Introduction
1963 turned out to be one of those years no one would ever forget. That fall I entered the 7 th grade, and at 12 years old was making the difficult transition from child to adolescent. Shortly “The Beatles” would be all the rage and the world of pop music would never be the same. Overshadowing everything, however, was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22 of that year in Dallas, Texas; an incident that, even today, still rivets our attention. I clearly recall being at school that Friday, when we began hearing rumors that something tragic had happened. All students were called to a lunch assembly, at which it was announced that the president had been shot and killed. The events of that terrible weekend played out; the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was caught and then himself murdered by a man named Jack Ruby, and all right in front of you on television. We took it in with a kind of stunned disbelief; a sort of suspension from reason. I spent much of that gray, autumn weekend hiking and fishing in the creek that ran through the canyon and woods about a mile from our house. The utter normalness of the trees; the constancy of the creek, buffered me somewhat from the insanity of the outside world. On the Monday following the president’s death, the kids in school wrote their impressions of what had occurred and what a loss it was. They centered their essays around how great a country it was that could have something like this happen, and yet the government was able to keep functioning, with power changing to a new president; and somehow things still worked. My classmates were grasping for something stable in a sea of confusion. Weren’t we all? When the president was killed I knew something significant had occurred, but it wasn’t until many years later that I at last had some comprehension of what really happened that day in Dallas. All of our lives were changed in ways we could not possibly have envisioned. Our nation is still haunted by this incident and will continue to be until the full truth is known about it. The article that follows is an introduction to some of that truth and is extracted from earlier articles and research I have done on this subject. All of the misinformation about the murder of President Kennedy, starting with the Warren Commission’s 26 volume report, distracts people from asking the real question about this tragedy that needs to be answered, and that is simply “Why?” Why was JFK killed? With the answer to that question revealed one begins to have an inkling of what has happened and is happening to our nation.…MA
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On the morning of Friday, November 22, 1963, a New York City attorney named Mark Lane was busy defending a client being tried at the Criminal Court Building in lower Manhattan. At 1 pm the judge declared a lunch recess and Lane left the Court building and headed toward a favorite Chinese restaurant a few blocks away. After lunch, as he walked back to the courthouse he observed people on the street gathered by radios listening intently. He asked one of the people what was going on and was told that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Lane ran back to the courthouse and headed straight to the press room, where he found a number of reporters, bailiffs and attorneys all listening to the radio. After a few minutes the announcement was made to the stunned crowd-the President was dead. Like everyone else, Mark Lane stood there in shock, only then realizing that for the first time in his life he was late for a court appearance; the trial of his client was to have resumed 5 minutes earlier. Lane dashed to the courtroom, half thinking the judge would cancel the afternoon session due to the tragedy that had unfolded in Dallas. The judge, however, had other ideas, and ordered that the trial continue.
Later that afternoon, with his client acquitted, Lane rushed from the courtroom to find a TV so he could get updated on the momentous occurrences that had transpired while he was in court. As he ran down the steps of the Criminal Court Building he encountered a judge he knew who was also walking down the steps. The judge turned toward him and said, “Well, Lane, do you think he did it alone?”
Being out of the loop on the afternoon’s happenings Lane responded, “Who, sir? Did what?”
“Do you think this Oswald killed the President?” he asked.
Lane explained that he had been trying a case all afternoon and had heard nothing of the details of the assassination. The judge, ignoring Lane’s explanation of his ignorance, just looked at him and said:
“He couldn’t very well shoot him from the back and cause an entrance wound in his throat, could he?” Not waiting for a response from Lane, the judge continued: “The doctors said the throat wound was an entrance wound. It’ll be an interesting trial. I want to see how they answer that question.”
