Reclaiming History
Page 80
I literally struggled for an hour or so that afternoon to comprehend the points Dr. Petty had told me, eventually using my left hand and my right index finger to grasp this simple, yet deceptive reality. To follow what I did, extend the palm and fingers of your left hand (representing a human body) straight up and perpendicular to the ground. Now incline your hand backward, that is, to your left, illustrating the president leaning forward. Now take your right index finger, and keeping it straight, point it slightly downward, putting the tip against the palm of your open hand, the tip representing the descending bullet about to enter the body. Without moving your right finger but keeping the tip touching the palm, now straighten out your left hand. As you do so, though the tip of your right finger hasn’t moved, it (bullet) is now touching the palm (entering the body) at a point higher up and would thereby exit at a lower point.257 Likewise, if you start inclining your hand back again to the left, the same bullet (tip of finger) that would have entered high up on the hand (president’s body) if the hand had been straight, now enters at a lower point on the hand (body), and hence would exit at a higher point. Indeed, the more the hand (body) is leaning to the left (forward), the lower the point of entry of the bullet and the higher the exit point.
See Exhibit A on this page for an illustration of the point that the same bullet enters and exits Kennedy’s body at different points (causing three separate bullet tracks) dependent on the orientation of Kennedy’s body at the moment of impact. As illustrated, if President Kennedy had been sitting absolutely straight up in the anatomic position at the time the bullet struck his body, it would have struck a point several inches higher than it actually did and exited a corresponding number of inches lower, in which case the whole issue of the exit point being higher than the entrance point would never have arisen.
Exhibit A
1. Where the point of impact (on Kennedy’s neck) would have been if the president had been sitting in the “anatomic position” at the time he was shot.
2. Where the point of impact would have been if the president had been leaning forward slightly at the time he was shot. Note that the exit wound would now be located higher up on the president’s body.
3. This representation of the president’s body, a reproduction of an HSCA sketch (HSCA volume 7, page 100), depicts the approximate orientation of the body at the time he was hit by the first bullet, although his head is tilted forward slightly more than it actually was as shown in the Zapruder film. The point of impact is now the lowest on the president’s upper right back, and the exit wound is the highest.
But the above only tells you why the orientation of the president’s body caused him to be struck precisely where he was, and why the bullet, passing through soft tissue, exited where it did (Exhibit A-3) as opposed to the two other bullet tracks (A-1 and A-2). Now let’s take this single bullet track (A-3) and see how it looks as the orientation of the president’s body changes. Exhibit B-1 (which is identical to A-3) is the actual track of the bullet through Kennedy’s body, and it is downward. But as we elevate the president’s head (B-2 and B-3), we see that the same bullet track, which is going downward through the president’s body, is traveling upward anatomically.
With the exception of Dr. Wecht, the HSCA understood this issue, and as opposed to the Warren Commission (see later discussion), dealt with it properly.258 But in the committee’s attempt to explain this elusive and illusive concept visually (see Exhibit C),259 it presented a sketch that, although correct, might be confusing to some. Although the three arrows (and lines) in Exhibit C are intended to represent the same single bullet track, without elucidation they could easily be erroneously viewed as depicting three separate bullet tracks, each one based on a different orientation of the president’s body at the time of impact. Exhibit B eliminates this confusion, and was the one I intended to present to the jury in London if Spence raised the issue, which he did not.
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
As indicated elsewhere in this book, the Kennedy family has not authorized any autopsy photographs to be released to the public. However, pirated autopsy photos have appeared in some conspiracy books on the assassination. Perhaps the clearest visual evidence of the fact that the entrance wound in the back was definitely above the exit wound in the throat appears in one of these photos taken of the left side of the president’s head as he is lying on his back, his head on a metal headrest. Only the wound to the throat is visible, not the wound to his upper right back. However, it couldn’t be clearer from this photo that the wound to the back was definitely above the exit wound in the throat.260 And Dr. Humes, in his testimony before the Warren Commission, made it very clear that “the wound in the anterior [front] portion of the lower neck is physically lower than the point of entrance posteriorly [to the rear], sir.”261 Undoubtedly, one factor that has contributed to the mistaken illusion that the bullet entered at a point lower on the president’s body than it exited is that one’s back is below one’s neck, and the bullet entered the president’s back and exited in his throat (neck). But this ignores the reality (shown in the photo) that the front of one’s neck extends farther downward (i.e., lower) into one’s body than the back of one’s neck does.
