Reclaiming History (199 page)

Was
Rowland the type of person to make a story up? Though he was only eighteen, he had already caused people who knew him to conclude he was not truthful. The assistant principal at his Dallas high school told the FBI that he had learned from his contact with Rowland that Rowland “would not hesitate to fabricate a story.”
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And the dean of the technical high school he had earlier attended told the FBI that from her dealings with him she “determined he could not be trusted and would not tell the truth regarding any matter.”
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As to Rowland’s exaggerating and embroidering the story as he told it to subsequent people, we’ve seen that he conducted his own self-immolation on this point, even his wife telling the Warren Commission he was “prone to exaggerate,” though she was quick to add that his exaggerations were usually “not concerned with anything other than himself. They are usually to boost his ego…that he is really smarter than he is or that he is a better salesman than he is, something like that.”
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Another Dealey Plaza witness quoted often by conspiracy theorists is Carolyn Walther. She told the FBI on December 5, 1963, that from her vantage point on the east side of Houston near Elm, within a minute before the shooting she saw a man standing in the southeasternmost window of either the fourth or the fifth floor of the Book Depository Building. (She said she was “positive” the window wasn’t as high as the sixth floor.) The man was leaning out the window holding a weapon that looked like a machine gun. He had blond or light brown hair. In the same window, to the left of this man, she saw a portion of another man in a brown suit coat. She could not see his head and she gave no description of him.
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Walther repeated her story to “the investigators” for a 1967 book
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and in 1978 to the
Dallas Morning News
.
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Apart from the fact that we know from photographs and testimony that the fourth-floor window was closed and the fifth-floor window occupied by identified Book Depository employees (James Jarman, Bonnie Ray Williams and Harold Norman, one of whom, Norman, can be seen leaning out the window in the Robert Hughes film, and undoubtedly is the person whom Walther saw), there is another very serious problem with Walther’s statement. She was watching the motorcade with her friend, Pearl Springer, who told the FBI that not only didn’t she see any armed man standing in the window, but much more importantly, Walther, after the shooting, did not mention to her anything about seeing any man in the window holding a rifle, machine gun, or any other type of weapon.
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Apparently Walther never considered her observation important enough to waste a breath on. I understand.

The last witness in this category is John Powell. Powell told Earl Golz of the
Dallas Morning News
in 1978, fifteen years after the assassination, that on the day of the assassination he was an inmate in the county jail (at the corner of Houston and Main) and that several minutes before the shooting he and others in his cell on the sixth floor of the jail saw two men in the sniper’s nest window who were “fooling with” the scope of a rifle. (In other words, Oswald didn’t need a second gunman firing a second rifle from the window, but he did need someone there to hold his hand, tinker with the scope of his rifle, or what have you.) Powell, seventeen at the time and in jail for three days on charges of vagrancy and disturbing the peace, told Golz, “Quite a few of us saw [the two men].” The two men “looked darker” than whites and seemed to be in “work clothes.” There’s no reference in Golz’s article that Powell had ever spoken to the authorities. Indeed, the opposite is suggested when Powell told Golz, “I didn’t tell very many people.”
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The Golz article, coupled with the allegation in Anthony Summer’s book,
Conspiracy
, two years later that the jail cells provided “an ideal vantage point for observation of the famous Depository window,”
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created a new stir in the conspiracy community.

Although it is not known whether law enforcement ever spoke to John Powell, the entire allegation of inmates at the Dallas county jail witnessing the assassination was investigated by the Dallas sheriff’s office and the FBI in November and December of 1964. The allegation was made to the FBI on December 11, 1964, by one Fay Leon Blunt, who wasn’t even incarcerated in the jail at the time of the assassination but claimed there were seventeen witnesses to the assassination who were in the hospital ward on the fifth floor of the jail, and none had been interviewed. The FBI contacted Sheriff Bill Decker on December 14 about the allegation and Decker told them a “thorough investigation [was] conducted at the County Jail immediately subsequent to the assassination and no witnesses to same [were] located among the inmates.” This, of course, would include not only the fifth floor, where the seventeen witnesses allegedly were, but also the sixth floor, where Powell claims he and others were. The search by the sheriff’s office for witnesses to the assassination at the jail would seem to have been an automatic one, and therefore appears to be a clear refutation of Powell’s story, one that he, Powell, saw fit to keep secret from the media and the authorities for fifteen years. The Powell allegation is not only silly on its face (someone apparently helping Oswald with the telescopic sight), but he is the only Dealey Plaza “witness” to have made it.

