Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

*In the spring of 1964, Robert Kennedy stated, “There was no plan to dump Lyndon Johnson. It didn’t make any sense…And there was never any discussion about dropping him.” The president himself told a close confidant in October 1963 that the idea of dumping Johnson was “preposterous on the face of it. We’ve got to carry Texas in ’64, and maybe Georgia.” (Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times, p.605)

  *Kilduff was the acting press secretary in the absence of Pierre Salinger, who was en route to Hawaii at the time of the assassination.

  *The president’s exaggeration was not great. Jacqueline Kennedy, traveling abroad to thirteen countries, alone or with the president, and speaking fluent French, Spanish, and Italian as she went, “soon carved for herself a niche of fame” independent of JFK. Described by many as beautiful, cultured, and imperious, “she drew crowds by the thousands and became a good-will ambassador for America on her own.” (Associated Press, November 26, 1963)

  †Kennedy had unquestionably become an effective politician, but unlike most in his chosen profession, he wasn’t inordinately ambitious, was famous for never taking himself too seriously, and once said that he only started in politics “because Joe died. [Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., JFK’s older brother, was the one of the four sons of Joe Sr. who was being groomed for high political office; he and his copilot died during the Second World War when their plane, laden with explosives to be dropped on a German bomb-launching base in France, exploded in midair over the English Channel on August 12, 1944.] If something happened to me tomorrow, my brother Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, Teddy would take over for him.” (New York Times, November 23, 1963, p.13)

  *The president received a long, standing ovation when he referred to the controversial TFX jet fighter, built at the General Dynamics plant in Fort Worth, as a powerful force for freedom (Dallas Morning News, November 23, 1963, p.11).

  †For years prior to its occupancy by the Texas School Book Depository Company, when it became known as the Texas School Book Depository Building after its principal occupant, the building was known as the Sexton Building, and many old-timers continued to call it that for years thereafter.

  *The $8.6 million Boeing 707 jet, tail number SAM26000, was delivered to the air force on October 10, 1962. Though not the first Air Force One, it is the first jet aircraft designed specifically for presidents, JFK being the first one to make extensive use of a jet for presidential travel. (James Sawa, “JFK Air Force One: Conspiracy or Not,” self-published, 2004) When JFK first saw the new Air Force One, he exclaimed, “It’s magnificent! I’ll take it.” President Gerald Ford would later say, “When they fly you on Air Force One, you know you’re the president.” (TerHorst and Albertazzie, Flying White House, p.13)

  *Variations in transcripts of both channels 1 (regular) and 2 (presidential motorcade) of the Dallas police radio transmissions are common. In 1982, the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Ballistic Acoustics (NAS-CBA) created a new recording of the channel 2 radio traffic at the time of the assassination directly from the original Gray Audograph disk. This recording proved to be the best to date, avoiding many of the skips and repeats inherent in previous recordings. Throughout this book, the most complete versions of channel 1 and 2 radio traffic conversations, primarily from the recordings themselves, are utilized.

  *The Depository had previously been occupied by a wholesale grocery company engaged in supplying restaurants and institutions, and during the time it occupied the building, the floors became oil-soaked and this oil was damaging the books that were now being stacked on the floor (CD 205, p.135).

  *Jackie would later recall that three times on the Texas trip “we were greeted with bouquets of the yellow roses of Texas. Only in Dallas they gave me red roses. I remember thinking: How funny—red roses for me” (Gun, Red Roses from Texas, unnumbered p.5).

  †The president’s personal style causes the Secret Service deep concern. Not only does he travel more frequently than any previous president, but he relishes contact with crowds of well-wishers. The problem is compounded by the fact that Kennedy is not receptive to many of the measures designed to protect him, treating the danger of assault philosophically. (HSCA Report, p.228)

  *According to U.S. Census records, the population of the city of Dallas was 679,684 in 1960. In 1970, it had increased to 844,401.

