JFK Windshield Bullet-Hole Theory: The FBI Memo and the Evidence

When the US government released thousands of John F. Kennedy assassination records in late 2017, one FBI memo went viral. Posts claimed a single paragraph proved Kennedy was shot from the front, through his limousine's windshield, and that the official story of a lone gunman firing from behind was a lie. The memo is real. What it records, however, is a speech by a far-right political activist in Florida, not the result of any investigation.

The windshield itself is a long-running part of assassination debates, mainly through the work of researcher Douglas P. Horne. This page explains what the memo says, what Horne and the witnesses he relies on claim, what official investigations concluded about the glass, and how to weigh the competing accounts.

What the 1964 FBI memo actually says

The document comes from the FBI's Tampa office and is dated early 1964. It reports on a dinner speech given on 16 January 1964 in St. Petersburg, Florida, by Oren Fenton Potito, to an audience of about 41 people. An informant passed an account of the evening to two FBI agents the next day.

The memo identifies Potito as a former national organiser of the National States Rights Party, a white-supremacist and segregationist group. In his talk he described Jack Ruby as a long-time Communist Party member and claimed that connection linked Ruby to Lee Harvey Oswald. He then said a "Surgeon General's report" showed the first bullet entered the President's throat from the front, fired from the overpass ahead of the car. To support this, he claimed there was a bullet hole in the windshield.

In other words, the memo is the FBI noting what a political speaker told a dinner audience. It is not an FBI finding. No "Surgeon General's report" reaching that conclusion is known to exist in the official record. The Kennedy autopsy was carried out by Navy pathologists at Bethesda Naval Hospital, who concluded the throat wound was an exit wound, a conclusion later disputed by critics but never attributed to the Surgeon General. The memo is worth reading as a snapshot of the rumours circulating weeks after the killing, not as proof of them.

The windshield theory and its witnesses

The fuller case for a frontal shot through the glass was set out by Douglas P. Horne in a 2012 essay on LewRockwell.com, which the viral 2017 posts reproduced. Horne served on the staff of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s as Chief Analyst for Military Records, and later wrote the five-volume Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.

Horne lists six people who reported seeing a hole or similar damage in the windshield:

• Stavis Ellis and H. R. Freeman, Dallas motorcycle officers, who later told interviewers they saw a hole at Parkland Hospital. Their accounts were published in David Lifton's 1980 book Best Evidence.
• Richard Dudman, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, who wrote in The New Republic in December 1963 that he and others noticed a hole but could not get close enough to tell which side had been struck.
• Evalea Glanges, then a medical student, who described a clean hole made from the front in interviews decades later.
• George Whitaker Sr., a Ford manager in Detroit, who told attorney Doug Weldon in 1993 that he saw the original windshield with a hole in it at the Rouge plant and that it was later scrapped. Weldon's account appeared in the anthology Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000).
• Charles Taylor Jr., a Secret Service agent, whose report of 27 November 1963 mentioned a small hole in the windshield from which fragments were removed. In a 1976 affidavit for the House Select Committee on Assassinations he said the word "hole" had been a mistake and that he had seen cracks.

Horne argues that the windshield now held as evidence was substituted, and that Taylor's change of statement was coerced. These are his interpretations. They rely mainly on recollections given many years after the event, and none of them has been confirmed by documents showing a switch.

"The Smoking Guns" and the History Channel episodes

Horne's newest evidence came from a television documentary. British producer Nigel Turner's series The Men Who Killed Kennedy added three episodes in 2003, including one called "The Smoking Guns". Horne says roughly two seconds of black-and-white newsreel footage in that episode, filmed as the car stood outside Parkland Hospital, shows a hole in the glass. By his own account, it can only be seen frame by frame on the original DVD and a large high-definition screen, and he called for independent experts to analyse the original film.

Another of the 2003 episodes, "The Guilty Men", accused Lyndon Johnson of involvement in the assassination. After protests from Johnson's family and former aides, including Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers, and requests for an independent review from former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the History Channel asked three historians, Robert Dallek, Stanley Kutler and Thomas Sugrue, to examine the programme. The new episodes were then withdrawn from broadcast. Horne sees that decision as censorship designed to bury the windshield footage. The public record shows the controversy centred on the accusations against Johnson.

Horne also cites earlier photographs, especially pictures taken by AP photographer James Altgens on Elm Street, which some viewers believe show a hole near the rear-view mirror. Versions appear in books such as The Torch Is Passed (1964), Robert Groden's The Killing of a President and Richard Trask's Pictures of the Pain. Horne himself admits some of these reproductions are too poor to settle the question.

What official investigations found about the glass

The Warren Commission examined the limousine's windshield in 1964. FBI experts found a small pattern of cracks on the outer layer of the glass, with a smear of lead residue on the inside surface directly behind it. The windshield had not been pierced, and the inner layer was intact.

FBI firearms examiner Robert Frazier testified that the glass had been struck from the inside. Laminated windshields bend outward when hit from within, stretching the outer layer so it cracks in a spoke-like pattern. He concluded that a bullet fragment travelling at fairly high speed, most likely from the shot that struck the President's head, had hit the glass from inside the car. Metal residue on the glass was similar in composition to fragments found in the car, though experts could not prove they came from the same bullet.

The windshield was kept as Commission Exhibit 351 and is held today at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The Commission concluded that Oswald fired all the shots from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, behind the motorcade.

In 1979 the House Select Committee on Assassinations agreed that Oswald fired the shots that hit Kennedy, from behind. Mainly on the basis of an acoustic analysis of a police radio recording, it also concluded Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy" and that a second gunman probably fired and missed. A National Academy of Sciences panel later disputed that acoustic evidence. The committee did not conclude that any shot came through the windshield.

How to weigh the competing accounts

Several points help when reading claims like these:

• Who is speaking? The viral memo records a partisan speaker's assertions. An FBI file noting a claim is not the FBI endorsing it.
• When was it said? Several windshield witnesses described what they saw decades later. Memory is honest but changeable, especially for chaotic scenes.
• What does physical evidence show? The preserved windshield shows cracks consistent with an impact from inside, not a through-and-through hole. Arguments that it was replaced need documentary proof of the switch.
• Can the claim be tested? Horne's call for an independent scan of the original newsreel film is a reasonable one. Until that is done, a two-second clip viewed on a home television is suggestive at best.

Doubts about the official account are not unreasonable. Polls have long shown that most Americans believe more than one person was involved, and the government's slow release of records fed that suspicion. But doubt about the overall story does not turn every individual claim into fact.

Reading the records yourself

The National Archives publishes the released JFK files online, including the memo above, and the Warren Commission and House Select Committee reports are freely available. Comparing primary documents with what is said about them is the best protection against misleading headlines, whichever side they come from.

Sources: National Archives: FBI memo on Oren Potito speech, 1964 (JFK release) · Warren Commission Report, chapter 3 · DocsTeach (National Archives): Windshield from President Kennedy's limousine, CE 351 · House Select Committee on Assassinations: summary of findings · CBS News/AP: Historians to settle LBJ-JFK flap (2004) · Douglas P. Horne, LewRockwell.com (2012) · Infographic: Reuters