George de Mohrenschildt saw that the testimony he had given, one with positive assessments of Oswald, was purposefully altered in print. “All the favorable facts that we mentioned about Lee were subsequently misinterpreted in the printed edition of the report or not mentioned in it at all,” de Mohrenschildt wrote.28
De Mohrenschildt also later felt that much of the interviewing conducted by the Commission had intentionally been leading intentionally leading the public to a visceral response, drawing it away from the evidence.
“We wondered why the Commission paid so much attention to the testimonies of people who had known Lee and Marina in Dallas long before the assassination or others who had known him long before that? And the answer was—just to fill up the pages and tranquilize the American populace.”29
The script had been written, and the Warren Commission was simply looking for actors to fill the roles. Such was the case with the witnesses attesting to the origin of the shots. Of the twenty-five witnesses who gave affidavits attesting to the origin of the shots on the day of and the day following the assassination, twenty-two pointed to the grassy knoll.30 In the evidence on hand for the Commission from 121 witnesses, fifty-one believed that the shots had come from the area of the grassy knoll; only thirty-two thought that they had come from the Texas School Book Depository.31 Yet the Warren Report would conclude that “No credible evidence suggests that the shots were fired from the railroad bridge over the Triple Underpass, the nearby railroad yards, or any place other than the Texas School Book Depository.”32 In spite of the majority of eyewitnesses pointing elsewhere, the Book Depository fit the story.
For the Commission, the shots could not have originated from anywhere else.
“In what other murder case would the testimony of fifty-one sworn and many other unheard witnesses be dismissed so cavalierly as “‘no credible evidence,’”33 wrote Commission critic Harold Feldman.
Also dismissed were reports from three Dallas Police Department officers—Seymour Weitzman, D. V. Harkness, and Joe Marshall Smith—that they had encountered men disguised as Secret Service agents just following the assassination. Officer Smith, directed to the grassy knoll from a woman who heard the shots, ran into someone who flashed him secret service credentials.34 This could only have been a counterfeit agent because all the Secret Service agents with the motorcade proceeded instantly to Parkland Hospital. When interviewed by Commission lawyer Wesley Liebler, Officer Smith maintained his story:
Mr. LIEBELER: There is a parking lot behind this grassy area back from Elm Street toward the railroad tracks, and you went down to the parking lot and looked around?
Mr. SMITH: Yes, sir. I checked all the cars. I looked into all the cars and checked around the bushes. Of course, I wasn’t alone. There was some deputy sheriff with me, and I believe one Secret Service man when I got there. I got to make this statement, too. I felt awfully silly, but after the shot and this woman, I pulled my pistol from my holster, and I thought, this is silly, I don’t know who I am looking for, and I put it back. Just as I did, he showed me that he was a Secret Service agent.
Gordon Arnold, a man on military leave in Dallas who stopped to watch the presidential motorcade, also saw someone who claimed to be a Secret Service agent behind the fence on the grassy knoll just before the shooting. The pseudo agent flashed a badge and informed Arnold that he didn’t belong in that area. Arnold recalled his confrontation with assassination researcher Jim Marrs:
I said all right and started walking back along the fence. I could feel that he was following me, and we had a few more words. I walked around the front of the fence and found a little mound of dirt to stand on to see the motorcade … Just after the car turned onto Elm and started toward me, a shot went off from over my left shoulder. I felt the bullet rather than heard it, and it went right past my left ear… . I had just gotten out of basic training. In my mind, live ammunition was being fired. It was being fired over my head. And I hit the dirt.
