The Day Kennedy Was Shot (24 page)

Somewhere on the retina of disinterested eyes the images of the four girls jumping with excitement, the “colored boys” leaning and watching, and the crouching figure of the stranger and the rifle may have appeared between blinks. They were present and visible. The blue eyes, which had seen so much that was flattering in the past forty minutes, would hardly have paused on one building, one assortment of faces. Like an infant in a perambulator, John F. Kennedy had been the center of attraction of all the faces which leaned over the sides to look, to approve, to adore. The moment of approval is important to infant and President. For Mr. Kennedy, it was a smashing triumph because, if he could earn the plaudits and the endorsement of the people in the camp of the political enemy, then the fight for other states next year was bound to be easier than he thought.

The car glided noiselessly across Houston. In the sixth floor window, the mediocre marksman could have had Mr. Kennedy in his sights and probably did. From Oswald's perch, the President of the United States was coming directly toward him. He could fix Kennedy in the crosshairs so that, at four hundred
feet, the victim appeared to be one hundred feet away. There was one shell in the chamber; there were three more in the clip below, ready to jump to duty.

Oswald could have fired all four into the face of the President at this moment. The target moved neither right nor left as Greer came down the middle. It just grew larger in the sights, the tan, smiling face growing bigger in the telescopic lens with each fifth of a second. Why not fire now? No one knows. No one will ever know. Is it possible that he feared that a missed shot would cause Greer to slam the car into high speed, running out of sight straight on Houston behind the Texas School Book Depository? It is possible. Then, too, if he fired now, from in front and above, all heads in Dealey Plaza could easily turn back up the trajectory of the shell to the window and see the assassin. Those Secret Service men in sunglasses faced him; he was facing marksmen. If he missed, would he have time for a second shot before Greer could make the heavy car leap out of sight? This, too, is possible.

But suppose a patient man could afford to decline the head-on shot in favor of the cul-de-sac? Suppose, just suppose, the President could be placed in a position from which he could not back up in time to save his life and, if he moved ahead, would become a more exposed target? This would be an improvement for a man who permitted himself four shots. He had at least thirty minutes to crouch in this window and study the aspects of murder. As a result of his military training, Lee Harvey Oswald understood the components of ambush. Surprise is a necessity, and the victim must be caught in a position from which it is impossible to escape. In this instance, the car could not back up into the Secret Service car behind it. There was insufficient room on Elm to make a U-turn; the forced move was to continue ahead toward the underpass, exposed to the rifle with the telescopic sight.

Greer watched the pilot car make the left turn onto Elm, but he misjudged it. The Secret Service driver thought of it as
a left turn, but it was more than left, curving more than ninety degrees. Instead of getting in the middle of the three lanes, the big car was now edging into the righthand lane, close to the people on the curb. The driver, swinging the heavy car toward the middle, saw the overpass ahead and people on it. Kellerman saw it, too, and so did Lawson and Sorrels in the pilot car. There was a policeman on the trestle in the middle of the group of people. Some of the Secret Service men waved to him to get the people away, out of a position where they would have the President directly below them as the car went into the underpass. The policeman didn't see the arm-waving.

In the back, there had been a long silence. Mrs. Connally flashed a smile over her shoulder and said: “Mr. Kennedy, you can't say that Dallas doesn't love you.” The President glanced at her, wearing his crowd smile, but said nothing. In the lead car, Sorrels said to Curry: “Five more minutes and we'll have him there.” Someone said: “We have almost got it made.” Lawson called the Trade Mart and gave the Secret Service the five-minute warning. Mrs. Kennedy, sweltering in the sun, kept waving and smiling to the thin knots of people, but, looking ahead to the dark of the underpass, she thought: “It will be so cool in that tunnel.”

The clock on the roof clicked to 12:30. Cameras were clicking, too. A schoolboy, Amos Lee Euins, sixteen, was impressed by the friendliness of the President, so he waved. The President waved back and Amos Euins, standing opposite the Depository, rolled his eyes upward with pleasure and was surprised to see a piece of pipe hanging out of an upper window. From where the schoolboy stood, it seemed to be hanging in midair, pointed toward the car. He looked back at the automobile. A ninth grader rarely gets an opportunity to look at a President. The pipe was unimportant.

Diagonally down from the sixth floor window, the gleaming car moved toward an open V in the branches of a piney oak on
the sidewalk. The curved windshield and the metal trim picked up flashes of sunlight and cast it to the sky. The man in the window followed the man in the car and perhaps led him a little. Then the crosshairs of the telescope sight and the smiling face met, for an instant, in the space between the big branches.

