How Do LNers Deal With Givens?

[David Von Pein]

One of the more blatant fabrications of the Warren Commission Sham was the introduction of Charles Givens' fictional account of going back up to the 6th floor and seeing Oswald coming from the southeast corner. How do LNers deal with this fabrication? How do they explain it away?

Just because Charles Givens didn't mention seeing Oswald in his earlier statements, you think that means he "fabricated" his later statements and during his testimony in front of the Warren Commission?

Silly.

Givens merely didn't mention his brief encounter with Oswald when Givens wrote his affidavit. Such an omission certainly doesn't mean that Givens' sixth-floor encounter with Lee Oswald never happened. Only a conspiracy theorist would possibly believe such a thing.

Plus, we know that there's no good reason for the authorities to start putting words into Givens' mouth about seeing Oswald on the sixth floor, because even WITHOUT Givens' account of seeing LHO on the sixth floor at approximately 11:55 AM, there is still ample witness testimony from other Depository employees who said they saw (and heard) Oswald on an UPPER FLOOR (either the fifth or sixth floor) shortly before noon. Those other employees are Billy Lovelady, Bonnie Ray Williams, and Danny Arce. And even Givens HIMSELF, in this FBI report, talks about hearing Oswald shout down the elevator shaft.

There is some confusion surrounding some of Charles Givens' statements with respect to Oswald asking to have the elevator sent back upstairs to him, which I talk about in this article.

But even if conspiracists wish to toss Charlie Givens under the bus and deem him a totally worthless liar (which many CTers have done), what do they do with Lovelady and Williams and Arce with respect to their individual observations about seeing (and hearing) Lee Oswald on an upper floor of the TSBD shortly before 12:00 noon on 11/22/63?

With those three witnesses saying what they each said, why would the FBI or the Warren Commission (or anyone else) have felt the need to coerce Charlie Givens to tell some wild tale about seeing Oswald in just about the VERY SAME PLACE at just about the VERY SAME TIME that those three other men saw him?

Many CTers think the FBI (and later the Warren Commission) desperately needed a witness on the inside of the TSBD building to place Oswald on the sixth floor to firm up the FBI's and WC's framing of poor innocent Lee Harvey Oswald. Therefore, per CTers, they got the easily-coerced Givens to add a lie to his story about going back up to the sixth floor to get his cigarettes and then seeing Oswald up there.

But if the goal of the FBI and Warren Commission was to shore up their "case" against Oswald, why wouldn't they have made Givens' lies even BETTER? They could have gotten Givens to say he saw Oswald moving boxes in the southeast corner of the sixth floor. Or they could have gotten Givens to say he actually saw Oswald with a long brown package too.

But instead, Givens' "cigarettes and jacket" story pretty much amounts to nothing more than the testimony given by Lovelady, Arce, and Williams -- i.e., Givens sees Oswald on an upper floor without a package, and without a gun. The biggest difference would be that Givens did place a definitive floor number on Oswald's whereabouts--the sixth floor (the Floor Of Death), whereas some of the other witnesses I mentioned were not quite sure whether Oswald was shouting down his request for an elevator from the FIFTH floor or the SIXTH Floor.

But if Givens' "going to get cigarettes" story was nothing but a fabrication invented by the authorities, it amounted to very little more than what other witnesses were also providing (or would very soon be providing to the Warren Commission).

In addition, I'll also add that Charles Givens' 11/22/63 affidavit is one that is very brief. It's a very short statement made voluntarily by Givens within hours of the assassination. Givens uses short, to-the-point sentences, not elaborating on anything at all--not even the shooting. He merely says "I think I heard three shots".

So it's fairly obvious to me when looking at Givens' 11/22 affidavit that it wasn't Givens' purpose at that time to go into very much detail about anything that happened on November 22. He was obviously making it as short as he could. And just because he did not mention his encounter with Oswald on the sixth floor in that very brief statement, that certainly does not mean such an encounter never took place.

