Despite the report's guarded language it was absolutely essential to the Commission's conclusion that a lone gunman firing from above and to the rear of the motorcade had killed President Kennedy and that JFK and Connally had been hit by the same bullet. The time constraints and the mechanical features of the alleged murder rifle required that CE 399 had inflicted all seven nonfatal wounds on Kennedy and Connally. Otherwise, at least one other rifle and a second gunman were necessary to account for all of the victims' wounds.

The career assigned to this single bullet was little short of fabulous. According to the report, CE 399 hit JFK in the back of the neck, then passed through the neck without striking any hard object and emerged at the front of his throat. It then entered Connally in the back of the right armpit and slid along his fifth rib, demolishing four inches of the rib before it exited the chest below the right nipple. The bullet then allegedly struck and shattered the radius of Connally's right wrist, one of the hardest bones in the body, located just above the wrist on the dorsal side, then exited at the base of his palm and entered his left thigh just above the knee. CE 399 then traveled about three inches beneath the surface of the thigh, hit the femur, and deposited a lead fragment on the bone. Some time later, with a spasm of re¬verse kinetic energy, it spontaneously exited the hole in Connally's thigh and neatly tucked itself under the mattress of a stretcher parked in a hallway of the Parkland Memorial Hospital that the report asserted was linked to the wounded governor.

Critics of the Warren Commission Report were quick to mockingly dub CE 399 the "magic bullet." They pointed to the fact that after allegedly producing seven wounds, most notably the shattering of Connally's fifth rib bone and the radius of his right wrist, CE 399 was, in the report's own words, "slightly flattened but otherwise unmutilated." CE 399 was turned over to the FBI. It was the bureau's firearms expert, Robert A. Frazier, who identified it as a full-metal-jacketed, military-type bullet weighing 158.6 grains. Frazier testified before the Commission that the original weight of a 6.5-mm bullet, unfired or pristine, was on average about 160 to 161 grains.

On the evening of the assassination, an autopsy was performed on the President at Bethesda Naval Hospital. During the autopsy, Dr. J. Thornton Boswell marked the location of the President’s wounds on a pre-existing outline of a body, on a piece of paper called a face sheet. This face sheet was eventually published in one of the 26 supporting volumes of the Warren Report.

On March 16, 1964, almost four months later, however, the autopsy doctors--Dr. Humes, Dr. Boswell and Dr. Finck--were called to testify before the Warren Commission. In preparation for their testimony, and at the urging of Warren Commission counsel Arlen Specter, Dr. Humes and Dr. Boswell met with medical illustrator Skip Rydberg and created three drawings depicting the President’s wounds. As the doctors were not allowed access to the autopsy photos, or even the face sheet, during the creation of these drawings, they were forced to rely purely on their memories.

They were not pleased with having to do so. Dr. Humes, in fact, testified that the autopsy photos would demonstrate the wounds more clearly than the drawings, and admitted that the drawings were “schematic” and imprecise. His use of the word “schematic” was no mistake, either. A schematic depicts an “arrangement of ideas into a systematic order,” according to an old Webster’s, and is thus an admitted distortion. One of the three drawings demonstrates the presumed trajectory of the bullet creating the back wound and depicts the location of the wounds as viewed from the side. Yet another of the drawings depicts the trajectory of the fatal bullet and presumed position of the President’s head at the moment of the fatal shot's impact. And the third drawing shows how these wounds might appear from behind.

And that's just the beginning of the problems related to these drawings. As shown above, the location of the back wound on the face sheet was several inches lower than the location of the wound on Rydberg's drawings. This is suspicious. Since Oswald was believed to have fired at the President from a sniper’s nest more than 60 feet above and behind the President, it follows that if he were the shooter the President’s back wound would be at a higher point on his body than the purported exit on his throat. And yet the back wound on the face sheet was below the throat wound...

It should come as no surprise then that the upwards migration of the back wound for the Warren Commission's exhibits was taken by many as an indication Warren Commission Counsel Arlen Specter had moved the wound to support his “single-bullet theory,” which held that a bullet passed through Kennedy from the sniper's nest location, and proceeded to hit Governor John Connally seated in front of Kennedy.

