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Part of understanding the cover-up is understanding the fact that some law enforcement agents pressured some witnesses to change their stories or misrepresented what the witnesses told them.
A prime example of this is the case of Kenny O'Donnell and Dave Powers. O'Donnell and Powers were two of JFK's best friends and top aides. They rode in the follow-up car during the assassination. Both men revealed to Congressman and future Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill in 1968 that they were certain they heard shots fired from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. It should be noted that both men were World War II combat veterans. Yet, both men changed their story in their Warren Commission statements and went along with the claim that all the shots came from the TSBD.
Why the change? What happened? In O'Donnell's case, we know what happened.
When O’Donnell was interviewed by the FBI, he told the agents he was certain he had heard two shots fired from behind the fence on the knoll. The agents responded by telling him that that could not have happened and that he must have been imagining things. As a result, O’Donnell decided to testify “the way they wanted me to.” O’Donnell revealed this to Tip O’Neill at a private dinner in Boston in 1968, and Powers confirmed O’Donnell’s account of grassy knoll shots to O’Neill at the dinner and later. Powers, like O'Donnell, heard shots fired from the fence. O’Neill discussed O’Donnell’s revealing disclosure in his 1987 memoir:
I was never one of those people how had doubts or suspicions about the Warren Commission’s report on the president’s death. But five years after Jack died, I was having dinner with Kenny O’Donnell and a few other people at Jimmy’s Harborside Restaurant in Boston, and we got to talking about the assassination.
I was surprised to hear O’Donnell say that he was sure he had heard two shots that came from behind the fence.
“That’s not what you told the Warren Commission,” I said.
“You’re right,” he replied. “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to”. . . .
Dave Powers was with us at dinner that night, and his recollection of the shots was the same as O’Donnell’s. Kenny O’Donnell is no longer alive, but during the writing of this book I checked with Dave Powers. As they say in the news business, he stands by his story. (Tip O'Neill, Man of the House: The Life and Political Memoirs of Speaker Tip O'Neill, Random House edition, 1987, p. 178).
If the FBI could pressure two presidential aides into changing their stories, imagine how many ordinary witnesses decided to change their stories after being pressured the way O'Donnell was.
It is also worth remembering that we have a long list of witnesses who later said their FBI statements misrepresented what they told the interviewing agents.
From a number of eyewitness accounts of being pressured to change their stories about the origin and number of the shots, we gather that the following arguments were used to try to persuade them to alter their stories:
-- "You could not have heard more than three shots because we have hard medical and physical evidence that only three shots were fired and that they all came from behind."
-- "You were merely hearing echoes of the shots that Oswald fired from the sixth-floor window. The echoes made it sound like there were more than three shots, but we know for a fact that only three shots were fired."
-- "If you insist on claiming you heard more than three shots or shots from the front, in spite of the clear evidence to the contrary, you're only going to cause more pain and confusion for the Kennedy family. They need closure."
We still see lone-gunman theorists repeating the argument that the many witnesses who said they heard shots fired from the grassy knoll merely heard echoes of the sixth-floor gunman's alleged three shots. WC skeptics have refuted this argument many times. In his superb 1998 book Cover-Up, mathematician Stewart Galanor explains why the echoes argument is invalid:
Echoes are caused by sound bouncing off large, hard surfaces. . . . There are no buildings on the knoll or overpass that would have reflected sound back to confuse witnesses in Dealey Plaza. Beyond the knoll the terrain is flat with railroad tracks, while the knoll is covered with grass, shrubs, and trees that absorb sound. If there were any echoes, they would have been caused by the sound of rifle fire from the knoll echoing off the Book Depository (p. 76).
I should add that the sound of rifle fire from the knoll could have also bounced off the Dal-Tex Building and the County Records Building.
Galanor documents that of the 218 witnesses in Dealey Plaza for whom we have a record of their interviews, 58 of them said shots came from the grassy knoll; 35 said they could not tell where the shots came from; and 70 of them were not asked to say where they thought the shots came from (Cover-Up, pp. 171-176).
Additionally, Galanor devotes 10 pages to discussing the cases where eyewitness accounts were misrepresented by federal agents (Cover-Up, pp. 66-75).
More of the evidence that shots came from the grassy knoll:
-- Six railroad workers said they saw smoke arising from a point on the knoll during the shooting.
-- The Wiegman film shows a small cloud of smoke hanging above the fence on the knoll. This smoke could not have come from the steam pipe in the railroad yard nor from exhaust from the patrol bikes.
-- Two witnesses saw a man running from the fence into the railroad yard after the shots were fired.
-- Several witnesses said they smelled the pungent odor of gun powder on or near knoll right after the shots were fired.
-- Three cars clearly seem to have scouted the area behind the knoll during the 35 minutes before the shooting. The first car came at 11:55, the second at 12:15, and the third at 12:20. One of the driver's appeared to be talking into a microphone. We know they were not local police or federal personnel, and they surely were not looking for a parking space.
