Witnesses+recount+aftermath+of+Kennedy+assassination,+2004

=**Witnesses recount aftermath of Kennedy assassination in 2004**=

DALLAS - President John F. Kennedy's assassination still kindles vivid memories -- especially for those with an inside view. Even today, Nellie Connally watches her back.

Then the first lady of Texas, she witnessed the huge, enthusiastic crowds that greeted Kennedy along the motorcade route through downtown Dallas. Kennedy, with wife Jackie at his side, smiled and waved at the crowds from the back seat of the presidential limousine. Up front, Nellie Connally and her husband, Gov. John Connally, beamed at the Texas welcome.

Moments before the limousine reached the Texas School Book Depository, Nellie Connally turned to the president and remarked, "No one can say Dallas doesn't love and respect you, Mr. President."

"You sure can't," he replied.

Seconds later, gunfire rang out in Dealey Plaza. Kennedy later died at a hospital and Gov. Connally was wounded.

"No longer was my life as peaceful as it had been, and I'm careful even now. I look behind me occasionally and I watch out for my children," said Connally, 84, as she promoted her new book, //From Love Field: Our Final Hours With President John F. Kennedy//.

Forty years later, she finds it hard to believe she's the only one still alive who was in that car. Her husband died in 1993 and Jackie Kennedy died the next year of cancer.

"For many weeks, it was like a phonograph record," she said of the assassination. "Now it is pushed back into the back of my mind, never to be forgotten. But I can bring it back up any time I want.

"It'll be with me forever, but I don't have to live with it every day."

Politics had brought the Kennedys to Texas, a pivotal and worrisome state in his 1964 re-election plans.

U.S. Rep. Jim Wright, a Democrat from Fort Worth, flew from Washington to Texas with Kennedy. He was about five cars back in the motorcade when Kennedy was shot.

"I thought someone was trying to fire a 21-gun salute with a rifle," said Wright, a former House speaker who left politics in 1989. "Then the third one came and it was off cadence.

"I knew when we passed the crowd waiting there on the grassy knoll they had seen something. I could see it in their faces. They were traumatized."

In her 1970 book, //A White House Diary//, former first lady Lady Bird Johnson described these moments with Jackie Kennedy aboard Air Force One as they returned to Washington:

"We all sat around the plane. The casket is in the corridor. I went in the small private room to see Mrs. Kennedy, and though it was a very hard thing to do, she made it as easy as possible. She said things like, 'Oh, Lady Bird, we've liked you two so much. ... Oh, what if I had not been there. I'm so glad I was there.'

"I looked at her. Mrs. Kennedy's dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked, it was caked with blood - her husband's blood. Somehow that was one of the most poignant signs - that immaculate woman exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood." Now 90, Johnson lives in Austin.

She has recovered her physical strength after suffering a stroke in May 2002, but remains unable to speak clearly, said her press secretary, Becky Tilson. "She hasn't given up," Tilson said. "She still has a wonderful outlook on life."

Two days after the assassination, Dallas homicide detective Jim Leavelle guarded Lee Harvey Oswald as he was moved from the Dallas County jail. Then he saw club owner Jack Ruby take two sharp steps and shoot Oswald from less than two feet away.

"What went through my mind was I needed to save my prisoner, so I tried to pull him behind me. But in one second you don't have much time to do that," said Leavelle, 83, who retired in 1976.

"He was too close to me and I couldn't move him. All I did was turn his body. When I turned his body, instead of the bullet hitting dead center in the stomach, it hit him about 4 inches to the left side of the naval.

"If it hadn't hit the seventh rib, it would've come on and hit me, but the rib slowed it down. He just groaned and slumped to the floor." Leavelle rode in the ambulance with Oswald to Parkland Hospital.

"A med student was doing CPR and I was holding his wrists, trying to get blood pressure and couldn't get any. I told the doctors in the trauma room I want that bullet out. .... It just popped out in a tray, like a grape seed.

"I gave the nurse my pocketknife and I said, 'Scratch your initial in that bullet because you and I will testify that that was the bullet.' I wrapped it in a tissue and put it in the crime lab later for analysis. We both did testify several times on it."

The Rev. Williams A. Holmes was at the Dallas Trade Mart, awaiting Kennedy's arrival at a sold-out luncheon for 2,600, when he heard the news.

"I was shocked and very upset, as was everyone who had been at that luncheon," said Holmes, now 74 and living in Silver Spring, Md. He set aside his already prepared sermon for that Sunday and began work on a special one. The title: "One Thing Worse Than This."

In the sermon and a nationally televised interview, Holmes maintained that while Dallas did not pull the trigger, the "spirit of assassination" had flourished in the politically conservative city. Even worse than the assassination, he said, would be Dallas taking no responsibility for the death.

His suggestion that Dallas somehow contributed to the assassination drew a flood of angry threats from citizens.

Police put him, his wife and two young sons under police guard for several days.

Holmes went on to serve as minister of Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church in Washington, the denomination's national church. He retired in 1998 after 24 years as senior pastor.

After the assassination, his anxiety level always rose when he contemplated addressing a national or international issue from the pulpit, he said. "At the same time, I realized that such feelings, while intense, couldn't rob me of my freedom to stand over and against them," he said.