Reclaiming History (121 page)

Question: “So that if we assume, as apparently is the fact, that this jacketed bullet did not hit anything solid in the way of bone in the president but only traversed the soft tissue of the neck, and presuming the approximate location of the limousine at the time, and the posture as nearly as can be determined of the president at that time, that in your view then, absent a deflection of that bullet, it could not have missed Governor Connally.”

Answer: “That is my view, yes.”
²³³

And all of this was decades before the apparent “revelation” the
Case Closed
author tells us about.

Just as remarkably,
Case Closed
goes on to tell its readers, “
The second question resolved by the Failure Analysis re-creation
is where the sniper would have to be located for the single bullet to have the correct trajectory.”
²³⁴
But, of course, this is not a second, separate question. In answering the first question posed by the
Case Closed
author—whether one bullet could have caused Kennedy’s
and
Connally’s wounds—one necessarily has to analyze and determine the trajectory of fire. And when you do that, you also necessarily determine the location of the sniper. The suggestion by the
Case Closed
author that the validity of the single-bullet theory and the question of the location of the sniper were “resolved by the Failure Analysis re-creation [of the shooting]” at the American Bar Association’s 1992 five-hour mock trial must have made those FBI agents who were a part of the FBI’s May 24, 1964, reenactment of the shooting to determine the location of the sniper’s rifle, and who have since passed on, spin in their graves. The precise location of the presidential limousine on Elm Street at the time of the second shot and the position of Kennedy’s and Connally’s bodies as they were in the limousine at the time of the shot, the trajectory of the bullet, and the determination of the location of the sniper at the sixth-floor window were all analyzed in depth at that time, leading the Warren Commission to conclude that the single bullet that struck Kennedy and Connally traced back to the sixth-floor sniper’s nest window.
²³⁵
And as we saw on the preceding pages, in 1978 the HSCA likewise, in determining whether Kennedy and Connally were struck by the same bullet, had to determine the trajectory of the shot. It, too, with three separate trajectories, concluded that the shot was fired from the vicinity of the sixth-floor window behind which Oswald’s fingerprints and Mannlicher-Carcano weapon were found.
²³⁶
All of this occurred many, many years before the
Case Closed
author told his readers these questions were finally “resolved.”

The further implication in
Case Closed
that the author commissioned or was somehow a part of the Failure Analysis study was equally deceptive. As I indicated in the introduction, this was the inference drawn by several leading newspapers who reviewed
Case Closed
, even though Posner had nothing to do with the Failure Analysis study. In his book
Final Judgment
, Michael Collins Piper writes that the
Case Closed
author “essentially leaves his readers to believe that the computer analysis was somehow prepared exclusively for his use, when, in fact, it was prepared for a mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald conducted by the American Bar Association.”
²³⁷

Perhaps Posner’s biggest deception is simply the title of his book,
Case Closed
, suggesting that the author, after nearly thirty years of unsuccessful effort by others, had finally closed the case. Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg sarcastically wrote, “All hail Gerald Posner. He has done the impossible—what had not been done in thirty years. He solved the JFK assassination case, what the Warren Commission, the FBI, and CIA, and all those other government agencies…were not able to do. Thus…his title:
Case Closed
.”
²³⁸

Indeed, in the very preface to his book, Posner goes way beyond the single-bullet theory, making it clear to the reader that he has accomplished what no one before him, including the Warren Commission and HSCA, had. He writes, “Many people,
understandably,
believe that the truth in the Kennedy assassination will
never
be discovered. [In other words, no one, prior to his book, has yet proved the truth in the Kennedy case.] But the troubling issues and questions about the assassination
can
be settled, the issue of who killed JFK resolved…
Presenting those answers is the goal of this book
.”
*
But the reality is that we already knew the full truth about the assassination—at least as to
all
of its essential matters—and we’ve known it since way back on September 24, 1964, the date the Warren Report was published. Admittedly, since that time, hundreds of additional issues have been raised by Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists, but they go nowhere and are almost embarrassingly devoid of substance.

