James Tague: Third man injured in the shooting of JFK
1936-2014
JAMES Tague, who has died at the age of 77, was a car salesman turned author and the third man injured in the shooting of President John Kennedy and Governor John Connally on November 22 1963.
On the day of the presidential assassination in Dallas, Texas, Tague, a 27-year-old local, was on his way to lunch with a “cute redhead” when he came to a halt amid the heavy traffic on Dealey Plaza. Unaware of the approaching cavalcade, he got out of his car and stood at the south kerb of Main Street to survey the crowd. It was then that he saw the president’s limousine turn down Elm Street. The first shot came a moment later.
Like many others who later described the event, Tague initially mistook the sound for a firecracker. When a further two rifle shots followed, however, the former US airman felt something sting him in the face and immediately took cover.
After a few seconds he felt it was safe to emerge and approached a deputy sheriff, Eddie “Buddy” Walthers. “You have blood there on your cheek,” Walthers told him.
The two men examined the surrounding area and found a clear scar in the road, which suggested the impact of a bullet. They concluded that debris from the shot must have hit Tague as it ricocheted off the kerb, missing Kennedy’s car entirely. Yet despite Tague’s statement to the police that same day, the official FBI report claimed that all three bullets had found their mark, with the first and third striking the president and the second injuring Connally.
A subsequent article by Jim Lehrer in the Dallas Times Herald in June 1964 attracted the notice of the Warren Commission, however, and Tague and Walthers were summoned to give their version of the day’s events.
Tague’s testimony forced the FBI to adopt a new stance. In order to account for all the wounds to Kennedy and Connally, without revising the total number of shots fired, it suggested that one bullet had injured both men.
This “single bullet” theory, proposed by commission counsel Arlen Specter, struck Tague as utterly implausible and propelled him on what he termed a “50-year hunt for the truth”.
His initial findings were selfpublished in 2003, when the author was seriously ill with kidney trouble, under the title Truth Withheld: Why We Will Never Know the Truth About the JFK Assassination. But when Tague recovered unexpectedly, he decided that he was “on this earth for a purpose” and started a new book that he promised would address outstanding questions from that day in 1963.
LBJ and the Kennedy Killing, published last year, proposed that the president was the target of a team of hit men organised at the behest of FBI director J Edgar Hoover and the then vice-president, Lyndon Johnson.
In pinning the blame on Johnson, Tague’s theory chimed with the likes of former Nixon aide Roger Stone, as well as Oliver Barr McClellan in his bestselling 2003 book, Blood, Money & Power. There were, Tague alleged, at least three shooters — perhaps as many as five — who fled the scene with the aid of several accomplices disguised as Secret Service agents.
Lee Harvey Oswald was a “patsy”, although it was also possible that he was not entirely innocent of involvement. “But the complete mechanics of the killing I will leave to others. I simply know from my direct involvement that our president was killed by very powerful people,” the book concluded.
Tague started an eBay store consisting of media related to the Dallas shooting. He is survived by four children.