The Day Kennedy Was Shot (27 page)

The nurse, in charge of the extensive emergency section of the hospital, asked Dr. Dulaney, resident surgeon, to report to Trauma One at once. She called Miss Standridge, who said that Trauma One was already set up. A “stat” call was placed for Dr. Tom Shires. Mrs. Nelson inspected the green-tiled room
referred to as Trauma Two, directly opposite Trauma One. She opened a bottle of Ringer's lactate. In the hospital restaurant, Dr. Malcolm Perry listened to the emergency call for Dr. Shires.

He also studied the salmon croquettes on his plate. Strange, nobody ever called Tom Shires on “stat.” He was the hospital's chief resident in surgery. Another thing: Shires was not in Dallas today. Dr. Perry walked to a phone and picked it up. “President Kennedy has been shot,” the operator said. The croquettes began to chill as Perry ran through the long warrens of the hospital to the emergency area. Young Dr. Charles Carrico, a specialist in gunshot wounds, was examining a patient for admission to the hospital. He got the news, left the patient, and hurried to Trauma Two.

Some, out on the emergency dock, could already hear the sirens. Within two minutes, the hospital was going to be a busy place. The Oneal ambulance which had brought the epileptic from Dealey Plaza had dropped him for admission. A policeman came up on a motorcycle and requested that no vehicle move. “Stay right where you are,” he said. All of them heard the approaching sounds now, but few knew what they meant.

In newspaper offices across the United States, a small bell began to tinkle. In the wire rooms, the UPI machine was chattering about a murder trial in Minneapolis, Minnesota:

The walk across Commerce and Main wasn't much for James T. Tague. His car was still dead, half in the underpass at Commerce Street and half out. No one seemed sure of what had happened, and he saw a man near Elm, on the grass, speaking excitedly with a policeman. Tague walked over, still feeling the sandy spray on his cheek. He heard the man say that he had been watching the President and it “just looked like his head exploded.” The policeman, Clyde A. Haygood, tried to calm the man down. The man said he had seen a piece of the President's head fly off behind the car. Tague joined the conversation and pointed to his cheek. He had been hit by something, probably bits of a bullet or grains of concrete from a curb. The officer observed flecks of blood on Tague's face. The other man insisted that he had seen the shots and he was certain that they had come from the end window of the School Book Depository.

Howard Brennan, who had watched all of it, was dismayed to see the police “running in the wrong direction.” He convinced a policeman, speaking almost desperately, that the whole thing had come from that window up there. The pipe fitter pointed. Quickly, the policeman counted from the ground floor upward, and decided that the shots had come from the fifth floor. Mr. Brennan gave him a description of the man behind the gun.
Officer W. E. Barmett wrote the words: “White male, approximately 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighing 165, in his early thirties.”

It was the first “make” on Lee Harvey Oswald. Brennan, slow to become aroused, was now nervously communicative. Sergeant D. V. Harkness, who had been studying the area behind the Depository, stopped to listen. Harold Norman and James Jarman, Jr., walked up to listen, and Brennan pointed at them excitedly and said he had seen both of them leaning out a window on the fifth floor. The people who had not been frightened away from Dealey Plaza were now trying to draw the attention of policemen and sheriff's deputies to individual versions of what had happened. Everyone, it seemed, had a story to which he would swear.

Haygood got on Channel Two and said: “I just talked to a guy up here who was standing close to it and the best he could tell it came from the Texas School Book Depository building here with the Hertz renting sign on top.” Dispatcher Henslee said: “Ten four. Get his name, address, telephone number there—all the information you can get from him. 12:35
P.M.”
A few moments later, Sergeant D. V. Harkness was on Channel Two. He had been approached by a “little colored boy, Amos Euins.” The student was appalled when he saw all those policemen—fourteen was his estimate—running toward the overpass to find the rifleman when he, Amos Euins, had seen him plainly in the Depository building. “He was a kind of old policeman,” Euins said of Harkness, “so I ran down and got him and he ran up here.”

