by Barry Ernest
A week later, Schoener replied. “Enclosed is the envelope in which your last letter came. Please examine it and drop me a note if it looks like it was opened after you sent it—i.e. if the sloppy sealing and tape was not yours. This is just a precaution since I have had many troubles with opened mail.”14
The sloppy sealing was definitely not mine.15
“I’m glad that you would like to continue to take an active part in the investigation,” Schoener went on. He suggested I do research at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. and, while there, spend time viewing Abraham Zapruder’s film of the assassination. He also wanted me to read books by Harold Weisberg.
I had already read several and admired Weisberg because he was different from the others. He offered no theories or speculations about the crime, relying instead on showing contradictions that existed between the evidence and the Warren Report’s conclusions. I associated his style of research with my own.
Schoener provided me with Weisberg’s address and telephone number in Frederick, Maryland. “If you are passing that way on the way to Washington, you might drop by his house . . . perhaps getting a chance to meet the man who is doing the most work on the case. If you do drop in on him, please use my letter for identification. He might be able to give you a number of important leads to check out in the Archives, so that it would be very mutually rewarding.
“When at the Archives, do not tell them that you know either me or Weisberg, so that you will have the opportunity to learn more information,” Schoener continued. “It’s best to portray yourself as a student rather than a critic of the Warren Commission. My name and Weisberg’s name are well known in the Archives.”
I wrote about this development to Terry, who expressed suspicion. But I felt heady with the prospects of working with a discreet band of brothers, searching out history’s meanings. I was young, motivated by a strong sense of idealism, of patriotism, of discovering the unknown.
At times, I could be very naïve.
CHAPTER 10
July 1968
Terry and I were led into a small room where a table with two chairs had been set up in front of a large movie screen. At the back of the room sat the projector and a National Archives staff member, waiting for us to settle in. What we were about to see, he whispered, was a copy of the Abraham Zapruder film made by the FBI from the original, which, for preservation’s sake, was not available to researchers.
The copy was in color, silent, and, because the original was a mere twenty-six seconds in length, appeared three times in succession on this film to avoid unnecessary rewinding. He could show the segments at normal running speed and in slow motion, as many times as we wanted.
“Are we ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
Nothing could have prepared me for the horror of the next half-minute.
The room was darkened. The film flickered on the screen six feet in front of us.
In the beginning, the Dallas Police motorcycle escort turns left from Houston Street onto Elm Street in advance of the motorcade. It is a beautiful day. The sun shines brightly in a late November sky.
The motorcycles move slowly. Suddenly, because Zapruder briefly stopped then restarted filming, the presidential limousine appears. President Kennedy, sitting in the rear passenger-side seat, faces the camera and raises his right arm to wave to an obviously enthused audience. Mrs. Kennedy, in her distinctive pink dress and hat, sits to his left, gazing at those on her side of the street. My eyes are drawn to a young girl in the background wearing a red dress and white-hooded jacket as she merrily runs to keep pace with the passing car. On the same side of the car as President Kennedy and directly in front of him sits Texas governor John Connally, in a jump seat. To the governor’s immediate left is his wife, Nellie.
The car glides behind a road sign, which temporarily obscures its occupants. As it reappears, Kennedy is noticeably distressed. He has been shot.
The young girl has stopped running and looks backward. Both of the president’s arms splay awkwardly upward, with clenched fists in front of his chin. Mrs. Kennedy has turned toward her husband, wearing a quizzical look. She attempts to help her stricken husband, putting her hands on his upraised left arm.
Connally has turned sharply to his right to look backward, then pivots toward the front of the car. His mouth opens wide, as if to scream. His cheeks are puffed. He is in obvious pain.
The governor’s wife begins to pull him down onto her lap. Figures in the background pass by: there is Charles Brehm, clapping his hands as his son stands beside him; and Jean Hill in her red coat, staring at the president, then looking up the street to her right; next is Mary Moorman and farther along is James Altgens, each with cameras to their eyes, taking what will become world-famous and controversial photographs. The car seems to coast leisurely down Elm, as if on snow, almost surreal in its quiet motion.
