Chapter 10: Examining the Examinations
The beginning of a detailed examination of the medical evidence, focusing on the manipulation of the back wound's location between 1963 and 1969
For reasons beyond my grasp, the first image in each chapter sometimes
fails to appear. If there's nothing up above, don't despair; you can still see the image here
The Wandering Wounds
Since we’re not the FBI, and since J. Edgar Hoover is no
longer in a position to interfere, we should feel free to inspect the
medical evidence.
While defenders of the FBI and Warren Commission, such as "historian" Max Holland, like to pretend there is nothing to discuss here, as all the questions have long been answered (In November 1995's American Heritage Magazine, Holland actually claimed that the "passing controversy over the President's autopsy..had been fairly easily resolved"), I suspect the reader will come to agree that the questions publicly asked and answered have been just the tip of the iceberg.
Let us begin, then, by examining the
movement of the President’s back wound.
On the evening of the assassination, an autopsy was performed on the President at Bethesda Naval Hospital. During the autopsy, Dr. J. Thornton Boswell marked the location of the President’s wounds on a pre-existing outline of a body, called a face sheet. This face sheet was eventually published in one of the 26 supporting volumes of the Warren Report.
On March 16, 1964, almost four months later, however, the autopsy
doctors--Dr. Humes, Dr. Boswell and Dr. Finck--were called to testify before
the Warren Commission. In preparation
for their testimony, and at the urging of Warren Commission counsel Arlen
Specter, Dr. Humes and Dr. Boswell met with medical illustrator Skip Rydberg
and created three drawings depicting the President’s wounds. As the doctors were not allowed access to the
autopsy photos, or even the face sheet, during the creation of these drawings, they were forced to rely purely on their memories.
They were not pleased with having to do so. Dr. Humes, in fact, testified that the autopsy photos would demonstrate the wounds more
clearly than the drawings, and admitted that the drawings were “schematic” and imprecise. His use of the word “schematic”
was no mistake, either. A schematic depicts an
“arrangement of ideas into a systematic order”, according to an old Webster’s,
and is thus an admitted distortion. One of the three drawings demonstrates the presumed trajectory of the bullet creating the back wound and depicts the
location of the wounds as viewed from the side, one of them depicts the presumed position of the President’s head
at the moment of the fatal shot's impact, and the third merely shows how these wounds might
appear from behind. None of these
drawings was created to represent the locations of Kennedy’s wounds as
accurately as possible. Although Humes testified that “We had made
certain measurements of the wounds and of their position on the body of the
late President, and we provided these and supervised directly Mr. Rydberg in
making these drawings,” moreover, it seems clear that Humes did not in fact give Rydberg
the measured locations of the wounds, as the drawings, which are reportedly
life-sized, do not reflect the measured locations of the wounds in the autopsy
report. (This will be demonstrated later.)
But that's not the only problem with Humes' testimony and the creation of these drawings. As researchers have found that when people are asked to make schematics representing theories, it distorts their memories of the events depicted, it's possible that these drawings would be deemed inadmissible in a modern courtroom. In any event, no proper examination of the photos was performed, and the three admittedly imprecise drawings were placed into evidence by the Warren Commission and re-printed as the official representations of the President’s wounds.
As anyone can see, however, the location of the back wound on the face sheet and the location of the back wound on the Rydberg drawings are several inches apart. This is suspicious. Since Oswald was believed to have fired at the President from a sniper’s nest 60 feet off the ground and behind the President, it follows that if he were the shooter the President’s back wound would be at a higher point on his body than the purported exit on his throat. And yet the back wound on the face sheet was below the throat wound, while the back wound in the Rydberg drawings, created months later, as "schematics" demonstrating that the shot came from above, was well above the throat wound. Since the bullet believed to have caused this wound was the so-called “magic” bullet, which was purported to have passed through the President non-deflected, and then strike Texas Governor John Connally, sitting in front of the President, in his chest, wrist and thigh--only to emerge unscathed--the movement of this wound was doubly suspicious.
It should come as no surprise then that this movement of the back wound upward on the drawings was taken by many as an indication that Warren Commission counsel Arlen Specter had deliberately moved the wound to support his “single-bullet theory.” After much reflection, however, I believe there is a slightly more innocent explanation for the movement of this wound on the drawings.
To get a clear understanding of why and how the wounds moved, we must go back to November 22nd, 1963, when the doctors performing the autopsy had a serious problem. They found a small entrance hole on the back of the President’s head, and a large exit hole by his temple, and concluded these holes were caused by the same bullet, but couldn’t figure out what became of the bullet causing a wound in the President’s back. When they learned that a bullet was found on a stretcher in Dallas, they concluded that this bullet must have fallen from the back wound during heart massage. Apparently, neither the doctors nor the FBI agents at the autopsy were aware that Dr. Perry, one of the doctors in Dallas, had already discussed an additional wound in the President’s throat at a press conference covered by the media.
The next day, however, after talking to Dr. Perry, and realizing he had performed a tracheotomy incision through this throat wound, and had thereby obscured its appearance, Dr. Humes concluded that the bullet penetrating the President’s back had proceeded to exit his throat. What’s important to understand, however, is that Dr. Humes made this deduction without re-inspecting the President’s body, and without consulting the autopsy photos, which had been seized by the Secret Service. Adding to his confusion was the unfortunate fact that Dr. Humes was a laboratory pathologist, who was accustomed to inspecting specimens to confirm a pre-existing diagnosis, and lacked experience as a forensic pathologist, whose job, according to Dr. Cyril Wecht, is “to establish independently the exact cause and manner of death.”
This lack of proper training, then, helps explain Dr. Humes’ inclusion in
the autopsy report of newspaper accounts reporting where the shots came from
and anecdotal evidence for the number of shots fired (three). His inclusion of these items, furthermore,
helps us understand that Dr. Humes was trying to match the wounds to the shots,
rather than the other way around. This discouraged Humes from concluding there were more than three shots fired, or that any of the shots could have
come from anyplace but above and behind. Dr. Humes simply concluded that there
was an entrance on the back and an exit towards the front of the President’s
skull, and an entrance high on the President’s back and an exit near that level
on his throat. Thus, the President must have been hit twice. Since Governor
Connally, sitting in front of the President, had also been hit, this would
account for the three shots heard by the witnesses. It was apparently just that simple for Humes. He really thought he’d figured it out. Keep in mind he had marginal experience with
wound ballistics and bullet trajectories, and had acknowledged problems with
angles and numbers. Humes just used his
common sense and came to a common sense solution. Four holes and no bullets in
the body meant two shots struck the president, period.
Unfortunately, a deduction such as
this can have side effects. The
memory research of Dr. Elizabeth Loftus reveals that when people are asked to
imagine a plausible event their imagined events can creep into their memories. It is not illogical therefore to presume that Dr.
Humes’ and Dr. Boswell’s attempt to determine, after Kennedy's body was no longer in front of them, if the wound on his back could
connect to a wound in the location of the tracheotomy incision they'd observed, led to their recalling the back wound at a point higher than its actual location, in line with a shot from where they'd been told the rifle had been fired. Thus, the memories of the doctors may have been tainted even before meeting with Warren Commission counsel, and future U.S. Senator, Arlen
Specter.
But the Warren Commission undoubtedly encouraged the
tainting. On January 27th 1964, in executive session, Chief Counsel
J. Lee Rankin told the Warren Commission that the face sheet (which he called a
picture) placed the back wound below the throat wound and that he would be
seeking the doctors’ “help” along these lines.
While it seems clear the Rydberg drawings’ depiction of the back wound above
the throat wound was just the “help” Rankin was looking for, it does not mean the
drawings were deliberate deceptions, however, as the doctors may have honestly come to believe the back wound was above the throat wound.
In fact, events subsequent to the introduction of the Rydberg drawings suggest the deliberate deceptions came later. As mentioned, Dr. Humes testified the drawings were schematic and that
he had doubts about their accuracy. In
an April 30th executive session of the Warren Commission, moreover, Counsel Rankin himself
requested that Dr. Humes be allowed to examine the autopsy photos and compare
them to the Rydberg drawings. This
request, furthermore, was triggered by a memo of that same day from of all men Arlen Specter,
which anticipated: “Commission Exhibits
Nos. 385, 386, and 388 were made from the recollections of the autopsy surgeons
as told to the artist. Some day someone
may compare the films with the artist’s drawings and find a significant error…”
While Rankin’s request was approved, and while a May 12th memo from Specter indicates that an inspection by Humes was forthcoming, no such inspection took place, due to the admitted interference of Chief Justice Earl Warren, who decided to inspect them himself.
The belief that Humes, Boswell, Rankin, and Specter were all
part of a conspiracy to alter the medical evidence is therefore probably unfair. I say probably because it seems a bit of a coincidence that, in late May, around the time he was set to inspect the autopsy photos, Chief Justice Warren suddenly announced that the commission would not be publishing the testimony and evidence gathered at its hearings, including the drawings created by the autopsy doctors. It seems possible from this that a private inspection of the photos had led Warren to realize that the doctors' drawings were deceptive, and that he was trying to find a way to keep this hidden from the public. (Warren's decision not to publish the drawings was soon overturned by his fellow commissioners, none of whom had seen the autopsy photos.)
Warren’s stated excuse for not allowing others to look at the photos--that he himself had looked at the photos and found them horrible and unnecessary to the work of the Commission--is simply hard to believe.
Still, when one considers that Warren was later to admit he found the case against Oswald a relatively simple matter, and was overheard boasting that "If I were still a district attorney and the Oswald case came into my jurisdiction, given the same evidence I could have gotten a conviction in two days, and never heard about the case again," it seems possible he considered his task of being fair to Oswald a pointless one, and that this justified his exclusion of what he believed to be horrifying medical evidence from the record. One would think the Chief Justice of the United States would have better sense than to deny such an important case its “best evidence” for personal or political purposes, but this was but one of numerous decisions made by Warren that reflect he saw the Commission’s work as largely political.
An August, 17, 1992 article in U.S. News & World Report, written with the cooperation of the surviving Warren Commission counsel, supports that Warren saw the Commission's role as political and reflects that Warren became severely agitated and nearly had a heart attack when he was informed that the final report of his commission would not be ready by July 1, 1964, as originally projected and as promised President Johnson. It also reflects that after this failure the White House gave Warren a new deadline of August 24, the day of the Democratic convention. That this second deadline was given to Warren by McGeorge Bundy, Johnson’s National Security Adviser, is especially intriguing. That the Warren Commission was infected by these political considerations from its beginning can not reasonably be disputed; heck, even its chief defender, former counsel David Belin, in his book on the assassination, You Be The Jury, acknowledged that the ramifications of Warren’s decision not to replace a no-show senior counsel named Francis Adams for fear how it might look, and to instead dump Adams’ responsibilities onto the lap of the relatively inexperienced Arlen Specter, were “indeed chilling”.
Still, Warren’s
comments in his final years should make one suspect there was something more to his
decision to withhold the autopsy photos from the doctors than his simple
concern for the Kennedy family’s privacy, and desire to move the Commission forward.
In March 1974, a few months before his death, for instance, Warren told
Warren Commission historian Alfred Goldberg, who’d asked “On reflection, do you
think it would have been better to have permitted the Commission staff access
to the x-rays of the President?” that “On reflection, I do not believe that
access to the x-rays should have been given. The public was given the best evidence available, the personal testimony
of the doctors who performed the autopsy.
