Popular Crime

by Bill James

  Howard Donahue was a Baltimore ballistics expert who became involved in the JFK investigation when he was called by CBS in the spring of 1967. CBS had constructed a mockup of Dealey Plaza, complete with a little track which pulled a moving target repeatedly through the “Plaza” at 11 miles per hour. CBS was trying to see whether they could find anybody who could hit the target three times in 5.6 seconds. Donahue fired three shots into a three-inch circle on the moving target in 5.2 seconds—and became fascinated with the weapons-and-ballistics aspects of the assassination.

  Donahue’s theory, developed over the following twenty years, is that Lee Harvey Oswald did in fact fire two shots at the President that warm November afternoon, with or without the assistance of a vast array of unknown conspirators. He missed with the first shot, although a fragment ricocheted up and hit the President in the neck. His second shot hit Kennedy and Governor John Connally, and his weapon jammed when he attempted a third shot. Unfortunately, a Secret Service man, George Hickey, grabbed a weapon and jumped when he heard the first shot. Hickey’s weapon accidentally fired, and that bullet, from Hickey’s gun, mortally wounded the President.

  On first hearing this theory, almost no one believes that it could be right. It sounds like just another helium balloon by someone who watched too many Mission: Impossible re-runs as a child. But I have read Mortal Error carefully, and I have to tell you, if there’s a flaw in his argument, I don’t see it. Unlike the conspiracy theories, which are almost universally based on conversations which took place in Russia in 1961, in New Orleans in 1962, or in Tampa in 1972, the Donahue analysis is based primarily upon a detailed, careful study of what happened in Dealey Plaza on November 22. The key points of his argument can be sorted into three classes:

  1) Ballistics.

  2) Circumstantial observations of the critical ten seconds.

  3) Circumstantial observations after the fact.

  Donahue is a ballistics expert who has testified in many criminal cases in that role. His ballistics arguments include:

  1) The trajectory of the fatal bullet, plotted very carefully based on the entrance and “exit” wounds and the position of Kennedy’s head at that moment, traces a line behind Kennedy, and directly back to the Secret Service car which was following at a distance of about five feet.

  2) The bullet which hit Kennedy in the head disintegrated after impact, which a bullet fired from Oswald’s rifle would not have done, but a bullet fired from a AR-15, carried by Hickey, would have. According to Menninger, “The Carcano round [Oswald’s round] simply did not have the velocity—either rotational, from the rifling in the gun barrel—or linear, from the gunpowder charge in the skull—to completely shred the thick metal jacket and disintegrate the lead inside upon impact … the startling fact was that the bullet that hit Kennedy’s head had not behaved like a full metal-jacketed round at all.”

  3) A Carcano round, fired at the distance between Kennedy and Oswald at the moment of the fatal shot (believed to be 261 feet), could not have transmitted as much energy as the fatal round obviously did.

  4) A .223 bullet, as fired from an AR-15 (Hickey’s gun), creates a little “lead snowstorm” in its target, as some of the lead actually melts on impact, then cools again in the tissue. A Carcano round has no similar effect. According to Donahue, exactly such an effect was described to him by Dr. Russell Fisher, a member of the pathologists’ panel which reviewed the autopsy results in 1968. (The President’s brain disappeared from the National Archives shortly after that, making it impossible to confirm this allegation.)

  5) The bullet fired by an AR-15 is 5.56 millimeters in diameter. A Carcano round is 6.5 millimeters in diameter. The entrance wound in the back of the President’s head was only six millimeters wide—making it seemingly impossible to put a 6.5 millimeter round through the hole.

  This material, on first read, is stupefyingly dense, and for that reason has little power to persuade. In establishing the trajectory of the fatal bullet, there’s a 3 degree slant of the road, a 16 degree angle of descent from the window to the car, a 25 degree turn to the President’s head, a 40 degree tilt to the President’s head, a 6 degree left angle from the Secret Service car, an angle of the road from true north, an angle from the grassy knoll, a path to be followed from the book depository to Governor Connally … add in muzzle velocities, Zapruder frame numbers, the widths and weights of bullets and bullet casings, and you’ve got a story problem that would boggle the mind of the Great God Texas Instruments.