Arnold’s story of an agent was confirmed by a photograph taken by Mary Moorman just as President Kennedy was fatally shot. The photograph shows an image of Arnold wearing an army cap and a service medallion filming the motorcade. The photograph more interestingly showed another figure. Known as the “Badge Man”, it provided proof that there was a man behind the fence on the grassy knoll. When analyzed with a photograph taken from a different angle at the same time by assassination witness Orville Nix, Jacques de Langre, a commercial photographer who had also done investigative photography work for the United States Army, said “without question, that the two angles of the subject are from the same person … [and] the subject is a man holding an elongated object.”35
In the 1980s, assassination researchers Gary Mack and Jack White, who studied the photograph and tried to have it better analyzed, attracted the attention of a news organization. The group had the Moorman photo analyzed using computer enhancement at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The result: The photo unequivocally showed a figure firing a rifle.36
When Arnold was later shown the photograph, he became overwhelmed with emotion as he recollected the moment. “I couldn’t understand why I would be standing crooked,” Arnold said as he examined the photograph and realized, “if that’s a muzzle blast or flash, then whoever is standing there would have been a fool to stand up straight, he would be trying to get away from harm’s way is what it boils down to.”37
Arlen Specter, then serving as an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, was the sole lawyer brought in to determine the facts of the assassination. Incredibly, before the assassination, Specter had made a fan in Robert Kennedy. He was successfully prosecuting Teamsters in Philadelphia, which led Bobby, in 1963, to seek Specter out to help in his Justice Department fight against Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa. Specter declined the offer. Six month later, he would accept a very different offer.
As assistant counsel for the Warren Commission, the “facts” that Specter determined included the “Magic Bullet Theory”, the trajectories and origin of the shots, and the sequence of events and number of assassins.38
Specter staged an elaborate re-enactment of the assassination in Dealey Plaza but used a different make and model car for the presidential limousine (the presidential limousine was a 1961 Lincoln; for the re-enactment investigators used a 1956 Cadillac). The smaller vehicle had no jump seats and instead had a rear bench more raised than the 1961 Lincoln.39 The replacement model invalidated the entire re-enactment. Strangely, the role of Governor John Connally in Specter’s re-enactment would be played by FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt, who would later be revealed as “Deep Throat” in the Watergate scandal. Felt would be the famous anonymous source for Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post.
I worked as a consultant in Specter’s 1980 US Senate campaign, which sent him to Washington after he had lost election bids for mayor of Philadelphia, district attorney, governor, and a previous race for the Senate in 1976. His perseverance was like Nixon’s—The quality that drove him was ambition.
I came to know Specter much better in his Senate days and served as chairman of his 1996 campaign for president. The race was a symbolic gesture meant to argue for a broader, more inclusive Republican Party not dominated by the religious right.
I told the senator that I thought the “Magic Bullet Theory” was bullshit. He always smiled and postponed the debate until cocktail time. Over drinks, he could zealously debate his theory of JFK’s death by gunshot. Specter had a zest for political combat and a passion for the details of public policy. He enjoyed campaigning, a brisk game of squash, a slab of roast beef, and an ice-cold martini with a glass of ice on the side. He would nurse it slowly adding ice cubes to keep it ever cold.
Specter was dogged and abrasive; he could be brusque and brutal. He rarely backed down when he pursued a course of action. When Robert Kennedy noticed his relentless pursuit of the Teamsters, the Pennsylvania poll was at the height of his energy. Specter’s manner was
a whirlwind of questions and orders, and he was notoriously rough on his staff. Yet in thirty years of friendship, he never spoke a harsh word to me.
The medical staff who treated President Kennedy following the shooting was also bullied, badgered, or had their testimony discarded. Ronald Jones, a resident physician at Parkland Hospital, upon viewing Kennedy’s body, saw what he knew to be an entrance wound in the throat. When this was suggested to Specter, Jones was probed to the accuracy of his statement:
Dr. JONES: The hole was very small and relatively clean cut, as you would see in a bullet that is entering rather than exiting from a patient. If this were an exit wound, you would think that it exited at a very low velocity to produce no more damage than this had done, and if this were a missile of high velocity, you would expect more of an explosive type of exit wound, with more tissue destruction than this appeared to have on superficial examination.
Mr. SPECTER: Would it be consistent, then, with an exit wound, but of low velocity, as you put it?
