Why Did the Earwitnesses to the John F. Kennedy Assassination Not Agree About the Location of the Gunman?

Earwitnesses to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy (JFK) did not agree about the location of the gunman even though their judgments about the number and timing of the gunshots were reasonably consistent. Even earwitnesses at the same general location disagreed. An examination of the acoustics of supersonic bullets and the characteristics of human sound localization help explain the general disagreement about the origin of the gunshots. The key fact is that a shock wave produced by the supersonic bullet arrived prior to the muzzle blast for many earwitnesses, and the shock wave provides erroneous information about the origin of the gunshot. During the government's official re-enactment of the JFK assassination in 1978, expert observers were highly accurate in localizing the origin of gunshots taken from either of two locations, but their supplementary observations help explain the absence of a consensus among the earwitnesses to the assassination itself.

Chapter 28

In the early 1960s, when Cary Grant was at the height of his popularity, he began to worry that he was too old to play the romantic leading man. He would not agree to make Charade (1963) until director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone agreed to change the script so that his young co-star, Audrey Hepburn, is seen to chase after him (rather than the other way around). In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, critics found this Hitchcockian comedy-thriller to be too violent, but it was another box-office hit and remains a fan favorite today. He did not consider himself too old to chase young women in his private life, and his relationship with actress Dyan Cannon grew more serious. When journalist Joe Hyams sued him for libel, in response to Grant’s denying that he had been interviewed by Hyams, they reached an out of court settlement. Grant agreed to collaborate with the journalist on the article that eventually emerged as “Archie Leach by Cary Grant,” a lengthy, truthful account of his family background and youth. In another hit comedy, Father Goose (1964), he broke free of his debonair image to play a drunken recluse who must look after schoolgirls stranded in the South Pacific at the beginning of the Second World War. His final film, Walk, Don’t Run (1966), was a gentle comedy set during the Tokyo Olympics, with a lively score by composer Quincy Jones, who became a close personal friend. By the time Walk, Don’t Run was released, he had married Dyan Cannon, and they had a daughter together, Jennifer Grant. This convinced Grant that it was finally time to retire.

A Troubled Decade

The Nineteen-Sixties was a decade of change and turmoil as, what David Zang, termed the “American One Way” was challenged on multiple fronts. Authority was challenged and in the NFL that meant a challenge to Commissioner Pete Rozelle. Rozelle was faced with issues surrounding gambling, drugs, and race. He was criticized for his handling of the NFL response to the Kennedy Assassination. Gambling involved players and owners. The issues involving race centered on segregation, the civil rights movement, and authority. The career of Jim Brown illustrated many of these issues. Joe Namath and Commissioner Rozelle faced off over issues of gambling, authority, and the counter-culture. Vince Lombardi became a national symbol for authority and discipline. This was also a decade when NFL Films--the creation of Ed Sabol--emerged as a powerful force for marketing the NFL and its values.

‘All Plots Tend to Move Deathward’: Plots and Consequences in Don DeLillo

This chapter considers the place of espionage and its consequences in the work of Don De Lillo. The discussion opens with a consideration of naïveté and danger in CIA intervention overseas as depicted in The Names. James Axton, an American in Greece, is perhaps the last to discover that he is working at one remove for the CIA, a role that may have placed his life, and those of others, at risk. If The Names suggests that American intelligence poses substantial risks for America and Americans, Libra brings that message home to the heart of the state itself in a fictionalized account of the Kennedy assassination. Here, the President's launching of covert operations against Cuba eventually turns back against him when a coalition led by disgruntled former CIA agents mount an attempt on the President's life, co-opting the inscrutable figure of Lee Harvey Oswald as a seeming lone radical. In this chapter’s final section, the discussion returns again to the subject of extralegal action by the state in a reading of Point Omega’s meditations on extraordinary rendition and torture, in a text centred on absences and death set against the backdrop of the Iraq war.

Tentacles

This chapter tracks the growing influence of Lenny Patrick during the 1960s. His notoriety as the man who ran Chicago Jewish organized crime for more than a generation made him an obvious candidate for others' imagination, even if he was not involved in high-profile cases such as the Kennedy assassination. Because he was suspected of having killed so many in his work as a Syndicate operative, he was a character who could be plugged into the stories that others were telling. Casting Patrick as Kennedy’s assassin makes him into a villain who changed the trajectory of American history. It should have been enough that he had changed the trajectory of Chicago Jewish organized crime when he led the Syndicate’s takeover of Benjamin Zuckerman’s operation.

Part II History: Fact and Fiction, 5 Section 4: Creation, Evolution, and Approval

The immediate impetus for the Twenty-Fifth Amendment was President Eisenhower’s leadership in the wake of his health problems. After the Kennedy assassination, Senator Birch Bayh led the effort to enact the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Section 4 underwent many changes before arriving at its final content in 1965 (it was ratified in 1967). These changes shed important light on what the framers intended Section 4 to accomplish, and what limits they intended it to have. The chapter includes a table that traces the evolution of individual parts of Section 4. It concludes with an examination of the framers’ intentions regarding specific issues discussed elsewhere in the book: the overall purpose of Section 4; how Section 4 interplays with the impeachment process; the roles of its decision-makers; technical details; and the tradeoffs between encouraging reluctant Vice Presidents and empowering power-hungry ones.