End of Days

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End of Days Page 15

by James L. Swanson


  Clint Hill could not believe what he was seeing. If the car accelerated now, Jackie might be thrown onto the trunk, slide off it, fall to the pavement, and get run over by the Secret Service car. He lunged forward and caught the left handle mounted on the back of the limousine. He’d made it! But at that moment, the car lurched forward, and Hill lost his footing. Unless he released his grip, in another second the car would drag him down to the pavement. The “Queen Mary,” traveling just a few yards behind SS-100-X, would run him over and kill him.

  But he would not abandon Mrs. Kennedy. He mustered all the strength he had and pulled hard against the handle, yanked his body up, and caught a tenuous foothold on the step. Then he launched his body across the trunk, gathered Jackie in his arms and pushed her back into the car. He used his body to cover her and the president.

  Later, Jackie had no memory of this terrifying scene. Clint Hill never forgot it: the president was lying faceup in her lap, and she shouted, “My God, they have shot his head off!”

  Hill looked at the president, appalled at what he saw: “The right rear portion of his head was missing.”

  As the car sped away, other agents saw Hill pound his fist on the trunk and shake his head in despair. Then he signaled them with a thumbs-down. The president’s car accelerated and, along with the trailing Secret Service car, reached the shadows of the triple underpass and disappeared from the view of the dumbfounded witnesses in Dealey Plaza and the rest of the motorcade.

  Abraham Zapruder was so shaken by what he had just seen, he lost the ability to speak coherently.

  In Vice President Johnson’s car, Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood yelled “Get down,” climbed from the front seat into the back, pushed LBJ to the floor, and covered him with his body to protect him from gunfire. The car raced after the others. Inside, Lyndon Johnson had no idea whether President Kennedy was dead or alive.

  The radio reporter in Dealey Plaza described what he saw: “It app . . . It appears as though something has happened in the motorcade route. Something, I repeat, has happened in the motorcade route. There’s numerous people running up the hill alongside Elm Street. Several police officers are running up the hill. . . . Stand by. Just a moment please . . . Parkland Hospital—there has been a shooting—Parkland Hospital has been advised to stand by for a severe gunshot wound. I repeat, a shooting in the motorcade . . . the president’s car is now going past me. The limousine is now traveling at a very high rate of speed . . . it appears that someone in the limousine might have been hit by the gunfire.”

  CHAPTER 6

  “THEY’VE SHOT HIS HEAD OFF”

  Lee Oswald abandoned his three spent brass cartridges where they fell and, still gripping his rifle, ran the 96-foot diagonal length of the sixth floor, heading for the back stairs. He shoved the weapon—horizontally, scope up—into a narrow space between two stacks of boxes. Now, as he raced down the stairs, he possessed no evidence that would link him to the shooting. Oswald descended the floors—fifth, fourth, third—and encountered no one coming up. When he reached the second floor, he must have heard someone below him ascending the stairs because he ducked into the lunchroom.

  A Dallas policeman, the first one to enter the Depository after the shooting, found the building manager, Roy Truly, and together, they hurried up the stairs. When the policeman reached the second floor, he spotted Oswald through a window in the lunchroom door, ordered him to stop, and asked the manager if Oswald worked there. When Truly answered yes, the policeman let Oswald go and continued racing to the roof.

  Oswald was lucky. It was a spectacular error for the officer to assume that the assassin was not an employee at the Depository.

  MRS. REID had hurried back to the front door of the Depository after the third shot. “It was just a mass of confusion,” she said. “I saw people beginning to fall, and the thought that went through my mind, my goodness, [was that] I must get out of this line of shots. They may fire some more.” So she sought shelter: “I ran into the building . . . I ran up to our office.”

  She passed through the lobby, went up the stairs, and, within two minutes of the last shot, Mrs. Reid entered the front door to her second-floor office. That office had two doors—the one she had just entered and another in the back.

  Oswald was still in the building. He continued his descent. He had just had a close call with Officer Baker and Mr. Truly. More policemen would rush up the stairs soon. He needed to get out of the building fast. Within a minute or two, the police and Secret Service might seal off all the exits.

  As soon as Mrs. Reid walked several feet past her desk, a man entered the office through the back door. She and the man faced each other. It was Lee Harvey Oswald.

  “Oh, the President has been shot” she told Lee, “but maybe they didn’t hit him.”

  Oswald mumbled something unintelligible to her.

  She did not regard her coworker as suspicious. “I didn’t pay any attention to what he said because I had no thoughts . . . of him having any connection with it all because he was very calm. He had gotten a coke and was holding it in his hands, and I guess . . . I thought it was a little strange that one of the warehouse boys would be up in the office at the time, not that he had done anything wrong.”

  Oswald strode past her, walked out the front door of the office, and descended the stairs to the first-floor lobby. He was headed for the first-floor exit onto Elm Street.

  OSWALD COULD have chosen to escape via the back door, the one through which he and Buell Wesley Frazier—and the rifle—had come in to work that morning. A man with something to hide might have preferred to sneak out the back way and run. But evidently Oswald shared Frazier’s philosophy—if you run, people will just think you are guilty. To avoid suspicion, Oswald decided to walk out right through the front door.

