camelot.

But the memory of this magical evening will linger, and even someone as famous as Greta Garbo is not immune to Camelot’s allure: “It was a most unusual evening that I spent with you in the White House,” she writes in her thank-you note to Jackie Kennedy. “It was really fascinating and enchanting. I might believe it was a dream if I did not have the president’s ‘tooth’ facing me.”

But Camelot is not a dream. It is reality—and that reality is about to take a turn that will alter America forever.

21

NOVEMBER 16, 1963

DALLAS, TEXAS

1:50 P.M.

Thirteen-year-old Sterling Wood aims his Winchester 30-30 rifle at the silhouette of a man’s head. He exhales and squeezes the trigger, then squints downrange at the target. It is Saturday. Sterling and his father, Homer, have come to the Sports Drome Rifle Range to sight their guns for deer season.

Young Sterling notices a young man standing in the shooting booth next to him. He is aiming at a similar silhouette. The teenager reads a lot of gun books and is pretty sure that the guy is firing an Italian carbine. It appears that the rifle’s barrel has been sawed off to make it shorter, but it’s still longer than Sterling’s Winchester, by a few inches. Judging from the number of scratches on the stock, the precocious Dallas teenager suspects that the weapon is army surplus. It’s even got a sling to make it easier for an infantryman to carry and a four-power telescopic sight to make the target seem closer and easier to shoot with pinpoint accuracy.

“Daddy,” Sterling whispers to his father. “It looks like a 6.5 Italian carbine.”

The man shoots. Flame leaps from the end of the gun, thanks to its shortened length. Sterling can actually feel the heat from the blast. The gunman removes the spent cartridge and places it in his pocket as if he doesn’t want to leave behind evidence that he’s been there. Sterling finds it unusual that the shooter does this after each and every round.

The teenager is impressed that almost all of the shooter’s bullet holes are clustered around what would be the eye if the paper target were a real man.

“Sir, is that a 6.5 Italian carbine?” Sterling asks the stranger.

“Yes, sir,” the man responds.

“And is that a four-power scope?”

“Yes, it is.”

The shooter stays just long enough to fire only “eight or ten” shots, in Sterling’s estimation—just enough rounds to ration his ammunition while ensuring that his rifle and scope are accurate.

Sterling will later testify that this man is Lee Harvey Oswald.

On that November Saturday, the front page of the Dallas Morning News features a story on President Kennedy’s visit to Dallas, which is just six days away. The paper speculates on the route Kennedy’s motorcade will follow through the heart of the city. Air Force One will land at the Love Field, and from there the president will travel to a large commercial center known as the Trade Mart, where he will give a speech. On the way, he will pass the Texas School Book Depository, the workplace of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oswald is an avid newspaper reader and has known for quite some time that John Kennedy is coming to Dallas. On this day, Oswald has decided to spend the weekend in the city rather than journey out to the suburbs to see Marina and their daughters.

Oswald turned twenty-four just one month ago. He has little to show for his time on earth. He is losing his wife and children. He works a menial job. And despite his keen intellect, he has no advanced education. He doesn’t know whether he wants to be an American, a Cuban, or a Russian.

Still, he longs to be a great man. A significant man. A man whose name will never be forgotten.

John Wilkes Booth, in the days before he shot Abraham Lincoln, also longed to be such a man. And just as Booth practiced his marksmanship at a shooting range days before the assassination, so, too, does Lee Harvey Oswald.

Thirteen-year-old Sterling Wood is the first person impressed by Oswald in a long time. For today, Oswald was truly great—great at firing several shots through the silhouette of a man’s head.

The destruction of Camelot might have begun with the Bay of Pigs, when John F. Kennedy made a permanent enemy of Fidel Castro and infuriated his own Central Intelligence Agency.

Or it might have started that October night in 1962 when JFK severed his ties with Sam Giancana, Frank Sinatra, and the Mafia, then stood back and did nothing as his brother Bobby zealously prosecuted organized crime.

Camelot’s demise could have originated during the Cuban missile crisis, when JFK scored a decisive public relations victory over Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Empire, while at the same time frustrating his top generals and what Dwight Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex” for refusing to launch a war.

The destruction of Camelot could have begun in any number of ways.

But in fact, it begins on November 18, when Special Agent Winston G. Lawson of the Secret Service advance team, Forrest V. Sorrels of the Secret Service’s Dallas office, and Dallas police chief Jesse Curry drive ten very carefully selected miles from Love Field to the Trade Mart. “Hell,” says Special Agent Sorrels, glancing up at the thousands of windows looking down on them, “we’d be sitting ducks.”

Nevertheless, the agents decide that this will be the presidential motorcade route.

Anytime the president of the United States drives through a crowded city, there is a careful balance between protecting his life and ensuring the spectacle of the chief executive intermingling with the American people. Security is the act of getting him through the crowds alive, which is difficult on those days when the bubble-top roof is not buckled onto his convertible. A perfect motorcade route is devoid of the high windows from which a sniper can poke a gun, offers alternative routes in case something goes wrong, features wide streets that keep crowds far back from the vehicle, and has few, if any, tight turns.

The Dallas motorcade route violates every one of these principles.

The process of turning the presidential vehicle forces William Greer, the Secret Service agent who most often serves as JFK’s driver, to slow the limousine down considerably. This makes the president an easier target for a marksman to hit. Secret Service protocol stipulates that whenever a motorcade must slow down for a turn, agents must do a security check of the entire intersection ahead of time. Something as simple as a ninety-degree turn, which the Dallas motorcade route features at the corner of Main and Houston, can cause Greer to step hard on the brakes. A sweeping 120-degree turn, such as the one at the corner of Houston and Elm, can slow Kennedy’s Lincoln down to just a few miles per hour.

That is the pace of a brisk walk, and, through the high-powered scope of an assassin’s rifle, such a slow speed can turn the president’s body into a very attainable target. When this happens, Secret Service agents are trained to position their bodies between the president and the crowd, acting as human shields. While doing so, they are to study the landscape and look up at building windows for signs of a gunman or rifle barrel. The president’s limousine has running boards on both sides that allow the agents to shield the president while also performing this scan. They hold on to metallic handles for balance. However, JFK does not like the the agents to stand on the running boards because this blocks the crowd’s view of him, so they often ride one car behind.

But all of this protection can be circumvented once a gunman knows the precise motorcade route. Thus, once Secret Service special agents Sorrels and Lawson choose the president’s path on November 18, and then release that information to the public, anyone who wants to harm the president can begin planning the precise place and time of the attack. To put it another way: Many people would like to see John F. Kennedy dead. But before Monday, November 18, there existed no field of fire in Dallas.

Now there does.

22

NOVEMBER 21, 1963

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE

2:00 P.M.

In the final hours of his life, President John F. Kennedy is flying in style aboard Air Force One. He pores over the “Eyes Only, President” intelligence documents overflowing from his battered black alligator-skin briefcase. JFK speed-reads at his normal 1,200 words per minute, glasses perched on the end of his nose, a study in focus. On the couch against the opposite wall of JFK’s airborne office, Jackie Kennedy speaks softly in Spanish, practicing a speech she will give tonight in Houston to a group of Latin American women.

The First Lady’s Castilian purr is a welcome addition to the president’s private in-flight sanctuary. John Kennedy is so glad Jackie is traveling to Texas with him that he took the unusual step of helping her select the clothes she will wear at her many public appearances. One outfit, a pink Chanel wool suit with a matching pillbox hat, is his personal favorite.

Fashion might not normally interest JFK, but the design and décor of Air Force One has received plenty of his attention. There were three presidential airplanes available to him when he first took office. Any one of them could be dubbed “Air Force One” whenever he is on board. Yet these airplanes looked more air force than presidential. Indeed, the words Military Air Transport Service were emblazoned on the sides. The predominant fuselage characteristic was unpainted metal.

But the craft possessing tail number 26000, in which John Kennedy now flies, is a distinct upgrade. The president took delivery of this new presidential version of the Boeing 707 in October 1962. And just as Jackie has overseen the redecoration of the White House—one fine detail is now taking place even as the Kennedys fly to Texas: upon their return, JFK will enjoy new drapes in the Oval Office—so John Kennedy has overseen the redecoration of Air Force One. The fuselage and wings, for instance, feature a bold new pale-blue-and-white color scheme, with the words United States of America proudly displayed above the row of forty-five oval passenger windows. Inside, the carpeting is lush and the creature comforts many, including a private office, a conference area, and a bedroom where a painting of a French farmhouse hangs over the president’s rock-hard mattress. The presidential seal seems to adorn every fixture. JFK enjoys this new airplane so much that he has flown seventy-five thousand miles aboard 26000 in just thirteen months.

Today’s journey began at 9:15 A.M., when John Kennedy said good-bye to Caroline as she set off to the third floor of the White House for school. John Jr., who will be three years old next week, got the privilege of riding with his parents in the presidential helicopter as they flew from the White House to Air Force One. The young boy wore a London Fog coat to keep away the November chill and enjoyed the trip immensely.

But as Marine One set down on the runway next to the presidential plane, young John pleaded for his journey to continue. “I want to come,” he said to his father.

“You can’t,” the president replied softly.

“It’s just a few days,” the First Lady reminded the crying child. “And when we come back, it will be your birthday.”

