By JAMIE STENGLE and CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN
FILE – In this Friday morning, Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, President John F. Kennedy, center, and Vice President Lyndon Johnson, center right, walk with others in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. Later in the morning, they headed to Dallas for a motorcade to a planned luncheon speech. It was part of a trip to help mend a rift among Texas Democrats and try to secure the state for Kennedy in the 1964 election. (AP Photo/Houston Chronicle)
JFK, John F. Kennedy
FILE – In this Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, President John F. Kennedy, center on foreground platform, addresses a rain-soaked crowd in Fort Worth, Texas. In an interview, Secret Service agent Clint Hill recalled, “I heard the noise outside” of a large, friendly crowd gathering, despite the drizzle, for a speech _ Kennedy’s first event of a packed day. (AP Photo/Ferd Kaufman)
Ruth Hyde Paine
FILE – In this Dec. 5, 1963 file photo, Ruth Hyde Paine stands outside her home in Irving, Texas. At the house on the morning of Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald made coffee, dressed for work, then paused before leaving his wife, Marina, and two young daughters. He drew most of the cash from his pocket, removed his wedding ring and left both behind. Gathering up a parcel he’d retrieved from the garage, he departed. “Lee left a coffee cup in the sink,” recalls Paine, whose house Marina and the girls were staying in. Oswald had come the previous evening to try – unsuccessfully – to reconcile with his estranged wife. (AP Photo)
Ruth Hyde Paine
FILE – In this Friday, Sept. 13, 2013 file photo, Ruth Hyde Paine, who offered up her home and lent other aid to the Lee Harvey Oswald family prior to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, speaks to the Sonoma Valley Historical Society in Sonoma, Calif. In her first public remarks in recent years, Paine reflected on the events a half century ago and told how she helped Oswald land a job at the Texas School Book Depository from where the fatal bullets were fired. In the foreground is a photograph of her with the Oswald family taken the day after the assassination. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
Buell Wesley Frazier
FILE – In this Feb. 14, 1969 file photo, Buell Wesley Frazier of Irving, Texas, a co-worker of Lee Harvey Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, leaves court after testifying in the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans. Frazier testified that he gave Oswald a ride to work on the day of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Much was unusual about that morning. Normally, Oswald would wait to be picked up; normally, he would have carried a sack lunch. Unlike most Fridays, he told Frazier he would not need a ride home that night. And then there was the long, paper-wrapped package in the backseat. When Frazier asked, Oswald said it contained curtain rods. (AP Photo)
Buell Wesley Frazier
Buell Wesley Frazier looks out onto Dealey Plaza from a window on the seventh floor of the Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas on Thursday, Nov. 14, 2013. Frazier was a co-worker of Lee Harvey Oswald at the depository and gave him a ride to work on the day of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Much was unusual about that morning. Normally, Oswald would wait to be picked up; normally, he would have carried a sack lunch. Unlike most Fridays, he told Frazier he would not need a ride home that night. And then there was the long, paper-wrapped package in the backseat. When Frazier asked, Oswald said it contained curtain rods. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, John Connally
FILE – In this Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, seen through the foreground convertible’s windshield, President John F. Kennedy’s hand reaches toward his head within seconds of being fatally shot as first lady Jacqueline Kennedy holds his forearm as the motorcade proceeds along Elm Street past the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. Gov. John Connally was also shot. (AP Photo/James W. “Ike” Altgens)
JFK That Awful Day
This Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013 photo of an Associated Press teletype news bulletin from Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 shows early news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, in the AP Corporate Archives in New York. The document is timed at 12:40 p.m. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Clint Hill
FILE – In this Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, President John F. Kennedy slumps down in the back seat of the Presidential limousine as it speeds along Elm Street toward the Stemmons Freeway overpass in Dallas after being fatally shot. First lady Jacqueline Kennedy leans over the president as Secret Service agent Clint Hill pushes her back to her seat. “She’s going to go flying off the back of the car,” Hill thought as he tried to secure the first lady. (AP Photo/James W. “Ike” Altgens)
James W. “Ike” Altgens
FILE – In this Dec. 3, 1963 file photo, James W. “Ike” Altgens, Associated Press Wirephoto operator-photographer, holds prints of the photographs he made of the Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. He recorded the Dealey Plaza chaos – including images of Kennedy grasping his throat and of Secret Service agent Clint Hill reaching for the first lady across the limo’s trunk. (AP Photo/Dave Taylor)
JFK That Awful Day
This Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013 photo of an Associated Press teletype news bulletin from Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 shows early news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. The document kept in the AP Corporate Archives in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
JFK That Awful Day
In this Oct. 21, 2013 photo, Dr. Michael Ellsasser of Lubbock, Texas, formerly of the Dallas Parkland Memorial Hospital, holds one of Jacqueline Kennedy’s roses, which he encased in Lucite. In the empty trauma room after President John F. Kennedy died, two young residents noticed the first lady’s roses, discarded and bloodstained. Each picked up one, and would preserve the flowers. “You can’t really tell what it is,” says Ellsasser, “but I still have it anyhow.” (AP Photo/Betsy Blaney)
JFK That Awful Day
This Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013 photo of an Associated Press teletype news bulletin from Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 shows news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. The document is in the AP Corporate Archives in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Robert McClelland
In this Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013 photo, Dr. Robert McClelland holds the blood stained shirt he was wearing Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 when he treated President John F. Kennedy in the emergency room of the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. McClelland stood at the head of Kennedy’s gurney to hold the retractor in the incision doctors were making to explore the president’s wound. “As soon as I got into that position,” McClelland recalled recently, “I was shocked … I said to Dr. [Malcolm] Perry, ‘My God, have you seen the back of his head?’ I said, ‘It’s gone.'” (AP Photo/LM Otero)
JFK That Awful Day
This Thursday, Oct. 31, 2013 photo of an Associated Press teletype news bulletin from Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 shows news that President Kennedy had died after being shot in Dallas. The message reads, “TWO PRIESTS STEPPED OUT OF PARKLAND HOSPITAL’S EMERGENCY WARD TODAY AND SAID PRESIDENT KENNEDY DIED OF HIS BULLET WOUNDS.” The document is located in the AP Corporate Archives in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Ronald C. Jones
In this Oct. 3, 2013 photo, Dr. Ronald C. Jones speaks during an interview in his office at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. Jones was the 31-year-old chief resident at Parkland Memorial Hospital on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 and one of the doctors who worked to save President John F. Kennedy’s life after being shot by Lee Harvey Oswald. Through the open door of the trauma room, Jones saw a stoic Jackie Kennedy, moving from a folding chair placed for her outside the room to standing quietly inside as doctors assessed her husband. “His eyes were open, they were not moving,” says Jones. (AP Photo/Benny Snyder)
JFK That Awful Day
FILE – In this Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, a U.S. flag flies at half-staff in front of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas where President John F. Kennedy was declared dead after being shot. When the end came, eyes turned to Jacqueline Kennedy at her husband’s side. Dr. Robert McClelland recalls a kiss. Dr. Kenneth Salyer, who had done external cardiac massage, says, “She sort of laid on his chest … in a sort of compassionate motion.” (AP Photo/RAJ)
JFK Martyr For Blacks
FILE – In this Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, women burst into tears outside Parkland Hospital upon hearing that President John F. Kennedy died from a shooting while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. (AP Photo/File)
Lee Harvey Oswald
FILE – This Nov. 22, 1963 file photo shows the Texas Theatre where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested after U.S. President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. The Warren Commission said Oswald left the book depository moments after shots were fired from the sixth floor, returned by bus and cab to his rooming house, then ventured out again _ soon encountering a Dallas police officer who stopped him based on descriptions of the assassination suspect. According to the commission, Oswald fatally shot Patrolman J.D. Tippit with a handgun, then fled into the nearby movie theater. (AP Photo)
John Brewer
In this Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2013 photo, John Brewer stands next to memorabilia at his home in Austin, Texas. Brewer helped direct police to Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas’ Texas Theatre after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963. As radio news reported an officer’s shooting near the shoe store where Brewer was manager, he noticed a man suspiciously engrossed in a window display instead of the police cars streaming past. When the man darted into a movie theater, Brewer followed and raised the alarm. The suspect pulled a handgun when confronted by a police officer, who wrestled it from him. “Cops were coming over the backs of the chairs…. In just a little while they had the cuffs on Oswald,” says Brewer. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
JFK That Awful Day
FILE – In this Monday, Nov. 25, 1963 file photo, Marie Tippit, widow of police officer J.D. Tippit who was slain during the search for President John F. Kennedy’s assassin, is led weeping from Beckley Hills Baptist Church in Dallas after funeral services for her husband. The services began about the time those for Kennedy were ending in Washington. (AP Photo)
Marie Tippit, Curtis Tippit
