5. AT THE DEPOSITORY -- THE TANGIBLE EVIDENCE

At about 12:30 p.m. the Presidential motorcade turned right into Houston Street, went a couple of hundred feet and turned left into Elm and was fired upon. The President received a wound below the larynx and a massive head wound that was probably irreversibly fatal. He lost much of the right side of his head. The Governor was hit near the right armpit by a bullet which exited under his right nipple. His right wrist was shattered and he sustained a wound in his left thigh. Within seconds the motorcade was racing toward Parkland Hospital at speeds of up to 80 miles an hour.

This synopsis of the Report includes most of the central facts that are not treated with equivocation, contradiction or evasion. They are among the few that are not subject to question, doubt or disbelief.

The language of the Report is employed skillfully. There are many central facts of which, when one version is questioned, the Commission can shift to another.

Unless it was willing to launch a searching investigation of its own, which clearly it was not, the Commission had little alternative. It could work with only the vast amount of information and misinformation in which it was submerged by the local police and national agencies. The full measure of the power of the police to alter and misrepresent a crime is beyond the comprehension of the average person. At the time of this writing, there was a scandal in New York City in which an innocent man had been prevailed upon to confess to barbaric crimes of which he was clearly innocent. Yet his confession was complete with details otherwise "known only to the police." The public is outspoken and persistent in its demands for solutions to spectacular crimes and the police, who are public employees, are human. As a result of this pressure, their "solutions" sometimes "solve" nothing and their actions sometimes undermine the freedom and rights of innocent citizens. Even the guilty can be and have only too often been convicted in proceedings so flagrantly illegal that, as Chief Justice Warren himself has said, the rights of all are jeopardized.

The investigation of the assassination at the Book Depository alone was of so highly dubious a character and accompanied by so many faults that, in itself it could be the subject of more than one long book. Perhaps experts will some day make such a study. The Commission inherited this botch and formalized it into fact and history with the imprint of its approval.

Rarely has a crime of such magnitude been perpetrated in the presence of so many police. Besides the large number of Dallas police, including ranking officials, there were also a large number of Secret Service agents and sheriff's deputies. The alleged source of the shots was reported within seconds. The exact window of the building from which the shots were supposed to have been fired was immediately pointed out. Yet this building was never sealed off -- not ever -- despite the obfuscation in the Report. Belatedly, it and the entire two or three block area were ordered isolated by an official, but there was not even a gesture in this direction. Even more inexplicably, there was no organized search of the building either immediately or as an afterthought. No one was ordered to inspect and search the area from which witnesses immediately reported the shots were fired. Not one of the police, from private to inspector, undertook this obvious search on his own. The empty cases of the bullets that both the police and the Commission concluded were fired were found in plain view at precisely the spot reported by witnesses -- 42 minutes after the assassination ® 79). The rifle was not found until ten minutes later than that, and it was on the same floor. An alleged eyewitness description of the man later accused of being the assassin was immediately reported to radio-equipped police who did nothing about it. With the supposed killer still in the building, its exits were not secured. His description was not even broadcast on the police radio for almost 15 minutes.

These blunders, if that is what they were, did not stop once the immediate shock of the crime had passed. They were the persistent pattern of the entire police operation, and they have been dignified and perpetuated by the Commission in both its hearings and its Report. Nowhere in the Report will you find any criticism of the police, except for its "public relations." Nowhere will you find any suggestion that the police could or should have done otherwise, or that their "errors" were in any way suspicious.

At the scene an abundance of evidence was immediately available from both tangible objects and many eyewitnesses. The evidence was sometimes contradictory, as it was regarding the source of the shots. But it was there. So were the eyewitnesses. These people in some cases were just told to wait until they were questioned, without their identifications even being sought. Today there is no way of knowing whether all these witnesses were ever interviewed or whether their knowledge was ever transmitted to the police.

The chief of homicide, Captain Will Fritz, went to the hospital on orders of Chief Jesse E. Curry. Before his experts got to the scene of the crime, Deputy Sheriff Luke Mooney (3H281ff.) found three empty cartridge cases near the easternmost window on the sixth floor of the building on the south side, facing the motorcade route. No one was allowed to touch this evidence until the identification experts arrived. About 1:22 p.m., Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone and Constable Seymour Weitzman simultaneously saw the rifle. At a moment less precisely fixed, the "bag" was identified as an important piece of evidence. These items have already been discussed. Both the shells and the rifle were ordered treated carefully. They were, at least until the picture possibilities of Captain Fritz holding the rifle arose. But the bag was not so handled. In his subsequent account Captain Fritz said he ordered only that the rifle and bullets be "protected" for the crime laboratory ® 599).

It was about a half-hour after the assassination before the chief of the crime laboratory, Lieutenant J. C. Day (4H249-78; 7H402), was ordered to the scene. By the time he got there, newsmen were already on the sixth floor (4H623). He and his assistants took about 50 pictures, but not one showing the bag in the place where it was found. No question is raised about this in the Report, especially regrettable because of the importance this bag assumes in the Commission's reconstruction. All sorts of pictures were taken, but not that one. Instead, there is a picture of the blank floor showing where the bag allegedly had been (Exhibit 729). Yet Day had immediately recognized the importance of this evidence, for "at the time the sack was found," he wrote on it, "Found next to the sixth-floor window gun fired from. May have been used to carry gun" (4H266-7). A number of pictures were taken with the police photographer standing on the very spot where that bag was found. There were no fingerprints on the outside, although it had been moved by Day's assistant, Robert Lee Studebaker (7H137-49). Studebaker testified that he had not taken any pictures first and that the bag does not show in any other pictures (7H144). He was not asked why. Everything else Studebaker is known to have moved he left well supplied with fingerprints ® 566). The Commission was no less indifferent in questioning Day about the inexplicable moving of evidence.

The police were at least consistent. The boxes in the area, especially those allegedly stacked up by the assassin to serve as a gun rest (7H149), were treated with equal carelessness. They were moved before they were photographed. Some had been moved before the police identification people arrived. Yet these were the pictures used to re-enact and reconstruct the crime!

Studebaker twice testified he had taken pictures of the boxes in the window before they were moved. On one of these photographs, identified as "Studebaker Exhibit A" (21H643), he marked an indentation he believed caused by the rifle. Thereafter he was asked, "Do you have any pictures of the boxes before they were moved . . .?" Studebaker replied, "Just these two," referring to Exhibit A and another marked "B," taken from the opposite direction and showing only a very small part of a box on the window sill (7H140-1). Then, with but the briefest interrogation ending with, "Then, you don't have any pictures taken of the boxes before they were moved?" Studebaker admitted, "No, sir" (7H141).

Before they were moved he said these boxes were "in the left-hand corner of the window looking towards Elm Street . . . right at the edge" of the sill (7H142). This was the correct location, according to a photograph taken at the time of the assassination, "Dillard Exhibit C" ® 66). (This exhibit also appears throughout the supplementary volumes in a number of differently edited versions, each with a different exhibit number.) When shown another of his photographs, identified as Studebaker Exhibit J (21H649), he twice said of the boxes, "I put them back in the exact same position" (7H147).

However, Studebaker Exhibit J shows these boxes not in the eastern corner of the window as does Studebaker A, but at least as far west as the middle of the window. Because the entire window is not shown, it is not possible to know how much further west the boxes were repositioned. Both photographs show the boxes at about a 45-degree angle to the window and piled all pointed in the same direction. Unfortunately, this reconstruction has the alleged mark of the rifle on the box pointing about 90 degrees in the wrong direction. Then there is another Studebaker photograph of the same "rifle-rest" boxes, Exhibit D (21H646). This picture shows all three boxes pointing in different directions, with the top box at right angles to the window and not touching the sill.

