The Kennedy Assassination: What lies behind the controversy?
James Perloff | The New American
November 21, 1988
The scene was Dealey Plaza, Dallas, 12:30 PM, November 22, 1963. The presidential motorcade, en route to the Dallas Trade Mart, cruised slowly along Houston Street. In the rear seat of the procession's second auto, President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline waved at the onlookers lining the sidewalk. In the jump seats in front of the Kennedys were Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie.
Since Dallas was a conservative stronghold, the warm reception from the crowds pleased John F. Kennedy. As the roofless limousine turned from Houston Street onto Elm, Mrs. Connally faced back and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you." "I certainly can't," he replied. There was a sudden sound that many thought came from a firecracker. One spectator said jokingly, "Oh! They got me!" and those around her laughed. But their laughter turned to screams as more reports sounded. The President grasped at his neck; then his head seemed almost to explode before their eyes. Governor Connally, wounded, slumped in his seat. Special Agent Roy Kellerman, in charge of the Secret Service detail guarding the President, yelled into his mike: "Get out of here fast! We are hit!"
As sirens wailed, the presidential limousine raced for Parkland Memorial Hospital, where the institution's best physicians began running to the emergency room. They worked intensively to save the President, but knew his gaping head wound foretold no hope for their efforts. At 1 PM, John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead. His body was sped to the airport, where Air Force One was waiting. On board, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been in the motorcade, was sworn in as President. Jacqueline Kennedy, still in shock, looked on.
A massive manhunt for the President's killer was meanwhile underway. Eyewitnesses had seen a gunman firing from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, some 50 yards behind where the President was hit. Beside the window, police found a high-powered Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a telescopic sight, and three empty cartridges.
At 1:15, Police Officer J.D. Tippit was driving his patrol car through the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. He saw a young man hurrying along who seemed to match the general description of the killer broadcast over his radio. He pulled over, addressed the man through the window, and stepped out of the car. Without hesitation, the young man drew a revolver from his jacket and fired four bullets into Tippit, as bystanders watched in terror.
At 2:20 PM, Captain Will Fritz, head of the Dallas Homicide and Robbery Bureau, strode into his office. He instructed detectives there to obtain a search warrant for a certain address, explaining that one employee at the Texas School Book Depository had been found missing -- Lee Harvey Oswald. "Captain," said a police sergeant, "we can save you a trip, because there he sits." The sergeant pointed to a surly young man just arrested for the murder of Officer Tippit.
It was soon proven that the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found in the Depository belonged to Oswald, an ex-Marine and self-proclaimed Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and returned to the United States in 1962. Evidence against him quickly mounted. On Sunday morning, November 24th, Americans received another shock to their senses. Oswald was to be transferred from the Dallas police station to the county jail. Millions of TV viewers watched as detectives escorted him out of an elevator in the station basement. As reporters pressed closer, a dark figure stepped in front. Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby aimed a revolver at Oswald. Yelling "You killed my President, you [expletive]!" he fired one round. Oswald collapsed, mortally wounded.
Five days later, President Johnson appointed a seven-man commission, headed by United States Chief Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the Kennedy assassination. Americans wanted to know if Oswald had been party to a conspiracy; his death at Ruby's hands smacked of an effort to silence him. After 10 months of inquiry, the Commission submitted its report. It declared that Oswald and Ruby had both acted alone.
Labyrinth of Scenarios
However, many expressed skepticism about these findings. Some charged a cover-up. Numerous books and articles appeared speculating on an assassination conspiracy. In 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison claimed to have evidence of such a conspiracy, formally charging a local businessman. The "evidence" was sharply discredited, however, and the defendant acquitted. In 1976, Congress established the House Select Committee on Assassinations. It reinvestigated the JFK slaying, but made no significant new discoveries. Nevertheless, the controversy continued to grow unabated. Literature on the assassination forms a labyrinth of scenarios. Some proposed as many as five assassins, with up to 22 bullets being fired.
Theories about Lee Harvey Oswald abound. Some hold he was actually shooting at Governor Connally (who had been Navy Secretary when Oswald's Marine discharge was changed to dishonorable because of his defection). Others hypothesize that Oswald was really a CIA or FBI agent. Quite a few insist he had no part in the crime at all, but was merely a "fall guy."
And if Oswald was innocent, who was guilty? Speculation overflows. The Dallas Police, Secret Service, FBI and CIA -- and various combinations thereof -- have frequently been targeted as conspiracy suspects. The following have also been accused: white supremacists opposed to Kennedy's civil rights program; "right-wing extremists" against his policies in general; Texas oil men incited by the prospect of oil industry taxes; the mob, threatened by Justice Department investigations under Kennedy; Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, for the same reason as the mob; Lyndon Johnson, ambitious for the Presidency; Nikita Khrushchev, angry over the 1962 Missile Crisis; pro-Castroites upset about the Bay of Pigs invasion; anti-Castroites upset about the results of the Bay of Pigs invasion; Castro himself, retaliating for a CIA plot against his life; and on the list goes. When Richard Nixon was President, his liberal critics did cartwheels upon learning that he had been in Dallas on November 21, 1963 -- Was it all a plot to avenge the 1960 election? Some claimed that two tramps, photographed in Dealey Plaza after the assassination, were really Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis. There has evolved an entire cult of assassination buffs -- individuals who have made a career out of speculative inquiry into the death of John F. Kennedy. They have turned a tragedy into a travesty -- a "whodunit" of almost comic dimensions. One exasperated writer, reviewing the unbounded spectrum of analysis, asked when someone will spring the theory that Jacqueline Kennedy planned the assassination so she could marry shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
Discerning individuals know that conspiracy has played a significant role in history. So it is tempting to look at the sheer volume of claims made about the Kennedy assassination and accept, prima facie, that it was a conspiracy.
It is true that conservative authors have occasionally -- and responsibly -- discussed the possibility of conspiracy in the JFK slaying. However, the liberal left has generated the overwhelming majority of such conjectures. As a reference point, Tass immediately called the assassination the work of "racists, the Ku Klux Klan and Birchists," while the Soviet magazine New Times termed it "an act of ultra-Right political terror." The American media flowed in the same direction -- with visible results. GOP leader Barry Goldwater was "stunned and shocked" by the threatening mail he began to receive. Conservative Texas Congressman Bruce Alger was forced to close his Washington office due to the volume of abusive phone calls and letters. Texas Senator John Tower did the same, and had to move his family out of Washington for several days. And from those days until now, the American conservative has remained the number one villain in Kennedy assassination scenarios.
The accusations and emotions of the controversy are not unique. At several points in modern history, movements have sought to exonerate leftists of crimes, shifting reproach to the right. Anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed due to conclusive evidence of their participation in a robbery-murder (modern ballistics tests on Sacco's gun have confirmed his guilt). Nevertheless, American liberals rallied to their cause, and canonized the two as innocent martyrs persecuted by the police and "ruling class." Alger Hiss and later the Rosenbergs passed U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union; in both cases, the left engineered campaigns proclaiming that the accused were victims of "frameups" by the FBI and rightists. It is not surprising, then, that after a Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald was shown to have murdered President John F. Kennedy, a plethora of books called him a patsy framed by the police and/or the FBI, in a sinister plot by conservatives.
Rush to Rumor
The standard-bearer of the cult of assassination buffs is Mark Lane, an attorney who has exerted his legal skills on behalf of American Communists, James Earl Ray, the radical American Indian Movement, and Jim Jones and his Guyana Peoples Temple. Lane is a longstanding proponent of Lee Harvey Oswald's innocence. He kicked his crusade off with a 10,000-word defense brief for Oswald in the National Guardian.
On November 22, 1963, a black-bordered, full-page ad criticizing Kennedy's policies had appeared in the Dallas Morning News. It had been signed by Bernard Weissman, a conservative. At first, some people wondered if the ad might have some link to the assassination, and Lane capitalized. He claimed before the Warren Commission that at Jack Ruby's night club, the week before the shooting, there had been a meeting between Weissman, Ruby, and Officer J. D. Tippit. (It so happened that Tippit had worked weekends at a restaurant owned by a member of The John Birch Society; thus the dead hero became a favorite target for speculation by the left.) When challenged, Lane was unable to produce any evidence or eyewitness supporting his allegation.
Lane also asserted that Oswald did not shoot Tippit. In his best-selling book Rush to Judgment, he stated that Helen Markham, a key witness to the incident, had told him the killer was "a short man, somewhat on the heavy side, with slightly bushy hair." Of course, this description did not fit Oswald, who was of medium height, weighed about 150 pounds, and had thinning hair. How did Lane procure this statement? Here is an excerpt from the tape of his actual phone conversation with Mrs. Markham.
Lane is a master of the leading question and the out-of-context quote. He reported that Charles Brehm, a Dealey Plaza witness, told him that "a portion of the President's skull was driven backward and to the left, as if the bullet had originated in an area to the right and to the front." An outraged Brehm later said: "Every question that he [Lane] asked me, I indicated that the shots came from up at the School Book Depository. There was no doubt in my mind that this was the way it was. I did not at any time indicate ... or will I ever say that those shots came from anywhere but the one place .... He has forgotten everything that I said except one little point that he can call a point of controversy. The nicest thing that can be said about Mark Lane is that he was an unmitigated liar."
