40. A Window in Dallas, Pt. 1A – The Official Story: Evidence of Our Eyes
The Story of Nowhere – Studies in Utopianism and Humanity
The Story of Nowhere (available as eBook, Audiobook, & Paperback): https://storyofnowhere.com/book/
Episode 35: “A Window in Dallas – Introduction: Peering into the State of Nature”
Episode 36: “A Window in Dallas – Interlude: A JFK Reading List”
The Story of Nowhere Podcast Introductory Episode – “Episode Zero”
The Nowhere Library
Website: storyofnowhere.com/library
Email: nowherelibrary@mail.com
Music Credits:
INTRODUCTION
- “Assassination of John F. Kennedy” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) – 35th President of the United States, 1961 to 1963
- Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973) – 36th President of the United States, 1963 to 1969
- “Timeline of the John F. Kennedy Assassination” – Wikipedia
- “JFK Assassination” – Mary Ferrell Foundation
- This is an incredible database replete with primary documents, essays, and links. It is absolutely essential to one studying the assassination.
- BOOKS REFERENCED
- “The Warren Commission Report” – Officially, Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy (1964) and its Twenty-Six Supplementary Volumes of testimony and exhibits
- Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993) by Gerald Posner
- Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (2007) by Vincent Bugliosi
- Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy (2013 ed.) by Jim Marrs
- Last Second in Dallas (2021) by Josiah Thompson
- MISCELLANY
- On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald (1986 mock trial) – (YouTube)
- “Case Closed or Posner Exposed?” – Electronic Assassinations Newsletter
- “Reclaiming History” (2007) – Vincent Bugliosi on CSPAN
- “Epic Book Resurrects Finding that Oswald Acted Alone in Killing JFK” by Josiah Thompson
- “Reclaiming History? Or Re-Framing Oswald?” website
- Psychological Warfare (1954) by Paul Linebarger
- “Psychological Warfare” – The Rand Corporation
THE OFFICIAL STORY
- “The Warren Commission” – Officially, The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy
- Established by President Lyndon Baines Johnson on November 29, 1963 with Executive Order 11130
- Called “Warren Commission” in recognition of its chairman, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren
- It was comprised of seven distinguished members, one general counsel, fourteen assistant counsels, and twelve staffers. It drew its finances from the Emergency Fund for the President
- Lee Harvey Oswald (1939-1963) – Accused of the murder of the president within an hour and a half of the shooting
- Henry Wade – Dallas County Attorney General during the assassination
- Wade would later rise to national notoriety when he defended the state of Texas’s anti-abortion law in the 1971-73 Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade
- a film called Countdown in Dallas began shooting in 1967. The film was largely centered on the JFK assassination, and Wade aided in the production, possibly even by providing documents from the district attorney’s office. The project foundered, and the movie was never completed
- Statement to the Press – “we just have to prove that he did it, which I think we have”
- Corrected by Jack Ruby on the name of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee: Marrs, p. 399; Posner, p. 350.