In his 11/22/1963 FBI statement, Lee Bowers, who observed the cars from his railroad tower behind the parking lot, said that three cars entered the parking lot behind the knoll in separate trips before Kennedy’s motorcade entered the plaza. He said the cars drove around slowly and then left the area. He told the WC that the first car appeared to be “checking the area,” and he used the words “probed” and “searching” to describe the actions of the second and third cars.
-- A credible eyewitness, Julia Ann Mercer, the wife of a former U.S. congressman, said that before the assassination she saw a man exit the back of a truck with an encased rifle in his hand on Elm Street, and that the man headed toward the grassy knoll.
Both of her first two documented accounts that she gave to federal and local law enforcement contain the same essential elements: there was a parked truck; there were two men in the truck; the man who was not driving took something from the back of the truck; the object that the man took from the back of the truck looked like a rifle encased in some kind of material; the man who exited the truck carrying an encased rifle headed up the grassy knoll.
In tacit recognition of the consistency in Mercer's accounts, WC apologist John McAdams allowed that her initial statements to the Dallas sheriff’s department and the FBI were truthful, but he suggested that she innocently mistook a tool box for a gun case. However, even in her first statement, Mercer specified that the object the man was carrying was 3.5 to 4 feet long and 8 inches wide at its widest point and tapered down to 4 or 5 inches wide at its narrowest point, which obviously rules out a tool box.
Moreover, to his credit, McAdams also acknowledged that soon after the assassination, Mercer told a Secret Service agent who was talking to witnesses in the sheriff’s office that she had seen a man with a gun case. The agent was Special Agent Forrest Sorrels. Sorrels told the WC that he spoke with a lady in the sheriff’s office who told him that she had seen “somebody that looked like they had a gun case.” McAdams conceded that “the lady pretty much has to be Mercer,” and that she said this before she was interviewed by the sheriff’s department.
-- Acoustical scientists consulted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) determined with a probably of over 95% that a gunshot impulse pattern on a police dictabelt recorded in Dealey Plaza during the shooting was caused by a shot fired from the grassy knoll. Even the NRC/NAS panel that was formed to discredit the HSCA's acoustical evidence was only able to reduce the probability of the grassy knoll shot down to 77.7%, and they did so by introducing two outright errors into their calculations, as several scientists have pointed out (e.g., Dr. Paul Chambers, Dr. Don Thomas, and David Scheim).
New research on the acoustical evidence conducted by BBN scientists from 2015 to 2018 proves that the alleged Decker "hold everything" crosstalk that critics have claimed refutes the acoustical evidence is not crosstalk at all but is an overdub that occurred during the copying process. Dr. Josiah Thompson spends over 100 pages discussing this historic new research in his 2020 book Last Second in Dallas.
The argument that the Decker transmission proves the impulse patterns on the dictablet were recorded after the assassination never made any sense from the outset. The argument always required the specious assumption that Channel 2 on the dictabelt stopped recording for 31 to 60 seconds.
As several scientists pointed out years ago, for this Channel-2-recording-pause theory to even be theoretically possible, there would have to be an offset in the dispatcher time notations on the dictabelt after that point, but there is none. The 12:35 and 12:36 time notations occur exactly five and six minutes respectively after the 12:30 time notation. The NRC/NAS failed to explain this problem, as did Linsker, Garwin, Chernoff, Horowitz, and Ramsey in their 2005 rebuttal to Dr. Don Thomas's 2001 article on the acoustical evidence.
In a 14-page critique of Dr. Thompson's 100-plus-page presentation on the acoustical evidence in Last Second in Dallas, Louis Girdler, writing under the pseudonym "Premier Kissov," says absolutely nothing about any of these things -- says nothing about the new BBN research (such as Dr. Richard Mullen's PCC testing of the Decker transmission, which proves it is an overdub and not crosstalk), and says nothing about the impossible Channel-2-recording-pause theory, which was the crucial assumption of the debunked Decker-crosstalk argument ("'Your Lying Eyes'--Josiah Thompson's Lonely Labrinth: A Critical Review of 'Last Second in Dallas,'" pp. 27-40).
Instead, Girdler simply rehashes some of the arguments made by the NRC/NAS panel, by Anthony Pellicano (who actually accidentally provided strong evidence against the Channel-2-recording-pause theory and provided evidence that the bell sound on the dictabelt does not automatically mean it was not recorded in Dealey Plaza during the assassination), by the FBI's Technical Services Division (who employed no acoustical scientists and proved they didn't even understand how N-waves can be identified in audio recordings), by some Sonalyst analysts (who didn't even understand how AGC works), and by amateurs such as Jim Bowles and Michael O'Dell.
You would think that any critical review of Thompson's book would deal with the historic new BBN research on the acoustical evidence, especially the two addendums written by Dr. Barger and Dr. Mullen, but Girdler says nothing about any of this. Girdler also says nothing about the NRC/NAS panel's admissions about the high probabilities of the timing-movement correlations and the grassy knoll shot, nor about the windshield-distortion correlations.
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