Chapter Two

That Morning

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Dallas, November 1963

The weather decided how the car was configured. It rained in Dallas early that morning, and the plastic top stayed on while the forecast was uncertain. By late morning the sky had cleared. The top came off, the crowds came out, and a wet Friday turned into a bright one. Almost every image anybody has of that day exists because the weather changed before lunch.1, 2

The expectation had been a cool reception. What actually happened on Main Street was a crush. People packed several deep for blocks, leaning off curbs, hanging out of windows. It was going so well that the Governor’s wife turned round to say so. Dallas gave that motorcade one of the biggest welcomes of the whole trip, right up until the last corner.2, 3

That morning’s Dallas Morning News carried a full-page advertisement attacking the President, laid out with a heavy black border like a funeral notice. He saw it before he left the hotel. He is recorded remarking on the atmosphere in the city that day. Then he got into an open car and drove through it, because that is what the trip was for.4, 5

Two thousand people were sitting in the Dallas Trade Mart waiting for him. Tables laid, speech printed, a room full of business leaders. The motorcade was ten minutes away. They sat there for a long time before anyone told them, and then most of them simply stayed in their seats because nobody knew what else to do.6, 7

There was a finished speech that never got delivered, and it is worth knowing what was in it. Copies had already gone to reporters, which is the only reason the text survives. It is about American power and the responsibility that has to come with it, and it has an edge aimed straight at the room he was flying into.8

The sharpest passage is a warning about people who preach doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, who mistake noise for strength and rhetoric for policy. He had written that for a Dallas business luncheon, in a city where a newspaper had run a black bordered advertisement accusing him that morning and where handbills were circulating with his face on them like a wanted poster. He was going to stand up in that room and say it to their faces.9

The closing is the part people remember once they have read it. He calls his country, in that generation, the watchmen on the walls of world freedom, by destiny rather than by choice. And then he ends on scripture: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. That is the last line of the last speech he wrote, prepared for a lunch he was eleven minutes from reaching.9

The car was almost out. Past the underpass the route went straight up the Stemmons Freeway ramp and away at speed, out of the crowd, out of the enclosed plaza and onto open road. The distance from the last shot to that ramp is a few seconds of driving. Whatever was going to happen had to happen inside that plaza, and it did, with feet to spare.10, 11

For years afterwards Dallas carried it. The place was called the city of hate in print. Businesses lost contracts, conventions went elsewhere, and people from Dallas traveling abroad stopped saying where they were from. A man from New Orleans who had lived in the Soviet Union did something in a building, and a whole city was held responsible for the geography of it.12

The communications that afternoon were a mess. Reporters ran for payphones and fought over them. Wire copy went out garbled and was corrected repeatedly. For a period, official Washington was learning what had happened from the same news tickers as everyone else. The most powerful government on earth found out its President had been shot largely by watching television.13, 14

Ninety-eight minutes after the shots, a federal judge swore in a new President in the cabin of an aircraft on the ground at Love Field, with the previous President’s widow standing beside him still in the clothes she had been wearing in the car. There is one photograph of it. The transfer of power in the United States took an hour and a half and happened on a parked plane.15, 16

Ask most people what Dealey Plaza is and you will get one answer. For thirty years before that afternoon it was simply the western entrance to downtown Dallas. A landscaped junction with lawns and colonnades, named after a newspaperman, where people parked and walked to work. One minute in 1963 took the name away from the place and gave it to the event.17, 18

Fort Worth, hour by hour

It is raining in Fort Worth at seven in the morning and he is in a suite on the eighth floor of the Hotel Texas, which is a nice hotel in a working city rather than a grand one. Somebody has hung borrowed paintings on the walls overnight because there was nothing worth looking at in the room. Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, collected from local houses by people who thought a president should not wake up to bad hotel art. He never mentions it. His wife notices.19

Outside, in a parking lot across the street, several thousand people have been standing in drizzle since before dawn to see him. He goes out to them with no coat and no lectern, borrows a microphone, and speaks for about three minutes. Somebody shouts about his wife. He says she is getting herself organized, that it takes her longer, but that when she does it she looks better than the rest of us. The crowd loves it. He is enjoying this.20

Then a Chamber of Commerce breakfast, two thousand people, and his wife arrives late in the pink suit to an ovation he did not get. He jokes that nobody wonders what he and Lyndon are wearing. And in the middle of it he says something worth holding: that this is a dangerous and uncertain world, that no one expects our life to be easy, and that the past does not entitle anybody to anything. It is the ordinary rhetoric of that presidency and it reads differently now.21

