 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Don Carlton, the executive director of the University of Texas Doft Briscoe Center for American History. On behalf of our co-sponsor of the OBJ Presidential Library, I want to welcome all of you to our program, which we have titled November 22, 1963, Personal Perspectives. Now, I think it's safe to say that those of us who are old enough to have been around on that November day have a vivid memory of how we learned of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. But while there are plenty of us with our own stories to tell, very few of us have the insider's perspective that our panelists will share with us this evening. It's fitting that the Briscoe Center is cosponsoring this special event as a leading history research center here at the university. Our collections are rich in material related to that fateful day, including Walter Cronkot's papers, which include a personal transcript of the CBS News broadcast with Cronkot's handwritten inscription, which states, that is the way it was, one of the most historic days of our lives. The Briscoe Center has other collections that shed light on the presidential visit to Texas, including the papers of Texas Congressman Jack Brooks and Henry B. Gonzales. Also the journalist, Dan Rather, and Seth Cantor, just to name but a few. The center's photojournalism holdings, which include the archives of Flip Shulky, Shell Hirschhorn, Daryl Hocus, and Frank Johnston, preserve many of the images of those November days that are so deeply etched into our collective memory. And the Briscoe Center is also the publisher of Julian Reed's memoir, JFK's Final Hours in Texas. Julian, who is one of our panelists tonight, also has his papers at the Briscoe Center. So now it's my distinct pleasure to turn things over to my good friend, Mark Updegrove, director of the OBJ Library, who will introduce tonight's panelists. Mark. Thank you, Don. Good evening. Last month in partnership with the Briscoe Center, we did our first Friends of the LBJ Library event of the fall season. Entitled 9-11, A White House View, we explored September 11 through the accounts of those who worked with President Bush and were with him on that terrible day. Tonight, we visit another day that is seared indelibly in the American consciousness, November 22, 1963, the day we lost John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Those of you who have visited our newly renovated core exhibit on Lyndon Johnson's presidency have seen an exhibit relating to the death of President Kennedy. In it, we hear an audio recording by Lady Bird Johnson, offering her account of the events of November 22, which she recorded that same evening. Here's some of the words that she spoke that night. It all began so beautifully. After a drizzle in the morning, the sun came out bright and beautiful. We were going into Dallas in the lead car, President and Mrs. Kennedy, and John and Nellie, and then a secret service car full of men, and then our car, Lyndon and me, and Senator Yarbrough. The streets were lined with people, lots and lots of children, all smiling, placards, confetti, people waving from windows. We were rounding a curve, going down a hill. Suddenly, there was a sharp, loud report, a shot. Mrs. Johnson reflected. But as we all know, it ended tragically. Tonight, we hear from five men who have their own unique perspectives on November 22. Sid Davis was the White House reporter for Westinghouse Radio and was on the press bus as President Kennedy's motorcade rolled through Dallas. This photo shows a page in Sid's notepad, on which he wrote the shocking words that President Kennedy had died. After President Kennedy was killed, a White House aide grabbed Sid to take him to Air Force One as one of three White House pool reporters, witnessing the swearing in of Lyndon Johnson as our nation's 36th president. Sid is one of the very few still alive who was on Air Force One that day. Immediately after the ceremony, Sid stood on the back of a car at Love Field to share with other reporters his account of President Johnson taking the oath of office. Julian Reed was an aide to Texas Governor John Connolly in charge of working with White House reporters during President Kennedy's Texas visit. He was riding in the White House press bus within full view of President Kennedy's limousine as the motorcade made its way through Dallas. After the shooting on Dealey Plaza, Julian went immediately to Parkland Hospital. Following the announcement that President Kennedy had died, Julian briefed reporters on the account of the shooting from Governor Connolly's wife, Nellie. Julian stayed at Parkland Hospital for three days, giving reporters updates on Governor Connolly's condition and working with Nellie Connolly. Julian worked with Governor Connolly to draft the Governor's Telegram of Condolence to Jacqueline Kennedy, which you see here. Former Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes, then a state representative, had spent weeks preparing for a fundraising dinner in downtown Austin that was to culminate President Kennedy's visit to Texas. This dinner program had been prepared for supporters who greatly anticipated the visit by President and Mrs. Kennedy. But as you can see here, the beautifully decorated room with its perfect dinner place settings inside the Austin Municipal Auditorium went untouched the evening of November 22nd. Instead, that same evening, Ben helped organize a prayer service at the Texas Capitol, which was attended by Texas lawmakers. Larry Temple, seen here on the far right, was in aid to Governor Connolly and was involved with the Kennedy White House in planning President Kennedy's trip to Texas. He had organized a reception for the Kennedys at the Governor's Mansion in Austin for the evening of November 22nd. Later in his career, Larry became Governor Connolly's chief of staff, and in 1967 went to work for President Johnson as his general counsel. Our moderator tonight, Neil Spels, was the anchor and news director at KTBC in Austin, which was then owned by Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. In 1960, Neil was in Highlandsport, Massachusetts, covering Johnson's meeting with Kennedy, at which the two candidates planned their upcoming campaign for the White House. On November 22nd, Neil was meeting with the Austin Police Chief to plan coverage of President and Mrs. Kennedy's visit when he learned of the shooting in Dallas. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Sid Davis, Julian Reed, Ben Barnes, Larry Temple, and Neil Spels. 1963, what a time in Texas, what a time in the nation. You may remember in 1963 in Texas, we were sitting there. Everybody, as far as politics was concerned, was in the Democrat Party. It was a one-party state, but the party was divided, and the party was divided between two general entities, the conservative Democrats and the liberal Democrats. Governor Connolly was kind of the de facto head of the conservative party of Democrats, and Ralph Yarborough, the senator from Texas, was kind of the de facto head of the liberal Democrats. So all during this time, here in Texas, as we were getting ready for a presidential campaign, again, these factions were here and working for the Democratic Party, but also with and against each other in many cases. So what we're gonna try to do tonight is to put this into perspective here. Sid Davis, I wanna start with you, and then we'll get the others here as well. Sid Davis, the unique distinction as a radio reporter, was part of the pool on the plane that covered the departure and swearing in of the new president of the United States. The pool was composed of only three or four reporters who represented the entire press corps because they couldn't all get on the plane. His insights are invaluable and we'll get to those in just a few moments about the plane itself. But to begin, Sid, what was a White House press corps looking for when they came to Texas on this trip? We were trying to solve a centuries-old problem of why one political party couldn't get along. And President... Still true today, isn't it? Still true. It's the only war that has lasted longer than the Cold War, and it's still going on. And President Kennedy at this point, the head of 1964's presidential election, wanted to come out to Texas to fix the fences, as they say, and so they planned a trip and they thought that November would be a good time to do it. He had been making some political forays in September and October into the West and Midwest, what they called constellation trips. But Texas was the big one. And there was one item that concerned the press corps and just about anybody else who wrote stories when you were looking for something to pin the story on. I can't tell the story without mentioning the fact that there were a couple of episodes where two Democrats were not mistreated, but they were given kind of the bum's rush or some criticism in public. And one was Vice President and