In a trial, the court would not have permitted the x-rays to be
introduced because it would have operated against the defendant. This decision was largely mine but the
Commission approved.”
Warren's answer to Goldberg is both hard to believe and historically
inaccurate. Since when has a drawing of a victim’s wounds based upon a doctor’s
verbal recollections been considered “better evidence” than a photo taken at
the actual autopsy? Particularly when the doctor’s own testimony says the
x-rays and photos taken at the autopsy would better demonstrate these
wounds? And since when have x-rays been
considered too prejudicial to be allowed into evidence? As far as I can tell,
x-rays have been admitted into evidence since 1896. And if Warren
was so hesitant to use x-rays, then how come not one but nine x-rays of
Governor Connally were entered as exhibits and printed in Volume 17 of the
Warren Report? And even if Warren really
did believe the President’s x-rays were too private to be placed into the
public record, why should the autopsy doctors themselves, who’d already seen
Kennedy’s body, and had, in fact, scooped out his brains, have been denied the
opportunity to check their findings against the x-rays and photos that they
themselves had taken? The traditional
explanation that Warren wanted everything used by the Commission to be made
public just doesn’t fly and is refuted by the thousands of pages on Oswald he
unquestioningly withheld from this very same public. In sum, Warren’s
withholding the autopsy materials from the doctors makes no sense unless one
accepts that Warren was an
incompetent old fool more concerned with protecting people’s memories of
Kennedy than in solving his murder, or was a competent politician tasked with white-washing what he knew to be a very complicated killing.
In 2005, I decided to research Warren’s comment that the x-rays could not have been used in a court of law because they would have “operated against the defendant.” I concluded he was citing Rule 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence. It holds: “Although relevant, evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues, or misleading of the jury, or by considerations of undue delay, waste of time, or needless presentation of cumulative evidence.” Introduction to Criminal Evidence by Jon R. Waltz discusses this a bit further. It says that photographs are admissible provided that:
1 The relevance of whatever the photographic evidence depicts must be demonstrated;
2 The evidence must be shown to constitute a true and accurate representation of what it depicts; and
3 The probative worth of the photographic evidence must not be outweighed by a potential for unfair prejudice stemming from its gruesome or inflammatory nature.
On the other hand, Waltz notes that “Ever since Franklin (Franklin V. State, GA, 1882) it has been the rule that photographs and films are not ruled inadmissible simply because they depict in a graphic way the details of a shocking or revolting crime. They will be deemed inadmissible only if they are irrelevant to the issues in the case or where their probative worth is outweighed by their potential for unfair prejudice.” Furthermore, Rule 401 of the Federal Rules of Evidence holds that “Relevant Evidence” means evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence,” and Rule 402 holds that “All relevant evidence is admissible, except as otherwise provided by the Constitution of the United States…” All this leads me to believe that the autopsy photos would have been inadmissible for the prosecution of Oswald, but thoroughly admissible for his defense. If Oswald had lived and went to trial, his defense would have been entitled to view the photos and to hire an expert to inspect them. If this expert found anything on the photos and x-rays that suggested there was a second shooter, Oswald’s defense would have been free to enter the photos into evidence, submit them before a jury, and have their expert give his opinion.
But Jack Ruby deprived Oswald of his life, and Earl Warren
deprived Oswald of a fair trial (in the court of public opinion). The Warren Commission asked the President of
the American Bar Association, Walter E. Craig, to advise the commission whether
“the proceedings confirmed to the basic principles of American justice.” There is no indication Warren ever told Craig
he decided to keep the medical evidence away from anyone who might be able to
interpret them. If he did, it would have been fascinating to have heard Craig’s
reply. In a similar vein, while Warren
was the sole commissioner to view the photos, and was supposed to report back
on what he saw to the other commissioners, he was not accompanied by an expert
when he viewed the photos, and was by no means qualified to offer an expert
opinion on what he saw. The
circumstances undoubtedly called for an expert witness. Waltz defines an expert
witness as someone whose “opinions, inferences, or conclusions depend on a
special skill or training not within the ordinary experience of lay jurors.” He
also states that “it has generally been true that an expert witness must first
describe the data on which his or her opinion, inference, or conclusion is
based or, in the alternative, the witness must testify in response to a
hypothetical question that sets forth the underlying data.” Warren
created no record detailing why he was expert enough to interpret the photos,
and what methodology he used in interpreting them. It seems clear from all this
that if Oswald had been tried in a court of law, and been convicted, and the
presiding judge had behaved like Warren
and had prevented the autopsy evidence from even being examined, Oswald’s
conviction would have been overturned.
Ironically, the court over-turning Oswald’s conviction might very well have been Warren’s own.
Back Wound in Motion
Since
the back wound used in the Warren Commission’s re-enactment of the
assassination was far lower on the back than the entrance in the Rydberg drawings,
it seems obvious to many that the re-enactment showed the impossibility of the
single-bullet theory, and that this led the Commission to create the Rydberg
drawings. A thorough reading of the
Warren Commission’s time-line, however, demonstrates that the Rydberg drawings were
created long before the
re-enactment.
This raises a few questions... If the Rydberg drawings were available to the re-enactors on May 24, 1964, why weren’t they used to
establish the location of the back wound? The Warren Report says that “The wounds of entry and exit on the
President were approximated based on information gained from the autopsy
reports and photographs.” Oh, really? Which photographs?
Warren Commission Counsel Arlen Specter, in his 2000 autobiography, Passion for Truth, finally shed some light on this matter by admitting that on the day of the re-enactment he was shown an autopsy photo of the back wound by a member of the Secret Service, Thomas Kelley. (The Saturday Evening Post had mentioned Kelley’s name in regards to this incident in 1967 and Kelley had admitted his role to researcher Harold Weisberg a few years later.) While Specter didn’t say he consulted this photo before approving the chalk mark on the jacket of the stand-in, one can only assume he used it to confirm its location. Kelley himself testified on June 4, 1964 that the basis for the chalk mark was a photograph of CE 386, the Rydberg drawing showing the entrance to be at the base of the neck, inches away from the entrance used during the re-enactment. This obvious deception suggests he was covering for Specter, and keeping from the record that Specter had looked at an autopsy photograph. As FBI agent Robert Frazier, only moments later, told Allen Dulles that the chalk mark location was determined by the measurements in the autopsy protocol, Kelley’s lie may also have been designed to hide that the measurements proved this wound to be on the back, and that Specter knew the Rydberg drawings were inaccurate. Also suspicious is that when one looks at the photographs taken of the trajectory analysis performed just after the re-enactment, one can see that Specter is ignoring the lower chalk mark, whose location he has presumably just verified, in favor of a higher invisible entrance wound in line with the entrance depicted on the Rydberg drawings and more in line with a shot from the sniper’s nest.
That this higher trajectory roughly corresponds to the trajectory in the Rydberg drawings may be more than a coincidence. The Warren Report, in a section presumably written by Specter, acknowledges that, during the re-enactment, the FBI measured the approximate trajectory needed to support the single-bullet theory, and that this angle was then compared against the locations of the President’s and Connally’s wounds. This is shown in Exhibit 903. The Report, reflecting the testimony of the FBI’s Lyndal Shaneyfelt, who'd asserted that the rod representing the single-bullet trajectory in the photo passed through a position on the back of the stand-in “approximating that of the entrance wound,” concludes that “the angle was consistent with the trajectory of a bullet passing through the President’s neck and then striking Governor Connally’s back…The alinement of the points of entry was indicative and not conclusive that one bullet hit both men…Had President Kennedy been leaning forward or backward, the angle of declination of the shot…would have varied…The angle…was approximately the angle of declination reproduced in an artist’s drawing…made from data provided by the autopsy surgeons.” Specter was thus citing the Rydberg drawings, which the photo he saw in Dallas proved inaccurate, as support for his theory.
Why he failed to trust them before the re-enactment isn’t known. But we should suspect he was aware that the artist who made the drawings was, in opposition to Dr. Humes’ sworn testimony, and in opposition to Specter’s subsequent words in the Warren Report, not provided with any data outside the verbal descriptions of the doctors. Specter’s April 30, 1964, memo to Rankin, we should remember, admitted that the Rydberg drawings “were made from the recollections of the autopsy doctors as told to the artist.” The measurements on the face sheet were not used in their creation.
When one considers that in 1966 Specter side-stepped the fact the photo shown him by Kelley didn’t match the Rydberg drawings by telling U.S. News that “It showed a hole in the position identified in the autopsy report”, and then played a similar word game with the Saturday Evening Post in 1967 by telling them “It showed the back of a body with a bullet hole, apparently of entry, where the autopsy report said it was” and that Specter failed to mention his seeing any autopsy photos when called before the HSCA (despite repeated discussion of the commissioners’ decision to withhold the photos from his inspection) it seems obvious that Specter deliberately concealed from the Commission and the public his knowledge that the drawings and photo were in disagreement.
Specter and Kelley’s use of the photos wrongly denied them in their passion for truth can only be considered admirable. On the other hand, when one looks at the re-enactment photo published in the New York Times and re-printed in the Doubleday edition of the Warren Report, it is clear that a bullet passing through the stand-in’s back and continuing on to hit Connally’s stand-in in his armpit would most likely exit from the President’s stand-in’s chest, and not his throat. Despite Shaneyfelt’s testimony before the Commission, there is no way this trajectory works. Specter had seen the Zapruder film. He knew Kennedy wasn’t leaning forward before the first shot. He knew that his theory left no room for deflection and he knew that the wounds didn’t align. It seems logical, therefore, to assume that Specter’s “crime” was one of rejecting his self-identified “passion” for the benefit of his career. An old story, indeed… and as American as apple pie…
Am I being too harsh? Well, if there had been but one or two misstatements or misrepresentations in Specter's chapter in the Warren Report, and in the testimony introduced by Specter, one might grant he'd simply made a mistake. But this is not the case. Consider the chapter's presentation of the back wound bullet trajectory. On page 90 of the paperback, it claims "The autopsy examination further disclosed that, after entering the President, the bullet passed between two large muscles, produced a contusion on the upper part of the pleural cavity (without penetrating that cavity), bruised the top portion of the right lung and ripped the windpipe (trachea) in its path through the President's neck." On page 91, it appears to build upon this, and relates: "While the autopsy was being performed, surgeons learned that a whole bullet had been found at Parkland Hospital on a stretcher which, at that time, was thought to be the stretcher occupied by the President. This led to speculation that the bullet might have penetrated a short distance into the back of the neck and then dropped out onto the stretcher as a result of external heart massage. Further exploration during the autopsy disproved that theory. The surgeons determined that the bullet had passed between two large strap muscles and bruised them without leaving any channel, since the bullet merely passed between them."
Upon reading this, one would undoubtedly come to believe the two large strap muscles in the second quote are the two muscles mentioned in the first quote, and were on the back of Kennedy's neck. And one would be right. While taking the testimony of Dr.s Baxter and McClelland, Specter made reference to the bullet's passing between the "strap muscles of the shoulder" and "strap muscles on the posterior aspect of the President's body," respectively. But there are no strap muscles in the shoulder or on the posterior aspect of the body. The bruised strap muscles which helped lead the autopsy doctors to conclude the throat wound was an exit were, according to Dr. Humes' testimony, on "the right anterior neck inferiorly" (i.e. the lower right quadrant of the front side of the neck). Dr. Humes testified that the bruising on these muscles by what he initially believed to be a simple tracheotomy incision was far more extensive than the bruising by the incisions on Kennedy's chest created by the Dallas doctors, and that this led him to suspect these neck bruises preceded the emergency procedures performed in Dallas, and were caused by a bullet. He said NOTHING about a bullet sliding between two muscles on the back of Kennedy's neck or shoulder. In fact, when discussing the entrance on Kennedy's neck/back, he said just the opposite, and described a defect in the underlying tissue, but no evidence for a pathway between two muscles. He testified "When the tissues beneath this wound were inspected, there was a defect corresponding with the skin defect in the fascia overlying the musculature of the low neck and upper back" and later added "We were unable, however, to take probes and have them satisfactorily fall through any definite path at this point."
