Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Wiegman then told Trask something possibly contradictory when he said that “when I [not he and Johns] came back down the hill Lem Johns didn’t have a ride and I said ‘Come on, get in our car,’” which he said Johns did.21

  Since Johns doesn’t say in his report that he went up the grassy slope, and Wiegman said he did, I contacted Johns by phone. Now living in retirement in Alabama, Johns chuckled when he heard Wiegman’s story. “I never got out of the street,” he said. When I asked him if he could have at least stepped a little off the street to the grassy area at the bottom of the slope, he said, “No, I never did. I never left the street.” He chuckled again over Wiegman’s story that implied he was checking around the assassination scene. “Our job is not to investigate. Our only job is to remove the vice president from danger.” He reiterated, “I never left the street,” adding, “I don’t know where that fellow came up with his story.” Johns said that he was on the street for “two to three minutes” before he hitched a ride to Parkland with the people “in the photographers’ convertible.”22

  We don’t know the definitive answer to the question concerning the alleged presence of Secret Service agents on the grassy knoll shortly after the shooting, but whatever it is, we know there is an innocent explanation for it. Why? Because the scientific and medical evidence could not be any more conclusive than it is: no shot was fired from the grassy knoll, the grassy knoll as the site where one would place an assassin makes no sense, no one saw anyone with a rifle behind the stockade fence or running away from it, and no rifle or expended cartridge casings from a rifle were found there. Since we know these things to be a fact, even if we assume for the sake of argument that there were twenty people on the grassy knoll claiming to be Secret Service agents, that wouldn’t change this fact. And by definition and necessarily, this reality would dictate that they would have to be up there for some reason other than complicity in the assassination. What I’m saying is that the Secret-Service-agents-on-the-grassy-knoll argument “doesn’t go anywhere.”

  Moreover, in the same “doesn’t go anywhere” mode, even if there had been a gunman firing at the president from behind the picket fence, what purpose could Secret Service agents have served? The two Dallas officers who thought they encountered Secret Service agents behind the fence never said the agents were doing anything that could possibly help any assassin who had shot the president from behind the fence. Both Weitzman and Harkness merely said they saw these “agents” there, not that they were trying to keep people away from behind the fence so someone could escape, or prevent legitimate law enforcement from searching behind the fence for evidence. So whoever gave the impression of being a Secret Service agent clearly wasn’t acting in any way indicative of complicity in the assassination.

  And how can anyone draw any conspiratorial inference from the supposed Secret Service agents standing around behind the Book Depository Building six minutes after the shooting? I personally don’t see where the Secret-Service-agent-impersonation story goes.

  As indicated, the Secret-Service-agent-behind-the-picket-fence story has been heavily cited by authors of pro-conspiracy books as strong evidence of a conspiracy. As one example among many, author Sylvia Meagher, in referring to the alleged Secret Service agent Dallas police officer Smith encountered, writes, “I suggest that he was one of the assassins, armed with false credentials.”23 And the conspiracy authors never fail to mention the main witnesses who thought they saw Secret Service agents that day on the grassy knoll, like Sergeant Harkness and Officer Joe Smith.24

  But with one commendable exception,25 they predictably do not mention the most prominent person of all who fell victim that day to the phenomenon that afflicts most humans—as Henry Thoreau put it, “We see what we expect to see.” It’s a rich irony that this person is the very person whose memory the conspiracy theorists fight so endlessly to defend, using the Secret-Service-impersonation story as one of the quills in their conspiratorial quiver. The reader has to know by now that I’m talking about Lee Harvey Oswald. In an interview of Oswald in Captain Fritz’s office on the morning of November 24, 1963, just an hour or so before Jack Ruby shot him, Oswald asked one of his interviewers, Secret Service inspector Thomas Kelley, if he was an FBI agent. When Kelley said he was not, that he was a member of the Secret Service, Oswald said that “when he was standing in front of the Textbook Building and about to leave it, a young crew-cut man rushed up to him and said he was from the Secret Service, showed [his] identification, and asked him where the phone was. Oswald said he pointed toward the pay phone in the building and that he saw the man actually go to the phone before he left.”26*

