Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination (3 page)

Wound position according to FBI Agent Francis O’Neill

Wound position according to mortician Thomas Robinson

Not one of the Parkland or Bethesda witnesses have described a wound like the one in the autopsy picture, which shows a great hole above the right ear, and the rear of the head virtually unmarked (see Photo 8).

What, then, to make of that photograph? After studying it, several of the Dallas medical staff expressed consternation. One, Dr.
Fouad Bashour, insisted the photograph was wrong. “Why do they cover it up?” he said. “This is not the way it was!”

In an interview with the author, the Dallas surgeon Robert McClelland offered an explanation. When he saw the President in the emergency room, he said, a great flap of scalp and hair had been “split and thrown backwards, so we had looked down into the hole.” In Photo 8, however, McClelland believes the scalp is being pulled forward, back to its normal position, to show what looks like a small entrance wound near the top of the skull. This is not visible in Photo 8. “I don’t think they were trying to cover up the fact that there was a large hole,” said McClelland, “but that’s what they were doing… . They were covering up that great defect in the back and lateral part of the head by pulling that loose scalp flap up. You can see the hand pulling the scalp forward.”
5

Dr. McClelland said the “great defect in the back” is visible on some photographs among the set of some fifty pictures he saw at the National Archives—pictures in which the torn scalp has been allowed to fall back on the President’s neck, pictures the public has never seen. His explanation may go a long way to resolve the apparent discrepancy. It certainly demonstrates that no outside researcher should form judgments on the basis of a set of photographs that may or may not be complete.

According to the pathologist who directed the autopsy, Dr. Humes, his colleague Dr. Pierre Finck, and the former director of photography at the Naval Medical School, who was the principal cameraman at the autopsy, not even the “official” set of autopsy photographs at the National Archives is complete. Pictures they remembered being taken, or thought should have been taken, are not in the collection. Photographs of the interior chest are not there. Nor, according to Dr. Finck, are certain photographs of the skull injuries.

With some pictures missing or possibly missing, and some showing injuries as witnesses do not recall having seen them, some have suspected forgery—notwithstanding a finding by a majority of the Assassinations Committee photographic panel that the pictures are authentic.
6

Such doubts were encouraged by the comments of Floyd Reibe, a former Bethesda technician who himself took some of the autopsy photographs. He claimed that some of the photographs in the National Archives are “phony and not the photographs we took.”

In 1994, the Assassination Records Review Board stated that a second set of autopsy photographs may have survived, photographs apparently made from the original negatives and thus presumably authentic. If so, they would be key evidence, but the matter was left unresolved.

There are other problems with the autopsy record, not least the bizarre fact that the President’s brain is missing. Sometime after the assassination, it was sent to President Kennedy’s former secretary, along with the photographs and X-rays, for safekeeping. Safe it was not—at least not from the point of view of future investigators. In 1966, after the materials passed into the care of the National Archives, it was discovered that the brain was no longer with the photographs and X-rays. Also absent were tissue sections, blood smears, and a number of slides.

The Assassinations Committee, which could find no trace of the missing material, favored the theory that Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother, disposed of it to avoid tasteless display in the future. A vial containing a part of the brain was destroyed by the Secret Service some six years after the assassination. Whatever the full facts, the result was to hamper the work of later
forensic pathologists.

The autopsy X-rays also feature in the catalog of mismanagement. Dr. McClelland, the surgeon who worked on the dying President in Dallas, reviewed the set of X-rays at the National Archives in 1989. He was quoted afterward as saying that they showed head injuries different from those he saw in the emergency room in 1963. Jerrol Custer, a former Bethesda technician who made some of the autopsy X-rays in 1963, claimed—as did his colleague of the autopsy photos—that some of the X-rays were “fake.”

A physicist and radiation therapist at the Eisenhower Medical Center, Dr. David Mantik, submitted the X-rays to a technique called optical densitometry. “This data,” he told the author, “provides powerful and quantitative evidence of alteration to some of the skull X-rays. They appear to me to be composites.”

It is not for this author to judge whether such suspicions are justified. What is clear, however, is that the best evidence, the President’s wounded body, was squandered. The deficiencies of the autopsy, and the mismanagement of the record, added fuel to the lasting controversy.
7

Aside from the evidence of body and bullets, there is one further invaluable aid to any analysis of the assassination. This is the short but infinitely shocking film made by an amateur cameraman in the crowd, Abraham Zapruder. Having initially left his camera at home, Zapruder had hurried home to fetch it at the last moment. So it was that he came to make the eighteen seconds of truly apocalyptic film that has remained the subject of diverse interpretation. The most famous amateur movie in the world was shot from a vantage point on a low concrete wall to the
right front of the approaching President. For all its fame, and although no description can replace actual viewing of the Zapruder film, its contents must be summarized here.

As the motorcade turns to come straight toward his lens, Zapruder catches the last uneventful seconds, with the President and his wife smiling and waving in the sun. Then the limousine vanishes for a moment behind a street sign. When it emerges, the President is clearly reacting to a shot—his hands clenched and coming up to his throat. Governor Connally turns around to his right, peering into the backseat. He begins to turn back, goes rigid, and shows signs that he, too, has been hit. Jacqueline Kennedy looks toward her husband, who is leaning forward and to his left. There is an almost imperceptible forward movement of the President’s head, and then, abruptly, his skull visibly explodes in a spray of blood and brain matter. He is propelled violently back into the rear seat of the car, then bounces forward and slides to the left into Mrs. Kennedy’s arms. The savage backward lurch by the President occurs, to the eye, at the instant of the fatal wound to the head. Then, as Mrs. Kennedy apparently reaches for a fragment of her husband’s skull on the back of the car, a Secret Service agent jumps aboard from behind, and the limousine finally accelerates away.

