Reclaiming History (332 page)

Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing the moment they heard Kennedy had died.

—Common observation about Kennedy’s murder

It was a transforming moment for America because we lost hope. Every president who succeeded Kennedy—they all had good points and bad points—but the legacy of hope died with him. You never had that sense again that we were moving forward, that we could do things.

—Helen Thomas, White House correspondent, United Press International

My really first conscious thoughts were just “My God, what a…great tragedy…What a horrible, horrible tragedy,” and how, in the space of a fleeting moment, things can change. Here we were, two relatively young men—we were almost the identical age, riding with what I would like to believe were two of the most beautiful wives in this country. The President and Jackie were happy. We were proud to be their hosts in Texas, and had a tremendous welcome in San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth and Dallas…There was just joy, anticipation, wonderful throngs of people…And then in the space of a few seconds…it is unbelievable how an incident can happen that changed all of our lives, changed the course of history for many people in so many different ways you will never know.

—Governor John Connally to CBS correspondent Martin Agronsky at Connally’s Parkland Hospital bedside a few days after the assassination

People have to realize that that was a very innocent time, and the very idea that a president could be shot down in the streets of America was absolutely unthinkable.

—Sixty-six-year-old Ventura County, California, resident

I think that for young people, of which I was one at the time, he spoke to the best of our instincts. He brought people together. He didn’t drive them apart. His spirit, elan, and charisma were uniquely American. For those of us who remember, it is undying.

—U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein

It is more satisfying to believe that Kennedy died as a victim of a cause rather than at the hands of a deranged gunman.

—Thomas Reed Turner, Abraham Lincoln scholar

In 1963, I lived in the small mountain village of Miraflores, Colombia, with several other Peace Corp volunteers. One of our compadres returned home that evening by horseback. He told of meeting a
campesino
[farmer] on the trail who called out to him “
Han matado a nuestro presidente
” (They have killed our president). He assumed that the president of Colombia had been killed.

—C. J. Lemonds of Plano, Texas, in a letter to the editor of
Dallas Morning News

I don’t get why anyone wanted to shoot him. What did he do wrong?

—Dallas high school student in 2003

The first thing about him was his driving intelligence. His mind was always on fire. His reading was prodigious, his memory almost total recall of facts and quotations. A friend of mine once crossed the Atlantic on a liner with the Kennedy family years ago. She remembered the day 12-year-old Jack was ill in his stateroom. There lay the thin, freckled little boy reading Churchill’s early life, other books scattered about his bed. John Kennedy’s intellectuality was perhaps the hallmark of his nature, even more than his youth…He was that rare and precious combination, the man of contemplation as well as the man of action. He had a sharp sense of history from his immense reading, and was acutely conscious of what his own place in history might be.

—CBS commentator Eric Sevareid

For the millions who mourned Kennedy, the grief and disbelief that followed his killing left a mark that is indelible to this day. Many likened the event to the death of a family member.

—
Dallas Morning News
, November 17, 2003

At the time Kennedy was killed I was 8 years old and in the third grade of my school in a small, rural village in northern Honduras called La Veinte y Ocho. Everyone there considered Kennedy to be the president of the people, not just the president of the United States, because he was concerned about the poor. For instance, under a program called CARITAS, the Kennedy administration started providing milk for the first time ever for school children in Honduras and throughout Central America. The people of my village took Kennedy’s death very hard and I clearly remember there was a lot of mourning and crying.

—Carlos Pena, now an American citizen living in Los Angeles

To show you the way that the minds of people were poisoned against the community [Dallas], I went to Detroit about two months after the assassination for a meeting with the automotive people. I got in a cab and I said, “Take me to the Detroit Athletic Club, please.” The cab driver said, “You must be from the South.” And I said, “I am.” He said, “Where are you from?” I said, “Texas.” He said, “Where in Texas?” I said, “Dallas.” He stopped the cab and said, “Get out. I ain’t taking you anywhere.”

—James Chambers Jr., president of the
Dallas Times Herald

He appealed to and elicited a sense of idealism instead of cynicism.

—Peace Corps volunteer Tina Martin

What John F. Kennedy left us with most of all was an attitude. To put it in the simplest terms, he looked ahead. He knew no more than anyone else what the future was going to be like, but he did know that that was where we ought to be looking.

