Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  An extension of the above argument comes at the question from a different direction and focuses on the allegation that the bullet that hit Connally only hit him: to my knowledge, everyone, even the extremists on the conspiracy fringes, agrees that Governor Connally was shot in his upper right back, not from the side or right front, as most conspiracy theorists believe Kennedy was. Some representative examples: “[the] bullet struck Governor Connally in the back”;46 “the missile that hit the Governor in the back”;47 “the [bullet] entered Connally’s body at the rear of his right armpit”;48 and “this shot…struck the Governor in the back.”49 And they likewise all agree that the bullet was proceeding from back to front, not right to left or left to right. For example: “[The bullet] exited by the right nipple,”50 and “the missile traversed Connally’s chest, blasting out approximately four inches of the [right] fifth rib and collapsing the right lung. It exited below the right nipple.”51 Indeed, when Governor Connally testified before the Warren Commission on April 21, 1964, he took his shirt off in front of six out of the seven Commission members, General Counsel Lee Rankin, five assistant counsels, and four other observers, including Waggoner Carr, the attorney general of Texas, and Dr. Robert Shaw, the doctor who operated on him, and all looked at his wounds. As Arlen Specter, one of those present, put it, “It was perfectly plain as to the fact that the bullet had struck the governor in the back and had exited below the right nipple at a lower angle on the front of his body.”52

  A question I have for the anti–single-bullet conspiracy theorists is that if Connally did not receive the wound to the upper right part of his back in the way that the Warren Commission and HSCA concluded he received it, then just how in the world did Connally receive a wound to his back from a bullet fired from his rear without the bullet having struck Kennedy (whose upper body completely covered, looking from the rear, the right upper part of Connally’s back, where he was hit) first? Who was it, if not Oswald, who fired this bullet that they say only hit Connally, and from what conceivable position in Dealey Plaza did he fire it?

  2. A second powerful reason to believe in the validity of the single-bullet theory without any reference to the Zapruder film is the lack of any physical evidence supporting a second gunman. As has already been established, three shell casings ejected from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle were found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building beneath the southeasternmost window. If, indeed, a fourth shot had been fired that day (and hence, there was a second assassin), how is it possible that not one person, out of an estimated crowd of four to five hundred spectators in Dealey Plaza, saw a second gunman? Furthermore, how is it possible that a blanket search of the plaza by law enforcement agents right after the shooting failed to turn up any physical evidence of a second gunman (e.g., a shell casing, a fourth bullet, a second rifle, etc.)? Are we to believe, then, that the second gunman simply vanished into thin air? Not only he himself, but all evidence of his existence? Is that life in the real world? Or is that nonsense? Again, the lack of any physical evidence of a second gunman, all by itself, is extremely powerful evidence supporting the single-bullet theory.

  3. Another fact that, all by itself, is virtually conclusive evidence proving the single-bullet theory is that the entrance wound in Governor Connally’s back was not circular, but oval. Drs. Charles Gregory and Robert Shaw, who attended Connally at Parkland Hospital, described the wound as “linear” and “elliptical” in shape,53 indicating that the bullet was out of alignment with its trajectory just before striking Connally’s body. The HSCA said that a factor which “significantly” influenced its conclusion that the bullet that struck Connally had first struck and passed through Kennedy “was the ovoid shape of the wound in the Governor’s back, indicating that the bullet had begun to tumble or yaw before entering. An ovoid wound is characteristic of one caused by a bullet that has passed through or glanced off an intervening object…The forensic pathology panel’s conclusions were consistent with the so-called single bullet theory advanced by the Warren Commission,” to wit, that one bullet had passed “through both President Kennedy and Governor Connally.”54