  *Dealey Plaza is a three-acre, well-manicured patch of land with concrete pergolas and peristyles, reflecting pools, and some office buildings. It is called “The Front Door of Dallas” and was named in 1935 after George Bannerman Dealey, a Dallas civic leader and the founder of the city’s main paper, the Dallas Morning News. The plaza is in the form of a triangle, with three main thoroughfares, Main Street in the middle having east and westbound lanes, and flanked by Elm to the north having only westbound lanes, and Commerce to the south with only eastbound lanes. The three arteries converge at a triple underpass built in 1936 beneath the Union Terminal Railroad overpass at the southwestern tip of the plaza. (CE 877,17 H 897–898) The site of the Texas School Book Depository Building at the northwest corner of Houston and Elm in the plaza was originally owned by John Neely Bryan, the founder of Dallas.

  *There is no evidence that the two Secret Service agents in the president’s limousine, Greer and Kellerman, were as alert as Youngblood and directed the president to get down.

  *Kellerman is the only one in the car who heard this remark. In 1964 he testified that he spoke often with the president during the three years he served him, and would not have mistaken the presidents’s Boston accent (2 H 75). But it’s unlikely the president could have spoken after the bullet penetrated his throat.

  *Back at Love Field, where Air Force One pilot Colonel James B. Swindal is listening to the radio chatter of the Secret Service agents in the motorcade (the plane’s communication center was linked with the White House Communications Agency’s temporary signal board in the Sheraton Dallas Hotel, which in turn was linked to the Secret Service radio frequency), he hears two loud shouts over the radio frequency around 12:30 that he recognizes as the voice of Roy Kellerman. Then he hears a third sharp cry from Kellerman: “Dagger cover Volunteer,” the code names, respectively, for Rufus Youngblood, the chief Secret Service agent in LBJ’s limousine, and Vice President Johnson. But the radio immediately becomes a “babel of screeching voices. Then it fell silent.” (TerHorst and Albertazzie, Flying White House, pp.199, 210–211)

  *Mrs. Kennedy would later have no recollection of crawling on the trunk of the car. Looking at still frames from the Zapruder film while working with author William Manchester, she said they brought nothing back to her. It was as though she were looking at photographs of another woman. (Manchester, Death of a President, p.161 footnote)

  *Parkland Memorial Hospital, a ten-story county hospital about four miles from Dealey Plaza, was the largest and best hospital in Dallas County, a distinction it holds to this very day. Taking its name from the wooded parkland it sat on, the hospital opened on May 19, 1894. The present Parkland Hospital, on a new site, was dedicated on October 3, 1954.

  *Later estimates of the speed vary. Two of the motorcycle escorts gave estimates of the speed on Stemmons Freeway ranging from 80 to 90 mph (Savage, JFK First Day Evidence, p.364; Sneed, No More Silence, pp.129, 156). Dallas police radio recordings (NAS-CBA DPD tapes, C2, 12:34 p.m.) indicate approximately four minutes were required to cover the four-mile ride to Parkland, which computes to an average speed of 60 mph over the entire route, which accounts for the slowing down of the limousine once it got off the Stemmons Freeway onto Industrial and then Harry Hines Boulevard.

  †Not all pass the Trade Mart. The first press bus in the motorcade, unaware the president has been shot, proceeds to the Trade Mart, where the bus passengers soon learn he’s been shot and is at Parkland Hospital (Semple, Four Days in November, pp.591–592).

  *Jackson redeemed himself two days later when he took a Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by night
club owner Jack Ruby.

  *Harkness testified that Euins told him, “It was under the ledge,” which referred to the sixth floor (6 H313). Photographs of the building show a decorative ledge separating the sixth and seventh floors. Harkness further testified that “it was my error in a hasty count of the floors” (6 H 313) that led to his broadcast reference to the “fifth floor.” Harkness’s error is understandable in light of the fact that in 1963 the Depository’s first-floor windows were covered with decorative masonry. Persons unfamiliar with the building could easily mistake the second floor for the first, third for the second, and so on—making the sixth floor appear as if it were the fifth floor. This is apparently what Harkness did during these initial confusing moments.

