Rounding Up the Usual Suspects: The Assassination's Puzzle Palace

The FBI and the CIA are at the heart of many conspiracy theories about JFK's killing. Researchers tend to be harsh, and some assume the absolute worst about Hoover and key leaders inside the CIA-direct involvement in JFK's assassination-without providing ironclad proof of the most serious allegations. There is no question, however, that both agencies were trying to cover their tracks to avoid blame; insiders quickly picked this up. Shortly after November 22, John Whitten, a CIA agent who ran covert operations in Mexico and Central America, was put in charge of the CIA's internal investigation of Oswald, a job that required close contact with FBI officials. In December 1963, the agent caught a glimpse of the early FBI report on the assassination, the same one that served as the starting point for the Warren Commission. Whitten was shocked when he realized that both the FBI and CIA had been purposely withholding critical information from him. When Whitten complained to his superiors, he was "told that his services would no longer be needed" and "was sent back to his Latin American duties." Apparently, Whitten was taken off the case by James Angleton, CIA's director of counterintelligence.1 But a cover-up to avoid culpability for missing signs of an impending assassination, or having worked with the assassin in some undercover capacity prior to November 22, is very different from the institutional orchestration of the murder of a U.S. president. Author Mark North has accused Hoover, in effect, of being a silent accomplice to the assassination. In his book Act of Treason, North argues that the FBI director knew about a Mafia plot to kill JFK but did nothing about it for two reasons. First, Hoover thought of Kennedy as "an indecisive, immoral liberal who, if left in place, would destroy the nation." The irony, given Hoover's unconventional private life, must be noted. And second, because "JFK had made it known that he intended, by the end of his first term in office, to retire [Hoover] and replace him with a man of his own, more liberal political philosophy." This argument is weak. While Kennedy would no doubt have preferred someone other than Hoover as FBI director, Hoover had cleverly accumulated evidence of JFK's infidelities and had made certain the Kennedys were aware of his proofs-which provided an unusual form of job security.

In any event, North claims that the "overwhelming body of evidence" points to the New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello as the person who masterminded the assassination. By the fall of 1962, Marcello was facing a federal indictment, possible deportation, and relentless attacks from Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department. He "realized that by placing the presidency in the hands of Lyndon Johnson" he could possibly "remedy the situation." It was "common knowledge," says North, that LBJ had "no interest in pursuing the Mafia." Before the Kennedys came to power, the FBI director had sometimes turned a blind eye to mob activity. During World War II, for example, the federal government essentially subcontracted the security of New York's waterfront district to a Mafia thug, Charles "Lucky" Luciano. The deal was simple: if Luciano's henchmen kept an eye out for German and Japanese saboteurs, then Hoover's G-men would not examine their business activities too closely.2 In Hoover's eyes, the Communists and their "useful idiots" in the United States were a greater threat than "patriotic" Mafia bosses.3 FBI informers and preNovember 22 eavesdropping had yielded a couple of clues that mob godfathers had drawn a bead on JFK. The assassination researcher Lamar Waldron has asserted, "In autumn 1962, according to one of his former associates, [Carlos] Marcello met with three men on the mobster's 3,000-acre estate outside New Orleans." During this meeting, the conversation turned toward the Kennedys. Marcello detested RFK, who was working to dismantle his business operations and had even secured his deportation to Guatemala. He "referred to President Kennedy as a dog, with his brother Robert being the tail. 'The dog,' he said, 'will keep biting you if you only cut off its tail.' " In other words, Marcello believed he needed to kill JFK in order to neutralize Bobby.4 Marcello is not the only Mafia chieftain to be implicated by assassination researchers. Santo Trafficante, a mob boss whose fiefdom was southern Florida, supposedly made a similar threat during a conversation with a Cuban exile, Jose Aleman. According to Aleman, Trafficante complained that the Kennedy brothers were "not honest. They took graft and they did not keep a bargain ... Mark my word, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him." When Aleman remarked that JFK would probably win a second term, Trafficante allegedly replied, "You don't understand me. Kennedy's not going to make it to the election. He is going to be hit."5 The lack of swift and decisive action once these threats became known to the FBI is disturbing. But it pales by comparison with the bureau's casual attitude toward Lee Harvey Oswald. How could Oswald have escaped identification as a real and present danger, given his unusual history as a turncoat and agitator? In the entire United States there lived only a handful of former defectors to Communist states; in Texas, exactly one, Lee Oswald. Make no mistake-the FBI knew that Oswald was in the Lone Star State. By October 1963, the bureau also "knew him as a possibly deranged Marxist who supported the Cuban revolution, who was capable of violence, and who had been in recent contact with Soviet intelligence officers." Hoover's G-men also knew where Oswald worked, and one might think this relevant fact would have occurred to an alert bureau matching up potential assassins with presidential motorcade routes. The FBI certainly realized this after the fact. Agent James Hosty had been tracking Oswald for months and, under orders, destroyed evidence after the assassination to cover the bureau's tracks. "We failed in carrying through some of the most salient aspects of the Oswald investigation," Hoover later admitted. "It ought to be a lesson to us all, but I doubt if some even realize it now." The magnitude of the FBI's mistake should not be understated. Hoover himself termed it "gross incompetency" and it resulted in the decapitation of the elected U.S. government.6 However, incompetency does not equal complicity in the murder of a president. The evidence, fairly sifted, does not justify such speculation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency are frequently lumped together in the public's mind as secretive organizations. But their missions and methods are different, and that distinction applies to any study of the Kennedy assassination. In matters pertaining to November 22, the CIA's role was utterly unique-a subtle, ambiguous, murky tale that befits the nature of the agency. It is highly unlikely that the CIA had any institutional role in John Kennedy's murder, nor were the vast majority of its personnel trying to cover up the real facts. In truth, the agency spent considerable resources in diligently checking out all manner of rumors and reports. On November 24, 1963, for example, the U.S. naval attache in Canberra, Australia, reported a telephone call from "an anonymous individual who had described himself as a Polish chauffeur for the Soviet Embassy in that city. This individual, while discussing several matters of intelligence interest, touched on the possibility that the Soviet government had financed the assassination of President Kennedy." The Navy office had received a similar call the previous year, before Dallas. Australian authorities shrugged off the incident, but the CIA launched a full inquiry and sent reports to the White House, the State Department, the Secret Service, and the FBI. A few days later, the agency also received information from the Dutch Foreign Office that hinted at Cuban Communist involvement in Kennedy's murder. When a Dutch official had mentioned the Bay of Pigs fiasco during a November 7, 1963, reception at the Soviet embassy, Ricardo Santos, a senior official of the Cuban embassy in the country, allegedly replied, "Just wait and you will see what we can do. It will happen soon." When the Dutch official asked for specifics, Santos merely said, "Just wait, just wait."7 The CIA also investigated a letter sent to the U.S. embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, dated November 25, 1963, which claimed that Chinese Communists had indoctrinated Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union. According to the letter's author, the Chinese had hired Oswald to pose as a Castro sympathizer so that the United States would bomb Cuba once Oswald had killed the president. This attack would in turn force the Soviets to retaliate against the Americans and simultaneously share their nuclear secrets with the "Red Chinese." Once the Communist bloc won the war, the Chinese would assassinate Soviet premier Khrushchev and take over the world.

The Stockholm embassy considered the letter a "crank"-after all, if the writer had known all this he would have been one of the world's best-informed people, and would not likely have had to resort to an anonymous letter to an out-of-the-way embassy. Nonetheless, the CIA had the missive forwarded to Langley for analysis.

The CIA chased other phantoms. The Berlin station interviewed a Moroccan student named Mohammed Reggab who claimed that he had known Marina Oswald in 1961 and kept a picture and letter from her at his house in Casablanca. The CIA gave Reggab a polygraph test and decided that he was lying. Another dead end involved a twenty-four-year-old Army private named Eugene Dinkin. On the very same day he was scheduled to receive a psychiatric evaluation, Dinkin went AWOL from his unit in Metz, France, and entered Switzerland using a fake ID and "forged travel orders." On November 6 and 7, "he appeared in the press room of the United Nations office in Geneva and told reporters he was being persecuted. He also wished to alert the world to the U.S. government's 'propaganda campaign.'" More important, at least one reporter thought she heard Dinkin say that "they" were plotting against JFK and that "something" big would happen in Texas. The CIA investigated Dinkin's story, but could not find any evidence linking him to the Kennedy murder.8 Between October 1963 and September 1964, CIA employees were diverted from other duties to investigate scores of allegations that led nowhere. Did the Soviets take advantage of the confusion to launch a disinformation campaign blaming right-wing, anticommunist elements for Kennedy's murder? It is certainly possible and would have served their interests. On November 26, 1963, a CIA agent with the code name of W/1 met with a Soviet spy known only as M in a busy cafe on the Rue Marcelin Berthelot in Paris. W/1's mission was to gauge the Soviet reaction to Kennedy's assassination and find out what they knew about Oswald. M pointed out that Kennedy had been opposed by a number of powerful right-wing organizations, thereby implying that one of these groups had likely planned the president's murder. In addition, M predicted that the U.S. investigation of the assassination would turn up nothing since "the Dallas police had silenced Oswald." When W/1 asked about Oswald's time in the Soviet Union, M denied ever knowing the ex-Marine and insisted-obviously incorrectly-that foreigners were not allowed to work in the USSR.

The historian Max Holland believes that Soviet disinformation of this sort helped spark the most famous antiWarren Commission event of the 1960s, later to be memorialized inaccurately in Oliver Stone's movie JFK. New Or-leans's flamboyant district attorney, Jim Garrison, held a show trial in 1969 to find President Kennedy's real killers. Garrison charged a local businessman, Clay Shaw, with JFK's murder, but in Garrison's concoction, the murder conspiracy was much wider, taking in a good portion of the U.S. government, especially the CIA. Max Holland uncovered a 1967 article in an Italian newspaper, Paese Sera, that claimed Clay Shaw had served on the board of a dummy corporation in Rome (Centro Mondiale Commerciale, or CMC) that funneled cash to CIA operatives. The story was totally false, but Holland says that it helped convince Garrison that he was on to something big. Twenty years later, the same bogus story made it into Stone's movie. During a scene in the district attorney's office, Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) confronts Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) while holding a copy of the article: GARRISON: Mr. Shaw, this is [an] Italian newspaper article saying that you were a member of the board of Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Italy-that this company was a creature of the CIA for the transfer of funds in Italy for illegal political espionage activity. [The article] says that this company was expelled from Italy for those activities.

SHAW: I'm well aware of that asinine article. I'm thinking very seriously of suing that rag of a newspaper ...

GARRISON: Mr. Shaw, [have] you ever been a contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency?

Shaw had worked with the CIA as a paid informant, but only for a brief period in the 1950s. Yet Stone portrayed Shaw as one of Langley's top operatives. After the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s, Holland found a telling document in the Soviet archives entitled "Disinformation Operations of the KGB through Paese Sera." According to the document, "Department A of the First Chief Directorate" began "a series of disinformation operations" in 1967 that included feeding phony stories to an "emplacement" in New York. Holland dug through old newspapers until he found the CMC story reprinted in a New York-based weekly called the National Guardian. Logically, the KGB's goal was not just to point an accusing finger at its right-wing enemies but also to keep public suspicion away from the Soviets while the American people sought a fuller answer to the Kennedy murder mystery.9 Long before Oliver Stone turned his prodigious talents to the Kennedy murder, the KGB and the Soviet leadership were worrying about the public framing of the assassination, given Oswald's defection to the USSR. Yet much of the informed speculation from the very beginning pointed to JFK's domestic enemies, not his foreign adversaries. Those believing this conjecture included some of the Kennedy family. In late November 1963, Robert Kennedy arranged a meeting in Russia between an artist friend of his, William Walton, and a Soviet defense attache, Georgi Bolshakov, who had helped the Kennedys during the Cuban Missile Crisis by serving as a diplomatic back channel to the Kremlin. Walton and Bolshakov met at a restaurant in Moscow called the Sovietskaya. "Bolshakov, who had himself been deeply moved by [the] assassination, listened intently as Walton explained that the Kennedys believed there was a large political conspiracy behind Oswald's rifle. Despite Oswald's connections to the Communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents."10 Some of JFK's aides long believed much the same. During a dinner at Jimmy's Harborside Restaurant in Boston five years after the president's death, Kenny O'Donnell told the future Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, that he had heard two shots come from behind the picket fence on November 22. O'Donnell was in a car closely following the presidential limo when JFK was killed. "That's not what you told the Warren Commission," O'Neill replied. O'Donnell admitted as much and explained why. "I told the FBI what I had heard but they said it couldn't have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn't want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family." Dave Powers, another close JFK adviser sitting next to O'Donnell in the car, attended the same dinner with O'Neill. Powers confirmed O'Donnell's recollection, claiming he had also heard two shots from the grassy knoll.11 For a long time, Ted Sorensen, JFK's loyal wordsmith, accepted the conclusions of the Warren report. In his bestseller Kennedy (first published in 1965), Sorensen wrote, "Personally I accept the conclusion that no plot or political motive was involved, despite the fact that this makes the deed all the more difficult to accept." But toward the end of his life, Sorensen had second thoughts. Encouraging a read of James Douglass's JFK and the Unspeakable, Sorensen said, "I endorse no conspiracy books, but that one made an impression. Its thesis is that Kennedy was killed by those opposed to his switch toward peace regarding the Soviets, the Cubans, and the North Vietnamese. That has a credible ring to it but lacks hard evidence including names that could stand up in [a] courtroom."12 Strangely, President Kennedy himself had considered the possibility of a military and intelligence community coup d'etat. "It's possible," he told Red Fay, one of his closest confidants, in the summer of 1962. "It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young president, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, 'Is he too young and inexperienced?' The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy they would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment."13 Given the lack of hard evidence, to accuse any arm or agency of the federal government of orchestrating Kennedy's assassination is both irresponsible and disingenuous. At the same time, it is impossible to rule out the possibility that a small, secret cabal of CIA hard-liners, angry about Kennedy's handling of Cuba and sensing a leftward turn on negotiations with the Soviets and the prosecution of the war in Vietnam, took matters into their own hands lest the United States go soft on Communism.14 There are plenty of historical parallels. In 44 B.C., twenty-three Roman senators stabbed Julius Caesar to death because they considered him a tyrant. In 1865, a handful of Southern nationalists hatched a successful plot against Abraham Lincoln for similar reasons. In 1914, members of a secret Serbian sect known as the "Black Hand" murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie, precipitating World War I. In the early 1960s, the CIA tried to assassinate Fidel Castro at least eight times, and the Cuban regime claims the attempts numbered closer to six hundred. The idea that a rogue element within the CIA, operating as an impregnable cell, could have assassinated Kennedy is not a mere flight of fancy. After all, during the Cold War, top CIA officials often ran clandestine operations without much or any oversight, and conducted disinformation campaigns that covered their tracks well.15 Those who lived through the tumult following the Kennedy assassination remember that few initially mentioned the CIA as a possible culprit. No one except for a tiny elite group of insiders knew of the CIA's efforts to kill Fidel Castro, or of some CIA higher-ups' views of President Kennedy. It would have been considered unpatriotic at the time to suggest seriously the possibility of CIA involvement-although a few years later, President Johnson expressed a belief in private in 1967 that the CIA had had a role in Kennedy's death.16 The Communists, on the other hand, were juicy targets right from the beginning. Since Oswald had embraced Marxism, defected to the USSR, and handed out flyers for Fidel Castro, many Americans thought it reasonable to assume that the Soviets or Cubans could have been behind JFK's murder.

