Reclaiming History
Page 85
It is because virtually all authors of books on the assassination have had no background in law enforcement that a remark like the following, from anti-conspiracy author Gerald Posner, could be made: “To think that if the Zapruder film did not exist we would never be able to prove with any certainty what happened in Dealey Plaza.”6
So traditionally—and the Kennedy case is no exception—guilt (and the existence or nonexistence of a conspiracy) in a murder case is proved not by a film or eyewitnesses, but rather by other evidence. And in this case, the physical evidence isn’t just persuasive or even overwhelming, it’s absolutely conclusive that only three shots were fired, and that one of the two shots that hit Kennedy also went on to hit Connally. Hence, Connally was not hit by a separate bullet, which would have established a second gunman and a conspiracy.
Yet the Zapruder film remains the focal point for most conspiracy theorists who are drawn to this unique and grisly spectacle. Over the past forty years, the film, for many, has become the Holy Grail of the case for conspiracy. At first, the apparent backward snap of the president’s head at the moment of the head shot, and the alleged delayed reaction between Kennedy and Connally around the time the Warren Commission claimed they were hit by a single bullet, were touted as absolute proof of two assassins. Today, even though the overwhelming majority of evidence has shown that neither allegation is true, most conspiracy theorists, embracing the philosophy of “Don’t confuse me with the facts, I’ve already made up my mind,” still cling tenaciously to these arguments. However, some theorists, knowing that the evidence has obliterated their position, are now actually arguing that the film itself has been altered as part of a massive cover-up to hide the truth about the “conspiracy.” In this chapter, we’ll examine the facts and the myths surrounding the timing and number of shots, the single-bullet theory, the president’s head snap to the rear, the source of the gunfire, and allegations that the most famous home movie of all time has been altered to conceal the truth. We’ll also learn that the “magic” bullet was not magic and the “pristine” bullet (same bullet) was not pristine.
Several hundred Dealey Plaza photographs relating directly to the assassination were taken by approximately thirty-one photographers on November 22, 1963, making the assassination of President Kennedy, arguably, the most photographed murder in history.
Contrary to popular belief, Zapruder was not the only one to capture the assassination on film.* Three other amateur films (by Marie Muchmore, Orville Nix, and Charles Bronson) did, but they are not nearly as valuable as the Zapruder film. All three were taken on the opposite side of the street from where Zapruder saw the right side of the president’s head open up, and whereas Zapruder was only 75 or so feet away from the president at the time of the fatal head shot, Bronson was around 240 feet away, Nix around 215 feet, and Muchmore around 140 feet.7 Moreover, the frame of the Bronson film that corresponds to the shot to the head is so unclear that nothing taking place can be identified, and the Muchmore frames corresponding to the head shot are partially obstructed by Dealey Plaza spectators. Only the Nix frames capture the fatal shot and snap of the head to the rear, though not with the clarity of the Zapruder film. Also, Nix did not shoot any film around the time of the first two shots.
Abraham Zapruder’s home movie is unique in that it shows the presidential limousine throughout the entire period of the shooting. It was, and remains, the only complete film of the assassination, Zapruder first picking up the limousine with his camera as it made the turn onto Elm Street from Houston Street and, except for a few frames when the limousine was behind the Stemmons Freeway sign, continuing to take a motion picture of the limousine until it disappeared from sight to his right.
