Thought you might like to read two personal accounts about the Kennedy assassination from our local newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle.
These are links to the stories, I pasted the text from both articles below.
http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/metro/2013-11-21/north-augusta-man-was-eyewitness-kennedy-shooting
http://chronicle.augusta.com/news/metro/2013-11-21/evans-woman-recalls-duty-parkland-memorial-hospital
Robert Davison's account:
Robert Davison doesn’t just think there was more than one shooter who killed President Kennedy; he says he knows there was.
EMILY ROSE BENNETT Staff writer
Robert Davison, of North Augusta, was a witness to the assassination of John F. Kennedy when he was living in Dallas. Davison remembers parking near an overpass and seeing Kennedy lurch forward 30 yards away as he was struck by the first bullet. "It's something that should never be forgotten," Davison said.
The 82-year-old North Augusta resident was in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, and stood with his eyes fixed on the president just as the fatal shot was fired.
Given his vantage point on the triple underpass – a railroad bridge that spanned three major Dallas streets near Dealey Plaza – and other eyewitness accounts, he doesn’t believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman.
“It’s just not right,” he said. “There’s too much evidence pointing to the fact that there was someone else.”
Mimicking the president’s movements after he was shot, Davison rocked forward in his chair with his hands clasped over his throat before tossing his body violently to the left. The first movement, he said, is proof the first shot that hit Kennedy in the throat and then Texas Gov. John Connally came from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository.
The second motion, a violent jerk to the left, was proof that the second shot, which struck Kennedy in the head, came from a shooter on a nearby grassy knoll, he said.
“I think there are more questions,” he said. “Why have they kept the information a secret for more than 50 years? I know. I was there.”
Davison belongs to an increasingly rare group of people who were eyewitnesses to the assassination of Kennedy. And for 50 years, he said, he has been haunted by what he saw.
On that sunny day in November, Davison planned to go to work just as he would have on any other day, but he changed his mind.
Kennedy, who had finished visiting nearby Fort Worth, was in Dallas to deliver a speech, and the event was preceded by a motorcade through downtown. Davison said the city was buzzing with excitement.
“You have to understand the buildup that this event caused,” he said. “The newspaper started publishing the event and the parade route probably a month before it ever happened. It had been a long time since a president had been to Dallas, Texas. I mean, the whole city was just in great anticipation of when this was going to happen.”
Davison said that as a 31-year-old Illinois transplant working for a communications company in Dallas, he was in his office building on North Akard Street just blocks from the motorcade route when people began lining the streets.
Some got there as early as 11 a.m. and were standing six deep in some places. About 11:30 a.m., Davison said, he decided to make his way down the parade route, though he struggled to find a good vantage point.
“Everybody who worked downtown was no doubt there,” he said. “It was like going out to the Augusta National and trying to watch the golf tournament.”
With few other options, Davison headed for higher ground. After taking back roads that ran parallel to the route, he found himself on Stemmons Freeway. He parked on the roadside and trekked back to the triple underpass.
“There was a policeman stationed on top of the underpass bridge, obviously to keep people from coming up there because they could have thrown something down into the open car,” Davison said. “I knew this guy, and he knew me. When I saw him, I asked, ‘Would it be all right if I could come up there and stand with you?’ and he said, ‘Sure, come on.’ ”
Davison’s view allowed him to watch the motorcade head-on. With the Texas School Book Depository straight ahead and the now-famous grassy knoll to his left, he watched Kennedy’s car round Elm Street and move toward the underpass.
His eyes were fixed on the president just as Kennedy began to clutch his neck.
“I was no more than 30 yards from the vehicle looking right at Kennedy when the first shot hit him,” Davision said, grabbing his throat. “As they went another 10 yards or so, the second shot hit him and he slumped over.”
Shocked, Davison looked to the police officer for answers, but the officer was just as stunned. The men didn’t hear any shots, just the rumble of the motorcycles passing beneath them and the roar of the crowd lining the parade route.
Within seconds, the motorcade was zipping down the street at breakneck speed.
“I looked right down into the car, and in the back seat, the roses that (Jacqueline Kennedy) had been carrying were strewn all over,” he said. “She had blood all on her skirt and (Kennedy) was just slumped over. I walked back to my car, turned on the radio and Walter Cronkite came on. He said, ‘We have just been informed that the president has been shot.’ Then I knew what I had just seen.”
Davison followed the motorcade to Parkland Memorial Hospital but was unable to get close to the building. He instead headed to a nearby RCA service building, which he was familiar with through his company.
By chance, an RCA serviceman was working on one of the company’s products, an electron microscope, inside the hospital just as Kennedy was rushed into the emergency room. The serviceman picked up the nearest telephone and narrated the sights and sounds for his colleagues down the street, Davidson said.
“We just sat there at the RCA service company building and listened to the serviceman talk about the doctors running back and forth the whole time,” Davison said. “It probably didn’t take him but six minutes to tell us that the doctors had pronounced Kennedy dead. We knew right then and there that he was gone.”
The assassination caused residents in the city to fear for their safety, Davison said.
“There were people afraid to come out of their house for a couple of days,” he said. “Hell, we didn’t know what was going on.”
