The Girl on the Stairs

by Barry Ernest

  “That Little Woman”

  By the spring of 1964, the Oswald/FBI rumor had dried up. The principals to the rumor in Dallas had been investigated, with negative results. Several at the FBI, including Hoover himself, had submitted affidavits affirming Oswald was not on the agency’s books. It was forgotten, and the Commission moved on.

  As late as April, the deadline for putting the conclusions into President Johnson’s hands remained June, even though Commission members at that point had not yet visited the scene of the crime. They intended to do just that, in order to avoid criticism if they didn’t.29

  There also was debate over the physical appearance of their Report and the need to avoid “a very cumbersome size to be circulated to the public.”30

  “If historians later want to read it over and work on it, well and good,” Dulles said in another classic understatement, “but I don’t think anybody would pay any attention to it to begin with.”31

  The Commission failed to meet its June 1 deadline. In fact, if Gerald Ford can be believed, the Commission had not at that point even decided whether Oswald was the sole guilty party. “Any statement that Commission members have come to this or that conclusion is obviously false, because the Commission has not discussed these matters as a Commission to my knowledge,” Ford explained in the June 4 Executive Session. “I don’t like being quoted when I have not made any final judgment.”32

  This was an amazing statement in light of a draft outline for the Warren Report circulated on January 11, 1964, five months prior. In that outline, which remained virtually identical to what appeared in the finished product, one of the main section headings read, “Lee H. Oswald as the Assassin.”33

  “Now, I have checked a little bit with some of my newspaper friends, and they tell me that any time AP or UP have a story with the same dateline, there is no doubt that it was a leaked story by a government official, or by anybody else who was involved,” Ford persisted. “And ever since that time, and in a growing intensity, and in growing volume now, there is this kind of newspaper propaganda with the same intent in mind. I have some personal conclusions, but I cannot prove them, so I don’t want to make any allegations. But it disturbs me.”34

  Warren had the solution. A press release was written explaining that testimony was almost completed and a final report was forthcoming. But under no circumstances had any final conclusions been drawn. Ford was pleased.

  Ironically, it was Ford who, two months later, would be accused of leaking to Life magazine details from a diary Oswald kept while in Russia. Ford admitted to the FBI he “did previously talk” with representatives of that magazine but not about Oswald’s diary.35

  Years later, the HSCA determined that Ford may have been keeping the FBI abreast of Commission activities and discussions, especially those detrimental to that agency.36 Then-President Ford denied the charge.37

  But Cartha D. DeLoach, an assistant director of the FBI whose internal memos helped link Ford to that accusation,38 wrote about the matter in his 1997 book, Hoover’s FBI: The Inside Story by Hoover’s Trusted Lieutenant. “For a while,” DeLoach said, “it appeared as if the Warren Commission report would treat the FBI respectfully, or so we heard from Congressman Gerald Ford, our chief contact on the seven-man commission.”39

  Late on the afternoon of Friday, June 5, Warren and Rankin finally got around to interviewing “that little woman,” Jacqueline Kennedy. Robert Kennedy sat in the shadows for moral support.40

  Conspicuously absent was Arlen Specter, who by this time already had completed his work concerning the very topic of which Mrs. Kennedy’s observations were an integral part. Specter did, however, submit a list of ninety questions to Rankin, from which those “deemed irrelevant or too specific” could be deleted.41 Most of them were.

