Subject: Interesting 1983 article: Nurse Doris Nelson & WH photographer Knudsen interviewed Date: Thu, 01 Apr 1999 14:46:23 -0800 From: "Vincent M. Palamara" Organization: http://www.njmetronet.com/palamara/ Newsgroups: alt.assassination.jfk Life, Nov 1983 v6 p48(24) 4 days that stopped America; the Kennedy assassination, 20 years later. Doris G. Kinney; Marcia Smith; Penny Ward Moser. Full Text: COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1983 Of the 135 million Americans now living who can recall the events that began on November 22, 1963, most know exactly what they were doing when they heard about the shooting of John F. Kennedy. It was that kind of moment--terrifying, deeply painful, beyond rationality--and one could struggle back to a bearable reality only by framing the huge unacceptable truth, a vital young President gone, within the banal margins of one's own life. that tragic event and the four days that followed it drew the stunned attention of the world. "...The mind and heart stand still," said British Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home. "Her gallant boy is dead. We mourn here with you, poor sad American people," wrote the Irish playwright Sean O'Casey. Watching that shocking and mournful weekend of history unfold on television, the whole country was drawn together with extraordinary unanimity. On the 20th anniversary of the assasination of President Kennedy, LIFE offers on these pages an album of refreshed recollection and new perspectives on four days that still burn in the national memory. The morning had been drizzly, but by one o'clock, when the 20-car motorcade left Love Field for the seven-mile drive to downtown Dallas, November 22 was dazzlingly clear--what his aides called "Kennedy weather." On the outskirts of the city the crowds thickened. "We got there an hour and a half early because my mother wanted a good spot," remembers Chris Darrouzet, 13 at the time, who borrowed his parents' Brownie Automatic Movie Camera. When his family--two station wagons full of brothers, cousins and aunts--arrived at a site along the route, they saw many homemade signs of greeting. Aunt Terry Jenkins, 35, hurried across the street to a five-and-ten for a roll of shelf paper and a marker. "PLEASE STOP & SHAKE OUR HANDS," she printed, "JFK-LBJ in '64." At 1:05 the motorcade came into view. The limousine had almost passed when it abruptly stopped--and the President beckoned. "As soon as he waved, I just dropped the sign and ran to shake his hand," remembers John Darrouzet, then 17. His family was close behind. "He looked right into my face," says brother Bob, then 15. "His hand was swollen from shaking hands. Jackie was looking away, so I said, 'Hi, Jackie,' and she turned and gave that typical smile." Meanwhile, photographer Chris was maneuvering for a vantage point. "The crowd was pushing in to get a handshake," he says. "I just wanted to shoot a few frames." Before the motorcade moved on to Dealey Plaza, 25 minutes away, the 13-year-old was able to record these images, never before published, offering a last glimpse of a radiant President. Abraham Zapruder, a Kennedy admirer, hoisted himself atop a four-foot abutment overlooking Dealey Plaza near the end of the motorcade route. He tried out his new 8mm Bell & Howell movie camera on Marilyn Sitzman, his dress firm's 20-year-old receptionist, as she walked by. then he asked her to climb up. "Mr. Z. had vertigo," says Sitzman (below), who returned to the scene for the first time in two decades. "He said, 'Hold onto me so I won't fall off.'" While Zapruder, who died in 1970, exposed the most intensely scrutinized 478 frames in the history of film, Sitzman witnessed the assassination. "They had just come down the hill. I heard shots, and I thought, firecrackers. All I could see was his hands going up. Then he was right in front of us," she says, gesturing toward Elm Street, 200 feet from the Texas School Book Depository. "The last shot got him in the head. Everybody was on the ground, and Mr. Z. was gone. There had been gunshots, and I was standing there all by myself." The horror of the moment struck her as she watched the movie the next morning. "The film," says Sitzman, "was more gruesome than in real life." In the artist's enlargement of a film detail, Mrs. Kennedy reacts with a quizzical look as both the President and Connally are wounded. At 1:15 Doris Nelson was eating lunch with other nurses in the Parkland Hospital cafeteria. "We were talking about what would happen if the President was in a car wreck or something," she remembers. "I said they'd never bring him here, they'd take him to a hospital in town." When Nelson returned to the emergency room, the phone was ringing. "It was the switchboard operator. she said, 'Doris, the President's been shot, and he'll be here in five minutes.' I said, 'Yes, Phyllis, so what else is new?'" At first, nobody believed Nelson either. "By the time I got two doctors and the head nurse convinced, they were rolling him down the hall." Nelson was emergency room supervisor. "As I looked around, I didn't see anyone from the higher echelon in the hospital, so I thought, 'Doris, you've got it.'" Connally came first. "He had been pretty badly wounded, and his skin was real pale. So I just ripped off his shirt to see where the injuries were. I put him in Trauma Two. Right behind him came the President. Jackie was walking beside him. A rose was lying across the stretcher. I put him in Trauma One." While physicians hovered over the President, Nelson stood at the door, screening the flow of nurses, doctors and Secret Service agents. "At one point, Jackie decided to go into the room when they were doing a tracheotomy on him. I though it was not in her best interest or in the best interest of the patient or the physicians. I suggested she wait outside. But the agent in charge said that if she wished to go in, that