Simple proof that the Zapruder film has been altered.

[Joseph McBride]

From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE:

 

SENATOR YARBOROUGH’S OBSERVATIONS

 

One of the other people I interviewed for my Bush articles was former Senator Ralph W. Yarborough, who fought off the challenge from Bush in the 1964 U.S. Senate race. Yarborough commented in our June 24, 1988, interview from his office in Austin that he didn’t know about Bush’s CIA background at the time of their campaign (“I never heard anything about it”) but that he always wondered how Bush could have become the CIA chief in 1976 supposedly without an intelligence background. As for Bush’s early CIA connections, the former senator said, “It doesn’t surprise me. What surprised me was they picked him for director of Central Intelligence -- how in hell he was appointed head of the CIA without any experience and knowledge -- that they would have picked a man with no intelligence experience, no assassination experience, no experience smearing people -- all those things the CIA is good at.”

Hoover’s memo, said Yarborough, “explains something to me that I’ve always wondered about. It does make sense to have a trained CIA man, with experience, appointed to the job. That opens a lot of road of understanding. Even if I was not a Democrat I wouldn’t want a CIA director in the White House. I don’t like to put professional assassins in the White House. I don’t want a bunch of assassins running it.”

This was echoed, in more circumspect terms, by Tom Wicker, who wrote the first-day banner story from Dallas about Kennedy’s assassination for the New York Times. Wicker commented in the April 1988 Times column I quoted in my first article for The Nation on Bush:

 

Do the American people really want to elect a former director of the CIA as their President? That’s hardly been discussed so far; but it seems obvious that a CIA chief might well be privy to the kind of “black” secrets that could later make him -- as a public figure -- subject to blackmail. Given the agency’s worldwide reputation for covert intervention and political meddling, moreover, one of its former directors in the White House certainly would be the object of suspicion and mistrust in numerous parts of the globe. And well he might be.

 

 

“THE ONLY ONE WHO DUCKED”

 

While I was interviewing Senator Yarborough about Bush, I took the opportunity of discussing with him the events of the Dallas motorcade. He offered an important revelation he also made over the years to some other researchers, and gave me some possibly significant insights into Lyndon Johnson’s state of mind that day. Yarborough was riding in the second car behind Kennedy’s, sitting behind the driver in the back seat of a convertible with Vice President and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. In the front seat were the driver from the Texas Highway Patrol, Hurchel Jacks, and the VP’s Secret Service agent, Rufus Youngblood. LBJ sat directly behind Youngblood, and Lady Bird between her husband and Yarborough. Directly ahead of their car was the Secret Service presidential followup car, the “Queen Mary.”

Senator Yarborough, who had “a lifetime of handling arms,” described for me his reactions to the shots fired in Dealey Plaza, giving an eyewitness and earwitness account that matched that of numerous other witnesses but is, like theirs, at odds over some details with what can now be seen in the altered Zapruder film:

 

The first shot I heard I thought was a rifle shot. The second shot, the motorcade almost came to a halt. They said later that the president‘s car slowed to something like five miles an hour. I wondered what the hell they were stopping for when somebody is shooting. People were jumping out of the car in front of me [the Secret Service followup car] and running to the president‘s car. I thought maybe somebody had thrown a bomb in there. The third shot I heard was a rifle shot.

 

When I asked Yarborough if he thought there was a gunman on the Grassy Knoll, he said,

 

I believe I would have heard or picked the shot up. I just don’t [think so]. I didn’t think so at the time. There’s one possibility -- I don’t think there was a second gunman, but if somebody else fired a shot at the identical time as the gunman in the School Book Depository, if two shots were fired instantly, it would be hard to differentiate them. I know that when I’ve gone deer hunting, if I fire my rifle at the same time as somebody else fires his, you can’t tell the two shots apart. I agree with John Connally that it’s foolish to say that only two shots were fired [Yarborough apparently is alluding to the single-bullet theory, which Connally never accepted].

I’ve talked to Dallas policemen who told me that the people from Washington gave them an awful grilling. They came down with a theory in mind and they didn’t want to hear anything else that might not match up with their theory. I have the suspicion this fellow Ruby knew somebody about it, with his criminal connections. Oswald went by his room in Oak Cliff, to get his gun or something, and the direction he was walking in was the direction of Ruby’s apartment. I think it was a conspiracy, of course, but I don’t know who the conspirators were. Anyway, too many people wanted Kennedy dead.

 

The official story put forth by Lyndon Johnson after the assassination was that when the shots were fired, Secret Service Agent Youngblood heroically vaulted over the seat and covered the VP with his body. Although Johnson arranged to have Youngblood receive the Treasury Department’s highest honor, the Exceptional Service Award, on December 4, 1963, and the agent was eventually promoted to Special Agent in Charge of the White House Detail and then deputy director of the Secret Service, Youngblood’s 1964 Warren Commission testimony contained significant qualifiers. He said that after hearing the first shot and seeing unusual crowd movement as well as movement in the Secret Service followup car behind the president’s limousine, “I turned around and hit the Vice President on the shoulder and hollered, get down, and then looked around again and saw more of this movement, and so I proceeded to go to the back seat and get on top of him. I then heard two more shots. But I would like to say this. I would not be positive that I was on that back seat before the second shot. But the Vice President himself said I was.” Asked to describe his movements further, Youngblood added another qualifier: “Well, the Vice President says that I vaulted over. It was more of a stepping over. And then I sat on top of him, he being crouched down somewhat.”

