Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination by Anthony Summers
Authors: Anthony Summers
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leave on November 22. Armed with his movie camera, he was to claim, he walked to the top of the grassy knoll just before the President arrived, looking for a good vantage point. He went behind the fence, looking for a way to get to the railroad bridge that crossed the road directly in front of the motorcade route. From there, his view would be perfect. Arnold was moving along the fence—on the side hidden from the road—when “… this guy just walked towards me and said that I shouldn’t be up there. He showed me a badge and said he was with the Secret Service and that he didn’t want anybody up there.” It sounded sensible enough, andArnold retreated to the next best spot—beside a tree on the road side of the fence, high on the grassy slope beyond the colonnade. Then the motorcade arrived.
Dealey Plaza, November 22, 1963
Arnold maintained, “The shot came from behind me, only inches over my left shoulder. I had just got out of basic training. In my mind, live ammunition was being fired. It was being fired over my head. And I hit the dirt.” The shooting that he remembered as being to his rear was so close, Arnold claimed, that he heard “the whiz over my shoulder. I say a whiz —you don’t exactly hear the whiz of a bullet, you hear just like a shock wave. You feel it … you feel something and then a report comes just behind it.”
Arnold’s dramatic story was not published until 1978—he could have concocted it on the basis of earlier reports. Yet his account found some support. Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, who had ridden in the motorcade two cars behind the President in 1963, recalled having seen a man in Arnold’s position. Yarborough said, “Immediately on the firing of the first shot I saw the man … throw himself on the ground … he was down within a second, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s a combat veteran who knows how to act when weapons start firing.’ ”
A railroad supervisor on the bridge, Sam Holland, observed a man he described as a “plainclothes detective or FBI agent or something like that” before the shooting. Something, moreover, led policemen to run up the grassy slope immediately afterward.
Mary Woodward, Maggie Brown, Aurelia Lorenzo, and Ann Donaldson all worked at the Dallas Morning News . They spoke of “a horrible, ear-shattering noise coming from behind us and a little to the right.” What they said was in the press the very next day, yet all four witnesses went unmentioned and unquestioned by the Warren Commission.
John Chism said, “I looked behind me, to see if it was a fireworks display.” His wife, Mary, said, “It came from what I thought was behind us.” The Chisms were not called by the Warren Commission.
A. J.Millican, who had been standing in front of the colonnade, said of the final gunfire, “I heard two more shots come from the arcade between the bookstore and the underpass, and then three more shots came from the same direction, only farther back. Then everybody started running up the hill.” Mr. Millican was not called by the Warren Commission.
Jean Newman stood halfway along the grassy knoll and said her first impression was that “the shots came from my right.” Ms. Newman was not called by the Warren Commission.
Abraham Zapruder, of film fame, was using the concrete wall on the grassy knoll as a vantage point. A Secret Service report of an interview with him reads: “According to Mr. Zapruder, the position of the assassin was behind Mr. Zapruder.” In testimony to the Warren Commission, Zapruder recalled that one shot reverberated all around him, louder than all the others. This would be consistent with a shot fired on the knoll itself, much closer to Zapruder than gunfire from the Book Depository.
Sam Holland, the railroad supervisor at the parapet of the railway bridge over the road, directly faced the President’s car as it approached (see diagram, page 999). Holland also had an excellent view of the fence on the knoll.
Dealey Plaza, November 22, 1963
Arnold maintained, “The shot came from behind me, only inches over my left shoulder. I had just got out of basic training. In my mind, live ammunition was being fired. It was being fired over my head. And I hit the dirt.” The shooting that he remembered as being to his rear was so close, Arnold claimed, that he heard “the whiz over my shoulder. I say a whiz —you don’t exactly hear the whiz of a bullet, you hear just like a shock wave. You feel it … you feel something and then a report comes just behind it.”
Arnold’s dramatic story was not published until 1978—he could have concocted it on the basis of earlier reports. Yet his account found some support. Texas Senator Ralph Yarborough, who had ridden in the motorcade two cars behind the President in 1963, recalled having seen a man in Arnold’s position. Yarborough said, “Immediately on the firing of the first shot I saw the man … throw himself on the ground … he was down within a second, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s a combat veteran who knows how to act when weapons start firing.’ ”
A railroad supervisor on the bridge, Sam Holland, observed a man he described as a “plainclothes detective or FBI agent or something like that” before the shooting. Something, moreover, led policemen to run up the grassy slope immediately afterward.
Mary Woodward, Maggie Brown, Aurelia Lorenzo, and Ann Donaldson all worked at the Dallas Morning News . They spoke of “a horrible, ear-shattering noise coming from behind us and a little to the right.” What they said was in the press the very next day, yet all four witnesses went unmentioned and unquestioned by the Warren Commission.
John Chism said, “I looked behind me, to see if it was a fireworks display.” His wife, Mary, said, “It came from what I thought was behind us.” The Chisms were not called by the Warren Commission.
A. J.Millican, who had been standing in front of the colonnade, said of the final gunfire, “I heard two more shots come from the arcade between the bookstore and the underpass, and then three more shots came from the same direction, only farther back. Then everybody started running up the hill.” Mr. Millican was not called by the Warren Commission.
Jean Newman stood halfway along the grassy knoll and said her first impression was that “the shots came from my right.” Ms. Newman was not called by the Warren Commission.
Abraham Zapruder, of film fame, was using the concrete wall on the grassy knoll as a vantage point. A Secret Service report of an interview with him reads: “According to Mr. Zapruder, the position of the assassin was behind Mr. Zapruder.” In testimony to the Warren Commission, Zapruder recalled that one shot reverberated all around him, louder than all the others. This would be consistent with a shot fired on the knoll itself, much closer to Zapruder than gunfire from the Book Depository.
Sam Holland, the railroad supervisor at the parapet of the railway bridge over the road, directly faced the President’s car as it approached (see diagram, page 999). Holland also had an excellent view of the fence on the knoll.
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