It should probably be mentioned here that "the musculature of the low neck and upper back" through which Humes could not find a path was the trapezius muscle, a flat sheet of muscular fibers covering the back of the neck and shoulder. A bullet could not slide between two muscles in this area because the area was covered by but one. The trapezius muscle covers so much area, in fact, that anatomists break it up into four parts when describing it in anatomy books. Kennedy's back wound, moreover, was in part three, the thickest and strongest of the four parts of the trapezius muscle.
It follows then that Humes had strong reasons to conclude, as he did on the night of the autopsy, that the bullet creating the back wound had failed to enter the body. Perhaps the cartridge for this bullet was undercharged. Perhaps there was a misfire.
When one digs further, moreover, and reads the Warren Commission testimony of Dr. Malcolm Perry, one finds that Dr. Humes continued to doubt that a bullet had entered the body at the back wound location even after Dr. Perry had told him of the throat wound, which could serve as an exit for the bullet. According to Perry:
He subsequently called back--at that time he told me, of course, that he could not talk to me about any of it and asked that I keep it in confidence, which I did, and he subsequently called back and inquired about the chest tubes, and why they were placed and I replied in part as I have here. It was somewhat more detailed. After having talked to Drs. Baxter and Peters and I identified them as having placed it in the second interspace, anteriorly, in the midclavicular line, in the right hemithorax, he asked me at that time if we had made any wounds in the back. I told him that I had not examined the back nor had I knowledge of any wounds of the back."
So where did Specter get that the autopsy disclosed that a bullet had slipped between two large back muscles? Simple. He either completely misunderstood Humes' testimony (which would be problem enough), or he completely made it up.
Arlen Specter: Back to Back and Face to Face
That Specter was willing to take shortcuts in order to help prop up his single-bullet theory is made clear by comparing two of the FBI photos taken in a garage after the May 24, 1964 re-enactment. In the first photo the Kennedy stand-in is seen leaning as far forward as one might possibly conceive Kennedy was leaning before he was shot. And yet the trajectory rod held by Specter is still inches above the chalk mark on the stand-in's back designating the location of Kennedy's back wound. The second photo is taken from the opposite angle, and only shows the JFK stand-in from the front, and gives little indication of where the trajectory rod passes in relation to the back wound. That Specter opted to have this photo submitted into evidence as Warren Commission Exhibit CE 903, and as the official depiction of the single-bullet theory, speaks volumes.
There are other curious details about the May 24 re-enactment. For one, Specter used Connally’s actual jacket in the re-enactment in order to establish
the entrance location on his back,
but disregarded the entrance location on Kennedy’s jacket, even though, according to both the 1964 Warren Commission testimony of Thomas Kelley and the
1977 testimony of Lyndal Shaneyfelt in a civil suit brought by Harold Weisberg, the coat was at their disposal during the re-enactment. Are we to believe this was just an oversight, and that it's just a coincidence that Specter's failing to track a precise trajectory between the entrance on Kennedy's coat and the entrance on Connally's coat allowed him to assume his own point of entry, based upon his
subjective (and, as it turned out, liquid) impression of the bullet
entrance?
Equally suspicious is that there
was no attempt to measure the right to left trajectories of bullets
entering the car from the sniper’s nest, while the car traveled down Elm. This
allowed the commission and its experts to say the alignment of Kennedy with
Connally was close enough without them making any actual calculations. When one
considers that if Specter had returned to Washington and informed the
Commission that their operating premise of Oswald’s sole guilt was made
doubtful by his (Specter’s) failure to get a couple of wounds to align, and
that he’d used evidence expressly denied him to make this determination, his
career would have been in jeopardy, then one can see how easy it was for Specter to
determine the trajectory was “close enough.”
After all, he was just a 33 year old assistant district attorney, by no
means an expert in forensic pathology or wound ballistics. And after all, the
proposal for the re-enactment (contained in an April 27 memo by Norman Redlich)
promised chief counsel Rankin and the Commission that the point of the
re-enactment was not to establish the facts “with complete accuracy, but merely
to substantiate the hypothesis which underlies the conclusions that Oswald was
the sole assassin.” Maybe someday
Senator Specter, a long-time member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, will see
fit to tell the rest of us with a “passion for truth” the whole truth to which
we are entitled.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath. Over the last forty years, Specter has doggedly defended his single-bullet theory. In his memoirs, for example, when he discusses being shown the autopsy photo at the re-enactment, he describes it as “a small picture of the back of a man’s body, with a bullet hole in the base of the neck.” This disguises the fact that the photo was copied by HSCA illustrator Ida Dox and that her drawing shows the bullet hole to be inches below the base of the neck. (In 2003, Specter went even further, telling Fox News that the early reports of the FBI and Secret Service said the first shot hit Kennedy on “the back of the neck,” when, in fact, they said the first shot hit Kennedy “below the shoulders.”) Anyhow, in his memoirs Specter admits he failed to tell anyone at the commission he saw the back wound photo, but discounts the role of cowardice in his decision by adding “an unauthenticated photo was no way to establish facts for the record.” This is nonsense. He admits he was shown the photo by Thomas Kelley, the Secret Service inspector responsible for conducting its investigation of the assassination. (Strangely, he told the 2003 Wecht conference it was Agent Elmer Moore who showed him the photos, but this was probably just his age talking.) He knew the Secret Service had the photos. It would have been a simple matter then of his stopping by Bethesda for ten minutes and talking to Dr. Humes, to verify the wounds, and John Stringer, the photographer, to verify it was one of the photos he took on the night of the autopsy. He would then have an authenticated photo. Instead, he played it safe. Later in his book Specter recounts visiting the National Archives in 1999 and looking at the autopsy photos with Dr. Boswell. Not surprisingly, they convinced themselves the President’s back and neck wounds were “consistent with the Single Bullet Conclusion.” As if at this point we should take their word on it. Unfortunately, it seems the closest thing to an acknowledgment of error we’ll ever get from Specter is his admission that the Rydberg drawings were “rough” and that he would never have had them created if he knew that people would credit them “with more precision than was intended.”
Ironically, Specter’s failure to tell the Commission that the wound he saw on the autopsy photograph was too low on the President’s back to support his proposed theory left a permanent stain on the reputation of another prominent Republican, Gerald Ford. In 1998, it was discovered that Ford, who would eventually become President, but who in 1964 was merely an influential Congressman from Michigan, was the member of the Warren Commission who had the words “a bullet had entered his back slightly above the shoulder” changed to “a bullet had entered the back of his neck,” in a draft of the Warren Report. Ford explained to a reporter that he believed this wording was more precise. Apparently, he was confused by the Rydberg drawings, which did indeed depict the back wound as residing at the base of the neck.
Thus, the back wound was officially moved to the back of Kennedy’s neck by a series of mistakes and/or wishful thoughts and/or deliberate fabrications, first by Humes and Boswell in the original creation of the Rydberg drawing, then by Warren in his withholding of the photographs, then by Specter in his failing to report the inaccuracy of the Rydberg drawings, and finally by Ford in his changing the language of the report. Truth by committee had become a lie.
(FWIW, when shown the slide above, single-assassin theorist spiritual leader John McAdams of Marquette University reacted in a typically disingenuous manner. On 1-16-2010, he wrote: "Specter pretty much had it nailed. The rod he has placed is very close to the true trajectory, probably as close as it can be without getting a rapier and running through the guys in the car." McAdams sidesteps, of course, that the problem was not that the rod was at the wrong angle, but that Kennedy's back wound location failed to align with the rod.)
Clothing Comparison
While Gerald Ford's description of a wound formerly considered a "wound on the back" as a "wound on the back of the neck" was, according to an essay written by Ford shortly before his death in December, 2006, and published posthumously, modified by unanimous agreement among the commissioners to read "a bullet had entered the back of the base of his neck" his confusion (or collusion) is apparent in other sections of the report as well. In a section of the report on "The President's Neck Wounds" entitled "Examination of Clothing", for example, it states "The clothing worn by President Kennedy on November 22 had holes and tears which showed a missile had entered the back of his clothing in the vicinity of his lower neck."
This distortion or lie was caught almost immediately by critics of the commission. By early 1966, a number of writers including Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg, and Edward J. Epstein, began to focus on the movement of the back wound, questioning how the hole in the middle of the back on the face sheet had become the hole at the base of the neck in the Rydberg drawings. Their suspicion the Rydberg drawings were in error was fueled, understandably, by their examining photos of the President’s shirt and jacket, which revealed holes in line with the lower entrance on the face sheet, only remotely in the "vicinity" of the lower neck. As a consequence, this period from 1966-1967 proved very contentious, with the FBI investigating those who publicly disagreed with the Warren Commission and the CIA sending out memos to its foreign offices with tips on how to argue against the complaints of the critics (and with instructions to plant these arguments in foreign media)
As discussed in Chapter 1b, a lot of this nastiness was brought about by the FBI’s own incompetence. Let’s recall that on the night of the autopsy, the FBI had two agents report on what they’d witnessed. These agents, Sibert and O’Neil, wrote up a report within a few days and the FBI used their report as the basis for a preliminary report on the entire investigation on December 9. They then used this report as a basis for a follow-up report in January. And yet, due to FBI reluctance to view the autopsy photos or even read the autopsy report, supposedly out of respect for the Kennedy family, the wounds they described differed a great deal from the wounds described in the autopsy report. This was because Dr. Humes changed his findings on the day after the autopsy, after speaking to Dr. Perry in Dallas and realizing the emergency tracheostomy performed on the President’s throat had sliced right through a small bullet hole. Between the FBI reports at odds with the autopsy report and the face sheet and clothes at odds with the Rydberg drawings the critics had more than enough kindling to fuel their fire. And much of their fire was justifiably directed at Arlen Specter.
To try and explain how the holes in the clothes could be so
much lower than the neck wound, Specter told writer Gaeton Fonzi in August 1966
that the shirt and jacket of the President had “hunched” up while the President
was waving to the crowd. This
plausible-sounding theory was first suggested by Dr. Humes in his testimony
before the Warren Commission, after having viewed the President’s clothes for
the first time and asserting that the hole in the clothing “corresponds
essentially” with the location of the back wound in the Rydberg drawing.
(According to Finck’s report to his Army superiors, Humes had refused Finck’s
request to inspect the clothes during the autopsy.)
Still, Specter never tested Humes’ theory. He could have arranged for an exact copy of the President’s jacket, with the precise location of the bullet entrance marked, to be worn by a man of Kennedy’s exact stature during the FBI re-enactment of May 24, 1964, but apparently was not interested in establishing that this theory actually made sense. It’s only appropriate then that, according to Fonzi , when Specter tried to demonstrate to him just how this hunching could occur, he made a fool of himself. Besides simply not working, this “hunching theory” failed to adequately explain how a well-tailored shirt and jacket could hunch up precisely in unison. It also failed to explain why the wound in the Rydberg drawing was not only several inches above the hole in the jacket, but to its right.
