Testimony of the
Eyewitnesses
The Warren
Commission Report: II
Fred J. Cook
The Nation, 20 June 1966, pages 737–746
The following is the second and concluding section of Fred J. Cook’s analysis of the testimony given before the Warren Commission. As we explained last week, the manuscript was delivered to us, in its present form, approximately three weeks before publication of Part I; in other words, before the appearance of press releases announcing publication of two books which also analyze the testimony and the rejoinders from spokesmen for the commission which these releases stimulated.—The Editors
Despite the speed with which the Dallas authorities closed
out the case of President Kennedy’s assassination after they had latched on to
Oswald, despite the speed with which they promulgated their
one-assassin-three-shot-theory, despite the effect that this must have had on
the recollections of all but the stoutest and most positive witnesses, a
surprising number of spectators insisted with varying degrees of certainty that
they had heard four, five or six shots.
One of the most positive and emphatic on
this point was Mrs. Jean Hill, the schoolteacher who was standing with Mary
Moorman when the latter took her widely distributed Polaroid picture of the
assassination. The two women were standing on the curb of the little grass plot
known as Dealey Plaza, on the left-hand side of the motorcade as it proceeded
toward the triple underpass. The firing broke out as the Presidential car moved
directly in front of them, and Mrs. Hill stubbornly testified that she heard
more than three shots.
“I’ve always said there were some four
to six shots,” she told the commission. “There were three shots—one right
after the other, and a distinct pause, or just a moment’s pause, and then I
heard more.…I think there were at least four or five shots and perhaps six,
but I know there were more than three.”
Mrs. Hill thought that she heard shots not
only from the Texas School Book Depository but from a knoll directly opposite
her, on the right-hand side of Elm Street. This would mean that the sounds came
from the same general direction, but from a different firing point. The ground
across Elm from Dealey Plaza slopes up to a semicircular monument structure in
the center of a little park. A concrete wall runs for some distance from the end
of the monument toward the underpass; behind the wall, crowning the crest of the
knoll, is a thin line of trees, thick with foliage. Beyond the trees there is a
parking lot, wedged in between the knoll and the railroad tracks that come
curving down to pass over Elm, Main and Commerce Streets.
Mrs. Hill saw a man who seemed to be
running away. She even crossed the street to pursue him, but people began to
mill around, and she lost sight of him. Subsequently, she and her friend were
taken to the courthouse so that officials could get their statements of what
they had seen. By the time they were released, Oswald had been captured and held
for the murder of Patrolman Tippit; his rifle and three discharged shells had
been found; and official theory already had hardened into the belief that the
entire case had been solved. To Mrs. Hill, the official theory didn’t jibe
with what she had seen and heard; and so, as she was leaving the courthouse, she
protested to a Secret Service agent.
I talked with this man, a Secret Service man, and I said, “Am I a kook or what is wrong with me?” I said, “They keep saying three shots—three shots,” and I said, “I know I heard more. I heard four to six shots anyway.”
He said, “Mrs. Hill, we were standing at the window and we heard more shots also, but we have three wounds and we have three bullets, three shots is all we are willing to say right now.”
This remark so perfectly expresses the official mentality that had
botched the aftermath of tragedy in Dallas that it carries the ring of truth. To
digress for a moment: every law-enforcement agency on the scene that day had
disgraced itself. The FBI knew all about the erratic Lee Harvey Oswald; it knew
he had been distributing Castroite leaflets in New Orleans and had gotten into a
street brawl there; it even knew that he was working in a building on the
Presidential route—and it told nobody. Adlai Stevenson, a short time before
the President’s trip, had been viciously attacked in Dallas, yet the Secret
Service, when making its protective plans, got from the FBI the name of not a
single fanatic in a city that breeds them like kernels on a corncob. To suggest
how strange this was, months before the killing in Dallas, in an article dealing
with fanatics of the Right, I had described the activities of a mysterious and
wealthy young Dallas businessman, self-styled “The Patriot,” who was trying
to form a nation-wide secret organization composed of radicals pledged to rise
and assassinate prominent officials on “The Patriot’s” orders. The
activities of this and other rich, powerful and wild-eyed yahoos in Dallas could
not have been unknown to the investigative agencies.
Then, once the seemingly unanticipated
disaster had occurred, the security agencies got a heaven-sent break. Oswald was
practically dropped into their arms and they grabbed their man. They solved the
case—and let no one take that glory from them! This is the quintessence
of police mentality, the kind of official reaction that atones for asinine error
with a fast “solution”; one suspects that some of the truest words spoken in
the entire Warren Commission inquiry were those of the Secret Service agent as
quoted by Mrs. Hill: “…we heard more shots also, but we have three wounds
and we have three bullets, three shots is all we are willing to say right
now.”
Three shots is all they were ever willing to say because, if they could just stick to those three shots, the crime which they were charged with preventing would be avenged in the only way possible—by the perfect solution. In less than twenty-four hours, Dallas officials were telling the press that they had absolute proof of Oswald’s guilt; and by Sunday night, when their passion for publicity had resulted in Oswald’s murder by Jack Ruby—live on nation-wide television—District Attorney Henry Wade was proclaiming that “the Oswald case was closed.” The record seems to show that there was never any official disposition to look beyond Oswald, to question whether “three shells, three shots, three wounds” would fit all the circumstances of the case. As a result we are left today with tantalizing implications.
