November 27, 2013 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • Page 15 More whitewash The American Experience offered four hours of what- ever the producers think the American people can handle about John F. Kennedy’s life, and a sequel from a differ- ent team then provided what they think people can handle about his death. Nova’s PBS special “Cold Case JFK,” like the Ameri- can Experience biography, showed some chips falling off the whitewash about the Kennedy assassination in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. In the 50 years since the president was murdered in front of thousands of witnesses, trying to find the responsible party has been a national industry. We still do not know and Nova apparently wants to ensure we never do. The official version endorsed by the Warren Commis- sion is that Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist deserter from the U.S. Marine Corps who spent two years in the Soviet Union and then came back to the United States with a Rus- sian wife, bought a cheap Mannlicher-Carcano rifle with a telescopic site for $19.98 from a Chicago mail order com- pany and shot President Kennedy twice from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald was shortly arrested after killing a police offi- cer name J.D. Tippett, who tried to question him on the street. Oswald fled to a nearby movie theater, where he was captured. He was then dispatched in the basement of the Dallas Police Headquarters by Jack Ruby, a guy who ran strip clubs, with about 100 armed policemen as gaping witnesses. Ruby, who was not known for his kindness or respect for women, said he killed Oswald to spare Jackie Kennedy the anguish of a trial. Ruby languished in prison without ever telling the real story, if there was one, perhaps because nobody ever asked him. Among Oswald’s recorded statements was, “They’re taking me in because I lived in the Soviet Union. I’m just a patsy.” A patsy is a designated culprit who is blamed as the sole instigator of a crime he may have committed, but did not think up on his own. The conviction or death of the patsy gives the police a closed case. The suggestion is that Oswald and Ruby were both expendables thrown away to get rid of Kennedy without revealing who sent them -- unless Oswald acted alone. “Cold Case JFK” offers a forensic argument that the lone actor shooting of the president was “probable.” A father and son team of forensic and gun buffs, Luke and Mike Haag, began by obtaining a Mannlicher-Carcano with a telescopic sight and firing bullets into stacks of pine boards to show the power a 6.5 copper-clad lead bullet has. The slug goes through three feet of pine planks and emerges somewhat flattened -- like the “Magic Bullet” found on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital in Dallas. They show that this single bullet could theoretically have passed through Kennedy’s neck and necktie, angled down a bit, and passed through Governor John Connolly’s torso, then broken his wrist, then struck his leg and finally lodged somewhere in the car until it mysteriously popped up on the stretcher in the hospital. Connolly denied to his death that he and Kennedy had been struck by the same bullet. Controversial audio tapes purportedly record the sound of a second bullet being fired that -- unless it hit Connolly -- must have missed. No one in the crowd was hit, but many people say they heard the shot. The problem is that there was a third shot, and no fire- arms expert has ever been able to fire three aimed shots from a bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano in 2.3 seconds. The father and son team is shown having trouble with the slushy Carcano bolt during the demonstrations. Viewers are told the second shot must have been an echo off the buildings in the vicinity. We know the exact amount of time available because Abraham Zapruder, a dress manufacturer, climbed up on a stanchion with a secretary holding onto his belt and filmed the entire Kennedy motorcade during the murder. Zapruder’s eight-millimeter camera ran at 18.5 frames per second and his color film first shows Kennedy grasping for his throat -- the first hit -- and then the awful impact of the last and fatal shot, which made Kennedy jolt back in his seat and to the left. A Polaroid photograph assassination witness Mary Moorman took from the opposite side of the motorcade shows Kennedy slumped to the left a split second after he was shot leaning left, not backward -- with the Grassy Knoll in the background as an easy bastion for a hidden marksman. This famous photograph was neither shown nor mentioned. Some spectators said they heard a shot from the Grassy Knoll, a mini-park to the right of the Kennedy motorcade. Nova’s Luke and Mike Haag responsibly use a computer simulation to show that the angle of a shot from the Grassy Knoll that hit Kennedy was entirely possible. Then they report on forensic tests done with actual human skulls packed with ballistic gel or ballistic soap -- simulating the brain tissue and blood in a living human -- to show that a shot from behind, Oswald’s firing position, could also have shattered Kennedy’s skull in the horrible explo- sion photographed by Zapruder. This, they say, makes the lone shooter “probable,” though they do not say “proved” or “substantiated.” The word “possible” would have been more appropriate. The problem with the Zapruder movie is that Kennedy visibly jerks and slumps to the left, and