Givens' statement given to the FBI on November 22nd is another matter for discussion. It's true that Givens didn't say anything about going back up to the sixth floor to get his jacket and cigarettes in that November 22nd interview with two FBI agents. But Givens did mention hearing Oswald shout down to have the elevator sent back up "so that he (LEE) could have the elevator returned to the SIXTH FLOOR" (DVP's emphasis).

So it's fairly clear from that FBI statement that Givens was saying he thought Oswald was on the SIXTH FLOOR and wanted an elevator to be sent back up to the SIXTH floor.

With such detail coming from Charles Givens himself about Oswald being on the SIXTH FLOOR shortly before noon on the day of the assassination, why on Earth would the FBI (or anyone else) feel the need to then coerce Givens to add an additional layer of lies to his story, which would be a fabricated layer of lies that essentially ADDS NOTHING NEW to the story Charlie Givens had already told the two FBI agents who interviewed him on November 22, 1963?

Also....

The conspiracy theorists who think Charles Givens just MADE UP his sixth-floor encounter with Lee Oswald due to the fact that Givens said nothing about such an encounter in his original November 22nd affidavit are going to have to accuse Billy Lovelady of pretty much the very same thing (i.e., leaving out important "I heard Oswald shout down the elevator shaft from an upper floor around noontime" information in his affidavit), because in Lovelady's 11/22/63 affidavit, he never says a thing about such an occurrence.

More here:
https://jfk-archives.blogspot.com/search?q=Charles+Givens

[Michael T. Griffith]

"Even if you could establish that Givens made up this story, which you haven't, it doesn't negate all the other evidence that positively establishes Oswald was the one who fired the shots from the sniper's nest."

I've not said it negates any other evidence. How could it negate any other evidence? What a stupid point to make. But what does it mean? If it can be established that the Givens story is a fiction, what does that mean?

I have to note that there have been 91 views of this thread so far.
I reckon a chunk of that number are LNers who have decided to keep their opinion to themselves on this matter.
But don't be shy, let's hear what you have to say.
Do you, like Corbett here, accept Givens' account of returning to the 6th floor?
Do you accept the WC's conclusion that Givens was the last TSBD employee to see Oswald prior to the assassination?

Here's some context as far as Givens is concerned:

On the day of the assassination Givens was a Wanted man. An APB was put out on him at 1:46pm by Sawyer:

We have a man we would like to have you pass this up on to the CID to see if we can pick this man up. Charles Douglas Givens, G-I-V-E-N-S. He's a colored male, thirty-seven, six foot three, a hundred sixty-five pounds. He has an ID number in the Sheriff's Department, 37954. He's a porter that worked on this floor up here. He has a police record and he left.

The search for the killer was still on. Two men had left the TSBD and were unaccounted for - Givens and Oswald (isn't it odd an APB wasn't put out for Oswald).

The interest in Givens wasn't just because he was missing. One of the first pro-active decisions Fritz made as part of his investigation was to round up everyone who had worked on the 6th floor that day and Givens was one of these men - the shots had been taken from the 6th floor, Givens worked on the 6th floor and he was missing.

When Fritz returned to the DPD he his first task was to get someone out to Oswald's house only to find Oswald was already in custody for Tippit's murder - one of the men who worked on the floor from where the shots were taken and who had 'fled the scene', was in custody for the murder of a police officer less than an hour after the assassination.

Meanwhile, Givens had returned to the TSBD to collect his coat only to be gripped by a police officer and taken down to DPDHQ. When he arrived there he was grilled for 45 minutes by Captain Fritz!!

During this extensive questioning Givens failed to mention his little trip back up to the 6th floor and seeing Oswald near the southeast corner.
Let that sink in for a minute...
The President had been assassinated.
A Dallas cop had been killed.
A prime suspect for the murders sat in the cells.
Now Fritz had in front of him one of the men who worked on the 6th floor that day.
It's safe to say Givens was grilled about his own actions, what he knew about Oswald and what he knew that might be useful to the investigation.

