Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination by Anthony Summers Page A
Authors: Anthony Summers
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Lieutenant Colonel Jones might have been able to throw more light on official knowledge of Oswald before the assassination. This was Dallas FBI Agent in Charge Shanklin, with whom Jones said he spoke on the afternoon of the murder. As will be discussed later, Shanklin has been widely held responsible for ordering the destruction of correspondence written by Oswald. A letter from Oswald to the FBI was deliberately destroyed after the assassination, when it should have beenpreserved as evidence. The Assassinations Committee called this “a serious impeachment” of Shanklin’s credibility.
Oswald’s use of an alias—any alias—to buy a gun, remains perplexing. If this was an attempt to conceal his real identity, as protection against taking blame for future crimes involving the rifle, Oswald was indeed a foolish fellow. Hard though it may be for a European to comprehend, in Texas it is still as normal to own a gun as not. In 1963, a man could buy a rifle across the counter in dozens of stores with few or no questions asked. Oswald could have done so and risked nothing more than a future shaky visual identification by some shop assistant.
As it is, Oswald not only gave his own post-office box number on the order for the gun, and committed his handwriting to paper, but also invited exposure—so we are told—by going out to murder the President with a Hidell identity card in his pocket and a Hidell-purchased rifle under his arm. One of the two policemen who first questioned him said Oswald gave his name as “Hidell.”
It is said that criminal cunning is invariably flawed by stupidity, but other evidence suggests Oswald was far from stupid. School records show that in several subjects he was three years ahead of his class, and his intelligence was noted by his officers in the Marine Corps. How, then, to explain this next anomaly? While “frantically” denying any part in the assassination, it was Oswald who sent the police straight to some of the most incriminating evidence of all.
On the morning of the day following the assassination, Oswald provided details of where he had stayed in Dallas and where his belongings were kept. Although some of his possessions were kept at his lodgings, Oswald volunteered the fact that hestored many items in the garage of the Paine house, where his wife was staying. Officers armed with a search warrant were soon on their way back to the Paine address, which had already been searched once the previous day. According to the police account, the officers returned triumphantly to headquarters with the enormously incriminating photographs of Oswald holding a rifle and with a pistol at his hip 6
At 6:00 p.m. that evening, when Oswald was confronted with an enlargement of one of the pictures, his reaction was confident. According to Captain Fritz, head of Homicide:
He said the picture was not his; that the face was his face, but that this picture was not him at all, and he had never seen the picture before. When I told him that the picture was recovered from Mrs. Paine’s garage, he said that picture had never been in his possession… . He denied ever seeing that picture and said that he knew all about photography, that he had done a lot of work in photography himself, that the picture had been made by some person unknown to him. He further stated that since he had been photographed here at the City Hall and that people had been taking his picture while being transferred from my office to the jail door, that someone had been able to get a picture of his face and that, with that, they had made the picture. He told me that he understood photography real well, and that in time, he would be able to show that it was not his picture, and that it had been made by someone else.
Oswald’s claim that the photographs were faked could reasonably be written off as desperate prevarication. Expert testimony that the pictures were taken with a camera believed to have been Oswald’s, and his widow’s
Oswald’s use of an alias—any alias—to buy a gun, remains perplexing. If this was an attempt to conceal his real identity, as protection against taking blame for future crimes involving the rifle, Oswald was indeed a foolish fellow. Hard though it may be for a European to comprehend, in Texas it is still as normal to own a gun as not. In 1963, a man could buy a rifle across the counter in dozens of stores with few or no questions asked. Oswald could have done so and risked nothing more than a future shaky visual identification by some shop assistant.
As it is, Oswald not only gave his own post-office box number on the order for the gun, and committed his handwriting to paper, but also invited exposure—so we are told—by going out to murder the President with a Hidell identity card in his pocket and a Hidell-purchased rifle under his arm. One of the two policemen who first questioned him said Oswald gave his name as “Hidell.”
It is said that criminal cunning is invariably flawed by stupidity, but other evidence suggests Oswald was far from stupid. School records show that in several subjects he was three years ahead of his class, and his intelligence was noted by his officers in the Marine Corps. How, then, to explain this next anomaly? While “frantically” denying any part in the assassination, it was Oswald who sent the police straight to some of the most incriminating evidence of all.
On the morning of the day following the assassination, Oswald provided details of where he had stayed in Dallas and where his belongings were kept. Although some of his possessions were kept at his lodgings, Oswald volunteered the fact that hestored many items in the garage of the Paine house, where his wife was staying. Officers armed with a search warrant were soon on their way back to the Paine address, which had already been searched once the previous day. According to the police account, the officers returned triumphantly to headquarters with the enormously incriminating photographs of Oswald holding a rifle and with a pistol at his hip 6
At 6:00 p.m. that evening, when Oswald was confronted with an enlargement of one of the pictures, his reaction was confident. According to Captain Fritz, head of Homicide:
He said the picture was not his; that the face was his face, but that this picture was not him at all, and he had never seen the picture before. When I told him that the picture was recovered from Mrs. Paine’s garage, he said that picture had never been in his possession… . He denied ever seeing that picture and said that he knew all about photography, that he had done a lot of work in photography himself, that the picture had been made by some person unknown to him. He further stated that since he had been photographed here at the City Hall and that people had been taking his picture while being transferred from my office to the jail door, that someone had been able to get a picture of his face and that, with that, they had made the picture. He told me that he understood photography real well, and that in time, he would be able to show that it was not his picture, and that it had been made by someone else.
Oswald’s claim that the photographs were faked could reasonably be written off as desperate prevarication. Expert testimony that the pictures were taken with a camera believed to have been Oswald’s, and his widow’s
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