While reviewing Mark Tyler’s Motorcade 63, I thought of Dale Myers’ 3D animation reconstruction of President Kennedy’s motorcade on November 22, 1963. Myer’s work is the most sophisticated effort to update the official story of the Warren Commission that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed the president for no reason.
Gerald Ford (left) looks on as Chief Justice Earl Warren presents the Commission’s report to President Lyndon Johnson
It was a private moment between two aspiring statesmen.
On the evening of May 19, 1976, President Valery Giscard d’Estaing of France visited President Gerald Ford in Washington. Giscard, a calculating centrist, had come for a state visit. Ford, the former Michigan congressman, had succeeded the disgraced Richard Nixon. Both men were new to their high offices.
In the limousine ride to the state banquet at George Washington’s home in Mount Vernon, Giscard asked Ford about a sensitive issue: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 13 years before.
‘Here is an indiscrete question, Giscard said, “You were with the Warren Commission. What was your take?’ …
In JFK Files: Holland’s Magic Bullet, Dale Myers critiques Max Holland’s recent writing on the first gunshot fired President Kennedy’s motorcade. Holland has argued that the first shot grazed the arm of a lamp post and missed the motorcade, hit a curb and injured bystander James Tague.
In characteristically sharp language, Meyers finds Holland’s version wanting in evidence and logic. Myers argues for the Warren Commission’s version of the gunfire.
A few things are known for sure. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, 34 years old and dressed in a U.S.-made knock off of a pink Chanel suit, was looking at her husband’s face with concern from inches away when a bullet shattered his head.
After that horrible moment, Jackie had to pull herself together, give Jack the funeral he deserved. She assumed that her husband’s enemies had killed him. A week after the assassination, she and her brother-in-law Robert Kennedy confided in a friend, William Walton. They said they believed Dallas was the work of a high-level domestic plot, meaning JFK’s enemies on the political right.
But mostly Jackie didn’t want to think about who killed Jack. She was close to insane with grief, clutching to her brother-in-law who was devastated as well. She was often suicidal. And so Jackie fades from the crime story. The men who dominate the discussions of JFK conspiracy theories are often united in ignoring the views of the woman closest to the crime.
A middle-schooler in Birmingham, Alabama, writing a paper for English class, recently asked me for my thoughts on the famous Single Bullet Theory, the keystone of the official theory of the Lone Gunman.
