LBJ

by Phillip F. Nelson

  David Lifton interviewed James Curtis Jenkins, a laboratory technician at the autopsy table “touching elbows” with Dr. Finck, who said he saw a “huge hole” in Kennedy’s head, “‘at least one-third of the skull was gone when Kennedy was brought in’ a hole which extended toward the rear, and with fragments that seemed to be hanging on, and which seemed to have been exploded toward the rear, Jenkins formed the opinion that President Kennedy had been shot in the head from the front … But then, the next day, said Jenkins, ‘I found out that supposedly he was shot from the back. I just, you know, I just couldn’t believe it, and have never been able to believe it.’”144 Jenkins went on to describe the scene between the doctors and the civilians, asserting that the men in civilian clothes seemed to have a “preconcluded” idea of what the evidence had to support and were growing angry with the physicians who were hestitating to agree with their findings. His opinion was that doctors would say that the purported shot was “not possible” and then be chastised for being insubordinate; the men in suits were becoming very irritated that the doctors were initially resistant to the portrayal of the assassination which their findings was supposed to describe.145 Apparently, their persistence eventually paid off, given the numerous traces of inexplicable contradictions between the reports they rendered versus the statements cited by other witnesses. Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Finck was the army doctor who assisted Dr. Humes and another navy doctor, Commander J. Thornton Boswell, in the autopsy. Colonel Finck was subpoenaed a few years later by Jim Garrison about that experience. A portion of his testimony is included below to illustrate the surreal—bizarre is more descriptive—nature of the president’s autopsy scene:146

  COLONEL FINCK: Well, I heard Dr. Humes stating that—he said, ‘Who is in charge here?’ And I heard an Army General, I don’t remember his name, stating, ‘I am.’ You must understand that in those circumstances, there were law enforcement officials, military people with various ranks, and you have to co-ordinate the operation according to directions.

  QUESTION: But you were one of the three qualified pathologists standing at that autopsy table, were you not, Doctor?

  COLONEL FINCK: Yes, I was.

  QUESTION: Was this Army General a qualified pathologist?

  COLONEL FINCK: No.

  QUESTION: Was he a doctor?

  COLONEL FINCK: No, not to my knowledge.

  QUESTION: Can you give me his name, Colonel?

  COLONEL FINCK: No, I can’t. I don’t remember.

  QUESTION: How many other military personnel were present at the autopsy in the autopsy room?

  COLONEL FINCK: That autopsy room was quite crowded. It is a small autopsy room, and when you are called in circumstances like that to look at the wound of the President of the United States who is dead, you don’t look around too much to ask people for their names and take notes on who they are and how many there are. I did not do so. The room was crowded with military and civilian personnel and federal agents. Secret Service agents, FBI agents, for part of the autopsy, but I cannot give you a precise breakdown as regards the attendance of the people in that autopsy room at Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  QUESTION: Colonel, did you feel that you had to take orders from this Army General that was there directing the autopsy?

  COLONEL FINCK: No, because there were others, there were Admirals.

  QUESTION: There were Admirals?

  COLONEL FINCK: Oh yes, there were Admirals, and when you are a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army you just follow orders, and at the end of the autopsy we were specifically told—as I recall it, it was by Admiral Kenney, the Surgeon General of the Navy—this is subject to verification—we were specifically told not to discuss the case.

  The testimony became a little more adversarial for the next several minutes as Dr. Finck tried to be responsive but not revelatory in his statements, and his interrogator repeatedly needed to ask the judge to intervene with direction to Dr. Finck as they got closer and closer to the point:

  QUESTION: I will ask one more time: Why did you not dissect the track of the bullet wound that you have described today and you saw at the time of the autopsy at the time you examined the body? Why? I ask you to answer that question.

  COLONEL FINCK: As I recall I was told not to, but I don’t remember by whom.

  QUESTION: You were told not to, but you don’t remember by whom?

