History of the Assassination

12:30pm, 11/22/63: The Shooting in Dealey Plaza

On Friday November 22, 1963 at 12:30PM CST, as President Kennedy’s motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) on Elm Street in Dallas, several shots rang out. The President was mortally wounded with gunshot wounds to his head, neck and back, and Texas Governor John Connally was wounded in his his chest, wrist and leg. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Hospital where emergency resuscitation procedures were performed, but the President was declared dead at 1PM. Governor Connally recovered from his wounds.

Immediately after the shooting motorcycle officer Marrion Baker, who saw pigeons fly off the roof of the TSBD during the shooting, parked his bike and ran into the TSBD.  He and Roy Truly, Superintendent of the TSBD ran up the stairs and to the roof, looking for a shooter without success.  That evening, Patrolman Baker wrote an affidavit which included the statement: "As we reached the third or fourth floor I saw a man walking away from the stairway.  I called to the man and he turned around and came back toward me.  The manager [Roy Truly] said, "I know that man, he works here."  I then turned the man loose and went up to the top floor.  The man I saw was a white man approximately 30 years old, 5'9", 165 pounds, dark hair and wearing a light brown jacket."   The next day Baker revised his statement to say that he saw a man standing in the second floor lunch room.  

Shortly after the shooting several bystanders on Elm Street reported that they had seen a person shooting a rifle from the sixth floor east window of the TSBD.  Another reported that he saw a man fleeing the building shortly after the shooting.  We'll return to what happened in the Texas School Book Depository in Week 4.

Broadcast of Subject

At 12:45pm, 15 minutes after the shooting, the Dallas Police Department broadcast a description of the subject: "Attention all squads. The suspect from Elm and Houston is reported to be an unknown white male about thirty, slender build, five feet ten inches tall, one hundred sixty-five pounds, armed with what is thought to be a 30-30 rifle. No further description at this time, or information. "  No one has satisfactorily explained where this description came from.   In a letter to the Warren Commission in January 1964, the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover stated that the original broadcast by the Dallas Police of the description of the assassin of President Kennedy was: “initiated on the basis of a description furnished by an unidentified citizen who had observed an individual approximating Oswald’s description running from the Texas School Book Depository immediately after the assassination. Although the citizen was requested by Dallas authorities to proceed to the Sheriff’s office for further questioning he apparently never appeared, as the Dallas Sheriff’s Office can locate no record of this citizen. Information regarding the unidentified citizen whose information initiated the Dallas Police Department broadcast on November 22, 1963, was obtained from Inspector J.H. Sawyer, Dallas Police Department by our Dallas Office on January 9, 1964.”  

1:10pm, Killing of Police Officer J.D. Tippit

Around 1:10pm, Dallas Officer J.D. Tippit was driving his patrol car in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas.  He stopped his car to speak with a man on the sidewalk, and then got out of his car and walked around the front of the car, whereupon he was shot four times by the man.  Officer Tippit died instantly, and the man walked off at a brisk pace, discarding the spent shells from his pistol.  Many police cars descended on Oak Cliff amid an intense search for the killer.  At 1:22pm police broadcast a description of the suspect as "White male, thirty, five eight, black hair, slender build, wearing white jacket, white shirt, dark slacks." (page 16)

Shoe store salesman Johnny Calvin Brewer noticed a suspicious looking character loitering outside his store, and followed as the man allegedly snuck into the nearby Texas Theatre. He persuaded the ticket taker, Julia Postal to call the police at 1:45PM. (page 18)  Several dozen police officers surrounded the Texas Theatre. Officer Armstrong went up to Lee Harvey Oswald, who was pointed out to him by Johnny Brewer and a scuffle ensued. They arrested Oswald at 1:50pm, with police shouting “Kill the President, will you?” and took him into custody.  As he was being escorted out of the theater, a police officer told Julia Postal Oswald’s name and said that they had their man on both counts, including the murder of Officer Tippit.

In the patrol car on the way to DPD headquarters, the police allegedly removed Oswald’s  wallet from his pocket and found ID for both Lee Harvey Oswald and Alek Hidell, although no mention of the name Hidell occurs in any police department reports or transcripts until the following day.

We’ll examine the Tippit killing and Oswald arrest more closely in Week 4.

