WHO KILLED J.F.K.? JUST ONE ASSASSIN

WHO KILLED J.F.K.? The jolting question glares from bumper stickers, intrudes from posters, lures capacity crowds on the national campus lecture circuit. At least 87 U.S. Congressmen have backed a resolution urging a new investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963--twelve years ago this Saturday. Three congressional subcommittees are trying to find out precisely what information the FBI and CIA withheld from the Warren Commission's investigation of the crime--and why.

A flurry of articles in magazines --from the solemn New Republic to the impetuous New Times, from the Saturday Evening Post to Penthouse--criticize the commission and question its conclusion that the murder was committed by Lee Harvey Oswald, acting "alone." A paperback published this week, "They 've Killed the President!" by Robert Sam Anson, suggests that Kennedy was the victim of a CIA-Mafia conspiracy. The first printing: 250,000 copies. Television and radio talk shows focus on the Warren Report--and question it. Shown three times on ABC-TV, the shocking color movie of the shooting taken by Amateur Photographer Abraham Zapruder has jarred millions of viewers into a renewed awareness of the brutal event.

The revival of doubt about that day in Dallas stems mainly from what Americans have since learned about their Government. The Viet Nam War and Watergate have inspired a new skepticism about the veracity and motives of high Government officials. The disclosure that some CIA agents schemed with Mafia racketeers to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro has fanned theories about a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. So, too, has the recent admission by the FBI that it secretly destroyed a threatening note from Lee Harvey Oswald, although that reckless act was apparently done only to save the agency from embarrassment. Those facts were withheld from the Warren Commission by both agencies. A Harris Poll, taken in October, shows that 65% of the public believe that the Kennedy assassination was "not the act of one individual, but rather of a larger conspiracy."

The resurgence of conspiracy theories is all the more remarkable because not a single fact linking Oswald with anyone else in a plot has become known in the eleven years since the Warren Commission issued its 888-page summary and 25 accompanying volumes of exhibits and testimony. Headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, the commission included Congressmen Gerald R. Ford and Hale Boggs, Senators Richard B. Russell and John Sherman Cooper, former CIA Director Allen W. Dulles and former Diplomat John J. McCloy. The mass of evidence was gathered over nine months and based on some 25,000 interviews conducted by the FBI, another 1,550 by the Secret Service. In addition, the commission's staff of 14 lawyers examined 395 witnesses and took sworn statements from another 63. The commission itself quizzed 94 people. That is surely not a record of investigators refusing to listen to witnesses who might disturb their eventual conclusions.

For varied reasons--some selfish and financial, others well-intentioned and sincere--dozens of critics have assailed the report and its central findings. Those conclusions were: 1) only one assassin, Oswald, fired the shots in Dallas' Dealey Plaza; 2) there were three shots, and all were fired from behind the two victims, Kennedy and then Texas Governor John Connally, who was seated ahead of the President on a jump seat in a limousine; 3) one bullet missed both men; one passed through Kennedy's neck and Connally's chest and right wrist, stopping in his left thigh. The other hit Kennedy in the head.

In the years since publication of the report, a generation of young people has grown up with no awareness of what the commission really said. Millions of older Americans, too, paid little attention to its details. Thus whatever a large portion of the public has learned about the report has been filtered, often in a highly prejudicial way, through the critics--some of whom show no signs of having read it. The more industrious critics have minutely analyzed the full 26 volumes and exploited every real or imagined conflict among witnesses, every investigative error or omission by Dallas police, the FBI or the Warren Commission itself. Never attempting a balanced assessment, and sometimes defying the evidence, the conspiracy theorists have raised an array of questions, many of which are readily answerable. Some examples:

Isn't the famed photo of Oswald with a rifle and a pistol actually Oswald's head imposed on someone else's body?

No. Lecturers making this claim often display a LIFE cover (Feb. 21, 1964) of this photo. LIFE'S artists routinely outlined parts of the photo to clarify detail, such as the rifle. Oswald's Soviet-born wife Marina testified that she took two snapshots of this pose. Warren Commission investigators have one of the negatives. Experts testified that beyond doubt it came from Oswald's camera and in no way was doctored.

Weren't Watergate Burglars E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis photographed in Dealey Plaza when Kennedy was killed?

No. A photo said by critics to resemble the two former CIA employees shows drastic differences in features.

Is not part of a man and a rifle vaguely visible behind a tree in the Zapruder assassination film ?