The most intriguing of these peep out from the testimony of S. M.
Holland, the signal supervisor of the Union Terminal Railroad, who had described
so accurately the sequence of sights and sounds as he looked down on the
assassination scene from the triple overpass. When one reads testimony in
transcript form, without the advantage of actually seeing and hearing witnesses,
one gets a wide variety of impressions. Some witnesses are obviously fumbling
and ignorant and confused; some appear to be lying; others, either in their
anxiety to please or the need to fatten their egos, begin to stretch their
observations and expand upon their actual knowledge. But occasionally one finds
a witness who has observed keenly and who is so scrupulously honest and factual
that one trusts what he has to say almost implicitly. Such a witness was
Holland.
He told the Warren Commission that since
he knew railroad personnel he had been asked by the Secret Service and police to
take up a post on the railroad overpass and help them check on expected
sightseers. Holland obviously took his job seriously and observed and recalled
with the greatest care. Looking down on Elm Street, he saw Mrs. Hill and Mary
Moorman with her Polaroid camera; he described how he saw the effects of the
shots that hit President Kennedy and Governor Connally before the sounds of the
shots reached him; he saw Jacqueline Kennedy turn toward her husband after the
first shot and saw the third shot knock the President flat, face down in the
back of the limousine. The testimony is sharp, vivid, as accurate and
straightforward a recital of what happened as the commission was to get from any
one witness. Then, under questioning by Samuel A. Stern, assistant counsel of
the commission, comes this sequence:
Stern:
Did you hear a third report?
Holland:
I heard a third report and I counted four shots and about the same time all this
was happening, and in this group of trees—[indicating].
Stern:
Now, you are indicating trees on the north side of Elm Street?
Holland:
These trees right along here [indicating].…There was a shot, a report, I
don’t know whether it was a shot. I can’t say that. And a puff of smoke came
out about 6 or 8 feet above the ground right out from under those trees. And at
just about this location from where I was standing you could see that puff of
smoke, like someone had thrown a firecracker, or something out, and that is just
about the way it sounded. It wasn’t as loud as the previous reports or shots.
Holland was asked what shot this would
have been. He explained that everything had happened so fast he could not be
certain.
Holland:
It could have been the third or fourth, but there were definitely four reports.
Stern:
You have no doubt about that?
Holland:
I have no doubt about it. I have no doubt about seeing that puff of smoke come
out from under those trees either.
Realizing what had happened, Holland said,
he took off at a run along the overpass, scrambling down it at the north side of
Elm Street where a picket fence, extending from the line of the concrete wall by
the monument, runs along the crest of the knoll, separating it from the parking
lot. There was a sea of cars in the parking lot, Holland testified, and he and
some “twelve or thirteen policemen,” who had come flocking to the same
place, looked around for empty shell casings, but didn’t find any. Holland
then decided he couldn’t be of any further help; he had better leave things in
the hands of the authorities and go back to his own job on the railroad.
On his return trip, however, he made a
discovery that, in the confusion of the moment and the belief that the
authorities would have everything in hand, he had not mentioned to anyone until
he came before the commission. He testified:
I remember about the third car down from this fence, there was a station wagon backed up toward the fence, about the third car down, and a spot, I’d say 3 foot by 2 foot, looked to me like somebody had been standing there for a long period. I guess if you could count them about a hundred foot tracks in that little spot, and also mud on the bumper of that station wagon…that is approximately the same location as—that car and the trees that I saw the smoke would probably be the same location.
The mud on the bumper of the station wagon, Holland said, looked as if someone had scraped off his shoes or had stood up on the bumper to look over the fence.
Some partial corroboration of Holland’s account may be found in the
testimony of Lee E. Bowers, Jr., the tower man in the north tower of Union
Terminal. From this vantage point, Bowers had a wide-ranging view over the
assassination scene and the surrounding landscape. He testified that, in the
twenty minutes before the assassination, he noticed three strange cars circling
around in the parking-lot area behind the knoll. Two of the cars had similar,
out-of-state license plates, he recalled; one was a blue-and-white station wagon
with a couple of bumper stickers, one a travel sticker, the other a Goldwater
sign; and in one of the cars, a man seemed to be talking over a microphone held
in his hand. The cars seemed to wander around the parking lot as if looking for
a way out, Bowers said, and one of them, a 1961 or 1962 Impala with an
out-of-state license and quite a bit of mud on it, stopped behind the knoll
directly opposite the assassination site about eight minutes before the
President’s motorcade came along. Then Bowers, whose job it was to operate
switches in the yard from the north tower, got busy and didn’t think any more
about the stopped car or observe it further.
Before he became so preoccupied with his
work, Bowers said, he had noticed two men, one heavy set and middle aged, the
other younger, in his mid-twenties, standing in the trees along the crest of the
knoll. When the motorcade came past, Bowers said, he heard three shots and the
reverberations from them, but he couldn’t tell from what direction the shots
had come. He quickly noticed, however, that there “seemed to be some
commotion” in the trees along the knoll, and he saw a motorcycle policeman try
to ride up the steep incline. The policeman was heading for the area in the
trees where Bowers had seen the two men moments earlier. One of the men had
vanished, Bowers said, but the other, he thought, was still there. Why had
Bowers’ eyes been drawn back so swiftly to this wooded section along the
knoll? He could not say.