But that didn't stop other Warren Commission counsel from trying this same line of defense. In an 11-7-66 radio interview with KCBS radio's Harv Morgan, Warren Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler proclaimed "When you take a shirt and pull it down on your body...and measure 5 1/2 inches below that bony tip behind your right ear--when I do it on myself the mark on the shirt comes 3 inches below the collar line. And then when you raise your shoulders up ever so slightly and hump the shirt up and raise your arms into the position the President was at the time, and measure it again, the mark on the shirt comes 5 1/2 inches below the collar line." Well, huh? Doesn't he mean that the spot on the back where the mark on the shirt was before the shirt was "humped up" was now 5 1/2 inches below the collar line?
And should one think Liebeler's confusion regarding this issue was a one-time thing, he presented an even more confusing argument in an 11-27-66 L.A. Times article in which the opinions of Warren Commission counsel Joseph Ball and Wesley Liebeler were pitted against those of Warren Commission critics Edward Epstein and Mark Lane. In this article, he claimed: "I had my wife measure 14 centimeters from my right mastoid process down into my shirt and that spot came three inches below the collar...And then if you raise your arm to the position that the President was in at the time he was shot, the shirt very easily rides up and so does the coat and I did it myself and measured again and the second mark comes on my body 5 1/2 inches below the collar line which is exactly one quarter of an inch from the place where the hole was in the President's shirt."
Well, beyond being confusing, this is most revealing. Liebeler acknowledges that a wound 14 cm below the mastoid process (the measurement of the back wound at autopsy) would be 3 inches below the collar line. Take a look at CE 386, the drawing of this wound's supposed location, on the slide above. There is no way Liebeler could possibly believe the wound in this drawing is 3 inches below the collar line. There is no way, for that matter, that he could possibly believe 2 1/2 inches of fabric bunched up above this point on Kennedy's neck/back.
And he didn't. Yes, when questioned by Morgan on the 11-7-66 radio show about the inconsistent back wound locations presented on the face sheet and Rydberg drawings, and the fact that the holes on the President's clothing suggest that the face sheet location was accurate, Liebeler (and not only Liebeler, but fellow WC counsel Joseph Ball) insisted that the face sheet measurements were "the most precise way" to determine the location of the back wound, and that, when one did so, one found it was "somewhat higher" on the back than the mark on the face sheet. No defense of the Rydberg drawings was even attempted.
Of course, Liebeler didn't exactly denounce them, either. In fact, before admitting that the measurements indicated that the back wound was only "somewhat higher" than the mark on the face sheet, he blew a puff of smoke in the dfirection of Morgan's listeners, telling them the wound was "right at the base of the neck." This, then, supported the myth he'd proclaimed earlier in the interview, that, when one used the wound and clothing measurements to determine the back wound location, one found that the president's back wound was "higher on the back than it was on the front" and that the bullet traveled at a "downward angle." Call me irresponsible, but it seems mighty suspicious that Liebeler would proclaim such nonsense and make a point of claiming the face sheet was inaccurate, but then fail to acknowledge the 800 pound gorilla in the room--that the Rydberg drawings were even less accurate.
As a result, it seems clear that Liebeler and Ball, as Warren and Specter before them, knew damn well that the Rydberg drawings were inaccurate and deceptive, but opted to not only not tell the public of this deception, but to play along and promote this deception.
Liebeler's reason for lying becomes clear, moreover, when one looks at events leading up to his discussion with Epstein and Lane.
Boswell's Anatomy
By
mid-1966, the critics of the Warren Commission, most prominently Edward Epstein, Mark Lane, and Harold Weisberg, had begun to make an impact, and had informed the public that the Warren Commission had failed to study the autopsy evidence or even verify the accuracy of the drawings depicting Kennedy's wounds. As a consequence, it became politically desirable for the Johnson Administration to have the autopsy doctors do what they should have done in '64 and verify the accuracy of the drawings presented the Commission.
But
there was a problem: the autopsy materials had been given to the
Kennedy family the year before. Negotiations thereby commenced for their
return. Finally, on October 31, 1966, the Kennedy
family returned the photos and x-rays to the Archives and announced
that, in but five years, in what those loyal to Johnson undoubtedly
assumed would be his second elected term as President, the photos and
x-rays would be open for review by independent doctors.
Wasting
no time, on November 1, 1966, the Johnson Administration arranged for
autopsy pathologists Dr.s Boswell and Humes, along with autopsy
radiologist John Ebersole
and autopsy photographer John Stringer, to finally review the autopsy
photographs and x-rays they'd had created. Under the over-sight of Johnson's Justice Department, they
then created an
inventory list for these items, and signed this list. Suspiciously, the
final version of this list included a statement that these photos and
x-rays represented all the photos and x-rays taken at the autopsy, a
statement all four men would later swear was untrue.
"I certainly would think he would have a very thorough interest in seeing that the truth was made evident. I believe he did have. I think that he, the FBI, and the entire government made available everything that the commission wanted. I think they made a very thorough study. I know of no evidence that in any way would cause any reasonable person to have a doubt about the Warren Commission. But if there is any evidence and it is brought forth, I am sure that the commission and the appropriate authorities will take action that may be justified."
President Johnson had of course misrepresented RFK's role in the assassination investigation, which had been next to non-existent. He had also failed to acknowledge that the Commission had long since disbanded. He was apparently, unaware, moreover, that his long-time friend, Texas Governor John Connally, had just been interviewed by Life Magazine, and had revived cries for a new investigation by asserting that he had serious doubts about the single-bullet theory, the cornerstone upon which the commission's case for a single-assassin had been built. (Johnson shared these doubts, but had never admitted as much to the public.)
This sent the Johnson Administration into crisis mode.
On November 21, 1966, Acting Attorney General Ramsey Clark and former Warren Commission counsel W. David Slawson (now working for President Johnson in the Office of Legal Counsel) have a conversation regarding a letter written them by former Warren Commission counsel J. Wesley Liebeler. According to Slawson's memo on this phone call (which can be found in the Harold Weisberg Archive) Liebeler claimed in this letter that he'd spoken to Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times the week before, and that Salisbury "was planning a series of articles on the criticisms of the Warren Report," and "believed the criticisms were serious enough to warrant a re-opening of the investigation." Even so, Liebeler felt:
"There is still a reasonable chance of spiking this thing by a re-investigation limited to aspects of the autopsy, but if public opinion continues to develop like it has over the past few months we may soon be faced with a politically unstoppable demand for a free-wheeling investigation of all aspects.'
The political importance of this "limited" re-investigation was paramount, moreover, because, according to Slawson's memo:
"The lunatic fringe already allege or broadly hint, the highest echelons of Government in the assassination, and the Government's participation in the 'hiding' of the photographs and X-rays dangerously lends creditability (sic) to their hints and allegations."
The memo then went on to discuss how at least one of the critics could be turned against the others, noting that Edward Epstein, the author of Inquest
"now feels satisfied on all issues raised in his book except those connected with the autopsy X-rays and photographs. He still believes that they should be examined by an independent group of pathologists. If they are so examined, and if the group contains a man acceptable to him, and if the result is to confirm the Commission's findings, Epstein will publicly state his satisfaction with the report--in effect, he will publicly repudiate the doubts and suspicions he himself cast in his book. And he will join with Liebeler and others in defending the report against Lane, who Epstein is now convinced is unscrupulous and dangerous."
This memo, then, suggests that the Acting Attorney General, President Johnson's legal advisers, and former Warren Commission counsel were all conspiring to prevent a new investigation.
And they weren't alone. Over the next few days, FBI Director J.Edgar Hoover and Governor John Connally would (at least, to all appearances) be roped into this plot, and give high-profile interviews in which they, too, claimed they supported the finding of the Warren Commission that Oswald acted alone, and that no new investigation was needed. Governor Connally, whose recent interview with Life Magazine in which he'd denounced the single-bullet theory had helped fuel the 'crisis," nevertheless joined hands with the Johnson Administration to attack Mark Lane, calling him a "journalistic scavenger" in headlines blasted across the country.
But this was small potatoes compared to the back-pedaling performed by Hoover. While Hoover had written, on an internal FBI memo dated 11-22-66 (Rosen to DeLoach, 11/22/1966, FBI HQ JFK Assassination File, 62-109060-4267) that “We don’t agree with the Commission as it says one shot missed entirely & we contend all three shots hit,” by 11-25-66 he had issued a statement claiming "There is no conflict" between the FBI's position and that of the commission, as "The autopsy report said the bullet did exit from the front of the President's neck. Thus, it could have passed through Connally, who was seated in a jump seat directly in front of the president." He then explained the confusion, attributing it to the fact that the FBI agents at the autopsy had been told no exit wound could be associated with the entrance wound on the back, but that, unknown to these agents, "the physicians eventually were able to trace the path of the bullet through the body." (This, of course, never happened.)
So, keeping this full-fledged media blitz by the Johnson administration in mind, can we really consider it surprising that on 11-24-66, right in the middle of all this, an AP article emerged on an interview with Dr. Boswell, in which he took personal responsibility for much of the confusion over the President's wounds? This article, by Jack Miller, claimed:
"A doctor who helped perform the autopsy on President John F. Kennedy said today he made a diagram error in a hasty 'worksheet' sketch which was not drawn for the final autopsy report. Some critics have used the sketch in challenging the Warren Commission Report.
Dr. J. Thornton Boswell said the diagram showed that the lower bullet wound was in the President's back. Actually, he said, the wound was at the back of the base of the neck.
The position of the wound was crucial in determining the trajectory of the bullet.
Boswell said the diagram was drawn quickly during the autopsy as 'rough notes' and was not meant to be exact. He pointed out that longhand notes he made on the sketch gave the correct, precise location of the wound...
In an interview, Boswell said that when he examined the autopsy photographs for the first time Nov. 1, the pictures showed clearly that the wound was in the neck. The photographs are in the National Archives and are not available to the public...
One of the critics of the Warren
Report, Edward Epstein, used the diagram and the FBI
reports to suggest the possibility that there may have been a second
assassin.
But Epstein, author of the book “Inquest,” conceded in the current issue of Esquire magazine that if the autopsy photos showed the wound in the neck, there would be no further doubt about the autopsy report and that second assassin would be ruled out.”
And should one think the timing of this article a coincidence, one should now consider further that an 11-25-66 article by Peter Kihss for
the New York Times quoted Boswell as asserting that, after he and Dr. Humes
inspected the photos on November 1, 1966, there was “absolutely no doubt in our
minds now” about the single-bullet theory, and then repeated the lie that measurements were used to create the Rydberg drawings and that we should thereby assume they're accurate. This article claimed:
"The Warren Commission published "schematic drawings" done by a Navy medical illustrator and, based on measurements and verbal descriptions given him by the autopsy surgeons just before they were called to testify. The drawings include Commission Exhibit 385, which shows the downward path the bullet is thought to have taken through the President's neck, and they remain 'sufficient to illustrate the finding' Dr. Boswell said yesterday."
And, should one still have doubts that Dr. Boswell's interviews were being orchestrated by hands unseen, one should finally consider that in the extensive 11-25-66 article in the Baltimore Sun, in which a new and improved version of the face sheet was unveiled, Dr. Boswell was purported to have also claimed that:
- the photographs and X-rays prove conclusively that the facts about the wounds as printed in the Warren Commission Report were consistent with the findings of the autopsy...
