Free Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination by Gus Russo, Harry Moses

through the curtain when the house lights came on. The movie continued to play. Oswald stood up as if he was going to leave and moved maybe one seat over but basically sat back down in the same position on the same row. Officer McDonald, myself, and another officer—I don’t know his name—walked out on the stage. I pointed to Oswald, and Oswald was just sitting there, calm as he could be.
    I pointed him out from the stage, but I probably wouldn’t have been there if I’d been aware that he was armed. I had no idea—didn’t evenenter my mind. He just kind of stared, glared back. I jumped off the stage, and Officer McDonald came up the left side, as you face the audience. Another officer and I walked up the right side. Officer McDonald was tapping people on the shoulder, telling them to get up, to move, but all the while he was keeping his eye on Oswald. Just as Officer McDonald walked into the aisle, tapping him to get up, Oswald got up. He threw a hard left cross and knocked Officer McDonald back into the seat.
    I’m standing maybe ten or twelve feet away. Almost in the same motion, he reaches under his shirt, which was not tucked in, and pulls out a pistol—I think it was a revolver—and puts it right in Officer McDonald’s face. Officer McDonald had recovered basically; he got back up, wrestled the gun away from him, and I’m sure I saw Oswald pull the trigger. But Officer McDonald has said that the hammer hit the fleshy part between his thumb and forefinger, preventing the gun from firing. Immediately the gun was taken away from Oswald, and then cops were coming over the backs of the chairs. They weren’t getting cheap shots in, but they were going to arrest this guy.
    HAWKINS: I came up the aisle and heard Nick McDonald say, “I’ve got him.” Then at I saw that they were locked up in a fight, and I went up and got Oswald’s left hand into the handcuffs; it seemed like two or three minutes, but it wasn’t that long. It was a lot of chaos. It rained police. One of the officers even jumped down off the balcony to assist in the arrest, but we had enough police there at that time. The only thing I heard Oswald say was “I haven’t done nothing.” That’s exactly what he said. Other than that, I didn’t hear anything. There were so many police then and so much confusion, it was kind of hard to hear who was saying what.
    It rained police.
    BREWER: As they were leading him out toward the side I was standing on, he looked me straight in the face, and I heard him say, “I’m not resisting arrest.” That was kind of hard to swallow, that he wasn’t resisting after having tried to kill a policeman. At the time, I really wasn’t thinking he might’ve been the assassin of President Kennedy because of the distance from downtown to here. I felt that maybe he did have something to do with Officer Tippit’s murder, but it didn’t really dawn on me until I got home that evening,turned on the television, and there was Oswald, down at the police station with Captain Will Fritz. I said, “Damn.”
    HAWKINS: When I came in here, I was also looking for somebody who had shot Officer Tippit. I hadn’t yet made the connection to President Kennedy. When I heard that he was the chief suspect in the assassination of the president—oh, my—I thought we were lucky to be here, just living through that. But I don’t even know what I thought when we were coming up the aisle in the theater before we found out he could be connected with the assassination. It was just really a weird night, a weird day and a weird night, really. We were lucky that nobody else was shot. I don’t know why Oswald let us walk all the way up in the theater and didn’t shoot one of us. I thought of that afterward; I didn’t think of it then. I thought we were lucky just to lose one officer.
    BREWER: When Oswald pulled the pistol, it kind of brought me back into focus, and still I’m wondering, Why am I doing this? What have I just got myself