Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (6 page)

From 1964 on, doctors with long experience of bullet wounds had great difficulty in accepting that a bullet could cause such damage, especially to bones, and still emerge almost unscathed. Typical of such doubters was Dr. Milton Helpern, former Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, once described by the
New York Times
as knowing “more about violent death than anyone else in the world.” Dr. Helpern, who had conducted two thousand autopsies on victims of gunshot wounds, said of the magic bullet:

The original, pristine weight of this bullet before it was fired was approximately 160–161 grains. The weight of the bullet recovered on the stretcher in Parkland Hospital was reported by the Commission at 158.6.
4
I cannot accept the premise that this bullet thrashed around in all that bony tissue and lost only 1.4 to 2.4 grains of its original weight. I cannot believe either that this bullet is going to emerge miraculously unscathed, without any deformity, and with its lands and grooves intact… . You must remember that next to bone, the skin offers greater resistance to a bullet in its course through the body than any other kind of tissue… .

This single-bullet theory asks us to believe that this bullet went through seven layers of skin, tough, elastic, resistant skin. In addition … this bullet passed through other layers of soft tissue; and then shattered bones! I just can’t believe that this bullet had the force to do what [the Commission has] demanded of it… .

Dr. Robert Shaw, professor of thoracic surgery at the University of Texas, the doctor who treated Governor Connally’s chest wounds, was
never satisfied that the magic bullet caused all his patient’s injuries.

Three of the seven members of the Warren Commission doubted the magic-bullet theory, even though it appeared in their own report. The commissioners wrangled about it up to the moment their findings went to press. John McCloy had difficulty accepting it. Congressman Hale Boggs had “strong doubts.” Senator Sherman Cooper told the author in 1978 that he was “unconvinced.”

Senator Richard Russell did not want to sign a report that said definitely that both men were hit by the same bullet. He wanted a footnote added that noted his dissent, but Warren failed to put one in. On a audiotape held at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library, Russell is heard telling President Johnson, “I don’t believe it.” And Johnson responds, “I don’t either.”

Was all this doubt unjustified? The House Assassinations Committee thought so—and proceeded to endorse the magic bullet theory.

The majority of the Committee’s forensic pathology panel, for their part, decided that the medical evidence was consistent with the one bullet having wounded both victims. They thought, moreover, that the photographic exhibits, and the Zapruder film, in particular, showed that the President and the Governor were lined up in a way “consistent with the trajectory of one bullet.” They listened to the opinion of a ballistics witness, who said that a Mannlicher-Carcano bullet could indeed emerge only minimally deformed after striking bone. The ballistics experts were satisfied, meanwhile, that the magic bullet had been fired from the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.

Finally, for the first time, the controversial bullet was linked to the wound in Governor Connally’s wrist. Dr. Guinn’s neutron
activation tests indicated that the makeup of the bullet was indistinguishable from fragments found in the Governor’s wrist. Guinn believed it “extremely unlikely” that they came from different bullets.

In light of all that support and even though—unlike the Warren Commission—it believed a second assassin had fired from the knoll in front of the President, the Assassinations Committee fell into line on the matter of the almost intact “magic bullet.” Here is the sequence of the shots fired on November 22, as the Committee saw it:

Shot 1 (from the Depository) missed.

Shot 2 (from the Depository)—the almost intact bullet—caused perhaps survivable wounds to both Kennedy and Connally.

Shot 3 (from the grassy knoll) missed.

Shot 4 (from the Depository) hit Kennedy in the head, killing him.

Tests done later—one of them reported in the
Journal of the American College of Surgeons
in 1994—appeared to validate the notion that a bullet could cause serious damage without losing any more of its metal content than did the magic bullet.
5
For a number of reasons, though, the magic bullet controversy has not gone away.

First, there is doubt as to whether the bullet in question was really found on Governor Connally’s stretcher. While tests appear to link the magic bullet to fragments removed from Connally’s arm, moreover, no fragments survived from his chest—or indeed from the President’s throat wound. Statements by a former Parkland Hospital operating-room supervisor, and by a policeman who
guarded the Governor’s room, refer to the retrieval of more fragments than could possibly have come from the magic bullet.
6

Nurse Audrey Bell, the supervisor, said she handled “four or five bullet fragments” after their removal, placed them in a “foreign body envelope,” and handed them over to the authorities. Contemporary reports confirm that she did hand over fragments. Bell, meanwhile, said that “the smallest was the size of the striking end of a match and the largest at least twice that big. I have seen the picture of the magic bullet, and I can’t see how it could be the bullet from which the fragments I saw came.”