3:30pm: Search of Ruth Paine's house in Irving, TX

Around 1:20pm Oswald's supervisor, Roy Truly pointed out to Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas Police that Oswald was missing, even though Truly and Marrion Baker had allegedly seen him just after the assassination.  This story seems strange because at that time a number of people were missing from the TSBD.  Nevertheless, Will Fritz sent Detective Guy Rose and several others out to the address that Truly had given Fritz which was the home of Ruth Paine in Irving Texas.  Oswald's Russian wife Marina was staying with Ruth Paine to help Ruth practice her Russian, while Oswald stayed in a rooming house in Dallas during the week and visited Marina on weekends.  According to Rose, "just as soon as we walked up on the porch, Ruth Paine came to the door. She apparently recognized us--she said, "I've been expecting you all," and we identified ourselves, and she said, "Well, I've been expecting you to come out. Come right on in."

Mr. BALL. Did she say why she had been expecting you?

Mr. ROSE. She said, "Just as soon as I heard where the shooting happened. I knew there would be someone out."

At that point, according to her own testimony, Ruth Paine thought Oswald was working at a different TSBD building–not the one at 411 Elm Street, where the Warren Commission ultimately placed Oswald and his rifle, but one that was located several blocks from Dealey Plaza.

Either the same day or the following day, a strange phone call was intercepted between Ruth Paine’s phone and that of her husband Michael, who said he felt sure that Oswald had killed the President but did not feel Oswald was responsible, and further stated “We both know who is responsible.”

The search of the Paine residence turned up a lot of incriminating evidence.  A search the following day turned up incriminating photos of Oswald with a rifle, and over the next few months, more evidence turned up which had previously been overlooked.  Many researchers are highly suspect of the Paines and the fact that so much of the circumstantial evidence incriminating Oswald appeared from their house. Even the Secret Service apparently told Marina Oswald not to associate with Ruth Paine because she was sympathizing with the CIA.

November 22-24, 1963: The Interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald

From Friday to Sunday of the assassination weekend, Oswald was interrogated by a variety of people for a total of 12 hours.   It does seem a little peculiar that while we have sworn statements, affidavits and testimony of hundreds if not thousands of people in the case, there were no notes, recordings or statements by the principal suspect in the case, other than statements that Oswald made to reporters  requesting legal representation and stating that he was "Just a patsy."   A number of people wrote later reports summarizing the interrogations, most notably Homicide Captain Will Fritz, FBI Agents James Hosty, James Brookhout and Manning Clements, Secret Service Inspector Thomas Kelley, and Postal Inspector H.D. Holmes.  The reports differ in reporting where Oswald was when JFK was shot.  Fritz' report  and Brookhout's confirms the second floor lunchroom drinking a cola story.  The Hosty/Brookout report says Oswald was on the first floor when JFK passed the building.  In the 1990's the ARRB released a set of handwritten notes by FBI Agent James Hosty in which Oswald indicated that he "returned to 1st floor to eat lunch.  Then went outside to watch P. [presidential?] Parade" .  Also in the 1990's some handwritten notes by Homicide Captain Will Fritz turned up.   These notes say "to 1st floor had lunch... out with Bill Shelly in front."  In Week 4 TSBD we'll see if we can determine where Oswald was when the President was shot.

Throughout the interrogation, Oswald denied owning a rifle and claimed that pictures of him holding a rifle were faked.  The rifle evidence is in an optional chapter.

During the weekend Oswald was placed in several line ups.  The star witness to the Tippit murder, Helen Markham testified to the Warren Commission but was quite incoherent; AssistantWarren Commission Counsel Liebeler has described her testimony as "contradictory and worthless", while Assistant Counsel Ball described her as "an utter screwball".  In her testimony she stated six times that she recognized nobody in the line up until Assistant Counsel Ball finally got her to say "I asked... I looked at him. When I saw this man I wasn't sure but I had cold chills run all over me ... when I saw the man. But I wasn't sure."

Howard Brennan was the other star witness who claimed to have seem a shooter on the sixth floor of the TSBD but he failed to identify Oswald in the line up.  Several months later he testified that he recognized Oswald but had been afraid for his life and thus refused to identify him.

