Chapter 5

Making Something Out Of Nothing

Brown's next chapter is titled "The Secret Service: Theories Old and New." There is not much in it but it serves to pad the book, to give it more bulk if nothing else. He resorts to the detail the frauds and the fakers love. They believe it gives them credibility or establishes them as authorities. It generally does them in.

Like the Rickey White fabrication, which is full of detail not a single part of which stacks. In fact, the essence of it came straight out of a novel which it happened I have and recalled the most preposterous part of it, which is the heart of the White fabrication.

Brown is no exception to the rule that they all go in for the irrelevant. Like most of the others, he has no concern for relevance. If in fact he can distinguish whether or not there is or can be relevance. Thus he begins this chapter with the early and inaccurate report that a Secret Service agent was killed during the assassination (page 46). It was the immediate report that was proven to be wrong immediately, to have no basis at all. That was almost as soon as it was reported the afternoon of the assassination.

From this he goes into the unconfirmed reports of the flashing of fake Secret Service credentials the day of the assassinations and at the scene. No Secret Service agents were then at the scene. But there are reports of other agents of the Treasury Department, of which the Secret Service is part, at the scene, and with their office nearby that does not appear unlikely.

The false report of the killing of a Secret Service agent at the scene was soon magnified to his having been part of the plot against the President.

This despite fact the fact that except for the shots fired during the assassination not another single shot was fired then.

No-source Brown go from this to what he says was confirmed to him privately by unnamed Secret Service agents.

He begins this no-sourcing with regard to motive saying that JFK had become convinced and had "indicated privately" that "LBJ would not be the '64 Vice-Presidential candidate" (page 47). This is part of his Texas motive for the assassination.

Then all the conjecture about the Secret Service not taking its usual precautions, the canard about Greer being too old to be the driver and that the Secret Service had ignored known threats against President elsewhere.

None of this is true, thus the lack of sources. But in his effort to seem to be making a case of negligence or worse, Brown writes that he "asked one agent why there had been no concern in Texas for Thomas Vallee, who had been arrested in Chicago in November 1963 clearly with the intent to kill President Kennedy." What he attributes to that agent, while not confirming what Brown wrote about Vallee, is written to appear to give it confirmation (page 48).

"Clearly with the intent to kill President Kennedy" is false and again, this no source.

Vallee was arrested for what had nothing to do with any kind of plot. Politically he was of the right extreme. And his car had a weapon and ammo in it. I brought that matter to light in an entirely different sense. It was one of a series of them that really had not been investigated when they should have been because, and as Brown does not say, they coincided with Kennedy's presence in those cities. If Brown had not merely repeated what he had heard he would have had a real angle on the Vallee matter that had no connection with the assassination. The arresting office, and I do have all those records filed away, was one Chicago police sergeant Danny Groth. Later that same Sergeant Danny Groth figured in the killing of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. That was investigated as an assassination by the government and I have that lengthy report , too.

Some of this work was stolen from a Chicago friend who was doing some checking for me. It was stolen by a wild man who had a wild gang doing the wildest things, Sherman Skolnick. That is when the many Vallee mythologies started.

Without saying how many agents he spoke to or identifying a single one of them Brown quotes them as saying, "Our focus would be on Texas" and "You have to remember it happened in about six seconds" (page 48). Of this Brown adds.

When I initially heard this disclaimer it was not all that long after I had taken my driver's education course, which taught me that in an automotive crisis I could hit the brakes in a second. Was there something manifestly different about the gas pedal (his emphasis*) on such an expensive car? (page 48).

While there is much that is "manifestly different" in using the brakes and the gas pedal, including that the brakes can stop a car faster than giving it the gas can speed it up, this approach is dishonest for several reasons.

One is that expensive as the limousine was it was overloaded with armoring which prevented rapid acceleration. There is the fact, too, that the first shot did not come with an official announcement that it was a shot, not what most, including the police, took it to be, a backfire or a firecracker.

But had none of this been true, what difference could it have possibly have made if the car could have able to go faster rapidly? It was in a cul-de-sac. There was no place for it to go but straight ahead. And that made no difference at all in the shooting or the capabilities of the shooter or shooters.