In the wake of Bell’s comments came another from a patrolman who guarded Connally’s room, Charles Harbison. He stated that on November 25 or 26, when the Governor was being moved, somebody—he thought it was a doctor—gave him fragments. Since he recalled “more than three,” and since he and Bell refer to different incidents, could they all have come from the magic bullet?

Dr. Pierre Finck, one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on the President—otherwise a staunch defender of the Warren Commission findings—expressed doubt on this one. “There are,” he testified, “too many fragments.”

X-rays, moreover, show that one fragment remained buried in Connally’s thigh. His doctors had chosen to leave it there. In 1993, when he died, the FBI saw merit in the suggestion that the fragment be removed from his body. Connally’s grieving family objected, however, and the fragment was buried with him. Modern tests might have gone far to resolve doubts about the magic bullet.

A more thorough and efficient autopsy might have established whether—as official probes have found—the bullet did indeed go through the President’s back and upper chest before exiting his throat. As reported earlier, photographs taken of the interior
chest at autopsy could not be found.

A statement by former Bethesda laboratory technician James Jenkins, who was at the autopsy, raised further doubt. “What sticks out in my mind,” he recalled years later, “is the fact that Commander Humes [the presiding surgeon] put his little finger in [the back wound] and, you know, said that … he could probe the bottom of it with his finger, which would mean to me it was very shallow.”

Later, when the surgeons had opened the President’s chest, Jenkins watched as they tried to track the wound again, using a metal probe. “I remember looking inside the chest cavity and I could see the probe … through the pleura [the lining of the chest cavity]… . You could actually see where it was making an indentation … where it was pushing the skin up… . There was no entry into the chest cavity… . No way that could have exited in the front because it was then low in the chest cavity … somewhere around the junction of the descending aorta [the main artery carrying blood from the heart] or the bronchus in the lungs… .”

As for the throat wound, numerous Dallas doctors and nurses who saw it before a tracheotomy incision obscured it, believed it to be a wound of entry—not of exit, as official reports have suggested. They have described it as very small, no bigger than a pencil. Some of them wondered whether a bullet had entered there and lodged in the chest. At autopsy, Humes found a bloody bruise at the top of the right lung, but no bullet. The throat-wound area was merely probed with a finger, not sectioned. In sum, all opinion on the throat wound—and the back wound for that matter—is based not on evidence but on guesswork.

Having reviewed the X-rays and photographs in 1988, and recalling his experience as a surgeon on the team that attended the dying
President, Dr. Robert McClelland was forthright. “I think he was shot from the front… . I think that the rifle bullet hit him in the side of the head and blew out the back of his head… . I certainly think that’s what happened, and that probably somewhere in the front part of the head, in the front part of the scalp, there probably was an entry wound, which—among all the blood and the laceration there and everything—was not seen, by us or anybody else perhaps, and it blew out the back part of his head… .”

Mortician Thomas Robinson did tell Assassinations Committee staff that he recalled seeing a small wound “about a quarter of an inch … at the temples [sic] in the hairline to the right side of the head.”

Another member of the Dallas medical team, Dr. Charles Crenshaw, claimed in a 1992 book that the wounds he saw indicated gunfire from the front.

Others thought the massive damage to the President’s skull was perhaps the result of not one headshot but of two impacting almost simultaneously. Kennedy’s personal physician, Admiral George Burkley, attended the autopsy and was to tell the Assassinations Committee that he “conceded the possibility” of two such shots. Dr. Baden, head of the Committee’s medical panel, acknowledged the “remote” possibility that the fatal head wounds “could have been caused by a shot from the grassy knoll, and that medical evidence of it has been destroyed by a shot from the rear a fraction of a second later.”

The Committee itself decided that notion was contrary to trajectory data and the time frame it had constructed from the Zapruder film and its acoustics findings. But the argument did not deter
independent medical observers who studied the X-ray evidence in 1994.

Dr. Mantik, the Eisenhower Medical Center radiation therapist who expressed suspicion that some of the X-rays had been tampered with, thought the fakery was designed to divert attention from evidence indicating a shot from the front.