“I am just unable to describe rather
than it was something out of the ordinary,” he testified, “a sort of milling
around, but something occurred in this particular spot which was out of the
ordinary, which attracted my eye for some reason, which I could not identify.”
Had the “something out of the
ordinary” been that puff of smoke that Holland had seen so clearly? Bowers
simply could not say.
It is perhaps of some significance that
despite the swift arrest of Oswald and the almost instantaneous discarding of
any evidence that did not point to him, so many witnesses still retained the
impression that the firing had come from the wooded knoll. Oswald, it should be
remembered, was firing from a spot directly above the heads of the thickest part
of the crowd; in fact, when he touched off his final shot, trailing cars in the
motorcade were directly beneath his window, and Mrs. Earl Cabell, wife of the
mayor of Dallas, looked up and saw the end of his rifle poking out above her
head. Further along Elm Street, in the direction of the underpass and the knoll,
the crowd thinned out considerably, and so it would seem that this very
distribution should have made more persons acutely aware of Oswald and the
firing from the School Book Depository. Yet this does not seem to have been the
case. A compilation made by Harold Feldman in The Minority of One showed
that, of 121 eyewitnesses whose statements appear in the twenty-six volumes of
the commission’s hearings, thirty-eight had no clear opinion about the origin
of the shots, thirty-two thought they came from the School Book Depository—and
fifty-one believed they had come from the knoll.
Several witnesses besides Mrs. Hill and
Holland felt certain that they had heard more than three shots. Some even
claimed to have seen shots hit that, it would seem, could not be accounted for
in the three-shot quota allotted for the action in the official version. One
Dallas patrolman, J. W. Foster, who was stationed on the overpass, was certain
that he had seen a shot strike the turf near a manhole cover on lower Elm
Street, but police insisted they had not been able to find any trace of such a
bullet. Another witness, Royce G. Skelton, a mail clerk who was also on the
overpass, thought he had heard four shots but could not be certain. As he
recalled it, the first two shots came closer together.
“After those two shots, and the car came
closer to the triple underpass, well, there was another shot—two more shots I
heard, but one of them—I saw a bullet, or I guess it was a bullet—I take for
granted it was—hit in the left front of the President’s car on the cement,
and when it did, the smoke carried with it—away from the building…”
Skelton testified. He explained that by “smoke” he meant a spray effect
spreading out ahead of the shot as it hit the concrete. Again police reported
that they had been able to find no evidence of such a shot.
Some indication that the Foster or the
Skelton bullet—or perhaps yet another bullet—may actually have been
recovered is to be found in the reporting of Richard Dudman, of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch. Dudman subsequently wrote in The New Republic that on
the day of the assassination he had learned of a bullet that did not seem to be
accounted for in the three-shot, official version of events. “A group of
police officers were examining the area at the side of the street where the
President was hit,” he wrote, “and a police inspector told me they had just
found another bullet in the grass. He said he did not know whether it had
anything to do with the assassination.” All mention of such a bullet seems to
have vanished from the subsequent official accounts.
There was one shot that did not vanish. It struck the south Main Street
curb, and a fragment from it nicked the cheek of a spectator, James T. Tague.
Tague had been watching the approach of the Presidential motorcade from a spot
beside a pillar at Commerce and Main Streets down by the triple underpass. After
the shooting, a patrolman noticed that Tague had blood on his cheek; he hunted
around and found what looked to be a fresh bullet scar on the curb. The Warren
Commission reported that scientific analysis showed traces of lead, apparently
made by the lead core of a bullet, but no traces of copper from a jacketed
bullet like those Oswald was firing. Hence, the commission reasoned that one of
his bullets (perhaps the shot it theorized had missed) must have shed its copper
jacket by striking somewhere else before its lead core hit the curb. Once one
acknowledges the evidence indicating a second marksman, however, this reasoning
becomes meaningless. For who knows what kind of bullets Assassin No. 2 might
have been firing? Anyone asking that question must begin to wonder what the
Tague incident really indicates.
We get from the Warren Report only the
vaguest impression of directions and angles. A much clearer account has been
given by Vincent J. Salandria, a Philadelphia attorney, legal consultant for the
American Civil Liberties Union and critic of the Warren Report. Salandria
reported in Liberation on his study of the Tague incident:
From my view of the maps, diagrams, photographs and after a personal inspection of the situs, at no point would Tague have been in the line of fire from the Depository Building to the Presidential limousine. He was some 1½ blocks from the Depository Building, about a block south of the limousine. But he was directly across from the grassy knoll on the north side of Elm Street.…If this was the source of Tague’s wound, then Tague was very much in the line of fire since the limousine was then between him and the knoll. The trajectory is consistent with an elevation beginning about 25 feet above sea level (my estimate from personal inspection of the height of the grassy knoll) downward to the curbing and thence into his cheek.…
Such discussions cause one to examine with greater skepticism the
commission’s account of President Kennedy’s wounds. If one agrees that the
evidence indicates that Governor Connally was not hit by the bullet that first
wounded the President, it follows that Oswald could not have injured them both
because he simply did not have time to get off two shots. Since ballistics tests
showed that the nearly whole bullet recovered from Governor Connally’s
stretcher came from Oswald’s Carcano, it then follows that the first bullet
that wounded the President must have been fired by someone else. But, if so, it
would have seem that the angle and the trajectory of the bullet would have to be
different. Is there any evidence for this?