- there was absolutely no doubt that the controversial neck and throat wound was caused by a bullet that entered the base of President Kennedy's neck, passed completely through the neck, and exited from the throat...
- The wound in the back of the neck, was without any doubt, one of entrance and not of exit...
- A report made by FBI observers present at the autopsy inaccurately referred to a 'back' wound rather than a neck wound and should be discounted...
- the autopsy was routine in every respect and...included every activity which would accompany a medical-legal autopsy...
- (At the commencement of the autopsy) The pathologists had already been told of the probable extent of the injuries and what had been done by physicians in Dallas...
- the tracheotomy incision was examined and extensive trauma was noted on one side...
- (The pathologists) "concluded that night that the bullet had, in fact, entered in the back of the neck, traversed the neck, and exited anteriorly'..."
- a telephone call made to the hospital in Dallas by Dr. Humes the next morning merely confirmed what was already a certainty to the pathologists--that there was a bullet wound in the President's neck at the point of the tracheotomy incision...
- (CE 385) was a scale drawing based on a photograph taken of the president when he was alive...
- the bullet path (on CE 385) was drawn using data about the entry hole and the lung bruises obtained during the autopsy and the precise exit wound as defined by the Dallas physicians...
- (The FBI report's reference to a back wound may have represented) "a laymen's observation of an area just below the shoulder line that, to a physician, is still the neck region..."
and then the standard line, soon to be repeated by Liebeler, that:
- the President, according to movie films, had his arm raised, waving to the crowds, when he was shot. This movement would have raised his coat and shirt resulting in bullet holes lower in the clothing than were indicated by the wound.
So..... Was it merely a coincidence that the previously-silent Dr. Boswell appeared out of nowhere to claim the non-fatal wound in the photos was “in the neck” and that the location of this wound left
“absolutely no doubt” about the single-bullet theory...just days after a phone call was made between a legal adviser to President Johnson and the acting Attorney General Ramsey Clark proposing that such statements could hold off the call for a new investigation? And was it merely a coincidence that Dr. Boswell's account of the autopsy contradicted Dr. Humes' sworn testimony about the throat wound? And that he instead claimed they'd assumed it was an exit while the body was still in front of them? And that this not-so-subtle tweak to the official story might help Johnson and his men fend off calls for an exhumation of the President's body?
No. I think not. The entire series of articles reeks of an orchestrated lie.
But perhaps that's being too harsh. Perhaps it's more like an orchestrated half-truth...
As we’ve discussed, it seems
logical that on the night of the autopsy Dr. Boswell placed the wound on the face sheet
based upon the President’s skeletal structure.
Sure enough, in keeping with the autopsy measurements, the mark on the
face sheet is virtually equidistant between the bottom tip of the right
mastoid process, and the tip of the right shoulder (acromion). In November, 1966, however, after Warren Commission critics began to notice that Boswell’s
depiction of the back wound was below the wound in the President’s throat on
the face sheet, and after having been given the opportunity to review the
autopsy photos of the back wound, he re-marked a copy of the face sheet for the
Baltimore Sun, and moved the back wound to a location above the wound in the President’s
throat. Boswell explained this at the time by stating “If I had known at the time that
this sketch would become public record, I would have been more careful.” And
yet, as careful as he claimed to be in 1966, in 1977, after having been
contacted by the HSCA and asked to mark a third face sheet, he lifted the back wound
even further, squarely onto the President’s neck.
From these actions one might wonder if Boswell was remembering things backwards, that is, if he was taking what he believed to be important or was told was important, e.g. that the bullet entrance was high enough on the President's body for a bullet heading on a downward trajectory to enter the President’s back and exit his throat, and then marking this position on the sheet. Perhaps suspicion he'd been part of a conspiracy had taken their toll on Dr. Boswell and had led his memories to blur into accordance with the official government impression of the wounds. The memory research of Dr. Elizabeth Loftus confirms that when one is led to imagine a plausible event, e.g. the single bullet theory, one’s memories can become entangled with that imagined event. Perhaps then Boswell’s face sheets are simply textbook cases of memory distortion arising from imagining a plausible event.
Dr. Boswell’s 1996 ARRB testimony in fact confirms that he worked backwards. Even though he’d been shown the official back wound photos three times, most recently in 1977, Boswell corrected his questioner Jeremy Gunn by telling him that the wound was not a thoracic wound (as stated in the autopsy report signed by Boswell) but was on the neck. He stated further that the wound would not be nearest a thoracic vertebrae, but a cervical vertebra. While looking at the back wound marked on the face sheet, he tried to explain his reasoning: “where I had drawn this was—if you looked at the back of the coat it was in the exact same place…but the coat had been…he was waving, and this was all scrunched up like this. And the bullet went through the coat way below where this would be on the body, because it was really at the base of his neck. And the way I know this best is my memory of the fact that…when we opened up the chest…the bullet had not pierced through into the lung cavity …And so…The wound came through and downward and out about the thyroid cartilage. So if you put a probe in this and got it back through like this, that would come out right at the base of the neck.” Minutes later, when shown the photo of the back wound, however, Boswell recognized his error and acknowledged that the wound in the photo was not on the neck but on the back, and was nearest, by his estimate, the second thoracic vertebrae. Were Dr. Boswell a simple liar he would most probably have argued that the wound was actually nearest a cervical vertebrae, but that the angle of the photograph had distorted the wound’s actual position, etc...
That Dr. Boswell was remembering things backwards in ’96, however, does not preclude that he was pressured into changing his statements in ’66. As there was a military order of silence in place on Dr. Boswell, his interviews with the Baltimore Sun and other papers in 1966 would almost certainly have to have received approval from the Justice Department...approval not likely to be granted should he not agree to, well, agree.
As a consequence, it's hard not to believe the upward migration of Kennedy's back wound between the night of the autopsy and the testimony of the autopsy doctors before the Warren Commission, and then again between Dr. Boswell's study of the autopsy photos on November 1, 1966 and his statements to the press afterward, was a migration spurred on by the climate in Washington.
Dox Back Wound/Fox Autopsy Photo Comparison
Confirmation that Boswell misled the press in 1966, the
Rydberg drawings were in error, and that the jacket did not bunch up to the degree proposed by Humes, Boswell, Specter, and Liebeler came in 1978 when the HSCA released an artist
rendering of the autopsy photo, along with a blow-up of the wound taken from
the actual photo. These showed the back wound to be, well...in the back, basically where Boswell marked it on the face sheet on 11-22-63.
Since the back wound
drawing is a nearly exact likeness of an alleged autopsy photo first printed
by writer David Lifton, moreover, it appears that the autopsy photos made available to
the research community by former Secret Service agent James Fox are indeed
copies of the originals in the National Archives. The chief differences between the Dox drawing
and the Fox photo is that in the drawing the wound appears slightly larger, and
a small mark near the bullet entrance, apparently dried blood, is omitted.
There is also a fold in the back of the neck at the top of the ruler. These could all be innocent mistakes. It is interesting, nonetheless, that all
these mistakes helped the HSCA with its argument that there was one back wound,
near the neck, consistent with a shot from the Texas School Book
Depository. That the wound in the
drawing is clearly wider than tall, however, when taken with the fact that Dr.
Humes always stated the width before the length in his Warren Commission
testimony, confirms that the wound measured as 7 by 4 on the autopsy sheet, was
in fact 7mm wide by 4 mm long, and the exact
opposite dimensions of the wound
described in Humes’ testimony. Since Humes was not allowed to consult the
autopsy photos before his testimony, it remains possible, of course, that he
was confused and settled on the proportions that best supported his conclusion
that the bullet creating this wound came from above.
Dr. Richard Lindenberg of the Rockefeller Commission medical panel had no such excuse. After inspecting the photos in 1975 he wrote a report describing the back wound in the photo as “7mm in width and 10 mm in length.” My observation that the wound is, in fact, wider than tall, is shared by, of all people, single-bullet theory defender Dr. John Lattimer, who described the wound seen in the photo as “6 mm x 8 mm in size, with the longer axis transverse” (meaning wide). Since the 15 by 6 entrance in the skull described on the face sheet was also transposed in Humes' testimony to be 6mm wide by 15mm long, and since the re-interpretation of these measurements was helpful in convincing the American people that the shots came from above, one might rightly wonder if the transposition of the measurements was not part of the “help” the doctors gave Chief Counsel Rankin before their testimony.
The measurements of the wounds in the autopsy of police officer J.D Tippit, believed to have been killed by Oswald shortly after he killed Kennedy, are also mysterious. While the sheet with the measurements lists width before length, and while the width measurements are listed first on the sheet with his drawings, the measurements are inverted on the measurement sheet, with the measurement of the length of the hole from the top of the head down towards his feet coming first, in the width box, and the measurements of the wound cutting lateral across the skull coming second. Perhaps this was simply Dr. Earl Rose’s idiosyncratic way of interpreting the width of a wound. Since he describes a 3/4” by 3/8” wound as “transverse,” which means, according to a standard medical dictionary “at right angles to the longitudinal axis of the body” or “crosswise,” and since this wound is listed as being 3/8” wide and 3/4” long on the measurements sheet, it seems either Dr. Rose listed his measurements backwards by accident or that his understanding of the word “width” runs counter to common acceptance. His autopsy report for Oswald seems to indicate he did entertain some confusion, as an entrance wound of “1/4 x 5/16” was listed as ¼” wide and 5/16” long and a wound in Oswald’s back described as “2 x 1” was 1 in wide by 2 in long. Strangely, Rose’ inconsistency helps clear Dr. Humes of the charge he deliberately lied about the measurements, both to Rydberg and the Warren Commission, as it is possible he was equally as confused as Rose. It’s important to remember here that the measurements themselves were determined by the Army doctor Finck, and Finck’s consistent and disciplined attitude to wound measurement may not have been known to the Navy doctors Humes and Boswell, the men charged with creating the Rydberg drawings.
While the actual autopsy photos have never been officially released it’s important that the bona fides of those in the research community and available on the internet be established. It is extremely valuable then that records show James Fox to have been the Secret Service photographer responsible for making copies of the photographs on November 26, four days after the autopsy. How many sets he made and to whom they were given is not completely clear.
It is interesting to note, however, that an ARRB interview of one of the doctors who worked on Kennedy in Dallas yielded the surprising anecdote that this doctor, Dr. Paul Peters, was friends with former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s urologist, Dr. John Lattimer, and that Lattimer had told him that Hoover had given him access to Hoover’s private set of the autopsy photos just to spite Robert Kennedy. If Peters' story is true it’s symbolic of the monumental failure of the Warren Commission: the man who conducted the FBI’s investigation into the physical aspects of the assassination, Al Rosen, refused to look at the autopsy photos or read the autopsy report; the man who conducted Kennedy’s autopsy and prepared the official drawings of Kennedy’s wounds, Dr. Humes, was denied the opportunity to review the autopsy photos or compare them to the drawings; and yet J. Edgar Hoover’s urologist Dr. Lattimer could study them to his heart’s content. Sickening. It should be pointed out that in 1972 Dr. Lattimer became the first non-government appointed doctor allowed inside the archives to inspect the autopsy materials. It seems possible, then, that Dr. Peters took this actual event and scrambled it up into the story he told the ARRB.