  So on first reading, my reaction to the ballistic stuff was “Well, he could be right, he could be wrong, I’m not a ballistics expert, and I don’t see how anybody can really claim to know.” Later, however, after reading Posner’s book, after watching a couple of documentaries which include copies of the Zapruder film, I returned to the analysis, and my reaction was different: not merely that Donahue could be right, but that he actually was.

  The situation is not as complicated as the language in which it must be stated. If you can wade through the math until you get an intuitive feel for what the argument is about, you can figure things out. Let’s start with the fact that, to quote from Posner, “the fatal shot entered the rear of the President’s skull and exploded out the right side of his head,” emphasis mine.

  But Oswald was positioned to the right rear of Kennedy, behind him and to the right. That should mean, on the surface of it, that a shot from Oswald should have exited the left side of Kennedy’s head. Put down the book, take your fingers and point; you’ll see what I mean.

  Not only that, but Oswald was way up in the air. The Warren Commission reported that the fatal shot was fired at a downward angle (from the sixth floor of the book depository) of 16 degrees. But, also according to the Warren report, the fatal bullet, as it exited, blew a hole in Kennedy’s skull about two inches from the top of his head—above the hairline. Why does a bullet fired at a downward angle of 16 degrees, entering behind Kennedy’s ear, exit through his skull? A descending bullet should have created an exit wound through Kennedy’s face, about the height of his nose—not through his skull.

  The Warren report defenders avoid this quandary by supposing that Kennedy’s head, at the moment of impact, is turned sharply to the left (25 degrees) and tilted sharply forward (40 degrees). The problem, based on my own observation of the film, is that they are simply wrong. Kennedy’s head was turned to the left and tilted forward at the moment of impact—but not nearly enough to explain the anomalous location of the exit wound. Donahue says that in order to cause the actual wound with a bullet descending at 16 degrees, the President’s head would have had to have been tilted forward about 60 degrees. In fact, it was tilted forward by about 10 to 11 degrees. On the other hand, the exit wound is exactly where it should be if the fatal bullet was in fact fired from Agent Hickey’s weapon.

  So Donahue is right on that issue—or at least, he convinces me. Rent one of the documentaries which includes an enhanced version of the Zapruder film, and reach your own conclusion. Watch the film frame by frame (as hard as that is), and ask yourself does this bullet come from

  a) the high right rear, or

  b) a position on the same level and slightly to the left.

  I think that almost anyone would conclude that the answer is (b). The Men Who Killed Kennedy, by the way, is a silly documentary and a dreadful disservice to the truth, but it does include a good, clean version of the Zapruder film.

  Donahue’s other four points, as I have summarized them, involve the disintegration of the bullet, the amount of energy transmitted by the bullet, the “lead snowstorm” in the President’s brain, and the size of the entry wound. On none of these issues am I able to get beyond the point of saying that Donahue’s argument is reasonable, as opposed to right. On the issue of how a bullet 6.5 millimeters in diameter could pass through a wound 6 millimeters in diameter, the Warren report says, “The dimension of 6 millimeters, somewhat smaller than the diameter of a 6.5 millimeter bullet, was caused by the elas
tic recoil of the skull which shrinks the size of an opening after a missile passes through it.” This is theoretically possible but, since pathologists routinely assume that an entrance wound must be larger than the bullet which causes it, not a very strong argument. The other defense for the anomaly is that the measurement, which is based on an X-ray, may not have been precise. On each of these four supporting points of his ballistic argument, I am inclined to believe that Donahue is probably correct.

  Let us deal, then, with the circumstantial observations of the critical seconds. It was this material which, in first reading, persuaded me that Donahue might indeed have unraveled the century’s greatest mystery. Donahue’s research has concluded that:

  1) Secret Service agent George Hickey carried an AR-15, which is the civilian version of the M-16, the rifle used by U.S. military ground troops in the Vietnam era. Numerous eyewitness reports state that Hickey had grabbed this weapon and was waving it around within seconds of the first shot.

