Besmirching History: Vincent Bugliosi Assassinates Kennedy Again
The purpose of Bugliosi's Reclaiming History is to defend the integrity of the USG National Security State by grossly distorting its nature and function, by disguising that it is the servant of factions of the ruling classes within the United States, and by pretending that it did not and could not contemplate the assassination of a democratically elected President whose recalcitrant politics fell outside its parameters. According to Bugliosi, only the lunatic can seriously entertain that Kennedy was murdered because he pursued dÈtente with the USSR, championed nuclear disarmament, decided not to back the invasion of the Bay of Pigs with US military, made a peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the military wanted invasion and war, and decided to withdraw US troops from Vietnam rather than pursue by brute force an imperial venture in Southeast Asia. According to Bugliosi, Oswald is not just the murderer of Kennedy, he is the only one involved, and he is nothing but "a first class 'nut.'" (945) Thus, Kennedy's murder is deprived of any political significance whatsoever.
Bugliosi considers himself at liberty to mock those who appreciate the opposing world view, inter alia, "conspiracy icon Vincent Salandria [for claiming that] 'the killing of Kennedy represented a coup d'Ètat.' ... I suppose that since a coup d'Ètat is defined as a sudden, unconstitutional change of state policy and leadership 'by a group of persons in authority,' ... you couldn't even have a coup without the involvement, cooperation, and complicity of groups like the FBI, CIA, and military-industrial complex." Individuals who entertain such notions are so wrapped up in "their fertile delusions" that they substitute finding a motive for finding evidence, make no connections between, e.g., the CIA and Oswald, and thus sadly show nothing but "this crazy, incredibly childlike reasoning and mentality that has driven and informed virtually all of the pro-conspiracy sentiment in the Kennedy assassination from the beginning." (985-987) We shall answer Bugliosi by showing direct involvement of all these organs of state power in the cover-up and the assassination, though in this brief excerpt, only the FBI.
Three Mannlicher-Carcano shell casings were found in the SE corner of the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository. The home movie film of the assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder, the obstruction of the line of sight to the motorcade by a large oak tree, and the fact that bystander James Tague nearly several hundred feet away was struck by cement fragments from a missed bullet that nicked the curb, imposed constraints on the official cover-up. The final shot that blew open Kennedy's head, and the missed shot, left just one other bullet to do all the rest of the damage to the president and Governor Connally. The "single-bullet" theory is essential to the Warren Commission's indictment of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman, and Bugliosi is committed to it in full. " ... in this case, the physical evidence isn't just persuasive or even overwhelming, it's absolutely conclusive that only three shot were fired, and that one of the two shots that hit Kennedy [CE 399] also went on to hit Connally. Hence, Connally was not hit by a separate bullet, which would have established a second gunman and a conspiracy." (451)
The official story has that bullet, CE 399, enter President Kennedy from behind through the base of his neck to the right of his spine at a steep downward angle, pass through him without hitting bone, exit at the very base of his anterior neck, and then strike, as Bugliosi tells us, "the upper right area of Connally's back, exit the right side of the chest (just below the right nipple), reenter the back of his right wrist, exit the opposite side, and finally come to rest after causing a superficial entrance wound in the left thigh." [1] This gentle description omits that 399 shattered Connally's fifth rib in many places, then broke the radius bone in his wrist, the densest and hardest-to-fracture bone in the human body, yet came out unscathed except for a slight flattening at its end.
Real bullets don't behave this way: when they break bone they are smashed, dented or mangled, whereas this slightly flattened bullet looks much like the sample Mannlicher-Carcano bullets fired by the FBI in its tests into cotton wadding or by Henry Hurt (Reasonable Doubt, 1985, photo section) into a bucket of water.
The frame-up of Lee Harvey Oswald was extensive, and pre-meditated long before the assassination itself. Here, however, I want to give you one example of the frame-up that is clean and simple, easy to understand and easy to remember. Bugliosi writes of Friday night, 11:30 p.m., the day of the assassination. Dallas Chief of Police Curry is being pressured to turn over his evidence to the FBI, when Curry has the only legal jurisdiction, and if something goes wrong with the evidence that undermines Oswald's prosecution, Curry will be blamed for it. Finally, Curry strikes a compromise to loan the evidence to the FBI for 24 hours only, provided there are "photographs of everything sent to Washington, and an accountable FBI agent, Vince Drain, to sign for and accompany all of the evidence to and from the nation's capital." (183) In an endnote on p.158, Bugliosi smears Curry by repeating sworn testimony from a subsequent DPD custodian of the evidence that "Jesse E. Curry, had pilfered the files to get material for his 1969 book, Retired Dallas Chief Jesse Curry Reveals His Personal JFK Assassination File," making Curry seem a cheap opportunist. It will become immediately clear why Curry may have had to pilfer the evidence. A portion the DPD picture of the evidence before it was taken to FBIHQ follows from p.88 of the 1969 edition of Curry's book.
