 
 Book ReviewAllen F. Ruffin
 MORTAL ERROR  The Shot That Killed JFK
 
    
              "MORTAL ERROR  The Shot That Killed JFK."  By Bonar
              Menninger. St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Ave., NY, NY
              10010.  1992. 361pp. $23.95.
    
         Will America ever know with certainty who killed President John
    F. Kennedy?  The twenty-six volume report of the Warren Commission
    that was appointed by President Lyndon F. Johnson to investigate the
    assassination was thought to be conclusive and exhaustive at the
    time of its publication nearly thirty years ago.  It was neither.
    
         Omissions, distortions, and errors in the Warren Report have
    been detailed.  Suggestions that these might have been deliberate
    were strongly made by some researchers.  Usually these are treated
    lightly by the media, shovelling all together into a bag labelled
    "crackpots."  There are a few to be sure, and by giving them media
    attention the serious students of the assassination are tarred with
    the same brush.
    
         Those who have firearms knowledge and experience and who had
    opportunity to study the complete Warren Commission Report as I did
    shortly after its release, and who are aware of results of later
    investigations, have long been troubled by persistent
    dissatisfaction.  The conclusions just were not consistent with the
    effect of a slow, long, heavily jacketed military bullet.  Enough
    woodchucks and big game have been shot with these in lean years when
    military surplus cartridges were cheap for a broad base of
    comparative experience.  The Kennedy head wound is more in keeping
    with that produced by a small, very high velocity projectile of the
    type used for woodchucks and other small varmints.  Such as from the
    .223 Remington cartridge.
    
         There was at least one gun made for a small, high-velocity
    cartridge at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.  It was in the hands
    of a United States Secret Service Agent assigned to protect the life
    of the President of the United States.
    
         Putting aside theories, allusions, and delusions leaves fact
    supported by physical evidence, the stuff forensic experts deal
    with.  Bonar Menninger details the years of work, often painful,
    done by Towson, MD, firearms authority Howard Donahue.  A gunsmith
    and resourceful inventor, Donahue devised and produced a
    hydraulic-tipped bullet for big-game-rifle cartridges that proved to
    have accuracy potential rivalling that of highly refined precision
    target-shooting bullets, which spawned a series of clones.  He
    developed many tricks of the gunsmithing trade that made shotguns
    work more smoothly and reliably.  He is a superb shotgun and rifle
    marksman.  In addition to giving one-on-one coaching to individuals
    intending to shoot driven birds in the highly structured fashion of
    the British Isles, Donahue was for years a licensed referee for the
    National Skeet Shooting Association, the governing body of a popular
    American-invented clay-target sport.  He is a respected authority on
    firearms forensics consulted by lawyers and police.
    
         Donahue was one of those asked to participate in a 1967
    reconstruction of the assassination at the H. P. White laboratory, a
    ballistic-test facility in Bel Air, MD, for a CBS television report.
    He was the only one of a dozen marksmen (recently seen again in
    rehashes) who made three hits in the kill zone in the allotted time,
    confirming tests done at the NRA in 1963 by a former World class
    rifle competitor.  Another marksman, probably one of those referred
    to only as "sportsmen", was John Dinning.  It was not mentioned that
    Dinning was many times selected for All-American Skeet Teams.
    
         Donahue reports on the findings of a stellar panel of
    pathologists and radiologists appointed by U.S.  Attorney General
    Clark in 1968, which disclosed a 6.5mm.  bullet fragment located
    beneath the scalp and near the head entrance wound.  The work of
    this panel and the existence of the bullet fragment have not before
    been exposed widely to the public.  Donahue draws the supposition
    that the fragment is from a first-shot miss that ricocheted off the
    pavement and broke up, the hot piece striking Kennedy and causing
    him to exclaim, "My God!  I'm hit!" as reported in testimony by
    Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman who was riding in the right,
    front seat of the Kennedy car.  This also supports Texas Governor
    John Connelly's often pooh-poohed claim that he heard the first
    shot, and then was struck by a second, which Donahue concludes also
    hit the President below the head and probably would have been a
    mortal wound had it not been for the head wound.
    
         No doubt drawing on his many years experience selling medical
    supplies, Donahue made mockups of the wounds with plaster skulls,
    inserting wood dowels to show probable bullet paths.  He concludes
    that the shot that tore away the chunk of the President's skull
    could not have come from the sniper in the School Book Depository,
    high up and to the right.  It had to have come from a
    near-the-ground-level, almost horizontal firing from the left of the
    President.
    
