Reclaiming History (108 page)

One would think that Horne would be ashamed of himself for writing the memorandum he did. But to the contrary, he is very proud. In an introduction to his memo that he wrote for
Probe
, a small, informative conspiracy publication that has since folded, he said his view of his memo as being “extremely significant, even seminal” was confirmed by the reaction of others of its importance, and that while he was writing it he “felt electrified” because of his “unique and revelatory interpretation” of the evidence “that was critical to proving that there was a massive government cover-up of the medical evidence in the JFK murder.” Horne goes on to say in his introduction that he was “still surprised” that no one else previously saw what he did and published the hypothesis before he did.
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But he has no reason to be surprised. Most people don’t have thoughts this irrational. And if, perchance, such a vagrant thought enters their mind, they recognize it as such. When you have such a virtually insane thought and you don’t realize it, that’s when, you know, there’s a problem.

There is one delightful gem that I must add to this section to lighten it up. Dr. David Mantik, a Loma Linda, California, cancer specialist, is, like Dr. Gary Aguilar, a part of the new wave of conspiracy theorists. Taking Horne’s theory to vertiginous heights, listen to what he has to say about Horne’s substitute brain. “If there was a surrogate brain, it
also
has disappeared…It is not likely that RFK would have wanted even a surrogate brain placed on public display as if it were his brother’s.
Most likely
, RFK placed the authentic brain into the coffin for initial burial on Monday, November 25, and was therefore fully aware that a surrogate brain had later surreptitiously appeared…If RFK understood the role that the surrogate brain had played, as he probably did, he could have used any convenient waste disposal site [to dispose of it].”
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My God. RFK somehow finds out that Humes and Boswell, as part of an apparent conspiracy to cover up the assassination of his brother, used a brain other than his brother’s to conduct their examination. So he goes out and finds, seizes, and then gets rid of his brother’s substitute brain. Is there any end to the silliness?

Dr. Mantik, as is obvious from his scholarly research in the Kennedy case as well as his background, is a person of considerable intelligence. Not only is he an oncologist, but also a radiologist with a doctorate in physics. How, then, can Mantik and thousands like him in the conspiracy community—many of lesser intellect—end up uttering absurdities like this, as well as countless others throughout the years? The answer is that within the world of insanity there is an internal logic. By that I mean one can frequently have a perfectly intelligent conversation with an insane person if one is willing to enter that person’s world of insane suppositions. Mantik is clearly a very rational person and not insane, but for whatever reason he is starting out with an insane premise (in this case, Horne’s theory). The internal logic that flows from this premise makes perfect sense. But only from the outside peeping into this mad world can one see how utterly crazy his “logical” conclusions are.

A great number of nuts have kept pumping out conspiracy theories for years. But these are private nuts, on the outside as it were. But when someone like Horne, working for an official review board of the federal government, someone we expect to be responsible, can author a document that couldn’t possibly be any sillier or transparently irresponsible, then unfortunately we know that the notion of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination will be alive and well until the crack of doom. I suppose it is a given that there will be other Doug Hornes who will breast-feed the conspiracy loonies for generations to come with their special lactations of bilge, blather, and bunk.

One wants to take earnest, well-intentioned, and intelligent people like Drs. David Mantik and Gary Aguilar seriously, even though neither of them are pathologists. But when they take someone like Doug Horne seriously, and accept his outrageous and patently false theory as completely valid,
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it becomes much more difficult to take them seriously.

It would be reassuring to know that Doug Horne was just an ARRB aberration, an unaccounted-for loose cannon. But very unfortunately, the evidence seems to indicate that Horne had soul mates, important ones at that, at the ARRB. Jeremy Gunn, the onetime executive director, no less, for the review board, told George Lardner Jr. of the
Washington Post
that he thought it was “highly plausible” that there were two different brain examinations.
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In other words, in Gunn’s view, it is “highly plausible” that Drs. Humes and Boswell joined in the conspiracy by getting another brain, altering it to reflect a shot from where Oswald was, when they knew the fatal shot came from the front, then lied under oath to everyone about their findings. And I repeat. This was an executive director of the ARRB!

