60 pages • 2-hour read
Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot
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Chapter 25-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary: “November 22, 1963. Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. 12:14 PM.
Several eyewitnesses see a man standing in a sixth-floor window holding a rifle. One later testifies that he thought the man was a Secret Service agent. Oswald has a bolt-action rifle, which means that he might be able to get off three shots in nine seconds. With the president in his telescopic sight, Oswald fires. He does not even know if the shot hit anything. He chambers another round and fires a second shot, then a third, all of which takes 8.4 seconds. Two bullets strike the president. One strikes him in the back of the neck, passes through the front of his throat, and into Governor Connally’s back. The other people in the limo, including the driver, have only seconds to react and have not yet processed what is happening. The president wears a back brace, which keeps his torso upright as Jackie turns toward him and moves closer to see what’s wrong. The third bullet strikes, and the president’s head explodes as the bullet “exits the front of his skull” (268).
Chapter 26 Summary: “November 22, 1963. Dallas, Texas. 12:31 PM.”
Jackie yells, “They’ve killed my husband” and “I have his brains in my hand” (270). She scrambles to the back of the car, instinctively grasping for the remnants of the president’s skull. From the third car, immediately behind the presidential limousine, Secret Service agent Clint Hill rushes to protect her. Hill flashes thumbs-down to the trailing vehicles, signaling that the agents now must focus on Vice President Johnson, the acting president. The motorcade races for Parkland Hospital, but everything is confusion. When the limousine arrives at the hospital, Jackie refuses to let go of her husband. Hill realizes that the first lady does not want anyone to see or photograph the murdered president. She finally lets go, and the president is taken to Trauma Room One. Johnson, under Secret Service guard, waits inside the hospital. Jackie pushes her way into the trauma room to be with her husband until the last possible moment. J. Edgar Hoover calls Bobby Kennedy at home to inform the attorney general of the shooting. In the trauma room, Dr. William Kemp Clark weeps after telling the first lady what she already knows: Her husband is dead.
Walter Cronkite of CBS informs the nation. Appointments Secretary Kenny O’Donnell informs Johnson that he is now president. Jack Ruby, owner of the Carousel Club in Dallas, closes his establishment for the weekend. Still on the run in Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald shoots and kills Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit before fleeing and hiding in the Texas Theater, where he is eventually recognized by the ticket taker. Aboard Air Force One, Johnson immediately moves into the president’s bedroom and then places a call to Bobby Kennedy. Undertaker Vernon O’Neal rushes a casket to Parkland Hospital. Dallas municipal officials, including police, refuse to allow the Secret Service to move the body pending a homicide investigation, but the Secret Service agents, at the urging of O’Donnell and Special Assistant Dave Powers, grab the casket, plow through the local officials, and return to Air Force One. After the president’s body is aboard, a federal judge administers the Oath of Office to Johnson; Jackie, still wearing her blood-soaked outfit, stands to the new president’s left.
In the custody of Dallas police, Oswald declares himself “just a patsy” (287). Two days later, in the basement of the Dallas Police Department, an enraged Jack Ruby shoots Oswald in the stomach. Oswald dies less than two hours later in Parkland Hospital’s Trauma Room Two, across the hall from Trauma Room One, where the president had died only 48 hours earlier.
Chapter 27 Summary: “January 14, 1964. Attorney General’s Office. Washington, DC.”
With Bobby and Teddy Kennedy nearby, Jackie films a newsreel that will appear in movie theaters. Dressed in black, she looks into the camera and thanks the American people for their outpouring of love and condolences. In an interview with Life magazine that appeared on December 6, Jackie described her husband “listening to the Camelot soundtrack before falling asleep” (293). This is how Jackie wants the world to remember the Kennedy White House: the one and only Camelot.
Afterword Summary
O’Reilly and Dugard briefly describe what happened to some of the book’s major figures in the months and years following the assassination. The Afterword begins with a lengthy paragraph on Jackie Kennedy’s later life and concludes with multiple paragraphs on the funeral of John F. Kennedy and his burial site at Arlington National Cemetery. Most other individuals receive a single paragraph, their names appearing in boldface type. This includes an entry for George de Mohrenschildt, the Russian expatriate with CIA connections who befriended the Oswalds. O’Reilly claims to have been present outside de Mohrenschildt’s daughter’s home in March 1977 when de Mohrenschildt died by suicide.
Epilogue Summary
The Epilogue consists of a scanned copy of a typed letter from President Kennedy, dated February 10, 1962. The subject of the letter is President Abraham Lincoln, and its occasion is the impending centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Chapter 25-Epilogue Analysis
In the book’s opening pages, O’Reilly explains that Killing Kennedy presents only the facts and does not indulge in conspiracy theories. As it builds toward the assassination, the book maintains this approach. O’Reilly and Dugard describe personalities and events. They introduce key figures both domestic and foreign who harbored resentments of one kind or another against President Kennedy, but they raise questions only, preferring to rely on their fact-based narrative.
Nonetheless, when it comes time to explain the sequence of events that unfolded in Dallas beginning at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, O’Reilly and Dugard can no longer rely only on undisputed facts. They must choose from among a number of explanations, and the one they choose is the official US government narrative as presented in the 1964 Warren Commission report. According to this report, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the president by firing three shots from a bolt-action rifle. While O’Reilly and Dugard do not conclude that Oswald acted alone, they do follow the official US government narrative in describing the sequence of events. In keeping with this official narrative, they do not explore theories of multiple shooters, nor do they mention the famous Zapruder film, the home-movie recording of the presidential motorcade that captured the fatal head shot.
Oswald’s motives for killing the president constitute one of the book’s major themes. O’Reilly and Dugard note that Oswald had no history of animus against Kennedy. Oswald did see himself as a devoted Communist, which placed him at odds with the US government as a whole, but this ideological disposition seems not to have fixed his rage on the president. Most of all, O’Reilly and Dugard depict Oswald as bitter and resentful, frustrated with his lowly place in the world, and longing to be a great man. This thirst for recognition left Oswald despondent after he learned through newspapers and radio that he had failed in his April 1963 attempt on the life of Major General Ted Walker. O’Reilly and Dugard posit that Oswald’s troubled mind about his thwarted greatness served as the primary motive for killing the president. After his arrest, however, Oswald referred to himself as “just a patsy” (287)—seemingly suggesting that he was a fall guy for another. O’Reilly and Dugard note that this “patsy” claim helped fuel theories that Oswald had not acted alone. The authors, however, dismiss Oswald’s self-effacing “patsy” claim because of his obsession with being recognized as a great man.
Above all, O’Reilly and Dugard emphasize the assassination’s human tragedy. This is why, for instance, they devote the final chapter to Jackie Kennedy’s post-assassination efforts to keep alive the Camelot narrative, in which she believed, and which at times she actually lived.
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