Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) (44 page)

John F. Kennedy had been gunned down at high noon, in a Dallas plaza named for the frontier-era father of Kennedy-hater Ted Dealey. JFK, the avid reader of history, would have appreciated the ripe irony.

Americans would get some sense of the utter horror—the visceral obscenity—of Dealey Plaza, when a home movie of the assassination made by a fifty-nine-year-old Dallas dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder was finally excavated from the
Life
magazine vault where it had been kept for years and widely exhibited. The infamous twenty-six-second film clip of the president’s final moments—culminating in the repulsive frame where a searing bolt slams his head viciously backwards, tearing off a shard of his skull in a spray of bloody mist—will forever punish the souls of those who watch it. Zapruder himself paid a terrible price for being the nation’s eyewitness. Amazingly, he kept steadily filming the horrible spectacle as it unfolded in graphic detail before his camera. Then he clambered down from his vantage point—a concrete abutment on the grassy knoll overlooking the crime scene—and stumbled back to his office in a daze, screaming, “They killed him, they killed him, they killed him!” Afterwards, he sat at his desk sobbing.

A terrible thought flashed across Zapruder’s mind as he watched his president being executed before his eyes. “I just felt that somebody had ganged up on him.” His words—conjuring the image of the most powerful man in the country bullied into bloody submission by anonymous assailants—are still deeply troubling.

Zapruder, a Russian Jewish immigrant who came to America as a teenager, never recovered from the shock of what he intimately observed through the lens of his Bell & Howell 8mm movie camera. For the rest of his life, he suffered recurring nightmares. When he was called before the Warren Commission in July 1964, he broke down in tears as he relived the afternoon. At the end of his testimony, he apologized abjectly for his outburst of emotion. “I am ashamed of myself,” he told the staff attorney taking his testimony. “I didn’t know I was going to break down, and for a man to—but it was a tragic thing, and when you started asking me that, and I saw the thing all over again, and it was an awful thing—I know very few people who had seen it like that—it was an awful thing and I loved the president. And to see that happen before my eyes—his head just opened up and shot down like a dog—it leaves a very, very deep sentimental impression with you. It’s terrible.”

Wesley Liebeler—the assistant counsel who was dispatched to belatedly and perfunctorily take Zapruder’s eyewitness account—was not interested in hearing about his trauma. Nor was the attorney particularly interested in his observations that the shots “came from right behind me” on the grassy knoll—the spot where most eyewitnesses and police bystanders that afternoon immediately suspected the sniper’s nest was located. The Warren Commission, which originally did not plan on interviewing Zapruder at all, treated him as an afterthought. But his 486-frame film would reveal more about the death of the president than the vast twenty-six-volume report delivered by the commission chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, to President Johnson on September 24, 1964. Zapruder’s handheld horror movie would live on long after his death in 1970, a haunting testament to how President Kennedy was “ganged up on” in Dealey Plaza by more than one assailant—gunmen firing shots from the front as well as rear of the presidential limousine.

As dreadful as it was, the Zapruder film did not capture the full mayhem inside the presidential limousine during the explosion of violence in Dealey Plaza. But the wives of the two men shot that day—Jackie Kennedy and Nellie Connally—would insist on telling everything they witnessed. It was Jackie’s wrenchingly matter-of-fact account, delivered to
Life
magazine correspondent Theodore White in an extraordinary interview at the family’s Hyannis Port compound one week after Dallas, that most vividly conveyed the unfiltered horror of it all. This—along with the interview she gave William Manchester, the family’s authorized chronicler of the assassination—would be the only times she ever publicly discussed November 22, 1963. Sitting on a sofa, dressed in black slacks and a beige pullover—her dark eyes “wider than pools”—she told her unspeakable story to White in a remarkably calm voice. The words poured out of her as if she were in a trance. “I realized that I was going to hear more than I wanted to,” White later wrote—an odd comment for a journalist who had just scored the scoop of his career.

