Car salesman from
Dallas, Tx, who on
November 22, 1963 became the unwitting
cause of a great many
headaches.
Tague had not initially intended to watch President Kennedy's
procession through Dallas, but was caught in traffic just outside Dealey Plaza
on his way to a lunch date with his fiancée; and so was standing
underneath the Triple Underpass at the time of the assassination. During the
time that shots were being fired, Tague felt a sting on his cheek, and a patrol
officer taking witness statements shortly afterward noticed blood there. It
was eventually determined that he had probably been hit by a piece of shrapnel
thrown up when a bullet ricocheted from the pavement about 15 feet from where he
was standing.
The Warren Report, written by the commission set up to investigate the events
of Nov. 22, found that three bullets had been fired: one missed the motorcade
completely and was the probable cause of Tague's injury, one was the fatal head
shot which killed the President, and one - the so-called "Magic Bullet" - caused all seven of the remaining wounds to the President and
Texas Gov. John Connally. However, close examination of the Zapruder film
in conjunction with the testimony given by both Tague and the Governor to the
Warren Commission paints a different picture.
Note: the notation ZXXX used below refers to frame XXX of the Zapruder
film.
The film shows that the wound to the Governor's chest - one of those caused by
the "magic bullet" - was sustained about Z223/224. Connally's testimony implies
that this wound was caused by the second bullet to be fired, making the
first bullet the miss. However, allowing for the two-and-a-bit seconds which it
takes to cycle the bolt on the rifle supposedly used by Lee Harvey Oswald,
this first shot cannot have occurred any later than about Z180. In order for a
shot fired at this time to have caused the Tague wounding, it would have had to
miss the Presidential limousine by a mile, not to mention the fact that at this
time the view of the car from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book
Depository would have been obscured by the foliage of the evergreen oaks that
stand in front of the building, and as so it is highly unlikely that a gunman
standing there would have fired a shot at this time anyway.
It is therefore highly unlikely that the first shot heard by Connally was the
one responsible for the injury to Tague. Couple this with Tague's own statement
that he heard at least one shot before the one which caused his injury,
and we have a problem.
Numerous theories have been put forward as to how the evidence surrounding the
wounding of James Tague can be reconciled with the findings of the Warren
Report, but most of them utterly fail to hold water. In the opinion of many
researchers, this is some of the best evidence - better even than the supposedly
bizarre trajectory of the "magic bullet", which (as I have explained in my
writeup under Magic Bullet Theory) is really not all that bizarre - that a
fourth shot was fired that day in Dealey Plaza; and due to the timing problems
associated with cycling the bolt on Oswald's rifle, the presence of a fourth
shot almost certainly implies the presence of a second gunman.
Tague's WC Testimony:
http://www.jfk-assassination.de/WCH/tague.html
Connally's WC Testimony:
http://www.jfk-assassination.de/WCH/connally_j.html
The Wounding of James Tague: Evidence for a Second Gunman in the JFK
Assassination:
http://ourworld-top.cs.com/mikegriffith1/id82.htm