Gary Mack and the evolution of a JFK conspiracy theorist
A noted brawler in the rough-and-tumble arena of assassination conspiracy in the 1970s and ’80s, Sixth Floor Museum curator Gary Mack now stands as a thoughtful voice of reason in the endless debate over what really happened at Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963.
Almost 50 years after President John F. Kennedy’s murder, the cacophony continues among conspiracy researchers, their numbers soaring thanks to the enormous accumulation of fact and fiction on the Internet.
Mack understands the fever to prove a theory true, to fit a piece of information into the mosaic. He burned with it.
And then, in the early 1990s, he had a revelation.
It was Mack, working with Jack White, a friend and skilled darkroom technician, who discovered “Badge Man” in an enlargement of a Polaroid photo of the grassy knoll taken by Mary Ann Moorman as the presidential motorcade rolled past the Texas School Book Depository. “Badge Man,” Mack maintained, appeared to be a second gunman.
In the darkroom, White changed the exposure a half step at a time and finally “we could make out a person in the classic shooting position, and he had a highlight on his chest that looked like a badge and an insignia on his shoulder,” Mack said.
White studied the photo further and noticed “a light area,” Mack said, “and he printed it in such a way to bring out the details, and it turned out it looked like a person. It looked like Gordon Arnold.”
Arnold, a soldier at the time, said he was on the grassy knoll with a movie camera, looking toward the approaching motorcade when he heard two shots fired from behind him. He dived to the ground and stayed there until the shooting stopped.
But no other photo of the grassy knoll appeared to include “Badge Man.”
“The bottom line for that picture, when you see the actual photograph, it is very, very convincing,” Mack said. “Jack White and I restaged the photo, and when you put a guy in that [shooting] position, it matches perfectly. But it only exists in [Moorman’s] picture. It’s either some sort of anomaly or they really are people.”
Mack was also at the center of a second piece of evidence that for a time seemed to offer scientific proof of a second gunman.
The old Gary Mack might be disappointed to hear himself lay out the facts that say Oswald killed the president. But he doesn’t completely back away from the possibility of a conspiracy.
“I’m personally convinced there’s more than just Oswald involved,” Mack said, “but I can’t prove it and neither can anyone else.”
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