B
efore we leave the subject of the Zapruder film, I want to address one of the craziest allegations that conspiracy buffs have ever latched onto in their efforts to pull the conspiratorial wool over the eyes of gullible people everywhere. The Zapruder film, of course, was originally touted by the vast majority of conspiracy theorists as incontrovertible proof of the conspiracy that killed the president (Connally reacting later than Kennedy, head snap to rear, etc.). As prosecutor Jim Garrison argued in his final summation in the Clay Shaw murder trial in 1969, the head snap to the rear on the film proves the fatal head shot “came from the front.” Though the Warren Commission’s investigation of Kennedy’s death, he said, was “the greatest fraud in the history of our country,” how wonderful, he told the jurors, that they had seen the “one eyewitness which was indifferent to power—the Zapruder film. The lens of the camera tells what happened…and that is one of the reasons two hundred million Americans have not seen the Zapruder film.”
²³⁹
*

Even the zany Garrison would have never believed that the latest big rage in the conspiracy community today is its charge that the film, through alteration, is a forgery, created by photographic experts (hired by the “conspirators”) in an effort to conceal the truth about the shooting in Dallas and frame Oswald. Can you imagine that, folks? The deliriously wacky conspiracy buffs are now claiming that the Zapruder film itself, the film of the assassination, is a hoax, a fraud, a forgery. What’s next? Kennedy is still alive in a suite on the top floor of Parkland Hospital? G. Gordon Liddy was the grassy knoll assassin? Oswald was, as rumored, Ruby’s illegitimate son? Just stay tuned to the buffs’ wacko network.

The absurd arguments made on behalf of the Zapruder film “alteration theory,” as it has come to be called, stem from conspiracy theorists who refuse to accept the explanations, discovered through scientific inquiry, that have successfully answered all of the earlier conspiracy allegations about the Zapruder film. But to concede to these scientifically based explanations, for many conspiracy theorists, is tantamount to high treason. And so, in recent years, a movement, nurtured by the Internet, has been growing around the allegation that the Zapruder film (as we know it) is a sophisticated forgery, altered by the conspirators in the days, weeks, and months following the assassination. Prominent conspiracy theorist Harrison Edward Livingstone, speaking for many in the conspiracy community, writes that “the famous Zapruder film is the biggest hoax of the twentieth century.”
²⁴⁰
The evidence of alteration, according to proponents, is plentiful and has been lying right under our noses for over four decades. In other words, the
Life
editor who wrote (presumably echoing the view of all of us) in an early issue of the magazine that “of all the witnesses to the tragedy, the only unimpeachable one is the eight-millimeter movie camera of Abraham Zapruder”
²⁴¹
was either blind or terribly naive.

Actually, though completely unlike the current rage, the idea that the Zapruder film might have been tampered with goes back to the beginning. The first allegation (and one that is still making the rounds among the uninformed) is that several frames of the Zapruder film had been cut out and are mysteriously “missing.” This claim arose when early students of the assassination discovered that frames 208 through 211 were missing from the sequence (Z171–334) reproduced in volume 18 of the Warren Commission’s exhibits.
²⁴²
The two frames adjacent to the “missing” images (Z207 and Z212) show a splice line, indicating that the four missing frames had been edited from the film. Conspiracy theorists immediately alleged that these missing frames, which are among the frames when the presidential limousine was hidden, from Zapruder’s viewpoint, behind the Stemmons Freeway sign, must have shown something the Warren Commission didn’t want the world to see. Since these frames (less than one-fourth of a second) could only show, like those just before and after them, the back of the freeway sign, the buffs had a difficult time explaining what the Warren Commission could possibly have seen that it did not want to reveal.

