Unusual suspects in the endless theories about JFK's assassination

A HALF-CENTURY after the event, the JFK assassination theories just keep coming.

John F. Kennedy in the car with Jackie and, in front, before the assassination.

FIFTY years after John F. Kennedy was murdered, in broad daylight, in front of hundreds of witnesses and the most famous 8mm camera ever wielded, is it possible to say with certainty who shot him?

If we hesitate before replying that it was Lee Harvey Oswald, it may not be because we have too little information. It may be because we have too much. Don DeLillo, in his formidable assassination novel Libra (1988), called it the "data-spew" - "an incredible haul of human utterance". November 22, 1963, must be the most documented day in history.

The deluge of paperwork started with the report of the Warren Commission, the inquiry ordered by Kennedy's successor Lyndon Johnson. The commission found Oswald acted alone. From the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository he fired three shots at Kennedy's motorcade. One bullet missed and hit a kerb. A second round, the much scoffed at "magic bullet", hit Kennedy's back and exited his throat before hitting the back, wrist and thigh of Texas governor John Connally, who was sitting in front of him. The bullet later turned up on Connally's hospital gurney in remarkably undamaged condition. Oswald's remaining shot entered the back of Kennedy's skull and blew out a gaping mortal wound above his ear.

Convened in haste, and well aware a lone gunman verdict would be the best result for national security, the commission seemed to bend over backwards to reach that finding. The early cliche was its report was a whitewash. For a long time, no self-respecting free-thinker would be caught dead believing Oswald had acted alone, or perhaps at all. Woody Allen used to joke, in the mid-1960s, that he was writing "a nonfiction version of the Warren report".

In the cracks of the official story, the conspiracy theories flourished like weeds. Oswald was in league with, or had been framed by, the CIA, the FBI, rogue or non-rogue Cubans, the Mafia.

The best overview of these theories has always been Anthony Summers's Conspiracy, first published in 1980, and now updated and re-released as Not in Your Lifetime: The Assassination of JFK. Summers has high standards of scholarship and he has never been rash enough to commit himself to a particular thesis. Those two virtues, I think, explain each other. Put together, they explain why his panoramic book remains the Big Daddy of the conspiracy works.

It seems significant, though, that in 50 years no single conspiracy theory has emerged as the dominant one, let alone acquired the ring of truth. After a half-century of fevered effort, the theorists still haven't cracked the mystery. Perhaps it's time to admit there isn't one. The more you read about Oswald, the harder it is to stave off the conclusion that he was guilty as sin, a sphinx without a secret.

The magic bullet remains unfalsified by science. Enhancements of Abraham Zapruder's 8mm film have proved Oswald had more time to fire his three shots than originally thought - something like eight seconds rather than six. The Warren Commission had its deficiencies, but its central findings look sounder as time goes by.

None of this means the lone gunman narrative is easy to believe. It's merely the least unbelievable explanation we have. We must live with its anomalies, flukes, loose ends. Oswald got amazingly lucky. And then Jack Ruby, the maudlin self-dramatist who shot Oswald two days later, got lucky too, as Larry Sabato reminds us in his capable and lucid The Kennedy Half-Century. "Thirty seconds one way or the other," Ruby said, and he would have missed his chance. But he didn't. A ratbag shot the president, then a joker shot the ratbag.

But the revisionists don't believe in luck on that scale and they will not cease exploring. Since Oswald is such a poor excuse for the criminal of the century (when arrested, he instantly whined "I know my rights!"), they crave a more diabolical culprit. Oswald wasn't ingenious, so they create ingenious theories to fill the void.

The latest of these comes from Colin McLaren, a retired Australian police detective turned crime writer. Modestly, McLaren's JFK: The Smoking Gun purports to have solved history's "ultimate cold case".

In truth, as McLaren acknowledges throughout the book, his "solution" isn't new. It was previously advanced in the 1992 book Mortal Error, by Bonar Menninger. But McLaren believes he can definitively prove it.

Oswald, according to McLaren's scenario, fully expected to be the afternoon's lone gunman. But he fired only two shots: one that missed, followed by the magic bullet. Kennedy was wounded, not necessarily fatally. At this point a Secret Service agent, George Hickey, stationed in the car behind JFK's, stumbled and accidentally blew off the President's head with an assault rifle. Before Oswald could complete the crime of the century, poor old Hickey perpetrated the cock-up of the millennium.

If McLaren's hypothesis seems not just superfluous but absurd, that is not sufficient reason to dismiss it. After all, the conventional narrative requires us to believe improbable things too. Whatever happened that day, it was radically unusual. So one is ready to accept McLaren's startling conclusion - as long as the evidence compels it.

McLaren thinks it does. For one thing, he says, an impressive number of witnesses believed the final two shots were "close together" or even "simultaneous". There just wasn't enough time between them for Oswald to work the bolt on his creaky Carcano rifle, re-aim and pull the trigger.

