Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Anthony Summers

  Sixteen people in or outside the Book Depository, behind the President, suggested that some shooting came from the knoll. They included the Depository manager, the superintendent, and two company vice presidents. Secret Service Agent Forrest Sorrels, traveling in the lead car and nearing the end of the knoll at the moment of the fatal shot, stared instinctively at the knoll. He first reported, “I looked toward the top of the terrace to my right as the sound of the shots seemed to come from that direction.” Only later, in his Commission testimony, did Sorrels go along with the conventional wisdom that the source of the gunfire was exclusively to the President’s rear.

  Secret Service agent Paul Landis, in the car behind the President, made an interesting distinction. He said, “I heard what sounded like the report of a high-powered rifle from behind me.” Landis drew his gun, and then, “I heard a second report and saw the President’s head split open and pieces of flesh and blood flying through the air. My reaction at this time was that the shot came from somewhere toward the front … and looked along the right-hand side of the road.” Landis was not called to testify before the Warren Commission.

  Several police officers also thought the shots came from the knoll area. The reaction of Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker, riding in front of the President, was to bark into the radio, “Notify station 5 to move all available men out of my department back into the railroad yards.” The railroad yards were just behind the fence—where the Committee acoustics experts placed a gunman.

  Loosely speaking, the “grassy knoll” refers to the whole area the President’s limousine passed after leaving the Book Depository to its rear (see page 999). It is easiest to describe it as three sectors. First a narrow slope topped by trees and bushes. Then a much longer slope up to a semicircular colonnade, with access steps and a retaining wall. Beyond that, the slope continued beside the road, topped by more vegetation and a fence. The fence made a right angle, which, in 1963, faced directly toward the oncoming motorcade. By the last stage of the shooting the President’s limousine was a mere thirty-five yards from the point on the fence where Committee acoustics experts placed a gunman.

  About a dozen people were on the grassy knoll when the President was shot, and almost all believed some of the gunfire came from behind them, high up on the knoll itself. For several, there could be no talk of illusions or echoes. The shooting was frighteningly close. Their stories, for the most part, never heard by the first official inquiry, are jolting even after fifty years.

  Gordon Arnold, a young soldier of twenty-two, was home on leave on November 22. Armed with his movie camera, he was to claim, he walked to the top of the grassy knoll just before the President arrived, looking for a good vantage point. He went behind the fence, looking for a way to get to the railroad bridge that crossed the road directly in front of the motorcade route. From there, his view would be perfect. Arnold was moving along the fence—on the side hidden from the road—when “… this guy just walked towards me and said that I shouldn’t be up there. He showed me a badge and said he was with the Secret Service and that he didn’t want anybody up there.” It sounded sensible enough, and Arnold retreated to the next best spot—beside a tree on the road side of the fence, high on the grassy slope beyond the colonnade. Then the motorcade arrived.

  Dealey Plaza, November 22, 1963

  Arnold maintained, “The shot came from behind me, only inches over my left shoulder. I had just got out of basic training. In my mind, live ammunition was being fired. It was being fired over my head. And I hit the dirt.” The shooting that he remembered as being to his rear was so close, Arnold claimed, that he heard “the whiz over my shoulder. I say a whiz—you don’t exactly hear the whiz of a bullet, you hear just like a shock wave. You feel it … you feel something and then a report comes just behind it.”

  Arnold’s dramatic story was not published until 1978—he could have concocted it on the basis of earlier reports. Yet his account found some support. Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, who had ridden in the motorcade two cars behind the President in 1963, recalled having seen a man in Arnold’s position. Yarborough said, “Immediately on the firing of the first shot I saw the man … throw himself on the ground … he was down within a second, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s a combat veteran who knows how to act when weapons start firing.’ ”

  A railroad supervisor on the bridge, Sam Holland, observed a man he described as a “plainclothes detective or FBI agent or something like that” before the shooting. Something, moreover, led policemen to run up the grassy slope immediately afterward.

  Mary Woodward, Maggie Brown, Aurelia Lorenzo, and Ann Donaldson all worked at the Dallas Morning News. They spoke of “a horrible, ear-shattering noise coming from behind us and a little to the right.” What they said was in the press the very next day, yet all four witnesses went unmentioned and unquestioned by the Warren Commission.

  John Chism said, “I looked behind me, to see if it was a fireworks display.” His wife, Mary, said, “It came from what I thought was behind us.” The Chisms were not called by the Warren Commission.

  A. J. Millican, who had been standing in front of the colonnade, said of the final gunfire, “I heard two more shots come from the arcade between the bookstore and the underpass, and then three more shots came from the same direction, only farther back. Then everybody started running up the hill.” Mr. Millican was not called by the Warren Commission.

  Jean Newman stood halfway along the grassy knoll and said her first impression was that “the shots came from my right.” Ms. Newman was not called by the Warren Commission.

  Abraham Zapruder, of film fame, was using the concrete wall on the grassy knoll as a vantage point. A Secret Service report of an interview with him reads: “According to Mr. Zapruder, the position of the assassin was behind Mr. Zapruder.” In testimony to the Warren Commission, Zapruder recalled that one shot reverberated all around him, louder than all the others. This would be consistent with a shot fired on the knoll itself, much closer to Zapruder than gunfire from the Book Depository.

