The limo stop—during which JFK was hit twice in the head, once from behind and once from in front—was such an obvious indication of Secret Service complicity that it had to be taken out, which is undoubtedly the principal reason for fixing the film. But it had other ramifications. What Clint Hill has consistently described is not in the Zapruder film: he describes several actions in those seconds around the limo stop that were deleted from the extant film. In editing the timeline of the extant film, it was necessary to delete his pushing of Mrs. Kennedy back into the seat—there just wasn’t enough time left in the film once the limo stop had been deleted. There is no possible way in which Clint could possibly have seen what he claims to have seen before the car accelerated away and passed the lead car when he was stuck on the back of the speeding limo as he is shown doing in the extant film. And from his initial reports right up to his latest “book signing” interview, he has insisted that that was when he saw those things, that he did reach Mrs. Kennedy and that he did push her down into the car, unlike what the film shows. Which means that the film is a fake.
All of these credible witnesses were either completely ignored by the Warren Commission or—such as in the case of Jean Hill, whose story will be examined closely in the next chapter—treated contemptuously by Arlen Specter and David Belin in order to try to discredit her testimony and then summarily ignored; the witnesses they decided to consider “important” enough to believe were among the most incredible, nontrustworthy, and unbelievable people they interviewed, as will also shortly become evident. The testimony about the first shot missing Kennedy will also become pertinent as we proceed through the narrative of this story.
Fifteen minutes before the assassination, one witness had been looking up at the windows of the Texas School Book Depository building. Arnold Rowland said that at about 12:15 p.m., as he awaited the motorcade, “he saw two men in sixth floor windows, one of them with a rifle across his chest.”74 He further stated that the man holding the rifle was not in the window of the “sniper’s nest,” at the right side of the building, but a window in the far left-hand side of the sixth floor. The man he saw at the right-hand side was dark complexioned, possibly a Negro.75 When he informed FBI agents about the second man, “they told me it didn’t have any bearing or such on the case right then. In fact they just the same as told me to forget it now … They didn’t seem interested at all. They didn’t pursue this point. They didn’t take it down in the notation as such.”76
About the same time that Rowland noticed the men on the sixth floor, another witness, Ruby Henderson also saw two men standing back from a window. She also noticed “that one of the men had dark hair, a darker complexion than the other.” At the time, it occurred to her that he might have been a Mexican or even a Negro.77 A third witness, Mrs. Carolyn Walther, noticed two men with a gun in an open window. “I saw this man in a window, and he had a gun in his hands, pointed downwards. The man evidently was in a kneeling position, because his forearms were resting on the windowsill. There was another man standing beside him, but I only saw a portion of his body, because he was standing partly up against the window, you know, only halfway in the window; and the window was dirty and I couldn’t see his face, up above, because the window was pushed up. It startled me; then I thought, ‘Well, they probably have guards, possibly in all the buildings,’ so I didn’t say anything. If Mrs. Walther had sounded the alarm, it would probably have been too late. She had barely noticed the second man when the President’s motorcade swept into view.”78 Two films, by Robert Hughes and Charles Bronson, were made of these windows which indicate movements in more than just the “sniper’s window.” The Bronson film was reviewed by the FBI and dismissed as “irrelevant.”79
Mary Mitchell (who had been standing on the southeast corner of Elm and Houston streets) testified to the Warren Commission on April 1, 1964: “Well, the president’s car passed and, of course, I watched it as long as I could see it but, as I remember, immediately behind it was a car full of men with the top down and quite a few of them were standing, and I assumed they were Secret Service men, so after the car turned the corner and started down the hill, I couldn’t see over the heads of the standing men for very long, so then I turned back to watch the other people in the caravan, whatever you call it, and probably about the time the car in which Senator Yarborough was riding had just passed, I heard some reports. The first one—there were three—the second and third being closer together than the first and second and probably on the first one my thought was that it was a firecracker, and I think on the second one I thought that some police officer was after somebody that wasn’t doing right.”80 (emphasis added).