The Grandstander of New Orleans
Only one court trial has ever investigated a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald spent the summer of 1963 in New Orleans. A lawyer there, Dean Andrews, performed some minor legal work for him. Questioned later by the Warren Commission, Andrews said that, after the assassination, someone calling himself "Clay Bertrand" had phoned, suggesting that he defend Oswald.
Later, Jim Garrison, the imperious district attorney of New Orleans, decided that "Clay Bertrand" was in reality local businessman Clay Shaw. In February 1967, Garrison announced to the press that he had "positively solved the assassination of President John F. Kennedy." His claim was that Clay Shaw, Oswald, and an anti-Communist named David Ferrie (who had just died of a cerebral hemorrhage) had secretly plotted the assassination at Ferrie's apartment. Garrison embarked on a publicity campaign that included a Playboy interview and an appearance on the Johnny Carson show. When pressed for evidence, he hedged, saying that there was plenty, that it would all come out at the trial of Shaw (whom he had thrown in jail).
Mark Lane and a host of amateur assassination sleuths descended on New Orleans, and were employed by Garrison. He accepted their suggestions with little challenge. At first, he declared that two assassins had been in Dallas; he kept increasing the number until it reached 16, with shots being fired from various buildings, bushes, and even a storm drain. At his apex, Garrison extended the conspiracy to include the CIA, oil millionaires, the Dallas Police, anti-Castro Cubans, the Minutemen, munitions dealers and White Russians, as well as other "reactionaries."
His evidence against Clay Shaw proved ludicrous. In Shaw's address book, he found this entry: "Lee Odom, PO Box 19106, Dallas, Tex." Garrison said this was actually a secret code for Jack Ruby's phone number. He reached this deduction by scrambling the number, subtracting 1300, and then using another system to change the "PO" to "WH." Unfortunately for Garrison, it turned out that there was a Lee Odom at Dallas PO Box 19106 -- a fact he had not bothered to check. The district attorney's star witness in court was Perry Russo, who had supposedly been at the meeting between Shaw, Oswald, and Ferrie. But it came to light that Russo had never reported any assassination plot until Garrison had had him hypnotized. Under hypnosis, Russo was told to visualize Ferrie's apartment, and was then fed leading questions about assassination. The case exploded when Dean Andrews -- the attorney who had inadvertently provided the original link between Clay Shaw and "Clay Bertrand" -- admitted "Clay Bertrand" was just a name he had made up to protect a friend. Shaw was acquitted, and the case went down as one of judicial history's greatest fiascos. But many of the rumors spread by the Garrison whirlwind persist to this day.
Hurt's Truth?
The most popular book about the Kennedy assassination today is Reasonable Doubt (1985) by Henry Hurt. It is a sort of bible of assassination conspiracy theories. People who read it -- and who are otherwise uninformed -- are apt to finish it believing that Lee Harvey Oswald was a dupe in an elaborate plot. The Washington Post calls it "convincing" and "meticulous," the Village Voice "thorough, accurate, judicious." On the surface, Reasonable Doubt seems to be a dispassionate assembly of documented facts. Beneath that surface, it is a web of misrepresentations.
For example, in reconstructing Oswald's movements after the assassination, the police determined that he boarded a bus near the School Book Depository. Of this, Hurt says: "The single silver of concrete evidence was a bus-transfer slip supposedly in Oswald's possession when he was arrested." What Hurt fails to mention is that Oswald's former landlady was on the bus and recognized him; that the bus driver testified the transfer slip bore his unique punch mark; and finally, that Oswald freely admitted boarding the bus!
Hurt postulates that Oswald could not have shot President Kennedy because he was a "mild-mannered young man" and "the evidence suggesting his capacity for violence is as tenuous today as it was two decades ago." Hurt supports this contention by simply omitting many contrary facts well-known to students of Oswald's life: Oswald frequently beat his wife; as a teenager he threatened his sister-in-law with a knife; at age 16 -- already an avid Marxist -- he said he would like to kill President Eisenhower for exploiting the working class; after his defection to Moscow, he wrote to his brother, "In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American government -- any American."
Furthermore, seven months before the assassination, Oswald tried to murder retired Major General Edwin Walker, a conservative activist whom he called a "fascist." The bullet, fired through a window of the general's home, missed his head by inches. Hurt says the evidence that Oswald did this is "of the flimsiest kind." (After the President's death, Oswald's wife admitted it was her husband who shot at Walker. She produced the note he had written her that night bearing instructions on what to do should he be arrested; photos of Walker's house were found among Oswald's belongings.)
Our attention now turns to three of the most widely discussed controversies of the Kennedy assassination: the deaths of witnesses, Jack Ruby's motives, and the source of the shots that killed the President.
"Everybody knows" that, after the assassination, witnesses began dying in grisly fashion. Executive Action, a 1973 movie based partly on material produced by Mark Lane, portrayed Oswald as the innocent patsy of right-wing conspirators. Its ending warned viewers that 18 material witnesses had died within three years. It then declared: "An actuary engaged by the London Sunday Times concluded that, on November 22, 1963, the odds against these witnesses being dead by February, 1967, were one hundred thousand trillion to one."
What few know is, the Times later admitted that this estimate was "based on a careless journalistic mistake." It was computed according to this proposition: Given 15 people, what were the odds that all would die within a short period? However, more than five hundred witnesses testified before the Warren Commission. That a handful of these were deceased by 1967 was not, of course, remarkable.
Most of the mystique about witness deaths originated with Penn Jones, Jr., a liberal Texas newspaper editor who once physically assaulted a speaker for The John Birch Society. When Lee Harvey Oswald left the assassination scene, the bus he boarded became immobilized by crowds. He walked a couple of blocks and took a cab to his rooming house. Two years later, the cab's driver, one William Whaley, died in an accident. Jones wrote that "details on Whaley's accident are not available. Whaley had a chance to talk to Oswald alone after the assassination of President Kennedy." The inference: Whaley was "silenced" because he knew too much. In fact, he died in a head-on collision. The other driver, also killed, was an 83-year-old man who had forgotten to turn on his headlights.
Mrs. Earlene Roberts, who had been the housekeeper at Oswald's rooming house, died in 1966. Jones wrote: "Now Mrs. Roberts has joined that long list of persons who had first-hand information, but are now dead." Mrs. Roberts was an elderly woman with numerous ailments. Her autopsy revealed that she had died of heart failure from massive calcium deposits.
Around the middle of the next century, perhaps some researcher will exclaim: "Aha! Every witness to the Kennedy assassination is dead! Explain that!" For a thorough debunking of the "murdered witnesses" rumor, see Chapter Three of Richard Lewis's The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report. It examines the heralded deaths, case by case.
Hit Man or Just a Man?
The most damning incident suggesting conspiracy was Jack Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruby said he felt grief for the Kennedy children, and wanted to spare Mrs. Kennedy the ordeal of returning to Dallas (as newspapers were projecting) for Oswald's trial. However, Ruby's explanation was received with skepticism. As the owner of two nightclubs that featured striptease acts, he hardly seemed a likely candidate for a deed with patriotic impetus.
The theory advanced about Ruby today runs something like this: He was originally from Chicago, and, as everyone knows, Chicago is famous for gangsters, such as Al Capone; Ruby also had acquaintances with criminal backgrounds; therefore, it stands to reason that the mob hired Ruby to shut up Oswald.
Just why they would fear Oswald talking, but not Ruby talking, is never explained. However, this allegation has been tenacious, because one cannot prove that the mob did not hire Ruby. Negatives are often impossible to prove. However, proponents of the hit-man scenario generally ignore certain pertinent facts.
Following the assassination, the National Opinion Research Center polled the public's reaction. It reported: "The first reactions of nine out of ten Americans were sympathy for Mrs. Kennedy and her children and deep sorrow that 'a strong young man had been killed at the height of his powers.'" Thus, the emotions Ruby professed were far from extraordinary. The poll also found that one of nine hoped Oswald would be "shot down or lynched." Ruby's sister and acquaintances observed him to be profoundly grieved (he had behaved similarly after the death of Franklin Roosevelt). He ordered his clubs closed for three days.
One little-publicized factor in the Oswald slaying was religion. Jack Ruby, born Jacob Rubenstein, was Jewish, and very conscious of it. As a young man in Chicago, he and his street friends had tried to break up pro-Nazi rallies of the German-American Bund. We referred earlier to a large, black-bordered ad criticizing JFK in a Dallas newspaper on November 22nd. It was signed "Bernard Weissman" -- a Jewish-sounding name. Jack Ruby, himself a believer in conspiracies, erroneously thought the name was a phony, and the ad an attempt to discredit Jews by linking them to the assassination. Bold action against Oswald in public, he hoped, might absolve his race. While questioned by police about his motives, Ruby said: "I also want the world to know that Jews do have guts."
