The dark blue presidential Lincoln was approaching Dealey Plaza and a corridor of buildings including the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald had just taken a $1.25-an-hour job.
The dark blue Lincoln carrying President John F. Kennedy was approaching Dealey Plaza and a corridor of buildings including the Texas School Book Depository, where Lee Harvey Oswald had just taken a $1.25-an-hour job.
Buell Frazier stood on the depository’s front steps, taking a break with co-workers — though not Oswald.
Frazier's among those who were closest to events on the day Kennedy was assassinated. Many there still talk about what they witnessed as if it happened yesterday.
Frazier recalls happy pandemonium greeted the presidential Lincoln, and suddenly he could see Jacqueline Kennedy.
“She’s as pretty as the pictures,” he remembers calling out to a woman nearby just after noon Central time Nov. 22, 1963.
And that quickly the motorcade glided by, enveloped by more cheers ahead. But then came another sound that Frazier first thought was a police motorcycle backfiring.
Then another pop. And another. Frazier recognized the sound of gunfire.
Instantly, all was mayhem. “People were running and screaming and hollering,” Frazier says. “Somebody came running by as we were standing there on the steps and she says, ‘They’ve shot the president.’”
In the Secret Service agents’ car, Clint Hill heard the first shot, sprinted to the Lincoln and scrambled aboard. Assigned to protect the first lady for the last three years, Hill strained to hold on; he saw Jackie Kennedy climbing onto the rear of the car, now speeding toward a freeway to the hospital.
“She’s going to go flying off the back,” he thought, and pushed her back to her seat.
‘President’s been shot’
The Lincoln, with Hill spread-eagled over the wounded president, raced to Parkland Hospital.
Because it was lunchtime, many on the Parkland staff were in the cafeteria when calls suddenly blared over the public address system, summoning specialists — “stat.”
Dr. Ronald Jones called the operator to learn why.
“Dr. Jones, the president’s been shot ...,” she said. “They need physicians.” The cafeteria cleared.
Through the open door of the trauma room, Jones saw a stoic Jackie Kennedy, moving from a folding chair placed for her outside the room to standing quietly inside as doctors assessed her husband.
“His eyes were open, they were not moving,” Jones says.
He scissored through Kennedy’s coat and shirt to find a vein to insert an IV. Other physicians worked frantically, trying to think of this as any trauma case, any patient.
Dr. Malcolm Perry, who’d been at lunch with Jones, was examining the wound in the president’s neck. Perry asked Dr. Robert McClelland to stand at the head of the gurney and hold the retractor in the incision they were making to explore the wound.
“As soon as I got into that position,” McClelland recalled recently, “I was shocked ... I said to Dr. Perry, ‘My God, have you seen the back of his head?’ I said, ‘It’s gone.’"
Dr. Kemp Clark, professor of neurosurgery, was standing by a heart monitor at one point, McClelland recalls. Kennedy’s heartbeat had flatlined.
“Dr. Clark said to Dr. Perry — and I remember the exact words — ‘He said, ‘Mac, you can stop now because he’s gone,’” McClelland says.
Officer killed in pursuit
The trauma room door opened moments later, admitting the Rev. Oscar Huber, who anointed the president’s head with oil and administered the Roman Catholic last rites. (The hospital official who phoned for Huber at his church, learning he was already on his way, and who later called a funeral home for a casket was Steve Landregan, whose daughter had taken airport snapshots of the first couple.)
When the end came, eyes turned to Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s side. McClelland recalls a kiss. Dr. Kenneth Salyer, who had done external cardiac massage, says, “She sort of laid on his chest ... in a sort of compassionate motion.”
Across town, after a rare lunch break at home, Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit hurried back to patrol. He soon spotted a man matching the description of the suspected assassin that had just been circulated; he pulled up alongside him and got out of his patrol car. In a flash, the man shot Tippit dead, then fled, shaking spent cartridges from his revolver as he ran.
