Across the hall, in Trauma Room One, Dr. Perry orchestrates the treatment of the president. Dr. Carrico finishes hooking up the respirator and flips the switch, pumping air into the president’s lungs. Carrico listens briefly to the president’s chest. His breathing is better, but still inadequate. Air is leaking from the small hole in the throat.340 Dr. Perry examines the chest briefly but can see no wound. He pushes up the body brace on the president’s left side to feel for his femoral pulse.* There is none. Perry can see that the president is still struggling to breathe, despite the endotracheal tube Dr. Carrico inserted in his throat. Perry knows that a more effective air passage must be made immediately. He asks someone to bring him a tracheotomy tray as he snaps on a pair of surgical gloves, but finds there is already one there. Perry gestures toward a small hole in the throat. “Did you start a tracheotomy?” he asks Carrico.
“No,” Carrico replies, shaking his head. “That’s a wound.” Carrico had previously observed foamy blood oozing, with each attempt at respiration, from a small, fairly round wound in the front of the president’s throat just below and to the right of the Adam’s apple.341
Commencing a tracheotomy (incision into the windpipe), Dr. Perry grabs a scalpel and makes a quick, large incision directly through the hole in the throat.342*
Other doctors are now arriving en masse. Dr. William Kemp Clark, the hospital’s senior neurosurgeon, pushes his way in and helps to withdraw Dr. Carrico’s endotracheal tube as Dr. Perry is about to insert a plastic tracheotomy tube directly into the windpipe.343 Drs. Charles R. Baxter and Robert N. McClelland, both general surgeons, along with urologist Dr. Paul C. Peters, assist Perry in inserting the tracheotomy tube, while Dr. Marion T. Jenkins, professor and chairman of Parkland’s Department of Anesthesiology, and his assistant, Dr. Adolph H. Giesecke Jr., hook up the tube to an anesthesia machine, which they had brought down from the Anesthesia Department on the second floor in order to better control the president’s circulation.344
Perry asks Dr. Peters to make an incision in the chest and insert a tube to drain any blood or air that might be accumulating in the right side of the chest cavity.345 Meanwhile, Dr. Ronald C. Jones inserts a chest tube into the left side of the chest, then, along with several other doctors (including surgery interns and residents Drs. Don T. Curtis, Kenneth E. Salyer, Martin C. White, and Charles A. Crenshaw),346 makes additional cutdowns on the president’s right and left arms and legs in order to quickly infuse blood and fluids into the circulatory system.347 The pace is very quick and intense. Dr. Clark works his way around closer to the president’s massive head wound. He exchanges a desperate glance with Perry. Both know there is no chance of saving the president. They are only going through the motions.348
Admiral George Burkley, the president’s personal physician, rushes into the room and immediately sees that the president’s condition is hopeless and death is certain. Whatever life might still exist in the motionless body on the gurney will be impossible to sustain no matter what the Parkland doctors do. He sees that the surgical team is working to supply type O RH-negative blood. He informs them that Kennedy’s type is O RH-positive349* and asks Dr. Peters to administer steroids to the president, essential because of the president’s adrenal deficiency, which leaves his body unable to cope with stress and trauma. He hands over three 100-milligram vials of Solu-Cortef, muttering, “Either intravenously or intramuscularly.”350 Burkley knows there is really no need for it, but knows also that they have to do everything they can.351
The president’s personal physician steps out into the corridor, where Mrs. Kennedy is sitting on a folding chair, dazed. Afraid that her husband’s death is imminent, she wants to go into the operating room.
“I’m going in there,” she murmurs.
Doris Nelson, the strong-muscled supervising nurse with plenty of starch in her collar, hears her and bars the door, the policy of the hospital, as with most hospitals, being not to allow relatives into an operating room.
“You can’t come in here,” she says sharply, setting her rubber-soled shoes against the frame of the door.
