From the July-August, 200 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5) of Probe
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Tag: FORENSIC EVIDENCE
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Warren Commission Document (WCD) 298: FBI Letter from Director of 20 Jan 1964 with Visual Aides Brochure
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The Evidence IS the Conspiracy, Table of Contents
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Forensics Journal Unintentionally Proves Conspiracy in Cover-Up of JFK Assassination
Lucien C. Haag, BS, describes himself as a “former criminalist and technical director of the Phoenix Crime Laboratory, with nearly 50 years of experience in the field of criminalistics and forensic firearm examinations; president, Forensic Science Services Inc.” And he was an “expert witness” in the November 2017 mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, hosted by South Texas College of Law.
In the December 2019 issue of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, Haag demonstrates this “expertise” with his article, The Unique and Misunderstood Wound Ballistics in the John F. Kennedy Assassination.
When it comes to this case, his expertise seems to be in the specialty of propaganda.
His article demonstrates scholarship below the level of a junior high school term paper. The title, like the rest of his story, is misleading. The wounds were not unique, and would have been understood had they been properly explored, and truthfully explained in previous investigations. But Haag is correct when he says the evidence is misrepresented — and he himself grossly misrepresents the evidence in crude attempts to perpetuate the government-approved narrative. His techniques include the following:
- Presents highly misleading and sometimes outright false information to support the Warren Commission.
- Omits documented key facts that contradict it.
- Provides almost no references to primary sources. Instead, he uses mostly his own articles as references. In other words, his “proof” of a particular statement is … that he said it before.
- Litters the discussion with an obstacle course of “alternate facts” and distracting irrelevancies.
Haag focusses on promoting a slightly tarted-up version of the single bullet theory: a bullet entered high in the base of JFK’s neck, exited his throat — traveling around 1800 fps (feet per second) — struck Governor John Connally while “yawing” (tumbling), perforated his torso, then wrist, and finally created a puncture wound in his thigh.
Bullet Probably Not Yawing
Haag’s main “proof” the bullet first went through Kennedy is the 15 mm elliptical wound in Connally’s back.
Haag claims its size and shape prove the bullet struck Connally while turned somewhat sideways, that is, yawing (tumbling) — presumably a result of having first gone through JFK.
Haag does not tell you that the wound in the back of Kennedy’s skull was also 15 mm long. No one claims that bullet had been yawing.
Obviously there are two possible explanations for an ovoid or elliptical wound:
The bullet strikes while turned sideways.
The bullet strikes nose-on — but at a slant, and the nose travels a bit on the surface before entering the body. This is a tangential hit.
Had the Connally hit been a tangential one, would the bullet have made a fairly straight path through his torso? Is this why Haag created this picture of a confused bullet tumbling around inside the governor?
There is an additional, critically important fact to understand, which is either not understood or deliberately dismissed by conspiracy advocates who draw straight wound paths through Governor Connally’s torso … A yawing, tumbling, destabilized bullet entering the Governor’s body is not at all likely to follow a straight path through his body. Because Governor Connally lived, we do not have the benefit of an autopsy report and autopsy photographs through which the actual wound path might be ascertained
Then why not report what Connally’s thoracic surgeon said about it?
Robert Shaw, MD testified to seeing indications of a straight path though the torso. Among his observations: the bullet created a small “tunneling wound … The bullet struck the fifth rib in a tangential way.” And it “followed the line of declination of the fifth rib.” Even more revealing was “the neat way in which it stripped the rib out without doing much damage to the muscles that lay on either side of it.” Apparently not the behavior of a tumbling bullet.
And watch how Haag tries to trick you into thinking the FBI said the bullet was tumbling:
The yawed entry of a de stabilized bullet was confirmed by FBI firearms expert Robert Frazier upon an examination of the governor’s suit coat, which also showed an elliptical entry hole approximately 5/8 of an inch in length.
In fact, the FBI couldn’t even swear the hole was caused by a bullet, let alone whether it was destabilized. Here’s what Frazier actually said:
On the hole on the back of the coat although it had the general appearance and could have been a bullet hole, possibly because of the cleaning and pressing of the garment, I cannot state that it actually is a bullet hole nor the direction of the path of the bullet, if it were a bullet hole.
No wonder Haag gives no references to primary source materials.
(Nor does he mention that Frederick W Light, Jr, MD, Former Chief Wound Assessment Branch, Edgewood Arsenal, testified to the Warren Commission that he was not convinced Connally was struck by a yawing bullet.)
JFK’s Throat Wound
Haag mentions the well-publicized smallness and roundness of JFK’s throat wound, but says nothing about its lesser known but more compelling features. Malcolm Perry, MD who performed the tracheotomy said it was approximately 5 mm (originally he said 3-5mm, later he seemed to have been persuaded to say it was a bit larger), punctate, had clean edges, not punched out (i.e. not everted) and, more important, something considered by many to be definitive of an entrance — it had a contusion ring. And figures for its small size included this bruising. (Charles Baxter, MD who assisted Perry, supported this observation.) To see more on contusion rings, please go here; and to see my own work on the throat wound, go here.
No one can say for sure whether the wound was an exit, but I cannot find any record of an exit wound associated with such bruising. And the back wound was never proven to connect with the throat wound. It was never dissected, and could not be probed with a finger. And, while viewing the open chest from the front, an autopsy technician said there was no entrance into the chest cavity from behind, and the bullet seemed to have stopped at the apex of the right lung.
Haag tries to sell the wound as an exit:
There is a common expectation that exit wounds from high-velocity rifle bullets will be larger than the entrance wound … The 6.5-mm Carcano bullet is not at all likely to behave this way. As will be shown, it is extremely stable as it penetrates soft tissue, resulting in exit wounds that are little different, to no different in dimensions, from entry wounds. This was, in fact, the case insofar as President Kennedy’s first gunshot wound.
Further below, I present reasons for why Haag’s research proves no such thing. But first you should take a look at this next specimen. But don’t step in it. Step around it:
The Carcano bullet, and others like it, are essentially a cylinder with a blunt, hemispherical nose. In such bullets, the CG [center of gravity] and CP [center of pressure] nearly coincide so the distance between them is very small. Any destabilizing force applied to the blunt, rounded nose when such a bullet deviates slightly from its nose-forward penetration into soft tissue is quickly counteracted by a much greater correcting force aft of this bullet’s CG … many, many shots have been fired by this writer into blocks of ballistic soap, 10% ordnance gelatin, 20% ordnance …These bullets consistently remain nose-forward throughout their journey …
The above may be true, but is a distraction from more relevant realities.
Relation of Wound Size to Exiting Velocity
The very small size of Kennedy’s throat wound suggested it was an entrance — but that’s not the biggest problem for the single bullet theory.
Here’s the biggest problem: a bullet, especially a 6.5mm FMJ bullet, exiting at 1800 fps, or even 1600 fps, does not create a 5mm wound — even if it exits straight out, that is, nose-on, and not sideways.
This was proven with experiments using steel spheres performed by Frederick W Light, Jr, MD, (mentioned above). Their shape eliminates such variables as bullet orientation (sideways vs nose-on) since the presented area of a sphere is always the same. Light said “the size of the wound at a given point in a given type of tissue depends basically on only two things: (1) the presented area of the missile at the point, and (2) velocity of the missile at the point.”
But what sort of wound would be created by an undeformed FMJ from a centerfire rifle, exiting straight out, without tumbling, at a velocity of ~1800 fps?
Larry Sturdivan, an Army wound expert consulted by the HSCA — and one of Haag’s sources — told me in an email that such a wound would be large with obvious lacerations radiating from the center (“stellate”). He described how these lacerations are formed:
Poke a finger through something flexible, such as cloth or saran wrap, and you will first see a “tenting effect,” a cone, with the tip of your finger at the small end. Push forward and you tear a hole in the material, and the tear grows into a laceration as you perforate the material.
Sturdivan said that Kennedy’s throat wound would have looked like a typical exit — i.e., much larger than 5mm, had it not been a “shored” wound.
Haag does not mention this argument about a shored wound, but you should be aware of it, lest he try to use it in the future: Sturdivan and the late John Lattimer, another favorite source of Haag, have spread the false claim that JFK’s throat wound was kept small and prevented from being stretched outward, because it was buttressed, or “shored,” by the collar and necktie. To understand why this could not have happened in this case, please take a look at what happens when shoring occurs:
Skin between the outgoing bullet and the buttressing material is crushed, and it becomes stuck to the material. When that material is pulled away, it creates a wide abrasion collar consisting of skin tags that resemble a peeling sunburn.
More important — grossly visible skin is left behind on the material. (Am J Foren Med Path 1983; 4(3):199-204) The FBI closely inspected Kennedy’s shirt, inside and out, and did not report seeing any skin on it.
Another thing. The wound was reported to have been “right above” any material that might have shored it.
Haag’s Scam: Don’t Use Skin! Don’t Even Mention it!
Haag assassinated many blocks of gelatin in his quest to prove that a Carcano bullet does not tumble when burrowing its way through 7 inches of the stuff. That is the assumed distance between the alleged high entrance in back to the throat. But it tumbles after it exits.
Therefore, says he, the bullet would (1) create a small exit, and (2) then tumble its way to fulfilling its job as a magic bullet. And never mind the effect of velocity alone on the size of the wound. He won’t tell you about that, even if he knows.
But here is yet another reason to doubt Haag’s conclusions: The behavior of skin. Entrance and exit wounds are in skin. And, according to one study, gelatin “does not replicate the significant resistance that human skin provides in preventing penetration into sub-dermal tissue.” [And presumably out of such tissue.] According to another study,
Hydrogels prepared from water solutions containing 10-20 mass% gelatin are generally accepted muscle tissue simulants in terminal ballistic research. They, however, do not have a surface layer which simulates the effect of human skin.
Haag said the stable Carcano bullets went through gelatin without yawing. So of course their exit holes — in that simulant — were not much larger than the bullet’s diameter.
Haag makes much ado about this. Look, he says, no yawing during its course through the simulant, and that “proves” why Kennedy’s throat wound was an exit, though small. And look, he says, the bullet does tumble right after it exits through those 7 inches. This “proves” why Connally’s wound was the size of a tumbling bullet.
But in none of his experiments did Haag give the bullet the job of exiting skin.
And he does not mention the fact that when the Warren Commission had the US Army perform experiments to reproduce the assassination — they did use skin, animal skin — but they did not reproduce small exits. Most of the bullets began to yaw during their exit, after going through only 5.3 to 5.7 inches of gelatin.
But back to Haag’s penetration of 7 inches before the bullet yawed, how many more inches were between Kennedy’s throat — and the true location of his entrance in the back? Might that longer journey, plus an exit through skin, have resulted in more yawing? (See next section.)
In any case, if Kennedy’s throat wound had been an exit, its small size suggests the bullet that created it was nearly out of energy — and could not have gone on to perforate Connally’s torso and smash his wrist.
(And those who say a bullet exited Kennedy’s throat wound, but did not go on to strike Connally in the back should explain where it did go.)
Haagwash Regarding JFK’s Back Wound
A big problem for the government-approved narrative was, and still is, the location of the back wound. It was lower than the throat wound. How could a bullet from the sniper’s nest above come down, enter the back — then go back up again?
To solve the problem, the late John Lattimer — one of Haag’s main sources of “information” — raised the back wound to the sixth cervical vertebra (C-6), using deceitful props, false reporting on X-ray findings, and fraudulent representation of neurological implications.
If you want to see instant proof of how much of a fraud Lattimer was, just look at the picture below. It says it all.
And the caption that went with the picture demonstrates one of Lattimer’s techniques in conning people. Lattimer created this prop himself, then said — as if he were an independent observer — “It appears that the first bullet … grazed the tip of the transverse process of his sixth cervical vertebra.” Of course it did: he put it there. (Note: the fragments of bone he mentions were dismissed as artefact.)
Haag appears to have learned from past experience that some of Lattimer’s “research” is too blatantly fraudulent, so he would not likely want you to see Lattimer’s contrivance shown above. It is conspicuously at odds with the autopsy photo below:
Photo credit: JFK Lancer
Like Lattimer, Haag tried to use X-ray reports to sell the higher entrance wound: He said:
[There was a] possible graze to the right traverse [sic] process of one of the cervical vertebrae at, or adjacent, to C6.
As usual, he provides no reference to support this assertion. In fact, the graze, if it happened, was assumed to have occurred lower, at the first thoracic vertebra — T-1, not the higher C-6:
And why doesn’t Haag mention what is in the autopsy report? It said the wound was “just above the upper border of the scapula.” (But numerous witnesses thought it was even lower. Kennedy’s own physician said it was at the T-3 level.)
Haag also recycles another Lattimer hoax — the “Thorburn position.” He repeats the false claim that JFK was struck at the C-6 level, based on the way he moved his arms after being shot for the first time. He said it was a reflex, tied exclusively to C-6, as described by the surgeon, Sir William Thorburn. As Haag put it:
When the President first reappears from behind this sign [on the Zapruder film], his arms are in a very odd position, and it looks as though he is reaching for his throat. This is not the case; rather, it has been attributed to a little-known, involuntary response first described by the English spinal surgeon and military doctor, Sir William Thorburn,1 in 1887 …
In fact, Thorburn described an entirely different position of the arms in response to damage at C-6. At no time did Kennedy ever move his arms in a way that resembled the position of Thorburn’s C-6 patient. That patient’s arms were abducted; Kennedy’s adducted.
