When the first shot rang out in Dealey Plaza, JFK immediately reacted. Both arms went up, hands near his throat. Did secret service agent Clint Hill immediately spring into action by leaping upon the presidential limo and using his body to shield JFK? No — he cooled his jets, waited until the third shot had blown half ot Kennedy’s head into shards. THEN he sprang into action.
That’s why Hill (RIP at age 93) was so guilt-ridden all his life.
Basic Instinct,” posted on 4.17.23:
The 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination will be upon us before we know it (concurrent, by the way, with the 11.22.23 opening of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon) and I’m asking myself something.
Why after all this time has no one ever suggested that Lenny Bruce may have been on to something when he suggested that Jackie Kennedy was simply, immediately terrified about being shot herself (as anyone would be) and was following a blind instinct to avoid a similar death by getting the hell away from the line of fire by climbing out of the back seat and onto the limousine trunk?
That has always seemed to me like a very natural and default kneejerk response — haul ass in order to save your own terrified, freaked-out ass.
And yet every last person who’s ever analyzed what happened during those fateful seconds in Dealey Plaza…they ALL say she was trying to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull that had been blown onto the trunk. And maybe she was, but why has no one ever suggested that Bruce’s interpretation was at the very least a reasonable possibility?
If so, Jackie wasn’t behaving in some cowardly or ignoble fashion. She’d just seen half of JFK’s head — very close, only inches away — explode into blood and skull and brain matter and vapor — soaking her gloves bright red and all that cranial flotsam spraying upon her own face. Naturally she came to a split-second realization that she might be next and immediately thought about saving herself from a similar fate and, not incidentally, staying alive in order to care for her two children.
Would that have been such a terrible instantaneous reaction?