Once Oswald was arrested, his Marxist past became known within hours, and an incident in the Dallas district attorney's office nearly lit the fuse on a confrontation with the Soviet bloc. Assistant D.A. Bill Alexander searched Oswald's apartment, which was cluttered with books and letters making clear his ideological affiliation. By ten P.M. on November 22, Alexander was composing Oswald's indictment when a Dallas reporter called and Alexander answered the phone. The reporter wanted to know about Oswald. "I told him [Oswald] was a Communist," said Alexander. The reporter replied that he would need something more substantial than Alexander's word. "All right, how about if the indictment reads, 'Oswald did then and there with malice aforethought kill John Kennedy, president of the United States, in furtherance of a Communist conspiracy'?" The reporter was well pleased: "Yeah, I can run with that." Washington was not as pleased once word reached senior officials there. Clark Clifford, a high-level adviser to Presidents Truman and now Johnson (later LBJ's defense secretary), called district attorney Henry Wade, Alexander's boss, to protest vigorously. "What the hell is Alexander trying to do, start World War III?" thundered Clifford. The "Communist conspiracy" clause was quickly dropped from both the indictment and the newspaper.17 Nonetheless, Lyndon Johnson feared precisely this scenario: that the public would conclude the Communists were behind JFK's murder, inevitably sparking a demand for nuclear retaliation-which in turn was a powerful motive for pinning it all on Oswald as a lunatic gunman. The irony is that, again completely in private, LBJ often told aides and reporters that Castro was responsible for Kennedy's murder and thus Johnson's own presidency. (As noted above, Johnson had also confidentially suggested that the CIA had an undefined role in the events of November 22.)18 Among LBJ assistants who have confirmed the president's Castro allegations is Joseph Califano, later President Carter's secretary of health, education, and welfare.19 During a confidential interview with ABC journalist Howard K. Smith in October 1968, Johnson said, "I'll tell you something about Kennedy's murder that will rock you ... Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got to him first." Smith said that he was "rocked all night" by Johnson's shocking statement, but that the president never gave him any additional details.20 LBJ told Leo Janos of Time magazine that Kennedy "had been operating a damned Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean." Even Earl Warren had suspicions about Cuba and considered the Communist nation "one of the principal suspects."21 As author Henry Hurt points out, Castro "possessed the motive, means, and opportunity" to kill Kennedy, especially since the dictator had successfully infiltrated the Cuban exile community with an army of undercover agents.22 Castro cast suspicion on himself by delivering a vitriolic speech in Brazil a few weeks before the assassination. "United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders," he warned, "they themselves will not be safe."23 Of course, the Cuban dictator knew what Americans did not: He was a constant CIA target.

Did Johnson really have proof that Castro was responsible for Kennedy's murder? A mysterious meeting held in Mexico City among high-ranking federal officials offers tantalizing clues. Shortly after the assassination, U.S. ambassador Thomas Mann convened with FBI agents Larry Keenan and Clark Anderson, CIA station chief Winston Scott, and CIA agent David Atlee Phillips in Mann's office. When Mann suggested that Cuban and Russian Communists might have planned November 22, Keenan assured him that it was an open-and-shut case-an emotionally disturbed Marxist named Lee Oswald had acted completely on his own. Mann was flabbergasted. "I hadn't reached any conclusion," he would say later, "and that's why it surprised me so much. That was the only time it ever happened to me-'We don't want to hear any more about that case-and tell the Mexican government not to do any more about it ... We just want to hush it up.' "24 Brian Latell, a former CIA agent and Cuba expert, recently published a book that raises new questions about Castro's possible links to November 22. In 2007 Latell was granted permission to interview Florentino Aspillaga, a high-level Cuban defector who worked for Castro's intelligence service in the early 1960s. Aspillaga told Latell that on the morning of the assassination, four hours before Kennedy died, he received orders to monitor radio signals coming from Texas. Aspillaga explained that the unusual directive caught him off guard since he was normally told to monitor CIA radio traffic. Separately, Latell discovered that Oswald may have bluntly threatened to kill Kennedy during his visit to the Cuban consulate in September 1963, and that Castro was quickly informed of Oswald's vow. Yet Castro did not send any warnings through his channels to Washington. None of this is conclusive. Perhaps on November 22, Castro and his henchmen may have wanted to know if Kennedy would address Cuba again in his scheduled speeches; just a few days earlier in Tampa and Miami, JFK had bashed Castro at length.25 And it may be that the Cubans dismissed Oswald's rant as unserious. It may also be true that Castro, having been targeted so often by the CIA for assassination, felt no special obligation to alert the American authorities about a threat on Kennedy's life.26 We cannot really know what role Cuba might have played unless investigators gain unfettered access to Castro government documents, assuming they exist and have not been altered. Still, the best available evidence casts doubt that Castro was actively involved in Kennedy's murder, and nothing Latell has uncovered proves otherwise. While it is always possible that Castro's reaction to the news of Kennedy's death was feigned, he did not seem like a man who had been embroiled in a plot or had advance knowledge. The Cuban dictator appeared "shocked and saddened" by the announcement and said over and over again, "Es una mala noticia" ("This is bad news"). Also, shortly before the assassination, Castro told the French journalist Jean Daniel that Kennedy had a chance of becoming "the greatest president of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists." In the end, the CIA was officially unable to establish any links between Cuba and JFK's death. On March 3, 1964, a CIA operative sent Langley the details of an interview he had conducted with a Cuban official who claimed that "Castro felt that it was possible that ... Kennedy would have gone on ultimately to negotiate with Cuba," not because of "love for Cuba" but rather "for practical reasons." Moreover, he had heard Castro denouncing LBJ "in harsh terms," hardly the reaction expected if Castro had wanted to replace JFK with LBJ-and there was no reason prior to November 22 for Castro to believe that Johnson would be better on Cuba policy than Kennedy had been.

In 1978 Castro himself told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that killing Kennedy would have been an "insane" thing for him to do. "That would have been the most perfect pretext for the United States to invade our country which is what I have tried to prevent for all these years."27 Rather, Castro pointed an accusing finger at his own enemies in the United States, CIA-trained anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Fabian Escalante, the former head of Cuba's Department of State Security, says that the exiles "had planned to kill Kennedy twice in November 1963, because they felt the U.S. president had done too little to topple the [Castro] government on the Caribbean island." According to Escalante, the exiles hoped that Kennedy's death would trigger a U.S. invasion of Cuba.28 Edward Martino's peculiar story about his father, John, lends some credibility to Escalante's claim. John Martino, who had Mafia connections, spent three years in one of Castro's prisons, and he emerged from that ordeal fiercely anticommunist. Martino traveled to Dallas twice in the autumn of 1963 and, on the day of the assassination, ordered his son to stay home from school and monitor the news. At lunchtime, when his son alerted him that Kennedy had been shot, the elder Martino appeared tense but unsurprised and spent many hours on the telephone, doing his part to blame Fidel Castro. In later years, John Martino claimed that he was a low-level operative in a plot to kill Kennedy that had been masterminded by anti-Castro Cubans and the Mafia, possibly with some CIA involvement. Martino told friends that Oswald had been manipulated by the anti-Castro group to assassinate Kennedy in order to trigger a U.S. invasion of Cuba.29 For their part, the Soviets had unfettered access to Lee Oswald for years and could have recruited him or created a brainwashed "Manchurian candidate" assassin.30 However, common sense and the existing evidence lead to a conclusion similar to the Cubans. A few months before he died, JFK signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union, abolishing aboveground nuclear weapons tests. The treaty represented a breakthrough in arms control between the superpowers and opened the door to further agreements that could have lessened Cold War tensions and saved both nations billions in defense expenditures. Since Khrushchev was putting his country on a path toward detente, and saw that Kennedy was doing the same, why would he risk war by authorizing the murder of his negotiating partner? He had come to understand what the consequences of nuclear war would be. In July 1963 Khrushchev told his fellow Communists that "only madmen" believed that the USSR could triumph in a nuclear war. "A million workers would be destroyed for each capitalist," said the Soviet premier. "There are people who see things differently. Let them. History will teach them."

In the months following the assassination, Khrushchev became convinced that a conspiracy of some sort, possibly organized by U.S. "reactionaries" had brought about Kennedy's murder. The Soviet chairman did not believe that Oswald acted alone and expressed doubt to one prominent journalist, Drew Pearson, that "the American security services were this inept." "What really happened?" he asked, and his suspicions were echoed by his wife, Nina, in May 1964.31 Sergei Khrushchev, the son of the Soviet premier, who now lives and teaches in the United States, remembers: "First of all, my father had no idea how [the assassination] happened and what happened. He tried to figure it out from [the] KGB, and of course [the] KGB said they were never involved with this. He knew it was not Soviets and he thought it was not Cubans, but he didn't have control over Soviets completely." A rogue group of Soviet hardliners or a secret KGB cabal similar to the one alleged by some to have existed within the CIA could have planned the president's murder, but theories without a shred of hard evidence must eventually be set aside.32 During a 1999 summit in Cologne, Germany, Russian president Boris Yeltsin presented President Bill Clinton with a surprise gift, "a report on declassified Russian information relating to the assassination of President John Kennedy." Although the account contained some intriguing materials, such as a handwritten note from Oswald to the Supreme Soviet asking for asylum and citizenship, it "did not alter Washington's conclusion regarding KGB recruitment of Oswald" or "even shed much new light on what was already known about Oswald's time in the Soviet Union."33 So if Oswald was not a Soviet agent, could he have been a hit man for the mob?34 Certainly, the American public has been conditioned by the media and Hollywood to believe that the Mafia is a well-oiled killing machine that can take down anyone. In the movie The Godfather, Part II (1974), mob boss Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) has this famous exchange with his half-brother, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) about plans to kill another top mobster: HAGEN: It would be like trying to kill the president. There's no way we can get to him.

CORLEONE: Tom, you know you surprise me. If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it's that you can kill anybody.35 The first two Godfather movies were released in the 1970s, just as the public, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, were reconsidering the Warren Commission's findings.36 Many Mafia kingpins loathed the Kennedys, mainly because RFK went after organized crime with a vengeance once he became attorney general.37 He raised the number of mob convictions from 35 in 1960 to 288 in 1963. Did Bobby's aggressive tactics represent a betrayal of a deal between Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and the mob? The father's ties to organized crime allegedly dated back to his days as a bootlegger during Prohibition.38 Shortly before the 1960 election, Joseph Kennedy was said to have promised Chicago mafioso Sam Giancana access to the White House in return for intervening with another mobster, Frank Costello, who had threatened to kill him over a property dispute. The elder Kennedy was said to have told Giancana, "You help me now, Sam, and I'll see to it ... that you ... can sit in the goddamned Oval Office if you want. That you'll have the president's ear."39 According to some published sources, Giancana agreed to the deal and convinced Costello to take the ambassador off his hit list. Even before this incident, Giancana had apparently helped JFK by distributing the Kennedy patriarch's cash to buy endorsements and votes during the critical West Virginia Democratic primary election in May 1960. And when JFK began having an affair with a black-haired beauty named Judith Campbell while he was still a U.S. senator, Giancana slept with her as well, reportedly so that he would eventually have a direct link to the White House.

The intermediary for the Kennedy-Giancana joint ventures was Frank Sinatra, an avid Kennedy supporter until their falling-out during JFK's presidency.40 Sinatra introduced Senator Kennedy to Judy Campbell in Las Vegas. Moreover, as Sinatra's daughter Tina informed CBS's 60 Minutes, her father called Giancana and acted as the go-between for the West Virginia primary shenanigans. When the Kennedys turned on Giancana once they were in the White House, Sinatra had to work hard to deflect the mobster's wrath at Sinatra on account of the Kennedys' unfaithfulness. In atonement, the singer played at Giancana's club, the Villa Venice, with his "Rat Pack" of fellow entertainers, for eight nights in a row.41 Sinatra worked his way back into Giancana's good graces, but the Kennedys never did.42 If Giancana followed through, he might have worked with fellow Mafia don Carlos Marcello, who had been deported by RFK and was, if anything, even angrier than Giancana with the Kennedys. In 1979 the New Orleansbased Marcello told an undercover FBI agent that he had known Dutz Murret (Oswald's uncle) and that Oswald had worked as a runner for Murret's book-making operation. Marcello supposedly knew David Ferrie as well. Ferrie had been hired as a researcher by Marcello's attorney, G. Wray Gill. When Ferrie wasn't researching cases for Gill, he did part-time investigative work for Guy Banister, another Marcello employee. Oswald's Marxist political views might have made him a suitable triggerman. Once the hit went down, federal law enforcement agencies and the public would blame Communists, not mobsters. Perhaps Marcello approached Oswald indirectly, through an intermediary posing as a Castro supporter. Some assassination buffs contend that the man who appeared at the Cuban embassy in Mexico City and was misidentified as Oswald was an impostor dispatched by the mob so that the real Oswald would be contemporaneously linked with Cuban and Soviet Communists.43 The HSCA's Robert Blakey believes that Marcello and Santo Trafficante, the mob don of southern Florida, were the brains behind the Kennedy murder. As proof, Blakey points to the confessions that Marcello and Trafficante made shortly before they passed away. In 1985, an FBI prison snitch named Jack Van Laningham heard Marcello say, "Yeah, I had the little son of a bitch [JFK] killed, and I would do it again; he was a thorn in my side. I wish I could have done it myself." Marcello also told Van Laningham that he had been introduced to Lee Oswald by a man named "Ferris" (possibly David Ferrie) and that he, Marcello, had personally helped Jack Ruby get "set ... up in the bar business." From his deathbed, Santo Trafficante told his lawyer, Frank Ragano, that he and Marcello had masterminded the assassination. Ragano published this story in his autobiography, Mob Lawyer. But Ragano apparently added this explosive revelation to his autobiography while he was trying to sell the manuscript-and just three weeks after the release of JFK, convenient timing so that he could capitalize on the movie sensation.44 Jimmy Hoffa, the corrupt president of the Teamsters Union, must also be included on a list of crime figures with strong motives to kill John F. Kennedy. Hoffa and Bobby Kennedy had a hatred for one another that would melt steel, stemming from the McClellan Committee hearings in 1957, when RFK served as counsel and grilled Hoffa in an unrelenting manner. Still enraged by Hoffa's smug answers to his inquiries, Bobby as attorney general set up a special "Get Hoffa" unit within the Justice Department. He was determined to destroy Hoffa no matter the cost. The usual union ties with Democrats did not come into play, since the Teamsters often supported Republican candidates. Hoffa grew deeply frustrated with the increased pressure from Washington and began making threats against the attorney general. According to a government informant, Hoffa discussed two "separate murder plans aimed at Robert Kennedy." The first involved blowing up RFK's estate in Virginia, Hickory Hill. The second is eerily familiar: Hoffa thought RFK could be "shot to death from a distance away; a single gunman could be enlisted to carry it out-someone without any traceable connection to Hoffa and the Teamsters; a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight would be the assassination weapon." Hoffa also thought that the South would be the ideal location for the hit since the authorities would likely blame it on segregationists.