Commander James J. Humes, the Navy
pathologist who had charge of the autopsy at Bethesda, gave the commission the
anatomical facts. He placed the entry wound in the President’s back “14
centimeters from the tip of the right acromium process and 14 centimeters below
the tip of the right mastoid process.” Fourteen centimeters are roughly 5½
inches, and the specifications locate the entry wound on a straight line in from
the tip of the acromium, or point of the shoulder, and straight down from the
mastoid bone, just to the right of the spinal column. Pathologists at Bethesda
were unable to get a probe through the wound and thus trace the actual path of
the bullet, so the trajectory must be judged solely by the entry and exit
wounds. And the exit wound was located in the President’s throat at about the
level of the “third and fourth tracheal rings”—in other words just below
the Adam’s apple.
The layman can perhaps better visualize
the approximate location of these wounds from the testimony of Frazier, the FBI
expert, who described the bullet holes found in the President’s clothing.
Frazier placed the point of entry at 5-3/8 inches below the top of the
President’s coat collar; 5-3/4 inches below the top of his shirt collar, and
1-1/8 inches to the right of the center line of the shirt. In exiting, Frazier
said, the bullet nicked the knot of the President’s necktie.
These, then, were the anatomical facts
about this first wound. Their significance can be understood only in relation to
one other vital factor. If Oswald had fired the bullet that caused this wound,
it would have struck the President in the back on a downward trajectory
precisely calculated by the FBI at 17º43′30″ at the point of
impact. This means that the exit point of the bullet would have to be the lowest
spot penetrated on the Presidents body.
Throughout Commander Humes’s testimony,
no attempt was made to relate the anatomical evidence to the exactly calculated
downward trajectory from Oswald’s gun. Instead, the commission was presented
with a couple of “schematic drawings” that seemed to reconcile the wounds
with the downward-trajectory thesis. The first of these drawings, which became
exhibit 385, shows a bullet zinging in and out of the President’s neck on a
dotted line representing the downward trajectory. The second drawing, Exhibit
386, is a back view of the President’s head and shoulders; it places the entry
wound, not on a line with the tip of the shoulder, not almost in the middle of
the back, but well up above the shoulder level on the right side of the
President’s neck. In other words, the location of this wound has been
changed!
The seriousness of the distortion becomes
apparent with the drawings when one contrasts Exhibits 385 and 386 with the
drawings in Commander Humes’s own autopsy report from Bethesda (Exhibit 397).
A comparison of the back view of the human male figure represented there with
the back view of the “schematic” Exhibit 386 shows that the entry wound has
hopped from the middle of the back on the autopsy report to well up on the neck
in the schematic drawing. Only so could the requirements of the downward
trajectory have been fulfilled.
A check with medical experts quickly
exposes the seriousness of this visual distortion. Doctors on both the West and
East Coasts, questioned about this vital conflict between the autopsy report and
the schematic drawing, all agree on these basic facts:
Even if Command Humes’s drawing on his
pathologist report is not exactly true to scale (doctors are notoriously poor
artists, one points out, and Humes may have placed his entry dot a little too
low), nevertheless his precise verbal description of the location of the entry
and exit wounds makes it impossible for the bullet that caused them to have
been fired into the President’s body on a downward trajectory of more than 17
degrees. The entry and exit wounds are located almost on a straight line,
indicating that the bullet must have been fired on a nearly level trajectory.
“The only way you can reconcile these wounds with the projected downward
trajectory would be if the President had been leaning forward at a angle of
almost 20 degrees when he was struck,” one expert said.
The Zapruder film, of course, establishes
that the President was not leaning forward, but was sitting erect and
waving to the crowds. It is significant that when the Presidential car vanished
from Zapruder’s camera behind the road sign at frame 205, the President’s
erect head and upright raised hand were still visible. They remained partially
visible after others in the car had disappeared from view.
From all of this, it is clear that the
“schematic drawings” that evidently deluded the Warren Commission
misrepresent the anatomical details. How was this accomplished? At this point,
the trail becomes murky. Commander Humes testified that the sketches were
prepared by a medical corpsman who was a skilled illustrator. He conceded that
the artist had not been permitted to view the X rays or pictures taken of the
President’s body; in short, he had drawn what he had been told to draw. One
might have thought that the commission itself would have had some doubts and
would have wanted to see the basic evidence, the X rays and the photographs.
But, no. Commander Humes assured the commission that these exhibits, though
horribly more “graphic,” would not alter essential details.
One final item should be mentioned in
connection with this phase of the investigation. In Vol. XVII, page 48, of the
Warren record, one finds Exhibit 397, a cryptic note signed by Commander Humes:
“I, James J. Humes, certify that I have destroyed by burning certain
preliminary draft notes relating to Naval Medical School Autopsy Report A63-272
and have officially transmitted all other papers related to this report to
higher authority.”
Commander Humes told the commission that
the notes he burned in his home fireplace comprised the original draft of his
final report. Just why he should have considered it necessary to burn any notes
in a case of such transcendent importance remains unexplained. As for the X ray
and photographic evidence of the President’s wounds, Humes said they had been
turned over either to the FBI or the Secret Service, and there they have
remained.
