Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  Arnold said he then took a position in front of the picket fence high up on the grassy knoll. He told Golz that when he heard the first of two shots that came from behind him, over his left shoulder, he immediately “hit the dirt.” He added that after all the shots were fired, and while he was still on the ground, “the next thing I knew someone was kicking my butt and telling me to get up. It was a policeman. [Arnold would later say the policeman asked him if he was taking pictures and he told him he was.] And I told him to go jump in the river. And then this other guy, a policeman, comes up with a shotgun and…that thing was waving back and forth. I said you can have everything I’ve got. Just point it [the gun] someplace else.” He told Golz he gave the officer with the gun the film from the canister and two days later he was on a plane reporting for duty in Alaska. He didn’t come forward with his story throughout the years because, he said, he heard that “a lot of people making claims about pictures and stuff…were dying sort of peculiarly.”46 But this is a bogus argument on its face. The completely unmeritorious argument that many witnesses associated with the assassination were dying mysteriously (see conspiracy section later in book) didn’t start until 1966, when conspiracist Penn Jones started peddling it. What excuse did Arnold have for not coming forward in the more than two years before then?

  Ten years later, in the 1988 British television production The Men Who Killed Kennedy, Arnold changed his story in two significant ways. The plainclothes agent who told him not to go up on the railroad overpass was no longer a Secret Service agent. Arnold said the man said to him, “I’m from the CIA.” Much more importantly, only one police officer, he now said, accosted him after the shooting, not two. The one who kicked him on the ground was the same one who had the gun. Arnold said that before he hit the ground, he was standing with his back almost to the picket fence, and the officer (officers) who accosted him came from behind him, from the opposite side of the fence.

  There are several photos, including film, of the precise area where Arnold said he was on the grassy knoll, and none of them, taken at the very time Arnold said the incident happened, show Arnold. This is conclusive photographic proof that Arnold’s story was fabricated. And many people who ran up the grassy knoll after the shooting, several of whom were on the south side of Elm and were facing where Arnold supposedly was, testified before the Warren Commission and have been interviewed untold times, and not one has ever said they saw the extraordinary sight of a police officer, right after the shooting, standing over a prone man on the knoll, kicking him. The reason why no one saw, and no camera or film shows, Arnold on the grassy knoll is that—and this is being very charitable to Arnold—this incident only took place in Arnold’s mind. In fact, in the British television production, he used a rather curious (for someone who was really there, but not for someone who was lying about the matter) way of expressing his presence on the knoll. He said, “There’s no doubt in my mind I was there.”*

  Arnold’s story inspires only one thing, disbelief. But as indicated, he has many believers in the conspiracy community, and two particularly avid supporters—Gary Mack and Jack White, the main Badge Man advocates.

  So we’re obviously being asked to believe that the Badge Man, the assassin who was in a police uniform behind the stockade fence (Arnold, Mack says, was in front of the fence), is the same person in a police uniform who ended up kicking Arnold and taking his film.* Apparently, Kennedy’s assassin, instead of trying to hide in the trunk of a car in the railroad yard parking lot or trying to escape from behind the picket fence after shooting Kennedy, had much more important things to do—mainly, climb over the fence (at which point he’d be in plain view of everyone on Elm Street) so he could beat up on that louse Gordon Arnold and take his film.

  Mack and White also have a big problem with the “light blob” being Arnold. The light blob is in a tall vertical position in front of the alleged Badge Man. But again, Moorman’s photo was taken around the exact time as the head shot, which was the third and last of the three shots. By that time, according to Arnold, he was already lying down, having immediately dropped to the earth after, he says, the first shot was fired. So he could not have been the “light blob.”

  Neither the Badge Man nor Gordon Arnold benefit from scrutiny, disappearing back into nothingness in the grassy knoll landscape.

  The next three witnesses fall under the “and others” part of this section. They are not, in other words, downright silly people whose stories are almost laughable. But their observations are nearly as lacking in credibility as their loony bird cousins.