The pigeons on the roof lifted in fright to swing in an aerial covey. Tiny chips of concrete sprayed upward from the right rear of the car. On the sidewalk, Mrs. Donald S. Baker saw the spray and pulled back. A jacketed bullet, striking the pavement at 1,904 feet per second—almost three times the speed of sound—was deflected slightly upward, headed diagonally across Dealey Plaza, hit a curb and broke the shell into fragments, and the spent grains peppered James Tague on the cheek. Then the sound spread across the plaza. It was like dropping a board; like snapping a bullwhip; a sharp intrusive sound; a sound to make every being within range pause in its pursuits, every mind to ask the same question: “What was that?”

Time froze, as though an eternity of things could occur between this and the next second. Faces, still smiling, turned apprehensive eyes on the President. Some hands fell on breasts while the minds murmured: “A motorcycle backfire.” “A salute.” “A firecracker.” “A railroad torpedo.” Some cameras kept whirring. Some stopped. The sharp sound slammed around the awkward billiard railings of the buildings on Houston, Elm, Commerce and the railroad trestle and, to some who listened, it came from here, from there, from behind, in front. There was one sound. There were two. Royce Skelton, on the trestle, saw grains of concrete arc upward from the right rear of the big automobile. Tague felt a burst of sand hit his cheek. The President of the United States, feeling the tiny grains hit his face, began to lift both hands upward in fright. He, perhaps better than anyone in the Plaza, understood the import: he had felt the sandy grains on his skin and he had heard the sound he feared. In slow motion, a stunned expression replaced the boyish grin. The
hands kept coming up, up, and the face began to turn slowly, an eternity of time, toward his wife.

Governor Connally, a Texas hunter, felt no grains of road concrete, but he knew the sound. His head, his body, began a slow-motion swing to the right. The stern expression under the pale cowboy hat began to change to openmouthed disbelief. His mouth was forming words not yet on his tongue: “Oh, no, no, no.” Howard Brennan's mind tripped; it said: “Backfire. No, firecrackers.” On the fifth floor of the Depository, Hank Norman had an instantaneous reaction, almost as swift as the pigeons: “Someone is firing from upstairs right over my head.”

S. M. Holland, a signal supervisor, standing on the overpass, heard what he thought was a firecracker and saw a puff of smoke come from the grassy knoll parking lot at his left. James R. Worrell, 20, heard the crack of sound and looked straight up at the Depository. He saw part of a barrel of a rifle sticking out of a sixth-floor window. In the Vice-President's car, just turning at the top of Elm, Agent Rufus Youngblood heard the loud pop, sat up in the front seat, saw the uncertainty of the crowd, and yelled, “Get down!”

Roy Kellerman, in the front seat of the President's car, thought he heard Kennedy speak and turned to see both hands coming up toward the face. He said to Greer: “Let's get out of here. . . .” Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the Lincoln continued on past the piney oak and out the other side. Perhaps three seconds had elapsed. Mrs. Kennedy, not sure whether to be disturbed by the sudden sound, turned slowly toward her husband as he held his hands up, pulling the jacket up a little with them and turned his eyes toward her with a dazed, uncomprehending expression. The Governor in the jump seat began to turn the other way, left, to see the President, whose right hand began to come up in front of his body.

The young man in the window had the car in plain sight now. The tree was behind his quarry. The bolt action was turned, the
spent shell was ejected onto the floor, and a new one was in the chamber. The crosshairs held the back of the President of the United States in fair focus. In the telescopic sight, Kennedy was about eighty-five feet away. This time the trigger was squeezed with more care. The car was moving away at eleven miles per hour and the bullet overtook it at 1,300 miles per hour. It was aimed diagonally downward and it went through the clothing between the bottom of the neck and the right shoulder, separating the strap muscles, cutting through the trachea, nicking the bottom of the knot in the tie, moving out into sunlight, drilling through Governor Connally's back, coming out the front of the rib cage just in time to shatter itself against his raised right wrist and deflect downward to furrow the left thigh and die against his leg.

