Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination

by Anthony Summers

  Abraham Zapruder sold his film to Life magazine for a quarter of a million dollars. The magazine later published still frames from the material, but the moving footage was not shown on television until March 1975. The film was a key tool for both official investigations, not least because it provides a near-precise time frame for the assassination.

  In 1978, however, it took on new importance, for its use in conjunction with a hitherto neglected item of evidence, one that was greeted as the most momentous single breakthrough in the case since 1964. It followed news that the sounds in Dealey Plaza had apparently been recorded—and included identifiable gunshots.

  This evidence, if evidence it is, had been ignored for sixteen years. It was a battered blue “Dictabelt,” a routine recording of police radio traffic that had been made, just as on any ordinary day, on the day of the President’s murder. To the layman it is a mishmash of barely comprehensible conversation between policemen in the field and their dispatch office at headquarters. The gaps between speech seem a meaningless blur of distorted sound and static. That certainly is what was assumed by the Dallas police and the Warren Commission, who used the recording only to establish police movement and messages. The Dictabelt long lay abandoned in a filing cabinet at Dallas police headquarters, until a director of the police Intelligence Division took it home. There it might have stayed, were it not for the keen archival mind of a private researcher named Mary Ferrell. Long aware of the recording, she drew the attention of the Assassinations Committee to its possible significance.

  Recovered in 1978, the Dictabelt was submitted to Dr. James Barger, chief acoustical scientist for the firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman. The company specialized in acoustical analysis, working not only on such projects as underwater detection devices for the U.S. Navy, but also on studies of matters of national importance. In 1973, during the investigation of Watergate, the firm advised on the famous gap in the White House tapes. Its expertise had been used, too, in the prosecution of National Guardsmen involved in the shooting of students at Kent State University.

  Nobody expected very much from the crackly Dallas police recording submitted to Dr. Barger. His work, though, along with a further study performed by two scientists at the City University of New York, turned out to be pivotal to the deliberations of the Assassinations Committee. Technical processes, including the use of equipment not available in 1963, enabled Barger to produce a visual presentation of the sound-wave forms on a part of the tape that—his initial findings indicated—had great significance.

  With his New York associates, Professor Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, Dr. Barger then designed an acoustical reconstruction in Dealey Plaza. Early one morning in 1978, guns boomed once again at the scene of President Kennedy’s murder. The results showed that impulses on the police recording matched sound patterns unique to the scene of the crime. Certain impulses, the scientists theorized, were indeed gunshots. They declared that the sounds had been picked up by a microphone moving along at about eleven miles per hour at the time of the assassination. They surmised that this was mounted on the motorcycle of a police outrider in the presidential motorcade, and that the recording had been made because the microphone button was stuck open at the time. Working from photographic evidence and testimony, Assassinations Committee staff decided that the motorcycle had been one ridden by Officer H. B. McLain. It appeared that the scientists and the investigators had achieved a tour de force of detection.

  The Committee’s experts concluded that gunfire had come from in front of the President as well as from behind him. At least two gunmen were therefore involved in the assassination. Aware that acoustics today has a rightful place in forensic science, that it has been admitted into evidence in court, the Assassinations Committee was forced into a dramatic reassessment. The acoustics finding formed a major plank of its official finding that President Kennedy was “probably” murdered as the result of a conspiracy.

  Soon, however, came dissenting expert opinion. First from the FBI, with a skimpy report declaring the two-gunman theory “invalid.” Even a lay reading revealed this critique to be hopelessly flawed, and it deserves no public airing here. The first serious blow to the acoustical evidence came in a 1982 report by the National Academy of Sciences. A panel of distinguished scientists concluded that the Committee’s studies “do not demonstrate that there was a grassy-knoll shot.” At the core of the finding lay not some abstruse scientific deduction, but the curiosity of a drummer in Ohio, Steve Barber.

  Barber came to the controversy thanks to a girlie magazine. In the summer of 1979, Gallery offered its readers, among the nudes, a record of the section of the police Dictabelt that includes the noises said to be gunshots. Barber, who played it again and again, detected something the experts had missed. What had been thought to be unintelligible “crosstalk”—conversation coming in from another radio channel—Barber’s ear identified as the voice of Sheriff Bill Decker, in the lead car of the motorcade. The sheriff’s voice occurs at the same point on the recording as the sound impulses that the Committee’s experts said were gunshots. What he is saying is, “Move all men available out of my department back into the railroad yards there … to try to determine just what and where it happened down there. And hold everything secure until the homicide and other investigators can get there.” Clearly, Decker did not issue his orders till after the shooting.

  Undeterred, acoustical scientist James Barger said this apparent anomaly could have been caused in several ways. Was it possible that the Dictabelt needle jumped back—as was said to occur sometimes with that old-fashioned system? Or did the process of copying the original police recording cause the illusion of “crosstalk”?

  Dr. Barger stood by his original findings. “The number of detections we made in our tests, and the speed of the detections—the odds that that could happen by chance are about one in twenty. That’s just as plain as the nose on your face.”