—Bruce Catton, senior editor of the
American Heritage
magazine

His life was such—the radiance he shed—that if we live to be a hundred, we will remember how he graced this earth, and how he left it.

—Melville Bell Grosvenor, president and editor of National Geographic Society

He brought gaiety, glamour, and grace to the American political scene in a measure never known before. That lightsome tread, that debonair touch, that shock of chestnut hair, that beguiling grin, that shattering understatement—these are what we shall remember. He walked like a prince and he talked like a scholar. His humor brightened the life of the Republic. Shown his latest nephew in August, he commented, “He looks like a fine baby—we’ll know more later…” When the ugliness of yesterday has been forgotten, we shall remember him, smiling.

—
Washington Evening Star
editorial

He was the most civilized President we have had since Jefferson, and his wife made the White House the most civilized house in America [alluding undoubtedly to the famous dinners the president and his wife hosted whose attendance was heavily sprinkled with cultural icons from the world of theater, art, literature, music, the sciences, and academe].

—Historian and author Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Kennedy brought more than courage and energy to the White House. Like Sir Winston Churchill, he had a style of his own. And, like Churchill, he had that indefinable thing called grace. Churchill always had style but he developed grace late. Kennedy always had it, and showed it in his quiet humor, even at his own expense, and in his avoidance of political brawling. Grace helped him enormously in American foreign relations: his good nature, his warmth, his good will, and generally his good judgment. It helped him with American voters, too. Kennedy fitted into the presidency almost elegantly.

—James Marlowe, Associated Press

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was struck down in his prime, as he was still striding buoyantly through the halls of Camelot. He had served his thousand days as America’s leader with wit and charm and courage and grace. That is the way most Americans choose to remember him and the brief, shining moments of his presidency.

—Bob Clark, Washington correspondent, ABC News

When Jack quoted something, it was usually classical, but I’m so ashamed of myself—all I keep thinking of is this line from a musical comedy. At night, before we’d go to sleep, Jack liked to play some records; and the song he loved most came at the very end of this record. The lines he loved to hear were:
Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot
. There’ll be great Presidents again, but there’ll never be another Camelot again…it will never be that way again.

—Jacqueline Kennedy, giving birth to the Camelot appellation as it applied to JFK’s thousand days in office, in an interview with historian Theodore H. White for the December 6, 1963,
Life
magazine memorial edition on President Kennedy

I should have known that he was magic all along. I did know it—but I should have guessed it could not last. I should have known that it was asking too much to dream that I might have grown old with him and see our children grow up together.

—Jacqueline Kennedy

I’ve never covered anything like it [President Kennedy’s assassination]. Not before, not since, and I don’t expect to in this lifetime, nor any lifetime beyond, to infinity and beyond.

—Dan Rather, CBS News

F
orever young in our collective minds, if John F. Kennedy, at forty-three the youngest man to be elected president in American history, were alive today, he would be ninety years old.

Because of space constraints in this book, all of the source notes (citations) for the material in the main text are in the CD-ROM attached to the book.

AFIP, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology

ARRB, Assassination Records Review Board

ARRB MD, Assassination Records Review Board, Medical Deposition

ASAIC, assistant special agent-in-charge (Secret Service)

CD, Warren Commission document

CE, Warren Commission exhibit

DA, district attorney

DMA, Dallas Municipal Archives (formerly the Dallas Municipal Archives and Records Center)

DOJ, Department of Justice

DOJCD, Department of Justice, Criminal Division

DPD, Dallas Police Department

FOIA, Freedom of Information Act

H, Warren Commission hearings and exhibits (volumes 1–15 are testimony; volumes 16–26 are exhibits)

HPSCI, House Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence

HSCA, House Select Committee on Assassinations (12 volumes)

JCS, Joint Chiefs of Staff

KISS-SCOW, Kissinger-Scowcroft

LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson

NARA, National Archives and Records Administration

NAS-CBA, National Academy of Science’s Committee on Ballistic Acoustics

NSA, National Security Agency

ONI, Office of Naval Intelligence

SA, special agent

SAC, special agent-in-charge (FBI)

SAIC, special agent-in-charge (Secret Service)

SSCIA, Senate Select Committee on the CIA

WC, Warren Commission

WCT, Warren Commission testimony

WR, Warren Report

Z, Zapruder film

Note: For further information about the format of the citations in this book, as well as a discussion about Warren Commission documents (CDs) and exhibits (CEs), the breakdown of the Warren Commission volumes, and the National Archives’ assignment of their numbers to documents in the Archives, see endnote.

