A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination

by Philip Shenon

  “Jacqueline Kennedy.”

  “And you are the widow of the former president Kennedy?”

  “That is right.”

  Rankin: “Can you go back to the time that you came to Love Field on Nov. 22 and describe what happened there after you landed?”

  Mrs. Kennedy: “We got off the plane. The then-vice president and Mrs. Johnson were there. They gave us flowers. And then the car was waiting. But there was a big crowd there, all yelling, with banners and everything. And we went to shake hands with them.”

  With his first few questions, Rankin led Mrs. Kennedy, gently, through the chronology of what happened in the hour before the assassination and what she remembered of the motorcade. He asked her where she had been seated in the car relative to her husband and to the Connallys.

  Mrs. Kennedy recalled how hot it had been in Dallas that day, and how she welcomed the sight of a tunnel in the distance as the president’s limousine made its turn onto Houston Street. The motorcade was headed toward the tunnel, which would lead them out of Dealey Plaza.

  “I remember thinking it would be so cool under that tunnel.”

  Rankin: “And then do you remember as you turned off of Houston onto Elm right by the Depository Building?”

  Mrs. Kennedy recalled how Mrs. Connally had pointed to the cheering crowds and turned back to the first couple to say, “You certainly can’t say that the people of Dallas haven’t given you a nice welcome.”

  Rankin: “What did the president say?”

  Mrs. Kennedy: “I think he said, ‘No, you certainly can’t’ or something. And then the car was very slow and there weren’t very many people around. And then…”

  There was a pause.

  “Do you want me to tell you what happened?” she asked.

  With her question, it was as if Mrs. Kennedy wanted to remind Warren and Rankin what they were now asking her to do—to offer up, on the public record, the details of what had happened inside the limousine when the shots rang out.

  Rankin: “Yes, if you would, please.”

  And so she began: “I was looking this way, to the left, and I heard these terrible noises, you know? And my husband never made any sound. So I turned to the right. And all I remember is seeing my husband, he had sort of a quizzical look on his face and his hand was up. It must have been his left hand.

  “And just as I turned and looked at him, I could see a piece of his skull and I remember it was flesh colored, with little ridges at the top. I remember thinking that he just looked as if he had a slight headache. And I just remember seeing that. No blood or anything. And then he sort of did this…”

  She raised one hand to her head, explaining that her husband “put his hand to his forehead and fell in my lap. And then I just remember falling on him and saying, ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ I mean, ‘Oh, my God, they have shot my husband.’ And ‘I love you, Jack,’ I remember I was shouting. And just being down in the car with his head in my lap. And it just seemed an eternity. You know, then, there were pictures later on of me climbing out the back. But I don’t remember that at all.”

  Rankin asked if she remembered Secret Service agent Clint Hill climbing onto the trunk and pushing her back into the passenger compartment.

  Mrs. Kennedy: “I don’t remember anything. I was just down like that. And finally I remember a voice behind me, or something, and then I remember the people in the front seat, or somebody, finally knew something was wrong, and a voice yelling, which must have been Mr. Hill, ‘Get to the hospital,’ or maybe it was Mr. Kellerman, in the front seat. But someone yelling. I was just down and holding him.

  “I was trying to hold his hair on,” she said, describing the large piece of his skull that had been blown off by the second bullet. “From the front, there was nothing—I suppose there must have been. But from the back you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair on, and his skull on.”

  Rankin: “Do you have any recollection of whether there were one or more shots?”

  Mrs. Kennedy: “Well, there must have been two because the one that made me turn around was Governor Connally yelling. And it used to confuse me because first I remembered there were three and I used to think my husband didn’t make any sound when he was shot. And Governor Connally screamed. And then I read the other day that it was the same shot that hit them both. But I used to think if I only had been looking to the right I would have seen the first shot hit him, then I could have pulled him down, and then the second shot would not have hit him. But I heard Governor Connally yelling and that made me turn around, and as I turned to the right my husband was doing this…”

  She raised to a hand to her neck. “He was receiving a bullet,” she said. “And those are the only two I remember. And I read there was a third shot. But I don’t know. Just those two.”