From this, with a little more worthless allegations thrown in, Brown gets to saying that "That the Secret Service failed to keep John Kennedy alive for three primary reasons." Not one has any relevance. Even where the President's speech was to be delivered was, to Brown, one of those "primary reasons" the Secret Service "failed" to keep him alive (page 49).

Again displaying ignorance or worse, Brown asks, "Why, in the face of danger, did the car slow down?" He adds that the "Average motorcade speed in the suburban portion had approached 20 to 25 miles per hour; in the city the average was about 15; the Zapruder film yields an average (his emphasis of 11.2 miles per hour during the time of the shooting . . ." For this Brown does not cite the source he could have cited, the FBI investigation. He then quotes Richard Trask's book on the pictures as saying that at the time of the fatal shot the speed was only 8.7 miles per hour. Brown the italicizes his question, "Why?" (page 48).

Aside from the limitation imposed on the limousine by all the armoring, that it was going only about eleven miles per hour was inevitable. It had just made a very sharp turn, at an obtuse angle. It was not required to slow down a little as in making the unusual sharp angle turn. It had to slow down much more.

Asking questions is easy, especially if answers are not required. So there is an answer to the questions Brown does not ask, "what difference does less than three miles per hour make to a rifle bullet?" That question is easily answered: "none at all."

The plain and simple truth is that once that car was where it was, not a thing in the world did or could have made any difference at all.

It is outrageous and it is indecent to suggest anything else and to blame the Secret Service for the President's death.

Brown then says "In the late 1960's, the question of John Kennedy's death turned from an intense curiosity into a personal obsession" for him. He says he spoke "to as many people as possible who were involved in one way or another" in hope that "the truth would hit me like as an apple once changed Isaac Newton's universe" (page 50).

Only Newton's universe?

He says he tried the autopsy doctors:

But they were not talking, period (and as of this writing they still aren't) (page 50).

Although for anyone who believes himself informed enough about the assassination to write a book about it, reference to what other books report ought not be necessary and with this matter isn't, because I wrote a large book based on what those very doctors did say and for publication long before his appeared, that those doctors had talked over and over again to a number of those writing books and to reporters. Some of their public statements of thirty years ago made sensational headlines. They also were quoted in a number of books. There is also the sensational series of articles for which they were interviewed and that were published by the Journal of the American Medical Association long before Brown started writing this book.

As big a lie as this is, Brown is not content with a single whopper:

They were tough to find and impossible to get by phone. National security, you know (page 50).

Not until many years later, when they retired, was there any problem locating anyone of them and even then it would have been child's play for a man with FBI experience to locate the two who had moved, Dr. James J. Humes to Florida and Dr. Pierre Finck to his native Switzerland. Boswell remained where he had been all along, in Bethesda, Maryland, with his same phone. I had no difficulty writing them or getting a copy of Whitewash to them. After reading it they declined to be interviewed. For which I can hardly blame them. But they were almost immediately interviewed by a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and one from the Associated Press.

Where Humes and Boswell both worked after their Navy careers was well and publicly known. Humes was at a Detroit hospital, Boswell in a Bethesda hospital, an easy walk from where he had worked in the Navy's hospital.

They never hid and they were never incommunicado.

"National security, you know" is more of Brown's wise-guy stuff and still another of the endless manifestations of his ignorance.

Again the wonder, was he really once an FBI agent?

There was never any "national security" issue raised and none existed.

Those doctors spoke often and freely.

Maybe not to every Tom, Dick or Harry who phoned or every kid, which it seems Brown was at the time of the assassination.

This writing of his is of the most deliberate and prejudicial dishonesty.

Trying to make the Secret Service agents look bad, Brown notes that they were all looking in different directions. He asks the question, "Why was Clint Hill the only one to react?" Hill was not "the only one to react." He was the one who, from his assignment, reacted most visibly. Omitting his assignment makes this added dishonesty easier for Brown. Hill was assigned to Mrs. Jackie Kennedy's protection. He was standing on the left running board of the secret Service follow-up car and as soon as she started reaching for a piece of the President's scalp that flew over the back of the car Hill rushed to keep her from falling off the trunk, under the wheels of the car he had jumped from to save her (page 51).

