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 evidence.  Let’s begin by examining the movement of the President’s wounds.  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, almost four months later, however, the autopsy doctors, Dr. Boswell, Dr. Humes, 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 to represent the President’s wounds. These drawings were created largely from memory, as the doctors were not allowed access to the autopsy photos.  They were not even given access to the face sheet for comparison. In fact, Dr. Humes expressed considerable doubt as to the accuracy of these drawings and admitted in his testimony that the drawings were in part “schematic” and imprecise, and suggested that the autopsy photos themselves would demonstrate the wounds more clearly.  His use of the word “schematic” was no mistake.  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 depicts the location of the wounds necessary for the bullet entering the back wound to exit from the throat, one of them depicts the position of the President’s head necessary for a bullet to connect the President’s head wounds in a straight line from above and behind, 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.  In fact, researchers have found that when people are asked to make schematics representing theories, it distorts their memories of the events depicted. This would make the admissibility of these drawings doubtful in a modern courtroom, and their mere creation possible grounds for a mistrial.  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,” 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. (As will be demonstrated later.) 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 back wound on the face sheet and the back wound on the Rydberg drawing are several inches apart. To many 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 would follow then that if he were the shooter the President’s back wound would be at a higher point on his body than the purported exit in his throat.  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, the location of this wound is doubly important  This movement of the back wound upwards on the drawings thus 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.  If one looks at the face sheet and compares it to the HSCA’s depiction of the wounds, which were based upon the autopsy photos, one can see that the placement of the back wound is consistent when compared to the point where the arm connects to the shoulder, and that it is the body shapes themselves that lead to the distortion. The face sheet outline distorts the neck region to such an extent in fact that a placement of a wound in this area can be true to the shoulder or true to the skull, but not both.  Since President Kennedy’s back wound was measured from both his skull and from his shoulder it only makes sense then that Dr. Boswell was forced to choose, and on the night of the autopsy chose to make his drawing true to the shoulder position.  Much confusion has stemmed from this decision. 

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 televised press conference.

The next day, however, after talking to Dr. Perry, and realizing a tracheotomy incision had obscured this throat wound, Dr. Humes concluded that the bullet penetrating the President’s back had in fact slipped between his back muscles, and 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 training 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, fortunately, helps us understand that Dr. Humes was trying to match the wounds to the shots, rather than the other way around. This prevented Humes from concluding that 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 to the assassination.  It was 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 there were two shots, period. Unfortunately, a deduction such as this can lead to memory distortion.  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 logical therefore to presume that Dr. Humes’ and Dr. Boswell’s attempt to determine if a wound on the back could connect to a wound in the throat led to their imagining where such a wound might be located, and that this imagined location came to replace their memory of the wounds’ actual location.  If their memories were tainted the taint may have even preceded their involvement with 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.  It seems clear the Rydberg drawings’ depiction of the back wound above the throat wound was just the “help” he was looking for. This does not mean the drawings were deliberate lies, however.  As mentioned, Dr. Humes testified the drawings were schematic and that he had doubts about their accuracy.   In an April 30th executive session, moreover, Counsel Rankin himself requested that Dr. Humes be allowed to examine the autopsy photos and compare them to the Rydberg drawings.  This request 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 was about to take place, the inspection never did take place, due to the admitted interference of Chief Justice Earl Warren.

The belief that the doctors, 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 both his fellow commissioners and the public. (Warren's decision not to publish 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 not that credible. 

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, 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 to 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; 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 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.  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.” These words are 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 manipulated into appearing as one.

Subsequent to my initial presentation, 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.  But how could this be? And 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.” Really? Which photographs? And why no mention of the Rydberg drawings?

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 Connnally’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 only 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. But they were not. The bruised strap muscles which helped lead the doctors to change their interpretation 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. In fact, when discussing the entrance on Kennedy's neck/back, he specifically ruled out making such a discovery. 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."

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, as well. For one, Specter used Connally’s actual jacket in the re-enactment in order to establish the entrance location on his back, but, as demonstrated in the photos above, disregarded the location of the entrance on Kennedy’s clothes when it became clear his proposed trajectory only “approximated” the location of this entrance. This allowed him to assume his own point of entry, based upon his subjective (and, as it turned out, liquid) impression of the bullet entrance. Also suspicious is that there was no effort by the FBI 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 Specter was only measuring the vertical trajectory, and could easily have placed the rod to the side of the stand-in should he actually have wished to do so.)

 

Clothing Comparison 

While Gerald Ford's words were, 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 "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. Within a few years of the Warren Report, 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. They’d also examined 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 already stated, 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. An 11-27-66 L.A. Times article based on a discussion between Warren Commission counsel Joseph Ball and Wesley Liebeler with Warren Commission critics Edward Epstein and Mark Lane, reveals that Liebeler took his cue from Specter, and reverted to the bunching argument. He hung himself in the process, however. 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, this of course is preposterous. Lift your elbow from your side and see if the clothing overlaying the middle of your back jumps 2 1/2 inches. But it is also 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. 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 back. As a result, we can only conclude that Liebeler, as Warren and Specter before him, 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.

(Intriguingly, a 1977 deposition in a civil suit brought against the government by researcher Harold Weisberg reveals that the FBI's chief re-enactor Lyndal Shaneyfelt testified that both the "President's coat and Connally's coat" were used during the May 24, 1964 re-enactment. This, when added to Thomas Kelley's June 4, 1964 testimony that the chalk mark location on the back of the presidential stand-in during the re-enactment was not only determined by examining CE 386 (a lie) but by "an examination of the coat which the President was wearing at the time," suggests that Kennedy's coat was right there for Specter to look at, and double-check against his trajectory. If so, his failure to realize that his "hunching theory" was full of holes, and was just a dumb "hunch," is more than suspicious.)

