Reclaiming History Page 17

  His appearance now—a hole in the right elbow of his brown shirt, which is “undone,” his trousers “all ragged” in the waist area, and a “bad” look on his “distorted” face—reaffirms her opinion of him. He passes right in front of her and sits somewhere behind her.318

  12:40 p.m.

  Harry McCormick, a veteran police reporter at the Dallas Morning News, pulls into Dealey Plaza and jumps from his car, which is filled with fellow newsmen. They were scheduled to cover the president’s luncheon at the Trade Mart, but after hearing of the shooting they immediately raced to the scene of the crime. One of the first people McCormick encounters is Abraham Zapruder, who is highly agitated, almost weeping.

  “I saw it all through my camera,” Zapruder half sobs to himself.

  “What happened?” McCormick asks.

  “I got it all on film,” Zapruder replies. “There were three shots. Two hit the president and the other Governor Connally. I know the president is dead. His head seemed to fly to pieces when he was hit the second time.”

  McCormick knows that if Zapruder really did capture the assassination on film, it could be the most important film in history.

  “The Secret Service will want to see those films,” McCormick says. “Where are you going?” Zapruder tells him that he’s going back to his office, across the street from the Book Depository. Thinking fast, McCormick assumes the authority of an officer.

  “Go ahead,” he tells Zapruder. “I’ll find Forrest Sorrels, head of the Secret Service here, and we’ll be back to talk with you.”

  McCormick didn’t have a clue where he was going to find Sorrels, whom he had known personally for many years, but he knew he’d have to find him fast, before his competition found out about Zapruder’s film.319

  Zapruder stumbles back to his office in a state of shock, muttering, “They killed him, they killed him.” At his office, Zapruder calls his twenty-six-year-old son, Henry, a government lawyer. “The president is dead,” he says. Henry suggests his father is wrong, that he had just heard over the radio the president was wounded and on his way to the hospital. “No,” the elder Zapruder says, “he’s dead,” explaining he had seen the president’s head exploding through the lens of his camera.320

  James Tague, who had witnessed the shooting from the mouth of the Triple Underpass, walks up to plainclothes deputy sheriff Buddy Walthers, combing the grass near the south curb of Elm Street.

  “Are you looking to see where some bullets may have struck?” Tague asks.

  “Yes,” Walthers replies, barely paying attention.

  “I was standing right there where my car is parked,” Tague says, pointing to where Commerce meets the underpass, “when those shots happened. Well, you know, now I recall something stung me on the face while I was standing down there.”321

  Walthers looks up.

  “Yes, you have blood there on your cheek,” he says, rising to his feet.

  Tague reaches up and wipes his fingers through a few drops of blood.

  “Where were you standing?” Walthers asks.

  “Right down here,” Tague says, leading him toward a concrete strip that runs between Commerce and Main Street just east of the Triple Underpass.322

  Twenty-three feet from the east face of the underpass,323 along the south curb of Main Street, Walthers spots a mark on the top of the curb. It is quite obvious to both of them that the fresh gash was made by a bullet, and from the angle of the mark, it came from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository.324

  Across America, housewives are following the fortunes of the characters of As the World Turns, the CBS network’s popular soap opera. Actress Helen Wagner turns to fellow actor Santos Ortega and says, “And I gave it a great deal of thought, Grandpa.” Suddenly, the program is cut off, replaced by a blank screen with the words “CBS NEWS” and in larger, white type, the single word “BULLETIN.” Over it comes the sound of the network’s leading newscaster, Walter Cronkite, his voice charged with emotion.*

  “Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade, in downtown Dallas. The first reports say President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.”

  Cronkite fumbles momentarily with a fresh sheet of wire copy handed to him.

  “More details just arrived,” he says, scanning it quickly. “These details about the same as previously. President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy. She called, ‘Oh no!’ The motorcade sped on. United Press International reports that the wounds perhaps could be fatal.”

