(With customary eloquence, courtesy of David S. Lifton. )
Excerpted from David Lifton’s Best Evidence,
December, 1965, at U.C.L.A.
. . .
"I wanted to ask just one question, I said, “and get your comments on it.” One of the most important conclusions of the Commission, I began, was that there was no evidence of conspiracy. “Wasn’t it,” said Dulles, correcting me, and punctuating the air with his finger as he spoke, “we have found no evidence of conspiracy?” I proceeded to describe the motion of the President’s head on the Zapruder film and some of the grassy-knoll testimony. How could the Commission Report make a statement like that, in view of all that evidence ?
Dulles responded: “We examined the film a thousand times,” and he proceeded to deny that the motion I described appeared on the film. As he answered, I retrieved from my briefcase a demonstration panel prepared by Ray Marcus in which the relevant portions of all frames between 313 and 323 were arranged in sequence on one 8-1/2 by 11-inch page.
The backward motion was obvious. I walked over to Dulles, and put one of the panels on his lap. “Here,” I said, kneeling beside him, “I know these are not the best reproductions, but just look at the President’s head and the rear seat of the car, and see if they get closer together or farther apart in successive frames after impact.”
“Now what are you saying . . . just what are you saying?” said Dulles, his voice rising.
“I’m saying there must be someone up front firing at Kennedy, and that means a conspiracy,” I replied.
“Look,” he said, “there isn’t a single iota of evidence indicating a conspiracy . . . no one says there was anything like that . . .”
As politely as possible I described the statistics in Harold Feldman’s “Fifty-Two Witnesses: The Grassy Knoll,” closing with the fact that several people on the overpass saw smoke coming from the area behind the fence, and that a policeman “even smelled smoke there.”
“Look,” he paused, and then, his voice rising again, angrily, “What are you talking about? Who saw smoke?” he thundered, sounding as though I had fabricated the information out of whole cloth.
“Sam Holland, for instance,” I replied. “He was standing on the overpass.” I named a few others, and said that anyone could buy the book Four Days, turn to page 21 and see, in color, what was apparently a puff of smoke on the Nix film frame published there.
By now, Dulles had worked himself into a lather.
“Now what are you saying,” he roared, “that someone was smoking up there?” His attempt at ridicule was unmistakable. “Are you telling me,” he continued, ”that there was no one up in that building, that no gun was found there, that no shells were found there?”
“Oh, no, sir,” I said, feigning surprise. “I’m sure there was a gun there. I’m sure there were shells there. I think someone was shooting from there. But I think someone was also shooting from up front. Harold Feldman analyzed all that testimony and quotes witnesses who even heard shots from two locations.”
“Just who,” asked Dulles in an extremely sarcastic tone, “is Harold Feldman?”
While I was certain Dulles knew who Feldman was, I answered by describing him as “a writer, sir, a freelance writer . . .”
“And who does he write for?” inquired Dulles.
“ . . . He frequently writes for the Nation.”
Dulles raised his right hand, slapped his knee with a savage intensity, and laughed loudly and derisively.
“The Nation! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
There was an embarrassing silence. No one laughed with him.
Politely, I interjected: “I don’t think that is so funny, sir. I don’t care what magazine the article was printed in – either the right or the left. The article is well written, and it is accurately footnoted.”
“You say the Nation is accurately footnoted, eh?” replied Dulles.
Dulles now turned to the group and said: “I don’t know if you’re really all interested in this, and if you’re not, we’d just as well . . .” His voice trailed off as he was met by anxious murmurs: “Oh, no, we’re interested. No, keep going,” etc. So he shrugged and we continued sparring.
Dulles looked down at the photographs on his lap and claimed he couldn’t see what was there. “Look, there isn’t one iota of evidence that the shots came from the front. How can you say such a thing?”
“Mr. Dulles,” I said, “I’m showing you this evidence, and I’ve told you about the eyewitness testimony, which was taken under oath and certainly qualifies as evidence. And I’m absolutely amazed to hear you deny the existence of all this . . .”
Dulles got very angry. “You have nothing! Absolutely nothing! The head could be going around in circles for all I can see. You can’t see a thing here! I have examined the film in the Archives many times. This proves nothing”
This exchange ended with my passing about forty copies of the photo exhibits around the room, and asking the students to see for themselves the movement of the head. Meanwhile Dulles, waving his hand vehemently, simply denied that the head went back at all! “I can’t see a blasted thing here. You can’t say the head goes back . . . I can’t see it going back . . . it does not go back . . . you can’t say that . . . you haven’t shown it . . . “
At some point during the conversation, Dulles looked at me and said: “You know, I’ve never heard that argument before, and I’ve read all those books the experts supposedly are writing.” He said it in a very funny way. To the students, I’m sure it sounded as though the argument must be no good because it hadn’t been published. But it had the two-edged tone of a disgruntled compliment reluctantly paid.
When the next student recognized from the floor asked another question about the Warren Commission, there was a whispered conference between Dulles and the moderator. Dulles said that if there were no further questions on other subjects he would prefer to go to bed. He said he had had enough of this work when he was on the Commission, that the Commission had settled all these questions a thousand times over
The student apologized to Dulles, and the moderator asked if there were “other types of questions someone might want to ask Mr. Dulles.”
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