Who Really Killed Kennedy?: 50 Years Later: Stunning New Revelations About the JFK Assassination (2 page)

But on the
Life
blowups, I saw for the first time enough evidence to prove that Connally had not been hit until at least thirteen frames (or three-quarters of a second) later—too late for it to have been the same bullet, too soon for it to have been a second bullet from the same rifle.

—Josiah Thompson,
Six Seconds in Dallas
, 1967
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A
WEEK AFTER THE ASSASSINATION
, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover told President Lyndon Johnson in a phone call that three shots were fired, with two hitting JFK and a separate shot hitting Governor John Connally. In accounting for three shots, Hoover did not imagine one shot had missed. More important, Hoover rushed to identify incorrectly the bullet the Warren Commission later was to designate as the single bullet that hit both JFK and Connally. Hoover told LBJ, “one complete bullet rolled out of the President’s head,” after it destroyed much of JFK’s head on impact. “In trying to massage his heart,”
Hoover continued, “on the way to the hospital, they loosened the bullet, which fell on the stretcher and we have that.”
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This Hoover fabricated. But somehow, from the very beginning of the investigation into the assassination, finding a nearly pristine bullet was important in the process of framing Lee Harvey Oswald as the assassin.

Only days after the assassination,
Life Magazine
writer Paul Mandel published an article in the December 6, 1963 issue, in which he asked questions that ultimately led to the conclusion of a conspiracy. Even though the purpose of Mandel’s article was to argue that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone shooter, firing three shots with a mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle in an interval of 6.8 seconds from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, Mandel raises doubts in his examination of the evidence. Perhaps most important, Mandel makes people aware that JFK’s neck wound was an entry wound. “The description of the President’s two wounds by a Dallas doctor who tried to save him have added to the rumors,” Mandel wrote. “The doctor said one bullet passed from back to front on the right side of the President’s head. But the other, the doctor reported, entered the President’s throat from the front and then lodged in his body.”
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Mandel explained what he believed to be the evidence as follows: “Since by this time the limousine was 50 yards past Oswald and the President’s back was turned almost directly to the sniper, it has been hard to understand how the bullet could enter the front of his throat. Hence the recurring guess that there was a second sniper somewhere else. But the 8 mm [Zapruder film] shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed – toward the sniper’s nest – just before he clutches it.”
Life
had purchased the exclusive rights to the Zapruder film and did not make it available to the public, so Mandel’s claim had to be taken at face value.

In a special memorial issue that
Life
published in the days after the assassination, the editors chose to show some stills from the film. In the first photograph published JFK is waving to the right just before the shooting began, but his torso is not turned back behind the limo.
¹⁰
In Zapruder frame 183, as published in the magazine, JFK’s head can be seen turning to the left, as he waves to the left, but his neck continues to face forward, as his back remains full into the seat behind him. Mandel knew the medical evidence at Parkland Hospital conflicted with the theory that
all the bullets were fired from the Texas School Book Depository behind the limo as the JFK motorcade headed west on Elm Street.

Mandel also assumed that only three bullets were fired and that a separate bullet hit JFK and Connally. Mandel wrote: “Three shots were fired. Two struck the president, one Governor Connally. All three bullets have been recovered – one deformed, from the floor of the limousine; one from the stretcher that carried the President; one that entered the President’s body. All were fired from the 6.5mm Carcano carbine which Lee Oswald bought by mail last March.”
¹¹
The truth is that no bullet was found in the limousine and no bullet was recovered from the president’s body. The bullet that was found at Parkland Hospital, marked Warren Commission Exhibit 399, was found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, but there is no evidence President Kennedy’s body was ever placed on that stretcher. Mandel assumed the first bullet struck JFK, the second bullet struck Connally, and the third bullet was the fatal headshot that mortally wounded JFK at Zapruder frame 313.

What was clear from the Mandel article was that in the first days after the JFK assassination, information was being fed to credible journalists like Mandel at
Life
to refute the physical evidence observed by the physicians who treated JFK immediately after the shooting at Parkland Hospital.

