title: I Have a Dream

text: Beginning with a reference to the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared millions of slaves free in 1863, King said "one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free". Toward the end of the speech, King departed from his prepared text for a partly improvised peroration on the theme "I have a dream", prompted by Mahalia Jackson's cry: "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" In this part of the speech, which most excited the listeners and has now become its most famous, King described his dreams of freedom and equality arising from a land of slavery and hatred.


title: I Have a Dream

text: Jon Meacham writes that, "With a single phrase, King joined Jefferson and Lincoln in the ranks of men who've shaped modern America". The speech was ranked the top American speech of the 20th century in a 1999 poll of scholars of public address. The speech has also been described as having "a strong claim to be the greatest in the English language of all time".


title: I Have a Dream

text: The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was partly intended to demonstrate mass support for the civil rights legislation proposed by President John F. Kennedy in June. Martin Luther King and other leaders, therefore, agreed to keep their speeches calm, also, to avoid provoking the civil disobedience which had become the hallmark of the Civil Rights Movement. King originally designed his speech as a homage to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, timed to correspond with the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation.


title: I Have a Dream

text: King had been preaching about dreams since 1960, when he gave a speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called "The Negro and the American Dream". This speech discusses the gap between the American dream and reality, saying that overt white supremacists have violated the dream, and that "our federal government has also scarred the dream through its apathy and hypocrisy, its betrayal of the cause of justice". King suggests that "It may well be that the Negro is God's instrument to save the soul of America." In 1961, he spoke of the Civil Rights Movement and student activists' "dream" of equality—"the American Dream ... a dream as yet unfulfilled"—in several national speeches and statements and took "the dream" as the centerpiece for these speeches.


title: I Have a Dream

text: On November 27, 1962, King gave a speech at Booker T. Washington High School in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. That speech was longer than the version which he would eventually deliver from the Lincoln Memorial. And while parts of the text had been moved around, large portions were identical, including the "I have a dream" refrain. After being rediscovered in 2015, the restored and digitized recording of the 1962 speech was presented to the public by the English department of North Carolina State University.


title: I Have a Dream

text: King had also delivered a speech with the "I have a dream" refrain in Detroit, in June 1963, before 25,000 people in Detroit's Cobo Hall immediately after the 125,000-strong Great Walk to Freedom on June 23, 1963. Reuther had given King an office at Solidarity House, the United Auto Workers headquarters in Detroit, where King worked on his "I Have a Dream" speech in anticipation of the March on Washington. Mahalia Jackson, who sang "How I Got Over", just before the speech in Washington, knew about King's Detroit speech. After the Washington, D.C. March, a recording of King's Cobo Hall speech was released by Detroit's Gordy Records as an LP entitled "The Great March To Freedom".


title: I Have a Dream

text: The March on Washington Speech, known as "I Have a Dream Speech", has been shown to have had several versions, written at several different times. It has no single version draft, but is an amalgamation of several drafts, and was originally called "Normalcy, Never Again". Little of this, and another "Normalcy Speech", ended up in the final draft. A draft of "Normalcy, Never Again" is housed in the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection of the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center and Morehouse College. The focus on "I have a dream" comes through the speech's delivery. Toward the end of its delivery, noted African-American gospel singer Mahalia Jackson shouted to King from the crowd, "Tell them about the dream, Martin." King departed from his prepared remarks and started "preaching" improvisationally, punctuating his points with "I have a dream."


title: I Have a Dream

text: The speech was drafted with the assistance of Stanley Levison and Clarence Benjamin Jones in Riverdale, New York City. Jones has said that "the logistical preparations for the march were so burdensome that the speech was not a priority for us" and that, "on the evening of Tuesday, Aug. 27, [12 hours before the march] Martin still didn't know what he was going to say".


title: I Have a Dream

text: Widely hailed as a masterpiece of rhetoric, King's speech invokes pivotal documents in American history, including the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the United States Constitution. Early in his speech, King alludes to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address by saying "Five score years ago ..." In reference to the abolition of slavery articulated in the Emancipation Proclamation, King says: "It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity." Anaphora (i.e., the repetition of a phrase at the beginning of sentences) is employed throughout the speech. Early in his speech, King urges his audience to seize the moment; "Now is the time" is repeated three times in the sixth paragraph. The most widely cited example of anaphora is found in the often quoted phrase "I have a dream", which is repeated eight times as King paints a picture of an integrated and unified America for his audience. Other occasions include "One hundred years later", "We can never be satisfied", "With this faith", "Let freedom ring", and "free at last". King was the sixteenth out of eighteen people to speak that day, according to the official program.


title: I Have a Dream

text: Among the most quoted lines of the speech are "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!"


title: I Have a Dream

text: According to US Representative John Lewis, who also spoke that day as the president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, "Dr. King had the power, the ability, and the capacity to transform those steps on the Lincoln Memorial into a monumental area that will forever be recognized. By speaking the way he did, he educated, he inspired, he informed not just the people there, but people throughout America and unborn generations."


title: I Have a Dream

text: The ideas in the speech reflect King's social experiences of ethnocentric abuse, mistreatment, and exploitation of black people. The speech draws upon appeals to America's myths as a nation founded to provide freedom and justice to all people, and then reinforces and transcends those secular mythologies by placing them within a spiritual context by arguing that racial justice is also in accord with God's will. Thus, the rhetoric of the speech provides redemption to America for its racial sins. King describes the promises made by America as a "promissory note" on which America has defaulted. He says that "America has given the Negro people a bad check", but that "we've come to cash this check" by marching in Washington, D.C.


title: I Have a Dream

text: King's speech used words and ideas from his own speeches and other texts. For years, he had spoken about dreams, quoted from Samuel Francis Smith's popular patriotic hymn "America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)", and referred extensively to the Bible. The idea of constitutional rights as an "unfulfilled promise" was suggested by Clarence Jones.


title: I Have a Dream

text: The final passage from King's speech closely resembles Archibald Carey Jr.'s address to the 1952 Republican National Convention: both speeches end with a recitation of the first verse of "America", and the speeches share the name of one of several mountains from which both exhort "let freedom ring".


title: I Have a Dream

text: King is said to have used portions of SNCC activist Prathia Hall's speech at the site of Mount Olive Baptist, a burned-down African-American church in Terrell County, Georgia, in September 1962, in which she used the repeated phrase "I have a dream". The church burned down after it was used for voter registration meetings.


title: I Have a Dream

text: The speech in the cadences of a sermon is infused with allusions to biblical verses, including ("I have a dream that every valley shall be exalted ...") and ("But let justice roll down like water ..."). The end of the speech alludes to : "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus". He also alludes to the opening lines of Shakespeare's "Richard III" ("Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer ...") when he remarks that "this sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn ..."


title: I Have a Dream

text: The "I Have a Dream" speech can be dissected by using three rhetorical lenses: voice merging, prophetic voice, and dynamic spectacle. Voice merging is the combining of one's own voice with religious predecessors. Prophetic voice is using rhetoric to speak for a population. A dynamic spectacle has origins from the Aristotelian definition as "a weak hybrid form of drama, a theatrical concoction that relied upon external factors (shock, sensation, and passionate release) such as televised rituals of conflict and social control."


title: I Have a Dream

text: The rhetoric of King's speech can be compared to the rhetoric of Old Testament prophets. During his speech, King speaks with urgency and crisis, giving him a prophetic voice. The prophetic voice must "restore a sense of duty and virtue amidst the decay of venality." An evident example is when King declares that "now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children."


title: I Have a Dream

text: Voice merging is a technique often used by African-American preachers. It combines the voices of previous preachers, excerpts from scriptures, and the speaker's own thoughts to create a unique voice. King uses voice merging in his peroration when he references the secular hymn "America".


title: I Have a Dream

text: A dynamic spectacle is dependent on the situation in which it is used. King's speech can be classified as a dynamic spectacle, given "the context of drama and tension in which it was situated" (during the Civil Rights Movement and the March on Washington).


title: I Have a Dream

text: Why King's speech was powerful is debated. Executive speechwriter Anthony Trendl writes, "The right man delivered the right words to the right people in the right place at the right time."


title: I Have a Dream

text: The speech was lauded in the days after the event and was widely considered the high point of the March by contemporary observers. James Reston, writing for "The New York Times", said that "Dr. King touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else. He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile." Reston also noted that the event "was better covered by television and the press than any event here since President Kennedy's inauguration", and opined that "it will be a long time before [Washington] forgets the melodious and melancholy voice of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. crying out his dreams to the multitude."


title: I Have a Dream

text: An article in "The Boston Globe" by Mary McGrory reported that King's speech "caught the mood" and "moved the crowd" of the day "as no other" speaker in the event. Marquis Childs of "The Washington Post" wrote that King's speech "rose above mere oratory". An article in the "Los Angeles Times" commented that the "matchless eloquence" displayed by King—"a supreme orator" of "a type so rare as almost to be forgotten in our age"—put to shame the advocates of segregation by inspiring the "conscience of America" with the justice of the civil-rights cause.


title: I Have a Dream

text: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which viewed King and his allies for racial justice as subversive, also noticed the speech. This provoked the organization to expand their COINTELPRO operation against the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and to target King specifically as a major enemy of the United States. Two days after King delivered "I Have a Dream", Agent William C. Sullivan, the head of COINTELPRO, wrote a memo about King's growing influence:


title: I Have a Dream

text: Personally, I believe in the light of King's powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands head and shoulders above all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negroes. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this Nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.


