Of course, at this late date there is no way to verify which account of Mrs. Connally’s is the true version; or if there is another, even truer version to be told. For the record, Connally’s clothes were not cut from his body, but merely removed, and were not sent to her in the mail.
In addition, researcher Murr is dubious that valuables were in the Connally suit breast pocket, post-assassination. The hospital’s records that are extant indicate valuables were removed from Connally’s clothing with the cash being sent on to the hospital cashier.
There is another puzzler: Photos commissioned by researcher Murr show the inside breast pocket of John Connally’s Oxxford Clothes-brand jacket as having been pierced by the same bullet that passed through him.
If there had been a billfold or wallet in that breast pocket it likely would have been pierced by a bullet—and thus would also be important evidence.
The bullet hole in the interior right side of Connally’s jacket, showing a hole through the breast pocket.
After Mrs. Connally had the clothes professionally cleaned and pressed, it appears the shirt and suit and other items were then sent to the Texas State Archives, although Murr says this bit of the garment’s itinerary has not been verified.
In any event, on March 30, 1964, the Warren Commission (WC) asked the Secret Service to bring Connally’s jacket and shirt to Washington for examination. By March 1964, nearly five months had passed since the assassination and no investigative body had examined Connally’s clothing. The shirt and jacket arrived at the WC on the suitable date of April 1st.
When the WC asked Governor Connally about the condition of the clothes on April 21, 1964, he responded, “They, the Archives of the State of Texas, asked for the clothing, and I have given the clothing to them. That is where they were sent from, I believe, here, to this Commission.” Researcher Murr is dubious about Connally’s answer, noting the Governor’s lawyerly use of the qualifying word “believe.” However, there are no hard records from what location the garments were sent to the WC.
There is an internal memo that reveals the WC examined the Connally clothes before sending the garments to the FBI. WC staffer Norman Redlich wrote on April 10th to Lee Rankin, “We have examined Governor Connally’s clothing and sent it to the FBI Lab for tests on the question of exit and entry holes.” The WC wanted some evidence to work into its single-bullet theory.
In any event, Robert Frazier, the FBI’s lead firearms and ballistics examiner at the time, told the WC that Connally’s shirt and jacket had been subjected to “cleaning and pressing.” Thus, no trajectories could be divined from the bullet holes in the items. More importantly, the cleaning and pressing of Connally’s shirt and coat were remarkably effective and evidently removed metallic traces from the bullet holes, effectively enough that the technology of the day, spectrographic analysis, could find nothing.[7]
Later the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) would also subject Connally’s assassination-day clothes—including his shirt—to testing and would find traces of copper, iron, and lead.
HSCA Tests
Nearly 15 years after the JFK murder, and after who knows how much handling by Secret Service men, spouses, dry-cleaners, WC staff, Texas Archive staff, and FBI investigators, Connally’s garments would be subjected to even more exacting tests, conducted by the Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas at the behest of the HSCA.[8]
The tests were so sensitive that iron was detected near the bullet holes in Connally’s clothes, from blood that had been deposited in 1963, despite the passage of time and the professional cleaning of years earlier. Yes, evidently Connally did not have “iron poor blood,” and that iron had been detected around the bullet holes in Connally’s clothing, claimed the institute.
Lead was found near the rear bullet hole in Connally’s shirt along with amounts of copper, but considered “trace” or too small be meaningful. However, a curiosity of the 1978 testing is that less copper but more lead was found at the rear bullet hole in Connally’s shirt than from a “back control” sample.
Given that the WC and HSCA storyline is that a copper-jacketed bullet passed through Connally, the finding of trace amounts of lead in the rear hole in the Governor’s clothing is interesting. Copper, in amounts considered meaningful, was found “in the region of the defect in the right front,” of Connally’s suit coat. “The results would indicate that the apparent borderline copper analysis is due to the lining containing some copper. Iron, apparently from blood, was still detectable near the right front defect in the coat, despite dry cleaning,” reported the Institute of Forensic Sciences.
The results of the 1978 testing, as usual in all matters JFK, raise more questions than answers.