  Mrs. Kennedy’s deposition lasted ten minutes and took up only three pages in the twenty-six volumes.42 When it came time for her to discuss her husband’s injuries, this terse line appeared in her published testimony: “[Reference to wounds deleted.]”43

  Early critics felt that something sinister was going on—that what Mrs. Kennedy said at that point may have offered some sort of proof of a second gunman and therefore was stricken from the public record. The passage of time, however, filled the gap. With her testimony now declassified, her missing words became known:

  I was trying to hold his hair on. But from the front there was nothing. I suppose there must have been. But from the back you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair on, and his skull on.44

  Why had these words been deleted from her testimony in the twenty-six volumes? They seemed innocuous, no more offensive than this sentence that did end up being published in the Warren Report: “At that point, both Governor and Mrs. Connally observed brain tissue splattered over the interior of the car.”45 Or this line, referring to one of the attending doctors at Parkland: “He observed shredded brain tissue and ‘considerable slow oozing’ from the latter wound, followed by ‘more profuse bleeding’ after some circulation was established.”46

  Perhaps the deletion resulted from nothing more than what Howard Willens, the Commission’s administrative assistant, had proposed back in December 1963. In a memorandum to Rankin regarding a proposed interview with Mrs. Kennedy, Willens said, “In order to insure the privacy of Mrs. Kennedy’s personal recollections and feelings, it might be desirable to seal the recording of this conversation for a stated number of years. After some sensitive editing of this transcript, most of the information desired by the Commission would probably be supplied by such a statement.”47

  Evidence of such “sensitive editing” has been found. According to the twenty-six volumes, Mrs. Kennedy said, “And Governor Connally screamed.”48 But what she told the Commission in full that day was: “And Governor Connally screamed like a stuck pig.”49

  July and August passed quietly as the members left behind in Washington scurried to finish writing the Report. By the time the final Executive Session meeting rolled around in September, few chores remained.

  Each Commission member became responsible for proofreading several pages of the Report’s first chapter, “Summary and Conclusions.” Care was taken to make sure no conflicts occurred between the conclusions in that chapter and the evidence presented in chapter 3, “The Shots From The Texas School Book Depository,” and chapter 4, “The Assassin.”

  Commission members were informed each would receive copies of the Report and its twenty-six volumes for personal use, plus a leather-bound set for their own bookshelves.50

  Group portraits were also scheduled.

  Arrangements were made “to liquidate and close up the affairs of the Commission.”51 Final expenditures were to be tabulated and shared with members. All documents and records were to be “delivered to the National Archives to be held in perpetuity for the use and benefit of the people of the Unites States.”52

  “There being nothing further to come before the Commission, the meeting was adjourned,” the stenographer typed.53

  Six days later, after clearing their busy schedules, all seven members collectively handed over the 888-page Warren Report to President Johnson.

  “It’s pretty heavy,” was Johnson’s first impression.54

  And with that, the Warren Commission ceased to exist.

  But the hits would keep on coming.

  It was November 22, 1963. Like many others, Navy Cmdr. John Ebersole never expected his week to end the way it did. Yet there he was, late into this Friday night and on into early Saturday, standing in for his temporarily absent boss as acting chief of radiology at the Bethesda Naval Hospital.

  Before him lay the lifeless body of the former president.

  Ebersole had been summoned to shoot what would become the controversial X-rays, one of the most hotly debated byproducts of the crime. The sole purpose of his job that evening was to locate the elusive bullet that had entered Kennedy’s back. Since no lanes of passage through the body or any corresponding exit wounds ha
d been detected, attending doctors felt that the missile must be somewhere inside.

  Or so it was initially thought. Hours later, all Ebersole had discovered was the image of a small, circular pellet in Kennedy’s stomach—he would call it “buckshot”—that he guessed resulted from previous consumption of a duck or rabbit whose meat had not been thoroughly cleaned.

  Confusion over the bullet’s whereabouts remained, until autopsy doctors learned quite unexpectedly from a phone call either to or from doctors in Dallas (Ebersole could not remember which) that the tracheotomy at the base of Kennedy’s throat actually had been made over a preexisting bullet hole. Ebersole placed the time of this newsflash at 10 or 10:30 P.M., on Friday, November 22, perhaps a bit later but certainly before things had been tidied up by 3 A.M. Saturday.

  Suddenly it all made sense. The bullet was not in the body after all. The X-rays had revealed nothing because that missile had exited from the throat.

  Or so it was initially thought.