At this point Brown invokes photographs to reinforce his argument. He has referred to the Zapruder film often. If he had paid any attention to those photos he would have seen in rushing to save Mrs. Kennedy life Hill was within not much more than a whisker of losing his life. The photos show the front bumper of the car from which he jumped to go to Mrs. Kennedy's rescue actually touching the cloth of his pants legs. He was that close to being run over and crushed by it.

Again it is to wonder if Brown ever really was an FBI agent because he knows (page 52) that those Secret Service agents were all to look in different directions, that being the only way they could know what if anything was going on in any direction.

For this ego-tripping ignoramus to malign these dedicated men some of whom suffered so much is monstrous.

There was not a thing they could do to prevent what they could not prevent.

But he is not finished with that simply awful thing in which he describes himself as no enemy could.

"One unanswered question is why Roy Kellerman did not go to the President's aid . . ." by throwing his body on the President's" (page 52).

In less than five seconds? With the steel handhold for the standing President across the back of the front seat sticking up in the air and with Governor Connally in addition to that handhold between them? And with Kellerman sitting and looking ahead? Did Brown ever try to duplicate the athletic feat he demands of Kellerman?

He even suggests there are "clearly conspiratorial tones" in the Secret Service insistence on taking the President's body back to Washington when Texas law required an autopsy there and Texas law was the only applicable law (page 52). Brown does not say that Mrs. Kennedy refused to leave the body.

That was a very serious mistake, as I first reported in 1965 only to be severely criticized for it. Given the emotions of the moment it can be understood. After this added defamation Brown says, "I can understand" those Secret Service decisions but "what is difficult to understand is how the Dallas authorities let them exert this loyalty." The "loyalty" he says accounts for those decisions (page 52). What Brown does not say is how these Dallas authorities were to have prevented it.

Were they to start a pitched battle?

Shoot the Secret Service down?

All because, the sophomore in Brown rising to the occasion, they "were protecting their man - from a Dallas scalpel?" (page 52).

In all of this, whether from ignorance or from his determination to make up a Dallas conspiracy out of nothing or from both, Brown does not indicate the consequences of what the Secret Service did in kidnaping the body and preventing the working of the only applicable law, local law. Again it is not because this was not know to Brown. It is set forth clearly in my books he has.

What was accomplished, the real harm that was done, was to avoid what would certainly have been a full, careful and at the least competent autopsy by the Dallas expert on them and the man the law called upon to perform that autopsy, Dr. Earl Rose.

To quote what I wrote thirty years ago and Brown has in his bibliography, the president got an autopsy unworthy of a Bowery bum but his alleged assassin got an autopsy worthy of a president.

Brown gets so lost in the phony case he is building he actually says of the autopsy Dr. Rose did not perform, "Perhaps the Dallas authorities wanted it done that way for their own sinister purposes" (page 52). And that is why they "gave the Secret Service carte blanche to abuse the procedure."

As he bludgeons this about he says that "The one thing that is clear is that the hours kept by the Secret Service on the night of November 21-22 certainly did not improve their performance in Dealey Plaza" (page 54).

This is ignorant, it is intended to dirty and it is both.

In Fort Worth the night before the assassination, the off-duty detail went to a night club. It was not in Dealey Plaza. It was off-duty!

Despicable as this is, Brown is not yet finished. He has a sub-chapter titled "SECRET SERVICE II: S/A HICKEY AND THE AR-15" (pages 58-60).

This so-called "theory" that the Secret Service killed the President is Brown's rendition of it from Howard Donahue's book ghosted by Bonar Menninger, Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK. (St. Martin's Press, 1992). Brown heaps praises on Donahue as a ballistics expert and as an expert shot. In the Donahue avoidance of all but this impossibility that popped into his mind, and as with others became real as soon as it did, Hickey fired the fatal shot by accident from the Secret Service follow-up car (page 58). In it Hickey was seated on the back of the back seat of that open car. Two of the white House staff sat on the jump seat. Two agents sat on the back seat. Two more Secret Service agents were on each of the running boards and the driver and another were in the front seat.

Brown does not spell the Donahue impossibility out. He does say that there "are no witnesses" to it (page 59). He seeks to explain this away by saying that all eyes were on the President. Had that been true and that accounted for there being "no witnesses to" that shot, which in fact was never fired, there were dozens who in looking at the President had to look over Hickey. Brown does say that the Altgens picture shows Hickey sitting on the top of the back seat and that he was looking behind him and not reaching for the AR-15" (page 59). He does not say that before Hickey could get the rifle in his hands he had to get it out from underneath the two who were sitting on it and then had to, in the Donahue story, stand erect on the seat in the careening car with the rifle in his hands and by accident fire that fatal shot - all in three seconds.

