The Kennedy Half-Century (30 page)

These credible accounts show that the Warren Commission missed key witnesses who might have been able to clear up some of the confusion emerging from that day. But for whatever reason, the commission appears to have been particularly uninterested in strategically placed onlookers who believed that shots came from the picket fence area. Mary Woodward, Maggie Brown, Aurelia Lorenzo, and Anne Donaldson all worked for the
Dallas Morning News
in 1963 and all of them were standing on the north curb of Elm Street. They told the press that they heard shots coming from behind them, “a little to our right,” and none ever heard from the Warren Commission. Neither did A. J. Millican, who had been standing near Woodward and her colleagues when he heard what he said were a total of eight shots coming from various directions, including two “from the arcade between the bookstore and the underpass” and three more “from the same direction, only farther back.” John and Faye Chism also believed they heard shots coming from behind them; they were ignored.
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Nor did the Warren Commission thoroughly investigate a story told by Victoria Adams, a young woman who watched the president die from the fourth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Adams said that after the shots were fired, she fled down the Depository’s back stairwell, supposedly the same stairwell that Oswald used to make his escape from the sixth floor. Adams testified that she did not see or hear Oswald in the stairwell immediately after the assassination. The staff of the Warren Commission seemed to view Adams not as a vital witness but as a threat to their preferred timeline of events, and they alternately ignored and defamed her.
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Had the Warren Commission enlisted Dallas police and citizens to identify more of those present in the Plaza and Depository while their memories were fresh, they might have secured many more reliable accounts from every perspective that could have enabled the commission and the public to weigh the preponderance of the evidence. One result of a contemporaneous and vigorous search for witnesses in 1963 and 1964 would have been to diminish the credibility of some individuals who turned up years later with dramatic but questionable narratives about the assassination.

Gordon Arnold, like Jim Towner, said that he saw a man on the grassy knoll who was shaking and crying. In Arnold’s version of the story, however, the weeping man pointed a gun at him and demanded his camera. “And he used some expletives to explain to me that he was going to have the camera, and I pitched it to him,” he recalled. After ripping out the film, the man tossed the empty camera back to Arnold before he (and another unidentified person accompanying him) disappeared behind the picket fence. Arnold says that the crying man was wearing yellow-tinted shooter’s goggles and what “looked like a Dallas police officer’s uniform.” He also claims that he heard shots whistling over his head that had originated from behind the picket fence, which caused him to lie flat on the ground. “It’s not a noise,” Arnold said in 1989, “You feel something go past you … You’ll hear a noise following behind it, and to me, I knew I was dead because that was a bullet that just went over me.” However, Arnold did not come forward until fifteen years after the assassination, in 1978. His son and widow confirmed in 2006 that they had heard him recount this story over the years, but families are sometimes told tall tales by a loved one. One anticonspiracy author, Gerald Posner, has claimed that Arnold is not visible in any photos, and that he probably wasn’t present at all in Dealey Plaza.
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But others who have closely studied the Arnold case strongly disagree. It is impossible to know for certain, but some aspects of Arnold’s story match verified eyewitness anecdotes that Arnold could not have known about simply by reading published reports.
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Like Arnold, other apparent witnesses with blood-chilling tales popped up years later. A deaf-mute named Ed Hoffman claimed that he saw shady
characters behind the picket fence on the day of the assassination. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the president, Hoffman positioned himself on the shoulder of Stemmons Freeway, “two hundred yards west of the parking lot behind the picket fence at an elevation of about the height of the first floor of the Texas School Book Depository.” From this vantage point, he supposedly saw a man with a rifle running along the back side of the fence dressed in a suit, tie, and overcoat. According to Hoffman, the man tossed his rifle to a second man wearing a railroad worker’s uniform; the second man hastily disassembled the weapon and crammed it into what looked like a railroad brakeman’s tool bag. Both men then disappeared. Hoffman insists that he tried to report what he had seen to the authorities, but his communications handicap hindered him, and police never followed up on his story. Hoffman did not go public with his account until 1967. Are his observations accurate or did he invent them? Again, one cannot say for certain and experts on the assassination disagree, but Hoffman—who has been prominently featured in TV shows questioning the Warren Commission—has altered his tale when challenged, and his reported line of sight may not fit what he said he witnessed.
