The Kennedy As­sas­si­na­tion, Part 1

Dealey Plaza is small — smaller than it looks in memory. It is a shallow bowl of grass fringed by streets, with a colonnade and a low fence on a gentle rise that would come to be called the grassy knoll, and, overlooking the corner where Elm bends, a seven-story brick building, the Texas School Book Depository. The limousine was moving at about eleven miles an hour, roughly forty feet below and ahead of the Depository's upper windows, when the first shot cracked across the plaza a little after 12:30 in the afternoon.

Accounts of what people heard diverged from the very first instant, and never fully converged. Some heard three shots, some two, some four; some thought a motorcycle had backfired, some thought firecrackers. Zapruder, a local dressmaker filming from a concrete pedestal with a home-movie camera, captured the sequence in a few seconds of silent color film that would later be studied frame by frame for decades. In it, the President is seen to raise his hands toward his throat. Governor Connally, in front of him, is hit and slumps toward his wife. Then, in a frame that has never lost its power to shock, the fatal head shot.

Parkland Memorial Hospital was four miles away. The limousine covered the distance in roughly four minutes, radioing ahead. When it screamed up to the emergency entrance a little before 12:40, there was a moment of horrible stillness — no one moved to lift the President out, because Jackie would not let go of him, cradling his head so that others could not see the wound. An agent quietly took off his suit coat and draped it over before they carried him inside to Trauma Room One.

The doctors who worked on him understood almost at once that there was nothing to be done. The head wound was catastrophic. They performed the motions of resuscitation anyway — a tracheotomy, transfusions, chest compressions — for the same reason anyone does when the patient is the President of the United States: because stopping was unthinkable while any procedure remained. A priest was called. At 1:00 p.m., roughly half an hour after the shots, John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead. Governor Connally, in a separate trauma room, was in serious condition but would survive.

Step back from the individual scenes and the shape of the afternoon becomes its own story. Nearly everything that would define the Kennedy assassination for the next sixty years was decided not by careful investigation but by the raw disorder of a few hours in which no one was in charge of the facts. The founding record of the most examined crime in American history was assembled on the run, by frightened people, before anyone understood what they were looking at.

Consider how much was already fractured by nightfall. Witnesses in the same plaza had heard different numbers of shots from different directions. The car had been washed out and the crime scene compromised before it could be properly secured. The President's body had been wrestled away from the Dallas authorities and flown to Washington, where the autopsy was performed by military pathologists working under pressure and without the Texas records — a chain of custody so ragged that it seeded doubt for decades. A man named Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested that afternoon in a movie theater, charged first with killing a policeman and then with killing the President, and he would be shot dead two days later on live television before he could be tried. The one person who might have answered the questions was gone almost as fast as Kennedy.

By the time Air Force One lifted off from Love Field that afternoon, carrying a dead president, a widow still in her bloodstained suit, and a new president who had just been sworn in aboard the plane by a local judge, the sunlit optimism of the morning was already unrecoverable. The day had begun with worries about rain and a bubble top. It ended with a nation staring at its screens, unable to assemble what it had watched into a single coherent picture.