by Barry Ernest
I was proud of my article (it was the first to discuss the head-snap in detail)8 but then decided to pack up my set of the twenty-six volumes and do no further work on the Kennedy assassination. Why? Because I did not see anything more that an ordinary citizen without police powers could do—there seemed no way to “break through” and get to the bottom of the crime. But then, shortly after returning to my studies, in the fall term of 1966, I made a rather astonishing discovery, which brings me back to the Kennedy head-snap, which Barry talks about in his book and which dominated my thinking when I wrote the Ramparts article.
I was convinced that the backward motion of President Kennedy’s head indicated the fatal shot had been fired from the front. But the scientific examination of the president’s body (and his wounds) conducted at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the night of November 22, 1963, reported that the president had been struck in the head from behind, and only from behind. Indeed, the Bethesda autopsy was quite clear on that point: there were no entry wounds on the front of the body, and no exit wounds on the rear.
Focusing on the fatal shot, the situation was simply this: if the autopsy could be relied upon, President Kennedy had been shot in the head from behind; but if the backward snap of Kennedy’s head on the Zapruder filmed were considered to be the primary evidence, then he had been struck from the front. In the fall of 1966, I struggled with this “contradiction,” persuaded not only that the president was struck from the front but, in addition, that the autopsy doctors must have lied.
There seemed no other way to resolve this apparent inconsistency in the evidence. Furthermore, I no longer gave the Warren Report much credibility, because not only had the Commission not addressed the backward motion of Kennedy’s head, it was a fact that the chief autopsy surgeon, Cmdr. James Humes, had burned his original autopsy notes9 and, in addition, testified that he had burned an earlier draft of the autopsy report. And the Warren Commission attorney who conducted his interrogation (the late Arlen Specter, who went on to become Senator Specter) did not even ask why!
During this period, I had made the acquaintance of UCLA law professor Wesley Liebeler, who had been one of the approximately fourteen assistant counsels on the Warren Commission. We had a number of meetings in his office at the UCLA Law School, and he asked me to attend a law seminar he was teaching on the Commission. We frequently debated this point: had Commander Humes lied? And wasn’t that what the Zapruder film head-snap was really all about? Wasn’t that the ultimate proof that the autopsy doctors had deliberately falsified their report and lied—under oath—about the wounds?
Professor Liebeler said no. He was adamant that, regardless of the deficiencies of the Bethesda autopsy, the two naval doctors—both pathologists—as well as the army colonel (Lt. Col. Pierre Finck, from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at nearby Walter Reed Army Hospital) would not (and could not) have lied about so basic a matter as the direction of the shot that struck President Kennedy’s head. Liebeler believed this to be the case not only on the grounds of what he (apparently) viewed as common sense but also because the doctors could not be certain that the Warren Commission would not subpoena the autopsy photographs. And if the photographs showed that Kennedy had been shot from the front, the doctors could be indicted for perjury, obstruction of justice, and much else besides.
For a while, our debate centered on this issue and the integrity of the doctors. But then a paradigm shift occurred, and the debate turned to what I shall call, for want of a better term, “the integrity of the body”—that is, the president’s body.
The President’s Body as “Best Evidence”
In attempting to resolve this matter, I had an insight: that the doctors would not have to lie about the direction of the shots if someone had altered the president’s wounds prior to autopsy. After all, the primary “evidence” was not the handwritten or even the typewritten autopsy report. The primary evidence was the body of the president! (It was the body, after all, that “contained” the wounds.)
So rather than postulate that the doctors had lied to the Warren Commission, suppose the president’s wounds had been altered? Suppose the president’s body, at the time of autopsy, was tantamount to a medical forgery? Suppose the body had lied to the doctors?
I had never thought of the problem in just those terms—that the primary evidence was “the body” and that the examining doctors were simply providing a written description of that evidence, i.e., what the president’s body “looked like” (what wounds it contained) at the time of their examination. But that’s all the autopsy report really was in this case: a description of President Kennedy’s body some six and a half hours after his murder.10
So late on Saturday night, October 22, 1966, I began to think of the problem in just that way. Focused on this apparent contradiction between the backward snap of Kennedy’s head and the Bethesda autopsy conclusion that the shot came from the rear, I started to question a basic assumption that I (and others) had been making: that the president’s body was in the same condition (at autopsy) as it was six hours earlier (in Dallas) at the time of the pronouncement of death. I constructed a chronology of the movements of President Kennedy’s body—from the moment of the fatal shooting in Dallas and the subsequent pronouncement of death at Parkland Hospital up till the time the body was brought to the Bethesda morgue, some six hours later and 1,500 miles away. At that time, Oswald was in the custody of the Dallas Police. He denied he had shot anyone, and, in one of the few “hallway appearances” he had made at the Dallas Police Department, he had exclaimed, “I’m a patsy,” or—as often quoted—“I’m just a patsy.”
Of course, that phrase has become legendary to any student of the assassination, but it is useful to go back to the dictionary definition. A “patsy” is somebody who is easily victimized, cheated, or manipulated.