John Jr. began to sob. “John, like Mummy said, we’ll be back in a few days,” the president explained. JFK then kissed his son and turned to the Secret Service agent in charge of the boy’s protection: “You take care of John for me, Mr. Foster,” he ordered gently.

Bob Foster thought this unusual. President Kennedy normally never made such statements, no matter how much his son cried when it was time to say good-bye.

At 11:00 A.M., the president gave John Jr. one last hug and stepped onto the tarmac before climbing the steps up into Air Force One. The First Lady was at his side. Five minutes later, the plane went wheels-up out of Andrews for the three-and-a-half-hour flight to Texas. John Kennedy Jr. watched the great jet rise into the sky and disappear into the distance.

Air Force One will land first in San Antonio. Then it’s on to Houston and then Fort Worth, where the president and First Lady will spend the night. Dallas will come tomorrow. JFK’s personal pilot, Colonel Jim Swindal, will fly the Kennedys from Fort Worth into Dallas’s Love Field. The flight will be short, just thirteen minutes. But the symbolic image of Air Force One descending from the heavens to land in that troubled city will be a far more powerful sight than John Kennedy driving thirty-five miles across the prairie in a limousine.

Now the president takes a break from his reading to light a cigar. Jackie has gone into their private cabin to change clothes. JFK smokes thoughtfully. Texas will be tricky politically. There’s no telling if the crowds will be hostile or receptive, and he’s concerned about Jackie enjoying herself. This could be a big test of whether she will be eager to campaign with him in 1964.

JFK gets up and makes his way back to the First Family’s quarters.

The president taps lightly on the door and pokes his head in. “You all right?” he asks Jackie. They will be landing soon. His wife is slipping into a crisp white dress.

“Fine,” the First Lady responds, looking in the mirror to adjust the beret that accessorizes the dress and its black belt.

“I just wanted to be sure,” he tells her, closing the door.

The president feels a slight dip as Air Force One begins to descend. He looks out the window. Five miles below and slowly rising up to greet him lies the barren and flat landscape of Texas.

On the ground in Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald stuffs cardboard shipping boxes with books as he fills orders at the Texas School Book Depository. But today he is easily distracted, and a map of the motorcade route printed on the front page of the Dallas Times Herald’s afternoon edition soon catches his attention. Oswald need look no farther than the nearest window to see precisely where President Kennedy’s limousine will make a slow right turn from Main Street onto Houston, then an even slower left-hand turn onto Elm, where it will pass almost directly below the windows of the depository. Getting a good glimpse of the president will be as simple as looking down onto the street below.

But Lee Harvey Oswald is planning to do much more than catch a glimpse. In fact, he is quietly plotting to shoot the president. Just a month ago, mere days before the birth of their second child, Marina noted his fascination with the movies Suddenly and We Were Strangers, both of which deal with the shooting of a government official—in the case of Suddenly, the president of the United States. The couple watched the films together, and Oswald even told Marina that the films felt authentic. She thought that a strange remark.

Oswald does not hate the president. He has no reason to want JFK dead. He is, however, bitter that a man such as John Kennedy has so many advantages in life. Oswald well understands that it’s easier for men born into privilege to distinguish themselves. But other than that small amount of envy, he does not speak unfavorably about the president. In fact, Oswald would very much like to emulate JFK.

Above all, he wants to be a great man.

“Can I ride home with you this afternoon?” Oswald casually asks coworker Wesley Frazier. The nineteen-year-old’s home is a half block from where Marina Oswald lives with Ruth Paine. Oswald often catches a ride out to the suburb of Irving on Friday in Frazier’s nine-year-old black Chevy four-door and then makes the return trip back into Dallas with him on Monday.

“Sure,” Wesley replies. They are standing on the first floor of the Texas School Book Depository, next to a large table. “You know, like I told you, you can go home with me anytime you want to, like I say, anytime you want to go see your wife that is all right with me.”

But then Frazier realizes that today isn’t Friday. It’s Thursday—and Oswald never rides to Irving on Thursdays. “Why are you going home today?” Frazier asks him.

“I am going home to get some curtain rods,” Oswald replies.

Oswald then steals a length of brown wrapping paper from the depository’s shipping department. He spends the rest of his workday fashioning a bag in which to conceal his “curtain rods.”

Through it all, as he folds the paper to form the best possible sheath in which to hide his rifle, Lee Harvey Oswald is unsure that he will actually kill President Kennedy. What he really wants is to be permanently reunited with Marina and the girls. Tonight, he will beg his wife to take him back.

But if she doesn’t, Oswald will be left with no choice.

That is how delusional Lee Harvey Oswald’s world has become. He now deals only in absolutes: either live happily ever after—or murder the president of the United States.

23

NOVEMBER 22, 1963

IRVING, TEXAS

6:30 A.M.

The Oswalds have been fighting. Again. But this time is different. This time it’s over. Lee Harvey stands at the foot of the bed in their cramped room at Ruth Paine’s house, dressed for work in gray pants and an old shirt. He twists the wedding band off his left hand and drops it into a china cup on the dresser. It was once a symbol of his love for Marina, but now it is yet another confirmation of the failure that envelops his life.

Today Oswald will do something to change all that. Today he will prove that he is not a failure, even if it means losing his own life in the process.

He drops $187 in cash onto the dresser as a going-away present to his wife and daughters. After all, it’s not as if he has a future.

Marina lies on the bed, half awake. Hers and her husband’s last night together was not romantic. Oswald tossed and turned while Marina was up with the baby twice. They did not make love, although Marina made a 3:00 A.M. attempt at tenderness. He responded by angrily kicking her away.

Oswald’s trip home was primarily to get his rifle. But he was willing to set aside his dark plan if Marina agreed to live with him. All evening long he pleaded with his wife to reconcile. He told her how much he missed his girls, and even promised to buy Marina a washing machine because he knew how much she wanted one.

But Marina was furious that he had come to see her on a Thursday, which was against Ruth Paine’s house rules. So Oswald’s pleas turned into yet another round of bickering. But still he didn’t give up.

Marina, however, doesn’t seem to want him back. They spent the evening outside, playing with June and Audrey on the dying autumn grass of Ruth Paine’s lawn. Oswald pleaded with Marina to become his wife again. She wavered, because Lee Harvey Oswald had once been the love of her life. But she did not give in.

Oswald went to bed early. He lay there thinking. Even when Marina came to bed, her body warm and smelling like soap from a late-night bath, he pretended to be asleep. The hours passed. Over time he found his courage. He had nothing left in the world. He would go forward with his plan.

Now, at dawn, after dressing for work and leaving his worldly possessions on the dresser, Lee Harvey Oswald hears Marina stir behind him.

“Don’t get up,” he tells her. “I’ll get breakfast myself.”

She’s exhausted and has no intention of getting up. Audrey fusses, and Marina reaches for her to nurse her. Oswald softly lets himself out of the room without saying good-bye.

The assassin fixes himself a cup of instant coffee in the kitchen, then steps into Ruth Paine’s crowded garage to retrieve his rifle. He unrolls the blanket lying next to his olive-green Marine Corps seabag, revealing the 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano infantry carbine. He lays the gun in the brown paper wrapping he stole from work yesterday.

Holding the “curtain rods” by the barrel, he steps out of the garage, forever leaving his old life behind.

By 8:00 A.M., Oswald and Wesley Frazier are pulling up for work at the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald is out of the car before Frazier cuts the engine. He has grabbed his brown package and raced inside the building before Frazier can catch up and ask him why he’s in such a hurry.

“It’s raining,” says George Thomas, stepping inside John Kennedy’s Fort Worth hotel suite. The president’s valet rouses him at precisely 7:30 A.M. A crowd is already gathering in the parking lot eight floors below, waiting to hear Kennedy speak to them from the back of a flatbed truck. The audience of nearly five thousand is mostly male, and primarily union workers. Many have been standing in the rain for hours.

“That’s too bad,” Kennedy replies to his valet. He rises from bed and heads for the shower. Rain means that the bubble-top roof will be buckled onto his limousine for the Dallas motorcade. Not only will the local citizens be upset by having to wait in the cold and rain for hours until he passes by, but their inability to get a clear glimpse of the president and First Lady inside the bubble will do little to sway their votes come next November.

The president wraps himself in his back brace, tightly adjusting the straps. He then dresses in a blue two-button suit, a dark blue tie, and a white shirt with gray stripes from Cardin’s in Paris. He reads the CIA situation reports, paying close attention to the casualty count from Vietnam. After that, he scans several newspapers. The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that Jackie just might be the pivotal factor in helping him get reelected in 1964. That’s the best news of this trip so far: everyone loves the First Lady. The uproar over her bikini photos has clearly been forgotten.

The people of Texas screamed and cheered for JFK on the first day of the Texas trip. But as big as his ovations are, and as intently as the audiences hung on every word of his speeches, the reception John Kennedy received was nothing like what his wife is experiencing. Jackie is the talk of Texas, and bringing her along may just be the smartest political move the president has ever made.

By 9:00 A.M., John Kennedy is standing on the back of the flatbed truck, looking upbeat and triumphant. “There are no faint hearts in Forth Worth,” he says approvingly to the crowd. He has a well-deserved reputation for not giving in to the elements. The union workers knew their waiting in the rain would be rewarded and that the speech would not be canceled.

