Here's one of the many ridiculous CT notions that will not die - Chamberlain was famous for his umbrella!
In the '30's a staggering amount of male, middle/upper class professionals carried an umbrella. The uniform of the "city gent" was a bowler hat and umbrella. Umbrellas were everywhere, it's like saying Chamberlain was famous for wearing trousers.
What Chamberlain
was famous for - and it's directly to do with appeasement - is stepping off a plane after his return from Munich and waving a white piece of paper (the peace agreement signed with Hitler) and claiming "we have peace for our time" [d'oh!]
This is from an article about Umbrella Man [https://www.businessinsider.com/jfk-umbrella-manmore-doubts-2011-12?r=US&IR=T]:
"According to John Simkin, a retired British history teacher and textbook author who runs the historical website Spartacus Educational, the umbrella was never the symbol of Chamberlain that the “umbrella man” claimed he was.
“In Britain, there was never any association with an umbrella at all,” Simkin told me. “Everyone had umbrellas and bowlers in those days.” According to Simkin, the only proper symbol for Chamberlain and appeasement was a piece of paper. That was the document he held aloft, with Hitler’s signature to the so-called Munich Agreement—in which Hitler agreed not to seek any further territorial gains in Europe—as Chamberlain famously declared that he had secured “peace in our time.” (In this old newsreel, you can see Chamberlain hold aloft that document.)
Simkin finds the New York Times video’s assertion that the purpose of opening the umbrella and pumping it in the air to signal Munich simply laughable."And it is laughable - but it won't go away.
Another myth to dispel is the "pumping action" of the umbrella. It doesn't happen.
In Zapruder it is just about discernible that the umbrella is being raised [using Stemmons sign as a guide] and that it is turning slightly. That's it.
In all other photos the umbrella is already up. As the Presidential limo approaches the umbrella is raised in the air.
What is also laughable is the notion this is being used as a signal for a shooter (or shooters) to fire/continue firing. I can just imagine the meeting when
that was arranged - "An umbrella? But what if it's sunny?"
That said, Witt's HSCA testimony is hard to swallow. In it he states that as the motorcade is coming down Elm he is sat on the grass of the grassy knoll. He stands up, begins to walk forward whilst opening up his umbrella. As he is opening his umbrella he hears three or more shots (but doesn't recognise them as shot sat the time), and misses what is going on because he still hasn't opened his umbrella. By the time he gets his umbrella open he is aware of the limo slowing down, a Secret Service agent running towards the limo and "a pink movement...Jackie Kennedy, I think, wearing a pink dress or something."
At best, this is a catastrophically bad memory, at worst, a complete fabrication.
Willis 5, thought to represent Zapruder frame 202, shows the umbrella clearly raised. This is way before the throat shot or the head shot. In fact, I believe Betzner 3 (z186) shows the umbrella already up in place even earlier. It's partially obscured but it is picked out by the red arrow below:
Witt goes on to state he never saw JFK hit, was unaware he'd been shot and was only aware that there had been slowing down of the limo and Hill running towards it. Yet he was aware "something terrible had happened" and was so stunned by what he'd
not seen he had to sit down.
Witt claims to remember the limo slowing down and Hill running from one car to the other. This is the moment of the head shot, the moment JFK's head explodes yet Witt seems to have missed this detail. Strange, considering he'd made the effort to go out of his way to heckle JFK specifically.
So, we have Witt's nonsense reason for taking his umbrella to Dealey Plaza that day and his catastrophically bad memory of the event (almost as if he wasn't there). But that's not the end of the weirdness.
As everyone around him flees the scene in horror, Witt has a sit down. He either joins or is joined by DCM, who also decides, very unusually given the situation, to have a sit down. I tried to track down the earliest record of this event and thought I'd found it in the Couch film. This screenshot is taken around 30-35 seconds after the headshot:
However, after carefully scanning the Wiegmen film, I believe I have an even earlier record of the event. It's poor quality, and not helped by the camera flying all over the place, but I believe the red arrow in the cropped picture below shows the two men:
I calculate this image to have been taken 6-8 seconds after the headshot. It seems a bizarrely short amount of time for the two men to be already in position.
