Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination by Anthony Summers Read Free Book Online Page B

part” based on “reconstruction,” that the shooting had come from the rear. “In part”? O’Donnell later told a friend, House Speaker Tip O’Neill, that he had been pressured by the FBI not to say what he firmly believed, that gunfire had come from in front of the motorcade.
    Mary Moorman, to the passenger side of the limousine, and busy taking pictures, could not tell where the shots came from. Maurice Orr, opposite her, was also too confused. Charles Brehm, not far away, said in a formal statement that shots came from behind him. On the day of the assassination, however, he was reported as saying he thought “the shots came from in front of or beside the President.” On the other side of the street, standing on the grass with their children, were William and Gayle Newman. Mr.Newman’s affidavit, sworn just after the assassination, said, “I was looking directly at him when he was hit in the side of the head… . I thought the shot had come from the garden directly behind me, that was on an elevation from where I was right on the curb. Then we fell down on the grass as it seemed we were in the direct path of fire.” The Commission omitted both Newman statements from its “Witnesses” section.
    Sixteen people in or outside the Book Depository, behind the President, suggested that some shooting came from the knoll. They included the Depository manager, the superintendent, and two company vice presidents. Secret Service Agent Forrest Sorrels, traveling in the lead car and nearing the end of the knoll at the moment of the fatal shot, stared instinctively at the knoll. He first reported, “I looked toward the top of the terrace to my right as the sound of the shots seemed to come from that direction.” Only later, in his Commission testimony, did Sorrels go along with the conventional wisdom that the source of the gunfire was exclusively to the President’s rear.
    Secret Service agent Paul Landis, in the car behind the President, made an interesting distinction. He said, “I heard what sounded like the report of a high-powered rifle from behind me.” Landis drew his gun, and then, “I heard a second report and saw the President’s head split open and pieces of flesh and blood flying through the air. My reaction at this time was that the shot came from somewhere toward the front … and looked along the right-hand side of the road.” Landis was not called to testify before the Warren Commission.
    Several police officers also thought the shots came from the knoll area. The reaction of Dallas County Sheriff Bill Decker, riding in front of the President, was to bark into the radio, “Notify station 5 to move all available men out of my department back into therailroad yards.” The railroad yards were just behind the fence—where the Committee acoustics experts placed a gunman.
    Loosely speaking, the “grassy knoll” refers to the whole area the President’s limousine passed after leaving the Book Depository to its rear (see page 999). It is easiest to describe it as three sectors. First a narrow slope topped by trees and bushes. Then a much longer slope up to a semicircular colonnade, with access steps and a retaining wall. Beyond that, the slope continued beside the road, topped by more vegetation and a fence. The fence made a right angle, which, in 1963, faced directly toward the oncoming motorcade. By the last stage of the shooting the President’s limousine was a mere thirty-five yards from the point on the fence where Committee acoustics experts placed a gunman.
    About a dozen people were on the grassy knoll when the President was shot, and almost all believed some of the gunfire came from behind them, high up on the knoll itself. For several, there could be no talk of illusions or echoes. The shooting was frighteningly close. Their stories, for the most part, never heard by the first official inquiry, are jolting even after fifty years.
    Gordon Arnold, a young soldier of twenty-two, was home on