Paul Rigby
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Transcript 1327C emerged three decades after the event. A comparison with interviews conducted and published in the days following the Dallas coup is instructive.
According to 1327C, Kemp Clark was, on the afternoon of the assassination, open-minded on the question of a link between the small entry on the throat’s midline, and the large exit wound at the right rear of Kennedy’s head: “The head wound could have been either the exit wound from the neck or it could have been a tangential wound...”(1).
Now compare that version with the direct quotes from Clark found within John Herbers’ despatch from Dallas, as reproduced in the NYT of November 27, 1963.
Here, in direct contradiction of transcript 1327C, there was no possible connection between the neck and head wounds, for the bullet “that struck him at about the neck tie knot...ranged downward in his chest and did not exit” (2). Had Clark’s powers of recall mysteriously improved between November 22 and November 26, as the 1994 transcript insisted? Or was it the case, rather more probably, that the November 27, 1963, despatch was adjudged inconvenient by the compilers of 1327C?
(1) Transcript 1327C, page B-5, as found in Appendix C, James H. Fetzer (ed.). Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK (Chicago: Catfeet Press, 1998), p.423.
(2) John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says/Physician Reports One Shot Remained in President’s Body After Hitting Him at Level of His Necktie Knot,” NYT, November 27, 1963, p.20.
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No, that's incorrect. The original film--plus one of the three Dallas duplicates--was in the hands of Time-Life starting with the sale that occurred on the morning of November 23, 1963, in accordance with a contract signed that morning, for $50,000. That contract was for print rights only. By Monday, November 25, a completely different contract was executed--an "all rights" deal (for $150,000) in which Time-Life took possession of the film, and owned all rights (i.e., motion picture rights). The payments would be (and were) made in $25,000 increments, on (or just after) the first of every year, out through January, 1968.
The film was only available--as a motion picture film--inside the offices of Time-Life, at the FBI, at the Secret Service, and at the offices of the Warren Commission.
UPI--as well as other news organizations--had some half dozen frames (in black and white)--on or around 11/28/63, and they were widely published in newspapers on that day and/or the next. As far as I know, UPI never had the Zapruder film as a motion picture film.
UPI had the Z film, and it was shown on US TV, most notably on New York's WNEW-TV in the early hours of November 26:
The Valley Independent, (Monessen, Pennsylvania), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 5Film Showing Assassination Is Released
NEW YORK (UPI) — United Press International Newsfilm early today was first on the air with exclusive film showing the assassination of President Kennedy.
The film is 16mm enlarged from 8mm. It was shown on a New York City television station.
The sequence, shot by an amateur photographer in Dallas Friday, begins with motorcycle police coming around the corner followed by the Kennedy motorcade.
The President is then seen leaning over when the bullets strike. Mrs. Kennedy puts her right arm around the President and he slumps out of view. The film then shows a Secret Service agent running toward the car.
The film was shown in slow motion and also stopped at key points in the assassination. The scene was shown four times at different speeds and under different magnifications.
Copies have been rushed to United Press Newsfilm clients all over the world.
Same despatch:
1. “Exclusive Films Show Shooting of Kennedy in Dallas,” Logansport Pharos-Tribune, (Logansport, Indiana), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 2
2. “UPI Newsfilm First On Air With Exclusive,” Great Bend Daily Tribune, (Great Bend, Kansas), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 9
3. “UPI Newsfilm Has Shooting On Film,” Humboldt Standard, (Eureka, California), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, p.2
Richard K. Doan, “Now the Task of Righting Upset Schedules,” New York Herald Tribune, 27 November 1963, section 1, p.21:“WNEW-TV (Channel 5) claimed it was the first TV station in the country to televise an amateur photographer’s film footage of President Kennedy’s assassination. The film was distributed by United Press International and aired by Channel 5 at 12:46 a.m. yesterday.”
Elsewhere in the US:
Milwaukee Journal, November 26, 1963, part 1, p.3"Movie Film Depicts Shooting of Kennedy”
Dallas, Tex.-AP - A strip of color movie film graphically depicting the assassination of President Kennedy was made by a Dallas clothing manufacturer with an 8 millimeter camera.
Several persons in Dallas who have seen the film, which lasts about 15 seconds, say it clearly shows how the president was hit in the head with shattering force by the second of two bullets fired by the assassin.
Life magazine reportedly purchased still picture rights to the material for about $40,000.
"The film also was being distributed by United Press International Newsfilms to subscribing stations. WITI-TV in Milwaukee is a subscriber, but will reserve judgment on whether to show the film until after its officials have viewed it."
This is what the film by Abe Zapruder is reported to show:
First the presidential limousine is coming toward the camera. As it comes abreast of the photographer, Mr. Kennedy is hit by the first bullet, apparently in the neck. He turns toward his wife Jacqueline, seated at his left, and she quickly begins to put her hands around his head.
At the same time, Texas Gov. John Connally, riding directly in front of the president, turns around to see what has happened.
Then Mr. Kennedy is hit on the upper right side of the back of his head with violent force. His head goes forward and then snaps back, and he slumps down on the seat.
At this time, Gov. Connolly is wounded and drops forward on his seat.
Mrs. Kennedy then jumps up and crawls across the back deck of the limousine, apparently seeking the aid of a secret service man who has been trotting behind the slowly moving vehicle. He jumps onto the car and shoves Mrs. Kennedy back into the seat. Then he orders the driver to speed to the hospital where the president died.
The elapsed time from the moment when Mr. Kennedy is first struck until the car disappears in an underpass is about five seconds."
Mark Lane?
Nor was there ever any projection of the Zapruder film at a New York City theater at any time in 1964.(FYI: Mark Lane was lecturing often to packed audiences at the Jan Hus theater in Manhattan at the time. Can you imagine if he could have told audiences to "go to such a such a theater, and watch the Zapruder film!" Sorry, not a chance.)
”A motion picture taken of the President just before, during, and after the shooting, and demonstrated on television showed that the President was looking directly ahead when the first shot, which entered his throat, was fired. A series of still pictures taken from the motion picture and published in Life magazine on Nov. 29 show show exactly the same situation.”from Mark Lane’s Defense Brief for Oswald, published by the National Guardian, 19 December 1963
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/The_critics/L...l_Guardian.html
Paul
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Will the poster please explain what movie theater showed the Zapruder film in 1964?
According to the record (as we now know it), the Z film was locked up tight as a drum at the offices of Time Life.
So I would be very interested in knowing the circumstances of its alleged projection at a New York City theater in 1964. Certainly, there was no media coverage of any such event.
Thanks.
DSL
It wasn't, at least not initially, even in the hands of Time-Life: UPI, Helms' pre-war outfit, had it.
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.ph...amp;hl=Muchmore
Paul
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The obvious question hitherto unbegged:
Given that no film, sound recording or example of contemporaneous note-taking has yet surfaced, how was transcript 1327C compiled?
And why was the basis for it - the recordings or notes - not produced upon its emergence? It was not, after all, as if the absence of record(ing)s was uncontroversial, from the mid-1960s on.
Until and unless the advocates of its "authenticity" adduce the basis for its production, we have no alternative but to conclude that it is a CIA forgery.
A very shrewd one, it must be acknowledged, which combines elements of the truth - the throat wound was of entry - with a sustained pretence that there was no front entry wound of the face/head.
Paul
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Daniel: Then I will say that I hope Daniel and Larry have accurately characterized Horne's position on the subject (and I have no reason to believe they wouldn't let alone haven't). And then we will have to stay tuned for further updates as to whether this is Horne's ultimate conclusion on the subject (in Vol. V presumably). And if it is, we will have to assess the evidence for that conclusion.
And if the evidence strongly suggests that Greer shot John Kennedy with a pistol, firing from the front seat of the limousine ......... then so be it. But it will be one of the more fantastic-sounding conspiracy scenarios to come along, and so one of the least likely to be given much hearing in the court of public opinion. And if that's how it is, then so be that too.
Fair enough. That strikes me as an honourable and prudent position to take. I am not, and never have been, opposed to the raising of legitimate objections/questions, what I have resisted - and will continue to - is the attempt to place the paradigm beyond the realm of legitimate discussion.
Now, having long advanced the proposition that Kennedy was killed by a member of his own bodyguard, it seems to me I have an obligation to set how I think the killing went down.
Let me say at the outset I have no beef with the idea that the CIA plan included provision for shooters from distance - but just not for the actual hit, assuming things went broadly to plan.
I can see two very good grounds for their utilisation: 1) emergency cover for unforseen intrusion or failure; and 2) for the purposes of misdirection. I believe the later is the key to the entire scheme: misdirection.
So here is my paradigm, as assembled from the most germane testimony I have found to date. It is predicated upon the provision from the outset of a fabricated film:
The Secret Service and the false trail up the grassy knoll
Ingenia nostra rerum contrariarum vicinitate fallantur
(Our minds are confused by the close proximity of opposites)
Petrach
Summary:
Secret Service men leave follow-up car: a) run to presidential limousine;
lay false trail up to knoll, c) Kellerman's part in the misdirection; d) SS place responsibility for run up grassy knoll on Dallas police; and e) are blown out by the CIA in satirical, if hubristic, mode.A) The SS checks the target is mortally wounded:
1) Earl Cabell: “No; we couldn't tell. We could tell, of course, there was confusion in the presidential car--activity. The Secret Service men ran to that car,” 7WCH479.2) James Chaney and other unnamed Dallas officers, as related by fellow motorcycle outrider, Marrion L. Baker: “I talked to Jim Chaney…during the time that the Secret Service men were trying to get into the car…from the time the first shot rang out, the car stopped completely, pulled to the left and stopped…I heard several of them say that, Mr. Truly he was standing out there, he said it stopped. Several officers said it stopped completely,” 3WCH265.
3) Norman Similas: “I swung back to look at the car. A Secret Service man ran up with his gun drawn…The Secret Service man opened the car door and I saw the President slumped down to the floor…,” Source: “‘I saw president fall’ – Willowdale man,” Toronto Daily Star, (All Star Night edition), Friday, 22 November 1963, pp.1&13
4) Robert Baskin: “The motorcade ground to a halt. There was a good deal of activity round the President’s car, with Secret Service men running about,” “Day Began As Auspiciously As Any in Kennedy’s Career,” The Dallas Morning News, 23 November 1963, p.2
The false trail to the knoll:1) Ronald B. Fischer: “And, after that, we stood there for 10 or 15 seconds and then we ran up to the top of the hill there where all the Secret Service men had run, thinking that that's where the bullets had come from since they seemed to be searching that area over there. They jumped off-out of cars and ran up the side of the hill there and onto the tracks where these passenger--freight cars were,” 6WCH1962) Jack Franzen: “Mr. FRANZEN advised he and his wife and small son were standing in the grass area west of Houston Street and south of Elm Street at the time the President's motorcade arrived at that location at approximately 12:30 PM on November 22, 1963. He said he heard the sound of an explosion which appeared to him to come from the President's car and noticed small fragments flying inside the President's car and immediately assumed that someone had tossed a firecracker inside the automobile…He noticed the men, who were presumed to be Secret Service Agents, riding in the car directly behind the President's car, unloading from the car, some with firearms in their hands, and noticed police officers and these plain clothesmen [sic] running up the grassy slope across Elm Street from his location and toward a wooded and bushy area located across Elm Street from him… Because of this activity he presumed the shots which were fired came from the shrubbery or bushes toward which these officers appeared to be running,” Statement to the FBI, November 24, 1963: http://www.jfk-online.com/franzen.html
C) Kellerman’s role in the misdirection:
Mark Lane: What were the Secret Service men in the front of the car doing when this happened?S.M. Holland: Well, he was standing up with his machine gun, pointed in the direction that I saw the smoke, and, er, heard the shot come from.
Mark Lane: And which way did he look?
S.M. Holland: He was standing up with a sub-machine pointed in the direction of that picket fence.
From the LP “The Controversy: The Death of John F. Kennedy” (Capitol Records KA02677, 1966)
D) The Secret Service covers its tracks
Compiled from wire reports, “John F. Kennedy Slain!,” Lima News, 22 November 1963, p.2: “Some of the Secret Service agents thought the gunfire was from an automatic weapon fired to the right rear* of the Chief Executive’s car, probably from the grassy knoll to which motorcycle policemen directed their attention as they raced up the slope.”* The assassination took place, of course, further up Elm Street, nearer the Triple Overpass, than the second version of the Z-fake would have us believe.
