Reclaiming History (209 page)

The background of the subject photo picks up the area of the grassy knoll around the eastern part of the stockade fence and the retaining wall to the east of the fence. But the image of the retaining wall area is so blurred that enlarging the photo and seeking to enhance it at the Rochester Institute of Technology “produced no significant increase in detail and no evidence of any human form.” And since the “fence region of the photograph was of even poorer quality than the retaining wall area, no enhancement” was even attempted.
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Mack says the HSCA was dealing with the original Moorman photo, but it had deteriorated. But around 1983, he came into possession of an eight-by-ten-inch UPI print of Moorman’s photo taken after the shooting on the day of the assassination, and it was in good condition. Mack says that in an area of the photo different from where most conspiracy theorists place the grassy knoll assassin (which is behind the picket fence, eight to ten feet
west
of the southeast corner of the fence)—behind the fence but about sixteen feet north from the southeast corner
*
—can be seen a man who “appears to be dressed in a manner that’s certainly consistent with a police uniform.”
⁴²

In the 1988 British Television Production
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
, Mack spoke about the origin of the “Badge Man” theory. He said that in studying the Moorman photo he saw an image behind the stockade fence that looked like “eyes and ears and forehead and hair. And little by little the pieces of the image started to make sense to me. And that’s when I first called Jack [White, someone, Mack says, who is “knowledgeable about photography and dark room technique”]. And with his photographic work doing the blowups we could see more and more detail. And at one point we realized this fellow was probably wearing a police uniform, or close enough to what the Dallas police were wearing to pass as a police officer.” Mack and White would later identify a “shining object” in the Moorman photo image as being the badge on the figure’s police uniform—hence, the birth of the “Badge Man” in conspiracy theorist mythology as being the grassy knoll assassin.

But there’s so much more to the story. In the British television production, Jack White also claims that the Moorman photo shows “another image standing directly behind the Badge Man. This appears to be a person in a hard hat and a white T-shirt.” It’s obviously just a matter of time before White will be able to tell us the color of the two men’s eyes, the condition of their teeth, and perhaps, someday, the number of hairs on their heads. White and Mack call this second man the “Back Up Man,” and say the Back Up Man was not in a uniform of any kind.
⁴³

Remember that the Moorman photo was taken at almost the precise moment of the shot to the president’s head. So for the Badge Man to have fired the fatal shot, not only would the badge he was supposedly wearing have to have been high up on his body (perhaps attached to his neck) so that it was visible behind the five-foot fence, but also the Badge Man would have to have been standing up tall, his head far above the top of the fence, at the time he shot Kennedy, for the badge to have been seen in the photo. And if that’s the case, then he wasn’t stooped down so his head was on a line with the rifle barrel and sight, which most likely would have been resting on the top of the fence for stability and accuracy. This makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? With respect to the rifle the Badge Man would have had to have had if he fired at the president, Mack said he has “never been able to see any rifle” in the Badge Man’s hands,
⁴⁴
but added that was “because the smoke and/or flash in front of it obscured it from my view. I’ve also noted that specific area seems to also be in shadow.”

“The so-called Badge Man image, if legitimate, would have to be of a man who is standing a considerable distance behind the stockade fence,” says Dale Myers, a computer graphics expert. “I used a computer model of Dealey Plaza to duplicate Mary Moorman’s position at the time she took the photograph that allegedly shows the Badge Man image. Using that position and placing a computer model of an average size man at the fence line where Badge Man is alleged to have stood reveals that the Badge Man image is too small to be a man standing at the fence line. In order to get the computer model to match the size of the Badge Man image, the model, to be as small as the Badge Man image, would have to be placed 32 feet behind the fence line and 4.5 feet off the ground. Other photographs taken at the time of the assassination show a Coke bottle sitting on the wall of the pergola between Moorman and the so-called Badge Man position. The Badge Man image is more than likely a distortion of this Coke bottle.”
⁴⁵

