Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  As with all criminal homicides, the first area of inquiry is the autopsy of the victim, the coroner usually being one of the first witnesses the prosecutor calls to the stand in a criminal trial.

  President Kennedy’s Autopsy and the Gunshot Wounds to Kennedy and Governor Connally

  In nearly every criminal investigation, something goes wrong—sometimes terribly wrong. The one phase of the Kennedy investigation that most experts agree was decidedly botched was the autopsy, a conclusion I do not completely agree with, particularly in view of the circumstances surrounding the autopsy. In any event, the main conclusion of the autopsy—that two shots hit the president from the rear—remains unassailable to this day. It is here that our exploration of the physical evidence in the murder of President Kennedy begins.

  The forensic pathology panel of the HSCA (one of several panels of the HSCA that reinvestigated the assassination) noted that John F. Kennedy was the fourth American president to be assassinated. In each of the four cases, pathologists performed an autopsy to determine the cause of death and the nature of the injuries. “It is quite remarkable,” the panel reported in classic understatement, “that despite major advances in medical technology, the autopsy of President Kennedy created more controversy than that of any of the others.”1 Dr. Michael Baden, chairman of the panel, put it more bluntly in his 1989 book, Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner: “Where bungled autopsies are concerned,” he wrote, “President Kennedy’s is the exemplar.”2

  In its 1978 critique of the president’s autopsy, the forensic pathology panel (often referred to as the medical panel) concluded that the three pathologists who performed the postmortem examination committed a number of procedural errors resulting in an incomplete autopsy. The failings, it said, were extensive. In a considerably overstated indictment, the panel stated that the autopsy pathologists didn’t confer with the Parkland Hospital doctors prior to their examination of the president’s body; failed to examine the president’s clothing, which could have provided clues about the direction of the shots (the autopsy surgeons did attempt to examine the clothing, but the clothing was not available [see later text]); failed to determine the precise exit point of the bullet causing the head wound (something the HSCA itself, after the benefit of hundreds of hours of study, was unable to do with 100 percent certainty); didn’t dissect the back and neck, and didn’t determine the angles of the bullet tracks through the body relative to the body axis, which would have aided in determining the source of the gunfire (there was pressure from the president’s family to keep dissection and hence mutilation of the president’s body to a minimum, but the surgeons did determine that both bullets were fired on a downward angle); didn’t have proper photographs taken (this is a gross exaggeration and probably untrue); and failed to properly examine and section the brain, which would have irrefutably established the path of the bullet (this was not done out of deference to the president’s family, which wanted to bury the brain with the body; however, some very limited sectioning was done).

  The HSCA panel further said that the autopsy report itself (known technically as the autopsy protocol) was equally incomplete and inaccurate in a number of areas: The location of the entrance wound to the head was incorrectly described; the location of the entrance wound in the upper back and exit wound in the throat were not referenced to fixed body landmarks to permit a precise trajectory reconstruction;* the neck areas, which were not dissected, were not described; the report didn’t mention that the pathologists, during the autopsy itself, failed to detect the presence of an exit wound in the throat (a strange objection in that the main failure was to detect the exit wound—perfectly understandable because it was obstructed by the tracheotomy—not the failure to mention in their report that they didn’t discern this until after the autopsy); and there wasn’t any description of the adrenal glands or other organs (hardly critical, and the abdominal organs were described).3

  The question that presents itself is how this critique of the autopsy, which misled its readers into believing that the autopsy was conducted by rank amateurs, made it through all the HSCA’s pathologists and lawyers who worked on or looked at it and was permitted to see the light of day.

  Few, if any, of these procedures neglected by the autopsy surgeons would have been overlooked in a standard medicolegal autopsy,† but as we’ve seen, the circumstances surrounding this autopsy were anything but typical.

  The admittedly less-than-perfect autopsy performed at Bethesda that night, which Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg cried was “unworthy of a Bowery bum,”4 has fueled skepticism about the president’s death for over four decades. The 1978 HSCA forensic panel fixed most of the blame on the three pathologists who, in its view, weren’t qualified to perform a forensic autopsy.

