Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  As I pointed out earlier in this book, within a few hours of the assassination, virtually all of Dallas law enforcement already knew Oswald had murdered Kennedy. Indeed, it was obvious to nearly everyone, not just law enforcement. At 4:45 p.m. on the day of the assassination, NBC network news anchorman Bill Ryan reported that “all circumstantial evidence points to the guilt of the suspect Lee Oswald.”15 Exactly what happened was that obvious within hours of the shooting.

  If there was one, and only one, contribution to the assassination debate I would want to make, over and beyond the substance of this book, it’s the obvious notion that once you prove the positive or negative of a matter in dispute, all other questions about the correctness of the conclusion become irrelevant. They only have a legitimate life if the matter has not yet been proved. Put another way, the answers to all other questions dealing with the correctness of a conclusion are rendered moot and academic by the answer to the seminal question. Hence, once you truly prove the earth is round, all questions about whether it is flat become irrelevant.

  With respect to the Kennedy assassination, once you establish and know that Oswald is guilty, as has been done, then you also necessarily know that there is an answer (whether the answer is known or not) compatible with this conclusion for the endless alleged discrepancies, inconsistencies, and questions the conspiracy theorists have raised through the years about Oswald’s guilt.* This, they simply do not understand. If they did, in all probability their voice would finally, after more than forty years, be silenced. Their inability or unwillingness to grasp this fundamental reality is the precise reason why questions about Oswald’s guilt will be broached by conspiracy theorists as long as chickens lay eggs. If they don’t have a satisfactory answer to any of their never-ending questions (one among thousands: something as obscure as whether it was Oswald or an imposter who allegedly signed Oswald’s name to a guest register at a restaurant in North Dakota in 1963), without thinking they automatically feel the question of Oswald’s guilt is still unresolved. In other words, every event, incident, piece of information, inconsistency, and so on, is segregated and becomes the whole story in itself. Nothing is part of the whole. Each incident is its own whole.

  What the Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists seem incapable of seeing is that the answers to their countless questions are irrelevant since Oswald’s guilt has already been conclusively established by other evidence. Now, if it hadn’t been, then, indeed, their many unresolved questions would have to be addressed.

  I gave an illustration of this reality in my book, Outrage, on the O. J. Simpson murder trial. To remind the reader, among much other incriminating evidence, not only was Simpson’s fresh blood found at the murder scene, but the victims’ blood was found in his car, driveway, and home. With this type of evidence, that’s the end of the ball game. There’s nothing more to say. To deny guilt under these circumstances, which Simpson did, is the equivalent of a man being caught by his wife in bed with another woman and, quoting comedian Richard Pryor, saying to her, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Simpson’s guilt couldn’t have been more obvious. In any event, Outrage was an in-depth discussion of all the major issues in the Simpson case, and I gave the following example to explain why it was unnecessary for me to discuss every single ancillary issue raised by the defense:

  Say that we know X committed a bank robbery in Detroit, Michigan, on October 25, 1993, at 10:00 a.m. We know this because there are ten eyewitnesses who have positively identified him; his fingerprints are found at the teller’s window even though he lives in El Paso, Texas, and there is no evidence he had ever been in Detroit (much less at this bank) to have left the fingerprints on some prior occasion; and at the time of his arrest, all of the bank’s marked money is found in his possession.

  Now, let’s say that a witness comes forward and says X was actually in his presence in El Paso at 10:00 a.m. on October 25, 1993. Since we know X is guilty, we also thereby know that the witness is either honestly mistaken or is lying. Say the bank robbery was a very famous one because of a record amount stolen, and Y steps forward and actually proclaims it was he who committed the robbery (in sensational murder cases, it’s not uncommon, for instance, for innocent people called “chronic confessors” to confess to a murder just to be in the limelight). Again, we know Y is either a kook trying to get into the news, or he’s clinically psychotic. Why? Because we already know who committed the Detroit robbery.

