Reclaiming History (116 page)

Governor Connally’s conclusion that the president was hit by the first shot is based solely, it seems, on the recollection of his wife, Nellie. “Nellie was there, and she saw it,” he said in 1967 on CBS television. “She believes the first bullet hit him [the president] because she saw him after he was hit.”
¹⁴⁰
But the governor’s wife was understandably equally confused. In her Warren Commission testimony, she testified that immediately after hearing the first shot, she “looked back and saw the president as he had both hands at his neck.” We know from the Zapruder film, of course, that Kennedy showed no visible reaction to the first shot around Z160, so we know Mrs. Connally was wrong. She also said that after the
first
shot, she recalls her husband exclaiming, “Oh, no, no, no.” But he testified, “When I was hit” (which he said was by the
second
shot) is when “I said ‘Oh, no, no, no.’”
¹⁴¹
All of this is perfectly understandable confusion.

In the governor’s September 6, 1978, testimony before the HSCA, he retreated from his categorical position: “Now, there’s a great deal of speculation that the president and I were hit with the same bullet.
That might well be
, but it surely wasn’t the first bullet, and Nellie doesn’t think it’s the second bullet. I don’t know. I didn’t hear the second bullet. I felt the second bullet.”
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In one of his last pronouncements on whether he thought he was hit by the same bullet that hit Kennedy, Governor Connally, who died at age seventy-six on June 15, 1993, departed from his ambivalence before the HSCA and went back to his earlier position. In a January 29, 1992, letter to Dr. Michael West, a proponent of the single-bullet theory, Connally wrote that “I disagree with the thesis that President Kennedy and I were both hit by the single bullet.”
Case Closed
author Gerald Posner says that just a few months later “during a telephone conversation in May of 1992” with the governor, Connally again suggested that the Warren Commission was right, saying, “The second bullet could have hit both of us.”
¹⁴³

The only thing that rings true to me about the governor’s reflections on what was happening around the time he was hit is not when he tries to be precise, but when he said things like this in his 1978 testimony before the HSCA: “
When
I was hit, or
shortly before
I was hit—no, I guess it was
after
I was hit…”
¹⁴⁴
All of his hesitation and confusion is more in keeping with what I would expect from a witness who had sustained the kind of injuries Connally did. Before Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter took the testimony of Connally and his wife in front of the Commission, he had them witness the Zapruder film. Even looking at the film, Specter said, “Connally and his wife argued over whether the Governor had fallen into his wife’s lap or she had pulled him into her lap. Connally insisted he had fallen. Mrs. Connally insisted she had pulled him. ‘No, Nellie,’ ‘No, John,’ they shot back and forth several times.” Eventually, Nellie prevailed.
¹⁴⁵

As previously indicated, the Warren Commission concluded that the first time they could see a reaction by Kennedy to a severe external stimulus was when he emerged from behind the Stemmons Freeway sign at frame 225. But they didn’t see a reaction from Connally until around frame 235. The HSCA, on the other hand, saw a reaction by Connally at around frames 222 to 226;
¹⁴⁶
the following frame, 225, being the time the Warren Commission saw Kennedy reacting.

My sense of when the second bullet was fired is this. Kennedy’s arm completely disappears behind the Stemmons Freeway sign at frame 207 of the Zapruder film.
¹⁴⁷
The president, per FBI photographic expert Lyndal Shaneyfelt, was still seen waving to the crowd at frame 205, and he testified that he saw “nothing in the frames” around this point to “arouse my suspicion about his movements” that he had been shot.
¹⁴⁸
We also know that frame 210 was the first frame at which the assassin in the sniper’s nest window had a completely clear shot at Kennedy,
¹⁴⁹
although as early as frame 207, the assassin would have had a clear enough shot.
¹⁵⁰
Since all the evidence confirms the single-bullet theory, and since Connally, when seen emerging from behind the Stemmons Freeway sign at frame 222, and Kennedy at frame 225, are already showing signs of reacting to a severe external stumulus,
¹⁵¹
we can reasonably assume that the second shot was fired somewhere between frames 207 and 222 of the Zapruder film.

