WHO KILLED KENNEDY?

President of the USA  John F Kennedy assassinated November 22 1963

NOW, AS WE APPROACH THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DEATH OF THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT JOHN F KENNEDY,  IS THE SEASON FOR CONSPIRACY THEORIES. THIS IS ONE THAT IS WORTHY OF YOUR CONSIDERATION. 

The death of Kennedy has been a mystery that continues to fascinate me. What I describe here satisfies me more than any other theory I have heard. It doesn’t explain the conspiracy and it thus extremely unsatisfying but it does explain some of the strange behaviour that surrounded the tragedy at the time and was then ascribed to a conspiracy cover-up. Cut away all the cock-up related behaviour and perhaps the truth surrounding the conspiracy will emerge. Perhaps. 

Perhaps the reason why no-one has satisfactorily answered the question of the title is that there were two scenarios that played themselves out almost simultaneously. The first, a planned attack, the second, a cock-up. It’s the first we all know about; a group of people set in motion a sequence of events that put a bullet or bullets into the President. Who were they? Mafia? Right Wing politicians? Cubans? CIA? We’ll never know. What we do know is that immediately after the attack there was total confusion and, as time went by, a lot of mysterious deaths – including that of the assumed assailant, Lee Harvey Oswald. Oliver Stone’s movie 'JFK’ (based on the book Crossfire by Jim Marrs) probably gives the most likely account of that story but he never touched on the cock-up story.

Nearly 30 years after the incident a book by Bonar Menninger, Mortal Error, The Shot That killed JFK, was published. It tells the story of how a ballistics expert, Howard Donahue, of Baltimore, developed an obsession with the possibility that another shot was fired, a shot that came from a rifle with ammunition quite different from that attributed to Oswald, a shot fired from a most unlikely source.

Start with the body of the poor dead man. A bullet that penetrated his upper back and exited through his throat. Do you remember the newsreel showing him grasping his throat with both hands? A bullet that went through him. This is a key point. This bullet was, according to the evidence, fired by Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. It was a 6.5mm diameter bullet; it was of the type known as having a ‘full metal jacket’ and it was designed not to fragment or expand on impact. There may have been another bullet fired, probably from the same rifle, which missed and hit the pavement but this is not immediately relevant to this aspect of the Kennedy death mystery. The bullet that passed through the body would ultimately have proved fatal but would not have been immediately fatal. Note, the title of this is Who Killed Kennedy? not Who Shot Him?.

The famous newsreel film almost immediately after that first shot shows the President receiving a horrifying wound to the head. The upper part of his skull flies off and a large part of it lands on the back of the car. You will remember Jackie Kennedy clambering back to recover this piece of her husband’s head. This coincides with many people hearing a second shot and also accounts for the belief at the time that there was another assassin on the now-famous ‘grassy knoll’ up ahead, waiting for his opportunity and taking it; not much credence is attached to this nowadays. 

The confusion begins. The Presidential car tears off taking its passengers, including the dying President, Governor Connolly who was also hit by a bullet, Mrs Connolly and Jackie Kennedy to the Parkland Memorial Hospital where doctors set about trying to revive the man who would be dead within minutes of arrival. There is a whole mass of confusion over who saw what, who said what, who did what and who were the people present at the post mortem examination that took place here and later that evening at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Washington where the body was taken. Much later one writer, David S. Lifton, was to write a book of some 750 pages dealing largely with what were clearly very serious attempts to influence the post mortem findings. There was even an allegation (which may have been correct - how can we tell?) that the body had been tampered with at some time between leaving Dallas and arriving in Washington. Whatever really took place is now almost certainly lost to us but one conclusion stands out above all others and that is attempts were made to conceal the specific damage to the skull caused by that second shot. Now this is serious. Why would concerted attempts be made to do this? It is even more significant that after a while the President’s brain simply disappeared. It ceased to be available for inspection. Why? Why? Why?

The ballistics expert, Howard Donahue’s attention moved to the wider scene at the time. Behind the Presidential car there was the ‘follow-up’ car containing and carrying ten Secret Service agents, part of the team whose job was to protect the President. They drove in an open-top limousine. Six men were within the automobile, two stood on the running boards on either side. On the back seat, sitting on the top of the back rest with their feet where a passenger would normally sit were two agents, George Hickey (on the left, on the driver’s side) and Glen Bennett (on the right). Between them there lay a rifle, a Colt AR-15. This rifle had a high muzzle velocity and fired bullets of relatively low weight; these rounds were encased in a thin copper jacket that was designed to rupture on impact to allow the core to disintegrate for more ‘lethality’. The purpose of such ammunition was to stop a person, literally ‘dead in his tracks’ without it passing through the body and harming people behind him. It was for use in crowds where a deadly threat was perceived and where collateral damage must be avoided. 

At the moment the first shot was heard the reaction of Hickey and Bennett was to stand on the seat, a squashy, bouncy seat, presumably to get a better view. Bennett said later that when he reached for the gun he saw that Hickey had grabbed it. Maybe the car jolted; it would have been a normal reaction for a driver to have braked. Many nearby said at the time that they heard another shot, some said they thought it had come from where they were rather than ‘up there’ where the sniper was supposed to be. Some said they could smell gunpowder in the vicinity. How easy it would have been for the rifle to have been discharged by accident as it was raised. In the various histories that have been written not much more is heard of George Hickey. Nothing more was heard of the rifle he had picked up and as another agent said, ‘Waved about’. 

It makes one think does it not? The specific brain damage so mysteriously concealed yet with enough evidence emerging to make it pretty clear that a penetrating full metal jacketed bullet could not have created it. How what is known of the head damage squares with the effect of a Colt AR-15 bullet. How, as Donahue proved, the trajectory calculated from where Hickey stood and where the President’s head was puts Hickey in the highly suspect category. 

Finally, the confusion. How would a group of people charged with protecting their President behave when they realise that not only have they failed to stop an assassination attempt one of their number, accidentally, pulled another trigger with deadly effect. Like headless chickens is how they would behave and how they did behave.

Keith Diggle

Mortal Error - The Shot That Killed JFK. Bonar Menninger. Pub. Sidgwick and Jackson, London 1992
Best Evidence - Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F Kennedy. David S. Lifton. Pub. Collier Macmillan, London 1980 
Crossfire - The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Jim Marrs. Pub.Carroll and Graf, New York 1989