Reclaiming History (106 page)

Robert Tanenbaum, the chief assistant to Richard Sprague, the first chief counsel for the HSCA, told me that in a personal conversation he had years ago with Frank Mankiewicz, Robert F. Kennedy’s press secretary and close confidant, Mankiewicz told him that he was present at the grave site when JFK’s body was reburied, and that Bobby Kennedy had “put Jack’s brain in the coffin.”
³⁰⁹
When I asked Mankiewicz about this, he denied expressly telling Tanenbaum this, though he conceded talking to Tanenbaum about the president’s brain and further acknowledged that he may have speculated to Tanenbaum that this could have happened. But since Mankiewicz was at the grave site, his “speculation” position doesn’t have nearly the believability it would have if he hadn’t been present, and it is unlikely that someone of Tanenbaum’s stature would have misunderstood what Mankiewicz told him about such an important matter.

Mankiewicz told me, “I do believe that the president’s brain was reburied with the president when his body was moved from its temporary grave to its permanent one,” adding, however, that he had no firsthand knowledge of this. Mankiewicz told the HSCA’sG. Robert Blakey in 1978 that after the reinterment, Edward Kennedy “seemed” to confirm that the brain was buried in the grave site, but when I asked Mankiewicz to elaborate on this, he said, “I honestly just don’t recall either Ted confirming this in any way, or telling Blakey this.”
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If, indeed, Robert Kennedy somehow placed the president’s brain in the president’s coffin when the president was reburied, we have a situation where the dead president was not “taking a secret to his grave,” but someone else’s secret.

E
asily one of the most obscenely irresponsible documents ever promulgated in the assassination debate, and yet one whose contention is being hailed and widely accepted today in the conspiracy community, is the one written by Douglas P. Horne, the ARRB’s chief analyst for military records. The ARRB, established in 1994, was not authorized by Congress to be an investigative agency. Its sole function was to determine what previously unreleased documents pertaining to the assassination should be released to the American public. (See discussion in endnote to “The Investigations” section.) But the authorization to determine what records could be released enabled the board members to stretch their narrow mandate here and there by taking depositions under oath to “clarify points that weren’t clear from the original records.” Nowhere did they do this more, and cause more harm and confusion, than in the area of Kennedy’s autopsy.

The juggling of dates by Horne unfortunately will make this section confusing to many readers, despite my effort to present Horne’s theory in an understandable way. Before we get into Horne’s theory, the reader should know that even before the ARRB hired Horne for his jurisdictionally narrow job, one that required objectivity, Horne was already a strong supporter and believer in perhaps the craziest theory ever to come out of the conspiracy community, David Lifton’s theory that Kennedy’s body was stolen and his wounds altered before his autopsy.
³¹¹

Horne wrote a “Memorandum for File” on June 2, 1998 (released by the National Archives on November 9, 1998), that has achieved iconic status in the conspiracy community. Its main conclusion belongs on the cover of the weekly tabloid
Sun
, which features stories like “Hitler Is Still Alive” and “Actual Photos of Heaven.” Unbelievably, Horne said that the depositions taken by the ARRB caused him to conclude that there were two (not one) supplemental brain examinations following the autopsy, and the second one—are you ready?—wasn’t on the president’s brain, but on another brain from some anonymous third party. Horne, accusing Drs. Humes and Boswell of criminal conduct to cover up the true facts of the assassination, said that what happened was a “carefully controlled, compartmented operation in regard to orchestrating who was present, and what procedures were performed, at the two separate brain examinations.”
³¹²
Horne’s star witness in reaching his conclusion was John T. Stringer Jr., the autopsy photographer.

