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Assassination Tapes
USED FROM PAGE 114
and hard stress on the PSE. Unfortu-
he made no other definite statement
the nature of the wound.
interview with Captain Humes was
informative. Just before the interview,
7, Humes had re-examined the autops-
y photographs and X-rays, and he dis-
cussed them at length on the CBS tapes.
grams drawn during the autopsy,
d. had not been intended to precisely
ent the location of the wounds. How-
e now produced a sketch which, he
did represent these locations accu-
The interviewer asked, “Your re-
lation of the photographs verify that
wounds were as shown here?”
i, sir,” he replied. No stress.
a there any wounds other than one
base of the neck and one up in the
“No, sir, there were not.” Moderate
not enough to suggest deception.
there any doubt that the wound at
ck of the President’s head was an
ound? “There is absolutely no doubt,
gain stress but again moderate.
gether, how many wounds were
“There were two wounds of entrance
o of exit.” At this point the stress be-
hard.
where were the entry wounds lo-
) “Posteriorly, one low in the right
or scalp, and one in the base of the
n the right.” Hard stress again.
d he be absolutely certain that what
d was an entry wound was, in fact,
’es, indeed we can.” Hard stress.
nterview with Humes was one of the
it and most detailed on the CBS
and I charted most of it with the PSE.
clear to me that he believed much
he was saying, but the frequent flick-
of moderate stress and the occasion-
es of hard stress suggested that he
nearly as confident of his testimony
claimed to be. As Dr. Perry had
l out, sometimes it’s not easy to tell
y wound from an exit wound.
nterviewer asked him one good “bot-
a” question:
you have any different conclusion,
ferent ideas, any different thoughts
seeing [the autopsy photographs]
than you had at that time?”
replied Captain Humes, “we think
ar up very well, and very closely,
imony before the Warren Commis-
stress was hard.
Specter, one of the Warren Commis-
principal investigators, also spoke on
tapes. He said that the case against
fitted together very well, and that
could one find among actual crim-
NTHOUSE
the charge that the Commission had been
formed to whitewash the facts.
The PSE said he was telling the truth.
John McCloy, a member of the Warren
Commission, said much the same thing,
and added that he had seen no credible
evidence to contradict the findings of the
Commission. The PSE backed him up on
this, but it failed to do so when, speaking
of the Warren Report, he said, “There was
nothing fraudulent about it.” Here the PSE
showed hard stress.
If Specter and McCloy were as confident
as the PSE shows them to be in the truthful-
ness of the Warren Report, what could be
fraudulent about it? Perhaps the snipping
off of a few loose ends, the suppression
of a few pieces of inconvenient evidence
which conflicted with a version of events
they believed to be essentially true.
The one man who could be expected to
have the most informed opinion regarding
the work of the Warren Commission is
former Chief Justice Earl Warren himself.
He had declined to be interviewed on the
CBS program in 1967, but he did appear
on television in May, 1972, in an interview
> “... we found no evidence
> of any kind that there was
> any conspiracy.”
> There was very hard stress
> on “no evidence”
which was part of a series called *The Bran-
deis Television Recollections*. Bob Smith of
the Committee provided me with the tape.
The interview was an hour long, but the
Kennedy assassination and the Warren
Commission came up only once. The inter-
viewer, Abram Sachar, Chancellor of Bran-
deis University, was friendly and deferen-
tial. I charted some of Warren’s remarks
unrelated to the assassination and found
that he was generally unstressed. Sachar
raised the subject of the Commission
obliquely, and Warren volunteered several
rather lengthy statements about it
Warren said that immediately after the as-
sassination there were two theories, one that
Khrushchev and Castro were behind the
killing, the other that a group of right-wing
Texas oilmen were responsible. He said:
“We explored both of those theories for
ten months and found no evidence that
either of them was involved in it.”
The PSE showed hard stress.
He continued:
“... we found no evidence of any kind
that there was any conspiracy.”
Again there was stress, and particularly
hard stress on the words “no evidence.”
“I have read everything,” said Justice
Warren, “that has come to my notice in the
that have criticized the Commission very
severely, but I have never found that they
have discovered any evidence of any kind
that we didn’t discover and use in determin-
ing the case as we did.”
Hard stress once again. The word “never”
was a perfectly “trimmed hedge.”
“I have found nothing since that time,”
he continued, “to change my view, nor have
I heard of anything that has changed the
view of any member of the commission
since that time.”
The stress was hard. As I had now come
to expect, the word “nothing” seemed a
particularly beautiful example of stress.
Another word seemed to show even more
stress: “member.” Could he have been
thinking of someone in particular? On Janu-
ary 19, 1970, Senator Richard B. Russell,
a member of the Warren Commission, re-
vealed that he had never believed that Lee
Harvey Oswald acted alone.
I had charted the last of the assassination
tapes. Of course, these few thousand feet
of recording tape are only a small fraction
of the relevant testimony recorded and
stored away in the archives of television
news departments. There is, for example,
Lee Harvey Oswald, as he was led through
the Dallas police station, denying that he
had killed the President. There are state-
ments by Marina Oswald, Jack Ruby and
by others.
I have no doubt that with these tapes,
a Psychological Stress Evaluator, and time
to work on them, a very detailed picture
of the assassination of John F. Kennedy
could be reconstructed, a picture that might
even reveal the identities of the assassins
and their co-conspirators. I hope that sooner
or later someone does this. I have gone as
far as the private resources of a free-lance
writer permit.
What, given the sample of testimony I
have processed with the PSE, can I say
about the assassination?
We should first examine the testimony in
which no stress was found, since it is almost
certain that these people were telling the
truth as they saw it. This strongly suggests
the following:
1. Oswald owned a rifle.
2. A bullet fired from that rifle was found
on Governor Connally’s stretcher at Park-
land Hospital.
3. Bullet fragments alleged to have been
found in the presidential limousine also
came from Oswald’s rifle.
4. At least one eyewitness believes he
saw gunsmoke on the grassy knoll, but
another is equally certain no shots came
from that direction.
5. Oswald shot and killed Officer Tippitt.
6. At least one member of the Warren
Commission and one member of the Com-
mission’s staff really believe in the validity
of the Warren Report.
7. Jim Garrison had little or no case
against Clay Shaw.
Almost all of this tends to support, in one
way or another, the Warren Report. But now