CHAPTER 9

DONAHUE'S "PROOF" IS DISPROOF

There are many more pages in this book but they are not worth the time we have taken for this first part. That tells us all we really need to know about Donahue and about what he made up. He presents himself as well informed when he is not. He writes about spectrographic analysis and neutron activation analysis without any real understanding of them and without the limited understanding he could have obtained about them and about the results from them from what is in my books that he supposedly read. He made some pretty dumb mistakes and many more of them are not needed to make that case. He says of himself all over again that he is Sherlock personified, as in supposedly quoting his wife as saying of him that "He was an investigator unsurpassed in sifting the physical evidence from the scene of the crime."1 To anyone who knows the available evidence in this case remarkably little of which is even mentioned by Donahue, that is a real laugh. He has stayed away from the actual official evidence more than anyone else I can recall who pretended to be writing seriously. What more indication do we need of this being his intent, to ignore the real evidence, than that when he came to see me and with that more than a third of a million pages of records freely accessible to him, he did not open a single file cabinet, did not look at a single sheet of paper, and he asked me nothing about the information I received on the results of the scientific testing. When he knew I had sued for those results, he never once wrote me to ask me what results I obtained or what they showed or could be taken to show.

The real evidence wipes out his claim to fame and fortune so Donahue stayed away from the real evidence that to this day he neither knows nor understands nor gives a damn about.

Katie added a note to his letter to me, saying that she had to come back to look at what I got from the FBI. That was not in his letter after he did not do it when he was here. Neither of them came again. I never heard from either of them again, and despite his bull about it. I did get some meaningful results of both the spectrographic and neutron activation testing, and he knew that from the parts of those results published, sometimes in facsimile, in Post Mortem.

From time to time Donahue complains that the House assassins committee paid no attention to him but his complaint is based on his own ideas about himself and what he knew, not on reality. He had nothing any committee, including this committee that began determined to support the official assassination "solution," could put to any use.

Even second-hand he was of no value because he could not be of any use relating to the original investigations of which he kept himself ignorant other than in making foolish statements about it when he did mention them. First hand he was of no value either because despite his big talk he never conducted anything even an intelligent child could call an original investigation.

Donahue is so determinedly ignorant of the actual subject-matter he does not have the slightest notion of when he makes a fool of himself over it when he pontificates about it, particularly when he misuses what he does not understand. He is ignorant and he really believes he is a maven, as we see on page 164. He is talking about the House assassins committee.

At the committee's ballistics hearings — the proceedings Donahue had tried so mightily to be a part of — additional information surfaced that, to Donahue, again fit a pattern of elimination or obfuscation of any evidence that pointed to the actual origin of the bullet.

The testimony by various experts focused primarily on the single bullet theory. This shopworn controversy was seemingly put to rest thanks to the neutron activation work of Vincent Guinn, a University of California professor of radiochemistry. Guinn reported that neutron activation tests showed the lead fragments removed from Connally's wrist were indeed pieces of the "pristine bullet" recovered at Parkland Hospital, although Guinn never explained how this conclusion could have been reached with any degree of certainty through the analysis of lead, since lead is nonhomogeneous and hence subject to wide variances in composition from sample to sample.

Turning to the head wound, Guinn said tests of the lead fragments removed from Kennedy's brain showed they too were probably from a Carcano bullet. But he quickly added a curious qualifier. According to the professor, the fragments tested — represented by the National Archives as having come from Kennedy's brain — were not the same brain fragments the FBI tested when the agency did its own neutron activation analysis back in 1964.

Guinn explained to reporters that a small container represented by the National Archives as holding all the metal recovered from the President's brain contained only two fragments, one weighing 41.9 milligrams and the other 5.4 milligrams. Yet FBI records from the original testing in 1964 showed a total of four samples were removed from the President's brain, and none had weights corresponding with the pieces at the National Archives.

"The pieces brought out by the archives did not include any of the specific pieces the FBI analyzed," Guinn said. "Where [the originals] are, I have no idea."2

Not having bothered to get the hearings published by the Warren Commission it goes without saying that renowned and omniscient an expert as Donahue says he is, considered himself to be, and as wisely and as fully informed, he did not trouble himself to get the hearings of this committee. They were published and sold at low cost by the Government Printing Office. Donahue had claimed a friendly relationship with Congressman Clarence Long. If Donahue had asked, Long could have gotten him those hearings without charge. But Donahue had no need for for them, not even when he could get them without cost.

