Reclaiming History (95 page)

The deadlock over whether there would be a complete or a partial autopsy was broken by the commander of the National Naval Medical Center, Rear Admiral C. B. Galloway, who ordered a “
complete autopsy
” after checking with the FBI and Secret Service agents in attendance.
²⁶
No doubt, the FBI and Secret Service were, at that point, more interested in the criminal aspects of the case than the feelings of the Kennedy family. So ironically, rather than the military suppressing and controlling the autopsy, as conspiracy theorists have claimed and filmmaker Oliver Stone’s movie
JFK
shows,
it was the military who was responsible for ordering a complete autopsy
against the personal wishes of the Kennedy family, who had hoped to expedite the process.

Although Admiral Galloway had ordered a complete autopsy, U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Godfrey T. McHugh, an aide to President Kennedy who was present throughout the autopsy and embalming procedure, told the HSCA that Attorney General Robert Kennedy and presidential friend and aide Kenny O’Donnell frequently telephoned him from the seventeenth floor of the naval hospital, where Jackie and other members of the Kennedy family were waiting, asking about the autopsy results and why it was taking so long. They also kept emphasizing the need for “speed and efficiency.” McHugh said that he related this information to the pathologists, never implying that they should limit the autopsy.
²⁷
Autopsy photographer John Stringer confirmed that while McHugh was emotional, he did not issue any orders.
²⁸
While he may not have meant to, McHugh’s remarks certainly caused undo anxiety for the pathologists. Humes told the HSCA, “There was no question but we were being urged to expedite this examination as quickly as possible, that members of the president’s family were in the building, that they had refused to leave the premises until the president’s body was ready to be moved, and similar remarks of that vein, which we made every effort to put aside [so we could] approach this investigation in as scientific a manner as we could. But did it harass us and cause difficulty. Of course it did, how could it not?”

Boswell added, however, “I don’t think it interfered with the manner in which we did the autopsy.”

Humes: “I don’t either.”
²⁹

The proof that the autopsy was not conducted quickly and therefore superficially is that it lasted at least three hours. I say “at least” because although Dr. Humes testified it started at 8:00 p.m. and ended at 11:00 p.m., later in his testimony he said that three pieces of bone were brought to the autopsy room by the FBI “later on that evening or very early the next morning while we were all still engaged” in conducting the autopsy.
³⁰
So the autopsy could have lasted over four hours. Dr. Michael Baden told me that a typical forensic autopsy, in which the clothing would also be examined (here, as indicated, it was not available for examination), and involving two gunshot wounds “would take four to five hours.” But Baden hastened to add that an autopsy of the president “could be expected to take all day, eight hours.”
³¹

One of the problems slowing up the autopsy was gaining access to the president’s adrenal glands, which could not be reached through an opening in the chest cavity, necessitating going in through the abdomen. The president’s adrenal glands have long been a focal point of the conspiracy theorists’ interest. One of the well-kept secrets about President Kennedy’s medical history during his lifetime was that he was being treated for Addison’s disease, an insufficiency of hormonal secretions by the adrenal glands, which, if left untreated, can be fatal. The treatment in the early 1960s was to supplement the lack of adrenal secretions with the drug cortisone, which allowed many of those afflicted to lead relatively normal lives.
³²
Although word of the president’s condition had circulated during the 1960 presidential campaign (the charge was that having Addison’s disease made him physically unfit for the presidency), it was never publicly confirmed or documented until 1967, when Dr. John Nichols of Kansas deduced circumstantially that case number 3, referred to in a 1955
American Medical Association Archives of Surgery
article involving a thirty-seven-year-old man with a seven-year history of well-documented and therapeutically controlled Addison’s disease who had undergone major back surgery on October 21, 1954, at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, was in fact John F. Kennedy. Dr. Nichols offered as evidence reports in the
New York Times
of October 11 and 21, 1954, and February 26, 1955, but he stopped short of claiming confirmation, calling his deduction “strongly presumed.”
³³

In a 1965 memorandum to Brigadier General J. M. Blumberg, Dr. Finck wrote that Kennedy “suffered from adrenal insufficiency,” though this apparent confirmation was not a public record.
³⁴
In August 1992,
JAMA
confirmed with hospital officials that Dr. Nichols’s earlier deduction was correct, the patient was Kennedy.
³⁵
But at the time of the assassination, these facts were not known to the public.

