“He Had a Death Look”
On November 22, Dr. Pepper Jenkins had lunch in the dining room at Parkland Hospital with several people from his anesthesiology department. “We were grousing as we pushed around some fish croquettes on our plate,” he told the author, “because it had already been announced that Kennedy would be having roast beef at his luncheon because he had gotten a special dispensation by the Catholic Church to eat meat, and we were stuck with fish.”1 During the lunch, the hospital began paging: “Dr. Shires [chief of surgery]. Stat” [indicating an emergency]. “And they never page the head of the departments, and never page them stat,” recalls Jenkins. “Dr. Ron Jones, one of the senior resident surgeons was at our table, got up and answered the phone.”2
“I knew that Dr. Shires was out of town,” Dr. Jones says. “And the operator told me the President had been shot and was on his way to the hospital. It took a second to recover from that news, and then I immediately walked back to our table to tell the others.”
“He was visibly upset when he got off the phone,” recalls Jenkins. “We were shocked when he came over and told us the President was being brought into Emergency.” Dr. Jenkins left to retrieve an anesthesia machine, while the chief nurse, Audrey Bell, went to prepare trauma room one.
The President’s limousine screeched into the rear of Parkland, stopping near the Emergency entrance. Governor Connally appeared unconscious in the middle seat, lying across his wife, his shirt and suit jacket heavily stained with blood. Only President Kennedy’s torso was visible as Jacqueline cradled his head in her lap. Blood and brain tissue were scattered over the seats. Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who had barely clung on to the rear of the car during the high-speed dash to Parkland, seemed dazed as he slid off the trunk.
“I was an ob-gyn [obstetrics-gynecology] resident,” recalls Dr. Bill Midgett, who has never before spoken publicly about that day. “I was in the emergency room nearest the door, and someone was disrupting my ability to take history from one of my patients because they were screaming for a gurney. I had no idea anyone had been shot. Because I could not carry on the conversation with my patient, I drew a stretcher and went out to find what was going on. The limousine was there when I went outside. There were any number of very serious people standing around with submachine guns, and I honestly thought I was not long for this world. I had no idea what was happening. Then one of the Secret Service men grabbed the other end of the carriage and hustled me toward this big black car, and all of sudden Jackie Kennedy sat up and I knew right away there was terrible trouble. Everyone was still in the car, all huddled down inside.”3
Governor Connally had to be removed before they could reach the President. Connally suddenly became semiconscious as the car stopped and, with a great show of determination, helped himself from the car before collapsing into the arms of hospital attendants. They raced him inside to trauma room two.
“I stayed at the car,” recalls Midgett. “Then it was a matter of Mrs. Kennedy letting go of the President. You couldn’t see the President’s head at this point.” Officer H. B. McLain (the subject of the acoustics controversy) walked over to the rear of the car. “She was laying over him,” he recalls. “I gently grabbed her by both shoulders, and said, ‘Now c’mon, ma’am, c’mon out of the car, and let them take him inside.’ And she sat up and let go of him.”4
“It was obvious that when she sat up in the car,” says Midgett, “she knew that people were there to assist her husband. When I could finally see the President, I thought he was dead. I never saw anyone with a head wound like that, with the amount of brain matter scattered about, that survived. We put the President on the gurney and wheeled him into emergency room one. Mrs. Kennedy would not leave his side. She went in with us as the gurney was rolled into the hospital, walking right beside him, holding his hand. She was absolutely deadpan quiet. One of the nurses offered to clean off her clothing, and she said, ‘Absolutely not. I want the world to see what Dallas has done to my husband.’ Someone else asked if she wanted to wait outside the emergency room while they worked on her husband, and she said no and went inside with the gurney.”5
“Everyone claims to be there first,” says Dr. Jenkins, “but the only doctor there when I arrived was [Charles] Carrico, and Drs. Baxter and Perry arrived shortly after me. Mrs. Kennedy was also there.”6 The President was on the stretcher on his back, unconscious. He was blue-white, had fixed, dilated pupils and slow, spasmodic breathing. There was initially no pulse. “He had a death look,” recalls Jenkins. “He was on the way out.”
Two nurses, Diana Bowron and Margaret Henchliffe, cut away the President’s clothes and his back brace, which was wrapped with Ace bandages about his waist and thighs.7* The doctors immediately noticed an external wound, a small wound in the neck almost directly under the Adam’s apple.8 Dr. Carrico placed his hands under the President’s back and felt for any other major wound. He did not find any. He missed the small bullet entrance in JFK’s upper shoulder/neck. Nobody at Parkland ever turned him over.
Dr. Carrico inserted a breathing tube into the President’s mouth and down his throat, and an automatic respirator was hooked up to the tube. Three cutdowns (slicing open the skin to find a vein) were done to give blood and fluids. As for the large wound in the head, Dr. Jenkins believes that few initially saw it. Jenkins had taken the traditional anesthesiologist position at the head of the table. “I was almost standing against his head,” he recalls. “And as the room filled up with more people coming in, I knew then, and I know now, that most of them did not even know he had a head injury. He had a shock of hair, a big shock of hair, and he was lying with his head back against me, and by this time we had the EKG [electrocardiogram] hooked up to him, and it showed a dying heart pattern. People only knew that he had been shot, but they didn’t know exactly where, and since there was a lot of blood, it was difficult to tell where it was coming from.”9 Dr. Jones’s account is typical: “When I came in, I did not know there was a head wound,” he says. “I just saw the neck, and was not aware there was a head wound for several minutes.”10
Dr. Malcolm Perry started a tracheotomy, an operation in which an artificial airway is created by cutting into the throat and inserting a tube directly into the windpipe. “When Dr. Carrico was trying to get the endotracheal tube in, he saw blood in the trachea,” Dr. Perry recalls. “So I did what I had done hundreds of times before, I put the tracheostomy right where the tracheal wound was. I had to control the airway, and if I did not put the tube at the point of entry, it would not work as well.” That surgical procedure cut directly over the exit wound on the throat, and therefore, within minutes of the President’s arrival, that wound was obliterated by Dr. Perry’s larger incision.
Drs. Baxter, Peters, and McClelland inserted a tube into the chest cavity to drain any blood or fluid. “I made an incision in the chest and put a tube in the right side,” recalls Dr. Paul Peters, “and someone put one in the left. Ron Jones did a cutdown on the left ankle. And there was some admiral behind me and he said, ‘Get him some steroids.’”11* Dr. Carrico set an intravenous solution of 300 milligrams of Solu-Cortef, a cortisone-based steroid.
“As soon as we got the tracheostomy in,” says Dr. Charles Baxter, “his pulse, which we had gotten to an erratic level near 100, started to decline. I glanced at his face and his eyes were so bulged out, there was so much hemorrhaging, that it was a little hard to recognize him as the President.”12
The room was soon packed. “A lot of people came in, looked, and then went out,” recalls Dr. Perry, “and others came in and were asked to leave because it was so busy.”13 Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent, walked around the room “wild-eyed and disoriented,” holding a cocked pistol.14 Another agent eventually came to take him outside. Jackie Kennedy continued to stand on the side, staring blankly at the frantic activities to revive her husband. Several times, a nurse or Secret Service agent led her outside, suggesting it was better if she did not remain in the trauma room. On one occasion when she was out of the operating room, Lady Bird Johnson walked around a bend in a corridor, and “suddenly I found myself face to face with Jackie in a small hall.… You always think of her … as being insulated, protected; she was quite alone. I don’t think I ever saw anyone so much alone in my life. I went up to her, put my arms around her, and said something to her … like ‘God, help us all,’ because my feelings for her were too tumultuous to put into words.”15
But Jackie always returned to the emergency room. “That did quiet down the whole atmosphere,” recalls Dr. Jones. “You weren’t sure you wanted to do everything you had to in front of her. Once you did it, you weren’t sure you should be standing there gazing.”16 “She would stand there with that look she had,” says Jenkins. “Then she would walk around with her hands clasped tightly in front of her. And on one of her trips back into the room, she nudged me with her elbow. The table wasn’t completely occupied at that time. And she handed me part of his brain—no bone, just tissue. So I handed it to a nurse. I don’t think Mrs. Kennedy would have any memory for the whole thing.”
