Recalling the day Specter became famous

Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pa.

When Pennsylvania's now-Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter charged that former Sen. Jack Kemp died because the Republican Party has lost its way, it was not the first suspect theory he had advanced.

In the 1960s, Specter came to national prominence as the young assistant lawyer with the Warren Commission who created the "single bullet theory" to argue Lee Harvey Oswald was a "lone nut" solely responsible for assassinating President John F. Kennedy with a World War II Italian-made bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight that was not properly mounted.

The central premise of Specter's much-criticized theory was that the first shot fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository had wounded both Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connally in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Without Specter's theory, the Warren Commission would have been forced to conclude that a conspiracy was behind the murder of JFK.

Why?

The Warren Commission faced an analytic problem in that the less-than-six-second period established by the 486 frames of the 26.6-second Zapruder film would have permitted a shooter, at most, only three shots firing a bolt-action 6.5 x 52 mm Mannlicher Carcano rifle.

The commission had evidence that one shot had missed the limousine completely, nicking by-stander James Tague in the cheek after leaving a mark on the south curb of Main Street.

So, if Oswald was the lone assassin, all the damage done to Kennedy and Connally from the shooting had to come from two bullets.

Arlen Specter of the Warren Commission demonstrating his single bullet theory

Specter's single bullet theory permitted the Warren Commission to conclude the following:

The first shot, the "single bullet," hit JFK in the back, passed through an exit wound in his neck, where it then wounded Connally, who was sitting in the jump seat in front of Kennedy, passed through Connally's back, his chest and wrist, before the lodging in Connally's left thigh;
The second shot missed the limousine and hit Tague; and
The third shot hit Kennedy in the back of the head and killed him.

The single bullet theory morphed into a "magic bullet theory" when the bullet that supposedly hit both Kennedy and Connally, identified by the Warren Commission as Commission Exhibit 399, was found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, where Kennedy and Connally were taken for medical care.

The bullet was considered a "magic bullet," because Exhibit 399 was found in pristine shape, with minimal distortion only at the bullet's base and almost no loss of mass, even though the bullet purportedly had passed through two adult male bodies, and fragments of the bullet remained lodged in Connally's body.

The single bullet theory was pivotal to the Warren Commission analysis, because if the ballistics of the assassination proved more than three shots were fired, there had to be a conspiracy, and Oswald did not act alone.

In other words, Specter's single bullet theory was the linchpin argument that permitted the Warren Commission to conclude a "lone nut" killed JFK.

To establish that Specter's theory was a possibility, the Warren Commission flew to Dallas on May 24, 1964, and staged a re-enactment of the assassination in which precise measurements of the position of Kennedy and Connally in the limousine were made.

In subsequent years, Dale Myers, a specialist in computer animation, created a 3-D computer model of Dealey Plaza in which he tracked the trajectory of shots fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository to the limousine. His model included an exact fix of the positions of Kennedy and Connally, as determined by the ample photographic documentation of the motorcade.

Myers' computer animation was the centerpiece of the 2003 ABC news 40th anniversary documentary "Peter Jennings Reporting: The Kennedy Assassination, Beyond Conspiracy."

What the Warren Commission reenactment and the Myers computer animation attempted to establish was that there existed at least one instant in which the limousine, Kennedy and Connally were properly aligned with the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository so that a single bullet trajectory theoretically was possible.

Still, in the nearly 46 years since the JFK assassination, Specter's theory has been one of the most attacked premises of the Warren Commission.

Among the many objections, the following arguments appear the most difficult for proponents to refute:

Neither the attending doctors at Parkland Hospital nor the doctors performing the autopsy found any trajectory through JFK's body which would have determined without doubt that the back wound was an entrance that connected to the neck wound as an exit for one bullet passing through.
Dr. Malcolm Perry, the attending physician at Parkland Hospital, testified to the Warren Commission (Volume VI) that he observed a small 5 mm spherical or oval wound in JFK's neck. Perry testified that he enlarged the neck wound in order to perform a tracheotomy. Perry also testified that he did not try to determine the trajectory or the path of the neck wound, and he could not state categorically whether the neck wound was an entrance or an exit wound.
Dr. James Humes, who conducted the JFK autopsy, testified to the Warren Commission that the autopsy doctors had not been informed Dr. Perry observed a neck wound from a bullet shot, so they considered the neck wound they observed at the autopsy had been caused by the tracheotomy. X-rays at the autopsy showed no bullets remaining lodged within JFK's body. Hume testified he and the other autopsy doctors considered the possibility that the bullet entering JFK's back had "been stopped in its path through the President's body and, in fact, then had fallen from the body onto the stretcher."
After a detailed examination of the ballistics, Josiah Thompson in his 1967 book "Six Seconds in Dallas" concluded that the lack of deformation on Commission Exhibit 399 precluded the possibility that it was the bullet that struck Connally's wrist.
Thompson also considered it possible the bullet fragments that remained in Connally's wrist and thigh could have come from the minimal amount of missing metal in Commission Exhibit 399. Thompson calculated that, at most, Commission Exhibit 399 was missing 2.5 grams of metal and that the fragments involved with Connally's wounds weighed 1.5 grams. When Connally died in 1993, however, he was buried without first taking the opportunity to remove the bullet fragments and weigh them. While multiple bullet fragments were recovered from the limousine, it has not been possible to determine if the fragments were attributable to the bullet or bullets involved in the head shot.
Dr. Humes further testified to the Warren Commission that the amount of metal fragments extracted from or embedded in the bone of Connally's wrist and thigh precluded for him the likelihood his injuries were caused by Commission Exhibit 399.
Two of JFK's most trusted aides, Dave Powers and Kenny O'Donnell, were riding in the car directly behind the limousine in which Kennedy and Connally rode; positioned alongside Powers and O'Donnell were the Secret Service agents standing on the car's running boards. In his autobiography entitled "Man of the House," Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill reported Powers told him that he and O'Donnell both observed shots from the grassy knoll, but they changed their stories when testifying to the Warren Commission, because the FBI expressed no interest in their original testimony. Powers and O'Donnell both subsequently confirmed to several credible sources that their original version was true – that they saw shots from the grassy knoll to the right front of the motorcade.

Finally, Connally and his wife Nellie, who was riding next to him in JFK's limousine, both testified to the Warren Commission that the second shot, not the first, hit the governor.

"Beyond any question, and I'll never change my opinion, the first bullet did not hit me," Connally told reporters after the assassination. "The second bullet did hit me. The third bullet did not hit me."

Connally's first interview after the assassination, Nov. 27, 1963, from his hospital bed, in which he makes the same claim, is available for viewing on YouTube.com.

Also archived on YouTube.com is an interview with a Dallas television station on June 22, 1964, in which Connally again insisted on camera that he was not hit by the first shot which hit JFK.

Special offers:

"$700 Billion Bailout": What it means to you, your money, your mortgage and your taxes

Surviving economic meltdown in the age of Obama

Subscribe to Jerome Corsi's new weekly economic newsletter, Red Alert, for one year and, for a limited time get "The Obama Nation" free. (This offer applies only to annual subscriptions for $99.)

Get "Taking America Back," Joseph Farah's manifesto for sovereignty, self-reliance and moral renewal