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Five minutes later, the cars arrived at the emergency entrance of Parkland Memorial Hospital on Harry Hines Boulevard. The agents ran inside to get stretchers. John Connally was still conscious. The President had never known what hit him. Jacqueline Kennedy, even then proving that she had courage enough for a dozen, calmly continued to cradle her husband. Stretchers were brought out and both men were placed on them. Jackie, her skirt and stockings blotched by blood, helped get the President out of the car and, her hand on his chest, walked into the hospital beside him. Lyndon Johnson walked into the emergency clinic holding his hand over his heart, giving rise briefly to rumors that he had either been wounded or was suffering from a heart attack. Neither was the case: Lyndon was simply, profoundly stunned.
Policemen surrounded the entrance as the crowds thickened. A guard was set up around the Lincoln as Secret Service men got a pail of water and tried to wash the blood from the car.
They left the sprays of red roses and asters that Jackie and Nellie Connally had been given at the airport lying forlorn on the floor.
The Hunt. At the assassination scene, meanwhile, that first moment of stillness gave way to frantic, confused movement. At the sound of the gunfire, bystanders grabbed children and fell over them to blanket them. Newsmen aboard the press bus far back in the procession yelled for the driver to stop, while others told him to keep moving. The bus jolted ahead, past horrified faces, frantically running figures, huddling women. A cop dropped to the ground and drew his revolver. A man fell on a grassy knoll, beating the earth with both fists in mindless fury. A heavy-set policeman began running, tripped, fell, scrambled to his feet, lumbered on. Police cars and motorcycle patrolmen stopped dead in their tracks. The officers got out, guns drawn, to search aimlessly. For what? For anything.
They surrounded the schoolbook warehouse. Dozens of them poured inside with shotguns and began a room-to-room search. And near the fifth-floor landing, half-hidden behind crates of textbooks, they found an Italian-made kind of 6.5-mm. rifle fitted with a fourpower telescopic sight. One flight above, near a sixth-floor window only 75 yds. from the point where Kennedy and Connally were shot, they discovered remnants of a chicken dinner in a bag, an empty pop bottle, and three spent cartridge cases. The assassin was gone.
But a Negro boy gave police a description of a man who had been seen leaving the building a few minutes earlier. At 12:36, an all-points pickup went over the radio to watch for a "white male, about 5 ft. 10 in. tall, weighing 160 to 165 Ibs., about 30 years old."
"This Is It!" In the 400 block of East 10th Street, about four miles from the warehouse, Patrolman J. D. Tippitt, 38, driving alone in a squad car, heard the call. He saw a man on the sidewalk and stopped his car to question him. The fellow's height and weight corresponded to the description. He had kinky brown hair, a prominent forehead, thick eyebrows, a crimped, tight mouth, and a defiant air. Tippitt and the man exchanged a few words. Then the policeman got out of his car and walked around to the sidewalk. The man pulled a .38-cal. revolver, shot and killed Tippitt with hits in the head, chest and abdomen. Then he fled. It was 1:18 p.m.