I think the facts of the assassination of President Kennedy are really very clear. It takes only time, persistence and attention to detail, a careful perusal of the Warren Commission testimonies of key persons, the Zapruder Film (especially), together with the five or six videos of the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald that exist. Then all should eventually come into focus clearly. Needless to say, we can come to a more complete knowledge of the facts behind this 1963 crime from more use of these same sources. At some point, anyone who comes to a clear and real understanding will have surpassed the “experts” who claim to understand much but have not understood the details. The information available is abundant, more than enough to understand.
Where should one start? No shots came from the grassy knoll. Gov. John Connally and Senator Ralph Yarborough, who was two cars behind the president’s limousine, recognized the rifle sounds immediately. The driver of the President’s limousine and the top agent next to him doubted that it was a rifle sound. They thought it also sounded like a motorcycle backfire. Nobody from the Warren Commission asked the driver, William Greer, why he lowered the speed of the limousine after he heard the shots. Yarborough wrote in his affidavit to the Commission that the motorcade came to what seemed either a complete or almost complete stop, and that it accelerated only after the last shot had been fired, and he emphasized this point. Both Connally and Yarborough said that the three shots they heard came from behind them and to the right. Mrs. Lady Bird Johnson was sitting in between her husband and Sen. Yarborough, and she also told the Commission that she heard three shots which originated from behind and to the right. She showed more presence of mind in this than her husband, Lyndon Johnson, who wrote in his Statement to the Commission that he didn’t know how many shots were fired or where they came from.
Regarding the notion of shots originating from the grassy knoll location, it’s illogical to say some shot came from there while also saying Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy. A “patsy” is supposed to take the place of an actual perpetrator, meaning any shots must come from where the patsy is at, or close to him. However, the testimonies of Yarborough and Connally in this regard should be enough. Both said they were well-familiar with rifle sounds. In harmony with what they affirmed, one concludes the shots came from the TSBD building or from the building across the street yet on the same side as the TSBD building. Those two buildings best fit the description ‘from behind and to the right’.
Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy’s testimony before the Commission is very important due to her close position with a direct view of President Kennedy, and it caused me to reconsider the Zapruder film. She could not remember climbing on top of the car or the last shot. The first loud shot heard and recognized well by Connally and Yarborough was to her the second shot. She testified precisely the following: “And just as I turned and looked at him, I could see a piece of his skull and I remember it was flesh colored. I remember thinking he just looked as if he had a slight headache. And I just remember seeing that. No blood or anything.” This account where he looked as if he had a slight headache cannot be about the first loud shot that caused Kennedy to raise both hands close to his throat.
Looking at the Zapruder film again with her account in view, one notices her eyes did become fixated on her husband just before the limousine disappeared from our view – behind the sign – and that she did not stop looking in the direction of her husband until she was distracted by the Governor’s reaction to the first loud shot, which Connally always insisted hit the President only. She said to the Commission about this first loud shot that was heard clearly: “I heard Governor Connally yelling and that made me turn around, and as I turned to the right my husband was doing this [indicating with hand at neck]. He was receiving a bullet. And those are the only two I remember. And I read there was a third shot. But I don’t know. Just those two.” Let’s remember “just those two”. The note in brackets is from the Commission. The words “that made me turn around” mean from continuing to look at the President (as is seen in the Zapruder film). Notice that the words “he was receiving a bullet” in no way refer to her earlier description about seeing “a piece of his skull”, nor to him looking as if he had a “headache”. She then stated: “…there were pictures later on of me climbing out the back. But I don’t remember that at all.” She had a shocked memory of the attack, yes, but real too. There’s no reason to ignore her account and it has to be checked with the Zapruder film. Even independently from what she said about first noticing “a piece of his skull”, an observer will reckon it’s likely that the first shot would have been aimed at the head, so I watched the film again paying attention to her account to see if the Zapruder film supports it. When Pres. Kennedy emerges into view (after the sign), there are already signs that he may have been shot twice prior to reappearing into our view.