A photograph similar to or from the same negative as Studebaker Exhibit J appears in Volume 22 as Exhibit 1301. It appears to be part of the FBI report, from the lettering that has been added. This lettering reads, "South-east corner of Sixth Floor Showing Arrangements of Cartons Shortly After Shots were Fired." The description of this photograph in the table of contents reads, "Photograph of southeast corner of sixth floor of Texas School Book Depository Building, showing arrangements of cartons shortly after shots were fired." Does not Studebaker's testimony provide the best characterization of this language and the only purpose it could have been intended to serve?

Exhibit 1301 shows the three places on two of these boxes where Oswald's fingerprints or palmprints were said to have been found. It is not at all surprising that the prints of an employee assigned to work among these boxes appears upon them. What is surprising is that any serious effort should be made to attribute meaning to the presence of these prints. It is also surprising that Exhibit 1301 should, by another of the never-ending coincidences upon which this Report is built, find Oswald's prints on only the top one of the three "gun rest" boxes and attribute meaning to this in the light of the Studebaker and Day Testimony that the police rearranged the boxes.

The Report discusses these prints ® 140-1). It quotes Studebaker as authority for the opinion that "the boxes in the window seem to have been arranged as a convenient gun rest (see Commission Exhibit 1301, p. 138)." It also suggested that the large second box on which Oswald's palmprint was found was a place upon which he sat, implying, in contradiction to the testimony of its star witness, Brennan, that the assassin was sitting. The words used are, "Someone sitting on the box facing the window would have his palm in this position if he placed his hand along side his right hip. (See Exhibit No. 1308, p. 139)."

Having seen fit not only to refer to these exhibits but to reproduce them in the Report, it is distressing that the authors of the Report appeared to overlook another in this series of photographs in Volume 22, Exhibit 1312, which shows that a man Oswald s size sitting upon this box could not have fired the weapon as the Report represents he did because the closed part of the window would have been in his way. The height of the window sill from the floor, as this exhibit shows, is about one foot. In this entire discussion, the authors of the Report found no interest in all the testimony about the moving of the boxes and in the fact that the boxes were placed in the pictures they reprinted in a way that did not and could not duplicate their positions at the time of the assassination.

Lieutenant Day was more helpful, but he, too, added confusion. These, remember, were the official photographs, from which both the police and the Commission were to reconstruct the shooting. At first, Day said he did not believe any boxes had been moved prior to his arrival. He was shown Exhibit 482 (21H200), a cropped version of Dillard C, and said this view from the outside coincided with what he saw on the inside (4H251). But after examining this picture, he decided it "Doesn't jibe with my picture of the inside" (4H252). Day was correct. The Dillard photograph clearly shows another box extending much higher than the "rifle rest" box in the opposite or western side of the window. But this box and the boxes upon which it rested are missing in all the official photographs. The official interest in them ended as soon as it began, too. Perhaps this was necessary because of the probability that a barricade such as these westernmost boxes necessarily represented could have effectively prevented the ricocheting of the third empty cartridge to the point at which it was found. This point is shown in Studebaker Exhibit A and in Exhibit 716 (17H500), similar but not identical photographs represented as taken before the empty cartridges were touched.

This mystery is not solved in the Report, which details the ricocheting of the ejected cases with the most scientific precision. But it avoids explaining how the case could have gone through a solid object. It also avoids mention of either this western barricade of boxes or how they disappeared completely. And it makes no allowance in its time reconstructions for the removal of such a barricade by Oswald.

Day understood what must have happened. He said the boxes had to have been moved after Dillard took his picture and before the identification police arrived (4H253). This left limited alternatives. If Oswald had done it, there had to be other boxes with his fingerprints, and there were none, and the extra time required would have shattered the Commission's time reconstruction which was tenuous at best. If another person did it, he is not accounted for and there is at least a strong suspicion he might have been the assassin. Otherwise, is there anyone left but the police?

With the "rifle-rest" boxes, Day was no help. He admitted that at the time Exhibit 722 (17H504) was taken these boxes had been moved. This photograph shows the window sill and the view south on Houston Street with no boxes at all (4H264). He identified Exhibit 724 (17H505) as a picture he took at 3:00 or 3:15 p.m. the day of the assassination from the assassination window looking west on Elm Street. This is still a different, though official, version. This photograph has the boxes stacked one on top of the other, all pointed toward Elm Street at about a 45-degree angle to the west. None of the boxes is on the window sill. They had been carefully stacked to allow the assassin room for his body between them and the eastern end of the window, a situation precluded by the Dillard photograph. When he acknowledged that the boxes had been moved prior to the taking of the picture, the Commission had no further interest or questions about such an obvious fate (4H264-5). Day's first attempt at an explanation was interrupted by the Commission's examiner. Day then returned to his self-justification, saying that an hour and a half after the assassination he did not know the direction in which the shots had been fired.

There are other contradictions, but are they in need of exposition? Day is perhaps best left with this explanation of what happened to the boxes: "They weren't put back in any particular order" (4H265). The reader should recall this account of what really happened to the boxes in considering the photographic reconstructions.

The story of the empty rifle shells is just as bad and does not require complete tracing. They were photographed in place. Detective Sims carefully picked them up and Day sought fingerprints. There were none. They were put into an unsealed envelope which Day signed and returned to Sims. Although Day had earlier informed the Commission he had marked all three shells at the scene, he admitted that was incorrect. At about 10 o'clock that night he had marked two of the shells. Although the third shell was missing, Day said, "I didn't examine it too close at that time." The third shell bears the identification of Captain George Doughty, Day's superior. Why the shells did not all bear Day's mark is unexplained. How Doughty's mark constitutes any kind of an identification at all is a mystery. There was much conflicting and contradictory testimony about these empty cases and a number of affidavits of further explanation were filed. There is this additional mystery: Day was asked by the examiner of one of these shells, "It appears to be flattened out here. Do you know or have you any independent recollection as to whether or not is was flattened out on the small end when you saw it?" Day's response was, "No, sir; I don't." What needs explaining is how a deformed shell fit into a precisely machined rifle breach (4H253-5).

By this time what happened when the identification experts were called over to where the rifle had been found should be comprehensible in a streamlined account. There is no indication the area was checked for fingerprints at all, even though the rifle was completely surrounded by boxes and carefully hidden in a space "just wide enough to accommodate that rifle and hold it in an upright position" (4H259). By "upright," Day meant horizontal. He and Studebaker clambered all over the un-fingerprinted barriers behind which the rifle was hidden to take pictures, but they took only similar pictures from exactly the same spot. Studebaker's even show his own knee as he photographed downward (21H645).

After the rifle was photographed, Day held it by the stock. He assumed the stock would show no prints. Then Captain Fritz, perhaps because of the presence of newsmen, grasped the bolt and ejected a live cartridge. Day had found no fingerprints on the bolt. If there was any need for this operation, it was never indicated. There was no print on either the clip or the live bullet. As with all the evidence, the pictures of the rifle also have other minor mysteries. Day testified that he made a negative (Exhibit 514) from one of his two negatives (Exhibit 718) of the rifle in the position in which it was found. What useful purpose this served especially if the result sought was greater clarity, is not apparent (4H257ff.). If these are identical, they were at the very least cropped differently. The confusion extended to the Commission's editor, who described the copied negative as "depicting location of the C2766 rifle when discovered" but of the original negative said, "Photograph of rifle hidden beneath boxes . . ."

In any event, the rifle was almost clean of prints, as were the shells, and well hidden. Two men appear to have found it at the same time. The Commission saw fit to call only one to Washington. He is Eugene Boone, a deputy sheriff (3H291ff.). The other was Seymour Weitzman, a constable and one of the rare college graduates in the various police agencies. He had a degree in engineering. Weitzman gave a deposition to the Commission staff in Dallas on April 1, 1964 (7H105-9). Under questioning, he described "three distinct shots," with the second and third seeming almost simultaneous. He heard some one say the shots "come from the wall" west of the Depository and "I immediately scaled that wall." He and the police and "Secret Service as well" noticed "numerous kinds of foot prints that did not make sense because they were going in different directions." This testimony seems to have been ignored. He also turned a piece of the President's skull over to the Secret Service. He got it after being told by a railroad employee that "he thought he saw somebody throw something through a bush."

