Dodging The Magic Bullet

__"Richard Russell and Earl Warren’s Commission: The Politics of an Extraordinary Investigation" by Max Holland, in Miller Center Report (Spring 1999), P.O. Box 5106, Charlottesville, Va. 22905.__

When the Warren Commission issued its acting alone, had assassinated President John F. report 35 years ago, it shortsightedly fudged a Kennedy. The note of ambivalence, which has bit on its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald, fed the popular belief in a conspiracy, was contrary to "all reliable evidence," says Holland, a Research Fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, and was only introduced because of a key commission member’s "misplaced pride" and antipathy toward the commission’s liberal chairman.

In testimony before the commission, Texas governor John Connally, who was wounded in the attack, insisted that one of the three shots heard in Dealey Plaza in Dallas that November day in 1963 was meant just for him. "He refused to believe that he had been injured incidentally," Holland says. "According to Connally, the president was injured by the first shot; then he, Connally, was wounded separately by the second shot; then the third and final shot hit the president in the head." Since it would have been impossible for Oswald to have fired the first bullet that hit Kennedy and a second one hitting Connally in the scant seconds between them, his account implied there were two shooters—a conspiracy.

Nevertheless, the medical and forensic evidence was clear, Holland says. The shot that first hit Kennedy entered the back of his neck, exited his throat, and then—according to what the commission stated was "very persuasive evidence from the experts"—hit Connally, who was sitting in front of Kennedy in the limousine. This bullet (which skeptics came to call the "magic bullet") must have hit Connally, avers Holland, for if it didn’t, as Connally claimed, then, after emerging from Kennedy’s body, it "disappeared altogether. Such a missile would truly have been a ‘magic bullet.’ " (That bullet and the second, fatal one that hit Kennedy’s head "probably" did all the damage, the commission said, with the other shot—Holland believes it was the first one fired—missing the limousine occupants entirely.)

Despite the unambiguous evidence, Holland says, the commission report left open the possibility that the so-called magic bullet might not have hit Connally after all. "Governor Connally’s testimony and certain other factors," the commission stated, "have given rise to some difference of opinion as to this probability."

Why did the commission thus water down the firm conclusion of its own staff? To avert a threatened dissent by one of its most influential members, conservative senator Richard Russell of Georgia, says Holland. Russell strongly disliked the commission’s chairman, Chief Justice Earl Warren, the bête noire of southern segregationists, and "would not permit the report—Warren’s report—to contradict the sworn testimony of a southern governor, no matter how impossible that testimony was."

Warren wanted a unanimous report to dispel public fears. So unwarranted doubt about the single-bullet conclusion was introduced. Though conspiracy theories were sure to abound anyway, the commission itself, Holland concludes, "bears some responsibility" for the widespread disbelief in its findings.