JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (125 page)

[
382
].
WCH
, vol. 3, pp. 250-51, 255;
Warren Report
, pp. 151-52.

[
383
].
Warren Report
, p. 151.

[
384
].
WCH
, vol. 3, p. 251.

[
385
]. Ibid., p. 274. According to what Oswald told his interrogators, he was already drinking the Coca Cola when Patrolman Baker came into the lunchroom (
Warren Report
, p. 600)—which would have made even more implausible his transition from “the sniper’s nest” in time to be seen by Baker. In a handwritten statement, Baker himself wrote, “I saw a man standing in the lunch room, drinking a Coke.” However, he crossed out “drinking a Coke” (Commission Exhibit No. 3076,
WCH
, vol. 26, p. 677).

[
386
].
WCH
, vol. 3, p. 263.

[
387
].
Warren Report
, p. 152.

[
388
]. Summers,
Not in Your Lifetime,
p. 60.

[
389
]. “Was Oswald in Window?”, p. 13A. FBI interview of Mrs. R. E. Arnold, November 26, 1963, by Special Agent Richard E. Harrison (File Number DL 89-43. RG 272, Records of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, Entry 10, Box 2).

[
390
]. “Was Oswald in Window?” ibid.

[
391
]. David W. Belin,
November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury
(New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1973), p. 466.

[
392
]. Ibid. Also David W. Belin,
Final Disclosure: The Full Truth about the Assassination of President Kennedy
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), p. 204.

[
393
]. Weisberg,
Whitewash II
, p. 24.

[
394
].
Warren Report
, p. 144.

[
395
]. Ibid.

[
396
]. Mark Lane,
Rush to Judgment
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), p. 83.

[
397
].
WCH
, vol. 3, p. 144.

[
398
]. Commission Exhibit No. 1311,
WCH,
vol. 22, p. 484. Gerald D. McKnight,
Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), pp. 109-10. Given the sixth-floor window’s physical facts, the Warren Commission conceded finally that its star witness, Howard Brennan, was wrong and that “most probably” the man in the window was “either sitting or kneeling.”
Warren Report
, p. 144. Nevertheless, the
Warren Report
asserted valiantly that Brennan, looking up at the sixth-floor window, could still have determined that a less visible shooter was 5’10” tall: “Brennan could have seen enough of the body of a kneeling or squatting person to estimate his height.” Ibid., p. 145.

[
399
]. Ibid., pp. 19, 156.

[
400
]. Ibid., pp. 151, 154.

[
401
]. Ibid., p. 157.

[
402
]. Ibid., p. 157-63.

[
403
]. Ibid., p. 162.

[
404
]. Ibid., pp. 162-63.
WCH
, vol. 22, p. 86, Commission Exhibit 1119-A.

[
405
].
Warren Report
, p. 162.
WCH
, vol. 22, p. 86.

[
406
].
WCH
, vol. 6, p. 438.

[
407
].
Warren Report
, pp. 163-65, 653-54.

[
408
]. Ibid., p. 165.
WCH
, vol. 7, p. 439; vol. 24, pp. 432-33, Commission Exhibit 2017.

[
409
].
Warren Report
, p. 648.

[
410
]. Ibid., pp. 5-6.

[
411
]. Ibid., p. 6.

[
412
]. Ibid., pp. 176-79.
WCH
, vol. 22, p. 86.

[
413
].
Warren Report
, pp. 159, 252.

[
414
]. Ibid., p. 604.

[
415
]. Ibid., pp. 157-59.

[
416
]. Craig interview, video
Two Men in Dallas
.

[
417
]. Kurtz,
Crime of the Century
, p. 132.

[
418
]. Craig,
When They Kill a President
, p. 9. What was the plotters’ purpose in making “Lee Harvey Oswald” so visible at this point—by his departing from the front of the Texas School Book Depository minutes after the assassination in a vehicle driven by “a husky looking Latin”? We can recall that Oswald was set up as a Cuban-and-Soviet-connected assassin, by the introduction of false evidence to implicate him step by step, from Mexico City to Dallas, as a Communist conspirator. His being driven away from the Depository by a “husky looking Latin” was consistent with his having Cuban connections. After the new president Lyndon Johnson pulled back from exposing such a CIA-doctored Communist conspiracy, Oswald’s faked Cuban and Soviet connections had to be suppressed or read innocently: his visits and phone calls to the Cuban and Soviet consulates in Mexico City, his letter received on November 18 by the Soviet Embassy in Washington, his accompanying two friends who tried to charter a plane from Wayne January for a November 22 flight toward Cuba, and his departure from the Depository with a “husky looking Latin” driving the car. As we shall see, even Jack Ruby’s (now little-known) involvement in the 1950s as a gunrunner to Fidel Castro could be used, if necessary, to implicate the young man (a second Oswald?) who carried the gun case from Ruby’s truck up the grassy knoll. Yet every such connection with a jettisoned Communist conspiracy scenario had to be covered up in the end for the sake of the Warren Commission’s lone-assassin story. It all said too much about both the composite scapegoat and the domestic intelligence network that was writing his story.

[
419
].
WCH
, vol. 6, p. 444.

[
420
]. Ibid., p. 443.

[
421
]. Ibid., p. 438.

[
422
]. An FBI agent walked the distance from Oswald’s boarding house, 1026 North Beckley, to the point where Tippit was shot, near Tenth and Patton, in twelve minutes.
WCH,
vol. 24, p. 18, CE 1987. A Secret Service agent also did it in twelve minutes. Commission Document 87 in Dale Myers,
With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J. D. Tippit
(Milford, Mich.: Oak Cliff Press, 1998), p. 514. The
Warren Report
, barely including the three or four minutes Oswald spent in his room, states: “If Oswald left his roominghouse shortly after 1 p.m. and walked at a brisk pace, he would have reached 10th and Patton shortly after 1:15 p.m. [just in time to shoot Tippit]” (p. 165). If, as subsequent investigation would show, Oswald was spotted walking west on 10th just a minute before the shooting, an additional 1.5 minutes would have been needed to put him in position to do so, making the minimum walk time 13.5 minutes. Myers, p. 665. All these Warren-Commission-derived calculations assume, however, that there was only one Oswald involved in “Oswald’s Oak Cliff movements.” That this is a false assumption can be seen from the testimony of Butch Burroughs, Bernard Haire, Wes Wise, T. F. White, and Robert G. Vinson in the pages that follow.

[
423
]. Ibid., p. 444. When Earlene Roberts saw that the police car that stopped and honked was 107, instead of 170 (a car that she was familiar with), she was able to remember the number from its having the same digits as the car she knew. She said she confused the number in her retelling (CE 2781 in
WCH
, vol. 26, p. 165; vol. 6, p. 443), but was clear in the end (from its having the same digits in a different order) that the correct car number was 107.

[
424
].
WCH
, vol. 24, p. 460, Commission Exhibit 2045. Norman Redlick of the Warren Commission staff followed up Earlene Roberts’s identification of the police car as number 107 by phoning the Dallas Police Department with an inquiry “as to the location of police car number 107 on November 22, 1963.” Ibid. In an August 4, 1964, letter in response, Charles Batchelor, Dallas Assistant Chief of Police, informed Redlick:

“Investigation reveals that the Dallas Police Department did not have a car with this number on the date in question. We had a 1962 model Ford carrying this number which was sold on April 17, 1963, to Mr. Elvis Blount, a used car dealer in Sulphur Springs, Texas. Before sale, all signs and numbers were removed from the car and the areas involved were repainted.