  In the fullness of time, however, it has become evident to others that the findings are far from proven. Barber’s discovery triggered an onslaught on the acoustics evidence. Because of the timing, the Academy of Sciences was to conclude the sounds on the recording had to be something other than gunshots, static perhaps, but not gunshots.

  Fifty years on, a significant number of responsible researchers indeed think that a conspiracy finding based on the acoustics is untenable. A 2001 study by researcher Michael O’Dell suggested that the impulses on the Dictabelt “happen too late to be the assassination gunshots,” and that “there is no statistical significance of 95% or higher for a shot from the grassy knoll.”

  On the other hand, one of those who has specialized in the acoustics evidence asserted in a 2010 book that there was indeed a shot from the knoll, and that it was the fatal headshot. Only for O’Dell, author of the 2001 study, to produce a further analysis refuting the Committee’s findings, as this book was going to press.

  It is evident that science—whether forensic, acoustic, or ballistic—has produced no certainties, and will not resolve the questions surrounding the Kennedy assassination.

  House Assassinations Committee Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, though shaken by the negative studies of the acoustics evidence, nevertheless held to his view. “I think our conclusion was correct,” he has said. “On balance, I say there were two shooters in the Plaza, and not just because of the acoustics… .” Blakey remained persuaded by “all the other evidence and testimony,” not least the human testimony about the day of the assassination. “I find on balance,” Blakey added, “that the earwitness and eyewitness testimony is credible.”

  Chapter 3

  How Many Shots?

  Where From?

  “The great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

  —Thomas H. Huxley, evolutionist,

  nineteenth century

  Much of the testimony of those present when President Kennedy was shot m
ay seem old hat to readers with long memories. Yet it remains vitally relevant to any serious account of the assassination.

  Of 178 people in Dealey Plaza—according to an Assassinations Committee survey—no less than 132 later came to believe that only three shots had been fired. Three spent cartridges were found near the window of the Texas School Book Depository. Initially, therefore, a count of three shots seemed rational, if not conclusive. Most witnesses’ statements, though, were given hours—in some cases weeks—later, when the generally published version of the assassination had already put the total of shots at three. A few people, including Mrs. Kennedy and a Secret Service agent in the follow-up car, thought they had heard as few as two shots. O thers, though, thought they had heard more than three, some speaking of as many as six or seven.

  Ballistics and acoustics specialists have looked at how and why people become mixed up in their memories of gunfire. The sound of a first shot comes upon a witness when he does not expect it, subsequent shots compound the surprise, and muddle ensues. Further confusion may be caused by the fact that a rifle shot actually makes three minutely separated sounds—the muzzle blast, the sound of a bullet breaking the sound barrier, and finally the impact on the target. On the other hand, say the experts, those listening in the immediate target area probably receive the least distorted impression of gunfire.

  Oddly, and inexcusably, the first inquiry produced no statement of any kind from the two police outriders traveling to the right rear of the President. Twelve people in the target area did go on record. All but one of the five surviving in the car itself, and two other outriders, spoke of three shots. Their predicament, however, was hardly conducive to rational recall. Mrs. Kennedy understandably said she was “very confused.” Governor Connally was himself severely injured during the shooting, and Mrs. Connally was preoccupied trying to help him. The two outriders to the President’s left rear were shocked by being spattered with the President’s blood and brain matter.

  The two Secret Service agents in the car, one of them the driver, had to make vital decisions. Both, however, did have interesting comments on the shots. Agent Kellerman said later that the last sound he recalled was “like a double bang—bang! bang! … like a plane going through the sound barrier.” Agent Greer, the driver, also said the last shot cracked out “just right behind” its predecessor. This could conceivably mean the two agents heard a single bullet breaking the sound barrier, or that they heard two shots very close together indeed—far closer together than one man could achieve with a bolt-operated rifle. Agent Kellerman thought that, based on what he heard and the wounds he observed later at the autopsy, “there have got to be more than three shots.”

  In spite of being himself shot in the hail of gunfire, Governor Connally—an experienced hunter—remembered that because of the “rapidity” of the shots, “the thought immediately passed through my mind that there were two or three people involved, or more, in this; or that someone was shooting with an automatic rifle.”

  As for the bystanders nearest to the off side of the President’s car, one, Mary Moorman, made estimates ranging from two to four shots. Like those in the car, she was first preoccupied, and then in such a panic, that she was distracted. (She was taking a photograph as the limousine approached, then threw herself to the ground, shrieking, “Get down! They’re shooting!”) Near her, Charles Brehm thought he heard three shots.

  Gayle Newman, standing on the curb on the near side of the President’s car, thought there could have been four shots. Then there was Maurice Orr, who also stood on the nearside pavement and was one of those closest to the President. Orr, questioned a few minutes after the tragedy, thought there could have been as many as five shots.