It seems clear that the Kennedy family didn’t want the president’s adrenal condition publicly known. Dr. Boswell told the HSCA in 1977 that Dr. Burkley told Dr. Humes that he didn’t want a report on the adrenal glands, preferring instead for the information to be reported to him informally (i.e., orally).
³⁶
Dr. Robert F. Karnei Jr., a twenty-nine-year-old, second-year resident who was “on duty” on the evening of the assassination, which meant that any autopsy that had to conducted after hours would normally have been his to perform, was merely assigned to “miscellaneous duties,” such as obtaining food for the military security guards and FBI and Secret Service agents and, most importantly, trying to control who was and who was not admitted into the morgue during the autopsy. Although Karnei even left the morgue occasionally to perform other duties, he nonetheless did observe, firsthand, several aspects of the autopsy. He told
JAMA
in 1992 that “no adrenal tissue could be found grossly on routine dissection,” a fact confirmed by Dr. Boswell, who said that “serial sections of the perirenal fat pads demonstrated no gross evidence of adrenal cortex or medulla.” Dr. Boswell’s findings are confirmation that the president did, indeed, suffer from severe Addison’s disease.
³⁷

As indicated, according to the HSCA forensic panel, the Kennedy autopsy pathologists failed miserably.
³⁸
However, despite these deficiencies, and the claims by conspiracy theorists that the autopsy pathologists were in essence amateurs, the HSCA forensic panel proceeded on the very next page to contradict itself to the extent of saying that the autopsy report did contain “sufficient documentation” for the panel to arrive at “correct and valid conclusions” regarding the precise nature of the wounds that caused the president’s death.
³⁹

Much more importantly, the HSCA’s forensic pathology panel came to the same, identical conclusion that the autopsy surgeons came to: that “President Kennedy was struck by two, and only two, bullets, each of which entered from the rear.”
⁴⁰

One important footnote, I believe, to the above discussion: If one were to set forth the top-five allegations of the Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists in the Kennedy assassination, one of the five would most likely be that Kennedy’s body was unlawfully spirited away from the Dallas authorities at Parkland Hospital (mainly, from Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas medical examiner who physically resisted the appropriation of Kennedy’s body by the Secret Service) to be taken to Bethesda for the autopsy. And if the autopsy
had
been conducted in Dallas, no cover-up would have taken place by the incompetent and/or complicit (in the conspiracy to cover up) autopsy surgeons, and therefore the autopsy findings would have been different.

The only serious problem with this is that ironically, and very unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, they don’t even have support for their argument from the very person whom they wanted to conduct the autopsy—Dr. Earl Rose. In 1968, Rose left his job as Dallas medical examiner to become a professor of pathology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. And in 1978, he was appointed by the HSCA to be one of the nine forensic pathologists to review the autopsy findings. Now retired in Iowa City, Dr. Rose told me no one ever calls him regarding his one year on the HSCA forensic panel and he was “enjoying” his “anonymity.” My key question to Dr. Rose was this: “Were you satisfied from your review of the autopsy photos and X-rays that the autopsy surgeons reached the same conclusion you would have reached if you had conducted the autopsy back in 1963 in Dallas?”

Rose immediately and unequivocally answered, “Yes, there’s no question their conclusions were correct. Two shots entered the president from behind, the entrance wound to the back exiting in the throat at the site of the tracheotomy and the entrance wound to the back of the head exiting in the right frontal temporal area.” The only place he said he disagreed with the autopsy surgeons is that they reported the entrance wound to the back of the head “too low. It was in the cowlick area.”

