WE HAD IDENTIFIED the once mysterious “Clay Bertrand.” Now, for a change, we had a period of calm. Here in New Orleans the usual crimes were being committed, night and day. Despite the syndrome that comes with the job—the feeling that the faster you convict burglars and armed robbers, the faster new ones appear to take their places—the main work of the district attorney’s office, the prosecution machinery, had to be maintained and improved. I let the members of the team go back to their regular office positions for a while, and I resumed mine. At night and on weekends, however, I continued my study of the available evidence. Alone in the office or at home surrounded by my family, I would stay up until the early hours of the morning, obsessively poring through testimony, looking for connections and contradictions, thinking, always thinking.
The gunfire coming from in front of the presidential limousine had satisfied me that Lee Oswald was not the lone killer of John Kennedy. The “admission note” at Parkland Hospital, signed by Dr. Robert McClelland, described the cause of death as a “massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple”—a location customarily accepted as being in the front of one’s head. And yet it was unanimously acknowledged that at the time of the shooting Oswald was in the School Book Depository, well to the President’s rear.
I began to wonder: Had Oswald actually shot the President at all? I studied the statements of witnesses who claimed to have observed unusual activity in the Book Depository and other buildings clustered behind the President. The more I read, the more my doubts grew.
About 15 minutes before the motorcade arrived, Arnold Rowland, a student, and his wife, Barbara, were standing on Houston Street across from Dealey Plaza. Arnold glanced up at the Book Depository, and at the easternmost end of the sixth floor (where the alleged “assassin’s lair” was located) he noticed a dark-skinned man whom he described as “an elderly Negro.” However, at the westernmost end of the sixth floor (the opposite end of the building) he saw a man standing, just back from the window, with a rifle in his hands. The man was holding the rifle, barrel pointing upwards, at the 45-degree angle which the military describes as “port arms.”
Barbara Rowland, at that moment, was preoccupied by a man having an epileptic seizure in the plaza directly across from them. By the time Arnold got his wife’s attention and she looked up, the man with the rifle had stepped away.[36] They both concluded that the man with the rifle was a Secret Service agent. Arnold testified that on the following day when he described the presence of the second, dark-skinned man on the sixth floor to F.B.I. agents, “they told me it didn’t have any bearing or such on the case right then. In fact, they just the same as told me to forget it now.”
Carolyn Walther, employed at the nearby Dal-Tex Building, also was standing on the east side of Houston Street. According to a statement she gave to the F.B.I., Walther watched the ambulance arrive for the seizure victim and happened to glance toward the Depository, where she saw a man with a rifle on one of the upper floors. The rifleman was holding the gun with the barrel pointed downward as he looked toward the oncoming motorcade on Houston Street. Mrs. Walther said that the rifle was different from any she had ever seen and had an unusually short barrel. The man holding it was wearing a white shirt and was either blond or had light-colored hair. He was standing in the middle of the most easterly window on the floor, leaning forward. In the same window, just to his left, she could see another man standing erect. He appeared to be wearing a brown suit.
Then the motorcade arrived and drew her attention. It did not occur to her to glance up at the window again, not even after the shooting began. She was not called to testify by the Warren Commission.
Toney Henderson of Dallas was waiting for the parade on the east side of Elm near the corner of Houston. After the ambulance departed with the epileptic, she glanced toward the Depository. She recalled that numerous people on different floors were at the windows, looking out. Then on one of the upper floors she noticed two men. They were standing in back of the window and looking out of it at the motorcade. One, a dark-haired man in a white shirt, was dark-skinned and “possibly a Mexican, but could have been a Negro.” Mrs. Henderson was unable to describe the other man, except that he was the taller of the two. She did not know exactly which floor the two men were on. The F.B.I. report of her statement did not identify the windows in which she saw the two men.
These statements from witnesses who saw two men on the Depository’s top floor were troubling enough, but one night when I came across the testimony of 16-year-old Amos Euins I was so disturbed I could not sleep. Testifying before the Warren Commission, Euins described having waved at the President as the long convertible made its leftward, 120-degree turn onto Elm. He happened to glance upward at the Book Depository and saw what appeared to be “a pipe” sticking out of a window. Earlier, when interviewed by Sergeant D.V. Harkness of the Dallas police, Euins had described the window as being the easternmost one on the floor “under the ledge”—which is the building’s famous sixth floor.
