Parkland (Movie Tie-In Edition)

by Vincent Bugliosi

  To confirm that firing a rifle will not leave nitrate residue on the firer’s cheeks, the FBI had one of their agents, Charles L. Killion, fire three rounds in Oswald’s Carcano rifle. The result of the paraffin test conducted thereafter was negative for his cheeks and hands (3 H 494, WCT Cortlandt Cunningham; WR, pp.561–562).

  *Virtually all high school, college, and professional sporting events were canceled or postponed throughout the nation that coming weekend. By far the most prominent exception (for which it has received criticism by many down through the years) was the National Football League. Although the American Football League postponed all of its Sunday games, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle said that “it has been traditional in sports for athletes to perform in times of great personal tragedy,” and announced that the NFL’s schedule of seven games would be played on Sunday. CBS announced it would not televise the games. ( Dallas Morning News, November 23, 1963, sect.2, p.1; Rozelle quote: Sunday Press [Binghamton, NY], November 24, 1963, sect.D, p.1)

  * The way Grant explained it, when he and Thompson were at Dallas police headquarters earlier in the day, there were “so many reporters and photographers pushing and shoving” in the crammed corridor on the third floor, some “standing on chairs, some on their camera cases, all trying to get in position” for a “photograph of suspect Lee Harvey Oswald” whenever he happened to appear “being led from one room to another,” that he suggested to Thompson they “get out” of the madhouse and “look for a more exclusive angle to the story.” With Thompson, born in Texas, “using his Texas accent and disarming demeanor” to extract information out of a deputy sheriff, they got the address of Oswald’s rooming house, and Earlene Roberts, the housekeeper, then told them of the phone calls that Oswald used to make to Irving. They headed out there and after inquiring around town, finally found the Paine residence. (Allen Grant, “Life Catches Up to Marina Oswald,” Los Angeles Times, November 22, 1988, part V, pp.1, 8)

  * Although Ruby was highly patriotic, he was completely apolitical, though a lifelong Democrat, “being devoid of political ideas to the point of naivete” (CE 2980, 26 H 469–470; CE 1747, 23 H 355). Carousel comic Bill Demar, who knew Ruby well, said he “never recalled ever having heard him discuss politics” (15 H 102, WCT William D. Crowe Jr. [Bill Demar]). His rabbi, Hillel Silverman, told the FBI that Ruby was a very shallow person intellectually, and he considered Ruby to be someone “who would not know the difference between a communistic philosophy and a totalitarian philosophy, in that he was not well-read and spent little time concerning himself with this type of information.” The rabbi, however, appears to have missed the mark when he said that although Ruby thought the president of the United States was the greatest individual in the world, it wasn’t because of the president himself, but because of Ruby’s respect for the position involved and of his high respect for the American government. (CE 1485, 22 H 906–907, FBI interview of Hillel Silverman on November 27, 1963) Though that was probably a large part of Ruby’s feeling for Kennedy, the consensus of others, including those who were much closer to Ruby than Silverman, is that Ruby had an extraordinary feeling for Kennedy personally.

  ‡ The fact that Barry Goldwater, who was alread gearing up to run against Kennedy for president in 1964, was brought up in the discussion by the emcee at the Carousel around the same time as the remark about Kennedy, indicates the incident probably happened within months of the assassination.

  * At some time during the afternoon, Ruby stopped in to see a friend of his, Joe Cavagnaro, the sales manager at the Statler Hilton Hotel. He told Cavagnaro about his plans to close the Carousel for three days. Cavagnaro said, “He asked me what we were going to do. I told him, ‘Jack, you can’t just close a hotel. People have to have a place to eat and sleep.’ But he expected the whole city to close down.” (Wills and Demaris, Jack Ruby, pp.38, 40)