  At that moment, a man grabbed Oswald—the assassin thought the man was a Secret Service agent—but he only asked Oswald where he could find the nearest telephone. It was just a reporter, Robert MacNeil. Oswald gave him directions.

  Then, as policemen and citizens converged near the front door of the Texas School Book Depository, and as Dealey Plaza devolved into the chaos of sirens, police radios, shouting, and people running in every direction—Lee Harvey Oswald strolled away from the scene of his crime. He had shot the president, and he had, at least for now, escaped. Seven months after his failed attempt to slay General Walker, his second attempt to shoot a man had proven more successful.

  In the press-pool car, Merriman Smith of United Press International, a news service that distributed reports to media outlets all over the world, grabbed for the radiotelephone mounted near him in the front seat. Another reporter sitting behind him, Jack Bell from the rival Associated Press news service, grabbed for the phone too. The two newshounds struggled over their only link to the outside world. Neither would give it up. Each wanted the credit for transmitting the first news of the shooting to the world. The men almost came to blows. Smith won the struggle and wrenched the phone away.

  Just four minutes after Oswald’s first shot, at 12:34 P.M., Smith communicated a brief message to his employer: “THREE SHOTS WERE FIRED TODAY AT PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S MOTORCADE IN DOWNTOWN DALLAS.”

  Bonnie Ray Williams remembered that after the gunshots, he and his two coworkers “got kind of excited . . . we all decided we would run down to the west side of the building.” He said they saw policemen and others, “running, scared, running—there are some tracks on the west side of the building, railroad tracks. They were running towards that way. And we . . . know the shots practically came from over our head. But since everybody was running . . . to the west side of the building, towards the railroad tracks, we assumed maybe somebody was down there. And so we ran all that way, the way that the people was running, and we was looking out the window.”

  Hank Norman said, “Man, I know it came from [above our heads]. It even shook the building.”

  Then Norman said to Williams, “You got something on your head.�


  James Jarman spoke. “Yes, man, don’t you brush it out.”

  Then Jarman added, “Maybe we better get the hell out of here.”

  Williams concurred. “And so we just ran down to the fourth floor and came on down.” Why didn’t they run up to the sixth floor? “I really don’t know. We just never did think about it . . . going up to the sixth floor. Maybe it was just because we were frightened.”

  Jarman reminded Hank, “That shot probably did come from upstairs, up over us,” and Hank said, “I know it did, because I could hear the action of the bolt, and I could hear the cartridges drop on the floor.”

  If they had quickly run across the fifth floor and bounded up the staircase, they might have encountered Oswald on his way down. Even if Oswald had already descended below the fifth floor, they would have been close enough to him on the staircase to have heard him running down it. Again, luck was with Oswald this day.

  HOWARD BRENNAN watched as law enforcement officers started to run west past the Book Depository. They were going the wrong way! “They were directing their search,” he observed, “toward the west side of the building and down Houston Street,” toward the underpass and the railroad tracks.

  He decided to do something. “I knew I had to get to someone quick to tell them where the man was.” He walked fast or ran across the street and found a police officer standing near the corner of the Book Depository. “I asked him to get me someone in charge, a Secret Service man or an FBI. That it appeared to me that they were searching in the wrong direction for the man that did the shooting.”

  Brennan said that the gunman was definitely in the Depository.

  “Just a minute,” the cop said. Then he took Brennan to a car parked in front of the building. Inside was agent Forrest Sorrels. Brennan told Sorrels what he had seen. As Sorrels discussed the information with some other law enforcement officers, two of the three men that Brennan had spotted looking out the fifth-floor windows emerged from the front door of Book Depository and ran down the front steps, close to where Brennan was now standing. “That’s them!” exclaimed Brennan. “Those were the two colored boys that was on the fifth floor . . . on the next floor underneath the man that fired the gun.” They got no farther and were brought in for questioning.

  THE ROUTE to Parkland Hospital would take President Kennedy right past the Trade Mart, where a thousand people awaited his arrival. Ron Jenkins, a reporter for Mobile Unit 6 at station KBOX, was in position outside the Trade Mart. He saw that the limousine was approaching too fast. It should be slowing down to pull up to the building.

  “The presidential car is coming up now,” he reported. “We know it is the president’s car. We can see Mrs. Kennedy’s pink suit. There is a Secret Service man spread eagle on the top of the car.”

  As Jenkins watched the motorcade speed past him, the wail of multiple sirens almost drowned out his voice. “Something is wrong here,” he warned, “something is terribly wrong.”

  BACK IN Dealey Plaza, Arnold Rowland and his wife already knew something was terribly wrong. He regretted his silence about the man in the window.

  “I never dreamed of anything such as that,” that the man he saw in the window could be an assassin. “Perhaps if I had been older,” the eighteen-year-old ruminated, “and had more experience in life it might have made a difference. It very well could have.”

  Many things might have made a difference. If Lee Harvey Oswald had succeeded in assassinating General Walker seven months ago in April, perhaps his thirst for blood would have been sated. And if Marina Oswald had reported that attempted murder to the police, perhaps on November 22 her husband would have been languishing in jail instead of lurking in a sixth-floor window. At least the police would have confiscated his rifle.