It is curious that Mary Mitchell referred to “the car in which Senator Yarborough was riding.” The vice president and his wife Lady Bird were also in the car, and most people would have considered him the “primary” occupant given his office. But she didn’t even mention Vice President Johnson, who should have been more visible, sitting closer to her as the car entered the intersection; after all, he was the primary “notable occupant” of the car. The reason for her curious observation—the only reasonable explanation about why she didn’t remember seeing Johnson—was because he wasn’t visible. He had already started ducking down behind the front seats, as if he knew in advance that danger was lurking there at the corner of Houston and Elm streets. Mrs. Mitchell, curiously, was also never questioned about this point by the Warren Commission’s lawyers, yet they were eager to go off onto other “fishing expeditions” numerous times with other witnesses as noted elsewhere.
Many people in the area of the grassy knoll said that shots had definitely come from that area. Abraham Zapruder’s initial reaction was that the shots had come from behind him, but for some reason he later changed his testimony to say he wasn’t sure where the shots came from. Four Dallas policemen rushed up the knoll upon first hearing rifle fire. Joe M. Smith, a patrolman, climbed up the hill and said he “caught the smell of gunpowder there.”81 Officer Smith also stated that “he came across a man standing by a car. The man reacted quickly at the sight of Smith and an accompanying deputy. As Smith remembers it, ‘The man, this character produced credentials from his hip pocket which showed him to be Secret Service. I have seen those credentials before, and they satisfied me and the deputy sheriff. So I immediately accepted that and let him go and continued our search around the cars … But he had dirty fingernails, it looked like, and hands that looked like an auto mechanic’s hands. And afterwards it didn’t ring true for the Secret Service … I should have checked that man closer, but at the time I didn’t snap on it.’”82 Seven Dallas union terminal railroad men witnessed the assassination and immediately observed a puff of smoke rising from the fence area. “Two of the men, S.M. Holland and James L. Simmons, ran from the overpass and into the railroad yard behind the fence. They found footprints behind the fence, and mud on the back bumper of a car which the gunman, or his spotter, could have stood on.”83
The Scene at Parkland Hospital
At Parkland Hospital minutes after the shooting, a team of doctors began working exhaustively to try to save JFK’s life. Their efforts were futile, of course, since at least a third of his brain was blown out of his head—ironically, “torn into a thousand pieces and cast unto the winds” on Elm Street—and he could not have been alive when he arrived at Parkland. Within minutes, they came to the realization that there was no hope the president’s life could be saved; he was pronounced dead one half hour after he had been shot, at 1:00 p.m., though it appears the conclusion came ten minutes before that but held pending the arrival of a priest.
One of the doctors, Robert McClelland, arrived at trauma room one with Dr. Charles Crenshaw, just behind Dr. Malcolm Perry and Dr. Charles Baxter. Interviewed at age seventy-nine in 2008, he described the president’s face as “cyanotic—bluish-black, swollen, suffused with blood.”84 Dr. Perry asked Dr. McClelland to hold a retractor as Perry began to work futilely to save the president, and as Dr.
McClelland did so, his face was eighteen inches above the president’s head wound.
