The Kennedy Conspiracy - Re-open the Investigation

The John F. Kennedy assassination has always had the air of being a riddle hidden inside an enigma, with various official government conclusions being forwarded at different times depending on which government body was investigating the Presidential murder. The Warren Commission, charged with the first investigation of the murder at the time it actually occurred, came up with the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald managed to do it all alone in a crazed effort to be recognized as a man to be reckoned with. Various researchers, some of them known charlatans but many of them honest researchers who came up with good hard facts that poked holes in the first official conclusion, tracked the crime back to the probability that the murder was probably set up by either the CIA or some other organization within the federal government, big multinational businesses, or both.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations finally got its turn at bat in the late 1970s, and reached the conclusion that the Mob did it. This, incidentally, was in direct contradiction to where some of its own investigators were being led by the facts. Some of them, like Gaeton Fonzi, had zeroed in on the fact that Oswald was CIA affiliated following his return to the States from a defection to Russia and had been seen in the company of a CIA "handler" not too many weeks prior to the assassination.

Further muddying the waters with an implication toward the Mob did it were the recent revelations of Judith Exner, former JFK mistress, who now says that she was a conduit between the President and various American Mafia figures who were involved in covert attempts on the life of Cuban Premier Fidel Castro.Exner, the subject of an interview in "People" magazine in which she notes she was the President to Mafia conduit and that she lied to one investigating U.S. congressional committee when she denied it in the mid-1970s, is not quoted as pointing the figure at any individual or group she considers responsible for the JFK murder.

What she does detail is what she now claims is the actual story of her relationship with the President, which included being a liaison between JFK and the Mob as well as the President's lover prior to and after he became President. Why does she claim she ought to be believed today when she makes these types of claims? She was afraid for her life before since all the principals in the story are dead now except for her and Frank Sinatra, all of them murdered. That doesn't matter any more because she knows that she is going to die from cancer, she says, and wants to clean her conscience up before she goes on to her final reward.

She has been quoted as saying that "For the past 25 years I have been terrified to tell the truth about my relationship with Jack Kennedy," then goes on to note that "In fact, I've gone to great lengths to keep the truth from ever coming out, which is probably the only reason why I'm alive today. With the exception of Sinatra, all the key figures involved in my story have been murdered." A mastectomy in 1978 was followed by a diagnosis last year as having metastatic cancer. Her doctor reportedly gives her about three years to live, even though she had her left lung removed last August.

What her story boils down to is that for 18 months in 1960 and1961 she was the President's link with mobsters, regularly carrying envelopes back and forth between the President and Sam Giancana, the head of the Chicago Mafia, as well as Johnny Roselli, Giancana's lieutenant in Los Angeles. She arranged about 10 meetings between Kennedy and Giancana and believes one took place inside the White House. Although she says she was never told what transpired between the President and Giancana, her speculation was in the People article that one of the meetings involved attempts to influence the crucial West Virginia Democratic primary before the 1960 election. Others apparently involved the CIA's collaboration with the mafia to assassinate Cuban Premier Fidel Castro. The assassination plots, known as Operation Mongoose, featured such esoteric devices as poison pens, pills and cigars, exploding seashells and even a contaminated diving suit.

One of the great unexplained situations arising out of the demise of the U.S. House of Representatives' Select Committee on Assassinations ten years ago is the reason why its recommendation that an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Justice Department was never followed up on.The Committee had recommended that further investigation be made along with a review of the acoustics evidence that led the committee to state that there was somebody shooting in Dealey Plaza in addition to Lee harvey Oswald. All that the recommendations the Committee left in its wake got was short shrift from a Federal Bureau of Investigation review of the evidence.

The FBI rapidly and with no great loss of breath noted that the acoustics evidence really didn't amount to anything, was basically flawed and therefore really did not prove there was a second shooter at all. There the subject has sat for the period of time since the Committee went out of business and issued its report. End of story, end of investigation, end of any hope of ever finding out who was involved in the obvious conspiracy to kill the President.

Or is it that way at all? Was the lack of a continuing investigation after the death of the Assassinations Committee actually the end of the road for any real answers to the investigation, or is the abrupt killing of the investigation an answer in itself? Some researchers who have looked into the JFK assassination over the years would say that it is an answer as to what direction the murder came from as well as whether or not it was a successful one in terms of killing the President and then covering up the fact that it was a plot.

According to the view of those persons, the murder was actually the successful carrying out of a coup d'etat from within the federal government, or at least using parts of the executive branch to help carry the assassination out. Following the assassination, according to that outlook, Kennedy's supposed protectors arranged for the coverup of the crime to be put into effect. The result was that actually unraveling the plot would be almost impossible except for a super large, well heeled investigative agency with plenty of cash, experienced investigators who were totally honest and some high-tech investigative tools like computers.

In the absence of this type of scenario, the dead stop of any continuing investigation of the JFK murder marks a turning point in American history that has never really been tied to any of the persons who probably carried it out on an operational level. This is to not even mention the persons who were actually the ones who ordered it, and went about carrying it out as far as the planning and management levels of the operation were concerned. The Warren Commission came up with the all-too-implausible story that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone madman and killed Kennedy alone. That story lasted just as long as it took people to read some of the Commission's own evidence that pointed to an actual conspiracy operating in the murder.

And, while the Committee to Investigate Assassinations did a better job in that it set things straight about there being a conspiracy, it was dumb enough leadership wise to drop promising leads to go for an "organized crime did it" answer that didn't jell with most of the real evidence floating around. Plenty of that evidence was in the form of what had been dug up over the years by private assassination researchers and also by investigators for the earlier Warren Commission which had originally investigated the JFK murder.

When that acoustics evidence was shot out of the water by the FBI claiming it was flawed and not worth looking at, all the rest of the evidence floating around that pointed to an actual conspiracy operating in the Dallas assassination also faded into oblivion as if it also really hadn't existed in the first place. The nice thing about the acoustics evidence was that it actually showed there were two shooters in Dealey Plaza when JFK was shot. It did that through the Committee conducting a test firing on the spot from several locations, taping the sound of gunfire with a battery of microphones strung through Dealey Plaza, then having a private firm analyze and compare the outcomes of the control tape. Also analyzed was a tape inadvertently recorded during the assassination when a radio microphone button jammed open on a Dallas Police Department motorcycle.

When the control firing tape was compared to the tape recorded inadvertently by the Dallas Police Department, it was discovered that there were several shots on the tape, and at least one of them came from the grassy knoll area in front of the President in addition to the shots from the Book Depository.

Two shooters in Dealey Plaza automatically meant a conspiracy at work, since the coincidence factor of two lone nuts deciding on their own to begin shooting at the President in the same general area at the same time but from two different locations simply staggers the imagination.

Besides that, there was plenty of evidence from those eyewitnesses leading to the conclusion that there were indeed two shooters at least operating in Dealey Plaza. Some independent assassination researchers, including some who have gained a reputation for serious, scholarly research in the JFK shooting, have postulated that there were probably more based on what is known of the actual evidence.

But to date there were at least two KNOWN firing locations-the Book Depository, which is not to say that it was necessarily Lee Harvey Oswald who did the shooting from there, and from the Grassy Knoll area.

Abraham Zapruder was one of those Dealey Plaza witnesses. He carried a second witness in his hands in the form of a home movie camera which recorded the assassination as it occurred and provided a graphic record of who was hit by gunfire and when.

The Zapruder film's depiction caught the result of a probable hit to the right temple area of the President's head when it showed his head head snapping backward in an abrupt, very violent manner to where JFK actually bounced off of the upright seat cushions from the force of being thrust back by the shot.

One Dallas motorcycle policeman who was in the motorcade, Bobby Joe Hargis, was absolutely soaked by pinkish brain matter and blood that drenched over him like a high-speed fog with enough force that made him think at first that he also had been hit by gunfire. Hargis rode to the left rear of Kennedy's position in the limousine during the motorcade to the Trade Mart, which was just one indication of a plot at work.

Other witnesses in Dealey Plaza when the shooting occurred either reported things or took actions that indicated there was shooting from the knoll area. One railroad worker whose job in a nearby railway yard tower allowed him a clear view of the grassy knoll area told investigators, both official and private, that there had been a puff of smoke or steam from the fence area at the top of the knoll. When he went down to the area in question following the shooting, he noticed a lot of tracks and crushed out cigarette butts which indicated somebody had laid in ambush there for some time.

Other persons in the same area as Abraham Zapruder, including one young man fresh out of Army basic training, quickly hit the deck when it became obvious the shooting was coming from directly behind them and they were in the line of fire.

One police officer went charging up the Grassy Knoll area to find a man who flashed an identification card and said he was a Secret Service man. Secret Service personnel later told the Warren Commission that all the agents of that department in Dallas that day had gone to Parkland Hospital with the President following the shooting.

And so it went. There were more, more than enough to nail down the idea of two firing positions and a conspiracy.

In looking at the days leading up to the JFK assassination in terms of the occurrences that indicated an assassination plot at work, the time line factor is probably the best one to use to show how things transpired.

In the month prior to the Dallas trip, for instance, President Kennedy had been scheduled to attend the Army-Air Force football game at Soldier's Field in Chicago on Nov. 2 as well as make a visit to Miami where he spoke at that city's Trade Mart on Nov. 18. The planned football game attendance was abruptly canceled, with most political and Presidential observers figuring that the overthrow and murder of President Diem in South Vietnam the same day as the football game was the reason why. The common sense explanation was that Kennedy was either so grieved by the occurrence in South Vietnam that he didn't want to appear in public, or it might have caused some large crisis he would have needed to be in Washington to cope with, or the overthrow of the South Vietnamese was actually a U.S. Government sanctioned plan and Kennedy wanted to keep his finger on it.

In this case, as is usual, the common sense explanation for what happened was totally off the mark and the actual reasons indicated that the Secret Service and probably JFK also knew that somebody was out to kill him.