  My firearms expert at the London trial, Monty Lutz, told me that “no bullet traveling at 2,000 feet per second is going to start to tumble or yaw on its own until around 200 yards. When Connally was struck he was around 60 yards from the window, so the bullet had to have hit something before it hit him, and other than Kennedy’s body, there was nothing between the sixth-floor window and him. Not the oak tree, or its leaves. Nothing.”55 It has to be emphasized that at the time Connally was struck by a bullet (somewhere between Z frames 210 and 222),* the oak tree to the north of Elm close to the Depository Building was no longer in the line of fire from the sniper’s nest to Connally’s body.56 So Kennedy’s body was the only intervening object that the Connally bullet could have first hit. HSCA physical scientist Larry M. Sturdivan told the committee that the Carcano bullet was a “very stable bullet, perhaps one of the most stable bullets that we have ever done experimentation with.” He said that it would only start yawing—and then very little, “perhaps less than a degree”—at “about 100 meters” (about 110 yards) and “if it had struck [Connally] without having previously encountered another object, it [Connally’s back wound] would never have been elongated. This bullet is too stable. It would have had to be a nice round hole.”57

  4. Another reason why we know Connally was hit by the same bullet that had struck Kennedy is that the argument that there wasn’t enough time to fire a second shot from the bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, and hence Connally must have been hit by a second assassin, doesn’t go anywhere. It would only go somewhere if Commission Exhibit No. 399, the bullet that struck Connally (and which the Warren Commission and HSCA concluded had first struck Kennedy), hadn’t been fired from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano. But firearm tests showed that it was fired from Oswald’s rifle to the exclusion of all other weapons.58 Therefore, even if we assume that Commission Exhibit No. 399 did not first pass through Kennedy’s body, we still know that it was fired from Oswald’s rifle, not a different rifle, and we don’t have any evidence of a second assassin, only Oswald. Or did Oswald, after shooting Kennedy in the back, hand his rifle to a second gunman standing beside him and say, “I just shot Kennedy, now you shoot Connally?”

  5. Finally, there’s another reason, almost too embarrassingly simple to mention, why, independent of all the conclusive reasons set forth above, we can almost be certain that the shot that hit Kennedy also hit Connally: no separate bullet was available to hit Connally! Let me explain. No one alleges anymore that the first shot around Z frames 160 to 165 hit Kennedy or Connally. (See later text.) And everyone agrees that the last shot, at frame 313, only struck Kennedy. (See later text.) So if only three shots were fired, that only leaves one more bullet, folks, to have hit both Kennedy and Connally. At least last time I heard, three minus two leaves one. Were only three shots fired? Well, only three empty cartridge cases were found on the floor of the sniper’s nest, and no other empty cartridge case was found anywhere else in Dealey Plaza. Also, of the two major studies of the number of bullets fired in Dealey Plaza, by author Josiah Thompson in his “Master List of Assassination Witnesses” in 1967, and the HSCA in 1978, 79 percent (Thompson) and close to 75 percent (HSCA) of the witnesses only heard three shots. Only 3.5 percent of the witnesses in each study heard four shots. (Small percentages of witnesses heard other numbers of shots, one claiming to have heard eight shots.) So the very, very high probability is simply that no other shot was fired that day that could have hit Connally without also having hit Kennedy. To be cruel to the buffs, they simply ran out of bullets for their second-gun theory. There was no other bullet flying through the air that could have only hit Connally.* To accept the position of the conspiracy theorists, one would have to reject the physical evidence (only three cartridge cases), but accept the hearing acuity of 3.5 percent of the people in Dealey Plaza over that of around 75 percent of the witnes
ses. Actually, the percentage of people the theorists would have to thumb their noses at would be 85 percent, since 10 percent of the witnesses in the HSCA study only heard two shots.59

  Each of the above five reasons, alone and by themselves, proves the single-bullet theory independent of the Zapruder film. (I would defy any conspiracy theorist to come up with even one—much less five—logical arguments that are independent of the Zapruder film and support the proposition that Kennedy and Connally were hit by separate bullets.) All five of these reasons, when taken together, prove the proposition that Connally was hit by the same bullet that hit Kennedy not just beyond all reasonable doubt, but beyond all possible doubt. Therefore, the film itself cannot, by definition, show something else. As I said earlier, any interpretation of the film that contravenes the single-bullet theory either must be a misinterpretation by the person analyzing the film, or is explainable in some other way.