The activity in the emergency room was frenetic.* Parkland had the best trauma unit in Dallas, and if the President had any chance of being resuscitated, it was there. “When we were working on Kennedy, he was not the President,” recalls Dr. Adolph Giesecke. “He was another life that we were trying our hardest to save. When we were in that room, we were doctors doing what we were trained for, but later we were just regular citizens and the enormity of it hit us.”17
Despite their efforts, the President still showed only an erratic pulse. Dr. Perry started closed-chest massage. The doctors spoke about cutting open the President’s chest and massaging the heart muscle. Dr. Jenkins, standing at the head of the table, noticed a priest, Father Oscar Huber, had appeared at the room’s swinging doors. “I asked one of my assistants to take over the breathing apparatus, and I went over to the priest,” he says. “I asked him, ‘When is the proper time to declare one dead for the last rites?’ And I remember him saying, and I doubt it meets Catholic doctrine, ‘Well, if we can perform the last rites within an hour or so of the death, it’s all right.’ And I returned to the head of the table and said to the others, ‘I think you better look at this first,’ pointing toward the President’s head. ‘We have no way of resuscitating him. I think it’s time to declare him dead.’” Dr. Kemp Clark, the only neurosurgeon in the room, put on a pair of gloves and quickly inspected the head wound. “That was the first time anyone looked at it,” says Jenkins.18
It took Dr. Clark only a moment to decide the wound was too massive. Dr. Perry was still doing a vigorous chest massage. “It’s too late, Mac,” Clark said.19 “The President’s pulse had gone from twenty to ten to zero,” remembers Baxter, “and Malcolm still pumped on his chest, and I said, ‘No, Malcolm, we are through.’ Somebody was poised with a knife ready to do open-chest massage, and I almost laid across his chest and said no. There was no way the President could survive no matter what we did.”20 The doctors had worked futilely for more than twenty minutes.
“And I said,” recalls Dr. Peters, “‘I think we need to find Mrs. Kennedy,’ and someone nudged me and signaled with their head behind me, and I turned and she was right there.” Dr. Baxter, the chief of the emergency room, walked over to Jacqueline, and quietly said, “‘Mrs. Kennedy, your husband is dead. We will not pronounce him dead until he has had the last rites.’ She had a look in her eyes, on her face, of terror, disbelief, and bewilderment. She was deadpan, with all those emotions in her eyes. It was like this really isn’t happening. I could understand every emotion she was going through.”21
“When we decided to declare him dead,” says Jenkins, “people just started to fade away. They just disappeared from the room. Out of respect, no one wanted to stay after that point. With Mrs. Kennedy there, we were not about to start examining the wounds or turning the body over. No one even lifted the head, although a few doctors passed by and quickly looked at the wound.”22 Dr. Baxter agreed: “What happened once we knew we lost him—we were gone. Everyone backed off from that body with the reverence, with the grief, with all the emotions you could imagine. When I had gone into that room, I was emotional. When taking care of him, I was a doctor. As soon as it was over, I was filled with emotions, and I never touched him again, except to pull a sheet over him.”23
As the room emptied, Dr. Baxter walked over to the President with Mrs. Kennedy. “She kissed his toe, his stomach, his lips, and then slipped off a ring and put it on his little finger,” he recalls. “Then she began crying. It was heart-wrenching.”24 Father Oscar Huber entered a minute later. “I stayed because I had to take out the tracheostomy,” Jenkins says, “take off the EKG leads we had, take out the IV’s and the other apparatus. I wanted to leave, too, but I couldn’t get out of the room because I was hemmed in by the priest and Mrs. Kennedy. When the last rites were being performed, I wish I had been elsewhere. Mrs. Kennedy looked just ghastly, pale, with blood all over her dress—it was a terribly personal moment.”25
Ken O’Donnell, one of the President’s aides, tried to persuade Jacqueline to step outside after the last rites, but she refused to leave her husband’s side. She remained while some nurses and residents wrapped the President in white sheets, a plastic mattress cover, and some pillowcases, and awaited the arrival of the casket.26
The attending doctors had decided to fix the time of death as 1:00 P.M. and, since the cause of death was the massive head wound, decided that Dr. Clark, a neurosurgeon, should sign the death certificate. Mac Kilduff, a Kennedy aide, went to a side room, where Vice-President Johnson was under heavy Secret Service guard. “Mr. President,” he said, and by so addressing LBJ notified him that Kennedy was dead. He informed Johnson that he wanted to announce Kennedy’s death, but LBJ told him to wait until his party was away from the hospital. No one was sure who had killed the President or if it was a conspiracy that targeted other members of the government. Johnson decided to return to Washington as soon as possible. Once Johnson was in the car on the way to the airport, Kilduff entered Parkland classrooms 101–102, which had been converted into a temporary press hall. It was 1:33 when he mounted the dais, and there were shouts of, “Quiet!” “President John F. Kennedy died at approximately 1:00 Central Standard Time today here in Dallas.” There was a tremendous rush into the hospital corridors by newsmen hurrying to get the word over the wire services.
While the drama with President Kennedy unfolded, another life-and-death battle was being waged with Governor John Connally. He had bullet wounds in his right rear shoulder, under his right nipple, right wrist, and his left thigh. Dr. Robert Shaw, a thoracic (chest) surgeon, took over the Governor’s care at 12:45. Within forty-five minutes, Dr. Shaw had moved Connally to surgery and for nearly two hours sutured the Governor’s damaged lung and muscles.27* “His wounds were life-threatening,” recalls Dr. Shaw, “and without prompt care he would have died.”28 When Connally was moved from the trauma room to the operating room, he was transferred from the stretcher on which he had been brought into the hospital to an operating table. That empty stretcher was placed into an elevator by an orderly and then moved into a hospital hallway. Darrell Tomlinson, the hospital’s senior engineer, later bumped into it, and when he did, a 6.5mm bullet rolled onto the floor.29*
The President’s body was placed into a casket and ready for transport back to Washington by 1:40, but by then Dallas city officials informed JFK’s staff that the body would have to remain in Texas, where the crime had been committed, for an autopsy.30 But unknown to the Texan authorities, Vice-President Johnson was determined not to leave the state without the President’s body. “When Mr. O’Donnell told us to get on the plane,” recalled LBJ, “and go back to Washington, I asked about Mrs. Kennedy. O’Donnell told me that Mrs. Kennedy would not leave the hospital without the President’s body, and urged again that we go ahead and take Air Force One and return to Washington. I did not want to go and leave Mrs. Kennedy in this situation. I said so, but I agreed we would board the airplane and wait until Mrs. Kennedy and the President’s body were brought aboard the plane.”31
The ensuing argument between the President’s staff and Dallas and Parkland officials was heated. Theron Ward, a Dallas justice of the peace, was at the hospital but was weak in asserting Texas law. “He did nothing,” recalled Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas medical examiner. “He was frozen with fear.”32 Some, such as Dr. Charles Crenshaw, claimed that the Secret Service agents drew their weapons and physically forced their way out of the hospital, stealing the bronze coffin from Texas jurisdiction.33 “Finally, without saying more, I simply stood aside,” said Rose. “The law was broken … [but] I felt that it was unwise to do anything more to accelerate or exacerbate the tension. There was nothing else I could do to keep the body in Dallas. I had no minions, no armies to enforce the will of the medical examiner.”34
The federal agents were indeed prepared to force their way out of the hospital with or without authorization. But most do not realize that Dr. Charles Baxter, chief of the emergency rooms, had authorized the body’s removal. “At the time that fight was going on between Earl Rose and the Secret Service,” Dr. Baxter told the author, “and I got involved in it, my thinking was twofold. One, the President was above state laws. And second, Earl was sort of a sensationalist, somebody always on the fringes, and I did not want him to do that autopsy. Earl was experienced and good, but I am sure he would have missed points that have since come up.”35
At 2:04, Jacqueline Kennedy, four Secret Service agents, and Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh left in an ambulance for the airport, with the President’s coffin.36 They arrived at Love Field in ten minutes and loaded the casket onto the rear of Air Force One at 2:18.37* Instead of immediately departing, Lyndon Johnson, after conferring with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, waited for a local judge to swear him in as President. That brief and somber ceremony took place in the front of the plane at 2:37, while a bloodstained Jacqueline Kennedy looked on in shock. After the ceremony, she returned to the rear of the plane, where she stayed with the casket for the remainder of the trip.
