Reclaiming History (345 page)

^*
The Parkland doctors had worked on the president in the emergency room for forty-two minutes before he expired. (See also
New York Times
, November 23, 1963, p.2)
Dr. Charles Baxter, one of the many surgeons attempting to save the president, would later recall, “As soon as we realized we had nothing medical to do, we all backed off from the man with a reverence that one has for one’s president. And we did not continue to be doctors from that point on. We became citizens again, and there were probably more tears shed in that room than in the surrounding hundred miles” (“Surgeon Who Operated on JFK in Dallas Dies,” Associated Press, March 12, 2005).

†In emergency medicine, injuries are described as one-plus, two-plus, et cetera. A four-plus injury is a worst-case scenario.

^*
The few minutes leading up to Tippit’s murder were only known to Tippit and Oswald. (Witnesses to the murder were only aware of the previous minute, not minutes.) So we have to infer what happened from what little we do know. Looking at the map in the photo section, we know that to get to Tenth and Patton, where Tippit was murdered, Oswald had to have at least started out by going south on Beckley. We also know that the last time we heard from Tippit was at 1:08 p.m. when he called the channel 1 police dispatcher twice to communicate but was never acknowledged. Since this time is so close to the time of his death, in February of 2004 I called the person I felt would be most qualified to confirm or dispel my suspicion that the 1:08 p.m. transmission by Tippit was related to his death, Dallas sheriff Jim Bowles, a fifty-three-year member of Dallas law enforcement—thirty years with the Dallas Police Department, twenty-three with the Dallas sheriff’s office, the last eleven as sheriff. Responding to my amazement over his fifty-three years in law enforcement, Bowles said, “Most police officers have starved to death [on their low pay] by that time.” Just as important as Bowles’s long experience in law enforcement is the fact that he was a Dallas police radio dispatcher supervisor in November of 1963. (Because of his father’s stroke, Bowles was off duty on the day of the assassination.) Indeed, it was Bowles who transcribed the recordings on the police radio tapes for the Warren Commission. “Oh, I don’t think there’s too much question the two 1:08 transmissions from Tippit pertained to Oswald,” Bowles said. I asked Bowles when would the 1:08 transmissions have likely been made, shortly before the murder or earlier? “Most likely earlier, when Tippit first saw Oswald walking like the devil possessed, probably back on Beckley or Crawford, and he just slow-tailed him to Tenth.” (Confirmation of Bowles’s analysis that Tippit was slowly following Oswald comes from witness William Scoggins, who said that when he saw Tippit’s car cross the intersection of Tenth and Patton, Tippit was traveling “not more than ten or twelve miles an hour” behind where Oswald was walking on Tenth [3 H 324]. And Helen Markham also noticed that the police car was “going real slow…real slow” [3 H 307].) I asked Bowles, “Tippit wouldn’t have pulled his squad car over to the curb next to Oswald shortly after spotting him, and was calling in at 1:08 to let the dispatcher know he was leaving his patrol car [and radio, since in 1963 the Dallas Police never had walkie talkies] to approach Oswald?” Bowles, who worked for ten years in the Dallas police radio dispatcher’s office, said, “Possible, but that wouldn’t be the norm for an officer under these circumstances, particularly Tippit. I knew Tippit. He was a slow, cautious, deliberate guy. The norm would have been for him to call in for a further description of the suspect from the dispatcher. But not being acknowledged, after following Oswald for a few minutes he pulled over to see what this person [Oswald] is up to.” “You don’t think Tippit had enough PC [not as in
probable cause
for an arrest, but still used as a loose way of referring to a reasonable suspicion of criminal activity justifying a police officer to stop a pedestrian or driver of a car for questioning] to stop Oswald because Oswald vaguely fit the general description of the suspect sent out over police radio?” “Possibly,” Bowles said, “but his PC was probably the description coupled with some overt behavior by Oswald like walking too fast, looking over his shoulder, walking in some erratic, jerky way. Remember, Oswald had just killed the president. He probably wasn’t walking in a normal, casual way and a police officer would pick up on this more than someone else would.” (Telephone interview of Dallas sheriff Jim Bowles by author on February 23, 2004)

