The Kennedy Half-Century (45 page)

No single piece of evidence has sown more doubt than the “magic bullet” fired from the Carcano rifle. Part of the bullet’s allure for conspiracy theorists arises from the inexplicable gap in the “chain of custody” surrounding the projectile, which police say was matched with forensic evidence to Oswald’s gun.

Upon arrival at Parkland Hospital, Governor Connally—who had fainted from shock and loss of blood—regained consciousness and was immediately helped onto a stretcher.
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About 1:20 P.M. the bullet was found on the stretcher by Parkland’s chief engineer, Darrell Tomlinson. Even though, in retrospect, Tomlinson was uncertain that this stretcher was the one used for Connally, the Warren Commission so designated it. Others wondered whether the bullet had been planted in order to implicate Oswald during the approximately forty minutes the stretcher had been empty.
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Further questions have been raised about the condition of this 1.2-inch-long bullet, which was only slightly compacted at its base despite having allegedly passed through two bodies and broken bones in Governor Connally. The skeptics insist a bullet that had such a destructive path would have shed more shards along the way.

This is not the only bullet that has proven controversial. One other person besides President Kennedy and Governor Connally was injured in Dealey Plaza at 12:30 P.M. James Tague, a bystander at the base of the triple underpass, on the opposite side of the street from the grassy knoll, was struck in the face by flying debris presumably caused by a stray bullet. The Warren Commission says it was the first bullet that missed the limo entirely and hit a curb near Tague. However, Tague insists that he was struck by the debris—whether curb concrete or bullet fragments—when he heard the second or third shot, not the first one. In addition, the FBI investigated a scar on a curb near where Tague was standing and found that the indentation did not contain any copper residue. This finding suggests to some observers that the ricocheting bullet was not one of the copper-encased projectiles fired from Oswald’s gun.
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Recently, a team of Texas A&M University scientists, using modern chemical and forensic techniques, concluded that the bullet fragments recovered on November 22 could have come from more than one gun.
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The scientists discovered “that many bullets within a box of Mannlicher-Carcano bullets have similar composition, leading them to conclude that two-element chance matches to assassination fragments are not extraordinarily rare.” In other
words, a second undiscovered assassin could have fired a weapon using Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition from another location around Dealey Plaza, and the bullet fragments would have resembled the composition of those that came from Oswald’s gun.
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Bullet fragments recovered during JFK’s autopsy at Bethesda add to the puzzle. The attending physicians identified two wounds in the president’s head: a 6-by-15-millimeter wound to the right and above the center back portion of the skull, and a more irregular, nearly 13-centimeter-diameter fracture of the skull that matched chunks of bone recovered by law enforcement personnel from along the parade route.
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Two small metal fragments were recovered from the larger wound. X-rays revealed particulate fragments of metal in a line from the rear wound to the front portions of the skull, and an embedded metal fragment above the president’s right eye.
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Yet for many, the Zapruder film contradicts the ballistic path analysis. Kennedy’s head and upper torso are clearly thrown backward in a manner seemingly inconsistent with a shot coming from the rear. For example, author Paul Chambers has studied the Zapruder frames using mathematical equations derived from Newtonian physics and concluded that the recoil of the president’s head proves that the fatal shot was not fired from the Depository but rather from a location in front of Kennedy’s limousine. By no means is Chambers’s analysis unanimously supported; others use photographic and scientific perspectives to insist that the Zapruder film shows that the president initially fell forward, having been hit from behind.
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The ambiguous nature of the visual evidence can lead to diametrically opposite conclusions. More generally, this survey of X-rays and ballistics has demonstrated that so-called hard evidence can prove to be softer than expected.

