“No,” I said, “it’s a paraphrase. There are no quotation remarks.”
“I thought so,” Dr. Baden replied. “It’s easy for a layperson to misinterpret what a doctor says. For one thing, unless we’re eating or drinking, the epiglottis [the thin cartilaginous valve that covers the opening at the upper part of the larynx during swallowing to permit the entrance of food and liquid into the larynx] is always open. Also, a bullet cannot cause the chest wall to collapse. Thompson probably meant lung as opposed to chest wall, but he would have misunderstood Dr. Gregory even on this point. When the lung is punctured, as Connally’s was,† the air in the lung goes out into the chest cavity, not out of the mouth, so Connally’s cheeks puffing would not have been caused by air trying to escape.” Baden attributed the puffing of the cheeks to just one of the many unpredictable ways one reacts to a physical trauma. He added that Connally’s right lung only partially collapsed and his left lung remained intact. Could Connally’s attempt to breathe have caused the puffing of the mouth, I asked. “I don’t see how,” he said. He added that we breathe about fifteen times a minute, meaning once every four seconds, which translates to more than seventy-three Zapruder frames. And here, we’re talking about a matter of just a few frames.134
Governor Connally’s observation that he was not hit by the same bullet that hit Kennedy has given aid and comfort to, and been embraced by, the conspiracy theorists for years. In the November 25, 1966, edition of Life magazine, he said, “They talk about the one-bullet or two-bullet theory, but as far as I am concerned, there is no theory. There is my absolute knowledge…that one bullet caused the President’s first wound, and that an entirely separate shot struck me. It’s a certainty. I’ll never change my mind.”135 Governor Connally said in many interviews through the years that he did not believe there were two assassins, that only one gunman fired all the shots at the presidential limousine. But of course, were one to accept his assertion that he and Kennedy were struck by separate bullets, his conclusion of one assassin would have to be wrong.
It was Connally’s belief that the president’s first wound was caused by the first bulled fired. He believes the second bullet hit him, and the third hit the president.136 But perhaps one of the least likely persons in the world who would know things such as this would be the person being shot. At the moment he was hit, Connally shouted out, “My God, they’re going to kill us all,” meaning he was in the ultimate state of fear and panic, which can only cloud, not sharpen, perception. Moreover, a bullet piercing a human body is an enormous, physiologically neutralizing assault on all the senses of the victim, including, of course, cognition. I mean, even when we are sitting in a comfortable chair watching a slow-motion film of the assassination, we cannot be absolutely positive exactly when Connally was hit and whether it was by the same bullet that first hit Kennedy. We must make recourse to other evidence to prove this point. So how in the world would Connally know these things? The governor himself, in his Warren Commission testimony, acknowledges as much when he said he was “in either a state of shock or the impact [of the bullet] was such that the sound didn’t even register on me…I was never conscious of hearing the second shot [the one, we should add, he nonetheless testified he was sure hit him] at all.”137
Quite apart from the fact that the governor, having been shot, would be one of the least likely people to know what happened, the governor’s own testimony refutes his conclusion that the president was hit by the first shot. Connally testified that after the first shot, which he said he heard as “we had just made the turn” onto Elm, “I turned to look back over my right shoulder…but I did not catch the president in the corner of my eye.”138 He said he was in the process of “turning to look over my left shoulder into the backseat to see if I could see him [the president]. I never looked. I never made the full turn.”139 Even if Governor Connally had seen the president, there would be no way for him to know for sure if the same bullet that struck him had struck the president, but since he admits not seeing the president when the president was hit or at any time during the shooting, it would be impossible on its face for him to know, or even have a sensible opinion, of whether or not he was hit by a separate bullet. If he had seen the president, he would have seen that the president was in no physical discomfort at all after the first shot. Rather, he was smiling and waving to the crowd for at least two full seconds after Z160.
