Deja Vu

July 24, 2008

Magic Bullets and Grassy Knolls

Tags:

assassination,

conspiracy theories,

Dallas,

John F. Kennedy,

murder,

Texas

“Nov. 22, 1963,” The Washington Post, July 24, 2008.

Max Holland, who appears to be coherent, is in his book-lined study, just off the kitchen in his house in Silver Spring. He's going over the Zapruder film. Again. And again. And . . .

Birds are chirping outside. The sun is out. Inside, it's dark, quiet among the filing cabinets.

He's been at work on his book about the Warner Commission investigation into President Kennedy's assassination for 12 years.

For. Twelve. Years.

And right here -- in just the fifth paragraph! -- you already have the overwhelming desire to take him by the collar and shout: Max!!! Buddy!!! SNAP OUT OF IT!!! Abort, abort! Entire human beings have disappeared in Dealey Plaza!! It's the Bermuda Triangle of pop culture! But he's saying, "Now, you see right here . . . "

“The Buffs,” by Calvin Trillin, The New Yorker, June 10, 1967.

Josiah Thompson is an assistant professor of philosophy at Haverford College, near Philadelphia. He graduated from Yale, Phi Beta Kappa, ten years ago; served two years as a naval officer (in 1958, when the Marines landed in Lebanon, he commanded the frogman detachment charged with beach reconnaissance); spent a year in Denmark, doing research in the works of the philosopher who has become his specialty, Sören Kierkegaard; and returned to Yale to complete his doctorate. At Haverford, he teaches courses in the Philosophy of Existence and the Phenomenology of Existence plus an introductory philosophy course; his dissertation, a study of Kierkegaard called “The Lonely Labyrinth,” is scheduled to be published by a university press this year. A boyish-looking young man whose friends call him Tink, he lives on the top floor of an old house on the Haverford campus with a wife, two small children, and perhaps the only complete set of Kierkegaard first editions in the United States. He is an authority on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Thompson has learned to use an Abney level, a tool invaluable in measuring angles, including the trajectories of bullets, and he has gone to Dallas, stood on Elm Street, early on Sunday morning when the traffic is light, and measured the angle from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Like many other academics, he has published a letter in the New York Review of Books that both commented on a review and displayed a vast and esoteric knowledge; in his case, the comment was on a review of assassination books by Richard Popkin, another philosophy professor and lay authority on the assassination, and the knowledge displayed was of pathology and ballistics as they relate to the course and impact of a 6.5-millimetre bullet. Although his interest in firearms had never extended past what he was required to learn in the Navy, he now owns a display board of the various types of bullets that could have theoretically been used in the assassination, and a rifle of the type Oswald was said to have used, so that he can personally get some idea of how its bolt operates. He may refer casually to the frames of amateur motion pictures taken during the assassination as “Zapruder 313” or “Nix 24,” and he sometimes calls the Texas School Book Depository the T.S.B.D. He is conversant with the technicalities of photographic development and refinement. “It’s just like scholarship,” he said recently. “There are good scholars and bad scholars. There are even analytical scholars and inductive scholars. But the marvellous thing about it is that there are no credentials. There’s no Ph.D. in the assassination. It’s pure scholarship. You have to make your own credentials.”

Thompson is quick to point out that in the community of assassination scholars he is a newcomer; he has been working on the case steadily for only a little over a year, which means that he is far from what the others sometimes call “a first-generation critic.” The first-generation critics began to devote most of their spare time to the assassination on November 22, 1963. Within a few weeks, Vincent Salandria, a lawyer in Philadelphia, had built a file of newspaper stories that contained references to any police agencies that had been involved. Raymond Marcus—who lives in Los Angeles and was, at the time of the assassination, running a small business for the distribution of “Keep off the Grass” and other household signs to retail stores—began a newspaper file to keep track of the changing theories about where the bullets came from. Anything that appeared about the assassination in the New York Times, among other papers, was being saved by Marjorie Field, the wife of a prosperous Beverly Hills stockbroker, and by Sylvia Meagher, a researcher at the World Health Organization in New York. By the first week in February, Shirley Martin, a housewife who then lived in Hominy, Oklahoma, had driven to Dallas with her four children to interview witnesses. Lillian Castellano, a Los Angeles bookkeeper who thought that reports on the wounds indicated that the President must have been hit from the front, had studied a picture of the Dealey Plaza area, discovered what seemed to be a strategically placed storm drain in front of the motorcade, and called that fact to the attention of a local news commentator, the Los Angeles Times, the Warren Commission, and anyone else she could think of who might be investigating what had happened….

President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, 1964.

This Commission was created to ascertain the facts relating to the preceding summary of events and to consider the important questions which they raised. The Commission has addressed itself to this task and has reached certain conclusions based on all the available evidence. No limitations have been placed on the Commission's inquiry; it has conducted its own investigation, and all Government agencies have fully discharged their responsibility to cooperate with the Commission in its investigation. These conclusions represent the reasoned judgment of all members of the Commission and are presented after an investigation which has satisfied the Commission that it: has ascertained the truth concerning the assassination of President Kennedy to the extent that a prolonged and thorough search makes this possible.

1. The shots which killed President Kennedy and wounded Governor Connally were fired from the sixth floor window at the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository. This determination is based upon the following:

* (a) Witnesses at the scene of the assassination saw a rifle being fired from the sixth floor window of the Depository Building, and some witnesses saw a rifle in the window immediately after the shots were fired.

* (b) The nearly whole bullet found on Governor Connally's stretcher at Parkland Memorial Hospital and the two bullet fragments found in the front seat of the Presidential limousine were fired from the 6.5- millimeter Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found on the sixth floor of the Depository Building to the exclusion of all other weapons.

* (c) The three used cartridge cases found near the window on the sixth floor at the southeast corner of the building were fired from the same rifle which fired the above-described bullet and fragments, to the exclusion of all other weapons.

* (d) The windshield in the Presidential limousine was struck by a bullet fragment on the inside surface of the glass, but was not penetrated.

* (e) The nature of the bullet wounds suffered by President Kennedy and Governor Connally and the location of the car at the time of the shots establish that the bullets were fired from above and behind the Presidential limousine, striking the President and the Governor as follows:

1. President Kennedy was first struck by a bullet which entered at the back of his neck and exited through the lower front portion of his neck, causing a wound which would not necessarily have been lethal. The President was struck a second time by a bullet which entered the right-rear portion of his head, causing a massive and fatal wound.
2. Governor Connally was struck by a bullet which entered on the right side of his back and traveled downward through the right side of his chest, exiting below his right nipple. This bullet then passed through his right wrist and entered his left thigh where it caused a superficial wound.

* (f)There is no credible evidence that the shots were fired from the Triple Underpass, ahead of the motorcade, or from any other location.

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