The House of Kennedy(31)
Chapter 20
Hugh Aynesworth, a thirty-two-year-old aerospace reporter for the Dallas Morning News, isn’t assigned to cover the president’s visit, but figures he won’t be missed from an empty newsroom. He works his way through the crowd and finds a place in front of the Texas School Book Depository a few minutes before twelve thirty.
Shots ring out and panic erupts around him: “My reporter instinct kicked in. I saw a man across from me pointing up to the sixth-floor window, saying, “he’s up there”…He [Howard Brennan] was the only witness, and he described the shooter perfectly.”
*
At the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department, Howard Leslie Brennan, a steamfitter employed by the Wallace and Beard Construction Company, gives a sworn statement. About 12:18 p.m., he tells them, he was looking up and into the brick building across from Elm Street, where he saw a man sitting in a window. “He was just sitting up there looking down,” Brennan recounts, “apparently waiting for the same thing I was, to see the President.” As the presidential motorcade passes, Brennan says he heard the sound of an engine backfiring, or maybe someone throwing firecrackers from the brick building.
“I then saw this man I have described in the window and he was taking aim with a high-powered rifle. I could see all of the barrel of the gun. I do not know if it had a scope on it or not. I was looking at the man in this window at the time of the last explosion. Then the man let the gun down to his side and stepped out of sight.”
Based on Brennan’s description of the man with the rifle—a slender white man in his early thirties dressed in light-colored clothing—an all-points bulletin goes out. By the time Brennan leaves the sheriff’s office at about 2:00 p.m., police will know just where to find the man who assassinated the president.
*
United Press International White House correspondent Merriman Smith has a seat in President Kennedy’s motorcade, in the press car, which is equipped with a radiotelephone.
Four minutes after the shooting, at 12:34 p.m., Smith breaks the first news of the assassination over UPI’s A-wire: “DALLAS, NOV. 22 (UPI)—THREE SHOTS FIRED AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE TODAY IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.”
Two minutes later, the press car arrives at Parkland Memorial Hospital following President Kennedy’s car. As Smith, who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of these events, writes, “I recall a babble of anxious, tense voices—‘Where in hill [sic] are the stretchers…Get a doctor out here…He’s on the way…Come on, easy there.’ And from somewhere, nervous sobbing.”
Immediately following the shooting, Nellie Connally recalled Jackie repeating, “They have killed my husband. I have his brains in my hand.”
Chief anesthesiologist Dr. Marion Thomas “Pepper” Jenkins—who within two days treats both JFK and his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald—similarly recalls his most haunting memory of November 22: the First Lady showing him that “she had been cradling his brain in her hand.”
Nor will it be the last macabre mention of JFK’s brain.
In 1998, the Assassinations Records Review Board releases a shocking report into the National Archives in Washington, DC. Douglas Horne, a former naval officer and the board’s chief analyst for military records, states, “I am 90 to 95 percent certain that the photographs in the Archives are not of President Kennedy’s brain. If they aren’t, they can mean only one thing—that there has been a coverup of the medical evidence.”
The case of the two “Kennedy” brains—one of them allegedly a plant showing much less damage than doctors saw during their examinations at Parkland Memorial Hospital—renewed the fevered discussion over whether Kennedy had been shot from the front, as initial medical reviews indicate, or from behind, as the Warren Commission ultimately concludes.
Rumors have long held that during the autopsy conducted at Maryland’s Bethesda Naval Hospital, the president’s brain had been removed and delivered in a stainless-steel container, first to the Secret Service, and then to a medical locker in the National Archives.
The author James Swanson tells the New York Post that a 1966 search for the brain proved futile, but that the probe did “uncover compelling evidence suggesting that former Attorney General Robert Kennedy, aided by his assistant Angie Novello, had stolen the locker.”
What Dr. Jenkins concludes either way, however, is that the brain injury was not survivable. While Kennedy was technically still alive when he was brought in, “He was dying.” Jenkins recalls telling the priest who was there to perform last rites, “Look at this head injury. We didn’t have any chance to save him.”
Merriman Smith watches as two priests enter the president’s hospital room to administer last rites, then rushes to the “nurses room,” where acting White House press secretary Malcolm Kilduff (Pierre Salinger is on an Asian tour) calls a hasty conference to officially announce what Merriman Smith has already learned from Secret Service agent Clint Hill.
“He’s dead.”
*
At approximately 1:15 p.m., forty-five minutes after Kennedy is shot in Dealey Plaza, J. D. Tippit, a Dallas cop, is patrolling the Oak Cliff neighborhood in his cruiser. The thirty-nine-year-old married father of three is roughly three miles from Dealey Plaza when he spots a pedestrian who fits the description of the assassin. Tippit calls the man over for questioning, then exits the vehicle to investigate further.