The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(105)

That’s a pretty strange story.

Yes.

Is it a true story?

No.

What’s the point?

The point is that people believe it. The point is that the more that emotion is tied up in an incident the less likely is any narration of it going to be accurate. I suppose there are incidents more dramatic than the assassination of a president but there cant be too many of them. I’d seen the Zapruder film of course. Multiple times. It wasnt released for ten years. By then it had been tampered with in ways that made no sense at all. I knew that Jackie had climbed out onto the decklid of the limousine. But I’d no idea why. So I sat down and watched it. There were three other films shot of the same scene but they were taken from the other side of the limousine and you cant see her hand. Plus Zapruder had a zoom lens on his Bell & Howell. How long do you think she was on the trunk of the limousine?

No idea.

Two point eight seconds.

All right.

She couldnt have scooped up some brains off the car. She crawled out, grabbed something, and turned and came back. You can see that she’s not scooping anything up. She never even looks at what’s in her hand. She has what she came for in her fingers and when she tries to scoot back she actually reaches down with this same hand and uses the heel of it to support herself and to push away to her left to get back to her seat. This is all on film. You can see it for yourself. What she’s holding in her fingers is a piece of her husband’s skull. At least one witness did actually report seeing where it sat rocking gently on the decklid of the limo. Like a teacup. Jackie had been bent over her husband. He’d already been shot. When the next round came through his head her face was about six inches away. It’s what follows that’s fairly extraordinary. From the time that her husband’s head explodes in her face it is less than a second before she turns to climb up onto the deck of the limo to take possession of the piece of skull teetering there. You know what she’s thinking. Or you should. She’s thinking that if her husband is to be put back together she has to have all the parts.

That’s even more bizarre.

Not really. For all the pain that he’s inflicted on her if there is any unassailable evidence of her love and her dedication that is it. There’s no argument. I find her to be a pretty astonishing woman.

He didnt deserve her.

If you look at the films taken from the driver’s side of the limo she seems to be reaching all the way to the rear of the decklid but the Zapruder film shows that what she is picking up is still about a foot from the rear. She sprang into action because she thought that the piece of her husband’s skull on the decklid was about to slide off into the street and be run over and crushed.

Western sat. After a while he looked up at Kline. You dont have a woman in your life.

No.

Why?

It’s a long story.

But you like women.

I love women.

Western nodded.

Kennedy was killed with a highpower hunting rifle. Most likely a .30-06 but possibly something even hotter like a .270 Winchester or even a Holland and Holland .300 Magnum. But in any case a rifle with twice the muzzle velocity of the Carcano and a number of times the energy. As noted. It could even have been a .223—which is the NATO round. The bullet was a hollow point. What is called a frangible round. And it would have pretty much disintegrated. The bullets that Oswald fired were solid-jacketed. The one that was recovered was hardly even deformed. That fact alone tells you everything you need to know. The President’s head literally exploded. This of course was not caused by the bullet but by the shockwave from the bullet. They looked at what was left of Kennedy’s brains under a microscope and they were impacted with fragments of lead. But even that didnt give them pause. These after all are ballistics experts who actually refer to cartridges as bullets. And since the frangible rounds left no trace other than small pieces of lead then the only bullet found was the one from Oswald’s rifle. But the so-called ballistics experts couldnt make anything of this.

All right.

Witness after witness was asked to change his—or her—testimony “for the good of the country.”

All right, why?

The reason might appear to be simply that it was not a federal offense at that time to shoot a president. But it was a federal offense for two or more people to conspire to do so. Somebody had to know that. And that would dump the assassination into the lap of the US Attorney General.

Bobby Kennedy.

Yes. But even that doesnt really fly. The real problem was all the troublesome shit that the brothers had been up to. From Hoffa to Giancana to Castro. All of which would come to light if the assassination was actually looked into. So we have the Warren Report instead. The US Government persuaded everyone—all those witnesses who wound up recanting almost everything they had seen or heard—that their testimony would decide whether or not Russia was going to nuke us. There are literally millions of pages of documentation concerning Kennedy’s death that have been filed away in a vault. To be seen when? The fatal round could have been fired from in front of the limousine. Contrary to the Warren Report of course. There are buildings there but no one bothered to look because they already had the book depository and the rifle and the empty shellcasings. And the actual sharpshooter could have been firing from an obscene distance. Marine snipers make kills at ranges of up to a mile. There’s a set of equations that cross here. Where the distance the smallbore travels washes out the bullet’s speed so that finally the energy and the shock of the heavier bullet supplant the smallbore’s speed advantage. It’s why longdistance snipers often prefer the fifty caliber. No matter how much it slows down it’s still pretty much like a traveling brickbat.