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THEN IT WAS ABSOLUTE CHAOS. When I left the elevator and tried to get onto the main floor of the chamber, guards and security people were all over the place, blocking the exits and challenging reporters and legislators indiscriminately. Looking past the clustered heads of a group guarding the door through which I had tried to enter, I could see the gunman's form, sprawled near a shattered bench; a whiff of gunpowder lingered in the air. The shot-up chandelier hung in sad, damaged glitter above, while three Secret Ser vice agents with pistols exposed at the hip stood underneath, looking up to the gradually emptying visitors' gallery with alert eyes. It was hot, and an air of shocked depression hung over all.
Backing away, I moved along the hall, elbowing a path through the crowd as I listened to rapid, hysteria-edged discussions of the shooting. I learned that during the brief interval when I was blocked on the stairs leading from the press gallery, the Senator had been rushed off to the hospital, that the Negro Hickman, and his followers, had been rounded up and placed under arrest, and that now the visitors' gallery was being searched for a possible second gunman, and, some said, for bombs-news which heightened our tension.