title: I Have a Dream

text: The speech was a success for the Kennedy administration and for the liberal civil rights coalition that had planned it. It was considered a "triumph of managed protest", and not one arrest relating to the demonstration occurred. Kennedy had watched King's speech on television and been very impressed. Afterward, March leaders accepted an invitation to the White House to meet with President Kennedy. Kennedy felt the March bolstered the chances for his civil rights bill.


title: I Have a Dream

text: Some Black leaders later criticized the speech (along with the rest of the march) as too compromising. Malcolm X later wrote in his autobiography: "Who ever heard of angry revolutionaries swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily pad pools, with gospels and guitars and 'I have a dream' speeches?"


title: I Have a Dream

text: The March on Washington put pressure on the Kennedy administration to advance its civil rights legislation in Congress. The diaries of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., published posthumously in 2007, suggest that President Kennedy was concerned that if the march failed to attract large numbers of demonstrators, it might undermine his civil rights efforts.


title: I Have a Dream

text: In the wake of the speech and march, King was named Man of the Year by "TIME" magazine for 1963, and in 1964 he was the youngest man ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The full speech did not appear in writing until August 1983, some 15 years after King's death, when a transcript was published in "The Washington Post".


title: I Have a Dream

text: In 1990, the Australian alternative comedy rock band Doug Anthony All Stars released an album called "Icon". One song from "Icon", "Shang-a-lang", sampled the end of the speech.


title: I Have a Dream

text: In 1992, the band Moodswings, incorporated excerpts from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in their song "Spiritual High, Part III" on the album "Moodfood".


title: I Have a Dream

text: In 2002, the Library of Congress honored the speech by adding it to the United States National Recording Registry. In 2003, the National Park Service dedicated an inscribed marble pedestal to commemorate the location of King's speech at the Lincoln Memorial.


title: I Have a Dream

text: Near the Potomac Basin in Washington, D.C., the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was dedicated in 2011. The centerpiece for the memorial is based on a line from King's "I Have A Dream" speech: "Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope." A -high relief sculpture of King named the "Stone of Hope" stands past two other large pieces of granite that symbolize the "mountain of despair" split in half.


title: I Have a Dream

text: On August 26, 2013, UK's BBC Radio 4 broadcast "God's Trombone", in which Gary Younge looked behind the scenes of the speech and explored "what made it both timely and timeless".


title: I Have a Dream

text: On August 28, 2013, thousands gathered on the mall in Washington, D.C. where King made his historic speech to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the occasion. In attendance were former US Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, and incumbent President Barack Obama, who addressed the crowd and spoke on the significance of the event. Many of King's family were in attendance.


title: I Have a Dream

text: On October 11, 2015, "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution" published an exclusive report about Stone Mountain officials considering the installation of a new "Freedom Bell" honoring King and citing the speech's reference to the mountain "Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia." Design details and a timeline for its installation remain to be determined. The article mentioned the inspiration for the proposed monument came from a bell-ringing ceremony held in 2013 in celebration of the 50th anniversary of King's speech.


title: I Have a Dream

text: On April 20, 2016, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that the US $5 bill, which has featured the Lincoln Memorial on its back, would undergo a redesign prior to 2020. Lew said that a portrait of Lincoln would remain on the front of the bill, but the back would be redesigned to depict various historical events that have occurred at the memorial, including an image from King's speech.


title: I Have a Dream

text: Ava DuVernay was commissioned by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture to create a film that debuted at the museum's opening on September 24, 2016. This film, "August 28: A Day in the Life of a People" (2016), tells of six significant events in African-American history that happened on the same date, August 28. Events depicted include (among others) the speech.


title: I Have a Dream

text: In October 2016, Science Friday in a segment on its crowd sourced update to the Voyager Golden Record included the speech.


title: I Have a Dream

text: In 2017, the statue of Martin Luther King Jr. on the grounds of the Georgia State Capitol was unveiled on the 54th anniversary of the speech.


title: I Have a Dream

text: "Time" partnered with Epic Games to create an interactive exhibit dedicated to the speech within Epic's game "Fortnite Creative" on the 58th anniversary of the speech.


title: I Have a Dream

text: Because King's speech was broadcast to a large radio and television audience, there was controversy about its copyright status. If the performance of the speech constituted "general publication", it would have entered the public domain due to King's failure to register the speech with the Register of Copyrights. But if the performance constituted only "limited publication", King retained common law copyright. This led to a lawsuit, "Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc.", which established that the King estate did hold copyright over the speech and had standing to sue; the parties then settled. Unlicensed use of the speech or a part of it can still be lawful in some circumstances, especially in jurisdictions under doctrines such as fair use or fair dealing. Under the applicable copyright laws, the speech will remain under copyright in the United States until 70 years after King's death, through 2038.


title: I Have a Dream

text: As King waved goodbye to the audience, George Raveling, volunteering as a security guard at the event, asked King if he could have the original typewritten manuscript of the speech. Raveling, a star college basketball player for the Villanova Wildcats, was on the podium with King at that moment. King gave it to him. Raveling kept custody of the original copy, for which he has been offered $3 million, but he has said he does not intend to sell it. In 2021, he gave it to Villanova University. It is intended to be used in a "long-term 'on loan' arrangement."


title: I Have a Dream

text: In the wake of King's death, the speech was issued as a single under Gordy Records and managed to crack onto the "Billboard" Hot 100, peaking at number 88.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The third generation of the BMW 3 Series range of compact executive cars is designated under the model code E36, and was produced by the German automaker BMW from 1990 to 2000. The initial models were of the four-door sedan body style, followed by the coupe, convertible, wagon ("Touring"), hatchback ("Compact"), and the rare four-door convertible Baur TC4 in later years.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The E36 was the first 3 Series to be offered in a hatchback body style. It was also the first 3 Series to be available with a six-speed manual transmission (in the 1996 M3), a five-speed automatic transmission, and a four-cylinder diesel engine. The multi-link rear suspension was also a significant upgrade as compared to the previous generations of the 3 Series. All-wheel drive was not available for the E36, unlike the previous (E30) and successive (E46) generations.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: Following the introduction of its successor, the E46 3 Series in 1998, the E36 began to be phased out and was eventually replaced in 1999.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: Development of the E36 began in 1981 and the exterior design was heavily influenced by aerodynamics, specifically the overall wedge shape, headlight covers and smaller wing mirrors. The lead designers were Pinky Lai and Boyke Boyer.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The production version of the E36 was launched in October 1990, with press release in November and market launch in early 1991.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: Safety equipment available included a driver's airbag, passenger airbag (from 1993 production) and side impact airbags in later models, ABS braking and stability control ("ASC +T"). Electronic climate control was also available on the E36.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The four-cylinder petrol engines used in the E36 range were initially engines carried over from the previous generation 3 Series: the BMW M40 SOHC engine and the BMW M42 DOHC engine. In 1993, the M40 was replaced by the BMW M43 SOHC engine and the M42 was replaced in 1996 by the BMW M44 DOHC engine.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: For the six-cylinder models, the E36 was launched with the then-new BMW M50 DOHC petrol engine. In late 1992 the M50TU versions added single-VANOS (variable valve timing), which increased torque (peak power was unchanged). In 1995, the BMW M52 engine replaced the M50TU, resulting in the 328i model replacing the 325i and the addition of a new mid-range 323i model (powered by a 2.5 litre version of the M52).


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: In 1992, the 3.0 L BMW S50 engine debuted in the E36 M3. In 1995, its capacity was increased to 3.2 L.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: Initially, the turbocharged straight-six BMW M51 engine was used in the E36 325td model. In 1993, the 325tds model was released, which added an intercooler to the M51. In 1994, the 318tds model was introduced, powered by the four-cylinder BMW M41 turbocharged and intercooled engine. Diesel engines were only available in sedan, touring and compact body styles. The coupe and convertible only had petrol engines.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: All models are rear-wheel drive since the E36 was not produced with all-wheel drive (unlike its predecessor and successor).


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The sedan, coupé, convertible and Touring models use the "Z-axle" multilink suspension in the rear, which was introduced in the BMW Z1 roadster.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The hatchback ("Compact") models use a rear semi-trailing arm suspension based on the older E30 3 Series design. This was done in order to save space due to the truncated rear end of the hatchback.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The E36 M3 was launched in 1992 and was powered by the BMW S50 and BMW S52 straight-six engines rather than the four-cylinder units used in the E30. Unlike the predecessor, it was no longer a homologation special and was not developed expressly with competition in mind. It was produced in coupé, sedan, and convertible body styles.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The Alpina "B6 2.8", "B3 3.0", "B3 3.2", "B8 4.0" and "B8 4.6" models were based on the E36. The B3 and B6 models were powered by straight-six engines, while the B8 models were powered by V8 engines.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The "3 Series Compact" range of three-door hatchback models was introduced in 1993, based on a shortened version of the E36 platform. The model code for the hatchback body style is "E36/5" and the model range consisted of 316i, 316g, 318ti, 323ti, and 318tds.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: A modified version of the E36 platform was used for the 1996-2002 Z3 roadster (model code E36/7) and coupé (model code E36/8).


