James Tague

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James "Jim" Thomas Tague (born October 17, 1936, Plainfield, Indiana) was a witness to the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. He received a minor wound on his right cheek during the assassination. Tague was a United States Air Force veteran.

Tague had been driving to downtown Dallas to have lunch with a friend when he came up on traffic that was completely stopped in the left lane of Commerce Street within Dealey Plaza because of the presidential motorcade. After stopping his car he got out and was standing for two to three seconds near the Dealey Plaza south curbstone of Main Street, 520 feet (158 m) southwest from the Texas School Book Depository and a few feet east of the eastern edge of the triple overpass railroad bridge, when Tague saw the presidential limousine, then he heard the first shot.

Like many of the witnesses, Tague remembered hearing his first shot and likened it to a "firecracker." Tague testified that the first shot he remembered hearing occurred after the Presidential limousine had completed the 120-degree slow turn from Houston Street onto Elm Street and straightened out, coming towards Tague.

Right after the shots Tague was approached by a Dallas police detective who immediately noticed that Tague had specks of blood on his right facial cheek. (Tague also had a small left facial scab, but it had happened several days before the attack.) The detective asked Tague where he had been standing. The two men then examined the area and discovered — on the upper curve of the Main Street south curbstone — a "very fresh scar" impact that, to each of them, looked like a bullet had struck there and taken a chip out of the curbstone concrete. (This curb surrounding the scar chip was not cut out until August 1964 and is now in the National Archives.) The scar chip was 23 feet 6 inches (7.2 m) east of the east edge of the Triple Underpass railroad bridge, about 20 (6.1 m) feet from where Tague stood during the attack. The detective told Tague it looked like a bullet had been fired from one of the Houston or Elm streets intersection buildings and had struck there.

At about 2:30 p.m. local time, after giving a statement to the authorities, Tague was driving back down President Kennedy's path on Elm Street when traffic was stopped by a Dallas policeman. The policeman told Tague that another piece of the President's skull had just been found.

In 1964, six months after the assassination, and only after the curb being struck with a bullet became widely known, Tague was called to testify to the Warren Commission.

Sometime after being spectrographically examined by the F.B.I. in 1964 the F.B.I. slides containing the trace physical elements of a bullet on the curbstone scar chip disappeared from the evidence. The F.B.I. later claimed (only after author/researcher/Congressional investigator Harold Weisberg filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit) that the F.B.I. itself had destroyed the spectrographic slides to save space within the F.B.I. building.

A 1983 documented study by an engineering firm hired by the Reader's Digest of the curb scar concluded that the curb scar had been patched with a foreign material. A photograph of the curb taken by a F.B.I. agent just before the curb stone was cut out of the street in August 1964 shows the curb had been patched before it was cut from the street. Tague, in his book Truth Withheld, has pictures of the scar taken just after the assassination, just before it was cut from the street in August 1964, and as it sat in the National Archives in 1997.

In 1997 James Tague visited the U.S. National Archives and personally examined the curbstone scar chip. Tague was also accompanied by a U.S. National Archivist. They both immediately agreed that the scar chip was covered up with a foreign-material patch over the scar chip (no documented record nor documented authorization exists of precisely who or what agency had the scar chip within its evidence chain, nor when the scar chip was covered up). Harold Weisberg had said the same thing about the scar chip covering patch after he first examined the scar chip in the late 1960s.

In 2003 James Tague wrote a book, Truth Withheld (ISBN 0-9718254-7-5), detailing his experiences during and after the assassination.

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