Is Robert Wagner the New Paul Hoch? - Part 2

Gary L. Aguilar, MD

Commission Exhibit #399, the “Magic Bullet”

Decades ago, Josiah “Tink” Thompson and I detailed the reasons we had for suspecting that CE #399, the  Magic Bullet, is not the original bullet that was found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital on the day of the assassination. We published our findings online in an essay entitled “The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?” [1]

The crux of it is that the FBI told the Warren Commission that one of their agents, Bardwell Odum, interviewed the two Parkland Hospital employees who had found the stretcher bullet, Darrell Tomlinson and O.P. Wright. And when Odum showed them CE 399, said the Bureau, they identified it as the stretcher bullet.[2] That was false: Odum never interviewed them.* Furthermore, according to the Bureau’s own, once-secret records, the witnesses told the Agent who did, Gordon Shanklin, that they did not recognize #399. That inconvenient FBI memo never reached the Warren Commission, which was left to believe that Tomlinson and Wright agreed #399 was the stretcher bullet.

(*Tink and I interviewed Odum in his home in Dallas in the 1990s. He flatly denied he’d ever shown any bullet to any Parkland employees, a claim backed up by the fact no FBI files exist of Odum’s supposed interview.)

Suspicion about CE 399’s bona fides first arose in 1966 when Tink Thompson interviewed Parkland’s O. P. Wright about it. A former cop and hunter with a trained eye for ‘guns and ammo,’ Wright said that the round-tipped #399 was not the Parkland bullet. Rather, the bullet he and Parkland engineer Darrell Tomlinson had found on 11/22/63 had a pointed tip. To show what he meant, he pulled a pointed-tipped bullet from his desk that he said looked like the 11/22 shell, and handed it to Tink. A photograph of Wright’s bullet is on page 175 of Tink’s 1967 book.[3]

But wait, Wagner exclaims. There is evidence that at least Tomlinson agreed that #399 looked like the stretcher bullet! It was dug up by Pat Speer,[4] he tells, and it comes from two credible, independent sources, Warren skeptic Ray Marcus and Earl Golz, a Dallas Morning News reporter. They both said that Tomlinson had told them (in 1966 and 1977, respectively) that #399 resembled the stretcher bullet. (p. 117-120) 

Our counselor admits that Tink and I were right that Agent Odum didn’t interview the two men. The record shows that Dallas Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Gordon Shanklin took the interview. But Wagner evades the most important evidentiary point: what Shanklin actually said in the declassified 6/20/64 FBI AIRTEL memorandum from the FBI office in Dallas. 

For the benefit of the jury, here’s what Shanklin wrote the DC Bureau, as Tink and I published it decades ago: 

“SAC, Dallas” (i.e., Special Agent in Charge, Gordon Shanklin) to J. Edgar Hoover, “For information WFO (FBI Washington Field Office), neither DARRELL C. TOMLINSON [sic], who found bullet at Parkland Hospital, Dallas, nor O. P. WRIGHT, Personnel Officer, Parkland Hospital, who obtained bullet from TOMLINSON and gave to Special Service, at Dallas 11/22/63, can identify bullet … .” (emphasis added) 

This memo is the only record, and an official record, of what Tomlinson and Wright told the FBI about CE 399 in 1964. It proves that the Bureau lied to the Warren Commission in CE # 2011 about their saying it resembled the stretcher bullet. And, as Wagner knows but prefers the jury not to, it predates whatever Tomlinson may have told Ray Marcus and Earl Golz in ’66 and ’77. Wagner credits Tomlinson’s later story even though he himself cites the evidence that Tomlinson may not have told Marcus or Golz the truth.