(Many readers of KennedyandKings.com are already familiar with this scam. Those who are not can go here for my detailed report. And see also Donald B. Thomas’s fraudulent revision of Lattimer’s scam.)
Aside from using deceitful means for establishing a back wound at C-6 while omitting documented information that contradicts it, Haag pretends Kennedy’s back wound controversy concerns whether it is was an entrance or exit:
Regarding this matter of entry or exit for this singular perforating gunshot wound, it is definitively solved by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) firearms examiner Robert Frazier when he notes and documents the presence of bullet wipe around the margin of the small, circular hole in the upper back of the President’s suit coat.
Kennedy’s Head Wound
Haag repeats the old government-approved line:
A massive exit site with expulsion of bone, tissue, and brain matter was produced in the upper right-front of the President’s head.
Yes, the wound was in right front and right side — but also the right rear, which he omits. Even the autopsy report says so: the wound extended into occipital bone. According to Parkland Hospital’s former chief of neurosurgery, enough occipital bone was missing to reveal a great deal of missing cerebellum.
Haag also made this strange claim:
The WCC Carcano bullet’s ability to totally change character into that of an expanding bullet once its nose area is breached by striking thick bone. In this situation, testing by this author and others (Lattimer2 and Sturdivan7) has shown that the nose of the full metal jacket Carcano bullet can be breeched [sic] upon striking skull bone, after which the bullet behaves much like a soft-point hunting bullet.
But Lattimer said that, in all experiments — his and those performed by the Army — there was a “complete separation” of the copper shell and the lead core. After that, much of the bullet’s energy has been spent. So how could the jacket alone go on to do the damage of a soft-point hunting bullet? That sort of bullet does its damage immediately on contact.
(Lattimer also claimed a complete separation of shell and lead core in the case of JFK’s head wound. But what was found in the front seat, and presumed to have been “the” head bullet, were two jacketed fragments, but that is another story.)
Regarding JFK’s backward head movement, Haag chose not to get into this issue. Instead, he referred readers to past articles on the jet effect.
Please go here to see my gallery of amazing scams related to this case, including my exposure of fraud — based on the omission of one fundamental fact — in all presentations of the so-called jet effect.
Conclusion
Haag published his article in a journal that makes the following claims about itself:
Drawing on the expertise of leading forensic pathologists, lawyers, and criminologists, The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology presents up-to-date coverage of forensic medical practices worldwide. Each issue of the journal features original articles on new examination and documentation procedures. (Emphasis added.)
Original? Haag is just a recycler. And what he recycles is crude pseudoscience.
New examination? He repeated experiments performed long ago by others, and they don’t back up his conclusions with respect to Kennedy’s wounds..
Documentation procedures? Haag violates the most basic principles of documentation. He provides no references to the primary sources that he pretends back up his misleading assertions. And he leaves out critical facts that challenge them.
How does such an unscholarly piece get into a peer reviewed journal? Obviously its vetting process has been corrupted by the deep, insidious contamination of politics.
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Vince Foster, JFK and the Rise of Chris Ruddy
One of the most nauseating characteristics of the New Right is its hypocrisy. For instance, the GOP has historically been the party of sound money and banking. Yet, in their devotion to supply-side/trickle-down economics, it was their party which ran up the national debt to heights no Democrat ever dreamed of doing. And it was a Republican administration which oversaw the worst banking/real estate crisis and economic downturn since 1929. Another example: for all of their pontificating about religion and family values, most of the GOP evangelist preachers endorse a president who had to pay off two former girlfriends to keep quiet during his election campaign.
Which brings us to the subject of this article. On December 17th, a week before Christmas, a man named Paul F. deLespinasse wrote an article for the conservative website Newsmax. It was titled: “Conspiracy Theories Merit Only Undivided Suspicion”. Mr. deLespinasse began by saying that such theories are meant to confuse the public, “often for political purposes.” As most conservative shills do, he tried to belittle this kind of thinking with a ludicrous example. He said that Nicholas II of Russia faked his overthrow and ruled from the back room. Obviously, he concedes, he made that up out of whole cloth. But the author said since it made sense to his students, he went on and “concocted new conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination.” He goes on to mention two truly ridiculous ones about the JFK case. The first was that Joe Kennedy wanted to have Jackie killed so she would not divorce his son while in office. So the father hired Lee Oswald, but Oswald missed. He then writes, well maybe JFK learned that his medical problems would kill him within months. Therefore he staged his own assassination to become a martyr in order to increase the chance his brothers would follow him into office. (In both of these examples, it is still Oswald as the killer.)
As was his intention, the author then goes on to ridicule any and all other kinds of alternate ways of thinking about certain momentous events: the 9-11 attacks, Pearl Harbor, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the idea that America never went to the moon. Note the way he has deliberately mixed in events of genuine interest and scholarship with those that amount to piffling: JFK and the moon landings, for instance. Consequently, he concludes that the best way to remain of sound mind is just to ignore “conspiracy theories and regard their propagators as probable cranks.” Which, of course, is what the Power Elite would like the general public to think, so they can continue on their rampage, killing whatever hopes we have of recovering our democratic processes.
The reason I mention this piece of claptrap is because it was run in Newsmax. For anyone who knows something about that business entity, the irony of the posting of this article is too rich to be ignored. It underscores the hypocrisy I just pointed out. How so? Because the CEO and founder of Newsmax is Chris Ruddy. And Newsmax would not exist if not for Ruddy’s propagation of one of the wildest and most rudderless conspiracy theories of recent decades––namely, that Vince Foster was murdered by sinister forces employed by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Why would the Clintons murder their close friend and legal colleague? Well, for any number of reasons. These would include that he was having an affair with Hillary Clinton or he was about to give away the secrets of the Whitewater scandal to Congress. But since there were no secrets to that manufactured scandal, then it must have been the first reason. Even though there was no credible evidence of that either. Note that deLespinasse did not mention the Foster case in his long listing, probably because he was aware that it was Ruddy’s hand that was feeding him.
II
Vince Foster was a legal and political colleague of Bill and Hillary Clinton in Arkansas. He worked with her there at the Rose Law Firm. By all accounts, he was an effective and successful lawyer. After the 1992 presidential election, the Clintons invited Foster to move to Washington and work for the Clinton administration. He did so, and this turned out to be a serious mistake on his part. Foster was a sensitive soul who was not cut out for what author James Stewart later termed the “blood sport” of Washington DC during the Clinton years.
It is important to recall an ignored historical milestone at this point. Late in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Republicans had managed to achieve one of their longtime goals. They negated the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time provisions of FCC law. This was quickly followed by ABC moving Rush Limbaugh from Sacramento to New York and channeling him nationwide. Rupert Murdoch had now become an American citizen. His purchase of Metromedia TV and a share of 20th Century Fox around this time would be the kernel that would launch Fox TV. In other words, what David Brock termed “The Republican Noise Machine”—a huge propaganda network––was now in place, well-positioned to amplify and aggrandize the so-called Clinton Scandals.
The first two out of the box were the Travel Office affair and the Whitewater real estate imbroglio. Foster worked as Deputy White House counsel. He was involved in the first, and tangentially in the second––which was even more of a pseudo-scandal than the first. Foster was also involved in vetting candidates for positions in the administration; for example, the Nannygate episode over the nomination of Zoe Baird for attorney general. Because of the controversy over these instances, in June and July of 1993 Foster came under political attack in the Wall Street Journal. By several different accounts, Foster was now suffering from depression and anxiety over these attacks. (Dan Moldea, A Washington Tragedy, pp. 203-12). His sister recommended he see a psychiatrist, and he called one to set up an appointment. In the meantime, his personal doctor gave him prescriptions for anti-depressants. Foster was so distraught that he thought of leaving Washington and going back to Little Rock. But he felt that this would be admitting defeat. (Moldea, p. 215). On July 20, 1993 Foster shot himself at Fort Marcy Park in Virginia with a handgun given to him by his father many years previous.
The first investigation of his death was submitted by the U.S. Park Police on August 10, 1993. The police had been supplemented by the FBI and Justice Department. Relying on that investigation and the medical examiner’s findings, they concluded that Foster had taken his own life. But now something absolutely remarkable began to occur. And for this author, it was the first manifestation of the awesome power of the advancing rightwing media.
To fully understand the spectacle, worthy of the Roman Colosseum, that was about to be unleashed on the national stage, one needs to outline the metamorphosis that the Republican Party had undergone. To do that, one must delve into a brief––but appropriate––historical synopsis.
III
Prior to the election of 1960, the two leaders of the Republican Party had been Senator Robert Taft and President Dwight Eisenhower. In 1952, those two had fought a close and bitter battle all the way to the convention for the Republican nomination for president. It was only through a questionable ploy at the convention that Eisenhower managed to win the nomination.
There are two points that should be drawn about these men in order to understand the subject at hand. First, Taft was a non-interventionist in foreign policy, to the extent that he was opposed to American involvement in World War II, the Nuremburg Trials and the formation of NATO. Second, Eisenhower more than once said that he was not about to repeal FDR’s New Deal. When Eisenhower left office after eight years, the income tax rate was 91 per cent for the highest income earners.
One last point needs to be made in order to delineate the dichotomy that was to come. Around this time—early to middle sixties––there was actually a moderate wing to the Republican Party. People like Senator Mark Hatfield, Governor George Romney, Senator Charles Percy, Senator Jacob Javits, Governor Raymond Shafer, Senator Charles Mathias, Governor William Scranton, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Congressman Pete McCloskey, these and others constituted a minority, but an influential one, within the GOP. As many have noted, what began to alter the Republican Party, and eventually made its moderate wing extinct, was the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964. That nomination brought to the forefront the extreme rightwing elements of the party—the John Birch Society types—who declared war on the moderate elements in the party. Although the Goldwater forces lost, they succeeded in establishing a beachhead in the GOP. Senator Goldwater had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was against the high taxation rate, and felt President Johnson was soft on communism. He became the first Republican nominee to consciously run on a Southern Strategy, one which was designed to break up the Democratic majority in the south by employing racist symbology. That strategy, plus the fact that Goldwater was from Arizona, began to rebuild the Republican party on a Southern/Western axis.
This included California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan made a last-minute televised appeal for Goldwater in 1964. And that appeal first put him on the national political map. At that time, the highest political office Reagan had attained was president of the Screen Actors Guild.
It was not just Reagan who supported Goldwater; it was also William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley’s Young Americans For Freedom supplied the shock troops for the Goldwater campaign. Goldwater was trounced, but Buckley and Reagan now started to pull the Republican party to the far right. In a blatant effort to exterminate them, Buckley began to defame and run against those from the moderate wing of the party: for instance, Charles Goodell and John Lindsay. The very threat of a Reagan run in 1976 provoked President Gerald Ford to perform the Halloween Massacre. That panic-stricken move, for all intents and purposes empowered the neoconservative movement and triggered the rise of Dick Cheney.
Once Reagan won the White House in 1980, he began to meet with representatives of the Religious Right in order to incorporate them into the GOP. But as writers like Sidney Blumenthal have noted, this was really a kind of flirtation that never made it to the altar. Reagan never gave people like Jerry Falwell what they really wanted, things like prayer in school or a bill banning abortion. But allowing them tea time was enough incentive to make them attack dogs against the Democratic Party. They therefore were useful politically. (Salon, 10/24/15, article by Neil J. Young.)
Because of all this, by the nineties, the Republican Party had undergone a stunning metamorphosis. Its philosophy had become the antithesis of Taft’s non-interventionism. The GOP now went looking for wars, such as against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Reagan assailed the War on Poverty by saying that the result of it was that poverty had won. This kind of talk eventually allowed his acolytes like Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan to begin the effort to privatize Social Security. Reagan had called Medicare “socialism”. His success allowed the new GOP to do what Eisenhower said he would not: assault the New Deal. (LA Times, 12/8/2017, article by Michael Hiltzik) With the cooperation of Bill Clinton, they almost succeeded at this. (See US News and World Report, 5/29/2008, “The Pact Between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich”)
The new Republican Party had cultivated a more reactionary base. Through Limbaugh-led talk radio, and people like Falwell, it traded on social conservatism, Christian fundamentalism, so-called family values, xenophobia, veiled racism and hostility toward immigrants (the anchor baby syndrome). The new GOP had no problem in depriving minority groups of their right to vote by scrubbing election rolls, which gave George W. Bush his win over Al Gore in the 2000 election heist in Florida. All of this was amplified and channeled into the Limbaugh/Fox sound machine. It was designed to appeal to what many have called “the angry white man vote.” This propaganda formula was so powerful that it managed to convince millions of working-class Americans that their interests coincided with those of billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife and later the Koch brothers.
IV
The staggering force of this new apparatus broke dramatically into the open during the rightwing war against Bill Clinton.