He does write about them, but he does not need them so he could write about them.

He cites three sources in what we quote above. All three are to The Washington Post of September 8, 1978, an article by George Lardner. As Donahue tells it, this got, his words, "scant attention in the press." That is at the least a novel way of referring to live coast-to-coast if not also international live TV coverage, with so many reporters representing so many news services and newspapers there. So "scant" was the attention in his source, the Post, the Post gave it a half page. A half page is not very "scant."

This also again raises the question we have encountered from the outset, can or does Donahue understand what he reads? Along with that, should it not also be asked, and often, does he tell the truth?

These are among the questions raised by what his source did say, as we see with this excerpt from it:

Quinn's tests also created a new mystery, however. The fragments the FBI tested in 1964, he told Fithian, have all disappeared. Guinn said he carefully weighed the bits and pieces of metal brought out to him by officials of the National Archives last year and not one of them matched the fragments recorded in the FBI data.

"The pieces brought out by Archives did not include any of the specific pieces the FBI analyzed," he testified. "Where they are, I have no idea."

Elaborating to reporters .later, Guinn said, for example, that he was presented a small container ostensibly carrying all the bullet fragments from Kennedy's brain. It contained two bits of metal, one weighing 41.9 milligrams and the other 5.4 milligrams. Yet, Guinn said, the FBI records showed four other samples from Kennedy's brain, all with different weights.

In the same fashion, the FBI data indicated that it had tested three bits of metal from Connally's wrist at Oak Ridge National Laboratories in 1964, two weighing 2.3 milligrams each and another weighing 1.52 milligrams. The container Guinn got, which he said came with assurances from Archives that this was all the metal from Connally's wrist in its possession, had two other pieces, one weighing 16.4 milligrams and the other 13 milligrams.3

(Floyd Fithian was a Committee member.)

With this we also address the legitimacy of Donahue referring to himself, as quoted earlier from his page 141, " as an investigator unsurpassed in sifting the physical evidence at the scene of the crime."

With this kind of "sifting" it would have been unsafe for Katie to tell him to sift her a cup of flour for a cake she was baking because he could have used salt, if not arsenic instead of flour and called it flour.

A President has been assassinated. That was the most subversive of crimes in a country like ours. His assassination was investigated by the government he had headed. It had specimens of evidence recovered from his body and it says it made scientific tests of those specimens. The comes a Congressional investigation and its expert goes over those, supposedly, same specimens and it finds that not one is the same as the specimens tested in the wake of the crime.

Without a word of comment, to say nothing about outrage or indignation, from this greatest "evidence" sifter of all or from the House assassins committee.

Not only is Donahue complacent about this, what is at the least, the alteration and destruction of the basic evidence of the assassination of our President, which constitutes a coup d' etat, he does not even ask a question it!

Altered or destroyed or substituted basic evidence in such a crime. A coup d'etat does not get a word of comment. This from the greatest sifters of evidence. No indignation. No complaint. He does not even offer his reader any possible explanation of what could have caused it, innocently or otherwise.

No wonder, leave alone conjecture, about how it could have happened when there was never a second of time this most important evidence of a this most important crime was not in the possession of the government.

In this he mimicked those he does not like because they did not treat him like the greatest of evidence sifter he says he is, the House assassins committee. It took this sensational Guinn evidence and was silent about it. Totally silent, like Donahue, this committee had not a word to say, not a question to ask, and not a single one of the committee members had the decency to express concern — or explode in outrage.

At the beginning of what is quoted from Donahue's book, he is talking about what he treats as his bullet, the one, and he does limit it to that one, that exploded in the President's head. His sole comment about this banana-republic official record to which Guinn testified is that it "again fit the pattern of elimination or obfuscation of any evidence that pointed to the actual [sic] origin of the bullet."

He does not say how the evidence would have pointed to the origin of the bullet which is just as good, because it is not possible and from the specimens tested, whatever happened to them, it would not have been possible, either.

In its simplest form, for what Donahue pretends would have been possible if the entire world were not out to defraud him of his great discovery, it would have been necessary to have a duplicate of what he refers to as "the actual" bullet that he imagines caused the death.

