Although they had just been shot, President Kennedy and Governor Connally were still alive and conscious . . . and might survive.
For the second time, the sound of gunfire had echoed in Dealey Plaza. If the president had heard this shot, his auditory senses did not register it until after he felt the bullet’s impact. And if he had heard it, he would have known it was a rifle and he was in the process of being assassinated. No one could doubt the sound now.
Side view of the bullet that struck President Kennedy and Governor Connally. Rear view of the same bullet, showing how it was deformed from impact.
(courtesy of the National Archives)
Tom Dillard, chief photographer of the Dallas Morning News, was riding in one of the motorcade’s press cars, and he warned the other passengers: “It’s heavy rifle fire.”
Rowland heard the shot too. “After the second report, I knew what it was. . . . I knew that it was a gun firing.” And it was not a pistol. “It gave the report of a rifle.” “It appeared to me he was standing up and resting against the left window sill, with the gun shouldered to his right shoulder, holding the gun with his left hand and taking positive aim . . . as I calculate a couple of seconds.”
Howard Brennan noticed the direction the barrel was pointing. It was “at somewhat 30 degrees downward and west by south.” In other words, down Elm Street, away from the Depository, in the direction of the railroad underpass.
The rifle was pointed at President Kennedy’s limousine.
Now Brennan lost sight of the presidential limousine. It had gone too far down Elm Street for his eyes to follow. It did not matter. “I knew what he was firing at.”
WESLEY FRAZIER knew it too. “It wasn’t just a few seconds that . . . I heard . . . the same type of . . . sounds, and by that time people was running everywhere, and falling down and screaming. . . . I knew something was wrong . . . somebody was shooting . . . I figured somebody was shooting at President Kennedy.” Frazier froze. “People were running and hollering so I just stood still. I have always been taught that when something like that happened, . . . it is always best to stand still because if you run that makes you look guilty sure enough.”
But Frazier had already done something that would soon make him a subject of suspicion. Five hours earlier, as he drove to work that morning, the rifle that was shooting at the president was lying flat in the backseat of his car. And the man who would fire it had been sitting in the front seat next to him. Frazier would have a lot to explain that afternoon.
SECRET SERVICE agents standing on the running board of the trail car turned their heads and looked over their right shoulders at the Book Depository. The shots sounded as though they had come from behind them. A moment after the second shot, a news photographer, James Altgens, snapped a picture of the front of Kennedy’s limousine and of the Secret Service trail car, freezing the agents in position with their heads turned back to the Depository. The photograph shows something else.
The impact of the bullet propelled President Kennedy’s elbows and forearms up, parallel to the ground, and pushed his clenched fists, thumbs in, toward his throat. He could not move his arms from this position—they were locked in place by nerve damage. In the photo, a white-gloved hand—Jackie Kennedy’s—touched the president’s left forearm.
Dave Powers, riding in the Secret Service car just a few feet behind the president’s, turned to Ken O’Donnell. “Kenny, I think the President’s been shot.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Look at him. He was over on the right, with his arm stretched out. Now he’s slumped over toward Jackie, holding his throat.”
Abraham Zapruder did not capture on film the moment the president was shot. Kennedy was uninjured when he disappeared behind the Stemmons Freeway sign. When he emerged from behind the sign, he had already been hit and had raised his arms. Zapruder kept filming.
Jackie Kennedy knew something was wrong. Governor Connally, an experienced hunter, already knew. He shouted “No, no, no!” and “They’re going to kill us all!”
A Secret Service agent riding in the trail car saw the bullet hit the president and tear a hole in the back of his suit coat. Jackie rotated her body toward her husband. She held his left forearm in her hands. Puzzled, she looked at Governor Connally, who was twisting strangely in his seat. Then she faced her husband again. The startled, wide-eyed expression on his face frightened her. She leaned in closer. Their eyes were just inches apart. Then she seemed to ask, “What’s wrong, Jack?” He did not answer. He could not speak.