After the first verdict in the Foster case was rendered by the Park Police, unfounded rumors now began to circulate, like the claim Foster’s body had been moved while wrapped in a carpet and there was no exit wound, even though Foster had shot himself through the mouth. As we shall see, these were both false. In fact, the autopsy report described the exit wound at the rear of the skull. But at that time, Richard Mellon Scaife was also in the process of forming the so-called Arkansas Project—hiring people to dig up dirt on the Clintons from their Arkansas days—through the conservative magazine American Spectator, and Limbaugh was now pushing that journal on his radio show. The Foster case and Whitewater were an early instance of the powerful rightwing propaganda outlets bleeding over into the mainstream media. The first book on the Foster case was published in February of 1994, entitled, The Murder of Vince Foster. It concluded that the Clintons had Foster killed. (Moldea, p. 286)
More importantly, Chris Ruddy was about to leave Murdoch’s New York Post, where he had already written some stories on the Foster case, for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. That newspaper was owned by Scaife. With the creator of the Arkansas Project now his boss, Ruddy had free reign to go after the Clintons and the Foster case. After 12 years of Republicans in the White House, the conservative media barons were intent on bringing down the new Democratic president––and it did not matter how they did it. The incessant work of people like Ruddy resulted in enough buzz for the appointment of a special prosecutor. Attorney General Janet Reno appointed a respected Republican lawyer named Robert Fiske to helm that inquiry. Opening an office in Little Rock, Fiske employed 15 lawyers and 25 FBI agents. (New York Times, “Muddy Water”, March 24, 1996) After a careful inquiry, during which he interviewed 125 people, Fiske concluded that the Clintons had not wielded undue influence in the Whitewater matter and that the original police inquiry was correct about Vince Foster’s death.
On the day that Fiske issued his report, President Clinton signed the reauthorization of the Independent Counsel law, with the difference that instead of being chosen by the Attorney General, a special prosecutor would now be picked by a panel of federal judges. The panel was led by Judge David Sentelle. Sentelle was elevated to the federal court upon the request of Senator Jesse Helms. Under the influence of Helms, Ronald Reagan duly appointed Sentelle in 1985. Reno requested Fiske be reappointed. Under the influence of Helms and fellow reactionary senator Lauch Faircloth, Sentelle and his two cohorts declined to do so. (Washington Post, 8/12/94, article by Howard Schneider). In August of 1994, they replaced Fiske with the even more conservative Ken Starr.
The Foster case was one of the most bizarre and, at the same time, most assiduous instances of a national political paroxysm this writer can remember. The entire effort to manufacture the case was backed by the late Jerry Falwell, the late billionaire Scaife, with people like reporter Ruddy and west coast political hatchet-man Pat Matrisciana. Matrisciana produced the dubious videotape The Clinton Chronicles. That infamous video began the whole fairy tale about the “Clinton body count”. This quartet perfected a combination business/political model that rose to a grand scale, prefiguring the rise of Alex Jones. Falwell raised money for Matrisciana and Ruddy by selling their productions, which then helped produce more films. Scaife paid for the ad campaigns for Ruddy’s pamphlets on the Foster case. By 1997, Matrisciana and Ruddy had a shared bank account worth over 3 million dollars.
Some of this massive haul was spent on paying off “witnesses” to talk about the alleged crimes of the Clintons. In other words, it was checkbook journalism. This included signing up Arkansas State Troopers Roger Perry and Larry Patterson. Their contract was designed to pay them to make statements saying that Vince Foster had not died in Fort Marcy Park in Virginia. Foster had actually died in the White House parking lot. This concoction quickly collapsed when the person who was supposed to have made a phone call revealing this––White House aide Helen Dickey––testified and proved that she did not learn of Foster’s death until late in the evening, not in the afternoon, which was when Foster’s body was discovered. As reported by Robert Parry, Starr concluded that Dickey was telling the truth and the troopers were not. (The Consortium, March 30, 1998; see also New York Review of Books, August 8, 1996, reply by Gene Lyons to Ambrose Evans Pritchard)
Just how far would these deceptive practices go? During an infomercial, Falwell interviewed a witness in silhouetted background he labeled an investigative reporter. The mystery witness said that he knew his life was in danger because not one, but two insider witnesses had been killed before he got their stories. They both died in plane crashes. (Note, the idea of neutralized witnesses was apparently borrowed from the JFK case.) The silhouetted “investigative reporter” then asked: “Jerry, are these coincidences? I don’t think so.” It was later revealed by journalist Murray Waas that the mysterious investigative reporter was Matrisciana himself. When the scheme was later exposed, Matrisciana tried to blame the idea on Falwell. (See again Parry, cited above) With this in mind, again note the hypocrisy: the name of Matrisciana’s business outfit was Citizens for Honest Government.
What troubled me about this outbreak of rightwing profiteering designed to increase political dementia was this: When I once mentioned it in Probe Magazine, I got a letter saying that somehow I was wrong to belittle the efforts of Ruddy and Matrisciana. The author then equated the death of Vince Foster to what had happened to President Kennedy. And that somehow, the “cover-up” around Foster’s death equated to what the Warren Commission did to JFK’s murder. I was disheartened by the letter. If one of our readers could not tell the difference between the political flackery around Foster’s death and the real criminality and cover-up around President Kennedy’s demise, then I was not doing a very good job as a writer or researcher. Either that, or the forces arrayed against me were simply too awesome to contemplate.
V
At around this time (1994-95), another Scaife-funded journalistic entity, Western Journalism Center (WJC), began to issue pamphlets based on Ruddy’s writings on the Foster case. These were supported by full-page ads in numerous newspapers throughout the nation, including the Washington Times, Chicago Tribune and New York Times. This writer was given one of Ruddy’s WJC reports by a friend. I immediately began to note even further that the techniques Ruddy was using were reminiscent of what the early critics of the Warren Commission had done. Ruddy was questioning the forensic basis of the prior pronouncements on the case by trying to find errors, misstatements or inconsistencies in those judgments. For example, Ruddy said that, although Foster’s body was found with the gun in his right hand, Foster was actually left-handed. Like so many other Scaife-sponsored “facts”, this turned out to be false. (Sixty Minutes, October 8, 1995). But this did remind me of the strange circumstances in the death of Gary Underhill, one of the earliest witnesses to proclaim a conspiracy in the death of President Kennedy. (Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 100) So Ruddy seemed to be imitating the early Warren Commission critics. The problem as I saw it was that there was simply no comparison between the circumstances of the two cases—in any manner. And by 1995, two more judgments had been rendered on the Foster case. One by the Senate Banking Committee and one by Congressman Bill Clinger of the Government Operations Committee. Both concluded that the original police investigation was correct. What I found striking about this was Clinger was a Republican and the Senate investigation was completed under the co-leadership of the highly partisan Republican Al D’Amato. (Starr Report on Foster, Section 2, part C)
This point was rammed home when, once Starr replaced Fiske, Brett Kavanaugh found a way to reopen the Foster case. (See article by Charles Pierce, Esquire, August 3, 2018). As any objective observer can conclude, Ken Starr had a rather unethical reign as independent counsel. More plainly: Starr had an agenda. He also utilized questionable methods in order to fulfill that agenda. (For a rather harrowing look at those methods, see Susan McDougal’s book The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk.) Yet, in spite of this, Starr came to the same conclusion everyone else did. (Although he delayed announcing it for well over a year to keep the controversy brewing.) But he did employ the man who many consider to be the finest criminalist in America, Henry Lee. Lee is noted for his independence. He has bucked the establishment in the OJ Simpson case and the JFK case. Lee teamed up with two other experts, Dr. Brain Blackbourne and Dr. Alan Berman, to certify that Starr agreed with Fiske.
The beginning of Starr’s Report relies upon the work of two doctors: James Beyer and Donald Haut. Dr. Haut was at the crime scene and Dr. Beyer did the autopsy. Unlike with the JFK case, the doctors identified the wound path with no ambiguities. (Moldea, p. 30) And there was an alignment between the entrance and exit wounds. In other words, there was no impossible Single Bullet Theory to contend with. Nor, as with Kennedy’s head wound, did the bullet come in from one angle and then veer 90 degrees to the right for its exit. (Read it here)
The Office of Independent Counsel traced the purchase of the .38 handgun as far back as 1913. Henry Lee actually determined how Foster carried the weapon that day. Lee also detected blood stains on nearby vegetation. These investigators, along with the FBI lab, also determined where the carpet fibers on Foster’s clothes came from, which was Foster’s home in Washington and the White House. These two evidentiary conclusions effectively countered Ruddy’s suppositions that, first, the weapon was not traceable, and therefore was not Foster’s; second, that Foster was killed elsewhere––or took his own life elsewhere––and then his body was transported to the park; and third, contrary to what Fiske’s critics reported, that there was a considerable amount of blood at the Fort Marcy Park scene (Moldea, p. 203), thus neutralizing reports saying there was not very much there and consequently Foster must have been killed elsewhere. (See section 6 of the report, part B; see also Moldea, pp. 312-17)
The work of Henry Lee and forensic pathologist Brian Blackbourne was devastating to the likes of Ruddy and conservative media attack dog Reed Irvine. In addition to the above, Foster’s DNA was found on the barrel of the handgun. There was a bone chip on a nearby piece of brown paper, and through DNA testing it was proven that the chip was part of Foster’s skull. Contrary to another myth, Lee found that Foster’s shoes did contain soil materials and vegetative matter. (See again Moldea, cited above)
The findings by Lee and Blackbourne were so compelling that when Ruddy issued his book on the Foster case—The Strange Death of Vincent Foster—even critics of conservative orientation, like Byron York and Jacob Cohen, panned the book. The American Spectator, home of the Arkansas Project, also filed a negative review of Ruddy’s volume. (Moldea, p. 320). When Scaife heard about the latter, he pulled his funding for the magazine, which indicated what the whole sorry episode was really about. Because of that, the journal went into a financial tailspin and was later sold to George Gilder. (Washington Post, May 2, 1999, “Arkansas Project Led to Turmoil and Rifts”)
As the reader can see, the Foster case and Kennedy case are not at all forensically equivalent. Virtually every forensic aspect of the JFK case is genuinely susceptible to challenge. These are challenges that, when followed through on, prove the opposite of what the Warren Commission concluded; this is especially the case with the medical and ballistics evidence, including Oswald’s alleged possession of the rifle and handgun.
Neither was there any credible evidence that the Foster autopsy was obstructed by officials on the scene. Or that notes were burned and the autopsy was rewritten once or twice. In the JFK case, both David Mantik and Doug Horne have argued that the autopsy we have in the JFK case is likely the third version. (See Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB, Volume 3, pp. 851-878) And this change occurred the morning of Sunday the 24th, when Jack Ruby killed Oswald, a murder which guaranteed there would be no trial for the defendant. I won’t even detail the wholesale revisions made in the Kennedy autopsy by the Ramsey Clark Panel in 1968. But the record shows there has never been a true official forensic inquiry into the JFK case. What Arlen Specter and the Warren Commission did was pretty much a pathetic disgrace. The forensic examination by the House Select Committee on Assassinations was flawed beyond recognition by its use of the junk science of Thomas Canning and the late Vincent Guinn. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 76-82) On top of that, the HSCA concealed much of their evidence, and then misrepresented the evidence that was concealed. (Essay by Gary Aguilar in Trauma Room One, pp. 208-11) This is why, in the upcoming Oliver Stone documentary, JFK: Destiny Betrayed, the public will––for the first time, fifty-seven years after the fact––see a real forensic review of the evidence in the JFK case.
VI
I would like to close the crime detection part of this essay with a direct comparison of the findings of a so-called expert in forensics who participated in both the Foster and JFK cases. That man is the late Vincent Scalice. Like many who worked for the House Select Committee, Scalice came out of the New York City Police Department. He was hailed as a fingerprint expert.
As both Sylvia Meagher and Henry Hurt have noted, there was a timing problem with the discovery of Lee Harvey Oswald’s palmprint on the barrel of the Mannlicher Carcano rifle found at the Texas School Book Depository. On the night of the assassination, there was no print announced by the Dallas Police. (Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 124) Their identification expert, Carl Day, was supposed to have been working on the rifle at the time it was taken from the police and sent to the FBI. Vincent Drain was the FBI agent who picked up the rifle from Day that evening and shipped it to Washington. Drain told author Henry Hurt that no such print was pointed out to him by Day when he picked up the rifle on the evening of the assassination. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 109)
What makes Drain’s statement compelling is that when the rifle was examined by FBI expert Sebastian Latona, he said that there were no prints of value he could discern on the weapon. (Hurt, p. 107) Latona was probably the foremost authority on the subject at that time. In conversations with Chief of Homicide in New York, Robert Tanenbaum, he told this writer that every DA in America wanted Latona for his case, for the simple reason that his pamphlet on fingerprint analysis was used by most local police departments as an instruction guide.
What happened after Latona came up with a negative verdict on the prints shows why the Dallas Police Department was later exposed as the single most corrupt police force in the country. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 196-98) After the rifle was returned to Dallas, DA Henry Wade announced that, presto, they now had a print on the rifle. What made the late arriving print even more suspect was this: After Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby on the 24th, his body was taken to Miller’s Funeral Home in Fort Worth. In 1978, agent Richard Harrison told Gary Mack that he had driven another agent to the funeral parlor with the alleged “Oswald rifle”. His understanding was that this other agent was to get a palm print off the corpse for “comparison purposes”. This makes no sense since Oswald had been fingerprinted three times while in detention. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, 1989 edition, p. 444) The owner of the parlor, Paul Groody, later said it took a long time to remove all of the “black gook” from the hand of the corpse. And that convinced him the agents were there to retrieve a palm print. (Hurt, p. 107) When the Warren Commission wanted Day to sign an affidavit to the effect he had identified the print before the rifle was turned over to the FBI, Day refused to execute the document. (Marrs, p. 445) Because of these rather suspicious circumstances, no serious author on the JFK case believed the palmprint was legitimate.