White’s employer shared his tender sensibilities. Once again,
Life
would find it necessary to suppress a terrible document of Dealey Plaza, publishing a soothingly expurgated version of the interview in its December 6, 1963, issue. The brief article, “An Epilogue for President Kennedy,” focused on JFK’s love of the musical
Camelot
, helping turn his story into a gauzy Arthurian legend instead of the monstrous crime mystery it was. Missing was the eyewitness testimony of a woman still scorched by what she had endured just one week earlier. But over three decades later, following the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1994, the Kennedy Library finally released White’s “Camelot documents,” including his handwritten notes from the interview. Despite the passage of time, Jackie’s account was still awful to read. And media coverage of the documents’ release was still decorous, pulling a veil over the grisly details that Jackie could not forget.

The motorcade from the airport that afternoon put her in mind of the first couple’s tumultuous procession through the streets of Mexico City the previous year, Jackie told White. It was “hot, wild” and the sun was blazing in her eyes. Jack had asked her not to wear her sunglasses for fear it would make the first lady look too much like an aloof movie queen to the people on the Dallas streets. She was happy to oblige him, knowing how important the Texas trip was to her husband’s political fortunes. After suffering the death of their newborn son Patrick in August, the couple seemed closer than they had been in a long time. Jackie had grown weary of the political circus, but riding with her husband that day was an expression of her love. JFK, who took pleasure from the electric effect that his wife had on crowds, deeply appreciated her company on the trip. Even without their sunglasses, the couple emitted a starry glow as they waved to the boisterous crowds lining the streets. Sitting in the press bus several cars behind the Kennedys’ limousine, Robert Donovan, the
Los Angeles Times
Washington bureau chief, mused that “if Hollywood had tried to cast a president and his wife, they could never have dreamed up John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. They were just two beautiful people that day, glamorous, and they had a screaming reception. There was never a point in the public life of the Kennedys, in a way, that was as high as that moment in Dallas.”

Nellie Connally was relieved and elated by the cheering crowds. As their car turned slowly onto Elm Street, she shifted around in the jump seat where she was riding next to her husband, and beamed at Kennedy: “Mr. President, you certainly can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you!” His eyes grew wide with excitement. Dallas had surprised him, thought Nellie. And then the plaza rang with the first gunshot.

The first bullet tore through Kennedy’s throat, and his arms went up as if to block himself from further injury. His wife turned to him, and just as she did, another bullet shattered his head. The picture of her husband in his final moment of life seared itself into her memory. She remembered the strange elegance of his demeanor. “His last expression was so neat; he had his hand out, I could see a piece of his skull coming off; it was flesh-colored not white. He was holding out his hand—and I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head; then he slumped in my lap.”

Later in her interview with White, Jackie returned to the moment of her husband’s death. It was an odd association to make, but something about his face brought back the alert play of his mind at press conferences. “You know when he was shot. He had such a wonderful expression on his face. You know that wonderful expression he had when they’d ask him a question about one of the ten million gadgets they’d have in a rocket? Just before he’d answer, he looked puzzled; and then he slumped forward.”

Now the contents of her husband’s precious brain were spilled all over the car. They splattered everyone riding in the limousine. To Nellie Connally it felt like she was being tattooed by “hot hail.” Even the motorcycle cops riding uselessly behind the presidential vehicle were splashed with Kennedy’s life matter.

The first lady tore the air with her frantic screams: “Jack, Jack!” And then: “They’ve killed my husband! I have his brains in my hand!”

Nellie Connally could offer no help. She was bent over her own husband, who was gushing blood through his shirt. By holding him tightly, Nellie Connally would save her husband’s life, blocking the gaping hole in his chest. “My God, they are going to kill us all!” the governor blurted before sagging forward. The Connallys would forever insist—contrary to the Warren Report, which strained to limit the number of bullets fired that day to fit its lone gunman theory—that the bullet that ripped into the governor’s back was not one of those that hit the president.

