Reclaiming History (21 page)

12:39 p.m.

Dallas police are quickly mobilizing in Dealey Plaza. More reports are coming in, each focusing on the building commanding the northwest corner of Elm and Houston.

“Get some men up here to cover this building, this Texas School Book Depository.” Officer Clyde A. Haygood radioes in. “It is believed these shots came from [there].”
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Officer E. D. Brewer cuts in with another report: “We have a man here that saw [a gunman] pull a weapon back through the window off the second floor
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on the southeast corner of that Depository building.”
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C
ecil McWatters, an eighteen-year veteran bus driver for the Dallas Transit Company, has been driving the Marsalis-Munger route for about two years now, zigzagging diagonally across the city from the Lakewood Addition out in the northeast to Oak Cliff in the southwest, and back again. There’s only a handful of people in the forty-four-passenger bus as he heads west on Elm in downtown Dallas, but McWatters more or less expects that, since so many folks went into town earlier for the presidential motorcade.
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While at a complete stop in traffic on Elm at Murphy (just before Griffin), which is seven blocks east of the Depository, a man bangs on the door and McWatters lets him board, collecting the twenty-three-cent fare, even though, as indicated, he is not at a bus stop. The man takes the second seat back, on the right. From that seat he will be passing right by the scene of the assassination.
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Mary E. Bledsoe is sitting right next to the front door of the bus. She turns her face away as the man gets on, hoping he doesn’t recognize her. It’s Lee Oswald and there is just something about him that she has never liked. Mary’s been divorced for a good many years, but she’s managed to scrape by and raise her two boys on a little money her doctor father had left her and by renting out two or three of the four bedrooms in her house on North Marsalis. Back in October she had rented a room to Oswald for seven dollars a week, then five days later asked him to leave the premises. He was always fussing with someone over the phone looking for a job. And she didn’t like his big-shot attitude or the fact that while using the telephone once she heard him talking in a foreign language. She told a lady friend of hers, “I don’t like anybody talking in a foreign language.”
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His appearance now—a hole in the right elbow of his brown shirt, which is “undone,” his trousers “all ragged” in the waist area, and a “bad” look on his “distorted” face—reaffirms her opinion of him. He passes right in front of her and sits somewhere behind her.
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12:40 p.m.

Harry McCormick, a veteran police reporter at the
Dallas Morning News
, pulls into Dealey Plaza and jumps from his car, which is filled with fellow newsmen. They were scheduled to cover the president’s luncheon at the Trade Mart, but after hearing of the shooting they immediately raced to the scene of the crime. One of the first people McCormick encounters is Abraham Zapruder, who is highly agitated, almost weeping.

“I saw it all through my camera,” Zapruder half sobs to himself.

“What happened?” McCormick asks.

“I got it all on film,” Zapruder replies. “There were three shots. Two hit the president and the other Governor Connally. I know the president is dead. His head seemed to fly to pieces when he was hit the second time.”

McCormick knows that if Zapruder really did capture the assassination on film, it could be the most important film in history.

“The Secret Service will want to see those films,” McCormick says. “Where are you going?” Zapruder tells him that he’s going back to his office, across the street from the Book Depository. Thinking fast, McCormick assumes the authority of an officer.

“Go ahead,” he tells Zapruder. “I’ll find Forrest Sorrels, head of the Secret Service here, and we’ll be back to talk with you.”

McCormick didn’t have a clue where he was going to find Sorrels, whom he had known personally for many years, but he knew he’d have to find him fast, before his competition found out about Zapruder’s film.
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Zapruder stumbles back to his office in a state of shock, muttering, “They killed him, they killed him.” At his office, Zapruder calls his twenty-six-year-old son, Henry, a government lawyer. “The president is dead,” he says. Henry suggests his father is wrong, that he had just heard over the radio the president was wounded and on his way to the hospital. “No,” the elder Zapruder says, “he’s dead,” explaining he had seen the president’s head exploding through the lens of his camera.
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J
ames Tague, who had witnessed the shooting from the mouth of the Triple Underpass, walks up to plainclothes deputy sheriff Buddy Walthers, combing the grass near the south curb of Elm Street.

“Are you looking to see where some bullets may have struck?” Tague asks.

“Yes,” Walthers replies, barely paying attention.

“I was standing right there where my car is parked,” Tague says, pointing to where Commerce meets the underpass, “when those shots happened. Well, you know, now I recall something stung me on the face while I was standing down there.”
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Walthers looks up.

“Yes, you have blood there on your cheek,” he says, rising to his feet.

Tague reaches up and wipes his fingers through a few drops of blood.

“Where were you standing?” Walthers asks.

“Right down here,” Tague says, leading him toward a concrete strip that runs between Commerce and Main Street just east of the Triple Underpass.
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Twenty-three feet from the east face of the underpass,
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along the south curb of Main Street, Walthers spots a mark on the top of the curb. It is quite obvious to both of them that the fresh gash was made by a bullet, and from the angle of the mark, it came from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository.
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A
cross America, housewives are following the fortunes of the characters of
As the World Turns
, the CBS network’s popular soap opera. Actress Helen Wagner turns to fellow actor Santos Ortega and says, “And I gave it a great deal of thought, Grandpa.” Suddenly, the program is cut off, replaced by a blank screen with the words “CBS NEWS” and in larger, white type, the single word “BULLETIN.” Over it comes the sound of the network’s leading newscaster, Walter Cronkite, his voice charged with emotion.
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“Here is a bulletin from CBS News. In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade, in downtown Dallas. The first reports say President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.”