The three autopsy surgeons negligently did not say, on the autopsy report they each signed, the date of its preparation. However, the chief autopsy surgeon, Dr. James Humes, testified that he prepared and delivered the final report on Sunday, November 24, 1963.
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One of the other autopsy surgeons, Dr. Pierre A. Finck, also has written, and testified, that it was the twenty-fourth.
³¹⁴
And a January 26, 1967, affidavit signed by all three autopsy surgeons reads, “The autopsy report, written by Dr. Humes with the assistance of Dr. Boswell and Dr. Finck, was…delivered by Dr. Humes to Admiral Burkley, the President’s physician, on November 24 at about 6:30 P.M.”
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The last page of the subject autopsy report reads, “A supplementary report will be submitted following more detailed examination of the brain and of microscopic sections.”
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But the surgeons continued their negligence in not saying, on their supplementary report, the date of their supplementary examination of the brain, or the date of the supplementary report, and as opposed to the date of the autopsy and autopsy report, the date of the supplemental examination of the brain, and the report thereof, has never been determined to anyone’s complete satisfaction. The handwritten date “12/6/63” in the upper right corner of the supplemental report was only determined to be the date Humes hand-delivered the report to the president’s personal physician, Admiral George Burkley.
³¹⁷

The supplementary autopsy report said, among other things, that “in the interest of preserving the specimen, coronal sections are
not
made. The following sections
are
taken for microscopic examination [seven sections are listed, e.g., “from the margin of the laceration in the right parietal lobe”].”
³¹⁸
So serial, coronal sectioning, sometimes called cross-sectioning, where the brain is sliced through and through—in small parallel intervals from one side of the brain to the other for interior analysis—was
not
done.
*
Only small sections of the brain were taken for analysis.

But in his appearance before the ARRB on July 16, 1996, when asked if the sections the autopsy surgeons took of the brain were “small pieces, or cross-sections,” John Stringer responded, “
If I remember
, it was cross-sections.”
³¹⁹
Apart from the fact that Stringer wasn’t absolutely sure and the supplementary report signed by all three autopsy surgeons clearly refuted his testimony, Humes had already testified in his ARRB deposition on February 13, 1996, that “we didn’t divide the brain like we often do…a so-called bread loaf-type incision.”
³²⁰
The reason? Humes told
JAMA
that Admiral Burkley told him, “The family wanted to inter the brain with the President’s body.”
³²¹
Dr. Thornton Boswell, the second autopsy surgeon, in his February 26, 1996, ARRB deposition, also testified that the president’s brain was not serially cross-sectioned, only small sections being taken.
³²²
And the other autopsy surgeon, Pierre Finck, in a February 1, 1965, report (based on his notes taken around the time of the brain examination) to his superior, Brigadier General J. M. Blumberg, wrote, “Commander [Humes] takes sections from [the brain] but does
not
make coronal sections in order to preserve the specimen.”
³²³

That should have been the end of it, right? But not for Mr. Horne. With Stringer speaking of cross-sectioning, and the three autopsy surgeons speaking only of small sections of the president’s brain being taken, he was off and running, concluding that there must have been two supplementary brain exams (all three autopsy surgeons have only referred to one), one of which was on the morning of November 25, 1963, and attended by Humes and Boswell, Stringer, and others. Drs. Humes and Boswell, Horne concludes, did not invite Dr. Finck to this exam. (The only supplementary report of a brain exam in the Warren Commission volumes is signed by Dr. Humes,
³²⁴
and Humes testified that “Dr. Boswell,
Dr. Finck
and I convened to examine the brain.”)
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This was an examination that even Horne agrees was of the
president’s
brain. But Horne alleges there was a
second
brain exam, this one of someone else’s brain being represented as the president’s, on November 29, 1963, at which time Humes, Boswell, and this time Finck were present, but not Stringer.

It was critical to Horne’s mad theory that the “first” exam be
no later
than the morning of November 25 because he concludes the brain was buried with the president’s body, and the funeral was that afternoon.
³²⁶
Hence, per Horne, the president’s brain wasn’t even available to be examined on November 29, when Horne says the “second” supplementary exam took place.
†
But to arrive at the twenty-fifth as the date of the “first” supplementary brain exam, Horne had to engage in what appears to be deliberate distortion. The only other option is serious incompetence. His main source for his conclusion of the twenty-fifth was an interview of autopsy surgeons Dr. James Humes and Dr. Thornton Boswell by
JAMA
editor Dr. George D. Lundberg and
JAMA
reporter Dennis Breo in the May 1992 edition of
JAMA
, in which Breo writes, “On December 6, 1963, Humes alone submitted to Burkley his supplementary report…
Shortly afterward
[i.e.,
after
December 6, 1963], Humes [and Captain John Stover, the commanding officer of the Naval Medical School at Bethesda] turned over everything from the autopsy to Admiral Burkley—bullet fragments, microscopic slides, paraffin blocks of tissue, undeveloped film, X-rays—
and the preserved unsectioned President’s brain
.” Breo then quotes Humes as saying, “Admiral Burkley gave me a receipt for the autopsy materials, including the brain. It was my understanding that all the autopsy materials, except the brain, would be placed in the National Archives.” Although, Humes said, he didn’t know whether the brain was ultimately buried with the body, he did recall Burkley telling him that “the family wanted to inter the brain with the President’s body.”
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*

