Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (11 page)

S. M. Holland, at the time a railroad employee since 1938, who was standing at the bannister of the triple underpass, by the railroad yard, at the time of the shooting, testified he heard four shots fired and saw a puff of smoke emerge from under the trees on the grassy knoll. Holland also
supported Governor Connally’s recollection, stating JFK was hit by the first shot and Connally by the second shot. In his testimony to the Warren Commission in Dallas on April 8, 1964, Holland remembered of the third and fourth shots: “And a puff of smoke came out about six or eight feet above the ground right from under those trees. And at just about this location from where I was standing you could see that puff of smoke, like someone had thrown a firecracker, or something out, and that is just about the way it sounded.”
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After the shooting, Holland joined the search behind the picket fence on top of the grassy knoll. One station wagon in particular caught his attention. “I remember about the third car down from this fence, there was a station wagon backed up toward the fence, about the third car down, and a spot, I’d say three foot by two foot. It looked to me like somebody had been standing there for a long time,” he testified. “I guess if you could count them about a hundred foot tracks in that little spot, and also mud up on the bumper of that station wagon.”
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He felt the mud on the bumper indicated that “someone had cleaned their foot, or stood up on the bumper to see over the fence.”
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Holland further testified that he watched a motorcycle policeman breaking out of the motorcade and stopping his motorcycle, so he could run up the grassy knoll with his gun drawn at approximately the place where Holland had seen the puff of smoke.
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Many witnesses who claimed the shots came from the grassy knoll were never called by the Warren Commission to testify. William E. Newman Jr. and his wife Gayle were standing on the north curb of Elm Street with their two children, waving at the president as the limousine passed, some fifteen feet from the president at the time of the head shot. In several different interviews, including an interview he gave to Dallas police in Dealey Plaza at the time of the shooting and an interview on Dallas television immediately after the shooting, Newman insisted that the shots were fired from directly behind where he was standing with his wife and children, from behind the picket fence at the top of the grassy knoll. Newman said it never entered his mind that the shots might be coming from the Texas School Book Depository.
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Newman and his wife can be seen in several assassination films and photographs lying on the ground, each covering one of their children to protect the child, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

The only place Newman’s testimony shows up is in his signed affidavit
to the Dallas Police Department, dated the day of the assassination, that is contained on
page 45
of a long, 209-page report submitted by the Dallas Police Department on the DPD investigation into the JFK assassination and published as Commission Exhibit 2003 in Volume 24 of the Warren Commission report.
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In his one-paragraph affidavit, Newman described: “We were standing at the edge of the curb looking at the car as it was coming toward us and all of a sudden there was a noise, apparently gunshot.” After describing the fatal headshot, Newman swore to the truth of his recollection the shots came from directly behind where he and his family were standing, identifying the shots as having come from behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll. “Then we fell down on the grass as it seemed that we were in direct path of fire,” he said in the affidavit. “I thought the shot had come from the garden directly behind me that was on the elevation from where I was as I was right on the curb. I do not recall looking toward the Texas School Book Depository. I looked back in the vicinity of the garden.” Had William and Gayle Newman thought the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository, the Warren Commission most likely would have made them star witnesses, especially given their proximity to JFK at the time of the fatal head shot. Very likely, since both believed the shots were fired from behind them on the grassy knoll, their affidavits were ignored by the official inquiry and neither was called to give testimony to the Warren Commission.

The Warren Commission relied heavily on the testimony of Howard L. Brennan, a forty-five-year-old steamfitter who watched the motorcade from the retaining wall at the southwest corner of Elm and Houston across the street from the Texas School Book Depository Building. Brennan claimed to have had a clear view of the assassin in the sixth floor corner window of the depository building, directly above his vantage point. Brennan was the only witness to claim to the Warren Commission he saw Lee Harvey Oswald fire a rifle at the JFK motorcade from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. On March 24, 1964, Brennan testified to the Warren Commission in Washington.
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Brennan claimed to have gotten a particularly good look at the shooter firing the third shot:

Well, as it appeared to me he was standing up and resting against the left window sill, with gun shouldered to his right shoulder, holding the gun with his left hand and taking positive aim and fired his last shot. As I calculate a couple of seconds. He drew the gun back from the window as though he was drawing it back to his side and maybe paused for another second as though to assure himself that he hit his mark, and then he disappeared.
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The Warren Commission Report concluded Brennan’s description of the man he observed in the sixth floor window was what most probably led to the description of the suspect that was called in by Dallas Police Department inspector J. Herbert Sawyer and broadcast over the radio alert sent to police cars at approximately 12:45 p.m., describing the suspect as white, slender, weighing about 165 pounds, about 5’10” tall, and in his early thirties.
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The Warren Commission Report considered Brennan’s testimony “as probative in reaching the conclusion the shots came from the sixth floor, southeast corner window of the depository building.”
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The Commission further relied on Brennan’s testimony “that Lee Harvey Oswald, whom he viewed in a police lineup on the night of the assassination, was the man he saw fire the shots from the sixth-floor window of the Depository Building.”
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The Commission further noted Brennan “was in an excellent position to observe anyone in the window,” because he was sitting on a concrete wall on the southwest corner of Elm and Houston Streets, “looking north at the Depository Building which was directly in front of him,” such that the sixth floor window was approximately 120 feet away.
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At a police lineup the night of the assassination, Brennan evidently was either unable or unwilling to positively identify Oswald as the shooter, a failure that should have badly damaged his credibility. A memo written by Secret Service Agent Robert C. Dish on the evening of the assassination noted: “BRENNAN advised he later viewed LEE OSWALD in a police lineup, Dallas PD, at which time he failed to positively identify him as the person he had observed standing in the window with a rifle, but that of all the persons in the lineup, he most resembled the man he observed with the rifle.”
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In his testimony to the Warren Commission, Brennan admitted that he could not make a positive identification of Oswald at the lineup. Consider the following exchange, with Brennan being questioned by Warren Commission assistant counsel David Belin:

Mr. Belin
: All right. Did you see anyone in the lineup you recognized?

