Picturing The Corruption of the JFK Assassination
Chapter 5
Whores Whore and Pimps Pimp for Money
There is no cheap trick too dirty for Groden and Viking to pull if they think it might add excitement to the book and there is nothing too small and without any evidentiary value for Groden not to get it wrong or make it wrong for his own purpose.
In his subchapter with the preposterous title, “Flight To Stemmons Freeway” (page 33H) the road that was just on the other side of the triple underpass, only a few hundred feet from the scene of the assassination, his caption for the picture that takes up the bottom half of the page is:
The Presidential limousine races toward the Stemmons Freeway on ramp. In the follow up car is a man, a Secret service agent, standing up with a machine gun in his right hand . . .
Groden then says that this picture of that man with that machine gun in his hand is what “proves” that all else a witness, Sam Holland said is true because he said “that he saw a man with a machine gun in the follow up car” (page 44).
While I believe what else Holland testified to, proving that he was correct in some of his testimony does not prove that he was correct in all of it. But if this single part of his testimony is “proof” about all of it, then all of Holland’s testimony has to be rejected.
That was not a “machine gun.” It was a rifle, a Browning AR-15.
The Secret Service agent Groden does not name was George W. Hickey.
And in this picture he is not “standing up.”
Groden says that the picture shows the limousine as it “races toward the Stemmons Freeway on ramp.” Unless he is trying to justify the subchapter title in some strange way, that “flight” foolishness, there seems to be no reason for his being wrong about this. Any more than there are reasons all the time he is wrong.
Although it is more than two decades since I drove on that freeway it was my recollection that where this picture was taken was on the freeway itself. The picture shows the railroad tracks running parallel with the roadway and that does not happen at a cloverleaf. It also shows the Texas School Book Depository on the other side of the tracks and to the south of the car. I got out my Conoco map of Dallas, which is three feet by more than thirty inches, and my recollection is correct. That “on” ramp is south of Elm Street but on the other side of the triple underpass. The three streets merge at the triple underpass. Only Commerce continues, and it was the southernmost of those three streets. It continues as a viaduct.
This is of course, a minor point other than in determining whether it is safe to take Groden’s word about anything. Even when he has no apparent need he is not accurate and truthful.
In addition to which he doctored that picture and the companion picture which takes up the top half of the next page.
He credits the picture to the Associated Press. It got the picture from The Dallas Times Herald one of whose staff photographers took it. The picture is published in Chief Jesse Curry’s JFK Assassination File (page 31), with the credit to the paper’s photographic staff (page 135).
For his own reason Groden has doctored this picture so it is indistinct. It looks like it was Xeroxed countless times. As a result it is so unclear no face in it can be made out. But as Curry published it Clint Hill is recognizable and his is the only face that shows in the limousine. The faces of the agents in the front seat cannot be made out because of the windshield and all those other in the back seat have fallen over or are leaning over and cannot be seen.
If Groden’s reason for making a clear picture unclear is to hide the fact that Hickey was not standing, he does not succeed in that. Hickey can be seen seated. He is seated on the back of the back seat. That is where he began. That was his assigned post. He left it momentarily after the shooting to be able to get his rifle that was on the seat but also under two men sitting on that seat.
This account by Groden is false in every detail, even the smallest detail. Even about where the car was, and he was there often enough to know the truth. Whether these errors are from congenital sloppiness, visible throughout the book or indifference to fact and truth, also visible, this time it cannot be attributed to his ignorance. It is a measure of his undependability. That he would doctor the picture also tells us we cannot trust his photographic work or his interpretations of the pictures unless they are amply confirmed independently.
Earlier we covered part of his “Aftermath in Dealey Plaza” chapter (pages 47ff). On the page on which he has the meaningless picture of the doorway carefully selected not to show the man in it he has opposite that a picture of one of those tramps. He uses that picture, which is clearly not that of E. Howard Hunt, to justify his caption for it:
One of the tramps arrested in the railroad yard resembles E. Howard Hunt, a CIA operative involved in the earlier plot against Fidel Castro, leading to speculation years later of a direct Dallas Watergate link involving Hunt.
Groden cites no evidence that Hunt was “involved” in any “plots against” Castro and there is no such evidence. He was involved in the political part of the Bay of Pigs operation, in what was to follow that invasion if it succeeded, as it did not. While some of the assassination nuts did speculate, as is usually the case, they had no rational basis for their speculation.
By the time Groden wrote this those arrest records were public. Before that time those and all related records were available to the House assassins committee for which he worked. Moreover, before Watergate Groden knew the truth about those tramps and those pictures from me. I learned it in 1968.
It is conspicuous that with more blank space than he uses for this picture and its caption, blank space above and below it, Groden had a motive for not using a picture of Hunt in that blank space: it would make clear that the man arrested was not and could not have been Hunt.
That he did not use a picture of Hunt is not because none was available.
This kind of dishonesty continues page after page, including boxes of those “Mysterious Death Projects” not one of which has any credibility. In this Groden seeks to plant the idea of an omnipresent conspiracy against all who could contradict the official story. While to the uninformed this can be persuasive it actually has the result of undermining all credibility of all criticism. While some of this can be attributed to Groden’s ignorance of the fact, some is deliberate, meaning intendedly dishonest. For example, he says that:
Deputy sheriffs Roger Craig, Eugene Boone and Seymour Weitzman found a rifle which they all described as a 7.65 Mauser with a scope near the west side of the sixth floor. Later police reports changed this information, stating that the rifle was a 6.5 Mannlicher Carcanno (page 64).
