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Cabell was riding beside Congressman Ray Roberts. She said he
acknowledged smelling gunpowder too.
    Former senator Ralph Yarborough also smelled gunpowder as the car
carrying him and Lyndon Johnson drove through the plaza. Yarborough, a
former Army infantry officer and an avid hunter, also failed to recognize
the sound of the first shot. He told this author:
    I thought, "Was that a bomb thrown?" and then the other shots were
fired. And the motorcade, which had slowed to a stop, took off. A
second or two later, I smelled gunpowder. I always thought that was
strange because, being familiar with firearms, I never could see how I
could smell the powder from a rifle high in that building.
    It does seem strange that people would smell powder from a shot fired
more than sixty feet in the air and behind them. However, it's not so
strange, if a shot were fired on top of the Grassy Knoll less than twelve
feet in elevation with a breeze from the north to carry smoke to street
level.
    One of the strangest omissions in the subsequent investigation by federal
authorities concerns a Navy commander who was assigned to film major
events involving President Kennedy. In early 1963, Thomas Atkins was
assigned as an official photographer for the Kennedy White House. As such, he traveled to Texas with Kennedy and was photographing the
motorcade with a quality camera, a 16 mm Arriflex S.

    He was riding six cars behind Kennedy and filming as the motorcade
moved through Dealey Plaza.
    In a 1977 article, Atkins said the car he was in had just turned onto
Houston Street and was facing the Texas School Book Depository, and
    .. . Kennedy's car had just made the left turn heading toward the
freeway entrance. Although I did not look up at the building, I could
hear everything quite clearly. . . . The shots came from below and off
to the right side from where I was [the location of the Grassy Knoll]... .
I never thought the shots came from above. They did not sound like
shots coming from anything higher than street level.
    After returning to Washington on Air Force Two, Atkins assembled his
film into a movie he entitled The Last Two Davs. That film was described
as "terribly damaging to the Warren Commission finding that Lee Harvey
Oswald was the lone assassin." Perhaps this explains why neither Atkins's
testimony nor his film were studied by either of the federal panels investigating the assassination. Atkins said in 1977: "It's something I've always
wondered about. Why didn't they ask me what I knew? I not only was on
the White House staff, I was then, and still am, a photographer with a
pretty keen visual sense."
    Obviously, the federal authorities didn't want to hear from a man with
a "keen visual sense" and strong credentials who might have told them
things they did not want to hear.
    But if the stories of the motorcade witnesses differed from the later
official version of the assassination, that was nothing compared to the
stories to come from the crowd of bystanders.
    I saw a man fire from behind the wooden fence.
    -Assassination witness Jean Hill
     
The Crowd
    The crowd of witnesses along the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza
saw many things that differed from the later official version.
    Even before the motorcade arrived, men with rifles were seen by people
in downtown Dallas.
    Shortly before noon, Phillip B. Hathaway and coworker John Lawrence
were walking on Akard Street toward Main to get an observation spot for
the motorcade when Hathaway saw a man carrying a rifle in a gun case.
He described the man as very tall, six-foot-five or more, weighing about 250 pounds and thick in the chest. The man was in his early thirties with
"dirty blond hair worn in a crewcut" and was wearing a gray business
suit. Hathaway said the case was made of leather and cloth and was not
limp, but obviously contained .a rifle.

    He remarked to Lawrence that it must be a Secret Service man.
    Lawrence also saw the big blond