Wagner recounts that Tomlinson told Marcus in 1966 that he had met with FBI agent Shanklin and O.P. Wright in 1964 (p. 118), and that he advised Shanklin that #399 looked like the stretcher bullet. That’s not what Shanklin told his bosses in Washington. No doubt Shanklin’s account is the more objective. For, if anything, Shanklin would have been happy to report that Tomlinson and Wright told him that the dubious  CE 399 was the actual bullet they found on a Parkland stretcher. Wagner discounts what Tomlinson and Wright told the high-ranking FBI agent in 1964, when their memories were fresh. And he touts Tomlinson’s questionable, later word, seemingly oblivious to the inconvenient fact that Shanklin’s 1964 memo debunks the convenient tale Tomlinson gave Ray Marcus in 1966 and Earl Golz in 1977.

It never seems to have occurred to our counselor that when Tomlinson was interviewed by Marcus, 2 years after the FBI interviewed him, and 13 years later by Earl Golz, that by then he might have learned the benefits of aligning with official preferences.  It shouldn’t be ignored that in 1964, Arlen Specter repeatedly leaned on a balky and uncomfortable Tomlinson to say that he found the Magic Bullet on Governor Connally’s stretcher. [5][6] Tomlinson stammered and stalled under oath, but later demonstrated on film to Walter Cronkite that he found the bullet on the stretcher that Tink Thompson had described in Six Seconds in Dallas, Ronnie Fuller’s stretcher--not Connally’s.[7]

Furthermore, after Tomlinson and Wright, the next two people in the “Magic Bullet’s” alleged chain of possession, Secret Service Agent Richard Johnsen and the Chief of the Secret Service James Rowley, were also unable to identify #399, a fact that the FBI reported accurately in CE # 2011. Wagner tries to discount this by arguing their failure to identify was merely a failure to “positively identify” the bullet because they hadn’t inscribed their initials on it, a claim Tink and I dismantled in our original essay.

The bottom line? The first four people in the “Magic Bullet’s” chain of possession said they couldn’t identify CE 399. The FBI lied about it, and Tomlinson probably lied about it, too. Wagner does the best he can with what little he has to make this problem go away. He hasn’t succeeded.

The X-Ray Evidence: Enhanced vs Unenhanced

JFK’s X-ray evidence is of particular importance to our counselor. For Dr. Wecht, myself, and others have argued that the presence of tiny, “dust-like” fragments in the right front quadrant of JFK’s skull X-ray can best be explained by his having been struck in the right front quadrant of his skull by a soft-nosed, hunting round, not Oswald’s jacketed bullet. This worries Wagner. “The nature of the tiny fragments is the most persuasive argument offered by the CRC (critical research community),” he writes, “at least regarding the head wounds of the president (sic) – to establish the multiple-gunman thesis and thus conspiracy.” (p. 305, emphasis added) Wagner is right to fret about the important implications of this evidence. But why?

Unjacketed, soft-nosed rounds don’t behave like Oswald’s jacketed bullets do. Jacketed rounds pass through bone and break up once on the other side into small, but not tiny, “dust-like” fragments. (Fig. 12) Soft-nosed ones flatten on impact and burst into a “snowstorm” of minuscule fragments that cluster near the point of impact. And because they flatten on impact, unjacketed bullets impart more directional momentum to targets than jacketed ones do. The X-ray findings of injuries from the two types of missiles are distinctly different and distinctly important in the JFK case. 

Wagner’s “expert,” again Larry Sturdivan, correctly described those differences to the HSCA. 

The Select Committee asked, “Mr. Sturdivan, taking a look at JFK exhibit F–53, which is an X-ray of President Kennedy’s skull (Fig. 11), can you give us your opinion as to whether the President may have been hit with an exploding bullet?”

