Ball turned to the question of Lane, asking whether she had talked to him and why she would back away from any of her account. She denied that she had ever talked to anyone she knew as Mark Lane or that she had claimed to anyone that Tippit’s shooter was “short, heavy and with bushy hair,” as Lane had insisted. Since November, she said, she had been interviewed by a reporter from Life magazine, which published some of her comments, and by a man who represented himself as a French journalist and who spoke with an accent. She could not recall the Frenchman’s name, but she said he had a “dark” complexion and a medium build and wore “horn-rimmed glasses”—a physical description that might match Lane’s.
Could Lane have impersonated a French reporter? Norman Redlich, who was watching the testimony, left the room and found two newspaper photographs of Lane, which were then shown to Markham. “I have never seen this man in my life,” she insisted. Ball and Belin were baffled, since Lane had given sworn testimony that he had talked to Markham. Lane might be duplicitous, Belin said, but he found it difficult to imagine that Lane would lie outright to the commission and risk a perjury charge.* The conflicts between Markham’s account and Lane’s would not be resolved for several more weeks, with the credibility of both of them damaged in the process.
It gnawed at Belin then and for years to come, he said. At least six credible eyewitnesses, other than Markham, had identified Oswald as Tippit’s killer. That included Benavides, the witness Belin had tracked down himself. Increasingly, Belin thought of Tippit’s murder as the “Rosetta Stone” of the Kennedy assassination—the event that explained everything else, since it proved that Oswald was capable of murder, and since he had no reason to kill Tippit other than to flee from police searching for the president’s assassin. And yet Lane and his growing army of conspiracy theorists were able to convince gullible audiences that the entire case against Oswald was a sham because a single “flighty” witness like Helen Markham might have confused her words in a telephone conversation she said she could not remember.
* * *
Understanding the crime scene in Dealey Plaza would never be so easy. Although Belin was certain that Oswald had acted alone in killing Tippit, he continued to suspect that Oswald might not have acted alone in gunning down the president. Belin was convinced that the bullets aimed at Kennedy’s limousine had all come from behind, ruling out a shot from the grassy knoll or some other location in front of the motorcade; but given the confusion about the ballistics and the conflicting witness testimony, he asked how the commission could rule out the possibility that Oswald had been joined in the book depository by an accomplice. Could another gunman have been positioned somewhere else behind the motorcade? Belin had joined the commission believing there had been a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, and he was still eager to expose one. Beginning in January, Mel Eisenberg, Redlich’s deputy, organized staff viewings of the Zapruder film. Eisenberg and several others, including Belin and Specter, watched the same sickening images hour after hour, analyzing the film frame by frame.
In late February, Life magazine finally, and reluctantly, agreed to provide the commission with the original film it had purchased from Abraham Zapruder. Up until then, the staff had depended on copies of the film made by the Secret Service and the FBI. The original film was far clearer and had “considerably more detail than any of the copies we had,” Belin recalled. Life also agreed to provide the commission with 35mm color slides of each frame. Belin was excited by the opportunity to see the original film; it was his best hope of demonstrating a conspiracy, possibly by showing that Oswald did not have enough time to fire all the shots that hit Kennedy and Connally.
Zapruder’s Bell & Howell home-movie camera was in the custody of the FBI, and the bureau’s technicians determined that it operated at a speed of 18.3 frames per second. That calculation enabled the bureau to determine the average speed of Kennedy’s limousine through Dealey Plaza—11.2 miles per hour. The FBI then matched the limousine’s speed against the results of tests to determine how quickly a gunman could fire off shots from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. The tests showed that the minimum time needed to fire “two successive well-timed shots” from the rifle would be 2.3 seconds—equivalent to 42 frames of the Zapruder film. The FBI insisted that its evidence proved that Kennedy and Connally had been hit by separate bullets. So if Belin and his colleagues could prove from the Zapruder film that shots had been fired at the motorcade less than two and a quarter seconds apart, they would have proof of two gunmen at Dealey Plaza.
