Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Nevertheless, the myth of Wallace being one of the shooters of Kennedy persists. Conspiracy theorist Walt Brown, the editor of the substantive JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly, claimed, in a May 29, 1998, press conference at the Conspiracy Museum in Dallas and in the October 2001 edition of his publication, that a latent print examiner from Texas, Nathan Darby, was furnished with a copy of the only latent print found on the cardboard cartons inside the sniper’s nest that was never identified,54† as well as the 1951 fingerprint card for Wallace following his arrest for the murder of John Kinser, and that the expert made a positive match, finding fourteen points of identification. (Recall that our boy Loy Factor put Wallace several windows to the west of the sniper’s nest.) According to Darby’s March 9, 1998, affidavit, the match was of “the left little finger.”55

  On November 20, 2001, I spoke over the telephone with Darby. Eighty-seven at the time, he told me he had been the head of the Austin, Texas, police department’s Identification and Criminal Records Section for several years. He had retired from the force and was still living in Austin. I told him I had trouble with his finding a “match” between prints found at the sniper’s nest on the sixth floor and the fingerprint exemplar card of Malcolm Wallace. “Why?” he asked. “Because,” I pointed out, “the unidentified latent print found on the sixth floor was a palm print, not a fingerprint, and unless you’ve come up with something new, I’ve never heard of anyone matching a palm print with a fingerprint.” Darby, sensing he had been taken, told me that he had been given “two fingerprints, one from a card, the other a latent. It was all blind. I didn’t know and wasn’t told who they belonged to [it was much later, he said, that he heard Malcolm Wallace’s name mentioned], although I recognized the layout of the card [he said all identifying features had been blacked out] as that of the Texas Department of Public Safety. I wasn’t given any palm print. They were both fingerprints. Of course, you can’t compare a palm print with a fingerprint.”

  So much for Malcolm Wallace at the window and another desperate attempt by the conspiracy community to implicate anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald for Kennedy’s murder.

  Or so one would think. But one Barr McClellan, who at one time was a lawyer in an Austin law firm that represented Lyndon Johnson, came out with a book in 2003 that claims LBJ was behind Kennedy’s murder, anchored on the same allegation that Wallace carried it out for LBJ. It seems that it was McClellan and an associate of his, one J. Harrison, who approached Darby with the two prints and engaged his services in March of 1998, McClellan alleging to his readers that the latent fingerprint they gave Darby was found on one of the four book cartons. McClellan says that Wallace put together a three-man hit team (Oswald firing two shots from the sniper’s nest window, Wallace firing one shot from the third window over, and one “Junior” firing the head shot from the grassy knoll) to kill Kennedy for LBJ. Indeed, McClellan said he had “confirmed” that LBJ was behind eleven murders in Texas, “with nine more possible.”

  McClellan (the father of Scott McClellan, President George W. Bush’s former press secretary, and Mark S. McClellan, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration) was considerate enough to tell us that “the way Wallace and Oswald met is not known, but they did meet and were together on the sixth floor…when Kennedy was shot.” Though he presents no evidence of Wallace ever meeting or even knowing of Oswald’s existence, he writes an entire chapter (without offering one source for anything) about Wallace and Oswald inside the Book Depository Building, with all of the details: when a Depository employee entered the sixth floor, “Wallace had decided to kill the worker but, in that instance, the man left. Wallace grinned and gripped his rifle”; “Oswald walked with Wallace to check out the boxes stacked in the southeast corner to get ready for the shooting”; “Oswald explained to Wallace that the windowsill would be a rest for the rifle”; “Wallace shook his head and moved another carton under the window”; later, “Wallace walked over to Oswald’s position”; “Wallace took up his position at the third window to the southwest”; “Wallace cursed” when Oswald’s first shot missed; and so on.56

  McClellan begins his book by telling of his membership in an Austin law firm from 1966 to 1971. The firm was headed by Edward Clark, LBJ’s personal lawyer, who, if we’re to believe the author, was the most powerful and corrupt lawyer in Texas, one who would do anything at all, including arranging for murders, for LBJ. Remarkably, the author unwittingly seems to acknowledge that he either was complicit in or had full knowledge of all the crimes committed by his law firm. He writes that “the only thing that mattered [in his law firm] was the ruthless exercise of our power. If scandals were threatened and murder was necessary, ‘so what’? That was the price of power and power was the firm’s business. Besides, what we did was privileged. We only worried about results, about winning.”