David Lifton, in one of the most unusual conspiracy theories, claims in his book Best Evidence that “the President’s body was inside the Dallas casket when it was put aboard Air Force One at 2:18, but it was no longer inside the casket at 2:47, as the plane rolled down the runway.”38 Lifton contends that the President’s body was stolen from the casket while on the plane, directly under the eyes of Mrs. Kennedy and the President’s personal staff. His theory relies on an elaborate shell game involving rapid exchanges of coffins, a decoy ambulance, and a switched body shroud. He contends that once the body was stolen from Air Force One, a covert team of surgeons surgically altered the corpse before the autopsy later that day at Bethesda. The alterations were purportedly done so the autopsy physicians would determine the bullets that hit the President were fired from the rear, from the direction of the Book Depository, thereby sealing the case against Oswald.
Lifton does not think any shots from the rear hit President Kennedy. Yet since the medical evidence only supports the conclusion that JFK was struck by shots from behind, Lifton tries hard to devise a theory of “medical forgery” to exonerate Oswald. According to Lofton, the covert team not only hid any evidence of front shots but created rear wounds that had the correct trajectory angles to fit with a sixth-floor assassin from the Book Depository. Lifton’s theory involves a massive plot of scores of conspirators in the Navy, Secret Service, and LBJ’s inner circle, none of whom he identifies. Among other allegations, he uses eyewitness testimony from bit players at Bethesda—orderlies, technicians, and casket carriers—to allege that Kennedy’s body arrived there in a body bag, although it had been sent from Dallas in sheets (in other words, the conspirators were sophisticated enough to steal the body but forgot to put it back in the same bag). He asserts the conspirators also made the mistake of forgetting to put the President back in the same bronze coffin, since he claims a simple gray metal one arrived at Bethesda. Even the President’s brain was missing, as the conspirators had to hide it, but another one showed up during the autopsy.
Lifton’s purported smoking gun is a November 26, 1963, report by two FBI agents, Francis X. O’Neill and James W. Sibert, in which they said that after the President’s body was removed for the autopsy, “it was also apparent that a tracheotomy had been performed, as well as surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull.”39 Since no surgery was performed on the President’s head at Parkland, Lifton concludes the surgery must have been done between Parkland and Bethesda. But that remark was an offhand comment by an attending physician at the autopsy and was misconstrued by the two nonmedical FBI men. “We weren’t doctors,” O’Neill told the author, “and it was either Humes or Boswell, but I just wrote it down as I understood it. There wasn’t any surgery on the head, only my misunderstanding of what the doctors were talking about.”40 All of the physicians at Parkland and Bethesda unequivocally reject the notion there was any surgery on the head.
Dr. Michael Baden, the chief forensic pathologist for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, says, “Lifton just doesn’t know what he is talking about. It’s a fantasy of his. He thinks he sees signs of surgery in some of the autopsy photos, but he doesn’t know how to read those pictures. It’s laughable. He’s not a doctor and it’s clear by his work that he doesn’t understand what really happened. He doesn’t even take into account rigor mortis [the stiffness caused by death], which starts two hours after death. Surgery done on a corpse would look different than one on a living person. His theory of medical alteration to the President is ridiculous.”41 Even forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht, the most vocal medical critic of the Warren Commission’s conclusions, dismisses Lifton out of hand. “Lifton gets away with crap, and no one challenges him. I could assemble a whole team of the best surgeons in the country and still not be able to accomplish in a day what Lifton says was done in a few hours. I have never bought his stuff. It can’t be done.”42
Beyond its medical impossibility, Lifton’s entire scenario rests upon the President’s casket being unattended on Air Force One for a few minutes, so that the body could be stolen. In a seven-hundred-page book, Lifton spends only two pages on this essential issue. Yet the casket was never unattended. Fulfilling the military duty that a high-ranking officer should remain as an honor guard with the body of a slain Commander in Chief until the burial, General Godfrey McHugh stayed with the casket after it was loaded onto the plane.43 He went to the cockpit to check on the plane’s departure only when Mrs. Kennedy or one of the President’s aides was in the rear. During LBJ’s swearing-in ceremony, while almost everybody was in the front, McHugh remained with the casket.* There was no opportunity for JFK’s body to be stolen anytime before the autopsy.44†
During the flight from Texas to Washington, Admiral Burkley, JFK’s physician, spoke to Mrs. Kennedy about the autopsy. “I stated an autopsy would be necessary, and that I was perfectly willing to arrange to have it done at any place that she felt it should be done. She said, ‘Well, it doesn’t have to be done.’ I said, ‘Yes, it’s mandatory that we have an autopsy. I can do it at the Army hospital at Walter Reed or at the Navy hospital at Bethesda or any civilian hospital that you would designate.’ However, I felt that it should be a military hospital, in that he had been President of the United States and was, therefore, the Commander in Chief of the Military. After some consideration, she stated that she would like to have the President taken to Bethesda [because he had been in the Navy]. This was arranged by telephone from the plane, and it was accomplished.”45*
Air Force One touched down at 5:58 Eastern time at Andrews Air Force Base. Part of the extensive security to meet the plane included FBI agents Francis O’Neill and James Sibert. “The casket was lowered from the plane, and then placed into the waiting ambulance,” recalls O’Neill. The casket they lowered was the same bronze one that JFK was placed into at Parkland and which was loaded onto Air Force One in Dallas. There was no sign of the simple gray casket that Lofton charged contained Kennedy’s body on the arrival at Bethesda. “Bobby Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy got into the ambulance,” O’Neill told the author. “Kellerman got into the front seat, and Greer was the driver. Admiral Burkley was there. I was in the second car of the motorcade, and I observed that ambulance the whole time, every single moment, from the time it left the aircraft to the time that ambulance opened its door and I assisted in taking the casket inside.”46