Like most other Americans, after the initial shock of President Kennedy's assassination had dimmed, we fell into the comfortable assumption that the Government was handling the matter judiciously, that the prestigious panel of respected individuals, headed by the most prestigious member of the American judicial system, would provide us with a thorough and valid appraisal of exactly what had happened when President Kennedy was killed. What led me to clip the article by Vincent Salandria is that it ran counter to that assumption.

It dealt with only one aspect of the report - the sequence of events surrounding the number and direction of the shots. But that just happened to be the area assigned to another Philadelphia lawyer, a young assistant district attorney whose quick intelligence and impressive record had landed him a staff job on the Warren Commission. His name, of course, was Arlen Specter.

I didn't initially understand some of the technical and complex points Salandria made in his article, but I did grasp the fact that what Salandria was implying was that the Warren Commission Report was wrong...

Local reporters had, of course, asked Specter about the Warren Report when it was released. He was vigorous in defense of its conclusions. He called the Commission's investigation the most exhaustive and complete in history. The single bullet theory, he insisted, was the only possible way to explain how Lee Harvey Oswald had shot President Kennedy. The reporters dutifully reported what he said.

Amazingly enough, even after all those months had gone by since the release of the Warren Report, I was the first journalist to ask Specter about specific details and about the Report's inconsistencies. I apparently caught Specter off guard.

I was shocked by his confusions, his hemming and hawing, his hesitations and evasions. This from someone who was the epitome of the always cool, collected and verbally masterful lawyer, the former star of the Yale Law debating team. I was even more shocked by his inability to provide valid explanations for some of the most blatant inconsistencies in the Report.

I believe the most crucial was the discrepancy between the levels of the so-called "exit" wound in Kennedy's throat and the holes in the back of Kennedy's jacket and shirt. Why were the holes in his back lower than the hole in Kennedy's throat? I still remember Specter hesitating, stuttering, making a few false starts in attempting to answer that question. Finally, he got up from his desk and came around to stand behind me. Well, he said, it was because the President was waving his arm, and then, trying to illustrate why the jacket would ride up, Specter pulled my arm high over my head - far higher than the Zapruder film showed Kennedy waving his hand. "Wave your arm a few times," Specter said, "wave at the crowd." And then jabbing a finger at the base of my neck - not six inches below my collar, where the holes in Kennedy's jacket and shirt were - Specter said, "Well, see, if the bullet goes in here, the jacket gets hunched up. If you take this point right here and then you strip the coat down, it comes out at a lower point."

"A lower point?" I repeated, wondering if Specter were trying to confuse me or was confused himself.

If the entrance holes were at a lower point than the exit hole, how could Oswald have shot Kennedy from the sixth floor window of the Book Depository?

In the end, Specter admitted they had what he described as - quote - "some problems with that."

My interviews also revealed that the Commission had "some problems" with other troublesome evidence, including the so-called "pristine" bullet, the angle of Governor Connally's wounds, the timing of the shots. "Some problems," indeed.

I'll never forget the numbing disbelief I came away with after my interviews with Specter. Vince Salandria was right, the Warren Report was wrong, there had to have been a conspiracy.

We were young once and not so brave. We wanted to cling to the myth of a mystery. We wanted to hang onto the questions of motivation and parade the usual suspects and the illusion of a dilemma before the American people. Could the Mob have killed President Kennedy? Could the KGB have killed President Kennedy? Could Castro have killed President Kennedy? Could anti-Castro Cubans have killed President Kennedy? Could the CIA have killed President Kennedy?

I suggest to you that if it ever becomes known what specific individuals comprised the apparatus that killed Kennedy, those individuals will have some association with any or all of the above. And still the emergence of such individuals, dead or alive, will add but inconsequential detail to the truth about the assassination. Because we have known -- and have long known - who killed President Kennedy.

Could any but a totally controlling force - a power elite within the United States Government itself - call it what you will, the military-intelligence complex, the national security state, the corporate-warfare establishment - could any but the most powerful elite controlling the U.S. Government have been able to manipulate individuals and events before the assassination and then bring such a broad spectrum of internal forces to first cover up the crime and then control the institutions within our society to keep the assassination of President Kennedy a false mystery for 35 years?