McClelland looked into the head wound. Stray hairs at the back of the head covered parts of the hole, as did bits of bone, blood, and more blood clots. He watched as a piece of cerebellum slowly slipped from the back of the hole and dropped onto the cart. (In the room with his students, Dr. McClelland softly touches the rear-right part of his own head. “Right back here,” he tells them. “About like this.” He puts his hands together to signify the size of the wound, about the size of a golf ball. (This is the writer’s characterization; most researchers agree with McClelland’s own previously stated comparison to a “baseball”). Staring at the hole in the back of the president’s head, “He looked at where the skull crumpled slightly around the edges. Knowing nothing else of the assassination at the time, he, too, assumed a bullet had come out of that opening.”85
None of the doctors there, of course, had heard anything about the supposed shot from the book depository, so they had already concluded that the hole in the “right rear” of Kennedy’s head was an exit wound, just as they had assumed the neck wound and temple wound were entrance wounds; they had not noticed the additional entrance wound in his back. Dr. McClelland was convinced, again, that the shot had come from Kennedy’s front and to his right upon seeing the Zapruder film for the first time in 1975 and seeing how the president swayed “back and to the left.”86 About 1:30 p.m., the White House assistant press secretary Malcolm Kilduff, announcing Kennedy’s murder, pointed to his own right temple to illustrate the direction from which he had been hit, saying, “He died of a gunshot wound in the brain … of a bullet right through the head.”87
Dr. Charles Crenshaw had left the room briefly while Kennedy was given his last rites and the death certificate was being prepared. As he returned, he saw two pathology doctors explaining to the Secret Service agents that an autopsy was now necessary, according to Texas law. The discussion at that point was polite but forceful; however, the agents’ responses were becoming even more emphatic that “they had orders to take the President’s body back to Washington, D.C. just as soon as it was ready to be moved, that there would be no Texas autopsy … talking turned to shouting and hand waving escalated to finger pointing. Unable to prevail in their mission, Drs. Stembridge and Stewart angrily wheeled and stomped away. Not only were they outnumbered, but the men in suits had guns. My impression was that someone, who had given explicit instructions to these men, wanted Kennedy’s body out of Parkland, out of Dallas, and out of Texas in a hurry” (emphasis added).88 Can there be any question whatsoever about just who it was that was acting “behind the scenes?” Or who might have had the authority—at least thought he had the authority—to circumvent Texas law and order that JFK’s body be forcefully removed from the hospital and brought back to his airplane so it could be returned to Washington with him?
The arguments grew worse until a phalanx of Secret Service agents encircled the bronze casket into which Kennedy had been placed and began forcibly taking it toward the hallway. The chief of forensic pathology, Dr. Earl Rose, had by now taken over the argument, telling Roy Kellerman, “When there’s a homicide, we must have an autopsy.”89 Dr. Rose had correctly sensed the same level of pent-up anger—and the danger of continuing the argument—after ten minutes of screaming back and forth and decided to let go of the coffin just before the guns of the Secret Service were pulled from their holsters.90 Anthony Summers stated that the guns were indeed drawn. “The Secret Service agents put the doctor and the judge up against the wall at gunpoint and swept out of the hospital with the President’s body.”91
Jim Bishop’s and William Manchester’s account of the surreal scene were similar: Dr. Rose was insistent that JFK’s body remain at Parkland until a proper autopsy could be performed, in accordance with Texas law; seeing that Kellerman was not backing down, he became apoplectic—furious that there was even a question about whether it would be done—and ordered Kellerman to step aside. Kellerman responded in kind, ordering Dr. Rose to get out of the way, that the body would be transported back to Washington immediately; they would have to waive their laws.92
After several more minutes of this back and forth squabbling over JFK’s body, and the hospital’s search for a justice of the peace, JP Theron Ward arrived on the scene, but by then tempers on both sides had flared, including the president’s doctor, Admiral George Burkley.93 Kellerman and the other Washingtonians were not impressed by the “JP” title or of Ward’s physical presence. In the end, JP Ward would only say, “It’s just another homicide case as far as I’m concerned.”94 By this time, everyone on both sides of the impasse had come to such anger that nothing that JP Ward might say could have resolved it; the tension continued to escalate as Kenneth O’Donnell glanced at Sergeant Robert Dugger of the Dallas Police, seeing that he was about to lose control and attack someone. Rose himself looked like he was ready to attack Kellerman who he continued screaming at as he flapped and swung his arms for added emphasis.95
As Rose and other policemen kept trying to stop them, finally, several agents led by Kellerman—with Larry O’Brien and Ken O’Donnell in front of the gurney and leading the way—shoved their way past the medical examiner and justice of the peace, ordering everyone to get out of the way, that they were waiting no longer, it was time to go.96 Doctor Rose, in his quest to preserve the “chain of evidence,” was evidently the only official in Dallas or Washington that day who remembered this fundamental rule of criminal investigations; JFK’s body was only one of the more prominent items that would be compromised by the rush to return to Washington and “normalcy” that would justify a complete breakdown in practically all rules of ordinary police procedure. The most likely way that this near violent incident then ended so suddenly was just as Anthony Summers described it: Kellerman and the other agents finally put the doctor and judge “up against the wall at gunpoint” as they commandeered the casket and carried it out to the waiting hearse. This action could have only realistically been accomplished in compliance with orders that came from the highest possible authority of the U.S. government.
