POSTSCRIPT

And so the dearly beloved President, foully assassinated and interred with the silent homage of the multitudes of the great and the humble of the world, has bestowed upon him the official epitaph of this dubious inquest. For the Report of the President's Commission was no Marc Antony's oration. No passionate throng was aroused to wreak vengeance on his assassins. Indeed, they run free, sheltered by the magic cloak of the Report and its untenable conclusions.

In the perceptive phrase of Stephen Barber, Washington correspondent of the London Sunday Telegraph, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was not only a President of the United States of America; he was a President for the world. Yet in the entire world, as in the United States there was none among the exalted and few indeed among the lowly who cried "Shame!" at this dubious epitaph with which this great man, loved beyond measure by millions, was consigned to history.

Perhaps, now, this wrong will be righted. This is the author's hope and intent, for he is unwilling to believe -- and will not -- that a democratic society will perpetuate such a miscarriage of justice and even further delay retribution.

Perhaps, also, there may remain in the minds of some a question of the intent of those who fashioned their "facts" from the cobwebs of obfuscations and from falsities. As we have already seen, the staff of the Commission did not shun lying to the Commission itself, and neither was deterred by perjury or its subornation. Is it possible they did not know what they were doing?

And what of the FBI, that almost hallowed institution whose director appears to be the only indispensable man in the United States Government; whose infallibility and incorruptibility is accepted by most as an article of faith, sustained as it is and has been by "statistics" about its convictions and other performances? The FBI performed most of the investigations and technical services for the Commission and rendered its own report to the Commission some time following the assassination. Could the almost sacred FBI have so grievously erred?

The author saw the once-secret FBI report on March 30, 1966, long after this book was written. It permits no doubt about the answer to this and other questions.

The FBI report, in fact, is a tissue so thin and a polemic so undisguised that it would demean the labors of a hick police force investigating the purloining of a desiccated flounder. It is a neat, clean, colorful and optically attractive rendition of such tenuous content that a self-respecting undergraduate lawyer would hesitate to take it to an uncorrupted court. It is further a hardly disguised political effort whose main thrust is that Oswald the Marxist was the agent of a Communist conspiracy to do away with the President, a police-created fiction long since evaporated by both fact and reason.

Appended to this inconsiderable report are three volumes of exhibits carefully culled from the vast collection than already made. These seek to credit incredible conclusions and to authenticate the nonsense of the FBI's concept of the political considerations it infers were involved.

There are three parts to this FBI report. The first deals with and is entitled "THE ASSASSINATION." Double-spaced and with generous margins, it consumes but three and a half pages! Shocking as it is this scant regard for such a shattering and traumatic event to which the most publicized police agency in the world devoted its not inconsiderable skills, talents and manpower, even more stunning is what it manages to both state and avoid stating in the mere 500 words of which it considers the assassinations of an American President worthy.

The first two sentences of the second paragraph read:

"As the motorcade was traveling through downtown Dallas on Elm Street about fifty yards west of the intersection with Houston Street (Exhibit 1), three shots rang out. Two bullets struck President Kennedy, and one wounded Governor Connally."

There were but three shorts fired, the FBI reports. Two of these struck the President and one, the Governor. It does not say that, of the three shots, one that struck the President also struck the governor, nor does it intend to. As we shall see, the FBI knew this was impossible. What, then, of the "missed" shot, already painstaking traced in the chapter, "The Number of Shots?" How could the FBI dare say there were but three shots, two of which struck the President and one the governor, thus accounting for all three, when it knew, in the words of its Director, that the "missed" shot could not be associated with any that hit the Presidential car or its occupants? It is only too obvious that there is here no acknowledgment of the missed shot which means a minimum of a fourth and the total elimination of Oswald as a lone and unassisted assassin. The language is not subject to semantic evasion. There were only "three shots." Of these, "two bullets struck President Kennedy, and one wounded Governor Connally." And there is not even a mention of the wound in the front of the President's neck!

If any but the obvious explanation of these words and their scandalous meaning can be made, let the FBI now make it.

Any other explanation is severely inhibited -- if not, in fact, totally eliminated -- by the FBI's account of the President's non-fatal injury, which appears in the second part of its report, on page 18. Here, with equal and equally inexplicable brevity, the FBI demolishes its own report and

that of the Commission which followed it:

"Immediately after President Kennedy and Governor Connally were admitted to Parkland Memorial Hospital, a bullet was found on one of the stretchers. Medical examination of the President's body revealed that one of the bullets had entered just below his shoulder to the right of the spinal column at an angle of 45 to 60 degrees downward, that there was no point of exit, and that the bullet was not in the body."

What oddly imprecise language for an agency with the reputation of the FBI, yet how clear and unmistakable the meaning, no mater how carefully phrased.

