Reclaiming History (223 page)

3. When Oswald told Wesley Frazier why he was coming to Irving on a Thursday night—to pick up curtain rods—Frazier said to Oswald, “Oh, very well,” then added, “Well, will you be going home with me tomorrow also?” and Oswald replied, “No.”
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4. Oswald and his wife, Marina, shared an abiding interest in President Kennedy and his family and spoke of them often. Yet on Thursday evening, the night before the assassination, when Marina brought up in conversation with Oswald the president’s scheduled visit to Dallas the next day, she said, “He just ignored a little bit, you know, to talk about [it]…maybe changed subject about talking about…newborn baby or something like that…It was quite unusual that he did not want to talk about President Kennedy being in Dallas that particular evening. That was quite peculiar.”
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5. Friday morning, before leaving Ruth Paine’s house in Irving, Oswald left behind his wedding ring and $170, believed to be virtually all of his money, for Marina, demonstrating that he realized he might never see her again—that is, he might not survive the assassination he was contemplating. Moreover, as he left Marina that morning, Oswald told her to use the money to buy shoes for their new baby, Rachel, and “anything” else that she felt was necessary for the children. Marina thought this to be strange since Oswald had always been “most frugal” and hardly allowed her to spend any money at all.
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6. Before Oswald got into Frazier’s car that Friday morning, the day of the assassination, he placed a long, bulky package on the rear seat, telling Frazier it contained the curtain rods.
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7. Wesley Frazier said that on the way to work on the morning of the assassination, he noticed that for the very first time Oswald did not bring his lunch.
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8. When Frazier and Oswald arrived in the parking lot for the Book Depository Building on the morning of the assassination, Oswald picked up the long package on the backseat and, for the first time ever, walked quickly ahead of Frazier all the way into the building, Oswald being approximately fifty feet ahead at the time he entered the building. Always previously, they had walked the three hundred or so yards from the car to the building together.
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9. Every morning after arriving for work at the Book Depository Building, Oswald would go to the domino room on the first floor of the building and read the previous morning’s edition of the
Dallas Morning News
, which another employee had brought in. On the morning of the assassination, for the first time, he did not do this.
²⁷

10. Despite the fact that the president’s visit and route received enormous and inescapable attention in the Dallas papers and on radio and TV, and that Oswald usually read both daily newspapers each day and had to know what was happening, he asked coworker James Jarman somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00 on the morning of the assassination why people were gathering around the corner of Houston and Elm. When Jarman said the president was going to pass by the building, Oswald asked if he knew which way he was coming, whereupon Jarman told Oswald the president’s route was from Main to Houston to Elm.
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Obviously, Oswald was trying to create the false impression that he knew nothing about the president’s visit. If not, these were just two nervous, pointless questions by someone who knew he was about to change history.

11. After the first and second shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, a motorcade witness, Howard Brennan, sitting on a short concrete wall directly across the street from the sixth-floor window, looked up and actually saw Oswald in the window holding his rifle. Only 120 feet away from Oswald, he got a very good look as he watched, in horror, Oswald (whom he had seen in the window earlier, before the motorcade had arrived) take deliberate aim and fire the final shot from his rifle.
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At the police lineup that evening, Brennan picked Oswald out, saying, “He looks like him, but I cannot positively say,” giving the police the reason that he had since seen Oswald on television and that could have “messed me up.”
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However, Brennan signed an affidavit at the Dallas sheriff’s office within an hour after the shooting and
before
the lineup saying, “I believe that I could identify this man if I ever saw him again.”
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On December 18, 1963, Brennan told the FBI he was “sure” that Oswald was the man he had seen in the window.
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And he later told the Warren Commission that in reality at the lineup, “with all fairness, I could have positively identified the man” but did not do so out of fear. “If it got to be a known fact that I was an eyewitness, my family or I…might not be safe.”
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Although Brennan did not positively identify Oswald at the lineup, he did say, as we’ve seen, that Oswald looked like the man. And we know Brennan is legitimate since the description of the man in the window that he gave to the authorities right after the shooting—a slender, white male about thirty years old, five feet ten inches—matches Oswald fairly closely, and had to have been the basis for the description of the man sent out over police radio just fifteen minutes after the shooting.
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12. Apart from Brennan, we
know
that Kennedy’s assassin was at the subject sixth-floor window. Among other evidence, the rifle that was used to murder Kennedy was found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, witnesses other than Brennan saw a rifle sticking out of the southeasternmost window on the sixth floor, a sniper’s nest was found around the subject window, and three cartridge casings from the murder weapon were found on the floor beneath the window.

