These Few Precious Days: The Final Year of Jack with Jackie - Hardcover

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Christopher Andersen is the critically acclaimed author of eighteen New York Times bestsellers which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages worldwide. Two of his books—The Day Diana Died and The Day John Died (about JFK Jr.)—reached #1. A former contributing editor of Time and longtime senior editor of People, Andersen has also written hundreds of articles for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, Life, and Vanity Fair. Andersen has appeared frequently on such programs as Today, Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, CBS This Morning, 20/20, Anderson Cooper 360, Dateline NBC, Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition, 48 Hours, and more.

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These Few Precious Days

1

“Jack, Jack, Jack! Can You Hear Me?”

DALLAS

NOVEMBER 22, 1963

12:30 P.M.

She would always remember the roses. Three times that day before they got to Dallas, she feigned delight as someone presented her with the yellow roses for which Texas was so famous. “Only in Dallas,” Jackie said, “I was given red roses. How funny, I thought—red roses for me.” Soon, the backseat of their car would be strewn with blood-soaked rose petals—a surreal image she would never be able to erase from her mind. But for now, as they basked in the noonday sunlight and cheers from the crowds that lined the streets, Jack and Jackie seemed happier—and closer—than they had ever been.

The forty-six-year-old president and his thirty-four-year-old first lady exchanged one final glance. And then, in an instant, it all ended.

The look on Jack’s still-boyish face the moment the first bullet struck him in the back of the neck, severing his windpipe and exiting his throat, would haunt Jackie’s dreams for the rest of her life. “He looked puzzled,” she later said. “I remember he looked as if he just had a slight headache.”

For a split second, Jackie thought the crack she had heard was the sound of a motorcycle backfiring—until she realized she was watching, as if in slow motion, the president’s head begin to pull apart. “I could see a piece of his skull coming off,” she recalled. “It was flesh-colored, not white. I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap.”

Texas governor John Connally, riding in the jumpseat in front of the president, had also been seriously wounded. “Oh no, no, no,” he yelled, “they’re going to kill us all!” Connally’s wife, Nellie, who with her husband was now covered with blood and bits of brain matter from JFK’s head wound, looked back at the first lady. “I have his brains,” Jackie said as she sat staring for a full seven seconds, “in my hands!”

The driver of the presidential limousine floored the accelerator, and the “sensation of enormous speed” gave Jackie a sudden jolt of adrenaline. It also nearly dislodged Secret Service agent Clint Hill from his tenuous perch on the rear step; ever since the first shot rang out, Hill, who had been riding in the backup car, had sprinted to catch up. He finally reached the president’s Lincoln just as the third shot struck, spraying Hill as well with bits of bone and brain matter.

What Hill then witnessed along with a breathless nation was something Jackie herself would not remember. Numb with shock and panic, Jackie clambered onto the slippery trunk of the Lincoln. To many, it appeared that she was trying to reach out to Agent Hill and pull him onto the car. In fact, she was grasping for a large chunk of the president’s skull. Terrified that the first lady would now tumble off the back of the speeding vehicle, Hill pushed her back into her seat as the shard from JFK’s skull flew into the street.

With the 190-pound Hill now sprawled over her, trying to act as a human shield for both the president and the first lady, Jackie cradled her husband’s shattered head in her lap. She pressed down on the top with her white-gloved hands, she said later, “to keep the brains in.”

Jackie’s head was down, her face only inches from the president’s. She was struck by the “pink-rose ridges” inside his broken skull, she later said, and the fact that despite everything, from the hairline down, “his head was so beautiful. I tried to hold the top of his head down, maybe I could keep it in . . . but I knew he was dead.” So did the crowds that lined the street. “He’s dead! He’s dead!” she could hear people shouting as the motorcade sped to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Jackie clung to the slimmest hope that maybe there was life there still, a latent if quickly ebbing consciousness. “Jack, Jack, Jack! Can you hear me?” she whispered over and over into his ear. The president’s blue eyes were wide open in a fixed stare. “I love you, Jack,” Jackie said. “I love you.”

Although she later said it “seemed like an eternity,” it took just seven minutes before the car screeched to a halt outside the emergency room entrance at Parkland. Hill, a fellow Secret Service agent named Roy Kellerman, and JFK’s longtime aide Dave Powers were about to lift the president onto a waiting stretcher, but Jackie, still cradling Jack’s head, refused.

“Please, Mrs. Kennedy,” Hill said. “We must get the president to a doctor.”

“I’m not letting him go, Mr. Hill,” she said. “You know he’s dead. Leave me alone.” Hill understood what was happening: Jackie did not want the world to see the gaping crater in her husband’s skull. Struggling to control his own emotions, Hill whipped off the jacket of his black suit and wrapped it around the president’s head.

Jackie ran alongside the gurney as her husband was wheeled into the hospital; she held Hill’s jacket in place so that it wouldn’t slip to reveal the gruesome truth. “It wasn’t repulsive to me for one moment,” she said. “Nothing was repulsive to me, and I was running behind with the coat covering it . . .”

Incredibly, Jack had a faint pulse and was still breathing when he was admitted to Parkland Hospital, simply as “Case 24740, white male, gunshot wound.” Inside Trauma Room 1 a team of doctors, soon joined by White House physician Admiral George Burkley, immediately began administering massive blood transfusions.

Suddenly two burly men in scrubs blocked Jackie’s path and began trying to pull her away. “Mrs. Kennedy,” one of them said, “you come with us.” But Jackie had other ideas. Nine years earlier, she had been kept away from Jack when he nearly died following one of his back surgeries. “They’re never going to keep me away from him again,” she told herself then.

This time, Jackie was standing her ground. The “big Texas interns wanted to take me away from him,” she later said. “They kept trying to get me, they kept trying to grab me.” This time things would be different. “I’m not leaving him,” she declared, softly at first. Then she raised her voice only slightly—but just enough to make the interns back away. “I am not leaving,” she told them.

No one seemed to notice that during all this time, Jackie had her left hand cupped over something she held in her right. As Parkland’s chief anesthesiologist, Dr. Marion Jenkins, stood outside Trauma Room 1, the first lady nudged him with her left elbow. Then, carefully, she handed Jenkins what the doctor could only describe as “a good-sized chunk of the president’s brain. She didn’t say a word. I handed it to the nurse.”

One of the uniformed Dallas police officers who had escorted the motorcade offered Jackie a cigarette. She had always managed to conceal her heavy smoking habit from the press and never smoked in public, but none of that mattered now.

Ten minutes later, the same patrolman fetched folding chairs...