The only hole that exhibited copper in more than trace amounts was the “defect” or very small hole in the front of Connally’s jacket, where a bullet exited. But here, a control sample—that is cloth not associated with a bullet strike—first yielded an even larger amount of copper than cloth near a bullet hole. But the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences said the high copper count in the control cloth was “aberrant,” as proved by repeat analyses of other control samples.
You can’t make this stuff up. Test until you get the right results. It should be noted that the HSCA investigation, like the WC investigation, did not have a “defense counsel” who asked probing questions about evidence in question.
Cliff Carter
Cliff Carter, the LBJ aide who put the two bloody sacks of clothing into Congressman’s Gonzalez’s hands on November 22, is also worth pondering. Carter was regarded as a “bagman,” who would collect cash for LBJ’s campaigns, or for other expenses, and handled other dark areas for LBJ.
According to Billy Sol Estes, Carter was also aware of the planning for the murder of Henry Marshall, a U.S. Department of Agriculture investigator who learned of Estes’ illegal scheme to illegally buy certain cotton allotments from smaller farmers. Agriculture agent Marshall was found dead in 1961 of five gunshots from a single-shot bolt-action rifle, and carbon monoxide poisoning to boot, but Texas authorities deemed the death to be a suicide. That ruling stood for decades, until a Grand Jury in 1985 reviewed the case and almost certainly corrected the ruling to murder.
In later years, Estes, who graced the cover of Time magazine 1962, would tell unverifiable tales regarding a clutch of murders of people in LBJ’s orbit.
But for the purposes of this story, the inquiry would be: Did Carter, even within two hours of the JFK hit, and in Parkland hospital, have presence of mind to recognize that controlling evidence could be important to the outcome of the JFK investigation?
Did Carter actually advise Gonzalez to take the two bloody paper sacks containing Connally’s clothes and then to sit tight until further instructions were received? Thus, Gonzalez became an unwitting “cut out” man in the sequestering of primary evidence.
Indeed, was “controlling the evidence” second nature for Carter, after having been involved in various and serious LBJ scrapes with the law, up to and including murder? In other words, gain control over evidence first and always in every untoward event, then later determine if there are advantages to withholding or releasing evidence?
Moreover, Mrs. Connally’s tale about wanting the assassination-day shirt and suit-jacket back to retrieve a wallet also does not hold water. First, hospital records indicate Connally’s money and valuables were removed from his clothing. Secondly, if the hospital staff had missed a wallet, and left it in a suit jacket breast pocket, why did not Mrs. Connally ask for the wallet back and not bloodied clothes?
At this late date, mind-reading Carter and divining who may have given instructions to Mrs. Connally or Gonzalez is a parlor game. Back in 1964 no one at the WC grilled Mrs. Connally, Carter, or Gonzalez about the inexplicable treatment of the bloodied sacks of clothing. Carter died in 1971, taking whatever secrets he had with him.
Of course, the JFK saga contains an unlimited amount of coincidences and many, many unusual turns of events.
In 1976, the U.S House voted 280–65, to establish the Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in order to investigate the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. A vote that followed the national screening of the Zapruder film on the TV show Good Night America in 1975. The chairman of the HSCA was outgoing Congressman Thomas Downing of Virginia, who harbored deep suspicions about the JFK case. And he hired a tough, well-regarded Philadelphia District Attorney, one Richard Sprague, as HSCA Chief Counsel.
But Downing would soon retire, and he turned over the reins to Gonzalez—yes, the very same Gonzalez who 13 years prior had hand-carried Connally’s assassination-day clothes to his closet in Washington, where they mysteriously sat for two weeks.
At first, the ascendance of Gonzalez was comforting to JFK researchers, as he also seemed dubious about the WC conclusions and the nature of the JFK case. The irony of what was to follow is almost cosmic.
Veteran JFK researcher Jim DiEugenio interviewed Downing in his office in Newport News back in the 1990s. The former congressman showed DiEugenio the ballot that Gonzalez submitted for Chief Counsel in September of 1976 and that Sprague’s nomination had been made by Gonzalez himself.
