Reclaiming History (104 page)

In response to a June 15, 1999, letter from me in which I asked him to elaborate on
why
he made the subject change in the draft, former president Ford, in his June 28, 1999, reply to me, merely said, “I will not comment on any ‘media’ report of the deliberations of the [Warren] Commission” except that “I reaffirm my comment in the July 3, 1997, edition of
USA Today
that ‘my changes had nothing to do with a conspiracy theory. My changes were only an attempt to be more precise.’” He added that “as the sole, surviving member of the Warren Commission, I reiterate my support for the Commission’s fundamental conclusions. I re-emphasize my endorsement that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin and he acted alone. I also reaffirm that the Commission found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic.”

With respect to the central issue of whether the Warren Commission made a mistake on the back-neck location of the wound, or deliberately changed the facts to solve the high-exit-wound problem, based on the fair manner in which I found the Warren Commission to have evaluated and handled the mountains of evidence in this case, of these two interpretations I am inclined to accept the first one (i.e., they were medically naive in not knowing, or negligently overlooked the fact), particularly when Dr. Humes himself told the Commission that the entrance wound was in the “low neck,” and then went on in the very same paragraph to use the precise language he used in his autopsy report, which stated that the wound was situated “just above the upper border of the scapula” (which is the upper back).
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It also has to be noted that the Warren Commission staff did not have access to the autopsy photographs and X-rays, as the HSCA later did,
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because the commissioners had made a commitment to make public all the evidence they examined, and they felt that if they examined the photographs and X-rays, they might be published, and the subsequent viewing of them (particularly the gruesome photographs) by the American public would constitute an invasion of privacy of the Kennedy family.
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Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter, in an April 30, 1964, memorandum to the general counsel, J. Lee Rankin, urged that the Warren Commission obtain the photographs and X-rays, saying it was “indispensable” that the staff examine them to, among other things, “corroborate the autopsy surgeons’ testimony that the holes on the President’s back [recall that the draft of the Warren Report said “back”] and head had the characteristics of points of entry” and “determine with certainty that there are no major variations between the [X-ray] films and the artist’s drawings.”
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However, Specter’s request was not met. Perhaps one reason why the Commission turned Specter down is that when he asked Dr. Humes, during the latter’s testimony, “In what way the availability of the X-rays would assist in further specifying the nature of the [president’s] wounds?” Humes answered, “I do not believe, sir, that the availability of the X-rays would assist in further specifying the nature of the wounds.” As to the photographs, though Humes said they “would show more accurately and in more detail the character of the wounds,” in answer to a question from Chief Justice Warren, he said that if he had the photographs in front of him while testifying, “it would not” change any of the testimony he had given.
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*

Inasmuch as the Commission felt that the photos and X-rays were “only corroborative,” it decided that they “should be excluded for other reasons of taste.”
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It’s my sense that if the Commission had felt the photographs and X-rays were necessary to make the determinations it had to make, that fact would definitely have overridden the fear of the Kennedy family that they may someday be seen by the American public.

In 1967, former Warren Commission member John J. McCloy told Walter Cronkite on a CBS News Special, “I think that if there’s one thing that I would do [differently], I would insist on those photographs and the X-rays having been produced before us. In the one respect, and only one respect there, I think we were perhaps a little oversensitive to what we understood was the sensitivities of the Kennedy family against the production of colored photographs of the body, and so forth.”
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Although the House Select Committee said that “there was no evidence that any members of the Warren Commission or its staff ever viewed any of the autopsy photographs or X-rays of President Kennedy,”
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apparently Chief Justice Warren was an exception, at least as to the photographs.
†
In his book
The Memoirs of Chief Justice Earl Warren
, Warren wrote,

It has been contended that the reason these pictures were not filed [in the National Archives] was because they would show that the shots which struck the President did not come from behind and above him. While I have never before entered into that discussion, I feel that it is appropriate to do so here because I am solely responsible for the action taken, and still am certain it was the proper thing to do.