For several days over the course of the late winter and early spring, the staff lawyers sat in a conference room with Lyndal Shaneyfelt, a former newspaper photographer who was now the FBI’s principal photography analyst. Together they watched the Zapruder film hundreds of times. The images haunted Belin for the rest of his life, he said. “I would wake up in the middle of the night seeing the president waving to the crowds and then, within a few seconds, seeing the fatal shot and the head of the president jerk and then slump over.”
Shaneyfelt numbered every frame of the film. The most disturbing image, marked as frame No. 313, captured the moment when the president was shot in the head and the bloody mist rose over the limousine. Two identifiable fragments of that bullet, which appeared to be Oswald’s third and final shot, were found inside the limousine. The other shots seemed to pose the bigger mystery. From the film, it was possible to determine that the first shot to strike Kennedy—the bullet that hit him in the upper back or lower neck—landed sometime between frames 210 and 224; it was not possible to be more precise, since Zapruder’s view was obstructed by a freeway sign during that period. (Beginning at frame 225, when Kennedy became visible again, he was clearly hit, because his hands were moving toward his throat.)
Shaneyfelt and the staff lawyers agreed that Connally was almost certainly hit sometime between frames 207 and 225, given the location of his wounds and his position in the limousine. An analysis of the medical evidence about Connally, matched up against the location of his body at other moments, showed that the very latest he could have been struck by a bullet was frame 240.
The remaining math was not so complicated, Belin realized. Assuming the FBI and Secret Service were right, the first and third bullets hit Kennedy and the second hit Connally. So if the president was hit for the first time no earlier than frame 210 and Connally was hit no later than frame 240, there were a maximum of 30 frames of film between the two shots, or less than two seconds. That would not have been enough time for Oswald to fire both shots. And that, Belin thought, meant that he might have the answer he had been searching for—there was at least one more gunman in Dealey Plaza.
27
THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION
WASHINGTON, DC
MARCH 1964
Arlen Specter faced an extraordinary workload. He had as much to do as any of the young lawyers on the staff and—after the abrupt disappearance of his senior partner, Frank Adams—probably more. “When will I get to see my family again?” he asked his colleagues, only half in jest. Of the ninety-three witnesses who gave formal testimony to the commission in Washington, twenty-eight were Specter’s responsibility. He took the testimony of most of the government officials and others who rode in the motorcade in Dallas, and of virtually all the doctors and medical personnel from Parkland Hospital and from the autopsy room at Bethesda. Specter was responsible for understanding the smallest details of what his witnesses described, and the transcripts of the witness testimony show that he was consistently well prepared.
He also continued to impress his colleagues with his willingness to stand up to the chief justice and Rankin. Not that he always got his way: he had recommended that when commissioners began to take witness testimony in Washington, they start with the people who were physically closest to the president in the motorcade. The logical leadoff witness, Specter argued, was the president’s widow: “Jacqueline Kennedy would have made an appropriate beginning,” since no one had been closer to
the president, physically or otherwise, at the moment of his death.
In the first weeks of the investigation, Specter had prepared a list of ninety questions he wanted to ask the former First Lady. He divided them into seven categories, beginning with “Events of November 22, 1963, Preceding the Assassination.” He thought she should be asked about every element of her husband’s murder, including what she remembered of his facial expressions after the first bullet pierced his throat. Question 31: “What reaction, if any, did President Kennedy have after the first shot?” He also wanted to resolve a lingering mystery about why Mrs. Kennedy had tried to climb onto the trunk of the limousine after the shots rang out. “That question is of historical interest and has caused some speculation,” Specter wrote to Rankin, offering several possible explanations for what she did, including the possibility that she was simply trying to escape “the tragedy and danger in the car.”
