Reclaiming History (100 page)

Not only does Baden’s observation make immense sense, but the photographs of the dead president bear him out. Two terribly gruesome autopsy photos of the president’s face and head (which, as previously indicated, I chose not to put in this book) that appear in Robert Groden’s
Killing of a President
¹⁷²
clearly show that the president’s thick hair, drenched in blood, is all going in the direction of the rear—matted tufts of bloody hair literally extending way beyond the rear of his head.

Author Jim Moore has added another possible explanation for the error made by many of the Parkland doctors. He points out that since the president was lying on his back and they could not see the rear of his head, most described the large exit wound as being to the right
rear
of the president’s head “because the
side
of the president’s head was the most rearward portion of the skull they observed.”
¹⁷³

I
n addition to the testimony of the Parkland doctors, conspiracy theorists cite the recollections and testimony of several eyewitnesses in attendance at the autopsy as further “proof” that the exit wound was to the right rear or back of the president’s head.
†
Once again, these eyewitness accounts (some of them, recollections over three decades old) are supposed to supersede the autopsy photographs and X-rays that show the large defect was primarily to the right front. Remarkably, the list by conspiracy theorists of eyewitnesses to this supposed back-of-the-head exit wound is so expansive it frequently even includes two of the autopsy pathologists, Drs. Humes and Boswell, who we know concluded that the bullet exited in the
right front of the skull
. Apparently the fact that they mentioned in their autopsy summary that the large exit defect “extended somewhat into the temporal and
occipital regions
” got them a ticket into the club of
rear
-exit believers. Indeed, even Captain John H. Stover, commanding officer of the Naval Medical School, who reported in 1978 that he saw “a wound on the
top of the head
,”
¹⁷⁴
qualified for the back-of-the-head list.

The list includes three Secret Service agents (William Greer, Roy Kellerman, and Clint Hill) and two FBI agents (James Sibert and Francis O’Neill) whose testimony points to a right-rear or back-of-the-head exit wound.
¹⁷⁵
*

The above is not to suggest that all of the lay witnesses at the autopsy thought the exit wound was to the right rear or back of the president’s head. For instance, James Curtis Jenkins, a lab technician during the autopsy, told HSCA investigators that the large head wound was to the “middle temporal region back to the occipital.”
¹⁷⁶
Chester Boyers, the chief petty officer in charge of the lab at Bethesda who was present at the autopsy, said the exit wound was to the “right side of the head above the right eyebrow and [extending?] towards the rear.”
¹⁷⁷
Richard A. Lipsey, a personal aide to General Wehle, told the HSCA it was obvious that a bullet “entered the back of his head and exited on the right side of his head.”
¹⁷⁸

Also, at the London trial, Paul O’Connor, the naval hospital corpsman who assisted in the president’s autopsy, testified he “assumed” that the bullet to the president’s head “had hit him from the rear and had come out the front only because of what other physical evidence was present.” When I said to O’Connor, “You told me over the phone that this large massive defect to the right frontal area of the president’s head gave all appearances of being an exit wound, is that correct?”

O’Connor: “Yes, on the front.”
¹⁷⁹

None of the aforementioned people or witnesses had a close-up view of the president’s head. Only four people in the autopsy room did, the three autopsy surgeons and John Stringer, the chief medical photographer for the navy at the autopsy who took the only photographs of the president’s head. When I spoke to Stringer, he said there was “no question” in his mind that the “large exit wound in the president’s head was to the right side of his head, above the right ear.” And in an ARRB interview on April 8, 1996, Stringer said, “There was a fist-sized hole in the right side of his head above his ear.”
¹⁸⁰
Though, as we shall see later, Stringer’s recollection of matters is questionable, he said he remembers this very clearly. When I asked him if there was any large defect to the rear of the president’s head, he said, “No. All there was was a small entrance wound to the back of the president’s head. During the autopsy, Dr. Humes pointed out this entrance wound to everyone.”
¹⁸¹

So we see that all four people who were much closer to the president’s head than anyone else, and whose business it was, as opposed to the many other people in the room, to know where the wounds were, have no question in their mind that the exit wound was to the right front side of the president’s head, not the rear.