Lee Harvey Oswald operated the bolt of his rifle and ejected a second brass cartridge onto the floor. He chambered a third round. He elevated the barrel a few degrees. He took his time. This shot might be his last. Yes, he still had a fourth and final bullet in the clip. But he would probably not have the opportunity to fire it before Kennedy’s car drove out of range, especially if it sped up to interfere with his aim. More time elapsed since the first shot. Seven seconds now.
Secret Service agent Clint Hill, riding the left-front running board of the trail car, knew what was wrong. He leaped off the car and sprinted for the presidential limousine. Fellow agents rooted for him to close the distance before the sniper could fire a third shot. Hill ran as fast as he could. The thirty-one-year-old agent had been with Mrs. Kennedy from the beginning and had protected her on trips all over the world. He had to help her now. She was sitting so close to the president that another rifle shot might blow her head off. If only Hill could get between the Kennedys and the sniper before he fired another shot.
Hill, who was not wearing a bulletproof vest, could block the bullet with his own body and save the president. It was a sacrifice he would be happy to make. He was an excellent athlete and closed on the president’s car fast. Just a few more yards, and he could grab for the big handle on the trunk and yank himself up on the rear foothold. If he could do that he would be a human shield—the assassin would have to shoot through him to get the president. Only Jackie’s agent could save John Kennedy now—the president’s own Secret Service agent had not yet left the trail car. Seven seconds.
Oswald’s second shot was not necessarily fatal. It had not struck Kennedy’s head, spine, or heart. His other vital organs—lungs, liver, kidneys, spleen—were undamaged. The chief danger to the president was shock and loss of blood. But it was a survivable wound. Many soldiers in World War II and the Korean War had survived worse injuries. If the driver gunned the engine and increased the car’s speed to 80 miles per hour, the president could be in the emergency room of nearby Parkland Hospital in less than ten minutes.
Eight seconds. Oswald began to squeeze the trigger. The Newman family, two young parents and their two small children, were standing just a few feet away from the president. Abraham Zapruder kept filming. Nellie Connally held her husband in her arms. As he lost consciousness, he believed he was dying. Bystander Mary Moorman raised her Polaroid camera and prepared to click the shutter. Clint Hill knew he would make it in just a couple more steps. The president remained upright in the backseat. He had not spoken a word. The driver did not race away to escape the gunfire. Instead, the limousine seemed to slow down. Jackie Kennedy gazed into her husband’s uncomprehending eyes. They had been married ten years that fall.
Howard Brennan could see most of the rifle now. “I calculate 70 to 85 per cent of the gun.” And he could see most of the man. “I could see practically his whole body, from his hips up.” He looked to be “a man in his early thirties, fair complexion, slender but neat . . . possibly 5-foot 10 . . . from 160 to 170 pounds.” He was a white man, and he wore “light colored clothes, more of a khaki color.”
Amos Euins watched too. After he heard the second shot, he did not take his eyes off the Depository. “I was still looking at the building. . . . I was looking where the barrel was sticking out.” After the first two shots, the teenager was afraid he might get shot too. For protection, he ducked behind a water fountain. “I got behind this little foun
tain,” Euins said, but he kept the sixth floor window in sight. “Then he shot again.”
“I could see his hand, and I could see his other hand on the trigger, and one hand was on the barrel thing.” Euins saw that the barrel was tracking JFK’s car as it moved farther away from the Depository. As the distance grew, the gunman thrust more of the rifle out of the window. “After the President’s car had come down the street further . . . he kind of stuck it out more.” When Euins first saw the barrel, only the tip protruded from the window. By the time Oswald was ready to fire for the third time, it looked to Euins like three feet of rifle was visible. “It was enough to get the stock and receiving house and the trigger housing to stick out the window.”
There was nothing Euins or Brennan could do. There was no time to shout a warning. There was no time to find a policeman. Or to stop the man in the window.
Brennan could only watch as the man “fired his last shot.”
