A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination

by Philip Shenon

  What might recommend Bethesda was the autopsy room itself. The whole morgue had just been renovated and outfitted with sophisticated medical and communications equipment. “We had just moved into it a couple of months before,” Humes recalled. “It was all brand new.” The autopsy room was spacious by the standards of military hospitals, about twenty-five by thirty feet, with a steel dissecting table fixed to the floor in the center. The room also functioned as an auditorium, with a viewing stand along one wall that allowed as many as thirty people—usually medical residents or visiting doctors—to view procedures. There was, in addition, a closed-circuit television camera so audiences across the street at the National Institutes of Health and down the road at the medical clinic at Andrews Air Force Base could observe at a distance. (Humes said later he wished someone had switched on the camera that night, to end the “ludicrous speculation” about what had gone on.) The morgue included large refrigerated closets able to store as many as six corpses, as well as a shower area for the doctors. The night of the president’s autopsy, the pathologists would need every square inch of space.

  The president’s body arrived at about seven thirty p.m. The bronze casket was wheeled in from a loading ramp off the street. The corpse was gently removed from the casket and—after X-rays and photos of every part of the body—was placed on the autopsy table, where it would remain for most of the next ten hours. The wounds to the skull were not immediately visible since the head had been covered with sheets in Dallas. After removing the blood-soaked cloth, Humes ordered that all the sheets be laundered immediately. “We had a washing machine in the morgue, and he stuck those in,” Boswell recalled. Humes worried from the start that something taken from the autopsy room would turn up as a grizzly souvenir in some rural sideshow—“he didn’t want those appearing in a barn out in Kansas sometime.”

  The autopsy was a “three-ring circus,” Boswell complained. Dozens of people—navy doctors and orderlies, X-ray technicians and medical photographers, Secret Service and FBI agents, military officers and hospital administrators—were either in the morgue or pressing at the door to be let in. The pathologists said the Secret Service agents who had accompanied the body to Bethesda, including some who had been in Dallas that day, were frantic with nervous energy. The man they had sworn to protect, even at the cost of their own lives, was dead. What were they protecting now? “Those people were in such an emotional state that they were running around like chickens with their heads off, and we understood their situation,” Boswell said later.

  Burkley, the president’s physician, had accompanied the body to Bethesda, and initially he tried to take control of the autopsy. As a rear admiral, he would normally have been in a position to give orders to the lower-ranking navy pathologists, but his medical training was as an internist and cardiologist, and his recommendations met with angry resistance from Humes and the other pathologists. At first, Burkley tried to argue that a full autopsy was unnecessary. He said that since the presumed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was under arrest in Dallas and there seemed little doubt about his guilt, there was no need for procedures that might severely disfigure the president’s corpse. He knew the Kennedy family was weighing whether to leave the casket open for a viewing of the body before burial. Burkley wanted to limit the autopsy to “just finding the bullets,” Boswell said.

  Humes rejected the admiral’s idea as absurd, given the danger that something important might be missed in a hasty postmortem, and Burkley backed down, although he insisted they move quickly. “George Burkley, his main concern was, let’s get this over with as fast as we could,” Humes said later, recalling his annoyance. Burkley appeared worried above all about the delay’s effect on Mrs. Kennedy, who was waiting with Robert Kennedy and other family and friends in the hospital’s VIP suite on the seventeenth floor. She had announced she would not leave Bethesda until she could take her husband’s body with her. Humes said he cringed at the thought of what she must be going through; he knew she was still wearing the bloodstained pink suit he had seen on television. (She had refused to change out of the clothes, in fact. “Let them see what they have done,” she had told Burkley defiantly.) Still, much as he felt sympathy for Mrs. Kennedy, Humes felt rushed by her presence in the hospital. “It did harass us and cause difficulty,” he remembered.

  Burkley had another request of the autopsy doctors, and on this point he was insistent. He asked Humes to promise that the pathologists’ report would hide an important fact about the president’s health, unrelated to the assassination. He wanted no mention of the condition of Kennedy’s adrenal glands. The White House physician knew an inspection of the adrenals would reveal that the president—despite years of public denials—suffered from a chronic, life-threatening disorder, Addison’s disease, in which the glands, which sit on top of the kidneys, did not produce enough hormones. Kennedy might have given the appearance of ruddy good health, but Burkley knew that was often a result of makeup and other staging for the cameras. The president survived because of daily hormone supplements that included high doses of testosterone.

  Humes, eager to begin, agreed. “He promised George Burkley that we would never discuss the adrenals until all of the then-living members of the Kennedy family were dead, or something like that,” said Boswell, who went along with the plan, even though it was a blatant violation of protocol. Days after the autopsy, Burkley returned to Humes with another secret request, this one about the handling of the president’s brain, which had been removed from the skull for analysis after the autopsy. As Burkley had asked, Humes delivered the brain, which had been preserved in formalin in a steel pail at Bethesda, to the White House so that it could be quietly interred with the president’s body.* “He told me flat out that the decision had been made and that he was going to take the brain and deliver it to Robert Kennedy,” Humes recalled.

