“He couldn’t see [properly] from his position because of the light,” Walker later theorizes to the Warren Commission. “He could have been a very good shot and, just by chance, he hit the woodwork.”
Although Oswald tells his wife, Marina, “I shot Walker” immediately upon returning home late that night, it’s not until after the events in Dallas that the ammunition used is linked back to Oswald.
Prior to JFK’s visit in November 1963, Walker, an outspoken adversary of the president’s, has his extremist associates distribute five thousand flyers. The flyers show a stylized mugshot of Kennedy alongside seven accusations of treason, from the political—“Betraying the Constitution”—to the personal—“LIES to the American people (including personal ones like his previous marriage and divorce).”
Hours before the president’s plane touches down in Dallas, twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald takes off his wedding ring and leaves it on the bedroom dresser. (Fifty years later, that ring will sell for one hundred eight thousand dollars at auction.) In recent months, he’s become estranged from his wife, Marina, and she and their daughters are staying with a friend, Ruth Paine, in suburban Dallas, while Oswald has a room in a boardinghouse. But on Thursday night, November 21, he decides to stay at the Paine house, where he typically visits only on weekends.
“I was surprised to see him,” Ruth Paine remarks. The couple fought often, but that evening she has “the impression that relations between the young Oswalds [are] ‘cordial,’ ‘friendly,’ ‘warm’—like a couple making up after a small spat.”
They sleep in the same bed, but in the middle of the night he kicks her away when her feet touch him. “My, he’s in a mean mood,” Marina thinks. The next morning, he sleeps late, then gets a lift to his job at the Texas School Book Depository from a coworker, Buell Wesley Frazier, one of Ruth Paine’s neighbors. While they are driving to work, Frazier asks Oswald what’s in the elongated brown package he’s brought.
“Curtain rods,” Oswald tells him.
Chapter 19
It all began so beautifully. After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We were going into Dallas,” Lady Bird Johnson observes in her diary of November 22, 1963.
The Texas native and wife of Vice President Lyndon Johnson will ride in the third car of the presidential motorcade that sets out from Love Field just before noon. The planned route is an eleven-mile drive through the city’s downtown at a slow crawl of twelve to fifteen miles per hour, ending at the Dallas Trade Mart for a scheduled 1:00 p.m. luncheon.
Fifteen minutes earlier, from inside Air Force One, Jack takes in the cheering crowd of two thousand gathered around the fenced perimeter of the airfield and remarks to Kenny O’Donnell, “It looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine for us.”
Earlier that morning, at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Jackie had felt uneasy upon seeing a hate-filled, full-page anti-Kennedy ad from the “American Fact-Finding Committee” in the Dallas Morning News. The ad was bordered in mourning black, and despite a headline proclaiming “Welcome Mr. Kennedy,” its tone was deeply belligerent.
On the spring day when Jackie first met Jack, she’d felt that he “would have a profound perhaps disturbing influence” on her life. Would angry Texans be the source of the disturbance she had sensed more than a decade before?
But her husband makes light of her fears, joking, “We’re heading into nut country today…You know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president,” he tells her, remarking on how easy it would have been for someone among the anonymous masses lining the streets in Fort Worth with “a pistol in a briefcase…could have dropped the gun and briefcase and melted away into the crowd.”
* * *
A fellow boarder at Lee Harvey Oswald’s rooming house recalls his rapt attention to a televised report two days earlier, on November 20, detailing the president’s upcoming visit and adding information to the maps and routes that the Dallas Times Herald had published on November 19.
Oswald now knows the expected timing of the presidential motorcade’s passage through Dealey Plaza, then on past the Texas School Depository building where he works. He knows that the president and the First Lady will be in the lead car, along with Governor John Connally and his wife, Nellie.
As the motorcade departs Love Field, Oswald is spotted on the sixth floor by a coworker, Charles Givens, carrying a clipboard and walking toward the elevator. Givens later testifies to the Warren Commission that Oswald directs him, “When you get downstairs, close the elevator.” Oswald doesn’t explain himself, but Givens does as he is told.
By twelve thirty, Oswald is positioned in his sniper’s perch.
* * *
Bill Greer, the president’s personal driver, is at the wheel of the open-top Lincoln Continental, license plate GG-300. By order of the president, the Secret Service are not standing on the retractable foot stands but positioned in the follow-car.
In the fold-down, forward-facing jump seats are Governor Connally and his wife, Nellie. President Kennedy and Jackie are in the seats behind them. “We were indeed a happy foursome that beautiful morning,” Nellie Connally writes in her book, From Love Field: Our Final Hours with President Kennedy. Both she and Jackie wear pink suits and carry roses, Jackie’s red and Nellie’s yellow. “Everything was so perfect.”
As the excited crowds cheer, Nellie turns in her seat to face Jack and says, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”
The president is smiling and waving his right hand at onlookers. Jackie has in her lap the bouquet of roses Dallas mayor Earle Cabell presented to her at Love Field. The day was “hot, wild,” Jackie recalls. “The sun was so strong in our faces.”
“Suddenly,” Lady Bird Johnson records, “there was a sharp loud report—a shot. It seemed to me to come from the right above my shoulder from a building. Then a moment and then two more shots in rapid succession.”
Dallas Morning News staff writer Mary Elizabeth Woodward, along with three newsroom colleagues, watch from across Elm Street just east of the triple underpass. Woodward’s article, titled “Witness from the News Describes Assassination,” states, “We were almost certainly the last faces [John F. Kennedy] noticed in the crowd. After acknowledging our cheers, he faced forward again and suddenly there was a horrible, ear-shattering noise, coming from behind us and a little to the right.”
What Woodward does not reveal in her eyewitness account is her lifelong hearing problem. She comes to deeply regret that omission, as the direction she gives for the source of the sound does not match the location of the Texas Book Depository where Oswald had holed up—and that discrepancy fuels decades of speculation. In her 2017 Dallas News obituary, she calls it “something that I have regretted the rest of my life because every conspiracy theorist in the world has quoted that. And I’m convinced that I did not hear it correctly.”
Roy H. Kellerman, special agent in charge, testifies on December 18, 1963, that after hearing the first shot, he “turned around to find out what happened when two additional shots rang out, and the President slumped into Mrs. Kennedy’s lap and Governor Connally fell into Mrs. Connally’s lap. I heard Mrs. Kennedy shout, ‘What are they doing to you?’”