  Although the Zapruder film, by itself, can never conclusively prove that Kennedy and Connally were struck by the same bullet, it will soon be obvious to the reader that a close examination of the film tends to corroborate, not refute, the single-bullet theory. Before we examine the sequence of shots fired during the assassination, I must point out the many built-in limitations in trying to analyze the Zapruder film.

  First of all, the difficulties of extracting information from a film whose images are small are formidable. Film as small as that used in Zapruder’s camera is limited in its ability to capture photographic detail, owing partly to the relatively large size of the film’s grain (i.e., the chemical dots that compose the image). Those who have never seen 8-millimeter film might find it hard to imagine just how tiny each frame is. The film strip itself is 8 millimeters wide, less than a third of an inch. Since a part of this width is taken up by the borders of the frames and the sprocket holes running down one side of the film, the actual image area is much smaller—just nineteen-hundredths by fifteen-hundredths of an inch (about one-fifth the size of a postage stamp). The area that Kennedy and Connally occupy within that image is even smaller. When the film first begins, the images of both Kennedy and Connally fit into an area that is only one-sixty-fourth of an inch square, less than the head of a pin. Even at the point where they appear the largest in the frame (their image size grows as the limousine draws closer to Zapruder’s camera), their combined images cover an area that is just one-thirteenth of a square inch. At Z225, around the time we can see they have been hit with a single bullet, Kennedy and Connally fit into an area one-twenty-sixth of a square inch. These images are so minuscule that the grain of the film obscures details, leaving us with a soft, slightly blurred image, a condition that is not improved by the enlargement of the individual frames.

  Second, although one constantly hears how the film has been digitally enhanced with the very latest computer technology (mostly, film stabilization techniques designed to remove the “jitter” inherent in hand-held home movies, and amplifying the contrast between bright and dark portions of the film), to this very day most frames of the film available to researchers (second and later generations of the film) remain grainy and blurry, making interpretation virtually as difficult as it has always been. As Richard Trask, the leading authority on photographic evidence in the Kennedy assassination, points out, “In a 4 or 5 frame cycle [of the film], a pattern was found of a good frame preceded and followed by several less sharp [actually, frustratingly fuzzy] frames. This was very common in these cameras at the time and was attributable to the mechanized system of the camera itself.”60

  And let’s not forget that, like all film, literally half of the movements of Kennedy and Connally were never captured by the film and have been lost forever. Why? Contrary to popular belief, a film does not provide a continuous image to the viewer. Instead, a sequence of still images is recorded in rapid succession by the motion picture camera, and when the sequence is played back at the proper speed, it creates the illusion of motion (through a natural human phenomenon known as “persistence of vision”). It takes a little more than twice as long to advance and stabilize each frame behind the closed shutter of the camera as it does to expose it, which means that for roughly half the overall time no image is being recorded at all. This lost time, seen as a screen “flicker” during projection, is more pronounced in home movies like the Zapruder film, which run at 18 frames per second, than in typical motion picture film shot for movie theaters, which runs at 24 frames per second. More frames (or images) per second results in less screen flicker during projection.

  Another limitation is the subjective nature of film interpretation. Just as beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, life’s events are seen differently by different people, and nothing will ever change this phenomenon. Since interpretations of the movements of Kennedy and Connally in the Zapruder film are subjective (only the explosion to the president’s head at frame 313 requires no interpretation), their value is inherently limited by the fact that the interpretations and the conclusions based thereon can never be proved or disproved scientifically. Moreover, it is a mission impossible to try to divine whether Kennedy and Connally, even if they were hit at the same time, showed this by their physical reactions. Since we know people can react to being struck by a bullet literally hundreds of seconds after the fact, then certainly either Kennedy or Connally could have reacted a second or so after being shot.

