To The Editor of Commentary:
As one of the Assistant Counsel to the Warren Commission, I was pleased to find Professor Bickel's "The Failure of the Warren Report to be responsible and, for the most part, well thought out, in marked contrast to other such critiques that have recently appeared. He has set a tone at which reasonable discussion is possible. So it is with real gratitude that I would like to make a few specific comments, albeit adverse ones.
Professor Bickel's principal point of attack on the Commission is its conclusion that the single bullet found on a stretcher after the assassination ("Bullet 399") had passed through the President's upper chest and Governor Connally's chest and wrist and lodged lightly in the governor's thigh. He says that this could not have happened, because the testimony was that Bullet 399 did not lose enough fragments to account for those left in the wounds it caused. I assume his reference was to the testimony of Drs. Finck and Humes, which he had discussed in a preceding paragraph. Each doctor testified that he thought, or had heard, that there were more fragments in Governor Connally's leg or wrist than Bullet 399 could have lost. Although Professor Bickel may not have meant to include it, the testimony of still a third witness, Dr. Shaw, was to the same effect (4 H 113).
Professor Bickel is not the first to have made this charge, nor of course did he claim to be. Mark Lane and Vincent Salandria have also made it, and more specifically. Their case is that whereas Dr. Shaw testified that the fragments found in Connally's wrist weighed more than 3 grains, the testimony of FBI Agent Frazier disclosed that Bullet 399 weighed only 1.4 to 2.4 grains less than the normal weight of a bullet of its type before firing, and that the testimony of Drs. Finck and Humes, though not including any reference to specific weights or amounts, was to the same effect. (Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment, 78-79; Vincent Salandria, "The Impossible Tasks of the One Assassination Bullet," The Minority of One, March 1966, pp. 12-18.) None of the critics to date has relied on any other evidence than that of the three doctors and Agent Frazier, nor to my knowledge is there any other such evidence.
But I believe that analysis will show that the doctors' testimony is unreliable, that Frazier's testimony has been distorted and, indeed, made to stand for the opposite of what he plainly said, and that the evidence on the other side of the issue is clearly the more reliable and fully supports the Commission's conclusion that the weight loss of the bullet is consistent with the weight of the fragments in the wounds. I will deal with these points in the order I have stated them.
Dr. Shaw said that he thought the wrist wound contained more than three grains of fragments. Yet he admitted that he had never worked on the governor's wrist (4 H 108, 109, 117); he never claimed to have made any other kind of close examination of the wrist fragments; and on two occasions he expressly denied being qualified to testify on the issue. In answer to questions, he admitted that he did not have sufficient knowledge of the wrist wound to render an opinion as to whether the bullet could have gone through it and emerged as much intact as it was (4 H 117). Drs. Finck and Humes, too. though they were never questioned on their ballistics experience, likewise never purported to possess the qualifications for, or have directed their attention to, the difficult task of actually measuring of estimating the weight of the fragments. And in their case, it is not even clear that they had any idea of how much weight the bullet had lost. Their testimony took place while tests on the bullet were still being run and more than two weeks before Frazier reported their results to the Commission. (2 H 374). The testimony, in fact, strongly indicates that neither of them even knew that Bullet 399 had lost fragments from its base. They were able to view the bullet only as it rested on cotton in a plastic case and were apparently misled by the intactness of its copper jacket into thinking its weight loss was so little as to be unobservable (2 H 374-75, 382).
Next, to Frazier's testimony (3 H 430). I think anyone who reads it will agree he plainly stated that Bullet 399 weighed 158.6 grains, that bullets of its type normally weigh about 161 grains before firing, that their weight not uncommonly varies from the norm by up to at least two grains, and that therefore Bullet 399's weight loss could easily have been approximately 3 or 4 grains. At one point Frazier made a quick, rough subtraction of 158.6 from 161 to obtain "only a grain and a half." Lane pounced on the mistake to support his own statement that Frazier's testimony showed the most probable weight loss to have been "1.4 to 2.4 grains." More subtly, both Lane and Salandria misconstrued the fact that the heaviest of the three sample bullets Frazier weighed to establish their normal pre-firing weight weighed 161.5 grains, as proof that 161.5 grains was the most that a bullet of that type could ever be expected to weigh. But surely it must be obvious that that fact no more proves what Lane and Salandria say it does than that, for example, the fact that the tallest of three boys chosen at random from a large high-school class measured six feet would prove that no other boy in the class measured more than six feet, or even no other boy in the class measured a lot more than six feet.