Making Peters’ story more believable, however, is Earl Warren’s recollection that he saw the photos when they came over from Bethesda Naval Hospital. As the official reports and testimony of Robert Bouck, head of the Protective Research Division of the Secret Service, indicate that from the night of the autopsy until mid-1965 the autopsy photos remained in Secret Service custody, and were never returned to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and that the Chief Justice never paid them a visit to view the materials, this could indicate that the Navy had a set all its own. To be fair, Warren was in his eighties when he wrote his memoirs, and may simply have forgotten a private visit with Secret Service Chief Rowley, or something equally innocent.
The effects of old age might also explain the June, 15, 1975, statements of Warren Commission counsel Joseph Ball. Ball told the Long Beach, California, Press-Telegram that “he was the first one to contact the autopsy surgeon at Bethesda Naval Hospital,” and that “We went out and spent the afternoon with him…he gave us a complete description of the wounds on Kennedy’s body—he even drew pictures of it….He showed us a complete set of x-rays and color pictures which were turned over to Bobby Kennedy at his request and the request of the Kennedy family.The color pictures definitely show there was an entrance wound on the rear, right side of his head that blew the top of Kennedy’s head off.” As Ball also insisted that the release of these pictures would end all speculation on the direction of the shots, and since he only mentioned the “color pictures” and stated elsewhere that “These pictures show, as every doctor has testified, that the wounds of entry were in the back of the head…he was shot in the back of the neck and the rear of the head” it seems likely the "pictures" he was thinking of were the Rydberg drawings, which were in color and depicted the wounds as described. But the Rydberg drawings were never turned over to Robert Kennedy. And neither were the x-rays. And one can only wonder how Ball could think the release of a drawing long available would end all speculation on the direction of the shots. So perhaps Ball was just confused. Ball was 73 at the time of this article. Supporting that Ball’s memory was slipping in 1975 (and that he'd confused the Rydberg drawings for the autopsy photos) is a 1-5-67 article in which Ball called for the release of the x-rays and photos, and claimed he’d never seen them.
Even so, there is some support for Ball's latter-day claim that he'd seen the photos. In a late June, 1967
series of articles on the Warren Commission by Associated Press writers Bernard
Gavzer and Sid Moody, it was reported: “Albert Jenner, an
assistant counsel now in Chicago, says he saw some of the autopsy
photographs...” 1967 was of course only three years after the Warren Commission
and Jenner was then but 60 years old. It’s doubtful, then, that his memory could have faded so rapidly about such an issue of such importance. The possibility exists,
therefore, that the autopsy photos supposedly denied the autopsy doctors prior
to their Warren Commission testimony and still officially hidden from the
public were never denied to anyone, and were secretly circulated among the
autopsy doctors, the Warren Commission, and the Warren Commission staff, as
well as various Washington
insiders, throughout 1964.
A September 18, 2010 post by single-assassin theorist John Fiorentino on the alt.assassination.jfk newsgroup further supports this possibility. While disputing something I'd written, Fiorentino boasted that he'd personally received a clear copy of the back wound photo from Warren Commission counsel David Belin. As Belin had also worked with the Rockefeller Commission pathology panel, which had indisputably viewed the photos, however, it seems likely that Belin had kept one of the Rockefeller Commission's copies as a "souvenir."
The much greater possibility remains, then, that Jenner lied to the Associated Press for their 1967 article. Researcher Sylvia Meagher claimed to have sat behind Jenner's daughter at a February 1967 televised discussion of the assassination, and to have overheard Jenner's conversations with his daughter. After Mark Lane quoted Jenner from a 12-23-66 radio broadcast, where Jenner claimed "Some members of the Commission saw both the film and the colored pictures, and the X-rays. We of the staff saw them ourselves," and Jenner refused to comment, Meagher heard Jenner's daughter ask her father if he'd in fact seen the photos, and witnessed Jenner shake his head "no." In December, 1966, of course, the Commission and its former counsel were dedicated to cutting off the then-widespread demands for a new investigation, and Jenner's lies may have been designed to help their cause.
If he'd lied, he wasn't the only one.
Military Review Review
Nor the last to do so... On January 20, 1967, the Justice Department asked
the doctors to re-examine the autopsy photos. For this inspection, Dr. Finck was rushed back from Viet
Nam. Disturbingly, the urgency of this review appears to be linked to an
upcoming CBS News program re-investigating the assassination.
That CBS’ over-all conclusions were pre-determined and were designed to
re-sell the Warren Report to the American people (CBS had run a special
supporting the Warren Report when it was first released) is suggested by a
January 11, 1967 memorandum from Les Midgley, Executive Producer of the
upcoming program, to former Warren Commissioner John McCloy, in which Midgley cites
a need for “a statement—if possible—from Humes, Boswell and Finck that
examination of the x-rays and color pictures does not change their findings,
and we certainly would appreciate your assistance in obtaining same.” This memo, for that matter,
may have been written in response to a 1-14-67
Saturday Evening Post article already on the street claiming “no single element of the commission’s
version of the assassination is more suspect than the official account of the
President’s autopsy.” In any event, the memo appears to have reaped some rapid rewards.
According to McCloy’s biographer, Kai Bird, McCloy traveled to Washington THAT VERY SAME DAY and met privately with a number of top government officials including Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury, Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara, and Henry Fowler. That Archivist Robert Bahmer wrote researcher Harold Weisberg on 1-16-67 and told him that no examinations of the autopsy photos and x-rays were pending, and that Dr. Finck received a phone call on 1-17-67--the VERY NEXT DAY--telling him to come to Washington and conduct the examination proposed by Midgley but 6 days before, then, suggests that McCloy, who had been advising CBS News President Richard Salant on the creation of their upcoming program since early December, and whose daughter was Salant’s assistant, may have talked to someone in the Justice Department as well. That Midgley’s memo also mentions his hopes of obtaining Dr. Humes’ help in resolving “forever the discussion about back versus neck wound,” and that Humes not only made an appearance on the program, but flat-out lied about the “back versus neck wound” to Dan Rather, is suggestive that McCloy’s visit may have been not only the impetus for the doctors' January review of the autopsy materials, but the determinant of their written conclusions.
Something is just wrong. When one looks at the report of the so-called “military review,” dated January 26, 1967, one can see that the photographs were not merely cataloged, but re-interpreted to show that they did indeed confirm the findings of the Warren Commission. As will be discussed later, one of the autopsy photos determined to be taken from behind Kennedy on the November inventory list was now determined to be taken from in front of Kennedy. At other points in the short report it is blatantly dishonest. For example, the photos determined on November 1, 1966 to represent a wound in the “right superior posterior shoulder” were now described as representing a wound “low in the back of the neck.” Even worse, the report asserts that the original autopsy reports’ description of this same wound as residing in “the upper right posterior thorax,” meant that, in layman terms, it was low in the back of the neck. Since the thorax ends when it reaches neck, this would be the same as saying that Governor Connally’s wrist wound was in layman’s terms a hand wound, or that the City of Las Vegas is, in layman’s terms, in California. No doctor would make this mistake. The report goes on to say “No one photograph shows both the wound at the back of the neck and the wound in the throat, but by comparing Photographs 11, 12, 38, and 39 with the side views shown in photographs 1-4, inclusive, it is clear that Warren Commission Exhibits 385 and 386, which also depict the location of the neck wound, are accurate.” As mentioned, Dr. Humes told this same tale on CBS six months later.
Well, this goes too far. There is no way one can say that CE 385 and CE 386 are accurate, as they portray a bullet hole at the base of the neck, inches above and to the right of the wound on the photo. In fact, since the Dox drawing of the back wound taken directly from the autopsy photos was published by the HSCA, one can state unequivocally that this is a damned lie. Not one defender of the Warren Report will defend this statement. Is it simply a coincidence then that the doctors claimed to have no memory of this report when asked about it by the ARRB?
Owing to their suspicious memory loss, and the suspicious change of the description of the autopsy photos, and the outright lie that the photos confirmed the accuracy of CE 385 and 386, I believe it’s logical to conclude this report was created for political purposes, and the doctors were forced to sign their names to it. Dr. Finck’s notes on his urgent trip to Washington seem to verify this contention, referring to the wound described in the report as a “neck wound” as simply “Entry, back” and declaring “the statement had been prepared by the Justice Department. We signed the statement.” Call me overly sensitive if you like, but the rank odor rising from this review only adds to the rankness of Earl Warren’s earlier decision not to allow an inspection of the autopsy photos, after telling Chief Counsel Rankin it would be fine. Something was rotten in Washington.
Contributing to my hard-fought conclusion that the autopsists were pressured into changing their interpretation of the wounds are the words of Attorney General Ramsey Clark in a phone call to President Johnson on 1-21-67. On the tapes released by the Johnson Library, as transcribed by Warren Commission defender Max Holland, Clark informs Johnson that the doctors “feel their professional reputations are at stake… they’re so reticent about signin’ anything, that it’s fairly difficult to work with ‘em.” Well, reticence implies resistance, does it not? What was in the affidavits that caused the doctors to resist? On January 26, 1967, Clark adds more fuel to my suspicion by telling Johnson “we have the three pathologists and the photographer signed up now on the autopsy review.” When used in this context, the words “signed up now” would indicate the doctors were under pressure to go along with something, would it not? And why, after the doctors had inspected the photos on the night of the 20th and had stayed in the archives till midnight preparing a “statement comparing the illustrations with our autopsy report,” according to Dr. Finck’s notes, did it take Clark almost another week to get them to sign a 5 page report “prepared by the Justice Department?” What was in the report that made the doctors so reticent? And what if anything, changed their minds? Could the doctors have been given direct orders to cooperate? And if the doctors had came to their conclusions purely on their own, why couldn’t they remember their decisions years later or stand by them?
Intriguingly, Johnson is reported to have contemplated
re-opening the investigation during this period. This was within days of Johnson's being told of the CIA's assassination plots against Castro, and the possibility these plots backfired and got Kennedy killed. According to Johnson aide Joseph Califano,
Johnson decided against it because it was not in the best interests of the
nation or the Kennedy family. This is highly dubious. Such a re-investigation was clearly not in the best interests of...Johnson. On March 3, 1967, the day after Robert Kennedy first openly criticized Johnson's handling of the Vietnam war, columnist Drew Pearson published a devastating expose on the assassination, with the introductory line "“President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb—an unconfirmed report that Senator Robert Kennedy (Dem. N.Y.) may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his brother.” As Pearson had been playing footsie with Johnson for years--on the evening of the assassination he was supposed to meet with Johnson and coordinate an attack on a man named Don Reynolds, who'd publicly accused Johnson of corruption-- and as Johnson admitted to Ramsey Clark on the phone that he met with Pearson and discussed the CIA's assassination plots against Castro, it seems more than likely the release of this info was fully orchestrated by Johnson. This, then, undercuts any notion that Johnson was protecting the Kennedys. One can
only wonder then if the problems with the doctors and autopsy photos was a bigger factor in his decision not to re-open the case.
As for Clark, I have been unable to find a single reference by him to this review, subsequent to his conversations with Johnson. In his 1978 interview with the HSCA’s Andy Purdy, he says the 1968 Clark Panel was formed after the autopsy photos and x-rays became available and after Finck, Boswell, Humes and Ebersole’s review proved inadequate. (Inadequate at what, one wonders—shutting down the critics?) Anyhow, this statement is confusing on the face of it because it makes it sound like there was but one review and that those four men were involved, when, in fact, Ebersole was only involved in the 1966 inspection and Finck was only involved in the 1967 inspection. In a 1998 interview with researcher James Douglass, Clark once again skips the 1967 review; he tells Douglass of obtaining the materials and calling in the doctors to make their initial inspection and then jumps to the creation of the Clark Panel in 1968. Either Clark had forgotten there were two separate reviews in 66 and 67 or he found discussion of the second review uncomfortable.