Dr. Joseph Riley, an expert in neuroanatomy, concentrated on two key X-rays. He deemed them authentic, but felt they had been misinterpreted. “The autopsy evidence,” said Riley, “demonstrates conclusively that John Kennedy was struck in the head by two bullets, one from the rear and one from the right front.”

As recently as 2006, moreover, a lengthy study performed in part by the Livermore National Laboratory under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy, challenged key evidence that had persuaded the Assassinations Committee that the single bullet theory was valid. Their findings, published in the
Journal
of
Forensic
Sciences
—the periodical of record of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences—pointed to “inconsistencies” in the data used by Dr. Guinn, who tested bullet specimens for the Committee.

The new calculations, the 2006 study reported, “considerably weaken support for the single-bullet theory.” Rather, the study suggested, “the extant evidence is consistent with any number between two and five rounds [not merely the four posited by the Committee] fired in Dealey Plaza.”
7

These have been voices from a forensic and scientific tower of Babel. All this study of the evidence, and all the theorizing, may have been in vain. So poorly were the wounds reported by the autopsy surgeons, so shoddy was the handling of the brain and the
collection of bullet fragments, so elusive is the truth about the nature and the location of the X-ray and photographic materials, so controversial is the acoustics evidence, that no one—however expert—can say the evidence proves anything beyond a reasonable doubt.

Theories about the meaning of the physical evidence are just that—speculation that compels belief in neither a lone assassin nor a conspiracy.

But then there is the human testimony.

Other Gunmen?

“The physical evidence and eyewitness accounts do not clearly indicate what took place on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository at the time John F. Kennedy was assassinated.”

—Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry, 1969

T
he last the people of Dallas saw of President Kennedy was his slumped figure. Then a Secret Service agent leaped into the backseat of the limousine as another—in the follow-up car—impotently brandished an automatic rifle. Then confusion reigned in Dealey Plaza, and it was the grassy knoll that seemed to attract most attention at first. Spectators and police seemed to think it was a key place to look for assassins.

Rosemary, daughter of amateur photographer Phillip Willis, had been running alongside the President’s car as it passed the knoll. As she ran, she caught a glimpse of someone standing behind the corner of a concrete retaining wall. He appeared “conspicuous” to her, and seemed to “disappear the next instant.” As we have seen, photographs bear out her story.

From his perch on top of a nearby high building, Jesse Price found his attention drawn to something behind the fence on the knoll. A man, about twenty-five and wearing a white shirt with khaki trousers, ran off “toward the passenger cars on the railroad siding.”

The man
seemed to be carrying something. Lee Bowers, the railway towerman who had seen two strangers behind the fence just before the assassination, had partially lost sight of them in foliage. At the time of the shooting, however, he had observed some sort of commotion behind the fence.

Then policemen began pouring into the area, one of the first of them Patrolman Joe Smith. He rushed into the parking lot behind the fence because a woman said the shots had come “from the bushes.” It was there, as we noted, that Smith smelled gunpowder, there that he had a very odd encounter.

The patrolman, who had drawn his pistol as he ran, was starting to feel “damn silly” when he came upon a man standing beside a car. On seeing Smith and an accompanying deputy, the man reacted swiftly. As Smith remembered it, “This character produces credentials from his hip pocket, which showed him to be Secret Service. I have seen those credentials before, and they satisfied me and the deputy sheriff. So I immediately accepted that and let him go and continued our search around the cars.” It was a decision Officer Smith later bitterly regretted, for there were no authentic Secret Service agents on the grassy knoll.
1

All Secret Service men in Dallas that day have been accounted for by official reports. There were none stationed in Dealey Plaza, and those in the motorcade are said officially to have stayed with their cars. No genuine agents are known to have been in the grassy knoll parking lot.

A Secret Service agent, in 1963, was the essence of the crew-cut, besuited American young man. The man encountered in the parking lot was not like that. As Officer Smith put it, “He looked like an auto mechanic. He had on a sport shirt and sport
pants. But he had dirty fingernails, it looked like, and hands that looked like an auto mechanic’s hands. And afterwards it didn’t ring true for the Secret Service.”

The policeman recalled wryly, “At the time, we were so pressed for time, and we were searching. And he had produced correct identification, and we just overlooked the thing. I should have checked that man closer, but at the time I didn’t snap on it… .”