The 2.4 grains difference between the weight of Bullet 399 and that of a normal bullet of its type before firing, plus the variation of at least 2 grains to be allowed, totals 4.4 grains of fragments that could have been found in the wounds without there being a reasonable doubt that they came from Bullet 399. That is amply consistent with the evidence of the fragments' actual weight, which is that they weighed but one grain. Only two bullet fragments were recovered from the governor's wrist (4 H 122-23). The much larger of the two was weighed and found to weigh one half grain (4 H 123; 5 H 72-74; CE 842). None was recovered from other portions of the bullet's path (6 H 95, 106; 5 H 73-74). None of the fragments found in the Presidential car or imbedded in its windshield was traceable to Bullet 399, and in view of the fact that the bullet which went through the President's head was known to have shattered, it is virtually certain that they came from it (Report 87).
No fragments from Bullet 399 were left in the President's body. Traces of copper were left on his coat where the bullet pierced it, but they were so small as to require detection by a spectrograph (5 H 59). X-ray photographs showed one fragment left in Connally's thigh (6 H 106), one in his chest (6 H 111), and seven or eight or more in his wrist (4 H 120). None of these could be actually weighed, of course, but their weights could be estimated by observation. The total of the wrist fragments estimated to be such as to be "weighed ... in micrograms" (4 H 120). A microgram is a millionth of a gram, or less than two hundred-thousandths of a grain. These fragments were described as "flakes" and most were so small that x-ray photographs had to be taken from different angles and compared in order to differentiate their appearance from that of tiny imperfections in the films or camera (4 H 120). The thigh fragment was also estimated to weigh "in micrograms" (4 H 125), or "maybe a tenth of a grain" (6 H 106). No one, not even any of the doctors who worried about the number of fragments left in the wrist or thigh, considered the chest fragment large enough to be concerned about. Dr. Shaw, in fact, who did the work on Connally's chest, was apparently not even aware that a bullet fragment was present there (6 H 95). Dr. Shires, who later spotted it in an x-ray photograph and who was the witness who described the thigh fragment as "maybe, a tenth of a grain," spoke of the sizes of both fragments in the same terms (6 H, 106, 111). All the fragments together thus totaled a half grain plus a few tenths, or about one grain. Professor Bickel's assertion to the contrary notwithstanding, the Commission had ample evidence to refute Drs. Finck and Humes on his issue.
Since the Commission's explanation is not, as he thought, impossible, the need to come up with another explanation consistent with the facts as we know them is not as compelling as Professor Bickel believes. But if I read him correctly, he would still urge his own alternative explanation because he sees it as more probable than the Commission's, which, even without the fragment "impossibility," he still believes to be improbable because it requires the bullet to have done all the damage it did and emerge relatively undistorted. I think he is wrong here, too. A more searching analysis of his own theory shows it to be far more improbable than ... that of the Commission...
Professor Bickel's alternative theory is that Bullet 399 entered the President's back and stopped short four inches in, and that the rest of the damage to Kennedy and Connally was done by other bullets or their fragments. Since we know that Bullet 399 broke no bones in the President nor even tore any large muscles, and since the bullet itself when recovered was only slightly distorted and but a few grains short of its initial weight, to have come to a halt as quickly as Professor Bickel hypothesizes, it must have hit the President with very little velocity --- much less than it would have had if it had flown freely the relatively short distance from Oswald's rifle. If it had not been previously slowed down, the dead stop in four inches could not have been accomplished without inflicting much greater damage both on it and on the President's body. Professor Bickel seeks to overcome this difficulty by suggesting that the bullet lost some speed by having "brushed a branch of the live oak tree" overhanging the street.
But the professor fails to appreciate how much speed the bullet would thus have to have lost. Tests on materials of similar permeability showed that a bullet traversing the entire breadth of the President's upper chest would have lost only about 120 feet per second of its entering velocity. The test bullets slowed down from about 1,904 feet per second, the probable entry velocity of Bullet 399, to about 1,785 feet per second (Report 91, and see 2 H 375, 381). To have stopped only part-way through, therefore, Bullet 399 must have entered at something less than about 120 feet per second, that is, it must have been slowed down by the "live oak tree" something like 1,800 feet per second.
