The Kennedy Half-Century (29 page)

The Warren Commission became the focus of these hidden agendas, and the resulting commission blunders undermined its claim to have conducted a thorough inquiry. Chief among them was the failure to interview significant eyewitnesses. On the morning of the assassination, Bill and Gayle Newman and their two boys, Billy and Clayton, were waiting at Love Field for Air Force One to arrive. But the size of the crowd convinced Bill to take the family downtown to watch the parade instead. They found a good viewing spot on a patch of grass inside Dealey Plaza at the end of the long motorcade route (soon to be renamed forever “the grassy knoll”). Bill could hear crowds cheering in the distance as the motorcade grew closer. He remembers seeing a well-dressed man, Abraham Zapruder, standing on a concrete pedestal holding a movie camera. When the president’s car turned onto Elm Street and drove down the center lane, Bill heard two loud booms. “I thought somebody had thrown a couple of firecrackers or something beside the president’s car,” he told an interviewer, “and I can remember the thought of, you know, that’s a pretty poor joke, somebody to do something like that.” Bill realized that it was no prank when he saw the president come up out of his seat with his arms in the air. He also noticed that Governor Connally’s eyes were “protruding” and that his shirt was covered in blood. When the presidential limousine pulled directly in front of the Newmans, who were standing on the curb, they heard a third shot. “And I saw the side of the president’s head blow off and saw the flash of white and the red,” Bill recalls, “and he went across the seat … into Mrs. Kennedy’s arms. And she hollered out, ‘Oh my God, no! They’ve shot Jack!’ ” Bill and Gayle instinctively threw themselves on top of their children to shield them from danger. When they were certain that the threat had passed, they got up and began climbing the grassy knoll. Gayle could see a crowd of people “rushing towards the railroad tracks behind the concrete
wall.” Bill noticed some men running in the same direction who were carrying what he thinks might have been Thompson submachine guns. To this day, he is not sure if the men he saw were FBI or Secret Service or other law enforcement officers, but he believes that they jumped off one of the cars in the presidential motorcade and ran toward the rail yard (not the School Book Depository) in search of the assassin.
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Bill and Gayle were curious to see what was happening on the other side of the fence, but they were buttonholed by two reporters from WFAA-TV who wanted to interview them.
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A short time later, the Newmans found themselves sitting inside WFAA’s main studio fielding questions from the station’s program director, Jay Watson. “You … think the shot came from up on top of the viaduct [the so-called triple underpass at Dealey Plaza] toward the president, is that correct?” asked Watson. “Yes, sir,” Bill replied before correcting himself, “no, not on the viaduct itself, but up on top of the hill, a little mound of ground with a garden.”
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Gayle Newman told Watson that she heard three shots—the first caused Kennedy to rise “up in his seat”; the second caused Governor Connally to grab “his stomach” and topple “over to the side”; and the third hit the president in the head.
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The Warren Commission concluded that only two bullets struck Kennedy and Connally. Although the Newmans gave statements to the sheriff’s office and were visited by two FBI agents on the Sunday after the assassination, the two witnesses closest to the limousine at the time of Kennedy’s murder, and positioned perfectly to take in the entire scene of the crime, were never formally interviewed by the Warren Commission. “I’m really surprised that they did not interview us,” Bill Newman said, “but I guess they didn’t see the need to.” He admits that it may have been because the family could not confirm the preferred theory, that the shots had come from the Book Depository.
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One of the country’s acknowledged experts on the assassination, Gary Mack, who has personally interviewed many of those connected to the events in Dallas in his role as curator of the Sixth Floor Museum (located in the old School Book Depository), estimates that “about fifty people thought
at least one of the shots
came from [JFK’s] front [and] not the Depository.”
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The Warren Commission also overlooked H. B. McLain, a Dallas motorcycle cop who was part of the presidential motorcade. McLain was on
Houston Street when he heard a single shot and saw pigeons flying off the roof of the Depository. At first he assumed it was someone in the building firing a gun to scare off the birds. That is, until he heard Dallas police chief Jesse Curry’s voice come over the radio. “Chief said, ‘go to Parkland Hospital,’” McLain recalls, “And it was already set up if anything went wrong … So when he said ‘go to Parkland,’ we went to Parkland.” When he arrived at the hospital, he found a nearly immobilized Mrs. Kennedy, in a state of shock, sitting in the back of the presidential limousine:

When the president’s car pulled in, I pulled in beside of it. And she was laid over his head. And she wouldn’t raise up to take his body out of the car. And I finally reached over and caught her by the shoulder. And I said, ‘Come on. Let them take him inside.’ She didn’t make a sound. And I walked her inside, turned around and come back out.

