Reclaiming History (111 page)

I encountered this misrepresentation on the alignment of Kennedy’s and Connally’s bodies to each other at the trial in London. On direct examination, Gerry Spence had Dr. Cyril Wecht testify about a schematic illustration introduced as a defense exhibit and supposedly based on the Zapruder film. It was the Groden sketch.
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Wecht testified, “The Zapruder film, which I have seen countless times, shows that the two men were seated in essentially a straight line, the governor
directly in front of the president
.” (On cross-examination, I introduced an illustration based on a photograph taken by Dealey Plaza spectator Hugh Betzner
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showing Connally not directly in front of Kennedy, as Wecht asserted, but to the president’s left, and his body, as opposed to the president’s, being turned fairly sharply to the right.) Using the Groden sketch, Spence asked Wecht to tell the jury what the bullet that struck Kennedy in the back would have had to do to hit Connally. Answer: “When it [the bullet] exited from the front of the president’s throat, it would have continued in a straight line. There’s simply no way possible for that bullet to have entered Governor Connally’s posterior right axillary area, which is a fancy way for saying behind the right armpit. If it hit him behind the right armpit, it would have had to come out of the president’s neck and in some way veered back to the right and then stopped and turned around and started once again in a path towards the left. Bullets do not react that way, not even in comic books.”
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On cross-examination I explored what happened to the bullet
after
it exited Kennedy’s throat.

“Now, Doctor, if the bullet was coming on a downward path as it entered the presidential limousine, as you say it was, is that correct?”

Answer: “Yes.”

Question: “And it missed Governor Connally, is that correct?”

Answer: “Yes.”

Question: “Why didn’t it hit the driver of the car or do any damage to the car?”

Answer: “Mr. Bugliosi, you are conveniently ignoring the fact that Elm Street is on a downward path which progresses in a more downward fashion as it goes away from the Texas [Book Depository] Building; and therefore, as the car is going downward and the bullet is going downward, then the declination, the angle downward of the car more than compensates for the slight downward angle of the bullet.”

Question: “Oh, but Doctor, please, the degree of declination of Elm Street is 3 degrees,
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and certainly the bullet [coming] from the second floor [where Wecht had speculated the assassin was] would have been 3 degrees higher on a horizontal plane than the presidential limousine.”

Answer: “Not considerably higher.”

When I asked Wecht once again why that bullet, after entering Kennedy’s body, did not go on to hit anyone inside the presidential limousine or cause any damage to the interior of the limousine, he responded, “What happened?…Where is it? You’re asking me to be responsible for the bullets in this case.”

Question: “I’m asking you what happened to the…bullet.”
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Answer: “I can’t tell you where all the bullets are. I didn’t conduct the investigation.”

After I firmed up that he agreed the bullet passed through soft tissue on a “straight line through the President’s body,” yet he believed it did not hit Governor Connally, I derisively accepted the defense’s notion of the prosecution’s magic bullet by saying, “Doctor, the prosecution has its own magic bullet, and frankly, we’re jealous of it…Now you’ve got
your
magic bullet, a bullet that is coming on a downward path into the presidential limousine, 2,000 feet a second, passes through President Kennedy’s body…and it misses the driver and it misses the car. It must have zigzagged to the left?”

Answer: “No. It need not have zigzagged to the left.”

Question: “Did it broadjump over the car?”

Answer: “No…It need not have performed any remarkable feats.”

Question: “But you don’t know what happened to it?”

Answer: “No, I do not. There is a lot of things I don’t know about what happened to it in this case.”
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If we’re to believe Dr. Wecht and his fellow conspirators on this matter, after the bullet passed through Kennedy’s body, it apparently vanished without a trace.

To further illustrate how untenable Dr. Wecht’s position was, I proceeded to underline in the jury’s mind how vulnerable he was in being the only one of nine pathologists on the HSCA medical panel to reject the single-bullet theory. I drew his attention to his testimony before the committee that his conclusion, as opposed to that of the other eight, was so obviously correct that it “is not in the realm of interpretative or speculative or conjectural opinion, but is related to things which I truly believe do not even require the expertise of a forensic pathologist to see and interpret.”
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Question: “Well, Doctor,” I then asked, “it seems to me that you’re saying that if the other eight pathologists disagreed with you, and they did, is that correct?”