Then, in 1991, a man named Rusty Livingston entered the scene. Livingston had worked for the Dallas Police, and his nephew Gary Savage later produced a book, called First Day Evidence, based on his uncle’s remembrances and souvenirs. Livingston claimed that, in addition to the palm print, there was a fingerprint Day developed on the trigger guard. He had pictures to prove such was the case. When the late Mike Sullivan of PBS heard about this, he and his crew—which included Gus Russo and Scott Malone––hurried to talk to Rusty and Gary. And this new evidence turned out to be the final sequence for their (quite flatulent) 1993 Frontline special entitled Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?
Savage had tried to get a confirmation that the trigger guard prints were Oswald’s from an examiner named Jerry Powdrill. Powdrill’s examination was quite weak; he only said he could match three points. This number is four times less than the usual standard in US courts, and five times less than in British courts. (Savage, p. 109)
Sullivan was undeterred. PBS then brought in a former FBI examiner, George Bonebrake. He said the prints were not clear enough for identification purposes. But that still did not discourage Sullivan and PBS. They now brought in Vincent Scalice. As Pat Speer notes in his fine article, “Un-smoking the Gun”, back in 1978, when working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Scalice said these trigger guard pictures were not defined enough for identification purposes (Volume 8, p. 248). But now, Mr. Scalice determined the prints were Oswald’s. He explained this switch by saying that he now had more and better pictures to work from.
As Speer notes, Scalice and Savage were wrong about the new and better photos which allowed the new determination. After separating out blow-ups from originals, Speer determined that Scalice worked from all of two photos––not as PBS said, “a set”. Scalice was also wrong when he said he had only seen one photo of the trigger guard prints while with the HSCA. He had seen more than one while working for that committee. (HSCA Admin Folder M-3, pp. 5-6, at Mary Ferrell Foundation Archives.) PBS was also wrong when they said that the trigger guard prints had been ignored prior to 1993. They had been examined by the HSCA and the FBI. (See preceding link)
But as Speer points out, although the misrepresentations above were pretty bad, they were not the worst part of the dog and pony show that Sullivan and PBS had produced. Sullivan realized PBS had a problem with the FBI work on the rifle which occurred the very evening of the assassination. So when PBS presented the program for the 40th anniversary of Kennedy’s murder in 2003, they wrote the following piece of narration: “The FBI says it never looked at the Dallas police photographs of the fingerprints ….” This statement strongly implies that when Latona examined the rifle for the Warren Commission, he did not have the DPD photos.
Again, this is false. In his Warren Commission testimony, Latona is quite clear on this point. He states that he did examine photos of the trigger guard area that were sent by the Dallas Police. (WC Vol. IV, p. 21). And he went beyond that. He says that he examined the area with a magnifying glass. (WC Vol IV, p. 20). He then adds that he called in a photographer and took his own photos. He states that they tried everything, “highlighting, side-lighting, every type of lighting that we could conceivably think of ….” Latona also said that he then processed the entire rifle, to the point of dismantling the weapon and breaking down all its parts. He concluded that there were no prints of value on the rifle. (WC Vol IV, p. 23)
It’s one thing to make a mistake. We all do that. But when you state as fact the opposite of what happened, then the audience has a right to suspect that the producer of the program––in this case Mr. Sullivan––has an agenda. I simply do not believe that every person involved with this program had failed to read Latona’s sworn testimony. Not when this issue was the concluding segment of the show. They had to have read it. But they were so eager to pronounce Oswald guilty that they ignored it. They did not want to explain why the best fingerprint expert the FBI had––using every technique he could muster––could not find a print on the weapon while Oswald was alive; but the most corrupt police department in America did find it after he was dead. If the case had been presented that way, then the audience would have been thinking: “Where did Day’s prints come from?” And they would have been justified in asking that question. As they would have been in asking these questions: What the heck is PBS up to? Didn’t this used to be a reputable network? And also this one: Why is Scalice going along with this cheap charade? (I strongly advise the reader to peruse the rest of Speer’s article, because, if you can believe it, the smelly evidentiary trail of this print gets even worse.)
After retiring from the NYPD Scalice had become a forensic examiner in the private field. In other words, he was for hire. And, yes sir, after his work for PBS and Sullivan, he later took part in the Foster case. And he joined it with a vengeance. In April of 1995, he issued a report through the WJC agreeing with the idea that Foster’s body had been transported to Fort Marcy Park from an outside location. (Moldea, pp. 249-50). Part of this “analysis” was based on the phony tenet that there was not any soil found on Foster’s shoes. (Associated Press Report of 4/28/95) The problem with this, as we have seen, is that Henry Lee proved it was wrong.
But Scalice now plunged further into the Foster mire. A few months later, he switched hats and became a document examiner, one specializing in handwriting analysis. Investment advisor James Davidson was friendly with both Ruddy and Republican stalwart Grover Norquist. He also later became a board member of Newsmax. In 1995, Davidson called a press conference. Vince Foster had written a note prior to his death. He had ripped it up and thrown it into his briefcase. It expressed his discouragement with the Washington scene and his disdain for the unfair attacks on him. It was found four days after his body was discovered. Both the Fiske and the Starr inquiries had employed authorities who determined the note was written in Foster’s hand. (See Final Report of Independent Counsel, Volume 3, Part 3, p. 278, published in 2001 and finalized by attorney Robert Ray)
Well, to counter this, Davidson put Scalice on a panel with two other men, including one Reginald Alton from England. (Alton seems to have been a bit biased against the Clintons; see Moldea, p. 373.) Their analysis differed from the prior ones and said the note was a forgery. That analysis was vitiated by Marcel Matley in the Volume 21 No.1, Spring 1998 issue of the Journal of the National Association of Document Examiners.
After reading the above analysis, this author is compelled to note that when Scalice offered up his confirmation statement of the Oswald fingerprint for PBS, he did not furnish any comparison charts. This would have been standard procedure for any legal proceeding. As Pat Speer wrote, this should have been easy for him to do, as exemplars of Oswald’s prints were in the record going all the way back to his Marine Corps days. Because of that, and the other points mentioned above, it is safe to suggest that, by the nineties, Scalice was pretty much planning for his retirement. Masquerading as a versatile forensic expert, he was the equivalent of a think-tank academic for hire. With the confirmation bias agreed upon during the signing.
VII
As the reader can see, unlike the first generation of critics in the JFK case, people like Chris Ruddy and Reed Irvine had a sugar daddy who was supplying them with bucketloads of cash. This patronage both furthered their endeavors and allowed them to be publicized via full page ads in large newspapers, thus ensuring their information would be available to millions of readers. This is almost the opposite of what happened with writers like Harold Weisberg, Mark Lane, Vincent Salandria and Sylvia Meagher. Weisberg was reduced to self-publishing his books after his first. The FBI stopped Lane from publishing Rush to Judgment in the USA, leading to its first being published in England. (Mark Lane, Citizen Lane, pp. 160-61) Whatever that first generation of critics achieved was largely due to the quality of their work, not to any promotion by wealthy rightwing backers.
But it was that rightwing backing that kept on advancing further inquiries into the Foster case. And these further official inquiries were all done by those who would be politically in line with the likes of Ruddy and misaligned with the Clintons. Again, this is contrary to the Kennedy case. The Warren Commission was clearly politically biased from the start to attain a no-conspiracy verdict. (See James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, Chapter 11) Once Dick Sprague and Bob Tanenbaum left the the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Robert Blakey attempted to convict Oswald, using a lot of the same dubious evidence the Warren Commission did. (See The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 63-89). Because of this innate bias, there has never been anywhere close to a real examination of the true circumstances of Kennedy’s death. This bias is furthermore why both of those inquiries proffered the ridiculous Single Bullet Fantasy as the sine qua non of their verdicts against Oswald.
But forensics was not what the Foster case was about. It was a political crusade. So––as we have seen––facts were not important. When needed, they could simply be made up. (For some further examples of this, see the Salon 12/23/97 article by Gene Lyons.) The idea, as future Solicitor General Ted Olsen told his then ally David Brock, was to publish speculation that even they understood was false, so that it would preoccupy the White House until a new scandal came along. (Washington Monthly, article by Martin Longman, 5/24/16). Can anyone in their right senses say that this stands in any comparison to what authors and activists in the Kennedy case were doing? But the underlying results in the Clinton case seem fairly obvious: it was effective. And it clearly drove Bill Clinton to the right. Which is why he hired the likes of Dick Morris to run his political office and his 1996 campaign.
The Clinton Wars brought some of the worst political hacks into the MSM. In addition to those I have mentioned, there were Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Floyd Brown, and David Bossie. And it was these characters who further decimated the Republican Party of any political beliefs it previously held under Taft and Eisenhower. They are and were simply shock troops. As congressman Trey Gowdy recently said upon leaving congress, the GOP is about one thing: winning. And since that party has been reduced to the level of Coulter and Bossie, it is about winning through a scorched earth policy, as in the case of Donald Trump Jr. trying to revive the Foster case in 2017. (CNN Report of May 11, 2017 by Andrew Kaczynski) Along with this, there was the constant refrain from the Right that the MSM was too liberal. This, of course, was preposterous. The Power Elite, which has owned the media in America for eons, was never liberal––which is why they cooperated so completely with the cover-ups of the assassinations of the sixties. As Eric Alterman has noted, this refrain about being too liberal was the equivalent of “working the refs” in sports. You softened up the gatekeepers in order to get your message on the field. And it worked. It also caused writers who had formerly been on the left to move right in order to to gain access, one example being the late Christopher Hitchens.
The Republican Party has become so bereft, so craven by this continuing devolution that it all but ignores the real scandals that have taken place in order to distract the public with these ersatz ones. The heist of the 2000 election, the probable stealing of the 2004 election, the Iran/Contra scandal, the importation of drugs into the USA by the CIA, these all are minimized or ignored by the GOP. In fact, during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Senator Lindsay Graham said the fact that the Senate allowed a sexual assault accuser to testify against Kavanaugh was one of the worst things he saw in his political career. Evidently, the Supreme Court and Roger Stone stealing the 2000 election––thus allowing the deaths of 600,000 Iraqis in a phony war––this did not count for anything to Graham. That is how bonkers that party has become. Their aim is to be constantly riling up the base, which does not really understand they are being used as lemmings to ensure policies that will make their lives worse.
To be clear: I never voted for either of the Clintons. Since I live in the safe state of California, I could vote Green in the general election. I never voted for either one in the primaries. As Robert Reich later noted, the Clintons were really Eisenhower Republicans. I mean, can anyone imagine Bobby Kennedy attending H. L. Hunt’s funeral, like Bill Clinton did Scaife’s? (CBS News, August 3, 2014, report by Jake Miller) My point here is that the political antics that surrounded them was nothing but a cheap and tawdry circus, one which, without Scaife’s money, likely would have never existed. And when all the investigations were done, what real charges were there? Monica Lewinsky. Talk about hypocrisy, as Larry Flynt later showed: the GOP was full of similar instances. (See SF Weekly, 9/15/99, article entitled “Inside Flynt”) To take the hypocrisy of the Lewinsky matter even further: Scaife himself carried on a long affair with a call girl, one which his wife found out about and exposed. (Vanity Fair, 1/2/08, article by Michael Joseph Gross) There were two good books written on the stupidity of all this. First, there is Blood Sport by James Stewart from 1997; and then The Hunting of the President by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, which came out in 2001. The latter was made into a documentary film in 2004.
Chris Ruddy rode the tidal wave of ridiculousness. He was well rewarded by his backers for his incessant efforts to aggrandize nonsense and create an aura of mystery where none actually existed: to suggest there was some kind of kill squad employed by the Clintons; that Vince Foster had to have been murdered and then, James Angleton style, the murder was made to look like a suicide; and that this was all over the Whitewater real estate deal in which the Clintons lost money. Today he runs Newsmax, which employs people like Mr. deLespinasse, who ridicules all ideas about conspiracies, but conveniently passes over the Foster mythology in silence. But when Ruddy does run a story and documentary on a possible JFK conspiracy, who is it about? The poseur James Files. (Report on Newsmax by Jim Myers, August 29, 2016). Ruddy has us nailed both ways.
Donald Trump has complained that he is the most attacked president in decades. Mr. Trump has a short memory. Bill Clinton was. Just ask Chris Ruddy how he did it. And how he benefited so much from it.
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Thomas, Lattimer, and Reality: A Study in Contrasts
Whenever I open a book on the Kennedy assassination, I never know what rabbit hole I’ll fall in to. And I wonder if I’ll ever be able to crawl out—especially when I start checking an author’s references.
Lately, I’ve been browsing through Hear No Evil. Politics, Science & the Forensic Evidence in the Kennedy Association by Donald Byron Thomas—and it is full of surprises. (Please go here to see my earlier story on Thomas’s presentation of Kennedy’s throat wound.)
Thomas, a scientist with the US federal government, has a PhD in entomology. He specializes in beetles, and is former president of the Coleopterists Society.
This report concerns the puzzling way in which Thomas represented the work of the late John Lattimer, MD with respect to what has become known as the “Thorburn reflex position.”
Lattimer—former head of the Department of Urology at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, private physician to many prominent men, including J. Edgar Hoover—is the author of many articles (infomercials really) promoting the lone assassin theory,
William Thorburn was a 19th-century neurologist who documented specific neurological consequences associated with traumas to different levels of the cervical spine. One of his articles featured a picture of a man whose arms became locked into position after damage to his spinal cord at the sixth cervical (C-6) level.
Because the position of the man’s upper arms superficially resembled that of Kennedy’s, Lattimer seized upon the picture as “proof” Kennedy was struck at the C-6 level—that is, higher than the throat wound, establishing a downward path from the alleged sniper’s nest. (Bull NY Acad Med 53, 1977) (The back wound was actually much lower.)
Lattimer’s co-author, distinguished neurosurgeon Edward Schlesinger, admitted to me that neither he, nor a third coauthor, neurologist H. Houston Merritt, ever saw the Zapruder film, knew very little about JFK’s reactions, and never read the manuscript that carried their names.
They did not take its publication seriously. They knew Lattimer’s JFK stories appeared in the “Biography” or “Historical Medicine” sections in journals with lenient standards.
So, what was the point of publishing in such journals? The answer is, doctors were not the intended audience—you were.
Every time Lattimer published a seemingly peer-reviewed story, the mainstream press was tipped off, and quotes supporting the official view were selected and widely disseminated.
Thomas did not accept Lattimer’s use of neurology to establish a high wound in the back of Kennedy’s neck. Yet, he gave space to it in his book—only he put together a revised version.
You may find this report confusing. It’s about one man’s revised version of another man’s revision of history. Well, let the confusion begin!
Lattimer’s Version of Kennedy’s Position
Let’s start with Lattimer’s “proof” the bullet struck near the sixth cervical vertebra, a woodcut of a patient treated by William Thorburn, MD, which Lattimer claims resembled Kennedy’s, soon after he was hit for the first time:
In his book, Kennedy and Lincoln (1980), Lattimer began his chapter on this subject with the question “Why Did the President’s Elbows Fly Up When He Was Hit?” And in all of his writings on this issue, he has used this picture to illustrate JFK’s reaction. In 1993, he said the same thing, “Finally, by frame 236, President Kennedy has assumed the reflex position illustrated by Thorburn almost 100 years ago…” (JAMA, March 24,1993, p. 1545)
Thomas’s Version of Lattimer’s Version of Kennedy’s Position
Here is what Don Thomas presented as Lattimer’s choice of an illustration from Thorburn’s long article on multiple cases. This is not the same Thorburn patient Lattimer used as a model. His arms are obviously not in the same position as that of the man shown above (or Kennedy’s!). Furthermore, the position below is related to damage to the seventh cervical vertebra, not the sixth.
In the above picture, the man’s elbows are most certainly not “flying up!” Clearly, his upper arms are down by his side. But Thomas said “Lattimer proposed that Kennedy’s reaction, bringing his arms into a folded position with the elbows outward…”
But Lattimer always said the elbows were raised. He never said JFK’s arms were in a “folded position.” And he never used the picture above.
Kennedy’s Actual Position
As you can see from the Zapruder frame below, Kennedy’s actual position looks like neither Lattimer’s nor Thomas’s false representation of Lattimer’s depiction of his position.
Here is what Kennedy actually did as shown in Zapruder frame 236.
Kennedy’s elbows are definitely up and out—much further up than in the picture Lattimer featured. But Kennedy’s elbows are bent, bringing his forearms high across his chest, while the Thorburn patient’s forearms and hands are twisted outward. In the picture Thomas falsely presented (below, middle) as Lattimer’s choice, the patient’s elbows and forearms are not up at all. Here you can compare all three:
How Thomas Gave Appearance of Backing Up His Version of Lattimer’s Claims
On page 318 of his book, Thomas wrote,
Lattimer invented the ‘Thorburn position’.78 Lattimer proposed that Kennedy’s reaction, bringing his arms into a folded position with the elbows outward, was a reflex resulting from stimulation of the nerve cord at the level of the seventh cervical vertebra.79 Lattimer noted that the innervation of the upper arms, the brachial plexus, occurs at this level, and also credited a nineteenth century physician, William Thorburn, for first associating this particular anatomical posture with a lesion to the cervical spinal cord.80
In the above passage, it is reference #79 that is the most misleading. Thomas’s words: “Updated Thorburn reaction in Lattimer (1993) JAMA March 24, 1993.”
As mentioned earlier, Lattimer never described Kennedy’s position that way, not even in his 1993 article which Thomas says is “updated.” The only change Lattimer made was to associate the trauma to “C6-7” instead of “C-7.” And he used the same illustration that he always used. Not much of an “update.”
For decades, Lattimer’s disinformation has been a major contaminant in the corporate media’s representation of the Kennedy assassination. (Most recently, atmospheric scientist Nicholas Nalli used some of Lattimer’s “research” to support his own pseudoscience promoting the lone nutter view on the head wound. Please go here to see these darkly amusing grotesqueries, and their illustrations.)
Why give Lattimer’s false Thorburn story a makeover? Was he trying to restore Lattimer’s reputation with what he thought was a better Thorburn story?
After all, Thomas does depend in part on Lattimer’s presentation of Governor John Connally’s back wound in his own efforts to promote the single bullet theory. In his book, Thomas repeats—without any revision—all the demonstrably false information Lattimer published, which I exposed long ago, in my article, “Big Lie About a Small Wound.” (I was told that Vincent Bugliosi was about to use the same false information in his book—Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy—but did not after being shown my findings.)
In the beginning of this article, I commented on the rabbit hole nature of references. Had Thomas dropped down even one of these holes in the Connally back wound tale, he might not have repeated it. Unless he could think of a way to give it a makeover.
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Clue to When JFK Was Shot in Back
Previously I posted an article here on the significance of S.S.A. Glen Bennett’s statement: He saw Kennedy shot in the back—and, as you will see from the story, this had to have happened at least two seconds after he was hit in the throat (see the link above).
This could explain the puzzling nature of JFK’s back wound—the way its abrasion collar suggests a shot coming from below. Some have explained it by insisting JFK was hit while he was leaning over.
As anyone can see from films, JFK was not leaning over at the time he first began to react.
But if Glen Bennett was telling the truth when he said he was looking at JFK’s back the instant he was struck in the back, photographic evidence shows this had to have happened after Kennedy was already hit.
The interesting thing is, seconds after that first hit, Kennedy actually did begin to lean forward. And so no wonder the abrasion collar was on the bottom edge of the back wound.
This is further proof that Kennedy was first hit in the throat, then in the back, but only after he began to sag in his seat.
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Suppressed Evidence of JFK Throat Entry
For years, distinguished pathologist Cyril Wecht, MD, JD has expressed doubts that Kennedy’s throat wound was an entry because no one could tell him where the bullet went. “The throat is all soft tissue, where did it exit?”
Good question, but it’s based on the premise that if the bullet had been found … we would know about it.
Well, we don’t know where that bullet went, but we do know about another bullet that was found—but never mentioned in the official record.
A Navy doctor published an obscure memoir in which he reports that petty officers sent to retrieve bone fragments from JFK’s car also found a misshapen, but whole bullet in the back of the car. (Official reports only mention bullet fragments, and they were found in the front of the car.)
That doctor, James Young, briefly inspected it, then gave it back to the petty officer who gave it to James Humes, the lead pathologist. Then where did it go? Humes made a big show of looking for bullets that night.
Young was puzzled when, years later, he could find no report on that bullet. He wrote to President Gerald Ford asking about it, and got a useless response. We have researcher Randy Robertson to thank for this discovery. (To see more on this, please go here.)
Maybe you can’t quite believe the above story, but you should be even more skeptical of anything you are told by the government. And you should wonder about what you are not told.
Humes et al Suppressed Fundamental Evidence:
(1) Kennedy’s cerebellum. You will not find one word about it in the main autopsy report, which only describes the upper brain, as well as organs not even relevant to the murder. Nor will you find mention of it any of Humes’s testimony. (The supplementary report mentions a microscopic analysis of a small piece of it.) The Parkland Hospital doctors described massive damage of this organ, damage inconsistent with the official narrative. (For more on this, go here and here.)
(2) Kennedy’s throat wound. Humes et al pretended they were completely unaware of it on the night of the autopsy, when the body was still available. And so they did not document it or explore it further. Years later, a pathologist who assisted Humes, said they saw the remains of the bullet hole itself, “part of the perimeter of a bullet wound in the anterior neck.” (For the complete story on this, go here.)
And so again I ask, why assume no bullet entered JFK’s throat because you don’t know where it went?
Throat Wound: Abrasion/Contusion Collar
Not long ago, I saw an email in which a researcher said Kennedy’s throat wound had no abrasion collar. He didn’t say that he saw no report of one, or that blood obscured the wound so that none was seen (a lone nutter claim). He just omnisciently asserted that none had existed. People are entitled to their opinions, but they should be given along with all the facts readers need for making up their own minds.
Here is probably the most relevant fact of all: When Malcolm Perry—the Parkland Hospital doctor who worked on the throat wound—was specifically asked by the HSCA to describe the wound’s edges, he included these words: “The edges were bruised.” A bruise is a contusion. Perry seems to have been referring to a contusion collar—which, like an abrasion collar, is definitive of an entrance wound.
Some authors use the expressions “abrasion” and “contusion” rings or collars interchangeably. But though related, they are not the same. Both are said to be caused by temporary over-stretching of the skin. And the skin on the perimeter of the bullet hole is abraded. A few millimeters away, damaged blood vessels in the dermis bleed beneath the skin, resulting in a visible bruise. Here’s an illustration from an article on the characteristics of entrance wounds by jacketed bullets, fired at a distance.
Note: Jacketed bullets from centre fire rifles do not always cause abrasion collars. Also, entrances can have slightly ragged edges. (Gunshot Wounds Aspects of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques, Second Edition, by Vincent J.M. Di Maio, MD, CRC Press, 1999.)
To the Warren Commission, Perry had described a typical entrance wound: “approximately 5 mm in diameter…exuding blood slowly which partially obscured it. Its edges were neither ragged nor punched out, but rather clean.”
Later he was again asked about the wound, and this time Commissioner Arlen Specter clarified something significant. Perry seems to have said the wound was “not punched out,” but he also said it was “not pushed out.” Specter specifically asked if the wound was “pushed out”—“everted” in the language of forensics—and characteristic of an exit. Perry said it was not. (Nor did he say it was pushed in.)
Don Thomas: Throat Wound Was an Exit
In his book Hear No Evil. Politics, Science & the Forensic Evidence in the Kennedy Association (Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2010), Donald Byron Thomas promotes the idea that the wound was an exit.
The author seems to believe the back and throat wounds were proven to be connected when in fact there was no proof. This was an inference based on incomplete information. Very few researchers claim the back wound was anything but an entrance, but we cannot explain where that bullet went. Since it created such an apparently shallow wound, it may have fallen out. It may have been the slightly bent bullet found in the limousine.
As for explaining what happened to the bullet that we say entered the throat, we cannot. But, based on all the other key evidence that went unreported, it’s not unreasonable to assume that if it had been found during the autopsy, it would not have been reported. (Thomas does not mention any of the known suppressed key evidence described above.)
Thomas also seems to believe the pathologists who performed the autopsy saw no evidence of the bullet wound in the throat. On page 238 of his book, he said “The precise nature of the wound cannot be determined because the wound was obliterated.” In fact, it was only bisected, not obliterated and, as mentioned above, one of the pathologists reported seeing part of it.
The author does not report any of the telling details Perry described, aside from the wound’s smallness. And instead of providing recent information on wounds, Thomas quoted from a not very informative book written in the early 1920s:
Provided no bone lesion is present, the exit aperture is often difficult to discriminate from the entrance wound. The two wounds maybe [sic] equal in size, the entrance wound may show inverted edges, while in the exit wound the edges are generally everted [pushed out]. When the bullet has passed through soft parts alone, the exit wound is apt to be circular in shape. (Thomas, p. 238) [Emphasis added.]
But Perry had specifically said the edges were not everted, that is, not pushed out. More important, Thomas said nothing about the bruised edges.
An Invalid Explanation for Wound’s Smallness
Thomas said that, though the wound was small, it was still an exit, and its size could be explained by the phenomenon of “shoring” or “buttressing.” Meaning the skin was held in place by Kennedy’s collar and necktie. And he quoted experts who say that when the skin is held in place by something, like a wall, floor, chair back, or supportive clothing, the bullet can’t stretch the skin outward until it tears (one reason why exits are small and star-shaped)—and a small “shored” wound is created.
But for this to be possible, the wound has to be right behind the shoring material.
Parkland Hospital’s Charles Carrico, MD—who saw the wound while Kennedy was still fully dressed—said the wound was “right above” the neck tie. And Malcolm Perry, the doctor who cut across the wound, said the bullet struck at the level of the second or third tracheal ring, just below the Adam’s apple.