  Likewise, with Simpson in this case. Since we know that in view of the evidence it’s not even possible for him to be innocent, we know that whatever evidence the defense offered on his behalf, there’s an explanation for it, even in those cases where we might not know what that explanation is. Whatever argument the defense makes, we know it is invalid. On the other hand, if we didn’t know Simpson was guilty, then in the absence of an examination of every single defense argument, we could not feel sanguine about any conclusion of guilt.*

  Has the evidence in this case proved Oswald’s guilt to the point where we know that there must be an innocent explanation, one that in no way disturbs the conclusion of Oswald’s guilt, to whatever question a Warren Commission critic or conspiracy theorist has about the case? Yes, unquestionably so. In very abbreviated and summary form, let’s look at most of that evidence. (Some of the following is presented without documentation of sources, since this has already been done earlier in the book.)

  1. Whenever Oswald had Wesley Frazier drive him out to visit his wife and daughters at the Paine residence in Irving, he’d go on a Friday evening and return to Dallas on Monday morning. The assassination was on Friday, November 22, 1963. For the very first time, Oswald went to Irving with Frazier on Thursday evening, November 21, obviously to pick up his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle for the following day.

  2. Oswald told Wesley Frazier he was going to Irving to pick up some curtain rods for his apartment in Dallas. But Oswald’s landlady testified that the windows in Oswald’s room on North Beckley already had curtain rods and that Oswald never discussed getting curtain rods with her.16 Indeed, Allen Grant, a photographer for Life magazine, took a photo of Oswald’s room on the afternoon of the assassination, and it clearly shows the curtain rods that were alreaady in his room.

  Additionally, Ruth Paine had two flat, lightweight curtain rods in her garage, and they were still there after Oswald’s arrest. 17 Oswald never asked Ruth Paine about curtain rods at any time.18 When Marina was asked in her Warren Commission testimony, “On the evening of the 21st, was anything said about curtain rods or his taking curtain rods to town the following day?” she answered, “No, I didn’t have any.” Question: “He didn’t say anything like that?” “No.”19 And no curtain rods were found in the Book Depository Building after the assassination.20

  If Oswald, as he claimed, brought curtain rods to work, whatever happened to them? We know from witnesses (on the bus, the cabdriver, and Earlene Roberts) that he wasn’t carrying any long package after he left the Book Depository Building. And, as indicated, no curtain rods were found in the building after the assassination. As with the supposed killer behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll whom no one saw run away, and the bullet that exited Kennedy’s throat without going on to hit Connally or anything else in the presidential limousine, did the curtain rods simply vanish into thin air? One would think that things like this would at least give the Oswald defenders and conspiracy theorists pause, but instead, their eyes blazing with certainty, they tell you that you just don’t understand.

  In addition to the evidence showing that Oswald’s curtain rod story was a fabrication, the story, all by itself, is inherently implausible. If Oswald did want to pick up curtain rods at Ruth Paine’s home for his apartment, why would that require him to go there on a Thursday evening? Could he only pick them up if he went there on a Thursday evening, not a Friday evening?

  3. When Oswald told Wesley Frazier why he was coming to Irving on a Thursday night—to pick up curtain rod
s—Frazier said to Oswald, “Oh, very well,” then added, “Well, will you be going home with me tomorrow also?” and Oswald replied, “No.”21

  4. Oswald and his wife, Marina, shared an abiding interest in President Kennedy and his family and spoke of them often. Yet on Thursday evening, the night before the assassination, when Marina brought up in conversation with Oswald the president’s scheduled visit to Dallas the next day, she said, “He just ignored a little bit, you know, to talk about [it]…maybe changed subject about talking about…newborn baby or something like that…It was quite unusual that he did not want to talk about President Kennedy being in Dallas that particular evening. That was quite peculiar.”22

  5. Friday morning, before leaving Ruth Paine’s house in Irving, Oswald left behind his wedding ring and $170, believed to be virtually all of his money, for Marina, demonstrating that he realized he might never see her again—that is, he might not survive the assassination he was contemplating. Moreover, as he left Marina that morning, Oswald told her to use the money to buy shoes for their new baby, Rachel, and “anything” else that she felt was necessary for the children. Marina thought this to be strange since Oswald had always been “most frugal” and hardly allowed her to spend any money at all.23