And he failed to mention that he had seen Oswald moving around near the crime scene!

Who, in their right mind, would think this was possible?
What logic could be applied to make this work?
Common Sense, Logic, Reason and Occam's Razor are pointing to one possibility, and one alone - Givens never mentioned going back up to the 6th floor and seeing Oswald because it never happened. There was no need to mention something that had not occurred.

Yes, bullseye. If you've never dealt with John Corbett before, I can assure that you're wasting your time trying to reason with him, although your replies will likely help lurkers and newcomers.

Anyway, yes, Givens' belated and oh-so-convenient tale about going back up to the sixth floor and seeing Oswald coming from the southeast corner has zero credibility. As you correctly note, if Givens' story were true, he surely would have told it to the police when he was grilled for nearly an hour shortly after the shooting.

As Anthony Summers and Barry Ernest have documented, partly with the help of newly discovered information that was suppressed by the WC, the eyewitness evidence powerfully puts Oswald on the first and second floors shortly before, during, and after the shooting.

The Martha J. Stroud document, found by Barry Ernest in the National Archives in 1999, refutes the WC's fairy tale about Oswald scrambling down the stairs after allegedly shooting JFK. Stroud informed the WC that "Miss Garner, Miss Adams’ supervisor, stated this morning, that after Miss Adams went downstairs she (Miss Garner) saw Truly and the policeman come up." This proves that Adams was on the stairs far earlier than the WC falsely said she was, which in turn proves Oswald did not come down the stairs before Adams went down them and before Baker and Truly came up them. This blows to pieces the idea that Oswald was on the sixth floor during the shooting.

https://www.pennlive.com/entertainment/2016/11/harrisburg_man_appears_in_docu.html

WC staffers deliberately changed Vicki Adams' timeline. In her original FBI interview, she said she left the fourth floor no more than 30 seconds after the shooting, but the WC changed "15 to 30 seconds" to 1 minute.

Adams said she arrived on the first floor within 1 minute of the shooting. The WC changed that to several minutes.

BTW, when Barry Ernest located and interviewed Dorothy Garner, she confirmed the Stroud memo. She told Ernest that she was at the window with Vicki Adams, that Adams left the window immediately, that she followed Adams out of the office and to a point where she could see her going down the stairs, and during that whole time she never saw Oswald.

Keep in mind, too, that Jack Dougherty, who was working on the fifth floor near the stairway, said he heard no one coming down the stairs.

Mrs. Lillian Mooneyham was a law clerk who worked in the Criminal Courts Building. She told the FBI soon after the assassination that she saw a man standing in the sixth-floor window four to five minutes after the shots had been fired. From her position at the window on the west side of the County Courts Building, Mrs. Mooneyham had an excellent view of the TSBD. She was a highly credible witness who reported what she had seen in a straightforward, matter-of-fact manner. The Commission made no effort to refute her account, nor did it attack her credibility nor claim she could not have seen what she said she had seen. So, what did the Commission do with this credible and important account? Nothing. The Commission simply ignored it. The man Mrs. Mooneyham saw could not have been Oswald.

Summers was impressed with the evidence that indicates Oswald was not on the sixth floor during the shooting, noting, among other things, that Oswald correctly described Junior Jarman and Harold Norman as walking through the first-floor lunchroom at around noon, strongly indicating that he was indeed in that lunchroom at noon. If one wants to argue that Oswald made a lucky guess, such a guess would have been amazingly lucky indeed since 75 people worked in the Book Depository. Says Summers, 

Other evidence suggests that Oswald not only declared his intention of going downstairs to lunch, but actually did so. It is evidence which, with disregard for the facts, official inquiries have either probed little or ignored.