E) Overview of the rehearsed role of the SS
In its October 1966 edition, Ramparts dedicated its central section to a lengthy, advert-free, investigation of the JFK assassination, the David Welsh-edited In The Shadow of Dallas. In the same edition, on the worn heels of William W. Turner’s penitential memoir of FBI service – “I was a burglar, wiretapper, bugger and spy for the FBI,” a title that read rather more prosaically, one imagines, in the US than the UK - not to mention three pages of vintage Ginsberg gibberish, it served up the most famous spoof in the canon of JFK assassination literature, the review by Jacob Brackman (“a staff editor of the New Yorker magazine”) and Faye Levin (“a graduate of Radcliffe…published in the Harvard crimson”) of a non-existent book by an imaginary author: Ulov. G K. Leboeuf’s self-published tetralogy, Time of the Assassins.As with most successful satires, the review prepared its trap with some care. It began by examining three real works - by Epstein (Legend), Weisberg (Whitewash I), and Lane (Rush to Judgment) – which the duo briskly considered before dismissing them with a judgment of some acuity. All three works, they noted, suffered from an “overweaning reluctance to point a finger.” Then it was on to Leboeuf, and a piece of sustained mockery which combined the knowingness of Monocle, that who’s who of CIA officers and literary fellow-travellers, with a buff’s eye for testimony detail, albeit of a special kind – that which the nominal opposition under review never mentioned. One paragraph has lingered with me ever since I first read it:
One eyewitness to the shooting, Merriweather Really, described the initial reaction as appearing to be an awkward, insufficiently rehearsed play. Two shots rang out in quick succession, he stated, sounding like they were coming from Kennedy’s car itself, or from one of the cars right behind. “The Vice-President slapped Andy Youngblood on the back and whooped, and the entire brigade of police and secret service men made a dash for the Knoll, almost as if,” testified Really, “they had known in advance they were going to head that way.”
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Who intervened contemporaneously to skew knowledge about the wounds?
Secret Service at Parkland:
AP (Dallas), “Connally no longer in danger,” Saturday (morning), 23 November 1963, section 1, p.1: “Mrs. Connally was questioned by Secret Service agents attempting to reconstruct the assassination.”Jim Bishop. The Day Kennedy Was Shot (Toronto: HarperPerennial, 1992 reprint), p.224: As Huber left the hospital, “Two Secret Service men took the priest by the arms. ‘Father,’ one of them said, ‘you don’t know anything.’ He understood.”
Secret Service/KRLD collaboration at Parkland:
Bob Huffaker, Bill Mercer, George Phenix, & Wes Wise (with foreward by Dan Rather). When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963 (Lanham, Maryland: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004), p.27:Bob Huffaker: “I told of the governor’s broken wrist, which at the time was a wound that Secret Servicemen had been unable to explain, beyond speculating that it might have come from another bullet or from Connally’s struggle to survive.”
Prior Secret Service/KRLD collaboration:
Bob Huffaker, Bill Mercer, George Phenix, & Wes Wise (with foreward by Dan Rather). When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963 (Lanham, Maryland: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004), pp.116-117:Wes Wise: “About two weeks after the Adlai Stevenson incident, two weeks before the president was to arrive, Eddie Barker called me into his office.
‘Wes,’ he said soberly, ‘the Secret Service and FBI are intensely interested in the Stevenson film. They want to go over it with you to try and identify people who might be a threat when the president comes.’
Some experts in today’s journalism ethics would frown on such co-operation between law enforcement and objective reporters. But given the circumstances of the times and the intensity of my experience at the U.N. Day meeting, there was no question in my mind that it was the prudent and proper thing to do.
I was in five or six sessions of two or three hours each that would go something like this: several of us would gather with local and federal officers in the little news department projection room. I would start the film on a 16 mm projector.
(p.117>)‘Wait a minute. Let’s see that frame again,’ a Secret Service agent would say.
‘Oh, that’s old so-and-so,’ a Dallas police officer would remark. ‘He might bear watching.’
‘Start it up again.”
‘Let me freeze-frame this,’ I would offer. ‘That guy in the right background got awfully upset at the U.N. meeting.’
The officers took detailed notes. Local police detectives identified certain individuals on the film by name, others by reputation. This we did over and over – repeating, backing up, starting, stopping – as I worked with the law enforcement agencies. I emphasize this cooperation both in the interest of history and to explain my unusual ‘assignment’ later at the Trade Mart, where the president was to speak...
In the social phase of my assignment, I was to watch for anyone I might recognize from the Stevenson incident. I was to advise – unobtrusively, of course – any of the Secret Service and FBI agents if I observed anything even slightly ‘different,’ a term I thought those fellows used somewhat self-consciously. By this time, after so many planning sessions, I could easily identify any agent at a glance.
Alleged FBI intervention into coverage of Parkland doctors’ recollections:
From: Paul Kuntzler's two-page advertorial as published in the New York Times.Source: http://gunnyg.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/lee...y-dale-k-myers/
Connie Kritzberg was a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald. She conducted a telephone interview a couple of hours after Kennedy’s death with the two principal doctors among the 16 doctors who attended Kennedy at Parkland Hospital. Both doctors, as did all 14 other doctors and four nurses reported that he was shot twice from the front, first in the neck and finally in the right temple.
Kritzberg talked to Dr.Williams Kemp Clark, head of neurosurgery, and Dr. Malcolm Perry. She asked the two doctors how many wounds there were in Kennedy’s body. Dr. Clark told Kritzberg that he was working on the gaping hole in the head, and Dr. Perry said he was working on the entrance wound in the neck. Kritzberg said that Dr. Perry said three times that “there was an entrance wound from the front.”
Connie Kritzberg then said she wrote “a simple story, only about 12 inches long, titled “Neck Wound Brings Death” and turned it in.”
The next morning, Saturday, November 23, Kitzberg found that the story she filed had been changed. She found in the story “an unprofessional sentence” in the third paragraph. It said, “A doctor admitted that it was possible there was only one wound.”
“I was very upset,” Kritzberg said. “I called the city desk and talked one of the assistant city editors. I asked him ‘Who changed my story?’ Kritzberg said. “He knew immediately what I meant,” She asked him, “ Who put in that sentence?” The assistant city editor said, “The FBI.”
Connie Kritzburg interview, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, The Final Chapter, episode 7, The Smoking Guns, segment 1:
FBI introduced line into her piece on interview with Perry and Clark in Dallas Times Herald 23 November 1963
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http://www.jfklancerforum.com/dc/dcboard.p...85445&page=
Subject: "RE: Admiral Burkley at Parkland?"Daniel Gallup, Thursday, 31 Dec 2009, on Doug Horne’s multi-volume work:
6. He accepts the possibility of a left-temple head shot as well; this bullet lodged by the right ear and was removed. As of the end of Volume IV, he allows that Greer might have been the shooter.
A third observer, and one with a particularly well-deserved reputation for honest and temperate comment, confirms that Horne does indeed give Greer's involvement serious consideration. Quite right, too.
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Fourth, as a matter of readily verifiable record, Allen Dulles didn't like any suggestion that Kennedy was shot from in front or beside. And, as you've just so eloquently demonstrated, neither do you.
Dulles to Humes:
“Just another question. Am I correct in assuming from what you say that this wound is entirely inconsistent with a wound that might have been administered if the shot were fired from in front of or beside of the President: it had to be fired from behind the President?” [2WCH360].(Humes’ response was no less remarkable: “Scientifically, sir, it is impossible for it to have been fired from other than behind. Or to have exited from other than behind"!)
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Mr. Kelly,
My two statements were in response to Paul Rigby's suggestions about Doug Horne and what Doug may or may not believe; apparently it is Mr. Rigby who believes "that Doug Horne believes that someone in the car shot JFK." Since I was responding to Mr. Rigby's assertion, you've taken issue with what I said (suggesting that there is a negative alternative to Mr. Rigby's happy perspective), instead of recognizing that the "JFK shot by Greer and Doug Horne believes it" idea is not on me but on Mr. Rigby.
I have very little idea of what Doug Horne believes in this regard, but I do stand by the cautionary note I made above. I can certainly believe a protective officer might have drawn his weapon in a situation where there was an attack; but I believe it is simply ridiculous to think a Secret Service agent in the middle of a downtown parade (no matter how suspicious he might be in every other respect) drew his g*dd*mn pistol and fired it into the back seat of the limo -- at the president, past the governor and his wife, all without any son of a b*st*rd somewhere quickly noting such an extraordinary detour in proper procedure .....
...On the other hand, I have a very serious attitude about anyone putting me in the company of Allen Welsh Dulles ......... back in the old days I would've been seriously pissed about such a thing, and let him know about it in an inexcusably vulgar way, but of course now we all have to watch what we say with all these snitches slamming the Report button every other day
Dan,
If the Clint Hill anecdote is indeed in one of Doug Horne's volumes, and I take it that it is given Bill Kelly's non-denial denial, then it directly addresses your claim that no "son of a b*st*rd somewhere quickly noting such an extraordinary detour in proper procedure..." Bill's reluctance to acknowledge the fact tells us something about him, a great deal about the power of group-think in the research community, and nothing whatever about the merits (or otherwise) of the case for an in-car shooting.
Second, you trot out that hoary old line about the execution taking place "in the middle of a downtown parade." What a pity it isn't true: It took place at the sparsely populated fag-end of the drive through Dallas. This irony was noted in contemporaneous press reports. You should really catch up.
Third, I'm very struck at the eruption of foul language. Why this level of emotion? Is this really the disinterested response of an independent researcher? I note with interest that this is not the first time we've seen a similar recourse to this kind of language in response to the proposition.
Fourth, as a matter of readily verifiable record, Allen Dulles didn't like any suggestion that Kennedy was shot from in front or beside. And, as you've just so eloquently demonstrated, neither do you.
Fifth, feel free to let rip without fear of the mods intruding: I've never reported anyone for anything. To the contrary, the more ill-tempered and irrational the response, the better.
Paul
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Dan Rather’s first detailed public description of the Z-film, 1963...
Dan Rather, CBS radio, 25 November 1963, as interviewed by Hughes Rudd and Richard C. Hotelett:
Dan Rather:“Well let me tell you then, give you a word picture of the motion picture that we have just seen. The President’s automobile which was proceeded by only one other car containing Secret Service Agents…the President’s open black Lincoln limousine…made a turn, a left turn off of Houston Street in Dallas onto Elm Street, this was right on the fringe area of the downtown area. This left turn was made right below the window from which the shot was fired.
As the car made the turn, completed the turn, went below the window from which the shot was fired…went on past the building, keep in mind the window was on the sixth floor, it got about 35 yards from the base of the building that is if you had dropped a plumb line from the window to the sidewalk to the President’s car, was around 35 yards from that spot…President Kennedy had just put his right hand up to the side of his right eye, it appeared that he was perhaps brushing back his hair or rubbing his eyebrow. Mrs. Kennedy was not looking in his direction. In front of them, in the jump seat of the Lincoln, were Governor and Mrs. Connally. The Governor, as was the President was on the side of the car of the building in which the assassin was located. Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Connally were on the opposite side, two Secret Servicemen on the front seat.
At almost the instant the President put his hand up to his eyebrow…on the right side of his face, with Mrs. Kennedy looking away…the President lurched forward just a bit, uh, it was obvious he had been hit in the movie, but you had to be looking very closely in order to see it.
Mrs. Kennedy did not appear to be aware that he was hit, but Governor Connally in the seat just in front of the President…seemingly heard the shot…or sensed that something was wrong…Governor Connally whose coat button was open turned in such a way to extend his right hand out toward the President and the Governor seemed to have a look on his face that might say, ‘What is it? What happened?’ and as he turned he exposed his entire shirtfront and chest because his coat was unbuttoned…at that moment a shot very clearly hit the part of the Governor.
He was wounded once with a chest shot, this we now know…uh the Governor fell back in his seat…Mrs. Connally immediately fell over the Governor, uh, I say fell, threw herself over the Governor…and at that instant the second shot, the third shot total, but the second shot hit President Kennedy and there was there, his head…went forward with considerable violence…Mrs. Kennedy stood up immediately her mouth wide open…the President slumped over against Mrs. Kennedy almost toppling her over as she was standing…Mrs. Kennedy then threw herself out of the back seat of the car onto the trunk of the car almost on all fours stretched out over the trunk of the car…there was a Secret Service man standing on the back bumper…it would appear that Mrs. Kennedy was either trying to get herself out of what she knew instinctively was danger or perhaps was trying to grab the Secret Service man and pull him into the back seat of the car for help.
At any rate, Mrs. Kennedy was prone, uh, face down on the back of the car on the trunk…the Secret Service man leaned over put his hands on her shoulders and shoved her back into the car. She seemed to be in danger of perhaps rolling or falling off the back. A Secret Service man in the front seat of the car, uh, was already on the telephone - perhaps he had been on the phone all along, it was not clear – and the car sped away.
Dick Hotelett:
The car never stopped, did it?
Dan Rather:
The car never stopped, it never paused.
Hughes Rudd:
How long did it all take, Dan? In a matter of seconds?
Dan Rather:
Well, the complete scene that I just described to you covers exactly 20 seconds; that is, from the time the car made the turn until the car disappeared onto an underpass.
Dick Hotelett:
Is it clear; is it clear that the President was hit twice?
