Chapter Eight

What Became of Them

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The rest of their lives

The man who took the most famous film in history could not stand to look at it. Abraham Zapruder testified that he had nightmares about what he had seen through that viewfinder. He sold the film to Life magazine and gave part of the money to the family of a policeman killed that day. He was asked about it for the rest of his life. He had gone out at lunchtime to watch a parade.1, 2

The agent who reached the car spent most of his life believing he had failed. Clint Hill left the Secret Service in the mid-seventies and did not speak publicly about that day for decades. When he finally did, in his seventies, he said the thing he had never been able to put down was those few seconds of running. Nobody else in the world thought he had been slow. That is not usually how guilt works.3, 4

The Polaroid was passed around, borrowed, copied and damaged. Its corner was torn. It has been enhanced, enlarged and analyzed by people looking for a man behind a fence, for sixty years. Mary Moorman was a private person from Dallas who took one photograph of a passing car, and the rest of her life had that photograph in it. She never claimed to have seen a gunman.5, 6, 7

†The towerman who had the only view behind the fence died in a car crash in 1966, aged forty-one. His death appears on almost every list of mysterious deaths connected to this case. It was a single-vehicle accident on a Texas road. There is no evidence of anything else, and there is also no way now to look. Both of those sentences are true, and the second one is why the lists exist.8, 9, 10

The two small boys whose parents threw them onto the grass were four and two years old. They are in their sixties now. Their father gave interviews for the rest of his life and never changed his account of the direction. The youngest witnesses to the assassination of a President were too young to remember it, and they have spent their whole lives being asked about it anyway.11, 12

One man in this story became famous for standing in a doorway. Billy Lovelady worked at the Depository and was photographed on the front steps as the motorcade went past. Because he resembled a colleague, he spent years being told by strangers that he was someone else. He testified, he was photographed in the same shirt, a Congressional panel confirmed it was him. People still argue about his face.13, 14

The third man wounded in Dealey Plaza went back to selling cars. James Tague was cut on the cheek by debris and it healed. He gave testimony, went home, and lived an ordinary life in Texas for decades before writing about it late on. He is the only person injured by gunfire that day who got to have the rest of his life. He always said his own injury was trivial and the curb mattered more.15, 16

One Dallas motorcycle officer spent the rest of his career answering a single question. Marrion Baker had a man at gunpoint in a lunchroom about ninety seconds after the shots and let him walk away, because the building superintendent said he worked there. He did nothing wrong by any standard of that afternoon. He was asked about it for the rest of his life.17, 18

About seventy-five people worked in that warehouse filling orders for schoolbooks. On Monday most of them went back in. They walked past reporters, took the same lift, and did the same job in a building that had become the most notorious address in America over a weekend. Almost none of their names are known. They are the largest group of eyewitnesses to that day and the least recorded.19, 20

Go there now and there are tourists on the grass, guides selling theories on the sidewalk, people standing in traffic to photograph a painted X, and office workers eating lunch on the same low wall Howard Brennan sat on. It is a working part of a city that happens to be a crime scene. Every day, hundreds of people stand in exactly the places in these stories, mostly without knowing which is which.21, 22

What happened to Jackie

It is worth stopping on the age. She was thirty-four years old. She had two small children, one of whom turned three on the day of the funeral. She had been First Lady for less than three years, she had buried an infant son in August, and by the end of that November she was the most photographed widow on earth. Almost everything written about her afterwards forgets to say how young she was.23, 24

Seven days after Dallas she asked a magazine writer to come to the house at Hyannis Port, at night, and she talked to him for four hours. Life was closing a memorial issue. Theodore White took notes at her kitchen table while she told him what she wanted said. She had been a widow for a week and she was already thinking about the wording, which is either extraordinary composure or extraordinary clarity, and is probably both.25, 26

The word Camelot had never been attached to that presidency until that night. She gave it to him. The record at night, the line about one brief shining moment, and Life printed it, and it has been the frame ever since. Sixty years of argument about what that administration actually was still runs into a word chosen by a thirty-four-year-old woman, seven days in, at a kitchen table, on purpose.25, 26