Donahue did not even bother to ask the manufacturer for a sample or at the least the chemical composition of its lots of ammunition sold to the Secret Service for use in the AR-15 in 1963.

In the Donahue system of supposed non-fiction, whatever Donahue says, no matter how spurious or how stupid, is automatically fact.

But the fact is that all these tests are done with comparisons and without the imagined Donahue "actual" bullet's analysis, that approach can go no farther.

If, as in reality it could not happen from what is established fact and beyond any reasonable question, if there was a specimen reflecting some of the elements that Donahue attributes to the bullet that he imagines was shot and wasn't, without the precise analysis of the one he imagines, he has not established that the one he imagines is other than imagined.

Donahue next quotes Guinn as testifying that the NAAs that he "showed that the lead fragments removed from Connally's wrist were indeed pieces of the 'pristine' bullet." This not being what to Donahue is the "actual" bullet of his creation, he does not bother to tell his reader that those specimens present the identical problem: they also did not meet their official descriptions, not one of them. Again, like that Committee, Donahue expresses no indignation or concern. Instead, expert of experts that Donahue is on everything, including these scientific tests of which he is ignorant, he complains about the Guinn testimony about those fragments from Connally's wrist. He says, regardless of the fact that Guinn was one of the world's outstanding experts and had been used to make definitive studies by the Department of Justice separate from the House assassins committee, that "Guinn never explained how his conclusions could be reached with any degree of certainty though the analysis of lead since lead is nonhomogeneous and hence subject to wide variances in compositions from sample to sample."4

First of all, and this is not unusual with Donahue, he does not know what he is talking about. If we limit ourselves to what seems to be the limit to the information on which Donahue can draw, the news story he cites as his source rather than the long and detailed testimony Guinn gave that was readily available to Donahue (if he had not been overwhelmed by his belief that he is the greatest sifter of evidence of all), the news story that he quotes says other than what Donahues says:

Guinn, a neutron testing expert who has testified in dozens of court cases, said he was helped by the fact that the Mannlicher-Carcano ammunition made in this country had a much lower antimony content than most bullets. It also varies widely, from one Mannlicher-Carcano cartridge to the next, even within the same box of 20.

"This is not true of most of the bullet leads we'd ever looked at before," Guinn told the committee. He said his tests showed that the "pristine bullet" from Connally's stretcher had traces of antimony and other elements, such as silver, strikingly akin to the fragments doctors had taken from Connally's wrist.

Similarly, Guinn testified, a large mashed bullet fragment found on the front seat of the president's limousine and smaller fragments found on the rear floor were clearly like three fragments he tested that had been taken from the president's brain.

Pressed by Rep. Floyd J. Fithian (D-Ind) about how certain his findings were, Guinn replied with scientific reserve.

"I would say highly probable,'' he told the committee. "I wouldn't want to say how high — whether 99 or 90 percent or 99.4."5

The first paragraph of this quotation that immediately preceded what Donahue did quote from the Lardner article gets to what Donahue does not mention. He gives his non-expert reader no reason to believe: the cores of bullets are not made of lead only. So, even if what Donahue says of lead were true, it is not relevant. What is tested in these tests is not lead alone. It is each of the components which can number up to a dozen. As I recall, that Mannlicher-Carcano bullet had in its core, which is not of lead but is of a lead alloy, eight different elements. So it is each of these elements, the percentage of each in the specimen that is tested and tabulated.

What Guinn actually testified is that the specimens he compared were in all respects identical, so identical it surprised him. So identical, I add, it justified suspicion.

But even if Donahue had been telling his reader the truth in what he says about lead, as seen in these tests, not as seen in a vacuum, saying that lead as used in manufacturing bullets, is "subject to wide variances in composition," certainly is an odd way to refer to a chemical element, lead being lead. That does not mean that in all specimens there are "wide variations in composition." In this instance there were not. And that is the sworn testimony of the outstanding expert in the field. There can be variances and they need not be in all supplies.

The fact is that with spectrographic analysis the results of bullet tests have been accepted by the courts for about a century.

Next Donahue says that "the lead fragments removed from Kennedy's brain showed they, too, were probably from a Carcano bullet." For Donahue, two important factors are missing here. One is in what he next says, that these fragments did not match their official descriptions, which he leaves there, without any explanation of its possible meanings. The other is that what was removed from the President's head was of a lead alloy and not of any copper composition. Yet earlier Donahue had been trumpeting that the bullet with the special copper jacket material he led his readers to believe had hit the President in the head would prove that bullet came from that AR-15 rifle.

