The Second Oswald

by Richard Popkin

  Then, if we accept Knebel’s account, the doctors’ findings were altered or revised the next day. On the morning of the 24th, Dr. Humes reports that he burned “certain preliminary draft notes” (II:373 and XVII:48). These may have been the findings of November 22nd, saying much the same as the O’Neill-Sibert account. Dr. Humes says the undated “official” autopsy report was drafted on November 24th, and that he finished it just as he heard that Oswald had been shot. Is this later report based solely on inferences from a wound the doctors never saw, but only heard described on the telephone by Dr. Perry? It would do much to help stem criticism and speculation if the doctors would frankly and publicly discuss what happened, and if they would offer an explanation for the discrepancy between the reports of the FBI men and Secret Service men who were present at the autopsy and the findings presented in the final version of the autopsy report.

  In the August 1, 1966 issue of Greater Philadelphia Magazine, it is stated that Dr. Humes refuses to discuss the discrepancies. He is quoted as saying, “I’m not concerned with what was in the FBI report. We did our job and we signed the report and it was straightforward and unequivocal. We don’t feel we should discuss the matter any more. That is the position we are taking and that is the position we have been instructed to take by our superiors” (p. 1). If this is the case, the public should demand to know what superiors are involved, and why they want to prevent any elucidation of these apparent contradictions.

  In view of Knebel’s explanation—which seems to be the one that the Commission staff and at least one of the autopsy surgeons want to stick to—it is interesting that Knebel also indicates that the final autopsy report may be wrong. “The doctors may well have erred in their autopsy finding.” Erred concerning what? Perhaps concerning where the entrance wound was, or concerning the path of this first bullet? But just how or why they may have erred, and exactly when, remains a mystery that must be clarified. Their errors, if any, may be due to the fact that on Nov. 23rd, the doctors no longer had access to the X-rays and photographs. Hence, their deductions of the path of the bullet may have been based on inadequate data or on faulty memory. Knebel’s explanation, which the FBI seems willing to underwrite, indicates a high degree of incompetence on the FBI’s part.

  The FBI says its first reports “were merely to chart a course and were not designed to be conclusive” (Look). Does that mean they were supposed to be inaccurate? They were prepared at the request of the President to get the basic facts, at a time when the FBI was the only official investigative agency dealing with the case. The reports were considered to be of “principal importance” by the Warren Commission when it started out. And how can the FBI explain that after receiving the autopsy report on December 23 it still issued a supplemental report on January 13, 1964, containing supposedly false information on the most substantive question: Where did the first bullet hit Kennedy and where did this bullet go?

  The FBI has not as yet tried to explain why its report of January 13 contradicts the autopsy report. In the Los Angeles Times of May 30, 1966, Robert Donovan quotes an FBI spokesman as saying only that “the FBI was wrong when it said ‘there was no point of exit.’”

  “The FBI agents were not doctors, but were merely quoting doctors, the FBI spokesman said.”

  So it would seem that even when the FBI states bluntly that “X is the case,” this can be wrong, and only based on hearsay. This raises the problem of determining when the FBI is reliable. (Was it when it said Oswald was not an FBI agent?) How reliable are its many, many reports, in the twenty-six volumes? When is the FBI to be taken at its word? One can understand the willingness of all concerned to disavow the FBI reports of December 13, 1963, and January 9, 1964. The texts printed by Epstein hardly do credit to the FBI, since the reports are so rhetorical and tendentious, and are bound to prove an embarrassment now that they have been made public. But one would have assumed, or hoped, that the facts given in these most important initial documents in the investigation would have been correct.