  Confusion over the missing projectile had thus ended.55 The radiologist was told to go home, his services no longer needed. Yet something strange would come up.

  According to Ebersole’s version of events, the doctors learned of the obscured bullet hole during the autopsy, maybe even as early as halfway through it. Yet autopsy surgeon Cmdr. James J. Humes said under oath to the Warren Commission that he wasn’t informed of the bullet hole in Kennedy’s throat until he spoke by phone with Dallas doctors from his home at 8 A.M. Saturday, up to ten hours after Ebersole said that conversation took place.

  Humes implied that the Saturday revelation about the hidden throat wound was what caused him to write a second draft of his autopsy report. He then burned the first and apparently erroneous draft in his fireplace.

  Yet if Ebersole was accurate and Humes had actually learned about the obscured bullet hole during the autopsy, what was it about the first draft of Humes’ report that required revising it the next morning?56 What exactly had Humes written on those enflamed papers?

  Years later, while Ebersole served as chief of radiation therapy at a hospital in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he was invited to testify before the HSCA about his late-night observations. A local newspaper reporter received a tip about Ebersole’s upcoming appearance, interviewed him, and, on March 8, 1978, penned a story that quoted Ebersole as saying, among other things, that “the back of his [Kennedy’s] head was blown off.”57

  Damage to the back indicated a shot from Kennedy’s front.

  Ebersole would later deny making that comment, saying he had been misquoted.

  Yet on March 11, three days after that article appeared and while being officially queried about Kennedy’s corpse, Ebersole essentially repeated what he had told the reporter, telling the HSCA medical panel, “The back of the head was missing.”58 The HSCA would exclude Ebersole’s sixty-eight-page deposition from its published twelve volumes of evidence.

  The Committee was nevertheless still interested in Ebersole’s mention of the strange Friday-night phone call. It sought clarification from FBI agents Francis O’Neill and James Sibert, both present during the autopsy. In a signed affidavit in 1978, O’Neill said he left the autopsy room only once, to quickly grab a bite to eat. He stated:

  When Humes and [Navy Cmdr. and autopsy assistant J. Thornton] Boswell couldn’t locate an outlet for the bullet that entered the back, Sibert left to call SA Charles Killion (FBI Laboratory) to determine if any extra bullets existed. He was advised of the finding of a bullet on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and relayed this information to the autopsy surgeons. I know for a fact that when the autopsy was complete, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind in attendance at the autopsy that the bullet found on the stretcher in Dallas came out of JFK’s body.59

  In the margin to the left of this statement, someone wrote the following cryptic words: “Unless he got his sandwich when Humes phoned Perry [Dr. Malcolm Perry at Parkland Hospital] he knew Humes called Perry before 11 p.m. 11/22/63.”60

  On the coversheet of this document, someone also wrote and circled the line, “Autopsy room had a phone,” a detail also mentioned by O’Neill in his affidavit.61

  An Adams by a Different Name

  On January 12, 1977, two staff members of the HSCA interviewed Thomas Evan Robinson, the funeral director who had been responsible for embalming the president after the autopsy. He told them he saw a small, quarter-inch-wide wound on Kennedy’s right temple , just at the hairline. Was it evidence of a shot from the front?

  He also recalled dialogue between autopsy doctors regarding discovery of a piece of metal or a bullet fragment within the victim’s chest.

  And he said there had been a ragged, somewhat circular wound about the size of an orange, “directly behind the back of his head.”62 The wound was so large, Robinson said, that “a piece of heavy duty rubber” had to be used to fill the void during the embalming process.63

  “It had to be all dried out, packed and the rubber placed in the hair and the skin pulled back over it as much as possible and stitched into that piece of rubber,” Robinson continued. “They were afraid again of leaks, once the body is moved or shaken in the casket and carried up the Capitol steps and opened again, we had to be very careful, there would have been blood on the pillow.64

  “Putting the head into the pillow of the casket would have hidden everything,” Robinson added.65

  Robinson also explained he did not draw any autopsy face sheets or sketches of the body, something he routinely did, because, “like I said everything was done to protect the family as far as we were concerned.”66

  At the conclusion of his HSCA interview, however, he made a rough drawing depicting the rear of Kennedy’s head. On that sketch, Robinson placed the large, gaping wound he had observed in the center and lower portion on the back of the skull.

