For the bullet to follow this track, it would have to be twice deflected off of Kennedy’s bones. “If the bullet had enough remaining velocity to punch straight through Connally’s back, breaking his ribs then shattering his wrist bone before lodging in his thigh, it had too much velocity to be deflected by bones inside Kennedy’s body prior to striking Connally,” wrote G. Paul Chambers in Head Shot. “It would just shatter Kennedy’s bones the same way it shattered Connally’s and keep right on going along its original path. Unless Kennedy was eating lead for breakfast, or his bones were made of depleted uranium, or he was the bionic man, a full-metal jacket 6.5-mm lead round fired from a military rifle could not bounce around inside his body like a pinball.”11
For facts to be altered, discarded or invented, the investigation into Kennedy’s death would have to take place in a controlled environment.
Johnson used fear of nuclear destruction to validate his halting of independent investigations in all branches of federal and state government and law enforcement.
“We don’t want to be testifying,” Johnson said to Speaker of the House John McCormack, “and some fellow comes up from Dallas and says, ‘I think Khrushchev planned this whole thing, and he got our president assassinated.’ … You can see what that’ll lead us to, right quick… . You take care of the House of Representatives for me.”
“How am I going to take care of them?” McCormack asked.
“Just keep them from investigating!” was Johnson’s decisive answer.12
Robert Kennedy’s trusted advisor Nicolas Katzenbach wrote into a memo the true purpose of what would become the Warren Commission.
“The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at a trial,” Katzenbach wrote. “The only other step would be the appointment of a presidential commission of unimpeachable personnel to review and examine the evidence and announce its conclusions… . We need something to head off public speculation or congressional hearings of the wrong sort.”13
The interest of the Commission would be to use and maneuver the available evidence to ensure Oswald’s perceived guilt; all other evidence was to be suppressed or ignored.
The seven-member Warren Commission comprised Chief Justice Earl Warren, Senators Richard Russell, Jr. and John Sherman Cooper, Congressmen Gerald Ford and Hale Boggs, John McCloy, and, representing the CIA, Allen Dulles.
The talks between Hoover and Johnson to handpick and assign appropriate members to the Warren Commission sounded like mafiosi talking within their ranks. Each faction of the assassination pact within the government would have to be represented: a Johnson company man, a CIA interest, and an FBI confidant. These men would channel information back and forth between their respective agency and the Commission brokering the interests of that particular agency.
Former Director of the CIA Allen Dulles was an asset for the Agency on the Commission. He and JFK blamed each other for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion and Dulles was dressed down and fired by the president after the disastrous operation. Dulles also held a lingering hatred for Kennedy.
“What do you think about Allen Dulles?” Johnson asked.
“I think he would be a good man,”14 Hoover answered.
Dulles himself had pushed hard to get on the Commission to help distance the CIA from Oswald and the assassination. He was so active and omnipresent on the Commission that critic Mark Lane commented that it should have been renamed the “Dulles Commission.”15
“Though no longer on the CIA payroll, the scorned director served as the agency’s undercover man on the Commission,”16 wrote David Talbot in Brothers, his sweeping indictment of CIA complicity in the Kennedy assassination.
At the first executive session of the Commission, Dulles issued each member a book which detailed the case that American assassinations were the work of lone, unaided triggermen.17 The message was clear: Oswald was the CIA’s dupe and any connections to him would have to be derided or buried.
“I don’t think Allen Dulles ever missed a meeting,”18 Warren said.
Dulles pushed the preconceived agenda of the Commission, while at the same time privately wiping his hands clean of any wrongdoing in front of the other members. A stenotypist’s notes on a private conversation among Dulles, Hale Boggs, and commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin partially revealed his manipulative, faux-naivety and also several commissioners’ willingness to follow the design of the proceedings:
DULLES: Why would it be in their [the FBI’s] interest to say he [Oswald] is clearly the only guilty one?
RANKIN: They would like us to fold up and quit.
BOGGS: This closes the case, you see. Don’t you see?
RANKIN: They found the man. There is nothing more to do. The Commission supports their conclusions, and we can go home, and that is the end of it.
BOGGS: I don’t even like this being taken down.
DULLES: Yes, I think this record ought to be destroyed.
RANKIN: There is this factor too that… . Is somewhat of an issue in this case, and I suppose you are all aware of it. That is that the FBI is very explicit that Oswald is the assassin … and they are very explicit that there was no conspiracy, and they are also saying they are continuing their investigation. Now, in my experience of almost nine years, in the first place, it is hard to get them to say when you think you have got a case tight enough to convict somebody, that this is the person who committed the crime. In my experience with the FBI, they don’t do that. They claim that they don’t evaluate [come to conclusions], and it is my uniform experience that they don’t do that. Secondly, they have not run out all kinds of leads in Mexico or in Russia and so forth which they could probably—It is not our business, it is the very …
DULLES: Why is that?