So, it appeared in late 1976 that the HSCA has a no-nonsense and smart chief counsel, backed by a solid chairman (the question of Connally’s clothes having been long forgotten).
Yet as JFK researchers know, as soon as Sprague began to probe connections between Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA, and connections between the Miami office of the CIA and anti-Castro Cuban exiles, stories began appearing in influential print publications questioning Sprague’s ethics and work history back in Philadelphia.
Based on some rather picayune bureaucratic and procedural tensions, HSCA Chairman Gonzalez began attacking Sprague publicly, called him a “rattlesnake,” and loudly roasted him for misconduct and mismanagement. Sprague’s rather small and iffy budget was scrutinized and challenged and the Philly DA was accused of not following the Committee’s directions.
Gonzales ultimately tried to fire Sprague, but on such flimsy grounds that the full committee overruled the firing. Nevertheless, the well was poisoned, and the erstwhile Philly DA did leave his post when he was told his departure was a condition of the HSCA obtaining future funding.
Even Gaeton Fonzi, the superb JFK researcher who was a staffer on the HSCA under Sprague, and who authored the book, The Last Investigation, strained to explain Gonzalez’ behavior, offering little more insight than Gonzalez was “flying off the handle.”
To this day, a good explanation of Chairman Gonzalez’ behavior at HSCA—on the surface, inexplicable—has not been rendered. The veteran researcher DiEugenio does offer up one possible explanation in his book The Assassinations: That there were moles planted on the HSCA to exacerbate the antagonism between Sprague and Gonzalez and one issue was Gonzalez and his curious role in the post-JFKA sojourns of Connally’s clothes.
For those familiar with the history of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his 1969 investigation of the JFKA, the possibility of moles or CIA-plants on the HSCA staff is not hard to believe—Garrison’s staff was infested with national security state operatives, some of whom actually leaked information to defense counsel for Clay Shaw, the CIA operative who Garrison suspected played a role in handling Lee Harvey Oswald.
After both Sprague and Gonzalez left the HSCA, the new chairman was the diffident Congressman Louis Stokes of Ohio, who brought in Robert Blakey, a US Justice Department mafia prosecutor, as HSCA chief counsel.
Blakey was entirely the wrong man for the job: an earnest civil servant and mob-hunter who, at that time, believed in, and vowed cooperation with, the CIA—the very agency, due to its extensive ties to anti-Castro Cubans and hostile relations with JFK, that was and is most suspect in regards to the JFKA.
As I said, you can’t make this stuff up.
Thus Gonzalez, who inexplicably kept assassination-day evidence—Connally’s clothes—in his office closet in 1963 without informing authorities, then also inexplicably helped torpedo the HSCA investigation of the JFK case 15 years later.
Conclusion
The WC, as it did so often when convenient, exhibited oceanic apathy regarding the strange post-JFK murder treatment of Connally’s assassination-day shirt and coat. As noted by researcher Murr, “There likewise was no effort undertaken by anyone associated with the Warren Commission to establish just who was responsible for the cleaning and pressing of components of the Governor’s clothing.” Neither the WC or HCSA asked Gonzalez how it was he chose to secretly stash Connally’s crime-day clothes, with bullet holes, in his Washington D.C. for two weeks after the JFK murder. Or why the Secret Service sent the garments to Mrs. Connally, instead of the FBI, when they retrieved the clothes from Gonzalez’ office.
Like so many aspects of the JFK case, the tale of Connally’s shirt and coat is unfathomable and more than deeply suspicious, yet simple bungling cannot be ruled out. But when the tale of Connally’s garments is added up with too many similarly suspicious explanations of events and evidence surrounding the JFK assassination, the weight of the whole JFK murder story shifts. There are simply too many stories akin to the Connally shirt and coat tale for comfort.
What Really Happened?
Of course, at this late date there is no way to verify which account of Mrs. Connally’s is the true version; or if there is another, even truer version to be told. For the record, Connally’s clothes were not cut from his body, but merely removed, and were not sent to her in the mail.
