The FBI was covering up the JFK assassination
immediately, pushing the lone nutter theory – even editing an article in the
Dallas Times Herald 11/23/63
FBI
adds sentence: “A doctor admitted that it was possible
there was only one wound.” to an article “Neck Wounds Bring Death to President”
by Connie Kritzberg. Connie did NOT write that sentence; she wroted the turned
in the article to her editor at the Dallas Times Herald about 3:45 PM on 11/22/63.
Her article included the typos “gangential” for “tangential.” She called her
editor on Saturday morning about noon on 11/23/63 and asked immediately WHO put
that sentence in which Connie did NOT write; her editor immediately replied:
“The FBI.” This, of course, is of blockbuster significance because it shows the
FBI in the immediate hours after the JFK assassination MORE concerned with pushing
lone nutter propaganda than finding out WHO killed John Kennedy; and that
points to FBI participation or foreknowledge in the JFK assassination.
Dallas
Times Herald 11/23/63 (it was an afternoon paper) (typos included “gangential” instead
of “tangential”)
Neck Wounds
Bring Death to President
Wounds in the lower front portion of
the neck and right rear side of the head ended the life of President John F.
Kennedy, say doctors at Parkland Hospital.
Whether there were one or two wounds
was not decided.
The front neck hole was described as
an entrance wound. The wound at the back of the head, while the principal one,
was either an exit or gangential entrance wound. A doctor admitted that it was
possible there was only one wound. [My note – “A doctor admitted” is the
sentence that the FBI added to the story as per the account of Connie Kritzberg
who actually wrote this story. The next day 11/23 Kritzberg called her editor about
noon who told her immediately that the FBI added this sentence which supports
the lone nutter theory.]
Dr. Kemp Clark, 38, chief of neurosurgery
and Dr. Malcolm Perry, 34, described the President’s wounds. Dr. Clark, asked
how long the President lived in the hospital, replied, “I would guess 40 minutes
but I was too busy to look at my watch.”
Dr. Clark said the President’s
principal wound was on the right rear side of the head.
“As to the exact time of death we
elected to make it – we pronounced it at 13:00. I was busy with the head wound.”
Dr. Perry was busy with the wound in
the President’s neck. “It was a midline in the lower portion of his neck in front.”
Asked if it was just below the
Adam’s apple, he said “Yes. Below the Adam’s apple.”
“There were two wounds. Whether they
were directly related I do not know. It was an entrance wound in the neck.”
The doctors were asked whether one
bullet could have made both wounds or whether there were two bullets.
Dr. Clark replied, “The head wound
could have been either an exit or a gangential entrance wound.”
The neurosurgeon described the back
of the head wound as:
“A large gaping wound with
considerable loss of tissue.”
Dr. Perry added, “It is conceivable
it was one wound, but there was no way for me to tell. It did however appear to
be the entrance wound at the front of the throat.”
“There was considerable bleeding.
The services of the blood bank were sent for and obtained Blood was used.”
The last rites were performed in
“Emergency Operating Room No. 1.
There were at least eight or 10 physicians
in attendance at the time the President succumbed. Dr. Clark said there was no
possibility of saving the President’s life.
The press pool man said that when he
saw Mrs. Kennedy she still had on her pink suit and that the hose of her left leg
were saturated with blood. In the emergency room, Mrs. Kennedy, Vice Pres. Johnson
and Mrs. Johnson grasped hands in deep emotion.
Doug Horne: on the importance of Dr. Malcolm Perry
Dr.
Malcolm O. Perry, Key Parkland Hospital Witness to JFK's Wounds, Dies HYPERLINK
"http://insidethearrb.livejournal.com/2370.html"
December 8th, 2009
Dr. Malcolm Perry's passing, at the age of 80,
was just announced in Texas newspapers.
Dr. Perry attempted to save President Kennedy's life on November 22, 1 massage
in Trauma Room One at Parkland hospital.
The tracheostomy he performed was a small, transverse incision 2.5 to 3 cm
wide, which he made through a puncture in the President's throat---below the
Adam's apple and just to the right of the midline---a puncture which he characterized
as AN ENTRANCE WOUND three different times during the televised hospital press
conference that afternoon following JFK's death.
On the day President Kennedy was treated, all of the attending physicians who saw
the bullet wound in the throat characterized it as a typical entrance wound.
Their observations have always stood in stark opposition to the official U.S.
government cover story that President Kennedy was killed by an assassin firing
from above and behind, and that he was not shot from the front by anyone.
What most of the public does not know---and what is detailed in my book,
"Inside the Assassination Records Review Board," is that late on the
night of President Kennedy's autopsy at Bethesda Naval hospital, Federal
officials located at Bethesda began harrassing Dr. Perry on the telephone in an
attempt to get him to change his mind about having seen an entry wound in the
President's throat earlier in the day. Nurse Audrey Bell told me in 1997 that
Dr. Perry complained to her the next morning (on Saturday, November 23, 1963)
that he had gotten almost no sleep the night before, because unnamed persons at
Bethesda had been pressuring him on the telephone all night long to get him to
change his opinion about the nature of the bullet wound in the throat, and to
redescribe it as an exit, rather than an entrance.
In his 1981 book "Best Evidence," David Lifton documented that the
Secret Service confiscated videotapes of the Parkland hospital press conference
from at least one local television station, and that Secret Service Chief James
Rowley had informed the Warren Commission in 1964 that no videotapes or
transcripts of the press conference could be found. But as Lifton revealed, a
White House verbatim transcript of the press conference (White House Transcript
1327-C) later surfaced. In my own book, "Inside the ARRB," I reveal that
Chief Rowley lied to the Warren Commission when he said no transcripts could be
found, for on the last page of transcript 1327-C, the document is stamped as
received by Rowley's office on November 26, 1963. His statement to the Warren
Commission was therefore false.
A graduate
student, James Gochenaur, revealed to both the Church Committee and to the HSCA
in the mid-1970s that Secret Service Agent Elmer Moore had confessed to him in
1970 that he had "leaned on Dr. Perry" shortly after the Bethesda
autopsy to get him to stop describing the bullet wound in President Kennedy's
throat as an entrance wound. (The Bethesda autopsy report concluded it was an
exit wound.) According to Gochenaur, Moore also told him that the Secret Service
had to investigate the assassination in an expected, predetermined way or they
would "get their heads chopped off." Moore, unfortunately, also told
Gochenaur that sometimes he thought President Kennedy was "a traitor"
because he was "giving things away to the Russians."
[According to Arlen Specter, this same Elmer Moore was present when Chief Justice
Warren, Gerald Ford, and he interviewed Jack Ruby in Dallas; and Arlen Specter
also revealed in 2003 (at a conference in Pittsburgh) that Elmer Moore was the
Secret Service Agent who showed him an undocumented photograph of President
Kennedy's back wound during the May 1964 re-enactment of the Dallas motorcade
conducted by the Warren Commission.]
Unfortunately, after Federal officials at Bethesda (on November 22-23, 1963)
and Elmer Moore (between November 29-December 11, 1963) "leaned on"
Dr. Perry, he spent the remainder of his life straddling the fence and saying
that the bullet wound in JFK's throat "could have been either" an entrance
or an exit wound.
But that is not what he said on the afternoon of the assassination, before
there was an official explanation for the crime to fall in line with. White
House Transcript 1327-C makes that very clear, as I reveal in my book, in Chapters
7 and 9.
Former
Chief Operating Room nurse Audrey Bell related to me in 1997 that Dr. Perry was
in a state of torment on November 23, 1963, after being pressured by Federal
officials all night long to change his mind, because, as he put it, "my
professional credibility is at stake." Sadly, he appears to have
decided for the remainder of his life that discretion was the better part of
valor.
The story does not end here. The chief prosector at the President's autopsy,
Dr. James J. Humes, described the throat wound in the autopsy report as having
"widely gaping, irregular edges," and in his Warren Commission
testimony, Humes said the gaping wound in the throat was 7 to 8 cm wide. In contrast, Dr.
Charles Crenshaw, a third year resident at Parkland in 1963, told ABC's
"20/20" news magazine in 1992 that after the tracheostomy tube and
flange were removed from the President's neck following his death, that the
very small incision made by Dr. Perry closed of its own volition, and that the
bullet wound had NOT been obliterated and was still clearly visible. When
Dr. Crenshaw viewed the widely published bootleg autopsy photo (from Bethesda
Naval hospital) showing the incision in JFK's neck, he expressed the opinion to
ABC's "20/20" that the incision in that photograph was DOUBLE the
width of the incision Dr. Perry originally made on the President's body.
The descriptions of the incision in the anterior neck, provided by Dr. Humes
and Dr. Crenshaw, together constitute de facto evidence that JFK's throat wound
was tampered with prior to the start of the Navy autopsy at Bethesda Naval
hospital. President Kennedy's body was in the custody of the U.S. Secret
Service while enroute Washington D.C. from Dallas, Texas. END
JFK researcher Lawrence Schnapf on
Jim Gocheanuer who interviewed Elmer Moore in 1970
https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/27159-the-ordeal-of-malcolm-perry/
At the CAPA "Last Witnesses" conference in 2018, Jim
Gocheanuer shared his story about his talks with Elmer Moore who said he regretted pressuring Dr. Perry.
Then we had the doctor who worked with Malcolm Perry in Washington who shared
that Dr. Perry said he was pressured to change his account but that he was
convinced the neck wound was one of entry.