The necessity for that amount of slowing down destroys Professor Bickel's theory. A light "brushing of a branch" could hardly have sufficed, and if the "brushing" were not light, but substantial, it would have thrown the bullet off its course to the President. (Or must we go into the infinitesimal probabilities of a carom shot?) And since a high velocity bullet colliding with solid oak with sufficient force to slow it down to about six per cent of its pre-collision velocity would have to have received a very jarring blow, any such collision would also have considerably scarred or distorted Bullet 399 --- but we know that, in fact, Bullet 399 was virtually unscathed. A head-on collision with a branch of the oak tree, on the other hand, even if it did not stop the bullet altogether, would have left it even more severely damaged. Additionally, whatever the nature of the branch collision that would be necessary to have so reduced the speed of the bullet, it could hardly have left it "pristine," that is, left it with essentially the same spin and arrow-straight alignment as it had when it left the muzzle. But the nature of the would on the President's back and holes in his shirt and jacket bear strong evidence of having been made by a "pristine" bullet (Report 87-88, 92).
Finally, if, as the professor's alternative theory suggests, there were separate shots that hit the President's back, the President's head, Connally's back, and the curb, for a total of four, what happened to the fourth empty cartridge and the fourth bullet? A thorough search of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building found only three cartridges, and the chance that someone picked one up before the police arrived and kept it seems remote. There is nothing to lead us to think that anyone one the premises was the kind of person thus to hide important evidence, or indeed, that anyone, no matter how evilly motivated, would have thought it made sense to seize and hide only one cartridge and leave the others and the rifle itself. As for the alleged fourth bullet, if it came to rest temporarily in Connally's thigh and later fell out, why wasn't it found? Bullet 399 was discovered resting on a stretcher, a fact consistent with its having dropped out of either Connally or Kennedy, but no other missile was discovered there, in the car, on the hospital premises, or elsewhere.
To The Editor of Commentary:
Alexander M. Bickel is less than fair to Mark Lane and more than generous to the Warren Commission ... He reserves his sharpest words for Lane, who has all along been the chief critic of the Commission. From the beginning, Lane protested the Commission's mode of operation which, Bickel now finds, insured a superficial inquiry. He pointed out its dependence on the FBI, to which Bickel now calls our attention. He also showed that the Commission at the outset of its investigation announced that six broad areas of inquiry would be explored, four of which related to Oswald's background and activities, one to Ruby's background, and one to the procedures employed to protect President Kennedy --- that is, it began with the implicit assumption that the investigation of Oswald's activities would give the answer to the question, "Who killed Kennedy?" Finally, Lane asked from the beginning that, since it was clear that Oswald was being tried posthumously, his interests be represented by a defense attorney. IT was only after the inquiry was well advanced that the Commission yielded to the pressure of public opinion, especially abroad, and appointed the president of the American Bar Association as such a representative, but he attended only two of the fifty-one meetings of the Commission, and did not cross-examine witnesses. Bickel complains that the critics of the Report have indulged in "idealization-by-contrast of the criminal trial, in which the defendant is represented by counsel with a right to cross-examine." However, one does not have to idealize the judicial processes in ordinary criminal cases to assert that a good defense attorney would have raised the questions which Bickel regrets the Commission did not raise.
The questions concerning the wounds, the undeformed recovered bullet, the wound-ballistics experiments, etc. which Bickel states need to be answered were also voiced, as he does not tell us, by Lane. Far from Lane's book being the "wildly speculative" work of a "veteran demonologist," it does not speculate at all, advancing no theories, but, in addition to showing the inadequacy of the Commission's evidence for arriving at its conclusions, raises questions that the evidence cries aloud should be asked. What Bickel does is to present as irresponsible speculation those of Lane's questions he does not make his own by omitting mention of the evidence which caused the questions to be raised in the first place. Thus, he says disparagingly that Lane is "absolutely certain" that Ruby "murdered Oswald through the complicity or complacency of the Dallas police." But Lane shows in detail how so many things went wrong in the protection measures for Oswald that one cannot but confront the implications of the fact that Ruby was allowed to kill the alleged assassin of the President: the Dallas police were either "incredibly stupid" and complacent in their stupidity or Ruby was aided by one or more of their members.
Which of the two was it? Lane does not make any categorical assertions, but he presents evidence that points to the second conclusion, evidence which the Commission chose not to explore. He allows, for instance, that sixteen witnesses closely associated with Ruby told FBI agents that Ruby's relations with the police were far more extensive, intimate, and high-reaching than they were said to be by the chief of police, whose word the Commission accepted. This reliance by the Commission on the word of an interested though official person illustrates what is abundantly proved in Lane's book: Professor Bickel's assertion that "the findings of the Warren Commission ... were in some measure a matter of wish-fulfillment" is a weak understatement...
