The Kennedy Half-Century (104 page)

21
. “Television: Why the Aliens Keep On Coming Back,”
Sunday Times
, November 14, 2004,
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/article389474.ece
 [accessed April 7, 2011].

22
. “John F. Kennedy’s Assassination Leaves a Legacy of Suspicion,” ABC News Poll: Who Killed JFK? November 9, 2003,
http://abcnews.go.com/images/pdf/937a1JFKAssassination.pdf
 [accessed April 8, 2011].

23
. Americans are now probably conditioned to believe conspiracy theories. A 2004 Zogby poll found that 49% of New Yorkers say that government officials knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance. See Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, “Conspiracy Theories,” Harvard University and University of Chicago Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series,
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585
 [accessed May 26, 2011].

24
. Telephone interview with Nancy Pelosi, May 26, 2011.

25
. The London Daily Mail Online, April 19, 2011,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378284/Secret-memo-shows-JFK-demanded-UFO-files-10-days-assassination.html
 [accessed April 19, 2011].

26
. Personal interview with Jerry Dealey, January 14, 2011, Dallas, Texas.

27
. The basement is mostly abandoned now, along with the old city jail where Oswald spent his last nights. It is obvious that the basement should have been cleared of all but police personnel and a small pool of reporters and cameras. But in 1963, the Dallas police made the fatal mistake of allowing a crowd to gather in the basement, large enough to enable the murder of the most historically significant prisoner they would ever hold.

28
. Kurtz,
Assassination Debates
, 23–26; William E. Scott,
November
22,
1963: A Reference Guide to the JFK Assassination
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999), 29; Warren Commission Hearings, vol. XXIV, CE 2011, p. 411, Mary Ferrell Foundation website,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do
 [accessed June 12, 2012].

29
. Interview with Bill and Gayle Newman, July 10, 2003, conducted by Stephen Fagin, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas.

30
. Almost forty-seven years after the assassination, when I interviewed the Newmans in Dallas on September 24, 2010, Bill Newman clarified that he thought the shots had come from behind him, but not necessarily from the grassy knoll. “What I try not to do, if I’m talking to a group of people … and I make the statement that I thought the shot came from behind—the ‘shot’ meaning the head shot—it was a visual impact that it had on me more so than the noise. Seeing the side of the president’s head blow off, see the president go across the car seat into Mrs. Kennedy’s lap, in her direction, it gave me the sensation that the shots were coming from directly behind me where I was standing. So, I said ‘behind,’ and I leave it at that, and then a lot of times, the interviewer or whoever it may be will say, ‘Behind to your left?’ meaning the School Book Depository. ‘Behind to your right?’ meaning the picket fence. And I just leave it. I won’t define it.”

31
. “Full Gayle & Bill Newman Interview by Jay Watson,” YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fPpLegSn1k
 [accessed April 14, 2011]. Officer D. V. Harkness, who was interviewed by the Warren Commission, recalled a similar scenario. “The first shot, Kennedy I think grabbed like this (motions). I was looking right at him. And then the next one he jerked (motions), [and] that was the second shot. And then [the] third one went wild, I think, I don’t know.” Interview with David V. Harkness, June 29, 2006, conducted by Stephen Fagin, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. This is quite different from the assessment of the Newmans. In fact, witnesses reported many combinations of the number of shots, the impacts of the shots, and the directions from which they came.

32
. Interview with Bill and Gayle Newman, July 10, 2003, conducted by Stephen Fagin, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. Also, personal interview with the author, September 24, 2010, Dallas. We often forget the impact that a trauma like 11/22 can have on a family. Bill Newman told me that for several nights following the assassination, he huddled his family together in one bedroom, his 20-gauge shotgun nearby. “My concern was that [the shooter] might have thought we were a threat and could have testified against them in court.” Their young son, Billy, asked his mother several days later, “Why did they shoot that man? Did you see all that blood?”

33
. E-mail from Gary Mack, June 29, 2011.