Monday November 25, 1963: The State Funeral of John F. Kennedy

FBI Response to the Assassination and the Formation of the Warren Commission

J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo to his lieutenants at 1:42pm EST (12:42 PM Dallas time) on November 22, 1963, giving an overview of the case. He had just broken the news of the shooting to JFK’s brother Bobby who was at the Hickory Hill compound.

Hoover’s mutual loathing of Bobby was in evidence when he called Bobby back shortly after 2PM EST, announced “The President’s dead.” and hung up, leading Bobby to note later, that Hoover’s voice was oddly flat – “not quite as excited as if he were reporting the fact that he had found a Communist on the faculty of Howard University.”

However, this story conflicts with Hoover’s report that RFK told Hoover JFK was dead:
2:10 PM From J. Edgar Hoover memo: “called RFK to advise him of President’s condition and was told by RFK that JFK was dead; repeated all information from phone calls from Shanklin.”

In the above memo, Hoover notes that the Dallas FBI Special Agent in Charge, Gordon Shanklin “stated that a Secret Service agent had also been killed. He stated they did not mention that at first but an agent at the Police Department advised that one died. He did not know the name of this Secret Service agent.” The report of a killed Secret Service agent was repeated throughout the afternoon by the press including Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, with attribution from the Dallas Police Department.

The origin of this false rumor has been a mystery to assassination researchers. Regardless of its origin it may have had the result of moving the jurisdiction of the investigation from Dallas to Washington DC.  As William Manchester outlined in his book, The Death of a President, in 1963 there was no Federal law against killing a President. There were laws against conspiracy to kill a President, or killing a Secret Service agent, but no laws against killing the President himself. Thus the FBI lacked jurisdiction in the case, and the Secret Service forcibly and illegally removed JFK’s body from Parkland Hospital despite protestation from Earl Rose, the Dallas County medical examiner who insisted that by Texas law he was to conduct the autopsy.

At 4:01PM EST (3:01PM Dallas time) Oswald had been in custody for 1 hour and 11 minutes. At this point there was little evidence against him, except for an eyewitness report that he entered a movie theater without paying. Despite this, Hoover called Bobby Kennedy again and told him “I thought we had the man who killed the President down in Dallas.” and “since the Secret Service is tied up, I thought we should move into the case. .. I related that Oswald went to Russia and stayed three years; came back to the United States in June, 1962, and went to Cuba on several occasions but would not tell us what he went to Cuba for.”  [note: there is no evidence that Oswald ever went to Cuba].

Also at 4PM, Hoover put out a teletype to all FBI offices: “All offices immediately contact all informants, security, racial and criminal, as well as other sources for information bearing on assassination of President Kennedy. All offices immediately establish whereabouts of bombing suspects, all known Klan and hate group members, known racial extremists, and any other individuals who on the basis of information available in your files may possibly have been involved.”

At 5:15pm J. Edgar Hoover put out an internal memo stating that LHO was the principal suspect, seemingly based only on his leftist views and travel to Russia.  This premature conclusion, as well as Roy Truly's fingering of Lee Harvey Oswald is suspicious.  There were many other suspicious characters who were taken into custody but then quietly released, including:

• Eugene Hale Brading, a career criminal from California who was arrested after the assassination in the Dal-Tex building in Dealey Plaza for acting suspiciously.

• Three tramps taken from Dealey Plaza train

• Charles Murphy in Fort Worth says on NBC that a “car wanted in connection with the assassination” has been stopped in Fort Worth at an intersection, suspect in custody.

• Buell Wesley Frazier was arrested and pressured to sign a confession

• 1:35 PM In Fort Worth, police picked up a man who looked somewhat like Oswald; this resulted from a phone tip from a woman in a town not far from Dallas who said that the car the man was driving (she gave the license number) was linked to the assassination. The suspect told the FBI that he had driven 100 miles from his home in Ranger, Texas, to Dallas hoping to surprise an old friend with a visit. He was unable to reach his friend on the phone, and decided to watch the presidential motorcade, and parked his car on Commerce Street. After the shooting, the man left downtown Dallas in his green and white 1957 Ford; after receiving the tip from the woman caller, police at 1:35pm broadcast a description of the man’s car and his license number. He was detained a few minutes later; after Oswald’s arrest was announced, he was let go. (Dallas Morning News 8/20/1978; Cover Up 88; H 19 523; CD 301 p111-12) A short time later, Dallas police received a report that a man in a residential section of Dallas was seen removing a rifle from a light green, two-tone car. Police discovered that the car in question was registered to a man who had the same last name as the “friend” the suspect had tried to telephone. (Senate Select Committee Final Report, book 5, p884-5; Cover Up 88) Gary Shaw has tried to interview the young man about this issue and has “met with extreme hostility.” (Reasonable Doubt 126)