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Other late-emerging accounts seem largely unsubstantiated and highly improbable, but at this late date it is difficult to separate truth from fiction. Ken Duvall, a truck driver who occasionally made deliveries to the Book Depository, described a man in the grassy knoll area who was, or resembled, a railroad worker. Duvall says that he was sitting on the front steps of the Depository on the day of the assassination when he noticed a suspicious-looking vehicle. “[T]here was a black car, on our left side, parked parallel with the School Book Depository … When Kennedy’s [car] came down Main Street to turn right, to come up to the School Book Depository … this guy was sitting here in the black car, he was waiting for [Kennedy] and them to turn right. And when he did, well he came up right by us—we’re sitting on the third step—and we look down in the car, and … he has a pair of coveralls on, and he went down to the building there at the end of the [picket] fence, and got out, and was holding something under his coveralls.” Duvall believes that the object was a rifle. “And it evidently had a silencer,” he says, “because nobody … heard the [man’s] shot.” Duvall also says that he encountered Lee Oswald in a lunchroom on the second floor of the Book Depository thirty minutes before the presidential motorcade arrived. “We’re gonna go out here and watch the president come by, you gonna go see him?” he supposedly asked Oswald. “Yeah, I’m gonna go see him.” Duvall accepts the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald shot JFK from the Depository, but he thinks the fatal head wound was caused by the mystery man wearing coveralls.
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Contrary to Duvall’s account, though, no films or photos show a black car in the location he described, and no one who had wanted to catch a
glimpse of Kennedy’s limousine would have been sitting on the steps of the Depository behind a crowd of standing spectators.

Victoria Rodriguez’s story seems equally suspect, both because of its very tardy telling and the lack of confirming testimony from others on scene. In 2010—forty-seven years after the assassination—Rodriguez came forward with an elaborate story about three suspicious-looking men who she says were milling around behind the picket fence right before the assassination. Rodriguez was thirteen years old in 1963. On November 22, she and several of her schoolmates were in a car parked near the Book Depository waiting for their chaperone, who was chatting with another adult. That’s when she says she saw a man in a cap and coveralls who looked “like one of those Saturday … matinee kind of characters that you would immediately identify as a railroad man.” He was standing on the railroad bridge overlooking Dealey Plaza. One of Rodriguez’s friends insisted that the man wasn’t supposed to be on the bridge. When someone asked why, the girl replied, “Because my father is a manager in that railroad yard over there … and he told us at breakfast this morning that we could not go over there because government men had come and said that … not even any of the employees could be up on the bridges or anywhere where they had any kind of sightline to the motorcade route.”
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Rodriguez claims that the railroad man signaled to a second man who was lurking near a tree, and that the second man was dressed in a bomber jacket, a “hunter’s plaid shirt,” casual slacks, and a bolo tie. A third man arrived shortly afterwards in “a blue … nondescript Chevrolet.” He was in his twenties, Rodriguez says, and was wearing a dark blue outfit that looked like a gas station attendant’s uniform (she has since nicknamed these three men “tall-blue,” “railroad-man,” and “bolotie”). Tall-blue was wearing a blank name patch on his uniform. She heard him say, “I’m sorry I was held up, you know I couldn’t help it.” “[A]nd so anyway as bolo-tie comes up he looks over at me,” Rodriguez recalls, “and he gives me a calculating glance … to kind of assess the threat … and I of course quickly … looked away, but I knew my timing and I looked back at them. When they came up and [tall-blue] was apologizing [but] bolo-tie shushed him immediately.” Bolo-tie supposedly said, “We don’t have time for that now” before speaking in hushed tones. Rodriguez then saw bolo-tie hand tall-blue a package in a strange spinning motion that reminded her of a marching band maneuver. After that, both men got in their cars and drove away, while railroad-man hustled down the track “lickity split” and disappeared. Although suspicious, Rodriguez says she put the incident out of her mind until she saw a young man in a sporting goods store one day buying a firearm. Right then, she says, a lightbulb went off. “[A]nd here was this package-looking thing, the same dimensions, the same shape, about as long as a man’s thigh, and flat rectanguplar …
And bam, it put me right there looking at that package change hands with these fellows.” Rodriguez says she suddenly realized that bolo-tie had given tall-blue a rifle.