YouTube interviews with Jim Gochenaur about his in person meetings
with Secret Service agent Elmer Moore (who hated JFK and was involved in the
JFK assassination cover up) at www.GrassyKnoll.US
I
need to get the date of the Jim Gochenaur interviews with Elmer Moore as well
as the date of the Grassy Knoll interview with Jim Gochenaur
1) Jim Gochenaur’s Meeting with Elmer Moore at Moore’s
Secret Service Office
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47bBHH2GaU8&t=174s
2) Secret Service Agent Elmer Moore visits Jim
Gochenaut at the Kirkland Art Fair https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orHt8k4l4IQ
3) Jim Gochennaur’s Discussion with Secret
Service Agent Elmer Moore at Jim’s House https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Uw4d22x50
4) Jim Gochenaur’s Ride Home from Secret Servie
Agent Elmer Moore
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ets5feOe9Y
Grassy Knoll YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCcowUpXlocqy4JOKpe_uNA/videos
Secret Service Agent Elmer Moore sent to Intimidate Dr. Malcolm Perry
into saying there was no frontal entry wound into the neck of John Kennedy
Phil Nelson: A Dallas Secret Service agent
named Elmer Moore admitted years later that ". . . 'he had been ordered to
tell Dr. Perry to change his testimony.' Moore said that in threatening Perry,
he acted on orders from Washington and Mr. Kelly of the Secret Service
Headquarters.' . . . Moore [admitted that he] 'badgered Dr. Perry into
'making a flat statement that there was no entry wound in the [front of the]
neck. . . [and, Moore continued] 'I regret what I had to do with Dr. Perry'. .
. [but] he had been given 'marching orders from Washington. . . I did
everything I was told, we all did everything we were told, or we'd get our
heads cut off.
Ron Bulman (1-1-2021) on Elmer Moore:
https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/26878-secret-service-agent-elmer-moore-etc/page/2/
QUOTE
Moore is
a key to the fact the assassination was a conspiracy. Perry's initial certainty the throat wound
was one of entrance is first hand, same day, expert analysis.
He was a experienced trauma room physician well familiar with gunshot wounds in
the ER of a major city's main hospital. He only changed his opinion to a
possible exit wound after pressure from Moore.
Perry later confirmed to
Dr. Donald Miller Jr., Professor Emeritus, University of Washington (with whom
he taught there), as well as Anchorage surgeon Dr. Robert Artwhol that the
throat wound was one of entrance. No matter what he said to
the Warren Commission.
Moore later admitted in
an interview to Washington Graduate Student James Gochenaur he regretted having
to pressure Perry to change his story. And stated JFK was a traitor.
Gochenaur testified to this.
Moore's refusal of the HSCA is interesting given he was one of
three SS supervisors of the SS investigation into the JFKA. If Moore thought
of JFK as a traitor was this belief prevalent within the Secret Service or at
least a part of it.
If as mentioned earlier in the thread by Micah, Moore called Burris of the
Dallas Times Herald about a back shot exiting the throat, was he the
true father of the magic bullet?
Moore stymied the fact of a frontal throat shot. He
admitted it. A frontal throat shot means a conspiracy. WC bs equals
dust in the wind.
UNQUOTE
Jim DiEugenio on Elmer Moore:
QUOTE
Elmer Moore was in on the
cover up up to his neck.
He was one of the best and most important
discoveries of the ARRB.
In fact, the belated discovery of Moore
shows how deep the cover up went.
And to show you how bad it was, Moore
ended up being the aide de camp to Earl Warren on the Commission.
UNQUOTE
Secret Service Agent Elmer Moore and the Ordeal of
Malcolm Perry:
https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-ordeal-of-malcolm-perry
JIM DIEUGENIO:
Using recent evidence discovered by Rob
Couteau, Jim DiEugenio revisits the experiences of Parkland Hospital Dr.
Malcolm Perry regarding the anterior neck wound he observed in President
Kennedy and the concerted and persistent efforts to manipulate his testimony
and obscure the clear evidence of a frontal entrance wound.
On the afternoon of the JFK assassination, within an
hour or two after his death, there was a press conference at Parkland Hospital.
Three important pronouncements were made. In fact, they were so important that
they should have shaped the case in a permanent manner.
First, acting press secretary Malcolm Kilduff talked
about how Kennedy had died.
When he did
so, he pointed to his right temple and said something like: it was a matter of
a bullet through the head. Very shortly after, Chet Huntley said the same thing
live on NBC television. On the air, he revealed his source to be Dr. George
Burkley, President Kennedy’s own personal physician.
Dr. Kemp
Clark, chief of neurosurgery—the man who actually pronounced Kennedy dead—said
he observed a large gaping hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. (Michael
Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 80) Dr. Malcolm
Perry, who cut a tracheostomy across the bullet wound in Kennedy’s neck, said that
the wound was one of entrance. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination:
The Evidence Today, p. 367)
Therefore,
from these three pieces of evidence, one would have had to conclude that
Kennedy was hit from the front. That implication would
be almost inescapable. Therefore, some strange things happened with this key
press conference. First of all, there is no film available of it today, which
is remarkable in and of itself, because, as one can see from pictures and film
snippets, there were many reporters in that conference room. It is very hard to
comprehend how not one of them called for a film camera to cover the initial
public pronouncement of President Kennedy’s death. Second, initially, the
Secret Service told the Warren Commission that they did not even have a
transcript of this conference. According to former Assassination Records Review
Board (ARRB) analyst Doug Horne, there are two real problems with the Secret
Service saying this. First,
according to Horne, the Secret Service went around collecting the films of this
press conference. Thus making it disappear. (See Horne at Future of Freedom
Foundation conference of May 18th. This is at the FFF web site.)
But further,
the Secret Service lied to the Commission about having the transcript. In responding to Commission counsel Arlen Specter’s request, Chief
of the Secret Service James Rowley wrote a letter to chief counsel J. Lee
Rankin. He said that he could not locate either the films or the transcript of
this press conference. (DiEugenio, p. 367) As the ARRB proved, this was a lie, because they found a
transcript of that press conference that was time stamped, “Received US Secret
Service 1963 Nov. 26 AM 11:40”. (ibid) Does it get much worse than that?
In other words, the Warren Commission’s own investigators were keeping important
pieces of evidence from them—and then lying about it.
As most of us
know, Perry was pressured to alter his first day story. By the time of his appearance before the Commission, he now said
that the edges of the wound were neither ragged nor clean and that the wound
could have been an exit or entrance. Gerald Ford got him to say that the
reporting from the press conference was inaccurate. Allen Dulles applied the
icing on the cake: he said Perry should issue a retraction—which, of course, he
just had. (DiEugenio, pp. 166–67)
The reason
Ford and Dulles could do this is because, in all probability, the Secret
Service had absconded with the films and the transcript. But further, Perry had been worked on. As the Church Committee had
discovered, a man named Elmer Moore had taken it upon himself to convert Perry
to the Commission’s point of view. Moore was a Secret Service agent who was forwarded to work for the
Commission. One of his first assignments was to take up a desk at Parkland
Hospital and convince the doctors there that they were wrong and the autopsy
report was correct. One of his priority targets was Perry. (DiEugenio, p. 167)
As Pat Speer later discovered, this story about Moore
gets even worse. After he performed his assignment in Dallas so effectively, he got a promotion to a longer
term one. He became the aide de camp to Commission Chairman Earl Warren.
(DiEugenio, p. 168)
But it was not just Moore—and it was not just a
couple of weeks later. As Horne stated during that FFF conference, Nurse Audrey
Bell testified that Perry told her he was getting calls that evening directing
him to alter his testimony.(DiEugenio, p. 169) This is now backed up by a
startling piece of evidence surfaced by author Rob Couteau. Martin Steadman was a reporter
at the time of the JFK assassination. Couteau discovered a journal entry
by Martin that is online. Steadman was stationed in Dallas for several days
after the assassination gathering information. Some of it got in print and some
of it did not. From all indications, the following did not.
One of the witnesses he spent some time with in
Dallas was Malcolm Perry. Steadman was aware of what Perry had said at the
press conference about the directionality of the neck wound. Steadman wrote that, about a
week after the assassination, he and two other journalists were with Perry in his
home. During this informal interview, Perry said he thought it was an entrance
wound because the small circular hole was clean. He then added two important
details. He said he had treated hundreds of patients with similar wounds and he
knew the difference between an exit and entrance wound. Further, hunting was a
hobby of his, so he understood from that experience what the difference was.
And he could detect it at a glance.
Steadman went on to reveal something rather surprising.
Perry said that during that
night, he got a series of phone calls to his home from the doctors at Bethesda.
They were very upset about his belief that the neck wound was one of entrance.
They asked him if the Parkland doctors had turned over the body to see the
wounds in Kennedy’s back. Perry replied that they had not. They then said: how
could he be sure about the neck wound in light of that? They then told him that
he should not continue to say that he cut across an entrance wound, when there
was no evidence of a shot from the front. When Perry insisted that he could
only say what he thought to be true, something truly bizarre happened. Perry said that one or more of
the autopsy doctors told him that he would be brought before a Medical Board if
he continued to insist on his story. Perry said they threatened to take away
his license.