Back upstairs he reads the Dallas papers, and there is the full-page advertisement edged in black like a death notice, accusing him. He hands it to his wife and says they are heading into nut country. Then he says the rest of it, the part about a man with a rifle in a window and how nobody could stop it. That is a little over two hours before it happens, in a hotel room, with the borrowed Monet on the wall behind him.22

By late morning the cloud has broken and Dallas is bright. Somewhere in that window a decision gets taken about the plastic top on the car, which is not armored and never was, and which exists to keep rain off. Because it is no longer raining, it comes off and goes in the trunk. Nobody agonized over it. It was a weather call, made the way weather calls are made, and it is the reason there is nothing at all between a rifle and a man for the whole of Elm Street.23

They fly from Fort Worth to Dallas, which is thirty miles, and the flight takes thirteen minutes including taxiing. They could have driven it in forty. But arriving by air gives you a set of steps, a crowd on a tarmac and a photograph, and the entire purpose of this trip is photographs. So the most powerful man in the world gets on an airplane to travel the distance between two suburbs.24

Look at what that morning actually contains. Borrowed paintings. A crowd in the drizzle. A joke about his wife being late. A cheerful room of businessmen at breakfast. A newspaper advertisement calling him a traitor, read out loud and half laughed at. A weather decision about a plastic roof. A thirteen minute flight. Thirty-five minutes after they land, it is over. Nothing in that morning is a warning. It is just a Friday, and it is the last one.25

The morning

The last full day started outside a hotel in Fort Worth, in drizzle, in front of a crowd standing in a parking lot. He came out without a coat and spoke without notes for a few minutes. There is film of it. He was relaxed, the crowd was large and friendly, and Texas was going far better than anyone on that trip had expected.26, 27

Fort Worth to Dallas is about thirty miles. They flew it. The presidential aircraft was airborne for roughly a quarter of an hour, because arriving by air gives you a crowd at a fence and pictures on the runway, and a motorcade from the airport gives you a route through the city. The whole point of the day was to be seen.28, 29

At every Texas stop the First Lady was handed yellow roses, the state flower. At Love Field somebody gave her red ones instead. It is the kind of detail nobody would ever record, except that it was the last bouquet, and so it got written down and repeated ever since. Small things become permanent when they attach to a day like that.30

There was a chain-link fence at Love Field with a crowd behind it, and instead of getting straight into the car the President and his wife walked over and shook hands along it for several minutes. Agents did not love it. He did it at nearly every stop. Half an hour before Dealey Plaza he was pressed up against a fence full of strangers with no idea who any of them were.31, 32

The suit is one of the most recognizable garments of the twentieth century and it was picked for a practical reason: it photographed well and it would stand out in a crowd. That was the job. She wore it because Texas was a political problem and being visible was the entire assignment. It went into an archive afterwards and has not been displayed since.33, 34

The trip existed because Texas Democrats were split and the President wanted them fixed before an election year. The Governor had been closely involved in planning where the motorcade went and where the lunch would be held. The man sitting in the jump seat had helped design the route that took the car into Dealey Plaza. Nobody has ever suggested he knew anything. It is just a very hard fact to sit with.35, 36

The route did not have to go down Elm Street. It went that way because the freeway ramp to the Trade Mart could only be reached from Elm, so the motorcade had to leave Main and jog through the plaza. It is an ordinary traffic-engineering fact, published in advance, and it is the reason the car passed under that window at eleven miles an hour.37, 38

Of everyone in that car, the person whose account of the sequence stayed most consistent for the rest of her life was the Governor’s wife. She gave the same order of events in 1964 and forty years later: a shot, the President reacting, then her husband hit. Her version has never matched the official reconstruction exactly, and she never adjusted it to fit.39, 40

The run from Love Field into downtown Dallas was long and slow and enormous. People stood ten deep in places, children were held up, the car stopped twice so he could greet people. By the time it reached Main Street the visit had been a success for the better part of an hour. Everything you have ever seen about that day is the last ninety seconds of a very good afternoon.2, 41

Twice on the way through Dallas the President had the car halted so he could speak to people in the crowd. Once for a group of schoolchildren, once for a nun with a class. An open car moving at walking pace, stopping on request, in a city that had been described to him as hostile. That is the security posture of the day, and it is why what happened was possible.42, 43