The suggestion shocks, but more than a few assassination researchers put forward the theory that Lyndon Johnson was a willing co-conspirator in the killing of his predecessor, or at the very least, had prior knowledge that something was afoot. The linchpin of this conjecture is the belief that Johnson was far more amenable than JFK to the plans of the military, defense industry, and CIA to escalate in Vietnam.
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That Johnson lusted after the White House is obvious. He had run for the Democratic nomination himself in 1960, and he regarded John Kennedy as a lightweight in the Senate. RFK was his enemy; their personal dislike was intense and barely containable on both sides. Johnson believed that he had been ill-treated as vice president, his talents underutilized and his influence marginalized by the Kennedy inner circle that called him “Uncle Compone.” And anyone who has studied Johnson’s career has to acknowledge that, for all
his dazzling legislative and strategic skills, he was exceptionally devious and capable of great cruelty even to those personally and professionally close to him.
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It may be that every vice president who has succeeded his president in midterm has been secretly delighted. All seconds-in-command realize, as did John Adams in describing his position as the first vice president, that “In this I am nothing, but I may be everything.”
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Nevertheless, Johnson was probably more delighted than most. Power, every bit as much as blood, coursed through his veins and kept his weak heart beating.
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Astoundingly, despite needing to assimilate and recover from the enormous shock of Dallas and with the heavy immediate burden of burying Kennedy and uniting the country, a pajama-clad LBJ was already planning out the legislative initiatives of his administration with close aides in his bedroom in the wee hours of November 23. In this same meeting, the new president even startled the exhausted Lady Bird Johnson—after she declared their new burdens would last only a few months until a new presidential nominee was selected in the summer of 1964—by announcing that he would be running for
at least
one full term in the White House.
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It also escaped the notice of few that President Kennedy had been murdered in LBJ’s Texas. JFK had gone there mainly to assist in brokering a truce in Democratic factional fighting in which Johnson was a key player. Some friends and advisers, aware of the harsh treatment of United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who had been spat upon in Dallas one month earlier, wanted Kennedy to cancel. Much like Jack Ruby’s rubout of Oswald, Johnson’s ascension to ultimate power, thanks to Kennedy’s death in LBJ’s state, seemed suspicious and convenient.
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Kennedy loyalists quickly made the connection, as revealed by a note penned by Evelyn Lincoln, JFK’s personal White House secretary, only a couple of hours after the assassination. Mrs. Lincoln was with Kennedy in Dallas and flew back to Washington aboard Air Force One with LBJ and Mrs. Kennedy. During the flight, she compiled a list of people and groups that she thought might have been responsible for the president’s death. At the top of her list was the name “Lyndon.” Lincoln was completely devoted to JFK and evaluated everyone with one simple standard: Would they help or hurt her president? She may have been reflecting the inner circle’s views of LBJ’s loyalty, since she had access like few others to the Oval Office, the president, and his closest advisers.
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Yet one of Johnson’s comments made during the flight, reflecting his fear of a possible conspiracy involving enemies of the United States, casts doubt on Lincoln’s assertion. “I wonder if the missiles are flying,” he told his aide, Bill Moyers, who had asked what was on his mind.
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Moreover, according to a key eyewitness, General Godfrey McHugh, the new president
was not as calm on Air Force One as one might have hoped, at least for a time. McHugh reported, “I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed, saying, ‘They’re going to get us all. It’s a plot. It’s a plot. It’s going to get us all.’ He was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing.”
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Author Craig Zirbel is convinced that Johnson played a role in Kennedy’s murder. In his bestselling book
The Texas Connection
, Zirbel writes, “From the outset Lyndon B. Johnson was involved with the planning of the president’s trip. A specific motorcade route was demanded which led to Kennedy’s death. The connections to Johnson, while regularly ignored, are so clear that undisputable evidence publicly ties Johnson through his friends to not only the Dallas murder, its criminal investigation, but even to Oswald and Jack Ruby.” Zirbel is certain that H. L. Hunt, a wealthy conservative oil baron with close ties to LBJ, was involved in the assassination. The author claims that Hunt, who apparently despised JFK, was among several people who helped recruit Oswald and Ruby on Johnson’s behalf.
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As with other theories of the Kennedy assassination, there are wisps of smoke here and there about H. L. Hunt, but no smoking gun that convinces an objective observer it is true.
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Conspiracy theorists believe they know why Johnson would have risked his career and even his life: By the autumn of 1963, rumors were circulating that LBJ would be dropped from the 1964 ticket. On the very day Kennedy died, the
Dallas Morning News
announced: NIXON PREDICTS JFK MAY DROP JOHNSON. Evelyn Lincoln also claimed years later that she had discussed with President Kennedy his 1964 vice presidential plans shortly before JFK left for Dallas, and Kennedy told her that he had decided to drop LBJ and substitute North Carolina governor Terry Sanford.
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Johnson had superb political antennae, so if JFK’s intention was to replace him, he likely knew his days as the man a heartbeat away from the Oval Office were numbered.