After Perry
finished this rather gripping tale, everyone was silent for a moment. Steadman
then asked him if he still thought the throat wound was one of entrance. After
a second or so, Perry said: yes, he did.
What is so remarkable
about this story is that it blows the cover off of the idea that the autopsy
doctors did not know about the anterior neck wound until the next day. Not only
did they know about it that night, they were trying to cover it up that night.
But things always get worse in the JFK case. And this
issue does also, because, if the reader can comprehend it, that night was not
the first time Perry was told to revise his story—or to just plain shut up. Bill Garnet and Jacque Lueth
have written, produced, and directed a documentary called The Parkland
Doctors. It was shown at the CAPA Houston mock trial a few years
back, but only to those in attendance, not to the viewing audience. Robert Tanenbaum is the host of the documentary. He let me see it at
his home two years ago. It is a good and valuable film, since it features seven
of the surviving doctors at that time, 2018.
Towards the end of the program, Dr. Robert McClelland
made a bracing comment about Perry. He said that as Perry was walking out, a man in a suit and tie grabbed
him by the arm. After he got his attention, he forcefully said to Malcolm,
“Don’t you ever say that again!” I turned to Tanenbaum and said: “This is about
ninety minutes after Kennedy was pronounced dead.” Tanenbaum said, “Jim, they
knew within the hour.” At the very least, someone knew that there had to be a
cover story snapped on.
Malcolm Perry was a victim of a large-scale crime.
The evidence above indicates that the cover up was planned with the conspiracy.
I would love to know who that well-dressed man who accosted him was.
One last
point. When Elmer Moore was asked to appear before the Church Committee, he brought
a lawyer with him. (DiEugenio, p. 168)
Reporter Martin Steadman recounts how Dr. Malcolm Perry
immediately came under intimidation to change his story on JFK’s neck wound
right after his Parkland doctors’ press conference on the afternoon of 11-22-63.
Martin Steadman in 1963 was a reporter for the New
York Herald Tribune.
http://evesmag.com/jfkassassination.htm
Fifty
Years from that Fateful Day in Dallas…
By Martin J. Steadman
The
murder of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November
22, 1963 has been the subject of fierce debate ever since. It
didn’t have to be that way. Long ago--when it happened--there should
have been an exhaustive search for the truth about the assassination of the
President, but there was not.
As
early as November 25, on the day the President was buried, Federal Bureau of
Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover and newly-sworn President Lyndon Johnson
reached agreement to squelch widespread speculation that Lee Harvey Oswald had
acted in concert with conspirators unknown.
And
of all the mysteries about the assassination that linger 50 years later, none
is more baffling than the decision by Attorney General Robert Kennedy to distance
himself and his Justice Department from the feeble inquiry that followed.
The
Johnson/Hoover deal to stifle speculation about the assassination of President
Kennedy resulted in the appointment of a Presidential Commission to inquire
into everything that happened on that weekend in Dallas. The
Blue Ribbon commission would be guided with a hastily prepared report from the
FBI that said Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and no connection
could be established between Oswald and the man who shot and killed him in the
basement of Dallas Police Headquarters two days later--Jack Ruby.
That’s
right. The new President and the FBI Director made up their minds
immediately that Oswald killed Kennedy, and Ruby killed Oswald, and case closed.
The
White House moved swiftly. Within days President Johnson lined up
the members of his Blue Ribbon panel, and on November 29 he signed an Executive
Order creating the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President
Kennedy. Within seven days of the death of John Kennedy and five
days of the murder of Lee Oswald, the White House had assembled an impressive
group of national leaders headlined by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,
Earl Warren. The panel was charged with “finding the full facts of
the case and reporting them, along with appropriate recommendations, to the American
people.”
Shortly
after the announcement of the appointment of the Warren Commission the
Associated Press sent a story on its national wire, reporting that a
high-ranking official of the Justice Department said the murder of President
Kennedy was the work of a lone assassin, and no evidence of a conspiracy had
been found linking Oswald to Jack Ruby or anyone else. The
Associated Press at that time had my respect and admiration. But
that was the moment my illusions were forever shattered. The AP was
used and abused by the President and the Director of the FBI.
I
was in Dallas as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune, there to
inquire into the unanswered questions surrounding the shocking events of
November 22-24. On the morning of Monday, November 25, the Herald
Tribune was holding its own high-level conference on what to do with its
Investigative Unit--William Haddad, chief of the unit, and
myself. Haddad had been the best investigative reporter in New
York City in the late 1950s, until he left the New York Post to work in
the Kennedy for President campaign in 1960. When John Kennedy was
elected, Haddad became the first Inspector General of the Peace
Corps. But in September of 1963 he was lured away from government by
the Herald Tribune to lead a newly-created Investigative Unit. When
the President was killed, I was Haddad’s second man, but I had a background
that was a neat fit for this assignment. When I worked at the old
New York Journal-American I spent three years tracking a Senate investigation
of labor racketeering that was driven by Chief Counsel Robert F. Kennedy.
Already
the newspaper stories out of Dallas had identified Jack Ruby as a
former organizer for the Waste Paper Handlers union in Chicago. That
one little sentence in a newspaper profile of Ruby hit me like a thunderclap
because I was familiar with that Chicago union and its
history. The Waste Paper Handlers union was owned and operated by Paul
Dorfman, Jimmy Hoffa’s partner in crime. And Hoffa despised the
Kennedy brothers, both of them.
The
Herald Tribune editors sent Haddad to Washington, where he would be at the
nation’s listening post for everything that might break in the days
ahead. While Bob Kennedy and I knew each other from his labor racketeering
investigation days, Haddad had a close personal relationship with him, and with
others in the administration he had only recently left. So it was
Haddad to Washington and I would go to Dallas to scratch
for any additional information I could find, and for good measure I would be in
the right place at the right time if the FBI conducted one of its famous
roundups of co-conspirators in the middle of the night.
No
one at the Herald Tribune that day could have known that while the paper was
assigning its two investigative reporters to Washington and Dallas, the White
House and the FBI had already closed the case. One more time--they
closed the case on the day the President was buried.. We knew nothing
about a top-level, secret pact to close the case prematurely, and that surely
was true in newsrooms all over America, and beyond.
I
spent 11 days in Dallas following the murder of President Kennedy, from November
26 to December 6, and I never wrote a word about my time there, mostly because
I came home with no proof of anything conclusive about the unanswered
questions-- many of which are still unanswered I came home only
with a deep, unsettling feeling that I was leaving Dallas too soon.
But as
the years go by, I believe I have an obligation to write some things that I
feel strongly about, especially as November 22 approaches each
year. Every year since 1963, I’ve been left with (a)
major grievances against the highest-ranking people in our own government and
(b) a haunting memory of a private interview with a doctor who attended the
dying President, and (c) some bits and pieces of information that might help
historians to a consensus on what was most likely the
case. The official finding that Oswald acted alone is believed
by almost no one today.
AT LAST A
THOROUGH, HONEST INVESTIGATION
The
Warren Commission, guided by Hoover’s FBI, deliberately misled the
American people. Its conclusion that Oswald was the only person who
could have fired off all three shots was demolished early on by Fred Cook, a
truly great investigative reporter. His painstakingly detailed
reenactment of the series of shots at the Presidential limousine appeared in The
Nation in 1966. Cook was the first to identify Warren Commission
counsel Arlen Specter as a classic empty barrel. Specter’s
Magic Bullet theory that never happened should have disqualified him for any
position in government to follow. Fifteen years after the release of
the Warren Commission Report a far more thorough investigation by the House
Select Committee on Assassinations buried the findings of the Warren Commission
forever on a shocking number of crucial points. The House committee
was chaired by Rep. Louis Stokes of Ohio, and its 1979 final report
included a blistering denunciation of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. A sampling of just some of its conclusions pulled no
punches:
§ “The
Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to investigate adequately the
possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President.”
§ “With an
acute awareness of the significance of its finding, the committee concluded
that the FBI’s investigation of whether there had been a conspiracy in President
Kennedy’s assassination was seriously flawed.”
§ “The
former Assistant Director, since deceased, who coordinated the FBI’s
investigation characterized the effort in testimony before the Senate Select
Committee with Respect to Intelligence Activities as rushed, chaotic and
shallow, despite the enormity of paperwork that was generated.”
§ “The
committee concluded that the FBI’s investigation into a conspiracy was
deficient in the areas most worthy of suspicion--organized crime, pro- and
anti-Castro Cubans, and the possible association of individuals from these
areas with Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. In those areas in
particular, the committee found that the FBI’s investigation was in all
likelihood insufficient to have uncovered a conspiracy.”
§ “The
committee established that the FBI’s own Organized Crime and Mafia specialists
were not consulted or asked to participate to any significant
degree. The Assistant Director who was in charge of the Organized
Crime division--the Special Investigations Division--told the House committee,
‘They sure didn’t come to me…We had no part in that that I can recall.’”
§ “The
committee further concluded that the critical early period of the FBI’s
investigation was conducted in an atmosphere of considerable haste and pressure
from Hoover to conclude the investigation in an unreasonably short
period of time.”
Final
reports from Congressional committees don’t get any tougher than
that. Especially as they relate to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
Beginning
in late 1977, the House committee pieced together Jack Ruby’s connections to
organized crime, something the FBI had brushed off and the Warren Commission simply
ignored. Incidentally, Chief Justice Earl Warren made a critical
error at the outset of his assignment. He decided the Warren
Commission did not need investigators. He assembled a staff of 14
lawyers and relied almost exclusively on the FBI for the investigative
work. He and his Commission did this with full knowledge the FBI had
already given them a hastily prepared report—written before they even began--
that found no evidence of a conspiracy.