Then he went to the sixth floor where he worked with Boone on the search. With Weitzman on the floor looking under the flats of boxes and Boone looking over the top, they found the rifle, "I would say simultaneously . . . It was covered with boxes. It was well protected . . . I would say eight or nine of us stumbled over that gun a couple of times . . . We made a man-tight barricade until the crime lab came up . . ." (7H106-7).

When shown three unidentified photographs that seem to be those the police took, Weitzman said of the one with the hidden rifle, "it was more hidden than there" (7H108). If it had not been so securely hidden, he said, "we couldn't help but see it" from the stairway (Ibid).

In addition to his only too graphic testimony about the finding and hiding of the rifle, Weitzman provided information about seemingly meaningful footprints at a place not in conformity with the official theories of the crime and about a strange effort to hide a piece of the President's skull. All this should have been valuable information for the members of the Commission. Why he was not called to appear before the full Commission is a mystery. Boone, who was called, did not have such testimony to offer.

Weitzman's testimony about the care and success with which the rifle was hidden and about the searchers stumbling over it without finding it is important in any time reconstruction. With the almost total absence of fingerprints on a rifle that took and held prints and the absence of prints on the clip and shells that would take prints, this shows the care and time taken by the alleged user of the weapon. That this version is not in the Report can be understood best by comparison with the version that is.

Marrion L. Baker is a Dallas motorcycle policeman who heard the shots and dashed to the building, pushing people out of the way as he ran. He is the policeman who put his pistol in Oswald's stomach in the dramatic lunchroom meeting. The Commission also used him in a time reconstruction intended to show that Oswald could have left the sixth floor and been in the lunchroom in time to qualify as the assassin (3H241-70). The interrogator was Assistant Counsel David W. Belin. As so often happened, despite his understanding of his role as a prosecution witness, Baker interjected information the Commission found inconsistent with its theory. It is ignored in the Report.

The time it would have taken Oswald to get from the sixth-floor window to the lunchroom was clocked twice (3H253-4). Secret Service Agent John Joe Howlett disposed of the rifle during the reconstructions. What he did was described as "putting" it away or, in Belin's words, he "went over to these books and leaned over as if he were putting a rifle there?" Baker agreed to this description. But this is hardly a representation of the manner in which the rifle had been so carefully hidden. With a stopwatch and with Howlett streamlining, they made two trips. The first one "with normal walking took us a minute and 18 seconds . . . And the second time we did it at a fast walk which took us a minute and 14 seconds." During this time Oswald had to clean and hide the rifle and go down to the lunchroom and 20 feet inside of it and a door with an automatic closure had to shut. This was an additional time-consuming factor ignored in the reconstruction and the Report.

On the other hand, the first reconstruction of the time the Commission staff alleged it took Baker was actually done at a walk! In Baker's words, "From the time I got off the motorcycle we walked the first time and kind of run the second time from the motorcycle on into the building. Once they got into the building, "we did it at kind of a trot, I would say, it wasn't a real fast run, an open run. It was more of a trot, kind of" (3H253).

Walking through a reconstruction was pure fakery and the "kind of run" or "kind of trot" was not much better. Both Baker and Roy Truly, who accompanied him once inside the building, described what would have been expected under the circumstances, a mad dash. They were running so fast that when they came to a swinging office door on the first floor it jammed for a second. In actuality, Baker had sent people careening as he rushed into the building. He had been certain this building was connected with the shooting that he had immediately identified as rifle fire (3H247). The totally invalid walking reconstruction took a minute and 30 seconds. The "kind of trot" one took a minute and 15 seconds.

The reconstruction of Baker's time began at the wrong place, to help the Commission just a little more. To compare with the rifleman's timing, this reconstruction had to begin after the last shot was fired. Witnesses the Report quotes at length describe the leisureliness with which the assassin withdrew his rifle from the window and looked for a moment as though to assure himself of his success. Not allowing for his leisureliness, the assassin still had to fire all three shots before he could leave the window. Commissioner Dulles mistakenly assumed the Commission's reconstruction was faithful to this necessity. He asked Baker, "Will you say what time to what time, from the last shot?"

The nonplused Baker simply repeated, "From the last shot." Belin corrected them both, interjecting, "The first shot" (3H252). Dulles asked, "The first shot?" and was then reassured by Baker, "The first shot." The minimum time of the span of the shots was established by the Commission as 4.8 seconds. Hence, that much as a minimum must be added to the Baker timing. During this time, according to Baker, he had "revved up" his motorcycle and was certainly driving it at something faster than a walk or "kind of a trot."

Added to this impossibility are a number of improbables. Roy Truly was running up the stairs ahead of Baker and saw nothing. He retreated from a position between the second and third floors when he realized Baker was not following him. Neither he nor Baker saw the door closing, as it did, automatically. The door itself had only a tiny window, made smaller by the 45-degree angle at which it was mounted from the lunchroom. Baker saw 20 feet through this, according to his testimony.

Dulles was troubled by this testimony. He asked Baker, "Could I ask you one question . . . think carefully." He wanted to know if Oswald's alleged course down from the sixth floor into the lunchroom apparently could have led to nowhere but the lunchroom. Baker's affirmative reply was based upon his opinion that a hallway from which Oswald could also have entered the lunchroom without using the door through which Baker said he saw him was a place where Oswald "had no business" (3H256). This hallway, in fact, leads to the first floor, as Commission Exhibit 497 (17H212) shows. It is the only way Oswald could have gotten into the lunchroom without Truly and Baker seeing the mechanically closed door in motion. It also put Oswald in the only position in which he could have been visible to Baker through the small glass in the door. And Oswald told the police he had, in fact, come up from the first floor.

There are ten references in the Report to this reconstruction. Two are specific. All conclude the reconstruction proves that Oswald could have been in the lunchroom before Baker got there and infer that he could have come from no other place than the sixth floor. The first one ® 152-3) says, "The time actually required for Baker and Truly to reach the second floor on November 22 was probably longer than in the test runs." The second says, "Tests of all of Oswald's movements establish that these movements could have been accomplished in the time available to him" ® 649).

Exactly the opposite is the truth. Ignoring the flummery in these reconstructions and the obvious errors, the Commission itself proved that the unhurried assassin would have required a minute and 14 seconds. And the policeman at a "kind of trot" rather than a fast run would have required only a minute and 15 seconds less than the time span of the shots, or at least four seconds less time. If things happened as the Report alleges, Baker would have been at the lunchroom before Oswald. And with Baker's gun in his belly, Oswald, having just killed the President, was "calm and collected" (3H252).

In following his role as a prosecution-type witness, Baker said that in going into the lunchroom Oswald was seeking escape. "There is a door out here," he alleged, "that you can get out and to the other parts of the building." This door leads to the conference room. The next witness in the Commission's reconstruction proved it was normally locked and, specifically, was locked that day.

Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr was given an opportunity to ask Baker a question. Speaking of the day of the assassination, Carr asked, "Did you have occasion during the rest of the day either in passing visits or idle conversation or anything of that type with any of the people who were there at the time who might have seen something or told you some theory they had about what might have happened?"

"Not until last Friday morning," Baker responded. "Chief Lunday . . . asked me to go to this Texas Depository Building, and I had -- I had worked traffic outside several times but never did go made to talk to any of the employees." Carr told Baker he was asking about only the time of the shooting. Baker was never asked what he had learned the Friday morning prior to his testimony at the Book Depository (3H264).

Unsolicitedly, Baker also offered the Commission unwelcome evidence of the invalidity of its conclusion that a single bullet hit both the President and the Governor. He quoted Officer Jim Chaney, one of the four flanking the Presidential car, Chaney said he saw a separate shot hit the Governor and that he had so informed the Chief of Police. Chaney also said, as had Truly and "several officers," that at the time it made the turn into Elm Street the Presidential car "stopped" (3H266).

Chaney was never called as a witness.