On January 30, 1967, George Hunt, managing editor of
Life
magazine, the owner and custodian of the film, cleared up the missing frames mystery when he released copies of frames Z208–211 to the American media, along with a statement: “[In] handling the film…we accidentally damaged not four but six frames of the original—frames 207 through212.
Before
that happened, however, and before we came into possession of the original print, [Abraham] Zapruder had ordered three color copies made by a Dallas Laboratory—two for federal agents and one for
Life
. These are and always have been intact…Thus, there never have been any missing frames.”
²⁴³

Another early allegation that the Zapruder film was tampered with revolves around the reproduction of Z314 and Z315, which were inadvertently printed in reverse order in volume 18 of the Warren Commission’s exhibits.
²⁴⁴
The conspiracy theorists naturally smell a rat here but fail to articulate how it would have benefited the Commission to have switched the frames. As switched, Kennedy’s head seems to go forward at Z313, backward at Z314, forward again at Z315, and finally backward at Z316. This wouldn’t be compatible with any theory postulated by the Warren Commission. In fact, it would be in direct opposition, since it not only could give rise to the inference of four shots to the head (and hence, automatically a conspiracy, since no one gunman could fire even two shots, much less four, in four-eighteenths of a second), but inasmuch as the Warren Commission concluded that the
sole
shot to Kennedy’s head was at Z313,
²⁴⁵
two separate backward movements at frames 314 and 316 would indicate (despite the neuromuscular reaction) that at least one shot came from the front, which is what the conspiracy theorists have always claimed.

In a December 14, 1965, letter responding to Judith R. Schmidt, an assistant to well-known conspiracy theorist Mark Lane,
²⁴⁶
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote, “You are correct in the observation that frames labeled 314 and 315 of Commission Exhibit 885 are transposed in Volume 18 as noted in your letter. This is a printing error and does not exist in the actual Commission Exhibit. For your information, the slides from which Commission Exhibit 885 was prepared are correctly numbered and are being shown in their correct sequence. The National Archives is aware of this printing error.”
²⁴⁷
This whole matter is really a nonissue, since there are a great number of copies of the Zapruder film in existence, and frames developed from any of them show Z314 and Z315 in their proper sequence.

With respect to the alterationists, there is no rhyme or reason to their allegations. Indeed, they aren’t even unified in their beliefs as to
what
has been altered. Suffice it to say, the claims of editing, digital airbrushing, compositing, and general image manipulation run deep and wide.

For instance, some alterationists claim that a large block of Zapruder frames showing the limousine nearly hitting the north curb of Elm Street as it made its turn were cut—the critics never bother to say
why
—from the very beginning of the shooting sequence.
²⁴⁸
The allegation is based on the testimony of Book Depository superintendent Roy Truly, the only witness who claimed driver William Greer swung the limousine too wide, nearly clipping the north curb.
²⁴⁹
However, amateur films taken by Elsie Dorman and in particular Tina Towner show the limousine making a smooth, tight turn from Houston to Elm, never veering far from the center lane.

One of the critics’ biggest allegations, which, they say, proves the Zapruder film has been altered, is that the presidential limousine came to a complete stop just prior to the time of the head shot (part of the conspiracy, they say, to make the president an easier target for the assassin), but the Zapruder film does not show this. It clearly shows that the limousine did not stop. However, the charge has been made so often that even anti-conspiracy author Gerald Posner almost accepts it, saying that the driver of the vehicle, William Greer, “slowed the vehicle to almost a standstill.”
²⁵⁰
The charge that the presidential limousine did is based on a number of eyewitnesses (forty-eight at last count) who testified that the limousine either “slowed,” “almost came to a halt,” or “stopped completely” as the shots rang out. One of the proponents of this theory, James H. Fetzer, asserts that “the driver [of the presidential limousine], William Greer, actually brought the vehicle to a stop in Dealey Plaza after bullets had begun to be fired. This was such an obvious indication of Secret Service complicity in the assassination,” he says, “that it had to be edited out.”
²⁵¹
In this case, critics have accepted eyewitness testimony—which can be very reliable, but so very often, as we know, is not—over what the film of the event actually shows—that the limousine did not stop. Since the witnesses are judged to be correct by the theorists, the film, they deduce, must be fake.