Did Hoffa implement this plan, but change the target to JFK instead of RFK?45 Or maybe the mob and a rogue group of CIA agents worked together to kill Kennedy. There was no hesitation by the CIA in reaching out to mobsters when they could be helpful, as they had done in planning assassination attempts against Castro. During the winter and spring of 1961, Robert Maheu, an FBI agent acting on behalf of the CIA, held meetings in Miami with crime kingpins Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, and Santo Trafficante. Maheu told them that if the mob wanted to murder Castro in order to reclaim their assets in Havana, the U.S. government would be glad to lend a hand. This foul relationship continued for years, even after senior administration officials thought it had ended, and the CIA continued to work with the Mafia to find ways to eliminate Castro. For example, CIA agent William Harvey delivered poison pills to Johnny Roselli, meant for Castro, even after CIA headquarters had told Attorney General Kennedy that the agency had severed its ties with gangsters.46 The counterargument to the Mafia theory is that even for the mob, a presidential assassination is potentially pulling the pin on a nuclear grenade. Presidents and attorneys general come and go, just like police crackdowns at the local level. Far better to wait the Kennedys out than to risk the wrath of a provoked public that would have demanded full retribution for the death of its president. Emotion and fury might have gotten the better of the godfathers' judgment, yet most organized crime experts do not believe that any of the bosses would have been willing to take such a risk. Ralph Salerno, who served as a consultant to the House Select Committee on Assassinations and the Department of Justice, tried hard to find evidence of mob involvement in JFK's death. He told an ABC reporter, "I felt it would have raised the hackles of the entire nation against organized crime so I would have loved to have found something. But I didn't find that." Salerno has expressed great respect for his former HSCA colleague Robert Blakey, but he disagrees with Blakey's conclusion about Mafia involvement. Perhaps reflecting that lack of consensus, the House committee's final report uses a bit of ambiguous language. While acknowledging that "the national syndicate of organized crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy," it says that "the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved."47 Bill Roemer, who helped the FBI dismantle mob operations in Chicago, is less wishy-washy. "I spent thousands and thousands of hours listening to surveillance tapes on the top mobsters in the country," he says. "[W]hen the assassination of the president happened, they discussed it relentlessly, but there was never any sign they had anything to do with it." Both Salerno's and Roemer's statements are compelling. These organized crime fighters, despite a strong desire to expose the mob's sinister nature, could not find substantial evidence linking the Mafia to Kennedy's death. This balances somewhat Robert Blakey's strong, informed opinion that organized crime is the premier suspect.48 If mob bosses were orchestrating the Kennedy assassination, they needed small-time flunkies to carry out the murder. And thus we come to the checkered career of Lee Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby, whose deadly act is one of the few connected to the Kennedy assassination that is undisputed. It was, after all, a nationally televised murder-the nation's first-ever live TV homicide.

Jacob Rubenstein was born into a dysfunctional Polish Jewish family in 1911. As a child, he witnessed frequent fights between his alcoholic father and mentally ill mother. When the couple's marriage ended in 1921, Rubenstein and his seven siblings were sent to live in foster homes. The divorce affected Rubenstein deeply and he soon began acting out; a psychiatric report labeled him as a "quick tempered" and "disobedient" young man.49 Jack quit school in the eighth grade and finished his education on the streets of Chicago. At one point, he earned money by running errands for Al Capone, the Windy City's most notorious Mafia chief. During the Great Depression, Rubenstein scalped baseball tickets, sold busts of FDR, and worked as a singing waiter in order to make ends meet. In 1937 he took a job as a secretary for Chicago's Scrap Iron and Junk Handlers Union, which brought him into contact with criminal elements. When his boss, a rogue named John Martin, shot the founder of the scrap iron union over a financial dispute, Rubenstein was questioned by police but found innocent of any wrongdoing. "Martin was replaced and the reorganized union was dominated by its secretary-treasurer, Paul J. Dorfman, a man with longstanding connections to Chicago racketeers."50 During World War II, Rubenstein served in the Air Force. When the war ended, he set up a small business in Chicago with his brothers and shortened his name to "Ruby"; bowing to the anti-Semitism of the day, he thought Ruby sounded "more American." When the business failed, he relocated to Dallas and established a series of nightclubs, most of which went bankrupt. Accustomed to using violence to settle disputes, Ruby would sometimes punch or pistol-whip customers who got out of line. And yet he never got into any real trouble with the Dallas police. Partly, this was due to Ruby's untiring efforts to make friends with members of the department. Some officers even patronized his clubs and were treated well. This form of petty corruption was tolerated and even accepted by the department. As a result, the Warren Commission found that "Ruby's police friendships were far more widespread than those of the average citizen." As he was being wrestled to the ground after shooting Oswald, Ruby told the arresting officers, "I am Jack Ruby. You all know me." They certainly did.51 Some individuals in organized crime also knew Jack Ruby. Irwin Weiner, one of Jimmy Hoffa's closest associates, described the Chicago native as "a friend of mine." FBI records show that Ruby phoned Weiner on October 26, 1963. "He called me," Weiner admitted. "I talked to him. What I talked to him about was my own business. And I just don't want to, don't feel that I should discuss it with anyone. It has no relation, it has no bearing on anything."52 Ruby made other possibly suspicious phone calls in the weeks leading up to the assassination. For example, on November 7, 1963, Ruby spoke with Barney Baker, a Hoffa associate whom RFK once called a "roving organizer and ambassador of violence." He talked to Baker on at least two other occasions during the same month, though no one knows for sure what they discussed. Ruby also made calls to Russell Mathews (a drug dealer who knew Carlos Marcello), Nofio Pecora (another Marcello lieutenant), Michael Shore (a record company executive with ties to the West Coast Mafia), Lenny Patrick ("a notorious member of Chicago's outfit"), and other disreputable characters. Ruby later insisted that he was simply trying to get advice from these men on how to handle the American Guild of Variety Artists, a Mafia-controlled union that represented strippers and nightclub entertainers.53 As in so many other areas, the Warren Commission was slapdash and did not thoroughly investigate Ruby's mob connections. That did not prevent the commission in its final report from stating categorically: Based on its evaluation of the record ... the Commission believes that the evidence does not establish a significant link between Ruby and organized crime. Both State and Federal officials have indicated that Ruby was not affiliated with organized criminal activity. And numerous persons have reported that Ruby was not connected with such activity.54 Fifty years on, it is clear that the Warren Commission was wrong, and that Ruby knew scores of mob figures, including David Yaras, a man whom the Justice Department considered a close associate of Sam Giancana's. Ruby and Yaras had become acquainted in the late 1930s or early 1940s. Yaras described his friend as a silver-tongued "Romeo" who was good at "picking up girls."55 Ruby also was acquainted with Joseph Campisi, "a close associate of Dallas mob boss Joseph Civello" and Frank Caracci, one of Carlos Marcello's lieutenants. Campisi visited Ruby in jail a few days after he shot Oswald; Caracci and Ruby talked on the phone several times during the summer and fall of 1963 and met in person at least once. Ruby knew plenty of other mobsters, including Johnny Roselli (the same Roselli who met with the FBI's Robert Maheu in Miami) and Lewis McWillie, another one of Sam Giancana's associates.56 Chuck Giancana is convinced that his brother not only knew Ruby, but also ordered the hit on Oswald. According to Chuck, Sam used Jack to open "a seedy night spot that the Chicago [mob] syndicate would slowly transform into a jumping strip joint, offering clientele everything from bookmaking to prostitutes." The job required someone who could deliver envelopes full of cash to local law enforcement personnel, and perhaps Ruby cultivated close ties with Dallas police officers so that it would be easier to bribe them on behalf of Giancana.57 The FBI was aware of Ruby's Mafia ties and tried to recruit him as an informant. In 1959 agent Charles Flynn approached Ruby nine times asking for information on gambling operations, drug networks, and organized crime in the Dallas area. But Ruby never divulged any useful information, and the FBI eventually ceased all contact with him.

And then there is Ruby's apparent connection to Cuba. According to a former associate, James Beard, Ruby periodically delivered guns and ammunition to pro-Castro Cubans. Beard says that he "personally saw many boxes of new guns, including automatic rifles and handguns" onboard a boat piloted by Ruby. At the time, the mob was hedging its bets by supplying weapons to Castro's friends and foes alike, hoping to win favor with whichever side ultimately triumphed. (Mobsters turned against Castro only after he seized power and began cracking down on their nefarious activities.) A Texas gunrunner named Robert McKeown says that Ruby got in touch with him in 1959 about transporting a number of jeeps to Castro's army. McKeown gathered that Ruby was working for Santo Trafficante, the godfather in south Florida, and says that the nightclub owner asked for help in "getting some people out of Cuba" for "a man in Las Vegas."58 Even the Warren Commission admitted that Ruby traveled to Cuba in 1959. Whether the commission coaxed the whole truth out of Ruby is another matter. "I want to tell the truth, and I can't tell it here," Ruby told Earl Warren in June 1964 from his Dallas jail cell. "Unless you get me to Washington, you can't get a fair shake out of me." Ruby insisted that his life was in danger if he stayed in Dallas, but Warren refused to transfer him. Ruby also reportedly told a friend who came to see him in jail, "Now they're going to find out about Cuba, they're going to find out about the guns, find out about New Orleans, find out about everything."59 Persistent reports have also suggested that Jack Ruby and Lee Oswald knew each other. If true, this would add spice to accusations of a possible conspiracy. Yet these assertions have tended to fall apart upon close examination. Beverly Oliver, a Dallas woman who claimed she was in Dealey Plaza on November 22, declared that Ruby had introduced her to "Lee Oswald of the CIA" before the assassination.60 But it is doubtful that Oliver was present in Dealey Plaza, and her yarn changed a good deal over the years. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, after interviewing her in executive session, did not consider her legitimate.61 A Dallas waitress, Mary Lawrence, reported that Ruby and Oswald ate a late-night meal at her restaurant. Yet Lawrence said "Oswald" had a small scar near his mouth, which Oswald lacked but Larry Crafard, a close friend of Ruby's who resembled Oswald, did indeed have.62 Some of Ruby's employees at the Carousel Club alleged that Oswald was often at the club, drinking and reveling with strippers. This contradicts testimony from Oswald's landlady and other rooming house tenants that Oswald was regularly home by six P.M. Dallas policeman Jim Leavelle investigated some of these reports, but he found them groundless: "If Oswald had any redeeming qualities, [they were that] he didn't drink alcohol and hang around clubs ... People would say, 'Oswald was up there in Ruby's club drinking and all this stuff, and so-and-so saw it.' And I'd go to so-and-so and he'd say, 'well, I didn't really see him but my friend George over there, he saw him.' And I'd go to George-and he didn't see Oswald, but his friend Frank did. And I never could get to the end of the damn line. There wasn't nothing to it."63 No single aspect of the Kennedy assassination has done more to perpetuate conspiracy theories than the cold-blooded execution of Lee Harvey Oswald. Americans already in shock over the president's brutal death were further numbed as they watched a new killing happen on television. For almost everyone, the quick elimination of the accused assassin seemed frighteningly convenient. The government and the news media kept a great deal from the public in those days, but that didn't mean people couldn't reason for themselves. In millions of homes throughout America, people uttered versions of what my father exclaimed seconds after Ruby shot Oswald: "They want to shut him up." Not "he," but "they." As Nancy Pelosi put it, "As soon as I saw Jack Ruby shoot Oswald, I thought, 'Of course! That's what they do to somebody who kills somebody-kill him so that he can't talk.'"64 In my large extended family, gathering for a sad Thanksgiving less than a week after the events in Dallas, every single relative expressed a belief in a conspiracy, most because of Oswald's elimination. Whether true or not, Americans sensed that large, evil, unseen forces were at work, and this gnawing suspicion added immensely to the disquiet of the time.

Once again, given an inadequate investigation when the trail was hot and after the passage of a half century, it is impossible to say with certainty whether Ruby was another "lone gunman" or part of a conspiracy. Ruby's own contemporaneous comments lead us in two different directions. He told police that he had shot a smirking Oswald in a fit of pique so that Mrs. Kennedy would not have to return to Dallas and go through a trial "for this son-of-a-bitch." Detective Barnard Clardy told the Warren Commission that he heard Ruby say, "If I had planned this I couldn't have had my timing better," and that "It was one chance in a million." In addition, right after he was arrested, Ruby told Bill Alexander, Dallas's assistant district attorney, that he was "proud that he killed the man who killed the president because it showed that Jews have guts." "He thought that he would be a hero," Alexander told me. "He said, 'you guys [the police] couldn't do it.' "65 There is also testimony that Ruby became deeply upset about JFK's death. He might have been acting, but his emotions appeared genuine to those who knew him best. Ruby's sister, Eva Grant, put Jack's demeanor over the weekend this way: "He was sick to his stomach ... He looked terrible ... He looked [like] a broken man [and said], 'I never felt so bad in all my life even when Ma and Pa died ... someone tore my heart out.' "66 Did Ruby, a self-professed admirer of the Kennedys, at least after the assassination, act on impulse when he shot Oswald? Or had he been hired to silence a patsy who might squeal to the police?

Unfortunately, Ruby's trial was almost perfunctory and did not address these questions, and a Texas jury sentenced him to death for his crime. (The conviction was later overturned by an appeals court.) Jim Cunningham, a retired Texas Instruments engineer and one of the last surviving members of Jack Ruby's jury, says that Melvin Belli, Ruby's celebrity attorney from California, didn't understand the Texas system and put on a poor case. But the key factor in the jury's decision was Ruby's own actions. While Cunningham was one of three jurors who at first voted against the death penalty, and considered a lesser penalty such as "murder without malice," he joined all his colleagues in a vote for capital punishment in the end: "If [Ruby] had no malice, why was he in the basement of the police station with a gun? ... Ruby had a temper and finally it got him into so much trouble he couldn't get out of it."67 For some Americans who lived at the time, Ruby was a folk hero who had avenged the murder of their president and spared the country a lengthy, expensive trial. When he was diagnosed with cancer in 1966, Ruby received a flood of sympathy cards and letters from admirers. Most expressed gratitude for Oswald's murder. Ruby may not have been able to appreciate them at the time-nor to give any deathbed confessions-because his mind and body were rapidly deteriorating. Ruby began to experience paranoid delusions. "He raved again and again that Jews were being tortured and killed because Gentiles wanted revenge for his crime. He shouted that he could hear screams from the jail cellar, machine guns in the street." He also gave visitors pieces of paper with phone numbers on them, explaining, "These people have been murdered. They're all out to get the Jews, and these people won't answer the phone because they're dead."

