The Lone Gunman
Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy. End of Story.
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Two extensive investigations of the assassination have been conducted by the United States government—the Warren Commission in 1964 and the HSCA in 1978. Both concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from the sixth floor of the depository, one of which wounded both the president and then–Texas governor John Connally, one of which hit the president in the head, and one of which missed entirely. However, the Warren Commissiom was unable to establish the order of the shots. Setting the record straight about the order of the shots is by far the most important contribution of independent research to the history of the assassination. Jim Moore of Hillsboro was the first to assert that the first shot missed, the second wounded the president and the governor, and the third and final shot struck the president’s head. Governor Connally always insisted that he had heard a shot before the one that wounded him, and it turns out he was right. The Warren Commission proved that the so-called magic bullet found in good condition on Governor Connally’s stretcher in Parkland Memorial Hospital after the shooting came from Oswald’s rifle to the exclusion of all other rifles. The HSCA, using neutron-activation analysis, another technological advance not available to the Warren Commission, proved that bullet fragments from the governor’s body came from the magic bullet and no other. Thus there is an unbroken string of physical evidence, evidence that does not rely on the sometimes mistaken, contradictory, or changing testimony from eyewitnesses, that goes from (1) bullet fragments in a victim’s body to (2) the bullet itself to (3) the rifle that fired the bullet to (4) Oswald’s palm print on the rifle to (5) Oswald’s handprint on the brown paper that wrapped the “curtain rods” he carried to work that day to (6) the photograph of Oswald holding the rifle to (7) Oswald’s post office box where the gun had been delivered to (8) Oswald’s original written order form for the gun. Whatever else did or did not happen that November day, Oswald shot the president.
It’s true that the HSCA also found there was a 95 percent chance that a fourth shot had come from behind the grassy knoll and missed. If there was a second sniper, there must have been a conspiracy. But the committee based this conclusion on an acoustic analysis of a tape from a police motorcycle that it believed contained sounds of Dealey Plaza during the assassination. Subsequently, no investigative body, including a committee of experts convened by the National Research Council, has been able to duplicate this result from the same data. Instead they proved that the tape did not record evidence of any shots and, in any event, did not begin until after the third shot had hit the president and his limousine was speeding away. This complicated science is consistent with simple logic. If a sniper had shot from behind the grassy knoll and missed, the bullet must have gone into the crowd of people watching the motorcade on the other side of Elm Street. Yet no one there was wounded, nor did anyone feel, see, or hear a bullet. And, despite careful searches, no bullet has ever been found.
The Warren Commission made other mistakes besides the order of the shots. It allowed the CIA and the FBI to investigate themselves, and both agencies withheld information. The commission never discovered that the CIA had repeatedly plotted to murder Castro, including plots with gangsters, which could have given both Castro and the mob a motive to murder the president. The FBI kept secret the extent of the agency’s contact with Oswald. Jack Ruby had more extensive mob contacts than the commission believed. But its errors were minor compared with all it got right. In particular, realizing that the same bullet had wounded both Kennedy and Connally, which seems implausible at first glance, was a great intellectual achievement that has since been borne out by scientific techniques unavailable to the commission in 1964. The worst libel about the commission is that it was a rubber stamp to prop up the theory that Oswald alone had murdered the president so that the real killers could escape. Think what you want about commission members such as Gerald Ford or Allen Dulles or even Earl Warren himself, the staff of the commission who did the actual investigations were energetic, determined, and talented young men who had distinguished careers afterward. Several had been fervent supporters of Kennedy and worked on his campaign. David Slawson, who was an assistant counsel for the commission and who is now a professor of law at the University of Southern California, told me, “We were all hoping like hell to find a plot, to find something that would lead us to the real killers. It would have made us heroes. We would have been the ones to solve the crime of the century.” But they found nothing to prove that anyone but Oswald was involved.
Which does not mean there was nothing to find, that somewhere in the bowels of the FBI or the CIA or the KGB, which all spawned secret plots in those days, was evidence of the most evil secret plot of all. And it’s easy to believe there must have been such a plot, that it would take a trained army of evil, not just one little evil squirt, to obliterate the golden president, husband, and father. And here is where the assassination still divides the country. Those who believe in a conspiracy are refusing to accept the word of what to them is a corrupt government and a corrupt society where a shadowy “they” are in control. To search for the conspiracy is to root out the truth and expose the guilty, whose ruthless power and greed, threatened by Kennedy, is the reason for all the country’s problems.
To believe Oswald was the lone assassin is to believe the clear evidence, however mundane it might be. It is to believe that those who insist on conspiracy are adding to the general confusion, leading innocent people astray, unjustly undermining confidence in the structure of the country, and that unwarrented confusion is the reason for all our problems. For me, until ghosts are proved to be real, it is far better to accept the clear and certain evidence and move on.
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