The Kennedy Half-Century (44 page)

Though the commission’s report indicated there had been some internal dissent over attributing Connally’s wounds to the same bullet that had passed through Kennedy’s throat, the document concluded that expert-derived “persuasive evidence” had demonstrated beyond any doubt that Oswald alone had fired the shots from his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Oswald could not have fired more than three bullets in the elapsed time, and one bullet unmistakably missed the limo and struck a curb near the triple underpass. Therefore, for the Warren Commission, the remaining two bullets had to account for all the wounds in JFK and Connally. The first of these has often been derisively termed the “magic bullet” or the “pristine bullet” because of its relatively good condition after allegedly doing so much damage to two men. The dispute about this bullet aside, the commission and subsequent investigations concluded that Oswald had sufficiently expert marksmanship to aim and fire the gun with deadly effect from the Depository to the street (a distance of no more than 88 yards). Finally, ballistics also matched several cartridge cases found at the scene of the shooting of police officer J. D. Tippit to a revolver found in Oswald’s possession at the time of his arrest, another gun that had been purchased by Oswald.
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A number of other vital details were analyzed by the commission. The panel said the shots rang out at 12:30 P.M. CST. Roy Kellerman and William Greer, two of the president’s bodyguards, agreed on the time, which was reinforced by a photograph of the limousine speeding to Parkland just past the grassy knoll and the triple overpass, with the large Hertz clock on the Depository clearly showing exactly half past twelve. The president’s vehicle was moving forward very slowly on Elm Street in the critical seconds before and
during the shooting. Frame-by-frame analysis of the Zapruder film produced a speed estimate averaging 11.2 miles per hour.
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However, agreement on the other particulars is elusive. The accounts of those in the presidential limo differ significantly on the most important point. From the rear left seat of the vehicle, Mrs. Kennedy heard a noise and subsequent cry of pain from Governor Connally, who was seated directly in front of her husband. Upon turning right, she observed the president raising his hands to his throat with a puzzled expression on his face. JFK realized what had happened. “My God, I am hit” were his last words. Mrs. Kennedy was attempting to help her husband when she heard the fatal shot and saw what the fatal bullet did. Mrs. Kennedy’s testimony would tend to support the theory that one bullet struck both JFK and Connally.
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But the recollections of Governor Connally and his wife, Nellie, sharply contrasted with those of Mrs. Kennedy, and both insisted throughout their lives that separate bullets struck Kennedy’s back and Connally’s back.
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The governor reported that he heard the first shot originating from a direction over his right shoulder and contorted his body in that direction to trace the origin of the noise. While turning his head in the other direction to check on an already wounded Kennedy, he was struck in the back by a bullet. Connally testified that he did not hear the shot that penetrated his body. It is possible that Connally heard the first shot that missed the limousine entirely and caught a glimpse of the wounded president at the very instant he (Connally) was struck by the bullet that had just exited JFK’s throat; perhaps Connally’s brain had not had time to process the noise from the second shot. It is also possible that Connally was struck by a separate bullet.
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Mrs. Connally, who was not hurt, confirmed her husband’s recollections. Moments after she had turned to JFK and chirped, “Mr. President, you can’t say that Dallas doesn’t love you,” she heard a shot fired from the right. Glancing over her right shoulder, she saw the president noiselessly clutching his throat before slumping toward Mrs. Kennedy. She insisted that a second separate shot then struck her husband, who exclaimed, “My God, they’re going to kill us all.” Mrs. Connally pulled her badly wounded husband downward onto her lap. From this position, with his head in her lap, both Governor and Mrs. Connally said they heard another shot, whereupon they were hit with blood and tissue from JFK’s head wound.
