Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  But that’s really the most unlikely of the two scenarios by far. If Humes and Boswell were going to be called upon by the conspirators to do what they did, the people behind this incredibly complex conspiracy obviously would never wait until after Kennedy was killed to start feverishly rounding up pathologists (in the few hours before the autopsy) to carry out that end of the plan. Those pathologists would necessarily have to be already on board. Meaning what? That Humes and Boswell weren’t just accessories after the fact to Kennedy’s murder, but part of the conspiracy to murder him. This is what Horne, and all of the many in the conspiracy community who have embraced his theory, have, in effect, accused Humes and Boswell of. In other words, they knew, before Kennedy’s murder, that he was going to be murdered, and agreed to be part of this conspiracy to murder him—their role being to help cover it up. And since, under the law of conspiracy (the so-called vicarious liability rule), each member of a conspiracy is criminally responsible for all crimes committed by his co-conspirators to further the object of the conspiracy, under federal law and the law in every state, if Horne’s allegations were true, Humes and Boswell would be guilty not only of the crime of conspiracy to commit murder, but also of Kennedy’s murder itself. Again, as I’ve said so many times in this book, it’s just too insane for words.

  And by the way, the conspirators would have had to have a team of pathologists ready at two hospitals to perpetrate the cover-up that Horne is sure took place. What I’m saying is that even if we exclude Parkland Hospital (which one can’t really do, since the conspirators couldn’t know, for sure, that the autopsy would not be conducted there), since it looked like the autopsy was going to be conducted at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., until Jacqueline Kennedy, midair between Dallas and Washington, D.C., decided on Bethesda, the conspirators would have also had to line up some pathologists at Walter Reed—in other words, if the autopsy was at Walter Reed, almost for sure the pathologists would not have been Humes and Boswell, who were naval doctors, but instead army pathologists. So the conspirators, cold-blooded murderers from the Mafia or CIA or KGB, and so on, would have necessarily had to approach not only Humes and Boswell, but also their counterparts at Walter Reed. And since other pathologists would be available at both places and the conspirators wouldn’t know until after Kennedy died who among them would be assigned to the case, the superiors of Humes and Boswell and the superiors at Walter Reed would also have had to have been approached* and told that they intended to murder the president and asked if they would be willing to join in the conspiracy. And of course, after they heard the conspirators’ proposal, none of the pathologists told them, “Are you crazy? The moment you leave I’m going to call the police.” Instead, every single pathologist the conspirators approached apparently agreed to participate in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy.

  At the time of the president’s autopsy, Dr. Humes was a commander in the Medical Corps of the U.S. Navy and senior pathologist and director of laboratories of the Naval Medical School at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. Humes received his undergraduate training at Villanova University in Philadelphia and his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. His internship and postgraduate training in his special field of pathology took place at various naval hospitals and at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.

  Dr. Boswell was also a commander in the Medical Corps of the U.S. Navy and the chief of pathology at the Naval Medical School at Bethesda. Receiving his medical degree from Ohio State University College of Medicine, he interned at naval hospitals and took his pathology training at St. Albans Naval Hospital in New York.

  But of course, according to Mr. Horne, all of this background of Drs. Humes and Boswell was simply preparation for their date with infamy—becoming big-time felons by joining shadowy conspirators who clandestinely approached them and enlisted their participation as conspirators in the murder of John F. Kennedy. Why would they want to jeopardize their lives and careers and legacy to do something so incredibly reprehensible as this? You’d have to ask the eminent Mr. Horne that question. So far he hasn’t said.

  Just as the discredited acoustic evidence has left an indelible stain on the legacy of the HSCA with its unwarranted conclusion of conspiracy, Doug Horne (and those who allowed him to do his thing) to a lesser degree has left a stain on the legacy of the ARRB, which overall did an excellent job under the chairmanship of John R. Tunheim. In a form letter sent to people around the country seeking assassination-related documents they might have, the then executive director of the ARRB, David Marwell, pointed out that the ARRB was a federal agency “whose members were appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate” and “charged with the responsibility of collecting records related to the assassination of President Kennedy.” The letter went on to say that the ARRB “is not seeking to reach any conclusions” regarding the assassination, but is primarily concerned with “identifying, clarifying, locating and making available assassination records.” From that very clear and limited mandate, the atmosphere at the ARRB apparently was such that someone like Doug Horne was allowed to pursue his fantasies to such an extent that not only was a prohibited and crazy conclusion reached and published, but it was one that accused innocent and honorable men of murder.

