Reclaiming History (24 page)

In fact, J. D. has plans to see Jack and his family tonight. Earlier this morning, J. D. stopped at his sister’s house on the way to work and got a ticket to the South Oak Cliff High School football game, where his niece, Linda, will be performing with the Golden Debs cheerleading squad. As he’s done on Friday nights past, he’ll have to beat it over to Austin’s Barbeque before the game gets out and a good part of the grandstand shows up. It’ll be another busy Friday night keeping the high school rowdies in line at Austin’s.
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12:57 p.m.

In a second-floor operating room at Parkland, an anesthesiologist rapidly evaluates Connally’s condition and starts to put the governor under for an operation that will last well over three hours.
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Dr. Robert Shaw and Dr. Charles F. Gregory, chief of orthopedic surgery, enter the operating room, where Connally lies ready for surgery. Dr. Shaw removes the temporary dressing and inspects Connally’s chest wounds. After three years with the U.S. Army Medical Corps in the European Theater of Operations, Shaw is no stranger to bullet wounds.
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The surgeons place an endotracheal tube into the pharynx and trachea to control the governor’s breathing, then roll him over to inspect the entrance wound just behind his right armpit, a roughly elliptical puncture with relatively clean-cut edges. Turning to the large and ragged exit wound below the right nipple, Shaw excises its edges, and then carries the incision back along the right side of the governor’s chest and finds that about four inches of the fifth rib have been shattered and carried away from what appears to have been a glancing strike by the bullet. Several small fragments of the rib are still hanging to bits of partly detached tissue from the rib’s lining. An X-ray reveals no metallic fragments left behind by the bullet in the area of the ribs. There’s a lot of damage to the right lung, which is engorged with blood and rib fragments. It will have to be closed and sutured, along with the muscles surrounding the rib cage, but the diaphragm is uninjured, and the wounds are far from fatal. The governor has also sustained wounds on both sides of his right wrist and a superficial wound in his left thigh. X-rays reveal a shattering of the radius bone just above the right wrist and the presence of a number of small metallic fragments. There’s several hours of work to do, but it’s clear to the surgeons that Governor Connally will survive his injuries.
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12:58 p.m.

An unmarked squad car pulls up to the front of the Book Depository, and Police Captain Will Fritz, Detectives Sims and Boyd, and Sheriff Bill Decker climb out. An officer in front of the building tells them that the man who did the shooting is believed to be still in the building. Several officers take out their shotguns and follow Fritz and his men as they enter the Depository. They quickly locate an elevator and go up to the second floor, where they see several officers already there. They continue up, finding officers already stationed on the third and fourth floors.

This particular elevator only goes to the fourth floor, so Fritz and his men exit the elevator and cross over to the freight elevators near the northwest corner of the building, and take one up to the fifth floor. They make a hurried search along the front and west side windows, then, joined by some other officers, go up to the sixth floor. A few officers get off on the sixth, and Fritz, Sims, and Boyd continue up to the seventh floor and start to search along the front windows.
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F
ather James Thompson drives into Parkland in the black Ford Galaxie belonging to Holy Trinity Church. Parkland is only three miles from the church, but the traffic is brutal. Even though he took a “secret route” taking advantage of back streets, he and Father Oscar Huber found themselves held up by what seemed like endless traffic delays. Both of them are worried because they know that the last rites of the Catholic Church, to be valid, must be administered to the dying before the soul has left the body. Father Huber, like many parish priests, takes a liberal view of that—to his way of thinking, there can be quite a long time between what the doctors call clinical death and the eventual flight of the soul, but that’s no reason to dally. As they pull up, Father Thompson tells Father Huber to jump out of the car and hurry into the hospital while he finds a place to park.
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Father Huber saw Jack Kennedy, it seems to him, only minutes ago. He knew that the president’s motorcade would pass within three blocks of Holy Trinity, and when he rose at five this morning in his room at the rectory, he resolved to go down to see it. He was disappointed that he couldn’t interest any of the other priests in the project.

“Well, I’m going,” he told them. “I’m seventy years old and I’ve never seen a president. I’ll be danged if I’m going to miss this chance.”

Huber, a short, stocky man, had to leap up and down to see over the heads of the dense crowd, but managed to get a glimpse of Kennedy, who turned and seemed to look right at him. Now he hurries to the emergency entrance to give the last rites to this once-vibrant man. The significance of his arrival is not lost on anyone.