Yarborough scoffed at that story. He said Youngblood never left the front seat. The back seat was so full, as photographs of the car in the motorcade confirm, that there would not have been room for the agent along with three other people; Yarborough would have known if a large man was sharing the seat with them. Yarborough’s description of Johnson’s reaction after the shots were fired was  suggestive:

 

Absolutely motionless. Said nothing. You know that tale Johnson liked to tell about Youngblood, the Secret Service man, jumping over the front seat when the shots were fired and shielding him with his body? Well, that’s as big a cock-and-bull tale as the time he told the Marines in Da Nang that his great-grandfather had fought at the Alamo. [Actually, Johnson told servicemen at Camp Stanley in Korea, “My great-great-grandfather died at the Alamo.”] Youngblood never jumped over the seat. Johnson sat there stoically. The only time they moved was when we were going through the Triple Overpass, and Youngblood leaned over the seat -- he had a small radio receiver in his hand -- and Johnson leaned over, they were about six inches apart, and they listened to some transmission together on the radio. [A photograph indicates Johnson had ducked earlier: See below.]

I asked them what happened, and they didn’t say anything. They were afraid somebody might tell the truth. They knew damn well what happened, because when the cars pulled up at the hospital, the Secret Service men swarmed all around Johnson, and one of them said, “Mr. President.” They left Mrs. Kennedy alone in the car with the body, grieving over it. They knew he was dead instantly, because his head was blown off. Mrs. Kennedy was holding onto him and wouldn’t let him go until they put a suit coat around him to cover his head [Secret Service Agent Clint Hill did that].

 

It isn’t entirely clear from the transcript of our interview what Yarborough meant by saying, “They were afraid somebody might tell the truth.” Agent Youngblood that day was carrying a large walkie-talkie radio from a shoulder strap (it can be seen in the photograph of him escorting Johnson out of Parkland Hospital). The Secret Service was communicating on two frequencies in Dallas, Baker and Charlie. The Baker frequency was for transmissions between cars in the motorcade, including those between the vice president’s car and his followup car, but the Charlie frequency had much broader links among the Trade Mart, Air Force One and Two, the president’s limousine, its followup car, the lead car in the motorcade, and the rest of the motorcade, via the temporary White House Communications Agency Center setup at the Sheraton Hotel, which was itself linked directly to the White House. Youngblood told the Warren Commission that after the shots were fired, he radioed his followup car, “I am switching to Charlie”; but perhaps he and LBJ had been listening on Charlie all along, to follow the larger picture.

One wonders if the behavior of Johnson even before the shots were fired meant he had some kind of premonition of trouble. Penn Jones always said that “Johnson was the only one who ducked” in the motorcade. He based this on the famous James Altgens panoramic photo of Elm Street during the shooting, in which it appears that Johnson is leaning sharply forward (possibly to duck for safety, possibly also to listen to Youngblood’s walkie-talkie) while Lady Bird and Yarborough smile and wave, momentarily oblivious to the gunfire. When I asked Yarborough what Johnson’s mood had been during the motorcade from Love Field before the shooting started downtown, the former senator said,

 

He hardly spoke. The crowd would holler at him on the street, and even though he was a politician he did not smile or wave, he just looked straight ahead all day long. Johnson was worried about some revelations that were supposed to come out that day before a congressional committee in Washington about Bobby Baker, Johnson’s bagman. Johnson was scared to death it was going to blow that very day. I wondered why he was being so dour in the car, when the crowds were giving him so good a response. I tried to butter him up and said, “Mr. Vice President, why don’t you wave at them? Look how fond of you they are.” He never would respond, not a word.

 

Senator Yarborough made it clear in our interview that what he thought Johnson was worried about came from his later knowledge of what was happening in the congressional committee at the time. Johnson was indeed very worried about the testimony being given at that exact moment in Washington by Maryland insurance man Donald Reynolds before a closed hearing with the staff of the Senate Rules Committee. As Robert A. Caro writes in the fourth volume of his Johnson biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (2012), “[O]n that Friday, for the first time a Lyndon Johnson financial transaction was going to be described by a witness, seated beside his lawyer, to representatives of the United States Senate.” This is Caro’s description of the atmosphere in the car when the motorcade began at Love Field: “Lady Bird, sitting between Yarborough and her husband, tried to make conversation but soon gave up. The two men weren’t speaking to or looking at each other -- the only noises in the car came from the walkie-talkie radio that Youngblood was carrying on a shoulder strap -- as the motorcade pulled out.”

