Puzzles Surround Kennedy Assassinations

There was one really incredible moment at the Politics of Conspiracy Conference held at Boston University last month. The capacity crowd in the Morse Auditorium was watching the Zapruder film--spectator Abraham Zapruder's home movie of President Kennedy's motorcade through Dallas on November 22, 1963--hot a new experience for most of the conspiracy buffs in the audience.

This was, however, an extraordinarily clear print of the film documenting the assassination. A few seconds after Kennedy is shot, as his car begins to pick up speed, a man aiming a rifle at the limousine appears in one of the frames, number 413. Although it is impossible to see him at normal film speed, or even when just viewing the single frame, a blow up enlarging the corner of the frame to the size of the entire screen shows clearly that the rifleman is no illusion. He appears to be in a prone position, wearing a small hat. We are almost directly in back of him, slightly to his left, as if to be looking over his shoulder.

Save for the organizers of the conference, the Cambridge-based Assassination Information Bureau, and a few selected assassination experts, none of those present had ever seen the man with the gun, despite the fact that many of them had viewed the film literally hundreds of times. This was brought home by the unanimous gasp of horror as the frame with the gunman dominated the screen. He had apparently remained unnoticed by the Warren Commission as well, although it had held the film as evidence while making its inquest. According to filmmaker Robert Groden, the unidentified gunman was just spotted earlier this year with the aid of a computer blow-up technique.

The man with the rifle shows up only seconds after the film of the president being shot seems to demonstrate, from the backward jerk of his head and body, that the bullet or bullets which killed him came from in front of the car, perhaps precisely from the spot--known to students of the assassination as the "grassy knoll"--where the man with the rifle is situated. Lee Harvey Oswald, of course, supposedly shot President Kennedy from in back of him, out of a window in the Texas School Book Depository. The filmed evidence of the actual shooting, which certainly seems to make it questionable that Oswald fired the fatal shots, is old material. The man aiming the rifle at the car, just discovered, compounds the likelihood of Oswald's innocence, and challenges Warren Commission's claim to have conducted a serious investigation.

This showing of the Zapruder film was certainly the high point of the conference in that it was convincing enough to give the entire event some legitimacy, and afford it some protection from charges of conspiracy, paranoia and opportunism--charges which are frequently leveled at assassination researchers. Not that everything said at the three-day extravaganza at B.U., which also dealt with the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. among other subjects, rang true, or even made sense. In fact, a great deal of what was said was totally incoherent. But the Zapruder film raises problems which cannot be resolved without a new investigation.

***

Mark Lane is a lawyer, a former New York politician, who represented Lee Harvey Oswald's interests posthumously before the Warren Commission. He is the author of Rush to Judgment, an attack on the Commission, and is one of the oldest and most established researchers into the J.F.K. assassination. Lane has said that asking "Who killed John F. Kennedy?" is simply another way of asking "What went wrong with America?". And indeed this does appear to be a motivating question for many assassination analysts, which may explain why solid, apparently incontrovertible evidence, like the blow up of the Zapruder film, is submerged beneath a mass of nonsensical and distorted material. For example, immediately after the showing of the film, as the participants in the conference were introducing themselves, one of them. Penn Jones, a newspaperman who has devoted the last ten years of his life to tracing what became of the witnesses to the J.F.K. assassination, made an announcement: he knew that Adlai Stevenson had been murdered in London, another victim of a massive, as yet unidentified conspiracy.

Just as it was impossible for the Warren Commission to conduct a complete investigation of the events in Dallas because it operated with the preconceived notion that Oswald was the assassin, individual researchers are also limited at the outset if they assume, without any substantive documentation, that they are going to uncover a conspiracy which led America down the road to national tragedy.

Lane is far from the worst offender. He has proven himself to be a painstaking and careful researcher, posing extremely provocative questions: Why did the FBI tell Harcourt, Brace, and World that it didn't want Rush to Judgment published?. Why did Victor Marchetti, former CIA agent and present investigator of the organization tell a journalist who had covered the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans that the CIA was very interested in the case because Shaw was a high ranking CIA operative? (Shaw was a New Orleans businessman accused by city District Attorney Jim Garrison of conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy. He was eventually acquitted and Garrison himself became the target of a federal corruption Investigation.)

These are only several examples of the type of legitimate unresolved questions, raised by Lane and others, related to the assassination of President Kennedy, which point to conspiracy. But before any conclusions are drawn, the questions must be answered. But when Mark Lane participates in a panel discussion with someone like Boston radio personality Mae Brussel, giving the weight of his presence to her completely unsupported allegation that the SLA kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the death of J. Edgar Hoover--which she terms murder--and the events of November 22, 1963, are all linked, he minimizes the credibility of his own work.

The evidence for reopening the John F. Kennedy case is very compelling. Aside from the Zapruder film, the coincidences and unanswered questions relating to the assassination and the Warren Commission investigation are almost too numerous to keep track of. From the untimely deaths of numerous witnesses, to the spiriting off of Oswald's mother by Dallas police for three days after the assassination, until after her son was killed, the circumstances surrounding the murder of the president are rife with mystery. A motorcycle policeman who was part of the president's escort and told a number of people, including reporters, that he saw Kennedy hit in the face by a bullet, was never called to testify by the Warren Commission.

