The Kennedy Half-Century (43 page)

To McClelland, from those awful minutes at Parkland onward, the wound in the back of Kennedy’s head seemed like an exit wound. During testimony to the Warren Commission, McClelland did admit, when questioned, that he had only “partially” examined the president’s head wound.
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Yet in 2011, McClelland recalled that years of reflection had led him to a definite conclusion: The opening he saw in the back of the president’s skull was most certainly an exit wound, consistent with a shot from the picket fence area. McClelland’s medical opinion is that the bullet entered JFK’s forehead around the hairline and blew out the right side and back of his skull. McClelland believes that his initial interpretation of the president’s wound is consistent with Kennedy’s violent motion backward and then to the left in the Zapruder film, which he first saw years after he formed a judgment based on the skull wound by itself.

A widely respected medical professional, McClelland not only attended JFK but operated on the wounded Governor Connally, Lee Oswald after he was shot, and several years later, Abraham Zapruder, who was suffering from gastric cancer.
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People who have known McClelland throughout his professional life vouch for him enthusiastically. He is not bombastic, but quiet and authoritative. In the aftermath of the assassination, he was flown to Washington to examine autopsy photos, and he is sure that the one showing the small bullet hole in the back of the skull was forged or altered. The shot came from the front, McClelland insists. He even kept the shirt he was wearing on November 22. It is soaked in JFK’s dried blood and brain matter, which drained onto McClelland as he performed his gruesome task. He has preserved the shirt in a plastic bag since that day. (See the photo on page 2 of the second insert.)
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All this being true, his admired professionalism and strong impressions from November 22 do not make McClelland’s view of the head wound unassailable. This was his notion or inkling, but no X-rays had yet been taken.

