Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy (70 page)

In the backseat of the Lincoln, Jackie Kennedy holds her husband’s head and quietly sobs. “He’s dead. They’ve killed him. Oh Jack, oh Jack. I love you.”

*   *   *

Lee Harvey Oswald is doing everything right. He’s walking east up Elm Street to catch a bus. The panic and chaos that now define Dealey Plaza recede behind him. No one has stopped Oswald. At this point, no one even suspects him.

Meanwhile, his escape plan is coming together slowly. For now, the assassin is on his way to his rooming house to pick up his pistol—just in case.

*   *   *

The radio call of “Code 3” means an emergency of the highest importance to Dallas-area hospitals. The term is almost never used. So when Parkland dispatcher Anne Ferguson requests more details, she is simply told, “The president has been shot.”

The time is 12:33
P.M.

Three minutes later, the presidential limousine roars into Parkland, blowing past the sign reading “Emergency Cases Only.” Bill Greer parks in the middle of the three ambulance bays.

But there is no stretcher waiting, no emergency team rushing to help the president. Incredibly, a breakdown in communications has stymied the hospital’s emergency response. The trauma team has barely been notified.

So those inside the presidential limo simply wait.

Nellie Connally lies atop her husband, even as a moaning Jackie Kennedy holds John Kennedy’s head.

Halfback pulls up, right behind SS-100-X. Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, men who have been in the political trenches with JFK since the 1946 congressional campaign, rush to the Lincoln, hoping for the best. The president still has a faint pulse—which continues to push pint after pint of blood out through his head wound.

“Get up,” Secret Service special agent Emory Roberts commands Jackie Kennedy.

She doesn’t move. She has positioned her arms and jacket so that no one can see JFK’s face or head. The First Lady does not want her husband remembered this way.

Roberts delicately lifts Jackie’s arm so he can see for himself if the president is dead. One look is all he needs. Roberts backs off.

Dave Powers sees the fixed pupils gazing sightlessly into the distance and breaks into tears. O’Donnell, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, reverts to his soldier days and snaps to attention as a sign of numb respect.

Even if Jackie were to try to move right now, she would have nowhere to go. The slumped body of John Connally blocks the car’s door, meaning that the governor of Texas must be moved before the president of the United States can be lifted from the Lincoln.

It is Dave Powers, not hospital personnel, who finally sets aside his tears and lifts Connally out by the legs and onto a gurney. The governor is conscious, though just barely. His wounds are life threatening, and the emergency physicians at Parkland will be very busy today trying to save Connally’s life. (They will succeed—a rare bit of good news on a brutal day.)

Though Connally has been wheeled inside to Trauma Room Two and no longer obstructs the car door, Jackie Kennedy still refuses to let go of her husband. When she lets go, she knows he’s gone forever. This will be the last time she holds him. The First Lady curls her body forward so that the president’s blood-soaked face and her breasts come together. She weeps quietly, pushing her body closer and closer to her husband’s.

“Mrs. Kennedy,” Special Agent Clint Hill says, “please let us help the president.”

Jackie doesn’t respond. But she knows that voice. It is the soft command of a man who has protected her from danger night and day.

The voice of Clint Hill is the only voice Jackie responds to in her moment of shocked grief.

Hill softly places his hand on her shoulder. The First Lady trembles, in mourning.

The quiet crowd of Secret Service agents and Kennedy staffers around the Lincoln do not speak. The seconds tick past.

“Please, Mrs. Kennedy. Please let us get him into the hospital,” Hill implores.

“I’m not going to let him go, Mr. Hill,” Jackie says.

“We’ve got to take him in, Mrs. Kennedy.”

“No, Mr. Hill. You know he’s dead. Leave me alone.”

Jackie sobs. Her body jerks as pain courses through her.

Hill realizes something. It’s bad enough that she is seeing the man she loves with his head blown off, but she doesn’t want anyone else seeing him like that. And as the media descend onto Parkland Hospital even in the midst of Jackie’s lonely Pietà, there is no way in the world Jackie will allow John Fitzgerald Kennedy to be photographed in this state.