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There is no shortage of strange tales from Dealey Plaza, some told by law enforcement personnel who were present for the assassination or its aftermath. For example, Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig claims that he was standing in front of the courthouse on Main Street when he heard the shots. Trained to respond in a crisis, Craig made the short trip over to Dealey Plaza. While questioning witnesses and searching for clues, he heard someone whistle. “I turned and saw a white male in his twenties running down the grassy knoll from the direction of the Texas School Book Depository building,” he later recalled. “A light green Rambler station wagon was coming slowly west on Elm Street.
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The driver of the station wagon was a husky looking Latin, with dark wavy hair, wearing a tan windbreaker type jacket. He was looking up at the man running toward him. He pulled over to the north curb and picked up the man coming down the hill.” Craig says that heavy traffic prevented him from stopping the vehicle and that it sped away traveling west on Elm Street. He says he then walked over to the Depository and asked to speak with someone in charge. A man in a gray suit identified himself as a Secret Service agent. At first, the man seemed uninterested in Craig’s story, but then started taking notes when Craig mentioned the station wagon. Later that day, Craig stopped by Dallas police headquarters. When he saw Lee Oswald, he identified him as the man he had seen running down the grassy knoll. Craig also says that he asked Oswald about the Rambler. “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine,” Oswald supposedly replied, “Don’t try to drag her into this.”
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Oswald then allegedly added, “Everybody will know who I am now.” Dallas police captain Fritz did not believe Craig’s story and said that the officer never set foot inside Oswald’s interrogation room and therefore had no opportunity for a conversation. Whose testimony should we believe?
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Although there are problems with Craig’s account, where you stand on this one, like so many other aspects of November 22, depends on where you sit—with the lone gunman conclusion or a conspiracy theory.

One aspect of Craig’s testimony is especially noteworthy: his alleged encounter with a Secret Service agent. Other witnesses, many reliable, claim to have seen or talked to one or more Secret Service agents in Dealey Plaza that day. But the Secret Service—whose agents are trained to stay with the president and other protectees in the event of an emergency—has always insisted that none of its employees was on the ground at Dealey Plaza in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. The Warren Commission confirmed this fact by tracing the movements of all agents assigned to the Dallas motorcade.
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However, Dallas officer Joe Marshall Smith was one of the first policemen to
climb the grassy knoll to the parking lot behind the picket fence.
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Told by a witness that the shots had come from the bushes, Smith drew his revolver. “He was beginning to feel, as he put it, ‘damn silly’ when he came across a man standing by a car. The man reacted quickly to the sight of Smith and an accompanying deputy. As Smith remembered it, ‘The man, this character, produces credentials from his hip pocket which showed him to be Secret Service. I have seen those credentials before, and they satisfied me and the deputy sheriff [who was with Smith]. So I immediately accepted that and let him go and continued our search around the cars.’ ”
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According to Smith, the man was wearing casual clothes and had grime under his fingernails. Gordon Arnold also reported the law enforcement officer who took his camera film was a man with dirty fingernails. Without any explanation or additional investigation,
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the Warren Commission accepted the Secret Service’s recommendation that it disregard Smith’s story.
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Smith was a dependable, low-key officer, and no one has suggested he was given to embellishment. This is one of the nagging examples of credible testimony that makes a reasonable person question the conclusions of the Warren Commission. Who was the individual with Secret Service credentials, when those who should know insist no real Secret Service agents could have been at that location?
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Perhaps more disturbing was the official handling of Smith’s statement. It suggests an ostrichlike approach to the evidence: Clues that may have strengthened the case for conspiracy were set aside or downplayed by the commission.