The purpose of the jacket is to keep the core together, so to speak. Lead, which in alloy is usually most of the core of most bullets, is relatively soft. In the Carcano bullet, consistent with the terms of the Geneva convention, the jacket was fairly thick, to make a through-and-through wound more likely. Donahue says the jacket of the AR-15 bullet is thinner, but it still serves as a jacket and it does not fragment easily as the lead alloys of cores.

I am not an expert and I'm not taking the time to consult experts but I am confident that the copper alloy in any AR-15 bullet would not disintegrate into "forty dust-like" fragments such as were seen in the X-rays of the President's head.

Donahue says these brain fragments "were not the same brain fragments the FBI tested when the agency did its own neutron activation analysis back in 1964."

This is not exactly what the cited news report says and the FBI did not do its own tests. Those tests were done for the FBI by Union Carbide, a contractor with the then Atomic Energy Commission, at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The weights given appear to be those made by the FBI lab of those specimens before any testing of them and the first testing was by spectrographic analysis.

This "original FBI testing" that Donahue says was in 1964 was in fact in 1963. The NAAs at Oak Ridge were in 1964 but they were not the "original" testing. That was spectrographic and was done by SA John Gallagher at the FBI Lab.

(What this greatest of evidence sifters of crime-scene evidence does not tell his reader is that spectrographic examination consumes the specimen tested but neutron activation analysis does not. What Donahue, in his supposed explanation of neutron activation analysis, did not also did not tell his reader is that what is pivotal is the rate of decay of the radioactivity, which is measured.)

With this glimpse of Donahue's expertise and how he sifts evidence at the scene of the crime better than anyone else, we can go on to the next of the endless conjectures that are all he has in what he has made up and became this atrocity of a book.

He says it was "likely" that "the pieces of the original brain fragments were simply switched with pieces from Oswald's ricochet bullet," another of his inventions, "a number" of pieces of which he believed had ended up on the floor of the President's limousine. He immediately regards what he made up as unquestionable fact because next, nothing omitted in quoting is, "This swap allowed 'brain fragments' stored at the National Archives to be traced to the Oswald rifle and, at the same time, covered the disappearance of the four genuine fragments taken from Kennedy's brain . . ."6 There is more but this is sickening enough and it is enough for further exposure of Donahue as the ignoramus and faker that he is.

Some terrible things have been said about the FBI but I recall nothing as horrible an accusation against the FBI as all I have heard of read in Donahue's book.

Donahue appears to be ignorant of inflexible FBI procedures as he is of just about all else other than making up the wildest of conjectures that have no basis in fact of any kind.

The specimens recovered during the autopsy left the Navy hospital in a pillbox and in the possession of those FBI agents, James W. Sibert and Francis X. O'Neill. They went right to FBI headquarters, to the lab with it.

First the Secret Service found two fragments on the floor of the limousine and on a later search the FBI found three additional fragments. (What, ignorant as he is about the real facts, this sifter of sifters overlooked is that the first the limousine was washed at the Parkland Hospital. My, what an opportunity that was to eliminate and to substitute, wasn't it? Yet he makes no mention of that. Even though there are published accounts of it, including in my book that he has, as well as pictures taken of it.)

Each of the fragments is identified and they are put in tiny cases which are also identified with case and specimen numbers. Before testing a "Q" number is give the specimen and after testing it is given a "C" number, and at each step there is a written record.

Testing was begun immediately and records of the testing were likewise created immediately.

All of which would have to be eliminated and replaced, with all the lab people in a position to have some knowledge of it. Assuming, of course, that each and every one of those involved was this corrupt and that each and every one of those who would have had to have the knowledge was no less corrupt. And permanently silent about it!

This and more, ever so much more like it, all because Donahue imagines there was a "ricochet" bullet and because he also imagines there was one that was fired from that AR-15 when one hundred percent of all the evidence is not only that no bullet was fired from that rifle but that no Secret Service agent fired any bullet.

And, of course, the Secret Service agents who searched the car when it was at the garage that night were also corrupt and were party to all of this evil that Donahue makes up out of nothing.