To the Editor of Commentary:
The eminent ... Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale University, Alexander M. Bickel, has paid me the honor of not letting the name of my book, Whitewash: The Report on the Warren Report, pass his lips. For this boon I am equally indebted to Commentary, to which I sent a copy of the book early last May.
Of course, it may just have been because my book reached you so much earlier than the others that Mr. Bickel managed to avoid consideration of it in what we must accept --- because of his exalted ... position and the reputation ... of your learned journal --- as an exhaustive study of the literature on the "Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy" ...
Please do not assume that I resent being forgotten ... It is a circumstance I have learned to live with in equanimity and increasing sales, for I find that those commonly thought of as intellects ... prefer to ignore a humble writer who suffers the indignity of living on a farm and ... has managed to survive the lack of mention ...
When first I began to read "The Failure of the Warren Commission [sic]," I foolishly thought it was a takeoff on Sholem Aleichem. I was led into this trap by the clear separation of this work from both the law, on which its author is such a resplendent authority, and reality, with which he has little association. Soon it became clear to even such a clouded understanding as mine ... that if it were Sholem Aleichem, it would be tenth-rate ...
Then it occurred to me that the piece --- like the one I read some months back in Ramparts --- might be a spoof. No, I told myself, this would be but fifth-rate spoofing and certainly ... Mr. Bickel would associate himself with nothing that could be called fifth-rate.
Aha! I said as the realization of what must be the truth slowly worked its way through ... my ... head, this is nonsense! ... At last I understood, and what a relief! This is nonsense, presented otherwise in order to tax those of limited understanding and delight those who are wise, a fitting presentation for a journal like yours ...
So I must congratulate you ... for such a tour of intellectual force ... for your ... attainment of the absolute perfection in nonsense so cleverly disguised as a review.
To the Editor of Commentary:
In his fine review of the Warren Commission and its critics, Alexander Bickel accepted too readily the opinion of the doctors who performed President Kennedy's autopsy that too many metal fragments were found in Governor Connally's wrist and thigh to have come from the one nearly whole bullet which was recovered. Their opinion is crucial, for it led Bickel to conclude that Kennedy's first wound and Connally's wounds were caused by separate shots and that therefore, given the time limitations, either there were two assassins or the first shot occurred before other commentators thought it possible. However, the doctors' opinion about the fragments was based solely on two written reports: one by Dr. Gregory, Connally's wrist surgeon, which referred to "small bits of metal"; and the other by Dr. Shires, Connally's thigh surgeon, which referred to "a bullet fragment." Dr. Gregory did not state the number of pieces, and neither doctor gave sizes or weights. Thus the opinion of the autopsy doctors was based on hardly any evidence. More significant is Dr. Gregory's testimony that he found few metal fragments, possibly only three, and that they were so very small that their loss would leave the mass of a bullet virtually intact.
This vital issue can be pursued further by finding out whether the maximum estimated weight of the fragments in Connally was more or less than the loss in weight of the bullet. Dr. Shaw, Connally's chest surgeon, believed that over three grains of metal were in the wrist; and Dr. Shires estimated that the fragments in the thigh weighed 0.1 grain. FBI Agent Frazier provided data indicating that the bullet which was recovered was about 2.5 grains lighter than the average of its type. Allowing for variation in weight, Frazier said that this bullet could have lost four grains, and if he had not mistakenly substituted "1.5 grains" for "2.5 grains" in his calculation, he would presumably have said that it could have lost five grains. In addition, he said that a bullet which had lost no weight could be as light as the bullet which was found, so presumably also it could be 2.5 grains heavier than average and thus five grains heavier than the bullet which was recovered. The five grains which this bullet could have lost appear heavier than the highest estimate of the weight of metal fragments in Connally. Thus the bullet could have wounded Connally as well as Kennedy.
Mr. Bickel writes:
To turn first to Miss Meagher:
(1) The Commission only cites Frazier to support the statement that Governor Connally could not have been hit after frame 240. It also reports him as saying that in his view Governor Connally was in position to be hit between frames 207 and 225. That is accurate enough. No misrepresentation there. Miss Meagher's point is quite a different one. Could Governor Connally have received a bullet after frame 225? Shaneyfelt, another BI expert, expressed the opinion that Governor Connally could have been hit at frame 238, or at least that is what he seems to say, although the inquiry was not pursued (Volume V, p. 155). Frazier's own testimony does not seem to me to be quite what Miss Meagher makes it. Frazier said also:
There is only one position beyond frame 225 at which the governor could have been struck according to the information furnished to me and from my examination of his clothing....
