Reclaiming History (198 page)

Arnold told both the
Dallas Morning News
reporter and Summers that the FBI report was wrong and the agent misquoted her. Being misquoted, of course, is not uncommon, but it is somewhat unlikely the FBI agent would have misquoted her on not just one but three significant parts of her story. It should be noted on her behalf that this was an FBI report of an interview with her, not a statement signed by Mrs. Arnold. But on March 18, 1964, she did give two FBI agents a signed statement that made no reference to seeing Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom, not mentioning the incident at all, or even that she thought she might have seen him on the first floor. The only reference to Oswald is her saying, “I did not see Lee Harvey Oswald at the time President Kennedy was shot.”
⁹⁶
Conspiracy theorists like author Howard Roffman claim that Mrs. Arnold was not asked about seeing Oswald
before
the shooting, but was only responding to the specific question of whether she saw Oswald
at the time of the shooting
, and therefore her reply has no relevance to the issue of whether she saw Oswald in the lunchroom before the assassination. Roffman adds, “There is no reason to expect that the agents who obtained the statements would have sought any further detail, and the final reports reveal that indeed none was sought.”
⁹⁷

But that’s not true. Although the Warren Commission asked the FBI to interview all of the Depository employees and ask them six specific questions,
⁹⁸
many of the respondents volunteered information that was not requested, including the fact that they had not seen Oswald
at any time
on November 22.
⁹⁹
In fact, two of the four women who accompanied Mrs. Arnold outside—Virgie Rackley and Judy Johnson—reported that they did not see Oswald
at any time
that day.
¹⁰⁰
Obviously, Carolyn Arnold had an opportunity in March of 1964 to report seeing Oswald on the morning of the assassination, and common sense would dictate that she would have, had she actually seen him. It may simply be that by 1964 she had decided that she was wrong about catching a “fleeting glimpse” of Oswald. But fifteen years later, Arnold, who had to know by then (the conspiracy theorists had made it well known to the world) that Oswald claimed he was having lunch at the time of the assassination, comes up,
for the very first time
, with her allegation of seeing Oswald eating lunch inside the second-floor lunchroom just before the shooting in Dealey Plaza.

Quite apart from all the inconsistencies in Mrs. Arnold’s story, it is also not believable because there is a mountain of evidence conclusively proving that Oswald shot Kennedy at 12:30 p.m. (and therefore would not likely be having lunch on the second floor at 12:25 p.m., but would be on the sixth floor getting ready for his murderous mission),
and because Arnold is the only witness who claims to have seen Oswald in the lunchroom on the second floor, or on the first floor
(Arnold’s 1963 statement)
shortly before the assassination or at any time between noon and 12:30
. (Piper says he saw him at noon.) The Warren Commission took statements from several Book Depository employees, some of whom had lunch in the second-floor lunchroom on the day of the assassination, where the office personnel normally had their lunch, and some of whom had lunch in the domino room on the first floor, where the regular workers (like Oswald) usually ate their lunch. Although the Commission attorneys could have done a better job in asking specific questions of each of them as to precisely when and where each had lunch that day and whether Oswald was in their presence, it is very inferable (e.g., “Did you see [Oswald] at
all
on November 22nd?” Answer: “I never did see him”)
¹⁰¹
from each of their testimonies that none of them saw Oswald during their lunch break starting at noon up to the time of the assassination at 12:30 p.m.
¹⁰²

So again, the bottom line is that no Book Depository employee other than Mrs. Arnold claims to have seen Oswald on the first or second floor between 12:00 and 12:30 p.m. And she claimed she did, for the first time, fifteen years after the assassination.

Additionally destructive of Mrs. Arnold’s fifteen-year-old claim, Mrs. Pauline Sanders, a fifty-five-year-old clerk-accountant at the Depository, reported
leaving the second-floor lunchroom
at “approximately 12:20 p.m.” to await the president’s arrival in front of the building. So here we have an employee who was actually in the lunchroom at the precise time that Carolyn Arnold claimed to have seen Oswald there. Yet Mrs. Sanders told the FBI that although she knew Oswald “by sight,” she did not see him “
at any time
” on November 22, 1963.
¹⁰³
Obviously, there’s no reason or basis to give any credibility at all to the statement Carolyn Arnold made fifteen years after the assassination.