Mrs. Johnson, cornered in a hotel lobby about a year or so before. And then after that, Adelaide Stevenson was here and in the wroughtiness of the crowd, you had Adelaide Stevenson hit on the forehead with a placard. There are great many disputes over whether that was intentional or not. I know that I heard the other day in one of my speeches in Texas that the lady was not trying to hit the ambassador, that it was an accident and I'm willing to accept that. But none of those things were major enough to create a crisis. We didn't think of it that way. We didn't come to Texas fearing, oh my Lord, something great, terrible is going to happen. That wasn't the first thing on our minds at all. We were looking for security but then we had security all over the country. There were episodes in Florida where even President Kennedy, we were in Florida the week before in Tampa, asked his secret service agents not to ride on the side of his limousine so that the crowds could see Jackie. And he kind of smiled at the two secret service agents he talked to and he said, that's how I get elected. And he kind of laughed about it because she was a glamorous person and a great asset politically. So when we came here, it was a great political trip. The weather was perfect for Texas and for a political trip in November. The crowds and I know where it would happen in Fort Worth where the crowds were enormous, where Mrs. Kennedy was, she was rejoicing for the first time on the road because three months earlier, she had lost a child after six days of being in critical condition with something called Hyaline Membrane Disease and she was just coming out of this morning period if she ever could and Texas was a brighter spot in her life and for the first time in our travels with the two of them, we saw that Mrs. Kennedy was really enjoying herself with politicians. She would rather be with artists and musicians and people like that than with politicians. There was not a secret about it. So this in effect was a political trip. Absolutely, it was a political every way and you had Yalfa Arbro, they brought people. Yet you had Congressman Jack Brooks come out here, you had Jake Pickle, you had Albert Thomas. By the way, the night before, if you weren't thinking politics, you certainly would when you went to Houston. The president made a speech in Houston and as you know, Henneland and Johnson created the space center in the manned spacecraft center in Houston and Kennedy was making a speech before this large gathering of Democrats and he slipped. He said, we are going to send the largest payroll in the space. And then suddenly he realized, he said payroll instead of payload. And that brought the audience down. So that was a part of, he was telling people what he'd done for Texas. Right, and you mentioned that this was a fence mending sort of trip from the White House press corps perspective. Well, it was, for instance, it was so trivial. We were trying to find out, one of the big investigative projects of the trip was to find out where Ralph Yarbrough was going to sit in one of the limousines in a motorcade because the colonies apparently didn't want him with them as the rumor went. So they had to find a place for Ralph to be upfront and be welcomed into the party. Yeah, that's interesting because it was a White House press perspective, looking at the national political scene and all. Larry Temple, general counsel for LBJ after he ascended to the presidency and also was close trusted aide to Governor Connolly. You were working here primarily heading up the Texas planning for the event in that regard. Does this fence mending fit the total picture? Well, you know, the conspiracy theories about the assassination seemed to be endless and every time I turn around there seemed to be more and more myths about the trip. The trip clearly was political, there's no question about that. But one of the myths, and I have a respectful disagreement with Sid, is that the reason for the trip was that President Kennedy wanted to come down here and mend the fences in the Democratic Party and see if he could reconcile the John Connolly, Lyndon Johnson wing with the Ralph Yarbrough wing. And that was a myth that's been perpetuated. The plain simple fact is it was to be a political trip, one for fundraising and two to get around the state so the president could lay the base for a 64 election campaign. President Kennedy had been wanting to have a fundraiser or multiple fundraisers in Texas apparently since 1962. And they talked to John Connolly about that and the governor had kind of pushed him back a little bit saying it's a little too early. Your popularity is not at the stage right now that serves your best interests. Why don't we wait until early 64 to have the fundraiser and President Kennedy kept pushing back on Governor Connolly's pushback. And in June of 1963, Governor Connolly was in El Paso and met with President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson. And while I was on that trip, I wasn't in the room when the conversation took place, but he reported that President Kennedy said, John, we've got to have the trip and the fundraiser. You've got to commit to do it. And he did. Governor Connolly said, okay, if that's what you wanna do and now's the time, we will do it. And President Kennedy initially wanted to have five fundraisers, one in Houston, one in San Antonio, one in Dallas, one in Fort Worth and one in Austin. And John Connolly said, no. Don't look like you're trying to come down here to rape the state. And that was the term he used. You need to come down and have the people think you really care about the state and you want the votes. So that was when the decision was made to have the single fundraising dinner here in Austin on the night of November 22, and then have the other parts of the trip that Sid just talked about, and Julie and Ben can tell about more detail of San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas before coming here. But it was a, there's nothing wrong with having a political fundraising trip. That's the nature of politics. But it wasn't a trip to heal the wounds. As John Connolly said, if he wanted to heal the wounds between LBJ and Ralph Yarbron, they were a few blocks from the White House. All he had to do was go over there. And the governor also said if he thought he could heal the disagreement between Senator Yarbron and me, that would be a bit fanciful. And even the president didn't think he could do that. So it was a political trip, one for fundraising, two to get around the state and try to generate popularity as a predicate to the election. Ben Barnes was a member of the House of Representatives at that time, a young state representative, later to become a Speaker of the House, later to become Lieutenant Governor of Texas in that regard. Ben, you were heavily involved in the fundraising aspect of it, weren't you? Yes, Nella was. And I'd like to add to what Larry said. In 1960, in the first Kennedy-Johnson campaign, an agreement was reached between the two Senators at that time, Senator Kennedy and Senator Johnson, that the money raised in Texas in 1960 would stay in Texas because carrying Texas was an absolute necessity. Now, Lyndon Johnson wasn't gonna be vice president, Jack Kennedy wasn't gonna be president unless Texas voted for the Kennedy-Johnson ticket. So Kennedy had not raised money in Texas. They were anxious to do it. The advanced people for the Kennedy campaign and for the president's entourage, Jerry Bruno, he's written a book about the advanced man, but they came down here and they were very interested in raising money. They were very interested in making sure the president got the exposure that he needed to be able to carry Texas. It was an absolute necessity. There was not a way, Sid, to work on an electoral map and maybe you can shed some light on this, but where Kennedy was gonna be reelected president without carrying Texas. And that's the reason that I consider a lot of the books that have appeared in the last few months about that Kennedy was considering dropping Johnson the ticket just hogwash because he could not have been reelected without Johnson. If he had dropped Johnson the ticket, he certainly wouldn't have carried Texas. So all of the pundits that are writing about that he was gonna drop Lyndon Johnson the ticket, that's just not true. Good point that you made there, man. Julian Reed obviously has just written a book about the final days in Texas and Julian, you were along as actually appointed by Governor Connolly to help coordinate the press while they were here in that sense and you were in San Antonio, you were in Houston, you were in Fort Worth and on into Dallas then. So now that we have some idea of what the trip was about, can you start describing where the events started in Texas and how they moved to the state? I would like to make one small addition to what Larry said about Governor Connolly's concept for the trip, because I think that was very important in