13. Although in his interrogation on Friday afternoon, November 22, Oswald said he was having lunch on the first floor of the Book Depository Building at the time of the assassination,
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during Sunday’s interrogation Oswald slipped up and placed himself on the sixth floor at the time of the assassination, making him
the only employee of the Book Depository Building who placed himself on the sixth floor, or was placed there by anyone else, at the time we know an assassin shot Kennedy from the sixth floor
. In his Sunday-morning interrogation he said that at lunchtime, one of the “Negro” employees invited him to eat lunch with him and he declined, saying, “You go on down and send the elevator back up and I will join you in a few minutes.” He said before he could finish whatever he was doing, the commotion surrounding the assassination took place and when he “
went downstairs
,” a policeman questioned him as to his identification, and his boss stated that he was one of their employees.
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The latter confrontation, of course, refers to Officer Marrion Baker, in Roy Truly’s presence, talking to Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom within two minutes after the shooting.
Where was Oswald at the time the Negro employee invited him to lunch, and before he descended to the second-floor lunchroom
? The sixth floor. Charles Givens testified that around 11:55 a.m., he went up to the sixth floor to get his jacket with cigarettes in it and saw Oswald on the sixth floor. He said to Oswald, “Boy, are you going downstairs…it’s near lunchtime.” He said Oswald answered, “
No, sir
. When you get downstairs, close the gate to the elevator.”
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There is another very powerful reason why we can know that Oswald, at the time of his confrontation with Baker in the second-floor lunchroom, had just come down from the sixth floor, not up from the first floor, as he claimed. It is an accepted part of conspiracy dogma to believe what Oswald told Fritz during his interrogation—that he had been eating lunch in the lunchroom on the first floor at the time of the shooting and had walked up to the second floor to get a Coke from the Coke machine just before Baker called out to him.
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Assassination literature abounds with references to “the Coca-Cola machine in the second floor lunchroom.” And indeed there was a Coca-Cola machine in the subject room.
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But to my knowledge, there is no direct reference in the assassination literature to a
second
soft drink machine in the Book Depository Building, and in a phone call to Gary Mack, the curator at the Sixth Floor Museum in the building, he told me he was “unaware” of any other soft drink machine in the building at the time of the assassination.
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What prompted my call to him was not the frequent references in the literature to the Dr. Pepper bottle found on the sixth floor after the shooting,
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since some soft drink machines contain a variety of drinks, but a reference in stock boy Bonnie Ray William’s testimony before the Warren Commission to his getting “a small bottle of Dr. Pepper from the
Dr. Pepper machine
,”
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and stock boy Wesley Frazier’s testimony that “I have seen him [Oswald] go to the
Dr. Pepper machine
by the refrigerator and get a Dr. Pepper.”
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Neither Williams nor Frazier expressly said what floor this machine was on, and I was aware, from a photo,
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that there was a refrigerator next to the Coca-Cola machine on the second floor. Through a few phone calls I was able to reach Wesley Frazier, whom I hadn’t talked to since 1986, when he testified for me at the London trial. Still living in Dallas, he told me that “there was a Dr. Pepper machine on the first floor.” Where, specifically, was it? “It was located by the double freight elevator near the back of the building.” Was there a refrigerator nearby? I asked. “Oh, yes, right next to it.” (And indeed, I subsequently found proof of the existence of the machine, with the words “Dr. Pepper” near the top front of it, in an FBI photo taken for the Warren Commission of the northwest corner of the first floor, and it is located right next to the refrigerator.)
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Frazier said that “almost all the guys would get their drinks for lunch from this Dr. Pepper machine. It mostly had Dr. Pepper, but also other drinks like orange and root beer.” I asked him, “What about the Coca-Cola machine in the second-floor lunchroom? Did it have other drinks too?” He said it “only had Coca-Cola in it” and “the only time anybody would go to that machine is if they wanted a Coke, which I did from time to time.” When I asked him whether or not “it was rare” for the workers to go to the second floor to get a Coke, he said, “Yes. We had our own machine on the first floor, where we ate our lunch. It was more convenient to use the machine on the first floor.” Frazier said he could not say whether Oswald ever went to the second floor to get a Coke or ever drank soft drinks other than Dr. Pepper, but “I only recall seeing him with a Dr. Pepper.”
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Author Jim Bishop, in his book
The Day Kennedy Was Shot
, writes (without a citation, however) that Oswald “invariably drank Dr. Pepper.”
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And we know that Marina told her biographer, Priscilla McMillan, that when he was working at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall in Dallas in 1963, “after supper” he would walk down the street as he often did “to buy a newspaper and a bottle of Dr. Pepper.”
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So we see that apart from all the conclusive evidence that Oswald shot Kennedy from the sniper’s nest, and therefore
had
to have descended from there to the second floor, his story about going
up
to the second floor to get a Coke doesn’t even make sense. Why go up to the second floor to get a drink for your lunch when there’s a soft drink machine on the first floor, the floor you say you are already on, particularly when the apparent drink of your choice is on this first floor, not the second floor?

