Reclaiming History (349 page)

^*
Not all Americans were accepting of the uninterrupted coverage. All three networks received calls, in the low hundreds, from viewers complaining about the cancellation of their favorite shows and asking when regular programming would be resumed.

†While the rest of the world, including the Soviet Union, eulogized the slain president, Communist China, in sharp contrast, stood virtually alone, Peking not only not offering condolences and eulogies, but defiling, even ridiculing him. The Official New China News Agency did not let up in its attacks on Kennedy and his successor. The
Worker’s Daily
went so far as to publish a cartoon of Kennedy sprawled face down in blood on the ground, his necktie bearing a dollar sign, with the caption “Kennedy Bites the Dust.” (United Press International, November 25, 1963, p.24)

^*
Depository employees James Jarman Jr., called “Junior” by friends (3 H 198, WCT James Jarman Jr.), and Harold Norman are believed to be the men referred to by Oswald. Both men ate lunch while on the first floor, but both said they did not have lunch with Oswald (3 H 188–189, WCT Harold Norman; Transcript of
On Trial
, July 28, 1968, p.72 [never saw Oswald after around ten in the morning]; 3 H 201, WCT James Jarman Jr.).

^*
The fact that the card contains a photograph at all is evidence of forgery since a genuine Selective Service card, including the one Oswald had in his wallet at the time of his arrest in his own name, does not include a photograph of the card bearer (CE 801, 17 H 686).

^*
“Those people [press] were in our way every time we moved that man from my office to the jail and back,” Captain Fritz would later tell the Warren Commission. “We had to push him and pull him through the crowd” (15 H 150).

†But later in the day, Chief Curry does, indeed, identify Molina by name over TV. Indeed, Molina is mentioned over national television on Saturday afternoon as someone who has been a previous subject of U.S. Department of Justice scrutiny as a possible subversive, with the vague implication that, who knows, maybe he could have been involved in the assassination in some way. FBI Director Hoover would later say that there had never been a file on Molina, and he wasn’t even known to the FBI prior to November 22, 1963. Molina’s wife, Soledad, had dropped him off at police headquarters at City Hall at 9:45 Saturday morning, and between then and 5:00 p.m., when the police drove him home after they were satisfied he had no connection to Oswald or the assassination, he was grilled off and on throughout the day by Dallas police detectives as well as the FBI. Though never told he was under arrest, when he once, between interviews, got up to leave, a Dallas police officer blocked his exit and told him to go sit down. Upon returning home, he learned from a horrified Soledad that he had been all over the news, and cast in a suspicious light. When his Book Depository Building employer thereafter started getting crank calls and warnings from some customers that if the company didn’t let the “subversive” working for it go, they would stop doing business with the company, the employer finally let Molina go on December 30, after sixteen years of employment, telling him that automation had required his firing, but he knew better. (6 H 369–371, WCT Joe R. Molina; CE 1937, 23 H 732; CE 2036, 24 H 448–449)

^*
Actually, Oswald received an honorable discharge from the Marines following active duty, but later received an “undesirable” discharge from the Marine Corps Reserves because of his defection to the Soviet Union (WR, pp.386–387).

^*
Contrary to his statement, Curry certainly knew where he had learned that the FBI purportedly had prior contact with Oswald—Lieutenant Jack Revill. It was Revill’s memo regarding FBI agent James P. Hosty Jr.’s alleged remarks in the basement of City Hall that had put Curry on alert. And Curry also may have known from Captain Fritz about Hosty’s contact with Oswald’s wife, which came out the previous day in Fritz’s interrogation of Oswald.

^*
The three other young men in the lineup with Oswald, age twenty-four, were John Thurman Horne, seventeen; David Edmond Knapp, eighteen; and Daniel Gutierrez Lujan, twenty-six (7 H 200, WCT Walter Eugene Potts).

^*
Oswald’s warning was unnecessary. Truth is, the visitors’ telephones were not tape-recorded by the police (4 H 154, WCT Jesse E. Curry).