the way it turned out. I remember that Governor Connolly told Nelly, I know that if people see John F. Kennedy in the right way, in the right setting, they will like him, just those simple words. And he wanted to show the people of Texas that John Kennedy did not have horns. And that was what was behind the strategy of doing four nonpartisan events. And he used his influence to make those events happen. In fact, if you will look at what happened in Dallas, I'll talk about that a little more in a minute. It was his persuasive powers with the power structures to bring off these events to the way they were planned. And they were not fundraisers, they were just simply nonpartisan. And he was right and that proved out because everywhere he went, in the setting he was presented, he was accepted. In fact, it was overwhelming. To respond specifically to you, of course, the trip started in San Antonio. They flew into San Antonio, LBJ and Mrs. Johnson flew over from the ranch and they met there and Governor Connolly met them there. They went to Brooks Air Force Base where he dedicated a new medical facility and he became personally interested in something they were doing there. In fact, that's documented in recent coverage of the news, how he had a personal interest in seeing exactly what they were doing, not just show up. But that was the start of the trip. If you look at pictures, photographs, the mobs on the street were incredible. The school children lined up the streets. He was received, you know, just of course, San Antonio's always been a Democratic stronghold. We know that, but even so, the reception in San Antonio just set a high mark from the outfit. So they left San Antonio then and flew into Houston for to take part in the event for Albert Thomas. Congressman Albert Thomas, as most of you know, there's an exhibit hall named after him, very prominent at that point, a very powerful member of Congress, Chairman of Appropriations Committee. So they went to that event. Jackie, before that event, spoke to a Lulac meeting. That was arranged. She wanted to speak to this group of Mexican Americans. That was the only appearance she made on the entire trip where she spoke. And that was a highlight and the press loved that to see her. And she spoke in Spanish. That's correct, she spoke in Spanish. That's right. So the Houston event went off very well. Then they flew into Fort Worth, arrived after 11 o'clock at Carzill Air Force Base. Those of you who know anything about Fort Worth, that's the military base at the bomber plant we used to call it back in those days. And that was a late arrival and much to surprise of everyone, including the press, even at that hour, there was a large contingent of people waiting for them at the airport, at that airport at Carzill. Then of course, they did the caravan downtown all along the way. There's little scattered knots of people. They got down to the old Hotel Texas where they were staying that night. Enormous crowd mobbed them at the door when they got to the hotel. So this was what was occurring in just the first day of the event. And that set the pattern, of course, what came the next day. Well, the next day started breakfast in Fort Worth. That's correct. The breakfast was at Hotel Texas. They came in late the night before, the next morning. Let me back up a bit. It was a chamber of commerce breakfast, a non-partisan breakfast, but there were only a limited number of tickets available. And of course, many of partisans who supported the president in 1960 complained loudly about that. Ben remembers that very well because he was in the middle of that controversy. And he and others, Jim Wright and others, persuaded the president to do another event, to do a piggyback event before the breakfast. So they arranged across the street, there was a parking lot at that point, across the street, vacant parking lot. And they arranged for the president to make a trip out there before the breakfast. And there were 5,000 people waiting out there in a drizzling rain to see the president. Just an incredible showing of affection. So they went out, all the entourage with him, Jim Wright, John Connolly. Speaker that, well, he was state representative. I mean, a congressman then, he wasn't yet Speaker of the House. So they went across the street and here's this mob awaiting them. I think he was energized tremendously about that. You know, he met, he worked the line, you know, as he did later in Lovefield. So it was a tremendous showing, but Jackie did not go with him. She stayed in the hotel room. People ask about her. Where is she? Where's Jackie? Where's Jackie? Well, it takes her a little longer to get ready. But then she's better looking than Linda and me. So that was a famous line. I've heard you, I'm sure you've read and heard many times. But they did the rally out there and the weather started to break about that time. If you'll see pictures, some of them have on raincoats and some of them do not. The president did not have a raincoat on. He went out without a raincoat on. So that went off tremendously. So we went back inside for the breakfast itself, sold out breakfast, wonderful, wonderful triumphal. But again, no Jackie, okay? Everybody else, all the people came in, all the host committee from Fort Worth came in and were all seated, but no Jackie. And I was standing in the back of a room with Liz Carpenter. And Liz turned to me and said, do you think she's gonna show? And I said, are you kidding? She's gonna make her own entrance. And sure enough, she did. And of course the crowd went crazy. Just went crazy to see her. Before we get into the day, the assassination aspect of it, Sid mentioned the Ralph Yarborough and wanting to see what the heck was gonna happen in this situation. Let's, you expressed it pretty well about how the two factions were there. Let's hear these other three guys here talk about what Ralph Yarborough was doing during this time and how that kind of weaved itself into the whole panoply of events. Ben, do you wanna start? Well, Neil, there would probably not been a parade in Dallas if it had not been for Senator Yarborough. Senator Yarborough was rather outspoken from the very first that John Kennedy was not gonna go to the most conservative city in Texas, the city that had not voted for, matter of fact, President Johnson or Ralph Yarborough. It was the Republican stronghold in Texas. He did not want Kennedy to go and meet with businessmen and women and have a private lunch and not be seen. And an argument went on for several weeks and I was in Dallas during those three or four weeks when we were talking about whether to have a parade not to have a parade. And the person that I got my instructions from was not President Johnson or Governor Connolly. It was Nellie Connolly. Nellie Connolly said to me, Ben, we're not gonna have a parade because I've looked at this schedule. And what happens is, Jack Don Kennedy is gonna get to the Driscoll Hotel at 445 after having been up all day. She's gonna have to change into a formal gown and be in a receiving line at the Governor's mansion where there was two receptions. The mansion wouldn't hold just one. The two receptions at 515. And she said, she's not gonna be mad at President Johnson. She's not gonna be mad at Governor Connolly. She's not gonna be mad at you. She didn't even know who you are. But she's gonna be mad at me. I'm the first lady of Texas and I'm her host. So the logistics of trying to crown in all the things that were happening that day. But yet Ralph Yarbrough kept and very persistently wanted that parade. And ultimately how the parade took place was Yarbrough pressuring Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General. And Robert Kennedy talked to President Johnson, the Vice President Johnson. Johnson talked to Connolly and the Texas Host Committee acquiesced and we had the parade in Dallas. And when you say parade, you're talking about the motorcade. I'm talking about the motorcade. Motorcade in Dallas and such. So that's how it all started in that sense. Now, go ahead, you've had something else to do. Well, one other thing that, again, I've read too many books in the last couple of weeks but talking about Lee Harvey Oswald and the book depository. Lee Harvey Oswald got a job at the book depository about five and a half weeks before he shot President Kennedy and Governor Connolly. The parade route was not going by the book depository until the last seven or eight days. We were going to the State Fair, a woman's building where the luncheon was gonna be held and there were gonna be a group of people that could come in the back. If those of you that have been in the State Fair know there's a large area at the back of the woman's building where a crowd could come in and hear the President speak. But that was decided by Dallas leaders and by the logistics, by the advanced people that if those, again, if those of you've been in the State Fair, you know it's a good journey from the State Fair back to