Ultimately, when the HSCA released their drawings of the President’s wounds, they acknowledged that the amount of “hunching” of the President’s clothes was minimal, and that the back wound was in fact two inches lower than in the Rydberg drawings.  While this still left the hole in the clothes a bit lower than the entrance location on the back, this could be explained by the fact that a man’s shoulders are curved slightly outwards from his neck, so that a piece of material 5 inches below the collar on a hanger would be perhaps 4 vertical inches below the collar on a back.  Still, I’m not aware of Mr. Specter or any of the doctors ever apologizing for the confusion they created by attributing the difference in the entrance locations to “hunching” or “bunching.”  As far as can be determined, he has never admitted that the critics were right on this very important point.  It is this lack of humility on the part of Mr. Specter and other defenders of the Warren Report that has disturbed so many for so long.



 Boswell's Anatomy

When one looks at the various face sheets marked by Dr. Boswell over the years, it becomes clear that the fragility of human memory has played a role in the movement of the wounds. In Dr. Boswell’s case, his memory of Kennedy’s wounds and understanding of the face sheet have seemingly changed with the weather, weather that was related, in no small part, to the political climate.  As we’ve discussed, it seems logical that on the night of the autopsy he placed the wound on the face sheet based upon the President’s skeletal structure.  Sure enough, 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).  This is in keeping with the autopsy measurements. In November, 1966, however, after writers 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 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 we might gather that Boswell was remembering things backwards, that is, 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 accusations that he'd been part of a conspiracy had taken their toll on Dr. Boswell and his memories had blurred 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.  Either that or he was lying.

Dr. Boswell’s ARRB testimony in 1996 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, T2, even lower than the HSCA’s placement of the wound at T1.  A liar would simply have argued that the photograph distorted the wound’s actual position.

That Dr. Boswell was remembering things backwards in ’96, however, does not rule out that he was pressured into changing his understanding of the face sheet in ’66. As there was a military order of silence placed on all the doctors, his interviews with the Baltimore Sun and other papers would have to have received approval from the Justice Department, which would undoubtedly have expected him to confirm the findings of the Warren Commission. It’s no surprise then that an 11-25-66 article by Peter Kihss of the New York Times quotes 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. 

The political importance of Boswell’s statements, and a possible motive for him to lie, was made crystal clear in an 11-24-66 AP article by Jack Miller.  Miller wrote “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 (the autopsy face sheet) 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.” 

How convenient then for the Warren Commission and the Johnson Administration that Boswell concluded the bullet wound in the photo of Kennedy's backside was “in the neck” and that the location of this wound left “absolutely no doubt” about the single-bullet theory!!!

Especially when, as admitted by Boswell to the ARRB, these very photos proved beyond all doubt that the wound in question was NOT "in the neck"!

 

Dox Back Wound/Fox Autopsy Photo Comparison     

Confirmation that Boswell lied to the press in 1966, the Rydberg drawings were in error, and the Warren Commission was mistaken about the size and location of the back wound came when the HSCA released an artist rendering of the autopsy photo, along with a blow-up of the wound taken from the actual photo.  Since the back wound drawing is almost an exact likeness of an alleged autopsy photo first printed by writer David Lifton, 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 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 was also transposed to be 6mm wide by 15mm long, and since the re-interpretation of these wounds’ measurements was helpful in convincing the American people that the shots came from above, one might rightly wonder if the transposition of these wounds 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 Secret Service records have been available for years which show that James Fox was indeed 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 photographs 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 possible he was thinking of the Rydberg drawings, which were in color and depicted the wounds as described. Ball was 73 at the time of this article. Supporting that Ball’s memory was slipping in 1975 (or that he was a big fat liar) 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. 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. 

The much greater possibility remains, however, that Jenner lied to the Associated Press for their 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

As discussed, by mid-1966, the critics of the Warren Report were making an impact on the public and politically embarrassing the Johnson Administration. From this, it became politically expedient for the Johnson Administration to have the men who performed the autopsy verify that the photos and x-rays taken at the autopsy supported the exhibits used by the Warren Commission. But there was a problem: the materials had inexplicably been given to the Kennedy family in 1965. Needless to say, negotiations began for their return. Following these negotiations, 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 thought untrue. After this inspection, and just in time for the 3rd anniversary of the assassination, Dr. Boswell made statements to the press claiming that the photos and x-rays supported the findings of the Warren Commission. 

Not quite satisfied, however, 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 made clear 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 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 Dr. Finck received a phone call only six days later telling him to come to Washington and conduct the examination proposed by Midgley therefore 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.”  (Another mis-statement or lie.  As Warren’s memoirs admit, 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 Warren did inspect them alone. This suggests that McCloy knew all along that Warren saw the photos and that McCloy flat out lied to CBS 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 acknowledges he used the Garrison case 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 and made comments indicating that President Johnson himself was involved.  It only makes sense from this that the President, whether he was involved in the assassination or not, would want to know just what the photos showed.  Another possible factor 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.

  • The Clark Panel concluded that the back wound "lies approximately 5.5 cm below a transverse fold in the skin of the neck." They 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.
  • The Clark Panel concluded 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. 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.