Reclaiming History (118 page)

S
o in the final analysis, even if one were forced to rely only on the Zapruder film, we have seen that from the film alone, there is strong evidence of three, and
only
three shots, fired during the assassination. This is completely consistent with all the physical evidence in the case, and flies in the face of over four decades of allegations made by conspiracy theorists that the film contains conclusive “proof” of two or more assassins.

With respect to the second shot fired in Dealey Plaza, the “single-bullet
theory
” is an obvious misnomer. Though in its incipient stages it was but a theory, the indisputable evidence is that it is now a proven
fact
, a wholly supported conclusion. As one of the authors of the single-bullet theory, Arlen Specter, says, “It began as a theory, but when a theory is established by the facts, it deserves to be called a conclusion.”
¹⁷⁴
And no sensible mind that is also informed can plausibly make the case that the bullet that struck President Kennedy in the upper right part of his back did not go on to hit Governor Connally.

L
eft with evidence of only three shots, the next obvious question is whether Oswald, using the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found on the sixth floor of the Depository Building, could have gotten off two out of three shots with accuracy in the time period shown in the Zapruder film. Critics of the Warren Report have argued from day one that it couldn’t be done, not by Oswald or any other lone gunman. The main reason they normally cite is that a bolt-action rifle takes too much time to operate between each shot. Though it does sound as if the hand movements of the firer, on paper, are time-consuming—after a shot, he has to push the bolt handle up, pull the bolt to the rear (which ejects the shell), push the bolt forward (which positions the next cartridge in the chamber), and then turn down the bolt handle to lock the bolt in place—these are not really four separate steps in the true sense of the word. As a Los Angeles Police Department firearms expert told me, “They [the steps] are all done in one continuous action; for instance, like turning a door knob, pushing it forward, and walking in. The operation of the bolt by an experienced rifleman is very fast.”
¹⁷⁵

Early press reports “guesstimated,” without the benefit of the Zapruder film, that the assassination occurred in a span of only 5 seconds, which helped make the general public predisposed to accept the critics’ argument. In attempting to resolve this issue, the Warren Commission cited the FBI’s conclusion (based on test-firing the Mannlicher-Carcano) that with telescopic sight, “the minimum time” for a person to fire two “successive, well-aimed” shots with the weapon was “approximately two and a quarter [2.25] seconds,”
¹⁷⁶
which is usually rounded out to 2.3 seconds. What this means is that the “minimum firing time
between
shots was 2.3 seconds”
¹⁷⁷
—that is,
after
a shot, it takes a minimum of 2.3 seconds to operate the bolt, reaim, and fire the second shot.
*
This firing time was based on the premise, which I believe to be false (see following), that Oswald
must
have used the telescopic sight.

The HSCA later found that Oswald’s rifle, using the iron sights rather than the scope, could be fired twice in a shorter time than 2.3 seconds. “The Committee test-fired a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle using the open iron sights. It found that it was possible for two shots to be fired within 1.66 seconds.”
¹⁷⁸
Monty Lutz of the HSCA firearms panel, and my firearms expert at the London trial, told me that “at distances below a hundred yards [Kennedy was about sixty yards from the sixth-floor window at the time the first shot hit him and almost precisely eighty-eight yards for the head shot], a shooter can not only fire faster with the open iron sights, which he can do at any distance, but, if rapid firing, more accurately. My assumption is that Oswald would know this and that he used the iron sights.”
¹⁷⁹
*

The one small piece of circumstantial evidence, which could easily be a coincidence, that Oswald used the telescopic sight is that the FBI found the scope to be defective, causing shots to land “high and slightly to the right.”
¹⁸⁰
The two shots that struck the president from behind hit slightly to the right of the center of the president’s body. However, assistant Warren Commission counsel Arlen Specter believes that the scope (irrespective of the issue of whether Oswald used it when he shot Kennedy) may very well have become misaligned when Oswald dropped it in haste onto the sixth floor of the Depository Building during his quick getaway. “A very reasonable inference,” Specter says, is that Oswald “most assuredly didn’t place it [his Carcano] on the ground with great care to preserve it for its next use; he gave it a pretty good toss,…[and] that could have damaged the sight.”
¹⁸¹
FBI agent James Hosty made the same assumption as Specter.
¹⁸²