Love Field. And so that was gonna add another 15 or 20 minutes. So the apparel mart where the luncheon was planned is only a 10 minute ride to Love Field. And so that went into logistics planning. And so when the decision was made to go to the apparel mart, that's when the parade route was planned by the Kennedy advanced people, by the FBI and by the police in Dallas. Didn't that motorcade parade route get published in the paper? It did, it was not supposed to be published and the Dallas One News published it. They were gonna do it and I think everybody had a permission to publish it about five or six days out but the Dallas News got it in the minute they got it. And the Times Herald made both ran it several days before they were supposed to. Well now let's pick up at that point. Obviously the assassination occurred at the motorcade we're all familiar with. Sid, as you were and Julian at the same time as part of this motorcade in the press corps, White House press corps and the Texas press corps were kind of melded following along in that sense. What were your impressions of the motorcade as it moved along? Well, it started at Love Field and the welcoming ceremony or welcoming crowd was absolutely marvelous and friendly and cheerful and they were shouting and the parents were holding up their children so they could see Mrs. Kennedy and the president. She was absolutely radiant that day in that raspberry colored dress. I have to tell you that there was a dispute over whether the color was pink or raspberry. And I was not a fashion expert and I never reported on fashion so when I first saw the dress in Fort Worth I asked one of the seasoned women reporters what color should I call the suit? And she said call it a two-piece raspberry wool suit but don't use pink because Mrs. Kennedy wouldn't I use pink? So I used raspberry but it was, I did a piece for American Heritage several years ago and they changed raspberry to pink. And I got wholly helpful. You lost that argument. Who didn't want it to be pink. In any case, she was absolutely stunning. They got off the rear of the airplane at Love Field, walked down the ramp and immediately went into the crowd and the crowd at the fence at the airport was probably two or 3000 but lining the streets into downtown Dallas there were hundreds of thousands of people, all the same cheering and applauding and parents holding up their children to catch a glimpse of history as the motorcade proceeded. There was absolutely no sign that there was gonna be any problem at all. And I think everybody, if they had any concerns they could be relieved by the fact that Dallas really turned out. It was a warm reception. And the motorcade proceeded from Love Field down into town and as we approached Almond Houston streets the crowds got larger. The motorcycles were making a lot of noise and the backfiring noises. So it's possible you couldn't discern a gunshot from a motorcycle backfire. But as we got near the schoolbook depository building and rounded the corner, you have to understand that the press bus was eight car lengths behind the presidential limousine which would be somewhere in a neighborhood of 100 feet or more. But the press bus was right below Harvey Oswald's window. The president's car was 100 and some yards or 100 feet or 164 feet ahead. I'm not sure which it was. So we heard the shots louder than anybody. We were in a cavernous area with the buildings around us. The shot, the sound just came down to us. And on our bus, they were clear and distinct. Three distinct gunshots. And you thought there were gunshots not backfiring from the motorcycle? I thought, I just thought there were loud noises. I thought there were gunshots. They didn't sound like a motorcycle. But Bob Pierpoint of CBS was on the bus. And he was a Korean veteran as a reporter. And he knew a lot about guns. And the first thing he said when he heard the first shot was, he got out of his seat and he said, that's gunfire. And then we all charged to the windows to see what we could see. We couldn't get out. Now the crowds were starting to panic. As we started to try to move, it was almost impossible. And the presidential limousine was up ahead They'd already had instructions. They usually do on where the nearest hospital is. And they hit the accelerator up front. And they took off. We got screaming at the bus driver to catch the presidential limousine, which is an impossibility. So we were blocked by crowds dashing in front of the bus. And we came near the so-called grassy knoll and Dealey Plaza. And I could see a motorcycle cop going up a hill and the motorcycle flipped. Up the hill on the grass? On the grass, he was going up the hill. He was heading to where he thought he heard a shot, obviously. Another police officer was on the ground and he was pounding the dirt and frustration and helplessness because he couldn't do anything about it. The limousine had taken off. And if you see the pictures of Dealey Plaza, you can see the crowd dispersing with parents lying on their children, women kicking off their shoes so they could run better in the grass. The press bus didn't know where to go. The driver didn't know where to go, so he took us to the trademark. And when we didn't see the presidential limousine at the trademark, then we realized something ominous had happened. Where is the president? So we charged inside like I heard a buffalo. People were, about 2,000 people gathered inside waiting to have lunch with the president, didn't know what had happened. I got to a phone and my boss, Jim Snyder in Washington, said to me, there were shots fired on a motorcade. And I said, yes, we know that. But where is the president? He says, he's in a place called Parkland Memorial Hospital. So I filed a story on what I saw, ran out in the street. I had a blue LVETI portable typewriter and I waved it in the air. I had never been to Dallas. So I was waving this typewriter in the air and a fellow in a white Cadillac stopped. He said, are you a reporter? And I said, yes. He said, I'll get you to Parkland Hospital. So he took me to the hospital and we took off like a rocket. I told him to slow down because he was going so fast over the railroad tracks. So we got to Parkland. And as I got there, they had offloaded, I had used that term, sad, but they had taken president's body by that time. He was mortally wounded and probably as close to death as he possibly was going to be. They took the body out of the president's body out of the car, placed it on the stretcher and they were ahead of me. But I saw Mrs. Kennedy pulling the stretcher along with some of the hospital. She was alongside the stretcher actually helping you push it through? Yes, she was trying to move that stretcher. She was in panic trying to move that stretcher inside the hospital, trying to get him inside. And Hugh Sidy of Time Magazine was a friend of mine. He was standing over the car and I went over to the car and Clint Hill, Mrs. Kennedy's secret service agent had taken off his suit jacket and placed it over the president at first. When they removed the president, he placed his jacket over the flesh and the blood that was on the back seat of the car. And I went over and take a look and Hugh said, don't do it, it's too horrible. And then we learned how bad it was. Now you've seen pictures in the Pruder film of Clint Hill chasing after the presidential limousine. He had to jump off of what we call the Queen Mary. This is a huge 1950s Cadillac. It's an open convertible where you could put nine secret service agents and had a running board. You wrote on the running board. And because President Kennedy had given orders that no secret service men were to ride alongside presidential limousine, they rode behind him on the follow-up car. Clint Hill claims he only heard two shots and that's probably from the location he was on the street, that's probably the reason for it. He doesn't know whether the first and third or the second and third. He jumped off of the secret service follow-up car and charged ahead to get onto presidential limousine. Now the accelerator on that limousine is at the floor and it is approaching 50 to 60 miles an hour. And if you see those photos, you wonder how it was that Clint Hill was able to grab a handle on the back of that trunk and be yanked along with the car. He stumbled once and if he'd have fallen into the street with that five ton follow-up car behind him, he would have been killed. Mrs. Kennedy probably would have been killed as well because there was no way she could stay on that trunk at that speed. Now you probably all have read by now that the reason she was on the trunk was not because she was frightened by the shots. Mrs. Kennedy had seen the parts of the president's skull going through the air and she tried to catch a shard of the president's skull. So she got into the air and got onto the trunk trying to catch it and that's what she had. Now I was told later on that day that when the surgeons were working on President Kennedy