And it very nearly did not run. He wrote about a thousand words in that house and read them down a telephone to his editors in New York, and the editors did not like it. They thought the Camelot passages were overwrought and wanted them out. She was in the house while that call was going on. She objected to the cuts, and the magazine printed it her way.27, 28

Sit with that arrangement. Professional editors, reading the copy cold, judged the most famous framing device in modern American political memory to be too much, and were overruled by the widow standing in the room. White came to be uneasy about it later, and said he had helped build a legend rather than report one. The story ran anyway, the word stuck, and his second thoughts arrived thirty years too late to matter.27, 28

In the same conversation she said this, and it is in White’s own handwriting: I am not going to be the Widow Kennedy. When this is over, I am going to crawl into the deepest retirement there is. She said it in the middle of the week she was inventing the legend. She built the frame and then she stepped out of it, and she spent the rest of her life keeping that second half of the sentence.25

She gave brief testimony to the Warren Commission in 1964 and then, in public, essentially never discussed it again for thirty years. She remarried, she was written about constantly, and she spent the last twenty years of her working life as a book editor in New York, on the other side of the desk from writers. The most recognizable witness to the most examined event of the century declined, for three decades, to be one.29, 30

White gave his notes of that night to the Kennedy library in 1969 with one instruction attached: nothing to be opened until a year after her death. She died in 1994. The papers came out in 1995, and only then could anybody read what she had actually said, as against what had been printed. Even the document that created the legend was written with a lock on it, timed to outlive her.31

She designed it

Nobody in Washington in 1963 knew how to bury a murdered president, because the last one had been in 1901 and everybody involved in that was dead. There was no plan in a drawer. And into that, in the first hours, stepped a thirty-four-year-old woman who had spent the afternoon in the clothes he was shot in, and who then made almost every decision about what the world would see.32

What she asked for first was history. On the night of the assassination she wanted to know exactly how Lincoln had lain in state, and people were sent to the Library of Congress in the small hours to find out. They came back with descriptions and engravings from 1865. The East Room was then draped to match, and the coffin was set on a copy of the catafalque Lincoln’s had rested on. She was reaching for the only precedent that existed.33

Everything people remember from that Monday was chosen. The caisson. The muffled drums that go on and on under everything. The horse with no rider and the boots reversed in the stirrups, which is a cavalry tradition for a commander who will not ride again and which almost nobody watching had ever seen. She wanted them. They were not protocol, because there was no protocol. They were selections made by a widow in her thirties over about seventy-two hours.34

The one that took nerve was the walk. From the White House to the cathedral, behind the coffin, on foot, in the open, with heads of state and royalty strung out behind her, three days after her husband had been shot in public and one day after the only suspect had been shot on television. The Secret Service did not want it. Foreign security details were appalled. She walked, and because she walked, everybody walked.35

The flame was hers too, and it was very nearly not possible. She asked for it late, wanting something like the one under the Arc de Triomphe, and the Army had roughly a day to work out how to put a permanent fire on a Virginia hillside. What burned on the twenty-fifth was improvised plumbing and a propane torch, lit by her hand, with the proper installation built afterwards. The thing I stood beside at Arlington started as a rush job nobody thought could be done.36

So hold this together with something from earlier in the book. This case has been argued for sixty years largely through pictures, and a great many of the most powerful ones are not accidents of news coverage. The veil, the boy on the steps, the horse, the flame. A woman who had been beside him when it happened decided, inside three days, what the world would be looking at. It is the largest single act of authorship in this entire story and it is almost never described as one.37

What became of the rest of them

John Connally was hit by the bullet the official account says passed through the President first. He never accepted it. Not in the hospital that week, not in testimony, not in thirty years afterwards. His words were that there is no theory. There is his absolute knowledge, and Nellie’s, that one bullet caused the President’s first wound and an entirely separate shot struck him. The man the bullet is supposed to have gone through disagreed with the finding until the day he died.38, 39, 40