• 1:50PM reported second suspect arrested with Oswald at Texas Theater

• CBS reports (approx 1:40 PM) that police are not satisfied the man they brought in is the right suspect. They are searching for a white man, about 30, 165lbs, used a 30-30 rifle. Assassin shot from the 5th or 6th floor. JFK was shot “in the right temple.” Bulletin from Dan Rather in Dallas that DPD has arrested a 30 year old man who was found with a weapon

• 12:38pm Dallas police detain a Latin man whom they have seized on Elm Street. (Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig states that this is the same man he will see driving a Rambler station wagon that picks up a man in front of the TSBD a few minutes later.) The Latin man is released when he indicates he cannot speak English.

• 1:05 PM On Interstate 45, a few miles south of Dallas, highway patrolmen stopped a black car for speeding; witnesses to the incident say it contained three men in suits, one of whom identified himself to an officer as a Secret Service agent. This man reportedly said, “We’re in a hurry to get to New Orleans to investigate part of the shooting.” (Conspiracy of Silence 96) There is no record of Secret Service personnel being dispatched to New Orleans on the day of the assassination.

Saturday November 23: Explosive Evidence of Conspiracy and Impersonation

The Warren Commission Report tells us that two months prior to the assassination, on Friday September 27, 1963, Oswald had arrived in Mexico City. He immediately checked into the Hotel del Commercio, and visited the Cuban Consulate in an attempt to obtain a transit visa to Cuba, which he wanted to visit on his way back to Russia. The Cuban Consulate told him he would need a Russian visa before giving him a Cuban transit visa, so he visited the Russian Embassy, who told him it would take at least six weeks to obtain a Russian visa and the decision would have to come from the Soviet Embassy in Washington DC. Repeated visits and telephone calls to the embassies over the next few days proved fruitless, so after a few days of sightseeing, Oswald departed Mexico City the following Wednesday October 2, on a bus back to Dallas. We have transcripts of four telephone calls from Lee Oswald to the Soviet Embassy since the CIA was bugging their phone lines, and they seem at first glance to be innocuous, although the date of the last call is October 3, after Oswald departed.

The day after Kennedy’s assassination, these transcripts appeared anything but innocuous. The CIA identified one of the names mentioned on the transcripts, a Soviet consular official named Valeriy Kostikov, as not only a member of the KGB, but indeed, a member of KGB’s Department 13 which was in charge of assassinations and sabotage.  Tennent Bagley, the Acting Chief of Soviet Russia Division at the CIA immediately issued an explosive memo entitled “Contact of Lee Oswald with a member of Soviet KGB Assassination Department.”  The CIA subsequently emphasized the danger with a memo dated January 21, 1964 to the Warren Commission stating that the Assassination Department 13 "conducts interviews or, as appropriate, file reviews on every foreign military defector to the USSR to study and to determine the possibility of utilizing the defector in his country of origin".  And on February 28, 1964, the CIA sent Warren Commission counsel Lee Rankin a memo outlining grisly assassination techniques, labeled "Soviet Use of Assassination and Kidnapping."

It should be noted that James Jesus Angleton, a top CIA employee in charge of counter-intelligence and a lifelong proponent of the Soviets killed Kennedy theory disputed the allegation that Kostikov was involved in assassinations both before and after the assassination, but approved sending the Kostikov story to the Warren Commission nonetheless.

The Kostikov incident prompted a huge reaction within the CIA because it implied that Oswald may have assassinated JFK on orders from Russia.

