Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (10 page)

Under interrogation, Oswald insisted he had followed his workmates down to eat. He said he ate a snack in the first-floor lunchroom alone, but thought he remembered two black employees walking through the room while he was there. Oswald
believed one of them was a colleague known as Junior, and said he would recognize the other man but could not recall his name. He said the second man was short.

There were two rooms in the Book Depository where workers had lunch, the “domino room” on the first floor and the lunchroom proper on the second floor. There was indeed a worker called Junior Jarman, and he spent his lunch break largely in the company of another black man called Harold Norman. Norman, who was indeed short, said later he ate in the domino room between 12:00 and 12:15 p.m., and indeed thought “there was someone else in there” at the time, though he couldn’t remember who. At about 12:15, Jarman walked over to the domino room, and together the two black men left the building for a few minutes. Between 12:20 and 12:25—just before the assassination—they strolled through the first floor once more, on the way upstairs to watch the motorcade from a window. If Oswald was not in fact on the first floor at some stage, it is noteworthy that he described two men—out of a staff of seventy-five—who actually were there. This information is nowhere noted in the Warren Report.
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The Report said no employee saw Oswald after 11:55 a.m., when he was still on the sixth floor. That ignored two items of evidence. Bill Shelley, a foreman, said he saw Oswald near the telephone on the first floor as early as ten or fifteen minutes before noon. An employee called Eddie Piper said he actually spoke to Oswald “just at twelve o’clock, down on the first floor.” The Warren Commission had these statements but omitted them.

Within hours of the assassination, Oswald told interrogators that he left the first floor for the second-floor lunchroom to get a Coca-Cola from the dispensing machine there. Oswald’s statement was again supported by
Eddie Piper, who said Oswald told him: “I’m going up to eat.” It has also been corroborated by a witness who was never questioned by the Commission.

In 1963, Carolyn Arnold was secretary to the vice president of the Book Depository.
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An FBI report, omitted from the Warren Commission Report, said Arnold was standing in front of the Depository waiting for the motorcade when she “thought she caught a fleeting glimpse of Lee Harvey Oswald standing in the hallway … on the first floor.” When the author contacted Arnold in 1978 to get a firsthand account, she was surprised to hear how she had been reported by the FBI. Her spontaneous reaction, that the FBI had misquoted her, came
before
the author explained to her the importance of Oswald’s whereabouts at given moments. Arnold’s recollection of what she observed was clear—having spotted Oswald had been her one personal contribution to the record of that memorable day. As secretary to the company vice president she knew Oswald; he had been in the habit of coming to her for change. What she claimed she told the FBI is very different from the Bureau report of her comments.

“About a quarter of an hour before the assassination,” she said in 1978, “I went into the lunchroom on the second floor for a moment… . Oswald was sitting in one of the booth seats on the right-hand side of the room as you go in. He was alone as usual and appeared to be having lunch. I did not speak to him, but I recognized him clearly.”

Arnold had some reason to remember having gone into the lunchroom. She was pregnant at the time and had a craving for a glass of water. She also recalled, in 1978, that this was “about 12:15. It may have been slightly later.”
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Should we believe Arnold’s 1978 recollection or the FBI account of what she told them back in 1963? Memories do blur, not least when much time has passed. One might think the
FBI’s contemporary report more trustworthy than Arnold’s. FBI agents, however, are as fallible as other mortals. Mistakes in their reports, seen during research for the author’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover, ranged from spelling errors to outright distortions.

Agents in Dallas after the assassination, we know, worked under intolerable time. “Hoover’s obsession with speed,” former Assistant Director Courtney Evans recalled, “made impossible demands on the field. I can’t help but feel that had he let the agents out there do their work, let things take their normal investigative course, something other than the simple Oswald theory might have been developed. But Hoover’s demand was ‘Do it fast!’ That was not necessarily a prescription for getting the whole truth.”

Other former FBI agents recall having been virtually ordered to avoid leads that might indicate a possible conspiracy, to follow only those that would prove Oswald was the lone assassin.