Reynolds was accusing Johnson to the Senate Rules Committee of taking bribes, sometimes disguised as demands for needless advertising on his and Lady Bird’s monopolistic Austin, Texas, television station, and other corrupt activities, and was providing the committee with documentation. Reynolds reportedly also was discussing details of the burgeoning Bobby Baker scandal, involving Johnson’s protege and legman, the recently resigned secretary of the Senate, in corrupt activities. Life magazine in its November 8, 1963, issue emblazoned across a cover photo of Baker at a Washington masquerade party the words “CAPITAL BUZZES OVER STORIES OF MISCONDUCT IN HIGH PLACES: THE BOBBY BAKER BOMBSHELL.” Its cover story, “THAT HIGH-LIVING BAKER BOY SCANDALIZES THE CAPITAL,” wrote of the fixer, “He was known as ‘Lyndon’s boy.’” In a caption under a full-page photo of a grinning Johnson with his arm around Baker, the magazine declared, “LEGMAN AND LEADER: For Lyndon Johnson when he was Senate majority leader -- and for Mike Mansfield, his successor -- Bobby was an indispensable confidant. He was a messenger, a pleader of causes, a fund-raiser and a source of intelligence.” Life’s extensive coverage of the Baker scandal in the weeks immediately leading up to the assassination also included a highly detailed article by Keith Wheeler “(and a LIFE task force)” in the issue dated November 22, ominously entitled “SCANDAL GROWS AND GROWS IN WASHINGTON.” That issue was already out at the time of the assassination. Both the November 8 and 22 articles in the widely read Luce publication prominently featured Johnson’s involvement in Baker’s rise and strong insinuations of his involvement in Baker’s corrupt activities, which included rampant influence-peddling and a prostitution ring involving members of Congress and prominent businessmen, among them some in the Texas oil business and in defense contracting. The growing scandal, Life warned in its November 22 issue, “might well wreck a few individuals in the next election.”

If the investigation of Reynolds’s charges and the rest of the complex investigation into Baker’s activities had gone forward, Johnson might not only have had to resign his vice presidency but might have gone to prison as well. Life reportedly was acting with the help of tips supplied by Robert Kennedy, who was trying to use the growing and extremely sleazy Baker scandal to help his brother push Johnson off the 1964 ticket. In his last press conference on November 14, 1963, President Kennedy was asked about the scandals involving Baker and Fred Korth, who had resigned as Secretary of the Navy in October over accusations of financial impropriety in regard to the awarding of the contract for the TFX (Tactical Fighter Experimental) plane to the Fort Worth defense contracting firm General Dynamics. After  differentiating the two scandals, Kennedy replied:

 

Now, if you are talking about -- there are always bound to be in the Government, the newspaper business, labor, and so on, farmers -- there are always going to be people who can't stand the pressure of opportunity, so that -- but the important point is what action is taken against them.

I think that this administration has been very vigorous in its action, and I think that we have tried to set a responsible standard. There are always going to be people who fail to meet that standard, and we attempt to take appropriate action dealing with each case.

But Mr. Baker is now being investigated, and I think we will know a good deal more about Mr. Baker before we are through. Other people may be investigated as time goes on. We just try to do the best we can. And I think that -- the governmental standards, let me say, on the whole I think compare favorably with those in Washington, with those in some other parts of America.

The president’s comment that “Other people may be investigated as time goes on” must not have given comfort to his vice president. JFK’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln writes in her 1968 book Kennedy and Johnson that the president told her on November 19, 1963, “You know if I am reelected in sixty-four, I am going to spend more and more time toward making government service an honorable career. . . . To do this I will need as a running-mate in sixty-four a man who believes as I do.” She asked, “Who is your choice as a running-mate?,” and Kennedy replied, “At this time I am thinking about Governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. But it will not be Lyndon.” Lincoln later told Caro that “the ammunition to get him off was Bobby Baker.” In an early edition on November 22, the Dallas Morning News prominently featured an interview with the visiting Richard Nixon headlined, “Nixon Predicts JFK May Drop Johnson.”

The assassination not only interrupted Reynolds’s testimony but it also, according to Caro in The Passage of Power, interrupted a meeting that day in New York of members of a Life investigative team with the magazine’s managing editor about plans for a major series on “Lyndon Johnson’s Money,” digging into Johnson’s dubious fortune, corrupt business history, and intimate involvement in the Baker scandal. The head of the nine-man team, Associate Editor William Lambert, had said of Johnson to managing editor George P. Hunt, “This guy looks like a bandit to me.” Life was considering a multipart investigation that would broaden the coverage to include the fullest possible details of Johnson’s largely unreported financial history and net worth, with the first installment under consideration to run in the next issue. 

Life’s ambitious plans to extensively scrutinize Johnson’s corruption were immediately scrapped when gunfire brought him the presidency, and the magazine instead became a leading proponent of the lone-gunman theory, while giving favorable treatment to the new president. The next issue did not feature Johnson’s money but instead a black-bordered cover portrait of the late President Kennedy and articles on Kennedy’s death and the transference of power, illustrated with frames from the Zapruder film. Life, however, eventually ran a report on Johnson’s net worth on August 21, 1964, estimating it at $14 million, much higher than the White House estimate of $3,484,000 but considerably lower than the figure Johnson’s principal Texas financial representative, attorney Edward A. Clark, gave Caro of the new president’s net worth at the time of the assassination, about $25 million. Johnson had accumulated that fortune while serving in public office since the mid-1930s.

