In other words, the shots really didn’t come from behind, where Oswald was, but from the president’s right front, that is, the grassy knoll. As a contributing writer in the book Murder in Dealey Plaza, Horne wrote,
The real brain, examined on or about Monday, 25 November 1963, constituted unassailable evidence of a shot from the front, and was incompatible with the “cover story” of a lone shooter from behind…The condition of the real brain was consistent with the reports of the Dallas doctors, who said President Kennedy had an exit wound in the right rear of his head…Allowing it to remain in evidence would have confirmed that the President was shot from the front, and would have made it impossible to sell the “cover story” to the American people. Removing the real brain from evidence and substituting photographs of another brain…with a pattern of damage roughly consistent with a shooter from above and behind, would support the “cover story” that a lone man in a building shot a man in a car from above and behind.337
Horne also goes on to say he believes “that President Kennedy’s body was altered—tampered with—prior to the commencement of the…autopsy, presumably to remove evidence (i.e., bullets or bullet fragments) inconsistent with the lone-assassin-from-behind cover story.”338 (See discussion of this body-alteration allegation in conspiracy section.) Since Horne and his fellow conspiracy theorists passionately believe that the conspirators shot Kennedy from the grassy knoll to the president’s right front, then tried to frame Oswald by making it look like the shots came from the president’s rear, where Oswald was, did the thought ever enter their mind that rather than get surgeons beforehand to alter the wounds on Kennedy’s body and remove bullets or fragments, and then have the autopsy surgeons engage in a monumental charade of having two separate brain exams, why wouldn’t the conspirators avoid the necessity for all of this by simply shooting Kennedy from the rear instead of the front? That way they wouldn’t have to pull off an operation of staggering difficulty and complexity and wouldn’t have to bring into the conspiracy all these surgeons and doctors, each one of whom could expose it and put all the conspirators on death row.
Since Dr. Finck’s letter to General Blumberg was based on “personal notes” of his that he presumably made around the time of the events to which they relate, his date of November 29, 1963, for the one and only supplementary brain exam is probably correct.* But if, as Horne suggests, the first supplementary brain exam was on November 25, and the conspirators, Humes and Boswell, made sure they didn’t invite their colleague Finck to attend, we can be sure that when they conducted their second exam—this one of a different brain, the one that Humes and Boswell purloined from the morgue, and apparently fired a bullet (or drilled a hole) through from the rear—they would be double and triple sure not to invite him to this one also, since the likelihood of his recognizing the brain as different from the one he saw at the president’s autopsy on November 22 could expose their participation in the conspiracy.
I mean, since Horne claims this second exam took place on November 29, only seven days after the November 22 autopsy, and Finck saw and was present when the president’s brain was removed from the cranium at the time of the autopsy, he could be expected to remember how the president’s brain looked, particularly since the right hemisphere was so badly damaged. Yet Finck never, in his personal notes and in his various testimonies since then, suggested the brain examined on November 29 was not the brain he saw removed from the president’s skull on the evening of November 22. The only difference he noted was that the convolutions (ridges) of the brain were flatter, and the sulci (furrows or grooves) were narrower than at the time of the autopsy, two normal changes brought about by formalin fixation, a fact he recognized in his personal notes.339*
Horne, however, desperate to prove his theory, in effect rejects what Dr. Finck says and totally accepts the testimony of former FBI agent Francis O’Neill before the ARRB in 1997. O’Neill, many years after he probably looked over someone’s shoulder in the crowded autopsy room to get a quick glimpse of the president’s brain, said that the photos he was shown by ARRB counsel, supposedly of the president’s brain, didn’t look like the brain he saw at the time of the autopsy. “It [the brain seen in the photo from the National Archives he was shown] appears to be too much.” On the night of November 22, 1963, he said, “More than half the brain was missing.”340 But if Dr. Finck noticed a change in the brain as minute as the width of the many grooves, surely he would have noticed if the size of the brain was markedly and demonstrably different, as O’Neill said. Yet Mr. Horne takes the word of a former FBI agent in the autopsy room, thirty-four years after the fact, over the word of one of the autopsy surgeons writing notes of his observations shortly after the autopsy. By the way, if Humes and Boswell were going to go through all the trouble of getting another brain, mangling and tearing part of it away to resemble Kennedy’s, and drilling or shooting a hole through it from behind, wouldn’t you think—if O’Neill’s observation that the president’s brain was much smaller than the photo of the brain he was shown was correct—they’d also do the much easier and obvious thing of making sure this other brain was the approximate size of Kennedy’s?
