Reclaiming History (204 page)

Even though there’s no credible evidence that any shot was fired from the grassy knoll, one could still have shouting rights if one could at least argue that logic and common sense dictate that one or more of the three shots emanated from there. But when you have no evidence and no common sense on your side, isn’t it time to put the “Closed” sign on your door and go home?

Dr. Cyril H. Wecht has been, throughout the years, by far the most prominent and vocal medical critic of the Warren Commission. One of nine doctors selected to be on the panel of forensic pathologists convened by the House Select Committee on Assassinations to address and evaluate the medical issues relating to the president’s death, he frequently was the lone dissenter (primarily in that he does not accept the single-bullet theory, as the rest of the panel did, believing that Governor Connally was hit by a separate bullet, and hence there was a second gunman and a conspiracy).
*
However, as indicated earlier in this book, on a critical point he was in agreement with the other eight. “I believe that the president was struck definitely twice, one bullet entering in the back, and one entering in the back of the head,” he testified before the HSCA.
¹
Wecht is agnostic on the source of these two bullets, not conceding or rejecting that Oswald fired them.

And throughout the years, Wecht, at different times, has spoken of the possibility of two other shots hitting the president, one hitting Kennedy in the throat and the other the right side of his head. In a 1967 written critique of the president’s autopsy, he suggested that the “size of the throat wound” was more indicative of a bullet entrance than an exit wound. He also noted that “an FBI examination of a slit in the president’s shirt near the collar button, and a nick in [his] tie failed to disclose the presence of any metallic traces,” concluding that “all of this indicates that the autopsy conclusion of a back to front transit” of the bullet that entered the president’s back “has become progressively more unacceptable”—that is, the wound in the president’s throat may possibly have been an entrance wound from a separate shot.
²
Wecht has also postulated the “possibility” of a second gunman firing a shot that entered the right side of Kennedy’s head which was “synchronized with the head shot that struck the president in the back of the head.”
³

Dr. Wecht has not always been consistent about these two additional shots, however. Ten years after the assassination, though highly critical of the president’s autopsy, he wrote, “So far as the available evidence shows,
all
shots were fired from the rear. No support can be found for theories which postulate gunmen to the front or right front of the presidential car.”
⁴
In a May 7, 1975, staff interview of him by Rockefeller Commission senior counsel Robert Olsen, when Olsen asked Wecht, “In 1972, you [made] an examination of all the autopsy photographs, X-rays, and the materials at the National Archives…and on the basis of your studies…you concluded that there was no medical evidence which would support a theory that a shot fired at the president, or that had struck the president, [came] from the front, or the right front?” Wecht responded, “Yes, that is correct.” However, troubled by the head snap to the rear, Wecht proceeded to qualify his answer by saying there were other possibilities that he acknowledged were “remote” and “not very likely.”
⁵
And in a June 12, 1975, press release, Dr. Wecht said, “I see no evidence for gunmen in front of the President.”
⁶

Dr. Wecht has a very impressive curriculum vitae, being not only a doctor but also a lawyer associated with a Pittsburgh law firm. Up to early 2006, he had been the coroner of Allegheny County for twenty-one years, president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences (1971–1972), and author, coauthor, or editor of thirty-six medical and forensic books as well as three mainstream ones (
Cause of Death, Grave Secrets
, and
Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey?
)—clearly, not someone whose views can be ignored. Dr. Michael Baden, the chief forensic pathologist for the HSCA, though disagreeing with many of Dr. Wecht’s conclusions, told me he had “the greatest respect for Dr. Wecht.”

Dr. Wecht is an expansive individual, and now and then he is given to wild and outrageous statements that I doubt he truly believes beyond the moment, such as the following remark in the 1988 British production
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
: “There’s no question in my mind that the twenty-six-volume set [Warren Commission volumes] should be taken from the shelves of all the libraries where they now rest in the United States for nonfiction and placed in the fiction shelves along with
Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn
, and
Gulliver’s Travels
. That’s where they belong.”
⁷
But despite this, as well as the rather heated exchanges he and I had during my cross-examination of him at the London trial in 1986, and my disagreement with his pro-conspiracy views, I recognize that he is a rationalist in principle, and as contrasted to the overwhelming majority of his colleagues in the conspiracy community, he will readily acknowledge points that cannot be reasonably disputed. Indeed, for years Dr. Wecht has been, and continues to be, a thorn in the side of the small, anti-conspiracy community because unlike most other conspiracy theorists, who can easily be written off as kooks or lacking in qualifications, he has excellent credentials. Because Dr. Wecht has been a student of the Kennedy assassination for over a quarter of a century, and for most of those years he was virtually the only credible expert in the area of forensic pathology to speak for the conspiracy theorists, I had two telephone conversations with him at his home and office on December 14, 1999, and January 5, 2000, about his hypothesis of two other “possible” shots.