Note that Frazier says "beyond frame 225"; but in the next breath he seems to indicate that it would not have been after frame 231 (Volume V, p. 170). Frazier assumes throughout a bullet which is entirely undeflected from its original path. Furthermore, I am not at all clear whether he was judging positions at which Governor Connally could have been hit by a bullet that had already passed through President Kennedy, or positions in which Governor Connally could have been hit independently. As to the possibility of deflection, the bullet that went through Governor Connally fractured a rib, and might, I suppose, well have been deflected. Governor Connally himself, having viewed the film, thought that he was hit between frames 231 and 234 (Vol IV IV, p. 145). Dr. Shaw, who treated Governor Connally, and who also saw the film, thought that the Governor was hit at frame 236, give or take one or two frames (Volume IV, p. 114). I hold no particular brief for the notion I suggested of a possible shot at the President at frames 185-6, and later separate shot at Governor Connally. But I do not think the testimony Miss Meagher quotes excludes it, certainly not when weighed against other testimony. I don't think the Commission investigated this possibility, eliciting testimony directed specifically at it, and attempting to reconcile or test conflicts in relevant testimony. I think somebody should, and I don't think that picking some lines out of Frazier's testimony and presenting them in isolation does the job.
(2) I thought I gave full credit to Epstein; at least I intended to do so. And I did not call Epstein a "demonologist."
(3) I don't accept that the Commission suppressed evidence. Had it done so, there would have been no Epstein book.
(4) I am afraid Miss Meagher will have to get accustomed to the thought that in a case like this the only kind of truth that is possible is a truth of probabilities.
(5) I don't propose to debate the question whether or not I consulted the volumes of hearings and exhibits. Miss Meagher cannot know that I failed to consult the record, and the few footnotes I printed might have indicated that I did.
I suppose I should he pleased to find myself patronized by "one of the assistant Counsel to the Warren Commission," but I wish Mr. Slawson had read me more closely. I did not argue that the single-bullet hypothesis is impossible, and I did not discount the difficulties that face any other theory. Two pathologists, I said, testified that Bullet 399 could not have done what the Commission (over three dissents, as we now know) concluded it did. Dr. Humes was shown the bullet, and he had seen "the medical reports on Governor Connally at Parkland Hospital." He thought it "most unlikely" that Bullet 399 could have passed through Governor Connally, gone through his wrist, and finally lodged in his thigh. That was the opinion also of Dr. Finck, formerly chief of the Wound Ballistics Pathology Branch of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. Could Bullet 399 have wounded the Governor in the wrist? Dr. Finck was asked. "No: for the reason that there are too many fragments described in that wrist," was the reply.
This damaging testimony, I continued, stands unrefuted in the Commission's record of hearings, and the single-bullet hypothesis cannot be accepted until this evidence is not merely explained away, but displaced by affirmative testimony from equally qualified wound ballistics experts that Bullet 399 --- not some other, theoretical bullet, but the actual bullet in question --- could have done what Drs. Humes and Finck said it did not do. Now both Mr. Slawson and Mr. Kilpatrick point to testimony suggesting that the fragments left in Governor Connally were very light. But shape and degree of distortion are also relevant. Moreover, Messrs. Slawson and Kilpatrick do not point to any direct testimony about Bullet 399 itself.
The Commission, as I indicated in my article, conducted wound ballistics experiments. These were not very helpful on the questions of distortion and weight loss. It is interesting, however, that a bullet fired through animal substance simulating Governor Connally's chest (and only his chest) came out very considerably more distorted than Bullet 399. And it weighed, after performing its task in the experiment, which involved no shedding of fragments in any wrist and thigh, 158.8 grains. Bullet 399 weighed 158.6 grains.
