CHAPTER 7

THE TWISTER'S INFAMOUS TWISTS

As Donahue resumes he depends on what we saw earlier is a lie, and not an accidental lie. He knows that even if what he made up could have happened there was not enough time in his invention for it to have happened.

So in saying: that he looked at the Betzner, Willis and Altgens photographs (of which there were many, not just these three in his account) he says that "Altgens snapped this picture about five seconds before the head shot."1 He knew that it is not true. He knows that in the official accounting the assassination was over in less than six seconds. He knows that this particular Altgens picture (which I had called to his attention because it disproves his fabrication) was snapped about half-way through the shooting but at not quite the middle of it. In the official accounting, which Donahue has not contested and cannot, there were forty-five frames of the Zapruder film between frame 210, when the Commission says the first shot was fired, and frame 255, when this Altgens picture was taken. At 18.3 frames per second, that is little less than three seconds of time. With the fatal shot at frame 312, there were but fifty seven frames between the time of that particular Altgens picture and the fatal shot. At the same rate of exposure, it was just a tiny fraction more than three seconds. But in this deliberately dishonest effort to make what he made up seen possible, when the official evidence itself makes his invention is impossible, Donahue gives five seconds despite knowing that there was only about half that time between the Altgens picture and the fatal shot. He knows he has given more time than the shooting took in the official accounting. In short, for his own purposes, he lied again.

As we have seen, all the evidence, and this is evidence of which Donahue knows, is that Hickey looked backward, not upward. So Donahue says that while Hickey was not looking some sixty feet up in the air "Hickey must have seen the barrel of Oswald's gun."2 When he is making it all up, he might as well make that up, too. When all the rest is not possible, it hurts him little for this, too, is not possible.

That is when Donahue admits Hickey got the rifle from the floor, Here he does say it was on the floor. Elsewhere, as we saw, he says it was on the seat between Hickey and Bennett.

His imagination then gets even more unhinged. He says that Hickey

. . . stands on the seat, preparing to return the fire. But his footing is precarious. The follow-up car hits the brakes or speeds up. Hickey begins to swing the gun around to draw a bead on Oswald, but loses his balance. He begins to fall.

And the barrel is pointing toward Kennedy's head, and the gun happens to go off.3

In what is supposed to be a factual non-fiction account Donahue says, literally, that the car in which Hickey was "hits the brakes or speeds up."4 Which, if either, is it? Is the difference not great, especially in the reaction of a man standing on an upholstered seat with what Donahue says is "precarious" footing? Can it be both ways? Can a self-styled expert not tell the difference? Especially one who claims to have studied a motion picture of it all?

Of course none of this happened. But if it did, did it not make a difference in which way Hickey would have fallen if the car had slammed on its brake or speeded up? Slamming on the brakes, which did not happen, would have thrown Hickey atop those in the jump seats. Sharply accelerating the car, which also did not happen, — could not happen with the load it carried — would have thrown Hickey backward and with him standing, in Donahue's account so precariously and erectly on the seat, it would have thrown him out of the car, over the back of the back seat, over the trunk and onto the street to be run over by the next car in the motorcade.

If the brakes had been put on hard, with the car going about eleven miles an hour, the car would have stopped almost instantly.

With all those men and all that equipment in that car, there was no chance of it speeding up with any kind of real jerk. Ten full-grown men alone were a real load.

Leaving it to his reader to decide whether Hickey fell forward from the brakes supposedly being slammed on or backward with — and it cannot be both — the car being accelerated. Donahue is careful not to tell his reader how Hickey was looking backward, supposedly preparing to take a shot at a man who was behind him and rather steeply above him (supposedly sixty-plus feet in the air), yet could possibly have had his rifle pointed directly in front of him. Hickey would have had to have had his rifle pointing forward and horizontal to the ground for Donahue's fictional invention to be possible. Thus, in the course of falling — and in this fiction it made no difference which way Hickey was allegedly falling — Hickey looking backward and, allegedly, steeply upward somehow kept the rifle pointed opposite the way he intended if he desired to line up his weapon with the shooter behind him.

