Glancing at her watch, nurse Phyllis Hall couldn’t help thinking how the warm autumn day was beginning to drag.
The Parklands Hospital outpatient department in Dallas was quieter than normal as most of the people she would normally have seen had gone into the city to see the President.
Making the most of the unusual quiet moment almost 50 years ago – on November 22, 1963 – Phyllis went along to see a friend working in triage.
But as the two nurses chatted, the peace of the emergency room was suddenly shattered by the harrowing screams of Texan Governor John Connally.
Six minutes earlier, he had been happily waving at the crowds, a passenger in the same car as President John F Kennedy.
But as the motorcade swept past a grassy knoll, three shots were fired, fatally wounding the President and badly injuring Governor Connally.
The two men were rushed to the Parklands Emergency and Trauma department where bewildered staff had no idea what had just taken place five miles away.
Phyllis, then 28, recalls: “The doors just exploded. At first we thought it was a woman being brought in who had gone into labour in the car park or even a bad car accident.
“It was only when I saw the mayor and Vice President Lyndon Johnson did we know something was gravely wrong.
“Johnson looked grey. We thought he was having a heart attack. Then all of sudden the screams got louder and louder.
“Governor Connally was crying in pain. It was like nothing I had ever heard before.
“Blood was pumping from his body. It was going everywhere.”
As surgeons rushed to his aid, the doors suddenly flung open again and Phyllis saw Jackie Kennedy running alongside a trolley carrying her husband.
“I recognised her straight away,” says mum-of-three Phyllis.
“She was draped over his body as the medics rushed him to the trauma room. Her face had a look of incredible disbelief. She was leaning over the President, clutching him.”
Phyllis, who had graduated as a nurse six years earlier, was then unwittingly thrust into Trauma Room 1, where a team of specialists had descended to try to resuscitate the President.
“I wasn’t supposed to be there,” she says. “It was only because I had been speaking to my friend in triage.
On the scene: Nurse Phyllis Hall was in the trauma room by accident
“All of a sudden a huge man, I think it was Mr Kennedy’s secret service agent, looked at me.
“He took one glance and said, ‘We need you back there’.
“Quickly, I did as he said and followed the trolley into theatre.
“Already the room was filled to capacity. There were about 15 to 20 staff inside all trying to do everything they could for the President.”
But she adds: “In my opinion Kennedy was dead on arrival.
“He wasn’t going to survive but it was our job to try. Already signs of cyanosis (the appearance of a blue or purple coloration of the skin ­indicating low oxygen) had set in.
“His pupils were dilated and there was a gaping exit wound in his throat.”
As surgeons feverishly worked on the President’s lifeless body, Phyllis made a startling discovery.
She reveals: “Mr Kennedy had such a thick head of hair, and few people noticed the gaping wound to his skull. The bullet had ripped it clean away.
“His brain was severely damaged and the blood loss was huge.
“But, as we continued to work, I held his head.
“I could see a bullet lodged between his ear and his shoulder. It was pointed at its tip and showed no signs of damage. I remember looking at it – there was no blunting of the bullet or scarring around the shell from where it had been fired.
“I’d had a great deal of experience working with gunshot wounds but I had never seen anything like this before.
“It was about one-and-a-half inches long – nothing like the bullets that were later produced.
“It was taken away but never have I seen it presented in evidence or heard what happened to it. It remains a mystery.”
Shot: First Lady Jackie Kennedy reacts to her husband's shooting
Throughout her husband’s attempted resuscitation, Jackie Kennedy stood holding his right foot. Phyllis says the First Lady gave no sign of emotion as she looked vacantly into the distance while the ­President’s life ebbed away.
After 43 minutes, neurosurgeon Dr Kemp Clark made the decision to stop all further resuscitation.
Phyllis says: “He just looked and said, ‘cut’.
“Dr Clark was a very of matter-of-fact doctor, sometimes appearing immune to emotion.
“He was the best surgeon a patient could ask for but the worse for sympathy.
“As the team moved away from the President’s body, Dr Kemp simply turned on his heels.
“Without looking at Mrs Kennedy he said quite abruptly, ‘Madam, your husband is dead’ and he continued on his way out of the room.
“I couldn’t help feel for her. She was stood with so many people around her but she looked so alone.
“I turned to her and said, ‘I am sorry for your loss’. Her face didn’t alter. She just continued to stare.”
It wasn’t until 9pm that Phyllis finished her shift that day.
When she returned home to her husband, she says she didn’t utter a word to him about what had happened. “It was something for years I just kept inside,” she says.
“As a nurse, it didn’t matter who it was who needed our help, we conducted ourselves equally the same.”
However Phyllis’s part in history did not stop there.
Attention: Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald
During the next few weeks she was regularly called on to treat Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald – the man accused of murdering President Kennedy.
She tells how Ruby would ­intentionally hurt himself to get out of his prison cell.
“He was an attention-seeker,” says Phyllis, who also treated Oswald’s pregnant wife Marina just three weeks before the ­President’s assassination.
“After shooting Oswald, he couldn’t stand to be held in a cell, so he did what he could to get out.
“One day he was brought in handcuffed to two police officers after he ran head first at his cell’s bars.”
She says the hospital continued to treat him until he died from cancer in 1967.
Phyllis, now 78, refuses to go along with the idea that Oswald acted alone to carry out the ­assassination.
“There are so many theories out there, who knows what to believe any more?” she muses.
“I truly believe no man could have carried out the attack without some sort of help, and after seeing the mystery bullet in Mr Kennedy’s head I feel there is something far deeper to his death than we the public know.”