The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (46 page)

It’s unlikely Oswald raced down all seventy-two steps of the eight flights of stairs from the far corner of the sixth floor’s “sniper’s nest,” and bought a Coke, in the seventy-five to ninety seconds since the last shot. The “sniper’s nest” was on the opposite corner of the building from the stairs, making Oswald’s alleged feat even more difficult. Oswald was next seen looking calm as he passed clerical supervisor and “saunters out of the building.”

Making any dash by Oswald down the stairs even more unlikely, if not impossible, was the fact that Victoria Adams had been walking down those same stairs at most just over thirty seconds after the last shot, and, as noted above, saw “no one on the stairs.”
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12:32 p.m.:
Dallas Deputy Seymour Weitzman ran to the knoll after hearing the shots. He was one of several law enforcement personnel who encountered someone behind the picket fence claiming to be a Secret Service agent, even though no real Secret Service agents were stationed there, or anywhere on the ground in Dealey Plaza. Dallas Police Officer Joe Smith ran to the knoll after hearing a woman scream, “They’re shooting the President from the bushes!” Once Officer Smith was behind the fence, he noticed “the lingering smell of gunpowder,” as did many of the witnesses on or near the knoll. Smith noticed a man near one of the cars, and, as he later testified to the Warren Commission, Smith pulled his pistol on him. The man then “showed me that he was a Secret Service agent.” Smith later explained that the credentials “satisfied me and the deputy sheriff” who had joined him.

The Deputy, Seymour Weitzman, confirmed in his Warren Commission testimony that he had also met the fake Secret Service agent. Officer Smith later explained his regret at allowing the phony agent to leave, because—instead of looking like a typically clean-cut, suit-and-tie Secret Service agent—this man “had on a sports shirt and sports pants. But he had dirty fingernails and hands that looked like an auto mechanic’s hands,” indicating they were greasy. (His hands could have been dirty from having just quickly broken down a weapon.) Officer Smith searched the interior of a four-door, off-white 1960 or 1961 Chevrolet sedan parked by the fence, but not the trunk.

Deputy Seymour Weitzman also told the Warren Commission he saw “Secret Service, as well” behind the fence. Weitzman later said the man who he thought was Secret Service showed him ID and said that he had everything under control. Although Weitzman was one of the first people behind the fence, he found “numerous kinds of
footprints that did not make sense because they were going in different directions.”

Three other witnesses—Jean Hill, soldier Gordon Arnold, and Malcolm Summers—also saw what they thought were Secret Service agents on the knoll. Malcolm Summers, who gave a statement to authorities on the day of the assassination, confirmed to PBS in 1988 that “he encountered a man with a gun on the knoll.” Summers said he was “stopped by a man in a suit and he had an overcoat—over his arm and . . . I saw a gun under that overcoat. And he [said], ‘Don’t you all come up here any further, you could get shot, or killed.’”

Behind the Book Depository, Police Sergeant D. V. Harkness met “several ‘well-armed’ men dressed in suits. They told Sergeant Harkness they were with the Secret Service.”

There is a insurmountable problem with the Secret Service agents encountered by Officers Smith, Weitzman, and Harkness, and the other witnesses like Malcolm Summers: Secret Service Chief James Rowley later confirmed that all Secret Service agents in the area of Dealey Plaza were riding in the motorcade and went to the hospital with the President—none were stationed on the ground. That means NONE of the “agents” the witnesses encountered were actually Secret Service, including the one who showed Officer Smith and Deputy Weitzman a valid Secret Service ID.

Who were the men pretending to be Secret Service? Those behind the Book Depository could have included someone who fired from the Depository. As for those on the grassy knoll, twelve years later, journalist Michael Canfield talked to retired Deputy Seymour Weitzman, who’d “had a nervous breakdown” soon after the arrest of the Watergate burglars. Canfield asked that Weitzman’s doctor be present during the interview, though Canfield said “Weitzman’s memory
seemed clear and sharp.” Weitzman described the man who claimed to be a Secret Service agent and said the man “produced credentials and told him everything was under control.” Deputy Weitzman said the man was of “medium height, [with] dark hair and wearing a light windbreaker.” Canfield then “showed him a photo of Sturgis [Frank Fiorini] and [Bernard] Barker” because the government had investigated reports—later proved false—that Fiorini and E. Howard Hunt had been photographed in Dealey Plaza after JFK’s murder.
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Instead of reacting to Fiorini’s photo, Weitzman “immediately stated, ‘Yes, that’s him,’ pointing to Bernard Barker.” Just to be sure, “Canfield asked, ‘Was this the man who produced the Secret Service credentials?’ Weitzman responded, ‘Yes, that’s the same man.’” Weitzman even said he’d be willing “to make a tape recorded statement for official investigators,” and he recorded a statement for Canfield, in which he reaffirmed the Barker identification.