Ruby believed he would emerge a hero. Instead, he found himself labeled a paid killer -- and perhaps even a conspirator in the President's murder. Authors of the assassination cult rarely disclose that Ruby insisted on -- and received -- a lie detector test in an effort to prove his motives. The polygraph, while not an infallible tool, indicated that Ruby was telling the truth on all questions relevant to motive and conspiracy. The complete results of this lengthy exam appear in volume XIV of the Warren Commission hearings. If Ruby had failed just one polygraph question, we can be sure that Mark Lane and the assassination cult would have trumpeted it far and wide.
Jack Ruby died of cancer in 1967. While he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by family members, his attorney Elmer Gertz interviewed him about the Oswald killing, tape-recording the conversation. Gertz subsequently released the tape to the public. Unto death, Jack Ruby held to his story.
The Notorious Knoll
The most hotly contested issue of the Kennedy assassination: Where did the shots originate from? Champions of Lee Harvey Oswald's innocence rely primarily on two arguments. The first is that the shots were fired not from the School Book Depository behind the President, as officially reported, but from a grassy knoll to his front and right. The second argument, which we will discuss shortly, involves a controversial slug known as "the magic bullet."
How did law enforcement officials and the Warren Commission determine where the shots came from? Several eyewitnesses saw the sniper shooting from the Depository's sixth-floor window, where the rifle and cartridges were found. Also, two newsmen in one of the motorcade's rear cars spotted the rifle extending from that same window. Three Depository employees, standing one floor beneath that window, heard the shots above: they said the blasts shook the building, causing plaster to fall on their heads; one testified he heard the cartridges striking the floor.
Then there were the bullets' effects. The paths of the wounds in Kennedy and Connally were at an angle consistent with the Depository window. The President's throat wound was shown to be back-to-front, not only by autopsy, but by the bullet holes in his jacket and shirt: the fibers in back were pointing inward and those in front outward. Kennedy's skull had a small posterior hole characteristic of an entrance wound, and a large gaping wound on the right side. "Grassy knoll" proponents say the latter proves a shot from the side. This is not, however, an informed position. A bullet tends to enter a body cleanly and, after impacting tissue, exit with gross damage. The President's autopsy showed the bullet fragmented inside the skull. One fragment lodged above the right eye. Others burst out the side; two large ones were recovered in the limousine. Governor Connally's physicians agreed unanimously that he was shot from behind.
How, then, do critics rationalize a grassy knoll gunman? First, they dismiss the foregoing data by saying that the official physicians and forensic scientists were pressured into lying. (This accusation is a symptom of the mentality that rejects any and all evidence incriminating Marxist Oswald.) Originally, many claimed the shots were fired from a railroad overpass in front of the President. This was dropped, however, when it was demonstrated that the bullets would have had to pierce the limousine windshield: None had. From then on, attention concentrated on the grassy knoll.
"Knoll" advocates cite assassination witnesses who believed the shots sounded there. However, as might be expected, there were many discrepancies among the perceptions of the witnesses. Recollections of the number of shots varied -- from one to six. But the consensus, especially among expert observers (such as policemen and Secret Servicemen), was decidedly three. Some noted loud reverberations that, to untrained ears, would have disguised the number and location of shots.
One witness, frequently quoted by the assassination cult, believed that the shots -- four to six of them -- came from the grassy knoll. She also thought, erroneously, that she saw a dog in the presidential limousine, and that a puddle from a spilled beverage was blood. Several people raced up the knoll immediately after the assassination; they found no gunman or cartridges. A railroad employee, who during the shooting was stationed in a tower behind and overlooking the knoll, had seen no snipers.
Another grassy knoll "proof" arises from the famous Zapruder film, a home movie of the motorcade. A prime Warren Commission exhibit, it can be found in volume XVIII of the hearings.
Zapruder frame 313 vividly records the fatal shot striking the President. Conspiracy proponents observe that succeeding frames show Kennedy falling back and to the left -- a response, they say, to a shot from the right front. However, anyone who carefully examines the film, and compares frame 313 to 312, can see that the shot drove the President's head forward on impact.
Why, then, did he subsequently move back and to the left? We noted earlier that a bullet tends to enter cleanly but exit with massive damage. Matter blowing forward out the right side of Kennedy's head, discernible in the Zapruder film, probably drove him in the opposite direction. Ballistics experiments on melons wrapped with tape have created this effect -- each time a melon is shot, contents burst out the other side, propelling the melon toward the gun. Many physicians also believe that decerebration -- a spastic reaction that occurs when part of the brain is removed -- may have caused the President's motion.
Members of the assassination cult spent years poring over blown-up photos of the grassy knoll, trying to spot a gunman. One believed he saw a sniper aiming over the roof of a station wagon. It turned out to be a space between tree foliage. David Lifton, who once saw a figure resembling Douglas MacArthur in one of the blowups, is perhaps the most diehard of the grassy-knollers. When a new team of pathologists confirmed the findings of the original Kennedy autopsy -- that the bullets came from the rear -- Lifton was undaunted. In his book Best Evidence (1980), he developed what may be the most complex assassination scenario yet.
When President Kennedy was brought to Parkland Memorial Hospital, doctors there did not see his two small posterior bullet wounds. This was because they never turned the President over: Their efforts were confined to resuscitation measures. After death was pronounced, the body went to the airport in a casket.
Lifton, however, deduces that, since the physicians did not see the rear wounds, those wounds did not exist. This is his thesis: Between Dallas and the autopsy in Washington (performed that same evening), the President's body was secretly switched to another coffin. It was then whisked to a place where the body was altered -- bullets extracted, artificial wounds created, etc. -- to fool autopsy doctors by creating the illusion of a shooter from behind while concealing those in front. Then, he says, the body was sneaked back into the original casket. To support this, Lifton quotes hospital personnel whose recollections of the President's casket and body wrappings vary from the official version -- not surprising since he interviewed them 15-16 years after the fact.
Surely there would have been less complicated ways to frame Lee Harvey Oswald! (Why not simply shoot from behind?) Absurd or not, Best Evidence enjoyed a lengthy stay on the New York Times bestseller list, and sold over 100,000 copies in hardback alone.
(Note: In 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Oswald alone fired the shots hitting Kennedy and Connally. However, at the last moment, under lobbying from assassination buffs, and pressure to justify the time and taxpayer money it had spent, the Committee amended its findings to say that a sniper on the grassy knoll probably fired one shot that missed. It based this on an acoustical study of an audio tape purportedly made during the assassination. In 1982, a new panel of acoustics experts unanimously discredited the tape.)
Super-slug
After the assassination, a nearly whole bullet was found on Governor Connally's stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Ballistics tests proved that Oswald's rifle had fired it, to the exclusion of all other weapons in the world. The Warren Commission concluded that three shots were discharged in Dealey Plaza: one that missed, hitting a curb; one that struck Kennedy's head, fragmenting; and one that, after traversing the President's throat, went through Governor Connally's chest (damaging a rib), smashed his wrist, and lodged in his thigh. This, the Commission stated, was the bullet found on Connally's stretcher -- an explanation ridiculed by authors of the assassination cult, who call the slug "the magic bullet." It could never have survived in such good shape after inflicting so much damage, they say, pointing out that fragments were found in Connally's wrist. They insist the bullet was planted on the stretcher to frame Lee Harvey. However, they usually leave a number of facts out of their texts.
(1) The bullet had a steel jacket and hard nose. Combined with what is called "tumbling" (the bullet spins end-over-end after contacting the first object, so that the nose is not necessarily what strikes subsequent objects), this could account for the bullet's durability.
(2) U.S. Army ballistics experts performed multiple tests using animal tissue and Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to simulate conditions of the assassination. These determined that the bullet could maintain the velocity necessary to do all the damage attributed to it.
(3) Employing the Zapruder film as a guide, the FBI and Secret Service reenacted the assassination. They placed the Mannlicher-Carcano in the Depository window, and photographed, through the telescopic site, a car representing the Presidential limousine. This showed that when President Kennedy grasped at his neck, it was in direct alignment with Connally's chest.
(4) Dr. Charles F. Gregory, the physician who treated the Governor's wrist, testified that the fragments were simply flakes, in total "something less than the weight of a postage stamp." Furthermore, sophisticated neutron testing later determined that the fragments were from the stretcher bullet.
(5) The wound in Connally's thigh was superficial (indicating a spent slug) and round in shape. What happened to the projectile causing this wound, if it was not the one found on the stretcher?
"Planted bullet" proponents face another problem. Ballistics tests also linked the large fragments found in the Presidential limousine to Oswald's rifle. Their explanation: "planted fragments."
Was Lee Harvey Oswald guilty or innocent? To be near his job, Oswald lived in a Dallas rooming house. Every weekend he would visit his wife and two young children in Irving, which is where he also stored his rifle. On November 21, 1963, Oswald departed from routine by going to Irving on a Thursday.
The following morning, unknown to his wife, he left his wedding ring in a cup on their bureau -- something he had never done before. He told her he would not return for the weekend. A co-worker named Frazier drove Oswald to the Depository that day. Frazier, noticing that Oswald had a tall, brown-paper package, asked what was in it. Oswald said it was curtain rods for his room in Dallas (which, it turned out, needed no curtain rods).