  Humes’s work on the night of the autopsy was hampered for other reasons. In the hours after the president’s death, the fear that the assassination was the work of a conspiracy, and that the conspirators might strike again, was a topic of fevered discussion in the hallways at Bethesda. As Humes and his team set to work, they overheard colleagues talk about how the Russians or the Cubans might be behind the murder, and how Lyndon Johnson, sworn in hours earlier as president, could be the next target.

  The doctors began to worry for their own safety. If there was a conspiracy, the killers might want to hide the truth of exactly how the president had died. Was it possible the Bethesda pathologists might also be silenced, or their evidence seized and destroyed? “It seemed like there might be some sort of cabal” behind Kennedy’s death, Boswell remembered thinking. “Anybody was likely to be killed.” Humes’s superior officer was so alarmed by the potential threat that he ordered Boswell to make sure that Humes, who had taken responsibility for writing the autopsy report, got back to his house safely. “So I got in my car behind Jim Humes, and I followed him home,” Boswell said.

  When Humes finally walked through his front door at about seven a.m., he had no opportunity to collect his thoughts, let alone sleep. He was scheduled to drive his son to church that morning for the boy’s First Communion—Humes was determined to be there—and he knew he needed to return to Bethesda within a few hours for a telephone call with the doctors at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas who had tried, futilely, to save Kennedy’s life. Humes later conceded he should have left the autopsy room and spoken with the Parkland doctors at some point Friday night, but he was under too much pressure to finish. “There was no way we could get out of the room,” Humes said later. “You have to understand that situation—that hysterical situation—that existed. How we kept our wits about us as well as we did is amazing to me.”

  The call on Saturday to Dr. Malcolm Perry, the chief Parkland doctor to attend to Kennedy, resolved a central mystery for Humes. There had been no question among any of the doctors in Dallas or Bethesda about Kennedy’s cause of death—the massive head wound from a bullet that blew away
much of the right hemisphere of his brain, an image captured in awful photographs. The mystery was over what appeared to be the first bullet to hit the president, which entered his upper back or neck and should have remained relatively intact as it passed through soft tissue. Where had it gone? The Bethesda pathologists could find no obvious exit wound.

  Humes and his colleagues struggled with the question for hours; it was one reason why the autopsy took so long. “I x-rayed the president’s body from head to toe for the simple reason that missiles do very funny things occasionally in a human body,” Humes said. Bullets often zig and zag once they strike flesh, even if fired from a direct angle, he explained. “It could have been in his thigh or it could have been in his buttock. It could have been any damn place.” As they worked, Humes and the others talked about the unlikely possibility that the bullet had fallen back out of the entrance wound as the president’s heart was massaged to try to restore a beat—speculation that made its way into the report of FBI agents observing the autopsy.

  During the phone call, Perry had an explanation for the missing bullet. The Parkland doctors had performed a tracheotomy, cutting into the president’s badly damaged windpipe to allow him to breathe, exactly where there had been a small wound in front of the throat, near the knot of his tie. Perhaps that was where the bullet had exited? “The minute he said that, lights went on and we said, a-ha, we have some place for our missile to have gone,” Humes said. The tracheotomy, he assumed, had destroyed evidence of the exit wound. The doctors could never be certain where that bullet had finally landed, but at least they now thought they knew where it had gone—out of the president’s throat.

  * * *

  That Saturday night, as Humes sat at his card table near the fireplace in his family room, he noticed the streaks of blood—the president’s blood—that stained each page of his notes from the autopsy room, as well as each page of the draft autopsy report. He later recalled being repulsed by the stains.

  Slowly, carefully, he began transferring the information from his notes to clean sheets of paper. “I sat down and word for word copied what I had on fresh paper,” Humes said later. It took hours. His well-thumbed copy of Stedman’s Medical Dictionary was at his elbow: he wanted no spelling errors on the report that he would give to the White House.

  Only Humes knew what motivated him to do what he did next. Were there embarrassing errors in the original autopsy report and in his notes that he wanted to correct? Did he adjust the location of the entry and exit wounds of the bullets? Beyond his promise to Burkley to eliminate any reference to the president’s adrenal glands, did he leave out other information? Was he ordered to? Whatever the reason, Humes decided—as he sat there at the card table—to destroy every piece of paper in his custody, except the new draft. He was determined, he said, to keep the bloodied documents from falling into the hands of “ghouls.”

  Years later, he admitted that he did not fully understand the implications of his actions, and he acknowledged that they might have helped feed the conspiracy theories that dogged him the rest of his career. He tried to reconstruct his thinking: “When I noticed these bloodstains were on these documents that I had prepared, I said, nobody’s going to ever get these documents.”

  Humes gave the original notes and autopsy report a final look before standing up and walking to the fireplace. He dropped the bloodstained pages of the original draft autopsy report into the fire and watched as the flames turned the paper to ash. He pushed his handwritten notes from the examination room into the fire as well.