Now if we are not influenced by the earlier Donahue lies, , we know that rifle was between Hickey and Bennett on the seat; and then we try to have Hickey do what Donahue makes up, with the rifle where it actually was, on the floor; behind and under those jump seats; and under the feet of, if not two agents at least under Bennett's feet; and assume that Hickey actually tried to reach and get that AR-15 from the floor, when he was standing on that seat; which is where Donahue has him and is one way that rifle; and somehow wind up pointing it and firing it to the front while looking backward and steeply upward; we see the utter impossibility of what Donahue made up.

In this Donahue invention of the impossible, Hickey had to get that rifle up from under and behind both of those jump seats when it was at right angles to the direction Donahue wanted to have Hickey to point it. What Donahue invented to get some fame, some fortune, and his book.

And, the only way that rifle could have come up from under and behind those who sat upon the jump seats was crosswise to the car, and once in that position, if Hickey fell either forward or backward, he could not have been pointing the rifle toward the President.

What Donahue made up out of nothing but sick ambition and longing for attention was, obviously, physically impossible.

Besides which the Zapruder film makes it clear that there were no such violent motions in the motorcade. They are a Donahue invention to make possible a Donahue book, or to make it seem possible, anyway.

Donahue follows these inventions with further inventions, that after the President was hit by the second shot, which the Warren Commission, Secret Service and the FBI say did not happen, "it was reasonable to assume that . . . everyone who wasn't diving for cover was watching the Presidential limousine, not the Secret Service follow-up car."5 This is his hocus-pocus for getting around the fact that nobody saw or heard that rifle being fired — nobody at all. He says they were not looking at that car. Not that dozens could not avoid looking at it if they were to look at the "presidential limousine" because they had to look over it to see that limousine.

But within two or three seconds, there had been no such reaction, no recognition that there was shooting by almost all the people there. Most believed it was backfiring or fireworks and in that very slight amount of time nobody was "diving for cover." The pictures all make this clear, including those Donahue published! It is not necessary to depend on testimony. There are quite a few people standing and looking as the limousine, when and after the President was fatally wounded.

Again, and as usual, Donahue, in making it all up and making it up in contradiction to what he has, photographic proof that his invention is false.

He seeks to get around the fact that there were people on the overpass looking directly at the motorcade that was driving toward them. The only reason Donahue makes up for not one of them, including police, reporting the seeing of that rifle being fired when they were looking right at it is that it "was equipped with a flash suppressor" so in daylight the flash would not be seen.

How did that keep all the people and all those on both sides of the street from seeing a rifle if it had been in the hands of anyone and pointed at anyone, particularly the President?

On nobody hearing the shot Donahue says was fired and wasn't, he argues that people "just could not pinpoint the location."6 Not even those looking right at it, as many were, in what he makes up. Not with it in their ears?

All those with military experience could not "pinpoint the location"? The four motorcycle policemen, two on each side of the President, could not? None of the police? Not one of the Secret Service men could? None of the others in the motorcade? Not a single reporter? Nobody in the military among the spectators? No veteran? No hunter among the spectators? Not one?

Simply preposterous!

It is not only that all the evidence is that the rifle was not fired, which despite Donahue is what all the evidence is. It is what he makes up that is really preposterous. Childishly preposterous, too. Of all those people with all their experiences on which to draw, all those whose ears would have been blasted by a rifle being fired within inches of their ears, it simply can not believed that not a single person would have been aware that the rifle was fired — if it had been.

As it was not!

Donahue's photo section follows. There is nothing new in it. It does include a photograph looking down on the empty seats of the limousine, with the jump seats open for siting. There was very little space between the backs of those seats and the front edge of the permanent seat. With men sitting in the jump seats and two sitting on the permanent seat, getting a rifle up from the floor would not have been easy and it would not have been possible as rapidly as what Donahue made up requires.

To try to get around this, as we saw earlier, Donahue said the rifle was on the seat between Bennet and Hickey. He knew that was false when he said it. He also argued that the rifle would have been loaded and cocked while it was being transported and bouncing around. What he does not say is that if it had been on the seat and loaded and ready to fire it would have been pointed at those in front of Bennet and Hickey in that car and if it went off and did not hit one of them it could have hit anyone in front of that car.

