Date: December 5, 2006 12:28:38 AM PST
Subject: jfk hit
Subject:
Guides To The JFK/RFK Kill Zones
Date:
Mon, 4 Dec 2006 19:09:58 -0800
From:
To:
Guides To The
JFK/RFK Kill Zones
By J. Bruce Campbell
11-26-6
The rhetorical questions I asked in the response to Carmichael's
RFK
piece got me to thinking. I studied reports of that night in the Ambassador
Hotel, which I'd seen live on television, thinking at the time that Bobby
was probably going to get it anytime. When it actually happened a few
minutes later, it was of course disconcerting.
Personally, I didn't like the Kennedys. But this was natural, I
guess, for a cowboy who would have nothing in common with a bunch of Boston
dudes. So I'm not going to get maudlin about our nouveau-royalty that was
foisted on us in 1960. The problem was, the super-rats who had them killed
were a hundred times worse.
It is obvious that the Kennedy brothers were betrayed by their
guards. Jack was driven into his kill zone by a guy named Bill Greer. The
astonishing thing about the Dealey Plaza hit was that Greer drove down the
Elm Street hill and came almost to a dead stop seconds after the shooting
started. Secret Service procedure is to gas it at the first hint of a
discouraging word or a loud noise. Greer came to a virtual halt, so as to
give the shooters a nice easy target. It probably never occurred to him
that
an old geezer with a Bell & Howell 8mm would be cranking away right next to
him. He came to a stop and looked back at Kennedy until the massive head
shot was made. Clint Hill was riding on the car behind and he was able to
hop off that one, run forward and jump on the rear step of the Lincoln
death
car, just in time to keep Jackie from scrambling the hell away from where
all the bullets were converging. She was going to bail but Hill got her
back
next to the corpse. Greer's work was done and then he gassed it, as if he
remembered to follow procedure all of a sudden. It's pretty obvious, when
you watch it a few times. Pay no attention to the nonsense about him
pulling
a nickel-plated .45 and shooting Kennedy. All he had to do was come to a
virtual halt and let the pros nail him in the head. He turned and watched
carefully until it was time to go.
In 1968 I was living in Reno. I knew a guy there, an FBI agent
named
Doug Burau. I knew him pretty well. We were shooting buddies. Doug was
involved in what the Bureau called "Security." Security had to do with
counter-espionage. Maybe it still does. One time I asked him what he
thought
of the Lee Oswald legend? All of a sudden, he wasn't so friendly. I said,
but it doesn't make any sense. He angrily cut off all discussion by
insisting that Oswald was the one and the only one. So I saw right there
what the FBI party line was. I never brought it up again because it was
like
a religious belief to him. I should have made the connection that Hoover,
being involved, naturally gave orders that allowed no discussion of the
assassination among his agents. Doug was a true believer in old J. Edgar,
as
he called him.
But Doug did tell me something that just came back to me as I began
to study the Bobby Kennedy killing. He said that his old friend, a former
FBI agent named Bill Barry, was Bobby's head security man. He told me that
Barry really didn't like Bobby. He hadn't cared for his brother, either,
and
Doug related the lurid reports by Barry of the wild sex parties in the JFK
White House, when the brothers would bring in uninhibited women for the
enjoyment of themselves and their buddies, when Jackie was not present.