There is another related matter that challenges, like no other in my judgment, the integrity of the Warren Commission. Although the autopsy report and autopsy descriptive worksheet both put the point of the entrance wound on the president’s back, the Warren Commission’s sketch of the path of the bullet through the president’s body262 has the bullet entering the lower part of the president’s neck. The sketch was made for the Warren Commission under Dr. Humes’s direction from his recollection of the autopsy.263 Moreover, Dr. Humes, no less than three times in his testimony before the Warren Commission, even specifically stated that the entry wound was in the “low neck.”264 This, despite the fact that, as indicated, his own autopsy report states,265 and the descriptive sheet of the president’s body made by his colleague Dr. Boswell at the time of the autopsy shows,266 that the entrance wound was not in the president’s neck, but lower, in his upper right back. In fact, the autopsy photographs of the wound clearly show that the wound was almost 2 inches lower than what is shown in the Warren Commission’s sketch267—in other words, just about where the autopsy report says it is. And the HSCA concluded that the bullet entered “the upper right back of President Kennedy.”268
In any event, I am compelled to conclude that the Warren Commission staff, in not challenging Dr. Humes’s testimony and sketch on this point, either was medically naive in not knowing (or negligently overlooked the fact) that the autopsy report’s description of the entry wound being in the “upper right posterior thorax just above…the scapula” (the shoulder blade) would put the wound in the upper right part of the back, not the low neck,* and hence did not realize that Dr. Humes’s testimony and his sketch varied materially from his own autopsy report and the autopsy descriptive sheet; or, erroneously believing they had no plausible explanation for the exit wound being ostensibly higher than (or even approximately the same height as) the entrance wound, changed the location of the entrance wound for the purpose of solving the higher-exit-wound problem.
USA Today reported on July 3, 1997, that Warren Commission member Gerald R. Ford had changed the Commission staff’s draft of its report from the language that the bullet had entered Kennedy’s “back at a point slightly above the shoulder,”269 to its entering “the back of his neck” in its final report.270 To immediate charges by conspiracy theorists that Ford did this to cover up a conspiracy in the assassination, Ford is quoted in USA Today as responding, “My changes had nothing to do with a conspiracy theory. My changes were only an attempt to be more precise.” Though Ford may have been responsible for changing the draft to reflect the entry wound as being in the neck, he would have had no influence over the sketch of the wound271 showing the same erroneous point of entry. As stated earlier, the sketch was made under Dr. Humes’s direction in preparation for h
is testimony before the Warren Commission.
In response to a June 15, 1999, letter from me in which I asked him to elaborate on why he made the subject change in the draft, former president Ford, in his June 28, 1999, reply to me, merely said, “I will not comment on any ‘media’ report of the deliberations of the [Warren] Commission” except that “I reaffirm my comment in the July 3, 1997, edition of USA Today that ‘my changes had nothing to do with a conspiracy theory. My changes were only an attempt to be more precise.’” He added that “as the sole, surviving member of the Warren Commission, I reiterate my support for the Commission’s fundamental conclusions. I re-emphasize my endorsement that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin and he acted alone. I also reaffirm that the Commission found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic.”
With respect to the central issue of whether the Warren Commission made a mistake on the back-neck location of the wound, or deliberately changed the facts to solve the high-exit-wound problem, based on the fair manner in which I found the Warren Commission to have evaluated and handled the mountains of evidence in this case, of these two interpretations I am inclined to accept the first one (i.e., they were medically naive in not knowing, or negligently overlooked the fact), particularly when Dr. Humes himself told the Commission that the entrance wound was in the “low neck,” and then went on in the very same paragraph to use the precise language he used in his autopsy report, which stated that the wound was situated “just above the upper border of the scapula” (which is the upper back).272
It also has to be noted that the Warren Commission staff did not have access to the autopsy photographs and X-rays, as the HSCA later did,273 because the commissioners had made a commitment to make public all the evidence they examined, and they felt that if they examined the photographs and X-rays, they might be published, and the subsequent viewing of them (particularly the gruesome photographs) by the American public would constitute an invasion of privacy of the Kennedy family.274 Commission assistant counsel Arlen Specter, in an April 30, 1964, memorandum to the general counsel, J. Lee Rankin, urged that the Warren Commission obtain the photographs and X-rays, saying it was “indispensable” that the staff examine them to, among other things, “corroborate the autopsy surgeons’ testimony that the holes on the President’s back [recall that the draft of the Warren Report said “back”] and head had the characteristics of points of entry” and “determine with certainty that there are no major variations between the [X-ray] films and the artist’s drawings.”275 However, Specter’s request was not met. Perhaps one reason why the Commission turned Specter down is that when he asked Dr. Humes, during the latter’s testimony, “In what way the availability of the X-rays would assist in further specifying the nature of the [president’s] wounds?” Humes answered, “I do not believe, sir, that the availability of the X-rays would assist in further specifying the nature of the wounds.” As to the photographs, though Humes said they “would show more accurately and in more detail the character of the wounds,” in answer to a question from Chief Justice Warren, he said that if he had the photographs in front of him while testifying, “it would not” change any of the testimony he had given.276*
Inasmuch as the Commission felt that the photos and X-rays were “only corroborative,” it decided that they “should be excluded for other reasons of taste.”277 It’s my sense that if the Commission had felt the photographs and X-rays were necessary to make the determinations it had to make, that fact would definitely have overridden the fear of the Kennedy family that they may someday be seen by the American public.
