Warren Commissioner John J. McCloy disagreed with the
final draft of the Commission Report specifically the "Single
Bullet" Theory.
John J. McCloy, Warren Commission member writes to J. Lee Rankin
correcting drafts of the final Warren Commission Report writing, "I
think too much effort is expended on attempting to prove that the first
bullet that hit the president was responsible for all Connally's
wounds."
The document below is part of the Rankin Documents (approximately 40,000
papers) donated by the Rankin family to the National Archives, through
the ARRB, as part of the JFK Assassination Records Collection.
News Article on this document's release:
By Michael Dorman. SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT, Newsday (8/11/97)
A Warren Commission member expressed serious reservations about one
of the panel's more controversial conclusions, the theory that a single
shot wounded both President John F. Kennedy and Texas Gov. John
Connally, a long-secret document has revealed. The
"magic-bullet" theory was essential to the commission's
conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone assassin.
Marked "confidential," the released document was a memorandum
sent by commission member John J. McCloy to the commission's chief
counsel, J. Lee Rankin. It was dated June 24, 1964, seven months after
Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, and conveyed McCloy's critique of a
draft of the final Warren Commission report.
"I think too much effort is expended on attempting to prove that
the first bullet, which hit the president, was also responsible for all
of Connally's wounds," McCloy wrote. (Note: the commas are not in
the original.) "The evidence against this is not fully
stated." He added that a section of the report dealing with the
possibility of shots being fired at Kennedy's motorcade from an overpass
was "not well done." Elsewhere, McCloy questioned the
commission's account that a bullet found on a stretcher at Dallas'
Parkland Hospital - where Kennedy and Connally were treated after being
shot - was the "magic bullet." He wrote: "The statement
concerning the bullet which was found on the stretcher is not
particularly persuasive because there is no indication that the
`stretcher bullet' was in fact the bullet which caused the [Connally]
wrist wound."
The "magic-bullet" theory's importance to the conclusion that
Oswald alone killed Kennedy lay in the number and timing of the shots
fired at the president's motorcade. The commission concluded there was
time for Oswald to fire no more than three shots and that he did, in
fact, fire three times. One was said to have missed the presidential
limousine entirely. A second - the fatal bullet - was said to have
struck Kennedy in the back of the head. That left just one more bullet,
but it was known that Kennedy also had been struck in the lower part of
the back of his neck and that Connally had suffered wounds to his back,
right wrist and left thigh.
If the commission had decided that separate bullets had struck Kennedy
and Connally, it would have been forced to conclude there had been a
fourth bullet. And since there had not been time for Oswald to fire more
than three shots, it would have meant there must have been a second
shooter. The commission responded with the "magic-bullet"
theory - concluding the bullet that struck Kennedy in the neck passed
through his body, hit Connally in the back, emerged from his chest, then
passed through his wrist into his thigh.
It has been perhaps the conclusion most criticized by conspiracy
theorists. The document recently released by the U.S. Assassination
Records Review Board - which screens Kennedy assassination documents and
releases those that will not endanger national security - also contains
many other suggestions by McCloy on revising the draft report. Some of
those suggestions were adopted by the commission. But the commission did
not revise the sections dealing with the "magic-bullet"
theory. Nor did it revise other sections criticized by McCloy, dealing
with the Kennedy and Connally wounds. He asked at one point, for
example: "Why is there no citation of authority with regard to the
wound in the president's back and its path through his body?"
McCloy, who died in 1989, served as Kennedy's disarmament adviser.
