End of Days

by James L. Swanson

  The morning after the Walker shooting, Oswald wondered how he possibly could have missed. He believed his aim was perfect. It was not his fault, he told himself and Marina. Fate had thwarted his plans. He had no time to fire a second shot.

  Lee had hidden his rifle and run away into the night. Now, alone in the quiet of the sixth floor, did he think about the ridiculous, failed attempt on General Walker’s life? Did he think of Marina and his two little girls one last time? Did he reconsider? Did he ask himself what on earth he was doing at this window with a rifle in his hands? Oswald left behind no journal, diary, or manifesto, no last-minute letter of explanation or justification to his wife or to the country.

  Oswald waited by the window. Whenever his eyes searched Houston Street for the first signs of the motorcade, he had to be careful to not hold the rifle high in his hands. Someone on the ground might spot a man with a rifle and warn the authorities.

  Map of Dealey Plaza.

  (by Nick Springer/© 2013 by Springer Cartographics LLC)

  Finally, the police motorcycles, their red lights flashing, trailed by the lead car carrying the Dallas chief of police, reached the corner of Main and Houston and then turned right onto Houston. The Texas School Book Depository stood one block ahead. Oswald could see the motorcycles first. Then the police chief’s white car. Then he could see what he had been waiting for—the big, gleaming, midnight-blue limousine carrying the president of the United States. (Today, presidential motorcades travel with as many as three hardtop limousines—two decoys, plus one occupied by the president—to confuse potential assassins. In John Kennedy’s era, there was only one.)

  From the moment Oswald saw that car turn onto Houston Street, he knew that one of its six occupants had to be John F. Kennedy. Even from a distance, if Oswald fixed his gaze on the car, he must have noticed what appeared to be an unusually bright pinpoint of color toward the right rear of the vehicle. It was Jacqueline Kennedy, her pink suit and pillbox hat glowing like a signal beacon. Indeed, he probably saw her first, before he spotted the president.

  Inside the limousine, Nellie Connally was delighted with how well the day had gone. The motorcade had passed through the cheering crowds in downtown Dallas without incident. As the car drove closer to the Book Depository, she turned around to congratulate JFK: “You can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you today, Mr. President.” Kennedy looked at her and smiled.

  FROM THE moment Oswald saw the presidential limousine, he knew the odds that he would be able to successfully assassinate President Kennedy had just tipped in his favor. Luck was with him that day. First, Kennedy had come to Dallas. Oswald would have never stalked him on a presidential trip to another city. But now the president had come to him.

  It was pure chance five weeks earlier, on October 16, before the details of Kennedy’s Dallas trip had even been planned, that Oswald would start a job at a building that would turn out to be on the motorcade route. Even President Kennedy’s itinerary proved lucky for Oswald. At any other time of day, the Book Depository employees working on the upper floors might have discovered Oswald hiding in his sniper’s nest. But JFK would drive by during lunch hour, when the employees would vacate the upper floors and go down to eat or leave the building to watch the president pass by. By a little after noon, Oswald could expect to have the entire sixth floor to himself. But even this advantage offered no guarantee of success.

  As the limousine got closer, Oswald could see that the bubble top was off. This plastic top was not exactly bulletproof, but it would have been protective because a bullet would have needed to penetrate it at a perfect angle in order to get through without being deflected. But this wasn’t something Oswald would have to worry about anymore.

  He could also see that no Secret Service agents were standing on the back of the Lincoln. That meant Oswald would have a clear line of sight to John Kennedy’s back once the limousine turned left onto Elm Street and drove past the Texas School Book Depository. Nothing would block his view of the president.

  At this moment Oswald was also in imminent danger. Three other men who worked at the Book Depository—James “Junior” Jarman, Harold Norman, and Bonnie Ray Williams—were heading to one of the upper floors to get a bird’s-eye view of the motorcade.

