The Kennedy Half-Century (105 page)

52
. Gary Mack of the Sixth Floor Museum wrote in an e-mail dated August 30, 2011, “The first officer to ‘climb the grassy knoll’ up the steps toward the fence and triple underpass was Clyde Haygood, one of the motorcade escort officers. There was no one with him. Within another minute or two, other officers ran there too and a few were accompanied by sheriff’s deputies. Joe Marshall Smith was stationed in the Elm-Houston intersection and he ran straight west along the Elm Street Extension directly in front of the Depository, NOT on Elm Street where the motorcade had passed. Smith encountered an unidentified man somewhere behind the [picket] fence and the man claimed to be with the Secret Service (the Service had NO men on the ground at the time). Two short pieces of TV news film (Mal Couch/WFAA and Jimmy Darnell/WBAP) caught Smith as he ran, but it is not possible to identify him since the photographers were in the same car at Smith’s left, and the scenes show him essentially from the side.”

53
. In his 2011 book
JFK Assassination Logic
, John McAdams says that the record shows that the Secret Service agent Smith encountered helped him search the parking lot behind the picket fence, thereby diminishing the possibility of a conspiracy. However, it is not clear from the Warren Commission hearings whether Smith, now deceased, was referring to the agent or another law enforcement officer who was standing nearby. See Joe Marshall Smith’s testimony before the Warren Commission, Warren Commission Hearings, vol. 7, p. 535, Mary Ferrell Foundation website,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=41&relPageId=545
 [accessed December 21, 2011] and John McAdams,
JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think About Claims of Conspiracy
(Washington: Potomac Books, 2011), 16.

54
. In an earlier personal interview in Dallas (September 25, 2010), in response to a question about Officer Smith’s story, Mack agreed that it was chilling, noting that it is “a good example of what I learned in journalism school. When the logical thing doesn’t happen, that’s where the story is. Well what’s the logical thing in this case? The Warren Commission should have said to the Secret Service, we want to know who that guy [the one claiming to be an agent] is. They did nothing of the sort … They [the Commission] questioned the head of the Secret Service and he said ‘There’s nothing there.’ That was the end of it.” Smith’s testimony before the Warren Commission can also be found here:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/smith_j1.htm
. One individual, now deceased, has claimed to be the person who manufactured phony Secret Service credentials for use in Dallas on November 22. His name was Chauncey Holt, a military deserter with a criminal record who supposedly forged documents for the Mafia and the CIA in the early 1960s. Other parts of Holt’s story do not check out or cannot be corroborated. See “Bottom Line: How Crazy Is It?”
Newsweek
, December 22, 1991, reprinted on the
Daily Beast
website,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1991/12/23/bottom-line-how-crazy-is-it.html
 [accessed November 8, 2011].

55
. Summers,
Kennedy Conspiracy
, 36–37; personal interview with Gary Mack, September 25, 2010, Dallas.

56
. In his most recent book,
The Last Word
, Mark Lane argues that the man Smith saw
behind the picket fence was a CIA operative. I had thoroughly investigated Smith’s story before I knew about Lane’s book. It is one of the most disturbing and unexplained pieces of evidence, so it is not a surprise that other researchers would focus on it. See Mark Lane,
The Last Word: My Indictment of the CIA in the Murder of JFK
(New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2011), 188–92.

57
. Telephone interview with Robert Blakey, July 8, 2011. Blakey has also considered the possibility that the hit man, thinking that Oswald’s first bullet or bullets had not yet fatally wounded Kennedy, decided to undertake the task himself. He may have fired his gun almost simultaneously with Oswald’s, and perhaps believing that his weapon, not Oswald’s, had caused the president’s fatal head wound, quickly retreated as the motorcade sped on—leaving his assigned duty of eliminating Oswald undone.

