The Mooch takes Dealey Plaza
/
This week on The Rest is History Club bonus episodes Dominic Sandbrook hosted Anthony Scaramucci, whom you might—might—remember as Donald Trump’s White House communications director for a week and a half in 2017. They talk through presidential history and their picks for the best of the lot. Despite my disagreeing with a lot of their choices it’s a generally fun conversation and Scaramucci is a smooth talker with a certain oily New York charm, like an ingratiating mid-tier Corleone enforcer who desperately wants you to know how many Douglas Brinkley books he’s read.
In the course of discussing JFK, Sandbrook teased that Scaramucci disagrees with the conclusions Sandbrook and Tom Holland laid out in their excellent series on Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. After a bit of puffing insinuation—“Remember I was in the White House, so I’m not really at liberty to talk about it,” as if the staffer who holds press conferences is going through highly classified FBI files in his off hours—Scaramucci says:
“But I would just ask you to look at the Zapruder film very closely—look at those three or four frames—and you tell me where the shot came from. Okay? Take a look. And if you believe the ‘magic bullet’ theory—”
Okay. The shot came from behind. Take a look at the Zapruder film however closely you want, but that’s not going to transform what you see in frame 313 into anything other than an exit wound.
Most of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, for me, founder upon a few immovable physical facts:
The first shot to strike Kennedy passed through him into Governor Connally. You can see both men react to the shot simultaneously in the Zapruder film.
No “magic” is necessary to explain the effects of that shot, as bullets do not move in straight lines, especially when passing through solid objects like human bodies. Read even a little bit about combat medicine and this should be obvious.
Regardless of which direction Kennedy’s head moves, the shocking head wound visible in the Zapruder film is an exit wound, meaning, again, that the bullet struck Kennedy from behind.
Shooting from behind was easier than the shot from the grassy knoll that Scaramucci and so many others either suggest or insist upon. A shooter on the grassy knoll would have to traverse left-to-right to hit a target moving across his line of fire. For a shooter above and behind Kennedy—in, say, the upper floors of the Texas School Book Depository—his target would be sitting almost motionless in his sights as the presidential limo moved down and away from him.
Argue all you like about Oswald, the Mafia, the Cubans, the CIA, or whatever, but no theory that contradicts these facts is credible.
I come down, like Sandbrook and Holland, firmly in the camp that it was Oswald acting alone in a politically motivated crime of opportunity, but I am willing to entertain some alternative that fits within the physical limits imposed by 1-4 above. For a detailed example worked out in fiction, see Stephen Hunter’s Bob Lee Swagger novel The Third Bullet. Hunter, who actually knows something about guns, ballistics, and marksmanship, posits a second shooter in the building across the street from the Texas School Book Depository firing along almost the same axis as Oswald, who is still in his historical position and still fires at Kennedy. I can’t remember who or what is behind this convoluted backup plan in Hunter’s story, but it works within the known facts.
I don’t believe it, but this is far more likely than whatever it is Scaramucci wants impressionable listeners to think he knows.
