Also Jim Garrison's new book, On the Trail of the Assassins, lays out evidence of the parade-route map on the front page of the Dallas Morning News -- that morning, November 22nd -- showing the parade going straight down Main Street, never indicating any turn onto Houston or then another turn onto Elm. In this context, the top-level Secret Service people would not even be aware of this last-minute change -- because, as of that morning, newspapers were still indicating the parade route would go straight down Main Street. What is your sense of how the Secret Service was fooled. Or, who was somehow involved in this monumental setting up of the ambush site by rerouting the last-minute change in the parade route to accommodate this absolutely essential place to get the car to go slow enough to get a shot in?
Prouty:
That's a very important detail that Jim Garrison has pointed out. Because, the Secret Service, along with its military assistants, studies the route that the President will travel over in any city -- not just Dallas, any city -- for at least 90 days ahead of time. They study all the idiosyncrasies of that bit of the city: where people could be hidden on a roof, what angle of fire they'd have from certain windows, what speed the car would be traveling at certain corners. And of course they try to reduce corners. They try to go perfectly straight and that's what the map in the paper showed, a straight route right through the city.
It is not Secret Service policy to change a route at the last minute. They've done too much work. If something comes up that causes them to want to change a route at the last minute, they're more apt to change the President's trip entirely -- not even have him stop there. They did that just before the trip to Dallas. It was either a trip to Chicago or a trip to Miami where they had some problem, and the public was told that President Kennedy was suffering from a severe cold and could not make the trip. Well, the Secret Service isn't going to put him in a position where he's doing something counter to their own best regulations. And they have very thorough regulations; they can keep the President alive.
So the fact that the parade route was changed and apparently changed even after the Dallas News had been told what the route was and after they printed a major map -- what was it, about five-six columns of the front page? It was an enormous map on the front page of the paper. And then the route was changed in spite of that. This simply underscores the evidence that elements within the structure of the government, at a very high level, were able to get such things as that route changed. Despite the fact that they had told, for instance, the Dallas News, very shortly before the parade, that he was going to be on another route.
The important point is that, if the Dallas News knew that, the Dallas police knew that, the Dallas sheriff's office knew that, the Secret Service knew that, the military people working on the visit knew that -- everybody else knew that the route went one way -- and then all of a sudden when he made this drastic change around the triangle there and the car slowed to four or five miles an hour, it was a shock to all of these people there. But what is really amazing is you don't hear any of these people talking about that. And maybe hundreds of them were on duty that day and found that their jobs were totally ignored as the car went off on its own somewhere else, and yet there's been no word from them. They've been covered up totally. You see, it works both ways. The place was left vacant of its normal guard, of its normal observation and all that sort of thing; and then the men who were there and saw this happen have been kept from speaking about that ever since it happened. I don't know the witness of any man, from the Secret Service or any other place, who has tried to explain why that change was made. They just leave it hanging in the air like that as though, "Well, it's something we can't account for." It's part of the crime, just like everything else. And Garrison was right to point that out.
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