  2) One eyewitness, S. M. Holland, told a Warren Commission interviewer that “just about the same time the President was shot the second time, he (Hickey) jumped up in the seat and was standing up … now I actually thought when they started up, I actually thought he was shot, too, because he fell backwards just like he was shot, but it jerked him down when they started off.” Holland also observed that agent Hickey had his weapon in his hands at that moment.

  3) Special Agent Winston Lawson was in the first car of the motorcade, the car ahead of Kennedy’s on that day. His job was to look steadily backward at the President, maintaining constant visual contact. In a statement written December 1, 1963, agent Lawson wrote that:

  As the Lead Car was passing under this bridge I heard the first loud, sharp report and in more rapid succession two more sounds like gunfire. I could see persons to the left of the motorcade vehicles running away. I noticed Agent Hickey standing up in the follow-up car with the automatic weapon and first thought he had fired at someone. (emphasis mine)

  4) Secret Service agent Glen Bennett, seated next to Hickey in the follow-up car, says that when the second shot hit Kennedy he yelled “He’s hit,” and reached for the AR-15 on the floor of the vehicle—only to realize that Agent Hickey already had it. Secret Service agent Emory Roberts, who was in charge of the agents in the follow-up car, reported that just after the shooting he turned and saw Hickey with the rifle, and said “Be careful with that.”

  5) While the sound reports from the scene are confusing, many earwitnesses thought that one or more of the shots had originated from near the President. Austin Miller, watching from the overpass, thought that the shots had come “from right there in the car.” Royce Skelton, also watching from the overpass, said that he thought the shots came “from around the President’s car.” Mary Elizabeth Woodward, standing just in front of the grassy knoll, described the third shot as “a horrible ear-shattering noise.”

  Agent Lawson, in the 1990s, was outspoken in condemning Donahue’s conclusions. But doing no more than re-wording his contemporary statement, Lawson says that what he actually saw led him to believe that Agent Hickey had fired his weapon—but that later events caused him to abandon or re-interpret this recollection.

  6) Several individuals who were part of the President’s motorcade reported smelling gunpowder. Mrs. Earle Cabell, wife of the mayor of Dallas, was riding in an open convertible, four cars behind the death car. She saw the barrel of the rifle projecting through the open window, and immediately after that reported smelling gunpowder. Other people riding in the motorcade also reported the smell of gunpowder, including Tom Dillard, a journalist who was riding in an open car about a block behind the President, and Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was in the car immediately behind Agent Hickey’s.

  This, to me, is probably the most persuasive element of Donahue’s argument. If in fact the only shots fired that afternoon were from Oswald’s rifle, six stories in the air and inside a building, I have a very difficult time understanding why numerous witnesses would smell gunpowder at ground level and in the path of the presidential limousine.

  Posner’s version of this is in a footnote. “Others near the School Book Depository also thought they smelled gunpowder,” writes Posner, emphasis mine. He starts with Mrs. Cabell and lists two others, both of whom were riding in open convertibles behind the President. His explanation for why these people smelled gunpowder is that “a stiff north-south wind did blow the odor of gunpowder further into the plaza.”

  But this doesn’t wash. A stiff north-south wind would disperse the smell of gunpowder, not pass it along intact. Although Posner himself does not believe in the Donahue thesis, all of the persons that Posner reports smelling gunpowder were in the cars which immediately followed Agent Hickey’s. This seems to me a weighty coincidence. To say that they were “near the School Book Depository” is disingenuous; they were near the Book Depository when the motorcade went by the depository.