34
. Personal interview with H. B. McLain, March 17, 2011.

35
. Interview with Marilyn Sitzman, June 29, 1993, conducted by Wes Wise with Bob Porter, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas; “Abraham Zapruder Film,” Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza website,
http://www.jfk.org/go/collections/item-detail?fedoraid=sfm:1999.042
 [accessed April 25, 2011].

36
. “Filming Kennedy: Home Movies From Dallas, Elsie Dorman,”
http://www.jfk.org/go/exhibits/home-movies/elsie-dorman
 [accessed April 15, 2011]; Vincent Bugliosi,
Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), endnotes on enclosed compact disc, 155, 256–57.

37
. The Towners did not come forward voluntarily during the commission’s investigation. On the other hand, the commission could have been much more aggressive in urging
witnesses to do so and in attempting to identify witnesses from the many photographs taken in and around Dealey Plaza. The Towners’ story and pictures were featured in the November 24, 1967, edition of
Life
magazine. See “Nov. 22, 1963, Dallas: Photos By Nine Bystanders,”
Life
, November 24, 1967, 87–94. Personal interview, September 24, 2010, Dallas, with Tina Towner Pender, who was thirteen years old in 1963 and standing next to her parents in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. See also Tina Towner Pender,
Tina Towner: My Story as the Youngest Photographer at the Kennedy Assassination
(Charleston, SC: Createspace.com, 2012).

38
. Interview with Jim, Patricia, and Tina Towner, March 30, 1996, conducted by Bob Porter with Gary Mack, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas.

39
. Eugene Boone, a Dallas County deputy sheriff, also encountered a porter (probably Desroe) in the freight yard behind the picket fence. “And we both were scared,” Boone recalls. “And it wasn’t but just a moment until I could discover … that he was back there cleaning up the cars and didn’t have anything to do with it.” The porter did not report anything suspicious to Boone. Like Jim Towner, Boone does not believe that there were additional gunmen either in front of or behind the picket fence. Interview with Eugene Boone, November 25, 2003, conducted by Stephen Fagin, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. For more information on the Desroes’ story, see the interview with Bishop Mark Herbener, February 1, 2006, conducted by Stephen Fagin, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas.

40
. Summers,
Kennedy Conspiracy
, 25–26; Jim Marrs,
Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy
(New York: Carroll and Graf, 1989), 29. See also John Chism’s statement to the FBI, 12/18/63, available on Prof. John McAdams’s website, “The Kennedy Assassination,”
http://jfkassassination.net/russ/exhibits/ce2091.htm
 [accessed July 3, 2012].

41
. See Barry Ernest,
The Girl on the Stairs: My Search for a Missing Witness to the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
(Lexington, KY: CreateSpace Publishing, 2011) and Christopher Means, “JFK Historian Studies ‘Missing Witness’ Who Should Have Seen Oswald,”
Pegasus News
, February 15, 2011,
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/pegasus-news/jfk-historian-studies-missing-witness-seen-oswald-20110215-120738-700.html
 [accessed January 9, 2012].