Exhibit "9" is the gun taken from Oswald when he was arrested in the Texas Theater. #4 is "a .38 Special bullet taken from Officer Tippit's body." And, the fact to take home with you, #3 is "a metal fragment from the arm of Governor Connally." The smashed bullet fragment, Exhibit #3, is wider than the .38 Special and about as wide as CE 399 itself. Stop and think! Here, in Exhibit #3, is the full assassination cover-up in a single example: The bullet fragment #3 smashed after breaking so much bone is at least the size of your pinky nail. It did not come from CE 399, so the FBI is not framing Oswald because they sincerely believe he is the guilty lone assassin, but because that is the assassination cover story, full stop. CE 399 was, of course, planted in order to have a bullet whose ballistic markings could be matched to the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that Oswald allegedly used to shoot Kennedy. There were many other bullets fired that day, but this bullet fragment gives the others collective legitimacy.[2]
The crucial point is that the FBI could not undertake this frame-up without full confidence that the National Security State, of which it is a member, had both the will and the means to accomplish all aspects of the cover-up. There were multiple shooters from multiple locations. Thus, masses of evidence would have to be ignored or destroyed. Scores of witnesses would need to be overlooked, dismissed, intimidated, or eliminated, most especially Lee Harvey Oswald. August committees would have to be formed whose witting members would pressure, seduce, or trick the others into sufficient compliance to fool the people. High-ranking well-respected trusted members of society who control the media would have to be complicit in fronting the salesmanship. Minions of the intelligence community, only relatively few of whom were in on the planning stages of the assassination, had to be counted upon to do their part to conceal the plotters of the assassination from the American public. The media would have to be ready and able, and known in advance to the FBI and others to be ready and able to bewilder and confuse the people. In fact, none of the plotters involved in the cover-up would have dared to undertake such a cover-up without the full faith and understanding that the media was under the control of the ruling class and would be used to facilitate, rather than expose, the cover-up. Think! How the hell could any such plotters ever dream of getting away with such a crime but for their control of the fictionally named "free press"? We shall in any case prove such control and use of the media. This "national security state" is not jargon, but the ugly reality behind the façade of democracy in American life.
We shall, in due course, reveal the essentials of the National Security State by making the "invisible government" visible. It is not a pretty sight. The only silver lining from Curry's Exhibit #3 is that it liberates us to look upon and interpret the evidence for what it is because we know that the National Security State, tool of the ruling class, is lying to us. Bugliosi, needless to say, repeatedly tells us that the evidence for the single-bullet (i.e., that did all the damage to Kennedy and Connally) is compelling and overwhelming.
Chief Curry provides a copy of the 11/23/63 five-page FBI analysis of the evidence completed within the 24-hour window given by the DPD. Guess what?† The fragment from Connally's arm is returned not weighed, to the Dallas Police Department.† (The only other bullet fragments that the FBI does not weigh are two fragments removed at autopsy from Kennedy's head.) In the process, it will be doctored or replaced to produce a drastic reduction in size and shape that will conform to the official story, and that will give rise to endless debate about whether the paltry fragments remaining as official evidence might have come from CE 399. [3] To answer Bugliosi, we have just shown the part of the coup d'Ètat directly engaging the FBI in the cover-up.
Citations
1. Reclaiming History, p. 447, with grammatical tense changed to fit this essay's text.
2. Robert J. Groden, The Killing of a President, 1993, under "Gunshots" in the index for possibly six shots, esp. pp. 41, 68-70 for photos of where missed shots struck.
3. In Post Mortem, JFK Cover-up Smashed!, ©1969, 1971, 1975, Harold Weisberg, the doyen of micro-analytic detail, discusses Curry's book and the 11/23/63 FBI report analyzing the bullets sent by Chief Curry, with particular attention to Q9, the fragment taken from Connolly's arm. (See especially pp. 603-604) Weisberg complains loud and long and justifiably at the paucity and poverty of the analysis, and about the omission of the requested spectrographic analysis, all of which permits endless debate about what the evidence means rather than "smashing" the cover-up. But the keen-eyed, detail-oriented Weisberg apparently never notes that the FBI did not weigh Q9 (DPD Exhibit #3), that it returned it to DPD, and most crucially - what would have smashed the cover-up by itself -- that Q9 is the size of a pinky nail. The Killing of a President, 1993, p.100, has a cropped picture of the evidence that DPD sent the FBI on 11/23/63 that is almost identical to the one in this article, but he offers it without any caption or explanation so that DPD Exhibit #3, which is FBI Q9, is meaningless, like so many of the otherwise excellent pictures in Groden's book. Although a picture may be worth a thousand words, this is the