Oswald carried the package into the Depository. Later that morning, he asked another employee about the direction of the presidential motorcade. On the building's sixth story, workers were laying a new plywood floor. Breaking for lunch shortly before noon, they passed Oswald on the staircase at the fifth floor. A few minutes later, one, having forgotten his cigarettes, returned to the sixth floor -- where he saw Oswald, alone.
The assassination occurred at 12:30 PM. One eyewitness, across the street, saw Oswald shooting and later positively identified him. Others with a poorer view gave descriptions resembling Oswald. The Mannlicher-Carcano found at the window belonged to him. His handwriting was on the coupon received by the mail-order house that shipped it.
Inspection of the rifle later revealed Oswald's palmprint on the barrel. His palmprints and fingerprints were on the tall, brown-paper package found nearby, and on the stacked boxes used as a gun rest. As we have noted, a bullet and fragments recovered from the shooting were linked exclusively to the Mannlicher-Carcano.
Police did not enter the School Book Depository until some 90 seconds after the shots. Oswald was next seen on the second floor, then boarding a bus that could not get through the crowds. He took a cab to a point near his rooming house, where the housekeeper saw him dash in and out, zipping up a jacket as he left.
Minutes later, a few blocks away, Officer Tippit spotted him. Six eyewitnesses positively identified Oswald, either in the act of shooting Tippit, or fleeing the scene as he shed cartridges from his gun.
When police converged on Oswald shortly thereafter, he yelled, "It's all over now!" He pulled his revolver, but was subdued. The gun was ballistically matched to the cartridges left at the scene of Tippit's murder. A paraffin test of Oswald's hands revealed he had recently fired a gun.
All of this evidence would be sufficient to convict anyone -- unless his name is Lee Harvey Oswald. The Lane-Lifton-Hurt crowd absolves him of both murders. Eyewitnesses? They were mistaken; if not mistaken, then they were intimidated into lying. Since no witness ever came forward to say he had been intimidated, it eventually became chic to say that Oswald had a double who perpetrated the killings. Details such as how the "double" managed to have Oswald's fingerprints are explained away with some difficulty.
And what about the ballistics tests, paraffin test, fingerprint identification, neutron testing, autopsy, etc.? The assassination cult says these were faulty; if they weren't faulty, they were faked; if they weren't faked, they were based on planted evidence. To accept such notions, one must accept either sweeping incompetence or a sweeping conspiracy that would include the FBI, Secret Service, Dallas Police, and all other investigative technicians and personnel.
It is manifest that, if the evidence against Oswald had been doubled or even tripled, his defenders would still have found reasons to reject it. What the motives are of such people is a subject almost as interesting as the motives of Oswald himself.
Lone Wolf or Wolf Pack?
If we acknowledge Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin, a question remains: Did he act as part of a conspiracy? Statesmen have lost their lives both to conspirators and to solitary men. No one believes that Julius Caesar was slain by a "loner." But who believes that John Hinckley, who fired shots at President Reagan, was a member of a conspiracy? Which role do we assign Oswald?
Some liberal theorists, perhaps realizing that claims for Oswald's innocence exceed credibility, have granted his guilt. However, they say he was not a Marxist, as he professed, but a secret anti-Communist or U.S. intelligence operative. In short, if you cannot pin the assassination on conservatives by making Oswald their dupe, you pin it on them by making him their agent.
It has not been difficult to create this illusion. When Oswald returned from the USSR to the United States, he brought back a Russian wife named Marina. She was the niece of a colonel in the MVD, the Soviet secret police. The FBI in Dallas kept tabs on the Oswalds, and, in October 1963, an agent called on Marina to ask a few routine questions. Lee Harvey, enraged to learn of this visit from the "gestapo," wrote down the agent's name and delivered a note of protest to the Dallas FBI Office. After the assassination, it was reported that Oswald had the name of an FBI agent in his address book and that, less than a month before Kennedy's death, he had been seen entering FBI headquarters .... Thus it was hinted that the FBI had a working relationship with Oswald, perhaps even a hand in the assassination.
All U.S. intelligence organizations kept a file on Oswald: This was routine for defectors. Henry Hurt writes in Reasonable Doubt: "In 1973, in one of the most outrageous official acts in the whole dismal debacle, the Department of Defense destroyed the Oswald records." Hurt suggests that U.S. military intelligence employed Oswald as an agent, and disposed of the file to cover up. The truth is, military intelligence kept files on thousands of potential subversives. Because liberals protested, the Defense Department destroyed all such files, of which Oswald's was only one. Those who saw it say it simply contained his Marine records, newspaper clippings, and some copies of FBI reports.
To reconcile known facts with the theory that Oswald was a secret agent or anti-Communist, the assassination cult claims his defection to Moscow was really an espionage mission, and that his activities in America (such as handing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee) were just a "cover." This interpretation defies reality. Oswald had been an avid Marxist since his mid-teens, when he would refuse to salute the flag in school. With scores of acquaintances, both publicly and privately, he expressed his passion for Marxism. He denounced religion. When a glass of lemonade seemed too expensive, he crabbed about greedy capitalism. When captured by police after the assassination, he yelled: "I protest this police brutality!" If Lee Harvey Oswald was an anti-Communist, he should receive a posthumous Academy Award.
Conservatives have also seen Oswald as a conspirator -- in a Soviet plot. While this has vastly greater credibility, much of the speculation has hit dead ends. British author Michael Eddowes believed that the Lee Harvey Oswald who shot the President was not the Lee Harvey Oswald who had defected to Moscow, but a KGB look-alike who returned in his place. After considerable controversy, Oswald's body was exhumed in 1981 and examined by pathologists. It was the real Lee Harvey Oswald.
Conservatives were interested in Hugh McDonald's 1975 book Appointment in Dallas. McDonald had met a man named "Saul" who claimed to have assassinated John F. Kennedy from the Dallas county records building. A subsequent McDonald book elaborated this as a KGB plot. Oswald was supposedly a patsy who thought he was working for the CIA in a test of the President's security. But McDonald's version of the assassination runs aground on the same points as liberal ones: Ballistics proved Oswald's gun the murder weapon; wound paths did not line up with the records building; and Oswald hated U.S. intelligence agencies far too much to work for them.
If Oswald is conceded to be the assassin, the potential for conspiracy should be weighed in light of certain observations. First, Oswald shot the President from his place of employment. Frequently out of work, he obtained the job through chance. His wife was staying with a Texas family; one of their neighbors, whose brother worked at the Depository, suggested applying there. Oswald was hired on October 15, 1963. At that time, no one in the world knew a presidential motorcade would pass the Depository a month later. The Dallas Trade Mart was not selected for a Kennedy luncheon until November 14th, and the motorcade route was not announced until November 19th.
No one furnished Oswald with a professional assassin's gun. He purchased the aging Mannlicher-Carcano from a mail-order house for $20.
If Oswald, in leaving the assassination scene, had jumped into a speeding car with three masked fellows inside, that would certainly have spelled conspiracy. But Oswald made his getaway on a bus. There is no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald received any material assistance in the assassination of the President.
Even if Oswald did act alone, how do we know someone did not order or encourage him? How do we know there was not a secret park-bench tryst with a KGB or Cuban DGI agent? We do not. Again, negatives cannot be proven. But, if the Soviets or Cubans wanted to kill the President, the question is raised of why they would choose an assassin so easily linked to them. And there is the broader matter of what they could hope to gain in this risky venture. John F. Kennedy had doomed the Bay of Pigs mission by withholding promised air support. After the Missile Crisis of 1962, he had agreed to bar any more invasion attempts on Cuba. As a further concession, he had withdrawn all intermediate-range missiles from Turkey, Italy, and England. On October 8, 1963, he had signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The Kennedy scorecard was a good one for the Soviets and Cubans. Reasons why they would want him dead can be conjectured, but they are far from obvious. And consider what they could have lost had Oswald, under interrogation, admitted being ordered by the KGB -- and the next day's headlines screamed: "SOVIETS ORDERED KENNEDY'S DEATH." The USSR, offending even liberals, would have then forfeited détente and aid and trade for years to come. A look at Oswald's life yields some insights into a perhaps more plausible impetus behind his trigger finger.
Continued...
James Perloff | The New American
November 21, 1988
The scene was Dealey Plaza, Dallas, 12:30 PM, November 22, 1963. The presidential motorcade, en route to the Dallas Trade Mart, cruised slowly along Houston Street. In the rear seat of the procession's second auto, President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline waved at the onlookers lining the sidewalk. In the jump seats in front of the Kennedys were Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie.
Since Dallas was a conservative stronghold, the warm reception from the crowds pleased John F. Kennedy. As the roofless limousine turned from Houston Street onto Elm, Mrs. Connally faced back and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you." "I certainly can't," he replied. There was a sudden sound that many thought came from a firecracker. One spectator said jokingly, "Oh! They got me!" and those around her laughed. But their laughter turned to screams as more reports sounded. The President grasped at his neck; then his head seemed almost to explode before their eyes. Governor Connally, wounded, slumped in his seat. Special Agent Roy Kellerman, in charge of the Secret Service detail guarding the President, yelled into his mike: "Get out of here fast! We are hit!"