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The remaining occupants of the presidential limousine, two Secret Service agents who were in the front seats facing forward and did not directly observe all the key moments, were unable to sort out whether Mrs. Kennedy’s or the Connallys’ version was correct. Roy Kellerman, the occupant of the front right passenger seat of the vehicle, reported hearing a firecracker-like pop;
upon turning his head to the right he saw the president clutching his throat. By all accounts it was Kellerman who ordered Agent Greer to accelerate while radioing the president’s condition. The Connallys said that they heard Kellerman’s call only after the tissue-splattering shot. Greer’s version of events is similar to Kellerman’s. He heard a loud noise, which he attributed to a nearby police motorcycle. Upon hearing a second such noise, he turned to look over his shoulder and spotted Connally slumped over in his wife’s lap. He stepped on the vehicle’s accelerator at the precise moment Kellerman issued a similar order. Kellerman claimed to have heard “a flurry of shells” for five seconds after the first shot rang out.
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Gerald Blaine, one of the other agents assigned to Kennedy’s Texas detail, believes the bullet that struck Kennedy’s head (and left behind fragments in the president’s skull) caused a large flap of skin to move in the same direction as the projectile, which is visible in the Zapruder film. Could the remnants of this slug still be buried inside Dealey Plaza? Blaine thinks so: “That [bullet] is probably laying up in the rail yard [or] embedded in the [grassy] knoll somewhere.”
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Secret Service agents in the follow car, trailing the president’s car by five feet or so, reported much the same sequence of events: a firecracker-like noise, the sight of Kennedy grabbing his throat and “lurching” left, followed by a second shot and the shattering of the president’s skull. Agent Clint Hill, who demonstrated great courage in the face of gunfire, remembered leaping from his position in the follow car, struggling to gain his footing on the presidential limousine as Greer pushed the gas pedal, and helping a frantic Mrs. Kennedy, who had climbed up on the car’s trunk, back into the rear seat.

As the motorcade accelerated through the underpass to Parkland Hospital on Kellerman’s orders, most agents drew their weapons, including George Hickey, who was armed with an AR-15 rifle.
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Agent Rufus Youngblood in the front passenger seat of the vice presidential vehicle—about a hundred feet behind Kennedy’s limousine—reported hearing an explosive noise before seeing the crowd lined up along the parade route suddenly disperse.
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Vice President Johnson confirmed hearing several sharp “explosions” in a row; he heard one or two of the shots from a position on the vehicle floor, where he had been pushed down for protection by Youngblood.
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Agent Clifton Carter, in the vehicle behind the vice presidential limousine, reported hearing two shots after Youngblood had secured LBJ.
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All Secret Service agents in the motorcade remained with their vehicles—per agency policy—until they reached Parkland Hospital.
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Despite the eyewitness testimony about Secret Service agents on and near the grassy knoll after the shooting, the Secret Service and the Warren Commission say that the first agent to return to Dealey Plaza, Forrest Sorrels, did not do so until approximately 12:50 P.M.
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There are contradictions aplenty here. Few of those likely to be most alert to the facts—the limousine occupants and the Secret Service agents following every instant intently—explicitly acknowledge a first shot that missed the limo. Some participants, including the Connallys, are sure Governor Connally was hit by a separate bullet from the one that struck JFK’s throat. Others have memories that differ on various specific points, including the exact number of shots they heard. Police homicide detectives often report that well-meaning eyewitness accounts can diverge wildly. But these aren’t average eyewitnesses.

Of course, critics see multiple problems with various elements of the scenario we have just described. For example, Ray and Mary La Fontaine, the husband and wife team behind the book
Oswald Talked: The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination
, and Mark Lane, who authored the highly influential 1966 volume
Rush to Judgment
as well as
Plausible Denial
in 1991, have argued that another gun, a 7.65 Mauser, was initially identified by Officers Seymour Weitzman and Eugene Boone as the weapon found on the sixth floor of the Depository. A Weitzman-signed affidavit described it as a “7.65 Mauser bolt action equipped with a 4/18 scope.”