“Where’s Jackie?” someone shouts.

“Where’s Jackie?” yells another voice.

John Kennedy smiles and points up to her hotel room. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” he jokes. On the eighth floor, sitting before her vanity, Jackie can hear the speech rising up from the parking lot. She enjoys hearing her name and how easily her husband banters with the crowd.

“It takes her a little bit longer,” the president adds. “But, of course, she looks a little bit better than we do when she does it.”

The crowd roars in laughter, as if the president is their coolest drinking buddy and he’s sharing some juicy tidbit about his personal life.

But the truth is that, today, Jackie doesn’t just need a little extra time to get ready—she needs a lot of time. The First Lady looks visibly exhausted as she primps before the mirror. Campaigning is hard work. Yet she is determined to stick this out. There is to be another swing through California in two weeks, and she wants to make that trip, too. In fact, Jackie Kennedy is determined to be at her husband’s side from now until he is reelected next November.

But all of that is in the future. What matters now is that the Texas trip is halfway done. All Jackie has to do is make it through this day, and then she can relax. “Oh, God,” she says, looking at her frazzled image in the mirror. “One day’s campaigning can age a person thirty years.”

The First Lady has no idea that today will age her like no other day in her young life.

The energy in the Fort Worth parking lot fuels the president, who delivers a powerful and impassioned speech. “We are going forward!” he exclaims in closing, reminding his audience that he is keeping the promises he made in his inaugural address less than three years earlier. The cold war is behind us, he’s saying, all the while implying that the future is a Camelot for all Americans.

The earsplitting cries of approval from those thousands of hardened union men is all the proof John Kennedy needs that Texas really isn’t such a bad place after all.

The president rides a wave of adrenaline off the stage and back into the hotel. Campaigning revitalizes him, even in an early-morning Texas drizzle.

But as good as he feels, the president knows that the rest of Friday, November 22, is not going to be easy. From both a political and a personal standpoint, he must be at the top of his game if he is going to win over the hardened people of Dallas.

Or, as the president warns Jackie, “We’re heading into nut country today.”

24

NOVEMBER 22, 1963

TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY, DALLAS

9:45 A.M.

Crowds of eager Dallas residents stand on the curb in front of the Texas School Book Depository. The president won’t pass by for three hours, but they’ve come early to get a good spot. Best of all, it looks like the sun might come out. Maybe they’ll get a glimpse of John F. Kennedy and Jackie after all.

Lee Harvey Oswald peers out a first-floor window of the depository building, assessing the president’s route by where the crowds stand. He can clearly see the corner of Elm and Houston, where John Kennedy’s limousine will make a slow left turn. This is important to Oswald. He’s selected a spot on the depository’s sixth floor as his sniper’s roost. The floor is dimly lit by bare 60-watt lightbulbs and is currently under renovation, and thus empty. Stacks of book boxes near the window overlooking Elm and Houston will form a natural hiding place, allowing Oswald to poke his rifle outside and sight the motorcade as it makes that deliberate turn. The marksman in Lee Harvey Oswald knows that he’ll have time for two shots, maybe even three if he works the bolt quickly enough.

But one should be all he needs.

Air Force One crabs into the wind as Colonel Jim Swindal eases her down onto the runway at Dallas’s Love Field. John Kennedy is ecstatic. Peering out the windows of his airplane, he sees that the weather has turned sunny and warm and that yet another large Texas crowd is waiting to greet him. “This trip is turning out to be terrific,” he happily confides to Kenny O’Donnell. “Here we are in Dallas and it looks like everything in Texas will turn out to be fine for us!”

Police cars circle the field, and officers are even stationed on rooftops. But these are the only ominous sights at the airport. For the estimated welcoming party of two thousand are overjoyed to see Air Force One touch down, marking the first time a president has visited Dallas since 1948. Grown men stand on their tiptoes to see over the throngs in front of them. Airport personnel leave their desks inside the terminal and jostle into position near the chain-link fence separating the runway from the parking lot. The U.S. Air Force C-130 carrying the president’s armored limousine lands and opens its cargo ramp. The bubble top remains on board the plane. The convertible top is completely down. A local television newsman, who is covering the spectacle live on air, enthusiastically reports that the bubble top is nowhere in evidence and that people will be able to see the president and First Lady “in the flesh.” The reporter also reminds his audience that the president will be returning to Love Field between “2:15 and 2:30” to depart for Austin.

Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, await the president on the tarmac, as they have on every leg of the Texas trip. The vice president’s job is to stand at the bottom of the ramp and greet the president. Johnson is not happy about this assignment, but he puts on a good face as Jackie emerges from the rear door of the plane, radiant in the pink Chanel suit with the matching pillbox hat. Two steps behind, and seen in person for the first time by the people of Dallas, comes John Kennedy.

“I can see his suntan from here!” the local TV reporter gushes.

The official plan is for JFK to head straight for his limousine to join the motorcade, but instead he breaks off and heads into the crowd. Not content with merely shaking a few hands, the president pushes deep into the throng, dragging Jackie along with him. The two of them remain surrounded by this wall of people for more than a full minute, much to the crowd’s delight. Then the president and First Lady reemerge, only to wade deep into another section of crowd.

“Boy, this is something,” enthuses the local reporter. “This is a bonus for the people who have waited here!”

The president and First Lady shake hands for what seems like an eternity to their very nervous Secret Service detail. “Kennedy is showing he is not afraid,” Ronnie Dugger of the Texas Observer writes in his notebook.

Finally, John and Jackie Kennedy make their way to the presidential limousine. Awaiting them are Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie. There are three rows of seats in the vehicle. Up front is the driver, fifty-four-year-old Bill Greer. To his right sits Roy Kellerman, like Greer, a longtime Secret Service agent. Special Agent Kellerman has served on the White House detail since the early days of World War II and has protected presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and now Kennedy.

JFK sits in the backseat, on the right-hand side, patting his hair into place after his foray into the crowd. Jackie sits to his left. The First Lady was handed a bouquet of red roses upon landing in Dallas, and these now rest on the seat between her and the president.

Governor Connally sits directly in front of the president, in the middle row, known as jump seats. Connally takes off his ten-gallon hat so that the crowds can see him. Nellie sits in front of Jackie and right behind the driver, Special Agent Greer.

As the motorcade leaves Love Field at 11:55 A.M., the presidential limousine—Secret Service code name SS-100-X—is the second car in line, flanked on either side by four motorcycle escorts.

Up front is an advance car filled with local police and Secret Service, among them Dallas police chief Jesse Curry and Secret Service special agent Winston Lawson.

Behind John Kennedy’s vehicle is a follow-up convertible code-named Halfback. Kennedy’s two main members of the Irish Mafia, Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, sit here, surrounded by Secret Service agents heavily armed with handguns and automatic weapons. Clint Hill, head of the First Lady’s Secret Service detail, stands on the left running board of Halfback. Special agents Bill McIntyre, John Ready, and Paul Landis also man the running boards.

Car four is a convertible limousine that has been rented locally for the vice president. Even as the vehicles pull away from Love Field, it is obvious that LBJ is angry and pouting. While every other politician in the motorcade is waving to the crowds, he stares straight forward, unsmiling.

Bringing up the rear is car five, code-named Varsity and filled with a Texas state policeman and four Secret Service agents.

Way up at the front of the motorcade, driving several car lengths in front of SS-100-X, Dallas police chief Jesse Curry is committed to making the president’s visit as incident-free as possible. The fifty-year-old chief is a lifetime law enforcement officer. In addition to working his way up through the ranks of the Dallas police, he has augmented his knowledge by attending the FBI Academy. Curry has been involved in almost every aspect of the planning for John Kennedy’s visit and is dedicating 350 men—a full third of his force—to lining the motorcade route, handling security for the president’s airport arrival, and policing the crowd at the Trade Mart speech.

However, Curry has chosen not to position any men in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza, thinking that the main crowd-control issues will take place prior to that destination. Once the motorcade turns from Houston Street and onto Elm, it goes under an overpass, turns right onto Stemmons Freeway, and through a relatively uncrowded area to the Trade Mart. Better to focus his officers on the busiest thoroughfares along the route, rather than waste them in a place where few people will be standing.

Curry has also ordered his men to face toward the street, rather than toward the crowd, thinking it wouldn’t hurt for them to see the man they’re protecting as a reward for the many long hours they will be on their feet. This ignores the example of New York City, where policemen stand facing away from the street, so they can better help the Secret Service protect the president by scanning the city’s many windows for signs of a sniper’s rifle.

But it doesn’t matter during the motorcade’s first easy miles. There is so little to do and so few people to see that a bored Jackie puts on her sunglasses and begins waving at billboards for fun. The white-collar workers along Lemmon Avenue are few in number and unexcited. They’d rather enjoy their lunch break from the IBM factory.

At the exact same moment, it’s also lunchtime at the Texas School Book Depository. Most of Lee Harvey Oswald’s coworkers have left the building, hoping to get a glimpse of the president.

Just down the block, FBI special agent James Hosty has forgotten all about investigating Lee Harvey Oswald and is just trying to make sure he gets a look at his hero, President Kennedy.

Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t bring a lunch to work today. And he doesn’t plan on eating. Instead, he moves a pile of boxes into position on the grimy sixth floor of the depository building, fashioning a well-concealed shooting nest.

At 12:24 P.M., nearly thirty minutes into the motorcade, the president’s car passes Special Agent James Hosty on the corner of Main Street and Field. The G-man gets his wish and sees Kennedy in the flesh, before spinning back around and walking into the Alamo Grill for lunch.

At 12:28 the motorcade enters a seedy downtown neighborhood. Straight ahead, the beautiful green grass of Dealey Plaza is clearly visible. The Secret Service agents are stunned by the reception the president is now receiving, with people everywhere cheering and applauding.

At 12:29 the motorcade makes the crucial sharp right-hand turn onto Houston Street. From high above, in his sixth-floor sniper’s lair, Lee Harvey Oswald sees John F. Kennedy in person for the first time. He quickly sights the Mannlicher-Carcano, taking aim through his scope as the motorcade skirts the edge of Dealey Plaza.

The crowds here are still large and enthusiastic, despite Chief Curry’s prediction that they would have thinned by this point. The people shout for Jackie and the president to look their way. As per agreement, JFK waves at the people standing in front of buildings on the right side of the road, while Jackie waves at those standing along grassy Dealey Plaza, to their left. This ensures that no voter goes without a wave.

The motorcade is just five minutes away from the Trade Mart, where Kennedy will make his speech. Almost there.

Inside the presidential limousine, Nellie Connally stops waving long enough to look over her right shoulder and smile at John Kennedy. “You sure can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President.”

Ironically, at that very moment, if JFK had looked up to the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, he would have seen a rifle barrel sticking out of an open window, pointed directly at his head.

But Kennedy doesn’t look up.

Nor does the Secret Service.

It is 12:30 P.M. The time has come for Special Agent Bill Greer to steer SS-100-X through the sweeping 120-degree left turn from Houston and onto Elm.

Most people live their lives as if the end were always years away. They measure their days in love, laughter, accomplishment, and loss. There are moments of sunshine and storm. There are schedules, phone calls, careers, anxieties, joys, exotic trips, favorite foods, romance, shame, and hunger. A person can be defined by clothing, the smell of his breath, the way she combs her hair, the shape of his torso, or even the company she keeps.

All over the world, children love their parents and yearn for love in return. They revel in the touch of parental hands on their faces. And even on the worst of days, each person has dreams about the future—dreams that sometimes come true.

Such is life.

Yet life can end in less time than it takes to draw one breath.

25

NOVEMBER 22, 1963

DEALEY PLAZA, DALLAS, TEXAS

12:14 P.M.

Anticipating the arrival of the president of the United States, a married high school student named Aaron Rowland stands with his wife, Barbara, along Dealey Plaza. Looking up at the Texas School Book Depository, he sees a man silhouetted against a corner sixth-floor window. An avid hunter, Rowland recognizes that the man is holding a rifle at port arms—diagonally across his body, with one hand on the stock and the other on the barrel. This is how a U.S. Marine might hold his weapon while waiting to fire at the rifle range.

Rowland is fascinated, but for all the wrong reasons. “Do you want to see a Secret Service agent?” he asks his wife.

“Where?”

“In that building there,” he replies, pointing.

Six minutes later, a full ten minutes before the motorcade reaches Dealey Plaza, Ronald Fischer and Robert Edwards, who work in the nearby county auditor’s office, look up and see a man standing motionlessly in the sixth-floor window. “He never moved,” Fischer will later remember. “He didn’t blink his eyes. He was just gazing, like a statue.”

At the same time, Howard L. Brennan, a local pipe fitter, uses his khaki shirtsleeve to wipe the sweat from his brow. This makes him wonder how hot it is. And so he glances at the Hertz sign atop the Texas School Book Depository’s roof that shows time and temperature. As he does so, Brennan’s eyes pick out a stone-still mystery man positioned to fire in the upper window.

But then comes the sound of cheering as the motorcade gets nearer and nearer. Down on Main Street, the crowds are lined up ten to twenty feet deep, and their roar echoes through the window-lined canyons of downtown Dallas. In all the excitement, the sight of a man standing in a window clutching a rifle is forgotten. The president is near.

Nothing else matters.

Lee Harvey Oswald would prefer to shoot while in the prone position. That is the optimum for a marksman. In such a position, the rifle is not supported by muscle, which can grow weary or flinch. Instead, when the body is belly-down on the floor, the hard ground and the bones of the right and left forearm form a perfect and stable triangle.

But Oswald does not have that option. He will have to shoot standing up. Yet as a veteran marksman, he knows to keep his body as still as possible. So now he leans hard against the left window jam and presses the butt of his Italian carbine against his right shoulder. The scratched wooden stock of the butt is against his cheek, just as it was for so many hours at the rifle range with the M-1 rifle from his Marine Corps days. His right index finger is curled around the thirty-three-year-old trigger.

Lee Harvey Oswald peers into his four-power telescopic sight, the one that makes John Kennedy’s head look as if it is two feet away. Oswald knows time is short. He’ll be able to shoot two shots for sure. Three, if he’s quick. He has probably nine seconds.

Seeing his target clearly, Oswald exhales, gently squeezes the trigger, and even as he feels the recoil kick the rifle back, hard against his shoulder, he smoothly pulls back the bolt to chamber another round. He can’t tell whether the first bullet has done much damage. But that doesn’t matter. Oswald must immediately fire again.

The assassin is an impulsive man, and perhaps even more powerless to stop the flood of adrenaline that would course through any man’s body after firing a high-powered rifle at the president of the United States. The instant a man commits such an act, his life is changed forever. There is no turning back. From that second on he will be hunted to the ends of the earth. Perhaps he will spend the rest of his life in prison. Perhaps he will be executed.

The smart thing to do after firing a shot at the president is to throw down the rifle and run.

But if the first shot somehow misses, just like that shot missed General Walker back in April, and the president lives, Oswald will look like a fool. And that’s the last thing he wants. No, the plan is to kill John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And Lee Harvey Oswald will see that plan through.

He doesn’t think twice. Oswald fires again.

The sound of the second shot is not drowned out by the crowd below. It is so loud that pieces of the plaster ceiling inside the Texas School Book Depository fall and the panes of the windows along which Lee Harvey Oswald stands rattle.

At approximately 8.4 seconds after firing his first shot, Lee Harvey Oswald pulls the trigger on the third. And then Oswald is away. He drops his now-unnecessary Italian carbine and steps from the tower of book boxes behind which he’s been hiding. He races to get out of the depository.

Dallas motorcycle officer Marrion L. Baker has raced into the building and up the stairs. He stops Oswald at gunpoint on the second floor but then lets him go when it becomes clear that Lee Harvey is a TBSD employee.

Sixty seconds later, Lee Harvey Oswald steps out of the depository building and into the sunshine of a sixty-five-degree Dallas afternoon.

Against all odds, the assassin is getting away.

Earwitness testimony in Dealey Plaza will later confirm that three shots were fired from the depository. One of the shots misses the president’s car completely, and decades later there is still speculation whether it was the first or third round. But the fact remains that two of the shots did not miss.

The first impact strikes the president in the back of his lower neck. Traveling at 1,904 feet per second, the 6.5-millimeter round tears through the president’s trachea and then exits his body through the tight knot of his dark blue tie. No bones are struck, and though his right lung is bruised, JFK’s heart and lungs still function perfectly.

The president is badly hurt, but very much alive. He has trouble breathing and talking as blood floods into his windpipe. Otherwise, the rifle shot will most likely not kill him.

The same cannot be said for Texas governor John Connally. His jump seat, immediately in front of the president, is three inches lower than where the president is currently sitting. Therefore, ballistics after the fact show that the bullet that passed through Kennedy then entered Connally’s back.

The governor had turned his body just before Oswald fired the shot. He was twisting around, trying to speak face-to-face with the president. Thus, the so-called “magic bullet” (which was traveling at slightly more than 1,700 feet per second) manages to pierce Connally’s skin and travel through his body, exiting below the right side of his chest. But the magic bullet isn’t finished. It then pierces the governor’s wrist and deflects off the bones and into his left thigh, where it finally comes to rest.

The blow knocks Governor Connally forward, bending him double. His chest is immediately drenched in blood. “No, no, no, no,” he cries, “they’re going to kill us both.”

Roy Kellerman thinks he hears the president yell, “My God, I’m hit,” and turns to look over his left shoulder at the man whose Boston accent he knows so well.

Kellerman sees for sure that JFK has been shot.

President Kennedy and Governor Connally are just four miles from Parkland Hospital. There, a team of emergency surgeons can save their lives. It’s up to Secret Service driver Bill Greer to get them there. But the driver of SS-100-X has also looked back to check on the president’s status. This distraction means that the limousine veers slightly from side to side rather than speeding to the emergency room. When Greer turns back to the wheel there’s still time to save the president. All he has to do is accelerate.

But the impact of what has happened has not sunk in. Not for Greer. Not for Kellerman. Not even for Jackie, who is now turning toward JFK.

And the presidential limo still travels far too slowly down Elm Street.

Secret Service special agent Clint Hill, in charge of the First Lady’s detail, hears the shot and leaps into action. Shoving himself away from the running board on Halfback, the vehicle directly behind the president’s limousine, Hill sprints forward in an effort to jump on the small step that sticks out from the back of the president’s car.