Governor Connally’s conclusion that the president was hit by the first shot is based solely, it seems, on the recollection of his wife, Nellie. “Nellie was there, and she saw it,” he said in 1967 on CBS television. “She believes the first bullet hit him [the president] because she saw him after he was hit.”140 But the governor’s wife was understandably equally confused. In her Warren Commission testimony, she testified that immediately after hearing the first shot, she “looked back and saw the president as he had both hands at his neck.” We know from the Zapruder film, of course, that Kennedy showed no visible reaction to the first shot around Z160, so we know Mrs. Connally was wrong. She also said that after the first shot, she recalls her husband exclaiming, “Oh, no, no, no.” But he testified, “When I was hit” (which he said was by the second shot) is when “I said ‘Oh, no, no, no.’”141 All of this is perfectly understandable confusion.
In the governor’s September 6, 1978, testimony before the HSCA, he retreated from his categorical position: “Now, there’s a great deal of speculation that the president and I were hit with the same bullet. That might well be, but it surely wasn’t the first bullet, and Nellie doesn’t think it’s the second bullet. I don’t know. I didn’t hear the second bullet. I felt the second bullet.”142 In one of his last pronouncements on whether he thought he was hit by the same bullet that hit Kennedy, Governor Connally, who died at age seventy-six on June 15, 1993, departed from his ambivalence before the HSCA and went back to his earlier position. In a January 29, 1992, letter to Dr. Michael West, a proponent of the single-bullet theory, Connally wrote that “I disagree with the thesis that President Kennedy and I were both hit by the single bullet.” Case Closed author Gerald Posner says that just a few months later “during a telephone conversation in May of 1992” with the governor, Connally again suggested that the Warren Commission was right, saying, “The second bullet could have hit both of us.”143
The only thing that rings true to me about the governor’s reflections on what was happening around the time he was hit is not when he tries to be precise, but when he said things like this in his 1978 testimony before the HSCA: “When I was hit, or shortly before I was hit—no, I guess it was after I was hit…”144 All of his hesitation and confusion is more in keeping with what I would expect from a witness who had sustained the kind of injuries Connally did. Before Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter took the testimony of Connally and his wife in front of the Commission, he had them witness the Zapruder film. Even looking at the film, Specter said, “Connally and his wife argued over whether the Governor had fallen into his wife’s lap or she had pulled him into her lap. Connally insisted he had fallen. Mrs. Connally insisted she had pulled him. ‘No, Nellie,’ ‘No, John,’ they shot back and forth several times.” Eventually, Nellie prevailed.145
As previously indicated, the Warren Commission concluded that the first time they could see a reaction by Kennedy to a severe external stimulus was when he emerged from behind the Stemmons Freeway sign at frame 225. But they didn’t see a reaction from Connally until around frame 235. The HSCA, on the other hand, saw a reaction by Connally at around frames 222 to 226;146 the following frame, 225, being the time the Warren Commission saw Kennedy reacting.
My sense of when the second bullet was fired is this. Kennedy’s arm completely disappears behind the Stemmons Freeway sign at frame 207 of the Zapruder film.147 The president, per FBI photographic expert Lyndal Shaneyfelt, was still seen waving to the crowd at frame 205, and he testified that he saw “nothing in the frames” around this point to “arouse my suspicion about his movemen
ts” that he had been shot.148 We also know that frame 210 was the first frame at which the assassin in the sniper’s nest window had a completely clear shot at Kennedy,149 although as early as frame 207, the assassin would have had a clear enough shot.150 Since all the evidence confirms the single-bullet theory, and since Connally, when seen emerging from behind the Stemmons Freeway sign at frame 222, and Kennedy at frame 225, are already showing signs of reacting to a severe external stumulus,151 we can reasonably assume that the second shot was fired somewhere between frames 207 and 222 of the Zapruder film.