Three Credible Witnesses: Jack Ruby was at Parkland Hospital
About the same time as the frenzied fight over JFK’s body was playing out, three witnesses saw Jack Ruby at Parkland: Veteran newsmen Seth Kantor and Roy Stamps, both of whom had known Ruby for years, and housewife Wilma Tice.97 In his testimony to the Warren Commission, Seth Kantor said he knew Ruby personally, having worked with him on at least six feature stories about people of interest who came through his clubs. He stated that he had numerous meetings with Ruby during the period when he worked in Dallas at the Herald Tribune, from September 1960 to May 1962. Yet when commission attorney Burt Griffin questioned him, he repeatedly used the words “you think,” or “you might have,” seen Jack Ruby, as if to suggest that Kantor might have been confused on this point or perhaps not completely certain it was indeed Jack Ruby he saw.
However, Kantor would testify, under oath, that he was positive that he had seen and talked to Jack Ruby at Parkland Hospital. “As I had told the FBI … I spoke with Jack Ruby … [followed by three pages of inane questions about exactly which doorway he was near at Parkland when this conversation occurred] as I was walking, I was stopped momentarily by a tug on the back of my jacket. And I turned and saw Jack Ruby standing there. He had his hand extended. I very well remember my first thought. I thought, well, there is Jack Ruby. I had been away from Dallas 18 months and 1 day at that time, but it seemed just perfectly normal to see Jack Ruby standing there, because he was a known goer to events … And I took his hand and shook hands with him. He called me by name. And I said hello to him, I said, ‘Hello, Jack,’ I guess. And he said, ‘Isn’t this a terrible thing?’ I said, ‘Yes’ but I also knew it was no time for small talk, and I was most anxious to continue on up the stairway … But he asked me, curiously enough, he said, “Should I close my places for the next three nights, do you think?’”98 Kantor went
on to say that “if it was a matter of just seeing him, I would have long ago been full of doubt. But I did talk to the man, and he did stop me, and I just can’t have any doubt about that.”99
But the sworn testimony of a man who knew Jack Ruby—who had known him for years—and who had talked to Jack Ruby at length in Parkland Hospital shortly after Kennedy’s assassination could not persuade the staff and/or the august commissioners of the presidential commission charged with investigating the circumstances of the assassination that there was anything to it. Yet other incredible and discredited witnesses—Helen Markham, for instance, is the best of several examples—were embraced by the commission as completely reliable (arguably the worst witness was the new president, who refused to testify under oath or even submit to a deposition under oath; they simply accepted Johnson’s casually written statement).
The Hunt for JFK’s Assassin Begins … and Abruptly Ends,
the Same Day
By 12:45 p.m., a radio dispatcher at Dallas Police headquarters had already sent out a description (the source of which remains unclear) of a man wanted for questioning: “an unknown white male approximately thirty, 165 pounds, slender build armed with what is thought to be a .30-30 rifle.”100 Around 1:30 p.m., the hunt for Kennedy’s assassin was somehow merged (how and why is also unclear) with that of the killer of policeman J. D. Tippit in the Texas Theater, a few miles southwest of Dealey Plaza. About the same time, a rifle was discovered inside a stack of boxes toward the northeast corner of the sixth floor. It was initially reported—not as the infamous 6.5 mm Italian Mannlicher-Carcano supposedly owned by Oswald—as a 7.65 mm German Mauser, according to Roger Craig and other policemen on the scene who found the rifle. According to Jim Bishop’s account, “Deputy Eugene Boone yelled: ‘Here is the gun!’ … He was near the staircase leading down, farthest away from the window where the shells had been found … It was standing upright between two triple rows of cartons, squeezed tight.”101 Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman, who was with Deputy Boone when the rifle was found, executed an affidavit the following day stating that the rifle found on the sixth floor of the depository was a 7.65 Mauser equipped with a 4/18 scope with a leather sling on it.102 Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig was standing near Weitzman at the time the rifle was discovered; he said that Weitzman already thought it was a Mauser when he first looked at it then, after inspecting it closely, confirmed verbally that it was stamped “7.65 Mauser.”103
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