It follows, then, that if the report is proven wrong on any of these key points, there must clearly be a conspiracy involving perpetrators of a master plan not only to do away with the President and to take control of the government of the United States but also to maintain the most elaborate cover-up of the century. Since all of this information is on the record, let’s examine some key elements of the Warren Commission scenario.
The alleged lair of the gunman was six floors above the turn that the President’s car made onto Elm Street. Unforeseeably, a Dallas resident named Abraham Zapruder had stationed himself on a low stone structure to take color movies of the President’s motorcade. He was a little higher than ground level and to the right front of the Texas School Book Depository building. Because of Zapruder’s eyewitness film, it is possible to mark precisely the location of the President’s car at the time of the first shot and to time the intervals between the shots.
Even at a slow speed and a moderate distance, a rifleman must follow the target and lead it to compensate for movement. From the distance and height of the sixth-floor window, it would not have been an impossible shot—had it not been for the foliage of a large tree that stood between the gunman’s lair and the President’s car, as shown in the spot news photos, such as the one taken by Altgens, a professional news cameraman.
The frame speed of Zapruder’s camera is known. The film captured the rotation of the tires and the movement past the spaced white lines in Elm Street. These items make it possible to ascertain with precision where the President was and to determine that he was concealed by that big tree at the time of the first shot. No marksman could have followed that moving target through the foliage and fired three shots in quick succession and have two of them hit his target with precision. To think that is possible is preposterous.
Moreover, an experienced gunman—a former marine, we’ll say—would not have selected a place where he had to peer through a tree if he was planning to shoot the President of the United States.
In an attempt to prove that the gunman had been able to shoot the President through the tree, the FBI had a camera mounted in the sixth-floor window and aimed it through a telescopic sight. The bureau arranged for an automobile with four passengers to move slowly down Elm Street while the camera took pictures, ostensibly to show what the gunman saw. In these photographs, it is possible to see the cross hairs of the telescopic sight zeroed in on the back of the target victim from that window and through the tree.
The FBI did not mention that this was a trick of photography. A telescopic lens may be focused on a distant target and will appear to see “through” intervening obstructions, such as leaves. In the same way, the eye can focus on a distant target through a screen door; it sees the distant target and doesn’t notice the screen. But although this can be done by the human eye and by means of a cameraman’s trick shot, it cannot be done by a rifleman peering through branches and leaves, as any hunter can tell you. It’s the bullet, not the lens, that has to crash through the branches and leaves; such obstructions knock it off its course.
This simple bit of FBI skullduggery with the tree, the telescopic lens, and the camera is a classic example of how a real crime can be hidden by a skillful cover-up. As this becomes obvious, we wonder who, at what high level of the administration, had the power to engage the FBI in such a plot and its cover-up. This is the heart of the matter as we dig further into the Kennedy assassination.
A memorandum by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover on November 29, 1963, cites a discussion he had on that date with President Johnson. (A copy of this memorandum is held by the author.) Hoover wrote:
The President then indicated our conclusions are:
He [Oswald] is the one who did it;
After the President was hit, Governor Connally was hit;
The President would have been hit three times except for the fact that Governor Connally turned after the first shot and was hit by the second. . . .
In summary, the President and the director of the FBI had concluded that Kennedy was hit once and Connally twice. That is a total of three bullets. As we know, the Warren Commission Report states that one bullet that went through the President’s body also hit Connally and that another bullet hit the President’s head and killed him. And the report recognizes that one bullet missed both men and hit a bystander. This also is a total of three bullets and requires all the trickery of the “magic” bullet scheme.
If we think about this for a moment, we realize the importance of the Johnson-Hoover conversation. President Johnson was stating his conclusion only one week after the murder. He had been two cars behind President Kennedy. He heard those shots, and his account that day completely contradicted what would later become the official scenario.
This important memorandum begins with a recapitulation of a conversation between Hoover and Johnson in which they discussed the selection of the men to be asked to serve on the Warren Commission. As quoted by Hoover, Johnson himself disproved the Warren Report’s “three-bullet” finding.
Hoover wrote, “I stated that our ballistics experts were able to prove the shots were fired by this gun; that the President was hit by the first and third bullets and the second hit the governor; that there were three shots. . . .” (Note that in the above “three-bullet” scheme, Hoover wrote, “ . . . indicated our conclusions” was that two bullets hit Connally and only one hit the President.)
That simple statement, by itself, throws out the validity of the Warren Report. It does not account for the “near-miss” bullet that hit a curb and injured a bystander named James Tague, as will be described below. That was an undeniable fourth shot. Furthermore, ample evidence proves beyond the slightest doubt that neither the Warren Report nor even this Hoover memorandum was correct. The stories are equally invalid. Both were contrived.
The Warren Commission murder scenario states that three shots were fired. Any change in that number destroys the commission’s entire case. Yet the most cursory of analyses of this “three-bullet” contrivance does ruin the case. There had to have been more than three shots and more than one gunman.
