Reclaiming History Read online

  12:30 p.m.

  First Shot—:00.0 seconds BANG!—The loud crack is quickly swallowed up by the sound of sputtering motorcycles. The three stock boys in the Depository think it’s a firearm salute for the president, or maybe, Bonnie Ray Williams thinks, it’s a motorcycle backfire. The thought that it could be anything more serious is beyond their imagination.191

  Virgie Rachley, a young bookkeeper for the Texas School Book Depository, watching from the curb in front of the Depository, is startled to see sparks fly off the pavement in the far left lane, right behind the presidential limousine. She thinks it’s a firecracker thrown by some boys who are fixing to get in a lot of trouble.192

  Secret Service agent Paul Landis, riding on the right running board of the Secret Service follow-up car, knows immediately what the sound is—the report of a high-powered rifle coming from over his right shoulder. Landis snaps his head back toward the Depository. Nothing. He begins scanning the crowd but doesn’t see anything unusual.

  “What was it?” Agent John Ready says. “A firecracker?”

  “I don’t know,” Landis answers, beginning to doubt his own senses. “I don’t see any smoke.” Landis now starts to wonder whether it was a blowout and glances at the tires on the right side of the presidential limousine. The one he can see, the right front, seems all right. The doubts unnerve him and he draws his gun.193

  Secret Service agent Rufus W. Youngblood, riding in the front seat of the vice president’s car, isn’t sure what the sound is either—some kind of explosive noise. Vice President Johnson is equally puzzled. Youngblood quickly surveys the crowd, then the Secret Service follow-up car ahead of him, and notices the agents aboard making “unnatural movements.” Fear suddenly consumes him. In a flash, Youngblood turns and hits the vice president on the right shoulder, shoving him down into the backseat. “Get down!” he shouts.194*

  Governor Connally knows exactly what the sound is—the report of a high-powered rifle. An avid hunter all his life, Connally knows it isn’t a firecracker or a blowout or anything else. It’s a rifle shot. He turns and looks over his right shoulder, in the direction of the sound. Faces in the crowd blur past, but he sees nothing out of the ordinary. There is only one horrific thought that crosses his mind—this is an assassination attempt. In despair, thinking that such a beautiful day and warm reception are about to end in tragedy, Connally blurts out, “Oh no, no, no!”195

  Mrs. Kennedy, who is looking to her left, mistakes the sound for a motorcycle backfire. Suddenly, however, she hears the governor’s exclamation of “Oh no, no, no” and turns to her right, toward him.196 Nellie Connally is turning too, startled by the loud frightening noise that emanates from somewhere to her right.197

  Motorcycle escort Marrion L. Baker is seven cars back behind the presidential limousine, having just turned north onto Houston, and knows exactly what the sound is too. He just came back from deer hunting, where he heard the firing of a lot of high-powered rifles. He sees a great number of pigeons flying around the top of the Texas Book Depository Building and suspects a sniper is firing from the roof. Baker instinctively revs his Harley-Davidson, rumbles past the faltering motorcade press cars, and races toward the building two hundred feet in front of him.198

  Twenty-year-old high school dropout James R. Worrell Jr. is standing right in front of the Book Depository, his back to the building from watching the motorcade come up Houston. When he hears the first shot, Worrell throws his head back, looks straight up, and sees six inches of gun barrel with the forepart of the stock sticking out a window high overhead on the southeasternmost side of the building.199

  Across the street, ninth-grader Amos Euins thinks it’s a car backfire and begins looking around, then up. He spots a pipelike object sticking out of the southeasternmost window of the sixth floor.200

  A few feet away, Howard Brennan sits on the low stone wall of the reflecting pool. He thinks it’s the backfire of a motorcycle, or a firecracker thrown from the Depository. Those around him must be thinking the same thing, because there’s no immediate reaction by the crowd. He looks up. The man he saw earlier in the sixth-floor window is aiming a rifle straight down Elm Street toward the presidential limousine. Brennan sees him from the waist up with awful clarity, the rifle braced against his right shoulder as he leans against the left window jamb. The gunman’s motions are deliberate and without panic. After a few seconds, he fires again.201

