Beyond the Magic Bullet: 3 Lingering Questions from the JFK Assassination

The Traditional or Dominant Interpretation

The historically dominant interpretation of the JFK assassination is a direct product of the Warren Commission’s findings. This perspective holds that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, fired three shots from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, killing President Kennedy and wounding Governor Connally. This conclusion rests on a convergence of physical evidence, witness testimony, and biographical analysis of Oswald.

The commission’s case against Oswald was substantial. The rifle found on the sixth floor was traced back to Oswald, who had purchased it via mail order. His palm print was found on the rifle. Ballistics tests concluded that the bullet fragments found in the limousine and the nearly whole bullet discovered on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital (designated Commission Exhibit 399 or CE 399) were fired from that rifle, to the exclusion of all other weapons. Eyewitnesses reported seeing a man with a rifle in the sixth-floor window, and Oswald was absent from his post in the Depository shortly after the shooting.

However, the commission faced a significant logistical problem presented by the timing of the event. The most famous visual record, a home movie filmed by Abraham Zapruder, showed that all the shots occurred within a span of approximately 5.6 seconds. The bolt-action Mannlicher-Carcano rifle required a minimum of 2.3 seconds between shots. This tight timeframe made it difficult to account for all the wounds sustained by both Kennedy and Connally with three separate shots, especially since one shot was widely believed to have missed the limousine entirely.

To resolve this, the commission developed what has become one of the most controversial elements of the case: the single-bullet theory. This theory posits that a single bullet, CE 399, caused all of President Kennedy’s non-fatal wounds and all of Governor Connally’s wounds. According to this interpretation, one shot passed through President Kennedy’s upper back and neck, exited his throat, and then proceeded to strike Governor Connally. It entered Connally’s back, shattered a rib, exited his chest, passed through his right wrist, and finally embedded itself in his left thigh. This single projectile thereby accounted for seven separate wounds in two men.

This explanation was critical to the lone-gunman conclusion. Without it, the tight timeframe of the shooting would almost necessitate a second shooter firing from a different location. The commission argued that the relative seating positions of the two men in the limousine made such a trajectory plausible. The near-pristine condition of CE 399, the bullet purported to have caused this damage, was explained by its velocity and the nature of the soft tissue and bone it struck. For proponents of the Warren Commission’s findings, the single-bullet theory is not an outlandish hypothesis but a necessary and logical conclusion drawn from the unassailable evidence of the Zapruder film’s timeline and the ballistics match of the rifle.

The commission concluded that Oswald was a disaffected loner, a Marxist who harbored resentment against American society and its leaders. They found no credible evidence linking him to any domestic or foreign conspiracy, determining that his motive was personal and ideological. In this view, the assassination was not the product of a grand plot but a tragic, random act of a single, disturbed individual.