Answer: “Yes.”

Question: “It seems to me, Doctor, that by necessary implication they are either hopelessly and utterly incompetent—if you say it’s so obvious anyone can see it, [you] don’t even have to be a doctor—or they deliberately suppressed the truth from the American people.”

Answer: “That is up to other people to determine.”

Question: “No, I’m asking, is there any other alternative to these two?”

Answer: “Yes, there is a third alternative, which would be a hybrid to some extent to the deliberate suppression, sir. To some extent, a subconscious desire not to injure or aggrieve the government [to] whom they look for various research grants and appointments and lectureships at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and a variety of reasons.”

When I asked Wecht whether it wasn’t true that these other doctors were “of good reputation and standing?” he responded, “You bring them here, sir, and present them to the jury. I can only present my testimony, show the pictures for his Honor and the jury. You bring the other eight in and let them present their views.” (I did have one in London, Dr. Petty.)

Raising my voice considerably in irritation and disbelief, I said, “So of the nine pathologists, Dr. Wecht, you’re the only one who had the honor and the integrity and the professional responsibility to tell the truth to the American people. Is that correct, Doctor?”

Dr. Wecht shouted back, “I’d prefer to put it this way. [I’m the only one] who had the courage to say that the king was nude and had no clothes on. Yes. That’s correct.”
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Wecht had given me the answer that I was hoping to elicit from him in my line of questioning, and I was confident that his final words weren’t helpful to him in the eyes of the jury.

If, as the conspiracy theorists allege, the bullet that exited the president’s throat did not go on to hit Connally, it would have inevitably gone on to hit the driver or caused some significant penetrating damage to the interior of the car. Yet no such damage was found when the limousine was examined by Secret Service and FBI agents at the White House garage on the evening of the assassination. So to accept the proposition that the bullet that hit Connally didn’t first hit Kennedy, you’d necessarily have to accept the further proposition that once the Kennedy bullet passed through his body, it literally, as I’ve said, vanished into thin air. When Robert Frazier of the Firearms Identification Unit of the FBI was asked by Warren Commission counsel what effect a whole bullet exiting Kennedy’s throat and not hitting Connally “would have had on any…portion of the automobile which it might have struck in the continuation of its flight,” Frazier answered, “In my opinion it would have penetrated any…metal surface and, of course, any upholstery surface.”

Question: “Was there any evidence in any portion of the car that the automobile was struck by a bullet which exited from the president’s neck under the circumstances which I have just asked you to assume?”

Answer: “No, sir, there was not.”

Question: “And had there been any such evidence would your examination of the automobile have uncovered such an indication or such evidence?”

Answer: “Yes, sir, I feel that it would have.”
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Since the bullet, after exiting Kennedy’s throat on a downward trajectory, never struck the interior of the car,
it must have struck someone in the car
. And other than Kennedy, only Connally was hit by a bullet. This simple logic cannot be controverted. And the Warren Commission’s most vocal proponent of the “single-bullet theory,”
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Arlen Specter, told
Life
magazine in a 1966 interview, “Where, if it [the bullet that hit Kennedy in the back and exited his throat] didn’t hit Connally, did that bullet go? This is the single most compelling reason why I concluded that one bullet hit both men.”
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In other words, since we know that the bullet exiting Kennedy’s throat did not go on and hit the interior of the car, or Mrs. Kennedy, or Mrs. Connally, or either of the two Secret Service agents in the front seat, the only remaining place it could have possibly gone was into Connally’s body.