was her prerogative." Nelson was impressed by the First Lady. "Amazed at how poised she was. I asked her if she would like to remove her gloves and wash her hands, and she said, 'No, thank you, I'm fine.' She seemed almost in a trance.c Nelson herself was on automatic pilot. "About an hour after it was over, someone brought me a cup of coffee. My hands started shaking so, I couldn't hold it. That's when it hit me." (Doris Nelson dies last month of liver cander at 52, shortly after she gave this interview.) Outside the trauma room the First Lady sat on a wooden chair. "She was very, very calm," recals retired Dallas Police Sgt. Robert Dugger, 62, who stood near her in the corridor. "She asked me if I had a cigarette and I said, 'I'm sorry, but I don't smoke.' She said, 'I have some cigarettes in my purse, will you get them for me?' One of the Secret Service guys came over and said, 'Get your hand out of Mrs. Kennedy's bag,' and she put him down pretty quick." Meanwhile, curious hospital personnel gathered at the corridor door for a peek at the First Lady. "The whole staff was coming to stare at her," says Dugger, "so i asked the nurse to put paper over the window." Dugger himself glanced into the trauma room. "The wound was real bad. they had some type of lifesaving equ ipment hooked up to him. It was very quiet." At two p.m. the President was pronounced dead, and his body placed in a casket. Wanting to leave something with her husband, Mrs. Kennedy slipped off her wedding band. "She tried to put it on his ring finger, but it couldn't go past to knuckle," remembers Dugger. "She asked me to try, but I couldn't get the ring on either. We left it there, on the first knuckle." Dugger began to break. "I was having trouble with my vision," he says, "tears coming down. She cried just a little. Then she regained her composure." As a drama of death played out at Parkland Hospital, police officer J. D. Tippit challenged a man on a Dallas street six miles away. the man, Lee Harvey Oswald, fit a description of the gunman in the Book Depository window. Oswald shot and killed Tippit, and then ran into the Texas Theatre, which was showing a double bill, War Is Hell and Cry of Battle. Within 10 minutes some 15 Dallas policemen converged on the theater. The movie projector stopped; the house lights were turned up. Patrolman Nick McDonal (right) was about to experience the most important moments of his life. the man who now signs his name "Officer Maurice N. McDonald, Captor of Oswald" remembers: "We were inches apart. I said, 'Get on your feet.' He stood up immediately, saying, 'Well, it's all over now,' and raised his hands. Suddenly, he made a fist with his left hand and hit me between the eyes, knocking my cap off. At the same time, he pulled a pistol from his waist with his right hand." McDonald lunged for the pistol and threw a right cross to Oswald's head. "As he was falling back into the seat, he pulled the trigger," says McDonald, 55, now retired from the police force. "The hammer made an audible snap as it hit the webbing between my thumb and forefinger." McDonald yanked the gun away, stuck it into Oswald's stomach and almost pulled the trigger himself, but feared the bullet would pass through Oswald and wound an officer directly behind him. Oswald, yelling about "police brutality," was rushed to headquarters while McDonald went back to the theater to retrieve his hat. At headquarters, Capt. J. Will Fritz told a policeman to go to suburban Irving to pick up a suspect in the Kennedy assassination named Lee Harvey Oswald. "Captain," said an officer, "we will save you a trip. there he sits." About an hour after the arrest, Kennedy's widow and White House aides huddled in the office of Air Force One to witness the swearing-in of the nation's 36th President. The coffin, made from 500-year-old African mahogany, weighed 1,300 pounds. On the White House steps the bearers strained, and Lt. Samuel R. Bird moved forward to help. Today, paralyzed from a head wound suffered in Vietnam, Bird struggles to articulate his pride as the 23-year-old officer in charge of the casket detail. "I can still hear the muffled drums. I can still see the American flag on the casket--even the name of the company that manufactured the flag." Head butler John Ficklin was at the White House when the family returned with the slain President. "I asked if there was something I could do," he recalls. "Just then Mrs. Kennedy stuck her head in the kitchen and said she would like a cup of hot tea." Ficklin, 64, whose career spanned administrations from Roosevelt to Reagan, says of Saturday: "It was just like any other home--especially one with a big family--when someone has passed. We tried to make everybody comfortable. We did everything we could to keep the pressure off the First Lady." Before the mass held in the White House that morning, JFK's private secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, 64, was packing to leave. She recalls Caroline asking her, "Why are all these people here?" "I said, 'They're friends of your daddy's.' She laughed, and I thought, 'This is the way Jack would want it to be.'" After brief eulogies in the Capitol Rotunda, wife and daughter knelt at the President's coffin. Then the first of 250,000 mourners began filing by. At almost the same moment, the stunning news of Oswald's death flashed around the world--withheld by the networks until the ceremony was over. He had been shot at 12:21 p.m. James Leavelle (right) was the Dallas detective handcuffed to Oswald when he was gunned down by nightclub owner Jack Ruby. (Leavelle holds the prizewinning newspaper picture of the shooting.) Why did Ruby do it? "He told me he just wanted to be a hero. I think he though they'd take him to the grand jury and they'd say, 'Jack, it's a bad thing you done killing Oswald, but since he needed killing, why we're going to forgive you this time.' And he