The FBI’s official theory remained that three bullets had been fired, with two hitting Kennedy and one hitting Connally, at least until government investigators realized a witness to the assassination, James Tague, had been hit in the cheek by a ricochet from a missed shot. On July 23, 1964, Warren Commission counsel Wesley J. Liebeler took Tague’s testimony in Dallas. As the motorcade passed through Dealey Plaza, Tague was standing on the far side of the triple underpass by the bridge abatement. When he realized what he first heard as firecrackers were actually gunshots, he ducked behind the bridge abatement. Tague testified as follows:

Mr. Tague
: … We walked back down there, and another man joined us who identified himself as the deputy sheriff, who was in civilian clothes, and I guess this was three or four minutes after. I don’t know how to gauge time on something like that.

And I says, “Well, you know now, I recall something sting me on the face while I was standing down there.”

And he looked up and he said, “Yes; you have blood there on your cheek.”

And I reached up and there was a couple of drops of blood. And he said, “Where were you standing?”

And I says, “Right down here.” We walked fifteen feet away when this deputy sheriff said, “Look here on the curb.” There was a mark, quite obviously was a bullet, and it was very fresh.
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The same day, Liebeler took the testimony of Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Eddy Raymond Walthers who confirmed Tague’s story. Although Walthers could not remember Tague’s name, he remembered a man who claimed he had been struck by something on the face during the shooting in Dealey Plaza. “… I started to search in that immediate area and found a place on the curb there in the Main Street lane there close to the underpass where a projectile had struck that curb,” Walthers told the Warren Commission.
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Tague’s confirmed testimony created a problem for the Warren Commission, especially after photographic evidence emerged showing exactly where Tague stood to watch the motorcade, along with a second photo that showed the cut on his cheek after the shooting. Tague was not sure which shot resulted in the ricochet that hit him, but he believed it was the second or third shot, not the first.

Tague’s testimony forced the Warren Commission to recalculate. If shots one and three hit JFK and shot two hit Connally, which shot hit Tague? Only three spent cartridges had been found on the floor of the sniper’s nest in the Texas School Book Depository. The Zapruder film set a narrow time frame in which the shooting could have happened, somewhere between 4.8 seconds and 7 seconds, according to the final report.
¹⁴
Even a top expert using a bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle would be limited to three shots in that time range, especially with the need to zero in the target with the scope anew for each shot.

The Warren Commission’s final report conceded that one shot missed, although the report equivocated over whether the missed shot was the first
or the second. In acknowledging a stray shot had hit Tague, the Commission implied that a single bullet had to have been responsible for hitting both JFK and Connally. The alternative was to argue a bullet fragment had hit Tague, most likely from the third shot that hit JFK’s head. But the markings the bullet left on the pavement prior to ricocheting to hit Tague made it unlikely that Tague was hit by a bullet fragment. The only room for doubt the Warren Commission’s conclusion left was whether the first shot had missed, or the second. But either way, the Warren Commission was stuck attributing all the damage done to JFK and to Connally to two bullets.

The pristine bullet J. Edgar Hoover had discussed with LBJ in the immediate aftermath of the assassination came in handy. Warren Commission junior counsel Arlen Specter cleverly decided he would craft the pristine bullet into the single bullet that hit both JFK and Connally. So if a first shot missed, Specter reasoned that was the shot that ricocheted to hit Tague, with the second shot hitting both JFK and Connally, and the third shot being the head shot that killed JFK at Zapruder frame 313. Or, alternatively, the first shot may have hit both JFK and Connally, with the second shot ricocheting to hit Tague, and the third shot being the head shot that killed JFK at Zapruder frame 313. Either way, the pristine bullet Hoover discussed became the “single bullet” of the Specter theory. Doubters quickly characterized Specter’s single bullet as the “magic bullet” that injured two adult men only to emerge from Connally’s body in pristine condition—a theory that quickly raised eyebrows from those experienced with firearms.