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The North American model range consisted of the models listed below. The 318i models were powered by the BMW M42 engine until 1995, and later the BMW M44 engine which was used in the 318is model sold in other countries.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The European model range had more variety than the North American and included diesel engines and the station wagon "Touring" body styles. The European market range had more low-range models than the North American, for example, the 316i and 318i had 8-valve SOHC engines. The M3 was also more expensive and had more horsepower than the North American version.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The E36 was produced in Munich, Germany; Regensburg, Germany; Rosslyn, South Africa; and Spartanburg County, South Carolina, United States.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: Local assembly of complete knock-down (CKD) kits was used for cars sold in Uruguay (until 1991), Egypt, Mexico, and Thailand. The E36 was also built as CKD kits in the Philippines starting from 1994 up until 1997, where production halted due to the 1997 Asian financial crisis.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: Joachim Winkelhock competed in the British Touring Car Championship with the 318i and 320i from 1993 to 1995, winning the title in 1993. In the same year, Johnny Cecotto won the German ADAC GT Cup driving an E36 M3. Cecotto won the Super Tourenwagen Cup for BMW in 1994 and 1998, Winkelhock in 1995.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: Geoff Brabham and his younger brother David Brabham won the 1997 AMP Bathurst 1000 at the Mount Panorama Circuit in Bathurst, Australia driving a Super Touring BMW 320i for BMW Motorsport Australia.


title: BMW 3 Series (E36)

text: The 1998 24 Hours Nürburgring was won by diesel for the first time - a BMW E36 320d, aided by its diesel engine requiring fewer fuel stops than rivals.


title: John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories

text: The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 spawned numerous conspiracy theories. These theories allege the involvement of the CIA, the Mafia, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, the KGB, or some combination of these individuals and entities. The original FBI investigation and Warren Commission report, as well as an alleged "benign CIA cover-up", have led to the claim that the federal government deliberately covered up crucial information in the aftermath of the assassination. Former Los Angeles District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi estimated that a total of 42 groups, 82 assassins, and 214 people had been accused at one time or another in various conspiracy scenarios.


text: In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating Kennedy. In 1979, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that Kennedy was probably assassinated in a conspiracy and that Oswald did not act alone. The HSCA concluded a second gunman also fired at Kennedy, based on acoustic evidence that was later discredited.


text: On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while traveling in a motorcade in an open-top limousine in Dallas, Texas. Former US Marine Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the murder of Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit and arraigned for both murders. On November 24, nightclub owner Jack Ruby killed Oswald.


text: Immediately after President Kennedy was shot, many people suspected that the assassination was part of a larger plot, and broadcasters speculated that Dallas right-wingers were involved. Ruby's murder of Oswald compounded initial suspicions. Among conspiracy theorists, author Mark Lane has been described as firing "the first literary shot" with his article, "Defense Brief for Oswald", in the "National Guardian"s December 19, 1963 issue. Thomas Buchanan's book "Who Killed Kennedy?", published in May 1964, has been credited as the first book to allege a conspiracy.


text: In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald had acted alone and that no credible evidence supported the contention that he was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate the president. The Commission also indicated that Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, CIA director John A. McCone, and Secret Service Chief James J. Rowley each individually reached the same conclusion on the basis of information available to them. During the trial of Clay Shaw in 1969, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison challenged the single-bullet theory, claiming that the Zapruder film indicated that the fatal shot to Kennedy's head was fired from the "grassy knoll", a small hill that featured prominently in later conspiracy theories.


text: In 1979, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) agreed with the Warren Commission that Oswald killed Kennedy, but concluded that the commission's report and the original FBI investigation were seriously flawed. The HSCA concluded that at least four shots were fired, with a "high probability" that two gunmen fired at the President, and that a conspiracy was probable. The HSCA stated that the Warren Commission had "failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President".


text: Documents under Section 5 of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 were required to be released within 25 years of the bill's October 26, 1992, effective date. Most of the documents were released on October 26, 2017. Exercising a provision of the 1992 act that allows for a President to extend the deadline, President Trump set a new deadline of October 26, 2021 for the remaining documents to be released. In October 2021, President Biden further extended the deadline to December 15, 2022, citing delays related to the COVID-19 pandemic.


text: According to author John C. McAdams, "[t]he greatest and grandest of all conspiracy theories is the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory." Others have often referred to it as "the mother of all conspiracies". Author David Krajicek describes Kennedy assassination enthusiasts as people belonging to "conspiracy theorists" on one side and "debunkers" on the other. The great amount of controversy surrounding the event has resulted in bitter disputes between those who support the conclusion of the Warren Commission and those who reject it, or are critical of the official explanation, with each side levelling accusations toward the other of "naivete, cynicism, and selective interpretation of the evidence".


text: The number of books written about the assassination of Kennedy has been estimated to be between 1,000 and 2,000. According to Vincent Bugliosi, 95% of those books are "pro-conspiracy and anti-Warren Commission". Very few of the books and articles published about the assassination have been written by historians. Calvin Trillin's article, "The Buffs", published in the June 1967 edition of "The New Yorker", has been credited as the first addressing the "conspiracy phenomenon". Regarding the increasing interest of those who examined and criticized the Warren Report, Trillin wrote: "They tend to refer to themselves (and the professionals) as 'investigators' or 'researchers' or, most often, 'critics.' They are also known as 'assassination buffs.'" Professor of History Colin Kidd, who also described amateur historians of the assassination as "buffs", wrote that "[t]he study of Kennedy's assassination is now best known to academics as a counterculture, which grossly caricatures the best practices of the academy and where extravagant theories tend to trump sound scholarship, plausibility and common sense."


text: Public opinion polls have consistently shown that most Americans believe there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. These same polls also show no agreement on who else may have been involved in the shooting. The National Opinion Research Center conducted 1,384 in-person interviews between November 26, 1963 and December 3, 1963 and found that 62% believed others were involved in the assassination, compared with 24% who believed only one person was involved. Forty years later, a 2003 Gallup Poll reported that 75% of Americans did not believe that Oswald had acted alone. That same year, an ABC News poll found that 70% of respondents suspected that the assassination involved more than one person. In 2009, 76% of people polled for CBS News said they believed the President had been killed as the result of a conspiracy. A 2013 Gallup Poll found that 61% of Americans, the lowest figure in nearly 50 years, believed other people besides Oswald were involved.


text: In a 1968 article for the "Alberta Law Review" comparing the Tichborne case and the Dreyfus affair to conspiracy theories proffered by Mark Lane and Edward Epstein, Arthur Lehman Goodhart, a former Master of University College in Oxford, dismissed the relevance of polls showing that a majority of Americans believed there was a conspiracy: "such a Gallup poll cannot prove anything except that the people often believe nonsense."


text: Kennedy's youngest brother, Ted Kennedy, wrote that he had been fully briefed by Chief Justice Earl Warren during the initial investigation and was "satisfied that the Warren Commission got it right". He also stated that their middle brother, Robert F. Kennedy, was a "strong advocate for the accuracy of the report" and that it was his belief upon all of their discussions that he, too, accepted the Commission's findings.


text: Kennedy's nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., believes his uncle was killed in a conspiracy, and endorsed the book "JFK and the Unspeakable". He also said that his father, Robert F. Kennedy, who publicly supported the Warren Commission, privately called it a "shoddy piece of craftsmanship", and was "fairly convinced" that others besides Oswald were involved in his brother's death.


text: After Oswald's death, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo detailing that the Dallas Police would not have had enough evidence against Oswald without the FBI's information. He then wrote: "The thing I am concerned about, and so is [Deputy Attorney General] Mr. Katzenbach, is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin." Top government and intelligence officials were also finding that, according to CIA intercepts, someone had impersonated Oswald in phone calls and visits made to the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City several weeks before the assassination. Over the next 40 years this became one of the CIA's most closely guarded secrets on the Oswald case. A CIA career agency officer, Anne Goodpasture, admitted in sworn testimony that she had disseminated the tapes of these phone calls herself. She had earlier denied to congressional investigators in 1970 that she had any knowledge of recordings of Oswald's phone calls.


text: On November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's preliminary analysis of the assassination included the following:


text: The Central Intelligence Agency advised that on October 1st, 1963, an extremely sensitive source had reported that an individual identifying himself as Lee Oswald contacted the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City inquiring as to any messages. Special agents of this Bureau, who have conversed with Oswald in Dallas, Texas, have observed photographs of the individual referred to above and have listened to a recording of his voice. These special agents are of the opinion that the referred-to individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald.


text: President Johnson expressed concern that the public might come to believe that Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and/or Cuban leader Fidel Castro was implicated in the assassination – a situation that Johnson said might lead to "... a war that [could] kill 40 million Americans in an hour". Johnson relayed his concern to both Chief Justice Earl Warren and Senator Richard Russell, telling them that they could "serve America" by joining the commission Johnson had established to investigate the assassination, which would later become known unofficially as the Warren Commission. In turn, Katzenbach wrote a memorandum to Lyndon Johnson aide Bill Moyers that said, among other things, that the results of the FBI's investigation should be made public. Katzenbach also suggested that a commission be formed, composed of people with "impeccable integrity", to conduct a complete investigation of the assassination. Katzenbach wrote: "Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off, and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right–wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists." He also wrote: "The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial". Four days after Katzenbach's memo, Johnson formed the Warren Commission with Earl Warren as chairman and Senator Richard Russell as a member.


text: Numerous researchers, including author Mark Lane, Henry Hurt, Michael L. Kurtz, Gerald D. McKnight, Anthony Summers, and Harold Weisberg, have referred to what they see as inconsistencies, oversights, exclusions of evidence, errors, changing stories, or changes made to witness testimony in the official Warren Commission investigation, which they say could suggest a cover-up.


text: Walter Cronkite, CBS News anchor, said, "Although the Warren Commission had full power to conduct its own independent investigation, it permitted the FBI and the CIA to investigate themselves – and so cast a permanent shadow on the answers."


text: United States Senator and U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence member Richard Schweiker said, "The fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was to not use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up." Schweiker also told author Anthony Summers in 1978 that he "believe[d] that the Warren Commission was set up at the time to feed pablum to the American public for reasons not yet known, and that one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at that time".