  COLONEL FINCK: Right.

  QUESTION: Could it have been one of the admirals or one of the generals in the room?

  COLONEL FINCK: I don’t recall.

  QUESTION: Do you have any particular reason why you cannot recall at this time?

  COLONEL FINCK: Because we were told to examine the head and the chest cavity and that doesn’t include the removal of the organs of the neck.

  QUESTION: You are one of the three autopsy specialists and pathologists at the time, and you saw what you described as an entrance wound in the neck area of the president of the United States who had just been assassinated, and you were only interested in the other wound but not interested in the track through his neck. Is that what you are telling me?

  COLONEL FINCK: I was interested in the track, and I had observed the conditions of bruising between the point of entry in the back of the neck and the point of the exit at the front of the neck, which is entirely compatible with the bullet path. [Emphasis added to Finck’s unsupported statement, in contradiction to the known evidence.]

  QUESTION: But you were told not to go into the area of the neck, is that your testimony?

  COLONEL FINCK: From what I recall, yes, but I don’t remember by whom.

  Navy medical corpsman Paul O’Connor, who helped the doctors with the autopsy, stated, “I was upset by the way the autopsy was conducted and by the fact that we weren’t able to do certain critical things like probe the throat wound that we thought was a bullet wound. We found out it was a bullet wound years later.”147

  Corpsman O’Connor, in an interview several years later, described how the military brass, crowded into the small room, would not permit the doctors to probe the throat wound, which everyone in Dallas had said was an entrance wound. “It got very tense. Admiral [Calvin] Galloway [the chief of the hospital command] started getting very agitated again, because there was a wound in his neck … and I remember the doctors were going to check that out when Admiral Galloway told them, ‘Leave it alone. Don’t touch it. It’s just a tracheotomy.’ He stopped anybody from going further. Drs. Hume and Boswell, Dr. Finck, were told to leave it alone, let’s go to other things … O’Connor further stated that Admiral George Burkley, the president’s physician, also blocked the doctors from probing the neck wound and a back wound, claiming to be acting in behalf of the family, none of whom were present at the autopsy.”148

  Doug Horne concluded that it was Doctors Humes and Boswell who conducted the earlier surgery to modify the head wound, enlarging it to make it appear that the fatal shot came from the rear and exploded the entire right side of the head; they had also removed evidence in JFK’s right temple of a shot fired from the front—the grassy knoll—in accordance with apparent orders from their superiors. Moreover, he also concluded that a number of small bullet fragments were removed at the same time and that a large bullet fragment was removed from JFK’s back.149 Horne also determined that, after the autopsy ended at about 11:00 p.m. new and misleading photographs were taken which showed the back of JFK’s head as seeming to be intact, something that was not seen by any of the witnesses, either in Dallas or Bethesda. It was only then that the body was passed to the Gawler’s Funeral Home personnel to begin preparing it for the services being planned to commence that morning. It was through the use of “special effects” that such photographs could be made for the obvious purpose of purporting to show that there was no “exit wound” in the back of the head, in direct contradiction of the statements of numerous eyewitnesses.150

  Doug Horne’s exhaustive research not only supports much of the material in this book but goes many steps
further. His new work also establishes many other conclusions regarding the facts of the cover-up and references many other sources. One such reference involves his detailed explanation and analysis of the conclusions of independent researcher David Mantik, who is both an MD (radiation oncologist) as well as a PhD in physics; Horne has already stated that Dr. Mantik “has conclusively proven, with his exhaustive optical density measurements of the x-ray materials in the archives, that the three head x-rays in the autopsy collection are not originals but are forged composite copy films that are simply modifications of the authentic skull x-rays. My [Horne’s] own hypothesis and reinterpretation of the medical evidence necessitates that the original head x-rays were exposed only after Humes and Boswell had completed their clandestine postmortem surgery on the skull to remove bullet fragments from the brain and enlarge the head wound.”151 Dr. Mantik’s expert analysis of the two lateral skull x-rays proved conclusively that “a very dense optical patch [was] superimposed on the copy films over the occipital-parietal area behind the ear to mask the blow-out or exit wound seen in Dallas in the back of the head.” In layman’s terms, Dr. Mantik’s work has documented the fact that the x-rays are forgeries—altered films created from the original skull x-rays, designed to intentionally distort the depiction of how President Kennedy was killed.152 In addition to author Horne’s new work, Noel Twyman previously included a very detailed layman’s interpretation of Dr. Mantik’s findings in chapter 14 of his book.153