Roger Craig was not there and he had nothing at all to do with the finding of that rifle. Weitzman was not a deputy sheriff. He was a deputy constable as he not only testified but as the Warren Commission’s list of witnesses states. While Weitzman and he alone, not Craig and Boone, did say that rifle was a Mauser, that he made a mistake and how he made that mistake is clear in his Commission testimony. In 1965 I published the following encapsulation of it.
Where they found the rifle was not “near the west side of the sixth floor.” It was in the northwest corner of that floor, near the stairway.
Then he went to the sixth floor where he worked with Boone on the search. With Weitzman on the floor looking under the flats of boxes and Boone looking over the top, they found the rifle, “I would say simultaneously . . . It was covered with boxes. It was well protected . . . I would say eight or nine of us stumbled over that gun a couple of times . . . We made a man tight barricade until the crime lab came up . . .” (7H106-7) . . .
Weitzman’s testimony about the care and success with which the rifle was hidden and about the searchers stumbling over it without finding it is important in any time reconstruction. With the almost total absence of fingerprints on a rifle that took and held prints and the absence of prints on the clip and shells that would take prints, this shows the care and time taken by the alleged user of the weapon. That this version is not in the Report can be understood best by comparison with the version that is in Whitewash, (page 36).
Weitzman made a mistake, clearly a mistake, and there is absolutely no question about what rifle he and Boone found or where they found it. His testimony establishes how well that rifle was hidden, so well hidden that eight or nine of them looked at it several times without seeing it; that it was covered with boxes and elsewhere in his testimony he said it was covered with paper, too. So, that he made the mistake with the two kinds of rifles resembling each other is comprehensible. Making this out to be more than a mistake is not comprehensible, not with any honest intent.
Groden himself, getting the idea from Whitewash (page 211), published a police picture of the rifle after all the paper and other debris was removed from on top of it on page 66. Anyone with any maturity, anyone not playing kids’ games with serious evidence, would see signs of conspiracy not in making something out of nothing and making the false pretense that one rifle as substituted for another but in the care in the hiding of the rifle. Oswald had no time for that when without taking time he would not have gotten away from that sixth floor alleged sniper’s nest before the building manager, Roy Truly, and the policeman, Marrion Baker, who were going up those stairs Oswald had to use, would have seen him. He was already inside that lunchroom before they got to the second floor.
As Weitzman testified, once they saw the rifle they did not touch it. Instead they protected it with “a man tight barricade” until the crime lab police came and photographed and then removed it, all in the presence of many witnesses. It was then held up for the press cameras to photograph it where it was found. It was then taken from the building to the police lab, all in the presence of many witnesses and all photographed. Groden uses one of those photographs, of the rifle being carried by the sling, on page 66.
The police did not “change” any “information.” Weitzman had not held the rifle up and examined it. He had seen it well hidden and formed an incorrect opinion. Were this not true, there are dozens of witnesses who were there when that rifle was removed from behind that barricade of boxes – from not one of which was any Oswald print lifted or even sought. There is not and never has been any legitimate question about the identification of the rifle that Boone and Weitzman found.
It is the assassination nuts like Groden, those who seek fame and fortune with irresponsible and dishonest writing, who see what is not there to be seen and write excitingly about that. But they do not see what is there to be seen.
The hiding and the finding of that rifle, the actual Mannlicher-Carcanno, adds to the proof that Oswald was not the assassin. It was an absolute impossibility for him to have hidden that rifle as it was hidden and still get where he was seen on the second floor before those who saw him there did. This is but one of the many evidentiary proofs that are in the official evidence and are there for honest writers to put together. The way that rifle was hidden is in itself legitimately interpreted as indicating a real, not an imagined conspiracy. But even when it slaps him in the face Groden is too ignorant of the actual fact, too wrapped up in his silly theorizing he regards as fact not theory, to begin to understand the realities. Instead he seeks to excite (and he did excite at least Viking) while spreading disinformation and misinformation and destroying the credibility of factual criticism.
Groden continues to emphasize this Mauser mistake as he pretends to get into “The Rifle,” the title of his next subchapter. He even tries to validate it by quoting Marrion Baker as saying “he heard the distinct report of a high-powered rifle.” Then Groden writes that the Mannlicher-Carcanno was “not a high-powered rifle.” He is till flogging that dead horse of the simple mistake to make it look as though the police made a substitution for a Mauser with a Mannlicher when that was impossible.
He follows this with what is false, that “ballistics test showed that the scratches on the three empty bullet shells could have been made by the Mannlicher-Carcanno” (page 66).
Not only does Groden not use the evidence, he refuses to use it even when it is all spelled out for him, when it requires no work of him more than reading.
When bullets are loaded into rifles each rifle makes a distinctive mark on each shell. They are not mere “scratches” and different parts of the rifle leave their own distinctive marks. Still again, Gorden prefers the childish nonsense he just makes up to the official evidence. Here is how I condensed some of it, also in 1965, in Whitewash:
Almost by accident, in trying to suggest what it cannot and does not prove, that Oswald practiced with a rifle, the Report casually mentions that “examination of the cartridge cases found on the sixth floor of the Depository Building established that they had been previously loaded and ejected from the assassination rifle, which would indicate that Oswald practiced operating the bolt” (R193). This intelligence is not examined by the Report in connection with the bullets. It is, of course, not necessary to use bullets to practice operating the bolt. And it is equally true that practice is not the only procedure that will mark a shell. Firing, for example, does exactly the same thing (and more).