RANKIN: They haven’t run out all the leads on the information, and they could probably say … that isn’t our business.
DULLES: Yes.
RANKIN: But they are concluding that there can’t be a conspiracy without those being run out. Now, that is not from my experience with the FBI.
DULLES: It is not. You are quite right. I have seen a great many reports.19
Revealed in this transcript is the belief of an FBI conspiracy not to investigate the assassination and a defeatist attitude in the decision of the Commission members not to question the Bureau. Reviewing the official FBI report on the assassination, the outline for the Commission, did not set the members any more at ease:
WARREN: Well, gentlemen, to be very frank about it, I have read the FBI report two or three times, and I have not seen anything in there yet that has not been in the press.
BOGGS: … Reading the FBI report leaves a million questions.
MCCLOY: Why did the FBI report come out with something that was inconsistent with the autopsy? The bullet business has me confused.
WARREN: It’s totally inconclusive.
BOGGS: Well, the FBI report doesn’t clear it up.
WARREN: It doesn’t do anything.
BOGGS: It raised a lot of new questions in my mind … There is still little on this fellow Ruby, including his movements … what he was doing, how he got in [the Dallas jail], it’s fantastic.20 Commission member Gerald Ford took pen in hand and changed the Commission’s initial description of where the bullet had entered John F. Kennedy’s body when he was killed in Dealey Plaza.
William C. Sullivan, the FBI’s number-two man, recounts in his book The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI that “Hoover was delighted when Gerald Ford was named to the Warren Commission. The director wrote in one of his internal memos that the Bureau could expect Ford to ‘look after FBI interests,’ and he did, keeping us fully advised of what was going on behind closed doors. He was our man, our informant, on the Warren Commission.”
Sullivan said that Hoover had been watching Ford from the beginning. “Our agents out in the field kept a watchful ey
e on local congressional races and advised Hoover whether the winners were friends or enemies. Hoover had a complete file developed on each incoming congressman. He knew their family backgrounds, where they had gone to school, whether or not they played football [Ford played football at Michigan], and any other tidbits he could weave into a subsequent conversation,” Sullivan said. “Gerald Ford was a friend of Hoover’s, and he first proved it when he made a speech not long after he came to Congress recommending a pay raise for him. He tried to impeach Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a Hoover enemy.”
Strangely enough, Sullivan himself would be killed in a “hunting accident” only days before he was to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He was shot dead near his home in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, on November 9, 1977. Courts ruled that he had been shot accidentally by fellow hunter Robert Daniels, who was later fined $500 and stripped of his hunting license for ten years.
Conservative Pundit and reporter Robert Novak said in August 2007 “[William Sullivan] told me the last time I saw him—he had lunch at my house—he had been fired by Hoover and he was going into retirement—he said that ‘Someday, you will read that I have been killed in an accident, but don’t believe it, I’ve been murdered,’ which was a shocking thing to say.”21
Sullivan was one of six top FBI officials who died in the six months before they were to testify before the House Select Committee in 1977. Others included Alan H. Belmont, special assistant to Hoover; Louis Nicholas, another special assistant and Hoover’s liaison with the Warren Commission; James Cadigan, a document expert who handled papers related to the murder of John F. Kennedy; J. M. English, former head of the FBI forensic sciences laboratory where Oswald’s rifle and pistol were both tested; and Donald Kaylor, an FBI fingerprint chemist who examined prints from the JFK case.
FBI documents disclosed in 2006 detail even more about Ford’s role as the FBI’s informant and agent. Assistant FBI Director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach regularly met secretly with Ford to inform the FBI on the status of the Warren Commission investigation. “Ford indicated he would keep me thoroughly advised as to the activities of the Commission,” DeLoach wrote in a memo. “He stated this would have to be done on a confidential basis, however he thought it should be done.”
The Associated Press reported that DeLoach wrote another FBI memo, which explained “that Ford wanted to take the FBI’s confidential assassination report on a ski vacation, but had no way to do so ‘in complete safety.’ DeLoach recommended lending him a bureau briefcase with a lock. The bottom of the memo contains a handwritten ‘OK’ over Hoover’s distinctive initial ‘H,’ which he regularly used in commenting on memos.” In return for his loyalty, the FBI gave its full blessing to Ford; he was given complete access to whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it.
The Associated Press also reported that DeLoach wrote a memo on December 17, 1963 about a meeting with Ford in which the deputy director laid out a problem. “Two members of the Commission brought up the fact that they still were not convinced that the president had been shot from the sixth floor window of the Texas Book Depository,” DeLoach wrote. “These members failed to understand the trajectory of the slugs that had killed the president. He [Ford] stated he felt this point would be discussed further but, of course, would represent no problem.”
