HISTORY
Sitting in her high-rise apartment overlooking the Houston skyline, Mrs. Connally, the widow of the Texas governor who was shot along with John F. Kennedy, is discussing the motorcade, thumbing through a diary she scribbled out on yellow legal pages a few weeks after the assassination. Mrs. Connally had put the diary away in December 1963 and rediscovered it only after her husband's 1993 death. The heretofore- unpublished diary reaffirms the Connallys' verdict about the shooting: that the Warren Commission was wrong in concluding that a single bullet passed through JFK's neck and Connally's chest. Neither Governor Connally nor his widow shared the more elaborate conspiracy theories of the case; like her husband, Mrs. Connally says that the only assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald--"a scrambled egg brain with 15 bucks" for a high- powered rifle. But the Connally family position is different from the Warren Commission's: though they agree there was no conspiracy, they also insist there was no "magic bullet." On the 35th anniversary of the murder, it is striking that doubts about the full truth of the assassination linger in even the last survivor, and her diary is a revealing, emotional account of one of the century's most important turning points.
The Connallys have maintained that two bullets struck JFK and another hit the governor. This view does not account for the Warren Commission's finding that one bullet missed the car entirely. Some conspiracy theorists argue that if three bullets hit their targets, and an additional bullet missed, then there must have been a second gunman: nobody could have fired so many rounds so quickly.
In her contemporaneous diary, she writes that after hearing a first shot, Connally turned to his right "to look back" at Kennedy "and then wheeled to the left to get another look at the President. He could not, so he realized the President had been shot. John said, 'No, no, no!' " Then Connally "was hit himself by the second shot and said, 'My God, they are going to kill us all!' " The governor "wheeled back to the right, crumpling his shoulders to his knees in the most helpless and pitiful position a tall man could be in."
Then, according to Mrs. Connally's diary, came a fatal third shot that passed through the president's head. She writes, "With John in my arms and still trying to stay down ... I felt something falling all over me. My sensation was buckshot ... My eyes saw bloody matter in tiny bits all over the car ... Mrs. Kennedy was saying, 'Jack, Jack! They have killed my husband! I have his brains in my hand'."
An Assassination Diary
The last surviving passenger of JFK's death car rediscovers a long-lost record of the murder.
By Michael R. Beschloss
"I will fight anybody that argues with me about those three shots," says the last survivor of the Lincoln Continental that rolled through Dealey Plaza in Dallas 35 years ago this week. "I do know what happened in that car," says Nellie Connally. "Fight me if you want to."