View full sizeThis Nov. 22, 1963, file photo shows the Texas Theatre where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. The Warren Commission said Oswald left the book depository moments after shots were fired from the sixth floor, returned by bus and cab to his rooming house, then ventured out again -- soon encountering a Dallas police officer who stopped him based on descriptions of the assassination suspect. According to the commission, Oswald fatally shot police officer J.D. Tippit with a handgun, then fled into the nearby movie theater. As radio news reported an officer’s shooting near the shoe store where John Brewer was manager, he noticed a man suspiciously engrossed in a window display instead of the police cars streaming past. When the man darted into a movie theater, Brewer followed and raised the alarm.
The suspect pulled a handgun when confronted by a police officer, who wrestled it from him. “Cops were coming over the backs of the chairs ... . In just a little while they had the cuffs on Oswald,” Brewer says.
Oswald’s rifle missing
Oswald’s estranged wife, Marina, and two young daughters, had been staying in Ruth Paine’s bungalow in the Dallas suburb of Irving. Oswald had come the previous evening to try — unsuccessfully — to reconcile with Marina Oswald.
That afternoon, police arrived with a sharp knock on Paine’s door as she and Marina Oswald sat transfixed by the television news.
“We have Lee Oswald in custody, for shooting an officer,” Paine remembers them declaring. They began questioning the women.
“And then one of the policemen asked Marina (whose native language was Russian), ‘Did Oswald have a gun?’
“And I said, ‘No,’ but translated to Marina, who said, ‘Yes, he did.’”
Paine continues: “She led us to the garage and pointed to a blanket roll.” That, she said, was where Oswald kept his rifle.
The rifle was gone.
“That was my worst moment,” says Paine, who late the night before had switched off the garage light, which had been left on.
Around 2:30 p.m. at Dallas’ Love Field, Clint Hill watched as Lyndon Johnson, flanked by his wife and Jackie Kennedy, was sworn in as president aboard Air Force One. The plane, with Kennedy’s casket secured inside, quickly took off for Washington, D.C.
It landed at Andrews Air Force Base at 5:58 p.m.
At attention stood a military team assigned a solemn duty: They’d attend the former commander in chief from here through his funeral on Monday — as pallbearers. “We were proud to do it,” says Coast Guardsman George A. “Bud” Barnum. “We wanted to do it right.”
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View full sizeAn Associated Press teletype news bulletin from Nov. 22, 1963, shows early news that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. The document is kept in the AP Corporate Archives in New York. ‘Bob, the president’s been shot’
In the motorcade and amid the crowd, reporters struggled to grasp the events and then get the news out.
In the Dallas AP office, the phone rang and bureau chief Bob Johnson grabbed it. On the line was staff photographer James W. “Ike” Altgens, breathing hard. He’d recorded the Dealey Plaza chaos — including images of Kennedy grasping his throat and of Hill reaching for the first lady across the limo’s trunk.
“Bob, the president’s been shot,” he shouted from a pay phone.
“Ike, how do you know?” Johnson demanded.
“I was shooting pictures then and I saw it.”
“Ike, you saw that?”
“Yes, there was blood on his face.”
Johnson typed furiously, folding in Altgens’ details:
“BULLETIN.
“DALLAS — PRESIDENT KENNEDY WAS SHOT TODAY JUST AS HIS MOTORCADE LEFT DOWNTOWN DALLAS. MRS. KENNEDY JUMPED UP AND GRABBED HIM. SHE CRIED: ‘OH, NO!’ THE MOTORCADE SPED ON.”
It timed off at 12:40 p.m. Central time. Instantly, in newsrooms everywhere, bells clanged on wire teletype machines as they churned out the unimaginable, line by line, and broadcasters tore the copy and relayed the unthinkable.
Fifty years on, that first bulletin — its type spilling down the page from being pulled by some forgotten editor as it printed out — is an artifact of the moment, preserved in the news service’s corporate archives.