Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  When I spoke to Dr. Carrico, one of the doctors who testified he had seen damaged cerebellar tissue, I asked him if there was any possibility that the Parkland doctors were confused about the cerebellum being damaged.

  “Oh, absolutely,” he immediately replied.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Looking at the shredded pieces of brain on the gurney, it looked like some of it had the characteristics of cerebellum, which kind of has a wavy surface. But because these brain pieces were shredded, this could easily have led to confusion as to whether it was all cerebrum—which has broader bands across the surface—or some cerebellum.”160

  And in a telephone conversation in 1994, Dr. Boswell, in response to Parkland doctor Kemp Clark’s claiming to have seen “exposed…cerebellar tissue,” told Dr. Gary Aguilar, “He was wrong. The right side of the cerebrum was so fragmented. I think what he saw and misinterpreted as cerebellum was that.”161 Parkland doctor Robert Grossman, who said he was present in Trauma Room One during the effort to resuscitate the president,162 would later write that “the autopsy demonstrated that the cerebellum was intact and that the physicians, including myself, who had thought that they had observed cerebellar tissue must have mistaken macerated brain for cerebellar folia.”163 It bears repeating that the autopsy report only mentioned damage to the cerebrum, not the cerebellum.

  When I spoke over the telephone to Dr. McClelland in late September and early October of 2002, McClelland, a respected Dallas surgeon whom no one accuses of trying to deliberately mislead anyone, only of being completely wrong in what he thought he saw (the most honest people in the world can think they saw the darndest things), said he was positive the president had a “massive hole to the back of his head.” He said at the time of his observation he was holding a metal retractor that was pulling the skin away from the president’s trachea so Drs. Perry and Carrico could perform their tracheotomy. “I had nothing else to do or to distract me so I fixated on this large, gaping hole to the back of the president’s head for ten to twelve minutes.” When I wondered how he could see the large hole when the president was always lying on his back, he said the wound was so large that he nevertheless could see “most of it.” If what he said was true, I asked, how is it possible that on the Zapruder film itself, the explosion is clearly to the right frontal portion of the president’s head with a large amount of brain matter spraying out, and the back of his head appears to be completely intact? Dr. McClelland gave an answer that deserves some type of an award for inventiveness: “What the explanation for this is, I just don’t know, but what I believe happened is that the spray of brain matter and blood was kind of like a bloodscreen, similar to a smokescreen, that precluded a clear view of the occipital area.”

  If, I pursued the matter, the exit wound was to the back of the president’s head, where was the entrance wound for this bullet? McClelland, who believes the shot to the head came from the grassy knoll, said he believed the president was struck “around the hairline near the middle of his forehead.” If that was so, I asked, how was it that seventeen pathologists, including Dr. Wecht, all agreed that the president was only struck twice, both times from the rear, and none of them—from photographs, X-rays, and personal observation (by the three autopsy surgeons)—saw any entrance wound to the president’s forehead? Again, McClelland, who acknowledged, “I’m not a pathologist and I’ve never conducted an autopsy,” said, “I don’t know the answer to your question.” But he remained sincerely inventive in his imagination. “What I believe happened is that none of the pathologists saw the entrance wound because it became a part of the destruction to the whole right side and top of the president’s head. In other words, it was no longer a separate hole that could be identified.” (Of course, none of the autopsy photographs show any such massive injury to the president’s forehead extending to the right side of his head, and none is referred to in the autopsy report, nor in the reports of the Clark Panel and Rockefeller Commission. As the HSCA said, “There is no evidence that the president was struck by a bullet entering the front of his head.”)164

  “So you do acknowledge,” I said, “the explosion to the right front part of the president’s head?”

  “Oh, yes,” the doctor said, “but that’s not where the bullet exited. It exited in the occipital region of his head, leaving a hole so big I could put my fist in it.”

  When I pointed out to the doctor again that not only didn’t the Zapruder film show any large hole to the back of the president’s head but autopsy photographs never showed any large hole there either, he said that although it was pure “supposition” on his part, at the time the photographs were taken, someone “could have pulled a flap of the president’s skin, attached to the base of his neck, forward,” thereby covering the large defect. When I asked him if he saw any such loose flap of skin at Parkland, he acknowledged, “I did not.”

