A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (41 page)

Specter took a tour through the hospital and examined the medical equipment that had been used on the president. He was shown the metal stretcher that had been used to move Connally. If the single-bullet theory was correct, the bullet would have fallen from this stretcher after Connally was transported to an operating table in the second-floor surgical wing. From other testimony, Specter knew that the stretcher used to move Kennedy was nowhere near the area where the bullet was found.

An orderly testified that after Connally was transferred to the operating table, the stretcher was placed in an elevator to be returned to the ground floor, where it would be wiped down and used again. The key testimony on the issue came from a hospital engineer, Darrell Tomlinson, who recalled that he had found the stretcher in the elevator on the ground floor and pushed it out into the hallway, setting it along the wall near another stretcher. He said he then heard the sound of a bullet hitting the floor; it had apparently been hidden under a rubber mat on one of the stretchers. Specter was frustrated by Tomlinson’s testimony; the engineer was confused about several details and could not say for certain which of the two stretchers produced the bullet. Even so, Specter said that under the circumstances there could be only one conclusion about the source of the bullet: it had to have fallen from Connally’s stretcher.

When he returned to Washington, Specter sat down with David Belin to talk through the single-bullet theory. In a sense, Specter knew that his friend from Iowa might be disappointed by the theory; it was Belin’s detailed analysis that winter of the Zapruder film and the timing of the shots that suggested the presence of a second gunman—and therefore a conspiracy. But as Belin listened to Specter, he could not deny the logic of the single-bullet theory, and he said later that he quickly accepted that it was the truth. Oswald had not fired three bullets into the limousine; he had fired only two, one hitting both Kennedy and Connally. In the decades that followed, scientific studies, using methods unavailable to the Warren Commission in 1964, would validate the single-bullet theory, although it would become perhaps the most controversial of the investigation’s findings. On the staff, it was never so controversial; in fact, several of the lawyers would recall that they readily embraced the theory when they first heard it that spring; “It just seemed sensible,” said Sam Stern.

That still left open the question of what had happened to the other shot that most of the witnesses in Dealey Plaza thought they had heard. If one hit the president in the head and another hit both Kennedy and Connally, where had the third one gone? The staff debated the question for weeks but could not come up with a final, conclusive answer, apart from deciding that the bullet had obviously missed the limousine. One strong possibility, cited in the commission’s final report, was that the first shot missed. Oswald may have fired for the first time—and missed—just as Kennedy’s limousine turned the corner onto Elm Street and approached a large oak tree that would have obstructed Oswald’s view for a moment. That could have prompted him to fire too quickly in the knowledge that his target was about to be hidden by the tree branches. If Oswald missed the first shot, the explanation might also be nerves, some of the lawyers thought. In pulling the trigger that first time, Oswald might have been struck by the monstrous significance of what he was about to do.

*

John and Nellie Connally agreed to testify before the commission in April. Specter assumed he would handle the questioning, since he had taken the testimony of all of the other witnesses who had been in the Dallas motorcade; no one knew the medical evidence better. The Connallys’ testimony had become all the more important with the discovery—astonishing to Specter—that the governor’s mangled clothes from the day of the assassination had been dry-cleaned and pressed. The clothes were “totally ruined for evidentiary value,” Specter said. The decision to clean them, it was later discovered, had been made by Mrs. Connally. “I couldn’t bear to look at the blood,” she said, insisting that “I told the cleaner to remove the stains as best he could but do nothing to alter the holes or other damage.”

Specter was startled when he was told, a few days before the Connallys’ testimony, that he would not conduct the questioning. Instead, at Warren’s request, Rankin would do it. It was a decision, Specter assumed, that reflected Warren’s annoyance at the detailed way he had questioned earlier witnesses. Rankin delivered the news to Specter, who tried to convince himself that he did not care. “It didn’t make a good goddamn to me whether I questioned them or not,” Specter said. “That’s not my call.”

Rankin asked for Specter’s help, though. “Arlen,” he said, “get me prepared.”