  * Throughout the rest of his life, Ruby rarely permitted the name “Oswald” to come from his lips, either purposefully or instinctively refraining from uttering the word. “I don’t know why,” he told the Warren Commission. “I don’t know how to explain it.” One explanation is that he unconsciously sensed that to do so would invest it with a human dignity it did not have. Authors Gary Wills and Ovid Demaris wrote that “Ruby could not bring himself to call the thing by name. It is the instinct that kept [Carl] Sandburg from using [John Wilkes] Booth’s name in his long

  description of Lincoln’s death. When he must refer to the assassin, he calls him ‘the Outsider.’” The authors note that William Manchester, who does use Oswald’s name many times in his book, is nonetheless “sickened by the need to do so.” Manchester writes, “Noticing him [Oswald], and even printing his name in history books…seems obscene. It is an outrage. He is an outrage.” (5 H 187, WCT Jack L. Ruby; Wills and Demaris, Jack Ruby, p.264; Manchester, Death of a President, pp.276–277)

  In their book Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, JFK’s two closest aides, Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, never used Oswald’s name once, though they wrote about the horrors of JFK’s death.

  * When I asked Alexander if Wade had immediately assigned him to the Oswald case, the tall, angular-faced Texan who speaks slowly, and sometimes sprinkles those words with salty, ranch-hand profanity, responded, “There was no need for any conversation between Henry and me. It was understood” (Telephone interview of William Alexander by author on December 11, 2000).

  * On the evening of April 10, 1963, retired Major General Edwin A. Walker, a prominent right-wing figure in Dallas, was shot at through the window of his suburban Dallas home. The bullet intended for him was deflected by the window frame and missed Walker’s head.

  * Wade would later tell the Warren Commission, “You just had to fight your way down through the hall through the press…To get into homicide it was a strain to get the door open enough to get into the office” (5 H 218). One problem is that the third-floor hallway was only about 113 feet long and just 7 feet wide (CE 2175; 24 H 848; WR, p.197), and this space was further reduced by all the radio and TV equipment, such as cables and tripods, in the corridor. To compound the problem of all the members of the media and Dallas Police Department mingling or moving about in the narrow hallway, throughout the three days of Oswald’s detention the Dallas police were obligated to continue normal business in all five of its bureaus located along the same hallway. Therefore, many persons, such as witnesses and relatives of defendants, had occasion to visit the third floor on matters unrelated to the assassination. (WR, p.204)

  *The total bill for the 255-pound Marsellus 710 coffin from Gawler’s and its accompanying 3,000-pound Wilbert Triune/copper-lined vault is $3,160 (ARRB MD 130, Embalmers Personal Remarks; ARRB MD 134, Funeral Arrangements for John Fitzgerald Kennedy, November 22, 1963, p.1).

  *“We wanted to file on him [Oswald] before midnight,” Alexander would later recall. “It just would look better that we got the SOB on the same day he killed Kennedy” (Telephone interview of William Alexander by author on December 12, 2000).

  ‡Alfred D. Hodge, the fifty-five-year-old owner of the Buckhorn Trading Post, was unable to identify the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle or .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver as being weapons he had sold (15 H 498, WCT, Alfred Douglas Hodge).

  *Why Oswald wasn’t fingerprinted when he was booked into the jail just after midnight is not known.

  *The only source for Oswald ostensibly being asleep is author Jim Bishop. However, Bishop does not say who his source was, but the implication is that it was Sergeant Warren. (Bishop, Day Kennedy Was Shot, p.651) Even if it were Warren, Warren may simply have assumed that a physically still Oswald was asleep and called out to awaken him.

  *“Someone had neglected to pass the word that the original Lincoln catafalque had been located in the basement of the Capitol building,” and based on a book on the Lincoln funeral that included steel-point engravings, White House carpenters had quickly constructed the replica (Bishop, Day Kennedy Was Shot, pp.486, 548; Manchester, Death of a Pre
sident, p.437).