In March, Specter said he was disappointed but not surprised when told that Mrs. Kennedy would not testify early in the investigation and that she might not be called to testify at all because of Warren’s reluctance to question her. “The Chief Justice had taken a protective stance toward Mrs. Kennedy,” Specter said later. It set a terrible double standard, he thought. If this had been a homicide case back at the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, police officers and detectives would have interviewed the victim’s spouse—especially one who had been at the murder scene—within hours of the crime. “In a first-degree murder case, the Commonwealth is obliged to call all eyewitnesses,” he said. “That’s because they’re that important to finding out the truth.” In the investigation of the assassination of the president, however, his widow might be asked no questions at all. “My view is that no witness is above the reach of the law to provide evidence,” Specter said. “I don’t think that Mrs. Kennedy was above that one iota.” He felt just as strongly that the commission needed to take testimony from President Johnson. The case for questioning the president was made stronger by the many conspiracy theories that he was somehow involved in the assassination. Specter insisted that he was ready to ask Johnson—“point blank”—if he had been part of a conspiracy. “Under other circumstances, he would have been considered a prime suspect,” Specter said later. “I don’t think President Johnson had anything to do with the assassination of President Kennedy, but I do not think that would have been an inappropriate question to ask.”
* * *
When Specter finally began taking testimony in Washington, his leadoff witnesses were the two Secret Service agents who had been in Kennedy’s limousine—first, Roy Kellerman, who had been riding in the right front seat, and then William Greer, the driver. Both were called to testify on Monday, March 9.
Kellerman struck Specter as “the casting model for the role” of a Secret Service agent. A former autoworker and Michigan state trooper, the soft-spoken Kellerman—so quiet that colleagues had jokingly given him the nickname “Gabby”—was “six feet four, weighed well over 200 pounds and was muscular and handsome.” While Kellerman might look the part, however, Specter was not convinced that the agent did his job well on the day of the assassination. He struck Specter as surprisingly unemotional, even blasé, when discussing the final moments of the life of the president he had been sworn to protect. Specter questioned why Kellerman did not jump to the back of the limousine, where Kennedy and Connally were grievously wounded, after hearing the gunfire in Dealey Plaza, at least to shield their bodies from the possibility of additional shots on the drive to Parkland Hospital. Kellerman insisted there was nothing he could have done; he felt he was more valuable to the victims by remaining in the front seat, where he could pass radio messages to Greer. Specter concluded that Kellerman “was the wrong man for the job—he was 48 years old, big, and his reflexes were not quick.”
Greer was a far more sympathetic witness. A fifty-four-year-old Irish-American immigrant who had arrived in the United States as a teenager, he still spoke with a slight brogue. He had joined the Secret Service after serving in the navy in World War II and then working for nearly a decade as a chauffeur for wealthy families in the Boston area. He made clear to Specter that he had been shattered by Kennedy’s murder. “He clearly felt deep affection for Kennedy, which I sensed had been reciprocal,” in part because of their shared Irish ancestry, Specter said. Greer was tormented by his actions in the motorcade, including his failure to hit the accelerator immediately after hearing the first shot. Photos and television film from the scene suggested he had actually hit the brakes after the first shot, turning around to see what was happening, possibly making Kennedy an easier target. When Jacqueline Kennedy learned those details later, friends said, she was furious, complaining that the Secret Service agents were no more capable of protecting the president than her children’s nanny would have been. Later, when William Manchester published his history of the assassination, he would report that Greer wept as he apologized to Mrs. Kennedy at Parkland Hospital, saying he should have swerved the car to try to save the president.
The chief justice, who sat through most of the witness testimony conducted by Specter, thought the young lawyer’s interrogation methods were methodical to the point of wasting time. Certainly, Warren thought, they were wasting his time. In the questioning of Kellerman and Greer, for instance, Specter asked the agents to give their best estimate of the time that passed between each of the shots, where each shot seemed to come from, and from how far away. He also asked them to mark on a map where they believed the motorcade had been when each of the shots was fired. Specter thought it was his obligation to ask about the most “minute details of the assassination,” no matter how much time it took. Warren disagreed, and he signaled his annoyance to Specter by tapping his fingers, loudly. During Kellerman’s testimony, Specter recalled, “the Chief Justice’s finger-tapping reached a crescendo,” and “he took me aside and asked me to speed it up.”