Smith and the deputy sheriff were not alone in their sighting of the “Secret Service man.” Gordon Arnold, the soldier who claimed he found himself virtually in the line of fire during the shooting, said he, too, encountered a “Secret Service agent” just before the assassination. Another Dallas witness, Malcolm Summers, spoke of seeing a man with a gun when he approached the knoll after the shooting.

Former Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry said in 1977 that he thought the “Secret Service agent” on the knoll “must have been bogus … Certainly, the suspicion would point to the man as being involved, some way or other, in the shooting, since he was in an area immediately adjacent to where the shots were—and the fact that he had a badge that purported him to be Secret Service would make it seem all the more suspicious.”

Within minutes of the assassination, an off-duty Dallas policeman, Tom Tilson, happened to be driving with his daughter on the road beyond the railway tracks. From there, just after hearing first word of the shooting on the car radio, he saw a man “slipping and sliding” down the railway embankment. Tilson said in 1978 that the man “came down that grassy slope on the west side of the triple underpass … had a car parked there, a black car. He threw something in the backseat and went around the front
hurriedly and got in the car and took off. I saw all of this and I said, ‘That doesn’t make sense, everybody running to the scene and one person running from it.’ ”

Officer Tilson said his seventeen years of police experience, coupled with the news by then pouring over the radio, prompted him to give chase. He lost his quarry after a while, but—as his daughter confirmed—managed to get the license number of the car. He reported the incident, and the number, to Dallas Police Homicide that afternoon.

Officer Tilson’s account appears to have been passed over in the chaos of the hours that followed, and there is no record of the car number he noted. There were other reports in Dallas that afternoon about speeding cars, one of them carrying stolen Georgia plates.

In Dealey Plaza, within minutes of the shooting, the focus had shifted from the grassy knoll. Before and during the shooting, people in the crowd had noticed a man, or a man with a gun, in a window of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Some said they saw two men.

Fifteen minutes before the assassination, a bystander named Arnold Rowland asked his wife if she would like to see a Secret Service agent and pointed to a window on the sixth floor. He had noticed, he said, “a man back from the window—he was standing and holding a rifle … we thought momentarily that maybe we should tell someone, but then the thought came to us that it [was] a security agent.”

Rowland testified that he had seen the rifle clearly enough to make out the telescopic sight and realize it was a high-powered weapon. The man he saw was not in the famous window, at the right-hand end of the sixth floor, but in the far
left
-hand window. Rowland also said that, at the same time, he spotted a second figure, at the famous right-hand window (see Photo 4).The second man was dark-
complexioned, leading Rowland to think he was black.

The Warren inquiry rejected Rowland’s comments about a second man, even though a deputy sheriff confirmed that the witness had mentioned the man right after the shooting. When he told FBI agents about the second man, Rowland said, “They told me it didn’t have any bearing or such on the case right then. In fact, they just the same as told me to ‘forget it now.’ … They didn’t seem interested at all. They didn’t pursue this point. They didn’t take it down in the notation as such.”

The Warren Commission Report ignored and omitted altogether statements the FBI took from two other witnesses. These also referred to two men, and the first of them seems to corroborate what Rowland said.

Shortly before the assassination, bystander Ruby Henderson saw two men standing back from a window on one of the upper floors of the Book Depository. Like Rowland, she particularly noticed that one of the men “had dark hair … a darker complexion than the other.” He might have been Mexican, she thought. Henderson had the impression the men were looking out as if “in anticipation of the motorcade.”

Henderson recalled having seen the two men after an ambulance removed a man who had been taken ill. An ambulance had indeed been close by, and the time was routinely logged. The sighting of the two men can therefore be placed as having occurred less than six minutes before the assassination.

The report of another witness, who also observed two men just before the assassination, is even more disquieting. Carolyn Walther noticed two men with a gun in an open window at the extreme right-hand end of the Depository. Though she was unsure that the window was on the sixth floor, photographs and the
location of innocent employees in fifth-floor windows establish that she must have been looking at the infamous sniper’s perch. Mrs. Walther said:

I saw this man in a window, and he had a gun in his hands, pointed downwards. The man evidently was in a kneeling position, because his forearms were resting on the windowsill. There was another man standing beside him, but I only saw a portion of his body because he was standing partly up against the window, you know, only halfway in the window; and the window was dirty and I couldn’t see his face, up above, because the window was pushed up. It startled me, then I thought, ‘Well, they probably have guards, possibly in all the buildings,’ so I didn’t say anything.