Dr. JONES: Yes, of very low velocity to the point that you might think that this bullet barely made it through the soft tissues and just enough to drop out of the skin on the opposite side.40
The conviction that a bullet fired from behind could only make the small neck wound upon exit if traveling very slowly was not consistent with the “Magic Bullet Theory,” in which the bullet upon leaving the president’s neck would also have ripped through Governor Connally’s chest, through his hand, and have burrowed into his leg. Specter found Jones’s testimony disagreeable and consequently asked him to alter it.
Over thirty years later, answering questions in front of the Assassination Records Review Board (AARB), Jones recounted a meeting with Specter following his Warren Commission testimony:
When I completed my testimony, Arlen Specter followed me into the hall and said, “I want to tell you something that I don’t want you to say anything about,” Jones recollected. He said, “We have people who will testify that they saw the president shot from the front.” He said, “You can always get people to testify about something.” But he said: We are pretty convinced that he was shot from the back. And that implied, although some of us thought that might initially have been an entrance wound, that, you know, that’s the end of the discussion, and we do have people who will testify to that.” I don’t know whether you construe that as pressure or not, but certainly I was surprised that he said don’t say anything about that to anyone. A young resident, thirty-one years old, you’re not going to say about that episode to anybody because, at that time, I think we were all—the whole country was—I mean, you didn’t joke about anything, and there were jokes going around about what happened at the time of the assassination. But we were serious about that. I thought that was unusual.41
Specter bullied Parkland Hospital engineer Darrell Tomlinson, the man who found the magic bullet, into testimony that implied Tomlinson had found the bullet on a stretcher that connected the projectile to Governor Connally. Specter also harassed Jean Hill, who as a witness to the assassination, testified that she had heard more shots fired than were accounted for by the Warren Commission, that the shots had come from multiple locations, and that one of those locations was the grassy knoll
Hill recounted Specter’s badgering to assassination researcher Jim Marrs:
He kept trying to get me to change my story, particularly regarding the number of shots. He said that I had been told how many shots there were, and I figured he was talking about what the Secret Service told me right after the assassination. His inflection and attitude were that I knew what I was supposed to be saying, why wouldn’t I just say it. I asked him, “Look, do you want the truth or just what you want me to say?” He said he wanted the truth, so I said, “The truth is that I heard between four and six shots.” I told him, “I’m not going to lie for you.” So he starts talking off the record. He told me about my life, my family, and even mentioned that my marriage was in trouble. I said, “What’s the point of interviewing me if you already know everything about me?” He got angrier and angrier and finally told me, “Look, we can make you look as crazy as Marguerite Oswald and everybody knows how crazy she is. We could have you put in a mental institution if you don’t cooperate with us.”42
The harassment was necessary to ensure that the witness testimony had the appearance of a uniform conclusion. In truth, not even the government itself could form a uniform conclusion.
In 1964, Specter would even tell the Philadelphia Bar Association that the FBI disagreed with the “Magic Bullet Theory.” While it was common knowledge that the FBI had initially believed Kennedy and Connally were hit by separate shots, documents uncovered concerning the FBI’s conclusions found that CE 399, the magic bullet fired into JFK “had entered just below his shoulder to the right of the spinal column at an angle of twenty-five to sixty degrees downward, that there was no point of exit, and that the bullet was not in the body.”43
Specter later admitted to HSCA and Church Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi that, after initial denial, the Zapruder film that the Warren Commission had reviewed was “missing frames” in critical sequences. When they looked at the frames together, Fonzi pointed out to Specter that Zapruder film frames 207 to 212 had been spliced. “Boy, you sure got me,” Specter said. “207–212? Well, I’ve got the intervening frames. I don’t think there’s anything deliberate about that at all. I never knew that. I’m very much surprised …”44
When confronted by Fonzi with evidence that the bullet holes in the clothing confirmed that the shot to the upper right back and throat did not line up, Specter seemed equally as absent minded and put forth the inane theory that the impeccably tailored Kennedy’s suit jacket and shirt were bunched up high as he was waving when the bullet was fired:
SPECTER: Well, the back hole, when the shirt is laid down, comes … ah … well, I forget exactly where it came, but it certainly wasn’t higher, enough higher to … ah … understand the … ah … the angle of decline which …
FONZI: Was the hole in the back of the shirt lower than the hole in the front of the neck of the shirt? (The president had a throat wound made by a bullet that had pierced his tie and made a hole in the front of the shirt at the throat.)