Abraham Bolden, the first black Secret Service agent to serve on the White House Detail of that organization which is charged with Presidential protection, was a direct participant in and an obvious victim of the goings-on relative to the Chicago trip that wasn't.

That particular Secret Service man was one of the agents called in to Chicago from his business in the Washington area due to an investigative effort that the Service was carrying out into the probability of a hit team being ready to try for JFK in that town.

Anthony Summers noted in his book CONSPIRACY that Bolden claimed Chicago Secret Service agents were alerted to a threat against the President involving a four-man team armed with high-powered rifles. One of the men, according to what Summers notes Bolden told him, had a Latin name.

The ex-Secret Service agent also said that two of the suspects were detained on the eve of the President's arrival and that two others eluded a surveillance operation. Although one other agent recalls a threat at that time, he Assassinations Committee found nothing on the record on that threat. It noted, however, that President Kennedy's planned visit to Chicago was abruptly canceled when crowds were already gathering to greet him.

Bolden was reportedly surveilling a Joseph Vallee, a man who was apparently supposed to be involved in the Presidential murder plot, when Chicago police moved in and arrested Vallee after a brief surveillance operation.

An M-1 American Army rifle along with some three thousand rounds of ammo for it were discovered in the trunk of the car the suspect had under his control at the time.

Vallee was later sprung out of the Chicago jail system with a more serious charge against him being bucked down to a misdemeanor offense of possession of a hunting knife.

The arrested man was a former Marine with a history of mental illness, Summers noted, and was also a member of the John Birch Society as well as an outspoken opponent of the Kennedy administration. He had also arranged to take time off from his job on the day of the President's arrival.

Bolden, meanwhile, developed problems of his own when he decided that he wanted to testify before the Warren Commission following the assassination about shortcomings in Secret Service protection and/or investigation of the assassination.

What finally happened was that the Secret Service man wound up going to prison on a conviction of selling government files to a counterfeiter, which was later shown to have been obtained through the perjured testimony of the one man to have testified against him.

Just as strange in its own way was what happened when Kennedy actually followed through with a visit to Miami just a few days weeks prior to the Dallas trip.

The Miami Police, as well as police departments elsewhere in the United States, have their network of informants set up in relation to a good many things in an effort to keep abreast of what's happening in the world of crime.

This is just one of the ways that good police officers manage to get information that will either lead them to the successful prosecution of a crime that's happened, or in other cases, even prevent one before it happens.

In this case, the latter was what happened during the Miami trip.

On November 9 Captain Charles Sapp, the head of the Miami Police Department's Intelligence Bureau, sat listening to a fuzzy tape recording of a conversation between one of the department's informants and Joseph Milteer, a wealthy joiner of extremist groups such as the White Citizens' Council of Atlanta, the Congress of Freedom and the National States Rights Party (which had close links with the anti-Castro movement).

Milteer noted on the tape that "You can bet your bottom dollar he is going to have a lot to say about the Cubans. There are so many of them here." Milteer then went on to say in a response to the informant's observation about Kennedy having a thousand bodyguards that "The more bodyguards he has, the easier it is to get him."

"Well, how in the hell do you figure would be the best way to get him?" the informant asked.

"From an office building with a high-powered rifle . . ." Milteer said. "He knows he's a marked man . . ."

"They are really going to try to kill him?" the informant asked. "Oh, yeah, it is in the working . . . ." Milteer responded.

"Boy, if that Kennedy gets shot, we have got to know where we are at. Because you know that will be a real shake if they do that," the informant noted.

"They wouldn't leave any stone unturned there, no way. They will pick up somebody within hours afterwards, if anything like that would happen. Just to throw the public off," Milteer responded.

Sapp and his team of a dozen specialized detectives had provided security on Kennedy twice before when he had visited Miami, working closely with the local Secret Service and the FBI, providing backup intelligence and support on the ground.

The major security problem with Miami was its population of well over a hundred thousand Cuban exiles, which Sapp had seven months earlier had warned of his chief of as a growing danger. Sapp's contention then was that "violence hitherto directed against Castro's Cuba would now be directed toward various governmental agencies in the United States" as a result of the President's crackdown on exile raids against the Castro regime.

When Sapp heard the tape, he feared that there might be an attempt on President Kennedy's life when he arrived for his November 18 visit in Miami.

Sapp ensured that a warning about the Milteer tape went to the FBI and the Secret Service with a special notation about Milteer's remark that the President's assassination was "in the working."

While the Secret Service did check on Milteer's whereabouts, he was not questioned nor arrested. The agents responsible for the President's safety in Miami did get briefed on the matter, and a last-minute change in plans was made in the visit.

What happened was that a planned motorcade was canceled, Sapp recalled to Summers, for fear of trouble from the anti-Castro movement.

On arriving at Miami Airport late in the day, the President then went into Miami via a helicopter, spoke at the Americana Hotel, then was flown back to the airport after the speech. Then he got back on board Air Force One and flew back home.

As in the case of the Chicago incident, the Secret Service failed to mention the Miami scare to the agents responsible for advance planning for the trip to Texas. Dallas was four days away.

The morning of November 22 members of the Presidential party noticed the black-lined full-page ad in a local newspaper which accused the President of various un-American activities such as selling out to Castro, operating in line with "the spirit of Moscow" and other nefarious activities.

By the time Air Force One reached Love Field in downtown Dallas, several key actors in the upcoming drama were already in place.

Lee Harvey Oswald was at work in the Texas School book Depository after being given a ride there by Buell Wesley Frazier, who questioned him at the beginning of the drive downtown about what he had in a long, wrapped package.

Oswald had replied that they were curtain rods he had picked up at the home of Ruth Paine, where his wife Marina and his daughter June were staying during one of the estrangements Oswald and his wife had over the months.

On the eve of the assassination, Jack Ruby appeared to have gone about his usual night club business until the late evening. Shortly before 10 pm he went out to dinner with his old crony Ralph Paul, who ran a local drive-in restaurant. After that, Ruby's moves became more interesting.

A friend of Ruby's from Chicago, Lawrence Meyers, had earlier in the evening invited the night club operator over to the hotel where he was staying, the Cabana, for a drink, which Ruby complied with. The two men talked for a few minutes, Meyers said later, then Ruby said he had to return to his club. But one of Ruby's employees later said that as late as 2:30 a.m. Ruby had called from the Cabana. While it is hard to tell who Ruby had visited if he had not been with his old friend from his Chicago days, he had to be meeting someone there. The question remains of who it was.

On the morning of the assassination, there are conflicting reports of where Ruby was at. Most of the morning he dallied for hours in the offices of the DALLAS MORNING NEWS. He was there for breakfast, and he made himself obvious to a number of employees during the morning.

About half an hour prior to the assassination, one woman who was caught in a traffic jam near the overpass in Dealey Plaza later told private researchers and official investigators, she had noticed Ruby driving a pickup truck which had parked at the bottom of the grassy knoll area with its right wheels up on the sidewalk.

A man got out of the right side of the pickup truck, plucked a long, wrapped object out of the bed of the truck, then went up the slope of the knoll area toward the fence area where the Assassinations Committee years later would show with its acoustics evidence that some of the gunfire during the assassination came from.

But Ruby was also noticed at the morning newspaper also in the half hour prior to the assassination, being in the advertising department with cash in hand to pay for his club ads which was a departure from normal custom for Ruby. Usually he was erratic in payments and tardy in submitting advertising copy to the newspaper.

Ruby was also noticed in the advertising department just after the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza, which is located just a few blocks away from the newspaper.

Some private investigators of the assassination figure that one of the reasons that Ruby was at the newspaper was for an alibi, at least at the time period leading up to the assassination.

The President, meanwhile, flew from Fort Worth where he and Jackie and the rest of his entourage had spent the night following his political appearance in that town, then the motorcade assembled and headed for the downtown area along the motorcade route.

There are several explanations of the chronology of events during the actual shooting that have been advanced from available evidence over the years, depending on what interpretation of available evidence one wants to put the most belief in.

The Assassinations Committee postulated two firing positions-one in the School Book Depository Building with Lee Harvey Oswald firing two shots which actually struck and killed the President with another shooter firing from the Grassy Knoll area who missed the President.

Most serious students and researchers who have looked into the JFK assassination take into consideration what the Assassinations Committee did not, figuring that the backward snap of the President's head was caused by the impact of a bullet fired from the Grassy Knoll in front of the President which hit him in the right temple. Several eyewitnesses told news reporters following the assassination that the President was hit in the right temple, which is awfully hard to tie in to the Grassy Knoll shooter missing. There is also the fact that Bobby Joe Hargis, the motorcycle officer to the left rear of the President, was spattered with the President's brain matter, which also indicates a gunshot which hit the President's right temple from where it was fired from the Grassy Knoll area.

The general sequence of events most heard from assassination researchers is as follows:

-The Presidential limousine made the hairpin curve into Dealey Plaza into the killing zone between the Book Depository and the Grassy Knoll area at low speed, then rolled onward at approximately 10 miles per hour.

-When the gunfire began, most people were reminded of the sound of firecrackers, which ties in with the type of report that a small-caliber round such as the 5.56 mm or .223 caliber round which the military M-16 round uses.

-JFK was probably first hit in the back by a shot from the rear. Occupants of the Presidential limousine recalled later that Kennedy said, "My God, I'm hit" just after the firing began.

-The second shot, probably fired from the front, apparently hit JFK in the throat. When the assassination sequence is viewed by watching the Zapruder film, the limousine is hid for a brief time by a "Stemmons Freeway" traffic sign. When the limousine emerges from behind the sign in the Zapruder film, JFK is clutching at his throat. Apparently his vocal cords have been shot out and he is incapable of making a sound after this. Parkland Hospital doctors reported that the tracheotomy incision they made in the President's throat was emplaced into an already-existing bullet hole.