McLain says he did not linger long inside the hospital because, “I just knew I didn’t have no business in there.” That the Warren Commission would fail to interview someone so well placed in the motorcade—a law enforcement official who had carefully noted key details and closely observed the as-yet-undisturbed crime scene in the limousine before almost anyone else—is difficult to understand. It is true that McLain failed to fill out a police report on his actions that day, as requested by his Dallas department, but the Warren Commission had a list of the officers in the motorcade—where McLain was prominently positioned. Aggressive investigators would have contacted him.

Underlining the Warren Commission’s error, H. B. McLain would later become a significant figure during the reopening of the assassination investigation in the 1970s. McLain was linked to the now-famous “Dictabelt recording.” In the early 1960s, police departments routinely recorded conversations between officers and headquarters on Dictaphone brand dictation devices. In 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), tasked with reinvestigating the deaths of JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr., learned that a Dallas police officer with a radio microphone stuck in the “on” position might have inadvertently helped to record the key minutes of the assassination—potentially a match for the soundless Zapruder film. The Dictabelt contained sounds that acoustic experts identified as gunshots. The committee then examined photographic evidence and determined that McLain had been the officer with the stuck microphone. McLain himself always denied this claim and wondered how he could have heard Chief Curry’s voice if his mike had been stuck in the “on” position. Of course, it is possible the microphone was stuck for a while, and the jostling of the travelling cycle “unstuck” it.
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In any event, the recording presumably came from McLain or one of the other motorcycle policemen in the motorcade, and the Dictabelt recording caused the HSCA to rewrite history. Based largely on this extraordinary piece of evidence, indicating that too many shots had been fired from too many locations for the assassination to have been the work of Oswald alone, the HSCA decided that the Warren Report was wrong, and concluded instead that JFK had probably been killed by more than one person—the definition of a conspiracy. We will return to the Dictabelt later.

The Newmans and H. B. McLain were among dozens of well-placed witnesses never interviewed by the Warren Commission. When asked why the commission ignored her, grassy knoll onlooker Marilyn Sitzman gave a pithy reply: “Because it was [the 1960s], I was female and I was young. And I was irrelevant.” In reality, Sitzman was an important eyewitness. Her boss, Abraham Zapruder, the owner of a Dallas clothing business, brought his 8-millimeter camera to the parade so that he could capture Kennedy’s visit on film. Sitzman steadied Zapruder, who had vertigo, as he stood on a wall on the grassy knoll and filmed JFK during the final moments of his life. When the shots rang out, she kept her boss in place so he could record some of the most infamous seconds in history. Thanks to Sitzman’s presence of mind, we have reasonably clear footage of the president’s assassination.
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Sitzman remembered hearing shots coming from the School Book Depository, but she did not turn her head. “We kept our attention on what was happening exactly in front of us,” she recalled, “and if you look at his film, there’s very little jumping. It’s very steady considering what was going on, and that’s why I’m saying the sound we heard … the third sound still sounded a distance [away] because if it had been as close as everybody’s trying to tell us, you know, twenty feet behind us [over the picket fence] … we would have jumped sky high.” This is an important firsthand account that argues against a grassy knoll or picket fence shooter.
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Zapruder and Sitzman could not have kept the camera steady if a second gunman had been firing in very close proximity. In that case, as Sitzman said, “That film would have been bounced all over the place.”