  If Lee Oswald had obtained permission that fall to return to Russia or enter Cuba, perhaps he would not have been in Dallas this day. If Ruth Paine and Linnie Mae Randle had not helped Lee get a job at the Texas School Book Depository, perhaps he would not have been working in a tall building along President Kennedy’s motorcade route. If Marina had disposed of her husband’s rifle when she had discovered it in Ruth Paine’s station wagon after her trip back home from New Orleans to Texas, perhaps Lee would not have bought another one. If on the night of Thursday, November 21, Marina had agreed that she and the girls would move to a new apartment in Dallas with Lee, perhaps that gesture of love would have turned his heart away from murder. If Marina had just moved the rifle from its hiding place in Ruth Paine’s garage, perhaps Lee would not have found it in time to bring it to work on the morning of Friday, November 22.

  There were other ifs. If on that morning the weather forecast for cloudy skies and precipitation over Dallas had proven true and the Secret Service had installed the rainproof plastic bubble top on the president’s limousine, perhaps it would have deflected any bullets fired at the car. If John Kennedy had not been so stubborn about his habit of riding through cities in a convertible, perhaps Oswald would have never tried to kill him. If Kennedy’s agents, the “Ivy League Charlatans,” had disobeyed their boss and had stood on the back of the open car during the motorcade, perhaps Lee Harvey Oswald might never have had a clear shot at the back of JFK’s head. If Oswald had never enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, perhaps he would have never learned the marksmanship skills he needed to shoot JFK. If Junior Jarman had peeked behind the boxes in the southeast corner when he went up to the sixth floor to eat his lunch, perhaps he would have surprised his coworker hiding in his sniper’s nest. If Bonnie Ray Williams and Harold Norman had gone up to the sixth floor to watch the parade with Jarman, perhaps they would have stopped Oswald from ever firing a second shot—or a third one. If Arnold Rowland had told someone that there was a man with a rifle in the window, perhaps the assassination might have been prevented. And if Special Agent William Greer had swerved or accelerated the limousine after the second shot, perhaps the president would have survived his wound and Oswald would have missed the third shot, just as he had the first.

  Ten minutes after the shooting, at 12:40 P.M. (CST), at the New York headquarters of CBS News, the television network interrupted its regular programming and displayed its company logo on television screens across the nation. CBS did not possess the technology to interrupt scheduled, pretaped programming and get a reporter’s face on the air immediately. The television camera needed twenty minutes to warm up, and it was not even in the vicinity of the news desk. At first, CBS could broadcast only a voice. Walter Cronkite, one of the most important journalists on television, spoke in an urgent, clipped tone: “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 that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.”

  Marina Oswald, knowing that the president was in Dallas, had been watching television all morning. The black-and-white images flickering on the screen were a poor substitute for the full-color, live, and in-person sights she would have enjoyed if Lee had granted her wish to see the president’s motorcade. She had not even gotten dressed yet.

  When Ruth Paine left the house earlier in the morning to take her children to a doctor’s appointment, she had left the television on for Marina. When Ruth returned home not long after one P.M., she joined Marina in front of the TV. She told Marina, who could hardly speak English, that the announcer on TV had just said the president had been shot. Marina was stunned.

  “It was hard for me to say anything,” Marina said. “We both turned pale. I went to my room and cried.”

  Ruth told Marina there was more news: “By the way,” Ruth said, “they fired from the building in which Lee is working.”

  Right away her instincts made her suspect him. It could not be. But if the shots had been fired from the School Book Depository, how could it not have been him? There was only one way to know.

  “I then went to the garage to see whether the rifle was there, and I saw that the blanket wa
s still there, and I said, ‘Thank God.’ ”

  She did not try to pick up the blanket. “I didn’t unroll the blanket. It was in its usual position, and it appeared to have something inside.”

  Seconds after Cronkite announced the news, another printed bulletin was thrust into his hands. Listeners could hear him shuffling papers as he spoke. “More details just arrived. 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 says that the wounds for President Kennedy perhaps could be fatal.”

  The nation waited in suspense. Would the president live or die? Everyone knew the story of PT-109 and John Kennedy’s close brush with death during the Second World War. Maybe he would beat the odds again. Millions of people began to hope and pray that Kennedy’s wounds were not fatal. Only a handful of people—Clint Hill and some of the Secret Service detail and Merriman Smith and a few other journalists—knew the awful truth. But Smith was reluctant to report it without official confirmation from the White House staff.

  Once the CBS network was able to broadcast both image and sound, Cronkite appeared on camera for the first time and continued to read news bulletins. It was the beginning of four unprecedented days of television coverage on all the national networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC. Within one hour of the shooting, more than three quarters of the American people knew what had happened.

  AS LEE Oswald walked down Elm Street, the driver of President Kennedy’s car raced to Parkland Hospital, and Dallas police officers radioed ahead to advise the emergency-room staff to stand by to receive the victim of a severe gunshot wound. On the hands of a clock, it was a brief ride. In the minds of the five unwounded passengers, it seemed to go on forever.

 

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