could stand at the door of his club and people would come from far and wide to shake his hand." Detective Leavelle, now retired, rode in the ambulance with Oswald. "When we were halfway there, he stirred a little bit and then groaned and went limp. I think that's when he died." "It was so simple, so egalitarian, so American." That is how Sargent Shriver, now a Washington lawyer, remembers the silent, sunstruck procession of kings and Kennedys to St. Matthew's Cathedral. The walk was a family ceremony to which the world had been invited. As a close Kennedy in-law, Shriver was put in charge of the funeral and recalls the constant conflict with protocol. "Finally, I just said the hell with it. It's her husband, and he's going to be buried the way she wants it." Pomp fell to the military. Arthur Carlson, now an oil-rig worker but then a 19-year-old private and reinsman of Black Jack, recalls how "skittish and spooked" the riderless horse was. "He'd never behaved like that before. He kept throwing his head. I was thinking, 'What am I going to do if my arm wears out and he gets away from me?'" For Shriver, a particularly bleak moment came as he was escorting JFK's mother, Rose, into the White House. "She turned, and in the only time I have ever seen her cry, tears streamed down her face. She fell into my arms." Shriver recalls what a JFK aide said: "We knew it wouldn't last forever, but we didn't think it would end so soon." Before the morning service, Sargent Shriver gave out mass cards with Jackie's inscription: "Dear God, Please take care of your servant John Fitzgerald Kennedy." In any other country, Shriver thought, the funeral memento would have been a medallion or something else of value. "But these were just little pieces of paper, and we were handing them out to all the big shots. Suddenly there I was in front of [French President] de Gaulle, and I can remember him taking the card. He looked at it and then handed it to his aide. The card was so simple, the gesture so regal." Burial at Arlington followed the mass, and afterward Jackie met privately with de Gaulle, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Ireland's President Eamon de Valera and Prince Philip, who suggested that a receiving line would be a more efficient way of greeting the other foreign dignitaries than simple mingling. The queue--220 representatives from 100 nations, including eight chiefs of state and 10 heads of government--stretched from the Red Room back through the Blue Room and the dining room. Cecil Stoughton, who took these pictures, remembers thinking, "How can she stand to do this?" But Jackie remained serene, embracing some, reassuring others. To Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas I. Mikoyan she said, "Please tell Mr. Chairman President [Khrushchev] that I know he and my husband worked together for a peaceful world, and now he and you must carry on my husband's work." Mikoyan listened to the translation and buried his face in his hands. Deep in the labyrinthine stacks of the National Archives, not far from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, archivist Marion Johnson broods over 630 file boxes and nine crates. They contain most of what is known about one of America's darkest days: the 3,154 documents, photographs and objects of the Warren Commission's 10-month investigation into the assassination of John f. Kennedy. Ever since the commission published its 888-page report 19 years ago, based on 26 volumes of interviews, testimony and documents, Johnson has said yes or no to requests to see the evidence--many of them from researchers who cannot accept the verdict that one man, acting alone, killed the President. Conspiracy theories (agents of China, Russia or Cuba) waned in the late '60s and then drew fresh life from 1973 Watergate revelations of CIA and FBI misconduct. When Congress reopened the case in 1976 (a Justice Department report is expected at year's end), its committee members relied on evidence from Marion Johnson's windowless and ultrasecure stack room. While the 67-year-old archivist has no retirement plans, he has been helping young staffers learn the assassination section. "It wouldn't really be any trouble for someone else to continue it," says Johnson. "Yes," responds a co-worker, "in twenty-five or thirty years they'd catch up." The Monday of the funeral had been john Jr.'s third birthday; two days later was Caroline's sixth. The joint party was postponed to December 5, the Kennedy family's last full day in the White House. That afternoon, sons and daughters of aides, friends and relatives and many of Caroline's classmates trooped past the crepe-hung entryway to provide the first signs of frivolity after a fortnight of gloom. There were movies, tricycle derbies, ice cream and cake, and some peppy marches and polkas by a four-piece combo from the Marine corps band. "Mrs. Kennedy was all in black and no makeup--she never looked more beautiful," says Captain Dale Harpham, then assistant director of the band. "She wanted us to play music that was bright, but there was scarcely anything that didn't tie up with President Kennedy. At one point we were playing tunes from South Pacific, and we started in on 'A Wonderful Guy.' We stopped." White House photographer Robert Knudsen was there when John showed off his new Marine uniform, a gift from his grandmother Janet Auchincloss. "I called to John, 'Let me get your picture,' and he turned around and saluted," says Knudsen. "I remembered his salute outside St. Matthew's at the funeral." The next day, with a final "Smile for Captain Stoughton," Jackie Kennedy and her children left the White House to take up residence in a Georgetown house owned by Averell Harriman. As she departed, the youth, the grandeur, the hope that once was Camelot dimmed to a tiny flame flickering on a hill across the Potomac. http://www.usao.edu/~fachuguenins/general2.html