ustxtxb_obs_1991_12_27_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

Lee Harvey Oswald came out near his right nipple and somehow managed to strike his or anterior side, and shattered the wristbone and came out of the wrist to strike Connally in the left thigh. Later that afternoon, a bullet was discovered on a Parkland Hospital stretcher which could not be conclusively connected to Kennedy or Connally, but was proclaimed by the federal government to be the bullet which caused the wounds just described. The recovered slug was “pristine,” with 159 of its original 161 grains of weight intact. To persons even vaguely familiar with ballistics or forensic science, this was and is hogwash. Just one of the facts that put the lie to the theory of the Parkland bullet is this one: with Connally’s wrist X-ray available to the public, we find more grains of bullet remain in his wrist today than are missing from the slug the government still claims caused his wrist wound. If the “single-bullet” theory collapses, so does the “lone-assassin” theory, because a single bolt-action rifle could not have been fired rapidly enough to hit both Kennedy and Connally with-in the time span recorded by the Zapruder film of the assassination. Further hard evidence of the existence of two or multiple assassins comes from the acoustical tests conducted by two separate groups of scientists commissioned by the House committee in the 1970s. More such hard evidence is provided by the Hughes and Bronson films, which corroborate eyewitness testimony that more than one man was seen on the sixth floor of the Depository both before the assassination and as long as six minutes after the shootingmore than four minutes after Oswald was encountered by both a Dallas policeman and his work supervisor in a downstairs lunchroom of the building. So, now we consider a conspiracy. It is my opinion, based on considerations that I regard as logical and controlling, that the theory that international communists were behind the plot can be dismissed. First, communistswhether of the Soviet or Cuban stripehad nothing to gain and everything to lose from killing President Kennedy. They gained as President Lyndon B. Johnson, a man with far grimmer anticommunist credentials than Kennedy, and thereby they ran the risk of another U.S. invasion of Cuba, or even World War III. It might be reasonable to suspect that the government hid proof of a communist plot in 1963-’64 to avoid war, but if it had such proof it certainly would have leaked it in the early 1970s to regain support for the anti-communist war in Vietnam. Furthermore, there is no solid evidence that either Oswald or his executioner Jack Ruby had any connection with U.S. communists. Quite the opposite, since both Oswald and Ruby can be connected to CIAsupported anti-Castro Cubans and to the FBI. So now we, with Oliver Stone, must consider a domestic conspiracy or conspiracies. Anyone could have hired competent assassins to kill the president, but no one would have dared move against the chief executive officer without firm assurances that there would be no meaningful pursuit of the conspirators. That proposition leads us to a second conspiracy, to block a real investigation of the crime and cover up any traces of the truth of the matter. Imagine that you are the detective in a homicide case. You arrive at the scene to find that the police have arrested four suspects. You are Jim Marrs, a Texan who grew up in Dallas-Fort Worth, is the author of Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy which is now in its fourth printing in both hardbound and softbound editions. In 1990 the rights to the book were purchased by Oliver Stone; the author informs us that Crossfire is one of the two books that were used as the basis for Stone’s film, “JFK,” the other one being Jim Garrison’s On the Trail of the Assassins Crossfire is reviewed at page 19. After graduating from the University of North Texas with a BA in journalism, Marrs worked for the Denton Record-Chronicle and the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal while attending graduate school at Texas Tech. Returning to the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 1968, he began working as a police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. By the mid-1970s he was an investigative reporter doing special assignments, some of which entailed trips to Europe and the Middle East. He was president of the Fort Worth Press Club and is a member of Sigma Delta Chi, the journalists’ professional organization. Since 1980 he has been a freelance writer and a public relations consultant. During his military service Marrs served with Fqurth Army Intelligence. As a college student, in the fall of 1963, he met Jack Ruby while visiting the Carousel Club in Dallas. As a reporter Marrs interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother Marguerite and his wife Marina; Jeanne DeMohrenschildt, one of Oswald’s closest friends; James Tague, the third man wounded in Dealey Plaza; and many police, governmental, and news media people involved in the case. He has followed the work of many of the critics of the government’s research and has kept in touch with the critics. Since 1976 he has taught a course on the JFK assassination at UT-Arlington, developing new leads through this work. He has made many presentations of material about the assassination to Texas civic organizations and other groups, including police agencies. Marrs lives in a log home in Wise County with his wife, their two daughters, and a menagerie. 6 DECEMBER 27, 1991