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John Fitzgerald Kennedy, born in 1917, was the youngest man ever elected President, and he was the youngest ever to die in office. He was shot to death on Nov. 22, 1963, after two years and 10 months as chief executive. The world mourned Kennedy's death, and presidents, premiers, and members of royalty walked behind the casket at his funeral. Kennedy was succeeded as President by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Kennedy won the presidency with his "New Frontier" program, after a series of television debates with his opponent, the then Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon. At 43, Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected President. Theodore Roosevelt was 42 when he became President upon the death of William McKinley, and was not elected President until he was 46. Kennedy, a Democrat from Massachusetts, was the first President of the Roman Catholic faith. He also was the first President born in the 1900's. In his inaugural address, President Kennedy declared that "a new generation of Americans" had taken over leadership of the country. He said Americans would "... pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." He told Americans: "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country." We must once again ask ourselves this question as we further investigate whether there truly was a conspiracy involved in his untimely death1 . The Warren Commission thought they had an open and shut case, and attested that there were three bullets and one assassin.2 But two unpredictable things happened that day that made it virtually impossible; one, the 8mm home movie taken by Abraham Zapruder while standing near the grassy nole and two, the third wounded man, James Tague, who was nicked by a fragment while standing near the triple underpass. The time frame 5.6 seconds, established by the Zapruder film, left no possibility of a fourth shot. So the shot or fragment that left a superficial wound on Tague’s cheek had to come from one of the three bullets fired from the 6th floor of the depository. That leaves just two bullets. And we know one was the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy. So now a single bullet remains. In this enigma, a single bullet now has to account for the remaining seven wounds found in Kennedy and Connally. Rather than admitting to a conspiracy, the warren commission accepted this theory, which has come to be known as the magic bullet theory3. Josiah Thompson, author of Six Seconds In Dallas, takes a vastly different point of view on the shooting. However, he does demolish the "steam pipe" explanation that lone assassin theorists had suggested that witnesses saw smoke from a shot on the knoll had actually only seen puffs of steam from a nearby pipe.4 Gerald Posner however supports this theory in his book Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, when he asserts that the smoke was really escaping steam from a steam line in the vicinity.5 I find this theory to be preposterous considering at the time Holland and the other railroad workers saw the smoke, they were standing not a foot from the steam line in question. This line parallels the railroad tracks and at no time is anywhere near the corner of the stockade fence, which I am inclined to take Thompson’s word for. Unfortunately, Thompson begins to disillusion me with his identification of the number of bullets. He suggested that Kennedy's anterior throat wound was a product of the head shot (51-55). A fragment of bullet or bone veered downward, severing Kennedy's left cerebral peduncle in the process and exiting the front of his throat. Since the Zapruder film showed Kennedy raising his hands to his throat well before frame 313, Thompson's view is hard to believe. Since those descriptions do not accurately characterize what we see on the Zapruder film, one is left to wonder what film Thompson saw. Appeals to the absence of science in these matters do little to strengthen the argument.6 In the Warren Commission's version of the crime, two of the alleged killer's bullets had to do double duty. One shot, the Magic Bullet, had to wound Kennedy and Connally. Another either had to hit the oak tree in front of the Depository and then wound James Tague, or it had to strike Kennedy's skull and then wound James Tague. The Commission never put the matter quite so concisely, but those were the only possibilities if the single assassin theory was true.7 Thompson suggested that the wounding of James Tague was a consequence of the head shot (231). In Case Closed, twenty-six years later, Gerald Posner chose the tree, the head shot being too unlikely a source (Posner, 325-326).8 As far as I’m concerned, both sources are too incredible and unlikely. But if Bullet 399 was not Magic, it had to do amazing things anyway. It had to strike Kennedy in the limousine and be found near someone else's stretcher by the emergency level elevator entrance. The Warren Commission's story was that the bullet must have been found on or by Governor Connally's stretcher, a position utterly defeated by the evidence. Thompson theorized that Bullet 399 was the bullet which caused the shallow wound in Kennedy's back. The bullet worked its way back out during efforts to resuscitate the President. Now how exactly did it get from Kennedy's stretcher to the emergency level elevators where it was found? "To answer this question we must appeal to an old, traditionally American institution, souvenir hunting." Perhaps someone "momentarily snatched it as a souvenir, only to recognize its importance and quickly secrete it on a stretcher" where it could be found later with "no questions asked" (168-169). Either Thompson is a comedian, or is suffering from an acute disorder of naivete. Although, Thompson approached the issue of why Bullet 399 wasn't found on Kennedy's stretcher by contriving a possible link between Kennedy's stretcher and the stretcher for a different patient altogether, a two-year-old boy named Ronald Fuller who had fallen and cut his jaw. And if that was what had occurred, then Bullet 399 I suppose could conceivably be genuine. In Thompson's presentation, a single bullet didn't have to account for wounds in Kennedy and Connally and emerge unscathed; it only had to penetrate a couple of inches into Kennedy's back. Why did a jacketed bullet traveling at 2000 feet per second fail to go completely through the President's body? Because, according to Thompson, it was a dud; because the ammunition was old and unreliable. Evidently, the sniper in the Depository brought three live rounds and one spent shell. By coincidence, his first round was a "short charge," thus explaining the firecracker noise reported by witnesses. Did the firecrackers sound as if they had exploded well above street level? Thompson didn't elaborate (167-168). Bullet 399 struck no bones and barely entered its target; that was why it was recovered in excellent condition. Someone found the bullet at Parkland Hospital and kept it briefly, only to change his mind and abandon it, presumably shamed or frightened by his actions. The assassin's second round worked better. It struck Kennedy's skull and then must have wounded Tague. Thus according to Thompson, the Depository assassin fired two shots, the maximum permitted by Thompson's assessment of the shell evidence and the minimum demanded in the case against Lee Oswald. If one watches the Zapruder film carefully he or she can easily note that the fatal head shot to Kennedy was delivered after the vehicle had passed the book depository where Oswald allegedly shot him. The depository on the left side of the road would thereby station the depository to the southwest direction of the vehicle. Therefore if Kennedy was shot from the behind left, the bullet would logically have to enter the back of head and thrust his head forward and to the right.
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