A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination (40 page)

He said later he tended to believe that Humes had not tried to hide something significant by destroying the paperwork. “I concluded he was inexperienced and naive, not realizing how many people would be looking over his shoulder, but not malicious.” Still, he feared that conspiracy theorists would assume that Humes had been “trying to hide his mistakes, or worse.”

Humes had another revelation that afternoon, although this one was welcome. It involved the first bullet to strike Kennedy. Although Humes had not mentioned it in the autopsy report, he volunteered that the bullet would have exited the president’s throat at high speed and remained largely intact; it hit nothing solid—no bones or thick tendons—as it passed through his neck. The bullet had certainly not fallen backward out of the president’s body, as the FBI report had suggested.

So where was it? If it had been traveling at high speed when it left Kennedy’s body and could not be found in the limousine, what did it hit next? The slug found on Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital had presumably been the one that struck Connally—and, according to the FBI and Secret Service, only Connally. Specter pondered the questions over the weekend, thinking he would pursue the issue again on Monday, when Humes was scheduled to give his formal testimony in Washington. Specter would have the chance to show Humes some of the physical evidence from Dallas that the pathologist had never seen, including frames from the Zapruder film.

*

Specter later remembered Humes’s testimony in Washington as historic, certainly a turning point in the commission’s investigation, because it was the first time anyone outlined the hypothesis that would become known as the single-bullet theory.

It came after Humes was sworn in and was shown the blown-up image of the frame of the Zapruder film that showed Kennedy’s hands rising to his neck, apparently after he was struck by the first bullet. Humes stared at the photo for a moment, noting the location of the president in the backseat and how Connally was sitting in a jump seat just ahead of him.

“I see that Governor Connally is sitting directly in front of the late president,” Humes said: “I suggest the possibility that this missile, having traversed the low neck of the late president, in fact traversed the chest of Governor Connally.” In layman’s terms, then, he was speculating that the first bullet to hit Kennedy also hit Connally.

Suddenly, Specter said, it all made sense. The FBI and Secret Service had been wrong in concluding that Kennedy and Connally were hit by separate bullets. They were hit by the same bullet, one that first passed through the president’s neck, then struck Connally in the back. Humes’s theory might resolve the commission’s confusion over whether Oswald had enough time to fire the shots. The assassin might not have had time to pull the trigger three times in the period in which the Zapruder film showed both Kennedy and Connally were hit, but there would have been time to pull the trigger twice—one bullet hitting both men, another hitting Kennedy in the head. Many witnesses in the motorcade and in the crowd at Dealey Plaza were convinced they heard three shots, so the commission would still have to sort out what happened to the third bullet; Specter thought that shot might somehow have missed.

Humes was shown what would be remembered by Specter as the most important piece of physical evidence the commission recovered from Dallas—the flattened, but nearly intact, copper-jacketed lead-core 6.5-millimeter rifle bullet that had reportedly been found on Connally’s stretcher at Parkland. As evidence was introduced during the commission’s hearings, it was labeled with exhibit numbers, and Specter now affixed a small commission exhibit tag—“CE #399”—to the transparent plastic tube that held the bullet.

If Humes was correct, CE #399 had to be the bullet that had hit both Kennedy and Connally. Specter asked Humes to look at the bullet in the tube. Assuming it only hit soft tissue in Kennedy’s neck, could this bullet have also caused all of Connally’s wounds? Humes was skeptical at first. “I think that extremely unlikely,” he said. He knew from Connally’s medical records that metal fragments had been found in the governor’s chest, thigh, and wrist. This bullet seemed too pristine to have left behind so many bits of metal.

Specter was not discouraged by the pathologist’s response—that Humes was distancing himself almost instantly from the valuable theory he had just offered the commission. As Specter looked back at the blowup from the Zapruder film, he thought the single-bullet theory simply sounded right. Humes, he knew, had only limited ballistics experience—little experience in performing homicide autopsies, for that matter—and might not know how to judge the weight of the metal flakes in Connally’s body. Specter suspected the flakes were so tiny that they might well have come from the same bullet—the one he was holding in his hands.

*

Specter was angry that he was being forced to take Humes’s testimony without showing him the autopsy photos or X-rays from Bethesda—the ones that Humes himself had ordered taken.

Three months into the investigation, Specter had still not been permitted to see the photos or X-rays, reflecting what he understood was Warren’s indulgence of the Kennedy family. Specter had pressed Rankin repeatedly about the issue, and Rankin kept putting him off, saying the commission first needed to reach a decision on how, and whether, the photos and X-rays would be presented in the panel’s final report. For the time being, he was told, he should rely on the expert testimony of Humes and the other pathologists. For his testimony, Humes had tried to be helpful by bringing along diagrams of the president’s wounds prepared by a navy sketch artist at Bethesda, but both he and Specter knew the drawings were based on Humes’s imperfect memory.

Now, with Warren and other commissioners present in the witness room, Specter decided to put his alarm about the situation on the record—to remind the chief justice of the absurdity of discussing the president’s autopsy report without access to all of the medical evidence.

Specter turned to Humes and asked how he could be certain that the sketches by the navy artist were accurate, since the artist had not seen the autopsy photos or witnessed the autopsy himself.

“If it were necessary to have them absolutely true to scale, I think it would be virtually impossible for him to do this without the photographs,” Humes admitted, offering Specter the response he wanted. Humes explained that he had not seen the photos himself since the night of the autopsy, when the Secret Service took them away for safekeeping; they would be helpful in getting his own testimony right, he acknowledged. “The pictures would show more accurately and in more detail the character of the wounds,” he said. They offered “a more graphic picture of the massive defect” to the president’s head.