After the shooting began, Euins was able to see the trigger and the stock of the rifle. He also noticed that the man doing the shooting had a distinct bald spot on his head. Euins described the bald area as going back about two and a half inches from the hairline and standing out as if it were white in the relative darkness of his surroundings. Immediately after the assassination he described the man as being black. Later in his Commission testimony Euins indicated that he could not be certain whether the man was white or Negro. However, he was immovable on two points. The first was his insistence that the man definitely had a “bald spot” on his head. The second was his denial that he had told a sheriff’s deputy that the man he saw on the sixth floor was white. What he had said, he explained to the members of the Commission, was that the bald spot on the man’s head looked like it was white.
Considering that Euins was standing just south of the Depository at approximately half past twelve, the sun would have been almost overhead and the bald spot of a man leaning forward might well have appeared to be white, I thought. In any case, Euins’s observation of an apparently dark-skinned man with a “bald spot” on his head seemed to coincide with Arnold Rowland’s observation of an “elderly Negro.” In each instance, the object of their attention was occupying the easternmost window in the Depository—the “assassin’s lair” where Oswald was supposed to have been—when the parade arrived.[37] And both of their statements seemed to be supported by Toney Henderson’s conclusion that the man she had seen was either a Mexican or a Negro.
Two other men, each of whom was considerably more observant than the average witness, helped to unify the collective observations of the foregoing witnesses into a comprehensive picture of who was on the sixth floor just before—and during—the shooting of the President. Roger Craig, honored in 1960 for his performance as a Dallas deputy sheriff, remembered that a few minutes after the assassination he observed the Dallas police questioning a Latin man on Elm Street. As Craig recalled it, the police, frustrated when the man did not answer their questions because he could not speak English, released him. Some minutes afterwards, Craig saw a Nash Rambler station wagon pull up in front of the Depository and recognized the driver as the Latin man who had just been released by the police. Before he could do anything, a young white man—whom Craig later identified as Lee Oswald—came running down from in front of the Depository, jumped in, and the station wagon tore off.[38] On this occasion—seeing the Latin man for the second time and in a more inculpatory situation—Craig got a closer look at him. He described the man as being not merely dark-skinned but “a Negro.”
Meanwhile, Richard Randolph Carr had observed a white man on the sixth floor of the Depository, only in this instance at the next westward window from the “assassin’s lair.” Carr, who also saw activity on the knoll, was a steel worker on the upper part of the new courthouse building under construction at the corner of Houston and Commerce. When the shots were fired, Carr, a combat veteran, glanced over at the Depository. Minutes later Carr was standing on the ground near the Depository when he recognized the very man he had seen earlier at the Depository window on the upper floor. Carr described this man as being a heavy-set individual with horn-rimmed glasses and a tan sport jacket.
Carr followed the man for a block. The man then climbed into a Nash Rambler station wagon (apparently the same car described by Roger Craig), which seemed to be waiting for him, and the car rapidly drove off. Like Craig, Carr noted, in several statements to law enforcement officers, that the driver was “real dark-complected,” either “Spanish or Cuban.”
It seemed fair to conclude from all the statements that a composite visualization of the Depository sixth floor just before—and during— the assassination added up to at least three different men: two white, one of whom was apparently youngish and either slightly blond or with light brown hair, and the other heavy-set with horn-rimmed glasses; and one distinctly dark-complexioned, very possibly of Latin origin. Whether they had one rifle or two was unclear. The youngish, thinner white man was seen holding one while he stood back of the westernmost window (at the opposite end of “the assassin’s lair”), whereas the dark-complexioned man was seen firing directly from the easternmost “lair.”
After reading the statements of these eyewitnesses, I knew that Lee Oswald could not have shot John Kennedy from the “assassin’s lair” as the Warren Commission claimed. Unlike the man who was observed shooting from the lair, Oswald did not have a bald spot, nor was he “dark-skinned” or “Spanish-looking.” In my mind at this point, it was still possible that Oswald was somehow involved in the assassination, but it seemed clear that others had participated in the shooting, both from the grassy knoll in front of the President and from the Book Depository behind him.