In its final report, the commission argued
strongly—and it would seem at first glance persuasively—that the sharp
downward trajectory of this bullet, presumably fired by Oswald, proved that it
must have also wounded Governor Connally. The commission made much of the fact
that a search of the interior of the limousine failed to show any spot where the
downward-flying missile had struck—and so it concluded that this pellet must
have been the one that pierced Governor Connally’s back. But once it is
realized from the evidence of the President’s wounds that the bullet was on a
virtually level trajectory, one of the commission’s strongest arguments for
believing the first shot wounded both the President and the Governor is
vitiated. A bullet on level flight, exiting from the President’s neck, could
have simply taken off into space.
Such a reconstruction of events, based on
the official anatomical evidence, indicates that Lee Harvey Oswald did not fire
the first shot that wounded President Kennedy; it suggests very strongly that
someone else was firing at the President from another vantage point, with a
different rifle, on a different and far flatter trajectory. The evidence argues
further that the Stemmons Freeway sign may well have been a predesignated firing
point. It would be a standard ambush tactic to zero in on the roadway at such a
landmark, and to begin firing when the President reached this precise point.
That would explain, as the commission’s version does not, the rapidity of the
first two shots that hit President Kennedy and Governor Connally; it would not
conflict head on with Governor Connally’s assertion that he was wounded by the
second shot; and it might explain, assuming that rifle reports in such
circumstances would almost blend, the confusion in the minds of witnesses about
the number of shots and their incredibly close spacing.
If Oswald was not the only gunman, were the assassins working together?
This is a question to which, at present, there is no possible answer since it is
a question that was never really explored. All that exist in the record are
certain vague trails, peculiar and tantalizing.
One of the more remarkable aspects of the
case may be found in the speed with which Oswald was identified as the killer.
This has suggested to some that he may have been a pre-selected pigeon, slated
from the start to be fingered and caught. Such suspicions gave rise to rumors of
some pre-assassination connection between Oswald and Jack Ruby or between Oswald
and Patrolman Tippit. The Warren Commission tried diligently to track down such
reports, and decided that there was no factual evidence to justify the
allegations. What remains, then, is the question of the lightning speed of the
identification. Is this natural? Can it be normally and logically explained?
The shots that killed President Kennedy
were fired at 12:30 P.M. By 12:45 the police radio was carrying its first, quite
accurate description of Oswald. And at 1:16 Patrolman Tippit, apparently acting
on the radio description, stopped Oswald—and, according to all the evidence,
was murdered by him. This rapid-fire sequence is dealt with in the Warren Report
with the statement that the radio description of Oswald “probably” stemmed
from details supplied by Howard L. Brennan, a steam fitter. The commission’s
vagueness on this vital point earned it some justifiable criticism, but there is
little doubt, from the report and other accounts, that Brennan was the man who
first accused Oswald. Rep. Gerald Ford (R., Mich.), a member of the commission,
later declared in an inside-the-hearing-room piece for Life that Brennan
was “the most important witness to appear before the Warren Commission in the
ten months we sat.”
Brennan told the commission that he
arrived on the scene about ten minutes before the Presidential motorcade
appeared. He perched himself on top of a low retaining wall around a little pool
in the park directly across Elm Street from the Texas School Book Depository. It
was later calculated that Brennan was about 120 feet, looking upward at an
angle, from the corner sixth-floor window behind which Oswald was stationed.
Brennan testified that as he waited for the President he “observed quite a few
people in different windows of the School Book Depository building. “In
particular, I saw this one man on the sixth floor which left the window to my
knowledge a couple of times.”
Why “in particular”? What was there
about this one man, in advance of the event, that caused Brennan to focus acute
and special attention upon him? One wishes here, as at other points in
Brennan’s recital, as at many other phases of the testimony, for the
illumination that comes only from the trial process, with a keen and skeptical
opposing attorney cross-examining and probing a witness’ story.
Brennan’s story, accepted without
challenge, continued as follows:
After the President had passed, he heard
“this crack that I positively thought was a backfire.” Then there came a
second explosion that “made me think that it was a firecracker being thrown
from the Texas Book Store and I glanced up. And this man that I saw previous was
taking for his last shot.”
Asked to describe exactly what he saw,
Brennan went on:
Well, as it appeared to me he was standing up and resting against the left window sill, with gun shouldered to his right shoulder, holding the gun with his left hand and taking positive aim and fired his last shot. As I calculate a couple of seconds. He drew the gun back from the window as though he was drawing it back to his side and maybe paused for a another second as though to assure himself that he hit his mark, and then he disappeared. (Italics added.)
Brennan was asked how much of the marksman he could see.
Well, I could see—at one time he came to the window sill and he sat sideways on the window sill. That was previous to President Kennedy’s getting there. And I could see practically his whole body, from his hips up. But at the time he was firing the gun, a possibility from his belt up. (Italics added.)
So fortified with observations, Brennan rushed to a policeman and rattled
off this description of the marksman at the sixth-floor window: a white man in
his early 30s, fair complexion, slender and neat, 5 feet 10 inches tall,
weighing 160 to 170 pounds. Note how nearly letter perfect was this description.
Oswald actually was 24 years old, slender, 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighing about
150 pounds.