  Second Shot—:03.5 seconds BANG!—The report is so loud inside the fifth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building that the windows rattle, and loose plaster and dirt fall from the ceiling onto Bonnie Ray Williams’s hair.202

  The car is very close to Charles Brehm and his son, maybe twenty feet away, so they can see the president’s face very well when the shot rings out. The president stiffens perceptibly, and his hands swoop toward his throat. “My God,” Brehm thinks, “he’s been shot.”203

  Secret Service agent Glen Bennett, sitting in the right rear seat of the follow-up car, is looking right at the president when the second shot hits him, he estimates, “about four inches down from the right shoulder.”204 “He’s hit!” Bennett shouts, and reaches for the Colt AR-15 assault rifle on the seat, but Agent George Hickey has already got it. Hickey cocks the rifle and spins toward the right rear, from where the shots appear to have come. Bennett draws his own side arm but there is nothing to shoot at.205 Special Agent Clint Hill leaps off the running board of the follow-up car and dashes toward the president’s limousine.206 Special Agent Roy Kellerman, riding in the front passenger seat of the president’s limousine, turns back to his right, the direction from which he hears the firecracker-like pop. He believes he hears the president say, “My God, I am hit!”207* Kellerman sees the president’s elbows have flown up higher than his shoulders, hands lower, fists clenched. He immediately turns his body back to the front and turns to his left to look into the backseats, where he sees Connally in clear distress.208

  Unable to see the president over his right shoulder, and deeply concerned for his safety, Governor Connally is in the middle of a turn to look back over his left shoulder into the backseat, to see if Kennedy has been hit, when he feels a hard blow to the right side of his own back, like a doubled-up fist. Driven down into the seat by the shot, Connally spins back to his right, a gaping, sucking wound in his chest drenching his shirt with blood.

  “My God,” he cries out, “they’re going to kill us all!”209

  His wife, Nellie, reaches out and pulls her wounded husband down into her arms and out of what she believes is the line of fire. She puts her head down over his head and doesn’t look up.210

  Mrs. Kennedy turns toward her husband, who has a strange, quizzical look on his face—almost like he has a slight headache.211

  Greer had thought the sound of the first shot was a backfire from one of the police motorcycles accompanying the motorcade, but when he heard the second loud sound, he glances over his right shoulder, momentarily slowing the car down, and sees Governor Connally in the process of slumping down. He turns back facing the front again, but knows something is very wrong now. At the same time, his partner, Kellerman, yells at him, “Let’s get out of here. We’re hit.”212*

  In the vice president’s car, Agent Youngblood vaults over the front seat and sits on top of the crouched-down figure of the six-foot four-inch Lyndon Johnson as Mrs. Johnson and Senator Yarborough collapse toward the vice president. There is no doubt in Youngblood’s mind what the sound is now—gunshots!213

  Abraham Zapruder hears the shot. The thought flashes in his mind, as he sees the president jerk and slump to his left against Jackie, that it’s a joke, the president clowning around like people sometimes do when they hear a shot, “Oh, he got me.” But even his confused mind is already telling him that the president of the United States does not make jokes like this.214

  Across the street, Mary Moorman and her friend, schoolteacher Jean Hill, watch as the president’s limousine glides toward them, curiously unaware tha
t shots have already been fired. Mary knows she will have only one chance to get a picture of the president with her Polaroid camera, which takes about ten seconds to recycle, and fears he will be looking away from her, to his right, at people on the north side of Elm street. As the limousine draws closer, Jean thinks that President and Mrs. Kennedy are looking down at something in the seat. She calls out to the president so Mary can get a good snapshot, “Hey, we want to take your picture!”215

  From the moment he looked up after the first shot, James Worrell hasn’t taken his eyes off the barrel of the rifle sticking out the window, and when he sees it fire again he sees a little flame and smoke coming out of the barrel. There is a lot of commotion, people screaming and saying, “Duck.” Frightened, he turns and starts to run toward Houston, just feet away, intending to run to the back of the building, which he feels is the safest place.216

  Amos Euins scuttles for cover behind a bench near the reflecting pool. From there he can see that the pipelike object sticking out of the southeasternmost window of the sixth floor of the Depository is a rifle. He can see a good portion of it, from the trigger housing to the front sight. The fifteen-year-old can’t take his eyes off the rifleman as he again takes aim.217