Rose said that although “more experienced” forensic pathologists should have been chosen to conduct the autopsy, the three autopsy surgeons were not, as so often said, inept and did a “competent job considering they were operating under the most trying, tremendously difficult circumstances,” with the Kennedy family “limiting” the extent of the autopsy. He said, “You can’t blame the autopsy surgeons for the fact that the autopsy should have been more complete.”
⁴¹
And Rose is not the only member of the HSCA’s forensic pathology panel who feels this way. Dr. Charles Petty, the chief medical examiner for Dallas County, and my medical expert at the London trial, told me in preparation for the trial that he felt the autopsy surgeons had done “an adequate job.” In 2003, he said the autopsy, overall and considering all the circumstances, was “well done and well reported.”
⁴²

With respect to the autopsy surgeons’ lack of experience (with the exception of Finck) in conducting gunshot wound autopsies, Rose said that “Humes was an extremely competent pathologist. Here’s someone who became president of the American Society of Clinical Pathologists.”
*
With respect to the issue of whether the autopsy surgeons took enough time to conduct the autopsy, when I asked Dr. Rose how long a typical autopsy would take, where, like the president, there were two bullet wounds and the decedent’s clothing was not examined, Rose, who at the time of his service on the HSCA panel had conducted around four thousand autopsies, said, “Oh, I think you should be able to do a very competent autopsy in around two hours,” which by all accounts is
less
time than the autopsy surgeons in the Kennedy case took.

Concerning his confrontation with the Secret Service at Parkland, although he said he was in the right, “I think they were doing what they thought was right under the circumstances and I believe that their motivations were completely aboveboard.”
⁴³

F
or over forty years, conspiracy theorists have claimed that the autopsy findings offer clear evidence of a conspiracy. But where? In the following pages we’ll take a detailed look at the facts and allegations surrounding the bullet wounds of both President Kennedy and Governor Connally and reveal how conspiracy theorists have bamboozled the general public into believing that even if a shot or two was fired from the sniper’s nest to the president’s right rear, where Oswald was believed to be, the fatal bullet to the president’s head was fired from the grassy knoll to the president’s right front. Also, the wound to the front of the president’s throat was an entrance, not an exit wound, and it too was fired from the grassy knoll to the president’s front.

Early in its investigation, the HSCA realized the importance of establishing the authenticity of the autopsy photographs and X-rays housed at the National Archives—that is, to determine whether they were taken of President Kennedy at the time of his autopsy and whether anyone had altered them, both of which questions have been raised by the conspiracy community. (The 1964 Warren Commission never had to deal with this issue because the autopsy photographs and X-rays were never part of its published record.) This important step of the committee’s investigation was essential since the conclusions of its forensic medical panel of experts would rely chiefly on this photographic and radiological (X-ray) record.
⁴⁴

To facilitate the scientific analysis of the photographs and X-rays, the HSCA brought in experts in anthropology, forensic dentistry, photographic interpretation, forensic pathology, and radiology. Anthropologists studied the autopsy photographs to verify that they all depicted one individual, John F. Kennedy, and in particular that the photographs of the rear of the head were consistent with other views in which President Kennedy’s facial features are recognizable. They also did a comparison study of the autopsy X-rays and premortem (i.e., prior to death) X-rays known to have been taken of President Kennedy over several years. The anthropologists focused on a number of anatomic characteristics (including cranial sutures, vascular grooves, and air cells of the mastoid bone) that would enable them to tell if the premortem and autopsy X-rays depicted one or two separate individuals. They concluded that there could be no reasonable doubt that the person depicted in both the autopsy photographs and X-rays was in fact John F. Kennedy and no other person.
⁴⁵
In addition, the committee’s forensic odontologist, Dr. Lowell J. Levine, who was experienced in identifying the victims of unnatural death through dental records, examined premortem X-rays of President Kennedy’s teeth and compared them with those visible in the autopsy X-rays. Dr. Levine concluded, based on the unique positions of the teeth (relative to each other), the shapes and sizes of fillings of the teeth, and a myriad of other anatomic characteristics, that the three autopsy skull X-rays were “unquestionably of the skull of President John F. Kennedy.”
⁴⁶
Dr. Levine’s final report also concluded that the “unique and individual dental and hard tissue characteristics which may be interpreted from [the skull X-rays] could not be simulated [i.e., faked].”
⁴⁷