At saner moments, Ruby seemed determined to dispel rumors that he had been part of a conspiracy. "The ironic part of this is, I had made an illegal turn behind a bus to the parking lot" near the jail, he said from his hospital bed. "Had I gone the way I was supposed to go-straight down Main Street-I would've never met this fate, because the difference in meeting this fate was thirty seconds one way or the other." Earl Ruby told the press that his brother wanted to take another lie detector test (he had already taken two) "so that people will be convinced that there was no plan on his part, or conspiracy of any kind." A month before he died, Ruby said, "There is nothing to hide. There was no one else."68 The best evidence that Ruby's encounter with destiny may have been accidental is derived from his actions on the day of the Oswald shooting. Ruby was in downtown Dallas Sunday morning, November 24, in order to send money to one of his strippers who had requested urgent help. We know Ruby was in the Western Union office, not far from the Dallas jail, at 11:17 A.M., since his money order was stamped at that exact time-and all Western Union clocks were carefully synchronized each morning. Oswald had been scheduled to be transferred from the city jail to the Dallas County jail sometime after ten A.M., and if Oswald had been moved shortly after ten, he and Ruby would have never crossed paths.69 Instead, at the last minute, a postal inspector had a few questions for Oswald, and Oswald himself unexpectedly requested a change of clothing upstairs in the interrogation room, which delayed his transfer-just enough time to permit Ruby to make the journey to the police basement entrance, gain admission to the media spectacle (apparently from either a friendly or an inattentive policeman), and find a suitable perch for close observation. If Ruby had been under orders to kill Oswald, he would never have cut the timing so close, and he would not have run a trivial errand in advance. Nor would he have brought his dog, Sheba-his companion animals were like children to him-and left her locked up in his car while he undertook a high-profile shooting that meant he would certainly be arrested and might even be killed via police counterfire. Finally, murdering Oswald would not have protected the plotters of November 22. Ruby would know who put him up to his part in the cover-up, and would talk sooner or later. Wouldn't Ruby have had to be eliminated eventually, too-and then the person who killed Ruby, and on and on? Ironically, the episode most Americans cite as having convinced them of a JFK assassination conspiracy may be the easiest to debunk, simply by following the details of Ruby's day and the illogic of this particular alleged "silencing."

An alternate explanation that places Ruby inside a mob conspiracy to kill JFK is offered by HSCA counsel Robert Blakey: "Did [Ruby] get [Oswald] that day [November 24] serendipitously? Or did he get him that day with a connection with some of the crooked cops in the Dallas police? And they were crooked. And they were connected to the organized crime in town-not the whole police department, but substantial numbers of them. I don't know how [Ruby] got in [to the police basement] for sure. There's some suspicion that he was let in. Even if he got in serendipitously, he still got in. He was stalking [Oswald]. If he hadn't got him today, he'd have got him tomorrow."70 Adding some credence to this view are Ruby's actions on Friday evening, November 22. Ruby got all the way to the door of Captain Fritz's office, where Oswald was being interrogated, and actually opened it several inches before he was stopped by two policemen.71 Was Friday's bold move Ruby's first attempt to get Oswald? Blakey's argument about Ruby is plausible, but on balance, it is less convincing than the coincidental theory.

Whatever his motivations, Jack Ruby was no hero. He robbed America of a fuller explanation of the Kennedy assassination. In time, it is highly probable Lee Oswald would have provided a great deal of information, either about his own objectives or the existence of a wider conspiracy. The year 1963 preceded significant Supreme Court decisions that enhanced the constitutional guarantees possessed by accused criminals, and police departments were often not terribly fussy about the rights of those in custody. When I asked Bill Alexander, one of Oswald's ranking interrogators for the short time he was in the Dallas jail, what would have happened if Oswald had lived, he reminded me that they were gathering incriminating evidence from many sources and Oswald's own writings. They had already surprised Oswald with what they knew about him (his rifle purchase, the staged photograph with the gun, and other details). By Monday, Alexander felt, they would have had enough hard proof to make him crack. And if he didn't, would the police have gotten a bit rough with Oswald behind closed doors? "Oh, surely not!" quipped Alexander in mock horror. "We would have [just] made him understand we [meant business]."72

10.

Examining the Physical Evidence: Old and New Controversies

Hard proof is often lacking to support plausible conjecture, semireliable hearsay, and logical guesswork. Unfortunately, contrary to what the experts say on TV crime shows, the same is true for some of the physical evidence. Where you stand on that evidence depends on where you sat on November 22, 1963, or shortly thereafter. Take the medical findings and judgments of those who saw President Kennedy right after his fatal shooting.

President Kennedy arrived at Parkland Hospital within a few minutes of the shooting, at around 12:35 P.M. Hospital staff gave him the designation "No. 24740, Kennedy, John F."1 When Dr. Charles Carrico received Kennedy in Trauma Room One, he knew the situation was extremely grim, and noted JFK's color as blue-white or ashen, an indication of poor blood circulation. Dr. Carrico also noticed that the president was having trouble breathing and "had no palpable pulse." In addition, Kennedy's eyes were wide open and unresponsive to light. As Dr. Carrico was making these observations, Trauma Room One began to fill with medical personnel. With the assistance of other doctors and a senior nurse, Dr. Carrico opened the president's shirt and put an ear to Kennedy's chest. Carrico detected a faint heartbeat, so the assembled physicians began working to restore the president's breathing.2 While inserting a breathing tube down the president's throat, Carrico noticed a small wound in the front of his neck. He described it as "rather round" without "jagged edges or stellate [starlike] lacerations." Carrico made these observations as he was connecting the breathing tube to a respirator machine.3 At this point, Dr. Malcolm O. Perry and other doctors arrived, and Perry assumed control over the effort to resuscitate the president.4 Perry noted a wound "in the lower part of the neck below the Adams apple," which he described as "a small, roughly circular wound of perhaps 5mm in diameter from which blood was exuding slowly."5 Since it seemed obvious that the president was losing oxygen through this hole, Perry decided to perform a tracheotomy. Using a scalpel, he made a "transverse incision right through the wound in the neck." Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the teaching faculty at Parkland, assisted with this procedure. Perry also asked another doctor to insert a tube in the president's chest in order to drain excess blood and air.6 Dr. Kemp Clark, Parkland's chief neurosurgeon, inspected the president's massive head injury. Clark could see "a large, gaping wound in the right rear part of the head, with substantial damage and exposure of brain tissue, and a considerable loss of blood." Although he "did not see any other hole or wound on the president's head," Clark later admitted that the massive amount of blood and thick hair could have concealed the full extent of the president's injuries. Finally unable to detect any pulse, the physician began performing external cardiac massage.7 Dr. Marion T. Jenkins, one of Parkland's anesthesiologists, later said that at this point, after "Dr. Clark had begun closed chest cardiac massage," he became "aware of the magnitude of the wound, because, with each compression of the chest, there was a great rush of blood from the skull wound. Part of the brain was herniated [i.e., the brain projected through the blasted-out cranial cavity]; I really think part of the cerebellum, as I recognized it, was herniated from the wound; there was part of the brain tissue, broken fragments of the brain tissue on the drapes of the cart on which the president lay."8 As the physicians worked desperately to save the president's life, Mrs. Kennedy forced her way into the operating room cupping a sizable piece of her husband's brain that she had retrieved from the trunk of the limousine-an action captured in famous photos and the Zapruder film of the awful instants after the shots were fired.9 Jenkins described the horrific scene: "Jacqueline Kennedy was circling the room, walking behind my back. The Secret Service could not keep her out of the room. She looked shell-shocked. As she circled and circled, I noticed that her hands were cupped in front of her, as if she were cradling something. As she passed by, she nudged me with an elbow and handed me what she had been nursing in her hands-a large chunk of her husband's brain tissues. I quickly handed it to a nurse."10 But it was much too late for miracles. The president had been brain-dead from the moment his skull exploded under fire at 12:30 P.M. The time of John Fitzgerald Kennedy's death was somewhat arbitrarily fixed by the doctors as being 1:00 P.M. CST. Dr. Clark signed the death certificate, citing a gunshot wound to the head as the cause of death.11 Years later, one of the attending doctors told an interviewer that "as soon as we realized we had nothing medical [left] to do, we all backed off from the man with a reverence that one has for one's president. And we did not continue to be doctors from that point on. We became citizens again, and there were probably more tears shed in that room than in the surrounding hundred miles." Most of the doctors quietly left the room, with a couple staying behind to remove tubing and medical equipment from the president's body.12 Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff had accompanied Kennedy to Dallas in lieu of Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, who was on a mission abroad with cabinet members. It was left to Kilduff to make the official announcement of the president's death to journalists gathered in the hospital. "His eyes red-rimmed, his voice barely controlled, [Kilduff] said: 'President John F. Kennedy died at approximately one P.M. central standard time here in Dallas. He died of a gunshot wound in the brain.' "13 When Kilduff had finished speaking, Drs. Perry and Clark gave an impromptu press conference. Perry told reporters that he had located "an entrance wound in the front of the throat" that had likely been caused by a bullet moving toward the president.14 Months later, he would describe this wound to the Warren Commission as "roughly circular." When asked whether it was an exit or entry wound, Perry told the commission that "it could have been either."15 By contrast, in his 1992 book, JFK: Conspiracy of Silence, Dr. Charles Crenshaw claimed that he had "identified a small opening about the diameter of a pencil" in the middle of the president's throat, and he remained convinced that it was "an entry bullet hole. There was no doubt in my mind about that wound. I had seen dozens of them in the emergency room."16 If Crenshaw is correct, this bullet could not possibly have caused Governor Connally's wounds, since it was coming from Kennedy's front and not his back.17 Other doctors who certifiably were in Trauma Room One insist that Dr. Crenshaw did not treat President Kennedy or was in no position to observe anything significant.18 Perry also told the press on November 22 that he could not identify the entry point for the bullet that had shattered the president's skull. This statement was corroborated by Dr. Clark, who said that "the head wound could have been either the exit wound from the neck or it could have been a tangential wound, as it was simply a large, gaping loss of tissue."19 Given the nature of the resuscitation efforts and the confusion of the day, none of the physicians in Trauma Room One could have conducted a thorough examination of the president's head wound. Yet a physician who spent considerable time in the room holding the president's shattered head and looking directly at the cranial wound for many minutes was Dr. Robert McClelland. One of the few surviving occupants of Trauma Room One on November 22, he told me that not only was "a third to a half of the president's brain" shot away, but while the other doctors were working feverishly to revive Kennedy, "the right half of [Kennedy's] cerebellum fell out of the hole in his skull cavity."20 To McClelland, from those awful minutes at Parkland onward, the wound in the back of Kennedy's head seemed like an exit wound. During testimony to the Warren Commission, McClelland did admit, when questioned, that he had only "partially" examined the president's head wound.21 Yet in 2011, McClelland recalled that years of reflection had led him to a definite conclusion: The opening he saw in the back of the president's skull was most certainly an exit wound, consistent with a shot from the picket fence area. McClelland's medical opinion is that the bullet entered JFK's forehead around the hairline and blew out the right side and back of his skull. McClelland believes that his initial interpretation of the president's wound is consistent with Kennedy's violent motion backward and then to the left in the Zapruder film, which he first saw years after he formed a judgment based on the skull wound by itself.

A widely respected medical professional, McClelland not only attended JFK but operated on the wounded Governor Connally, Lee Oswald after he was shot, and several years later, Abraham Zapruder, who was suffering from gastric cancer.22 People who have known McClelland throughout his professional life vouch for him enthusiastically. He is not bombastic, but quiet and authoritative. In the aftermath of the assassination, he was flown to Washington to examine autopsy photos, and he is sure that the one showing the small bullet hole in the back of the skull was forged or altered. The shot came from the front, McClelland insists. He even kept the shirt he was wearing on November 22. It is soaked in JFK's dried blood and brain matter, which drained onto McClelland as he performed his gruesome task. He has preserved the shirt in a plastic bag since that day. (See the photo on page 2 of the second insert.)23 All this being true, his admired professionalism and strong impressions from November 22 do not make McClelland's view of the head wound unassailable. This was his notion or inkling, but no X-rays had yet been taken.

