Dealey Plaza, Dallas The Witness
Of the four people who rode in the presidential limousine on November 22, 1963, only Nellie Connally is still alive—alone with her memories of the day that defined the rest of her life.
Recovering at Parkland.
Courtesy of Nellie Connally
Every November, as she has done for almost forty years, Nellie Connally readies herself for the reporters' calls. She has her hair done in preparation for the cameras, and she buys flowers—yellow roses, typically—to freshen her home, a sun-washed two-bedroom condominium on the twelfth floor of a luxury high-rise, the Four Leaf Towers, in Houston. Because the story is always present in her memory, she doesn't have to brush up for the interviews, and because she is a trouper—she wanted to be an actress, a long, long time ago—she always sounds as if she is speaking on the subject for the first time. The story she is perpetually asked to tell, of course, is the tale of that fateful day, November 22, 1963, when she rode in an open Lincoln convertible with the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy; his wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy; and her husband, John Connally, the governor of Texas.
Every Texan of a certain age recalls the events that swept Nellie Connally into history: the fury of Dallas toward Kennedy's liberal politics, the bitter, full-page ad in the Dallas Morning News addressed to the president that essentially accused him of treason ("Why have you scrapped the Monroe Doctrine in favor of the 'Spirit of Moscow'?"), the adoring crowds that lined the route of the motorcade. "Mr. President, you certainly can't say that Dallas doesn't love you," Nellie Connally said to Kennedy, turning around in her jump seat to fix him with a broad, proud smile as she uttered what has become the most famous line of her life. And then, three shots rang out within all of six seconds, changing the country forever. Of the survivors in the car, John Connally, seriously wounded, lived until 1993; Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died in 1994. So it has come to pass that Nellie Connally is the last living soul to have experienced, firsthand, one of the seminal events of the twentieth century.
Nellie, as she likes to be called—you really can't call her anything else after meeting her—makes an unlikely sage. At 84, she still moves with the hurried step of a happy sorority girl (which she once was); her blue eyes are unclouded and sly, as is her mind. She still wears a variation of the bouffant she wore in the sixties, and she has a closetful of sharp suits from Armani and Yves Saint Laurent, which she wears with aplomb; she enjoys sweets and the occasional cocktail, despite her doctor's orders, and if you get her talking off the record, she will pretend to stick her finger down her throat to describe her feelings about certain former first ladies of the United States. This is a woman who wields the word "jackass" with complete confidence. "I have always been full of fun and full of the joy of living," she explained to me, showing off her dimples. "I just restrained myself when I represented you."
If this is the way Nellie Connally sees herself, others see her as a tragic figure, a witness to America's loss of innocence. As Julian Read, John Connally's longtime public relations adviser, elucidated, "The thing about Nellie you need to know is that she's a survivor." On the day he imparted this information to me, he was seated in Nellie's living room under one of many portraits of the former governor that adorn the apartment. (This one had Connally surrounded by Texas symbols: oil wells, the Capitol, the state flag, Herefords.) Nellie listened attentively to Read's pitch from a comfortable chair across the room, nodding and occasionally supplementing. She knew the Job-like recitation was coming, which in chronological order includes: the suicide in 1958 of her eldest daughter, Kathleen, at age seventeen; the assassination of the president and near death of her husband in 1963; John Connally's failed quest for the presidency, which lasted for the entire decade of the seventies; the collapse of his real estate empire and subsequent bankruptcy in 1987; her battle with breast cancer in the late eighties; and finally, the death of her husband, whom she loved deeply for more than fifty years. "We had everything we ever wanted," she told me simply. "We just lost it all."
Except for her memories, with which she has had a long and ambivalent relationship. They are like the forty-year-old suit shrouded in dry cleaner's plastic in the farthest reaches of her closet, the one she wore on November 22, 1963. It's a jaunty pink tweed, with cheery oversized buttons, and she could still get into it if she wanted to. Nellie can't bring herself to part with the suit, but she can't quite hold on to it either, as time frays the seams and weakens the fabric.