According to this Donahue "scenario" a major part of the government had to have been involved in covering up what did not happen, could not have happened, and would not have had to have been covered up if it had happened.

To make the impossible seem possible Donahue has additional drawings of the limousine and the follow-up car as his Figure 13 on his unnumbered page 179. He shows a small outline supposed to be of the sitting President in that car only and in the follow-up car he has one man standing on one running board, nobody in any jump seats or anyplace else in the car other than the figure representing Hickey standing up on that upholstered seat with in an imaginary line of fire from that rifle to, of all possibilities, the President and only to his head. And, although supposedly Hickey is falling and from this drawing, which may mean nothing, he appears to be going backwards while he forces the rifle to a point down in front, what would not easily be done by accident.

We skip such irrelevancies as the history of the manufacture of the AR-15 rifle to reach more of Donahue's impossible nastiness, this obviously taken, without credit to him, from the baseless criticism of William Manchester. Manchester's crack was that it was because Greer and Kellerman were too old that Kennedy was killed. Greer was the President's favorite driver. Manchester's utter nonsense is that if Greer had not been so old,7 which he wasn't, he could have saved the President. What Donahue says is "Driver Greer's failure to speed up or take evasive "was the source of criticism by 'many.'"8 This is as impossible as the Manchester original version. I sought and got "fairness doctrine" time from a Washington radio station to respond to it, to defend, Greer and Kellerman, who were totally powerless to change the outcome of events as soon as that first shot was fired.

Just what, had humans been able to react instantly, as they are not, could Greer have done, in five seconds or less, done that could have made any difference? Not a thing! That heavily armored car could not speed up quickly. It weighed too much and there were, in addition to all the equipment of various kinds in it, eight grown people in it. If Greer had been able to recognize the first shot for what it was and without even a split second had been able to press on the gas pedal, there was only the slightest distance he could have moved that car in less than six seconds and even more distance would have made no difference at all.

"Evasive action" we here from this sifter of crime scene evidence equaled by no others. There are no cars that are also helicopters and if there were, that limousine was not one of them. What "evasive action" was Greer to take other than run people over as the car climbed the curb on either side of the street, without making any difference in the kind of target the President would have presented — if any of this was even possible?

As it was not! Not in that cul-de-sac.

There was no "evasive action" that was possible and Donahue knows it!

In the course of making this whole thing up Donahue even developed a prejudice against Hickey. Hickey was a trusted Secret Service agent with a clean record. He was also a Secret Service driver. So, he was used as a driver in the May 1964 "reenactment, such that it was, in Dallas. Donahue quotes Arlen Specter's questioning of FBI lab agent and photo expert, Lyndal Shaneyfelt, who was also part of that "reenactment. Hickey was identified as the driver of the car.9 The next words are, "Donahue was amazed, What on earth was Hickey doing there?10

Why should he not have been? He had done nothing wrong, nothing at all!!!

Donahue is so worked up with what he made up that he asks this? Hickey was innocent of any fault of any kind. Only Donahue had made this case up and because he seems to believe what it would seem a child should know better than to believe he is suggesting that something should have happened to Hickey beginning with losing his job, which was to drive a car for the Secret Service.

Donahue struggles forever trying to make baseless conjectures appear to be a fact. As he nears the end of his book, there is what, for Donahue, what has to be accepted as an acknowledged that he has no case at all. Here is how he starts page 226 of his last chapter, titled "Today."

Admittedly, Donahue's case is built entirely on circumstantial evidence. No eyewitness ever suggested that Hickey's weapon went off, although several said the sound of the shots seemed to come from around the presidential limo. No one ever stepped forward to confirm Donahue's scenario. Then again, it is logical to assume that if Donahue is right, no one who knew about the accident would stand to gain anything by coming forward to confirm it.11

Even the first word in this paragraph is a lie. By whom it is "admittedly" only "circumstantial evidence?" By Donahue alone and an honest man intending honesty would have said "I admit this case is entirely circumstantial evidence." But even that would not have been true because there is no "evidence" in support of what Donahue made up. It is not evidence of any kind. It is distortion, misrepresentation, lies and lust for fame if not also fortune. Nothing more, nothing else. It is made-up and it is fiction.