Meanwhile, JFK is leaning to his left, but still upright. Jackie wraps her hands lovingly around her husband’s face. The First Lady looks into the president’s eyes to see what’s wrong with him. The distance between her beautiful, unlined face and that of the tanned and very stunned John Kennedy is approximately six inches.

The torso of a normal man would have been shoved farther forward by the force of a bullet striking his body at nearly twice the speed of sound. This is precisely what happened to Governor Connally. If John F. Kennedy had been knocked forward, he might have lived a long life.

But now the president’s long and painful struggle with back problems returns to torture him one last time.

The back brace that he is wearing holds his body erect. The president fortified its rigidity this morning by wrapping the brace and his thighs in a thick layer of Ace bandages.

If not for the brace, the next bullet, less than five seconds later, would have traveled harmlessly over his head.

But it does not. The next bullet explodes his skull.

The diameter of the entry wound from the second impact is just slightly wider than that of a number two pencil. The high rate of speed ensures that the shell will travel all the way through the brain and out the front of the skull, rather than lodging inside like the slower bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln was shot, physicians inserted something called a Nelaton probe into his brain. This slender porcelain stick followed the path of the wound until the tip struck the solid metal ball fired from John Wilkes Booth’s pistol. The path of the bullet was all very linear and neat.

But the 6.5-millimeter round fired by Lee Harvey Oswald is a far more vicious chunk of lead. Such a slender bullet might seem insignificant, but it is capable of bringing down a deer from two hundred yards.

This copper-jacketed missile effectively ends John F. Kennedy’s life in an instant. It barely slows as it slices through the tender gray brain matter before exploding the thin wall of bone as it exits the front of his skull.

Jackie’s arms are still wrapped around her husband when the front of his head explodes. Brains, blood, and bone fragments shower the First Lady’s face and that pink Chanel suit; the matter sprays as far forward as the limousine’s windshield visors.

As is so often his habit when something messes up his hair, John Kennedy’s hand reflexively tries to pat the top of his head.

But now the top of his head is gone.

There is no chance for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, as was attempted when Lincoln lay dying on the floor of his Ford’s Theatre box. There will be no overnight vigil, as with Lincoln, so that friends and loved ones can stand over JFK in his final moments, slowly absorbing the pain of impending loss, and perhaps speaking a few honest words about how much they love John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

The man who swam miles to save the men of PT-109, who has shaken the hands of kings and queens and prime ministers, who inspired the entire world with his bold speeches and deeply held belief in the power of democracy and freedom, who caressed the cheeks of his children, endured the loss of so many family loved ones, and who stood toe-to-toe with men who might otherwise destroy the world, is brain dead.

Little do the horrified onlookers know, but historians and conspiracy theorists, as well as average citizens born years after this day, will long argue whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or perhaps had the help of others. Federal authorities will scrutinize ballistics and use a stopwatch to time how quickly a man can aim and reload a 6.5-millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano. A variety of people will become self-described experts on grainy home videos of the assassination, grassy knolls, and the many evildoers who longed to see John F. Kennedy physically removed from power.

Those conspiratorial arguments will become so powerful and so involved that they will one day threaten to overwhelm the human tragedy of November 22, 1963.

So let the record state, once and for all, that at 12:30 P.M. on a sunny Friday afternoon in Dallas, Texas, John Fitzgerald Kennedy is shot dead in less time than it takes to blink an eye.

He leaves behind a beautiful widow.

He leaves behind two adoring young children.

He leaves behind a nation that loves him.

26

NOVEMBER 22, 1963

DALLAS, TEXAS

12:31 P.M.

Inside the presidential limousine, there is chaos.

“Oh, no, no, no. Oh, my God. They have shot my husband. I love you, Jack,” Jackie Kennedy cries.

The First Lady will not remember what she does in the seconds after her husband is shot. She is in shock. In the future, she will watch videos of herself and feel as if she is watching some other woman. Her children will protect her by tearing the assassination images out of books before she can see them.

“They’ve killed my husband,” Jackie says to no one and everyone. Up front, driver Bill Greer and Special Agent Roy Kellerman are radioing that the president has been hit. Governor Connally is still conscious, but fading fast. His wife, Nellie, has thrown her body over his. This leaves Jackie alone in the backseat, the president’s lifeless body leaning against hers.

“I have his brains in my hand,” she yells.

And then Jackie is up and out of the seat. She’s on a mission.

Secret Service special agent Clint Hill knows precisely what the First Lady is doing. Rather than sitting with her husband’s body, she is crawling onto the trunk of the moving presidential limousine in order to collect pieces of skull and brain that cover the dark blue metal. Some fragments are flesh colored, with the skin still attached. Behind her, the president’s body is still upright, though tilted to the left. Blood pours out of his head wound in great torrents, drenching her roses and his clothing and spilling onto the floor of the vehicle.

“Good God, she’s going to fly off the back of the car,” Hill thinks as he jumps onto the small platform attached to the back of the Lincoln. To Special Agent Hill, the shot that killed the president sounded like “a melon shattering onto cement.” Splatter from the president’s head covers Hill’s face and clothes as he and the fatal bullet reached the kill zone simultaneously.

Terror fills the First Lady’s eyes. Her face is covered in blood and gray matter. This is a stark change for a woman so often consumed by appearing nothing less than elegant. But Jackie could not care less. “My God, they have shot his head off,” she screams.

Hill is just inches away from Jackie Kennedy as Bill Greer accelerates toward Parkland Hospital. SS-100-X is a behemoth of a vehicle, specially modified for use by the president. In addition to those mid-vehicle jump seats—which stretch the car from the 133-inch wheelbase of a factory Lincoln to 156 inches—the car weighs almost four tons. The 350-horsepower engine is its weak link, making it unable to accelerate quickly. But once the vehicle is up to speed, it hurtles down the freeway like an unstoppable force.

Which is precisely what it’s doing now. Scattering the police motorcycle escort, Bill Greer is pressing the accelerator all the way to the floor. Clint Hill, struggling to keep Jackie Kennedy from falling off the vehicle, almost flies off the back bumper himself. His hand clings to a grip on the trunk that has been placed there specifically for the Secret Service to hold on to. Now he grips for dear life with just that one hand, the other reaching for Jackie as the limo rockets down Elm Street. Hill grabs Jackie’s elbow, which allows him finally to get stabilized on the trunk of the presidential limousine.

Hill’s first job is to protect Jackie Kennedy. Even as he presses his body flat against the trunk and holds on tight, he shoves her hard back into the backseat. The president’s body falls over and onto her lap. She holds his head in her white-gloved hands, cradling him as if he has simply fallen asleep. “Jack, Jack. What have they done to you?”

Up front, driver Bill Greer is depending upon Chief Curry to lead the president’s limousine to Parkland Hospital, which is four miles away.

Still clinging to the trunk, Clint Hill turns and looks at Halfback, where Secret Service agents ride on the running boards. He makes eye contact with Special Agent Paul Landis, then shakes his head and holds out his hand in a thumbs-down signal.

Special Agent Emory Roberts sees Hill’s gesture and immediately radios to the agents protecting Lyndon Johnson. With one downturned thumb, Clint Hill has confirmed that Lyndon Baines Johnson is now the acting president of the United States. Protecting his life becomes the Secret Service’s number one priority.

In the backseat of the Lincoln, Jackie Kennedy holds her husband’s head and quietly sobs. “He’s dead. They’ve killed him. Oh Jack, oh Jack. I love you.”

Lee Harvey Oswald is doing everything right. He’s walking east up Elm Street to catch a bus. The panic and chaos that now define Dealey Plaza recede behind him. No one has stopped Oswald. At this point, no one even suspects him.

Meanwhile, his escape plan is coming together slowly. For now, the assassin is on his way to his rooming house to pick up his pistol—just in case.

The radio call of “Code 3” means an emergency of the highest importance to Dallas-area hospitals. The term is almost never used. So when Parkland dispatcher Anne Ferguson requests more details, she is simply told, “The president has been shot.”

The time is 12:33 P.M.

Three minutes later, the presidential limousine roars into Parkland, blowing past the sign reading “Emergency Cases Only.” Bill Greer parks in the middle of the three ambulance bays.

But there is no stretcher waiting, no emergency team rushing to help the president. Incredibly, a breakdown in communications has stymied the hospital’s emergency response. The trauma team has barely been notified.

So those inside the presidential limo simply wait.

Nellie Connally lies atop her husband, even as a moaning Jackie Kennedy holds John Kennedy’s head.

Halfback pulls up, right behind SS-100-X. Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, men who have been in the political trenches with JFK since the 1946 congressional campaign, rush to the Lincoln, hoping for the best. The president still has a faint pulse—which continues to push pint after pint of blood out through his head wound.

“Get up,” Secret Service special agent Emory Roberts commands Jackie Kennedy.

She doesn’t move. She has positioned her arms and jacket so that no one can see JFK’s face or head. The First Lady does not want her husband remembered this way.

Roberts delicately lifts Jackie’s arm so he can see for himself if the president is dead. One look is all he needs. Roberts backs off.