  Three

  The Mystery of the Back Wound

  If the FBI reports are false, is the Commission position then defensible, in view of the FBI photos of Kennedy’s jacket and shirt published in Epstein’s book? Its one-bullet theory depends in part on this bullet following approximately the path described in the sketch in the Commission Exhibit 385, entering the back of Kennedy’s neck, and exiting at his throat on a downward path, then entering Connally’s back and exiting below the nipple, going through his wrist, and finally reaching his femur (Commission Exhibits 679-80 and 689. See Appendix II). But if Kennedy was shot in the back, then there is something basically wrong with the very possibility of the Commission theory. Further indication that he was shot in the back is provided by Secret Service Agent Hill, who was sent in after the autopsy to be a witness as to where the wounds were located on the President’s body. When he testified, he stated, “I saw an opening in the back about 6 inches ‘below the neckline to the right-hand side of the spinal column” (II: 143). A bullet traveling downward would have exited from the chest, where there was no wound, and would have struck Connally at too low a point to inflict the damage. So the FBI pictures of the President’s clothing become very significant, especially since the photos of the coat and the jacket shown in the Warren Commission’s Exhibits 393 and 394 are so badly reproduced that it is not possible to see where the holes are, though they are clearly described by both Specter and Dr. Humes as being “approximately 6 inches” below the collar (II: 365). Some of the comments on Epstein’s book by hostile critics who were associated with the Commission appear to concede that the FBI may have been right in locating the bullet in the back; and the FBI photographs definitely indicate that this was the case. Suggestions have appeared that Kennedy could have been bending over at the time, and so a bullet in his upper back could have exited from his throat (without hitting his chin??). But if this were so, the bullet would obviously have been too low to hit Connally where it did; and the Zapruder pictures clearly rule out the possibility that Kennedy was bending over at this time.

  The Detroit News, June 5, 1966, p. 22A, offers another possibility, that Kennedy’s coat was hiked up and bunched at the time. They offer a photo “taken just seconds before the first bullet.” The issue is of course the condition of his clothes at that very moment. Zapruder’s pictures don’t show this; and they portray only a front view of Kennedy.. However, if the jacket was bunched, it seems most unlikely that a bullet fired at neck level would leave only one hole in the jacket nearly six inches from the top of the collar. And even if it were somehow possible, this would still leave the problem of the shirt. Would a buttoned shirt hike and bunch in this manner, that is, rise in such a way that a point nearly six inches below the top of the collar would at that moment be at neck level, and not be doubled over?

  Dr. Humes tried to offer some possible explanations, although he had previously said that the holes in the clothing conform “quite well,” and that “the wounds or the defects in 393 and 394 (the shirt and the jacket) coincide virtually exactly with one another” (II:366), which should place the wound well into the back rather than in the neck. First Dr. Humes somewhat disowned the diagram No. 385, prepared at his instructions: “385 is a schematic representation, and the photographs would be more accurate as to the precise location” (II:366). But the photographs, of course, have never been seen by the Commission, the FBI, nor the public, nor even, as it turns out, by Dr. Humes himself or by his fellow autopsy surgeons, since the undeveloped negatives were given to (not seized by, as Lane suggests) the Secret Service.

  According to an article by Jacob Cohen in The Nation of July 11, several lawyers on the Commission staff stated in interviews that the photographs were “not published at Robert Kennedy’s request,” and Cohen speculates that if the Kennedy family “asked that this material be kept in the family, the Warren Commission might not have pressed to examine it”; it is not known whether or not the photos have ever, in fact, been
developed, and hence seen by anyone.

  Exhibit No. 385 was drawn, Humes said later on, to a certain extent from memory and to a certain extent from the written record (II:730). While indicating that No. 385 may not exactly represent the actual state of affairs, Dr. Humes also moved the clothing holes upwards by saying that the relation of the defects in the clothing to the wound on the body would depend upon how the clothes had hung on a person, and how that person was built physically. President Kennedy’s muscular condition, he argued, would have pushed the clothes higher on his body. (One assumes, however, that Kennedy could afford to have bought suits that fitted him to begin with; and it has been reported that he wore custom-made shirts that presumably fitted well.)

