The Kennedy Half-Century (32 page)

Occasionally, a central figure in the November 22 saga will shift his or her story. Motives can only be guessed at, but the conspiracy pot is usually stirred as a result. One need look no further than Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow, Marina, who remarried two years after the assassination to a Texas Instruments employee, Kenneth Jess Porter, and is still living in the suburbs of Dallas.
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Marina told the Warren Commission that she believed her first husband shot JFK, but she later recanted—without any specific evidence being presented to support her change.
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Retired Dallas policeman Jim Leavelle, best remembered as the detective in a beige cowboy hat standing next to Oswald as Ruby pulled the trigger, has had meals from time to time with Marina and her husband, and also with Lee’s brother, Robert Oswald.
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This previously undisclosed bond will startle most people. It seems odd but it is compelling. After all, these individuals had their lives forever and involuntarily transformed by the actions of Lee Oswald, and together they were caught up in a maelstrom only the participants could fully comprehend. At one such dinner years after the assassination, Leavelle remembers that Marina was “sounding him out” to see if he had changed or would change his opinion about Oswald’s guilt. The crusty, plain-spoken Leavelle thinks that
assassination researchers had told Oswald’s widow that, “ ‘[Lee] didn’t shoot anybody, he was a patsy, somebody else done the shooting and they were putting it on [Lee].’
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And then so I said, ‘Well, that’s hogwash, of course. It just didn’t happen that way.’ ”
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In time, Marina Oswald Porter not only changed her story but began insisting on payment for interviews. Henry Hurt, a seasoned reporter who penned stories for
Readers’ Digest
and wrote a bestseller on the Kennedy assassination, said, “Every time I talked to her, it was off the record because we wouldn’t pay. [Once] we talked theoretically and I said, ‘Well, what would you give me for [several thousand dollars]?’ She replied, ‘I’ll just say anything you want for that much.’ ” Hurt researched the Kennedy murder for many years, and kept up with Oswald’s widow. “Marina told her story forty different ways,” he reports.
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Another Oswald who frequently changed her story and demanded money for interviews was Lee’s mother, Marguerite. On the day of the assassination, she called the
Fort Worth Star Telegram
looking for a ride into Dallas. CBS’s Bob Schieffer was then a cub reporter for the
Star Telegram
and just happened to pick up the phone when Marguerite called. “And I said, ‘Lady, we’re not running a taxi service here. Besides, the president’s been shot,’” Schieffer recalls. “So she says, ‘Yes, I heard it on the radio, I think my son is the one they have arrested.’ Well, I immediately dropped this business about not running a taxi service and I said, ‘Where are you? I’ll come out and get you.’ ” Schieffer quickly roped in a co-worker and his car, and they chauffeured Marguerite from Fort Worth to Dallas police headquarters. “I interviewed her on the way, and it was obviously the biggest story I’d ever gotten. She was truly an evil person. She was a lunatic. She was obsessed with money. She had actually worked for a time as a governess or au pair for the publisher of the
Star Telegram
, Amon Carter, Jr., and Mrs. Carter had let her go because she had tried to extort money from the children, trying to get their allowance money, selling them little carved soap [figures] and things like that. I mean she was truly obsessed and on the way to Dallas she kept saying to me that everybody will be sympathetic to [her son’s] wife and ‘nobody will remember momma’ and ‘I’ll die, I won’t have any means of income and what’s going to happen to me?’ And the things that she was saying were so harsh that I didn’t put some of them in the paper.” In the years that followed, Schieffer says, Marguerite occasionally contacted him to see if CBS would pay her for an interview. “And I said, ‘No, we don’t do that.’ And she would say, ‘Well, I really need some money and I know some things.’ Well, she didn’t know anything by that time. I guess she got paid for a couple of interviews and she basically lived out her life selling [her son’s] clothes and things of that nature to souvenir hunters [until] she finally passed away.”
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Exposure to the truth about Oswald’s very unusual mother, upbringing, and life make it easier to understand why Oswald may have undertaken the assassination—although the word “why” presumes an underlying rationality that might not have existed in this deeply troubled individual. Thus, the glaring inadequacies of the Warren Commission inquiry do not automatically mean that the commission erred in fingering Oswald as the lone gunman.
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Much testimony supports the commission viewpoint. Tom Dillard, a photographer for the
Dallas Morning News
in 1963, has long accepted the conclusions of the Warren Commission report. On the day of the parade, he had hoped to be able to ride directly in front of the president’s limousine on a flatbed truck, but the Secret Service, concerned about evacuating Kennedy in an emergency, nixed the idea. Instead, Dillard was placed in a convertible several cars behind the presidential limousine. Dillard was on Houston Street, passing the Dallas County sheriff’s office, when he heard the shots. He dismissed the first one as a “torpedo” (a large firecracker that can explode underwater). But when he heard the second shot, he realized it was rifle fire. At the third shot, Dillard says he exclaimed, “My God, they’ve killed him.”

Bob Jackson, a photographer for the
Dallas Times Herald
who was in the car with Dillard, said, “There’s a guy with a rifle up in that window.” “I said, ‘Where?’” Dillard recalled during a 1993 interview, “Bob says, ‘In that window up on that building right there’… And by that time, I shot a picture with the wide-angle camera.” His photo captured Bonnie Ray Williams and Harold Norman peering out of the fifth floor corner window of the Book Depository; above their heads can be seen some of the boxes from the “sniper’s nest”—but no Oswald. Dillard has lost sleep over the years thinking about what might have been. If he had only “shot it a little quicker,” he might have captured Oswald in the window. But Dillard firmly believes the shots came from the Depository’s sixth floor window.
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Mal Couch, a WFAA-TV cameraman, was also in the car with Dillard. He confirmed that Jackson said he saw a rifleman in the Book Depository. “And I looked up in the window and saw about a foot of the rifle going back in the window.”
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Just after the shots, Couch and the other journalists ordered the driver to stop their car, and they jumped out. As Couch moved down the street toward the grassy knoll, he noted that “There were guys there, and I’m sure they were Secret Service men or FBI … And one of them reached down, and he picked up something. And I walked past him. It was a piece of brain matter that had been in the street.” According to Couch, the man was dressed in a gray suit or a coat and tie and simply walked away with what appeared to be a piece of Kennedy’s brain or skull that was “probably around three or four inches long.”