No. The tree was only inches in diameter and nobody could have hidden behind it. Moreover, the "gunman" disappears in a fraction of a second; the suspected shape is visible on only three frames of the film.

Didn't many witnesses think they heard shots fired from the "grassy knoll" area ahead and to one side of Kennedy's car?

Yes. Some policemen even rushed in that direction. But the acoustics of rifle shots are often misleading. No one on the knoll saw a gunman. No physical evidence of any such shooting was found.

Is it not probable that Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Oswald, was part of a plot?

No. His act seemed completely impulsive and unplanned. Only four minutes before Oswald was taken out of a basement exit of the Dallas police headquarters. Ruby was in a nearby Western Union office, sending a money order to one of his nightclub strippers. If the customers ahead of him in line had been slower, he would have missed Oswald's exit. An off-duty police inspector had dropped by to ask Oswald a few extra questions; otherwise Oswald would have been moved before Ruby walked down the police ramp and drew his pistol. Ruby had not even been stalking his victim.

But wasn't Ruby a crony of both Dallas cops and the Chicago underworld?

Ruby was a police buff who often entertained officers at his nightclub. He was the type they, in turn, would question about gambling, prostitution and hoodlums. In Chicago, where he lived before moving to Dallas, he knew a few criminals. But he was the insignificant type of hanger-on, according to one Mob expert, whom "the gangsters used to scratch matches on."

Why was Oswald able to get a hardship discharge from the Marine Corps in just three days?

He didn't. He applied for a discharge on Aug. 17, 1959; he was released from active duty on Sept. 11, only three months before his enlistment was to have expired. He claimed he had to support his ailing mother.

Wasn't Oswald photographed on the street-level steps of the Texas Schoolbook Depository building about the time of the shootings?

No. Another employee in the building, Billy Lovelady, testified that he was the man in the picture. Other employees in the photo confirm that they were standing beside Lovelady, not Oswald, at the time.

Why was Oswald carrying the license-plate number of the car of Dallas FBI Agent James Hosty?

Marina testified that Oswald had asked her to jot it down. Hosty had interviewed her at least twice about her husband. This angered Oswald--and triggered his hostile note to Dallas FBI headquarters.

Why is so much of the Kennedy autopsy material missing?

Not much is. Only some tissue, taken for microscopic slides, and the brain itself are not at the National Archives, where the rest of the material is held. They were given to Robert Kennedy, apparently at his request, after the brain was X-rayed and photographed. According to a family spokesman, he did not tell other family members what he did with these parts of his brother's body. They assume that, for reasons of privacy, he destroyed or buried them.

Two official re-examinations of the evidence have reinforced, rather than weakened, the Warren Commission's findings. Unwisely, the commission at first withheld autopsy materials--X rays and color photos of Kennedy's body, a recovered bullet, metal fragments and his clothing. Though apparently motivated by a desire to protect the Kennedy family against public discussion of grisly detail, this decision fanned many arguments about the precise nature and location of Kennedy's wounds.

But in 1968 Ramsey Clark, then Attorney General, appointed an independent panel of four professors of medicine to study the autopsy materials. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller's Commission on CIA Activities within the U.S. selected another panel of five physicians to do the same thing last spring. All of the experts on both panels concluded that Kennedy had been struck from above and behind by two shots.

Four other experts have individually seen the available autopsy evidence since. One, Dr. Cyril Wecht, coroner of Pennsylvania's Allegheny County, still challenges the single-assassin conclusion. To the dismay of some of his fellow critics, Wecht abandoned his earlier tentative opinion that shots could have struck Kennedy from the front; he too decided they had come from behind and above the President's car. But he does not believe the bullet that struck Kennedy high in his back also injured Connally. Based on his estimate of the bullet trajectories, Wecht contends that two assassins must have been firing from different positions in the Book Depository.

All of the doctors rule out shots from ahead of Kennedy's car because they can find no exit wounds on X rays and photos of his back or the rear or left side of his head. A small hole in the rear of Kennedy's skull, they say, is clearly an entrance wound; part of the bone is pushed inward. Discoloration of flesh and the lack of jagged skin edges similarly identify the back wound as one of entrance.

The autopsy reviews confirm irrefutably that Kennedy was hit in the back of his neck. They ought to still the argument raised by a rough autopsy sketch in the Warren Commission report; prepared by Commander James J. Humes, it placed Kennedy's back wound too low to be consistent with the exit wound in his throat (partially obscured by a tracheotomy incision). The hole in Kennedy's suit jacket also had seemed too low. Since Kennedy was seen in the Zapruder film to be waving before he was first struck in the back of the neck, the experts believe that his raised right arm bunched up the top of the jacket; unfolded, the jacket thus shows a hole lower than the one in his back (see diagram page 33).