Dan Rather:
It was very clear that the President was hit twice. He was hit, Governor Connally has hit and the Gov…uh the President was hit again.
Hughes Rudd:
How long a time did the actual three shots take from the first shot until the final shot, Dan?
Dan Rather:
Not more than five seconds and I…am inclined to think slightly less than that perhaps.
Hughes Rudd:
There [sic] must have been very grim pictures to watch, especially today.
Dick Hotelett:
What was the source of these pictures, Dan?
Dan Rather:
An amateur photographer had an 8 millimeter color, uh, camera. He had positioned himself up off the sidewalk on an old street lamp base, he was above the heads of the crowd and he was facing the automobile.
Dick Hotelett:
Of course he was focused on the automobile so there’s no indication of where the shots came from.
Dan Rather:
No, he was focused on the automobile with his back or side to the window from which the shots came. Only the automobile was shown in the film.”
Richard Trask, National Nightmare on six feet of film: Mr Zapruder’s home movie and murder of President Kennedy (Danvers, Mass.: Yeoman Press, 2005), pp.138-142.
Dan Rather's second description of the first version of the Zapruder film on CBS, this time for television news, from November 25:
Walter Cronkite:Correspondent Dan Rather was permitted today to see some films of the actual assassination and here is his report from Dallas.
Dan Rather:
The films we saw were taken by an amateur photographer, who had a particularly good vantage point, just past the building from which the fatal shot was fired. The films show President Kennedy’s open, black limousine, making a left turn off Houston Street on to Elm Street on the fringe of downtown Dallas, a left turn made just below the window in which the assassin was waiting. About 35 yards past the very base of the building, just below the window, President Kennedy could be seen to, to put his right hand, up to the side of his head to, either brush back his hair or cover up his eyebrow. President Kennedy was sitting on the same side of the car, as the building from which the shots came. Mrs. Kennedy was by his side. In the jump seat in front of him, Mrs. Connally, and Governor Connally, Governor Connally on the same side of the car as the President. And in the front seat, two Secret Service men.
Just as the President put that right hand up to the side of his head, he, you could see him, lurch forward. The first shot had hit him. Mrs. Kennedy was looking in another direction, apparently didn’t see him, or sense that first shot, or didn’t hear it. But Governor Connally, in the seat in front, appeared to have heard it, or at least sensed that something was wrong. The Governor’s coat was open. He, he reached back in this fashion, back as if to, to offer aid or ask the President something. At that moment, a shot clearly hit the Governor, in the front, and he fell back in his seat. Mrs. Connally immediately threw herself over him in a protective position.
In the next instant, with this time Mrs. Kennedy apparently looking on, a second shot, the third total shot, hit the President’s head. He, his head can be seen to move violently forward. And Mrs. Kennedy stood up immediately, the President leaned over her way. It appeared that he might have brushed her legs. Mrs. Kennedy then, literally, went over the top of the trunk, of the Lincoln car, p-put practically her whole body on the trunk. It, it appeared she might have been on all fours, there, reaching out for the Secret Service man, the lone Secret Service man who was riding on the bumper of the car, the back bumper on Mrs. Kennedy’s side. Uh, the Secret Service man leaned forward and put his hands on Mrs. Kennedy’s shoulder to, to push her back into the car. She was in some danger, it appeared, of rolling off or falling off. And when we described this before, there was some question about what we meant by Mrs. Kennedy being on the trunk of the car. Only she knows, but it appeared that she was trying desperately to, to get the Secret Service man’s attention or perhaps to help pull him into the car.
The car never stopped, it never paused. In the front seat, a Secret Service man was, was on the telephone. The car picked up speed, and disappeared beneath an underpass. This is Dan Rather in Dallas.
Walter Cronkite:
The White House tonight announced a full investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy under orders from President Johnson. All Federal agencies have been advised to cooperate with the FBI.
Source: Richard B. Trask. National Nightmare on six feet of film: Mr. Zapruder’s home movie and the murder of President Kennedy (Danvers, Mass.: Yeoman Press, 2005), pp. 142-14, citing “CBS Radio Description of Zapruder Film by Dan Rather,” from a transcript from the Richard Sprague Papers, Special Collections Division, Georgetown University Library, Washington, D.C., p.[1-3]
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Dan Rather, CBS Radio interview, 25 November 1963:“I…have just returned from seeing a…a movie…the President’s open black automobile…made a turn, a left turn off of Houston Street in Dallas onto Elm Street…as the car completed the turn…,”
Richard Trask. Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the assassination of President Kennedy (Danvers, Ma: Yeoman Press, 1994), pp.86-87.
Dan Rather’s first detailed public description of the Z-film, 1963, versus Bob Huffaker’s, 2004:
Dan Rather, CBS radio, 25 November 1963, as interviewed by Hughes Rudd and Richard C. Hotelett:
Dan Rather:“Well let me tell you then, give you a word picture of the motion picture that we have just seen. The President’s automobile which was proceeded by only one other car containing Secret Service Agents…the President’s open black Lincoln limousine…made a turn, a left turn off of Houston Street in Dallas onto Elm Street, this was right on the fringe area of the downtown area. This left turn was made right below the window from which the shot was fired.
As the car made the turn, completed the turn, went below the window from which the shot was fired…went on past the building, keep in mind the window was on the sixth floor, it got about 35 yards from the base of the building that is if you had dropped a plumb line from the window to the sidewalk to the President’s car, was around 35 yards from that spot…President Kennedy had just put his right hand up to the side of his right eye, it appeared that he was perhaps brushing back his hair or rubbing his eyebrow. Mrs. Kennedy was not looking in his direction. In front of them, in the jump seat of the Lincoln, were Governor and Mrs. Connally. The Governor, as was the President was on the side of the car of the building in which the assassin was located. Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Connally were on the opposite side, two Secret Servicemen on the front seat.
At almost the instant the President put his hand up to his eyebrow…on the right side of his face, with Mrs. Kennedy looking away…the President lurched forward just a bit, uh, it was obvious he had been hit in the movie, but you had to be looking very closely in order to see it.
Mrs. Kennedy did not appear to be aware that he was hit, but Governor Connally in the seat just in front of the President…seemingly heard the shot…or sensed that something was wrong…Governor Connally whose coat button was open turned in such a way to extend his right hand out toward the President and the Governor seemed to have a look on his face that might say, ‘What is it? What happened?’ and as he turned he exposed his entire shirtfront and chest because his coat was unbuttoned…at that moment a shot very clearly hit the part of the Governor.
He was wounded once with a chest shot, this we now know…uh the Governor fell back in his seat…Mrs. Connally immediately fell over the Governor, uh, I say fell, threw herself over the Governor…and at that instant the second shot, the third shot total, but the second shot hit President Kennedy and there was there, his head…went forward with considerable violence…Mrs. Kennedy stood up immediately her mouth wide open…the President slumped over against Mrs. Kennedy almost toppling her over as she was standing…Mrs. Kennedy then threw herself out of the back seat of the car onto the trunk of the car almost on all fours stretched out over the trunk of the car…there was a Secret Service man standing on the back bumper…it would appear that Mrs. Kennedy was either trying to get herself out of what she knew instinctively was danger or perhaps was trying to grab the Secret Service man and pull him into the back seat of the car for help.
At any rate, Mrs. Kennedy was prone, uh, face down on the back of the car on the trunk…the Secret Service man leaned over put his hands on her shoulders and shoved her back into the car. She seemed to be in danger of perhaps rolling or falling off the back. A Secret Service man in the front seat of the car, uh, was already on the telephone - perhaps he had been on the phone all along, it was not clear – and the car sped away.
Dick Hotelett:
The car never stopped, did it?
Dan Rather:
The car never stopped, it never paused.
Hughes Rudd:
How long did it all take, Dan? In a matter of seconds?
Dan Rather:
Well, the complete scene that I just described to you covers exactly 20 seconds; that is, from the time the car made the turn until the car disappeared onto an underpass.
Dick Hotelett:
Is it clear; is it clear that the President was hit twice?
Dan Rather:
It was very clear that the President was hit twice. He was hit, Governor Connally has hit and the Gov…uh the President was hit again.
Hughes Rudd:
How long a time did the actual three shots take from the first shot until the final shot, Dan?
Dan Rather:
Not more than five seconds and I…am inclined to think slightly less than that perhaps.
Hughes Rudd:
There [sic] must have been very grim pictures to watch, especially today.
Dick Hotelett:
What was the source of these pictures, Dan?
Dan Rather:
An amateur photographer had an 8 millimeter color, uh, camera. He had positioned himself up off the sidewalk on an old street lamp base, he was above the heads of the crowd and he was facing the automobile.
Dick Hotelett:
Of course he was focused on the automobile so there’s no indication of where the shots came from.
Dan Rather:
No, he was focused on the automobile with his back or side to the window from which the shots came. Only the automobile was shown in the film.”
Richard Trask, National Nightmare on six feet of film: Mr Zapruder’s home movie and murder of President Kennedy (Danvers, Mass.: Yeoman Press, 2005), pp.138-142.
Bob Huffaker of KRLD on, er, the same film:
While Jack Ruby had been intervening to confuse an already complicated tale, Dan Rather, the CBS Southwest Bureau chief, had been negotiating to buy the 8mm color movie film that Abraham Zapruder had taken of the fatal bullet striking JFK. The Time-Life corporation outbid him and bought the only film that had captured the terrible sight. We were not allowed to show the film, so each of the three networks could only describe what it revealed. Dan brought a 16 mm print of the film to our newsroom a few days after the assassination, and he and I took it into the projection room. Dan had to view it and feed a report about it to Walter Cronkite’s evening news. I ran the soundless film over and over again for the better part of an hour while Dan took notes.We timed the bullet’s impacts and noted how the president’s head and body reacted to the two shots that hit their mark. We did not know then that the first of the three shots had ricocheted off an oak limb and hit a main street curb. When the second one strikes Kennedy in the upper back, a road sign obscures the president in Abraham Zapruder’s frame, which shows Governor Connally react to the shot from the back. The film shows JFK grasping at his throat when he reappears from behind the sign. As Kennedy holds both arms upward toward his throat where the bullet had emerged, Governor Connally, having glanced over his right shoulder at the sound of the first shot, which had missed, slumps after being hit by the same slug that wounds the president. Then the third and final shot hits the back of Kennedy’s head, which is tilted forward when the bullet blasts away a massive section of right rear skull and brain. The bullet’s plowing through the right posterior brain causes the president’s head to snap to the left and roll violently back towards his horrified wife.
As I ran the now-famous film time after time, Dan and I talked about what its fuzzy sequence revealed. Dan was well acquainted with firearms, and I’d been an expert army rifleman. We agreed that the film showed reactions to at least two hits from behind, consistent with ballistics evidence of shots fired from the sixth floor. I’d warn a lumbar back brace like the president’s, and right or wrong, I speculated that the corsetlike device might have helped to hold JFK up and account for the backward movement of his head and upper body when the final shot had struck.
Dan went to a typewriter, then into our television studio, where he reported our conclusions for CBS. Like the rest of us, he read directly from the copy he wrote, since TelePrompTers were still in their early stages of development. Dan, who had begun his career at KSAM in Huntsville while he was attending Sam Houston State, and while I was at KORA in Bryan thirty miles away, was a careful and wise journalist. Years later some assassination buffs labelled him a conspirator for distorting what Zapruder’s film showed as he reported it that evening. That would make both of us part of the conspiracy.
When the News Went Live: Dallas 1963 (Lanham, Maryland: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004), pp.67-8
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... someone with a different perspective might be less offended than worried that an apparently significant work includes an apparently serious argument about someone shooting John Kennedy in the head from the front seat of the presidential limousine, firing past Governor and Nellie Connally to do so. That alone raises caution about the work and the judgment of the author.
One sees immediately why Horne is so very, very "misguided":
1. Bobby Hargis:Mr. Stern: Do you recall your impression at the time regarding the shots?
Hargis: “Well, at the time it sounded like the shots were right next to me,” 6WCH294.
2. Austin Miller:
Mr. Belin: “Where did the shots sound like they came from?”
Miller: “Well, the way it sounded like, it came from the, I would say right there in the car,” 6WCH225.
3. Charles Brehm: “Drehm seemed to think the shots came from in front or beside the President. He explained the President did not slump forward as if [sic] he would have after being shot from the rear,” “President Dead, Connally Shot,” The Dallas Times Herald, 22 November 1963, p.2 [cited by Joachim Joesten. Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy? (London: Merlin Press, 1964), p.176.]
4. Officer E. L. Boone:" I heard three shots coming from the vicinity of where the President's car was,” 19WCH508.
5. Jack Franzen: “He said he heard the sound of an explosion which appeared to him to come from the President's car and ...small fragments flying inside the vehicle and immediately assumed someone had tossed a firecracker inside the automobile,” 22WCH840.
