Reclaiming History (109 page)
Read Reclaiming History Online
Authors: Vincent Bugliosi
What is Humes’s take on all of the conspiracy theories, some of which, like Horne’s, involve him? He called them “general idiocy” and “a tragedy” themselves. “It almost defies belief,” he said. “But I guess it is the price we pay for living in a free country. I can only question the motives of those who propound these ridiculous theories for a price and who have turned the president’s death into a profit-making industry.”
354
Governor Connally’s Wounds
Of course, President Kennedy wasn’t the only one shot during the motorcade. Texas Governor John B. Connally was also wounded, although the nature of his wounds is far less controversial than that of the president’s. According to both the Warren Commission and the HSCA, the governor suffered five wounds caused by a single bullet that struck the upper right area of his back, exited the right side of the chest (just below the right nipple), reentered the back of his right wrist, exited the opposite side, and finally came to rest after causing a superficial entrance wound in the left thigh.
355
Three surgeons attended the governor: Dr. Robert R. Shaw (chest), Dr. Charles F. Gregory (wrist), and Dr. Tom Shires (thigh).
Dr. Shaw’s postoperative report describes the “wound of entrance” in the governor’s upper right back as being “just lateral to the right scapula [shoulder blade] close [to] the axilla [armpit].”
356
The HSCA medical panel described the location of the entrance wound more precisely as 20 centimeters (7
9
/
10
inches) right of the midline and 18 centimeters (7
1
/
10
inches) below the top of the first thoracic vertebra.
357
In other words, just below and to the left of the right armpit. Shaw wrote that the entrance wound was “approximately 3 centimeters [1
1
/
5
inches] in its longest diameter.”
358
This was later corrected by Dr. Shaw to 1.5 centimeters (
3
/
5
inch) in its longest diameter during testimony before the Warren Commission and again during an interview for the HSCA.
359
(Shaw explained to the HSCA that when the edges of the wound were later surgically cut away, this effectively enlarged the entrance wound to about 3 centimeters.)
During the HSCA interview, Dr. Shaw prepared a drawing of the entrance wound in which the longest dimension is in the
vertical
plane.
360
However, on September 6, 1978, Dr. Michael Baden conducted a physical examination of Governor Connally’s wounds in the governor’s room at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and found that the scar from the entrance wound was actually longest in the
horizontal
plane.
361
This fact coincides with the hole in the back of Connally’s suit coat, which also was found to be longest in the horizontal plane.
362
The egg shape, as opposed to a circular shape, of the wound indicates it had hit an intervening object (almost assuredly President Kennedy’s body) before it hit Connally, causing it to “tumble.” (See discussion in endnote and in text of the Zapruder film section.)
Because of the back wound’s small size and relatively clean-cut edges, Dr. Shaw, who had a considerable amount of experience evaluating gunshot wounds (having attended to over nine hundred gunshot cases as head of the Thoracic Center in Paris, France, during World War II), concluded that it was an entry wound.
363
After entering the governor’s back, the bullet passed downward through the chest, where it tangentially struck the midpoint of the fifth rib, shattering approximately 10 centimeters (4 inches) of the rib before exiting. The exiting bullet (and accompanying rib fragments) blew a 5-centimeter (2-inch) ragged hole in the governor’s chest at a point 7.5 centimeters (3 inches) to the right of the midline and 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) below the right nipple.
364
Dr. Shaw described it as a sucking wound, meaning that air was allowed to pass freely between the chest cavity and the outside of the body.
365
During Governor Connally’s appearance before the Warren Commission, Dr. Robert Shaw measured the angle of declination between the entrance and exit wounds in the governor’s chest and concluded that the bullet that struck the governor proceeded on a downward angle of 25 degrees.
366
In a 1964 analysis based on an examination of the bullet holes in the governor’s suit coat, the FBI reported that the bullet “passed through Governor Connally at an angle of approximately 35 degrees downward from the horizontal and approximately 20 degrees from right to left if he were sitting erect and facing forward [neither of which he was doing] at the time he was shot.”
367
The right-to-left trajectory is consistent, as we saw earlier, with the right-to-left path the bullet took through Kennedy’s body.
Considering the nature and location of the entrance and exit wounds, the bullet that struck the governor’s chest, then, was fired from above and behind and was moving slightly right to left, consistent with Oswald’s firing position on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, located to the right rear of the presidential limousine.