  Dr. James J. Humes, the senior pathologist and director of laboratories at the Naval Medical School at Bethesda, was the chief autopsy surgeon. Although Humes was board-certified in clinical and anatomic pathology, the panel noted that his training in forensic pathology was limited to a course “at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology,” and although Humes had conducted upward of a thousand autopsies, they overwhelmingly involved deaths from natural causes, not deaths from violence, accidents, or suicides.5 Dr. Milton Helpern, one of New York City’s leading forensic pathologists, though having a point to make, made himself look far sillier than Humes looked incompetent by saying that selecting Humes (who, as we’ve already seen, was board-certified in anatomic pathology and was the senior pathologist at Bethesda) to perform a medicolegal autopsy was “like sending a seven-year-old boy who has taken three lessons on the violin over to the New York Philharmonic and expecting him to perform a Tchaikovsky symphony. He knows how to hold the violin and bow, but he has a long way to go before he can make music.”6

  Actually, neither the HSCA forensic panel nor Dr. Helpern were being completely accurate regarding Dr. Humes’s experience with gunshot wounds. A 1992 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), based on an interview with Dr. Humes, mentions that by 1963 he “had performed several autopsies on military personnel killed by gunshot wounds.”7 Asked about the article during his February 13, 1996, deposition before the Assassination Records Review Board (hereinafter “ARRB”) and whether the statement was true, Humes testified, “Yes.”

  Question: “When did you conduct the autopsies for gunshot wounds?”

  Humes: “Well, ones that stand out in my mind, two were in Tripler Army Hospital in Hawaii. The truth of it, I can’t recall…where else. In San Diego, we did 800 autopsies a year. It’s really kind of hard for me to specifically recall the details of many of those. I never held myself forth as an expert in gunshot wounds. That’s why I called Pierre Finck, who was an expert.”

  Question: “Had you had experience with gunshot wounds prior to 1963?”

  Humes: “Yes.”

  Question: “And those were, as best you recall now, at Tripler Hospital in Hawaii?”

  Humes: “Yes.”

  Question: “And in San Diego?”

  Humes: “Possibly San Diego.”

  8 J. Thornton Boswell, the chief of pathology at the Naval Medical School who assisted Humes, was board-certified in clinical and pathological anatomy but was not trained in forensic pathology either.9 The autopsy team fortunately included Dr. Pierre A. Finck, who had been a board-certified forensic pathologist since 1961, although the HSCA panel concluded that Humes would have been better served by a forensic pathologist who was “engaged in the full-time practice of forensic pathology, not merely in a consulting or review capacity,” which was the current situation with Dr. Finck.10 At the time of the autopsy, Finck was chief of the Wound Ballistics Pathology Branch of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, where he had been since he received his board certification as a forensic pathologist in 1961. During that time he had reviewed over four hundred armed forces and civilian autopsy cases, many of them involving bullet wounds. Between 1955 and 1958, several
years before the president’s autopsy, Finck had personally performed approximately two hundred autopsies, many of them pertaining to trauma, including bullet wounds, as pathologist at the U.S. Army Hospital in Frankfort, Germany.11

  While conspiracy theorists roundly agree with Dr. Helpern and the HSCA’s assessment of the autopsy pathologists’ relative inadequacies to conduct a forensic examination, the critics most hotly contended argument is that the autopsy was incomplete, largely owing to orders from the military, the Kennedy family, or both. The allegation that the military controlled the autopsy stems from a comment made by Dr. Finck during cross-examination at the 1969 trial in New Orleans of businessman Clay Shaw for Kennedy’s murder. When asked if Humes was “running the show,” Finck replied, “Well, I heard Dr. Humes stating that—he said, ‘Who is in charge here?’ and I heard an army general, I don’t remember his name, stating, ‘I am.’”12 Oliver Stone’s largely fictional (see conspiracy section) film JFK, which alleged that the military-industrial complex was behind Kennedy’s murder, included this scene in the movie, and conspiracy theorists have taken this to mean, and have reported in countless books and articles, that an unidentified army general was directing the autopsy. However (and naturally, the conspiracy theorists don’t put this in their books), when Finck was asked to give “the name of the general that was in charge of the autopsy,” he quickly responded, “There was no general in charge of the autopsy.” Finck went on to say that the general’s statement “may have been pertaining to operations other than the autopsy. It does not mean the army general was in charge of the autopsy…And by ‘operations,’ I mean the over-all supervision.” That Finck (and unquestionably the general who made the remark) was making this distinction was corroborated by the fact that elsewhere in his testimony Finck said, “There were several people in charge. There were several admirals, and, as I recall, the adjutant general of the navy.”13