Other witnesses later reported that they,
too, had seen a man lurking at the sixth-floor window, but none had seen him
with Brennan’s precision and detail. Most had seen only a vague figure and
“a stick” or “a pipe” poking out the window. According to those
witnesses, Oswald himself was barely visible—and for a very good reason. In
its report, the Warren Commission gave this description of Oswald’s sniper
nest:
A carton had been placed on the floor at the side of the window so that a person sitting on the carton could look down on Elm Street toward the underpass and scarcely be noticed from the outside. Between this carton and the half-open window were three additional cartons arranged at such an angle that a rifle resting on the top carton would be aimed directly at the motorcade as it moved away from the building. (Italics added.)
The conflict becomes obvious. This man who could scarcely be seen from
the outside had been observed in startling detail by Brennan 120 feet away and
looking up at a sharp angle. Brennan could give an almost exact description of
the height, weight and appearance of this man who was only barely visible to
everyone else.
But the difficulties are only beginning.
At the moment of gunfire, a press photographer, Thomas C. Dillard, swung his
camera on the upper stories of the Texas School Book Depository. His lens caught
the figures of two Negroes in windows on the fifth floor, and above them it
pictured a black gap behind the half-raised window of Oswald’s aerie. It is
interesting to note that the Negroes on the fifth floor appear right in the open
window frames, resting their elbows on the window sills and looking out. But can
you judge their height, weight and age with any exactitude? Try it. You will
find that you cannot.
One of the problems lies in the fact that
the men appear to be standing and leaning on the window sills. But the window
sills of the School Book Depository were very close to the floor, and the men at
the windows were actually kneeling. Exactly so, above them, was Oswald. He could
not have stood and fired his shots through the half-open window; he had to be
either kneeling or squatting on the carton he had placed at the side of the
window for this purpose—the carton on which his palm print was later found.
Yet we are to assume that Brennan judged perfectly the height of a squatting or
kneeling man whom he mistook for a standing man—and that he saw this squatting
man from the belt up as he fired his last shot.
Brennan’s explanation, of course, was
that Oswald had come out and squatted on the window sill prior to the arrival of
the President; at which time he had had a chance to observe him more closely. It
must be said that no one else saw Oswald sitting on the window sill, and it
should perhaps be noted that Oswald would have found it difficult to perform the
feat. As pictures taken at the time make clear, the entire window sill was
blocked by three heavy cartons of books, arranged at an angle, the last carton
resting on the sill itself and giving Oswald a rifle rest for his shots down Elm
Street. For Oswald to have sat on the window sill and displayed himself to
Brennan, he would have had to lug away some of the obstructing book cartons, and
one might have thought that he would have raised the sash all the way up so that
he could see out without obstruction. There is no evidence of any of this
activity.
A hint of the puzzle shows in the
testimony. David W. Belin, an assistant counsel, showed Brennan the Dillard
photos, and it is fairly obvious that Brennan was a bit staggered. He had
described the pile of boxes that reared up behind Oswald’s nest, shielding
Oswald from view inside the building. Belin asked if he had seen any box in the
window itself.
“No, no,” Brennan said. “That is, I
don’t remember a box in the window.…”
Belin: Well, here is Exhibit
482. First of all, I see a box on Exhibit 482, right in the window.
Brennan:
Yes, I don’t recall that box.
There it ends. No one seems to have thought that the obstructing cartons
raised a question of credibility abut Oswald’s supposed window-sitting
feat—and so about all of Brennan’s reported observations.
Brennan’s subsequent performance on the
day of the assassination might well raise doubts as to his story. After
Oswald’s arrest, Brennan was summoned to see if he could identify the suspect
in a police line-up. He said that Oswald “looked like” the man he had seen
in the window, but he could not be certain. Actually, he insisted to the
commission, he had always been certain but he was scared of what might happen to
himself or his family if he made a positive identification. As he explained to
the commission:
“I believed at the time, and I still
believe, it was a Communist activity, and I felt like there hadn’t been more
than one eyewitness, and if it got to be a known fact that I was an eyewitness,
my family or I, either one, might not be safe.”
It is impossible to reach a final judgment
on Brennan’s testimony, but it strains credulity to believe that he could have
observed Oswald as he said he did. Had he known Oswald previously? Did he
recognize him? And, if so, how and where and when had they met? Such questions
instantly suggest themselves; indeed, they are elementary—but they were never
asked.
In the brief span of life left to him, Oswald kept insisting—for
example, to Seth Kantor of the Scripps-Howard press—that he had been made the
“patsy.” What did he mean by this? What might have been brought out had
Oswald lived to go to trial? One can never know. Certainly, Oswald’s character
does not shine with the light of truth. He denied to police, for example, that
he owned the Carcano, yet clearly it was his. Oswald was hardly the compete
innocent that he pretended to be, and his cry of “patsy” may have been
nothing more than the bleat of a guilty man deprived of other excuse. Yet, in
view of all the evidence that there had to be a second gunman, one cannot
completely dismiss the possibility that Oswald may indeed have been
double-crossed so that other, more important men might go free.