  Williams remembered that they had planned to watch the parade from the sixth floor. He had gone downstairs to retrieve his lunch—a chicken sandwich, a bag of Fritos, and a soda. Then he went back up to the sixth floor, sat by a window along the Elm Street side of the building, and ate his meal while he waited for his friends to come back up.

  Visibility on that floor was limited: “I couldn’t see too much of the sixth floor,” Williams said, “because the books . . . were stacked so high. I could see only in the path I was standing . . . I could not possibly see anything to the east side of the building. So far as seeing to the east and behind me, I could only see down the aisle behind me and the aisle to the west of me.”

  What Williams could not see, concealed just a few dozen feet away from him, behind stacks of book cartons, was Lee Oswald hiding with his rifle. The men were almost within spitting distance of each other. Lee didn’t make a sound, and Williams never realized that someone was lurking near the corner window.

  Williams finished his lunch and, impatient for his tardy friends to join him, he took an elevator down to the fifth floor to search for them. If he did not find them there, he planned to go to the first floor and watch the motorcade from street level, in front of the Depository. But there were Norman and Jarman standing along the windows facing the Elm Street side. Hank Norman was right below Oswald’s window, Junior Jarman was two or three windows over, and Williams took a position between them.

  They had staked out the windows closest to the far southeast corner of the building, knowing it would give them a great view straight up Houston Street as the president’s car drove toward the Depository and then turned left onto Elm right under their window.

  Their perch there gave them a commanding, unparalleled view of Dealey Plaza, better than anyone else waiting for Kennedy that day. Only Oswald—on the sixth floor, right above their heads—could see the president better. Oswald was lucky that the men did not ride the elevator up one more floor, where they might have discovered him hiding with his rifle in his little fort of book boxes.

  A man on the street had noticed Jarman, Norman, and Williams looking out the fifth-floor windows. Arnold Rowland was an eighteen-year-old newlywed high-school graduate, taking classes in preparation to attend college and working part time as a pizza maker at Pizza Inn. Rowland and his wife, who was still in high school, finished their classes early and went downtown: “I had to go to work at 4, so we were going downtown to do some shopping. We went early so we could see the President’s motorcade,” Rowland recalled.

  They arrived about 11:45 A.M. and spent the next fifteen minutes walking five or six blocks to find a good vantage point. Frustrated, they tried out several locations but could not find one that suited them. They noticed a lot of policemen and commented on the security precautions being taken. By about 12:15 P.M., they had settled on a spot near the Book Depository. Arnold’s watch read 12:14, but when he looked up at the Hertz clock atop the Depository, he observed that his timepiece was running one minute behind. He reset it to quarter past.

  More than most people in Dealey Plaza that afternoon, the Rowlands took an unusual and keen interest in presidential security. “It was a very important person who was coming, and we were aware of the policemen around everywhere, and especially in positions where they would be able to watch crowds,” Arnold noted. “We talked momentarily of the incidents with Mr. Stevenson, and the one before that with Mr. Johnson, and this being in mind we were more or less security conscious.”

  Then Rowland noticed several people in the windows of the Book Depository: “My wife and I were both looking and making remarks that the people were hanging out the windows . . . the majority of them were colored people, [and] some of them were hangi
ng out the windows to their waist.”

  Mrs. Rowland began watching a “colored boy” in one window. Her husband continued to scan the Depository facade. “At that time,” he continued, “I noticed on the sixth floor of the building that there was a man [standing] back from the window, not hanging out the window.” It was then, Rowland explained, that “I saw the man with the rifle.”

  Rowland stared at the open window. “He was standing there and holding a rifle. This appeared to me to be a fairly high-powered rifle because of the scope and the relative proportion of the scope to the rifle, you can tell what type of rifle it is. You can tell it isn’t a .22.”

  The man stood still, grasping the rifle with both hands, and holding it in front of his body at a forty-five-degree angle, with his right hand near his waist and his left hand near his left shoulder.

