Lone Assassins

Decisions on the deaths of Kennedy and King

It started as a gaudy circus. When the House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed two years ago to investigate once again the killings of President John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., Congressmen vied for the limelight and fought with their abrasive chief counsel, Richard Sprague, who quit within a year. But, to the surprise of its early critics, the committee disciplined itself and did some meticulous though costly work (nearly $5 million by the end of this year). As its public hearings wind down, the committee's sober findings are reinforcing long established official conclusions about the deaths of both Kennedy and King.

Last month the committee in effect re-convicted James Earl Ray of stalking and slaying the civil rights leader in the spring of 1968. In the process, the Congressmen discredited the persistent theory that Ray did not act alone. Last week the committee turned to the Kennedy assassination and added credence to the main finding of the Warren Commission: Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed the President and wounded former Texas Governor John Connally.

The Kennedy hearings produced some dramatic and grisly theater. The Zapruder film, the pathologists, the conspiracy theorists--everyone and everything was there in the Cannon House Office Building to recall the agony of that day in Dallas.

Kennedy's suit coat, the front ripped apart by frenzied doctors trying to save lis life, and his bloodstained shirt were mounted on a mannequin and used to illustrate the path of one shot. All too vivid sketches showed the exact entry point of the bullet that shattered the President's skull. There was prolonged discussion about what had happened to the President's lower brain after the autopsy. It had apparently been buried at the request of Robert Kennedy.

John Connally, who was moved to tears as he testified, and his wife spoke for three hours in gripping detail about the events leading up to the assassination. They had feared a cool reception for Kennedy in Dallas, but the crowds had greeted him so warmly that Mrs. Connally turned in the limousine, just as it neared the book depository, and said: "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you." And the pleased Kennedy had replied: "That's obvious." Connally recalled hearing a shot ring out and moaning, "No, no, no, no."

Since November 1963 the Warren Commission and two different teams of pathologists have reviewed the autopsy report made at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The House committee's panel, after its own reexamination, made only minor objections to the original findings, like the exact location of the entry wounds. Its views strengthened the conviction that the shots had been fired from the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald worked. Eight out of nine forensic experts retained by the committee said it was likely that one bullet passed through the President's neck and then wounded Connally in the back, chest, wrist and thigh, thus supporting the Warren Commission's controversial "single-bullet theory."

The panel's findings that the shots came from behind should lay to rest the theory that another gunman, perhaps firing from a grassy knoll in front of the car, was involved in the assassination. But it is unlikely even now that many Americans, deeply skeptical about official pronouncements and constantly confronted by the dirty linen of the CIA and FBI, will give up their notions of a conspiracy. Showing there was no second gunman, as Connally pointed out, posed a difficult problem: How do you prove a negative?

Conspiracy theories will flourish as long as any questions remain unanswered, and the House committee is set to concede in its report that some points remain unsettled. But TIME has learned that the committee will recommend that there be no further studies, on the grounds that many of the remaining questions are simply unanswerable and that 14 years of attack on the Warren Commission report and almost a decade of faultfinding with the King investigation have failed to shake the fundamental conclusions of either of the official explanations: The President and the civil rights leader were each killed by a single assassin. .

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