CHAPTER 5

DONAHUE'S MAGIC BULLET:	IT DOES NOT MAKE THE HEAD BLEED

Poor Donahue! With his lies that never end and cannot end if he is to have his book, he is like a snake that has begun to swallow: he cannot stop.

After all of this and so much more like it for which there now is no need to take or waste any time, he actually says what follows about the front of the shirt collar after raving about the clarity of the FBI picture that I loaned him. To lead into what I am about to quote I repeat his words in his letter to me of October 30, 1985: "I am returning herewith your excellent photo of JFK's shirt showing the exit point . . ." That, to him, was the front. Of course he also had that and more in Post Mortem, with full explanations, as reported above. So, with that official and entirely irrefutable evidence this is how he begins:

In any event, the FBI's examination of the bullet hole on the front of the president's shirt offered final, irrefutable proof that the bullet had passed from back to front, in Donahue's view. According to the FBI, the cloth fibers surrounding the hole were pressed out, not in. This showed the cloth was carried forward as the bullet made its way through the shirt from the rear. Conversely, the fibers around the hole on the back of the shirt were pressed in, confirming the back wound was one of entrance.1

With what he had, to be able to write this, the man has neither pride, principle, self-respect, nor any vestige of personal integrity. He also does not have any excuse that is accepted from a man who claims to be both a "firearms examiner" and as we saw, even an "engineer" in the field.

There is no hole through the front of the President's shirt. There are two slits in the top made by a scalpel. The results of the spectrographic testing of those slit and the point on tie where there was a slight nick establish beyond any reasonable question that none was cased by any bullet. Those spectrographic tests of which the subject-matter ignoramus Donahue is so contemptuous from the profundity of his ignorance leave no question at all about this. And if instead of bullshitting, which is what he does in his references to references to the Commission's evidence at the Archives, he had really read it, as he'd have learned in my books he has and cites that testimony, the FBI lab sworn testimony is that there are no bullet traces on the front of the shirt or on the tie.

What this supposed authority on weapons refers to as "irrefutable" is the exact opposite of what is actually irrefutable, and that is official.

No, bullet passed through the front of that shirt, period. Without question, no matter what Donahue makes up and says.

Now when he gets to the direction of the threads he exposes himself as anything but a "firearms examiner" or whatever kind of"firearms engineer" he poses as because the FBI's testimony to the Commission again could not have been more explicit.

Donahue says he quotes the FBI, which is another of his endless lies. It testified that the direction of the threads can mean nothing. They can have meaning only when taken possession of after not being touched. It was an authentic firearms examiner, FBI lab agent Robert Frazier, who explained to the Commission that merely using the easer on a pencil enabled reversing the direction in which these threads pointed. So unless taken into possession immediately, he testified, the direction in which threads point has no meaning.

Besides which, as that picture shows, those threads were cut, were not caused by any bullet and did not point in only one direction.

This is followed by more Donahue conjecture and imagination that have no basis in fact that again is not worth wasting any time on but there is another professional booboo by this self-styled "firearms examiner" that I do refer. On page 37 he tried to argue that the impossible history made up for that magical bullet, Commission Exhibit 399, is for real. He directs the reader to some pictures taken for others, including me, at the National Archives. Here are his actual words:

To the trained eye [meaning his, of course] the jacketed slug was somewhat bent and severely flattened, so much that a small amount of lead had been extruded from the bullet's base. Clearly it had hit something. (See illustrations 8, 9, and 10.)."

His illustration 10 is not even of a bullet! It is a Mannlicher Carcano rifle!

His 8 is the well-known and oft-used picture of that bullet standing upright on its base. It is at right angles to what it is resting on so there is no "extrusion" to make it impossible for the bullet to be perfectly erect in the picture.

His 9 is a picture of the base taken for me not to show extrusions, which it does not show, but to show that all that is missing from that bullet's base was cut out of it in the FBI lab. In our deposing of him in CA 75-226, Frazier testified that he did it.

So, this "engineer" of a "firearms examiner" says the pictures that he uses show the metal extruded from the base of the bullet when they actually show the exact opposite: no extrusion! He even calls an "extrusion" what is quite visibly where a piece of the metal core was cut out of that bullet.

Donahue says that bullet is "somewhat bent and severely flattened." Both statements are, very obviously false. I held that bullet in my hand and examined it closely. I could not see even a scratch on it. It was not bent at all, and in fact the picture Donahue uses proves this! The flattening is very slight. This even the government said, and that slight flattening is at the back end, away from the point.

When Donahue gets to his chapter "The Head Shot,"2 he begins to get to what he intends to be his pay dirt. Dirt it is but pay it does not.

He does say that his work on the fatal shot, which consisted of dowel sticks stuck through models of a head as he says the President's head was positioned at the time of the shot and, laying the foundation far his coming fabrication, he says, that he "was stunned" because one afternoon's work" had " effectively destroyed" the Warren Report.3

Enter our hero.