Not long after Kennedy expired, the White House staff and Secret Service, with Mrs. Kennedy at their side, began wheeling JFK's body out of Parkland Hospital. Earl Rose, Dallas County's medical examiner, tried to stop them. "I was trying to explain ... that Texas law applied in the ... case of the death of the president, and that the law required an autopsy to be performed in Texas." Kennedy's aides refused to comply, and the situation became tense, with armed agents determined to get the president's body back aboard Air Force One and eventually to an official autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Voices were raised, and given the circumstances, Rose had to relent or be run over. The law was actually on Rose's side. Remarkably, the killing of a president was not yet a federal crime in 1963. JFK's homicide had occurred in Dallas and as such fell under the jurisdiction of Texas authorities. Rose always insisted that the autopsy should have been performed in Dallas. "People are governed by rules and in a time of crisis it is even more important to uphold the rules," Rose said. "In Dallas, we had access to the president's clothing and to the medical team who had treated him."24 It is possible that some of the unending controversy about the JFK autopsy would have been resolved or would never have occurred had the procedure been done in Dallas. As it happened, the autopsy performed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center (which began just after eight P.M. and ended shortly before four A.M. on November 23) was inadequate in some ways. The Bethesda physicians did not confer with the Parkland medical team before they began the procedure, which put them at a considerable disadvantage. Nor did they have the opportunity to examine the president's clothing, which was removed at Parkland Hospital; this was unfortunate, since the bullet holes in JFK's coat and shirt were critical in understanding one bullet's trajectory. Apparently because of the pressure of time-the Kennedy family was waiting to go back to the White House with the body-they did not dissect Kennedy's back-to-neck wound, which could have proven quite useful. While the doctors insisted later that they did not experience direct interference in their work, the autopsy occurred under highly irregular conditions with many military, staff, and Secret Service observers buzzing about and asking questions.25 The close proximity of so many influential individuals and their indeterminate role in the substance and pace of the autopsy has generated suspicion and debate for decades.26r The Bethesda doctors did examine Kennedy's shattered head thoroughly, which led them to determine that the entrance wound was "situated in the posterior scalp."27 In other words, they claimed the bullet that destroyed Kennedy's brain had come from the rear, not from the front, contrary to the view of Dr. McClelland and many others. There is a good deal of evidence that on this key point, they were correct. The path of the bullet from back to front is distinguishable, thanks in part to the pattern of the bullet fragments that remained in Kennedy's head. Furthermore, additional analyses in the years following the assassination have shown a "jet propulsion effect" from a bullet exiting the front of the brain, pushing the body violently backward and helping to explain the backward and leftward movement of JFK's moribund body in the Zapruder film, occurring at the instant the bullet exited his skull. For example, in the 1970s, Dr. Alfred G. Olivier, director of biophysics at the Army's Edgewood Arsenal, told the Rockefeller Commission that "the violent motions of the president's body following the head shot could not possibly have been caused by the impact of the bullet ... [Olivier] explained that a head wound such as that sustained by President Kennedy produces an 'explosion' of tissue at the area where the bullet exits from the head, causing a 'jet effect' which almost instantly moves the head back in the direction from which the bullet came." Thus, to the untrained eye, the Zapruder images would suggest a bullet striking Kennedy from the front and pushing him back, but as in so many other ways, our eyes can deceive when split-second supersonic effects are involved.28 While they may well have gotten the big things right, the Bethesda physicians understood the imperfections in their work within hours. In a report to his commanding officer, Colonel Pierre Finck cited the various limitations he was forced to work under during the autopsy: "no clothing of the deceased at [the] time of [the] autopsy; no photos to view at [the] time of [the] autopsy; no information from Dallas; and his impression that the Kennedy family did not want a 'complete' autopsy."29 The doctors felt pressure from the attorney general, White House aides, and Mrs. Kennedy to finish as quickly as possible. They were refusing to leave the hospital until the autopsy was finished and the body was prepared to lie in state at the White House. The family had initially resisted the procedure, but Bobby ultimately relented and allowed a complete autopsy on his brother's corpse.30 The rushed procedure, saving an hour or two, would be regretted for years. Dr. James Humes, one of the three physicians who performed the autopsy, would later admit that he and his colleagues "were influenced by the fact that we knew Jackie Kennedy was waiting upstairs to accompany the body to the White House and that Admiral Burkley wanted us to hurry as much as possible."31 Nonetheless, Humes (now deceased) always insisted that his team's conclusions, though rushed, were basically accurate, and he was delighted when an independent panel of experts appointed by Attorney General Ramsey Clark in 1968 agreed with his assertion.32 The initial autopsy report contained information on only three of the president's wounds-the entrance and exit wounds associated with the skull, and the small wound occupying the lower posterior neck of the president. The physicians were unaware of a possible exit (or entrance) wound on JFK's throat and only noticed the small entrance wound on his back. Therefore, they assumed that the president still had a bullet lodged in his back. Humes testified that "[a]t Colonel Finck's suggestion, we then completed the X-ray examination by X-raying the president's body in toto."33 When the X-rays did not reveal any projectiles, the autopsy team manually probed the president's back wound. The result was the same: no bullet. When Humes learned about the bullet that had been discovered on the gurney at Parkland Hospital, he simply assumed that it was the same one that had penetrated President Kennedy's back.34 However, the next day, Humes spoke to Dr. Perry at Parkland and learned about the apparent bullet hole in the president's throat. Humes went home and drafted a new autopsy report for the Warren Commission in which he described this wound as the probable exit point for the bullet that had pierced Kennedy's back.35 Humes's team took fourteen X-rays and fifty-two photographs of the president's corpse. The X-rays showed that the bullet that struck Kennedy's head "had shattered into about forty dustlike particles, appearing on the X-ray film like 'stars at night.'" In addition, Humes said the doctors found a small 6-millimeter-diameter entrance wound in the rear of Kennedy's head. Humes believed that a high-velocity rifle bullet had entered through the rear of the skull, then fragmented and exited through the top of the skull.36 Below is a diagram that roughly explains Humes's conclusion (produced in the 1970s by the House Select Committee on Assassinations). The medical evidence, autopsy photos, and analyses in the decades that followed mainly support this theory of the fatal bullet's path. Initial controversy was caused by the Warren Commission's placement of the head wound entry point a full four inches below the one shown in the diagram we have reproduced.37 Why did the commission get the placement so wrong? It relied on the inaccurate written notes of Dr. Humes, who told the House Select Committee on Assassinations a decade later that he had been up all night on November 2324 and had drafted the final autopsy report based on rough notes he jotted down during the procedure. He testified that he did not take greater care with the wounds' placement since he assumed the autopsy photographs would be used to precisely establish their location.38 Understandable exhaustion and less excusable haste created a long-term controversy that could easily have been avoided.39 The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has never released the autopsy photos to the press or public; they are, after all, fundamentally private medical records. They have been made available on a limited basis to congressional investigators, forensic experts, and government agents with the approval of the Kennedy family. It was completely appropriate to withhold the photos in the years immediately following JFK's death. But after a half century, this is pure American history, and a vital piece of the assassination puzzle. It is time to release all of the medical evidence so that everyone with an interest in the case can sort out the truth from varying perspectives.40 The locations of Kennedy's wounds, and the subsequent autopsy, have proven controversial, but the ballistic evidence from the assassination is even more disputed. The Warren Commission concluded that the shots that killed the president and wounded Governor Connally came from the southeast corner window of the sixth floor of the Book Depository, an assertion based on (1) eyewitness accounts of a gun present in the window, seen either during the firing or immediately after the shots; (2) the forensic matches among bullet fragments found in the front seat of the presidential limousine, the whole bullet discovered on the hospital stretcher that purportedly transported Connally, and the grooves made on the bullet by the rifle found on the sixth floor; (3) the presence of three spent cartridge cases located below the key sixth floor window, which were forensically matched to the rifle and bullets "to the exclusion of all other weapons"; (4) the damage on the inside front windshield of Kennedy's limousine, presumably caused by a bullet fragment striking, but not penetrating or shattering, the glass surface;41 and (5) the nature of the wounds inflicted upon Kennedy and Connally, which seemed to indicate that the bullets had come from an elevated position behind the limousine on Elm Street rather than from any other location along the parade route, such as the triple overpass or the grassy knoll.

The commission also found that three bullets were fired from the Depository. The first bullet missed the car entirely. The second bullet entered the back of the president's neck and exited through the flesh at the lower front of the neck, near his tie knot. (Most of the Parkland physicians, including Dr. Robert McClelland, believed that this wound was dangerous but survivable by the president.) The same second bullet continued on, entering the right side of Connally's back and exiting from the right side of his chest immediately below the nipple before again entering his body, apparently passing through the top of his right wrist near his hand and then causing a minor wound on his left thigh, possibly remaining just under the skin, where it later exited while Connally was on the Parkland stretcher. The third and final bullet ended Kennedy's life as it entered the right rear quadrant of the president's head, shattering the cranial area.42 Though the commission's report indicated there had been some internal dissent over attributing Connally's wounds to the same bullet that had passed through Kennedy's throat, the document concluded that expert-derived "persuasive evidence" had demonstrated beyond any doubt that Oswald alone had fired the shots from his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Oswald could not have fired more than three bullets in the elapsed time, and one bullet unmistakably missed the limo and struck a curb near the triple underpass. Therefore, for the Warren Commission, the remaining two bullets had to account for all the wounds in JFK and Connally. The first of these has often been derisively termed the "magic bullet" or the "pristine bullet" because of its relatively good condition after allegedly doing so much damage to two men. The dispute about this bullet aside, the commission and subsequent investigations concluded that Oswald had sufficiently expert marksmanship to aim and fire the gun with deadly effect from the Depository to the street (a distance of no more than 88 yards). Finally, ballistics also matched several cartridge cases found at the scene of the shooting of police officer J. D. Tippit to a revolver found in Oswald's possession at the time of his arrest, another gun that had been purchased by Oswald.43 A number of other vital details were analyzed by the commission. The panel said the shots rang out at 12:30 P.M. CST. Roy Kellerman and William Greer, two of the president's bodyguards, agreed on the time, which was reinforced by a photograph of the limousine speeding to Parkland just past the grassy knoll and the triple overpass, with the large Hertz clock on the Depository clearly showing exactly half past twelve. The president's vehicle was moving forward very slowly on Elm Street in the critical seconds before and during the shooting. Frame-by-frame analysis of the Zapruder film produced a speed estimate averaging 11.2 miles per hour.44 However, agreement on the other particulars is elusive. The accounts of those in the presidential limo differ significantly on the most important point. From the rear left seat of the vehicle, Mrs. Kennedy heard a noise and subsequent cry of pain from Governor Connally, who was seated directly in front of her husband. Upon turning right, she observed the president raising his hands to his throat with a puzzled expression on his face. JFK realized what had happened. "My God, I am hit" were his last words. Mrs. Kennedy was attempting to help her husband when she heard the fatal shot and saw what the fatal bullet did. Mrs. Kennedy's testimony would tend to support the theory that one bullet struck both JFK and Connally.45 But the recollections of Governor Connally and his wife, Nellie, sharply contrasted with those of Mrs. Kennedy, and both insisted throughout their lives that separate bullets struck Kennedy's back and Connally's back.46 The governor reported that he heard the first shot originating from a direction over his right shoulder and contorted his body in that direction to trace the origin of the noise. While turning his head in the other direction to check on an already wounded Kennedy, he was struck in the back by a bullet. Connally testified that he did not hear the shot that penetrated his body. It is possible that Connally heard the first shot that missed the limousine entirely and caught a glimpse of the wounded president at the very instant he (Connally) was struck by the bullet that had just exited JFK's throat; perhaps Connally's brain had not had time to process the noise from the second shot. It is also possible that Connally was struck by a separate bullet.47 Mrs. Connally, who was not hurt, confirmed her husband's recollections. Moments after she had turned to JFK and chirped, "Mr. President, you can't say that Dallas doesn't love you," she heard a shot fired from the right. Glancing over her right shoulder, she saw the president noiselessly clutching his throat before slumping toward Mrs. Kennedy. She insisted that a second separate shot then struck her husband, who exclaimed, "My God, they're going to kill us all." Mrs. Connally pulled her badly wounded husband downward onto her lap. From this position, with his head in her lap, both Governor and Mrs. Connally said they heard another shot, whereupon they were hit with blood and tissue from JFK's head wound.48 The remaining occupants of the presidential limousine, two Secret Service agents who were in the front seats facing forward and did not directly observe all the key moments, were unable to sort out whether Mrs. Kennedy's or the Connallys' version was correct. Roy Kellerman, the occupant of the front right passenger seat of the vehicle, reported hearing a firecracker-like pop; upon turning his head to the right he saw the president clutching his throat. By all accounts it was Kellerman who ordered Agent Greer to accelerate while radioing the president's condition. The Connallys said that they heard Kellerman's call only after the tissue-splattering shot. Greer's version of events is similar to Kellerman's. He heard a loud noise, which he attributed to a nearby police motorcycle. Upon hearing a second such noise, he turned to look over his shoulder and spotted Connally slumped over in his wife's lap. He stepped on the vehicle's accelerator at the precise moment Kellerman issued a similar order. Kellerman claimed to have heard "a flurry of shells" for five seconds after the first shot rang out.49 Gerald Blaine, one of the other agents assigned to Kennedy's Texas detail, believes the bullet that struck Kennedy's head (and left behind fragments in the president's skull) caused a large flap of skin to move in the same direction as the projectile, which is visible in the Zapruder film. Could the remnants of this slug still be buried inside Dealey Plaza? Blaine thinks so: "That [bullet] is probably laying up in the rail yard [or] embedded in the [grassy] knoll somewhere."50 Secret Service agents in the follow car, trailing the president's car by five feet or so, reported much the same sequence of events: a firecracker-like noise, the sight of Kennedy grabbing his throat and "lurching" left, followed by a second shot and the shattering of the president's skull. Agent Clint Hill, who demonstrated great courage in the face of gunfire, remembered leaping from his position in the follow car, struggling to gain his footing on the presidential limousine as Greer pushed the gas pedal, and helping a frantic Mrs. Kennedy, who had climbed up on the car's trunk, back into the rear seat.

As the motorcade accelerated through the underpass to Parkland Hospital on Kellerman's orders, most agents drew their weapons, including George Hickey, who was armed with an AR-15 rifle.51 Agent Rufus Youngblood in the front passenger seat of the vice presidential vehicle-about a hundred feet behind Kennedy's limousine-reported hearing an explosive noise before seeing the crowd lined up along the parade route suddenly disperse.52 Vice President Johnson confirmed hearing several sharp "explosions" in a row; he heard one or two of the shots from a position on the vehicle floor, where he had been pushed down for protection by Youngblood.53 Agent Clifton Carter, in the vehicle behind the vice presidential limousine, reported hearing two shots after Youngblood had secured LBJ.54 All Secret Service agents in the motorcade remained with their vehicles-per agency policy-until they reached Parkland Hospital.55 Despite the eyewitness testimony about Secret Service agents on and near the grassy knoll after the shooting, the Secret Service and the Warren Commission say that the first agent to return to Dealey Plaza, Forrest Sorrels, did not do so until approximately 12:50 P.M.56 There are contradictions aplenty here. Few of those likely to be most alert to the facts-the limousine occupants and the Secret Service agents following every instant intently-explicitly acknowledge a first shot that missed the limo. Some participants, including the Connallys, are sure Governor Connally was hit by a separate bullet from the one that struck JFK's throat. Others have memories that differ on various specific points, including the exact number of shots they heard. Police homicide detectives often report that well-meaning eyewitness accounts can diverge wildly. But these aren't average eyewitnesses.

Of course, critics see multiple problems with various elements of the scenario we have just described. For example, Ray and Mary La Fontaine, the husband and wife team behind the book Oswald Talked: The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination, and Mark Lane, who authored the highly influential 1966 volume Rush to Judgment as well as Plausible Denial in 1991, have argued that another gun, a 7.65 Mauser, was initially identified by Officers Seymour Weitzman and Eugene Boone as the weapon found on the sixth floor of the Depository. A Weitzman-signed affidavit described it as a "7.65 Mauser bolt action equipped with a 4/18 scope."57 Boone was the first person to view the weapon and believes that Lane and the La Fontaines are assigning sinister motives to an honest mistake. "That probably was my fault," he told me during a phone interview. "I referred to it as a Mauser. There were a lot of World War II weapons [on] the market at that time, and 'Mauser' really refers to a bolt action weapon." Boone means that he was using the brand name in a generic sense in the same way that one might ask for a Kleenex instead of a tissue. But journalists ran with his description until authorities later identified the murder weapon as an Italian-made Mannlicher-Carcano.58 Bertrand Russell, the noted Cambridge philosopher and mathematician, wanted to know how the authorities could have missed a man walking into a "building while allegedly carrying a rifle over three feet long?" Russell observed that along a motorcade route swarming with police and Secret Service agents on heightened alert, it was strange that no one noticed Oswald lugging such a weapon.59 Was the rifle taken to, or planted in, the Depository much earlier? This is possible; multiple reports suggest that the Depository's back loading dock was frequently open and unguarded, and the freight elevators to the sixth floor could be accessed from that location. Of course, say lone-gunman advocates, there is a logical explanation that would show how Oswald could bring in a rifle on the morning of the motorcade. The neighbor with whom he hitched a ride early on the morning of November 22, Wesley Buell Frazier, said Oswald was carrying a brown-paper-wrapped package that contained "curtain rods"-Oswald's cover for his disassembled rifle. As in so many other respects that day, Oswald was devilishly lucky. The slight, physically unremarkable Oswald was dropped off nearby the Depository, wasn't stopped by any policeman or guard on his way into the building (there may not have been any law enforcement personnel stationed in the plaza five hours before the motorcade was to pass), and could have proceeded unmolested once inside up to the sixth floor to drop off his deadly parcel for later use.

