The Kennedy Half-Century (31 page)

Robert Blakey, the former chief counsel and staff director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, believes that Smith was telling the truth. “He met somebody coming, and the guy identified himself as a Secret Service agent. There were no Secret Service agents up there. And when they got behind the picket fence, it had been raining that day, and the ground was damp. There were footprints where the person [on] the grassy knoll was supposed to [have been] and … he had wiped mud off his feet [on] one of the cars that was there. This is testimony that’s consistent with somebody being there.” In addition, Blakey theorizes that the person behind the fence might have been a Mafia hit man sent to kill Oswald after he assassinated the president. “It’s a standard mob format,” he says. “Somebody always kills the assassin. And then you kill the people who killed the assassin.”
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In addition to Smith, another completely believable eyewitness is Pierce Allman, the program director for WFAA radio. Allman chose the critical corner of Elm and Houston to observe the motorcade. Just seconds before the shots, Kennedy passed within a few feet of him, and Allman reports having shouted, “Welcome to Dallas, Mr. President,” among the last words the president likely heard. Allman was also one of the first to reach the Newmans as
they lay sprawled across the lower grassy knoll, asking them, “Are you all right?” And then Allman’s journalistic instincts came to the fore, and he realized he needed to find a telephone. The Depository was logically the closest place, and at the door he asked a young man who was exiting the building where he could make a call. The man helpfully pointed out a place inside. That man was Lee Oswald as he was leaving the Depository. Oswald told police about the encounter with Allman as he attempted to account for his whereabouts after the shooting. The Secret Service eventually figured out it was Allman and discussed the incident with him later. Allman told them the timing and gave a general description of Oswald—but he also told them something interesting. After Allman had been on the telephone in the Depository for a few minutes, a man identifying himself as belonging to “Army Intelligence” told Allman to hang up the phone and leave. The Secret Service told Allman he must have been mistaken because no one from Army Intelligence was on the scene. But Allman is certain of what he heard. The man may have been James Powell, a specialist from the Army Intelligence Corps, who was at Love Field and then the corner of Elm and Houston to observe the motorcade, apparently as just an interested bystander. Powell snapped a photo of the Depository about thirty seconds after the shooting, when a bystander pointed to it as the source of some or all of the shots.
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Another eyewitness, Malcolm Summers, claims to have seen a strange man on the grassy knoll. Summers says he was standing in the middle of Dealey Plaza, opposite the knoll, when he saw the president struck by a bullet. A motorcycle cop who had been escorting the motorcade immediately threw down his bike and stood directly in front of Summers. “[He] looked straight in my direction like he was going to pull his gun,” the Dallas native remembered. “[H]e was looking at me, and I knew he wasn’t looking at me, but I mean, in my direction. I thought, well, somebody behind me was doing the firing, and because I thought that … I fell down, I hit the ground.” Summers eventually got up and followed a crowd across the street toward the picket fence. There he encountered a clean-shaven, well-dressed man with a coat over his arm. Summers spotted a gun underneath the man’s coat. “You better not come up here,” the man warned. “You could get shot.”
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Declining to argue with an armed man, Summers retreated back across the street to his office on Houston Street. A short time later, he departed work. “When I was leaving, I noticed … three Spanish-looking guys jump in their car, and they were leaving from the front of the post office where they were parked,” Summers recalled, adding that the three men seemed like they were “in a hurry” and “left at a great speed.” They drove in the direction of Oak Cliff, a neighborhood suburb of Dallas. Summers says he did not think much of the incident until he later learned that Lee Harvey Oswald had allegedly headed for Oak
Cliff, Officer J. D. Tippit was shot there, and Jack Ruby had once lived in the neighborhood.
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The armed man Summers saw on the grassy knoll might have been a co-conspirator in the president’s death, or he just as easily could have been a Dallas County sheriff. In 1963 the sheriff’s office stood on the corner of Main and Houston Streets. Houston connects Main with Elm, and thus was very near Dealey Plaza. Law enforcement personnel apparently poured out of the building after the shots were fired. The “Spanish-looking guys” could have been anti-Castro Cubans who had taken part in the assassination as revenge for the Bay of Pigs and were on their way to meet Oswald or Ruby—or the whole episode could have been innocent and unrelated to JFK’s killing. Even though Summers gave a prompt statement to the sheriff’s office and the Secret Service interviewed him on two separate occasions, the authorities apparently made no comprehensive efforts to identify the men Summers saw while the trail was hot.
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Then there is the seemingly trustworthy account of Earlene Roberts, the woman who ran the Dallas boarding house where Oswald stayed most of the time, and who told the Warren Commission that she had been watching television in the living room at around one P.M. on November 22 when Oswald rushed in and went straight to his room. That is when Roberts supposedly saw a police cruiser:

WARREN COMMISSION STAFFER: Did this police car stop directly in front of your house?

MRS. ROBERTS: Yes—it stopped directly in front of my house and it just [went] “tip-tip” [the sound of the horn being tapped twice] and that’s the way Officer Alexander and Charles Burnely would do when they stopped, and I went to the door and looked and saw it wasn’t their [squad car] number.
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Why did an unidentified police car honk twice in front of Oswald’s boarding house while he was inside, just after the assassination? Was it a prearranged signal from his coconspirators or handlers, or just another coincidence? Is it possible that Roberts’s police friends were riding in a different cruiser that day and drove off when they were ordered by radio to another location? Or is conspiracy author James Douglass right to conjecture that “the horn signal to Oswald came from two uniformed men in a counterfeit police car” who were part of a clandestine group of assassins?
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Douglass’s assertion seems fantastic, yet so many peculiar things happened that cruel day in Dallas—things that were unexplained and, unfortunately, unexplored at a time when they might have been clarified.

Dallas officer Marvin Wise told another odd but ultimately truthful story that has been elucidated only in recent years. Shortly after the shots were fired, Wise learned that three men (later known as “the three tramps”) had been seen climbing into a boxcar in the rail yard behind the Book Depository. By acting quickly, he managed to apprehend the suspects before they could escape and turned them over to the Dallas County sheriff’s office.
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Photos taken in November 1963 (which were not made available to the public until the 1970s) as well as police records released in 1989 show that a trio of men were taken into custody but released a short time later. For years, conspiracy theorists claimed that one of the men was Charles Harrelson, the father of actor Woody Harrelson.
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Frank Sturgis and Howard Hunt, both key figures in the 1972 Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, were also named from time to time as suspected members of the “tramp” group (they were not). But the least convincing source for the Harrelson-did-it theory was Harrelson himself. Harrelson had ties to organized crime and was convicted in 1982 of murdering a federal judge in Texas. Looking for a way out of a long jail sentence, the newly arrested and cocaine-high Harrelson “confessed” to being part of a team of Kennedy assassins and offered the prosecutors a deal: He would identify the other team members if he could walk free. The authorities were not foolish enough to buy Harrel-son’s story, and he later admitted he invented it. In 1989 the Dallas Police finally released files that showed the “three tramps” were actually unfortunate unknowns named Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle, and John Gedney—drifters who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
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While some of the witness accounts are disquieting because of their implications for possible conspiracy, there are also pro-conspiracy testimonies that are as doubtful as Harrelson’s and Hunt’s assertions. Jean Hill is one Dealey Plaza witness who saw her opportunities and took them, making it up as she went along and fooling many. Hill and her friend Mary Moorman were standing in the center of Dealey Plaza (opposite the grassy knoll) when they saw Kennedy’s motorcade pass by. “Hey, Mr. President,” Hill shouted, “we want to take your picture.” When she heard the shots ring out, Moorman urged her friend to take cover. But Hill says that she was oblivious to the danger and kept her eyes focused on the surrounding area. “I looked up and saw a flash of light, a puff of smoke from the knoll,” she said, “And I knew a shot
had come from there and I kept looking …” Hill maintained she saw a man in a brown hat and overcoat “walking faster than … normal” from the Book Depository toward the rail yard. His name? According to Hill, it was Jack Ruby. Suspicious, Hill followed Ruby (she says she didn’t know his name at the time), and that’s when she reported being stopped by another man who flashed a badge and identified himself as a Secret Service agent. He allegedly confiscated a set of Polaroid pictures that Hill had been holding for Moorman. “You are coming with me,” the man supposedly told her. Hill says that when she refused, the man put her neck in a Vulcan death grip and was soon joined by another man, who helped escort her to a room on “about the fourth or fifth floor in the Courts Building.” Other shadowy figures in the room asked her how many shots she had heard. “Four to six,” Hill replied. No, she had only heard three, they insisted. Hill also claimed to have seen a patrolman on the grassy knoll holding a rifle instead of a standard issue police shotgun.

However, in her original police statement on November 22, Hill said that she was turned back by officers when she got to the grassy knoll and that a “Mr. Featherstone” escorted her to the Dallas County sheriff’s office. Jim Featherston, a reporter for the
Dallas Times Herald
, and Mary Moorman both confirmed this initial version of Hill’s experience. Hill also gave a widely seen interview to a local TV station shortly after the assassination, but did not mention the flash of light, the puff of smoke, the man in the brown overcoat, the men on the grassy knoll, or the interrogation in the Courts Building. Therefore, we can reasonably assume that Hill, now deceased, fabricated parts of her story.

In 2011, Mary Moorman gave her most extensive interview since the assassination. Moorman, not Hill, took the most famous still photograph of the moment the fatal bullet struck John Kennedy—a photo that may or may not show a man in a uniform behind the picket fence, and an apparent puff of white smoke that may or may not have been the aftermath of a gunshot. More recently, Moorman told me that she does not recall seeing anything out of the ordinary behind the fence, and she is not at all convinced that her famous photograph reveals a second shooter.
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Interestingly, Moorman’s sightline positioning and exceptionally important snapshot won her an actual invitation to give testimony to the Warren Commission staff, but she injured her ankle and asked for a postponement. She never heard from the commission again, despite having taken the photo that is perhaps the most revealing supplement to the Zapruder film.
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Jean Hill’s creativity may only be outdone by a U.S. Air Force sergeant named Robert Vinson. Vinson says that he boarded a C-54 cargo plane at Andrews Air Force Base on November 22 that he assumed, or was told, was
traveling to Denver. Vinson and his wife lived in Colorado at the time. The sergeant says that the aircraft “bore no military markings or serial numbers” and that two men wearing “olive drab coveralls” (also with “no markings”) got on board with him. Instead of flying to Colorado, though, the plane “landed abruptly in a rough, sandy area alongside the Trinity River” in Dallas at three P.M. CST and picked up two men—a Latino and a Caucasian man Vinson identified as a Lee Harvey Oswald look-alike. The plane then took off and landed at Roswell Air Force Base in New Mexico. From there, Vinson says, he hopped a bus to Colorado. Beyond a complete lack of corroborating evidence, Vinson’s story contains at least one major flaw: The section of the Trinity River that cuts through Dallas is bordered by two major roadways, the Stemmons Freeway and Industrial Boulevard. Therefore, it seems somewhat unlikely that a C-54, a propeller plane with a wingspan of 117 feet, could have made a safe sand landing next to dual thoroughfares in the middle of the afternoon without anyone’s noticing, especially on a day when police and reporters were swarming.
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Why would Vinson make up such a story? In his case and others, no one can say with certainty, but a desire for money or attention—often granted to almost anyone who has “new information” or a novel theory about the assassination—might be one reason. More than a few have cashed in over the previous half century. While there are many legitimate researchers who have spent much of their own time and money to investigate the assassination, there are others who have sought treasure from the tragedy.