8.4 seconds.
The rifle fired.
The president was less than one hundred yards away. The Marine Corps had taught Oswald to shoot at targets with fixed, iron sights—without the aid of a telescopic sight—at distances of two hundred, four hundred, and even six hundred yards.
The accuracy of Oswald’s third shot would determine if the president of the United States lived or died. For Oswald, everything depended on this last bullet. The first two bullets had already guaranteed his infamy. The third would determine whether he was remembered as a failure who missed his chance or as a man of history who changed the future.
AT THE third shot, Bob Jackson, a photographer riding in the same press car as Tom Dillard, glanced at the upper floors of the Depository. “There’s a rifle,” Jackson said, “in that open window!”
Dillard’s instant conclusion was that “they’ve killed him.”
Euins watched Oswald fire the third shot: “I had seen a bald spot on this man’s head. I was looking at the bald spot. I could see his hand, you know the rifle laying across his hand. And I could see his hand sticking out on the trigger part. And after he got through, he just pulled it back in the window.” But the boy could not see Oswald’s face. He did not get a very good look at him. “The cardboard boxes near the window were throwing a reflection, shaded.”
Bob Jackson saw two men on the fifth floor “leaning out and looking up.” Then he saw Oswald’s gun. “[M]y eyes went up to the next window, and I could see the rifle on the ledge and I could see it being drawn in. I could not see who was holding it.”
Jackson’s camera was out of film. That caused him to miss what would have been one of the most dramatic and important pictures in American history—the assassin’s rifle shooting at the president, and possibly an image of Lee Harvey Oswald firing it. In the days ahead, Jackson would have a chance to redeem himself.
Tom Dillard brought his camera up in an instant and snapped a photograph. But it was too late. All he got was a picture of the empty sixth-floor window and of the Depository employees still in the windows one floor below. Oswald had stepped back just in time to avoid being photographed.
Malcolm Couch, a cameraman for WFAA-TV, saw it too: “I looked up and saw about a foot of the rifle going back in the window.”
Brennan kept his eyes on the man in that window. “He drew the gun back from the window as though he was drawing it back to his side and maybe paused for another second as though to assure hisself [sic] that he hit his mark, and then he disappeared.”
WHITE HOUSE reporter Merriman Smith, riding in the front seat of the press-pool car, said out loud that “those were gunshots.” To Bob Clark from ABC News, who was riding in the same car, the three shots sounded “equally loud and equally clear” and were “clearly fired from almost over our head.” Clark was sure that someone “was firing from almost directly above us.” Pierce Allman from WFAA-TV and radio heard it too. “There were three shots. They were very distinct.”
Mrs. Robert A. Reid, a clerical supervisor who had worked at the Texas School Book Depository for seven years, was standing on Elm Street in front of the building: “I was . . . watching for the car as the President came by. I looked at him and was very anxious to see Mrs. Kennedy, I looked at her and I was going to see how she was dressed, and she was dressed very attractive, and she put up her hand to her hat and was holding it on, the wind was blowing a little bit and then [they] went right on by me.”
A few seconds later, Reid heard the three shots. She turned to Mr. Campbell, who also worked at the Depository, and said, “Oh, my goodness, I am afraid those came from our building.” It seemed to her that the shots “came just so directly over my head.” Then she looked straight up. She saw “three colored boys up there, and I only recognized one because I didn’t know the rest of them so well.” It was James “Junior” Jarman. Then she said, “Oh, I hope they don’t think any of our boys have done this.”
THIS TIME Lee Harvey Oswald did not miss.
The third bullet hit John Kennedy in the back of the head and sliced through his thatch of thick, reddish brown hair. It tore a neat hole through his scalp and punched a round hole through the back of his skull. The velocity, the pressure, and the physics of death did the rest. The right rear side of the president’s skull blew out—exploded really—tearing open his scalp, and spewing skull fragments, blood, and brains several feet into the air, where they hung for a few seconds, suspended in a pink cloud. It splattered the motorcycle windshield and face of a police officer riding close to the left side of the car.
