The House of Kennedy Read online

  As the motorcade departs Love Field, Oswald is spotted on the sixth floor by a coworker, Charles Givens, carrying a clipboard and walking toward the elevator. Givens later testifies to the Warren Commission that Oswald directs him, “When you get downstairs, close the elevator.” Oswald doesn’t explain himself, but Givens does as he is told.

  By twelve thirty, Oswald is positioned in his sniper’s perch.

  * * *

  Bill Greer, the president’s personal driver, is at the wheel of the open-top Lincoln Continental, license plate GG-300. By order of the president, the Secret Service are not standing on the retractable foot stands but positioned in the follow-car.

  In the fold-down, forward-facing jump seats are Governor Connally and his wife, Nellie. President Kennedy and Jackie are in the seats behind them. “We were indeed a happy foursome that beautiful morning,” Nellie Connally writes in her book, From Love Field: Our Final Hours with President Kennedy. Both she and Jackie wear pink suits and carry roses, Jackie’s red and Nellie’s yellow. “Everything was so perfect.”

  As the excited crowds cheer, Nellie turns in her seat to face Jack and says, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”

  The president is smiling and waving his right hand at onlookers. Jackie has in her lap the bouquet of roses Dallas mayor Earle Cabell presented to her at Love Field. The day was “hot, wild,” Jackie recalls. “The sun was so strong in our faces.”

  “Suddenly,” Lady Bird Johnson records, “there was a sharp loud report—a shot. It seemed to me to come from the right above my shoulder from a building. Then a moment and then two more shots in rapid succession.”

  Dallas Morning News staff writer Mary Elizabeth Woodward, along with three newsroom colleagues, watch from across Elm Street just east of the triple underpass. Woodward’s article, titled “Witness from the News Describes Assassination,” states, “We were almost certainly the last faces [John F. Kennedy] noticed in the crowd. After acknowledging our cheers, he faced forward again and suddenly there was a horrible, ear-shattering noise, coming from behind us and a little to the right.”

  What Woodward does not reveal in her eyewitness account is her lifelong hearing problem. She comes to deeply regret that omission, as the direction she gives for the source of the sound does not match the location of the Texas Book Depository where Oswald had holed up—and that discrepancy fuels decades of speculation. In her 2017 Dallas News obituary, she calls it “something that I have regretted the rest of my life because every conspiracy theorist in the world has quoted that. And I’m convinced that I did not hear it correctly.”

  Roy H. Kellerman, special agent in charge, testifies on December 18, 1963, that after hearing the first shot, he “turned around to find out what happened when two additional shots rang out, and the President slumped into Mrs. Kennedy’s lap and Governor Connally fell into Mrs. Connally’s lap. I heard Mrs. Kennedy shout, ‘What are they doing to you?’”

  * * *

  Abraham Zapruder will spend the rest of his life answering that very question.

  “How many times will you have a crack at [taking] color movies of the president?” Lillian Rogers, Zapruder’s secretary at his apparel manufacturing company, Jennifer Juniors, tells her boss. She sends “Mr. Z”—a fifty-eight-year-old Kennedy enthusiast who’d emigrated from Russia as a teenager—home to retrieve his high-end Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Camera, already loaded with eight-millimeter Kodachrome II color safety film.

  The clothing factory occupies two floors of the Dal-Tex Building, located across the street from the Texas School Book Depository where the armed Oswald lurks. Zapruder walks a block toward Elm Street, steps onto a raised concrete platform, and points his viewfinder at the approaching motorcade.

  The visuals Abraham Zapruder captures over the next twenty-six seconds instantly convince him that he has just witnessed an assassination. “They killed him!” he shouts at bystanders. Then, minutes later, “It was terrible. I saw his head come off.”

  “I think he was very sorry to be the guy who got it on film,” says Zapruder’s granddaughter, Alexandra, decades later. “It brought him nothing but heartbreak.”

  * * *

  “Step on it! We’re hit!” Roy H. Kellerman orders Bill Greer. As the Continental speeds toward Parkland Memorial Hospital, Jackie protectively cradles her dying husband, his bright red blood seeping into her pink suit.

  “It’s the image of yellow roses and red roses and blood all over the car…all over us,” recalls Nellie Connally. “I’ll never forget it.”

  Lady Bird Johnson catches a tragic glimpse as their cars speed off. “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying in the back seat.”

  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 re
cords, 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.

  The man, Lee Harvey Oswald, puts a .38-caliber revolver between them and, at point-blank range, shoots the officer three times. A fourth shot, to the head, proves fatal. Oswald leaves the scene and continues walking down the street as passerby T. F. Bowley comes upon the horrifying scene and uses Tippit’s police radio to report the crime.

  Twenty-two-year-old Johnny Calvin Brewer is listening to the radio as he works the cash register at Hardy’s Shoe Store. He hears a news bulletin that Officer Tippit has been shot, and the sound of approaching sirens. Just then, a man enters Hardy’s, pretending to shop for shoes while clearly trying to avoid the police activity outside. Brewer realizes this man might be Tippit’s killer.

  It is. Oswald exits Hardy’s, moving four doors down to the Texas Theater, where the film War Is Hell is already screening. Ticket taker Julia Postal notices Oswald sneaking in without paying the ninety-cent admission, so when Brewer comes over to alert her to his suspicions about Oswald, Postal calls the cops.

  At this point, no one other than Tippit has connected Oswald to the assassination, but they’re after him for the officer shooting. About 2:00 p.m., squad cars, their sirens wailing, seal off the perimeter of the movie house. Four officers enter through the rear of the theater, checking it from front to back, discovering Oswald seated in one of the last rows.