To this very day, Arlen Specter (now a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania) has been the recipient of endless vitriol and condemnation by conspiracy theorists. The story of one of them is instructive. Andrew Purdy, the law student at the University of Virginia who brought conspiracy theorist Robert Groden to speak at his school in 1976, told me, “Groden told us the single-bullet theory was a complete fraud perpetrated by Arlen Specter, and most of us bought what Groden said hook, line, and sinker. I was convinced Specter was a liar and could never pass a polygraph test. In fact, I became the head of a group of around a hundred law students who lobbied Congress, by letters and actually knocking on their doors, to reopen the investigation [of the assassination].” When Congress, by its House Select Committee on Assassinations, did so in 1977, Purdy got a plum assignment as one of the leading assistant counsels to the committee, ready to expose the fraud and get the truth out. “But amazingly and astonishingly,” he said, “when I closely looked at and examined all the evidence, I came around full circle. I am now certain the single-bullet theory is correct. And if I ever see Arlen Specter, I will apologize to him.”
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An extension of the above argument comes at the question from a different direction and focuses on the allegation that the bullet that hit Connally
only
hit him: to my knowledge, everyone, even the extremists on the conspiracy fringes, agrees that Governor Connally was shot in his upper right back, not from the side or right front, as most conspiracy theorists believe Kennedy was. Some representative examples: “[the] bullet struck Governor Connally in the back”;
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“the missile that hit the Governor in the back”;
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“the [bullet] entered Connally’s body at the rear of his right armpit”;
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and “this shot…struck the Governor in the back.”
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And they likewise all agree that the bullet was proceeding from back to front, not right to left or left to right. For example: “[The bullet] exited by the right nipple,”
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and “the missile traversed Connally’s chest, blasting out approximately four inches of the [right] fifth rib and collapsing the right lung. It exited below the right nipple.”
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Indeed, when Governor Connally testified before the Warren Commission on April 21, 1964, he took his shirt off in front of six out of the seven Commission members, General Counsel Lee Rankin, five assistant counsels, and four other observers, including Waggoner Carr, the attorney general of Texas, and Dr. Robert Shaw, the doctor who operated on him, and all looked at his wounds. As Arlen Specter, one of those present, put it, “It was perfectly plain as to the fact that the bullet had struck the governor in the back and had exited below the right nipple at a lower angle on the front of his body.”
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A question I have for the anti–single-bullet conspiracy theorists is that if Connally did not receive the wound to the upper right part of his back in the way that the Warren Commission and HSCA concluded he received it, then just how in the world did Connally receive a wound to his back from a bullet fired from his rear without the bullet having struck Kennedy (whose upper body completely covered, looking from the rear, the right upper part of Connally’s back, where he was hit) first? Who was it, if not Oswald, who fired this bullet that they say only hit Connally, and from what conceivable position in Dealey Plaza did he fire it?

2. A second powerful reason to believe in the validity of the single-bullet theory without any reference to the Zapruder film is the lack of any physical evidence supporting a second gunman. As has already been established,
three
shell casings ejected from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle were found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building beneath the southeasternmost window. If, indeed, a fourth shot had been fired that day (and hence, there was a second assassin), how is it possible that not one person, out of an estimated crowd of four to five hundred spectators in Dealey Plaza, saw a second gunman? Furthermore, how is it possible that a blanket search of the plaza by law enforcement agents right after the shooting failed to turn up any physical evidence of a second gunman (e.g., a shell casing, a fourth bullet, a second rifle, etc.)? Are we to believe, then, that the second gunman simply vanished into thin air? Not only he himself, but all
evidence
of his existence? Is that life in the real world? Or is that nonsense? Again, the lack of any physical evidence of a second gunman, all by itself, is extremely powerful evidence supporting the single-bullet theory.

3. Another fact that, all by itself, is virtually conclusive evidence proving the single-bullet theory is that the entrance wound in Governor Connally’s back was not circular, but oval. Drs. Charles Gregory and Robert Shaw, who attended Connally at Parkland Hospital, described the wound as “linear” and “elliptical” in shape,
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indicating that the bullet was out of alignment with its trajectory just before striking Connally’s body. The HSCA said that a factor which “significantly” influenced its conclusion that the bullet that struck Connally had first struck and passed through Kennedy “was the ovoid shape of the wound in the Governor’s back, indicating that the bullet had begun to tumble or yaw before entering. An ovoid wound is characteristic of one caused by a bullet that has passed through or glanced off an intervening object…The forensic pathology panel’s conclusions were consistent with the so-called single bullet theory advanced by the Warren Commission,” to wit, that one bullet had passed “through both President Kennedy and Governor Connally.”
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