As far as Blunt’s allegation about the fifth floor is concerned, Ernest Holman, the Dallas County chief jailer, took the FBI on a tour of the jail on December 14, 1964, and pointed out that the hospital section of the jail on the fifth floor had three cells. One cell was for mental inmates, and the windows from this cell allowed a view of the motorcade, but the sniper’s nest window, per the FBI report, “is not visible from this cell area.” Another cell area in the hospital section was “only used on weekends by persons serving three day sentences for ‘Driving While Intoxicated’ charges” and there were “no DWI prisoners in this particular cell at the time of the assassination.” The third cell in the hospital section did have a view of the sniper’s nest window, but the FBI report said the cell window “is very dirty and is backed by an iron mesh type grid guard.” The view from this window is “very distorted” and Holman told the FBI he believed it would be “impossible to identify anyone” from this window. The FBI report said that “Holman and Chief Identification Officer James H. Kitching advised that Fay Leon Blunt…is well known to them as a person completely unreliable who has been arrested on several occasions in the past on lunacy charges.”
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M
ore than the eyewitness testimony already discussed, conspiracy theorists rank Oswald’s second-floor lunchroom encounter with Dallas police officer Marrion L. Baker near the very top of the list of reasons to believe Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy. According to the critics, Oswald couldn’t possibly have gotten from the sixth-floor sniper’s nest to the second-floor lunchroom in the ninety-second time frame estimated by the Warren Commission. Howard Roffman, who offered a critical analysis of Oswald’s and Baker’s movements in his book
Presumed Guilty
, wrote, “Thus, Oswald had an alibi. Had he been the sixth floor gunman, he would have arrived at the lunchroom
at least
five seconds
after
Baker did, probably more…[Therefore] Oswald
could not
have been the assassin.”
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Once again, however, the critics have exaggerated and misrepresented the circumstances surrounding this encounter in their curious zeal to exonerate Oswald of the crime he so obviously committed.

You’ll recall that Officer Baker was one of the motorcycle escorts riding in the motorcade approximately two hundred feet behind the president’s car. Baker had just turned onto Houston Street and was heading north toward the Depository when the shooting started. His immediate thought (though later proved incorrect) was that the shots were being fired from the roof of the Book Depository directly ahead of him. Racing his motorcycle to the front entrance, Baker dashed into the building and together with building superintendent Roy Truly ran to the freight elevators at the back of the building. After a brief delay (trying unsuccessfully to bring an elevator down by remote control so they could ascend to the upper floors), they ran up the nearby staircase. As Baker rounded the second-floor landing, he caught a glimpse of someone walking away from him in the vestibule leading to the second-floor lunchroom. Baker approached the lunchroom door, pistol drawn, and spotted Oswald, now inside the lunchroom, continuing to walk away from him. “He was in the center of the room walking away from me,” Baker testified at the London trial.
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When Warren Commission counsel asked Baker if, when he saw Oswald, Oswald was “carrying anything in his hands,” Baker answered, “He had nothing at that time.” Oswald’s statement to Captain Fritz that he “was on the second floor drinking a Coca-Cola when the officer came in”
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became so famous and written about that Officer Baker himself would later have to catch himself for buying into it. In a September 23, 1964, handwritten statement he gave to the FBI, he wrote, “I saw a man standing in the lunchroom drinking a coke.” He immediately crossed out the words “drinking a coke” and placed his initials above the words crossed out.
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Conspiracy theorists were quick to pounce on this as evidence that Oswald was in fact drinking a Coke when Baker confronted him, and Baker, like everyone else in the world, was trying to cover up the truth in the assassination and falsely implicate Oswald. But Baker’s credibility in this matter couldn’t be any better. After all, if he were trying to implicate Oswald he obviously would never have told the Warren Commission that Oswald was calm and collected when he, Baker, first confronted Oswald.