  Roger Craig was a twenty-seven-year-old Dallas County Sheriff’s Department deputy. In a composite summary of what he says he saw on the day of the assassination, he told the Dallas sheriff’s office on November 23, 1963,47 the FBI on November 2348 and November 25,49 and the Warren Commission, in testimony before it, on April 1, 1964,50 the fairly consistent story (there were minor discrepancies, which is normal) that at the time the presidential motorcade approached Dealey Plaza, he was waiting for it in front of the sheriff’s office on the north side of Main Street (corner of Main and Houston). A short time after the president’s car had passed, he heard three shots. He said he ran across Houston Street and then Elm up to the railroad yards behind the grassy knoll and Texas School Book Depository Building and “began moving people back out of the railroad yard.” He then went to the front of the Book Depository Building and began talking to people “to see if they’d seen anything.” After speaking to a husband and wife (Arnold and Barbara Rowland) for a few minutes, he and Deputy Sheriff Clinton “Lemmy” Lewis crossed Elm and walked down to where they were told one of the bullets had ricocheted off the curb. As they were searching, which he testified was about “fourteen or fifteen minutes” after the shooting, he heard a “shrill whistle,” looked up, and saw a man “start to run down the hill on the north side of Elm Street” (across the street from Craig) coming from the direction of the “southwest corner of the [School Depository] Building.” At that point, Craig saw a white Nash Rambler station wagon with a luggage rack on the top driving slowly westbound on Elm. In Craig’s first interview he described the driver as a “Negro,” then later a “dark-complected white male,” then finally said he “couldn’t say.” The running man, who he said was around five feet eight or nine inches tall, 140 to 150 pounds, with medium-brown sandy hair, got in the station wagon, which continued southbound on Elm out of sight. Craig had wanted to talk to the running man and the driver, but the “traffic was so heavy” he couldn’t get across the street before the station wagon drove off without his even getting the license plate number.

  When he heard later in the day that the authorities were trying to see if there was a connection between the murder of Officer Tippit and the assassination, he called Captain Fritz’s office, told one of his officers what he had seen, and was asked to come up and look at the suspect (Oswald) in Fritz’s office. According to Craig’s testimony before the Warren Commission (all of what follows is heavily disputed), he entered Fritz’s small office and identified Oswald as the running man he had seen get in the car. He says when Fritz asked Oswald, “What about the station wagon?” Oswald responded, “That station wagon belongs to Mrs. Paine…Don’t try to tie her into this. She had nothing to do with it.”* When Fritz said to Oswald, “All we’re trying to do is find out what happened, and this man saw you leave the scene,” Oswald, according to Craig, said, “I told you people I did,” then added, “Everyone will know who I am now.” Craig said he then left.

  There are three basic parts to Craig’s story: a running man getting into the Nash Rambler, the identification of the man as Oswald, and the alleged conversation in Fritz’s office. It’s my sense that Craig was more likely than not telling the truth about the first part, lying or simply wrong about the second part, and almost assuredly lying about the third part. For those who find it hard to believe that Craig would make up any part of the story, police are human beings like everyone else, and a few hav
e been known, in their effort to be looked upon as heroes, not only to magnify what they did or saw, but actually to make false claims, for example, that they were shot at by mobsters or drug traffickers, and so on.

  With respect to the running man, there are two strong inferences, going in opposite directions, on the issue of whether or not Craig should be believed. With over two hundred people, including many police officers, milling about on Elm Street after the shooting, one would assume that a significant number of them—I would think at an absolute minimum, ten—would have seen what Craig claims he saw. Yet, of all the police officers who should have seen this, including his fellow deputy, Lemmy Lewis,† only Craig reported seeing what Craig claims to have seen. On the other hand, two people, not afoot in Dealey Plaza but passing through in cars, did, indeed, support Craig’s story. And if what Craig said he saw didn’t happen, how is it possible that anyone at all (assuming they are not connected in some way with Craig, of which there’s no evidence) would say they saw essentially the same thing Craig says he saw? It would seem there’s a greater improbability of the second thing happening than the first, and this is why I give the benefit of the doubt to Craig here.