Let us, then, allow for the possibility that Carolyn Arnold’s 1978 memory is correct, that she did see Oswald downstairs at 12:15 p.m. or later. It is, of course, possible that Oswald scurried upstairs to shoot the President after Arnold saw him in the second-floor lunchroom. Yet, as we have seen, bystander Arnold Rowland said he saw two men in sixth-floor windows, one of them holding a rifle across his chest, at 12:15. Rowland’s wife confirmed that her husband drew her attention to the man, whom he assumed to be a Secret Service agent. There was, of course, no such agent, and no other employees were on the sixth floor at that time.

The time detail—12:15—is the vital point here. It can be fixed so exactly because Rowland recalled having seen the man with the rifle just as a nearby police radio squawked out the news that the approaching motorcade had reached
Cedar Springs Road. The police log shows that the President passed that point between 12:15 and 12:16.

Carolyn Arnold’s given time for leaving her office—12:15 or later—is corroborated by contemporary statements made by her and office colleagues. She told the FBI she finally left the building, after visiting the lunchroom, as late as 12:25 p.m. If Arnold saw Oswald in the lunchroom at 12:15 or after, who were the two men, one of them a gunman, whom Rowland said he saw in the sixth-floor windows?

There never was any reliable eyewitness identification of Oswald in the sixth-floor window after he was seen downstairs. The Commission, however, set store by the evidence of Howard Brennan, a spectator in the street who stood directly opposite the Depository. He said he saw a man moving around at the famous “sniper’s perch” window between 12:22 and 12:24 and that, at the moment of the assassination, he looked up to see the man fire his final shot. Later that day, Brennan was taken to a police identity lineup that included Oswald. He failed to make a positive identification of Oswald as the man he had seen in the window—even though he had seen Oswald’s picture on television before attending the lineup.

A month later, however, Brennan told the FBI he was sure the man he had seen was Oswald. Three weeks on, he was saying he couldn’t be sure. And many months later, Brennan told the official inquiry that he could have identified Oswald at the lineup but had feared reprisals from the Communists.

Brennan’s testimony was replete with contradiction and confusion. He claimed to have been watching as the last shot was fired, yet saw neither flash, smoke, nor recoil. Testimony showed that, in the
immediate aftermath of the tragedy, he did not at once draw attention to what he claimed to have seen in the Book Depository, but joined others hurrying toward the grassy knoll. Questioning suggested that Brennan at first stated he had seen smoke in the area of the knoll. The Commission was able to conclude only that “Brennan believes the man he saw [in the Depository] was in fact Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In 1979, the Assassinations Committee Report did not use Brennan’s testimony at all. Brennan was less consistent than many a witness discredited or totally ignored by the official inquiry. He may have seen a gun, or a man with a gun, but his testimony does not put Oswald in the sixth-floor window.

Nor does the physical evidence support that notion. When caught, Oswald was wearing a long-sleeved rust-brown shirt with a white T-shirt beneath it. He said he had changed his clothing since the assassination and that he had worn a long-sleeved “reddish-colored shirt” at work that day. This may have been true. A policeman who saw Oswald after the assassination, but before he left the Depository, said on seeing him under arrest that “he looked like he did not have the same clothes on.” The policeman explained that the shirt Oswald had on at work had been “a little darker.”

Whether Oswald changed or not, neither shirt fits with the clothing described by those who noticed a gunman on the sixth floor between 12:15 and 12:30 p.m.
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Rowland, who made the earliest sighting, remembered a “very light colored shirt, white or a light blue … open at the collar … unbuttoned about halfway” with a “regular T-shirt, a polo shirt” beneath it. Even Brennan, the man who inconsistently claimed to be able to recognize Oswald as having been a gunman, described the man he saw in the window as having worn “light-colored clothes, more a
khaki color.” The two clerks from the county building, who also noticed a man in the sixth-floor window, spoke of an “open neck … sport shirt or a T-shirt … light in color, probably white” and of a “sport shirt … yellow.”

