The Assassination

By Hugh Sidey

Assassination was impossible. John Kennedy, with Jackie beside him in her raspberry pink suit, was too young, too exuberant to fall. The Secret Service, snooping beneath manhole covers, scanning for hostile eyes, was invincible. There would be no darkness on this bright day in Dallas.

How fragile our myths, how fleeting certainty.

Perhaps we knew when the first sound reached the press bus behind Kennedy's limousine. A distant crack, another. A pause, and another crack. Something was dangerously off-key.

Bob Pierpoint of CBS stood up, and our eyes met for ever so tiny an instant. We knew but did not want to believe. "What was that?" he asked. Doug Kiker, now of NBC, then a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, was typing on his lap. He paused. Kennedy's limousine had turned the corner beneath a boxy, ugly building and sunk out of sight. The pigeons -- the famous pigeons of death -- were rising and swooping under the trees.

Pierpoint stood still for a couple more seconds, Kiker pecked a time or two. Three seconds, four. Then reality rushed with terrifying clarity down that short street beneath the Texas School Book Depository. We were never the same, nor was the world.

The story at the core was the stuff of everyday American violence. A killer and a city street and a wild ride to an emergency room and a young body too broken to repair. But it was Camelot and this was John Kennedy, and television now rushed in to make the dreadful event an epic.

Madness descended. Motorcycle cops jumped curbs, machines roaring over the grass in a ballet of aimless panic. The crowd on the grassy knoll looked like it had been swept with a giant scythe. The street was empty, a stark, lifeless slab of concrete that smelled of disaster. Kennedy's motorcade had been chopped in two like a luckless centipede, the front end blown to God knew where, the rear end writhing and thrashing.

The presidential limousine rested at Parkland Hospital. A grim young man was washing away the blood and flesh that had splattered the leather upholstery. The sight was shattering. The red roses given to Jackie were still in the car -- crushed, broken. The young man in his neat dark suit, sleeves pushed up, swabbed the seats. They glistened in their miserable wetness. Beside the car was a bucket with brownish red water. If any doubt remained about this calamity, it was swept away in one glance at that bucket. So simple, so hideous.

The nurses' classroom at Parkland became a vortex of the world's clamor for information. Each word from that tiny point of a suburban hospital was flung across continents.

Two priests left the hospital, silent, sagging. Their duty was plainly over, whatever it had been. Asked if Kennedy was dead or alive, they remained silent for a few seconds. Then one of them blurted the terrible truth: "He's dead, all right." The four words were carried back to the temporary pressroom, then exploded around the world.

The tragedy enlarged through the afternoon. First had come the awareness of the death of a man, a friend, a father and a husband. Then numbed nerves began to grapple with the fact that the Government too was brain-dead for the moment. There was the sense of a beast in convulsion at Parkland. Police rushed here and there. Vehicles circled, darted. A small coterie with Vice President Lyndon Johnson . . . No, try it again. A small coterie with President Lyndon Johnson dashed for Love Field and Air Force One. A piece of lead weighing less than an ounce had blown away a single mind, and history had been halted in its tracks, pushed back a generation, then hesitantly restarted, but in a different direction.

Tragedy picks out its participants without regard for position or prestige. Press secretary Pierre Salinger was flying to Japan with a Cabinet delegation, so Malcolm Kilduff, his deputy, became the link between the trauma room at Parkland and the world beyond. On a torn fragment of paper, he crafted in a few short sentences the message that would sadden the globe. "President John F. Kennedy died . . ."

As newsmen shouted, Kilduff sought out an empty room with a friend. The scrap of paper with its devastating message quivered like a leaf in his fingers. He lighted a cigarette. Then something broke. "I saw that man's head," he sobbed. "I couldn't believe it. I nearly died. Oh, my God. Oh, my God."

At noon John Kennedy had grinned and waved back as the cheers cascaded down the Dallas streets. Two hours later what was left of him re-entered the public domain on the loading dock of Parkland Hospital. "I can't stand it," muttered one of the journalists watching. "Like dirty laundry out the back door." Jackie carried what dignity was left. Face stained, clothes marked with dried blood, eyes straight ahead, hand on the bronze casket as it was wheeled down the ramp. Several aides walked beside Jackie. The whole bright prospect of their new world shaped by their friend and leader had been vaporized in an instant by Oswald.

Jackie was helped into the white hearse to ride with Kennedy's body to Air Force One. Everything about the scene was small and colorless -- casket salesman, disheveled reporters, unpainted concrete, exhaust fumes, arguing police and security men, traffic grinding by on a freeway.

. The new Government formed in the fuselage of Air Force One, yet another ritual that mocked dignity. But it was, perhaps, that magnificent plane that began to reclaim the majesty of the presidency. With the body of Kennedy onboard, the new President invested formally, Colonel James Swindal taxied his plane out on the emptied runway of Love Field. The ship paused in lonely splendor, then lifted off into a blue sky, clean and beautiful even in that mournful flight.