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A bystander jumped into the patrol car, called headquarters. Seven blocks away, the cashier at the Texas Theater telephoned police to report that a suspicious-looking man had entered the movie house, was constantly changing seats. At 1:35, four cops entered the theater, where the movie, War Is Hell, was just starting. The lights went up. The cop killer rose and cried: "This is it!" He aimed his revolver at one police man and pulled the trigger—but the weapon failed to fire. The cops jumped him and there was a fierce, brief struggle. Hauled bruised and kicking to police headquarters, the man was booked as Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, 5 ft. 9 in., 160 Ibs.
"Terrible, Terrible." At the hospital had gathered the spirit-spent remnants of the presidential party. Outside the emergency entrance stood Senator Yarborough, who had had his political differences with both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Now he was weeping. "It didn't sound like a firecracker; I knew it wasn't right off," he said. "It was too loud, and there was a sort of concussion. Then all of a sudden they speeded up in front of us, and we tore right away from there as fast as we could. I saw an agent in front of me pull out his machine gun and look up at the building. The shots were like explosives, horrible explosives. I knew right away that something terrible, terrible, was wrong."
Inside, John Connally was quiet and calm in his pain as surgeons prepared to operate. His aide, Bill Stinson, blurted, "How did it happen?" Said Connally: "I don't know."
"Where'd they get you?"
"I think they shot me from the back. They shot the President too. Take care of Nellie."
For four hours the doctors worked, cleaning the wounds, removing bone splinters from the Governor's chest cavity, stitching a hole in one lung, treating the wounds in his thigh and wrist. At week's end doctors said his condition was satisfactory.
"To No Avail." But the President never regained consciousness. In Emergency Room No. 1, Dr. Kemp Clark, 38, chief of Parkland's neurosurgical department, examined a large wound in the President's head and another smaller wound—from the second of the three shots—in his throat. Clark and eight other doctors worked over him for 40 minutes, but the President was already as dead as though he had fallen on a battlefield in mortal combat. The doctors gave him oxygen, anesthesia, performed a tracheotomy to help breathing; they fed him fluids, gave him blood transfusions, attached an electrocardiograph to record his heartbeat.
When heart action failed to register, they tried closed-chest massage. But, said the doctors, "it was apparent that the President was not medically alive when he was brought in. There was no spontaneous respiration. He had dilated, fixed pupils. Technically, by using vigorous resuscitation, intravenous tubes and all the usual supportive measures, we were able to raise a semblance of a heartbeat." There were some "palpable pulses," said one doctor, but "to no avail."
While the doctors worked, Jackie waited. The look in her eyes, said a young medical student who saw her, "was like an animal that had been trapped, like a little rabbit—brave, but fear was in the eyes."