  Sam Holland, the railroad supervisor at the parapet of the railway bridge over the road, directly faced the President’s car as it approached (see diagram, page 999). Holland also had an excellent view of the fence on the knoll. He told police immediately after the assassination that there had been four shots and that he had seen “a puff of smoke come from the trees.”

  Holland persisted in maintaining that at least some of the firing “sounded like it came from behind the wooden fence… . I looked over to where the shots came from, and I saw a puff of smoke still lingering underneath the trees in front of the wooden fence.” Pressed as to where the shots had come from, Holland replied, “Behind that picket fence—close to the little plaza—there’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind” (see Photo 6).

  The Warren Commission heard Holland’s testimony but ignored it. Skeptical suggestions that he saw smoke or steam from a locomotive make no sense. The railway line itself is far from the fence on the knoll. Rifles, on the other hand, sometimes do emit smoke.

  Holland’s account was supported—with variations as to the precise location of the smoke—by eight witnesses, most of them fellow railroad workers, who stood on the same bridge. Others saw the same phenomenon from other vantage points—one of them a man in a better position than anyone to observe suspicious activity by the fence on the knoll. Railroad worker Lee Bowers, perched in a signal box that commanded a unique view of the area behind the fence, said he noticed two men standing near the fence shortly before the shots were fired. One was “middle-aged” and “fairly heavyset,” wearing a white shirt and dark trousers. The other was “mid-twenties in either a plaid shirt or plaid coat … these men were the only two strangers in the area. The others were workers that I knew.”

  Bowers said, too, that when the shots were fired at the President “in the vicinity of where the two men I have described were, there was a flash of light,
something I could not identify, but there was something which occurred which caught my eye in this immediate area on the embankment … a flash of light or smoke or something which caused me to feel that something out of the ordinary had occurred there.”

  Lee Bowers was questioned by the Warren Commission but cut off in mid-sentence when he began describing the “something out of the ordinary” he had seen. The interrogating lawyer changed the subject.

  Six witnesses, all of them either distinguished public figures or qualified to know what they were talking about, claimed to have smelled gunpowder in the air. Three witnesses who had traveled in the motorcade—the Mayor’s wife, Mrs. Cabell; Senator Ralph Yarborough; and Congressman Ray Roberts—later mentioned such a smell. Unlikely, surely, that the odor could have reached them from a sixth-floor window high above. Surprising, too, that they could have smelled it from the grassy knoll, yet it seems they were in that general area when they did notice it. Police Officer Earle Brown, on duty at the railway bridge, and Mrs. Donald Baker, at the other end of the knoll, reported the same acrid smell.

  Another policeman, Patrolman Joe Smith, was holding up traffic across the road from the Book Depository when the motorcade passed by. On hearing the gunfire—and a woman cry out, “They’re shooting the President from the bushes!”—Smith ran to the grassy knoll, the only bushy place in the area. In 1978, he still remembered what he reported shortly after the assassination, that in the parking lot, “around the hedges, there was the smell, the lingering smell of gunpowder.”

  The Assassinations Committee photographic panel would examine a Polaroid photograph taken by bystander Mary Moorman at the moment of the fatal shot. A shape—some believe it is a man’s head—can be seen in the fenced area on the knoll (see Photo 5). The shape is no longer there in subsequent photographs.

  In 1978, amid the excitement over the Assassination Committee’s conclusion that two guns were fired at President Kennedy, rather less attention was given to the Committee’s decisions on a secondary but equally vital question. Which of the shots actually hit the President?

  If the only comprehensive visual record of the Kennedy assassination had been shown on television on November 22, 1963, most people in the United States would have gone to bed that night certain that their President had been shot from the front and only perhaps—by an earlier shot—from behind. The general public was not shown the full Zapruder film until more than a decade later. They were, within days, given a verbal description of the footage on CBS television. The narrator was Dan Rather, then a junior television correspondent, who had been permitted to view the film. Rather said that at the fatal headshot the President “fell forward with considerable violence [author’s emphasis].” He omitted to say what is in fact mercilessly obvious from any alert viewing of the film. It is manifestly clear that the President jerked backward at the moment of the shot that visibly exploded his head.

  Members and staff of the Warren Commission did see the Zapruder film, yet nowhere in its report is the backward motion mentioned. Still frames from the film were published in the Warren Commission volumes, but with the two frames following the headshot printed in reverse order—supposedly the result of a printing error at the FBI—which did nothing for clarity. The first impression of the ordinary person viewing the film today, however, is that the President was knocked backward by a bullet originating in front of him, from the direction of a sniper on the grassy knoll.