John Connally has suffered a similar fate. For Texans who lived through his governorship, which paralleled almost all of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, it is hard to believe how quickly and harshly time has erased his memory from the public imagination until, like Nellie's suit, all that remains of his role in history is a single day in Dallas. In his day, he was powerful and popular and something of a visionary, who brought state government into the modern era. He was spoken of as a future president. An unauthorized biography of him by James Reston Jr. titled The Lone Star: The Life of John Connally, published in 1989, ran almost seven hundred pages and seemed to herald an enduring legacy. But the latest Encyclopaedia Britannica dispatches Connally as "an ambitious political figure" who helped elect three presidents and was "indelibly identified as the seriously wounded front-seat passenger who was riding in the presidential limousine in Dallas, Texas, when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963." A seventh-grade history text published earlier this year, Texas and Texans, mentions Connally only once, in a reference to a 1966 meeting with farmworkers who were marching toward Austin to protest working conditions in the fields: "His actions did not satisfy the unhappy workers, and they became more active in politics." That is hardly the grand place in history that he and his followers—and Nellie Connally—believed he was due.
Now, it is through telling the story of the assassination that she keeps the memories alive. She has recorded them in a new book, From Love Field: Our Final Hours With President John F. Kennedy, with help from the Texas co-author of choice, Mickey Herskowitz (who also helped John Connally with his autobiography, In History's Shadow). But in Texas, there are now more people born after November 22, 1963, than before it—Michael Dell, Lance Armstrong, Beyoncé Knowles, just to name a few. That the assassination has been subjected to the crushing callousness of history was brought home to me the day I sat with Nellie while she was having her picture taken.
I arrived to find her bossing the photographer around good-naturedly—"You've called me 'beautiful' more in the last hour than John Connally did his whole life," she cracked. As the shoot wound down, she served coffee and candies, and the conversation turned, as it almost always does with Nellie, to that day in November 1963. With little prompting, she told a version of her story, and as she did, the living room, crowded with the photographer, his assistant, and a makeup artist—all decidedly youthful—grew deathly quiet.
"Wow," someone said when Nellie finished. "When did you say that happened?"
Novelist Charles Baxter has called the Kennedy assassination "the narratively dysfunctional event of our era" because "we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanation we need to enclose it." This is not Nellie's view of the event; the speculation and conspiracy theories intrigue her not at all. People looking for any new insights into the assassination—some clue that Oswald didn't act alone or that the mob, Fidel Castro, Lyndon Johnson, or even John Connally was behind the killing—should look elsewhere. As Nellie carped one day, "Some of these people think Johnson did it. Some people think John did it. What kind of idiots do they think we were to plan that and then get in the car and sit there?"
By nature, she's not a skeptic. Her narrative is instead more intimate, more feminine, and somehow, more frightening. Four decades of investigations and conspiracy theories have diluted the horror of that day, which she makes vivid again in her book. But more to the point, her book is a way to secure her life with, and love for, John Connally for posterity. In one way or another, that is the story she has been telling, over and over again, since the day they met.
"We were indeed a happy foursome that beautiful morning," she wrote. They were all in their thirties and forties, ready to take on the world: the handsome young president, who promised the dawn of a new era; the governor, fresh from his role as Secretary of the Navy, who had been in office for only ten months; Jackie, glamorous and, to Nellie, a little intimidating, dressed in a pink Chanel suit and carrying a bouquet of red roses; and Nellie, also dressed in pink, carrying yellow roses. She'd been fretting for days that her suit would clash with the first lady's, that the Governor's Mansion wouldn't measure up to the sophisticated first couple's scrutiny, and that, in general, the Kennedys would find Texas lacking. The warm response in Dallas, then, was an enormous relief. "John and I were just smiling with genuine pleasure that everything was so perfect," Nellie wrote. Suddenly, "a terrifying noise erupted behind us." From her spot on a jump seat, she turned back to look at the president just in time to see his hands fly up to his throat. Then, Nellie turned back to meet her husband's eyes. John Connally had fought in World War II and was a hunter; he knew that sound had come from a gun, but it was too late. A second shot rang out, and Connally uttered what has become one of the most remembered lines of that day. "My God," he cried, his rich, stentorian drawl taut with fear, "They're going to kill us all!" Then he collapsed. The second bullet had hit him in the back.
What happened next was, for Nellie Connally, a defining moment. As she wrote in her book: "All I thought was, What can I do to help John?" Her husband was a big man—he stood six feet two inches—but she pulled him onto her lap and covered him with her body. "I didn't want him hurt anymore," she explained, and so, when the third shot hit its mark, exploding Kennedy's head and showering Nellie with bits of blood and flesh, she was exposed but her husband was not. Nellie felt her husband move underneath her, bleeding heavily but alive. "I felt tremendous relief," Nellie wrote, "as if we had both been reborn." She pulled his right arm over his chest to draw him closer and comforted him as if he were a frightened child: "Shhhh. Be still," she said. "It'll be all right. Be still. It'll be all right."
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