Is there any doubt that the Warren Commission deliberately set out not to tell the American people the truth?

There is a brief glimpse, an illustration of the level at which that deceit was carried out, in an incident that occurred during the Warren Commission's investigation. Commission chairman Earl Warren himself, with then Representative Gerald Ford at his side, was interviewing a barman, Curtis LaVerne Crafard. Crafard had worked at Jack Ruby's Carousel Club before he was seized by FBI men as he was hightailing it out of town the day after the assassination, having told someone, "They are not going to pin this on me!"

In the interview, Warren asks Crafard what he did before he was a bartender.

"I was a Master sniper in the Marine Corps," Crafard answered.*

The next question that Warren immediately asked was: "What kind of entertainment did they have at the club?"

To support the scenario that a lone assassin (Oswald) could fire the purported number of shots within an allotted time frame, the Warren Commission concluded that one of the bullets fired that fateful day hit both Kennedy and Connally. This conclusion came to be known as the "single bullet theory." However, given the location of Kennedy's and Connally's wounds, for the "single bullet theory" to be correct, the bullet would have had to change course several times, behaving in the manner shown in the diagram (below left). The chief architect of the "single bullet theory" was the Warren Commission's ambitious junior counsel, Arlen Specter, now US Senator from Pennsylvania. In the reenactment photo (below right) Specter, with his pointer in hand, attempts to make the "single bullet theory" appear more plausible by deceptively indicating a straight line trajectory for the bullet. While Specter managed to sell his "single bullet theory" to the Warren Commission, he had trouble selling it to the American public. A recent New York Times/CBS poll found that 77 percent of Americans rejected the Warren Report's conclusions.

Specter made his first train trip to the commission's headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 13, 1964, a snowy day, and returned home that night after cramming his briefcase full of materials. On the ride home, he looked at the autopsy report. He'll never forget it.

"I still shudder when I think about it," Specter said last week. "It was an overwhelming experience to read what happened to the president."

Over the next 10 months, Specter would become immersed in the killing and its immediate aftermath. Based upon the trajectory, ballistic, witness, photographic, forensic and scientific evidence, Specter concluded that Commission Exhibit 399 - the so-called "magic bullet"- had caused Kennedy's neck wounds and all of Texas Governor John Connally's nonfatal wounds.

On June 7, 1964, Specter and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who headed the commission, visited the "sniper's nest" on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, from where Oswald was supposed to have fired his rifle. There, for eight minutes, Specter detailed for Warren his contention that the same bullet had killed Kennedy. Warren subsequently agreed with Specter's argument, as did the commission.

During an interview about his new book, Passion for Truth, on 4 March 2001 with Paul Alexander and John Batchelor on WABC, which lasted seven minutes, Arlen Specter asserted seven claims about the assassination of JFK and the "magic" bullet theory that are not simply false but actually provably false. His assertions and the grounds on which we know they are false are as follows: (1) that JFK was standing when he was hit: provably false. We have more than 200 Dealey Plaza witnesses and 500 photographic records - counting the Zapruder film as one - that prove he was sitting, not standing, when he was killed; (2) that a bullet entered at the back of JFK's neck: provably false in six different ways: (a) Boswell's diagram; (b) Jack's shirt; (c) Jack's jacket; (d) Berkley's death certificate; (e) Sibert and O'Neill's report on the autopsy; plus (f) ARRB release showing that Gerald Ford had the final report changed to make it appear as if the bullet had entered the base of his neck when it had not; (3) that the bullet hit nothing solid: provably false. David Mantik, M.D., Ph.D., has drawn a line through a CAT scan that demonstrates that a bullet entering where this is alleged to have entered and exiting where this is alleged to have exited would have had to impact with cervical vertebra, which means that the single bullet theory is not just false but actually anatomically impossible; (4) that he has "looked" at the X-rays and they support the conclusions of the Warren Commission: provably false. Specter is not an expert on the interpretation of X-rays, so even if he has taken a look (which I doubt), it would mean nothing. Someone who is an expert has studied them repeatedly and has discovered that they have been fabricated in at least two different ways: (a) the right lateral cranial X-ray has been fabricated by imposing a patch to conceal a massive blow-out to the back of the head; and, (b) the anterior-posterior X-ray has been fabricated by adding a 6.5 mm metal-like object to implicate a 6.5 mm weapon; (5) he claims there is no evidence of conspiracy: provably false. That the magic bullet theory is anatomically impossible and that the X-rays have been altered implicates the government in a conspiracy to conceal the truth about the assassination, where the most reasonable explanation for government complicity in the cover-up is government complicity in the crime. (6) he says that we now know that Humes burned his notes: but what is new is not that he burned his notes (which were stained with blood: that is rather old news) but that he also burned the first-draft of his autopsy report (under orders from his superior: that is the new news); and, (7) he asserts that you can't prove a negative: but we have just done so six times: we have proven that Arlen Specter has made no less than six false claims - seven, including this one - during this brief interview.