  Not that Humes’s and Boswell’s characters have to be vouched for, but when I asked John Stringer what he thought of Douglas Horne’s two-brain theory, he chuckled and said, “What these people won’t come up with next?” About the possibility that Humes and Boswell (both of whom, he said, he knew very well and worked with for many years) would ever do what Horne accused them of, Stringer, who is now in his late seventies, said, “Oh, no. Not even a chance. They were both honest and sincere men, real gentlemen. I would trust anything they said.”353

  What is Humes’s take on all of the conspiracy theories, some of which, like Horne’s, involve him? He called them “general idiocy” and “a tragedy” themselves. “It almost defies belief,” he said. “But I guess it is the price we pay for living in a free country. I can only question the motives of those who propound these ridiculous theories for a price and who have turned the president’s death into a profit-making industry.”354

  Governor Connally’s Wounds

  Of course, President Kennedy wasn’t the only one shot during the motorcade. Texas Governor John B. Connally was also wounded, although the nature of his wounds is far less controversial than that of the president’s. According to both the Warren Commission and the HSCA, the governor suffered five wounds caused by a single bullet that struck the upper right area of his back, exited the right side of the chest (just below the right nipple), reentered the back of his right wrist, exited the opposite side, and finally came to rest after causing a superficial entrance wound in the left thigh.355 Three surgeons attended the governor: Dr. Robert R. Shaw (chest), Dr. Charles F. Gregory (wrist), and Dr. Tom Shires (thigh).

  Dr. Shaw’s postoperative report describes the “wound of entrance” in the governor’s upper right back as being “just lateral to the right scapula [shoulder blade] close [to] the axilla [armpit].”356 The HSCA medical panel described the location of the entrance wound more precisely as 20 centimeters (79/10 inches) right of the midline and 18 centimeters (71/10 inches) below the top of the first thoracic vertebra.357 In other words, just below and to the left of the right armpit. Shaw wrote that the entrance wound was “approximately 3 centimeters [11/5 inches] in its longest diameter.”358 This was later corrected by Dr. Shaw to 1.5 centimeters (3/5 inch) in its longest diameter during testimony before the Warren Commission and again during an interview for the HSCA.359 (Shaw explained to the HSCA that when the edges of the wound were later surgically cut away, this effectively enlarged the entrance wound to about 3 centimeters.)

  During the HSCA interview, Dr. Shaw prepared a drawing of the entrance wound in which the longest dimension is in the vertical plane.360 However, on September 6, 1978, Dr. M
ichael Baden conducted a physical examination of Governor Connally’s wounds in the governor’s room at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and found that the scar from the entrance wound was actually longest in the horizontal plane.361 This fact coincides with the hole in the back of Connally’s suit coat, which also was found to be longest in the horizontal plane.362 The egg shape, as opposed to a circular shape, of the wound indicates it had hit an intervening object (almost assuredly President Kennedy’s body) before it hit Connally, causing it to “tumble.” (See discussion in endnote and in text of the Zapruder film section.)

  Because of the back wound’s small size and relatively clean-cut edges, Dr. Shaw, who had a considerable amount of experience evaluating gunshot wounds (having attended to over nine hundred gunshot cases as head of the Thoracic Center in Paris, France, during World War II), concluded that it was an entry wound.363

  After entering the governor’s back, the bullet passed downward through the chest, where it tangentially struck the midpoint of the fifth rib, shattering approximately 10 centimeters (4 inches) of the rib before exiting. The exiting bullet (and accompanying rib fragments) blew a 5-centimeter (2-inch) ragged hole in the governor’s chest at a point 7.5 centimeters (3 inches) to the right of the midline and 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) below the right nipple.364 Dr. Shaw described it as a sucking wound, meaning that air was allowed to pass freely between the chest cavity and the outside of the body.365