  Next Dr. Humes put forth the suggestion that Kennedy was raising his hand, and therefore was pulling his clothes still higher. All of this still seems insufficient to get a hole in the back to enter the neck. And, interestingly, Commission Exhibit No. 397 (XVII:45), an autopsy chart drawn up by Humes and Finck during the actual autopsy, shows the bullet well into the back, and not near the neck at all, a good six inches below the collar. But the measurements given on this chart locating the wound are identical with those Humes employed to describe a “low neck” wound (II: 361).

  Arlen Specter’s attempts to explain the difference between the FBI photographs and the Commission’s report are no more convincing than Dr. Humes’s. His statements on the matter in a recent interview with Joseph Fonzi in the Greater Philadelphia Magazine were confused and did not clarify matters:

  “Well,” said Specter, when asked about this in his City Hall office last month, “that difference is accounted for because the President was waving his arm.” He got up from his desk and attempted to have his explanation demonstrated. “Wave your arm a few times,” he said, “wave at the crowd. Well, see if the bullet goes in here, the jacket gets hunched up. If you take this point right here and then you strip the coat down, it comes out at a lower point. Well, not too much lower on your example, but the jacket rides up.”

  If the jacket were “hunched up,” wouldn’t there have been two holes as a result of the doubling over of the cloth?

  “No, not necessarily. It … it wouldn’t be doubled over. When you sit in the car it could be doubled over at most any point, but the probabilities are that … aaah … that it gets … that … aah … this … this is about the way a jacket rides up. You sit back … sit back now … all right now … if … usually, I had it, where your jacket sits … it’s not … it’s not … it but if you have a bullet hit you right about here, which is where I had it, where your jacket sits … it’s not … it’s not … it ordinarily doesn’t crease that far back.”

  What about the shirt?

  “Same thing.”

  So there is no real inconsistency between the Commission’s location of the wound and the holes in the clothing?

  “No, not at all. That gave us a lot of concern. First time we lined up the shirt … after all, we lined up the shirt … and the hole in the shirt is right about, right about the knot of the tie, came right about here in a slit in the front …”

  But where did it go in the back?

  “Well, the back hole, when the shirt is laid down, comes … aah … well, I forget exactly where it came, but it certainly wasn’t higher, enough higher to … aaah … understand the … aah … the angle of decline which …”

  Was it lower? Was it lower than the slit in the front?

  “Well, if you took the shirt without allowing for its being pulled up, that it would either have been in line or somewhat lower.”

  Somewhat lower?

  “Perhaps. I … I don’t want to say because I don’t really remember. I got to take a look at that shirt.”

  Even if one could somehow connect the holes in the jacket and the shirt with a wound in the neck (and I doubt it can be done), the original problem remains: the time interval on Zapruder’s pictures between Kennedy’s being wounded and Connally’s being hit. As we have seen, the Commission has to hold to the theory that the Governor was hit at the same time as the President, but that his reaction was delayed. The pictures, however, definitely show him without noticeable reaction when Kennedy had already been struck. Connally’s clear testimony is that he heard the first shot (and the bullet traveled much faster than the speed of sound), looked for its source to the right and to the left, and then was struck:

  We had just made the turn, well, when I heard what I thought was a shot. I heard this noise, which I immediately took to be a rifle shot. I instinctively turned to my right because the sound appeared to come from over my right shoulder, so I turned to look back over my right shoulder, and I saw nothing unusual except just people in the crowd, but I was interested, because once I heard the shot in my own mind I identified it as a rifle shot, and I immediately—the only thought that crossed my mind was that this is an assassination attempt. So I looked, failing to see him, I was turning to look back over my left shoulder into the back seat, but I never got that far in my turn. I got about in the position I am in now facing you, looking a little bit to the left of center, and then I felt like someone had hit me in the back (IV: 132).

