The JFK 100

Stone's scenario begins:

The camera is on Kennedy waving. A MONTAGE follows -- all the faces in the square that we've introduced in the movie now appear one after the other . . . INTERCUT with the Zapruder and Nix films on JFK in the final seconds coming abreast of the Stemmons Freeway sign.

JIM (VOICE OVER) The first shot rings out.

CUT TO: the Dal-Tex shooter firing. We see the back of Kennedy's head through his gun sight. Kennedy (stand in) reacts in the Zapruder film.

JIM (V. O.) Sounding like a backfire, it misses completely . . . Frame 161, Kennedy stops waving as he hears something. Connally turns his head slightly to the right.⁽¹⁾

 

However, there is no evidence whatsoever of a shot from the Dal-Tex Building behind the limousine; following the assassination, not even a single witness reported hearing shots come from the building, much less seeing anyone fire a gun there. Compare this to the numerous witnesses who saw someone fire from the "sniper's nest" window of the Texas School Book Depository, as well as the many earwitnesses who immediately indicated the building as the source of the shots.⁽²⁾

The evidence supports Stone on the timing of the first shot, but not its place of origin.

NOTES:

1. Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, JFK: The Book of the Film (New York: Applause, 1992), p. 164. All quotations are from the shooting script and may vary slightly from the finished motion picture.

2. Howard Leslie Brennan saw a gunman fire from the "sniper's nest" window, and later identified Lee Harvey Oswald as the gunman. 15-year-old Amos Lee Euins saw a someone fire from the window, though he could not positively identify the shooter as Oswald. James Robert Worrell, Jr., saw a rifle firing from the window. Robert Hill Jackson of the Dallas Times Herald and newsreel photographer Malcolm O. Couch saw a rifle in the window immediately after the shots were fired, as did Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell and his wife. James N. Crawford and Mary Ann Mitchell each had their gaze attracted to the window during the shots and noticed movement in the window, which they both believed to have been a person. Robert Fischer and Robert Edwin Edwards both noticed someone in the window shortly before the motorcade turned onto Houston Street from Main, though neither could positively identify the man as Oswald. Texas School Book Depository employees Harold Norman, Bonnie Ray Williams, and James Jarman, Jr., were looking out windows on the fifth floor, directly below the "sniper's nest" window; all three men were certain that shots came from directly above them. Dallas police officer Marrion L. Baker rushed into the building immediately after the shots were fired; his attention had been drawn by a flock of pigeons that flew from the building's roof at the moment of the shots. Police Inspector J. Herbert Sawyer testified that after the shooting, he talked to "a number" of people who "were pointing out one of the upper floors of the Texas School Book Depository" as the source of the shots. Officer Welcome Eugene Barnett heard the shots and immediately believed they had come from the roof of the Book Depository. Numerous other witnesses believed the shots had come from the Depository building, based on the sound of the shots. Two photographers (Tom Dillard and James Powell) independently were motivated to snap photos of the south side of the Depository building, including the window later identified as that of the "sniper's nest." (Warren Commission Report, pp. 63-79, 143-55. Worrell: Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. II, pp. 200-01. Sawyer: WCH Vol. VI, p. 323. Barnett: WCH Vol. VII, p. 541.)