The second entrance wound the governor suffered was caused by the bullet exiting just below the governor’s right nipple and going on to enter his right wrist. Dr. Charles Gregory, who attended to the governor’s wrist wound, wrote in his postoperative report that the wound was located “on the dorsal aspect [i.e., the back] of the right wrist over the junction of the right distal fourth of the radius and shaft,” and testified that the wound was “approximately 5 centimeters [2 inches] above the wrist joint.”
368
The wound was approximately 0.5 centimeter wide (
1
/
5
inch) and 2 centimeters (
4
/
5
inch) in length, rather oblique (i.e., the bullet had entered at an angle), with a loss of tissue and considerable bruising at the margins.
369
X-rays showed that as the bullet passed through the right wrist it caused a comminuted (i.e., shattering) fracture of the radius (one of two bones connecting the hand to the arm) into seven or eight pieces. Near this radial fracture were found a number of bits of metal.
370
Several were removed during surgery; however, no effort was made to recover all of the tiny fragments seen in the X-rays. The few fragments recovered from the governor’s wrist were found by chance as the wound was cleaned.
371
All of the evidence surrounding the governor’s wrist wound indicates that a bullet, tumbling and distorted from having struck a previous object, impacted the back of the right wrist, shattered the right radius (depositing small fragments of metal), and exited on the palm side of the wrist close to an inch above the wrist joint.
372
The governor’s third entrance wound occurred when the bullet that exited the right wrist went on to hit his left thigh, causing a superficial injury. Dr. Tom Shires, who examined the wound, testified that there was a puncture or entrance wound 1 centimeter (
2
/
5
inch) in diameter over the junction of the middle and lower third of the left thigh. X-rays of the wound revealed only a small fleck of metal lying about
1
/
2
inch beneath the surface of the skin.
373
The doctors thought the bullet might have ended up somewhere else in the left leg and so additional X-rays were taken, but no bullet was seen. The doctors knew that a fragment so small could not have produced the nearly ½-inch-diameter puncture wound in the thigh, and were perplexed that they could not find a bullet of sufficient size to account for the three wounds in the governor’s body.
374
Of course, we know that a bullet (Commission Exhibit No. 399)
was
found that afternoon by a hospital maintenance worker on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital believed to have been occupied by Governor Connally.
Dr. Gregory opined that the stretcher bullet could very well have struck the thigh in reverse fashion (i.e., base end first), shed a small fragment immediately beneath the skin, then, because it hadn’t penetrated the thigh deep enough, worked its way out of the wound.
375
The reduced velocity of the bullet after having passed through Kennedy’s and Connally’s bodies would be the main factor causing it to penetrate the governor’s left thigh only slightly. Although the muzzle velocity of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle is 2,296 feet per second,
376
the FBI estimated that the speed of the bullet at the time it struck Kennedy in the back was around 1,900 feet per second.
377
It is believed to have lost speed of about 100 feet per second in passing through the soft tissue of Kennedy’s body and over 400 feet per second after having struck Connally’s rib and radius.
378
The HSCA estimated that the speed of the bullet when it exited Connally’s wrist and struck his left thigh would probably have been reduced down to around 1,100 to 1,300 feet per second.
379
Dr. Shires told the Warren Commission that during the operation on Governor Connally, all three attending surgeons, as well as their assistants (Drs. McClelland, Baxter, Patman, Osborne, Parker, Boland, and Duke), thought that
one
bullet had caused all of the governor’s wounds.
380
The majority of the nine-member HSCA medical panel (Dr. Cyril Wecht was the only dissent) agreed.
381
A
lthough the medical findings
alone
do not provide enough evidence to state with absolute certainty that the bullet that passed through the president’s body went on to hit the governor, the majority of the HSCA forensic panel members (with the exception of Dr. Cyril Wecht) felt that the medical evidence was “consistent with this hypothesis” (i.e., the single-bullet theory) and “much less consistent with other hypotheses.”
382
In fact, as you’ll see later in this book, when other nonmedical evidence is considered, there can be
no reasonable doubt
that both men were struck with the same, single bullet.
