End of Days

by James L. Swanson

  Only if Oswald’s aim and timing were perfect would he hit Kennedy. And he might get off only one shot. To fire a frontal shot, the assassin would have to step forward and poke his rifle through the open window. Even before he aimed and fired, he would be visible, in plain sight, to anyone in Chief Curry’s car, in the presidential limousine, or in the Secret Service trail car. Kennedy’s driver might take evasive action, swerving or accelerating to disrupt Oswald’s aim. Agents might open fire on him, forcing him to duck for cover. The assassination would most likely fail.

  And if Oswald got off a shot, the sound of gunfire would draw eyes to the upper floors of the Book Depository. If the police or Secret Service were quick to pinpoint Oswald’s location, he risked capture or death before he could even run down the stairs from the sixth floor to the first. No, the risk was too great. Oswald held his fire as he watched the president’s limousine drive straight at him, until it reached the corner of Houston and Elm and slowed to make its hairpin left turn onto Elm.

  A radio reporter in Dealey Plaza described the scene: “The president’s car is now turning onto Elm Street, and it will be only a matter of minutes before he arrives at the Trade Mart.”

  In the Secret Service car behind the presidential limousine, Dave Powers looked at his watch and spoke to Ken O’Donnell: “It’s just twelve thirty. That’s the time we’re due to be at the Trade Mart.”

  “Fine,” said O’Donnell. “It’s only five minutes from here, so we’re only running five minutes behind schedule.”

  By now, the president was passing right below Oswald. If he leaned out of the window now, aimed down, and fired as the president’s car slowed to almost a stop to make the turn, he could hardly miss. But that would expose his position to the rest of the motorcade and to the people in the street. It must have been difficult for the impulsive Oswald to restrain himself. Kennedy was so close that if Oswald had wanted to, he could have thrown a hand grenade out of the window and it could have landed in the president’s lap.

  Six floors below Oswald, standing on the front steps of the Depository, Buell Wesley Frazier—the man who had driven Oswald and his rifle to work that morning—got a great view of the president too.

  Oswald readied to take full advantage of his well-chosen sniper’s nest. Now the shiny Lincoln entered Abraham Zapruder’s field of vision, and the amateur cameraman started filming again.

  Jackie Kennedy shifted her eyes away from the crowd and looked ahead a few blocks to the spot where Elm Street merged into the triple underpass. “We saw this tunnel ahead,” Jackie said. “I thought it would be cool in the tunnel . . . the sun wouldn’t get into your eyes.”

  Amos Lee Euins, a fifteen-year-old high-school student, was in Dealey Plaza standing at the corner of Houston and Elm directly across the street from the Depository. Late that morning, about eleven thirty A.M., he was excused from school to watch the motorcade: “The teachers called us and told us the ones who wanted to go downtown to see the President could come down to the office and get an excuse and they could go.”

  Euins’s mother drove him from Franklin D. Roosevelt High School to a spot near the motorcade route. She had to go to work, so she left him there alone.

  The boy did not even look for a street sign that would tell him what road he was on: “I was just trying to keep an eye on the President.” Euins never forgot what he saw next: “I was standing here on the corner. And then the President came around the corner right here . . . and I was waving, because there wasn’t hardly no one on the corner right there but me. . . . He looked . . . and waved back at me.”

  Then Euins looked at the Book Depository. He saw something protruding from a window on one of the upper floors.

  It was a long, thin, horizontal object.

  At that moment, the boy continued, “I had seen a pipe, you know, up there in the window, I thought it was a pipe, some kind of pipe . . . right as [President Kennedy] turned the corner.”

  As Oswald peered out the sixth-floor window and looked to his right, he was facing the president’s back. A single tree partially obstructed his view. Oswald positioned his body in a shooting stance—he was either standing or kneeling before he took his first shot—and thrust the barrel of his rifle through the open window. He might have rested it on a cardboard box of schoolbooks to stabilize his aim. He pointed down and aimed for the back of John Kennedy’s head—the only sure kill shot.