42
. Arnold also said that a man in a suit who identified himself as either a CIA or Secret Service agent ordered him away from the railroad bridge overlooking Dealey Plaza before the president’s motorcade passed by. Interview with Gordon Arnold, June 6, 1989, conducted by Conover Hunt, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas; interview with Mary and Les Arnold, January 13, 2006, conducted by Gary Mack with Stephen Fagin, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. Posner, author of
Case Closed
, rejects Arnold’s version of events: “Although Arnold claims he is not visible [in the pictures of the knoll] because he is lying flat on the ground, photo enhancements show no such person.” Posner also points out that, “Arnold appeared vindicated when Senator Ralph Yarborough [D-TX] later said he remembered seeing a young man ‘throw himself on the ground’ as soon as the shooting started. However, Yarborough has since clarified that he was referring to Bill Newman, who was at the foot of the grassy knoll with his family and threw himself, his wife, and their two children onto the grass.” Gerald Posner,
Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK
(New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 255–56. Sixth Floor Museum curator Gary Mack disagrees with Posner’s conclusions: “My understanding is different, and far more accurate since I spoke to Arnold, Earl Golz, and Dave Murph, the source of the later Yarborough interview. Golz’ 1978
Dallas Morning News
story about Arnold repeatedly referred to him as a
soldier
. After reading Golz’ story, Yarborough called him the next day to confirm he
had seen that man (or such a man) hit the ground. So to clarify, a few years later, I asked Arnold what he was wearing that day because Golz had not. That’s when Arnold said he wore his ‘Army tans,’ which explained to me how Yarborough knew that the man who hit the ground was the soldier. Newman didn’t look anything like a soldier.” E-mail from Gary Mack, May 25, 2012. See Earl Golz, “SS ‘Imposters’ Spotted by JFK Witnesses,”
Dallas Morning News
, August 27, 1978.

43
. Arnold said the man who accosted him had very noticeable “dirty fingernails.” A Dallas police officer, Joe Marshall Smith, had an encounter with an unusual individual on the grassy knoll immediately after the assassination that fit the same description. This case is discussed on p. 152.

44
. Marrs,
Crossfire
, 81–83. Posner says that Hoffman was “some 250 to 300 yards west of the picket fence” and told two different versions of the story. In 1967, he “said he saw two men running from the rear of the Texas School Book Depository, but the FBI concluded he could not have seen them from where he was because a fence west of the Depository blocked his view. He then changed his story to say he saw the men on top of the fence.” None of the four policemen stationed “near where Hoffman claimed to be” said that they had seen him there. Posner also reports that there were a number of objects obstructing Hoffman’s view, including freight cars and a giant Cutty Sark liquor billboard (Posner,
Case Closed
, 256–57). But Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, while admitting that there are problems with Hoffman’s story, again contradicts Posner: “There were no freight cars at the time and the [Cutty Sark] sign was not in the way from where Hoffman claimed to be.” E-mail from Gary Mack, May 25, 2012.

45
. Interview with Ken Duvall, May 12, 2009, conducted by Stephen Fagin, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas.

46
. Gary Mack, who describes Rodriguez’s tale as “another false story,” told us that the “railroad men were on private property and had every legal right to remain there. Dallas police asked the railroad to ID all of the men to confirm they were employees, and a supervisor was sent over and confirmed every one of them.” E-mail from Gary Mack, May 25, 2012.

47
. Interview with Victoria Wahlstrom Rodriguez, July 7, 2010, conducted by Stephen Fagin, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas.

48
. Craig told the Warren Commission that he saw a “Nash Rambler” and that “it looked white to me.” In later years, he changed his story and insisted that the vehicle he saw had been “light green” in color. See Warren Commission Hearings, vol. VI, p. 267, Mary Ferrell Foundation website,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=35&relPageId=277
 [accessed June 13, 2012].

49
. Ruth Paine spoke Russian and befriended the Oswalds when they moved to Dallas. When Marina decided to separate from her husband, she moved in with Ruth. The Paines owned a green 1955 Chevrolet station wagon, not a white Rambler station wagon, though one could argue they are not completely dissimilar.

50
. James W. Douglass,
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
(New York: Touchstone, 2008), 274–75. Craig said that he reported the Rambler incident to police headquarters on the day of the assassination. Marrs,
Crossfire
, 329–30.

51
. See the Warren Report (St. Martin’s Press edition, 1991), p. 52: “Other Secret Service agents assigned to the motorcade remained at their posts during the race to the hospital. None stayed at the scene of the shooting, and none entered the Texas School Book Depository
Building at or immediately after the shooting … Forrest V. Sorrels, special agent in charge of the Dallas office, was the first Secret Service agent to return to the scene of the assassination, approximately 20 or 25 minutes after the shots were fired.” See also
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wr/html/WCReport_0038b.htm
 [accessed November 30, 2012].