Davison hasn’t seen a presidential motorcade in person since that day. That one he will never forget.
“It’s etched in my mind,” he said. “It has been there forever and it will be forever.”
Myrna Hackett's account:
Myrna Hackett’s brush with one of America’s greatest tragedies began with a scream.
MICHAEL HOLAHAN Staff writer
Myrna Hackett saw JFK's body taken away in a hearse at the hospital in Dallas.
“Myrna, the president has been shot!” she recalls her mother yelling shortly after noon on Nov. 22, 1963, awakening her from a nap.
Within the next 72 hours, Hackett, then a 22-year-old Texas Women’s University nursing student interning at Parkland Memorial Hospital, would see President Kennedy’s body hauled away in a hearse, tend to the wife of wounded Texas Gov. John Connally and have guns pointed at her by Texas Rangers guarding the body of Lee Harvey Oswald.
She was scheduled to be at work at 3 p.m. but rushed in early in her red 1963 Volkswagen Beetle after learning of the shooting.
“It was horror,” said Hackett, 72, who now lives in Evans. “The president and governor was being treated, but we still had other patients to take care of.”
She got there in time to see the white hearse pulling out of the hospital with Kennedy’s body.
Inside the hospital, Hackett went to her station in the operating room where Connally was in surgery being treated for wounds to his back, ribs, chest, wrist and thigh. At the time, 23 other patients were undergoing treatment in the same emergency room. Seven additional emergency patients were admitted between the time Kennedy and Connally arrived at 12:38 p.m. and the removal of the president’s body at 2:19 p.m.
As a nonsterile student nurse, Hackett was responsible for taking tools and equipment to doctors’ rooms and making rounds in the recovery area.
She remembers Nellie Connally, the governor’s wife, seated in shock, waiting for news of her husband. Hackett offered Texas’ first lady water, coffee, tea and a sandwich but doesn’t recall her taking up the offer.
“She was very composed, even though she was in shock,” Hackett said. “What I remember about her was she was such a Southern lady. She looked like she had just stepped out of a fashion magazine, she was so put together, even then.”
Hackett said the hospital was abuzz about a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death. Nurses whispered among themselves, wanting answers to questions they never received.
She recalls hearing from co-workers that Ronald Jones, the 30-year-old chief resident, was white as a ghost on hearing news the president was being rushed to his operating room. Hackett saw an equipment cart shuttled through the hospital that afternoon that had pink rose petals from Jacqueline Kennedy’s bouquet.
Like many Americans, she had long admired the president, especially for his ideas about desegregation and early efforts in the civil rights movement. She wanted to watch Kennedy’s visit to Dallas on television but missed it because she had to rest up before work.
In the days after the shooting, the hospital was packed with FBI agents and Texas police as Connally recovered and relocated his headquarters to a hospital bed. According to a December 1963 hospital newsletter that Hackett saved, the governor’s assistant set up a special office in a portion of the administrative suite and the Texas Department of Public Safety established a radio communication center in the nursing service office.
Hackett was not at work when Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin, was taken to the hospital after he was fatally shot by Jack Ruby on Nov. 24. When she came in for her 3 p.m. shift, Hackett was unaware that Oswald’s body was in a storage room and went in to get a headrest for a patient. When she opened the door, two Texas Rangers pulled their guns on her and ordered her to step away from the body.
“I didn’t realize they were back there at all,” Hackett said. “I screamed so loud you could have heard me all over the hospital. They were on edge, too, and of course they told me if I had to come back there, please let them know. It’s funny now, but wasn’t so funny then.”
Over the next few weeks, Hackett said, reporters camped around the hospital, and the vibe at Parkland remained dreary.
According to the Parkland newsletter, a wreath hung on the surgery room door where doctors tried to save Kennedy’s life. During the funeral, and in the weeks that followed, staffers used trauma room No. 1 only when necessary.
The hospital’s staff was commended with a letter of thanks from Connally on Nov. 30, 1963, and with a message from Jacqueline Kennedy printed in the hospital’s December newsletter.
Hackett’s encounter with history in the assassinations didn’t end there, however.
Her husband, Earl Hackett, a theology student at Southern Methodist University, was assigned in 1967 as one of the chaplains for the family of Ruby, a Dallas nightclub operator, when he lay dying of cancer at Parkland Memorial.
Hackett said her husband counseled Ruby and his family, but because of the sanctity of his work, was unable to talk much about his experience.
“As a chaplain, you have to treat everyone with the same respect, but it was something to see him work with Ruby, the one who shot Oswald in front of thousands of people,” she said.
After working in Texas and Kansas as a nurse, Hackett relocated to Augusta in 1975, where her husband set up the chaplaincy program at University Hospital.
She retired in 2003 but still teaches clinical classes for USC Aiken twice a week.
She said she’ll never forget that chaotic day at Parkland and the loss of Camelot.
“I thought he was a very good president and was hoping for some good things to come out of his presidency,” Hackett said. “I had never gone to school with blacks growing up, and at the hospital we had white waiting rooms and black waiting rooms. I could never understand why we treated people differently ... but we thought Kennedy might change that.”