When Oswald’s coworkers left the sixth floor for their lunch break around 11:45 a.m., they left behind them an Oswald vocally impatient to come down and join them. Two, Bonnie Ray Williams and Billie Lovelady, remembered Oswald shouting to them as they went down in the elevator, “Guys! How about an elevator?” and adding words to the effect: “Close the gate on the elevator” or “Send one of the elevators back up.” Sometime after this, around noon, Bonnie Ray Williams went back to the sixth floor to eat his own lunch in peace and quiet. Later, his lunch bag, chicken bones, and empty pop bottle were found there to prove it. Williams stayed on the sixth floor until at least 12:15 p.m., perhaps until 12:20. He saw nobody, certainly not Oswald.

Under interrogation, Oswald insisted he had followed his workmates down to eat. He said he ate a snack in the first-floor lunchroom alone, but thought he remembered two black employees walking through the room while he was there. Oswald believed one of them was a colleague known as Junior, and said he would recognize the other man but could not recall his name. He said the second man was short. There were two rooms in the Book Depository where workers had lunch, the “domino room” on the first floor and the lunchroom proper on the second floor.

There was indeed a worker called Junior Jarman, and he spent his lunch break largely in the company of another black man called Harold Norman. Norman, who was indeed short, said later he ate in the domino room between 12:00 and 12:15 p.m., and indeed thought “there was someone else in there” at the time, though he couldn’t remember who. At about 12:15, Jarman walked over to the domino room, and together the two black men left the building for a few minutes. Between 12:20 and 12:25 -- just before the assassination -- they strolled through the first floor once more, on the way upstairs to watch the motorcade from a window. If Oswald was not in fact on the first floor at some stage, it is noteworthy that he described two men -- out of a staff of seventy-five -- who actually were there. This information is nowhere noted in the Warren Report. (Not In Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the JFK Assassination, 2013, pp. 90-91)

As I point out in my article "Where Was Oswald During the Shooting?", since Oswald was seen by Eddie Piper on the first floor at noon, and since Williams was on the sixth floor at noon to eat his lunch, the only time Oswald could have gone up to the sniper's nest was after Williams left the sixth floor at 12:15 or 12:20, but Carolyn Arnold saw Oswald on the first or second floor at 12:15 or 12:20.

And on and on we could go.

[John Corbett]

MTG and O'Meara are like two peas in a pod. Both seem incapable of critical thinking. If they were capable, they would realize how unimportant Givens seeing Oswald on the 6th floor is to the case against Oswald. It's neither exculpatory nor incriminating regarding Oswald. It neither establishes Oswald was in the sniper's nest at the time of the shooting nor refutes it. IOW, a real nothing burger. Why would anyone coerce Givens to say something that was so unimportant?

[Tim Nickerson]

Pat Speer is an idiot and anyone who believes him must be as well.

It wouldn't surprise me if the other LNs already know what an idiot you are and not worth the time it takes to respond to your moronic posts.

Pat Speer is wrong on a great many things but he is not an idiot.  I really dislike the way that he treats people in his online book but his chapters on X-Rays and the head wounds are must reads for anyone interested in the JFK assassination.

One of his chapters on the SBT has got me thinking of him as Pat "Small Ears" Speer.    His case against the SBT is very weak.

[John Corbett]

Pat Speer is wrong on a great many things but he is not an idiot.  I really dislike the way that he treats people in his online book but his chapters on X-Rays and the head wounds are must reads for anyone interested in the JFK assassination.

Why? Is he some kind of expert in radiology or forensic medicine? We already have plenty of amateurs like MTG offering their silly opinions about what the medical evidence indicates. Why do we need to read more of the same?

One of his chapters on the SBT has got me thinking of him as Pat "Small Ears" Speer.    His case against the SBT is very weak.

Isn't everybody's?

[Tim Nickerson]

Isn't everybody's?

A strong case against the SBT does not exist. The SBT is rock solid.

[Martin Weidmann]

A strong case against the SBT does not exist. The SBT is rock solid.

You just can't actually prove it, right?

Nice to see you Tim. It's been some time.