In the final analysis, it’s difficult to accept the testimony of any of these lay witnesses as irrefutable truths given the fact that their accounts run directly contrary to the conclusions of the three autopsy surgeons and fourteen other pathologists whose position is supported by the autopsy photographs and X-rays. In other words, lay observations, notoriously problematic, have to yield to hard, scientific evidence.

One footnote to all of this, and a possible explanation for the claim by some of the autopsy eyewitnesses that the exit wound was farther back on the head than the photographs and X-rays show, is the fact that the condition of the head wound
changed as the autopsy progressed
. As Dr. Humes testified in 1964, the skull came apart “very easily” in the pathologists’ hands as they conducted their examination. Some bone fragments fell into the head wound, others onto the autopsy table,
¹⁸²
thereby necessarily causing an
enlargement
of the large exit defect,
including to the rear
. When we couple this with the fact that the president was lying on his back during the autopsy, and therefore, the blood and brain tissue would naturally fall toward the rear of the head, we would
expect
the head wound to appear differently to the autopsy witnesses, depending on their viewpoint and the time of their observation. Add to the mix a generous sprinkling of erroneous observations and a few outright fabrications (not uncommon in a case of this magnitude) and you have a recipe for the kind of contradictions that fertilize the growing number of unfounded allegations made year after year after year by conspiracy theorists.

Lest anyone still has any doubt as to the location of the large exit wound in the head, as indicated, the Zapruder film itself couldn’t possibly provide better demonstrative evidence. The film proves conclusively, and beyond all doubt, where the exit wound was. Zapruder frame 313 (when the president’s head exploded) and frame 328 (almost a second later) (see photo section) clearly show that the large, gaping exit wound was to the
right front
of the president’s head.
*
The back of his head shows no such large wound and clearly is completely intact
. And yet, silly conspiracy theorists cite witness after witness, and write article after article—even in prestigious academic journals—alleging that the large exit wound was to the back of the president’s head. There is simply nothing that will take the air out of their tires of advocacy for the conspiracy position.

T
he president’s throat wound has received an equal amount of attention from critics seeking to knock down the conclusion that the president was struck by a bullet fired from behind. And again, as in the case with the president’s head wound, conspiracy theorists have seized on the testimony of some of the Parkland doctors, as well as statements a few of them made to the press around the time of the president’s death, for the proposition that the wound to the president’s throat was an entrance wound rather than an exit wound, as the evidence clearly shows it was. “It is clear that the Parkland Hospital doctors [formed] an opinion of the anterior neck wound—they thought it was an entrance wound,” says Sylvia Meagher in her book
Accessories after the Fact
.
¹⁸³
“The [Parkland] doctors were unanimous [not true, as we shall see] about the nature of the throat wound: it was an entrance wound,” Mark Lane asserts in his book
Rush to Judgment
.
¹⁸⁴
Another conspiracy theorist, Harrison Edward Livingstone, writes that “all the doctors in Dallas” who saw the wound thought “it was a wound of entry.”
¹⁸⁵
The conspiracy theorists, convinced the shot came from the front, and citing the Warren Commission’s position that Oswald was to the president’s right rear in the Book Depository Building at the time of the shooting, conclude that Oswald could not have fired the bullet that caused the throat wound. And therefore, they argue, he is completely innocent, or at a minimum, there were two gunmen and hence a conspiracy.

What has complicated the correct characterization of the wound and kept this from being a nonissue is the fact that as previously indicated, Dr. Malcolm Perry, a Parkland Hospital doctor, used the wound in the president’s throat as the point to make his tracheotomy incision (cutting into the president’s trachea, or windpipe, to enable the insertion of a tube to maintain breathing), and in the process enlarged the wound, destroying most of its original configuration.
¹⁸⁶
Indeed, when the Warren Commission asked Dr. Humes, “In spite of the incision made by the tracheotomy, was there
any
evidence left of the exit aperture?” he answered (erroneously), “Unfortunately not that we could ascertain, sir.”
¹⁸⁷
But although the tracheotomy had destroyed much of the exit wound’s original configuration, it had not completely obscured the wound. Looking at black-and-white photographs of the wound to the throat (which were sharper and clearer than similar color photographs), the nine-member panel of forensic pathologists for the HSCA noticed “a semicircular
missile
defect near the center of the lower margin of the tracheotomy incision.” The committee said it was an “
exit
defect.”
¹⁸⁸
Dr. Baden, who headed up the HSCA panel, said, “The semicircular defect was caused by the exiting bullet. I saw it right away in the photographs, even though they weren’t of the best quality.”
¹⁸⁹
The four-member 1968 Clark Panel of physicians and pathologists also saw a portion of the exit wound that was not obliterated by the tracheotomy.
¹⁹⁰