Moreover, says McLaren, the entrance wound in the back of JFK's head was only 6mm wide. Oswald's rounds were 6.5mm in diameter and a bullet can't make a hole smaller than itself.

Finally, McLaren believes the catastrophic damage to Kennedy's head was "the work of a frangible round, designed to explode on impact". If it was, the fatal shot can't have come from Oswald, who was firing full-metal jacket rounds "designed to pass cleanly through a target".

If just one of these premises is correct, you have to believe there was a second shooter. Enter the hapless Hickey, located right behind Kennedy's car, packing an AR-15 rifle loaded with frangible 5.56mm rounds.

Fortunately for Hickey, who died in 2011, McLaren's arguments crumble to the touch. Take his claim that the magic bullet and the fatal head shot were discharged almost simultaneously, meaning Oswald couldn't have fired both. This notion bizarrely flouts the evidence of the Zapruder film, the most famous resource in the whole case, which shows an excruciating lapse of time between the moment Kennedy was wounded and the moment of the head strike.

Gerald Posner, author of the scrupulous and convincing Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993), times the gap at 4.9 seconds. Vincent Bugliosi, who wrote the 1600-page conspiracy-nuker Reclaiming History (2007), puts it at 5.6. Not even the hardiest sceptic, as far as I know, has ever denied that Oswald's rifle could be fired twice in five seconds. The Warren Commission, on the basis of test-firings, found it conceivable that Oswald fired three rounds in this timeframe, with his missed shot falling between the two hits.

Reading The Smoking Gun, you keep waiting for McLaren to raise and deal with the Zapruder evidence. Almost unbelievably, he never does. He just keeps repeating "forty-eight witnesses on the ground" heard two near-simultaneous sounds. Well, maybe they did. But whatever those sounds were, they can't have been the two shots that struck JFK. (One of the witnesses suggests, in a portion of testimony not quoted by McLaren, that the second sound was "probably" the crack of the bullet striking Kennedy's head.)

What about Kennedy's suspiciously small entry wound? Oswald's ammunition was 6.5mm in diameter. Yet "the entry hole width to JFK's skull wound measured 6mm in width", writes McLaren. "A stunning fact!" McLaren derives this "fact" from testimony delivered to various inquiries by JFK's autopsy pathologists, who apparently failed to notice they were providing slam-dunk evidence of a second gunman.

But the transcripts of these inquiries, which can be read online, make it plain the pathologists are talking about the hole in JFK's scalp, not his skull. One of these doctors explains, in a stretch of testimony McLaren doesn't quote, that scalp tissue is elastic, meaning it is "not infrequent" that "the measured wound is slightly smaller than the calibre of the missile that traversed it". The underlying wound in JFK's skull was wider, indicating the bullet had a maximum diameter of 7mm.

Like many a revisionist, McLaren has a habit of airily implying that most of his forerunners in the field, including trained scientists, were chumps. Repeatedly, tirelessly, he asserts that fully jacketed bullets such as Oswald's do not fragment on impact. The explosive wound in Kennedy's head could only have been caused by a soft-nosed or frangible bullet. But if this is so self-evident, you wonder why the experts have never considered the notion before.

They have. They just haven't found it persuasive. You wouldn't know this from McLaren's book. "There was no frangible bullet fired," a forensic pathologist told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978.

Nor did Kennedy's autopsy pathologists have trouble believing Oswald's ammunition inflicted the head wound. One told the Warren Commission it was "quite common" for such bullets to fragment after hitting "bony structures". Another testified that a soft-nosed bullet would have inflicted a "much more disruptive" entry wound than the neat 6mm hole that McLaren, in another context, finds so suggestive.

The commission also hired an expert on wound ballistics, Alfred Olivier, to fire Oswald's rifle into 10 human skulls from an appropriate distance, to see if his ammunition was indeed capable of blowing a huge exit wound in a head. Olivier found it was.

McLaren acknowledges Olivier's testimony but finds it sinister that the commission dwelt on just one of the 10 skulls. "The blatant absence of evidence on the missing nine bullets strongly suggests the rounds passed cleanly through the skulls."

By now McLaren is thinking more like a conspiracy theorist than a cop. "Absence of evidence" has become meaningful in itself; it "strongly suggests" one is on to something big. But how many skulls need to explode before he'll ditch his belief that Oswald's ammunition was incapable of exploding a skull? One out of 10 should be enough, but apparently it isn't. "A burning fascination as to what happened to the other nine skulls remains."

Well, that burning fascination can be readily doused. It isn't hard to Google Olivier's written report of the experiments: "Ten skulls were shot at this range and extensive damage was produced in each instance. The bullets broke up to a greater or lesser degree in at least nine of the skulls." The commission no doubt believed putting one skull into evidence was enough to make the point. They didn't know what they'd be up against.