There has been little medical argument over Connally's wounds. His doctors agree that a single bullet struck the right side of his back, fractured a rib, then hit the upper side of his right wrist and shallowly penetrated his left thigh. For this bullet to have come from ahead of the car, the shot would have had to be fired from near the level of the floor.

That does not, however, rule out Wecht's theory that more than one gunman may have been firing from the rear, two shots striking Kennedy and a third inflicting Connally's wounds. Since most witnesses in Dealey Plaza thought they had heard three shots (a minority estimated four, a few five), the FBI and the Warren Commission staff at first had also assumed that three separate shots had inflicted the wounds on Kennedy and Connally, though they thought one rifleman could have done all of the shooting. The Zapruder film and the known characteristics of Oswald's rifle forced them to reconsider; this resulted in the theory that a single bullet struck both Kennedy and Connally.

Since the speed at which Zapruder's film was moving could be checked (18.3 frames a second), it served as a stopwatch on events. The presidential limousine was found to be traveling at only 11.2 m.p.h. In the film, Kennedy is seen to be waving to a sparse crowd when, unfortunately for later investigators, a large Stemmons Freeway sign blocks the view from Zapruder's camera (at frame 205). When the President emerges 1.09 seconds later (at frame 225), he is reaching for his throat and clearly has been hit. His head, all too graphically, is struck another 4.8 seconds later (at frame 313). Thus the two wounds had to be inflicted no more than six seconds apart and in no less than five seconds. It is also clear that Connally was hit neither before nor after Kennedy's successive blows; he is noticeably reacting to his own wounds before Kennedy is struck the second time.

Oswald's 6.5 mm. Mannlicher-Carcano Italian rifle required at least 2.3 seconds between each firing to work the bolt, aim and pull the trigger. Thus it was possible for Oswald to have fired both shots at Kennedy within five seconds--but not to have got off a third shot that wounded Connally within the same time span. Since the bullet that went through Kennedy's neck obviously was traveling on a downward course but left no hole anywhere in the car, the Warren Commission staff concluded that it must have hit Connally.

To Wecht and other skeptics, that was an impossibility. Oswald's alleged perch gave him a line of fire toward Kennedy of slightly left to right. Connally was seated in front of Kennedy. Yet the bullet exited from Kennedy's neck, grazing the left side of his tie knot. How then could it strike the right side of Connally? Only, scoffs Wecht, by "making an acute right turn in mid-air." That might be true if both Kennedy and Connally were seated stiffly upright and facing straight ahead at the time Kennedy was first hit. But there are no photos of this precise moment. Before the sign obscured him, Kennedy was last seen in the film to have been waving; Connally is shown turning to his right as he emerges from behind the sign.

Dr. John K. Lattimer, chairman of the department of urology at Columbia University medical school, has examined the autopsy material, analyzed the Zapruder film and, with his two sons, has fired some 600 rounds of ammunition with rifles identical to Oswald's. He notes that as a seated person turns to the right to look directly behind, he invariably first shifts his upper body slightly to the left. Such a movement could have aligned the two men to account for the single-bullet wounds. Moreover, the wound in Connally's back is not neatly circular; its vertical dimension is longer. Only a bullet that has struck something else and is tumbling would leave such a mark. The shape of Connally's thigh wound indicates that this turning bullet entered his leg backward. Lattimer's test firings of the powerful bullets into human-cadaver wrists also convince him that Connally's wrist would have been totally shattered if struck by a bullet that had not been drastically slowed up by other objects.

Connally has insisted that he could not have been hit by the same bullet that struck Kennedy's neck. He testified he heard a shot, turned to his right to look at Kennedy, could not see him, and began turning back toward his left before he was hit. The commission lawyers believe that Connally, like so many witnesses to the events, was mistaken. He may have heard a shot before he was hit, they say, but perhaps it was the shot that missed both men. They note that Connally did not even know he had been hit in the wrist and thigh until he awoke from surgery the next day.

Most viewers of the Zapruder film are bothered by two questions that it seems to pose: 1) Why does Connally take so long to show signs of pain if, indeed, he had been hit at almost the same instant as Kennedy? 2) Why, if Kennedy was struck from the rear, does his body move sharply back? The commission's experts explain Connally's delayed reaction (at most, 1.5 seconds) as a quite plausible nervous-system occurrence. He also clings to his hat, despite a wrist wound; the experts contend that his muscles tightened.