A
s we have seen, good minds have differed and will continue to differ on when Kennedy and Connally were hit by a bullet, what precise frame of the Zapruder film Kennedy and Connally
first
reacted to being hit by a bullet, what the nature of their reactions was, what position Kennedy and Connally were in relation to each other at the time each was first hit, what movements they made that resulted from their being hit, and what overall interpretation should be put on the totality of the observations. A year before he died, Governor Connally wrote, in a letter to Dr. Michael West, that “this dispute [about the single-bullet theory] will go far beyond our time on earth to engage in it.” I would only add this elliptical clause to the governor’s words: that is, as long as we try to resolve the dispute by referring primarily to the Zapruder film. For fertile minds and susceptible eyes, the Zapruder film can be, as Winston Churchill once said about the Soviet Union, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” But the overwhelming evidence is that whenever Kennedy and Connally were hit, or first reacted to being hit, they were both struck by the same bullet.

The Third Shot

Of the three shots fired that day in Dallas, there is no doubt as to when the third (and according to nearly all of the witnesses, the last) shot was fired. The Zapruder film graphically shows the results of the impact of that shot on the president’s head at frame 313,
*
when the president was exactly 265.3 feet from the sniper’s nest window.
¹⁵²
Here, the controversy is centered on what happens next—in just four-tenths of a second (Z314–321) the president’s head snaps violently to the rear. Perhaps the majority of Americans have seen this portion of the Zapruder film at least once on television. The conspiracy theorists have argued, and millions of Americans have agreed, that this head snap conclusively proves that the president was shot in the head from the front. Indeed, it would be safe to say that the single thing that has convinced people more than anything else that the fatal head shot to the president came from the front, not the rear where Oswald was, is the head snap to the rear. “No layman can watch these frames,” author Henry Hurt wrote, “and avoid the clear impression that the shot came from the right front of the President, the grassy knoll area.”
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Mark Lane declared, “So long as the Commission maintained the bullet came almost directly from the rear, it implied that the law of physics vacated in this instance, for the President did not fall forward.”
¹⁵⁴
New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison said, “You don’t have to be a genius. It takes no arguments, no words. When you look at the Zapruder film you see that the president of the United States was shot from the front, and there’s no question about it. He’s so clearly hit from the front the force almost catapults him out of the back of the car. Any American seeing the film would know at a glance that the entire Warren Commission conclusion was a complete hoax, was absolutely false, and every man on the Warren Commission had to know it was a lie.”
¹⁵⁵

This impression was not just limited to those who would end up being hard-core conspiracy theorists, but was widespread. When Robert Healey, the executive editor of the
Boston Globe
, saw the Zapruder film in his office during a presentation to him and his staff on April 23, 1975, by members of the Assassination Information Bureau, a conspiracy-oriented group, he wrote the following editorial just two days later: “Oswald could not have fired all the shots that killed President Kennedy…The visual presentation is far more convincing than all the books and all the magazine articles that have ever been advanced…No words can make the case better than the Zapruder film. It is as simple as that.”
¹⁵⁶

In the London trial, there was little doubt in my mind that if I didn’t satisfactorily explain away the problem of the head snap to the rear for the jury, their verdict would most likely be not guilty. And I knew I couldn’t use the sudden acceleration of the presidential limousine to explain the backward lurch since the Zapruder film shows that the acceleration was several frames after the president’s head had lurched backward.
¹⁵⁷

Perhaps the biggest shock I had in my investigation of the facts and evidence in preparation for the London trial was how this most overshadowing point was completely disregarded by the Warren Commission. In the Commission’s report and accompanying twenty-six volumes, I could not find one single word of reference to the president’s head snap to the rear. Warren Commission assistant counsel Wesley J. Liebeler, on the
Louis Lomax
television program in Los Angeles in 1966, acknowledged that the Commission did not focus in on the president’s head movements. “It is only since the critics have raised this point that anybody has ever looked at it closely,” Liebeler said.
¹⁵⁸