Clint Hill is exhausted. He has worked long hours on this trip and gotten by on little food and even less sleep. But there’s nothing he won’t do for Jackie Kennedy. Knowing in an instant that it is the right thing to do, Special Agent Hill removes his suit coat and sets it gently atop the president’s body.

Jackie Kennedy, her pink suit and white gloves now covered in the president’s copious blood, wraps her husband’s head and torso in Clint Hill’s coat.

Then, for the last time, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy lets go of the man she loves. The president is placed atop a gurney and hustled down to Trauma Room One, those pushing the gurney following the red line on the floor. The walls are tiled in tan, and atop the president’s chest is the bouquet of bloody red roses, which have stuck to his body.

*   *   *

About four miles away from the bloody hospital scene, Lee Harvey Oswald boards a bus at the corner of Elm and Murphy and completes his getaway.

*   *   *

The assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 was a spiderweb of conspiracy. On the same evening that Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre, there were also plans to kill his vice president and secretary of state. Had those plans succeeded, the top level of American government would have been beheaded.

As soon as the first shot is fired in Dallas, those long-ago events are instantly remembered. Immediate steps are taken to ensure that a possible conspiracy is not completed. Several members of the cabinet are west of Hawaii, en route to Japan. A radio call orders them to turn around and come home.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson is under constant watch the instant his rented limousine arrives at Parkland Hospital. He is hustled into a small white cubicle in Parkland’s Minor Medicine section with his wife, Lady Bird. A Secret Service detail guards his life. A patient and a nurse are kicked out to make room for them. There is no word yet on the fate of the president, though everyone knows that surviving such a gunshot wound is just about impossible. The Secret Service wants LBJ flown immediately back to Washington and out of harm’s way. Failing that, it would like him relocated to the safest possible security zone in Dallas: Air Force One.

But Vice President Johnson refuses to leave the hospital. He remains waiting for word of President Kennedy’s fate. The Secret Service pressures him again and again to depart, but LBJ will not go. Johnson is planning his next steps. Until the presidential succession is official, he will deliver no orders. The oath of office is not necessary to make him officially president. Succession will take place the instant JFK is declared dead. So LBJ stands there in the small cubicle at Parkland Hospital, leaning against the wall and sipping coffee in complete silence, waiting for the official announcement of President Kennedy’s death.

In Trauma Room One, the president’s body is stripped, except for his underwear. His gold watch is removed from his wrist. He no longer has a regular pulse, but he breathes in short breaths. Blood continues to pour out of his head wound and the hole in his throat; the rest of his body is unscathed. An overhead fluorescent lamp lights the small army of medical professionals at work in the trauma room. The first doctor on the scene is second-year medical resident Charles J. Carrico, who knows what to do and acts quickly. A tube is inserted into John Kennedy’s throat to open his airway, and saline solution is pumped into his body through his right femoral vein.

The room slowly fills with surgeons, until there are fourteen doctors standing over the president. Outside the trauma room, Jackie Kennedy sits in a folding chair holding vigil.

Dr. Mac Perry, a thirty-four-year-old surgeon, now steps in to head the team. He uses a scalpel to slice open the president’s throat and perform a tracheotomy, while someone else attaches a tube to a respirator to induce regular breathing.

Jackie now rises from her chair, determined to enter the trauma room. She has heard the talk about fluids and resuscitation and is beginning to hope that her husband might just live. A nurse blocks her path, but the demure First Lady can display an iron will when she wants to. “I’m going to get into that room,” she repeats over and over as she wrestles with Nurse Doris Nelson, who shows no signs of backing down. “I’m going to get into that room.”

“Mrs. Kennedy, you need a sedative,” a nearby doctor tells her.

But the First Lady does not wish to be numbed. She wants to feel every last moment with her husband. “I want to be in there when he dies,” she says firmly.

*   *   *

Bobby Kennedy gets the bad news from J. Edgar Hoover.

As the head of America’s top law enforcement agency, Hoover is informed of the shooting almost immediately. The FBI director is a dispassionate man, but never more so than right now. He sits at his desk on the fifth floor of the Justice Department Building as he picks up the phone to call Bobby Kennedy. It has been fifteen minutes since Lee Harvey Oswald first pulled the trigger. The surgical trauma team at Parkland is fighting to keep the president alive.