  Marvin C. Robinson told the FBI on November 23, the day after the assassination, that at sometime “between 12:30 and 1:00 p.m.” the previous day he was driving westbound on Elm Street. After crossing the intersection of Elm and Houston, “a light-colored Nash station wagon” suddenly appeared before him. The vehicle stopped and a “white male came down the grass-covered incline between the [School Book Depository] building and the street and entered the station wagon.” The station wagon then proceeded westbound on Elm. Robinson said he did not “pay any particular attention” to the person who entered the station wagon and told the FBI he would be unable to identify him.51 Roy Cooper told the FBI the day after the assassination that he was driving behind Marvin Robinson, his boss, in his car, when he saw a “white male somewhere between 20 and 30 years of age wave at a Nash Rambler station wagon, light colored, as it pulled out…real fast in front of the Cadillac driven” by his boss. Cooper could not see who was driving the station wagon and could not give any further description of the man who got into it.52 Although Robinson and Cooper did not say the man running was Oswald, they did corroborate the essence of Craig’s story.

  As far as Craig’s observation that about fourteen or fifteen minutes after the shooting in Dealey Plaza he saw Oswald get in the Rambler, either this was a sincere mistake on his part or he deliberately lied to magnify his importance in this historic event. In any case, we can be certain he was wrong because we already know where Oswald was at the time: Just two minutes after the last shot was fired, a Book Depository employee, Mrs. Robert Reid, saw Oswald on the second floor of the building walking toward the front stairway leading out of the building. Then, within minutes after the shooting, Oswald boarded a bus seven blocks from the Book Depository Building, and two blocks later the driver issued a bus transfer to him, which was found on his person after his arrest. A former landlady of Oswald’s was on the bus at the time and positively identified him. Getting off the bus, he picked up a cab another two blocks away and was driven to within a few blocks of his home. The cabdriver also positively identified Oswald. Not that Oswald’s word, by itself, should be given any credibility at all, but during his interrogation, even he confirmed the bus and cab rides (right down to some of the details told by the bus and cab drivers) as the transportation he used to get home from the Book Depository Building on the day of the assassination. Fourteen to fifteen minutes after the assassination, then, Oswald was far away from the Book Depository Building.

  With respect to Craig’s alleged encounter with Fritz and Oswald in Fritz’s office, the high probability is that Craig lied about it. T. L. Baker, one of the three Dallas Police Department lieutenants who were assistants to Captain Fritz, confirmed to me that it was he whom Craig called in the late afternoon of November 22 with his information about the running man. Baker said that when Craig, who Baker said was in plainclothes, thereafter came to the Homicide and Robbery Bureau, “I met him at the door and took him into my office, where he sat down. I knocked on Captain Fritz’s door, the captain stepped out, and I told him what Craig had told me, and he told me, ‘We already know how he [Oswald] left. Thank him [Craig] for coming down.’ I told Craig this and walked back to the door with him.”

  Baker said that he did not know Craig and didn’t see him again. When I asked Baker if he had any opinion on whether Craig had made up his story about the running man, he said, “I don’t know about this because I wasn’t there, but I know he made up the story about being in Captain Fritz’s office. He didn’t enter the room. I’m absolutely positive about that.”53

  Captain Fritz, in an affidavit to the Warren Commission, confirmed the essence of Baker’s version of events. He said, “I do remember a man coming into my outer office and I remember one of my officers calling me outside the door of my private office. I talked to this man for a minute or two, and he started telling me a story about seeing Oswald leaving the building. I don’t remember all the things that this man said, but I turned him over to Lieutenant Baker who talked to him.”54

  Baker told me, “Everything was hectic at that time and the captain was incorrect here about talking to Craig. He simply forgot. He was confusing my telling him what Craig said with Craig having told it to him. He never spoke to Craig.”55

  And in his Warren Commission testimony, counsel asked Fritz, “Now this man…has stated that he came to your office and Oswald was in your office, and you asked him to look at Oswald and tell you whether or not this was the man he saw, and he says that in your presence he identified Oswald as the man that he had seen run across this lawn and get into the white Rambler sedan. Do you remember that?”