In this Oct. 15, 2013 photo, Marie Tippit, left, widow of slain Dallas Police officer J.D. Tippit, hugs her son Curtis Tippit after an interview about her husband in Dallas. Curtis is the youngest son of Tippit, who was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Marie speaks of the blessing of her husband’s brief return home for lunch that day and of their years together. She is a great-grandmother now, but as a young widow treasured a letter she received from another, Jacqueline Kennedy. “She said that she had lit a flame for Jack and she was going to consider that it would burn for my husband, too, that it would burn forever.” (AP Photo/LM Otero)
Lyndon B. Johnson, Jacqueline Kennedy, Malcolm Kilduff, Jack Valenti, Albert Thomas, Lady Bird Johnson, Jack Brooks
FILE – In this Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 photo from the White House via the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston, Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as president as Jacqueline Kennedy stands at his side in the cabin of the presidential plane on the ground at Love Field in Dallas. Judge Sarah T. Hughes, a Kennedy appointee to the Federal court, left, administers the oath. In background, from left are, Associate Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff, holding microphone; Jack Valenti, administrative assistant to Johnson; Rep. Albert Thomas, D-Texas.; Lady Bird Johnson; and Rep. Jack Brooks, D-Texas. (AP Photo/White House, Cecil Stoughton, via the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston)
Jacqueline Kennedy, Robert Kennedy
FILE – In this Friday, Nov. 22, 1963 file photo, Jacqueline Kennedy, with bloodstains on her clothes, holds hands with her brother-in-law, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, as the coffin carrying the body of President John F. Kennedy is placed in an ambulance after arriving at Andrews Air Force Base, Md. near Washington. President Kennedy was assassinated earlier that afternoon in Dallas. (AP Photo)
JFK That Awful Day
FILE – In this Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963 file photo, the flag-draped casket of President John F. Kennedy lies in state in the East Room of the White House in Washington. “Jackie Kennedy sent word that she wanted the East Room, where the president would lie in state, to look as it did when Lincoln’s body lay there,” remembers Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter and adviser to the administration. He and others went to work. Someone was sent to the Library of Congress for a sketch and a newspaper description from Lincoln’s time; artists and upholsterers were called in, and black crepe was carefully hung. “In the midst of all these activities we would alternately break down in tears,” Goodwin says. (AP Photo)
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DALLAS (AP) — The mementoes are everywhere, preserved for five decades by people who wish they could forget: Letters of grief and thanks, in a widow’s hand. An unwanted wedding band. A rose stained with blood.
Those who were closest to events on the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated still talk about what they witnessed as if it happened yesterday. And they frequently mention a keepsake, some small but often heavy burden they’ve carried since Nov. 22, 1963 — perhaps a touchstone to happier memories or just an artifact proving history brushed their lives.
Some can’t even explain the items they keep from those awful, convulsing, world-changing 24 hours.
___
Dawn was approaching — it was past 6 a.m. that Friday.
In a bungalow in suburban Irving, the only one up was Lee Harvey Oswald. He made coffee, dressed for work, then paused before leaving his wife, Marina, and two young daughters. He drew most of the cash from his pocket, removed his wedding ring and left both behind. Gathering up a parcel he’d retrieved from the garage, he crept out.
“Lee left a coffee cup in the sink,” recalls Ruth Paine, whose house Marina and the girls were staying in. Oswald had come the previous evening to try — unsuccessfully — to reconcile with his estranged wife.
When he departed, leaving the ring, Paine says, “My guess is that he did not expect to live.”
She would later retrieve the ring for investigators, and it would find its way into a lawyer’s file for decades. Only recently was it returned to Oswald’s widow, who put the bitter memento up for auction. In a letter, she explained that “symbolically I want to let go of my past” and what she has called “the worst day of my life.” The ring sold last month for $108,000.
Walking from Paine’s house, Oswald reached the home where Buell Frazier, his co-worker, lived. He put his parcel in Frazier’s Chevrolet for the ride to work at the Texas School Book Depository, where both had $1.25 an hour jobs filling orders.
Normally, Oswald would wait to be picked up; normally, he would have carried a sack lunch. And unlike most Fridays, he told Frazier he would not need a ride home that night. Then there was that package in the backseat. When Frazier asked, Oswald said it contained curtain rods.
They drove off in a misting rain and arrived at work around 7:55 a.m.
At that same time, 25 miles away, at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, Secret Service agent Clint Hill was walking toward Room 850, where Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline were staying in a suite that locals had specially decorated. They had lent art treasures — 16 originals by Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet and others — and hung them on the walls in welcome. Today, these artworks themselves have become mementoes of that day, reassembled in an anniversary museum exhibit.
Emerging from the suite, Kennedy called out, “Good morning,” to Hill, whom he knew well as the agent who’d been protecting the first lady for three years.