More than three thousand people were crowded onto the hospital grounds, and they surged around the ambulance as it arrived.47 Sibert and O’Neill helped take the casket inside, and there, waiting for the President’s body, were Dr. James Humes and Dr. J. Thornton Boswell. Humes, a thirty-nine-year-old Navy commander, was director of labs of the Naval Medical School in Bethesda. Boswell, also a commander, was forty-one, and chief of pathology at the Navy hospital. Humes had been notified at 5:15, when he was at home, that he should return to the hospital. Canceling a dinner party for twenty-four guests, he rushed to Bethesda, where Admiral Ed Kenney, the Navy’s surgeon general, told him “to be prepared to do an autopsy” on JFK.48 Humes chose Boswell to be his assistant. Although they had performed several autopsies involving gunshots before, they did not have extensive experience with bullet wounds.49 Humes spoke to Dr. Bruce Smith, the deputy director of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and asked for a pathologist with experience in gunshot deaths. Smith chose Dr. Pierre Finck.50 An Army colonel, Finck completed the autopsy team. He was a ballistics expert, and although he had reviewed records of U.S. military personnel who had died of gunshot wounds for nearly ten years, he had never done an autopsy involving a gunshot wound. No forensic pathologist was included on the team.*
When the funeral motorcade arrived at the hospital, Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy were escorted to upstairs waiting rooms while the casket was brought to the morgue. There, Drs. Humes and Boswell, with help from FBI agents O’Neill and Sibert and Secret Service agents Kellerman and Greer, removed the body. O’Neill took responsibility for security, ensuring that no unauthorized personnel entered the area or had access to the body.51 “It was a shocking experience,” recalled Humes. “We found the unclothed body of President John F. Kennedy, wrapped in sheets in a swaddling manner, the massive head wound wrapped around and around with gauze and bandages.”52 “There was also a plastic liner inside,” recalls O’Neill, “and because of the massive amount of blood, some of it was stuck onto the body as well.”53*
Then Humes started the preparatory work for the autopsy, giving the orders for photographs and X rays. Fourteen X rays and fifty-two photographs were taken of the body. The Navy corpsman who started taking pictures did not have a security clearance, and O’Neill confiscated his film and exposed it (the roll is still in the National Archives). There is an oft-repeated story of an FBI photographer, without any prior autopsy experience, who allegedly took the photographs. “Those reports are an incredible lie,” said Humes. “The official photos taken by John Stringer [the medical school’s chief of photography] were never touched, and no one from the FBI even had a camera, let alone the intention to take autopsy photos.”54
The autopsy photographs and X rays are critical because, despite criticism of the procedure, they provide proof positive of the President’s wounds, and have served as the basis for subsequent forensics-panel studies. Because they support the conclusion that the President was shot by two bullets from the rear, there have been attempts to cast doubt on their authenticity. Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone, in High Treason, conclude the X rays are fakes and raise doubts about some of the photos.55 However, they ignore the extensive work of the House Select Committee in examining that very issue.
John Stringer, who took the photographs, viewed them at the National Archives on November 1, 1966, and verified that the pictures were the ones he had taken. (He again confirmed the photographs in 1993.) Photo experts for the Select Committee concluded the photos were authentic, there was no evidence of fakery, and that alteration of such photos, often taken with two or three exposures from the same camera position, is “essentially impossible.”56 As for the X rays, the tests were also absolute. Human bone structure varies uniquely from one individual to another and can be as good a means of identification as fingerprints.57 Twenty-two earlier X rays of John Kennedy were compared to those taken at Bethesda. The Committee’s experts concluded they were not forgeries and “there was absolutely no question … [they were] of John F. Kennedy and no other person.”58 Because of certain peculiarities with JFK’s bones and teeth, the experts concluded it was impossible to simulate the twenty-two base X rays used for comparison.59*
Once the autopsy began, it took slightly more than three hours. Bethesda was a teaching hospital, and its morgue had an amphitheater filled with almost forty people. Humes recalled that though they were dealing with the President, the autopsy doctors did not allow the crowd to bother them. “The people who accompanied his body to the morgue,” recalled Humes, “were the most disturbed and distressed people I have ever seen. We were unfazed by the commotion …”60 The three pathologists found two wounds caused by high-velocity missiles.
There has been considerable criticism of the autopsy team and the examination they performed on JFK. Dr. Cyril Wecht, the Allegheny, Pennsylvania, medical examiner, called it one of the “worst and most botched autopsies ever—the autopsy work was a piece of crap.”61* Other forensic pathologists are less vociferous, but they do criticize the fact that Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy remained in the hospital during the proceeding and kept asking when it would finish, placing pressure on the physicians to hurry their work.62 The Kennedys were willing to let the doctors determine the cause of death but not to let them conduct an extensive autopsy. Dr. Michael Baden says that a proper examination of the President “could have taken two or three days, and yet they only spent a few hours on the autopsy and the rest of the time working with the funeral director to put the body together in case Mrs. Kennedy decided to have an open coffin. A lot of things weren’t done, such as inspecting the spine, dissecting the neck organs, tracing out the bullet tracks, and inspecting the clothing. They should have shaved the head—it’s necessary for proper examination of a head wound—but Humes didn’t do it, to save time.”63 (The Kennedy family did not want the wound shaved, since they intended to have an open casket, and only changed their mind at the last moment).64†
The findings of the original autopsy physicians have been studied by subsequent panels of leading national forensic specialists. In 1968, a four-member medical panel appointed by attorney general Ramsey Clark concluded the President was struck by two shots from behind, and reaffirmed the original autopsy report. In 1975, the Commission on CIA Activities Within the U.S. (the Rockefeller Commission) reviewed the case, and also confirmed the autopsy results and the Warren Commission conclusions. In the late 1970s, the House Select Committee appointed a nine-member medical panel of experts with vast experience in gunshot wounds. Its members were the first forensic scientists and medical examiners to have complete access to all the photographs and X rays, as well as financial support to conduct the latest scientific tests, including neutron activation and photo enhancements. The Select Committee panel found faults with the autopsy, but confirmed its findings, and held that JFK was struck only by two bullets from behind.