Abraham Zapruder sold his film to
Life
magazine for a quarter of a million dollars. The magazine later published still frames from the material, but the moving footage was not shown on television until March 1975. The film was a key tool for both official investigations, not least because it provides a near-precise time frame for the assassination.

In 1978, however, it took on new importance, for its use in conjunction with a hitherto neglected item of evidence, one that was greeted as the most momentous single breakthrough in the
case since 1964. It followed news that the sounds in Dealey Plaza had apparently been recorded—and included identifiable gunshots.

This evidence, if evidence it is, had been ignored for sixteen years. It was a battered blue “Dictabelt,” a routine recording of police radio traffic that had been made, just as on any ordinary day, on the day of the President’s murder. To the layman it is a mishmash of barely comprehensible conversation between policemen in the field and their dispatch office at headquarters. The gaps between speech seem a meaningless blur of distorted sound and static. That certainly is what was assumed by the Dallas police and the Warren Commission, who used the recording only to establish police movement and messages. The Dictabelt long lay abandoned in a filing cabinet at Dallas police headquarters, until a director of the police Intelligence Division took it home. There it might have stayed, were it not for the keen archival mind of a private researcher named Mary Ferrell. Long aware of the recording, she drew the attention of the Assassinations Committee to its possible significance.

Recovered in 1978, the Dictabelt was submitted to Dr. James Barger, chief acoustical scientist for the firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman. The company specialized in acoustical analysis, working not only on such projects as underwater detection devices for the U.S. Navy, but also on studies of matters of national importance. In 1973, during the investigation of Watergate, the firm advised on the famous gap in the White House tapes. Its expertise had been used, too, in the prosecution of National Guardsmen involved in the shooting of students at Kent State University.

Nobody expected very much from the crackly Dallas police recording submitted to Dr. Barger. His work, though, along with a further study performed by two scientists at the City University of
New York, turned out to be pivotal to the deliberations of the Assassinations Committee. Technical processes, including the use of equipment not available in 1963, enabled Barger to produce a visual presentation of the sound-wave forms on a part of the tape that—his initial findings indicated—had great significance.

With his New York associates, Professor Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy, Dr. Barger then designed an acoustical reconstruction in Dealey Plaza. Early one morning in 1978, guns boomed once again at the scene of President Kennedy’s murder. The results showed that impulses on the police recording matched sound patterns unique to the scene of the crime. Certain impulses, the scientists theorized, were indeed gunshots. They declared that the sounds had been picked up by a microphone moving along at about eleven miles per hour at the time of the assassination. They surmised that this was mounted on the motorcycle of a police outrider in the presidential motorcade, and that the recording had been made because the microphone button was stuck open at the time. Working from photographic evidence and testimony, Assassinations Committee staff decided that the motorcycle had been one ridden by Officer H. B. McLain. It appeared that the scientists and the investigators had achieved a tour de force of detection.

The Committee’s experts concluded that gunfire had come from in front of the President as well as from behind him. At least two gunmen were therefore involved in the assassination. Aware that acoustics today has a rightful place in forensic science, that it has been admitted into evidence in court, the Assassinations Committee was forced into a dramatic reassessment. The acoustics finding formed a major plank of its official finding that President Kennedy was “probably” murdered as the result of a conspiracy.

Soon,
however, came dissenting expert opinion. First from the FBI, with a skimpy report declaring the two-gunman theory “invalid.” Even a lay reading revealed this critique to be hopelessly flawed, and it deserves no public airing here. The first serious blow to the acoustical evidence came in a 1982 report by the National Academy of Sciences. A panel of distinguished scientists concluded that the Committee’s studies “do not demonstrate that there was a grassy-knoll shot.” At the core of the finding lay not some abstruse scientific deduction, but the curiosity of a drummer in Ohio, Steve Barber.

Barber came to the controversy thanks to a girlie magazine. In the summer of 1979,
Gallery
offered its readers, among the nudes, a record of the section of the police Dictabelt that includes the noises said to be gunshots. Barber, who played it again and again, detected something the experts had missed. What had been thought to be unintelligible “crosstalk”—conversation coming in from another radio channel—Barber’s ear identified as the voice of Sheriff Bill Decker, in the lead car of the motorcade. The sheriff’s voice occurs at the same point on the recording as the sound impulses that the Committee’s experts said were gunshots. What he is saying is, “Move all men available out of my department back into the railroad yards there … to try to determine just what and where it happened down there. And hold everything secure until the homicide and other investigators can get there.” Clearly, Decker did not issue his orders till
after
the shooting.

Undeterred, acoustical scientist James Barger said this apparent anomaly could have been caused in several ways. Was it possible that the Dictabelt needle jumped back—as was said to occur sometimes with that old-fashioned system? Or did the process of copying the original police recording cause the illusion of “crosstalk”?

Dr.
Barger stood by his original findings. “The number of detections we made in our tests, and the speed of the detections—the odds that that could happen by chance are about one in twenty. That’s just as plain as the nose on your face.”