As sirens wailed, the presidential limousine raced for Parkland Memorial Hospital, where the institution's best physicians began running to the emergency room. They worked intensively to save the President, but knew his gaping head wound foretold no hope for their efforts. At 1 PM, John F. Kennedy was pronounced dead. His body was sped to the airport, where Air Force One was waiting. On board, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had been in the motorcade, was sworn in as President. Jacqueline Kennedy, still in shock, looked on.
A massive manhunt for the President's killer was meanwhile underway. Eyewitnesses had seen a gunman firing from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, some 50 yards behind where the President was hit. Beside the window, police found a high-powered Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a telescopic sight, and three empty cartridges.
At 1:15, Police Officer J.D. Tippit was driving his patrol car through the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. He saw a young man hurrying along who seemed to match the general description of the killer broadcast over his radio. He pulled over, addressed the man through the window, and stepped out of the car. Without hesitation, the young man drew a revolver from his jacket and fired four bullets into Tippit, as bystanders watched in terror.
At 2:20 PM, Captain Will Fritz, head of the Dallas Homicide and Robbery Bureau, strode into his office. He instructed detectives there to obtain a search warrant for a certain address, explaining that one employee at the Texas School Book Depository had been found missing -- Lee Harvey Oswald. "Captain," said a police sergeant, "we can save you a trip, because there he sits." The sergeant pointed to a surly young man just arrested for the murder of Officer Tippit.
It was soon proven that the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found in the Depository belonged to Oswald, an ex-Marine and self-proclaimed Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 and returned to the United States in 1962. Evidence against him quickly mounted. On Sunday morning, November 24th, Americans received another shock to their senses. Oswald was to be transferred from the Dallas police station to the county jail. Millions of TV viewers watched as detectives escorted him out of an elevator in the station basement. As reporters pressed closer, a dark figure stepped in front. Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby aimed a revolver at Oswald. Yelling "You killed my President, you [expletive]!" he fired one round. Oswald collapsed, mortally wounded.
Five days later, President Johnson appointed a seven-man commission, headed by United States Chief Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the Kennedy assassination. Americans wanted to know if Oswald had been party to a conspiracy; his death at Ruby's hands smacked of an effort to silence him. After 10 months of inquiry, the Commission submitted its report. It declared that Oswald and Ruby had both acted alone.
Labyrinth of Scenarios
However, many expressed skepticism about these findings. Some charged a cover-up. Numerous books and articles appeared speculating on an assassination conspiracy. In 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison claimed to have evidence of such a conspiracy, formally charging a local businessman. The "evidence" was sharply discredited, however, and the defendant acquitted. In 1976, Congress established the House Select Committee on Assassinations. It reinvestigated the JFK slaying, but made no significant new discoveries. Nevertheless, the controversy continued to grow unabated. Literature on the assassination forms a labyrinth of scenarios. Some proposed as many as five assassins, with up to 22 bullets being fired.
Theories about Lee Harvey Oswald abound. Some hold he was actually shooting at Governor Connally (who had been Navy Secretary when Oswald's Marine discharge was changed to dishonorable because of his defection). Others hypothesize that Oswald was really a CIA or FBI agent. Quite a few insist he had no part in the crime at all, but was merely a "fall guy."
And if Oswald was innocent, who was guilty? Speculation overflows. The Dallas Police, Secret Service, FBI and CIA -- and various combinations thereof -- have frequently been targeted as conspiracy suspects. The following have also been accused: white supremacists opposed to Kennedy's civil rights program; "right-wing extremists" against his policies in general; Texas oil men incited by the prospect of oil industry taxes; the mob, threatened by Justice Department investigations under Kennedy; Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, for the same reason as the mob; Lyndon Johnson, ambitious for the Presidency; Nikita Khrushchev, angry over the 1962 Missile Crisis; pro-Castroites upset about the Bay of Pigs invasion; anti-Castroites upset about the results of the Bay of Pigs invasion; Castro himself, retaliating for a CIA plot against his life; and on the list goes. When Richard Nixon was President, his liberal critics did cartwheels upon learning that he had been in Dallas on November 21, 1963 -- Was it all a plot to avenge the 1960 election? Some claimed that two tramps, photographed in Dealey Plaza after the assassination, were really Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis. There has evolved an entire cult of assassination buffs -- individuals who have made a career out of speculative inquiry into the death of John F. Kennedy. They have turned a tragedy into a travesty -- a "whodunit" of almost comic dimensions. One exasperated writer, reviewing the unbounded spectrum of analysis, asked when someone will spring the theory that Jacqueline Kennedy planned the assassination so she could marry shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
Discerning individuals know that conspiracy has played a significant role in history. So it is tempting to look at the sheer volume of claims made about the Kennedy assassination and accept, prima facie, that it was a conspiracy.
It is true that conservative authors have occasionally -- and responsibly -- discussed the possibility of conspiracy in the JFK slaying. However, the liberal left has generated the overwhelming majority of such conjectures. As a reference point, Tass immediately called the assassination the work of "racists, the Ku Klux Klan and Birchists," while the Soviet magazine New Times termed it "an act of ultra-Right political terror." The American media flowed in the same direction -- with visible results. GOP leader Barry Goldwater was "stunned and shocked" by the threatening mail he began to receive. Conservative Texas Congressman Bruce Alger was forced to close his Washington office due to the volume of abusive phone calls and letters. Texas Senator John Tower did the same, and had to move his family out of Washington for several days. And from those days until now, the American conservative has remained the number one villain in Kennedy assassination scenarios.
The accusations and emotions of the controversy are not unique. At several points in modern history, movements have sought to exonerate leftists of crimes, shifting reproach to the right. Anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed due to conclusive evidence of their participation in a robbery-murder (modern ballistics tests on Sacco's gun have confirmed his guilt). Nevertheless, American liberals rallied to their cause, and canonized the two as innocent martyrs persecuted by the police and "ruling class." Alger Hiss and later the Rosenbergs passed U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union; in both cases, the left engineered campaigns proclaiming that the accused were victims of "frameups" by the FBI and rightists. It is not surprising, then, that after a Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald was shown to have murdered President John F. Kennedy, a plethora of books called him a patsy framed by the police and/or the FBI, in a sinister plot by conservatives.
Rush to Rumor
The standard-bearer of the cult of assassination buffs is Mark Lane, an attorney who has exerted his legal skills on behalf of American Communists, James Earl Ray, the radical American Indian Movement, and Jim Jones and his Guyana Peoples Temple. Lane is a longstanding proponent of Lee Harvey Oswald's innocence. He kicked his crusade off with a 10,000-word defense brief for Oswald in the National Guardian.
On November 22, 1963, a black-bordered, full-page ad criticizing Kennedy's policies had appeared in the Dallas Morning News. It had been signed by Bernard Weissman, a conservative. At first, some people wondered if the ad might have some link to the assassination, and Lane capitalized. He claimed before the Warren Commission that at Jack Ruby's night club, the week before the shooting, there had been a meeting between Weissman, Ruby, and Officer J. D. Tippit. (It so happened that Tippit had worked weekends at a restaurant owned by a member of The John Birch Society; thus the dead hero became a favorite target for speculation by the left.) When challenged, Lane was unable to produce any evidence or eyewitness supporting his allegation.
Lane also asserted that Oswald did not shoot Tippit. In his best-selling book Rush to Judgment, he stated that Helen Markham, a key witness to the incident, had told him the killer was "a short man, somewhat on the heavy side, with slightly bushy hair." Of course, this description did not fit Oswald, who was of medium height, weighed about 150 pounds, and had thinning hair. How did Lane procure this statement? Here is an excerpt from the tape of his actual phone conversation with Mrs. Markham.
LANE: ... I read that you told some of the reporters that he was short, stocky, and had bushy hair.
MARKHAM: No, no. I did not say this.
LANE: You did not say that?
MARKHAM: No, sir.
LANE: Well, would you say that he was stocky?
MARKHAM: Uh, he was short.
LANE: He was short.
MARKHAM: Yes.
LANE: And was he a little bit on the heavy side?
MARKHAM: Uh, not too heavy.
LANE: Not too heavy, but slightly heavy?
MARKHAM: Oh, well, he was, no he wasn't, didn't look too heavy, uh-uh.
LANE: He wasn't too heavy, and would you say that he had rather bushy hair, kind of hair?
MARKHAM: Yeh, just a little bit bushy, uh huh.
MARKHAM: No, no. I did not say this.
LANE: You did not say that?
MARKHAM: No, sir.
LANE: Well, would you say that he was stocky?
MARKHAM: Uh, he was short.
LANE: He was short.
MARKHAM: Yes.
LANE: And was he a little bit on the heavy side?
MARKHAM: Uh, not too heavy.
LANE: Not too heavy, but slightly heavy?
