Reclaiming History (105 page)

On April 22, 1965, Senator Robert Kennedy sent a letter to Admiral Burkley, directing Burkley to transfer, in person, all of the aforementioned autopsy material being kept at the White House to the president’s personal secretary, Mrs. Evelyn Lincoln, at the National Archives for safekeeping.
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Mrs. Lincoln did not work at the archives, but the archives gave her an office there to assist in the transfer of the president’s official papers to the archives. Pursuant to this request, on April 26, 1965, Burkley, accompanied by Bouck, said he personally took the brain and tissue sections, with all the other materials, which were now inside a locked footlocker, to Mrs. Lincoln.
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Accompanying the transfer was a cover letter of the same date on White House stationery from Burkley to Lincoln memorializing the transfer to Lincoln. An attached list set forth an inventory of nine items of autopsy-related materials that were transferred. Item number 9 (the other eight items being predominantly autopsy photos, negatives, and X-rays, although item number 1 was “one broken casket handle”), the last item on the inventory, contained paraffin blocks of tissue sections of the president’s brain, four boxes of slides, one of which was of “blood smears,” and “1 stainless steel container,” 7 × 8 inches in diameter, “containing gross material”—that is, what was left of the president’s brain.
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Admiral Burkley told the HSCA that item number 9 represented “the container of the brain.”
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As of this point in time, the materials had only been transferred, per the April 26, 1965, letter to Lincoln, to “your [Mrs. Lincoln’s] custody,” not the custody of the archives. It’s from this point on that the situation gets very murky. Mrs. Lincoln gave an affidavit to the HSCA in which she said that approximately one month after she received the footlocker, Robert Kennedy telephoned to inform her that he was sending Angela Novello, his personal secretary, over to her office to move the footlocker. Lincoln, who said she had never opened the footlocker while it was in her custody,
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assumed it was going to be moved to another part of the archives where Robert Kennedy stored other materials. Novello, accompanied by Herman Kahn, assistant archivist for presidential libraries, came and took physical possession of the footlocker. Lincoln gave Novello both keys to the footlocker and never saw it again.
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No one knows what Novello did with the footlocker. It was either kept in a personal storage area set aside for Robert Kennedy within the archives or, more likely, removed from the archives building altogether, since it turned up one and a half years later in the possession of Burke Marshall, a Kennedy family friend.
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At the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, on October 29, 1966, Marshall, on behalf of “the executors of the estate of the late President John F. Kennedy,” transferred ownership of the autopsy materials and other items (such as the “personal clothing” and “personal effects” of the president that were “gathered as evidence” by the Warren Commission) to the U.S. government. The seven-page letter transferring title to the government, from Marshall to Lawson B. Knott, the administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), constituted a “deed of gift” from the Kennedy family, and per the letter, the items transferred thereunder “should be deposited, safeguarded and preserved” in the National Archives. The letter said that the Kennedy family “desires to prevent the undignified or sensational use of these materials…or any other use which would tend in any way to dishonor the memory of the late President or cause unnecessary grief or suffering to the members of his family and those closely associated with him. We know the Government respects these desires.”
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The “gift” had restrictions. Although access to the president’s clothing and personal effects would be immediately available to any federal government investigative agency and any “serious scholar or investigator” whom the administrator approved of, access to the autopsy photographs and X-rays would not be authorized “until five years after the date of this agreement [October 29, 1966] except with the consent of the Kennedy family representative,” designated in the document as Burke Marshall. Also, per the deed of gift, no public display of the items would be permitted and the limitations on the gift would remain in effect throughout the lifetime of Mrs. Kennedy, the president’s parents, his brothers and sisters, and his two children.
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Two days later, on October 31, 1966, Marshall delivered the footlocker back to the archives, and in the presence of many people, including Novello (who furnished the key to open it) and several officials from the GSA, archives, and attorney general’s office, the footlocker was opened and all the materials contained within were removed so they could be inspected and reinventoried. Per a document signed on November 4, 1966, by Robert Bahmer, the archivist of the United States, James B. Rhoads, the deputy archivist, and three other officials, “Inspection of the footlocker disclosed that it contained items 1 through 8, inclusive, referred to in the attachment to Admiral Burkley’s letter of April 26, 1965. It did not contain
any
of the material [i.e., not just the stainless steel container holding the brain, but the slides and tissue sections] referred to in item 9 of the attachment.”
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So sometime between April 26, 1965, when Burkley transferred the footlocker to Evelyn Lincoln and confirmed that the steel container holding the president’s brain was inside, and October 31, 1966, when it was discovered the container was no longer there, someone removed the container from the footlocker.