Getting Oswald to wherever he had to be to make the Commission's reconstruction possible was a never-ending problem. In not a single case did the time reconstructions prove the Commission right. Following the fatal Baker reconstruction was one intended to get Oswald out of the building in time. This was attempted with Mrs. Robert A. Reid. Mrs. Reid's reconstructed time from her view of the motorcade outside to her desk was fixed at two minutes. When she began to protest that it was longer, she was interrupted and diverted. Her desk was near the lunchroom and she recalled seeing Oswald walk past it, something not confirmed by other employees present. The Report thus theorizes that, whereas it took Mrs. Reid two minutes to run to her desk from the outside, Oswald could have calmly walked it in one minute. But Mrs. Reid shattered the reconstruction by undeviatingly insisting that at the time she saw Oswald he was wearing no shirt over his T-shirt. All who saw Oswald thereafter without exception say he was wearing a shirt. The Report allows no time in its departure reconstruction for Oswald to have gotten his shirt from elsewhere in the building.

The Report has no witnesses to Oswald's presumed trip from the sixth to the second floor. But the Commission had witnesses who gave evidence proving it impossible. Jack Dougherty was working on the fifth floor at the stairway where both elevators were then located. He saw no one going down the stairs. Three employees were at the windows on the fifth floor underneath the one from which the Report says the shots were fired. They testified they heard the empty cartridge cases hit the floor and the slight clicking of the operation of the rifle bolt. But all agreed that even after the shooting, when they were alerted and in some fear, they heard no one moving around on the sixth floor (3H181). Nothing but silence (3H179). Ten minutes before the shooting, Bonnie Ray Williams, one of the trio, had eaten his lunch next to this sixth-floor window (3H173). Asked ". . . did you hear anything that made you feel that there was anybody else on the sixth floor with you?" he explained, "That is one of the reasons I left -- because it was so quiet" (3H178).

Placing Oswald at that sixth-floor window was one of the most unsuccessful tasks of the Report. They had the testimony of but a single man, Howard Leslie Brennan. Congressman Gerald R. Ford, Commission Member, was to describe Brennan as the most important of the witnesses in an article in LIFE dated October 2, 1964. Brennan had already described himself as a liar when lying served his purposes, as his own words will show. The Report has a section mislabeled "Eyewitness Identification of Assassin" (R143-9).

This section begins with a prime example of the use of words to convey meaning that is the opposite of the truth. It says, "Brennan also testified that Lee Harvey Oswald, whom he viewed in a police lineup the night of the assassination, was the man he saw fire the shots from the sixth-floor window of the Depository Building." It is true that Brennan "viewed" the lineup, although he appears to be the one person of whose presence the police have no written record. But he did not identify Oswald. Two pages later the Report, in its own way, acknowledges this by admitting "he declined to make a positive identification of Oswald when he first saw him in the police lineup." The fact is that Brennan at no time at the lineup made any identification (3H147-8). The next sentence reads, "The Commission, therefore, does not base its conclusions concerning the identity of the assassin on Brennan's subsequent certain identification . . ." How certain Brennan could be of anything he saw or alleged he saw his own testimony will reflect better than any description. But the fact is that the Commission had and quoted no other so-called eyewitness. In the balance of this section it refers to the testimony of a number of people, none of whom identified Oswald. Congressman Ford's article stated without semantics or equivocation that Brennan "is the only known person who actually saw Lee Harvey Oswald fire his rifle at President Kennedy." Nobody did, as Brennan admitted.

The Report imparts a new meaning to words in saying "the record indicates that Brennan was an accurate observer " (R145). It says his description "most probably" led to the description broadcast by the police (R144), having forgotten its earlier and contradictory version that this broadcast was "based primarily on Brennan's observations" (R5). The earlier version also concedes Brennan was the "one eyewitness." Between the 12:45 police broadcast and Brennan's statement to the police the same day, there were changes in Brennan's description, but the Report calls the two descriptions "similar." The Report quotes the police broadcast of the suspect as "white, slender, weighing about 165 pounds, about 5'10" tall, and in his early thirties." Of his account to the police, the Report says "he gave the weight as between 165 and 175 pounds and the height was omitted." this information is footnoted. The source referred to in the footnote contains no description of any kind. It does not even refer to Brennan.

However, in a statement made to the Sheriff's Department immediately after the assassination (19H470), Brennan swore he saw "a white man in his early 30's, slender and would weigh about 165-175 pounds. He had on light colored clothing but definitely not a suit." The three different and contradictory versions of the same police radio log are discussed elsewhere. The Report here refers to but two. The description given by all three included "reported to be armed with what is believed to be a .30 caliber rifle." The logs reveal "no clothing description"; Brennan had one available for his statement at the Sheriff's office, which was actually at the scene of the assassination.

How the Report can be vague about the source of the police description or accept the inability of the police to provide their source when there was but a single eyewitness is simply beyond comprehension. This is one of the most basic elements of both the investigation and reconstructions and cannot possibly be accepted unless unequivocally stated in the most positive terms.

A page after beginning its account of the observation of its "accurate observer," the Report begins apologizing for him. It says, "although Brennan testified that the man in the window was standing when he fired the shots, most probably he was sitting or kneeling." It does not say how Brennan would have known the height, weight and clothing of a man sitting or kneeling behind a solid 16-inch wall. Exhibit 1312, previously referred to, shows a sitting man could not have performed this feat without major contortions, and his face would have been against a double thickness of dirty windows from which the sun was reflecting. Exhibit 1311 (22H484) shows a standing man also would have had to fire through the doubled window.

How accurate an observer does Brennan show himself to be when under oath? He was questioned about his observation of the Negro employees he saw on the fifth floor. He was shown a photograph of the south side of the building. By accident or design it was rigged to make identification of the windows in which these Negroes had been as automatic as possible. Of the 84 windows in the picture, only four were open. One was at the western end of the building. So, in the entire side of the building in which these men had been, the only windows open just happened to be the same as those in which they actually had been, one at each, at the moment of the assassination. These were three of the four easternmost windows on the fifth floor. Of this series of adjoining windows, the only wrong window was closed.

When shown the picture, Brennan at first said he was confused. The questioning lawyer, with a big fat hint, asked if this was because some of the windows were open. It was not, and Brennan proceeded with his marking. First, he encircled two adjoining windows on the sixth floor as the one from which the assassin had fired. This was wrong, and only one had been open. Then he marked the one wrong window on the floor below as the one in which the Negroes had been. Brennan's powers as an "accurate observer" are preserved on page 62 of the Report, Exhibit 1477. Although he had spectacularly upset the law of averages with his fifth-floor identification and had the assassin shooting out of two windows instead of one, the explanation of this photograph reads: ". . . marked by Brennan to show the window (A) in which he saw a man with a rifle, and the window (B) on the fifth floor in which he saw people watching the motorcade."

His testimony about what he saw cannot in any way be explained by the apology in the

Report. He testified:

"Mr Brennan. Well as it appears to me he was standing up and resting against the left window sill, with gun shouldered to his right shoulder, holding the gun with his left hand and taking positive aim and fired his last shot. As I calculate a couple of seconds. He drew the gun back from the window as though he was drawing it back to his side and maybe paused for another second as though to assure himself that he hit his mark, and then he disappeared. And, at the same moment, I was diving off of that firewall and to the right for bullet protection of this stone wall that is a little higher on the Houston side.

Mr. Belin. Well, let me ask you. What kind of a gun did you see in that window?

Mr. Brennan. I am not an expert on guns. It was, as I could observe, some type of a high-powered rifle.

Mr. Belin. Could you tell whether or not it had any kind of a scope on it?

Mr. Brennan. I did not observe a scope.

Mr. Belin. Could you tell whether or not it had one? Do you know whether it did or not, or could you observe that it definitely did or definitely did not, or don't you know?

Mr. Brennan. I do not know if it had a scope or not.

Mr. Belin. I believe you said you thought the man was standing. What do you believe was the position of the people of the fifth floor that you saw -- standing or sitting?

Mr. Brennan. I thought they were standing with their elbows on the window sill leaning out.

