Free Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination by Anthony Summers Page A

nature and the location of the X-ray and photographic materials, so controversial is the acoustics evidence, that no one—however expert—can say the evidence proves anything beyond a reasonable doubt.
    Theories about the meaning of the physical evidence are just that—speculation that compels belief in neither a lone assassin nor a conspiracy.
    But then there is the human testimony.

Chapter 4
    Other Gunmen?
    “The physical evidence and eyewitness accounts do not clearly indicate what took place on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository at the time John F. Kennedy was assassinated.”
    —Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry, 1969
    T he last the people of Dallas saw of President Kennedy was his slumped figure. Then a Secret Service agent leaped into the backseat of the limousine as another—in the follow-up car—impotently brandished an automatic rifle. Then confusion reigned in Dealey Plaza, and it was the grassy knoll that seemed to attract most attention at first. Spectators and police seemed to think it was a key place to look for assassins.
    Rosemary, daughter of amateur photographer Phillip Willis, had been running alongside the President’s car as it passed the knoll. As she ran, she caught a glimpse of someone standing behind the corner of a concrete retaining wall. He appeared “conspicuous” to her, and seemed to “disappear the next instant.” As we have seen, photographs bear out her story.
    From his perch on top of a nearby high building, Jesse Price found his attention drawn to something behind the fence on the knoll. A man, about twenty-five and wearing a white shirt with khaki trousers, ran off “toward the passenger cars on the railroad siding.”
    The manseemed to be carrying something. Lee Bowers, the railway towerman who had seen two strangers behind the fence just before the assassination, had partially lost sight of them in foliage. At the time of the shooting, however, he had observed some sort of commotion behind the fence.
    Then policemen began pouring into the area, one of the first of them Patrolman Joe Smith. He rushed into the parking lot behind the fence because a woman said the shots had come “from the bushes.” It was there, as we noted, that Smith smelled gunpowder, there that he had a very odd encounter.
    The patrolman, who had drawn his pistol as he ran, was starting to feel “damn silly” when he came upon a man standing beside a car. On seeing Smith and an accompanying deputy, the man reacted swiftly. As Smith remembered it, “This character produces credentials from his hip pocket, which showed him to be Secret Service. I have seen those credentials before, and they satisfied me and the deputy sheriff. So I immediately accepted that and let him go and continued our search around the cars.” It was a decision Officer Smith later bitterly regretted, for there were no authentic Secret Service agents on the grassy knoll. 1
    All Secret Service men in Dallas that day have been accounted for by official reports. There were none stationed in Dealey Plaza, and those in the motorcade are said officially to have stayed with their cars. No genuine agents are known to have been in the grassy knoll parking lot.
    A Secret Service agent, in 1963, was the essence of the crew-cut, besuited American young man. The man encountered in the parking lot was not like that. As Officer Smith put it, “He looked like an auto mechanic. He had on a sport shirt and sportpants. But he had dirty fingernails, it looked like, and hands that looked like an auto mechanic’s hands. And afterwards it didn’t ring true for the Secret Service.”
    The policeman recalled wryly, “At the time, we were so pressed for time, and we were searching. And he had produced correct identification, and we just overlooked the thing. I should have checked that man closer, but at the time I didn’t snap on it… .”
    Smith and the deputy sheriff were not alone in their sighting of the “Secret Service man.”