^*
Mrs. Paine attempted to reach attorney John Abt after six o’clock, as Oswald requested, but was unable to get an answer at either number. She testified that she could not recall if she conveyed the results of her efforts to Oswald during a subsequent conversation at 8:00 p.m. Saturday evening. Mrs. Paine made another attempt to reach Mr. Abt at home on Sunday morning, again without success. (3 H 88–89, WCT Ruth Hyde Paine)

^*
Michael Paine had told Fritz that he and Ruth had visited the Oswalds when they lived on Neely Street. Fritz later determined that the photographs were taken in the backyard at Neely. (CE 2003, 24 H 268)

^*
Abt testified that he told reporters who called him at his cabin in the Connecticut woods, where he had gone to spend the weekend, that “if I were requested to represent him, it would probably be difficult, if not impossible, for me to do so because of my commitments to other clients.” Abt said he was never contacted directly by Oswald or any member of his family. (10 H 116)

†Normally, except in rare instances, men from Sheriff Decker’s office handle the transfer of prisoners between the city and county jails. Decker testified that the city police handle “maybe one-tenth of maybe 1 percent” of the transfers (12 H 45).

^*
There actually was no person in protective custody as described in the story. Darwin Payne later stated that the report may have been a distorted reference to Howard Brennan, who had been assured by police that he and his home would be under surveillance by law enforcement. (Hlavach and Payne,
Reporting the Kennedy Assassination
, p.94)

^*
There are two jail offices in the police building, one in the basement next to the parking area, the other on the fourth floor.

^*
See photo section for photo of November 24, 1963,
Dallas Times Herald
found on the floor at the foot of Ruby’s bed after he shot Oswald. The paper is opened to page A3, the facing page, A2, being the “My Dear Caroline” letter. (CE 2426, 25 H 525; WR, p.355)

†A Dallas police detective, Leonard Mullenax, was shot to death the previous year in a hotel room while working undercover on a drug case. Though Ruby didn’t know Mullenax well, he was sufficiently depressed over it to contribute two hundred dollars to his widow, close his club, and take his strippers with him to the funeral. Because of lack of sufficient evidence, Mullenax’s alleged killer was never prosecuted. (Kaplan and Waltz,
Trial of Jack Ruby
, pp.66–67; Hall [C. Ray] Exhibit No. 2, 20 H 43)

^*
In accordance with postal regulations, the portion of Oswald’s application for his post office box in Dallas that listed names of persons other than the applicant who were entitled to receive mail was thrown away after Oswald closed his box on May 14, 1963 (7 H 527, WCT Harry D. Holmes; Cadigan Exhibit No. 13, 19 H 286). But the New Orleans post office did not comply with this regulation, and that portion of Oswald’s application for his New Orleans post office box still existed (7 H 527, WCT Harry D. Holmes).

^*
Humes completed the autopsy report between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. EST (1 HSCA 330; ARRB Transcript of Proceedings, Deposition of Dr. James Joseph Humes, February 13, 1996, p.135).

^*
There is no evidence that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York ever sent Oswald a letter signed by Alex Hidell.

†In fact, Oswald appeared on Stuckey’s television program once, a related radio program once, and was interviewed once by the press in relation to his court appearance.

^*
Later investigation revealed that Oswald’s encounter was probably with a young, crew-cut WFAA radio newsman named Pierce Allman, who ran into the Depository to telephone the radio station about the shooting. Allman reported encountering a young man on the front steps who pointed toward the telephone inside, although Allman told the Secret Service he couldn’t say for sure whether the man was Oswald or not (CD 354, p.2, Secret Service interview of Pierce Allman on January 29, 1964).

^*
But Holmes testified that Oswald made it clear that “he was still up in the building” when the shooting started and had “rushed downstairs to go out to see what was going on” (7 H 302, 306).

†Sorrels probably misspoke here since the Warren Commission investigation never came up with a change-of-address card, if there ever was one, for Oswald in New Orleans. Sorrels probably was referring to the portion of the application for Oswald’s post office box in New Orleans that listed “A. J. Hidell” as someone entitled to receive mail through the box.

