The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (5 page)

JFK’s two closest aides, Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, both riding in the limousine behind JFK’s, said that two shots came from the right front of the motorcade—the area of the “grassy knoll” with its picket fence—and many other witnesses in Dealey Plaza also saw or heard shots from that area. These witnesses included Abraham Zapruder, who made the famous film of the assassination, standing to the left and in front of the grassy knoll, and who testified that he thought the shots “came from back of me.” According to investigative journalist Anthony Summers, “a dozen people were actually on the grassy knoll when the President was shot, and almost all of them believed some of the gunfire came from behind them, high up on the knoll itself,” though “many were never called by the Warren Commission.” He notes that even “sixteen people, in or outside the Book Depository, indicated some shooting came from the knoll.” While the number of shots claimed by all the known Dealey Plaza witnesses ranged from two to five, in 1966 author Josiah Thompson found that “with no exceptions, all those witnesses who were deep inside the Depository (either at work or in hallways) report hearing fewer than three shots”—either just one shot or two. When single bullet theory supporters claim that most people in Dealey Plaza heard three shots and that they came from the Book Depository, they’re including witnesses such as Powers and O’Donnell, who later admitted that they were pressured to change their testimony. It’s important to remember while reading this book that even before the release of 4.5 million pages of files, author Henry Hurt discovered in 1986 that “at least 60 witnesses claimed that the FBI in some way altered what the witnesses had reported.” Many more such claims have emerged since then, and the witness intimidation/alteration always favored the theory—stated as fact by the FBI within hours of the crime—that Oswald was the lone assassin.

JFK’s autopsy records and clothes show that his back wound was almost six inches below his collar. Even the 1964 attempt to restage the shooting by the FBI—which always slanted its investigation toward Oswald as a single assassin—depicted the wound on its test subject accurately, about six inches below the collar. The Warren volumes even included a photo of that FBI reenactment with the back wound accurately placed, yet the Commission ignored it when adopting the single bullet theory.

Any bullet fired from the sixth floor of the Book Depository that entered JFK’s back would have been traveling downward at a steep angle. Yet for the “lone nut/magic bullet theory” to work, that same bullet had to cause the wound just below JFK’s Adam’s apple—a wound that is significantly higher than the wound in JFK’s back. Even if the bullet somehow ricocheted off one of JFK’s bones, theoretically turning upward to exit JFK’s throat, it would have been impossible for the bullet to change course in midair to dive down to hit Connally. In 1997 Warren Commissioner Gerald Ford admitted to the Associated Press that he had changed the description of the “back wound” in the
Warren Report
into a “back of the neck” wound. Raising the back wound almost six inches made the single bullet theory appear more viable.

Anyone can disprove the single bullet theory by simply sitting a person (preferably a six-foot-tall male) in a chair. With your test subject in a chair, measure six inches below the top of his collar and put a mark there. Then put another small mark just below his Adam’s apple. You don’t even need to figure the exact downward angle of the bullet, which is a matter of some debate. The autopsy physician who probed JFK’s back wound said the downward angle was 45 to 60 degrees, but all experts agree that the angle was downward at least 15 to 20 degrees, possibly much more. On a normal-sized adult male,
the wound just under the Adam’s apple would be significantly higher than a back wound almost six inches below the collar. Thus the single bullet theory is physically impossible and should rightly be called the “magic bullet” theory. Historian Gerald D. McKnight points out:

A theory is a well-supported and well-tested hypothesis or set of hypotheses. [But] the [Warren] Commission’s one-bullet construction never met these demanding standards. It was an ad-hoc invention or fabrication to meet the Commission’s requirements for a lone-assassin, no conspiracy explanation of the Kennedy assassination.

Since that’s the case, this book will henceforth refer to the almost pristine bullet as the “magic bullet.”

Dr. McKnight devoted many pages of his acclaimed Warren Commission critique
Breach of Trust
to the many other reasons the “magic bullet” theory is impossible. Some of this information comes from files unavailable until recent years, but most of it has been known for decades yet ignored or glossed over by “magic bullet” theorists.

One obvious disproof of the “magic bullet” theory is visible to anyone watching the Zapruder film. Notice JFK, when he emerges from behind a sign, clearly shot in the throat as he raises his arms to his neck. At that exact instant—and for several moments more—John Connally is seen just as clearly holding his white Stetson hat with his right hand, even though the “magic bullet” has supposedly already smashed his rib and shattered his right wrist. In addition, doctors testified that more small bullet fragments were removed from Connally’s wounds than were missing from the almost pristine bullet. The amount of material missing from the “magic bullet” was about the weight of a postage stamp, far less than the weight of those bullet fragments.