On this and again bearing on dishonesty of intent, Donahue has a sketch of the presidential car and of that follow-up car. His sketch 4 is on unnumbered page 103. It also shows how little space there was between the jump seat and the permanent seat and it does not show where he says the rifle was. To give the deceptive impression that there was no crowding, each of the ten mean is represented by a small dot, nothing the size of any of those men. For this he did not use a picture, even though he claimed those men were so large they blocked any view of Hickey with the rifle. The Hickey who is clearly visible through all those men in many pictures when he has no rifle in his hands!

The intent not to be honest is omnipresent. It dominates everything in this book.

The intent to be nasty to just about everybody is also omnipresent.

His tenth chapter, titled "Breaking News," which is something not in this book in any form or at any point,7 holds some of his worst and most indecent rottenness, some of which we quoted. He begins it with a confession he did not realize he was making or he would not have been as slack-jawed in trying to make himself look like what he was not, a diligent researcher and an honest investigator. He says, in the first sentence of the second paragraph of this chapter, that he "continued to sift the evidence for anything that might strengthen his case."8 An honest scholar, an honest investigator, really does what Donahue never did do! He sifts through all the evidence to learn not only what could support what is at best a theory but what could prove it to be invalid.

Which, as we have seen and will see more, the evidence that invalidates his invention was abundantly available. It proves the impossibility of his fabrication, that he actually writes about as established fact, as we soon seen again.

Then he misquotes a newspaper misrepresentation , making a big deal of what he could have misused this way either deliberately or from the most profound ignorance. With him it could be either or both. He refers to Chief Justice and Commission Chairman Earl Warren's alleged "remark about restricting testimony " . . . because of security precautions."9 Warren did not say there was testimony the Commission would not take. What he said and was misinterpreted by some of the newspapers is that there are laws and regulations for withholding "national security" information and others intended to protect people that prohibit disclosure for seventy-five years of what can reflect on them. This is proper and it is a proper protection for people.

If Donahue had been an investigator instead of an uninformed blowhard making it up, as he went and not having a legitimate basis for what he made up or if he had used any of his time when he visited me to look at any of those hundreds of thousands of pages I obtained by all those FOIA lawsuits, he would have been aware that all sorts of misinformation gets into government files as well as truthful information that can be hurtful. Hurtful to the innocent, too.

On occasion the FBI withheld from me motel registrations it obtained in its investigations. If they were disclosed and included the information that Mr. and Mrs. John Jones of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, had been registered at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami on April 1, 1967 — and if that had been seen by the real Mrs. John Jones who did not leave Oshkosh, there would have been trouble.

There also could have been trouble with the disclosure of FBI reports of who was sleeping with whom without being married. The FBI did disclose that information when it wanted to hurt those about whom it chose to disclose those records. As it did to me.

There could be more than one John Jones of Oshkosh, which could mean more trouble, and there is incorrect information that is given to government investigators about people in whom they may have an interest, and that, too, can make trouble. Has.

What Earl Warren was talking about was no more than that the Commission had to live within the law and protect national security and the rights of people. No matter how Donahue misrepresents it, he was speaking of this and of no more, of living within the laws and regulations.

They also prevented and still prevent, as they should the disclosure of the names of informers working for the government or of agents the intelligence agencies have and use.

There not only is legitimate reasons for some withholdings, on several occasions I notified the government of mistakes it had made in disclosures that could get people killed. Like the FBI disclosing the name of an informer it had inside the mafia, which it did disclose to me.

So, specialist that he is in dirty works of his own imagining and fabrication, Donahue leads into outrageous indecencies with these misrepresentations to his readers of what Warren really said. Donahue actually says that what Warren was talking about, when obviously he wasn't and could not have been, is this monstrosity of Donahue's invention. This follows immediately upon what is explained above:

In any event, Donahue surmised the true cause of Kennedy's head wound must have been known at the very least among the President's top advisors and the Secret Service agents in the motorcade within minutes of the shooting. Several incidents at Parkland Hospital seemed to bear this out and offered a glimpse into how news of the accident may have been suppressed.10

It is word selection worth examining with care to try to fathom the depths to which these two have slunk in their attempt to rewrite our tragic history as they defame almost anyone they don't like or almost anyone other than the real villain in this monstrous atrocity, the subject- matter ignoramus with the sincere belief he is a genius. He begins this particularly outrageous and indecent passage by referring to it, first at least, as his "surmise." (It is not even that. It is fiction.)

