Fifty years ago today, the world
came to a standstill while it digested the assassination of American President
John F. Kennedy. As a young lad, I can quite clearly remember much of the
news coverage of that day and the following days, largely because I was absent from
school because of an illness. I can still remember walking through K-Mart
and seeing the coverage by the major television networks. Since that
time, one of my "hobbies" has been researching the Kennedy
assassination and trying to understand what alternative scenarios are plausible,
given that the scenario presented by the Warren Commission seems, in hind
sight, to be rather unlikely.
One of the most interesting but
little discussed scenarios involves a "friendly fire" incident.
In this scenario, one does not have to invoke a "foil hat
conspiracy" that involves the Chicago Mafia or the military-industrial
complex, rather, a simple accident could explain the untimely death of President
Kennedy.
Decades ago, ballistics and firearms expert
Howard Donahue proposed a theory that Secret Service agents in the car
following the Presidential limousine may have accidentally shot the President.
According to Mr. Donahue's theory, Lee Harvey Oswald was able to fire
twice at the President with the first shot showering the car with fragments
that slightly wounded Kennedy. Owald's second shot then struck Kennedy in
the back of the neck, passed through the front of his neck and then went on to
injure Texas Governor John Connally (the Single Bullet Theory). Seconds
later, the shot that killed the President was fired from the follow-up Secret
Service vehicle. This shot was fired by 40 year old Secret Service Agent
George Hickey Jr. after he picked up and cocked his automatic Colt AR-15 from
the floor of the car in response to the sound of gunfire. When the
motorcade came to a sudden halt, Agent Hickey accidentally pulled the trigger,
firing a bullet at the back of Kennedy's head.
Here is a photograph showing the
Secret Service follow-up vehicle immediately behind the President's limousine
just before it enters Dealey Plaza:
Here are several of the arguments
for this theory:
1.) The bullet that caused Kennedy's
fatal head wound behaved like a high-velocity frangible bullet. Oswald
used medium-velocity, non-frangible ammunition. Secret Service Agent
Hickey was seen with an AR-15 rifle around the time that the head shot was
fired; the AR-15 fires high-velocity, frangible ammunition.
2.) Witnesses in Dealey Plaza
reported that there were two shots fired nearly simultaneously, far too fast to
have been fired from Oswald's bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.
3.) The reported diameter of the
bullet wound on the back of Kennedy's head was 6.0 millimetres compared to the
6.5 millimetre ammunition used in Oswald's Carcano rifle.
4.) The damage to the windshield on
the President's limousine was too high to have been caused by a projectile
fired from the sixth floor of the School Book Depository.
5.) Witnesses at street level
reported the smell of gunpowder, particularly in the northwest corner of Dealey
Plaza. Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough who was riding in the second car
behind the Presidential limousine reported that he smelled gunpowder in the
street and that it clung to the car throughout the race to Parkland Hospital.
One of the accompanying motorcycle policemen, Officer B. J. Martin also
recalled " ... you could smell the gunpowder ... you knew he wasn't
that far away. When you're that close you can smell the powder burning ... Why,
you can smell the gunpowder ... right there in the street."
Interestingly, in 1995 Secret
Service Agent George Hickey sued Bonar Menninger, the author of the 1992 book
"Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK", a book about the "friendly fire" accidental shooting of the President but the case was dismissed
because the judge in the case ruled that the time between the filing of the
suit and the publication of the book was beyond the one-year statute of
limitations. After an appeal, the publishers of the book, St. Martin's, paid
Agent Hickey an undisclosed sum of money. In case you are interested, here
is a link to the Hickey suit against St. Martin's with a detailed list of the erroneous claims made in Menninger's book.
George Hickey passed away in 2011.
While I think that this theory is
more than a bit of a stretch, it is unique in its complete lack of a
conspiracy, a rather rare commodity in the world of JFK assassination theories.
That, however, does not necessarily make it more plausible.
Unfortunately, as shown here, fifty years on, the majority of Americans still believe that
President Kennedy's death was a conspiracy:
It is our skepticism about
government openness that has kept the JFK assassination conspiracy theorists in
business for five long decades. With the current level of mistrust in government now, one can only imagine how many conspiracy theories would exist if there were another high profile political assassination today.
Posts