- Statement to the Press – ‘would try for the death penalty [for Oswald]’
- Dallas Police captain Will Fritz charges Oswald with the president’s murder: Warren Report, p. 198
- Police Chief Jesse Curry on Oswald’s certain guilt to the press
- Oswald’s fingerprints not on murder weapon
- Paraffin test indicates Oswald had not fired a rifle
- LBJ – J. Edgar Hoover phone call, 11/23/1963 – “we have a very, very close plan”
- Hoover memo, 11/24/1963 – “convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin”
- Katzenbach Memo issued by acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to LBJ’s special assistant, Bill Moyers, 11/25/1963
- Moyers would later become White House Chief of Staff, then Press Secretary. Following his time in the Johnson administration, Moyers was the director of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1967 to 1974; he is also a member of the Bilderberg Group. He is best known for his decades as a television journalist
- Summary of the Warren Commission’s findings – See Warren Report, Chapter 1: Summary and Conclusions, “Conclusions” section (specific quotes taken from pp. 18 to 21)
- The Crowd (1895) by Gustave Le Bon
- Michael Shermer and Joe Rogan on the JFK Assassination – The Joe Rogan Experience #1222
MATERIAL EVIDENCE
THE ZAPRUDER FILM
- The Zapruder Film (1963) – stabilized and enhanced
- All 486 frames of the Zapruder Film for viewing and download
- A brief history of the Zapruder Film by Brian Frye: “The Zapruder Film”
- “The Zapruder Film Reconsidered” – Max Holland (YouTube)
- Pictures of the Pain: Photography and the Assassination of President Kennedy (1994) by Richard Trask
- “The Zapruder Film” at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website
THE OFFICIAL VIEW
- “[I]t’s absolutely conclusive that only three shots were fired” – Bugliosi, p. 451, emphasis in original
- “The film … cannot show otherwise” – Bugliosi, p. 458, emphasis in original
- “[A] time clock for the assassination” – Posner, p. 318
- “[B]ecause the Commission thought the first shot would be the most accurate” – Posner, p. 319
- Posner on the time Oswald had to fire three shots – Posner, p. 320
- Warren Report on Oswald’s shot timing – Warren Report, p. 115
- Posner on the first shot coming around frame 160 – Posner, pp. 321-323
- On the motion of Zapruder’s camera – See the “jiggle analysis” postulated by physicist Luis Alvarez: “A Physicist Examines the Kennedy Assassination Film” (1976) in the American Journal of Physics. See also Thompson, ch. 9
- “Connally finally relented [regarding his conviction that the bullet that struck him did not strike JFK]” – Posner, p. 333
- “[E]nough time for even a mediocre shooter” – Posner, 323
- “John Kennedy Assassination Film Analysis” (1977) by Francis Corbett of Itek Optical Systems Corporation
- See also:
- Posner, p. 315
- Bugliosi, pp. 484-486
- Thompson, chs. 13 & 14
- See also:
- “Dr. John Lattimer” – Military History Wiki
- Dr. Michael Baden
- Baden has long been a high-profile forensic pathologist, having been involved with the cases of O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, and George Floyd
- “The body then stiffens” – Posner, p. 315
- See also HSCA Appendix to Hearings, vol. VII, pp. 173–175
- “[P]reventing him from falling forward” – Posner, p. 316
- Criticism of Alvarez’s “jet effect” theory – Thompson, ch. 9
- Bugliosi on a rear head-shot and the Itek Report – Bugliosi, pp. 484-489
- “[The left-rearward motion after frame 313] could not possibly have been caused by the force of a bullet from the front” – Bugliosi, p. 488
- “[T]hree, and only three shots fired during the assassination” – Bugliosi, p. 489, emphasis in original
BACK AND TO THE LEFT
- JFK (1991) – Director’s Cut
- JFK Records Act of 1992
- Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB)
- On the use of the term “meme” in reference to “back, and to the left”:
- A “meme” is not merely a picture on the Internet. From the Online Oxford English Dictionary, a meme is “A cultural element or behavioural trait whose transmission and consequent persistence in a population, although occurring by non-genetic means (esp. imitation), is considered as analogous to the inheritance of a gene.” The word comes from biologist Richard Dawkins’s 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, in which Dawkins describes a meme as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” (Emphasis in original.) In laymen’s terms (and removing any implicit negative connotations), a meme is a behavior or an idea which spreads not vertically, like genes, but horizontally and diagonally, like a virus
- JFK “Back, and to the left” film clip (YouTube)
- Bill Hicks, “Back, and to the left” (YouTube)
- Seinfeld, “The Magic Loogie” (YouTube)