As I write this 60 years have now passed since John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the question that Mark Lane’s judge friend asked him on the Court Building’s steps in 1963 has still not been adequately answered. Indeed, it remains the central illogic at the heart of the JFK murder case. How could Oswald have shot Kennedy from the front causing a throat entry wound, if he was behind the president shooting from the Texas School Book Depository? In the hectic first few minutes after the assassination, before the full cover story of Oswald as a lone nut killer had taken hold in the media, some truth had leaked out. One of the emergency room doctors trying to save Kennedy’s life told a reporter that the small, round bullet hole they observed at the front of JFK’s throat before they cut across it in performing a tracheotomy, was an entry wound. All of these doctors were seasoned trauma room professionals who knew gunshot wounds. They had also observed a large, gaping wound at the rear of Kennedy’s skull, which they identified as an exit wound. In addition, grassy knoll witnesses interviewed referred to shots coming from up the knoll behind the fence, and a number of them went running up the hill right after the shots had been fired to find who had pulled the trigger. Lane’s judge friend had caught some of these initial reports on the radio or TV and had, like a good jurist would, immediately spotted the contrary facts of the case. Oswald was in the Book Depository behind the President. He couldn’t have caused a throat entry wound and rear skull exit wound from that location.
Seeing the illogic his friend had pointed out, Mark Lane immediately took on the JFK assassination case as his personal mission and, like a pit bull, has never let go. Being a defense attorney, he had a unique perspective. He knew that no jury of his peers would have convicted Oswald of Kennedy’s killing based on the evidence presented in the Warren Report. A competent defense would have picked that case apart easily. He was also personally impacted by Kennedy’s death, having met JFK and his brother Robert on several occasions. Lane had been elected to the New York state legislature in 1960 with Kennedy’s endorsement, and also had helped to organize JFK’s campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1959. For these reasons, as well as a commitment to justice, Lane took on the task of getting at the truth of JFK’s assassination. His most recent book on the subject was written in 2011 and is entitled “Last Word”. His first was 1965’s bestselling “Rush to Judgment”. In between are nearly 60 years of Lane and others striving to get at the facts, and we owe him and these other researchers a debt of gratitude.
This is, however, not an article about Mark Lane. In earlier articles I mentioned of the radical decline we are now witnessing in the United States as a nation. I also stated that decline has a number of elements to it; it didn’t just spring into being full bloom in today’s situation. That situation is the sum of what has happened before, and a huge part of THAT was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is very important, therefore, that we understand what happened on November 22nd, 1963, not just to Kennedy, but to our nation.
The illogical presentation of information pointed out by Mark Lane’s judge friend above, is but a small fraction of the array of contrary and conflicting data to be found when one starts digging in to the mass of evidence on the Kennedy assassination. Besides the doctors’ statement of the throat wound being an entry wound, consider the home movie of the assassination taken by a guy named Abraham Zapruder. He was standing just to the left of the grassy knoll shooting his film as Kennedy’s motorcade passed in front of him. Zapruder’s film clearly shows Kennedy being shot and slumping forward and then being hit by a fatal head shot and being thrown backward and to the left by the force of impact of the bullet. The only way he could be thrown backward is by a bullet striking him in the head coming from the front; yet Oswald was supposedly in the Book Depository to the rear. Watch the film yourself. It really is all you need to know to understand there was a conspiracy involved in JFK’s death. While there were shots fired from behind, as all the wounds received by Texas Governor John Connally seem to indicate, the fatal head shot and throat shot were from the front, and as the judge pointed out, Oswald could not shoot the President from the front and behind at the same time.
This leaves two possibilities. The first is that two assassins, each unaware of the other, chose to kill the President in Dallas at the same time and in the same place completely and entirely accidentally. And of course the obvious other option is that at least two, and probably more, people conspired to kill the President. We do not even need to look at the fact that Oswald was known to be an average marksman at best; that the shoddy, WW II vintage, Italian rifle he supposedly used had a defective scope and was also known as the “humanitarian” rifle for its poor performance in battle; that FBI sharpshooters could not duplicate Oswald’s supposed accuracy in their own re-enactments of the assassination or that the official autopsy photos do not show the large, exit wound observed by the doctors on the rear of Kennedy’s head, indicating the photos had been tampered with so as to create the illusion of only shots from the rear. (This last fact points to Government involvement in the cover-up, if not the assassination itself.) We do not need to know that a piece of Kennedy’s skull from the occipital (rear) region of his head was retrieved the next day from the grass next to the road in Dealey Plaza or that a man was seen by an eyewitness behind the picket fence at the top of the knoll breaking down a rifle and handing it to another man in the first seconds after the shooting…or that a number of witnesses reported hearing from 4 to 6 shots that day, while the Warren Commission says there were only 3. (In the duration of the shooting, as documented by the Zapruder film, Oswald would have been hard pressed to get off the 3 shots; 4 to 6 was out of the question, indicating there must have been a second shooter.) I could go on and on with this sort of thing but there is no real reason to.