To be clear on this, I understand five shots were fired based on the Zapruder film and witness testimonies. I believe there’s something like a 99.99% chance that the President was hit in the head just prior to disappearing from view behind the traffic sign, a shot whose effect only Mrs. Kennedy saw, an unheard shot that came from a silenced rifle. We know the following, or second, shot was heard by all, and that it happened while his face was still hidden from our view by the traffic sign. There was definitely a third shot, a silenced shot, which we see happened about a second or less after the previous (loud) shot, and which happened when we could see the President fully after the sign. This third shot convulsed his upper body and it undoubtedly happened after the loud shot which caused the President’s hands to go up as if toward his neck. This unheard third shot, which to my knowledge has gone unnoticed, definitely came from a silenced rifle. I believe, as I will explain below, that this third shot hit the extended right wrist of Governor Connally also. The evidence of this shot to the wrist in the Zapruder film confirms this third shot, too. Then the fourth (second loud) shot hit Governor Connally in his back and it hit his left thigh when it exited his chest. Then came the fifth and final shot that made the right side of the President’s face explode. (I link below, in the end, the Zapruder film I used where this can be observed well.) When the president reemerges into view, his right hand is still in a high position and almost at the same angle in which it disappeared from our view behind the sign, indicating, very possibly, a loss of motor control from a shot nobody heard but whose effect she described, the first impact from a silenced shot. Watch closely just before his head disappears behind the sign. Then when you see his hands raised close to his throat, notice that it was only his left hand which was lifted from waist level, because his right hand had remained raised up there, probably due to a motor control loss. His raised right hand basically reappears to our sight in the same place and angle as when it disappeared from our sight.
To recapitulate, the loud first shot occurred when we still could not see his face because of the sign. This is the one that became the object of the strange “magic bullet” theory. Both Connally and his wife said always that this bullet did not hit him and there’s no chance that they’re wrong on that! When Kennedy’s face appears fully into view, you see both hands moving close to his neck from the bullet impact. The subsequent shot which convulsed his upper body came definitely from a silenced rifle because no one heard that shot. There’s no ‘magic’ to this third bullet but it did hit Governor Connally too, in his wrist and only there. In frame # 226, he is seen with his clenched right fist raised up and to his right. In frame #227 he disappears from view because this is when he has been hit (wrist) and his body has began to shift to the left from the impact. In the next frame you see how that right hand has shifted to the left. People look at his body doing that. Knowing the reality of the third shot, you look at this hand in that next frame. Rifles with silencers existed in 1963. They were used by snipers in WWII.
I’d like to explain further about how that third bullet hit the right wrist of Governor Connally. I added a speed of 2.5 to the slow motion Zapruder film linked below. Notice (later, hopefully) that when the Governor heard the first audible shot, he lifted his right fist from below. His body shifted abruptly/violently towards the left at the same time that the president’s upper body was convulsed by the third shot, a silenced rifle shot. To be more specific, it was his right hand which moved abruptly towards the left and his body with it when the President was hit by a third shot. Even after the Governor was subsequently hit by a bullet in his back, he didn’t know that a bullet had hit his wrist before it; Connally said he found out at the hospital, on Sunday, that he had been hit in the wrist. The next bullet shot was the fourth shot, second audible one, and it hit Connally’s back, left thigh, and nothing more. The supposed “magic bullet” effect of the second bullet is disproved by the Zapruder film which shows that Connally’s wrist was hit after it, and that his back was hit after his wrist was.
Notice how Mrs. Kennedy is looking at her husband when the car emerges from the sign in frame # 222. Notice in frame # 225 that the president has been hit, already, by the second shot or first loud shot. Notice that Connally is not hit yet in this frame. In frame # 226, Connally is reacting to the shot he heard and has lifted his right fist. Another bullet now comes, in frame # 227: It’s the third shot that hit both the President and Connally, second silent shot that none could hear but which can be seen happening.
Now, the trajectory of the bullet that hit Connally in the back becomes clear: He had shifted to the right to look at Pres. Kennedy and when he was returning to his original position with the idea of turning back from his left side, another bullet, the fourth bullet (second loud one) hit him, entering close to his right armpit and exiting two inches below his right nipple and to the left. Let’s consider how it landed in his left thigh: When turning in a car seat like he did, the left leg is naturally moved to the right also so as to make the turn better – more easily – and that’s how that bullet landed in his left thigh. The original one-bullet theory of the Commission said that it bounced from Connally’s rib, which explained how from there it hit his right wrist but not how his left thigh was also hit. See the problem that happened from missing a shot seen on film. It was a film with no sound but it’s like they heard more than they watched. Senator Specter later said that “some facts are stranger than fiction”, but it’s an indefensible theory contradicted by the Governor and his wife and by closer observation of the Zapruder film.