The
investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was
directed by G. Robert Blakey, whose first job in Washington after
graduation from law school was with the Justice Department when Robert F.
Kennedy was the Attorney General. Blakey was assigned to the
Organized Crime unit from 1960 to 1964. Later he came back to Washington as
Chief Counsel to the Senate Committee on Labor Racketeering, led by Arkansas
Senator John McClellan. Fittingly, his four years with the Attorney General led
him to Senator McClellan, whose committee in the late 1950s was driven by Chief
Counsel Robert F. Kennedy through years of memorable
exposes of union corruption. Before he left that job and
moved up and on, Bob Kennedy was a hands-on Chief Counsel, personally attending
to many of the most critical moments in the committee’s long inquiry. It
was not unusual for him to take a committee staffer with him on a plane to
anywhere, walk in on a suspected labor racketeer and begin the questioning
before he sat down. And he carried a Congressional subpoena in his
pocket if the interview wasn’t going well.
As
chief counsel to the McClellan Committee, Kennedy relentlessly pursued both
Jimmy Hoffa and Paul Dorfman, and the sweetheart deal they had
reached. Dorfman gave Hoffa the Mob Muscle he needed to consolidate
his growing power in the Teamster hierarchy, and in return Dorfman’s stepson
Allen was given control of investments by the massive pension funds of the
Central States Conference of Teamsters. The Dorfmans, father and
stepson, made millions on the arrangement, and to this day no one knows how much
of that money was shared with their partners in crime. Paul Dorfman,
remember, ran the Chicago racket union where Jack Ruby served his
apprenticeship. Dorfman’s own apprenticeship was served with the
notorious Al Capone. And with Capone gone, Paul Dorfman was still
hand-in-glove with the new bosses of the Chicago Mob. If anyone was
wondering where Hoffa’s Mob Muscle came from, it came from way back in
America’s most corrupt city, then and now--Chicago.
Teamster
leader James R. Hoffa despised Bob Kennedy, which was well known at the
time. Hoffa also hated John F. Kennedy, who sat in on the McClellan
Committee hearings as a Senator from Massachusetts.. How deep
did the hatred go? Bob Kennedy wrote a book (The Enemy
Within) about his experiences in that long investigation, and here is
his own account:
“In
the most remarkable of all my exchanges with Jimmy Hoffa,” Kennedy wrote, “not
a word was said. I called it ‘the look.’ It was to occur
fairly often, but the first time I observed it was on the last day of the 1957
hearings. During the afternoon I noticed that he was glaring at me
across the counsel table with a deep, strange, penetrating expression of
intense hatred. I suppose it must have dawned on him about that time
that he was going to be a subject of a continuing probe—that we were not
playing games. It was the look of a man obsessed by his enmity, and
it came particularly from his eyes. There were times when his face
seemed completely transfixed with this stare of absolute
evilness. It might last for five minutes—as if he thought that by
staring long enough and hard enough he could destroy me. Sometimes
he seemed to be concentrating so hard that I had to smile, and occasionally I would
speak of it to an assistant counsel sitting behind me. It must have
been obvious to him that we were discussing it, but his expression would not
change by a flicker.
“During
the 1958 hearings, from time to time, he directed the same shriveling look at
my brother. And now and then, after a protracted, particularly evil
glower, he did a most peculiar thing: he would wink at
me. I can’t explain it. Maybe a psychiatrist would
recognize the symptoms.”
Now
in 1963, several years after he experienced and then wrote those words, Bob
Kennedy was burying his brother, but across Washington at the Teamster Headquarters Building the
American flag was still flying at full staff. Everywhere else in the
nation the flags had been lowered to half staff, but Hoffa ordered the flag
atop the Teamster building should not be lowered to honor the dead President.
On
the plane from New York to Dallas, I thought I would come upon a
beehive of law enforcement activity in Dallas. I knew immediately
what Attorney General Robert Kennedy must have been thinking. He had
to be looking at the Paul Dorfman/Jack Ruby connection. He put in
years of his life chasing down Hoffa. I imagined law enforcement was
turning Jack Ruby upside down, inside out and every way but loose on his connections
to Hoffa, Dorfman and the Chicago mob. I’m still stunned
by how little interest J. Edgar Hoover had in following leads or suspicions
President Kennedy had been killed by his most hate-driven enemies in Organized
Crime.
Consider
the blizzard of long-distance telephone calls unleashed by Ruby in the three
weeks prior to the assassination. Blakey and his House Committee
found a Dallas newspaper item dated April 24. 1963 that quoted Vice
President Johnson saying President Kennedy might visit Dallas and
other major Texas cities that summer. The House Committee
pieced together all of Ruby’s toll calls from his apartment and five office
phones in his two night clubs, and a pattern emerged: Ruby’s
long-distance calls increased significantly in the months leading up to the
assassination—from less than 10 calls in March (before the alert that Texas
might be the place to strike) to 25 to 35 calls a month in May, June, July,
August and September. The Presidential trip to Texas was officially
confirmed by the White House in September and Ruby’s long-distance calls
reached 75 in October and 96 toll calls in the first three weeks of
November. In his book “Fatal Hour,” Chief Counsel Blakey
wrote, “It was perhaps more significant that we discovered a pattern of
telephone calls to individuals with criminal affiliations, calls that could
only be described as suspicious.”
Suspicious? How
about stunningly suspicious? Many of Ruby’s frenetic phone calls
were to associates of Organized Crime chieftains Santo Trafficante and Carlos
Marcello, and ultimately to a very close associate of Jimmy Hoffa--two such
calls in November were to Robert “Barney” Baker, Hoffa’s notorious strong-arm man
for many years. At one point in testimony before the HSCA, Baker
said there was “nobody closer to Jimmy Hoffa” than himself. Baker
was a 320-pound gorilla whose dearest friends were ruthless
killers. He appeared before the McClellan Committee in 1958 and an
exchange with Chief Counsel Robert Kennedy says all you need to know about
Barney Baker. He was asked about the killing of Anthony Hintz, a
famous New York gangland murder case in 1947. How famous
was it? After the legendary District Attorney Frank Hogan won
convictions in the case, corruption on the New York City piers
captured the attention of a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the World
Telegram and the writers and producers of the Academy Award winning movie, “On
the Waterfront.”
District
Attorney Hogan was later on top of a gangland attempt by Hoffa to gain control
of the New York metropolitan area of the Teamsters Joint
Council. Some of the most notorious New York racketeers
were issued phantom Teamster Local Union charters to cast enough votes to
remove the incumbents and replace them with Hoffa
supporters. Hogan’s expose opened the door for Senator McClellan and
his Committee to set up shop in the Federal Courthouse in New York City and
splash that outrage all over newspapers across the country. District
Attorney Hogan assisted Chief Counsel Robert Kennedy every step of the
way. Why is that important to note here? It was District
Attorney Frank Hogan’s findings that led to my assignment to cover the
McClellan Committee.. But here is that memorable exchange between
Kennedy and Barney Baker:
Mr.
Kennedy: Do you know Cockeye Dunn?
Mr.
Baker: I don’t know him as
Cockeye Dunn. I knew him as John Dunn.
Mr. Kennedy: Where
is he now?
Mr.
Baker: He has met his
maker.
Mr. Kennedy: How
did he do that?
Mr. Baker: I
believe through electrocution in the City of New York of the State of New York.
Mr.
Kennedy: Did you know “Squint” Sheridan?
Mr.
Baker: Mr. Sheridan, sir? He
also has met his maker.
Mr.
Kennedy: How did he die?
Mr.
Baker: With Mr. John Dunn.
Mr.
Kennedy: He was electrocuted?
Mr.
Baker: Yes, sir.
Mr.
Kennedy: He was also a friend of yours?
Mr.
Baker: Yes, he was a
friend of mine.
Chief
Counsel Kennedy then asked Baker about a third man involved in the killing of
Anthony Hintz, a gangster named Danny Gentile.
Mr.
Kennedy: Where is he now?
Mr.
Baker: I don’t know where
he could be now—excuse me. I believe he was implicated in a certain
case in New York. He must be in jail.
Mr.
Kennedy: That was the Hintz killing. You see
we have testimony that you were closely associated with these people, Mr. Baker.
Mr.
Baker: Yes, I knew them
real well.
For
good measure, Baker testified he knew a number of other underworld luminaries,
such as Joe Adonis, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Trigger Mike Coppola and
Vincent Alo, (also known as Jimmy Blue Eyes) who was identified as a close
friend of Cockeye Dunn at the trial. Ten years or so after the
Hintz murder, when I was a young reporter at the Journal-American, a veteran
NYPD detective told me Vincent Alo was the new Boss of Bosses in New York
City.. That would be circa 1958. Shortly thereafter, when
Barney Baker’s testimony before the McClellan Committee included Jimmy Blue
Eyes in his galaxy of underworld associates, that got my attention.
Hoffa
took the witness stand immediately following Baker’s appearance, and after
saying Barney Baker “works under my direct orders,” Hoffa was asked if Baker’s
testimony that he associated with killers, gangsters, gamblers, racketeers,
traffickers in narcotics and human flesh bothered him at all. The response was
typical Jimmy Hoffa.