In addition, researcher Murr is dubious that valuables were in the Connally suit breast pocket, post-assassination. The hospital’s records that are extant indicate valuables were removed from Connally’s clothing with the cash being sent on to the hospital cashier.
There is another puzzler: Photos commissioned by researcher Murr show the inside breast pocket of John Connally’s Oxxford Clothes-brand jacket as having been pierced by the same bullet that passed through him.
If there had been a billfold or wallet in that breast pocket it likely would have been pierced by a bullet—and thus would also be important evidence. The bullet hole in the interior right side of Connally’s jacket, showing a hole through the breast pocket.
After Mrs. Connally had the clothes professionally cleaned and pressed, it appears the shirt and suit and other items were then sent to the Texas State Archives, although Murr says this bit of the garment’s itinerary has not been verified.
In any event, on March 30, 1964, the Warren Commission (WC) asked the Secret Service to bring Connally’s jacket and shirt to Washington for examination. By March 1964, nearly five months had passed since the assassination and no investigative body had examined Connally’s clothing. The shirt and jacket arrived at the WC on the suitable date of April 1st.
When the WC asked Governor Connally about the condition of the clothes on April 21, 1964, he responded, “They, the Archives of the State of Texas, asked for the clothing, and I have given the clothing to them. That is where they were sent from, I believe, here, to this Commission.” Researcher Murr is dubious about Connally’s answer, noting the Governor’s lawyerly use of the qualifying word “believe.” However, there are no hard records from what location the garments were sent to the WC.
There is an internal memo that reveals the WC examined the Connally clothes before sending the garments to the FBI. WC staffer Norman Redlich wrote on April 10th to Lee Rankin, “We have examined Governor Connally’s clothing and sent it to the FBI Lab for tests on the question of exit and entry holes.” The WC wanted some evidence to work into its single-bullet theory.
In any event, Robert Frazier, the FBI’s lead firearms and ballistics examiner at the time, told the WC that Connally’s shirt and jacket had been subjected to “cleaning and pressing.” Thus, no trajectories could be divined from the bullet holes in the items. More importantly, the cleaning and pressing of Connally’s shirt and coat were remarkably effective and evidently removed metallic traces from the bullet holes, effectively enough that the technology of the day, spectrographic analysis, could find nothing.[7]
Later the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) would also subject Connally’s assassination-day clothes—including his shirt—to testing and would find traces of copper, iron, and lead.
HSCA Tests
Nearly 15 years after the JFK murder, and after who knows how much handling by Secret Service men, spouses, dry-cleaners, WC staff, Texas Archive staff, and FBI investigators, Connally’s garments would be subjected to even more exacting tests, conducted by the Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas at the behest of the HSCA.[8]
The tests were so sensitive that iron was detected near the bullet holes in Connally’s clothes, from blood that had been deposited in 1963, despite the passage of time and the professional cleaning of years earlier. Yes, evidently Connally did not have “iron poor blood,” and that iron had been detected around the bullet holes in Connally’s clothing, claimed the institute.
Lead was found near the rear bullet hole in Connally’s shirt along with amounts of copper, but considered “trace” or too small be meaningful. However, a curiosity of the 1978 testing is that less copper but more lead was found at the rear bullet hole in Connally’s shirt than from a “back control” sample.
Given that the WC and HSCA storyline is that a copper-jacketed bullet passed through Connally, the finding of trace amounts of lead in the rear hole in the Governor’s clothing is interesting. Copper, in amounts considered meaningful, was found “in the region of the defect in the right front,” of Connally’s suit coat. “The results would indicate that the apparent borderline copper analysis is due to the lining containing some copper. Iron, apparently from blood, was still detectable near the right front defect in the coat, despite dry cleaning,” reported the Institute of Forensic Sciences.
The results of the 1978 testing, as usual in all matters JFK, raise more questions than answers.
The only hole that exhibited copper in more than trace amounts was the “defect” or very small hole in the front of Connally’s jacket, where a bullet exited. But here, a control sample—that is cloth not associated with a bullet strike—first yielded an even larger amount of copper than cloth near a bullet hole. But the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences said the high copper count in the control cloth was “aberrant,” as proved by repeat analyses of other control samples.