  6. Before Oswald got into Frazier’s car that Friday morning, the day of the assassination, he placed a long, bulky package on the rear seat, telling Frazier it contained the curtain rods.24

  7. Wesley Frazier said that on the way to work on the morning of the assassination, he noticed that for the very first time Oswald did not bring his lunch.25

  8. When Frazier and Oswald arrived in the parking lot for the Book Depository Building on the morning of the assassination, Oswald picked up the long package on the backseat and, for the first time ever, walked quickly ahead of Frazier all the way into the building, Oswald being approximately fifty feet ahead at the time he entered the building. Always previously, they had walked the three hundred or so yards from the car to the building together.26

  9. Every morning after arriving for work at the Book Depository Building, Oswald would go to the domino room on the first floor of the building and read the previous morning’s edition of the Dallas Morning News, which another employee had brought in. On the morning of the assassination, for the first time, he did not do this.27

  10. Despite the fact that the president’s visit and route received enormous and inescapable attention in the Dallas papers and on radio and TV, and that Oswald usually read both daily newspapers each day and had to know what was happening, he asked coworker James Jarman somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00 on the morning of the assassination why people were gathering around the corner of Houston and Elm. When Jarman said the president was going to pass by the building, Oswald asked if he knew which way he was coming, whereupon Jarman told Oswald the president’s route was from Main to Houston to Elm.28 Obviously, Oswald was trying to create the false impression that he knew nothing about the president’s visit. If not, these were just two nervous, pointless questions by someone who knew he was about to change history.

  11. After the first and second shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, a motorcade witness, Howard Brennan, sitting on a short concrete wall directly across the street from the sixth-floor window, looked up and actually saw Oswald in the window holding his rifle. Only 120 feet away from Oswald, he got a very good look as he watched, in horror, Oswald (whom he had seen in the window earlier, before the motorcade had arrived) take deliberate aim and fire the final shot from his rifle.29 At the police lineup that evening, Brennan picked Oswald out, saying, “He looks like him, but I cannot positively say,” giving the police the reason that he had since seen Oswald on television and that could have “messed me up.”30 However, Brennan signed an affidavit at the Dallas sheriff’s office within an hour after the shooting and before the lineup saying, “I believe that I could identify this man if I ever saw him again.”31 On December 18, 1963, Brennan told the FBI he was “sure” that Oswald was the man he had seen in the window.32 And he later told the Warren Commission that in reality at the lineup, “with all fairness, I could have positively identified the man” but did not do so out of fear. “If it got to be a known fact that I was an eyewitness, my family or I…might not be safe.”33 Although Brennan did not positively identify Oswald at the lineup, he did say, as we’ve seen, that Oswald looked like the man. And we know Brennan is legitimate since the description of the man in the window that he gave to the authorities right after the shooting—a slender, white male about thirty years old, five feet ten inches—matches Oswald fairly closely, and had to have been the basis for the description of the man sent out over police radio just fifteen minutes after the shooting.34

  12. Apart from Brennan, we know that Kennedy’s assassin was at the subject sixth-floor window. Among other evidence, the rifle that was used to murder Kennedy was found on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, witnesses other than Brennan saw a rifle sticking out of the southeasternmost window on the sixth floor, a sniper’s nest was found around the subject window, and three cartridge casings from the murder weapon were found on the floor beneath the window.