It should be noted that Roy Truly’s testimony is corroborative of Baker’s testimony before the Warren Commission. When Warren Commission counsel asked if Oswald “had anything in either hand,” Truly responded, “I noticed nothing in either hand.”
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Author Gerald Posner is probably correct when he concludes that after Baker and Truly left him, Oswald “was now left in the empty lunchroom, and almost instantly he must have thought of the alibi he later used after his arrest—that he was eating lunch during the shooting. He went to the soda machine and purchased a Coke as he decided how to leave the Depository.”
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The Warren Commission concluded that the “full bottle of Coca-Cola” Oswald was holding in his hand when Depository employee Mrs. R. A. Reid saw him was “presumably purchased
after
the encounter with Baker and Truly.”
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On March 20, 1964, the Warren Commission had Baker and Truly repeat their movements as the first step in determining whether Oswald could have descended to the second-floor lunchroom from the sixth floor by the time Baker and Truly arrived.
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Two trial runs were made, beginning with Baker’s position on Houston Street at the time of the first shot and ending at the moment Baker saw Oswald. (It is not clear whether the Commission’s timing ended when Baker first saw Oswald in the vestibule or a moment later in the lunchroom.) Using a stopwatch, the Commission timed Baker’s reconstructed movements at
ninety seconds
during the first test, and
seventy-five seconds
during the second.
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That same day, Oswald’s presumed descent from the sixth floor was also reconstructed and timed. Secret Service agent John Howlett, playing the role of Oswald, carried a rifle from the southeast corner of the sixth floor north along the east aisle to the northeast corner of the floor, then west to the top of the northwest corner staircase, near where Oswald’s rifle was found.
*
He placed the rifle on the floor there, descended the stairs to the second floor, and entered the lunchroom. Again, two test runs were conducted. The first, covering the route from the sixth floor to the lunchroom at a “normal walking” pace, was clocked at seventy-eight seconds. The second test run, at a “fast walk,” took seventy-four seconds.
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In a test the HSCA conducted, running from the sixth floor to the lunchroom, the same or close to what we could have expected Oswald to do, took just forty-six seconds.
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The Warren Report noted that even the minimum (fastest) time it took Baker to reach the second-floor lunchroom (seventy-five seconds) would have put him in the lunchroom just three seconds
before
Oswald reached it by merely walking at a normal pace (seventy-eight seconds), though the time taken by Baker (and Truly) on November 22 was “probably longer than in the test runs,” in which case Oswald would have had
more
time to get to the second-floor lunchroom before Baker arrived. For example, the Commission wrote, “No allowance was made for the special conditions which existed on the day of the assassination,” including Baker’s possible delayed reaction to the sound of the shots, his taking time (after parking his motorcycle) to survey the area along Elm Street before entering the building (as he testified he did),
*
and jostling with the crowd of people on the steps leading to the entrance of the Depository.
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Even Baker acknowledged that his reconstructed times of ninety and seventy-five seconds “would be the minimum, because I am sure that I, you know, it took me a little longer [on the day of the assassination].”
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Just as obviously, we can assume that Oswald would have moved faster than merely a “normal walking pace” or even a “fast walk” from the sniper’s nest to the second floor. Indeed, we would expect him to have run, although when Warren Commission counsel asked Baker if, when he confronted Oswald, Oswald was “out of breath, did he appear to have been running?” Baker answered, “It didn’t appear that to me. He appeared normal, you know.”
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However, running downstairs and running upstairs are two very different things. When I asked Baker at the London trial if he was out of breath himself from his “fast walk” simulation, he said he was not.
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Truly would later say, “He [Oswald] didn’t have to hurry. He just walked down the stairway from the sixth to the second floor.”
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