  By now several eyewitnesses on the ground had seen the barrel protruding from the window. Amos Euins still thought it was a pipe. Another person spotted a man at the window with a sneer on his face. It was too late for either of them to stop Oswald. The president was now in the crosshairs of Oswald’s scope.

  A re-creation of Oswald’s view of the presidential limousine.

  (courtesy of the National Archives)

  This was it.

  Oswald had not lost his nerve.

  He was really going to do it.

  He squeezed the trigger. Never jerk the trigger back with a quick pull, he learned in the Marine Corps. Squeeze the trigger slowly, apply gradual, increasing pressure. When that pressure reached a few pounds, his trigger released the firing pin. It struck the rear of the bullet in the chamber, instantaneously igniting the gunpowder in the brass cartridge case.

  The rifle spit a 6.5mm conical, jacketed lead bullet traveling at 1,700 or 1,800 feet per second at the president of the United States. John Kennedy was close—less than one hundred feet away.

  The Book Depository clock read 12:30 P.M.

  Abraham Zapruder’s finger maintained constant pressure on his camera’s RUN switch, and he continued filming.

  Through his telescopic sight, Oswald expected to see the evidence of his deed. But the president’s body displayed no reaction to being hit by the bullet. He did not recoil from the impact, slump in his seat, or even twitch.

  Oswald had missed!

  Not only did he fail to shoot Kennedy, he was not even close. He did not hit Jackie, who was sitting a few feet to the president’s left, nor did he hit Governor Connally, who was sitting in front of Kennedy. The shot was so off the mark it had even failed to hit the car, which, at this close range, was a huge target in Oswald’s scope.

  But those in the motorcade certainly heard the gunfire. In the car, John Kennedy heard the shot. At that moment he stopped waving to the crowd and lowered his right arm. Jackie heard it too. She had been looking to her left at the people standing along the curb. At the sound of the gunfire, she spun her head to the right and looked to her husband’s side of the car.

  “They were gunning the motorcycles,” she remembered. “There were these little backfires. [Then] there was one noise like that. I thought it was a backfire.”

  Witnesses heard different things. Some people traveling in the motorcade—and many bystanders along Elm Street—thought it sounded like a firecracker. What kind of jerk would play a joke like that, they wondered. Jack Bell, a reporter for the Associated Press wire service riding in the press-pool car, thought to himself, My God, these Texans don’t ever know to quit . . . they are shooting off firecrackers and cherry bombs.

  Others thought it sounded like a car or a motorcycle backfiring. To the pigeons atop the roof of the Depository, it was a sound of danger that caused them to flee to the skies. To others—some of the policeman, Secret Service agents, ex-military men, or hunters in Dealey Plaza that day—it sounded like something else.

  It was a rifle shot.

  “After the President had passed my position,” steamfitter Howard Brennan observed, “I really couldn’t say how many feet or how far, a short distance I would say,” there was a sound. “I heard this crack that I positively thought was a backfire.” Brennan thought it was a motorcycle.

  “Then something, just right after this explosion, made me think that it was a firecracker being thrown from the Texas Book Store. I glanced up.”

  The man he had seen earlier in the sixth floor window was back.

  He was holding a rif
le.

  Abraham Zapruder heard it too. It caused him to jostle his camera involuntarily, almost imperceptibly. Through his viewfinder, he, like Oswald, observed no signs of distress to the president or the other passengers. He continued to film the car, keeping it in his sights as it moved slowly in front of him from left to right.

  Arnold Rowland also heard the first report. “This I passed off as a backfire, so did practically everyone in the area because gobs of people, when I say gobs, I mean almost everyone in the vicinity, started laughing that couldn’t see the motorcade . . . a lot of people laughed.”

  James Worrell, a high-school senior, had decided to cut class to see the president. At around eight A.M., he had hitchhiked a ride to Love Field to watch John Kennedy’s arrival. He got there early, about nine A.M., “and just messed around until the President come in.” But Worrell did not have a good vantage point—“I didn’t get to see him good at all.”