One bullet hit the President in the back. (This can be established, beyond doubt, by the fact that both Kennedy’s suitcoat and shirt have holes in the back below the right shoulder blade.) Without going into the autopsy details, we will simply accept that as bullet number one. One bullet hit the President in the head, shattering his skull. Gov. John Connally of Texas, who was sitting in the car on a jump seat just in front of the President, said it had the effect of “covering the car with brain matter.” That is bullet number two. One bullet missed and has been acknowledged by the Warren Commission as a clear miss. That is bullet number three.
Unfortunately, the members of the Warren Commission were confronted with the fact that at least one bullet hit Governor Connally. There was no fourth bullet, or so they said. The commission members bulldozed their way through this dilemma by ramming bullet number one (which hit Kennedy in the back) through the President, out a small aperture in his throat area, through the air (in a circuitous path), and into the governor’s back, crashing through a rib, out into the air, crashing through the governor’s wrist, out into that clear Texas air again, and then back into the governor’s thigh, where to this day a few small fragments remain.
As if the flight of this “magic” bullet were not fantasy enough, the Warren Commission asserted that someone found this much-traveled projectile lying on a stretcher in Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy and Connally had been taken. The Warren Commission published photographs of that bullet, and the bullet itself may be seen “live” in the National Archives. Miraculously, the magic bullet is unscathed, except for a slight mark where someone cut away a tiny bit for identification purposes. This historic specimen, moreover, shows no evidence of missing those bits that John Connally still carries with him in his injured thigh.
The story of bullet number one’s magic flight is preposterous. But it is valuable for illustrati
ng how certain the perpetrators of this crime were of sufficient power to arrange for the murder of the President, for the extensive cover-up, and for the abject reduction of the chief justice to the role of puppet for purposes of issuing the cover-up report. Even more unnerving has been their ability to foist such a story on the American public for nearly thirty years and to make it stick by having every President since Kennedy vouch for it. This alone is a definition of the location of and the magnitude of that anonymous power center.
The magic-bullet scenario has survived more than a generation of attacks, investigations, and doubt. It remains the official story, a story that very few, if any, government officials and major news media representatives contest. Examples such as these prove that this crime was committed not only to kill the President but to take over the powers of the government. The cabal knew that whatever it contrived as the explanation for the crime could never be contested. This murder has never been tried in a Texas court, as law requires.
The Secret Service, the FBI, and the Warren Commission had to admit that one of the three bullets fired by their “lone gunman” missed. This admission was forced upon them by the fact that James Tague, a bystander, was struck on the cheek by a fragment of the bullet or by a bit of the granite curbstone struck by that errant round. In either case, Tague was photographed with blood running down his cheek by an alert news cameramen. He also photographed the curbstone where Tague stood that day, and those photographs show the bullet strike on the stone.
This left the Warren Commission with only two bullets to account for the injuries to Kennedy and Connally cited above. They were further constrained by the “fact” that someone had “found” only three shell cases at the scene of the alleged gunman’s lair. Once all of these bits of evidence, real and contrived, had become public, the commission had to weave its story accordingly. It handled the Tague item rather casually. The members of the Warren Commission agreed that Tague had been struck by a fragment and that Tague’s injury was the result of a “near miss.” It said nothing about where Tague was standing.
Most readers of the Warren Report assume that Tague was standing close to where the President’s car passed on Elm Street. They think it was an actual near miss and that the path of the bullet could not have been far from the others that were fired. The readers assume that if the commission was going to credit this gunman with the uncanny ability to shoot through the foliage of a tree and hit a moving target with two out of three shots, then he must have been good enough to have a very “near” miss with the wasted shot. That was not the case, however, and therein lies another key factor in the ingenious plot to kill the President.
Tague was standing on a curb on Main Street, not Elm Street. He was more than one full block away from the President’s car. Let’s draw a line from the point of impact on that curbstone back to a position within a circle with an eighteen-inch diameter around the President’s head and shoulders. If we project that line back to some firing point, we have placed that gunman in a window on the second floor of the Dal-Tex building, behind the President’s car.
On the other hand, if we draw a line from that same point of contact with the curbstone back to the alleged lone gunman’s lair on the sixth floor of the Book Depository building, we discover that the bullet would have traveled about twenty-two feet above the President’s car and as much as thirty-three feet to its right. Obviously, this bullet is hardly a “near” miss. The path of the Tague bullet reveals that the true location of at least one gunman at Dealey Plaza was in a second-floor window of the Dal-Tex building. In this location he would have had a logical field of fire from the rear of the car, with no intervening tree. The caliber of a professional “mechanic” or hit man is such that he would select only the best position. That Dal-Tex window is an ideal sniper’s location.
