by Gus Russo
At 12:21 p.m., the procession took a sharp right turn at the Dallas City Jail and began the last leg of the inner-city route, along 13 blocks of Main Street. Again, the size and warmth of the crowd was startling. Main Street was a proverbial sea of humanity, a canal seemingly filled by most of the city’s 750,000 residents. Cheering, roaring throngs were packed ten deep, from the gutters to the buildings.
In the windows of those buildings, some of the faces were hard. A stone-faced H. L. Hunt watched the tumult from his seventh-floor office in the Mercantile Building, which could have been a model for “Dallas,” the later television series. But the street—at this point, flanked by banks and expensive shops; further down, by pawn shops and other cheaper establishments—belonged to Kennedy, even more than in the three previous cities. His “thank you, thank you” as he and Jackie waved could not be heard, even by the others in his car. Nellie Connally, the Governor’s wife, called to him. “You sure can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you, Mr. President.”
“No, you can’t,” Kennedy smiled. Farther back in the procession, Evelyn Lincoln remarked with delighted surprise that they had come through all of Dallas without even a single demonstration.
The motorcade’s lead car, driven by Police Chief Curry, reached the end of Main Street just before 12:29. It turned right onto Houston Street, the eastern border of a triangular area named Dealey Plaza, named after E. M. “Ted” Dealey, founder of the Dallas Morning News. In the offices of that newspaper, Ted’s son Joe—the man who had published the black-bordered ad—permitted secretaries to watch the proceedings on his television set. The young women were glued to the screen. In a moment, the motorcade would be at a triple underpass that marked the end of the route, then pick up speed—perhaps a little more than planned, for the party was behind schedule—on the Stemmons Freeway leading to the Trade Mart, where Kennedy would make another speech, this one featuring a full salvo at his right-wing critics. Aides and Texas Congressmen, who saw an advance copy, wondered whether the president would consider toning the speech down. He would not.
Arrival at the Trade Mart was scheduled for 12:30. After lunch, there would be another short hop to much-less-hostile Austin, then a weekend at the Johnson ranch—not an entirely pleasant prospect with the current tension between the President and Vice President.
After a cloudy morning, the Texas sun beat down. It was so bright that Jacqueline Kennedy kept slipping on her sunglasses despite the President’s reminders that one reason for their trip was to show themselves, to work the crowds for next year’s presidential election. Waving and smiling in the open Lincoln was hot, hard work, especially for a First Lady who had not packed the right clothes and could not quite conquer her disdain for what she considered the vulgar aspects of politics.
But relief was in sight. The motorcade was nearly over. A few more minutes and they would arrive at the luncheon site, the new, air-conditioned International Trade Mart on the city’s north side.
The lead car traveled one block on Houston Street, the eastern border of Dealey Plaza, then swung left onto Elm Street. The second turning, which was wider than 90 degrees because Elm Street ran on an angle rather than perpendicular to Houston Street, was regarded as a minor security concern. Although it would slow the President’s car, making him an easier target for a possible assailant, the Secret Service had decided on this route because only Elm Street provided access to the freeway that led to the Trade Mart. In order to reach the freeway directly from Main Street, the motorcade would have had to jump a low curb.57
The Killing
“I fight for communism. . . In the event of war, I would kill any American who put on a uniform in defense of the American government—any American.”
—Lee Harvey Oswald in a letter to his brother Robert58
“Castro knew Kennedy had to do something before the election, so Castro had to act first.”
—Carlos Bringuier, Cuban Student Directorate delegate59
“Personally, I consider Kennedy responsible for everything.”
—Fidel Castro in an interview, November 22, 1963, minutes before he heard the news of Kennedy’s death60
The motorcade slowed to a crawl as it made the 110-degree turn from Houston to Elm. The northwest corner of that intersection was occupied by the seven-story Texas School Book Depository. On the sixth floor, Lee Oswald crouched against a windowsill. Dealey Plaza, the triangular-shaped park bordering the western edge of the city, lay in the palm of his hand from his sixth-story vantage point. Rifle accuracy is usually measured in distances of hundreds of yards. In this case, the distance to a car on Elm Street below was slightly over 100 feet, almost point-blank in target-practice terms.