  Third Shot—:08.4 seconds BANG!—A final shot rings out. Howard Brennan, who is also looking directly at the gunman as he fires, turns quickly to his left to see if it hit, but his view of the president’s car is blocked by part of the concrete peristyle.218

  Zapruder’s view, on the other hand, is clear and unobstructed. He pans his camera with the limousine as it rolls inexorably on down the long slope, the angle changing from three-quarter frontal to near broadside. As it draws abreast of him and only a few yards away, he hears a shot and sees, through the viewfinder, to his horror, the right side of the president’s head explode.219 His receptionist, Ms. Sitzman, sees the president’s “brains come out, you know, his head opening…between the eye and the ear.” It must have been a “terrible shot,” she says, “because it exploded his head, more or less.”220

  Mrs. Kennedy is six inches from her husband’s face when the bullet strikes, driving pieces of his skull into the air. His limp body bounces off the back of the seat and topples onto her shoulder in one horrifying, violent motion. She cries out, “Oh, no, no no. Oh my God, they have shot my husband. I love you, Jack.”221

  Just as Agent Clint Hill’s hand reaches for the handhold on the trunk of the limousine, he hears the sound of a fired bullet smacking into a hard object.222 In the front seat, Special Agent Roy Kellerman feels a sickening shower of brain matter blow into the air above his head and hears Mrs. Kennedy shout, “What are they doing to you?”223

  From the follow-up car, Agent Paul Landis hears a muffled exploding sound—like shooting a bullet into a five-gallon can of water or a melon. He sees pieces of flesh and blood flying through the air and thinks, “My God, the president could not possibly be alive after being hit like that.” He is not certain from which direction this shot came, but senses it came from the president’s right front.224

  Governor Connally, grievously wounded, is nonetheless still conscious at the moment of the head shot and knows all too well that the president has been hit. He and his wife are even more horrified to hear Jackie, somewhere behind them, saying, “They’ve killed my husband. I have his brains in my hand.”225

  At the same time that Kellerman yelled to Greer they were hit and to take off, Kellerman had grabbed the microphone used to access the Secret Service radio network linking the cars of the motorcade.

  “Lawson, this is Kellerman,” he shouts into the mike. “We’re hit. Get us to the hospital immediately!”226 But as he’s starting to talk to Lawson and before Greer accelerates, a third shot rings out. Greer stomps on the gas pedal and the massive limousine lunges forward.227

  Agent John Ready, who had jumped off the running board of the Secret Service follow-up car when the limousine had slowed and had started to run across the asphalt for the president’s car, doesn’t make it in time as the limousine speeds up, and Special Agent Emory Roberts orders Agent Ready back to the follow-up car.228 As soon as he’s aboard, Halfback’s driver, Agent Sam Kinney, hits the accelerator and releases the car’s siren as they shoot after the presidential limousine.229

  Clint Hill, his hand grasping the trunk handhold, loses his footing, but jumps onto the back of the car just as it lurches forward.230 Mrs. Kennedy has already climbed out of the backseat and is crawling toward him.* Hill senses that she is probably reaching for something coming off the right rear bumper of the car. He thinks he sees something come off the back of the car too, but he cannot be sure.231 Hill pushes the First Lady back into the seat. “My God, they have shot his head off,” she cries. Hill climbs toward her, clinging to the trunk as the limousine picks up more speed.

  An instant after the head shot, Mary Moorman, on the grass fifteen feet away near the south curb of Elm Street, snaps a picture of the presidential limousine passing by. She quickly falls to the ground and tugs on Jean Hill’s slacks, shouting, “Get down, they’re shooting.” Despite her pleas, Jean Hill is too stunned to move and just stands there for a moment, transfixed, before she slumps to the grass.232

  A few feet away, Charles Brehm instinctively throws himself on his young son, covering him with his body. Brehm, a former army staff sergeant, knows about gunfire. Nineteen years before, at Brest in Normandy, not long after D-day, a German bullet went through his chest and blew his elbow joint apart. Now, despite his desperate hopes, he is positive that the president was also hit.233

