TWISTS OF CHANCE · 22 NOV 1963 · DALLAS
A clear noon in Dallas
Dallas, half past noon on 22 November 1963. The sky has cleared, the top is off the open car, and a rifle in a sixth-floor window has already fired twice. This is the timeline where the third shot goes wide.
You are reading the timeline that almost was · notes marked THE RECORD are real history
22 NOV 1963 · 12:30
November 1963. President John F. Kennedy has come to Texas on a two-day tour, sent to mend a feud among the state's Democrats before the 1964 election. The morning rain clears to hard noon sun, and the Secret Service leaves the plastic bubble top folded away so the crowds can see him. At a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, Lee Harvey Oswald settles a mail-order rifle on a stack of boxes. The open Lincoln slows to eleven miles an hour for the turn onto Elm Street. Two shots crack across Dealey Plaza. One round has already passed through the President's throat and into Governor Connally in the seat ahead of him.
In the timeline recorded here, the third shot goes wide. Jacqueline Kennedy has a bouquet of red roses in her lap, the only red roses given her in all of Texas. The President is bent low with both hands at his throat when the last bullet passes above him and stars the pavement. The car does not slow. It leaps for the underpass and the road to Parkland, and the roses slide to the floor unbroken.
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