And it did feel like a good morning, Hill said in an interview. A large, friendly crowd was gathering outside, despite the drizzle, for a speech — Kennedy’s first event of a packed day. Next was a breakfast speech inside the hotel, where another crowd erupted when the first lady entered.
“Everybody was just stunned by her. And of course everybody in the world would later see the pink outfit she was wearing,” recalls Associated Press writer Mike Cochran, who stayed with the couple as they headed to the Fort Worth airport for the hop to Dallas and a motorcade to a planned luncheon speech.
Skies had cleared by the time Air Force One touched down at Dallas’ Love Field, allowing the bubble top to be removed from the dark blue Lincoln that would carry the president through downtown.
It was a few minutes before noon.
Agents riding in the Secret Service vehicle just behind the president scanned the jubilant throngs, which thickened as the motorcade neared downtown. At one point, the cars slowed, then halted for a group of students.
“There was a banner: ‘Mr. President, please stop and shake our hands,'” Hill says. “Whenever that happened, we knew pretty well he was going to stop.”
Nancy White reached out from the crowd. “He shook my hand,” she says, amazement still in her voice.
The motorcade moved on.
Up ahead was Dealey Plaza and a corridor of buildings including the book depository, where Buell Frazier stood on the front steps with co-workers — though not Lee Oswald.
Happy pandemonium greeted the presidential Lincoln, and suddenly Frazier could see Jackie Kennedy.
“She’s as pretty as the pictures,” he remembers calling out to a woman nearby.
And that quickly the motorcade glided by. But then came a sound that Frazier first thought was a police motorcycle backfiring.
Then another pop. And another. Frazier recognized it was gunfire.
Instantly, he says, “People were running and screaming and hollering. Somebody came running by as we were standing there on the steps and she says, ‘They’ve shot the president.'”
In the agents’ car, Hill heard the first shot, sprinted to the Lincoln and scrambled aboard. As he strained to hold on, he saw Mrs. Kennedy climbing onto the rear of the car. He pushed her back to her seat.
Meanwhile, reporters were struggling to grasp the events, then get the news out.
In the Dallas AP office, the phone rang and bureau chief Bob Johnson grabbed it. On the line was staff photographer James W. “Ike” Altgens, who had been recording the Dealey Plaza chaos.
“Bob, the president’s been shot,” he shouted from a pay phone.
“Ike, how do you know?” Johnson demanded.
“I was shooting pictures then and I saw it.”
Johnson typed furiously, folding in Altgens’ details:
“BULLETIN.
“DALLAS — PRESIDENT KENNEDY WAS SHOT TODAY JUST AS HIS MOTORCADE LEFT DOWNTOWN DALLAS. MRS. KENNEDY JUMPED UP AND GRABBED HIM. SHE CRIED: ‘OH, NO!’ THE MOTORCADE SPED ON.”
___
The Lincoln, with agent Hill spread-eagled over the wounded president, raced to Parkland Hospital.
Because it was lunchtime, many on the Parkland staff were in the cafeteria when calls suddenly blared over the public address system, summoning specialists — “stat.”
Dr. Ronald Jones called the operator to learn why.
“Dr. Jones, the president’s been shot …,” she said. “They need physicians.” The cafeteria cleared.
Through the open door of the trauma room, Jones saw a stoic Jackie Kennedy, moving from a folding chair placed for her outside the room to standing quietly inside as doctors assessed her husband.
“His eyes were open, they were not moving,” Jones says.
As he located a vein to insert an IV, other physicians worked frantically.
Dr. Malcolm Perry, who’d been at lunch with Jones, was examining the wound in the president’s neck. Perry asked Dr. Robert McClelland to stand at the head of the gurney and hold the retractor.
“As soon as I got into that position,” McClelland recalled recently, “I was shocked … I said to Dr. Perry, ‘My God, have you seen the back of his head?’ I said, ‘It’s gone.'”
Dr. Kemp Clark, professor of neurosurgery, was standing by a heart monitor at one point, McClelland recalls. Kennedy’s heartbeat had flatlined.
“Dr. Clark said to Dr. Perry — and I remember the exact words — ‘He said, ‘Mac, you can stop now because he’s gone,'” McClelland says.
The trauma room door opened, admitting the Rev. Oscar Huber, who anointed the president’s head with oil and administered Roman Catholic last rites.
When the end came, eyes turned to Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s side. McClelland recalls a kiss. Dr. Kenneth Salyer, who had done external cardiac massage, says, “She sort of laid on his chest … in a sort of compassionate motion.”
Afterward, in the empty trauma room two young residents noticed the first lady’s roses, discarded and bloodstained. Each picked up one, and would preserve the flowers in Lucite. “You can’t really tell what it is,” says Dr. Michael Ellsasser, “but I still have it anyhow.”