Yet Brown seeks to give credence to this impossibility, the impossibility of which he does not mention in his "Analysis," a word that has no meaning as he uses it: "Mr. Donahue's ballistics arguments are well taken and deserve a look at, but his conclusion is far easier to doubt than to prove." He adds that Hickey was not available for Comment, "having suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage in 1993" (page 60).

(Donahue calls himself a "firearms examiner." That is what the FBI calls the laboratory agents who are ballistics experts. But as Menninger says and as Donahue is well known for being, he is a gunsmith. That is not the same as a "ballistics expert.")

Among what else Brown omits is that Hickey filed suit against Donahue, Menninger and two publishers over the libel in that book.

Not, scholar that he is, does Brown mention the fact that this Donahue fantasy was first published in a lengthy article in The Baltimore Sun magazine of May 1 and May 8, 1977. Ralph Reppert of the Sun staff wrote those articles. Reppert appears to have had no further interest after we exchanged a few letters.

Thereafter Donahue was in touch with me and finally asked to come up. I invited them toward the end of September, 1985 and they came for a Sunday the next month. I then encouraged him to make a real study of the existing pictures and offered him access to all I have. His letter of October 30, 1985 begins by thanking me "for a most enjoyable and informative day." His wife Katie added a note thanking me for some apples from an old tree nobody can identify. She said that on their next trip, "I would be interested in looking through the FBI files."

They did not come again.

Brown regards Donahue and his word highly so I go into this because I told him almost two decades ago that what he believes simply was not possible and that a real study of the pictures alone would prove that.

When his book was out I was surprised to read about myself what ranged from overtly false to deliberately twisted.

He said he "had read several of "my books" and he commented upon my "lack of knowledge about firearms and ballistics - ignorance that allowed Weisberg to conjure up a hail of bullets from the grassy knoll and elsewhere in Dealey Plaza" (page 233).

There is nothing even close to this in anything I have written or said and those books, of which Donahue expressed an entirely different opinion to me, speak for themselves. Putting it plainly, Donahue's is a deliberate lie.

Yet on the same page Menninger writes that Donahue "had to admit that Weisberg provided key information to Ralph Reppert back in 1977."

Just about all else Donahue and Menninger say about me is no less false. For example, "I complained bitterly about the University of Maryland's refusal to accept thousands of assassination-related documents he'd collected over the years" (page 214).

There could be no basis for this. I never offered them to the University of Maryland, never even thought of it and have always had a home for them.

On the next page he professes sympathy for me because when my "health was failing, the state university couldn't care less about his painstakingly amassed collection of assassination documents. . ."

I do not know what kind of work Brown did to get his Ph.D. but it does not seem likely that he worked with deposits of records.

Deposited records require acquisitioning and that takes time and costs money.

It is not uncommon for deposited records to remain in dusty boxes and not accessible. The donor, if he is wealthy enough, gets his tax deduction for it but the institution faces the cost and the work of making them available. A decade after Edward Jay Epstein deposited his records at Boston College they were still inaccessible, were still as they arrived at Boston College. I know. I tried to get access to them and could not.

If the gift is not wanted, it faces at best this kind of reality and I am not in the class that can benefit from any tax deduction. Particularly not after I am dead.

If the University of Maryland had accepted the offer I did not make and never thought of making, having all these file cabinets and cartoned boxes doing nothing but collecting dust would have been of no value and no interest.

Moreover, I had arranged for then to be a permanent free public archive where the history professor in charge is a subject expert and is interested and has familiarity with these records. He and his students have been using them for many years.

Donahue is not alone in his compulsion to try to defame those who do not agree with him. They all resort to distortions and lies.

With regard to my alleged ignorance, and I am not and never pretended to be any kind of expert on ballistics or firearms, those records Donahue does not describe are mostly from the FBI, obtained under a dozen or so lawsuits under the Freedom of Information act. In the lawsuit that Donahue does make passing and slighting reference to I was sufficiently well informed, however, to state under oath, thus making myself subject to the penalties of perjury if I lied, that the FBI's lab's agent in that lawsuit, John W. Kilty, indubitably an expert, was a perjurer.