If there was such a plot, what was its
basis? There is a possibility that Oswald intended to kill Governor Connally,
not president Kennedy. Connally was secretary of the Navy when Oswald’s
honorable discharge from the Marines was changed into a dishonorable one, and
Oswald blamed Connally, as he showed in one angry letter that he wrote. Since
the only bullet definitely tied both to a victim and to Oswald’s gun by
ballistics tests is the one that wounded Connally, since the autopsy suggests
that the first shot that struck the President was fired by another marksman, it
is possible that Oswald’s selected target was the Governor and that someone,
knowing of his hate and intentions, perhaps stimulating them, took advantage of
the situation. Such nagging threads of doubt and suspicion have been exhibited
by those closest to Oswald. Marina Oswald first indicated to the Warren
Commission that she had no doubt her husband had shot the President; but later
she shifted ground and said she thought he might have intended to shoot Governor
Connally. The change in testimony incensed Congressman Ford and veteran Sen.
Richard B. Russell, who both concluded that, for some reason they couldn’t
fathom, Marina was a far less candid person than they originally had thought
her. Immediately after the publication of the Warren Report, Robert Oswald said
that he accepted its findings about his brother’s guilt, but added that he
felt someone must have worked on Lee to get him to commit such a deed.
Against this background, one is compelled to ask: What about the final
and fatal head shot? If there was a second marksman, as the evidence indicates,
did he fire this shot? Or did Oswald?
Two fairly large shell fragments,
identified by ballistics experts as coming from Oswald’s Carcano, were found
in the front seat of the limousine. Clinging to them were particles of tissue,
indicating that they had struck either the President or Governor Connally. No
attempt was made to examine this issue clinically; the fragments were simply
cleaned off so that ballistics tests could be made. Since the commission had
attributed all of Governor Connally’s wounds to the nearly whole bullet found
on his stretcher, it followed logically that these large fragments with their
clinging tissue could have come only from the shattered head of the President.
But even here difficulties arise that make
this conclusion not as simple as it first appears. As the commission
reconstructed events, one bullet did all the damage to Governor Connally. The
Governor himself could recall having been hit just once, but then he was in pain
and shock and did not even realize his right wrist had been fractured until he
woke up in the hospital and found it in a cast. For the commission, adhering to
its one-assassin-three-shot theory, it was essential to decide that only one
bullet had struck the Governor.
Cracks began to appear in this hypothesis
with the testimony of FBI expert Frazier. Frazier said that the almost whole
bullet weighed 158.6 grains; standard bullets of identical make weighted about
161 grains—sometimes even a little less. This meant, Frazier estimated, that
the Connally bullet had probably lost only about 1.5 grains; it could not
possibly have lost more than 3 or 4 grains. But Frazier had also been given a
one-half grain fragment of metal that had been taken from Governor Connally’s
wrist. In addition, other minute fragments of metal were never recovered from
the Governor’s wrist and leg.
Lt. Col.. Pierre S. Finck, chief of wound
ballistics for the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, one of the three experts
taking part in the autopsy at Bethesda, was asked by Specter whether this nearly
whole bullet could have inflicted Governor Connally’s wrist wound along with
his other wounds.
“No; for the reason that there are too
many fragments described in that wrist,” Colonel Finck replied.
Commander Humes, asked if this nearly
whole bullet, after passing through Governor Connally’s chest, could have
inflicted the wounds on his wrist and thigh, answered:
“I think that is most unlikely.…The
reason I believe it most unlikely that this missile could have inflicted either
of these wounds is that this missile is basically intact; its jacket appears to
be intact, and I do not understand how it could possibly have left fragments in
either of these two locations.”
Commander Humes believed that the
“intact” bullet was the one that had caused Governor Connally’s chest
wounds because no particles of metal were found in the Governor’s chest and
“I doubt if this missile would have left behind it any metallic fragments
from its physical appearance at this time.” Arlen Specter tried again,
with a persistence that shows the importance he attached to the issue. But
wouldn’t it have been possible, he wanted to know, for this bullet to have
caused Governor Connally’s thigh wound? Colonel Humes stood fast. “I think
that extremely unlikely. The reports, again Exhibit 392 from Parkland, tell of
an entrance wound on the lower midthigh of the Governor, and X rays taken there
are described as showing metallic fragments in the bone, which apparently by
this report are still present in Governor Connally’s thigh: I can’t
conceive of where they came from this missile.” (Italics added.)
Dr. Robert Roeder Shaw, of Parkland
Hospital, was asked whether this one bullet could have inflicted all of Governor
Connally’s injuries, and he replied: “I feel there would be some difficulty
in explaining all of the wounds as being inflicted by bullet Exhibit 399 without
causing more in the way of loss of substance to the bullet or deformation of the
bullet.…As far as the wounds of the chest are concerned, I feel that this
bullet could have inflicted those wounds. But the examination of the wrist both
by X ray and at the time of surgery showed some fragments of metal that would
make it difficult to believe that the same missile could have inflicted those
two wounds. There seems to be more than three grains of metal missing as far as
the—I mean in the wrist.”
This explicit testimony strongly indicates
that Governor Connally was hit by two bullets, a situation that in itself would
cast heavy doubt on the commission’s one-assassin-three-shot theory. It would
also remove all certainty from the deduction that the two large fragments found
in the front of the Presidential car were sprayed there from the bullet that
killed the President. They may have been, but again they may not.