6. Mrs. Jack Franzen: “Shortly after the President’s automobile passed by…she heard a noise which sounded as if someone had thrown a firecracker into the President’s automobile…at approximately the same time she noticed dust or small pieces of debris flying from the President’s automobile,” 24WCH525.
7. James Altgens: “The last shot sounded like it came from the left side of the car, if it was close range because, if it were a pistol it would have to be fired at close range for any degree of accuracy," 7WCH518.
8. Hugh Betzner, Jr.: “I cannot remember exactly where I was when I saw the following: I heard at least two shots fired and I saw what looked like a firecracker going off in the president's car. My assumption for this was because I saw fragments going up in the air,” 19WCH467
9. Mary Moorman: “The sound popped, well it just sounded like, well, you know, there might have been a firecracker right there in that car,” Jay Hogan interview with Mary Moorman and Jean Hill, KRLD Radio (Dallas), 15:30hrs (CST), 22 November 1963, Tape 5B and 6A (NARA) – see http://educationforum.iphost.com/index.php?showtopic=9364
10. Jean Hill: ““I thought I saw some men in plain clothes shooting back but everything was such a blur...,” Sheriff Department’s statement, 22 November 1963.
11. Don Schulman: “Just then the guard…took out his gun. And he fired also…The guard definitely pulled out his gun and fired,” KNXT-TV reporter, minutes after the assassination of RFK, within Ted Charach’s landmark documentary, The Second Gun.
You join very distinguished company in your concern, Dan, men like...Allen Welch Dulles, for example.
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The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Tuesday, 24 December 1963, p.13
Truman and the CIA
By Richard Starnes
The murmuring chorus of Americans who are deeply concerned with the growing power and headlong wilfulness of the Central Intelligence Agency has been joined by former President Truman.
Mr. Truman must be accounted an expert witness in this matter, because it was under his administration that the CIA came into being. In a copyrighted article he wrote recently that the CIA had strayed wide of the purposes for which he had organized it.
"It has," he wrote, "become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas."
For writing substantially the same thing from South Viet Nam last fall, this reporter was (and still is) subjected to a calculated behind-the-scenes campaign of opprobrium at the hands of the CIA. So, indeed, has the United States' ambassador to Saigon been subjected to the same sort of behind-the-hand attack, on the theory that he was the source of my account of the CIA's heedless bureaucratic arrogance in Saigon.
Mr. Lodge, it is now charged by CIA apologists, destroyed the effectiveness of one of the CIA's most skilful agents. It is also charged that this reporter violated a gentleman's agreement in naming the agent.
Both charges are false, meaching and disingenuous.
The name of the agent, hurriedly summoned home from Saigon within 24 hours of my account of his stewardship of the huge spook operations, was John Richardson. In my several conversations with Ambassador Lodge, Richardson's name never passed between us.
It was, indeed, not necessary for any wayfaring journals to go to any such exalted figures to descry the activities of the CIA's station chief in Saigon. Richardson, a frequent visitor at the presidential palace and a close adviser to the devious and powerful Ngo Dinh Nhu, was widely known in the Vietnamese capital. Until Mr. Lodge replaced Frederick Nolting as ambassador, most knowledgeable Americans and sophisticated Vietnamese regarded Richardson as the most powerful foreigner in Viet Nam.
It is nonsense to say that Lodge destroyed Richardson's value as a CIA agent. In Saigon, Richardson was as clandestine as a calliope with a full head of steam. It is, moreover, a libel to allege (as high CIA officials have alleged) that this reporter violated an agreement to shield Richardson's identity. In all my assiduous inquiries about the man, never once was it suggested that there was an agreement to keep his identity secret. If there had been any such agreement, I would, of course, have respected it even though it would have been plainly absurd in view of Richardson's notoriety.
This is, unfortunately, more than a parochial dispute between a reporter and a writhing, unlovely bureaucracy. The President of the United States himself has been misled by the CIA mythology regarding just how and by whom Richardson's utility as chief resident spook was destroyed. Neither Lodge nor any journalist cast Richardson in his role in Saigon. If CIA chief John McCone really believes that his man in Saigon was compromised by my dispatches (and presumably he does believe this or he would not have planted and cultivated the tale as thoroughly as he has) then he does not know what is going on in the huge, bumbling apparatus he nominally leads.
Mr. Truman knows whereof he speaks. Wise in the ways of malignant bureaucracy, he knows that unfettered and unaccountable power such as is vested in the CIA is bound to feed upon itself until it poses a threat to the very free institutions it was founded to safeguard. No man alive knows the enormous power that is now vested in the CIA, nor the wealth it dispenses, nor the policy it makes. Most people in government would be appalled if they knew that already the CIA has overflowed its huge new headquarters building in McLean, Va., but it is fact that it has done.
There is far, far too much about the CIA that is unknown to far too many Americans. We will, occasionally and from time to time, twang this same sackbut. It is not a pretty tune it plays, but it is an important one.
Truman’s attack on the CIA in the Washington Post of 22 December 1963 was sure to prove a source of profound irritation to a murderous bureaucracy that believed itself above both criticism and the law. Dulles was still scratching vigorously four months later, even as he engrossed himself in the finer points of intimidating a Dallas doctor. Here’s the sequence in order:
A week after the publication of Truman’s attack, the Washington Post rubbed editorial salt into the wound:
“Truman and the CIA,” 28 December 1963, p.A8:
Former President Truman speaks with unique authority about the CIA inasmuch as the agency was organized in his Administration. When he writes, as he did in this newspaper last Sunday, that there “is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position” we can rightly sight up and take notice. Mr. Truman is concerned that the agency’s operational functions have gotten out of hand. So are many Americans.The President makes perfectly clear that a central intelligence agency was an urgent requirement when the CIA was formed. The Chief Executive is virtually blanketed by intelligence documents from many existing agencies. He needs a central organization charged with the duty of assembling various estimates and presenting the facts without the tincture of special pleading. The intelligence reports of the various armed services obviously must reflect, consciously or unconsciously, the institutional bias of services with their own policies to defend.
The trouble is that over the years the CIA had become increasingly entangled in its own operations. It has seemed less an objective interpreter of events than a rival policy arm with a very sharp axe to grind. As Mr. Truman remarks:
“I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassments that I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue – and a subject for enemy cold war propaganda.”
President Truman emphasizes his confidence in the patriotism and ability of CIA officials. That is not in dispute. What is at issue is the wisdom of combining within the CIA functions that should be separate. Moreover, there is real doubt whether any arm of the United States Government should be involved in subversion of another government. Experience suggests that this is an area in which Americans do not excel. Morality suggests that it drains this country’s professed principles of meaning when a shadowy arm of the Government appears to practice the same subversion that we condemn in others.
Francis J. Gavin, “Politics, Power, and U.S. Policy in Iran, 1950-1953,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Winter 1999, (Vol. 1, No 1), pp.88-89:
Note 130:Some of the mythology concerning cover operations may have come from Truman himself. In 1963, a review of a book by Allen Dulles called The Cult of Intelligence appeared in the Washington Post, with Truman listed as the reviewer. Although generally favourable, the review called for the CIA to get out of the covert operations business. Dulles wrote a letter to Truman reminding him that it was under Truman’s guidance that such operations began:
“You will also recall that about a year after the Truman Doctrine declaration of April [March] 1947, you were also the first to take stock of the fact that the Communist subversive threat could not be met solely by the overt type of assistance which you were able to render the beleaguered countries of Greece and Turkey. This peril was evidenced by events early in 1948, with the take-over of Czechoslovakia by secret subversion, the Communist threat to Italian independence in the elections of 1948, and the communizing of Poland, Hungary and the other ‘Satellite’ countries. It was then, in June 1948, that you, through National Security Council action, approved the organization within CIA of a new office to carry out covert operations directed against secret Communist subversion…The administration which followed your own, re-affirmed the need for this type of activity. While the charter that you initially gave the CIA in this field has been slightly modified over the years by NSC action, it remains substantially as you had approved it. It was during ‘Beedle’ Smith’s directorship and again under your directive that the responsibility of the Director of Central Intelligence for covert operations was established, subject of course to the high policy guidance it has always had and to which its has faithfully adhered, despite newspaper reports to the contrary.”
Allen Dulles to the Honorable Harry S. Truman, 7 January 1964, in USNA, RG 263, History Source Collection, NN3-263-94-010, Box 18, File HS/HC, Folder 3.
Dulles then arranged a private meeting with Truman, which is described in the memo.
“I reviewed the various covert steps which had been taken under his authority in suppressing the Huk rebellion in the Philippines, of the problems we had faced during the Italian election in 1948…I then showed him the article in The Washington Post of December 22, 1963, which I suggested seemed to me to be a misrepresentation of his position. I pointed out the number of National Security Actions which…he had taken which dealt with covert operations by the CIA. He studied attentively the Post story and seemed quite astounded by it. In fact, he said that this was all wrong…At no time did Mr. Truman express other than complete agreement with the viewpoint I expressed and several times said he would see what he could do about it…He was highly disturbed at The Washington Post article.*”
Dulles came to the reasonable conclusion that the review article attributed to Truman had been written by someone else.
Memo for Mr. Lawrence R. Houston, General Counsel, from A. W. Dulles, 21 April 1964, in USNA, RG263, History Source Collection, NN3-263-94-010, Box 18, File HS/HC, Folder 3.
*Dulles had evidently developed a taste for this sort of thing during the period in question:
http://www.jfk-assassination.com/warren/wch/vol3/page377.php
Monday, 30 March 1964:
Mr. Dulles: I suggest, Mr. Specter, if you feel it is feasible, you send to the doctor the accounts of his press conference or conferences. And possibly, if you are willing, sir, you could send us a letter, send to the Commission a letter, pointing out the various points in these press conferences where you are inaccurately quoted, so we can have that as a matter of record. Is that feasible?Dr. Perry: That is, sir. Would you prefer that each clipping be edited individually or a general statement?
More on Truman’s attack on the CIA post-Dallas; and Dulles’ attempt to neutralise the former President’s criticisms
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/122909b.html
Are Presidents Afraid of the CIA?By Ray McGovern
December 29, 2009
In the past, I have alluded to Panetta and the Seven Dwarfs. The reference is to CIA Director Leon Panetta and seven of his moral-dwarf predecessors — the ones who sent President Barack Obama a letter on Sept. 18 asking him to “reverse Attorney General Holder’s Aug. 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations.”
Panetta reportedly was also dead set against reopening the investigation — as he was against release of the Justice Department’s “torture memoranda” of 2002, as he has been against releasing pretty much anything at all — the President’s pledges of a new era of openness, notwithstanding. [see Consortiumnews.com’s “CIA Torturers Running Scared.”]
Panetta is even older than I, and hearing is among the first faculties to fail. Perhaps he heard “error” when the President said “era.”
As for the benighted seven, they are more to be pitied than scorned. No longer able to avail themselves of the services of clever Agency lawyers and wordsmiths, they put their names to a letter that reeked of self-interest — not to mention the inappropriateness of asking a President to interfere with an investigation already ordered by the Attorney General.
Three of the seven — George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden — were themselves involved, in one way or another, in planning, conducting or covering up all manner of illegal actions, including torture, assassination and illegal eavesdropping.
In this light, the most transparent part of the letter may be the sentence in which they worry: “There is no reason to expect that the re-opened criminal investigation will remain narrowly focused.”
When asked about the letter on Sunday TV shows on Sept. 20, Obama was careful always to respond first by expressing obligatory “respect” for the CIA and its directors.
With Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation,” though, Obama did allow himself a condescending quip. He commented, “I appreciate the former CIA directors wanting to look out for an institution that they helped to build.”
That quip was, sadly, the exception to the rule. While Obama keeps repeating the mantra that “nobody is above the law,” there is no real sign that he intends to face down Panetta and the Seven Dwarfs — no sign that anyone has breathed new life into federal prosecutor John Durham, to whom Holder gave the mandate for further “preliminary investigation.”
What is generally forgotten is that it was former Attorney General Michael Mukasey who picked Durham two years ago to investigate the CIA’s destruction of 91 tapes of the interrogation of “high-value detainees.”
Durham had scarcely been heard from when Holder added to his job-jar the task of conducting a preliminary investigation regarding the CIA torture specialists. These are the ones whose zeal led them to go beyond the already highly permissive Justice Department guidelines for “harsh interrogation.”
Durham, clearly, is proceeding with all deliberate speed (emphasis on “deliberate”). Someone has even suggested — I trust, in jest — that he has been diverted to the search for the money and other assets that Bernie Maddow stashed away.
In any case, do not hold your breath for findings from Durham anytime soon. Holder appears in no hurry. And President Obama keeps giving off signals that he is afraid of getting crosswise with the CIA — that’s right, afraid.
Not Just Paranoia
In that fear, President Obama stands in the tradition of a dozen American presidents. Harry Truman and John Kennedy were the only ones to take on the CIA directly.