-John Connally, then the governor of Texas, is hit by another gunshot from the rear as he attempts to look around at President Kennedy. His cheeks puff out from the air being forced from his lungs and further reaction to his gunshot wound follows.

-Finally, John F. Kennedy is hit by what is apparently the last bullet to reach a target during the assassination, when he is hit in the right temple and his body is thrown backward violently against the back cushion of his car seat, with his brains being sprayed out over the left rear of the open limousine.

The mayhem following any violent event such as a murder started then. The limousine started accelerating, while Jackie Kennedy in shock began climbing onto the trunk of the car in a futile effort to recover some of the debris from the head of the by-then-dead President. A Secret Service agent gallops up to the rear of the car as it begins to accelerate, hops on board the rear and forces Mrs. Kennedy back inside. The vehicles of the motorcade begin rolling to Parkland Hospital at high speed as Jesse Curry, then the Dallas police chief, broadcasts orders for officers to get up on the overpass at the south end of the plaza and find out what happened up there.

When the President's body reaches Parkland Hospital, various lifesaving techniques are tried in vain, including the placing of the tracheotomy and placement of air tubes into the chest area. Those measures prove futile since it's practically impossible for anybody to remain alive with almost half their head blown off by gunfire.

Jack Ruby once again enters the situation by being spotted by persons who knew him at Parkland Hospital. Speculation arises later that he had planted the so-called "Magic Bullet," which the Warren Commission later insists wounded both Kennedy and Connally yet only lost a few grains of its total weight and remained in practically its original shape despite going through two men, and hitting several large, hard bones on the way. Any other bullet would have been severely flattened on its front end but the "Magic Bullet" was not.

As the saga of the conspiracy behind the Kennedy assassination unfolds, we find that the Secret Service was in fishy waters up to its earlobes when it was decided it was high time to get the Presidential party out of Dallas.

Once again we have a discrepancy between what the official story was as to the reason for getting out of Dallas against what the real reason could have been with a conspiracy at work.

The official story was a twofold one, which held that it was decided somehow that the feelings of Jacqueline Kennedy were to be spared the ordeal of staying in Dallas any longer and possibly having to come back later for an inquest, along with a very real sense of uncertainty about what was actually occurring. It was thought by some of the Presidential party that the death of President Kennedy could have been the opening salvo of a coup d'etat and others, such as vice president Lyndon Baines Johnson could well be next. Better to pull up stakes fast and get to the airport, then get airborne for Washington as fast as possible before anybody else got shot. After all, there were killers in the area.

On the other hand, what the hasty departure from Parkland Hospital also did was ensure that no independent and accurate autopsy was done on the body of JFK. With the departure of the corpse from the hands of then-Dallas County Medical Examiner Earl Rose, the way was clear for a fast surgical alteration of the way the head looked, as far as the wound trajectory patterns were concerned, and also to probably get any bullet fragments dug out of the brain area so that manufactured evidence could be used against Lee Harvey Oswald.

Rose, in fact, did object to any idea of the Secret Service and the Presidential party taking the corpse out of Dallas prior to an autopsy being held there, but he had one main problem with that-he was heavily outnumbered by men who were simply not about to listen to reason.

Aubrey Rike, who at the time of the assassination worked for the O'Neal funeral home which supplied the bronze casket the President supposedly rode back to Washington in, noted that the argument over whether the body should stay or go was one of the scariest things he had ever seen in his life.

Vernon O'Neal's funeral home had the contract for part of the ambulance service in Dallas in November of 1963. Rike, along with "Peanuts" McGuire, another O'Neal employee, had helped put President Kennedy's body into the bronze Brittanica casket after JFK was pronounced dead. The casket had been lined with what Rike described as a heavy plastic sheet that is normally used for bedwetters and other cases where body fluids leak. The body was then wrapped in sheets and put into the coffin.

Vernon O'Neal then closed the casket and the three men, along with the Catholic priest present, were not allowed to leave the room at the behest of the Secret Service. Mrs. Kennedy came in twice, once to put a ring on her husband's finger and a second time after the casket was closed.

About the pushing match over the coffin, Rike told Lifton that "I was scared to death. I was scared all the time I was there... Dallas wanted to do an autopsy. The government wanted the casket out. The government said `Take it out'; Dallas would say `Bring it back.' You know, we'd start pushing, and somebody would grab us, and push us back, and pull the casket back. You'd have to see it to believe it."

Rike also added that " ...it was the most unorganized, scary type situation that I have ever been in in my life. I'm a policeman now and I've been up against all kinds of stuff," in his interview with Lifton.

Another angle of view to the brouhaha over the coffin was provided by William Manchester in his book DEATH OF A PRESIDENT. In Manchester's narrative of the incident, Earl Rose confronted the Kennedy forces led by Roy Kellerman, head of the White House detail of the Secret Service at the time of the assassination in the hallway of Parkland Hospital.

"Rose . . . turned to leave the nurse's station. Kellerman blocked the way. In his most deliberate drawl, Roy said, `My friend, this is the body of the President of the united States, and we are going to take it back to Washington.'

"`No, that's not the way things are.' Rose wagged his finger.

`When there's a homicide, we must have an autopsy.'

"`He is the President. He is going with us.'

"Rose lashed back, `The body stays.'

"`My friend, my name is Roy Kellerman. I am the Special Agent in charge of the White House Detail of the Secret Service. We are taking President Kennedy back to the capital.'

"`You are not taking THE BODY anywhere. There's a law here. We're going to enforce it.'"

Then Dr. Burkley, the White House physician, entered the fray.

"`Mrs. Kennedy is going to stay exactly where she is until the body is moved. We can't have that.'" Rose wouldn't budge.

"`It's the President of the United States!`" Burkley said.

"`That doesn't matter,' Rose replied. `You can't lose the chain of evidence.'"

But that's exactly what happened, since the body of John F. Kennedy disappeared from the coffin it was supposed to be in during the trip to Bethesda Naval Medical Center.

The casket was wheeled to the hearse and put inside, Jacqueline Kennedy climbed inside and sat next to the casket, and the Secret Service commandeered the O'Neal hearse and drove to the airport. The hearse arrived at Air Force One at Love Field at 2:14 p.m., and Secret Service personnel and Air Force One staff helped carry the casket up the ramp. Secret Service reports noted that the casket was in place at 2:18 p.m. on the aircraft, and by 2:47 p.m. Air force One was airborne following the swearing-in of Lyndon Baines Johnson as President.

The casket, ostensibly holding the body of President John F. Kennedy, was placed in the Boeing 707's tail compartment in the quarters normally used for Secret Service agents and White House staff, against the port side of the aircraft just forward of the rear door.

From the time the casket went aboard the plane at Love Field in Dallas to the time the plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, somebody apparently got that body out of that coffin.

They then somehow got it off the airplane and to some location during an approximate 20-minute travel gap between Andrews and Bethesda Naval Medical Center. The object in getting the body to that unknown location was for purposes of surgical alteration of the President's head, which made the wound trajectory patterns look different to a degree at Bethesda than they did at Parkland. These conclusions were the result of David Lifton's research into the head wound patterns and were based on actual interviews with Navy enlisted men who worked at the Bethesda morgue on the night that the autopsy was performed on the President.

The Parkland doctors who worked on JFK when he was brought to that hospital, with the exception of just one, stated that a large exit hole was located in the rear of JFK's head at Parkland, which implied that he had been shot from the front.

The official conclusions by the Warren Commission and the Assassinations Committee, which were based on the official autopsy report which was based on autopsy findings at Bethesda, put the exit wound at the front right of Kennedy's head which meant he got shot in the head from behind, namely by Lee Harvey Oswald.

What that meant, Lifton noted in BEST EVIDENCE, was that surgical head wound trajectory alteration twisted the main piece of evidence-the body-around so that it was made to lie.

Earl Rose, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, was also correct in stating during his tussle with the Secret Service that the chain of evidence had to be preserved. What he meant was that it had to be proven to a jury or a judge in a trial of anybody connected with the murder of the President that JFK had been shot at point A, pronounced dead at point B, autopsied at point C, a report prepared at D, and so on, with no break in the chain of possession of the body at any point along the way. If the chain were broken, the entire process would be flawed and the results of the autopsy would also be flawed and tossed out of court as evidence. The autopsy report just wouldn't exist as evidence, in short.

In the end, that is exactly what happened since the whereabouts of the body was unknown from the time Air Force One landed at Andrews Air Force Base until the time it showed up at Bethesda-since there was no accounting for where it was exactly at all times, the autopsy report was flawed and therefore worthless as evidence. If Lee Harvey Oswald had not been killed by Jack Ruby and had gone to trial, Dallas County authorities would have had to do without an autopsy report and their case would probably have been gravely weakened. This is in addition to the spectre of conspiracy raising its head in the disappearance of the body for that small length of time along with the appearance of the head wounds being different at Bethesda than it was at Parkland.

The story of the arrival of John F. Kennedy's body at Bethesda Naval Medical Center begins with personnel at that facility being informed of the arrival of the President's body and how the autopsy proceedings would be handled, as well as security arrangements surrounding the autopsy.

J. S. Layton Ledbetter was Chief of the Day for the Medical Center Command, and was one of those persons who were aware of the fact that the President's body was at the hospital before it was supposed to have arrived in the motorcade from Andrews Air Force Base.

Ledbetter had reported to Bethesda for work at perhaps 4:20, shortly before his shift as Chief of the Day was to start at 4:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1963. A phone call came in from "downtown" as Ledbetter called it as he walked in and he took the call, with the news the call conveyed being that the President's body would be coming to Bethesda.

While he was taking the call, three Secret Service agents showed up at his office.