One final observation about the contention that someone other than Oswald was at the sixth-floor sniper’s nest shooting at Kennedy. There is no record of any Book Depository employee seeing a stranger or strangers in the building on the morning of the assassination. In fact, sixty-four Book Depository employees gave signed statements affirmatively declaring that they saw no stranger or strangers in the building that morning. Only one employee, Danny Arce, said that around 11:45 a.m. he saw an “elderly white man” around eighty years old at the entrance of the building. The man asked Arce to direct him to a restroom. Arce did, saying the man was feeble and could “hardly make it up the steps.” Five minutes later the man left the building and Arce saw him enter an old Buick with three women in it and drive off.
¹⁰⁴
Some sinister stranger.

So if it wasn’t Oswald who shot Kennedy from the sixth-floor window, and no stranger was in the building at the time, it must have been some other Book Depository employee, right? But who? Charles Givens? James Jarman? Victoria Adams? (Why not? Women can pull triggers too, you know.) Or maybe there was a stranger in the building who shot Kennedy from the sixth-floor window, and like his counterpart, the grassy knoll gunman, he had the unprecedented ability to become invisible. Or then again, maybe he exists only in the minds of desperate conspiracy theorists.

A
few Dealey Plaza witnesses gave statements of observing men on the upper floors of the Book Depository Building, which, if true, would support the conclusion that whoever shot Kennedy from the building may have had someone else with him. Since this would conflict 100 percent with the Warren Commission’s conclusion of no conspiracy, it arguably spills over and throws into question the Commission’s main conclusion that Oswald killed Kennedy, and I am therefore including this discussion under the “evidence of Oswald’s innocence” rubric. Undoubtedly, a fact that has contributed greatly to the confusion about men on the upper floors is that three Book Depository employees—Harold Norman, Bonnie Ray Williams, and James Jarman—were watching the presidential motorcade go by from the fifth floor (Norman and Williams at the double-windows directly below the sniper’s nest window Oswald was at, Jarman at the double-window immediately to their west) and no Dealey Plaza witness who happened to see them or Oswald in these windows before the shooting commenced would have had any reason at all to make a mental note of exactly who was at what window, and whether they were on the fourth, fifth, or sixth floor. (See the photo section for a photo of Bonnie Ray Williams on the left and Harold Norman on the right in the half-opened double-windows on the southeasternmost side of the fifth floor. The photo, by
Dallas Morning News
photographer Tom Dillard, was taken within seconds following the third shot.
¹⁰⁵
Note that the sniper’s nest window, as opposed to the double-windows below, is only one-quarter open—the bottom quarter.
¹⁰⁶
)

The most famous (and most widely quoted by conspiracy theorists) of all the Dealey Plaza witnesses who claim they saw people and happenings on the upper floors of the Book Depository Building that differ from the weight of the evidence and conclusion of the Warren Commission is Arnold Rowland. Rowland was a clearly intelligent and fairly articulate eighteen-year-old high school student who was watching the motorcade with his wife in front of the sheriff’s office on the east side of Houston Street. While waiting for the president’s arrival, they discussed the security measures being taken to protect the president, noting the number of police officers in the Plaza.
¹⁰⁷

Rowland spoke to several members of law enforcement in Dealey Plaza right after the shooting. It appears he first spoke to Dallas deputy sheriff Roger Craig. Craig testified that Rowland told him that around 12:15 p.m., he saw
two
men, one holding a rifle with a telescopic sight on it, walking back and forth two windows over from the west side of the sixth floor, not the east side where the sniper’s nest was located. He assumed they were Secret Service agents. When he looked back a few minutes later, he only saw the man with the rifle.
¹⁰⁸
In Craig’s report filed the day after the assassination, he not only does not mention the Rowlands, he makes no reference to anyone claiming to have seen two men (one with a rifle) on the sixth floor of the Depository moments before the shooting.
¹⁰⁹
C. L. “Lummie” Lewis, the Dallas deputy sheriff who escorted the Rowlands to the sheriff’s office to make a statement,
did
mention the Rowlands in his report of November 23, noting that Arnold Rowland “saw man in bldg about 15 min before shooting with a gun. Wife Barbara was with him,” but not one single word about Arnold Rowland seeing a second man.
¹¹⁰
Rowland then told Dallas police detective F. M. Turner that he saw a white man with a rifle that had a telescopic sight standing in the background of an open window on the southwest side of the sixth floor, but made no reference to seeing any second man on the floor.
¹¹¹
And he told Forrest Sorrels, the special agent in charge of the Dallas office of the Secret Service, that he saw a man (he again made no reference to seeing any second man) standing with a rifle several feet back from an open window that was two windows from the westernmost side of the building. (If Rowland told him what floor, Sorrels didn’t say.) The man, whom Rowland said he “could not” identify, was holding the rifle, per Rowland, at the ridiculous formal military position of “port arms.”
¹¹²