text: In 1966, Roscoe Drummond voiced skepticism about a cover-up in his syndicated column, saying, "If there were a conspiracy to cover up the truth about the assassination, it would have to involve the Chief Justice, the Republican, Democratic, and non-party members of the commission, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the distinguished doctors of the armed services – and the White House – a conspiracy so multiple and complex that it would have fallen of its own weight."


text: Richard Buyer wrote that many witnesses whose statements pointed to a conspiracy were either ignored or intimidated by the Warren Commission. In "JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness", a 1992 biography of Jean Hill, Bill Sloan wrote that Warren Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter attempted to humiliate, discredit, and intimidate Hill into changing her story. Hill also told Sloan that she was abused by Secret Service agents, harassed by the FBI, and received death threats.


text: A later book by Sloan, entitled "JFK: Breaking the Silence", quotes several assassination eyewitnesses as saying that Warren Commission interviewers repeatedly cut short or stifled any comments casting doubt on the conclusion that Oswald had acted alone.


text: In his book "Crossfire", Jim Marrs gives accounts of several people who said they were intimidated by either FBI agents or anonymous individuals into altering or suppressing what they knew regarding the assassination. Some of those individuals include Richard Carr, Acquilla Clemmons, Sandy Speaker, and A. J. Millican. Marrs also wrote that Texas School Book Depository employee Joe Molina was "intimidated by authorities and lost his job soon after the assassination", and that witness Ed Hoffman was warned by an FBI agent that he "might get killed" if he revealed what he observed in Dealey Plaza on the day of the assassination.


text: Warren Reynolds, who claimed that he saw the shooter of Police Officer J. D. Tippit and chased him, was shot in the head in January 1964, two days after first talking to the FBI. He survived. Reynolds later testified to the Warren Commission that, in February 1964, someone attempted to kidnap his 10-year-old daughter.


text: The idea that witnesses to the Kennedy assassination met mysterious or suspicious deaths because they knew things that conspirators did not want to be revealed has been referred to by author Vincent Bugliosi as "one of the very most popular and durable myths".


text: Allegations of mysterious or suspicious deaths of witnesses connected with the Kennedy assassination originated with journalist Penn Jones Jr. On the third anniversary of the assassination, "Ramparts" published an editorial from Jones and a handful of his articles that earlier appeared in his newspaper, the "Midlothian Mirror". Noting that they were three of six men who had met in Jack Ruby's apartment the night after Ruby shot Oswald, Jones described the deaths of reporter Jim Koethe, reporter Bill Hunter, and Jack Ruby's first attorney, Tom Howard, as "mysterious". A second article in the same issue reported on the deaths of the three men as well as seven other individuals that Jones had investigated and said were to have had "mysterious deaths" in the three years since the assassination: Earlene Roberts, Nancy Jane Mooney, Hank Killam, William Whaley, Edward Benavides, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Lee Bowers. The report in "Ramparts" was picked up by Reuters and various other news outlets. "TIME" stated "the Ramparts-Jones non-history is riddled with factual errors and perverse conclusions" and offered examples to support their assessment.


text: In 1973, similar claims about suspicious deaths of witnesses were brought to national attention by the theatrically released movie "Executive Action". In 1989, Jim Marrs published a list of 103 people he believed had died "convenient deaths" under suspicious circumstances. He noted that the deaths were grouped around investigations conducted by the Warren Commission, New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Marrs pointed out that "these deaths certainly would have been convenient for anyone not wishing the truth of the JFK assassination to become public." In 2013, Richard Belzer published "Hit List: An In-Depth Investigation into the Mysterious Deaths of Witnesses to the JFK Assassination" that examines the deaths of 50 people linked to the assassination and claims most of them were murdered as part of a cover-up.


text: Vincent Bugliosi devoted two pages of his book "Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" to journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. Kilgallen was publicly skeptical of the official version of the assassination of President Kennedy and Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Oswald. During 1964 and 1965, she wrote several newspaper articles on the subject and many relevant short items in her daily column. On February 23, 1964, the New York City newspaper "New York Journal-American", where Kilgallen had worked since its formation in 1937, published her article about a conversation she had had with Jack Ruby, when he was seated at his defense table during a recess in his murder trial.


text: Whether Kilgallen and Ruby had a second conversation in a private room in the Dallas County, Texas courthouse several days later has been disputed. If they did, she never wrote about it for publication. One of Kilgallen's biographers, Mark Shaw, contends that even if Ruby did not reveal sensitive information to Kilgallen about the assassination, she still could have learned sensitive information during a trip she made to New Orleans several weeks before she died.


text: Kilgallen's last brief item about the Kennedy assassination, published on September 3, 1965, ended with these words: "That story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter aliveand there are a lot of them alive." Two months later, on November 8, 1965, Kilgallen was found dead in her Manhattan townhouse. Her death was determined to have been caused by a combination of alcohol and barbiturates. Bugliosi referred to Kilgallen’s 1965 death as "perhaps the most prominent mysterious death" cited by assassination researchers. He added that the presence of Kilgallen’s husband and son in their five-story townhouse throughout the night when she died proves she could not have been murdered. Bugliosi said an intruder would have awakened her husband or her eleven-year-old son and then her husband would have called the police.


text: According to author Jerome Kroth, Mafia figures Sam Giancana, John Roselli, Carlos Prio, Jimmy Hoffa, Charles Nicoletti, Leo Moceri, Richard Cain, Salvatore Granello, and Dave Yaras were likely murdered to prevent them from revealing their knowledge. According to author Matthew Smith, others with some tie to the case who have died suspicious deaths include Lee Bowers, Gary Underhill, William Sullivan, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, George de Mohrenschildt, four showgirls who worked for Jack Ruby, and Ruby himself.


text: The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated another alleged mysterious deaththat of Rose Cheramie (sometimes spelled Cherami), whose real name was Melba Christine Mercades. The Committee reported that Louisiana State Police Lieutenant Francis Fruge traveled to Eunice, Louisiana, on November 20, 1963two days before the assassinationto pick up Cheramie, who had sustained minor injuries when she was hit by a car. Fruge drove Cheramie to the hospital and said that on the way there, she "... related to [him] that she was coming from Florida to Dallas with two men who were Italians or resembled Italians." Fruge asked her what she planned to do in Dallas, to which she replied: "... number one, pick up some money, pick up [my] baby, and ... kill Kennedy." Cheramie was admitted and treated at the state hospital in Jackson, Louisiana for alcoholism and heroin addiction. After the assassination, Lt. Fruge contacted Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz regarding what he had learned from Cheramie, but Fritz told him he "wasn't interested".


text: In the 1970s, a state hospital physician, Dr. Victor Weiss, told a House Select Committee on Assassinations investigator that on November 25three days after the assassinationone of his fellow physicians told him that Cheramie had "stated before the assassination that President Kennedy was going to be killed". Dr. Weiss further reported that Cheramie told him after the assassination that she had worked for Jack Ruby and that her knowledge of the assassination originated from "word in the underworld". Cheramie was found dead close to a highway near Big Sandy, Texas on September 4, 1965; she had been run over by a car.


text: Concerning the Tippit shooting, the Warren Commission named 12 witnesses to the shooting and its aftermath. One of these witnesses, Warren Reynolds, was shot in the head 2 months after the Tippit shooting, but survived. Another witness, Domingo Benavides, who was close to the shooting and saw Tippit fall after being shot, lost his brother 15 months after the Tippit shooting; Benavides' brother was shot in the head in a bar and died.


text: The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated the allegation "that a statistically improbable number of individuals with some direct or peripheral association with the Kennedy assassination died as a result of that assassination, thereby raising the specter of conspiracy". The committee's chief of research testified: "Our final conclusion on the issue is that the available evidence does not establish anything about the nature of these deaths which would indicate that the deaths were in some manner, either direct or peripheral, caused by the assassination of President Kennedy or by any aspect of the subsequent investigation."


text: Author Gerald Posner said that Marrs's list was taken from the group of about 10,000 people connected even in the most tenuous way to the assassination, including people identified in the official investigations, as well as the research of conspiracy theorists. Posner also said that it would be surprising if a hundred people out of ten thousand did not die in "unnatural ways". He noted that over half of the people on Marrs's list did not die mysteriously, but of natural causes, such as Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman, who died of heart failure at age 69 in 1984, long after the Kennedy assassination, but is on Marrs's list as someone whose cause of death is "unknown". Posner also pointed out that many prominent witnesses and conspiracy researchers continue to live long lives.


text: Many of those who believe in a JFK assassination conspiracy also believe that evidence against Oswald was either planted, forged, or tampered with.


text: Some researchers assert that witness statements indicating a conspiracy were ignored by the Warren Commission. Josiah Thompson stated that the Commission ignored the testimony of seven eyewitnesses who said they saw smoke in the vicinity of the grassy knoll at the time of the assassination, as well as an eighth witness who said he smelled gunpowder. Jim Marrs wrote that the Commission did not seek the testimony of eyewitnesses on the triple underpass whose statements pointed to a shooter on the grassy knoll.


text: In 1978, Gordon Arnold told the "Dallas Morning News" that he had filmed the assassination from the grassy knoll and that he gave the film to a policeman who was waving a shotgun. Arnold said that he had been afraid to report the incident due to claims of "peculiar" deaths of witnesses to the assassination. Ten years later, he told producers for Nigel Turner's "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" that the film was taken from him.