“Well,” he replied, “this adds considerable amount of evidence to the pictures which were not conclusive. In this enhanced x-ray of the skull, the scattering of the fragments throughout the wound tract are characteristic of a deforming bullet. This bullet could either be a jacketed bullet that had deformed on impact or a soft-nosed or hollow-point bullet that was fully jacketed and therefore not losing all of its mass. It is not characteristic of an exploding bullet or frangible bullet, because in either of those cases the fragments would have been much more numerous and much smaller. A very small fragment has very high drag in tissue and, consequently, none of those would have penetrated very far. In those cases, you would definitely have seen a cloud of metallic fragments very near the entrance wound. So this case is typical of a deforming jacketed bullet leaving fragments along its path as it goes. (emphasis added throughout)[8]

Elaborating in his 2005 book, Sturdivan reproduced on the same page both Kennedy’s enhanced lateral skull X-ray and the unenhanced lateral X-ray of a skull shot with a Carcano round in the Biophysics Lab’s tests in 1964.[9] The pattern of bullet fragmentation was very similar, he said. He was right, but for reasons he didn’t at all understand. (Figs. 11 and 12.)

Re JFK’s enhanced X-ray, he wrote: “… Lead fragments are scattered within the skull, reaching the frontal bone, not clustered at the entry point. Frangible bulletswould disintegrate very quickly, producing a dense cloud of fragments at the entry site … the extent of fragmentation of the bullet (in the enhanced X-ray) is characteristic of that of a fully jacketed military bullet that deformed and broke apart upon impact with the skull … It is not that of a frangible, soft-nosed or hollow-point bullet.”[10] (Fig. 11) (emphasis added)

Sturdivan is simply wrong. Cyril Wecht and I explained why in a piece in the AFTE Journal that Wagner discusses in his book, and which he ignores. (p. 301-303) It’s not complicated. 

Because he was neither a radiologist nor a physician, Sturdivan didn’t know how to read X-rays. He was reading the wrong X-ray when he compared Kennedy’s enhanced X-ray (Fig. 11) with the unenhanced film of the blasted test skull (Fig. 12). An apples to oranges comparison. The process of “enhancing” an X-ray renders minuscule fragments invisible. In Kennedy’s original, still secret,unenhanced X-ray, there is an obvious cloud of “dust-like” fragments that don’t show up in the enhanced film that Sturdivan discussed. And that “cloud” is located right where critics believe JFK was struck: the right front quadrant of JFK’s skull, just inside the “entry point,” to borrow from Sturdivan.

Had he done it properly and scientifically, he would have compared Kennedy’s unenhanced post-mortem X-ray with the unenhanced X-ray of the test skull he reproduced in his book. (Why the HSCA hired someone as unqualified as Sturdivan to give an expert interpretation of the X-ray of the Century is a mystery, though perhaps not to those inclined to the view that the HSCA wanted a witness to tell them what they wanted to hear.)

The unenhanced X-ray of the Biophysics test skull (Fig. 12) shows a pattern that is similar to Kennedy’s disanalogous, enhanced X-ray (Fig. 11) -- a scattering of small fragments, but none of the “dust-like” radiolucencies that are present in JFK’s original, unenhanced X-rays. 

The Snowstorm

In the Biophysics experiment (Fig. 12), the test skull was shot from behind, and the missile entered where Oswald’s is said to have entered Kennedy’s, low through the occipital bone. The small fragments run across the lower portion of the skull, virtually undeflected. In this enhanced X-ray of JFK, small fragments run along the top. But the “dust-like” fragments, the “snow storm” of fragments, that are easily seen in the original, unenhanced films, aren’t seen because the process of “enhancement” has blotted them out. 

Figure 11. Enhanced lateral X-ray taken of JFK during the autopsy. (HSCA Exhibit F 53; 1HSCA240) 

Red arrows: The autopsy report and Sturdivan and Wagner maintain Oswald’s bullet entered low, through the occipital bone. The Clark Panel and the HSCA’s Forensics Pathology Panel said it entered high, through the parietal bone. When the Biophysics Lab shot test skulls through the occipital bone, the resulting fragment trail was low. (Fig 12) By contrast, the fragment trail in Kennedy’s X-ray runs very close to the top of JFK’s skull, above: orangearrow. Wagner and Sturdivan maintain Oswald’s low-entering bullet left the fragments along the top of JFK’s skull, and that there were no “dust-like” fragments on his X-ray.