Born in czarist Russia in 1905, Zapruder emigrated to the United States in 1920 and landed a job at a New York City dress factory. He and his wife moved to Dallas, Texas, in 1941, where they raised two children. In 1954, Zapruder and a partner went into business as “Jennifer Juniors, Inc., of Dallas,” which manufactured a line of young women’s and children’s clothing. By 1963, the company occupied the fourth and fifth floors of the Dal-Tex (Dallas Textiles) Building, located on the northeast corner of Elm and Houston across the street from the Texas School Book Depository.8 On the morning of November 22, Zapruder left his Model 414PD Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series 8-millimeter movie camera at home, figuring that the drizzly overcast morning wouldn’t allow him to get good movies of the president’s scheduled motorcade trip past his office building. By late morning, however, sunshine began breaking through the thick cloud cover that shrouded Dallas. At the urging of his assistant, Lillian Rogers, Zapruder drove home and retrieved his amateur camera. He first thought of filming the motorcade from his office window, but decided to go down to the street for a better view. He found a good spot—a two-and-a-half-by-four-and-a-half-foot rectangular concrete pedestal about four feet high—on the north side of Elm Street in front of the decorative pergola. The perch would afford Zapruder, a tremendous fan of the president, a commanding view of the motorcade as it passed from his left to his right down Elm. Only the Stemmons Freeway sign, which stood between the concrete pedestal and Elm Street, would interrupt Zapruder’s view for a moment.
Wearing his customary fedora hat and bow tie, the fifty-eight-year-old Zapruder climbed atop the pedestal, then urged his office receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman, to stand behind him on the pedestal in case “he got dizzy.”9 His camera loaded with a twenty-five-foot roll of 16-millimeter film (which in effect afforded him fifty feet of 8-millimeter silent film for his 8-millimeter camera), half of which had already been exposed, Zapruder checked to make sure it was fully wound, pushed the zoom lens to the maximum telephoto position, and set the camera to its “normal” run mode (approximately 18 frames per second).10
The first scene Zapruder shot of the motorcade was a seven-second sequence of the three lead Dallas police motorcycles (traveling a half block ahead of the motorcade’s lead car) turning the corner from Houston onto Elm Street. Zapruder, unaware of the makeup of the motorcade, stopped filming as soon as he realized that the president wasn’t coming into view. A moment later, the presidential limousine, its flags fluttering in the breeze, appeared among the cheering crowd gathered at the southwest corner of Elm and Houston. Just after the limousine had turned onto Elm and straightened out, Zapruder started filming again at frame 133, the first frame of the Zapruder film that shows the presidential limousine. The next ten seconds captured the presidential party waving to the crowd and then, in a moment of horror, coming under gunfire. Zapruder told the Warren Commission eight months later, “I heard the first shot* and I saw the president lean over and grab himself like this (holding his left chest)…For a moment I thought it was, you know, like you say, ‘Oh, he got me,’…you’ve heard these expressions, and then I [said to myself]—I don’t believe the president is going to make jokes like this, but before I had a chance to organize my mind, I heard a second shot and then I saw his head open up and the blood and everything came out and I started—I can hardly talk about it.” Zapruder started crying. After taking a moment to compose himself, he continued, “Then I started yelling, ‘They killed him, they killed him,’…and I was still shooting the pictures until he got under the underpass—I don’t even know how I did it.”11
In the hours after the shooting, Zapruder took the film to the Eastman Kodak Company in Dallas, where it was processed (developed), and later to the Jamieson Film Company, where three color copies were made. Zapruder turned two of the first-generation copies over to the Secret Service that night and sold the third copy and the original film to Life magazine the following morning (November 23).12 One of the Secret Service copies was subsequently loaned to the FBI, which made a second-generation copy and sent it to the FBI laboratory for analysis. There, FBI special agent Lyndal Shaneyfelt, the FBI’s photographic expert, assigned numbers to each of the frames, beginning with the first frame that showed the Dallas police motorcycles turning the corner from
Houston onto Elm.13 It has become customary to refer to each frame of the Zapruder film by Shaneyfelt’s number, preceded by the letter Z for Zapruder, for example, Z186.