The Department and the FBI did not charge me with perjury. Instead they told that court that I could undoubtedly make such allegations "ad infinitum" because I was more informed about the assassination and its investigations than anyone working for the FBI. (That case was C.A. 75- 226, the judge was John Pratt.)

And with all the many criticisms I have made of so many on the Commission and in the government agencies, after three decades I have not had a call or a letter from any one of them complaining that I had been either unfair or inaccurate.

Which, as is obvious, Howard Donahue and Bonar Menninger cannot say.

With regard to Brown, my fat Donahue file did not interest him, as nothing I had interested him. He and the Donahues are much more comfortable with what they make up than with established fact.

They and their publisher are so dishonest they even faked a drawing of the seating in that FBI follow-up car to make Donahue's impossible invention appear not to be impossible. President Thomas W. McCormack of St. Martin's, wrote an article for The Times of London. It appeared to promote the book on February 2, 1992. The heading is Kennedy: The Publisher's Case. In the center four of the six columns devoted to it, just under this heading, is their "seating plan of Secret Service follow-up car and the Presidential limousine." It has Hickey as one of the two agents sitting on the back seat, not on the back of that back seat. This neatly eliminates the time required to get that AR-15 from underneath the two sitting on it.

This dishonesty has Hickey standing on the car floor rather than on the back seat itself. The floor is rigid, the seat is quite the opposite. It was the most unstable place Hickey could have stood.

Not a bad idea when he had to do that, stand on the seat and be tossed around while trying to aim the rifle and then firing that allegedly fatal shot, all within three seconds. And that after getting to the rifle from under the two the two sitting on it!

In general and because Brown is so high on Donahue as a ballistic expert a few words about his expertise are in order. He is Brown's authority.

Donahue is a gunsmith. He is not a ballistics expert.

I made no notes on his visit or what we discussed. He came for help and as best I could I tried to provide it not knowing he was not looking for help but may have been hoping for the impossible, confirmation for or support of the impossibility he made up. If he says we discussed the wound to the President's head, we probably did. He says I postulated only a shot to the head from the front and that is not true. I did begin to refer to one from the front in 1966 and I thereafter wrote about it extensively enough. All I wrote and all I knew of the damage to the head was the official evidence, the autopsy report and the testimony about it by the pathologists. Some of that he attributes to me is impossible, such as my saying "the wound was surrounded by fragments." It was not and I never even heard anyone say that. So, this is his opinion of what he says that I assuredly did not say, Menninger's words:

"Moreover Donahue knew the only weapon capable of inflicting a frontal wound as massive as Kennedy's would have been a shotgun fired from a few feet away" (page 214).

I was the first to reprint the autopsy protocol, in Whitewash, in 1965. In Post Mortem I reprinted the hidden original copy and also the hidden original of the only existing Humes handwritten version of it. (He had burned the first handwritten copy as soon as he knew Oswald was dead and there would be no trial at which his protocol would be examined and cross- examined.) That autopsy protocol reports forty "dust-like" fragments in the President's head and it describes the line along which they are dispersed narrowly.

No "dust-like" fragments ever came from any shot gun pellets! No shotgun shell is designed and manufactured to behave as bullets do. Their purpose is the exact opposite: to scatter the pellets.

What I quote above Menninger says is one "of those troublesome technicalities" to Donahue. He sure did not say it to me! I'd have laughed in his face!

They are critical of the FBI's results of its spectrographic examinations I showed him, those I'd gotten from that lawsuit in which to get them I had to prove that Kilty had perjured himself. This is what they say of it:

Unfortunately, the only information from the spectrographic tests test included in those papers were unidentified, partial and therefore meaningless numerical notations made during the procedure (page 123).

The results of those spectrographic tests are tabulations of figures and symbols. But at the top of each column is the chemical abbreviation for the element detected. That is what the result of the test is. Those figures are then compared and the comparison discloses whether or not the specimen tested are from the same source.. There are also standards for each bullet made by each manufacturer. While the results can very from bullet to bullet and from batch to batch of metal from which they are made, there is sufficient varying between different makes for ruling out what the test specimen could not have come from. Western and Remington, for example, do not use identical combinations of metal in the identical proportions.

