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A GenePoool.com Essay
JFK
I'm going to reveal a secret to you.
I know who killed JFK.
That's right. One of the most pervasive secrets in modern history, and I'm sitting on the name of the assassin. I've done the reading, watched the films, studied the theories, and weighed the conclusions based on likelihood and purity of evidence.
In a way, I've been studying this since I was a child, because for some reason what happened in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963, has always captivated my imagination even though I wasn't even born yet. I've read the Warren Commission Report, I've read my Jim Marrs, and I've studied my Gerald Posner. I've even visited Dealey Plaza.
I have not devoted my life to this, because, well, I've had other things to do. But I've kept up.
So do you want to know the name? Here it is.
Ready?
The name is:
(Drum roll)
Lee Harvey Oswald.
Disappointed? Sorry about that.
I may be the only person you'll ever meet who is willing to admit that he thinks Oswald was the assassin. In the past, this expressed viewpoint has resulted in my being labeled
A) stupid,
B) uninformed,
or C) a government agent.
I'm particularly fond of C) myself. When I hear that I realize there's no point in continuing the discussion, so I just take down the name of my accuser and tell them to check the arithmetic on their tax forms VERY carefully next year. Paranoia can be fun.
There is simply no way I can refute every single claim out there. There are far too many and I just don't have the space or the patience, and even if I did, I'd still miss one or two. So in the interest of using this space as economically as possible, I'll have to skim a bit.
The Weight of the Evidence
You might think there isn't much actual proof that Oswald was the shooter. If you're a devoted follower of the conspiracy myth you might even think that of the 200 + people there that day, he's the one person that most definitely could NOT have been the shooter. You'd be wrong.
Oswald was spotted the morning of the assassination carrying a long, slender object in a paper bag. He told a neighbor the object was curtain rods. The paper bag was later found next to the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle in the sniper's nest with trace fibers on it that matched a blanket in Oswald's garage. The curtain rods were never found for some strange reason.
Before Noon, five co-workers verified that when they left the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository Oswald remained there, alone. Well after the fact (in a 1978 statement) one co-worker later claimed to have seen Oswald eating lunch in a booth on the second floor. But six other co-workers' statements, given separately, confirm that Oswald was not on the second floor at that time.
Oswald was spotted in the sixth floor window prior to the shooting. There are a fair number of witnesses who claim there was more than one person there, though. In more than one case the descriptions given match the physical appearance of the workers who were one floor below and watching the motorcade on their lunch hour. There were claims that prisoners in a nearby jail cell witnessed multiple occupants on the sixth floor, but of the two cells in view of the plaza, one was empty and the other afforded no direct view of the depository window. Likewise an eyewitness on the street who claimed to see more than one person was at a location that would have made it impossible for him to have seen what he claimed. On the other hand, there are two eyewitnesses who were in a good position to see the corner window of the sixth floor, and both of them made statements that confirm only one person, and their descriptions match Oswald very well. Enhanced film from two separate angles that capture the depository window also yield an image of only one person at the window at that time.
When the shots rang out there was, surprise, surprise, a great deal of confusion in Dealey Plaza, partly because it's a gigantic echo chamber and nobody could be sure where the shots were coming from, which is why 44% of the witnesses could not pinpoint the location of the shots. A full 88% stated that they only heard three shots, which also happens to be the number of shots fired by Oswald's rifle. Likewise, Oswald's co-workers, who were directly underneath the sniper's nest when the shots were fired not only heard the three shots, they also heard the sound of the bolt-action on the rifle and the sound of the spent shells hitting the floor above them.
Several witnesses also saw a rifle slowly withdraw from the open window on the sixth floor. A man named Howard Brennan not only saw the rifle, he saw Oswald firing it. He even gave a description to a uniformed police officer at the scene. To discredit this inconvenient testimony, many have pointed out that Brennan wears glasses, and did not have them on at the time. But Brennan is FARSIGHTED. He could see distances just fine.
