Tales from JFK’s ‘kill zone’
November 26, 2006 | 12:00am
It was an eerie feeling that came over me as I stood on the grassy knoll overlooking the road where John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot in an open Lincoln limousine in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
There were two X marks on the asphalt, indicating the exact spots where the bullets from alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle struck Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally. Historians call it the "kill zone."
I looked up at the sniper’s nest from my vantage point. Oswald fired the shots from the east window of a storeroom on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, now the Dallas County Administration Building, at the corner of Houston and Elm streets.
I replayed the sequence in my mind from accounts in the media. I remembered that there were six passengers in the limousine – Kennedy and wife Jacqueline, Connally and wife Nellie, Secret Service driver William Greer and, beside him, another Secret Service agent, Roy Kellerman. The stretch car had three rows – Greer and Kellerman were in the first row, the Connallys in the second and the Kennedys in the third.
The shooting happened at 12:30 in the afternoon. The street was lined by well-wishers. Motorcycle policemen escorted the limousine along the downtown route. The Kennedys arrived at Love Field in Dallas from Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth on the presidential jet, Air Force One, at 11:22 a.m.
Kennedy flew to Texas on a mission to cement relations with the state’s Democratic Party and to raise political support for the 1964 election.
For some reason, the car slowed down to under five miles per hour when it approached the "kill zone" a few meters away from a triple underpass. Kennedy was shot in the throat, below the Adam’s apple, and in the head, through the right temple. The bullet that exited at the back of his head literally blew his brains out. A skull fragment hung in front of his right ear. The exit wound was measured to be more than two inches in diameter. A policeman close to the action, Bobby Hargis, was splattered with Kennedy’s blood and brain matter.
Mrs. Kennedy climbed onto the trunk of the limousine to retrieve a piece of the president’s head. She held on to the piece until handing it over to Dr. Marlon Jenkins when Kennedy was admitted at Parkland Memorial Hospital, about 3 1/2 miles from the depository. The limousine sped at 80 miles per hour to reach the hospital – rated then as one of the 25 best in the United States – in only five minutes. Kennedy was pronounced dead a half an hour after the shooting.
Oswald, a depository employee, was arrested at 2 p.m. on the day of the assassination in a downtown movie theater as a suspect in the murder of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit who was killed less than an hour after the attack on Kennedy. He would later be charged with killing Kennedy. Two days after the assassination, Oswald was silenced forever by nightclub owner Jack Ruby who shot the former Marine on live national TV. Ruby allegedly had links to gangsters. He was convicted for murder and was sentenced to death but died of cancer in jail in 1967.
When I visited the assassination site, it was a quiet Sunday morning and there were more hawkers of Kennedy memorabilia than customers. Across the street from the depository was a collage of newspaper clippings about the assassination on a large cartolina, the work of a Kennedy fan. By the side of the grassy knoll near a stockade fence were peddlers of Kennedy books, souvenirs and mementos. A TV crew was nearby filming a Kennedy chronicler who sells reproduced clippings of newspaper articles, DVDs, books and magazines related to the assassination.
I thought to myself that 43 years after Kennedy’s death, there was still considerable interest in the event that shocked the world – not just because the president was a symbol of democracy in the world but also because the crime has never been satisfactorily solved. Kennedy was a cult figure in his time, blazing the trail for a "New Frontier" of freedom. As I stood on the steps of the depository building, I imagined how on that fateful day, the building became a landmark that is now a reminder of a dastardly deed.
The sixth floor of the depository has been converted into a museum where adult visitors pay a $10 admission fee or $13.50 with an audio hook-up (in seven languages) to replay the sequence of the assassination. The museum is open every day each year, except on Christmas, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
I happened to be in town for the television coverage of the National Basketball Association (NBA) finals last June and a friend, Mario Whitmire, a Dallas resident who is married to a Filipina, took me to Dealey Plaza which is the junction at Elm and Houston leading to Stemmons Freeway. I was in grade school when Kennedy was murdered but I knew enough about the 35th US president to want to visit the place where he was shot.
What bothered me as I imagined the havoc on the streets over 40 years ago was the fact that nothing conclusive has ever been established in determining why Kennedy was killed and who masterminded it. Obviously, Oswald was a fall guy and to this day, the consensus is that he wasn’t the only gunman involved, contrary to the findings of the Warren Commission in 1964.
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, created the Warren Commission to investigate the facts of the assassination. The Commission’s mandate was not necessarily to solve the crime but to quell rumors of a widespread conspiracy. Chief Justice Earl Warren submitted the commission report to Johnson after a 10-month period of study. Two of the Commission members were Michigan Congressman and later US president Gerald Ford and former Central Investigation Agency (CIA) director Allen Dulles.
The Commission concluded that Oswald was the lone gunman and a single bullet had caused seven separate wounds on Kennedy and Connally, passing from one to another. The report created more confusion and controversy as it appeared to be a grand cover-up. "The fact that the wound trajectories and angles never line up did not deter the commission and its defenders from relying on this fiction to explain their myth of a lone assassin," wrote Robert Groden in JFK: The Case for Conspiracy.