"I answered the phone. The White House wanted to speak to the Officer of the Day, and . . . these three gentlemen walked up to me and they said: `Are you Chief Ledbetter? Do you have the Chief of the Day watch today?' And I said, `Yes, sir, I do. Can I help you?' He said, `We're Secret Service men receiving the body of President Kennedy back here, and . . . there's already twenty-six of us here on the compound.' They identified themselves."

Ledbetter's contact was limited to those three Secret Service agents along with "a few more" later on but they made it perfectly clear to him that from that point forward the autopsy was a Secret Service operation.

Lifton noted that the Secret Service men seen by Ledbetter at 4:20 p.m. were as unknown to the official records of the investigation as the so-called Secret Service men that some persons ran into on the Grassy Knoll. Assuming the ones at Bethesda who spoke with Ledbetter were authentic, the only conclusion Lifton could reach was that the Secret Service had sent a contingent of operatives to Bethesda but never chose to reveal that to the Warren Commission or the FBI.

Ledbetter referred the group of agents to the Administrative Duty Officer, and arrangements were made for the handling of the autopsy.

The Chief's account made it clear that by 4:30, some two and a half hours prior to the time the body got to the hospital, agents were at the hospital and had made detailed arrangements as to who would conduct the Presidential autopsy, Lifton noted. Dennis David, for instance, was Chief of the Day for the Medical School which was located at Bethesda Naval Hospital the day of JFK's murder.

David also told Lifton when interviewed by that author that the coffin that arrived in the ambulance at the front of Bethesda with Jackie Kennedy was empty. This was the big bronze Brittanica job that was offloaded from Air Force One at Andrews while the one military helicopter was flying away from the right side of the aircraft.

David, who retired from the Navy as a Lieutenant Commander in the Medical Service Corps, was a Petty Officer First Class (E-6) on Nov. 22, 1963, and was an editor of training manuals for Hospital Corpsmen affiliated with the U.S. Navy Medical School at Bethesda. He was Chief of the Day for the Medical School on Nov. 22 and when he heard about the assassination went to the office of the Master at Arms and sat there listening to the radio with Dr. Boswell, one of the doctors who later were involved in the autopsy.

At about 5 or 5:30 p.m., David noted to Lifton, the radio announcer reported that Kennedy's body was being flown in from Texas and would be taken to the Medical School. The Chief of the Day for the Medical Center Command was in touch with him within fifteen minutes, David added, and Secret Service agents were also at the hospital. "They called us together . . . I was asked to get a certain number of people to help guard the doors, to stand at the elevators, to act as roving patrols to keep sightseers and other morbid people out," Dennis David told Lifton. David also had to make telephone calls to various members of the morgue crew so that they would come in to the morgue for the upcoming autopsy.

When David got to the point where he described the arrival of the coffin with JFK's body for Lifton the surprises really started. What the ex-Navy man recounted was the arrival of the body via the back door of the hospital rather than the front, some thirty minutes prior to the arrival of the bronze casket that it was supposed to be in, and in a plain, gray shipping casket instead of the bronze casket it was supposed to have arrived in at the front of the Bethesda facility later.

David said that the plain shipping casket arrived with JFK's body at approximately 6:40 p.m. at the rear loading dock of the Medical Center, in a black Cadillac hearse with no markings on it, with two attendants in the front and six or seven men in back with the casket whom David assumed were Secret Service men. The men in the rear of the hearse opened the vehicle up and they, along with some of the sailors at the medical facility, unloaded the casket from the hearse and took it into the morgue, David said.

The black Cadillac hearse had come down a street at the rear of the Naval medical facility and pulled up at a loading dock at the rear of the building, David noted, and while he personally did not see Kennedy's body being taken from the shipping casket after it went into the morgue Dr. Boswell told him later that JFK's corpse had been in the shipping casket. David also noted that it was obvious that there was something in the shipping casket because if it was empty six to eight men would have bounced it around as they were carrying it. This shipping casket did not bounce and you could see the men carrying it strain as they did, he noted.

Dennis David also noted that he had been on the balcony on the interior of the front of the Medical Center building approximately half an hour later when the official motorcade with the bronze "official" casket arrived from Andrews Air Force Base. The ex-Navy man noted that it was obvious that the bronze casket was empty when it was brought in because of being told by one of the autopsy doctors earlier that it had come in by way of the shipping casket.

The men Dennis David worked with also discussed the matter, and he recalled that one conversation that he and some of the other Bethesda personnel had with one of the federal agents as to why there had been so much rigmarole with more than one ambulance being involved in getting the body to Bethesda. The answer that the federal agent gave was that it was necessary to keep a bit more control that would be necessary on the process because it was feared that somebody might attempt to hijack the corpse, or there might be delays due to people perhaps gathering around and slowing up traffic.

While Dennis David had lost sight of the shipping casket with JFK's body in it when it went into the morgue, persons inside the morgue automatically got their first glimpse of the conveyance that the deceased President's body arrived in as it entered. One of those persons was Paul Kelly O'Connor, who along with James Jenkins had the duty of preparing the body of the dead President for the autopsy.

O'Connor had been assigned to pathology at the medical school, and that was his duty station the day John Kennedy was shot. When the news hit Bethesda that the President had been shot, all classes were canceled and everybody was told to report to their duty station, according to O'Connor's recollection. That meant he had to report to the morgue, where he and Jenkins were told that they were confined to the morgue and they were going to have an "important visitor" that night. That was the first they knew the President was on his way to Bethesda, O'Connor said.

The body came into the morgue in a shipping casket, O'Connor noted, which is nothing but a cheap casket used to move dead persons from one location where they died at to whatever their destination might be. O'Connor described the shipping casket as a sort of slate gray color that was kind of pinkish on the edges.

The surprise that O'Connor provided was that when the lid of the coffin was undone by unscrewing the screws that held it down the President's body was not wrapped in sheets as Aubrey Rike said he had been in Dallas, but was instead discovered in a body bag. O'Connor, who had worked in a funeral home in his Indiana hometown as a teenager, described a body bag as nothing but a rubber bag that bodies are put into after a disaster or other violent incident which is zipped up, the same sort of bag that dead soldiers were brought back from Vietnam in.

The President's body was naked from head to toe, O'Connor recollected, with only a sheet being wrapped around the head. Normally the brain is removed from a corpse for examination during an autopsy, O'Connor told Lifton, but that just couldn't be done in the case of JFK due to the fact that there was literally no brain left in his head.

O'Connor, who at the time Lifton interviewed him believed the Warren Report, said that the wound to his head was "terrific," and measured some eight by four inches. It also stretched from the right rear of the head to the right temple area of the head when O'Connor first saw Kennedy's body, in comparison to a much smaller wound in the right rear of the head seen by the doctors at Parkland Hospital.

The ex-funeral home worker told Lifton that he believed the bullet must have literally blown all the brains out of Kennedy's head, due to the fact that the head was literally totally empty. There were some small bits of brain left in the head, but for the greatest part there was no brain left in the head. There was no need to remove the skullcap and open the skull as is usually done in an autopsy, O'Connor noted. These guys in the Bethesda morgue did not have to do that. They just looked right down into the head through that huge hole and noticed there was nothing left in the brain case.

The autopsy doctors noticed it also and O'Connor noted that they were "aghast" when that detail of the President's condition at the start of the autopsy was noted, probably due to the fact there was no brain left in the head and the severity of the wound. The morgue technicians didn't have to tell Commander Humes,the chief autopsy surgeon, that there was no brain, O'Connor said.

The appearance of the dead President really must have shaken Commander Humes up, from the way O'Connor described his reaction. "He was scared to death," O'Connor told Lifton.

O'Connor had also noted that he was afraid also, because that sort of situation on first looking at a corpse was not normal. He was also just a junior enlisted guy with a bunch of big Admirals and whatnot about. " . . . I just decided to keep my mouth shut," O'Connor said.

James Curtis Jenkins, also in charge of prepping the body for autopsy along with O'Connor, noted that when he first saw the body it had a hole in the head that had taken off at least one third of the skull which was gone. The hole extended toward the rear, with fragments that seemed to be hanging on, and which seemed to have been exploded toward the rear. Jenkins, who had previous exposure to the effects of gunshot wounds, expressed the belief that Kennedy had been shot in the head from the front. He had not noticed a frontal entry wound and assumed it had been blown away when the bullet struck, and concluded that the bullet must have struck from the right front.

The next day, Jenkins noted, "I found out that supposedly he had been shot from the back. I just, you know, I just couldn't believe it, and have never been able to believe it.

"I was very surprised by the conclusion . . . it was really kind of shocking to me. I guess I accepted it because of the circumstances I was in . . . But, I mean, I didn't accept it as being fact."

Lifton noted in his book that it was clear from speaking with Jenkins that he was very frightened by the experience. He had left the autopsy room convinced of the fact that Kennedy had been shot from front to back, only to find out from the next day's newspapers that the opposite had been reached as an autopsy conclusion. "It frightened me," he said. "I did not discuss it with anybody for many, many years, but I followed it very closely . . . I eventually discussed it with my wife."

The official story surrounding the autopsy held that conclusions about how Kennedy was shot and from what direction were reached the night of the autopsy, but Jenkins recalled that this was not the case.

"There were no conclusions that night," Jenkins told Lifton. What Jenkins heard at the autopsy table he described as "discussions."

"There were some speculations-discussions-between the three physicians, with a couple of other people-I don't know who they were. They seemed to be in charge, or seemed to be some type of authority," Jenkins said.

Jenkins didn't know who those civilians were who had the discussions with the doctors, but what they were talking about with the doctors was an obvious source of friction.

When the conversations came around to the fatal shot, Jenkins noted, "There were some discussions, questions asked, and things of that nature. but it was all kind of in a manner of-you know, searching for a conclusion, as opposed to drawing a conclusion."

As to the role of the civilians, Jenkins said that "The people running around in civilian clothes . . . had a preconcluded idea, and . . . because it was not panning out, you know, they were VERY-there were a lot of animosities, to be quite frank with you . . . there were very short tempers. Things of that nature."