As for JFK’s throat wound, the Dallas doctors called it a small wound of “entrance,” meaning JFK was shot from the front.
Chapter Sixteen
explains how that tiny (3–5mm) neat entrance wound seen by the Dallas doctors became the much larger, jagged wound seen in JFK’s Bethesda autopsy photos. Since the Bethesda doctors couldn’t find a bullet while probing JFK’s back wound during the autopsy, they were relieved to hear that the almost pristine “magic bullet” had been found in Dallas. However, Dr. David Osborne—later an Admiral and Deputy Surgeon General of the Navy—told Congressional investigators that he saw “an intact bullet roll . . . onto the autopsy table” when JFK was first removed from his casket, before the start of the official autopsy. “I had that bullet in my hand and looked at it,” he said, and it was “reasonably clean [and] unmarred,” but “the Secret Service took it.” An X-ray technician at the autopsy also saw “a pretty good-sized bullet . . . when we lifted [JFK] up . . . that’s when it came out.” The Commanding Officer of the Naval Medical School at the time, Captain John Stover, told two authors “there was a bullet in the Bethesda morgue.” However, the “magic bullet” wasn’t at Bethesda but many miles away at the FBI laboratory. Like so much other crucial evidence, including JFK’s brain, the Bethesda bullet vanished from the official record, for reasons explained in later chapters.

FBI and other scientific claims that the “magic bullet” could be matched to the same batch of ammunition as the bullet fragments found in JFK’s limo were finally debunked to the scientific community in 2007 by Texas A&M researchers Cliff Spiegelman and Dennis James. When the Army provided the Warren Commission with its top wound ballistic expert, Dr. Joseph R. Dolce, he and his associate Dr. Fredrick Light Jr. said that the “magic bullet” couldn’t “have shattered Connally’s wrist and still retained its virtually pristine condition.”
When they fired Oswald’s actual Mannlicher-Carcano “into ten cadaver wrists . . . in each and every instance the bullet was ‘markedly deformed’” and not pristine. Dolce and his tests were not mentioned in the
Warren Report
. Instead, Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter—the creator of the “magic bullet” theory—relied on a veterinarian’s tests, which involved shooting into horse meat, gelatin blocks, and goat carcasses, to “prove” his theory. Decades later, a wound ballistics expert said he was finally able to produce a relatively unmarred bullet after firing into a cadaver’s wrist, but only by reducing the bullet’s speed by half and not firing it through a rib first.

In a desperate attempt to make the “magic bullet” theory work, some authors claim that JFK was leaning very far forward in his seat or had his suit coat and shirt greatly bunched up along the back of his head, but photos and the Zapruder film show that that was clearly not the case. The bunching was minor, which is why the wound in the autopsy drawing and photograph lined up perfectly with the bullet holes in JFK’s shirt and suit coat, all almost six inches below the top of the collar. When computer animation was used in a major television special to try to make the “magic bullet” theory work, JFK’s neck and shoulders were so distorted that he almost didn’t look human. In one Discovery Channel special (not one of mine), when JFK’s shooting was restaged accurately, it showed that the bullet striking JFK in the back would have exited through his heart, not just below his Adam’s apple.

In addition, that Discovery crew had trouble getting its Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to fire, even though it had been worked on by a top gunsmith, unlike Oswald’s cheap mail-order rifle. The problem wasn’t just the rifle’s age, since a 1967 special by CBS had the same problems, even though CBS used a rifle that fired faster and was
in better condition than Oswald’s weapon. More than a third of the attempts had to be disqualified “because of trouble with the rifle,” as documented by author Michael T. Griffith. Not only that, but in the case of CBS, “not one of the eleven participating expert marksmen scored at least two hits (as the ‘magic bullet’ theory requires) on his first attempt. A majority, seven of them, failed to do so on ANY of their attempts. Oswald would have had only one attempt.”

