(2 of 9)
For varied reasons—some selfish and financial, others well-intentioned and sincere—dozens of critics have assailed the report and its central findings. Those conclusions were: 1) only one assassin, Oswald, fired the shots in Dallas' Dealey Plaza; 2) there were three shots, and all were fired from behind the two victims, Kennedy and then Texas Governor John Connally, who was seated ahead of the President on a jump seat in a limousine; 3) one bullet missed both men; one passed through Kennedy's neck and Connally's chest and right wrist, stopping in his left thigh. The other hit Kennedy in the head.
In the years since publication of the report, a generation of young people has grown up with no awareness of what the commission really said. Millions of older Americans, too, paid little attention to its details. Thus whatever a large portion of the public has learned about the report has been filtered, often in a highly prejudicial way, through the critics—some of whom show no signs of having read it. The more industrious critics have minutely analyzed the full 26 volumes and exploited every real or imagined conflict among witnesses, every investigative error or omission by Dallas police, the FBI or the Warren Commission itself. Never attempting a balanced assessment, and sometimes defying the evidence, the conspiracy theorists have raised an array of questions, many of which are readily answerable. Some examples:
Isn't the famed photo of Oswald with a rifle and a pistol actually Oswald's head imposed on someone else's body?
No. Lecturers making this claim often display a LIFE cover (Feb. 21, 1964) of this photo. LIFE'S artists routinely outlined parts of the photo to clarify detail, such as the rifle. Oswald's Soviet-born wife Marina testified that she took two snapshots of this pose. Warren Commission investigators have one of the negatives. Experts testified that beyond doubt it came from Oswald's camera and in no way was doctored.
Weren't Watergate Burglars E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis photographed in Dealey Plaza when Kennedy was killed?
No. A photo said by critics to resemble the two former CIA employees shows drastic differences in features.
Is not part of a man and a rifle vaguely visible behind a tree in the Zapruder assassination film ?
No. The tree was only inches in diameter and nobody could have hidden behind it. Moreover, the "gunman" disappears in a fraction of a second; the suspected shape is visible on only three frames of the film.
Didn't many witnesses think they heard shots fired from the "grassy knoll" area ahead and to one side of Kennedy's car?
Yes. Some policemen even rushed in that direction. But the acoustics of rifle shots are often misleading. No one on the knoll saw a gunman. No physical evidence of any such shooting was found.
Is it not probable that Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Oswald, was part of a plot?