Later, after the hue and cry led to Oswald’s arrest in a nearby movie theater, five of the witnesses would identify Oswald at police lineups. Crisply summarized in the Warren Report, it all sounded straightforward.
The Warren Commission had shown little interest in fully investigating the Tippit shooting. Only a handful of relevant witnesses testified to the Commission, and contradictions in the evidence were papered over.
The star witness to the murder itself was a Dallas waitress named Helen Markham, supposedly the only person to have seen the shooting in its entirety. The official version, which accepted her testimony as “reliable,” credited Markham with having watched the initial confrontation between Tippit and his murderer and with having peeped fearfully through her fingers as the murderer loped away—thus becoming competent to identify Oswald at a police lineup.
This “reliable” witness, however, made more nonsensical statements than can be cataloged here. She said she talked to the dying Tippit, who understood her until he was loaded into an ambulance. All the medical evidence, and other witnesses, indicate that Tippit died instantly from the head wound. Another witness who saw the shooting from his pickup truck and got out to help the policeman, put it graphically: “He was lying there and he had—looked like a big clot of blood coming out of his head, and his eyes were sunk back in his head… . The policeman, I believe, was dead when he hit the ground.”
Markham said twenty minutes passed until others gathered at the scene of the crime. Nonsense. Men were in Tippit’s car almost at once calling for help on the police radio, and a small crowd was there by the time an ambulance arrived three minutes later, at 1:10 p.m.
Markham was credited with having recognized Oswald within three hours at the police station. So hysterical was she at the station, however, that she was able to enter the lineup room only after the administration of ammonia. Before the Commission, Markham repeatedly said she had not been able to recognize anyone at the lineup—then changed her tune only after pressure from counsel.1
The quality of the star witness in the Tippit shooting was described by Joseph Ball, a senior counsel to the Warren Commission itself. Speaking at a public debate in 1964, he said Markham’s testimony had been “full of mistakes.” She had been an “utter screwball … utterly unreliable.”
Other witnesses would paint a very different picture of events when Tippit was killed. Some of their statements, however, were also controversial. Acquilla Clemons, who ran out from the porch of a house close to the spot where Tippit was killed, told independent investigators that she had seen not one but two men near the policeman’s car just before the shooting. Here is part of the transcript of a filmed interview with Clemons:
Interviewer:Was there another man there?
Mrs. Clemons:Yes, there was one, other side of the street. All I know is, he tells him to go on.
Interviewer:Mrs. Clemons, the man who had the gun. Did he make any motion at all to the other man across the street?
Mrs. Clemons:No more than tell him to go.
Interviewer:He waved his hand and said, “Go on.”
Mrs. Clemons:Yes, said, “Go on.”
According to Clemons, the man with the gun went off in one direction, the second man in another. She described the man with the gun as “short and kind of heavy,” wearing “khaki and a white shirt”—a description that does not fit Oswald. The second man, she said, was “thin” and tall rather than short, a description that could perhaps refer to Oswald.
According to reporters who visited Clemons several years later, she—and her family—still spoke of having seen two men at the scene of the shooting of Officer Tippit. Another witness, Frank Wright, added a further odd detail. Having heard the shots as he sat in his living room, he told researchers, he went to his front door in time to see the stricken policeman roll over once and then lie still. “I saw a man standing in front of the car,” he said. “He was looking toward the man on the ground.” This man, Wright said, “ran as fast as he could go and he got into his car. His car was a little gray old coupé. It was about a 1950–1951, maybe a Plymouth… . He got in the car and he drove away as quick as you could see.”
What Frank Wright and Acquilla Clemons had to say became ammunition for independent researchers who believed others—unknown—had played a role in the Tippit shooting.