Mr. Belin. At the time you saw this man on the sixth floor, how much of the man could you see?

Mr. Brennan. Well, I could see -- at one time he came to the window and he sat sideways on the window sill. That was previous to President Kennedy getting there. And I could see practically his whole body, from his hips up. But at the time that he was firing the gun, a possibility from his belt up.

Mr. Belin. How much of the gun do you believe that you saw?

Mr. Brennan. I calculate 70 to 85 percent of the gun. (3H144)

The men he saw standing on the fifth floor were kneeling behind a foot-high window sill.

After giving his statement Brennan went home, getting there about a quarter of an hour either side of 2:45 p.m. and saw Oswald's picture "twice on television before I went down to the police station for the lineup." At the lineup he failed to identify Oswald. He admitted to the Commission that he later told a different story to a federal investigator. This is Brennan's

explanation:

"Mr. Brennan. Well, he asked me -- he said, 'You said you couldn't make a positive identification.' He said, 'Did you do that for security reasons personally, or couldn't you?' And I told him I could with all honesty, but I did it more or less for security reasons my family and myself.

Mr. Belin. What do you mean by security reasons for your family and yourself?

Mr. Brennan. I believe at that time, and I still believe it was a Communist activity, and I felt like there hadn't been more than one eyewitness, and if it got to be a known fact that I was an eyewitness, my family or I, either one, might not be safe.

Mr. Belin. Well, if you wouldn't have identified him, might he not have been released by the police?

Mr. Brennan. Beg pardon?

Mr. Belin. If you would not have identified that man positively, might he not have been released by the police?

Mr. Brennan. No. That had been a great contributing factor -- greater contributing factor than my personal reasons was that I already knew they had the man for murder, and I knew he would not be released.

Mr. Belin. The murder of whom?

Mr. Brennan. Of Officer Tippit.

Mr. Belin. Well, what happened in between to change your mind that you later decided to come forth and tell them you could identify him?

Mr. Brennan. After Oswald was killed. I was relieved quite a bit that as far as pressure on myself of somebody not wanting me to identify anybody, there was no longer that immediate danger.

Mr. Belin. What is the fact as to whether or not	your having seen Oswald on television would have affected your identification of him one way or the other?.

Mr. Brennan. That is something I do not know." (3H148)

Despite the end of his fears, Brennan did not communicate with the police or federal agents following Oswald's murder. Yet he had presumed he was the only eyewitness (3H160).

The basis for his alleged fears is melted elsewhere in the testimony, startling the examiner.

"Mr. Brennan. Well, don't you have photographs of me talking to the Secret Service men right here?

Mr. Belin. I don't believe so.

Mr. Brennan. You should have. It was on television before I got home -- my wife saw it.

Mr. Belin. On television?

Mr. Brennan. Yes.

Mr. Belin. At this time we do not have them. Do you remember what station they were on television?

Mr. Brennan. No. But they had it. And I called I believe Mr. Lish who requested that he cut those films or get them cut by the FBI. I believe you might know about them. Somebody cut those films, because a number of times later the same films were shown, and that part was cut out." (3H150)

And despite the assurance of the Report that Brennan "saw a rifle being fired" (R5), Brennan testified to the contrary. Asked by Commission Member McCloy, "Did you see the rifle discharge, did you see the recoil or the flash?" Brennan replied, "No" (3H154).

Almost all of Brennan's testimony is preposterous and impossible. But of one thing there is no doubt: He spoke to the police immediately. As though it were something unusual, he testified he may have run across the street "because I have a habit of, when something has to be done in a hurry, I run." He reported the rifle on the sixth floor (3H145). He also incorrectly said he spoke to Secret Service Agent Sorrels at that time, but Sorrels was not there.

This was about 10 minutes before the alert was broadcast and within seconds the whole area was alive with radio-equipped police vehicles. At least one, Sergeant D. V. Harkness, was parked on that corner before the assassination. No explanation of the crucial delay of about 14 minutes is offered, nor was one asked for. The Report has no questions about the absence of any immediate directed organized search of the building or of the area of the sixth floor from which the shots had reportedly been fired. It sought to apologize for the failure of the police to seal the building. It says, "While it is difficult to determine exactly when the police sealed off the building, the earliest estimates would still have permitted Oswald to leave the building by 12:33" (R155). That was really the Commission's only interest, getting Oswald out. The front door was not sealed until Inspector J. Herbert Sawyer arrived. With the most dubious kind of computations, the Report says this was "no earlier that 12:37 p.m." The Report refers to only one "rear door." It quotes Sorrels as saying he walked through it about 20 minutes after the assassination and found no one there (R156). What the Report avoids mentioning is that there are, besides the rear walk-through door, also four warehouse-type doors leading to loading docks. There is no reference to even a gesture toward securing them. Even though the Report says the police sealed off the building but it could not know when, there is no evidence the police ever did seal the building.

No one saw Oswald leave the building and the Commission was extremely careful to avoid the photographic evidence that might have shown him leaving after 12:33, as certainly he did from the Commission's own evidence. One of the strangest blanks in all the record is of any contemporaneous photograph after the very moment of the assassination. They were available in abundance. But the only photographs of that period used were those taken by the news photographer Dillard and show only part of the face of the building, not the street level.

Mary Moorman had a Polaroid picture of the front of the building that from its description in the testimony of her companion, Mrs. Jean Lollis Hill, was taken from her and never returned. Mark Lane also testified to this. Mary Moorman was never called as a witness. Nor is there any "Moorman Exhibit."

Malcolm Couch, a newsreel photographer for WFAA TV (6H153-62), made pictures of the crowd as his press was in the sixth car and had seen the rifle or rifle-like object in the window 50 or 60 feet before the turn. When the car stopped about 70 yards past the Depository, he got out and ran back getting "sweeping pictures" as he ran. He took these pictures not more than a minute and a half after the last shot was fired. The Commission even asked him if he knew of any other photographs of the south side of the building (6H160). But they did not use his.

The assistant news director of KRLD-TV had bad luck that might have been good luck for the Commission if it had had any interest in film of the front of the building, including the entrance and showing men "going in and out of the building." James Underwood (6H167-71) had a defective camera at the moment of the assassination and ran back a short distance to get a good one from another photographer. When he got back to the building, he saw that "most of the people in the area were running up the grassy slope toward the railroad yard" to the west of the Depository. Among these he "recognized at least a dozen deputy sheriffs . . ." Underwood remained at the corner of Elm and Houston and continued to take pictures. During this time he heard Amos Euins tell Sergeant Harkness that the man he had seen in the sixth-floor window was a Negro. This Euins account, according to the Report (R64), was radioed by Harkness at 12:36, making more inexplicable the Commission's lack of interest in Underwood's footage. The Commission could have used photographic proof that Oswald walked out that front door, as it theorized. The lack of interest is revealing. Underwood had enough footage so that when he got time in January he spent several days checking it. But what would have happened to the testimony of other questionable witnesses if the camera showed they were outside the main entrance at a time they said they were elsewhere, or if it showed Oswald leaving at a much later time?

Other pictures were used extensively by the Commission. How they were used may be another question, but used they were. The most important of these was a roll of 8-mm. color movies taken by Abraham Zapruder, a still picture by veteran AP newsman James W. Altgens and excellent amateur pictures by former Air Force Major Phil Willis. By a strange quirk, Willis is in Zapruder's film and Zapruder in Willis's a moment after the first shot struck the President. Altgens is probably in the Zapruder film, but the Commission went out of its way not to find out. With this photographic knowledge properly interpreted, the Commission could have learned a great deal about the position of the Presidential car at the important times. The logical inference from what the Commission did do and neglected to do is that it did not want to learn it wanted to theorize and reconstruct. The use and misuse of these pictures demonstrates clearly that, rather than making the crime fit the evidence, the Commission wanted to adapt the evidence to the crime.

