The man, Lee Harvey Oswald, puts a .38-caliber revolver between them and, at point-blank range, shoots the officer three times. A fourth shot, to the head, proves fatal. Oswald leaves the scene and continues walking down the street as passerby T. F. Bowley comes upon the horrifying scene and uses Tippit’s police radio to report the crime.
Twenty-two-year-old Johnny Calvin Brewer is listening to the radio as he works the cash register at Hardy’s Shoe Store. He hears a news bulletin that Officer Tippit has been shot, and the sound of approaching sirens. Just then, a man enters Hardy’s, pretending to shop for shoes while clearly trying to avoid the police activity outside. Brewer realizes this man might be Tippit’s killer.
It is. Oswald exits Hardy’s, moving four doors down to the Texas Theater, where the film War Is Hell is already screening. Ticket taker Julia Postal notices Oswald sneaking in without paying the ninety-cent admission, so when Brewer comes over to alert her to his suspicions about Oswald, Postal calls the cops.
At this point, no one other than Tippit has connected Oswald to the assassination, but they’re after him for the officer shooting. About 2:00 p.m., squad cars, their sirens wailing, seal off the perimeter of the movie house. Four officers enter through the rear of the theater, checking it from front to back, discovering Oswald seated in one of the last rows.
“I was about fifteen feet away from where Oswald was seated,” recalls the Dallas Morning News aerospace reporter Hugh Aynesworth, who has hitched a ride on a news van after tipping the crew off to the bulletin he’d heard on a police scanner. “They got him out of there in a hurry. I never understood how so many [police officers] got there so fast.”
Officer Nick McDonald orders Oswald to get up and out of his seat. “Well, it’s all over now,” Oswald declares.
But it isn’t, yet.
“He made a fist and bam, hit me right between the eyes,” McDonald recalls. Then Oswald points a gun at the officer. “Bracing myself,” McDonald says, “I stood rigid, waiting for the bullet to penetrate my chest.” When the gun misfires, fellow officers Ray Hawkins and T. A. Hutson help subdue Oswald.
“I protest this police brutality and I am not resisting arrest!” Oswald declares.
* * *
At 2:38 p.m., U.S. district judge Sarah Tilghman Hughes administers the Oath of Office—dutifully copied by a staffer from Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution—to Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
For the first time, two presidents are aboard Air Force One.
One of them is in a coffin.
A defiantly dry-eyed Jackie refuses to change out of her bloodstained pink suit. “My whole face was spattered with blood and hair,” Jackie remembers, explaining that she began to wipe it off, but immediately regretted it. “Why did I wash the blood off? I should have left it there…I should have kept the blood on.”
“Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights,” the suddenly new First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, writes in her diary of that day, “that immaculate woman, exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.”
“I want them to see what they have done to Jack,” Jackie says, several times.
Just after 6:00 p.m., the plane lands at Andrews Air Force Base. There are crowds of mourners waiting for Air Force One—among them, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, who immediately boards the plane and goes to embrace his sister-in-law.
“I’m here,” he tells her.
Chapter 21
Earlier that day, at the Lafayette Hotel in Washington, DC, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who is six months pregnant with her fourth baby, has just sat down to a Friday lunch with her husband, Sargent Shriver, and their four-year-old son, Timmy.
The growing family hasn’t had much time together since March 1961, when with Executive Order #10924, President Kennedy established the Peace Corps “to promote world peace and friendship,” and named his brother-in-law Shriver as head of the new agency within the State Department.
A waiter approaches the table with word that Shriver has an urgent phone call from his secretary, Mary Ann Orlando.
An ashen Shriver soon returns to the table. “Something has happened to Jack,” he tells his wife.
A second call quickly follows. The president’s condition is critical.
Eunice holds fast to the belief that her big brother Jack can survive. “There have been so many crises in Jack’s life—he’ll pull through,” she declares.
It seems only yesterday that Eunice and Jack shared a house in Georgetown. Jack was single then, in the 1940s. They’d throw raucous all-night parties, and both smoke Cuban cigars.
Eunice and Shriver rush across Lafayette Park to Peace Corps headquarters, where Eunice places a call to the attorney general’s office. Her brother Bobby confirms that Jack is clinging to life. But then the unbearable news flashes on the wire service: The president is dead.
The Shrivers and Peace Corps staffers kneel on the office floor together in prayer, repeating Hail Marys.
* * *
Three days earlier, on November 19, Jack had pardoned a turkey at the White House in advance of the November 28 Thanksgiving holiday. “Let’s keep him going,” Kennedy had joked. Thanksgiving is less than a week away now, and in New York, Jean Kennedy Smith is doing some holiday errand-running on Friday afternoon. She notices passersby crying, listening to a news bulletin blaring from every car radio on the street.
She can’t believe what she’s hearing. Her husband, Stephen Smith, is at the Kennedy campaign office in the Pan Am building, strategizing for Jack’s reelection. Stephen, Jean thinks, will know if the news is true.
* * *
Patricia Kennedy Lawford is at her oceanfront home in Santa Monica, California, a magnificent property previously owned by studio head Louis B. Mayer. Her husband, actor Peter Lawford—whom she will divorce in 1966, the first (but not the last) Kennedy to ever divorce—is away in Lake Tahoe performing with comedian “Ragtime Jimmy” Durante, but her best friend and neighbor, Judy Garland, makes sure Pat won’t be alone. (Sociable Judy occasionally vacations with the Kennedy family in Hyannis Port, and sings to Jack over the telephone. “He’d request ‘Over the Rainbow,’” Judy’s third husband, Sid Luft, recalls. She “obliged the president with several renditions of his favorite melodies.”)
* * *
Senator Ted Kennedy is sitting in the Speaker’s chair presiding over the day’s business, a job relegated to junior senators during quiet legislative stretches. Around 2:00 p.m., aide Richard Riedel rushes in with the news from Dallas. Ted is devastated, but his first thought is how his wife, Joan, will react. They’ve been married for five troubled years, and she’s been numbing the pain of Ted’s infidelities with alcohol. Ted locates Joan in Washington’s Elizabeth Arden salon and has her brought to their Georgetown home. A terse call from Bobby—“He’s dead”—unleashes in Joan a demonstrative grief that is too much for Ted to handle. “Just go to bed,” he tells his wife. “Take a pill or something.”
* * *
Rose Kennedy ventures out, bundled in “the same old but warm coat I had worn through the snows when I went to Mass the morning of Jack’s inauguration.” She walks on the Cape Cod beach both alone and with her nephew Joe Gargan, telling him that they “must go on living.”