The congressional investigations of Johnson’s finances were effectively aborted by the new president, but not without further testimony by Reynolds and strong resistance from some Republicans in Congress. Johnson’s ascension to the presidency also helped him fend off accusations of involvement in other illegal activities including the early-1960s scandals involving Texas financier Billie Sol Estes and General Dynamics of Fort Worth, which would make a fortune building its fighter planes for the Vietnam War. Another Fort Worth firm with connections to Johnson that benefited greatly from the war was the Bell Helicopter Company, which built the Huey helicopters used in Vietnam (Michael Paine, the supposedly estranged husband of Marina Oswald’s CIA handler Ruth Paine, worked as a research engineer for Bell at the time of the assassination).

Although Senator Yarborough told me he didn’t know who the conspirators in the assassination were, he mentioned as possible suspects the Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa and the Mafia, but Yarborough seemed more focused on people angered by JFK’s plans to “pull out of Vietnam. The big boys, the big contractors, knew what was involved [in the plans to withdraw], because they had the inside knowledge. That was bigger money than [organized] crime.” Yarborough didn’t think Johnson was involved in the assassination, however: “I don’t think he’d take that risk. He would have known if he had, too many people would talk.”

If the assassination saved Johnson from being dropped from the 1964 ticket by President Kennedy or being removed from office, and even from going to prison, it also greatly enriched him and his backers in what President Eisenhower had called the “military-industrial complex.” As Caro extensively documents in his multivolume Johnson biography, since the 1930s, Johnson had effectively been owned and operated by the Houston construction firm Brown & Root, which funneled huge sums of money to him for his own use and for distribution to his political colleagues, serving as the basis for his national political influence. In return, Brown & Root, which was absorbed into the Dallas-based oil field services company Halliburton Energy Services in December 1962, received giant government contracts.

These ranged from a huge dam in Texas during the late 1930s Depression era, the first major LBJ payback to Brown & Root that Caro details, to membership in a consortium of four companies awarded an astounding “97 percent of the construction work in [Vietnam] during the seven years they operated there [1965-72],” according to Dan Briody’s 2004 book The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money.

 

. . . The group, which came to be known collectively as RMK-BRJ, went on to do more than $2 billion worth of work in Vietnam, of which Brown & Root took a 20 percent cut. The contract was cost plus 1.7 percent, meaning that the consortium would be reimbursed all costs, plus an additional 1.7 per cent profit, a method of contracting that encourages the contractor to markedly increase costs, thereby increasing their profit. The world would be reintroduced to this concept nearly 40 years later when Kellogg Brown & Root [as the Halliburton subsidiary had been renamed] won the same type of contract in Iraq. [U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney served as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000.]

RMK-BRJ literally changed the face of Vietnam, clearing out wide swaths of jungle for airplane landing strips, dredging channels for ships, and building American bases from Da Nang to Saigon. As part of the single most lucrative contract the company had ever entered into, Brown & Root was in Vietnam from 1965 to 1972 pulling down $380 million in revenue in the process.

 

Russ Baker reports in Family of Secrets that around 1 p.m. on November 22, the time when President Kennedy was officially declared dead at Parkland Hospital, Johnson was in a secluded part of the hospital making a telephone call to his personal tax lawyer in Houston, J. Waddy Bullion, lamenting, “Oh, I gotta get rid of my goddamn Halliburton stock.” Most likely Johnson ultimately did not have to do so, for as the Wall Street Journal reported in August 1964 (and Caro confirms in detail in the first volume of his Johnson biography, The Path to Power), Johnson’s so-called “blind trust” as president was a mockery because he had telephone hot lines in the Oval Office and at the LBJ Ranch that he used frequently to confer with his financial advisers on trades involving his stock holdings. Waddy Bullion was one of the trustees. Caro reports that Ed Clark told him that Johnson “sometimes spent several hours a day during his Presidency conducting personal business.”

Johnson had an unusually friendly relationship with the Republican George H. W. Bush, as Baker and others have reported. LBJ is said to have privately favored the rightwing Bush over Yarborough, John Connally’s enemy and the leader of the liberal wing of the Texas Democratic Party, in the 1964 Senate race. Yarborough, who said he had to campaign with “meager money,” told me,

 

I had the feeling that somebody was in the background working against me. I thought it was Johnson, but I learned since then from Bobby Kennedy that it was Connally. Bobby Kennedy told me after [the campaign] that he saw Bush during the campaign in the Yale Club in New York and asked him, “George, why do you want to run? You can’t win against Yarborough, you can’t win with Johnson running for president.” And Bush said, “Governor Connally is going to help me in the race.” Bobby ran into him again at the Yale Club after he lost, and he said, “I thought Connally was going to help you.” Bush said, “I’m satisfied he did everything he could under the circumstances.” Connally couldn’t come out for him publicly, because it would have split the ticket, and Johnson wouldn’t brook anything that would have cut his vote down, but they did everything they could.

