Who KilledWho Killed President Kennedy?
Salisbury, Harrison E.
Who Killed President Kennedy? by HARRISON E. SALISBURY Five days after President Kennedy was assassinated, November 22, 1963, I made a few notations in an occasional diary I keep. From the moment...
...He cites Oswald's statement that he was carrying curtain rods...
...488 and reports both as being "garbled...
...World...
...However, he was also engaged in something which, in the end, has proved most useful...
...For example, no one has examined the slaying of Officer J. D. Tippit more painstakingly than Lane...
...To take one puzzling circumstance...
...I want to quote two paragraphs from what I jotted down because they have a close bearing on what I shall have to say in this review: "I am sure that the echo of this killing will resound down the corridors of our history for years and years and years...
...Not so the works of Epstein and Lane...
...The unanswered questions about how and why Tippit was killed are legion...
...But all the questions as to the purported "discrepancies" should be susceptible to resolution...
...The Viking Press...
...Lane demonstrates that there are several versions of how the officer was killed...
...I will add one warning...
...But nothing in the work of the Warren Commission has foreclosed the possibility of such a fantastic conspiracy...
...Lane has demonstrated, however, that there could have been another assassin...
...Most of us feel that in some way and in some measure by some deed committed, some duty ignored, we contributed to the tragedy of John F. Kennedy's death...
...This possibility was examined by the Warren Commission and rejected...
...no inquiry, re-examination, reassessment of evidence is going to erase from the minds of people in the United States and especially from the minds of those abroad the indelible impression that President Kennedy was 'the victim of an assassination plot much more complex than U.S...
...Neither Lane nor Epstein has found another assassin...
...This reexamination might well prove inconclusive...
...The question of the number of bullets fired and the sequence of wounds is central to almost every challenge to the theory of Oswald as the single assassin...
...I think some of the questions are unfair, some biased, some are "lawyer's questions"—seeming to imply more than the humdrum non-logicality of life will support...
...The Dallas police tape shows that Officer 78 (Tippit's call number) twice tried to reach his dispatcher apparently just before being shot...
...Did Oswald own but four bullets...
...Representative Theodore R. Kupferman of New York has proposed a joint Senate-House Committee to investigate the Warren Commission's work...
...Or three...
...Possibly a re-questioning of all the witnesses who stood in this region would merely add to the confusion...
...The nation no longer lives in the trauma which persisted for months after the President's death...
...The Warren Commission report, far from quenching the flames Inquest, by Edward Jay Epstein...
...The facts of Abraham Lincoln's murder are well known...
...Lane entered the case as a kind of self-appointed gadfly...
...There is precedent for it...
...possibly a reconstruction of the trajectory of a bullet fired from here would neither prove nor disprove the possibility of a shot from the knoll, from behind the fence, or from the overpass...
...Professor Richard H. Popkin of the University of California at San Diego, basing his thesis largely on Epstein's work, has filled the gap by suggesting that there were "two Oswalds," that is, another man looking very much like Oswald was involved in the killing...
...No other cartridges for the weapon were ever found...
...of rumor, has become a principal source—the principal source—of the ever-broadening tide of hypothesis, speculation, guess, and challenge of the verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot and killed the President...
...the choosing of adjectives, the emphasis, the inclusions, and exclusions, the rows, the wrangling...
...He may not always get the right answers...
...As was predicted, all have grown and flowered...
...A good many of the "contradictions" which still concern Sauvage are in reality the byproduct of the publicity-seeking and panic-inspired statements of Dallas officials during the incredible first forty-eight hours after the tragedy...
...As an editor of The New York Times remarked when he read the bulletin announcing the President's death at 1:35 p.m...
...He seeks to demonstrate that the package carried by Oswald to the Depository was too short to have fitted the rifle...
...The Commission was never able to establish the origin of the description...
...Yet, even should that be true this would be as valuable a contribution as might be made toward cleaning the slate of rumor, slander, gossip, and old wives' tales...
...Yet today, one hundred years after his death, the legends of its occurrence are still flowering...
...As Lane and others have noted, the description probably fitted many thousands of young men on the Dallas streets that day...
...That it happened is a stain not alone on the nation, but upon each of our private consciences...
...There could have been two Oswalds...
...Even after another inquiry few of us will feel that the final word has been spoken...
...They may not always be the right questions...
...The Pearl Harbor investigations quickly come to mind...
...I doubt this very much...
...A careful re-examination of the Tippit killing might still leave the police officer's death a mystery...
