JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (92 page)

The Warren Commission decided Oswald had just barely enough time, after he supposedly shot the president and Governor Connally, to hide his rifle and go down four flights of stairs into the lunchroom. Yet, according to both Baker and Truly, Oswald was remarkably composed. In response to questions from the Warren Commission, Baker affirmed that Oswald “did not seem to be out of breath” and “did not show any evidence of any emotion.”
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Truly said Oswald “didn’t seem to be excited or overly afraid or anything,”
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after having just accomplished the crime of the century and a quick trip down the stairs.

How is one to explain the presumed assassin’s composure? Carolyn Arnold’s testimony would have helped. Her encounter with Oswald in the lunchroom, a few minutes before Baker and Truly confronted him in the same place, indicates they found him finishing what she saw him doing – not killing the president but eating lunch. That was not the explanation desired. Arnold was not asked to testify before the Warren Commission.

Fifteen years after the assassination, Carolyn Johnston, whose name had changed from Carolyn Arnold, was surprised to learn about the FBI report of her November 26, 1963, interview. The FBI had, as she put it, “misquoted” her statement about seeing Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom just before she went out to see the president.
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Instead the FBI report claimed that, after she left the Depository and “was standing in front of the building” to watch the motorcade, she “thought she caught a fleeting glimpse of Lee Harvey Oswald standing in the hallway” off the first floor.
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“This is completely foreign to me,” she told the
Dallas Morning News
. “It would have forced me to have been turning back around to the building when, in fact, I was trying to watch the parade. Why would I be looking back inside the building? That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
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As in Julia Ann Mercer’s experience, what Carolyn Arnold saw on November 22, 1963—Oswald eating lunch on the second floor, not preparing to shoot the president from the sixth—did not fit the government’s story. Carolyn Arnold was a witness to the unspeakable.

Warren Commission counsel David Belin wrote: “The Rosetta Stone [the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics] to the solution of President Kennedy’s murder is the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit.”
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From the Warren Commission’s standpoint, the killing of Tippit, who presumably challenged the assassin’s flight after he killed Kennedy, was said to prove “that Oswald had the capacity to kill.”
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Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg saw Tippit’s murder instead as the government’s way of poisoning the public mind against Lee Harvey Oswald: “Immediately the [flimsy] police case [against Oswald] required a willingness to believe. This was provided by affixing to Oswald the opprobrious epithet of ‘cop-killer.’”
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According to the
Warren
Report
, the tracking of Oswald from Dealey Plaza to Tippit’s murder began with eyewitness Howard Brennan, a forty-five-year-old steamfitter who was standing across the street from the Texas School Book Depository watching the presidential motorcade. Brennan told a police officer right after the assassination that he saw a man standing in a sixth-floor window of the Depository fire a rifle at the president’s car.
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The
Warren Report
says Brennan described the standing shooter as “white, slender, weighing about 165 pounds, about 5’10” tall, and in his early thirties,” a description matching Oswald that was radioed to Dallas Police cars at approximately 12:45 p.m.
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Yet, as Mark Lane pointed out, “There could not have been a man standing and firing from [the sixth-floor window] because, as photographs of the building taken within seconds of the assassination prove, the window was open only partially at the bottom, and one shooting from a standing position would have been obliged to fire through the glass.”
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Moreover, Brennan’s testimony that the man firing the rifle “was standing up and resting against the left windowsill”
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was also impossible because the windowsill was only a foot from the floor, with the window opened about fourteen inches.
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So if it was impossible for key witness Howard Brennan to have provided such a description accurately, and if the Warren Commission could cite only him as a source for the 12:45 p.m. police description, who put out that Oswald-like alert if not the conspirators?

Supposedly on the basis of nothing more than that radioed description, Officer Tippit stopped his car at 1:15 p.m. to confront a man walking on East 10th Street in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas. The man then shot Tippit to death. The murderer fled the scene on foot. Half an hour later, the man was reported sneaking into the Texas Theater, which the Dallas police then stormed, arresting a man who was soon identified as Lee Harvey Oswald.

As Weisberg pointed out, the killing of Tippit provided a dramatic reinforcement of Oswald’s assumed killing of Kennedy. At the same time, the killing of a fellow police officer helped motivate the Dallas police to kill an armed Oswald in the Texas Theater, which would have disposed of the scapegoat before he could protest his being framed.

Once again, however, the assassination script was imperfectly carried out. Oswald survived his arrest in the theater. And as in a flawed movie where scene variations are shot, doubles are used, and the director is in a hurry, the final version of this film for our viewing doesn’t add up. The Warren Commission’s attempt to squeeze it all into a lone-gunman explanation has resulted in an implausible narrative.