So, the above means that Oswald was indeed a patsy (100% percent so), for otherwise he would be someone who by coincidence was also trying to perpetrate the same crime with his own rifle and at the same time! The certain use of a rifle with a silencer has clear implications. It means that there were maybe more than three shooters, and certainly that no less than three shooters did it: The one with the silenced rifle, the other one that fired the first loud shot, and the one that fired the last shot which blew up the right side of his face. The loud shot that hit Connally’s back may have come from the same shooter that fired the first loud shot (second shot that hit) or from an additional shooter; we don’t know this. It is possible that the silent shooter(s) fired more shots. All we know is that if any additional silent shot landed, it was on the President’s head because the only other wound was his upper back wound. It’s said that the bullet that hit his back exited through his throat. Excuse me, but I think that’s only possible if that bullet came from below and it didn’t. I must conclude that the hole in his throat was made when they inserted a tube into it. We know with certainty he was hit at least three times in the head: By the first shot, by either the second or the third, and by the third loud shot that was more devastating, and the fact that one of the shots which hit the president hit the Governor’s wrist, and that a separate, direct shot hit Connally’s back and then his thigh.
Regarding Lee Harvey Oswald, big and similarly ascertainable facts can be established with certainty about what happened at the City Jail in Dallas, where Lee Harvey Oswald was killed. I will try to be concise. It’s hard not to pay special attention to Oswald as you read about what happened there, watching him on video saying he is innocent and asking repeatedly for a lawyer to be provided to him. During the midnight “showup” for reporters held at about 12:10 AM, Saturday, Oswald again said he didn’t have access to a lawyer: “I do request someone to come forth to give me a legal assistance.” A reporter asked him, “Did you kill the President?” Oswald replied: “No, I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet. First thing I heard about it was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that question.” Captain Fritz, of the Dallas Police Department, led all the interrogations of Oswald. There’s thankfully no need to confront his account to the Commission with what Oswald said about not being interrogated regarding the President’s murder. Fritz described in detail for the Commission the interrogations of Oswald held on that Friday. He did not say anything about asking Oswald if he killed the President. So, months earlier and in front of his captors, Oswald told the truth when he said no one spoke to him about it on Friday. Fritz was not even asked by the Commission whether he asked his prisoner that question, i.e., “Did you ask him if he killed the President?”
Only on Saturday did Fritz bring this accusation forward to Oswald, but Oswald had already been arraigned for the murder of President Kennedy at 1:30 AM, little over an hour after the “midnight” presentation. The Dallas Police Chief, Jesse Curry, quotes in his “JFK Assassination File” (published in 1969), Oswald’s reaction after this second, bigger charge was read to him: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s the idea of this. What are you doing this for.” Oswald behaved in a dignified way during his ordeal, showing good manners while proclaiming his innocence. Curry said that he behaved arrogantly in the midnight presentation, but we can see it in its entirety, and he did not. Rubinstein also told the Commission that he thought Oswald had acted arrogantly in that midnight presentation, adding that perhaps it was then that he started to think he should kill him…
There are five or six films of the killing of Oswald. Jack Rubinstein is supposed to have loved President Kennedy because he indicated so…He had no reason to. Kennedy was “not a friend” (emphasis mine). We see in the networks’ films that the man who shot Oswald is not at all Jack Rubinstein, meaning that Jack Rubinstein agreed to this arrangement, that is, for a surrogate to do it. You can tell it’s a different person, more stocky, with an entirely different profile and more hair too (there’s a film frame of him inside that melee where you see his head without the hat from about a 45 degree angle). One can imagine why it would be agreed that someone else should literally do it for Rubinstein: “I can do it.” “No, you can miss.” Had the case gone to court, Oswald would have been acquitted by a fair jury. Nineteen year old Buell Frazier drove Oswald to Dallas that Friday morning, and he told the Commission – more than once – that the little package Oswald had under his armpit and cupped in his hand was shorter than the folded rifle the Commission showed him to compare. If the end of the folded rifle was cupped with one hand, the butt of the rifle went about 8 inches over the armpit. A lawyer could have said back then, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Sergeant Patrick T. Dean was present in the first interview-interrogation of Rubinstein. He wrote a report about it for Chief Curry (also in Curry’s “JKF Assassination File”). He stated that the interview happened “approximately five to ten minutes after the shooting of Oswald”. I quote from Dean’s report the two reasons Rubinstein gave for killing Oswald: “…and that with the facts of the incidents already known to him was the motivation for his shooting Oswald” – literal quote. “Ruby then stated some words to the effect, ‘I also want the world to know that Jews do have guts’” – his second reason.