...Lane is not convinced by the Commission's investigation of the Mann-licher-Carcano rifle, either concerning its necessarily having been fired by Oswald, or that it was the assassination weapon...
...These are serious, thoughtful examinations...
...But I would still like the answers and I think the American public and the world public are entitled to them...
...I do not believe such a theory for a minute...
...A minor point...
...But the procedural flaws open the way to legitimate criticism, attack, and eventual loss of credence...
...This is not to say that a Commission with a more formal approach to investigation and evidence would have arrived at different findings...
...It was born at about 12:30 p.m...
...The question might not be fully resolved by a re-examination of all the doctors, the medical attendants, and the various Secret Service and FBI personnel who were present before, during, and after the autopsies...
...Did Tippit recognize Oswald from the description...
...The Oswald Affair, by Leo Sauv-ge...
...He analyzes a whole series of Commission actions and demonstrates clearly that both in investigation and reasoning the Commission was careless, inadequate, ambiguous, and even occasionally misleading...
...The Warren Commission had good reason to concern itself for the national image, to worry about national morale, to take upon itself the task of damping down rumors...
...The legend of President Kennedy's death began with the crack of the sniper's rifle that took his life...
...Far too many to mention all...
...The legend, the enigma, the Euripedean tragedy of that event have not receded...
...And even if there were no precedent it would be a wholesome air-clearing process...
...Did he have only four in the Depository...
...Rush to Judgment, by Mark Lane...
...It has grown steadily since that moment...
...Lane has made a careful inquiry into what might be called the "grassy knoll" hypothesis...
...Or the only weapon used...
...Epstein makes much of the differences in various medical and autopsy reports about the Kennedy wounds, the bullets, and the Commission thesis that a single bullet wounded both the President and Texas Governor John Con-nally...
...In the early months after the assassination he was striking out in almost every direction, firing off charges, allegations, and denunciations more rapidly than they could be recorded...
...I still hold to that belief...
...It is so strange, so bizarre, so incredible, so susceptible to legend making...
...that day: 'The year 2000 will see men still arguing and writing about the President's death.' " A little more than two years have passed since the Warren Commission delivered its report and those words were written...
...But an understanding of the Tippit killing would eliminate one of the major ancillary mysteries which cluster around the President's death...
...And, strange story though it is, there is not one fact thus far which essentially changes the public story—or makes it any more understandable...
...Lane does not but could raise the same, question about the ammunition for the revolver seized from Oswald when he was arrested...
...There has never been any clear indication of why or how Tippit became involved with Oswald—if, indeed, he did...
...But the revelations cannot fail to erode public confidence in the Commission's conclusions...
...Two transcripts exist of the Dallas police radio tape, one submitted by the Dallas police, a second transcribed and edited by the FBI...
...Nothing can now be done about slipshod logic or efforts to orient the report toward supposed public needs...
...He does not add that no curtain rods were found in the Depository building to bear out Oswald's explanation...
...He documents the obvious fact that the busy prominent citizens who constituted the Commission often were unable to attend its sessions and that, in consequence, the main burdens devolved upon the staff...
...This was broadcast at 12:45 p.m...
...That is past...
...My belief in this explanation was strengthened—not weakened —by the Warren report...
...Or seven...
...I am convinced that Oswald was a psychopath and Ruby a cheap gangster and that these were individual acts...
...5.95...
...None is convincing and most are contradictory...
...And that puzzle leads directly to another which Lane presses with great force: What was the origin of the police broadcast of a description of the assassin: "The wanted person in this is a slender white male about thirty, five feet ten, one-sixty-five, carrying what looked to be a 30-30 or some type of Winchester...
...The first area of questions centers on the Warren Commission, its methods, its omissions, its commissions...
...Allen Dulles, the former CIA head and a member of the Commission, has very reasonably said: "If they've found another assassin, let them name names and produce their evidence...
...He was carrying on single-handedly his own investigation, not only of the assassination but of the Warren inquiry into the assassination...
...In the very first moments a police officer charged his motorcycle up the knoll and scrambled over the fence, presumably in search of the assassin...
...He asks an interesting question: One live round was found in the rifle...
...I began this review by citing my own conviction immediately after the assassination that Oswald was the killer —a lone killer...
...It sounds too much like Uncle Tom's Cabin with two Simon Legrees...
...This is a sound idea and should engage our national attention...
...And with profit...
...But it is no trick to create a hypothesis of something just the opposite...
...Demands for a new official inquiry are beginning to be put forward seriously...
...We are running down every single item of Oswald's background that can be found...
...But the questions raised by Lane deserve an answer—a more complete answer than is provided by the Commission's report...