As for McCloy, his motivation for helping CBS debunk the conspiracy theorists and defend his work with the Warren Commission is made obvious in an undated letter reprinted by Warren Commission counsel David Belin in one of his books. McCloy tells Belin: “I never cease to be amazed at the willingness of so much of the public to accept the statements of the charlatans and sensationalists rather than the facts and the record.” He then recalls the political climate in the mid-sixties: “It was actually thought “liberal” to be convinced that President Kennedy had been shot as a result of a conspiracy by a group of Texas millionaires or chauvinists and that it was quite “illiberal” to think that he has been assassinated solely by a little “punk” who perhaps had some communistic leanings.”
How far McCloy was willing to go in his assistance of CBS in their quest to re-assert “the facts and the record” is made clear by contrasting his video-taped response on the CBS program against his private correspondence with Belin years later. On the CBS special he says “It was our own choice that we didn’t subpoena the photographs, which were then in the hands of the Kennedy family” (This is not true; throughout the entire duration of the Warren Commission the autopsy photos were in the sole possession of the Secret Service. The Kennedy family and the Justice Department not only didn’t control them, they never even saw them.) He then proclaims “Mr. Justice Warren was talking to the Kennedy family about that at that time. I thought he was really going to see them, but it turned out that he hadn’t.” (This is another mis-statement or lie--as Warren’s memoirs admit that, in fact, he had.)
Now compare this to McCloy’s letter to Belin some time later: “I agree wholeheartedly with your criticism
of the Commission itself for failure to demand the original x-rays and
photographs. I agreed to having the Chief Justice’s viewing them alone if he
would do so and I understand he was to do
this.” Notice he doesn’t say “I
mistakenly believed he would do this” or “he led me to believe he would do
this.” No, McCloy says that he agreed to
let Warren inspect them alone and
that it was his understanding that Warren did indeed inspect them alone. (A 1992 article in U.S. News reported that Warren wrote Specter in 1967 and claimed "the other members of the commission had no desire to see" the photos. In light of McCloy's "agreeing" Warren could see the photos alone, when he'd previously pushed that a doctor should be present, however, this doesn't exactly ring true.) In any event, McCloy's statements suggest he knew all along that Warren
had seen the photos, and this, in turn, suggests he'd lied to CBS and the world when he said that Warren had not.
Well, why would he do this? To protect Warren? Well, if he was willing to lie to protect Warren on such a minor matter then what reason do we have to believe anything he had to say?
And what about CBS? Since when do news divisions tell members of government commissions what kind of reports they need to shut down political rumors, and then ask them to have such reports created? Isn’t that crossing a line between reporting the news and orchestrating the news? And why did CBS consider it their job to shut down rumors? Perhaps as an acknowledgement that his behavior was not quite kosher, Les Midgley never mentions McCloy’s “help” on the special in a book he co-wrote about the creation of the CBS special, entitled Should We Now Believe The Warren Report?, nor in his memoirs, How Many Words Do You Want? Instead he downplays McCloy’s crucial role, and even says “McCloy was doubtful about participation, although he did, in the end, agree.” Throughout both books, in fact, Midgley staunchly defends his program: “the avid critics and attackers thrive in a mental climate such that most of them undoubtedly believe CBS, its News Division, and its staff to be part of a vast conspiracy to conceal the “facts” about the assassination…They are wrong but nothing can be done about it…The people who wrote, filmed, produced, and appeared on these broadcasts would have been the happiest journalists of this or almost any other century if they could have come up with a sensational “solution” to the Kennedy murder…But it didn’t happen.” Never mind believing the Warren Report. Based upon what we now know of Midgley’s behind the scenes dealings with McCloy, should we now believe him? I’m undecided. Since Midgley’s memoirs were written when he was in his seventies, it’s possible he left out his indiscreet contact with McCloy for the same reasons he said that Connally was riding beside Kennedy at the time of the assassination and the magic bullet was found on the floor of the limousine…perhaps he was simply an old man who could no longer remember the facts.
On the other hand, it seems a bit of a coincidence that Associated Press writers Sid Moody and Bernard Gavzer conducted a seven-month long investigation into the issues raised by critics such as Epstein, Lane, and Weisberg, and published their series the same week as the CBS telecasts, with near identical conclusions! Not surprisingly, Moody and Gavzer were granted interviews with 11 of the 15 Warren Commission counsel and 4 of the 10 staff for their investigation. As one should have real doubts the government would allow such access to an investigation whose outcome is unknown, one might reasonably conclude the AP investigation was designed as a Warren Commission defense from the get-go. Perhaps it was even coordinated with CBS through the “Justice Department.” Incredible? Read on.
Defending the Line
On May 27, 1967, a letter was written to Dr. Humes by Acting Assistant Attorney General Carl Eardley, telling him that CBS had requested permission to interview him for a television special and that the attorney general had no objection to his appearance. As Dr. Humes was under an order of silence from the military since the day of the autopsy, and as the White House renewed this directive right before the Warren Report was published, Dr. Humes could only speak to CBS by permission. Two days later, Cliff Sessions, the Director of Public Information, wrote a memo to Eardley which included a script for Dr. Humes to follow when questioned by Dan Rather on this special. Among the statements included was that one bullet “entered the back of the neck and exited through the throat,” that the autopsy face sheet depicted this wound much lower than it really was, and that “the location of the wound was accurately described in a notation on the margin of the drawing.” It ended by stating that Humes had “thoroughly examined” the photographs and x-rays at the National Archives and that they supported in “every detail” the “autopsy findings which were reported to the Warren Commission.” Whether or not the Justice Department’s providing Humes with this script was intended to communicate that he should not waver from this script is open to conjecture, but when asked about the locations of Kennedy’s wounds by Rather in a taped interview first broadcast on June 26, 1967, Humes described the back wound as “in the base of the neck on the right.” When Rather followed up by asking about the conflicting locations of the back wound on the autopsy face sheet and Rydberg drawing CE 385, Dr. Humes inspected CE 385 and contended that the face sheet was never meant to be precise but that “the second drawing which you have mentioned (CE 385) was prepared as we were preparing to testify before the Warren Commission, to rather schematically and as accurately as we possibly could, depict the story for the members of the Warren Commission... We were trying to be precise and referred back to our measurements made in the margins of the other drawing….since this time we have had opportunity to review the photographs which we made at that time. And these photographs show very clearly that the wound was exactly where we stated it to be in our testimony before the Warren Commission, and as it is shown in this drawing.” Rather then re-asked:“Your re-examination of the photographs verify that the wounds are as shown here?” To which Humes replied “Yes sir, they do.” This is simply not true.
Humes was not only being deceptive about the accuracy of the Rydberg drawings, but about the inaccuracy of the face sheet. As demonstrated elsewhere, the back wound location on the face sheet had been marked in accord with the measurements, while the Rydberg drawings were made from verbal descriptions only. What Humes and Boswell had apparently failed to grasp
was that the problem with the face sheet was not so much that the back wound on the face sheet was too
low, but that the mark reflecting the location of the tracheotomy incision was too high. As this incision was not considered a bullet wound until after the creation of the face sheet, and as its location was unmeasured, this mistake would have been understandable. Unfortunately, no one seems to have caught this mistake, and the "back wound was really higher" movement took shape. (P.S. Many of the face sheets found online are similarly in error and depict the suprasternal notch above the shoulder line when it is normally slightly below. How long will it take before this gets corrected?)
During the January, 1969 trial of Clay Shaw, the subject matter of the film JFK, it became Dr. Finck’s turn to fudge the facts. Although Dr. Finck had been offered by the U.S. government as a defense witness for Mr. Shaw, as his testimony was intended to convince the jury that the medical evidence pointed towards Oswald acting alone, Finck’s strange demeanor and surprising answers confused almost everyone. At one point, in fact, he was doing so badly that Carl Eardley rushed Dr. Boswell down as a stand-in. Anyhow, on the stand Dr. Finck described the back wound as being on the “back of the neck” 33 times, when in his testimony before the Warren Commission, in his military reports to his superiors, and in an extensive article he wrote for Military Surgeon magazine, he never once described the wound in that manner, describing it instead as being in the “upper back” or in the “right upper region of the posterior thorax.” In fact, as far as can be determined, he has never claimed it was on the “back of the neck” before or since his testimony in the Shaw trial. During his testimony before the HSCA, for example, he said the wound was on the “upper back/lower neck” 5 times, even though he had not seen the photos in the intervening years, and had no reason to add in the “upper back” outside a desire to be accurate. Not surprisingly, a military report he filed on his participation in the trial of Clay Shaw discloses he had a meeting with Acting Assistant Attorney General Carl Eardley shortly before his testimony.
It seems obvious then that the doctors were under intense pressure from the Justice Department when they publicly misrepresented the back wound. While this may seem an argument for a vast government conspiracy, it is undoubtedly possible that those putting the pressure on the doctors felt they were merely defending the government’s line against its critics, and not protecting any possible conspirators. As for Carl Eardley, who supervised the doctors’ re-inspection of the photos in January, 1967, and presumably saw the photos himself, it would have only been fair for him to have been asked on national television, with the eyes of the nation upon him, where the neck ends and the back begins, and whether the wound in question on the autopsy photos was on the neck or on the back.
The Incredible Shrinking President
Scarcely a year after the military review, however, it was determined that yet another examination was needed, this time without the input of those present at the autopsy. While the inspiration for this new panel purportedly came from Dr.s Boswell and Humes, who, according to a letter written by Boswell to the Justice Department, wished for a second opinion, Dr. Boswell’s testimony before the ARRB reflects that he wrote this letter only after Carl Eardley “called me out of the blue…and said they thought it was a good idea to have an independent panel…now I had been talking about this with perhaps him and other people…And whether Carl suggested it or whether I convinced him, I’m not sure. But, anyway, he was willing to accept the letter, which he essentially described to me what they wanted, and I wrote it.” This suggests that Boswell’s letter was but window dressing to disguise the fact that someone else in the government, quite possibly the President himself, wanted a new panel to be formed. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, however, has accepted the credit for the panel’s creation, telling the HSCA that he felt the earlier examination by the doctors was “inadequate,” and that this led him to create a new panel. He also acknowledged that he was present at the discussions of the photos with the doctors, and saw the photos himself. He also said he drew a line: that they were not trying to re-open the Warren Commission, but only trying to see what the photographic evidence showed. He said even so he was “relieved” when the experts corroborated the Warren Commission, and he acknowledged he used the Jim Garrison trial of Clay Shaw as a vehicle for releasing the report without stirring up doubt.
This seems to be a bit disingenuous, as one of the factors in the decision to create a new panel and get a second opinion was almost assuredly that Jim Garrison, the district attorney of New Orleans, had expanded his investigation of Kennedy's assassination and had made comments indicating that President Johnson himself was involved. In Crime in America, published 1970, Clark questioned Garrison's mental health and claimed Garrison's conduct during his investigation of Shaw was "abusive," and that his "charges of conspiracy reaching even into the Federal Government" were "bizarre." Such a man, no doubt, in Clark's mind, would be capable of stretching the slightest inconsistency into the appearance of a vast conspiracy. It only makes sense then that Clark--at the urging of the President, whether he was involved in the assassination or not--would endeavor to find out just what the photos showed, and would want to make sure there was nothing in them that Garrison could use to question the legitimacy of Johnson's presidency.
