Seeds of Doubt
Some Questions About the Assassination
by Jack Minnis and
Staughton Lynd
The New Republic, 21 December 1963, pages 14–20
On December 3, newspapers reported that the Federal Bureau
of Investigation would confirm in all essentials the version of the
President’s assassination previously presented by the Dallas police and by
Gordon Shanklin, FBI agent in charge in Dallas. According to these accounts the
FBI will state that: (1) Lee Oswald, without accomplices, fired three shots at
President Kennedy from a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository
Building; (2) about five and one-half seconds elapsed between the first shot and
the last; (3) all three shots came from behind and slightly to the right of the
President’s car; and (4) the same weapon fired all three shots.
It has not been announced how long the
Presidential commission of inquiry will take to reach a finding, but meanwhile
certain questions pose themselves:
(1) How Lee Oswald, from a position behind
and slightly to the right of President Kennedy, fired a shot which entered the
President’s neck just below the Adam’s apple; (2) how Oswald, using a
bolt-action rifle, fired three shots with deadly accuracy in five and one-half
seconds at a target 75–100 yards away moving about 25 miles an hour; (3) how
the three shots could have produced four bullets; (4) how Lee Oswald did all the
things he is supposed to have done in the 15 or 30 minutes (there are two
different accounts) between the time the President was assassinated and the time
Oswald allegedly ran into his apartment four miles away.
The Target
On page 15 is a rough diagram of the assassination scene constructed from a map of the area printed in The New York Times of November 23 and from the pictures of the scene found in other newspapers.
The leading vehicle in the motorcade was
the Presidential limousine with Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy in the rear seat, the
President on the right. On jump seats facing forward, were Mr. and Mrs.
Connally, Governor Connally on the right. The second car was filled with Secret
Service men. The third car carried Vice President and Mrs. Johnson and Senator
Ralph Yarborough. In the fourth car were Secret Service agents protecting the
Vice President.
At about 12:30 p.m., November 22, the
President’s limousine made the turn at Elm and Houston Streets into the
approach to the underpass leading to Stemmons Freeway. The car was traveling
about 25 miles an hour, or about 12 yards per second. The distance between the
turn at Elm Street and the underpass is about 220 yards. Thus at the speed at
which most witnesses agree the motorcade was traveling, the maximum time it
could have consumed traversing this distance would have been 20 seconds.
It is difficult to determine, with
precision, the exact point in the traversal of the 220 yards at which the
shooting occurred. However, some definite limits can be set. Experienced newsmen
reporting in The New York Times, The New York Herald-Tribune, The
Washington Post, The Atlanta Constitution, and for both Associated
Press and United Press International, estimate that the President’s car was
75–100 yards past the turn at Elm and Houston when the first shot was fired;
others, persons on the spot at the time, say the President’s car was midway
between the turn and the underpass; Mrs. Connally says the car was almost ready
to go underneath the underpass; Governor Connally says the car had just made the
turn at Elm and Houston.
A reader, making use of the tree, the lamp
post, and the ornamental wall shown in pictures on pages 24, 25 and 32H of Life
magazine for November 29, can approximately identify for himself the point at
which the President, smiling, waving, and looking straight ahead as the
limousine moved away from the Depository Building and toward the underpass,
suddenly made a “clutching movement toward his throat.”
John Herbers, writing in The New York
Times of November 27, comments on the 15-second movie sequence of the
assassination taken by an amateur photographer (from which the pictures in Life
magazine were selected). He says five seconds elapsed from the first shot until
the President’s car disappeared into the underpass. If the President’s car
continued at 25 miles an hour after the first shot, then it traveled about 60
yards during this five seconds and, therefore, must have been about 160 yards
from the turn at Elm and Houston when firing commenced. If, as most witnesses
believe, it accelerated rapidly after the first shot, then it traversed
considerably more than 60 yards during those five seconds. On the evidence of
the movie, we would estimate the distance between the turn at Elm and Houston
and the site of the first shot at something less than 160 yards, not appreciably
out of line with the estimates of witnesses and newsmen, and the anticipated
conclusion of the FBI report.
Having established, with some certainty we
think, the fact that the Presidential car was approximately 100 yards past the
turn at Elm and Houston when the first shot was fired, we can move to a
consideration of the wounds themselves.