- “Robert J. Groden” – Spartacus Educational
- “Dick Gregory” – Encyclopedia Britannica Online
- The Zapruder Film aired nationally on ABC’s Good Night America (1975)
- Prior instances of the Zapruder Film being shown before limited public audiences:
- 1969 trial of Clay Shaw and its airing on KTLA in Los Angeles – “Abraham Zapruder Film” (Sixth Floor Museum)
- For more on the Shaw trial and Jim Garrison’s investigation, see On the Trail of the Assassins (1988) by Jim Garrison and the Clay Shaw trial transcripts
- WSNS’s Underground News – Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film (2016) by Alexandra Zapruder
- On Both Sides Now in California – “The JFK Assassination Films with Robert Groden” – America’s Untold Stories
- 1969 trial of Clay Shaw and its airing on KTLA in Los Angeles – “Abraham Zapruder Film” (Sixth Floor Museum)
- House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) Final Report
- See also:
- “President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy” – HSCA Report, p. 3
- Bidding war for the Zapruder Film – Marrs, pp. 69-70
- “[JFK’s] head could be seen to move violently forward” – Dan Rather on CBS, 11/25/1963
- Zapruder Film frames 171 to 334 are published in Volume XVIII of the twenty-six supplemental volumes of the Warren Report
- On frames 314 and 315 being transposed, and J. Edgar Hoover’s response – see Six Seconds in Dallas (1966) by Josiah Thompson, p. 89, and Last Second in Dallas, p. 442
- Six Seconds in Dallas: A Micro-Study of the Kennedy Assassination (1966) by Josiah Thompson
- “Josiah Thompson Oral History” – Sixth Floor Museum
- Thompson’s and Itek’s measurements aligning – See Thompson (Last Second), pp. 174-175, for Thompson’s story of how he came to discover the Itek report, and a table comparing his measurements of Kennedy’s movements with those of Itek. He writes, “When I compared my charts of measurements with Corbett’s [the head of Itek], the two sets of measurements matched up remarkably well. They agreed in every case with respect to the direction of movement. The critical measurements of forward movement between frames 312 and 313 were almost identical”
- “JFK Unsolved: The Real Conspiracies” (2021) by ABC, featuring Josiah Thompson
- “Last Second in Dallas: A Granular Account of the Final Second of the Assassination,” a presentation by Josiah Thompson for the Sixth Floor Museum (2023)
- “A Motion Blur Analysis of the Zapruder Film” – David Wimp
- Wimp purports to have analyzed Kennedy’s movements after expunging the blur. With no blur, he found Kennedy’s head to have moved just 0.95 inches between frames 312 and 313, at a time when all other occupants of the limousine also tilted forward, the result of the limousine breaking. For more, see the cited work and Thompson, ch. 14
- Dallas Police Department dictabelt recordings
- “[H]igh probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy” – HSCA Final Report, pgs. 3 & 4
- “[W]ith a certainty factor of 95 percent or better” – HSCA Final Report, p. 74
- “The Ramsey Panel Report” – Report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Ballistic Acoustics (1982) by the National Academy of Sciences
- Barger and Mullen validating the Channel One tape
- “Quantitative Analysis of Crosstalk Found in Audio Recorded During the JFK Assassination” (2019) by James Barger [Appendix A of Last Second in Dallas]
- “Signal Processing Results for Both DPD Audio Files” (2018) by Richard Mullen [Appendix B of Last Second in Dallas]
- See also Thompson, chs. 17, 21, and 22
- Barger in “JFK Unsolved” documentary
- “[L]ess than one second later” – Zapruder’s camera ran at an average of 18.3 frames per second, meaning frame 328 was approximately 0.82 seconds after frame 313
- See also Posner, p. 318, and the Warren Report, p. 97
- Thompson places each of the five shots at frames 175, 204, 224, 313, and 328
- Dom DeLillo quote – Thompson, p. 353
AUTHENTICITY
- James Fetzer
- Jack White
- David Lifton
- Michael Griffith
- John Costella
- Douglas Horne
- November 29, 1963 issue of Life Magazine
- “A Brief Overview of the Zapruder Film Alteration Argument” (1998) by Martin Shackelford
- Zapruder Film Chain of Custody
- “[Time-Life] began making numerous copies” – In fact, the familiar Zapruder Film comes from one of these copies. In the mid-1970s, film analyst Robert Groden was allowed to review one of the Time-Life copies, which he bootlegged and then aired on television in 1975. Groden does not believe that the film was altered
- Douglas Horne interview with Homer McMahon (1997)
- National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC)
- Directorate of Science and Technology (DS & T)
- Church Committee (1975-1976) – Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities
- CIA Document 450