  Others that day made the same erroneous assumption as Oswald. Dealey Plaza motorcade witness Ronald Fischer testified before the Warren Commission that after the shooting, he “ran up to the top of the hill [grassy knoll] where all the Secret Service men had run.”27 But he told an HSCA investigator he did not know the men were Secret Service men, except that they wore suits and ties and appeared to have been law enforcement people.28 And Mrs. Arnold Rowland testified that when her husband saw a man in the window of the Book Depository Building minutes prior to the shooting, “we assumed that it was a Secret Service man.”29

  From all the evidence it clearly appears that the Secret Service sightings on the grassy knoll and behind the Book Depository Building after the shooting are entitled to about the same weight as Oswald’s statement in Captain Fritz’s office about being confronted by a Secret Service agent in front of the Book Depository Building.

  The Zanies (and Others) Have Their Say

  Comedy feeds on tragedy. And whenever there’s a major catastrophe or tragedy, as sure as death and taxes a chorus of cuckoo birds will voice their bizarre observations. It’s automatic, as automatic as the bird whistles in the stands when there’s a controversial call in an athletic event. But unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists in this case, although an enormous number of crackpots have surfaced to tell their silly stories about every single aspect of the Kennedy assassination, not nearly as many cuckoo birds as the conspiracy theorists would have liked, nor as many as one would have expected given the bedlam and chaotic circumstances following the shooting in Dealey Plaza,* have surfaced to say they saw things at or around the time of the assassination from which an inference of conspiracy could be drawn. Those who did ranged in credibility from nonexistent to—well—nonexistent. But no matter how far-fetched, fantastic (as in fantasy), and lacking in credibility their stories were, the conspiracy theorists have seized on these stories as holy writ and totally worthy of belief.†

  One of the Dealey Plaza witnesses whom conspiracy theorists have dearly embraced (to the extent of paying for his autograph at their conventions) as an important rebuttal to the conclusion of the Warren Commission that no shots came from the grassy knoll is Virgil “Ed” Hoffman, a deaf-mute. Conspiracy theorist Jim Marrs, in his book Crossfire, says, “It is [a] strange irony that the one person who apparently witnessed men with guns behind the wooden picket fence on the grassy knoll at the time of the Kennedy assassination was unable to tell anyone what he saw. Virgil Hoffman of Dallas has been deaf since birth and, as is common with that disability, he cannot speak.”1 Hoffman could make sounds, but nothing that was comprehensible to a third party.2

  Virgil Hoffman first came to the attention of the authorities almost four years after the assassination when Jim Dowdy, his supervisor at Texas Instruments in Dallas, called the FBI on June 26, 1967, and told them that an employee, Hoffman, desired to tell the FBI what he saw at the time of the assassination. The FBI told Dowdy that Hoffman, being a deaf-mute, should put in writing everything he saw on that day.

  Two days later, Hoffman appeared at the Dallas FBI headquarters. Because he did not read lips and was only semiliterate in reading and writing, he had a difficult time communicating with the agents, but he managed to convey to them, per an FBI report of that day, that when the motorcade was passing through Dealey Plaza, he was standin
g off the Stemmons Freeway (often referred to as the Stemmons Expressway) near the Texas and Pacific Railroad bridge that crosses over the freeway (not the railroad overpass above Elm, Main, and Commerce, but the one about a hundred yards to the northwest). He said that right after the shooting he saw two white males, clutching something dark to their chests with both hands, running from the rear of the Texas School Book Depository Building. The men ran north, then east, and Hoffman lost sight of them. The report doesn’t say whether the interviewing agent (Special Agent Will Hayden Griffin) told Hoffman that from Hoffman’s vantage point he wouldn’t have been able to see the rear of the Texas School Book Depository Building because of a six-foot fence west of the building running for about 150 feet north of the building. In any event, the report goes on to say, “Approximately two hours after the above interview with Hoffman, he returned…and advised he had just returned from the spot on the Stemmons Freeway…and had decided he could not have seen the men running because of a fence west of the Texas School Book Depository Building. He said it was possible he saw these two men on the fence or something else.”3

  Since Hoffman admitted that he couldn’t have seen what he said he saw, that should have been the end of him as a purported witness. But Hoffman was not about to go away.