More than three decades later, the work of a veteran broadcast journalist named Dale Myers brought a degree of clarity where confusion and rumor had reigned. Myers’ 1998 book, devoted solely to the Tippit murder, impresses as being the most thorough study of the case. His analysis of a mass of testimony and the ballistics evidence dispels much of the doubt as to Oswald’s guilt in the Tippit murder.2
Myers noted that Mrs. Clemons’ statements about having seen two accomplices—rather than a lone gunman—are unsupported by any other testimony, even though Clemons was only one of a number of witnesses at or near the scene at the time. Wright’s account, with its claim that he saw the apparent gunman drive away in a car, was also his and his alone—and was disputed by others well placed to observe events.
The best evidence in the Tippit case, meanwhile, was the forensic evidence. Four revolver cartridge cases were produced as having been recovered at the scene, and Oswald had been carrying a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver at the time of his arrest. He admitted later that the gun was indeed his, and offered a feeble excuse for having had it with him when arrested. “You know how boys do when they have a gun. They just carry it.”
Sloppy police work, though, gave openings to skeptics who thought two gunmen had been involved in the Tippit shooting. Careless talk brought confusion as to whether the firearm that killed Tippit was a revolver, like Oswald’s weapon, or an automatic. Two of the cartridge cases produced in evidence were of one make, two of another. A vital record in any firearm case, the chain of possession—the record as to who retrieved which cartridges, where and when—was inadequate.
In the overall picture, these points are of little importance. Given that Oswald had both types of ammunition in his revolver when caught, the discrepancy in the make of the cartridges becomes insignificant. The sloppiness over the chain of possession appears to reflect not deception but inefficiency.
Firearms experts said unanimously that all four bullets removed from Tippit’s body had characteristics consistent with those of Oswald’s weapon. Two of the four cartridge cases recovered, which had a good chain of possession, definitely came from Oswald’s gun. The bulk of the evidence—and common sense—suggest that Oswald killed Officer Tippit on his own.
Even so, questions remain, questions that troubled official investigators after the assassination and remain unresolved today. Could Oswald have traveled the nine tenths of a mile from his lodgings to the scene of the Tippit shooting on foot, unaided, in the time available?
Even by using the shortest possible time frame—and ignoring factors that militated against it, the Warren Commission fudged the issue. So did the Assassinations Committee, years later. Did Oswald have transport to get to the site of the policeman’s murder on East Tenth, and if so, who provided it? And why was he there? Where was he headed?
The official who directed the initial investigation of the Tippit shooting, former Assistant District Attorney William Alexander, voiced his suspicions in an interview with the author fifteen years after the assassination. “Along with the police,” he said, “we measured the route, all the conceivable routes he could have taken to that place; we interrogated bus drivers, we checked the cab-company records, but we still do not know how he got to where he was, or why he was where he was… . Was he supposed to meet someone? Was he trying to make a getaway? Did he miss a connection? Was there a connection? If you look at Oswald’s behavior, he made very few nonpurposeful motions, very seldom did he do anything that did not serve a purpose to him. People who’ve studied his behavior feel there was a purpose in his being where he
was. I, for one, would like to know what that was.”
As he drove the author along the route Oswald is supposed to have taken to the Tippit murder, the former Assistant District Attorney slapped the dashboard and repeated, “Oswald’s movements did not add up… . No way. Certainly he may have had accomplices.”3
There are further outstanding questions. If the account of the housekeeper at the rooming house was true, if she really did see a police cruiser outside the house just after 1:00 p.m. and hear it sounding its horn, was Tippit the driver? It’s conceivable—Tippit did not respond to the police dispatcher at 1:00 p.m. Could it be that Tippit drove Oswald to the spot where the policeman was murdered?
Were there things about Tippit that never came out? Shortly before his death, several witnesses claimed, Tippit spent some ten minutes sitting in his patrol car at a service station not far from where he would be killed. He then drove off at high speed. There was also a claim that, shortly before he was murdered, Tippit hurried into a record shop near the site of the killing, used the store’s telephone, dialed a number, then rushed out again.