“I
am sure, hearing him testify here that he knew every one of them…it doesn’t
disturb me one iota.”
I’m
focusing on Jack Ruby’s phone calls to Barney Baker shortly before the
assassination of President Kennedy (two of dozens of such calls Ruby made to
known racketeer enemies of the Kennedy brothers) because those lengthy
conversations between Baker and Ruby two weeks before the President was
murdered should have set off loud alarms in law enforcement circles
immediately. For emphasis--Immediately. Repeat--Right
Now, Stupid.
Barney
Baker called Jack Ruby from Chicago on November 7, 1963. The
call lasted 17 minutes. One day later, on November 8, Ruby called
him back and the second call lasted 14 minutes. In a deposition
taken by the HSCA on May 23, 1978, Baker swore he never heard of Jack Ruby
until Ruby called him. Baker testified Ruby left a message with his
wife and his November 7 call to Ruby was a returned call. But no
record could be found by the House Committee of an initial call by Ruby. As
for the two long conversations, Baker testified he never asked Ruby for
anything, Ruby merely wanted his assistance in “settling a union dispute”
Ruby was having with his dancers, who were members of the American Guild of
Variety Artists (AGVA). But Baker said he was on probation for five
years following a federal conviction and jail time, and he couldn’t get
involved in labor-management disputes. As for the call from Ruby
that lasted 14 minutes the next day, Baker said Ruby asked him for names of
people Baker knew who might be of help to him in Dallas. Baker said
he told Ruby he didn’t have any names for him. You be the
judge. The first call lasted 17 minutes and the second call lasted
14 minutes. Baker said neither man knew each other before the
calls. He said Ruby was asking him for help but he couldn’t help
him. Baker said that was the sum and substance of two calls that
totaled more than a half hour. And both calls were two weeks in
advance of the President’s trip to Dallas.
Baker
was under oath, but he had a comfort level against a possible perjury
charge--when he was interviewed by the HSCA in 1978 Ruby had been dead for 1l
years. But that brings us to how the Warren Commission handled the
same telephone log information 14 years earlier, when Ruby was in custody and
still alive. Baker wasn’t interviewed by the FBI until January
3, 1964, six weeks after the President was murdered. Whatever he
told the FBI, there is no record the FBI passed the information along to the
Warren Commission. The HSCA addressed this God-awful lapse bluntly:
“Baker had been under prior investigation by the FBI and was considered a
hoodlum with organized crime and Teamster connections. The FBI and
the Warren Commission failed to investigate any possible connections between
Baker’s associates and associates of Jack Ruby.”
Another
of the suspicious phone calls was to Irwin Weiner, a notorious money man for
the Teamsters and the Mob. Weiner wrote bonds for huge loans from
the Central States Conference of Teamsters (Hoffa) to mob-connections in Florida and Las
Vegas. He was a boyhood friend and close associate of Paul Dorfman,
Hoffa’s partner in crime. Long after, in 1983, Paul
Dorfman’s stepson Allen Dorfman was gunned down by two hit men who pumped seven
bullets into him. He and Weiner were walking to lunch in a Chicago hotel
but the gunmen weren’t interested in killing Weiner. All seven
shots were aimed at Allen Dorfman. Weiner was a Chicago-based bail
bondsman, with a long record of posting bail and writing bonds for individuals
and entities that walked on the wrong side of the law. But he hit
the jackpot when he teamed up with the Dorfmans and Hoffa. He was a
boyhood friend of Earl Ruby, and knew his brother Jack, but to a lesser
extent. The October 26, 1963 phone call from Jack Ruby
lasted 12 minutes, and when Weiner was grilled by the House committee 14 years
after the assassination, he had the same protection against a perjury rap
enjoyed by Barney Baker because Jack Ruby was long dead. Weiner was
closely tied to Paul and Allen Dorfman in lucrative business deals with the
Teamsters union and mob figures in Chicago, Florida, New Orleans and Las
Vegas, and anywhere in between.
So
when he testified at the HSCA many years after the phone call, Weiner adopted
the same line Barney Baker used--he testified Ruby called to ask him to write a
bond that Ruby needed to bring an injunction against the American Guild of
Variety Artists, and Weiner told him he didn’t want to get involved in a Texas
matter, far from his Chicago office. That alibi was so unbelievable
that Members of the Congress on the committee took turns telling Weiner they
didn’t believe him. Were there no insurance agencies in Dallas to
write a routine bond in a very small legal matter? Did Ruby never do
business with insurance agencies in Dallas during many years of
operating night clubs and occasionally suffering misdemeanor arrests of his
own? Did it take Weiner 12 minutes to tell Ruby he couldn’t get
involved? Ruby was calling Weiner in Chicago for the first
time in years, and it was all about a minor problem easily handled in Dallas? Jack
Ruby’s toll calls in the weeks and months before the assassination of the President,
to the people who hated the Kennedys the most, were mostly ignored by the FBI
following the death of the President, and later by the Warren Commission—all of
it a terrible stain on the history of the assassination of a President.
ATTORNEY
GENERAL ROBERT KENNEDY EXCLUDED
When
President Johnson and FBI Director Hoover agreed on the appointment of the
Warren Commission and immediately provided the fledgling committee with an FBI
report that said there was no conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy and the Justice Department were cut out of the
loop. The FBI works for the Attorney General, but in this case
President Johnson decreed that Hoover would report FBI findings
directly to the Warren Commission. The net effect was to muzzle all
the talent and expertise of the Justice Department, including their power to
convene grand juries. The nullification of Bob Kennedy’s
Justice Department was deliberate and to this day I can’t get my mind around
the enormity of that decision and Robert Kennedy’s acceptance of it.
It
wasn’t just Barney Baker and Irwin Weiner. Many of Ruby’s toll calls
were placed to associates of two major Organized Crime chieftains that
controlled the South and Southwest--Santo Trafficante of Tampa, Florida,
and Carlos Marcello of New Orleans. Attorney General Kennedy
had built a ferocious team of attorneys and investigators assigned to the
Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering
Section. Between 1960 and 1964, the number of attorneys assigned to
the Section grew from 17 to 63. The crusade began with a list of 40
gangland figures and interestingly, the two names targeted in the South were Trafficante
and Marcello. They were charter members of the nation’s worst career
criminals on Bob Kennedy’s earliest Organized Crime list.
By
1964 that initial list of 40 had grown to 2,300 Organized Crime figures and
175,000 profiles in the Justice Department’s master file on U. S. racketeers
and their associates. When President Johnson ordered the FBI to
report directly to the Warren Commission, all of that Organized Crime and
Racketeering Section talent and expertise and database knowledge was bypassed
and ignored--all of it deemed to be of no use to the Warren Commission. How
effective had Bob Kennedy’s war on the mob been? The number of
indicted individuals rose five-fold, from 121 in 1961, to 615 in
1963. Carlos Marcello was one of them, indicted multiple times.
Carlos
Marcello had another, more personal reason to want either or both of the
Kennedy brothers dead. On April 4, 1961, Bob Kennedy ordered U.
S. marshals to arrest Marcello, load him on a plane and dump him in Guatemala with
just the clothes on his back and whatever cash he had in his pockets. Members
of his family quickly dispatched an attorney and clothes and money and his Guatemala passport
(his only passport) and the New Orleans Mafia chieftain and his lawyer spent a
harrowing two months scrambling around Central America in a desperate
effort to return to the United States. Guatemala officials
were embarrassed by his sudden appearance and the way it had been done, so they
ordered their own troops to dump him again in a jungle village in El
Salvador.
El
Salvador wasn’t happy with the lawyer and his client either. The
two were jailed for five days before soldiers put Marcello and the attorney on
a bus and drove them 20 miles deeper into the mountains and left them
off. The two men walked for eight hours before they reached a village,
and at one point Marcello fell down a hill and broke two
ribs. Marcello later reported he fainted three times during the long
hike.
Eventually
the two wanderers made contact with Guatemalan officials again and this time
things went a little more smoothly. Actually, this time they got the
red carpet treatment. Marcello and his lawyer were flown on a
Guatemala Air Force plane to Miami, where he reentered the U. S. on June
2, 1961. Seventeen years later, appearing in closed session before
the HSCA, he was still angry:
“Two
marshals put the handcuffs on me and they told me I was being kidnapped and
being brought to Guatemala….and in thirty minutes…I was in the plane…They
dumped me off in Guatemala…They just snatched me, and that is it, actually kidnapped
me!” Writing in his book Fatal Hour, Chief Counsel
Blakey said Marcello explicitly fixed the responsibility for his
deportation: “(Kennedy) said…he would see that I be deported just as
soon as he got in office. Well he got in office January 20…and April
the 4th he deported me.”
Attorney
General Robert Kennedy was just getting warmed up when his marshals flew
Marcello out of the country. Six days later the Internal Revenue
Service filed an $835,000 tax lien against Mr. and Mrs. Marcello, and less than
a week after he returned to the U. S., on June 8, 1961 a federal
grand jury in New Orleans indicted him for illegal re-entry into the United
States. Four months after that Robert Kennedy had him indicted again
for defrauding the United States with a false Guatemalan birth certificate. But
every charge brought against Marcello in the federal courts ultimately
failed. He was found not guilty in one trial and other indictments
collapsed when witnesses changed their minds and their testimony.