  According to McClellan, in 1973 another member of the law firm, Don Thomas, “told me that our senior partner had engineered the death of John Kennedy. ‘Clark handled all of that in Dallas,’” he quotes Thomas as telling him. Conveniently for the author, Clark, Thomas, LBJ, and Wallace are long ago dead, so they can’t rebut his accusations. It would have been nice if McClellan hadn’t waited thirty years to finally tell the American public what he knew.

  Nowhere in McClellan’s book does he offer any evidence at all that Clark knew Wallace,* whom McClellan says Clark enlisted to kill Kennedy for LBJ, or that Wallace knew LBJ, other than to say, without citing any authority, that when LBJ was a U.S. senator in Washington, he got Wallace a job as an economist at the Department of Agriculture.† But in one’s reveries, such details as showing a real connection between parties to a conspiracy and showing them acting in concert are not essential.

  In his book, McClellan repeats all the charges in The Men on the Sixth Floor about the murder of Henry Marshall and LBJ being behind it; however, he claims that LBJ and Edward Clark (not LBJ aide Cliff Carter, whom Estes had implicated) decided Marshall would have to be “taken care of for good,” and so Clark had Wallace murder Marshall. Since McClellan doesn’t suggest or provide evidence that LBJ had anything to do with the misconduct of Estes, which was the subject of the Marshall investigation, one therefore wonders if McClellan ever questioned why LBJ would order the murder of Marshall, Estes’ investigator. Although it was loosely alleged in The Men on the Sixth Floor that Marshall could connect LBJ with Estes’ misconduct, no evidence has ever surfaced that Marshall learned of any misconduct by LBJ from his investigation of Estes. Estes did acknowledge giving large sums of unreported money from his investments to an LBJ slush fund managed by Cliff Carter.57 The unreporting of money given to LBJ, if true, was a federal offense. But if LBJ was contemplating murder to prevent harm to his political ambitions, it would have been Estes, not Marshall, whom he would have silenced. Why Marshall? In any event, McClellan goes on to allege that to prevent the attorney general, Bobby Kennedy (whose office was investigating Marshall’s murder), from finding out about LBJ’s ordering Marshall’s murder, LBJ asked Clark to have Kennedy murdered for him so he could become president rather than go to jail. My God. Has this author no shame at all?

  McClellan, of course, has no evidence that LBJ asked Clark to have Wallace kill Kennedy, but substitutes a reverie of his in which he lets the listener hear a long conversation he fabricated between Clark and LBJ at LBJ’s ranch “soon after” Marshall’s murder in which the decision to kill Kennedy was finally made.

  One reads McClellan’s book with disgust and a certain degree of awe that someone would have the audacity to write a book like this. Just when the reader feels that the author cannot push his despicable fantasy any further, he reaches into his bag and produces one crowning nugget to do the reader in. The author sets forth a long conversation (that Thomas allegedly told the author about) between Thomas and LBJ at LBJ’s ranch shortly before LBJ’s death on January 22, 1972, in which—are you ready?—Johnson confesses to being behind JFK’s murder and—are you really ready?—beseeche
s Thomas to tell the world about this after he and his wife die because—are you really and truly ready?—his reputation was no good, and if he at least had the honesty to confess to JFK’s murder to the American people, “my damned legacy just might improve. Hell. Might just improve my reputation, you know.”