Before we look at and evaluate the observations of the Parkland doctors, it should be noted that by their own admission, they did not even attempt to make a determination of whether the wound to the president’s throat was an entrance or exit wound. They were only trying to save his life.
¹⁹¹
Among the later pathologists who
did
attempt to determine whether it was an entrance or exit wound, all fifteen of them not only concluded that it was an exit wound, but that it was the exit wound of the bullet that entered the president’s upper right back.
*
And as I pointed out in my cross-examination of Dr. Cyril Wecht at the docu-trial in London, even Wecht, a member of the nine-doctor HSCA panel and the leading medical voice for years for the conspiracy theorists, agreed in his testimony before the HSCA that the throat wound was a wound of exit when he conceded, by necessary implication, that no bullet that struck the president entered from the front. “The president was struck definitely twice,” Wecht said, “one bullet entering in the
back
, and one bullet entering in the
back
of [his] head.”
¹⁹²

Dr. Perry testified before the Warren Commission that he did not know whether the throat wound was an entrance or exit wound.
¹⁹³
However, at a press conference at Parkland Hospital commencing at 3:16 p.m. on the day of the assassination, he told the assembled media that “the wound appeared to be an entrance wound in the front of the throat.”
¹⁹⁴
Confronted with this apparent contradiction when he was interviewed by the HSCA, he tried to explain his press conference remarks by saying that “I thought it looked like an entrance wound because it was small, but I didn’t look for any others, and so that was just a guess.”
¹⁹⁵
†
In a subsequent interview with author Gerald Posner on April 2, 1992, Dr. Perry said that the press “took my statement at the press conference out of context. I did say it looked like an entrance wound since it was small, but
I qualified it by saying that I did not know where the bullets came from
. I wish now that I had not speculated. Everyone ignored my qualification.”
¹⁹⁶

The reason the press ignored Dr. Perry’s qualification is that he did not, in fact, make one. To the contrary, the transcript of the press conference, which Posner had and cites as a source, reflects just the opposite of what Perry told Posner and what Posner led his readers to believe. In response to the question “Which way was the bullet coming on the neck wound?” from a member of the press, Perry answered, “It appeared to be coming
at him
.” (In Dr. Perry’s mind, he may have
felt
unsure about what type of wound the wound to the throat was. His telling Dr. Robert McClelland, another attending physician, that the wound had “somewhat irregular margins,” which is indicative of an exit wound, supports this. But he never qualified at the press conference, at any point, his conclusion it was an entrance wound.)
¹⁹⁷
‡

Dr. Charles Carrico was the first Parkland doctor to see the president and to start the resuscitation effort. He testified before the Warren Commission that he made no determination whether the throat wound was an entrance or exit wound. “It could have been either,” he said.
¹⁹⁸
However, in his 4:20 p.m. Parkland Memorial Hospital “Admission Note” on November 22, 1963, he described the wound as a “penetrating” wound.
¹⁹⁹
Conspiracy theorists have alleged that by the word
penetrating
, Carrico meant an entrance wound (e.g., “Dr. Carrico…described the throat wound as one of entrance, using the phrase: [a] small
penetrating
wound”).
²⁰⁰
When I asked Dr. Carrico what he meant by the word
penetrating
, he responded, “I was not using the word
penetrating
to be synonymous with entry, because I didn’t know at the time whether it was an entry or exit wound. Although Mr. Webster might not agree, we physicians differentiate the mechanism causing injury into two broad groups. One is
blunt
trauma, which is, for instance, broken bones from car wrecks, bruises and lacerations from aggravated assault, or other wounds caused by machine or blunt force or instrument. The other is
penetrating
trauma, which is a wound caused usually by a knife or gunshot, or by impalement from other sharp objects.”
²⁰¹
Although Carrico was unable to determine whether the throat wound was an entrance or exit wound, he did observe that the wound was “ragged,”
²⁰²
virtually a sure sign of an exit wound as opposed to an entrance wound, which is usually round and devoid of ragged edges.