  *Later that afternoon, Euins told the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department in a sworn and signed statement that the shooter “was a white man” (CE 367, 16 H 963).

  †The gesture, witnessed by a spectator, became the basis for an early report that Johnson had been wounded or suffered a heart attack (Associated Press wire copy, November 22, 1963, 1:18 p.m.; Manchester, Death of a President, p.169).

  *There was one red rose from the bouquet that did not make it into the hospital. Stavis Ellis, one of the Dallas police cyclists who had led the close-tailing presidential limousine to Parkland is among the large crowd of people who have swarmed around the emergency area in back of the hospital. After President Kennedy’s body and Connally have been removed from the limousine he can’t resist the temptation to look inside the car. He sees several puddles of blood on the rear seat and floorboard. Right in the middle of one of the puddles lay a beautiful red rose. Years later he would recall, “I never forgot that. I can still see it, that red rose in that blood.” (Sneed, No More Silence, p.147)

  *Inside the emergency area at Parkland were four emergency rooms, Trauma Rooms One, Two, Three, and Four. They were located on what was called the ground floor, not the first floor, at Parkland Hospital. Kennedy was immediately taken to Trauma Room One. (3 H 358–359, WCT Dr. Charles James Carrico) Above the ground floor were floors one through ten. The operating rooms were on the second floor. Though Governor Connally, who was taken to Trauma Room Two, was eventually brought up to an operating room on the second floor, Kennedy never left Trauma Room One. The entire emergency area at Parkland has since been reconstructed, and the Trauma Room One that Kennedy was brought into is no longer in existence. (Telephone interview of representative of Parkland’s Corporate Communication section by author on January 21, 2004)

  †Photographs show this second-floor window to be closed at the time of the shooting. Brewer no doubt meant the sixth-floor sniper’s nest window, which would have been at the southeast corner, second floor down from the roof.

  *At the time, CBS did not have the capability of putting a commentator on camera immediately. “It took nearly twenty minutes to set up the cameras so Cronkite’s voice could be joined by his face, and because of that experience, CBS would later install a ‘flash studio’ to enable visual, as well as audio, bulletins to be transmitted immediately.” (Gates, Air Time, p.3)

  *After eliciting from Carrico and other Parkland doctors that the president was wearing a back brace, nowhere did Warren Commission counsel go on to ask the doctors just what they did with the famous brace, although one could assume they would have removed it at some point. One doctor testified he saw it “lying loose” (6 H 66, WCT Dr. Gene Coleman Akin), though another said he “pushed up the brace” to feel the president’s femoral pulse (3 H 368, WCT Dr. Malcolm O. Perry), suggesting it wasn’t removed. In less-than-clear testimony, Secret Service agent William Greer suggested that the brace was among the items of the president’s belongings he was given in two shopping bags by a Parkland nurse when the body was ready for removal (2 H 125), but this wouldn’t tell us when, if at all, it was removed by the Parkland doctors during their effort to save his life. Almost thirty years later, Dr. Marion T. “Pepper” Jenkins, one of the Parkland doctors, said the president “must have had really severe back pain judging by the size of the back brace we cut off. [Again, not when, though the natural assumption would be at the beginning of the effort to save the president. But Dr. Paul Peters, who arrived at least five minutes after the president entered Trauma Room One, said the brace was still on, and he only refers to his removing “an elastic bandage wrapped around his pelvis,” but says nothing about removing the back brace (6 H 70).] He was tightly laced into this brace with wide Ace bandages making figure-of-eight loops around his trunk and thighs” (Breo, “JFK’s Death, Part II,” p.2805). A Parkland doctor described it as a “corset-type” brace with “stays…and buckles” (3 H 359, WCT Dr. Charles James Carrico).