Six months and a day following the assassination, the Commission had the FBI photographic agent, Lyndal L. Shaneyfelt (5H138ff.), do a photographic reenactment. The Report indicates no reason for such a prolonged delay. The Secret Service had completed its reenactment by December 5, 1963. It is difficult to imagine that the Commission could have loaded Mr. Shaneyfelt with more invalidating conditions. His reenactment could serve only one purpose, to try and make credible a reconstruction under which the Commission's thesis, that all the shots came from the sixth floor window, might be possible. In fact, he attempted nothing else. In order to accomplish this, he had to show that no shot was fired before the frame numbered 210 on the Zapruder film.

To begin with, Shaneyfelt had to work with a black-and-white copy of the original Zapruder color film. Necessarily, the copies were less clear. Then the reenactments began at 6 a.m. as a concession to traffic. Between the time of the year and the time of the day differences between the mock-up and the real thing, all the values of shadows in photographic intelligence were forfeited. For the precise placing of the camera, mounted on the rifle, and other measuring devices Shaneyfelt had the information supplied by the Commission. He was working in fractions of degrees, yet he had to base everything on "information furnished us by the Commission, photographs taken by the Dallas Police Department immediately after the assassination . . ." (5H145).

With no two of them in agreement with each other or the facts, as the testimony quoted earlier in this chapter shows, with none of them even close to what incontrovertible actual photographs taken at the moment of the assassination showed, this was an immediate and total disqualification of anything he might try. No matter how fine an expert Shaneyfelt is, no matter how excellent his equipment or how careful his associates, his testimony and reconstruction could have no validity. It had no more relationship to reality than a statement by such an eminent mathematician as Albert Einstein that two plus two equals five and a half.

The experts surrounded their reenactment and reconstructions with impermissible questions. For example, Exhibit 887 (R99) is a photograph of a camera mounted atop the rifle pointing westward from the sixth-floor window. The window is raised several inches higher than it was shown in the Dillard photograph. Of necessity the rifle is mounted on a photographic tripod. But there can be only one necessity for fudging on the window -- to make the whole reconstruction possible where otherwise it would not have been. The tripod is adjustable. The rifle is inside the window. With such an obvious flaw, the exhibits invalid as is any testimony based upon it. Another photograph of the reenactment printed on page 41 of LIFE Magazine for October 2, 1964, shows that part of the reconstruction was made with the window entirely open. This picture shows the ballistics expert resting his arm on a box incorrectly positioned. It is much too far to the west. Worse, the rifle is without its telescopic sight. Can any testimony based upon this reconstruction have any value?

The reason is made clear from an examination of an ignored picture taken by Phil Willis (21H773). The twelfth slide in this series was taken from the opposite side of Dealey Plaza. It shows the Depository Building at a much flatter angle. The so-called "gun rest" box clearly extends almost to the eastern end of the window and with equal clarity takes up at least half of the open space. When to these additional handicaps to shooting from that position in that window is added the 16-inch thickness of the wall and the need for shooting at a sharp downward angle, the entire theory is jeopardized. This picture also shows the box that baffled Lieutenant Day. From this angle it is shown to be both larger and higher because the wide stile between the windows that were installed in pairs does not block the view of the box, as to a degree it did in the Dillard picture. This box extended as high as the middle of the window, providing an even greater obstacle to the passage of ricocheting shells. This sequence of Willis pictures also shows that the entire area was already littered with police cars. With the police in possession, the boxes had not yet been moved.

In addition, the experts "duplicated certain frames of the Zapruder film" and of two others available to the Commission. These appear in the Report on pages 100-8 and are readily available for inspection. Not a single one can be called a duplication, as the most superficial inspection, even without instruments, will show. The angles are grossly different. The elevations are radically wrong. Even the backgrounds are not the same. One of the best examples is the critically important frame 210 (R102). These are printed side by side and it will be no problem for any doubting reader to satisfy himself. This particular illustration is also proof of another inexcusable fault: The landscaping in the background has been altered. Valuable intelligence was thus lost. In other cases trees which served the same purpose were removed and even the vital signs that figure in all of this identification and testimony were both moved and removed. It is no longer possible to make the most precise photographic reconstruction of the assassination because of this destruction and mutilation of evidence.

If the Commission did not know it sooner, it learned it not later than the testimony of Emmett J. Hudson, grounds-keeper of Dealey Plaza (7H562). In discussing Exhibit 875, photographs of the earlier Secret Service reconstruction (17H875ff.), Hudson said, ". . . Now, they have moved some of those signs. They have moved that R. L. Thornton Freeway sign and put up a Stemmons sign." Assistant Counsel Wesley J. Liebeler asked, "They have? They have moved it?" After Hudson reaffirmed his statement, Liebeler contented himself with explaining, "That might explain it, because this picture here, No. 18, was taken after the assassination and this one was taken at the time -- No. 1."Even stranger, with the importance the Commission imparts to frame 210 of the Zapruder film, reproduced in the Report and duplicated in the re-enactment, is its absence from Exhibit 885, in Volume 18, where 160 frames of this film are printed. Beginning with frame 171, they appear seriatim through frame 207. The frames 208 209, 210 and 211 are entirely omitted. And frame 212? It has so amateurish a splice through it that a single tree in the upper section is a full quarter of the frame to the left in the lower section! There is no indication of damage to the original film, nor that this was done by the staff of LIFE, which provided the film clips. Why, then, was this frame cut and spliced at all? And why are these most crucial frames, 208 through 211, omitted from the one place they serve the greatest value, where they could be compared with each other and with what preceded and followed them? Or is the question self-answering?

Shaneyfelt's science was not always controlled by scientific or even pseudoscientific methods. He was recalled by the Commission on September 1, 1964 (15H686ff.). This was at a time when the Commission's work was almost complete. Most of its Report, handed to the President in printed form but 23 days later, certainly was drafted. Shaneyfelt's appearance could not have contributed to affirmative purposes of the Commission for its conclusions had already been reached, at least for the most part. In context, one of his major functions, with the help of misrepresentation by the Commission, was rebuttal. He was used to try and destroy the clear meaning of the Willis pictures, especially the fifth in the series.

This picture was taken after President Kennedy had been shot. It was therefore important to know exactly where Willis was standing and what kind of equipment he was using. This picture also showed Zapruder taking his movies. For purposes of establishing where Willis was standing, Shaneyfelt wrote and asked him and then made his own interpretations of Willis's letter. Actually, as the Commission well knew, it had a photograph showing the precise place, for it was in the Zapruder footage. Besides, Willis had informed the Commission that this frame of the Zapruder movies had been printed in the November 29, 1963, issue of LIFE on page 24.

As a basis for expert opinion, Assistant Counsel Norman Redlich told Shaneyfelt that Willis had testified "he took this photograph almost at the instant that the President was hit . . ." (15H697). What Willis had actually said (7H493) in several different ways was that he had taken the picture after the shot, "in fact, the shot caused me to squeeze the camera shutter . . ."

Redlich also asked Shaneyfelt if it would have been possible to locate Willis's location "by reference to two fixed points in the background . . ." Shaneyfelt agreed and was asked if he was "reasonably satisfied" he had been "reasonably accurate," and again Shaneyfelt agreed. When the variation of a tiny fraction in an angle or a foot or two in a distance of several hundred feet could destroy the Commission's entire case by proving the President had been shot prior to frame 210 on the Zapruder film, such evasions can serve only the obvious purpose of avoiding precise accuracy. But Shaneyfelt's conclusion was that by correspondence rather than the available pictures in the Commission's files he had accomplished "an exact establishing of the position of Mr. Willis."

This was transferred onto a chart, Shaneyfelt Exhibit 25 (21H471). In a Report and a record in which the Commission usually managed to omit the scale from its important charts and to include it on the unimportant ones, and where the important ones are illegible or barely legible and the less important ones are large, clear and bold, this exhibit is the prize-winner. It includes the entire area from Houston Street to the Triple Underpass, five hundred feet, in three and a half inches. It is indistinct, unclear and incomplete. The lettering is so fine that it cannot be read with a magnifying glass under strong light. And above all, it appears to be inaccurate on the two major points: The location of Willis and the location of the President after he was shot.