In case the reader is wondering, I did not call Doug Horne to have him comment on his highly defamatory (to Drs. Humes and Boswell) and scurrilous memorandum. I would not be interested in anything further he had to say. But on August 21, 2000, I did call and speak to Horne’s superior, Jeremy Gunn. Gunn immediately tried to distance himself from Horne. When I said to him, “You of course have read Douglas Horne’s memorandum,” he said, “I try to avoid reading anything written by Douglas Horne.” When I told him that in Horne’s introduction to the
Probe
republication of his memo Horne said he had shown him (Gunn) the first draft of his memorandum on August 28, 1996, and that Gunn had told him he liked what Horne had written about the two-brain discovery “very much” and that it was “very persuasive,” but that it was “a little bit too one-sided, and a little bit too biased in tone” and that he could be more effective in making his argument if he included “devil’s advocate” arguments on the other side,
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Gunn said, “Anything that Horne said about any conversation I had with him I would not consider reliable.”

Gunn refused to give me his opinion on the merits of Horne’s theory, saying, “I don’t want to get into any of this. It’s no longer a part of my life. I want to stay away from all of this as far as I can.” When I reminded him that he had told the
Washington Post
’s George Lardner Jr. on November 10, 1998, that he found Horne’s position “highly plausible,” he responded that so often in interviews, remarks are taken “out of context,” adding he would “neither confirm nor deny” he told Lardner this.

The bottom line is that finally, in 1996, Doug Horne, after thirty-five long years, proved what the conspiracy theorists had only been alleging—Oswald was innocent, and the killer or killers were firing from the grassy knoll. Most of the conspiracy community has welcomed Horne with open arms. He is routinely praised in conspiracy publications and articles and has been the guest of honor at gatherings of conspiracy buffs. “This man is a hero,” gushed conspiracy writer Joseph Backes in a 1999 article.
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Before I get into Governor Connally’s wounds, let me point out that Horne, without expressly saying it, at a minimum accused Drs. Humes and Boswell not only of perjury, but also, as indicated, of being criminal accessories after the fact to Kennedy’s murder by joining a conspiracy to suppress the truth. He writes that “Drs. Humes and Boswell were present at
two different
brain examinations, and that they have intentionally tried to obscure this fact from all official parties to whom they have spoken
or testified
about this matter over the past thirty-three years.”
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In other words, Horne wants us to believe one of two possibilities. The first is that someone (one of the conspirators who was behind Kennedy’s murder) “got to,” or “reached” Drs. Humes and Boswell—you know, tapped them on the shoulder and whispered into their ears, or some variation thereof—
after
Kennedy was killed, but before the autopsy, and got them to join the conspiracy. And I imagine it was easy for the doctors to decide to help frame Oswald for Kennedy’s murder. After all, everyone else in the world was in on the conspiracy. Why shouldn’t they be? Why should they rain on the parade?

But that’s really the most unlikely of the two scenarios by far. If Humes and Boswell were going to be called upon by the conspirators to do what they did, the people behind this incredibly complex conspiracy obviously would never wait until after Kennedy was killed to start feverishly rounding up pathologists (in the few hours before the autopsy) to carry out that end of the plan. Those pathologists would necessarily have to be already on board. Meaning what? That Humes and Boswell weren’t just accessories
after
the fact to Kennedy’s murder, but
part of the conspiracy to murder him
. This is what Horne, and all of the many in the conspiracy community who have embraced his theory, have, in effect, accused Humes and Boswell of. In other words, they knew,
before
Kennedy’s murder, that he was going to be murdered, and agreed to be part of this conspiracy to murder him—their role being to help cover it up. And since, under the law of conspiracy (the so-called vicarious liability rule), each member of a conspiracy is criminally responsible for all crimes committed by his co-conspirators to further the object of the conspiracy, under federal law and the law in every state, if Horne’s allegations were true, Humes and Boswell would be guilty not only of the crime of conspiracy to commit murder, but also of Kennedy’s murder itself. Again, as I’ve said so many times in this book, it’s just too insane for words.