Rowland was taken inside the sheriff’s office that same afternoon, where he gave a notarized affidavit that reiterated what he had told Turner and Sorrels, except that now the man was holding the rifle at the military position of “parade rest,” but again made no reference to seeing a second man.
¹¹³
In two separate FBI interviews on the day of the assassination and the following day, Rowland told the FBI essentially the same story, again not referring to a second man.
¹¹⁴
On November 24, Rowland gave a signed statement to the FBI. He said he only saw the man “momentarily” on the sixth floor, and this time he was once again back to holding the rifle at “port arms.” Again, there was no reference to seeing anyone else in the window, or anywhere else on the sixth floor.
¹¹⁵

Three and a half months later, in his March 10, 1964, testimony before the Warren Commission, Rowland repeated the essence of his previous statements about the man with the rifle he claims he saw around 12:15 p.m. He definitely was holding the “high-powered” rifle, he said, at “port arms,” not parade rest, either one of which would be a laughably inappropriate way to hold a rifle for a man about to kill the president. But the devil was in the details he added and his additional observations.
*
Unbelievably, even though he told the FBI he only saw the man “momentarily” (indeed, he told the Commission that he told his wife about the sighting of the man immediately after he saw him, and when she looked up the man was already “gone from our vision”), he gave the Commission incredible details. The man had “dark hair” that was “well-combed or close cut,” was a “light Latin or Caucasian,” had on a “very light-colored shirt” that was “open at the collar” and (get this) “unbuttoned about halfway,” was wearing “a polo shirt under” the shirt, and was wearing “dark slacks or blue jeans.” Rowland didn’t mention the state of the man’s shoeshine, but only because he couldn’t see more than “six inches below his waist.” This was not looney bird time. This clearly was fabrication time. “There was nothing dark on the man’s face, no mustache,” Rowland testified, but he allowed that “there could have been a scar, if it hadn’t been a dark scar.”

Rowland now added, for the first time that has been recorded in any statement of his, that on the same floor the man with a rifle was on, he saw, around five minutes before the shooting, an elderly “colored man…hanging out the window…that they said the shots were fired from,” the “southeast corner” of the building, and that on the floor directly below the colored man, he saw “two Negro women” (obviously, the two black men, Harold Norman and Bonnie Ray Williams) looking out adjacent windows.
¹¹⁶
But when his wife was asked by Warren Commission counsel if her husband “ever told you that he had seen anyone else on the sixth floor other than this man with the gun,” she responded, “No, sir.”

“Has he ever told you that he told anyone else that he saw anyone else on the sixth floor?”

“No, sir.”
¹¹⁷

It was obvious that Rowland had no credibility left to squander, but Rowland tried hard to prove this conclusion wrong in the remainder of his testimony. He said he saw “three women” and a “couple of boys” on the freeway overpass (though we know from the testimony of several witnesses that neither were there), and that “
all
the officers…50, maybe more” converged on the railroad yards behind the picket fence right after the shooting
¹¹⁸
(again, we know this is not true).

Since no one else but Arnold Rowland claimed to see a man holding a rifle on the west side of the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, and since there is no physical evidence that Kennedy was shot from a window on the west side of the building (e.g., no cartridge cases were on the floor), and certainly no evidence at all that Oswald had any accomplice helping him that day, there appear to be several possible explanations of what happened here. Rowland may have seen Oswald himself holding the rifle, around fifteen minutes before the shooting, on the west side of the sixth floor. Another possibility is that Rowland was simply mistaken as to what he thought he saw. This would be consistent with the well-known phenomenon that whenever there are multiple witnesses to an event, almost invariably there is very wide divergence as to what people think they saw. But if I were to guess, I’d say that Rowland made the story up for his wife, and then later ran with it, exaggerating and embroidering his yarn along the way. Rowland said that just prior to his alleged sighting of the man in the window, he and his wife “were discussing…the different security precautions. I mean, it was a very important person who was coming and we were aware of the policemen around everywhere, and especially in positions where they would be able to watch crowds…
We had seen in the movies before where they had security men up in windows…with rifles
.”
¹¹⁹
His wife, Barbara, confirms this conversation.
¹²⁰
Further support that Rowland may have made his sighting up is that it doesn’t ring true—that he immediately told his wife of his sighting, but when she looked up shortly thereafter, the man who had been holding his rifle at port arms, no less, suddenly vanished, her husband telling her “the man had moved back.”
¹²¹
True, his wife was nearsighted and she wasn’t wearing her glasses at the time, but she said she “saw the window plainly, and I saw some people…looking out of some other windows.”
¹²²