Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

 I mentioned that LIFE magazine did not include the infamous Frame 313 of the Zapruder film in its display on November 29, 1963: the fatal head shot. But, the fact is: they also did not mention the fatal head shot. Their narrative said that JFK was hit behind the sign, and then Connally was hit with a separate shot after that. And that's all they said about the shots. They mentioned nothing about JFK being shot again after an interval of time. They just said that after a while he collapsed into his wife. 

And in the frames they published- in the way they published them- it's hard to tell that anything else happened to him. And it was obviously their intent to avoid stating or implying that he was shot again.

Now, why did they do that? Was it because they were afraid they would run out of shots? They knew already that there were just 3 bullet cartridges on the 6th floor. So, they knew that the total number of shots could not exceed three. They only mentioned two, and I think that at that stage, they didn't want to commit themselves about the third shot. They wanted to leave their options open. They wanted to wait and see how the rest of the story was going to evolve. 

And I think it attests to that red splotch of 313 not being there. Because: if it were there, they would have known that a shot happened, and it would be futile to deny it. So, they would have admitted it and published it. 

Another weird thing is that they mentioned that the film shows that JFK was smiling and waving at the crowd before he passed behind the sign and got shot. But, they didn't publish any frame of him smiling and waving at the crowd.  Not a one. So, why the heck not?

It's because they had it, but it wasn't in the right form for them to use. It took a while to make it suitable. It was a picture in which he was smiling and waving high on the hill, and then he stopped smiling and waving- before he got to the sign. They didn't want that to be the story. They wanted it that he smiled and waved until he got to the sign, and then everything happened behind the sign. But, by October 1964, they had the frame reconditioned to represent what they wanted. 

So, this is the frame they published in October 1964. They didn't publish it in November 1963 because it took a long time to build this from disparate elements, rather like Mr. Potato Man. And this really is a ridiculous image. That's the top of the hill there. Those people at the top of the frame are on Houston  Street. This has got everything compacted. It's all squeezed together. There is no way that sign would intrude on an image of the top of Dealey Plaza.  They messed with this severely, but they didn't do it in November 1963. But, they had it ready by October 1964, and in it went.