Reclaiming History (107 page)

Horne’s modus operandi in reaching his incredibly far-out conclusion is standard conspiracy fare. All normal people know that people’s recollections of an event vary widely, sometimes just moments or a day after it happened, and it doesn’t mean anything at all. It’s to be expected. For instance, Dr. Finck himself, whose recollections Horne relies on for his sinister scenario, stated at the end of his deposition before the ARRB, “that there are things I remember, others I don’t…And to me, it is a real burden to have to repeatedly answer questions, being asked, ‘Do you remember this, do you remember that,’ and quite often I have to answer, ‘Well, I don’t remember,’ or ‘I cannot answer that question with precision.’”
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But exactly like his congenitally suspicious predecessors, who apparently have different experiences in life than normal humans, whenever Horne spots a discrepancy in the recollection of two or more people trying to remember a long-ago event that supports his theory of what happened, he immediately smells the sweet (to him) aroma of a conspiracy. For example, Dr. Finck, in his report to General Blumberg, writes that “color and black and white photographs are taken by the U.S. Navy photographer: superior and
inferior
aspects of the brain.”
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Horne writes in his report, “Navy photographer Stringer, who was present at the earlier brain exam [the first one, he says, of the president’s brain]…
is on record
[ooh!] in his ARRB deposition transcript that he did not shoot basilar [meaning
base, below
], or
inferior
views of the brain
*
…This Finck recollection of witnessing a photographer shoot
inferior
views of the brain, therefore, corroborates that he was at a different examination than was John Stringer.”
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I get it. If five witnesses to an automobile accident each give different versions of what they saw, there must have been five separate automobile accidents. Someone with this mentality was being paid with
our
tax dollars.

But when a discrepancy can’t be used to support Horne’s theory, he suddenly becomes normal and doesn’t think anything of it. For instance, FBI agents O’Neill and Sibert watched the entire autopsy proceeding together. Yet Horne has no difficulty at all with O’Neill testifying before the ARRB that he saw the president’s brain being removed from his cranium and measured, weighed, and put in a jar, and Agent Sibert not being able to recall seeing the president’s brain ever being removed from his cranium or seeing the brain at any time outside the body.
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Now why would Humes and Boswell, who testified that there was only one supplementary brain exam, have conducted a second one of a different brain? Of course, Horne has an answer, in effect accusing Humes and Boswell of being a part of a vast conspiracy to cover up the true facts of the assassination, which pointed away from the guilt of Oswald. He writes that there
was
coronal sectioning of the president’s brain on November 25, but photographs of the damage to these sections couldn’t be allowed to see the light of day. Why? Because they would have documented the damage to the president’s brain “in great and irrefutable detail” and hence, “was considered knowledge which had to be suppressed.” Therefore, “an examination of a second (different) brain (exhibiting a more acceptable pattern of damage), with photographs to record [that] different pattern of damage (such as those now in the Archives),” was deemed “necessary.”
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In other words, the shots really didn’t come from behind, where Oswald was, but from the president’s right front, that is, the grassy knoll. As a contributing writer in the book
Murder in Dealey Plaza
, Horne wrote,

The real brain, examined on or about Monday, 25 November 1963, constituted unassailable evidence of a shot from the front, and was incompatible with the “cover story” of a lone shooter from behind…The condition of the real brain was consistent with the reports of the Dallas doctors, who said President Kennedy had an exit wound in the right rear of his head…Allowing it to remain in evidence would have confirmed that the President was shot from the front, and would have made it impossible to sell the “cover story” to the American people. Removing the real brain from evidence and substituting photographs of another brain…with a pattern of damage roughly consistent with a shooter from above and behind, would support the “cover story” that a lone man in a building shot a man in a car from above and behind.
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Horne also goes on to say he believes “that President Kennedy’s
body
was altered—tampered with—prior to the commencement of the…autopsy, presumably to remove evidence (i.e., bullets or bullet fragments) inconsistent with the lone-assassin-from-behind cover story.”
³³⁸
(See discussion of this body-alteration allegation in conspiracy section.) Since Horne and his fellow conspiracy theorists passionately believe that the conspirators shot Kennedy from the grassy knoll to the president’s right front, then tried to frame Oswald by making it look like the shots came from the president’s rear, where Oswald was, did the thought ever enter their mind that rather than get surgeons beforehand to alter the wounds on Kennedy’s body and remove bullets or fragments, and then have the autopsy surgeons engage in a monumental charade of having two separate brain exams, why wouldn’t the conspirators avoid the necessity for all of this by simply shooting Kennedy from the rear instead of the front? That way they wouldn’t have to pull off an operation of staggering difficulty and complexity and wouldn’t have to bring into the conspiracy all these surgeons and doctors, each one of whom could expose it and put all the conspirators on death row.