All feigned modesty, he says that "no one seemed to have thought to bear a trained ballistics look at the head shot" no one, although he does not say so, obviously includes the FBI and its famous lab. He adds that he "was reasonably proud of his expertise in the field of firearms [How can this be doubted when as we have just seen he refers to a rifle as a bullet?] but he did not judge himself some kind of genius."4

Of course not! All he says is that of all the multimillions of people in the world and the hundreds of thousands of experts he and he alone figured out what he says is the solution to the crime.

Nobody in the FBI or the Secret Service or on the Warren Commission — and did they have sessions with all kinds of experts, including from the Army and the FBI — and not one among the many writing in the field, but nonetheless we are to believe that with this record he genuinely "didn't judge himself some kind of genius."

Well, on that I do agree with him. He certainly is something but not what is normally called a genius.

Donahue, the self-described "firearms engineer" and "firearms examiner," says he is so expert, as we have seen from the photographs of his own selection, he sees a bullet bent where it is not bent — and he has more on such imagined bending to which we do come — he assumes that nothing deflects a bullet, so those dowel sticks of his are perfectly straight. But as all the professional literature I had to study for all those FOIA lawsuits of which non-genius Donahue is so contemptuous says, what it without question is that almost anything can deflect a bullet somewhat and what is hard, like bone, in particular, can — and does. Bone, like as in the head. Only it didn't in this case, as Donahue reports it, so that, even though it fragmented, he could have his book and the fame and fortune he sought with it.

Donahue quotes Humes as saying there were "multiple minute fragments" of bullet "embedded in the skull and brain. The words Humes used in his protocol are "dust-like" to describe how tiny those fragments are.5

As many years before Donahue got this book ghosted I reported in Post Mortem, that is impossible for a bullet made in accord with the provisions of the Geneva convention, as those Carcano bullets were.

In reading Donahue's dreadful bore I annotated it. Throughout, including at this point, as guides for the future I wrote "false" in often but there is little point now in going into all those statements of his. Hickey alone is plural?

His next chapter, the sixth, is titled "Fortuitous Encounter"6

Here he starts getting into his notion that the President was actually killed by his "bodyguards."7 The plural is his.

As he seeks to get the Secret Service to incriminate itself he refers to the response to one of his letters by the chief of the Secret Service, James Rowley. He quotes Rowley as telling him that "no shots were fired by the Secret Service at the time of the assassination."8 To mere mortals this is a statement that has no ifs or buts and is unequivocal. But if you are a genius like Donahue you know better and then you complain when you get no further answers.

If the Secret Service did not know sooner, it did know as soon as Reppert's articles appeared in the Baltimore Sun what Donahue was up to. Once it told him, in writing, that no shots were fired by it at the time of the assassination, what reasonable question could he have had to ask unless he could prove that statement was not true, and what reason consistent with rationality did the Secret Service have for having anything further to do with him and his defamation of it and of its retired agent?

The "fortunate encounter" to which his chapter title refers is a friend telling him about the late Dr. Russell Fisher, who was then Maryland's chief medical examiner and who had headed a panel of medical and forensic experts for the Department of Justice.

Fisher did agree to see Donahue.

Donahue gives no dates in this but from his account, which I am inclined to question, Fisher laid it all out to him before the report of those experts, with Fisher more or less in charge, was disclosed. It is not only because Donahue has trouble telling the truth even by accident that I doubt his version. It would have been enormously unprofessional for Fisher to have disclosed any of that to anybody when the department was keeping it all very secret, as it did for much of a year. And it would have been in 1968, long before Donahue was off on his assassination kick.

According to John P. Roche, then the intellectual in residence in the Johnson White House, the suggestion that this be done was by him. Rather than being aimed at Jim Garrison, as Donahue says, it was to respond to the attention the books mine, Epstein's and then Lane's, were getting. It was, however, used in the Garrison lawsuit for the evidence and any earlier use of it by Fisher would have been enormously unprofessional. I do not believe Fisher would have done that.

Particularly not because I long ago had information from inside the Department of Justice that some members of the panel were reluctant to support what I regard as the official mythology and that a Department of Justice lawyer, Carl Eardley, drove up to Fisher's and that Fisher whipped the, others of his panel into line for the Government. This is not consistent with what Donahue says.

It happens that I was involved in that matter in court. Soon after he started, Garrison had asked me to be what he referred to as his Dealey Plaza expert" at the Shaw trial. I had no interest in Shaw but I was anxious for that case to go to trial. Garrison sought to obtain some of the alleged evidence to show his jury and he filed suit for it in Washington. I had offered to help in that suit. The Washington attorney was the late Bernard Fensterwald, Jr., know as Bud. One night he phoned me telling me to get my toothbrush and meet him at the Key Bridge Hot Shoppe prepared to work at his home and to stay over. He said he had something he had to do first but in meeting me there he would lead me to his home, then in Arlington,, to which I'd never been. He did meet me with his then law partner and when we got to his home he divided the papers he had obtained that the government had intended to hand us by surprise the next morning in court. He divided those papers up. He and his partner took the legal arguments and they gave me the secret, until then, report of the Fisher panel. I spent the night going over it to be of help to our professional witness the next morning, Dr. Cyril Wecht. His testimony was so persuasive we won. The rest is a long story that would be confusing and is pretty strange but it has no pertinence to these Donahue concoctions.

