The Assassination of William Greer

by DALE K. MYERS

In today’s Tyrone Times of Northern Ireland, writer Mark Rainey asks “Did Stewartstown native kill JFK?”

Rainey’s rhetorical question refers to William Robert Greer, a farmer's son from Stewartstown in County Tyrone, who immigrated to America in 1929, and who has (thanks to the Internet) become the subject of the most ridiculous conspiracy theory on either side of the Atlantic.

Greer, who joined the U.S. Secret Service in 1945 having served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, became a personal bodyguard to both Presidents Truman and Eisenhower before becoming the ill-fated driver of President Kennedy’s limousine in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Rainey’s article offers nothing of real substance about Greer or his drive through Dallas other than to perpetuate the Internet myth that Greer might have blown Kennedy’s head off when “others” failed to do the job. Yea, sure.

According to Rainey, an army of amateur sleuths have picked up the torch originally carried by William Cooper, who proposed in his 1991 tome Behold a Pale Horse that Greer looked back at Kennedy twice immediately after the shooting began - the first glance supposedly establishing the likelihood of the President surviving the attack, and the second allegedly to initiate 'plan B' where Greer himself was to brazenly finish the job while all eyes were on Kennedy.

Lifting most of his “facts” from the Internet’s Wikipedia Encyclopedia (apparently, Wiki has become the tool of choice for wannabe journalists everywhere), Rainey reports that the wealth of “evidence” offered by conspiracy theorists to substantiate the charges against Greer include: Zapruder film frames that seem to show Greer pointing a gun at Kennedy at the moment of the head shot, Greer's Protestant upbringing (which allegedly supports theories of anti-Catholic sentiments influencing Kennedy’s assassins), a report that Jacqueline Kennedy was bitterly critical of Greer's slow reaction at the time of the shooting, and TV footage which supposedly shows Greer ordering the ambulance crew at Andrews Air Force Base from their vehicle and then driving the President's body to the autopsy (which, conspiracy theorists contend, is further evidence of Greer and his fellow conspirators’ need to keep others from seeing Kennedy’s body).

Rainey writes, “Greer's actions, and his alleged part in a right-wing conspiracy within the CIA against Kennedy, have been analyzed time and again in books such as, The Death of a President, Crime of the Century, and Deadly Alliance, but no definitive conclusions have been reached.” [emphasis added]

Huh?

This is the kind of nonsense that is designed to perpetuate myths, sell newspapers, and drive readers to Internet websites - not to illuminate our understanding of history or to solve crimes.

Nowhere in this article does Mr. Rainey even hint that William Cooper’s initial allegation was bunk to begin with. As reported in my July 2007 entry “Definitive Proof? The Secret Service Killed JFK,” William “Wild Bill” Cooper, the UFO conspiracist, tax resister, and self-styled "militiaman" based his 1991 claimed that JFK was assassinated by limousine driver William Greer, on a special "washed out" version of the Zapruder film — an allegation easily refuted by simply looking at the original Z-film which clearly shows that Greer doesn't have a gun in either hand. Clear copies of the Zapruder film are abundantly available on Internet streaming video sites. All one has to do to debunk Cooper’s fantasy is click a button. How hard can it be?

Cooper, the originator of the charges against Greer, was shot and killed during a shoot out with Apache County, Arizona, sheriff’s deputies in November, 2001, when they attempted to serve Cooper with an arrest warrant at his residence.

The report of Jacequeline Kennedy’s bitterness toward Greer comes from the 1969 best-seller My Life With Jacqueline Kennedy, by Mary Gallagher, secretary to Mrs. Kennedy. Gallagher wrote, “She mentioned one Secret Service man who had not acted during the crucial moment, and said bitterly to me, ‘He might just as well have been Miss Shaw!’,” a reference to the Kennedy children’s nanny. It was later confirmed that the unnamed agent was Greer.

This is in sharp contrast to Mrs. Kennedy’s reaction to Greer on the day of the assassination. Author William Manchester reported in Death of a President, without citation, that at Parkland Hospital, “Those who had been in the motorcade were racking their brains with if only this, if only that. One of them came to her [Jackie Kennedy]. Bill Greer, his face streaked with tears, took her head between his hands and squeezed until she thought he was going to squeeze her skull flat. He cried, ‘Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, oh my God, oh my God. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t hear, I should have swerved the car, I couldn’t help it. Oh, Mrs. Kennedy, as soon as I saw it I swerved. If only I’d seen in time! Oh!’ Then he released her head and put his arms around her and wept on her shoulder.” [Death of a President, p.290]

In fact, Mrs. Kennedy felt so sorry for Greer that she requested that he drive the naval ambulance containing the casket to the naval hospital. [O’Donnell and Powers with McCarthy, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, p.44]

So much for the conspiracy claim that Greer shooed the real ambulance driver’s away so that he could grab possession of the president’s body as part of the big coverup.

Much like Secret Service agent Clint Hill’s deeply troubled and guilt filled “what-if” self-examination (so vividly portrayed in a 1975 interview with Mike Wallace on CBS television’s 60 Minutes), Greer’s own self doubts must have been understandably overwhelming in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

Greer eventually came to accept what happened in Dallas (and to him, as the limousine’s driver) as the hand of fate. His son told researcher Vince Palamara, “My father certainly didn't blame himself; it's not one of those things - if only I was driving one mile per hour faster. My father had absolutely no survivor's guilt...he figured that events were kind out of their control...it was pretty common knowledge that a person riding in an open car was subject to a bullet at any time...”

Greer, who retired on disability from the Secret Service in 1966 due to a stomach ulcer that grew worse following the Kennedy assassination, died in 1985.

One last question remains: Would it have mattered, as conspiracy theorists argue, if Greer hadn’t slowed the limousine during the five seconds between the second and third shots, and instead accelerated the limousine carrying the president out of harms way? Could Greer have saved Kennedy? Was he truly partly responsible for Kennedy’s death?

In his book, Reclaiming History, author Vincent Bugliosi reasonably argues that Greer’s slowing of the limousine did not substantially alter what happened in Dallas, “Since even before slowing, the limousine was only traveling around eleven miles per hour on a straight line with the barrel of the rifle and on a declining road. Kennedy, as [Monty] Lutz [a member of the HSCA Firearms Panel] said, was already essentially a stationary target, and the limousine merely slowing down further to seven or eight miles an hour probably didn’t give Oswald, in the sniper’s nest, too much more of a break than he already had.” [Reclaiming History, p.315 Endnotes]

While it is quite apparent that the answer to writer Mark Rainey’s rhetorical question, “Did Stewartstown native kill JFK?” is a resounding no, there seems to be no end to mindless speculation about Greer’s role in Kennedy’s death.

Mr. Rainey concludes, “He could have been just another of the countless anonymous exiles from these shores over the centuries, but thanks to the hand of fate and the power of the Internet, the William Greer story looks set to run and run.”

One might also conclude that the kind of tabloid-style journalism apparent in this Tyrone Times article only serves to further empower the Internet kooks bent on assassinating the character of former U.S. Secret Service agent and navy veteran William R. Greer.