There are very few people who manage to complete a long and difficult journey without having a lot of help along the way, and I am no exception. But the list of names of those who have helped me in some way, if only to answer one question among the thousands I have asked since I first started work on this book in 1986, is unmanageably long for an acknowledgments section. So to those of you whom I do not mention in this section, and you know who you are, I say thank you so very much.

I can tell those who have not seriously studied the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that it is a bottomless pit. With every project that we take on in our lives, we intuitively know, without even giving it a thought, that if we work long and hard enough we will reach the bottom of the pile. But I found, as others also have, that there is no bottom to the pile in the Kennedy case. It is endless, and I say this not as a casual turn of phrase. At the very moment I am writing these words on my yellow pad, I’m aware that there are at least a hundred people in the United States alone who are dedicating their lives to this case, examining every word and paragraph in every document they can find (the millions of pages on the case at the National Archives alone would take a lifetime to read) to come up with some inconsistency, discrepancy, or hint of a conspiracy in the assassination. And when there are a hundred or more intelligent minds working almost full-time on something (and, in the Kennedy case, thousands of others working part-time), they can create a lot of mischief. For many years during the writing of this book, I’ve been responding to their findings. But alas, most things, good and bad, come to an end in life, and at least for me, this book will be the end of my immersion in the Kennedy case, as I must go on to other endeavors. For me to continue to address the mostly imaginary issues of this case would be to sacrifice the rest of my life inasmuch as the allegations are, and will continue to be, without end.

The following people have helped me the most in this terribly long journey I am now bringing to an end. I must start with my erudite editor—by my lights, the best in the business—Starling Lawrence. Star’s limitless patience and unconditional support, always saying yes, never no, to whatever I needed, coupled with the sagacious advice and guidance he gave me through the many years, elevates him to a very special position on my list. No one has a better ear, if you will, for the right or wrong word in a sentence. And the times were very numerous when Star immediately caught that word, or told me I was going over the top on some point. And when someone as highly critical as I am (I’d find fault with a beautiful morning sunrise) accepts the advice of someone over 90 percent of the time, that person has to be special. And Star is. I’ve been so blessed to have him as my editor on this monumental odyssey of mine.

And I want to thank Mary Babcock, a hardworking and meticulous copy editor who helped me so very much in rounding my manuscript into its final form.

And then there is Rosemary Newton, who has been like my secretary for this book. Though Rosemary works freelance, typing this book has been her main job, occupying most of her working day for many years. (And in the last several years the times have been many when I have also asked Rosemary to search for something on the Internet for me.) I wrote and dictated at my home and then made literally hundreds of trips to Rosemary’s home in the hills, picking up drafts of sections she had typed and dropping off new work for her. Rosemary has had a very tough job working with me on this book, yet she was always competent and extraordinarily reliable. In a way, she worked more closely with me than anyone else and became the person on whom I relied the most.

In addition to transcribing, from my audio dictation, the contents of 72 sixty-minute and 8 ninety-minute tapes, during which she had to listen to my less-than-dulcet voice and my speaking a mile a minute, Rosemary had to decipher and type at least a thousand (maybe many more) inserts of mine handwritten in pencil on yellow legal paper. Though resulting from much dictation, the book you have read is, much more than dictation, a book of inserts. By that I mean the first drafts of sections I wrote (e.g., Zapruder film, wounds to the president, CIA, Oliver Stone, etc.), which I then dictated, were not overly long. But they all increased far beyond their original size in the many subsequent drafts with the addition of yellow-page inserts (as well as inserts on the top, sides, bottom, and between the lines of the pages). If you could read some of these inserts you would have great compassion for Rosemary. While still within an insert on the handwritten yellow or typewritten white page, she would be very apt to get directions like this: “Now to Insert 36 [arbitrary number] on the seventh yellow page following page 67.” Fine. But when she gets there she sees I’ve inserted a five-page handwritten endnote which has three footnote inserts in it, any one of which could itself contain an endnote or direct her to one or more other places. And then back to where she left off on the original insert perhaps an hour earlier. Often the pages and flow of the point I was trying to make got so garbled with inserts, deletions, arrows, et cetera, that it was impossible for me, the architect of the madness, to follow. Yet Rosemary never complained and more than once figured out my own labyrinth for me. As if the above were not enough, a great number of times I would write so small on a page (to squeeze in what I wanted in the only space available) that without a magnifying glass only the world’s most myopic person could read what I had written. I don’t have to tell Rosemary how very grateful I am to her. She deserves some type of medal.