Suddenly the first lady, her pink suit drenched in her husband’s gore, was clambering onto the trunk of the moving limousine. She needed to retrieve the missing fragment of her husband’s skull. It was the only way that she could save him, that she could make him whole again. The sprinting Clint Hill pushed her back into the car, just as it suddenly sped off to Parkland Hospital. “We all lay down in the car and I kept saying, ‘Jack, Jack, Jack’ and someone was yelling, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead,’” she told White. “All the ride to the hospital, I kept bending over him saying, ‘Jack, Jack, can you hear me, I love you, Jack.’ I kept holding the top of his head down trying to keep the…” She could not finish the sentence.

At the hospital, sitting in the terrible Lincoln—“long and black as a hearse,” in Nellie’s words—Jackie could not let go of her broken husband. “The seat was full of blood and red roses,” she recalled. Everywhere else during the trip, they had given her the yellow roses of Texas. But at Love Field, she had been presented a bouquet of red American Beauties. Secret Service men were suddenly swarming everywhere, screaming, “Mr. President!” They pleaded with Jackie to get out of the car. “These big Texas interns kept saying, ‘Mrs. Kennedy, you come with us.’ They wanted to take me away from him. Dave Powers came running to me; my legs, my hands were covered with his brains. When Dave saw this, he burst out weeping. From here down”—and here, she made a gesture indicating her husband’s forehead—“his head was so beautiful. I’d tried to hold the top of his head down, maybe I could keep it in…I knew he was dead.

“They came trying to get me; they tried to grab me, but I said, ‘I’m not leaving.’ When they carried Jack in, Hill threw his coat over Jack’s head [but] it wasn’t repulsive to me for one moment—nothing was repulsive to me. And I was running behind this big intern, I was running behind with the coat covering it. I remember this narrow corridor. I said, ‘I’m not going to leave him, I’m not going to leave him, I’m not going to leave him.’” She remembered the grueling back operation that had nearly killed him when they were newlyweds. She had promised him that she would not leave his side during the surgery, but they had taken him away and she had not seen him again for hours. “They’re never going to keep me away from him again,” she told herself at Parkland.

Dr. Malcolm Perry, the surgeon working on her dying husband, did not want her in the operating room, but she forced her way in. She told him, “It’s my husband, his blood, his brains are all over me.” There was nothing Perry and the other doctors could do to save her husband. A priest was summoned to deliver the final rites. “There was a sheet over Jack, his foot was sticking out of the sheet, whiter than the sheet. I took his foot and kissed it. Then I pulled back the sheet. His mouth was
so beautiful
, his eyes were open. They found his hand under the sheet, and I held his hand all the time the priest was saying extreme unction.”

In the months following Dallas, the fallen president’s deeply despondent widow sought counsel from a Jesuit priest named Richard McSorley. She was plagued by something from that day, she told McSorley. Her husband was already dying from the fatal second shot before she realized it. “If only I had a minute to say goodbye. It was so hard not to say goodbye, not to be able to say goodbye.”

Later, in the hot confines of Air Force One, which Lyndon Johnson insisted stay on the Love Field tarmac until he was sworn in as the new president of the United States, everybody urged her to wipe her husband’s dried blood off her face. A photographer was going to commemorate the historic ceremony and Johnson wanted Jackie by his side. She stared at herself in the mirror. “My whole face was splattered with blood and hair. I wiped it off with a Kleenex.” But she immediately regretted it. “One second later I thought, why did I wash the blood off? I should have left it there, let them see what they’ve done.” That’s what she told Bobby when she saw him later. They should have seen her with her painted face and clotted hair when the famous photo was taken on Air Force One; her horrible visage would have condemned them for all time.

But, widowed at thirty-four, she already felt herself fading into history. White’s notes are filled with the word. She repeated it often during the interview. “History,” she said inexplicably at one point, as if describing herself, for that’s what she was becoming. As Air Force One flew through the darkening sky to Washington, events were already sweeping past her. “I thought no one really wants me here.”

For a brief, savage moment, Jacqueline Kennedy considered playing the role of a raging truth-teller from a Greek tragedy. This is how they killed the king! This is how they spilled his beautiful mind into my hands! But she would soon allow herself to be turned into “the Widder Kennedy,” as she mocked her image—the stoic woman who taught a nation how to mourn.