MARKHAM: Oh, well, he was, no he wasn't, didn't look too heavy, uh-uh.
LANE: He wasn't too heavy, and would you say that he had rather bushy hair, kind of hair?
MARKHAM: Yeh, just a little bit bushy, uh huh.
Lane is a master of the leading question and the out-of-context quote. He reported that Charles Brehm, a Dealey Plaza witness, told him that "a portion of the President's skull was driven backward and to the left, as if the bullet had originated in an area to the right and to the front." An outraged Brehm later said: "Every question that he [Lane] asked me, I indicated that the shots came from up at the School Book Depository. There was no doubt in my mind that this was the way it was. I did not at any time indicate ... or will I ever say that those shots came from anywhere but the one place .... He has forgotten everything that I said except one little point that he can call a point of controversy. The nicest thing that can be said about Mark Lane is that he was an unmitigated liar."
The Grandstander of New Orleans
Only one court trial has ever investigated a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald spent the summer of 1963 in New Orleans. A lawyer there, Dean Andrews, performed some minor legal work for him. Questioned later by the Warren Commission, Andrews said that, after the assassination, someone calling himself "Clay Bertrand" had phoned, suggesting that he defend Oswald.
Later, Jim Garrison, the imperious district attorney of New Orleans, decided that "Clay Bertrand" was in reality local businessman Clay Shaw. In February 1967, Garrison announced to the press that he had "positively solved the assassination of President John F. Kennedy." His claim was that Clay Shaw, Oswald, and an anti-Communist named David Ferrie (who had just died of a cerebral hemorrhage) had secretly plotted the assassination at Ferrie's apartment. Garrison embarked on a publicity campaign that included a Playboy interview and an appearance on the Johnny Carson show. When pressed for evidence, he hedged, saying that there was plenty, that it would all come out at the trial of Shaw (whom he had thrown in jail).
Mark Lane and a host of amateur assassination sleuths descended on New Orleans, and were employed by Garrison. He accepted their suggestions with little challenge. At first, he declared that two assassins had been in Dallas; he kept increasing the number until it reached 16, with shots being fired from various buildings, bushes, and even a storm drain. At his apex, Garrison extended the conspiracy to include the CIA, oil millionaires, the Dallas Police, anti-Castro Cubans, the Minutemen, munitions dealers and White Russians, as well as other "reactionaries."
His evidence against Clay Shaw proved ludicrous. In Shaw's address book, he found this entry: "Lee Odom, PO Box 19106, Dallas, Tex." Garrison said this was actually a secret code for Jack Ruby's phone number. He reached this deduction by scrambling the number, subtracting 1300, and then using another system to change the "PO" to "WH." Unfortunately for Garrison, it turned out that there was a Lee Odom at Dallas PO Box 19106 -- a fact he had not bothered to check. The district attorney's star witness in court was Perry Russo, who had supposedly been at the meeting between Shaw, Oswald, and Ferrie. But it came to light that Russo had never reported any assassination plot until Garrison had had him hypnotized. Under hypnosis, Russo was told to visualize Ferrie's apartment, and was then fed leading questions about assassination. The case exploded when Dean Andrews -- the attorney who had inadvertently provided the original link between Clay Shaw and "Clay Bertrand" -- admitted "Clay Bertrand" was just a name he had made up to protect a friend. Shaw was acquitted, and the case went down as one of judicial history's greatest fiascos. But many of the rumors spread by the Garrison whirlwind persist to this day.
Hurt's Truth?
The most popular book about the Kennedy assassination today is Reasonable Doubt (1985) by Henry Hurt. It is a sort of bible of assassination conspiracy theories. People who read it -- and who are otherwise uninformed -- are apt to finish it believing that Lee Harvey Oswald was a dupe in an elaborate plot. The Washington Post calls it "convincing" and "meticulous," the Village Voice "thorough, accurate, judicious." On the surface, Reasonable Doubt seems to be a dispassionate assembly of documented facts. Beneath that surface, it is a web of misrepresentations.
For example, in reconstructing Oswald's movements after the assassination, the police determined that he boarded a bus near the School Book Depository. Of this, Hurt says: "The single silver of concrete evidence was a bus-transfer slip supposedly in Oswald's possession when he was arrested." What Hurt fails to mention is that Oswald's former landlady was on the bus and recognized him; that the bus driver testified the transfer slip bore his unique punch mark; and finally, that Oswald freely admitted boarding the bus!
Hurt postulates that Oswald could not have shot President Kennedy because he was a "mild-mannered young man" and "the evidence suggesting his capacity for violence is as tenuous today as it was two decades ago." Hurt supports this contention by simply omitting many contrary facts well-known to students of Oswald's life: Oswald frequently beat his wife; as a teenager he threatened his sister-in-law with a knife; at age 16 -- already an avid Marxist -- he said he would like to kill President Eisenhower for exploiting the working class; after his defection to Moscow, he wrote to his brother, "In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American government -- any American."
Furthermore, seven months before the assassination, Oswald tried to murder retired Major General Edwin Walker, a conservative activist whom he called a "fascist." The bullet, fired through a window of the general's home, missed his head by inches. Hurt says the evidence that Oswald did this is "of the flimsiest kind." (After the President's death, Oswald's wife admitted it was her husband who shot at Walker. She produced the note he had written her that night bearing instructions on what to do should he be arrested; photos of Walker's house were found among Oswald's belongings.)
Our attention now turns to three of the most widely discussed controversies of the Kennedy assassination: the deaths of witnesses, Jack Ruby's motives, and the source of the shots that killed the President.
"Everybody knows" that, after the assassination, witnesses began dying in grisly fashion. Executive Action, a 1973 movie based partly on material produced by Mark Lane, portrayed Oswald as the innocent patsy of right-wing conspirators. Its ending warned viewers that 18 material witnesses had died within three years. It then declared: "An actuary engaged by the London Sunday Times concluded that, on November 22, 1963, the odds against these witnesses being dead by February, 1967, were one hundred thousand trillion to one."
What few know is, the Times later admitted that this estimate was "based on a careless journalistic mistake." It was computed according to this proposition: Given 15 people, what were the odds that all would die within a short period? However, more than five hundred witnesses testified before the Warren Commission. That a handful of these were deceased by 1967 was not, of course, remarkable.
Most of the mystique about witness deaths originated with Penn Jones, Jr., a liberal Texas newspaper editor who once physically assaulted a speaker for The John Birch Society. When Lee Harvey Oswald left the assassination scene, the bus he boarded became immobilized by crowds. He walked a couple of blocks and took a cab to his rooming house. Two years later, the cab's driver, one William Whaley, died in an accident. Jones wrote that "details on Whaley's accident are not available. Whaley had a chance to talk to Oswald alone after the assassination of President Kennedy." The inference: Whaley was "silenced" because he knew too much. In fact, he died in a head-on collision. The other driver, also killed, was an 83-year-old man who had forgotten to turn on his headlights.
Mrs. Earlene Roberts, who had been the housekeeper at Oswald's rooming house, died in 1966. Jones wrote: "Now Mrs. Roberts has joined that long list of persons who had first-hand information, but are now dead." Mrs. Roberts was an elderly woman with numerous ailments. Her autopsy revealed that she had died of heart failure from massive calcium deposits.
Around the middle of the next century, perhaps some researcher will exclaim: "Aha! Every witness to the Kennedy assassination is dead! Explain that!" For a thorough debunking of the "murdered witnesses" rumor, see Chapter Three of Richard Lewis's The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report. It examines the heralded deaths, case by case.
Hit Man or Just a Man?
The most damning incident suggesting conspiracy was Jack Ruby's murder of Lee Harvey Oswald. Ruby said he felt grief for the Kennedy children, and wanted to spare Mrs. Kennedy the ordeal of returning to Dallas (as newspapers were projecting) for Oswald's trial. However, Ruby's explanation was received with skepticism. As the owner of two nightclubs that featured striptease acts, he hardly seemed a likely candidate for a deed with patriotic impetus.
The theory advanced about Ruby today runs something like this: He was originally from Chicago, and, as everyone knows, Chicago is famous for gangsters, such as Al Capone; Ruby also had acquaintances with criminal backgrounds; therefore, it stands to reason that the mob hired Ruby to shut up Oswald.
Just why they would fear Oswald talking, but not Ruby talking, is never explained. However, this allegation has been tenacious, because one cannot prove that the mob did not hire Ruby. Negatives are often impossible to prove. However, proponents of the hit-man scenario generally ignore certain pertinent facts.
Following the assassination, the National Opinion Research Center polled the public's reaction. It reported: "The first reactions of nine out of ten Americans were sympathy for Mrs. Kennedy and her children and deep sorrow that 'a strong young man had been killed at the height of his powers.'" Thus, the emotions Ruby professed were far from extraordinary. The poll also found that one of nine hoped Oswald would be "shot down or lynched." Ruby's sister and acquaintances observed him to be profoundly grieved (he had behaved similarly after the death of Franklin Roosevelt). He ordered his clubs closed for three days.