The President was hardly buried before people with ghoulish minds began putting together artifacts of the assassination for the purpose of establishing a museum on the subject. They offered as much as ten thousand dollars for the rifle alone. They also wanted to buy…various things at the Depository, and they were even making inquiries about the availability of the clothes of President Kennedy. They also, of course, wanted the pictures of his head. I could see in my mind’s eye such a ‘museum’ preying on the morbid sentiments of people and perhaps planting seeds of assassination in the minds of some deranged persons who might see opportunity for personal notoriety or expression in assaulting yet another President.
I saw the pictures when they came from Bethesda Naval Hospital, and they were so horrible that I could not sleep well for nights
. Accordingly, in order to prevent them from getting into the hands of these sensation mongers,
*
I suggested
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that they not be used by the Commission, but that we rule on the convincing testimony of the Naval doctors who performed the autopsy to establish the cause of death [and the] entry, exit, and course of the bullets…

Sometime in the latter part of President Johnson’s administration, when the aforementioned charge was made, he set up a Board [Clark Panel] of outstanding pathologists from various parts of the country and submitted the pictures to them for comparison with the findings of the [autopsy] doctors…on which the Commission had relied. That Board confirmed the findings of the Commission.
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Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin pointed out to the HSCA that if the Commission had seen the photographs and X-rays, they would necessarily “become a part of the official record of the Commission,” so they would have to be published.
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Returning to the key issue, even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that my innocent interpretation of what happened here is incorrect, and the Warren Commission and its staff knowingly raised the entrance wound from the back to the neck so the entrance wound would not be lower than the exit wound, I feel it would be a non sequitur to conclude that the misconduct of the Warren Commission in this matter contaminates the immense and irrefutable evidentiary logic and power of its ultimate findings. Moreover, even if the Commission did do this, it in no way changed the actual location of the wound in the upper right part of the back as shown in the autopsy photographs and X-rays, a location agreed upon by all of the pathologists who reviewed them, nor the reality of the bullet, as indicated, always proceeding in a downward trajectory.

T
here can be no escape from the simple fact that the wounds in the president’s body were the result of two bullets that had been fired from above and behind.
All
pathologists who examined the evidence in this case for four national commissions (seventeen pathologists for the head wound, fifteen for the back wound) reached the same conclusion: that the two wounds to the back side of the president’s body (i.e., the upper back and back of the head) were
entrance
, not exit wounds, and that both exited toward the front of the body. And this group of pathologists includes, as I indicated earlier, the leading forensic pathologist for the conspiracy community, Dr. Cyril H. Wecht.

And yet, allegations (many of them offered by respected professionals who should know better) that the president was shot from his right front continue to appear in books, magazines, and newspaper articles, accomplishing little other than to titillate the public’s fascination for such exotic imaginings and, more importantly, to throw into question the clear and incontrovertible tower of facts that prove that no such thing ever happened.

One allegation that conspiracy theorists are particularly fond of (and one they
had
to invent to counter the irrefutable conclusions of the autopsy) is that the autopsy photographs and X-rays have been doctored, phonied up, or otherwise faked to hide the conspiracy to kill the president. We know this charge is false because, as discussed earlier, the photographs and X-rays were authenticated by the HSCA in 1978. But conspiracy theorists have never let facts stand in the way of a good, sensational story. In this case, critics point to a comment made by one of the two FBI agents at the autopsy in his deposition before the ARRB that reportedly suggests the autopsy photographs in evidence are forgeries.