  Rankin: “Do you have any recollection generally of the speed that you were going?”

  Mrs. Kennedy: “We were really slowing turning the corner. And there were very few people.”

  Rankin asked if she thought the limousine had stopped at any time after the shots.

  Mrs. Kennedy: “I don’t know, because—I don’t think we stopped. But there was such confusion. And I was down in the car and everyone was yelling to get to the hospital and you could hear them on the radio, and then suddenly I remember a sensation of enormous speed, which must have been when we took off.”

  Rankin: “And then from there you proceeded as rapidly as possible to the hospital, is that right?”

  Mrs. Kennedy: “Yes.”

  Rankin: “Do you recall anyone saying anything else during the time of the shooting?”

  Mrs. Kennedy: “No. There weren’t any words. There was just Governor Connally’s. And then I suppose Mrs. Connally was sort of crying and covering her husband. But I don’t remember any words. And there was a big windshield between—you know—I think. Isn’t there?”

  Rankin: “Between the seats.”

  Mrs. Kennedy: “So you know, those poor men in the front, you couldn’t hear them.” She was referring to the two Secret Service agents in the front seat.

  Rankin turned to the chief justice: “Can you think of anything more?”

  “No, I think not,” Warren said, drawing her testimony to a close nine minutes after it began. “I think that is the story and that is what we came for. We thank you very much, Mrs. Kennedy.”

  The transcript of Mrs. Kennedy’s testimony was included in the published archives of the commission, although the commission chose to leave out, without an explicit explanation of why, three sentences in which Mrs. Kennedy described trying to hold the president’s skull in place, beginning with the words, “I was trying to hold his hair on.” In the official transcript, the commission replaced that passage with the phrase: “Reference to wounds deleted.”

  40

  THE TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  SUNDAY, JUNE 7, 1964

  Earl Warren was not eager to go to Texas, even in the final weeks of the investigation, and his reluctance was understandable. If any large city in the United States was enemy territory to the chief justice, it was Dallas—the city where his friend the president had been murdered, and where he knew so many of the ultraconservative, segregationist leaders of the national Impeach Earl Warren movement lived and worked. The chief justice could be certain that on any trip to Dallas, he was likely to see several Impeach Earl Warren billboards. Warren claimed to friends that he was never angered by the signs; it was his wife, Nina, who was offended. “I could smile at it,” he said. “It was not so easy, though, to convince my wife.”

  However reluctantly, he had agreed to go to Dallas to take the testimony of Jack Ruby, scheduled for Sunday, June 7. The trip would also give him the chance to see Dealey Plaza and the Texas School Book Depository for himself. With Specter’s help, Rankin began to organize a full week’s itinerary. Specter remembered that the trip was originally going to be “crammed with meetings and inspections.” But Wa
rren balked; he did not want to spend nearly that much time in Dallas. Rankin then proposed a long weekend, organized around Ruby’s testimony, with Warren leaving Washington at lunchtime Friday and returning the following Monday in time to join arguments at the Supreme Court.

  “I’ll give you Sunday,” Warren said, according to Specter. The trip would be limited to a single day. The chief justice would not agree to spend even one night in Dallas.

  Specter felt badly for his colleague Burt Griffin, the commission’s expert on Ruby; Griffin would be left behind in Washington because of his flap with the Dallas police. Specter would have happily turned down the trip if Warren and Rankin had given him the chance; he would have preferred to go home to Philadelphia and “spend the whole weekend with my wife and young sons.”

  Rankin asked Specter to help organize a Sunday morning tour of Dallas for the chief justice. It would focus on Dealey Plaza, as well as Oswald’s route across town to the scene of the murder of Officer Tippit, and then to the Texas Theatre. When the tour reached the book depository, Rankin wanted Specter to make a full presentation to Warren about the single-bullet theory—“right from the assassin’s perch on the sixth floor,” Specter said.