Since Dr. Finck’s letter to General Blumberg was based on “personal notes” of his that he presumably made around the time of the events to which they relate, his date of November 29, 1963, for the one and only supplementary brain exam is probably correct.
*
But if, as Horne suggests, the first supplementary brain exam was on November 25, and the conspirators, Humes and Boswell, made sure they didn’t invite their colleague Finck to attend, we can be sure that when they conducted their second exam—this one of a different brain, the one that Humes and Boswell purloined from the morgue, and apparently fired a bullet (or drilled a hole) through from the rear—they would be double and triple sure not to invite him to this one also, since the likelihood of his recognizing the brain as different from the one he saw at the president’s autopsy on November 22 could expose their participation in the conspiracy.

I mean, since Horne claims this second exam took place on November 29, only seven days after the November 22 autopsy, and Finck saw and was present when the president’s brain was removed from the cranium at the time of the autopsy, he could be expected to remember how the president’s brain looked, particularly since the right hemisphere was so badly damaged. Yet Finck never, in his personal notes and in his various testimonies since then, suggested the brain examined on November 29 was not the brain he saw removed from the president’s skull on the evening of November 22. The only difference he noted was that the convolutions (ridges) of the brain were flatter, and the sulci (furrows or grooves) were narrower than at the time of the autopsy, two normal changes brought about by formalin fixation, a fact he recognized in his personal notes.
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*

Horne, however, desperate to prove his theory, in effect rejects what Dr. Finck says and totally accepts the testimony of former FBI agent Francis O’Neill before the ARRB in 1997. O’Neill, many years after he probably looked over someone’s shoulder in the crowded autopsy room to get a quick glimpse of the president’s brain, said that the photos he was shown by ARRB counsel, supposedly of the president’s brain, didn’t look like the brain he saw at the time of the autopsy. “It [the brain seen in the photo from the National Archives he was shown] appears to be too much.” On the night of November 22, 1963, he said, “More than half the brain was missing.”
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But if Dr. Finck noticed a change in the brain as minute as the width of the many grooves, surely he would have noticed if the size of the brain was markedly and demonstrably different, as O’Neill said. Yet Mr. Horne takes the word of a former FBI agent in the autopsy room,
thirty-four years after the fact
, over the word of one of the autopsy surgeons writing notes of his observations shortly after the autopsy. By the way, if Humes and Boswell were going to go through all the trouble of getting another brain, mangling and tearing part of it away to resemble Kennedy’s, and drilling or shooting a hole through it from behind, wouldn’t you think—if O’Neill’s observation that the president’s brain was much smaller than the photo of the brain he was shown was correct—they’d also do the much easier and obvious thing of making sure this other brain was the approximate size of Kennedy’s?