Still another possible reason for the Clark Panel's formation was that Johnson had grown to suspect, after being informed by the CIA in early 1967 that the CIA and the Mafia had joined forces during Kennedy’s presidency to try to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, that some sort of reprisal had occurred, and that Kennedy had indeed been killed by a conspiracy. Yet another possible factor, and one easily overlooked, is that by February, 1968, Johnson had decided not to seek another term, and wanted to be sure the photos showed no evidence for a conspiracy, lest the next President, who in Johnson’s worst nightmares would be Robert Kennedy, the deceased President’s younger brother, use the photos to re-open the investigation and damage Johnson’s legacy. Since the panel was conducted in secret on February 26, 1968, and its report not released till January 16, 1969, the day Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw finally went to trial, it would seem it served some purpose. Johnson left the Presidency four days later.
What
was surprising about this panel, however, was that they agreed with the many
assassination researchers on a central point, that the autopsy report’s
description of an entrance wound low on the back of Kennedy’s head was
incorrect. The secret panel proposed,
instead that the entrance hole in the back of the President’s head was 4 inches
higher than depicted in the Rydberg drawings, at a point often described as a
cowlick. While the skull photographs and
x-rays were certainly influential in their decision, another factor apparently was
that the photos of the President’s brain revealed no path of destruction linking
the cerebellum, the point nearest the entrance in the President’s hairline
displayed in the Rydberg drawing, with the clearly devastated upper right lobe
of the President’s brain, where the bullet was presumed to exit. While much has been made of this movement of
the head wound, mostly by anti-Warren Commission conspiracy writers delighted
that Humes and Boswell were made to look foolish, these same writers miss that
the Clark Panel itself made as many or more mistakes as the Warren Commission
doctors.
Some of these mistakes cast doubt on the integrity of the Clark Panel. To begin with, even though the Clark Panel decided the rear head wound was four inches higher on the skull than the one described at the autopsy, they stuck by the autopsy measurements of the wound, only transposing the numbers. This 6 by 15 measurement, however, is not anywhere near the proportions of the mark in the cowlick as eventually revealed in the drawings of the HSCA. Similarly, the back wound was measured as 7 by 10, longer than wide, when the close-up photo released by the HSCA demonstrates the exact opposite. This could indicate that, as with the original testimony of Dr. Humes, the doctors were describing the wounds as longer than wide to help create the illusion the shots came from above.
But there's much stronger evidence to indicate they lied.
- Let's start with something simple. The Clark Panel, in concurrence with the autopsy report, concluded that the back wound was 14 cm below the mastoid process of Kennedy's skull. It also claimed, however, that the back wound was "5.5 cm below a transverse fold in the skin of the neck," also visible in the back wound photo. It follows, then, that this fold was 8.5 cm below the mastoid (at the approximate level of the bottom tip of the ear)...and much closer to the back wound than to the mastoid. Now look at the lateral autopsy photo on the slide above. Is it remotely possible that the fold is 8.5 cm (over 3 1/2 inches) below the mastoid? No. There's no way that fold can be 3 1/2 inches from the mastoid. This suggests then, that the Clark Panel has somehow inserted extra space between the mastoid and the skin fold (perhaps in order to pretend their findings were consistent with the autopsy measurements) whilst simultaneously moving the back wound up the neck.
- Beyond concluding that the back wound "lies approximately 5.5 cm below a transverse fold in the skin of the neck," the Clark Panel also asserted that the bullet wound in the throat was "above the trachea incision" and "situated approximately 9 cm below the transverse fold in the skin of the neck described in the last paragraph. " They therefore were claiming that the throat wound was 3 1/2 cm below the back wound.
- The HSCA medical panel, conversely, proposed that the throat wound was 1 cm above the back wound. This means the two panels were 4 1/2 cm apart on their interpretation of the relative placement of these wounds. Actually, more.
- The HSCA medical panel also proposed that the throat wound was on the bottom margin of the trachea incision, which was 1 1/2 cm wide. This means that, from the perspective of the HSCA, the Clark Panel's throat wound location was not 1 cm above the HSCA's back wound location, but 2 1/2 cm.
- The relative placement of these wounds, then, is: the Clark Panel proposed the back wound was 3 1/2 cm above the throat wound, which was 2 1/2 cm above the HSCA's proposed location for the back wound. There is therefore a 6 cm difference in interpretation of the back wound location when compared to the throat wound. Now, if the Clark Panel's back wound location is 6 cm higher than the HSCA's back wound location, the problem can be directly linked to a difference of opinion on the back wound's location. Only no such luck.
- As stated, the Clark Panel concurred with the measurements taken at autopsy and concluded that the back wound was 14 cm below the mastoid process. When one takes into account that the HSCA's back wound location was, in the eyes of the Clark Panel, another 6 cm below this location, then, in order for both panel's measurements to be correct, the HSCA's back wound location would have to be 20 cm below the mastoid process. This they did not do. The HSCA medical panel instead determined this wound to be about 13 1/2 cm below the mastoid process.
- The HSCA's measurements are the more accurate. The Clark Panel held that the back wound was 14 cm below the mastoid, and that the throat wound was 3 1/2 cm below this point. This location was, furthermore, 1 1/2 cm above the throat wound location as determined by the HSCA, along the bottom margin of the tracheotomy incision. This means that, in order for the Clark Panel's measurements to be correct, the bottom margin of the tracheotomy incision must have been 19 cm below the mastoid process. The measurements of the HSCA medical panel, on the other hand, place the bottom margin of the tracheotomy incision about 12 1/2 cm below the mastoid process. I have measured this location on myself and others and the HSCA's measurement is far more accurate. A wound 12 1/2 cm below the mastoid would be between the Adam's Apple and sternal notch, where Kennedy's wound was located. A wound 19 cm below the mastoid would, in contrast, be a wound overlying the sternum, about the level of the top of the heart. This suggests that, for the Clark Panel's measurements, they'd somehow added an extra 6 1/2 cm (over 2 1/2 inches) onto the front of Kennedy's throat, basically doubling its length. Now why would they have done this, other than to lower the throat wound location, and help sell the single-bullet theory? Were they deliberate liars? Or simply incompetent?
Only adding to the likelihood the Clark Panel lied is that they re-measured the hole in the back of Kennedy's jacket, and claimed it was 12 cm below the upper edge of the coat collar. The FBI had previously measured this distance and found it to be 5 3/8 inches, or 13.6 cm. The HSCA would subsequently measure this distance and find it to be 13.5 cm. It seems more than a coincidence then that the FBI and HSCA measurements were off by but 1 mm, and the Clark Panel's measurement was off by 15 times as much, particularly when this "mistake" by the Clark Panel helped them sell the single-bullet theory already supported by their clearly incorrect wound location measurements. One is tempted to conclude, therefore, that the Clark Panel was the deliberate cover-up many believed the Warren Commission to be. Only adding to this suspicion is the fact that the Clark Panel is the only review of the autopsy evidence to have a representative of the American Bar Association along to serve as “legal counsel to the panel," and to “collaborate” with the panel in the “preparation” of its report. Such an overt conspiracy is made doubtful, however, due to the Clark Panel report’s acknowledgment that the Warren Commission’s wound in the “back of the neck” in fact entered in the “back” and its description of several strange things that were never even noticed by the doctors on the night of the autopsy, including metal fragments in the President’s neck, a large round fragment at the back of the President’s skull, and a strange shape in the President’s brain. If they were covering up, it seems doubtful they would have opened fresh doors to such previously unexamined mysteries. The possibility remains, therefore, that on most of its mistakes the Clark Panel was well-intentioned, but just horribly, horribly wrong.
But you gotta wonder. When one compares Warren Commission CE 386 with HSCA Figure 24, and adjusts their size based upon their respective measurements, one can see that the skull in the Warren Commission drawing is roughly 27 ½ cm from ear to ear, while the HSCA drawing measures 19 cm. (Since my own skull measures but 15-17 cm, depending on how I feel about this presentation, I suspect this 19 cm is still too large.) This proves that Dr. Humes lied to both the Warren Commission in 1964 and CBS in 1967 when he said the measurements taken at the autopsy were used in the creation of the Rydberg drawings. In recent years, Rydberg has spoken to researchers and has acknowledged no measurements were used or provided. He’s also discussed the military order of silence he received which prevented him from discussing his drawings. (This order was rescinded by the HSCA.) In an article written by Barry Keane, Rydberg relates how, when he asked Dr. Boswell in May, 1968, for a recommendation, Boswell wrote back that he was “somewhat circumspect about putting anything in writing or discussing this due to continuing controversy”. The article also reproduces a letter of commendation written to Rydberg by his commanding officer John Stover for his creation of the drawings. It states: “The illustrations thus produced most accurately depicted the situation required.” That the Clark Panel measurements reflect a body as large as the one in the Rydberg drawings, approximately 50% larger than life, and that these mistakes make the single-bullet theory look feasible, should make one suspect that the members of the Clark Panel, as with the military doctors before them, were pressured by the Justice Department into supporting the single-bullet theory.
Researcher Harold Weisberg sure smelled a rat. He attempted to gain access to the working papers of the Clark Panel, and, after being told that the working papers had been destroyed, personally contacted the various members of the panel. In his book Post Mortem Weisberg includes a small section on his contacts with these men. He relates that Dr. Russell Fisher was clearly the leader and spokesman of the panel. Weisberg also tells us that Fisher, via private correspondence, admitted to having some doubts about the single bullet theory and that, in Fisher’s own words, “quite some time after the panel report had been submitted” he conducted tests on cadavers. Fisher related to Weisberg that this was “purely to satisfy my own interest,” and that he’d made no report. Fisher explained that these tests were to determine if it was even possible for a bullet to go through the neck as conjectured, and that afterward “we were convinced it was possible for a bullet tract to connect the entrance and exit wounds without being deflected by, or hitting the bony vertebrae.”
Fisher also told Weisberg that “The measurements…can be assumed to be accurate. They were measured by scale. We had photographs which showed a scale. We were able, therefore, to confirm the measurements…” As we’ve seen, however, Fisher’s assertion is incorrect. The Clark Panels’ measurements for the relative positions of the back wound and throat wound were embarrassingly inaccurate. The inaccuracy of these measurements, moreover, should make us question the accuracy of whatever tests Fisher performed on the entrance and exit wounds. Did he shoot the cadavers on a downward trajectory, as theorized in his report? If so, then he should have realized that the entrance wound was much higher than the actual entrance wound on Kennedy’s back. Or did he shoot his cadavers at the measured site of the bullet entrance on the back, in which case he knew that the part of his report confirming the downward trajectory in the neck was in error? Or was he just lying to Weisberg to get him off his back? Ironically, it’s to Fisher’s advantage that we think him simply a liar, for if he’d actually performed the tests he described to Weisberg and failed to realize his measurements regarding the back wound and throat wound were in error, he had no business conducting an autopsy, let alone writing a respected book on the subject.
A final point learned from Weisberg’s contact with Fisher
should come as no surprise. Fisher told
Weisberg that, when completed, the Clark Panel’s report ” was transmitted by Mr.
Bruce Bromley to Mr. Carl Eardley of
the Justice Department.” Eardley, of course, had previously worked with the autopsy doctors, and was the Justice Department's point man on the medical evidence.