Lattimer, again, has done grisly but practical experiments on Kennedy's head movements. As do other analysts, he notes that the head momentarily moved forward in one frame of the film before jolting more noticeably backward. Lattimer and his sons have fired the Oswald-type gun and ammunition into the rear of human skulls packed with gelatin. He has films to show that in each case the skulls toppled backward off their stands, never forward. Similar tests were conducted with melons by Physicist Luis Alvarez of the University of California, with the same results. Though neither had expected this movement, they theorized that the escape of material through the larger exit wounds in these tests had a jetlike effect that propelled the melons and skulls to the rear.

Critics of the single-bullet theory also dwell on the relatively undamaged condition of the bullet recovered near Connally's stretcher at Parkland Hospital. They marvel sarcastically at all of the wounds this bullet is supposed to have inflicted, while remaining so "pristine." The bullet is only slightly flattened at its rear, with a mere 2 to 2.5 grains of its soft lead core missing.

Ballistics experts have fired this type of bullet through 25 in. of tough elmwood and 47 in. of pine--and it has come to rest similarly intact (on the other hand, it has also been fired through cotton wadding and emerged misshapen). Lattimer has cut up two grains of this bullet's lead core and found they would yield 41 fragments--more than found in Connally's wounds. No one has estimated the weight of the metal X-rayed in or recovered from Connally at more than two grains. Thus, although this bullet is surprisingly undamaged, its condition does not mean it could not have hit both men.

Still, many of the critics insist that Oswald was not a good enough shot to have hit Kennedy twice with a cheap rifle. They contend that it was a difficult shot. In fact, the longest shot was 265.3 ft. from the sixth-floor window. To Oswald, peering through a four-power scope on his rifle, it looked like only about 22 yards. His target, moreover, was moving slowly and in a straight line away from him, rather than laterally.

When he was a Marine, Oswald had qualified as a marksman and, though that is the corps' lowest of three rifleman's ratings, it makes him a good shot by civilian standards. Oswald's mother Marguerite sold two pages from his Marine rifle-score book; they show him making 48 and 49 points out of a possible 50 in rapid fire at 200 yards from a sitting position, without a scope.

Some Army experts checking out Oswald's rifle were able to hit simulated human targets at the assumed motorcade distance in the same time that was available to Oswald. After considerable practice to manage the rifle's stiff bolt action, even Lattimer's son Gary, only 14 at the time, was able to place three shots within a head target at 263 ft. within twelve seconds. Marina Oswald testified that she had heard Oswald practicing the rifle's bolt action outside their Dallas home in 1963. From the Book Depository building, Oswald also had the benefit of resting his gun on a book carton and steadying his grip with an arm sling.

It is true, as the critics stress and the Warren Commission concedes, that Oswald's scope was mounted slightly off center; the rifle is so constructed as to make a precise center mounting impossible. Practice shooting is required to compensate for the scope's misalignment. Oswald at least once told Marina he was going off to target-shoot. Also, as one army weapons expert advised the commission, Oswald may have been disastrously lucky in that the 3DEG decline on which the Kennedy car was traveling could have offset the scope's error.

The other evidence against Oswald is overwheLming. His handwriting on mail orders for the rifle, as well as for the revolver used to kill Dallas Patrolman J.D. Tippit, is proof that he bought both under an alias (A. Hidell). On the eve of the assassination, he caught a ride with a coworker, Buell Wesley Frazier, to make a rare weeknight visit to his estranged wife in a Dallas suburb; he claimed that he wanted to pick up some curtain rods. Although his rented room in Dallas had all its needed rods, next day he carried a long, thin package in brown paper to work with Frazier. On this day--the day of the assassination --Oswald spurted some 50 feet ahead of his friend instead of walking, as he usually did, with him from the parking lot to the building.

The wrapping paper and the rifle later were found on the sixth floor of the building from which the shots

were fired. A palm print of Oswald's was on the rifle barrel, under its stock. The intact bullet recovered at the hospital and a fragment of the second bullet, found in the car, matched the rifling of the gun. Oswald's flight from his perch, which was handily obscured by boxes moved by a crew laying new flooring, was not as impossibly speedy as the critics contend. He was seen on the second floor by the building manager and a police officer about 90 seconds after the shooting. Warren Commission investigators retraced the same route from the sixth floor and reached the second floor, without running, in the allotted time. Oswald did not have to struggle through the cartons, meticulously wipe prints off the gun and carefully hide it; he apparently simply pushed a box or two aside, dropped the gun, and walked down four flights of stairs.