The Neck Wound
The autopsy doctors were unable to figure out the path for the bullet that had entered at the rear base of the President’s neck. They could find no exit for that bullet, even conjecturing that it might have penetrated the back for only a few inches and then fallen out during the emergency treatment in Dallas. They did not know there was an exit hole in the front of his neck because they had not examined the President’s clothes and did not see the holes made by the exiting bullet through JFK’s shirt collar. Moreover, the tracheotomy done by Dr. Perry at Parkland had obliterated the neck wound and it was not until Dr. Humes spoke with Perry over the phone the following day that he realized what had happened.*
Early statements by some Parkland physicians that the wound in the front of the neck was a wound of entrance led to considerable confusion. Of all the doctors involved in treating the President at Parkland, only five—Carrico, Perry, Jenkins, Jones, and Baxter—saw the front neck wound in its original condition before the tracheotomy was performed.65
At a press conference following the announcement of the President’s death, Dr. Perry said in response to a question that the throat wound he saw “appeared to be an entrance wound.”66 “As the press is wont to do,” says Dr. Perry, “they took my statement at the press conference out of context. I did say it looked like an entrance wound since it was small, but I qualified it by saying that I did not know where the bullets came from. I wish now that I had not speculated. Everyone ignored my qualification. It was a small wound, slightly ragged at the edges, and could have been an exit or entrance. By Sunday, after working on Oswald, I had learned my lesson, and I handed out a written statement to the press and took no questions. I had got a lot smarter in two days.”67
What of the opinion of the other four Parkland doctors who saw that wound before the tracheotomy? No one at Parkland ever turned the President over, so they did not see the even smaller hole on his back that was in direct line with the one in the throat.*
Dr. Jones told the author, “The neck wound could have been either an entrance or an exit. I only called it an entrance wound because I did not know about the back wound.”68 Drs. Carrico and Baxter also agreed the wound could have been either an entrance or an exit.69 But the doctor with the most experience with gunshots at Parkland, Dr. Pepper Jenkins, recalls, “Even at that time, I was convinced it was a wound of exit because it was bigger than an entrance wound should be. Entrance wounds, as you look at them, are small and round, and may have a halo around them, black, from the bullet. But it makes a clean wound. When a bullet goes through the body, tissue moves in front of it and bursts.”70
Was the hole in the front of the President’s neck, described as only 5mm to 8mm in size, too small to be an exit wound, as some have charged? “There is a mistaken impression that exit wounds are large, gaping wounds,” says Dr. Baden. “They can be large, but if the bullet isn’t tumbling and doesn’t hit anything inside the body beyond soft tissue, they can be very small. I have seen plenty of exit wounds like that in gunshot cases.”71 Moreover, experiments conducted by Dr. John Lattimer, a New York physician who was the first private doctor allowed to view the autopsy X rays and photographs, reveal why the exit wound in the President’s neck was small. In reconstructions of the shot, with 6.5mm ammo, Lattimer discovered the exit wound remained small and tight if the bullet exited near the collar band of the shirt, where the buttoned collar and the knotted tie firmly pushed the neck muscles together. As Lattimer moved the shots farther away from the collar band, even by fractions of an inch, the exit wounds became larger.72 Dr. Carrico said the neck wound was right at the collar band and tie knot.73
When the House Select Committee’s nine-member forensics panel reviewed the autopsy X rays and photographs, it also examined JFK’s clothing, which confirmed the direction of the neck shot. Through enhancements of the original autopsy photos, the panel also noticed that the back wound had a unique “abrasion collar, a roughening of the edges … which clearly depicts the entrance.”74 The angle of the abrasion wound showed the bullet was traveling from right to left, the angle of Oswald’s line of fire from the sixth floor.75 The X rays confirmed there was internal injury, a stress fracture to the first thoracic vertebra, caused by the trauma of the bullet passing so close to the spine.76 The Select Committee’s medical panel unanimously determined that the neck wound was caused by a rear shot.77
The autopsy physicians concluded the fatal shot entered the rear of the President’s skull and exploded out the right side of his head. Humes said the wound was “blatantly obvious.”78 The evidence of the head wound was a textbook example of entrance and exit for a bullet. Seventy percent of the right hemisphere of the President’s brain was blown out, leaving a nearly six-inch hole on the right side of his head. The entry on the back of the head was small, not much larger than the 6.5mm bullet that did the damage.79 Examination of the inside of the skull indicated the edges of the hole were beveled inward, confirming the entry point. Fragments of the parietal bone missing from the right side of the President’s head, found in Dealey Plaza, later confirmed outward beveling, indicating that was the exit point.80 Less than 1mm of metallic dust particles was evident on the X ray of the President’s brain, and followed the bullet’s rear-to-front path, leading directly to the exit on the right side.81 Three fragments were found, one at the entrance point and two near JFK’s right eye, further evidence of the bullet’s path.82 There was no photographic, X ray, or personal observation of any other exit on the head except for the large hole on the right side.*
However, some of the Parkland doctors who treated the President described a gaping wound in the rear of JFK’s head (the occipital region), not the right side (the parietal). If true, this not only contradicted the findings of the autopsy team but was evidence that the President was probably shot from the front, with a large exit hole in the rear of the head. Several Parkland doctors also thought they saw cerebellum, tissue from the base of the brain, on the stretcher or in the operating room. Yet, the autopsy photos of the brain show the cerebellum intact. If the Parkland descriptions of the cerebellum were true, this raised legitimate questions over the authenticity of the photographs of JFK’s brain, which showed no such damage. Robert Groden and Harrison Livingstone, in their book High Treason, devote more than thirty pages to highlighting this conflict between the Parkland and Bethesda descriptions of the head wound.
However, it is questionable to rely on the Parkland doctors for any assertion about the head wound since, by their own admission, they did not examine it in detail. When Dr. Kemp Clark looked at the wound to determine whether the President could be revived, it was the first time it had been examined. “From what I read in later books, everyone looked at it in detail from the beginning, but that is not true,” recalls Dr. Jenkins. “We were trying to save the President, and no one had time to examine the wounds. As for the head wound, they couldn’t look at it earlier because I was standing with my body against it, and they would only have looked at my pants.”83
“We never had the opportunity to review his wounds,” Dr. Carrico told the author, “in order to describe them accurately. We were trying to save his life.”84 Dr. Adolph Giesecke agrees: “We had no time to examine the wounds. That was to be done by a forensic pathologist, not by us.”85 “I don’t think any of us got a good look at the head wound,” confirms Dr. Perry. “I didn’t examine it or really look at it that carefully.”86 “And when we realized he was dead,” Dr. Baxter recalls, “none of us had the heart to go and examine the head wound while Mrs. Kennedy was in the room. We all just made our way out of the room.”87 “When things were over with,” Dr. Jones says, “you felt it was her time and you should get out of there and let her be alone with him.”88
Dr. Baden of the Select Committee concurs: “Parkland was not concerned with whether the bullet was going from front to back or vice versa, they were only treating the symptoms, not the wounds. Some of them could be good surgeons but lousy pathologists. A third of the time, an autopsy shows something was missed by the treating doctors at the hospital. In unnatural deaths, it is common for the treating physicians to mix up stab wounds and gun shots, and they are wrong half the time about exit or entrance. The Parkland doctors did not clean Kennedy off—there is just no way they could have hazarded a real guess about that wound, since it was covered with blood and tissue. If they say they saw cerebellum, they are just wrong because the cerebellum was perfect. And if they say there was a large hole in the rear of the head, they don’t know what they are talking about since there is nothing there but the entry injury in the rear cowlick. The mistakes in judgments from Parkland are exactly why we have autopsies.
“One of the most important aspects of the Zapruder film, often overlooked by the critics, are the frames immediately after the President was shot in the head. It’s very clear on the enhanced frames that there is a wound over the right ear, but the back of the head is clean. That film is incontrovertible evidence that there was no defect on the rear of the head.”89
Yet mistaken descriptions of what the Parkland doctors did and saw continue to be published. High Treason asserts that some doctors examined the wound with a flashlight and that Dr. Jenkins picked the head up from the stretcher to show other doctors the extent of the rear wound.90 The eight principal doctors who attended to JFK on that day all told the author that such reports were false. Moreover, Groden and Livingstone cite early interviews and some testimony before the Warren Commission to support their hypothesis that the Parkland doctors saw a different head wound than the one described at Bethesda.* Yet the Parkland physicians, in their discussions with the author, were almost unanimous in supporting the autopsy findings that the massive exit wound was on the right side (parietal) of the President’s head, not the rear (occipital), and that there was no sign of damaged cerebellum tissue. They insisted that the explainable differences in the wound descriptions between them and the Bethesda doctors have been exploited by conspiracy writers, who created a controversy where none exists. Some admitted that their early statements about the wounds, which they now consider to be mistaken, may have contributed to the confusion.
Dr. Bill Midgett, who helped wheel the President from the limousine into trauma room one, says, “The President had quite thick hair, and there was a lot of blood and tissue. All of us were so shocked … and to have Mrs. Kennedy there—none of us stared very closely to see the wound. But it was more parietal than occipital—that much I could see. I did not turn the President over to look, but there was no cerebellum in that car or on the people.”