  “Everything that I had, exclusive of the final report, I burned,” he said. “I didn’t want anything to remain. Period.”

  EXECUTIVE INN

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1963

  In the city where the president had been killed, the destruction of evidence began within a day of the assassination. On Friday, hours after learning of her husband’s arrest, Marina Oswald remembered the “stupid photographs” that she had taken of Lee in the yard of the shabby New Orleans home where the couple lived earlier that year. The photos showed a smirking Lee, dressed in black, holding his mail-order rifle in one hand; in the other, he held recent issues of two leftist newspapers, the Militant and the Worker. There was a pistol in a holster around his waist.

  On Friday night, after hours of initial questioning by the FBI and the Dallas police, Marina was allowed to return to the home of Ruth Paine, a local friend who spoke some Russian. Marina, the strikingly pretty twenty-two-year-old Russian who had married Oswald during his failed defection to the Soviet Union, had lived in the Paine home for several weeks that year while Oswald lived elsewhere, first in New Orleans, as he looked for a job.

  When she got back to the house, Marina found the photos, which she had hidden in an album of baby pictures, and showed them to her mother-in-law, Marguerite Oswald. The two women barely knew each other—Oswald had always claimed to hate his mother and so refused to see her—and the two Mrs. Oswalds had been reunited only because of the assassination. Marina spoke just a few words of English.

  “Mama, Mama,” Marina said, showing her mother-in-law the photos.

  Mrs. Oswald appeared shocked by the image of her young son with the weapons and replied, without hesitation, “Hide them,” according to her daughter-in-law’s account.

  Marina said she did as she was told, putting the photos in her shoe.

  The next day, Saturday, after hours of additional police questioning, she was approached by her mother-in-law and asked where the photos were hidden.

  Marina said she pointed to her shoes. “Burn them,” Marguerite told her daughter-in-law, according to Marina’s account. “Burn them now.”

  Again, Marina said, she did as she was told. That evening, she and her mother-in-law were moved by the Secret Service to a small motel, the Executive Inn, near Love Field airport. Marina said she found an ashtray in the motel room, placed the photos in it, and then lit a match, touching the flame to the corner of one of the pictures. The heavy photographic paper was difficult to burn, she recalled, so it took several matches to do the job. Her mother-in-law would later insist that the decision to destroy the pictures had been Marina’s alone. But Marguerite Oswald did admit that she was in the room and watched as her daughter-in-law destroyed the photos. And Marguerite admitted that she—not Marina—took the ashtray and emptied it into the toilet. “I flushed the torn bits and the half-burned thing down the commode,” Mrs. Oswald later explained. “And nothing was said.”

  DALLAS FIELD OFFICE

  THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1963

  Evidence was also beginning to vanish that weekend from the files of the FBI. At about six p.m. Sunday, FBI Special Agent James Hosty was called to the office of his boss, Gordon Shanklin, the special agent in charge of the Dallas field office. Hosty said that Shanklin pushed a piece of paper across the desk.

  “Get rid of this,” Shanklin ordered. “Oswald is dead now. There can be no trial.” Seven hours earlier, Oswald had been gunned down by Jack Ruby in Dallas police headquarters, a shocking scene captured live on national television.

  Shanklin nodded to the piece of paper and repeated the order to Hosty, a square-jawed thirty-nine-year-old who had joined the FBI a decade earlier as an office clerk, a traditional career route for the bureau’s field agents. “Get rid of it,” Shanklin said again.

  Hosty didn’t need to be told a third time. He recognized the piece of paper—a handwritten note that Oswald had delivered in person to the FBI office in early November, apparently warning the bureau to stop disturbing his Russian-born wife.

  “If you don’t cease bothering my wife, I will take appropriate action,” Oswald had written, according to Hosty’s later account. The FBI receptionist who took the note from Oswald said she thought he sounded “crazy, maybe dangerous.”

  Hosty and Shanklin could well imagine what would happen if J. Edgar Hoove
r learned of the note’s existence. It was proof that the bureau had been in contact with Oswald only days before the assassination; that there had been face-to-face contact between the bureau and Oswald’s wife; that Oswald had actually stood there, in person, in the Dallas office. Simply put, the note could be read as proof that the bureau—in particular, Hosty and Shanklin—had missed the chance to stop Oswald before he gunned down the president.

  And the note only hinted at the extent of the FBI’s months-long pursuit of Oswald. The truth, Hosty and Shanklin knew, was that the bureau’s Dallas office had maintained an open file on Oswald as a potential national-security threat since March. Oswald had returned to the United States the previous year after his aborted defection to Russia, and the FBI suspected that he might have come back to spy for the Soviet Union.

  Shanklin continued to stare down at the note, waiting for Hosty to pick it up.

  Hosty had a lot to protect—a wife and eight children at home who depended on his $9,000-a-year salary. At the FBI, orders were followed, no questions asked, even an order as grave and almost certainly illegal as destroying a vital piece of evidence involving the man who had just killed the president.