  *Earlier in the day, Jackie’s mother, Mrs. Janet Auchincloss, had told Maud Shaw, Caroline and John Jr.’s nanny, that she and Jackie felt that Miss Shaw “should be the one to break the news to the children, at least to Caroline,” who was five years old and would be six in a little less than a week. “Oh, no,” Shaw said, “please don’t ask me to do that.” “Please, Miss Shaw,” Mrs. Auchincloss said. “It is for the best. They trust you, and you know how to deal with them. I am asking you as a friend, please. It has to be you.” In writing about the matter later, Shaw does not pinpoint the time she did this, merely indicating it was after she had tucked the children into bed for the night. She says she went into Caroline’s room and started reading to her from one of her books. When Caroline asked her why she was crying, she told her she had “very sad news.” She says, “Then I told her what had happened. It was a dreadful time for us both.” Caroline eventually fell asleep, with Ms. Shaw still petting her. She said John Jr. still did not know and “was really too young [two, though he’d be three in a few days] to understand.” Later, she said, it was decided that Mrs. Robert Kennedy would tell him the best she could. (Shaw, White House Nannie, pp.14, 20–21)

  *In fact, Marina Oswald doesn’t return as expected. Ruth Paine won’t see her again until March 9, 1964, the beginning of an estrangement that exists to this day.

  *After viewing the copy in New York, Life publisher C. D. Jackson instructed Stolley to purchase all rights to the film, including television and movie rights, for $150,000 paid in six annual installments of $25,000. The agreement was consummated November 25 in the office of Zapruder’s lawyer, Sam Passman. Zapruder asked Stolley not to reveal the fact of the sale because it might intensify the already existing anti-Jewish sentiment in Dallas. Stolley felt that Passman earned his legal fee by suggesting that Zapruder donate the first $25,000 he received for the film to the widow and family of Officer Tippit. Zapruder readily agreed and his donation of $25,000 two days later earned public applause. Zapruder died of cancer in 1970, two years after he received his last payment. (Trask, National Nightmare, pp.146–150; Stolley, “What Happened Next…,” p.262; Wrone, Zapruder Film, p.36)

  *This is apparently a reference to the claim of Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig, who told police Friday evening that he saw a man who resembled Oswald get into a station wagon driven by a Negro. Evidence, including a bus transfer and Oswald’s own admissions, proved Craig’s claim to be false. The fact that Curry is still unaware that Oswald took a bus and a cab to Oak Cliff after the shooting, something homicide investigators learned Friday night, demonstrates how little Curry knew about the details of the assassination investigation.

  *Quite apart from his unfathomable grief, RFK did not want to attend, finding it difficult to accept that anyone, particularly LBJ, whom he disliked, would be taking his brother’s place, and he showed up five minutes late. As alluded to earlier, Johnson had a deep sense of illegitimacy following the assassination and “desperately needed affirmation.” Though the American public and Congress gave it to him, it was clear to him RFK had not, and in Bobby’s attitude, Johnson felt the rejection of his legitimacy he had feared from others. (Shesol, Mutual Contempt, p.119) “During all of that period,” LBJ would later say, “I think [Bobby] seriously considered whether he would let me be president, whether he should really take the position [that] the vice president didn’t automatically move in. I thought that was on his mind every time I saw him in the first few days. I think he was seriously considering what steps to take” (Tape-recorded interview of LBJ by William J. Jorden, LBJ Library, Austin, Texas; Shesol, Mutual Contempt, p.119).

  *Bobby Kennedy agreed to stay on as LBJ’s attorney general, if for no other reason than he didn’t have anywhere else to go, at least in government. His friend Dean Markham warned RFK that to resign could “boomerang,” benefiting Johnson. “Public sentiment will be on his side,” Markham told RFK, “and the feeling will be that he tried to cooperate and work with you, but you didn’t want to.” (Shesol, Mutual Contempt, p.124) After serving as attorney general until September 2, 1964, when he resigned to run for and win the U.S. Senate seat from New York, on March 16, 1968, Kennedy announced his decision to run against Johnson for the Democratic nomination that year, but fifteen days later, on March 31, 1968, Johnson told a stunned nation on national television that he would not seek reelection.