Another unresolved lead was the statement of a garage mechanic who said he saw a man behaving suspiciously on the afternoon of the assassination—he appeared to be trying to hide himself—in a car parked near the scene of the Tippit shooting. That night, the mechanic recognized Lee Oswald, from his pictures on television, as the man he had seen in the car. He had taken the number of the car, and it turned out to belong to a friend of Tippit.4
“It may be,” said Andy Purdy, former senior staff counsel on the Assassinations Committee, “that Officer Tippit, by himself or with others, was involved in a conspiracy to silence Oswald. And when the attempt to kill Oswald by Tippit failed, then Jack Ruby** was a fallback.”
Long after the assassination, there would be claims—one of them from an associate of a Mafia boss suspected of involvement in the assassination—that Oswald had been on his way to a planned rendez-vous at the time Tippit was shot. As this book will show, the alleged assassin was involved in a weird world of intrigue. He had blundered into a quicksand of intelligence agents, Cuban exile plotters, and thugs, and it may be that he was in over his head.5
** Jack Ruby—infamous as the Mob-connected club owner who was to kill Oswald two days after President Kennedy’s assassination—an act that will be dealt with at length in a later chapter.
Chapter 7
A Sphinx for Texas
“Constitutional scrutiny of Intelligence services is largely an illusory concept. If they’re good, they fool the outsiders—and if they’re bad they fool themselves.”
—John le Carré
Fifteen years on, standing in the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, Jesse Curry stared out over Dealey Plaza and remembered the oddest prisoner he ever had: “One would think Oswald had been trained in interrogation techniques and resisting interrogation techniques,” said the retired Dallas police chief. Curry’s puzzlement was echoed by Assistant District Attorney Alexander, who told the author, “I was amazed that a person so young would have had the self-control he had. It was almost as if he had been rehearsed, or programmed, to meet the situation that he found himself in.”
“Rehearsed? Rehearsed by whom?” I asked Alexander. He could only shake his head and murmur, “Who knows?”
Lee Oswald was an enigma, and not only for Texas law enforcement officials. In the summer of 1964, when the Warren Report was being drafted, the alleged assassin’s elder brother, Robert, received a call from a Commission lawyer holed up in a cabin in Vermont, working on the chapter that would deal with the question of why Oswald might have killed President Kennedy. Robert Oswald was “flabbergasted,” he would recall, that the Commission had yet to find a motive for the man it had pegged as the lone assassin.
Motive is a basic ingredient that any investigator seeks in any crime, but the Commission never found one for Oswald. Its Report stated, “No one will ever know what passed through Oswald’s mind during the week before November 22, 1963,” and made do with guesses about “hostility to environment,” “hatred for American society,” and the like. There has never, moreover, been any evidence that the alleged assassin was insane.
In 1979, the Assassinations Committee could come up only with talk about Oswald’s “conception of political action, rooted in his twisted ideological view of himself and the world around him.” Were the same conclusion to be drawn about all young people of Oswald’s addled left-wing politics, we should expect presidents to be assassinated all the time. The Committee admitted that it picked on that explanation only “in the absence of other more compelling evidence”—a phrase perhaps suggesting that its section on motivation was written before the science and other evidence forced a finding that there had been more than one assassin.
Where the Committee identified likely sinister hands behind the assassination, they were those of Mafia bosses or anti-Castro activists. It avoided the question of how Oswald’s left-wing stance might fit into such scenarios, and dwelled hardly at all on the possibility that—because of that very stance—he may have seemed ripe for a setup. Whatever the truth about that, Oswald’s lack of motive has mitigated in his favor. In his police questioning, indeed, the alleged assassin gave his captors the impression that he had rather liked President Kennedy.
“I am not a malcontent; nothing irritated me about the President,” Oswald replied mildly when asked after the assassination what he had thought of Kennedy. He said, too, “I have no views on the President. My wife and I like the President’s family. They are interesting people. I have my own views on the President’s national policy.” In this instance, Oswald’s version was corroborated almost unanimously by those who knew him. The accused’s wife, Marina, whose testimony was to damn him in so many other ways, told of Oswald’s enthusiasm for Kennedy. She said of her husband, “He always spoke very complimentary about the President. He was very happy when John Kennedy was elected… . Whatever he said about President Kennedy, it was only good, always.”