As if the Badge Man firing at Kennedy from behind the stockade fence is not fantastic enough, Mack, White, and a few other conspiracy theorists have tried to bolster and connect the Badge Man with an even more bizarre story. In 1978,
fifteen years
after the assassination (not too long, after all, just a little longer than the Second World War, Vietnam War, and the Korean War all put together), one Gordon Arnold came from behind the curtains and appeared for the first time on the conspiracy stage. Arnold says that at the time of the assassination he was a twenty-two-year-old soldier home on leave. He told reporter Earl Golz of the
Dallas Morning News
that minutes before the motorcade came by, he was moving toward the railroad overpass to film the motorcade when “this guy walked towards me and said I shouldn’t be up there.” When he challenged the man’s authority, he said the man “showed me a badge and said he was with the Secret Service.” As we’ve seen, several people said that
after
the shooting they confronted men who indicated or said they were Secret Service agents. Now, for the first and only time on record we have someone (someone, to repeat, who materialized fifteen long years after the assassination) who says he met someone
before
the shooting who said he was a Secret Service agent.

Arnold said he then took a position in front of the picket fence high up on the grassy knoll. He told Golz that when he heard the first of two shots that came from behind him, over his left shoulder, he immediately “hit the dirt.” He added that after all the shots were fired, and while he was still on the ground, “the next thing I knew someone was kicking my butt and telling me to get up. It was a policeman. [Arnold would later say the policeman asked him if he was taking pictures and he told him he was.] And I told him to go jump in the river. And then this other guy, a policeman, comes up with a shotgun and…that thing was waving back and forth. I said you can have everything I’ve got. Just point it [the gun] someplace else.” He told Golz he gave the officer with the gun the film from the canister and two days later he was on a plane reporting for duty in Alaska. He didn’t come forward with his story throughout the years because, he said, he heard that “a lot of people making claims about pictures and stuff…were dying sort of peculiarly.”
⁴⁶
But this is a bogus argument on its face. The completely unmeritorious argument that many witnesses associated with the assassination were dying mysteriously (see conspiracy section later in book) didn’t start until 1966, when conspiracist Penn Jones started peddling it. What excuse did Arnold have for not coming forward in the more than two years before then?

Ten years later, in the 1988 British television production
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
, Arnold changed his story in two significant ways. The plainclothes agent who told him not to go up on the railroad overpass was no longer a Secret Service agent. Arnold said the man said to him, “I’m from the CIA.” Much more importantly, only one police officer, he now said, accosted him after the shooting, not two. The one who kicked him on the ground was the same one who had the gun. Arnold said that before he hit the ground, he was standing with his back almost to the picket fence, and the officer (officers) who accosted him came from behind him, from the opposite side of the fence.

There are several photos, including film, of the precise area where Arnold said he was on the grassy knoll, and none of them, taken at the very time Arnold said the incident happened, show Arnold. This is conclusive photographic proof that Arnold’s story was fabricated. And many people who ran up the grassy knoll after the shooting, several of whom were on the south side of Elm and were facing where Arnold supposedly was, testified before the Warren Commission and have been interviewed untold times, and not one has ever said they saw the extraordinary sight of a police officer, right after the shooting, standing over a prone man on the knoll, kicking him. The reason why no one saw, and no camera or film shows, Arnold on the grassy knoll is that—and this is being very charitable to Arnold—this incident only took place in Arnold’s mind. In fact, in the British television production, he used a rather curious (for someone who was really there, but not for someone who was lying about the matter) way of expressing his presence on the knoll. He said, “There’s no doubt
in my mind
I was there.”
*

Arnold’s story inspires only one thing, disbelief. But as indicated, he has many believers in the conspiracy community, and two particularly avid supporters—Gary Mack and Jack White, the main Badge Man advocates.

So we’re obviously being asked to believe that the Badge Man, the assassin who was in a police uniform
behind
the stockade fence (Arnold, Mack says, was in front of the fence), is the same person in a police uniform who ended up kicking Arnold and taking his film.
*
Apparently, Kennedy’s assassin, instead of trying to hide in the trunk of a car in the railroad yard parking lot or trying to escape from behind the picket fence after shooting Kennedy, had much more important things to do—mainly, climb over the fence (at which point he’d be in plain view of everyone on Elm Street) so he could beat up on that louse Gordon Arnold and take his film.