Supportive of Specter’s and Hosty’s assumption is the testimony of FBI firearms expert Robert Frazier that when he got the Carcano back at the FBI lab in Washington, D.C., the scope tube had a “rather severe scrape” on it, and the “scope tube could have been bent or damaged.” Ironically, though, if the scope had become defective
before
the assassination, the defect would have actually assisted the assassin in his aiming at a target moving away from him. Frazier testified that the weapon firing high “would actually compensate for any lead which had to be taken. So that if you aimed with this weapon as it actually was received at the laboratory, it would be necessary to take no lead whatsoever in order to hit the intended object. The scope would accomplish the lead for you.”
¹⁸³

Quite apart from the fact that the Mannlicher-Carcano, then, could be fired twice within 1.66 seconds, since the HSCA determined that the first shot was fired around Z160, not between Z210 and Z225, the committee had ample evidence to conclude that contrary to the popularly accepted 5 seconds, the assassin had over 8 seconds (18.3 frames per second divided into 153 frames between Z160 and Z313 gives 8.4 seconds), a point I made very clearly to the London jury through my photographic expert, Cecil Kirk.
¹⁸⁴
But, to be even more precise, Oswald really had 8.4 seconds to operate the bolt, aim, and fire
two
, not three shots. Most people forget that for the first shot, the cartridge was already in the chamber and Oswald had all the time in the world to prepare for that shot, so the clock doesn’t really start to run until the time of the first shot. Deducting the millisecond it took him to pull the trigger for the first shot, Oswald had at least 8 seconds from that point forward to fire two more rounds, hardly the impossible timing problem that conspiracy theorists have alleged throughout the years.

Even when we analyze the amount of time Oswald had available to him between individual shots, we find that the feat was not impossible. Virtually everyone agrees that President Kennedy and Governor Connally were showing a reaction to being hit at frame 225 of the Zapruder film, 65 frames or 3.5 seconds after the first shot at around Z160.
Even if we use the 2.3-second (telescopic sight) figure as the minimum amount of time to fire two shots
, at 3.5 seconds Oswald would have had 1.2 seconds
more
than the minimum time needed to fire a second shot at the time of Z225. If we assume Kennedy and Connally were hit at Z210 (the earliest time, according to the Warren Commission, they were probably shot), this would be 50 frames or 2.7 seconds after frame 160, which is 0.4 second
more
than the minimum time needed to fire two shots.

Using the more likely open-iron-sights figure of 1.66 seconds, if the shot that hit the president was fired at frame Z210 (50 frames or 2.7 seconds after Z160), Oswald would have had 1.04 seconds
more
than he needed for the second shot. It is only when we consider the HSCA’s conclusion that Kennedy and Connally were hit at about Z190
¹⁸⁵
(a highly dubious conclusion which every other major study of the Zapruder film has disagreed with, and which is sorely lacking in common sense—see earlier text) that we find Oswald would have been left with only 1.6 seconds (30 frames) to get off his second shot, a very tight window of opportunity to be sure but a period still possible, according to HSCA estimates, if he used the rifle’s open iron sights to aim.