A bullet was found on one of the stretchers. The FBI will not say as the Commission did -- falsely -- that it was proved to have come from the governor's stretcher.

One of the two bullets the FBI says hit the President only "entered" his body. And not in his neck, as the Commission, despite its own indestructible evidence, had alleged, but below the shoulder and to the right of his spine, as we have already established must have been the case.

There was "no point of exit" and "the bullet was not in the body."

And only a single bullet was found.

There is but a single possible meaning: This bullet hit the President and penetrated his body so slightly that it fell out and was found at the hospital. Is there any other way in which it neither went through his body nor remained in it? And is there any other explanation of the inability of the autopsy surgeons to probe this wound? How could they explore a passage that did not exist?

And how could they not have known what the FBI reports when they could -- and did -- cut the President's body as their task required?

This behavior of this particular bullet is consistent with the behavior of a spent bullet, one that has lost its energy in distance or age. The Western ammunition was ancient. It was of World War II manufacture. But the short distance from that sixth-floor window to the President was hardly enough to exhaust the "high velocity" projectile so misleadingly emphasized in the Report and by the Commission's staff in its questioning of witnesses.

Important as this evidence is, it is of minor significance compared to what it does to the Report and to the Commission's staff and their entire effort to reconstruct the tragic events in a way more compatible with their desires, their attempt to rewrite history for their own purposes which they alone must now explain.

What happens now to the flat angle alleged to have been the path of the non-fatal bullet which, according to the Report, entered the back of the President's neck and exited in the front, near the Adam's apple? The FBI says the angle was not less than 45 degrees and could have been as steep as 60 degrees. Which, if either, tells the truth?

The ballistics of the Report are revolutionary, to employ a generous designation, as it describes the unprecedented and impossible path of this single, un-mutilated bullet through both the President's and the governor's bodies and the governor's shattered wrist and thigh, with all the changes of angle and direction. The Report creates a bullet like no other in the world, a missile that could at will go forward or backward, up or down, and did so in defiance of the immutable laws of nature and all that was known and misrepresented, as we have already seen. But if all the truly magical powers the Report attributes to this marvelous if ancient and undependable bullet were capacities it really possessed, the Report does not claim for it the power either to fly in circles around the President's body or to tracelessly and bloodlessly gash his skin and rend his flesh.

Clearly, the non-fatal bullet of the FBI report that did not go through the President's body and did not remain in it is not the bullet that inflicted Governor Connally's injuries. Nor can it possibly be the bullet that wounded the President at the thorax, in the front of his neck. What bullets, then, wounded the governor and the President in the front of the neck? Not the "missed" shot, not the exploded fatal bullet, and certainly not this one that did not go anywhere but back out the way it came.

And how could the President have been wounded in the front by a shot fired from behind and above him? Unless this FBI report is totally wrong, the President was shot from both front and back. Nothing else makes sense. Nothing else is possible.

God alone knows how many shots were fired by how many people from how many weapons and from how many directions. But one thing is now beyond question: There was not a single assassin, Oswald or any other. Thus there was at least one conspiracy -- to kill the President.

Was there a further conspiracy?

What must now be asked and thought of the investigations and reports?

Do we now know all the reasons for all those strange doings, especially about the autopsy, why it was two days and so many revisions in the drafting?

Why there was so much editing and of a factual rather than an editorial nature?

Why these most historic and classified papers were removed from the Naval Hospital?

Why some were irretrievably destroyed by fire and their unprecedented destruction so carefully certified?

Why there were the telephone calls from the Naval Hospital to Dallas?

And, above all, why the photographs and X-rays and the spectrographic analysis are not only not in the twenty-six volumes appended to the Report, but are not even exhibits in the Commission's record?

Are these really questions?

Is there, in fact, now any basic question other than who the assassins are?

And have we anything less than the most odious event in our national history?

EXCERPTS FROM THE FBI REPORT

I. THE ASSASSINATION

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, at approximately 12:29 p.m. (CST) on November 22, 1963. At the time the President was en route from Love Field to the Trade Mart in Dallas to address a luncheon sponsored by several civic groups. Among those in the motorcade were ...
Street (Exhibit 1), three shots rang out. Two bullets struck President Kennedy, and one wounded Governor Connally. The President, who slumped forward in the car, was rushed to Parkland ...
Immediately after President Kennedy and Governor Connally were admitted to Parkland Hospital, a bullet was found on one of the stretchers. Medical examination of the President's body revealed that one of the bullets entered just below his shoulder to the right of the spinal column at an angle of 45 to 60 degrees downward, that there was no point of exit, and that the FBI Laboratory determined that it had been fired from the rifle owned by Oswald. (Exhibit 23)