While reaching different conclusions about the nature of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Warren Commission in September 1964 and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in January 1979 agreed that Lee Harvey Oswald had shot JFK with a WWI-vintage 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.
Yet both panels also ignored much “reasonable doubt” about Oswald having fired a rifle at all.
The young ex-defector to the USSR himself insisted throughout his time in Dallas police custody that he “didn’t shoot anybody,” and substantial evidence supported Oswald’s declarations in his own defense. Unfortunately for historical truth, the Warren Commission omitted such evidence, some of it in the form of compelling forensic test results. Political considerations trumped science.
Standard Police Procedure
The Dallas police subjected Oswald’s face and hands to paraffin tests soon after his arrest. This customary process, performed by applying warm paraffin wax to the hands and face of someone suspected of firing a gun, tests for a higher-than-normal concentration of nitrates implanted on the skin of the suspect as residue from the gunshot blast. The wax forms a cast, and nitrates adhere to the cast.
Though both of Oswald’s hands returned a positive paraffin test result, investigators couldn’t treat this as “probative” evidence he had discharged any firearm, never mind a rifle. Oswald stood accused of gunning down a Dallas police officer with a .38 caliber revolver 45 minutes after President Kennedy was shot, but a positive result for a hand has probative value only if the other hand (the one not holding the handgun) tests negative.
Apart from that, many substances can test positive for nitrates, including everyday household products such as paint. On the morning of the assassination, Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) workers were installing freshly painted floorboards on the sixth floor. Had Oswald been involved in that kind of manual labor, his hands would have tested positive for nitrates without having even handled a weapon.
Further confusing matters, more nitrates were found on the insides of Oswald’s hands than on the outside. Since the backs of hands holding a firearm would absorb most of the gunshot blast residue, the paraffin test suggested the pattern of nitrate deposits resulted from something Oswald touched on the day of the assassination, not from firing a gun.
But more important to the mystery of JFK’s murder, the cast of Oswald’s face tested negative. Had he fired a rifle, nitrates from his right cheek would have shown up on the wax cast. But the Dallas County Criminal Laboratory, which processed the casts, found no traces of nitrates on the accused assassin’s face.
The Warren Commission treated the paraffin tests as immaterial to any presumption of innocence for the accused. In fact, facing the possibility that the tests might exonerate Oswald, the Commission simply declared the paraffin tests “completely unreliable.” The Warren Report even remarks that because there is “no gap between the chamber and the barrel,” one would “not expect nitrates to be deposited on a person’s hands or cheeks as a result of his firing a rifle.” (Warren Report, p. 561)
On April 1, 1964, FBI firearms expert Cortlandt Cunningham testified to the Commission that he “personally wouldn’t expect to find any residues on a person’s right cheek after firing a rifle” because “the cartridge itself is sealed into the chamber by the bolt being closed behind it,” so that “the cartridge case expands into the chamber filling it up and sealing it off from the gases, so none will come back in your face… .” (p. 561)
But Special Agent Cunningham evidently based his opinion only on the paraffin test conducted by the Dallas police. There is no evidence that, at the time he testified, Cunningham knew that the FBI already possessed evidence from a much more sophisticated and sensitive form of forensic examination.
State-of-the-Art Analysis
Soon after the assassination, officials at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began contacting the FBI, making repeated offers to subject Oswald’s paraffin casts to neutron activation analysis (NAA) at the AEC’s National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn. While researchers such as Dr. Gary Aguilar have effectively discredited the infallibility of NAA in determining the provenance of bullets — i.e., which fragments come from which slug or rifle — the process is highly reliable in detecting the presence of gunshot residue.
The reluctant FBI eventually relented to the AEC’s requests, while demanding control of the results. In an internal memo, FBI Special Agent Roy H. Jevons noted that Oswald’s murder had ensured the tests would never be examined at trial, and “any such examinations will, of course, be with the strict understanding that the information and dissemination of the results will be under complete FBI control.” (See FBI HQ JFK File, 62–109060–5).
In December, the FBI contracted with a private firm to run the NAA tests on the paraffin casts at the AEC’s top secret Oak Ridge facility. FBI lab specialist John F. Gallagher brought the samples to the lab and stayed there with them until the tests were complete.
Unlike the paraffin tests at the Dallas police station, the NAA [neutron activation analysis] detected traces of barium and antimony, substances found in the residue of discharged rifle cartridges on the surface of the cast of Oswald’s cheek.
Unfortunately for the FBI, which had already issued a 400-page report identifying Oswald as the “lone gunman” in JFK’s assassination, the NAA results created a new set of problems for the Bureau in establishing Oswald’s guilt.