Key to the Warren Commission’s conclusion that a lone shooter was responsible for killing JFK is what has become known as the “magic bullet,” a pristine bullet identified as Commission Exhibit 399, or CE399 for short. The bullet found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital in the first hour after JFK was admitted for treatment is important because ballistics linked it to having been fired from Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. The bullet is controversial in that the precise stretcher on which the bullet was found is not certain, and because the Parkland Hospital employees
who found the bullet were unable to identify with certainty that it was the CE399 bullet. As a footnote, without explanation the Warren Commission dropped Hoover’s suggestion the pristine bullet had fallen on a stretcher as a result of massaging JFK’s heart on the way to the hospital. For one, Jackie Kennedy and a brain-dead JFK remained in the back seat of the limo on the way to the hospital; no one massaged JFK’s heart. And second, Specter had to dismiss the idea the pristine bullet dropped from JFK’s body because if the pristine bullet remained in JFK’s body, then it couldn’t have been the single bullet that hit both JFK and Connally.

Professor Richard H. Popkin, writing in the
New York Review of Books
on July 28, 1966, summarized succinctly the problem with CE399, when he wrote:

The [Warren] Commission never seems to have considered the possibility the bullet was planted. Yet in view of evidence concerning No. 399 it is an entirely reasonable hypothesis that the bullet had never been in a human body, and could have been placed on one of the stretchers. If this possibility had been considered, then the Commission might have realized that some of the evidence might be “fake” and could have been deliberately faked. Bullet No. 399 plays a most important role in the case, since it firmly links Oswald’s rifle with the assassination. At the time when the planting could have been done, it was not known if any other ballistics evidence survived the shooting. But certainly, the pristine bullet, definitely traceable to Oswald’s Carcano, would have started a chase for and pursuit of Oswald if nothing else had, and would have made him the prime suspect.
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The story of CE399 begins at about 1:00 p.m. on November 22, 1963, when Darrell C. Tomlinson, a senior engineer at Parkland Hospital then in charge of the hospital power plant pushed a stretcher off a hospital elevator onto the hospital ground floor, placing the stretcher against the wall about two feet away from another stretcher already in the ground floor hall. In the process of arranging the stretchers to allow someone to use a restroom along the wall, Tomlinson bumped the wall with the stretcher he took off the elevator. This caused a bullet on the stretcher already in the hall to roll out. Tomlinson assumed the bullet had been lodged under the edge of a mat on top of the stretcher. In the testimony he gave to the Warren Commission at Parkland Hospital on March 20, 1964,
Tomlinson noted there were two bloody sheets rolled up on the stretcher from which the bullet rolled out, along with a few surgical instruments and a sterile pack or two.
¹⁶

Through two pages of questioning, committee junior counsel Arlen Specter expressed frustration that Tomlinson’s story had apparently changed from an earlier account in which Tomlinson supposedly told the Secret Service the bullet was found on the stretcher he rolled off the elevator, not the stretcher that was already in the hall. Repeatedly, Tomlinson made clear he could not remember precisely. The following exchange is typical of how Specter pressed Tomlinson to change his story:

Mr. Specter
: What did you tell the Secret Service man about which stretcher you took off the elevator?

Mr. Tomlinson
: I told him that I was not sure, and I am not—I’m not sure of it, but as I said, I would be going against the oath which I took a while ago, because I am definitely not sure.

Mr. Specter
: Do you remember if you told the Secret Service man which stretcher you thought you took off the elevator?

Mr. Tomlinson
: Well, we talked about taking a stretcher off the elevator, but when it comes down on an oath, I wouldn’t say for sure, I really don’t remember.
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Finally, in exasperation, Tomlinson told Specter, “Yes, I’m going to tell you all I can, and I’m not going to tell you something I can’t lay down and sleep at night with either.”
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In the very next exchange, Tomlinson explained to Specter that he had no idea where the stretcher in the elevator came from, or who put it there. This is important. The stretcher was on the elevator when Tomlinson got on the elevator. Despite repeated attempts, Specter was unable to establish that the bullet was found on the stretcher Tomlinson rode with in the elevator, or that Tomlinson had any idea where the bullet may have come from. To Specter’s obvious frustration, Tomlinson testified the bullet came from the stretcher already in the hall on the ground floor, a stretcher Tomlinson knew even less about than the stretcher he found in the elevator when he entered.