Gerald
“Jerry” O’Rourke
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Subject:
Ex-Agent Refuses to Toe Party Line on JFK Slaying
Ex-agent
refuses to toe party line on JFK slaying
By
Ellen Miller, Special To The News
November
20, 2003
GRAND
JUNCTION - Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone when he killed
President
John F. Kennedy, a retired agent said Wednesday, and the
president
died because Secret Service agents failed at their jobs.
"Officially,
the answer to Oswald when somebody asks - because we
were
ordered to say it - is that the Warren Commission found that he
acted
alone," retired agent Jerry O'Rourke said. "But was
there more
than
one gunman? Yes, personally I believe so. And my personal
opinion
about Jack Ruby is that he was paid to kill Oswald."
O'Rourke
grew up in Telluride and attended Western State and Regis
colleges,
then spent 22 years in the Secret Service. Now retired and
back
home, he spoke Wednesday to the downtown Grand Junction Rotary
Club.
O'Rourke
said his group of agents, about 10 of them, had protected
Kennedy
the morning of Nov. 22, 1963, at a breakfast speech in Fort
Worth.
Then the group left by air for Austin, the next stop planned
for
the president's Texas tour.
"We
got the word (of the assassination) in the air, and we didn't
believe
it at first," he said. "We were joking. But later, most
of
the
agents had tears in their eyes. Agents believed in Kennedy, and
we
knew we failed our job in Dallas."
After
his White House tour ended during Johnson's presidency,
O'Rourke
spent a year in the Secret Service intelligence division,
which
offered him glimpses into the investigation of Kennedy's death.
Those
glimpses, and the accounts of other agents, have convinced
O'Rourke
that Oswald didn't act alone. He cited several reasons:
.
Kennedy had a number of enemies, any of whom could have plotted
against
him. They included Southerners angered by his insistence on
civil
rights; organized crime; labor unions unhappy with
investigations
of them by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy; Cuban
dissidents
angry over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion; and FBI
Director
J. Edgar Hoover.
.
The shots were impossible to make. O'Rourke learned to shoot as a
boy
and trained as a marksman in the military. He said his visits to
Oswald's
perch at the Texas Book Depository convince him that no one
could
have fired a rifle three times so quickly, hitting the
president
and Texas Gov. John Connolly.
.
The trajectory of one of the shots could not have been made from
a
gunman
on the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. The shot
entered
Kennedy's body at his lower back and traveled up, to exit
near
his throat.
.
The circumstances of the autopsy were irregular. Texas law
requires
autopsies
to be done in state, but agents, acting on the orders of
White
House, took Kennedy's body back to Washington, D.C. The autopsy
was
performed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center under secrecy that
prevails
to this day.
.
Evidence was destroyed. O'Rourke said that on the day of the
assassination,
one agent was ordered to clean out the cars used in
the
motorcade, getting rid of blood and other evidence. The agent
told
O'Rourke that he found a piece of skull, asked the White House
doctor
what to do with it, and was told to destroy it.
.
Instructions were given to lie. The agent in charge of motorcade
protection
told O'Rourke that he was told by the Warren Commission
during
his testimony that he did not hear a fourth shot and he did
not
see someone running across the grassy knoll. But the agent
insisted
that his account was accurate.
.
Evidence about the shots is in conflict. An open microphone on a
motorcycle
in the motorcade picked up four shots, not three.
"In
my opinion, Hoover wanted the commission to find that Oswald
acted
alone," O'Rourke said. "The complete file won't be
released
until
2027, and the reason for that is most of us will be dead by
then."
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