LBJ
Page 74
The pilots and other military officers who participated in the transfer in Dallas would of course, have been sworn—and warned—to keep their silence, on the basis of “national security” reasons due to highly sensitive matters that were naturally well over their “need to know.” So the statements they made to Lifton and others to obfuscate or “not remember” what happened are understandable. If the doctors at Bethesda could be influenced to hide the truth, which has been proven beyond a doubt as we shall see, then it is not far-fetched to suggest that the same phenomenon existed all along the way, from the time the casket left Parkland Hospital, and is at the heart of the dichotomy between Parkland doctors and Bethesda doctors. This would also apply to the arrival time logged in for Air Force Two. Rather than 18:30 (6:30 p.m. EST) the logged number might have been fudged because a normal flight time of two hours and fifteen minutes from Dallas to Andrews was more likely, which would mean that it arrived before Air Force One, given that the latter aircraft was slowed in flight to allow the “backup” aircraft to do its customary “leapfrog” and arrive ahead of the master ship, a common procedure as explained elsewhere. Yet, regardless of which aircraft JFK’s body arrived on, its movement after arrival in Washington was, nonetheless, not exactly as depicted in the news reports of the time.
At the Morgue: A Colossal Hearse “Shell Game” Plays Out
The maneuvering to return JFK’s body to the casket in which it left Parkland Hospital in Dallas—after it had been removed during Johnson’s swearing-in on the tarmac of Love Field—took on an (almost) comical aspect at Bethesda Naval Hospital when three different ambulance/hearses appeared on the scene. The first one was a black Cadillac hearse at approximately 6:35–6:40 p.m. from which a “plain gray shipping casket” was removed and immediately taken into the morgue. Inside was the president’s body in a military-style zippered body bag. This casket was received by First-Class Petty Officer Dennis David, who stated that it was accompanied by six or seven civilians who he assumed were Secret Service agents. A navy hospital corpsman, Paul O’Connor, and x-ray technician Jerrol Custer both confirmed that the body was nude except for a sheet wrapped around only the head; that there was a huge hole (4'' × 7'') in the back and top of the head; and the brain was almost completely gone except for residual tissue.122
In the meantime, the gray Pontiac navy ambulance carrying the ornate bronze coffin from Dallas arrived approximately fifteen to twenty minutes later, at 6:55 p.m., dropping Jacqueline and Bobby Kennedy off at the front door before delivering the bronze casket to the rear of the building. In a bizarre scene, as Jacqueline entered the building at 7:05 p.m. through the front lobby, Jerrol Custer passed her “carrying exposed x-ray film of JFK’s body that had already been taken. This despite the fact that JFK’s body was supposedly outside in a bronze casket in the navy ambulance. We now have a corroboration of Dennis David’s story “mutually corroborative evidence from three extremely credible witnesses …”123 (emphasis added).
To add even more drama to the clearly broken “chain of custody” of JFK’s body, a carefully planned “mix-up” occurred on the hospital grounds when the truck with the seven men serving as the casket team could not keep up with the gray Pontiac navy ambulance after Robert and Jackie Kennedy got out of it at the front of the hospital; another identical Pontiac decoy hearse was entering the area at the rear at the same time, and the men in the pickup became confused regarding which was which. For one hour, from 7:00 p.m., when Mrs. Kennedy exited the hearse, until nearly 8:00 p.m., when the casket team carried the bronze casket into the morgue, as reported by Lt. Sam Bird’s report,* there was an inexplicable break in its custody.124 It appears that the “shell game” being played out with multiple gray Pontiac ambulances was planned by someone who had studied the art of illusion as practiced by magicians, something that in fact the CIA had done in the previous decade as part of the MK/ULTRA operation.
One of the men assigned to the “casket team” recalled that the reason they became lost and confused was because the ambulance/hearse left the front of the hospital and sped away; they tried to catch up with it, spending “ten to fifteen minutes” at speeds up to 50 mph on the hospital grounds and another fifteen minutes trying to get back to the building from where they started. When they returned to the rear entrance they were advised that the casket had still not arrived so they returned to the front entrance (twice, apparently); it returned for the second time to the rear entrance shortly before 8:00 p.m., finally finding the ambulance with the bronze casket.125 The driver of the ambulance was not from the casket team, nor was he any other enlisted man; he was an admiral, Calvin B. Galloway, the man in charge of the entire medical center, the immediate superior of Commander Humes who would perform the “autopsy”126 (emphasis added).
The scene around Bethesda Naval Hospital, described by many of the witnesses to it, is, admittedly, bizarre. However, through attempting to understand and explain these anomalies while giving the witnesses due credibility, it becomes apparent that the entire scenario was explainable. It was considered essential that the body be made to conform to a preconceived plot; to facilitate that end, it had to be subjected to certain adjustments to hide the evidence of any gunshots from the front (e.g., the resizing of the hole, so that it extended toward the top and front of the skull) to make it congruent with the ideal plot of two shots from behind. After that was done, the “shell game” was played out by secretly moving the body out of the hospital room after the “adjustments” were complete, into another “decoy” standard-issue navy ambulance, which met the original Pontiac ambulance in some other part of the hospital grounds; after the body was transferred back to the original coffin and ambulance, Admiral Galloway personally returned it just before 8:00 p.m. to the rear entrance. The result of this “sleight of hand” scenario explains generally how the subterfuge created long ago in Lyndon Johnson’s mind was executed. It also reconciles most of the “irreconcilable differences” extant, which relate to noted anomalies between the credible witness statements and the incredible story represented in the Warren Commission Report.