According to the
Warren Report
, between President Kennedy’s assassination at 12:30 p.m. and Officer Tippit’s murder at 1:15 p.m., Lee Harvey Oswald did the following:

After the lone assassin shot the president to death and wounded Governor Connally from a sixth-floor window in the Texas School Book Depository,
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he hid his rifle and stepped quickly down four flights of stairs to the lunchroom, where he was seen calmly preparing to buy a bottle of Coca Cola from a vending machine.
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He escaped from the building and walked seven blocks.
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He took a bus that was headed back toward the Texas School Book Depository, got stuck with the bus in a traffic jam, and got off it. He walked three to four blocks to hire a taxi.
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He offered to give up his taxi to an old lady when she asked his driver for help finding a cab (an offer she refused, allowing him to continue his escape without changing taxis).
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He rode 2.4 miles in the taxi, taking him five blocks too far past his rooming house.
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He paid his fare, got out, and walked five blocks back to his rooming house.
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“He went on to his room and stayed about 3 or 4 minutes,”
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picked up his jacket and a revolver, and departed.
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The housekeeper saw him standing in front of the house by the stop for a
north
bound bus.
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He apparently gave up on the bus and instead walked
south
another remarkably brisk nine-tenths mile.
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All of these actions, following his killing of the president, were, by the Commission’s timetable, accomplished in forty-five minutes.
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Oswald then, we are told, used his revolver to calmly murder Officer J. D. Tippit on a quiet street in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, “removing the empty cartridge cases from the gun as he went,”
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helpfully leaving a trail of ballistic evidence for the police to collect. He thereby aborted his escape and became a magnet for a massive police chase. The police arrested him in the Texas Theater at 1:50 p.m.
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This jam-packed scenario was created by more than one man bearing Oswald’s likeness, with help from behind the scenes. At 12:40 p.m., exactly the same time that Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig and Helen Forrest saw Oswald get into a Rambler station wagon in front of the Book Depository, Oswald’s former landlady, Mary Bledsoe, saw him board a bus seven blocks east of the Depository.
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Oswald told Captain Will Fritz he rode the bus, until its holdup in traffic made him switch to a taxi.
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A bus transfer found in his shirt pocket at his arrest seemed to confirm the short bus trip.
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Yet when Fritz told Oswald that Craig had seen him depart by car, Oswald said defensively, “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine. Don’t try to drag her into this.”
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When he added dejectedly, “Everybody will know who I am now,” Oswald seemed to imply that his (or a double’s) departure in the station wagon, and the vehicle’s association with Mrs. Paine, were keys to his real identity.

If he was not the man picked up by the station wagon, then Roger Craig and Helen Forrest had seen, in Forrest’s words, “his identical twin.”
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The man spirited away by the Nash Rambler had been either Oswald or a double; driven, Craig said, by “a husky looking Latin.”
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Besides the mysterious Nash Rambler that was in the end spotted by so many mutually supportive witnesses—Craig, Forrest, Pennington, Carr, Robinson, and Cooper—there may have been two more cars even more deeply in the shadows that helped Lee Harvey Oswald make his otherwise unlikely transitions that climactic afternoon in the assassination plot. Another car appeared out of nowhere when he arrived at his rooming house.

After Oswald went to his room at 1:00 p.m., the housekeeper, Mrs. Earlene Roberts, saw a police car stop directly in front of the house. She told the Warren Commission that two uniformed policemen were in the car. The driver sounded the horn, “just kind of a ‘tit-tit’—twice,”
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an unmistakable signal, then eased the car forward and went around the corner.
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After “about three or four minutes,”
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Oswald returned from his room and went outside. Before Mrs. Roberts turned her attention elsewhere, she saw him standing in front of the house by a northbound bus stop—to be heard from next in the
Warren Report
twelve minutes later as the apparent killer of Officer Tippit near the corner of Tenth and Patton, almost one mile away in the opposite direction. How he got there in time to kill Tippit, or even
if
he did, has never been clearly established.
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He may have been picked up by the Dallas police car that parked briefly in front of the house, beeped its horn twice lightly—tap, tap—in a signal, and drove around the corner (perhaps only to circle the block and return for him). Earlene Roberts told the Warren Commission that the number on the police car was 107.
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As the Commission’s staff would discover, the Dallas Police Department no longer had a car 107. It had sold its car 107 on April 17, 1963, to a used car dealer. The Dallas Police would not resume using the number 107 until February 1964, three months after the assassination.
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If Mrs. Roberts had the car’s number right, then the horn signal to Oswald came from two uniformed men in a counterfeit police car. Their likely destination, with Oswald as their passenger, was the Texas Theater, where they would drop off Oswald for a setup for his arrest and murder—while the Oswald impostor in the Nash Rambler was being let off for a short walk to meet Officer Tippit in a fatal encounter at Tenth and Patton.

The
Warren Report
describes the murder of Officer Tippit “at approximately 1:15 p.m.,” after he confronted a man walking east along the south side of Patton: “The man’s general description was similar to the one broadcast over the police radio. Tippit stopped the man and called him to his car. He approached the car and apparently exchanged words with Tippit through the right front or vent window. Tippit got out and started to walk around the front of the car. As Tippit reached the left front wheel the man pulled out a revolver and fired several shots. Four bullets hit Tippit and killed him instantly. The gunman started back toward Patton Avenue, ejecting the empty cartridge cases before reloading with fresh bullets.”
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As the gunman walked and trotted away from the murder scene while still holding the revolver, the
Warren Report
says he was seen by at least twelve persons: “By the evening of November 22, five of them had identified Lee Harvey Oswald in police lineups as the man they saw. A sixth did so the next day. Three others subsequently identified Oswald from a photograph. Two witnesses testified that Oswald resembled the man they had seen. One witness felt he was too distant from the gunman to make a positive identification.”
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