In the hours after the Kennedy assassination, after Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit and was identified as the president's assassin, a Secret Service officer named Mike Howard was dispatched to Oswald's apartment. Howard found a little green address book, and on its 17th page under the heading "I WILL KILL" Oswald listed four men: an FBI agent named James Hosty; a right-wing general, Edwin Walker; and Vice President Richard Nixon. At the top of the list was the governor of Texas, John Connally. Through Connally's name, Oswald had drawn a dagger, with blood drops dripping downward.
Special Agent Howard turned the address book over to the FBI and, ultimately, to the Warren Commission. Only some time later did he learn that the list with its hugely important insight into the killer's motive had been torn out of the book.
I didn't hear about Howard until after I published my book "The Accidental Victim" three years ago on the 50th anniversary of the assassination. In it I argue a circumstantial case that it was Connally, not John F. Kennedy, who was Oswald's target in Dallas. It is the story of a smoldering grudge in which Oswald came to associate Connally with all the setbacks in his disastrous, hopeless life. |