The Assassination

Assassination was impossible. John Kennedy, with Jackie beside him in her raspberry pink suit, was too young, too exuberant to fall. The Secret Service, snooping beneath manhole covers, scanning for hostile eyes, was invincible. There would be no darkness on this bright day in Dallas.

How fragile our myths, how fleeting certainty.

Perhaps we knew when the first sound reached the press bus behind Kennedy's limousine. A distant crack, another. A pause, and another crack. Something was dangerously off-key.

Bob Pierpoint of CBS stood up, and our eyes met for ever so tiny an instant. We knew but did not want to believe. "What was that?" he asked. Doug Kiker, now of NBC, then a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, was typing on his lap. He paused. Kennedy's limousine had turned the corner beneath a boxy, ugly building and sunk out of sight. The pigeons -- the famous pigeons of death -- were rising and swooping under the trees.

Pierpoint stood still for a couple more seconds, Kiker pecked a time or two. Three seconds, four. Then reality rushed with terrifying clarity down that short street beneath the Texas School Book Depository. We were never the same, nor was the world.

The story at the core was the stuff of everyday American violence. A killer and a city street and a wild ride to an emergency room and a young body too broken to repair. But it was Camelot and this was John Kennedy, and television now rushed in to make the dreadful event an epic.

Madness descended. Motorcycle cops jumped curbs, machines roaring over the grass in a ballet of aimless panic. The crowd on the grassy knoll looked like it had been swept with a giant scythe. The street was empty, a stark, lifeless slab of concrete that smelled of disaster. Kennedy's motorcade had been chopped in two like a luckless centipede, the front end blown to God knew where, the rear end writhing and thrashing.

The presidential limousine rested at Parkland Hospital. A grim young man was washing away the blood and flesh that had splattered the leather upholstery. The sight was shattering. The red roses given to Jackie were still in the car -- crushed, broken. The young man in his neat dark suit, sleeves pushed up, swabbed the seats. They glistened in their miserable wetness. Beside the car was a bucket with brownish red water. If any doubt remained about this calamity, it was swept away in one glance at that bucket. So simple, so hideous.

The nurses' classroom at Parkland became a vortex of the world's clamor for information. Each word from that tiny point of a suburban hospital was flung across continents.

Two priests left the hospital, silent, sagging. Their duty was plainly over, whatever it had been. Asked if Kennedy was dead or alive, they remained silent for a few seconds. Then one of them blurted the terrible truth: "He's dead, all right." The four words were carried back to the temporary pressroom, then exploded around the world.