  Consistent with the practice of conspiracy theorists knowingly omitting and citing material out of context, the conspiracy authors of the book Trauma Room One do not tell their readers about Finck’s clarifying the implications of the remark made by an army general, instead referring to “Finck’s astounding claim that a non-physician was calling the shots” at the autopsy, thereby totally misleading their readers on this point. Likewise, the authors quote Finck as testifying at the Shaw trial, “There were admirals, and when you are a lieutenant colonel in the Army [referring to himself] you just follow orders,” to further support their thesis that the military was in charge of the autopsy, and Finck “was out of his league and out of his element.”14 But they don’t tell their readers that immediately after the words “you just follow orders,” Finck said, “And at the end of the autopsy we were specifically told…by Admiral Kenney, the Surgeon General of the Navy,…not to discuss the case,” a reference that had nothing to do with the conduct of the autopsy.15

  Just who were the generals and admirals at the autopsy? According to conspiracists, there were a considerable number, many of whom were unknown, and among whom were members of the conspiracy to murder Kennedy who were now attending the autopsy to begin the cover-up. But let’s look at them, since we know exactly who they are. During the autopsy, FBI special agents Francis X. O’Neill Jr. and James W. Sibert recorded the names of all those present, including the admirals and generals, of whom there were only four. In addition to their report, which identifies them,16 listen to what O’Neill said in an October 12, 2001 interview: “There was the commanding officer of the hospital [Admiral Calvin B. Galloway]. There was a rear admiral [Admiral George C. Burkley, the president’s personal physician]. There was a General Godfrey McHugh, who was on the airplane with Kennedy and was his military attaché; he was a one-star general. And there was a Major General Philip Wehle [commanding officer of the U.S. Military District, Washington, D.C.] who tried to enter and I kicked him out and he came back and told me he was there to get another casket because the other one was broken. There was no one else.”17 If someone can find a likely conspirator in this group who was covering up the assassination, please let me know.

  Bethesda medical corpsman Paul Kelley O’Connor told an interviewer that he remembers the “I am” coming “from the area of Admiral Burkley.”

  Question: “So you think Admiral Burkley is the one who said, ‘I’m in charge’?”

  “Yes.”18

  Dr. Humes told JAMA in 1992, “I was in charge from start to finish and there was no [military] interference—zero…Nobody made any decision in the morgue except me. Nobody…influenced me in any way, shape, or form.”19 Dr. Finck agreed. “I will repeat this. There was no military interference with the autopsy. There were many people in the morgue—all very upset—and this made it difficult for us. But there was no military interference.”20*

  Although the military did not interfere with the autopsy, it is clear that the Kennedy family did. FBI agent Francis O’Neill wrote that as he understood it, “Mrs. Jackie Kennedy gave permission for a partial autopsy and Dr. George Burkley, the president’s personal physician, reiterated her remarks,” and that “there was no question that Burkley was conveying the wishes of the Kennedy family.”21 The family’s request for a “partial autopsy” was not, however, an attempt to circumvent the investigation, as some have claimed. Dr. Humes explained to the HSCA that “initially, Admiral Burkley said that they had caught Oswald and that they needed the bullet to complete the case, and we were told initially that’s what we should do,…find the bullet.”22 Dr. Boswell reported much the same thing, that Dr. Burkley said the police had “captured the guy who did this, all we need is the bullet.” Boswell added that they argued with Burkley, saying the autopsy must be “complete and thorough.”23 Autopsy photographer John T. Stringer Jr. reported that Dr. Burkley urged that they “shouldn’t do a complete one if [they] didn’t have to.”24 The issue was expediency, not the suppression of facts. This is underscored by the testimony of Dr. Humes, who said in 1996 that Burkley’s “main concern was let’s get this over with as fast as we could…[But] we had big problems, and we couldn’t get it over with as fast as he would have liked it to have been completed.”25