text: Another witness, identified as Beverly Oliver, came forward in 1970 and said she was the "Babushka Lady" who is seen, in the Zapruder film, filming the motorcade. She also said that after the assassination, she was contacted at work by two men who she thought "... were either FBI or Secret Service agents". According to Oliver, the men told her that they wanted to take her film, have it developed, and then return it to her within ten days. The agents took her film, but never returned it.


text: Richard Buyer and others have complained that many documents pertaining to the assassination have been withheld over the years, including documents from investigations made by the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and the Church Committee. These documents individually included the President's autopsy records. Some documents still are not scheduled for release until 2029. Many documents were released during the mid-to-late 1990s by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. However, some of the material released contains redacted sections. Tax return information, which identified employers and sources of income, has not yet been released.


text: The existence of several secret documents related to the assassination, as well as the long period of secrecy, suggests to some the possibility of a cover-up. One historian noted, "There exists widespread suspicion about the government's disposition of the Kennedy assassination records stemming from the beliefs that Federal officials (1) have not made available all Government assassination records (even to the Warren Commission, Church Committee, House Assassination Committee) and (2) have heavily redacted the records released under FOIA in order to cover up sinister conspiracies." According to the ARRB, "All Warren Commission records, except those records that contain tax return information, are (now) available to the public with only minor redactions." In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by journalist Jefferson Morley, the CIA stated in 2010 that it had over 1,100 documents in relation to the assassination, about 2,000 pages in total, that have not been released due to national security-related concerns.


text: Some researchers have alleged that various items of physical evidence have been tampered with, including the "single bullet" (also known as the "magic bullet" by some critics of official explanations), various bullet cartridges and fragments, the presidential limousine's windshield, the paper bag in which the Warren Commission said Oswald hid the rifle, the so-called "backyard" photos depicting Oswald holding the rifle, the Zapruder film, the photographs and radiographs obtained at Kennedy's autopsy, and the president's dead body itself.


text: Among the evidence against Oswald are photographs of him holding a Carcano rifle in his back yard, the weapon identified by the Warren Commission as the assassination weapon. The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the Oswald photos are genuine and Oswald's wife Marina said that she took them. In 2009, the journal "Perception" published the findings of Hany Farid, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College who used 3D modeling software to analyze one of the photographs. He demonstrated that a single light source could create seemingly incongruent shadows and concluded that the photograph revealed no evidence of tampering. Researcher Robert Groden asserts that these photos are fake.


text: Groden said in 1979 that four autopsy photographs showing the back of Kennedy's head were forged to hide a wound fired from a second gunman. According to Groden, a photograph of a cadaver's head was inserted over another depicting a large exit wound in the back of the president's head. HSCA chief counsel G. Robert Blakey stated that the "suggestion that the committee would participate in a cover-up is absurd" and that Groden was "not competent to make a judgment on whether a photograph has been altered". Blakey stated that the photographic analysis panel for the Committee had examined the photographs and that they "considered everything" that Groden had to say "and rejected it."


text: The House Select Committee on Assassinations described the Zapruder film as "the best available photographic evidence of the number and timing of the shots that struck the occupants of the presidential limousine". The Assassination Records Review Board said it "is perhaps the single most important assassination record." According to Vincent Bugliosi, the film was "originally touted by the vast majority of conspiracy theorists as incontrovertible proof" of a conspiracy, but is now believed by many conspiracy theorists to be a "sophisticated forgery". Jack White, photographic consultant to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, claimed there were anomalies in the Zapruder film, including an "unnatural jerkiness of movement or change of focus… in certain frame sequences". In 1996, the Assassination Records Review Board asked Kodak product engineer Roland Zavada to undertake a thorough technical study of the Zapruder Film. Zavada concluded that there was no detectable evidence of manipulation or image alteration on the film's original version.


text: Former senior official at the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center, Dino Brugioni, said that he and his team examined the 8mm Zapruder film of the John F. Kennedy assassination the evening of Saturday 23 November 1963 and into the morning of Sunday 24 November 1963. In a 2011 interview with Douglas Horne of the Assassination Record Review Board, Brugioni said the Zapruder film in the National Archives today, and available to the public, has been altered from the version of the film he saw and worked with on November 23–24. Brugioni recalls seeing a "white cloud" of brain matter, three or four feet above Kennedy's head, and says that this "spray" lasted for more than one frame of the film. The version of the Zapruder film available to the public depicts the fatal head shot on only one frame of the film, frame 313. Additionally, Brugioni is certain that the set of briefing boards available to the public in the National Archives is not the set that he and his team produced on November 23–24, 1963.


text: In his 1981 book "Best Evidence", author David Lifton presented the thesis that President Kennedy's dead body had been altered between the Dallas hospital and the autopsy site at Bethesda for the purposes of creating erroneous conclusions about the number and direction of the shots. (See section below.)


text: The Warren Commission found that the shots that killed Kennedy and wounded Connally were fired from an Italian 6.5mm Manlicher Carcano rifle owned by Oswald. Deputy Sheriff Eugene Boone and Deputy Constable Seymour Weitzman both initially identified the rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository as a 7.65 German Mauser. Weitzman signed an affidavit the following day describing the weapon as a "7.65 Mauser bolt action equipped with a 4/18 scope, a thick leather brownish-black sling on it". Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig claimed that he saw "7.65 Mauser" stamped on the barrel of the weapon. When interviewed in 1968 by researcher Barry Ernest, Craig said: "I felt then and I still feel now that the weapon was a 7.65 German Mauser ... I was there. I saw it when it was first pulled from its hiding place, and I am not alone in describing it as a Mauser."


text: Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade told the press that the weapon found in the book depository was a 7.65 Mauser, and the media reported this. But investigators later identified the rifle as a 6.5mm Carcano. In "Matrix for Assassination", author Richard Gilbride suggested that both weapons were involved in the assassination and that Dallas Police Captain Will Fritz and Lieutenant J. Carl Day both might have been conspirators.


text: Addressing "speculation and rumors", the Warren Commission identified Weitzman as "the original source of the speculation that the rifle was a Mauser" and stated that "police laboratory technicians subsequently arrived and correctly identified the [murder] weapon as a 6.5 Italian rifle."


text: The Warren Commission determined that three bullets were fired at the presidential motorcade. One of the three bullets missed the vehicle entirely; another bullet hit President Kennedy and passed through his body before striking Governor Connally; and the third bullet was the fatal head shot to the President. Some claim that the bullet that passed through President Kennedy's body and hit Governor Connallydubbed by some critics of the Commission as the "magic bullet"was missing too little mass to account for the total weight of bullet fragments later found by the doctors who operated on Connally at Parkland Hospital. Those making this claim included the governor's chief surgeon, Dr. Robert Shaw, as well as two of Kennedy's autopsy surgeons, Commander James Humes and Lt. Colonel Pierre Finck. However, in his book "Six Seconds in Dallas", author Josiah Thompson took issue with this claim. Thompson added up the weight of the bullet fragments listed in the doctor reports and concluded that their total weight "could" have been less than the mass missing from the bullet.


text: With Connally's death in 1993, forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht and the Assassination Archives and Research Center petitioned Attorney General Janet Reno to recover the remaining bullet fragments from Connally's body, contending that the fragments would disprove the Warren Commission's single-bullet, single-gunman conclusion. The Justice Department replied that it "... would have [had] no legal authority to recover the fragments unless Connally's family gave [it] permission [to do so]." Connally's family refused permission.


text: The Warren Commission concluded that "three shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository in a time period ranging from approximately 4.8 to in excess of 7 seconds." Some assassination researchers, including Josiah Thompson and Anthony Summers, dispute the Commission's findings. They point to evidence that brings into question the number of shots fired, the origin of the shots, and Oswald's ability to accurately fire three shots in such a short amount of time from such a rifle. These researchers suggest that multiple gunmen were involved.


text: Based on the "consensus among the witnesses at the scene" and "in particular the three spent cartridges" found near an open window on the sixth-floor of the Book Depository, the Warren Commission determined that "the preponderance of the evidence indicated that three shots were fired". In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there were four shots, one coming from the grassy knoll.


text: The Warren Commission, and later the House Select Committee on Assassinations, concluded that one of the shots hit President Kennedy in "the back of his neck", exited his throat, and struck Governor Connally in the back, exited the Governor's chest, shattered his right wrist, and implanted itself in his left thigh. This conclusion became known as the "single-bullet theory".


text: Mary Moorman said in a TV interview immediately after the assassination that there were either three or four shots close together, that shots were still being fired after the fatal shot, and that she was in the line of fire. In 1967, Josiah Thompson concluded from a close study of the Zapruder film and other forensic evidence, corroborated by the eyewitnesses, that four shots were fired in Dealey Plaza, with one wounding Connally and three hitting Kennedy.


text: On the day of the assassination, Nellie Connally was seated in the presidential car next to her husband, Texas Governor John Connally. In her book "From Love Field: Our Final Hours", she said she believed that her husband was wounded by a bullet separate from the two that hit Kennedy.


text: The Warren Commission concluded that all of the shots fired at President Kennedy came from the sixth-floor window at the southeast corner of the Texas School Book Depository. The Commission based its conclusion on the "cumulative evidence of eyewitnesses, firearms and ballistic experts and medical authorities", including onsite testing, as well as analysis of films and photographs conducted by the FBI and the US Secret Service.


text: In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations agreed to publish a report from Warren Commission critic Robert Groden, in which he named "nearly [two] dozen suspected firing points in Dealey Plaza". These sites included multiple locations in or on the roof of the Texas School Book Depository, the Dal-Tex Building, the Dallas County Records Building, the triple overpass, a storm drain located along the north curb of Elm Street, and the Grassy Knoll. Josiah Thompson concluded that the shots fired at the motorcade came from three locations: the Texas School Book Depository, the Grassy Knoll, and the Dal-Tex Building.