However, JFK’s original, still secret, unenhanced X-rays at the National Archives do show myriad, minuscule fragments that are not visible in this enhanced image. They are clustered in the right front quadrant of JFK’s lateral skull X-ray. 

Figure 12. Unenhanced, lateral x-ray of a test skull shot with a Mannlicher Carcano by the government’s Biophysics Lab.[11] The jacketed bullet entered low, through the occipital bone, as Oswald’s is said to have done. The fragment trail is low, as the undeflected Mannlicher Carcano round traversed the lower portion of the skull. 

As with JFK’s enhanced X-ray, there is a scattering of small fragments. But no “dust-like” fragments are visible on this X-ray such as those that are visible, and were described in JFK’s original, unenhanced X-rays. JFK’s unenhanced, lateral skull X-ray would look like this X-ray if he’d been shot with a Mannlicher Carcano. But it doesn’t.

The presence and location of the “snow storm” of dust-like fragments in the right front quadrant of JFK’s original, unenhanced skull X-rays destroys Wagner’s case for a lone gunman. It proves a non-jacketed bullet, a non-Oswald bullet, blew into the right front part of JFK’s skull. Were those X-rays available to the public, I would show them, and the issue would vanish. That those inconvenient “dust-like” fragments exist is not just my and Cyril Wecht’s opinion. 

In fact, they were reported by Kennedy’s chief pathologist, James Humes, MD, also by a Secret Service agent, by an FBI Agent, as well as other government consulting, expert radiologists. This evidence has largely lain unrecognized and unappreciated in the record since 1964.

• During his Warren Commission testimony in 1964, Dr. Humes said: “(JFK’s X-rays) had disclosed to us multiple minute fragments of radio opaque material…These tiny fragments that were seen dispersed through the substance of the brain in between were, in fact, just that extremely minute, less than 1 mm in size for the most part.” A few moments later, Dr. Humes was asked, “Approximately how many fragments were observed, Dr. Humes, on the x-ray?” “I would have to refer to them again (the X-rays),” he answered, “but I would say between 30 or 40 tiny dust-like particle fragments of radio opaque material, with the exception of this one I previously mentioned, which was seen to be above and very slightly behind the right orbit.”[12]
• Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman, an autopsy witness, testified that the fragments in JFK’s skull X-ray “looked like a little mass of stars; there must have been 30, 40 lights where these pieces were so minute that they couldn’t be reached.”[13]
• The HSCA interviewed FBI Agent James Sibert and reported, “the X-ray had many ‘… flecks like the Milky Way… .’ Sibert said a lot of the metal fragments were tiny.”[14]
• Russell Morgan, MD, the chairman of radiology at Johns Hopkins University, was the Clark Panel’s radiologist. “Distributed through the right cerebral hemisphere are numerous, small irregular metallic fragments,” the Panel reported, “most of which are less than 1 mm in maximum dimension. The majority of these fragments lie anteriorly and superiorly. None can be visualized on the left side of the brain and none below a horizontal plane through the floor of the anterior fossa of the skull.”[15]
• Cook County Hospital Forensic Radiologist John Fitzpatrick, MD, examined JFK’s X-rays in consultation for the ARRB and agreed, writing: “There is a ‘snow trail’ of metallic fragments in the lateral skull X-rays which probably corresponds to a bullet track through the head, but the direction of the bullet (whether back-to-front or front-to-back) [sic] cannot be determined by anything about the snow trail itself.”[16]
• Practicing neurologist Michael Chesser’s work requires examining skull X-rays. He examined the original, unenhanced JFK X-rays at the National Archives with special permission. He came to the same conclusion. “This location, on the intracranial side of the bony defect, is highly suggestive of an entry wound,” he wrote. “One of the principles of skull ballistics is that the largest fragments travel the furthest from the entry site, with the smallest traveling the least distance, and that is exactly what is seen on this right lateral skull X-ray. Tiny fragments are seen on the inner side of this right frontal skull defect, and the largest fragments were noted in the back of the skull.”[17]