“I’m coming in, and I’m staying,” Mrs. Kennedy says and pushes. The nurse, considerably stronger, pushes back. Jackie Kennedy always used to bow to medical advice. She was young, and the doctors, she thought, always knew best. When she heard her husband calling her after his back operation in 1954, she tried to go to him, but no one would admit her and she backed off. Then, after the operation, when a specialist’s treatments began to fail, they talked her out of bringing in a consultant. The president subsequently suffered through four months of intense pain. She vowed then and there not to allow doctors and nurses to intimidate her.
“I’m going to get in that room,” she whispers fiercely to the nurse blocking the door.
The commotion attracts Admiral Burkley, who suggests that Mrs. Kennedy take a sedative.
“I want to be in there when he dies,” she tells him, and she refuses the sedation,352 wanting, it seems, to soak up as much pain as she can. To cheat pain at a moment like this, when her husband has suffered the most horrible wounds and was near death, would have diminished her and what they had meant to each other.
The admiral nods understandingly.
“It’s her right, it’s her prerogative,” he says as he leads her past the nurse, who mistakenly believes he is a Secret Service agent.
Looking shell-shocked, Mrs. Kennedy aimlessly circles the hospital gurney where technicians work feverishly on her husband’s body. Her hands are cupped in front of her, as if cradling something. As she passes Dr. Jenkins, she nudges him with her elbow and hands him what she has been nursing—a large chunk of brain tissue. Jenkins quickly gives it to a nearby nurse.353 The president’s physician ushers Mrs. Kennedy into a corner of the trauma room, now overflowing with people. She rests her cheek on Admiral Burkley’s shoulder, then drops briefly to the floor, closes her eyes and prays.354
The McWatters bus carrying Lee Oswald rumbles west on Elm Street, the smell of diesel exhaust permeating the floorboards. Between Poydras and Lamar, the driver pumps the air brakes as the bus rolls up behind traffic that is stalled for four blocks from the assassination scene. From the looks of it, they won’t be going anywhere soon. A man climbs out of a car stopped in front of the bus, and walks back. McWatters pulls the lever next to him and the front doors hiss open.
“I heard over my car radio that the president has been shot,” the man says.
The passengers are astonished. Some don’t believe it.
The woman across from Mrs. Bledsoe realizes in panic that the bus may not move for a very long time, and she has to catch a train at Union Station, four blocks away. She decides to walk, even if it means lugging her suitcase all that way. She asks McWatters if she can have a transfer so she can get back on the bus if it breaks free from traffic, and McWatters is happy to oblige.
Oswald gets up and asks McWatters for a transfer too, following the woman off the bus. He walks right past his former landlady again, and this time Mary Bledsoe thinks he might have recognized her. In any event, she is happy enough to see the last of him.355
The area around the entrance to the Depository is quickly growing chaotic. Dealey Plaza witnesses are offering various bits of information. Inspector Sawyer knows he will need help to handle the situation, and reaches for his car radio.
“We need more manpower down here at this Texas School Book Depository,” he says and instructs the dispatcher to have some squad cars pick up the officers stationed along the motorcade route and bring them down to the Depository.356
Officer E. W. Barnett, with Howard Brennan in tow, tells Sawyer that he has an eyewitness who saw the gunman.
“What did you see?” Sawyer asks Brennan.
The steelworker gives him a description of the man in the window and the inspector mashes the button on his car radio again: “The wanted person in this is a slender white male about thirty. Five foot ten. A hundred and sixty-five. And carrying a—what l
ooked like—a 30-30 or some type of Winchester.”
“It was a rifle?” the dispatcher asks.
“A rifle, yes,” Sawyer replies.
“Any clothing description?”
“The current witness can’t remember that,” Sawyer says.357
The dispatcher immediately throws a switch in the radio room that allows him to broadcast simultaneously on both channels of the Dallas police radio, effectively reaching every officer in the city. “Attention all squads. Attention all squads. The suspect in the shooting at Elm and Houston is reported to be an unknown white male, approximately thirty. Slender build, height five feet, ten inches. Weight one hundred sixty-five pounds. Reported to be armed with what is thought to be a thirty caliber rifle.” The dispatcher repeats the message, adding, “No further description or information at this time. 12:45 [p.m.] KKB-364, Dallas.”358*
12:45 p.m.