  In the meantime, the FBI interviewed Roy Truly, the superintendent of the Book Depository Building, on July 6, 1967, and he said that the subject fence was constructed approximately two years before the assassination. The previous day, July 5, the FBI interviewed Hoffman’s father, E. Hoffman, and brother, Fred. The FBI report of the interview said, “Both advised that Virgil Hoffman has been a deaf mute his entire life and has in the past distorted facts of events observed by him. Both the father and brother stated that Virgil Hoffman loved President Kennedy and had mentioned to them just after the assassination that…he saw numerous men running after the President was shot. The father…stated that he did not believe his son had seen anything of value and doubted he had observed any men running from the Texas School Book Depository, and for this reason did not mention it to the FBI.”4 Hoffman would later claim that his father and uncle had told him it would be “dangerous” for him to say what he saw because of the “C.I.A. or other persons.”5

  It should be noted that way back in 1964, two men, James E. Romack and George W. Rackley, told the FBI they were standing about thirty-five yards to the rear of the Depository Building at the time of the shooting, facing the rear doors of the building, and they saw no one come out of the rear of the building right after the shooting.6

  At this point, everyone (including apparently Virgil Hoffman’s own family) intended to put the matter behind them. Everyone, that is, except Virgil Hoffman. Almost another ten years went by before Hoffman, this time with bells and bangles, emerged once again. Thoughts about the assassination obviously had not died within him, but instead had been gestating. By 1977, when he reemerged, allegations about Kennedy’s assassin being behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll and about a “puff of smoke” being seen in the vicinity at the time of the shooting (much more on this later) had become the currency of discourse in the conspiracy theory community, and Hoffman had a much better tale for the authorities. He appeared at the Dallas FBI office on March 21, 1977, and this time told agents that the two men he had seen were not, as he had first told them, behind the Texas School Book Depository Building, but instead were—yes, you guessed it—behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll, and one had a rifle and the other a handgun. (The conspiracy theorists, in their books, have always put one assassin behind the picket fence. Hoffman put two there. Both were obviously real, professional hit men for the mob or CIA, etc. If the rifle doesn’t get Kennedy, a good old revolver will for sure.) The FBI report says, “Hoffman made hand motions indicating that one of the men disassembled the rifle and placed it in a suitcase” and that he had also seen a puff of smoke prior to that.7

  Four days later, on March 25, one Richard Freeman, a coworker of Hoffman’s at Texas Instruments, called the FBI to advise that he knew sign language and Hoffman was concerned that the FBI perhaps did not fully understand what he was trying to communicate. But it turned out the FBI had gotten the story pretty straight. Freeman told the FBI that Hoffman had communicated the following to him: From his position atop the Stemmons Freeway overpass, “Hoffman saw two men, one with a rifle and one with a handgun, behind a wooden fence…this fence is located on the same side of Elm Street as the Texas School Book Depository Building but closer to the Stemmons Freeway. Since he is deaf, he naturally could not hear any shots but thought he saw a puff of smoke in the vicinity of where the two men were standing. As soon as he saw the motorcade speed away and saw the puff of smoke in the vicinity of the two men, the man with the rifle looked like he was breaking the rifle down by removing the barrel from the stock and placing it in some dark type of suitcase that the other man was holding. The two men then ran north on the railroad tracks” out of Hoffman’s sight. Hoffman told Freeman, “Both men were white males, both [were] dressed in some type of white suits, and both wore ties.”*