The possibility remains that Oswald,
though clearly involved and guilty, may still have been a decoy for others more
intent than he on killing the President. Who would these others have been? There
is no evidence on which to base a judgment since the very possibility was
shunted aside, first by authorities in Dallas and later by the commission. The
kind of deep-digging investigation that alone could have found the answer was
never made.
Given the almost hysterical right-wing bias of Dallas, given a
“Patriot” whose brain had envisioned the wholesale slaughter of public
officials, an all too easy assumption is that Oswald may have been the pawn in
some devious right-wing conspiracy. But, again, it is not necessarily so. In the
background are Oswald’s undeniable Castroite activities and his earlier
attempt, seemingly well established by the testimony of his wife, to assassinate
rightist Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker. That abortive attempt at murder is said to
have taken place on the evening of April 10, 1963, when a bullet, fired through
the window of Walker’s study, missed his head by inches, went through a wall
and was later recovered, battered beyond identification, on some packing cases
in an adjoining room. Marina Oswald testified that her husband, before going out
that evening, had instructed her on how to act if he never came back. She said
that he later admitted to her that he fired the shot, and that he hid the rifle
for a time so that he would not be caught with the evidence if the bullet should
be traced.
The Walker incident could suggest a plot
by some Castroite fanatics of Oswald’s own persuasion. For one thing, there
are some indications, vague and indefinite but still disturbing, that Oswald was
not alone in the Walker attempt. Robert Alan Surrey, who described himself as
General Walker’s partner in a book-publishing venture devoted to right-wing
propaganda (he claimed the Fifth Amendment when the Warren Commission sought to
question him about his role in distributing a scurrilous handbill that showed
President Kennedy’s picture under the headline, “Wanted for Treason”) said
that two nights before the shooting he had seen a car parked about 20 yards from
Walker’s house: “I saw two men around the house peeking into the windows and
so forth.” The men leaped into the car and sped away. Surrey chased them, but
lost them. The next morning he reported the incident to General Walker, who
notified the police. Surrey said he had not had a good look at either of the
prowlers, and could not identify either as Oswald.
On the night of the Walker shooting, a
next-door neighbor, Walter Kirk Coleman, 15, heard the sound of the shot. He ran
out and peered over a picket fence into a Mormon Church parking lot that
adjoined the Walker property. Coleman subsequently told authorities that he saw
two men. One was hurrying toward the driver’s seat of a Ford, parked headed
out with lights on and motor running. The other went to a Chevrolet parked by
the fence adjacent to the Walker property, and appeared to put something into
the back of the car before getting in behind the wheel. Coleman could not tell
whether there was anyone else in either car. Both cars drove away. Later, shown
a picture of Oswald, Coleman told the FBI that neither of the men he saw
resembled Oswald. And there it ends.
Again, nothing is definite. Surrey and Coleman may have seen different
men, and perhaps none of these men had anything to do with the attempt on
Walker’s life. But the faint threads dovetailing between the two accounts,
plus the fact that Coleman added he had never seen anyone prowling around the
Walker home before or since, makes it seem unlikely that it could all have been
inconsequential coincidence. If it was not, serious questions are raised. If
Oswald had collaborators in an attempt on Walker’s life, he might have had the
same collaborators in a Kennedy assassination plot. Crackpot leftists might have
hated Walker enough to want to kill him; and the same men, if of Castroite
persuasion as Oswald was, might have hated Kennedy just as irrationally for the
Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis and his general Cuban policy. It is only a
possibility, but it cannot be dismissed.
In summary, then, we are left with this
picture:
Unless the commission’s
one-shot-multiple-wound thesis can be justified, the entire one-assassin theory
collapses. To uphold this hypothesis, the commission had to turn its back on
Governor Connally’s clear and explicit testimony; it had to disregard the
graphic, corroborative evidence of the Zapruder film; it had to ignore the vital
fact that every eyewitness supported the Governor, that not one
saw the action as the commission reconstructed it. To make the pieces of its
theory fit together, the commission took the fastest firing time of the fastest
finger in the FBI and implied that this “bolt-action only” speed was
consistent with both Oswald’s capabilities and his task of aiming accurately
at a moving target. But even with this assumption, theory would not mesh with
fact. The commission’s case rested upon the evidence of the Zapruder film and
its own reconstruction, and it established these fixed points: if Oswald were
the marksman, he could not have shot President Kennedy before frame 210—and
Governor Connally could not have been wounded after frame 240. Yet the fastest
marksmen the commission could find could not fire two shots within that time
span; if the President and Governor Connally were wounded by separate shots, as
the weight of the evidence indicates, there had to be a second marksman. This
conclusion is reinforced by the anatomical evidence. The first bullet to strike
the President, if fired on a downward-slanting angle by Oswald, could not have
entered his back at the point it did and still have exited just below his
Adam’s apple; the anatomical evidence says that this bullet was fired into the
President on virtually a flat trajectory. Such a trajectory would conflict with
the angle of fire from Oswald’s window, and so, in illustrative drawings, the
entry point was actually moved from back to neck; otherwise, the downward
trajectory of this bullet could not have been depicted. All of this suggests a
reconstruction of the assassination in serious conflict at vital points with the
preponderance of the evidence.
Yet if the reconstruction was not valid,
there had to be a second marksman—and a Pandora’s box of possibilities flies
open. To admit so much is to admit that the man whose bullet actually killed
President Kennedy may still be at large.