Worst of all, evidence continues to build that the CIA was responsible, at least in part, for the assassination of President Kennedy. Evidence new to me came in response to things I included in my article of Dec. 22, “Break the CIA in Two."
What follows can be considered a sequel that is based on the kind of documentary evidence after which intelligence analysts positively lust.
Unfortunately for the CIA operatives who were involved in the past activities outlined below, the temptation to ask Panetta to put a SECRET stamp on the documentary evidence will not work. Nothing short of blowing up the Truman Library might help some.
But even that would be a largely feckless “covert action,” copy machines having long since done their thing.
In my article of Dec. 22, I referred to Harry Truman’s op-ed of exactly 46 years before, titled “Limit CIA Role to Intelligence,” in which the former President expressed dismay at what the Central Intelligence Agency had become just 16 years after he and Congress created it.
The Washington Post published the op-ed on Dec. 22, 1963, in its early edition, but immediately excised it from later editions. Other media ignored it. The long hand of the CIA?
Truman wrote that he was “disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment” to keep the President promptly and fully informed and had become “an operational and at times policy-making arm of the government.”
The Truman Papers
Documents in the Truman Library show that nine days after Kennedy was assassinated, Truman sketched out in handwritten notes what he wanted to say in the op-ed. He noted, among other things, that the CIA had worked as he intended only “when I had control.”
In Truman’s view, misuse of the CIA began in February 1953, when his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, named Allen Dulles CIA Director. Dulles’s forte was overthrowing governments (in current parlance, “regime change”), and he was quite good at it.
With coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954) under his belt, Dulles was riding high in the late Fifties and moved Cuba to the top of his to-do list.
Accustomed to the carte blanche given him by Eisenhower, Dulles was offended when young President Kennedy came on the scene and had the temerity to ask questions about the Bay of Pigs adventure, which had been set in motion under Eisenhower.
When Kennedy made it clear he would NOT approve the use of U.S. combat forces, Dulles reacted with disdain and set out to mousetrap the new President.
Coffee-stained notes handwritten by Allen Dulles were discovered after his death and reported by historian Lucien S. Vandenbroucke. They show how Dulles drew Kennedy into a plan that was virtually certain to require the use of U.S. combat forces.
In his notes Dulles explained that, “when the chips were down,” the new President would be forced by “the realities of the situation” to give whatever military support was necessary “rather than permit the enterprise to fail.”
Additional detail came from a March 2001 conference on the Bay of Pigs, which included CIA operatives, retired military commanders, scholars and journalists. Daniel Schorr told National Public Radio that he had gained one new perception as a result of the “many hours of talk and heaps of declassified secret documents”:
“It was that the CIA overlords of the invasion, Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Richard Bissell, had their own plan on how to bring the United States into the conflict.… What they expected was that the invaders would establish a beachhead … and appeal for aid from the United States. …
“The assumption was that President Kennedy, who had emphatically banned direct American involvement, would be forced by public opinion to come to the aid of the returning patriots. American forces, probably Marines, would come in to expand the beachhead.
“In fact, President Kennedy was the target of a CIA covert operation that collapsed when the invasion collapsed.”
The “enterprise” which Dulles said could not fail was, of course, the overthrow of Fidel Castro. After mounting several failed operations to assassinate him, this time Dulles meant to get his man, with little or no attention to what the Russians might do in reaction.
Kennedy stuck to his guns, so to speak; fired Dulles and his co-conspirators a few months after the abortive invasion in April 1961; and told a friend that he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”
The outrage was mutual, and when Kennedy himself was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, it must have occurred to Truman that the disgraced Dulles and his outraged associates might not be above conspiring to get rid of a President they felt was soft on Communism — and, incidentally, get even.
In his op-ed of Dec. 22, 1963, Truman warned: “The most important thing … was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions.” It is a safe bet that Truman had the Bay of Pigs fiasco uppermost in mind.
Truman called for CIA’s operational duties [to] be terminated or properly used elsewhere.” (This is as good a recommendation now as it was then, in my view.)
On Dec. 27, 1963, retired Admiral Sidney Souers, whom Truman had appointed to lead his first central intelligence group, sent a “Dear Boss” letter applauding Truman’s outspokenness and blaming Dulles for making the CIA “a different animal than I tried to set up for you.”
Souers specifically lambasted the attempt “to conduct a ‘war’ invading Cuba with a handful of men and without air cover.”
Souers also lamented the fact that the agency’s “principal effort” had evolved into causing “revolutions in smaller countries around the globe,” and added:
“With so much emphasis on operations, it would not surprise me to find that the matter of collecting and processing intelligence has suffered some.”
Clearly, CIA’s operational tail was wagging its substantive dog — a serious problem that persists to this day.
Fox Guarding Hen House
The well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s assassination.
Documents in the Truman Library show that he then mounted a small domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Truman’s and Souers’s warnings about covert action.
So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence, Missouri. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964, Dulles spent a half-hour trying to get the former President to retract what he had said in his op-ed. No dice, said Truman.
No problem, thought Dulles. Four days later, in a formal memo for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA General Counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was “all wrong,” and that Truman “seemed quite astounded at it.”
No doubt Dulles thought it might be handy to have such a memo in CIA files, just in case.
A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so, because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it.
In a June 10, 1964, letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in “strange activities.”
Dulles and Dallas
Dulles could hardly have expected to get Truman to recant publicly. So why was it so important for Dulles to place in CIA files a fabricated retraction? My guess is that in early 1964 he was feeling a good bit of heat from those suggesting the CIA might have been involved somehow in the Kennedy assassination.
Indeed, columnists were asking how the truth could ever come out with Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission. Prescient.
Dulles feared, rightly, that Truman’s limited-edition op-ed might yet hit pay dirt and raise serious questions about covert action. Dulles would have wanted to be in position to flash the Truman “retraction,” with the hope that this would nip any serious questioning in the bud.
The media had already shown how co-opted — er, I mean “cooperative” — it could be.
As the de facto head of the Warren Commission, Dulles was perfectly positioned to exculpate himself and any of his associates, were any commissioners or investigators — or journalists — tempted to question whether the killing in Dallas might have been a CIA covert action.
Did Allen Dulles and other “cloak-and-dagger CIA operatives have a hand in killing President Kennedy and then covering it up? The most up-to-date — and, in my view, the best — dissection of the assassination appeared last year in James Douglass’s book, JFK and the Unspeakable.
After updating and arraying the abundant evidence, and conducting still more interviews, Douglass concludes the answer is Yes
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Professor Fetzer,
Your answer, then, is, "The other guy did it!" Fine, you just edit books. You bear no responsibility for visual effects in your books that trick the reader.
As for the McClelland quote in Six Seconds, what about it? It is part of a chapter that marshals many discriptions of the head would to point out there is a difference between what was observed at Parkland and what the autopsy records show. Back then, that was sort of a new point to make. I am in no way obliged to have done forty some years ago what you deem is appropriate. Just more distraction, eh?
Josiah Thompson
Um. Thompson on McClelland in SSID. A tad inadequate, that explanation, perhaps? Let's revisit a classic piece of Thompsonian "honesty":
Or, How to make an exit wound into an entrance wound…
Yet our most detailed description of the Kennedy head wound appears in the testimony of Parkland Physician Dr. Robert N. McClelland:“As I took the position at the head of the table…I was in such a position that I could very closely examine the head wound and I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been blasted. It had been shattered, apparently, by the force of the shot so that the parietal bone was protruded through the scalp …posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out.”
Dr. McClelland is quite clearly describing an impact on the right-hand side of the head that blasted backward… (1)
Was McClelland doing any such thing? Not according to the Admission Note made out by McClelland on the afternoon of the coup, which is to be found within the Warren Report itself (2):
Cause of death was due to a massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple (3)As Thompson knew full well, when asked by Arlen Specter whether he stood by this verdict – the heroic lawyer, it should be noted, could not bring himself to specify out loud what that verdict was – McClelland replied in the affirmative” (4).
1. Six Seconds in Dallas (Bernard Geis Associates, 1967), p.107, citing 6WCH33.
2. Warren Report, Appendix VIII, Medical Reports from Doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dallas, Tex., p.527.
3. In Commission Exhibit 392, the two-page submission from McClelland, timed at 4:45pm on 22 November 1963, referred to in 2) is again reproduced in17WCH12.
4. 6WCH35.
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At some point, one or more of Doug Horne's exegetes on this forum is, I'm sure, going to offer a word or two, if only for honesty's sake, on the seriousness with which he treats the proposition that William Greer shot his President.
And perhaps reproduce details of the anecdote concerning Clint Hill and the flight back to Washington?
I don't yet have any of the volumes, but I take the following descriptions as accurate summaries.
http://jfkresearch.com/forum3/index.php?to...icseen#msg31146
Re: Doug Horne's book(s) now for sale on Amazon
« Reply #25 on: December 22, 2009, 07:03 AM »
Doug Mizzer:Horne mentions witnesses in the Plaza that day that saw guns drawn inside the limo and thought they were firing back at the assassins. He also higlights a steward that was within earshot of Clint Hill on the trip home from Dallas. The steward claims that as Hill was washing the blood off himself, he blurted out that when he jumped on the rear bumper of the limo, Greer had his handgun pointed directly at him. And as I previously noted, his Moorman photo with the caption about Greer missing from it, is in Volume 1. This is where all the illustrations are located. I believe it's number 76.
« Reply #26 on: December 22, 2009, 07:24 PM »
Larry Hancock:…like it or not Doug does bring up the possiblity of Greer shooting JFK many
times and from a noumber of angles (as Doug pointed out). So far I have found
mention of it in Vol 1, 4 and 5. Doug does caution that he actually hates to bring it
up but he obviously feels strongly enough to do so and introduce it multiple times.
And in truth he seems pretty convinced of it ...certainly as a possiblity if not a
probability. He even states that the Moreman photo is probably altered
to blur out Greer and what he might be doing.
...there is a ton of good stuff in his volumes but there is little doubt that he
is seriously introducing the subject of Greer shooting JFK with a pistol.
My congratulations to Doug for having the courage to follow the evidence, however much it offends partisans of the two great CIA-imposed orthodoxies in the case, the TSBD and the grassy knoll.
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At some point, one or more of Doug Horne's exegetes on this forum is, I'm sure, going to offer a word or two, if only for honesty's sake, on the seriousness with which he treats the proposition that William Greer shot his President.
And perhaps reproduce details of the anecdote concerning Clint Hill and the flight back to Washington?
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From Gary Mack:In 1963, most 16mm TV news cameras were silent (I think that was in one of my earlier notes to you – see my comments regarding WBAP). KRLD’s George Phenix was in a different wing of Parkland where he filmed the hearse leaving at 2:05pm. Phenix’ camera that day was a silent model. Either he or possibly another KRLD photographer filmed part of Kilduff’s announcement at 1:30, but that camera, too, was silent. Both films exist on original KRLD video tapes at The Sixth Floor Museum.
So as far as KRLD is concerned, only one or perhaps two of their photographers are known to have been inside Parkland at some point in time, yet no TV film photographer or microphone can be seen in existing photographs of the Perry-Clark news conference. And no KRLD video cameras were set up in that classroom until after the press conference ended.
Gary Mack
"In 1963 we still relied upon vacuum tubes as well as the newly developled transistor, and our sound cameras used film with an optical sound track alongside the reel of framed pictures. Hold the developed film to the light, and you would see the squiggly white line that reproduced sound as it passed throught the projector,"
Bob Huffaker, When the News Went Live (2004), pp.184-5.
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Break the CIA in Two
By Ray McGovern
Former CIA Agent
December 22, 2009
Consortiumnews.com
http://consortiumnews.com/2009/122209a.html
Editor’s Note: Exactly 46 years ago, President Harry Truman looked back on the still-young CIA, which he had helped create, and was alarmed at how its original purpose – to provide unvarnished information to top policymakers – was being perverted by the agency’s growing role in covert operations.
Nearly a half century since Truman’s warning, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern marvels at Truman’s prescience and suggests that the only answer today is to separate out – and protect – the agency’s core analytical function:
After the CIA-led fiasco at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, President John Kennedy was quoted as saying he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” I can understand his anger, but a thousand is probably too many...
For those of you who may have forgotten, Dec. 22 is the 46th anniversary of the most important op-ed of all the 381,659 written about the CIA since its founding. Do not feel bad if you missed it; the op-ed garnered little attention — either at the time or subsequently.
Media Un-Reaction
A blockbuster op-ed, no? Well, no. Investigator Raymond Marcus is among those struck by the curious lack of response — one might say embargo — regarding Truman’s Washington Post article. Marcus has written:
“According to my information, it was not carried in later editions that day, nor commented on editorially, nor picked up by any other major newspaper, or mentioned in any national radio or TV broadcast.”
