The shooting of President John F. Kennedy stunned the nation. For his wife, Jackie,
the loss of her husband was both earth shattering
and deeply personal. Here's what she said about those final moments.
A few days after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy,
Jackie Kennedy sat down for an interview with Theodore H. White for a Life magazine story.
White was a journalist and historian who received a Pulitzer Prize the year before for his coverage
of the 1960 presidential election that JFK had won. Though the interview started out slowly,
Jackie suddenly rushed headlong into her memories of that horrific day in
Dallas. She stared into space as she recounted the tragic story.
As the presidential motorcade slowly made its way through downtown Dallas,
Texas on November 22, 1963, Jackie Kennedy sat next to her husband. She was wearing
a pink Chanel suit with a matching pillbox hat and white gloves. She cradled a bouquet
of red roses she'd recently been given by well-wishers as she smiled and waved. Suddenly,
she heard a crack. She thought it was the sound of a motorcycle backfiring,
according to These Few Precious Days, a book by Christopher Anderson. According to the same book,
Jackie recounted later that her husband had a quizzical look on his face, saying,
"He looked puzzled. I remember he looked as if he had a slight headache."
"President Kennedy and Governor John Connally have
been cut down by assassin's bullets in downtown Dallas."
Her interpretation of the gunshots lasted
only as long as it took to look at her husband. She told White,
"Jack turned back so neatly — his last expression was so neat. I could see a
piece of his skull coming off. [...] He was holding out his hand and I could see
this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap."
An incident that Jackie had no memory of occurred just seconds after the shots rang
out. At one point, she had lunged toward the back of the convertible in what many
thought was an attempt to jump out of the vehicle. In truth, she was
trying to retrieve a piece of her husband's skull that had landed on the car's trunk.
After the shots were fired, their dark blue 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible began
to race past the confused onlookers who lined the motorcade route. Jackie screamed, staring
blankly into space. As the car continued onto Stemmons Freeway to Parkland Memorial Hospital,
Jackie tried to hold her husband's head together. She leaned down close to him and whispered,
"Jack, Jack, Jack. Can you hear me? I love you, Jack."
It was the last thing she said to her husband, who was barely alive, breathing raggedly,
his pulse barely perceptible. Seven minutes later they were at Parkland Hospital and he
was still alive, but a half hour later doctors declared him dead.
"Two priests who were with President Kennedy say he is dead."
When the motorcade arrived at the hospital, Jackie Kennedy refused to leave her husband's
side. His body lay on a stretcher, with one foot — whiter than the sheet covering
him — sticking out. Jackie went over and kissed him. She pulled back the
sheet and looked at her dead husband. She recalled the moment later, saying,
"His mouth was so beautiful. His eyes were open."
She again kissed him, working her way up his body until she reached his lips.
She held his hand while a Catholic priest gave him Last Rites. Hours later, a dazed Jackie
was on Air Force One still wearing her blood splattered outfit at the swearing-in of Lyndon
B. Johnson as the next president. Her husband's body, now in a bronze coffin, was also onboard.
On November 24, the day JFK's body was to lay in state, Jackie and Robert F. Kennedy,
JFK's brother, went to the East Room in the White House to say one
final goodbye before the casket lid was shut for the last time.
"Its poignancy calls only for tears."
She snipped off a few locks of her dead husband's hair as she wept. Jackie moved to New York City
and married the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis in 1968. After his death in 1975,
she became an editor at the book publisher Doubleday until her death in 1994 from
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She had wanted to live a life away from public view,
something she was never able to achieve.