The Warren Commission’s study of the film began in earnest on January 27, 1964. During seven, day-long examination sessions (not consecutive), Commission representatives (always in the company of Secret Service representatives) viewed a second-generation copy of the film at regular, slow-motion, and freeze-frame modes in an attempt to sort out exactly what happened. By day two, Special Agent Shaneyfelt suggested that the Commission try to get access to the original film, which no doubt would be clearer. On February 25, the assistant chief of Life’s photographic lab, Herbert Orth, brought the original film to Washington and projected it a number of times for the Commission (as well as representatives from the FBI and Secret Service). Shaneyfelt was right. The original film contained far more detail and clarity than the Commission’s second-generation working copy.14 Reluctant to loan out the original film because of the possibility of damage, Life, which jealously guarded the original film, publishing only selected frames in its November 29 and December 6, 1963, editions, agreed to make available to the Commission a set of 35-millimeter color slides, taken directly from the original film, of all pertinent frames of the assassination, determined by Shaneyfelt to be Z171–334.15
It wasn’t long before the Commission’s examination of the Zapruder film turned up a serious problem. FBI tests had determined that Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano could not be fired twice in less than 2.3 seconds16 (a figure that would later be revised). The FBI had also determined that Zapruder’s Bell & Howell camera had been operating at an average speed of 18.3 frames per second on the day of the assassination.17 The Commission noted that the Zapruder film showed the president waving to the crowd until he disappears from Zapruder’s view behind the Stemmons Freeway sign at Z205. When he emerges a little over a second later, at Z225–226, he seems to be reacting to a shot. Yet an undiscerning view of the Zapruder film shows Governor Connally apparently reacting to a shot between Z235 and Z240.18 As Raymond Marcus puts it in his 1966 book, The Bastard Bullet, “Even assuming that the shot to which JFK is reacting in 226 had struck him as early as 210 (the first frame in which he would have been clearly visible from the sixth floor window after emerging from behind the oak tree), there still would not be time for a second shot from the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle [to hit Connally] until at least 42 frames(2.3 seconds) later, or 252.”19 So at a minimum, 42 frames would have had to elapse between any first and second shot with Oswald’s Carcano. In other words, at this very early stage in the analysis of the Zapruder film, it appeared that unless there was a delayed reaction by Connally, Connally was hit too late to have been hit by the same shot that hit Kennedy, and clearly too soon for Oswald to have gotten off another shot with his bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Ergo, four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza, not three, and hence, there was a conspiracy. Indeed, upon seeing the Zapruder film for the first time, several assistant counsels thought there must have been two assassins. One, David Belin, even called his wife to say there was a second gunman.20
It is a maxim in the conspiracy theorist community that to get around the apparent slight discrepancy in the reaction times of Kennedy and Connally, the Warren Commission “came up with” (as out of whole cloth) or “made up” the “single-bullet theory,” the notion that irrespective of what the Zapruder film shows, the same bullet that hit Kennedy must have gone on to hit Connally. But the Commission didn’t have to make the theory up. In view of all the evidence that there was only one gunman in Dealey Plaza (e.g., only one rifle and one gunman were seen, the bullets that killed Kennedy were connected to only one rifle, etc.), the Commission’s conclusion became inevitable. However, what solidified the theory was the FBI and Secret Service reenactment of the shooting in Dealey Plaza on May 24, 1964 (see later text). When three points—the sniper’s nest, the bullet wound to Kennedy’s back, and the bullet wound to Connally’s back—were found to exist along a straight line, the Commission’s single-bullet theory was “substantiated.”21
The Commission staff’s hypothesis didn’t exactly receive a warm welcome from all of the Warren Commission members. At the Commission’s last meeting on September 18, 1964, and with its report scheduled to reach President Johnson’s desk in just six days, the majority of Chief Justice Earl Warren, Representative Gerald Ford, Allen Dulles, and John McCloy sided with the staff’s single-bullet theory, but Representative Hale Boggs and Senators Richard Russell and John Cooper thought it improbable. Boggs told author Edward Jay Epstein that he had “strong doubts” about the theory and felt the question was never resolved. Cooper claimed that “there was no evidence to show both men were hit by the same bullet.” Russell was the most adamant and wanted his opposition to the single-bullet theory to be acknowledged in a footnote at the bottom of the page in the Commission’s report.*
But Warren felt it was vital that the Commission release a unanimous report. After haggling over the language of the report, Russell relented (as did Cooper and Boggs) if his dissent was acknowledged by reducing the word the majority wanted (“compelling”) down to “persuasive,” and the Commission finally held that: “Although it is not necessary to any essential findings of the Commission to determine just which shot hit Governor Connally, there is very persuasive evidence from the experts to indicate that the same bullet which pierced the President’s throat also caused Governor Connally’s wounds.”22
As tape-recorded on the evening of September 18, President Johnson called Senator Russell at his home in Winder, Georgia. Russell complained to LBJ, “That danged Warren Commission business, it whupped me down so, I’m just worn out fighting over that damned Report.” Russell proceeds to talk about his opposition to the single-bullet theory, saying, “The commission believes that the same bullet that hit Kennedy hit Connally. Well, I don’t believe it.”