 

Bush reciprocated with conspicuous favors for Johnson, unusual for someone from the opposite political party. To represent the Zapata oil firm in Medellín, Colombia, Bush hired Zapata County, Texas, Judge Manuel B. Bravo, who was instrumental in Johnson’s theft of the 1948 U.S. Senate race. And when Johnson left Washington from Andrews Air Force Base in 1969 to return home to Texas after Richard Nixon’s inauguration, Poppy Bush was the only well-known Republican there to help give the former president a ceremonial sendoff.

“Soon thereafter, [Bush] was a guest at the LBJ ranch,” Russ Baker reports in Family of Secrets. “There is no public record of what the two men talked about.”

 

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Ralph Yarborough recalled:

Quote

The second shot, the motorcade almost came to a halt. They said later that the president's car slowed to something like five miles an hour. I wondered what the hell they were stopping for when somebody is shooting.

It's worth remembering not only that Yarborough was a "slowing down" witness, not a "came to a complete halt" witness, and that people in general do use the expression "stopping" to mean "slowing down".

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Chris Bristow writes:

Quote

if there was a limo stop removed  the alteration was an undeniable success. As I stated before the Z film has convinced Millions that the witnesses had to be wrong.

If by "witnesses" Chris is referring to the limo-stop witnesses, I'd be surprised if there are more than a few thousand people in the world who are even aware of those witnesses' existence. The whole limo-stop question has always been a trivial aspect of the assassination debate, even among enthusiasts. Among the general public, its impact is surely negligible.

If there's one element of the Zapruder film that the general public is aware of, it's the incriminating 'back and to the left' head snap. You'd think the first priority of any film-altering masterminds would have been to get rid of that part.

Quote

Whenever I see a debate on the limo stop the Skeptics inevitably point to the Z film as absolute proof that it didn't stop,

What people point to is the apparent consistency between the three or four home movies which show the limo at the time it was supposed (by a small proportion of those witnesses who would have seen it) to have stopped.

In other words, if the limo did stop, the following things must have happened:

• The Zapruder film was altered.
• The Nix film was altered to match the altered Zapruder film.
• The Muchmore film was altered to match the altered Nix film and the altered Zapruder film.
• The Bronson film, depending on exactly when the limo was supposed to have stopped, was altered to match the altered Muchmore film, the altered Nix film, and the altered Zapruder film.
• A large proportion of witnesses must have failed to notice that the limo stopped, or thought it not worth mentioning.

If one also believes (as one must do, if one is being consistent) those few limo-stop witnesses who claimed that the limo pulled into the left-hand lane as it stopped, the following things must have happened:

• The Zapruder film was altered.
• The Nix film was altered to match the altered Zapruder film.
• The Muchmore film was altered to match the altered Nix film and the altered Zapruder film.
• The Bronson film, which shows two police motorcyclists riding in the left-hand lane before, during and after the time of the fatal shot, was altered to match the altered Muchmore film, the altered Nix film, and the altered Zapruder film.
• The Moorman Polaroid photo, which shows two police motorcycles to the left of the limo within a second of the head shot, was altered to match the altered Bronson film, the altered Muchmore film, the altered Nix film, and the altered Zapruder film.
• The Altgens 7 photo, which shows the limo in the middle lane immediately after the shooting, was altered to match the altered Moorman photo, the altered Bronson film, the altered Muchmore film, the altered Nix film, and the altered Zapruder film.
• A very large proportion of witnesses must have failed to notice that the limo pulled to the left and stopped, or thought it not worth mentioning.

There's a vastly more plausible alternative explanation for all of this:

• What we see in the films and photos is what actually happened.
• Some witnesses got a small detail wrong.

It's an uncontroversial fact that witnesses get details wrong sometimes. The whole limo-stop question is a lot of fuss about nothing.

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Chris also writes:

Quote

they did not immediately release the Z film. The only thing the public saw for years is some individual frames.

Within a year of the assassination, all of the frames were published which show the limo when it is claimed to have pulled to the left and stopped. Life magazine printed a number of frames just a week after the assassination, then again in December 1963, in October 1964, and in December 1966 (and possibly on other occasions). In September 1964, the Warren Commission published frames 171-334 in Commission Exhibit 885 (Hearings and Exhibits, vol.18, pp.1-80): https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1135#relPageId=15.

As far as I'm aware, all of those printed frames match the supposedly altered film that we see today. The film-altering masterminds who supposedly removed the limo stop must have done so before those frames were published.

Although the Zapruder film wasn't widely watched as a movie by the general public until the famous TV broadcast in 1975, a number of bootleg copies were in circulation from the late 1960s onwards. Many thousands of people watched these bootlegs at informal gatherings and organised events during the late 60s and early 70s.

