by Peter Janney
As Lifton pointed out, there was a possibility that some—or all—of the president’s wounds had been tampered with prior to the arrival of his body at Bethesda. Indeed, the entry wound in the throat had been enlarged—obliterated, actually—by the time the Bethesda autopsy began at 8:15 P.M., and the posterior head wound had been dramatically enlarged to five times its original size, so that it encompassed not just the rear of the skull, as it had when first seen in Dallas, but the top and the right side as well, when examined at Bethesda. Lifton also presented persuasive evidence that Kennedy’s shipping casket arrived at Bethesda close to fifteen minutes prior to the official motorcade from Andrews Air Force Base carrying the bronze Dallas casket. This meant that the bronze Dallas casket seen by millions on television was empty when it was off-loaded from Air Force One at Andrews. In 1997, the ARRB obtained an official military report that verified, beyond all reasonable doubt, the earlier arrival of President Kennedy’s body at Bethesda, thus proving there had been a break in the chain of custody of the body, prior to the autopsy. ARRB staff member Douglas Horne, in his 2009 book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, using new evidence gleaned from the ARRB’s ten autopsy witnesses, provided confirmation of Lifton’s 1980 hypothesis that President Kennedy’s wounds had, in fact, been altered prior to the commencement of the 8:15 P.M. Bethesda autopsy.29
Both Douglas Horne and David Lifton agree today that the entry wound in President Kennedy’s throat was crudely tampered with in transit, prior to the body’s arrival at Bethesda. But whereas Lifton speculated in his book that Kennedy’s head wounds were surgically altered prior to arrival at Bethesda, Horne has presented a compelling case that postmortem surgery—forensic tampering—was actually performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital prior to the start of the official autopsy. All the facts point to the conclusion that evidence tampering of the most serious nature—the clandestine expansion of JFK’s head wound and the removal of evidence (bullet fragments and brain tissue)—was performed by Dr. James J. Humes, the lead Navy pathologist, as part of a Navy cover-up of the medical evidence, after President Kennedy’s body arrived at 6:35 P.M., and before the start of the official autopsy at 8:15. The autopsy photos and x-rays in the National Archives collection today, Horne has concluded, actually demonstrate the results of clandestine surgery performed by the Naval pathologist, not the damage caused by bullets in Dallas. This was, and remains, an intentional misrepresentation by the U.S. government.30
Horne and Lifton are also in agreement that the “best evidence”—the body of the deceased president—was surgically altered to (1) remove evidence prior to the autopsy, and (2) to radically change the appearance and size of both the head wound and the entry wound in the throat, so that they were much more compatible with the myth of one lone shooter firing from behind the motorcade. All evidence of frontal entry on President Kennedy’s body was surgically removed prior to the commencement of his autopsy.31 As of 2012, Douglas Horne and David Lifton have together established the clear-cut obstruction of justice that took place in the forensic alteration of President Kennedy’s wounds. No longer speculation, it is now an undeniable fact.
And that is why one problem in the immediate aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination wouldn’t go away—a piece of conspiracy evidence available to Mary Meyer and anyone else observing events unfolding in “real time” in the media. After the president had been declared dead, the two attending physicians in Dallas, Dr. Malcolm Perry and Dr. Kemp Clark, gave a short press conference. According to Tom Wicker of the New York Times, the two physicians described the president’s throat wound on the afternoon of the assassination: “Mr. Kennedy was hit by a bullet in the throat, just below the Adam’s apple,” they said. “This would have had the appearance of a bullet’s entry.”32 In fact, when Dr. Perry was asked by a reporter at the press conference immediately following the announcement of President Kennedy’s death, he confirmed this opinion—that President Kennedy’s throat wound was an entrance wound. If the government was about to declare that all shots came from behind the president, Dr. Perry was unknowingly, and indirectly, asserting there had been more than one shooter, again making the president’s assassination by definition a conspiracy.
Reporter: Where was the entrance wound?
Dr. Perry: There was an entrance wound in the neck. As regards the one
on the head, I cannot say.
Reporter: Which way was the bullet coming on the neck wound? At him?
Dr. Perry: It appeared to be coming at him.
Reporter: Doctor, describe the entrance wound. You think from the front in the throat?
Dr. Perry: The wound appeared to be an entrance wound in the front of
the throat; yes, that is correct. 33
That evening after the press conference, according to Audrey Bell, the nurse who had been the supervisor of the operating and recovery rooms at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dr. Perry was harassed by a barrage of telephone calls all through the night “from people at Bethesda Naval Hospital who were trying to get him to change his mind about the opinion he had expressed at the Parkland Memorial Hospital press conference the day before; namely, that President Kennedy had an entry wound in the front of his neck.” In an interview by ARRB members Douglas P. Horne and Jeremy Gunn on March 20, 1997, Audrey Bell confirmed her conversation with Dr. Perry when, on the morning of November 23, she had learned about the pressure he was being subjected to.34 The second conspiracy—the cover-up—had been under way immediately after the assassination.