But having said that and made this slight gesture to which he could point if criticized for what he is up to, he wipes that all out not by referring to what he "surmises" as possible, or even as probable, as conjecture or a theory. No, he refers to his utterly irrational and totally disproved fabrication as "the true cause of Kennedy's head wound," which is to say "the true cause of his death." He here refers to not a "surmise" but to a murderer and he has named him often enough as Hickey.

Then he has what he says "must have been known," and that what "must have been known" is "at the very least among the President's top advisers and the Secret Service in the motorcade within minutes" when there is not a word of truth in this and as we have seen, not even a reasonable, responsible basis even for suspecting it.

In this these shameless and shameful men make all those they include, and from their language others can include the President's "top advisors" and all the Secret Service in the motorcade at the least as conspirators to hide what they make up as the cause of death.

They then refer to what they describe, in taking liberties, as usual, with the language, as "several incidents at Parkland Hospital" which, in their twisted and corrupted minds, they interpret as having "seemed to bear this out and offered a glimpse into how news of the accident may have been suppressed."11

All of this, mind you, not only with no proof at all that the Secret Service fired a single shot but with unrefuted official statements that it had not!

With no more than the most undependable of those who wrote successful books supposedly about the assassination as their source, Jim Bishop, Donahue and Menninger use one of those so-called "incidents." Bishop, in The Day Kennedy Was Shot, 12 writes that Secret Service agent Clint Hill told Robert Kennedy, by phone, before there was an official determination of what had happened that there had been an "accident." Donahue and Menninger interpret that not as, assuming it is the word Hill used — and my experience with Bishop when he was preparing to write that book suggests that his unconfirmed word can't be taken for anything — as meaning that Hickey killed the President. There was no basis at all assuming that this is even what Hill said, leave alone to misinterpret it as those two do.

However, if this did happen and if Hill did use the word "accident'' in talking to Robert Kennedy, then according to the Oxford American dictionary he used precisely the word for what had happened and not for what these two literary shysters connote. The dictionary meaning is "an unexpected or undesired event, especially one causing injury or damage."

These two try to rewrite more than our history. They try to rewrite the dictionaries, too.

They then quote Hill as adding, "The situation is bad. We'll get back to you."13

There is nothing wrong with this and there is nothing in it to justify their deliberate misrepresentation of it.

The second "incident," well known and more exhaustively reported in the very first book14 on the assassination and the Commission, was the forcible removal of the corpse from the only jurisdiction for that crime at that time, Texas. I was severely criticized for taking that position by even a judge supposedly reviewing Whitewash but as a matter of law, only Texas had jurisdiction and the federal government should have respected that law and that jurisdiction.

Motive for what particularly, in retrospect can't be excused, the kidnaping of the corpse from the only jurisdiction for the crime, is understandable, whether or not these lunkheads could. understand it or would permit themselves to. There is little else they allow themselves to understand so there is no certainty that they could let themselves understand this.

Mrs. Kennedy refused to leave the body of her dead husband. The federal agents wanted her out of there. They had to be concerned, and this is never mentioned, about whether other violent acts were to follow. They had other concerns, normal and proper, including for the grieving widow who refused even to let the blood be taken from her clothing.

It was wrong, but to get her out of Texas where all this had happened, they took the corpse by force out of the one jurisdiction where there had been a crime.

That, however, does not justify even the suspicion of these depraved minds who invent the impossible and then refer to it as proven fact. There is no basis for any rational mind to interpret this as one of those alleged "incidents" that, with the most despicable indecency, they actually say "bear out" the absolute impossibility they invented. What they would have proven was an impossibility if either of them had a shred of decency or honesty and had sought to repeat the fact. Rather, in his rare moment of atypical honesty, Donahue said he would "sift" what he refers to as, but what he did not get near, "the evidence." "The evidence" that he sought was only what "might strengthen the case" that was a proven impossibility.

No honest writer, no honest investigator, no honest researcher, limits himself that way and only one carried away with his sense of omniscience and omnipotence is sloppy enough to make so brazen a confession of it.

Neither of these matters is any kind of "evidence" and neither "confirms" any part of this dastardly mischief we are examining.