  During Governor Connally’s appearance before the Warren Commission, Dr. Robert Shaw measured the angle of declination between the entrance and exit wounds in the governor’s chest and concluded that the bullet that struck the governor proceeded on a downward angle of 25 degrees.366 In a 1964 analysis based on an examination of the bullet holes in the governor’s suit coat, the FBI reported that the bullet “passed through Governor Connally at an angle of approximately 35 degrees downward from the horizontal and approximately 20 degrees from right to left if he were sitting erect and facing forward [neither of which he was doing] at the time he was shot.”367 The right-to-left trajectory is consistent, as we saw earlier, with the right-to-left path the bullet took through Kennedy’s body.

  Considering the nature and location of the entrance and exit wounds, the bullet that struck the governor’s chest, then, was fired from above and behind and was moving slightly right to left, consistent with Oswald’s firing position on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, located to the right rear of the presidential limousine.

  The second entrance wound the governor suffered was caused by the bullet exiting just below the governor’s right nipple and going on to enter his right wrist. Dr. Charles Gregory, who attended to the governor’s wrist wound, wrote in his postoperative report that the wound was located “on the dorsal aspect [i.e., the back] of the right wrist over the junction of the right distal fourth of the radius and shaft,” and testified that the wound was “approximately 5 centimeters [2 inches] above the wrist joint.”368 The wound was approximately 0.5 centimeter wide (1/5 inch) and 2 centimeters (4/5 inch) in length, rather oblique (i.e., the bullet had entered at an angle), with a loss of tissue and considerable bruising at the margins.369 X-rays showed that as the bullet passed through the right wrist it caused a comminuted (i.e., shattering) fracture of the radius (one of two bones connecting the hand to the arm) into seven or eight pieces. Near this radial fracture were found a number of bits of metal.370 Several were removed during surgery; however, no effort was made to recover all of the tiny fragments seen in the X-rays. The few fragments recovered from the governor’s wrist were found by chance as the wound was cleaned.371

  All of the evidence surrounding the governor’s wrist wound indicates that a bullet, tumbling and distorted from having struck a previous object, impacted the back of the right wrist, shattered the right radius (depositing small fragments of metal), and exited on the palm side of the wrist close to an inch above the wrist joint.372

  The governor’s third entrance wound occurred when the bullet that exited the right wrist went on to hit his left thigh, causing a superficial injury. Dr. Tom Shires, who examined the wound, testified that there was a puncture or entrance wound 1 centimeter (2/5 inch) in diameter over the junction of the middle and lower third of the left thigh. X-rays of the wound revealed only a small fleck of metal lying about 1/2 inch beneath the surface of the skin.373 The doctors thought the bullet might have ended up somewhere else in the left leg and so additional X-rays were taken, but no bullet was seen. The doctors knew that a fragment so small could not have produced the nearly ½-inch-diameter puncture wound in the thigh, and were perplexed that they could not find a bullet of sufficient size to account for the three wounds in the governor’s body.374 Of course, we know that a bullet (Commission Exhibit No. 399) was found that afternoon by a hospital maintenance worker on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital believed to have been occupied by Governor Connally.

  Dr. Gregory opined that the stretcher bullet could very well have struck the thigh in reverse fashion (i.e., base end first), shed a small fragment immediately beneath the skin, then, because it hadn’t penetrated the thigh deep enough, worked its way out of the wound.375 The reduced velocity of the bullet after having passed through Kennedy’s and Connally’s bodies would be the main factor causing it to penetrate the governor’s left thigh only slightly. Although the muzzle velocity of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle is 2,296 feet per second,376 the FBI estimated that the speed of the bullet at the time it struck Kennedy in the back was around 1,900 feet per second.377 It is believed to have lost speed of about 100 feet per second in passing through the soft tissue of Kennedy’s body and over 400 feet per second after having struck Connally’s rib and radius.378 The HSCA estimated that the speed of the bullet when it exited Connally’s wrist and struck his left thigh would probably have been reduced down to around 1,100 to 1,300 feet per second.379

