Zero fail, p.6
Zero Fail, page 6
The waitresses brought agents Hill and Landis a couple of yellow-colored drinks. “What’s this?” Hill asked.
“A Salty Dick,” came the reply.
The agent could taste sour fruit, maybe grapefruit. Hill wasn’t sure if the other swirling fluid was imitation alcohol or what, but it didn’t matter. The taste didn’t improve with more swigs, so he didn’t finish it. Landis had two.
In the course of the night, three agents on the midnight shift took breaks from securing the stuffy hotel hallway outside the president’s suite to check out the Cellar too. Kirkwood heard some agents giggling about leaving their posts. “The firemen are guarding the president over at the Hotel Texas!” one said to a roar of laughter.
Hill headed back to the hotel around 2:45 a.m., and Ready and Bennett followed close behind at around three. Landis, who was single, ended up talking late into the night with a woman in the club, and left around five.
Secret Service regulations prohibited White House detail agents from drinking “intoxicating liquor of any kind” on the road. After all, they could be called for duty at any time when the president was traveling. But the rule was roundly ignored, in favor of letting grown men use their own judgment.
“Sometimes you’d come off a long day like that, you can’t go to sleep right away anyway,” Hill recalled. “There was no party. We were just trying to unwind.”
* * *
—
WHEN THE AGENTS of the White House detail reported for duty in the Hotel Texas lobby at 8 a.m. that Friday, several members were very short on sleep. That was fairly normal. The abnormal part was how many experienced players the team was missing. All told, eleven veterans on the detail were on other assignments that week—all handling advances for the flurry of Florida and Texas stops instead. Ten more experienced hands had recently rotated off the job. Detail members who started with Kennedy’s inauguration had won promotions to supervisory roles or secured transfers to other jobs. The most senior man on the detail—the person who had shadowed Kennedy on every public trip since his election—happened to be taking his first “vacation” from the road in four years that week too.
The detail’s affable leader, Special Agent in Charge Jerry Behn, decided his seasoned deputies could handle the Florida-Texas trip. On the Friday that Kennedy planned to visit Dallas, Behn planned on a short day in the office to catch up on paperwork.
The president rose after 7 a.m. in his hotel suite, put on a dark suit, and headed, agents in tow, to speak to a crowd gathered outside. The locals clapped and cheered, but a few seemed disappointed that the First Lady hadn’t joined him. “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself,” the president explained. “It takes her longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.” Walking back in the hotel foyer, however, the president turned sternly to the nearest agent at his side: “Get Mrs. Kennedy down here, please.”
Clint Hill, the head of the First Lady’s detail, beat a quick path upstairs to collect Mrs. Kennedy. He found her in her suite putting on her gloves and escorted her briskly to the hotel banquet hall. There, two thousand members and guests at the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce breakfast gave a standing ovation as the First Lady joined her husband on the dais.
A little after 11:20 a.m., the couple and their entourage boarded Air Force One for the thirteen-minute flight from the Carswell Air Force Base to Love Field in Dallas. They could have driven the thirty-five miles from Fort Worth, but Kennedy’s aides wanted the television stations and newspapers to run plenty of pictures of a delighted Dallas welcoming their president as he disembarked from the newly designed Air Force One.
Here the strain that the detail was under showed itself more plainly as agents went to man their motorcade positions. Paul Landis, Hill’s deputy on Jackie Kennedy’s detail, walked down the ramp of the backup plane concerned he had the wrong assignment. He had been surprised when Roberts told him he was supposed to ride on the running boards of the follow-up car behind the president’s limo. He’d never done that before. Landis, an amiable ham, kidded agent Sam Kinney, the follow-up car driver, as they both stood next to his car: “Hey, Sam,” he said, feigning confusion and swiveling his head right and left. “I’m supposed to be in the follow-up car. Do you know where it is?”
Landis chuckled at his own joke. But still, he was concerned. He walked over to Lawson near the fence to double-check he had the correct assignment.
“Yep, that’s right,” Lawson told him.