  “They’ve killed him, they’ve killed him!” Abraham Zapruder cries, his finger frozen on the movie camera’s button. He pans to his right, following the presidential limousine as it lunges toward the Triple Underpass. Only after it disappears into the shadows of the underpass does Zapruder release the switch.234

  Before James Worrell makes the left turn to start running north on Houston, he pivots and looks back over his shoulder before the window with the rifle in it is out of sight and sees the rifle fire a third time. Crossing Houston he runs north nearly a block along the east side of the Depository, stopping finally at the corner of Pacific to catch his breath. All he can think of is the sight of that gun barrel firing over his head.235

  Across from the Depository, Howard Brennan dives off the stone wall. Caught up in the confusion and hysteria around him, he half expects bullets to start flying from every direction. His eyes swing back to the sixth-floor window. He watches as the gunman pulls the rifle back from the window as though drawing it back to his side. The gunman pauses another second as though to assure himself that he hit his mark, and then he disappears.236

  Press photographer Bob Jackson, twenty-nine, saw the gun being withdrawn from the window too. All the press guys in Jackson’s car (James R. Underwood, Thomas Dillard, Jimmy Darnell, and Malcolm O. Couch) were still laughing at a reporter chasing a canister of film across the street when the gunfire had broken out. Jackson had tossed it to him, as scheduled, at Main and Houston but it got caught in a strong gust of wind and started bouncing away from its pursuer. The press car was halfway up the block toward Elm when its occupants heard the first shot. Dillard told his companions that it sounded like a firecracker, but the words were barely out of his mouth when they heard the other two shots and realized it was gunfire. Jackson looked straight ahead at the Book Depository. He noticed two black men in the southeast corner window of the fifth floor leaning out to look up to the floor above. Jackson followed their gaze and saw the better part of a rifle barrel and stock being withdrawn, rather slowly, back out of sight behind the right edge of the window.

  “There’s the gun!” Jackson shouts.

  “Where?” the others ask.

  “It came from that window!” he says, pointing at the southeast corner window of the sixth floor.237

  WFAA-TV cameraman Malcolm Couch, hearing Jackson, catches a one-second glimpse of “about a foot of a rifle” barrel being brought back “into t
he window” on the “far right” of “the sixth or seventh floor.” He snatches his camera up from his lap and starts shooting the window, but there’s nothing more to be seen there, just stacks of cartons.

  The press car rounds the corner onto Elm, and Couch finds his camera’s viewfinder filled with people running in all directions. Dillard, Underwood, and Darnell jump out at the corner, leaving Couch and Jackson to wonder whether they should follow them or stay with the motorcade.238

  James Crawford had thought the first loud sound he heard to be a backfire of a car, but he quickly realized that the quality of the cars in the motorcade would not be the type to have backfires. Then he heard the second sound and began to look around, thinking someone was firing firecrackers. As the report from the third shot sounded, he looked up and saw a very quick, indistinct movement in the southeasternmost window on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building. It was a profile, somewhat from the waist up, of something light colored, perhaps caused by the reflection of the sun, and what came to his mind automatically was that it was a person having moved out of the window. He also saw boxes stacked up behind the window. Crawford turned to his friend Mary Ann Mitchell, and pointing to the window, tells her, “If those were shots, they came from that window,” but she is unable to see anything. Neither Crawford nor Mitchell saw or was aware of the president being hit and they soon returned to their office to listen to the radio to learn what had taken place.239

  Aftermath Agent Bill Greer pulls the president’s car to the right as he charges the lead car, overtaking it in the cool darkness of the underpass. Chief Curry accelerates the lead car to catch them. As the two cars emerge into the sunlight on the west side of the underpass, Agent Clint Hill, spread over the trunk of the president’s car, looks into the backseat. The sight sickens him. The president’s head is covered in blood, a portion blasted away. Hill can see a chunk with hair on it lying on the seat next to him. There is blood everywhere. Hill looks forward to the jump seats and notices Governor Connally’s chest covered in blood. Only then does he realize that the governor, too, has been shot. But for Hill, the heart-wrenching scene is in the backseat, where Mrs. Kennedy is cradling the president’s head, whimpering over and over, “Jack, Jack, what have they done to you?”240