†It is the strongest witness objection in the case and it still is not decisive, for one reason. People who are shot are extremely poor witnesses to the order of their own wounding. He was turning, he was hit through the back, the wrist and the thigh, and he was unconscious within seconds. What he remembers is a sequence assembled afterwards by a man in shock. That does not make him wrong. It means his certainty is not the same thing as evidence, and he was certain.41, 42

He recovered, finished as Governor of Texas, then crossed the aisle and became Secretary of the Treasury under Nixon. He ran for the Republican nomination in 1980 and spent an enormous sum to win a single delegate. He was bankrupt by the late eighties. He died in 1993 of a lung disease, in Houston, aged seventy-six, having spent thirty years being asked the same question about six seconds in a car.43, 44

Nellie Connally said the last thing anybody said to him. That Dallas loved him, and then it happened. She backed her husband’s account for the rest of her life, wrote her own book about that day in her eighties, and died in 2006. She was the last surviving passenger of that car. Since September 2006 there has been nobody left alive who was inside it, and everything anybody says about what happened in that back seat is now second hand for ever.45, 46

There were two widows that weekend. One was thirty-four and the whole world was looking at her. The other was twenty-two, foreign-born, barely spoke English, had a baby a month old and a toddler, and was the most important witness against her own dead husband. She married again two years later, moved to a small town in Texas, and spent the rest of her life declining to be photographed.47, 48

†In 1964 she testified in a way that helped convict him in the public mind. Decades later she said publicly that she no longer believed he did it. Both of those are on the record from the same person. You can read that as a frightened young woman telling the authorities what they needed and correcting it once she was safe, or as an old woman softening toward a husband she once condemned. Nobody has ever established which, and she is the only person who could.47, 49

It is worth being exact about this, because people assume it was worse. Three people were struck in Dealey Plaza. The President. The Governor. And a man standing a block away who was cut on the cheek by a fragment off a curb. That is all. Forty-five minutes later a police officer was shot dead in Oak Cliff, and two days after that the suspect was killed in a police basement. Five people shot across one weekend, three of them in the plaza.50, 51

What the family said

Within hours of the shooting the President’s brother, who was the Attorney General of the United States, called the Director of Central Intelligence and asked him to come out to the house. And when he arrived, the brother asked him directly whether his agency had killed the President. Not a researcher. Not a critic. The chief law officer of the country, on the same afternoon, asking the head of the CIA to his face. He was told no.52, 53

Ask why that was his first thought and the answer is uncomfortable. He had been the one riding the Cuban operations. He knew what had been attempted against Castro, because he had pushed it. He told people that week that there was so much bitterness, and that he had always thought they would get one of them, and that he had assumed it would be him. That is a man who suspected his brother had been killed by something he himself had helped set in motion.52, 54

In public he backed the Commission’s findings. He said the report was thorough, he declined to reopen the argument, and he stayed on that line for four years. In private he never accepted it and everybody close to him knew. What he told people was that he could do nothing about it from where he was standing, and that if he ever got the power to look properly, he would. He was running for President when he said versions of that.55, 53

He won California, walked through a hotel kitchen, and was shot. Whatever you believe about why, hold on to the plain structure of it. The one person in American life with the motive, the standing and the plausible power to reopen his brother’s case did not live to try. That is a fact about the record, not a theory about the cause, and it is one reason this question has never had an advocate at the top of the government since.56

The third brother was thirty-one and had been a senator for ten months. On the afternoon of the twenty-second he was presiding over the United States Senate, sitting in the chair, when a press liaison came onto the floor and told him. He gavelled the Senate out and went to find a telephone that worked. Then he spent forty-six years almost never discussing it in public.57, 58

He broke the silence once, in a memoir published after his death in 2009. What he wrote is the opposite of what his brother believed in private. He said he had always accepted the official finding, that one man had done it. He also wrote about how badly it went for Robert, and how the family had feared for him. Two brothers, the same loss, and they did not end up in the same place about it.59