  Dr. Shires told the Warren Commission that during the operation on Governor Connally, all three attending surgeons, as well as their assistants (Drs. McClelland, Baxter, Patman, Osborne, Parker, Boland, and Duke), thought that one bullet had caused all of the governor’s wounds.380 The majority of the nine-member HSCA medical panel (Dr. Cyril Wecht was the only dissent) agreed.381

  Although the medical findings alone do not provide enough evidence to state with absolute certainty that the bullet that passed through the president’s body went on to hit the governor, the majority of the HSCA forensic panel members (with the exception of Dr. Cyril Wecht) felt that the medical evidence was “consistent with this hypothesis” (i.e., the single-bullet theory) and “much less consistent with other hypotheses.”382 In fact, as you’ll see later in this book, when other nonmedical evidence is considered, there can be no reasonable doubt that both men were struck with the same, single bullet.

  The Most Famous Home Movie Ever, the “Magic Bullet,” and the Single-Bullet Theory

  No other issue in the Kennedy assassination has given birth to more literature and argument among Warren Commission critics, supporters, and students of the assassination than the timing and number of bullets that were fired in Dealey Plaza, the resolution of which involves no less than whether or not there was a conspiracy in the death of the president. The principal source and starting place for their inquiry is always the Zapruder film, the twenty-six-and-a-half-second, 8-millimeter color film of 486 frames shot by Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder, for certain the most famous and examined film footage in history.

  It is also, in the estimation of the New York Times, “the most valuable piece of film in the world,”1 the U.S. government paying Zapruder’s heirs $16 million in 1999 for the original footage. After Time-Life purchased the film from Zapruder for $150,000 in 1963 for its magazine, Life, payable in six installments of $25,000 per year (the first $25,000 of which Zapruder contributed to the family of slain police officer J. D. Tippit),2 Time-Life returned the film and copyright back to the Zapruder family for one dollar in 1975. On April 24, 1997, the Assassination Records
Review Board, on a 5-to-0 vote, declared that the Zapruder film was “an assassination record,” and hence, the historic film became the property of the federal government, the board’s ruling being effective as of August 1,1998.3 However, the U.S. Constitution (the Fifth Amendment in 1791) requires the government to pay the owners of private property “taken for public use” a “just compensation,” and the question became what was the original film worth. The government originally offered $750,000 but hinted it might go as high as $3 million. The Zapruder family, led by Zapruder’s son, Henry, a Washington, D.C., tax attorney, countered that it believed the half minute of history captured on the film would auction for as high as $30 million, but asked for $18 million. A three-member arbitration panel, in a 2-to-1 vote, agreed to the sum of $16 million, plus $800,000 in interest.4 Today, the film and two original copies sit in a refrigerated, fireproof safe at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, too fragile ever to be run through a projector again. A third original copy was donated by Zapruder’s heirs to the Sixth Floor Museum located inside the old Book Depository Building in Dallas.5*

  Although entire books and millions of words have been written to analyze and interpret the Zapruder film, my personal view, for whatever it’s worth, is that while the film is very important to the assassination inquiry, it has been given more attention than it deserves, its examination to determine the timing and number of shots being more of an intellectual, academic exercise than providing conclusive evidentiary value. There are several reasons why I say this, among which is the fact that the Zapruder film is a silent one (if there were sound on the film, we’d know the number of shots and their timing), making interpretation of it subjective and speculative for the most part. Moreover, we don’t need the Zapruder film at all to tell us what happened. Indeed, less than .01 percent of all murders, if that, are captured on film, yet law enforcement has done quite well, thank you, without such films in proving beyond a reasonable doubt exactly what happened. And here, even without the Zapruder film, there were well over a hundred witnesses to the murder in Dealey Plaza—here again, a fact that sets the assassination apart from nearly all other murders. The overwhelming majority of premeditated murders don’t even have one eye or ear witness, yet law enforcement normally is successful in proving the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.