Dave Powers sees the fixed pupils gazing sightlessly into the distance and breaks into tears. O’Donnell, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, reverts to his soldier days and snaps to attention as a sign of numb respect.

Even if Jackie were to try to move right now, she would have nowhere to go. The slumped body of John Connally blocks the car’s door, meaning that the governor of Texas must be moved before the president of the United States can be lifted from the Lincoln.

It is Dave Powers, not hospital personnel, who finally sets aside his tears and lifts Connally out by the legs and onto a gurney. The governor is conscious, though just barely. His wounds are life threatening, and the emergency physicians at Parkland will be very busy today trying to save Connally’s life. (They will succeed—a rare bit of good news on a brutal day.)

Though Connally has been wheeled inside to Trauma Room Two and no longer obstructs the car door, Jackie Kennedy still refuses to let go of her husband. When she lets go, she knows he’s gone forever. This will be the last time she holds him. The First Lady curls her body forward so that the president’s blood-soaked face and her breasts come together. She weeps quietly, pushing her body closer and closer to her husband’s.

“Mrs. Kennedy,” Special Agent Clint Hill says, “please let us help the president.”

Jackie doesn’t respond. But she knows that voice. It is the soft command of a man who has protected her from danger night and day.

The voice of Clint Hill is the only voice Jackie responds to in her moment of shocked grief.

Hill softly places his hand on her shoulder. The First Lady trembles, in mourning.

The quiet crowd of Secret Service agents and Kennedy staffers around the Lincoln do not speak. The seconds tick past.

“Please, Mrs. Kennedy. Please let us get him into the hospital,” Hill implores.

“I’m not going to let him go, Mr. Hill,” Jackie says.

“We’ve got to take him in, Mrs. Kennedy.”

“No, Mr. Hill. You know he’s dead. Leave me alone.”

Jackie sobs. Her body jerks as pain courses through her.

Hill realizes something. It’s bad enough that she is seeing the man she loves with his head blown off, but she doesn’t want anyone else seeing him like that. And as the media descend onto Parkland Hospital even in the midst of Jackie’s lonely Pietà, there is no way in the world Jackie will allow John Fitzgerald Kennedy to be photographed in this state.

Clint Hill is exhausted. He has worked long hours on this trip and gotten by on little food and even less sleep. But there’s nothing he won’t do for Jackie Kennedy. Knowing in an instant that it is the right thing to do, Special Agent Hill removes his suit coat and sets it gently atop the president’s body.

Jackie Kennedy, her pink suit and white gloves now covered in the president’s copious blood, wraps her husband’s head and torso in Clint Hill’s coat.

Then, for the last time, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy lets go of the man she loves. The president is placed atop a gurney and hustled down to Trauma Room One, those pushing the gurney following the red line on the floor. The walls are tiled in tan, and atop the president’s chest is the bouquet of bloody red roses, which have stuck to his body.

About four miles away from the bloody hospital scene, Lee Harvey Oswald boards a bus at the corner of Elm and Murphy and completes his getaway.

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 was a spiderweb of conspiracy. On the same evening that Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre, there were also plans to kill his vice president and secretary of state. Had those plans succeeded, the top level of American government would have been beheaded.

As soon as the first shot is fired in Dallas, those long-ago events are instantly remembered. Immediate steps are taken to ensure that a possible conspiracy is not completed. Several members of the cabinet are west of Hawaii, en route to Japan. A radio call orders them to turn around and come home.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson is under constant watch the instant his rented limousine arrives at Parkland Hospital. He is hustled into a small white cubicle in Parkland’s Minor Medicine section with his wife, Lady Bird. A Secret Service detail guards his life. A patient and a nurse are kicked out to make room for them. There is no word yet on the fate of the president, though everyone knows that surviving such a gunshot wound is just about impossible. The Secret Service wants LBJ flown immediately back to Washington and out of harm’s way. Failing that, it would like him relocated to the safest possible security zone in Dallas: Air Force One.

But Vice President Johnson refuses to leave the hospital. He remains waiting for word of President Kennedy’s fate. The Secret Service pressures him again and again to depart, but LBJ will not go. Johnson is planning his next steps. Until the presidential succession is official, he will deliver no orders. The oath of office is not necessary to make him officially president. Succession will take place the instant JFK is declared dead. So LBJ stands there in the small cubicle at Parkland Hospital, leaning against the wall and sipping coffee in complete silence, waiting for the official announcement of President Kennedy’s death.

In Trauma Room One, the president’s body is stripped, except for his underwear. His gold watch is removed from his wrist. He no longer has a regular pulse, but he breathes in short breaths. Blood continues to pour out of his head wound and the hole in his throat; the rest of his body is unscathed. An overhead fluorescent lamp lights the small army of medical professionals at work in the trauma room. The first doctor on the scene is second-year medical resident Charles J. Carrico, who knows what to do and acts quickly. A tube is inserted into John Kennedy’s throat to open his airway, and saline solution is pumped into his body through his right femoral vein.

The room slowly fills with surgeons, until there are fourteen doctors standing over the president. Outside the trauma room, Jackie Kennedy sits in a folding chair holding vigil.

Dr. Mac Perry, a thirty-four-year-old surgeon, now steps in to head the team. He uses a scalpel to slice open the president’s throat and perform a tracheotomy, while someone else attaches a tube to a respirator to induce regular breathing.

Jackie now rises from her chair, determined to enter the trauma room. She has heard the talk about fluids and resuscitation and is beginning to hope that her husband might just live. A nurse blocks her path, but the demure First Lady can display an iron will when she wants to. “I’m going to get into that room,” she repeats over and over as she wrestles with Nurse Doris Nelson, who shows no signs of backing down. “I’m going to get into that room.”

“Mrs. Kennedy, you need a sedative,” a nearby doctor tells her.

But the First Lady does not wish to be numbed. She wants to feel every last moment with her husband. “I want to be in there when he dies,” she says firmly.

Bobby Kennedy gets the bad news from J. Edgar Hoover.

As the head of America’s top law enforcement agency, Hoover is informed of the shooting almost immediately. The FBI director is a dispassionate man, but never more so than right now. He sits at his desk on the fifth floor of the Justice Department Building as he picks up the phone to call Bobby Kennedy. It has been fifteen minutes since Lee Harvey Oswald first pulled the trigger. The surgical trauma team at Parkland is fighting to keep the president alive.

Bobby is just about to eat a tuna fish sandwich on the patio of his Virginia home when his wife, Ethel, tells him he has a call.

“It’s J. Edgar Hoover,” she tells Bobby.

The attorney general knows this must be important. The director knows better than to call Bobby at home. He sets down his sandwich and goes to the phone. It’s a special direct government line known as Extension 163.

“I have news for you,” Hoover says. “The president has been shot.”

Bobby hangs up. His first reaction is one of great distress, and his body seems to go slack. But his next thought, as always, is to protect his older brother. He calls the White House and has all the locks on JFK’s file cabinets changed so that Lyndon Johnson cannot go through them. The most delicate files are completely removed from the White House and placed under round-the-clock security.

Bobby then fields phone call after phone call from friends and family. He holds back tears, but Ethel knows that her husband is breaking down and hands him a pair of dark glasses to hide his red-rimmed eyes.

The calls don’t stop. In the midst of them all, Bobby realizes that the tables have been turned. And he knows that he will soon get a call from a man he despises.

Jackie Kennedy gets the bad news from Dr. William Kemp Clark.

It comes just moments after, against great odds, the First Lady battles her way into the trauma room. She stands in a corner, out of the way, just wanting to be near her husband.

The sight is singularly medical, as tubes now sprout from the president’s mouth, nose, and chest. His skin is the palest white. Blood is being transfused into his body. Dr. Mac Perry presses down on the president’s sternum to restart the heart, even as the electrocardiogram machine shows a flat line. Dr. William Kemp Clark, Parkland’s chief neurosurgeon, assists Perry by monitoring the EKG for even a flicker of deviation.

Finally, Clark knows they can do no more. A sheet is drawn over JFK’s face. Dr. Clark turns to Jackie Kennedy. “Your husband has sustained a fatal wound,” the veteran surgeon tells the First Lady.

“I know,” she replies.

“The president is dead.”

Jackie leans up and presses her cheek to that of Dr. Clark. It is an expression of thanks. Kemp Clark, a hard man who served in the Pacific in World War II, can’t help himself. He breaks down and sobs.

Most people in the United States get the bad news of the president’s death from CBS newsman Walter Cronkite.

The most trusted man in America first breaks into the soap opera As the World Turns just eight minutes after the shooting, saying that an assassin has fired three shots at the president. Despite the fact that most Americans are at work or school, and not home watching daytime television, more than seventy-five million people are aware of the shooting by 1:00 P.M.

Lyndon Baines Johnson gets the bad news from Kenny O’Donnell.

Shortly after 1:00 P.M., John F. Kennedy’s appointments secretary marches into the small white cubicle in the Minor Medicine section of the hospital and stands before Lyndon Johnson. O’Donnell is openly distraught. He is not the sort of man who weeps at calamity, but the devastated look on his face is clear for all to see.

Even before O’Donnell opens his mouth, LBJ knows that it is official: Lyndon Baines Johnson is now the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

Jack Ruby gets the bad news from television, just like most of America.