One of the passengers in the motorcade confessed to smelling gunsmoke as the vehicles proceeded through Dealey Plaza, which has been used evidence that the gunfire was in front of the cars and not behind. But the passenger in question was riding in the fourth car, which was passing in front of the Book Depository when the shots were fired.
As for the eyewitness claims of a puff of smoke from the Grassy Knoll, there may very well have been a puff of smoke, but it's fairly unlikely it came from a gun. Modern ammunition is smokeless. As Gerald Posner points out in Case Closed "When Oliver Stone filmed JFK he could not find a rifle that emitted enough smoke to be captured on film when fired from the grassy knoll. Finally, he resorted to a props man pumping smoke from a bellows." There was also a steam pipe in roughly the same spot where witnesses claimed to have seen the smoke, and the wind through Dealey Plaza at that time was moving up to 20 miles per hour, which makes it unlikely any smoke would hang in the air for any length of time.
There is, in short, ample evidence that places Oswald where he needed to be, with rifle in hand, at the time the shots were fired from the Depository. According to his army records he was also an expert marksman, and he had plenty of time to make the shots despite what you might have read elsewhere.
The timing of the shots are calculated based on the Zapruder film, and there is a period of time during which the President's car is obscured by a road sign. The Warren Commission assumed that the first shot would be an accurate shot, and that that shot took place when the Kennedy was partly obscured. This would be the bullet that hit Kennedy in the neck, and wounded Governor Connally. We'll get back to it in a minute.
So if this was the first shot, a second and third shot had to have been fired in a very short span of time, too short a time for Oswald to have reloaded the bolt-action on the rifle. Which would be a problem if it were the first shot. But it was the second.
The first shot was fired when the car was just making its turn onto Elm Street, BEFORE it drove behind the street sign. Evidence for this is on the Zapruder film. Several people on the street can be seen looking upward in the direction of the Depository window. Connally himself was turning to look. Likewise, Kennedy stopped waving, and most tellingly, Abraham Zapruder's camera jiggled slightly when the noise startled him.
What happened to this first bullet was that it was deflected by a tree branch. When the location of Kennedy's car is matched up with the timing from the film and the angle Oswald's shot would have come from, the first shot would have had to have been through the branches of an oak tree. The deflected bullet fragments ricocheted into the concrete sidewalk some ways up Elm Street, and a chip of concrete hit a bystander in the cheek. The bullet, its jacket stripped by the branch (at the right angle, this is not just possible, it's likely,) probably disintegrated on impact.
The second bullet, the "magic" bullet, isn't very magic. It struck Kennedy in the upper back, exited at the base of his throat, entered Connally's right shoulder, exited below his right nipple, shattered his wrist and came to rest in his thigh. Now, to begin with, if the two men were sitting in the same positions (back flat, head facing front) this would be an impossible shot. But Connally's body is turned to the right and leaned slightly forward. Why? He heard the first shot and was turning around to see what it was. Likewise, the bullet was coming down from a steep angle and Kennedy was taller than Connally.
When the entire scene is put together again in a computer model the path of the bullet is nearly straight. The only time it alters course is when it enters Connally and glances off a rib. Until then it doesn't hit anything but soft tissue, which slows it, but does not stop it.
The "pristine" quality of the bullet has been called into question as well, and rightly so. It seems like a stretch that one bullet could come out of this so unscathed. In fact, when tests were done to determine how well a rifle bullet would survive after passing through a wrist bone (on a cadaver, of course) the results seemed to point to this being an impossibility.
Except the test was faulty. The bullet that struck the wrist of the cadaver was traveling at top speed from a close range shot and impacted directly with bone immediately. But the bullet that hit Kennedy and Connally had already traveled a few hundred yards before it struck, and then it was slowed down with each impact. It didn't hit Connally's wrist at top speed at all, but had lost nearly two-thirds of its velocity by then.
Likewise, it wasn't pristine. It was bent, slightly flattened, and it had lost some lead from its base, not coincidentally the same amount of lead also found in the bodies of Kennedy and Connally.