Edgar Hoover of the FBI was on top of this. The evening of the assassination he had sent an FBI agent down to Mexico City to obtain the original tapes of the phone calls as well as photographs of Oswald which were taken by CIA surveillance as he went in and out of the Soviet and Cuban Embassies:

As you can see, the photograph is of someone else; assassination researchers call him the Mystery Man and he has not yet been identified. On Saturday, November 23 at 10 AM Hoover had a phone call with LBJ who asked him for an update on the “Mexico City incident”. Apparently LBJ had been briefed on this at some earlier point, but we have no record of that discussion. See the Hoover LBJ phone transcript:

(6) Lyndon B. Johnson: Have you established any more about the visit to the Soviet embassy in Mexico in September?

(7) J. Edgar Hoover: No, that’s one angle that’s very confusing, for this reason – we have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet embassy, using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice, nor to his appearance. In other words, it appears that there is a second person who was at the Soviet embassy down there.

Interestingly enough,  this conversation between LBJ and Hoover is the only one of the LBJ telephone tapes  at the LBJ Presidential Library that seems to have been deliberately erased, so that revealing as it is, we can’t be sure that it reflects their actual conversation or if other parts of the conversation were not transcribed.

As of Saturday morning 11/23, it appeared to LBJ and Hoover that someone impersonating Lee Oswald had made these calls which were causing so much conspiracy concern. We know it probably wasn’t Oswald not only due to the FBI voice match, but also because the translator said the man spoke “terrible, hardly recognizable Russian” while Oswald was quite fluent in Russian. Perhaps the Mexico City CIA station had made a mistake with the photos, but the three most senior personnel: David Atlee Phillips, CIA station chief Win Scott, and Ambassador Thomas Mann (as well as James Jesus Angleton) were strongly pushing the Soviets-killed-Kennedy story long after Washington had settled on the lone nut theory, so it would seem that if they had surveillance photos of the real Oswald, they would have found them. The fact of Oswald’s impersonation would seem to strengthen Oswald’s claim that he was just a patsy and indicate that there was a conspiracy, if not to assassinate JFK, at least to implicate Oswald with Kostikov.  Tennent Bagley’s memo also seems overly inflammatory, perhaps indicative of a plan to frame Oswald. We’ll look at revelations of strange things happening in the CIA files between Oswald’s Mexico trip and the assassination later, in Week 9.

The Warren Commission

The Warren Commission began in January 1964 and was slated to complete its work and issue a report within a few months.  It was hoped that the report would, in the words of Assistant Director of the FBI, Alan Belmont "settle the dust, in so far as Oswald and his activities are concerned, both from the standpoint that he is the man who assassinated the President, and relative to Oswald himself and his activities and background, et cetera."  This would hopefully pave the way for LBJ's election in November 1964. 

 The Warren Commission was designed to review the evidence gathered by the FBI. It had the ability to subpoena witnesses and get their testimony under oath, but the bulk of the investigatory process was handled by the FBI. The FBI report, which had been delayed by the investigation of conspiracy rumors involving Fidel Castro, was finally delivered to the Warren Commission on December 9, 1963. In Hoover’s eyes, this was a simple, albeit circumstantial case: the rifle found in the TSBD was linked to Oswald who had purportedly ordered it by mail order using an alias, through a post office box. Three shots were fired at the motorcade: one hit JFK in the back, one hit Governor Connally, and the third and fatal shot hit JFK in the head. Incriminating photos showing Oswald with the rifle were found. Ballistics evidence matched bullet fragments and a pristine intact bullet found at Parkland hospital to the rifle, and the pistol cartridges allegedly found at the scene of the Tippit murder were matched to Oswald’s pistol. Importantly, Oswald, while not a card carrying communist, had leftist leanings, was a self-avowed Marxist, who had lived in the Soviet Union, and attempted to visit Cuba.  However, while it was difficult to prove a negative, no evidence was found that Oswald was part of an international communist conspiracy, rather, he was deemed a malcontent loner, or a lone nut.  Any evidence suggesting a link between Oswald and foreign sources such as Kostikov were suppressed.  (See the FBI Report)