With respect to the throat wound, I asked Dr. Wecht, “If the bullet entering the president’s upper right back did not exit in the front of his throat at the site of the tracheotomy, where
did
it exit?” He responded, “I have no exit wound to give you for the entrance wound to the president’s back. I can’t tell you what happened to
that
bullet.”

I reminded Dr. Wecht that at the London trial I had asked him to be more specific as to the location of his possible second gunman, and he ended up positioning the triggerman not on the grassy knoll but “around the second floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building, and more down towards the other end [far west side] of the building.”
⁸
When I pointed out to him in our phone conversation that from that position—not as far behind the president as Oswald was believed to be, but still to the president’s right rear at the time of the first shot that hit him—it would have been physically impossible for a bullet shot from there to enter the front of the president’s throat, he replied, “Yes, of course. And that’s why I want to drop that position of mine and put the possible second gunman more to the west [right front] in the area of the grassy knoll. I know I testified to the other position in London and also wrote that in one of my articles in the past
⁹
but I no longer believe that to be true.”

Wecht conceded in our December 14 conversation that if the wound to the president’s throat was an entrance wound from a bullet fired from the grassy knoll to the president’s
right
front, since the bullet passed through soft tissue there would have to have been an exit wound somewhere on the
left
side of Kennedy’s body, and none was found there. I therefore asked Dr. Wecht why not concede that the throat wound wasn’t caused by a bullet from the president’s right front, but was the exit wound of the bullet that entered the upper right back, an entrance wound he acknowledges? Because, Wecht said, if a bullet were fired in a “slightly upward” trajectory from the president’s right front on the grassy knoll, it could have entered where the throat wound was and “exited at the president’s lower left occipital protuberance, which was covered with his thick hair, and the autopsy surgeons may not have seen the exit wound, and may not have seen the actual pathway of the bullet.” Wecht says this is “only a possibility” and he has “no evidence” of any such exit wound to the left side of the president’s head. Of course, engaging in such speculation where there is no evidence to support your position is more appropriate to fiction than historical nonfiction.

My follow-up question of the doctor was that assuming this “possible” shot from the right front was fired at the president, where, specifically, did he propose the gunman was located
on
the grassy knoll? After the doctor said, “From behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll,” and I pointed out to him that that would be
above
the president and that he had earlier postulated that his possible shot had traveled on a slightly
upward
trajectory, he countered, although not robustly, that “we don’t know if there was an aperture somewhere lower on the fence.” I responded that even if the imaginary gunman fired through an aperture at the bottom of the fence, it would still be at the top of the knoll, and the top of the knoll was around twenty-five feet
above
Elm Street. Since, in fact,
everything
to the president’s right was above him (and the doctor said, “I don’t buy any gunman firing from a manhole on the street”), where in the world, I asked, could his second gunman have been located? The doctor said, “That’s a fair question. I cannot answer that. I’ll have to take a further look at the topography of Elm Street and Dealey Plaza and get back to you on this point.”

When Dr. Wecht called back on January 5, 2000, I knew what his research about Elm Street and Dealey Plaza
had
to tell him, and I wasn’t indelicate enough to even raise the issue. I didn’t have to. Dr. Wecht told me to “forget about” his previous statement to me about the “possibility” of a shot being fired from the grassy knoll entering the wound in Kennedy’s throat and then exiting in the left occipital area of his head. “That’s no longer a possibility,” he said, adding that he had reconsidered his position and now accepts that the bullet that entered the right upper back of the president “must have” exited the front of the throat where the Warren Commission and HSCA said it did.
*