  The Warren Report favored the silent testimony of the three cartridges lying near the sixth-floor window, combined with its reading of the autopsy details and the Zapruder film. It said there had been three shots, one of which missed, all fired from behind and above Kennedy.

  Then, in 1978, came the acoustic study of the Dictabelt that appeared to cast real doubt on the Warren lone-gunman finding and suggested—as summarized by the Assassinations Committee’s Robert Blakey—that there had been “four shots … The first, second, and fourth came from the Depository; the third came from the grassy knoll.” Four shots, including one from the raised ground to the right front of the President, posited at least two assassins.

  The acoustics study of the Dictabelt appeared to provide a time frame for the shooting. Taking zero as the time of the first shot, the second would have been fired 1.66 seconds later, the third at 7.49 seconds, and the fourth at 8.31 seconds (allowing for an error of about 5% in the Dictabelt’s running speed). The brevity of the pause between the first and second shots, both fired from the rear, raised questions as to whether one lone gunman could possibly have fired both. That issue will be dealt with later, along with the question as to whether more than one assassin fired from the rear.

  A fractional pause between the third shot, from the knoll, and the fourth, from the rear—acoustics study or no acoustics study—could explain a great deal. With less than a second between them, the two shots could have sounded like one to those who believed only three were fired altogether. It would also make sense of the comments of two of those in the target area and best placed to hear the gunfire. It would explain Governor Connally’s impression that someone was shooting with an automatic rifle, Agent Greer’s observation that the last shot was “just right behind” its predecessor, and Agent Kellerman’s recall of a “double bang”—like the sound barrier being broken. Kellerman may have been right in his belief that there were more than three shots.

  The acoustics work suggested that all but the third shot originated “in the vicinity of the sixth-floor southeast corner window of the Texas School Book Depository.” The experts wondered though, whether further tests might indicate that some of the shooting had come from the Daltex Building next door.

  The most refined study was reserved for the third shot, because the Committee was acutely aware of the need to resolve whether there had really been a sniper on the knoll. The acoustics study concluded that the third shot was “fired from a point along the east-west line of the wooden stockade fence on the grassy knoll, about eight feet west of the corner of the fence” (see Photos 5, 6). Professor Weiss and his colleagues suggested it was certain the shot had come from behind the fence—allowing for a margin of error of five feet in either direction. A mass of evidence seemed, at last, to fall into place.

  Onetime Congressman, later President, Gerald Ford served on the Warren Commission and wrote afterward, “There is no evidence of a second man, of other shots, or other guns.” That was not so, even in 1964.

  Of the 178 witnesses whose statements were available to the Warren Commission, 49 believed the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository, 78 had no opinion, and 30 came up with answers that do not mesh with the rest of the evidence; 21, though, believed the shots had come from the grassy knoll. Another sample of the statements suggests 61 witnesses believed that at least some of the gunfire originated in front of the motorcade. A number of others said as much in statements to newspapers or private researchers.1 Few of these witnesses were called to testify.

  Here are the opinions of the fifteen people in the immediate target area, where the experts say sound impressions are least distorted. Of those in the car, Mrs. Kennedy had no opinion on where the shots came from. Governor Connally—injured before the fatal shot—thought he heard shooting behind him. His wife said on one occasion that she believed all shots came from the rear, on another, “I had no thought of whether they were high or low or where. They just came from the right.” Agent Greer, the driver, said the shots “sounded like they were behind me.” Agent Kellerman said only that his main impression was of sound to the right—perhaps to the rear. Two police outriders to the left rear of the car, the two splattered with blood and brain, had no idea where the sh
ooting originated. Those at the eye of the storm were hardly well placed for rational recall.

  The two policemen to the President’s right rear, very close to him, were excellently placed. One of them, Officer James Chaney, closest to the President, thought some of the shooting came from “back over my right shoulder.” He also said, however, that “when the second shot came, I looked back in time to see the President struck in the face by the second bullet.”

  Kennedy’s close aide, Kenneth O’Donnell, was traveling in the car immediately behind the presidential limousine. He testified that he thought, “in part” based on “reconstruction,” that the shooting had come from the rear. “In part”? O’Donnell later told a friend, House Speaker Tip O’Neill, that he had been pressured by the FBI not to say what he firmly believed, that gunfire had come from in front of the motorcade.

  Mary Moorman, to the passenger side of the limousine, and busy taking pictures, could not tell where the shots came from. Maurice Orr, opposite her, was also too confused. Charles Brehm, not far away, said in a formal statement that shots came from behind him. On the day of the assassination, however, he was reported as saying he thought “the shots came from in front of or beside the President.” On the other side of the street, standing on the grass with their children, were William and Gayle Newman. Mr. Newman’s affidavit, sworn just after the assassination, said, “I was looking directly at him when he was hit in the side of the head… . I thought the shot had come from the garden directly behind me, that was on an elevation from where I was right on the curb. Then we fell down on the grass as it seemed we were in the direct path of fire.” The Commission omitted both Newman statements from its “Witnesses” section.