Horne does his best to protect his credibility on his memorandum by burying in a footnote near the very end of it some information that severely damages the credibility of his star witness, autopsy photographer John Stringer. (But it’s too late. There is nothing that can possibly restore the credibility of Doug Horne for the main conclusions he sets forth in the body of his memorandum.) Stringer, it turns out, told the ARRB that he had no recollection whatsoever of ever having spoken to, or having any contact with, anyone from the HSCA. Yet he was interviewed over the phone by an HSCA investigator on August 12, 1977, and accompanied HSCA personnel to the National Archives on August 15, 1977. And on September 11, 1977, he wrote a letter to Andy Purdy of the HSCA staff. Additionally, although he told Purdy of the HSCA on August 12, 1977, that he believed the doctors had “sectioned” the brain, on August 15 he told Purdy the doctors “didn’t section the brain serially.” They “cut some pieces from the brain…while normally they would cut it right in half.”
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“Within a few days,” Purdy told me, “Stringer completely changed his story.”
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With this type of witness who, though well intentioned, has no memory of three contacts with the HSCA staff, and through confusion or faulty memory has flatly contradicted himself on the principal point of whether the brain was sectioned—the point that launched Horne on his harebrained theory—Horne decides to build a case around him. Horne thereby rejected the language in the autopsy and supplementary autopsy reports, and sworn testimony of Drs. Humes and Boswell, that the brain was not cross-sectioned or coronally sectioned (only small sections were taken), taking Stringer’s word in his 1996 testimony before the AARB over all of theirs that the brain was cross-sectioned. By doing so, he in effect accuses these honorable men of being in on a conspiracy to suppress the truth from the American public.

It obviously would be bad enough to take the word of someone whose credibility on this issue was as diminished as Stringer’s was over that of Drs. Humes and Boswell,
*
but since Horne writes it was estimated that fifteen people were present at the supplementary exam of the president’s brain, he must have been referring to more than just Humes and Boswell when he writes that Stringer’s “recollection of the sectioning of the brain” was “at variance with every other witness to that event who can be located today.”
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No matter. Stringer’s weak, lone, and self-contradictory recollection of the cross-sectioning of Kennedy’s brain makes for a conclusion of two brains, a cover-up of the truth, and a sensational story. Everyone else’s version, plus that of common sense, produces no story at all. When a reporter asked Dr. Boswell about Stringer’s recollection of photographing cross-sections of Kennedy’s brain, Boswell sneered, “He’s full of [expletive].”
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Knowing that Stringer’s memory and credibility are suspect, when I interviewed him over the telephone on September 21, 2000, I nonetheless sensed that the entire Stringer issue of whether or not Kennedy’s brain was “sectioned” may have all been the result of a simple misunderstanding of terms. Now living in retirement in Vero Beach, Florida, Stringer told me he is certain the autopsy surgeons cut sections of the president’s brain out, and that he photographed them. When I asked him if he meant by this that the surgeons made coronal, through-and-through sectioning, he said, “I don’t recall if they cut it [the brain] through and through.” Nor could he recall at this late date the size of the sections that were cut out. What was very illuminating, however, is that when I asked him how many photographs he took of the sections during the brain examination, he said, “I took around six or eight photos.” Of each cut-out section? I asked. “No, no. You would only take one, or two at the most, of each section. I took six or eight total.” The relevance of this, of course, is that as set forth earlier, and this bears repeating, in the supplementary report of the autopsy surgeons on the brain examination, it reads, “In the interest of preserving the specimen, coronal sections are not made. The following sections
are
taken for microscopic examination,” whereupon
seven
sections are set forth (e.g., “from the right cerebellar cortex”).
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The seven sections cut out of the president’s brain match up almost perfectly with the “six or eight” photographs (assuming he didn’t take more than one photo of each section) Springer said he took. One additional point on this issue. Although Stringer testified in his ARRB deposition, “If I remember, it was cross-sections,” launching Horne into a world whose dwellings are booby hatches, he had said earlier that the autopsy surgeons “
took
some sections” of the brain,
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language one would be more apt to use if, as the supplementary autopsy said, “sections are
taken
” of the brain, than one would use if through-and-through, bread-loaf incisions were made.

Before Doug Horne, the main beef that most conspiracy theorists had with the autopsy surgeons was their alleged incompetence. But thirty-five years after the assassination, Horne showed all these naive, whippersnapper conspiracy theorists a thing or two. Humes and Boswell weren’t incompetent. They were criminals and co-conspirators.