In the late 1990s, when researchers showed Malcolm Summers a photo of Bernard Barker, he had identified Barker as the armed man he had encountered on the knoll moments after JFK was assassinated.

Could CIA agent and later Watergate burglar Bernard Barker have been one of the fake Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza? Michael Canfield was party to a lawsuit involving E. Howard Hunt in which he and his coauthor obtained a sworn deposition from Barker. When their attorney asked Barker where he was on November 22, 1963, Barker initially remarked, “This is a question that came up during the Watergate Hearing,” but review of Barker’s Watergate testimony
reveals no such questioning. In Barker’s deposition, he said that “I was working for the Agency, they know exactly everywhere I was, I reported to them daily.” Barker claimed to be at home watching television at the time of the assassination, though he said no one but his family and friends could vouch for him that day. When Canfield’s attorney asked if Barker “heard of the assassination via a news flash,” Barker responded, “No.” He stated, “I think I saw the parade, how the whole thing happened.”

If Barker “saw . . . how the whole thing happened,” he didn’t see it on live TV, or even on the news later that night, because the motorcade wasn’t broadcast live, even in Dallas. The Zapruder film, so well known today, wasn’t shown on TV at all until almost twelve years after JFK’s murder, and at the time of Barker’s deposition, the film had appeared on TV only a handful of times. It was not the bright, colorful, and sharp restored version we’re now used to, but a grainy, dark copy of the somewhat fuzzy eight-millimeter film that looked nothing like the high-quality videotape or sixteen-millimeter news footage shown on TV at the time.

12:32–12:33 p.m.:
Behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll, Deputy Weitzman and Officer Smith were soon joined by three (of seven) railroad employees who had watched the motorcade from an overpass approximately fifty feet in front of the Presidential limousine. They had also heard shots coming from the grassy knoll. The railroad men also saw all the footprints on the ground and two muddy footprints on the bumper of a station wagon parked there. One of the railroad men said that near the “station wagon there were two sets of footprints . . . they could’ve gotten in the trunk compartment of this car and pulled the lid down, which would have been very easy.” None of the trunks of the cars parked behind the knoll were searched.

According to Anthony Summers, “within minutes of the shooting” off-duty policeman John Tilson was driving near the knoll and “saw a man ‘slipping and sliding’ down the railway embankment behind the knoll.” He later “described the man as ‘38–40 years, 5' 8" . . . dark hair, dark clothing.’ Tilson comments that he looked like Jack Ruby, whom he knew, but does not claim it was Ruby.” Officer Tilson said the man “had a car parked there, a black car. He threw something in the back seat and went around the front hurriedly and got in the car and took off.” Tilson tried to follow the car but lost it. Around this time, a car was reported speeding through downtown Dallas, bearing a stolen Georgia license plate.

Journalist Robert MacNeil wrote that “a crowd, including reporters, converged on the grassy knoll believing it to be the direction from which the shots that struck the President were fired.” He “saw several people running up the grassy hill beside the road. I thought they were chasing whoever had done the shooting and I ran after them.”

At the Book Depository, James Worrell told police and the Warren Commission that he saw a man emerge from the back entrance of the Depository and run off down Houston Street, toward the south. He described the man as in his early thirties, 5' 8" to 5' 10", dark hair and average weight, in a dark sports jacket open in front with lighter-colored pants, no hat or anything in his hands.

Two witnesses, one of them a sheriff’s deputy, saw “a light colored Nash (Rambler) station wagon” pull up in front of the Book Depository “and a white male came down the grass-covered incline between the building and the street and entered the station wagon after which it drove away in the direction of the Oak Cliff section of Dallas.” Deputy Roger Craig also saw the incident and said “I heard a shrill whistle and I turned around and saw a white male running down
the hill from the direction of the” Depository, while “a light colored Rambler station wagon” pulled over and the man “who had been running got into this car. The man driving this station wagon was a dark complected white male.” Deputy Craig “reported this incident at once to a Secret Service officer, whose name I do not know”—though again, no real Secret Service agents were in the area. Craig saw Oswald at police headquarters later and thought that he had been the running man.