"You mean-`tensions'?" Lifton asked him.

"Yes," Jenkins replied, "that you kind of feel."

Jenkins also told Lifton that it was his impression that "animosity" was directed toward the people doing the autopsy-Doctors Humes, Boswell and Finck. " . . . you know, this would be found, and somebody would say, `No, that's not right; can't be . . .' that type of thing," Jenkins noted.

Jenkins also noted that at the time he felt like Dr. Humes and Commander Boswell were getting irritated during the autopsy, and got the idea on his own that the two doctors were somehow being chastised.

Jenkins also noted that the source of the overall irritation in the morgue was the two or three civilians who were there during the autopsy, but he really didn't know who they were. "I don't know what they were, or who they were, or what their functions were, or anything of that nature," Jenkins noted in the Lifton interview.

Jenkins had been preoccupied with the medical details of the examination and didn't remember much about the civilians. He was tied down with handing doctors instruments, making sure the specimens were available, taking down weights of various things and handling other chores connected with the autopsy.

Jenkins also noted that there were more than five men in civilian clothes at the morgue during the autopsy, pointing out that he could not give Lifton an exact number. He noted that many more were present and they were sitting in the "gallery" section of the morgue that was a bit removed from the morgue proper but afforded a clear view of the proceedings.

While Jenkins was a bit vague during the interview on some aspects of the autopsy proceedings, his recall on the controversy over the neck trajectory was vivid. The wound at the front of the throat was assumed throughout the autopsy to be a tracheotomy, he said. But the civilians who seemed to be in charge seemed to be trying to get Humes to conclude that a bullet passed from back to front through the body. Jenkins had a clear recollection that this sort of thing was not possible, and remembered very clearly Humes probing the back wound with his little finger.

"What sticks out in my mind is the fact that Commander Humes put his little finger in it, and, you know said that . . . he could probe the bottom of it with his finger, which would mean to me [it was] very narrow," Jenkins noted. After the body was opened and the organs removed, Jenkins watched the doctors probe it again and remembered looking inside the chest cavity and seeing the probe through the bottom of the lining of the chest cavity, which also indicated that the wound was not very deep.

Jenkins also noted that he had assumed the autopsy report would have concluded that the President had been shot once in the back from behind and the bullet could not be found during the autopsy, and that the second shot to the head had come from the front.

In explaining how the autopsy report had come to be written the way it was, going along with the standing Warren Commission and Assassination Committee reports that the shots that hit Kennedy both came from behind, Jenkins straightforwardly said that Humes was a "super-military type of person," not in that he was authoritarian in nature but that he was concerned with his next promotion and his military career in general.

"He was the type of individual that would do anything anybody above him told him to do . . . my personal feeling is that he was probably directed to write the autopsy report." Jenkins also told Lifton that he has always assumed that those types of directions came from someone outside the Bethesda Naval Hospital. Lifton noted that the chain of command was pretty short at the level the autopsy was performed at-Humes's senior officers were the commanding officer of the medical school, the Commanding Officer of the Medical Center, and the U.S. Surgeon General. "And then you're either at the Joint Chiefs of Staff or orders from the White House," Lifton observed. Jenkins replied that "I didn't say that, you did." Lifton noted in the book he wrote based on his findings that it was obvious Jenkins had given the matter some thought and was not comfortable discussing it.

What Jenkins had to say also cast some doubt on the fact that despite that fact that Kennedy's body was altered, it was not altered sufficiently to create the unambiguous appearance of a shot from the rear. The former morgue attendant noted that when the body arrived in the autopsy room, at least a third of the skullbone was not attached. Fragments were in the coffin while some were attached to the scalp. He noted that the right rear and right side of the head was a large gaping area, but that most of the bones were still there and were put back together during the autopsy. "It had just been crushed, and kind of blown apart, toward the rear," Jenkins said. In short, despite the wound pattern being different then, it did not give the unambiguous appearance of a back-to-front shot. It did later after the head area was filled in with plaster of paris, though.

The main thing Jenkins derived from the autopsy was that the President was shot in the head from the front, and that fact was covered up from the start. Lifton noted that during the conversation he had with Jenkins the man was still frightened. The former corpsman was also very incredulous about the veracity and credibility of the federal government in the wake of the mangled autopsy report.

"Every time there seems to be something of importance that affects the nation, and I'm told one way by the government, I'm skeptical about it. Because this (the JFK assassination) was probably the most significant thing that had happened in this country in God knows how long, and my feelings are that the people themselves were just-well, to be quite frank-lied to about it, and for what reason I have no idea. I don't want to speculate on that-those types of things. If it's happened in something this important, this dramatic-I had almost wished I had not been there. . . ."

There was a postscript to Lifton's interview with Jenkins that the author included in his book about the head wound trajectory alteration. Andrew Purdy, lawyer with the Assassinations Committee, got hold of Jenkins in 1978 while that probe was still going on, and Jenkins told him he would be happy to talk to him, if he had proper identification. He also requested that the interview be conducted in his Congressman's office.

Purdy went to Jackson, Mississippi, where Jenkins was a student at the time, and Purdy was accompanied by staff investigator James P. Kelley. The interview the two men held with Jenkins lasted some three and a half hours.

No tape recording was made and no stenographic record was made. Jenkins thought that Kelley might have made a few handwritten notes. Jenkins told Lifton later that it quickly became apparent that Purdy and Kelley were not really interested in what he had to say nor his opinion, but merely wanted him to answer their questions. "I did feel a little intimidated," Jenkins told Lifton.

But while the body did enter the medical facility by way of a plain shipping casket and a body bag as the technicians who worked at the morgue the night of JFK's murder have noted, the arrival of the bronze casket and the necessity to get that casket back together with the corpse had to be done somehow to keep anybody from getting wise to the fact that they had been separated. It brings to mind the old American military saying among clerks that "It's all done with smoke and mirrors" in reference to some standard ploys that sometimes have to be engaged in due to the necessity for getting the job done.

Proof that the body and the Dallas casket were reunited came from James E. Metzler, who was an eyewitness to and probably a participant in the arrival of the body inside the Dallas casket. He was a hospital corpsman third class at the time of the autopsy but was only in the room for five or ten minutes, and was then asked to leave the morgue.

Metzler was in the lab school at Bethesda at the time, and had chosen the morgue watch for the type work he did at Bethesda when he was not attending classes because he thought it was more interesting than watching for fires in the barracks at night, which was the alternative.

"I was just there for maybe about five or ten minutes when they brought in President Kennedy [to the morgue] . . . we got a call from upstairs-they said they were bringing him in by decoy around the back. So I went out back and sure enough, there was the honor guard (supplied by the Military District of Washington which usually provides funeral honor guards)." Metzler told Lifton that he had heard there was a helicopter somewhere that was apparently part of the decoy scheme, and some sort of measure was used to keep people away from the area when the body was brought in, according to information Metzler had heard during the few days following the autopsy. He did tell Lifton that it was common knowledge in the hospital that the Kennedys had arrived after the body did. That honor guard had escorted the bronze casket into the hospital.

Metzler also noted to Lifton that he went to the door to the loading dock and they brought the casket in, after which the honor guard had to leave. Then Metzler helped put Kennedy on the table with about four other people.

Kennedy was all in a sheet and his head was wrapped in a sheet also, according to Metzler, when he was taken out of the viewing casket that the honor guard had brought into the rear of Bethesda. One of the sheets was wrapped completely around the entire body while the other one was wrapped around the head, Metzler told Lifton.

It was then that Metzler was requested to leave the morgue. "The pathologist told me I could go-they had everything they needed," Metzler noted. "They hadn't started the autopsy yet. They were just about to begin."

What Metzler encountered on his way out of the morgue through the area where the various refrigerated chillboxes were located where bodies were temporarily kept prior to autopsies being performed was also interesting.

Metzler walked out of the morgue into the anteroom with the chillboxes in it along with a desk and a telephone. Big double doors open from the anteroom into the morgue itself, with its amphitheater and the two autopsy tables.

What he encountered was a group of men in plainclothes, about ten of them, whom he had always assumed were FBI men. He really did not know which government agency they represented, though. The men did have what Metzler referred to as a "roster," which was a list of names of persons who were supposed to be in the morgue during the autopsy. Metzler's immediate problem after walking into the anteroom was that his name was not on the list.

" . . . when I left, they asked me for my identification, and I gave it to them, and they saw that my name was not on the list to be in the room, because I had been in the room before they came. "I guess they were guarding who comes in and who goes out-security, part of it . . . Because when I came out into the refrigerated room, this one guy says, `What's your name?' and I told him and he looked down at his list and he said `Let me see your ID card' and they looked it that-there's a picture on it, of course-[and] they said, `His name isn't on the list.' And the other guy steps across the door, so you can't open the door, you know, it [was] really kind of spooky. . . ."

The strange men in the anteroom wrote down his name, and he was cut loose, then went upstairs to let one of the officers in charge know that his name wasn't on the list because Metzler didn't want him to get into any trouble.

Interestingly enough, it was also Metzler's idea that from the way the wound was located toward the back of the head that President Kennedy must have been shot in the head from the front. Metzler was not adamant about it, Lifton noted, and when he later read that the official autopsy concluded otherwise, he simply assumed that he was wrong.

Metzler also thought that when the sheet was taken off, you could see a brain, or part of a brain, within the cranial vault of Kennedy's head.

All the preceding persons whom Lifton interviewed about their experiences who said that when JFK's body arrived at the Bethesda morgue the wound pattern was indicative of a shot from the front were not the only ones who said that. The two X-ray technicians who were called in to contribute their expertise to the autopsy of the dead President also said that the wound trajectory looked like it was mainly a front-to-back wound pattern to the head.

