Lyndon Johnson would also be glad to see that the Dallas Police Department had ordered most of their men to duty at Love Field, leaving only light protection the rest of the way; even the policemen posted at the major intersections would disappear at the point where the motorcade turned north on Houston, at the edge of Dealey Plaza, “the weakest link in downtown Dallas.”3 As William Manchester later noted, there were only a few scattered patrolmen around Dealey Plaza, though there had been 365 policemen at Love Field and 60 stationed at the Trade Mart.4 As he had directed, the Dallas Police Department and the county Sheriff’s Department were told to end motorcade protection at Houston Street because from there on, the Secret Service was to take over, though no actual Secret Service agents were posted anywhere around there other than those in the motorcade. It was only a short distance from the triple underpass to the ramp leading to the freeway; however, it left the motorcade completely unprotected for that critical distance designated as the “killing zone.” Johnson knew also that there would be men posted there with Secret Service credentials who would ensure that no well-meaning bystanders would get in the way and spoil the planned getaway of the men behind the picket fence. They were also instructed to note everyone taking pictures of the motorcade and immediately begin confiscating them after the operation was completed.
After leaving the airport, according to Senator Yarborough as chronicled by William Manchester, Johnson did not enjoy being in the motorcade as he rode through Dallas, staring glumly at the people who had come out to greet the presidential party.5 Shortly after the motorcade started, Johnson abruptly leaned forward toward the front seats and ordered the driver to “turn the radio on.” Hurchel Jacks obeyed the vice president, turning the volume up so that Johnson could hear a local station broadcasting the progress of the motorcade through the city.6 Listening to the local radio station was a pretext for Johnson to lean forward during parts of the entire ride—making his actions when his car approached Elm Street, by then, not seem all that unusual to his fellow passengers—while virtually ignoring the crowd lining the streets. Riding forward on the seat and hunching down like this would put him into the ideal position to quickly fall behind the front seat as the car approached Elm Street. By this point, he would switch his attention to a hand-held wireless “walkie-talkie,” shared with Secret Service Agent Youngblood, according to Senator Yarborough. This would give him further excuse to duck down below the rear seatbacks feigning hearing difficulties. This kind of conniving, as part of his overall long-term planning, was precisely what Lyndon Johnson excelled in throughout his life; the objective of his behavior in the motorcade, as we shall see shortly, was to take himself out of the line of fire when the shooting began.
By noon in Dealey Plaza, three cars somehow had gained entrance into the parking area adjacent to the railroad yard, which had supposedly been closed by the police at 10:00 a.m. Lee Bowers, a railroad switchman, was sitting in a tower overlooking the parking lot at that time. He had a good view of the area between his tower and Elm Street. In sworn testimony, he stated there was a lot of activity going on in the area of the picket fence, with strange cars coming in and out and strangers loitering around inside the fenced area. He saw two men as they arrived in the parking lot to take up positions along the fence area. He added, “These men were the only two strangers in the area. The others were workers whom I knew.” He saw that one of the men had a handheld “walkie-talkie,” which he was talking into sporadically.7 Though their movements looked very suspicious to him, he decided that they were probably involved in the presidential security detail.
The logistics of the “crime of the century” had been worked out by men who held some of the highest offices of the government and involved about a dozen; they also had access to an assortment of the best equipment available to carry out their mission. But most did not know any more than that which they needed to know to perform their own part. Only three at the top, another three or four in the middle, and as many again at the bottom, including the actual shooters, were aware of the real agenda. The others were part of the loosely accountable, compartmentalized world of covert operations and had no knowledge of the ultimate objective of their assignments. Many were veterans of “Operation Mongoose” and were now actively involved in ZR/RIFLE or “Operation 40,” but this operation was only supposed to be a failed assassination attempt, for vague purposes to them. The only unifying object of their diversionary mission was the promise of being the catalyst for a new and energized retaliatory attack on Cuba to finally achieve the permanent removal of Fidel Castro.
According to an interview conducted by Dick Russell, Gerry Patrick Hemming told him that the Cubans were brought into the picture in the middle of November 1963:8
The week before the assassination, Felipe Vidal Santiago told my group that some people had approached him to go to a big meeting in Dallas that week,” Hemming said. “We warned him and some other people not to go, that something funny was up. I’d heard of other meetings, where the conversation got steered around toward hitting JFK instead of Fidel. I’m talking about … some people in Dallas. It’s hard to say exactly who this select group of Cuban exiles was really working for … For a while, they were reporting to Bill Harvey’s ex-FBI CIA guys. Some were reporting back to Hoover, or the new DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]. There was a third force—pretty much outside CIA channels, outside our own private operation down in the Keys—that was doing all kinds of shit, and had been all through ’63.