  The deadlock over whether there would be a complete or a partial autopsy was broken by the commander of the National Naval Medical Center, Rear Admiral C. B. Galloway, who ordered a “complete autopsy” after checking with the FBI and Secret Service agents in attendance.26 No doubt, the FBI and Secret Service were, at that point, more interested in the criminal aspects of the case than the feelings of the Kennedy family. So ironically, rather than the military suppressing and controlling the autopsy, as conspiracy theorists have claimed and filmmaker Oliver Stone’s movie JFK shows, it was the military who was responsible for ordering a complete autopsy against the personal wishes of the Kennedy family, who had hoped to expedite the process.

  Although Admiral Galloway had ordered a complete autopsy, U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Godfrey T. McHugh, an aide to President Kennedy who was present throughout the autopsy and embalming procedure, told the HSCA that Attorney General Robert Kennedy and presidential friend and aide Kenny O’Donnell frequently telephoned him from the seventeenth floor of the naval hospital, where Jackie and other members of the Kennedy family were waiting, asking about the autopsy results and why it was taking so long. They also kept emphasizing the need for “speed and efficiency.” McHugh said that he related this information to the pathologists, never implying that they should limit the autopsy.27 Autopsy photographer John Stringer confirmed that while McHugh was emotional, he did not issue any orders.28 While he may not have meant to, McHugh’s remarks certainly caused undo anxiety for the pathologists. Humes told the HSCA, “There was no question but we were being urged to expedite this examination as quickly as possible, that members of the president’s family were in the building, that they had refused to leave the premises until the president’s body was ready to be moved, and similar remarks of that vein, which we made every effort to put aside [so we could] appro
ach this investigation in as scientific a manner as we could. But did it harass us and cause difficulty. Of course it did, how could it not?”

  Boswell added, however, “I don’t think it interfered with the manner in which we did the autopsy.”

  Humes: “I don’t either.”29

  The proof that the autopsy was not conducted quickly and therefore superficially is that it lasted at least three hours. I say “at least” because although Dr. Humes testified it started at 8:00 p.m. and ended at 11:00 p.m., later in his testimony he said that three pieces of bone were brought to the autopsy room by the FBI “later on that evening or very early the next morning while we were all still engaged” in conducting the autopsy.30 So the autopsy could have lasted over four hours. Dr. Michael Baden told me that a typical forensic autopsy, in which the clothing would also be examined (here, as indicated, it was not available for examination), and involving two gunshot wounds “would take four to five hours.” But Baden hastened to add that an autopsy of the president “could be expected to take all day, eight hours.”31

  One of the problems slowing up the autopsy was gaining access to the president’s adrenal glands, which could not be reached through an opening in the chest cavity, necessitating going in through the abdomen. The president’s adrenal glands have long been a focal point of the conspiracy theorists’ interest. One of the well-kept secrets about President Kennedy’s medical history during his lifetime was that he was being treated for Addison’s disease, an insufficiency of hormonal secretions by the adrenal glands, which, if left untreated, can be fatal. The treatment in the early 1960s was to supplement the lack of adrenal secretions with the drug cortisone, which allowed many of those afflicted to lead relatively normal lives.32 Although word of the president’s condition had circulated during the 1960 presidential campaign (the charge was that having Addison’s disease made him physically unfit for the presidency), it was never publicly confirmed or documented until 1967, when Dr. John Nichols of Kansas deduced circumstantially that case number 3, referred to in a 1955 American Medical Association Archives of Surgery article involving a thirty-seven-year-old man with a seven-year history of well-documented and therapeutically controlled Addison’s disease who had undergone major back surgery on October 21, 1954, at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, was in fact John F. Kennedy. Dr. Nichols offered as evidence reports in the New York Times of October 11 and 21, 1954, and February 26, 1955, but he stopped short of claiming confirmation, calling his deduction “strongly presumed.”33