With respect to the third shot, the head shot at Z313, if the second shot was at Z225 (the latest time, according to the Warren Commission, that Kennedy and Connally were hit), as the Warren Commission concluded, this would have given Oswald 4.8 seconds (88 frames) to fire the third shot. Assuming Kennedy and Connally were first hit at Z210, Oswald would have had 5.6 seconds (103 frames) to fire his third shot. If we accept the HSCA’s questionable conclusion that the second shot was fired at Z190, Oswald would have had 6.7 seconds (123 frames) to fire the third shot,
four times
the minimum time required. What follows is a summary of the relevant times:

As these figures show, as opposed to what the conspiracy theorists have been alleging for years, whether Oswald used the telescopic sight or iron sights, he would have had, in nearly every case,
more than enough time
to fire the three shots. At the London trial, I felt it was relevant to ask those who actually heard the three shots in Dealey Plaza that day, and who had fired a bolt-action rifle, for their on-the-spot sense and impression of whether one person could have fired all three of the shots. For example, I asked Charles Brehm, the combat veteran who was a part of the D-day invasion of Normandy, who was on the south side of Elm Street with his five-year-old son as the motorcade came by, and who was “very familiar” with bolt-action rifles, “Did it appear from the timing of the shots that you heard that you, yourself, could have operated, aimed, and fired a bolt-action rifle as quickly as those shots came?”

Answer: “Very easily.”

Question: “So you definitely believe that the three shots you heard that day could easily have been fired by one person?”

Answer: “Absolutely.”

Question: “From your experience with rifles and the report of rifle shots, did you hear any difference at all in the report of the three shots that indicated more than one rifle or firing location was involved?”

Answer: “No. All three shots were from the same origin.”
¹⁸⁶

I also asked Dallas police officer Marrion Baker, who was riding a police motorcycle in the motorcade, “Have you personally had occasion to fire a bolt-action rifle and fire shots in rapid succession?”

Answer: “Yes, sir. I have.”

Question: “Did it appear from the timing of the shots you heard that you could have operated, aimed, and fired a bolt-action rifle as quickly as those shots came?”

Answer: “Yes.”

Question: “So you believe the three shots you heard that day could have been fired by one person?”

Answer: “Yes.”
¹⁸⁷

The conspiracy crowd has three arguments for the proposition that although the Carcano could be fired twice within 1.66 seconds, the accuracy simply wouldn’t be there, none of which have merit. One argument is that, as conspiracy theorist Walt Brown puts it, Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano was a “piece of junk” that “certainly lacked accuracy.”
¹⁸⁸
Even if Oswald’s Carcano was the worst piece of junk in the world, this is an irrelevant argument since we have seen that firearms experts for the Warren Commission (FBI) and HSCA proved that it was, in fact, the weapon that fired three bullets in Dealey Plaza, two of which struck the president. But in point of fact, the Carcano was not a piece of junk that lacked accuracy. Ronald Simmons, the chief of the Infantry Weapons Evaluation Branch of the Department of the Army, had his people test-fire Oswald’s Carcano rifle (not
a
Carcano rifle, but Oswald’s, the one found on the sixth floor, Warren Commission Exhibit No. 139) forty-seven times, and testified the rifle was “quite accurate”—in fact, just as accurate as the American military rifle being used at the time, the M-14.
¹⁸⁹
Indeed, the exact type of rifle Oswald used to kill Kennedy was still being used at the time by the Italian NATO rifle team in competition.
¹⁹⁰
*

Another argument made by the conspiracy theorists is that Oswald’s Carcano had a “hair trigger” that would affect its ability to be fired with accuracy. The problem with this argument is that although the trigger pull of the Carcano, at approximately three pounds, is below average for most military rifles, a hair trigger only requires an extremely light pull, normally measured at one pound or less. So the Carcano’s trigger pull was three times that of a hair-trigger rifle.
¹⁹¹

Perhaps the biggest argument of the conspiracy theorists is that even apart from the rifle, no one could possibly have hit Kennedy twice in the time Oswald had available to him, particularly Oswald. But of course, the very best evidence that Oswald had the ability to fire his Carcano rifle within the subject time and with the requisite accuracy is that we
know
, from all the evidence, that he did. Conspiracy thorists, naturally, don’t accept this. “Oswald was known as a poor shot,…missing the target [in the military] altogether as often as he hit it,” says conspiracy theorist Harrison E. Livingstone.
¹⁹²
Kirk Wilson says that “to those who knew him in the Marines, Oswald’s marksmanship was a joke.”
¹⁹³