By now we're running out of reasons to believe Hickey shot JFK, unless of course somebody saw him do it. But nobody did, and a pretty vast crowd was looking in his direction at the time. Did anybody even see the gun in his hands before the fatal shot? McLaren thinks people did. But he engages in some brawny massaging of the evidence to prove it.

We're told Clint Hill, a Secret Service agent perched on the running-board of Hickey's car, "recalled George Hickey being in possession of the AR-15 ... Their vehicle ... 'lurched forward' and Hickey lost his footing." But Hill's testimony can be checked: it doesn't mention the AR-15 at all, except to say it was kept in the back seat. Hill indeed says the car "lurched forward" - after the fatal shot. He mentions losing his own footing at that point but says nothing about Hickey's.

Then there is the statement of Agent Glen Bennett, which, in McLaren's view, "places the AR-15 assault weapon in the hands of Hickey prior to the final and fatal shot". But Bennett merely says when he reached for the gun after the terminal shot, Hickey had already picked it up.

McLaren doesn't mention, but must surely know, that Bennett also made some handwritten notes on the night of the shooting, in which he described the moment following the head shot less ambiguously. "I immediately hollered to Special Agent Hickey, seated in the same seat, to get the AR-15." That was an odd thing to holler if Hickey was holding the weapon already.

Here is McLaren's smoking gun, then: still lying on the floor after the fatal shot, not just unsmoking but untouched.

Why, in any case, does McLaren take the statements of Hickey's fellow agents at face value? Elsewhere he alleges the Secret Service covered up the accident. So shouldn't he want these men to protest, loudly, that the weapon wasn't within a country mile of Hickey at the fatal moment?

McLaren's narrative is fundamentally incoherent, a common feature of untrue stories. On one hand he claims the Secret Service meddled with JFK's autopsy, stealing X-rays that showed his brain to be riddled with Hickey-implicating bullet fragments. But then, to demonstrate how damning those X-rays were, he quotes the Warren Commission testimony of Agent Roy Kellerman, the cover-up's alleged ringleader.

"The whole head looked like a little mass of stars," Kellerman testified. The brain contained "thirty, forty" metal fragments. Why would Kellerman say this if he thought the fragments pointed to Hickey? The answer, surely, is that he didn't and they don't. McLaren is now disproving his own case. Does he genuinely believe what he's saying? Or he is clinging to his junk thesis only because without it there is no book?

In his closing pages McLaren grasps at some flimsy straws. Jackie, he notes, couldn't be persuaded to change out of her dress, which was stained with her husband's blood. "I want them to see what they have done," she said. Who, McLaren asks darkly, were "they"? Was Jackie hinting the deed had been done by a plural entity, namely the Secret Service?

But they meant Dallas, as Sabato's scholarly and unhysterical book reminds us. JFK himself, on the morning of the assassination, had warned Jackie they were "heading into nut country" - the city was known to be dangerously rife with Kennedy-haters. But really, you don't need Sabato's book to tell you that Jackie, if she thought the Secret Service had killed her husband, would have found some less cryptic way of saying so. All you need is a sense of the way the world really works.

This is the sense conspiracy theorists conspicuously lack. They claim to be sceptics, but the first thing a sceptic must be sceptical about is their own thesis. Instead the conspiracists are infinitely credulous about their own big ideas, while levying an unreasonable burden of proof on everyone else.

The literary mind, in contrast, defers to the texture of reality. Norman Mailer, at the end of his typically weird and wonderful Oswald's Tale (1995), cut through the blur of the Dallas data-spew with some lines that only a novelist would dare to utter. "The proof of the magic bullet is that it happened," he wrote. "One cannot introduce the odds after the fact."

McLaren accepts the magic bullet but can't believe Oswald's third shot had its own idiosyncrasies. Instead he invites us to imagine Oswald leering down his scope at Kennedy's head only to see it get blown off accidentally, at that very instant, by someone who can't even be shown to have been armed at the time.

Either that happened, or Oswald fired a bullet that behaved in a not unheard-of way. To borrow Mailer's logic, the proof that Oswald's final bullet fragmented in JFK's head is that it did. This argument strikes me as far sounder than any of the "evidence" advanced in McLaren's flimsy stitch-up of a book.

Back in 1993, Oswald's own brother, Robert, vainly tried to tell the conspiracy theorists they were wasting their time. "The facts are there," he said. "There's hard physical evidence there ... Enough's enough. It's there. Put it to rest."

But what were the odds anyone would listen to Robert Oswald, when his considerably less subtle brother had somehow failed to make the point stick himself?

JFK: The Smoking Gun 
By Colin McLaren 
Hachette, 336pp, $29.99

Not In Your Lifetime: The Assassination of JFK 
By Anthony Summers
Headline, 528pp, $22.99

The Kennedy Half-century: The Presidency, Assassination and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy
By Larry J. Sabato
Bloomsbury, 624pp, $29.99 (HB)

David Free is a novelist and critic.