The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (51 page)

If Oswald were a lone Communist assassin, it makes no sense for the Mafia to have risked having Jack Ruby kill him in a police station, on live TV. It’s also hard to believe the mob would have gone against decades of successful experience and hired someone like Oswald to kill JFK. The thought of the Mafia having an inexperienced hit man flee a major assassination using public transportation is ludicrous.

There were probably officials at the time—and even today—who thought that Oswald was a low-level US intelligence asset who “turned.” Yet that scenario still doesn’t make sense, in terms of him assassinating JFK. If Oswald had suddenly turned against the US, he blew his chance to expose the US to the world by keeping quiet about US anti-Castro efforts at his Friday-night press conference. Instead, after reviewing all the evidence for almost twenty-five years, my view is that Oswald was a low-level part of some US effort against Castro, and he had been told his cover must be maintained at all costs to avoid blowing an important operation, one that could cost lives if exposed.

Oswald was finally charged with killing JFK at 1:30 a.m. (CST); he had been charged with killing Tippit earlier, at 7:30 p.m. Anthony Summers writes that Assistant DA Alexander later said Oswald was charged with killing JFK because of his departure from the Book Depository, Frazier’s story about Oswald bringing curtain rods to work that morning, and the “‘Communist’ literature found among Oswald’s effects at the rooming house.”

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Remarkably, that scenario closely matches a scene in a then-forgotten 1948 film noir that court records show Johnny Rosselli helped to produce,
He Walked by Night
. The murderous ex-serviceman in Rosselli’s film even kept one of his long-barreled weapons hidden away, wrapped in a blanket, just like Oswald is said to have done.

*
One or more conspirators could have gotten into the Book Depository with a rifle by simply breaking into the lightly secured building the night before. They could have hidden on the roof or on one of the large, box-filled warehouse floors. It was also possible to enter the Depository shortly before the motorcade, through the back door in the loading dock area.

CHAPTER 16

Another Mafia Murder in Dallas

A
S NIGHT FELL in Washington, DC, on November 22, 1963, Robert Kennedy went to Bethesda Naval Medical Center along with Jackie and a caravan that included the hearse with JFK’s body. During the twenty-minute ride, RFK heard Jackie’s account of the shooting. At Bethesda, the man really calling the shots was Robert Kennedy, from the family suite on the hospital’s seventeenth floor. Robert was part of a group that included Jackie as well as JFK aides Dave Powers and Kenneth O’Donnell. RFK was no doubt shocked when he heard what Powers and O’Donnell had seen from their vantage point in the motorcade, in the limo directly behind JFK’s.

As Powers told my research associate—and as Powers and O’Donnell both confirmed to former House Speaker Tip O’Neill—they clearly saw shots from the front, from the grassy knoll. Powers and O’Donnell had known and worked with RFK for years; the Attorney General would have trusted their observations. In addition, White House physician Admiral George Burkley—the only doctor at Bethesda who had also seen JFK at Parkland—later stated that he believed JFK had been killed by more than one gunman. All of this presented a dilemma for RFK: If Oswald had been shooting from
the rear, as Hoover and the news were now reporting, who had been shooting from the front?

Entire books have been written about JFK’s autopsy, which several government commissions studied over the course of thirty-five years, yet substantial controversies remain. The location and size of wounds on some autopsy X-rays and photos don’t match what others show, or what some at Parkland or Bethesda observed. Even worse, crucial evidence is missing, ranging from photos and tissue samples to JFK’s brain. At the root of these controversies is the fact that Robert Kennedy controlled the autopsy.

Only a few basic facts are not in dispute. All agree that the Bethesda doctors didn’t realize JFK had been shot in the throat, since a tracheotomy incision obscured that wound. The Bethesda doctors did find JFK’s small back wound, so they initially assumed he had been shot once in the back and once in the head, and that Connally had been hit by a separate shot. Not until the next day, Saturday, did lead autopsy physician Dr. James Humes learn about the throat wound, and he burned his first draft of the autopsy report on Sunday, November 24. Beyond those key points, much has been disputed over the years and remains controversial, ranging from what the autopsy doctors did or didn’t do—and why—to what type of casket JFK arrived in.