^*
The Kennedy loyalists felt it was in the worst of taste for President Johnson to take the former president’s plane back to Washington instead of flying back on Air Force Two, the plane he had come to Texas in. And indeed, when Warren Commission counsel asked O’Donnell if, after he informed LBJ that the president had died, there was “any discussion about his taking the presidential plane, AF-1, as opposed to AF-2?” O’Donnell replied, “There was not” (7 H 451). And he reiterated this in his book (O’Donnell and Powers with McCarthy,
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye
, p.40). But one wonders if O’Donnell found it convenient to deny the conversation when he thereafter heard the sentiments of his associates about Johnson flying on Air Force One. President Johnson told the Warren Commission that after O’Donnell informed him that Kennedy had died, O’Donnell “said that we should return to Washington and that we should take the president’s plane” (5 H563). And Secret Service agent Rufus Youngblood, special agent in charge of the vice presidential detail for the Texas trip, testified before the Warren Commission that “O’Donnell told us to go ahead and take Air Force One. I believe this is mainly because Air Force One has better communications equipment and so forth than the other planes [Air Force Two and the cargo plane]” (2 H 152–153).
U.S. News & World Report
sought to confirm this and was told by a former White House official that, at the time, the three jet planes in the presidential fleet were being “regeared for communications of a classified nature. Naturally, the first plane to be re-equipped was AF-1. Most of the new gear had been installed in AF-1. The other two jet planes had not been completed” (“Fateful Two Hours without a President,” p.73).
Another reason to believe LBJ and Youngblood on this point is that the weight of the evidence (see later text) is that LBJ was very sensitive to the feelings of the entire Kennedy camp following the assassination.

^*
O’Donnell thought that he had convinced Johnson to depart immediately upon his arrival at Love Field; however, Johnson wasn’t about to fly back to the capital alone, with a dead president and a grieving widow on a following plane. He agreed to return to Love Field but was determined to wait for Mrs. Kennedy and the president’s body before departing for Washington. (5 H 563, WC statement of President Lyndon Baines Johnson; O’Donnell and Powers with McCarthy,
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye
, p.34; Bishop,
Day Kennedy Was Shot
, pp.193–194; Telephone interview of Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Lem Johns by author on June 28, 2005)

†Although the FBI and other members of law enforcement first suspected that the nation’s right wing was behind the assassination, Warren Commission chronicler and assassination researcher Max Holland writes, “For officials whose instincts were honed by national-security considerations, the Soviet-American rivalry loomed over what had happened and dictated what immediately needed to be done. The overwhelming instant reaction among these officials was to suspect a grab for power, a foreign, Communist-limited conspiracy aimed at overthrowing the U.S. government. The assassination might be the first in a concerted series of attacks on U.S. leaders as the prelude to an all-out attack…When Major General Chester Clifton, JFK’s military aide, arrived at Parkland Hospital, he immediately called the National Military Command Center and then switched to the White House Situational Room to find out if there was any intelligence about a plot to overthrow the government. The Defense Department subsequently issued a flash warning to every U.S. military base in the world and ordered additional strategic bombers into the air. General Maxwell Taylor [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] issued a special alert to all troops in the Washington [D.C.] area, while John McCone, director of Central Intelligence, asked the Watch Committee to convene immediately at the Pentagon. The committee, an interdepartmental group organized to prevent future Pearl Harbors, consisted of the government’s best experts on surprise military attacks” (Holland, “Key to the Warren Report,” pp.52, 54).

^*
The conventional wisdom and that of the Warren Commission is that Tippit pulled his squad car over to talk to Oswald because Tippit must have heard the description of the suspected killer of the president, which was sent out over Dallas police radio at 12:45, 12:48, and 12:55 p.m., that he was a “white male, approximately thirty, slender build, height five foot ten inches, weight 165 pounds,” and Oswald’s description was similar to the suspect (WR, p.165). The argument of conspiracy theorists, seeking to link Oswald to Tippit before Tippit’s murder, that Oswald wasn’t similar enough for Tippit to have stopped him, is a very weak one. If there ever was a time when a police officer would stop someone if he even remotely resembled a suspect, surely this was it.

†We will never know what words Oswald and Tippit exchanged that caused Tippit to leave his patrol car and start to approach Oswald. But we can safely assume that there was something about Oswald’s words, appearance, or demeanor that made Tippit want to check Oswald out further, but that was not suspicious enough at that point for him to have drawn his gun on Oswald.

‡Tippit had a bad habit, which his fellow officers unsuccessfully tried to break him of, of never looking anyone straight in the eye, looking down or sometimes sideways when he approached a person on duty. This may have accounted for how Oswald got the jump on him. (See endnote discussion.)

^*
I asked Tatum at the London trial if he got “a good look” at the man who shot Tippit and whom he identified at the trial. “Very good look,” Tatum responded. I asked if there was “any question in your mind” that the man was Oswald. “None whatsoever,” he answered. (Transcript of
On Trial
, July 23, 1986, p.200)

^*
Actually, Tippit pulled over and stopped his squad car on the street in front of the driveway between 404 and 410 East Tenth Street (CE 523, 17 H 229; photo of car parked on East Tenth: Barnes Exhibit D, 19 H114).