In 1979 or 15 years after the Warren Commission turned in its findings, the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations released a report reversing the Commission’s conclusions, stating that there was a 99 percent or greater probability that the murder was the result of a conspiracy.
Examination of film footage taken by amateurs and professionals during the shooting revealed that it was impossible for one gunman to shoot Kennedy and Connally from a single spot. Wounds indicated the shots were fired by a gunman from behind the car and another assassin hidden on the grassy knoll. Apparently, at least three shots were fired and Oswald couldn’t have possibly shot thrice from his rifle within a matter of seconds.
Believe it or not, since the Kennedy assassination, there have been more than 400 deaths of witnesses to the killing, witnesses to Oswald’s activities, Ruby’s associates and those involved in the medical procedures at Parkland and the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Many questionable deaths were curiously never investigated.
For instance, New York reporter Dorothy Kilgallen was mysteriously found dead a few days after conducting an exclusive interview with Ruby in jail. She said she would break the assassination mystery wide open with her story but it was never published. Her files disappeared and medical examiner Dr. James Luke said he could not determine if her death was the result of murder.
Another example was Lee Bowers, an eyewitness to the shooting. Bowers saw two men standing on top of the grassy knoll communicating with another man in a car at the back of the stockade fence, talking into a radio. When the commotion started, Bowers said there appeared to be smoke or a quick flash of light from where the two men stood. Bowers died a few months later when the car he was driving crashed into a bridge abutment. The pathologist said Bowers was in a state of "strange physical shock" at the time of the accident.
According to Groden, Kennedy made a lot of enemies during his 1,000 days as Chief Executive. He was at odds with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the CIA because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and his refusal to launch another attempt to invade Cuba, the military for his stand on ending the Vietnam War and elements of big business. With brother Robert as Attorney General, the President had declared war against organized crime and mobsters were increasingly agitated by government moves to close their operations. So a conspiracy theory involving any of those groups could have been hatched to eliminate Kennedy because he was such a thorn in their sides.
The records show that a month before the assassination, Kennedy signed the National Security Action Memorandum calling for a total withdrawal of US troops from South Vietnam. Four days after the killing and on his first working day as new head of state, Johnson signed another security memorandum countermanding Kennedy’s withdrawal order. Groden claims if Kennedy had not been killed, 58,000 American lives and $220 billion in tax money would have been saved by stopping the US escalation in Vietnam.
A few years ago, the Assassination Records Review Board released a report after three years of studying the findings of the Warren Commission, the House Committee on Assassinations and every government agency that has records relating to the murder. The Board disclosed that the brain examined for the official autopsy report was not Kennedy’s and some of the autopsy photographs were forged. It was speculated that the brain was replaced because the location of the wounds would prove there had to be more than one gunman in the assassination.
Will the Kennedy murder ever be solved?
There were two X marks on the asphalt, indicating the exact spots where the bullets from alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle struck Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally. Historians call it the "kill zone."
I looked up at the sniper’s nest from my vantage point. Oswald fired the shots from the east window of a storeroom on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, now the Dallas County Administration Building, at the corner of Houston and Elm streets.
I replayed the sequence in my mind from accounts in the media. I remembered that there were six passengers in the limousine – Kennedy and wife Jacqueline, Connally and wife Nellie, Secret Service driver William Greer and, beside him, another Secret Service agent, Roy Kellerman. The stretch car had three rows – Greer and Kellerman were in the first row, the Connallys in the second and the Kennedys in the third.
The shooting happened at 12:30 in the afternoon. The street was lined by well-wishers. Motorcycle policemen escorted the limousine along the downtown route. The Kennedys arrived at Love Field in Dallas from Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth on the presidential jet, Air Force One, at 11:22 a.m.
Kennedy flew to Texas on a mission to cement relations with the state’s Democratic Party and to raise political support for the 1964 election.
For some reason, the car slowed down to under five miles per hour when it approached the "kill zone" a few meters away from a triple underpass. Kennedy was shot in the throat, below the Adam’s apple, and in the head, through the right temple. The bullet that exited at the back of his head literally blew his brains out. A skull fragment hung in front of his right ear. The exit wound was measured to be more than two inches in diameter. A policeman close to the action, Bobby Hargis, was splattered with Kennedy’s blood and brain matter.
Mrs. Kennedy climbed onto the trunk of the limousine to retrieve a piece of the president’s head. She held on to the piece until handing it over to Dr. Marlon Jenkins when Kennedy was admitted at Parkland Memorial Hospital, about 3 1/2 miles from the depository. The limousine sped at 80 miles per hour to reach the hospital – rated then as one of the 25 best in the United States – in only five minutes. Kennedy was pronounced dead a half an hour after the shooting.
Oswald, a depository employee, was arrested at 2 p.m. on the day of the assassination in a downtown movie theater as a suspect in the murder of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit who was killed less than an hour after the attack on Kennedy. He would later be charged with killing Kennedy. Two days after the assassination, Oswald was silenced forever by nightclub owner Jack Ruby who shot the former Marine on live national TV. Ruby allegedly had links to gangsters. He was convicted for murder and was sentenced to death but died of cancer in jail in 1967.