^*
As can be seen in the sketch of the layout of the basement in the photo section of this book, looking out from the jail office to the garage basement ahead, there is a traffic lane that starts at the top of the Main Street entrance ramp on the left. The lane descends into the garage basement and continues past the jail office until it exits the basement by way of the Commerce Street ramp on the right. Most of the media are on the far side of the lane behind a railing that runs alongside the lane, their backs to the parking lot behind them, their eyes facing the jail office. To enable those reporters craning their necks behind others to have a better view, Assistant Chief Batchelor has given permission for them to stand in a semicircle extending from the end of the railing across the bottom of the Main Street ramp. However, on their own, many have also spilled over beyond the railing on the Commerce Street side and are on the jail side of the railing close to the armored truck. (15 H 119–120, 12, H 17–18, WCT Charles Batchelor; 12 H 101–102, WCT M. W. Stevenson; Batchelor Exhibit No. 5001, 19 H 116; 12 H 119, WCT Cecil E. Talbert; CE 2179, 24 H 851; Talbert Exhibit No. 5070, 21 H 668; 15 H 150, WCT John Will Fritz)

^*
For whatever reason, Brown, not Beck, will end up being behind the wheel of this car (CE 2003, 24 H 295; 12 H 19, WCT Charles Batchelor).

^*
Roger Mudd was still ten seconds from the end of his piece when the shot was fired. Since CBS television was taping Mudd, it missed the live broadcast from the Dallas basement. Dan Rather partially redeemed CBS’s blunder by coming up with the idea of a televised slow-motion playback of the shooting with freeze frames and analysis. This was a national television first, but Dallas’s KRLD-TV had been using the technique occasionally for local sporting events. Unbeknownst to Rather and the technicians working with him at KRLD-TV, in New York, Don Hewitt, one of two executive editors of CBS News, was on the telephone trying to reach Rather to suggest the same idea. An hour and a half after the shooting, Rather was on the air with a slow-motion version of the shooting, using a pointer to draw the audience’s attention to the critical frames and movements. (However, it was not the first slow-motion showing of the shooting of Oswald [without freeze-frame analysis] on national television. At 12:42 EST, NBC television commentator Frank McGee at NBC headquarters in New York tells his national audience, “We will replay the tape of this bizarre shooting in slow motion.”) (Rather with Herskowitz,
Camera Never Blinks
, pp.120, 139–140; NBC News,
Seventy Hours and Thirty Minutes
, p.93) In
Air Time: The Inside Story of CBS News
, author Gary Paul Gates writes, “November 22, 1963, was, in career terms, the most important day in Dan Rather’s life. His swift and accurate reporting on the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath that weekend transformed him from a regional journalist into a national correspondent. A few days after the assassination, he received a call from [CBS headquarters in New York] informing him that he was being transferred to Washington to cover the White House” (Gates,
Air Time
, p.293).

†However, less than a minute later, CBS headquarters in New York, upon seeing the tape of the shooting from its local affiliate’s live coverage in Dallas, which was received over closed circuit in New York, puts the tape on over the network to a national audience (
New York Times
, November 25, 1963, p.1).

^*
An FBI examination of Pappas’s tape at the FBI laboratory “revealed that no identifiable utterances were made by Ruby at the time he shot Oswald…Two groans are heard on the tape immediately following the shot. However, it cannot be said whether any utterance by Ruby would have been picked up by the microphone at this time” (FBI Record 124-10072-10368, July 17, 1964, Letter from J. Edgar Hoover to J. Lee Rankin; see also CD 1314, July 29, 1964). The Ike Pappas tape recording (CD 1314a) is available at the National Archives and reveals that the shot was fired one minute and fifty-eight seconds after Oswald left the third-floor Homicide and Robbery office (see also 15 H 368–369, WCT Icarus M. Pappas).
The famous photo of Ruby shooting Oswald (see photo section) was snapped by
Dallas Times Herald
photographer Robert Jackson. It won Jackson a Pulitzer Prize. Another photo, taken six-tenths of a second before by rival
Dallas Morning News
photographer Jack Beers, did not. Beers’s daughter said that this six-tenths of a second bothered her late father to the day he died, her father feeling he had been cheated by fate. He had a “depression that went untreated” and it was “all due to that picture.” Bitter and despondent, Beers died of a heart attack in 1975 at the age of fifty-one. (Michael Granberry, “Six Tenths of a Second, Two Lives Forever Changed,”
Dallas Morning News
, June 30, 2002, pp.1A, 33A)