  The tangled mess that remains of John F. Kennedy’s autopsy records can only be understood in the context of how the above descriptions of the hurried and extemporaneous orders were issued to make his wounds fit a predetermined script caused so much confusion in the military officers, doctors, and pathologists who received those orders. The fact that the autopsy conclusions seem to have evolved over a period of time was apparently caused by a succession of changes in orders leading to multiple versions of autopsy reports; the result was incrementally differing conclusions about the nature of the president’s wounds. The intentional fabrications of the x-rays were another facet of the widely based conspiracy to cover up the real cause of Kennedy’s murder. In the next chapter, it will be shown that other photographs, as well as the famed Z film, were similarly altered, beginning within hours of the assassination. The conclusions reached will prove overwhelmingly that the hand of Lyndon B. Johnson, aided continually by J. Edgar Hoover, was behind all of the evidence tampering.

  The Final Changes to the Plan

  The operation went according to plan but for the botched killing of Oswald; it came too late to silence his real voice, which meant that all the phony tapes that had been fabricated to convince the world that his orders came from Castro could no longer be used to justify the invasion. That was probably just the backup, “plan B” anyway; Johnson’s preferred plan appears to have been the “lone nut” story, which would avoid the invasion but would require a lot of last-minute “fixes” to make the evidence and witnesses conform to the tale. It would also require that all of the other planted documents that had been ready for release would need to be destroyed, since they had suddenly become too hot to handle. There were a number of them: Agent Hosty’s note, which Hoover and Shanklin ordered destroyed, the FBI cable warning of an assassination attempt that was found in New Orleans, the Mexico City photos, tapes, and transcripts—all had to be destroyed or discredited. The decision to ditch the plan to blame the assassination on Cuba and Russia was made by Johnson and Hoover when it became apparent that the voice on the tape was clearly not that of Lee Harvey Oswald. This tape, fourteen minutes in length, was made at 10:01 a.m. Saturday morning, November 23, 1963, and their conversation was noted in the previous chapter; it was apparently a victim of the hurried plan to destroy all of the evidence containing original recordings and photographs and other evidence of Oswald’s visits to Mexico.

  The planted evidence trails were used in another way, however. Johnson used them to convince other leaders of the danger of a nuclear war with Cuba and the Soviet Union, which might “kill 39 million Americans.” His goal became one of enlisting the support of other national leaders—specifically those he named to the Warren Commission—to cooperate in burying the affair for the good of the country. By sealing the vaults containing the evidence until the year 2039, he would prevent the truth from emerging for at least seventy-five years, and even beyond that, since the trails would be so cold by then that the real truth would be lost forever. By then, thanks to the help he would enlist of unwitting “historians,” his enduring legacy as a great president worshipped by millions would be assured.