  But Thomas disobeyed LBJ, telling McClellan the following year, 1973, instead of waiting, and McClellan finally tells the American people in his book thirty years later.58

  Shame on a former member of the American bar* for sinking to such a depth of ignominy. Although McClellan has written a blasphemous and completely false story, his book has sold an incredible seventy-five-thousand copies, and when he repeated his claim on the History Channel in its November 18, 2003, documentary, The Guilty Men (Part 9 of Nigel Turner’s The Men Who Killed Kennedy), hundreds of thousands of Americans heard the damning allegation, precipitating a flood of angry letters on the LBJ Library in Austin, some of the writers threatening to burn the library down. McClellan’s charges were taken seriously enough that a group of LBJ loyalists led by Bill Moyers and Jack Valenti demanded that the History Channel investigate the charges and set the record straight. Indeed, two former presidents, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, formally protested the show by letter to the History Channel, Ford calling McClellan’s charges “the most damaging accusations ever made against a former vice-president and president in American history.”59

  Responsibly, the History Channel asked three prominent historians to review McClellan’s charges and conducted “its own internal review” of the allegations. On April 2, 2004, the History Channel issued a press release saying that the historians reported back that McClellan’s allegation of LBJ’s complicity in the assassination “is entirely unfounded and does not hold up to scrutiny.” The channel also said its own review revealed that its show “fell short of the high standards that the network sets for itself. The History Channel apologizes to its viewers and to Mrs. [Lady Bird] Johnson and her family for airing the show.”60 But former president Gerald Ford, although undoubtedly pleased by the apology, wasn’t completely appeased. Writing later about the incident, he says that it is one thing for an independent writer like McClellan to publish such “despicable…trash, but a reputable media organization, which the public trusts to give accurate and unbiased information, [was] swept into this frenzy. Who or what is next? Will I be inducted into the JFK assassination ring when I am no longer around to defend myself? America needs to get a grip on this hysteria.”61

  The search for any assassin of President Kennedy other than Lee Harvey Oswald has been so intense and persistent that it has even trespassed beyond the margins of conventional irrationality into the allegation—are you ready for this one?—that Kennedy was killed accidentally by a Secret Service agent in Vice President Johnson’s car. This approaches (but does not rival, since no one can rival) David Lifton’s lunacy in theorizing that Kennedy’s body was stolen before the autopsy and new bullet wounds were created to make it look like he was shot from behind (see conspiracy section). Also, if one bought into Lifton’s madcap theory, the reputations of many innocent people would be destroyed, whereas in the accidental assassination theory, no one’s is.

  In Mortal Error, author Bonar Menninger chronicles the odyssey of one Howard Donahue, a firearms expert who flew thirty-five combat missions over Europe in the Second World War and was one of eleven marksmen employed by CBS in 1967 to see if they could duplicate what Oswald did firing at a moving target. Donahue not only matched Oswald, he beat Oswald, firing three shots with a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle within 5.2 seconds, all of which hit the bull’s-eye.62 This triggered Donahue’s interest in the assassination and ultimately led to an obsession in which he said he gave “twenty-five years of my life” to his search for the solution to Kennedy’s murder. Donahue clearly is no kook, and when one reads the first fifty or so pages of his book, one is impressed with the fastidiousness of his research and the commonsense inferences he draws therefrom. But then Donahue and Menninger (basically, his friendly biographer) ask the reader to swallow a story unfit for human consumption.

  Donahue believes that three shots were fired in Dealey Plaza. However, Oswald only fired two, one that missed and the other that struck Kennedy and Connally. The third, the fatal shot to the head, was accidentally fired by George Hickey, a Secret Service agent seated in the left rear seat of the presidential follow-up car.63 The weapon, he says, that killed Kennedy was an AR-15, an automatic rifle that is the civilian version of the M-16 rifle, the primary American infantry weapon used in Vietnam.*

  This is how Donahue (through Menninger) says Kennedy was shot: “Oswald fires again [the second and last shot from Oswald, Donahue believes]. So Hickey reaches down and grabs the AR-15 off the floor, flips off the safety and stands up on the seat, preparing to return fire. But his footing is precarious. The follow-up car [the one Hickey is in] hits the brakes or speeds up. Hickey begins to swing the gun around to draw a bead on Oswald, but he loses his balance. He begins to fall. And the barrel happens to be pointing towards Kennedy’s head. And the gun happens to go off,” hitting Kennedy in the head and killing him. In other words, per Donahue, “the gun accidentally discharged.”64†