  “I was about fifteen feet away from where Oswald was seated,” recalls the Dallas Morning News aerospace reporter Hugh Aynesworth, who has hitched a ride on a news van after tipping the crew off to the bulletin he’d heard on a police scanner. “They got him out of there in a hurry. I never understood how so many [police officers] got there so fast.”

  Officer Nick McDonald orders Oswald to get up and out of his seat. “Well, it’s all over now,” Oswald declares.

  But it isn’t, yet.

  “He made a fist and bam, hit me right between the eyes,” McDonald recalls. Then Oswald points a gun at the officer. “Bracing myself,” McDonald says, “I stood rigid, waiting for the bullet to penetrate my chest.” When the gun misfires, fellow officers Ray Hawkins and T. A. Hutson help subdue Oswald.

  “I protest this police brutality and I am not resisting arrest!” Oswald declares.

  * * *

  At 2:38 p.m., U.S. district judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes administers the Oath of Office—dutifully copied by a staffer from Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution—to Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

  For the first time, two presidents are aboard Air Force One.

  One of them is in a coffin.

  A defiantly dry-eyed Jackie refuses to change out of her bloodstained pink suit. “My whole face was spattered with blood and hair,” Jackie remembers, explaining that she began to wipe it off, but immediately regretted it. “Why did I wash the blood off? I should have left it there…I should have kept the blood on.”

  “Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights,” the suddenly new First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, writes in her diary of that day, “that immaculate woman, exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.”

  “I want them to see what they have done to Jack,” Jackie says, several times.

  Just after 6:00 p.m., the plane lands at Andrews Air Force Base. There are crowds of mourners waiting for Air Force One—among them, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, who immediately boards the plane and goes to embrace his sister-in-law.

  “I’m here,” he tells her.

  Chapter 21

  Earlier that day, at the Lafayette Hotel in Washington, DC, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who is six months pregnant with her fourth baby, has just sat down to a Friday lunch with her husband, Sargent Shriver, and their four-year-old son, Timmy.

  The growing family hasn’t had much time together since March 1961, when with Executive Order #10924, President Kennedy established the Peace Corps “to promote world peace and friendship,” and named his brother-in-law Shriver as head of the new agency within the State Department.

  A waiter approaches the table with word that Shriver has an urgent phone call from his secretary, Mary Ann Orlando.

  An ashen Shriver soon returns to the table. “Something has happened to Jack,” he tells his wife.

  A second call quickly follows. The president’s condition is critical.

  Eunice holds fast to the belief that her big brother Jack can survive. “There have been so many crises in Jack’s life—he’ll pull through,” she declares.

  It seems only yesterday that Eunice and Jack shared a house in Georgetown. Jack was single then, in the 1940s. They’d throw raucous all-night parties, and both smoke Cuban cigars.

  Eunice and Shriver rush across Lafayette Park to Peace Corps headquarters, where Eunice places a call to the attorney general’s office. Her brother Bobby confirms that Jack is clinging to life. But then the unbearable news flashes on the wire service: The president is dead.

  The Shrivers and Peace Corps staffers kneel on the office floor together in prayer, repeating Hail Marys.

  * * *

  Three days earlier, on November 19, Jack had pardoned a turkey at the White House in advance of the November 28 Thanksgiving holiday. “Let’s keep him going,” Kennedy had joked. Thanksgiving is less than a week away now, and in New York, Jean Kennedy Smith is doing some holiday errand-running on Friday afternoon. She notices passersby crying, listening to a news bulletin blaring from every car radio on the street.

  She can’t believe what she’s hearing. Her husband, Stephen Smith, is at the Kennedy campaign office in the Pan Am building, strategizing for Jack’s reelection. Stephen, Jean thinks, will know if the news is true.

  * * *

  Patricia Kennedy Lawford is at her oceanfront home in Santa Monica, California, a magnificent property previously owned by studio head Louis B. Mayer. Her husband, actor Peter Lawford—whom she will divorce in 1966, the first (but not the last) Kennedy to ev
er divorce—is away in Lake Tahoe performing with comedian “Ragtime Jimmy” Durante, but her best friend and neighbor, Judy Garland, makes sure Pat won’t be alone. (Sociable Judy occasionally vacations with the Kennedy family in Hyannis Port, and sings to Jack over the telephone. “He’d request ‘Over the Rainbow,’” Judy’s third husband, Sid Luft, recalls. She “obliged the president with several renditions of his favorite melodies.”)

  * * *

  Senator Ted Kennedy is sitting in the Speaker’s chair presiding over the day’s business, a job relegated to junior senators during quiet legislative stretches. Around 2:00 p.m., aide Richard Riedel rushes in with the news from Dallas. Ted is devastated, but his first thought is how his wife, Joan, will react. They’ve been married for five troubled years, and she’s been numbing the pain of Ted’s infidelities with alcohol. Ted locates Joan in Washington’s Elizabeth Arden salon and has her brought to their Georgetown home. A terse call from Bobby—“He’s dead”—unleashes in Joan a demonstrative grief that is too much for Ted to handle. “Just go to bed,” he tells his wife. “Take a pill or something.”

  * * *

  Rose Kennedy ventures out, bundled in “the same old but warm coat I had worn through the snows when I went to Mass the morning of Jack’s inauguration.” She walks on the Cape Cod beach both alone and with her nephew Joe Gargan, telling him that they “must go on living.”

  The matriarch takes a condolence call from now President Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird, who accompanied Jack’s coffin from Dallas to Washington. “We must all realize,” Lady Bird tells Rose, “how fortunate the country was to have your son as long as it did.”