58
. Personal interview with Pierce Allman, Dallas, September 24, 2010. Allman thinks that Oswald was the lone gunman, but he is nonetheless puzzled about the incident with the Army Intelligence representative. The FBI interviewed Powell on January 3, 1964. Gary Mack of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza told us the man Allman met is probably Powell. E-mail from Gary Mack, July 5, 2011. Powell’s photo of the Depository shows the boxes of books stacked up near the window ledge of the alleged Oswald perch on the sixth floor, though no one is visible. The details about Powell appear at
http://www.history-matters.com/analysis/witness/witnessMap/Powell.htm
 and
http://jfkassassinationfiles.com/arrb_interview
 [accessed January 3, 2013].

59
. According to Summers, the armed individual may have also said, “You all better not come up here. You can get shot or killed.” In any case, Summers believed he understood what the man meant.

60
. Like every other aspect of 11/22, there is avid speculation about Oswald’s real destination after the assassination. Conspiracy believers think Oswald was supposed to meet some undefined contacts in Oak Cliff, who would then spirit him away to safety. Law enforcement and nonconspiracy researchers are of the opinion that Oswald may have concocted a half-baked plan to escape to Mexico and from there to Cuba or points unknown. While he had left most of his money for Marina, Oswald had a bit less than $15 in his pockets when captured. In the early 1960s this was enough (barely) for bus transportation to Mexico. Other observers speculate that Oswald had not even expected to get away from the Depository, and without a plan, he was simply wandering aimlessly, which is how he ended up inside the Texas Theatre.

61
. Interview with Malcolm Summers, March 7, 2002, conducted by Gary Mack, Stephen Fagin, and Arlinda Abbott, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas.

62
. The officer’s correct name is Charles Burnley, but the Warren Report misspells the name as Burnely.

63
. “Testimony of Mrs. Earlene Roberts,” Warren Commission Hearings, vol. VI, pp. 443–44,
History Matters
,
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh6/html/WC_Vol6_0227a.htm
 [accessed May 16, 2011]; Douglass,
JFK and the Unspeakable
, 289.

64
. Interview with Marvin Lynn Wise, November 14, 1977, conducted by Harold Rose,
JFK Assassination Files
website,
http://jfkassassinationfiles.com/hsca_180-10112-10156
 [accessed June 7, 2012].

65
. Gary Mack says that he “started [this] theory from observing video of Harrelson in 1979, after his arrest for killing Judge Wood, and noting the strong similarity with the tall
tramp; this of course was 10 years before anyone knew the names of the arrested tramps.” E-mail from Gary Mack, May 30, 2012.

66
. Interview with David V. Harkness, June 29, 2006, conducted by Stephen Fagin, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas; Marrs,
Crossfire
, 333–36; Bugliosi,
Reclaiming History
, 907; Posner,
Case Closed
, 271–72. You can listen to part of Hunt’s deathbed “confession” here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bknUDgKdEJQ&feature=youtube
 and read about it in Erik Hedegaard’s “The Last Confession of E. Howard Hunt,”
Rolling Stone
, April 5, 2007, 44–84. In the mid-1970s, a presidential commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller studied the past activities and misadventures of the CIA. The commission compared photographs of the tramps to photographs of Hunt taken before and after November 22, 1963, and found that “even to non-experts it appeared that there was, at best, only a superficial resemblance between the Dallas ‘derelicts’ and Hunt … The ‘derelict’ allegedly resembling Hunt appeared to be substantially older and smaller than Hunt.” See Nelson A. Rockefeller,
Report to the President by the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States
(New York: Manor Books, 1975), 257.

67
. Telephone interview with Mary Moorman, now Mary Moorman Krahmer, March 5, 2013. As always, it can be argued that Moorman’s vision was fixed on JFK and Jackie, and she might not have noticed something happening on or near the grassy knoll. She told me, for instance, that she had no recollection of having seen Abraham Zapruder directly across from her, even though he shows up in her photograph.