DiMaio’s Patriotic Folly

Forensic pathologist Vincent DiMaio, MD, explained the meaning of a “snow trail” or “snowstorm”: “[T]he snowstorm appearance of an X-ray almost always indicates that the individual was shot with a centerfire hunting ammunition…”[18] That is, a soft-nosed, non-jacketed round. And as per Sturdivan, the right-forward location of the tiny fragments is a clear indication of what is visible in Zapruder film: an entrance wound in the right front quadrant of Kennedy’s head from an unjacketed bullet that left a tell-tail snowstorm of “dust-like” fragments in that area. 

For, although he thought that the shot at Zapruder frame 312-313 went from back to front, Sturdivan admitted what is well understood among “ballistics/forensics” authorities: just as the X-ray “snowstorm” can’t tell you whether the bullet was going back-to-front or front-to-back, Sturdivan said that “[a] similar explosion would have taken place if the bullet had gone through in the opposite direction.”[19]

Wagner, and his X-ray “expert” Sturdivan disagree. Our counselor clings to the theory Oswald’s bullet could have left the “snowstorm” of fragments in the right front part of JFK’s skull based on comments DiMaio made in a later edition of his book. 

In it, he suggested that the breach of the shell’s jacket after Oswald’s bullet struck Kennedy’s skull from the rear might have released the “dust-like” fragments seen in Kennedy’s unenhanced X-rays. (p. 323) However, DiMaio never examined Kennedy’s X-rays; he offered no evidence for his theory; and the Biophysics skull-shooting tests offer stout counterevidence: they show that MCC shells don’t release “dust-like” fragments. (Fig. 12) The absence of minuscule fragments in the X-ray of the test skull crushes the DiMaio-Wagner-Sturdivan theory. For as Richard Feynman once put it, “It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with the experiment, it's wrong.”[20]

[As an aside, Sturdivan finally did see the original, unenhanced images in 2004 at the National Archives. He was emphatic under oath to the HSCA that the absence of tiny fragments in the enhanced X-ray proved that a jacketed bullet, not a hunting round, had felled JFK. But when he reported on his examination of the originals that dramatically do show a snowstorm of fragments in the right front quadrant of JFK’s skull, he said nothing about them. (Nor did he mention them in his 2005 book, JFK Myths.) He either didn’t notice them, or elected not to say they were there.[21] The HSCA’s, and Wagner’s, X-ray “expert” conveniently didn’t see what he didn’t want to see, but what credentialed experts did see.

X-ray Evidence of a Second Headshot?

Besides the “snow trail” of dust-like fragments in the right front quadrant of JFK’s skull, there is also a trail of small, but not minuscule, fragments that runs along the top of JFK’s skull in both the enhanced and the still-secret nonenhanced lateral skull X-rays. It does not align with the supposed low, occipital entrance wound specified in Kennedy’s autopsy report, although the autopsy surgeons said that it did. [22]> Nor does it line up with the higher entrance wound the Clark Panel identified, although that Panel said that it lined up to that higher entrance spot that they chose. [23] In fact, as anyone can see, the fragment trail in JFK’s lateral X-ray is about 5 cm above where both the Clark Panel and the HSCA said it was. (Fig. 11, orange arrow.)