These devices were necessary because, according to the best calculations of the agents, from frame 166 until frame 210 of the Zapruder film, an oak tree blocked the President from the sixth-floor window (R98). Actually, the limits probably should have been moved in both directions, for the testimony of two of the important witnesses showed a strong wind was blowing the day the President was assassinated. Patrolman Marrion L. Baker said it was so strong it almost blew him off his motorcycle a block from the Depository. Photographer Altgens said that he got a picture as the wind almost blew Mrs. Kennedy's hat off at the same location. So if any shot was fired after frame 166 and before frame 210 it could not have come from that window.

What do these various motion and still pictures show and how did their makers describe them and what they saw through the camera viewers?

Zapruder is a manufacturer of women's dresses. His office is in the building to the east of the Depository. On the day of the assassination, he was standing on a raised concrete abutment to the west of the Depository Building and on the north side of Elm Street. He started taking pictures with his 8-mm. movie camera as the advance escort turned from Houston into Elm and suspended photographing until the Presidential car came into view. He then exposed film continuously, until the motorcade, disappeared under the Triple Underpass on its way to Parkland Hospital. This film may have been the best single piece of evidence of the crime. But the Commission, while having access to it from the beginning, never called Zapruder as a witness until toward the end of the hearings. He was questioned on July 22, 1964 (7H569ff.).

There was one thing that distinguished Zapruder from all other spectators. His camera, to which he had his eye glued, had a telephoto lens. It was focused on the President and it greatly enlarged what Zapruder saw. No other person is known to have had this greatly magnified view of the President. Therefore, Zapruder was also a unique eyewitness. While the delay in calling the man who had these unusual films was in itself questionable, when the nature of the eyewitness testimony Zapruder could have given when the shocking events were fresh in his memory is added, the failure to call him is particularly suspect. In his testimony only the slightest attention was paid to what he saw and it was even then not properly compared with his film record.

The middle of the three large road signs on the north side of Elm Street was between Zapruder and the President for about 20 frames, from about 205 to 225. Because of the downward grade to the underpass, at the beginning of the sequence, only part of the President's head is still visible over the top of this sign. The Commission's entire case is predicated upon the assumption that the first shot could not have been fired prior to frame 210, for that is the portion of the film in which, even on a still day, the President first became a clear shot from the sixth-floor window.

Zapruder was explaining how he took his pictures. "I was shooting through a telephoto lens . . . and as it (the Presidential car) reached about -- I imagine it was around here -- I heard the first shot and I saw the President lean over and grab himself . . ." (7H571). Lawyers know very well that such words as "here" in testimony relating to a location reflect nothing on the printed page. When they 'want the testimony clear, they ask the witness to identify the spot meant by "here." Zapruder was not asked to explain where "here" was. But the startling meaning of Zapruder's testimony is this: He saw the first shot hit the President! He described the Presidents reaction to it. Had the President been obscured by the sign, Zapruder could have seen none of this. Therefore, the President was hit prior to frame 210, prior to frame 205, the last one that shows the top of his head, and the exact point can probably be reconstructed from another unique quality of the Zapruder footage the Commission saw fit to ignore entirely.

The first 80 pages of Volume 18 are devoted to clips from this film, printed two to a page. These suffer from the reduction in clarity due to the printing process. They had a built-in reduction of distinction because they are printed from black-and-white 35-mm. slides made from 8-mm. color film. Zapruder himself pointed out this known fact to the Commission. Nonetheless, they are almost all pretty clear, although detail has suffered from the extra steps in the processing. Beginning with frame 190, this film suddenly becomes fuzzy. Nothing had changed -- the exposure was the same, the sun had not gone behind the clouds and the camera had kept clicking away. As any amateur photographer knows, this clearly means that the change was in Zapruder. He was no longer holding the camera as still. The slight motion imparted to the camera by his emotions at what he saw seems to be the only reasonable explanation for this fuzziness in the film to which the Commission was so completely indifferent. The failure to question Zapruder about this obvious possibility when the Commission had such eminent photographic experts available to it, if it had no amateurs on its staff, reinforces this belief. It was just too obvious to be overlooked. The Commission's work was incredibly sloppy. Its interrogations were puerile. Before long the analyst of its record becomes used to this and even gets to anticipate the pertinent questions that will not be asked. But this omission in the Zapruder testimony is so flagrant it is not susceptible to such explanations. The government had a print of this roll of film in its possession the night of the assassination. It was shown countless times to countless people. The meaning of the failure to ask any questions about the fuzziness of the film or the place represented by "here" is truly shocking.

Zapruder even informed the Commission that he saw the President's waving motion with his hand turn into a grasping at his neck (7H571). He even called to the attention of the Commission something wrong at this precise sequence in the footage (7H573). He had been shown a few frames beginning with 185 and was testifying about them when he said, after looking at 185 and 186, "Yes; this is before -- this shouldn't be there -- the shot wasn't fired was it? You can't tell from here?"

The lack of response from Assistant Counsel Liebeler was noted by the court reporter: "Mr. Liebeler. (No response)

Zapruder then continued, "I believe it was closer down here where it happened. Of course, on the film they could see better but you take an 8-mm. and you enlarge it in color or in black and white, you lose a lot of detail. I wish I had an enlarger here for you" (7H573).

His offer was never accepted. The Commission did not want this clarified. He was not even asked anything about the characteristics of his lens or other such elementary technical questions!

Exactly the same thing happened with James W. Altgens on exactly the same day (7H515-31). He was not only an experienced, competent professional photographer but had been with the Associated Press for more than 26 years and was a news photo editor. It was Altgens who took the famous still picture used by the Commission to show that a man resembling Oswald, standing in the main entrance of the Book Depository at the moment of the assassination, was really someone else (R113). This photograph is used throughout the hearings in a number of different versions and for a number of different purposes. The entire photograph is never used at any point. The Commission prefers the left-hand side and omits the right-hand side.

Altgens was standing opposite the Book Depository on the south side of Elm Street when he took this shot. He had, as professionals do, set up for it in advance. At the time of his testimony, the Commission was well aware of what this photograph revealed, for it had been testified to by Shaneyfelt in a manner that makes it clear without spelling it out. He was standing closer to the Presidential car than suited the Commission's theories. He had previously identified the spot at which he was standing to FBI Agent Switzer. On Exhibit 354 he marked this spot for Liebeler. Unfortunately, Exhibit 354, as reproduced by the Commission, is not the same as the one marked by Altgens (16H949 ). First, it is a fuzzy aerial photograph, not at all unusual in the Commission's photography. It shows about four times as much area as is necessary to show the assassination scene, resulting in further size reduction and lack of clarity. It was not the ideal type of photograph to show Altgens' location. More informative would have been a shot showing his relationship to the picture he took. In addition, the Commission chose to transfer Altgens' marking onto a photograph with more than a dozen and a half other and confusing identifications, all of which at this point in the record stand totally unexplained. The "Spot" marked by Altgens as reproduced turns into an area twice the size of automobiles visible in the same photograph. So he is placed with anything but accuracy.

When Altgens said he was about 30 feet from the Presidential car at the time he took the picture, and about 15 feet from it at the time the President received his fatal head wound, Liebeler disputed him. By making a simple assumption that was known to the Commission to be false, Liebeler made the record look credible and confused Altgens, who could do little more than hold his ground.

"I don't know how many feet it moved," Liebeler argued, "but it moved quite a ways from the time the first shot was fired until the time that the third shot was fired. I'm having trouble on this Exhibit 203 (one of the many barbered versions of the Altgens picture) understanding how you could have been within 30 feet of the President's car when you took Commission Exhibit No. 203 and within 15 feet of the President's car when he was hit with the last shot in the head without moving yourself" (7H521).