The Wounds
Tom Wicker, in The New York Times of November 23,
wrote that Doctors Malcolm Perry and Kemp Clark, who attended Mr. Kennedy in the
emergency room of the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas immediately after the
shooting, described the President’s wounds thus: “Mr. Kennedy was hit by a
bullet in the throat, just below the Adam’s apple….This wound had the
appearance of a bullet’s entry. Mr. Kennedy also had a massive, gaping wound
in the back and on the right side of the head.” Dr. Perry was the first
physician to treat the President. Dr. Clark was summoned and arrived in a minute
or two.
We saw nowhere in the newspapers nor heard
in any of the earlier radio or TV accounts any attempt to reconcile a wound in
the front of the President’s throat with the theory that the shots came from
the Texas School Book Depository, 75–100 yards to the rear of the President at
the time the first shot was fired. Nor did we see or hear any suggestion that
the original accounts of where the President’s car was at the time of the
shooting might be inaccurate. This could, perhaps, be attributed to the fact
that identification of the throat wound as one of entry was tentative, and that
it would be reasonable to suppose a bullet entering the back of the
President’s head, fired from an angle of about 45 degrees above him, might
exit at the Adam’s apple. The examining doctors, as they were quoted in the
early press accounts, seemed to be unsure as to whether one bullet or two had
inflicted the head and throat wounds of the President.
However, John Herbers, in a follow-up
story in the Times of November 27, cleared this up. Herbers quotes Dr.
Kemp Clark, the Dallas surgeon who pronounced the President dead, as saying that
two bullets hit the President. One entered through the throat just below the
Adam’s apple and ranged downward, without exiting. The other struck the right
side of the back of the President’s head tangentially (that is, it smashed in
and out, traveling on a tangent to his head).
From this description, it would seem that
one bullet was fired from in front of the President. Herbers tries to reconcile
the frontal wound with the supposed position of the assassin in the School Book
Depository Building by suggesting that the gunman could have fired as the
President’s car was approaching the building, then swung the gun through an
arc of almost 180 degrees and fired twice more. But this reconciliation ignores
the uncontroverted accounts of many eyewitnesses as to where the President’s
car was at the time the first shot was heard. It appears well-established that
the first shot was fired only after the President’s car was more than 75 yards
past the building. Indeed, Herbers’ own interpretation of the 15-second movie
sequence supports this. In order for the assassin, from his supposed position in
the building, to have wounded the President frontally, he would have had to fire
while the Presidential car was entering the turn at Houston and Elm, or before
the car had halfway completed the turn. By all accounts this would have been six
to eight seconds before a shot was heard. According to a New York Times
dispatch from Dallas dated November 27, the Secret Service conducted a
re-enactment of the assassination that day. The dispatch reported that “the
consensus was that the shooting began after the President’s car had made the
turn.”
We see no way to reconcile the conclusion
attributed to the forthcoming FBI report, that “it has been established that
all three shots came from the same direction, behind and slightly to the right
of the President’s car” (AP dispatch datelined Washington, Atlanta
Journal, Dec. 3), with the statement of Dallas doctors that one bullet
struck the President at about the necktie knot “in the mid-section of the
front part of his neck” (New York Times, Nov. 24 and 27). Indeed, the
bullet that struck the President’s throat was sufficiently frontal that Dr.
Clark at first thought the same bullet might have entered through the throat and
exited through the upper rear of the President’s head. (See “The Kennedy
Wound,” New York Times, Nov. 24, for an account based on this
supposition.)
On December 5, 13 days after the
assassination, “federal investigators” were still simulating the crime with
car, camera and surveyor’s transit on Elm Street in Dallas, in an attempt to
answer the question “how the President could have received a bullet in the
front of the throat from a rifle in the Texas School Book Depository Building
after his car had passed the building and was turning a gentle curve away from
it” (Joseph Loftus in the New York Times, Dec. 6).
Finally, what is the explanation of the
reports of Frank Cormier of the AP and of Richard Dudman of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch of a small hole in the windshield of the President’s
limousine?
The Weapon
First press accounts quoted various members of the Dallas
police force as saying the assassin’s weapon was a .30-caliber Enfield and a
7.65mm Mauser. One Secret Service man said he thought the weapon was an “Army
or Japanese rifle” of .25 caliber. The same accounts reported that the rifle
was found on the second floor of the building by a window, in the fifth-floor
staircase, by an open sixth-floor window, and hidden behind boxes and cases on
the second or sixth floors.