text: According to some researchers, the grassy knoll was identified by most witnesses as the area from where shots were fired. In March 1965, Harold Feldman wrote that there were 121 witnesses to the assassination listed in the Warren Report, 51 of whom indicated that the shots that killed Kennedy came from the grassy knoll, while 32 said the shots originated from the Texas School Book Depository. In 1967, Josiah Thompson examined the statements of 64 witnesses and concluded that 33 of them thought that the shots emanated from the grassy knoll. In 1966, "Esquire" magazine credited Feldman with "advanc[ing] the theory that there were two assassins: one on the grassy knoll and one in the Book Depository".


text: According to a 2021 article in "Frontiers in Psychology", discrepancies in earwitness testimony regarding the origin of the gunshots has "contributed to the breadth and persistence of the conspiracy theories that had emerged since the assassination." Dennis McFadden with Center of Perceptual Systems at the University of Texas at Austin summarized: "Localizing the origin of a supersonic gunshot is not easy under optimal conditions. On the day of the JFK assassination, the earwitnesses present were startled, surprised, confused, disbelieving, excited, and likely scared, so there is little wonder that their perceptions were inconsistent, and with the passage of time, fluid. Once the confusing acoustics of supersonic bullets and the vagaries of human sound localization are taken into account, the widespread uncertainty amongst the earwitnesses to the assassination becomes more understandable."


text: Lee Bowers operated a railroad tower that overlooked the parking lot on the north side of the grassy knoll. When interviewed by the Warren Commission in 1964, he reported that he saw two men behind the grassy knoll's stockyard fence before the shooting took place. The men did not appear to be acting together or doing anything suspicious. After the shooting, Bowers said that one of the men remained behind the fence, but that he lost track of the second man whose clothing blended into the foliage. When interviewed by Mark Lane and Emile de Antonio in 1966 for their documentary film "Rush to Judgment", Bowers noted that he saw something that attracted his attention, either a flash of light or smoke from the knoll, allowing him to believe "something out of the ordinary" had occurred there. Bowers told Lane that he heard three shots, the last two in quick succession.


text: Several conspiracy theories posit that at least one shooter was located in the Dal-Tex Building, located across the street from the Texas School Book Depository. According to L. Fletcher Prouty, the physical location of James Tague when he was injured by a bullet fragment is not consistent with the trajectory of a missed shot from the Texas School Book Depository, leading Prouty to theorize that Tague was instead wounded by a missed shot from the second floor of the Dal-Tex Building.


text: Some researchers claim that FBI photographs of the presidential limousine show a bullet hole in its windshield above the rear-view mirror, and a crack in the windshield itself. When Robert Groden, author of "The Killing of a President", asked for an explanation, the FBI responded that what Groden thought was a bullet hole "occurred prior to Dallas".


text: In 1993, George Whitaker, a manager at the Ford Motor Company's Rouge Plant in Detroit, told attorney and criminal justice professor Doug Weldon that after reporting to work on November 25, 1963, he discovered the presidential limousine in the Rouge Plant's B building with its windshield removed. Whitaker said that the limousine's removed windshield had a through-and-through bullet hole from the front. He said that he was directed by one of Ford's vice presidents to use the windshield as a template to fabricate a new windshield for installation in the limousine. Whitaker also said he was told to destroy the old one.


text: Film and photographic evidence of the assassination have led viewers to different conclusions regarding the origin of the shots. When the fatal shot struck, the President's head and upper torso moved rapidly backwardsindicating, to many observers, a shot from the right front. Sherry Gutierrez, a certified crime scene and bloodstain pattern analyst, concluded "the head injury to President Kennedy was the result of a single gunshot fired from the right front of the President." Paul Chambers believes that the fatal head shot is consistent with a high velocity (approx. 1,200 m/s; 4,000 ft/sec) rifle rather than the medium-velocity (600 m/s; 2,000 ft/sec) Mannlicher–Carcano.


text: Close inspection of the Zapruder film (frames 312 and 313) show Kennedy's head moves downward immediately before it moves rapidly backwards. Anthony Marsh suggests that this downward motion was caused by driver William Greer's deceleration of the car. Others, including Josiah Thompson, Robert Groden, and Cyril Wecht, suggest that this downward-and-then-backward motion was caused by two near-simultaneous bullets: one from the rear and the other from the right front.


text: In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission appointed a panel of experts to review the movement of Kennedy's head and body following the fatal head shot. The panel concluded that "...the violent backward and leftward motion of the President's upper body following the head shot was not caused by the impact of a bullet coming from the front or right front [but was] caused by a violent straightening and stiffening of the entire body as a result of a seizure-like neuromuscular reaction to major damage inflicted to nerve centers in the brain".


text: In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations analyzed a Dictabelt recording of the Dallas Police Department radio dispatch transmissions from the day of the assassination to "resolve questions concerning the number, timing, and origin of the shots fired in Dealey Plaza". The Committee concluded that the source of the recording was from an open microphone on the motorcycle of Dallas police officer H.B. McLain escorting the motorcade and that "the scientific acoustical evidence established a high probability that two gunmen fired at President John F. Kennedy."


text: However, the acoustical analysis that the HSCA presented as evidence for two gunmen has since been discredited. The HSCA acoustic experts said the Dictabelt evidence came from police officer McLain. However, McLain stated that he was not yet in Dealey Plaza when the assassination occurred. A skeptical McLain asked the Committee, "If it was my radio on my motorcycle, why did it not record the revving up at high speed plus my siren when we immediately took off for Parkland Hospital?"


text: Also, in 1982, a panel of 12 scientists appointed by the National Academy of Sciences, including Nobel laureates Norman Ramsey and Luis Alvarez, unanimously concluded that the HSCA's acoustic evidence was "seriously flawed". They concluded that the recording was made after the President had already been shot and that the recording did not indicate any additional gunshots. Their conclusions were later published in the journal "Science".


text: In a 2001 article in "Science & Justice", a publication of Britain's Forensic Science Society, D.B. Thomas wrote that the NAS investigation was itself flawed. Thomas analyzed audio recordings made during the assassination and concluded with a 96% certainty that a shot was fired from the grassy knoll in front of and to the right of the President's limousine. In 2005, Thomas's conclusions were rebutted in the same journal. Ralph Linsker and several members of the original NAS team reanalyzed the recordings and reaffirmed the earlier conclusion of the NAS report that the alleged shot sounds were recorded approximately one minute after the assassination. In a 2010 book, D.B. Thomas challenged the 2005 "Science & Justice" article and restated his conclusion that there actually were two gunmen.


text: Some researchers have pointed to the large number of doctors and nurses at Parkland Memorial Hospital who reported that a major part of the back of the President's head was blown out. In 1979, the HSCA noted: "The various accounts of the nature of the wounds to the President ... as described by the staff at Parkland Memorial Hospital, differed from those in the Bethesda autopsy report, as well as from what appears in the autopsy photographs and X-rays". The HSCA concluded that the most probable explanation for the discrepancy between the Parkland doctors' testimony and the Bethesda autopsy witnesses was "that the observations of the Parkland doctors [were] incorrect".


text: Some critics skeptical of the official "single bullet theory" have stated that the bullet's trajectory, which hit Kennedy above the right shoulder blade and passed through his neck (according to the autopsy), would have had to change course to pass through Connally's rib cage and fracture his wrist. Kennedy's death certificate, which was signed by his personal physician George Burkley, locates the bullet at "about the level of the third thoracic vertebra"which some claim was not high enough to exit his throat. Furthermore, since the shooter was in a sixth floor window of the Book Depository building, the bullet traveled downward. The autopsy descriptive sheet displays a diagram of the President's body with the same low placement at the third thoracic vertebra.


text: There is a conflicting testimony regarding the autopsy performed on Kennedy's body, particularly during the examination on his brain and whether or not the photos submitted as evidence are the same as those taken during the examination. At Bethesda Naval Hospital, Commander J. J. Humes, the chief autopsy pathologist noted that Kennedy's brain weighed 1,500 grams following formalin fixation. In August 1977, Paul O'Connor, a laboratory technologist who assisted in the President's autopsy, told investigators for the HSCA that there was "nothing left in the cranium but splattered brain matter" and "there was no use me opening the skull because there were no brains." Douglas Horne, the Assassination Record Review Board's chief analyst for military records, said he was "90 to 95% certain" that the photographs in the National Archives are not really of Kennedy's brain. Some conspiracy theorists have said that Kennedy's brain was stolen to cover up evidence that he was shot from the front.


text: In his book "JFK and the Unspeakable", James Douglass cites autopsy doctor Pierre Finck's testimony at the trial of Clay Shaw as evidence that Finck was "... a reluctant witness to the military control over the doctors' examination of the president's body".


text: A bone fragment found in Dealey Plaza by William Harper the day following the assassination was reported by the HSCA's Forensic Pathology Panel to have been from Kennedy's skull, a part of his parietal bone. Some critics of the lone gunman theory, including James Douglass, David Lifton, and David Mantick, contend that the bone fragment that Harper found is not parietal bone, but is actually a piece of Kennedy's occipital bone ejected from an exit wound in the back of his head. They allege this finding is evidence of a cover-up, as it proves that the skull radiographs taken during the autopsy, which do not show significant bone loss in the occipital area, are not authentic.