However, the fact is that officially and outside of the Department of Justice I am supposed to be the first one to have this chance to even look at that report of the panel Fisher headed.

Which can explain the total absence of dates in this Donahue account of his story. Once it was used in court then, of course, it could be seen by others. It was a court record, a public record.

I doubt very much if a professional like the late Dr. Russell Fisher, who wrote the standard text for medical examiners, would violate his own standards and precepts.

Unlike Donahue, I have no problem with these dates. That court hearing in Washington was the Friday before Richard was sworn in as President in January 1969. I had gone over the report with care the night before. It was entered into the record of that court that Friday morning. I began writing what I wrote about that report two days later, Sunday night, the Sunday before the Nixon inauguration. It is, as Donahue knows in detail because it is included — in facsimile — in Part Two of Post Mortem, not secret since then.

However, with Fisher dead and from Donahue's own notations, all his "verbatim" accounts of conversations have no claimed basis other than his memory. I do not believe that a professional medical examiner like Fisher would have disclosed that report while it was still secret and that to a total stranger.

I repeat that in 1975 I published that panel report, in facsimile, in Post Mortem9. There is no proof that Donahue actually got it from Fisher, as he says, when it was secret. Seven years before his book, he had Post Mortem. Besides this what Donahue attributes to Fisher is but a fraction of what is in that part of Post Mortem.

Even then he cannot be honest.

The magic bullet on which he depends cannot have struck anything that caused it to shed any fragments. Again as Donahue knows from Post Mortem.

But it did and Fisher and his groups said so. Only Donahue did not.

Under "Neck Region" (Fisher Panel Report, page 13), which is page 592 in Post Mortem, the Fisher panel stated that "several small metallic fragments are present in this region."

This seems to have gotten by Donahue and his dependence on that magic bullet, the same dependence the Warren Report had. It did strike bone and it did leave pieces of bullet in the President's neck region, as the Fisher panel said unanimously.

Without that being visible on those pictures Donahue printed after so many others had printed them!

It is interesting that this "engineer" of a "firearms examiner" who is so critical of just about all others, could find it possible not to mention that his magic bullet did strike bone inside the President's body and did leave fragments of bullet there, in accordance with Fisher and his panel's report.

Donahue's seventh chapter has the fictional title: "Kennedy's Unknown Wound."10 In this he refers to what the Fisher panel refers to, as I also did in Post Mortem, a metallic fragment in the President's head that was not mentioned by those doctors who prepared the autopsy report. To Donahue, who is as good as the next, if not better than most, at what is made up, this becomes what he refers to as "A ricochet".11

I have no idea what it is. In reporting it in Post Mortem, I did not conjecture about it. And not considering myself Sherlock Holmes reborn I was not pretending to solve the case. But Donahue says this is a kind of ricochet from a missed shot by Oswald coming down so steeply and bouncing up from the street and over the back of the limousine and then imbedding itself in the President's head. One of those films I referred Donahue to that he should look at only in the futility of seeking confirmation of his impossible fabrication, either disproves it or the President had the remarkable capability of being hit in the head with a large piece of bullet and not bleeding — of not even getting a hair out of place.

There is a relevant story that I told earlier and Donahue should know, having the book. He characterized it as "excellent," but others may not.

When Time/Life made 35mm positive film of the Zapruder film for the Commission the number of frames it duplicated was reported. When the Commission supposedly printed those frames I found that nine had not been included. The FBI made black-and-white prints that could be printed in those volumes and it was a bit cute, having its own unspecified interests to serve. Instead of making black-and-white prints for the Government Printing Office to use in the 26 volumes and ending with the frame the FBI itself numbered 343, it stopped with 334. When I discovered that I wrote the Archives. It was embarrassed. It invited me in to see the color slides of those nine frames the FBI had avoided having published. In two of those nine frames, as I recall 336 and 337, the back of the President's head is clearly visible as he falls over onto his wife with the back of his head briefly pointed toward Zapruder's camera. There is no sign of blood on the back of the President's head even though the upper right part of it has so visibly been blown out. No hair on the back of his head is out of place. His shirt collar is visible and there is no blood on it, and there is not a not a smidgeon of blood on his jacket — and this is about twenty- five frames after the head was exploded out.

So, that is more of the magic on which, when he does not depend on what else we have seen in detail, Donahue's impossible solution depends, on the magical ricochet that hit the magical head. Without causing it to bleed where that alleged ricochet allegedly broke the skin and skull and entered the head.

And that without disturbing a single hair on the back of the head.

Perhaps we can now agree with what we quoted Donahue as saying about himself, that he did not claim to be a genius.

But he made no denial of being a magician.