Instead of deferring to these doctors who provided facts, Thomas gave his opinion, based on a photo showing JFK in an unnatural position with his neck hyperextended: “… it would seem more likely that the bullet passed below the necktie.” (p. 236)
Below the necktie? As you can see from this photo, his Adam’s apple is well above his collar and necktie.
Though Thomas disagreed with what Carrico said about the wound’s location, he argued the idea of shoring even if Carrico was right: The amount of buttressing would still be appreciable whether just above or just below the exiting bullet’s path.” (p. 236) He did not buttress this assertion with any references.
Here’s another good reason to doubt the wound was buttressed. Take a close look at what actually happens: Skin between the outgoing bullet and the buttressing material is crushed, and it becomes stuck to the material. When that material is pulled away, it creates a wide abrasion collar consisting of skin tags that resemble a peeling sunburn. More important—grossly visible skin is left behind on the material. (Am J Foren Med Path 1983; 4(3): 199-204)
The FBI closely inspected Kennedy’s shirt and tie, and did not report seeing skin on either garment.
Relevance of Bullet Velocity
What Malcolm Perry said about the internal damage in the neck reveals that if a bullet entered the throat, it was probably traveling at medium velocity (as defined circa 1963.).
There’s some concussive damage to surrounding organs—these are the kind of things one sees with gunshot wounds, in a blast injury … And with high velocity, we do see a lot. Now the low velocity stuff, it’s often just a track, a wound track, with very little concussive or blast injury. This one was in between. There was evidence of some blast injury, but not like, say, what one sees with a high velocity rifle, like a 3006 or 223 …
A bullet traveling that fast would have left a much larger exit wound. And this was proven by Army experiments involving the assassination of goats.
Yet other experiments proved that when non-deformed jacketed bullets exit straight out—as opposed to sideways—the size of the wound created is directly proportional to their exiting velocity. (J Trauma 1963; (March) 3(2): 120-128, p. 122) (Gunshot Wounds: Aspects of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques, Second Edition, by Vincent J.M. Di Maio, CRC Press, 1999.) (Thomas did not report this, but possibly he was unaware of these experiments.)
Translated: When all other things are equal, the slower the bullet, the smaller the exit wound. Put another way, the smaller the exit, the slower the bullet.
Translated further: If a bullet really did exit the president’s throat, it would not likely have had the energy to make it through Connally’s mohair jacket, let alone his chest and wrist.
And there goes the Single Bullet Theory.
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Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Robert Kennedy Assassination
It’s a rare thing indeed when a book actually delivers everything you could wish for—and then some. I can count on one hand the number of books in recent memory that have achieved this. Incorporating over twenty years of research, personal interviews, deep archival digging, and a comprehensive survey of nearly all the extant literature and articles surrounding Robert Kennedy’s encounter with the unspeakable in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel on the night of Jun 5, 1968, A Lie too Big to Fail will no doubt stand the test of time as the definitive book on the RFK murder. Pease establishes not only the most compelling case against the LAPD’s compromised (non-)investigation of the case to date, but reveals startling new discoveries, including previously unexplored forensic evidence, new witnesses to multiple shooters, and evidence of foul play at the highest levels of the United States political apparatus.Digging deep into the court records and transcripts of the also-compromised defense attorney who sold the 24-year old Sirhan Sirhan down the river before he ever had a chance at anything approaching a fair trial, Pease presents a firm case for why his fate—as he sits locked up in a California prison for life—cannot be justified in a democratic society. That Sirhan is still alive and paying for a crime he never committed brings a necessary urgency to her plea that the case be reopened. Because not only did Robert Kennedy’s murder signal the death knell of true progressivism in the United States political arena, but it served as perhaps the most arrogant abuse of power by a hidden hand that, for five decades, hijacked the United States’ foreign and domestic policy. Written with a gripping, driving cadence, the author’s narrative gifts are as pronounced as her investigative acumen. And with this book as her lifetime achievement on a case that still remains relatively obscure in light of the JFK assassination, she will likely establish herself as the preeminent authority on the subject for years to come.
II
Officially, minutes after delivering his victory speech in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just after midnight, Senator Kennedy—to the cheers of his teeming supporters and staff—excused himself from the podium, proceeded backstage through a small passage leading to large double doors, entered the hotel’s kitchen pantry, shook hands with cooks and a busboy, and was shot to death. The sole perpetrator was held to be Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant who appeared in the confusion of the crowded space in front of the senator and fired a .22 caliber revolver at Kennedy, mortally wounding him and injuring five other people with his eight-shot discharge.
Kennedy died almost a day later. He had multiple brain surgeries and finally succumbed to the massive damage of the shattered bullet fragments: his heart rate lowered to barely a pulse, then stopped. His funeral ceremony was one of the most highly attended in U.S. history. For people like Tom Hayden, original author of the Port Huron Statement, who sat crying in a church pew upon learning of the death of his hero, the senator’s untimely death was also the death of hope for a generation seeking to take their nation on a course of peace and social justice. With Richard Nixon’s victory all but assured in the confused scrambling of the Democratic Party to promote their second tier candidates, the United States was going to fundamentally change.
That’s the official version of events we teach our kids in school and repeat ad nauseum in the mainstream media. The problem, of course is that when Thomas Noguchi, the LA County coroner who was tasked with performing Robert Kennedy’s autopsy, was finished, he discovered that the fatal shot, just behind his right ear into the victim’s brain, was fired with the gun barrel at contact range, which could not have been more than three inches. This was demonstrable, as Kennedy’s neck exhibited tell-tale signs of powder burn tattooing, or stippling, which Noguchi took great pains to demonstrate by setting up a test-firing at the LA Police Academy on mock human skulls made of latex and pig ears after the autopsy. Each officer was asked to fire at his respective target from six ranges: barrel-pressed against the target, a quarter inch, half inch, two inches, three, and finally four. Only at three inches, did the stippling dispersal pattern match that on Kennedy’s corpse. Of the nearly seventy witnesses in the pantry that night, none placed Sirhan closer than three feet, and most average a distance of approximately five to six feet. Equally troubling was the fact that the three shots which struck Kennedy were fired from behind and at equally sharp vertical angles, from low to high, which makes it physically impossible for them to have come from Sirhan’s gun, which even before he was attacked and restrained by bystanders, was by all accounts pointed directly at Kennedy in a flat, arm-outstretched fashion. We know Kennedy only perceived a threat from the front by the fact that numerous witnesses recall his hands defensively coming up to cover his face at seeing an approaching Sirhan before he fell to his knees, wounded, and then slumped to the floor where he lay dying in a pool of gathering blood from his fatal head wound.
The immediate aftermath of the shooting is another one fraught with contradictory claims. Officially, the LAPD concluded—or as we will see, decided actively to conclude, with the urging of two former CIA interrogation experts who took over the investigation within days of the murder—there was no conspiracy. Sirhan was apprehended, everyone saw him shoot, Kennedy went down, case closed. And yet, as Lisa Pease aptly demonstrates, that is not at all what witnesses reported. Almost thirty separate people placed Sirhan in the company of a young lady in a polka dot dress, along with several male accomplices. Many of them saw her in the pantry, seemingly holding Sirhan, and having the same sickly smile on her face as they claim he did before he lurched forward with gun outstretched to make his move. Witness Sandy Serrano places her in the immediate aftermath of the shooting running down the fire escape to the back parking lot with her male companion—both of whom Serrano witnessed entering the hotel via this very fire escape with Sirhan Sirhan earlier in the evening. Serrano said she was exuberantly shouting, “We shot him!” When asked by Sandy who did she kill, the girl responded, “Kennedy! We killed him!”. They were overheard by the Bernsteins, an elderly couple in the parking lot who reported the incident to first-responder Paul Sharaga, of LAPD. When Sharaga put out an APB for these two suspects, he was told moments later by a superior at Ramparts station that, “We don’t want them to get anything started on a big conspiracy.” (Larry Hancock, “Incomplete Justice, Part One: At the Ambassador Hotel,” 5/19/2007) The APB was subsequently pulled, allowing any accomplices ample time to make their escape.
Lisa Pease details this familiar chain of events and the controversy surrounding the clearly real accomplices, sited by dozens of witnesses throughout the ballroom and surrounding areas that night. With regard to figures like the infamous girl in the polka dot dress, she brings some fascinating new insights to the case: including the likely use of multiple teams and multiple polka dot women who were also part of the plot. Many have wondered: What would have happened had Kennedy exited via a different route? The author is quick to note that he was marked for death that night by the sheer number of likely assassins actually positioned in the Ambassador Hotel that evening. While as many as three shooters could have been in the pantry, the LAPD was immediately told to stand down in their pursuit of leads concerning anyone but Sirhan’s immediate family and friends. Therefore, we will probably never be able to say conclusively who these people were. Lisa Pease provides some excellent considerations though, and that is perhaps one of the most exciting parts of her new findings, along with some of her personal interviews which to my knowledge she is sharing here for the first time in print. That, plus the fact that SUS officers at Ramparts station also burned over 2,400 photos taken at the Ambassador ballroom in a hospital incinerator, removed and later destroyed key ceiling and door panels containing bullet holes because they “didn’t have room to store them,” and both discredited and intimidated major credible eyewitnesses: all this smacks of a systematic cover-up.
III
Stylistically, A Lie To Big To Fail achieves a fine balance between the immense complexity of the case—with its thousands of files, its many bizarre suspects and characters, its hypno-programming realities, and other strange but relevant source data—and the inherent drama of the event. We begin with an almost Raymond-Chandler-styled portrait of those fateful California nights spent with folks like director of The Manchurian Candidate John Frankenheimer (talk about situational irony) and other supporters, then progress to the primary victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel. The book is instantly engaging, no matter how familiar readers might be with the case. The accessibility of the book is another commendable feat Pease has pulled off; experts who have studied the case for decades will still find evidence and propositions they had never seen or considered, while a friend I loaned the book to—who had never examined the case—could just as easily engage with the text. That is no small feat. Too often a book in the assassination field presumes a level of familiarity with the subject material that is beyond the scope of most readers, while those that are more accessible often gloss over the depth and complexity of the subplots, and also motives and new information gleaned from recent declassifications. A Lie to Big to Fail does neither, and presents an eminently readable, thoroughly substantiated story that, in many respects, is stranger than fiction.
Covering the gamut of the LAPD’s Special Unit Senator files, along with newly discovered archival footage from places like the California State Archive and local news agencies, Pease’s book is probably the most comprehensive I have ever read on this case, incorporating not only the limited but extremely useful secondary literature from the 1970s, 80s and recent times, but also combing the entire primary source record of the case as well. The author poured thousands of hours of personal research into the book. And it shows. Sources are meticulously detailed and annotated, in the classical manner with the references at the bottom of the page. This allows anyone with an internet connection to fact check most of her findings; some must be accessed in person in Sacramento and elsewhere.
The other thing that really stands out in the book is the author’s refusal to argue she’s definitively solved the case. Don’t get me wrong: if anyone has come close to figuring out exactly what happened that night, it’s Lisa Pease. What I mean is that too often plots of this magnitude, which require not only clandestine funding, months of planning, a deeply complex cover-up often stretching decades, and the complicity of many high-level officials and planners, are traced to a single source: the mob, the CIA, the Minutemen, Nixon. What seems to be the case, and I will let readers reach their own conclusions, is that, as Lisa notes, there were aspects of both underworld crime liaisons, private military contractors, and off-the-books involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency in the persons of say Hank Hernandez and Manny Peña (USAID/CIA), and of course Robert Maheu (Howard Hughes Corporation/CIA). Thane Cesar has been and still is a prime suspect, given his anti-Kennedy, pro-segregation views and convenient placement as RFK’s escort in the pantry. That he “retired” from Ace Security, a job he’d had for only a few weeks, as he sarcastically stated during his exit interview with the LAPD, is also extremely suspicious. (RFK LAPD Microfilm, Volume 122, Reporters Daily Transcripts, Reinvestigative Files 1974—1978) p. 314). That Nixon was basically handed the presidency does not, of course, implicate him personally; though as the end of the book suggests, there is anecdotal evidence his brother Don was indeed apprised of the events surrounding the assassination and informally debriefed shortly thereafter. In a diary entry that Pease personally procured from John Meier, a Howard Hughes top aide from 1966 to 1970, Meier wrote on June 6, 1968:
Bob Maheu called to ask about the Don Nixon meeting and suggested 8:30 breakfast at the Desert Inn Country Club (in Las Vegas). I went to the club. Maheu was all smiles, and Don Nixon walks in an all smiles. What followed next had to be seen to be believed. They embraced each other and Don Nixon said, “Well that prick is dead,” and Maheu said, “Well it looks like your brother is in now.” (Pease, p. 493)
This book also presents perhaps the most balanced look at the controversy surrounding the potential and very likely programming Sirhan underwent before his arrival on the scene. Drawing from both familiar and quite obscure cases, where people were indeed exposed as hypno-programmed assets operating against their will with no working knowledge of how or why they performed various acts and crimes, she gives those in the research community a solid footing on which to stand in what amounts to the hardest part of the case for the MSM to digest. Given the CIA’s millions of dollars of research into its MK-ULTRA and related mind control experiments, along with the accounts provided in Pease’s later chapters, even the most skeptical critics will be hard pressed now to discredit this exotic but very real use of actionable hypnosis.
