Parkland (Movie Tie-In Edition)

by Vincent Bugliosi

  *Mrs. Paine attempted to reach attorney John Abt after six o’clock, as Oswald requested, but was unable to get an answer at either number. She testified that she could not recall if she conveyed the results of her efforts to Oswald during a subsequent conversation at 8:00 p.m. Saturday evening. Mrs. Paine made another attempt to reach Mr. Abt at home on Sunday morning, again without success. (3 H 88–89, WCT Ruth Hyde Paine)

  *Michael Paine had told Fritz that he and Ruth had visited the Oswalds when they lived on Neely Street. Fritz later determined that the photographs were taken in the backyard at Neely. (CE 2003, 24 H 268)

  *Abt testified that he told reporters who called him at his cabin in the Connecticut woods, where he had gone to spend the weekend, that “if I were requested to represent him, it would probably be difficult, if not impossible, for me to do so because of my commitments to other clients.” Abt said he was never contacted directly by Oswald or any member of his family. (10 H 116)

  *Normally, except in rare instances, men from Sheriff Decker’s office handle the transfer of prisoners between the city and county jails. Decker testified that the city police handle “maybe one-tenth of maybe 1 percent” of the transfers (12 H 45).

  *There actually was no person in protective custody as described in the story. Darwin Payne later stated that the report may have been a distorted reference to Howard Brennan, who had been assured by police that he and his home would be under surveillance by law enforcement. (Hlavach and Payne, Reporting the Kennedy Assassination, p.94)

  *There are two jail offices in the police building, one in the basement next to the parking area, the other on the fourth floor.

  *See photo section for photo of November 24, 1963, Dallas Times Herald found on the floor at the foot of Ruby’s bed after he shot Oswald. [Images in this ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.] The paper is opened to page A3, the facing page, A2, being the “My Dear Caroline” letter. (CE 2426, 25 H 525; WR, p.355)

  *A Dallas police detective, Leonard Mullenax, was shot to death the previous year in a hotel room while working undercover on a drug case. Though Ruby didn’t know Mullenax well, he was sufficiently depressed over it to contribute two hundred dollars to his widow, close his club, and take his strippers with him to the funeral. Because of lack of sufficient evidence, Mullenax’s alleged killer was never prosecuted. (Kaplan and Waltz, Trial of Jack Ruby, pp.66–67; Hall [C. Ray] Exhibit No. 2, 20 H 43)

  *In accordance with postal regulations, the portion of Oswald’s application for his post office box in Dallas that listed names of persons other than the applicant who were entitled to receive mail was thrown away after Oswald closed his box on May 14, 1963 (7 H 527, WCT Harry D. Holmes; Cadigan Exhibit No. 13, 19 H 286). But the New Orleans post office did not comply with this regulation, and that portion of Oswald’s application for his New Orleans post office box still existed (7 H 527, WCT Harry D. Holmes).

  *Humes completed the autopsy report between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. EST (1 HSCA 330; ARRB Transcript of Proceedings, Deposition of Dr. James Joseph Humes, February 13, 1996, p.135).

  *There is no evidence that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York ever sent Oswald a letter signed by Alex Hidell.

  ‡In fact, Oswald appeared on Stuckey’s television program once, a related radio program once, and was interviewed once by the press in relation to his court appearance.

  *Later investigation revealed that Oswald’s encounter was probably with a young, crew-cut WFAA radio newsman named Pierce Allman, who ran into the Depository to telephone the radio station about the shooting. Allman reported encountering a young man on the front steps who pointed toward the telephone inside, although Allman told the Secret Service he couldn’t say for sure whether the man was Oswald or not (CD 354, p.2, Secret Service interview of Pierce Allman on January 29, 1964).

  *But Holmes testified that Oswald made it clear that “he was still up in the building” when the shooting started and had “rushed downstairs to go out to see what was going on” (7 H 302, 306).

  ‡Sorrels probably misspoke here since the Warren Commission investigation never came up with a change-of-address card, if there ever was one, for Oswald in New Orleans. Sorrels probably was referring to the portion of the application for Oswald’s post office box in New Orleans that listed “A. J. Hidell” as someone entitled to receive mail through the box.

  *As can be seen in the sketch of the layout of the basement in the photo section of this book, looking out from the jail office to the garage basement ahead, there is a traffic lane that starts at the top of the Main Street entrance ramp on the left. [Images in this ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.] The lane descends into the garage basement and continues past the jail office until it exits the basement by way of the Commerce Street ramp on the right. Most of the media are on the far side of the lane behind a railing that runs alongside the lane, their backs to the parking lot behind them, their eyes facing the jail office. To enable those reporters craning their necks behind others to have a better view, Assistant Chief Batchelor has given permission for them to stand in a semicircle extending from the end of the railing across the bottom of the Main Street ramp. However, on their own, many have also spilled over beyond the railing on the Commerce Street side and are on the jail side of the railing close to the armored truck. (15 H 119–120, 12, H 17–18, WCT Charles Batchelor; 12 H 101–102, WCT M. W. Stevenson; Batchelor Exhibit No. 5001, 19 H 116; 12 H 119, WCT Cecil E. Talbert; CE 2179, 24 H 851; Talbert Exhibit No. 5070, 21 H 668; 15 H 150, WCT John Will Fritz)

  *For whatever reason, Brown, not Beck, will end up being behind the wheel of this car (CE 2003, 24 H 295; 12 H 19, WCT Charles Batchelor).