As example of how the commission did work when ostensibly investigating, we have the interrogation of Jack Ruby. Earl Warren and then-Congressman Gerald R. Ford went to the Dallas jail in which Ruby was imprisoned after shooting Oswald and asked whether he had any information to impart to the commission. Ruby replied that he had a great deal to say, but that he would only testify in Washington, afraid that if he talked while in the very jail in which he killed Oswald, his own life would he in danger. After refusing to transport Ruby to Washington, despite the fact that the commission had the legal right to do so. Warren and Ford departed. While they were in Dallas, Ruby told them that he had information which could change the entire course of their investigation and point to a wide conspiracy. Why did Warren and Ford ignore Ruby? Wouldn't common sense dictate that an individual so obviously involved in the case be thoroughly investigated? Was Warren, as Ruby later said, "a very naive man," or did the commission deliberately and carefully pick and choose its evidence? What did Ruby mean when he told the two public officials, as they were leaving, that they would see the emergence of an entirely new form of government, if they did not uncover the truth about the assassination.

Though Gerald R. Ford may have been too dense to realize the importance, potentially at least, of getting Ruby to testify, he was astute enough to publish classified Warren Commission information for personal profit in his book Oswald: Portrait of an Assassin, despite the fact that he was sworn to secrecy. Ford did not, it should be noted, have any trouble getting his book published due to his position on the assassination, while simultaneously all the networks prohibited coverage of dissenting opinions and edited their programs on the subject to conform with the findings of the commission.

Another participant in the Politics of Conspiracy Conference was freelance journalist Ted Charach, a student of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Charach contends that, although Sirhan Sirhan did fire his gun in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel on the morning of June 5, 1968, Kennedy was in fact killed by a bullet from a second gun, placed directly in back of the Senator while Sirhan struck a pose in front of him, and with wild shots and dramatic gestures drew attention to himself. Sirhan, according to a psychiatric study done while he was in police custody, is extremely susceptible to hypnosis. This coincides with the statement of writer George Plimpton, an eyewitness to the assassination, that Sirhan appeared to be in a "trance" as he fired. Charach's theory would have Sirhan a dupe of the real assassin or assassins.

Charach's primary source of evidence is the report of Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi that Kennedy was killed by a gun not more than three inches from the back of his head. Not only did Sirhan fire from in front of Kennedy, but all witnesses said that he was never closer to the Senator than three feet.

Charach has produced a full-length movie. "The Second Gun," in which he seeks to prove from the testimony of eyewitnesses that another gun was drawn and fired in the Ambassador kitchen. His suspect is a former hotel security guard, an avowed right-winger who believed that John F. Kennedy "sold us out to the Russians" and that his brother would have done the same, if elected. The guard admitted having owned a gun of the same caliber as the one which apparently killed Kennedy but claimed to have sold it six months before. Charach demonstrates that he sold it in September, 1968, one month after the assassination. Since last year, the guard has disappeared.

Though Charach's evidence is certainly less substantive than the material in the J.F.K. case, he does show fairly well that the likelihood of Sirhan having acted alone is very small. Who was the woman in the polka-dot dress who appears in photographs of the assassination scene, and who was identified as having been seen with Sirhan earlier in the week? Who is the man who mounts the platform as Kennedy is concluding his victory speech, looks around cautiously, signals to someone in the audience, and then departs? No one in the Kennedy entourage could identify him, security around the senator was very tight, and it was possible to identify everyone else on the platform. The man who, like the woman in the polka-dot dress has never been traced, had a pencil line moustache, as did a man who witnesses saw with Sirhan, also earlier that week.

The Los Angeles district attorney's office has adamantly refused to reopen the Sirhan case despite the district attorney's personal admission that the gun which supposedly killed Kennedy had been tampered with while held as evidence.

This is an auspicious time for reopening the Kennedy assassination cases. The investigations of the CIA and the FBI for illegal practices have created an atmosphere conducive to new inquiries centering on the unanswered questions surrounding the events in Dallas and Los Angeles. Lane's goal is to turn the assassination question into the dominant issue in the 1976 national campaign. He would like to see the development of a broadly-based movement which would force all candidates to address themselves to the questions he and his fellow researchers have posed. At this point, it seems highly unlikely that Lane will achieve this goal.

***

It does matter who killed John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, simply because a great deal might have been different if they had lived. The motives of the assassins, the reasons for any coverups which might have existed, are not important merely because they would satisfy basic human curiosity. Perhaps the answers to these questions can also help us to understand the sources of power in America.

Possibly no pervasive conspiracy existed, and the gray areas surrounding each of these murders, as well as that of Martin Luther King Jr. are entirely independent. The answers are important nonetheless.

No mass movement to learn the truth about the assassination of the 60s will emerge, in part because it may well be too late to arouse sufficient interest. The mysteries are already beginning to take on the same character for many people as questions like "What ever happened to Amelia Earhart?". In addition, the integration of serious research and solid evidence with pure fantasy has weakened the appeal of many legitimate investigators. But it may be possible to compel Congress to reopen the cases, just by the weight of evidence already uncovered. One Congressman, Texas Democrat Henry Gonzales, has already called for such a step. This should be the primary objective of all researchers. Independent investigations can only pose the questions. If some form of a real resolution is at all possible, it will only come from an investigation that has the cooperation of members of the national government, and the use of its resources.