JFK Conspiracy: The Bullet Hole In The Windshield

by Jim Fetzer

Among the most controversial issues in JFK research has been the existence or not of a through-and-through hole in the windshield of the Lincoln limousine in which JFK was riding when he was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963. As a long-time student of this question, I published an exceptional study by Douglas Weldon, “The Kennedy Limousine: Dallas 1963″, in Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), in which he made the case for a shot from the above-ground sewer opening half-way between the roadway and the top of the Triple Underpass on its south side as the location from which the shot was made, which passes through the windshield en route to JFK’s throat, where the trajectory aligns perfectly.

As Bob Livingston, M.D, a world authority on the human brain and an expert on wound ballistics explained to me, it appears to have fragmented, where half went down into his right lung and the other upward into his brain, where it severed the tough membrane that covers the cerebellum known as the “tentorum”. Otherwise, even the near-simultaneous impact of two shots to the head – one from the rear, which appears to have been fired from the Dal-Tex; the other from the right/front, which appears to have been fired from the symmetrically-placed above-ground sewer opening on the north side – could have caused cerebellar as well as cerebral tissue to be extruding from the wound, as physician after physician reported from Parkland.

As Bob reported in Assassination Science (1998), as the Scientific Director of two institutes of the National Institutes of Health, whose building is located across the street from Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the autopsy on JFK was performed, had many occasions to interact with high ranking officials of the Kennedy Administration, he had learned that the Secret Service had obtained around a dozen windshields for use in “target practice”. Indeed, Richard Dudman was a friend of his and he had read Richard’s article in The New Republic, “Commentary of an Eyewitness”, which I republished following Bob’s own statement in the book and which is discussed below. Bob’s observations about it on page 165 are as follows:

“There is evidence that the Ford Motor Company had an order for a dozen windshields for the Lincoln limousine similar to that which bore President Kennedy on the day of this assassination. These were for ‘target practice’, presumably to see how much or how little security the windshield provides. But that ‘target practice’ on a dozen windshields leaves in some doubt whether the windshield in the National Archives is the same one that was on the Kennedy limousine at the time of the assassination.” Indeed, as the following should make clear, there can be no doubt, at this point in time, that the windshield in the National Archives cannot possibly be the same one that was on the Kennedy limousine at the time of the assassination.

What has complicated the question was that the limousine was sent back to the Ford plant in Detroit, MI, to be completely stripped down to bare metal and the windshield was replaced. That windshield was brand new and unblemished, of course, yet the Secret Service would subsequently produce a third windshield, which had a star-like configuration of spider-cracks on the inside, nothing like the through-and-through hole observed at Parkland. A recent article by Douglas Horne, which marshals evidence that substantiates the existence of the through-and-through hole, has led me to revisit this question as we approach the 50th observance of the death of our 35th president, whom most of us greatly admired and whose lose has brought about incalculable consequences for us and the world.

The Windshield Bullet Hole Witnesses

On pages 1439-1450 of Volume V of Doug Horne’s book, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, he reviews what witnesses from Parkland Hospital and the Ford plant in Detroit have had to say about their own personal observations on 22 November 1963, the day of the assassination, and on 25 November 1963, three days later, at Ford. In the next several sections, I am taking passages from Horne’s recent article – with his permission – and presenting them together with photographs and other commentary that was not in his earlier study.

(2) St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Richard Dudman wrote an article published in The New Republic on December 21, 1963, in which he stated: “A few of us noted the hole in the windshield when the limousine was standing at the emergency entrance after the President had been carried inside. I could not approach close enough to see which side was the cup-shaped spot which indicates a bullet had pierced the glass from the opposite side.”