Then the next generation, saying it louder than anybody. Robert’s son has stated publicly that he believes there is overwhelming evidence the CIA was involved in his uncle’s murder, and that he does not accept that one man alone killed his father either. He now holds a cabinet post in the government that ordered the 2025 release. So the father doubted it privately, the uncle accepted it in print, and the son says it on television.60, 61

The President’s own son was three years old, and he spent his whole life declining to discuss it. He founded a political magazine, interviewed people about power, and left this subject almost entirely alone. He died in 1999. And in the quarter century since, more words have been attributed to that man about his father’s death than he ever spoke on it, including by people who insist he is still alive. The quietest person in this story has been made the loudest.62

An hour with Clint Hill

He was adopted as an infant and grew up in a small town in North Dakota. He went to a Lutheran college in Minnesota, did his time in Army counter intelligence, and joined the Secret Service in 1958 in the Denver field office. Within a year he was on the White House detail under Eisenhower. Nothing in any of that was aimed at Dallas. He was a competent young man from the northern plains who was good at a job.63, 64

In 1960 he was told he was going to Mrs Kennedy’s detail and he was disappointed. He had wanted the President. What he got instead was four years beside one of the most watched women in the world. Paris, Vienna, India, Greece, the horses, the children, the ordinary days nobody photographed. He stayed with her after Dallas too. The assignment he did not want turned out to be the work of his life, and he was still writing about her fifty years later.65

Eisenhower. Kennedy. Johnson. Nixon. Ford. He served five presidents across seventeen years. In 1967 he was made Special Agent in Charge of presidential protection. The detail itself, the job he had wanted back in 1960, and he finished as an Assistant Director of the Secret Service with every protective detail in the country under him. The man the internet knows as somebody running for three seconds behind a car was eventually given responsibility for protecting all of them.63, 64

Almost everything about how a president is protected now was built in the twelve years after Dallas. Permanent armor. Route control. Real threat research instead of a filing cabinet. Details measured in hundreds rather than dozens. Hill spent those twelve years inside that Service, rising through it, working on it. The man who believed he had failed spent the rest of his career making sure the failure could not happen the same way twice.66, 67

Here is the whole thing in one measurement. Twenty-five feet, from a running board to the back of a moving car, while it accelerated away from him. He crossed it in about three seconds, which is roughly the fastest a human being can do it, and he got a hand on the car and pushed a woman back into her seat. He judged himself against that distance for sixty years. Nobody else ever did.3, 68, 69

In 1975 he sat down with Mike Wallace and was asked about Dallas, and on national television he came apart. He said he should have reacted quicker. He said he would live with it to his grave. He retired that year on medical grounds at forty-three, and then went quiet for the better part of thirty years. A generation of men were taught not to say any of that out loud. He said it on camera, once, and then could not speak about it again for decades.70, 65

For decades after Dallas, Clint Hill did not talk about it. Then late in life he started writing. About the years on Mrs Kennedy’s detail, about the five presidents he served, about those four days in November. He was not settling arguments and he was not selling a theory. He was putting down what he personally saw, in order, while he still could. That is a different kind of document from everything else in this story.71, 3

I got to spend an hour with Clint Hill. We talked about his book. He was in his nineties by then and he had spent sixty years being asked about twenty-five feet of Elm Street. What I remember is that it had not lifted. He was the man who got there, and he still carried it as the man who did not get there fast enough. He answered my questions kindly, one more time.72

I want to say what I did not do with that hour. I did not ask him about theories, or the shots, or the fence, or the film. He had written a book and he was out talking about it, and he had chosen to do that, and I knew what it cost him to keep choosing it. So we talked about the book. I have done a great many of these events over the years. That one hit home in a way none of the others have.73

Clint Hill died on February 21, 2025, at home in California. He was ninety-three. He had outlived almost everybody who was that close to it, and he had spent the last part of his life doing the opposite of what the men of his generation were trained to do. Writing it down, saying it out loud, answering the same question again and again from anybody who asked properly. I was one of the people who asked. That hour is not research any more. It is a record, and there will not be another one.73, 74, 75