The question of who it was has mystified students of the assassination for years, and the HSCA conducted a very thorough and comprehensive investigation to answer the question, interviewing or deposing over thirty people who were believed to have possible knowledge about the disappearance,
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all of whom claiming to the HSCA that they had no knowledge. One person they naturally sought out was Novello, who gave them an affidavit saying she had no recollection of handling the footlocker, of possessing a key or keys to such a footlocker, or handling any of the autopsy materials. The HSCA did not believe Novello, particularly in view of the fact that when the footlocker was opened for inspection on October 31, 1966, it was she, in the presence of many witnesses, who produced the key to open the locker.
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Burke Marshall told the HSCA it was his opinion that Robert Kennedy obtained and disposed of the brain and slides himself. “Marshall said Robert Kennedy was concerned that these materials would be placed on public display in future years in an institution such as the Smithsonian, and wished to dispose of them to eliminate such a possibility.
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Marshall emphasized that he does not believe anyone other than Robert Kennedy would have known what happened to the materials and is certain that obtaining or locating these materials is no longer possible.”
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Marshall’s strong suggestion that Robert Kennedy disposed of the items is strengthened by the testimony of Evelyn Lincoln, who told HSCA investigators in 1978 that Robert Kennedy came to the National Archives four or five times during the key period of 1965–1966, when the autopsy materials are known to have disappeared. After Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, Mrs. Lincoln reportedly became concerned about the autopsy materials stored at the archives. She called Ken O’Donnell, who contacted Ted Kennedy. O’Donnell called back and said, “Everything is under control.”
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The HSCA noted that “the
only
materials” removed from the footlocker were “physical specimens from the body of [RFK’s] brother: tissue sections, blood smeared slides, and the container of gross material [i.e., the president’s brain]. He [RFK] may have understandably felt more strongly about preventing the misuse of these physical materials than the photographs and X-rays. Second, the Justice Department…pushed hard to acquire the photographs and X-rays but did not request the physical materials.”
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After its extensive inquiry, the HSCA concluded “that Angela Novello
did
remove the footlocker…from the office of Mrs. Lincoln at the direction of Robert Kennedy” and that “circumstantial evidence tends to show that Robert Kennedy either destroyed these materials or otherwise rendered them inaccessible.”
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As indicated, the conspiracy theorists maintain the president’s brain was stolen as part of the cover-up and that only with an examination of the brain itself could we “determine whether all the shots were fired from the rear or if shots came from the right front. The path of the bullet through the brain could be discerned, and the location of the gunman determined.”
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But we’ve already seen that the three autopsy surgeons, as well as every one of the many other forensic pathologists who looked at the X-rays and photographs of the president’s brain, already reached firm and irrefutable conclusions as to the location of the entrance and exit wounds and the path the two bullets took through the president’s body. If both of the wounds to the rear of the president’s body (upper right area of the back and right rear of his head) were determined to be entrance wounds, as they were, it would be physically impossible for an examination of the president’s brain to reflect that the bullets, in fact, entered from the front or the side.

The conspiracy theorists also seem to forget that this “missing brain” that they go on and on about was not always “missing.” The three autopsy surgeons
saw
the brain, held it in their hands, examined it, even weighed it. And they said the left hemisphere of the brain was “intact.” If they saw any damage to the left hemisphere of the president’s brain or any bullet track through the left hemisphere, they obviously would have mentioned it in their autopsy report. And the only bullet track the autopsy surgeons noted through the right hemisphere was one that “traversed the cranial cavity in a posterior-anterior[i.e., back to front] direction…depositing minute particles along its path.”
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And Dr. Michael Baden, the chief forensic pathologist for the HSCA, testified before the HSCA that an examination of the photographs and X-rays of the brain and a description of the brain by autopsy surgeons did not indicate “any injury of the brain
other than
the extensive damage to the right upper part of the brain consistent with the upper track” of the bullet that entered the rear of the president’s head.
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In other words, there was absolutely no evidence of any second bullet entering the president’s head. So finding the “missing brain” would not have any evidentiary value.

