"Eyewitness to the Death of a President" Gary Goettling Georgia Tech Spring, 1992. 15-22. Posted on the Kennedy Assassination Home Page with the permission of Gary Goettling. Rufus W. Youngblood has more than a passing interest in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Like millions of americans, the 1950 industrial engineering graduate remembers exactly where he was and what he was doing on March 22, 1963. He was riding in a motorcade in downtown Dallas. As the special agent in charge of the vice presidential Secret Service detail, Youngblood rode in an open Lincoln convertible with Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, Texas Sen. Ralph Yarborough and a driver. Only a Secret Service follow-up car separated him from the president's limousine, and the violence that unfolded there with graphic finality on a warm Dallas afternoon 28 years ago. Who killed Kennedy? It's a question Youngblood has been asked hundreds of times, and his firm answer defies popular opinion: "Lee Harvey Oswald." "I support the findings of the Warren Commission. (Conspiracy theorist) have had investigation after investigation, and nobody has come up with anything concrete. Nothing." Actor Kevin Costner "should have stuck to dancing with wolves," Youngblood says tartly, referring to the movie "JFK." Although he says that he has not seen the Oliver Stone film, he is familiar with its premise, which implicates Lyndon Johnson and the secret service in a massive conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy and cover up the crime. Stone, he notes, "is making a whole bunch of money from it," a motive that he believes drives other conspiracy proponents as well. Youngblood has not read any of the dozens of "conspiracy books" that promulgate theories ranging from CIA plots to French hit-men, but he is generally familiar with their assertions. In particular, he labels as "ridiculous" an upcoming book that blames the assassination of "friendly fire" from a secret service agent. "I don't think any Secret Service guy fired his weapon down there that day. I could look ahead and see (George) Hickey, an agent in the president's follow-up car, who had the AR-15 (rifle). He stood up and looked, but didn't see anything to fire at." Kennedy's body was removed from Parkland Hospital by the Secret Service and flown back to Washington aboard Air Force One, technically a violation of Texas law which states that homicide victims must be autopsied in-state. Many conspiracy proponents point to that as evidence of Secret Service complicity in an assassination cover-up. "That's nitpicking," Youngblood says. "I was telling Johnson that the safest thing for us was to get out of there and get back to Washington. He said that we were not leaving without Mrs. Kennedy, and she wasn't leaving without her husband's body. There was nothing sinister about it. Some people are just trying to make something up that isn't really there." Youngblood is particularly bothered because "children growing up are not going to know what to believe because the apparently the adults don't know what to believe," he says, a reference to polls which indicate that over 70 percent of the public does not support the lone-gunman conclusion in the Warren Report. The bi-partisan Warren Commission did a thorough investigation of the crime, including the subsequent killing of Oswald, and reached the most reasonable and logical conclusions, Youngblood says. Acknowledging that there are some "honest skeptics," Youngblood believes that more people would concur with the commissions' findings--if they read them. "I'd say that 90 percent of the public has never read (the summary), says Youngblood, who keeps a bound copy of the report on a living-room bookshelf. And although he has not read all 26 volumes himself, he has read the two-inch thick summary, and reviewed the other volumes... ....Inevitably, the conversation drifts back to 1963 and the tragedy that staggered the world --and put Rufus Youngblood's name in a hundred reporter's notebooks. Up until the time the presidential motorcade turned onto Elm Street, "it looked like just another very successful political trip," Youngblood remembers. "They wanted crowds, and they got crowds. As the procession crawled into Dealey Plaza, Youngblood glanced up at the clock on the roof of the Texas School Book Depository. It flashed 12:30. Less than a minute to the freeway, and only five minutes to the Trade Mart, he thought. That instant, piercing through the shouts of the thinning crowd, and the stuttering and backfiring of police motorcycle's, Youngblood heard the shattering crack! of a rifle. His reaction was immediate and instinctive. "Get down!" he yelled. "GET DOWN!" And in the time it takes to pull the bolt of a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, Youngblood had vaulted over the back of the limousine seat onto Vice President Johnson, pushing him to the floor of the Lincoln convertible and shielding Johnson's body with his own. Johnson, in his statement to the Warren Commission, said that Youngblood reacted immediately after the first shot by the time the second shot and fatal third shot were fired into Kennedy. Youngblood's heroic action earned him the Treasury Department's highest honor, the Exceptional Service Award, presented by President Johnson on Dec. 4, 1963. In his own testimony before the Warren Commission, Youngblood said: "As we were beginning to go down this incline, all of a sudden there was an explosive noise. I quickly observed unnatural movement of crowds, like ducking or scattering, and quick movements in the presidential follow-up car. So I turned around and hit the vice president on the shoulder and hollered 'Get down,' and then looked around and saw more of this movement, and so I proceeded to go to the back seat and get on top of him." From his position, Youngblood noticed, "a grayish blur in the air above the right side of the president's car" right after the third shot. "There were shouts from ahead, then the cars in front of us lurched forward under the underpass. I yelled to our driver, 'Stay with them and keep close!'" From his uncomfortable sprawled position on the back seat, Johnson asked what happened. Youngblood replied that the president had been shot, and that they were headed to the hospital. "My god! They've shot the President!" Exclaimed Sen. Yarborough, who shared the back seat of the limousine with the vice president. Lady Bird Johnson, seated between the two men, cried out, "Oh no, that can't be!" After arriving at the hospital, the vice president climbed out of the car, rubbing his stiff shoulder, giving rise to early erroneous press reports that Johnson had also been wounded in the attack. Still unsure if a larger plot to assassinate all top government officials was being deployed, Youngblood worked quickly to sequester Johnson. "President Kennedy was practically dead when the arrived at the hospital," Youngblood says. "He had a little pulse, but for all practical purposes, he was gone. At the time, I didn't know how badly wounded the president was, but I did know that if he was incapacitated in some way, then Johnson was next in line, so I acted accordingly." All accounts of the event immediately following the assassination, up through the when the aircraft carrying a new president and a slain president touched down at Andrews Air Force Base, single out Youngblood for maintaining his composure and professionalism in the face of absolute pandemonium. Eventually, the enormity of it all caught up with him, and when he returned home after the longest day of his life, "I really broke down," Youngblood says. Lyndon Johnson, on the other hand, did not receive universal high marks for his performance after the assassination, mostly from people who felt he jumped into the presidency with more enthusiasm than appropriate or necessary. "I'm really surprised at a lot of the things that have been written," Youngblood says. "Some nasty things have been said about him, and the guy could not have been any more considerate toward the president's family and the president's staff. I mean, not only on that day and the flight back, but through the ensuing months and even years. They didn't treat him as nicely as he treated them." Youngblood is still dogged by the Kennedy assassination--not so much by the past as the present; but the outrageous speculation and accusations of people who literally spent years dissecting decisions made in a few chaotic minutes or seconds. Once upon a time it may have hurt and sometimes it still makes him angry. But mostly, he is just tired of it. "I wish they would just put it to rest," he sighs. "But they won't--not as long as someone can make a buck off it.