What are we to make of this? Was/is it the case, as former CIA Director William Colby is quoted as saying in a different connection, that the CIA “owns everyone of any significance in the major media?” Or at least that it did in the Sixties? How much truth lies beneath Colby’s hyperbole?
Did the CIA and its White House patrons put out the word to squelch a former President’s op-ed already published in an early edition of the Post? Or is there a simpler explanation.
Fascinating piece by McGovern, with much to assent to. The fact is, however, that it's not true that there was no reaction to Truman's op ed within the mainstream US press. Here's the proof:
The New York World-Telegram & Sun, Tuesday, 24 December 1963, p.13Truman and the CIA
By Richard Starnes
The murmuring chorus of Americans who are deeply concerned with the growing power and headlong wilfulness of the Central Intelligence Agency has been joined by former President Truman.
Mr. Truman must be accounted an expert witness in this matter, because it was under his administration that the CIA came into being. In a copyrighted article he wrote recently that the CIA had strayed wide of the purposes for which he had organized it.
"It has," he wrote, "become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas."
For writing substantially the same thing from South Viet Nam last fall, this reporter was (and still is) subjected to a calculated behind-the-scenes campaign of opprobrium at the hands of the CIA. So, indeed, has the United States' ambassador to Saigon been subjected to the same sort of behind-the-hand attack, on the theory that he was the source of my account of the CIA's heedless bureaucratic arrogance in Saigon.
Mr. Lodge, it is now charged by CIA apologists, destroyed the effectiveness of one of the CIA's most skilful agents. It is also charged that this reporter violated a gentleman's agreement in naming the agent.
Both charges are false, meaching and disingenuous.
The name of the agent, hurriedly summoned home from Saigon within 24 hours of my account of his stewardship of the huge spook operations, was John Richardson. In my several conversations with Ambassador Lodge, Richardson's name never passed between us.
It was, indeed, not necessary for any wayfaring journals to go to any such exalted figures to descry the activities of the CIA's station chief in Saigon. Richardson, a frequent visitor at the presidential palace and a close adviser to the devious and powerful Ngo Dinh Nhu, was widely known in the Vietnamese capital. Until Mr. Lodge replaced Frederick Nolting as ambassador, most knowledgeable Americans and sophisticated Vietnamese regarded Richardson as the most powerful foreigner in Viet Nam.
It is nonsense to say that Lodge destroyed Richardson's value as a CIA agent. In Saigon, Richardson was as clandestine as a calliope with a full head of steam. It is, moreover, a libel to allege (as high CIA officials have alleged) that this reporter violated an agreement to shield Richardson's identity. In all my assiduous inquiries about the man, never once was it suggested that there was an agreement to keep his identity secret. If there had been any such agreement, I would, of course, have respected it even though it would have been plainly absurd in view of Richardson's notoriety.
This is, unfortunately, more than a parochial dispute between a reporter and a writhing, unlovely bureaucracy. The President of the United States himself has been misled by the CIA mythology regarding just how and by whom Richardson's utility as chief resident spook was destroyed. Neither Lodge nor any journalist cast Richardson in his role in Saigon. If CIA chief John McCone really believes that his man in Saigon was compromised by my dispatches (and presumably he does believe this or he would not have planted and cultivated the tale as thoroughly as he has) then he does not know what is going on in the huge, bumbling apparatus he nominally leads.
Mr. Truman knows whereof he speaks. Wise in the ways of malignant bureaucracy, he knows that unfettered and unaccountable power such as is vested in the CIA is bound to feed upon itself until it poses a threat to the very free institutions it was founded to safeguard. No man alive knows the enormous power that is now vested in the CIA, nor the wealth it dispenses, nor the policy it makes. Most people in government would be appalled if they knew that already the CIA has overflowed its huge new headquarters building in McLean, Va., but it is fact that it has done.
There is far, far too much about the CIA that is unknown to far too many Americans. We will, occasionally and from time to time, twang this same sackbut. It is not a pretty tune it plays, but it is an important one.
And here's the editorial which preceded Starnes' endorsement of Truman:
New York World-Telegram & Sun, 23 December 1963, p.18AEC and CIA
In a report just released, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (of Congress) takes sharp issue with Defense Secretary McNamara’s decision not to build a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.
The point is not whether the committee or McNamara is right, but that a Congressional committee, with some authority behind it, is in a position to analyze the McNamara decision.
No committee of Congress is in position to perform a similar service with respect to our intelligence agencies.
The Central Intelligence Agency, for instance, operates in high secrecy and there is no watchdog group in Congress informed enough and close enough to the agency to do knowledgeably what the Joint Atomic Energy Committee has done.
Former President Truman, in his recent copyrighted comment, said he thinks the CIA has strayed far afield from the purposes for which it was created in his administration.
Some searching questions should be asked, he said. But there is no authoritative committee in Congress to ask them.
Whether the Atomic Energy Committee’s size-up on the nuclear ship is right or not is not as important as the assurance that there is a bi-partisan, well-equipped committee in Congress to keep a constant check on these matters, for the guidance of the public and especially Congress.
The secret, vital intelligence field should be given the same treatment.
One of the problems afflicting US historians and commentators on the period lies in the curious belief that only the New York Times counts; and that if something wasn't covered by the Old Grey Lady, it didn't get covered at all. The absurdity of such an approach should be obvious to all, not least given the historically close ties between the paper and the CIA.
Paul
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Doug Horne - IARRB, Vol. IV, P. 1203
The Misuse of the Zapruder Film by LIFE Magazine In It's December 6, 1963 Issue
The 'Big Lie' so prevalent in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union was perfected in America in the December 6, 1963 issue of LIFE magazine, the issue which featured numerous photos of President Kennedy's funeral.
In this issue, the corporate entity (Time, Inc.) which had just purchased the film so that it could be suppressed as a motion picture, lied to the public about the film's image content. Because the home movie had not been publicly exhibited as a motion picture, and would not be until 1975, the public did not know that it was being fed a blatant falsehood, but LIFE magazine - presumably Henry Luce and C.D. Jackson - certainly did.
On page 52F, in an article titled "End to Nagging Rumors: the Six Critical Seconds," written by Paul Mandel, there were numerous false statements. The most egregious of these falsehoods attempted to reconcile the reports originating from the Parkland hospital medical staff the day of the assassination (of an entry wound in President Kennedy's throat) with the government's pat explanation the JFK had been killed by lone gunman firing from above and behind the limousine.
Mandel's text begins wih one blatant lie about the medical evidence, and ends with another blatant lie about what was supposedly seen in the (suppressed) Zapruder film:
The description of the President's two wounds by a Dallas doctor who tried to save him have added to the rumors. The doctor said one bullet passed from back to front on the right side of the President's head [Comment: This is completely untrue; no Parkland hospital physician ever said this. On the contrary, they all spoke only of seeing an exit defect in the back of JFK's head.] But the other, the doctor reported, entered the President's throat from the front and then lodged in his body. Since by this time the limousine was 50 yards past Oswald and the President's back was turned almost directly to the sniper, it has been hard to understand how the bullet could enter from the front of his throat. But the 8mm film shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed - toward the sniper's nest - just before he clutches it. [This is pure bullxxxx, of course. the film shows no such thing - JFK never turns to his rear at any time in the extant film. Nor was he physically capable of doing so, so severe were his back problems. [emphasis added by author].
Whether Paul Mandel ever saw the Zapruder film or not, we shall never know. If he did not see it himself, then one of his superiors told him - lied to him - that this is what happened. If he did see the film, then surely he would not have told such a blatant falsehood unless ordered to do so by someone in high authority at LIFE magazine, for this is the kind of mistake that in major journalism is a 'career ender.' Anyone caught in this kind of lie would suffer irreparable loss of inegrity that would forever damage his credibilty as a serious journalist. And we know today that since Mandel's statement is so grossly at odds with what is shown in the Zapruder film, that there is no conceivable way that it could be an innocuous mistake.
If there is a hell, I sincerely hope that Henry Luce and C.D. Jackson are in it.....
p. 1204
Bill,
First things first - thank you for all the extracts etc. you've taken the time and trouble to reproduce from Doug Horne's enormous tome. For those of us without access to the various volumes, it's been a great help. Do keep them coming.
Credit duly paid, the fact is that Horne is quite simply wrong when he isolates Mandel's rank disinfo in the Life edition in question. As demonstrated above, Mandel was simply one contributor in a much bigger campaign which sought to reconcile a front entry in the throat with the Z fraud. This doesn't invalidate everything else he has to say, nor does it mean he is a purveyor of fibs, or anything of the sort. But the point is worth making, not least because it bears directly on the scale of the plot, and much else besides.
Paul
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Features in Zapruder public version 1 (Zpv1) absent from or different to Zapruder public version 2 (Zpv2):
1) Presidential limousine turning left from Houston onto Elm
2) No street sign interposed between camera and President at moment of impact of first bullet
3) Shooting took place further up Elm St towards Overpass, either opposite (or “abreast” of) Zapruder, or beginning at the steps leading up to the grassy knoll
4) Connolly’s white shirt visibly covered in blood following impact of shot
5) JFK’s head went forward in response to impact of head shot
Elements of Zpv1 (1) to (5) described in following:
1) Presidential limousine filmed turning left from Houston onto Elm:
• Abraham Zapruder on WFAA-TV, at 2:10pm CST, November 22, 1963: transcript: http://www.jfk-info.com/wfaa-tv.htm
• Dan Rather, CBS radio & TV, 251163: http://www.i-accuse.com/Rudd_Hotelet.html
• UPI (New York), “Film Showing Assassination Is Released,” The Valley Independent, (Monessen, Pennsylvania), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 5 (description of film shown on WNEW-TV, NY, at 00:46hrs, November 26, 1963)
• Arthur J. Snider (Chicago Daily News Service), “Movies Reconstruct Tragedy,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, (Evening edition), November 27, 1963, section 2, p.1
• Warren Report (U.S. Government Printing Office (1964), p.98
• Roy Kellerman, 090364 (2WCH91): http://jfkassassination.net/russ/testimony/kellerma.htm
• Mark Lane. Rush to Judgment: A Critique of the Warren Commission’s Inquiry into the Murders of President John F. Kennedy, Officer J. D. Tippit and Lee Harvey Oswald (London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966), p.66, footnote 2
2) No street sign interposed between camera and President at moment of impact of first bullet:
• Dallas Morning News, “Photographer Sells Pictures of Assassination for $25,000,” November 24, 1963
• Dan Rather, CBS radio & TV, 251163 (Richard Trask. Pictures of the Pain, p.87): http://www.i-accuse.com/Rudd_Hotelet.html
• Associated Press (Dallas), "Movie Film Depicts Shooting of Kennedy,” Milwaukee Journal, November 26, 1963, part 1, p.3
• UPI (New York), “Film Showing Assassination Is Released,” The Valley Independent, (Monessen, Pennsylvania), Tuesday, November 26, 1963, Page 5 (description of film shown on WNEW-TV, NY, at 00:46hrs, November 26, 1963)
• UPI (Dallas), “Movie Film Shows Murder of President,” Philadelphia Daily News, Tuesday, 26 November 1963, p.3 (4 star edition)
• Express Staff Reporter (New York, Monday), “The Man Who Got the Historic Pictures,” Daily Express, Tuesday, 26 November 1963, p.10
• John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” New York Times, November 27, 1963, p.20
• Arthur J. Snider (Chicago Daily News Service), “Movies Reconstruct Tragedy,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, (Evening edition), November 27, 1963, section 2, p.1
• “The Man Who Killed Kennedy,” Time, December 6, 1963, p.29
• Abraham Zapruder (7WCH571): http://www.jfk-info.com/wc-zapr.htm
• William Manchester, Look magazine, 040467; Death of a President (London: Pan, paperback, 1968), p.234
3) Shooting took place further up Elm St towards Overpass, either opposite (or “abreast” of) Zapruder, or beginning at the steps leading up to the grassy knoll:
• Associated Press (Dallas), "Movie Film Depicts Shooting of Kennedy,” Milwaukee Journal, November 26, 1963, part 1, p.3
• John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” New York Times, November 27, 1963, p.20
• Abraham Zapruder, 7WCH571: http://www.jfk-info.com/wc-zapr.htm
• Harold Feldman, “Fifty-one witnesses: The Grassy Knoll,” The Minority of One, March 1965, p.17
• John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” New York Times, November 27, 1963, p.20
4) Connolly’s white shirt visibly covered in blood following impact of shot:
• Dan Rather, CBS, Radio & TV, 251163: http://www.etcfilmunit.com/iaccuse.html
5) JFK’s head went forward in response to impact of head shot:
• Dan Rather, CBS, Radio & TV, 251163 (Richard Trask, Pictures of the Pain (Danvers, Mass.: Yeoman Press, 1994, p.87): http://www.etcfilmunit.com/iaccuse.html
• Associated Press (Dallas), "Movie Film Depicts Shooting of Kennedy,” Milwaukee Journal, November 26, 1963, part 1, p.3
• UPI (Dallas), “Movie Film Shows Murder of President,” Philadelphia Daily News, Tuesday, 26 November 1963, p.3 (4 star edition)
• John Herbers, “Kennedy Struck by Two Bullets, Doctor Who Attended Him Says,” New York Times, November 27, 1963, p.20
• Cartha DeLoach, Hoover’s FBI: The Inside Story by Hoover’s Trusted Lieutenant (1995), p.139: http://www.kenrahn.com/jfk/the_critics/gri...Alteration.html
Most of the newspaper articles cited above can be found in the thread Eleven early print descriptions of the Zapruder film: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=8953
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Of the original “Who Killed Kennedy Committee” only John Arden, John Calder and Michael Foot are still alive.