Horne does his best to protect his credibility on his memorandum by burying in a footnote near the very end of it some information that severely damages the credibility of his star witness, autopsy photographer John Stringer. (But it’s too late. There is nothing that can possibly restore the credibility of Doug Horne for the main conclusions he sets forth in the body of his memorandum.) Stringer, it turns out, told the ARRB that he had no recollection whatsoever of ever having spoken to, or having any contact with, anyone from the HSCA. Yet he was interviewed over the phone by an HSCA investigator on August 12, 1977, and accompanied HSCA personnel to the National Archives on August 15, 1977. And on September 11, 1977, he wrote a letter to Andy Purdy of the HSCA staff. Additionally, although he told Purdy of the HSCA on August 12, 1977, that he believed the doctors had “sectioned” the brain, on August 15 he told Purdy the doctors “didn’t section the brain serially.” They “cut some pieces from the brain…while normally they would cut it right in half.”341 “Within a few days,” Purdy told me, “Stringer completely changed his story.”342
With this type of witness who, though well intentioned, has no memory of three contacts with the HSCA staff, and through confusion or faulty memory has flatly contradicted himself on the principal point of whether the brain was sectioned—the point that launched Horne on his harebrained theory—Horne decides to build a case around him. Horne thereby rejected the language in the autopsy and supplementary autopsy reports, and sworn testimony of Drs. Humes and Boswell, that the brain was not cross-sectioned or coronally sectioned (only small sections were taken), taking Stringer’s word in his 1996 testimony before the AARB over all of theirs that the brain was cross-sectioned. By doing so, he in effect accuses these honorable men of being in on a conspiracy to suppress the truth from the American public.
It obviously would be bad enough to take the word of someone whose credibility on this issue was as diminished as Stringer’s was over that of Drs. Humes and Boswell,* but since Horne writes it was estimated that fifteen people were present at the supplementary exam of the president’s brain, he must have been referring to more than just Humes and Boswell when he writes that Stringer’s “recollection of the sectioning of the brain” was “at variance with every other witness to that event who can be located today.”343 No matter. Stringer’s weak, lone, and self-contradictory recollection of the cross-sectioning of Kennedy’s brain makes for a conclusion of two brains, a cover-up of the truth, and a sensational story. Everyone else’s version, plus that of common sense, produces no story at all. When a reporter asked Dr. Boswell about Stringer’s recollection of photographing cross-sections of Kennedy’s brain, Boswell sneered, “He’s full of [expletive].”344
Knowing that Stringer’s memory and credibility are suspect, when I interviewed him over the telephone on September 21, 2000, I
nonetheless sensed that the entire Stringer issue of whether or not Kennedy’s brain was “sectioned” may have all been the result of a simple misunderstanding of terms. Now living in retirement in Vero Beach, Florida, Stringer told me he is certain the autopsy surgeons cut sections of the president’s brain out, and that he photographed them. When I asked him if he meant by this that the surgeons made coronal, through-and-through sectioning, he said, “I don’t recall if they cut it [the brain] through and through.” Nor could he recall at this late date the size of the sections that were cut out. What was very illuminating, however, is that when I asked him how many photographs he took of the sections during the brain examination, he said, “I took around six or eight photos.” Of each cut-out section? I asked. “No, no. You would only take one, or two at the most, of each section. I took six or eight total.” The relevance of this, of course, is that as set forth earlier, and this bears repeating, in the supplementary report of the autopsy surgeons on the brain examination, it reads, “In the interest of preserving the specimen, coronal sections are not made. The following sections are taken for microscopic examination,” whereupon seven sections are set forth (e.g., “from the right cerebellar cortex”).345 The seven sections cut out of the president’s brain match up almost perfectly with the “six or eight” photographs (assuming he didn’t take more than one photo of each section) Springer said he took. One additional point on this issue. Although Stringer testified in his ARRB deposition, “If I remember, it was cross-sections,” launching Horne into a world whose dwellings are booby hatches, he had said earlier that the autopsy surgeons “took some sections” of the brain,346 language one would be more apt to use if, as the supplementary autopsy said, “sections are taken” of the brain, than one would use if through-and-through, bread-loaf incisions were made.
Before Doug Horne, the main beef that most conspiracy theorists had with the autopsy surgeons was their alleged incompetence. But thirty-five years after the assassination, Horne showed all these naive, whippersnapper conspiracy theorists a thing or two. Humes and Boswell weren’t incompetent. They were criminals and co-conspirators.
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.347 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].”348 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,349 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.350 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,* 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 lif
e. 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.351
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.”352 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?
Reclaiming History Page 83