That’s what Oswald was saying, to explain why he had been arrested. In addition, he told his brother, in a brief jailhouse visit the next day: “Do not believe the so-called evidence.”
Lee Oswald was probably thinking of such things as the bolt-action rifle (with scope) that he had ordered to his post-office box the previous March—under the name “Hidell”—and the fact that that rifle was found (at about 1:20 P.M. CST) on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
Whether or not Oswald was on the sixth floor—or near the window—at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination, one thing is certain. The critical link between the rifle found on the sixth floor and the assassination was the president’s body. That is, the nexus between the body and Oswald, i.e., his gun, was to be found in the conclusions of the Bethesda Naval autopsy, because the body, at the time of autopsy, was tantamount to a diagram of the shooting. Moreover, any metal in the body would be retrieved at autopsy. So the autopsy report would not only contain legally authoritative statements describing bullet trajectories, but the autopsy examination would also be the time when bullets (or fragments) would be recovered and sent to the FBI Laboratory for ballistics tests.
Air Force One, carrying the new president—Lyndon B. Johnson—and the coffin that left Parkland Hospital with President Kennedy’s body arrived at Andrews Air Force Base at about 6 P.M. EST. In terms of my own work, which—by October 23, 1966—was focused on “the body,” a preliminary tally quickly revealed what seemed to be the “weak link” in the sequence of events that followed the offloading of the Dallas coffin, an event that was televised on national TV a few minutes after 6:04 P.M., EST, the official time that Air Force One rolled to a halt. The coffin was lowered to the ground and then placed in a naval ambulance. The ambulance (which also contained Jacqueline and Robert Kennedy) pulled away from the side of Air Force One at 6:10 P.M. and traveled directly to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where, according to Secret Service and press reports, it arrived at 6:55 P.M. EST. But then, over an hour passed before the autopsy started.
Exactly what happened during that hour was my initial focus, and within hours of viewing the problem in ju
st this fashion, and carefully reviewing all the documents I then had pertaining to the autopsy, I made a remarkable discovery.
The Sibert-O’Neill FBI Report
Two FBI agents had accompanied the president’s casket from Air Force One. The two agents—James Sibert and Francis O’Neill—would write a six-page single-spaced report dated November 26, 1963, which had just been located at the National Archives earlier that summer (1966) and made available to many of the early researchers by “first generation” researcher Paul Hoch. The report was also published as an appendix to two books that appeared in the fall of 1966: Inquest, by Edward Epstein, and The Second Oswald, by Prof. Richard Popkin.
My discovery, made late that night, was simply this. In the report appeared a passage that had been completely overlooked and ignored by the Warren Commission: that after President Kennedy’s body was removed from the casket “in which it had been transported” and placed on the autopsy table, it was “apparent” that there had been “surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull.”
This was my aha moment, and the beginning of a completely new way of viewing the problem—not only the issue of “how many assassins?” (which immediately receded in importance), but the issue of fraud in the evidence. And what evidence was that? It was the most critical evidence linking the crime to Oswald—the body of the dead president. Because there it was, in plain English: if that FBI statement was true, then something indeed had happened to the president’s body between the pronouncement of death and the start of the official autopsy.
Something else in the Sibert and O’Neill FBI report drew my attention. The agents reported that the doctors could find no bullets in the president’s body and, quoting their language, actually stated that they were “at a loss to explain” why.
All at once, I had a major paradigm shift and realized that there was indeed a way to “break through” to the center of the Kennedy assassination mystery—not by identifying “the assassins” but by exposing the deception that had been employed to falsify the basic facts of President Kennedy’s murder. I realized that the key to the Kennedy case was not who put the bullets into the president’s body but who took them out. In short, I realized that the key to the Kennedy assassination was recognizing that the most important evidence of all was the president’s body—and its covert alteration (i.e., the alteration of the wounds) was why the Zapruder film showed a backward snap, whereas the doctors stated that the head-wound pattern showed the shot came from behind. It then also became clear why the Dallas doctors, who saw the president at Parkland Hospital, had declared that he had been shot from the front, while the autopsy doctors concluded he had been shot from the rear.
It wasn’t so much a matter of opinion (two groups of experts, with differing interpretations of the same data) but rather of basic facts—exactly what wounds were on the president’s body at each point in time and what those wounds looked like. Both groups of doctors, I realized, could have told the truth about what they had seen. Their opinions (about the direction of the shots) differed because the wounds were different.11
Somehow, somewhere, the wounds had been altered. The diagram of the shooting had been changed. If my analysis was correct, then at the time of autopsy, the president’s body was a medical forgery. Had the “Oswald case” gone to trial, I reasoned, Lee Oswald’s statement, “Do not believe the so-called evidence,” would have applied not just to the paraphernalia at the sniper’s nest but to the president’s body itself.
