From Love Field: Our Final Hours
with President John F. Kennedy
by Nellie Connally,
with Mickey Herskowitz
Hardcover
Posted on 11/04/2003 5:45:31 AM PST by Theodore R.
Nellie Connally authors book on assassination of Kennedy
SAN ANTONIO — (AP) A week or so after President John F. Ken nedy was assassinated, Nellie Connally grabbed a legal pad and a couple of pens and found a quiet place in the gov ernor's man sion to write down what she remembered about the tragic event.
Over the next few hours, the then-first lady of Texas scribbled out 22 single-space pages about gunshots and her pink tweed suit being splattered with blood, about trying to protect her wounded husband, about the futile attempt to save the president and the successful surgery that kept the governor alive, and about her vivid anger when a dying Lee Harvey Oswald was wheeled into the same hospital two days later.
Then she stuck her notes into a filing cabinet and forgot about them for 33 years.
"I was going through the file and I saw this stack of yellow tablet paper and I thought, 'What in heaven's name is that?'" she recalled Monday about finding her narrative in 1996. "And I read it, and I thought it was pretty good."
It was good enough to become the new book "From Love Field: Our Final Hours with President John F. Kennedy".
The book is a slender, photo-filled volume that opens with the Kennedys and the Connallys riding in the same limousine during a motorcade that took them past adoring crowds in downtown Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Then came shots from behind.
Four decades after Kennedy's slaying, Nellie Connally — widow of John Connally, former governor, cabinet member and presidential aspirant — is that limousine's only surviving passenger. And she says she can remember the details as if it were yesterday.
"It's not in the front of my head where I think about every day, like I did for weeks," said Connally, still spry and mischievous at age 84. "It's pushed back into the back of my head, never to be forgotten. But I can bring it forward any time I want, exactly like it happened."
The single most enduring picture she carries in her mind about perhaps the single most talked-about, written-about, speculated-about event in American history?
"It's the image of yellow roses and red roses and blood all over the car... all over us," she said. "I'll never forget it. ... It was so quick and so short, so potent."
Her son Mark, a Houston investment banker, says the family's proximity to the Kennedy assassination was not a major topic of conversation over the years.
"It wasn't something that anybody avoided if someone else brought it up, but it just wasn't something that we would sit around and discuss," he said Monday.
Nellie Connally waves off the myriad conspiracy theories regarding the assassination and wants to persuade her readers that Oswald acted alone.
"I want them to know what I know because, you see, now nobody knows this story except me," she said. "You can't argue with me because all I have to say to you was, 'Were you in that car?' and you'll have to say, 'No.'"
The book recounts that she boiled when Oswald, a former Marine sharpshooter, was brought to Parkland Hospital after being shot by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
"I wish I could have been more charitable, or at least appreciated the irony of the situation, but all I felt was uncontrollable rage," she wrote. "Here was the man who probably killed our president and tried to kill my husband ... being treated to the finest emergency care our city had to offer. ... I simply couldn't believe it."
The Connallys had 30 more years together before John Connally died from a lung ailment in 1993 that some doctors believe may have been a result of the chest wound he suffered in 1963.
Those years saw many political and personal successes and also major setbacks, including Nellie Connally's bout with breast cancer and financial woes that led to the family declaring bankruptcy in the 1980s.
"There's few women who have had all of the triumphs and the tragedies she's experienced," said Julian Read, an Austin public relations executive who was riding a few vehicles back in the press bus when Kennedy was killed. "But through it all she's a delight."
And each November, she fields calls to her Houston home from journalists seeking to hear her recollections. She's convinced that's a big reason why the Kennedy assassination remains so alive in America's collective conscience.
"Every year the press wants the story again, and the story is the same, but it comes every year," she said. "I would hope they wouldn't do anything more about it at all until the 50th."
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From Love Field: Our Final Hours
with President John F. Kennedy
by Nellie Connally,
with Mickey Herskowitz
Hardcover
A tragic and dramatic end to the consummately mediocre Presidency of Bill Clinton I.
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