- “McMahon did tell the ARRB ‘that he believed 6 to 8 shots had hit President Kennedy'” – “The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s Alteration” (2012) by Douglas P. Horne
- “McMahon and Hunter received what they were told was the original” – In his three-part series of articles arguing for the legitimacy of the Zapruder Film, “Bedrock Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination,” Josiah Thompson writes of “the critical observation made by technician Ben Hunter that the film he and McMahon worked on at NPIC had no intersprocket images and thus had to be a copy.” However, Douglas Horne, who interviewed both McMahon and Hunter three times each for the ARRB in 1997, reports that “Homer McMahon vividly and independently recalled during his first interview that an unslit, ‘double 8’ home movie film, 16 mm wide, was delivered to him at NPIC by ‘Bill Smith’ of the Secret Service. This was confirmed by him during his second, tape-recorded interview. He remembers being told by Bill Smith that the unslit double 8 movie was the camera-original film, and he believed this, because of its unslit format, as well as because of the sharpness of the image.” (Emphasis in original)
- Peter Janney is the author of the 2012 book on the assassination, Mary’s Mosaic. This book was met with mixed reviews: Oliver Stone and researcher Dick Russell applauded the book, while researcher Lisa Pease called it “a frustrating mix of fact, fiction, speculation and unverifiable data”
- “The Two NPIC Zapruder Film Events: Signposts Pointing to the Film’s Alteration” (2012) by Douglas P. Horne
- “The Zapruder Film Mystery” – Douglas Horne interviews Dino Brugioni
- “The CIA’s Zapruder Film Secrecy” (2022) by Jacob G. Hornberger
- “Erwin Schwartz, told researcher Noel Twyman” – Inside the Assassination Records Review Board (2009) by Douglas Horne, pp. 1295-1296
- Twyman is the author of Bloody Treason: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, 1997
- “[Officer Bobby Hargis] struck … such that for a moment he thought he was himself shot” – Newspaper accounts, reproduced at History-Matters website
- “Groden claims that the original film was not slit” – For detailed discussions with Groden regarding the Zapruder Film, its legitimacy, and more—including his take on the Brugioni story—watch his two appearances on America’s Untold Stories, here and here
- “[T]he original film was, in fact, slit [in Dallas]” – This information comes directly from former Kodak employees who were interviewed by Roland Zavada (also a former employee of Kodak) of the ARRB, who was tasked with analyzing the Zapruder Film. Zavada was of the opinion that the Zapruder Film is authentic, though no formal authenticity study was conducted. Zavada’s entire report can be found here
- Mary Muchmore Film
- Orville Nix Film
EVIDENCE OF OUR EYES: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
- “It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles” – The Man with the Twisted Lip (1891) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- “The Ultimate History Lesson: A Weekend with John Taylor Gatto” (2012) official playlist, by Tragedy and Hope Productions (YouTube)
- “Compartmentalization in the Secret Services. The Italian Case” – Invisible Dog
- Intelligence Analysis for Tomorrow: Advances form the Behavioral and Social Sciences (2011) by the National Research Council
- Secrecy, Technology, and War: Greek Fire and the Defense of Byzantium, 678-1204 (1992) by Alex Roland
- “No True Scotsman Fallacy
- The Story of Nowhere Podcast Episode 11 – “History is Written By…”
- Gordon Arnold to Jim Marrs – Marrs, p. 80
- Orville Nix to Jom Marrs – Marrs, p. 35
- See also the taped interview between Nix and researcher Mark Lane in the documentary Rush to Judgment (1967)
- “JFK Assassination Film: Proof of Tampering?” (2018) by Milicent Cranor
- “Evidence of Alteration in the Zapruder Film” (2022) by Michael Griffith
- Nix and Muchmore Films aired publicly – “Why the Zapruder Film is Authentic” (1998) by Josiah Thompson
- “Distortion of the image … everybody in the car moved forward in unison” – Bedrock Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination, Part 3, by Josiah Thompson
- Charles Douglas Jackson
- Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
- Supreme Headquartered Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF)
- Operation Mockingbird
- Frank Wisner
- Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and Her Washington Post Empire (1979) by Deborah Davis
- John J. McCloy
- Bilderberg Club
- Frank Stanton
- Eisenhower Ten
- Continuity of Government (COG)
- Theodore Koop
- “Adorno, Lazarsfeld, and The Princeton Radio Project, 1938-1941” (2022) by Susan Cavin
- “War of the Worlds Broadcast” (1938) by Orson Welles