  The Commission has to have Connally oblivious to the wounding for about a second, while he is looking, even though his fifth rib was smashed and his wrist shattered, and even though he stated positively that when hit he felt something slam into his back. Even Dr. Humes, who seems to be the apparent author of the one-bullet hypothesis and of the theory that Governor Connally had a delayed reaction to being shot, declared, “I am sure that he would have been aware that something happened to him” (II: 376). The problem of whether the Commission theory is at all possible first turns on whether Kennedy was hit in the neck or the back. The FBI and the Secret Service witnesses to the autopsy say that he was hit in the back; the final autopsy report and exhibit No. 385 put the wound in the neck. A couple of inches makes all the difference in whether the one-bullet hypothesis actually states a genuine possibility. A simple factual matter like this should be definitely ascertainable. But the Commission did not examine the photos or X-rays of the autopsy, and it remains unclear where these are now to be found. A report in the August 15 Newsweek stated that “the whereabouts of these photographs and X-rays remains one of Washington’s most puzzling mysteries. A diligent two-month inquiry … has failed to turn up a single government official who can, or will, give a simple answer to the question: ‘Where are the Kennedy autopsy photos?’” The article by Jacob Cohen in The Nation discusses in detail the mysterious fact that none of the interested parties ever saw these data. Instead the Commission makes bullet No. 399 the key. If the bullet fell out of Connally after traversing the two victims, then the Commission could claim, in seventeenth-century theological style, that if it happened, it must be possible.

  Four

  The Strange Career of Bullet Number 399

  Bullet No. 399 raises all sorts of problems. Medical experts in Dallas who had treated Governor Connally doubted that the same bullet had struck both the President and the Governor though they granted that it was theoretically possible. Two of the doctors who performed the autopsy on Kennedy held that No. 399 could not have done all of the damage to Governor Connally, let alone Kennedy.

  Dr. Humes said it was “most unlikely” (II:375-6), and Dr. Finck said it could not have done this (II:382). Both based their view on the fact that there are too many fragments in both Connally’s wrist and femur. Vincent Salandria, in The Minority of One, calculated that No. 399 may have lost only about 2.5 grains of its estimated original weight, while more than 3 grains of fragments were either still in Connally or had been recovered from his body. Some of the medical testimony concerning the fragments is contradictory, but Dr. Shaw, who operated on Governor Connally’s chest, was clear in stating that “… the examination of the wrist both by X-ray and at the time of surgery showed some fragments of metal that make it difficult to believe that the same missile could have caused these two wounds. There
seems to be more than three grains of metal missing … in the wrist” (IV: 113). And Dr. Gregory, who minimized the weight of the fragments still in the wrist, admitted that the largest fragment or fragments—“the major one or ones”—had been lost; therefore they could not be measured or weighed (IV: 123).

  It was not possible, in any case, to determine the exact original weight of bullet No. 399 before it was fired. In its present condition it weighs 158.6 grains. Similar 6.5 bullets had weights of around 160 and 161 grains. Since there are variations in weight among these bullets, Frazler testified that, “There did not necessarily have to be any weight loss to the bullet.” Further, the only place that he could suggest where any material at all could have come off the bullet was at the base of it, which is slightly flattened (III: 430). Neither Frazier nor the doctors seemed to think that any material had come off the top part of the bullet. Second, other bullets shot from Oswald’s rifle through any substance became mashed, unlike pristine No. 399, which is supposed to ‘have gone through two human bodies, and have smashed Connally’s rib, wrist, and entered his femur. Commission Exhibit 858 (XVII:851), a photograph taken during tests sponsored by the Commission, shows a bullet fired from Oswald’s gun through a skull filled with gelatin. The bullet is quite distorted.

  There is no evidence that the Commission could obtain anything like pristine No. 399 in any of its tests—except when it was trying to obtain bullets for comparison purposes, probably by firing into cotton wool, or some such material. Commission Exhibit No. 572 shows two nearly perfect bullets, obtained by FBI expert Robert Frazier for comparison with No. 399 and with the two fragments found in the car.

  Incidentally, Specter’s attempts to explain the undamaged condition of bullet No. 399 in the Greater Philadelphia Magazine are no more convincing than his comments on the FBI photos: How then had 399 emerged unscathed?