  13. Although in his interrogation on Friday afternoon, November 22, Oswald said he was having lunch on the first floor of the Book Depository Building at the time of the assassination,35 during Sunday’s interrogation Oswald slipped up and placed himself on the sixth floor at the time of the assassination, making him the only employee of the Book Depository Building who placed himself on the sixth floor, or was placed there by anyone else, at the time we know an assassin shot Kennedy from the sixth floor. In his Sunday-morning interrogation he said that at lunchtime, one of the “Negro” employees invited him to eat lunch with him and he declined, saying, “You go on down and send the elevator back up and I will join you in a few minutes.” He said before he could finish whatever he was doing, the commotion surrounding the assassination took place and when he “went downstairs,” a policeman questioned him as to his identification, and his boss stated that he was one of their employees.36 The latter confrontation, of course, refers to Officer Marrion Baker, in Roy Truly’s presence, talking to Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom within two minutes after the shooting. Where was Oswald at the time the Negro employee invited him to lunch, and before he descended to the second-floor lunchroom? The sixth floor. Charles Givens testified that around 11:55 a.m., he went up to the sixth floor to get his jacket with cigarettes in it and saw Oswald on the sixth floor. He said to Oswald, “Boy, are you going downstairs…it’s near lunchtime.” He said Oswald answered, “No, sir. When you get downstairs, close the gate to the elevator.”37

  There is another very powerful reason why we can know that Oswald, at the time of his confrontation with Baker in the second-floor lunchroom, had just come down from the sixth floor, not up from the first floor, as he claimed. It is an accepted part of conspiracy dogma to believe what Oswald told Fritz during his interrogation—that he had been eating lunch in the lunchroom on the first floor at the time of the shooting and had walked up to the second floor to get a Coke from the Coke machine just before Baker called out to him.38 Assassination literature abounds with references to “the Coca-Cola machine in the second floor lunchroom.” And indeed there was a Coca-Cola machine in the subject room.39 But to my knowledge, there is no direct reference in the assassination literature to a second soft drink machine in the Book Depository Building, and in a phone call to Gary Mack, the curator at the Sixth Floor Museum in the building, he told me he was “unaware” of any other soft drink machine in the building at the time of the assassination.40 What prompted my call to him was not the frequent references in the literature to the Dr. Pepper bottle found on the sixth floor after the shooting,41 since some soft drink machines contain a variety of drinks, but a reference in stock boy Bonnie Ray William’s testimony before the Warren Commission to his getting “a small bottle of Dr. Pepper from the Dr. Pepper machine,”42 and stock boy Wesley Frazier’s testimony that “I have
seen him [Oswald] go to the Dr. Pepper machine by the refrigerator and get a Dr. Pepper.”43

  Neither Williams nor Frazier expressly said what floor this machine was on, and I was aware, from a photo,44 that there was a refrigerator next to the Coca-Cola machine on the second floor. Through a few phone calls I was able to reach Wesley Frazier, whom I hadn’t talked to since 1986, when he testified for me at the London trial. Still living in Dallas, he told me that “there was a Dr. Pepper machine on the first floor.” Where, specifically, was it? “It was located by the double freight elevator near the back of the building.” Was there a refrigerator nearby? I asked. “Oh, yes, right next to it.” (And indeed, I subsequently found proof of the existence of the machine, with the words “Dr. Pepper” near the top front of it, in an FBI photo taken for the Warren Commission of the northwest corner of the first floor, and it is located right next to the refrigerator.)45

  Frazier said that “almost all the guys would get their drinks for lunch from this Dr. Pepper machine. It mostly had Dr. Pepper, but also other drinks like orange and root beer.” I asked him, “What about the Coca-Cola machine in the second-floor lunchroom? Did it have other drinks too?” He said it “only had Coca-Cola in it” and “the only time anybody would go to that machine is if they wanted a Coke, which I did from time to time.” When I asked him whether or not “it was rare” for the workers to go to the second floor to get a Coke, he said, “Yes. We had our own machine on the first floor, where we ate our lunch. It was more convenient to use the machine on the first floor.” Frazier said he could not say whether Oswald ever went to the second floor to get a Coke or ever drank soft drinks other than Dr. Pepper, but “I only recall seeing him with a Dr. Pepper.”46 Author Jim Bishop, in his book The Day Kennedy Was Shot, writes (without a citation, however) that Oswald “invariably drank Dr. Pepper.”47 And we know that Marina told her biographer, Priscilla McMillan, that when he was working at Jaggers-Chiles-Stovall in Dallas in 1963, “after supper” he would walk down the street as he often did “to buy a newspaper and a bottle of Dr. Pepper.”48