This book, as you know, is itself broken down into two books, Book One being on
what happened
, the non-conspiracy part, and Book Two, on
what did not happen
, the conspiracy allegation part of this sweeping story. For Book One, I was fortunate to have two people who made noteworthy writing contributions. Even though he worked with me for a relatively short part of my long journey, no one helped me as much as Dale Myers, the Emmy Award–winning computer animation specialist and superb student of the assassination from Detroit, Michigan. Dale helped me in the writing of several sections of Book One, most notably on acoustics, “Four Days in November” (particularly in the Oswald interrogations), and all matters dealing with still photography. I am deeply grateful to Dale for lending his time, energy, and considerable expertise to this literary project.

The other person who played a writing role, though a smaller one, was Fred Haines, a soft-spoken and extremely well-read intellectual. Fred’s fine hand has survived in several places of the “Lee Harvey Oswald” and “Four Days in November” sections. And it was Fred’s suggestion, a great one, I feel, and one for which I am indebted to him, to have the latter section, and to a lesser extent the Oswald biography (as opposed to every other part of the book), written in a narrative style normally reserved for fiction, giving this part of this nonfiction book a literary quality it would not have had without it. Very few nonfiction books can be written in such a narrative style without resorting to invention, but the unprecedented richness of the historical record on every single incident in this case has permitted it. Thus, as opposed to “Rimma accompanied Oswald to the train station, where he departed for Minsk,” this: “Always faithful Rimma saw him off at the station. He was depressed and wanted her to accompany him on the overnight train trip, but by now he understands that such things were not as simple in the Soviet Union as they might have been in the states. It was snowing as they said their good-byes. Both of them were crying.”

I also want to thank Patrick Martin for all the work he put into the graphics in the photo section of the book to help make them what they are, and Douglas Martin, Fred Kuentz, and Michael McDermott for the similar contributions they made with their respective graphics.

Other individuals who stand out among the many who have helped me along the way include Dr. Michael Baden, the great pathologist who headed up the forensic pathology panel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. With his many duties (he’s still a pathologist, he lectures, serves as a consultant on important criminal cases, even appears as a regular on a television reality series) he still always got back to me when I called, and took the time to answer my many questions dealing with the medical aspects of the assassination. Though I did not rely on him quite as much, whenever I did call on Dr. Baden’s friend and counterpart in this case, Dr. Cyril Wecht, the famed pathologist and coroner (up to January of 2006) of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh, he unfailingly found time in his very busy day, or in the evenings or on weekends, to answer my questions.

And then there were two people in Dallas, both of whom I could invariably count on to make me laugh in response to their dry, homespun Texas humor, but more importantly, to help me get to the bottom of several problem areas in the case I was exploring. I’m speaking of Bill Alexander, the former top prosecutor in the Dallas DA’s office who was the lead prosecutor in the trial of Jack Ruby for killing Lee Harvey Oswald, and was scheduled to prosecute and put Oswald away if Ruby hadn’t gotten to him first, and former Dallas County sheriff James C. Bowles, who probably was a member of Dallas law enforcement (fifty-three years) longer than anyone else in Dallas history. Alexander, in his mid-eighties, is still practicing law, and Bowles just retired in 2005. Though both were always busy—especially Bowles when he was still sheriff—they always found time in their day to answer my many questions. Together, the two of them were part of Dallas law enforcement for a great number of years and know it as well or better than any two other people alive. They graciously shared their accumulated knowledge and wisdom with me, and even helped me to the extent of putting me in contact with former members of Dallas law enforcement I had been unable to locate.