text: The Warren Commission examined the capabilities of the Carcano rifle and ammunition, as well as Oswald's military training and post-military experience, and determined that Oswald had the ability to fire three shots within a time span of 4.8 to 5.6 seconds. According to their report, an army specialist using Oswald's rifle was able to duplicate the feat and even improved on the time. The report also states that the Army Infantry Weapons Evaluation Branch test fired Oswald's rifle 47 times and found that it was "quite accurate", comparing it to the accuracy of an M14 rifle. Also contained in the Commission report is testimony by Marine Corps Major Eugene Anderson confirming that Oswald's military records show that he qualified as "sharpshooter" in 1956.


text: According to official Marine Corps records, Oswald was tested in shooting in December 1956, scoring 212 (slightly above the minimum for qualification as a sharpshooterthe intermediate category), but in May 1959, he scored 191 (earning the lower designation of marksman). The highest marksmanship category in the Marine Corps is 'Expert' (220).


text: Despite Oswald's confirmed marksmanship in the USMC, conspiracy theorists like Walt Brown and authors such as Richard H. Popkin contend that Oswald was a notoriously poor shot, that his rifle was inaccurate, and that no reconstruction of the event has ever been able to duplicate his ability to fire three shots within the time frame given by the Warren Commission.


text: The Warren Commission concluded that "there is no evidence that [Oswald] was involved in any conspiracy directed to the assassination of the President." The Commission came to this conclusion after examining Oswald's Marxist and pro-Communist background, including his defection to Russia, the New Orleans branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee he had organized, and the various public and private statements made by him espousing Marxism.


text: Some conspiracy theorists have argued that Oswald's pro-Communist behavior was in fact a carefully planned ruse and part of an effort by U.S. intelligence agencies to infiltrate left-wing groups and conduct counterintelligence operations in communist countries. Others speculate that Oswald was either an agent or an informant of the U.S. government and that he may have been trying to expose the plot behind the assassination.


text: Oswald denied shooting anyone and declared that he was "just a patsy". Dallas Police Department Chief Jesse Curry said, "I'm not sure about it. No one has ever been able to put [Oswald] in the Texas School Book Depository with a rifle in his hand." When asked to account for himself at the time of the assassination, Oswald claimed that he “went outside to watch P. Parade” (referring to the presidential motorcade), and was “out with [William Shelley, a foreman at the depository] in front”, and that he was at the “front entrance to the first floor”. Initially, Texas School Book Depository superintendent Roy Truly and Occhus Campbell, the Depository vice president, said they saw Oswald in the first floor storage room after the shooting. Some researchers theorize that a man who was filmed by Dave Wiegman, Jr., of NBC, and James Darnell of WBAP-TV, standing on the Depository front steps during the assassination, referred to as "prayer man", is Oswald.


text: Oswald's role as FBI informant was investigated by Lee Rankin and others of the Warren Commission, but their findings were inconclusive. Several FBI employees had made statements indicating that Oswald was indeed a paid informant, but the Commission was nonetheless unable to verify the veracity of those claims. FBI agent James Hosty reported that his office's interactions with Oswald were limited to dealing with his complaints about being harassed by the Bureau for being a communist sympathizer. In the weeks before the assassination, Oswald made a personal visit to the FBI's Dallas branch office with a hand-delivered letter which purportedly contained a threat of some sort but, controversially, Hosty destroyed the letter by order of J. Gordon Shanklin, his supervisor.


text: Some researchers suggest that Oswald served as an active agent of the Central Intelligence Agency, often pointing to how he attempted to defect to Russia but was, however, able to return without difficulty (even receiving a repatriation loan from the State Department) as evidence of such. A former roommate of Oswald, James Botelho, who would later become a California judge, stated in an interview with Mark Lane that he believed Oswald was involved in an intelligence assignment in Russia, although Botelho did not mention this suspicion in his testimony to the Warren Commission years earlier. Oswald's mother, Marguerite, often insisted that her son was recruited by an agency of the U.S. Government and sent to Russia. New Orleans District Attorney (and later judge) Jim Garrison, who in 1967 brought Clay Shaw to trial for the assassination of President Kennedy, also held the opinion that Oswald was most likely a CIA agent drawn into the plot to be used as a scapegoat, even going as far as to say that Oswald "genuinely was probably a hero". Senator Richard Schweiker, a member of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence remarked that "everywhere you look with [Oswald], there're fingerprints of intelligence". Schweiker also told author David Talbot that Oswald "was the product of a fake defector program run by the CIA." Richard Sprague, interim staff director and chief counsel to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, stated that if he "had to do it over again", he would have investigated the Kennedy assassination by probing Oswald's ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.


text: In 1978, James Wilcott, a former CIA finance officer, testified before the HSCA that shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy he was advised by fellow employees at a CIA post abroad that Oswald was a CIA agent who had received financial disbursements under an assigned cryptonym. Wilcott was unable to identify the specific case officer who had initially informed him of Oswald's agency relationship, nor was he able to recall the name of the cryptonym, but he named several employees of the post abroad with whom he believed he had subsequently discussed the allegations. Later that year Wilcott and his wife, Elsie (also a former employee of the CIA), repeated those claims in an article in the "San Francisco Chronicle". The HSCA investigated Wilcott's claims- including interviews with the chief and deputy chief of station, as well as officers in finance, registry, the Soviet Branch and counterintelligence - and concluded in their 1979 report they were "not worthy of belief".


text: Despite its official policy of neither confirming nor denying the status of agents, both the CIA itself and many officers working in the region at the time (including David Atlee Phillips) have "unofficially" dismissed the plausibility of any possible ties of Oswald to the agency. Robert Blakey, staff director and chief counsel for the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, supported that assessment in his conclusions as well.


text: In addition to Oswald, Jerome Kroth has named 26 people as "Possible Assassins In Dealey Plaza". They include: Orlando Bosch, James Files, Desmond Fitzgerald, Charles Harrelson, Gerry Hemming, Chauncey Holt, Howard Hunt, Charles Nicoletti, Charles Rogers, Johnny Roselli, Lucien Sarti, and Frank Sturgis.


text: Vincent Bugliosi provides a "partial list of assassins ... whom one or more conspiracy theorists have actually named and identified as having fired a weapon at Kennedy" in his book "Reclaiming History". He also mentions the three tramps, men photographed by several Dallas-area newspapers under police escort near the Texas School Book Depository shortly after the assassination. Since the mid-1960s, various allegations have been made about the identities of the men and their involvement in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. Records released by the Dallas Police Department in 1989 identified the men as Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle, and John Gedney.


text: The theory that former CIA agent and Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt was a participant in the assassination of Kennedy garnered much publicity from 1978 to 2000. In 1981, Hunt won a libel judgment against Liberty Lobby's paper "The Spotlight", which in 1978 printed an allegation by Victor Marchetti stating that Hunt was in Dallas on the day of the assassination and suggesting Hunt's involvement in a conspiracy; the libel award was thrown out on appeal and the newspaper was successfully defended by Mark Lane in a second trial. After Hunt's death in 2007, an audio-taped "deathbed confession" in which Hunt claimed first-hand knowledge of a conspiracy, as a co-conspirator, was released by his son Saint John Hunt. In the confession, Hunt claimed to have been a "bench warmer" in Dallas during the events, and he named several high-level CIA operatives as those who likely carried out the logistics of the assassination. Hunt named Vice President Lyndon Johnson as the most likely figure behind the main impetus of the conspiracy. The authenticity of the confession was met with some skepticism.


text: Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit has been named in some conspiracy theories as a renegade CIA operative sent to silence Oswald and as the "badge man" assassin on the grassy knoll. According to some Warren Commission critics, Oswald was set up to be killed by Tippit, and Tippit was killed by Oswald in self-defense. Other critics doubt that Tippit was killed by Oswald and assert he was shot by other conspirators. (See section below.) Some critics have alleged that Tippit was associated with organized crime or right-wing politics.


text: According to the Warren Commission, the publication of a full-page, paid advertisement critical of Kennedy in the November 22, 1963, "Dallas Morning News", which was signed by "The American Fact-Finding Committee" and noted Bernard Weissman as its chairman, was investigated to determine whether any members of the group claiming responsibility for it were connected to Oswald or to the assassination. The Commission stated that "The American Fact-Finding Committee" was a fictitious sponsoring organization and that there was no evidence linking the four men responsible for the genesis of the ad with either Oswald or Ruby, or to a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy.


text: Related to the advertisement, Mark Lane testified during the Warren Commission's hearings that an informant whom he refused to name told him that Weismann had met with Tippit and Ruby eight days before the assassination at Ruby's Carousel Club. The Commission reported that they "found no evidence that such a meeting took place anywhere at any time" and that there was no "credible evidence that any of the three men knew each other".


text: Lane later stated that he initially learned of the meeting through reporter Thayer Waldo of the "Fort Worth Star-Telegram". According to Lane, a "prominent Dallas figure" who frequented Ruby's Carousel Club told Waldo, and later Lane, that he observed the meeting of the three men at the club. He said, "I had promised the man he would not be involved; he was a leading Dallas citizen; he was married, and the stripper he was going with had become pregnant." Despite not having revealed to the Warren Commission that Waldo was his original source of the alleged meeting, Lane disputed their findings and complained that they failed to ask Waldo about it. According to Hugh Aynesworth, the source of the allegation whose identity Lane promised not to reveal was Carroll Jarnagin, a Dallas attorney who had also claimed to have overheard a meeting between Oswald and Ruby. Aynesworth wrote: "Several people in Dallas were well aware of Jarnagin's tale, and that he later admitted making it all up."