  The man was light complexioned with dark hair, and “he was rather slender in proportion to his size.” Rowland guessed he might weigh 140 to 150 pounds. The man looked to be “either a light Latin or a Caucasian.” His hair was “either well-combed or close cut.” He was young: “I remember telling my wife that he appeared in his early thirties.” He was wearing, Rowland observed, “a light shirt, a very light colored shirt . . . this was open at the collar . . . it was unbuttoned about halfway, and then he had a regular T-shirt . . . under this . . . he had on dark slacks.”

  Rowland thought that the man was standing three to five feet back from the window to avoid being seen but still close enough for the sun to shine on him.

  Rowland asked his wife if she wanted to see a Secret Service agent.

  “Where?” she asked. He pointed at the Book Depository.

  “In that building there.” But he was mistaken. No Secret Service agents had been deployed to the Book Depository.

  At that moment, the Rowlands noticed a man in Dealey Plaza who was suffering an epileptic fit. They watched policemen come to his aid and call an ambulance. Then Arnold told his wife to look at the building again, and at the open sixth-floor window at the southeast corner of the Book Depository. But the man was gone. “He is not there now,” he told his wife.

  She asked what he looked like. Her husband gave her a brief description of the man, including his clothing—“open collared shirt, light-colored shirt, and he had a rifle.” Mrs. Rowland said she wished she could have seen him, speculating that he had gone to another part of the building to watch the crowd.

  The young couple continued discussing the rough treatment that Adlai Stevenson had received in Dallas a few weeks ago. “This was fresh in our mind,” Arnold recalled.

  Rowland could not take his eyes off the window. “I [looked at it] constantly . . . I looked back every few seconds, 30 seconds, maybe twice a minute . . . trying to find him so I could point him out to my wife.”

  But Rowland never saw anything else in the window.

  Another man standing in Dealey Plaza had noticed the epileptic man near the Book Depository too. He was Howard Leslie Brennan, a forty-five-year-old steamfitter employed by the Wallace and Beard construction company. That day he was working on a fabrication for pipe at the Republic Bank Building. At noon he ate lunch at a cafeteria on the corner of Main and Record Streets. When he finished, he glanced at a clock—it read 12:18 P.M.

  “So I thought,” he recalled, “I still had a few minutes, [and] that I might see the parade and the President.”

  He walked over to the Southwest corner of Houston and Elm, across the street from the Book Depository. It was about 12:22 P.M. A couple minutes later, about twenty yards away from the corner, he noticed the man having an epileptic fit.

  Then Brennan walked over to a retaining wall of a little park and jumped up on the top ledge. He sat down on the top of the wall. It was between 12:22 P.M. and 12:24 P.M. Soon another bystander making a home movie of the motorcade captured an image of Brennan sitting atop the wall, wearing his dark gray construction worker’s hard hat and gray khaki work clothes. From here Brennan could survey Dealey Plaza.

  “I was more or less observing the crowd and the people in different building windows, including the fire escape across from the [Book Depository] on the east side of the [Depository], and also the [Depository] building windows.”

  Then Brennan scanned the upper floors.

  “In particular, I saw this one man on the sixth floor [who] left the window . . . a couple of times . . . at one time he came to the window and he sat sideways on the window sill. That was previous to President Kennedy getting there. And I could see practically his whole body, from his hips up.”

  Brennan did not see anyone else at any of the other sixth-floor windows.

  He did see men in the windows on the fifth floor. “There were people on the next floor down, which is the fifth floor, colored guys.” Brennan had just spotted Junior Jarman, Bonnie Ray Williams, and Harold Norman. Brennan got a good look at them. Later, he was able to recognize the faces of two of the three men.

  Just then the motorcade approached Dealey Plaza, and Brennan turned his eyes to the parade. “I watched it . . . as it came on to Houston” and headed to Elm and the Book Depository.

  THE CARS following the president copied the turn onto Houston. Oswald could see a whole line of them now—the Secret Service car bearing eight agents—four in the car and four standing on the side running boards—plus longtime JFK aides Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell, then the car carrying Vice President Johnson, then the other vehicles filled with the reporters, White House staff members, and others.

