Quote from: Michael T. Griffith on July 14, 2026, 08:05:45 PM
You've misread Summers. Here's what he says about Carolyn Arnold and her FBI statement:[SNIP]
In her discussion with Earl Golz Carolyn Arnold insisted she said 12:25...That was reinforced by her March 1964 FBI statement that listed in plain writing "12:25"...
FBI acted criminally and with intent when it criminally altered both Arnold's and Stanton's key witnessing of Oswald in the 2nd Floor Lunch Room...
You are misreading Carolyn Arnold's statements. You are confusing her departure time with the time she saw Oswald before she departed.
Arnold's 3/18/64 FBI statement says that she left the TSBD at 12:25, that she was standing at the front of the building before then, and that she did not see Oswald at the entrance (
CE 1381, p. 7). It says nothing about her seeing Oswald shortly before she left the building. Her 11/26/63 FBI statement has her saying that she left her office between 12:00 and 12:15 and that she "thought" she caught a "fleeting glimpse" of Oswald "standing in the hallway between the front door and the double doors leading to the warehouse, located on the first floor" (
FBI file number DL 89-43-1743, 11/26/63).
When she spoke with Earl Golz in 1978 (as Carolyn Arnold Johnston), she repeated that she left the TSBD at 12:25, but she also told Golz that she had never read her two FBI statements, and that she was surprised the statements did not mention that she saw Oswald sitting in the second floor lunchroom while she was getting a drink of water before she headed out to the front of the building (
"Was Oswald in Window?", Dallas Morning News, 1978).
This is exactly what she told Anthony Summers when he interviewed her in 1978, after Golz had interviewed her. She told Summes that she saw Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom at 12:15 or "slightly later" and that she was surprised this was not mentioned in her FBI statements.
So you have no reason to distrust Summers. He is one of the most careful, credible, and thorough scholars who has written about the JFK case. In fact, we should read what Summers says about the conflict between Carolyn Arnold's FBI statements and her 1978 account:
Should we believe Arnold’s 1978 recollection or the FBI account of what she told them back in 1963? Memories do blur, not least when much time has passed. One might think the FBI’s contemporary report more trustworthy than Arnold’s. FBI agents, however, are as fallible as other mortals. Mistakes in their reports, seen during research for the author’s biography of J. Edgar Hoover, ranged from spelling errors to outright distortions.
Agents in Dallas after the assassination, we know, worked under intolerable time. “Hoover’s obsession with speed,” former Assistant Director Courtney Evans recalled, “made impossible demands on the field. I can’t help but feel that had he let the agents out there do their work, let things take their normal investigative course, something other than the simple Oswald theory might have been developed. But Hoover’s demand was ‘Do it fast!’ That was not necessarily a prescription for getting the whole truth.”
Other former FBI agents recall having been virtually ordered to avoid leads that might indicate a possible conspiracy, to follow only those that would prove Oswald was the lone assassin.
Let us, then, allow for the possibility that Carolyn Arnold’s 1978 memory is correct, that she did see Oswald downstairs at 12:15 p.m. or later. It is, of course, possible that Oswald scurried upstairs to shoot the President after Arnold saw him in the second-floor lunchroom. Yet, as we have seen, bystander Arnold Rowland said he saw two men in sixth-floor windows, one of them holding a rifle across his chest, at 12:15. Rowland’s wife confirmed that her husband drew her attention to the man, whom he assumed to be a Secret Service agent. There was, of course, no such agent, and no other employees were on the sixth floor at that time.
The time detail -- 12:15 -- is the vital point here. It can be fixed so exactly because Rowland recalled having seen the man with the rifle just as a nearby police radio squawked out the news that the approaching motorcade had reached Cedar Springs Road. The police log shows that the President passed that point between 12:15 and 12:16.
Carolyn Arnold’s given time for leaving her office -- 12:15 or later -- is corroborated by contemporary statements made by her and office colleagues. She told the FBI she finally left the building, after visiting the lunchroom, as late as 12:25 p.m. If Arnold saw Oswald in the lunchroom at 12:15 or after, who were the two men, one of them a gunman, whom Rowland said he saw in the sixth-floor windows? There never was any reliable eyewitness identification of Oswald in the sixth-floor window after he was seen downstairs. (Not In Your Lifetime[/], pp. 92-94)Summers then proceeds to shred Howard Brennan's specious identification of Oswald as the sixth-floor gunman:
The Commission, however, set store by the evidence of Howard Brennan, a spectator in the street who stood directly opposite the Depository. He said he saw a man moving around at the famous “sniper’s perch” window between 12:22 and 12:24 and that, at the moment of the assassination, he looked up to see the man fire his final shot. Later that day, Brennan was taken to a police identity lineup that included Oswald. He failed to make a positive identification of Oswald as the man he had seen in the window—even though he had seen Oswald’s picture on television before attending the lineup.
A month later, however, Brennan told the FBI he was sure the man he had seen was Oswald. Three weeks on, he was saying he couldn’t be sure. And many months later, Brennan told the official inquiry that he could have identified Oswald at the lineup but had feared reprisals from the Communists.
Brennan’s testimony was replete with contradiction and confusion. He claimed to have been watching as the last shot was fired, yet saw neither flash, smoke, nor recoil. Testimony showed that, in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, he did not at once draw attention to what he claimed to have seen in the Book Depository, but joined others hurrying toward the grassy knoll. Questioning suggested that Brennan at first stated he had seen smoke in the area of the knoll. (Not In Your Lifetime[/], pp. 94-95)So, again, you have no reason to distrust Summers. We are fortunate to have a scholar of his caliber on our side. Many far-left conspiracy theorists view Summers as a "sellout," if not an "Operation Mockingbird plant," because he doesn't share their political views, because he acknowledges that JFK was a flagrant adulterer, and because he doesn't go off on wild tangents about the Vietnam War, 9/11, etc., even though he argues for a Mafia-driven conspiracy and multiple gunmen.
Regarding John Mytton's reply about Olivier's head-shot wound ballistics test, he is once again misrepresenting that test. I have pointed this out to him in other threads, but he has once again misrepresented Olivier's test as supporting the myth of the FMJ-bullet head shot. For one thing, as I've pointed out to Mytton in previous exchanges, the bullet fragmentation seen in the skull x-rays from Olivier's test looks nothing like the fragmentation seen in the JFK autopsy skull x-rays. Also, the FMJ bullets in Olivier's test did not shatter into dozens of tiny fragments, contrary to what Mytton is falsely claiming. There are over 40 tiny fragments in the right-frontal fragment cloud alone in the autopsy skull x-rays, and that's not counting the other fragments near the right orbit, in the rear outer table, and the lone fragment in the left side of the skull. None of the FMJ bullets in Olivier's test produced that many fragments. I'll reply in more detail to Mytton's response today or tomorrow.
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