the blood explosion came from the left side of his head. This would normally mean he was shot from the right side. This left/backward jolt is explained as a reflex action because the victim’s back muscles, stronger than his stomach muscles, would have caused a response of jerking backward when the bullet hit the brain. This is called a “Galvanic jolt” and is not unknown in head shot deaths. Kennedy, however, had terrible back problems all his adult life and courageously and constantly swam for ther- apy and recreation. An autonomous reflex should have jerked Kennedy’s body forward -- the same direction that Oswald’s bullet was headed if it came from behind. Ken- nedy’s back problems were covered in detail in “American Experience” but not mentioned in “Cold Case JFK.” Haag & Haag admit the official Kennedy autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital was a farce. The two elderly physi- cians first thought the bullet hole in Kennedy’s throat from the first shot was a tracheotomy done in Parkland Hospi- tal in Dallas to keep Kennedy alive. The sketches with the autopsy reports showed the bullet hole in the rear of the head in two different places inches apart. The photographs taken -- Kennedy still had a full head of hair which was not shaved for the autopsy -- do not show any bullet hole. Had Kennedy been shot from directly behind, would not the exit wound have exploded the blood from his forehead or face? Kennedy’s face and most of the forehead were both intact, as shown later in photos leaked to the press against the wishes of the family. His eyes were wide open. These are very sad photographs. Realistically, Kennedy was either struck from the right, beneath the hairline, or on the left side from the front with the bullet traveling front to rear -- from the Grassy Knoll. What the details reveal, without subjective input, was that Kennedy was shot once from behind, probably by Oswald, and once from the front and side, the shot that exploded the left half of his head. The bullet that hit Connolly was also fired from the School Book Depository and may or may not have been from the Kennedy neck shot. After the Warren Commission brought guffaws and objections, a subsequent U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee evaluated the same evidence and said there were two shooters. This got one sentence from Nova. Why the hush-up? Oswald had spent two years in the hostile Soviet Union, and tracing the murder of a seated president back to the Kremlin would have made retalia- tion against the Soviet Union mandatory. Oswald may have been the patsy for a Soviet agent, but his uncle and sur- rogate father had serious Mob connections in New Orleans and the Mob also had issues with Kennedy and his brother Bobby. For the Mob theory, the best book is “Mafia Kingfish” by John H. Davis. The book has the perhaps unfortu- nate tendency to show that the whole Kennedy clan was beholden to the Mob for his election and other favors, and then turned on them, which is all it takes to get killed. People who want to view John Kennedy and Bobby Ken- nedy as purely heroic may not like “Mafia Kingfish” any better than the Mob did. For darker conspiracies, check out “The Manchurian Candidate” with Laurence “Lee” Harvey as a hypnotized president- shooter and Frank Sinatra -- the Mob’s unof- ficial ambassador to Hollywood -- as Captain Bennett Marco, the good guy. “The Manchurian Candidate” shows an unpopular confused veteran with an obnoxious mother and a pretty wife (Oswald?) shooting with a high-powered rifle and telescopic sight from a cluttered, elevated vantage point very much like the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. He is assigned to shoot a president. He hits two people. Then he wakes from his hypnotized state and kills himself without a trial. What a perfect patsy! This film, however, was not inspired by the Kennedy Assassination. It may, in fact, have inspired it. “The Manchurian Candi- date” was released in 1962. Watch it and tell me there was no conspiracy. Breaking ground J.T. Bolger (left) shakes Edward Goodell’s hand after pre- senting him with the Bolger Challenge grant. (continued from page 3) meet the full construction budget, which is expected to top $2.8 million. “We have reached out to countless people and organiza- tions over the past year and, thankfully, we continue to get generous offers to help,” Goodell said. On Oct. 29, the trail conference’s board of directors approved a construction contract amount of $2.3 million to complete the Phase 2 interior renovation of the original 4,400 square-foot schoolhouse and a 3,700 square-foot, two-story addition. Construction is expected to begin in December and should be completed in November 2014. The schoolhouse was built in 1891 as a gift to the Mahwah community by Alfred B. Darling and Theodore Havemeyer. The NJ Historic Trust considers the building the state’s most architecturally significant schoolhouse. The trail conference and Township of Mahwah pur- chased the schoolhouse for $550,000 in 2005 with matching grants from the Bergen County Open Space Trust Fund and New Jersey Green Acres funds. Public grants for the build- ing’s adaptive reuse as the conference’s new headquarters include $829,000 from the New Jersey Historic Trust and $436,000 from the Bergen County Historic Preservation Trust Fund, a part of the Bergen County Open Space, Rec- reation, Farmland, and Historic Preservation Trust Fund.