Posted on 11/22/2019 9:52:46 AM PST by Hot Tabasco
early 1989, I was working as a business reporter in Washington, D.C., and interviewing a private investigator for a story about his company. At the end of our conversation, he casually mentioned he’d done some research into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“Oh yeah?” I said, in an ironic, indifferent way. “So who killed him?” He said: “Well, I think this gunsmith in Baltimore, a guy named Howard Donahue, figured it out.” The private eye showed me a magazine article from 1977 and as I read it, my skepticism began to fade. Within a week, I was heading to nearby Towson, Maryland, to meet Donahue in person.
Donahue’s Dealey Plaza odyssey began 21 years earlier. The World War II veteran was a firearms specialist who’d testified as an expert witness in multiple shooting cases. He was also a well-known marksman. That’s why he’d been recruited to take part in a CBS News reenactment of the shooting in the spring of 1967.
The network wanted to know if Lee Harvey Oswald’s Italian military-surplus, bolt-action rifle really could have been fired three times with two hits on a moving target in less than six seconds. Donahue proved that it could. Of the 11 shooters participating in the experiment, only Donahue exceeded Oswald’s performance by scoring three hits in 4.8 seconds, well under the 5.6-second maximum....
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
“The bullet was flying at 3,300 feet-per-second when it slammed into the back of Kennedy’s head, 21 feet away, and disintegrated.”
Disintegrated.
Yes, Oswald acted alone, but the time and place was perfect for some other party or parties to act on their disputes with the Kennedy Administration.................
Oswald qualified with open sights over 200 yards. Next, there is a picture of the second building and no person with a rifle there.
Been there. It’s a small right space.
not an AR 15. The Secret Service had M-14’s.
The route was not change in the last minute. This was the normal parade route.
No problem. I understand fully about not wanting to read something when I just want them to get to the point.
It is a rather long read (so says they guy that actually read Bugliosi's book), so I may go back and finish it.
Yes, it is a rather long read, and I have to admit I didn't finish it. I read just enough to convince myself that there may actually be something to this theory.
When I started, I thought it was just more nonsense, but after learning some details of information I had never previously heard, I now put this theory into the plausible category.
Read the article. It’s a very plausible explanation. The scenario presented is that LHO shot Kennedy and Connally first, but then the fatal final shot came from the accidental discharge of a Secret Service agent’s AR-15 when he fell over in the following car.
SS had M-14’s not AR 15’s.
I thought the statement that the entrance wound in the back of Kennedy's skull being only 6 mm in diameter was compelling. The Carcano rifle rounds were 6.5 mm before they were fired, but the article claims they expand to 6.75 mm from the force of the charge propelling them.
How does a 6.75 mm round leave a 6 mm hole?
On the other hand, the Secret Service agent behind Kennedy had an AR 15 which fires 5.6 mm rounds, and which would then conceivably leave a 6 mm hole.
Seems like that would be a pretty compelling bit of evidence that Oswald didn't make the killing head shot.
Perhaps the explanation lies in a disturbing little detail that may or may not be true. The author says the SS agent who may have been the culprit was only on the presidential detail for a few months before the assassination, and wouldn’t have been assigned the responsibility for the AR-15 under normal circumstances ... but was given this responsibility because the veteran SS agents on the detail were hung over after a night of heavy drinking.
I find it implausible that a professional gunsmith and one of the expert witnesses called to testify in the Warren Commission and who spent ten years researching the matter, would not know the difference between an AR 15 and an M-14.
Unless you have proof to the contrary, if the Donahue guy said they had AR 15s, i'm going to believe him.
Good points.
Photographic evidence. There is a photo of the SS with a M-14 clearly out in the trailing car as it comes out of the triple overpass. At the 6th Floor Museum. Sorry.
She’s one of my favs!............................JUDYISM!..............
I read this when it came out. The best thing about Menninger’s book is he discussed the 1968 (?) recreation of the shoot in Maryland for a TV station. They built a Dealey Plaza style track, had a car with silhouettes at the right height, location of Kennedy and Connelly, timed it at 6.6 seconds which the Zapruder film said was the time (more on that in a minute). They brought in 10 marksmen to see if they could get off 3 shots in 6.6 seconds with a M-C rifle.
All 10 got off 6 shots, as I recall about 6 of them got two hits, and the last shooter, who fired in a rainstorm, got three hits. However later it was discovered that the Zapruder film was erroneously calibrated, and that the real time Oswald had was 10 seconds.
Measurements might not have been precise. That doesn’t bother me. If one believes the head shot came from behind then Oswald likely did it.
My problem is I have never been able to watch the Zapruder film and feel convinced the shot came from behind based on how his head reels backwards. Perhaps the car was speeding up at the exact moment the head shot was delivered. Dunno.
Again, I don't see someone making this sort of mistake by announcing a particular man shot Kennedy with a particular gun. The idea that he didn't even get the gun correctly identified seems implausible to me.
So perhaps you have a photograph of one of the Secret Service agents carrying an M-14, but unless it is Hickey, it doesn't quite disprove the man's claim.
Perhaps it is unlikely that one Secret Service agent would carry one thing, and another would carry a different thing, but I have no knowledge on what they would or would not have done in 1963.
On the other hand, if you are correct about this, the whole story is a ball of crap.
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