Rubinstein was present in Oswald’s midnight showup; he described his presence there to the Warren Commission, his presence there being confirmed by the District Attorney Henry Wade and by reporters also. Rubinstein confided to the Commission that he had not cared if Oswald was innocent or not. He stated that all he cared about was that they had “the prisoner”. I quote now from his testimony to the Commission so you can appreciate directly that Rubinstein did not care whether Oswald killed the President or not, an admission which means he did not kill Oswald because he loved Kennedy so. Rubinstein sounded incoherent, but was coherent in terms of what he did. Rubinstein: “From the way he stated, he [District Attorney Henry Wade] let the reporters know that this was the guilty one that committed the crime. He specifically stated that in that room, that he was the one. It didn’t have any effect in my mind, because whether the person had come out, whether he come out openly and publicly stated didn’t have any bearing in my mind, because I wasn’t interested in anything. All I knew, they had the prisoner. But the reporters like to know where they stand, ‘is he the one?’”
Another important point regarding Oswald’s murder should be mentioned: In the films, Oswald is taken back inside through the same door he came out from. This does not happen with “Jack Ruby”. He is carried toward the right on the sidewalk and is carried inside the Police building through a side door facing the street. Later you see Jack Ruby indeed entering through a door on the right into the room where Lee Harvey Oswald is on the floor with agents standing around him, and you see how Ruby is taken across this large room while he looks only straight ahead and down, and the TV reporter informs that he’s the person who shot Oswald.
Lee Harvey Oswald’s wife, Marina, told the House Select Committee (HSCA) that when they were living in the Soviet Union and people criticized the United States, Oswald would react defending the United States. His mother, standing next to his grave, stated: “Lee Harvey Oswald, my son, even after his death, has done more for his country than any other living human being.” Oswald had turned 24 the previous month (October 18). He ended up representing his dear country in the end. He did not stay quiet; he defended himself in front of television cameras; he spoke clearly and well.
Finally, I would like to share the good affidavit account which Senator Yarborough wrote for the Warren Commission:
“A rifle shot was heard by me; a loud blast, close by.” “When the noise of the shot was heard, the motorcade slowed to what seemed to me a complete stop (though it could have been a near stop).” “After the third shot was fired, but only after the third shot was fired, the cavalcade speeded up, gained speed rapidly, and roared away to the Parkland hospital.” “I heard three shots and no more. All seemed to come from my right rear. I saw people fall to the ground on the embankment to our right, at about the time of or after the second shot, but before the cavalcade started up and raced away.” “Due to the second car, with the secret service men standing on steps on the sides of it, I could not see what was happening in the presidential car during the shooting itself. Some of the secret service men looked backward and to the right, in the general direction from which the rifle explosions seemed to come. After the shooting, one of the secret service men sitting down in the car in front of us pulled out an automatic rifle or weapon and looked backward. However, all of the secret service men seemed to me to respond very slowly, with no more than a puzzled look. In fact, until the automatic weapon was uncovered, I had been lulled into a sense of false hope for the president’s safety, by the lack of motion, excitement, or apparent visible knowledge by the secret service men, that anything so dreadful was happening. Knowing of the training that combat infantrymen and marines receive, I am amazed at the lack of instantaneous response by the Secret Service, when the rifle fire began. I make this statement in this paragraph reluctantly, not to add to the anguish of anyone, but it is my firm opinion, and I write it out in the hope that it might be of service in the better protection of our presidents in the future. After we went under the under pass, on the upward slope I could see over the heads of the occupants of the second car (Secret Service car) and could see an agent lying across the back or trunk of the presidential car, with his feet to the right side of the car, his head at the left side. He beat the back of the car with one hand, his face contorted by grief, anguish, and despair, and I knew from that instant that some terrible loss had been suffered. On arrival at the hospital, I told newsmen that three rifle shots had been fired. There was then no doubt in my mind that the shots were rifle shots, and I had neither then or now any doubts that any other shots were fired. In my opinion only three shots were fired.” – July 10, 1964.
Zapruder film link: Assassinat de John F. Kennedy – YouTube
“I should add it is possible that the shot that hit the Governor’s wrist was a direct shot that did not hit the President first. What is certain is that the Governor’s wrist was hit by a bullet seconds before his back and thigh were hit.”
This ending would be for the 8th paragraph counting from the end (last change too). The next paragraph starts with “Regarding Lee Harvey Oswald…”.