It was not until the FBI said it had
discovered that Oswald had purchased an Italian-made 6.5mm rifle from a Chicago
mail-order house that the confusion was dispelled. Then all accounts and all
sources agreed: The former .30 caliber-Enfield-7.65 Mauser was now a 6.5mm
Italian-made rifle with telescopic sights. It was also at this time that all
sources began agreeing that the gun had been found on the sixth floor—though
some still held out for the open-window location, while others argued for the
buried-behind-the-boxes theory.
We did not at that time have a very clear
idea of the precise number of seconds within which the shots had occurred, but
we were uneasy about anyone’s having got off the reported three shots with a
bolt-action rifle from that distance at a target moving 12 yards a second, with
that accuracy and quickly enough to have created such confusion about who got
hit first, the President or the Governor.
On November 25 The New York Times
reported that “a group of the nation’s most knowledgeable gun experts,
meeting in Maryland at the time of the shooting, agreed that, considering the
gun, the distance, the angle and the movement of the President’s car, the
assassin was either an exceptional marksman or fantastically lucky in placing
his shots.” The Times account does not indicate whether the experts
also considered the extreme rapidity with which the shots were fired.
Then on November 27 the Times ran
another story telling about tests which had been conducted by a “firearms
expert from the National Rifle Association” in Washington. The expert had used
a “Model 1938 6.5mm bolt-action rifle.” His target had been 50 feet away. He
was able to get off three shots in 11 seconds and they struck within a one-inch
circle. On a second try the expert was able to get off three shots in eight
seconds with comparable accuracy. Using this performance as a basis for
speculation, the expert reasoned that a person well-practiced with the use of
the gun could have done as well or better under the conditions of the
assassination in Dallas. (The story did not indicate whether or not the target
used in these tests was stationary or moving.)
Others did not agree with this expert. The
Italian newspaper Corriere Lombardo of Milan said, as reported in the
same Times story, that if the Model ’38 were used and if more than one
shot had been fired “there must have been a second attacker.” In Vienna, the
Olympics champion shot, Hubert Hammerer, said that the initial shot could have
been made under the conditions in Dallas when Mr. Kennedy was killed, but he
considered it unlikely that one man could have triggered three shots within five
seconds with the weapon used.
All these judgments were made on the
theory that the shots were fired as the Presidential car sped away from the
gunman, with the gunman having to allow only for the forward movement of the
car. This supposition, of course, takes no account of the marksman himself
having to move in order to swing the gun through an arc of 180 degrees.
These experts were also proceeding on the
theory that Lee Oswald was a crack marksman. However, Oswald was only an
“average” marksman in the Marines (Laurence Stern and Alfred E. Lewis,
writing in The Washington Post, December 1). Of course, he could have
improved with practice since his Marine service. On December 9, Fred Powledge,
reporting from Dallas to The New York Times, quoted several persons as
saying they had twice seen Oswald firing at a practice range within three weeks
of the assassination. One remembered him coming “alone in a battered
automobile.” But Mrs. Michael Paine, with whom Lee Oswald’s wife had been
staying, is quoted as saying that “in late October or early November she tried
to teach [Oswald] how to drive her car in a parking lot, but that [he] did not
even learn to park it.”
The Bullets
There is general agreement among the witnesses and
newspaper accounts that three shots were fired. Typical is Senator Ralph
Yarborough’s description, quoted by The Washington Post of November 23:
“I heard three loud explosions that sounded like shots from a deer rifle. You
could smell powder.”
Yet there appear to be four bullets
involved. In The New York Times of November 25, Fred Powledge’s story
from Dallas listed as part of the evidence supporting the
Oswald-School-Book-Depository-Mannlicher-Carcano theory: “A bullet that Secret
Service men removed from a stretcher at Parkland Hospital after the shooting,
and two bullet fragments removed from the Presidential automobile matched
bullets fired by the rifle [FBI] agents found inside the [warehouse].”
Powledge cites Gordon Shanklin, FBI agent in charge in Dallas, as his source of
information. This it would appear accounts for two bullets. In the Times
of November 27, John Herbers’ story from Dallas says: “Three shots are known
to have been fired. Two hit the President. One did not emerge. Dr. Kemp Clark,
who pronounced Mr. Kennedy dead, said one struck him at about the necktie knot.