If Mrs. Walther had sounded the alarm, it would probably have been too late. She had barely noticed the second man when the President’s motorcade swept into view.

No one appears to have bothered to interview another witness, one who had an ideal vantage point from which to observe the sixth-floor window on November 22. John Powell was one of many inmates housed on the sixth floor of the Dallas County Jail, spending three days in custody on minor charges. In the minutes before the assassination, he told friends and family members, he and cellmates saw two men with a gun in the window opposite. So clearly could he see them, he said, that he recalled them “fooling with the scope” on the gun. “Quite a few of us saw them. Everybody was trying to watch the parade… . We were looking across the street because it was directly straight across. The first thing I thought is, it was security guards… .”

Like Ruby Henderson and Arnold Rowland, Powell recalled
spontaneously that one of the men appeared to have dark skin.

Though some inmates of the county jail were apparently questioned after the assassination, it is not clear that any official ever spoke with Powell at the time. His story emerged only years later, after a friend contacted a Dallas area newspaper.

The testimonies that referred to two men acting suspiciously were either to be judged mistaken or ignored by the Warren Commission.

There never was serious interest in the possibility that two assassins or more might have lain in wait for the President. For the focus of official interest became, less than five minutes after the shooting, a hunt for just one man.

Two other bystanders, clerks from the county building, noticed a man in the sixth floor just before the shooting. He looked “uncomfortable” as though he was “hiding or something.” To the clerks, he seemed to be looking toward the grassy knoll rather than in the direction from which the President would be arriving.

Then there was Howard Brennan, later to become a star witness for the Warren Commission. He had stood across the road from the Depository and reported having seen a man at the right-hand sixth-floor window both before and during the shooting. After the second shot, said Brennan, “This man I saw previous was aiming for his last shot.” He then drew back “and maybe paused for another second as though to assure himself that he had hit his mark,” before disappearing.

Close by Brennan, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy named Amos Euins also saw a rifle being fired from the famous window. “I could see his hand,” he said later, “and I could see his other hand on the
trigger, and one hand on the barrel thing.” Another youth in the crowd, James Worrell, said he looked up after the first shot and saw “six inches” of a rifle barrel sticking out of the window.

Three people traveling in the motorcade, the Mayor’s wife and two photographers, saw part of a rifle protruding from the window—though neither photographer reacted fast enough to take a picture.

Less than five minutes after the shooting, a policeman called in over the radio to say, “A passerby states the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository.” Three employees at the Depository came forward about the same time to say that, while watching the motorcade from a fifth-floor window, they had heard suspicious sounds above them—a clatter like a rifle bolt being operated and what sounded like shells being ejected onto the floor. The police operation gradually became more organized, the Depository was sealed off and a floor-by-floor search begun.

As early as 12:44 p.m., the police radio put out a first description of a suspect in the assassination:

“Attention all squads. The suspect in the shooting at Elm and Houston is supposed to be an unknown white male approximately thirty, 165 pounds, slender build, armed with what is thought to be a 30-30 rifle … no further description at this time.”

The Warren Commission never did establish the source of this description. Its best guess was that it derived from a policeman’s exchange with Brennan, one of the witnesses who reported having seen a man with a gun in the sixth-floor window. Whatever the source, policemen in Dallas now had a lead,
however vague, a rough description of somebody to be on the lookout for.

At 1:16 p.m., forty-five minutes after the assassination, operators at Dallas police headquarters were startled by a civilian’s voice breaking into official radio traffic. A citizen was relaying news of fresh drama and a second murder:

Citizen: Hello, Police Operator?

Operator: Go ahead, go ahead, Citizen using police radio.

Citizen: We’ve had a shooting out here.

Operator: Where is it at?

Citizen: On Tenth Street.

Operator: What location on Tenth Street?

Citizen: Between Marsalis and Beckley. It’s a police officer. Somebody shot him.

A couple of miles from Dealey Plaza, on a leafy street in the Oak Cliff district, a police officer had indeed been shot. He was patrol-car driver J. D. Tippit, and he was dead. Within four minues, drawing on what witnesses at the scene said, the police broadcast a description of a suspect in this second murder: “A white male approximately thirty, five-eight, slender build, has black hair, a white jacket, a white shirt, and dark trousers.”