JFK's Final Hours in Texas: An Eyewitness Remembers the Tragedy and Its Aftermath

Julian Read, a Texas political insider who delivered the first eyewitness report of President John F. Kennedy's assassination to the media, has authored a behind-the-scenes account that chronicles the tragedy and its fifty-year legacy. In JFK's Final Hours in Texas, Read documents not only the immediate agony endured by the people in the epicenter of the tragedy but also the continuing experience of a wounded community recovering from its aftermath. In 1963, Read was the media representative for Governor John B. Connally, host of the president's November visit to Texas. On the day Kennedy was killed, Read was aboard the chartered White House Press bus, just a few vehicles behind the presidential limousine in the motorcade through downtown Dallas. After hearing the shots and watching the limousine lurch forward amid panicking onlookers, Read raced to nearby Parkland Hospital, where the president and Connally had been rushed to emergency rooms. There, immediately after White House Deputy Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff announced that the president was dead, Read briefed journalists based on what Nellie Connally, wife of the governor, had hurriedly reported to him. Beyond capturing the drama of the immediate hours following the assassination, Read illuminates the previously overlooked consequences of the aborted portion of the trip. The author also traces the long aftermath of the assassination, including the intensity of the bitterness against Dallas and Texas. And, in what he calls "the long journey from anguish to reconciliation," Read follows the decades-long struggle to create the Sixth Floor Museum in downtown Dallas, located in the space where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the fatal shots.