were too smart for them, for at least fifty years. The next few days? We’ll see.
Anyhow, back from my first tour in Vietnam as a kind of hero, with a few empty weeks to fill before a tour in Moscow, I decided it was time to read the damned report and see what they had learned. By that time, my own internal turmoil had settled and I felt I’d be able to confront the findings in a more or less rational manner. My conclusions were mainly that the operation had succeeded brilliantly, particularly Lon’s solution of the ballistics issue. If you recall, our problem was to shoot a man with a bullet that would leave no trace of itself except in tiny metallic residue that could be traced only to a specific bullet identified by category and lot but not to any particular rifle. (I suppose if Lon’s rifle were located, traces of the same metal might be found within its barrel. But Lon – though we never discussed this, I’m sure it’s so – would have destroyed the rifle so that no such discovery was possible.)
That is exactly what Lon managed: the head-shot bullet exploded dynamically when it hit the skull, leaving no fragment large enough to be tracked to Alek’s rifle and therefore no fragment that could be ID’d as
As I see it, he fired wretchedly, coming off a mistake that I will describe shortly, and the bullet (other testimony buttresses this argument) hit the curb immediately behind or adjacent to the limousine. Since the angle of refraction is always less than the angle of reflection, when the bullet tore itself to pieces against the hard stone, its “cloud” of fragments was projected in a conelike shape that almost perfectly intercepted the vehicle a few feet away, all of this in micro-time. Some think that one fragment hit the president in the scalp, stinging him. Maybe so, maybe not, but one hit the windshield from the inside, cracking it, and that fragment bounced downward and to the left, where it was found the next day by FBI searchers. Another fragment also landed there, but no one can identify the trajectory, other than to say that the energies released by explosions are madly random.
We know the two frags found in the car couldn’t have come from Lon’s rifle, because of the rifling marks already mentioned, but also because of the geometry of the head shot. It is not particularly enjoyable to focus on such a morbid topic, but in the interest of truth, I shall go onward. The detonation took place in the upper right- hand quadrant of the president’s skull, above his ear (suggesting, among other things, the left-to-right axis of Lon’s shot, given our position to the left of the sniper’s-nest corner; LHO’s theoretical shot would have created a necessarily right-to-left axis, which would have exploded out of JFK’s left-hand quadrant, maybe above his left eye). The salient point is that, given the physics of the “explosion,” all those fragments would have spewed at high energy from the right-hand upper quadrant of the skull along that axis, carrying metallic debris and brain tissue to the right, out of the car; there’s no way the widely documented head shot, as witnessed eventually by the whole world, would have deposited fragments radically twenty full feet to the left, and downward, no less, to the carpet near the pedals, where those two pieces were found.
My one criticism of the report is that its investigators quickly came to believe in the single-gunman theory. Lane was right about one thing: it was a rush to judgment. Though they worked hard and honorably, that precept framed their findings, shaping them, perhaps only at the unknowable subconscious level. Had they remained open to theories outside their own invented box, they might have seen indications, subtle but persistent, in Alek’s behavior that suggested strongly there were other players on the field.
Therefore, I shall walk you through Alek’s last hour or so of freedom. There were developments that baffled the commission’s investigators and continue to baffle the amateur assassinationologists, so let me lay out, for the sake of history, exactly what I think happened between 12:30 p.m., when Alek fired the first bullet, and 2:17 p.m., when he was nabbed in the Texas Theatre.
I doubt he was nervous. He was too exuberant, too happy, too coursing with energy. I can see him, crouched and hiding behind the fortress of boxes he’d arranged on the sixth floor of the Book Depository, his eyes beady, his face tight with the characteristic smugness that so exiled him from his fellow man, presidential assassin or no, thinking not What if I miss? but Hurry up, hurry up! He must have been hungry for his destiny, for his entry into history. He wasn’t giving escape or survival a thought, but concentrating entirely on getting the job done to the best of his meager abilities. Consider his mind at the moment: he was about to strike a blow not merely at the United States, which he claimed to loathe, but at all those who’d seen him as he was – a fringe man clearly unable to hold a job, much less have a career, a life of normalcy and contribution – and insisted on reporting the bad news: You are nobody. You are not equipped to compete. Your destiny is nothingness. So this was his moment: to all of them, he was saying
As we were, he was alerted to the approach of the killing moment not by his watch but by the roar of the crowd as its crescendo followed the motorcade down Main like a human wave. He saw it emerge, the long boatlike vehicle, with its bounty of politicians and wives, as it turned for its one-block run down Houston. I’m guessing it was here that the rifle flew to his shoulder and he edged closer to the window, not caring if he was seen (several witnesses noted him all but hanging out of the frame). The car reached its 120-degree turn at Elm, rotating slowly to the left. Question: why didn’t he fire then? Car hardly moving, Kennedy as close as he would be, probably under seventy-five feet, head-on, pivoting slightly as the automobile pivoted; plus, instructions from his Russian control that this was the moment. Why would he go against his own instincts as well as orders from a superior whom he feared and loved? Again speculation: the safety? He pulls, ugh, nothing happens, so he breaks his line of vision through the scope, unshoulders the rifle, finds the safety – a poorly placed button half under the protruding rear of the firing pin assembly – and struggles to get it off. Perhaps his heavy sweating occluded the scope, and he saw nothing and had to quickly clean it with his shirt collar. Whatever, it was already going wrong for him, one tenth of a second in.
Desperately, he frees the mechanism, throws it to his shoulder, and fires the first shot in haste. True to form, a clean, clear, almost comical miss. I hold with many that the bullet, sailing along at that leisurely two-thousand- feet-per-second velocity, broke apart on the curb, depositing only its wan spray of fragments into the limo. He rushed, his trigger squeeze was a mess, the target was lost in the single tree that stood between him and his quarry, and the first shot, the closest shot, was a complete failure.
The man is haunted by folly. Now he’s in a panic, having missed pitifully, given up his position, fair game for counter-snipers (there weren’t any that day, though there would be evermore), and he hasn’t even hit the car!
He labors through the cocking motion, the rifle jerked from his shoulder by the raggedness of the manipulation, and he comes back “on target.” His finger lunges against the coarse grind of the pull, and my guess is that the crosshairs weren’t anywhere near the target when he fired, for the simple reason that he hit it.
Or did he? Yes, according to the commission, he did, with the famed magic bullet that drilled through the president’s upper back and exited his throat, its angle adjusted slightly by the muscle tissue through which it had traveled, which also cost it enormous velocity; then, spinning sideways, it hit Governor Connally in the back (its impression recorded indelibly in scar tissue), sliced through his body, exited much damaged (despite claims to the contrary), and drilled his wrist and his thigh. Then it tumbled, spent, hot, mangled, to rest in the folds of his jacket, to be discovered by a technician that afternoon at the hospital on the governor’s gurney after the governor was removed. Oh, what a bad boy that bullet was! The mischief it unleashed! What grist for the mills of the ignorant, the malicious, the embittered lefty proletariat-intellectuals! Yet I knew then and I know now that the bullet did what Arlen Specter said it did. It is beyond dispute.
What isn’t much thought about is the next issue.