Accounting for much of the controversy were the national security implications of the autopsy. The President’s assassination was a nightmare scenario beyond anything contemplated for the Cuba Contingency Plans that Alexander Haig and others had been working on. Oswald was still alive, so the results of JFK’s official autopsy would have to be part of a public trial—and there are many indications a hasty “national security” autopsy was performed before the “official” autopsy.

Robert Kennedy’s concerns about the exposure of the Almeida coup plan would have been shared by other officials in the know, like Joint Chiefs Chairman General Maxwell Taylor, who had ultimate authority over a military facility like Bethesda. One of the main points of RFK’s subcommittee’s making the Cuba Contingency Plans—the one about the possible “assassination of American officials”—had been to avoid a situation in which the premature release of information could back the President into a corner and cause a crisis that could go nuclear. The thinking behind that planning appears to have been implemented to deal with JFK’s death.

Some have tried to claim that shadowy generals, the CIA, or J. Edgar Hoover ran the autopsy without Robert Kennedy’s knowledge, but much evidence shows that’s simply not true. Several of the people at the autopsy made it clear that JFK’s personal physician, Admiral Burkley, wielded a heavy hand at the autopsy on RFK’s behalf. Francis O’Neill, one of two FBI agents present at the autopsy, told Congressional investigators that there was “‘no question’ that Burkley was conveying the wishes of the Kennedy family.” Jerrol F. Custer, the radiology technician who took X-rays in the autopsy room with a portable X-ray machine, stated that Admiral Burkley said, “I am JFK’s personal physician. You will listen to what I say. You will do what I say.”

A laboratory technician at the autopsy, Paul O’Connor, said that “Admiral Burkley controlled what happened in that room that night, through Robert Kennedy and the rest of the Kennedy family.” O’Connor said that when Burkley came into the autopsy room, he “was very agitated—giving orders to everybody, including higher-ranking officers.”

Since the Commandant of the Bethesda facility, Admiral Calvin Galloway, was present in the autopsy room, Burkley sometimes
conveyed RFK’s wishes through him. James Jenkins, a navy man from Bethesda’s clinical laboratory who assisted at the autopsy, said that the main autopsy physician “was probably being directed by Burkley through [Admiral] Galloway.” One of the assisting autopsy physicians, Dr. J. Thorton Boswell, said that “Dr. Burkley was basically supervising everything that went on in the autopsy room, and that the commanding officer was also responding to Burkley’s wishes.” Dr. Burkley himself stated in his oral history at the JFK Library that “during the autopsy I supervised everything that was done . . . and kept in constant contact with Mrs. Kennedy and the members of her party, who were on the seventeenth floor.”

Robert Kennedy was calling the shots to Dr. Burkley, and JFK military aide General McHugh later testified that “Bobby Kennedy frequently phoned the autopsy suite.” According to Gus Russo, the Commander of Bethesda’s Naval Medical School, Captain John Stover, said that “Bobby went so far as to periodically visit the autopsy room during the procedure.” However, RFK also had someone—an individual I interviewed in 1992—assisting him in dealing with Burkley and the autopsy room. The presence of this very sensitive, confidential source at the autopsy has been confirmed by a Kennedy-authorized account, and his credibility is not only clear based on the public record but has been vouched for by numerous associates of John and Robert Kennedy. These include Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Harry Williams, and RFK’s trusted FBI liaison Courtney Evans. It’s significant that my source who assisted RFK at the autopsy was fully knowledgeable not only of the JFK–Almeida coup plan, but also about the Cuba Contingency Plans designed to protect it. The bottom line is that whatever went on at the autopsy most likely happened with the full knowledge, and probably at the ultimate direction, of
Robert Kennedy. Further proof of this concept is the fact that some of the most important missing evidence, such as JFK’s brain, wound up under RFK’s control.

Even such a basic fact as the time when the autopsy started has caused much debate and uncertainty over the past four decades. There was a delay of at least forty minutes, and possibly as much as an hour, between the arrival of JFK’s body at the facility and the start of the autopsy. While that might not be very unusual in itself, something else was: There were two ambulances—one was a decoy supposedly meant to throw off reporters and sightseers who might have made it onto the base. After the ambulance that actually carried JFK’s body arrived at the front of the building, the
Washington Post
reported that Admiral Galloway himself “pushed into the front seat and drove to the rear of the hospital, where the body was taken inside.”