In contrast to the 400 pages of the FBI report and exhibits, the Warren Commission report  was a massive undertaking: an 888 page report, together with 26 volumes, totaling 18,462 pages of hearing transcripts and exhibits. The report was issued on September 24, 1964, prior to the upcoming presidential election in November and was lauded by the media at that time and still today as the final word on the assassination.  At first glance, the Warren Commission report appears to be completely comprehensive. It includes a report of a dental exam of Jack Ruby’s mother, but it does not include Oswald’s tax returns for 1962 which is unfortunate because of the persistent rumors that Oswald was a paid FBI informant (we'll examine in Week 5). Neither does the Warren Commission (hereafter WC) report include a copy of the FBI report. This is perhaps because the WC realized in the spring of 1964 that the FBI’s three shots/three hits scenario was incompatible with the shot timing and trajectory evidence from the Zapruder film and the eyewitness evidence of a missed shot.  The Warren Commission had a great deal of difficulty fitting the Dealey Plaza eyewitness and film evidence to their hypothesis.  Fortunately, a young WC staffer and future Senator Arlen Specter, was able to rationalize the medical evidence with the trajectory evidence with his Magic bullet theory, which postulated that the pristine bullet found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital had hit JFK in the back, exited his neck, and continued on to shatter Governor Connally’s rib, break his wrist and lodge in his thigh.  Specter ran a re-enactment in Dealey Plaza as late as the end of May 1964 to show that a shot from the sixth floor snipers nest could have hit both JFK and Connally.  The final conclusion of the Warren Commission was that one shot missed, one shot hit both JFK and Connally and the final shot killed JFK.  Three of the seven WC Commissioners: Senator Richard Russell, Senator John Sherman Cooper, and Congressman Hale Boggs disagreed or had serious misgivings about the single bullet theory but were persuaded to sign the report with some last minute weasel wording.  Here is a picture of Commission Exhibit 399, the so called Magic Bullet which allegedly passed through both JFK and Connally and emerged almost completely pristine:

1966: Garrison Trial

In late 1966 Jim Garrison, District Attorney of Orleans Parish, Louisiana, began an investigation into the JFK assassination. He received several tips from Jack Martin, a private investigator, who implicated his boss, Guy Banister, and David Ferrie and businessman Clay Shaw, together with Lee Harvey Oswald in an assassination conspiracy to kill JFK which was purportedly planned when Oswald was in New Orleans during the period May to September 1963.  Oswald's association with Banister, Ferrie, and Shaw made little sense since Oswald was ostensibly a Marxist and pro-Castro, while those associates in New Orleans were rabid anti-communists and had worked to overthrow Castro.  This suggested that perhaps Oswald was playing a role for unknown purposes.

The story is recounted in Jim Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins, as well as Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK. Garrison’s case was hampered by Banister’s heart attack death in 1964 and Ferrie’s death by “natural causes” shortly after news of Garrison’s investigation broke.  Ferrie was reportedly afraid he would be killed and typed two suicide notes before dying of natural causes.

Garrison’s trial of Clay Shaw, the last remaining alleged conspirator ended in acquittal. Garrison claimed that his investigation had been compromised by FBI and CIA.  See Joan Mellen’s A Farewell to Justice or a critical review of her book.

The evidence regarding Oswald’s actions in New Orleans is long and complicated and will be discussed further in Week 5: Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?.  A New Orleans lawyer by the name of Dean Andrews Jr. claimed that on the day after the assassination, someone named Clay Bertrand called him and asked him to provide legal representation to Oswald.  When Clay Shaw was arrested and booked he was asked if he had any aliases, and he admitted that he used Clay Bertrand as an alias. See Shaw Bertrand Booking Alias.  See the counter argument that the alias listed on Clay Shaw’s fingerprint card was faked.  One of the reasons Clay Shaw was acquitted at trial was the judge disallowed this admission. David Ferrie had known Oswald years earlier in the Civil Air Patrol and two witnesses claim that Ferrie loaned Oswald his library card and tried to retrieve it from Oswald’s landlady after the assassination.

Oswald passed out leaflets for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans with an address stamped on them which was in the same building as Banister’s office.

Banister’s secretary Delphine Roberts told the House Select Committee on Assassinations that she saw Banister and Oswald working together and she later told author Anthony Summers that she thought Oswald was working undercover.  Former CIA agent William Gaudet told author Anthony Summers, "I do know that I saw him [Oswald] one time with a former FBI agent by the name of Guy Banister...  What Guy's role in all of this was... I really don't know. I did see Oswald discussing various things with Banister at the time, and I think Banister knew a whole lot of what was going on. I suppose you are looking into Ferrie. He was with Oswald..."