“We did say there was a parietal-occipital wound,” recalls Dr. Carrico. “We did say we saw shattered brain, cerebellum, in the cortex area, and I think we were mistaken. The reason I say that is that the President was lying on his back and shoulders, and you could see the hole, with scalp and brain tissue hanging back down his head, and it covered most of the occipital portion of his head. We saw a large hole on the right side of his head. I don’t believe we saw any occipital bone. It was not there. It was parietal bone. And if we said otherwise, we were mistaken.”91 Dr. Giesecke also admits an error in his original testimony when he described the wound as more occipital. “I guess I have to say that I was wrong in my Warren Commission testimony on the wound and in some of my pronouncements since then. I just never got that good of a look at it. But, for instance, Lifton spent six hours with me trying to get me to say the wounds were like he wanted them. The truth is there was a massive head wound, with brain tissue and blood around it. And with that type of wound you could not get accurate information unless you feel around inside the hole and look into it in detail, and I certainly didn’t do that, nor did I see anyone else do that.”92
Dr. Peters had said that the cerebellum was damaged. “I saw the photograph of the brain when I was in Washington for the Nova program, and I saw the cerebellum was depressed, but it was not lacerated or torn. It is definitely pressed down and that would be the damage I referred to in 1964.… The only thing I would say is that over the last twenty-eight years I now believe the head wound is more forward than I first placed it. More to the side than the rear. I tried to tell Lifton where the wound was, but he did not want to hear.”
Dr. Jenkins’s original report also stated he saw cerebellum. “The description of the cerebellum was my fault,” he says. “When I read my report over, I realized there could not be any cerebellum. The autopsy photo, with the rear of the head intact and a protrusion in the parietal region, is the way I remember it. I never did say occipital.”93*
“I did not really look at it that closely,” says Dr. Perry. “But like everyone else, I saw it back there. It was in the occipital/ parietal area. The occipital and parietal bone join each other, so we are only talking a centimeter or so in difference. And you must remember the President had a lot of hair, and it was bloody and matted, and it was difficult to tell where that wound started or finished. I did not see any cerebellum.”94 Dr. Baxter agrees that it was difficult to determine the precise location of the wound when treating the President: “He had such a bushy head of hair, and blood and all in it, you couldn’t tell what was wound versus dried blood or dangling tissue. I have been misquoted enough on this, some saying I claimed the whole back of his head was blown away. That’s just wrong. I never even saw the back of his head. The wound was on the right side, not the back.”95 Dr. Jones makes the same observation, saying he did not even know there was a head wound for several minutes, and then finally realized it was a “large side wound, with blood and tissue that extended toward the rear, from what you could tell of the mess that was there.”96 Dr. Giesecke agrees “that the occipital and parietal region are so close together it is possible to mistake one for the other.”97
The only Parkland doctors who still believe they saw a wound in the rear of the head, as well as seeing cerebellum, are Robert McClelland and Charles Crenshaw. “I saw a piece of cerebellum fall out on the stretcher,” says McClelland, who claims he was in the best position of any of the doctors to view the head wound.98 He drew a sketch in 1967 for Josiah Thompson’s book Six Seconds in Dallas, which showed a gaping wound in the rear of the head.99
“I am astonished that Bob would say that,” says Dr. Malcolm Perry. “It shows such poor judgment, and usually he has such good judgment.”100 “I don’t think Bob McClelland was in the best place to see the head wound,” says Dr. Peters. “He wasn’t in that position the way I remember it, as he was on the other side of the table. As for Dr. McClelland saying he saw cerebellum fall out on the table, I never saw anything like that.”101 “Bob is an excellent surgeon,” says Dr. Jenkins. “He knows anatomy. I hate to say Bob is mistaken, but that is clearly not right. In 1988, when I went to the National Archives, the photos showed the President’s brain was crenelated from the trauma, and it resembled cerebellum, but it was not cerebellar tissue. I think it has thrown off a lot of people that saw it. I guess a last point is that Bob and Groden [co-author of High Treason] are such good friends, I believe it has changed his attitude.”102 “McClelland may be a fine surgeon, but he is a lousy pathologist,” says Baden. “I am sure he thinks he saw that, and has developed it in his mind. But his memory is just completely wrong, and the autopsy photos and X rays prove that.”103*
Dr. Crenshaw wrote a book in 1992 in which he claimed he examined the wound, that the hole was in the rear of the head, and that the cerebellum was lacerated.104† Crenshaw, a junior resident at the time, arrived late at trauma room one and assisted for only a few minutes near the end. He was in no position to make the judgments he sensationally proclaimed in his book. In fact, his role was so minor that most of the other doctors do not even remember him. “I don’t remember Dr. Crenshaw in the room,” says Dr. Ron Jones. “I don’t remember him in there at any time, but he may have been,” recalls Dr. Jenkins. “Neither do I,” says Dr. Baxter.
“I feel sorry for him,” says Dr. Perry. “I had thought about suing him, but when I saw him on television [promoting his book], my anger melted. He has to know that what he said is false, and he knows the rest of us know that. You have to pity him. What a way to end his career. His story is filled with halftruths and insinuations, and those of us who know him know he is desperate.… He is a pitiful sight.” A senior Dallas doctor who is a close Crenshaw friend told the author, “I think it is a bag of worms of ego, going over the hill, the last hurrah.”
While almost all the Parkland doctors who treated JFK support the findings of the autopsy team, their confirmation may not be as important as the studies conducted by subsequent panels of experts. The Clark and Rockefeller commissions, as well as the House Select Committee’s medical panel, affirm the original autopsy conclusions about JFK’s head wound. The most detailed work was done by the Select Committee. All nine forensic pathologists agreed that the beveling of the skull and the damage to the brain meant the small rear hole in the President’s head was an entrance wound.105 The exit hole was consistent with a wound caused by the two large bullet fragments found in the front of the President’s car.106*
But if the President was struck in the head by a bullet fired from the rear, then why does he jerk so violently backward on the Zapruder film, which recorded the assassination? To most lay people, the rapid backward movement at the moment of the head shot means the President was struck from the front. “That’s absolutely wrong,” says Dr. Michael Baden. “People have no conception of how real life works with bullet wounds. It’s not like Hollywood, where someone gets shot and falls over backwards. Reactions are different on each shot and on each person.”107
In the case of President Kennedy’s head wound and the reaction on the Zapruder film, the Itek Optical Systems did a computer enhancement for a CBS documentary. Itek discovered that when the bullet hit JFK, he first jerked forward 2.3 inches before starting his rapid movement backward.108 Unless the film is slowed considerably and enhanced, the forward motion is not detectable.