McClelland was changing clothes later when he remembered once seeing in a museum a piece of clothing stained with Abraham Lincoln’s blood after he was shot. Struck by the sense of history in his own simple white shirt — soaked in blood from where he leaned over the gurney — he decided it should be preserved. He has it still.
The shooting of the president was now a homicide case, and investigators fanned out.
Buell Frazier, who had innocently driven Oswald to work, was rounded up for hours of fierce questioning.
Across town, after a rare lunch break at home, Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit hurried back to patrol. He soon spotted a man matching the description of the suspected assassin, pulled up alongside him and got out of his patrol car. In a flash, the man shot Tippit dead, then fled.
As radio news reported an officer’s shooting near the shoe store where John Brewer was manager, he noticed a man suspiciously engrossed in a window display instead of the police cars streaming past. When the man darted into a movie theater, Brewer followed and raised the alarm. “Cops were coming over the backs of the chairs…,” Brewer recalls. “In just a little while they had the cuffs on Oswald.”
Today, Tippit’s wife Marie speaks of the blessing of his brief return home for lunch that day and of their years together. She is a great-grandmother now, but as a young widow treasured a letter she received from another, Jacqueline Kennedy. “She said that she had lit a flame for Jack and she was going to consider that it would burn for my husband, too, that it would burn forever.”
She keeps her husband’s badge in a bank vault.
That afternoon, police arrived with a sharp knock on Ruth Paine’s door as she and Marina Oswald sat transfixed by the television news.
“We have Lee Oswald in custody, for shooting an officer,” Paine remembers them declaring. They began questioning the women.
“And then one of the policemen asked Marina (whose native language was Russian), ‘Did Oswald have a gun?’
“And I said, ‘No,’ but translated to Marina, who said, ‘Yes, he did.'”
Paine continues: “She led us to the garage and pointed to a blanket roll.” That, she said, was where Oswald kept his rifle.
The rifle was gone.
“That was my worst moment,” says Paine.
She keeps few mementoes of the time. What she does carry still, she says, is “a sense of grief and loss.”
And regret. “If only I had known that Lee Oswald had hidden a rifle in my garage.”
Around 2:30 p.m. at Dallas’ Love Field, Clint Hill watched as Lyndon Johnson, flanked by Jackie Kennedy, was sworn in as president aboard Air Force One. The plane, with Kennedy’s casket secured inside, quickly took off for Washington.
It landed at Andrews Air Force Base at 5:58 p.m.
The capital was still. Stunned Kennedy aides steered through silent streets to the White House to keep vigil. Richard Goodwin, a speechwriter and adviser, was one of them.
“Jackie Kennedy sent word that she wanted the East Room, where the president would lie in state, to look as it did when Lincoln’s body lay there,” Goodwin remembers.
He and others went to work. Someone was sent to the Library of Congress for a sketch and a newspaper description from Lincoln’s time; artists and upholsterers were called in, and black crepe was carefully hung. “In the midst of all these activities we would alternately break down in tears,” Goodwin says.
It was now well past midnight.
Agent Hill had stayed at Jackie Kennedy’s side — as an autopsy was conducted on the body, and then as it was taken to the White House, arriving at 4:24 a.m.
A waiting U.S. Marine honor guard marched before the ambulance to the North Portico entrance.
Goodwin, watching the scene from inside the White House, described the transfer of the casket to the now-ready East Room. Jackie Kennedy and family members entered, spent some moments in silent thought and prayer, then left.
With Mrs. Kennedy retired for the night, Hill recalls, “I went down to my office on the ground floor. I made some notes for myself as to what had transpired that day.”
Then and long afterward, guilt consumed the agent; he believed he could have protected Kennedy from the fatal bullet by reaching the limousine more quickly. There would be bouts of depression and of heavy drinking. He says he’s doing well now, but there was a process to reach this point.
For years, he talked little about that day and turned aside suggestions that he write about it. Eventually he agreed to speak for another agent’s book and then wrote his own memoir, “Mrs. Kennedy and Me.” (He has another book, “Five Days in November,” coming out this month.)
All of this helped, he says. And the notes he wrote were a factor. But they’re not mementoes.
“I had them for a long time,” Hill says. “In 2008 or so, I burned them.”
Partly, that was “an attempt to bury it. But that just hasn’t happened. You can’t get rid of it.”
He does keep letters from Jackie Kennedy.
In his last act on that awful day, Hill closed his notebook, left the White House and walked to his car.
It was past 6 a.m. Saturday, and dawn was approaching.d CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN
