The Kennedy Half-Century (50 page)

In the morning, there are standard police communications about a presidential visit, from the arrival of Air Force One at Love Field to the difficulties of holding back enthusiastic crowds pressing to get a better view of the Kennedys. Occasionally, due to transmitting over the same lines, non-police conversations
from telephone calls bleed over into the police channels: a man profanely curses his favorite but losing football teams, a man and woman alternate between romance and argument, and someone asks a friend for money—and the friend begs off.

Suddenly, routine conversation ends, and police work turns chaotic. Sheriff Decker issues an order to investigate the area behind the grassy knoll: “Have my office move all men available … into the railroad yard in an effort to determine what happened in there and hold everything secure until Homicide and other investigators should get there.” There is discussion about “victims” remaining in Dealey Plaza, the possible shooting of a Secret Service agent (which did not happen), and an early description of “a suspect.” Officers report the contradictory claims of witnesses about the sources of the gunshots: Some said the shots originated at the grassy knoll, others at the Dallas courts building, and still others at the book depository.

The Dictabelt captures the chilling moments of absolute panic as President Kennedy was taken to Parkland for a futile attempt at resuscitation. Officer Price, after he arrives at Parkland and views the extent of President Kennedy’s wounds, calls in a report to the dispatcher: “I believe the president’s head was practically blown off.” Price immediately regretted his comment and declined to repeat it when asked, noting, “It’s not for me to say, I can’t say.” Jim Bowles, the Dallas dispatcher who provided an original, partial transcript of the Dictabelt in 1964, assisted his fellow officer by labeling Price’s remark “inaudible≵—something Bowles admitted to me that he did purposely to protect Price from embarrassment.
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Officers at the Trade Mart ask what they can tell the hundreds of people assembled for a speech President Kennedy would never deliver. The dispatcher asks Officer One [Dallas chief Jesse Curry], who is at Parkland with the presidential entourage and is well aware of the fatal nature of the wounds, “[Is] the president going to appear at the Trade Mart?” The sad, sparse answer from Chief Curry: “It’s very doubtful … I feel reasonably sure that he will not.” There are also Dictabelt references to a series of post-assassination events, from the shooting of Officer Tippit to the arrest of Oswald to the police transporting of LBJ, Jackie Kennedy, and JFK’s body back to Air Force One. At the end of a horrible day, there is also the bizarre, jarring reintroduction of everyday life as the police dispatcher tells an officer to “go over to Wholesome Bakery and pick up eight packs of hamburger buns” and deliver them to the Deluxe Diner. “Tell ‘em down there at the bakery to charge ‘em to the Deluxe Diner.”

Yet no out-of-place note of normality can expunge the earth-shattering words heard in Dallas on November 22. From tiny sound impressions made on crude recording devices on that long-ago day, the shock and horror comes to life again, and a listener cannot help but to be mesmerized.

While we now have a firm resolution of the truths both contained in and absent from the Dictabelt, by no means do we have all the available facts needed for an airtight finding about the assassination—certainly not one that will satisfy the warring theorists. Perhaps as-yet unreleased documents will help, though it is doubtful that any eureka revelations will emerge from fifty-year-old bureaucratic paperwork. The missed opportunities for full resolution of John Kennedy’s death occurred early. The assassination tragedy continued unabated thanks to a sloppy initial investigation whose purpose was to nail Oswald rather than inquire about the murder more comprehensively. The death of most principals and the mists of time have permanently obscured the full truth. Therefore, we have to accept a somewhat unsatisfying ending, the inability of a balanced analyst—much like the Dictabelt—to reveal with absolute certainty what really happened.

Recognizing these limitations, the following two conclusions seem reasonable. First, the chance of a conspiracy of some sort—either a second gunman in the grassy knoll-picket fence area or a plot involving more than a single shooter who fired the bullets in Dealey Plaza—cannot be dismissed out of hand. The conspiratorial scenario includes the possibility that a lone gunman was supported or encouraged by others. At the same time, the known and incontrovertible hard proof simply does not permit a definitive declaration of conspiracy. The advocates of this point of view have offered several plausible theories but have never been able to produce powerful evidence that would stand up in a court of law—evidence sufficient to warrant a clear confirmation of a conspiracy.

The second conclusion is based on the undisputed evidence we have today. There is no reasonable doubt that at least one of John F. Kennedy’s assassins was Lee Harvey Oswald. It may well be that Oswald was the only killer in Dealey Plaza on November 22, and that he alone concocted the plan to murder the president, but that is less certain than Oswald’s manifest individual guilt.

Those who insist Oswald was “a patsy”—an innocent front man, set up to take the blame for a murder he did not commit—ignore far too much. As I have reviewed, and as others have devoted lengthy books to confirming, there is a mountain of evidence establishing his culpability. For example, despite all of the Warren Commission’s inadequacies, I believe the facts support the commission’s assertions about the origin point of the bullets that struck President Kennedy (that is, the sixth floor of the Book Depository) and the paths that they took (back-to-front, with the first successful shot—the so-called magic bullet—striking both President Kennedy and Governor Connally). There are multiple, believable eyewitness reports of a man with a rifle in the sixth floor window of the Depository. Unfortunately, since no photographs or positive identifications of Lee Oswald (or anyone else) in the window were made, there will always be
room to suggest that someone else fired the gun in the Depository and that Oswald was framed in an elaborate plot. Yet the weight of evidence is overwhelming that Oswald was there in the window and fired the bullets. He is the only logical suspect from the Depository, the place where he worked and from which he fled. The murder weapon was Oswald’s rifle, his palm print was on the gun, and (despite the dispute over the size of Oswald’s “curtain rods” package) he likely brought it to work with him the morning of the assassination.

Moreover, anyone attempting to exonerate Oswald must ignore the ballistic evidence found at the scene of Officer J. D. Tippit’s murder.
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Three bystanders—Domingo Benavides, Barbara Jeanette Davis, and Virginia Davis—found four spent cartridge casings in the bushes that were traced to Oswald’s .38-caliber Smith & Wesson. Four bullets were retrieved from Tip-pit’s body, one of which matched Oswald’s revolver “to the exclusion of all others.” The analysis on the other three bullets suggested they very likely came from Oswald’s gun, too.
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Slaying a policeman who has stopped you for questioning is not the act of an innocent man.
^w

Oswald’s life was a virtual template for a potential assassin. He was an acutely unhappy, troubled young man who had long been an angry loner, perpetually dissatisfied with his personal circumstances but hopelessly incapable of changing them. He had led a life marked by wild fluctuations, alienation, deceit, lack of sustainable love, and violent tendencies. At the time of the assassination, Oswald was at the end of his rope; he had exhausted his options for escape from a dead-end existence. Oswald may have disagreed with Kennedy politically on certain subjects such as Cuba, but in a disturbed and agitated mind, was politics really the paramount motivator? This most political of murders may not have been terribly ideological from Oswald’s perspective. If ideology entered into it, it may have been more of a secondary justification for an intense emotional impulse. Kennedy was the ultimate symbol of a society Oswald hated because it
had left him, with his considerable help, at the very bottom, with little money or food, a deeply unsatisfying marriage, and no real prospects for a brighter future. Kennedy was the pinnacle of success in a world where Oswald had failed utterly at everything. By chance and fate, Lee Oswald ended up close enough to the motorcade and he had a serviceable weapon that he had almost certainly used before in the assassination attempt on General Walker. Oswald saw an opportunity to fulfill the delusions of grandeur he had always nursed. An explosion of suppressed rage and a sick determination to destroy his human opposite helped Oswald get even with the world for his miserable existence, and in spectacular fashion. The instant the bullets hit Kennedy, Oswald, a nobody, became a historic somebody. This momentous “accomplishment” delivered unto Oswald a triumph for the ages. It is no wonder that in his few public moments after the assassination, luxuriating in worldwide attention, he looked so self-satisfied, the famished cat who had gobbled up the prize canary.

Does this mean all the other theories about November 22 hold no water? Much of the conjecture is groundless, no matter how enticing it may be for those inclined to believe. As distasteful a man as Lyndon Johnson could often be, LBJ did not kill JFK. The Secret Service agents didn’t pull guns and accidentally shoot the president, as some absurdly charge, nor did the agents conspire with others to leave the president undefended.
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The military establishment and the leadership of the FBI and CIA did not join in a massive conspiracy to kill Kennedy in a banana-republic-style coup d’état. Castro and the Russians had no rational motive to do the deed, and the risks would have been enormous for them. There wasn’t a UFO involved, either.

But the chance of some sort of conspiracy involving Oswald is not insubstantial. For all the attempts to close the case as “just Oswald,” fair-minded observers continue to be troubled by many aspects of eyewitness testimony and paper trails. There remains the live possibility of a second gunman in the grassy knoll area. It is not just the number of Dealey Plaza spectators who believe one or more shots came from that locale. Who were the individuals representing themselves as Secret Service agents, with credentials good enough to fool Dallas policemen familiar with official identification? Who were the armed men and suspicious individuals seen in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza before, during, and after the assassination? What exactly has the CIA been trying to hide about Oswald all these years? Maybe these questions, and others that we have posed, have innocent explanations, but they have eluded honest investigators to this point.

The odds of conspiracy include a second possibility: There was no second gunman, but private assistance or encouragement was given to Oswald in achieving his murderous hit. The most likely suspects, based on the available evidence, would be the Mafia, the anti-Castro Cubans (who had an undisclosed cell operating in Dallas at the time of the assassination), or a small
unsupervised cabal within the CIA.
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All three potential suspects had the means, motive, and opportunity to reach out to Oswald either as a lone assassin or in partnership with someone behind the picket fence. I have already laid out what rationale exists in all three categories. If Oswald was a lone gunman but people from one of these groups encouraged him, the silencing of Oswald by Jack Ruby, even if uninitiated by the co-conspirators, makes it improbable we will ever find out. A smoking gun for conspiracy has never emerged—though, again, technological advances applied to surviving physical evidence such as film and photos might one day prove that
somebody
participated in the shooting with Oswald in Dealey Plaza. If that person existed on November 22, he would have been a person with substantial backing, not because the murder required elaborate planning (it was all too easy) or special equipment (tens of millions of weapons qualified for the job), but because the clean getaway was complicated to arrange and sustain. To disappear without a trace for fifty years, to have no credible deathbed confessions, to have no accomplices disclose the plot in exchange for a great deal of media money—well, all this is possible but adds to one’s doubts about conspiracy.

We should also not forget about another intriguing twist that may prove true with time. As I stressed earlier, no one has offered a convincing explanation for the CIA’s special treatment of Oswald’s paperwork in the weeks leading up to the assassination. It is beyond question that the CIA lied to the Warren Commission in 1964 and then again to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s. What were they hiding? What was so important that the CIA risked intense public condemnation had their dissembling been discovered at those sensitive times? This was especially true in the atmosphere of the 1970s, when the CIA had become widely unpopular. Some politicians and activists were calling for the CIA’s dismantling after exposure of its foreign assassination plots, the CIA’s role in the bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel, and the agency’s extensive spying on U.S. citizens domestically.
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Given its long history of double-talk and dishonesty regarding the Kennedy assassination, and the agency’s undeniable misleading of two separate government inquests, the CIA has little credibility left on the subject. Journalist Jefferson Morley believes that, at the very least, CIA agents and directors who withheld information on Oswald “should be stripped of any medals or commendations they received for their job performance in 1963.”
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That is reasonable, but punishing long-departed CIA officials will not end the debate over who killed JFK.