In light of all the above we should just be done with any debate about if there was a conspiracy and instead just concentrate on the question “Why?”. Why was Kennedy killed?
It is this question that I am seeking to answer in the series I am writing, the working title of which is, “JFK and the Road to Dallas”. When one walks through the series of crises that Kennedy negotiated during his time in office, starting with the crisis in Laos and the Bay of Pigs disaster in spring of 1961, through the Berlin and Cuban Missile Crises in 1962, and then onto 1963 with his “Peace Speech” at American University and the passage of the Limited Test Ban Treaty, it starts to become clear that Kennedy, had he lived, would not have pursued the Vietnam War. This has everything to do with why he was killed. (After Kennedy’s death Vietnam started for real and by the time it ended 58,000 Americans had died and, by some estimates, up to two million Vietnamese.) It is my hope that you will be challenged enough to find out for yourself.
All of the installments in the “JFK and the Road to Dallas” series so far written are posted in this blog site (From A Native Son) and I invite you to read them all. I name names, authors and books throughout the series and you can follow up on and verify anything you wish. Most important to me is that I do all that I can to inform my fellow citizens of the knowledge I have in the hope that we can recover our nation and steer its future path on a decent and honorable course.
As I state on the home page of “From A Native Son”, the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox many years ago wrote:
“To sin by silence when we should speak makes cowards of men.
With these writings I choose to sin no more.
Copyright © 2013
By Mark Arnold
All Rights Reserved
7 Responses
I have some personal experience of my own in interactions with people involved tangentially with the events of that day in Dallas. I was in my last weeks of Naval Officer’s Candidate School in Newport, RI the day Kennedy was shot and in my later years came across two people who were minor actors in the drama that followed. The first of these was a military man played by Donald Sutherland in the Oliver Stone movie “JFK”. The other was an attorney who worked in Garrison’s New Orleans office during the prosecution and trial of Clay Shaw (Garrison was played by Kevin Cosner in the same “JFK” movie). My personal interviews of these two men casts further doubt on the “lone gunman” theory.
I guess the best summation is “We are not done yet”.
Richard
Thanks Richard! Well, what you say is fascinating. Since Sutherland’s character in “JFK” was based on L.Fletcher Prouty that means that you must have met “Fletch” yourself. I would be very interested to get your debrief of both your talk with Prouty and with the Garrison attorney. Who was that by the way? Were you doing these in some capacity for “Freedom” magazine back in the ’80s? If not you may recall (and if you were you for sure do) that Freedom ran an extended series based on the writings of Prouty and Garrison (mostly Prouty) dealing with the JFK assassination. I still have most of these Freedoms. Very valuable. I have read both of Prouty’s books “The Secret Team” and “JFK” The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Kill Kennedy” as well as Garrison’s “On The Trail of the Assassins”. I would be very interested in what Garrison’s associate attorney had to say to you. There is another book out on the Garrison investigation that is more recent. It is called “Let Justice be Done” and is a summary of data garnered from the millions of pages of assassination related docs that were declassified by the “Assassinations Records Review Board” created after the flap resulting from Stone’s JFK movie. The book vindicates Garrison on many of the points he was making, based on the docs.
Thanks for getting back to me Richard and I look forward to your stories about the individuals you mentioned in your comment.
Best, Mark
On Public Television, the American Experience had a piece on JFK that was fairly interesting and informative until they got to the “experts” and their “forensic science”.
They “proved” that the throat wound was actually an ‘exit’ wound with the bullet tumbling, that the 4-6 shots heard were “actually echo’s” recorded by their fancy machine that can make sounds visual, and showed that the damage to the skull was from a “rear shot”, and that on the fantail head shot it actually goes forward for an instant and then back, because of a massive reaction of the nerves in his back, causing his head to go back and to the left. Their conclusion was that Lee Harvey Oswald was the only shooter.
I was going to buy this DVD until all of this (I’ll be gentle) scientific crap was put in the video.