‘It ranged downward and did not exit,’ the surgeon said.” Thus there is
the bullet from the stretcher, the bullet which was found fragmented in the car,
and the bullet that did not exit from the President.
An AP dispatch from Dallas in The
Atlanta Constitution of November 23 quoted Dr. Robert R. Shaw, attending
physician for Governor Connally: “[The Governor] seems to have been struck by
just one bullet….We know the wound of entrance was along the right shoulder.
He was shot from above….[The bullet] entered the back of his chest and moved
outward….It emerged from his chest and struck his wrist and thigh….The
bullet is still in his leg.”
Now we have the stretcher bullet, the
fragmented bullet, the bullet that remained in the President, and the bullet in
the Governor’s leg. Herbers, in the Times of the 27th,
presumes “that the bullet that struck the President’s head was the one
recovered from the stretcher that bore the President into the hospital. He
declines to theorize about how the bullet got onto the stretcher. Dr. Clark
stated that the bullet went “in and out” of the President’s head. We
assume this to mean that there was an exit as well as an entry wound in the
President’s head. Furthermore, it would seem rather likely that the fragmented
bullet would be the one which made the head wound. LeMoyne Snyder, forensic
medicine specialist, in his book Homicide Investigation, writes: “When
a lead bullet is fired into the skull at an angle, it will sometimes fracture
the skull bone in such a way that a sharp edge of bone is presented to the
bullet. As a result, the bullet is cut in two lengthwise….It is not likely to
happen if jacketed ammunition is used.”
It should be noted here, too, that while
Herbers identifies the stretcher from which the bullet was removed, Powledge’s
story of two days earlier, in which he cites FBI agent Shanklin as his source,
merely says: “A bullet the Secret Service men removed from a stretcher
[our italics].”
We have no way of knowing whether the
bullet remained inside the body of the President and was buried with him, or
whether it was removed for evidence. Dr. Clark, in Herbers’ story of the 27th,
merely says that the bullet did not exit of its own accord. Then Herbers writes:
“The bullet that did not exit from the President’s body may have since been
removed in an autopsy, but the Parkland Hospital said no autopsy was performed
in Dallas.” An AP dispatch in the Dallas Morning News of November 27
states that “the White House has so far declined to say whether an autopsy was
performed on the body of slain President John F. Kennedy. For approximately nine
hours, the body was at Bethesda, Md., Naval Hospital last Friday night and early
Saturday morning [November 22 and 23].” An AP dispatch which appeared in the Pine
Bluff [Ark.] Gazette of November 27 stated that “doctors at the
Bethesda [Maryland] Naval Hospital made a post-mortem examination of Kennedy’s
wounds.”
The hospital authorities also stated,
according to Herbers, that “the medical report of President Kennedy’s
assassination, written in longhand by Dr. Clark, chief of neurosurgery at
Parkland, had been given to the Secret Service and the hospital had no copy.”
Another puzzling fact is that apparently
the two bullets with the cloudiest pedigree are the ones that link the shooting
to the gun the investigators finally settled on. Powledge’s story of the 25th,
quoted above, states that the stretcher bullet and the fragmented bullet matched
bullets fired by FBI men from the rifle found inside the building. The rifle
(identified variously as an Enfield and a Mauser) was found early in the
afternoon of November 22. So were the two bullets. They were in the possession
of the Dallas police and the FBI, presumably, from then on. Sometime on November
23, the rifle became a Mannlicher-Carcano. Is it the custom of Italian
rifle-makers to leave their names off their products, so that they cannot be
identified immediately? We don’t know.
We do know that the more damage
done to the surface of the bullet, the more dubious becomes the accuracy of
laboratory comparison with other bullets to determine which gun of a
given make it was fired from, even if the make of the gun can be determined.
Thus the identification of the gun that supposedly fired the assassination
bullets seems to rest primarily, not on the fragmented bullet, but on a bullet
allegedly found by a secret Service man on a stretcher in Parkland
Hospital, Dallas, after the President was shot.
It is not clear at this point just where
this bullet came from and how it came to be on “a stretcher.”