Not long after Kennedy expired, the White House staff and Secret Service, with Mrs. Kennedy at their side, began wheeling JFK’s body out of Parkland Hospital. Earl Rose, Dallas County’s medical examiner, tried to stop them. “I was trying to explain … that Texas law applied in the … case of the death of the president, and that the law required an autopsy to be performed in Texas.” Kennedy’s aides refused to comply, and the situation became tense, with armed agents determined to get the president’s body back aboard Air Force One and eventually to an official autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. Voices were raised, and given the circumstances, Rose had to relent or be run over. The law was actually on Rose’s side. Remarkably, the killing of a president was not yet a federal crime in 1963. JFK’s homicide had occurred in Dallas and as such fell under the jurisdiction of Texas authorities. Rose always insisted that the autopsy should have been performed in Dallas.
“People are governed by rules and in a time of crisis it is even more important to uphold the rules,” Rose said. “In Dallas, we had access to the president’s clothing and to the medical team who had treated him.”
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It is possible that some of the unending controversy about the JFK autopsy would have been resolved or would never have occurred had the procedure been done in Dallas. As it happened, the autopsy performed at Bethesda Naval Medical Center (which began just after eight P.M. and ended shortly before four A.M. on November 23) was inadequate in some ways. The Bethesda physicians did not confer with the Parkland medical team before they began the procedure, which put them at a considerable disadvantage. Nor did they have the opportunity to examine the president’s clothing, which was removed at Parkland Hospital; this was unfortunate, since the bullet holes in JFK’s coat and shirt were critical in understanding one bullet’s trajectory. Apparently because of the pressure of time—the Kennedy family was waiting to go back to the White House with the body—they did not dissect Kennedy’s back-to-neck wound, which could have proven quite useful. While the doctors insisted later that they did not experience direct interference in their work, the autopsy occurred under highly irregular conditions with many military, staff, and Secret Service observers buzzing about and asking questions.
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The close proximity of so many influential individuals and their indeterminate role in the substance and pace of the autopsy has generated suspicion and debate for decades.
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The Bethesda doctors did examine Kennedy’s shattered head thoroughly, which led them to determine that the entrance wound was “situated in the posterior scalp.”
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In other words, they claimed the bullet that destroyed Kennedy’s brain had come from the rear, not from the front, contrary to the view of Dr. McClelland and many others. There is a good deal of evidence that on this key point, they were correct. The path of the bullet from back to front is distinguishable, thanks in part to the pattern of the bullet fragments that remained in Kennedy’s head. Furthermore, additional analyses in the years following the assassination have shown a “jet propulsion effect” from a bullet exiting the front of the brain, pushing the body violently backward and helping to explain the backward and leftward movement of JFK’s moribund body in the Zapruder film, occurring at the instant the bullet exited his skull. For example, in the 1970s, Dr. Alfred G. Olivier, director of biophysics at the
Army’s Edgewood Arsenal, told the Rockefeller Commission that “the violent motions of the president’s body following the head shot could not possibly have been caused by the impact of the bullet … [Olivier] explained that a head wound such as that sustained by President Kennedy produces an ‘explosion’ of tissue at the area where the bullet exits from the head, causing a ‘jet effect’ which almost instantly moves the head back in the direction from which the bullet came.” Thus, to the untrained eye, the Zapruder images would suggest a bullet striking Kennedy from the front and pushing him back, but as in so many other ways, our eyes can deceive when split-second supersonic effects are involved.
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While they may well have gotten the big things right, the Bethesda physicians understood the imperfections in their work within hours. In a report to his commanding officer, Colonel Pierre Finck cited the various limitations he was forced to work under during the autopsy: “no clothing of the deceased at [the] time of [the] autopsy; no photos to view at [the] time of [the] autopsy; no information from Dallas; and his impression that the Kennedy family did not want a ‘complete’ autopsy.”
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The doctors felt pressure from the attorney general, White House aides, and Mrs. Kennedy to finish as quickly as possible. They were refusing to leave the hospital until the autopsy was finished and the body was prepared to lie in state at the White House. The family had initially resisted the procedure, but Bobby ultimately relented and allowed a complete autopsy on his brother’s corpse.
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The rushed procedure, saving an hour or two, would be regretted for years. Dr. James Humes, one of the three physicians who performed the autopsy, would later admit that he and his colleagues “were influenced by the fact that we knew Jackie Kennedy was waiting upstairs to accompany the body to the White House and that Admiral Burkley wanted us to hurry as much as possible.”
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Nonetheless, Humes (now deceased) always insisted that his team’s conclusions, though rushed, were basically accurate, and he was delighted when an independent panel of experts appointed by Attorney General Ramsey Clark in 1968 agreed with his assertion.
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The initial autopsy report contained information on only three of the president’s wounds—the entrance and exit wounds associated with the skull, and the small wound occupying the lower posterior neck of the president. The physicians were unaware of a possible exit (or entrance) wound on JFK’s throat and only noticed the small entrance wound on his back. Therefore, they assumed that the president still had a bullet lodged in his back. Humes testified that “[a]t Colonel Finck’s suggestion, we then completed the X-ray examination by X-raying the president’s body in toto.”
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When the X-rays did not reveal any projectiles, the autopsy team manually probed the president’s back wound. The result was the same: no bullet. When Humes learned
about the bullet that had been discovered on the gurney at Parkland Hospital, he simply assumed that it was the same one that had penetrated President Kennedy’s back.
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However, the next day, Humes spoke to Dr. Perry at Parkland and learned about the apparent bullet hole in the president’s throat. Humes went home and drafted a new autopsy report for the Warren Commission in which he described this wound as the probable exit point for the bullet that had pierced Kennedy’s back.
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Humes’s team took fourteen X-rays and fifty-two photographs of the president’s corpse. The X-rays showed that the bullet that struck Kennedy’s head “had shattered into about forty dustlike particles, appearing on the X-ray film like ‘stars at night.’” In addition, Humes said the doctors found a small 6-millimeter-diameter entrance wound in the rear of Kennedy’s head. Humes believed that a high-velocity rifle bullet had entered through the rear of the skull, then fragmented and exited through the top of the skull.
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Below is a diagram that roughly explains Humes’s conclusion (produced in the 1970s by the House Select Committee on Assassinations). The medical evidence, autopsy photos, and analyses in the decades that followed mainly
support this theory of the fatal bullet’s path. Initial controversy was caused by the Warren Commission’s placement of the head wound entry point a full four inches below the one shown in the diagram we have reproduced.
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Why did the commission get the placement so wrong? It relied on the inaccurate written notes of Dr. Humes, who told the House Select Committee on Assassinations a decade later that he had been up all night on November 23–24 and had drafted the final autopsy report based on rough notes he jotted down during the procedure. He testified that he did not take greater care with the wounds’ placement since he assumed the autopsy photographs would be used to precisely establish their location.
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Understandable exhaustion and less excusable haste created a long-term controversy that could easily have been avoided.
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The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has never released the autopsy photos to the press or public; they are, after all, fundamentally private medical records. They have been made available on a limited basis to congressional investigators, forensic experts, and government agents with the approval of the Kennedy family. It was completely appropriate to withhold the photos in the years immediately following JFK’s death. But after a half century, this is pure American history, and a vital piece of the assassination puzzle. It is time to release all of the medical evidence so that everyone with an interest in the case can sort out the truth from varying perspectives.
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The locations of Kennedy’s wounds, and the subsequent autopsy, have proven controversial, but the ballistic evidence from the assassination is even more disputed. The Warren Commission concluded that the shots that killed the president and wounded Governor Connally came from the southeast corner window of the sixth floor of the Book Depository, an assertion based on (1) eyewitness accounts of a gun present in the window, seen either during the firing or immediately after the shots; (2) the forensic matches among bullet fragments found in the front seat of the presidential limousine, the whole bullet discovered on the hospital stretcher that purportedly transported Connally, and the grooves made on the bullet by the rifle found on the sixth floor; (3) the presence of three spent cartridge cases located below the key sixth floor window, which were forensically matched to the rifle and bullets “to the exclusion of all other weapons”; (4) the damage on the inside front windshield of Kennedy’s limousine, presumably caused by a bullet fragment striking, but not penetrating or shattering, the glass surface;
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and (5) the nature of the wounds inflicted upon Kennedy and Connally, which seemed to indicate that the bullets had come from an elevated position behind the limousine on Elm
Street rather than from any other location along the parade route, such as the triple overpass or the grassy knoll.

The commission also found that three bullets were fired from the Depository. The first bullet missed the car entirely. The second bullet entered the back of the president’s neck and exited through the flesh at the lower front of the neck, near his tie knot. (Most of the Parkland physicians, including Dr. Robert McClelland, believed that this wound was dangerous but survivable by the president.) The same second bullet continued on, entering the right side of Connally’s back and exiting from the right side of his chest immediately below the nipple before again entering his body, apparently passing through the top of his right wrist near his hand and then causing a minor wound on his left thigh, possibly remaining just under the skin, where it later exited while Connally was on the Parkland stretcher. The third and final bullet ended Kennedy’s life as it entered the right rear quadrant of the president’s head, shattering the cranial area.
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