It is not only "nobody ever suggested that Hickey's weapon went off." Donahue knows this, too. He knows that the Secret Service stated officially that no agent fired any shot that day. He knows also that agents who were there stated that. Besides which nobody saw or heard or even reported a rumor that any shot was fired by a Secret Service agent.

Putting it this way is typical Donahue's dishonesty.

It is irrational to assume that "Donahue is right" and that is, from the actual evidence, impossible. But again we have a view of the kind of man Donahue is, the mind he has. He says that even if people knew that Hickey had shot the President by accident, they would not "stand to gain anything by coming forward to confirm," his complete and total fabrication.

When a President is assassinated and people have information about it they would have "to stand to gain anything" to report what they saw or knew?

They would not, they could not do that human beings, as decent people, as loyal and patriotic Americans?

Even as Donahue recaps his fictitious case he is less than honest. He has only two people of all those in and around the motorcade he can even pretend to use as witnesses to confirm what he made up and they do not!!

First, Hickey had picked up the gun before — not after — the last shot, according to both Glen Bennett, the agent who sat beside him, and S. M. Holland, the railroader who had watched the motorcade from atop the triple overpass.12

As Donahue then admits, the Commission said that "Hickey did not pick up the gun until the motorcade was speeding through the underpass," which is true. It says that on page 51 of official copy, the one Donahue does not use.

Special agent George W. Hickey, Jr., in the rear seat of the Presidential follow-up car, picked up and cocked an automatic rifle as he heard the last shot. At this point the cars were speeding through the underpass and had left the scene of the shooting, but Hickey kept the automatic weapon ready as the car raced to the hospital.13

But even the Warren Commission is not to be trusted on Hickey, according to Donahue. Not one of those prestigious members, not of their professional staff, not even a clerk.

We return to what Donahue says is evidence after one more quotation from that page of his, continuing on to the top of the next page:

And nowhere in the Report's version of events was it mentioned that Hickey has apparently [sic] fallen over with the gun in his hand, as Holland had reported.14

(Holland alone, said this along with that dog sitting between the Kennedy's, who had no dog; a larger number of shots than Donahue admits, and coming from where Donahue does not admit — that grassy knoll near where Holland was — none of which Donahue says.)

First, we return to one Donahue says is one of his two witnesses, that Hickey had picked the gun up before — not after — the last shot. This is his paraphrase of what is in the Bennett statement that he prints in his appendix, as the Commission it in its. Donahue misrepresents what Bennett actually said. So there can be no mistake in typing I use a xerox of his statement in Commission Exhibit 1024 as it was published in Volume 18 of the Commission's hearings on page 760:

I heard what sounded like a fire-cracker. I immediately looked from the right/crowd/physical area/ and looked towards the President who was seated in the right rear seat of his limosine open convertible. At the moment I looked at the back of the President I heard another fire-cracker noise and saw the shot hit the President about four inches down from the right shoulder. A second shot followed immediately and hit the right rear high of the President's head. I immediately hollered "he's hit" and reached for the AR-15 located on the floor of the rear seat. Special Agent Hickey had already picked-up the AR-15. We peered towards the rear and particularly the right side of the area, I had drawn my revolver when I saw S/A Hickey had the AR-15. (Italics represent a Xerox facsimile.)

Bennett is one of those who heard and said he heard what he identified as two shots only, as this statement makes clear. The first he at first thought was a firecracker, and in that he was far from alone. As he would have been far from alone in believing the first shot he heard was a backfire. He said the first shot he saw hit the President was about four inches down from his right shoulder. This was confirmed by all the uncorrupted medical evidence, including the official certificate of death. Then he says, "A second shot followed." He saw that hit high on the rear of the President's head. It was only after that, as he makes clear, after he saw that the President had been hit in the head that he reached for the AR-15, which he then says, and only then, "Hickey had already picked up." He says nothing about Hickey standing up but he does say that he and Hickey both "peered toward the rear and particularly the right side of the area." He had drawn his revolver and Hickey "had the AR-15."

Not a word about it being fired, or about Hickey falling over. How in the world could he have, with Bennett, "peered to the rear and particularly the right side of the area" if he had just fallen over by accident and fired the shot that killed the President?

It is, of course, impossible, and Donahue knew what Bennett really said. To make it look like his revolting trash of a book is real he or his publisher decided to add an appendix of a few well-known records. All had been published by the Commission. The Bennett statement I xeroxed from the Commission's volume is on pages 237-7 of Donahue's book.