This pair never stops referring to what, from the evidence, they knew had not happened as what really happened. With that in their greedy and twisted minds, they compound what would ordinarily be as terrible an indecency as could be made up, that the President's closest advisors knew that he had been killed by the Secret Service and each and every one kept quiet then and ever since. With conjecture for which there is no legitimate basis mixed in with their expressed certainty about how the President was killed they then next defamed his , then still alive, then martyred himself:

Consequently, when Hill had informed the attorney general of the "accident" during the Parkland phone conversation — and it was reasonable to believe that Hill or someone else had told Kennedy the specifics that afternoon — Bobby may well have, understandably, codified the cover-up: instructing that word of the misadventure go no further and that the President's body be brought back to Washington as rapidly as possible, Texas law be damned.15

It simply is not possible to take up and expose every sly use of language by this pair of scoundrels. It is enough to say once again that there is not only no proof of what they say, the evidence is that it is false — the evidence they had and the evidence they misused. Yet they with their lies, so many of their own creation, then have the to be martyred brother of the martyred President be the one who "codified the cover-up; instructing that word of the [ugh!] misadventure go no farther."16

No matter how much they may have hated either or both Kennedys politically, no matter if they actually did believe their farcical fabrication that was so overwhelmingly proven to be false by the evidence they had, for them to resort to this most despicable kind of character assassination — and that of the dead — of the dead — and to do that with total fabrication, with no basis for it at all, must be condemned with all the contempt such evil deserves.

The simplest of the actual facts are that 1) Robert Kennedy had totally, and quite properly, recused himself from any part of the investigation; and 2) if he wanted to he could not have decided for J. Edgar Hoover what Hoover would or would not say or do.

Although there is more, much more, adding this is more than enough: the Warren Commission was completely independent, as anyone knowing some of the members of that Commission would never have doubted.

So, in addition to there being no basis for this infamous slur on the loving brother, holding him responsible for what they refer to as the cover-up of their baseless invention, it again needs repeating, they knew they had no case and they knew that the actual evidence disproved what they made up and commercialized.

Rotten as this is, this pair had not yet finished with their baseless, their totally fabricated irresponsibility and defamations that would shame any honest writer absent some hidden political objective. Here, nothing omitted in quoting, is how they continue:

If Robert Kennedy had made such a decision, it was completely in keeping with his character. He was an aggressive man used to having things his own way. For three years he'd served as his brother's shield and cutlass. Now, with Jack dead, Bobby perhaps saw his cover-up as his final task in that role — an arguably humane decision that would serve primarily to protect the memory of JFK. Certainly Kennedy's position as attorney general put him in the ideal spot to execute such a cover-up. He was the nation's top law enforcement official and held authority over the FBI as well as considerable influence over the federal and state agencies involved in the preliminary investigations of the assassination.17

Having written their infamous fabrication on the basis of their stating that Robert Kennedy had made the decision, had "codified" the "cover-up," they try to hide their ugliness in this monstrosity by beginning with "If" when they mean no "if" at all and all the writing is based on their being no "if." They even imagine the coverup that there had not been and could not be, what they say having been invented totally and refuted by all the fact, imagining that somehow that non-existing coverup served the interest of the assassinated President, a complete impossibility.

It is, on the basis of what Donahue knows from Post Mortem, a deliberate lie he assumed he would get away with, saying that Robert could have and did control of the investigation, the only possible way, of trying to cover it up. He was totally divorced from it, refused even to look at the Commission's drafted Report.

(Where the ignorance of the established fact that Donahue was careful to preserve does him in on this fantasy, as does his not reading what did not support his myth, is that if Robert Kennedy had known about any Secret Service shot at his brother, which there had not been; and if he had wanted to cover that up, for which there was no need and he had no such need; there would have been no more effective means for him to do that than by doing what the Commission tried to persuade him to do, endorse their Report which he had not even seen and refused to see. That would have been the ideal cover-up.)

(This raises still again the question, can Donahue understand what he reads or does he block out all that is not myth he imagines supports the myth of his own invention?)

The rest of this is fiction, too, as only the most dishonest or the most ignorant would write, especially with a political animus:

The gunsmith's instincts that a cover-up may have developed in the minutes after the assassination would be supported by additional evidence accumulated in the years ahead — evidence that would continue to point to Bobby Kennedy as the key player in this fateful decision.18

They continue their intended defamation of Robert Kennedy with total falsehood and irrelevancy as their sole basis in what we read above. Unless politics is also figured in it.