That high fragment trail offers evidence for a second headshot circa Z-frames 327-328, one striking high from behind with a jacketed round that left small, but not “dust-like” fragments. Such a possibility is also backed up by the “jiggle” evidence in the Zapruder film (Z-frame 331 is blurred, which fulfills the 3-frame delay Luis Alvarez posited for a shot from the distant School Depository.[24]), by Professor James Barger’s acoustics analysis that indicated a shot from the rear at this moment, and by JFK’s rapidly forward-moving skull after Z frame 328, as explored by Thompson in Last Second in Dallas. Both Sturdivan and Wagner do not agree. Improbably, they claim Oswald’s bullet entered Kennedy’s skull low, was deflected upward, and left the high fragment trail at the top of Kennedy’s skull. Sturdivan, however, didn’t always see things that way.

Sturdivan, Wagner, and the Improbable Bullet Deflection

In 1978, Sturdivan told the HSCA that the evidence was clear and that the Forensic Pathology Panel got it right: “[T]here is no indication of any (bullet) track in the lower half of the skull. It definitely was in the upper part.” (Wagner, p. 305-6) [25] However, in 2003 he apparently changed his mind. He then endorsed the “low entrance” claim of Parkland neurosurgeon Robert Grossman, MD, with whom he had collaborated in a paper that appeared in the journal Neurosurgery. “There was a laceration approximately 1 inch in diameter located close to the midline of the cranium,” Grossman said, “approximately 1 inch above the external occipital protuberance,” and he produced a sketch of what he saw (Fig. 13).[26]<

Figure 13. Left: diagram prepared by Parkland neurosurgeon Robert Grossman, MD, depicting the entry wound he saw on 11/22/63. He said it was ~1 inch in diameter and slightly above the external occipital protuberance (EOP) in occipital bone. Right: Ida Dox’s drawing of the back of Kennedy’s head. It is a reasonably accurate rendition of an original autopsy photograph. [Dr. Grossman has said that JFK’s actual wound looked much different than the Dox image.[27]]

Against the Clark Panel and the HSCA’s forensic pathologists, Wagner endorses Grossman and Sturdivan that the entry wound was low, just like the autopsy surgeons said it was (Chapter 10). Neither Sturdivan, Wagner, nor Grossman appear cognizant of the fact that X-rays, and Sturdivan’s own sworn testimony, pose virtually insurmountable obstacles for their theory.

As per the lateral X-ray of the skull shot with Oswald’s type of ammo in the government’s tests (Fig. 12 and 15), the fragment trail is low and horizontal. Virtually undeflected, it follows the striking bullet’s trajectory across the test skull. Of course, upon impact, bullets may be deflected and veer away from the straight-line path. But the test bullet didn’t deflect much, if at all, as jacketed bullets like Carcano shells tend not to. Could Oswald’s bullet have been so severely deflected from its low entry point as to leave its fragments along the top of the President’s head, a full 100mm above the point of entry?

Sturdivan and Wagner say: Yes, it could, and it did. No, it couldn’t, according to the government’s skull shooting tests and, ironically, Wagner’s trusty expert. Sturdivan has testified about bullet deflection. Speaking from experience, he said,

“Well, let's put it this way. With most military bullets, like the M-193, the bullet would curve almost immediately because the yaw begins to grow almost immediately. With the Mannlicher-Carcano bullet, it is much more stable, the yaw begins to grow much more slowly, and it curves much more slowly. So that at a target of 4 or 5 inches of soft tissue, that bullet would not deviate appreciably from its path… .” (emphasis added) [28]

Recall that he told the HSCA that Oswald’s bullet had entered high:  “[T]here is no indication of any track in the lower half of the skull. It definitely was in the upper part.” [29]> (Wagner, p. 305-6) Sturdivan’s obvious point was that Oswald’s bullet wasn’t much deflected, so the fragment trail at the top of JFK’s skull X-ray was close to the path of the bullet. “I would place the original track as being somewhat lower than that trail of fragments indicated through there,” he testified, “certainly not much lower.” (emphasis added) [30]

The X-ray of the test skull backs up Sturdivan’s claim: after entering the skull, the fragment trail does not deviate much from the bullet’s low trajectory. (Figs. 12 and 14)

Figure 14. Left: Lateral skull X-ray of Biophysics Lab test skull shot with a Mannlicher Carcano round from the rear. The bullet entered just above the external occipital protuberance. Note the fragment trail is horizontal and low (green line). The higher, red line is the path Sturdivan/Wagner propose Oswald’s bullet took after striking near the bottom of Kennedy’s skull.