It is noteworthy that on Saturday, November 23, 1963, the curbstone with the mark of the bullet strike on it was removed and replaced. Oswald, the supposed lone gunman, was then in custody. Who benefited by removing this evidence? The answer begins to be clear: those who wanted to maintain the scenario of a lone gunman. Yet the idea of a sixth-floor location of a lone assassin is absurd. The final, fatal, and shattering shot—as clearly and starkly revealed by the Zapruder film—came from ground level and from a position in the direction of the grassy knoll that gave the gunman a close-in, clear shot at Kennedy’s head. The fact that brain matter was splattered backward, over the trunk of the car, onto the motorcycle policeman riding to the left and rear of the car, and even as far as onto the grass to the left and rear of the car, fortifies the conclusion that the shot came from the right, from in front of the car, and from ground level.
What happened to the Zapruder film provides further insight into how the wily plotters arranged their cover-up. That night, November 22, 1963, a Life magazine official negotiated with Zapruder for the rights to the film in his camera. Later, when a series of still photographs was printed to show the tremendous impact of that bullet on the President’s head, someone had cleverly reversed their sequence to make it appear that the head had been thrust forward, not backward.
Not long after the publication of that series of pictures, a researcher, Harold Weisberg, noted that these crucial moving picture photos had been reversed and did not match the sequence of the actual movie strip film. This was truly astonishing.
This meant that, somehow, someone had either caused the FBI to change the sequence or had caused Life magazine to arrange the pictures in an order to make it appear that the President’s head had been struck from the rear—from the direction of the lone gunman’s sixth-floor lair, and not from the front, where the actual killer had been.
This crafty reversal of the photographic sequence reveals that the case was carefully monitored by skilled agents who could control certain key activities of the bureaucracy (the military and Secret Service), the Warren Commission (including its staff assistants), and the news media, which have remained under this control since that date.
But perhaps the most incredible aspect in this plot to murder the President, to take over control of the administration of the U.S. government, and to cover up any related actions for as long as necessary, is the ability of the conspirators to reach as far as the chief justice of the United States in order to lend credence to the cover-up scenario.
Nothing reveals the extent of this control more than the following words from a January 27, 1964, meeting of the newly created Warren Commission. The members were discussing the problems they foresaw in having to deal with the Secret Service, the FBI, and the state of Texas, where the murder trial should have taken place.
John McCloy, a member of the commission, said of one such problem, “I can see the difficulty with that [differences between the Secret Service account and the report from the FBI], but on the other hand, I have a feeling we are so dependent upon them [the FBI and the Secret Service] for our facts.”
J. Lee Rankin, the commission’s general counsel, said, “Part of our difficulty in regard to it [the murder] is that they [the FBI and the Secret Service] have no problem. They have decided that it is Oswald who committed the assassination. They have decided that no one else was involved. They have decided.”
Sen. Richard B. Russell then said, “They have tried the case and reached a verdict on every aspect.”
Congressman Hale Boggs agreed: “You have put your finger on it.”
With reference to the thousands of “further inquiries” the commission would have to make, Rankin said he assumed the response from the FBI and Secret Service would be “Why do you want all that? It is clear.”
As you will recall, in the Hoover memorandum of November 29, 1963, the new President, Lyndon Johnson, said the murderer was Oswald. Hoover concurred and stated there were three shots. Those two men had decided. Setting up the Warren Commission after that was itself a mere gesture. The Warren Commission did not investigate what had happened; it merely took prepackaged, precooked data and published its prescribe
d report, as it had been ordered to do.
Going back to the meeting of the Warren Commission on January 27, Senator Russell gave his view of the probable response from the FBI and the Secret Service: “You have our statement. What else do you need?”
McCloy then offered his version of what the FBI and the Secret Service would say: “We know who killed Cock Robin.”
Those statements illustrate the troubled climate under which the members of the Warren Commission operated.
The commission was created by executive order on November 29, 1963, the same day Hoover and Johnson met to discuss how the investigation would be handled. A first get-together of the commission took place on December 5, 1963. Official hearings began on February 3, 1964. The commission received a five-volume report from the FBI on December 9, 1963, and another report from the Secret Service on December 20, 1963.
Of particular interest is the fact that during the November 29 meeting between President Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, Johnson told his good friend and longtime neighbor that, in Hoover’s words, “he wanted to get by just with my [Hoover’s] file and my report.”
An important result of the announcement of the formation of the Warren Commission was the derailing of a planned independent congressional investigation of the assassination. Johnson told Hoover on November 29 that he wanted to “tell the House and Senate not to go ahead with the investigation.”
Waggoner Carr, the Texas attorney general, and Preston Smith, the lieutenant governor of Texas, were two of Johnson’s first visitors after he became President. The visit occurred on November 24. It would be interesting to know whether they decided then not to hold a trial for the murder of Kennedy, even though it was committed in Texas. It should be noted that at almost the exact time Johnson, Carr, and Smith were conferring in the White House, Jack Ruby (Rubenstein) shot Lee Harvey Oswald at Dallas Police Department headquarters, a murder shown on nationwide TV.
JFK: CIA, Vietnam & The Plot to Assassinate JFK Page 43