  Though some of the high-level plotters feared that a crime involving so many men could not be contained, the two men at the highest level of planning knew that the secondary conspiracy, to “cover up” the first, would need to be even more precisely executed in order to protect everyone connected to the first phase, “the execution,” to ensure ultimate success. Their confidence grew out of the knowledge that they would have ultimate control of the subsequent investigation. They would make maximum use of the federal government’s well-developed protocols for maintaining secrecy and the CIA’s ability to manage evidence, and people, outside the rules. Eventually, they would screen all physical evidence to ensure that it was congruent with the predetermined verdicts to be reached; that which was not would be destroyed or modified or ignored as necessary. After the screening process, all key evidence would then be stored away for seventy-five years (based, ironically, on the immediate need to maintain “national security’), to allow the Agency plenty of time to perform whatever editing and altering that was required to prepare it for the more credulous of the future historians. By the end of that fateful day, as the stories coming from Dallas switched from “many signs of a conspiracy” to a single “lone nut,” the massive cover-up phase of the conspiracy had begun. By Saturday morning, Lyndon Johnson had chosen the course and would permit neither further speculation about a “conspiracy,” nor any efforts by investigators, to follow leads in that direction. His basic instincts told him to stay as far away from that as possible, since that might expose the truth.

  It is now, finally, time to throw out all of the pseudo evidence created under the watchful eyes of Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover and replace it with the credible testimony of the witnesses so long denied their truthful stories: the bystanders in Dealey Plaza, the emergency room doctors at Parkland Hospital, the attendants in Bethesda who told of the horrible scene of decoy ambulances playing a massive “shell game” to move JFK’s body around the back lot to get it back to the original casket, the many others who have come forth to describe their peripheral involvement in processing secret photographs, modified films, and documents or their own stories which, combined together, form a complete and believable account of what really happened. The truth has emerged from the common threads woven together throughout this book to reveal a tapestry that more accurately portrays the events of nearly fifty years ago: it was nothing less than a clever takeover of the U.S. government by a man who marshaled the resources of the very government he commanded to execute a secret coup d’état that would remain covered up for at least two generations.

  1. (Ref. for example, Chapter 5, the story recently told by James Wagenvoord, an assistant editor of Life magazine in November 1963).

  2. Twyman, pp. 844–845 (interview with Johnson’s mistress Madeleine Brown).

  3. Manchester, p. 149.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Manchester, p. 134.

  6. Ibid., p. 136.

  7. Twyman, p. 19, 759.

  *Based upon a book by Herbert Arthur Philbrick titled I Led Three Lives: Citizen, ‘Communist’, Counterspy, which was made into a movie and television series called I Led Three Lives, starring Richard Carlson and Ed Hinton, loosely based on Philbrick’s experiences.

  8. Ibid., pp. 623–624.

  9. Fetzer, Murder, pp. 361–370.

  10. JFK Lancer symposium, Nov. 2007, David Giammarco pres
entation.

  11. Twyman, pp. 706, 727–729.

  12. Ibid.

  * This sequence offers a more viable explanation of (i) the entry wound in Kennedy’s throat, rather than being an “exit” wound as claimed by the Warren Commission; (ii) a more plausible reason for the delay between Kennedy’s and Connally’s reactions in lieu of the “single bullet theory”; (iii) an explanation of why Kennedy’s head briefly jerked towards the front, followed immediately by a forceful backward movement; (iv) and the real reason for the first shot—hitting the curb and ricocheting upwards to graze James Tague’s face, which should have been the easiest to aim—having been missed so wildly, was because it did not emanate from the “snipers nest” but from another location entirely.

  13. Lane, Rush . . . p. 32.

  14. Manchester, p. 228.

  15. Ibid., p. 134.

  16. Manchester, pp. 145, 134.

  17. Ibid., pp. 151–152.

  18. Manchester, p. 145, Sloan and Hill, JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness p. 112.

  19. Sloan and Hill, JFK: The Last Dissenting Witness p. 112.

  20. Warren Commission Report, p. 52.

  21. See: http://www.jfk-online.com/youngblood.html.

  22. Marrs, pp. 249–250 (Also See The Senator who Suspected a JFK Conspiracy: http://www.geocities.com/senatoryarborough/.

  23. WCH, Vol. XVIII, p. 801.

  24. Manchester, p. 166.

  25. Kearns, p. 30.

  26. Manchester, p. 166.