Kennedy was voted into office while the Oswalds were living in Russia, and Marina said of Lee, “He was very proud of the new President of his country.” She said Oswald called Kennedy “a good leader” and usually gave the impression that “he liked him very well.” Acquaintances and relatives told the official inquiry much the same thing, and Oswald’s attitude apparently remained consistent in the months before the assassination. In August, when the Oswalds were in New Orleans, the American press was full of the latest Kennedy family tragedy, when the President’s newborn son died two days after birth. Then, like many people in America, Oswald followed bulletins on the baby’s progress with concern. He hoped the child would survive, worried when its condition went downhill.
More dispassionate was the opinion of a policeman who interviewed Oswald at that very same period, following an incident on a New Orleans street between Oswald and anti-Castro exiles. Lieutenant Francis Martello also formed the impression that Oswald liked President Kennedy. Martello thought Oswald was: “Not in any way, shape or form violent… . [A]s far as ever dreaming or thinking that Oswald would do what it is alleged that he has done, I would set my head on a chopping block that he wouldn’t do it.” In a conversation about civil rights a month before the assassination, Oswald said he thought Kennedy was doing “a real fine job, a real good job.”1
It frequently occurs, of course, that people commit crimes that seem out of character. The night before the assassination, there had perhaps been a sign that something was brewing in Oswald regarding the President. When Marina brought up the subject of Kennedy’s impending visit, she was to say, her husband avoided talking about it. According to Marina, Oswald was preoccupied that night with personal worries, pressing Marina to live with him once again, talking a lot of making a fresh start by moving the family into an apartment together. It was hardly the talk of a man planning a crime that might, as it
indeed turned out, spell his own imminent death.
In custody, aside from his “frantic” denials that he had murdered the President and his shout of “I’m just a patsy!” to the press, Oswald did drop a hint that he would have more to say. He would tell none of it, though, until he could get legal advice. When allowed a visit by the president of the Dallas Bar Association, Oswald spoke of wanting to find a lawyer “who believes in anything I believe in, and believes as I believe, and believes in my innocence as much as he can, I might let him represent me.”
According to a Secret Service agent present, Oswald “wanted to contact a Mr. Abt, a New York lawyer whom he did not know but who had defended the Smith Act ‘victims’ in 1949 or 1950 in connection with a conspiracy against the government.” An attorney known for his leftist activism—he had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s—Abt was away from home during the weekend of the assassination. Oswald, who never did reach him, also talked of asking the American Civil Liberties Union to find him a lawyer. Nothing came of it. Oswald was a mystery, and he knew it.
When his brother, Robert, visited him in custody, Oswald warned him: “Do not form any opinion on this so-called evidence.” Robert wrote later in his diary: “… I searched his eyes for any sign of guilt or whatever you call it. There was nothing there—no guilt, no shame, no nothing. Lee finally [sic] aware of my looking into his eyes, he stated: ‘You will not find anything there.’ ” The years of endless investigation, of groping toward an understanding of Oswald’s real role, have given us no firm answers.
We now have fragments, however, of a picture of Oswald that was denied to the public in the wake of the assassination. Ironically, it was President Lyndon Johnson—the man who succeeded Kennedy and appointed the Warren Commission—who eventually dropped the heaviest official hint that Lee Oswald was more than he appeared to be. In a 1969 interview for CBS Television, Johnson remarked: “I don’t think that [the Warren Commission] or me or anyone else is always absolutely sure of everything that might have motivated Oswald or others that could have been involved. But he was quite a mysterious fellow, and he did have connections that bore examination.” That was an understatement, but the former president felt he had said too much. He asked CBS to withhold that section of his interview on grounds of “national security.” CBS obliged by suppressing Johnson’s remarks until 1975.
Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Page 11