IV
Sirhan remains languishing in prison to this day, narrowly avoiding the gas chamber by a lucky break which saw California abolish the death penalty in 1972. Despite his good behavior, insistence that he has no memory of the events in the pantry, his numerous and sincere interviews with new therapists and hypno-suggestive experts, his fate remains sealed. William Pepper, the attorney and barrister who represented the King family during their 1999 civil trial against Lloyd Jowers, in which a Shelby County jury determined Martin Luther King had been assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, has joined attorney Laurie Dusek in a bid to free Sirhan from a crime we know he could not possibly have committed.
Senator Kamala Harris, who served as the California Attorney General until 2017, and who was also the DA of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011, insisted since the parole hearing reached her desk in 2012 that Sirhan is still guilty. Following the release of an audio tape found in the California State Archives which captured what acoustics expert Philip Van Praag believes is thirteen distinct shots in the pantry, Harris was confronted by the very real possibility that Sirhan was not a lone gunman. Harris calls Van Praag’s analysis “pure speculation.” (Martinez and Johnson, “Prosecutors, attorneys argue: Was there a second gun in RFK assassination?” CNN, 3/12/2012)
Similarly, despite the very real fact that hypno-programming has been successfully deployed in military, civilian, and criminal plots, and other special operations dating back to the early 20th century, Harris refuses to accept its possible use on Sirhan in the RFK saga. Upon reading the adamant testimony of Harvard professor of forensic psychiatry and hypnosis, Dr. Daniel Brown—who spent over sixty hours interviewing Sirhan—Harris claimed, “The theory that a person could be hypnotized into planning and committing a murder against his will is a controversial (if not fantastic) one and has not been adopted by most of Brown’s peers, including the American Psychological Association.” She continues, “Thus, even if Sirhan could show that some psychologists believe in mind control or hypno-programming, his showing of actual innocence is nevertheless based on a debatable theory that is not universally accepted in the psychology community.” (CNN, 3/12/2012) Brown, in a signed 2011 affidavit, stated, “I have written four textbooks on hypnosis, and I have hypnotized over 6,000 individuals over a 40-year professional career. Mr. Sirhan is one of the most hypnotizable individuals I have ever met, and the magnitude of his amnesia for actions under hypnosis is extreme.” (Tom Jackman, “The Assassination of Bobby Kennedy: Was Sirhan Sirhan hypnotized to be the fall guy?” Washington Post, 6/4/2018)
What is actually a debatable theory, in reply to DA Harris’ conclusions, is that three bullets fired at very close range and one at contact range (the fatal head shot behind the right ear), all from behind and at a steep upward angle are supposed to have come from a weapon that was always at least three feet in front of the target. Or that at least thirteen bullets were fired from a gun which could only hold eight, and which likely fired no real bullets, just blanks. These are solidly based facts of the case, yet they are treated as conjectures. If other major legal cases were handled with this much disregard for forensic evidence, lawyers would be disbarred. And if Sirhan had been offered a fair trial—another exceptional chapter of A Lie Too Big to Fail—it is almost certain he would be a free man. But the special logic applied by those seeking to obfuscate the sinister implications of the final major assassination of the 1960s continues to hold fast, at least at the legal level.
Things are changing though, and it would seem that the concerted efforts of those like Lisa Pease, along with the recent public denial of the official version of events by none other than Robert Kennedy Jr., may be turning the tide towards the real evidence which supports a concerted high-level conspiracy to remove a potential president. It was with a real sigh of relief that I read a recent Washington Post summary of Lisa’s new findings, one that, for a change, actually took her argument seriously and did not attempt to reduce her thesis to fringe theory. In the fifty-one years of relative silence surrounding the case, dotted here and there by books and talks by people like Allard Lowenstein, Ted Charach, Philip Melanson and others, that’s a true testament to the work of informed citizens uncovering the darker chapters of their nation’s history. As journalist Tom Jackman’s article notes, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the slain senator, said he thought Pease was ‘a great researcher.’ Similarly, Kennedy said that his own investigation, which included meeting with Sirhan in prison in December 2017, showed that ‘Sirhan could not and did not fire the gun that shot and killed my father.’” (Jackman, “CIA may have used contractor who inspired ‘Mission Impossible,’ to kill RFK, new book alleges,” Washington Post, 2/9/2019)
V
A Lie Too Big To Fail is more than a window into one of the most fascinating and disturbing assassinations of the sixties. It is a work whose implications are relevant to anyone trying to understand how the United States devolved into a shell of a country whose tenets of equality, freedom and justice have gone by the boards, leaving us with a paper-thin facade of a democracy embodied by charlatans who wear red and blue uniforms but who essentially represent the same corporate and military-industrial overlords, or what Colonel Fletcher Prouty once referred to as “The Secret Team:”
It is a sinister device of opportunity and contrivance. What does exist is the mechanism. What exists is the automatic system, much like a nervous system or an electrical system. More properly, what exists is like a giant electronic data processing machine … which has its own power to grow, to reproduce, and to become more insidiously effective and efficient as it operates. It is a great intra-governmental infrastructure that is fed by inputs from all sources. It is big business, big government, big money, big pressure, and headless—-all operating in self-centered, utterly self-serving security and secrecy. (Prouty, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, p. xvii)
It was Jim Garrison who eerily predicted this in an obscure and brief interview less than a month after the RFK slaying. Art Kevin, host of Los Angeles’ KHJ Radio, asked the New Orleans District Attorney,
AK: Jim … are you prepared to say that the same elements responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy were responsible for the deaths of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and perhaps even Martin Luther King?
JG: Well, you can remove the perhaps. The answer is “of course,” except that in the case of Senator Kennedy, they apparently interposed a cover organization.
A bit later:
JG: But there’s no, I don’t think there’s any question about the fact that the same forces removed everyone. Every one of these men were humanists. They were concerned about the human race. They were not racist in the slightest way, and above all, they were opposed to the evolution of America into an imperialist empire-seeking warfare state. Which it has become, I’m afraid. And now there aren’t too many, now there aren’t too many leaders left to talk out loud against the war in Vietnam. They’re eliminating them, one by one. Always a lone assassin. (“Jim Garrison says RFK was Hip to Murder Plots,” San Francisco Express-Times, 7/3/1968)
Entrenched in an almost two-decade long foreign policy disaster in the Middle East and Afghanistan, riddled with crippling, insurmountable debt, with young people more despondent and driven to self-medication and violence, the United States of 2019 is unquestionably the dark legacy of those tiny .22 caliber slugs flying through the pantry that fateful July night. As political philosopher Sheldon Wolin described it, the United States in the past half-century has come to resemble an inverted totalitarian government. By that he means, a state run not by a traditional dictator like Stalin, Mao or Mussolini, but one even more ruthlessly efficient at quelling dissent and spreading disinformation through a diffuse and impossible-to-pin-down network of powerful and manipulative factors, from the corporate media to lobbyist groups, to the hollow candidates propped up every four years for the election circus:
Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism. Antidemocracy does not take the form of overt attacks upon the idea of government by the people. Instead, politically it means encouraging what I have earlier dubbed ‘civic demobilization,’ conditioning an electorate to being aroused for a brief spell, controlling its attention span, and then encouraging distraction or apathy. The intense pace of work and the extended working day, combined with job insecurity, is a formula for political demobilization, for privatizing the citizenry. It works indirectly. Citizens are encouraged to distrust their government and politicians; to concentrate upon their own interests; to begrudge their taxes; and to exchange active involvement for symbolic gratifications of patriotism, collective self-righteousness, and military prowess. Above all, depoliticization is promoted through society’s being enveloped in an atmosphere of collective fear and of individual powerlessness: fear of terrorists, loss of jobs, the uncertainties of pension plans, soaring health costs, and rising educational expenses. (Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, p. 239)
Indeed, many of these issues, which could have been addressed in Dr. King’s Poor People’s March—which RFK conceived and encouraged MLK to undertake—have never been seriously resolved in the last fifty years of American history. The powerful and vigorous aspirations of those like Tom Hayden, which burned briefly and flickered out with RFK’s assassination, have not been rekindled. After Robert Kennedy’s death, there have not been any significant, ideologically divergent political candidates offering real change or practical solutions to basic entrenched issues in the United States. What we got was Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter. It then got worse with the full-blown neoconservative movement’s apotheosis in the persons of Ronald Reagan, followed by George H. W. Bush, and W. In effect, the antithesis of everything which people like Martin Luther King, JFK, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy represented.
But we must not lose hope, however bleak the future looks. And it is our responsibility not to. As Lisa Pease has so expertly done in her recent book, everything is in our power to expose the lie which still surrounds RFK’s untimely end. As the author concludes in her final passages, “He spent the last years of his life tilting at the windmills of greed and self-interest that ultimately cut him down. But his song lives on in all of us who strive, in whatever ways we can, to reach those unreachable stars.” (Pease, p. 504)
Some related items:
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Life Magazine Warren Commission Issue, October 2, 1964
Findings of the Warren Commission
“Like most of us who are interested in the Kennedy assassination, I was aware of the existence of different versions of the Life Magazine Special Warren Commission issue dated October 2, 1964. I had read that there were three versions of the issue. The explanation researchers have given for the different versions is that Life Magazine was trying to make the issue released to the public (the newsstand issue) support more clearly the lone assassin Warren Commission results.
It turns out that I subsequently was able to confirm firsthand the existence of at least two different versions, by a bit of serendipity. I already possessed the newsstand version but wanted a copy in a better condition. I checked out the best issue on e-bay that was available and purchased it. When I received my newly acquired issue, I was surprised at this version’s Warren Commission results. They were indeed different from the newsstand issue that I previously owned. It appeared to be the first version of the three versions of this issue that Life produced.”
The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate for the readers of Kennedys And King what those differences are. The three versions of this issue are as follows:
- Version one [V1]: issue with different frame 6 of Zapruder film stills shown and different caption describing frame 6 shown (different from newsstsnd copy). This copy I possess.
- Version two [V2]: issue with different frame 6 of Zapruder film stills shown (different from newsstand copy) and caption describing frame 6 the same as the newsstand copy. This is alleged since I do not own this version.
- Version three [N]: newsstand issue. This one I possess.
These were produced in the order shown above, with version three being the final result sent to subscribers and the newsstands.
The following set of images are reproduced from the two versions I own. I have included here the cover of the October 2, 1964 issue, the first page of the Warren Commission article (p. 42), and the eight still frames of the Zapruder film shown directly after page 42. First, the final newsstand issue [N], with exhibits numbered one through seven:
Exhibit 1: Newsstand Cover Exhibit 2: Newsstand p. 42 
Exhibit 3: Newsstand Frames 1 & 2 Exhibit 4: Newsstand Frames 3 & 5 
Exhibit 5: Newsstand Frames 4 & 6 
Exhibit 6: Newsstand Frame 7 Exhibit 7: Newsstand Frame 8 Next, the copy of the earlier version [V1], with exhibits numbered eight through fourteen:
Exhibit 8: Alternate Cover Exhibit 9: Alternate p. 42 
Exhibit 10: Alternate Frames 1 & 2 Exhibit 11: Alternate Frames 3 & 5 
Exhibit 12: Alternate Frames 4 & 6 
Exhibit 13: Alternate Frame 7 Exhibit 14: Alternate Frame 8 The feature begins with a story by Gerald Ford on the workings of the Warren Commission. On this same page are also eight captions describing the corresponding eight still frames of the Zapruder film displayed on the next four pages.
The difference between the two issues (I reserve comment on the putative second version [V2] since I have not seen it) centers on the frame 6 Zapruder film still and its corresponding caption. The earlier alternate version [V1] (produced before the final issue version was sent to the newsstands) shows JFK’s head and body up against the rear seat cushion, suggesting, when seen in sequence with the preceding frames, that he had moved backwards and to the left (see exhibit 12). This frame corresponds to Z-323. The caption for this frame on page 42 reads as follows: “The assassin’s shot struck the right rear portion of the president’s skull, causing a massive wound and snapping his head to one side” (see exhibit 9). The caption, however, seems to be telling you something different from what your own eyes tell you. Would you, from comparison with frame 5, exhibit 11, be led to conclude that JFK’s head was “snapping to one side” or backwards and leftwards?
With the newsstand issue [N], this Zapruder frame has been swapped out in favor of Z-313, which shows the famous halo of red exploding on the right side of JFK’s head (see exhibit 5). The caption for this version now reads: “The direction from which shots came was established by this picture taken at instant bullet struck the rear of the president’s head, passing through, caused the front part of his skull to explode forward” [sic] (see exhibit 2).
While arguments have been made that the preceding frame, Z-312, in sequence with this one, shows the head moving forward, that motion (which may not be due to a bullet strike) is so imperceptible as to be negligible to the normal viewer, much less one perusing a selected sequence of stills. In fact, judging from the motion of the head, there really is no unequivocal proof of a bullet strike from the rear in the film, much less so in the frame that was originally chosen to represent the fatal shot (Z-323). One can only conjecture here that this was recognized by redaction. The misleading description of what is depicted in Z-323 already raises the suspicion that the authors of the feature struggled to choose a frame for the fatal shot which would unamibiguously support the offical story. The further possibility that Z-323 might actually suggest just the opposite (motion backwards) must have eventually led them to opt for the more gruesome frame they were evidently avoiding, because the latter showed that some blood, brains and skull went forward, implying (for the non-expert, at least) a rear-to-front bullet trajectory.