No one has ever conclusively identified this individual. However, it is possible he was the person who handed Dallas County deputy Seymour Weitzman a skull fragment.
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Weitzman testified to the Warren Commission that, within ten minutes of the assassination, “[S]omebody brought me a piece of what he thought to be a firecracker … but I turned it over to one of the Secret Service men and I told them it should go to the lab because it looked to me like human bone. I later found out it was supposedly a portion of the president’s skull.”
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Weitzman himself had been standing at the corner of Main and Houston, just a few dozen yards from the presidential limousine when the shots were fired. As befits his law enforcement training, he ran toward the limo in time to see it speed away, then immediately scaled the wall at the top of the grassy knoll, next to the picket fence, because that’s where a bystander told him the shots had come from. He saw the rail yards behind the knoll before just about anyone, and reported to the Warren Commission, “We noticed numerous kinds of footprints that did not make sense because they were going [in] different directions.” The commission interrogator asked Weitzman, “Were there other people there besides you?” “Yes, sir, other officers, Secret Service as well.” Here is more reliable testimony that Secret Service officers, or people impersonating them, were present in Dealey Plaza at the time of, or immediately after, the shooting. The Warren Commission staff did not further question Weitzman about this, asked him for no names, and never bothered to reconcile Weitzman’s testimony (and the statements of others we have cited) with the commission’s firm conclusion that no Secret Service personnel were present in Dealey Plaza.
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As these conflicting examples demonstrate, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction when dealing with eyewitness accounts of events on November 22, 1963. Human beings notice different things during a crisis, and they see only a small part of the whole. They also tend to confuse media reports and the stories of other eyewitnesses with what they actually saw or heard.
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And of course, some people will make wild statements to garner attention. The result is a hodgepodge of truths, half-truths, blatant falsehoods, and sensational embellishments. Decades after the assassination, people pop up who claim to have been in Dealey Plaza or on the grassy knoll at precisely the moment of the assassination.
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Because the local police and then the Warren Commission did not catalog and contact many key Dealey Plaza witnesses, it is very difficult to verify or disprove new accounts. Maybe the individuals coming forward are honest, or perhaps they wanted to be at a seismic historical event so badly that they invented a personal association. Retired Dallas
officer Leavelle notes that if everyone who claims to have been on the grassy knoll on November 22 had actually been there, “You couldn’t put them in the Rose Bowl.”
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One theory that explains all, or even a preponderance, of the testimony is impossible to achieve—unless one approaches the explosive subject with a predetermined answer. This has been the path chosen by most authors and filmmakers. Naturally, potentially fallible judgments must be made by any researcher. Some witnesses’ statements ring true. Others are a mixture of accurate and inaccurate observations by people sincerely trying to recall the most dramatic moments of their lives—a few seconds of chaos in a large, noisy crowd, with only fragments recollected about what happened before and after the shots. The memories have also been infected by an avalanche of news coverage that continued for years, as well as hundreds of personal conversations about this seminal event with family and friends. Inevitably, some witnesses have been mistaken, and a few have made up their versions. One thing is certain: They cannot all be right, given the inherent contradictions.

A fair investigation can only reach a truthful conclusion once all the relevant testimony has been considered and compared. That the Warren Commission failed to do so is obvious to any unbiased investigator. In the days, weeks, and months following November 22, the trail was hot and memories were at their sharpest. The commission had the strong backing of Congress and the country, and whatever money and staff were needed to produce a thorough report would have been forthcoming. While impatient, the public would have been willing to give the investigators the time they required to produce complete answers. Instead, many critical witnesses were overlooked, many paths were not taken and tips not pursued, and a political schedule—not an investigator’s timetable—determined the release date. Those responsible for these decisions would say the nation needed to move on. Yet the irony of the commission’s rushed and predigested report is that the nation was caught in a time warp for years. Instead of shutting the door on cynical and destructive assassination speculation, the Warren Commission maximized the opportunities for it.

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Live television reporting has always been a dangerous business, and inaccurate information was aired almost immediately on November 22. In the first minutes after he began his CBS broadcast, Walter Cronkite actually suggested that the Newmans could be the assassins. (They were not named, but Cronkite said Secret Service agents and others had surrounded them on the grassy knoll.) See “Two Hours of Uncut 11/22/63 CBS-TV Coverage, Starting at 1:30 P.M.,” YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Ry9-bpixM
 [accessed April 23, 2013.]

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You can see the footage for yourself at
http://emuseum.jfk.org/view/objects/asitem/items@:32274
.

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The picket fence is actually a stockade fence without the openings of a picket fence, but almost everyone refers to this element of Dealey Plaza as “the picket fence,” so we will, too.

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On his deathbed, E. Howard Hunt told his son, on videotape no less, that he had been one of the tramps, and this dramatic “revelation” has been widely circulated. Perhaps he was seeking one last historically significant dose of villainy for his obituary, or maybe he was playing a final macabre trick. But Hunt had not been one of the Dallas tramps, proving once and for all that deathbed confessions are not always truthful.