The backward movement is the result of two factors. First, when the bullet destroyed the President’s cortex, it caused a neuromuscular spasm, which sent a massive discharge of neurologic impulses from the injured brain shooting down the spine to every muscle in the body.109 “The body then stiffens,” said Dr. John Lattimer, “with the strongest muscles predominating. These are the muscles of the back and neck …”110 They contract, lurching the body upward and to the rear.* The President’s back brace likely accentuated the movement, preventing him from falling forward. At the same instant the President’s body was in a neuromuscular seizure, the bullet exploded out the right side of his head. Dr. Luis Alvarez, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, focused on that to discover the second factor that drove the President’s head back with such force. Dubbed the “jet effect,” Dr. Alvarez established it both through physical experiments that re-created the head shot and extensive laboratory calculations. He found that when the brain and blood tissue exploded out JFK’s head, they carried forward more momentum than was brought in by the bullet. That caused the head to thrust backward—in an opposite direction—as a rocket does when its jet fuel is ejected.111 Because the bullet exited on the right side of JFK’s head, it forced him to be propelled back and to the left, exactly what is visible on the Zapruder film.†
“So much has been made of Kennedy’s movement in the Zapruder film,” says Dr. Baden, “and yet it is one of the least important parts of the case. By his movement alone, you can’t tell which direction he was shot from. You then need to examine the bullets, the bones, tissue, X rays, and photographs to determine from where the bullet came. I have personally done thousands of gunshot autopsies. There is no doubt that the bullets that hit John Kennedy, both in the neck and in the head, came from the rear. Nothing hit him from the front.”112
* Examination of JFK’s clothes later confirmed that the bullet that struck him in the shoulder/neck came from the rear. The back of his suit jacket had a bullet hole that pushed the threads inward, indicating the entrance point (WC Vol. V, p. 59). The size of the hole corresponded to a 6.5mm bullet. Spectrographic tests showed residues of copper at the edges of the jacket’s hole, the same metal that jacketed Oswald’s ammunition. JFK’s shirt also had one hole in the rear, with the threads pushed in as well (WC Vol. V, p. 60). The front of the shirt had nicks near the collar, with the threads pushed out, confirming an exit (WC Vol. V, p. 61). There was also a nick in his silk tie, near the knot, and because of the thread pattern, it is further evidence the bullet exited at the President’s neck (WC Vol. V, p. 62).
* The admiral was George Burkley, the President’s personal physician, who had been in the motorcade and arrived at Parkland several minutes after the President was wheeled inside the trauma unit. JFK needed steroids because of a deficiency in his natural production. Although it was a well-kept secret at the time, the President suffered from Addison’s disease, a rare illness named after the English physician who discovered it. That disease slowly destroys the cortex of the adrenal glands, and while it is usually fatal, cortical hormones alleviate many of the symptoms. The President, in shock from the wounds, was in desperate need of the hormones since his adrenal glands were incapable of producing any.
* Dr. Malcolm Perry says, “There must be three hundred people who claim they were in there that day, and there’s no way that could be true. It’s interesting that most of those of us who were intimately involved don’t talk about it, and the others do.”
* On the following day, minor operations were done on both Connally’s wrist and thigh.
* There were two stretchers in the hallway he passed through. Tomlinson was not certain from which one the bullet had dropped. But only one was connected to the assassination, as President Kennedy’s stretcher was never in that location. Tomlinson admitted he was not paying much attention when he bumped into it (WC Vol. VI, pp. 49, 56, 130). That slightly deformed whole bullet was later determined to have been fired from Oswald’s rifle, to the exclusion of all others. Critics have dubbed it the “magic bullet” because the Warren Commission concluded it was responsible for President Kennedy’s throat wound and all the wounds to Governor Connally. Yet the bullet had lost only 3 grains of its total weight of 161 grains, and its main deformity was a flattening, but no crushing of the nose or significant fragmenting. It is discussed in detail in Chapter 14.
* Four seats had been removed from the back of the narrow Boeing 707 so the casket could be placed inside the main cabin. The casket was slightly damaged when it was removed from the hearse. Later that night, a mahogany replacement coffin was ordered.
* Moreover, stealing JFK’s corpse from its Elgin Britannia coffin was not an easy task. The coffin had an air-lock mechanism that, when turned, hermetically sealed the lid on the casket. It was sealed at Parkland. Aboard Air Force One it had been strapped to the floor. To get the body out, the conspirators would have had to unstrap the coffin and unscrew the lock, allowing the unit to unseal itself. After removing the President’s body, something of similar weight would likely have to be placed inside, so people handling the casket would not notice it was too light. Finally, the casket would have to be resealed and strapped back into its original position before anyone on the plane noticed the unusual activity.
† Lifton spent an obsessive fifteen years working on his assassination thesis. His book Best Evidence eventually became a national best-seller in 1980. Lifton’s work has always been unusual. During the mid-1960s, he did his own photo enhancements of the shrubbery on the grassy knoll, and concluded that one tree had been artificial on the day of the assassination, in order to camouflage snipers. In his enhancements, Lifton believed he spotted a man wearing a Kaiser Wilhelm helmet, another with an electronic headset, one with a periscope, and another with a machine gun hidden in a hydraulic lift. He thought one of the men resembled General Douglas MacArthur (The Scavengers, pp. 172–73).
Despite his prodigious research, some experts still have little respect for his work. According to Professor David Wrone, a historian and assassination researcher, “In 1967, Lifton had a theory of fake trees, that a construction company put in fake scenery and so forth at Dealey Plaza, and then after the shooting, it was removed. He thought it helped the assassins get close for the shooting and also confused the people.… Lifton is a beast … [does] gross plundering. It’s almost as though he is a religious convert, and he is proselytizing for a false religion” (Interview, February 1, 1992). Robert Blakey, the chief counsel for the House Select Committee, says, “Lifton is just bizarre.… On a scale of one to ten, his theory is a zero” (Interview, January 22, 1992). Richard Billings, editorial director of the House Select Committee, said the committee was aware of Lifton’s theory and “rejected it as illogical, even absurd.” Billings called Lifton a “master nit-picker” and said his theory was “a preposterous notion” and “at best, the book is a monument to one man’s ingenuity. At worst, it is an appalling hoax” (February 6, 1991, letter, Billings to Pat Sklar of Times Books).
* There are those who believe even the autopsy physicians were part of a conspiracy. Yet, since Mrs. Kennedy was given the choice of which hospital she wanted for the procedure, the conspiracy plan would have required teams of conspirator doctors at both Walter Reed and Bethesda, as well as at key civilian hospitals in the area. Moreover, the body almost remained in Dallas for an autopsy, requiring further conspirators in that medical examiner’s office. Lifton actually believes that “President Kennedy’s body was never supposed to have left Dallas unaltered. However, the plotters lost control of the body. The reason for that loss of control was a major accident: the shooting of Governor Connally” (Best Evidence, p. 703). Again, Lifton bases his theory on an untenable hypothesis: that plotters who were able to arrange for a secret team of assassins, frame Oswald, and plan an unprecedented medical forgery to cover up the crime had forgotten to consider that Governor Connally, sitting only 24 inches directly in front of JFK, might be wounded from a bullet or a fragment. Even if Connally had not been wounded, it is difficult to imagine how any of the events in Dallas would have been different. Certainly the President would have been taken to Parkland (the hospital listed as the primary stop in case of an emergency) and an effort would have been made to save his life. Yet Lifton gives no indication whatsoever of how the medical deception involving Kennedy’s corpse was to be carried out in Dallas.
* Hospital pathologists such as Humes and Boswell are not trained in the forensic aspect of autopsies or the search for clues in unnatural deaths, nor do they normally preserve evidence for subsequent medical or legal proceedings. Forensic pathologists are not just concerned with what caused the death but also with the circumstances around the death. “In 1963, there was little appreciation for the difference of the two very different types of autopsies available,” says Dr. Baden. “There was the usual hospital one, which is what the President received, and there was the forensic one. Most people mistakenly thought a pathologist was a pathologist.”
* Technicians Paul O’Connor and Jerrol Custer claimed that the President’s body was brought into the rear of the hospital in a simple gray metal coffin and that he was zipped inside a military body bag. James Jenkins, a laboratory technician, said that a plain gray coffin, containing the body of an Air Force officer in a body bag, arrived at Bethesda before JFK’s coffin. That may have created confusion among the technicians.
But O’Connor and Custer also allege the President had no brain when he arrived. Custer even asserted that he put both his hands inside the President’s head and it was empty. But they were not part of the team that removed the body, although O’Connor arrived later (Humes interview, November 4, 1992). They were both interviewed by the House Select Committee in 1978, and neither mentioned what they now claim to have witnessed. When O’Connor was interviewed by author Harrison Livingstone in 1990, he admitted, “It has been so many years and so much has happened, I kind of doubt my own ability to remember fine details.”