The bootlegs appear to have come from two main sources: the copy of the film used in the Clay Shaw trial, and copies made for the personal use of Time-Life executives. See David Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination, University Press of Kansas, 2003, pp.59-61, for an account of the surprising extent of public access to the film while it was supposedly being hidden away and worked on by a team of expert, though strangely incompetent, film-altering masterminds.

Quote

holding on to it for years would allow them to compare their forgery to all the other documented photographic evidence.

All the other photographic evidence that was known about at that time, perhaps.

But what about the photos and films that came to light after those alterations were supposedly made (assuming there's any agreement about exactly when the hypothetical alterations were made)? And what about any images that still haven't come to light? How could the masterminds ever be sure that the photographic record was complete?

There are substantial practical problems in matching an altered film with other images. For a start, consider the difficulty of actually getting hold of those images. We know of spectators who went off to other parts of the US, and abroad, very soon after the assassination. How many others, that we don't know about, might have done the same? No real effort was made by the authorities to identify the spectators in Dealey Plaza, let alone to round up any of their cameras and films, as I pointed out last year:

https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/24498-david-lifton-spots-a-piece-of-scalp-in-the-moorman-photo/?do=findComment&comment=442261

Each time the masterminds might hypothetically have found a photo or film that contradicted one of their alterations, what would they do? Would they destroy those images, or would they alter them to match their altered Zapruder film? I've listed the known films and photos that ought to, but do not, show the hypothetical limo-stop. If the Zapruder film was altered to remove the limo-stop, all of these images must have been altered too.

Was that even physically possible? The Moorman photo, for example, is a Polaroid. Can Polaroids be altered without leaving traces that give the game away? If anyone is claiming that the Moorman photo was altered, they need to demonstrate that such a thing could actually have been done.

Even if it was technically possible to alter all of these images without leaving physical traces, could it have been done in the time available? The Moorman photo was broadcast on TV shortly after 3 o'clock that afternoon, and copies were circulating among journalists soon after that. The Altgens photos were distributed shortly after 1 o'clock that afternoon. The Muchmore film was sold, unseen and undeveloped, a few days after the assassination.

The practical problems with altering all of these images are substantial, and they require a detailed explanation.

The whole film-and-photo-alteration idea, whether or not the purpose was to remove an incriminating limo-stop, proposes an expanded conspiracy for no good reason. There are two possibilities:

• A group of conspirators arranged to (a) shoot a politician and (b) frame a patsy; and a small minority of the eye-witnesses mistakenly recalled seeing the politician's car stop when it merely slowed down.
• Or a larger group of conspirators, which now includes photo-alteration specialists and trackers-down of home movies and photographs, arranged to (a) shoot a politician, (b) frame a patsy, (c) obtain access to dozens of photographs and home movies from locations all over the US and abroad, and (d) alter as many of those images as was necessary to remove an incriminating car-stop which a large majority of the eye-witnesses failed to mention.

Which of those scenarios is the more likely?

[Barry Keane]

It does not matter one iota that the Zapruder was altered or not( which I don't believe it was) It still shows the limo stopping and the head shot! Move on ask the real question, why was JFK killed. The shooters are irrelevant, why, why why was he killed not how? 

Edited February 1 by Barry Keane

[Chris Bristow]

11 hours ago, Jeremy Bojczuk said:

Chris also writes:

Within a year of the assassination, all of the frames were published which show the limo when it is claimed to have pulled to the left and stopped. Life magazine printed a number of frames just a week after the assassination, then again in December 1963, in October 1964, and in December 1966 (and possibly on other occasions). In September 1964, the Warren Commission published frames 171-334 in Commission Exhibit 885 (Hearings and Exhibits, vol.18, pp.1-80): https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=1135#relPageId=15.

As far as I'm aware, all of those printed frames match the supposedly altered film that we see today. The film-altering masterminds who supposedly removed the limo stop must have done so before those frames were published.

Although the Zapruder film wasn't widely watched as a movie by the general public until the famous TV broadcast in 1975, a number of bootleg copies were in circulation from the late 1960s onwards. Many thousands of people watched these bootlegs at informal gatherings and organised events during the late 60s and early 70s.

The bootlegs appear to have come from two main sources: the copy of the film used in the Clay Shaw trial, and copies made for the personal use of Time-Life executives. See David Wrone, The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination, University Press of Kansas, 2003, pp.59-61, for an account of the surprising extent of public access to the film while it was supposedly being hidden away and worked on by a team of expert, though strangely incompetent, film-altering masterminds.

All the other photographic evidence that was known about at that time, perhaps.

But what about the photos and films that came to light after those alterations were supposedly made (assuming there's any agreement about exactly when the hypothetical alterations were made)? And what about any images that still haven't come to light? How could the masterminds ever be sure that the photographic record was complete?

