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The Commission had in its possession three movie films, taken by amateurs, of Kennedy's car at the moment of the assassination. Using these films as its guide, the Commission staged a chilling re-enactment of the assassination. Oswald's rifle, with scope, was pointed out of the sixth-floor window. A camera attachment took pictures, complete with cross hairs, of a car moving past on the street below.
In that car, sitting where Kennedy and Connally sat, were two FBI men, closely resembling Kennedy and Connally in physical proportions. Kennedy's stand-in had a chalk-marked circle on the back of his suit jacket just at the point where the assassin's first bullet struck the President; Connally's double wore the actual jacket the Governor had worn on Nov. 22, and its torn fabric still showed a bullet hole. From its assassin's eye view, the camera first showed the line of sight between the window and the car obscured by an oak tree (the Warren Commission was careful to note that the amount of foliage on the tree was about the same at the time of the experiment as it had been on Nov. 22). But once the car moved away from the oak tree, the test pictures, taken through the four-power rifle scope, clearly showed what an easy target Kennedy had been.
Into the Theater. The Commission also reconstructed Oswald's movements after the assassination with near minute-by-minute precision. A Dallas motorcycle cop, M. L. Baker, who was in the presidential motorcade on Nov. 22, had heard the shots, dashed into the Depository building. The Commission had him re-enact his part, timed him at 90 seconds between the time he left his motorcycle and the time he encountered (but did not arrest) Oswald outside a second-floor lunchroom. Could Oswald have run that quickly from the sixth floor to the second? A Secret Service agent, testing, moved at a "fast walk" from the killer's lair to the lunch room in 78 seconds—without being winded.
From the Depository, Oswald moved on foot, by bus and taxi cab back to his rooming house, changed to a grey zippered jacket, picked up his mailorder Smith & Wesson .38-cal. revolver and left about 1 p.m. Says the Commission: "Oswald was next seen about nine-tenths of a mile away at the southeast corner of 10th Street and Patton Avenue, moments before the [Officer J. D.] Tippit shooting."
A description of the assassin had already been broadcast three times by police on the basis of a report from Eyewitness Howard Brennan. At 1:15 p.m., Officer Tippit saw Oswald and called him to his squad car. Oswald walked over to the window vent, spoke briefly. Tippit got out, started toward the front of the car. Oswald shot Tippit four times with his revolver. Tippit was dead before he hit the ground. Says the Commission: "At least 12 persons saw the man with the revolver in the vicinity of the Tippit crime scene at or immediately after the shooting. By the evening of Nov. 22, five of them had identified Lee Harvey Oswald in police lineups as the man they saw. A sixth did so the next day. Three others subsequently identified Oswald from a photograph. Two witnesses testified that Oswald resembled the man they had seen. One witness felt