You can’t make this stuff up. Test until you get the right results. It should be noted that the HSCA investigation, like the WC investigation, did not have a “defense counsel” who asked probing questions about evidence in question.
Cliff Carter
Cliff Carter, the LBJ aide who put the two bloody sacks of clothing into Congressman’s Gonzalez’s hands on November 22, is also worth pondering. Carter was regarded as a “bagman,” who would collect cash for LBJ’s campaigns, or for other expenses, and handled other dark areas for LBJ.
According to Billy Sol Estes, Carter was also aware of the planning for the murder of Henry Marshall, a U.S. Department of Agriculture investigator who learned of Estes’ illegal scheme to illegally buy certain cotton allotments from smaller farmers. Agriculture agent Marshall was found dead in 1961 of five gunshots from a single-shot bolt-action rifle, and carbon monoxide poisoning to boot, but Texas authorities deemed the death to be a suicide. That ruling stood for decades, until a Grand Jury in 1985 reviewed the case and almost certainly corrected the ruling to murder.
In later years, Estes, who graced the cover of Time magazine 1962, would tell unverifiable tales regarding a clutch of murders of people in LBJ’s orbit.
But for the purposes of this story, the inquiry would be: Did Carter, even within two hours of the JFK hit, and in Parkland hospital, have presence of mind to recognize that controlling evidence could be important to the outcome of the JFK investigation?
Did Carter actually advise Gonzalez to take the two bloody paper sacks containing Connally’s clothes and then to sit tight until further instructions were received? Thus, Gonzalez became an unwitting “cut out” man in the sequestering of primary evidence.
Indeed, was “controlling the evidence” second nature for Carter, after having been involved in various and serious LBJ scrapes with the law, up to and including murder? In other words, gain control over evidence first and always in every untoward event, then later determine if there are advantages to withholding or releasing evidence?
Moreover, Mrs. Connally’s tale about wanting the assassination-day shirt and suit-jacket back to retrieve a wallet also does not hold water. First, hospital records indicate Connally’s money and valuables were removed from his clothing. Secondly, if the hospital staff had missed a wallet, and left it in a suit jacket breast pocket, why did not Mrs. Connally ask for the wallet back and not bloodied clothes?
At this late date, mind-reading Carter and divining who may have given instructions to Mrs. Connally or Gonzalez is a parlor game. Back in 1964 no one at the WC grilled Mrs. Connally, Carter, or Gonzalez about the inexplicable treatment of the bloodied sacks of clothing. Carter died in 1971, taking whatever secrets he had with him.
Back to Gonzalez
Of course, the JFK saga contains an unlimited amount of coincidences and many, many unusual turns of events.
In 1976, the U.S House voted 280–65, to establish the Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in order to investigate the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. A vote that followed the national screening of the Zapruder film on the TV show Good Night America in 1975. The chairman of the HSCA was outgoing Congressman Thomas Downing of Virginia, who harbored deep suspicions about the JFK case. And he hired a tough, well-regarded Philadelphia District Attorney, one Richard Sprague, as HSCA Chief Counsel.
But Downing would soon retire, and he turned over the reins to Gonzalez—yes, the very same Gonzalez who 13 years prior had hand-carried Connally’s assassination-day clothes to his closet in Washington, where they mysteriously sat for two weeks.
At first, the ascendance of Gonzalez was comforting to JFK researchers, as he also seemed dubious about the WC conclusions and the nature of the JFK case. The irony of what was to follow is almost cosmic.
Veteran JFK researcher Jim DiEugenio interviewed Downing in his office in Newport News back in the 1990s. The former congressman showed DiEugenio the ballot that Gonzalez submitted for Chief Counsel in September of 1976 and that Sprague’s nomination had been made by Gonzalez himself.
So, it appeared in late 1976 that the HSCA has a no-nonsense and smart chief counsel, backed by a solid chairman (the question of Connally’s clothes having been long forgotten).
Yet as JFK researchers know, as soon as Sprague began to probe connections between Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA, and connections between the Miami office of the CIA and anti-Castro Cuban exiles, stories began appearing in influential print publications questioning Sprague’s ethics and work history back in Philadelphia.
Based on some rather picayune bureaucratic and procedural tensions, HSCA Chairman Gonzalez began attacking Sprague publicly, called him a “rattlesnake,” and loudly roasted him for misconduct and mismanagement. Sprague’s rather small and iffy budget was scrutinized and challenged and the Philly DA was accused of not following the Committee’s directions.
Gonzales ultimately tried to fire Sprague, but on such flimsy grounds that the full committee overruled the firing. Nevertheless, the well was poisoned, and the erstwhile Philly DA did leave his post when he was told his departure was a condition of the HSCA obtaining future funding.
Even Gaeton Fonzi, the superb JFK researcher who was a staffer on the HSCA under Sprague, and who authored the book, The Last Investigation, strained to explain Gonzalez’ behavior, offering little more insight than Gonzalez was “flying off the handle.”
To this day, a good explanation of Chairman Gonzalez’ behavior at HSCA—on the surface, inexplicable—has not been rendered. The veteran researcher DiEugenio does offer up one possible explanation in his book The Assassinations: That there were moles planted on the HSCA to exacerbate the antagonism between Sprague and Gonzalez and one issue was Gonzalez and his curious role in the post-JFKA sojourns of Connally’s clothes.
For those familiar with the history of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his 1969 investigation of the JFKA, the possibility of moles or CIA-plants on the HSCA staff is not hard to believe—Garrison’s staff was infested with national security state operatives, some of whom actually leaked information to defense counsel for Clay Shaw, the CIA operative who Garrison suspected played a role in handling Lee Harvey Oswald.
After both Sprague and Gonzalez left the HSCA, the new chairman was the diffident Congressman Louis Stokes of Ohio, who brought in Robert Blakey, a US Justice Department mafia prosecutor, as HSCA chief counsel.
Blakey was entirely the wrong man for the job: an earnest civil servant and mob-hunter who, at that time, believed in, and vowed cooperation with, the CIA—the very agency, due to its extensive ties to anti-Castro Cubans and hostile relations with JFK, that was and is most suspect in regards to the JFKA.
As I said, you can’t make this stuff up.
Thus Gonzalez, who inexplicably kept assassination-day evidence—Connally’s clothes—in his office closet in 1963 without informing authorities, then also inexplicably helped torpedo the HSCA investigation of the JFK case 15 years later.
Conclusion
The WC, as it did so often when convenient, exhibited oceanic apathy regarding the strange post-JFK murder treatment of Connally’s assassination-day shirt and coat. As noted by researcher Murr, “There likewise was no effort undertaken by anyone associated with the Warren Commission to establish just who was responsible for the cleaning and pressing of components of the Governor’s clothing.” Neither the WC or HCSA asked Gonzalez how it was he chose to secretly stash Connally’s crime-day clothes, with bullet holes, in his Washington D.C. for two weeks after the JFK murder. Or why the Secret Service sent the garments to Mrs. Connally, instead of the FBI, when they retrieved the clothes from Gonzalez’ office.
Like so many aspects of the JFK case, the tale of Connally’s shirt and coat is unfathomable and more than deeply suspicious, yet simple bungling cannot be ruled out. But when the tale of Connally’s garments is added up with too many similarly suspicious explanations of events and evidence surrounding the JFK assassination, the weight of the whole JFK murder story shifts. There are simply too many stories akin to the Connally shirt and coat tale for comfort.
[1] Details of Governor Connally’s Damaged Clothing.
[2] Warren Commission, Volume VI: Ruth Jeanette Standridge.
[3] Forgive My Grief, Volume II.
[4] Ibid.
[5] November 25, 1966, Life, “A Matter of Reasonable Doubt.”.
[6] “From Love Field: our final hours with President John F. Kennedy,” 2003, Nellie Connally.
[7] Warren Commission, Volume III: Robert A Frazier.
[8] See “Soft X-ray and Energy-Dispersive X-ray Analyses of Clothing,” Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences, 2/1/78, Vol. 7, HSCA.