  On Friday, June 5, Specter did the last-minute planning in Washington for the trip. He had hoped to get out of the office early that afternoon to catch a train home to Philadelphia; he wanted to spend at least part of the weekend with his family before returning to Washington to join the flight to Dallas early Sunday. But he needed to speak to Rankin before leaving, and Rankin was nowhere to be found. So Specter waited. “I missed the four o’clock train and then the five.”

  It was that afternoon that Warren and Rankin, without telling Specter, had gone to Jacqueline Kennedy’s Georgetown home to take her testimony. Rankin returned to the commission’s office shortly after five p.m., and he ran into Specter in the men’s room.

  “Rankin said he’d heard I was looking for him,” Specter recalled. “I said I had the details worked out for Sunday’s trip to Dallas.”

  Rankin then revealed, reluctantly, where he had been, and Specter remembered that Rankin “braced” for the young lawyer’s angry response.

  And Specter was furious, he said. He had been pressing for months to interview Mrs. Kennedy, and now Warren and Rankin had gone to talk to her without even the courtesy of telling him in advance.

  “I didn’t say anything,” Specter said later. “I didn’t have to. Rankin knew I was livid.”

  Specter remembered taking a deep breath and deciding there was no point in mounting any larger protest, at least not at that moment. “What was done was done.” He tried to put aside his anger and focus on his immediate priority—getting home to Philadelphia for the night.

  Rankin was also in a bad mood. Warren had insisted that he join the Dallas trip, which meant that he would not be able to commute home to Manhattan that weekend to see his wife. Instead, he would be in Dallas, locked in an interrogation room with Jack Ruby and the chief justice. Like Specter, he was growing tired of spending so much time in Washington. “It looks like I’m going to have to have a damn bed in the skies,” he complained.

  * * *

  On Sunday morning, Specter was back in Washington, and Warren offered to pick him up at his hotel for the ride to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, where they would board a small government JetStar plane for the flight to Texas. The chief justice was in an unusually good mood, Specter recalled. On the plane, the two men talked baseball. A game that afternoon between the San Francisco Giants, Warren’s team, and Specter’s hometown Philadelphia Phillies would decide first place in the National League. “So the battle lines were clear,” Specter said.

  They landed in Dallas mid-morning and got right to work. Congressman Ford and commission lawyer Joe Ball had traveled there separately and met up with Warren, Rankin, and Specter for the tour of the book depository. The presence of the chief justice and his delegation in the streets of Dallas attracted small, friendly crowds. Drawing on the political talents he had honed in California, “Warren chatted and kidded with a stream of passersby,” Specter said.

  At the book depository, Warren was taken to the sixth floor and shown what was believed to have been Oswald’s perch. The scene from the day of the assassination had been re-created for Warren’s inspection, including the stacks of boxes of children’s wooden blocks—the blocks were known as “Rolling Readers,” since each block contained letters and words that children could fashion into sentences—that Oswald had apparently assembled to hide what he was doing. Warren could not resist his politician’s instincts and took some of the blocks out of the boxes to sign and give away as souvenirs when he got back outside; Specter got one with Warren’s signature.

  At about eleven a.m. Specter and Warren stood at the sixth-floor window. “Warren assumed a silent and thoughtful pose at the window, which I knew was my cue to start,” Specter remembered. “For about eight minutes, the chief justice didn’t say a word as I summarized” the single-bullet theory. As he spoke, “Warren stood with his arms folded across his chest and studied Dealey Plaza,” Specter recalled. “Except for the cheering crowds and the presidential motorcade, our view of Dealey Plaza, Elm Street and the Triple Underpass matched what Oswald had seen as he crouched at that window six and a half months before.”

