JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (120 page)

[
239
]. Interviews of Smith by Summers,
Conspiracy,
p. 50.

[
240
]. Ibid.

[
241
]. Earl Golz, “SS ‘Imposters’ Spotted by JFK Witnesses,”
Dallas Morning News
(August 27, 1978), p. 1A.

[
242
]. Interview of Gordon Arnold by Henry Hurt, May 1982; cited in Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt
, p. 112.

[
243
]. Ibid.

[
244
]. Golz, “SS ‘Imposters,’” p. 1A.

[
245
]. Interview of Gordon Arnold by Jim Marrs, summer 1985; cited by Jim Marrs,
Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 1989), p. 78. Interview of Arnold by Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt,
p. 112.

[
246
]. Interview of Gordon Arnold on
The Men Who Killed Kennedy: Part Two—“The Forces of Darkness”
; a Nigel Turner film (C.G. Communications, 1992).

[
247
]. Golz, “SS ‘Imposters,’” p. 4A.

[
248
]. In 1978 reporter Earl Golz persuaded a still-fearful Gordon Arnold to be interviewed anonymously for a story in the
Dallas
Morning News
. Because of the last-minute insistence of Golz’s editor, Arnold wound up being identified in the story, “SS ‘Imposters’ Spotted by JFK Witnesses,”
Dallas Morning News
(August 27, 1978), p. 1A. Interview of Earl Golz by Henry Hurt, 1983, cited in Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt
, p. 113.

After the story appeared, former U.S. Senator Ralph Yarborough contacted Golz. Yarborough said he had seen a man behaving like Gordon Arnold on the grassy knoll. Senator Yarborough had been riding with Vice President Lyndon Johnson two cars behind the presidential limousine. Yarborough told Golz: “Immediately on the firing of the first shot I saw the man you interviewed throw himself on the ground. He was down within a second of the time the shot was fired and I thought to myself, ‘There’s a combat veteran who knows how to act when weapons start firing.’” Earl Golz, “Panel Leaves Question of Imposters,”
Dallas Morning News
(December 31, 1978), p. 2A.

[
249
]. Bill Sloan with Jean Hill,
JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness
(Gretna, La.: Pelican, 1991), p. 26.

[
250
].
WCH
, vol. 7, p. 107. Bogus Secret Service agents were also behind the Texas School Book Depository by 12:36 p.m. Dallas Police Sergeant D.V. Harkness said that at 12:36 when he went around to the back of the Depository to seal it off: “There were some Secret Service agents there. I didn’t get them identified. They told me they were Secret Service.”
WCH
, vol. 6, p. 312. Stewart Galanor, “The Grassy Knoll,”
Kennedy
Assassination Chronicles
(Spring, 1999), p. 42.

[
251
]. Ed Hoffman and Ron Friedrich,
Eye Witness
(Grand Prairie, Tex.: JFK Lancer, 1996), pp. 5-6.

[
252
]. Bill Sloan,
JFK:
Breaking the Silence
(Dallas: Taylor, 1993), p. 15.

[
253
]. Hoffman and Friedrich,
Eye Witness,
pp. 6-7.

[
254
]. Casey J. Quinlan and Brian K. Edwards,
Beyond the Fence Line: The Eyewitness Account of Ed Hoffman and the Murder of President Kennedy
(Southlake, Tex.: JFK Lancer, 2008), pp. 28, 30-31, 33, 40-41, 157-58. “Ed has been asked many times how he was able to distinguish the make of this station wagon from such a distance. He communicated that his best friend, Lucien Pierce, owned a Rambler station wagon exactly like the one he saw driving in the parking lot” (ibid., p. 28).

[
255
]. Ibid., p. 8. Lee Bowers, Jr., a railroad supervisor in a fourteen-foot tower, was looking behind the fence at the same time as Ed Hoffman but from a different angle. Bowers told Mark Lane he saw “some unusual occurrence—a flash of light or smoke or something which caused me to feel like something out of the ordinary had occurred there.” Interview of Lee Bowers, Jr., by Mark Lane, filmed in Arlington, Texas, March 31, 1966;
The Plot to Kill JFK: Rush to Judgment
(MPI Home Video, 1988), a film by Emile de Antonio and Mark Lane.

On August 9, 1966, four months after he was interviewed by Mark Lane, Lee Bowers, Jr., was killed in a single-car accident in Midlothian, Texas. Benson,
Encyclopedia of the
JFK Assassination,
p. 28.