The third bullet hit Kennedy in the back of the head and blew the entire front portion of his head off. I've watched the Zapruder film many times and don't know how anyone can miss seeing the skull flap forward from a rear entry wound. It also seems obvious that his head's movement to the back and side are consistent with the shot because he was wearing a back brace at the time. Not only could he not duck, he couldn't fall forward, so what we are seeing is his head snap forward with the shot and then snap back after the impact. This is consistent with most of the physics I'm familiar with.
How All This Nonsense Got Started
The effort to discredit the Warren Commission report began almost immediately after its findings were released. This report is a fairly hasty construction, and I'll be the first to admit that if I were living in that time I would have trouble with it as well. Doubts were justifiably raised regarding some of the details, but at the same time, nobody had a better idea as to who might possibly replace Oswald as the assassin.
Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney, took care of that. You might remember him as the character Kevin Costner played in Oliver Stone's remarkable work of fiction, JFK.
Even a casual examination of Garrison's investigative techniques should convince the most ardent supporter that he was on something of a witch hunt. An example of his detective skills, from Posner:
"Garrison... took the number 1147, that appeared in Oswald's address book, multiplied it by 10, rearranged the numbers, subtracted 1700, and remultiplied. He said it resulted in 522-8874, the CIA's phone number in New Orleans, although he failed to mention it was listed in the phone book."
Garrison put a forward a lot of theories that seemed to have been based on nothing more than his own imagination and desire to see his name on the front page. But the problem is that a lot of what he had to say became "true" when repeated by other conspiracy buffs. This is a consistent problem. Investigative errors and suppositions in one book become unquestioned fact in the next.
Why You Still Don't Believe Me
The real issue here, I think, is psychological. I don't think it's very easy for any of us to accept that "great" people can die in mundane ways, and while Kennedy's death was certainly not mundane, Lee Oswald was not exactly spectacular. He was not the sort of person we would like to think has any power whatsoever to alter the course of history as dramatically as he did. Much better to think Kennedy was killed by a vast, multifaceted conspiracy.
There are a LOT of theories out there, all of them seemingly relying on hearsay and twenty year old memories, and occasionally outright lies. None of them have even remotely enough evidence to be seriously considered, not when compared to the evidence against Oswald. Worse, all of them rely on a huge chain of people "in the know," along with a huge number of bullets flying around Dealy Plaza, none of which have ever been recovered.
Simple reason suggests that the more people involved in a conspiracy, the less likely it is that the conspiracy actually exists. The odds that one person is out to "get me" may be very high, but when that one person becomes three, ten, or a hundred, it's time to consider the possibility that I might just be paranoid.
But sometimes a conspiracy is more comforting. We are a nation of king-makers, and it's disquieting to consider that our kings are only flesh and blood, like us. The pattern repeats itself with Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe and more recently, Kurt Kobain. Some of us readily believe Elvis still lives, because the King couldn't have possibly died on the toilet.
Why I Care
If you read some of the conspiracy literature you'll find that Oswald is, depending on the source, a co-assassin, an innocent patsy, or a hero. In the inscrutable search for the proof that someone else shot Kennedy we've gone so far as to deify his killer.
This does a tremendous disservice to the memories of the dead, and not just Kennedy. How do you suppose the family of Officer J.D. Tippit feel? Tippit, in the line of duty, was shot and killed by Oswald while attempting to question him on the street. How do we honor his memory? We accuse him of being part of the conspiracy.
Lee Harvey Oswald was not a great man. He was a wife beater and a pathological liar. He suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions of grandeur. He wanted to change the world, and unfortunately, he did.
The myth we've chosen to perpetuate is not just wrong; it's offensive. And the longer we believe it, the longer we spit on the graves of his victims.
NOTE: Most of my columns rely on a large quantity
of sources, and while I had multiple sources in this column as
well, the bulk of the factual material came from Case Closed,
by Gerald Posner. I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge
this exceptional piece of research.
© 2000, Gene Doucette
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