Who is Nellie?
“In the jump seat John was crumpled up. Nellie Connally pulled him over into her arms. She put her head down over his head. She was pretending she was him. They were both alive or both dead. They could not be one and one. (…) She heard Jackie say, “They’ve killed my husband.” It could have been Nellie’s own voice, someone speaking for her. She thought John was dead.”
When I first read this, I was really confused. I did not know who Nellie was and what her relationship was to John F. Kennedy. I was more confused when I looked up the footage of JFK’s assassination and did not see any lady cradling his head in their lap.
So clearly I read this wrong.
Nellie Connally was the wife of the governor of Texas at the time of the assassination. She and her husband were sitting in front of the Kennedys when the shots were fired. Both she and Jackie’s husband’s names were John, and that was what confused me.
Of the interesting things that I found when I was looking up Nellie Connally was her story about what happened. Her husband told a news reporter that he thought there were three shots: one missed, one hit him and Kennedy, and one hit Kennedy in the head. But right after he said that he told the reporter that his wife (Nellie) has a different theory that is probably more reliable. So then I saw Nellie talking to the reporter and basically saying what DeLillo said: One shot hit Kennedy, one shot hit Connally, and one shot hit Kennedy in the head. Of course, she would not have known about the bullet that missed entirely since it was shot at the same time as the bullet that hit the head but Mrs. Connally is basically providing more authenticity to DeLillo’s theory, which I thought was cool.
Thoughts?
I'm glad you looked into this, because I was also a little confused reading this scene but wasn't able to look it up and then forgot to later. The two different interpretations of what happened are also interesting. It really plays well into all the speculation and confusion after the assassination that two people sitting right next to each other and the target of the shots had such radically different viewpoints.
ReplyDeleteOhh this makes sense now--I was confused too. Anyways, I was just thinking in class yesterday about how I have really taken for granted evidence when it comes to crimes when we were watching the video of the assassination. A lot of the stuff that DeLillo is writing about are narratives that we can't confirm what happened. however, with the bullet, it's a simple answer whether it went through Kennedy to Connally, but we'll never know.
ReplyDeleteI love how DeLillo throws in relatively minor characters from history and their tiny narratives and details. It creates a much fuller picture and really hammers in how authentic his entire narrative feels. It's incredible how he was able to pull together so many different verifiable details from the event while still incorporating it into and creating a coherent narrative.
ReplyDeleteNice post! I appreciate you looking into this because it definitely confused me when I was reading this part. I thought that DeLillo including this was really interesting because Nellie and her husband seem to be pretty minor characters, but they are incredible important in the actual assassination scene due to their proximity and unintented involvement in the actual assassination.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! Thanks for researching this - I was pretty confused too. I wonder if DeLillo was purposefully trying to make the scene confusing to reflect the confusion of the actual shooting.
DeleteOne particularly crazy branch of conspiracy thinking, which I may have mentioned in class, has Governor Connally turn around in the seat and shoot Kennedy in the face with a concealed gun (which he then throws out the window of the limo without anyone noticing or ever finding it??). And, of course, he pulls this off after having been SHOT (the perfect alibi, yes). Presumably Nellie would be in on the cover-up, with her facile cover story about "three shots," completely ignoring the fact that it was clearly her HUSBAND who did it!
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