  *Not all Americans were accepting of the uninterrupted coverage. All three networks received calls, in the low hundreds, from viewers complaining about the cancellation of their favorite shows and asking when regular programming would be resumed.

  ‡While the rest of the world, including the Soviet Union, eulogized the slain president, Communist China, in sharp contrast, stood virtually alone, Peking not only not offering condolences and eulogies, but defiling, even ridiculing him. The Official New China News Agency did not let up in its attacks on Kennedy and his successor. The Worker’s Daily went so far as to publish a cartoon of Kennedy sprawled face down in blood on the ground, his necktie bearing a dollar sign, with the caption “Kennedy Bites the Dust.” (United Press International, November 25, 1963, p.24)

  *Depository employees James Jarman Jr., called “Junior” by friends (3 H 198, WCT James Jarman Jr.), and Harold Norman are believed to be the men referred to by Oswald. Both men ate lunch while on the first floor, but both said they did not have lunch with Oswald (3 H 188–189, WCT Harold Norman; Transcript of On Trial, July 28, 1968, p.72 [never saw Oswald after around ten in the morning]; 3 H 201, WCT James Jarman Jr.).

  *The fact that the card contains a photograph at all is evidence of forgery since a genuine Selective Service card, including the one Oswald had in his wallet at the time of his arrest in his own name, does not include a photograph of the card bearer (CE 801, 17 H 686).

  *“Those people [press] were in our way every time we moved that man from my office to the jail and back,” Captain Fritz would later tell the Warren Commission. “We had to push him and pull him through the crowd” (15 H 150).

  ‡But later in the day, Chief Curry does, indeed, identify Molina by name over TV. Indeed, Molina is mentioned over national television on Saturday afternoon as someone who has been a previous subject of U.S. Department of Justice scrutiny as a possible subversive, with the vague implication that, who knows, maybe he could have been involved in the assassination in some way. FBI Director Hoover would later say that there had never been a file on Molina, and he wasn’t even known to the FBI prior to November 22, 1963. Molina’s wife, Soledad, had dropped him off at police headquarters at City Hall at 9:45 Saturday morning, and between then and 5:00 p.m., when the police drove him home after they were satisfied he had no connection to Oswald or the assassination, he was grilled off and on throughout the day by Dallas police detectives as well as the FBI. Though never told he was under arrest, when he once, between interviews, got up to leave, a Dallas police officer blocked his exit and told him to go sit down. Upon returning home, he learned from a horrified Soledad that he had been all over the news, and cast in a suspicious light. When his Book Depository Building employer thereafter started getting crank calls and warnings from some customers that if the company didn’t let the “subversive” working for it go, they would stop doing business with the company, the employer finally let Molina go on December 30, after sixteen years of employment, telling him that automation had required his firing, but he knew better. (6 H 369–371, WCT Joe R. Molina; CE 1937, 23 H 732; CE 2036, 24 H 448–449)

  *Actually, Oswald received an honorable discharge from the Marines following active duty, but later received an “undesirable” discharge from the Marine Corps Reserves because of his defection to the Soviet Union (WR, pp.386–387).

  *Contrary to his statement, Curry certainly knew where he had learned that the FBI purportedly had prior contact with Oswald—Lieutenant Jack Revill. It was Revill’s memo regarding FBI agent James P. Hosty Jr.’s alleged remarks in the basement of City Hall that had put Curry on alert. And
Curry also may have known from Captain Fritz about Hosty’s contact with Oswald’s wife, which came out the previous day in Fritz’s interrogation of Oswald.

  *The three other young men in the lineup with Oswald, age twenty-four, were John Thurman Horne, seventeen; David Edmond Knapp, eighteen; and Daniel Gutierrez Lujan, twenty-six (7 H 200, WCT Walter Eugene Potts).

  *Oswald’s warning was unnecessary. Truth is, the visitors’ telephones were not tape-recorded by the police (4 H 154, WCT Jesse E. Curry).