The Kennedy Half-Century (112 page)

9
. Clint Hill, the agent who jumped on the back of the presidential limousine in an attempt to shield the Kennedys from additional gunfire, believes that Mrs. Kennedy had been trying to retrieve a large piece of JFK’s skull when she climbed on the trunk of the vehicle. Billy Harper, a medical student at Texas Christian University, found a 2¾-inch piece of Kennedy’s skull lying in Dealey Plaza, which he quickly turned over to the authorities. E-mail from Gerald Blaine, January 9, 2013. See also G. Paul Chambers,
Head Shot: The Science Behind the JFK Assassination
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010), 93–96.

10
. Breo, “JFK’s Death, Part II,” 2804–7.

11
. Warren Commission Hearings, History Matters website, Testimony of Dr. Kemp Clark, March 21, 1964 (vol. 6, p. 20),
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh6/html/WC_Vol6_0015b.htm
 [accessed September 29, 2010].

12
. “Surgeon Who Operated on JFK in Dallas Dies,” Associated Press, March 12, 2005. Quoted in Vincent Bugliosi,
Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 71.

13
. “The Assassination,”
Time
, November 29, 1963,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,875361,00.html
 [accessed September 29, 2010]. Only WBAP, the NBC television affiliate in Dallas, made a sound recording of Kilduff’s historic announcement, and NBC did not even air it until November 1964. It has made only infrequent appearances in films about the assassination since then. E-mail from Gary Mack, June 15, 2012.

14
. Dr. Perry described the throat wound as an “entrance” wound three times during the press conference. See Assassination Records Review Board, Master Set of Medical Deposition Exhibits, available at the National Archives (Box 1, MD 41) or online at
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do;jsessionid=B71BDC6C072CE59FC303 A37418E504DE?docId=622
 [accessed August 16, 2011].

15
. Warren Commission Hearings, History Matters website, Testimony of Dr. Malcolm Perry, March 30, 1964 (vol. 3, pp. 373–74),
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh3/html/WC_Vol3_0191b.htm
 [accessed August 15, 2011]. The doctors who attended Kennedy believed, as Dr. Robert McClelland put it to me, that despite his other health problems, the president “would have very likely survived” the neck wound alone. Personal interview, January 14, 2011, Dallas.

16
. Charles A. Crenshaw, M.D.,
JFK: Conspiracy of Silence
(New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 79.

17
. Gary Mack considers Crenshaw’s account “nonsense” and told me that “Crenshaw arrived with McClelland, who testified that when he first saw JFK, the tracheotomy was in progress and the wound was obliterated.” E-mail from Gary Mack, June 15, 2012.

18
. Some have expressed doubts as to whether Dr. Crenshaw was even present at the time of the resuscitation efforts. See Breo, “JFK’s Death, Part II,” p. 2804. None of the physicians interviewed during Breo’s research remembered seeing Dr. Crenshaw in the trauma room. Of course, the room was crowded and most eyes were undoubtedly fixed on the president or Mrs. Kennedy. No photographs were taken in Trauma Room One, so once again, we will never know for sure.

19
. “AARB MD 41—White House Transcript of Dallas Press Conference,” Mary Ferrell Foundation website,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=622&relPageId=5
 [accessed September 29, 2011].

20
. Personal interview with Robert McClelland, Dallas, January 15, 2011. Dr. McClelland almost certainly meant to say “cerebrum,” not “cerebellum.” See note 8 above.

21
. “MR. SPECTER: Did you observe the condition of the back of the president’s head? DR. McCLELLAND: Well, partially; not, of course, as I say, we did not lift his head up since it was so greatly damaged. We attempted to avoid moving him any more than it was absolutely necessary, but I could see, of course, all the extent of the wound. MR. SPECTER: Did you observe a small gunshot wound below the large opening on the back of his head? DR. McCLELLAND: No.” Testimony of Dr. Robert Nelson McClelland, March 21, 1964, Warren Commission Hearings, History Matters website (vol. 6, pp. 30–39),
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh6/html/WC_Vol6_0023a.htm
 [accessed September 29, 2011].