Some 46 minutes after the shooting of Kennedy, Officer J.D. Tippit stopped a suspicious looking young man less than one mile from the crime. The man gunned down Tippit. The critics ask, "Why did Tippit stop Oswald?" Only Tippit knew. But if a gunman who had just shot the President saw a police car approach, he might well show signs of fright. Oswald was so shaken moments after killing Tippit that a suspicious storekeeper followed him to a theater, where Oswald was arrested.

When caught later, Oswald carried the revolver that ballistics tests showed had fired the four cartridge cases found in a yard near Tippit's body. A witness saw Oswald discard the empty shells there. Six witnesses identified Oswald as the gunman they saw either at the Tippit murder scene or fleeing it.

To accept the conclusion that Oswald killed both Kennedy and Officer Tippit is not necessarily to believe that no one put him up to it. Yet no evidence of a plot has ever been brought forward. The hit man in such a scheme does not wander around, as Oswald did --walking, catching a bus, switching to a cab, picking up a revolver at his rooming house and walking again--with not enough money to travel far from the scene of the crime. He does not call attention to himself ahead of time by barging into the Cuban and Soviet embassies in Mexico City, demanding immediate visas.

Still, a much-bruited theory is that Cuba's Castro enticed Oswald into killing Kennedy to avenge CIA attempts against his own life. With no more hard evidence than anyone else, Lyndon Johnson thought that Kennedy had been a victim of a Communist plot. "When I took office," Johnson told TIME Correspondent Leo Janos in June 1971, "I discovered that we had been operating a goddamn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean. I never believed that Oswald acted alone, although I can accept that he was the one who pulled the trigger."

L.B.J. often told intimates that he suspected that Castro was behind Oswald. As Johnson said: " 'See how it feels to be the target of an assassination?' That was Castro's reply."

Allen Dulles, a former CIA director and member of the Warren Commission, was aware of the CIA attempts to kill Castro; but he never told the commission. Yet that possible motivation for a plot against Kennedy was something the commission was entitled to know.

Some responsible critics of the commission feel that the CIA has not yet revealed everything it knows about Oswald. Republican Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania strongly suspects that Oswald was some kind of intelligence agent, if not for the CIA, then for the Soviet Union. He thinks that there are too many mysteries about Os wald's defection to Russia, his 32 months of life there (from October 1959 to June 1962), his marriage to Marina and his quick acceptance for re-entry into the U.S. with a State Department cash loan and a renewed passport. Schweiker is co-chairman of a subcommittee within Senator Frank Church's Committee on Intelligence Activities, and he is considering holding public hearings on any possible links between Oswald and the CIA or the FBI.

Certainly, the nature of Oswald's relations with both the CIA and the FBI, as well as his movements in Russia and Mexico City, is the most formidable lingering question about the assassination. It should be vigorously pursued by congressional committees.

But Oswald was much too unstable a personality for any government to have used him for serious undercover work. He seems to have provoked fights with government officials wherever he went. He was not, as once rumored, a paid FBI informer with a badge number (the FBI does not issue badges to informers). As a returned defector, however, he quite possibly was queried periodically by FBI agents; they may have asked him about pro-Castro activities in New Orleans and the Russian-speaking community in Dallas. His note threatening to blow up Dallas FBI offices--which was destroyed by FBI officials--indicated that any relationship was hostile. Even if he was an informer for either the CIA or FBI, that would be no indication that either agency was a part of any plot. Only in the unlikely event that congressional investigations provide evidence of a conspiracy would there be any purpose in reopening the entire assassination inquiry.

Robert Kennedy often said that he was satisfied with the Warren Commission's conclusions. During the investigation, he was Attorney General and the boss of J. Edgar Hoover, and he was often consulted by Chief Justice Warren. If dissatisfied, he could readily have shaken up both the FBI and the commission with demands to find out more. Now Senator Edward Kennedy has spoken publicly about the painful topic for the first time in years. Interviewed by TIME Correspondent Hays Gorey, he said: "My brother is gone. He cannot be brought back. With us that has always been the thought that completely filled our minds." As for the Warren investigation: "There were things that should have been done differently. There were mistakes made. But I know of no facts that have been brought to light which would call for a reassessment of the conclusion. I'm fundamentally satisfied with the findings of the Warren Commission."

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