I was looking at the car with the president in it and—after the pops—I saw what I thought was confetti. It was the shot that caused the president’s head to explode. My Mom cried out, “Oh, my God.” So I’m watching, I hear the bangs, see what I think was confetti, hear my mom yelling, and I realized something was very wrong. Then the car slowed down and this guy was running up to it; it was the Secret Service agent. Mrs. Kennedy was climbing out the back of the car, the guy jumped on it and was hanging on as the driver punched it and the car took off.

Then it was bedlam, people running all around, motorcycle police like bees flying all over the place. One crashed his motorcycle right in front of us. My Dad, like JFK, had served in the South Pacific during World War II and had enough awareness of what was going on to grab my mother and me and put us on the ground with his body on top of both of us. I later learned we had been directly in the line of fire.

By that time, people up the parade route, where the car had already passed, began to realize something had happened, so it was becoming a big crowd. Shortly after that, we got out of there. I don’t remember it as being scary. My friends have asked me about that over the years, saying I must have been disturbed by what I saw. But I wasn’t. I didn’t understand—as a 6 year old, it just didn’t register.