Right: JFK’s enhanced lateral X-ray. Against Sturdivan’s testimony that MCC shells don’t much deflect, Wagner says that Oswald’s bullet entered JFK’s skull low and was dramatically deflected upward. He believes it left the fragment “trail” that we see in JFK’s X-rays at the very top of the skull, the red line. Note that there are no fragments between Wagner’s/Sturdivan’s low entrance wound and the “trail” at the top of Kennedy's skull. 

I’ll leave it to the jury to decide whether Wagner and Sturdivan are right about the President’s X-rays.

Wagner “Debunks” the Acoustics

To dismiss the HSCA’s acoustics evidence for a shot from the grassy knoll, our counselor ignores credentialed authorities who are agnostic on the question of conspiracy. Instead, he cites non-credentialed, pro-Warren Commission sources. A little context, first.

Apparently, a Dealey Plaza motorcop’s microphone was stuck open in broadcast mode during the murder. Sounds were picked up, fed to, and recorded by the Dallas police. The HSCA hired two independent groups of acknowledged acoustics experts to analyze the recording. The first was M. R. Weiss and E. Aschkenasy; [31] the second was J. E. Barger, S.P. Robinson, E.G. Schmidt, and J.J. Wolf. [32] Both groups concluded that the recording revealed that gunshots had been fired, and that there was a high probability that one of the shots was fired from the grassy knoll. This finding arrived late in the HSCA’s proceedings, and it raised a ruckus. As the HSCA went out of business, two HSCA members recommended further study.

“The acoustical evidence of a gunman on the grassy knoll has enormous significance for our Nation,” Congressman Christopher J. Dodd wrote. “This by itself makes real the idea of a conspiracy to kill the President. The data upon which the experts base their conclusion should, therefore, be reviewed by other noted experts in this field.”[33] (emphasis added)

Similarly, Congressman Robert Edgar suggested, “I recommend that the Congress immediately order a full and detailed restudy of the acoustics work, perhaps through the National Science Foundation. Included in this restudy, a panel of scientific experts with knowledge of acoustics should be employed to monitor the methodology used in the study to ensure accuracy and determine the level of weight which should be given to this evidence.”[34] (emphasis added)

As Thompson minutely documented in Last Second in Dallas, the government ignored the sensible, specific recommendations of the HSCA. Two “reinvestigations” were done. Neither used credentialed acoustics authorities. Instead, this hot potato was first handed to the FBI, which in 1964 had “proved” there was no conspiracy. A thoroughly inadequately trained Bureau agent, B. E. Koenig, wrote a paper “disproving” the HSCA’s acoustics authorities. [35] His work was promptly debunked and discredited.[36] [37]

The Sorry Story of Luis Alvarez

So the government then turned to its trusted deputy: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez. Though lacking any acoustics expertise, the Nobelist had sterling credentials as a Warren Commission devotee, and had previously set science aside to run cover for the government on another controversy. That story is worth a few words that Wagner denies the jury. It helps contextualize Alvarez’s subsequent work on the acoustics.