  It was getting late in the evening, Dallas time, but before I ended the interview I reminded Dr. McClelland of the fact that in his Parkland Hospital admission note at 4:45 p.m. on the day of the assassination, he had written that the president died “from a gunshot wound of the left temple.”165 “Yes,” he said, “that was a mistake. I never saw any wound to the president’s left temple. Dr. Jenkins had told me there was a wound there, though he later denied telling me this.”* Since there was no bullet wound to the left side of the president’s body, and since the conspiracy theorists allege that Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll to his right front, conspiracy author Robert Groden solves the problem and avoids having his star witness, Dr. McClelland, look very confused and noncredible simply by changing McClelland’s words “left temple” to “right temple” in his book, The Killing of a President.166

  When I called Dr. McClelland the following evening to discuss further one of the points he had made, he quickly told me he was glad I had called because “since we hung up last night, I’ve had some second thoughts about the exact location of the exit wound.” Unlike the many conspiracy theorists who have exploited Dr. McClelland’s obvious errors to their benefit, he told me, “I don’t question the integrity of all the pathologists who disagree with me” (he wasn’t so kind to his colleague, Dr. Charles Crenshaw: “Chuck had a lot of problems and fabricated a lot of things”), saying, for instance, that he and the three autopsy surgeons were “obviously looking at the same head and the same wound,” but that the area on the head where they placed the wound differed because of “the different positions from which we viewed it and also because of the different interpretations of what we saw, which is normal.” But he made a major concession in an effort to reconcile his position with theirs. “I have to say that the sketch I first drew for Josiah Thompson’s book a few years after the assassination was misleading. Since last night, I’ve been thinking that I placed the large hole in the president’s head farther back than it really was, maybe. It may have been a bit more forward.” When I asked him where he now put it, he said, “Partially in the occipital region and partly in the right back part of the parietal bone” (which I told him was actually consistent with the original position he took in his Warren Commission testimony), but he still insisted that this large exit wound was not to the right frontal area of the president’s skull as concluded by all the pathologists.

  Dr. McClelland told me he believes there were two gunmen, Oswald and someone else, and further believes that “the CIA and FBI, mostly the CIA, were behind the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, and they brought in the Mafia, who carried out the killing.” He said he didn’t know but suspects that “the Warren Commission covered up the conspiracy.” On that note, I thanked the good doctor for his time and bid him a good night.167

  Even apart from Dr. McClelland’s wandering completely off the reservation in the sketch he drew for Josiah Thompson, what is the explanation for several of the other Parkland doctors erroneously thinking that the large exit wound was to the right rear of the president’s head as opposed to the right frontal region, where all the medical a
nd scientific evidence proved it to be? Dr. Michael Baden, the chief forensic pathologist for the HSCA, has what I believe to be the answer, one whose logic is solid.* “The head exit wound was not in the parietal-occipital area, as the Parkland doctors said. They were wrong,” he told me. “That’s why we have autopsies, photographs, and X-rays to determine things like this. Since the thick growth of hair on Kennedy’s head hadn’t been shaved * at Parkland, there’s no way for the doctors to have seen the margins of the wound in the skin of the scalp. All they saw was blood and brain tissue adhering to the hair. And that may have been mostly in the occipital area because he was lying on his back and gravity would push his hair, blood, and brain tissue backward, so many of them probably assumed the exit wound was in the back of the head. But clearly, from the autopsy X-rays and photographs and the observations of the autopsy surgeons, the exit wound and defect was not in the occipital area. There was no defect or wound to the rear of Kennedy’s head other than the entrance wound in the upper right part of his head.”168

  Indeed, in a letter to conspiracy theorist Vince Palamara on October 13, 1998, Dr. Ronald Jones wrote that “President Kennedy had very thick dark hair that covered the injured area.” Where was that injured area? Jones said it was only his “opinion” (i.e., without being able to see it) that the large defect “was in the occipital area in the back of the head.”

  A few other explanatory observations relative to Dr. Baden’s comments: Dr. Marion Jenkins, the Parkland anesthesiologist, says, “I was standing at the head of the [cart] in the position the anesthesiologist most often assumes closest to the patient’s head…The President’s great shock of hair and the location of the head wound was such that it was not visible to those standing [on] each side of the gurney where they were carrying out their resuscitative maneuvers.”169 And Dr. Carrico, the first Parkland doctor to treat the president, told me, “The president was lying on his back, so we couldn’t see the rear portion of his head. Consequently, what we did see appeared to be further back than it was since we were not viewing it in relation to his whole head. But really, none of us were looking closely at where the defect was and making mental notes. We were just trying to save his life.”170 And Dr. Charles Baxter told author Gerald Posner that Kennedy “had such a bushy head of hair, and blood and all in it, you couldn’t tell what was wound versus dried blood or dangling tissue.”171

  Not only does Baden’s observation make immense sense, but the photographs of the dead president bear him out. Two terribly gruesome autopsy photos of the president’s face and head (which, as previously indicated, I chose not to put in this book) that appear in Robert Groden’s Killing of a President172 clearly show that the president’s thick hair, drenched in blood, is all going in the direction of the rear—matted tufts of bloody hair literally extending way beyond the rear of his head.