The majority of the HSCA forensic pathology panel (eight of the nine members, the exception being Dr. Cyril Wecht) concluded that “the documentation that is available—photographs and X-rays of the brain and the autopsy report—are sufficient to permit accurate evaluation of the gunshot injury to the head and brain, and…examination of the brain itself
would only further confirm
the panel’s conclusion that one, and only one, bullet struck the president’s head from behind.”
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On February 13, 2002, I called Dr. Wecht, who in assassination literature is the leading proponent of the position that the president’s brain, if it could be found, could unlock all kinds of mysteries in the Kennedy assassination. Dr. Wecht told the
Washington Post
’s Michael Isikoff that “there’s something very sinister” about the brain’s disappearance, adding that “it’s the most important piece of physical evidence in the case.”
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Wecht agreed with me, as he had to, that all forensic pathologists, including himself, who either physically examined the president’s head or looked at X-rays and photographs of it, agreed that the only entrance wound discernible from the physical examination and the X-rays and photographs was a wound to the upper right rear of the president’s head, meaning the shot came from the rear. I then asked Dr. Wecht, “Doctor, since the wound to the back of the president’s head was an entrance wound, meaning the bullet would have had to travel from the back of the president’s head to the front, how would it be physically possible for the brain itself to reflect that the bullet actually came from a different direction?”

Wecht responded, “Well, of course, it could not. I agree that the brain could only show that that bullet passed from the back of the president’s head to the front.”

“So then you agree, do you not,” I said, “that finding the president’s brain would not have any evidentiary value?”

“No,” Dr. Wecht said, proceeding to reprise a position he had taken with me in an earlier conversation. “The brain,” he said, “could show a second track through the president’s brain from a second missile entering the right side of the president’s head in the area of the large exit wound.”

But since there’s absolutely no evidence that this ever took place, and even Dr. Wecht agrees that such a bullet (if it were a normal bullet) would have had to penetrate into the left hemisphere of the president’s brain, and Wecht agrees the left side of the president’s brain “was intact,” the bottom line is that even if the president’s brain were to be found, it would not have any evidentiary value.

Dr. Wecht did point out a theoretical value the brain could have. It could help determine where, based on the path of the bullet through the president’s brain, the shooter was located
to
Kennedy’s rear. But all the evidence, including, but not limited to, the trajectory studies (see later text), shows that the bullet came from the vicinity of the sniper’s nest window. And we know from the physical evidence (e.g., Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano, his finger and palm prints, etc.) that Oswald fired the rifle. There’s no evidence the bullet was fired, for instance, from a lower floor in the Book Depository Building or from the Dal-Tex Building to the president’s rear.

As a side note, if Senator Robert Kennedy came into possession of his brother’s brain, as appears likely, what did he do with it to make it inaccessible to others? For years, there have been rumors that when President Kennedy’s body was moved from its temporary site and reinterred at a new and permanent granite and marble site at Arlington National Cemetery
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under floodlights on the evening of March 14, 1967,
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the brain was placed in the president’s grave. In a photo at the grave site (see photo section), Robert and Edward Kennedy stand between the Eternal Flame on their left and a curious box to their right. No one knows what this box’s purpose at the grave site was, or what it contained, if anything, but the speculation is that it contained the president’s brain. The subject photograph surfaced after the HSCA concluded its investigation in 1979, but the HSCA did interview the few people (it was a very private ceremony that the press was not privy to) who were present at the grave site, and they could not recall any additional package or material being placed in the grave. John Metzler, the superintendent of the cemetery, now deceased, told the HSCA that the coffin was in a sealed vault. He was present throughout the entire process—from the opening of the old grave site through the transfer by crane of the vault to the reinterment at the new site—and said there was no way anyone could have placed anything in the coffin or vault without his seeing it, and no one placed anything in the new grave site.
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