...Many persons who stood outside the Texas Book Depository and witnessed the shooting thought that the shots came from a grassy knoll or from behind a wooden fence just beyond it about 200 feet southwest of the Depository building and adjacent to the underpass...
...And even if Oswald were an informer it would have no necessary bearing on the assassination or his role in it...
...on November 22, 1963, when the lethal bullet whined toward his body...
...I do not really believe that if we' got all the answers to all the questions we would have a verdict other than the one the Warren Commission presented...
...And the exhaustive, stimulating (and sometimes prejudiced) reinvestigation by Mark Lane in Rush to Judgment establishes half a dozen areas which must be reexamined...
...6.95...
...And it is that knowledge which does not let us rest, which sends us questing on and on for an explanation and an answer which will never be forthcoming...
...Holt, Rinehart & Winston...
...It is not necessary to prove that Oswald killed Tippit to be convinced that he killed the President...
...Nevertheless, there are questions begging for answers...
...418 pp...
...They ask many questions...
...three spent cartridge cases lay on the Depository floor...
...But we owe him a debt of gratitude for his persistence, for his everlasting determination to run down every single seeming discrepancy he can find...
...But this does not invalidate my central thesis: Enough questions have been raised, fairly and squarely, about the assassination, and about the Commission's findings, to warrant a reexamination...
...It is nearly three years since the President's tragic death...
...Lane suggests the same possibility, even hinting that Oswald could have been a patsy or fall guy for the real killer or killers...
...He is still at it, still asking questions, still seeking answers...
...Epstein is very convincing in his demonstration that the Commission by selectivity in citing evidence weakened rather than strengthened credibility...
...authorities ever will admit and with ramifications which lead in curious directions...
...It is going to remain...
...But not all of them...
...Before going into the specifics I may as well also record my absolute conviction that no amount of investigation...
...It matches Lincoln's assassination and may well have equal public effects...
...From the moment of the assassination until the evening of November 27,1 had been so occupied in directing the news coverage for The New York Times that I had not had a moment for reflective thought...
...58 and No...
...Epstein's most devastating criticisms are directed toward the writing of the Commission's report...
...No one can read Epstein (or the critique of Epstein by Fletcher Knebel published in Look) without knowing that the issue of whether or not Oswald was a paid informer of the FBI should be painstakingly re-examined...
...The FBI transcript attributes the calls to No...
...I happen to think it would not have...
...Kennedy's death...
...A reinvestigation, in my opinion, would not produce a single piece of important additional evidence...
...All theories which suggest there was more than one assassin point to this area as the locale of a second rifleman...
...Perhaps...
...This is the area in which Epstein has worked...
...For in each of us there still burns some sense of guilt, some sense of responsibility—personal responsibility and personal guilt—for the President's death...
...There is good reason to believe that for sound police reasons the FBI does not maintain any written record of some categories of informers...
...He suggests that an FBI report was either suppressed or ignored because it did not agree with a Commission hypothesis...
...Yet the police tape would seem to have recorded Tippit's voice a moment before he died...
...And, because he has a lively mind and inexhaustible energy, he has found plenty of them...
...But the point should be settled...
...Lane's section on Jack Ruby notably lacks the careful detail and rechecking to be found in his material on Oswald...
...Ten months later, September 27, 1964, the Warren Commission issued its report on President Kennedy's assassination...
...If not, where were the other bullets...
...The thrust of Mark Lane's book is in a somewhat different direction...
...Writing that day in an introduction of a paperback edition of the Commission report I said: "It seems naive to suppose that the Warren report—comprehensive, careful, compendious, and competent as it is—will provide the final word on Mr...
...But the interesting, shrewd (and sometimes unfair) analysis by Edward Jay Epstein, in Inquest, of the methods, procedures, and internal "checks and balances" within the Warren Commission convinces me that there are questions—some of them of major importance—which must be answered...
...I cannot say that the work of Leo Sauvage, in The Oswald Affair, on what he calls the "contradictions and omissions" of the Warren report is as impressive as the other two bodies of research and analysis...
...Perhaps...
...224 pp...
...Many are pertinent...
...But I would like to see the most painstaking inquiry into each of the principal areas of doubt...
...478 pp...
...That impression has been tattooed on the world mind...
...But today and tomorrow the sole criteria of an inquiry should be the truth —every element of it that can be obtained—and a frank facing of unresolved and unresolvable dilemmas...
...This is not to say that all of Lane's points are necessarily valid...
Vol. 30 • November 1966 • No. 11