I want to reach out and somehow turn the steering wheel, push this vehicle from the road and avoid the awful scene that I know, I just know, is coming next. But I am helpless, as helpless as the young and vulnerable president. Kennedy appears to drift slightly forward and then, in a most sickening explosion of blood and brain matter, a chilling halo of crimson red appears above him. The right front side of his head has burst open, exposing a large gaping hole and a hanging flap of skin and still-attached skull bone. The shock of hair is disrupted. His once easily identifiable and handsome face suddenly looks monsterish, unrecognizable, severely altered. Strangely, his head moves backward and to his left with tremendous force, his body now limp and slamming into the back of the seat, then bouncing forward into his wife’s arms.
Bystanders in the background at once run and duck for cover. In shock, Mrs. Kennedy crawls onto the trunk lid. Secret Service Agent Clint Hill, from the left running board of the follow-up car, jumps onto the rear bumper of the limousine and forces her back into her seat. The car accelerates, is consumed by the blackness of the Triple Underpass, and disappears, and the film mercifully ends.
President Kennedy was shot from the front.
How could it be denied?
His head had snapped backward. His body was slammed backward into the seat. How was that possible if Oswald fired from behind?
I pounded my fist onto the table. Why hadn’t the Warren Commission investigated this? In its massive final Report and accompanying twenty-six volumes, not a single word was written about this sickening and frightening motion, this contradictory backward motion.
Commission members had viewed this film. Surely they must have seen this phenomenon. Why had they ignored it?
The first image that came to my mind was that of Walter Cronkite, who had told unsuspecting viewers in 1967 that the fatal shot in the Zapruder film “appears to move the President’s head back.” His sidekick, Dan Rather, described that same shot as causing a “minor explosion.”1
After what I had just seen, there could never be more colossal understatements.
No wonder Gary Schoener insisted I spend time with this film during my venture into the bowels of the National Archives. The sad thing was, the film was only available to researchers. Reservations were required—in advance.
America was not otherwise privy. It would have to wait seven more years for that privilege.
“Shall I show it again?” the projectionist was asking.
I could not speak.
“Yes,” I heard Terry say. “Yes, please.”
The film was run again, and again, each time in triplicate, sometimes at regular speed, sometimes in slow motion. We watched it a hundred times if not more. Then we watched it in reverse, eerily inverting this blot on America’s history. As I gradually gained my composure, I began focusing on single aspects of the film: the responses of the Secret Service agents; the movements of Mrs. Kennedy and Governor Connally and his wife; the bystanders and their reactions; and, of course, a closer examination of the president.
Four hours later, I had seen all I needed. Terr
y went off to lunch. I had long since lost my appetite. It was only when the Archives was about to close at nine that night that I noticed he had never returned.
“Aren’t you going to ask me whether I still believe the Warren Report?” I teased him later in the hotel. It was a question he had asked a hundred times, if not more.
He looked up at me but was silent.
“I’ve grown tired of it,” he finally admitted. “We’re never going to know the truth anyway. That film proved it.”
I had known this was coming. In the letters he wrote to me first weekly, then monthly, then only on occasion, I sensed his draining interest. He didn’t want to go to Dallas. I had to practically beg him to come with me to Washington.
Maybe it was a lack of time or the frustrations of this game. Maybe it was the real world or the Zapruder film itself. Somewhere along the way, Terry had given up.
Maybe he was the smart one.
Examining Some Physical Evidence
I was alone now at the National Archives, staring at the many boxes of documents on the table in front of me, the boxes I had hoped Terry would help explore.
Minutes after I checked in that day, a staff member approached and motioned me to the door. I was escorted to a private area down the hall. Inside was a table that had several large cartons on it containing the physical evidence I wanted to examine: Oswald’s rifle and pistol, his clothing, and Commission Exhibit 399. Look at it; carefully handle it; take as long as you like, said a monitor seated nearby.
So I began with the rifle, the Mannlicher-Carcano 6.5-millimeter Italian-made weapon Oswald fired three times.2 It had been found stashed beneath some boxes during a police search on the sixth floor shortly after the assassination. According to the Report, the rifle had “an inexpensive four-power telescopic sight” and a sling that was “not a standard rifle sling but appears to be a musical instrument strap or a sling from a carrying case or camera bag.”3
Two police officials simultaneously discovered the weapon. Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman, in an affidavit filed on November 23, 1963, said, “This rifle was a 7.65 Mauser bolt action equipped with a 4x18 scope, a thick leather brownish-black sling on it.”4 Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone, in a Sheriff’s Department report filed on the day of the assassination, said, “The rifle appeared to be a 7.65mm Mauser with a telescopic sight.”5
Boone was not asked about his “Mauser” label when Commission counsel questioned him in March 1964. However, he was shown the 6.5-millimeter Carcano for purposes of identification. After examining it, Boone testified, “It looks like the same rifle. I have no way of being positive.”6
Weitzman, who admitted being “fairly familiar” with guns, was asked about his statement that the gun was a 7.65 German Mauser. “In a glance, that’s what it looked like,” he said.7 The Commission, however, neglected to show him Oswald’s rifle.
A third official, Deputy Sheriff Luke Mooney, was nearby when Weitzman and Boone found the rifle. He, too, had observed the weapon in its hiding place. But in a report to the Sheriff’s Department filed on November 23, 1963,8 and in his Commission testimony,9 he was not asked nor did he volunteer anything about the make or model of the rifle.
Mooney also was not shown the weapon.10
Weitzman and Boone may simply have been mistaken when they described the rifle as a 7.65 German Mauser. In its secreted position, the rifle was hard to see and neither one of them actually held it.11 Had they done so, the confusion might have ended there, since the notations MADE ITALY and CAL. 6.5 were conspicuously stamped on the underside of the weapon.
That inscription was observed by Lt. Carl Day of the Dallas Police crime lab after he picked up the rifle and held it as his boss, Capt. Will Fritz, ejected a live cartridge from the chamber. Day, the Warren Report stated, “promptly noted that stamped on the rifle itself was the serial number ‘C2766’ as well as the markings ‘1940’ ‘MADE ITALY’ and ‘CAL. 6.5.’”12
The question then is why, despite Day’s identification of the weapon as a 6.5-caliber Italian rifle, it continued to be labeled by authorities as a 7.65-caliber German Mauser throughout the remainder of the day.13 It was even described as “a Mauser, I believe” by District Attorney Henry Wade in a press conference during the early-morning hours of November 23.14
How was it that the description being fed to a copy-crazed media was based on casual “glimpses” made by Weitzman and Boone, rather than the more authoritative identification the Report cites Lieutenant Day as making?
In any event, one thing I determined after nearly an hour examining the Carcano was that, even at the $19.95 purchase price, Oswald had paid too much for this thing. It was cheap in cost and looked even cheaper. From its worn wooden stock and scratched metal right down to the flimsy sling attached to its side, this thing was a throwaway. In its present state, it appeared better suited as a club to thwack its intended victim rather than shoot him. According to the date of its manufacture, it was twenty-three years old when the government said it was used so effectively in Dallas. It had not aged gracefully.
If Oswald was as talented with a rifle as the Commission claimed, whatever would compel him to invest in such an inferior firearm?
After I had carefully checked every square inch of the rifle, I held it up and looked through its telescopic sight. I put my finger on the trigger and hesitated. The room monitor was watching my every move. I expected him to stop me from doing what I was about to do, but he merely smiled.
So I did it.
I pulled the trigger and heard the distinctive click as metal met metal in the empty chamber.
As weapons experts testified in 1964, the trigger was tricky. At first it was easy to pull back but then became increasingly more difficult until the firing pin was released. The bolt action was no better.
In the dozen times I operated it, I found it to be sluggish and sticky. Even the Commission’s experts had agreed that working the bolt was not the smooth operation it should have been and often required having to sight the weapon on its target again before firing another time. Perhaps the accuracy as displayed on November 22 far outweighed its poor appearance and operational quirks.
I rooted around in another box and located the three 6.5-millimeter shell casings found beneath the sixth-floor window.15 Then I pulled out and examined the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver allegedly used in the murder of Officer J. D. Tippit.16
I next asked my host about Commission Exhibit 399, the bullet assigned by the Commission the task of injuring both Kennedy and Connally. He slowly reached into his coat pocket and brought out a small hinged case, which he opened with the kind of fanfare usually reserved for presentation of an engagement ring.
Inside was the so-called “magic bullet.” I picked it up gingerly and held this famous and extremely controversial piece of metal in my hand. Only through touch and firsthand examination can one realize what little deformity it actually had suffered, even though it had shattered Governor Connally’s rib and pulverized his wrist bone.
Had it not been for a slight flattening at the rear, a small piece of its nose removed by the FBI for spectrographic testing, and striation marks along its sides, this bullet would have looked as it had when it was sold new. It was definitely no match for the damaged condition of other bullets test fired in attempts to duplicate its feat.17
Next I found Oswald’s clothing: the shirt he wore on the day of the assassination and the discarded jacket found in Oak Cliff. I had also asked to see the suit coat and dress shirt worn by President Kennedy, to verify distances between the collar and bullet hole in each item. That request was denied. Their historic value and bloodstained appearance prevented release.
Oswald’s shirt was rust colored with a tweed-type design to its fabric, long sleeved, and “small” in size and had several buttons missing from its front.18 In its present condition, it looked surprisingly similar to the one worn by a man captured in a photograph by James Altgens who was standing in the Depository’s front doorwa
y as Kennedy passed. Critics said that man was Oswald. The Commission said it was employee Billy Lovelady.
The zippered jacket was light gray in color and manufactured by a clothing company in Los Angeles. It still had the much-questioned laundry tag labeled B 9738 pinned to it. A separate laundry mark, 30 030, was stamped onto the jacket and clearly visible.19 Even though Oswald’s shirt was sized “small,” the jacket was tagged M for medium.20
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t awed by this evidence. I was holding in my own hands the clothing worn by the assassin, the guns he used on that terrible day, and the bullet. It was an opportunity afforded to few others.
I thanked my by-now dozing host, then hurried back to the research room. There was still much to be done.
New Leads and Mr. Weisberg
The Zapruder film and the physical evidence were both reasons why I went to the Archives. The real motive, though, was to search through the reams of Commission Documents for any information I could find about Victoria Adams.21 As I groped through box upon box of this mostly disorganized paperwork, I came across some tidbits.
One was a two-page interview of Miss Adams conducted by the FBI on November 24, 1963. Taken only two days after the assassination, it appeared to be her first official “on-the-record” statement. It was my first fresh lead in a while.
Miss Adams’ story to the FBI then was virtually the same as what she related to David Belin some five months later. The report was written in a third-person format that the FBI routinely used to summarize its interviews.
“Vickie [sic] Adams, 3651 Fontana Street, Dallas, Texas, furnished the following information:
“She is employed as office service representative by the Scott Foresman and Company, with offices located on the fourth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Company, Dallas.
“On November 22, 1963, she was on duty at her place of employment and at about 12:20 PM on that date she went to the second window from the left of the building on the fourth floor and opened same in order to watch out of this window to observe the passing of the motorcade, bearing President Kennedy and group. She took her lunch with her at this time and stationed herself there with a fellow employee, Sandra Styles, 2102 Grauwyler Street, Dallas. They observed the motorcade as it approached and began passing in front of her window and at about 12:30 PM, as the car containing President Kennedy, Governor Connally and his wife, was passing, she heard three loud reports which she first thought to be fire crackers of a crank and she believed the sound came from toward the right of the building, rather than from the left and above as it must have been according to subsequent information disseminated by the news services.”22