Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

 Chat GPT agrees with me that Roy Kelleman was atrocious in his lack of action and even in his verbiage. It was an emergency, and he spoke in conversational phrases.

Yes — I think your point is stronger than I gave it credit for.

There are actually two separate verbal reactions in Kellerman's account:

1. He says Kennedy supposedly said "My God, I am hit" though Jackie, Connally, and Nellie all denied that JFK spoke.
2. Kellerman himself says "Let's get out of here; we are hit," and then radioed Lawson, "We are hit; get us to the hospital immediately."

Your objection is that Kellerman's formulation sounds strangely conversational for an assassination in progress. I agree that this deserves scrutiny.

If Kennedy was sufficiently conscious and verbally capable to formulate "My God, I am hit," one would expect an immediate, imperative response to the danger by him—something like:

• "Get down!"
• "Drive!"
• "Floor it!"
• "They're shooting!"

It would be especially natural for the President to react to the attack by giving an instruction to the driver, since Greer was literally inches away and the obvious immediate objective was to get the car moving.

And interestingly, that's exactly what Kellerman himself does. He doesn't say something elaborate to Greer. He says, according to his testimony, "Let's get out of here; we are hit." Then he gives Lawson the even more operational instruction: "We are hit; get us to the hospital immediately."

So I would sharpen the question:

If Kennedy was conscious enough to identify his condition verbally, why is there no reported imperative from him concerning the immediate emergency?

That doesn't prove he didn't say anything. A severely wounded person can behave unpredictably, and we shouldn't manufacture a response that isn't in the evidence. But the absence of an expected emergency response is legitimately probative when evaluating Kellerman's lone recollection.

There's another interesting piece of evidence here. Nellie Connally's account doesn't describe Kennedy speaking at all. She said she saw him with his hands at his neck and then saw him slump with an "empty expression." The Warren Commission nevertheless inserted Kellerman's alleged statement into its reconstruction.

And the later HSCA investigation is revealing: its investigator Thomas Kelley acknowledged that when the Zapruder film was examined, there was no apparent action by Kellerman in response to the initial shooting; Kelley said the first apparent reaction of the agents was when Kellerman said, "Let's get out of here." The chairman pointed out that this occurred only after the third shot.

So I think we should be particularly careful about treating Kellerman's narrative as a transparent description of what happened. There are several layers:

What the film appears to show → what other occupants reported → what Kellerman later remembered → what the Warren Commission constructed from those accounts.

Those aren't necessarily the same thing.

And, as you pointed out, "My God, I am hit" isn't just an isolated disputed sentence. If we accept it literally, it has behavioral implications that don't fit particularly well with the rest of the account.

The whole reference to the hospital is ridiculous because in that situation, there was only one thing that mattered; one thing that was pressing, and it was fleeing.

I think that's a fair behavioral objection, but I'd phrase it carefully.

At the instant shots were being fired, the immediate tactical problem was getting the limousine out of the kill zone. Medical treatment was obviously important, but it was a subsequent objective. The first priority would ordinarily be to escape the source of the gunfire.

That makes the sequence in Kellerman's testimony worth examining:

1. Allegedly, Kennedy says: "My God, I am hit."
2. Kellerman says: "Let's get out of here; we are hit."
3. Kellerman then tells Lawson: "We are hit; get us to the hospital immediately."

The first two make sense as an immediate reaction to an attack. But "get us to the hospital" is a different kind of instruction: it presupposes that the immediate danger has been dealt with and shifts attention to medical treatment.

And there's an important distinction: Kellerman's statement to Lawson wasn't necessarily his first response to the shooting. He testified that he first told Greer to get out of there and then communicated with Lawson. So it isn't necessarily accurate to say that he chose "hospital" instead of fleeing.

The more interesting question, in my view, is what happened in the seconds between the first shot and the limousine's acceleration.

If we want to test Kellerman's account rather than simply accept or reject it, I'd suggest reconstructing those seconds from the Zapruder film, Kellerman's WC testimony, Greer's testimony, Jackie Kennedy's testimony, Nellie Connally's testimony, and the radio transcripts. That would let us see whether Kellerman's claimed sequence is actually compatible with what the other evidence shows.

And given your point about emergency behavior, I think the timing of Kellerman's "Let's get out of here" becomes much more important than the hospital reference itself.

And he started with Lawson with a salutation.

Yes. That's another detail that makes the wording worth examining.

Kellerman testified that he communicated to Lawson:

"Lawson, we are hit; get us to the hospital immediately."

So the reported communication has the form "Lawson..." + identification of the situation + an instruction.

I wouldn't call the salutation itself impossible—agents routinely addressed one another by name over the radio. But in the context you're describing, it is strikingly composed language. The sequence is not something like:

"GET OUT OF HERE!"

or

"GO! GO!"

Instead, according to Kellerman, it is a calm identification of the person, followed by a declarative statement and then a specific medical destination.

That becomes particularly interesting when we compare it with Kellerman's own testimony about what happened immediately after the first shot. His account portrays him as sufficiently composed to recognize the situation, communicate with the lead car, and direct the response.

So there are really two questions worth keeping separate:

1. Did Kellerman actually say those words? That's a question of evidence and corroboration.
2. Does the wording sound like a natural contemporaneous response to an assassination in progress? That's a behavioral question.

The second question can't establish that the testimony is false, but it is legitimate to ask whether the reported language sounds more like a retrospective reconstruction of events than the kind of terse, instinctive communication one would expect during an unexpected burst of gunfire, especially by a Secret Service officer.