  Specter opened the presentation by reminding Warren of “the incontrovertible physical evidence” of Oswald’s guilt, including the discovery of his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle on the sixth floor—only inches from where Warren was standing at that moment—and the ballistics evidence that proved that the bullet found at Parkland Hospital had been fired from the same rifle. Oswald’s fingerprints were on the rifle, and the spent cartridges found on the sixth floor matched the rifle and the fired bullets.

  He reminded the chief justice of the findings in the autopsy report and how navy pathologists demonstrated that a bullet had entered the base of Kennedy’s neck from behind and exited out his throat, nicking the knot of his tie. Specter then used his finger, pointing out the window, to show the bullet’s trajectory in the instant after it struck the president’s neck. He explained how the on-site tests done two weeks earlier showed that the bullet would then have entered Connally’s back, exiting his chest before passing through his wrist and settling in his thigh. Warren had already seen the Zapruder film several times, so Specter did not need to remind the chief justice what happened next, when a second bullet struck the president in the back of the head.

  “When I finished my discourse, the Chief Justice remained silent,” Specter recalled. “He turned on his heel and stepped away, still saying nothing.” Specter was annoyed that Warren could not be bothered to say anything, if only to compliment him on the quality of the presentation. But Warren’s silence, Specter decided, probably signaled that he had accepted, in full, the single-bullet theory.

  * * *

  From the book depository, the group was taken across the street to the Dallas county jail, where they would use the sheriff’s kitchen to take Ruby’s testimony. Ford remembered the room as relatively small, about ten feet by eighteen feet, and “very austere.” A table, about three feet by eight feet, had been placed in the middle of the room, with chairs around it for Ruby and his questioners.

  Specter remembered that Warren had specifically requested a small room for Ruby’s testimony, to limit the number of people who could witness the event. “A swarm of Washington and Texas bigwigs had descended” on Dallas in hopes of being part of this moment of history, Specter said. But not all could get in. There was so little space that Warren could see he would have to leave a member of his own delegation out of the room. “As the Chief Justice studied the roster, he found only one person he could exclude—me,” Specter said. “So I sat in the sheriff’s office watching the Philadelphia–San Francisco baseball game on national television. At the time, I didn’t mind too much. In retrospect, I should have.”*

  At about eleven forty-five a.m., Ruby was brought
in by sheriff’s deputies. He was wearing a white prison-issue jumper. His feet were covered in thong sandals, which were given to prisoners on suicide watch in place of shoes with laces. Ford remembered that Ruby took a seat and fumbled with a small piece of paper tissue and a rubber band. He was “clean-shaven, balding, hawk-nosed, big hands and feet for a small, slight person,” Ford said. One of Ruby’s trial lawyers, Joe Tonahill, joined them. At first, Ruby appeared “surprisingly rational and quite composed—certainly far different acting than psychiatric reports I had read before the trip,” Ford said. But Ruby was also inscrutable. He had a “habit to look right at you for a period” before looking away, so it was “hard to know what he is thinking.”

  Even before Ruby was sworn in by Warren, he had an urgent question for the chief justice: “Without a lie detector on my testimony, my verbal statements to you, how do you know if I am telling the truth?”

  “Don’t worry about that, Jack,” Tonahill said.

  Warren stepped in: “You wanted to ask something, did you, Mr. Ruby?”

  Ruby: “I would like to be able to get a lie detector test, or truth serum, on what motivated me to do what I did.… Now, Mr. Warren, I don’t know if you have any confidence in the lie-detector test and the truth serum, and so on.”

  Warren would later admit that he did not think fast enough, and he found himself agreeing to Ruby’s request. “If you and your counsel want any kind of test, I will arrange it for you. I would be glad to do that, if you want it.”

  Ruby was pleased. “I do want it.”

  Warren: “We will be glad to do it.”

  That settled, Ruby wanted to be certain he would have time, on this visit, to tell his full story.

  “Are you limited for time?” he asked.

  Warren: “No, we have all the time you want.”

  The testimony had only begun, but Ruby already wanted to know: “Am I boring you?”

  Warren: “Go ahead, all right, Mr. Ruby, tell us your story.”