The appearance and reappearance of “dark-skinned,” “Spanish-looking” or “Negro” men in the descriptions of the witnesses intrigued me. Not only was the man in the lair identified this way, but the “epileptic” observed in Dealey Plaza was described as a Latin man wearing Army green combat garb.[39] That description reminded me of the anti-Castro Cuban exiles who were constantly traipsing through Guy Banister’s office on their way to guerrilla training on Lake Pontchartrain. It occurred to me that the “dark-complected” man whom some observers saw might well have been Cuban. Moreover, given what I knew about Guy Banister’s guerrilla training operation and Lee Oswald’s proximity to it, the involvement of anti-Castro Cuban exile guerrillas in the assassination of a President whom they despised for “betraying” them at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and for ordering their training camps shut down in the summer of 1963 seemed a distinct possibility.
In fact, the Cubans began to seem more likely suspects than Lee Harvey Oswald himself. In addition to the eyewitness descriptions, other evidence pointed away from Oswald. For example, Oswald’s fingerprints were never found on the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he was alleged to have used.[40]
A great deal of confusion surrounded this second-rate Italian rifle because there was compelling evidence that it was not the weapon found in the assassin’s lair shortly after the assassination. Officer Seymour Weitzman, part of the Dallas police search team, later described the discovery of the rifle on the afternoon of November 22. He stated that it had been so well hidden under boxes of books that the officers stumbled over it many times before they found it. Officer Weitzman, who had an engineering degree and also operated a sporting goods store, was recognized as an authority on weapons. Consequently, Dallas Homicide Chief Will Fritz, who was on the scene, asked him the make of the rifle. Weitzman identified it as a 7.65 Mauser, a highly accurate German-made weapon. Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig was also there and later recalled the word “Mauser” inscribed in the metal of the gun. And Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone executed a sworn affidavit in which he described the rifle as a Mauser. As late as midnight of November 22, Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade told the media that the weapon found was a Mauser.
There is, of course, a significant difference between a first-class Mauser and a cheap mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano. It should have been simple to know which weapon had been found. However, to complicate the issue, three empty cartridges from a Mannlicher-Carcano were found in the same room as the Mauser. They were near the easternmost sixth-floor window, close together and almost parallel to each other. Although this arrangement made them easy to find, it defied what any experienced user of rifles knows: that when a rifle is fired, the cartridge is flung violently away. A neat distribution pattern of cartridges like the one found on the sixth floor of the Depository is virtually impossible. It strongly suggested to me that the cartridges were never fired from the assassin’s lair but were planted near the window, presumably having been fired earlier elsewhere, so that bullet fragments found in the President’s limousine could be described as having come from the Carcano.
There were other problems with the story that the Mannlicher-Carcano had been the murder weapon. For instance, no ammunition clip was ever found. The clip is the device that feeds the cartridges into the rifle’s firing chamber. Without such a clip, the cartridges have to be loaded by hand, making fast shooting such as Oswald was alleged to have done impossible. The Warren Commission skirted this problem by never confronting that fact.
Complicating the matter even further, the Mannlicher-Carcano triumphantly produced as the “assassin’s rifle” was found to have a badly misaligned sight. So badly was the sight out of line with the barrel that an adjustment was necessary before government riflemen could complete their test firing. Even so, no rifle expert was ever able to duplicate the feat the government attributed to Lee Oswald.
Despite these problems, when the smoke cleared and all the law enforcement authorities in Dallas had their stories duly in order, the official position was that the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Depository was the Mannlicher-Carcano, which allegedly was linked to Oswald under an alias, and not the Mauser, which disappeared forever shortly after it reached the hands of Captain Fritz.
But even this revision of the official story did not explain the third rifle. A film taken by Dallas Cinema Associates, an independent film company, showed a scene of the Book Depository shortly after the assassination. Police officers on the fire escape were bringing down a rifle from the roof above the sixth floor with the tender care you might give an infant. When the policemen reached the ground, a high-ranking officer held the rifle high for everyone to see. The camera zoomed in for a close-up. Beneath the picture was the legend, “The Assassin’s Rifle.” When I saw the film, I noted that this rifle had no sight mounted on it. Thus it could not have been either the Carcano or the vanished Mauser, both of which had sights.