Yet Frazier, who had the opportunity to handle and measure an Italian Carcano rifle in later years, insists that Oswald's package was too small to be the weapon discovered on the sixth floor of the Depository. "You know, they asked me, 'How long was the package?'" he recalls. "I said, 'Oh, around two feet, give or take an inch or two.' [So] even if it were disassembled, it wouldn't fit in there." Frazier stuck to his estimate of the size of Oswald's package from the day of the assassination through to his interview with the Warren Commission staff in Washington the next year. The commission put him through a comical routine in which he had to cut up wrapping paper to demonstrate the dimensions of Oswald's object-and staffers made him do it over and over, hoping that he would produce one version large enough to accommodate the rifle.60 Lending further credence to Frazier's story is the testimony of an FBI firearms expert who told the Warren Commission that the length of the rifle's longest component when disassembled was 34.8 inches-considerably longer than the brown paper package Frazier had observed.61 The commission determined, however, that the homemade bag discovered near the sniper's nest measured 88 inches in length (roughly seven feet), which would have been more than enough to conceal Oswald's rifle.62 In addition, photos taken on the afternoon of the assassination clearly show curtains hanging from the windows inside Oswald's boarding house room, which suggests that Oswald had been lying to Frazier about the need for curtain rods.63 Frazier recalls the conversation they had the day before the assassination: "He came up to me during the day on Thursday. And he asked me, 'Can I ride home with you this afternoon?' I said, 'Well, sure.' A few minutes later, I realized it wasn't Friday. So when I ran back into him on the first floor, I said, 'Why do you want to go home with me today?' I said, 'Today is Thursday, not Friday.' He says, 'I know. I need to go home because Marina's got some curtain rods for me and I'm gonna put some curtains up in my room.' So I said, 'Okay.'"64 This suggests that Oswald had decided on his plan of action, either by himself or with the help of conspirators, by Thursday during the day; and that he either came across or was shown the motorcade route on Wednesday or Thursday. Oswald's assassination plan was not a last-minute snap decision, as some have suggested. Rather, he thought about it for at least a day or two, maybe longer. Moreover, Oswald told Frazier he would not be going back with him on Friday, again suggesting he knew what he was going to do-and that he would either be dead after shooting at the motorcade or he had an escape plan in place, on his own or with the help of co-conspirators.65 No single piece of evidence has sown more doubt than the "magic bullet" fired from the Carcano rifle. Part of the bullet's allure for conspiracy theorists arises from the inexplicable gap in the "chain of custody" surrounding the projectile, which police say was matched with forensic evidence to Oswald's gun.

Upon arrival at Parkland Hospital, Governor Connally-who had fainted from shock and loss of blood-regained consciousness and was immediately helped onto a stretcher.66 About 1:20 P.M. the bullet was found on the stretcher by Parkland's chief engineer, Darrell Tomlinson. Even though, in retrospect, Tomlinson was uncertain that this stretcher was the one used for Connally, the Warren Commission so designated it. Others wondered whether the bullet had been planted in order to implicate Oswald during the approximately forty minutes the stretcher had been empty.67 Further questions have been raised about the condition of this 1.2-inch-long bullet, which was only slightly compacted at its base despite having allegedly passed through two bodies and broken bones in Governor Connally. The skeptics insist a bullet that had such a destructive path would have shed more shards along the way.

This is not the only bullet that has proven controversial. One other person besides President Kennedy and Governor Connally was injured in Dealey Plaza at 12:30 P.M. James Tague, a bystander at the base of the triple underpass, on the opposite side of the street from the grassy knoll, was struck in the face by flying debris presumably caused by a stray bullet. The Warren Commission says it was the first bullet that missed the limo entirely and hit a curb near Tague. However, Tague insists that he was struck by the debris-whether curb concrete or bullet fragments-when he heard the second or third shot, not the first one. In addition, the FBI investigated a scar on a curb near where Tague was standing and found that the indentation did not contain any copper residue. This finding suggests to some observers that the ricocheting bullet was not one of the copper-encased projectiles fired from Oswald's gun.68 Recently, a team of Texas A&M University scientists, using modern chemical and forensic techniques, concluded that the bullet fragments recovered on November 22 could have come from more than one gun.69 The scientists discovered "that many bullets within a box of Mannlicher-Carcano bullets have similar composition, leading them to conclude that two-element chance matches to assassination fragments are not extraordinarily rare." In other words, a second undiscovered assassin could have fired a weapon using Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition from another location around Dealey Plaza, and the bullet fragments would have resembled the composition of those that came from Oswald's gun.70 Bullet fragments recovered during JFK's autopsy at Bethesda add to the puzzle. The attending physicians identified two wounds in the president's head: a 6-by-15-millimeter wound to the right and above the center back portion of the skull, and a more irregular, nearly 13-centimeter-diameter fracture of the skull that matched chunks of bone recovered by law enforcement personnel from along the parade route.71 Two small metal fragments were recovered from the larger wound. X-rays revealed particulate fragments of metal in a line from the rear wound to the front portions of the skull, and an embedded metal fragment above the president's right eye.72 Yet for many, the Zapruder film contradicts the ballistic path analysis. Kennedy's head and upper torso are clearly thrown backward in a manner seemingly inconsistent with a shot coming from the rear. For example, author Paul Chambers has studied the Zapruder frames using mathematical equations derived from Newtonian physics and concluded that the recoil of the president's head proves that the fatal shot was not fired from the Depository but rather from a location in front of Kennedy's limousine. By no means is Chambers's analysis unanimously supported; others use photographic and scientific perspectives to insist that the Zapruder film shows that the president initially fell forward, having been hit from behind.73 The ambiguous nature of the visual evidence can lead to diametrically opposite conclusions. More generally, this survey of X-rays and ballistics has demonstrated that so-called hard evidence can prove to be softer than expected.

The suggestion shocks, but more than a few assassination researchers put forward the theory that Lyndon Johnson was a willing co-conspirator in the killing of his predecessor, or at the very least, had prior knowledge that something was afoot. The linchpin of this conjecture is the belief that Johnson was far more amenable than JFK to the plans of the military, defense industry, and CIA to escalate in Vietnam.74 That Johnson lusted after the White House is obvious. He had run for the Democratic nomination himself in 1960, and he regarded John Kennedy as a lightweight in the Senate. RFK was his enemy; their personal dislike was intense and barely containable on both sides. Johnson believed that he had been ill-treated as vice president, his talents underutilized and his influence marginalized by the Kennedy inner circle that called him "Uncle Compone." And anyone who has studied Johnson's career has to acknowledge that, for all his dazzling legislative and strategic skills, he was exceptionally devious and capable of great cruelty even to those personally and professionally close to him.75 It may be that every vice president who has succeeded his president in midterm has been secretly delighted. All seconds-in-command realize, as did John Adams in describing his position as the first vice president, that "In this I am nothing, but I may be everything."76 Nevertheless, Johnson was probably more delighted than most. Power, every bit as much as blood, coursed through his veins and kept his weak heart beating.77 Astoundingly, despite needing to assimilate and recover from the enormous shock of Dallas and with the heavy immediate burden of burying Kennedy and uniting the country, a pajama-clad LBJ was already planning out the legislative initiatives of his administration with close aides in his bedroom in the wee hours of November 23. In this same meeting, the new president even startled the exhausted Lady Bird Johnson-after she declared their new burdens would last only a few months until a new presidential nominee was selected in the summer of 1964-by announcing that he would be running for at least one full term in the White House.78 It also escaped the notice of few that President Kennedy had been murdered in LBJ's Texas. JFK had gone there mainly to assist in brokering a truce in Democratic factional fighting in which Johnson was a key player. Some friends and advisers, aware of the harsh treatment of United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who had been spat upon in Dallas one month earlier, wanted Kennedy to cancel. Much like Jack Ruby's rubout of Oswald, Johnson's ascension to ultimate power, thanks to Kennedy's death in LBJ's state, seemed suspicious and convenient.79 Kennedy loyalists quickly made the connection, as revealed by a note penned by Evelyn Lincoln, JFK's personal White House secretary, only a couple of hours after the assassination. Mrs. Lincoln was with Kennedy in Dallas and flew back to Washington aboard Air Force One with LBJ and Mrs. Kennedy. During the flight, she compiled a list of people and groups that she thought might have been responsible for the president's death. At the top of her list was the name "Lyndon." Lincoln was completely devoted to JFK and evaluated everyone with one simple standard: Would they help or hurt her president? She may have been reflecting the inner circle's views of LBJ's loyalty, since she had access like few others to the Oval Office, the president, and his closest advisers.80 Yet one of Johnson's comments made during the flight, reflecting his fear of a possible conspiracy involving enemies of the United States, casts doubt on Lincoln's assertion. "I wonder if the missiles are flying," he told his aide, Bill Moyers, who had asked what was on his mind.81 Moreover, according to a key eyewitness, General Godfrey McHugh, the new president was not as calm on Air Force One as one might have hoped, at least for a time. McHugh reported, "I walked in the toilet, in the powder room, and there he was hiding, with the curtain closed, saying, 'They're going to get us all. It's a plot. It's a plot. It's going to get us all.' He was hysterical, sitting down on the john there alone in this thing."82 Author Craig Zirbel is convinced that Johnson played a role in Kennedy's murder. In his bestselling book The Texas Connection, Zirbel writes, "From the outset Lyndon B. Johnson was involved with the planning of the president's trip. A specific motorcade route was demanded which led to Kennedy's death. The connections to Johnson, while regularly ignored, are so clear that undisputable evidence publicly ties Johnson through his friends to not only the Dallas murder, its criminal investigation, but even to Oswald and Jack Ruby." Zirbel is certain that H. L. Hunt, a wealthy conservative oil baron with close ties to LBJ, was involved in the assassination. The author claims that Hunt, who apparently despised JFK, was among several people who helped recruit Oswald and Ruby on Johnson's behalf.83 As with other theories of the Kennedy assassination, there are wisps of smoke here and there about H. L. Hunt, but no smoking gun that convinces an objective observer it is true.84 Conspiracy theorists believe they know why Johnson would have risked his career and even his life: By the autumn of 1963, rumors were circulating that LBJ would be dropped from the 1964 ticket. On the very day Kennedy died, the Dallas Morning News announced: NIXON PREDICTS JFK MAY DROP JOHNSON. Evelyn Lincoln also claimed years later that she had discussed with President Kennedy his 1964 vice presidential plans shortly before JFK left for Dallas, and Kennedy told her that he had decided to drop LBJ and substitute North Carolina governor Terry Sanford.85 Johnson had superb political antennae, so if JFK's intention was to replace him, he likely knew his days as the man a heartbeat away from the Oval Office were numbered.

The problem with this scenario is that not a shred of real evidence-the kind that would survive under competent cross-examination-has emerged in the past half century to back up the suspicions about LBJ's involvement. Top Kennedy aides have insisted that the Kennedy-Johnson ticket would have been kept intact for the 1964 campaign; Jackie Kennedy also confirmed her husband's intention to keep LBJ as his running mate.86 Texas was still a critical state for JFK, and it was in the throes of party factionalism and realignment that would have been made worse if Johnson were dumped from the ticket. And many ask why President Kennedy would go to Texas on a fence-mending mission if he secretly knew he would be changing his reelection paradigm in a few months.

Another conclusion about the Sanford-for-Johnson swap is possible. JFK was thick as flies with top reporters and loved to hear their gossip. It is quite likely he had been informed about press investigations of LBJ's corrupt business practices in Texas that were being undertaken even as the Dallas trip was being scheduled.87 JFK may have hatched a contingency plan: If he needed to drop Johnson from the ticket in 1964, Terry Sanford, a moderate Southerner, was a reasonable substitute. Kennedy might well have shared this with Lincoln. He often told her what was on his mind at the moment-a kind of thinking out loud to a confidential secretary, just to hear the idea verbalized. The contingency plan might or might not have ever been put into effect. If Johnson's financial shenanigans had been exposed before the spring of 1964, Kennedy probably would have dropped him. In living memory at the time, FDR had dropped two separate vice presidents (John Nance Garner in 1940 and Henry Wallace in 1944), so it wouldn't have been seen as terribly unusual. On the other hand, if LBJ was able to suppress or squelch the press inquiries-quite possible in those days-then he likely would have survived on the ticket.

Johnson arguably had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill Kennedy. But so did dozens, if not hundreds, of other individuals and groups. And during the five decades since, his involvement is nothing more than conjecture, with no proof even of real smoke, much less fire. It is more like misty fog, generated by the need to find a larger-than-life villain to explain the great evil that ended a promising leader's life.

Another area of controversy concerns the protection accorded JFK. This much is obvious: The federal agencies that were supposed to protect him failed at one of their most fundamental responsibilities, and then tried to paper over their mistakes. The FBI destroyed evidence and assembled a self-serving report. The CIA withheld crucial information from the public, the press, and the Warren Commission for decades-and may still be doing so. The Secret Service fell short in two ways. The agents designated to protect Kennedy's life were unable to accomplish the paramount mission of the Secret Service. And the administrative leadership of the Secret Service and its parent Treasury Department had not made an aggressive case for more agents and stricter standards to guard the president when he was outside the safe confines of the White House "bubble." The individual agents are the least culpable even though no group has blamed itself more. These men were shockingly overworked and overextended, almost beyond human endurance at times.88 Also, the agents were too few in number to do the job fully, and they were kept too far away from the president to help in the kind of split-second attack that occurred in 1963. Their supervisors knew the dangers for years, yet nothing was done to stop a tragedy waiting to happen.