The timing of Victoria Adams’ trip down the stairs at the Texas School Book Depository was one way of arguing that, just as Oswald claimed, he did not shoot President Kennedy, but the alteration of the body addressed the problem in an even more fundamental way. Victoria Adams, if she was correct, established that the Warren Report was wrong. If the president’s body was covertly intercepted and altered, then the problem went even deeper: there was fraud in the evidence. In short, by altering wounds and removing bullets, someone had manufactured the legal foundation for a false story of the Kennedy assassination, one that would implicate Oswald as “the assassin.”
The next day (Monday, October 24, 1966) I had a five-hour meeting with Professor Liebeler and showed him the passage in the FBI agents’ report. I write about this at length in Best Evidence,12 describing how Liebeler was astounded, not just that somebody might have altered the body (that was shocking enough), but even more so, that such explicit evidence—such a bald statement in an FBI report13—could exist in the Commission’s own files, and yet, apparently, no one on the Commission legal staff even knew it was there! Here was a statement in an official FBI report that, if true, would mean that the president’s body had been covertly intercepted and altered. Here was a statement that, if true, meant that the Commission’s most critical evidence—the body of President Kennedy—had been altered prior to the autopsy. If true, the implications were huge. It would mean that the Warren Commission’s “case against Oswald” was built on a foundation of sand—for it was based on autopsy conclusions that were, in turn, based on altered evidence.
If this was the case, then obviously, unknown (i.e., unreported) events had occurred prior to the autopsy. From the standpoint of the official record, those events did not exist. Certainly, no such thing had been formally reported to the Warren Commission.
Liebeler told me he wanted to call Arlen Specter but needed privacy. So he went into an adjoining room—we were in Joe Ball’s Beverly Hills law offices at the time—and made the call. The two were on the phone for about ten minutes. When he emerged, I asked what he said. Liebeler replied (and I quoted this in Best Evidence): “Arlen hopes he gets through this with his balls intact.” He also called Ball, who was responsible, along with David Belin, for the chapter titled “The Assassin” in the Warren Report, the one that identified Oswald as the assassin, largely based on the evidence at the sniper’s nest. “Joe,” he asked, “did you ever get the feeling we were being led down the garden path?”14
In a homicide, the body of the victim is the “best evidence,” and that was no less true in the case of a president. The body—when properly examined—tells “the story” of the crime. Here, in the Warren Commission’s very own files, was evidence the body had been altered, yet the Commission was so biased in its approach (and so oblivious to contrary data in the manner in which it had conducted its inquiry) that no one even knew such evidence existed!
In the days that followed, Liebeler mulled over the situation and decided what he would do: write a memorandum to Chief Justice Warren and every member of the Warren Commission, focusing just on the autopsy and prominently mentioning this passage. He also told me he was going to give me credit, in the text of his memo, for having made this discovery. Liebeler was amazed that a graduate student carefully studying publicly available records could find something of such significance that the entire Warren Commission staff had missed!
Copies of Liebeler’s thirteen-page memo, dated November 8, 1966, went to every member of the Warren Commission, the entire staff, the Kennedy family, and the Justice Department. After detailing numerous problems with the autopsy, it zeroed in on that statement about “surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull.”15
Was the concept horrible, even ghoulish, that somehow, somewhere, unknown persons had messed with the body of President Kennedy, prior to autopsy? Sure it was. It was not just ghoulish but frightening. But it was also a fact that the FBI had reported the situation to the Commission—in some rather terse prose—and nothing had been done about it!
Would something be done about it now? The answer was no. On December 1, J. Lee Rankin, the former Commission general counsel, responded with copies to everyone on Liebeler’s list. He told Liebeler that as far as he was concerned, the case was closed; furthermore (he said), the “best evidence” of what was seen and heard at the autopsy proceeding was the navy autopsy report, not what two FBI agents reported.
Considerably annoyed, Liebeler showed me the lette
r and said he was not going to pursue the matter any further. He had done all he could do, and that was the end of it. But that was not the end of it for me. To the contrary, that’s when I set out to follow up on my discovery, which I did, and which—fifteen years later—resulted in my book Best Evidence, published in January 1981.
By that time, I not only had considerably more evidence that the wounds had been altered but also some rather dramatic evidence that the body had been covertly intercepted. Specifically, I found that:
1. the body left Dallas wrapped in sheets but arrived at Bethesda in a body bag;
2. the body left Dallas in a large ceremonial casket but arrived at Bethesda in a shipping casket.16
Furthermore, I found plenty of evidence that there had been organized cutting in the area of the head, prior to autopsy, which Commander Humes had disguised by reporting it as part of the gunshot wounding. (See chapter 18 of Best Evidence, which I titled “The Pre-Autopsy Autopsy.”) For those interested in these details, I refer you to my book and to the many debates about it that have taken place on the Internet.
I bring all this up to let the reader know that, like Barry Ernest, I have done my share of following a particular lead, and then another, and then another. It’s very hard work, and the process seems always to take much longer than was originally intended.
That’s what Barry got involved in. Along the way, he also did a stint in the navy, got married, had a son, paid a mortgage, etc. But Barry kept coming back to the Kennedy case, and to Vicki Adams. Because, as many of us know, once you get hooked, it is very hard to just set it aside.