JFK and Oswald in Dealey Plaza: Curtain Rods, a Jump Seat and Final Words

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John F. Kennedy came to Texas in November 1963 to mend a feud between Senator Ralph Yarborough and Governor John Connolly and to protect the state's 25 electoral votes, after a term shaped by the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lee Harvey Oswald, born in 1939, read Marx by 14, shot himself in the elbow and faced two courts-martial in the Marines, won a dependency discharge, and defected to the Soviet Union at 19, working in a Minsk factory and marrying Marina before returning on a State Department repatriation loan. In 1963 he shot at General Edwin Walker, ran a one-member Fair Play for Cuba chapter in New Orleans, and took a $1.25-an-hour job at the Texas School Book Depository while the FBI, CIA and Secret Service kept separate files.

On November 22 Oswald carried a long package he called curtain rods; the Warren Commission found it held his mail-order Carcano rifle, bought for about $20. As the Lincoln slowed for the sharp turn onto Elm Street, Nellie Connolly told the president that Dallas loved him, and he answered, no, they sure can't. Connolly, a hunter, recognized the first shot, and the episode explains how his lower, inboard jump seat lines up with the single bullet theory before the fatal third shot. Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital at 1 p.m., and Johnson took the oath on Air Force One beside Jacqueline Kennedy in her stained suit. Later, the HSCA's 1979 conspiracy finding rested on a Dictabelt that a National Academy of Sciences panel showed was recorded about a minute after the shooting.

• Agent Clint Hill reached the limousine's rear bumper as the final shot struck and Jacqueline Kennedy climbed onto the trunk.
• Johnson refused to take off from Dallas without Jacqueline Kennedy and her husband's body.
• Oswald killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit before his arrest in a movie theater.
• The FBI sent 169 agents, ran over 25,000 interviews and wrote more than 2,300 reports.
• A Secret Service budget of $5.5 million in 1963 grew into the billions, and open-top cars for presidents ended.