In Irving, Marina is hanging up clothes in the backyard when Ruth comes out and joins her with the latest news: “They’re reporting that the shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository.”
Marina’s heart drops. She thinks about the rifle she knows that Lee has stored in Ruth Paine’s garage, about the last time he used it—a few months earlier in trying to murder Dallas John Birch Society figure Major General Edwin Walker—and whether that might have been the real reason he came out to the house last night. She hopes that Ruth can’t see the fear in her face.
As soon as she can do it inconspicuously, Marina slips into the garage. She knows exactly where the rifle is, wrapped in a green and brown wool blanket, near the garage door, by some suitcases. She saw the blanket there in early October and unwrapped it then and found the rifle inside. Is it still there? When she gets inside the garage, she sees the familiar bundle laying in the same place it had been before, and feels a great weight lift from her shoulders.
“Thank God,” she thinks.359
William Whaley, a squat, burr-haired former navy gunner who won a Navy Cross during the battle of Iwo Jima, pulls his cab up to the cabstand at the Greyhound bus station on the northwest corner of Jackson and Lamar, four blocks south of Elm Street, and realizes that he’s out of cigarettes. He’s about to go inside the terminal to get a pack when he sees a fare walking toward him down Lamar Street.360
“May I have the cab?” the man asks.
“You sure can,” Whaley says. “Get in.”
To Whaley, Lee Oswald looks like a wino who has been off his bottle for about two days, like he’s been sleeping in his clothes, although he isn’t actually dirty or nervous or anything.361 Oswald gets in the front, which is allowed in Dallas, and Whaley’s got nothing against it. A second later an elderly woman pokes her head in the passenger’s window and asks if she can get in his cab.
“There’ll be a cab behind me in a few moments that you can take,” Whaley tells her, and he vaguely recalls that Oswald may have told the woman something similar.362 As he pulls the 1961 Checker sedan out into Lamar and turns west into Jackson, he asks his fare where he wants to go.
“Five hundred North Beckley.”
Police cars, their sirens wailing, are crisscrossing everywhere.
“I wonder what the hell is the uproar,” Whaley muses, but Oswald doesn’t answer and Whaley figures he’s one of those people who doesn’t like to talk, which is fine with him.363
Whaley, who has been driving cabs for thirty-seven years, notices Oswald’s silver ID bracelet. He always takes note of watchbands and identification bracelets because he makes them himself, and this one is unusual. Most of them are made with chain links, not stretch bands, like this one.364 They drive in silence, turning left at the first corner, Austin, and then onto Wood. They catch the light at Lamar and Jackson and several others as they move smartly through traffic down to Houston, the street they call the “old viaduct,” which is the fastest way to Oak Cliff.365
Dallas police radio dispatcher Murray J. Jackson can see from the call-board in front of him that many of the patrolmen assigned to the Oak Cliff area (south of the Trinity River, which separates it from downtown Dallas, and before the emergence of North Dallas in later years, perhaps the biggest area of Dallas) have gone downtown to help in the assassination investigation.366 He knows that if an emergency such as an armed robbery or a major accident occurs in that area, there might not be anyone to respond quickly to the call. He decides to pull two of the outermost patrol units in Oak Cliff closer to central Oak Cliff just in case something comes up. Units 78 and 87 (radio call numbers for Dallas Police Districts 78 and 87)* get the call—J. D. Tippit and Ronald C. Nelson.367
“[Units] 87 and 78, move into central Oak Cliff area,” Jackson orders, basically giving Tippit and Nelson a blank check to move at will within the roughly five or six police districts that could be considered as Oak Cliff.
Tippit, cruising his beat alone in south Oak Cliff on the 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. day shift, lifts the radio microphone first.
“I’m at Kiest and Bonnieview,” Tippit replies.