Liebeler had simply pretended the photograph had been taken the moment the President received his first wound. It was, in fact, taken much later, after both the President and Governor had been injured and, as Shaneyfelt had already told the Commission (5H158), corresponded to frame 255 of the Zapruder film. Altgens tried to counter the argument with scientific information about optics without getting anywhere until he suddenly challenged Liebeler to a reconstruction. At that moment Liebeler lost all interest, saying, ". . . it's not all that important as to how far you were away from the car at the time you took the picture . . ." (7H522). Liebeler's statement was correct only if the Commission did not want to know the exact location of the Presidential car, the subject of a massive and expensive phony reconstruction to justify the Commission's untenable conclusions.

The failure of the Commission to call as a witness the man who took this important photograph until eight months after the assassination, until well after the Commission had buffered its own theory, was pointed up by Altgens in his polite comment at the end of his testimony: "Well, I wish I had been able to give this information to you the next day when it was fresh in my mind . . ." (7H525).

Like Zapruder, he had been asked to bring nothing with him -- not his camera, not his original film, nothing (7H517). Both would have done it voluntarily. Both could have been compelled to. Neither was asked, and only the record and the solution of the crime suffered.

But the importance in the Altgens photograph cannot possibly be exaggerated. Had the Commission not seen fit to edit all the most significant information out of it, there would have been no difficulty placing the exact position of the Presidential car at the time it was taken. In addition, the Commission had a positive fix of this picture in the Zapruder sequence, which also contains basic intelligence suppressed by the Commission.

The Altgens picture shows that at frame 255 of the Zapruder film the front end of the Presidential car had barely reached the beginning of the fourth road stripe in Elm Street, coming from Houston. This is a fixed landmark that requires no elaborate and confusing interpretations and calculations. No transits were needed, no surveyors. All the Commission needed was a ten cent tape measure. Here the significance of the lack of intelligibility in the various charts of the area becomes clear. In addition to the Shaneyfelt exhibit referred to above, there are two similar charts, Exhibits 882 and 883 (17H901). These also have the road stripes clearly marked. But except for the curb lines, almost nothing else in these charts is intelligible. Most of the lettering is too small to be read with a magnifying glass. Even the outline of the Depository Building is incomplete. The western end is left out completely. So both the scale in feet and the landmarks necessary for complete orientation are omitted from comprehensible charts. For what purpose? Can this be regarded as mere carelessness? And if it is but carelessness, what does this say of a Commission with such special and vital obligation, responsibilities and duties?

Other vital and equally ignored intelligence springs from this photograph, or, rather, from the parts suppressed by the Commission. Part of the building on the northeast corner of Elm and Houston is clearly visible. It has a fire escape accessible from the street leading to an open window on the second floor. It was in this building that one of the mysterious suspects referred to earlier was apprehended.

The Altgens photograph also shows the total lack of reaction of the Presidential guard and the alertness of the vice presidential escort. By the time this picture was taken, Secret Service Agent Rufus Youngblood's shadow is visible as he hurled himself from the front seat. He immediately shielded the Vice President Johnson with his own body, before the President received his fatal wound. The back door of the vice presidential escort car is already open as agents respond to what they have already recognized as an assassination attempt.

Of all the cars in the motorcade, this is the last one visible. This car also has barely reached the first of the road stripes. It was then just around the corner, not much more than a car length from the intersecting curb lines. This irrefutable knowledge helps in both time and distance reconstructions.

There is much more valuable information in this picture, or rather, in the expurgated parts of it. None is reflected in the Report. Why? Is it possible that all the excellent lawyers on the Commission's staff and all the government's photographic analysts were unaware of its importance? Is it possible this persistent suppression in all the various versions that were used of this picture was accidental?

The details of the location of the vice presidential follow-up car are clear in the margin of the Zapruder film. Movie film has sprocket holes by means of which cogs advance the film. When shown through a projector, this part is invisible on the screen, but when the film is printed, what is recorded between the sprocket holes is visible. Parts of both the vice presidential car and the vice presidential follow-up cars are clearly visible in frame 171, the very first of the clips from the Zapruder film printed in Volume 18. From the Commission's point of view, these films disturb the pat little package it had inherited and decided to accept. With any shot fired before frame 210 or with Governor Connally wounded by a bullet other than the one that caused the President's non-fatal wounds, there was no more package left, for the assassination could then no longer have been the act of a single man.

These films are not without other confirmation. For example, the testimony of several witnesses places the first shot before frame 210. Also, when Governor and Mrs. Connally were shown the Zapruder movies (4H145ff.), in the presence of their doctors, they all picked the same narrow range of frames beginning with 230 as the point at which the Governor was shot. This, in turn, was confirmed by the testimony of Shaneyfelt, even with the questionable foundation on which his reconstruction was based (5H155-8). Shaneyfelt said the Governor could have been hit in this sequence, up to about frame 240. The films also completely confirm the probatory testimony by the Connallys about what they did, and in detail. The Commission elected not to believe either the Connallys or the evidence of the film.

The Report's version of the photographic evidence is contrary to all the above (R96ff.). In saying the films were viewed by the Connallys, it neglects to mention what the Connallys testified to (R97). At the same point it misrepresents the faithfulness with which the reconstructions were staged. For example, it says that the window "was raised half-way, the cardboard boxes were repositioned . . . " The window was as we have seen, raised more than halfway, and the cardboard boxes could not have been repositioned accurately by any of the number of police photographs, all of which are in contradiction with each other and the real situation at the time of the assassination. It also says the cars were located "in the exact spot where they were" (R98) for each frame, whereas the previously cited pages of the Report show the opposite. The President's reaction is "barely apparent" in frame 225 (R105), whereas he has reacted strongly. His right hand is at his throat and his left hand is just beneath it. The only sense in which this can be called "barely apparent" has nothing to do with his reaction. That is the first frame in which the President is visible as the car emerged from behind the sign. The Report ignores it, but this sequence clearly reflects the accuracy of Governor Connally's testimony about turning toward the front when he had been unable to see the President on turning to his right (18H24ff.).

One glaring omission deserves a final comment. The Commission was reconstructing the crime, ostensibly to find out what happened, not to prove that Oswald alone committed it. When the motorcade turned toward the Depository Building on Houston Street, for several hundred feet there was a completely unobstructed view of it from the sixth-floor window. The police photographs and the forgotten Secret Service reconstruction of 1963 also show this. There was not a twig between the window and the President. There were no curves in that street, no tricky shooting angles. If all the shots came from this window, and the assassin was as cool and collected as the Report represents, why did he not shoot at the easiest and by far the best target.? Why did he wait until his target was so difficult that the country's best shots could not duplicate his feat?

J. Edgar Hoover raised this point (5H105) in non-response to a question about Oswald's possible motives: "Now, some people have raised the question: Why didn't he shoot the President as the car came toward the storehouse where he was working?" Unimpeded by the incontrovertible and obviously contrary fact, Hoover supplied his own answer: ". . . there were some trees between his window on the sixth floor and the cars as they turned and went through the park . . ."

In their handling of the tangible evidence of the assassination at the Depository Building, the Commission and the Report were consistent with their treatment of the earlier evidence. Both ignored or suppressed what was opposed to the predetermined conclusion that Oswald alone was the assassin. This meant that the destruction, alteration and manipulation of evidence had to be "overlooked." It was. This meant that impossible testimony from preposterous witnesses had to be credited. It was. This meant that invalid reconstructions had to be made. They were. This meant that valuable evidence available to the Commission had to be avoided. It was. This meant that the incontrovertible proofs in the photographs had to be replaced by elaborate and invalid reenactments which, in turn, had to be based upon inaccuracies, misinformation and misrepresentation, which is what was done.

The solid proof in the record that supported Oswald's denial of guilt had to be kept from the Report. It was. The indescribably incompetent performance of the police, a description that may be a great euphemism, had to be shielded from public scrutiny. It was. The Report had even to misrepresent the Commission's own time reconstructions, which showed that Oswald could not have done what it attributed to him. The Report does just that.

Had it not, the Report would have had to concede that Oswald was not the unassisted assassin and that he could not have been the murderer of Officer J. D. Tippit.