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

Sources for this chapter

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

  1. Zapruder WC testimony (7H569)
  2. records of the Life magazine sale and the Tippit family donation
  3. Hill WC testimony (2H132)
  4. Hill's later published accounts and interviews
  5. Moorman WC-era statements
  6. the physical condition of the Moorman Polaroid
  7. her later interviews
  8. Bowers WC testimony (6H284)
  9. Texas accident records, 1966
  10. 'mysterious deaths' literature and its critiques
  11. Newman WC testimony (19H488)
  12. Newman family later interviews
  13. Lovelady WC testimony (6H336)
  14. HSCA photographic panel findings on the doorway figure
  15. Tague WC testimony (7H552)
  16. Tague's later published account
  17. Baker WC testimony (3H242)
  18. Warren Report ch.4
  19. Warren Report ch.4 (Depository employee roster)
  20. employee testimony to the Warren Commission
  21. present-day Dealey Plaza
  22. Sixth Floor Museum visitor information
  23. contemporary press coverage, November 1963
  24. JFK Presidential Library biographical record
  25. Theodore H. White, handwritten notes of the 29 November 1963 interview, JFK Presidential Library
  26. Life, memorial issue, December 1963
  27. Theodore H. White, interview notes of 29 November 1963, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
  28. Life magazine, 6 December 1963
  29. Warren Commission testimony of Mrs John F. Kennedy, 5 June 1964
  30. contemporary press coverage, 1964 to 1994
  31. Theodore H. White Personal Papers, JFK Presidential Library, deposited 1969, released 1995
  32. contemporaneous accounts of the planning of the state funeral, November 1963
  33. contemporaneous accounts of the East Room preparations, 23 November 1963
  34. contemporaneous accounts of the state funeral, 25 November 1963
  35. contemporaneous reporting of the funeral procession, 25 November 1963
  36. United States Army Corps of Engineers accounts of the eternal flame installation, November 1963
  37. the author's assessment
  38. Warren Commission testimony of Governor John Connally
  39. John Connally, public statements 1963 to 1993
  40. HSCA final report 1979
  41. HSCA forensic pathology panel report 1979
  42. Warren Report, chapter III
  43. John Connally obituary, June 1993
  44. US Department of the Treasury, secretaries of the Treasury
  45. Nellie Connally, From Love Field: Our Final Journey with President Kennedy, 2003
  46. Nellie Connally obituary, September 2006
  47. Warren Commission testimony of Marina Oswald, volume I
  48. contemporary press coverage, 1963 to 1965
  49. Marina Oswald Porter, later public statements
  50. Warren Report, chapters I and III
  51. Dallas Police Department records, 22 to 24 November 1963
  52. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times
  53. David Talbot, Brothers
  54. contemporaneous accounts by Kennedy aides
  55. contemporaneous reporting of Robert Kennedy's public statements, 1964 to 1968
  56. contemporaneous reporting, Los Angeles, 5 June 1968
  57. Congressional Record, 22 November 1963
  58. contemporaneous reporting
  59. Edward M. Kennedy, True Compass, 2009
  60. published statements of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 2023 onward
  61. Executive Order on declassification, January 2025
  62. published profiles and interviews of John F. Kennedy Jr., 1988 to 1999
  63. Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin, Five Presidents, 2016
  64. US Secret Service service record
  65. Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin, Mrs. Kennedy and Me, 2012
  66. Warren Report, chapter VIII recommendations
  67. US Secret Service annual reports 1964 to 1975
  68. Zapruder film Z313-390
  69. Hill's later published accounts
  70. CBS 60 Minutes, 1975
  71. Clint Hill's published accounts
  72. personal, the narrator's own conversation with Clint Hill
  73. Author interview with Clint Hill
  74. Washington Post obituary, 24 February 2025
  75. United States Secret Service Association announcement, February 2025