To Clint Hill, the impact resembled the squashing sound of a melon being smashed on cement.
Artist’s depiction of Kennedy’s second wound, the fatal head shot.
(courtesy of the National Archives)
The president of the United States never heard this shot. He lost consciousness the moment the bullet hit him. His wife’s mouth opened wide in shock as his limp body began to tip toward her. “Oh no!” she exclaimed. She was so close to her husband when Oswald shot him in the head that her hair, face, white gloves, and pink suit were all stained with gore. “I could see a piece of his skull coming off,” she said. “It was flesh-colored, not white . . . I can see this . . . piece detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap; his blood and brains were in my lap.”
Powers and O’Donnell watched it happen from just fifteen or twenty feet behind Kennedy’s car. “While we both stared at the President, the third shot took the side of his head off. We saw pieces of bone and brain tissue and bits of his reddish hair flying through the air.”
O’Donnell was horrified. “He’s dead,” he said to Powers. It would be impossible for a man to suffer a wound like that and live.
OSWALD, HIS eye glued to his rifle scope, must have seen the spray of red mist. Then he lowered the stock from his right cheek, operated the bolt, ejected the third cartridge case, and chambered the fourth round. He was ready to shoot again. If he wanted to fire a last round, he had to be quick. He could not take as much time as he had between the second and third shots. He would have to aim this shot by instinct, and maybe even use the iron sights and not the scope. Locating the car in the telescopic sight might take a fraction of a second too long. And Kennedy was slumping over, about to disappear into the backseat. Jackie and Clint Hill presented finer targets, and by now Oswald had a better chance of hitting them than the president. Would he fire his fourth and last round?
He paused, and then he stepped away from the window. His work was done. Now it was time to escape.
The disappearance of the shooter from the window did not convince Brennan that no more shots would be fired in Dealey Plaza. What if there were other gunmen? He did not want to get shot. He jumped off the retaining wall and took cover. “It occurred to me that there might be more than one person, that it was a plot which could mean several people.” He feared that “there were going to be bullets flying from every direction.”
THIS WAS not a suicide mission for Oswald, despite his ritualistic behavior that mor
ning at Ruth Paine’s house. Leaving behind his wedding ring and almost all of his cash symbolized a shedding of worldly things, a fatalism that suggests that Oswald believed he was about to undertake a dangerous—even suicidal—task from which he might never return. At the Book Depository, once he shot the president, he could have surrendered himself to the police as a political prisoner. Once upon a time, he had fancied the romanticism of that. “If I am taken prisoner . . . ” he had written last April in that frightening note of instructions to Marina before he went off to assassinate General Walker. But this morning, although he had left his ring and cash, he left no note, letter, or political manifesto on the bedroom dresser.
No, Lee Oswald was not ready to give up. His heart raced. Adrenaline pumped through his system. His survival instincts kicked in and whisked him away from the sixth floor window. He had done it. He had summoned all the will and the discipline buried inside him to shoot John F. Kennedy. And he had done what no man had ever done before—he had become the first presidential assassin to ever commit the act from long distance, with a rifle. But this was no time for self-congratulation. He had to get out of that building.
Photograph taken moments after Oswald fired the third shot and disappeared from the sixth-floor window.
(© by Tom Dillard Collection, The Dallas Morning News/The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza)
JACKIE KENNEDY panicked. She saw that something had fallen onto the dark blue, mirrored finish of the limousine trunk. It was a piece of her husband’s skull. She rose from the backseat, turned around, kneeled on the blue upholstery, and reached for the top of the trunk. She was fully exposed to the assassin now. If Oswald had lingered in the window and desired to fire a fourth shot, he could have used his last bullet to kill Jackie. Still kneeling on the backseat, she stretched her body toward the skull fragment. The president, she might have convinced herself, would need that piece of his head when the doctors fixed him at the hospital.
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