Israel and South Africa detonated a nuclear bomb in the Indian Ocean on 22 September 1979, the so-called “Vela Incident.” [38] It was inconvenient for President Carter’s nonproliferation policy that America’s ally, Israel, was testing nuclear weapons fashioned with American technology. To make the story go away, the government engaged Alvarez. He assembled a team and investigated, reporting that the “double flash” detected by the Vela satellite – invariably betokening a nuclear explosion – was, in this unique case, not a nuclear event. Rather, it was caused by a meteorite striking the satellite. As Thompson pointed out,Alvarez was promptly debunked by both expert government investigators and on-site Israeli sources that Seymour Hersh personally interviewed. [39]

As had the Vela Incident, the conspiratorial implications of HSCA’s acoustics posed an uncomfortable problem for the government. So again, the government tapped Alvarez. Given his longstanding pro-government position on JFK’s murder, the Nobelist did not chair the Ad Hoc Committee on BallisticAcoustics.[40] But he influenced who would be on it. None of the selectees had any acoustics training or expertise, including its chair, physicist Norman Ramsey--with whom Alvarez had long collaborated on prior government projects. He also picked Richard Garwin and F. Williams Sarles, both physicists who’d served on the disinforming Vela Panel. Alvarez thereupon worked closely with the “Ramsey Panel” to debunk the HSCA’s acoustics. 

Does Wagner embrace the experts who are truly expert in the field in which they offer opinions, such as the credentialed acoustics authorities? No. He goes instead with the uncredentialed Ramsey Panel, whose pro-government conflicts, prior history, and lack of expertise he omits any mention of--despite knowing of them from Thompson’s book, which he cites frequently. He also cites, in extenso, the conclusions of the untrained, non-acoustician Michael O’Dell (pp. 184-187, 191, 418-9, 423, 425, 428, 433.) Apparently, they told him what he wanted to hear. And with little more than that, he closes the case on the acoustics in favor of the official narrative. 

Conclusion

I would have much liked to have written a more favorable review, and would have if Wagner had written a different book. I’ve known him for seven years and bear him no personal animosity. He’s been a welcome guest in my home, attending JFK mini-conferences. He is invariably polite, well-mannered, and polished. Like Hoch, he presents himself as a “fair witness,” as someone who is detached, objectively minded, and willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads. But I’ve long thought that that’s not the real Wagner. Beneath a veneer of cautious, objective detachment, I see a devoted partisan. 

My first suspicion arose in the wake of Wagner’s presence supporting anti-conspiracy activist Lucien Haag in a debate at a mock trial of Oswald in Houston in 2017. As he had in a paper in the Association of Firearms and Toolmark Examiners Journal (AFTE), Haag argued that Governor Connally’s back wound was so large and oval that it proved Oswald’s bullet (#399) had not hit point forward, undeflected. It instead must have struck the governor sideways, in “yaw,” because it had tumbled through JFK’s back and neck before it hit Connally. 

Wecht and I had thoroughly debunked that same Haag myth two years before the Houston “trial” in the pages of the AFTE Journal.[41] It was foolish of Haag to gift us the opportunity to debunk him again in Houston. When later I read his first book, I discovered that Wagner had himself already debunked Haag’s fairy tale. Yet he remained mute as Haag tried foolishly to pass off this falsehood before the jury. This episode suggested to me that Wagner’s loyalty is likely less to truth than to the official narrative, and to junk-peddling “experts” like Haag who agitate in support of it. His latest book shows that our counselor’s stripes haven’t changed. 

He’s still privileging pro-government nonexperts and dubious evidence while sedulously ignoring true experts and hard evidence. Does he really expect his jury of readers to accept the debunked claims of his “authorities” when their most demonstrable virtue is not their expertise in the fields in which they offer opinionson JFK, but their loyalty to the government’s lone gunman wheeze? I don’t think he can. Wagner has thus failed the jury. He has also failed his dwindling band of Warren Commission coreligionists who cleave to the official mythology, defending a government that has lied about the death of JFK since the day he was murdered. 

But Wagner may yet redeem himself. He made a pledge that I hereby also make: “If I am wrong in certain respects, I will admit error and work to correct it.” (p. 13) I’ll do that no matter what he does, and I invite corrections. Let’s see if he does the same.

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Footnotes

[1] https://www.history-matters.com/essays/frameup/EvenMoreMagical/EvenMoreMagical.htm