In 1997, Jeremy Gunn, the ARRB general counsel, showed former FBI agent Francis O’Neill autopsy photograph number 42 (depicting the back of the president’s head) and asked whether the photograph resembled what O’Neill saw at the time of the autopsy
thirty-four years earlier
. O’Neill answered, “This [photograph] looks like it’s been doctored in some way.
Let me rephrase that.
When I say ‘doctored,’ [I mean] like the stuff [brain matter] has been pushed back in, and it looks like [the photograph was taken] more towards the end [of the autopsy] than at the beginning. All you have to do was put the flap [of scalp] back over here, and the rest of the stuff is all covered on up.”
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The conspiracy theorists have had a good old time with O’Neill’s “doctored” photograph remark and naturally have posted their distortions on Web sites all over the Internet, where they can quickly and eagerly trade misinformation with each other. (I know this not because I have a computer—I’m still in the nineteenth century, working with a yellow legal pad and pencil, although recently I graduated from a number-three to a number-four pencil, so I’m inching my way into modernity—but because people sometimes send printouts from the sites to me.) Naturally and predictably, and in the best tradition of the conspiracy theorists’ discipline, a conspiracy newsgroup posting of January 5, 2000, quoted O’Neill as testifying about the subject photograph: “This looks like it’s been doctored in some way.” The author of the message, of course, fails to include what O’Neill said immediately thereafter to explain what he meant. Likewise, Warren Commission critic and conspiracy theorist Dr. Gary Aguilar writes that “the theory of some kind of photographic ‘doctoring’ is not mere lunacy. It has significant support in the record.” But after quoting O’Neill’s testimony that “this looks like it’s been doctored in some way,” Aguilar proceeds to insert “…” instead of including O’Neill’s words immediately thereafter, where he makes it clear he was not referring to a doctoring of the photograph.
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Aguilar is a polished writer, a reputable doctor, and an excellent researcher. It is beneath him to play this dot-dot-dot game. The three dots (“…”), he knows, are only supposed to be used when the words they replace don’t alter or modify the words quoted. But at least Dr. Aguilar gave researchers a heads-up with his dots, which thereby announced he had deleted
something
. Most conspiracy theorists don’t even do that.

O
ne of the very biggest mysteries concerning missing evidence in the Kennedy assassination, one that continues to fascinate, and one that may never be solved—but, fortunately, one that doesn’t need to be, since it has only academic value—is
what happened to President Kennedy’s brain
? At the London trial, Gerry Spence zeroed in on the issue with my pathologist, Dr. Charles Petty.

Spence: “Did you ever see the brain?”

Petty: “No.”

“Do you think it’s important for a doctor, before he gives his opinion, to see the brain to determine what the course of the bullet was?”

“It would be nice if the brain were available.”

“Now, please, Doctor, let’s not be silly. You’re a professional. You’re under oath. Tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury if it isn’t essential for you to see the brain?”

“No, it’s not essential to see the brain.”

“You didn’t see the brain in this case?”

“No, I did not.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“No, I do not.”

“Did you look for it?”

“Well, not really.”

“As a matter of fact—well, now, please, Doctor, you smiled. But as a matter of fact, didn’t your committee ask some twenty different people where the brain of the president was?”

“We asked, but we did not look for it.”

“You couldn’t find it, could you?”

“No.”
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Conspiracy theorists have always been certain that the conspirators who killed Kennedy somehow were able to expropriate his brain as a part of the cover-up.

Here’s what we do know. As the HSCA summarized it, “shortly after” the supplemental examination of the president’s brain (the date of which has never been confirmed—see later discussion), Kennedy’s personal physician, Admiral George Burkley, directed the Bethesda Naval Hospital to transfer all the physical autopsy material in its possession to Robert I. Bouck, the special agent in charge of the Protective Research Section of the Secret Service, at the White House. Captain John H. Stover, the commanding officer of the Naval Medical School at Bethesda, gave Burkley “the [president’s] brain in a…stainless steel bucket,” and Burkley “personally transferred it to the White House where it was placed in a locked Secret Service file cabinet” along with the other autopsy-related material, such as photographs, X-rays, and tissue sections.
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Bouck took the containers of autopsy-related material and stored them inside a four-drawer file cabinet safe with a dial combination lock in a basement location in the White House adjacent to the control room occupied by White House police.
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