He knew and his publisher knew!

As we saw, no matter how well intended Holland could have been, he could not be depended upon. Actually, he disproves Donahue and makes a liar of him.

But if, as Donahue represents, Holland is a thoroughly dependable witness, Holland swore that shots came from behind the stockade fence on that grassy knoll. That alone destroys this fiction of Donahue's because neither Oswald nor Hickey could have fired any shots from that grassy knoll. So with Holland as a dependable witness, there was a conspiracy in which it was possible, from what Holland said, Oswald did not fire a shot, as Hickey could not have. To the Commission, Holland testified to his belief that shots came from behind that picket fence on six different pages.15 From these pages Donahue uses his testimony that he smelled smoke to mean that he smelled the smoke of the imagined Hickey shot.

From Holland's testimony this was a deliberate lie on Donahue's part because repeatedly and throughout Holland testified he also saw that puff of smoke and that it came from behind that; picket fence.

Donahue's use of Holland as a witness to Hickey's standing up and firing that shot also entails deliberate lying by Donahue. Here is that Holland testimony that, long as Donahue's book is, he does not include:

After the first shot the Secret Service man raised up in the seat with a machine gun and he dropped down in the seat.16

First shot, not the last shot.

This version is entirely different than the one Donahue makes up for Bennett to have said. It also contradicts Donahue because according to Holland the unnamed Hickey did not get up and stand on the seat at all.

In terms of Donahue's honesty, which really means his intended dishonesty, he knows what this says about Holland's testimony because he uses these very pages, which means misuses them, as part of the knowingly impossible, knowingly dishonest defamation of Hickey he is making up.

Holland on smoke and Holland as the only person Donahue can claim saw Hickey "drop down in the seat" are indispensable in this Donahue fabrication and with his source of the shots and his stating that it was after the first shot that the unnamed Hickey "raised up" he not only makes a liar of Donahue he disproves the case Donahue pretends he proves.

It simply was not possible that Hickey "raised up in his seat" and that "with a machine gun" after the first and before the second shots — of the at least four to which Holland testified as Donahue was so careful not to say.

So, as I told Donahue to begin with, what he made up is not possible.

They do.

Rather than the lie he attributes to me about picture I told him the existing pictures prove what he made up is not possible.

Before publishing what I quote from the Commission Report above, about Hickey and the rifle at the underpass, the Commission looked at the entire Zapruder film. He kept shooting film as long as he could see the receding motorcade that had begun its dash to the hospital. The Zapruder film confirms the Commission and is proof without question that Donahue what behaved about as reprehensibly as a man can in this country and that with the intent to hurt innocent people like Hickey and his family.

I told Donahue that this and the Altgens picture prove what he made up is impossible, as they do. I may have mentioned other pictures. One I think I did but am not certain is one I should have told him about and does prove the impossibility of what he made up. It was taken by Charles Bronson, an engineer. Although the FBI was offered free copies of the fine quality 8mm movies he took and the also fine color pictures he took with his 35mm Leica the FBI turned them down!

The Dallas FBI did not even tell headquarters about this even though its own internal report states that the pictures show the President being killed!

I got the Dallas records in CA 78-0322 and as soon as these Bronson reports reached my friends Earl Golz and Gary Mack in Dallas, they looked up Bronson, protected his films by copyrighting them for him and he gave the Dallas Morning News, for which Golz was then an investigative reporter, permission to publish what it wanted of them. One of the Leica pictures shows Hickey and the untruthfulness of what Donahue cobbled together. Bronson was to the south of the motorcade. He was well onto Dealey Plaza grass. So his pictures show much.

The pictures of which Donahue knew and of which he was told prove the absolute impossibility of the horror he huckstered together that is also disproved by the evidence cited earlier and he had.

Despite all of this and more that can be added but is not needed, the publisher claims to have made a diligent and costly effort to confirm the book prior to publication.

Without, of course, much less costly competent peer reviews, what was once the norm in responsible nonfiction.

The most obvious of the reasons for the publisher to spend all the money, money not necessary to spend if it used a much less costly peer review which would be ever so much more authoritative and dependable, has to be that the publisher knew that no competent peer review could recommend publication of this dishonest book. Therefore, St. Martin's must have expected to make a pot of money with the publication of what Donahue wrote.