The Murderer
The way the supposed assassination gun is linked to Lee
Oswald is somewhat curious, too. Powledge’s story of the 25th
states: “The FBI agent [Gordon Shanklin] said the young man ordered a 6.5mm
rifle with telescope sight from a Chicago store last spring. The rifle was sent
to an ‘A. Hidell,’ at Oswald’s post office box here. It arrived by parcel
post on March 20. Samples of Oswald’s handwriting were sent yesterday to the
FBI laboratory in Washington where they were found to match the handwriting in
the letter ordering the rifle.” In his story of the 26th, Powledge
again refers to the gun: “The district attorney said the police had traced the
serial number of the murder weapon, an Italian rifle with a telescopic sight, to
the Chicago mail-order house that had sold Oswald a rifle last spring.” Thus
all the FBI and the Dallas police appear to claim so far is that the gun which
fired the stretcher bullet and the gun they say Oswald ordered came from the
same mail-order house.
Moreover, in the early accounts it was
being said that the gun, with telescopic sight, was purchased for $12.78. But on
November 25 The New York Times reproduced an advertisement from a
mail-order house showing clearly that $12.78 was the price of the gun without
telescopic sight. Subsequently it was reported (UPI dispatch of November 29, Atlanta
Journal) that, in addition to $12.78 for the gun, Oswald paid $7.50 for the
sight. Was the sight ordered in a separate letter, also in Oswald’s
handwriting and also signed “A. Hidell”? Was there one money order signed by
Hidell for $12.78 and another for $7.50? And if so, why was the latter
information held back at the time the former was announced?
In his news conference of November 24,
District Attorney Wade said that Oswald’s palmprints were on the gun found in
the warehouse. However, first he called them fingerprints, then palmprints. And
on November 27, “Edward Bennett Williams, one of the nation’s leading
defense lawyers…said the police’s purported discovery of Oswald’s
palmprints in the room where the assassin lay in wait was not necessarily
incriminating. ‘Palmprints are not nearly as conclusive as fingerprints,’ he
said.” (New York Post, November 27)
In other parts of his November 24
conference, District Attorney Wade seemed so confused that we must question
whether he really knew much about the evidence against Oswald at the time. As an
example of his confusion, note the following exchange referring to the reported
attempt by Oswald to shoot an arresting officer in the Texas Theater (taken from
transcript of the news conference published in The New York Times,
November 26):
Q. Why didn’t it go off?
A. It snapped. It was a misfire. Then the officers subdued him—some six
officers—subdued him there in the theater, and he was brought to the police
station here.
Q. Mr. Wade, why didn’t the gun fire?
A. It misfired, being on the—the shell didn’t explode. We have it where it
hit it, but it didn’t explode. It didn’t fire the shell.
Q. There was one officer who said that he pulled the trigger, but he managed to
put his thumb in the part before the firing pin. It didn’t…
A. Well…
Q. …strike the—the bullet didn’t explode. Is that it?
A. I don’t know whether it’s that or not. I know he didn’t snap the gun is
all I know about it.
Now, either Wade had, as part of the evidence, the misfire
bullet from the pistol, with a mark on it made by the pistol’s firing pin, or
he didn’t. He didn’t seem to know whether he had it or not.
All in all, it is hard to see how the
District Attorney felt able then to conclude: “I would say without any doubt
he is the killer,” particularly in view of the fact that some of the
evidence—such as the alleged statement by Mrs. Oswald that her husband had a
rifle in their garage on the night before the assassination but that it was gone
the next day—would never have been admissible in a Texas court, as the police
readily admitted.
We will remark on only one other aspect of
the case. Dallas District Attorney Wade offered to newsmen and to the public, as
one of the links in the chain of evidence against Oswald, the fact that Oswald
went to his home in Oak Cliff, changed his clothes hurriedly, and left (Wade’s
November 24 news conference as printed in The New York Times, November
26). According to a UPI dispatch datelined Dallas in The Atlanta Journal,
November 23, “Mrs. R.C. Roberts, who works for the Johnsons [from whom Oswald
rented a room in Oak Cliff], said that about 12:45 p.m. [Dallas time] Friday she
had just learned that Mr. Kennedy was shot. In rushed Oswald, ‘On the dead
run,’ she said. ‘He ran to his room, came running back with a gray zipper
jacket and out the door’.”