text: The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald killed President Kennedy and then "killed Dallas Police Officer J. D. Tippit in an apparent attempt to escape." Regarding the evidence against Oswald in the shooting of Tippit, the Commission cited: "(1) two eyewitnesses who heard the shots and saw the shooting of Dallas Police Patrolman J. D. Tippit and seven eyewitnesses who saw the flight of the gunman with revolver in hand positively identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the man they saw fire the shots or flee from the scene, (2) the cartridge cases found near the scene of the shooting were fired from the revolver in the possession of Oswald at the time of his arrest, to the exclusion of all other weapons, (3) the revolver in Oswald's possession at the time of his arrest was purchased by and belonged to Oswald, and (4) Oswald's jacket was found along the path of flight taken by the gunman as he fled from the scene of the killing."


text: Some researchers have alleged that the murder of Officer Tippit was part of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Jim Marrs hypothesized that "the slaying of Officer J. D. Tippit may have played some part in [a] scheme to have Oswald killed, perhaps to eliminate co-conspirator Tippit or simply to anger Dallas police and cause itchy trigger fingers." Researcher James Douglass said that "... the killing of [Tippit] helped motivate the Dallas police to kill an armed Oswald in the Texas Theater [where Oswald was arrested], which would have disposed of the scapegoat before he could protest his being framed." Harold Weisberg offered a simpler explanation: "Immediately, the [flimsy] police case [against Oswald] required a willingness to believe. This was proved by affixing to Oswald the opprobrious epithet of 'cop-killer.'" Jim Garrison alleged that evidence was altered to frame Oswald, stating: "If Oswald was innocent of the Tippit murder the foundation of the government's case against him collapsed."


text: Some critics doubt that Tippit was killed by Oswald and assert he was shot by other conspirators. They allege discrepancies in witness testimony and physical evidence that they think call into question the Commission's conclusions regarding the murder of Tippit. According to Jim Marrs, Oswald's guilt in the assassination of Kennedy is placed in question by the presence of "a growing body of evidence to suggest that [he] did not kill Tippit". Others say that multiple men were directly involved in Tippit's killing. Conspiracy researcher Kenn Thomas has alleged that the Warren Commission omitted testimony and evidence that two men shot Tippit and that one left the scene in a car.


text: William Alexanderthe Dallas assistant district attorney who recommended that Oswald be charged with the Kennedy and Tippit murderslater became skeptical of the Warren Commission's version of the Tippit murder. He stated that the Commission's conclusions on Oswald's movements "don't add up", and that "certainly [Oswald] may have had accomplices."


text: According to Brian McKenna's review of Henry Hurt's book, "Reasonable Doubt", Hurt reported that "Tippit may have been killed because he impregnated the wife of another man" and that Dallas police officers lied and altered evidence to set up Oswald to save Tippit's reputation.


text: In the documentary "JFK to 9/11", Francis Conolly claims that Tippit was shot because his looks resembled Kennedy's. Conolly speculates that the assassination plot did not go as planned, and that the conspirators needed a second body. He further theorizes that Tippit's body and JFK's body were switched on Air Force Two.


text: The Warren Commission identified Helen Markham and Domingo Benavides as two witnesses who actually saw the shooting of Officer Tippit. Conspiracy theorist Richard Belzer criticized the Commission for, in his description, "relying" on the testimony of Markham whom he described as "imaginative". Jim Marrs also took issue with Markham's testimony, stating that her "credibility ... was strained to the breaking point". Joseph Ball, senior counsel to the Commission, referred to Markham's testimony as "full of mistakes", characterizing her as an "utter screwball". The Warren Commission addressed concerns regarding Markham's reliability as a witness and concluded: "However, even in the absence of Mrs. Markham's testimony, there is ample evidence to identify Oswald as the killer of Tippit."


text: Domingo Benavides initially said that he did not think he could identify Tippit's assailant and was never asked to view a police lineup, even though he was the person closest to the killing. Benavides later testified that the killer resembled pictures he had seen of Oswald. Other witnesses were taken to police lineups. However, critics have questioned these lineups as they consisted of people who looked very different from Oswald.


text: Witnesses who did not appear before the Commission identified an assailant who was not Oswald. Acquilla Clemons said she saw two men near Tippit's car just before the shooting. She said that after the shooting, she ran outside of her house and saw a man with a gun whom she described as "kind of heavy". She said he waved to the second man, urging him to "go on". Frank Wright said he emerged from his home and observed the scene seconds after the shooting. He described a man standing by Tippit's body who had on a long coat and said the man ran to a parked car and drove away.


text: Critics have questioned whether the cartridge cases recovered from the scene were the same as those that were subsequently entered into evidence. Two of the cases were recovered by witness Domingo Benavides and turned over to police officer J. M. Poe. Poe told the FBI that he marked the shells with his own initials, "J.M.P." to identify them. Sergeant Gerald Hill later testified to the Warren Commission that it was he who had ordered police officer Poe to mark the shells. However, Poe's initials were not found on the shells produced by the FBI six months later. Testifying before the Warren Commission, Poe said that although he recalled marking the cases, he "couldn't swear to it". The identification of the cases at the crime scene raises more questions. Sergeant Gerald Hill examined one of the shells and radioed the police dispatcher, saying: "The shell at the scene indicates that the suspect is armed with an automatic .38 rather than a pistol." However, Oswald was reportedly arrested carrying a "non"-automatic .38 Special revolver.


text: The Warren Commission investigated Oswald's movements between the time of the assassination and the shooting of Tippit, to ascertain whether Oswald might have had an accomplice who helped him flee the Book Depository. The Commission concluded "... through the testimony of seven witnesses [that] Oswald was always alone." According to their final report, Oswald was seen by his housekeeper, Earlene Roberts, leaving his rooming house shortly after 1:00 pm and had enough time to travel nine-tenths of a mile (1.4 km) to the scene where Tippit was killed at 1:16 pm.


text: Witness Helen Markham stated in her affidavit to the Dallas Sheriff's department that Tippit was killed at "approximately 1:06 pm." She later affirmed the time in testimony before the Warren Commission, saying: "I wouldn't be afraid to bet it wasn't 6 or 7 minutes after 1." She initially told the FBI that the shooting occurred "possibly around 1:30 pm." In an unpublished manuscript titled "When They Kill a President", Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig stated that when he heard the news that Tippit had been shot, he noted that the time was 1:06 pm. However, in a later statement to the press, Craig seemed confused about the time of the shooting.


text: Warren Burroughs, who ran the concession stand at the Texas Theater where Oswald was arrested, said that Oswald came into the theater between 1:00 and 1:07 pm; he also claimed he sold Oswald popcorn at 1:15 pmthe "official" time of Officer Tippit's murder. A theater patron, Jack Davis, also corroborated Burroughs's time, claiming he observed Oswald in the theater prior to 1:20 pm.


text: Some conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination have focused on witnesses to the assassination who have not been identified, or who have not identified themselves, despite the media attention that the Kennedy assassination received.


text: The so-called "umbrella man" was one of the closest bystanders to the president when he was first struck by a bullet. The "umbrella man" has become the subject of conspiracy theories after footage of the assassination showed him holding an open umbrella as the Kennedy motorcade passed, despite the fact that it was not raining at the time. One conspiracy theory, proposed by assassination researcher Robert Cutler, suggests that a dart with a paralyzing agent could have been fired from the umbrella, disabling Kennedy and making him a "sitting duck" for an assassination. In 1975, CIA weapons developer Charles Senseney told the Senate Intelligence Committee that such an umbrella weapon was in the hands of the CIA in 1963. A more prevalent conspiracy theory holds that the umbrella could have been used to provide visual signals to hidden gunmen.


text: In 1978, Louie Steven Witt came forward and identified himself as the "umbrella man". Testifying before the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, Witt stated he brought the umbrella to heckle Kennedy and protest the appeasement policies of the president's father, Joseph Kennedy. He added: "I think if the "Guinness Book of World Records" had a category for people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing, I would be No. 1 in that position, without even a close runner-up." Some researchers have noted a number of inconsistencies with Witt's story, however, and doubt him to be the "umbrella man".


text: An unidentified individual who is referred to by some conspiracy theorists as the "dark complected man" can be seen in several photographs, taken seconds after the assassination, sitting on the sidewalk next to the "umbrella man" on the north side of Elm Street. Louie Steven Witt, who identified himself as the "umbrella man", said he was unable to identify the other individual, whose dark complexion has led some conspiracy theorists to speculate Cuban government involvement, or Cuban exile involvement, in the assassination of Kennedy.


text: "Badge man" and "tin hat man" are figures on the grassy knoll who it is alleged can be seen in the Mary Moorman photo, taken approximately one-sixth of a second after President Kennedy was struck with the fatal head wound. The figures were first discovered by researchers Jack White and Gary Mack and are discussed in a 1988 documentary called "The Men Who Killed Kennedy", where it is alleged a third figure can also be seen on the grassy knoll, possibly the eyewitness Gordon Arnold. The "badge man" figureso called as he appears to be wearing a uniform similar to that worn by a policeman, with a badge prominenthelped fuel conspiracy theories linking Dallas Police officers, or someone impersonating a police officer, to the assassination.


text: Another "figure" is the so-called "black dog man" figure who can be seen at the corner of a retaining wall in the Willis and Betzner photo of the assassination. In an interview, Marilyn Sitzman told Josiah Thompson that she saw a young black couple who were eating lunch and drinking Cokes on a bench behind the retaining wall and, therefore, it is possible that the "black dog man" figure is actually the black woman and her child.