  *Roger Mudd was still ten seconds from the end of his piece when the shot was fired. Since CBS television was taping Mudd, it missed the live broadcast from the Dallas basement. Dan Rather partially redeemed CBS’s blunder by coming up with the idea of a televised slow-motion playback of the shooting with freeze frames and analysis. This was a national television first, but Dallas’s KRLD-TV had been using the technique occasionally for local sporting events. Unbeknownst to Rather and the technicians working with him at KRLD-TV, in New York, Don Hewitt, one of two executive editors of CBS News, was on the telephone trying to reach Rather to suggest the same idea. An hour and a half after the shooting, Rather was on the air with a slow-motion version of the shooting, using a pointer to draw the audience’s attention to the critical frames and movements. (However, it was not the first slow-motion showing of the shooting of Oswald [without freeze-frame analysis] on national television. At 12:42 EST, NBC television commentator Frank McGee at NBC headquarters in New York tells his national audience, “We will replay the tape of this bizarre shooting in slow motion.”) (Rather with Herskowitz, Camera Never Blinks, pp.120, 139–140; NBC News, Seventy Hours and Thirty Minutes, p.93) In Air Time: The Inside Story of CBS News, author Gary Paul Gates writes, “November 22, 1963, was, in career terms, the most important day in Dan Rather’s life. His swift and accurate reporting on the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath that weekend transformed him from a regional journalist into a national correspondent. A few days after the assassination, he received a call from [CBS headquarters in New York] informing him that he was being transferred to Washington to cover the White House” (Gates, Air Time, p.293).

  ‡However, less than a minute later, CBS headquarters in New York, upon seeing the tape of the shooting from its local affiliate’s live coverage in Dallas, which was received over closed circuit in New York, puts the tape on over the network to a national audience (New York Times, November 25, 1963, p.1).

  *An FBI examination of Pappas’s tape at the FBI laboratory “revealed that no identifiable utterances were made by Ruby at the time he shot Oswald…Two groans are heard on the tape immediately following the shot. However, it cannot be said whether any utterance by Ruby would have been picked up by the microphone at this time” (FBI Record 124-10072-10368, July 17, 1964, Letter fro
m J. Edgar Hoover to J. Lee Rankin; see also CD 1314, July 29, 1964). The Ike Pappas tape recording (CD 1314a) is available at the National Archives and reveals that the shot was fired one minute and fifty-eight seconds after Oswald left the third-floor Homicide and Robbery office (see also 15 H 368–369, WCT Icarus M. Pappas).

  The famous photo of Ruby shooting Oswald (see photo section) was snapped by Dallas Times Herald photographer Robert Jackson. [Images in this ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.] It won Jackson a Pulitzer Prize. Another photo, taken six-tenths of a second before by rival Dallas Morning News photographer Jack Beers, did not. Beers’s daughter said that this six-tenths of a second bothered her late father to the day he died, her father feeling he had been cheated by fate. He had a “depression that went untreated” and it was “all due to that picture.” Bitter and despondent, Beers died of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of fifty-one. (Michael Granberry, “Six Tenths of a Second, Two Lives Forever Changed,” Dallas Morning News, June 30, 2002, pp.1A, 33A)

  ‡The Dallas Police Department had failed to protect the accused presidential assassin, and hence he would never be brought to trial for a jury to decide whether he was guilty, a fact that will reverberate, to the benefit of those who question the official position of the Warren Commission, down through the centuries. “If we had had jurisdiction,” J. Edgar Hoover would later say, “we would have taken custody of him and I do not believe he would have been killed by Rubenstein [Ruby]” (5 H 115).

  *There’s a rather interesting addendum to this. Although Combest never mentioned this in his testimony before the Warren Commission, he told author Anthony Summers in August of 1978 that Oswald accompanied his shaking of his head with “a definite clenched-fist salute” (Summers, Not in Your Lifetime, p.407 note 85). Anti-conspiracy author Joan Davison wrote in 1983, “When Combest testified [before the Warren Commission] in 1964 he probably didn’t know what a clenched-fist salute was. Although the gesture had been a socialist salute in Spain in the 1930’s, it didn’t become a widely recognized symbol of political militancy in this country until the late 1960’s. It was probably then that Combest reinterpreted Oswald’s gesture as a political statement. Second, a news photograph taken of Oswald after his arrest [see photo section of this book] shows him raising his right manacled arm in what very clearly appears to be a clenched-fist salute. [Images in this ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.] In any event, a raised fist was Oswald’s last comment” (Davison, Oswald’s Game, p.254).