Bobby is just about to eat a tuna fish sandwich on the patio of his Virginia home when his wife, Ethel, tells him he has a call.

“It’s J. Edgar Hoover,” she tells Bobby.

The attorney general knows this must be important. The director knows better than to call Bobby at home. He sets down his sandwich and goes to the phone. It’s a special direct government line known as Extension 163.

“I have news for you,” Hoover says. “The president has been shot.”

Bobby hangs up. His first reaction is one of great distress, and his body seems to go slack. But his next thought, as always, is to protect his older brother. He calls the White House and has all the locks on JFK’s file cabinets changed so that Lyndon Johnson cannot go through them. The most delicate files are completely removed from the White House and placed under round-the-clock security.

Bobby then fields phone call after phone call from friends and family. He holds back tears, but Ethel knows that her husband is breaking down and hands him a pair of dark glasses to hide his red-rimmed eyes.

The calls don’t stop. In the midst of them all, Bobby realizes that the tables have been turned. And he knows that he will soon get a call from a man he despises.

*   *   *

Jackie Kennedy gets the bad news from Dr. William Kemp Clark.

It comes just moments after, against great odds, the First Lady battles her way into the trauma room. She stands in a corner, out of the way, just wanting to be near her husband.

The sight is singularly medical, as tubes now sprout from the president’s mouth, nose, and chest. His skin is the palest white. Blood is being transfused into his body. Dr. Mac Perry presses down on the president’s sternum to restart the heart, even as the electrocardiogram machine shows a flat line. Dr. William Kemp Clark, Parkland’s chief neurosurgeon, assists Perry by monitoring the EKG for even a flicker of deviation.

Finally, Clark knows they can do no more. A sheet is drawn over JFK’s face. Dr. Clark turns to Jackie Kennedy. “Your husband has sustained a fatal wound,” the veteran surgeon tells the First Lady.

“I know,” she replies.

“The president is dead.”

Jackie leans up and presses her cheek to that of Dr. Clark. It is an expression of thanks. Kemp Clark, a hard man who served in the Pacific in World War II, can’t help himself. He breaks down and sobs.

*   *   *

Most people in the United States get the bad news of the president’s death from CBS newsman Walter Cronkite.

The most trusted man in America first breaks into the soap opera
As the World Turns
just eight minutes after the shooting, saying that an assassin has fired three shots at the president. Despite the fact that most Americans are at work or school, and not home watching daytime television, more than seventy-five million people are aware of the shooting by 1:00
P.M.

*   *   *

Lyndon Baines Johnson gets the bad news from Kenny O’Donnell.

Shortly after 1:00
P.M
., John F. Kennedy’s appointments secretary marches into the small white cubicle in the Minor Medicine section of the hospital and stands before Lyndon Johnson. O’Donnell is openly distraught. He is not the sort of man who weeps at calamity, but the devastated look on his face is clear for all to see.

Even before O’Donnell opens his mouth, LBJ knows that it is official: Lyndon Baines Johnson is now the thirty-sixth president of the United States.

*   *   *

Jack Ruby gets the bad news from television, just like most of America.

The nightclub owner is on the second floor of the
Dallas Morning News
building, just four blocks from Dealey Plaza. He has come to place an ad for his burlesque business, the Carousel Club—“a f---ing classy joint,” in Ruby’s own words. He pays in person because the
Morning News
has canceled his credit after he fell behind on his payments one too many times. The ad announces his featured performers for the coming weekend and is no different from his usual weekly ads gracing the newspaper.

Ruby is five foot, nine inches and 175 pounds, and is fond of carrying a big roll of cash. He’s got friends in the Mafia and on the police force. He is known to like health food and has a lightning-quick temper. But most of all Jack Ruby considers himself a Democrat and a patriot.

The first reports state that a Secret Service man has been killed, but as Ruby and the advertising staff of the
Morning News
gather around a small black-and-white television for more information, the harsh truth is announced.