The motorcade

The President’s car had a clear plastic top. It was not armored. It was weather protection, and it would have stopped nothing. It came off at Love Field that morning because the rain had cleared, and because the whole point of a motorcade is that people can see the man. It is the detail everyone reaches for first, and it is the one that would have changed least.44, 45

There are steps on the rear bumper of that limousine, and handholds, and they are there for agents to stand on. Down Elm Street they were empty. Agents rode the follow-up car instead, twenty-five feet back. That is why Clint Hill had twenty-five feet to cover. The protective formation used that day put nobody within reach of the President, in an open car, at walking pace.46, 47

Four Dallas motorcycles rode with the President’s car, and all four were behind him. Standard practice for a slow crowd run would put outriders level with the passenger compartment, screening it. That day they were at the rear quarters so the crowd’s view would not be blocked. Every arrangement made in Dallas that morning was optimized for people being able to see him.48, 49

The average speed of the President’s car down Elm Street was about eleven miles an hour. That is slower than a bicycle. It is roughly the pace of a jog. For the entire length of that street, an open car carrying a head of state moved slowly enough that a person on the sidewalk could have kept up with it at a run. And one did. Clint Hill caught it.50, 51, 52

The motorcade route was public. It ran in the Dallas papers days ahead, including the turn from Main onto Houston and Houston onto Elm. That was normal. The entire purpose was for crowds to gather along it. Anyone in Dallas who wanted to know exactly where that car would be, and roughly when, could read it over breakfast. No secret was needed and none was kept.53, 2

Three vehicles behind the limousine, in an open convertible of his own, was Vice President Lyndon Johnson. An agent pushed him to the floor of that car and lay on top of him. Within two hours he had taken the oath of office on an aircraft at Love Field. The distance between those two facts is about 130 feet of Elm Street and ninety minutes.54, 55, 56

The photographers who covered the President every day were in vehicles near the back of the motorcade, still on Houston Street when the shooting happened. The professionals missed it almost entirely. Practically every usable image of it was taken by amateurs with home cameras who happened to stand in the right place. The historical record of the most consequential minute of the century is bystander footage.57, 58

The couple in the jump seats were not staff. John Connally was Governor of Texas and the trip was partly about him. A Democratic Party split in the state that the President had come to patch up. He and Nellie were riding in that car as hosts, showing off their city. The Governor was shot through the back, the chest, the wrist and the thigh. He recovered, and served two more years.59, 36

Four or five car lengths ahead of the President was an unmarked Ford carrying the Chief of Police of Dallas, the county Sheriff, and two Secret Service agents. They were past the Depository and rolling toward the underpass when the firing started. The senior law enforcement officers in the city were the closest people to the shots and among the least able to see anything, because they were already ahead of it.60, 61

There is a photograph taken by an Associated Press man on Elm Street in which the President is already hit and still upright, his hands coming up toward his throat, his wife turning toward him. It went out on the wire within the hour and ran on front pages around the world the next morning. It is the last picture of John Kennedy alive, and it was taken by a working photographer doing his job about thirty feet away.62, 63

The rest of that day

The menu is on the record, because 2000 of them were printed. Fresh fruit cup. Eight ounces of top sirloin club steak. Tossed green salad. French-cut green beans almondine. Rolls and butter. Apple pie and coffee. A perfectly ordinary business lunch in a big room, laid and waiting, ten minutes down the road from the plaza. Nothing about that afternoon was supposed to be memorable, and the menu is the proof.64, 65

That night he was booked into Austin. A Texas Welcome Dinner at the Municipal Auditorium, seven thirty, a hundred dollars a plate. The menu was the same one he had been served at lunchtime, with a baked potato added for the money. Somewhere in Austin a room was laid for a thousand people who would never be told to sit down, and it had the same steak on it as the room in Dallas.66

After Austin the plan was to drive out to the Johnson ranch and stay the night with Lyndon and Lady Bird, then fly back to Washington on the Saturday. A political weekend in the hill country to patch up a state party that was tearing itself apart. That is what the diary said. The trip was two days of handshakes with a barbecue at the end of it, and it is the most ordinary document in this entire story.67, 68

It was not his first time in the city. He had campaigned there in 1960, when Dallas was a place he needed and did not win, in a state he took by about two points with a Texan on the ticket beneath him. So the 1963 trip was a return to somewhere he already knew was difficult. He was not walking into an unknown city. He was walking back into a known problem, on purpose, because the arithmetic for 1964 required it.69, 70

† disputed   ‡ theory   § reconstructed — everything unmarked is established. Superscript numbers key to the sources below. Corrections

Sources for this chapter

70 sources. Every claim above is keyed to one of them. The complete list for the whole book runs to 1,276.