I was not surprised to find that this third rifle, like the Mauser, had disappeared. But its existence confirmed my hypothesis that Lee Oswald could not have killed John Kennedy as the American public had been told. Setting aside the evidence of two other weapons on the scene, the incredibly accurate shooting of an incredibly inaccurate rifle within an impossible time frame was merely the beginning of the feat we were asked to believe Oswald had accomplished.
I knew from his fellow Marines’ testimony that Oswald was a notoriously poor shot. But this job would have been impossible for even the greatest marksman. From the assassin’s lair the first thing an assassin would see, when attempting to shoot someone in a motorcade below on Elm Street, was an extremely large tree, still luxuriant in the deep South as late as November. This made it unlikely that the first round fired would have hit anything more than a limb or a handful of leaves from the tree below.
Moreover, Oswald had been seen in the lunchroom down on the second floor of the Depository less than two minutes after the shooting. He not only had appeared composed and relaxed, but was drinking a Coke which he had bought from the vending machine. For him to have finished his historic shooting feat (causing eight wounds in two men in less than six seconds), then hidden the rifle beneath the piles of boxes which Officer Weitzman described, then run down four flights of stairs, then stopped for a Coke at the vending machine—all in less than two minutes without losing his breath—would have required that Oswald move at nearly the speed of light.
Other physical evidence found at the scene pointed away from Oswald as well: a pop bottle that did not have Oswald’s fingerprints on it was consequently tossed into the nearest garbage can by Captain Fritz and his investigators.
But the most obvious and compelling piece of evidence exonerating Oswald was the “nitrate” test he was given on the evening of the assassination. Simply put, this test reveals the deposits of nitrate on an individual’s cheek when he or she has fired a rifle. The nitrate test results indicated that Lee Oswald had not fired a rifle on November 22, 1963. However, for reasons best known to the government and its investigators, this fact was kept secret for ten months. It was finally revealed in the Warren Commission report.
After going over the government’s own evidence, I realized that my earlier conclusion that Oswald had not been the lone killer of President Kennedy was not entirely correct. Clearly there had been others involved in the shooting, but the truth was that Lee Oswald himself had not shot John Kennedy at all. Nor had he even attempted to shoot John Kennedy.
It seemed inescapable to me as a professional prosecutor that the man damned by the world as the criminal of the century was innocent. Only the truly innocent have to be as thoroughly set up as Lee Oswald obviously had been.
* * *
The temporary respite from the investigation did not last long. Frank Klein could not stay away from it, and neither could I. One morning I was in my office reading and rereading a newspaper. I did not hear Frank enter.
“I have never seen you so preoccupied,” said Frank.
“It’s not just any paper, son,” I said. “This is the front page of the Dallas Morning News for November 22, 1963.”
“Well, what’s got you so hypnotized?”
I gestured to the large diagram on the paper’s front page, indicating the route of the presidential parade. “Have I ever shown you this before?” I asked.
He shook his head.
I turned the paper around facing his way so that he could read the diagram of the motorcade. It covered almost five-sixths of the front page.
“Frank,” I said, “I want you to follow the parade route with me. Let’s pick it up right here as it comes down Main approaching Dealey Plaza. Are you with me?”
“Yes,” he said, his finger following the thick line indicating the motorcade. “And here is where it reaches Dealey Plaza…” He stopped.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“This diagram indicates that the President’s parade was supposed to continue on Main Street through the center of Dealey Plaza—without even leaving Main.” He stared at it in disbelief.
“So what’s wrong with that?” I asked.
His finger was moving off of Main, inches downward to Elm until he found the Depository area where the President had been shot. “If that was the presidential parade route up there on Main …”
I finished the question for him. “How did he get way down here on Elm?”
Frank looked up at me with a slight frown, then looked back at the diagram. He moved his finger back along Main Street to where it reached Houston. “The motorcade turned right on Houston and went down onto Elm,” he said.
“Where the motorcade made that sweeping 120-degree left turn you are looking at, which had to slow the President’s car down to about ten miles an hour.”
Frank looked up again at the thick line indicating the motorcade route continuing on Main through the center of Dealey Plaza as it headed for the Stemmons Freeway.
“Here on Main Street, continuing through the open meadow,” he said, “they couldn’t have hit him. Are you telling me that at the last moment they just moved the President of the United States off of his scheduled route to here where the Depository is?” He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Hell, I haven’t read a damned word about that anywhere. How can they keep something like that a secret for three years?”