LBJ responded, “I don’t either,” as if he had studied the issue and was very knowledgeable about it, both of which we can reasonably assume are not true.
Russell goes on to say, “I couldn’t sign it [the Report]. And I said that Governor Connally testified directly to the contrary and I’m not going to approve of that. So I finally made ’em say there was a difference in the commission, in that part of [us] believed that that wasn’t so.” Russell, who, as indicated, attended far fewer hearings of the Warren Commission than any other member, apparently was so out of it and ill-informed he never understood that the Commission agreed to no such thing. The members did make a concession to Russell, but only in the language used about the single-bullet theory conclusion. Nowhere does the Commission report refer to the division of beliefs among the Commission members about the theory. One typed transcription of the telephone conversation has Russell telling LBJ, “I tried my best to get in a dissent, but they’d come ’round and trade me out of it by giving me a little old threat.”23 But when assassination researcher Max Holland listened to the tape, he concluded that Russell had actually said, “Little old thread of it.”24 Russell most likely was referring to the “thread” or tidbit the Commission had given him in reducing the language from “compelling” down to “persuasive.”
Russell tells LBJ that “I don’t think you’ll be displeased with the Report. [But] it’s too long.”25
A point that never, ever is mentioned by the conspiracy theorists who speak about the division among the Warren Commission over the single-bullet theory is that although a minority of members found the theory hard to accept, the report that all seven Commission members signed off on said, “There was no question in the mind of any member of the Commission that all the shots which caused the President’s and Governor Connally’s wounds were fired from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository.”26
Despite the Warren Commission’s assertion that the single-bullet theory was not essential to its conclusion that there was no evidence of a conspiracy, as critics would correctly point out, the
single-bullet theory was essential to its findings. Commission assistant counsel Norman Redlich put it more bluntly: “To say that [Kennedy and Connally] were hit by separate bullets is synonymous with saying that there were two assassins.”27
It may be advisable to step back for a moment and reflect on what the dispute among the Warren Commission members over the single-bullet theory really says about the Commission. With the single-bullet theory being so important to the Commission’s finding that there was no evidence of a conspiracy in Kennedy’s murder, if—as virtually all conspiracy theorists allege—the Warren Commission deliberately set out to suppress the truth about a conspiracy from the American people, how would it be possible that three out of the seven members of the Commission voiced, for the public record, their skepticism about the theory’s validity? Are the conspiracy theorists at least willing to alter their decades-old argument that “the Warren Commission” conspired to suppress the truth from the American people, by changing it to “four members of the Warren Commission” conspired to do so? Because if the other three members (Boggs, Russell, and Cooper) were trying to suppress the truth about a conspiracy, why in the world would they be advocating a position (i.e., the invalidity of the single-bullet theory) that could only serve to reveal the conspiracy’s existence? And if the Warren Commission critics are willing to make this concession, as it would seem they almost have to, do they then really want us to believe that whoever (Warren?) decided to keep the truth from the American people only approached Ford, Dulles, and McCloy with his conspiratorial idea, not Boggs, Russell, and Cooper? Or that he also approached those three and they refused to join in the conspiracy, but agreed not to tell anyone about it?