Postscript to Warren
SIR,—Those who have not had the advantage of reading the Warren Report might be forgiven for supposing that Mr R. A. Cline (January 27) would not mislead them as to its contents. They need to be warned that Mr Cline is not to be relied upon in this matter. He discusses the question, 'whether
Oswald fired once, so that the bullet must have passed through the President and, unretarded by its course through his body, have reached and wounded Governor Connally sitting in front, or whether Se fired twice.' He goes on, 'The fact that a bullet can pass ihrough a body with such velocity may come as a surprise to many who are not seeking weapons to destroy Anglo-American understanding.' It might, indeed, and would certainly surprise the members of the Warren Commission. For the conclusion stated in the report is that the velocity of the bullet in question was retarded. The commission thought that between entry and exit the speed would drop by at least four hundred feet per second, and that the bullet would emerge wobbling, with the consequence that its speed would be still further reduced before it struck Governor Connally. Indeed one of the argu- ments used in the report for the view that the bullet which struck Governor Connally had previously passed through the President was that the Governor's wounds could not have been caused by a bullet whose velocity had not been retarded.
I am not entirely happy that Mr Cline may not be under an even more serious misapprehension as to
the contents of the report, for he seems, in the pas-
sage quoted, to be implying that the commission thought that Oswald fired once; elsewhere he talks of 'the Warren finding that a single bullet was fired.' There was, of course, no such finding, but it may be that Mr Cline knows this. But before he causes any more confusion would he please check his refer- ences with a little more care?
[R. A. Cline writes: Harsh words seem to be de rigueur on the Kennedy assassination, especially in academic quarters. The record must speak for itself. The Warren Report at page 91: 'after the examining doctors expressed the thought that a bullet would have lost very little velocity in passing through the soft tissue of the neck, wound ballistics experts con- ducted tests to measure the exit velocity of the bullet . . . The entrance velocity of the bullet fired from the rifle averaged 1,904 feet per second after it had travelled (sic) 180 feet. The exit velocity aver- aged 1,772-1,798 feet per second.' And at page 107 some other experiments showed a loss of 265 feet per second, not 400 feet. ('The reduction in velocity of a bullet passing through the Governor's body,' not the President's). I agree that the bullet was found to have lost some velocity in passing through the President, but nothing very much. Perhaps I should have written 'scarcely retarded,' but the difference hardly warrants such extreme castigation. Surely it was clear that I was referring to the con- troversial question whether a single bullet hit both the President and the Governor or whether each was hit by a separate one, not to the whole Assassina- tion episode.]
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