[
256
]. Hoffman and Friedrich,
Eye Witness,
pp. 8, 25; Marrs,
Crossfire
, p. 82.

[
257
]. Hoffman and Friedrich,
Eye Witness,
p. 9.

[
258
]. Ibid., p. 33.

[
259
]. Ibid., p. 10.

[
260
]. Ibid., pp. 11-12.

[
261
]. Ibid., p. 12. Author Bill Sloan interviewed retired police detective Robert Hoffman in 1992 about his memories of his twenty-nine-year-old Thanksgiving Day conversation with his nephew through the interpretation of his brother, Frederick Hoffman, who had died in 1976. Robert Hoffman claimed he had misunderstood the details of the story: “. . . all I knew at the time was that someone in a car had pointed a gun at him . . . His father was very, very concerned that Eddie knew anything about the assassination at all.” Sloan,
JFK: Breaking the Silence
, p. 30.

Robert Hoffman vouched for his nephew’s character and truthfulness: “Maybe it’s better that I
didn’t
understand what he had seen. I know that Eddie’s a very bright person and always has been, and I can’t think of any reason that he would make up something like this. It would be completely out of character for him to change his story or add to it at a later date.”

Sloan asked Robert Hoffman if he believed “Ed would have been putting himself in physical danger by making his story public.”

He replied, “I don’t know. A lot of witnesses obviously did [put themselves in danger], because some of them died. The same thing could have happened to Eddie.” Ibid., pp. 30-31.

[
262
]. June 28, 1967, Dallas FBI Report on “Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963,” p. 2. Appendix A, Hoffman and Friedrich,
Eye Witness,
p. 32.

[
263
]. Hoffman and Friedrich,
Eye Witness,
pp. 16-17.

[
264
]. Ibid., p. 18.

[
265
]. Ibid.

[
266
]. Ibid. When the FBI’s report of its July 1967 interview with Frederick Hoffman was finally released and it was then claimed that “Ed’s [deceased] father thought that he was lying,” Ed’s mother, brother, wife, and other family members all insisted that, on the contrary, Frederick Hoffman believed his son from the beginning. He had simply tried to keep Ed quiet out of fear for his son’s life. Hoffman and Friedrich,
Eye Witness,
pp. 18-19.

[
267
]. April 5, 1977, Dallas FBI Report on “Assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, November 22, 1963, Dallas, Texas,” pp. 1-9. Appendix B, Hoffman and Friedrich,
Eye Witness,
pp. 36-44.

[
268
]. Marrs,
Crossfire
, pp. 81-85. Even Marrs’s generally accurate interview of Ed Hoffman contains sign-language interpreter errors. The best statements of Ed Hoffman’s testimony have been given in
Eye Witness,
written by Ed Hoffman with his pastor and translator, Ron Friedrich, and in
Beyond the Fence Line,
written by Casey J. Quinlan and Brian K. Edwards in close consultation with Ed Hoffman.

During the activity Hoffman has described, his view of the area behind the fence at Dealey Plaza was, contrary to some critics, unobstructed. Pictures taken just after the assassination establish that, as Hoffman says, the train that would soon become a barrier to his vision had not yet appeared. See the pictures on pp. 42, 43, 46, 50, and 51 of Robert J. Groden’s
The Killing of a President: The Complete Photographic Record of the JFK Assassination, the Conspiracy, and the Cover-Up
(New York: Viking Studio Books, 1993). The billboard that now blocks one’s view was extended vertically to its present height after 1963, and the trees have grown considerably from the time when Hoffman looked over them. Hoffman and Friedrich,
Eye Witness,
pp. 14-15. Groden, pp. 16-17. Quinlan and Edwards,
Beyond the Fence Line,
pp. 152-53.

[
269
]. Two books about Ed Hoffman (
Eyewitness,
p. 9;
Beyond the Fence Line,
p. 33) and the hardcover text of this book (p. 265) have identified the “suit man” seen by Hoffman with the man whom Dallas police officer Joe Marshall Smith confronted with a gun behind the stockade fence. However, Smith said the man he confronted “had on a sports shirt and sports pants,” so how could it have been the same man? (I am grateful to reader Norman J. Granz for raising this question.)

Hoffman communicated that, in addition to the “suit man” and the “railroad man,” he saw two other men behind the fence just before the shooting:

“a) A man in a plaid shirt, labeled ‘P’ (dotted black line on Photo 23) [in
Beyond the Fence Line,
p. 34], stepped around from the north end of the fence, walked up to the man in the business suit ‘A’ and spoke to him for a few seconds.