"His hands flew up to his neck," she said, "and he sank down in his seat. He didn't say a word. John, who was seated in front of him and was a hunter, knew it was a gunshot. He turned to his right and couldn't see him, so he flips to his left, and he still can't see him. And he says, 'No, no, no ' And when he was trying to turn back, the second shot came. John said, 'My God, they're trying to kill us all!' Meaning the four of us in the car. Then he collapsed, and the front of his shirt was covered in blood. He fell forward.

"My only thought then was, I've got to do something for John. I've got to get him out of the line of fire so they won't hurt him anymore. I reached over and pulled him over into my lap. He was looking up, and he was bloody all over. He had his Stetson in his hand like he always did. So I leaned over and put my hand on that spot, on the wound. Later, the doctors said by closing the wound I may have saved his life, that he probably would have died before we got to the hospital."

The Warren Commission concluded there were three shots, with one striking both the president and Gov. Connally — the so-called "magic bullet" theory — and one missing altogether before the third shot hit the president.

But Connally contends that all three bullets reached their intended targets. She believes the first struck only the president, the second only the governor.

"They were wrong," she says of the Warren Commission.

Then came the third, most damaging shot.

"I'm sitting with John on my lap, and suddenly, brain matter has covered the car. It's like tiny, bloody buckshot," she said.

Soon, Mrs. Kennedy was trying to climb out of the back of the car, her pink pillbox hat clinging to the top of her hair. "She said later she was going after a piece of his skull," said Connally, whose book about the assassination, "From Love Field: Our Final Hours With President John F. Kennedy," was released earlier this month. "I don't know but I will say this. You don't know what you would have done had you been in that car. She may have been trying to get out of the car — and you would not blame her one bit if you had been in that car. And that is not a derogatory remark about Jackie. Had I not been pinned down, I would have tried to get out of the car, too."

Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent riding in the car behind the president's, rushed forward to force Kennedy back in. He shoved her and the president to the floor and kept them pinned until the motorcade reached Parkland Hospital.

In the tense moments that followed the transport from bloody car to operating room, Connally and the first lady were left to stare at each other while sitting outside the trauma rooms. Neither said a word. Soon, the first lady would leave the hospital, to return to Washington with her husband's body and the new president, Lyndon Johnson.

She and Nellie Connally would exchange a pair of heartfelt letters but never again see or speak to one another. The governor's wife had to deal with her own demons.