But Nelson shoots back, “[Unit] 87’s going north on Marsalis, [at] R. L. Thornton.”368
Dispatcher Jackson knows from Nelson’s location that he is already on his way downtown to join other units. He decides to let him go. Tippit can handle anything that might come up, he figures. Jackson has known “J. D.”† for eleven years and in that time they’ve become close friends. In fact, it was Tippit who originally got Jackson interested in police work. In 1952, Murray was a high school graduate working at a Mobil filling station where Tippit and his partner used to stop occasionally. Tippit was his image of a hero, and through J. D.’s encouragement, Jackson was successful at joining the force. After a promotion to patrolman, Jackson and Tippit were partnered for eight months and the bond between the two men strengthened.
One night in the early 1960s, Jackson was working temporarily with new partner Bill Johnson when they arrested seven teenagers for being drunk and disorderly. En route to the Oak Cliff substation, the teenagers decided they didn’t want to go to jail and a fight broke out in the squad car. Jackson put out a call for assistance and J. D. was the first to arrive.
“Thanks, partner,” Jackson told him, “you saved my life.”
The humor of the situation wasn’t lost on Tippit, who joked and chided Jackson, “I turn you loose one time and I got to come down here and save your life.” Of course, Jackson’s life wasn’t really in any danger. It was just Tippit’s way of kidding his former police apprentice.
It was with this incident in mind that Jackson called on Tippit to help him out again, this time by covering an area outside his own assigned district.369
But it obviously wasn’t necessary for Jackson to have this prior relationship with Tippit to get him to go into central Oak Cliff. Tippit was on duty and had to go wherever assigned. Moreover, Tippit was not the type of officer to complain about much, being easy to get along with. Not overly ambitious, and with only a tenth-grade education, he wasn’t “sharp enough,” as one Dallas detective who knew Tippit said, to pass department promotional exams. However, the shy officer loved his job and seemed more than satisfied to remain a patrolman, resigned to his inability to advance because of his limited education. Well liked by his fellow officers, his immediate supervisor on the force, Sergeant Calvin B. Owens, described Tippit as a “good officer” who used “good common sense.” A Dallas police officer, Donald Flusche, said that Tippit and he “worked together in West Dallas. He was really a good and decent man…He was pretty much a country boy…He was kind of bashful, thought a little slow, moved a little slow, but there was nothing dishonest about him.”370 Seldom talking about politics, Tippit, age thirty-nine, had voted for John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election. On this day, Tippit had come home to have lunch with his wife, Marie, around 11:30 a.m., hurried through his food, and reported back for duty by 11:50 with a “78 clear” transmission from his car radio to the police dispatcher.371
12:50 p.m.
Forrest S
orrels, the agent in charge of the Dallas Secret Service office, arrives at the side of the Texas School Book Depository and walks to the same backdoor used by Frazier and Oswald that morning.372 There is a black employee on the loading dock who doesn’t seem to realize what’s happened.
“Did you see anyone run out the back?” Sorrels asks him, as he approaches.
“No, sir,” the man replies.
“Did you see anyone leave the back way?” Sorrels probes.
“No, sir,” the man says again.373
The agent proceeds to the first floor by the rear loading-dock door, and to his surprise there’s nobody in law enforcement there to challenge him.
“Where is the manager here?” he asks upon entering the building.
Someone directs him to Roy Truly. Sorrels pulls out his Secret Service credentials.
“I want to get a stenographer,” he tells him, “and we would like to have you put down the names and addresses of every employee in the building.”374 Sorrels has not yet learned that shots have been fired from the building. He simply wants to establish the identity of everyone present at the time of the shooting so that they can be interviewed later.375 Sorrels heads for the front of the building, pushes open the glass front doors, and steps out onto the concrete landing, “Is there anyone here that saw anything?”
“That man over there,” a voice calls out, pointing to Howard Brennan standing nearby.
Sorrels bounds down the steps and identifies himself to the construction worker. “What did you see?” he asks.
Brennan tells him what happened and how he glanced up at the building and saw the man take deliberate aim and fire the third shot. “He just pulled the rifle back in and moved away from the window, just as unconcerned as could be,” Brennan says.
After Brennan gives him a description of the gunman, Sorrels asks him if he thought he could identify him and Brennan says, “Yes, I think I can.”
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