that Mrs. Kennedy walked into the operating room in the emergency area and took out a piece of his skull and offered it to the doctors and said, would this be of any help? Of course by then it was too late. The hospital? Sid, let's interrupt just a moment here because Julian parallels what you're saying with where he was and what was happening in the colon and the limousine as well. Can you kind of pick up and overlap now what Sid was talking about? Then we'll come back into Parkland Hospital. Well, of course my memories of it are very similar to Sid's. I was in that same White House press bus. I was sitting up at the front of it and when we heard the shots, he said we had decided what to do with the bus and I talked to the driver along with another assistant press secretary who was on the bus with us and we decided the only thing to do was go to the floor of the luncheon because we had 3,000 people out there waiting for the president and they didn't know anything what had happened. I might point out something about when this happened, of course, no one on the bus had any concept of what had occurred. I'll remind you that this was before the day of cell phones. The only persons who had any outside communication were one person in the pool who had a radio telephone. Was that Merriman Smith? Merriman Smith who broke the story incident. Merriman Smith was a United Press? That's right. So we didn't know what had happened but we knew something terrible had happened. So as Sid says, the bus, we took the bus on out to park them to the trademark and I jumped out of the bus while all the press guys ran for the pay phones. That's back when we had rows of pay phones, you remember, in public buildings. So they all rushed to pay phones and I rushed up to the podium where Eric Johnson was the chairman for the lunch and he was up above me. He was up on the podium and I rushed in to him and I said, Mr. Johnson, something terrible has happened. We don't know exactly what happened but we think perhaps that the president and Governor Connelly have been shocked. He just stared down at me for a moment. Seemed like forever because he was in shock and he said, I think we'll wait a few minutes and then he turned and asked for a prayer. Luther Holcomb, that's correct, Luther Holcomb who was supposed to do the invocation he instead ended up doing a prayer. So I immediately rushed out. Incidentally, I will tell you that when I walked in that hall or ran in that hall, the murmur of 3,000 people who were waiting for the president and Ms. Kennedy to walk in any minute, it was eerie when I knew they didn't have a clue of what had happened. At any rate, I rushed out, happened like you to have luck, ran into a friend outside who had just pulled up for the luncheon. I commandeered her in her car to rush me to Parkland Hospital. I got to Parkland in just a few minutes, it's not very far from there. I rushed in an indoor at Parkland Hospital. I just saw an indoor that was the closest place. I was astounded that there was no security, nobody in sight. I went in the indoor which was wide open and found a nurse as quickly as I could and asked her to take me to Ms. Connolly. She took me to Ms. Connolly who was in a dark hallway. Two women had two straight chairs across hall of each other. Net economy on one side, Jackie on the other. Neither spoke a word. I knew that the press would be crawling all over us shortly. I knew that Malcolm Kilduff would represent the president, but I knew they also had one about Governor Connolly and I wanted to know about Governor Connolly, obviously. He already was in the operating room. It already started surgery on him. And those chairs outside the operating room areas? Yes, there was trauma one and trauma two just across the hall from each other. The president was in trauma one, Connolly was in trauma two. So Nelly very quickly told me what the seating arrangement was. Of course, everybody in the world knows that now but they didn't know it then. So we sketched out between us quickly in a little piece of paper how the seating arrangement was. In the limousine. In the limousine, that's right. So then I ran down, found Malcolm Kilduff and we set up a temporary press room very quickly in the nurse's training room. And Malcolm Kilduff got up, made the announcement that the president was dead. And I got up immediately after him and drew on the blackboard the sketch of the seating as reported to be by Nelly. Okay, Larry? It might be instructive to tell about the shooting from the standpoint of John Connolly. He's not here to do it for himself but I think I can repeat the story he told. Julian told Ben, told me. And as Julian said, the seating arrangement was in that limousine. On the right side, in the regular seat was President Kennedy. On the left side was Business Kennedy. And then in the jump seat right in front, in front of the president was John Connolly. In front of the first lady was Nelly Connolly. And the governor said that when he heard the shot he said I'd been around guns all my life. It never occurred to me that it was a backfiring of an automobile. I knew it was a gunshot because I have known gunshots all my life. And he said when he heard the shot, he turned to his right to see President Kennedy and he couldn't see anything. And he turned around his left so that he could see President Kennedy. And about that time, the bullet went in his back, out his chest, into his wrist and splintered and went into his leg. So I mean, it was a powerful bullet that did all of that. And then Nelly grabbed him and pulled him over in her lap and bent over him to protect him. And the doctor says that he had a sucking wound and had she not done that, air would have gotten in the wound and he would have died before he got to the hospital. So that was the story about the shooting from his standpoint. Well, and fascinating in that sense now, but coming back to Parkland Hospital, where the two of you were located at that time and the announcement was made that the shooting had occurred and the president was dead, then the president, how long was it before President Johnson then moved toward Air Force One because at that moment he, in effect, was the president of the United States? Well, back up just a second. Malcolm Kilduff, when he came in the nurses' training room to make the announcement, had just talked to President Johnson downstairs in the emergency room area. And he said, Mr. President, I have to tell the press that John F. Kennedy is dead. At that point, Kilduff realized that he might have been the first person to call Lyndon Johnson, Mr. President. And he said, the president was sort of taken aback when he said, Mr. President, and he paused, and I have to do this. And Johnson said very, very firmly and without hesitation, Mac, I don't think you ought to make the announcement until I leave the hospital with Mrs. Johnson. We don't know whether this is a communist conspiracy. Give me a few minutes to get out of here, back to Love Field, and then you can make the announcement. So they waited three or four minutes until the car got out of the way and the president was safe going to Love Field, and then Kilduff came into the room. And his eyes, his cheeks were full of tears. He stood up the microphone, and you have to understand that Malcolm Kilduff was an assistant press secretary. He was not the full press secretary. The full press secretary was Pierre Salinger on a mission to Asia with the Secretary of States. So this younger person who'd never handled anything of this enormity is now in charge of making an announcement that President of the United States is dead. So he opened his mouth and tried to talk, and nothing came out at first. And then he said, President John F. Kennedy died today at 1 o'clock Central Standard Time. He was killed by a bullet to the brain. I have nothing further to say. At this point, all hell broke loose. There was chaos in there. We all ran for telephones. I had commandeered a phone earlier, so I had a phone to go to. I ran out and made the announcement. I'll backtrack for just a second. This is not a self-serving statement, but I think it's something you ought to know about people in the press. While we were waiting to get the announcement of President Kennedy's death, I had been in that same nurse's area near that training room waiting for this briefing to take place. And some of my friends from Washington were talking to two priests. One of them was Father Oscar Huber. As I recall, he was about 67 years old, and he was the parish priest in the Parkland Hospital area, or neighborhood. And just as I got over there to hear what he was telling the reporters, I heard him say, he's dead all right. I gave him the last rights. And I told Mrs. Kennedy that I thought his soul had not yet left his body. I ran back to my phone. I talked to my boss, Jim Snyder, and I said, can you keep me off the air for a second? I've got to tell you something. They cut me off the air, and I said, Jim, there's a priest