SPECTER: Well, I think, that … that if you took the shirt without allowing for it being pulled up, that it would either have been in line or somewhat lower.
FONZI: Somewhat lower?
SPECTER: Perhaps, I … I don’t want to say because I don’t really remember. I got to take a look at that shirt.
Specter also admitted to Fonzi that the Commission had not been interested in seeing the autopsy photographs and X-rays and would not say whether or not he had asked to see the important evidence.
“Have I dodged your question?” Specter asked. “Yes, I have dodged your question.”45
What Specter could not evade was the lack of credible eyewitnesses to testify that the same bullet that struck Kennedy also wounded Connally. It was a theory that forensic pathologist Cyril H. Wecht called “an asinine, pseudoscientific sham at best.”46
Oddly, Wecht’s career would intersect with Specter’s on a few occasions. He served on the staff of St. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh before becoming deputy coroner of Allegheny County in 1965. He was elected Allegheny County coroner four years later, where he served from 1970 to 1980 and again from 1996 to 2006.
In 1978, he was elected chairman of the Allegheny County Democratic Party. One year later, he was elected to the Allegheny County Board of Commissioners. In 1982, he was the Democratic Party’s nominee to oppose Senator John Heinz, who won a seat by defeating Arlen Specter in the Republican Primary six years earlier. Heinz won the election with 59 percent of the vote.
In 1978, Wecht was the lone dissenter on a nine-member forensic pathology panel before the HSCA re-examining the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which had concurred with the Warren Commission conclusions and ”Magic Bullet Theory.” Out of the four official examinations into
the Kennedy assassination, Wecht is the only forensic pathologist who has disagreed with the conclusion that both the “Magic Bullet Theory” and Kennedy’s head wounds are mutually consistent.
Wecht, after studying the clothes of the victims, the alleged rifle of the shooter, X-rays, and photographs from the autopsy and the actual bullet itself, came to the undeniable conclusion that the path the bullet had taken in the “Magic Bullet Theory” was a scientific impossibility.47
”Give me one bullet, in one case, just one from hundreds of thousands of cases … that has done this. Nobody has ever produced one,”48 Wecht said. As almost all of the researchers, he realized that the theory was necessary to string together the Commission’s faulty conclusions. “Without the single bullet theory, there cannot be one assassin, whether it is Oswald or anybody else,”49 said Wecht.
John Connally himself testified that he had been hit with a separate bullet. “They talk about the ‘one-bullet’ or ‘two-bullet theory,’ but as far as I am concerned, there is no ‘theory,’” Connally said. “There is my absolute knowledge, and Nellie’s too, that one bullet caused the president’s first wound, and that an entirely separate shot struck me.”50 Connally though, ever the ardent Johnson man, concluded that he had been satisfied with the final judgments of the Warren Commission.
”Connally has stated that he is satisfied with the conclusions of the Warren Commission,” said assassination researcher Penn Jones. “This is insanity. By persisting that he was hit by a separate shot, Connally destroys the Warren Report completely. How can he then state that he has no quarrel with the Commission’s findings?”51
More damaging to the theory was Commission Exhibit 399, the recovered bullet that the Commission linked to it. The problem with the projectile found is that it was completely intact, without a mark on it. Still, Specter stood by his theory. When Oliver Stone’s film JFK was released, Specter expressed the opinion that it might only bolster the Commission’s findings. “In a curious way, this absurd movie, which no one is taking seriously once acquainted with the facts, may lead people to read and accept the extensive factual analysis and sound conclusions of the Warren Commission’s Report,” Specter said.52
The Man Who Killed Kennedy Page 33