During the months that followed, however, Dr. Perry did alter his conclusion, finally testifying before the Warren Commission that the throat wound “could be consistent with an exit wound.”35 The relentless pressure applied to Dr. Perry amounts to another “alteration” of evidence in an attempt to prove that the shooting came from behind the motorcade—that is, from Oswald—and not from sharpshooters positioned somewhere in front of the motorcade, likely behind the fence on the grassy knoll.
Nonetheless, long before the Warren Commission proceedings began, the theory of “throat wound as entrance wound” was gaining traction, as were some other anomalies. Mary Meyer’s access to Kenny O’Donnell shortly after the events in Dallas likely provoked her suspicion as well as horror, and his perspective had to have aroused her curiosity. O’Donnell had been a witness to the fact that the shots were fired from in front of the limousine, not from where Oswald was alleged to have been.
Before the end of the first month after the assassination, two articles appeared in national media outlets raising considerable doubt that there had been only one shooter. The first article, by attorney Mark Lane, was entitled “Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief;” the second, by history professor Staughton Lynd and Jack Minnis, was called “Seeds of Doubt: Some Questions about the Assassination.”36 Whether either of these articles were included among Mary’s “clippings of the JFK assassination” or not, it is quite likely that she would have come across them, as she would have been on the lookout for further validation of her growing suspicion concerning the treachery taking place in the cover-up.
Attorney Mark Lane’s article, “Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief,” was published in the left-leaning National Guardian on December 19. Lane had offered his feature gratis to any number of periodicals, including the New Republic Look, Life, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Progressive. No one would touch it. The New York Times, unwilling to muster any journalistic courage or integrity of its own, yet not wanting to be outdone, knowing what was coming, published a story about Lane’s National Guardian article the very same day it appeared, suggesting they had gone to the trouble of obtaining an advance copy.37 Lane’s article immediately ignited a firestorm of controversy, and its publication would become a defining moment in his career, setting the stage for an unrelenting pursuit that ultimately took him to a showdown at the doorsteps of the CIA in 1985. So many additional press runs of Lane’s article were needed to keep newsstands supplied, the Guardia
n editors eventually reprinted it as a special pamphlet. It was inconceivable that such an article—published within a month of events in Dallas—would have escaped Mary’s attention.
The then thirty-seven-year-old Mark Lane took no prisoners with his “Oswald Innocent? A Lawyer’s Brief.” Already, the New York Times on November 26 had published the text of Dallas district attorney Henry Wade’s press conference, given shortly after Oswald’s murder. Wade had presented fifteen assertions concerning the sole guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald. Lane scrutinized not only Wade’s assertions, but also the contrived narrative that was emerging. He challenged the government’s narrative and exposed its many inconsistencies and half-truths. Point by point, Lane rebutted every allegation that Wade had made about Oswald’s guilt, particularly those reprinted uncritically by the New York Times itself. Indeed, Wade’s remarks about Oswald were nothing but distorted half-truths that would not have stood up in any court proceeding. Charging, for example, that Oswald had murdered police officer J. D. Tippit before being arrested, Wade never reconciled the original statement of Dallas authorities that Tippit was shot in a movie theater, and their subsequent assertion that “he had been shot on a street,” only to then change it again by moving the murder to a different street.
Most notable was Lane’s forceful argument that President Kennedy’s throat wound was one of entrance, not exit:
A motion picture taken of the President just before, during and after the shooting, and demonstrated on television showed that the President was looking directly ahead when the first shot, which entered his throat, was fired. A series of still pictures taken from the motion picture and published in Life magazine on Nov. 29 show exactly the same situation. The Life pictures also reveal that the car carrying the President was well past the turn from Houston St. and a considerable distance past the [Texas School book] depository building. The Life estimate in an accompanying caption states that the car with the President was 75 yards past the sixth-floor window when the first shot was fired.38
Lane then reviewed five separate newspaper accounts, including the New York Times, that quoted the Parkland Memorial Hospital doctors who had examined Kennedy’s body—Dr. Kemp Clark, Dr. Malcolm Perry, and Dr. Robert McClelland—all of whom had described the throat wound as “an entrance wound.” In particular, Lane pointed out that Dr. McClelland, too, had been quoted as saying that he saw bullet wounds every day, “sometimes several a day. This [President Kennedy’s throat wound] did appear to be an entrance wound.”39
Finally, lambasting the media for the uncritical reporting that had convicted Oswald before any defense could be assembled and before the evidence had been properly examined, the outspoken young attorney was unequivocal about the implications of the falsehoods that were being concocted to prove Oswald’s guilt. “Let those who would deny a fair consideration of the evidence to Oswald because of a rage inspired, they say, by their devotion to the late President, ponder this thought,” Lane wrote. “If Oswald is innocent, then the assassin of President Kennedy is still at large.”40
Two days later, on December 21, the New Republic published an article entitled “Seeds of Doubt: Some Questions about the Assassination.” It was authored by Spelman College history professor Staughton Lynd, who would move to a position at Yale in 1964, and Jack Minnis, a graduate student in political science at Tulane University and the research director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Like Mark Lane’s article, this article in the liberal New Republic would articulate some of the bedrock questions about the assassination that would never be satisfactorily reconciled by the Warren Report and that persist to this day. This article, too, had likely captured Mary’s attention, coming immediately on the heels of the Lane exposé. Citing New York Times reporter Tom Wicker’s November 23 interview of the two Dallas attending physicians, the authors arrived at the same conclusion as Mark Lane regarding President Kennedy’s throat wound: It was an entrance wound, indicating that at least one shot had been fired from in front of the motorcade. Taken together, both articles articulated issues that ruled out the possibility that Oswald, or any one person alone, could have pulled off a feat of the magnitude that had occurred that day in Dallas.