Specter said later he remembered Warren scowling as he listened.

And the chief justice interrupted, turning the tables on Specter with his own question for Humes: “May I ask you this, Commander? If we had the pictures here and you could look them over again and restate your opinion, would it cause you to change any of the testimony you have given here?”

Humes was understandably reluctant to suggest he was getting his facts wrong in front of Warren and the other commissioners: “To the best of my recollection, Mr. Chief Justice, it would not,” he replied.

It was the answer that Warren had been looking for.

*

Specter shared his frustration with Belin and some of the other young lawyers. They were united in thinking how wrong it was for the commission to block their access to any evidence, and especially the most basic medical evidence of how the president had died. “It was dangerous,” Belin believed. “It violated basic, elementary rules of evidence familiar to every law student in America.” He said he was also offended by the commission’s decision—or at least Warren’s decision—to allow the Kennedy family to dictate what evidence could be seen. “It was special treatment to a favored few,” Belin said. There was no similar restriction on the staff in reviewing the autopsy photos of Officer J. D. Tippit, some of which were nearly as horrifying as those of President Kennedy. “If Officer Tippit’s widow wanted to keep photos and x-rays of her husband private, she would not” get her way, Belin declared. “So why should President Kennedy’s family be treated differently?”

Specter eventually got a fuller explanation. The photos and X-rays, he was told, were in Robert Kennedy’s custody at the Justice Department, and the late president’s brother did not want to release them to the commission for fear that they might become public—a judgment Warren came to share. The Kennedy family worried that “those ghastly images might reach the public,” Specter said. “They feared that the American people would then remember John F. Kennedy as a mutilated corpse with half his head blown away, rather than as the dashing young president.” He also saw a political calculation by the Kennedy family. “It seemed that the family wanted to preserve the late president’s image in part for the future political benefit of family members. Younger brothers Robert and Edward both closely resembled the late president. Any damage to John Kennedy’s image could harm them.”

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THE OFFICES OF THE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON, DC

MONDAY, MARCH 16, 1964

Warren did not want Specter to wait before leaving for Texas. “The Chief Justice did not let grass grow under anyone’s feet,” Specter said. So on Monday, March 16, the same day the commission took the testimony of Humes and the other pathologists from Bethesda Naval Hospital, Warren asked Specter to leave for Dallas immediately to take testimony from the doctors and medical staff at Parkland Hospital.

“Well, Mr. Chief Justice, Passover is midweek, and I kind of have to do some preparation for these witnesses,” said Specter, who wanted to be with his family for the Jewish holidays. “I think I can leave a week from today.”

“I was hoping you’d leave this afternoon,” Warren replied.

The two men compromised, with Specter agreeing to leave Thursday. He arranged for his wife and children to go to Kansas to spend the holidays with his family.
*

Specter hoped his trip to Texas would clear up several mysteries about the medical evidence. Why, for instance, did the Parkland doctors initially suggest to reporters that the wound in the president’s throat was an entry wound, not an exit wound, which would rule out a shot from the book depository? And what was the chain of evidence for the mostly intact bullet found in the hospital’s first-floor hallway—the bullet, Specter now believed, that had passed through the bodies of both Kennedy and Connally? Ballistics tests proved that the bullet had been fired by Oswald’s rifle.

Specter was curious to see Parkland for himself and to meet the emergency-room doctors who had been confronted on November 22 with the challenge of trying to save the life of the president of the United States. The hospital proved to be nothing like the luxurious, well-equipped military clinics back in Washington where a president and his family would normally receive their medical care. Parkland was a big, noisy, dingy medical center on the outskirts of a large city—“a rambling, dun-colored, 13-story teaching hospital,” Specter remembered. He was given a small meeting room for his interviews, and he set to work immediately, asking the hospital to arrange appointments with “every staff member even tangentially involved” with the treatment of Kennedy and Connally. “I intended to take the sworn testimony of every doctor, nurse, orderly and bystander who had been involved.” On Wednesday, March 25, he interviewed thirteen witnesses back to back.

Specter would say later that, under the circumstances, the performance of the Parkland staff on the day of the assassination was “superb.” Dr. Charles Carrico, the surgery resident who was the first to treat Kennedy, told Specter that the president’s heart was still beating when he arrived in the emergency room. “From a medical standpoint, I suppose he was still alive,” Carrico said. But as Specter now knew, so much of Kennedy’s brain had been blown away that the doctors’ efforts were futile despite “every conceivable, desperate effort to save him.”

The Parkland doctors had a logical explanation for the confusion about the president’s throat wound and why they initially suggested the wound might have been an entry point. (The error had been memorialized in the hospital’s paperwork, with one of the emergency-room doctors describing the hole in the president’s throat as “thought to be a bullet entrance wound.”) As the doctors explained it, they had simply never turned the president’s body over, so they had not seen the entry wound in the back. After the president was declared dead, the doctors said, they left the emergency room without any further examination. “No one, at that time, I believe, had the heart to examine him,” Carrico said. In other cases, he and his colleagues might inspect a corpse “for our own education and curiosity.” In this case, Carrico said, “I make no apologies. I just saw the president die.” Specter suspected that if the doctors had any thought of turning the president’s body over to inspect it, they abandoned it when they noticed Mrs. Kennedy standing nearby. “They didn’t want to prod the body with the widow watching.”