Spectrographic examination now is quite an old test but it was the most common test in those early days of neutron activation analysis. Old as spectrographic testing is, it was then fine to parts per million and even much smaller than that. We deposed four lab agents in CA 75-226. They testified that for the test a specimen as small as a millimeter is adequate.

The information Donahue says was not identified was identified and the numbers have the meaning for which the test was made.

Leading into this Menninger writes:

Donahue reasoned that spectrographic comparison of the jacket material from Kennedy's brain would show conclusively whether the bullet that killed the President came from a Carcano or an AR-15 (page 122).

Not a very professional way of putting it, especially not from a "ballistics" expert like Donahue. There can be bullets of the same manufacturer made for a wide assortment of rifles. The question really is whether the analysis of the fragments showed they could have been from the kind of ammunition used in that AR-15. Or whether from the bullets allegedly used in the crime.

When I had the results of the spectrographic analysis of the fragments said to have been recovered from the President's head all Donahue had to do to begin with was learn from the Secret Service the kind of ammunition it used in those AR-15's. Standard literature would have disclosed whether it was possible or not possible for those fragments to have come from what the AR-15 was loaded with.

Donahue did not do that, expert that he is and ready as he is to condemn other for what he says is their ignorance. He does not mention the kind of ammo used in the AR-15. He does not mention asking the Secret Service. He also does not mention asking the Secret Service if that rifle had been fired that day.

The use of ammunition is accounted for and rifles are cleaned after being fired.

All the Secret Service would have had to do after the assassination to learn if any weapon had been fired, as not a single one was, would be to push or pull a cotton patch through the barrel. If fired, deposits would appear. If not fired, the traces of oil from the last cleaning would appear, without deposits from the firing.

Donahue asked none of the questions he should have asked before making the gruesome charge he made against poor Hickey.

And it was not "jacket material" only. Jacket material is but a small fraction of the metal of a bullet. Most of it by far is core. Similar jackets can be used on different cores. To the best of my recollection nothing identified as "jacket material" was recovered from the President's head. No effort was made to retrieve any of those "dust-like" fragments."

Donahue, expert as he says he is and as Brown affirms he is, made no effort to learn whether the existing tests, the one he had freely available to him, proved or could prove that the fragments could not have come from any AR-14 bullet.

Just as he made no effort to determine whether the existing photographs to which I referred him proved that the accidental firing of that AR-15 by Hickey that Donahue says killed the President is proven by those pictures to have been impossible.

As without doubt will be settled in court in the lawsuits over this that scholar and demon investigator does not mention.

Thus far we have seen nothing that can be called a ''theory" involving the Secret Service in the assassination, Donahue has less than a half of a page (page 60) on the only other "theory" he mentions. It is under the heading "SECRET SERVICE III: WILLIAM GREER." In it he refers to "a lecture tour by Milton William Cooper" who "shows the Zapruder film and sees Kennedy's driver, William Greer, turning around with a gun in his left hand and firing a bullet into the President's head."

Brown has his own "theory" about this. He calls it "Analysis" He says that "What Mr. Cooper sees as a gun flash is the result of a bullet doing damage to the limousine windshield, with shards of glass resulting."

Actually, Cooper has been selling a videocassette of his fabrication for thirty-five dollars. And he is not the only one pushing that impossibility.

Greer was to the President's left and the President never did turn his head to make possible either the wound on its right side, the massive one, of the hole said to be in the back of the head.

And there is no other damage to his head.

Things can be simple for the Browns who just make up whatever they think that they need or can use, without regard to the official evidence. Or reality.

The official explanation of the damage to the windshield is that it was caused by fragmentation of the last or final shot.

That is the shot Greer is alleged to have fired by those nuts of assassination mythologies.

Thus there were no glass shards for Brown to see, as he just made up, because the only shot that could have caused that damage had not yet been fired! It is this ridiculous notion, that Greer fired that fatal shot.

For all the magic Brown depends on, there is no bullet that can cause glass to shard before it is struck by a bullet.

So, after fifteen pages of it Brown has no Secret Service Theories, either old or new.

And no Secret Service assassination theory is all Brown needs to incorporate it in the chapter on Secret Service assassination conspiracies.