The schoolboy convinced the sergeant. Harkness was reporting on Channel Two, not realizing that he was corroborating what Officer Clyde Haygood had just concluded. “I have a witness,” Harkness said, “that says it came from the fifth floor of the Texas School Depository store.” It was at this point that Harkness began to seal the Depository building. He went to the back of the building, near the freight loading platform, and saw
two men lounging. They identified themselves as Secret Service agents. Harkness did not ask for identification. He acknowledged their authority and went deeper into the railroad yards, where he found some hoboes on freight trains. The sergeant arrested all of them.

Police cars pulled up all along Inwood and on Harry Hines Boulevard to clear the way. The dispatchers had done a good job, pulling them in from nearby areas to open the two vital roads to Parkland Memorial Hospital. They stood awkwardly, at crossroads, their red blinkers flashing, their men in the middle of the road flagging the lead car and the presidential car onward at top speed. Rubber squealed as the cars made a right turn and then another, now heading back toward downtown Dallas. Off Butler Street, Curry swung in onto the service road, and Greer followed, tipping the big car. The follow-up was directly behind them, then Johnson and the press pool car. Merriman Smith handed the phone over to Jack Bell of the Associated Press, and, at this moment, the line died.

At the little emergency overhang, the cars skidded to a stop in attitudes of disarray and men began to tumble out, all running toward the Kennedy automobile. As the car slammed to a stop, Governor Connally hung between the jump seats, his head on his wife's lap, his feet on the other seat. He felt a twinge of pain and, for the first time, hoped he might live. He looked across at the other jump seat and saw on his leg a piece of the President's brain about the size of a man's thumbnail.

Men were running and yelling everywhere. Emory Roberts, agent in charge of this shift of Secret Service, ran from the follow-up car to the Kennedys to learn whether he still had a President to protect. He opened the door on Mrs. Kennedy's side, saw the President face down on her leg, and said: “Let us get the President.” Mrs. Kennedy, bending over her husband's head, said, “No.” It was firm and final. He turned to Kellerman,
nominally his superior, and said: “You stay with the President. I'm taking some of my men to Johnson.”

This was the second time in one day that many things would happen swiftly, and yet, in retrospect, they tumbled over each other in slow motion. Sometimes, as the men of government and law sped this way and that, they seemed to stop, frozen in flight. Two men hopped on the Oneal ambulance and ordered the driver to remain where he was. Three agents—McIntyre, Bennett, and Youngblood—hustled Vice-President Lyndon Johnson through the emergency door. He was flapping his arms and trying to get back to the Kennedy car. Youngblood said, “No,” and kept pushing. “We are going to another room and I would like you to remain there. . . .” Other agents surrounded Mrs. Johnson, who was looking at the Kennedy car and saw a blur of pink and the edges of some red roses.

The moment was hectic, hysterical, and historical. The nation had a new President, but he did not know it, although the men around him did. Two Secret Service men ran up the hall, with its arrow in the center of the floor to point the way to Trauma One and Trauma Two. The nurse at the triage desk didn't know the situation—no one had told her—and she winced as she saw the men with the guns. They demanded to know where the hell the carts were. Chief Jesse Curry had asked that the hospital be alerted; now where were the carts?

Outpatients sat on benches in the chocolate-tiled corridor, or limped on their way in or out. They were rudely pushed aside and told to stand against the wall. There was no time to explain; just get the carts and clear this damn hall. Greer, who had been within six feet of the President all the way, slid out of the driver's seat and got his first look at the carnage in the back. The tears came and he looked at Mrs. Kennedy and kept mumbling: “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

To die so suddenly; to die at the peak; to die in an alien place. William Greer looked up and saw the vast array of medi
cal and surgical buildings, new and bright like the rest of Dallas. He knew that things would never be quite the same here again. There was a man in the back seat with a chest that seemed, every few moments, to convulse. He was dead, just as Mrs. Kennedy and Clint Hill had said, but some of the parts of the body fought the inevitable without any brain to direct them.