  Menninger/Donahue reports on another person who smelled gunpowder, that being Officer Earle Browne, who was stationed on the Triple Overpass. This makes sense, however, since the Secret Service vehicle would pass right underneath Browne’s feet a few seconds after the shot. The smell of the gunpowder would obviously be carried along with the vehicle. According to Menninger/Donahue (p. 90):

  Oswald was sixty feet above the street and most of the windows in the book depository were closed. Bullets don’t emit or trail gun smoke. And what about Officer Browne on the highway overpass? He was a considerable distance upwind from Dealey Plaza, and the wind was blowing briskly that day. Any gun smoke produced in Dealey Plaza could never have reached him.

  There may be a disagreement here about which way the wind was blowing. Leaving that aside, I submit that you can go there today and fire three shots inside that book depository, and nobody down on the street is going to smell gunpowder four seconds later, regardless of which way the wind blows. So if Donahue is wrong, explain it to me. Why did so many witnesses in the path of the motorcade smell gunpowder, if no gun was fired in that path?

  From there on, what we have in support of the Donahue thesis is a series of after-the-fact observations, culled by Donahue from dozens of other Kennedy books.

  1. Jim Bishop, in The Day Kennedy Was Shot, reported that Secret Service agent Clint Hill phoned the White House from the hospital. “There’s been an accident,” he reported, apparently overheard by the reporter.

  2. According to LBJ: The Way He Was, by Frank Cormier, Lyndon Johnson hated to have Secret Service agents tailgating him, and once, on a hunting trip, threatened to shoot out their tires if they didn’t keep a safe distance. Another time, Johnson told Cormier that “If I ever get killed, it won’t be because of an assassin. It’ll be some Secret Service agent who trips himself up and his gun goes off. They’re worse than trigger-happy Texas sheriffs.”

  There are others, but none of the after-the-fact observations, really, can be taken to mean very much. Johnson’s comment is intriguing, but as we get further away from the actual event, the circle of material which can be reviewed for supporting “evidence” becomes almost inconceivably large, and for that reason it becomes possible to find support for any theory, no matter how far-fetched; this is the basis of the Assassination Industry.

  Donahue’s research is somewhat inaccessible. It isn’t sexy. It doesn’t satisfy our natural paranoia. It relies on some understanding of ballistics, which is a very difficult field for a lay reader to plow through. But to a responsible adult reader who isn’t paranoid, much of this reveals not the weakness of Donahue’s argument as contrasted with other accounts, but the strength of it.

  The best thing that can be said about many of the competing accounts—High Treason, Contract on America, Reasonable Doubt, the film JFK and the documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy—the best thing that can be said about them is that they are childish. Body-snatching, duplicate Oswalds and duplicate Jack Rubys, reconstructive surgery to disguise the corpse, manufactured photographs
and assassins visible in the shadows of grainy Polaroids—who believes this stuff ?

  As to the conspiracy theories, my personal experience is that the maximum number of people who can successfully conspire to do anything is two. If you get three people involved, one of them is going to talk. If you have two, one of them will probably talk, but it’s possible that they’ll carry it off, if the deception is small and of no particular interest. Successful conspiracies involving as many as eight or ten people might be theoretically possible, but I wouldn’t want to bet on them.

  But these vast, international conspiracies involving the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, Jack Ruby, the United States Army, the Warren Commission, the mafia, two hospitals—it’s crazy. Hundreds of people involved in a plot stretching over twenty years, and yet none of them ever talks about it, except some drug dealer who is imprisoned in Jamaica or someplace. Hundreds of books written about the subject, incalculable man hours invested in researching the case, and yet no document ever surfaces to reveal the conspiracy. It is childish to believe that such a thing is possible.

  Donahue’s theory is that nobody intended to kill the President, other than Oswald; it was an accident. It was an accident which happened to occur in such a manner that it was very unclear, to the persons on the scene, what had happened or what was happening. Once this terrible accident had occurred, very few people would have to have any knowledge of what was going on. It is quite possible that Agent Hickey himself did not realize what had happened.

  And those few people who did, faced with a fait accompli, have a powerful incentive to keep quiet about it. Look at what happens if they talk:

  1. Agent Hickey’s life is destroyed.

  2. All of the agents involved are professionally destroyed.