Edward Reed was twenty years old when he was an X-ray technician at Bethesda in 1963, and the front to back trajectory appearance was what he remembered also. He told Lifton that he relied on the location of the large head wound that was "more posterior than anterior" in forming the opinion that the President was shot in the head from the front.

It was about six months before he realized that the official version of the autopsy conflicted with the opinions he had drawn from the actual appearance of the body on the night of the autopsy, and it was hard form him to accept the official version when he discovered what it was.

Jerrol Custer, the other X-ray technician, said that the President's head wound was enormous, so enormous that "I could put both of my hands in the wound . . . ." Custer also believed that Kennedy had been shot from the front, and pointed out that when a person goes hunting the bullet goes into the body small and comes out large. That is exactly how the skull looked in relation to the front-to-back appearance of the wound trajectory, he told Lifton.

While Custer held that view in November of 1963, he shrugged it off when the official version was publicized due to the fact that he was a "lowly X-ray technologist . . . and all of these so-called experts were saying this didn't happen. I just figured-well, maybe I could be wrong."

Custer also told Lifton that he exposed, and returned to the morgue, X-rays showing that the rear of the President's head was blown off.

By the end of the conversation Lifton had with Custer, the X-ray tech supplied one piece of information that tied in with other pieces of information pertaining to what coffin the President's body first arrived in.

According to Custer, Jackie Kennedy came walking in the front entrance to the Bethesda medical facility while he was making his second or third trip from the morgue to an area upstairs where the X-ray film was developed at.

When Custer saw Jackie Kennedy she was walking into the Bethesda front entrance on her way to the Towers section of Bethesda, where she stayed while the autopsy was going on. Custer said that he passed her, " . . . and I had my arms full of film, and in fact what struck me is she still had that dress on."

Custer explained that developing the X-rays required a trip from the morgue to one of the upper floors in the Bethesda medical center, and that trip passed through the lobby area. A Secret Service man served as an escort on the trips that Custer had to make to the area where the film was developed.

"I remember her coming in and being surrounded by reporters, and then there were Secret Service men, and they were pushing the reporters out of the way. As they pushed them out of the way, I remember seeing her come through . . . . I can't remember what color dress, but I remember I saw the bloodstains on it . . . and the Secret Service guy behind us said: `Come on, let's go.' For some reason, he didn't want people to know-you know-what we were doing."

Jackie Kennedy was spotted by Custer from a distance of about ten or fifteen yards. "I saw her, because she stuck out like a sore thumb," he told Lifton. He continued down the hallway and then took an elevator upstairs to get his X-ray film processed, Lifton added.

Floyd Albert Reibe,the photographer's assistant at the autopsy, noted that he was inside the morgue when he first saw the coffin, which was brought in by men "in civilian clothes, with a military guard." Reibe also noted that the casket was pretty much like a shipping casket and had turnbuckles on it. The coffin was definitely not a viewing casket, he noted. He also recalled that the body was in a body bag when the coffin was opened.

One interesting thing Reibe contributed was that he had taken some pictures of Kennedy lying on his stomach. What is interesting about that recollection is that there are no such shots in the official collection of photographs surrounding the autopsy report.

The picture of the back wound shows Kennedy lying on his back with his right shoulder tilted up away from the table. He added that he also thought he took about six pictures composed of about three film packs of internal portions of the body. Those pictures are not with the official collection either.

Those official photos also contain one detail Reibe said clash with the normal way autopsies are done-the corpse had a towel clearly labeled "Bethesda Naval Hospital" underneath it. The reason no towel or anything else is put under a corpse at autopsy, according to Reibe, is due to the way an autopsy table is constructed with two levels to facilitate the draining of fluids.

"You got the upper part and it's got hundreds of holes in it for any fluid to go ahead and drain down and almost out of sight; but if you put a sheet or a cover, something like that [under the body], it would all stay up at the top."

Reibe's talk with Lifton also brought out the information that security measures which in effect gagged the men who helped perform the autopsy until the Assassinations Committee put the heat on to have the gag order rescinded years later came right from the top of the federal government when it was issued.

The assistant photographer at the autopsy told Lifton that the persons who participated in the autopsy were called into the office of Dr. Stover, head of the medical facility. Captain Stover explained the Secrecy Act to the personnel involved and told them that the White House wanted to keep details of the autopsy secret and not to talk about it. Those personnel called in had to sign a standard military letter indicating that they had been informed that they were not to talk about what had transpired during the autopsy and that the penalty for talking in contravention of the warning letter could well include their being court martialed among other penalties.

The warning letter had been extremely effective. When Lifton tracked down the men who had been involved in the autopsy, in the late 1970s when all of them were out of the service even, they would not talk with him or even with Assassinations Committee personnel until the order was rescinded.

The general thought on the part of the men at the time was that the gag order was part of the normal security procedures which surrounded the autopsy and the rest of the incidents surrounding the assassination of the President. Lifton's outlook was that it was probably part of the conspiracy in effect to help shield the fact that there had been wound trajectory modification carried out in an attempt to frame Oswald.

Given the fact that what Lifton had fallen upon and dug out was evidence that the body of JFK had gotten to Bethesda well before the bronze Brittanica coffin it had been placed in at Dallas, what we are faced with is, as Lifton notes, a probable operation to cover up the fact that we actually witnessed a crossfire in Dealey Plaza that killed the President. The alteration of the head wound pattern was central to the coverup and all the strange things reported by the morgue technicians when they were finally interviewed years after the fact supported the fact that head alteration did occur-the body arriving prior to the bronze casket in a body bag and a shipping casket, the head appearing as if it had a front-to-back wound trajectory despite the alteration being done [which implies the job not being totally completed at whatever point it was done] and the clamping down of a gag order so that none of the Navy morgue technicians could leak any information of what had happened to the outside world.

The question of where the body had gotten altered, and how it had gotten to that point, was one big gap in the head wound alteration angle of the story. Lifton, after checking out various leads on that part of the Kennedy assassination, came to the conclusion that the head wound trajectory pattern had been altered at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which is only a few miles away from Bethesda.

Going on such evidence as what radio transmissions were made to and from Air Force One enroute from Washington to Dallas, sound and videotapes lifted from live broadcast news coverage of the arrival of Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base near both medical facilities, Lifton postulated the following chain of events in the head wound alteration:

-The body could have been stored in either the baggage hold or in the Boeing's galley by persons unknown as baggage during some brief intermission when nobody was with the coffin, such as the time period when all of the persons on the aircraft went to the area where Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as President for that ceremony.

-The body was taken off the aircraft upon its arrival at Andrews via a ramp on the right front of the plane, which was the side away from all the radio and television reporters with their sound gear and cameras. A military helicopter moves in close to the right side of Air Force One just after it taxis to a stop, and is again airborne and flying away within 90 seconds of the plane stopping. While the helicopter is flying off, the bronze casket is taken off the rear of the Presidential aircraft, loaded into a Navy ambulance, and a motorcade including the ambulance heads for Bethesda for the autopsy.

-Once that Presidential plane had landed there was something like a 20-minute time gap available for whomever did the head alterations to actually do them, including air transportation to the location it was done at and from that location to Bethesda. Walter Reed, according to a look at a map Lifton carried out, was the closest point to Bethesda where such an alteration could be carried out. It had all the right equipment and plenty of appropriate areas, one would suspect, where it could be done, not to mention the trained personnel who could do it.

-Once the alteration was made to the extent it was made, the body was loaded into that Cadillac hearse or another helicopter and taken over to Bethesda Naval Medical Center. While some of the personnel at Bethesda definitely reported the shipping casket being taken from a Cadillac hearse by Navy personnel and six big, strong men in civilian clothes, other reports of helicopters being used as either decoy transportation or actual means of transportation were also heard from personnel that Lifton interviewed.

Lifton noted that altering the body did two things for whoever was behind the plot to kill John Kennedy --

1. The bullet trajectories changed and the true locations of the shooters were concealed. Bullet retrieval from the President's head insured that bullets and bullet fragments from the weapons that actually murdered the President would not reach the FBI Laboratory.

2. Introduction of a false assassin could be arranged through changing the wounds, throwing off the major investigations which would be sure to follow and making sure that the very vulnerable position of the actual plotters over discovery was solved by letting the actual shooters get away scot free. The protection of the plotters would be significantly increased if they could deflect all investigations by providing a false solution and a false perpetrator.

Lifton also noted that while the assassination of an American President is a political event since people would want to know not only who killed the president but why, those who altered the body were in a position to provide a sort of answer to that question. By creating the appearance that President Kennedy was killed by a lone and embittered man, JFK's death was denuded of political meaning and made to look like a historical accident.

The reason the plan to alter the head wound worked, at least on the official level, is due to what Lifton discovered about the legal profession in general-the lawyers in this country don't think like everybody else does, nor do they use the English language like everybody else does.

When they say they need the best evidence to prosecute or defend a legal case, they don't talk about things like what an eyewitness saw or the testimony that witness can offer. In fact, eyewitness facts and testimony in the eyes of a lawyer in America is actually among the worst types of evidence due to the fact that witnesses are seen as not accurate recorders of what actually happened.

On the other hand, things like autopsy reports which are the issue of an official autopsy done by professional forensic pathologists with training and experience, and physical evidence dug up by detectives such as spent shell casings and an old Italian army rifle in the Book Depository are among the best types of evidence as far as lawyers are concerned.

The corpse is also among the best evidence, due to the fact that the pathologists have the corpse to work on to come up with an autopsy report from.

So, if one makes the body lie in the JFK assassination by altering the head wound trajectory pattern, you've automatically gulled the pathologists (especially when they are military men under orders) and thrown the basics of the case right out the window.

A very simple thing when one thinks about it, but a brilliant move nonetheless in its simplicity. Apparently the JFK assassination was not engineered by fools.