The problem with this scenario is that not a shred of real evidence—the kind that would survive under competent cross-examination—has emerged in the past half century to back up the suspicions about LBJ’s involvement. Top Kennedy aides have insisted that the Kennedy-Johnson ticket would have been kept intact for the 1964 campaign; Jackie Kennedy also confirmed her husband’s intention to keep LBJ as his running mate.
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Texas was still a critical state for JFK, and it was in the throes of party factionalism and realignment that would have been made worse if Johnson were dumped from the ticket. And many ask why President Kennedy would go to Texas on a fence-mending mission if he secretly knew he would be changing his reelection paradigm in a few months.

Another conclusion about the Sanford-for-Johnson swap is possible. JFK was thick as flies with top reporters and loved to hear their gossip. It is quite
likely he had been informed about press investigations of LBJ’s corrupt business practices in Texas that were being undertaken even as the Dallas trip was being scheduled.
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JFK may have hatched a contingency plan: If he needed to drop Johnson from the ticket in 1964, Terry Sanford, a moderate Southerner, was a reasonable substitute. Kennedy might well have shared this with Lincoln. He often told her what was on his mind at the moment—a kind of thinking out loud to a confidential secretary, just to hear the idea verbalized. The contingency plan might or might not have ever been put into effect. If Johnson’s financial shenanigans had been exposed before the spring of 1964, Kennedy probably would have dropped him. In living memory at the time, FDR had dropped two separate vice presidents (John Nance Garner in 1940 and Henry Wallace in 1944), so it wouldn’t have been seen as terribly unusual. On the other hand, if LBJ was able to suppress or squelch the press inquiries—quite possible in those days—then he likely would have survived on the ticket.

Johnson arguably had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill Kennedy. But so did dozens, if not hundreds, of other individuals and groups. And during the five decades since, his involvement is nothing more than conjecture, with no proof even of real smoke, much less fire. It is more like misty fog, generated by the need to find a larger-than-life villain to explain the great evil that ended a promising leader’s life.

Another area of controversy concerns the protection accorded JFK. This much is obvious: The federal agencies that were supposed to protect him failed at one of their most fundamental responsibilities, and then tried to paper over their mistakes. The FBI destroyed evidence and assembled a self-serving report. The CIA withheld crucial information from the public, the press, and the Warren Commission for decades—and may still be doing so. The Secret Service fell short in two ways. The agents designated to protect Kennedy’s life were unable to accomplish the paramount mission of the Secret Service. And the administrative leadership of the Secret Service and its parent Treasury Department had not made an aggressive case for more agents and stricter standards to guard the president when he was outside the safe confines of the White House “bubble.” The individual agents are the least culpable even though no group has blamed itself more. These men were shockingly overworked and overextended, almost beyond human endurance at times.
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Also, the agents were too few in number to do the job fully, and they were kept too far away from the president to help in the kind of split-second attack that occurred in 1963. Their supervisors knew the dangers for years, yet nothing was done to stop a tragedy waiting to happen.