The Secret Service

The House committee found that the Secret Service was “deficient in the performance of its duties.” It faulted how threat information was gathered and shared, the lack of preparation for a sniper, and the agents’ performance in the motorcade. [1]

The Warren Commission had already criticized the service’s advance work, its failure to check buildings along the route and the agents’ drinking in Fort Worth the night before. [2]

In January 1995, after the 1992 JFK Records Act required agencies to preserve assassination records, the Secret Service destroyed presidential protection survey reports for some of Kennedy’s trips in the fall of 1963. The Review Board learned of it about a week later and made the service explain itself in writing and in a briefing. [3]

William Greer, the driver, testified that he took the first noise for a motorcycle backfire. Then, “I heard it again. And I glanced over my shoulder. And I saw Governor Connally like he was starting to fall.” He said he stepped on the accelerator as Roy Kellerman told him, “Get out of here fast.” Critics say the car slowed and his reaction was too slow. [1]

A theory that spread in the early 1990s says the Zapruder film shows Greer turning and firing a pistol over his shoulder. It rests on blurry copies of the film. No one in the car or the follow-up car, including Mrs. Kennedy, the Connallys, Kellerman and Clint Hill, described anything like it, and Hill was looking straight at the back seat. [1][2][3]

A short clip from Love Field shows a Secret Service agent walking beside the limousine, then stopping and raising his arms as it leaves. It circulates as proof that agents were ordered off the car. The agent is usually named as Henry Rybka; some researchers say it is Don Lawton. [1]

A Secret Service report given to the Warren Commission says agents Lawton, Rybka, Patterson and Warner “had remained at Love Field awaiting the return of the Presidential party,” securing the plane for the departure to Austin. Eight agents did ride in the follow-up car, and Clint Hill ran from it to the limousine. [1][2]

Whatever the gesture meant, it is consistent with an agent peeling off on a planned assignment. No document or testimony shows an order for the motorcade agents to stand down.

Agent George Hickey rode in the follow-up car with an AR-15 rifle. In his written statement for the Warren Commission he said the shots took possibly four or five seconds, and: “At the end of the last report I reached to the bottom of the car and picked up the AR 15 rifle, cocked and loaded it, and turned to the rear.” By then, he wrote, the cars were passing under the overpass. [1]

In 1992 the book Mortal Error, by Bonar Menninger, laid out the theory of the ballistics expert Howard Donahue: that Hickey, startled, accidentally fired the shot that hit Kennedy in the head. Hickey sued for libel. A court dismissed his suit as filed too late, a ruling on the deadline, not on the merits. [2]

By Hickey’s account he did not have the rifle in hand until the shooting was over, and none of the agents’ statements describes a shot from the follow-up car. The two large fragments recovered from the limousine’s front seat were matched to the Carcano. [1][3]