  Davison limits the salute to Spanish socialists in the 1930s, but no one was watching the Communists more in 1963 than the John Birch Society, and in a February 1964 article in its publication, American Opinion, a contributor wrote that what Oswald gave was “the Communists’ clenched-fist salute” (Oliver, “Marksmanship in Dallas,” p.14; Oliver Exhibit No. 2, 20 H 721).

  *Prior to the Escobedo case in 1964, federal law enforcement agencies had a policy of doing this, but as indicated earlier, there was no legal requirement that they advise suspects of this constitutional right, and if they didn’t, any statement made by the defendant thereafter would be inadmissible at the defendant’s trial.

  *During the ceremony, John-John, age three, was kept busy in a room off the rotunda.

  *At midnight, police begin warning those at the rear of the line that extends for miles from the Capitol, that they might as well go home—the rotunda would be closed at nine in the morning in preparation for the burial later that day. Most paid no heed. (New York Times, November 26, 1963, p.10)

  *Fritz may have misspoken here, as there is no evidence that any Dallas officer was stationed at the bottom of the ramp.

  ‡In a December 6, 1963, meeting between Captain Fritz and Tom Howard, attorney for Jack Ruby, Fritz asked Howard if Ruby knew the officer at the top of the ramp, to which Howard replied no. Fritz asked why, then, did Ruby refuse to discuss this point with him during questioning, and Howard stated that “the reason was because Ruby did not want to get the officer in trouble.” (CE 2025, 24 H 438–439)

  *Murray Kempton and James Ridgeway would write in the New Republic, “It had been less than three years since Mr. Kennedy had announced that a new generation was taking up the torch. Now, old General de Gaulle and old Mr. Mikoyan were coming to see him buried” (Kempton and Ridgeway, “Romans,” p.10).

  *“How come you weren’t handcuffed to Ruby?” I asked Leavelle. “No need to,” Leavelle said. “Jack wasn’t going anywhere I didn’t want him to. If he did, I’d know where to find him,” he added in the special dry wit of Texans. (Telephone interview of James Leavelle by author on November 19, 2004)

  *The idea of the eternal flame at Kennedy’s grave site, one that would glow forever, was Jackie’s. She had seen one under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris (one of only two in the world, the other at Gettysburg), and insisted on one for her husband, saying she didn’t want the country to ever forget him. Her request threw those around her, as well as those in charge of the funeral, into a tizzy, no one knowing how to produce such a device—at one point prompting Richard Goodwin, a JFK assistant and writer, to bark into the phone at an officer at nearby Fort Myers, “If you can design an atomic bomb, you can put a little flame [one that wouldn’t die] on the side of that hill.” The military ended up passing, resorting instead to the yellow pages of the telephone directory under “Gas Companies,” and securing a modified road torch supplied by the Washington Gas & Light Company. (Manchester, Death of a President, pp.550–552)

  *A quarter hour after the Kennedy family had left the cemetery, the president’s coffin was lowered into the grave under the vigilant eyes of the network television cameras. It’s 3:32 p.m. Three minutes later, under orders from John C. Metzler, Arlington Cemetery’s superintendent, the power to the network cameras was cut to allow the final stages of the burial to be carried out in private. Shortly thereafter, the burial vault was sealed, the grave filled with dirt, a picket fence erected around the plot, and the surrounding ground dressed with evergreen boughs and flowers. (Manchester, Death of a President, p.604; 3:32 p.m.: ARRB MD 134, Funeral Arrangements for John Fitzgerald Kennedy, November 25, 1963, p.3, “at precisely 3:32 p.m., the casket was slowly lowered into the ground” see also New York Times, November 26, 1963, pp.2, 4)

  *In a court distribution on October 21, 1964, Mrs. Tippit received $312,916 in cash, and a trust fund for $330,946 was set up for the Tippit children. Also, $3,716 went to policemen’s and firemen’s funds. (“$650,000 for Family of Man Killed by Oswald,” p.9)

  At least financially, Mrs. Tippit would now have no worries. In an AP interview during the weekend after her husband’s death, Marie Tippit said, “We always kept thinking we’d put money [aside], but with three kids it just never worked out. It was one payday to the next.” Tippit’s police salary when he died was $490 per month. She said that to get by, her husband “worked at Austin Barbecue Friday and Saturday nights and at the Stevens Park Theater Sundays.” Her eyes swollen with tears as she sat in her neat, three-bedroom, pink-brick home, she spoke lovingly of her husband. “He was very quiet, likeable—almost a lovable guy…He was a good father. He always told the kids, ‘If you’re going to do a job, do it right or not at all.’ There was no hollering around here. He wanted me to stay at home and take care of the children.” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, November 25, 1963, p.2)