No other issue in the Kennedy assassination has given birth to more literature and argument among Warren Commission critics, supporters, and students of the assassination than the timing and number of bullets that were fired in Dealey Plaza, the resolution of which involves no less than whether or not there was a conspiracy in the death of the president. The principal source and starting place for their inquiry is always the Zapruder film, the twenty-six-and-a-half-second, 8-millimeter color film of 486 frames shot by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder, for certain the most famous and examined film footage in history.
It is also, in the estimation of the
New York Times
, “the most valuable piece of film in the world,”
1
the U.S. government paying Zapruder’s heirs $16 million in 1999 for the original footage. After Time-Life purchased the film from Zapruder for $150,000 in 1963 for its magazine,
Life
, payable in six installments of $25,000 per year (the first $25,000 of which Zapruder contributed to the family of slain police officer J. D. Tippit),
2
Time-Life returned the film and copyright back to the Zapruder family for one dollar in 1975. On April 24, 1997, the Assassination Records Review Board, on a 5-to-0 vote, declared that the Zapruder film was “an assassination record,” and hence, the historic film became the property of the federal government, the board’s ruling being effective as of August 1,1998.
3
However, the U.S. Constitution (the Fifth Amendment in 1791) requires the government to pay the owners of private property “taken for public use” a “just compensation,” and the question became what was the original film worth. The government originally offered $750,000 but hinted it might go as high as $3 million. The Zapruder family, led by Zapruder’s son, Henry, a Washington, D.C., tax attorney, countered that it believed the half minute of history captured on the film would auction for as high as $30 million, but asked for $18 million. A three-member arbitration panel, in a 2-to-1 vote, agreed to the sum of $16 million, plus $800,000 in interest.
4
Today, the film and two original copies sit in a refrigerated, fireproof safe at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, too fragile ever to be run through a projector again. A third original copy was donated by Zapruder’s heirs to the Sixth Floor Museum located inside the old Book Depository Building in Dallas.
5
*
Although entire books and millions of words have been written to analyze and interpret the Zapruder film, my personal view, for whatever it’s worth, is that while the film is very important to the assassination inquiry, it has been given more attention than it deserves, its examination to determine the timing and number of shots being more of an intellectual, academic exercise than providing conclusive evidentiary value. There are several reasons why I say this, among which is the fact that the Zapruder film is a silent one (if there were sound on the film, we’d
know
the number of shots and their timing), making interpretation of it subjective and speculative for the most part. Moreover, we don’t need the Zapruder film at all to tell us what happened. Indeed, less than .01 percent of all murders, if that, are captured on film, yet law enforcement has done quite well, thank you, without such films in proving beyond a reasonable doubt exactly what happened. And here, even without the Zapruder film, there were well over a hundred witnesses to the murder in Dealey Plaza—here again, a fact that sets the assassination apart from nearly all other murders. The overwhelming majority of premeditated murders don’t even have
one
eye or ear witness, yet law enforcement normally is successful in proving the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
It is because virtually all authors of books on the assassination have had no background in law enforcement that a remark like the following, from anti-conspiracy author Gerald Posner, could be made: “To think that if the Zapruder film did not exist we would
never
be able to prove with
any
certainty what happened in Dealey Plaza.”
6
So traditionally—and the Kennedy case is no exception—guilt (and the existence or nonexistence of a conspiracy) in a murder case is proved not by a film or eyewitnesses, but rather by other evidence. And in this case, the physical evidence isn’t just persuasive or even overwhelming, it’s
absolutely conclusive
that only three shots were fired, and that one of the two shots that hit Kennedy also went on to hit Connally. Hence, Connally was not hit by a separate bullet, which would have established a second gunman and a conspiracy.
Yet the Zapruder film remains the focal point for most conspiracy theorists who are drawn to this unique and grisly spectacle. Over the past forty years, the film, for many, has become the Holy Grail of the case for conspiracy. At first, the
apparent
backward snap of the president’s head at the moment of the head shot, and the
alleged
delayed reaction between Kennedy and Connally around the time the Warren Commission claimed they were hit by a single bullet, were touted as absolute proof of two assassins. Today, even though the overwhelming majority of evidence has shown that neither allegation is true, most conspiracy theorists, embracing the philosophy of “Don’t confuse me with the facts, I’ve already made up my mind,” still cling tenaciously to these arguments. However, some theorists, knowing that the evidence has obliterated their position, are now actually arguing that the film itself has been altered as part of a massive cover-up to hide the truth about the “conspiracy.” In this chapter, we’ll examine the facts and the myths surrounding the timing and number of shots, the single-bullet theory, the president’s head snap to the rear, the source of the gunfire, and allegations that the most famous home movie of all time has been altered to conceal the truth. We’ll also learn that the “magic” bullet was not magic and the “pristine” bullet (same bullet) was not pristine.