Arthur
Schlesinger Jr. was a trusted friend of the Kennedy family, and on the night of December
9, 1963 he was visiting with Bob Kennedy at his home in Virginia. Schlesinger
later wrote a book of his own, Robert Kennedy and His Times, and in
it he wrote of the night when he asked Kennedy “What about Oswald?”
“There
could be no serious doubt that Oswald was guilty,” Kennedy
replied. “But there was still argument if he had done it by himself
or as part of a larger plot, whether organized by Castro or gangsters.”
That
conversation was less than three weeks after the assassination, and if at that
moment Bob Kennedy knew Jack Ruby had telephone contacts with Barney
Baker and Weiner and associates of Trafficante and Marcello in the weeks before
his brother was murdered, that almost certainly would have spurred the Attorney
General into action of some sort Bob Kennedy knew Baker from
personal experience and his band of brothers at the Justice Department knew all
of the gangland players identified years later by the House Select
Committee. If they knew Jimmy Hoffa’s closest associates were in
Jack Ruby’s November telephone records, along with known associates of
Trafficante and Marcello, Robert Kennedy and his Justice Department could not
have remained silent.
Which
raises another question that is so difficult to comprehend. How
could all of that talent and knowledge and experience at Attorney General
Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department have been silenced for the 10 months the
Warren Commission conducted its inquiry? Initially, Bob Kennedy
removed himself from the events that followed the assassination of his brother,
on the grounds that it would not seem proper for him to lead the investigation. But
he and his powerful Organized Crime strike force accepted the role of
unconcerned spectators totally. At no time from the murder in Dallas to
the issuance of the Warren Commission Report 10 months later was the Justice
Department a factor in the process. What the hell happened then and
thereafter?
SPINNING
MY WHEELS IN DALLAS
When
the FBI quickly leaked its conclusions that Oswald acted alone and Ruby killed
Oswald to avenge the murder of the President, much of the air went out of my Dallas assignment
to pursue the unanswered questions. But there were still some
important stories to cover. Texas Governor John Connally was still
in Parkland Memorial Hospital with gunshot
wounds. A superb television reporter, Martin Agronsky, was selected
as the pool reporter to interview Governor Connally when he was well enough to
speak about the shots fired into the Presidential limousine that fateful
day. Nellie Connally was present at her husband’s hospital
bedside. All the other reporters were gathered in a makeshift hospital
press room downstairs and I called my office in New York to tell them
to turn on the TV and have a reporter ready with a tape recorder for the
Governor Connally interview.
Agronsky’s
interview remains a classic instruction for young journalism aspirants
everywhere. Always sensitive, always conscious of the Governor’s
condition and his wife’s concerns, always aware that the Governor and his wife
were wounded witnesses to history, Agronsky’s interview nevertheless documented
the horrifying moments in the rear seats of an open limousine in Dallas that
can never be fully explained or forgotten. Agronsky and the
reporters downstairs hanging on every word by Governor Connally, had no idea
that the Governor’s recollections of what happened that day would conflict with
the conclusions of the Warren Commission a year later. Somehow,
Governor Connally’s most critical moments meant nothing at all to the Warren
Commission. His recollections didn’t fit their findings.
I
had been elsewhere scrounging for any scrap of information missed by the first
wave of reporters to descend on Dallas and when I got to Parkland Hospital just
in time to learn that the Agronsky interview would be taking place upstairs, I
missed the briefing that instructed the pool reporters that the TV interview
would be embargoed for an hour to give the reporters assembled downstairs time
to file. I alerted my newsroom and I took only a few sketchy notes
as Agronsky worked his deft touch, believing the interview was going live
around the world and I was covered by my newsroom back in New York City,
capturing every word.
The
interview over, I called my office and said, “Okay. Did you get all
that?”
“Get
all what?” was the answer. “We don’t have anything.”
Oh,
no. My first solid story down there, and all I had was sketchy
notes. A Dallas reporter told me what I hadn’t heard
sooner--the Connally TV interview was on a one-hour delay. The
Herald Tribune City Desk put a rewrite man on the phone with me, and I was
bumbling and stumbling through what I could recall when he told me the wire
services were beginning to come through with bulletins on the
story. Fortunately, we weren’t anywhere near deadline and the wire
copy and the delayed TV broadcast bailed me out. The Herald Tribune
story for the next day was as complete as could be, with little or no help from
me.
I
felt like a dope, but the paper put my byline on the story and nobody gave me
any more grief than I had already taken upon myself.
After
that incident, I told the City Desk there was too much happening in Dallas and
if I was ever going to wrap up some loose ends on the investigative assignment,
we needed another guy down there. They gave me the best reporter I
could hope for--Fred Ferretti.
There
were no more glitches, and when Ferretti arrived a day later I was pretty much
free to roam again. In fact, there were occasions when I wanted Fred
to accompany me. One
such memorable evening was an interview with Dr. Malcolm Perry at his
home. Dr. Perry was among the team of doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital when
a mortally wounded President Kennedy was rushed into Emergency Room One.
The
meeting with Dr. Perry occurred the evening of December 2. Fred and
I were joined by Stan Redding, a first-class crime reporter for the Houston
Chronicle. I’d taken a liking to Redding as soon as I met
him; he was my kind of reporter. Speculation and suspicion and
insinuation were never part of his game. He was interested in facts,
only facts. But he was a keen political observer as well as a
seasoned police reporter. It was no secret in Texas that
the President and the First Lady had come to their state because Texas polls
showed Kennedy was in trouble for re-election in 1964. Arizona GOP
Senator Barry Goldwater held a comfortable lead, despite the fact
Vice-President Lyndon Johnson was a Texan. And the Goldwater edge in
the polls also applied to other states in the South and Southwest at that time. Stan
Redding spoke softly when he allowed an opinion, but I’ll never forget what he
said: “Those three bullets shot Barry Goldwater right out of the
saddle.” He was noting that Texan Lyndon Johnson was now the President,
and Senator Goldwater would be matched against a man of the South in the new
polls. How bright was Redding’s political crystal ball in
November 1963? Johnson led Barry Goldwater in the first wave of new
national polls, and Johnson buried Goldwater in November 1964, in a landslide.
Our meeting with Dr. Perry was
after dinnertime at his home, and I remember a little girl playing with her
toys on the living room floor as the three reporters and her father talked
about how he tried to save a President’s life. She was oblivious to
the gravity of the conversation, playing quietly with her toys throughout.
Dr. Perry had become a
controversial figure in the assassination story--to his dismay. With
the President lying on his back on a gurney, fighting for breath in his dying
moments, Dr. Perry tried to create an air passage with an incision across what
he believed to be an entrance wound at the front of Kennedy’s
neck. The President was pronounced dead soon after, but the doctor’s
incision at the throat had forever foreclosed a conclusion that the wound was
an entrance wound or an exit wound.
Late that Friday
afternoon, the Parkland Hospital officials held a news
conference for the hundreds of reporters who had descended on Dallas. Dr.
Perry spoke of his efforts to save the President and his belief that his
incision was across an entrance wound. The controversy didn’t erupt
until government officials in Washington later said all three shots
at the President had been fired from a sixth floor window of a building behind
the President’s limousine.
So
little more than a week later, three reporters were speaking quietly to the
surgeon at the center of the dispute. As far as I know, it was the
first and only such private interview with Dr. Perry. None of us in
his living room that night took out a notebook or a pencil. It was a
conversation with a clearly reluctant surgeon who had done his best in a crisis
and who had agonized about it since.
Dr. Perry said he believed it
was an entrance wound because the small circular hole was clean, with no
edges. In the course of the conversation, he was asked and answered
that he had treated hundreds of gunshot victims in the Emergency Rooms at Parkland Memorial Hospital. At
another point he said he was a hunter by hobby, and he was very familiar with
guns and ammunition. He said he could tell at a glance the
difference between an entrance wound and an exit wound with its ragged edges.
But he told us
that throughout that night, he received a series of phone calls to his home
from irate doctors at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, where an
autopsy was being conducted, and the doctors there were becoming increasingly
frustrated with his belief that it was an entrance wound. He said
they asked him if the doctors in Dallas had turned the President over
and examined the wounds to his back; he said they had
not. They told him he could not be certain of his conclusion
if he had not examined the wounds in the President’s back. They said Bethesda had
the President’s body and Dallas did not. They told Dr.
Perry he must not continue to say he cut across what he believed to be an
entrance wound when there was no evidence of shots fired from the
front. When he said again he could only say what he believed to be
true, one or more of the autopsy doctors told him they would take him before a
Medical Board if he continued to insist on what they were certain was
otherwise. They threatened his license to practice medicine, Dr.
Perry said.
When he was finished, there was
only one question left. I asked him if he still believed it was an
entrance wound. The question hung there for a long moment.
“Yes,” he said.
Ultimately
Dr. Perry appeared as a witness before the Warren Commission. In
substance he testified that he realized he had no proof the bullet hole in the
President’s neck was an entrance wound, and he conceded that the Bethesda doctors
who autopsied the President would know better because they had all of the
forensic evidence and he had but a fleeting recollection.
I
can’t fault Dr. Perry for his testimony before the Warren
Commission. Surely it occurred to him there was no point in holding
out for a belief that couldn’t be proved. And just as surely, this 34-year-old surgeon with
an exemplary record and a brilliant future knew his life would be forever
shadowed by conspiracy theories that relied heavily on a bullet fired from the
front. He testified only as he most certainly had to testify. But
I’ll never forget what he said to three reporters that night in Dallas.