Warren told Specter that it was “unrealistic to expect meaningful answers to questions about the elapsed time” between the shots, especially when the agents had no clear memory of hearing the individual shots. But Specter refused the chief justice’s order to hurry up. “No, sir,” he recalled telling Warren. “These questions are essential.” Specter reminded Warren that people would “read and reread this record for years, if not decades, and perhaps over centuries.” He had plenty of experience with appeals courts back home in Pennsylvania and he knew how appeals judges scrutinized trial transcripts, looking for a prosecutor’s smallest error or inconsistency. The commission’s transcripts would be more closely reviewed than any transcript of any case he would ever prosecute. Specter thought that Warren, who had spent so much of his law-enforcement career managing prosecutors instead of prosecuting cases himself, did not understand that. “I don’t know if Warren had any comprehension of what a transcript would look like,” Specter remembered. “This was my work, and I was going to do it right.”
Warren was not pleased with Specter’s defiance, “but he didn’t order me to change my approach,” Specter said. “Aside from drumming his fingers, Warren did not interfere with this examination.”
The next Secret Service agent to testify, Clint Hill, was the true hero of the day of the assassination, Specter thought. He believed that anyone who closely reviewed the Zapruder film could see that Hill, a thirty-one-year-old North Dakotan who had been with the Secret Service for nine years, had saved Jacqueline Kennedy’s life. Hill had been in the follow-up car directly behind the presidential limousine; when he heard the first shot, he jumped into the street and ran toward the Kennedys, climbing onto the trunk of the presidential limousine. “I was amazed every time I watched the Zapruder film and saw Hill dash to the limousine, barely grasp the handle of the left rear fender and leap on the small running board at the left rear just as the car accelerated,” Specter said. The young agent pushed Mrs. Kennedy back in the limousine as she began to climb onto the trunk. Without his actions, Specter said, “Mrs. Kennedy would ha
ve tumbled into the street when the Lincoln accelerated, into the path of the speeding backup car.”
Specter was forgiving of Hill’s acknowledgment that he had broken Secret Service rules by going out drinking the night before the assassination; the agent admitted he had a Scotch and soda at the Press Club in Fort Worth and then went to another club, where he remained until he returned to his hotel at two forty-five a.m. Whatever the aftereffects of the alcohol, Specter believed that “Clinton Hill’s reflexes could hardly have been quicker when they were needed to save Mrs. Kennedy’s life.”
Hill offered Specter a convincing, if horrifying, explanation, for why Mrs. Kennedy had attempted to climb onto the trunk. “She had jumped up from the seat and was, it appeared to me, reaching for something coming off the right rear bumper of the car,” Hill said.
Specter: “Was there anything back there that you observed, that she may have been reaching for?”
Hill thought she had been reaching for bits of her husband’s skull that had been blown off by the second bullet to hit him. The blast “removed a portion of the president’s head and he had slumped noticeably to his left,” Hill said, remembering the bloody mist and particles of flesh in the backseat of the limousine. “I do know that the next day we found the portion of the president’s head” on the street in Dallas. He recalled that his only impulse was to get the First Lady back into the passenger compartment. “I grabbed her and put her back in the back seat, crawled up on the top of the back seat and lay there.”
* * *
Specter was also responsible for reviewing the medical evidence, and much of it was a mess, he quickly discovered. The record created by the emergency-room doctors at Parkland Hospital and later by the autopsy-room pathologists at Bethesda Naval Hospital, was full of contradictory, inaccurate information. Specter sensed early on how the confusion might give birth to conspiracy theories. The problems began within hours of the assassination, when doctors at Parkland held an ill-advised news conference. Facing a crowd of frantic reporters, Dr. Malcolm Perry, who had attended the president in the emergency room, seemed to say that one of the bullets that hit the president had come from the front of the motorcade instead of from the Texas School Book Depository or some other point behind Kennedy’s limousine. “Yes, it is conceivable,” said Perry, a comment suggesting at least two gunmen. An alarmed reporter from Time magazine, Hugh Sidey, warned Perry, “Doctor, do you realize what you’re doing? You’re confusing us.”
A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Page 30