The nightclub owner is on the second floor of the Dallas Morning News building, just four blocks from Dealey Plaza. He has come to place an ad for his burlesque business, the Carousel Club—“a f---ing classy joint,” in Ruby’s own words. He pays in person because the Morning News has canceled his credit after he fell behind on his payments one too many times. The ad announces his featured performers for the coming weekend and is no different from his usual weekly ads gracing the newspaper.

Ruby is five foot, nine inches and 175 pounds, and is fond of carrying a big roll of cash. He’s got friends in the Mafia and on the police force. He is known to like health food and has a lightning-quick temper. But most of all Jack Ruby considers himself a Democrat and a patriot.

The first reports state that a Secret Service man has been killed, but as Ruby and the advertising staff of the Morning News gather around a small black-and-white television for more information, the harsh truth is announced.

A despondent Jack Ruby wanders off and sits alone at a desk. After a time, he gets up and announces that he is canceling the club advertisement. Instead, he places another ad. This one tells the good people of Dallas that the Carousel Club will be closed all weekend, out of respect for President Kennedy.

Jack Ruby will not be doing business over the next few days. He will be doing something else.

Lee Harvey Oswald is on the move. After his bus stalls in heavy post-assassination traffic, he gets off and walks a bit before finding a cab, which takes him closer to his rooming house at 1026 North Beckley. Upon arriving there, he races to his room, grabs his .38-caliber pistol, and sticks it in his waistband. Then he quickly leaves.

Little does Oswald know, but eyewitnesses at the scene have given the police his description. Now the cops are on the lookout for a “white male, approximately 30, slender build, height 5 foot 10 inches, weight 165 pounds.”

At 1:15 P.M., Officer J. D. Tippit of the Dallas Police Department is driving east on Tenth Street. Just after the intersection of Tenth and Patton, he sees a man matching the suspect’s description walking alone, wearing a light-colored jacket.

Tippit is a married father of three children. He is thirty-nine years old, earned a Bronze Star as a paratrooper in World War II, has a tenth-grade education, and earns just a little over $5,000 a year. The “J.D.” initials do not stand for anything.

Tippit has been with the Dallas Police Department eleven years as he pulls his car alongside Lee Harvey Oswald. He knows to be cautious. But he also knows to be thorough in his questioning.

Oswald leans down and speaks to Tippit through the right front window vent. He is hostile.

Tippit opens the door and steps out of his police cruiser. He walks around to the front of the car, intending to ask Oswald a few more questions. Based on the answers, Tippit will then make a decision whether to place Oswald in handcuffs. But the policeman doesn’t get farther than the left front wheel. Lee Harvey Oswald pulls out his .38 and fires four bullets in rapid succession. Tippit is killed instantly.

Oswald, the man who nervously missed General Walker so many long months ago, has now killed the president of the United States and a Dallas police officer in cold blood just forty-five minutes apart.

But Oswald is running out of options. He is out of money, almost out of ammunition, and the Dallas police know what he looks like. He will have to be very clever in these next few minutes if he is to continue his escape.

The killer quickly reloads and continues his journey, turning down Patton Avenue. But this time he doesn’t walk; he jogs. There is no doubt about it: Oswald is being hunted. The police are closing in. He needs to move quickly now. The time is 1:16 P.M.

At 1:26 P.M. the Secret Service whisks Lyndon Johnson to Air Force One, where he immediately climbs the steps up to the back door of the plane. There he moves into President Kennedy’s personal bedroom, takes off his coat, and sprawls on the bed while he awaits Jackie Kennedy’s return to the plane. She has remained behind at Parkland, refusing to leave until the body of her husband comes with her.

And so LBJ waits. Even as he relishes his first moments of power, outside the bedroom, mechanics are removing several of the first-class seats in the rear of Air Force One to make room for John Kennedy’s coffin.

LBJ has chosen the bedroom because he wants privacy. He picks up John Kennedy’s personal presidential telephone next to the bed and places a call to a man he loathes.

On the other end of the line, Bobby Kennedy picks up the phone and says a professional hello to his new boss.

Lee Harvey Oswald hears the sirens and knows they’re coming for him.

He races toward the quickest hiding place he can find, a movie house called the Texas Theatre. Oswald has traveled eight blocks in the twenty-five minutes since killing Officer Tippit. He shed his jacket shortly after shooting Tippit, hoping to confuse his pursuers. He runs past the Bethel Temple, where a sign advises “Prepare to Meet Thy God.”

But Lee Harvey Oswald is not showing fear.

Foolishly, he runs right past the ticket booth. In the dark of the theater, he finds a seat, trying to make himself invisible. His seat is on the main floor, along the right center aisle. The matinee film is War Is Hell, an ironic name for a decidedly hellish day of Oswald’s invention.

After seeing the man run inside without paying, and then at the same time hearing sirens as police cars race to the scene of Officer Tippit’s murder, ticket taker Julia Postal puts two and two together. Realizing that the man she just saw is “running from them for some reason,” she picks up the phone and dials the police.

Squad cars are on the scene almost immediately. Police close off the theater’s exits. The house lights are turned on. Patrolman M. N. McDonald approaches Oswald, who suddenly stands and punches the policeman in the face while reaching for the pistol in his waistband. McDonald is not hurt and immediately fights back. Other policemen join the scrum. Thus, screaming about police brutality, Lee Harvey Oswald is dragged out of the theater and taken to jail.

Undertaker Vernon Oneal receives the call from Clint Hill personally, ordering him to bring his best casket to Parkland Hospital. Oneal specializes in taking care of the dead, running a fleet of seven radio-equipped white hearses that convey the newly departed to his mortuary, where relatives can sip from the coffee bar before paying their respects in the Slumber Room.

The casket Oneal quickly selects for John Kennedy is the “Britannia” model from the Elgin Casket Company. It is double-walled and solid bronze. The upholstery is satin.

Upon his arrival at Parkland Hospital, Oneal is told that Jackie Kennedy wants one last moment with her husband. That’s all. She removes the wedding band from her finger and slides it over the knuckle of Jack’s little finger with the help of an orderly, so that it will not fall off during the inevitable embalming. She then smokes a cigarette. Jackie is exhausted and brokenhearted. The mood at Parkland is mournful but slowly returning to normal hospital routine. As doctors and nurses begin attending to other cases, Jackie Kennedy is feeling more and more out of place.

“You could go back to the plane now,” she is told.

“I’m not going back till I leave with Jack,” she replies.

Meanwhile, Vernon Oneal places a sheet of plastic down on the inside of the coffin, lining the bottom. He then carefully swaddles the body of John Kennedy in seven layers of rubber bags and one more of plastic. Finally, the president’s body is laid inside. Oneal is concerned that the president’s blood will permanently stain the satin lining.

Almost an hour after being declared dead, John Kennedy is now ready to leave Parkland Hospital and fly back to Washington.

Yet ironically, the city of Dallas, which once wanted him to stay away, now will not let JFK leave.

It is a little-known fact that it is not a federal crime to kill the president of the United States. It is against federal law to initiate a conspiracy to kill the president, which is why J. Edgar Hoover is now insisting that JFK’s murder was the act of many instead of just one. Hoover wants jurisdiction over the case. But at this point, he is not getting it. Jurisdiction falls to the state of Texas and the municipality of Dallas.

Thus Dallas officials won’t let John Kennedy’s body leave the state of Texas until an official autopsy has been performed. The Dallas medical examiner, who has now arrived at Parkland, will not budge on this matter.

Veteran Secret Service special agent Roy Kellerman, who has now taken charge, is livid. “My friend,” Kellerman makes it clear to Dallas medical examiner Dr. Earl Rose, “this is the body of the president of the United States and we are going to take it back to Washington.”

“No. That’s not the way things are,” Rose replies. “Where there is a homicide, we must have an autopsy.”

“He is going with us,” Kellerman tells Rose.

“The body stays,” insists the medical examiner, an upright man fond of wagging his finger in people’s faces.

Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson and Air Force One are stuck on the ground because of this legal wrangling. Jackie Kennedy won’t leave without JFK’s body, and LBJ won’t depart without Jackie, fearing he would be considered insensitive if he did.

The argument now becomes an old-fashioned Texas standoff—a physical showdown between the Secret Service, Dr. Rose, and members of the Dallas Police Department. There are forty men present. Pushing and shoving break out. The Secret Service is determined to have its way, but the Dallas police won’t back down. Finally, Kennedy’s close friends Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers order Secret Service agents to grab JFK’s coffin and bull their way through the police. “We’re getting out of here,” O’Donnell barks as the undertaker’s cart on which the casket rests is rolled toward the exit door. “We don’t give a damn what these laws say. We’re leaving now!”

The president’s body is loaded into Vernon Oneal’s 1964 white Cadillac hearse. Jackie Kennedy sits in the rear jump seat, next to her husband’s body. Clint Hill and other agents jam themselves into the front seat. Bill Greer is still inside the hospital, but Roy Kellerman isn’t waiting for him. Secret Service special agent Andy Berger takes the wheel and races for Love Field at top speed. As he watches the hearse peel out, Vernon Oneal wonders aloud how and when he’s going to be paid.