here who says President Kennedy is dead. And I heard a gasp at the other end. And he said, well, what do you want to do? And I said, what do you want to do? And we talked. And we both agreed that it was just too important. We would know that Father Huber would know what a dead person looked like, but we were dealing with the President of the United States. And we decided to keep it off the air until the official announcement. And that's what we did. Now, if you're a reporter, the congenital thing you want to do is take the boughs and break the story. The other side of it was just the dread of saying yourself the President is dead. The other side of it is, shouldn't we get more defining detail? All of these things went through my mind, but we held it. We didn't do anything until we had it on the air. I bring that out because I don't think that would happen today. I think the press is a lot different today than it was then. But we did hold it. And it was like an eternity waiting for Malcolm Kilduff to then come and make the announcement. Seemed like hours. And yet it was only a minute and a half. Right about it. Let me ask a question. Most people relate to the announcement that the President was dead to Walter Cronkite on CBS. How did he, any of you know how he got that word? Did you get it from the wire service? The wire service. I think you got Merriman Smith's bulletin. Just to say something about Merriman Smith. Those of you in the room, I know we have Gwen Gibson here. And Joanne Christian is here. Some people who know some of these reporters. Merriman Smith deserves some comment somewhere along the line. He did get a bullet surprise, but he was one of the greatest reporters that ever lived. He covered Roosevelt. He covered Truman. And he was a genius. And he was in the motorcade. And he had the wire car phone. In those days, we had a car assigned to the motorcade that was provided by the phone company. And four reporters rode in that car because we always argued to have someone closer to the president than the press bus. Yeah, this was the pool. Pool car. Representing radio, television, newspaper. There was a radio reporter, a television reporter, a newspaper reporter, a wire service reporter. And it rotated. I was going into Fort Worth. As a matter of fact, when I was chosen to be the pool man, I argued that I didn't want to be the pool man, that it was Peer Point's turn. And we had a big argument over whether I was going to go on Air Force One. But I just want to say something. Merriman Smith was a reporter's reporter. He was absolutely magnificent in his handling of it. He had the telephone, the one phone. He always sat up front in the middle of the seat of the wire car, which is usually a Ford, but not a big car. And the first thing he would do when we got into a city, no matter what city it was, no matter how dull the story was, it was Smitty always got the telephone. And we used to laugh at him, because he would say, we're going on Mass Avenue now, or we're going across Elm Street, there's a traffic light here. And he would use the telephone to describe things. So he always felt that telephone belonged to him. He also believed Air Force One belonged to him. So when Dallas hit, now he's sitting in that seat. He's got the telephone. He's got the story of the century. He's got his chief competitor sitting behind him, a guy from the Associated Press, who's dying a million deaths because Smitty has that phone and he won't let go of it. And not only did he let go of it, not only did he tell what happened and he couldn't have something fresh happen all the time, he would say to the office, he was dictating to the United Press here in Dallas. Now, repeat what I just told you. And the guy in the back seat is dying. So they started the time. I heard there was various stories about it. There were stories that it was a big fight between the AP and the UPI. A friend of mine says there's more of a tussle. But the guy in the back seat had the disadvantage, because he couldn't rest that phone out of Smitty's hand. And Smitty was the one who pulled a surprise for what he did. But they're all great reporters. Let's jump to that famous photograph of LBJ with his hand raised, a judge, Sarah T. Hughes, administering the oath of office as president. You said we're there on that plane. And I think in the introduction, they said you may be the only one who was alive in that pool still, then. I know. I'm the only one of the three. I hate to say this. I'm the last surviving one of the three. Whether that's a distinction. Interestingly, all the other people in that picture are gone, too, except for Bill Moyers. And I want to get to how Bill Moyers got there in just a few minutes about how he, because Bill was in Austin when the shooting took place. He was in. And Valenti's gone, and Jack Brooks is gone, Albert Thomas is gone. They're all gone. All these people. Let's describe how that picture took place. What happened is that was it? I was on the air broadcasting, the president's death, when the White House travel office person grabbed me, but I called my suit caller from behind and said I had to go with him. And I said, I'm on the air. I'm not leaving this. I'm not leaving, damn it. I'm on the air. I said, well, we need a pool. And I said, well, get pure points. It's his turn. I mean, we're arguing over the biggest story of the century, and I'm not wanting to go to cover it. It's crazy. I couldn't believe it. And I looked back and thought about fighting over it. But I did go. And we picked up Merriman Smith and Chuck Roberts of Newsweek and went down through the hospital, and they had an unmarked police car waiting for us. And they said, we're going out to Air Force One. We took off, and we were doing 60 to 70 miles an hour through Dallas over curbs, driveways, lawns, no matter how this police officer could get through backyards, trying to get to Air Force One before it took off back to Washington. Got to the airport, and Mrs. Kennedy had just arrived with a casket. And they were putting the casket onto the aircraft. And they had to carry it up the incline of the rear stairs. This was a 707, a big airplane, and majestic airplane, because Mrs. Kennedy and Jack Kennedy had helped design the colors. The colors you see on Air Force One today and the lettering were designed by Mrs. Kennedy and Jack Kennedy. It was a brand new airplane that came into his administration. So they had a piece of it in history as well. They had to knock four handles off the casket because the handles were sticking out and they couldn't get it into the airplane. So the Secret Service got an axe somewhere and they knocked off the handles and were able to manage to get the thing in there. I went around the side of the airplane with Merriman Smith and Chuck Roberts and climbed in from another side of the aircraft coming from the front end of the plane, went back to the midships. And I saw Mrs. Johnson. I saw President Johnson in there with a group of people. And President Johnson was talking to Marie Famer, his secretary. I talked to Marie for a little bit, and they said they were trying to assemble and get a judge from downtown to come out and do the swearing in. Mrs. Kennedy was in the rear with the casket. Marie told me when the president arrived on the aircraft, which was maybe 15 minutes, no more than that, than Mrs. Kennedy's arrival. The first thing he did was he asked for a hot cup of vegetable soup. And he said to Marie, I've lived a year since this morning. And then he told her, and I overheard him tell her, that I would like you to go and ask Mrs. Kennedy if she will stand with us at the swearing in. And Marie went back and talked to Mrs. Kennedy or sent a message back. And the message came back, yes, I'll come, but I want a few minutes to compose myself. And so we waited. By this time, the room was stifling hot, probably 120 degrees. He'd been sitting under a hot sun. And only one engine had been running to keep the electronics going. And it was probably a few minutes before Mrs. Kennedy appeared in the doorway. And that's when the sobbing, the quiet sobbing by the young Kennedy staff, you have to understand these are young people in their 20s and 30s who had made the long march to the campaign and made him president. And they'd gone to the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. And he was their hero. And now he was gone. And the sadness of this scene was evident on the faces of these young women with the mascaras streaking their cheeks as they were waiting for Mrs. Kennedy. And once she came into the room, the crying became almost unbearable among everyone. The sobbing was just unbelievable. Was Mrs. Kennedy crying? Mrs. Kennedy, no. Was Jackie Kennedy crying? No, she was not. She was standing in the doorway. And we could see her. President Johnson left his place in the middle of the room, walked over to her, took her by both hands. And he walked backwards, sort of backward, and took her and placed her to his left in