The men coming into place in Dealey Plaza that morning were working on a covert operation that had been cloned from the earlier efforts to assassinate Castro and invade Cuba. The operation was modified in the final days once the final nod was given by the commander of the operation. One of the lower-level contract agents involved in the conspiracy was Lee Harvey Oswald, selected months ago to become, in his own words after the realization had dawned on him, the “patsy” of the operation. He had been deluded into thinking that this was the culmination of his lifelong childhood dream: becoming a spy like the exciting character on the television series I Led Three Lives.* Oswald was not one of the actual assassins, however; he personally liked John F. Kennedy. Many researchers agree that the Altgens photo (to be reviewed shortly) shows Oswald standing at the entrance to the building and that of course would mean he fired no shots at all. A more likely scenario for the errant shot would be that it was not fired from the TSBD building at all, but rather from a lower floor of the Dal-Tex building; this would explain why it was not so much a “wild shot” but rather one which narrowly missed hitting its mark, instead it hit the edge of the gutter directly in front of the limousine. As Dr. James H. Fetzer has established, Oswald’s weapon could not have fired the shots that killed JFK; he was not even on the sixth floor at the time, and Oswald passed his paraffin test showing he had not fired a carbine.9 Furthermore, it is improbable that Oswald had even been on the sixth floor of the TSBD after noon that day for several reasons, including the testimony of Officer Marion Baker and Oswald’s boss, Roy Truly, both of whom stated that Oswald was very calm and not out of breath, which anyone would have been after running down four flights of stairs, something he would have had to have done if he had been a shooter, in order to meet them on the second floor only ninety seconds after the final shots were fired. Another was that Carolyn Arnold saw Oswald on the first floor at 12:15 p.m. and about the same time Arnold Rowland saw a man standing at a window with a rifle, but this was the corner of the other side of the building (the southwest corner) on the sixth floor. Josiah Thompson established this in 1967; he also postulated that John Connally was hit from a different shot than the president. Thompson’s work helped to prove there were multiple shooters and simultaneously demolish the “single bullet theory” as well.
Sometime after the shots were fired, it must have occurred to Oswald that he was being played as a “patsy,” and if he didn’t get out of there immediately, he would probably be shot dead upon capture. A “suspect descri
ption” of unknown origin, which loosely matched Oswald, was broadcast as an “All Points Bulletin” about then; Ruby might have been the source. It appears that Ruby had told him to meet him at the Texas Theater as soon as possible that afternoon but he had to go back to his apartment first to retrieve his pistol, for his own self-protection. Oswald headed back to his apartment to get it as well as change his shirt. The plan after that, he had been told, would then be to reconnoiter at Redbird Airport with pilots who would then fly him to Mexico with papers and visa for entry into Cuba to begin preparing for the coming U.S. invasion. Oswald thought that, finally, he would achieve his ultimate lifetime goal: becoming a full-time, well-paid spy just like his hero from I Led Three Lives. Ruby had expected that the police would track him to the theater and kill him when he drew his pistol; unfortunately for Ruby, it didn’t work out that way.
Oswald had quietly prepared for his part in the mission, starting back in New Orleans accompanying his handlers, primarily David Ferrie, Guy Bannister, and Clay Shaw, on several “test” training missions. George de Mohrenschildt, like his counterpart Clay Shaw, a sophisticated and urbane man having a long history of CIA connections, had also helped to pave the way for a number of actions, including moving Oswald from Fort Worth to Dallas and securing him a job through others not aware of the pending assassination. Both Shaw and de Mohrenschildt had taken their orders directly from the man controlling the details of the operation from his CIA position in Mexico, under the code name of Maurice Bishop, David Atlee Phillips. Phillips, as did his peer David Morales, in charge of the operational and logistical end of the plan, took his orders from Bill Harvey who reported only to two men at the highest levels of the CIA, James Jesus Angleton and Cord Meyer. According to information furnished by E. Howard Hunt during negotiations related to a possible film expose—which was finally scuttled because of his excessive monetary demands—Harvey and the others were being guided primarily by Cord Meyer, operating out of his London CIA offices.10 In turn, David Ferrie and Guy Banister, the point men in New Orleans, were guided by Harvey to groom Oswald for his coming role in Dallas.11 Moreover, it is clear from the evidence cited that Oswald knew of his initial role in a simulated assassination with the intent of forcing Kennedy to invade Cuba.12 He knew that it was only for his own good that he did not know details on the overall mission; his objective was simply to perform his task well, and he would be whisked off to his next mission, assured of safe passage to Cuba and that his young family would be taken care of in his absence, probably better than he could have done himself, he reckoned.
The highest levels of the operation had set the “stage” in many ways, beginning with the virtually complete elimination of the normal protection given to the president. In addition to the absence of more than a few patrolmen, no effort had been made, as was the norm, to see to it that all the windows in the buildings around Dealey Plaza were closed and that normal security checks of personnel within those buildings had been made. The motorcade route—which could have alternately gone straight down Main Street to a temporary crossover onto the Stemmons Expressway and the Trade Mart—would require the limousine to go into a 120-degree turn at the Elm Street intersection, which ensured that the vehicle would slow to a crawl. Shortly after that, the driver would be instructed over the radio to slow down, even stop, at a place in the road next to a man with an open umbrella now marked with a big white X.