  The network suddenly returns to As the World Turns, the actors, working live in their New York studio, unaware of the interruption. Shocked viewers who switch to ABC or NBC are treated to similar bulletins, equally terse, equally alarming. All three networks will soon cancel all programming and commercials for coverage of the event in Dallas.325

  At Parkland Hospital, thirty-four-year-old Dr. Malcolm O. Perry is enjoying a quiet lunch with Dr. Ronald C. Jones in the main dining room. They hear Dr. George Shires being paged.

  Perry knows that Shires, chief of the emergency surgical service at the hospital, was actually delivering a paper to a medical conference in Galveston that morning and may not be back yet. When Shires is paged a second time, Perry asks Jones to pick up the page to see if it’s a matter on which they might be of some assistance.

  Jones rushes back to their table to report that the president has been shot and is being brought to emergency, not knowing the president had already arrived by the time he received the message from the hospital operator. The two surgeons bolt from the dining room and, too rushed to wait for the elevator, gallop down the flight of stairs to the emergency room.326

  12:41 p.m.

  Out in Irving, Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine, who has returned from her errands, are taking care of some household chores. When Ruth goes into the kitchen to fix lunch for them, Marina retires to her bedroom to get dressed. She hears a sudden, loud, puzzling commotion from the television set in the living room, but makes no sense of it—until Ruth appears in the doorway, ashen. Someone shot at the president.

  They run to the living room and stare at the television, waiting for it to tell them something, anything. There are no images of the event, nothing but a news announcer who seems to be at a loss too, obviously marking time until some real information comes in, and it’s clear that he knows little more than they do. Ruth is crying as she translates the essential information—President Kennedy’s been taken to Parkland Hospital. Marina knows Parkland—she had baby Rachel there just a month ago.

  Lunch is forgotten. No one feels like it now. Ruth lights some candles, and lets her little girl light one. Marina, who knows that her friend takes her Quaker religion very seriously, asks, “Is that a way of praying?”

  “Yes, it is,” Ruth says, “just my own way.”

  Marina goes to her room and cries.327

  Dr. Charles Carrico is standing in Trauma Room One, a narrow room with gray-tiled walls and a cream-colored ceiling, when the president is wheeled in on an emergency cart. Carrico is only twenty-eight and still doing his residency in surgery, but he has already seen nearly two hundred gunshot wounds at Parkland Hospital.328 He rapidly assesses the president’s condition—his color is “blue white, ashen,” an indication of failing blood circulation; his respiration is slow, agonal (death throes), and spasmodic, with no coordination; there are no voluntary movements at all; his eyes are open and staring, with no reaction to light, his pupils dilated; and there is no palpable pulse. With the assistance of Drs. Don T. Curtis and Martin G. White and Nurse Diana Bowron, Dr. Carrico opens the president’s suit coat and shirt and puts his ear to the president’s chest. He listens for a few seconds and detects a faint heartbeat. Other nurses arrive and continue to remove Kennedy’s clothing. Carrico slips his hands under the president’s midsection and runs them up his back past his back brace.* He can fee
l blood and debris, but no wounds. He looks briefly at the president’s head wound—a gaping hole, oozing with blood and shredded scalp and brain tissue—then turns his attention to restoring the president’s breathing and circulation.329

  Carrico orders Drs. Curtis and White to do a cutdown on the president’s right ankle—a small incision to lay bare a large vein into which they can insert polyethylene catheters through which fluid, medicine, and blood can be administered to maintain the body’s circulatory system.330 The president is losing so much blood that the trauma room is already awash with it. Meanwhile, Carrico inserts a plastic endotracheal tube down the president’s throat into the trachea (windpipe) in order to create an adequate air passage. He notices a small ragged tear to the right of the larynx (voice box) and ragged tissue below, indicating tracheal injury. Carrico steers the plastic tube deep into the throat and begins connecting the cuff inflator (a latex cuff designed to prevent air leakage) to a respiratory machine.331