  The pros and cons on the evidence for a shot from the front have long been argued to and fro. Some noted gory details, which seemed to reinforce the thesis of a hit from the front. Both motorcycle officers riding to the left rear of the President were splattered with blood and brain coming toward them. Officer Hargis, only a few feet from Mrs. Kennedy, said later that he had been struck with such force by the brain matter that for a moment he thought he himself had been hit. Officer B. J. Martin, who rode to Hargis’s left, later testified that he found blood and flesh on his motorcycle windshield, on the left side of his helmet, and on the left shoulder of his uniform jacket.

  A student, Billy Harper, was later to pick up a large piece of the President’s skull in the street, at a point more than ten feet to the rear of the car’s position at the time of the fatal shot. The evidence is that the human debris, including other skull fragments, was driven backward. Some researchers, making light of the fact that people in the front of the car were also “covered with brain tissue,” see this as further evidence of a hit by a knoll gunman.

  In 1979, the Assassinations Committee said this was not so. On all the evidence, it thought that only two of the four shots—almost certainly fired by a gun in the sixth-floor corner window of the Book Depository, to the rear—found their human targets. The two other shots, one from the Depository, the other from the grassy knoll, missed.

  How to account then for the President’s lurch backward in the Zapruder film? A wound ballistics expert told the Committee he thought it reflected “a neuromuscular reaction … mechanical stimulation of the motor nerves of the President.” The Committee’s medical panel, with one doctor dissenting, supported the thesis that the backward movement was either “a neurological response to the massive brain damage” or a “propulsive” phenomenon, sometimes known as “the jet effect.”

  Studies of the X-rays and photographs convinced the doctors that the bullet had entered in the upper part of the skull and exited from the right front. They agreed that the rear wound was “a typical entrance wound.” In spite of the fact that the brain had not been fully sectioned, as the panel would have preferred, existing pictures of it may be thought to support the notion that the headshot was fired from behind.

  The Committee was further convinced by new tests on the bullet specimens. Dr. Vincent Guinn, a chemist and forensic scientist, broke new ground with his “neutron activation” tests—a process in which the specimens were bombarded with neutrons in a nuclear reactor. The results appeared to many to resolve fundamental areas of controversy.

  Dr. Guinn was supplied with all the surviving bullet specimens, the several pieces from the car, tiny fragments removed from the wounds of both the President and Governor Connally, and the full-size bullet found on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital.2 He concluded that these represented only two bullets and that it was “highly probable” that both were of Mannlicher-Carcano manufacture—the ammunition designed for the rifle found in the Book Depository.

  Guinn was equally confident about a third conclusion, one that—in conjunction with the ballistics evidence—supported the thesis that the fatal headshot was fired from behind. Guinn’s tests indicated that fragments from the President’s brain matched the three testable fragments found in the car and that they, in turn, came from the same bullet. Since ballistics experts concluded that the fragments in the car were fired by the gun in the Book Depository, it seemed certain that a shot from the Depository did hit the President in the head. The Committee decided this was the fourth shot and that it was fatal.

  Over the objections of staffers who felt Guinn’s work was inherently flawed—the fragments had been handled in a slipshod fashion over the years, and some appeared to be missing—the Committee accepted the findings. The fourth shot, it accepted, had not come from the knoll.

  Dr. Guinn’s study also influenced what the Committee eventually decided about an issue that went to the very heart of the debate between the lone assassin theorists and those who believe more than one shooter was involved—and still does. It was an issue that had initially stumped the Warren Commission.

  Back in 1964, Warren investigators analyzing the Zapruder film concluded that a lone assassin would not have had time to fire his rifle again between the moment the President was first seen to be hit and the time Governor Connally appeared to react to his wounds. It had seemed, however, that the only alternative was that two gunmen had fired almost simultaneously.3

  The Warren Commission’s staff found a way to
dispose of that disquieting notion—eventually producing what became known as the “magic bullet theory.” According to the theory, a single bullet—the one found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital—had coursed right through President Kennedy, inflicting the wounds to his back and throat, and gone on to cause the multiple injuries to Governor Connally’s torso, wrist, and thigh.

  That is what the Warren Commission asked the world to believe, and what over the years was to cause more skepticism than anything else about the physical evidence. The most persistent objection arose from the remarkable state of preservation of the bullet found at the hospital. It remained almost intact (see Photo 15). Consider, though, what—according to the Warren theory—the bullet is supposed to have done.

  As it theoretically progressed, it purportedly pierced the President in the back; coursed through his upper chest; came out through the front of his neck; went on to strike the Governor in the back; pierced a lung; severed a vein, artery, and nerve; broke the right fifth rib, destroying five inches of the bone; emerged from the Governor’s right chest; plunged on into the back of the Governor’s right forearm; broke a thick bone, the distal end of the radius; came out of the other side of the wrist; and finally ended up in the left thigh. It then supposedly fell out of the thigh, to be recovered on the stretcher at the hospital.

  From 1964 on, doctors with long experience of bullet wounds had great difficulty in accepting that a bullet could cause such damage, especially to bones, and still emerge almost unscathed. Typical of such doubters was Dr. Milton Helpern, former Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, once described by the New York Times as knowing “more about violent death than anyone else in the world.” Dr. Helpern, who had conducted two thousand autopsies on victims of gunshot wounds, said of the magic bullet: