I recently saw a Discovery Channel program “JFK: Inside the Target Car,” first broadcast in November 2008. It contains some very interesting material.

The program set up a simulation in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, where the assassination took place, using actors, a replica of Kennedy’s presidential limousine, and a video of the Zapruder film to recreate the exact positions of the presidential limousine, its occupants, and a gunman firing from the “grassy knoll,” a spot from where many conspiracy theorists believe a second gunman fired. The grassy knoll is to the front and the right of where the limousine was when the shots that hit President Kennedy were fired.

Looking from the grassy knoll, at the point when the fatal shot was fired, President Kennedy was slumped over, cradled in his wife’s arms, after having been wounded by the first shot. It is perfectly clear, seeing the positions of the actors, that if the shot that killed Kennedy had been fired from the grassy knoll, it would have killed or severely wounded Mrs. Kennedy because she was positioned directly behind her husband.

As we all know, none of the bullets struck Mrs. Kennedy, so the fatal shot could not have come from the grassy knoll. Nor did the first shot that struck President Kennedy come from that direction. It struck him in the upper back and exited the front of his throat. Given the location of the entrance and exit wounds, it could have only come from the back and above – the direction of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald was.

As Vincent Bugliosi writes in Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy:

We know that among other evidence, a gunman was seen in the sixth-floor window [of the Depository], Oswald’s finger and palm prints were found on boxes and a large bag in the sniper’s nest, and his rifle, as well as expended cartridge casings from the rifle, were found on the sixth floor.

Bugliosi adds:

Every one of the pathologists who examined the president’s wounds and/or photographs and X-rays of the wounds … concluded that there was no entrance wound to the front or right front of the president’s body, thereby eliminating not only the grassy knoll as the source of the bullets but also any other position to the president’s front.

On November 19, Washington Post reporter Charles Krause wrote an account of what happened when he was shot and wounded while accompanying U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan to Jonestown, Guyana in 1978. Ryan’s visit prompted Jonestown leader Jim Jones to murder Ryan and others in his party as well as 909 Jonestown residents, who died in a revolutionary “mass suicide.”

Krause recalls his encounter at that time with Mark Lane, a lawyer for Jonestown and author of one of the most influential conspiracy theory books on the Kennedy assassination, Rush to Judgment. Lane had accompanied Ryan, Krause and others in their visit to Jonestown, but escaped the carnage.

Krause writes:

A few days after the killings, Lane asked me if I had eaten the cheese sandwiches served to us that day before we left for the airstrip where I was wounded and Ryan was murdered. When I said yes, I had eaten the sandwiches, Lane said he had not – because he’d been told they were poisoned. Why hadn’t he told Ryan and the rest of us, I asked. There was no response.

Lane’s ethical lapses are also evident in Rush to Judgment. Vincent Bugliosi writes, in Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, “if the reader checks Lane’s assertions against the evidence produced by the [Warren] Commission … he or she will find that Lane’s contentions are either distortions or outright fabrications.”

Bugliosi notes that Lane says that none of the doctors who treated Kennedy in Dallas observed a bullet entry wound in the back of his head. This would seem to indicate that Oswald, who was behind Kennedy, could not have been the assassin. But Bugliosi says the reason the doctors saw no entry wound is that they did not turn over Kennedy’s body to look at the back of his head. Their concern was treating his visible injuries to try to save his life.

It sounds like it’s not wise to trust either a cheese sandwich served by Lane’s employers or a book produced by him.

In a related historical footnote, when Vasili Mitrokhin, senior archivist for the KGB’s First Chief Directorate, defected to the United Kingdom in 1992 with thousands of transcribed summaries of KGB documents, he revealed the KGB had sent Lane, through an intermediary, $2000 to support his work on Rush to Judgment. Lane says he did not know these funds had come from the KGB, although the KGB suspected he might have guessed.