  Just then, Drs. Perry and Jones arrive. Perry sheds his dark blue glen-plaid jacket and wristwatch in the corner, and takes charge.332 Dr. Charles Baxter, another thirty-four-year-old assistant professor of surgery at the school, and director of the emergency room at Parkland, arrives around the same time, having made a dead run from the school as fast as he could when he heard the news.333* The trauma room is now filled with law enforcement officers and several members of the president’s party. Supervising nurse Doris Nelson has already arrived and is struggling to clear them from the room.334

  Dr. Perry steps over toward the ambulance gurney where the president is lying under the hot glare of an overhead lamp, a sheet over his lower extremities and trunk. He is surprised to find the president a bigger man than he thought, and is momentarily awed by the thought, “Here is the most important man in the world.” Perry quickly notes the deep blue color of his face and the short, jerky contractions of his chest and diaphragm as he struggles to draw a breath.335

  12:43 p.m. (1:43 p.m. EST)

  Robert Kennedy, the nation’s attorney general, had been in a good, even bouncy mood this morning. He called a meeting in his office with U.S. attorneys from around the country to report to him on his war against organized crime in their respective districts. As was his style, he loosened his tie, and with his suit coat hanging over a nearby chair, rolled up his shirt sleeves and got down to work with his associates. The news he received was encouraging. The mob was on the run. Breaking for lunch he got into his car with the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Robert Morgenthau, and Morgenthau’s chief deputy, Silvio Mollo, and drove to his Hickory Hill home in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. It was an unseasonably warm day for November 22, and the men and RFK’s wife, Ethel, took their lunch of clam chowder and tuna-fish sandwiches at an outdoor patio. When a pool-side extension phone rings nearby, Ethel leaves the table to answer it.

  “It’s J. Edgar Hoover,” she says, holding the phone out toward her husband.

  He knows something extraordinary has happened; Hoover never calls him, and certainly not at home. It is an open secret that there is no love lost between Hoover and RFK. Hoover had never been in a position before of having an attorney general who was closer to the president than he was, and he resented this. Also, RFK’s strong offensive against organized crime was, in effect, a slap in the face to Hoover in that it implied that the FBI had not been the gangbusters everyone had been brought up to think they were. RFK rises and crosses over to take the phone, “Hello?”

  Morgenthau sees one of the workmen painting the new wing of the house spin and race toward them, clutching a transistor radio. He’s shouting something unintelligible.

  “I have news for you,” Hoover says formally. “The president’s been shot. It’s believed to be fatal. I’ll call you back when I find out more.”

  Bobby Kennedy turns away, his hand to his mouth. There is a look of shock and horror on his face. Ethel rushes to his side. For a few seconds he can’t speak. Then, he forces the words out: “Jack’s been shot. It may be fatal.”336

  On the other side of Washington, the U.S. Senate press liaison officer, Richard Riedel, darts onto the Senate floor and gives the message of the president’s shooting to the first senator he encounters, S. L. Holland of Florida. He repeats the message to Senator Wayne Morse and then spots Senator Edward Kennedy on the dais, presiding over the chamber in a desultory debate over a bill on federal library services. He immediately rushes to the young senator.

  “The most terrible thing has happened!” Riedel exclaims.

  The senator, who is signing correspondence, looks up.

  “What is it?”

  “Your brother, the president,” Riedel says. “He’s been shot.”

  Ted Kennedy gasps.

  “No!” he says. “How do you know?”

  “It’s on the ticker. Just came in on the ticker.”

  Senator Kennedy quickly gathers up his papers and runs from the chamber. He knows he must get his sister Eunice and fly immediately to Hyannis Port to be with his mother and father. When Majority Leader Mike Mansfield learns the news, he is too overcome with grief to make a motion for adjournment.337

  With the Senate in recess, senators and reporters rush to the “marble room,” the lobby behind the Senate chamber where UPI and AP printers (“tickers”) are slowly delivering the tragic and unfolding story on paper. A young CBS reporter, Roger Mudd, sees Richard B. Russell, the conservative, states-rights senator from Georgia who opposed civil rights legislation, bent over the cabinet enclosing the UPI ticker, reading the Teletype out loud to the crowd around him as tears are streaming down his face.338

  At Parkland Hospital in Trauma Room Two, across the hall from the president, Dr. Robert R. Shaw attends to Governor Connally. Shaw, chief of thoracic surgery at Parkland, saw the motorcade fly past the intersection of Harry Hines and Industrial boulevards as he drove back to Parkland from Children’s Hospital. Continuing on to the medical school,* where he expected to have lunch, he heard the news of the shooting on his car radio. At the medical school, he overheard a student telling three others that the president was dead on arrival at Parkland.