14. There is yet another reason why Oswald’s statement that he was on the first floor eating lunch at the time of the shooting makes no sense at all. If he had been, once he heard the shots and the screaming and all the commotion outside, if he were innocent, what is the likelihood that he would have proceeded to go, as he claims, up to the second floor to get himself a Coke? How could any sensible person believe a story like that?

15. Though Oswald was probably more politically oriented than all thirteen other warehousemen at the Book Depository Building put together, if we are to believe Oswald’s story, he apparently was the only one who had no interest at all in watching the presidential motorcade go by, either from out on the street or from a window, claiming in one version that he was having lunch on the first floor of the Book Depository Building at the time of the shooting, and in another version that he was working on the sixth floor. Indeed, Oswald, the political animal, was so uninterested in the fact that the most powerful politician on earth had just been shot that he had no inclination to stick around for a few minutes and engage in conversation with his coworkers about the sensational and tragic event. Does that make any sense?

16. After the shooting in Dealey Plaza, nearly all of the sixteen warehousemen who worked in the Depository Building returned to the building and were present at a roll call of employees. Only Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Givens were not present; Givens was located shortly thereafter.
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So only Oswald left the building and was unaccounted for.
Dallas Morning News
reporter Kent Biffle, who was inside the Depository Building, wrote in his journal that day, “I listened as the building superintendent [Roy Truly] told detectives about Lee Oswald failing to show up at a roll call. My impression is that there was an earlier roll call that had been inconclusive because several employees were missing. This time, however, all were accounted for but Oswald.”
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17. After exiting the front door of the Book Depository Building, if Oswald hadn’t just murdered the president but still wanted to go home, he only had to turn left on the sidewalk in front of the building, cross Houston, and wait for the Beckley bus, which stopped at the northeast corner of Houston and Elm.
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This is the same bus that he took every weekday to and from work, picking it up almost directly in front of his rooming house
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and getting off at Houston and Elm, and on the way home getting off diagonally across the street from his rooming house on the northwest corner of the intersection of Beckley and Zangs Boulevard.
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