The death of Nellie Connally a few days ago brought back an aching shock and a flood of unhappy memories for Americans about fifty years of age and older. The last survivor of the JFK assassination car in Dallas, Mrs. Connally was the final personified reminder of a day that will live in infamy, November 22, 1963. Even now, it is difficult for most older people to recall that day without experiencing anew the terrible horror of an unthinkable act–and feeling the awful melancholy of what might have been.
By the way, Mrs. Connally was a prominent disbeliever in the single-bullet theory, an essential component of the lone-assassin conclusion of the Warren Commission Report . The single-bullet theory, devised by a Warren Commission staffer named Arlen Specter (now the senior U.S. senator from Pennsylvania) suggested that one bullet inflicted critical wounds on both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally of Texas. In a private conversation at the LBJ Library in the early ’90s, Mrs. Connally insisted to me that both she and her husband distinctly heard and reacted to the shot that first injured President Kennedy–and it was not the one that nearly killed Connally. John and Nellie Connally apparently never wavered in reporting that the Governor was struck by a separate bullet than the one that pierced JFK’s neck (the one before the fatal head shot). If the Connallys were correct, it would have been impossible for Lee Harvey Oswald to have acted alone, since there was not time for Oswald to shoot both officeholders in the time recorded by the Zapruder film, the only continuous visual evidence of the assassination.
Many other key figures have disputed the Connallys. At that same event at the LBJ Library, I had the opportunity to privately ask President Gerald Ford, the last surviving member of the Warren Commission, about Mrs. Connally’s assertions. Ford stressed that at no time since he was appointed to the Warren Commission, including his White House years, had he found cause to question the report’s basic conclusions. His view was that the Connally recollections were flawed, an innocent mis-remembrance of a traumatic event that took place within a few chaotic seconds.
After forty-three years, there is not, and probably never will be, a final resolution of this “murder of the century” to everyone’s satisfaction. Just as important is the fact that the Kennedy assassination was one of a handful of modern American moments that had major effects on our politics for decades afterwards. JFK’s untimely death at age 46 generated massive public sympathy, congressional guilt that Kennedy’s programs had been given short shrift, and most importantly, a passing of the torch to a very different kind of President–all of which had wide-ranging effects……