The FBI took me to Parkland Hospital. I had no idea what I was doing there. They escorted me through a labyrinth of corridors and up to one of the top floors of Parkland. I didn't know where we were. They took me into this little room where I met Arlen Specter. He talked to me for a few minutes, trying to act real friendly, then this woman, a stenographer, came in and sat behind me. He had told me that this interview would be confidential, then I looked around and this woman was taking notes. I reminded him that the discussion was to be private and he told the woman to put down her notebook, which she did. But when I looked around again she was writing. I got mad and told Specter, 'You lied to me. I want this over.' He asked me why I wouldn't come to Washington, and I said, 'Because I want to stay alive.' He asked why I would think that I was in danger and I replied, 'Well, if they can kill the President, they can certainly get me!' He replied that they already had the man that did it and I told him, 'No, you don't!'

He kept trying to get me to change my story, particularly regarding the number of shots. He said I had been told how many shots there were and I figured he was talking about what the Secret Service told me right after the assassination. His inflection and attitude was that I knew what I was supposed to be saying, why wouldn't I just say it. I asked him, 'Look, do you want the truth or just what you want me to say?' He said he wanted the truth, so I said, 'The truth is that I heard between four and six shots.' I told him, 'I'm not going to lie for you.' So he starts talking off the record. He told me about my life, my family, and even mentioned that my marriage was in trouble. I said, 'What's the point of interviewing me if you already know everything about me?' He got angrier and finally told me, 'Look, we can even make you look as crazy as Marguerite Oswald (Lee Oswald's mother) and everybody knows how crazy she is. We could have you put in a mental institution if you don't cooperate with us.' I knew he was trying to intimidate me....

He finally gave me his word that the interview would not be published unless I approved what was written. But they never gave me the chance to read it or approve it. When I finally read my testimony as published by the Warren Commission, I knew it was a fabrication from the first line. After that ordeal at Parkland Hospital, they wrote that my deposition was taken at the US attorney's office in the Post Office Building."

Edward Jay Epstein: art of the job of the Warren Commission was restoring confidence in the American Government. And for this he had to pick seven very respectable men, men who would lend their name and lend probity to the report. And so that the problem was, in any seven men he picked of this sort, they would have very little time for the investigation.

They would also have two purposes. One purpose would be to find the truth, all the facts. The other purpose would be to allay rumors, to dispel conspiracy theories and material of that sort.

Arlen Specter: My view is that there is absolutely no foundation for that type of a charge. When the President selected the commissioners, he chose men of unblemished reputation and very high standing. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States would have no reason whatsoever to be expedient or to search for political truths. Nor would Alien W. Dulles, the former head of the CIA, nor would John McCloy, with his distinguished service in government, nor would the Congressional or Senatorial representatives.

Specter began by assuring me that he was simply trying "to find out what happened." Nevertheless, in short order, any hope that Senator Specter would transcend the political was dashed. He began his questioning with an unmistakably prosecutorial tone. He used a familiar cross-examination tactic - a tactic common in sexual harassment cases. He ridiculed my reaction to Thomas' behavior, suggesting that I was being oversensitive, even to the point of misrepresenting my testimony....

The tension between Senator Specter and me was measurable. The process seemed to break down completely. Senator Specter would repeat the same questions until he got the answer he wanted.... To the press and spectators, we must have sounded silly and ill tempered. More than one sigh erupted from the seats behind me as Specter returned to the questioning and I once more gave my explanation. Clearly, neither of us would budge from our position.