In combination, the Secret Service's errors were fatal to John Kennedy. The Service did not have Lee Harvey Oswald on any of its watch lists. When agent Win Lawson found out about the trip to Dallas, he instructed the Protective Research Section (PRS) of the Secret Service to investigate people in the area that might potentially pose a threat to JFK-individuals who had demonstrated hostility toward the president as well as groups that might back a political assassination. A great deal of this information came directly from threatening letters or telephone calls to the White House. Other names were sent along by the FBI, CIA, and state and local police departments, mainly because individuals or organizations had been forthright about their possible intentions. In the early 1960s a person such as Oswald-despite being a defector and having demonstrated hostility toward the United States and its leadership-could easily escape notice, since he had not telegraphed his intentions about the president in palpable ways. In practice, the Secret Service depended heavily on regional law enforcement to provide them with the names of dangerous local residents. This was barely a safety net at all, and the Secret Service knew it, which is one of the reasons agents were always nervous during presidential trips.89 As is too often the case, a monumental tragedy was needed to produce commonsense reforms in presidential safety. After November 22, the Secret Service tightened protection in ways that should have been evident well before President Kennedy's murder.90 Much like the FBI and CIA, the Secret Service tried hard to exonerate itself. A month after the assassination, Gerald Behn, who had been the special agent in charge during JFK's Dallas visit, issued several statements designed to deflect criticism away from his agency. "The United States Secret Service never releases the exact route of any presidential motorcade," read one such statement. "The route, after it has been decided upon by the Secret Service advance agent, the local police and the local committee, is released either by the White House Press Secretary or by the local committee, usually after they have checked with the White House Press Secretary." This misses the point entirely. When the route is released and publicized by any individual or group, it is then the responsibility of the Secret Service to make safe the path. Kennedy's motorcade track had been published in the Dallas newspapers and aired on television for three days, as was inevitable.91 The purpose of a motorcade is to enable a president to be seen. Why hadn't the agency provided in Dallas what in modern times would be considered a minimal level of security? Behn said that it was "almost impossible" to inspect buildings during presidential visits "because of the shortage of time and manpower"-which argued for more time and manpower, not a suspension of precautions. This is not a modern discovery. Fifty years ago, the Secret Service had precise procedures for inspecting buildings in Washington during inaugural parades and events for visiting dignitaries. Under these circumstances, the Secret Service required building managers to:

1. [K]now the occupants of each room in their building.

2. Keep people off the ledges of their buildings.

3. Know who is on the roof or lock the door(s) to the roof.

4. [C]ontact the highest official in each office which has windows facing on the parade route and request them not to allow any strangers or any persons they cannot vouch for into the room.

5. [C]ontact the top official in each office with windows facing on the parade route and request them to make certain that nothing is thrown out of the windows.

6. [C]heck each unoccupied room or office and then lock it.92 Why were these requirements in effect only for special D.C. events? Weren't they even more essential for road trips where the locales and threats might be less well defined and known in advance-especially when a president is sitting in an open car with nothing to stop bullets fired from any direction? If the Secret Service's standards used in the nation's capital (and sometimes elsewhere) for important presidential appearances had been followed in Dallas, John Kennedy might have survived the trip. Just four days earlier, during JFK's visit to Tampa, Florida, where serious threats against Kennedy's life had been made, the sheriff's office had secured the rooftops of major buildings along the president's motorcade route.93 Surely the Dallas of 1963 was anti-Kennedy enough to have justified similar measures. It is obvious in hindsight that the Secret Service should have asked the Dallas police department and sheriff's office to post guards on top of the government buildings overlooking Dealey Plaza, such as the Criminal Courts Building and the Post Office. There was a decent chance that police sharpshooters on the roof with binoculars could have spotted the barrel of a rifle extended from the sixth floor window of the Depository.

In 2010 some Secret Service agents who were assigned to protect JFK published a book, The Kennedy Detail, that contains what some say is a blame-the-victim charge. The agents claim that during a trip to Tampa just days before the assassination, Kennedy called the agents "Ivy League charlatans" and ordered them off the back of his limousine. "Tell them to stay on the follow-up car," the president allegedly remarked. "We've got an election coming up. The whole point is for me to be accessible to the people." JFK supposedly issued similar orders during the Dallas trip.94 After so much time it is not possible to know for sure whether these words were uttered, and no contemporaneous paperwork records such instructions. At the same time, the agents are a reliable lot who have been loyal to the Secret Service and mainly kind in their reminiscences about the Kennedys.95 (Still, some assassination researchers adamantly refute the ex-agents' claim.)96 Even if the report about Kennedy's instructions is true, the director of the Secret Service could have approached Bobby Kennedy or JFK's close aides to insist that tight security was essential. Such intervention might well have worked, and if it did not, resignation in protest is an honorable way to bring attention to a potential calamity. (Sadly, this is a rare practice in American government.) Gerald Blaine, a member of JFK's security team and author of The Kennedy Detail, told me that he and fellow agents "had to diplomatically beg for resources to handle the motorcade routes and the venues." "In Dallas, they ... did not have enough resources to man all of the rooftops," Blaine notes. "In 1963 there was little air conditioning and [therefore an] office building window could be raised and lowered." The former agent also says that the modern-day Secret Service does a much better job of protecting the president in part because of lessons learned in Dealey Plaza: "If we would have had the 4,000 agents they have today-some of which are trained in counter sniping-and we had the armored vehicle used by President Obama, Dallas might not have happened. Instead, JFK's assassination is the reason they have those resources [and] new technologies."97 Blaine's comments suggest that the Dallas trip provided a perfect opportunity for the Secret Service to press its case. As mentioned, JFK and many of his supporters were apprehensive about the visit due to Dallas's reputation as a right-wing mecca.98 There had been warnings of possible trouble. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson had been accosted in Dallas during the 1960 campaign. While traveling to an event at the Adolphus Hotel, the Johnsons were swarmed by a group of demonstrators who shouted insults and waved signs with slogans such as LET'S BEAT JUDAS and TEXAS TURNCOAT. "It makes me sad to know that people could be so bitter and so frustrated and so discourteous and desperate," LBJ said after one protestor screamed in his wife's face. As mentioned earlier, a Dallas mob had also attacked United Nations ambassador Adlai Stevenson when he was visiting Dallas just weeks before Kennedy was scheduled to come.99 The protestors spat on Stevenson and hit him in the head with a placard.100 The pre-Dallas Secret Service had inadequately studied the sad history of assassinations, and not just in the United States. Around the globe, a chastened Secret Service noted in 1964, "There has been an assassination or a serious attempt at one in every nation during every generation." In France, assassins tried to kill Napoleon III eight times. In England, Queen Victoria survived an equal number of attempts on her life. In China, T. V. Soong and Chiang Kai-shek cheated death a total of nine times. The rulers of Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia have been targeted dozens of times.101 In 1962, in a disturbing incident that President Kennedy himself had noted, French president Charles de Gaulle only narrowly escaped death when a would-be assassin using a submachine gun sprayed de Gaulle's car with bullets as it drove through a Paris suburb. One bullet shattered the car's rear window, while another came within two inches of de Gaulle's head. Police found hand grenades and plastic explosives at the scene and connected the attack to a group protesting France's withdrawal from Algeria. Afterward, Kennedy sent a message to de Gaulle "expressing gratitude that the French president escaped unhurt."102 To be a head of state is to invite attacks from mentally disturbed or politically motivated persons. The threat cannot be eliminated; the only antidote is unrelenting security. The modern Secret Service is much more adept at doing so, thanks to greatly increased manpower and a heightened sense of the dangers after so many actual and attempted presidential assassinations. In 1996, for example, President Bill Clinton was visiting the Philippines for an Asia-Pacific Economic summit when his Secret Service agents "picked up radio chatter mentioning the words wedding and bridge." Aware that the word "wedding" has often been used by terrorists as a code word for "assassination," agents decided to change the motorcade route, which had previously included traversing a bridge. It was a smart decision. Authorities later found explosives on the bridge, which could have killed Clinton and many in his entourage.

Secret Service agents have occasionally gone to extreme measures to protect the president. For example, President George H. W. Bush's security team once changed a motorcade route in Oklahoma after a psychic told them that a sniper would be waiting at a certain location along the route. But even the most gifted soothsayer or Secret Service agent cannot foresee every threat. During a 2005 event at Tbilisi's Freedom Square in Georgia, a would-be assassin threw a grenade at President George W. Bush. Fortunately, the grenade landed more than thirty yards away from the president and did not explode. Presidential aides have privately admitted that a more competent assassin would have found his mark, unimpeded by the security arrangements on stage.103 What few realize is that, in every presidency, there are many potential dangers that are never uncovered by security personnel, despite procedures that are many times better than those existing in 1963. Most who have worked on presidential events or in presidential protection can cite examples, though they do so only on an off-the-record basis (preventing authors like me from recounting them). At my college, the University of Virginia, we still recall the lengthy visit of President George H. W. Bush for his "education summit" in 1989. One major event, a breakfast for the nation's governors and spouses, was held out in the open air, on the terraces of Thomas Jefferson's Rotunda, at the head of his architectural masterpiece, an "academical village" consisting of ten large faculty pavilions and dozens of student rooms on "the Lawn." Towering right above the terrace on one side is Pavilion II, which the Secret Service tried to secure because of the obvious danger of a sharpshooter's perch just a few feet away from the president and his summit cohost, at the time a little-known governor by the name of Bill Clinton. But the Secret Service never checked the pavilion's attic, where there is a window with a direct view of the terrace. A couple of days after the summit, hunting rifles and ammunition were discovered there. As one university official put it, "So much for bomb-sniffing dogs and Secret Service thoroughness."104 Circumstances only became tenser with the election of the nation's first African American chief executive. The journalist and author Ronald Kessler reported that "threats against [Barack] Obama [have risen] by as much as 400 percent compared with when President [George W.] Bush was in office." In November 2011, a disturbed twenty-one-year-old man from Idaho opened fire on the White House, striking a pane of protective glass on the south side of the mansion. Fortunately, no one was injured during the incident. In 2012, police arrested another twenty-one-year-old who posted threats against the president on his Twitter page and compared himself to Lee Harvey Oswald.105 Looking back, it is mind-boggling how nave-some would say lax-the Secret Service was about presidential security in 1963. Contrary to some published accounts, the limousine was not armored, and even the bubbletop was just a glassy plastic called Plexiglas.106 Even more surprising is the fact that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover enjoyed greater protection than the president of the United States. In 1964, Hoover lent his government-owned bulletproof car to President Johnson while the presidential limousine received long-overdue security upgrades.107 There was also little crowd control in many instances. Presidents were permitted to ride in long motorcades past tall buildings with hundreds of open windows, any one of which could have hidden an assassin. This was a disaster waiting to happen, and just about everyone in authority at the time knew it.

rKennedy's need for protection expired with his life. The body of Abraham Lincoln had a state-of-the-art autopsy inside the White House in April 1865, with no prying and meddling from others. See Dr. Robert King Stone's "Report on Lincoln's Death and Autopsy," Library of Congress website,

http://myloc.gov/Exhibitions/lincoln/hebelongstotheages/ExhibitObjects/AutopsyReport.aspx

[accessed July 26, 2011].

11.

Inevitability: The Assassination That Had to Happen

It has taken fifty years to see part of the truth clearly. John F. Kennedy's assassination might have been almost inevitable. It didn't have to happen on November 22, 1963, but given a host of factors, one could reasonably argue that JFK was unlikely to make it out of his presidency alive. This assertion is jarring but completely supported by the facts that have emerged.

Almost no one disputes that the security surrounding President Kennedy was thin on November 22, as it often was. The leader of the free world, the most powerful person on the globe, was guarded by twenty-eight Secret Service agents in Dallas, only twelve of whom were actually in the motorcade. Hundreds of local law enforcement personnel assisted with the Dallas visit, but they were neither assigned specifically to, nor trained for, presidential protection.1 Only a few of JFK's agents were close enough to do him any good in case of attack, yet he was passing an estimated two hundred thousand people from Love Field to Dealey Plaza-most just a few feet away, others gathered with a view of him from open windows in buildings along the way. It had been no different in Fort Worth that morning, when he spoke to hundreds of unscreened people outside his hotel, or in other stops on the Texas trip.

No one had even considered that the president's back brace, needed to stabilize his war-injured torso, would make it difficult for him to duck or be pushed down in the limo in the event of an attack. Nellie Connally was able to pull her wounded husband into her lap. Jackie Kennedy could probably not have quickly done something similar even if she had tried. Some believe the back brace kept JFK upright after the first traumatic back-to-neck wound, giving the assassin a clear follow-up shot to Kennedy's still-erect head.

Much has legitimately been made of the fact that Secret Service agents were not on the runners of JFK's car, which was specifically designed to permit agents to stand guard just a few feet away near the back bumper. While not certain, it is probable that an agent would have blocked Oswald's line of sight to Kennedy most of the time, though perhaps not enough to keep the president completely out of harm's way. Had the agents been on the runners, however, they would have saved precious seconds if the president had been hit with the first bullet, probably jumping on top of him to shield him from the head shot, as Lyndon Johnson's Secret Service agent did in a follow car. (However, Oswald might have chosen to shoot Kennedy from the front or side, just as the limo was turning from Houston Street onto Elm Street; even with agents on the runners, the president was terribly vulnerable.) Kennedy certainly understood his frightening degree of exposure, and thought a good bit about the possibility of assassination-though he was fatalistic about it. He had a false sense of invulnerability, perhaps relying on history's odds. His White House predecessors had taken their chances and (since McKinley) all had survived. In addition, for the Texas trip, JFK undoubtedly preferred to avoid criticism that he was anxious about his reception in a place perceived as opposed to him.

Then there was the Kennedy clan's penchant for risk-very apparent in JFK for sure, but also a trait on display in his father and most of JFK's siblings. It was quite a gamble for a forty-three-year-old Catholic to think he could be elected president of the United States; far safer to have stayed in the Senate, as Harry Truman had advised, and run for the White House at a more mature, traditional age. Some friends and biographers have noted Kennedy's past brushes with death, from disease as a child, the Japanese during World War II, and back injuries in the 1950s as experiences that inured him to danger. A long-standing Kennedy family joke was that when a mosquito bit JFK, the mosquito died. Moreover, JFK's almost unfathomable level of recklessness in pursuing women of all types, even prostitutes, clearly suggests someone who enjoyed the adrenaline high of getting away with edgy behavior. In any event, Kennedy's role in waving off the Secret Service agents from the runners on November 22 may have been a fatal miscalculation, assuming this allegation is accurate.

Kennedy's staff bears some indirect responsibility for creating the security conditions that made the assassination possible. There is no indication anywhere that his closest advisers made the case to him for tighter security.2 If they had insisted on greater protection, especially the aides in his longtime inner circle, Kennedy likely would have acceded to the request.