What tipped it, as Lifton noted, were those little things that came up as slips in the overall situation, the occurrence of the assassination and its aftermath. If Zapruder had not been standing there with his camera, if those technicians in the Bethesda morgue would not have noticed what they did about the head wounds and spoke up finally after the gag order was rescinded, and all the other little things that went astray in the plan just enough to let the cover story slip so the truth underneath could be glimpsed, nobody would have been the wiser.

After so many years the trail would logically have gone cold in the Kennedy assassination, but that may not necessarily be so.

As late as the late 1970s and the early 1980s, when the Assassinations Committee was concluding its work and Lifton was bringing his book out respectively, there were areas and paths that could be looked at and followed in any sort of investigation that the Justice Department could go after if it chose to . . . or was forced to, considering that the evidence to warrant a new official investigation has been there all along.

The probe into who was behind orders from the White House pertaining to the autopsy and the way it was handled are just one area, as are details of how the Secret Service handled the evidence, the trip planning for the President and other aspects of getting the corpse back to Washington from Dallas. Why did they really feel constrained to almost running the Dallas County Coronor, Earl Rose, over with the coffin on their way out of Parkland Hospital? In the light of all evidence pointing toward foul play in the form of a conspiracy and subsequent coverup in the JFK assassination, one suspects that simple consideration for the feelings of Mrs. Kennedy was certainly not the primary reason for that isolated incident.

One other area of investigation is one that was unlocked by freelance writer and former Assassinations Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi while he was working for that committee, where he was literally breathing down the back of a mysterious CIA agent in pursuit of the "Who Did It?" question of the JFK assassination.

The Assassinations Committee, when it released its report in the summer of 1979, was overdue with the report since it had officially gone out of business in December of 1978. The lag between the actual death of the committee and the issuance of its report was caused by Chief Counsel Robert Blakey figuring the report had to be rewritten with a lot more weight being given to a conspiracy since the acoustics evidence showed there was one. The problem was who to blame for it. Since Blakey was an old hand at being an organized crime expert with experience in Federal organized crime strike forces, as well as being head of Cornell University's Organized Crime Institute when he was asked to take over the Assassinations Committee, the fact he blamed organized crime for it was not surprising.

Problem was, there was plenty of evidence that Fonzi dug up alone to show that the footprints of an intelligence agency were all around and through the Kennedy assassination, and that investigator had also been tracking that one American intelligence agent who had been seen in the company of Lee Harvey Oswald not too long before the Dealey Plaza assassination.

When Blakey took over and starting hiring staff personnel, it soon became obvious that his personal background was heavily influencing the way the investigation would probably go, according to Fonzi's article "Who Killed JFK?" in the Washingtonian Magazine of November 1980. All the new hires were from Blakey's contacts in the organized-crime-fighting old boy network, such as Gary Cornwell who was picked to head the Kennedy investigation task force. Cornwell, when he was chief of the Federal strike Force in Kansas City, had achieved notable trial victories against key Mafia figures in the Midwest.

The hiring pattern apparently wasn't so bad in itself. However, the outlook behind the investigation was really what kicked the applecart over as far as the failure to track down leads as they were instead of trying to make the facts fit a preconceived idea.

Fonzi noted that in his first address to the staff that the first priority was to get a report produced. The second priority was to produce a report that looked good, one that appeared to be definitive and substantial.

The report actually doesn't say organized crime did it, though, as Fonzi pointed out in his article. The report said that "The Committee believes, on the basis of evidence available to it, that the national syndicate of Organized Crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved."

Blakey, in a press conference attached to the issuing of the report, noted that HE and not the committee said that organized crime was involved, and he was correct in saying that.

The persons the committee were talking about being involved, as Fonzi noted, were Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Santos Trafficante of Florida, who could have been involved in the assassination on their own hooks. But at the same time, the report said in its body that "It is unlikely that either Marcello or Trafficante was involved in the assassination of the President."

With contradictions like that, it was hard to believe how the committee managed to spend the time and money it did on investigating the situation until one read Fonzi's article.

What he detailed was the shooting down of the first Chief Counsel of the committee after he began locking horns with the CIA, then a relatively dead investigative period where the very existence of the committee was in doubt, followed by the Blakey takeover and the roll into getting a report out instead of conducting a no-holds-barred homicide investigation like the first counsel wanted to.

That first Chief Counsel of the committee was Richard Sprague, who had gotten a national name for himself with his successful prosecution of United Mine Workers president Tony Boyle for the murder of UMW reformer Joseph Yablonski. Sprague also had a record of 69 homicide convictions out of 70 prosecutions while he was first assistant district attorney of Philadelphia.

One of Sprague's stipulations on accepting the job was that he have complete authority to hire his own staff and run the investigation as he saw fit. Two separate investigations were what he had in mind, one for John F. Kennedy and another for Martin Luther King, Jr. He also insisted on handling both cases as if they were homicide investigations.

Out of a longtime prosecutor, this was not a surprising move, and made sense when one remembered that the files don't ever close on a homicide case until it is either solved or until the perpetrator is deemed to have died from natural causes. He also noted that he would need a staff of at least 220 and an initial annual budget of $6.5 million, and there was no guarantee that amount of money would be enough to finish the job.

When it became obvious that Sprague meant to conduct and honest-to-God investigation, it didn't take long for the fire to begin. While he had not pulled either the staff or budget figures out of the air but based it on resources the Warren commission had available from all the investigative agencies which kicked in information, the budget became the focal point of the the attacks on Sprague.

While the new Chief Counsel probably thought he was going to Washington to conduct an investigation, he found himself very quickly having to do a bunch of tap dancing, procrastinating on getting the actual investigating going, and trying to just get enough money coming in from irate Congressmen who didn't like his approach for the committee to literally just stay alive.

The committee was also hampered by the fact that Congressman Henry Gonzalez of Texas was ticked off at not being named chairman of it when it was originally set up. When the congressman who had been named the original chairman had retired prior to the time the vote came up on whether or not to keep the committee going by funding its operations, Gonzalez was in the chairman's seat and kicking his heels up at Sprague, whom he saw as too independent for his own or the committee's good.

The entire upshot was that Sprague won the peeing contest with Gonzalez, but wound up having to resign because a large amount of Congressmen didn't like the idea of a Chief Counsel being directly responsible for a congressman being booted out of the chairmanship even if it was directly voted on by the rest of the committee.

What happened was that Sprague finally had no choice but to resign after it became obvious to everybody that the committee simply would not get funded and would effectively die if he did not resign.

As far as it went, it was apparently obvious that this was what drove Sprague to resign. Fonzi noted it was apparent that Sprague's insistence on lie detectors and voice stress analyzers, his demand for an expensive, unrestricted investigation and his refusal to play politics with Chairman Gonzalez all brought on the criticism that resulted in the committee almost dying and Sprague resigning.

After Sprague had a chance to think it over following his resignation, he took what Fonzi described as a wider view of what the cause really was.

Robert Sam Anson of NEW TIMES magazine interviewed Sprague after he returned from Acapulco following his resignation, and the prosecutor admitted that he and the staff had little time to investigate when fire was being directed at him from all directions.

He told Anson that if he could do it over again, he would begin his investigation of the Kennedy assassination by probing "Oswald's ties to the Central Intelligence Agency."

When Fonzi asked Sprague why he had come to that conclusion, Sprague noted he first thought that the leadership of the House of Representatives really hadn't intended for there to be an investigation, with the Committee being set up to appease the Black Caucus which had wanted it to get the Martin Luther King assassination investigated also.

"I still believe that was a factor," Fonzi noted that Sprague told him. "But when I looked back at what happened, it suddenly became very clear that the problems began only after I ran up against the CIA. That's when my troubles really started."

What Sprague meant by the time he ran up against the CIA was the incident he started looking into when the Committee was trying to get reconstituted, when Congressional critics were screaming for something substantial in the way of results so that it would look like the Committee was really producing something.

What this mean that Sprague was looking for some obvious things to go after, Fonzi said. One of them was the situation where the CIA had given the Warren Commission a photo of what it said was Lee Harvey Oswald leaving the Cuban and Russian embassies while in Mexico City, in an effort to get an in-transit visa to Russia via Cuba. When Oswald visited the Russian Embassy he spoke with a Soviet consul who was really a KGB intelligence officer, the CIA also said. The CIA station in Mexico City told headquarters that it had also obtained a photo of Oswald visiting the embassy and described the man in the photo as approximately 35 years old, six feet tall, with an athletic build and receding hairline, Fonzi noted.

When the Warren Commission got the photos of the man at the embassy, it turned out not to be Oswald. The CIA said it had simply goofed when informed of that discrepancy, and there were no photos of Oswald taken in Mexico City. The man in the photos was never identified. CIA also could provide very little information of Oswald's activities in Mexico City, could provide no record of Oswald's daily movements there, nor could they confirm the date of his departure or his method of travel.

A CIA man by the name of David Atlee Phillips was the person in charge of reporting such information from Mexico at the time of Oswald's visit, Fonzi noted that Sprague learned when he approached that area of enquiry.

Phillips was called to testify in front of the assassination s committee in November of 1976. Sprague had noted that Phillips said the CIA had monitored and taped Oswald's conversation with the Soviet Embassy, with the tape being transcribed by a CIA employee who mistakenly coupled it with a photo of a person who was not Oswald. Phillips also noted that the actual tape recording was routinely destroyed or recycled a week after it was received.

Sprague, however, discovered later that an FBI memorandum to the Secret Service dated November, 1963, referred to the CIA identification of the man who had visited the Russian Embassy, and noted that "Special Agents of this Bureau who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Texas, have observed photographs of the individual referred to above and have listened to a recording of his voice. These Special Agents are of the opinion that the above-referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald."

