Hidden in Plain Sight
Did a Secret Service Agent Accidentally Shoot JFK?
By Bonar Menninger
In early 1989, I was working as a business reporter in Washington, D.C., and interviewing a private investigator for a story about his company. At the end of our conversation, he casually mentioned he’d done some research into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
“Oh yeah?” I said, in an ironic, indifferent way. “So who killed him?” He said: “Well, I think this gunsmith in Baltimore, a guy named Howard Donahue, figured it out.” The private eye showed me a magazine article from 1977 and as I read it, my skepticism began to fade. Within a week, I was heading to nearby Towson, Maryland, to meet Donahue in person.
Donahue’s Dealey Plaza odyssey began 21 years earlier. The World War II veteran was a firearms specialist who’d testified as an expert witness in multiple shooting cases. He was also a well-known marksman. That’s why he’d been recruited to take part in a CBS News reenactment of the shooting in the spring of 1967.
The network wanted to know if Lee Harvey Oswald’s Italian military-surplus, bolt-action rifle really could have been fired three times with two hits on a moving target in less than six seconds. Donahue proved that it could. Of the 11 shooters participating in the experiment…