As we have seen, good minds have differed and will continue to differ on when Kennedy and Connally were hit by a bullet, what precise frame of the Zapruder film Kennedy and Connally first reacted to being hit by a bullet, what the nature of their reactions was, what position Kennedy and Connally were in relation to each other at the time each was first hit, what movements they made that resulted from their being hit, and what overall interpretation should be put on the totality of the observations. A year before he died, Governor Connally wrote, in a letter to Dr. Michael West, that “this dispute [about the single-bullet theory] will go far beyond our time on earth to engage in it.” I would only add this elliptical clause to the governor’s words: that is, as long as we try to resolve the dispute by referring primarily to the Zapruder film. For fertile minds and susceptible eyes, the Zapruder film can be, as Winston Churchill once said about the Soviet Union, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” But the overwhelming evidence is that whenever Kennedy and Connally were hit, or first reacted to being hit, they were both struck by the same bullet.
The Third Shot
Of the three shots fired that day in Dallas, there is no doubt as to when the third (and according to nearly all of the witnesses, the last) shot was fired. The Zapruder film graphically shows the results of the impact of that shot on the president’s head at frame 313,* when the president was exactly 265.3 feet from the sniper’s nest window.152 Here, the controversy is centered on what happens next—in just four-tenths of a second (Z314–321) the president’s head snaps violently to the rear. Perhaps the majority of Americans have seen this portion of the Zapruder film at least once on television. The conspiracy theorists have argued, and millions of Americans have agreed, that this head snap conclusively proves that the president was shot in the head from the front. Indeed, it would be safe to say that the single thing that has convinced people more than anything else that the fatal head shot to the president came from the front, not the rear where Oswald was, is the head snap to the rear. “No layman can watch these frames,” author Henry Hurt wrote, “and avoid the clear impression that the shot came from the right front of the President, the grassy knoll area.”153 Mark Lane declared, “So long as the Commission maintained the bullet came almost directly from the rear, it implied that the law of physics vacated in this instance, for the President did not fall forward.”154 New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison said, “You don’t have to be a genius. It takes no arguments, no words. When you look at the Zapruder film you see that the president of the United States was shot from the front, and there’s no question about it. He’s so clearly hit from the front the force almost catapults him out of the back of the car. Any American seeing the film would know at a glance that the entire Warren Commission conclusion was a complete hoax, was absolutely false, and every man on the Warren Commission had to know it was a lie.”155
This impression was not just limited to those who would end up being hard-core conspiracy theorists, but was widespread. When Robert Healey, the executive editor of the Boston Globe, saw the Zapruder film in his office during a presentation to him and his staff on April 23, 1975, by members of the Assassination Information Bureau, a conspiracy-oriented group, he wrote the following editorial just two days later: “Oswald could not have fired all the shots that killed President Kennedy…The visual presentation is far more convincing than all the books and all the magazine articles that have ever been advanced…No words can make the case better than the Zapruder film. It is as simple as that.”156
In the London trial, there was little doubt in my mind that if I didn’t satisfactorily explain away the problem of the head snap to the rear for the jury, their verdict would most likely be not guilty. And I knew I couldn’t use the sudden acceleration of the presidential limousine to explain the backward lurch since the Zapruder film shows that the acceleration was several frames after the president’s head had lurched backward.157
Perhaps the biggest shock I had in my investigation of the facts and evidence in preparation for the London trial was how this most overshadowing point was completely disregarded by the Warren Commission. In the Commission’s report and accompanying twenty-six volumes, I could not find one single word of reference to the president’s head snap to the rear. Warren Commission assistant counsel Wesley J. Liebeler, on the Louis Lomax television program in Los Angeles in 1966, acknowledged that the Commission did not focus in on the president’s head movements. “It is only since the critics have raised this point that anybody has ever looked at it closely,” Liebeler said.158
Upon reflection, I realized that the Warren Commission probably believed it never had to concern itself with the head snap because it had conclusive medical evidence that the president was struck by two and only two bullets, both of which entered the president’s body from the rear.159 Therefore, whatever caused the head snap to the rear was irrelevant to its inquiry since it could not have been a bullet from the front. While the Warren Commission was correct in this regard, its conclusion did not suffice for my purposes at the London trial. It was one thing for my medical expert to testify that an examination of the autopsy photographs and X-rays of the wound to the right rear of the president’s head revealed that it was an entrance, not an exit wound, and hence, the bullet that caused the wound had to have been fired from the president’s rear. But Kennedy’s head dramatically being thrust to the rear would, I feared, be more powerful evidence of a shot from the front in the eyes of twelve lay jurors, probably enough, indeed, to raise a reasonable doubt of Oswald’s guilt, which would result in a not-guilty verdict. The old saw that a picture (here, a motion picture, no less) is worth a thousand words was never more applicable.
