Killing Kennedy

the worst of days, each person has dreams about the future—dreams that sometimes come true.
    Such is life.
    Yet life can end in less time than it takes to draw one breath.

 
    25
    N OVEMBER 22, 1963
    D EALEY P LAZA, D ALLAS, T EXAS
    12:14 P.M.
    Anticipating the arrival of the president of the United States, a married high school student named Aaron Rowland stands with his wife, Barbara, along Dealey Plaza. Looking up at the Texas School Book Depository, he sees a man silhouetted against a corner sixth-floor window. An avid hunter, Rowland recognizes that the man is holding a rifle at port arms—diagonally across his body, with one hand on the stock and the other on the barrel. This is how a U.S. Marine might hold his weapon while waiting to fire at the rifle range.
    Rowland is fascinated, but for all the wrong reasons. “Do you want to see a Secret Service agent?” he asks his wife.
    “Where?”
    “In that building there,” he replies, pointing.
    Six minutes later, a full ten minutes before the motorcade reaches Dealey Plaza, Ronald Fischer and Robert Edwards, who work in the nearby county auditor’s office, look up and see a man standing motionlessly in the sixth-floor window. “He never moved,” Fischer will later remember. “He didn’t blink his eyes. He was just gazing, like a statue.”
    At the same time, Howard L. Brennan, a local pipe fitter, uses his khaki shirtsleeve to wipe the sweat from his brow. This makes him wonder how hot it is. And so he glances at the Hertz sign atop the Texas School Book Depository’s roof that shows time and temperature. As he does so, Brennan’s eyes pick out a stone-still mystery man positioned to fire in the upper window.
    But then comes the sound of cheering as the motorcade gets nearer and nearer. Down on Main Street, the crowds are lined up ten to twenty feet deep, and their roar echoes through the window-lined canyons of downtown Dallas. In all the excitement, the sight of a man standing in a window clutching a rifle is forgotten. The president is near.
    Nothing else matters.
    *   *   *
    Lee Harvey Oswald would prefer to shoot while in the prone position. That is the optimum for a marksman. In such a position, the rifle is not supported by muscle, which can grow weary or flinch. Instead, when the body is belly-down on the floor, the hard ground and the bones of the right and left forearm form a perfect and stable triangle.
    But Oswald does not have that option. He will have to shoot standing up. Yet as a veteran marksman, he knows to keep his body as still as possible. So now he leans hard against the left window jam and presses the butt of his Italian carbine against his right shoulder. The scratched wooden stock of the butt is against his cheek, just as it was for so many hours at the rifle range with the M-1 rifle from his Marine Corps days. His right index finger is curled around the thirty-three-year-old trigger.
    Lee Harvey Oswald peers into his four-power telescopic sight, the one that makes John Kennedy’s head look as if it is two feet away. Oswald knows time is short. He’ll be able to shoot two shots for sure. Three, if he’s quick. He has probably nine seconds.
    Seeing his target clearly, Oswald exhales, gently squeezes the trigger, and even as he feels the recoil kick the rifle back, hard against his shoulder, he smoothly pulls back the bolt to chamber another round. He can’t tell whether the first bullet has done much damage. But that doesn’t matter. Oswald must immediately fire again.
    The assassin is an impulsive man, and perhaps even more powerless to stop the flood of adrenaline that would course through any man’s body after firing a high-powered rifle at the president of the United States. The instant a man commits such an act, his life is changed forever. There is no turning back. From that second on he will be hunted to the ends of the earth. Perhaps he will spend the rest of his life in prison. Perhaps he will be executed.
    The smart thing to do after firing a shot at the president is to throw down the rifle and run.
    But if the first shot somehow misses, just like that shot missed General Walker back in April, and the president lives, Oswald will look like a fool. And that’s the last thing he wants. No, the plan is to kill John Fitzgerald Kennedy. And Lee Harvey Oswald will see that plan through.
    He doesn’t think twice. Oswald fires again.
    The sound of the second shot is not drowned out by the crowd below. It is so