The
interview in Dr. Perry’s living room was the most memorable moment, but there
were other disturbing bits and pieces of information from my time in Dallas.
OSWALD AND
THE POLICE OFFICER HE MURDERED
Oswald
shot the President and he dropped his rifle and beat it out of the School Book
Depository building. He got on a bus to his rented room in a Dallas suburb,
but the bus got stuck in a traffic jam around the Presidential motorcade
route. He got off the bus and found a taxi that took him to his room
at 1026 North Beckley Street, in the Oak Cliff section of Dallas. Once
there, he picked up a jacket and a pistol and headed south along North
Beckley to East 10th Street, where he made a left turn.
A
police car driven by Officer J. D. Tippett pulled alongside Oswald and Tippett
told him to stop right there. The police radios had been crackling
with alerts about a lone gunman since the firing on the Presidential motorcade. The
officer got out and was headed around the front of his car to question Oswald,
who pulled his pistol and fired several shots across the hood of the car,
killing Officer Tippett instantly. Oswald turned and ran back toward North
Beckley. People in the area heard the shots and came running into
the street. Someone called the police and several people tried to
follow Oswald from a safe distance. The gunman turned left on North
Beckley and right on East Jefferson Blvd and onto West
Jefferson running in and out of store doorways as patrol car sirens wailed
from every direction. He finally ducked into the Texas
Theatre. The ticket booth attendant told the police a guy ran right
in without paying, and when the movie theatre lights were turned up, there he
was in an almost empty theatre, pistol in hand and ready to shoot again if he
could. No chance. One of the cops pistol-whipped him in the
head, and he was quickly subdued and cuffed.
But
where was Oswald going on foot when Officer Tippett pulled alongside and
stopped him? Where was the killer going on foot? He
had to be going somewhere, and on foot. That question is rarely
asked and has never been answered. He wasn’t going to the Texas theatre
for a movie; when he turned left off North Beckley he was walking in
the opposite direction from the Texas theatre.. He wasn’t
in a car, a taxi, or a bus, or a trolley—he was walking. A week
later I drove around that neighborhood, speaking to some of the residents. One
of the foreign reporters assigned to Dallas told me Jack Ruby lived
in a nearby apartment. I found Ruby’s apartment complex in a
cul-de-sac seven blocks away from where Officer Tippett was
killed. I knocked on some doors and rang some bells in the complex
and in the nearby one and two-family houses, but no one knew of any unusual
activity in the neighborhood that would be of interest. The
superintendent of the complex, a woman, told me she never saw Lee Harvey Oswald
there. I can’t say I was able to interview everyone in the
area. It was hit or miss; some people weren’t home, and some people
wouldn’t open their doors to me. The one thing I learned for sure
was that no one in law enforcement had canvassed the neighborhood; the people I
spoke with told me so. The FBI and the Dallas police and
the Texas Rangers should have blanketed the area, searching for information of
any importance. Silly me.
When
Fred Ferretti arrived to join me, I thought it might be worthwhile to return to
Oak Cliff and pick up Oswald’s walk from where he was stopped by Officer
Tippett, and on to where Ruby lived. Maybe I missed something the
first time, something we might get with another try. Maybe Fred and
I would find someone who knew something of interest, but it was another failed
effort and we didn’t. We did go somewhat further than I had on the
first trip though. Behind the garden apartment complex where Ruby
lived was a major Texas highway running north and south with a
six-foot wire fence on a divider down the middle of the highway. The
highway, with its divider, fenced off that entire residential area and made the
cul-de-sac where Ruby lived a dead end for anyone on foot. No
overpass or underpass across the highway. It was seven blocks
to Ruby’s place and nowhere to go beyond it.
The
House Select Committee on Assassinations turned up some fascinating
coincidences that, taken together, prove nothing except Dallas at
that time was a small world. Rep .Stokes reported that three Dallas police
officers moved into the apartment adjacent to Ruby’s apartment. They
moved in on September 1, 1963 and moved out on October 15, 1963. And
when a combo debuted at Ruby’s Carousel Club on September 1, 1963, two of
the three musicians, William Simmons (piano) and Bill Willis (drums) rented a
house at 2530 West 5th Street, in Irving, Texas. Across
the street, at 2515 West 5th Street, lived Mrs. Ruth
Paine, who had taken in Marina Oswald and her two children. Husband
Lee Oswald lived in a boarding house in Oak Cliff, but he visited his wife and
children on weekends. Oswald visited his family Thursday night
before the day President Kennedy died.. Oswald was there to pick up
his rifle, which he had kept in Mrs. Paine’s garage. Small world Dallas was,
and I still would like to know where Oswald was going on foot the next
day. He was walking directly toward Ruby’s place when Officer Tippitt
stopped him. Let’s stay with that for a
moment. Oswald walked south along North Beckley until
he turned left on East 10th Street. That turn
eliminated any possible destinations to the north, the south and the
west. And now it was only seven blocks east to Ruby’s apartment complex.
That small world in Dallas just got a lot smaller. His
destination could only be in the seven blocks between Officer Tippitt’s dead
body and Ruby’s apartment.
As
I said before, I never wrote anything about my time in Dallas. The
Herald Tribune editors were good about it. I told them I didn’t have
anything solid to report--just a whole lot of suspicion--and I didn’t think the
Herald Tribune wanted to add to the confusion and conspiracy theories that were
already beginning to surface. I also believed then that ultimately
the Warren Commission would report every detail of an exhaustive investigation. The
reason I’m writing all this now is for my wish for the permanent record to show
that the investigation of the crime of the century was sabotaged at its
start. We did not get an honest investigation of the assassination
of President Kennedy from our vaunted FBI and the Warren
Commission. Instead we got a cynical political decision to close the
case prematurely.
Many
years later the House Select Committee on Assassinations was able to gain access
to some of J. Edgar Hoover’s personal files for those days immediately
following the murder of President Kennedy. Here are a few revealing
segments:
November
24, 1963. In a telephone conversation with President Johnson only
hours after Jack Ruby killed Oswald, Hoover said, “The thing I am most
concerned about…is having something issued so that we can convince the public
that Oswald is the real assassin.”
November 26, 1963. Hoover received
a memo from an Assistant Director that warned, “…we must recognize
that a matter of this magnitude cannot be fully investigated in a week’s
time.” The House committee said Hoover jotted his reply on
the memo and sent it back to his assistant. Indicating
his impatience he wrote, “Just how long do you estimate it will
take? It seems to me we have the basic facts now.”
My own assignment in Dallas ended
because Hoover leaked a story on December 1 that Oswald was the lone
assassin and Ruby didn’t know Oswald. I called my City Desk when I
read that Associated Press story out of Washington in the Dallas papers.
“Who is the high- ranking person in the
Justice Department who gave the AP that story?” I asked Murray “Buddy”
Weiss, the City Editor of the Herald Tribune.
“J. Edgar Hoover,” he
said.
“How do we know?”
“Our Washington Bureau
says so.”
“Well,
I guess there isn’t going to be an FBI roundup of conspirators,” I said.
“Doesn’t
look like it,” Buddy said. “How much longer are you going to be down
there? Fred can handle it if you think you should come home.”
“I
have a couple of things still bothering me. Give me a couple more
days.”
“Okay,
but if you think you’re spinning your wheels down there, pack it in and come
back.”
I’ve
often wondered how many more reporters were ordered home from Dallas following
that Justice Department leak to the Associated Press. Virtually all
that I know now was learned since, as we finally got an honest effort from the
Stokes Committee. And all these many years later, I still wonder how
Attorney General Robert Kennedy felt as President Lyndon Johnson and FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover torpedoed a thorough investigation as President
Kennedy was being lowered into his grave.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2009/12/09/dallas-doctor-malcolm-perry-who-worked-on-jfk-and-oswald-dies-at-80/
Drs. Malcolm O. Perry and Robert
McClelland began their friendship in July 1958 at Parkland Memorial Hospital,
where they slept on bunk beds and spent hours with their hands in patients - one
clamping off arteries while the other stitched up holes.
It was a time of exhaustion and
adrenaline. And it was a time of history.
Drs. Perry and McClelland were two of
the four doctors who struggled to save a mortally wounded President John F.
Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
Saturday in Tyler, Dr. Perry died at
age 80 after a two-year battle with lung cancer.
Dr. McClelland said his friend, a
surgeon and professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, rarely spoke of the
assassination, except in his official government testimony.
Even so, Dr. Perry's early account of
the president's injuries gave rise to conspiracy theories that persist today -
that the small wound near Kennedy's Adam's apple could have been an entrance
wound, suggesting a shot from the grassy knoll instead of the sniper's nest on
the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
Dr. Perry later told the Warren
Commission that he believed the bullet hole was an exit wound, supporting the
single-gunman and magic-bullet theories that were the foundation of the government's
investigation.
"Malcolm never wanted to talk
about it," said Dr. McClelland, who helped Dr. Perry insert a breathing
tube in the president's trachea that November afternoon. "I think he had a
bad experience with the press right after, and I think that may have colored
his lack of willingness to talk."
Drs. Perry and McClelland worked
sweltering summers at Parkland as young men, and later as professors shared an
office and a secretary at UT Southwestern Medical School.
