WASHINGTON — Jack Valenti, who was riding six cars back in President Kennedy's motorcade, didn't hear the gunfire.
But when the car in front of him suddenly sped off, he knew something was wrong.
"Sometimes the brain does not want to answer questions that the mind doesn't want to hear," said Valenti, who had convinced himself that the president was simply late for his speech at the Dallas Trade Mart.
Upon arriving there, Valenti discovered "about 2,000 people, with no president." He went to find out what was happening, and the next thing he knew, he was being escorted to a hospital by a sheriff's deputy.
"I went to the basement. There was a stainless steel door that later on I was told was the emergency operating room, where the lifeless body of Kennedy was already there, though we didn't know it," Valenti said. "It was a lot of people down there, somber and grief-stricken, and absolutely full of wonderment."
Vice President Lyndon Johnson's chief aide told Valenti that Johnson wanted to talk to him.
"Then he hesitated, and he leaned down close to my ear, and he said, 'The president is dead, you know,"' Valenti recalled. "The tears just came, just awful. He said, 'Compose yourself,' and we went to this room where Johnson had been sequestered."
Valenti called Nov. 22, 1963, a day "that will live in perfidy." He described it poignantly Wednesday in an interview with The Associated Press.
Even 40 years later, he recalls the assassination in Dallas in vivid detail, from Johnson's impromptu request that Valenti, at that time a political consultant, join his administration, to Jackie Kennedy's refusal to change her bloodstained blouse, to Valenti's first assignment from Johnson: to track down the wording of the oath of office so Johnson could be sworn in as president aboard Air Force One.
"It is so seared in my memory I literally, sometimes at night — not often, but once or twice a year — I relive that day," Valenti said. "Because it was an apocalyptic intrusion. I think the nation's life changed, and I can assure you mine radically changed."
Johnson made two decisions instantly, Valenti said: He refused to let Air Force One take him back to Washington without Kennedy's body on board, and insisted on taking the oath of office on the plane. A deputy attorney general assured Johnson he already was president, but Johnson took the oath there anyway, swearing on a Catholic missal found in the presidential bedroom aboard Air Force One, Valenti said.
"Now why? I didn't know this until later. He knew that the world was absolutely in a state of shock, as was this country," Valenti said. "He had to show that in spite of all this anxiety and in spite of the fear and the wonderment and the bafflement, that the country was OK."
Valenti said Johnson wanted the photograph of him taking him the oath of office "flashed around the world, to show that the president is dead, the president lives, the nation goes on."
And the picture was. Valenti saw it on television as he sat in a bedroom with Johnson and two others until about 4 a.m. watching coverage of the assassination.
"I thought, 'Here 5 billion people are inspecting this guy, and I'm one of three sitting in a bedroom with him,"' Valenti said. "I was just awe-struck by it all. I was so green to Washington. It didn't take me long to get ungreen."
Valenti served as a special assistant to Johnson for nearly three years. He left in 1966 to become the Motion Picture Association of America's chief executive, a post he still holds.
Valenti, now 82, said he has "fought like a tiger to keep the government out of the industry," including proposals to regulate movie content. Nonetheless, he keeps a close eye on films about Kennedy's assassination, and fiercely contests those that pose conspiracy theories.
Valenti said he was angered by a documentary aired this week on the History Channel that alleged Johnson helped plot Kennedy's assassination. Valenti called it the "slimiest piece of garbage I've ever seen on television."
The History Channel has said it wasn't saying the Johnson theory was correct, and that it was meant to present a point of view.