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Boone was the first person to view the weapon and believes that Lane and the La Fontaines are assigning sinister motives to an honest mistake. “That probably was my fault,” he told me during a phone interview. “I referred to it as a Mauser. There were a lot of World War II weapons [on] the market at that time, and ‘Mauser’ really refers to a bolt action weapon.” Boone means that he was using the brand name in a generic sense in the same way that one might ask for a Kleenex instead of a tissue. But journalists ran with his description until authorities later identified the murder weapon as an Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano.
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Bertrand Russell, the noted Cambridge philosopher and mathematician, wanted to know how the authorities could have missed a man walking into a “building while allegedly carrying a rifle over three feet long?” Russell observed that along a motorcade route swarming with police and Secret Service agents on heightened alert, it was strange that no one noticed Oswald lugging such a weapon.
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Was the rifle taken to, or planted in, the Depository much earlier? This is possible; multiple reports suggest that the Depository’s back loading dock was frequently open and unguarded, and the freight elevators to the sixth floor could be accessed from that location. Of course, say lone-gunman advocates, there is a logical explanation that would show how Oswald could bring in a rifle on the morning of the motorcade. The neighbor with whom he hitched a ride early on the morning of November 22, Wesley Buell Frazier, said Oswald was carrying a brown-paper-wrapped package that contained “curtain rods”—Oswald’s cover for his disassembled rifle. As in so many other respects that day, Oswald was devilishly lucky. The
slight, physically unremarkable Oswald was dropped off nearby the Depository, wasn’t stopped by any policeman or guard on his way into the building (there may not have been any law enforcement personnel stationed in the plaza five hours before the motorcade was to pass), and could have proceeded unmolested once inside up to the sixth floor to drop off his deadly parcel for later use.

Yet Frazier, who had the opportunity to handle and measure an Italian Carcano rifle in later years, insists that Oswald’s package was too small to be the weapon discovered on the sixth floor of the Depository. “You know, they asked me, ‘How long was the package?’” he recalls. “I said, ‘Oh, around two feet, give or take an inch or two.’ [So] even if it were disassembled, it wouldn’t fit in there.” Frazier stuck to his estimate of the size of Oswald’s package from the day of the assassination through to his interview with the Warren Commission staff in Washington the next year. The commission put him through a comical routine in which he had to cut up wrapping paper to demonstrate the dimensions of Oswald’s object—and staffers made him do it over and over, hoping that he would produce one version large enough to accommodate the rifle.
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Lending further credence to Frazier’s story is the testimony of an FBI firearms expert who told the Warren Commission that the length of the rifle’s longest component when disassembled was 34.8 inches—considerably longer than the brown paper package Frazier had observed.
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The commission determined, however, that the homemade bag discovered near the sniper’s nest measured 88 inches in length (roughly seven feet), which would have been more than enough to conceal Oswald’s rifle.
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In addition, photos taken on the afternoon of the assassination clearly show curtains hanging from the windows inside Oswald’s boarding house room, which suggests that Oswald had been lying to Frazier about the need for curtain rods.
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Frazier recalls the conversation they had the day before the assassination: “He came up to me during the day on Thursday. And he asked me, ‘Can I ride home with you this afternoon?’ I said, ‘Well, sure.’ A few minutes later, I realized it wasn’t Friday. So when I ran back into him on the first floor, I said, ‘Why do you want to go home with me today?’ I said, ‘Today is Thursday, not Friday.’ He says, ‘I know. I need to go home because Marina’s got some curtain rods for me and I’m gonna put some curtains up in my room.’ So I said, ‘Okay.’”
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This suggests that Oswald had decided on his plan of action, either by himself or with the help of conspirators, by Thursday during the day; and that he either came across or was shown the motorcade route on Wednesday or Thursday. Oswald’s assassination plan was not a last-minute snap decision, as some have suggested. Rather, he thought about it for at least a day or two, maybe longer. Moreover, Oswald told Frazier he would not be going back
with him on Friday, again suggesting he knew what he was going to do—and that he would either be dead after shooting at the motorcade or he had an escape plan in place, on his own or with the help of co-conspirators.
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