Some of the witnesses in Dealey Plaza soon started talking to authorities, and many of those on or near the grassy knoll said the shots came from there. Abraham Zapruder, filming the motorcade as he stood on a concrete step on the knoll, testified that the shots “came from back of me.” On the knoll steps, not far from Zapruder, Emmett Hudson said, “The shots that I heard definitely came from behind and above me.” Photos and films show a couple—the Newmans—and their two children on the knoll all on the ground because, as Mr. Newman said later, “I thought the [first] shot had come from the garden directly behind me,” and “it seemed that we were in the direct path of fire.”

Jean Hill was one of the closest witnesses to JFK when the shooting started. From where she stood, Hill was looking at the knoll from the other side of the street as her friend Mary Moorman took what would become a famous Polaroid photo of JFK. Hill said, “I frankly thought they were coming from the knoll . . . people shooting from the knoll.” Summers found that “sixteen people, in or outside the Book Depository, indicated some shooting came from the knoll. They included the Depository manager, the superintendent, and two company vice presidents.” Six witnesses, including three in the motorcade, said they smelled gunpowder around the knoll. Those in the motorcade
were Senator Ralph Yarborough, Congressman Ray Roberts, and the Dallas mayor’s wife, plus there were two police officers and a civilian who were on the ground near the knoll.

Those on or near the knoll tended to hear at least some shots from there, while others farther away reported one or more shots from the vicinity of the Book Depository. But even the number of shots witnesses reported—two, three, four, even five or more shots—varied widely. Several witnesses near the knoll said they heard only two shots, perhaps indicating the number fired from there. In an interesting parallel, investigator Josiah Thompson found that, “with no exceptions, all those witnesses who were deep inside the Depository (either at work or in hallways) report hearing fewer than three shots”—either just one shot or two.

Several witnesses and officers did direct attention to the Book Depository. However, the Depository had not attracted as much notice as the area behind the grassy knoll and was not sealed off until twenty-eight minutes after the shooting. A witness named Howard Brennan, whose statements to authorities would be very inconsistent, later became the star witness in making the case against Oswald. Though he initially appeared to have gone toward the knoll after the shots, he later claimed to have seen Oswald fire a shot from the Depository. As Anthony Summers notes, Brennan couldn’t identify Oswald in a lineup on the night of November 22, even though a month later he said he could, and then, three weeks after that, said he wasn’t sure. Finally, Brennan told the Warren Commission he was sure he had seen Oswald in the Depository window, even though Brennan’s vision was questionable. The initial lookout for a suspect, apparently based on Brennan’s description of the man in the window, was for a man older and heavier than Oswald. Dr. Gerald McKnight pointed out
numerous other flaws in Brennan’s testimony, rendering it worthless in placing Oswald in the “sniper’s nest.”

Two other witnesses later said they saw “a rifle being pulled back from a window” in the Book Depository. One was
Dallas Times Herald
photographer Bob Jackson, who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for his famous photo of Ruby shooting Oswald. The other was WFAA-TV cameraman Malcolm Couch, who was riding with Jackson in the press car, five cars behind JFK. Couch said he saw about a foot of rifle being pulled back into the window. (A shooter wouldn’t need to extend the rifle out of the window at all in order to fire at JFK—unless he wanted to call attention to his position.) Neither Couch nor Jackson immediately contacted police about what he had seen, which even a Warren Commission counsel considered unusual, especially for a newsman.

Within minutes of the shooting, Oswald had walked out of the building without being noticed—and if Oswald could leave the building without being noticed, anyone else could, too. According to most accounts, Oswald walked north one block, then turned right and went east on Pacific. He swung back to Elm Street and paused in front of the Blue Front Inn, seven blocks east of the assassination site. He possibly boarded the Marsalis Street bus, on Griffin Street. When the bus became stalled in traffic, Oswald asked for a transfer and got off the bus at the same time as another passenger. Oswald headed south on Lamar Street. He paused in front of the Greyhound bus terminal, three blocks from where he had left the bus. He took a cab, which drove southeast down Zangs Boulevard and turned south onto Beckley.