The assassin’s bullets were fired
between 12:30 and 12:31 p.m. (Dallas time). Oswald supposedly fired them from
the sixth floor of the building where he worked. Then, supposedly, he hid the
rifle behind some books and packing cases and made his way to the second floor
of the building. Roy S. Truly, TSBD manager, and a policeman ran into the
building immediately after the shots were fired. “The two men scrambled up the
stairs to the second floor. As they made their way to the back stairway, the
policeman saw Oswald standing beside a soft-drink machine, sipping from a coke
bottle” (Washington Post, December 1). According to the New York
Post (November 27) two noted criminal lawyers have puzzled over this
account. Maurice Edelbaum said: “The main incongruity I see is the report of
Oswald’s swift descent from the sixth floor. The moment a policeman rushed
into the building Oswald was there.” Raymond Brown asked: “How did he get
down? Were there steps or an elevator from the sixth floor? Did anybody see
him?”
Then, according to Wade, Oswald left the
building and walked four blocks west to Lamar Street where he boarded a bus. He
rode the bus an undetermined number of blocks and then got off. He hailed a
taxicab and rode four miles to his room in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. He
arrived, according to Mrs. Roberts, just 14 minutes after the assassination. Now
if the taxicab was able to average 20 miles an hour, which we think would be a
maximum, the taxi ride would have taken 12 minutes. This leaves Oswald with just
two minutes to shoot the President and Governor Connally, clean and hide the
gun, run down four flights of stairs, search his pockets for coins, get a coke
from the machine, open it, engage in some conversation with Mr. Truly and the
policeman, make his way from the second floor out of the building, walk four
blocks to the bus stop, board the bus and ride several blocks, and get off the
bus and hail a taxi.
On December 1, however, The Washington
Post quoted housekeeper Roberts as saying: “He came dashing in about 1
o’clock.” This second version created new difficulties, for these reporters
refer to “the floundering of the bus in the choked downtown traffic,” and to
the fact that Oswald “told the [cab] driver to drop him off at a corner five
blocks beyond his rooming house.” If the traffic was “choked” we probably
need to cut in half the estimated average speed of the taxi over the four miles
to Oswald’s rooming house. At an average speed of 10 miles an hour, it would
have taken the taxi 24 minutes to cover the distance. This would leave Oswald
five minutes to shoot the President and Governor Connally, clean and hide the
gun, run down four flights of stairs, search his pockets for coins, get a coke
from the machine, open it, engage in some conversation with Mr. Truly and the
policeman, make his way from the second floor out of the building, walk four
blocks to the bus stop, board the bus and hail a taxi. And if we accept this
version, we must allow, within the first five minutes left to Oswald, the time
necessary to walk the five blocks back to his rooming house from the corner to
which the taxi took him
Conclusion
Since the bulk of this analysis was written, the
newsmagazines—Time, Life, Newsweek, and US News and
World Report—have made public their versions of the assassination. They
help add to the confusion. For example, Time (December 6) has Oswald
buying rifle and sight for $19.95, while according to Newsweek (December
9) he paid $12.78. All early accounts of the assassination put the speed of the
President’s limousine at about 25 miles per hour, but now it has slowed to 15
miles per hour (Life, November 29), “no more than half the 25 miles per
hour first estimated by authorities” (Newsweek, December 9), and 12
miles per hour (US News and World Report, December 9). The latter
magazine comments: “If President Kennedy’s car had been moving even 20 miles
an hour, the experts say, it might have made the lead time too difficult a
problem for the sniper.”
The central problem—the fact that the
President was wounded in the front of the throat, “the midsection of the front
part of his neck,” according to “staff doctors” at Parkland Hospital on
November 23 (New York Times, November 24)—remains. Life and Newsweek
place the President’s car 170 feet and 150 feet past the turn at the time of
the first shot: a shorter distance than our estimate, but much too distant from
the window for a shot through the front of the neck. Life (December 6)
recognizes the problem, but solves it by saying that the President was turning
far to the right at the moment of impact. This explanation appears to fail for
two reasons. First, Life’s own pictures of the event in the issue of
November 29 show the President looking straight ahead. Second, Elm Street curves
left as it passes the warehouse building (see the picture on page 32H of Life,
November 29), in such as way that when the first bullet struck, the
President’s back was to the window. In order for a bullet to have entered
“the mid-section of the frontal part of his neck” the President would have
had to turn completely around just before the shot was fired.
___________________
Jack Minnis did
graduate work in Political Science at Tulane University and now works in the
South.
Staughton Lynd received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University.
His articles and reviews have appeared in Commentary, the Political
Science Quarterly and the William and Mary Quarterly.
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