Oswald waited. He had been alone for at least fifteen minutes, and most likely thirty-five. One employee vacillated as to whether she had seen Oswald in the lunch room at 12:15, while the rest were unanimous that he wasn’t there. Other workers clearly remember leaving Oswald alone on the sixth floor at about 11:55 a.m. when they took the elevator down to lunch. Oswald therefore had plenty of time to stack book cartons around the window and to reassemble the two-piece rifle (an FBI man later did it in six minutes, using only a dime— two minutes with a screwdriver.)61 Co-worker Harold Norman remembers seeing Oswald:
At approximately ten o’clock that morning, Junior Jarman and myself were on the first floor looking out towards Elm Street. Oswald walked up and asked us, “What is everybody looking for? What is everybody waiting on?” So we told him we were waiting on the President to come by. He put his hand in his pocket and laughed and walked away. I thought maybe he’s just been happy that morning or something. He was glad the President was coming through. He acted as though he didn’t know, but I kind of think he did know. I don’t know where he went—if he went upstairs or downstairs or whatever. I didn’t see him any more till late that afternoon when they captured him on TV.62
This strange reaction has always stayed with Norman, who now suspects that Oswald’s was a knowing laugh.
By 12:30, the Presidential limousine had turned onto Houston street, and was coming directly toward Lee Oswald and the Book Depository. Through the four-power scope, Kennedy must have appeared to be inches from Oswald. Two things might have kept him from shooting at this point: first, hundreds of eyes on the street below were now facing Oswald’s building as they watched Kennedy approach it—too many potential witnesses. If he just waited until the car made the turn down Elm Street, Oswald may have decided, these same potential witnesses would all have their backs to him as he shot. Secondly, Oswald had already decided to employ a classic military firing strategy known as “downwind shooting”—it is much easier to track a moving target “going away” from a high perch than approaching it. If Oswald had attempted a shot on Main Street, he would have had to constantly lower his rifle in order to follow the target as it neared his building. Going down Elm, Kennedy would appear as a relatively stationary target.
The moment Lee Oswald had long-prepared for had at last arrived. Even though he probably hadn’t chosen his target while living in New Orleans, he had started practicing there to shoot someone. (As previously mentioned, Marina and her neighbors were often disturbed in the evening by his rapid-fire “dry runs” on the screened-in porch.) He had continued to hone his skills at the Dallas shooting ranges, impressing witnesses with his ability at 200 yards. Step by inexorable step had delivered him to this juncture. Now, as Kennedy’s limousine turned below his window, the target distance was a mere 30 yards, referred to by rifle enthusiasts as “shooting fish in a barrel” distance. However, Oswald initially resisted the temptation to shoot “the fish”—his arm-rest boxes were aligned for a later shot. (In addition to constructing a four-foot high wall of boxes behind him, Oswald had arranged three boxes against the half-opened windowsill.) The boxes were angled to allow him a rifle rest, affording a “downwind” shot into the middle of Elm Street. Oswald assumed his crouch, resting the rifle on its perch.
On the street below
, fifteen-year-old Amos Lee Euins, standing on a concrete pedestal across from the Depository, noticed something protruding from the sixth floor window. “I could see everything. I saw what I thought was a pipe. I saw it ahead of time. . . I never realized it was a gun until the shooting started.”63
Also on Elm Street was a man with extraordinary distance vision, Howard Brennan. Brennan would later testify that he could read license plates on cars over 200 feet away, and that God had allowed him to be the main witness to the shooting because of “my gift of super eyesight.” Before the shooting started, Brennan saw Oswald pacing around inside the southeast corner window of the sixth floor. He later recalled: “As I looked at the man, it struck me how unsmiling and calm he was. He didn’t seem to feel one bit of excitement. His face was almost expressionless. . . He seemed preoccupied.”64 The Lincoln Presidential limousine had just turned below Lee Oswald’s perch.
“It’s always better to take advantage of your chances as they come along.”