There are substantial practical problems in matching an altered film with other images. For a start, consider the difficulty of actually getting hold of those images. We know of spectators who went off to other parts of the US, and abroad, very soon after the assassination. How many others, that we don't know about, might have done the same? No real effort was made by the authorities to identify the spectators in Dealey Plaza, let alone to round up any of their cameras and films, as I pointed out last year:

https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/24498-david-lifton-spots-a-piece-of-scalp-in-the-moorman-photo/?do=findComment&comment=442261

Each time the masterminds might hypothetically have found a photo or film that contradicted one of their alterations, what would they do? Would they destroy those images, or would they alter them to match their altered Zapruder film? I've listed the known films and photos that ought to, but do not, show the hypothetical limo-stop. If the Zapruder film was altered to remove the limo-stop, all of these images must have been altered too.

Was that even physically possible? The Moorman photo, for example, is a Polaroid. Can Polaroids be altered without leaving traces that give the game away? If anyone is claiming that the Moorman photo was altered, they need to demonstrate that such a thing could actually have been done.

Even if it was technically possible to alter all of these images without leaving physical traces, could it have been done in the time available? The Moorman photo was broadcast on TV shortly after 3 o'clock that afternoon, and copies were circulating among journalists soon after that. The Altgens photos were distributed shortly after 1 o'clock that afternoon. The Muchmore film was sold, unseen and undeveloped, a few days after the assassination.

The practical problems with altering all of these images are substantial, and they require a detailed explanation.

The whole film-and-photo-alteration idea, whether or not the purpose was to remove an incriminating limo-stop, proposes an expanded conspiracy for no good reason. There are two possibilities:

• A group of conspirators arranged to (a) shoot a politician and (b) frame a patsy; and a small minority of the eye-witnesses mistakenly recalled seeing the politician's car stop when it merely slowed down.
• Or a larger group of conspirators, which now includes photo-alteration specialists and trackers-down of home movies and photographs, arranged to (a) shoot a politician, (b) frame a patsy, (c) obtain access to dozens of photographs and home movies from locations all over the US and abroad, and (d) alter as many of those images as was necessary to remove an incriminating car-stop which a large majority of the eye-witnesses failed to mention.

Which of those scenarios is the more likely?

I said:
"If there was a limo stop removed the alteration was an undeniable success."
My premise started with the logical operator "IF". That means most of your statements are irreverent to my premise.
  There are bits of the debate that I find worthy of discussion but so much of it is just rehashed arguments that have been repeated for decades.
 How multiple films could have been altered is, imo, the strongest argument against the alteration theory. It is an interesting and long standing debate as to whether it could be done. After years of trying to figure out how to resolve the myriad problems associated with removing a limo stop, I finally found a logical process to at least solve the problems that come from attempting a matte process and/or removing frames from the Z film. I posted it a few months ago. My point is it took years of thought experiments to solve those Z film problems. I have to assume people very knowledgeable in photogrammetry may have been able to alter the other films. The Z film would have been the most complicated alteration, imo.
 I'm going to spitball here and throw out some observation about the Moorman photo. If it was published right away it would impossible to alter. If not they would need to alter the position of the limo by about 12 inches to the west to match an altered Z film. That would require blowing up the photo slightly then cropping it back to its original form. That gives them some extra image area on the left side of the photo. Then they do a matte to separate the background from the limo. Then they slide that background a little to the right which makes the limo look like it was a farther down Elm.
The Polaroid camera made no negative just the print on photographic paper in the camera. That makes it vastly harder to uncover fakery. I have  not looked at this in detail yet but it seems to be within the realm of possibility.
 
I look at these issues from the standpoint of how likely or unlikely they might be. I try not to engage in absolute terms. Absolute terms in debate are often just opinions stated as facts. 
 I find the 4 bike cops testimony compelling and will usually point to their close proximity to the limo and their attention that was always focused on matching the limo speed. I have repeated that in the past but it is just an opinion. In the past I have discussed the minutia of what each cop said and their contradictions and corroborations. It always reaches a dead end because we must interpret their meaning and subtleties of the event. As an example IF the limo slowed to maybe 1 or 2 mph then very briefly stopped some would likely miss the stop in the panic of the moment.  That is the type of ambiguity that prevents the argument from reaching a resolution that results in a fact. It is an interesting subject that can be tossed back and forth a few times but then is quickly exhausted. It becomes a another useless rabbit hole.
You said:
"I'd be surprised if there are more than a few thousand people in the world who are even aware of those witnesses' existence. The whole limo-stop question has always been a trivial aspect of the assassination debate, even among the enthusiasts. Among the general public, its impact is surely negligible."
  I bet most people with any knowledge in the JFK assassination CT know about the limo stop theory. "even among the enthusiasts." Wow seriously??  Probably 99.9% of the members on this forum must have heard of it. How could these members have never heard of it unless they are new to the forum? Trying to throw the kitchen sink here?
  So my goal with the "IF" post was to address a specific topic not rehash a dozen or more subjects, some of which I think are frivolous. I think your "more than a few thousand people" comment is frivolous so of course you have every right to reply. But that being my opinion don't expect me engage in a debate about it.
 