However, author David Lifton found that the men who were to guard the ambulance with JFK’s body had lost sight of the ambulance as it sped away. The guards chased after the ambulance but couldn’t find it. Much confusion on their part followed, before they finally arrived at the rear of the facility and found the ambulance at last. Oddly, Secret Service Agent Kellerman says the autopsy started at 7:30, while the casket team’s report says JFK’s casket was not carried in until 8:00 p.m. The two FBI agents say the first incision was made at 8:15 p.m.

In addition to the unusual timing discrepancies, there were also easy-to-document differences between how JFK’s body looked at Parkland and how it looked (and was photographed) at the start of his autopsy in Bethesda. The most obvious example is JFK’s throat wound, where the tracheotomy incision had been made. Dallas’s Dr. Perry said that his small, neat incision was only 2–3 centimeters.
However, photos of JFK’s body at the start of the autopsy show a very ragged incision, spread open in the middle, that was at least two or three times larger. JFK’s official autopsy report said the incision was 6.5 centimeters when the autopsy began, while the lead autopsy physician, Dr. Humes, said under oath that it was 7–8 centimeters. The throat incision was not enlarged during the official autopsy, because, as assisting autopsy physician Dr. Pierre Finck later testified, the doctors had been ordered not to.

While the official autopsy was jammed with officers and other personnel, an earlier unofficial national security autopsy would have been conducted with only a few people present. This scenario could also explain other documented discrepancies. As the official account would evolve, JFK’s back wound was supposedly caused by the complete “magic bullet” found at Parkland on a stretcher—no bullet (or substantial part of a bullet) was found at the autopsy. Yet Dr. Osborne—then a Captain and later an Admiral and the Deputy Surgeon General—told Congressional investigators he saw “an intact bullet roll . . . onto the autopsy table” when JFK was removed from his casket. Osborne reiterated to David Lifton that “I had that bullet in my hand and looked at it.” He said it was “reasonably clean [and] unmarred,” and “the Secret Service took it.”

Dr. Osborne’s account is confirmed to a degree by the account of X-ray technician Custer, who said that “a pretty good-sized bullet” fell out of JFK’s “upper back,” where his back wound was located. He said that when “we lifted him up . . . that’s when it came out.” Finally, the Commanding Officer of the Naval Medical School at the time, Captain John Stover, told author William Law, “Well, there was a bullet.” To Lifton, “Stover confirmed there was a bullet in the Bethesda morgue” from JFK’s body. However, Stover thought it was
the bullet found on the stretcher at Parkland. But it wasn’t, since that bullet was at the FBI laboratory, many miles away.

A brief national security autopsy before the official one, as well as national security concerns following the official autopsy, could also account for the many problems surrounding the autopsy photographs and X-rays. Douglas Horne was the Chief Analyst of military records for the congressionally created JFK Assassination Records Review Board for three years in the 1990s. In addition to the problem with JFK’s throat wound, Horne recently wrote, “There is something seriously wrong with the autopsy photographs of the body of President Kennedy. . . . The images showing the damage to the President’s head do not show the pattern of damage observed by either the medical professionals at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, or by numerous witnesses at the military autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital. These disparities are real and are significant.”

Horne also cites FBI Agent Frank O’Neill, who “testified to the Review Board that the brain photos in the National Archives could not possibly be of President Kennedy’s brain, because they showed too much remaining tissue; O’Neill testified that more than half of President Kennedy’s brain was missing when he saw it at the autopsy following its removal from the cranium, and his objections to the brain photographs in the Archives were that they depict what he called ‘almost a complete brain.’”

FBI Agent O’Neill made other interesting observations. Along with his colleague at the autopsy, Agent James Sibert, he doesn’t believe in the “magic bullet” theory that was later proposed. Sibert says he looked at JFK’s back wound from only two feet away. Measurements of the bullet holes in JFK’s jacket and shirt show they were almost six inches below the tops of the collars, well below the neck. Agent Sibert
says, “There’s no way that bullet could go that low, then come up, raise up, and come out the front of the neck, zigzag and hit Connally, and then end up in a pristine condition over there in Dallas.” Agent O’Neill concurs, saying, “Absolutely not, it did not happen.”