There is not a word of truth in this and there is not a factual word in support of it in this book.

Or anywhere.

It is totally false.

Those who can bring themselves to make up such defamation of the dead without a word that can be considered proof may be human in form but they are not human in fact.

With all, and this cannot be repeated too often, despite all the lies, all the inventions, all the corrupt interpretations; despite all they make up, they still have no proof that the Secret Service fired any shots of any kind that day and they have the unrefuted official denials of it that they sublimate to the point where the average reader does not have it in mind.

They do have more of this filth but there is no need to repeat more of it.

In the course of getting himself all wound in representing himself as the man who hated Robert Kennedy more than any man whoever lived Donahue gets careless and exposes himself not only as a real, gold-plated assassination subject-matter ignoramus but as a phony in his claim to be a "firearms engineer" and a firearms examiner." With more rubbish about what is supposedly in his mind he gets to those empty gun shells found in the book depository after the assassination:

It was true that three spent Carcano shells were found on the floor of the book depository near Oswald's sixth-floor roost. The Commission pointed to this as proof positive that Oswald had fired three times. Yet one of the shells was dented and showed numerous marks from the carrier, the large spring in the Carcano clip that pushed the bullets up to the chamber.15 Donahue did not believe this dented shell could have been used to fire a bullet that day. The gun would not have functioned properly. Instead, he theorized that dent and the markings may have been made by Oswald inserting and reinserting a spent shell into the magazine to repeatedly dry-fire, or practice the Carcano's bolt and trigger action, without damaging the firing pin. As a Marine, Oswald would have known how to do this.19

This from a man who in addition to referring to himself as a firearms engineer, whatever that may be, and a firearms examiner, which is a title he liked and took for himself, has just referred to himself as a "gunsmith."

So, he is a phony in his claimed area of expertise, too!

That deformed shell could not be gotten into the breech of that rifle for practice or for any other purpose! As any gun buff should know.

There is also about those three shells what this dumdum with the exalted opinion of himself read in Whitewash, that two of those shells had been chambered earlier, one not in the rifle said to have been Oswald's.

I was troubled about the dent that gunsmith/firearms examiner/firearms engineer Donahue does not even try to describe so the reader has some notion of what he is supposedly writing about.

Donahue did not even have to examine the shells to know the reality. The Commission published pictures of them.

Knowing that it was physically impossible to get that empty shell in the rifle, I went with a friend who is a rifle expert and a member of the National Rifle Association to the local police range, with the duplicate of the rifle I had and a good supply of that ammunition. But none of us could duplicate that dent, which is at what is known as the "throat" of the empty shell, where the bullet fits into it.

As that shell could not have fit into the breech, so also could no bullet fit into that throat of that shell.

A retired army colonel was in charge of the range. When nobody there could figure out how that throat got that dent in it with the rifle being used, there came another man and the colonel suggested that he consult with us. He was on the staff at local Fort Detrick. He also had a sideline business of rifles. All I remember of him other than what he did is that his name was "Chuck," Chuck took a look at the picture of that shell with the dented throat and with his first shot duplicated it.!

None of this Donahue nonsense is relevant and that may be a fair reflection of his expertise.

What Chuck knew that the rest of us did not know is that there is only one way that kind of deformity can be made on a shell in firing a bullet. It is by the use of excessive force in ejecting the empty shell. Excessive force throws the shell violently up against the part of the rifle known, as I recall it, as the "follower," which is on the right side behind where the bullets are put in and the empty shells are ejected.

With the excessive force he used Chuck made me a duplicate of that deformed shell found in the Depository after the assassination.

In turn that suggested it was not fired that day because if it had been, with that excessive force, it would not likely have been found near the other shells but would have been thrown much farther.

As we saw happen when Chuck made the duplicate for us.

Donahue, the firearms engineer/firearms examiner/gunsmith, could not figure this out and went through all the foolishness, the impossible foolishness above. It is that because there is no way that dented shell could have been breeched in "practicing."

And so, from the bragging Donahue, we get a reflection of his knowledge and of his expertise other than in his own representation as well as a means of measuring anything and everything he says in this book.

Aside from what he made up, and that is the most important part, he does not know what he talks about and, as said earlier, he also does not understand what he reads.