Upon reflection, I realized that the Warren Commission probably believed it never had to concern itself with the head snap because it had conclusive medical evidence that the president was struck by two and only two bullets, both of which entered the president’s body from the
rear
.
¹⁵⁹
Therefore, whatever caused the head snap to the rear was irrelevant to its inquiry since it could not have been a bullet from the front. While the Warren Commission was correct in this regard, its conclusion did not suffice for my purposes at the London trial. It was one thing for my medical expert to testify that an examination of the autopsy photographs and X-rays of the wound to the right rear of the president’s head revealed that it was an entrance, not an exit wound, and hence, the bullet that caused the wound had to have been fired from the president’s rear. But Kennedy’s head dramatically being thrust to the rear would, I feared, be more powerful evidence of a shot from the front in the eyes of twelve lay jurors, probably enough, indeed, to raise a reasonable doubt of Oswald’s guilt, which would result in a not-guilty verdict. The old saw that a picture (here, a motion picture, no less) is worth a thousand words was never more applicable.

Fortunately, the HSCA did address itself to the issue, though extremely briefly, concluding that the sharp rearward movement of the president’s head was probably caused by a neuromuscular reaction—that is, nerve damage caused by the bullet to the president’s brain caused his back muscles to tighten, which in turn caused his head to be thrust backward.
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Among other things, Larry Sturdivan, a research wound ballistics scientist at the Biophysics Laboratory at the federal Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, showed the HSCA a film of an experiment in 1948 conducted at Aberdeen where live goats were shot in the brain by a bullet, causing the subject neuromuscular reaction, resulting in the goat’s back arching backward.
¹⁶¹

Although no evidence was presented that a goat’s back and abdominal muscles are the same as a human’s, when Sturdivan was asked whether he was “troubled” by the president’s head being thrust backward, he said, “No, sir…The neuromuscular reaction in which the heavy back muscles [of a human] predominate over the lighter abdominal muscles would have thrown him backward no matter where the bullet came from, whether it entered the front, the side, or the back of the head.”
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*

But this was a
technical
explanation, and although I certainly intended to present it to the jury in London, I felt it might not carry the day for me on this critical issue. The first and most fundamental question I asked myself was why the bullet coming from the rear, irrespective of the neuromuscular reaction, didn’t propel the president’s head forward at least at the moment of impact, that is,
before
the reaction came into play? Rather ironically, I first learned that my assumption that the president’s head had not been pushed forward was an erroneous one while reading the pro-conspiracy, but serious and scholarly book
Six Seconds in Dallas
by Josiah Thompson, in which Thompson treated the whole head snap issue in considerable depth, though ultimately incorrectly.
¹⁶³
Thompson’s book pointed out that Kennedy’s head
was
propelled slightly forward between Z312 and Z313 (the frame in which blood and tissue are seen spraying forward from the president’s head).

Thompson’s observation was confirmed when in 1975 CBS asked Itek Corporation, a Massachusetts photo optics company, to study the
original
Zapruder film using the most advanced photo analysis techniques and instrumentation then available. (CBS had purchased, from Zapruder’s heirs, the right to use the original for analysis purposes.) Over several months, Itek, with a staff of a dozen specialists, studied the film. Among the many findings in its ninety-four-page report to CBS in 1976, Itek proved that
before
the president’s head snap to the rear commenced at Z314 and continued until Z321, “at [Zapruder frames] 312–313 [the president’s] head goes forward approximately 2.3 inches, his shoulder about 1.1 inches.”
¹⁶⁴
Although at one point Itek’s report says that “frame 313 is the frame in which the President is fatally struck in the head,” it is clear from the report that Itek’s experts believed the shot struck at frame 312, at another point saying, “Prior to impact at frame 312,” and referring “to the impact at frames 312–313.” Itek found that “by [frame] 314 Kennedy’s head has reversed direction” and continues in a backward direction until “it reverses direction at about frame 321 as his body contacts the back of the seat.”
¹⁶⁵