The Warren Report: a reasonable doubt
By JACK HARRINGTON UDK Editorial Editor
The controversy over the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the ensuing Warren Commission findings naming Lee Harvey Oswald the lone assassin are perhaps the biggest and most publicized such dispute in modern times. And justly so. The possibilities and implications connected with the affair are too far-reaching to be ignored.
To date, five books have been published criticizing the Warren Report, not to mention innumerable editors' and documentary articles. The two best-known books are "Rush to Judgment" by Mark Lane, a New York attorney who was asked by Oswald's mother to represent her dead son's interests before the commission but was refused by them, and "Inquest" by Edward Jay Epstein, who started the book as a master's thesis in graduate work at Cornell.
BOTH LANE and Epstein contend that the commission's findings are based upon insufficient and selectively chosen evidence, that much important evidence was ignored because it did not support the verdict that Oswald acted alone in the assassination, and that the investigation was carried out in a haphazard manner in order to meet an impossible deadline set up by Justice Earl Warren.
Neither author offers any new evidence, nor does he claim to. Lane has said that his sole contention is that Oswald would not have been convicted had he lived to stand trial, while Epstein offers only a study of the commission's investigation with pertinent accusations as to its shortcomings. Both advocate a re-opening of the investigation and a thorough study of all evidence.
However, both are also guilty of the very faults they accuse the investigators of; carefully chosen facts to support a specific point, incomplete investigation of sources, etc. Their cases are built around a pre-conceived conclusion, as they claim was the nature of the commission's activities.
BUT SHORTCOMINGS of these books, and any others which have been written notwithstanding, certain facts brought out by them cannot and must not be ignored.
There are simply too many vital issues which have been overlooked, ignored or suppressed which indicate that the commission's findings are at best incomplete, at worst totally incorrect.
The largest facet of the controversy hinges on the theory that there was at least one other assassin besides Oswald. This idea has been bolstered recently by Gov. John Connally of Texas, who was riding in the limousine with the president and was critically wounded by one of the shots. Connally stated publicly for Life magazine that he was certain the bullet which hit him was not the same which pierced. Kennedy's back and exited near the base of his throat, as was stated in the commission's report.
—Richard Geary
Richard Geary
JOHN F. KENNEDY
On viewing the individual frames of the only film record of the assassination, taken by Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas store owner, Connally determined that he was hit about 1.3 seconds after it was obvious that the president reacted to his first wound. He said that he heard what he immediately recognized as a rifle shot, and turned instantly around to his right to look at the president. Not seeing him out of the corner of his eye, Connally began a turn to the left to look over his other shoulder, and it was at this point that he claims he was hit.
HAD CONNALLY and Kennedy been struck by the same bullet, Connally would not have heard a shot before the bullet entered his body. The FBI determined the velocity of a slug fired from Oswald's rifle to be some 1900 feet per second, while sound only
travels 1100 feet per second. Thus Connally already would have been wounded, and, due to the shock of the impact, probably would not have heard the shot at all.
In other ballistics tests with the 6.5mm Italian Carcano rifle, the FBI further determined that even a superior marksman, with much practice in operating the clumsy bolt-action mechanism, could not fire the weapon twice in less than 23 seconds, a full second longer than Oswald would have had to hit both men with separate shots. And this was done with no regard for accuracy, at a still target, and without the extra one second it was estimated would be required to line up on a moving target.
Thus, if Connally was indeed hit by a second shot, as he is positive he was and as the Zapruder film seems to bear out, there had to be a second assassin firing immediately after Oswald's first shot.
ANOTHER ARGUMENT for the "second assassin" theory is the fact that 58 of 90 eyewitnesses testified that they thought the shots came from a grassy knoll to the right of the motorcade. Seven of these said they saw white smoke at this point. Statements were made by nearly all eyewitnesses, including some Dallas police officers, that they were sure they heard four, five and even six shots, instead of only three, the number officially determined.
The official bungling with which the case was handled in Dallas is evident in the statement of one officer, when questioned by a bystander about the fact that she and many others heard distinctly more than three shots. "Lady, we were there and we heard more, too, but we've got three wounds and three shells (cartridges, found by Oswald's rifle), so three shots is all we're willing to say."
Kennedy's wounds and the autopsy report from the U.S. Navy Medical Center at Bethesda, Md., have been surrounded by a cloud of secrecy ever since the assassination. If one accepts the theory that the president and governor were hit with the same bullet, then there are only two shots which found targets, the other being the one striking Kennedy fatally in the head. If the "second assassin" theory is adopted, then we must say that the first shot
(presumably Oswald's) struck Kennedy in the back, about five and one-half inches below the top of his collar,and exited through his throat, just below the Adam's apple, flying off into space. The second, then from the second rifle, struck Connally below the right shoulder blade, exited through his chest leaving a five-inch hole, finally smashing his right wrist and lodging itself in his left thigh. And the third and fatal shot was that to the head of the president.
If the freedom that we fight for in Viet Nam means the freedom to use patriotism as an excuse for open brutality, then I unabashedly reject that freedom, And if the honor that we retain is the honor of midwestern small-town lynch law, then I am content to remain without honor. There are times, it seems, when words like "freedom," "honor," and "American" begin to crack and fester in the ear.