Something in the back of my head said, "Just say what he wants you say and get on with it." But I was much too stubborn to do that. And the more he pursued it, the more inclined I was to resist. Digging in was, perhaps, for me one way of hanging on to some amount of my dignity. By now I knew that his questions were both insincere and ill informed. Though I tried to answer him, I was equally determined that the senator not put words in my mouth.

With every question he asked, it became clearer that despite any declaration to the contrary, he viewed me as an adversary. Rather than seeking to elicit information, his questioning sought to elicit a conclusion that he had reached before the hearing began.

The single bullet theory, of course, was the scenario developed in 1964 by Arlen Specter, a young lawyer on the Warren Commission and now a Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Originally, the FBI said that three shots had been fired at Kennedy's motorcade. The first supposedly hit President Kennedy in the back but did not penetrate too deeply. The second, which hit Governor John Connally in the back, exited his chest, punctured his wrist and wound up in his thigh. The third shot hit Kennedy in the head. The Warren Commission staff accepted this three-shot scenario until a staff lawyer, Arlen Specter, began looking frame by frame at the home movie from the crime scene made by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder. Selected frames from the film were published by Life magazine but the movie was not broadcast, not the least because it showed the wounding of President Kennedy by a first shot in the back followed by the wounding of Governor Connally about 1.1 seconds later. It was impossible for Oswald to have fired his Mannlicher-Carcano bolt action rifle twice in 1.1 seconds. The photography from the crime scene indicated a second gunman -- a finding that the entire weight of the federal government from the president to the director of the FBI had already rejected.

Specter solved the problem by arguing that one bullet had caused all the non-fatal wounds to both JFK and Connally. This scenario has been much mocked over the years, though Specter has said, "the single bullet theory has become the single bullet fact."

Specter's theory remains the keystone on which the edifice of Oswald's sole guilt rests. For if one bullet did not cause all of Kennedy's and Connally's wounds, the only explanation of their injuries is that they were caused by two gunmen and some kind of conspiracy.

The latest study of JFK ballistic evidence was conducted by Patrick Grant and Erik Randich and published in 2006 in the Journal of Forensic Sciences. Grant, the deputy director of the Forensic Science Center at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, is fond of saying, "Forensic science is the application of technological displays that can narrow the limits of plausible conjecture." Grant and Randich's article raises the very real question of whether the single bullet theory is still within the limits of plausible conjecture.

The new article is an outgrowth of a scientific paper Randich published with William Tobin in 2002 which casts doubt on the FBI's technique known as bullet-lead analysis. This technique is based on the assumption that each batch of lead used to make the core of bullets has a unique chemical "fingerprint" that can be used to match it with other bullets. Thus bullet lead found at the scene of a shooting could be matched to bullets found in a suspect's gun and prove complicity in gun violence. But Randich's study of bullet manufacturing found that batches of lead are not chemically unique, and bullets from the same box could have very different chemical signatures. His work helped persuade the FBI in 2005 to stop using bullet-lead analysis in criminal prosecution.

Says Grant: "We applied the same thinking to the JFK bullet fragments that had been analyzed by a man named Vincent Guinn [on behalf of the HSCA] back in the 1970s. I knew Guinn because I took his forensic science course when I was in graduate school and it helped inspire my interest in the subject."

Guinn, now dead, had concluded that the level of a trace element called antimony in five bullet fragments taken from the JFK crime scene fell into two distinct groups chemically. Given their chemical similarity, the handful of fragments taken from Kennedy's head, Connally's body and the front seat of the limousine could have come from two -- and only two -- bullets. From 1978 to 2006, Guinn's findings heartened defenders of the Warren Commission which found that Kennedy and Connally had been hit by only two bullets.

Randich and Grant's paper found that Guinn's analysis was fatally flawed. He had assumed the chemical composition of bullet lead is consistent throughout a given bullet, a finding that Randich's metallurgical analysis refuted. Guinn also underestimated the margin of error in his measurement of antimony and wrongly discounted contradictory evidence, they said. Grant and Randich concluded that their findings "considerably weaken support for the single bullet theory."