Landis wasn’t the only new guy assigned to the follow-up car either. Tim McIntyre had just finished his first full week as a permanent detail agent, after working several shifts on a temporary basis. Newly transferred from Spokane, he would ride the rear running board on the left side, behind the First Lady and behind Hill. Glen A. Bennett, on loan from the Protective Research Section at headquarters, was supposed to ride in the rear seat of the follow-up car. So was George Hickey, a driver agent who normally worked behind the wheel rather than behind a gun.
Other than shift leader Roberts, there was only one agent in the follow-up car who had spent more than a year protecting President Kennedy. That was Jack Ready, who was assigned to ride the boards, directly behind Kennedy, in front of Landis.
An impromptu crowd of two thousand pressed up to the fence around the Love Field perimeter, clapping and calling out to the Kennedys. The couple accepted the gifts of their receiving party when they reached the bottom of the plane’s ramp-like stairs. A framed charcoal drawing for him, a bouquet of red roses for her. The president saw the faces at the fence and handed the gifts to Landis. Without a word, he was off with Jackie to shake all the outstretched hands.
Agents moved alongside the couple down the fence for a few minutes, then Lawson signaled it was time to go. They guided Governor John Connally and his wife to their small jump seats in the president’s open-air limousine, and then helped the Kennedys into the long back row. Their Irish-born limo driver, fifty-four-year-old agent Bill Greer, pulled out slowly for the ride to Dallas. He drove through a wide break in the airport fence that Lawson had specifically arranged be cut for the president’s visit.
Hill and Ready, old hands, would normally jump on the back of the limo’s rear steps. But Roberts had warned the agents about the president’s firm request in Tampa. As Kennedy had requested, Ready did not ride on the limo steps behind him that day.
Hill wasn’t keen on the president’s request. As Mrs. Kennedy’s longtime shadow, he felt his duty was to her. Hill hopped onto the limo behind the First Lady when he felt the limo put her too close to the crowds, which was often that day. Greer frequently steered to the left side of the roadway to give the president more buffer on the right. It put Mrs. Kennedy within two arm’s lengths of spectators.
Crowds stood four and five people deep along the Main Street route. The Dallas Morning News that morning had outlined the specific streets the president’s motorcade would travel, which some claimed a local politician leaked in order to bring people out.
The crowds thinned as the limo neared the turn into Dealey Plaza, a grassy rise between a few tall buildings and an on-ramp to the Dallas freeway. Hill hopped off the limo and returned to the follow-up car running board, expecting they would soon speed up on the freeway.
Arnold and Barbara Rowland, a young couple, had waited here—on the slope near the freeway—for the Kennedys to pass. A few moments before the cars arrived, Arnold Rowland looked up at a brick office building across the on-ramp and saw something striking. In a large window archway near the building’s top floor, a man stood with a rifle resting on his shoulder.
The husband nudged his wife and pointed out what he thought was a Secret Service agent. “It must be a security man guarding the motorcade,” he said.
Then the lead car of the motorcade came into view. Agent Greer cut his speed to 5 or 10 mph to make the turns—right onto Houston, then left onto Elm. As the cars descended toward the freeway, Hill heard an explosive crack behind his right shoulder. He saw the president raise his hands to either side of his throat. Someone had shot the president.
I knew I should have been on the back of the car! Hill thought. His body could have kept the assassin from getting a clean shot.
But Hill appeared to be the only agent who immediately connected that first sound to an attack on the president. Landis and Ready, the two agents on the right-side running boards, turned to look back over their right shoulders, scanning the spectators and buildings for the source of the sound.
“What was it?” Ready yelled. “A firecracker?”
“I don’t know. I don’t see any smoke,” Landis said.
What the hell was that? McIntyre thought as he also swiveled his head to look behind him.
Roy Kellerman, forty-eight, the ranking supervisor on the Dallas trip, turned around in his right front passenger seat to look back into the rear of the limo. He couldn’t immediately figure the source of the noise. Greer, the driver, thought maybe a motorcycle had backfired. He reflexively pulled his foot off the gas. Some police escorts on motorcycles thought they saw the limo’s brake lights flash red. Whatever the reason, the limousine slowed as Greer awaited instructions from Kellerman.