S
everal hundred Dealey Plaza photographs relating directly to the assassination were taken by approximately thirty-one photographers on November 22, 1963, making the assassination of President Kennedy, arguably, the most photographed murder in history.
Contrary to popular belief, Zapruder was not the only one to capture the assassination on film.
*
Three other amateur films (by Marie Muchmore, Orville Nix, and Charles Bronson) did, but they are not nearly as valuable as the Zapruder film. All three were taken on the opposite side of the street from where Zapruder saw the right side of the president’s head open up, and whereas Zapruder was only 75 or so feet away from the president at the time of the fatal head shot, Bronson was around 240 feet away, Nix around 215 feet, and Muchmore around 140 feet.
7
Moreover, the frame of the Bronson film that corresponds to the shot to the head is so unclear that nothing taking place can be identified, and the Muchmore frames corresponding to the head shot are partially obstructed by Dealey Plaza spectators. Only the Nix frames capture the fatal shot and snap of the head to the rear, though not with the clarity of the Zapruder film. Also, Nix did not shoot any film around the time of the first two shots.
Abraham Zapruder’s home movie is unique in that it shows the presidential limousine throughout the entire period of the shooting. It was, and remains, the only complete film of the assassination, Zapruder first picking up the limousine with his camera as it made the turn onto Elm Street from Houston Street and, except for a few frames when the limousine was behind the Stemmons Freeway sign, continuing to take a motion picture of the limousine until it disappeared from sight to his right.
Born in czarist Russia in 1905, Zapruder emigrated to the United States in 1920 and landed a job at a New York City dress factory. He and his wife moved to Dallas, Texas, in 1941, where they raised two children. In 1954, Zapruder and a partner went into business as “Jennifer Juniors, Inc., of Dallas,” which manufactured a line of young women’s and children’s clothing. By 1963, the company occupied the fourth and fifth floors of the Dal-Tex (Dallas Textiles) Building, located on the northeast corner of Elm and Houston across the street from the Texas School Book Depository.
8
On the morning of November 22, Zapruder left his Model 414PD Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series 8-millimeter movie camera at home, figuring that the drizzly overcast morning wouldn’t allow him to get good movies of the president’s scheduled motorcade trip past his office building. By late morning, however, sunshine began breaking through the thick cloud cover that shrouded Dallas. At the urging of his assistant, Lillian Rogers, Zapruder drove home and retrieved his amateur camera. He first thought of filming the motorcade from his office window, but decided to go down to the street for a better view. He found a good spot—a two-and-a-half-by-four-and-a-half-foot rectangular concrete pedestal about four feet high—on the north side of Elm Street in front of the decorative pergola. The perch would afford Zapruder, a tremendous fan of the president, a commanding view of the motorcade as it passed from his left to his right down Elm. Only the Stemmons Freeway sign, which stood between the concrete pedestal and Elm Street, would interrupt Zapruder’s view for a moment.
Wearing his customary fedora hat and bow tie, the fifty-eight-year-old Zapruder climbed atop the pedestal, then urged his office receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman, to stand behind him on the pedestal in case “he got dizzy.”
9
His camera loaded with a twenty-five-foot roll of 16-millimeter film (which in effect afforded him fifty feet of 8-millimeter silent film for his 8-millimeter camera), half of which had already been exposed, Zapruder checked to make sure it was fully wound, pushed the zoom lens to the maximum telephoto position, and set the camera to its “normal” run mode (approximately 18 frames per second).