Cronkite fumbles momentarily with a fresh sheet of wire copy handed to him.

“More details just arrived,” he says, scanning it quickly. “These details about the same as previously. President Kennedy shot today just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas. Mrs. Kennedy jumped up and grabbed Mr. Kennedy. She called, ‘Oh no!’ The motorcade sped on. United Press International reports that the wounds perhaps could be fatal.”

The network suddenly returns to
As the World Turns
, the actors, working live in their New York studio, unaware of the interruption. Shocked viewers who switch to ABC or NBC are treated to similar bulletins, equally terse, equally alarming. All three networks will soon cancel all programming and commercials for coverage of the event in Dallas.
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A
t Parkland Hospital, thirty-four-year-old Dr. Malcolm O. Perry is enjoying a quiet lunch with Dr. Ronald C. Jones in the main dining room. They hear Dr. George Shires being paged.

Perry knows that Shires, chief of the emergency surgical service at the hospital, was actually delivering a paper to a medical conference in Galveston that morning and may not be back yet. When Shires is paged a second time, Perry asks Jones to pick up the page to see if it’s a matter on which they might be of some assistance.

Jones rushes back to their table to report that the president has been shot and is being brought to emergency, not knowing the president had already arrived by the time he received the message from the hospital operator. The two surgeons bolt from the dining room and, too rushed to wait for the elevator, gallop down the flight of stairs to the emergency room.
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12:41 p.m.

Out in Irving, Marina Oswald and Ruth Paine, who has returned from her errands, are taking care of some household chores. When Ruth goes into the kitchen to fix lunch for them, Marina retires to her bedroom to get dressed. She hears a sudden, loud, puzzling commotion from the television set in the living room, but makes no sense of it—until Ruth appears in the doorway, ashen. Someone shot at the president.

They run to the living room and stare at the television, waiting for it to tell them something, anything. There are no images of the event, nothing but a news announcer who seems to be at a loss too, obviously marking time until some real information comes in, and it’s clear that he knows little more than they do. Ruth is crying as she translates the essential information—President Kennedy’s been taken to Parkland Hospital. Marina knows Parkland—she had baby Rachel there just a month ago.

Lunch is forgotten. No one feels like it now. Ruth lights some candles, and lets her little girl light one. Marina, who knows that her friend takes her Quaker religion very seriously, asks, “Is that a way of praying?”

“Yes, it is,” Ruth says, “just my own way.”

Marina goes to her room and cries.
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D
r. Charles Carrico is standing in Trauma Room One, a narrow room with gray-tiled walls and a cream-colored ceiling, when the president is wheeled in on an emergency cart. Carrico is only twenty-eight and still doing his residency in surgery, but he has already seen nearly two hundred gunshot wounds at Parkland Hospital.
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He rapidly assesses the president’s condition—his color is “blue white, ashen,” an indication of failing blood circulation; his respiration is slow, agonal (death throes), and spasmodic, with no coordination; there are no voluntary movements at all; his eyes are open and staring, with no reaction to light, his pupils dilated; and there is no palpable pulse. With the assistance of Drs. Don T. Curtis and Martin G. White and Nurse Diana Bowron, Dr. Carrico opens the president’s suit coat and shirt and puts his ear to the president’s chest. He listens for a few seconds and detects a faint heartbeat. Other nurses arrive and continue to remove Kennedy’s clothing. Carrico slips his hands under the president’s midsection and runs them up his back past his back brace.
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He can feel blood and debris, but no wounds. He looks briefly at the president’s head wound—a gaping hole, oozing with blood and shredded scalp and brain tissue—then turns his attention to restoring the president’s breathing and circulation.
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Carrico orders Drs. Curtis and White to do a cutdown on the president’s right ankle—a small incision to lay bare a large vein into which they can insert polyethylene catheters through which fluid, medicine, and blood can be administered to maintain the body’s circulatory system.
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The president is losing so much blood that the trauma room is already awash with it. Meanwhile, Carrico inserts a plastic endotracheal tube down the president’s throat into the trachea (windpipe) in order to create an adequate air passage. He notices a small ragged tear to the right of the larynx (voice box) and ragged tissue below, indicating tracheal injury. Carrico steers the plastic tube deep into the throat and begins connecting the cuff inflator (a latex cuff designed to prevent air leakage) to a respiratory machine.
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Just then, Drs. Perry and Jones arrive. Perry sheds his dark blue glen-plaid jacket and wristwatch in the corner, and takes charge.
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Dr. Charles Baxter, another thirty-four-year-old assistant professor of surgery at the school, and director of the emergency room at Parkland, arrives around the same time, having made a dead run from the school as fast as he could when he heard the news.
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*
The trauma room is now filled with law enforcement officers and several members of the president’s party. Supervising nurse Doris Nelson has already arrived and is struggling to clear them from the room.
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