  Dr. John Lattimer, who studied the assassination for years, researched the entire brace issue and concluded it may have been responsible for Kennedy’s death. He writes that Kennedy had “bound himself firmly in a rather wide corset, with metal stays and a stiff plastic pad over the sacral area, which was tightly laced to his body. The corset was then bound even more firmly to his torso and hips by a six-inch-wide knitted elastic bandage, which he had wrapped in a figure eight between his legs and around his waist, over large thick pads, to encase himself tightly…He apparently adopted this type of tight binding as a consequence of the painful loosening of his joints around the sacroiliac area, probably a result of his long-continued cortisone therapy.” The result? When he and Connally were hit by the same bullet, the “corset prevented him from crumpling down out of the line of fire, as Governor Connally did. Because the president remained upright, with his head exposed, Oswald was able to draw a careful bead on the back of his head.” (Lattimer, Kennedy and Lincoln, p.171; Lattimer, “Additional Data on the Shooting of President Kennedy,” p.1546)

  Since the first bullet that struck Kennedy passed through soft tissue and did not penetrate any organ of the body, it was the opinion of Dr. Perry, Kennedy’s chief attending surgeon, that “barring the advent of complications, this wound was tolerable, and I think he would have survived it” (3 H 372). Writer James Reston Jr. captioned his article on this issue, “That ‘Damned Girdle’: The Hidden Factor That Might Have Killed Kennedy” (Los Angeles Times, November 22, 2004, p.B9). If this is true, the Japanese destroyer that sunk Kennedy’s PT boat in World War II and killed two of his crewmates, only injuring Kennedy’s already fragile back when he was hurled backwards onto the deck (Leaming, Jack Kennedy, p.139; O’Donnell and Powers with McCarthy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, p.48), finally claimed Kennedy as its third victim twenty years later.

  If there is no certainty as to the role the president’s back brace played in his death, there is something closer to certainty that caused his death and which he himself was responsible for. As indicated earlier, President Kennedy did not want Secret Service agents riding on the steps attached to the right and left rear bumper of the presidential limousine. Gerald A. Behn, special agent in charge of the White House Secret Service detail, said that shortly after assuming his job in late 1961, President Kennedy had told him this. No fewer than five Secret Service agents gave statements to the Warren Commission that it was common knowledge among the White House detail that this was Kennedy’s desire, which he reiterated twice in the summer of 1963, once in Rome on July 2, 1963, the other time in Tampa, Florida, just four days before the assassination. Kennedy’s desire was not etched in stone, and since the Secret Service has the right to do whatever is necessary to protect the president, in Tampa, on November 18, Special Agent Donald Lawton was standing on the right rear step, Special Agent Charles Zboril on the left rear. Kennedy told Special Agent Floyd Boring, who was seated in the right front seat of the limousine, to have the two agents return to the follow-up car. When the limousine slowed through downtown Tampa about three minutes later, the two agents dismounted. (CE 1025, 18 H 805–809; “Kennedy Barred Car-Step Guards,” New York Times, November 24, 1964, pp.1, 33)

  The likelihood is high that if Kennedy had not been opposed to Secret Service agents riding on the ba
ck of his car—the agent standing on the right rear step would have blocked Oswald’s sight on Kennedy’s head.

  *Per the Warren Report, “As the President’s limousine sped toward the hospital, 12 doctors rushed to the emergency area.” The report named the twelve (four surgeons, one neurologist, four anesthesiologists, one urological surgeon, one oral surgeon, and one heart specialist), but omitted at least two doctors, Dr. Carrico and Dr. Charles Crenshaw. (WR, p.53)

  *The medical school, so often referred to in assassination literature, is the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School located right next door to Parkland Hospital. In fact, the first floors are connected by a long corridor. The two institutions are separately owned and governed but have an extremely close relationship, Parkland being the “teaching hospital” for the medical school. In fact, many of the doctors on the Parkland staff are professors at the school, and most of the school’s graduates do their residency at Parkland.

  *The femoral artery is the main artery of the thigh and can be felt in the pelvic area.