JFK secret servicemen called off limo as it enters Dealey Plaza

I’ve never seen this footage before. Clearly showing the Secret Service men who ride or trot at the rear of the presidential limo being ordered off their station as the car turns into (apparently) Dealey Plaza.

It seems to be the right hand turn onto Houston Street, which was shortly followed by a sharp left turn onto Elm Street, where the murder occurred.

3 comments

1. ed says:

   The following is from JOHNNY, WE HARDLY KNEW YE, by Kenny O’Donnel and Dave Powers, the people closest to JFK on a daily basis in the White House. Both Boston Irishmen.

   O’Donnell is the narrator. His is also the featured POV in the recent film THIRTEEN DAYS about the Cuban missiles (with Kevin Costner as O’Donnell), which was based on RFK’s book of the same name and this book by O’Donnell and Powers.

   I’ve avoided JOHNNY for years, assuming it was mostly anecdotes and uncritical at that.

   In general the authors’ do not contest the official story of the assassination. But the opening chapter describes the two-day trip to Texas in detail, and reports conflicting details and suspicions.

   O’Donnell and Powers were riding in the SS car pictured in the video above, about ten feet behind the presidential limo. Powers is on the right, “directly behind the President,” with O’Donnell on his left.

   They report hearing three shots:

   “– two close together and then a third one. There must have been an interval of at least five seconds before the third and last shot because, after the second shot, Dave said to me, ‘Kenny, I think the President’s been shot.’

   “I made a quick sign of the cross and said, ‘ What makes you think that?’

   “‘Look at him!’ Dave said. ‘He was over on the right, with his arm stretched out. Now he’s slumped over toward Jackie, holding his throat.’

   “While we both stared at the President, the third shot took the side of his head off. We saw pieces of bone and brain tissue and bits of his reddish hair flying through the air. The impact lifted him and shook him limply, as if he was a rag doll, and then he dropped out of our sight, sprawled across the back seat of the car. I said to Dave, ‘He’s dead.’ ”

   The authors then describe an SS agent on the left running board beside O’Donnell, “probably Tim McIntyre,” pulling out a gun as SS agent Clint Hill jumps off the left running board to leap onto the presidential limo to keep Jackie Kennedy from falling off the rear (upon which, of course, the presidential driver finally accelerates, having slowed to a snail’s pace after the first two shots).

   Two useful reports then follow:

   “The police found a bullet mark on the street pavement, indicating that one of the three shots might have missed the President’s car. But Dave, who was watching the President and Connolly carefully during the shooting, still thinks that the first bullet hit Kennedy in the neck, the second struck Connally and the third one ripped open the President’s head.”

   A pedestrian was struck in the face by (it’s generally agreed) the ricochet of the bullet that struck the pavement. Thus, although the authors don’t explicitly reject the Warren Commission’s so-called single-bullet theory (which asserts that the first bullet that struck Kennedy’s then wildly changed direction to hit Connelly), they bear witness against it by publishing Powers’ view.

   More to the point of SS complicity raised in the video linked above:

   “I don’t remember any of us in our car saying a word during the fast drive to Parkland Hospital. I was thinking (and Dave told me later that he was thinking about the same thing) of the interval between the first shot that hit the President and the later one tha tkilled him — a lapse of time long enough for Dave and me to talk about whether or not there had been a shooting.

   “As Dave says, if there was an interval of at least five seconds between the second and third shots, as it seemed, that was long enough for a man to run fifty yards. If the Secret Service men in the front seat had reacted quicker to the first two shots at the President’s car, if the driver had stepped on the gas before instead of after the fatal third shot was fired, would President Kennedy be alive today?”

   When one marries all this — the video, the simple apprehension of the SS’s inactivity — with Col. Fletcher Prouty’s consistent insistence across decades that the usual protections had been withdrawn that day in Dallas, a rather simple if damning picture takes shape.

   July 3rd, 2010 at 9:54 am

2. ed says:

   AhA. Mark Lane. Perhaps the most important critic of the official story, author of RUSH TO JUDGMENT in 1966, which blew the Warren Report to bits, and PLAUSIBLE DENIAL, which focused on the trial in 1985 in which it became clear (the jury said afterward) that Howard Hunt and other CIAists were involved in the murder plot …

   Mark Lane has a documentary coming out in 2011 focused on the Secret Service’s withdrawal of protection, featuring former Secret Service agent Abraham Bolden

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px-7IRJpMZE&feature=related

   January 8th, 2011 at 4:28 pm

3. ed says:

   The theme and reality of Secret Service withdrawal of protection is central to Fletcher Prouty’s understanding of the assassination.

   http://www.newcombat.net/article_prouty_assassinations.html

   January 8th, 2011 at 4:30 pm

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