Mr. Brennan
: Yes.

Mr. Belin
: And what did you say?

Mr. Brennan
: I told Mr. Sorrels [Secret Service] and Captain Fritz [Dallas Police Department] at that time that Oswald—or the man in the lineup that I identified—looked more like a closest resemblance to the man in the window than anyone in the lineup.

Mr. Belin
: Were the other people in the lineup, do you remember—were they all white, or were there some Negroes in there, or what?

Mr. Brennan
: I do not remember.

Mr. Belin
: As I understand your testimony, then, you said that you told him that this particular person looked the most like the man you saw on the sixth floor of the building there.

Mr. Brennan
: Yes, sir.

Mr. Belin
: In the meantime, had you seen any pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald on television or in the newspapers?

Mr. Brennan
: Yes, on television.

Mr. Belin
: About when was that, do you believe?

Mr. Brennan
: I believe I reached home quarter to three or something of that, 15 minutes either way, and I saw his picture twice on television before I went down to the police station for the lineup.

Mr. Belin
: Now, is there anything else you told the officers at the time of the lineup?

Mr. Brennan
: Well, I told them I could not make a positive identification.
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Yet, only a few questions later, Brennan insisted he could “with all sincerity” identify Oswald as the man he saw in the sixth floor window,
even though he admitted that whether seeing Oswald on television might have affected his identification was “something I do not know.” Brennan later said he hesitated to give a positive description of Oswald at the lineup because he was afraid doing so might place him and his family in personal danger of a reprisal, although Brennan did not specify who might do what to him or to his family. “After Oswald was killed, I was relieved quite a bit that as far as pressure on myself of somebody not wanting me to positively identify anybody, there was no longer that immediate danger,” he explained to counsel Belin in the questioning before the Warren Commission.
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Documentary evidence exists supporting Brennan’s claim he did not make a positive identification of Oswald in a lineup. Commission Exhibit 2003, the Dallas Police Department report on their investigation into the JFK assassination, lists the names of all witnesses who positively identified Oswald in a DPD lineup, and Brennan’s name is not included on the list.
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If Brennan told Dallas police that Oswald resembled the man he saw in the sixth floor window, he did so unofficially, off the record. Still, in response to Belin’s direct questioning, Brennan insisted Oswald was the shooter:

Mr. Belin
: Was the man that you saw in the window firing the rifle the same man that you had seen earlier in the window, you said at least a couple of times, first stepping up and then stepping back?

Mr. Brennan
: Yes, sir.
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Despite the inconsistencies in Brennan’s testimony, proponents of the lone-assassin theory embrace his testimony. Bugliosi goes so far as to assert in his “Summary of Oswald’s Guilt,” that what proves the reliability of Brennan’s identification of Oswald as the shooter is that “the description of the man in the window that he gave to the authorities right after the shooting—a slender, white male about thirty years old, five feet ten inches—matches Oswald fairly closely, and had to have been the basis for the description of the man sent out over police radio just fifteen minutes after the shooting.”
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Certainly Bugliosi does not expect the reader to assume that Oswald was the only slender white male matching that description in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Nor do the Warren Commission or Bugliosi provide any proof that Brennan’s description was the basis for the police radio suspect description.
Who wrote the police radio suspect description? Where did that person or persons get their information? Neither the Warren Commission nor Bugliosi provide any testimony or evidence that would resolve the question with certainty. Similarly, Warren Commission apologist Posner excuses Brennan’s failure to positively identify Oswald as being justified by his fear, noting the FBI had already given him a twenty-four-hour guard that continued for three weeks after the assassination.
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But if Oswald was the lone gunman and was already in custody, who was Brennan afraid would harm him or his family? Certainly, Posner’s insistence that Oswald acted alone would not allow him to posit the idea of an accomplice who might seek to silence witnesses.

Historian Gerald McKnight has a different explanation. McKnight described Brennan as a “self-promoting bystander” driven by a need to be associated with some great tragedy, who pretends knowledge after the fact of events over which they truly have no information.
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Reading the Warren Commission testimony closely, there does not seem to be support for McKnight’s supposition. In his testimony to the Warren Commission in Dallas on April 8, 1964, Inspector Sawyer makes no mention of Brennan as his source for the description of the suspect believed to have fired shots from the Texas School Book Depository. Sawyer describes how he entered the Book Depository shortly after the shooting:

Mr. Belin
: Where did you park your car?

Mr. Sawyer
: In front of the Texas School Book Depository.

Mr. Belin
: In front of the main entrance there?

Mr. Sawyer
: In front of the main entrance.

Mr. Belin
: What did you do then?

Mr. Sawyer
. Immediately went into—well, talked to some of the officers around there who told me the story that they had thought some shots had come from one of the floors in the building, and I think the fifth floor was mentioned, but nobody seemed to know who the shots were directed at or what had actually happened, except there had been a shooting here at the time the President’s motorcade had gone by.
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