The Garrison case is often widely derided today by both conspiracy theorists and Warren Commission advocates, however, at the time senior figures in the CIA thought Garrison would be successful obtaining a conviction of Shaw and there were CIA concerns that anti-Castro Cubans could be implicated by Garrison.

This was because perhaps, contrary to Shaw’s testimony, he had had a long term relationship with the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division.  In addition, in 1962 Clay Shaw had been approved for a CIA project titled QKENCHANT. Other person approved for this project were E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame and Guy Banister. The QKENCHANT project seems to have allowed its agents to recruit others for CIA operations.

1975: The Zapruder Film is First Seen by the Public

In March 1975, Geraldo Rivera showed a poor bootleg copy of the Zapruder film on ABC’s Good Night America. The film, owned by LIFE magazine, had never been widely shown, although Garrison had subpoenaed the film and showed it at the Garrison trial. The film reignited the controversy around the Warren Commission report, as JFK’s body is seen to be thrown back and to the left after the fatal head shot, which would imply a shot from the front, while Oswald was allegedly firing from the rear. To see the back and to the left motion, click here – Head Shot.  The resulting public outcry, coupled with an expose on domestic spying by Seymour Hersh prompted President Ford to launch a new investigation, the Rockefeller Commission (otherwise known as the Presidents Commission on CIA Activities within the United States)

Chapter 19 of the report deals with two narrow allegations surrounding JFK’s assassination. The first is that a veteran CIA agent, E. Howard Hunt (active in the coup d’ etat in Guatemala, head of CIA domestic covert action, and future head of the Nixon Plumbers unit famous in the Watergate affair) and Frank Sturgis, an anti-Castro operative and future Watergate Plumber, were two of the three tramps rousted from a train in Dealey Plaza just after the assassination. The Rockefeller Commission determined the tramps were not Hunt or Sturgis, as did the later House Select Committee on Assassinations.

The Rockefeller Commission determined JFK’s back and to the left movement was due to a combination of neuromuscular reaction and the “Jet Effect”, an idea from Dr. Luiz Alvarez, a Nobel Prize winning physicist. See this video and this rebuttal.  We'll try to figure it out in Week 2: Dealey Plaza.

1976: The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)

In 1976, the US House of Representatives launched a major re-investigation of the murders of JFK and Martin Luther King.  The investigation was prompted by the erosion of public trust, since only about 10% of the American public trusted the Warren Commission's findings at that point.  Also the new revelations of assassination plots and evidence of conspiracy made a new investigation very popular politically.   The House Select Committee on Assassinations was not just a re-examination of the prior record, but involved hiring investigators, taking witness testimony and hiring experts to do scientific studies. The investigation, which took two years and cost $5 million, is described in a book called The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi, one of the Church Committee and HSCA investigators. In it, he describes how the original Chief Counsel Richard Sprague started the investigation with a spirited attempt to obtain information under oath from the CIA. He quickly ran into loggerheads with the Committee Chairman, Henry Gonzales, and as a compromise both of them resigned. The new Chief Counsel, G. Robert Blakey controlled the investigation tightly and the resulting conclusions were close to those of the Warren Commission: Oswald did it alone, but Ruby was tied to the Mob. However, late in the investigation, Mary Ferrell, an assassination researcher in Dallas offered up a Dictabelt audio recording of the assassination, caused by a stuck transmit button on one of the motorcycle radios in the motorcade. When the resultant sound recording was analyzed, the audio experts concluded that three shots were fired from the general location of the TSBD and one was fired from the grassy knoll to the west of the TSBD. Thus, late in its life, HSCA concluded that JFK was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The audio evidence, like everything in the JFK assassination has been subject to great debate, and as of 2025, it is controversial.  