And by the way, the conspirators would have had to have a team of pathologists ready at two hospitals to perpetrate the cover-up that Horne is sure took place. What I’m saying is that even if we exclude Parkland Hospital (which one can’t really do, since the conspirators couldn’t know, for sure, that the autopsy would not be conducted there), since it looked like the autopsy was going to be conducted at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., until Jacqueline Kennedy, midair between Dallas and Washington, D.C., decided on Bethesda, the conspirators would have also had to line up some pathologists at Walter Reed—in other words, if the autopsy was at Walter Reed, almost for sure the pathologists would not have been Humes and Boswell, who were naval doctors, but instead army pathologists. So the conspirators, cold-blooded murderers from the Mafia or CIA or KGB, and so on, would have necessarily had to approach not only Humes and Boswell, but also their counterparts at Walter Reed. And since other pathologists would be available at both places and the conspirators wouldn’t know until
after
Kennedy died who among them would be assigned to the case, the superiors of Humes and Boswell and the superiors at Walter Reed would also have had to have been approached
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and told that they intended to murder the president and asked if they would be willing to join in the conspiracy. And of course, after they heard the conspirators’ proposal, none of the pathologists told them, “Are you crazy? The moment you leave I’m going to call the police.” Instead, every single pathologist the conspirators approached apparently agreed to participate in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy.

At the time of the president’s autopsy, Dr. Humes was a commander in the Medical Corps of the U.S. Navy and senior pathologist and director of laboratories of the Naval Medical School at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. Humes received his undergraduate training at Villanova University in Philadelphia and his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. His internship and postgraduate training in his special field of pathology took place at various naval hospitals and at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Boswell was also a commander in the Medical Corps of the U.S. Navy and the chief of pathology at the Naval Medical School at Bethesda. Receiving his medical degree from Ohio State University College of Medicine, he interned at naval hospitals and took his pathology training at St. Albans Naval Hospital in New York.

But of course, according to Mr. Horne, all of this background of Drs. Humes and Boswell was simply preparation for their date with infamy—becoming big-time felons by joining shadowy conspirators who clandestinely approached them and enlisted their participation as conspirators in the murder of John F. Kennedy. Why would they want to jeopardize their lives and careers and legacy to do something so incredibly reprehensible as this? You’d have to ask the eminent Mr. Horne that question. So far he hasn’t said.

Just as the discredited acoustic evidence has left an indelible stain on the legacy of the HSCA with its unwarranted conclusion of conspiracy, Doug Horne (and those who allowed him to do his thing) to a lesser degree has left a stain on the legacy of the ARRB, which overall did an excellent job under the chairmanship of John R. Tunheim. In a form letter sent to people around the country seeking assassination-related documents they might have, the then executive director of the ARRB, David Marwell, pointed out that the ARRB was a federal agency “whose members were appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate” and “charged with the responsibility of collecting records related to the assassination of President Kennedy.” The letter went on to say that the ARRB “
is not seeking to reach any conclusions
” regarding the assassination, but is primarily concerned with “identifying, clarifying, locating and making available assassination records.” From that very clear and limited mandate, the atmosphere at the ARRB apparently was such that someone like Doug Horne was allowed to pursue his fantasies to such an extent that not only was a prohibited and crazy conclusion reached and published, but it was one that accused innocent and honorable men of murder.

Not that Humes’s and Boswell’s characters have to be vouched for, but when I asked John Stringer what he thought of Douglas Horne’s two-brain theory, he chuckled and said, “What these people won’t come up with next?” About the possibility that Humes and Boswell (both of whom, he said, he knew very well and worked with for many years) would ever do what Horne accused them of, Stringer, who is now in his late seventies, said, “Oh, no. Not even a chance. They were both honest and sincere men, real gentlemen. I would trust anything they said.”
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