One little-publicized factor in the Oswald slaying was religion. Jack Ruby, born Jacob Rubenstein, was Jewish, and very conscious of it. As a young man in Chicago, he and his street friends had tried to break up pro-Nazi rallies of the German-American Bund. We referred earlier to a large, black-bordered ad criticizing JFK in a Dallas newspaper on November 22nd. It was signed "Bernard Weissman" -- a Jewish-sounding name. Jack Ruby, himself a believer in conspiracies, erroneously thought the name was a phony, and the ad an attempt to discredit Jews by linking them to the assassination. Bold action against Oswald in public, he hoped, might absolve his race. While questioned by police about his motives, Ruby said: "I also want the world to know that Jews do have guts."
Ruby believed he would emerge a hero. Instead, he found himself labeled a paid killer -- and perhaps even a conspirator in the President's murder. Authors of the assassination cult rarely disclose that Ruby insisted on -- and received -- a lie detector test in an effort to prove his motives. The polygraph, while not an infallible tool, indicated that Ruby was telling the truth on all questions relevant to motive and conspiracy. The complete results of this lengthy exam appear in volume XIV of the Warren Commission hearings. If Ruby had failed just one polygraph question, we can be sure that Mark Lane and the assassination cult would have trumpeted it far and wide.
Jack Ruby died of cancer in 1967. While he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by family members, his attorney Elmer Gertz interviewed him about the Oswald killing, tape-recording the conversation. Gertz subsequently released the tape to the public. Unto death, Jack Ruby held to his story.
The Notorious Knoll
The most hotly contested issue of the Kennedy assassination: Where did the shots originate from? Champions of Lee Harvey Oswald's innocence rely primarily on two arguments. The first is that the shots were fired not from the School Book Depository behind the President, as officially reported, but from a grassy knoll to his front and right. The second argument, which we will discuss shortly, involves a controversial slug known as "the magic bullet."
How did law enforcement officials and the Warren Commission determine where the shots came from? Several eyewitnesses saw the sniper shooting from the Depository's sixth-floor window, where the rifle and cartridges were found. Also, two newsmen in one of the motorcade's rear cars spotted the rifle extending from that same window. Three Depository employees, standing one floor beneath that window, heard the shots above: they said the blasts shook the building, causing plaster to fall on their heads; one testified he heard the cartridges striking the floor.
Then there were the bullets' effects. The paths of the wounds in Kennedy and Connally were at an angle consistent with the Depository window. The President's throat wound was shown to be back-to-front, not only by autopsy, but by the bullet holes in his jacket and shirt: the fibers in back were pointing inward and those in front outward. Kennedy's skull had a small posterior hole characteristic of an entrance wound, and a large gaping wound on the right side. "Grassy knoll" proponents say the latter proves a shot from the side. This is not, however, an informed position. A bullet tends to enter a body cleanly and, after impacting tissue, exit with gross damage. The President's autopsy showed the bullet fragmented inside the skull. One fragment lodged above the right eye. Others burst out the side; two large ones were recovered in the limousine. Governor Connally's physicians agreed unanimously that he was shot from behind.
How, then, do critics rationalize a grassy knoll gunman? First, they dismiss the foregoing data by saying that the official physicians and forensic scientists were pressured into lying. (This accusation is a symptom of the mentality that rejects any and all evidence incriminating Marxist Oswald.) Originally, many claimed the shots were fired from a railroad overpass in front of the President. This was dropped, however, when it was demonstrated that the bullets would have had to pierce the limousine windshield: None had. From then on, attention concentrated on the grassy knoll.
"Knoll" advocates cite assassination witnesses who believed the shots sounded there. However, as might be expected, there were many discrepancies among the perceptions of the witnesses. Recollections of the number of shots varied -- from one to six. But the consensus, especially among expert observers (such as policemen and Secret Servicemen), was decidedly three. Some noted loud reverberations that, to untrained ears, would have disguised the number and location of shots.
One witness, frequently quoted by the assassination cult, believed that the shots -- four to six of them -- came from the grassy knoll. She also thought, erroneously, that she saw a dog in the presidential limousine, and that a puddle from a spilled beverage was blood. Several people raced up the knoll immediately after the assassination; they found no gunman or cartridges. A railroad employee, who during the shooting was stationed in a tower behind and overlooking the knoll, had seen no snipers.
Another grassy knoll "proof" arises from the famous Zapruder film, a home movie of the motorcade. A prime Warren Commission exhibit, it can be found in volume XVIII of the hearings.
Zapruder frame 313 vividly records the fatal shot striking the President. Conspiracy proponents observe that succeeding frames show Kennedy falling back and to the left -- a response, they say, to a shot from the right front. However, anyone who carefully examines the film, and compares frame 313 to 312, can see that the shot drove the President's head forward on impact.
Why, then, did he subsequently move back and to the left? We noted earlier that a bullet tends to enter cleanly but exit with massive damage. Matter blowing forward out the right side of Kennedy's head, discernible in the Zapruder film, probably drove him in the opposite direction. Ballistics experiments on melons wrapped with tape have created this effect -- each time a melon is shot, contents burst out the other side, propelling the melon toward the gun. Many physicians also believe that decerebration -- a spastic reaction that occurs when part of the brain is removed -- may have caused the President's motion.
Members of the assassination cult spent years poring over blown-up photos of the grassy knoll, trying to spot a gunman. One believed he saw a sniper aiming over the roof of a station wagon. It turned out to be a space between tree foliage. David Lifton, who once saw a figure resembling Douglas MacArthur in one of the blowups, is perhaps the most diehard of the grassy-knollers. When a new team of pathologists confirmed the findings of the original Kennedy autopsy -- that the bullets came from the rear -- Lifton was undaunted. In his book Best Evidence (1980), he developed what may be the most complex assassination scenario yet.
When President Kennedy was brought to Parkland Memorial Hospital, doctors there did not see his two small posterior bullet wounds. This was because they never turned the President over: Their efforts were confined to resuscitation measures. After death was pronounced, the body went to the airport in a casket.
Lifton, however, deduces that, since the physicians did not see the rear wounds, those wounds did not exist. This is his thesis: Between Dallas and the autopsy in Washington (performed that same evening), the President's body was secretly switched to another coffin. It was then whisked to a place where the body was altered -- bullets extracted, artificial wounds created, etc. -- to fool autopsy doctors by creating the illusion of a shooter from behind while concealing those in front. Then, he says, the body was sneaked back into the original casket. To support this, Lifton quotes hospital personnel whose recollections of the President's casket and body wrappings vary from the official version -- not surprising since he interviewed them 15-16 years after the fact.
Surely there would have been less complicated ways to frame Lee Harvey Oswald! (Why not simply shoot from behind?) Absurd or not, Best Evidence enjoyed a lengthy stay on the New York Times bestseller list, and sold over 100,000 copies in hardback alone.
(Note: In 1978, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Oswald alone fired the shots hitting Kennedy and Connally. However, at the last moment, under lobbying from assassination buffs, and pressure to justify the time and taxpayer money it had spent, the Committee amended its findings to say that a sniper on the grassy knoll probably fired one shot that missed. It based this on an acoustical study of an audio tape purportedly made during the assassination. In 1982, a new panel of acoustics experts unanimously discredited the tape.)
Super-slug
After the assassination, a nearly whole bullet was found on Governor Connally's stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Ballistics tests proved that Oswald's rifle had fired it, to the exclusion of all other weapons in the world. The Warren Commission concluded that three shots were discharged in Dealey Plaza: one that missed, hitting a curb; one that struck Kennedy's head, fragmenting; and one that, after traversing the President's throat, went through Governor Connally's chest (damaging a rib), smashed his wrist, and lodged in his thigh. This, the Commission stated, was the bullet found on Connally's stretcher -- an explanation ridiculed by authors of the assassination cult, who call the slug "the magic bullet." It could never have survived in such good shape after inflicting so much damage, they say, pointing out that fragments were found in Connally's wrist. They insist the bullet was planted on the stretcher to frame Lee Harvey. However, they usually leave a number of facts out of their texts.
(1) The bullet had a steel jacket and hard nose. Combined with what is called "tumbling" (the bullet spins end-over-end after contacting the first object, so that the nose is not necessarily what strikes subsequent objects), this could account for the bullet's durability.
(2) U.S. Army ballistics experts performed multiple tests using animal tissue and Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano rifle to simulate conditions of the assassination. These determined that the bullet could maintain the velocity necessary to do all the damage attributed to it.
(3) Employing the Zapruder film as a guide, the FBI and Secret Service reenacted the assassination. They placed the Mannlicher-Carcano in the Depository window, and photographed, through the telescopic site, a car representing the Presidential limousine. This showed that when President Kennedy grasped at his neck, it was in direct alignment with Connally's chest.
(4) Dr. Charles F. Gregory, the physician who treated the Governor's wrist, testified that the fragments were simply flakes, in total "something less than the weight of a postage stamp." Furthermore, sophisticated neutron testing later determined that the fragments were from the stretcher bullet.
(5) The wound in Connally's thigh was superficial (indicating a spent slug) and round in shape. What happened to the projectile causing this wound, if it was not the one found on the stretcher?