Mrs. Walther, who saw two men in the window only moments before the assassination, said, “The man behind the partly opened window had a dark brown suit, and the other man had a whitish-looking shirt or jacket, dressed more like a workman that did manual labor.
It was the man with the gun that wore white
[author’s emphasis].” None of these statements about light-colored clothing fit either the rust-brown shirt Oswald was wearing when arrested or the red shirt he said he had been wearing at the time of the assassination.

The fact is that Oswald could not be placed on the sixth floor either at the time of the shooting or during the half hour before it. The last time he was seen before the assassination was apparently by Carolyn Arnold—in the second-floor lunchroom. The next time Oswald was firmly identified was immediately after the assassination—again in the second-floor lunchroom.

When the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, one motorcycle policeman, Marrion Baker, thought they came from high in the Book Depository. He drove straight to the building, dismounted, and pushed his way to the entrance. Joined by the building superintendent, whom he met in the doorway, he hurried up the stairs to the second floor. Just as he reached it, Baker caught a glimpse of someone through a glass window in a door. Pistol in hand, the policeman pushed through the door, across a small vestibule, and saw a man walking away from him. At the policeman’s order, “Come here,” the man turned and walked back.

Baker noticed the man did not appear to be out of breath or even startled. He seemed calm and said nothing. Though reports conflict, it
seems he may have been carrying a bottle of Coca-Cola.
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At that moment, as Baker was about to start asking questions, the Depository superintendent arrived and identified the man as an employee. He was, of course, Lee Oswald, and the room was the second-floor lunchroom, exactly where Oswald had been last seen—at most, fifteen minutes before the assassination. Baker let Oswald go, and hurried on upstairs.

The Warren Report reckoned the policeman confronted Oswald one and a half minutes after having heard the shots. It calculated that Oswald, as the gunman on the sixth floor, took slightly less than that to reach the lunchroom door. Other apparently competent reconstructions have suggested that Baker took less time and that Oswald, if he was a sixth-floor gunman, would have taken longer to clear up and get downstairs.

The Warren Report just succeeds in getting Oswald downstairs in time to be confronted by Patrolman Baker. After making its own tests at the scene, the Assassinations Committee in 1979 said merely that the available testimony “does not preclude a finding that Oswald was on the sixth floor at the time the shots were fired.” Alternative, independent calculations say that, had Oswald really been a gunman, he could not have reached the lunchroom in time for the meeting with the policeman. The best evidence seems to be that Oswald was down in the lunchroom fifteen minutes before the assassination, and just two minutes afterward.

The fresh look at Oswald’s whereabouts becomes even more significant in the knowledge that the President was late for his appointment with death. He was due to arrive at his first Dallas appointment at 12:30, and that was about five minutes’ drive beyond the Book Depository. Had the motorcade been on time, it would have passed beneath the windows of the
Depository at 12:25 p.m. This was clear from from the President’s published schedule for the day, and would have come into the calculations of any would-be assassin. A killer planning the assassination would hardly have been sitting around downstairs after 12:15 p.m., as the evidence about Oswald suggests, if he expected to open fire as early as 12:25.

It may be argued that the alleged assassin was merely trying to assure himself of an alibi. If so, it was a curious and unreliable way to go about it, and the lunchroom an odd spot to choose. That room was deserted at all relevant times, and Lee Oswald was seen there only by chance observers. On the other hand, it is hard to understand why Oswald, known to be interested in politics and politicians, would stay in the lunchroom when he knew the President was about to pass by. We know he was aware of the President’s visit, because earlier that morning he had asked a workmate why the crowd was gathering outside. Told the President was coming and which way he was coming, Oswald had said merely, “Oh, I see.” Supporters of the official story say, of course, that this was another attempt to establish an alibi, by professing ignorance of the very fact that President Kennedy was in town. Oswald’s wide-eyed question does not ring true.

The evidence does cast enormous suspicion on Oswald. Aside from the evidence linking him to the rifle, his own statements—above all, the implausible “curtain rod” tale—leave him looking guilty of something. The evidence does not, though, put him behind a gun in the sixth-floor window. Some information, indeed, suggests that others manned the sniper’s perch. “We don’t have any proof that Oswald fired the rifle,” former Police Chief Curry said in 1969. “No one has been able to put him in that building with a rifle in his hand.”