Fortunately, the HSCA did address itself to the issue, though extremely briefly, concluding that the sharp rearward movement of the president’s head was probably caused by a neuromuscular reaction—that is, nerve damage caused by the bullet to the president’s brain caused his back muscles to tighten, which in turn caused his head to be thrust backward.160 Among other things, Larry Sturdivan, a research wound ballistics scientist at the Biophysics Laboratory at the federal Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, showed the HSCA a film of an experiment in 1948 conducted at Aberdeen where live goats were shot in the brain by a bullet, causing the subject neuromuscular reaction, resulting in the goat’s back arching backward.161
Although no evidence was presented that a goat’s back and abdominal muscles are the same as a human’s, when Sturdivan was asked whether he was “troubled” by the president’s head being thrust backward, he said, “No, sir…The neuromuscular reaction in which the heavy back muscles [of a human] predominate over the lighter abdominal muscles would have thrown him backward no matter where the bullet came from, whether it entered the front, the side, or the back of the head.”162*
But this was a technical explanation, and although I certainly intended to present it to the jury in London, I felt it might not carry the day for me on this critical issue. The first and most fundamental question I asked myself was why the bullet coming from the rear, irrespective of the neuromuscular reaction, didn’t propel the president’s head forward at least at the moment of impact, that is, before the reaction came into play? Rather ironically, I first learned that my assumption that the president’s head had not been pushed forward was an erroneous one while reading the pro-conspiracy, but serious and scholarly book Six Seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson, in whic
h Thompson treated the whole head snap issue in considerable depth, though ultimately incorrectly.163 Thompson’s book pointed out that Kennedy’s head was propelled slightly forward between Z312 and Z313 (the frame in which blood and tissue are seen spraying forward from the president’s head).
Thompson’s observation was confirmed when in 1975 CBS asked Itek Corporation, a Massachusetts photo optics company, to study the original Zapruder film using the most advanced photo analysis techniques and instrumentation then available. (CBS had purchased, from Zapruder’s heirs, the right to use the original for analysis purposes.) Over several months, Itek, with a staff of a dozen specialists, studied the film. Among the many findings in its ninety-four-page report to CBS in 1976, Itek proved that before the president’s head snap to the rear commenced at Z314 and continued until Z321, “at [Zapruder frames] 312–313 [the president’s] head goes forward approximately 2.3 inches, his shoulder about 1.1 inches.”164 Although at one point Itek’s report says that “frame 313 is the frame in which the President is fatally struck in the head,” it is clear from the report that Itek’s experts believed the shot struck at frame 312, at another point saying, “Prior to impact at frame 312,” and referring “to the impact at frames 312–313.” Itek found that “by [frame] 314 Kennedy’s head has reversed direction” and continues in a backward direction until “it reverses direction at about frame 321 as his body contacts the back of the seat.”165
In the CBS television broadcast “Inquiry: The American Assassins,” part 1, presented on November 25, 1975, host Dan Rather told the TV audience, “According to John Wolf, president of Itek’s optical systems division, when the fatal [head] bullet struck, the president’s head went forward with extreme speed, almost twice as rapidly as it subsequently traveled backwards.”
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