  “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” one of the three asked.

  “No, I’m not. I saw him. And Governor Connally has been shot through the chest.”

  Shaw sprinted over to the hospital’s emergency room, where he found the governor being attended by three doctors. Now, Connally complains of difficulty breathing due to a deep pain in the right side of his chest. He has apparently been conscious, except for brief moments, since the shooting. Shaw notes that the team has already put a tight occlusive dressing over the large sucking wound in the chest, and a rubber tube, connected to a water seal bottle, between the second and third ribs—an attempt to expand the collapsed right lung. Shaw steps outside for a moment to relay to Nellie Connally that a sample of the governor’s blood has been sent for cross-matching, and that a regular operating room two floors above has been alerted. A few minutes later, the team transports the governor upstairs by elevator.339

  Across the hall, in Trauma Room One, Dr. Perry orchestrates the treatment of the president. Dr. Carrico finishes hooking up the respirator and flips the switch, pumping air into the president’s lungs. Carrico listens briefly to the president’s chest. His breathing is better, but still inadequate. Air is leaking from the small hole in the throat.340 Dr. Perry examines the chest briefly but can see no wound. He pushes up the body brace on the president’s left side to feel for his femoral pulse.* There is none. Perry can see that the president is still struggling to breathe, despite the endotracheal tube Dr. Carrico inserted in his throat. Perry knows that a more effective air passage must be made immediately. He asks someone to bring him a tracheotomy tray as he snaps on a pair of surgical gloves, but finds there is already one there. Perry gestures toward a small hole in the throat. “Did you start a tracheotomy?” he asks Carrico.

  “No,” Carrico replies, shaking his head. “That’
s a wound.” Carrico had previously observed foamy blood oozing, with each attempt at respiration, from a small, fairly round wound in the front of the president’s throat just below and to the right of the Adam’s apple.341

  Commencing a tracheotomy (incision into the windpipe), Dr. Perry grabs a scalpel and makes a quick, large incision directly through the hole in the throat.342†

  Other doctors are now arriving en masse. Dr. William Kemp Clark, the hospital’s senior neurosurgeon, pushes his way in and helps to withdraw Dr. Carrico’s endotracheal tube as Dr. Perry is about to insert a plastic tracheotomy tube directly into the windpipe.343 Drs. Charles R. Baxter and Robert N. McClelland, both general surgeons, along with urologist Dr. Paul C. Peters, assist Perry in inserting the tracheotomy tube, while Dr. Marion T. Jenkins, professor and chairman of Parkland’s Department of Anesthesiology, and his assistant, Dr. Adolph H. Giesecke Jr., hook up the tube to an anesthesia machine, which they had brought down from the Anesthesia Department on the second floor in order to better control the president’s circulation.344

  Perry asks Dr. Peters to make an incision in the chest and insert a tube to drain any blood or air that might be accumulating in the right side of the chest cavity.345 Meanwhile, Dr. Ronald C. Jones inserts a chest tube into the left side of the chest, then, along with several other doctors (including surgery interns and residents Drs. Don T. Curtis, Kenneth E. Salyer, Martin C. White, and Charles A. Crenshaw),346 makes additional cutdowns on the president’s right and left arms and legs in order to quickly infuse blood and fluids into the circulatory system.347 The pace is very quick and intense. Dr. Clark works his way around closer to the president’s massive head wound. He exchanges a desperate glance with Perry. Both know there is no chance of saving the president. They are only going through the motions.348