UPI's White House Correspondent Merriman Smith was in the motorcade, in a press car four cars behind the President John F. Kennedy's open limousine as he drove through Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, the last ride of his life.

As the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository, Smith heard three loud bangs, which he recognized as gunfire. Sitting in the middle of the front seat, Smith grabbed the car's radio-telephone and called the Dallas bureau. He spoke to Southwest Division Editor Jack Fallon, who dictated a bulletin to staff editor Don Smith.

Toward the end of the bulletin it stated "Flash, Kennedy seriously wounded/Perhaps seriously/Perhaps fatally by assasins bullet."

See the original bulletin here.

Teletype operator Jim Tolbert filed the bulletin, which gave the world the first news that shots had been fired at Kennedy's motorcade. Hampton phoned a police dispatcher, who confirmed the three shots and said there was a rumor the president had been hit.

The press car followed the president's limousine as it raced to Parkland Hospital. As Smith ran up to the limousine parked at the emergency entrance, he saw Kennedy face down on the back seat, with Jacqueline Kennedy cradling her arms around the president's head.

Smith saw secret service agent Clint Hill, who was guarding Jacqueline during the Dallas motorcade, and asked him about Kennedy. The agent responded: "He's dead."

Scroll through the images to see images of the late president mere hours and even minutes before his assasination. Below are some of his quotes.

"Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

-President Kennedy's commencement address at American University, June 10, 1963

"If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can make the world safe for diversity."
- President Kennedy's commencement address at American University, June 10, 1963

"Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all."
- JFK's remarks upon presenting the NASA Distinguished Service Medal to astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, in the Flower Garden of the White House, May 21, 1963

"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death."
- JFK's remarks at the opening of a USIA Transmitter in Greenville, N.C., February 8, 1963

"Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life."
- John F. Kennedy

"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
- JFK's address at St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt, Germany, June 25, 1963