No president had been assassinated since the current Secret Service had begun to provide protection in late 1901.3 That bred overconfidence; as one agent was heard to say in the aftermath of the assassination, "We've never lost a president before," as though that record had been created by airtight security instead of a large dose of luck. There were many avenues open to the then-director of the Secret Service, James Rowley, to appeal the overall lack of funding, point out the giant holes in presidential protection, and object to a thoughtless decision by the staff or even the president himself about the degree of security around the motorcade. Back channels to RFK or Mrs. Kennedy might have yielded results. According to former Reagan aide Mike Deaver, Nancy Reagan gathered key staffers and Secret Service officials together after the attempt on her husband's life and insisted on greater presidential protection.4 By the time Reagan left office, procedures had been tightened in dozens of ways and the president's protective cordon had been considerably strengthened.

Kennedy, his staff, and the Secret Service had plenty of company in self-delusion. In 1963 it was alarmingly easy for a disturbed man such as Oswald to obtain a deadly scoped rifle by mail order under a false name. As J. Edgar Hoover said to Lyndon Johnson less than a day after JFK's killing, "It seems almost impossible to think that for $21.00 [the amount of Oswald's money order for the gun] you could kill the president of the United States."5 The real conundrum is why this observation had not inspired the man who had headed the FBI and its predecessor for nearly forty years to take action much earlier. In addition to the actual slayings of Presidents Lincoln (1865), Garfield (1881), and McKinley (1901), many presidents before Kennedy had survived attempts on their lives-some of them close calls.6 Andrew Jackson lived when a man pointed two pistols at him at point-blank range in 1835; both guns misfired, but when police tried them later, they discharged perfectly. Before John Wilkes Booth's bullet found its mark, Lincoln had survived at least two other assassination plots and received scores of death threats. At one point, Lincoln showed a newspaper reporter the eighty-plus threatening letters he kept in his desk and said, "I know I am in danger; but I am not going to worry over threats like these."7 There were probably disturbed individuals like Oswald represented in the sixteenth president's letter packet, but Lincoln's actual assassin was perhaps the most famous actor in America, a national celebrity. In that sense, Booth's accomplishments and notoriety created a macabre equilibrium in the Lincoln case: A luminary killed a superstar. Lee Harvey Oswald, on the other hand, was a complete nobody-even less than a nobody. The psychological dissonance created by this vast imbalance encourages conspiracy talk in the JFK case.

During the final weeks of the administration of Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, a crazed woman accosted him in the halls of the White House before she was easily subdued.8 Theodore Roosevelt, running for president again in 1912 after a term out, was shot in the chest on the campaign trail in October. A thick speech manuscript in his pocket helped slow the bullet, which was never removed from his body-a wise choice, since operations often did as much damage as projectiles in that era. Argentinean police foiled a serious attempt on President-elect Herbert Hoover's life during a December 1928 goodwill tour of Latin America. Police found guns, grenades, and a railway map inside the house of four anarchists who were determined to "vindicate those who have been exploited by capitalism." This plot had the potential for success, since someone had leaked Hoover's detailed itinerary to the would-be assassins.9 An assassin, Guiseppe Zangara, also nearly claimed the life of Franklin Roosevelt before he took the oath of office four years later. In mid-February 1933 while in Miami, bullets fired at President-elect Roosevelt from close range proved fatal to Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak instead and wounded four others sitting with Roosevelt and Cermak in FDR's automobile.10 In an example of the serendipity sometimes accompanying a failed assassination attempt, the gunman's aim was deflected at the last instant by bystanders Lillian Cross and Thomas Armour. Their efforts, combined with a rickety seat on which Zangara was standing, spared the life of a man who was shortly to become one of America's most consequential presidents. Incidentally, FDR personally cradled Cermak, who survived for three weeks, on the way to the hospital; the president-elect's car served as the ambulance that transported the wounded. He visited the victims the next day, bearing gifts. Mrs. Cross received a warm thank-you note from FDR, plus an invitation to the inauguration and a White House tea. Mr. Armour, who apparently was more reticent about his role, was ignored.11 Harry Truman was attacked by pro-independence Puerto Rican nationalists in November 1950. The assailants killed a policeman and wounded a Secret Service agent, but Truman escaped injury. Richard Nixon was targeted by a man who very nearly hijacked a commercial airliner, with plans to crash it into the White House. Nixon was also trailed by Arthur Bremer, the man who instead turned his gun on presidential candidate George C. Wallace in 1972. Gerald Ford had two serious assassination attempts in the month of September 1975, both in California by troubled women, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme of the murderous Charles Manson cult and Sara Jane Moore. Jimmy Carter was stalked by John Hinckley on the campaign trail in 1980, and his nonpartisan assassination plans to impress actress Jodie Foster continued through the Reagan transition, when he managed to get into a press conference that announced cabinet appointments. Reagan failed to show for the event. Hinckley finally achieved infamy in March 1981 when he shot Reagan and three others. George H. W. Bush was the target of a foiled plot by Saddam Hussein while Bush visited Kuwait shortly after leaving the White House in 1993. In addition to the bridge-bombing incident on foreign soil that has been mentioned already, Bill Clinton was targeted twice domestically in 1994, once by a man who opened fire outside the White House gate and by another who crashed his Cessna into the White House. (Clinton was indoors the first time, and away entirely during the second incident.)12 Another man fired a gun directly at the White House just three weeks after George W. Bush took office. Beyond the 2005 grenade incident in Tbilisi, Georgia, that we have already recounted, Bush was possibly a target on September 11, 2001-not just by a plane headed for the White House but early that morning near Sarasota, Florida, where Bush was to speak at an elementary school that became the backdrop for his first statement about the 9/11 attacks. The terrorist Mohammed Atta had been in this area earlier in September, and a van showed up at Bush's hotel full of men described as "of Middle Eastern descent" claiming they had a nonexistent "poolside interview" with him. They were turned away and have never been identified.13 Keep in mind that these enumerated actual and attempted assassinations probably represent only the tip of a large iceberg; undoubtedly, as mentioned before, some plots and threats throughout history have not been discovered or disclosed. Looking back at the number of incidents we see on the public record, mainly luck has kept the number of assassinated presidents to a total of four. If the presidency was judged by the usual standards employed by the life insurance industry, the job would be almost uninsurable. This much was evident well before 1963. The refusal to learn from our bullet-ridden past-guaranteeing that we would repeat it-is a massive failure all around. Government leaders virtually denied history in the years leading up to November 22 with a conceit that suggested somehow it could not happen again.

Even prior to 1963, President Kennedy had experienced some close calls that should have given all the warnings needed to dramatically tighten security.14 Twin scares occurred five days before the 1960 election, on November 4 in Chicago. Police arrested two men with guns who were on their way to see JFK speak at Chicago Stadium. The first man, twenty-three-year-old Jaime Cruz Alejandro, "closed in" on Kennedy's car as it moved toward its destination. Alejandro was tackled by a policeman, who needed the help of five other officers to subdue him. At the time of his arrest, Alejandro was carrying a .25-caliber automatic pistol. A sixty-one-year-old minister, Israel Dabney, was also arrested after he tried to push past an officer while carrying a .38 revolver in a brown paper bag. Both men claimed to be carrying their guns for self-defense and said they had no intention of harming Senator Kennedy; both were charged with a misdemeanor for carrying a concealed weapon.15 Police concluded that Alejandro and Dabney did not intend to harm Kennedy, but the fact that people could get within twenty feet of JFK with concealed weapons was a warning.

A genuine plot unfolded in Palm Beach, Florida, in December 1960, when a disturbed seventy-three-year-old man, Richard Pavlick, carefully planned to kill President-elect Kennedy.16 Pavlick was well known to the Secret Service because he had written threatening letters to a series of presidents, and he was in the database of possible assassins used by law enforcement. But Pavlick lived in New Hampshire; no one had calculated that he might simply drive to Palm Beach and take up residence waiting for the right moment to strike. Angered by a belief that the president-elect's father had bought the election, Pavlick wired his car with a considerable amount of dynamite, ready to crash it into the president's.17 The Secret Service later admitted the plan might have worked, since Kennedy was usually driven in a single car during this interregnum. As it happened, Mrs. Kennedy saved her husband from a prepresidential death. As Pavlick waited in his car just outside the Kennedy compound one Sunday, preparing to turn his car bomb into JFK's path, Jackie came out with her husband. Pavlick's twisted conscience was still sensitive enough to deter him, since he had no desire to kill Mrs. Kennedy.

The would-be assassin waited a week until Kennedy turned up at Mass at a nearby Catholic Church. A disheveled Pavlick wandered into the church to make sure JFK was there, spotted him, and made a beeline for that pew. An alert agent grabbed him and whisked him around-but let him go without a clear identification and without knowing whether the man was armed. Before Pavlick drove away, the agent did record the license number and description of Pavlick's decrepit Buick sedan. An all-points bulletin was later issued, and four days later, Pavlick was found in his car, still dynamite-laden-close to the Kennedy compound yet again. As with FDR in 1933, the nation had come close to losing a president before he had ever served a day.18 Even after JFK's slaying, the nation was slow to recognize the full importance of security. There was little public or institutional pressure to protect presidential candidates until Robert F. Kennedy was killed in 1968. Shortly after RFK died, one fretful FBI agent sent a telegram to Hoover which read, PLEASE MAKE CERTAIN THAT TED KENNEDY GETS ALL THE PROTECTION HE NEEDS WE ARE DOWN TO ONE KENNEDY THANKS.19 Robert Kennedy's assassination brought Secret Service protection for future presidential candidates, though not early in the campaign.20 Protection or not, shortcuts have been taken on the campaign trail when aides to a candidate want a full auditorium but the lines behind the magnetometers is long.21 The imperfect security arrangements have continued under Presidents Bush and Obama, according to some in and out of the Secret Service. Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush's former press secretary, recounted an odd and potentially threatening incident that occurred during his boss's first inauguration. Shortly before the inaugural parade began, a nondescript man managed to slip through the Secret Service cordon and press a religious message and medallion or "coin" (as Fleischer describes it) into the president's hand. The interloper turned out to be a harmless preacher from California named Richard Weaver, but Bush's bodyguards eventually caught up with Weaver and banned him from attending future presidential events. The Secret Service, according to Fleischer, had some explaining to do to the new administration, especially when it was learned this same individual had slipped through security and confronted the first President Bush and President Clinton at various times.22 Unauthorized guests have also found their way face-to-face with President Obama at state dinners.23 As it happened, the intruders were just publicity-seeking party crashers, but who is to say the next ones could not be well-trained assassins? The Kennedy legacy ought to produce constant vigilance in the realm of presidential security, but failing memory and human weakness inevitably take their toll.24 President Kennedy's preventable assassination on November 22 proved that we did not take the steps necessary to protect our leader, and we suffered in a thousand ways on account of it. One of the greatest, saddest lessons of JFK's short White House tenure is that there are terrible costs when we fail to imagine and believe the worst could occur at any moment. Everyone is guilty, not least the partisans who would have pointed fingers at an "overprotected" chief executive had the Secret Service requested a major appropriations hike in order to better safeguard JFK. There was a precedent for such criticism. In 1861, Abraham Lincoln had taken reasonable precautions before his inauguration. Rumors of an assassination plot forced him to board a train to Washington disguised as an invalid, guarded by a heavily armed companion. Once in the District he slipped into his hotel by the ladies' entrance. Lincoln was denounced as a coward and mocked for his prudence.25 Kennedy came to power just as inexorable forces in American life were colliding in a way certain to produce social upheaval during his term. Foremost was the civil rights movement. The dream of equality for black Americans could no longer be deferred, yet the clash with deeply rooted traditions of segregation, especially in the South, ensured considerable violence. Just as in the 1860s, the shedding of blood was a precondition for racial justice. An army of racists such as James Earl Ray, convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been gunning for JFK after civil rights legislation passed.

The Cold War had generated deep fears of Communism, especially on the right. Any attempt at compromise, any effort to decrease tensions between East and West was viewed by millions as betrayal. The leaflets distributed in Dallas for Kennedy's visit that bore his photo and the caption WANTED FOR TREASON were just a hint of what might have come. Kennedy had made lasting enemies among an intransigent community of anti-Castro exiles who would never have forgiven him for the Bay of Pigs. Names from this group constantly appear on researchers' lists of possible Kennedy assassins, as do organized crime individuals.

In addition, many in the defense and intelligence establishment, active and retired, eyed Kennedy with great suspicion, dismayed by what they regarded as Kennedy's "weak" response to Cuba and Russia during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. The vast majority of these individuals would never have considered taking violent action against their commander in chief. The elaborate coup d'etat theory of the Kennedy assassination, prominent in Oliver Stone's film JFK, appears especially overwrought. However, rabble-rousers, such as retired General Edwin Walker (Oswald's first assassination target), had thousands of extremist followers whose animus toward Kennedy was visceral; they could have grown to menacing proportions had JFK de-escalated the Vietnam conflict in his second term.

Lyndon Johnson avoided Kennedy's fate for two obvious reasons. First, LBJ benefited from the lessons of the Kennedy assassination. The Secret Service was determined not to lose two presidents in a row, and the agency took security precautions for Johnson that had never been employed for Kennedy. Johnson's first trip out of D.C. after the assassination was to attend the funeral of former New York governor Herbert Lehman. When Air Force One landed at New York's Idlewild Airport on December 8, it was met by police helicopters and uniformed officers standing guard on the roof of the airport hangar and oil storage tanks overlooking the tarmac. Johnson rode to the funeral in a closed limousine escorted by thirty-five police motorcycles and dozens of Secret Service agents. James Rowley, the head of the Secret Service, rode in the motorcade. Two thousand police officers guarded the bridges and highway overpasses along the route. Mrs. Johnson was flown in on a separate plane-possibly at the request of the president-to ensure her safety.26 Just as important, Lyndon Johnson-as controversial as he came to be because of Vietnam and civil rights-was not John Kennedy. There was something about JFK that engendered in many Americans a loathing that was the full equal of the loyalty and love that others had for him. Indeed, this was true of the entire Kennedy family. JFK and his clan had everything-power, wealth, youth, looks, celebrity, style, and a soaring trajectory for the future that might have included a presidential dynasty. In the early 1960s, it was assumed in many quarters that Bobby Kennedy would try to succeed JFK in 1968, with Ted waiting in line to follow Bobby.27 It may even have been true. In the warped minds of some potential assassins, the gun might have been the only way to short-circuit old Joe Kennedy's money and connections before they produced a long line of Kennedys in the White House.

Add it all together: JFK's surfeit of enemies, racial turmoil greater than we had seen since the Civil War era, social upheaval that unsettled millions, the clash between the anticommunist right wing and those willing to negotiate with the Reds, and most of all, a shockingly casual approach to presidential security based on utterly false assumptions. This toxic combination of trends and events made Kennedy appallingly vulnerable, an easy target for murder.

JFK was a marked man. If Lee Harvey Oswald had never been born, if the Texas trip had never been scheduled, John F. Kennedy would still have been in jeopardy every day of his presidency. Given all the factors threatening JFK's safety, even without Dallas, Kennedy would have been very lucky to have been found next to a successor on the inaugural stand come January 20, 1969.

12.