AS I WAS walking back to my car, I was nearly run down by a Caddillae with an American flag on the hood. I suppose, as I look back upon it, that the driver was a good family man, a hard worker, a patriot, a typical American—and, in a strange way, I have sympathy for him. Indeed, sympathy is the only available emotion when one realizes that the typical citizen of this "peace loving" country have become so frustrated with the smallness of their lives that, in their search for self-respect, they must finally resort to patriotic hatred and, in some cases, to the urge to murder
The People Say
THE DOCTORS at Bethesda, while performing the autopsy on the president's body on the night of Nov. 22, discovered the back wound, but could not probe it any deeper than a finger's length. It was discovered the next morning, in a telephone call to Parkland Hospital in Dallas, that the doctors there, in a frantic effort to save the president's life, had performed a tracheacotomy, or insertion of an oxygen tube into the throat to aid breathing.
After freedom, honor—what?
To the editor:
Last Saturday, in Leavenworth, Kan., I came to understand the tactics of American hate. Couched in patriotic slogans and moralistic pietism, this is the same hate. I suppose, that massacred the Indians, scorched the Japanese landscape and murdered Alabama negroes.
a "peacenik" in the act of asking for peace.
A man's country is that place where his dignity is valued and his rights respected, where he can confidently announce his opinions without fear of reprisal. Last Saturday, America was not my country. Someone else's, perhaps—but not mine.
I stood with a group of men and women who had gathered to protest the Viet Nam war and the imprisonment of three dissident soldiers, and I wondered, as the eggs, ice, and obscenities came at us from across the street, if this country had come finally to the outskirts of wholesale barbarism.
I HAVE BEEN told that we fight in Viet Nam to save the world for freedom, and to retain the honor of our country. When I saw the hatred in the faces of the counter-demonstrators, when I saw an older woman splattered twice with eggs and snow, I understood well the maudlin sophistry of words like "freedom" and "honor."
Hamilton J. Salsich
Asst. Instr. of English
(Note: Editorial Editor-to-be Austin, who covered the above mentioned incident for the Kansas, wholeheartedly concurs with Mr. Salsich's comments.
** **
It was indeed a sickening sight to watch a democratic citizenry degenerate into an evil mob in the space of a few short hours. -DA)
In doing this, they enlarged the throat wound prior to the insertion of the tube; this was the first that the Bethesda staff knew of the throat Wound. The Parkland doctors remarked that the hole had been small enough, and without jagged edges or blood, to be an entrance wound. An exiting bullet usually leaves a much larger hole than one which is entering the body. However, the Navy doctors, finding no bullet anywhere in the body and no exit wound for a bullet which might have entered at the throat, deided that it had to be an exit
2
Daily Kansan editorial page Tuesday, January 10, 1:6
Richard Geary
LEE HARVEY OSWALD
wound resulting from the same bullet which entered through the back, even though they could not trace the bullet's path through the body any farther than about five inches.
Neither the autopsy photographs nor the X-rays appear in the Warren Commission report. Following the autopsy, they disappeared, at least for quite a while. The Secret Service thought the FBI had them, the FBI thought the Kennedy family had them, Bethesda hospital didn't know where they were, and the
Kennedys weren't saying. Recently they turned up in the possession of Robert Kennedy, who placed them in the National Archives, to be viewed by no one but a few "selected government officials" for a period of five years. All that appeared in the commission's report in the way of illustrations of the body were two drawings made at Bethesda, which incidentally, show Kennedy's back wound in two different places, neither of which corresponds to the holes in his clothing.
ONE-BULLET; fired from Oswald's rifle, was found after the assassination. The slug, curiously enough, was found almost entirely intact and only slightly blunted. According to FBI tests, approximately three to five grains of metal were all that were missing from the copper-jacketed projectile. It was found, also curiously, on Connally's ambulance stretcher after he had been removed to the operating room.
The official ruling on this bullet says that it is the one which entered Kennedy's back, exited through his throat, entered Connally's back, exited through his chest, smashed his right wrist and finally lodged in his left thigh. Now, as an outside possibility, it is conceivable that such a slug might have traveled through the president's body (if any bullet at all passed through him) without becoming misshapen, because the alleged path was to the right of the spinal column and does not encounter any solid obstructions. However, according to all medical opinions (including those of doctors at Bethesda and Parkland) a projectile which comes in contact with any bony matter will become blunted at the end to a fairly high degree, and will in all probability begin spinning and further distort its shape upon contact with solid obstructions.
The bullet which struck the governor hit one of his right ribs just before it exited just below his right nipple, and then completely smashed his wrist bone, traveling clear through the wrist, and finally came to rest in his left thigh.
FURTHERMORE, the doctors at Parkland removed several metal fragments from Connally's wrist and thigh, and to this day he carries a number of fragments in his leg. The attending doctors have stated that they feel it was impossible, judging from the amount of metal recovered, for the whole bullet to be the one which caused the damage. In fact, it is conceivable that a bullet weighing 161 grains would lose three to five grains of its weight in passing over the riffling grooves in the barrel of the weapon, before it even left the muzzle.
(Continued on page 3)
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