Throughout his life, Mark Lane would valiantly continue to lead a crusade to obtain the truth about President Kennedy’s assassination. Immediately after Dallas, he founded the Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry. Speaking almost daily to the fact that there had been a conspiracy that was now being covered up, Lane even volunteered to defend the deceased Lee Harvey Oswald in front of the Warren Commission; however, the offer was rejected. Oswald’s mother, Marguerite Oswald, would retain Lane to defend her son’s reputation anyway. Lane’s books would eventually become international bestsellers—after Mary had been murdered. She would not live to finally witness attorney Mark Lane (Hunt v. Liberty Lobby) expose E. Howard Hunt on the witness stand in January 1985 for the pathological liar he was: Hunt had, in fact, been in Dallas on the day of the assassination, acting as one of the paymasters for the conspiracy. Leslie Armstrong, the jury’s forewoman, would state to the media in attendance immediately following the trial’s conclusion: “The evidence was clear. The CIA had killed President Kennedy, Hunt had been part of it, and that evidence so painstakingly presented, should now be examined by the relevant institutions of the United States government so that those responsible for the assassination might be brought to justice.”41
In Washington, the Post, as well as the rest of the national media, avoided the story about the jury’s verdict—a case in which the unanimous jury, on the basis of the evidence presented during the trial, had found the CIA’s role in the president’s assassination to be conclusive.
On December 22, an unusually newsworthy editorial appeared in the Washington Post, followed by a somewhat ominous event. President Harry Truman was the author of the editorial, “U.S. Should Hold CIA to Intelligence,” published in the morning edition of the Post, one month, to the day, after the assassination. Mary Meyer, who had a delivered-daily subscription to the Post, would have to have seen the Truman editorial that morning. It contained an eerie warning, even a kind of coded message for the most discerning. “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel we need to correct it,” concluded Truman at the end of his editorial. Suggesting something sinister, the former president regretted what he had given birth to in 1947:
For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.
That Truman was making such a statement exactly one month to the day after Dallas was astounding in and of itself. His warning was ominous. “But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered,” wrote the former president. “I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.” Like the slain president, who had intended to neuter the operational arm of the CIA after his reelection in 1964, President Truman had come to a similar conclusion about the Agency—and with good reason.42
According to veteran researcher and author Ray Marcus, the editorial appeared only in the first edition of the Post that morning. It was omitted from all subsequent editions that day. Who would have the decision to limit its publication? Moreover, the editorial was never picked up by any other media outlet, nor discussed by any other journalist, columnist, or broadcast commentator. It simply evaporated from the public landscape.
“I can’t read it any other way but [as] a warning by him [President Truman] that the CIA was involved in the [JFK] assassination,” said Marcus. “If that wasn’t what he meant, then I can’t imagine he would have written and/or rel
eased it then for fear of having it read that way.”43 Was Truman trying to alert the nation to the CIA’s involvement? Marcus came into possession of a draft of the editorial from the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum that was dated December 11, 1963. “To me, this further strengthens the already high probability that in warning of the Agency’s excesses he had the assassination in mind.”44 Marcus reiterated that same position in an interview for this book.45
Unknown to Mary, however, or anyone else at the time, was the fact that Allen Dulles, the former CIA director defrocked by President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs failure, undertook a personal covert operation of his own after the short-lived Truman editorial appeared. At the very first executive session of the Warren Commission on December 5, 1964, Allen Dulles had wasted no time, not only in establishing himself as the so-called intelligence expert, but also in immediately attempting to control and narrow the parameters of the entire inquiry. At that meeting, according to author Peter Dale Scott, the disgraced spymaster took it upon himself to give each member of the commission a copy of a book that argued that all American assassinations, unlike European ones, were the work of solitary, deranged, and disaffected gunmen, thereby using his influence to immediately discourage any real investigation into the possibility of conspiracy.46
Whatever the ordinary reader’s interpretation of Truman’s Washington Post editorial, Allen Dulles would clearly have understood the former president’s implicit message. Again, according to Ray Marcus and based on his research of documents at the Truman Library, Dulles traveled to President Truman’s home in Independence, Missouri, on April 17, 1964, using as a pretext for his visit a scheduled talk he was to give in Kansas City, Missouri, that evening. His real mission, however, was almost certainly to document that his meeting with Truman took place that day so that he could then fabricate a story that Truman had come to disavow his December 22 editorial in the Washington Post.47