Jeff Franzen was six years old when he witnessed the assassination of JFK:
It was a crystal clear day and the sun was over our shoulder. Then the car came down the hill toward us and I heard the three pops. I assumed it was firecrackers—that made sense to me at a parade. I was looking at the car with the president in it and—after the pops—I saw what I thought was confetti. It was the shot that caused the president’s head to explode. My Mom cried out, “Oh, my God.” So I’m watching, I hear the bangs, see what I think was confetti, hear my mom yelling, and I realized something was very wrong. Then the car slowed down and this guy was running up to it; it was the Secret Service agent. Mrs. Kennedy was climbing out the back of the car, the guy jumped on it and was hanging on as the driver punched it and the car took off.
Then it was bedlam, people running all around, motorcycle police like bees flying all over the place. One crashed his motorcycle right in front of us. My Dad, like JFK, had served in the South Pacific during World War II and had enough awareness of what was going on to grab my mother and me and put us on the ground with his body on top of both of us. I later learned we had been directly in the line of fire.
Franzen is highlighted in the above image. Bob Schieffer was a young reporter who stumbled into an odd job that day:
Every phone in the newsroom was ringing. I answered one and a woman said, “Is there anyone who can give me a ride to Dallas?” I couldn’t believe it. “Lady,” I replied, “We’re not running a taxi service here. And besides, the President has been shot!” And she said, “Yes, I heard it on the radio. I think my son is the one they’ve arrested.” It was Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother. …
There she was, standing on the curb—a small woman with gray hair and large horn-rimmed glasses, carrying a little blue travel bag. I got in the back seat with her; [editor] Bill [Foster] drove, and I interviewed her along the way.
Mrs. Oswald didn’t talk much about her son, or about the president’s death. She was hysterical, and, I later came to believe, deranged. Some of the things she said on that drive were so outrageous that I didn’t put them in my story. During the entire drive, she did not mention the death of the President once. Her only reference to the incident while we in the car was “do they think he did it?”
Merriman Smith was a UPI reporter riding in the press car and saw the whole thing:
When we cleared the same curve we could see where we were heading — Parkland Hospital, a large brick structure to the left of the arterial highway. We skidded around a sharp left turn and spilled out of the pool car as it entered the hospital driveway.
I ran to the side of the bubble-top. The president was face-down on the back seat. Mrs. Kennedy made a cradle of her arms around the President’s head and bent over him as if she were whispering to him. Governor Connally was on his back on the floor of the car, his head and shoulders resting on the arm of his wife, Nellie, who kept shaking her head and shaking with dry sobs. Blood oozed from the front of the governor’s suit. I could not see the president’s wound. But I could see blood spattered around the interior of the rear seat and a dark stain spreading down the right side of the president’s dark gray suit.
From the telephone car, I had radioed the Dallas bureau of UPI that three shots had been fired at the Kennedy motorcade. Seeing the bloody scene in the rear of the car at the hospital entrance, I knew I had to get to a telephone immediately. Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent in charge of the detail assigned to Mrs. Kennedy, was leaning over into the rear of the car. “How badly was he hit, Clint?” I asked.
“He’s dead,” Hill replied curtly.
A Dish reader’s eyewitness account here.
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