Garrison said it best in the movie JFK in the courtroom scene when he talked about how the government can use Theoretical Physics to prove an elephant can hang from a cliff with his tail tied to a daisy.
I’d be interested in your comments on this, and also about an announcer I heard on the radio who stated that a TV news service – I don’t remember which one – had experts fire the type of rifle Oswald used and were able to make the 3 shots in the 5.3 seconds. To my knowledge this was tried by many sharp shooters and they were not able to make the shots.
Tony
Hi Tony! Thanks for your comm and interest. Great duplication of the “Costner as Garrison” quote from JFK. Did you actually remember it or did you go check it with the movie? If you just remembered it, now, that’s impressive.
Anyway, the national media is, more or less, a national security state asset and so their comments on the JFK assassination for me fall into the “what do you expect from a pig but a grunt” category. They make their statements in defiance of one’s own eyes, the clearest evidence yet they are not interested in the truth. There is a great little book, if you are not familiar with it, called “Conspiracy of Silence” written by one of the Parkland Hospital trauma room Drs named Charles Crenshaw. In the book Crenshaw, a trauma room expert totally familiar with gunshot wounds, describes the throat wound as follows:
“I also identified a small opening, about the diameter of a pencil at the midline of his throat, to be an entry bullet hole.”
On confronting the head wound of the President, he described it as follows:
“From the damage I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that the bullet had entered his head through the front…”
Add to that the fact that the next day a part Kennedy’s occipital (rear) skull bone that had been blown out the back of his head was found in the grass in Dealey Plaza. Bones do not get blown out by entry shots, as common sense tells you.
Had Oswald not been killed himself, and had he gone to trial instead, witnesses like Crenshaw would have been compelled to testify and we would not now be today so subject to the revisionist history of the Warren report and others more interested in obfuscation than the truth.
The real tragedy of the JFK assassination lies in its consequences more so than the act itself. 58,000 Americans and as many as two million Vietnamese and South East Asians, depending on the estimates, died during its course. The alienation of American youth in the late ’60s and early ’70s about the war and the general dissafection as a result, are direct results of the Kennedy assassination.
From all the research I have done, as I am chronicalling in this “Road to Dallas” series, it is as clear as clear can be to me that JFK was not going into Vietnam with combat troops and instead would have pulled out. He did not do it in any of the other crises he faced (Laos, Bay of Pigs, Berlin, Cuban Missile Crisis and to that point in Vietnam) and I can find no reason to think he would have done otherwise in Vietnam. The puzzle of the contrary statements he would make from time to time that seemed to indicate a contrary view to that I have just expressed, is understood when you understand the line he was walking with his hard line military and intelligence people as well as his perception of what it would take to get elected again in ’64.
There is a great little documentary video you can get on Netflix called “Virtual Kennedy” which covers this. Check it out.
I hope the above has adequately answered any query you may have had as well expresses my views on the travesty of the media in this nation.
Say Hi to Helen for me!
Best, Mark
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Hi Mark,
Thanks for the references! I did recall the context of the quote from the JFK film, I did go to the trial scene to get it more exactly.
Tony
PS Your “What do you expect from a pig……..” quote sums up the media perfectly, and was also a great line from the JFK film!
Thanks for your blog on JFK – I really am fascinated with the information, and want to learn the truth!
Thanks Tony! Will keep ’em coming. Ultimately the series will be turned into a Kindle book. Stay in comm! Best, Mark
Nicely done Mark.
The usual response by LNers to this is, “ok, then where are the bullets?”
Corpsman O’Connor claims that a bullet was removed from the intercostal muscles of the back while an internal FBI memo between Tolson and Belmont states that while the SS has one of the bullets (CE399), the other bullet is lodged behind JFK’s ear and we will attampt to get that one as well
The comment on the 11/22 memo states it was at 9:18 local time that Belmont speaks to Shanklin in Dallas – DURING the AUTOPSY –
Obviously these other two bullets – in addition to the manhole cover/grass bullet, the bullet which exploded in JFK’s head and the claim for CE399 you start to see that Dino’s 6-8 shots seen at NPIC that night is not such a stretch.
http://www.jfklancer.com/hunt/mystery.html