There is no stopping when the Cadillac reaches the airport. Tires squealing, Special Agent Berger races the hearse onto the tarmac, ignoring the signs reading “Restricted Area” and “Slow—Dangerous Trucks.” He speeds past the Braniff and American Airlines hangars, oblivious to all dangers until the hearse screeches to a halt at the back steps leading up to Air Force One. Kennedy’s friends and bodyguards then personally manhandle the six hundred pounds of coffin and president, banging it off the stairwell leading up into the plane and tilting the casket at awkward angles. They load the body onto Air Force One through the same rear door John Kennedy stepped out of three hours earlier. That moment was ceremonial and presidential. This moment is morbid and ghastly.

Jackie Kennedy waits until her husband’s body is on board before climbing up the steps. The inside of Air Force One is like an inferno; the air-conditioning has been off for hours. The blinds are down, and the cabin is dark out of fear that more assassins are on the loose and will shoot through the plane’s windows. Yet Lyndon Johnson insists on being sworn in before Air Force One leaves the ground. So it is that the Kennedy staff and the Johnson staff stand uncomfortably next to one another as federal judge Sarah Hughes, who was personally appointed to the bench by LBJ and now has been hastily summoned to the presidential jet of which John F. Kennedy was so fond, administers the oath.

“Do you, Lyndon Baines Johnson, solemnly swear…”

“I, Lyndon Baines Johnson, solemnly swear…”

LBJ stands tall in Air Force One. To his left, still wearing the bloodstained pink suit, is Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. The former First Lady has not changed clothes. She is adamant that the world have a visual reminder of what happened to her husband here.

Standing before Johnson is the judge.

Several feet behind them, in the rear of the plane, lies the body of John F. Kennedy.

After the swearing-in ceremony, Jackie sits down in a seat next to the coffin as the long ride home begins.

It is Sunday morning, November 24. The nation is devastated by the assassination of John F. Kennedy and is riveted to the television with depressed fascination as events unfold. Jackie Kennedy is now out of sight, privately mourning her husband’s death. So the eyes of America turn to Lee Harvey Oswald. The assassin has become infamous since Friday, particularly after telling a crowd of reporters, “I’m just a patsy.”

That impromptu midnight press conference at Dallas police headquarters was surreal. Reporters were allowed to physically crowd the handcuffed Oswald. Many in Dallas, and across America, are so infuriated by JFK’s death that they would gladly exact revenge. Yet the Dallas police do little to shield Oswald.

One of those enraged is Jack Ruby, who worked his way into the press conference unmolested, with a loaded Colt Cobra .38 in his suit coat pocket.

The lack of security around Oswald continued throughout the press conference. He told reporters that the police were after him only because he had lived in the Soviet Union. He denied shooting the president. His tantalizing words “I’m just a patsy” hung in the air, suggesting that he was some sort of scapegoat.

To some, those words brought to mind another such incident, thirty years earlier.

On February 15, 1933, in Miami, Florida, Giuseppe “Joe” Zangara emptied a .32-caliber handgun at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Zangara missed his target, instead hitting and killing Chicago mayor Anton Cermak. The trial was amazingly quick, and Zangara was executed by the electric chair just five weeks later.

There are some who insist that Roosevelt was not the intended target. Instead, they believe that the point all along was to kill Cermak, as part of a Mafia conspiracy.

In mob slang, Zangara was a “patsy”—someone whose guilt was set up to advance a crime coordinated from behind the scenes.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s public statement that he is a patsy fuels the flames that John Kennedy’s death is part of a greater conspiracy.

There are still Americans who believe Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in killing John F. Kennedy. Some came to this belief thanks to Oswald’s comments and J. Edgar Hoover’s insistence that there was a conspiracy. Even Bobby Kennedy believed that Oswald did not act alone.

The world will never know the answer.

After saying just a few words to the press on Sunday morning, Lee Harvey Oswald is led through the basement of the Dallas Police Department to a waiting armored car, where he will be transferred to the county jail. In actuality, the armored car is a decoy—for security measures, Oswald will be led to a police car instead.

A crowd of journalists watches a handcuffed and smiling Oswald as he makes his way down the corridor, his right arm handcuffed to the left of Detective J. R. Leavelle.

Between forty and fifty journalists and more than seventy policemen are waiting as Oswald is brought out. Three television cameras roll.

“Here he comes!” someone shouts as Oswald emerges from the jail office.

The newsmen press forward. Microphones are thrust at Oswald and questions shouted. Flashbulbs pop as photographers capture the moment for posterity.

Oswald walks ten feet outside the jail office, on his way to the ramp where the police car is waiting.

Suddenly, Jack Ruby emerges from the crowd to Oswald’s left. He has come back to see Oswald for a second time, and once again he carries a pistol. Known to policemen and reporters, Ruby had no problem getting close to the perp walk, even though there is absolutely no reason for him to be there.

Ruby has left his dog waiting in the car. But he is an impulsive man, fond of spontaneously beating drunks who make passes at the strippers in his club. He is so devastated by Kennedy’s assassination that friends have found him crying. Now, enraged by Oswald’s smiling presence, Jacob Rubinstein ensures that he will never see his dog again. He moves fast, aiming his gun at Oswald’s abdomen, and fires one shot. The time is 11:21 A.M.

Jack Ruby is set upon by police. Lee Harvey Oswald slumps and is immediately transported to Parkland Hospital. After arriving, he is placed in Trauma Room Two, right across the hall from the emergency room where John Kennedy spent the final minutes of his life. At 1:07 P.M., forty-eight hours and seven minutes after JFK’s death, Lee Harvey Oswald also dies.

But unlike Kennedy, Oswald is not mourned.

By anyone.

27

JANUARY 14, 1964

ATTORNEY GENERAL’S OFFICE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Jackie Kennedy sits in a simple leather club chair before a roaring fire. The flag of the United States can be seen over her left shoulder. Her eyes, once so bright and playful, are dull. She wears black. Across from her as the cameras roll, are Bobby and Teddy Kennedy, there to offer moral support. Bobby, in particular, has become a surrogate parent to Caroline and John, and a constant companion to Jackie.

When her husband died eight weeks ago, Jackie Kennedy had no place to go—protocol mandated that she move out of the White House immediately, which also meant an end to Caroline’s special schooling and John’s fondness for riding in Marine One. Jackie was hardly penniless, but actually had little cash to her name, a circumstance that will continue until JFK’s will is sorted out.

Jackie’s whole life was John Kennedy, and even now she sometimes forgets that he’s dead. She is filming this spot, which will be shown in movie theaters across the nation as a newsreel, because she wants to give thanks for the tremendous outpouring of warmth from the American people. She’s received more than eight hundred thousand letters of condolence. “The knowledge of the affection in which my husband was held by all of you has sustained me,” Jackie says firmly to the camera, “and the warmth of these tributes is something we shall never forget.”

Jackie’s words are scripted, and she reads from cue cards. But they are her own words, chosen specifically to evoke heartfelt emotion. The same American people who elevated a president and his wife to movie star celebrity status have not forgotten Jackie in her time of need. And while she is no longer the First Lady, Jackie Kennedy carries herself with the full weight of that title as never before.

But looks are deceiving: privately she aches, compulsively chain-smoking Newport cigarettes and biting her fingernails to the quick. Her eyes are constantly red-rimmed from crying.

Jackie pauses several times during the filming to catch her breath or flutter her eyes to keep the tears at bay. “All of you who have written to me know how much we all loved him, and that he returned that love in full measure,” she tells the world.

And then Jackie Kennedy takes on the same visionary tone of her husband. She speaks of building a John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, so that people from around the world will know of her husband’s legacy.

It is a brave and poignant performance. In less than two minutes, Jackie Kennedy says a heartbreaking thank-you to the American people. Her grief is obvious, as is her elegance. She symbolizes the grandeur of Camelot, for which Americans are already growing nostalgic.

One of the last times Jackie Kennedy saw her husband’s face was that afternoon at Parkland Hospital, just before the quiet reverence of Trauma One was turned into an unsightly fracas between Secret Service agents and Dallas police. It was in that quiet moment before she slipped her wedding ring onto Jack’s finger. She remembers that moment as if it were yesterday, but prefers to dwell only on the wonderful times. All the indiscretions and controversies of the past are forgotten.

Calm and in command is the way Jackie will always remember Jack. And that’s the way she wants history to remember him. “For Jack, history was full of heroes,” she told Theodore White of Life magazine a week after the assassination. “He was such a simple man, but he was so complex, too. Jack had this hero side to history, the idealistic view, but then he had that other side, the pragmatic side. His friends were his old friends, he loved his Irish Mafia.”

It was during that interview, which ran in Life’s December 6 edition, that she first told the world the tale of JFK listening to the Camelot sound track before falling asleep, and how he loved the final line: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”

When White dictated the story to his editors in New York, Jackie hovered nearby, listening in. She insisted that the Camelot theme be predominant. This is how she wants her husband’s presidency to be remembered.

So as Jackie Kennedy finishes filming the newsreel, and rises from the club chair in Bobby Kennedy’s office—he will keep the attorney general title for nine more months—she understands that this is all part of her ongoing obligation to frame her husband’s legacy. But she also knows it is time to move on to a more normal life—a life that will be far less magical than the one she wants the world to remember. As she sadly admitted to Life’s Theodore White, “There’ll never be another Camelot.”

And to this day, that statement remains true.