The HSCA convened a medical panel to re-evaluate JFK's wounds compared to bullet trajectories.  They noticed that in Warren Commission Exhibit CE 388, the bullet trajectory between the back of the head and the exit wound implied that the bullet came from the trunk of the limousine, below JFK, not above him.  The HSCA badgered Kennedy's autopsy doctor, Dr. Hume for hours until he admitted that he had probaby been mistaken and adopted the HSCA medical panel's conclusion that the entrance hole in JFK's skull was four inches higher than the autopsy doctors had determined, as shown in HSCA Exhibit F-66:

Over the years, Blakey subsequently came to believe the HSCA was misled by the CIA.” …I no longer believe that we were able to conduct an appropriate investigation of the [Central Intelligence] Agency and its relationship to Oswald…. We now know that the Agency withheld from the Warren Commission the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. Had the commission known of the plots, it would have followed a different path in its investigation. The Agency unilaterally deprived the commission of a chance to obtain the full truth, which will now never be known. Significantly, the Warren Commission’s conclusion that the agencies of the government co-operated with it is, in retrospect, not the truth. We also now know that the Agency set up a process that could only have been designed to frustrate the ability of the committee in 1976-79 to obtain any information that might adversely affect the Agency. Many have told me that the culture of the Agency is one of prevarication and dissimulation and that you cannot trust it or its people. Period. End of story. I am now in that camp.”– Robert Blakey, 2003.

It is interesting in retrospect that James Jesus Angleton, CIA head of counterintelligence, was the CIA's main conduit of information to the Warren Commission.  We have subsequently found out that Angleton's CI/SIG Counterintelligence/Special Investigation Group closely held and maintained the earliest CIA files on Oswald, perhaps indicating an operational interest in Oswald when he travelled to the Soviet Union.  Similarly, when the HSCA was formed, the CIA called George Joannides out of retirement to be the primary interface between the CIA and the HSCA.  Undisclosed was the fact that Joannides had been the case officer for the anti-Castro Cuban group, the DRE during the summer of 1963 when Oswald was very involved with the New Orleans chapter of the DRE.  Dan Hardway was a researcher for the HSCA and felt that Joannides and the CIA stonewalled and blocked access to key information held by the CIA.  We'll look more closely at the CIA in Week 9.

1992: The Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB)

Public reaction to Oliver Stone's  film prompted the federal government again to take action.  Given all the problems with the prior investigations, no agency of government was brave enough to take on another investigation, so Congress passed the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.  This law established the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to aggressively find and declassify government documents relating to the assassination. Over a four year period, the ARRB found and declassified several million pages of documents including most of the FBI and CIA files that they could find, all of the Warren Commission Documents and session transcripts and HSCA documents. These documents are stored at the National Archives and can be inspected there by researchers.   The National Archives were authorized under Joe Biden to digitize these records and put them on line, but the process will take many years.   In the meantime, some organizations, such as www.History-Matters.com and www.MaryFerrell.org have scanned archives of over 2 million pages available for viewing on the internet.

One government organization refused to comply with the ARRB. After being notified by the ARRB, the Secret Service removed all its files pertaining to JFK’s Dallas trip from the National Archives and destroyed them as well as the files for several other JFK trips that fall.  We'll look at some other questionable actions by the Secret Service in Week 6.  

A few hundred thousand pages of classified documents were withheld for 25 years following the passage of the ARRB act.  Many of these were released in late 2017 and 2018, and almost all the rest were released by President Trump in 2025, with most of the redactions removed.  As it turns out, most of the documents that the CIA lobbied so hard for 60 years to be kept secret had little to do with JFK's assassination, and were mostly documents which cast the CIA in an embarrassing or negative light, such as this 1961 memo by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., advocating a reorganization of the CIA.

The ARRB arranged for the Federal Government to purchase the physical Zapruder film from the Zapruder family for $16 million (Time Inc. had sold it back to the Zapruder family for $1 in 1975 to settle a lawsuit.) Unfortunately, the government allowed the Zapruder family to keep the copyright, making it illegal for people to distribute or show the film without prior permission. Fortunately, the current copyright holder, the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, has not been aggressively pursuing the blatant copyright infringement taking place on the internet, although high-quality film scans are not available.

Since the ARRB, researchers have combed through the materials and found documents to support their various points of view. Spirited debates among researchers continue on internet forums (see Resources). The mass media remains committed to the Warren Report as demonstrated in many television specials released on the 50th anniversary of the assassination.   Several deathbed confessions of Mafia and CIA officials have emerged (see Week 8). Occasionally new bits of evidence come out, such as former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s claim that former President Gerald Ford told him there was a conspiracy.

Absent new revelations, the body of evidence in the case is mostly fixed, and the challenge is now to understand it and decide what really happened in 1963.

In the next week, we’ll delve into the evidence surrounding What Happened in Dealey Plaza?