Peace News, 7 October 1966, pp.1-3
‘A First Class Texas Job’
By John Arden
Rush to Judgment, by Mark Lane (Bodley Head, 42s.)
Inquest, by E. J. Epstein (Hutchinson, 30s.)
Somebody once said that “the man on the Clapham omnibus” was the sort of typical figure of average common-sense whom judges, juries, lawyers and the like ought to have at the backs of their minds as a point of reference when considering complex and over-technical legal problems. If this anonymous traveller does not have the expert knowledge and confidential sources of information possessed by the police or the pathologists or the psychiatrists, at least, so runs the argument, he may have some degree of intelligent objectivity that can enable him to distinguish wood from trees and thus come a little nearer to a just understanding of the truth. He seems to have been referred to very infrequently during the inquiries concerning the death of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963.Now I myself do not often travel to Clapham, and I have not personally consulted “the man on the omnibus.” The nearest I got to him was perhaps “the man at the Dublin dinner party,” the evening of the day upon which it was announced that Oswald had been shot by Ruby. The conversation turned naturally upon the news from Dallas; indeed, it did more than turn, it was obsessed by it. “Who do you think did it?”, “What’s your interpretation?”, “Is any of the official story true?”, etc. Then this man said:
“Whoever did it, and for whatever reason, there is no doubt in my mind that the whole thing is a first class Texas job.”
I asked him exactly what he meant and he replied, in effect:
“You go to the cinema, don’t you? You enjoy Western films? Well, Dallas is a great modern city, as far as its material way of life is concerned; but spiritually it is still more or less a wide-open town of the 1880s, and the murders of Kennedy and Oswald and Tippit belong to that period of history. Whatever their subsequent effects upon the history of our own time, they must be viewed through the appropriate retrospective lenses, which in this case are the lenses of a film camera. It doesn’t have to be a good film, even. The Wild West in its own time saw itself as a mythological age and dramatised itself in exactly the same way as the cinema has done ever since.”
Let me give one example of this self-dramatisation which I found out about later: a civilian motorist in Texas is apparently permitted, by state law, to carry a gun in his map compartment on the grounds that “saddle holsters” are a necessary provision for self-defence when making a journey across the desert; nobody knows when rustlers, Mexican bandits, Injuns, or Billy the Kid might not suddenly turn up.
And turn up they did, with a vengeance, in Dallas, in 1963.
Wild West scenario
So let me, a dramatist by trade and not a lawyer like Mr. Lane nor an academic like Mr. Epstein, set out a few notions for a film sequence of just such a “first class Texas job.” We are in Texas, around 1880, and an important person, much loved and much hated, is about to arrive in town. He does not have to be the President: he need be no more than the fearless, hard-hitting editor of a newspaper who has been exposing a number of local financial scandals involving large scale cattle transactions and various dubious deals with the Apaches. He is believed to be interested in examining the causes of a recent and nearly disastrous Indian rising, and he is known to be anxious to find ways and means of coming to some sort of accommodation with, say, Geronimo, the scourge of the south-west. He has expressed the opinion that the said scourge has been unduly provoked by the US Cavalry, in alliance with the Texas Rangers and, more important, he is being listened to in Washington. He is played by Spencer Tracy.
As the stage coach swings into the dung-covered main street, a volley of shots ring out and Mr. Tracy falls back into his seat, dead. Confusion in the street. Everyone runs backwards and forwards, and guns go off all round the compass. From the Sheriff’s Office emerges the Sheriff (Dean Jagger) yelling: “Some renegade’s shot the Editor!” The cry is taken up from end to end of the town, and after having utilised about thirty seconds of sound track it becomes, rather strangely, metamorphosed into a shout of “That half-breed’s shot the Editor!” Immediate rush of persons to a shack on the edge of the desert in which dwells Anthony Perkins, half-breed and generally disreputable character. When the posse, or lynch mob, or whatever it is, gets to the shack, it is to discover Mr. Perkins standing, bewildered, over the corpse of the Sheriff’s Deputy (Lee Marvin). A smoking gun lies beside the porch, and the half-breed’s redskin wife (Jean Simmons, for some reason) grovels in the dust, screaming hysterically. Perkins is hauled off to jail, and the Sheriff, his thumb in his waistcoat, a shotgun in the crook of his elbow, and an ambiguous smile under his moustache, makes a great performance of telling everyone within earshot that:
“This man’s gonna git a fair trail or else Ah wanta know the reason why. An’ he’s gonna git his fair trail at ten o’clock on Tuesday mornin’, and at precisely ten o’clock on Tuesday mornin’ Ah’m abringin’ him out o’ this yar jail house and Ah’m atakin’ him across the street to that thar court house and no-one’s agoin’ to stop me!”
Short interlude inside the jail during which Mr. Perkins rattles the bars and shrieks: “You can’t hang an innocent man!” And then, Tuesday morning. Amidst a roaring, muttering, definitely overacting crowd of unwashed extras, the prisoner is led out of the jail. A pause on the veranda while the Sheriff addresses a few more self-congratulatory remarks to the citizens. Then, suddenly, through the press comes Frank Sinatra (or perhaps Dean Martin) in a character part: beat-up gambler who has been established as alternately beating up and making love to the girls in the saloon. He has also been established as a great pal of Mr. Jagger and also of Mr. Marvin, and with a swift lunge of his right arm he fires six successive bullets straight into Mr. Perkins’s stomach.
He then breaks down and sobs out something about “That Editor was a fine man and he had the sweetest little wife this side of the Rio Grande. She never knew I existed even , but I’m telling you all, I did it for her sake.” Further up the street, a slow track of the camera reveals a group of well-fed gentlemen in frock coats and spotless Stetsons, smoking cheroots and apparently very much at ease with the world. They are on the steps of the Inter-State Cattleman’s Bank and Trading Assoc. Inc., and among their frock coats is at least one blue and braided cavalry uniform.
Now any ordinary audience will have a very fair idea of what such a sequence means. It means that a reel or two later James Stewart is going to discover on behalf of the “simple, decent people of this state” (i.e. a group of hymn singing smallholders, at feud with the cattlemen, and suspicious of Mr. Stewart, because he is supposed to be a professional gunfighter) that the Sheriff, the Deputy, and a number of others are all in a conspiracy , backed by the frock coats and the uniform, to kill Mr. Tracy and implicate the Mr. Perkins (who, being a half-breed, has no friends). The actual shots at the stage coach were probably fired by Mr. Marvin, though Mr. Perkins may have been blackmailed into expending at least one cartridge, and Mr. Marvin, unfortunately, has made a mess of his second assignment, which was to kill Mr. Perkins before he could be arrested, so the Sinatra/Martin character has had to be called in to finish the job. This was unwise, because being such an unstable individual, he is liable to overdo it. His fervent expressions of devotion to the Editor’s wife are an example of his injudicious zeal in this direction.
Of course, the flaw in this argument is fairly obvious. Had the Sherriff been played by John Wayne rather than Dean Jagger, the audience would take an entirely different interpretation, and there would be no need to put James Stewart under contract at all, because Mr. Wayne would clearly be able to wind up the story on his own, positively oozing independent integrity. But in fact, in Dallas, three years ago, there was no John Wayne, and a great deal of trouble was taken to see that there was to be no James Stewart either. Nevertheless, after one or two false claimants (terrible old hams, for the most part, whose mouthings and sawings of the air would convince very few Clapham commuters) he has turned up. He is, of course, Mark Lane, and he has been given some unexpected and not entirely sympathetic assistance by Edward Jay Epstein.
Mr. Lane comes into the business as the legal adviser of Mrs. Oswald, mother of the alleged assassin, and he attended (or rather, tried to attend, for there was great resentment against him, and he was pretty successfully obstructed) the meetings of the Warren Commission in order to guard the posthumous interests of her unhappy son. As Oswald was dead there was no regular trial for murder. The Warren Commission was supposed to find out who had done the murder: but in fact, as Mr. Lane clearly establishes in his book, they began their sessions with an unconscious (one could almost say conscious) assumption that the Dallas police and the FBI were quite right and that the arrested man was in fact the guilty man. Thus the evidence brought forward into the Commission’s final summary of its report is nearly all what one would call “prosecution evidence.” Other (“defence”) evidence was heard by the Commission, and it appears in the supplementary volumes of the report (all 26 of them). Mr. Lane has collated this raw material with the Commission’s own summing up and interpretation of it in the first volume; and he has come to the conclusion, from which it is difficult to dissent, that a jury at Oswald’s trial (had he been alive to have faced one) might very well have brought in a verdict of “not guilty,” if only because there was insufficient weight of proof presented.
The witnesses before the Warren Commission were not cross examined in the interests of the accused, and a great many inconsistencies, contradictions, evasions, and downright lies were allowed to go unquestioned, the Commission being anxious to show that Oswald and nobody else killed Kennedy, that Oswald and nobody else killed Tippit, and that Ruby killed Oswald without assistance, encouragement, inducement, or even motive. Ruby, you see, like Oswald, was barmy; therefore the consistency of his acts need not be examined, he could not be part of a conspiracy, and America can turn over and go to sleep again untroubled. Such, in brief, is Mark Lane’s thesis.
And such is also the general tenor of Mr. Epstein’s book. This work is not, in origin, a partisan piece of writing. It is based, indeed upon an objective survey of the actual workings of the Commission itself, and those members who provided the author with his information must by now be feeling a little queasy. But Earl Warren, it has been argued, is an excellent famous Judge, whose services to the cause of right and liberal truth have been innumerable. His fellow commissioners were men of proven integrity; indeed, great care was taken to exclude “controversial” figures from the Commission, whatever that means, but we have Mr. Epstein’s word that it was done.
Mysterious deaths
Can we then believe that such an honourable assembly could sit down to examine a notorious and outrageous crime and then calmly agree to hush it up and paper it over? At this point, Mr. Epstein gets nervous. He points out, rightly, that in fact the Commission was not quite all it appeared to be. The senior members did not sit continuously; some of them hardly attended at all. But then they were busy public servants and had other responsibilities. So much of the detailed work of taking and evaluating evidence was left to their junior assistants. These, in turn, relied upon the FBI and other investigatory bodies for the greater part of their work, and if a group of young and ambitious lawyers should be a little embarrassed and more than a little deferential in the face of ex cathedra pronouncements from the mighty J. Edgar Hoover, FBI chief, then we should be neither surprised nor condemnatory. There may have been inefficiency, there was certainly undue haste, but there was no villainous collusion. Besides, anyone can make a mistake; and the interests of public order were well served. The Commission, it may be claimed, is vindicated by results: Oswald was found to have done everything he was supposed to have done, and nothing else; and there were no race riots, insurrections or further assassinations.
No, that is not quite true. If we refer to Mr. Lane at this point, we discover that afterwards, in Dallas, there were one or two mysterious deaths and assaults and outbreaks of threat. Of course, Dallas is Dallas, where map compartments in a motor car are saddle holsters on a horse, and it might happen to anyone, down there. But why did it have to happen to Mr. Lane’s particular list of people, who had all offered evidence that in some way might have helped, had it been examined more closely, to clear Oswald of guilt, or at least to provide him with one or more confederates.
Awkward questions
So perhaps there a conspiracy? My own view is that there certainly was. But it need not have been a very big one. We do not have to indulge ourselves with the seductive myths of international plots, which is a game leading rapidly to McCarthyite hysteria and theories about the “Protocols of Zion.” But suppose there were a few men in Dallas who hated Kennedy (John Birchers or petty racialists seem the most plausible suggestions) who were also in a position to cover their tracks with the assistance of some of the local police? For instance, when Oswald was brought out to the car that was to take him to the prison, there was a tremendous guard of lawmen to protect him in the fatal basement; but at the crucial moment, there was no car in position. So they all had to stand and wait for the vehicle, with their prisoner well to the fore, not even covered by a blanket in the time honoured British way; and when Ruby came forward he found Oswald so liberally presented to his gun that he might have been put there on purpose. Perhaps he was. Anyway, the local police had some awkward questions to face. The FBI did not make them any more awkward than they had to. Why not? Well, there is a question that Oswald might have been an FBI agent. The mighty Hoover, beating as he swept as he cleaned, (flatly) said that this was not the case. The Commission took his word and thanked him fulsomely for his co-operation.