  On March 28, 1977, FBI special agent Udo H. Specht had Hoffman take him to where he said he was at the time of his alleged observations. Specht estimated the distance from the vantage point to the area behind the wooden fence “at approximately 200 yards.” Hoffman communicated to Specht that after he saw what he claims he did, he tried to get the attention of a Dallas policeman nearby but he could not communicate with the officer.8

  On the 1988 British television production The Men Who Killed Kennedy, Hoffman said the FBI didn’t want him to tell anyone what he saw and “offered me money to keep me quiet.” The conspiracy theorists are so impoverished in their desperate search for evidence to support their cause that they are compelled to descend to such whimsical, ever-changing, and obviously untrue accounts as that of Virgil Hoffman.*

  One of the very biggest favorites of the conspiracy community is the late Jean Hill, the famed “Lady in Red” who parlayed her Dealey Plaza experience into a commercial enterprise, speaking for a fee at buff conventions (always signing autographs in red ink in memory of the red raincoat she was wearing that day), making many appearances on radio and TV, and even writing a book, JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness. London Weekend Television contacted her about testifying for the defense in the London trial and she agreed, but after Gerry Spence and his staff either interviewed her or looked at her record, they elected not to call her to the stand as a witness. It’s not hard to figure out why. It has something to do with credibility.

  At the time of the assassination, Mrs. Hill, with her friend Mary Moorman, was watching the motorcade pass by from the south side (to the president’s left) of Elm Street. At approximately 1:20 p.m., NBC national news cut to its Fort Worth affiliate, WBAP, for a live interview of Mrs. Hill by reporter Tom Whalen. Hill told Whalen that just before the president’s car came right in front of her and Mary Moorman, “the shots came directly across the street from us. And just as the president’s car became directly even with us,” the president and his wife “were looking at a dog that was in the middle of the seat,† and about that time two shots rang out.” Hill said she heard “more shots” right after these two. She elaborated that “the shots came from the hill—it was just east of the underpass”(i.e., the grassy knoll) and said she thought she saw “this man running…up there.”9 Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Hill gave a sworn statement to the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department in which she repeated the dog story, did not indicate where the shots came from, but added, “I thought I saw some men in plain clothes shooting back” (none were), acknowledging that “everything was such a blur.” After the shooting, she said she “looked across the street and up the hill [grassy knoll] and saw a man running toward the monument [pergola]” and she “started running” across the street in his direction but was eventually turned back by police officers.10

  At this point, Mrs. Hill was just one of many Dealey Plaza witnesses who thought the shots
came from the grassy knoll. As to the running man, with chaos reigning after the shooting and people running in every direction, a man running toward the pergola, in and of itself, is meaningless. So there was nothing of any special significance to the assassination inquiry in Hill’s two statements on November 22, 1963. But not to worry. Like wine, Mrs. Hill’s self-described “blur” became clearer and better with time and she came to embrace virtually everything about the grassy knoll any conspiracy buff could ever hope for.

  In her testimony before the Warren Commission on March 24, 1964, in addition to repeating that she thought the shots came “from the [grassy] knoll,” she elaborated on the running man. He was wearing a brown overcoat and hat and when she first saw him, “he was at the top of [the] hill…right up there by the School Depository,” she said, “more to the west-end” of the building, and he was “running, or getting away, or walking away or something—I would say he was running.” He was going “toward the railroad tracks to the west.” When Warren Commission counsel asked if the man had a weapon in his hand, she answered, “No, I never saw a weapon during the whole time, in anyone’s hand.” She said she ran after the man to “catch” him, and while she was running after him she “looked down and saw some red stuff and I thought ‘Oh, they got him, he’s bleeding,’…but it turned out to be Koolade or some sort of red drink.” By the time she looked up from the grass, she had lost sight of the man and “couldn’t find him again…By that time everyone was screaming and moving around.”