"Planted bullet" proponents face another problem. Ballistics tests also linked the large fragments found in the Presidential limousine to Oswald's rifle. Their explanation: "planted fragments."
Was Lee Harvey Oswald guilty or innocent? To be near his job, Oswald lived in a Dallas rooming house. Every weekend he would visit his wife and two young children in Irving, which is where he also stored his rifle. On November 21, 1963, Oswald departed from routine by going to Irving on a Thursday.
The following morning, unknown to his wife, he left his wedding ring in a cup on their bureau -- something he had never done before. He told her he would not return for the weekend. A co-worker named Frazier drove Oswald to the Depository that day. Frazier, noticing that Oswald had a tall, brown-paper package, asked what was in it. Oswald said it was curtain rods for his room in Dallas (which, it turned out, needed no curtain rods).
Oswald carried the package into the Depository. Later that morning, he asked another employee about the direction of the presidential motorcade. On the building's sixth story, workers were laying a new plywood floor. Breaking for lunch shortly before noon, they passed Oswald on the staircase at the fifth floor. A few minutes later, one, having forgotten his cigarettes, returned to the sixth floor -- where he saw Oswald, alone.
The assassination occurred at 12:30 PM. One eyewitness, across the street, saw Oswald shooting and later positively identified him. Others with a poorer view gave descriptions resembling Oswald. The Mannlicher-Carcano found at the window belonged to him. His handwriting was on the coupon received by the mail-order house that shipped it.
Inspection of the rifle later revealed Oswald's palmprint on the barrel. His palmprints and fingerprints were on the tall, brown-paper package found nearby, and on the stacked boxes used as a gun rest. As we have noted, a bullet and fragments recovered from the shooting were linked exclusively to the Mannlicher-Carcano.
Police did not enter the School Book Depository until some 90 seconds after the shots. Oswald was next seen on the second floor, then boarding a bus that could not get through the crowds. He took a cab to a point near his rooming house, where the housekeeper saw him dash in and out, zipping up a jacket as he left.
Minutes later, a few blocks away, Officer Tippit spotted him. Six eyewitnesses positively identified Oswald, either in the act of shooting Tippit, or fleeing the scene as he shed cartridges from his gun.
When police converged on Oswald shortly thereafter, he yelled, "It's all over now!" He pulled his revolver, but was subdued. The gun was ballistically matched to the cartridges left at the scene of Tippit's murder. A paraffin test of Oswald's hands revealed he had recently fired a gun.
All of this evidence would be sufficient to convict anyone -- unless his name is Lee Harvey Oswald. The Lane-Lifton-Hurt crowd absolves him of both murders. Eyewitnesses? They were mistaken; if not mistaken, then they were intimidated into lying. Since no witness ever came forward to say he had been intimidated, it eventually became chic to say that Oswald had a double who perpetrated the killings. Details such as how the "double" managed to have Oswald's fingerprints are explained away with some difficulty.
And what about the ballistics tests, paraffin test, fingerprint identification, neutron testing, autopsy, etc.? The assassination cult says these were faulty; if they weren't faulty, they were faked; if they weren't faked, they were based on planted evidence. To accept such notions, one must accept either sweeping incompetence or a sweeping conspiracy that would include the FBI, Secret Service, Dallas Police, and all other investigative technicians and personnel.
It is manifest that, if the evidence against Oswald had been doubled or even tripled, his defenders would still have found reasons to reject it. What the motives are of such people is a subject almost as interesting as the motives of Oswald himself.
Lone Wolf or Wolf Pack?
If we acknowledge Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin, a question remains: Did he act as part of a conspiracy? Statesmen have lost their lives both to conspirators and to solitary men. No one believes that Julius Caesar was slain by a "loner." But who believes that John Hinckley, who fired shots at President Reagan, was a member of a conspiracy? Which role do we assign Oswald?
Some liberal theorists, perhaps realizing that claims for Oswald's innocence exceed credibility, have granted his guilt. However, they say he was not a Marxist, as he professed, but a secret anti-Communist or U.S. intelligence operative. In short, if you cannot pin the assassination on conservatives by making Oswald their dupe, you pin it on them by making him their agent.
It has not been difficult to create this illusion. When Oswald returned from the USSR to the United States, he brought back a Russian wife named Marina. She was the niece of a colonel in the MVD, the Soviet secret police. The FBI in Dallas kept tabs on the Oswalds, and, in October 1963, an agent called on Marina to ask a few routine questions. Lee Harvey, enraged to learn of this visit from the "gestapo," wrote down the agent's name and delivered a note of protest to the Dallas FBI Office. After the assassination, it was reported that Oswald had the name of an FBI agent in his address book and that, less than a month before Kennedy's death, he had been seen entering FBI headquarters .... Thus it was hinted that the FBI had a working relationship with Oswald, perhaps even a hand in the assassination.
All U.S. intelligence organizations kept a file on Oswald: This was routine for defectors. Henry Hurt writes in Reasonable Doubt: "In 1973, in one of the most outrageous official acts in the whole dismal debacle, the Department of Defense destroyed the Oswald records." Hurt suggests that U.S. military intelligence employed Oswald as an agent, and disposed of the file to cover up. The truth is, military intelligence kept files on thousands of potential subversives. Because liberals protested, the Defense Department destroyed all such files, of which Oswald's was only one. Those who saw it say it simply contained his Marine records, newspaper clippings, and some copies of FBI reports.
To reconcile known facts with the theory that Oswald was a secret agent or anti-Communist, the assassination cult claims his defection to Moscow was really an espionage mission, and that his activities in America (such as handing out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee) were just a "cover." This interpretation defies reality. Oswald had been an avid Marxist since his mid-teens, when he would refuse to salute the flag in school. With scores of acquaintances, both publicly and privately, he expressed his passion for Marxism. He denounced religion. When a glass of lemonade seemed too expensive, he crabbed about greedy capitalism. When captured by police after the assassination, he yelled: "I protest this police brutality!" If Lee Harvey Oswald was an anti-Communist, he should receive a posthumous Academy Award.
Conservatives have also seen Oswald as a conspirator -- in a Soviet plot. While this has vastly greater credibility, much of the speculation has hit dead ends. British author Michael Eddowes believed that the Lee Harvey Oswald who shot the President was not the Lee Harvey Oswald who had defected to Moscow, but a KGB look-alike who returned in his place. After considerable controversy, Oswald's body was exhumed in 1981 and examined by pathologists. It was the real Lee Harvey Oswald.
Conservatives were interested in Hugh McDonald's 1975 book Appointment in Dallas. McDonald had met a man named "Saul" who claimed to have assassinated John F. Kennedy from the Dallas county records building. A subsequent McDonald book elaborated this as a KGB plot. Oswald was supposedly a patsy who thought he was working for the CIA in a test of the President's security. But McDonald's version of the assassination runs aground on the same points as liberal ones: Ballistics proved Oswald's gun the murder weapon; wound paths did not line up with the records building; and Oswald hated U.S. intelligence agencies far too much to work for them.
If Oswald is conceded to be the assassin, the potential for conspiracy should be weighed in light of certain observations. First, Oswald shot the President from his place of employment. Frequently out of work, he obtained the job through chance. His wife was staying with a Texas family; one of their neighbors, whose brother worked at the Depository, suggested applying there. Oswald was hired on October 15, 1963. At that time, no one in the world knew a presidential motorcade would pass the Depository a month later. The Dallas Trade Mart was not selected for a Kennedy luncheon until November 14th, and the motorcade route was not announced until November 19th.
No one furnished Oswald with a professional assassin's gun. He purchased the aging Mannlicher-Carcano from a mail-order house for $20.
If Oswald, in leaving the assassination scene, had jumped into a speeding car with three masked fellows inside, that would certainly have spelled conspiracy. But Oswald made his getaway on a bus. There is no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald received any material assistance in the assassination of the President.
Even if Oswald did act alone, how do we know someone did not order or encourage him? How do we know there was not a secret park-bench tryst with a KGB or Cuban DGI agent? We do not. Again, negatives cannot be proven. But, if the Soviets or Cubans wanted to kill the President, the question is raised of why they would choose an assassin so easily linked to them. And there is the broader matter of what they could hope to gain in this risky venture. John F. Kennedy had doomed the Bay of Pigs mission by withholding promised air support. After the Missile Crisis of 1962, he had agreed to bar any more invasion attempts on Cuba. As a further concession, he had withdrawn all intermediate-range missiles from Turkey, Italy, and England. On October 8, 1963, he had signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The Kennedy scorecard was a good one for the Soviets and Cubans. Reasons why they would want him dead can be conjectured, but they are far from obvious. And consider what they could have lost had Oswald, under interrogation, admitted being ordered by the KGB -- and the next day's headlines screamed: "SOVIETS ORDERED KENNEDY'S DEATH." The USSR, offending even liberals, would have then forfeited détente and aid and trade for years to come. A look at Oswald's life yields some insights into a perhaps more plausible impetus behind his trigger finger.
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