(3) Second year medical student Evalea Glanges, enrolled at Southwestern Medical University in Dallas, right next door to Parkland Hospital, told attorney Doug Weldon in 1999: “It was a real clean hole.” In a videotaped interview aired in the suppressed Episode 7 of Nigel Turner’s series, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, titled “The Smoking Guns,” she said: “… it was very clear, it was a through-and-through bullet hole through the windshield of the car, from the front to the back … it seemed like a high-velocity bullet that had penetrated from front-to-back in that glass pane.” At the time of the interview, Glanges had risen to the position of Chairperson of the Department of Surgery, at John Peter Smith Hospital, in Fort Worth. She had been a firearms expert all her adult life (see video clip below).

(4) Mr. George Whitaker, Sr., a senior manager at the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant in Detroit, Michigan, told attorney (and professor of criminal justice) Doug Weldon in August of 1993, in a tape recorded conversation, that after reporting to work on Monday, 25 November 1963, he discovered the JFK limousine – a unique, one-of-a-kind item that he unequivocally identified – in the Rouge Plant’s B building, with the interior stripped out and in the process of being replaced, and with the windshield removed. He was then contacted by one of the Vice Presidents of the division for which he worked, and directed to report to the glass plant lab, immediately. After knocking on the locked door (which he found most unusual), he was let in by two of his subordinates and discovered that they were in possession of the windshield that had been removed from the JFK limousine.

They had been told to use it as a template, and to make a new windshield identical to it in shape – and to then get the new windshield back to the B building for installation in the Presidential limousine that was quickly being rebuilt. Whitaker told Weldon (quoting from the audiotape of the 1993 interview): “And the windshield had a bullet hole in it, coming from the outside through…it was a good, clean bullet hole, right straight through, from the front. And you can tell, when the bullet hits the windshield, like when you hit a rock or something, what happens? The back chips out and the front may just have a pinhole in it…this had a clean round hole in the front and fragmentation coming out the back.” Whitaker told Weldon that he eventually became superintendent of his division and was placed in charge of five plant divisions. He also told Weldon that the original windshield, with the bullet hole in it, had been broken up and scrapped – as ordered – after the new windshield had been made.

When Doug Weldon interviewed Whitaker in August of 1993, his witness insisted on anonymity. Weldon reported on the story without releasing Whitaker’s name in his excellent and comprehensive article titled: “The Kennedy Limousine: Dallas 1963,” which was published in Jim Fetzer’s anthology Murder in Dealey Plaza, in 2000. After Weldon interviewed Whitaker in August of 1993, Mr. Whitaker subsequently – on 22 November 1993 (the 30th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination) – wrote down all he could remember about the events he witnessed involving the Presidential limousine and its windshield. After George Whitaker’s death in 2001, his family released his written testament to Nigel Turner, who with their permission revealed Mr. Whitaker’s name, as well as the text of his “memo for history,” in Episode 7 of The Men Who Killed Kennedy, “The Smoking Guns.”

In “The Smoking Guns,” the text of Whitaker’s memo can be read on the screen employing freeze frame technology with the DVD of the episode. It said, in part: “When [I] arrived at the lab the door was locked. I was let in. There were 2 glass engineers there. They had a car windshield that had a bullet hole in it. The hole was about 4 or 6 inches to the right of the rear view mirror [as viewed from the front]. The impact had come from the front of the windshield. (If you have spent 40 years in the glass [illegible] you know which way the impack [sic] was from.”

(5) The sixth credible witness to a bullet hole in the windshield of the limousine was Secret Service agent Charles Taylor, Jr., who wrote a report on November 27, 1963 in which he detailed his activities providing security for the limousine immediately after the car’s return to Washington following the assassination. The JFK limousine and the Secret Service follow-up car known as the “Queen Mary” arrived at Andrews AFB aboard a C-130 propeller-driven cargo plane at about 8:00 PM on 22 November 1963. Agent Taylor rode in the Presidential limousine as it was driven from Andrews AFB to the White House garage at 22nd and M Streets, N.W. In his report about what he witnessed inside the White House garage during the vehicle’s inspection, he wrote: “In addition, of particular note was the small hole just left of center in the windshield from which what appeared to be bullet fragments were removed.”