“This is it,” Congressman Henry Gonzalez thinks as he sees Huber arrive at the hospital. Malcolm Kilduff, the president’s acting press secretary, whispers to Congressman Albert Thomas, “It looks like he’s gone.”
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I
n Oak Cliff, at 1026 North Beckley, Earlene Roberts tugs at the “rabbit ear” antennas trying to get a clear picture on the television set when the young man she knows as “O. H. Lee” enters, walking unusually fast, in shirt sleeves.

“You sure are in a hurry,” the housekeeper says, but he goes straight to his room without saying a word.
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That isn’t so strange. Since renting the room in mid-October, “O. H. Lee” has hardly said two words to anyone. Once, Mrs. Roberts said “good afternoon” to him and he just gave her a dirty look and walked right past her. At night, if one of the other boarders had the television on in the living room, he might stand behind the couch for a couple of minutes, but then he’d go to his room and shut the door without a word. For the most part, “O. H. Lee” has kept to himself, which is why Mrs. Roberts doesn’t really know anything about him, least of all the fact that his real name is Lee Harvey Oswald.
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Oswald is in his room just long enough to get his revolver and his jacket. He comes out of his room, zipping up his jacket, and rushes out.
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Mrs. Roberts glances out the window a moment later and notices Lee standing at the curbside near a bus stop in front of the rooming house. That’s the last she sees of him.
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He apparently doesn’t wait to board any bus since there is no record of anyone seeing him on a bus after one o’clock, and if he had boarded a bus in front of his home, it would take him in a direction away from where we know he was next seen.

1:00 p.m.

At Parkland Hospital, Dr. Kemp Clark feels the carotid artery in the president’s neck for a pulse. There is none. Clark asks that a cardiotachyscope (a cardiac monitor that measures heartbeat) be connected to the president’s body, and starts external heart massage,
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an unsophisticated physical procedure practiced by physicians from the sixteenth century, even before they understood anything about the circulation of blood in the body.

The anesthesiologists, Drs. Jenkins and Giesecke, now report a carotid pulse in the neck, and Dr. Jones reports a pulse in the femoral artery in the leg. After a few moments, Dr. Perry takes over for Dr. Clark, who is in an awkward physical position to continue the rigorous cardiac massage.
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“Somebody get me a stool,” Dr. Perry commands. A stool is slid near the table and Perry stands on it to get better leverage as he works the livid white flesh beneath his palms. Drs. Jenkins and Clark watch the cardiotachyscope. The green dot suddenly darts across the screen trailing a perfectly smooth line of fluorescence, without the tiniest squiggle of cardiac activity.
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Dr. Clark shakes his head sadly, “It’s too late, Mac.” Perry slowly raises himself up from the body, steps down off the stool, and walks numbly away. Dr. Jenkins reaches down from the head of the cart and pulls a white sheet up over the president’s face as Dr. Clark turns to Mrs. Kennedy.

“Your husband has sustained a fatal wound,” he says solemnly.

Her lips move silently, forming the words, “I
know
.”

It is one o’clock and it’s all over. The thirty-fifth president of the United States is dead.
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*

As the senior neurosurgeon, Dr. Clark will sign the death certificate, and the cause is so obviously the massive damage to the right side of the brain.
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It is what they call a four-plus injury,
†
which no one survives, even with the five-star effort they made. Clark knows what Carrico and the others knew from the outset—medically, the president was alive when he entered Parkland Hospital, but from a practical standpoint he was DOA, dead on arrival.
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As
New York Times
White House correspondent Tom Wicker, who was in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting, put it, Kennedy probably died way back on Elm Street a half hour earlier. He “probably was killed instantly. His body, as a physical mechanism, however, continued to flicker an occasional pulse and heartbeat.”
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Dr. Jenkins starts disconnecting the multitude of monitoring leads running to the lifeless body and removing the intravenous lines. Admiral Burkley begins to weep openly. Mrs. Kennedy moves toward the hospital cart where her husband lies, and Jenkins retreats quietly to a corner of the room. Looking pale and remote, she leans down and kisses the president through the sheet on the foot, leg, thigh, abdomen, chest, and finally on the partly covered face.
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Father Oscar Huber enters the room out of breath and walks directly to Jackie Kennedy. He whispers his sympathies, draws back a sheet that is covering the president’s face, pulls the purple and white stoll over his shoulders, wets his right thumb with holy oil and administers in Latin the last rites of the Catholic Church, the sacrament of extreme unction, including the anointing of a cross with his thumb over the president’s forehead. Because the president was dead, a “short form” of absolution was given, and in a few minutes he finishes and steps back.