  Abraham Zapruder’s Bell and Howell camera.

  (courtesy of the National Archives)

  So he caught a bus from the airport to downtown Dallas with the hope of intercepting the motorcade as it drove through town. “I just, I don’t know, happened to pick that place at the Depository, and I stood at the corner of Elm and Houston.” When President Kennedy’s motorcade drove by, Worrell was standing with his back to the building, about four or five feet from the wall, facing Elm Street.

  When the president’s car had moved “oh, at least another 50, 75 feet on past me,” Worrell heard the sound too. “I heard the first shot, [and] it was too loud to be a firecracker . . . there was quite a big boom . . . just out of nowhere, I looked up . . . just straight up.”

  The student tilted his head up at a ninety-degree angle and looked straight back over his head, toward the sky. That’s when he saw it, protruding from a window above him. “I saw about 6 inches of the gun, the rifle. It had . . . a regular long barrel but it had a long stock and you could only see maybe 4 inches of the barrel.”

  Buell Wesley Frazier heard the noise too. “Just right after he went by, he hadn’t hardly got by, I heard a sound, and if you have ever been around motorcycles, you know how they backfire, and so I thought one of them motorcycles backfired.”

  It did not take Frazier long to realize that it was something else.

  Amos Euins had a better view from across Elm Street: “I was standing [there], and as the motorcade turned the corner, I was facing, looking dead at the building. And so I seen this pipe thing sticking out the window. I wasn’t paying too much attention to it. Then when the first shot was fired, I started looking around, thinking it was a backfire. Everybody else started looking around.”

  From inside the Book Depository, the three men on the fifth floor knew exactly where the shot had come from—right above their heads, one floor up. Bonnie Ray Williams remembered, “After the President’s car had passed my window, the last thing I remember seeing him do was—it seemed to me he had a habit of pushing his hair back. The last thing I saw him do was he pushed his hand up. . . . I assumed he was brushing his hair back. And then . . . [there] was a loud shot—first I thought they were saluting the President . . . even maybe a motorcycle backfire.”

  Williams was not sure where the first shot—if it was a shot—came from. “I really did not pay attention to it, because I did not know what was happening.”

  Lee Harvey Oswald had botched the first shot. The same man who had failed to assassinate General Walker had just failed in his attempt to assassinate the president of the United States. But how had he missed? Lee was too good a rifleman and the limousine too close for him to have missed it completely. Even if, in his excitement, he had rushed the first shot, he should have hit someone or something in the car. Chance had played a role in saving General Walker, and it had just saved President Kennedy from the assassin’s first bullet.

  At the moment Oswald had trained his scope on JFK, the presidential limousine had driven under an oak tree on the Book Depository side of Elm Street. For a few seconds, the tree’s branches had acted as a semitransparent screen that stood between Oswald and Kennedy. Looking between the branches, Oswald could still see the president, so he had fired that first shot. But before it could find its target, the bullet had probably nicked a tree branch, which deflected its trajectory and probably stripped it of its outer metal jacket. Instead, the bullet struck a concrete curb beyond the limousine on the far side of Elm Street. It is also possible that the bullet had glanced off the horizontal beam of a traffic signal light. The impact showered fragments into the air that hit a bystander in the face and made a small cut in his cheek.

  ANYTHING MIGHT happen next. If Kennedy’s driver hit the gas and accelerated the car from its present speed of 12 to 15 miles per hour to just 25 or 30 miles per hour, he could carry the president away from further danger. It might have been enough to just swerve the car violently from right to left. But the driver did not react. The leader of John Kennedy’s Secret Service detail, sitting in the front passenger seat, could have ordered the driver to race out of Dealey Plaza. But he did not. The president himself—a decorated World War II navy veteran who had heard gunshots before—could have shouted orders to get him out of there. But he did not.