Of course, in the Kennedy assassination mystery, few things are clear-cut and definitive. Sitzman, who passed away in 1993, also believed that the second gunman could have been using a silencer. “I have no qualms saying that I’m almost sure that there was someone behind the fence or in that area up
there [near the fence],” she asserted, “but I’m just as sure that they had silencers because there was no sound.” Over the years, Sitzman was occasionally approached by researchers who she claimed were trying to coach her. Mark Lane, author of the conspiratorial bestseller
Rush to Judgment
, conducted a phone interview with her as he was finishing his manuscript. “Last words he said were, ‘Now, you did hear those six shots behind you?’” she recalled. “I said, ‘No, I never heard anything behind me.’ ‘Oh.’ You know, I never heard from that man again.” In addition, she described Oliver Stone’s movie
JFK
as a “comic book type thing” even while acknowledging that it contains a number of truths.
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The Warren Commission should also have interviewed Elsie Dorman and Robert Croft, two amateur photographers who captured images of the president’s motorcade as it drove through Dealey Plaza. Dorman filmed JFK from the fourth floor of the School Book Depository with “her husband’s Kodak Brownie, Model 2 home movie camera.” Although Dorman’s footage is brief and shaky (she did not have any experience operating a movie camera), it clearly shows the president’s car as well as people who were standing in vital Dealey Plaza spots. Robert Croft captured photos of JFK seconds before he died. In recent years, Dorman’s and Croft’s images have provided valuable clues to assassination researchers. The Dorman film helped one investigator discredit a story by the reporter Travis Lynn, who claimed he had left a tape recorder in Dealey Plaza on November 22. Dorman’s film shows that there was no equipment anywhere near that location. Croft’s still photos convinced the HSCA that Kennedy’s suit jacket was bunched up at the neck at the time of his death—a key piece of evidence that might explain why the holes in his shirt and jacket weren’t logically aligned with the bullet hole in his back.
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No one from the commission talked to Jim and Patricia Towner and their daughter Tina, either.
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The Towners were taking film and photos in Dealey Plaza seconds before the assassination. While talking to a policeman and waiting for the motorcade, Jim Towner noticed a man in a “white coat” peering out of the sixth floor window of the School Book Depository. “And I didn’t know who it was,” he recalled. “And I told the patrolman, I said, ‘That nut. He doesn’t know that he can come down and watch it from the street.’ ” The policeman didn’t bat an eye. Plenty of other people were hanging out of their office windows, he replied nonchalantly. Jim conceded the point and forgot about the man in the window, who was presumably Lee Oswald.

As the presidential motorcade passed, the Towners began walking back toward their car, parked near the railroad tracks on the other side of the picket fence, when they heard a loud popping noise. “Oh mercy, some fool is shooting firecrackers,” said Mrs. Towner. “That’s no firecracker,” replied Jim, who had served in the military and was familiar with gunfire. “That’s a
thirty-[aught]-six rifle.” He heard a total of three shots, which he thought had come from the Book Depository. Swept up in the nervous energy of the moment, he followed a crowd of “spectators” and “policemen” behind the picket fence and into the railroad yard, where he encountered “a white-uniformed black man with a cap” standing on the back of a Pullman dining car. “Did you see anybody coming this way?” someone in the crowd hollered. “No sir, I haven’t seen anybody back here,” said the porter, “and I’ve been back here watching the whole thing.” Jim then proceeded to the grassy knoll, where he came across a man who was “shaking and crying.” “Oh, he’s dead. He’s dead,” the unidentified man sobbed. “The whole side of his head blew off.”

Although the FBI eventually requisitioned the Towners’ film and photos, no one from the bureau or the Warren Commission ever interviewed the family, even though they had important firsthand observations about several critical aspects of the assassination. “Well, I thought it was pretty stupid,” Jim Towner commented in 1996 about the failure to reach out to the porter or his own family.
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The porter, Carl Desroe, was not identified or interviewed by the commission, and before his death, he shared his story only with his pastor, Bishop Mark Herbener. Bishop Herbener was the first to identify Desroe in 2006. Desroe and his wife had been on the overpass before Kennedy’s motorcade approached, but had been ordered off by unknown “officials.” Desroe’s wife, Amelia, told Herbener, “I saw some things … I’m afraid to tell anybody. I’ll never tell anybody. I’m afraid for my life.” Herbener knew the couple well. Desroe was the personal porter to the president of Katy Railroad. As for Amelia, Herbener said, “What she saw or thinks she saw, I have no idea. She wasn’t a screwball. She was a pretty genuine person.” Both Desroes are long deceased.
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