In 1967, former Warren Commission member John J. McCloy told Walter Cronkite on a CBS News Special, “I think that if there’s one thing that I would do [differently], I would insist on those photographs and the X-rays having been produced before us. In the one respect, and only one respect there, I think we were perhaps a little oversensitive to what we understood was the sensitivities of the Kennedy family against the production of colored photographs of the body, and so forth.”278
Although the House Select Committee said that “there was no evidence that any members of the Warren Commission or its staff ever viewed any of the autopsy photographs or X-rays of President Kennedy,”279 apparently Chief Justice Warren was an exception, at least as to the photographs.† In his book The Memoirs of Chief Justice Earl Warren, Warren wrote,
It has been contended that the reason these pictures were not filed [in the National Archives] was because they would show that the shots which struck the President did not come from behind and above him. While I have never before entered into that discussion, I feel that it is appropriate to do so here because I am solely responsible for the action taken, and still am certain it was the proper thing to do.
The President was hardly buried before people with ghoulish minds began putting together artifacts of the assassination for the purpose of establishing a museum on the subject. They offered as much as ten thousand dollars for the rifle alone. They also wanted to buy…various things at the Depository, and they were even making inquiries about the availability of the clothes of President Kennedy. They also, of course, wanted the pictures of his head. I could see in my mind’s eye such a ‘museum’ preying on the morbid sentiments of people and perhaps planting seeds of assassination in the minds of some deranged persons who might see opportunity for personal notoriety or expression in assaulting yet another President. I saw the pictures when they came from Bethesda Naval Hospital, and they were so horrible that I could not sleep well for nights. Accordingly, in order to prevent them from getting into the hands of these sensation mongers,* I suggested† that they not be used by the Commission, but that we rule on the convincing testimony of the Naval doctors who performed the autopsy to establish the cause of death [and the] entry, exit, and course of the bullets…
Sometime in the latter part of President Johnson’s administration, when the aforementioned charge was made, he set up a Board [Clark Panel] of outstanding pathologists from various parts of the country and submitted the pictures to them for comparison with the findings of the [autopsy] doctors…on which the Commission had relied. That Board confirmed the findings of the Commission.280
Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin pointed out to the HSCA that if the Commission had seen the photographs and X-rays, they would necessarily “become a part of the official record of the Commission,” so they would have to be published.281
Returning to the key issue, even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that my innocent interpretation of what happened here is incorrect, and the Warren Commission and its staff knowingly raised the entrance wound from the back to the neck so the entrance wound would not be lower than the exit wound, I feel it would be a non sequitur to conclude that the misconduct of the Warren Commission in this matter contaminates the immense and irrefutable evidentiary logic and power of its ultimate findings. Moreover, even if the Commission did do this, it in no way changed the actual location of the wound in the upper right part of the back as shown in the autopsy photographs and X-rays, a location agreed upon by all of the pathologists who reviewed them, nor the reality of the bullet, as indicated, always proceeding in a downward trajectory.
There can be no escape from the simple fact that the wounds in the president’s body were the result of two bullets that had been fired from above and behind. All pathologists who examined the evidence in this case for four national commissions (seventeen pathologists for the head wound, fifteen for the back wound) reached the same conclusion: that the two wounds to the back side of the president’s body (i.e., the upper back and back of the head) were entrance, not exit wounds, and that both exited toward the front of the body. And this group of pathologists includes, as I indicated earlier, the leading forensic pathologist for the conspiracy community, Dr. Cyril H. Wecht.
And yet, allegations (many of them offered by respected professionals who should know better) that the president was shot from his right front continue to appear in boo
ks, magazines, and newspaper articles, accomplishing little other than to titillate the public’s fascination for such exotic imaginings and, more importantly, to throw into question the clear and incontrovertible tower of facts that prove that no such thing ever happened.
One allegation that conspiracy theorists are particularly fond of (and one they had to invent to counter the irrefutable conclusions of the autopsy) is that the autopsy photographs and X-rays have been doctored, phonied up, or otherwise faked to hide the conspiracy to kill the president. We know this charge is false because, as discussed earlier, the photographs and X-rays were authenticated by the HSCA in 1978. But conspiracy theorists have never let facts stand in the way of a good, sensational story. In this case, critics point to a comment made by one of the two FBI agents at the autopsy in his deposition before the ARRB that reportedly suggests the autopsy photographs in evidence are forgeries.
In 1997, Jeremy Gunn, the ARRB general counsel, showed former FBI agent Francis O’Neill autopsy photograph number 42 (depicting the back of the president’s head) and asked whether the photograph resembled what O’Neill saw at the time of the autopsy thirty-four years earlier. O’Neill answered, “This [photograph] looks like it’s been doctored in some way. Let me rephrase that. When I say ‘doctored,’ [I mean] like the stuff [brain matter] has been pushed back in, and it looks like [the photograph was taken] more towards the end [of the autopsy] than at the beginning. All you have to do was put the flap [of scalp] back over here, and the rest of the stuff is all covered on up.”282