FBI’s heel
Does this mean that the whole thing was an FBI job? I do not think so. Even if a presumably sophisticated man like Hoover believed that Kennedy alone was responsible for the conception and working out of policies that might have been unsatisfactory by FBI standards (which would no doubt, to Hoover, have meant treasonable policies), it is not probable that such policies would be necessarily reversed by killing Kennedy. It is much more likely that the FBI is as the Church of Rome or the Communist Party and cannot bear to admit error. Therefore a rumour that his smallest of small fry informants was mixed up in the death of the President would appear to the mighty Hoover like an arrow in the heel to the godlike Achilles, and it would have to be prevented by whatever means came first to hand. If such a means was the murder of Oswald then it would have to be done. It would be organised by some dedicated servant of the public good, carried out by a convenient near-criminal (Ruby), and covered up by the blandest of Olympian denials. Such events take place daily in the world of the secret police, and the public enjoys them weekly in the world of the cinema, but it is rare that their repercussions interest quite so many people in quite so many places as happened on this particular occasion. The apparently pusillanimous reaction of the Warren Commission need not upset us too much; unless, of course, we are the sort of people who really do believe that an honest man in public life has only to be honest and all falsehood will flee before him. Imagine yourself to be Earl Warren or one of his colleagues confronted with a piece of evidence that suggests that Oswald was in the FBI and that the FBI are covering this up, or that Oswald’s hiding place in the Book Depository was not the only place from which shots were fired at the presidential motorcade, or that Ruby and Tippit and a well known rightist called Weissman had a meeting in Ruby’s strip club a whole week before the murders. (All these suggestions were made, and were rejected by the Commission on not very adequate grounds.) Now, what are you going to do? You have three choices.
1. Hush the whole thing up, silence the inconvenient witnesses by trumped up charges of drug addiction and what not, and publish nothing at all of the truth.
2. Accept the “Oswald defence” evidence as at least as plausible as the rest (which it was, as Mr. Lane makes clear).
3. Publish all the evidence, but contrive to denigrate those parts of it that do not fit the preconceived theory.
The true dishonest conspirator would follow course number 1. This is what was apparently done by the Dallas police and perhaps by the FBI. But the Commissioners did not. Nor did they follow course number 2. If they had, they would really have been in trouble. They might have had to find that Oswald was innocent, in which case who was guilty? Or that he had associates, and then who would they be? Heaven knows what would turn up. Why, LBJ is a Texan. Suppose some friends of his were mixed up in it? Even if he cleared himself, to the satisfaction of the Commission, what would the public think? Let alone the Republicans. And who among that loyal Commission (appointed by the President) would dare to ask the President to clear himself? Lord Denning’s little job was cushy compared with this. The nation, as they say, would be plunged into anarchy. The most liberal of judges would surely blench at such a prospect.
So were are left with course number 3. They did indeed publish nearly all of what they were told. But they did not enlarge upon it, when it posed too many questions, and they published it in no less than 26 volumes. You need stamina to read them all and separate wheat from chaff, and there was plenty of chaff. To assist the weary student and to prepare the newspapers of the world, the Commission’s conclusions, tendentious and half-baked, were carefully listed in the first volume and only a man with a direct interest in the case, like Mark Lane, would trouble to read further, and make notes as he read.
Which brings us to a final point. Anyone, a year or two ago, who ventured to suggest that Mark Lane might have some pertinent things to say, and should be encouraged to say them, was subjected to an extraordinary campaign of vilification from quite unexpected directions: The Guardian, where a Mr. Grigg threw such words about as “renegade” (see my improvised film treatment above!), The New Statesman, and even Peace News, they all came swinging in about our heads, demanding resignations, retractions and general public breast beating. But now Mr.Lane has written his book. He may not be right; he is, after all, no more than an advocate. But as an advocate he presents the side of the case that no-one wanted to hear. The Warren Commission desired above all to preserve public order and a quiet mind in time of trouble. Agreeable objects, but if we possess them at the expense of truth, we are not likely to be able to enjoy them for very long.
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From Gary Mack:KRLD's remote truck was stationed at the Dallas Trade Mart for local pool coverage of JFK's planned speech at 1pm. The original KRLD video tape is in The Sixth Floor Museum's collection showing interior scenes at the venue with voiceover narration by the station's news director, Eddie Barker. His live broadcast ended at 1:30pm and, shortly thereafter, as Eddie told me personally years ago, the technicians and engineers disconnected all three cameras, cables and lights, packed them up in the truck, and headed for Parkland Hospital. Eddie returned to KRLD where he co-anchored some Dallas reports for CBS, which was the network KRLD had carried since sign on in 1949.
By the time KRLD got their truck stationed, the microwave feed to the studio set up and cameras, lights and assorted equipment connected and adjusted, the doctors' press conference had ended. KRLD was still setting up in that same room shortly after a 3:30pm conference with Dr. Robert Shaw, discussing Connally's wounds, began. That video tape is also in the Museum's collection.
Gary Mack
So if Barker's live broadcast from the trade mart ended at 1.30, and if the Perry/Clark conference began at 2.13 at Parkland, KRLD had less than 45 minutes to pack up cameras, etc., truck everything to Parkland, find out where the press conference would be, and get everything set up again.
According to Google Maps, the actual driving time is only 5 minutes, but I can easily imagine that it took an hour or more to do all that.
Oh dear, Jay: Big Mack dependency - it's fatal. The greater the reliance, the flabbier the conclusion.
Alas for this compelling tale, there was at least one KRLD cameraman at Parkland work between 1.30 and, let's be generous, 2.00 p.m. - his name was George Phenix. He filmed the departure of the First Lady and the coffin using a Bell and Howell 16 mm camera reportedly much favoured by TV news crews of the period.
Now, according to the Dallas Establisment-CIA version of his work that mournful afternoon, Phenix no sooner concludes filming that departure than he runs into a colleague, Dan Garza, and the two of them hasten away to Love Field, there to take lots of compelling shots of planes from long distance. (By his own admission, the SS wouldn't let him anywhere near LBJ et al.)
So much for the official DE/CIA version.
The problem with this version is that said colleague Garza a) didn't know Phenix was at Parkland, but had
nevertheless brought fresh 16 mm film to Parkland for two other colleagues, one of whom, Warren Fulks, had, according to the other, Bob Huffaker, grabbed a camera when the pair made the dash from KRLD studios to Parkland. And which one of the two attended the Kilduff press conference?
Yes, you got it, Warren Fulks.
On second thoughts, Mack resembles nothing so much as a WWI general, sending his ill-equipped legions over the top to be mown down like leaves in a gale.
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In response to some questions I sent him, Gary Mack has sent me this email about the Perry/Clark press conference, which he says is based on "information I’ve learned over the years from those who were there."Also, there were no TV video cameras at the Perry-Clark press conference. WBAP’s remote truck blew the engine a few miles from the station’s east Fort Worth studio and it was later towed to the Dallas Police station. The WFAA and KTVT trucks arrived outside Parkland minutes before the hearse left with Kennedy’s body at 2:05. Their video cameras, however, weren’t set up inside Parkland until after the Perry-Clark conference ended. KRLD’s truck arrived even later, but their camera (and WFAA’s) caught most of Dr. Robert Shaw’s press conference around 3:30pm.Gary Mack
Dan Rather looks ahead to clarification from Parkland of the "confusion" (Von Pein 13 of 65):
“A briefing session for newsmen is anticipated at Parkland Hospital at any one moment, er, Pierre Salinger, the Presidential press secretary, presumably will preside over that briefing session. We hope to bring you that briefing session either live from the hospital or on film."
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The vanishing left temple entrance - wound location noted by Parkland and Bethesda staff
Parkland medical staff:
a) Dr. Robert McClelland: "The cause of death was due to a massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple," Commission Exhibit 392. [‘Admission Note,’ written 22 Nov 1963 at 4.45 pm, reproduced in WCR572, & 17WCH11-12: cited in Lifton’s Best Evidence, p.55; and Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact, pp.159-160.]
Dr. Marion Jenkins: "I don't know whether this is right or not, but I thought there was a wound on the left temporal area, right in the hairline and right above the zygomatic process," 6WH48. [Cited by Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After The Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities, & The Report (New York: Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), p. 40.]c) Dr. Robert Shaw: "The third bullet struck the President on the left side of the head in the region of the left temporal region and made a large wound of exit on the right side of the head," Letter from Dr. Shaw to Larry Ross, "Did Two Gunmen Cut Down Kennedy?", Today (British magazine), 15 February 1964, p.4.
d) Dr. David Stewart: “This was the finding of all the physicians who were in attendance. There was a small wound in the left front of the President’s head and there was a quite massive wound of exit at the right back side of the head, and it was felt by all the physicians at the time to be a wound of entry which went in the front,” The Joe Dolan (Radio) Show, KNEW (Oakland, California), at 08:15hrs on 10 April 1967. (Cited by Harold Weisberg. Selections from Whitewash (NY: Carroll & Graf/Richard Gallen, 1994), pp.331-2.)
Bethesda: Drs. Humes & Boswell:
“The autopsy documents also provide some cryptic indications of damage to the left side of the head. The notorious face-sheet on which Dr. J. Thornton Boswell committed his unfortunate 'diagram error' consists of front and back outlines of a male figure. On the front figure, the autopsy surgeons entered the tracheotomy incision (6.5 cm), the four cut-downs made in the Parkland emergency room for administration of infusions (2 cms. Each), and a small circle at the right eye, with the marginal notation '0.8 cm,' apparently representing damage produced by the two bullet fragments that lodged there. Dr. Humes testified that the fragments measured 7 by 2 mm and 3 by 1 mm respectively (2H354). Although he said nothing about the damage at the left eye, the diagram shows a small dot at that site, labeled '0.4 cm' (CE 397, Vol XVII, p.45). Neither Arlen Specter, who conducted the questioning of the autopsy surgeons, nor the Commission members and lawyers present asked any questions about this indication on the diagram of damage at the left eye.
Turning back to the male outline of the figure – the one Dr. Boswell did not realize would become a public document even though it had to be assumed at the time of the autopsy that findings would become evidence at the trial of the accused assassin – we find a small circle at the back of the head about equidistant from the ears and level with the top of the ears. Apparently this represents the small entrance wound which the autopsy surgeons and the Warren Commission say entered the back of the head and exploded out through the right side, carrying large large segments of the skull. but an arrow at the wound on the diagram points to the front and leftand not to the front and right.
A forensic pathologist who was asked to interpret this feature said that it signified that a missile had entered the back of the head traveling to the left and front. As if in confirmation, an autopsy diagram of the skull (CE 397, Vol XVII, p.46) shows a large rectangle marked '3 cm' at the site of the left eye, with a ragged lateral margin, seemingly to indicate fracture or missing bone.
The autopsy surgeons were not questioned about any of the three diagram indications of bullet damage at the left eye or left temple. Nevertheless, when Dr. Jenkins testified that he thought there was a wound in the left temporal area, Arlen Specter replied, 'The autopsy report disclosed no such developments,'” Sylvia Meagher. Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities & The Report (NY, Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), pp.161-2.
lay false trail up to knoll, c) Kellerman's part in the misdirection; d) SS place responsibility for run up grassy knoll on Dallas police; and e) are blown out by the CIA in satirical, if hubristic, mode.
Dr. Marion Jenkins: "I don't know whether this is right or not, but I thought there was a wound on the left temporal area, right in the hairline and right above the zygomatic process," 6WH48. [Cited by Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After The Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities, & The Report (New York: Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), p. 40.]
David Lifton -- Final Charade
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
1. Wolper produced 32 episodes of the 1954 series OSS: it is inconceivable that the CIA did not take a keen interest in the shaping of the series, not least because of the presence of so many ex-OSS in its own ranks, among them, the most senior.
2. The Wolper documentary Four Days in November, released in October 1964, was made in conjunction with UPI, and debuted just as UPI completed its takeover of Wolper's production company and its (five?) subsidiaries.
3. Four Days is perhaps most remarkable for what it omits - any footage of the presidential limousine turning the corner from Houston on Elm:
4. The absence of any footage of said turn is more than a little curious because according to a UPI despatch from New York in the early hours of Tuesday, November 26, 1963, it had footage of precisely that turn:
My conclusion from the above?
Rather to my surprise, I find Pamela's recollection entirely credible, for this additional reason: The version of the Zapruder fake which, unannounced, followed Wolper's cynical piece of pro-WC hackwork was almost certainly the second version, the one which had removed the left turn from Houston on to Elm. What I suspect she was subjected to was a small scale experiment in perception management, as part of the preparation for introducing the new, improved version of the Zapruder fake.
Paul