  1. Dallas weather records, 22 Nov 1963
  2. Warren Report ch.2
  3. press coverage of the Dallas motorcade route
  4. Dallas Morning News, 22 Nov 1963 (the black-bordered advertisement)
  5. contemporaneous accounts of the President's remarks
  6. Warren Report ch.2 (Trade Mart luncheon)
  7. contemporary press accounts
  8. Prepared remarks for the Dallas Trade Mart, 22 Nov 1963 (JFK Library)
  9. Undelivered remarks prepared for the Dallas Trade Mart, 22 November 1963
  10. Warren Report ch.2 (motorcade route to Stemmons Freeway)
  11. plaza and underpass geometry
  12. contemporary and retrospective press coverage of Dallas after November 1963
  13. UPI and AP wire logs, 22 Nov 1963
  14. contemporary accounts of press communications from Parkland
  15. Air Force One oath of office, 22 Nov 1963
  16. Cecil Stoughton photograph
  17. Dealey Plaza history, Dallas Historical Society
  18. George Bannerman Dealey and the Dallas Morning News
  19. contemporaneous accounts of the Hotel Texas suite, 22 November 1963
  20. remarks in the parking lot, Fort Worth, 22 November 1963
  21. remarks at the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce breakfast, 22 November 1963
  22. accounts of Kennedy's remarks in the Hotel Texas suite, 22 November 1963
  23. Secret Service records regarding the limousine top, 22 November 1963
  24. Air Force One flight record, 22 November 1963
  25. the author's assessment
  26. Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce breakfast and parking lot remarks, 22 Nov 1963
  27. White House film and press pool
  28. Warren Report ch.2 (Fort Worth to Love Field)
  29. Air Force One flight records, 22 Nov 1963
  30. contemporaneous press accounts of the Love Field arrival, 22 Nov 1963
  31. Warren Report ch.2 (Love Field arrival)
  32. press and film coverage of the fence line
  33. contemporaneous accounts of the Texas trip wardrobe
  34. National Archives holdings and display restrictions
  35. Warren Report ch.1 and ch.2 (planning of the Texas trip)
  36. Connally WC testimony (4H129)
  37. Warren Report ch.2 (motorcade route selection)
  38. Dallas street and freeway layout, 1963
  39. Nellie Connally WC testimony (4H146)
  40. her later published account
  41. press and film coverage of the Dallas motorcade
  42. Warren Report ch.2 (motorcade stops on Main Street)
  43. contemporaneous press accounts
  44. Warren Report ch.2 (motorcade preparations)
  45. Secret Service statements on the SS-100-X top
  46. Warren Report ch.8 (protective arrangements)
  47. Zapruder and Altgens imagery of the rear steps
  48. Warren Report ch.2 (DPD motorcycle assignments)
  49. the reconstruction's motorcade spacing model
  50. Warren Report ch.2 (limousine speed)
  51. CE 884 frame stationing
  52. the reconstruction's motorcade model
  53. Dallas Morning News and Dallas Times Herald route publication, Nov 1963
  54. Warren Report ch.2 (motorcade order)
  55. Secret Service accounts of the VP car
  56. Air Force One oath, 22 Nov 1963
  57. Warren Report ch.2 (motorcade order, press vehicles)
  58. the plaza photographic record
  59. Warren Report ch.1 and ch.2 (purpose of the Texas trip)
  60. Warren Report ch.2 (lead car occupants)
  61. Curry and Decker statements
  62. Altgens AP photograph, 22 Nov 1963
  63. Altgens WC testimony (7H515)
  64. Dallas Trade Mart luncheon programme and menu, 22 November 1963
  65. Dallas Market Center press materials, November 1963
  66. Texas Welcome Dinner programme, Municipal Auditorium, Austin, 22 November 1963
  67. White House presidential schedule, Texas trip, 21 to 23 November 1963
  68. Warren Report, chapter II
  69. 1960 presidential campaign itinerary
  70. 1960 presidential election returns, Dallas County and Texas