Doug Horne, in his five-volume, eighteen-hundred-page work, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board: The U.S. Government’s Final Attempt to Reconcile the Conflicting Medical Evidence in the Assassination of JFK, has conclusively established the presence of unequivocal evidence of a U.S. government cover-up of the medical evidence in the Kennedy assassination; his research (based upon previous works cited) proves that the Zapruder film was in fact altered within a few days of the assassination in a manner consistent with that to be described in chapter 9. In an interview with author Dick Russell, for his 2008 book On the Trail of the JFK Assassins, Horne stated that127
I am now convinced—and this insight didn’t really come to me until 2006, when I did much of the writing on the manuscript I’m putting together about all this—that Humes and Boswell, who were there at the morgue with the president’s body well before the autopsy started and prior to Dr. Finck’s arrival, were involved in a covert deception operation from the very beginning. I believe they were told, for national security reasons, to destroy or suppress any evidence that the president was shot from the front and to record only evidence that he was shot from the rear—even if they had to manufacture some of it.
I don’t think Finck was initially a part of the deception; the great irony is that even though he was a board-certified forensic pathologist, I believe he was a victim of the Humes-Boswell covert operation. At some point, after the fact, I believe Finck suspected this, but felt he was in so deep by this time, and realized he was so compromised, that he decided not to blow the whistle officially; instead he left a few clues in the record over the years for “CYA” purposes … The main point I am trying to make here is that Humes and Boswell had possession of the president’s body much earlier in the evening than the official record indicates, and undertook activities to alter the evidentiary record that they did not reveal to Finck.
Jerrol C
uster told William Matson Law in 1998 that “the Officer of the Day said to me he was coming in from Walter Reed. I took the films and the cassettes to the morgue, and I set everything up. We sat there and waited and waited; they said, ‘He should be arriving at any moment.’ They brought him in, in the [shipping] casket, put the casket down and opened it. So we proceeded to remove the body from the casket and place it on the autopsy table … the head was completely covered by a plastic bag and there was a sheet around it. The sheet, of course, was bloodied and nothing was ever mentioned about that”128 (emphasis added). Custer said he “double loaded” the x-ray machine with two films, so that “if one film is a little bit too dark, one film is just right … I ran [i.e., processed] one film and put the other film in the light-proof box [and later] ran the films in the light-proof box, those were all good too. I put them in one of the mailing folders [and kept them there] for a ‘Couple of months.’”129 When author Law asked him what happened to those extra films, Custer said “I destroyed them … Because of the gag order that I had signed. I didn’t destroy them right away. After I’d thought on it and pondered on it a little bit, and thought, ‘Well, if these films happened to surface along the line somewhere, they’re going to trace them back to me. And guess whose body is going to wind up in jail.’ I never thought that later on down the road that they could have been worth millions. Or they could have solved the whole problem.”130
It should be noted here that all navy personnel were immediately ordered, verbally, and subsequently very formally, in writing, not to speak of anything they saw that night to anyone else, under threat of court martial. According to David Lifton, “A group of men, in civilian clothes … were keeping very careful track of who was entering and leaving the room. This group, between six and ten in number, was stationed in the anteroom to the morgue, where the chillboxes were.”131
Researcher/author Doug Horne told Dick Russell about how he and his colleagues tracked down an ex-marine sergeant who was in charge of the security detail at the morgue. He and his team were not the honor guard, with the white gloves and dress uniforms described by William Manchester, but they formed a physical security detail from the Marine Barracks in Washington DC, dressed in Marine Corps working uniforms, and carrying weapons:132
The sergeant’s name was Roger Boyajian, pronounced “Boy-gen.” He had retained an original onion-skin carbon copy of the after-action report that he wrote on November 26, 1963, the day after JFK’s funeral, and had shared its contents with Ms. Cunningham. A document like this one that is contemporaneous is priceless, because it’s not distorted by fading memories, by time—or by anyone’s subsequent theories about the assassination. So I interviewed Boyajian on the phone, and he then mailed me a photocopy of that document, and authenticated it with a letter written above his signature.
He’d gotten to Bethesda really early, before the president’s body arrived. One of the entries in his report reads: “1835—President’s Casket Arrives.” That means 6:35 PM, and indicates that he took notes; every military man in those days had what’s called a “wheel book,” a little green U.S. government memoranda notebook that fits into your back pocket. The thing is, that’s a mind-blowing entry, because it is a well-documented fact that the light-gray Navy ambulance, with the president’s bronze casket from Dallas inside, didn’t arrive at Bethesda until approximately five minutes before seven, and it sat outside in front of the main building, for about 12 minutes or so before being driven around to the back of the morgue. HSCA interviews of FBI agents James Sibert and Francis O’Neill revealed that these two men, assisted only by two Secret Service agents, helped carry in this heavy bronze casket (using a dolly), without the assistance of the joint service casket team (which was not present when this happened); and a 1964 FBI report provides a time marker for this event of about 7:17 p.m. Yet here was Sergeant Boyajian, four days after the assassination, placing the arrival time of the president’s body almost forty-five minutes earlier. (emphasis in original)
There were so many witnesses who were on the scene at Bethesda who have independently come forward and agreed on the fact that Kennedy’s body had come in between 6:35 and 6:40 p.m. that they cannot be ignored. Now Roger Boyajian joins Dennis David, Paul O’Connor, Floyd Riebe, Jerrol Custer, and Captain John Stover; even Dr. Boswell “confirmed to Dennis David that he and his sailors had indeed carried the president’s body into the morgue early that evening.”133
The scenario described here is merely a synthesis based upon the original research performed by authors Lifton, Twyman, Law, and Horne, fitted to conform with known anomalies of the situation and the previously inexplicable actions of Lyndon Johnson. The premise of this thesis is that JFK’s body arrived in a shipping casket on board the backup aircraft perhaps fifteen minutes before Air Force One’s arrival and was transported by helicopter first to Walter Reed Hospital, then on to Bethesda Navy Hospital in the black Cadillac hearse after an initial review of the wounds on the body and the initial modifications, which is not to say that additional modifications were not made when it arrived at Bethesda (as noted by David Lifton, a helicopter was taking off very near Air Force One just as it arrived at Andrews Air Force Base).134 Dennis David told author David Lifton that “he was told the black hearse he saw coming from the rear gate had come down Fourteenth Street. A check of a map of Washington showed that a few miles away was Walter Reed Army Medical Center.”135 This suggests that the helicopter was used to move the body to Walter Reed; after possibly some of the “adjustments” were made there, it was transported to Bethesda in the black Cadillac hearse, arriving there at approximately 6:35–6:40 p.m.
Author David Lifton—whose original research over thirty years ago was ridiculed by many at the time, but which has now been largely vindicated—interviewed Floyd Albert Reibe, a photographer’s assistant who had taken many photographs of Kennedy’s corpse. Before he would say anything at all, he reminded Lifton that everything about it had been declared “top secret” and refused to speak about it until Lifton convinced him that the order had been rescinded, reading to him the pertinent part of the House Select Committee document. The statement he had signed on November 27, 1963, included the warning:136
“I have read and fully understand them and am aware of the disciplinary action possible in the event that I disobey these orders …” He further said that “Captain Stover called down and told Mr. Stringer that he and myself [were] to come on up, and I think just about everybody who was at the autopsy that night was up there—all navy personnel, and he explained to us the Secrecy Act, and [word] came down from the White House, [they] wanted this kept top secret and nobody must talk about it …” (emphasis added)
LIFTON: He actually used the words ‘the White House’. ?
Reibe: Yes.
The reason that Reibe and the others were given for the “top secret” orders was “security.” He had no reason to suspect anything sinister was going on, even as his photos were destroyed, as he assumed that it was because they raised some kind of “security” concern, just as the casket team was told the “decoy ambulance” served a “security function.”137
The photos included some of JFK lying on his stomach, showing the back wound, and six pictures of internal portions of the body; none of them is in the collection stored in the National Archives. The reason was that Secret Service agents seized the film and exposed it to light, destroying all images he had taken.138
Reibe told David Lifton that JFK’s body had arrived in a plain shipping casket with turnbuckles and thumbscrews, designed so that “the whole lid came off.”139 He further said that it was his recollection that the body was contained in a body bag … “a dark bag that opened with zippers” and that the word around the hospital—though he did not see it himself—was that it had come in by helicopter.140 The helicopter transport would ensure that the body arrived well before the navy ambulance carrying Bobby Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy.
JFK’s Autopsy
By the time
the autopsy began on JFK’s body, many other links to high-level military officers would suddenly materialize. Twenty-eight (28) civilians and/or high-level military brass were in attendance and in total control of the ‘autopsy’ was General Curtis LeMay, with the president’s doctor Admiral Burkley directing the medical aspects of the autopsy: Paul O’Connor, a laboratory technologist who assisted in the autopsy of President Kennedy said, “I remember Curtis LeMay sitting there [in the gallery at the JFK autopsy] with a big cigar in his hand.”. 141
None of the medical officers had ever experienced such a large number of observers who had mysteriously inserted themselves into the autopsy procedure in a relatively small autopsy room. This prompted Navy Commander Humes to ask at the outset, “Who’s in charge here?” An answer came from the back, “I am.” The fact that the highest-ranking military man there—the Air Force representative of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—was General Curtis LeMay, would suggest that it was he who responded to Commander Humes’ question.142 However, according to William M. Law’s interview with O’Connor, it seems that Admiral Burkley, the president’s personal physician, “came in and was very agitated giving orders to everybody, including higher-ranking officers.”143