The Windshield Was Switched-Out Twice

Summarizing, six credible witnesses – Stavis Ellis, H. R. Freeman, Richard Dudman, Evalea Glanges, George Whitaker, and Charles Taylor – all reported seeing a bullet hole in the windshield of JFK’s limousine either on the day of the assassination (for five of the six witnesses), or on the following Monday (in the case of Mr. Whitaker, who did not see the limousine and its windshield until he reported to work at the Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant, in Detroit, on Monday morning, 25 November 1963).

Two of these witnesses – Evalea Glanges and George Whitaker – were absolutely positive that the bullet causing the damage had been a shot from the front, which had entered the front surface of the windshield, and exited the inside surface. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT? Because if true, the windshield bullet hole evidence alone disproves the lone assassin myth aggressively promoted by the U.S. government for 49 years now, since the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was supposedly firing from above and behind the limousine as it traveled down Elm Street. The windshield in evidence today at the National Archives is not the windshield that was in the Presidential limousine on Elm Street, in Dallas, on 22 November 1963. It simply cannot be. Why? Remember, according to George Whitaker, Sr. of the Ford Motor Co., the original was destroyed, per company orders, after it was used as a template to make a replacement on 25 November 1963. But it gets much worse than that.

The first replacement, the one installed by Whitaker’s two lab technicians in Detroit, was damaged on the wrong side by an incompetent Secret Service organization (incompetent not only at protecting the 35th President, but also in implementing a cover-up). Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman (who rode in the right front seat of the limousine in Dallas) testified before the Warren Commission, in March of 1964, that when he examined the windshield (obviously the replacement, installed by Whitaker’s team in Detroit) on November 27th, it was smooth on the outside, and damaged on the inside. This is consistent with damage caused by an impact on the front side of the windshield. (Safety glass exhibits damage on the opposite side from which it is struck). Researcher Robert P. Smith (as reported by David Lifton in Best Evidence) interviewed a Mr. Bill Ashby, crew leader at the Arlington Glass Company, who told Smith he removed the limousine’s windshield in Washington, D.C. on November 27th; this occurred after Roy Kellerman had felt the interior surface earlier that day and determined it to be damaged on the inside, and smooth on the outside.

But the windshield at the National Archives today exhibits long cracks – not a through-and-through bullet hole – and is damaged on the outside, which is the opposite of what Kellerman noted by physical examination on 27 November 1963.

Co-owner Willard Hess of the automotive firm Hess and Eisenhardt in Cincinnati, Ohio told Doug Weldon that his company also replaced the windshield in the Presidential limousine, and that the glass removed was standard safety glass – consistent with what George Whitaker said his team reinstalled in the limousine in Detroit, immediately after the assassination. Hess and Eisenhardt replaced the standard safety glass with special bullet resistant glass made by the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. (Presumably, the windshield removed by Hess and Eisenhardt was the second new windshield installed – by the Arlington Glass Company – on November 27th, 1963, and is the one in the National Archives today.) Mr. Hess told Weldon that the windshield his company removed was not damaged at the time it was removed. The clear implication here is that the windshield in the Archives today, which exhibits cracks but not a bullet hole, was intentionally damaged by someone involved in the cover-up AFTER its removal by Hess and Eisenhardt.

This distressing (and depressing) tale of cover-up, deceit, and deception mirrors what was going on with the JFK medical evidence (namely, the President’s cranial wounds and throat wound; and the autopsy photographs and x-rays), and the Zapruder film, during the weekend following the assassination – that is, alteration and gross substitution. The pattern is the same, and the pattern is one of lying, and intentionally covering up the truth, by destroying some evidence, and substituting altered evidence in its place. All of this substitution of evidence – tampering with wounds prior to the commencement of the autopsy through clandestine post mortem surgery; the alteration of some of the key autopsy photographs and x-rays (and the destruction of others); and the alteration of the Zapruder film – was all intended to suppress evidence of shots from the front (i.e., proof of conspiracy), so the government could more easily promote its lone assassin cover story.

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