22
. In another strange twist, McClelland almost physically bumped into John Kennedy at the entrance to Baylor Hospital in late 1961, when JFK arrived to visit terminally ill House Speaker Sam Rayburn. Kennedy returned for Rayburn’s funeral, which made the November 1963 trip his third and final visit to Texas as president.

23
. Personal interview with Robert McClelland, Dallas, January 15, 2011. McClelland’s suit was soaked as well, but he had only two of them, so his wife had it drycleaned.

24
. Breo, “JFK’s Death: Part II,” at p. 2806. Practically, it is difficult to see how November 22 would have played out had Kennedy’s body been delayed for hours in Dallas so that an autopsy could be performed. Probably new president Lyndon Johnson would have had to leave Mrs. Kennedy and the fallen president behind to take a separate flight to D.C. Mrs. Kennedy also would not have participated in the swearing-in of LBJ, and there would have been additional mass confusion as aides and Secret Service decided who would be assigned to which flight.

25
. The last surviving FBI agent to witness JFK’s autopsy, James Sibert, died in 2012. In the years after the Kennedy assassination, Sibert told numerous interviewers that he “didn’t buy the single bullet theory.” See Stephanie Borden, “Last Surviving FBI Agent at JFK Autopsy Dies in Fort Meyers,”
Naples News
, April 18, 2012,
http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2012/apr/18/last-surviving-fbi-agent-at-jfk-autopsy-dies-in/
 [accessed April 19, 2012].

26
. See Jim Marrs,
Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy
(New York: Carroll and Graf, 1989), 368–73.

27
. Warren Report, History Matters website, appendix IX, page 541,
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wr/html/WCReport_0283a.htm
 [accessed September 29, 2011].

28
. See Dennis Breo, “JFK’s Death—The Plain Truth from the MDs Who Did the Autopsy,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
267:20 (1992): at p. 2798,
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/267/20/2794.short
 [accessed September 29, 2011]; Rockefeller Commission Report, chapter 19, p. 262, Mary Ferrell Foundation website,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do;jsessionid=1A16E8264CA1C009F1291DFB0211602A?docId=930&relPageId=274
 [accessed October 11, 2011]. Also in the 1970s, the Kennedy family allowed Dr. John Lattimer, chairman of the urology department at Columbia University, to examine the autopsy photos and X-rays. Lattimer upheld the main conclusions of the Warren Report—namely that President Kennedy had been struck from behind by two bullets. See Fred P. Graham, “Doctor Inspects Kennedy X-rays,”
New York Times
,
January 9, 1972. A few years earlier, an independent panel of medical experts appointed by Attorney General Ramsey Clark arrived at a similar conclusion. See “ARRB MD 59—Clark Panel Report (2/26/68),” page 4, Mary Ferrell Foundation website,
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=323&relPageId=4
 [accessed October 11, 2011].

29
. Dennis Breo, “JFK’s Death, Part III—Dr. Finck Speaks Out: ‘Two Bullets, from the Rear,’ ”
Journal of the American Medical Association
268:13 (1992): 1748–54, History Matters website,
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/arrb/master_med_set/md23/html/Image09.htm
 [accessed September 29, 2011].

30
. Henry Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation Into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 36. Gerald Posner says that the Kennedys still intended to have an open casket at this point and did not want the president to be disfigured. Gerald Posner,
Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK
(New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 302.

31
. Breo, “JFK’s Death—The Plain Truth,” 2794–2803.

32
. Dr. Humes helped persuade Clark to assemble the panel. He and J. Thornton Boswell—one of the other two physicians at Bethesda—wrote a letter to the attorney general requesting a new investigation in order to quell rumors of a conspiracy. See Breo, “JFK’s Death—The Plain Truth,” p. 2800. However, some medical experts, such as Cyril Wecht, do not accept the findings of the autopsy and other matters related to President Kennedy’s assassination. See Wecht with Mark Curriden and Benjamin Wecht,
Cause of Death
(New York: Dutton, 1993).

33
. Warren Commission Hearings, History Matters website, Testimony of Commander James Humes, March 16, 1964 (vol. 2, p. 364),
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh2/html/WC_Vol2_0186b.htm
 [accessed September 29, 2011].

34
. Michael L. Kurtz,
The JFK Assassination Debates: Lone Gunman versus Conspiracy
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 16. Of course, Humes was correct if this was the same bullet that struck JFK and then Connally—though Humes could not have imagined at the time that the bullet had dropped from Connally’s wounded body onto the governor’s gurney and not Kennedy’s.

35
. Breo, “JFK’s Death—Part III,” 1750.

36
. Posner,
Case Closed
, 300; Chambers,
Head Shot
, 98.

37
. “The Moving Head Wounds,” Mary Ferrell Foundation website,
http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/The_Moving_Head_Wounds
 [accessed July 26, 2011].

38
. Humes’s testimony can be found at
http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/hsca/reportvols/vol1/html/HSCA_Vol1_0167b.htm
 [accessed October 11, 2011].

39
. Some of the autopsy photos are available at
http://jfklancer.com/photos/autopsy_slideshow/index.html
 [accessed October 11, 2011].

40
. In February 2013 I wrote to former U.S. senator Paul G. Kirk, Jr., Ted Kennedy’s appointed successor in the Senate and a longtime Kennedy family friend, requesting access to JFK’s autopsy records. Kirk replied respectfully but wrote: “[T]he terms of the Deed are explicit, and they do not permit access to these autopsy materials to persons, however serious their purpose or the level of esteem in which they may be held in their own particular field of study, who are not recognized experts in the field of pathology or related areas of science and technology. I trust you can understand the logic of limiting access to those whose conclusions and theories about the assassination would be founded on their own recognized
expertise and academic qualifications in those particular fields or disciplines.” Letter from Paul Kirk to author, March 1, 2013.

41
. Richard Dudman, a reporter covering the president’s trip for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, insisted that he saw a “small hole” (not a “crack”) in the windshield of the limousine when it arrived at Parkland Hospital. See Jefferson Morley, “Dec. 1, 1963: The Origins of Doubt,” JFK Facts, April 25, 2013,
http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/on-this-date/dec-1-1963-the-origins-of-doubt/#more-4321
 [accessed April 26, 2013].

42
. The ordering of this evidence replicates the Commission’s own listing in the summary of its findings. Warren Commission Report, chapter 1, pp. 18–20, History Matters website,
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wr/html/WCReport_0021b.htm
 [accessed September 30, 2011].

43
. Ibid.

44
. The calculations behind this are outlined in the report: The vehicle traveled 136 feet in the 152 Zapruder frames preceding the first shot. At a camera rate of 18.3 frames per second, this yields 11.2 mph.

45
. Warren Commission Hearings, vol. V, p. 180, History Matters website,
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh5/html/WC_Vol5_0095b.htm
 [accessed October 3, 2011].

46
. I personally heard this version from Nellie Connally at a private dinner at the LBJ Library on February 7, 1997. Ironically, the dinner speaker was former president Gerald Ford of the Warren Commission.

47
. There are slightly differing assessments of Connally’s movements, including Connally’s own testimony a week after the assassination. According to the author Michael Kurtz, Governor Connally “turned to his right to see what had happened, but he saw nothing, so he decided to turn around to his left, but he only moved back to a straight ahead position. Then Connally, his movements having consumed about a second and a half, felt the searing pain of a shot that tore through his upper back …” (Kurtz,
Assassination Debates
, p. 4). Vincent Bugliosi described the same moment this way: “Unable to see the president over his right shoulder, and deeply concerned for his safety, Governor Connally is in the middle of a turn to look back over his left shoulder into the backseat, to see if Kennedy has been hit, when he feels a hard blow to the right side of his own back, like a doubledup fist.” (Bugliosi,
Reclaiming History
, 40.) For Connally’s own recollection, see
https://www.tsl.state.tx.us/governors/modern/connally-agronsky-1.html
 [accessed November 1, 2012].