JOHN F. KENNEDY - PART # 3

JOHN F. KENNENDY
#  1  > Plan, CHAOS OR CONSPIRACY?
While the police converged on the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas and doctors at Parkland Hopital began working on the mortally wounded president in emergency room No. 1, Lee Harvey Oswald was briskly walking the seven blocks from the depository to the bus stop at Elm and Murphy. At 12:40 P.M. he boarded a bus driven by Cecil J. McWatters. Oswald did not realize it, but a former landlady, Mary Bledsoe, was also on the bus and recognized him immediately. "He looks like a maniac," she later observed. At just the time that Oswald stepped on the bus, the Secret Service placed a frantic call for a priest to administer the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church to John F. Kennendy, the 35th President of the United States. 

#  2  > With all of the police activity in the area around Dealey Plaza, traffic had come to a standstill. At 12:44 pm; Oswald asked for a transfer, got off the bus, crossed in front of it, and started walking to the Greyhound bus station three-and-a-half blocks away. As he proceeded, police began broad-casting a description of the shooter based on the eyewitness account of Howard Brennan, a 44-year-old steam-fitter who had been watching the presidential motorcade from a concrete retaining wall at the coner of Elm and Houston, with a clear view of the sixth-floor window of the depository building where he saw a man "a couple of times." The description matched Oswald's ( along with that of hundreds of other young men in Dallas ). "Attention all squads. Attention all squads. At Elm and Houston, reported to be an unknown white male, approximately 30, slender build, height 5 foot 10, 165 pounds. Reported to be armed with what is believed to be a .30-caliber rifle." 

#  3  > A dispatcher ordered police car No. 10 to patrol  the Oak Cliff area. The driver was J.D. Tippit, an 11-year veteran of the force. Dallas police had recently begun experimenting with the new policy of allowing officers to ride alone in cars patrolling low-crime areas. Tippit had voted for Kennedy and would have liked to have seen him, but he was also relieved to be far removed from the dangerous and high-stakes job of guarding his safety. "10-4," Tippit radioed back. At 12:47 p.m. Oswald entered a taxi driven by William Wayne Whaley at the Greyhound bus terminal. Whaley opened the back door for his passenger, but Oswald said he wanted to sit in the front seat__a common practice in the Soviet Union, where the former U.S. Marine had defected in 1959.