It is the substitution of this telltale frame and caption that suggests an effort to make the newsstand version of the Life issue better conform with the Warren Commission’s single assassin findings; the swap was ostensibly made both to be more visually consistent with them, and to mask from the public the motion of Kennedy’s head and body which could denote, even via a still sequence, a bullet fired from the right front.
There is a rather bizarre déjà vu in this legerdemain by the editors of the October 2, 1964 Life issue: something very similar had already been done once before. On November 29, 1963, Life published an issue mainly dedicated to John F. Kennedy and the assassination. This was a regular issue in that it contained, along with the assassination reportage, the usual full-page ads, unrelated features, and so forth. Shortly thereafter, Life decided to excerpt and rerun the relevant material from the November 29th issue in a separate, ad hoc volume, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Edition, of about 80 pages in length (only about 20 pages less than the total number of pages in the regular issue). The date is not clearly given on the cover or credits page, but the issue appears to have been published December 14, 1963.
As can be seen from the covers, these two versions are readily distinguishable.
The special edition, while carrying over what was originally published on November 29 (including the insert on LBJ), has also greatly amplified the text and photos for its now multifeatured retrospective on Kennedy’s life, presidency, and assassination. But what is most noteworthy for our purposes is the difference between the two versions in their respective presentation of the Zapruder film. What was in the regular issue a black-and-white, fuller sequence of frames is swapped out for a more limited, in-color, and somewhat magnified sequence of frames. The captioning is also very different.
The November 29, 1963 issue carries the caption for the entire sequence:
SPLIT-SECOND SEQUENCE AS THE BULLETS STRUCK
There is no explicit commentary on the direction of the shots in this issue, except for what has been underlined. Here is a partial reproduction of the frame sequence, which is spread out over four pages:
The December 14th Memorial Edition, on the other hand, carries the caption for the entire sequence, now running across the first two pages of the four-page color spread:
SPLIT-SECOND HORROR AS THE SNIPER’S BULLETS STRUCK
One immediately notes the not-so-subtle variant, “horror”, and the addition of “the sniper’s” in the singular. The selected frames are now larger and fewer:
One could, of course, argue that some of these changes were constrained by marketing choices. Color reproductions, something Life was famous for, would undoubtedly sell more copies. Given the relative expense of color vs. black-and-white, and the further magnification of some of the frames on the page, it might seem inevitable that parts of the previous frame sequence would be curtailed. On the other hand, the special edition contains a number of other color photos besides the full-page blow-up, also in the November 29th issue, of Jack and Jackie as they step off Air Force One at Love Field, which tends to undercut the idea that the change in the presentation of the Zapruder frames was guided by purely economic considerations. In any case, what was (quite conveniently) excised is telling: the frames following Z-323 depict JFK bouncing off the rear seat and Jackie scrambling out onto the hood, image sequences capable of raising questions in the reader about why JFK would move this way, and what Jackie actually might have been doing (other than crawling for help). The fuller sequence also hints at the embarrassing interval before Clint Hill reached the limo (we see in the special issue only three of those frames, two of which occupy the entire fourth of the four pages, not shown here). At the very least, providing answers to these questions would have embroiled the magazine in something more easily left to silence.
But even if these frames were innocently removed as a result of some sort of design decision, one frame substitution cannot so be explained. Indeed, we may ask ourselves, how is the fatal shot indicated in the black-and-white sequence in the original issue? The captioning is vague, but given the absence of both Z-312 and Z-313, and the fact that it is one of the larger frames, the only candidate for this is Z-323 (marked in red in the reproduction above). But where is this frame in the Memorial Edition? It has once again been removed, with Z-312 (also in red, above) now being used to “demonstrate” the bullet strike to the rear of the head (Z-313 was probably considered just too shocking for public consumption at that time). Granting Life the benefit of the doubt and attributing this change to “clarifications” afforded by the passage of two weeks between the two editions, it is still remarkable that no frame from the fatal wounding sequence after Z-312—much less Z-323—is printed in the special edition.
Aside from this sleight of hand with frame selection and elimination, the Memorial Edition also exchanges the original text for significantly modified copy, which names Oswald and clearly places him in the TSBD, firing three shots with a carbine, and in general adds details that follow the official story more explicitly. In this regard, one is tempted to reflect further on the main caption it has borrowed from the original issue, not only because it now declares the shots to be from a single gunman, but because the switch to “horror” there almost seems too glib. At first blush the new diction might suggest an effort to render more vividly the shared experience of Dealey Plaza witnesses, to invest the description with evaluative, rather than simply objective, content (and direct that judgment squarely at the sole perpetrator). But the word also serves as a trace, a verbal stand-in for what has been visually erased, naming the very emotion that is simultaneously denied the reader through a fuller graphic re-experiencing of the event. If this rhetorical ploy is not cynical in origin, its final effect is nonetheless ironic.
That such editorial “rethinking” occurred twice at a distance of ten months, both times involving, among other things, the suppression of the same Zapruder frame (Z-323), is astonishing and, from the standpoint of what was going on internally at Time-Life, puzzling. But in connection with this peculiar repeat performance, let us not forget what Life reporter Paul Mandel wrote in the December 6, 1963 issue in another article on the assassination, “End to Nagging Rumors: The Six Critical Seconds”. Mandel realized that Kennedy’s treating doctor, Malcolm Perry of Parkland Hospital, had said the bullet hole in his throat was an entry. Since the moment of that impact was considerably past the time Kennedy’s limousine could have been in front of the Depository building, and in fact, Kennedy’s back was now facing the alleged sniper, Life and Mandel had a serious problem with directionality. They solved it by blatantly misrepresenting what is in the Zapruder film:
Since by this time the limousine was 50 yards past Oswald and the President’s back was turned almost directly to the sniper, it has been hard to understand how the bullet could enter the front of his throat. Hence the recurring guess that there was a second sniper somewhere else. But the 8mm film shows the President turning his body far around to the right as he waves to someone in the crowd. His throat is exposed—toward to the sniper’s nest—just before he clutches it.
As Life must have known, since they had the film, no such movement exists. On December 14, Life is still sticking to this story, as can be seen by the caption to frames 1 & 2 above:
Past the book warehouse the President turned to his right to wave to someone (1). Just as his car passed behind the road sign shown in the foreground the first bullet struck him in the neck. He clutched at his throat (2).
Though less clearly articulated here, one has only to read further in the issue to find Mandel’s article reprinted under a slightly different title (“First Answers to Nagging Rumors: What Lay Behind Six Crucial Seconds”), but with essentially the same text containing the crucial gloss quoted above. The only way to sustain this ruse was to omit the intermittent frames which would have given the lie to this explanation. The frame with Kennedy waving has purposely been made the focus here; interestingly, it was missing from the black-and-white sequence in the November 29th issue, which shows only three of the frames before the limousine emerges from behind the Stemmons Freeway sign. In just four more days, however, this entire charade will no longer be necessary: on December 18th, the NYT and Washington Post will relate “autopsy findings” which appear to derive either from the FBI or possibly some earlier, destroyed version of the autopsy report, where the wound in the back/shoulder does not exit and the puncture in the throat is from an exiting fragment from the head shot; see this article by Jefferson Morley from 2012.
Together with the Mandel story, the frame sequence evidence we have presented above establishes that at least three times in less than a year Life colluded in deceiving the American public about the circumstances of President Kennedy’s assassination.
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Bullet Trails on the Zapruder Film?
Years ago, on a shadowy website for snipers, I saw an interesting complaint. It had to do with the problem of killing people in very humid weather. The sniper was concerned about bullet trails leading back to his hidden position. These tell-tale bullet trails are condensation, not muzzle flashes, and certainly not tracers.
The trails he was worried about are water vapor. A bullet creates a partial vacuum in its path, and a vacuum is very cold. Moisture in the air condenses around things cold. If you quickly pump an aerosol can until it’s nearly empty, it will become cold inside, and the can will “sweat,” that is, moisture in the air will condense on it.
In dry air, any vapor trails created are quickly absorbed. But in humid weather, vapor dissipates more slowly. That’s why you can see your breath in the winter only when it’s cold enough and humid enough.
Here is what a trail caused by a 6.5mm, 122 grain bullet traveling very fast (over 3000 feet per second) through “very humid” air looks like, as recorded by a high speed camera:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ2a80vxvrY
We do not know what kind of bullets were fired at Kennedy, or their muzzle velocity, but it is doubtful they were as fast as the one above. (Weatherman Dan Satterfield told me in a private email that at 12:30 in Dallas on that day it was 66 degrees, with a west wind of 15-20 MPH. He did not know the humidity, but it had rained earlier.)
Trails on the Zapruder Film?
I suspected that such trails show on the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, especially in frame 313. But what I claim to be bullet trails leading to the head are assumed to be matter leaving from the head—the two long, fairly straight, white lines.
On some of the earlier copies of the film, the lines are longer. On other copies, the lines are not only shortened, they are smeared together. I have been unable to find a copy of the film as clear as the one I saw years ago, but here is a copy of frame Z-313 that isn’t bad:
Over 20 years ago, I showed those Zapruder frames to two scientists—one from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, and one from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel—both of whom wish to remain anonymous. Both agreed: the lines are most likely bullet trails.
In any case, they said condensation trails from bullets had to have occurred, whether seen or not.
Since they would not allow me to quote them by name, I asked for a textbook reference on the phenomenon. One suggested a book I could not get my hands on. The other told me to look into the work of Daniel Bernoulli—and the phenomenon of an aircraft’s “wingtip vortices”, which are easy to see:
Go here for a fuller explanation. (Note: these are not the “contrails” that come from a jet engine’s exhaust. The wingtips are not excreting vapor, they are causing it to form.)
(I am not the only researcher to suggest the white lines are bullet trails. In the early 90s, when I went to Jim Lesar of the Assassination Archives Research Center to tell him of my findings, he had no comment, but showed me a letter from Robert Morningstar, another researcher interested in the white lines. Morningstar’s interpretation was nothing like that of the scientists. He called them “heat tracks.”)
Exploding Brain
Bullet-related exploding brain looks nothing like those lines.
Consider what happens when a bullet fired by a high powered rifle perforates the skull: the bullet goes in and out, leaving holes in the skull that are almost the same size. Milliseconds later, a process known as “cavitation” takes place. Exploding brain thrusts open the skull, creating adherent as well as loose bone fragments, and a massive wound—usually on top, regardless of where the bullet enters. This process is known as “cavitation.” How it happens:
“With high-velocity wounds, there is … a sudden sharp increase in intracranial pressure … (and a) temporary cavity … formed by the radial motion imparted by the missile, through creation of oscillating positive and negative pressure along the path of the missile …” (Youmans, J.R. (ed.), Neurological Surgery, Vol.4, p. 2056, W.B. Saunders Company)
Scientists discovered the difference between holes created by cavitation, and those created by exiting bullets when they shot empty skulls. Without brain or brain simulant, there is no cavitation. And both entrance and exit wounds were almost the same size. The exit wound is usually only slightly larger because the bullet deforms or tumbles. Sometimes the bullet takes a small amount of adjacent skull with it, and then the hole is bigger.
If exploding brain creates massive holes—and we know JFK had a massive hole at the top of his head extending into the right rear—then how could exploding brain appear as two long, rather straight, slender lines? Or, as some say, exiting bone fragments leaving the head, one behind the other?
Fluid forced through small holes under high pressure will come out as long streams—but would such streams have the strength to blow off so much bone?
And why would they remain in the air—afterward?
The more visible line seen on the Zapruder film is broken into small, fairly evenly spaced, individual bits. Magnified, the bits seem to be little spirals. The most prominent one lies across Kennedy’s head in frame 313, leaning to the right at about a 50 degree angle.
This bullet trail—if that indeed is what it is—suggests the bullet skated across Kennedy’s right temple, creating a shallow tangential wound that flipped out a flap of bone—and kept on going.
Did Rockefeller Commissioner See Those Lines?
An exchange between Robert Olsen of the Rockefeller Commission and John Lattimer, MD, who examined the autopsy materials (President’s Commission on CIA Activities, 1975, pages 28-30):
Doctor, did you find any evidence whatever that would support postulating a tangential shot from the front or right front which would not have penetrated the President’s head, but merely would have glanced off the right side of his skull?.
Lattimer said he saw no such evidence.
What about the possibility of the President having been struck from the rear … and then that being followed, within a fraction of a second, by a tangential blow by a bullet from the front, or the right front, glancing off the right side of the head? Is there any possibility?
Again Lattimer said he saw nothing to indicate that. But why did Olsen ask such questions?
Following the Trail
In the early 90s, I went on a fool’s errand to Dealey Plaza to see if I could find where that bullet trail might have led back to. The most likely spot, in my non-expert opinion: The sniper was to the left of Zapruder, firing from behind the pergola through one of the lattice holes, about midway between the left and right side of the crescent-shaped structure, concealed from behind by the parked cars. The shot would have been nearly horizontal.
All just conjecture, of course.