—Lee Oswald, in a letter to his brother Robert (March 1963)
“I would describe Lee Oswald at the time I saw him as being potentially explosive.”
—Dr. Renatus Hartogs, court-appointed psychiatrist, assigned to the adolescent Lee Oswald65
What follows involves some obvious speculation about Oswald’s thought processes. However, it is speculation derived from over twenty years of research into what considerations Oswald had to deal with in those crucial moments:
When the President’s back first appeared to Oswald, he could resist no longer. Without waiting for Kennedy to clear a tree and arrive in the planned “target zone,” Oswald made the impulsive mistake of attempting a quick “shot from the hip.” This was a tendency first observed by Oswald’s Russian friends. When in Minsk, he had joined a hunting club. On one occasion, a fellow rabbit hunter, Leonid Tsagoika, noticed this quirk:
Suddenly a shot rang out. I asked Oswald, “Why are you shooting?” He said, “Look, look, a hare!” The others fired too but missed. And then we all stopped and discussed why he had shot too soon. He explained that, because the hare had started from underneath his feet, he was startled and shot.66
Now, Oswald was again startled by the closeness of his prey. He pulled out of his military shooting crouch, and took a step back from the window to gain a reasonable chance at the severely-angled target below. Even though he had to remove the rifle from its armrest, and even though this unplanned-for shot was probably obstructed by the upper frame of the half-opened windowsill, Oswald fired his first shot. It missed badly, with its final resting place never determined (most likely it buried itself deep in the middle section of turf within the triangular-shaped plaza).
Because Oswald had taken a step back into the building, the building itself absorbed much of the sound of the first shot, thus sounding muffled to the motorcade participants and observers—like a firecracker, as they later testified.
With his adrenaline now pumping ferociously, Oswald ejected the spent shell and placed his rifle back in its planned armrest. He had to wait five seconds, which must have seemed an eternity, for the limousine to emerge from the partial obscurity of the tree. He would thus fire his second shot from the military crouch in which he had proved so proficient while in the Marines.
Amos Euins looked back up at the “pipe” extending from the sixth-floor window. This time he saw more detail—he saw the shooter. Later, he recalled seeing “the rifle laying across his hand, and I could see his hand on the trigger part.”67
Nineteen-year-old James Worrell was also standing on Elm Street, directly below Oswald’s sixth floor lair. “I looked up—just straight up,” he recalled. “I saw the rifle, about six inches of it. I saw about four inches of the barrel. . . but it had a long stock. . . I saw about two inches [of the stock].”68
When Oswald regained sight of his target, the President was still a mere 60 yards away. Kennedy appeared stationary as his driver took the car directly away from Oswald at a snail’s pace—9 miles per hour. If Oswald had decided to sight in the target with his four-power scope, the President’s head would have filled his field of view. But at this distance, even using only the fixed iron sights on the rifle barrel, it was an easy shot. For a trained shooter like Oswald, this was a “gimme.” Again he squeezed the trigger.
James Worrell was still looking at the rifle as the shot rang out. Like the witnesses at the shooting range the previous weekend, Worrell saw “what you might call a little flash of fire” as the bullet escaped the rifle barrel.69
The extremely dense Mannlicher Carcano bullet hit the President at the junction of the neck and back, just to the right of the spinal cord. Experts believe that the pressure exerted by this spinal cord blow so severely injured the President as to render him a quadriplegic. The President’s physical reaction to the shot—the involuntary raising of his arms known as “Thorburn’s response”— indicated to many experts that the shock to Kennedy’s mid-brain was severe. Conceivably, the injury could have prevented this area of the brain from performing its breathing control function. In short, this injury alone could have proved fatal. The trauma to the nervous system also mercifully left Kennedy unconscious to the horrible shot yet to come. Encountering no hard bone, the bullet traversed the President’s neck unscathed, exiting at the base of the front of the neck.
