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This hypothesis was originated by a commission assistant counsel, Aden Specter, now district attorney of Philadelphia, after Warren investigators became puzzled over the timing of Oswald's shots. After a frame-by-frame analysis of a movie, film taken by a tourist named Abraham Zapruder, commissioners decided that 1.8 seconds—at most—had elapsed between Kennedy's first visible response to being hit in the neck and John Connally's first measurable reaction to a bullet striking him. The early assumption had been that the two were hit by separate shots. But since Oswald's bolt-action rifle could not be operated any faster than once every 2.3 seconds, the commission finally adopted Specter's theory that one bullet had struck both men—even though the bullet that was supposed to have done the damage was all but unmarked.
The decision to accept the hypothesis was by no means unanimous, and there ensued what has since been described in Author Edward Jay Epstein's book Inquest as the "battle of the adjectives." Some commissioners wanted to say that "compelling'-' evidence supported the single-bullet thesis; others thought "credible" evidence was strong enough, and a compromise was reached with the word "persuasive."
Split-Second Specifics. Even the commission's conclusion collided head-on with the testimony of a primary witness to the shooting—Governor Connally himself. From the start, he insisted that he did not feel any impact until an instant after he heard a shot, presumably the one that struck Kennedy first, and thus could not have been wounded by the same bullet. The commission decided that he was mistaken; that he had experienced a delayed reaction to his wounds. The Governor said no more about it publicly until early this month, when LIFE prevailed upon him to review the Zapruder films to see if he might have been wrong. The commission had merely shown the Governor screenings of the Zapruder assassination film, but LIFE gave him enlargements of 168 consecutive frames covering the whole shooting episode. As Connally examined them through a magnifying glass, he spotted details he had missed before and recalled the specific split seconds of those shattering moments.
There is no doubt in his mind that he was right. "I know every single second of what happened in that car until I lost consciousness," he says in the current LIFE. "I recall I heard that first shot and was starting to turn to my right to see what had happened. [Then] I started to look around over my left shoulder, and somewhere in that revolution I was hit. My recollection of that time gap, the distinct separation between the shot that hit the President and the impact of the one that hit me, is as clear today as it was then."