Assassination Tapes
*Continued from page 11*
showed hard stress on the PSE. Unfortunately, he made no other definite statement about the nature of the wound.
The interview with Captain Humes was more informative. Just before the interview, 1967, Humes had re-examined the autopsy photographs and X-rays, and he discussed them at length on the CBS tapes. Diagrams drawn during the autopsy, said, had not been intended to precisely present the location of the wounds. However, he produced a sketch which, he said, did represent these locations accurately. The interviewer asked, “Your re-examination of the photographs verify that the wounds were as shown here?” “Yes, sir,” he replied. No stress.
Were there any wounds other than one at the base of the neck and one up in the skull? “No, sir, there were not.” Moderate stress, not enough to suggest deception. Was there any doubt that the wound at the back of the President’s head was an entry wound? “There is absolutely no doubt.” Again stress, but again moderate.
Altogether, how many wounds were there? “There were two wounds of entrance and two of exit.” At this point the stress became hard.
And where were the entry wounds located? “Posteriorly, one low in the right posterior scalp, and one in the base of the skull on the right.” Hard stress again.
Could he be absolutely certain that what was said was an entry wound was, in fact, true? “Yes, indeed we can.” Hard stress.
The interview with Humes was one of the most detailed on the CBS tapes, and I charted most of it with the PSE. It was clear to me that he believed much of what he was saying, but the frequent flickerings of moderate stress and the occasional flashes of hard stress suggested that he wasn’t nearly as confident of his testimony as he claimed to be. As Dr. Perry had pointed out, sometimes it’s not easy to tell an entry wound from an exit wound.
The interviewer asked him one good “bottom line” question:
Do you have any different conclusion, different ideas, any different thoughts after seeing [the autopsy photographs] in, than you had at that time?”
“No,” replied Captain Humes, “we think it’ll bear up very well, and very closely, testimony before the Warren Commission.”
The stress was hard.
Glen Specter, one of the Warren Commission’s principal investigators, also spoke on CBS tapes. He said that the case against Oswald fitted together very well, and that there could one find among actual criminal convictions a case equally persuasive. He added that there was no foundation for 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 truthfulness 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 Brandeis 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 interviewer, Abram Sachar, Chancellor of Brandeis University, was friendly and deferential. 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 assassination 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 press, and I read some of the documents 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 determining 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 January 19, 1970, Senator Richard B. Russell, a member of the Warren Commission, revealed 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 statements 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 Parkland 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 Commission’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