Here's a good, succinct article on the Tague wounding written in 2013 by NBC journalist Jeff Smith and published on the local NBC Dallas-Fort Worth website:
"Spectator's Minor Injury Changes JFK Assassination Explanation"
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/minor-injury-changed-jfk-assassination-history/2066552/Smith wrote the article after interviewing Tague in Dealey Plaza. Here's the bulk of the article's content:
Tague was standing under the triple underpass on the west side of Dealey Plaza when the motorcade turned onto Elm Street, in front of the Texas School Book Depository. That's when a sharp noise pierced through the cheering crowds.
"Somebody threw a firecracker. And then I thought what kind of an idiot would be throwing a firecracker with the president driving by," Tague said.
Of course, it wasn't a firecracker -- it was an assassin's bullet.
"I'm standing there still in disbelief over somebody throwing a firecracker, and then, 'Crack! Crack!' Two rifle shots, not a second apart, and something stings me in the face."
What stung Tague was a fragment from a bullet that struck the nearby curb.
"It could've been a mixture of a little bit of lead and concrete," Tague said. "I was sprayed. Debris hit me in the face. Broke the skin in maybe three or four places. A drop of blood in each place. Nothing serious."
But it's arguably the most important "minor injury" in American history, and here's why: Just two weeks after the assassination, the FBI finished its investigation and concluded Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots. Two of those shots hit Kennedy and one hit Connally. The Warren Commission was prepared to reach the same conclusion months later.
But when commissioners read the local newspaper reports proving the curb shot, they realized that one of the three shots missed the motorcade entirely.
"I didn't know I was changing history. I just knew it was probably important that there was a missed shot," Tague said.
The 27-year-old filed an affidavit about what happened.
"All of a sudden the Warren Commission had a big problem. They had to rewrite the report."
That spawned the infamous "single bullet theory" or the "magic bullet theory," the contested conclusion that just one bullet caused significant injuries to both Kennedy and Connally.
"It changed history. If that policeman had not ran up to me, if I had just gotten back in my car and gone home, and forgot all about it, history would've been different," Tague said.
Tague understands his role in history. But even now, 50 years later, he struggles with what happened.The Tague wounding was not the only reason Arlen Specter had to concoct the fanciful single-bullet theory (SBT), but it was one of two major reasons. The other reason was that Specter and other WC staffers realized there was a serious timing problem caused by Gov. John Connally's wounding as seen in the Zapruder film.
The WC said the first hit occurred between Z210 and Z225. However, they had to account for the dramatic drop of Connally's right shoulder, the puffing of his cheeks, and the pained expression on his face in Z238-242, which clearly indicated Connally was hit by a separate bullet after JFK was first hit, just as Connally insisted was the case. Even assuming JFK was hit at Z210 and Connally was hit two to four frames before Z238, that would still only allow 24 frames between the hit on JFK and the hit on Connally, or only 1.3 seconds -- far, far too little time for the alleged murder weapon to have fired two shots. This vexing timing problem was the other major reason that drove Specter to conjure up the SBT.