Specter took the opportunity to remind Rankin—really, to warn him—how much detail he would have to understand before questioning such important witnesses. Specter was not going to “dress this up,” as he put it, and he inundated Rankin with facts and figures, as well as the medical and ballistics terminology, that he would need to master quickly. “I pointed out to Rankin that the bullet had a muzzle velocity of approximately 2,200 feet per second; that by the time it reached the president, the bullet speed was about 2,000 feet per second and that the bullet would have had an exit velocity of about 1,900 feet per second.” Rankin listened as Specter explained how the army had just completed ballistics tests to try to replicate the victims’ wounds “with a gelatin solution and compressed goat meat” and that the bullet had slowed as it “entered slightly to the left of the governor’s right armpit, exited beneath his right nipple, leaving a large exit wound, and entered the dorsal aspect of his wrist and exited the volar aspect, finally lodging in his thigh.”

Years later, Specter chuckled while remembering the look on Rankin’s face. “By the time I had finished, Rankin, knowing he had little time to immerse himself in such detail, shook his head in despair.”

Rankin gave up on the spot. “You’ll have to question Connally,” he told Specter, who admitted that he took a little pleasure in effectively overturning the decision of the chief justice. “Warren wanted Rankin but he was stuck with me.”

The Connallys’ testimony was scheduled for the afternoon of Tuesday, April 21. That morning, the Texas governor and his wife were invited to the commission’s offices to see, for the first time, the full Zapruder film. Specter, who had already viewed it hundreds of times, remembered being fascinated as he sat there, “watching Governor Connally watch himself get shot.” Nellie Connally found it a “sickening experience, but strangely surreal” to see the film, “as if it all were happening to someone else at some other time and place.” She was particularly disturbed, she said, by the image of the shot to the president’s head, and of Jacqueline Kennedy’s attempt to climb out of the passenger compartment. “I watched the grainy film in disbelief as it showed Jackie crawling onto the trunk. What on earth was she doing?”

Mrs. Connally’s testimony was, in many ways, just as important as her husband’s, since she had not been hit by the gunfire and had memories unhindered by the physical pain and shock her husband had suffered. And that was part of Specter’s problem. The strong-willed, articulate First Lady of Texas was convinced that her husband and Kennedy had been hit by separate shots. She believed the first bullet had hit Kennedy in the throat—she knew this, she said, because she turned around after the first shot and saw the president reaching for his neck—and that a second bullet fired moments later hit her husband in the back. It was the third bullet, she said, that shattered the president’s skull, by which time her husband was hunched down in her lap.

As the Connallys watched the film, Specter had a sense of the power that Nellie Connally could exert on her husband. The couple began to argue about whether she had pulled her injured husband into her lap or whether he fallen there. She insisted she had pulled him down.

“No, Nellie, you didn’t pull me down,” the governor said. “I fell into your lap.”

“No, John,” she answered. “You didn’t fall—I pulled you.”

Specter recalled that the argument lasted some time—they “shot back and forth, several times.” David Belin, who was also watching this exchange, remembered that the Connallys ended the debate only when they realized that others were in the room listening to them argue. Mrs. Connally had the film stopped, and the couple left the room, Belin said. “When they returned, Nellie Connally and the governor were in agreement—on Mrs. Connally’s version.”

Specter was disturbed that Mrs. Connally had convinced her husband to alter his account, especially since the couple’s seemingly consistent testimony might forever be seen as a credible attack on the single-bullet theory. She wrote later about her conviction that her husband could not have been hit by a bullet that also hit the president. She insisted that her husband had time to turn back and forth in the car after the first shot was heard and before he was hit. “Even ‘magic’ bullets don’t hang in the air that long,” she said.

After lunch, the Connallys returned to the VFW building for their formal testimony. The entire commission had gathered to hear from them. Specter said it was the first time he had ever seen Senator Russell in the commission’s offices for witness testimony; he was there out of respect for a fellow southern governor, Specter assumed. (Russell had been Democratic governor of Georgia before his election to the Senate in 1932.) Specter was struck by what a lonely figure Russell seemed to be, a man with almost no life outside of the chambers of the Senate; he would never marry. “Russell was immaculately dressed in a blue suit and white starched shirt and tan socks that barely covered his ankles,” said Specter. “He was a bachelor. Nobody took care of his socks.”