68
. Interview with Jean Hill, February 1989, conducted by Bob Hays, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas; Posner,
Case Closed
, 251–52. During a 1993 interview, Bill Sloan (who coauthored a book with Hill entitled
JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness
) admitted, “I think though that I cannot in all honesty sit here and tell you that I believe everything Jean said, but I truly believe that Jean believed everything she said. Now, I don’t know if this was a classic case of self-brainwashing or whatever you want to call it, but I think she had made these statements so many times over the years that she had come to believe them firmly herself.” Interview with Bill Sloan, July 31, 2001, conducted by Bob Porter with Stephen Fagin and Anna Besch, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. By contrast, Mary Moorman’s contribution to the history of 11/22 is worth ten thousand words. Her picture of the president’s limousine as it cruised down Elm Street has fascinated researchers for decades. In 1989, author Jim Marrs wrote, “[An] enlargement of the knoll area in her photo seems to reveal a man [aka “Badge Man”] firing a rifle. The man is dressed in what appears to be a police uniform.” Marrs,
Crossfire
, 88. The “Badge Man” photo has been analyzed and reanalyzed over the decades. Some say there is a man there, while others insist the image is just leaves and shadows in an indistinct background. Mary Moorman rejects the Badge-Man interpretation of her famous photo and told me flatly, “There is no such thing as the Badge Man.” Telephone interview with Mary Moorman Krahmer, March 5, 2013. As for Hill’s later assertions, Moorman said that she could account for all of the photographs she took on 11/22 and that she and Hill went straight to the sheriff’s office after the assassination. Regarding Hill’s claim that she was accosted by Secret Service agents, Moorman says bluntly, “Didn’t happen.” “Mary Moorman Breaks Her Silence—
iAntique.com
Interview,” iAntique.com, May 24, 2011,
http://vimeo.com/24228714
 [accessed May 31, 2011]. Moorman reaffirmed this evaluation of Hill’s somewhat flamboyant pronouncements in her interview with me.

69
. Douglass,
JFK and the Unspeakable
, 297–303; personal interview with Gary Mack, February 22, 2011, Dallas, Texas.

70
. Marina Oswald and Kenneth Porter married in 1965, had a son, and then divorced in 1974. The Porters have apparently reconciled and continue to live together in Texas, though they appear not to have remarried. Porter helped Marina raise Lee Harvey Oswald’s children.

71
. See, for example, Marina’s recent TV interview with former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura:
http://12160.info/video/conspiracy-theory-with-jesse-2?xg_source=shorten_twitter
 (the second clip at the 11-minute, 30-second mark [accessed January 3, 2013]). See also Marina’s correspondence with the Assassination Records Review Board, in which she expresses her doubts about her former husband’s guilt:
http://www.jfk-info.com/mar04.htm
 and here:
http://www.jfk-info.com/mar09.htm
 [accessed January 3, 2013].

72
. Oddly, Leavelle was stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—the date prior to 11/22/63 that is indelibly imprinted on the American consciousness. As Leavelle put it, he had “double duty” in U.S. history.

73
. For example, British author Michael Eddowes convinced Marina that her former husband had been replaced, prior to November 22, with a look-alike Soviet agent who actually killed Kennedy. With Marina’s support, the Dallas authorities exhumed Oswald’s remains in the fall of 1981, but dental records confirmed beyond any doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald and no one else was buried in his grave. This macabre event received wide national press coverage at the time—just as almost anything concerning the Kennedy assassination has done for fifty years. See Michael Eddowes,
The Oswald File
(New York: Ace Books, 1978) and “JFK Video: The Dallas Tapes,” KDFW, Fox 4 Special Project, Dallas–Fort Worth,
http://www.myfoxdfw.com/subindex/news/fox_4_projects/jfk_video
 [accessed March 19, 2012].

74
. Personal interview with Jim Leavelle, April 8, 2011, Dallas, Texas.

75
. Telephone interview with Henry Hurt, June 1, 2011.

76
. Interview with Bob Schieffer, March 4, 2013.

77
. Bill Alexander, Dallas’s assistant district attorney in 1963 who was the first to gather evidence in Oswald’s residence hours after the assassination, is another who believes that Oswald carried out the shootings on his own, and that his own paper trail—“Oswald was a paper-saver,” says Alexander—helped the police put together their case quickly. Personal interview, January 14, 2011, Dallas, Texas.

78
. Interview with Tom Dillard, July 19, 1993, conducted by Wes Wise with Bob Porter, Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, Dallas.