  What would Oswald do now? He could run away, just as he’d done that night at General Walker’s house. If he stepped back from the window right now and withdrew his rifle, he could hide it between the boxes and return to work and pretend that nothing had happened. If no one on the ground had seen him, he might have reasoned, and if witnesses convinced themselves that the sound had been nothing more than a firecracker or engine backfire, then police might not even investigate the Book Depository. He might escape. Lee Harvey Oswald could go home that night and scold himself for yet another failed attempt to become part of history.

  But Oswald did not have a faint heart in Dallas that afternoon. He did not release his grip on the rifle. At the limousine’s present speed and direction, the president would be within range for the next ten to twelve seconds. The clock had started ticking with Oswald’s first shot. Now he prepared to fire a second one.

  With his right hand, Oswald grasped the bolt, raised it, pulled it back, and ejected the empty brass cartridge casing, which popped into the air and made a hollow ping when it landed on the wood floor. The ejection of the cartridge caused a spring in the clip to push another round into position in front of the bolt. Oswald slammed the bolt forward, chambered the round, and turned the bolt handle down. He had practiced this movement countless times and had distilled it into one quick, fluid motion.

  On the floor below him, Junior Jarman, Harold Norman, and Bonnie Ray Williams had heard the first explosion a few feet above their heads. They heard the brass casing hit the floor. The loud shot sent a vibration through the floorboards and produced a shock wave that rattled the windows.

  It was easy for Oswald to track the president in his scope. The car was traveling at a slow speed in almost a straight line down Elm Street away from the sixth-floor window. Thus Oswald did not have to swing his rifle from left to right to track a target moving horizontally. The car’s speed and direction created for Oswald the advantage of an optical illusion in which the car seemed to be almost a stationary object that was slowly getting smaller. All he needed to do was make a small vertical adjustment. He raised the barrel of his rifle a few degrees.

  James Worrell watched the rifle barrel: “I looked to see where he was aiming.” It was pointing up Elm Street, tracking the president’s car.

  Almost 2.7 seconds had elapsed since Oswald had fired the first shot. No one in the presidential entourage had reacted to it yet. For the second time, Oswald took aim at the back of John Kennedy’s head. Abraham Zapruder continued to film the motorcade. For a few moments, Kennedy disappeared from Zapruder’s viewfinder—a large Stemmons Freeway roadside sign temporarily blocked his view of the limousine and President Kennedy. For the second time, Oswald squeezed the trigger. Three seconds. The president was 190 feet—a
little more than 60 yards—away.

  3.4 seconds.

  The rifle fired.

  To Bonnie Ray Williams: “The second shot, it sounded like it was right in the building. . . . And it . . . even shook the building, the side we were on. Cement fell on my head.”

  Through wide cracks between the floorboards above their heads, loose debris drizzled down on them. Williams saw it come down: “Cement, gravel, dirt, or something, from the old building, because it shook the windows and everything. Harold [Norman] was sitting next to me, and he said it came from right over our head.”

  “No bull shit!” Williams replied, “and we jumped up.”

  Then Hank Norman confirmed it came from directly over their heads. “I can even hear the shell being ejected from the gun and hitting the floor.”

  Junior Jarman moved toward Williams and Norman and said, “Man, somebody is shooting at the President.”

  “No bull shit,” Williams said a second time.

  WITH HIS second shot, Oswald missed the president’s head, but the bullet struck Kennedy in the upper back, to the right of his spine, bored a tunnel through his body at a downward angle—because Oswald was shooting from high above the car—and exited through his lower throat.

  John Kennedy’s tissue absorbed some of the bullet’s energy, and it exited his body at a slower speed—1,500 to 1,600 feet per second—than it had entered it. Upon exit, the bullet, still deadly, tumbled and struck Governor Connally in the back, exited his chest at 900 feet per second, hit his wrist, and then, its speed reduced to 400 feet per second, lodged in his thigh. Oswald’s bullet had traveled through the bodies of two men and had inflicted serious wounds to both. These multiple impacts had flattened and deformed the bullet’s shape, but it was still in one piece.