         The smell of gunsmoke reported by many near the scene also is a
    puzzle.  The smoke from shooting in the Depository would have been
    above and a nearly hundred yards away, and one police officer who
    reported smelling powder smoke was upwind of the building.
    
         Donahue asserts that the claim of some that the violent forward
    and backward movement of Kennedy's head revealed in the Zapruder
    film resulted from near-simultaneous shots from front and rear is
    not necessarily true.  Hundreds and hundred of shooting tests in
    animals by the Military over many years and examined war evidence
    published in heavy, obscure reference tomes that Donahue is unlikely
    to have known of, plus the experiences of hundreds of hunters
    expressed in their letters to the American Rifleman while I worked
    there, support Donahue's opinion.
    
         All the old arguments concerning angles of bullet travel,
    entrance, and exit are gone over in tortuous detail.  This is needed
    to make a platform for Donahue's determination that the deadly
    bullet came from nearby, not from the School Book Depository.
    
          But, while millions upon millions of dollars have been spent
    on investigatory panels with all their experts, so much obfuscation
    has occurred that no clear finding has yet emerged  except,
    perhaps, Donahue's.  And, while he, his wife Katherine, and powerful
    Washington friends tried and tried to be heard, the smoke and mirror
    artists of illusion that seem to comprise our Government refused to
    see him, to call him before a panel, even to speak to him at chance
    meetings.
    
          So Donahue was prevented from making his argument that the
    proof of his theories depends on comparison of remains of the
    bullets' metal outer jacket materials.  If this was ever done, and
    some evidence suggests that it was, the results have been hidden.
    So apparently were the metal fragments themselves, tissue from the
    wound areas, and the brain tissue.  Available results of testing
    lead fragments do not make conclusive proof.
    
         The essential quality of Donahue's research is marred by author
    Menninger in Chapter 14, which details U.S.  Army efforts to protect
    themselves from adopting the M-16 Rifle, the nomenclature eventually
    assigned to the Armalite AR-15.  (This is a convoluted tale
    deserving a book in its own right, and to treat it sketchily does
    history injustice.) The long, small-caliber cartridge development
    leading to the 5.56mm.  NATO cartridge, called the .223 Remington in
    civilian version, is omitted.  Details of rifle tests and
    modifications are lightly gone over, such as rifling twist-rate
    deficiency causing accuracy deterioration in cold weather that was
    only detected by NRA technical editor E.H.  Harrison.  The
    specification for use of Olin Ball Powder is given mendacious
    overtones by not noting that all remaining military small-arms
    propellant plants are set up for Ball Powder manufacture, which is
    safer, easier, and cheaper than other powder types.
    
         Yet, Bonar Menninger has written "Mortal Error" in an
    uncomplicated, almost conversational style that makes easy the
    devouring of chunks of pages at a sitting.  The book is almost a
    can't-put-it-downer.  However, while I know Howard Donahue as a man
    with a broad sense of humor who delights in making his friends
    laugh, Menninger's excursions relating funny incidents in Donahue's
    life in the midst of a topic of extreme gravity are perhaps
    inappropriate.  It reminds me of a Mahler symphony where in the
    midst of a ponderous passage, all appears to stop while a German
    brass band seems to be passing behind the symphony musicians.
    
         In an unusual seventeen-page conclusion to Menninger's text,
    the Chairman of St.  Martin's Press, Thomas McCormack in a "Note
    From The Publisher" describes the great lengths to which he went to
    convince himself of the validity of Donahue's work before committing
    himself to this book's publication.  So much else on the Kennedy
    assassination has seen print, he points out, that only work that has
    fresh and uncommon evidence merits attention from serious
    publishers.  McCormack states, "Donahue ...  thought it was the
    truth, and that it was important."
    
         So do I.
    
         Read this book.  Then write your Congressperson.
    
                                        -end-
                            Copyright (c)1994 Allen F. Ruffin
    
    Allen F. Ruffin
    P.O. Box 241
    Middletown, MD 21769
    (301) 834-9467 voice
    ->1716 in any P&BNet conference
         
    Allen F. Ruffin, 63, has a lifetime professional involvement with
    firearms.  For many years, he was an Associate Technical Editor with
    The American Rifleman Magazine.  He has written about firearms and
    related subjects in a variety of periodicals, competes in
    clay-target shooting championships nationwide, and is a consultant
    on sporting firearms accidents and safety, and forensic ballistics.
    