In February Dr. Vincent P. Guinn, a physicist with the General Atomic Division of General Dynamics Corporation, compounded the FBI’s troubles by calling Gallagher to tout the wonders of his recent NAA research at Oak Ridge. Guinn said that over the past few years he and his colleagues had been using NAA to test powder residues from discharged firearms, including a rifle similar to Lee Harvey Oswald’s.
The triple firing of the rifle, Guinn advised, “leaves unambiguous positive tests every time on the paraffin casts. Because of the inferior construction of the Mannlicher-Carcano….Guinn noted that the blowback from one or three shots deposited powder residue “on both cheeks” of the shooter.…Guinn also reported that “it appears that these results can be obtained even if the paraffin casts are made 2.5 hours after the shooting.…providing the skin of the shooter has not been washed in the meantime. (“Breach of Trust,” p. 211)
No evidence has ever emerged that Lee Harvey Oswald washed his hands or face between the time of the shootings in Dealey Plaza and his arrest at the Texas Theatre 80 minutes later. NAA hassles thus mounted for the FBI — and its conclusion that Oswald was a lone gunman — as the Warren Commission investigation progressed.
‘An Acute Problem’
On March 6, 1964, the FBI reported the NAA findings in an internal letter, explaining that “as a result of these examinations, the deposits found on the paraffin casts from the hands and cheek of Oswald could not be specifically associated with the rifle cartridges.”
Apparently Warren Commission Chief Counsel J. Lee Rankin only learned in March that the FBI had submitted the paraffin casts to NAA testing. Once he knew, he demonstrated no curiosity about the results even as his subordinate lawyers sought more information on NAA’s effectiveness in detecting gunshot residue.
As McKnight notes, the issue of the paraffin casts continued to develop into “an acute problem” for Commission lawyers Norman Redlich and Melvin Eisenberg, who were responsible for this area of the Warren Report. The Commission was still counting on the “highly sensitive and discriminating NAA procedure to make a clear determination of whether Oswald had actually fired a weapon.” The young lawyers had none.
By July, when the staff lawyers were putting together the final draft of the Commission’s findings, Redlich found himself in a quandary about how to smooth over test results that pointed more in the direction of Oswald’s exculpation than incrimination. (“Breach of Trust,” p. 207)
On July 2, the FBI reported the NAA findings to Redlich over the phone, as another internal FBI letter on that day confirms.
Excerpt of an internal letter from Jevons to Conrad, July 2, 1964
Although the FBI’s letter to the Commission “covering the results” didn’t include the original NAA test results, Redlich evidently still felt he had enough information to write to Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles. He reported to the ex-CIA chief that the analysis showed, at best, that Oswald “may have fired a pistol, although this is by no means certain.” At the same time, there was “no basis for concluding that he also fired a rifle.”
By Sept. 5, 1964, with the Warren Commission’s final report already in “galley proof” format for printing, the Commission lawyers who had the task of clearly determining that Oswald had actually fired a weapon still hadn’t seen the results of the NAA tests.
Under these circumstances, 10 days later, the Commission called John Gallagher — the FBI man who had overseen the NAA tests — as its very last witness. Norman Redlich questioned Gallagher, who could not explain why the outside surface of the cast of Oswald’s face had more residue traces than the surface touching his skin.
When Redlich asked him whether he had “any explanation” for the greater amount of barium on the outside than on the inside of the cast, Gallagher said he had none.
The Warren Commission excluded actual results of the NAA from its report and all 26 volumes of exhibits, evidence and testimony, thus shielding them from the prying eyes of outside experts. Instead, the Commission’s report includes a reference to the NAA testing in an awkward single paragraph, which actually admits that the Commission had no forensic evidence that Oswald had fired a rifle:
The paraffin casts of Oswald’s hands and right cheek were also examined by neutron-activation analysis at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Barium and antimony were found to be present on both surfaces of all the casts and also in residues from the rifle cartridge cases and the revolver cartridge cases. Since barium and antimony were present in both the rifle and the revolver cartridge cases, their presence on the casts were not evidence that Oswald had fired the rifle.
Moreover, the presence on the inside surface of the cheek cast of a lesser amount of barium and only a slightly greater amount of antimony than was found on the outside surface of the cast rendered it impossible to attach significance to the presence of these elements on the inside surface. Since the outside surface had not been in contact with Oswald’s cheek, the barium and antimony found there had come from a source other than Oswald. (Warren Report, p. 562)
In other words, the Commission simply ignored the significance of the NAA test results and effectively buried them in its report. This was because high-tech forensic tests implied that, if the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle in evidence had been used to kill the President, Oswald himself hadn’t fired it.
Labels: History, JFK