When I visited the assassination site, it was a quiet Sunday morning and there were more hawkers of Kennedy memorabilia than customers. Across the street from the depository was a collage of newspaper clippings about the assassination on a large cartolina, the work of a Kennedy fan. By the side of the grassy knoll near a stockade fence were peddlers of Kennedy books, souvenirs and mementos. A TV crew was nearby filming a Kennedy chronicler who sells reproduced clippings of newspaper articles, DVDs, books and magazines related to the assassination.
I thought to myself that 43 years after Kennedy’s death, there was still considerable interest in the event that shocked the world – not just because the president was a symbol of democracy in the world but also because the crime has never been satisfactorily solved. Kennedy was a cult figure in his time, blazing the trail for a "New Frontier" of freedom. As I stood on the steps of the depository building, I imagined how on that fateful day, the building became a landmark that is now a reminder of a dastardly deed.
The sixth floor of the depository has been converted into a museum where adult visitors pay a $10 admission fee or $13.50 with an audio hook-up (in seven languages) to replay the sequence of the assassination. The museum is open every day each year, except on Christmas, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
What bothered me as I imagined the havoc on the streets over 40 years ago was the fact that nothing conclusive has ever been established in determining why Kennedy was killed and who masterminded it. Obviously, Oswald was a fall guy and to this day, the consensus is that he wasn’t the only gunman involved, contrary to the findings of the Warren Commission in 1964.
Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, created the Warren Commission to investigate the facts of the assassination. The Commission’s mandate was not necessarily to solve the crime but to quell rumors of a widespread conspiracy. Chief Justice Earl Warren submitted the commission report to Johnson after a 10-month period of study. Two of the Commission members were Michigan Congressman and later US president Gerald Ford and former Central Investigation Agency (CIA) director Allen Dulles.
The Commission concluded that Oswald was the lone gunman and a single bullet had caused seven separate wounds on Kennedy and Connally, passing from one to another. The report created more confusion and controversy as it appeared to be a grand cover-up. "The fact that the wound trajectories and angles never line up did not deter the commission and its defenders from relying on this fiction to explain their myth of a lone assassin," wrote Robert Groden in JFK: The Case for Conspiracy.
Examination of film footage taken by amateurs and professionals during the shooting revealed that it was impossible for one gunman to shoot Kennedy and Connally from a single spot. Wounds indicated the shots were fired by a gunman from behind the car and another assassin hidden on the grassy knoll. Apparently, at least three shots were fired and Oswald couldn’t have possibly shot thrice from his rifle within a matter of seconds.
Believe it or not, since the Kennedy assassination, there have been more than 400 deaths of witnesses to the killing, witnesses to Oswald’s activities, Ruby’s associates and those involved in the medical procedures at Parkland and the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Many questionable deaths were curiously never investigated.
For instance, New York reporter Dorothy Kilgallen was mysteriously found dead a few days after conducting an exclusive interview with Ruby in jail. She said she would break the assassination mystery wide open with her story but it was never published. Her files disappeared and medical examiner Dr. James Luke said he could not determine if her death was the result of murder.
Another example was Lee Bowers, an eyewitness to the shooting. Bowers saw two men standing on top of the grassy knoll communicating with another man in a car at the back of the stockade fence, talking into a radio. When the commotion started, Bowers said there appeared to be smoke or a quick flash of light from where the two men stood. Bowers died a few months later when the car he was driving crashed into a bridge abutment. The pathologist said Bowers was in a state of "strange physical shock" at the time of the accident.
According to Groden, Kennedy made a lot of enemies during his 1,000 days as Chief Executive. He was at odds with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the CIA because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and his refusal to launch another attempt to invade Cuba, the military for his stand on ending the Vietnam War and elements of big business. With brother Robert as Attorney General, the President had declared war against organized crime and mobsters were increasingly agitated by government moves to close their operations. So a conspiracy theory involving any of those groups could have been hatched to eliminate Kennedy because he was such a thorn in their sides.
The records show that a month before the assassination, Kennedy signed the National Security Action Memorandum calling for a total withdrawal of US troops from South Vietnam. Four days after the killing and on his first working day as new head of state, Johnson signed another security memorandum countermanding Kennedy’s withdrawal order. Groden claims if Kennedy had not been killed, 58,000 American lives and $220 billion in tax money would have been saved by stopping the US escalation in Vietnam.
A few years ago, the Assassination Records Review Board released a report after three years of studying the findings of the Warren Commission, the House Committee on Assassinations and every government agency that has records relating to the murder. The Board disclosed that the brain examined for the official autopsy report was not Kennedy’s and some of the autopsy photographs were forged. It was speculated that the brain was replaced because the location of the wounds would prove there had to be more than one gunman in the assassination.
Will the Kennedy murder ever be solved?
BrandSpace Articles
<
>