Indeed, we shall see what Ford meant by “no problem,”
Here, more specifically, is the problem DeLoach described. The initial draft of the Warren Commission report stated, “A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder to the right of the spine.” This description matches that of Admiral Burkley’s autopsy. Burkley, JFK’s personal physician, attended the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Medical center and noted that the wound was “in the upper posterior about even with the third thoracic vertebra.”
In fact, autopsy photographs of the back place the wound in the back two to three inches below the base of the neck. A diagram by Burkley included in the Warren Commission’s owns report confirms this location. The actual physical evidence demonstrates that the first draft of the Warren Commission report was indeed accurate. Photographs of bullet holes in Kennedy’s shirt and suit jacket, almost six inches below the top of the collar, place the wound in the upper right back.
As American history Professor Michael L. Kurtz pointed out in The JFK Assassination Debates: “If a bullet fired from the sixth-floor window of the Depository building nearly sixty feet higher than the limousine entered the president’s back, with the president sitting in an upright position, it could hardly have exited from his throat at a point just above the Adam’s apple, then abruptly change course and drive downward into Governor Connally’s back.”
Ford did Hoover’s bidding. His handwritten edit said, “A bullet had entered the base of the back of his neck slightly to the right of his spine.” This change was later revealed in declassified papers kept by the Warren Commission’s general counsel accepted in the final report.
“A small change,” Ford told the Associated Press when it surfaced decades later in 1997.
Ford, a public supporter of the single-assassin theory, insisted that his edit had intended to clarify meaning, not change history. However, the effect of his alteration is clear: With this “small change,” he bolstered the Commission’s false conclusion that a single bullet had passed through Kennedy and hit Governor Connally—thus solidifying what is now known as “The Magic Bullet Theory.” Indeed, the Associated Press stated that Ford’s “small change” became “the crucial element” to determine that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone assassin.
Ford’s co operation may have been motivated by other factors. Bobby “Little Lyndon” Baker wrote that Washington lobbyist Fred Black, a crony and secret business partner of Baker and LBJ, had a suite at Washington’s Sheraton Carlton Hotel. There, he often arranged for call girls to entertain congressmen and senators. The FBI surreptitiously filmed the action.
According to Baker, Ford was a frequent visitor:
The American public first learned of Ford’s alteration in 1997, over three decades after Kennedy’s assassination, and this information was only released as a result of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Interestingly enough, the ARRB was formed as a response to Oliver Stone’s film JFK. For the first time in generations, the public demanded an in-depth examination to determine what was fact, what was fiction and what was covered up. In 1992, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act to empower the ARRB to declassify JFK assassination records.
Hoover memorialized Ford’s role in an internal FBI memo dated 1965 that stated, “Though we did experience some difficulty with all the members of the Warren Commission, Ford was of considerable help to the Bureau.”
In a supreme act of irony, in April 2001 in Boston, former President Ford was given the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award from the directors of the Kennedy Library. Was he rewarded for covering up the facts of John F. Kennedy’s death?
Tim Miller, the publisher of Ford’s 2007 memoir, revealed that although the book contended that Ford had maintained the belief that Oswald had acted alone, in private, the former president believed that Oswald had had help.22
“There is no doubt that President Gerald Ford knew more about the JFK death,”23 Miller said.
Another Commission member who succumbed to the pressure to follow the foundations laid by Johnson and Hoover was Richard Russell, an old mentor of Johnson.
In public, Russell would be a willing participant to its motives and conclusions, but in private, to Johnson and to the Commission, he would voice his concerns. Russell’s biggest contention was the “Magic Bullet Theory,” on which the Commission’s entire case hung.
“Well, what difference does it make which bullet got Connally?” Johnson asked Russell.
“Well, it doesn’t make much difference. But they said that … the Commission believes that the same bullet that hit Kennedy hit Connally. Well, I don’t believe i
t.”24
The “Magic Bullet Theory” did make a difference, however. More than one bullet causing all the nonfatal wounds to President Kennedy and Governor Connally would have meant that there were at least four shots fired. If true, it was impossible that just one gunman had fired upon the president in the timeframe of the assassination.
“To say that they were hit by separate bullets,” a commission lawyer stated, “is synonymous with saying that there were two assassins.”25
Another shooter meant a conspiracy, which did not fit the Warren Commission narrative.
A handwritten note by Russell in December 1963 further detailed his disenchantment with the Commission. “W. [Warren] & Katzenbach know all about the FBI, and they are apparently through psychiatrists & others planning to show Oswald only one who even considered—this to me is untenable position—I must insist on outside counsel,”26 Russell wrote.
Before he died in 1970, Russell had given a final interview saying that he “never believed that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy without at least some encouragement from others. And that’s what a majority of the Committee wanted to find. I think someone else worked with him on the planning.”27
The witnesses to the assassination who were to testify were presupposed to follow the established conclusions set for the Commission. If the witnesses testified contrarily, they were led or coerced to present their case otherwise. If they did not, their account was altered or discarded.
The Man Who Killed Kennedy Page 32