What got Sprague's interest up was how the FBI agents could have listened to a tape recording in November that Phillips said had been destroyed in October. He decided to push the CiA for an answer, Fonzi said, which meant that he wanted information about the CIA's operation in Mexico City, access to all its employees who may have had anything to do with the photographs, tape recordings, and transcripts. The result was that the CIA balked and Sprague pushed harder, Fonzi noted. The Agency finally agreed that Sprague could have access to the things he wanted provided he signed a CIA secrecy agreement.

He declined. Sprague figured that would be a direct conflict with House Resolution 222, which established the Assassinations Committee and authorized it to investigate the agencies of the United States government. Sprague's main question was how could he possibly sign an agreement with an agency he was supposed to be investigating. The Chief Counsel's comeback was that he would subpoena the CIA's records.

It was not too long after that occurred that the first attempt to get the assassinations committee reconstituted was blocked, Fonzi said. One of the critics was Representative Robert Michel of Illinois who objected to the scope of the Committee's mandate, Fonzi noted. "With the proposed mandate," Michel said, "that Committee could begin a whole new investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency!"

Sprague said that is exactly what he intended to do, and he contended at the time of Fonzi's story that it was the beginning of the end.

During the time the infighting was going on between Committee members, Fonzi had not been sitting on his hands in Miami, where he was doing his investigative work for that body, mainly in the area of anti-Castro Cuban activities surrounding the assassination. Such investigative leads as there were surrounding the expatriate Cubans would lead him down a path where he would close in a CIA spymaster during the Committee investigation, but there were also other interesting characters and leads Fonzi was working on.

One such person who was a lead all in himself was George de Mohrenschildt, the White Russian emigre who had befriended Oswald and Marina Oswald on their arrival in American from Russia when Oswald returned from a supposed defection and later change of heart.

George de Mohrenschildt had long been one of the shadowy figures of the JFK assassination, with a background in intelligence work and a large amount of suspicion surrounding him regarding what role he may have played in it. Putting his out-of-context friendship with the Oswalds and his intelligence background caused a lot of raised eyebrows among private assassination researchers over the years, but nobody ever came up with anything that would definitely point to him being directly involved in any capacity. Fonzi's look at de Mohrenschildt came as the result of a phone call he got from committee member Bob Tannenbaum in May of 1977, where Tannenbaum told him he had just gotten a call from Dutch journalist Wilhelm Oltmans.

Oltmans had gotten national television coverage when he told the Committee he had interviewed de Mohrenschildt and claimed the White Russian had confessed he had been part of the "Dallas conspiracy" of oilmen and Cuban exiles with a "blood debt to settle." According to Oltmans, de Mohrenschildt had also said that Oswald had "acted at his guidance and instructions."

de Mohrenschildt was reportedly the victim of a nervous breakdown during the time he was talking to Oltmans, but had left a hospital in Dallas to travel with the journalist on a book and magazine rights negotiating trip in Europe. While in Brussels, Oltmans said, de Mohrenschildt had disappeared.

Tannenbaum told Fonzi during their May telephone conversation that Oltmans had called the Committee from California, and said that in tracking down de Mohrenschildt had discovered that the White Russian could be reached at a telephone number in Florida. Tannenbaum gave Fonzi the phone number and that same afternoon Fonzi checked it out.

The number belonged to Mrs. C. E. Tilton III of Manalapan, a Palm Beach area strip of high-value land on the ocean. Fonzi would later learn that Mrs. Tilton was the sister of one of de Mohrenschildt's former wives. At that time he decided to contact de Mohrenschildt in person rather than by telephone.

Fonzi went out looking for his man the morning of March 29, 1977, in Manalapan. The Tilton home was located on the edge of the ocean highway behind a barrier of high hedges, and was a large, two-story structure with dark cedar shingles and green trim. Fonzi though it looked like it belonged in New England more than it did in Florida.

Fonzi drove into the wide yard beside the house and ran into de Mohrenschildt's daughter, Alexandra, as she appeared from behind a garage. She told him that her father was in Palm Beach and that she did not know how to reach him. She was certain that he would be in the same evening and that Fonzi could reach him if he phoned about 8 o'clock. She also said that she would tell her father to expect Fonzi's call.

About 6:30 that evening Fonzi got a call from a friend who was a television reporter in Dallas. The reporter told him that "We just aired a story that came over the wire about a Dutch journalist saying the Assassinations Committee has finally located de Mohrenschildt in south Florida. Now de Mohrenschildt's attorney, a guy named Pat Russel-he calls and says de Mohrenschildt committed suicide this afternoon. Is that true?"

The train of events Fonzi recounted in the death of de Mohrenschildt was that the man he was looking for had returned to the Tilton home in Manalapan about four hours after Fonzi left it the same morning. Alexandra told him of Fonzi's visit and gave him a card Fonzi had left. He put the card in his pocket and, according to Alexandra, did not seem upset. Shortly afterwards he said he was going upstairs to rest. He apparently took a 20-gauge shotgun Mrs. Tilton kept beside her bed for protection, sat down on a soft chair, put the stock of the shotgun on the floor and the end of the barrel in his mouth, leaned forward, and pulled the trigger.

Fonzi called Sprague in Washington as soon as he had confirmed de Mohrenschildt's death, and Sprague suggested he get to the scene immediately while he attempted to get staff members together and contacted Committee members to prepare subpoenas.

Fonzi took off and rushed around Palm Beach County to learn the details of de Mohrenschildt's death, trying to coordinate the Committee's handling of the case with Palm Beach State Attorney Dave Bludworth, who was cooperative but increasingly confused about the lack of coordination the Committee had. Sprague, Fonzi later learned, was unable to do anything and never did get back in touch with him. No subpoenas were ever issued, no witnesses were ever called to testify, and no independent investigation was ever made of de Mohrenschildt's death, Fonzi noted in his article. He also noted that it was a sign of how well the Committee's opponents had been in keeping it distracted and off balance that six months after its formation the Committee could not react to the death of a key witness.

Fonzi found out from the next morning's headlines that while he was trying to get the goods on the de Mohrenschildt death, Sprague had quit. By 8 that morning, as Fonzi was still trying to get hold of somebody on the Committee in Washington, Sprague was on his way to Acapulco.

The same day, the House voted to continue the Committee at a stripped-down budget of $2.5 million for the year. Fonzi pegged the resignation of Richard Sprague and the death of George de Mohrenschildt as the key factors in the House vote to let the Committee live.

It was probably too bad that Fonzi had not gotten to talk to de Mohrenschildt and that his death was not investigated as well as it might have been. He was born in Russia in 1911, the son of a czarist official who later became a wealthy landowner in Poland. He was a longtime petroleum engineer and was a consultant for various Texas oil companies.

He also self-admittedly worked for French intelligence and in 1961 showed up at a Guatemalan camp being used by Cuban exiles as a training center for the Bay of Pigs invasion. At the time, he and his fourth wife, Jean LeGon, were reputedly on a walking tour of South America.

He also moved in high society, which made his befriending the Oswalds a dubious proposition. His first wife was Palm Beach resident Dorothy Pierson. His second wife was the daughter of a high State Department official, while his third was Philadelphia Main Line socialite Wynne Sharples. He took Jeanne LeGon as his fourth wife in 1959 in Dallas. Her father had been the director of the Far Eastern Railroad in Manchuria.

Gary Taylor, who had been married to de Mohrenschildt's daughter Alexandra, had been asked by one Warren Commission counsel if he thought the White Russian had any influence over Oswald.

Taylor replied in the affirmative, also noting that there had apparently been what he termed a great deal of influence there. Taylor, when asked if he had any further comments that might help the Commission, noted that in his opinion noted that " . . . the only thing that occurred to me was that-uh-and I guess it was from the beginning-that if there was any assistance or plotters in the assassination that it was, in my opinion, most probably the de Mohrenschildts." Lifton noted that the Warren Commission did little to explore that contention.

Once the Committee settled down after Bob Blakey came in as Chief Counsel, Fonzi was able to concentrate on one lead he had dug up while he had been an investigator for Senator Schweiker during an earlier Congressional investigation that touched on the Kennedy assassination. That lead had led him to a Cuban exile who had been one of the leading anti-Castro activists in the Miami exile community, who had in turn led Fonzi to a CIA spymaster who had been in touch with Lee Harvey Oswald not too long before the assassination.

That investigation was the one carried out by the Senate's Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to intelligence Activities, headed by Idaho Senator Frank Church, which became known as the Church Committee and was in operation in 1975-76.

Richard S. Schweiker, Senator from Pennsylvania, was a member of that committee and was intrigued enough by details of the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission to spend one of his summers poring through the evidence, and the available agency documents relating to the murder of JFK. When the committee reopened after the Congressional recess, Schweiker issued a call for the JFK assassination to be reopened. The congressman also noted that Oswald had intelligence connections and that the fingerprints of intelligence work were all around the man blamed for Kennedy's death.

The Church Committee had been formed in January 1975 and its report was due for release by that next coming September, so when Schweiker had this move called for there just wasn't that much time left. The deadline was extended to March of 1976, though, and Schweiker then came up with his idea of throwing the Kennedy assassination into the pot also. The upshot was that Church, not wanting to really get into it too broadly with everything else the committee was looking at but not wanting to go against the idea publicly, came up with a compromise. Schweiker and a Democratic counterpart, Colorado Senator Gary Hart, were allowed to set up a two-man Kennedy assassination subcommittee provided that it also would finished in March along with the rest of the committee.

Schweiker, hoping for enough hard facts or a new revelation to push the entire committee into going after the Kennedy assassination, went along with it. That Senator was looking into the JFK deal for about a month before he called Fonzi.

While Fonzi noted that Schweiker never told him all the reasons he wanted an independent investigator, there were several reasons the senator felt he needed an outside staff investigator who would report directly to him and not the committee. He wanted someone who knew something about the Kennedy case, and he wanted to do some original investigative work instead of relying on the FBI and CIA. He also wasn't ready to rule out other possibilities, Fo