The main source for this book on the assassination is, of course, as it must be, the twenty-seven volumes of the Warren Commission, the granddaddy of all literature on the assassination. Not too far behind are the thirteen volumes of the HSCA. The next great source, among so many others, is the collection of countless documents on the assassination stored at the National Archives, the temple to America’s past, in College Park, Maryland. There simply is no way that this book ended up being the book I think it is without the wonderful cooperation I received from Steven D. Tilley, up until April of 2004 (he has since been elevated) the chief person in charge of these documents (the JFK Assassination Records Collection) at the archives, and his staff, particularly his able assistant James R. Mathis. Tilley and his staff, more than once, went above and beyond the call of duty to locate obscure but important documents for me. My requests for specific documents, several of which alone contained over a hundred pages each (e.g., the testimony of a witness before the HSCA), were continuous. I kept wondering whether I’d soon be getting a letter from Steve or one of his assistants saying, “Vince, please. Enough is enough,” but I never did. What I always got, never accompanied by a complaint, was a very large envelope in the mail containing everything I had requested that they could find. I of course am very grateful to Steve and his staff for all the tremendous assistance they gave me.

Although I am proud to say that I have done 99.9 percent of my own research for everything I wrote in this book (which is typical for me, not feeling comfortable relying on others to do research for me), I want to give very special thanks to four individuals, three of whom are avid students of the assassination, who have helped me in so many diverse ways. Having no official connection to the case like a Bill Alexander, Dr. Michael Baden, or Steven Tilley, just their friendship and their desire to help me, they were always there for me, without hesitation, whenever I needed them—whether it was to take a photo of an angle at Dealey Plaza I needed, secure someone’s phone number for me, loan me one of their many books on the assassination, in some cases get a document for me they had ready access to, or whatever. They are Jack Duffy of Fort Worth (who has been with me on this book the longest), David Phinney of Los Angeles, Jim Agnew of Chicago, and Bill Drenas of Lowell, Massachusetts. I’ll never forget the help these four gave me and will always be especially grateful to them.

And then there is Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas since 1994 and a student of the assassination since 1975. Gary carries in his head an enormous wealth of knowledge about the case—much of it not the type one would find in the Warren Report or the report of the HSCA—which he is generous to share with whoever asks. If I called Gary once in the past years, I called him thirty times, always for his input on some arcane issue, and nearly always he was able to help me, for which I am, of course, very appreciative and indebted. I also want to thank Gary’s research colleague, fellow Texan David Perry, a former insurance investigator from Grapevine, Texas, who was also very helpful to me on the many occasions I called him for assistance. Dave has made a specialty out of debunking (sometimes in league with Mack) people like Ricky White and Madeleine Brown who come out of the woodwork with their phony assassination-related tales. The story I like to tell about David is the time I found a reference to a nut in a conspiracy book, one I had never heard of before and about whom there was no reference in any other book on the assassination that I was aware of. I called Dave to find out what he knew about the kook and his allegation, but a small part of me was hoping that Dave, too, had never heard of him, enabling me to say to him, “I finally found a nut you’ve never heard of.” But before I could even get the second syllable of the man’s name out of my mouth, Dave started bombarding me with a blizzard of information on him. He knew all about this guy and his allegation and had already debunked the man’s story.

Thanks are also in order to John H. Slate, the very diligent chief of the Dallas Municipal Archives who was invariably helpful to me whenever I needed his assistance, and the many members of the reference staff at the Dallas Public Library. I must not forget the staff of the Pasadena Public Library, where I spent literally hundreds of hours on their machines looking at microfilm and to a lesser extent microfiche. Since up to last year, when they got new machines, the machines were in terrible condition from overuse, and I’m not proficient with mechanical things, I would frequently need their help to fix or adjust a malfunctioning unit, and not once were the staff members anything but helpful and pleasant. And then there were the virtually hundreds of books the library staff got for me that were not at their library but at one of their branches, and the considerable number they got for me through their interlibrary loan service—most out of print and several very obscure—from libraries not only throughout California, but in other states, like one published in 1798, a copy of which they located for me at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.