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.
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00:00The shooting of President John F. Kennedy stunned the nation. For his wife, Jackie,
00:05the loss of her husband was both earth-shattering and deeply personal. Here's what she said
00:10about those final moments.
00:12A few days after the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy, Jackie
00:16Kennedy sat down for an interview with Theodore H. White for a Life magazine story. White
00:21was a journalist and historian who received a Pulitzer Prize the year before for his coverage
00:26of the 1960 presidential election that JFK had won. Though the interview started out
00:31slowly, Jackie suddenly rushed headlong into her memories of that horrific day in Dallas.
00:36She stared into space as she recounted the tragic story.
00:40As the presidential motorcade slowly made its way through downtown Dallas, Texas, on
00:44November 22, 1963, Jackie Kennedy sat next to her husband. She was wearing a pink Chanel
00:50suit with a matching pillbox hat and white gloves. She cradled a bouquet of red roses
00:55she'd recently been given by well-wishers as she smiled and waved. Suddenly, she heard
01:00a crack. She thought it was the sound of a motorcycle backfiring, according to These
01:05Few Precious Days, a book by Christopher Anderson. According to the same book, Jackie recounted
01:10later that her husband had a quizzical look on his face, saying,
01:14"...he looked puzzled. I remember he looked as if he had a slight headache."
01:17President Kennedy and Governor John Connally have been cut down by assassin's bullets in
01:21downtown Dallas.
01:22Her interpretation of the gunshots lasted only as long as it took to look at her husband.
01:27She told White,
01:28"...Jack turned back so neatly. His last expression was so neat. I could see a piece of his skull
01:34coming off. He was holding out his hand and I could see this perfectly clean piece detaching
01:39itself from his head. Then he slumped in my lap."
01:42An incident that Jackie had no memory of occurred just seconds after the shots rang out. At
01:47one point, she had lunged toward the back of a convertible in what many thought was
01:50an attempt to jump out of the vehicle. In truth, she was trying to retrieve a piece
01:54of her husband's skull that had landed on the car's trunk.
01:58After the shots were fired, their dark blue 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible began
02:03to race past the confused onlookers who lined the motorcade route. Jackie screamed, staring
02:08blankly into space. As the car continued onto Stemmons Freeway to Parkland Memorial Hospital,
02:14Jackie tried to hold her husband's head together. She leaned down close to him and whispered,
02:19"...Jack, Jack, Jack, can you hear me? I love you, Jack."
02:23It was the last thing she said to her husband, who was barely alive, breathing raggedly,
02:28his pulse barely perceptible. Seven minutes later they were at Parkland Hospital and he
02:32was still alive. But a half hour later, doctors declared him dead.
02:36"...Two priests who were with President Kennedy say he is dead."
02:41When the motorcade arrived at the hospital, Jackie Kennedy refused to leave her husband's
02:46His body lay on a stretcher with one foot, wider than the sheet covering him, sticking
02:50out. Jackie went over and kissed him. She pulled back the sheet and looked at her dead
02:54husband. She recalled the moment later, saying, "...his mouth was so beautiful, his eyes were
02:59open." She again kissed him, working her way up his body until she reached his lips. She
03:04held his hand while a Catholic priest gave him last rites.
03:08Hours later, a dazed Jackie was on Air Force One, still wearing her blood-splattered outfit
03:13at the swearing-in of Lyndon B. Johnson as the next president. Her husband's body, now
03:17in a bronze coffin, was also on board.
03:20On November 24th, the day JFK's body was to lay in state, Jackie and Robert F. Kennedy,
03:26JFK's brother, went to the East Room in the White House to say one final goodbye before
03:31the casket lid was shut for the last time.
03:33"...Its poignancy calls only for tears."
03:36She snipped off a few locks of her dead husband's hair as she wept.
03:40Jackie moved to New York City and married the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis
03:44in 1968. After his death in 1975, she became an editor at the book publisher Doubleday
03:50until her death in 1994 from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. She had wanted to live a life away
03:56from public view, something she was never able to achieve.