"It was a very intense experience
taking care of a lot of very sick patients in an un-air-conditioned
hospital," said Dr. McClelland, 80, who still spends most days teaching
young doctors.
"Dr. Perry was a real help to me,
physically, mentally and in every way other way. He was standing by my side all
the time. I'm not sure I could have made it without him."
Dr. Perry was eating lunch in Parkland's
main dining room on Nov. 22, 1963, when an emergency page came over the
hospital's speaker system. When he picked up the phone, the operator told him
the president had been shot.
By the time the 34-year-old physician
arrived in the emergency room, Kennedy was already there.
He was joined by Drs. Charles J.
Carrico, Charles Baxter and McClelland, who - after Dr. Perry's passing - is
the only surviving member of the historic surgical team.
"Of course, it was an extremely
intense experience," Dr. McClelland said. "It sounds a bit callow,
but you can't respond emotionally in those situations. You go into professional
mode. If you let your emotions sweep you away, I don't think you can do your
work like you should."
Minutes later, after the president was
declared dead, the wide-eyed doctors gathered around a coffeepot at a nearby
nurse's station.
Secret Service agents handed them note
pads and asked each of the physicians to write his impressions of the
president's injuries. Years later, those notes became key evidence for the
Warren Commission's investigation of the assassination.
"We just kind of sat there, and I
can't even remember what we said," Dr. McClelland said. "It was just
kind of an astonished looking at one another - 'Were we really just involved in
that? Is this a nightmare? What just happened?' "
The mind-numbing weekend continued to
play out two days later when Dr. Perry and Dr. McClelland rushed into an
emergency room to find the body of Lee Harvey Oswald after he was shot by
nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
The young doctors took turns massaging
the Marine-trained rifleman's heart while Dr. Tom Shires tried to stop the
bleeding.
Dr. McClelland said Oswald, unlike
President Kennedy, had a slim chance of survival.Doctors were able to stop
bleeding from major arteries deep in the body - the aorta and vena cava - and
were searching for other wounds when his heart gave up.
"Oswald had had so much damage to
his heart from the severe shock that he arrested, and even with open chest
massage we couldn't get his heart started again," Dr. McClelland said.
"It was possible that he could have been salvaged, but not so with the
president."
Dr. McClelland said he and others
dealt with Oswald's death in a more dispassionate way.
"He was the assassin rather than
the president, so there wasn't quite the sadness," he said. "There
was a fair amount of general horror over that weekend."
In time, Dr. McClelland said, the
public interest faded and the men continued with their careers.
Dr. Perry was born Sept. 3, 1929, in
Allen and was raised by his grandfather Dr. Malcolm O. Perry, for whom he was
named.
He grew up inspired and intrigued by
medicine, earning degrees from the University of Texas and Southwestern Medical
School and finishing his residency at Parkland in 1962.
"He told me his chief father
figure was his grandfather," Dr. McClelland said. "I think his
parents separated about the time he was born, and for whatever reason, his
mother left him in the care of his grandfather in Allen. And Malcolm worshipped
the ground his grandfather walked on."
Dr. Perry, a private pilot and avid
golfer, became a faculty member at UT Southwestern from 1962 to 1974, serving
as professor and chief of vascular services. He held similar positions at the
University of Washington School of Medicine, Cornell and Vanderbilt
universities. He returned to UT Southwestern in 1996 and retired as a professor
emeritus in 2000.
He is survived by his wife, Jeannine,
and their children, Jolene Perry Yousha and Dr. Malcolm O. Perry III, a
urologist in Allen. After Dr. Perry's cremation, the family plans a private
memorial service.
Jeff
Whitfield Facebook post on 8/16/2020 in JFK Assassination Discussion Group – on
the Parkland doctors Hospital press conference in the afternoon of 11-22-1963
THE PARKLAND
HOSPITAL PRESS CONFERENCE - This press conference was given at Parkland
Hospital, Dallas, beginning at 2:16pm on 22 November 1963, just over one hour after
President Kennedy had been pronounced dead (see the Minor Notes below for the
timing of the event).
The conference
was held by two doctors, Dr Malcolm Perry and Dr Kemp Clark, and a member of
the White House staff, Wayne Hawks.The conference is a significant incident in the
John F. Kennedy assassination for two reasons:
Dr Malcolm Perry stated three times that he considered
the wound in Kennedy’s throat to be one of entrance, not exit. Dr Perry, who
was experienced in interpreting bullet wounds, had inspected the wound before he
performed a tracheotomy on the president. A shot in the throat from the front
would, of course, both invalidate the single–bullet theory and, when combined
with certain uncontroversial items of evidence, prove that at least two gunmen
took part in the assassination.
The evidence contained in the press conference
was wilfully ignored by the Warren Commission, which made only a token effort
to locate a recording or transcript of the conference. Because it had been widely
reported in the media that Dr Perry had made remarks unhelpful to the
Commission’s preconceived conclusion, Arlen Specter, one of the Commission’s leading
attorneys, worked hard to get Perry to renounce his initial opinion about the
throat wound. In the absence of a corrective record, Perry agreed with Specter
that the news reports were inaccurate and that he had not made the remarks
attributed to him. Specter’s behaviour is documented and analysed in chapter 1
of Roger Feinman’s Between the Signal and the Noise, which also reports the
comical efforts of the Warren Commission and the Secret Service in not managing
to track down a recording or transcript of the press conference. The typed transcript
had been sitting in the White House press office since shortly after the assassination.
DR MALCOLM PERRY AND THE THROAT WOUND
Dr Perry’s three remarks in the press conference:
“There
was an entrance wound in the neck.”
“Which
way was the bullet coming on the neck wound? At him?” “It appeared to be coming
at him.”
“The
wound appeared to be an entrance wound in the front of the throat; yes, that is
correct.”
His testimony can be
found at Warren Commission Hearings, vol.3, pp.366–389 and Warren Commission
Hearings, vol.6, pp.7–17
Jim DiEugenio
discusses JFK’s throat wound and the pressure that was put to bear on Dr. Malcolm
Perry to lie about what he saw
https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/last-second-in-dallas-part-2
QUOTE
That passage is undermined by Nurse Audrey Bell’s 1997
testimony to the Review Board. Bell told them that Dr. Malcolm Perry complained
to her the next morning (on Saturday, November 23rd) that he had been virtually
sleepless, “because unnamed persons at Bethesda had been pressuring him on the
telephone all night long to get him to change his opinion about the nature of
the bullet wound in the throat, and to redescribe it as an exit, rather than an
entrance.” (See DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today,
pp. 167-68; also this discussion)
In a very late discovery by writer Rob Couteau, Bell’s
testimony was both certified and expanded. In the days following the assassination,
many reporters were milling around Dallas, and some found their way to Malcolm Perry’s
home, for the reason that he and Dr. Kemp Clark had held a press conference on
the day of the assassination where Clark said there was a large, gaping wound
in the back of Kennedy’s skull, and Perry said the anterior neck wound appeared
to be one of entrance. One of the reporters who migrated to Perry’s home was
from the New York Herald Tribune and his name was Martin Steadman.
He asked Perry about this issue and Perry was frank. He affirmed that it was an
entrance wound. But beyond that he said he was getting calls through the night from
Bethesda. They wanted him to change his story. He said that the autopsy
doctors questioned his judgment about this and they also threatened to
call him before a medical board to take away his license. (See further “The Ordeal of Malcolm
Perry”) To put It
mildly, I disagree with Thompson’s next day thesis on this point.
UNQUOTE
Connie
Kritzberg,
author of "Secrets
From The Sixth Floor," Kritzberg was a reporter at the "Dallas
Times Herald" on November 22, 1963, and interviewed two significant figures
in the assassination. She remained a reporter until the 1980s and has written
several papers and two books on the assassination. She was certain of a cover-up
from 1963 on. When working in Washington, D.C. in 1968, she was a volunteer in
Bobby Kennedy's campaign for President until he was assassinated. TOPIC:
November 22, 1963, The Dallas reporter's experiences included Dr. Malcolm Perry's
statement that the neck wound was an entrance wound, and a coverup of the statement
by the FBI.
Here is an email dated 5/11/11 from Connie
Kritzberg:
“The
information given you by Rob Morrow was true. I had been promoted from obituary
writer to “Home Editor” but was called back to cityside to work in a rewrite
slot covering the President’s visit. I interviewed Drs. Kemp Clark and Malcolm
Perry, then wrote the “Neck Wounds” story. As I assume you know, reporters don’t
write the headlines. Earlier in the afternoon, soon after the assassination, I
had interviewed Mary Moorman and Jean Hill, and written their story. My last work
on cityside that day was an on-the-street “mood” story.
I had the
weekend off because of my main assignment to the women’s section. Saturday was the first day I saw wounds story. I was at
home, and was startled by addition of one sentence: “A doctor admitted that it was
possible there was only one wound.”
I immediately called the city desk, believe the editor I talked to was Tom
LaPere, Asst Editor. It was quiet—I asked, “Who added that sentence to my
story?” He answered quickly, “The FBI.”
I think I said
something like, “OK.”
I am 79 years
old, have slightly slurred speech, but brain still working.
Connie Watson
Kritzberg”
Here is an excellent article by Connie Kritzberg!!
On her experiences and reporting of the JFK assassination
https://archive.org/details/nsia-KritzbergConnie