The loudspeaker called for ambulance carts. The call was repeated. In the emergency section, doctors by ones and twos got off elevators, bounded down and up stairways, all heading for Trauma One and Trauma Two. The only patient waiting for treatment was Julia Cox, 14, who was admitted for an X-ray. Others were resting after treatment, or on their way out of the numberless little sheet-covered cubbyholes against both sides of the wall. Jack Price, hospital administrator, had heard the ugly news and rushed down from his office to expedite matters and to lend a hand if necessary. In the long corridor, as he passed personnel, he issued orders calling for additional skilled assistance. The call for carts was heard by Diana Bowron, a young British nurse, and she asked orderly Joe Richards to help her run one out to the ambulance port. The press pool car was parked, and Merriman Smith jumped out to take a look. Baskin and the others followed. They saw the carnage, the huddled pink suit, the Governor sagging between jump seats, the moans from the mouth of Mrs. Connally, and the whispered sibilations from Mrs. Kennedy to her husband.

David Powers hurried to the automobile, gasped, and cried: “Oh. Mr. President!” and burst into tears. O'Donnell, the general of the palace guard, did not come. He went inside, looking for carts, came out and ordered the police to cordon the area off, to keep everybody out unless they could present White House credentials, to put special guards over the Lincoln and permit no one to touch it. Senator Yarborough was weeping. Mayor Earle Cabell beat his fists against a wall, roaring: “Not in Dallas! Not in Dallas!”

The cart was beside the car but no one could get over Governor Connally to reach the President. Mrs. Kennedy did not want anyone to take her husband. Clint Hill whispered to her, “Please let us remove the President.” She said, “No,” Hill removed his jacket and dropped it gently over President Kennedy's head. A security policeman, with his radio on, patrolled the front entrance of Parkland and heard ABC's Don Gardiner cut into another program to say: “Dallas, Texas. According to United Press International, three shots were fired at President John F. Kennedy's motorcade today.”

Inside, Mr. Johnson was being hustled to a remote part of the emergency area. He followed the phalanx of Secret Service agents without question. He kept rubbing his sore right shoulder, which had sustained Youngblood's weight, and passing nurses saw it and spread the rumor that the Vice-President had sustained a heart attack and was in the emergency area for treatment. In downtown Dallas, people were saying that two Secret Service agents had been killed in Dealey Plaza.

Outside, police officers were roaring: “Clear this area!” On Channel Two, other patrols were assigned to Harry Hines Boulevard to keep automobiles off the service road. Roy Kellerman snatched the first phone and dialed White House-Dallas, and asked for Jerry Behn, agent in charge of the White House detail, in Washington. He started his conversation by saying: “Jerry, look at your clock. . . .” CBS was rushing a flash to Walter Cronkite in New York, while officials were calling for a cut-in on all CBS affiliates throughout the country. Cronkite hadn't seen it yet, but the announcement read: “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade. First reports say that the President is seriously wounded.” In Washington, David Brinkley saw the teletype flash, but was powerless to use it. His boss couldn't be found.

At the hospital, men ran at top speed for precious telephones, to have and to hold. Merriman Smith, after a long heartrending
look into the back of that automobile, had skidded inside, found a man hanging up a phone, and said: “How do you get outside?” He was told to dial nine. Smith said: “The President has been hurt and this is an emergency.” This time, in a couple of sentences, he dictated a bulletin which said that the President had been “seriously, perhaps fatally, injured by an assassin” in Dallas.

The stretchers were going by, almost at a run. First there was Governor Connally; behind him was President Kennedy, on his back with a coat over his face. On his chest were a few bloody roses and a pink hat. Kellerman told Behn in Washington: “The man has been hit. He's still alive in the emergency room. He and Connally were hit by gunfire. Don't hang up. This line should be kept open, and I'll keep you advised.” Mrs. Kennedy, as forlorn as the bloody roses, trotted beside the cart, her fingers trying to maintain contact with her husband, while visitors leaving the emergency area bumped into her. Her head was back, her dark hair swinging behind from side to side, the mouth was open in anguish, and the eyes begged for the assistance no one could give.