Looking back, Kellerman heard the unmistakable Boston accent of the president: “My God, I am hit.”
Kellerman saw the president’s hands clutching his neck. The senior supervisor paused just a few seconds, trying to figure out what was happening. A second shot rang out.
Hill didn’t hear it. With the first shot, he had jumped off the follow-up car and was now running for the back of the limo. He stumbled, then grabbed hold of the trunk handle. A third shot rang out, which Hill not only heard but felt. The right side of the president’s head exploded, a pinkish spray rising up near his ear, and he slumped over on his left side onto his wife.
Mrs. Kennedy wailed, “Oh my God, Jack! Jack! What are they doing to you?”
Landis hadn’t connected the first two shots to the president. But he turned back in time to see the impact of the third. The sound was sickening, he thought. Like someone had shot into a melon for target practice. “I saw pieces of flesh and blood flying through the air and the president slumped out of sight towards Mrs. Kennedy,” Landis later said.
Kellerman, now flecked with that blood and bits of the president’s flesh, instantly grabbed for his radio mike and yelled at Greer, “Step on it. We are hit.” He shouted into the radio, hoping it reached the detail agent in the vice president’s car: “Have Dagger cover Volunteer!”
Greer punched the accelerator hard. Kellerman would later say of that moment, “We just literally jumped out of the God damn road.”
Shift leader Emory Roberts, who watched Hill’s heroic dash for the trunk, saw the bloody spray around Kennedy’s head. To his right, Ready moved to jump off the running board and sprint to the limo, but Roberts called him back. He feared it would be dangerous at this speed and not much help anyway.
“Halfback to Lawson,” Roberts called on the car radio to the advance agent in the lead car. “The president has been hit. Escort us to the nearest hospital. Fast.”
Agent George Hickey grabbed the AR-15 assault rifle from the rear floorboards. He stood up, scanning the sky to the rear of the motorcade, readying for another attack. But the attack had already come and gone.
Hill, with his feet on the rear steps of the accelerating limo and his hands holding tight to the upright handles on the trunk, found Mrs. Kennedy inexplicably coming in his direction. Standing on the bloodied backseat cushions, she stretched her torso and right arm out over the car’s trunk. She looked blankly, straight through Hill. She reached out to retrieve something on the shiny black metal of the trunk’s lid—a small chunk of her husband’s brain and skull.
Hill pressed the First Lady back into her seat and spread his body across the back of the wide convertible to shield the couple.
Only six or seven seconds had passed since Hill heard the first shot. Peering down into the limo, he saw blood, as well as gray and white bits of flesh and brain, splattered over the backseat, Mrs. Kennedy, and the Connallys. The governor, the back of his shirt inked with blood, had fallen over from his waist onto his wife. Until that moment, Hill hadn’t realized the governor had been shot too.
The president was slumped lifeless on his left side on his wife’s lap, his gaze fixed. Hill could see Kennedy’s brain through a golf-ball-sized hole in the right side of his head. A small piece of skull with hair still attached sat on the car floor.
Hill looked back to his brethren in the follow-up car, his face contorted with anguish. He shook his head back and forth and gave his teammates a thumbs-down sign. Hill felt sure the president was dead or close to it.
“They got him. They got him,” Roberts shouted into the air.
The shift leader leaned toward McIntyre: “You and Bennett take over Johnson as soon as we stop.”
Vice President Johnson couldn’t see a thing. He was flattened on the floor of his limousine, under his lead detail agent. At the sound of the first or second shot, Rufus Youngblood yelled “Get down!” at the vice president. He clambered over the seat divider, from the front to the back, and threw his 185 pounds on top of Johnson.
A motorcycle escort officer pulled alongside Lawson, a passenger in the unmarked lead car, and yelled, “The president’s been shot!”
Like an echo, Lawson then heard Kellerman call out on the radio: “We’re hit. Get us to the nearest hospital.”