Accounts supporting the “magic bullet” theory and Oswald as the lone assassin usually mention that Oswald earned a rating of “marksman” when he was in the Marines, leaving the impression that he was a crack shot. That’s an important part of the “magic bullet/lone nut” theory since in all the years since the assassination, no sharpshooter has ever duplicated the shooting attributed to Oswald on his first try and with an accurate moving target. However, the reality is that “marksman” is the lowest of the three Marine shooting titles. The lowest possible score on the test is 190, with the highest being 250. In other words, almost anyone could get a score of at least 190 and be considered a “marksman” on that test. Before Oswald left the Marines, he scored only one point above the minimum and sometimes missed not just the bull’s-eye but the entire target.

Finally, the evidence is clear that the “magic bullet” was not even found on Governor Connally’s stretcher. At Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, an hour and fifteen minutes after JFK was shot, Senior Engineer Darrell Tomlinson found the nearly pristine bullet. It was on one of two stretchers close together in a hallway, one of which had probably been used to transport Connally. The other hadn’t been used for either Kennedy or Connally but instead for either a female adult patient who had been “bleeding from the mouth” or a “two-and-a-half-year-old [patient] with a deep cut on his chin.”

Tomlinson initially told Arlen Specter that he had found the bullet on the stretcher that had NOT held Connally. But after being pressured and intimidated by Specter to reverse his testimony, Tomlinson claimed uncertainty, still refusing to say the bullet came from Connally’s stretcher. However, Dr. McKnight’s recent analysis of the testimony of Parkland nurse Jane C. Wester and orderly R. J. Jamison corroborates Tomlinson’s initial statement “and strongly supported the conclusion that” the bullet had NOT been found on Connally’s stretcher.

Both stretchers had probably been unattended for thirty minutes, in a hall where various people were milling about. The non-Connally stretcher might have had enough bloodstains to cause a person to think it had been Connally’s or even Kennedy’s stretcher. Someone could have easily planted the “magic bullet” to incriminate Oswald.

Around 1:30 p.m., about fifteen minutes before the “magic bullet” was discovered, two reliable witnesses at Parkland Hospital saw Jack Ruby, a lower-level member of Carlos Marcello’s organization. One of the two witnesses, journalist Seth Kantor, even spoke to Ruby, as he later told authorities and confirmed to me. However, Ruby later lied to authorities about the encounter, saying that he hadn’t gone to Parkland that day. That raises the question of why Ruby would deny his presence there—unless he was engaged in some illegal activity, such as planting evidence. Ruby might have planted the “magic bullet” or might have given it to someone else to plant. Regardless of who placed the pristine bullet on the non-Connally stretcher, it was used to link Oswald’s rifle to the shooting of JFK and Connally.

Since the Warren Commission’s version of the “magic bullet” theory is impossible to physically support and since someone planted
the bullet to incriminate Oswald—and much evidence and testimony shows that there were at least two shooters—where does that leave the
Warren Report
’s “lone nut” scenario?

THE
WARREN REPORT
went out of its way to stress that Oswald’s “commitment to Marxism and communism appears to have been another important factor in his motivation” to kill President Kennedy. The Commission related information saying that Oswald had become a Marxist/Communist when he was a teenager and had continued a fascination with Russia when he joined the United States Marines. According to the official story, after getting an early discharge by claiming he needed to financially provide for his mother, he defected to Russia in 1959. After marrying a Russian woman, Marina Prusakova, he returned to the United States in 1962. He worked at a photographic map firm in Dallas in the fall and moved to New Orleans in the spring to live with his uncle, after ordering the rifle and pistol he would allegedly use on November 22, 1963. Marina eventually joined him in New Orleans, where he worked for a relatively short time at a coffee company before being unemployed during August 1963. In that month he got a surprising amount of publicity for his local chapter of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

After sending Marina and their child to live with a friend in Dallas, Oswald made a mysterious trip to Mexico City, visiting the Russian and Cuban Embassies there before heading to Dallas himself. He lived for a time in a Dallas YMCA before moving to a rooming house in the Oak Cliff section of the city, visiting Marina on the weekends. He also got a job at the Texas School Book Depository, one of dozens of tall buildings that overlooked JFK’s planned motorcade route. From there, according to the
Warren Report
, he alone would
shoot JFK and soon after kill Dallas patrolman J. D. Tippit. From teenage Communist to Presidential assassin and murderer, Oswald’s story was readily accepted by an American audience in the middle of the Cold War, just one year after the tense nuclear showdown with Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis. For decades, authors ranging from Gerald Posner to Bill O’Reilly have repeated and expanded on this version of the story.