^*
Hulse has gotten the 510 East Jefferson address (the site of Reynolds Motor Company) from the call sheet passed through the conveyor belt to the dispatch room from the adjacent room manned by civilian employees of the police department taking calls from other civilians—the result of the phone call made by L. J. Lewis from that location. The confusion resulting from the two addresses given for the shooting delayed the arrival of many police officers in getting to the shooting scene.

^*
This, and Hoover’s statement about a Secret Service agent being killed, are two examples of the kind of erroneous information that was being passed along immediately after the assassination during the initial phases of the investigation. Shanklin’s source was apparently the Dallas police radio where similar information had just been broadcast.

^*
Seventeen of O’Neal’s eighteen employees are out to lunch when he got a call from Secret Service agent Clint Hill, shortly after 1:00 p.m., who wanted him to bring the best casket he had to Parkland Hospital. His most expensive model, at $3,995, was the Elgin Casket Company’s Handley Britannia, a four-hundred-pound, double-walled, hermetically sealed, solid-bronze coffin manufactured by the Texas Coffin Company. O’Neal had to wait until three more of his men came back from lunch before he could wrestle the behemoth into his 1964 Cadillac hearse. (ARRB MD 131, Texas Coffin Company reorder card; Bishop,
Day Kennedy Was Shot
, p.267; Manchester,
Death of a President
, pp.291–292)

^*
At 1:00 a.m. the next morning at Bethesda Hospital, O’Donnell slipped into the room where Kennedy’s body lay, removed the ring, and brought it back to Jackie (O’Donnell and Powers with McCarthy,
Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye
, p.35;
New York Times
, December 5, 1963, p.32).

†One of the most prominent misconceptions that has been parroted by virtually everyone, including the Warren Commission, is that in 1963 it wasn’t a federal crime to murder the president. “Murder of the president has never been covered by federal law,” said the Warren Commission in 1964 (WR, p.454). “At that time it was not a federal crime to assassinate a president,” said Chief Justice Earl Warren in his memoirs (Warren,
Memoirs
, p.355). Indeed, even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said that “it is not a federal crime to kill the president” (5 H 98, WCT, Hon. J. Edgar Hoover). For
almost
all practical intents and purposes, this is true, but the statement, technically, is not. Under Section 1111 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, murder was, of course, a federal crime in 1963. And just as obviously there was no language in Title 18 that said, “However, if the victim of the murder is the president of the United States, then it’s not a federal crime.” Where the limitation came in is in subdivision (b) of Section 1111, which provided (and still does) that for there to be federal prosecutorial jurisdiction over any murder, it has to take place “within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States,” which the courts have held to be places owned, possessed, or controlled by the U.S. government (most importantly, the president’s residence, the White House, but also, for example, federal buildings like the Pentagon, military installations, U.S. highways, national parks, islands like Palmyra in the Pacific that are U.S. possessions, etc.). Since a Dallas street is not a U.S. highway and would not qualify, there could not be a federal prosecution of Oswald for having killed Kennedy. It is highly anomalous that even in 1963, if it could have been shown that Oswald had entered into a conspiracy to murder the president, or even threatened harm to him, since Sections 372 and 871, respectively, of Title 18 contain no such territorial limitation, federal jurisdiction to prosecute Oswald for those separate offenses would have existed. But not for the actual act of murdering the president.
As a direct result of Kennedy’s assassination, and pursuant to one of the recommendations of the Warren Commission (WR, pp.26, 455), this loophole in the federal law was plugged on August 28, 1965, when Congress enacted Section 1751 of Title 18 specifically making the assassination of a president (or president elect or vice president) murder under Section 1111, and conveying federal jurisdiction irrespective of where the killing occurred, even if on foreign soil. Section 1751(k) provides that “there is
extra
territorial jurisdiction over the conduct prohibited by this section.” Also, anomalously, although the jurisdictional limitation wasn’t removed for the president until 1965, in 1963 it already was a federal crime to murder (anywhere) federal judges, U.S. attorneys and marshals, and other “officers and employees of the United States.” (18 USC §1114; WR, p.454)
Congressional efforts to make, without limitation, the assassination of a president a prosecutable federal crime (a House bill in 1901 and Senate bill in 1902 following the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, and a House bill in 1933 following the attempted assassination of President Roosevelt on February 15, 1933) failed to be enacted into law (WR, pp.454–455; H.R. 10386, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 1901; S. 3653, 57th Cong., 1st sess., 1902; H.R. 3896, 73rd Cong., 1st sess., 1933).
Attempted assassination is also covered under Section 1751, and the indictment of Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme for her attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford on September 5, 1975, in Sacramento, California, was the first under the new law. Fromme was subsequently convicted and is now serving a life sentence.