The House of Kennedy(30)
*
A fellow boarder at Lee Harvey Oswald’s rooming house recalls his rapt attention to a televised report two days earlier, on November 20, detailing the president’s upcoming visit and adding information to the maps and routes that the Dallas Times Herald had published on November 19.
Oswald now knows the expected timing of the presidential motorcade’s passage through Dealey Plaza, then on past the Texas School Depository building where he works. He knows that the president and the First Lady will be in the lead car, along with Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie.
As the motorcade departs Love Field, Oswald is spotted on the sixth floor by a coworker, Charles Givens, carrying a clipboard and walking toward the elevator. Givens later testifies to the Warren Commission that Oswald directs him, “When you get downstairs, close the elevator.” Oswald doesn’t explain himself, but Givens does as he is told.
By twelve thirty, Oswald is positioned in his sniper’s perch.
*
Bill Greer, the president’s personal driver, is at the wheel of the open-top Lincoln Continental, license plate GG-300. By order of the president, the Secret Service are not standing on the retractable foot stands but positioned in the follow-car.
In the fold-down, forward-facing jump seats are Governor Connally and his wife, Nellie. President Kennedy and Jackie are in the seats behind them. “We were indeed a happy foursome that beautiful morning,” Nellie Connally writes in her book, From Love Field: Our Final Hours with President Kennedy. Both she and Jackie wear pink suits and carry roses, Jackie’s red and Nellie’s yellow. “Everything was so perfect.”
As the excited crowds cheer, Nellie turns in her seat to face Jack and says, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”
The president is smiling and waving his right hand at onlookers. Jackie has in her lap the bouquet of roses Dallas mayor Earle Cabell presented to her at Love Field. The day was “hot, wild,” Jackie recalls. “The sun was so strong in our faces.”
“Suddenly,” Lady Bird Johnson records, “there was a sharp loud report—a shot. It seemed to me to come from the right above my shoulder from a building. Then a moment and then two more shots in rapid succession.”
Dallas Morning News staff writer Mary Elizabeth Woodward, along with three newsroom colleagues, watch from across Elm Street just east of the triple underpass. Woodward’s article, titled “Witness from the News Describes Assassination,” states, “We were almost certainly the last faces [John F. Kennedy] noticed in the crowd. After acknowledging our cheers, he faced forward again and suddenly there was a horrible, ear-shattering noise, coming from behind us and a little to the right.”
What Woodward does not reveal in her eyewitness account is her lifelong hearing problem. She comes to deeply regret that omission, as the direction she gives for the source of the sound does not match the location of the Texas Book Depository where Oswald had holed up—and that discrepancy fuels decades of speculation. In her 2017 Dallas News obituary, she calls it “something that I have regretted the rest of my life because every conspiracy theorist in the world has quoted that. And I’m convinced that I did not hear it correctly.”
Roy H. Kellerman, special agent in charge, testifies on December 18, 1963, that after hearing the first shot, he “turned around to find out what happened when two additional shots rang out, and the President slumped into Mrs. Kennedy’s lap and Governor Connally fell into Mrs. Connally’s lap. I heard Mrs. Kennedy shout, ‘What are they doing to you?’”
*
Abraham Zapruder will spend the rest of his life answering that very question.
“How many times will you have a crack at [taking] color movies of the president?” Lillian Rogers, Zapruder’s secretary at his apparel manufacturing company, Jennifer Juniors, tells her boss. She sends “Mr. Z”—a fifty-eight-year-old Kennedy enthusiast who’d emigrated from Russia as a teenager—home to retrieve his high-end Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Camera, already loaded with eight-millimeter Kodachrome II color safety film.
The clothing factory occupies two floors of the Dal-Tex Building, located across the street from the Texas School Book Depository where the armed Oswald lurks. Zapruder walks a block toward Elm Street, steps onto a raised concrete platform, and points his viewfinder at the approaching motorcade.
The visuals Abraham Zapruder captures over the next twenty-six seconds instantly convince him that he has just witnessed an assassination. “They killed him!” he shouts at bystanders. Then, minutes later, “It was terrible. I saw his head come off.”
“I think he was very sorry to be the guy who got it on film,” says Zapruder’s granddaughter, Alexandra, decades later. “It brought him nothing but heartbreak.”
*
“Step on it! We’re hit!” Roy H. Kellerman orders Bill Greer. As the Continental speeds toward Parkland Memorial Hospital, Jackie protectively cradles her dying husband, his bright red blood seeping into her pink suit.
“It’s the image of yellow roses and red roses and blood all over the car…all over us,” recalls Nellie Connally. “I’ll never forget it.”
Lady Bird Johnson catches a tragic glimpse as their cars speed off. “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying in the back seat.”