I leaned back in my chair. “Now you see why I didn’t hear you knock when you came in.”
“Where the hell were the Dallas police when they made that last-minute change in the route?” he asked.
“Where indeed?” I asked. “And the Secret Service. And the F.B.I.”
“And the city administration of Dallas,” he added. “Don’t they have a mayor over there in that damned place?”
“Yes, they do. The mayor when this happened was Earle Cabell.”
I buzzed the intercom and my secretary, Sharon Herkes, came in. I asked her to take a cab to the public library and find the latest volume of Who’s Who in the Southwest. “I’m sure you’ll find Earle Cabell in there. See if his article indicates any connections with Washington.”
“With Washington?” Frank asked.
“Of course,” I replied. “You can’t tell me it’s possible to hijack the President—with the whole world watching—unless there’s some kind of cooperation between the city administration and the federal government.”
Frank grabbed the front page of the Dallas Morning News and pointed to the diagram. “Hell,” he said, “was the Warren Commission blind? Didn’t they see this?”
“Oh,” I said. “Would you like to see the front page that was introduced to the Warren Commission?”
I pulled open my middle desk drawer and took out a copy of the Dallas Morning News front page that had been introduced as a Commission exhibit. I handed it to Frank and lit my pipe. I had hardly taken the first puff on it when he yelled.
“Those bastards! They just removed the entire motorcade route from the front page.”
That was true. On five-sixths of the Dallas Morning News page where the diagram of the motorcade route was supposed to be was nothing but a large square of solid gray. “And this has been printed as an official exhibit by the Warren Commission?” he asked.
I nodded.
“And just what in the hell are we supposed to call this?” he asked, waving the nearly blank exhibit.
I took a puff or two on my pipe. “This is what you call,” I replied, “a coup d’etat.”
An hour or so later Sharon walked in the door with a large photostat in her hand. “They didn’t have anything about Mayor Cabell in the Who’s Who,” she said. “But there’s a lot of stuff here about a General Charles Cabell.”
I glanced down at the article. Right away it jumped out at me from the page that this Charles Cabell had been the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Now I found myself looking at that last name with real fascination. It took one phone call to an attorney friend in Dallas to determine that General Charles Cabell was the brother of Earle Cabell, former mayor of Dallas.
Now the eleventh-hour change in the President’s motorcade route was even more intriguing to me, and I immediately headed for the public library. Before sunset I had become the leading expert in New Orleans on General Charles Cabell, who, it turned out, had been fired as the C.I.A.’s number two man by President Kennedy. General Cabell had been in charge of the Agency’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. In the final hours, while Castro’s small air force was tearing the landing effort apart, Cabell had managed to get through a call to President Kennedy in an attempt to halt the disaster. Just over the horizon, by something less than happenstance, lay aircraft carriers with fighter planes on their decks, engines warming up. General Cabell informed the President that these fighters could reverse the course of disaster in minutes and secure the success of the invasion. All that was needed was the President’s authorization.
On the preceding day Kennedy had assured the assembled media that if anyone invaded Cuba (and the air had become rife with invasion rumors) there certainly would be no help from the U.S. armed forces. He flatly turned Cabell down. With that the invasion’s chances sank, as did the general’s intelligence career. President Kennedy asked for Cabell’s resignation and the general was subsequently replaced on February 1, 1962, as the C.I.A.’s deputy director. General Cabell’s subsequent hatred of John Kennedy became an open secret in Washington.
In most countries, a powerful individual who had been in open conflict with a national leader who was later assassinated would receive at least a modicum of attention in the course of the posthumous inquiry. A major espionage organization with a highly sophisticated capability for accomplishing murder might receive even more. Certainly a powerful individual who also held a top position in a major espionage apparatus and had been at odds with the departed leader would be high on the list of suspects.
However, General Cabell, who fit that description perfectly, was never even called as a witness before the Warren Commission. One reason may have been that Allen Dulles, the former C.I.A. director (also fired by President Kennedy), was a member of the Commission and handled all leads relating to the Agency. During the nine years that Dulles had been the C.I.A.’s chief, General Charles Cabell had been his deputy.