The doctors and FBI agents who removed the body are consistent in their descriptions. They noticed the damage on the bronze casket that had been done in Dallas, and without knowing how Parkland had prepared the President for the trip, they correctly described the white sheets, plastic liner, and rubber bags that were used. As for the brain, it was photographed after being removed during the autopsy by Humes and Boswell (Autopsy report). “There was no body bag near the scene,” recalls Dr. Humes. “The President most certainly had a brain when he arrived. I don’t know how these stories get started. They are absolutely false” (Interview, November 4, 1992).
* Groden and Livingstone have asserted as part of their ever-widening plot that the conspirators replaced all the earlier X ray films of John Kennedy taken over the years and maintained at different hospitals and private doctors’ offices. They charge that while the X rays of the neck and head are forgeries, the conspirators forgot to replace the photographs of the face, which he admits are real. They claim those photos contradict the X rays since the X rays show the right eye and forehead to be missing, and the photos do not. But the X rays do not show any such damage. “Groden doesn’t know how to read those X rays,” says Dr. Michael Baden.
The reason Groden and Livingstone offer for the decision of the conspirators not to destroy the photographs, which they say are the medical proof of the plot, is this: “They did not dare destroy all of them for fear of a Presidential or Congressional order asking to see them.” In other words, people who were willing to murder the President of the United States were more afraid of the possibility of a future congressional subpoena.
* The author, as part of the research for this chapter, observed an autopsy performed by Dr. Wecht.
† There have been suggestions that Humes was under orders to limit the scope of the autopsy, but he insists that is not true. “Nobody made any decision in the morgue except me. Nobody distracted or influenced me in any way, shape, or form.” The House Select Committee concluded that Humes had the authority for a full autopsy but only performed a partial one (HSCA Vol. VII, pp. 9–10, 13–14, 191–92).
* There was also some question as to why the location of the entry wound at the rear base of the President’s neck is several inches higher than is indicated by the bullet holes in his suit jacket and shirt. Photographs taken during the motorcade show the President’s jacket was often bunched and riding up his back as a result of his waving to the crowd. His back brace also pushed his clothing up. Therefore, measuring placement of the holes in the clothing is not an accurate means of determining precisely where the bullet entered the body.
* Although no one at Parkland saw JFK’s back wound, Dr. Pepper Jenkins later told Dr. John Lattimer that he had felt it with his finger when he positioned the President’s head and neck to facilitate the passage of oxygen (Kennedy and Lincoln, p. 153).
* After the autopsy, Humes and Boswell wrote their report from memory, without the benefit of the photographs or X rays. Robert Kennedy, who feared the public display of the X rays and photos would be offensive to the Kennedy family, reached an agreement with the Warren Commission not to publish the materials, and except for Earl Warren, the commissioners did not examine them. When the film was turned over to the custody of the National Archives in 1966, a metal box containing the President’s brain was missing from the inventory, together with some tissue slides. Humes had given everything from the autopsy, including the brain, to JFK’s personal physician, Admiral George Burkley. “He told me,” said Humes, “that the [Kennedy] family wanted to inter the brain with the President’s body” (Journal of the American Medical Association, May 27, 1992, Vol. 267, No. 20, p. 2803). The House Select Committee concluded that Robert Kennedy likely disposed of the material for fear it would become a lurid public exhibition (HSCA Vol. VII, pp. 367–68).
* In 1988, four of the Parkland doctors—Pepper Jenkins, Richard Dulaney, Paul Peters, and Robert McClelland—went to the National Archives at the invitation of a PBS documentary show, Nova, about the assassination. They were the first Parkland physicians to see the autopsy photographs, and each confirmed the photos represented what they remembered seeing that day, including a picture of the rear of President Kennedy’s head, which shows no defect. It has been suggested that the reason the photo shows the rear of the President’s head as undamaged is because the doctor (whose fingers are present in the picture) is holding a large flap of skin to cover the rear defect. “False,” says Dr. Michael Baden. “There is no flap of skin there. There is a bony protrusion from the right side of the head, but the rear is undamaged, except for the entry hole near the top of the skull” (Interview, January 23, 1992).
* High Treason asserts that Jenkins originally said JFK was shot in the chest. Jenkins laughed when the author read him the Groden and Livingstone charge. “I don’t know where they get this stuff from. We put tubes into the President’s chest, but there were no chest wounds caused by anything else.”
* In his original report, McClelland said there was a wound to the left temple, one that does not show up on any autopsy X ray or photograph. This has caused some to charge that Kennedy was shot by a second gunman from another location at Dealey, and that the autopsy team either negligently or intentionally overlooked that wound. “I’ll tell you how that happened,” Dr. Jenkins explained to the author. “When Bob McClelland came into the room, he asked me, ‘Where are his wounds?’ And at that time I was operating a breathing bag with my right hand, and was trying to take the President’s temporal pulse, and I had my finger on his left temple. Bob thought I pointed to the left temple as the wound.”
† Crenshaw also said the autopsy photograph of the tracheotomy opening on Kennedy’s neck shows that it was larger than it had been at Parkland, implying that additional surgery might have been done between Parkland and Bethesda. “That’s ridiculous,” Dr. Malcolm Perry told the author. “I did the procedure. Tracheotomies are not pretty things, as speed is of the essence. Tissue can sag and stretch after death, but the photos I have seen look like the opening I remember making.”
* While the Select Committee’s forensic panel agreed that a bullet had entered from the rear and exploded out the side of the President’s head, there was a lone dissent. Dr. Cyril Wecht said that such a finding did not preclude a shot also entering from the front. Dr. Wecht believed that the large exit wound on the right side “could hide an entrance wound at the same spot.” In other words, just as Oswald fired from behind and his bullet exited the President’s head, a front shooter fired into the wound created by the rear bullet. That is Wecht’s way of explaining why there is not another entry hole on JFK’s head. However, the X rays and photographs show no exit for a front bullet. The author raised the issue with Wecht, and he admitted that “the question of where did a front bullet exit is a very good one.” He first suggested that the front shot may have been a frangible bullet, which would have exploded upon impact in the brain. However, the X rays do not show any metal fragments in the brain from such a bullet, and when this was pointed out to Wecht, he acknowledged, “Yes, that’s true, there should be more fragments.” Finally, he suggested that the front bullet may have been plastic, and penetrated the brain but did not exit. He argued that since the brain is not available for examination, his speculation is possible—except that plastic bullets were rarely available until 1968, five years after the assassination.
* The author viewed a video taken of the execution of a journalist by army troops in Central America. When the victim, who was lying flat on his stomach on the ground, was shot in the rear of the head, his upper torso and legs arched off the ground, in the opposite direction of the bullet. It was similar to the neuromuscular reaction JFK suffered. Also, when Governor Connally was struck in the rear shoulder by a bullet, he did not fall forward, but is clearly visible on the Zapruder film, his wounded shoulder pushing back into the car seat, toward the direction from which he was shot.
† Dr. Lattimer also conducted twelve physical experiments that confirmed Alvarez’s work. In each instance, the jet effect, on mock-ups of human heads struck from the rear by a 6.5mm bullet, caused the specimens to rocket back toward the shooter.
Another argument that the shot must have come from the front is based on the fact that two motorcycle policemen riding to the rear of the President’s car were splattered with blood and brain tissue. But on an enhanced version of the Zapruder film, the two officers drive right into the head spray, which actually shot up and to the front of the President.