Mack and White also have a big problem with the “light blob” being Arnold. The light blob is in a tall vertical position in front of the alleged Badge Man. But again, Moorman’s photo was taken around the exact time as the head shot, which was the
third
and last of the three shots. By that time, according to Arnold, he was already lying down, having immediately dropped to the earth after, he says, the
first
shot was fired. So he could not have been the “light blob.”

Neither the Badge Man nor Gordon Arnold benefit from scrutiny, disappearing back into nothingness in the grassy knoll landscape.

T
he next three witnesses fall under the “and others” part of this section. They are not, in other words, downright silly people whose stories are almost laughable. But their observations are nearly as lacking in credibility as their loony bird cousins.

Roger Craig was a twenty-seven-year-old Dallas County Sheriff’s Department deputy. In a composite summary of what he says he saw on the day of the assassination, he told the Dallas sheriff’s office on November 23, 1963,
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the FBI on November 23
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and November 25,
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and the Warren Commission, in testimony before it, on April 1, 1964,
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the fairly consistent story (there were minor discrepancies, which is normal) that at the time the presidential motorcade approached Dealey Plaza, he was waiting for it in front of the sheriff’s office on the north side of Main Street (corner of Main and Houston). A short time after the president’s car had passed, he heard three shots. He said he ran across Houston Street and then Elm up to the railroad yards behind the grassy knoll and Texas School Book Depository Building and “began moving people back out of the railroad yard.” He then went to the front of the Book Depository Building and began talking to people “to see if they’d seen anything.” After speaking to a husband and wife (Arnold and Barbara Rowland) for a few minutes, he and Deputy Sheriff Clinton “Lemmy” Lewis crossed Elm and walked down to where they were told one of the bullets had ricocheted off the curb. As they were searching, which he testified was about “fourteen or fifteen minutes” after the shooting, he heard a “shrill whistle,” looked up, and saw a man “start to run down the hill on the north side of Elm Street” (across the street from Craig) coming from the direction of the “southwest corner of the [School Depository] Building.” At that point, Craig saw a white Nash Rambler station wagon with a luggage rack on the top driving slowly westbound on Elm. In Craig’s first interview he described the driver as a “Negro,” then later a “dark-complected white male,” then finally said he “couldn’t say.” The running man, who he said was around five feet eight or nine inches tall, 140 to 150 pounds, with medium-brown sandy hair, got in the station wagon, which continued southbound on Elm out of sight. Craig had wanted to talk to the running man and the driver, but the “traffic was so heavy” he couldn’t get across the street before the station wagon drove off without his even getting the license plate number.

When he heard later in the day that the authorities were trying to see if there was a connection between the murder of Officer Tippit and the assassination, he called Captain Fritz’s office, told one of his officers what he had seen, and was asked to come up and look at the suspect (Oswald) in Fritz’s office. According to Craig’s testimony before the Warren Commission (all of what follows is heavily disputed), he entered Fritz’s small office and identified Oswald as the running man he had seen get in the car. He says when Fritz asked Oswald, “What about the station wagon?” Oswald responded, “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine…Don’t try to tie her into this. She had nothing to do with it.”
*
When Fritz said to Oswald, “All we’re trying to do is find out what happened, and this man saw you leave the scene,” Oswald, according to Craig, said, “I told you people I did,” then added, “Everyone will know who I am now.” Craig said he then left.

There are three basic parts to Craig’s story: a running man getting into the Nash Rambler, the identification of the man as Oswald, and the alleged conversation in Fritz’s office. It’s my sense that Craig was more likely than not telling the truth about the first part, lying or simply wrong about the second part, and almost assuredly lying about the third part. For those who find it hard to believe that Craig would make up any part of the story, police are human beings like everyone else, and a few have been known, in their effort to be looked upon as heroes, not only to magnify what they did or saw, but actually to make false claims, for example, that they were shot at by mobsters or drug traffickers, and so on.