It can happen all the time, Lawson thought as his driver, Dallas Police Chief Curry sped toward Parkland Memorial Hospital. My God, it did happen.
* * *
—
JUST MOMENTS LATER, a young woman’s voice came over the paging system in Parkland Memorial Hospital’s first-floor cafeteria. She was summoning Parkland’s chief of surgery: “Dr. Tom Shires, stat.”
Ron Jones, a thirty-year-old surgical resident eating lunch, knew Shires was at a conference in Galveston. The overhead pager then began calling out the names of other surgeons to respond immediately.
What is going on? he wondered. He walked over to answer the wall phone and asked the operator.
“Dr. Jones, the president’s been shot and they’re bringing him to the emergency room,” she gasped. “They need doctors right away.”
Jones told his fellow doctor, Malcolm Perry. They dashed out of the cafeteria and hurried down the back steps toward the emergency room bay. A whine of sirens grew closer and louder.
An abbreviated part of the president’s motorcade zoomed up to Parkland’s emergency bay door at about 12:35 p.m. Some of the other cars, including the press, had continued to the Trade Mart, not knowing where the lead car and limo had gone. Kellerman hopped out of the limo’s front seat and told his agents to get stretchers quickly.
Vice President Johnson and his wife scrambled out of their Lincoln convertible. Lady Bird saw a flash of raspberry out of the corner of her eye—it was Mrs. Kennedy curled protectively over her husband. Agent Youngblood hurried the Johnsons inside the hospital entrance and asked the first nurse he saw to find him a secure room.
Roberts walked to the rear of the presidential limousine. The gentle “Father Roberts” took one look at Kennedy and concluded he would not likely survive. “I am going to Johnson,” he told Kellerman.
Some detail members rushed back with the hospital’s long collapsible metal carts on wheels. Agents Hill and Landis asked Mrs. Kennedy to come out of the car so they could help the president. She shook her head. “No! I want to stay with him!” she said.
Hill opened the left rear door and stepped into the limo on her side. The son who had been so fiercely protective of his deaf mother seemed to instinctively sense how to protect this shocked and fragile woman. He took his suit jacket and covered the president’s head. Then he took Mrs. Kennedy’s arm. She let him lead her out.
“We need to help your husband, Mrs. Kennedy,” he said.
Hill, Landis, Lawson, and a few other agents lifted the president onto a gurney and pushed him into tiny Trauma Room One, as the nurses directed them. Doctors and nurses swarmed around the patient and the agents exited quickly to give them room to work. Mrs. Kennedy opened her fist to give a doctor a piece of her husband’s skull, which she had been clutching since the shooting. Hill found a chair for the First Lady to sit in just outside the emergency room door as more doctors arrived.
Kellerman, who was trained to stay by the president’s side no matter what, asked Hill to get an open line to the White House and to keep it open. Hill found a phone and connected Kellerman to Jerry Behn in his East Wing office.
“Jerry, we have had an incident here in Dallas. The president, the governor have been shot,” Kellerman said. “We are in the emergency room of the Parkland Memorial Hospital. Mark down the time.”
Behn felt he’d been punched. Behn had traveled alongside Kennedy everywhere he went since his election in 1960 and they’d become close. The first trip he hadn’t taken! Behn called out to his assistant, “Find Chief Rowley!”
In the hospital passageway, Kellerman handed the receiver back to Hill and returned to the trauma room. Then a White House operator cut into the open line. “The attorney general would like to speak with you,” she told Hill.
Hill heard Robert F. Kennedy’s unsteady voice asking the only thing to ask: “How bad is it?”
“It’s about as bad as it can get,” Hill replied. He didn’t say that he felt sure Robert’s brother was dead.
Meanwhile, in a hospital office commandeered for the vice president on another wing, Roberts told Johnson and his wife that the president was probably not going to survive. “We need to get out of Dallas as soon as possible,” Roberts said. Johnson asked Roberts to check to see whether White House staff agreed he should leave.