“Is that
all
?” Admiral Burkley blurts out, offended at the brevity of the ceremony. The death of a president deserves more, he thought. “Can’t you say some prayers for the dead?”

Father Huber quickly obliges with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary, joined by the widow and Admiral Burkley, while the nurses who are cleaning up the appalling mess in the room remain still, their heads bowed. Father Thompson, having parked the car outside, steps in just as they are finishing.

Mrs. Kennedy turns and walks back out into the corridor, slumping into the folding chair just outside the door. The two priests follow.

“I am shocked,” Father Huber says to her, his body beginning to tremble. “I want to extend my sympathy and that of my parishioners.”

“Thank you for taking care of the president,” she whispers. “Please pray for him.”

“I am convinced that his soul had not left his body,” he assures her. “This was a valid last sacrament.”

Mrs. Kennedy’s head drops down as she struggles to keep from fainting. Father Thompson signals a passing nurse.

“Do you want a doctor?” Father Huber asks Mrs. Kennedy.

“Oh, no,” she mumbles. The nurse brings her a cold towel anyway. The First Lady presses it to her forehead and leans over until the spell passes.
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Across the hall from Trauma Room One, the two priests confer briefly. What will they say to the horde of reporters outside as they leave? It’s clearly not their role to make any statement at all. In fact, as they head for the exit a Secret Service agent warns Huber, “Father, you don’t know anything about this.”

Just as they feared, they are besieged in the parking lot by the news media. Father Thompson refuses to give his name, but Father Huber is unable to remain silent.

“Is he dead?” Hugh Sidey of
Time
magazine asks.

“He’s dead all right,” Huber answers.
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1:05 p.m. (2:05 p.m. EST)

At his Virginia home, Robert Kennedy is in an upstairs bedroom with his wife, Ethel, preparing to leave for Dallas. The White House extension phone rings and he practically dives for it. It’s Captain Taz Shepard, the president’s naval aide, with news from Parkland.

“Oh, he’s dead!” Bobby cries out in anguish.

“Those poor children,” Ethel says in tears.

The attorney general stares out the window.

“He had the most wonderful life,” he finally manages to say.

Bobby Kennedy descends the stairs and pokes his head into the living room where Robert Morgenthau and several others are watching television coverage.

“He died,” Kennedy says in a low voice and walks toward the pool, where the extension phone has rung. It’s J. Edgar Hoover again. He informs the attorney general, in a cold and unsympathetic manner characteristic of the FBI director, that the president is in “very, very critical condition.” Bobby Kennedy listens politely, then says, “It may interest you to know that my brother is dead.”
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RFK is plunged into a staggering gloom and depression by his brother’s murder, one from which his intimates said he never recovered. For months thereafter, a biographer wrote, he “seemed devoured by grief. He literally shrank, until he appeared wasted and gaunt. His clothes no longer fit, especially his brother’s old clothes—an old blue topcoat, a tuxedo, and a leather bomber jacket with the presidential seal—which he insisted on wearing and which hung on his narrowing frame. To close friend John Seigenthaler, he appeared to be in physical pain, like a man with a toothache or on a rack. Even walking seemed too difficult for him, though he walked for hours, brooding and alone…On many winter nights he arose before dawn and drove, too fast, in his Ford Galaxie convertible with the top down, sometimes to see his brother’s grave.” That is why it is all the more remarkable that within an hour of his brother’s death, and in the trancelike midst of his dark abyss, the protective concern over his dead brother’s well-manicured image enables him to extricate himself enough to call JFK’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, over at the White House. He instructs Bundy to immediately change the locks on his brother’s personal files in the event that Lyndon Johnson decides to comb through them, and transport them to the offices of the national security staff located in the Old Executive Office Building, with a round-the-clock guard. And though he has no jurisdiction over the Secret Service, he has them dismantle and remove the secret taping system his brother had installed in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room.
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