I failed to mention in my article --- and Mr. Slawson and Mr. Kilpatrick overlook it now --- a brief passage in the testimony of Dr. Olivier, one of the experts who conducted the Commission's tests. Dr. Olivier though that one fragment recovered from Governor Connally's wrist could have come from Bullet 399 --- from the back of it. He also gave it as his "feeling" ("I believe that it was. That is my feeling.") that Bullet 399 caused the wound in Governor Connally's wrist. But the question to which he was responding asked him to assume, "if you will that [Bullet 399] was the missile found on the Governor s stretcher at Parkland Hospital" --- an assumption that might overcome doubts about distortion and weight loss, but that rests on very slender and insufficiently explained evidence. Possibly it was an accident that the question to Dr. Olivier was phrased in this fashion, and possibly it was his independent and well-founded opinion that Bullet 399 could have gone through Governor Connally's chest and wrist, and lodged in his thigh. But the missile was not pursued with Dr. Olivier; the rest of his testimony concerns hypothetical bullets. Feeling and assumption about Bullet 399 were left to buttress each other without more.
Dr. Light, a colleague of Dr. Olivier, who participated with him in the tests, was of the opinion that Bullet 399 caused all of Governor Connally's wounds. He was persuaded to this view, he said, by his assumption that Bullet 399 was found on Governor Connally's stretcher. Was there anything about the bullet itself that led him to this conclusion, he was asked. "Nothing about the bullet," was the answer. Dr. Olivier's other colleague was not interrogated about Bullet 399. And nothing was said about the opinion of Drs. Humes and Finck, which was the only unambiguous and direct expert opinion elicited by the Commission. It may have been based on insufficient information, as Messrs. Slawson and Kilpatrick believe, but then Doctors Humes and Finck should have been recalled and reexamined, the Commission having made certain that the proper information was before them. For the only other, and presumably fully informed, view that the Commission obtained was that of Dr. Gregory, who, asked whether Bullet 399 could have remained as intact as it was after going through Governor Connally's wrist, thought it possible, but owned that he hardly knew enough to be able to tell. And Dr. Gregory, as I pointed out in my article, also thought it improbable that a bullet that had gone through Governor Connally's chest and wrist and lodged in his thigh could first have traveled through another man's neck.
As to Frazier: he was testifying that Bullet 399 had been fired from Oswald's rifle, and that it was not so diminished by loss of weight as to have made ballistic examination difficult. Its markings were serviceable. The bullet might in fact, he said, have lost no weight at all. Frazier was never asked whether Bullet 399 could have caused Governor Connally's wounds, and he never said so.
This is no mere complaint of inelegance in the Commission's performance. The single-bullet theory is a difficult one, and yet that theory is the basket in which the Commission chose to put all its eggs. We are dealing with the heart of the case; not the case against Oswald, but the Commission's case for the proposition that Oswald acted alone. The main prop supporting the single-bullet theory, namely, the conclusion that Bullet 399 was found on Governor Connally's stretcher, is weak. And yet, although it had heard the authoritative opinion of Drs. Humes and Finck, the Commission never obtained a fully informed and direct statement that the bullet could indeed have done all that the theory crucial to the Commission's findings required it to have done. The testimony, not of one, but of two or three experts to this effect was essential, and it should have been explored in the fullest detail. Of course, all that could have been obtained would have been opinion, which is ultimately fallible; and even if the opinion was entirely accepted, it could not have established the one-bullet theory to a certainty, but only to a probability. That much, however, was to be expected.
It is perhaps needless to say --- and the record of the Commission's own hearings demonstrates it --- that experts are people who deal in nice distinctions. That is the whole point about them. If an assured answer is wanted from them, it can be elicited by a question that is sufficiently qualified to enable them to answer with assurance. The value of their testimony depends, therefore, on the directness and precision of the questions they are asked. The question crucial to the Warren Commission's findings was asked with the requisite directness and precision, and answered with assurance as such, only in the interrogation of Drs. Humes and Finck. Elsewhere in the record, it was either not asked at all, not asked directly, asked in qualified fashion, with the support of assumptions, or, as in the case of Dr. Gregory, not answered with assurance. Such a state of the record might be good enough on a marginal issue, or on a question on which other evidence is satisfactory. Concerning the Warren Commission's single-bullet hypothesis, this state of the record is not good enough.
The theory of an earlier shot, which I put forward, but which I must tell Mr. Slawson, I do not accept as my "own," still does not seem to me to be precluded. The autopsy doctors themselves initially took the position that a bullet penetrated only a short distance into President Kennedy's back, and as to the difficulties which are surely presented, I can only say that I am not myself qualified to judge whether the bullet could have lost enough speed by brushing against a tree, or, as has been suggested to me, might have had less speed to begin with because it was possibly defective. I do not maintain that on this hypothesis a fourth shot must have hit the curb. The mark on the curb could be accounted for by a fair-sized fragment.
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