  All of the passengers in Kennedy’s car could see the Texas School Book Depository now, looming only one block ahead. And Oswald had a clear view of the president, who was now within range and getting closer with every passing second. Soon Oswald could raise his rifle, place the crosshairs of his scope on Kennedy’s forehead, and squeeze the trigger. One well-aimed shot through the head would be sure to kill him.

  Arnold Rowland was eager to see the motorcade too. “As the motorcade came along, there was quite a bit of excitement. I didn’t look back [at the Book Depository] from then. I was very interested in trying to see the President myself. I had seen him twice before, but I was interested in seeing him again.”

  Rowland did not realize he had seen something much more important than John Kennedy. A few minutes before the president was about to drive past the Book Depository, Rowland had spotted the man waiting inside to assassinate him.

  Oswald was in jeopardy now. He and his rifle had been spotted. What if Rowland found a policeman and told him of what he had seen. Or what if he shouted a warning to the crowd? “There’s a man with a rifle in the window of that building!” Police officers might have run into the street to stop the motorcade in its tracks. It was a historic but fleeting opportunity to save the life of the president of the United States.

  “We thought momentarily that maybe we should tell someone,” Rowland admitted. “But then the thought came to us that it was a security agent. We had seen in the movies before where they have security men up in windows and places like that with rifles to watch the crowds, and we brushed it aside as that . . . and thought nothing else about it.”

  Rowland remembered films he had seen about the failed attempts on the lives of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt: “Both of these had Secret Service men up in windows or on top of buildings with rifles, and this is why . . . it didn’t alarm me.”

  Mrs. Rowland was more interested in looking at Jackie Kennedy than the mystery man in the sixth-floor window. “My wife,” Mr. Rowland remembered, “remarked on Jackie’s clothing.” The pink suit was having its desired effect. “We made a few remarks on [her suit] and how she looked, her appearance in general. . . . Everyone was rushing, pressing the cars, trying to get closer. There were quite few people . . . trying to run alongside the car.”

  The couple was still discussing Jackie’s outfit as President Kennedy’s car drove away from them. “My wife likes clothes,” Mr. Rowland explained.

  IN DEALEY Plaza, another man
waited to get President Kennedy in his sights. He was Abraham Zapruder, a dress manufacturer whose office was nearby. He owned a portable color 8mm Bell & Howell movie camera, a popular compact recorder that served as the unofficial memory maker of the 1960s.

  Zapruder walked over to Dealey Plaza with one of his female employees, after another one had encouraged him to bring his camera and film President Kennedy. Zapruder selected an optimal vantage point along Elm Street in the middle of the plaza, on the same side of the street as the Book Depository.

  To get a better view above the heads of people gathering to see the president, Zapruder stood on top of a low concrete pedestal. He asked his employee to hold his legs and steady him once the president’s car came into view. It was the perfect spot. From here, Zapruder would enjoy a panoramic vista of the limousine from the time it turned onto Elm Street until it disappeared below the Stemmons Freeway underpass and out of sight.

  When the police motorcycles leading the motorcade turned onto Elm Street and came within sight, Zapruder held down the RUN button of his camera and started shooting. But the president’s car had not yet made the turn. To save film, he stopped after a few seconds to wait for John Kennedy.

  LEE OSWALD waited too. He was still waiting to get the president in his sights.

  CHAPTER 5

  “SOMEONE IS SHOOTING AT THE PRESIDENT”

  If Oswald shot now, as Kennedy drove toward him, he would have very little room for error. To hit a passenger in a vehicle moving at so close a distance, Oswald would have to lower the barrel of his rifle in a dipping, continuous motion to keep his target sighted. His aim would have to be perfect. If he shot too low, he risked hitting the windshield or the metal horizontal crossbar above the middle of the car used to attach the top. If his aim was a little better, he might hit Governor John Connally, who was sitting in a jump seat in front of the president.