  Even assuming for the sake of argument that the AR-15 was fired, Donahue’s assumption that with the possibility of the shot ending up in thousands of other places in Dealey Plaza (or Hickey’s own car or the air above), it just happened to hit Kennedy in the back of his head is more than hard to believe. But to compound the problem, after a quarter of a century of research, Donahue is unable to come up with any evidence at all that the AR-15 was even fired that day. There were nine other people riding in or on the running boards of the presidential follow-up car,65 each of whom testified before the Warren Commission or gave a statement, and not one of them, including Agent Glen Bennett, who was seated within a foot or two of Hickey, said the AR-15 rifle or any other weapon was fired in the car around the time of the assassination. How is it possible that none of them heard the rifle being fired right next to them if it had indeed been fired? As Kennedy aide Dave Powers, who was in Hickey’s car, put it, “Someone a foot away from me or two feet away from me couldn’t fire the gun without me hearing it.”66

  And among the several hundred or so people in Dealey Plaza that day, not one said they saw or heard any weapon being fired inside the subject vehicle, or anywhere close to it. Indeed, Dealey Plaza witness Hugh Betzner Jr., in a November 14, 1967, letter to assassination researcher Richard E. Sprague, specifically said that he saw the rifle in Hickey’s hands and “it was not fired.”*

  In Hickey’s own November 30, 1963, Secret Service report, he said he heard three shots that day. “At the end of the last report I reached to the bottom of the car and picked up the AR-15 rifle, cocked and loaded it, and turned to the rear. At this point the cars were passing under the overpass and as a result we had left the scene of the shooting. I kept the AR-15 rifle ready as we proceeded at a high rate of speed to the hospital.”67

  To support his contention that the reason Hickey’s rifle accidentally went off was that he lost his balance and while falling backward the rifle fired accidentally, Donahue relies exclusively on Dealey Plaza witness S. M. Holland, who told Richard Warren Lewis and Lawrence Schiller in 1967, “I actually thought when they started up, he [Hickey] was shot, too, because he fell backwards…It jerked him down when they started off.”68 But neither Hickey nor Bennett nor anyone else said that Hickey lost his balance and fell backward. Only Holland said this. And Holland’s questionable perceptive abilities have been discussed earlier in this book.

  Donahue’s other-world conclusion is a textbook example of the fact that if you start out with an erroneous premise, the conclusion based thereon may be logical, but it’s wrong. A few, among several, illustrations: Donahue said that since Oswald was located to Kennedy’s right rear, a bullet “coming in at a 6% angle from right to left…should have exited through the president’s face…yet the actual exit wound was in t
he upper right portion of the skull”—in other words, too far to the right. Hence, the only geometric sense for such an exit wound would be if the bullet were fired from where Hickey was, slightly to the president’s left rear. But that’s because Donahue, a firearms expert but not a photographic one, asserted that at the time of impact, Kennedy’s head was tilted 15 degrees to the left. The reality, however, per the HSCA photographic panel of experts, was that Kennedy’s head was tilted 25 degrees, not 15 degrees to the left, at the time he was struck in the head.69 With that orientation of the head, the trajectory that the HSCA (and Warren Commission) concluded the fatal bullet took now makes perfect sense.

  Donahue also finds it incomprehensible that both the back bullet and the head bullet were fired from Oswald’s Carcano rifle, because if that were the case the two bullets would not “have behaved so differently”—the back bullet having relatively little damage to it but the head bullet fragmenting into many pieces.70 Of course, as discussed elsewhere in this book, the back bullet passed through soft tissue in Kennedy’s body and then, after having slowed down, only struck a glancing blow to Connally’s right fifth rib and then struck the small wrist bone, whereas the head bullet, striking Kennedy’s skull head-on, could be expected to fragment the way it did.

  Donahue also questions how a 6.5-millimeter bullet (Carcano round) could create a 6-millimeter hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. (The AR-15 round, Donahue points out, is 5.6 millimeters in diameter.)71 But very frequently the measured wound is slightly smaller than the caliber of the missile that created it because of the subsequent recoil of the tissues of the skin.72