a happy foursome that beautiful morning,” Nellie Connally writes in her book, From Love Field: Our Final Hours with President Kennedy. Both she and Jackie wear pink suits and carry roses, Jackie’s red and Nellie’s yellow. “Everything was so perfect.”
As the excited crowds cheer, Nellie turns in her seat to face Jack and says, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”
The president is smiling and waving his right hand at onlookers. Jackie has in her lap the bouquet of roses Dallas mayor Earle Cabell presented to her at Love Field. The day was “hot, wild,” Jackie recalls. “The sun was so strong in our faces.”
“Suddenly,” Lady Bird Johnson records, “there was a sharp loud report—a shot. It seemed to me to come from the right above my shoulder from a building. Then a moment and then two more shots in rapid succession.”
Dallas Morning News staff writer Mary Elizabeth Woodward, along with three newsroom colleagues, watch from across Elm Street just east of the triple underpass. Woodward’s article, titled “Witness from the News Describes Assassination,” states, “We were almost certainly the last faces [John F. Kennedy] noticed in the crowd. After acknowledging our cheers, he faced forward again and suddenly there was a horrible, ear-shattering noise, coming from behind us and a little to the right.”
What Woodward does not reveal in her eyewitness account is her lifelong hearing problem. She comes to deeply regret that omission, as the direction she gives for the source of the sound does not match the location of the Texas Book Depository where Oswald had holed up—and that discrepancy fuels decades of speculation. In her 2017 Dallas News obituary, she calls it “something that I have regretted the rest of my life because every conspiracy theorist in the world has quoted that. And I’m convinced that I did not hear it correctly.”
Roy H. Kellerman, special agent in charge, testifies on December 18, 1963, that after hearing the first shot, he “turned around to find out what happened when two additional shots rang out, and the President slumped into Mrs. Kennedy’s lap and Governor Connally fell into Mrs. Connally’s lap. I heard Mrs. Kennedy shout, ‘What are they doing to you?’”
* * *
Abraham Zapruder will spend the rest of his life answering that very question.
“How many times will you have a crack at [taking] color movies of the president?” Lillian Rogers, Zapruder’s secretary at his apparel manufacturing company, Jennifer Juniors, tells her boss. She sends “Mr. Z”—a fifty-eight-year-old Kennedy enthusiast who’d emigrated from Russia as a teenager—home to retrieve his high-end Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series Camera, already loaded with eight-millimeter Kodachrome II color safety film.
The clothing factory occupies two floors of the Dal-Tex Building, located across the street from the Texas School Book Depository where the armed Oswald lurks. Zapruder walks a block toward Elm Street, steps onto a raised concrete platform, and points his viewfinder at the approaching motorcade.
The visuals Abraham Zapruder captures over the next twenty-six seconds instantly convince him that he has just witnessed an assassination. “They killed him!” he shouts at bystanders. Then, minutes later, “It was terrible. I saw his head come off.”
“I think he was very sorry to be the guy who got it on film,” says Zapruder’s granddaughter, Alexandra, decades later. “It brought him nothing but heartbreak.”
* * *
“Step on it! We’re hit!” Roy H. Kellerman orders Bill Greer. As the Continental speeds toward Parkland Memorial Hospital, Jackie protectively cradles her dying husband, his bright red blood seeping into her pink suit.
“It’s the image of yellow roses and red roses and blood all over the car…all over us,” recalls Nellie Connally. “I’ll never forget it.”
Lady Bird Johnson catches a tragic glimpse as their cars speed off. “I cast one last look over my shoulder and saw a bundle of pink, just like a drift of blossoms, lying in the back seat.”
Chapter 20
Hugh Aynesworth, a thirty-two-year-old aerospace reporter for the Dallas Morning News, isn’t assigned to cover the president’s visit, but figures he won’t be missed from an empty newsroom. He works his way through the crowd and finds a place in front of the Texas School Book Depository a few minutes before twelve thirty.
Shots ring out and panic erupts around him: “My reporter instinct kicked in. I saw a man across from me pointing up to the sixth-floor window, saying, “he’s up there”…He [Howard Brennan] was the only witness, and he described the shooter perfectly.”
* * *
At the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department, Howard Leslie Brennan, a