Meanwhile, as the limousine lurched to a brief halt, the snipers, including a Corsican sharpshooter and a Mafia hit man—expert shooters using expensive, highly accurate automatic rifles with equally precise telescopic sights—let loose a volley of at least five more shots, the first one at almost the same time as the missed shot, hitting Kennedy in the throat, the next hitting him in the back. As Kennedy reacted to that by leaning to his left, another similarly placed shot missed him and hit Connally in the back. The last volley consisted of one from the back, hitting Kennedy in the back of the head and causing his body to jerk forward; within a fraction of a second, the last shot was fired from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. This was the instantly fatal shot, which hit him in the right front side of his head, violently pushing it backward while exploding his skull and causing most of his brain tissue from the right side of his skull to splash backward, hitting the motorcycle policemen riding to the left rear corner of the limousine.*
Lee Bowers, watching from the railroad yard tower, told Mark Lane, “At the time of the shooting … there was a flash of light or, as far as I am concerned, something I could not identify, but there was something which occurred which caught my eye in this immediate area on the embankment. Now, what this was, I could not state at that time and at this time I could not identify it, other than there was some unusual occurrence—a flash of light or smoke or something which caused me to feel like something out of the ordinary had occurred there.”13 There was no question in the mind of Lee Bowers that a shot, possibly more than one, was fired from the area of the wooden stockade fence. It is interesting that Bowers also told of the men’s use of a walkie-talkie.
Inside the Vice Presidential Car: Noon to 12:29 p.m.
As the motorcade proceeded down Main Street to the turn on Houston Street, the nervous anticipation must have been overwhelming for Johnson and had rendered him sullen and morose. From the many descriptions of Johnson’s actions and behavior that day, it is clear that he was extremely stressed and apparently in the “depressive” phase of his manic-depressive illness noted earlier and to be examined further in the final chapter. William Manchester, writing one to two years after the event—perhaps not realizing the real depth of, or the reasons for, Johnson’s dour mood (how much he did realize will not be known until the year 2067, as noted elsewhere)—described him as having sat in the backseat of the convertible throughout the ride through Dallas as he sought solace by pretending to listen to the car’s radio; before the shots, his prestige had all but disappeared amidst the daily news of investigations closing in on him.14 Apparently, Mr. Manchester had not become fully aware of the real reason for Johnson’s worries; yet there were glimpses, between the lines, of his considerable discomfort with the new president.
Despite the fact that the Johnson car lagged behind the Queen Mary by one and a half car lengths (to make the vice president’s appearance a ‘separate event’ from the president’s),15 Johnson hunched himself down at various times throughout the motorcade as it made its way through Dallas, at times leaning forward pretending to listen to the radio. According to Manchester’s account, Johnson had remained hunched down in the car throughout the ride down Harwood Street, to Main Street, and Dealey Plaza as he continued listening to the Dallas radio station.16 Meanwhile, Senator Yarborough, who was waiving jubilantly and repeatedly calling to onlookers, “Howdy, thar” throughout the trip, said that Johnson was clearly not enjoying this bit of politicking; he said that Johnson appeared “saturnine.”17
Clearly, Senator Yarborough—as most politicians of clear conscious would in this situation—was enjoying the event, in contrast to the morose and dour Johnson who obviously had other things on his mind. When the motorcade turned right from Main Street onto Houston Street, after the first few cars had passed, people in the crowds noticed that Johnson’s profile in the convertible was unusually low, even lower than his diminutive wife Lady Bird’s, who sat next to him.
As the president’s limousine began proceeding down Elm Street after slowing to practically a complete stop as it made the turn, in the second car behind, Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird, and Senator Yarborough were just entering the intersection as the first shot rang out. Johnson, who had already been slouching down in his seat as he pretended to listen to the radio on the car’s dashboard, had by now disappeared from view.18 As noted in the previous chapter, Johnson was already practically invisible to onlookers and was below the front seat back of the car even before the shooting started. Mary Mitchell stated that she heard the first shot just as Senator Yarborough’s car entered the intersection
, obviously because she had not seen Johnson in the car.
As will be detailed shortly, Officer B. J. Martin stated that other police officers riding motorcycles close by the Johnson convertible in the motorcade said that he had slouched down in the seat and continued shrinking along Houston Street as he sat lower and lower in the seat. “According to the guys who were escorting his car in the motorcade, our new president is either one jumpy son of a bitch or he knows something he’s not telling about the Kennedy thing … he started ducking down in the car a good thirty or forty seconds before the first shots were fired.”19 Johnson’s profile had disappeared completely by the time the car turned onto Elm Street.
The Hidden Key to Unraveling the Crime of the Century
The famous Altgens photograph (below) captured the moment Johnson’s car completed its turn onto Elm Street, just before anyone other than Kennedy had time to react to the first shot. The millions of eyes which looked at it either didn’t notice something very peculiar about it or disregarded an anomaly that was written off as a blur in an otherwise very clear photograph: Lyndon Johnson was not in it. He had already disappeared completely out of sight. As he knew he had to be all along the motorcade route, he would have to remove himself from the line of fire sometime before the turn onto Elm Street. He did so under the pretext of listening to the radio or a walkie-talkie even before the first shot rang out. Johnson, in a prepared statement to the Warren Commission, invented an unsupported explanation for the incident:
LBJ Page 67