However, he still maintained there was a possibility of a second gunman located somewhere to the president’s right side who fired a shot at the president’s head. But the shot to President Kennedy’s head also creates insurmountable directional problems for Dr. Wecht. We see from frame 312 of the Zapruder film (see photo section) that Kennedy’s head was tilted to the
left
at the moment he was hit. Thus, a bullet fired from his right rear, where Oswald was, and hitting him on the
right
rear of his head could logically be expected to exit (as both the Warren Commission and HSCA concluded) on the
right
side of his head, which we know it did. But if the bullet had come from Kennedy’s right side, wouldn’t it be expected to exit on the left side of his head, or at least penetrate far enough to cause
some
damage to the left side of his brain? Or at least leave some metal fragments there? Yet the autopsy showed that “the left cerebral hemisphere is intact,” and the HSCA said that X-ray film of the skull reveals “the absence of any metal fragment within the left cerebral hemisphere.”
¹⁰
Dr. Wecht has always felt he had a possible answer for this. He theorized in his testimony before the HSCA that the bullet may have entered the right side of the president’s head in the very same spot that the bullet that struck the president’s head from the rear had exited. Such a bullet, he said, “would have been fired in synchronized fashion
†
simultaneously with the shot that did strike [Kennedy] in the rear of the head,” and the reason it didn’t exit or even penetrate any part of the left side of his head was that it was a “frangible” (dumdum) bullet, a bullet that immediately disintegrates into a great many pieces. But Wecht testified before the HSCA that if such a shot were fired, it did not come from the right front (grassy knoll) but from the president’s “right side or the lower right rear.” And he conceded that his synchronized frangible-bullet theory was “extremely remote” and “the evidence is not there” to support it.
¹¹

Dr. Charles Petty of the HSCA forensic pathology panel responded to Dr. Wecht’s frangible-bullet theory in his testimony before the committee. “I happen to be the coauthor of the only paper that has ever been written about the wounding capabilities of frangible bullets…[They are] used in shooting galleries…[and] are specifically designed to break up on the backdrop of the…gallery so as not to ricochet and cause injury to either the shooters or the people who work in the gallery…Such bullets and the breakup products of [these] bullets are easy to detect in X-rays. There are no such fragments in the X-ray of the late president’s head. There was no frangible bullet fired. I might also add that frangible bullets are produced in .22 caliber loads and they are not produced [for] larger weapons.”
¹²
In fact, all eight of Dr. Wecht’s colleagues on the HSCA forensic pathology panel rejected his frangible-bullet hypothesis as well as any hypothesis concerning a bullet striking the president’s head in the area of the exit wound. “We believe strongly that another missile did not enter the right front of the head within the area of the large defect. We find no evidence supporting this speculation in the photographs of the head or brain, or in any of the X-rays of either adjacent bone fragments or the left side of the head where, in such an event, one might expect such a bullet to lodge. No other missile was found, and the majority [of the forensic panel excluding Dr. Wecht] knows of no bullet that would completely disintegrate on hitting the soft tissue of the brain, as Dr. Wecht suggests.”
¹³
Additionally, the HSCA’s wound ballistics expert, Larry Sturdivan, concluded that the bullet was not a frangible one.
¹⁴
Dr. James Humes also dismissed the frangible-bullet theory for the head wound. “Had this wound…been inflicted by a dumdum [frangible] bullet, I would anticipate that the [wound] would not have anything near the regular contour and outline which it had.”
¹⁵

In my January 5, 2000, telephone conversation with Dr. Wecht, I asked him, “If the synchronized bullet you postulate, but acknowledge have no evidence to support, was
not
, in fact, a frangible bullet, do you concede that it would have exited the left side of the president’s head, or at least penetrated far enough to cause
some
damage to the left hemisphere of his brain or have left metallic fragments there?” “Yes,” he responded. “It would have had to go over to the left side of the president’s brain.” When I asked, “So do you concede that if the bullet was
not
a frangible bullet, your theory about the possible synchronized shot coming from the president’s right side is no longer viable?” he answered, “Correct.” When I also reminded Dr. Wecht that the autopsy X-rays of the president’s head did not show any metallic fragments from a bullet proceeding from the right side of Kennedy’s head to the left, only from the back to the front, he conceded this was another problem with the theory postulating a shot from the president’s right side. He added, “I have no basis to set forth a theory that a bullet fired from the president’s right side was comprised of nonradiopaque [that is, transparent, and hence, not seen on X-rays] material such as plastic or glass.”