  It was right where other doctors had observed it; right where the government said it wasn’t.

  Robinson’s interview also was not published by the HSCA. Neither was his illuminating drawing.

  The comments of both Ebersole and Robinson were scheduled to be locked tight for fifty years. The JFK Act interrupted their hibernation. But the story doesn’t end there.

  In 1992, after the country turned passive as a result of all the confusion, the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a ten-page interview with autopsy surgeons Humes and Boswell.67 Both quickly labeled their critics “conspiracy buffs” whose theories were nothing but “hogwash.”68

  Nevertheless, Humes did admit to burning his “original notes,” saying he did so simply to avoid having them turn into “a collector’s item,” since they were stained by the president’s blood.69

  Boswell admitted to his lack of care when he erroneously placed the back wound as low as he did on Kennedy’s body chart, saying if he had seen the bullet holes in the president’s clothing first, he would have realized his mistake.

  In actuality, the holes in Kennedy’s clothes corresponded precisely with the hole location depicted on Boswell’s drawing.

  During the interview, Humes made the extraordinary statement, “I believe in the single-bullet theory that it struck Governor Connally immediately after exiting the President’s throat.”70

  Only someone who had read Humes’ testimony to the Warren Commission could have realized this comment was the opposite of what he had said in 1964. Back then, after being shown the bullet of “single-bullet” fame, Humes was asked if he felt that projectile could have caused all the damage to both men. “Most unlikely,” he had responded.71

  I brought this contradiction to JAMA’s attention and also asked why nothing had been said about the death certificate signed by Admiral Burkley that confirmed Boswell’s placement of the back wound. I’m still awaiting a reply.

  In the meantime, I hadn’t forgotten about Victoria Adams. There just weren’t any new clues to pursue. But I must have had a penchant for those with that last name.

  Somewhere
in my journey, I became fascinated with Francis W. H. Adams, distinct in more ways than his dual middle names (William Holbrook). Adams was a senior Warren Commission attorney teamed with Arlen Specter to head what many considered the most important aspect of the investigation: the source of the shots.

  He was touted as the perfect candidate for the job: wise at fifty-nine years, a former police commissioner of New York City, a leader in the community, someone who was genuinely interested in working for the Commission.72 He was honest too, revealing in his application for federal employment that his only scrape with the law came when he was questioned by police on a violation of the New York State prohibition act—as a teenager some forty years earlier. The offense was so minor that official records weren’t kept.73

  So why, when J. Lee Rankin was questioned by the HSCA years later, did he make the comment he should have fired Adams from the very beginning?74 Adams was certainly conscientious, at least early on in his Commission job. He diligently wrote detailed and lengthy memos to his boss, explaining his expected course of action. His goals were lofty.

  He said he fully intended to resolve the confusion over the location of Kennedy’s back wound. He also wanted to closely examine films of the assassination, especially Zapruder’s, and solve that nagging three-shots, three-hits timing problem presented by the FBI.75 But suddenly, all that ended.

  Records indicate that by February, only a month after being hired, Adams was gone. Well, not gone literally, but there was a noticeable change in his work habits.

  He just no longer showed up.

  He’d pop in every once in a while to exchange pleasantries, but as far as work for the Commission went, it was virtually nil. The most important aspect of the investigation—the source of the shots—was therefore left squarely on the shoulders of thirty-three-year-old junior attorney Arlen Specter.

  Adams’ behavior remained a question mark. There was no resignation letter; no quibbling “memos to file” indicating dissention, as several others had written; no outward signs of dissatisfaction. He just quit working.