the center of the room. And he pulled Mrs. Johnson over to his right. And he asked for a glass of ice water. And Marie brought him some ice water. And then he looked at the judge and he said, proceed. Now, as a pool reporter, it's my responsibility to write everything I saw. I'm just a rinky dink reporter who covered the police station in Ohio, and now I'm covering one of the biggest stories in the world. And I have to tell you that I was worried that I wouldn't get everything I had to get. It was such an important story. But I examined her pretty carefully. I saw blood on her legs. It had congealed on both legs. I saw blood and speckles of her brain matter on her skirt and on her blouse. I noticed that she was unblinking. She was in grief, but she had her wits about her. She knew exactly what was going on. She understood everything was going on. I don't think she would have come forward had she not known what was going on. I think in the annals of history, this is one of the most courageous things I've ever seen between a president and another first lady. Where she, I believe, suffering probably the worst thing that could happen to a married couple, losing your husband in a murderous situation, leaving the casket to come up front to attend the ceremony, took a lot of courage. And I think Mrs. Kennedy felt it was important for her to be in that room. At the same time, I thought that gesture by President Johnson, asking her to come forward if she would like to stand with us because he knew the circumstances. I think that the opportunities for greatness were there in that setting for the brief of time. The compassion shown by President Johnson, I've never seen it since. He invited all the members of the Kennedy staff on the airplane that wanted to come into the compartment, they jammed the compartment as close as they could. He asked people to get closer together so that more of the Kennedy people could attend the thing. In his behavior, I never saw anybody who was more resolved than what he had to do. He had his wits totally about him. He went over, as soon as the oath was finished, he kissed Mrs. Johnson, then he kissed Mrs. Kennedy on the cheek, then he went over to President Kennedy's secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. He shook her hand and held her tightly and said he was sorry that this had happened. And then he fended off almost any effort on the part of anyone to come up and congratulate him, which was another sign of, I think, his greatness. And he did not want this to turn into a celebration. And the sombre mood that existed from the beginning was there at the end. My friend Chuck Roberts, one of the other poolers, who was standing near me, but went over to President Johnson, and he shook his hand, he looked up at the president, he was president of 63 or 64, and he looked up to the president, he told me later, he said, I looked up at him and now he's different. And he said, I didn't know what to say. So I said, Godspeed, Mr. President. And I thought, I wish I could have said something like that. It was so appropriate for him to have said that. And then President Johnson's first order was, let's get airborne. That they knew they had to move that airplane out of Dallas and get back to Washington. One interesting sidelight is Colonel Jim Swindle, who was the Air Force One pilot. I understand that Air Force One pilot, Jim General Cross, is he here? I thought he was gonna be here tonight. In any case, I understand what Swindle did was, on his own because he sensed the danger of the situation where you don't know where there's a conspiracy, you don't know what's going about with foreign countries, that he took that 707 up above its normal cruising rate, 41,000 to over 41,000 feet in order to avoid any ground, air missiles that might take place. He did that on his own, he went back to Washington. I got off the plane, I volunteered to get off and give the pull report and I let Smitty and Chuck Roberts go back to Washington because I wanted to give the report to the rest of the press call at the airfield. Because if I gave the report, then I was free to use the story myself. Otherwise, I would've been on the airplane for three hours and my office would know where I was. So it's a selfish act on my part. I said I'd get off and do the pull report. But I stood there with Judge Hughes. You've seen the dress that Judge Hughes wore. Brown dressed with these huge flowers. And I've often wondered if she'd worn that dress that day if she knew what's going to happen because it's such a glaring part of the picture. In any case, she was in tears the whole time. She said President Johnson had nominated her for the office and that President Kennedy had appointed her. And we both stood there and in tears, we watched Air Force One disappear into the eastern sky. And I couldn't help but think of the strength of this country, its leadership. Because as the Associated Press said of Lyndon Johnson that day, it was though a giant hand had reached down and stroke the heart of a grieving nation. And I think that was the most appropriate thing anybody could say about his behavior that day. It was exemplary. And I wanted to come to Austin and I have people here in Austin hear me say it. Well, Lucy Johnson is here in the audience and she heard what you just said. So I think it was appropriate. Let's move as we have time now, only about 10 more minutes or so. But we'll talk about how it impacted that day and then the next couple of days. Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, what happened in Texas. But start with what happened in Austin, Texas after this occurred in Dallas because Ben Barnes, Larry Temple, you guys were set up and ready to go here with what was going to go on and nothing happened. So Ben, you couldn't convene, I guess, because you weren't speaker at that time. He thought he was. But you convened a prayer service in the house chambers. Well, I think the first thing that I would like for the audience to know is that I was at the 40 acres club with Bill Warriors and Frank Irwin and Bill Warriors got the call from the secret service that President Johnson wanted him to proceed to Lovefield as quick as he possibly could. And then you had a commercial, he didn't have an airplane to get to Lovefield and I call Colonel Garrison. He didn't know I was not speaker either, Larry. Colonel Garrison was head of the public safety. Colonel Garrison was head of the department of public safety. Head of the department of public safety they kept their plane, the twin engine, a Cessna outlet at the Browning. And by the time I got to the airport with Bill Warriors, the plane was there with the engines running and Bill got to Dallas in time to see President Johnson take the oath of office. So that's about a 45 or 50 minute flight. So you can, that much time left. Was that a legal act? The statute of limitations has run. We're here to talk about November the 22nd, not illegal acts, we don't have enough time. But Frank Irwin left to try to make certain that the Conley children were there in public schools and go get those. But the real difficult thing was in driving Marriors to the airport, the first report that we had was that President Kennedy had been killed and that John Conley had been seriously wounded and was not expected to live. And so we were very concerned that we were gonna receive word any time that Governor Conley had died also. The town was full of people that were here for the reception and for the dinner that night. And driving down the streets of Austin, you knew you'd see grown people standing on the street crying and everybody was at a loss. It was a terrible thing. Nothing like this had happened in any of the lifetimes of any of the people that were alive in here in Austin at that time. And it was really very fortunate that we came up with the idea of having the prayer service in the house chamber because people wanted something to do. And so we did plan the prayer service and the house gallery was, and floor was overflowing with people and it was a very wonderful service. It was open to the public. It wasn't just for members. Yes, it was open to the public. But the gallery was full and people jammed the Capitol and we couldn't have accommodated all the people that would like to have been there at the service. I know when we sent our television crew down to the auditorium, it was vacant, but the people who were there, Walter Jiton was catering, I think, to a banquet that evening. And people wait, staff crying and just standing numb. Just didn't know what to do. They were just standing there waiting. But then they rushed to television sets just to see what was happening in that regard. And Julian, people in Texas were concerned about the governor, obviously. Very much so. I've said many times, any other time in history that a governor of Texas was almost murdered himself, it would have been the six columns, eight column headline. But it just so happened that that was the moment of