  

[Chris Bristow]

8 hours ago, Barry Keane said:

It does not matter one iota that the Zapruder was altered or not( which I don't believe it was) It still shows the limo stopping and the head shot! Move on ask the real question, why was JFK killed. The shooters are irrevavalent, why, why why was he killed not how? 

It shows the limo slowing to 8 mph which does not match the witness statements in question. 

[Jonathan Cohen]

2 hours ago, Chris Bristow said:

I'm going to spitball here and throw out some observation about the Moorman photo. If it was published right away it would impossible to alter. If not they would need to alter the position of the limo by about 12 inches to the west to match an altered Z film. That would require blowing up the photo slightly then cropping it back to its original form. That gives them some extra image area on the left side of the photo. Then they do a matte to separate the background from the limo. Then they slide that background a little to the right which makes the limo look like it was a farther down Elm. The Polaroid camera made no negative just the print on photographic paper in the camera. That makes it vastly harder to uncover fakery. I have  not looked at this in detail yet but it seems to be within the realm of possibility.

Chris, the original Moorman Polaroid exists. How could it have been altered?

[Chris Bristow]

1 hour ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Chris, the original Moorman Polaroid exists. How could it have been altered?

As I understand it the original was returned to Mary Ann Moorman after the FBI analyzed it. I guess the question would be after altering a photo printed on the Polaroid in camera paper could you then copy  and  print that onto the same type of Polaroid paper?

[Jonathan Cohen]

10 hours ago, Chris Bristow said:

As I understand it the original was returned to Mary Ann Moorman after the FBI analyzed it. I guess the question would be after altering a photo printed on the Polaroid in camera paper could you then copy  and  print that onto the same type of Polaroid paper?

I don’t see how that could be physically possible, especially given the available technology in 1963.

[Chuck Schwartz]

Barry, I think John Newman's  " JFK and Vietnam" answers the question as to why JFK was killed.  It was to allow for the escalation of the war  in Vietnam, which JFK was against.  That is my take away from the aforementioned book.

[Sandy Larsen]

20 hours ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

On 8/14/2022 at 9:20 PM, Chris Bristow said:

As I understand it the original was returned to Mary Ann Moorman after the FBI analyzed it. I guess the question would be after altering a photo printed on the Polaroid in camera paper could you then copy  and  print that onto the same type of Polaroid paper?

 

20 hours ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

I don’t see how that could be physically possible, especially given the available technology in 1963.

 

That's because you're not an engineer. R&D engineers are good at coming up with solutions to problems like that. As are inventors and experimenters of all kinds.

I have a simple idea at this very moment how I would go about doing what Chris suggests. I would try it and make adjustments if it didn't work out as expected.

 

[Jonathan Cohen]

5 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

That's because you're not an engineer. R&D engineers are good at coming up with solutions to problems like that. As are inventors and experimenters of all kinds.

I have a simple idea at this very moment how I would go about doing what Chris suggests. I would try it and make adjustments if it didn't work out as expected.

Great. I would love to see your solution for how to fake a Polaroid so as to be undetectable from the original, utilizing only 1963 technology such as the exact type of camera owned by Mary Moorman and the paper on which it printed photos.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Great. I would love to see your solution for how to fake a Polaroid so as to be undetectable from the original, utilizing only 1963 technology such as the exact type of camera owned by Mary Moorman and the paper on which it printed photos.

In only know you could take the negative out of the older polaroids, wash it and you could duplicate it.  In the old days (1950's) of the Land camera (I think it was called so ?) it was possible to make extra prints.  There were sets available for commercial use to make duplicates "on the spot".  I would have to check, what I'm saying is from memory from stuff I have read years ago, so correct me if I'm wrong.    And of course, once you have a negative... anything goes... Now... I do believe any fake is detectable.  The problem is getting the 1st generation fakeprint, and not a copy of a copy of a copy.

[Chris Bristow]

Here is a fast and cheap experiment/attempt at altering the photo. Much easier to move the limo and the bikes than the background. I slightly enlarged the limo but if it was further down the street it should be smaller. I also had to crop it and narrow the field of the photo by 3%. I did not have an image of the front of Chaney's bike so when I moved him back a bit the right side of the limo was stretched. If an original photo showed a bit more of Chaney's bike the problem would be solved.
 If the photo was altered we don't know for sure what they had to work with so it is hard to guess at the specific changes that could be made.
 Polaroid cameras do not have negatives and even if you printed a negative from the original photo it would be no better than the photo itself. A negative is needed to compare things like the film grain pattern. If you shop in a piece of an image from a different photo or, I think, even a copy of the same photo the grain may not look the same. Having no original negative for the Mary Moorman photo limits what can be analyzed.
 Old Polaroids had to be swiped with a hardener within minutes of taking the photo otherwise the image would turn faded and blurry. I don't know if the earlier photo of the bike cop on Elm was not hardened soon enough but it looks distinctly different than the limo photo. If there can be such a difference in those two photos it would make subtle comparison impossible, imo. The first photo of Jean Hill and Mary Moorman standing by the car is much clearer and may be suitable for some comparison.
 
 

 

Edited February 6, 2023 by Chris Bristow