10
The first scene Zapruder shot of the motorcade was a seven-second sequence of the three lead Dallas police motorcycles (traveling a half block ahead of the motorcade’s lead car) turning the corner from Houston onto Elm Street. Zapruder, unaware of the makeup of the motorcade, stopped filming as soon as he realized that the president wasn’t coming into view. A moment later, the presidential limousine, its flags fluttering in the breeze, appeared among the cheering crowd gathered at the southwest corner of Elm and Houston. Just after the limousine had turned onto Elm and straightened out, Zapruder started filming again at frame 133, the first frame of the Zapruder film that shows the presidential limousine. The next ten seconds captured the presidential party waving to the crowd and then, in a moment of horror, coming under gunfire. Zapruder told the Warren Commission eight months later, “I heard the first shot
*
and I saw the president lean over and grab himself like this (holding his left chest)…For a moment I thought it was, you know, like you say, ‘Oh, he got me,’…you’ve heard these expressions, and then I [said to myself]—I don’t believe the president is going to make jokes like this, but before I had a chance to organize my mind, I heard a second shot and then I saw his head open up and the blood and everything came out and I started—I can hardly talk about it.” Zapruder started crying. After taking a moment to compose himself, he continued, “Then I started yelling, ‘They killed him, they killed him,’…and I was still shooting the pictures until he got under the underpass—I don’t even know how I did it.”
11
In the hours after the shooting, Zapruder took the film to the Eastman Kodak Company in Dallas, where it was processed (developed), and later to the Jamieson Film Company, where three color copies were made. Zapruder turned two of the first-generation copies over to the Secret Service that night and sold the third copy and the original film to
Life
magazine the following morning (November 23).
12
One of the Secret Service copies was subsequently loaned to the FBI, which made a second-generation copy and sent it to the FBI laboratory for analysis. There, FBI special agent Lyndal Shaneyfelt, the FBI’s photographic expert, assigned numbers to each of the frames, beginning with the first frame that showed the Dallas police motorcycles turning the corner from Houston onto Elm.
13
It has become customary to refer to each frame of the Zapruder film by Shaneyfelt’s number, preceded by the letter
Z
for
Zapruder
, for example, Z186.
T
he Warren Commission’s study of the film began in earnest on January 27, 1964. During seven, day-long examination sessions (not consecutive), Commission representatives (always in the company of Secret Service representatives) viewed a second-generation copy of the film at regular, slow-motion, and freeze-frame modes in an attempt to sort out exactly what happened. By day two, Special Agent Shaneyfelt suggested that the Commission try to get access to the original film, which no doubt would be clearer. On February 25, the assistant chief of
Life
’s photographic lab, Herbert Orth, brought the original film to Washington and projected it a number of times for the Commission (as well as representatives from the FBI and Secret Service). Shaneyfelt was right. The original film contained far more detail and clarity than the Commission’s second-generation working copy.
14
Reluctant to loan out the original film because of the possibility of damage,
Life
, which jealously guarded the original film, publishing only selected frames in its November 29 and December 6, 1963, editions, agreed to make available to the Commission a set of 35-millimeter color slides, taken directly from the original film, of all pertinent frames of the assassination, determined by Shaneyfelt to be Z171–334.
15
It wasn’t long before the Commission’s examination of the Zapruder film turned up a serious problem. FBI tests had determined that Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano could not be fired twice in less than 2.3 seconds
16
(a figure that would later be revised). The FBI had also determined that Zapruder’s Bell & Howell camera had been operating at an average speed of 18.3 frames per second on the day of the assassination.
17
The Commission noted that the Zapruder film showed the president waving to the crowd until he disappears from Zapruder’s view behind the Stemmons Freeway sign at Z205. When he emerges a little over a second later, at Z225–226, he seems to be reacting to a shot. Yet an undiscerning view of the Zapruder film shows Governor Connally apparently reacting to a shot between Z235 and Z240.
18
As Raymond Marcus puts it in his 1966 book,
The Bastard Bullet
, “Even assuming that the shot to which JFK is reacting in 226 had struck him as early as 210 (the first frame in which he would have been clearly visible from the sixth floor window after emerging from behind the oak tree), there still would not be time for a second shot from the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle [to hit Connally] until at least 42 frames(2.3 seconds) later, or 252.”
19
So at a minimum, 42 frames would have had to elapse between any first and second shot with Oswald’s Carcano. In other words, at this very early stage in the analysis of the Zapruder film, it appeared that unless there was a delayed reaction by Connally, Connally was hit too late to have been hit by the same shot that hit Kennedy, and clearly too soon for Oswald to have gotten off another shot with his bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Ergo, four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza, not three, and hence, there was a conspiracy. Indeed, upon seeing the Zapruder film for the first time, several assistant counsels thought there must have been two assassins. One, David Belin, even called his wife to say there was a second gunman.
20