  I elicited this well-known phenomenon of a “delayed reaction” from one of my Dealey Plaza witnesses at the London trial, Charles Brehm. Over many objections by defense counsel Gerry Spence, the judge allowed me to pursue the matter. To counter Spence’s argument that Connally reacted too long after Kennedy did for them to have been hit by the same bullet, but too soon after Kennedy did for Oswald to have been able to fire two rounds, I wanted to offer to the jury a plausible reason for this in the event the jury accepted Spence’s position.

  Question: “Do you have any personal knowledge of a person being hit by a bullet and having any delayed reaction to having been shot?”

  Brehm: “Yes, sir.” Brehm said it was in 1944, during the Battle of Brest in France during the Second World War. He noticed a soldier on his left who got wounded in his right arm.

  Question: “How do you know that?”

  Answer: “Because he bloodied up in that area.”

  Question: “You saw a reddening of his jacket?”

  Answer: “That’s correct.”

  Question: “And you presumed it was blood?”

  Answer: “Yes.”

  Question: “At the time you saw the blood, what was he doing?”

  Answer: “We were all on a dead run across the field.”

  Question: “He was continuing on?”

  Answer: “Yes.”

  Question: “He didn’t stop?”

  Answer: “No.”

  Question: “He didn’t put his left hand over his right arm?”

  Answer: “No.”

  Question: “Nothing at all?”

  Answer: “No.”

  Question: “He showed no visible signs of his reaction to being hit?”

  Answer: “None at all.”

  Brehm testified that “in the months that I spent with him in the hospital, he said that he could not remember being hit in the arm. It was only after he was [also] hit in the side that he was aware he was wounded.”61 In this case, Connally himself testified before the HSCA that although he was aware of being struck in the back, he did not realize until much later that he had also been struck in the rib and wrist by the bullet.62 And Dr. Michael Baden, the chief forensic pathologist for the HSCA, told the committee, “There’s no way to compare how people react to…gunshot injury. There often is delay time between an injury and a person manifesting the effects of such injury.”63

  The essence of what I’m saying is that determining the timing* and number of shots (or the validity or invalidity of the single-bullet theory) by only analyzing the Zapruder film is really like an existential discussion about how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin (i.e., it’s more of an intellectual exercise than anything else). Fortunately, since we have other more reliable evidence, we are not hostage to, nor bound by, whatever results this exercise produces.

  Two final thoughts before we examine the Zapruder film in detail: In dealing with the frames of the film, one is wise not to think of the numbers of frames in the same context as other numbers. By that I mean that the difference between, for instance, the numbers 200 and 209 is 9, a substantial, meaningful number in our minds. But in the context of the Zapruder film, 9 frames only represents one-half of one second. So one shouldn’t place too much importance in, let’s say, a hypothetical reaction time difference between Kennedy and Connally of 5 frames, which is less than one-third of one second!

  Second, one should be aware that in the study of the timing of the shots in the Zapruder film, one is always dealing with at least two moments in time, and usually three, for each shot being analyzed. One moment is the first frame that we notice Kennedy or Connally showing some physical reaction to a severe external stimulus. Even where there’s no delayed reaction, this moment is usually at least a frame or two after Kennedy or Connally has been hit—a “frame or two after” meaning that Kennedy or Connally was actually struck one-eighteenth to two-eighteenths of a second earlier. And since the time it takes the bullet to travel eats up frames before it reaches its target, the actual firing of the bullet (at the distance the bullets were fired in Dealey Plaza) is around two frames earlier. For instance, as to the head shot, we see the president’s head exploding at frame 313, but the HSCA deduced that it actually struck Kennedy at frame 312. It went on to say, “The distance from that window [sixth-floor sniper’s nest] to the limousine at frame 312 is approximately 265 feet. Since a Mannlicher-Carcano bullet travels at approximately 2,000 feet per second, the bullet flight time would have been 0.13 second, or the passage of approximately 2.4 frames in Zapruder’s camera. Subtracting these two frames from frame 312, it is apparent that the fatal head shot was fired at approximately frame 310.”64