Nation: The Assassination

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To President Kennedy, popularity was the breath of life—and now he was breathing of it deeply. Texas was supposed to be a hostile political land, but for 23 hours he had been acclaimed there. Conservative Dallas was supposed to be downright dangerous, but he had just come from a warm airport welcome and along much of his motorcade route in the downtown district he had basked in waves of applause from crowds lined ten and twelve deep. What was about to happen must have been the farthest thing from his mind.

Next to him sat Jackie. In front of them, on jump seats of the President's Lincoln, its bubbletop off, were Texas' Democratic Governor John Connally, 46, and his wife Nellie. As the President's car approached an underpass near the intersection of Elm, Main and Commerce Streets, Nellie Connally turned to Kennedy, said laughingly: "You can't say that Dallas isn't friendly to you today." The President started to reply . . .

That reply was stilled by a shot. It was 12:30 p.m. C.S.T., and in a split second a thousand things happened. The President's body slumped to the left; his right leg shot up over the car door. A woman close by at the curb saw it. "My God!" she screamed. "He's shot!" Blood gushed from the President's head as it came to rest in Jackie's lap. "Jack!" she cried. "Oh, no! No!"

John Connally turned—and by turning, probably saved his own life. There were two more shots, and a bullet pierced his back, plowed down through his chest, fractured his right wrist, and lodged in his left thigh. A photographer looked up at a seven-story building on the corner—the Texas School Book Depository, a warehouse for textbooks—and caught a glimpse of a rifle barrel being withdrawn from a window on the sixth floor.

There was a shocked, momentary stillness, a frozen tableau. Then Kennedy's driver cried: "Let's get out of here quick!" He automatically pulled out of the motorcade—the set procedure in emergencies. The Secret Service agent next to him grabbed the radio telephone, called ahead to the police escorts, and ordered them to make for the nearest hospital. Jackie bent low, cradling the President's head in her lap, and the Lincoln bolted ahead as if the shots themselves had gunned the engine into life. Spurting to 70 m.p.h., it fled down the highway, rounding curves on two wheels. A Secret Service man, who had jumped onto the rear bumper of the car, flung himself across the trunk, and in his anger and frustration pounded it repeatedly with his fist.

The next car in line, an open touring sedan containing agents bristling with weapons, followed swiftly. In the third car, an open convertible carrying the Lyndon Johnsons and Texas' Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough, security agents yelled for the passengers to duck low, and that car followed in wild pursuit.