The slowed-down bullet tumbled erratically. Sitting in the lower seat in front of and slightly to the left of Kennedy, Governor Connally was next in line for the projectile, which hit him lengthwise just below his right armpit. Coursing through his chest, the back end of the bullet shattered five inches of rib bone, leaving the base of the bullet flattened. This collision also forced the full metal-jacketed bullet to extrude some of its inner lead core out of the rear portion. These lead fragments would later be removed from various parts of Connally’s body.
Now traveling much more slowly, the bullet exited Connally’s chest, only to find his waiting wrist. One of Connally’s wrist bones was fractured in this encounter. The bullet ricocheted, hitting Connally in the thigh, moving far too slowly to penetrate the flesh. The bullet would later be recovered at Parkland Hospital, having fallen down Connally’s pants leg onto a stretcher.
By this time, the Secret Service, who had mistaken the first shot for a backfire or a firecracker, realized what was happening. Emory Roberts of the Secret Service shouted “Go!” and Jack Ready (assigned to the President) and Clint Hill (assigned to the First Lady) finally left the Secret Service backup car (“The Queen Mary”) and raced to the Presidential limousine. Hill looked over his shoulder for Ready, who had stumbled. As Hill approached the rear bumper of the limousine, the impossible happened—Kennedy’s driver, agent Bill Greer, slowed down the car.
With three advance cars and eight motorcycles in front of the Presidential limousine, and none of them aware of what was happening, Greer had no place to go. Regardless of what Greer did next, Oswald was sure to find his mark again three seconds later—with the president still only 88 yards away. But Greer made an easy shot virtually unmissable when he stepped on the brake pedal in order to turn and try to observe the President. Thus, the car was almost brought to a standstill, with Greer looking directly at “Lancer,” Kennedy’s Secret Service code name.
With his target positioned perfectly, Oswald squeezed the trigger and achieved his best result. This bullet was a direct hit, striking Kennedy in the cowlick area of his head. Because it was a “clean hit,” the bullet did not dramatically force Kennedy forward. But it did slightly push him ahead nonetheless. Immediately thereafter, other forces took effect. As the bullet traversed the right side of Kennedy’s brain, the area behind the bullet created a pressure cavity that literally caused the inside of his head to explode. Seeking to exit the area of least resistance in the skull, this pressurized brain matter then located the bullet exit wound just above Kennedy’s right ear. The explosive force of the exiting brain matter created a “jet effect,” jerking the President’s head violently to the
rear. This reverse head snap would be the hook upon which dozens of conspiracy theories were hung—the theories that a shot had been fired from the front, thus refuting the lone gunner conclusion. (For more on these details, see Appendix A: The Shooting of the President.)
The President died instantly. As one of the attending physicians at Parkland Memorial Hospital told the author, “He was dead before his car went under the triple overpass [50 feet from where Kennedy was shot].” By now, Clint Hill was ready to jump onto the rear bumper, where Jackie had crawled out to meet him. Hill had long been assigned to Jackie, during which time they had become extremely close. “She depended on him for everything,” recalls Mike Howard, a fellow agent and close friend. “She always ran to him as her protector.”
Hill would later tell Howard that when Jackie realized that the President was hit, she instinctively turned, looking for him, and screamed, “Clint!”70 Hill, approaching the now-accelerating limousine, later told Marty Underwood that he yelled back at Jackie, “Tell him to slow down!” The plea went unheard, and driver Greer stepped on the gas. With his first attempt, Hill missed his foothold, barely hanging on. It is a wonder more fatalities didn’t occur under the circumstances. Both Hill and Jackie could have easily fallen off the trunk as Greer hit the gas, and, if they had, they might have been run over by the accelerating back-up car, the “Queen Mary.” Also, when the limousine made it under the triple overpass, it nearly collided with its forward motorcycle escorts, which hadn’t yet accelerated. Witnesses have said that in the shadows of the overpass, there came a cacophony of screeching tires and swerving vehicles.
For a third and final time, Amos Euins looked up at the sixth floor window and watched, this time as the shooter “pulled the gun back in the window.” Reporters and cameramen riding in the convertible cars in the motorcade also saw the rifle. Among them were Malcolm Couch and Bob Jackson. They also saw the gun being drawn back into the Depository.71