  Author Jim Moore has added another possible explanation for the error made by many of the Parkland doctors. He points out that since the president was lying on his back and they could not see the rear of his head, most described the large exit wound as being to the right rear of the president’s head “because the side of the president’s head was the most rearward portion of the skull they observed.”173

  In addition to the testimony of the Parkland doctors, conspiracy theorists cite the recollections and testimony of several eyewitnesses in attendance at the autopsy as further “proof” that the exit wound was to the right rear or back of the president’s head.† Once again, these eyewitness accounts (some of them, recollections over three decades old) are supposed to supersede the autopsy photographs and X-rays that show the large defect was primarily to the right front. Remarkably, the list by conspiracy theorists of eyewitnesses to this supposed back-of-the-head exit wound is so expansive it frequently even includes two of the autopsy pathologists, Drs. Humes and Boswell, who we know concluded that the bullet exited in the right front of the skull. Apparently the fact that they mentioned in their autopsy summary that the large exit defect “extended somewhat into the temporal and occipital regions” got them a ticket into the club of rear-exit believers. Indeed, even Captain John H. Stover, commanding officer of the Naval Medical School, who reported in 1978 that he saw “a wound on the top of the head,”174 qualified for the back-of-the-head list.

  The list includes three Secret Service agents (William Greer, Roy Kellerman, and Clint Hill) and two FBI agents (James Sibert and Francis O’Neill) whose testimony points to a right-rear or back-of-the-head exit wound.175*

  The above is not to suggest that all of the lay witnesses at the autopsy thought the exit wound was to the right rear or back of the president’s head. For instance, James Curtis Jenkins, a lab technician during the autopsy, told HSCA investigators that the large head wound was to the “middle temporal region back to the occipital.”176 Chester Boyers, the chief petty officer in charge of the lab at Bethesda who was present at the autopsy, said the exit wound was to the “right side of the head above the right eyebrow and [extending?] towards the rear.”177 Richard A. Lipsey, a personal aide to General Wehle, told the HSCA it was obvious that a bullet “entered the back of his head and exited on the right side of his head.”178

  Also, at the London trial, Paul O’Connor, the naval hospital corpsman who assisted in the president’s autopsy, testified he “assumed” that the bullet to the president’s head “had hit him from the rear and had come out the front only because of what other physical evidence was present.” When I said to O’Connor, “You told me over the phone that this large massive defect to the right frontal area of the president’s head gave all appearances of being an exit wound, is that correct?”

  O’Connor: “Yes, on the front.”179

  None of the aforementioned people or witnesses had a close-up view of the president’s head. Only four people in the autopsy room did, the three autopsy surgeons and John Stringer, the chief medical photographer for the navy at the autopsy who took the only photographs of the president’s head. When I spoke to Stringer, he said there was “no question” in his mind that the “large exit wound in the president’s head was to the right side of his head, above the right ear.” And in an ARRB interview on April 8, 1996, Stringer said, “There was a fist-sized hole in the right side of his head above his ear.”180 Though, as we shall see later, Stringer’s recollection of matters is questionable, he said he remembers this very clearly. When I asked him if there was any large defect to the rear of the president’s head, he said, “No. All there was was a small entrance wound to the back of the president’s head. During the autopsy, Dr. Humes pointed out this entrance wound to everyone.”181

  So we see that all four people who were much closer to the president’s head than anyone else, and whose business it was, as opposed to the many other people in the room, to know where the wounds were, have no question in their mind that the exit wound was to the right front side of the president’s head, not the rear.

  In the final analysis, it’s difficult to accept the testimony of any of these lay witnesses as irrefutable truths given the fact that their accounts run directly contrary to the conclusions of the three autopsy surgeons and fourteen other pathologists whose position is supported by the autopsy photographs and X-rays. In other words, lay observations, notoriously problematic, have to yield to hard, scientific evidence.

  One footnote to all of this, and a possible explanation for the claim by some of the autopsy eyewitnesses that the exit wound was farther back on the head than the photographs and X-rays show, is the fact that the condition of the head wound changed as the autopsy progressed. As Dr. Humes testified in 1964, the skull came apart “very easily” in the pathologists’ hands as they conducted their examination. Some bone fragments fell into the head wound, others onto the autopsy table,182 thereby necessarily causing an enlargement of the large exit defect, including to the rear. When we couple this with the fact that the president was lying on his back during the autopsy, and therefore, the blood and brain tissue would naturally fall to
ward the rear of the head, we would expect the head wound to appear differently to the autopsy witnesses, depending on their viewpoint and the time of their observation. Add to the mix a generous sprinkling of erroneous observations and a few outright fabrications (not uncommon in a case of this magnitude) and you have a recipe for the kind of contradictions that fertilize the growing number of unfounded allegations made year after year after year by conspiracy theorists.

  Lest anyone still has any doubt as to the location of the large exit wound in the head, as indicated, the Zapruder film itself couldn’t possibly provide better demonstrative evidence. The film proves conclusively, and beyond all doubt, where the exit wound was. Zapruder frame 313 (when the president’s head exploded) and frame 328 (almost a second later) (see photo section) clearly show that the large, gaping exit wound was to the right front of the president’s head.* The back of his head shows no such large wound and clearly is completely intact. And yet, silly conspiracy theorists cite witness after witness, and write article after article—even in prestigious academic journals—alleging that the large exit wound was to the back of the president’s head. There is simply nothing that will take the air out of their tires of advocacy for the conspiracy position.