Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination Read Online Free PDF

it’s so heavily armored and jammed with Secret Service men with their automatic rifles hidden on the floor and four agents on the running boards. In the first car are Kennedy and Connally, with his leonine head, and Nellie Connally, the former sweetheart of the University of Texas. Then there’s a seventy-five-foot gap. The Secret Service insists there be a seventy-five-foot gap between the president’s cars. Then there’s the Johnson car, which is an open convertible with Johnson sitting on the right in the backseat, Ladybird in the center, and Senator Yarborough on the left; in the front is Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood.
    Suddenly there’s a crack—a sharp, cracking sound. People think it’s a backfire from a motorcycle, or they think it’s a balloon popping. But Connally told me, “I was a hunter. I knew the moment I heard it that it was the crack of a hunting rifle.”
    Rufus Youngblood in Johnson’s car hears the noise, doesn’t know what it is, but he says, “I suddenly saw not normal”—those are his words—“not normal movements in the president’s car. The president seemed to be tilting to the left.” At the same moment he sees in the Queen Mary, the Secret Service car, an agent jump to his feet with a rifle in his hands; he’s looking around, trying to find out what’s going on. Then the other shots crack out. It’s only eight seconds between the first and the last shot. Everyone knows what they are now.
    Youngblood whirls around in his seat. He grabs Johnson by the right shoulder and says, “Get down. Get down.” Youngblood shouts in a voice that Ladybird says she had never heard him use before. He pulls Johnson to the floor and sort of falls over the back of the front seat and lies on top of Johnson, shielding him from bullets. As they’re lying there, Youngbloodhas a radio strapped to his shoulder. The radio is basically in Johnson’s ear, and he hears the words, “He’s hit. He’s hit,” and he hears the words, “Hospital, hospital.” Not only has the president been wounded but the governor’s been shot. Who knows if Johnson was the next target or not?
    Youngblood tells him to keep down, and he realizes his best chance of protection is to put his car as close to that Secret Service car in front of him as he can. So he tells the driver, a Texas highway patrolman named Hershel Jacks. A typical Texas patrolman—laconic, cool—Jacks puts the car just a few feet from the bumper of the Secret Service car. The three cars—Kennedy’s, the Secret Service’s, and Johnson’s—roar up a ramp onto the expressway, roar down the expressway, and squeal off the expressway and into the emergency bay at Parkland Hospital.
    Youngblood says to Johnson, “When we get to that hospital, don’t stop for anything. Don’t look around. We’re taking you to find you a secure place.” So they yank him out of the car. His car is right next to Kennedy’s. He never has a moment to look to the left to see what’s in Kennedy’s car. What’s in Kennedy’s car is the president’s body. They haven’t taken it out yet, with the blood pooling from his head on Jackie’s lap as she’s sitting there. But he doesn’t know this. He doesn’t know what’s happened to the president. They run Johnson—four agents with the agent behind them carrying a rifle in his hand—looking for a secure place.
    The radio is basically in Johnson’s ear, and he hears the words, “He’s hit. He’s hit,” and he hears the words, “Hospital, hospital.”
    The Secret Service agents sort of lift Johnson out of the car and run him down one corridor, down another one, and finally they get to what they call the medical section. They find a cubicle that’s been divided into three sections. Johnson is put against a back wall. They close the blinds on the windows. For forty-five minutes, Johnson stands there. They bring in a chair, and Ladybird sits beside him. But Lyndon Johnson is standing there. Then Ken