“We are hit!” Kellerman said. Greer, bewildered, slammed on the footbrake and the car slewed slightly to the right and almost stopped. The Governor, fearful of that explosive sound, had a sensation of being punched in the back. President Kennedy, with hands no farther than his chin, reacted by trying to clutch his throat. He was conscious and he heard both shots. Slowly, almost sedately, he began to collapse toward the roses and his wife. With the hole in his throat breathing as he breathed, it is doubtful that he could have uttered an articulate sound.

Rufus Youngblood hopped from the front seat of the Vice-President's car, yelling, “Get down!” and shoved Mr. Johnson's right shoulder, pushing him toward Mrs. Johnson and Senator Yarborough and jumping up high enough to sit on his man. The men on the follow-up car turned backward toward the door of the Depository, as though, without consultation, they knew the sounds came from there. The faint scream of a woman came from somewhere. A man yelled, “Duck, for Christ's sake!” One of the drivers hit a siren, and the wail started low and moved up to a pitch to terrify bystanders.

Tague, farthest away on Commerce Street, put his hand against his cheek and saw blood. Governor Connally looked down at his shirt and saw a massive amount of gore and was sure he had been killed. He began to sag toward the car door. Mrs. Connally, alarmed, reached quickly and pulled him toward her. Agent Hickey, in the follow-up car, got to his feet with the AR-15 rifle. He had no target. He was staring wildly at the green of sweet grass and the blue of a warm sky.

The final horror is always reserved for those least prepared. Mrs. Kennedy, the sheltered person, turned to see the agony on her husband's face and she screamed: “What are they doing to you?” He could not tell her and, with his last conscious effort began to slump toward her—who knows?—maybe to protect her from what was still to come. He was conscious and there was time to fall forward, between the jump seats—seven seconds to be exact.

The man in the rough work clothes and the gray steel helmet, Mr. Howard Brennan, looked up in time to see the rifle being made ready again. On the fifth floor, Jarman heard a second empty shell drop. He and his friends began to look uneasy. On the street, a policeman roared: “Oh, goddamn!” Spectators who had struggled to approach the President began to flee. Like the pigeons now circling the plaza, they had been frightened and each moved awkwardly and precipitously away from danger. In the center of the plaza, some ran. Others fell and cupped their hands behind their heads. On the sidewalk near the grassy knoll, those in front knocked down those behind in the scramble to reach safety at the top of the knoll.

The aged Abe Zapruder kept the film in his camera moving, though he had heard the sharp reports. The policemen on the motorbikes flanking the presidential limousine turned their gleaming hard helmets this way and that, looking like inquisitive monsters behind the giant sunglasses. Off to the left, Postal Inspector Harry D. Holmes kept his binoculars on the car. He
was sure someone was throwing firecrackers at it because he distinctly saw dust fly up from the street with the first crack. Then he noticed the car pull to a halt, and Holmes thought: “They are dodging something being thrown.”

Sorrels yelled: “Anybody hurt?” and a motorcycle policeman, pulling up on the lead car, nodded. “Get us to the hospital.” Curry picked up his microphone and said: “Surround the building!” He didn't tell Channel Two what building. The Secret Service saw the President's car pull up to a stop behind them and Lawson yelled: “Let's get out of here!” They would trap the President if Curry's car blocked the Lincoln. S. M. Holland, frozen with fright on the overpass, heard three more shots after the solitary puff of smoke and saw the President slump.

The terror spread. A man on a bench got up, picked his wife up, and slammed her onto the turf. Then he protected her body by falling on her. Officer T. L. Baker slowed his motorcycle and began to run it toward the curb with his feet dragging. Agent Clinton Hill left the running board of the follow-up car and began to run toward the back of the President's car. William Greer hit the accelerator as Kellerman roared into a microphone: “Take us to a hospital, quick!”

The hard-boiled O'Donnell began to bless himself. Powers murmured: “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph . . .” On the sidewalk, Charles Brend, holding his five-year-old son up to see the President, fell on the little boy. Senator Yarborough thought he smelled gunpowder. “My God,” he said, “they've shot the President!” Mrs. Johnson, the sensitive one, the apprehensive wife and mother, shook her head negatively and said: “Oh, no. That can't be.” In the press pool car, assistant press secretary Malcolm Kilduff straightened up and said: “What was that?” The young Negro student, Amos Lee Euins, was still watching the man in the window. He told himself it was a white man and he didn't have a hat on. Euins could see some boxes behind the man. Mrs. Earle Cabell, wife of the mayor, was in a car still on
Houston Street. She heard shots and jerked her head up toward the School Book Depository. She could see something sticking out of one of the windows.