Horne conveniently omits from his report the reference to the brain being turned over to Burkley
after
December 6, 1963. If he had, this would have proved that his theory that the president’s brain was buried with his body on November 25, 1963, was wrong. Instead, he focuses only on the desire of the Kennedy family to inter the brain with the body, and since the president’s funeral was on the afternoon of November 25, 1963, he concludes that “the supplementary brain examination [took place] prior to the November 25, 1963 state funeral of President Kennedy.”
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Could the highly unlikely argument be made that Horne was unaware of the
JAMA
interview with Humes? This argument, even if accepted, doesn’t save Horne. In fact, the situation gets much, much worse for him. Four years after the
JAMA
interview, Dr. Humes himself testified before the ARRB.
And Horne was present at the deposition
. Humes testified that Admiral Burkley told him that Robert Kennedy, as the “spokesperson” for the Kennedy family, told Burkley that the family wished “to inter the president’s brain with the body.”

ARRB counsel then asked him, “Did you give Dr. Burkley the [president’s] brain prior to the time President Kennedy was interred?”

Humes: “No, no, no, no, no, no. It was
afterwards
.”

Question: “Approximately when?”

Humes: “I can’t remember. I would say it was within ten days, probably.”
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Horne, with full knowledge of this, didn’t tell the readers of his memorandum report what Humes had testified to because, again, it would destroy his whole theory. And whether Horne believed Humes or not is completely irrelevant. You don’t write a single-spaced, fifteen-page report with footnotes and eighteen pages of supporting documents accusing Humes of this terrible crime without finding space to include what Humes had to say, under oath, about the matter. Nor, of course, did Horne tell his readers that Admiral Burkley had given an affidavit (which was also under oath) that
after
the supplementary autopsy examination of the president’s brain he had delivered the president’s brain, in a steel container, to the White House, and that on April 26, 1965, when the container was transferred to the National Archives, the brain was
still
in the container.
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Inasmuch as Drs. Humes and Burkley have given statements under penalty of perjury that the president’s brain was not buried with his body, I wonder if Doug Horne would be willing to testify under penalty of perjury that he didn’t know about Burkley’s affidavit, or about Breo’s article, and that he had also forgotten what he personally heard Humes testify to. Or that yes, he was aware of all three of these things, but he never included them in his memorandum because he didn’t think they were relevant?

By the way, at least as to Dr. Humes, could one make the argument that Humes lied under oath to protect himself from Horne’s accusation? No. Humes testified on February 13, 1996, and Horne didn’t even write the first draft of his unbelievable theory until more than six months later, on August 28, 1996.

Trying to construct his nonexistent case, Horne goes on to say in his memorandum that since Dr. Finck, in his letter to Dr. Blumberg, specifically says the supplementary brain examination was on November 29, this must have been a
second
supplementary exam, the only one of the two, Horne says, that Finck attended. Horne says that “although John Stringer did photograph the supplemental brain examination [the one that Horne says occurred on November 25, not the later one on November 29 that Horne claims took place], the photos of a brain in the National Archives today are
not
the photographs that he took at that event…Those photographs…are photographs of a different brain, and
are not images of President Kennedy’s brain
.”
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Horne doesn’t know who took these photos at the alleged second brain exam on November 29, but it wasn’t Stringer, he says. So according to Horne, the photographs held today at the National Archives that researchers are told are of the president’s brain, really are photographs of the brain of some anonymous third party, and all of the photographs of President Kennedy’s brain are missing. I see.