  Fritz: “If he saw him [Oswald] he looked through that glass and saw him from the outside because I am sure of one thing, that I didn’t bring him into the office with Oswald.”

  Counsel: “You are sure you didn’t?”

  Fritz: “I am sure of that. I feel positive of that. I would remember that. I am sure.”

  Counsel: “He also says that in that office…after he had said ‘that is the man,’ that Oswald got up from his chair and slammed his hand on the table and said, ‘Now everybody will know who I am.’ Did that ever occur in your presence?”

  Fritz: “If it did, I never saw anything like that. No, sir. No, sir.”

  Counsel: “That didn’t occur?”

  Fritz: “No, sir. It didn’t. That man is not telling a true story if that is what he said.”56

  A further indication that Craig made up the encounter inside Fritz’s office was that Oswald’s alleged remark, “Don’t try to tie her [Ruth Paine] into this. She had nothing to do with it,” and particularly his alleged assertion, “Everybody will know who I am now,” together almost constitute an implied confession to Kennedy’s murder by Oswald, which is totally inconsistent with Oswald’s repeated remarks after his arrest, some captured on television film, that he was innocent and didn’t know anything about what happened. It should be noted further that if, indeed, Oswald said what Craig claimed he did, why would Fritz deny it if it actually happened? The alleged remarks could only serve to bolster Fritz’s case against Oswald, not weaken it.

  Dallas police detective Elmer Boyd knew Craig, and told me when I asked him about Craig’s reputation for truthfulness, “Well, I could tell you a few stories, but I won’t. Let’s just say he had a tendency to exaggerate.”57

  But assuming the running-man incident Craig reported did take place, which, in view of existing, albeit limited corroborative evidence, is a reasonably fair assumption, we have to ask ourselves, What significance does it have? My view is very little. I say that for several reasons. One is the very time the event occurred, assuming, again, that it did. Though not impossible, it is highly improbable that anyone running from the direction of the Book Depository Building a quarter of an hour after the shooting (r
ecall that Craig said it was “fourteen or fifteen minutes” after) would have been the shooter of the president, or a second gunman. If he had successfully avoided detection (despite the fact that swarms of law enforcement personnel almost immediately converged on the Book Depository Building and surrounding area) for that very considerable period of time, why would he suddenly choose to draw attention to himself by running away and letting out a shrill whistle to his accomplice in the getaway car rather than casually walking into, and getting lost among, the crowd? It doesn’t make too much sense.

  Second, it’s hard to pull off the biggest murder ever without leaving not one speck of evidence of your existence. As we have seen, there is much evidence putting Oswald and the murder weapon at the sniper’s nest window. Yet no one saw this second gunman or accomplice before or during the shooting, and there’s no evidence that any other rifle or cartridge case from said rifle was found anywhere in Dealey Plaza, much less the Book Depository Building, after the shooting. So unless the man Craig said he saw running had taken his rifle and any cartridge case or cases with him (and Craig never reported that the man was carrying a rifle or anything else), this man would seem to have been a benign figure. Finally, as we have seen, the vast majority of witnesses that day only heard three shots. And as we know, three cartridge casings, all ejected from Oswald’s rifle alone, were found beneath the window on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, where we know Oswald was. So even if Craig’s mysterious running man had intended to shoot Kennedy that day, he in fact didn’t fire any weapon at Kennedy, and would have been running, if at all, for some other reason, not because of having physically participated in the crime of the century.