President of the United States died. So the story understandably and appropriately was subdued to the tragedy about the president. But we were all very concerned about the Governor's column and of course the hospital was jammed with people coming to see him, wanted to see how, everybody wanted to say, how are John and Nellie? How are John and Nellie? How are John and Nellie? So we had our own vigil to watch and it was 10 days before Governor Connolly and Nellie came back to the... Well, Larry didn't some of the staff go, run the government office out of the office. That did happen. And there was a 24 hour period that Ben alluded to and Julian alluded to. That happened at noon on Friday and it was not till noon on Saturday that it became apparent that John Connolly was gonna survive. For that 24 hour period, there was a strong belief in presumption he would not survive that bullet wound that went through his body. And it wasn't until noon on Saturday that it became apparent he was going to survive. And as Julian said, he was in the hospital for a while. Howard Rose, who's probably here and was the Governor's Chief of Staff, went and set up an office of the Governor's in Dallas so he could operate there. And he tried to operate as best he could under the circumstances from the hospital until he returned here. Julian says 10 days later, I'm not sure I ever counted the number of days. But then there was a period, a long period of time that he was, had his arm in a sling and he was here recuperating. That was obviously November 22nd. I think he never did get out of that sling with his arm that had gotten so messed up with that bullet until maybe January or February. And he had to sign bills and documents with his left hand, learned how to operate. He got pretty adroit at signing with his left hand and I always remember he wasn't a complaining guy and he only did it in a nice way but he was complaining about it. If he had to eat with his left hand, he didn't know how to keep English peas on his fork. And I just thought to myself, if I had any courage, I'd say, well, don't eat English peas. But I didn't do that. A couple of other quick little notes. Lucy Johnson was not here in Austin at the time. Linda Bird was in school at the University of Texas. And immediately, of course, they were subject to the Secret Service providing protection to them as such. So their lives also were impacted beyond that. And I simply wanted to bring that to the attention of the group here. Julian? You mentioned one other footnote. I called it the unfinished itinerary. Most people do not know that the plans also included the president was gonna spend that night at the LBJ Ranch. And there was gonna be a beautiful, typical LBJ barbecue on the banks of the Brenton House. That so many of you have experienced. And all of those arrangements were made. And of course, that was enough else that did not happen. Never heard. We've got a little more than five minutes left. But I want to talk about Texas role here because as I understand it, Larry, you're the lawyer in the group here. But as I understand it, under Texas law, the crime that was committed in Dallas, the assassination of the president, was under the jurisdiction of the state of Texas at that time. It was. And the attorney general of the state of Texas, Wagner Carr, immediately soon thereafter wanted to conduct an investigation. The other aspect of it, obviously, was on Sunday following the assassination, Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald and when he was transferring between Jails and Dallas at that sense. So in Texas, what described what you feel then Larry Julian was happening inside this state at a time when the nation was grieving horribly so because it was playing out all of the funeral services in Washington, everything that was being said there. And yet the subplot or maybe a plot all of its own in its own way was taking place here and just embroiling Texas at this time. I think Neil, there was a feeling of shame by a lot of people that this would have occurred here in our backyard that the president of the United States had been invited to come to this state and he was welcomed. And the fact that one crazed individual would do this and bring that shame and disrepute on the state, wasn't that the people generally thought they had a responsibility for it because they didn't. But there was not only the disappointment but the shame and it took a long time to get over that. And I think, for example, in Dallas they still work on that and they've got that wonderful activity that's going on November 22 to recognize the 50th anniversary of the assassination. I think it's being done in a very droid, sophisticated, nice way without it looking like anything ghoulish. Let me tell you, Dallas was by trooperative comments about Dallas and Texas at that time, Junior, it was just. Well, I've written a lot about that. It was vicious. It was horrible. There's all sorts of examples. People who were from Dallas traveling outside of Dallas, outside of Texas actually were refused service in restaurants. That actually happened. There were cases of a car was pinned into an elevator when he went up there for the memorial services. The head of the largest foundation in Dallas was literally thrown out of a cab in New York because they heard he was from Texas. And a woman who had a direct mail service in Dallas, all the mail, of course, came back to Dallas, actually had to change her mailing address to Arlington because her business dropped off so much. She was that bitter for a long, long time. Neil, I'll echo what Julian said, but I want to go back and talk about a comment that Nellie Connelly made to the president in the motorcade in Dallas when she turned around and said, Julian, correct me if this may not be a correct quote, but she said, Mr. President, you can't say they don't love you here. I think that this trip was a great up until the time in Dallas. It was a great political score for Kennedy. He was welcomed here and was such enthusiasm. People had not really known, as I think Julian referred, they'd really not known Jack Kennedy or Jacqueline Kennedy. Jacqueline Kennedy was a celebrity all over the world. She was a first lady that created great excitement, but I think if Jack Kennedy had lived and the 64 campaign had taken place that Kennedy and Johnson would have carried Texas much stronger regardless of who'd been the nominee of what would happen. That way it was a great political trip and a great political victory and score for Kennedy, Johnson ticket for Kennedy to come to Texas and go to the five cities he went to and handle himself the way he handled him. And Texans loved him. Let me add one foot note to that. What we've talked about that got overlooked at the time, how he was received in Texas and how she received the National Geographic Channel has recognized that they have produced a two hour documentary that's focused on the happy times he experienced in Texas. And it's gonna be aired on November the 8th, eight o'clock Eastern. And it's a fabulous show, it's worth seeing. A lot of activities are underwaves on this 50th anniversary of a very, very dark day in the history of this country and the history of Texas at that point. How has this nation just real quickly, just about a minute or two, how do you think this nation has survived based on that looking back now 50 years and where we are today? What has it done to us? Well, I think that it'd be wonderful if we could put an end to these conspiracy theories that people wanna believe in without any facts to support it. 50 years is enough to have played the game here and the evidence hasn't changed. The evidence is the same. I think that I don't wanna get into a quarrel with people who disagree with me, but I think the Warren Commission report still holds after 50 years and... All three of you others agree with that? Absolutely. Lee Harvey, Oswald. I not only agree with that, but I accompanied Ted Kennedy here to this library to make his first trip. Teddy Kennedy never went to Dallas after that. But he came here to visit Ms. Johnson in this library and he said walking through the exhibits and going up to Ms. Johnson's office, he said that he agreed with the Warren Commission report and he had no reason to doubt the validity of the Warren Commission report. And Senator Kennedy said that in this library. Gentlemen, thank you very much. I would like to take about three minutes to say something because I can run out of time and you won't see me again. Well, actually, what we've got is, we've got a hard time that we have to end the broadcast, but we will have the audience stick here to hear your remarks as soon as we wrap up. Well, we do need to wrap this up now in this regard because of the constraints of television time in this regard. Larry Temple, Ben Barnes, Julian Reed, Sid Davis, you folks have added immeasurably to the history of this event with what you said here tonight and we thank you so much for being here.