Doug
told me these things in the four or five months after I'd met him, before
the June assassination. I thought it strange that Bobby's chief bodyguard
really didn't like him, however considering Hoover's hatred of all three
brothers, it was more understandable. And I forgot about it for all these
years, until I read something today. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Bobby's friend and part-time bodyguard, LA Rams lineman Roosevelt
Grier, told the police that the plan had been to take Bobby and Ethel to
meet the press in another ball room downstairs, I believe. And there was a
set way they were going to get there. But at the last minute, Grier said,
Bill Barry, the chief of security, changed the route. They'd be going
through the kitchen instead, supposedly to avoid the big crowd. And Barry
led the way off the podium, down some stairs to the pantry. But once they
got in the narrow pantry, Grier said that Barry fell behind. Grier and
Rafer
Johnson were then leading the way, with the maitre'd, Karl Uecker, taking
Bobby by his right wrist and leading him through the tight passageway. A
rent-a-cop named Gene Cesar was behind Kennedy's right shoulder and in fact
had his left hand on Bobby's right shoulder. Kennedy stopped to shake hands
with a busboy and a waiter, hovered over protectively by Uecker, when
Sirhan
came forward with his Iver Johnson 8-shot .22 revolver. He cursed Kennedy
and opened up, managing to get off two shots before Uecker let go of
Kennedy
and grabbed Sirhan's gun hand and began twisting and banging it on a
serving
table, quickly joined by the athletes and others. Sirhan kept pulling the
trigger, hitting five bystanders but missing Kennedy. Simultaneously,
Kennedy fell over backwards, shot in the mastoid region behind his right
ear
and then twice more up through his right armpit. A fourth shot went through
the shoulder pad of his coat. At least twelve shots were fired in all.
One man saw the whole thing and immediately reported it to the
police and to his television news team. Donald Schulman, of KNXT Television
in Los Angeles, reported to his anchorman, Jerry Dunphy, that he had seen
the Ace Security Company's part-time rent-a-cop named Thane Eugene Cesar,
pull his revolver and fire it as he fell down with Kennedy. Cesar later
admitted that he had pulled his gun from its holster but he "wasn't sure"
that he'd fired it. But he was exactly where you'd have to be to put those
three holes in Kennedy.
He also admitted some other things, such as the fact that he
detested the Kennedy brothers, who'd "sold out the country." What kind of a
gun was he carrying? A .38 special. Did he have a .22, like Sirhan's? Well,
yes, he did, but he wasn't carrying it that night. He said he'd sold it to
a
guy in Arkansas the previous February. This was June. It turned out that he
still had it and sold it to the guy a few months later. The cops never
asked
him about either gun. He said he'd rather not talk to the grand jury and
the
cops said, "Okay." The .22 was a 9-shot Iver Johnson, almost identical to
Sirhan's. Ted Chirach finally found it in an Arkansas pond years later.
Chirach's the dogged reporter who nailed Cesar as the real killer, but no
one would do anything about it because Kennedy was supposed to die.
There's a lot more to the Gene Cesar story, but you get the idea.
All he had to do was get behind Bobby and wait for some nut with a gun to
start shooting. Almost nobody would notice him in the excitement.
But Don Schulman did notice and stuck to his story, even insisting
that Bobby had been hit three times when the cops were saying twice. Then
even his own television colleagues betrayed him, insisting that he'd never
said anything about seeing Cesar draw and fire.
Years later, former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates had a radio show on KFI
Radio in Los Angeles. He made some crack about "assault weapons needing to
be banned" so I called in and objected to a guy who was a public servant
violating the Bill of Rights. He tried to laugh me off but then I accused
him of sending his captains and lieutenants off to Ventura County the day
the Rodney King jury was due to come back and of trying to blame some poor
underling for letting the riot get out of control. That knocked him off
balance because he wouldn't allow any talk about the L.A. Riot on his show.
Then I said, "But you're also the guy who destroyed all the evidence from
the Ambassador Hotel kitchen. You had all the ceiling panels and door
frames
with the bullet holes in them destroyed. You did this, Chief, because
you've
been an asset of the CIA for your whole career as a Los Angeles policeman,
haven't you?" He was flabbergasted. The next day, he was fired from KFI. It
was so easy!
The main thing in all these assassinations, starting with Lincoln,
is the complicity or negligence of the bodyguards combined with fake
investigations and destruction of evidence by the police. It's always the
same. The more important the murder, the more mundane the murderer, the
more
prosaic the weapon.