Governor Connally testified first, and his testimony was stomach-churning in its description of what had taken place inside the president’s limousine as the motorcade rounded the corner onto Elm Street and approached the book depository. “I heard a noise which I immediately took to be a rifle shot,” he told Specter. “I instinctively turned to my right because the sound appeared to come from over my right shoulder.… The only thought that crossed my mind was this was an assassination attempt.”

He said he had no memory of hearing the second shot—the one he believed hit him—but “I was in either a state of shock or the impact was such that the sound didn’t even register on me.” But he felt it: “I felt like someone had hit me in the back.” Blood started to pour from his chest, he said, and he assumed he was moments from death. “I knew I had been hit, and I immediately assumed, because of the amount of blood … that I had probably been fatally hit.”

“So I merely doubled up,” he said. “And Mrs. Connally pulled me over to her lap. So I reclined with my head in her lap, conscious all the time, and with my eyes open.”

Then he heard another shot, which he was later told was the third shot. He said he assumed it was aimed at Kennedy. “I heard the shot very clear. I heard it hit him,” he said. “It never entered my mind that it ever hit anybody but the president.”

Suddenly, he said, the passenger compartment was covered with blood and bits of human tissue. The tissue was “pale blue—brain tissue, which I immediately recognized, and I recall very well.” On his trousers, Connally said, there was “one chunk of brain tissue as big as almost my thumb.” He remembered yelling out: “Oh, no, no, no.… My God, they are going to kill us all.”
*

Connally agreed with his wife that separate bullets hit him and Kennedy. “The man fired three shots, and he hit each of the three times he fired,” he said. “He obviously was a pretty good marksman.” He said the president was silent after the first shot. After the last shot, he heard Mrs. Kennedy cry out: “They have killed my husband.… I have got his brains in my hand.”

Asked by Specter to describe his wounds, Connally suggested it would be easier for the commissioners to see for themselves. “If the committee would be interested, I would just as soon you look at it. Is there any objection?”

There was none, and Connally took off his shirt, pointing first to the entry wound just below his right shoulder blade, then turning around to show where the bullet had exited from his chest. Specter recalled “a large, ugly, four-inch-diameter scar under his right nipple.” The scene produced the only moment of humor in the otherwise grim day of testimony. Specter remembered that he had to suppress a laugh when Rankin’s secretary, Julia Eide, walked into the room and was shocked to see the bare-chested governor. “She walked in in the middle of the hearing and saw Connally with his shirt off and gasped and walked out.”

Connally’s testimony was useful to Warren and others who believed that Oswald acted alone—because the governor said he was convinced of it, too. “You had an individual here with a completely warped, demented mind who, for whatever reason, wanted … a niche in the history books of this country.” He was also convinced that all of the shots came from the rear—from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository.

In his testimony, Connally speculated that Oswald might have been targeting him, as well as Kennedy. Before his election as governor in 1962, Connally had been the Kennedy administration’s navy secretary, which gave him responsibility for the Marine Corps. While still in Russia, Oswald had written a letter to Connally, asking him to overturn the less-than-honorable discharge that Oswald had received from the marines after his attempted defection. (He had been given an “undesirable” discharge, one level less punitive than a dishonorable discharge.) The request was rejected. Perhaps the sting of the discharge was still on his mind in Dealey Plaza. It was possible, Connally said, that “I was as much a target as anyone else.”

When Connally finished his testimony after nearly three hours and began to leave the room, Specter could see how upset Warren was—agitated again at the detailed, time-consuming questioning. When Mrs. Connally then entered the room and was sworn in, Warren took charge: “Mrs. Connally, would you mind telling us the story of the affair as you heard it, and we will be brief.” Warren’s promise—
“we will be brief”
—was directed at him, Specter knew.