JFK: What The Doctors Saw Documentary | SettingBrushFires
Summary
Transcript
President’s car is now turning on to Elm street, and it will be only a matter of minutes before he arrives at the trademark. This is water crime guide in our news. And there has been an attempt, as perhaps you know now, on the life of President Kennedy. It was the first time that the public had seen a murder on television. We heard Kennedy had been shot and he was being brought to the emergency room at Parkland Hospital.
Within minutes of seeing President Kennedy, doctors at Parkland concluded that the neck wound was an entrance wound and the head wound was an exit wound. My president had been assassinated and was deaf. My goodness. You’ve just taken care of the president and he’s dead. Did that really happen or was this a nightmare? My God. Parkland hospital doctors were quoted as saying they thought at least one bullet entered Mister Kennedy’s neck from the front.
The Parkland doctors were a serious problem for the US government because they had provided evidence that there was a shooter somewhere in the front. And that ran totally contrary to the official narrative of a lone shooter from above and behind. All this mattered because Oswald had to have had an accomplice. The government narrative is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to kill the president. Killing President Kennedy. Case closed.
And as we know, it was not case closed at that particular point. Who was behind all of this? Certain people in our government tampered with critical evidence in order to make sure the american people would not know the truth about who murdered the president. Documents are withheld by the FBI, the CIA, intelligence agencies did all the wrong things if they were looking for conspiracy. A lot of people just decided to keep their mouth shut, including the Parkland doctors.
I didn’t want to be a target for those who had killed our president. So I didn’t tell anybody for over 30 years that I was present in trauma room one because so many people did die who had been involved in the assassination. And he said, you must never, ever say that that was an entrance wound again, if you know what’s good for you. What actually happened in trauma room one never came out, never became public.
I was there. I know what I saw. I was there. I remember it in detail. It’s etched in my memory forever. What’s more likely, Parkland doctors telling the truth or the autopsy telling the truth? The Parkland doctors told the truth. These doctors are about as trustworthy as you can get. This country has not been told the truth about the JFK assassination. Will people feel that they have a better understanding of what actually happened? Absolutely.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is Bob Walker. Speaking from Dallas Love Field, where a large crowd is gathered now to await the arrival of president and misses John Fitzgerald Kennedy from Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth. We were aware that the president was coming to Dallas. It had been well publicized. Police were circling the field all morning long from the early morning hours, and a huge contingent of police are on hand.
Next, big jet approaches. And this one should contain the president and misses Kennedy. Here comes Jack. He was like a rock star. He was handsome and rich and a pretty wife. I liked him. I thought he was really cool. Right into us now and the crowd below. Keery. There’s Misses Kennedy and the president of the United States. And I can see his son’s hand all the way from here.
Crowd waving as you can see, he was standing up all over everything available to get a glimpse of the president and his wife. Oh, I idolized him. I was a Democrat, of course. And he’s broken away from his plan and gone right up to the fence to shake hands with people. Boy, this is something. Makes the eggshells even thinner for the secret service, whose job it is to guard the man.
I was very excited that the president and Jacqueline Kennedy were coming to Dallas, and I was sorry that I was on call at Parkland because I wanted to go down and see the parade. And back they go to the car. Governor Conley standing in the car, beaming. Now, the motorcade will very shortly start to move out for downtown Dallas, where thousands should already be on the street right now, awaiting for a view of the president and his wife.
The route of the location of the parade had been published in the paper two or three days before, so everyone knew the route. And that’s the reason that there were so many thousands of people standing on the streets. There was some discussion as to whether it was really good for him to come to Dallas. And here is the president of the United States. And what a crowd and what a tremendous welcome he’s getting now.
We can. And there’s Jackie. She’s getting just as big a welcome. And there is Linda Johnson and Lady bird passing by in the second car. And the crowd is absolutely going wild. This is a friendly crowd in downtown Dallas. So my wife and children with everybody else went out, and when the little motorcade coming by, they saw this crowd of people and they slowed down and Kennedy waved at them.
President’s car is now turning on to Elm street, and it will be only a matter of minutes before he arrives at the trademark. I was on Simmons Freeway earlier, and even the freeway was jam packed with spectators? Yes, we were all aware that he was coming to Dallas. I think the whole city was excited about it one way or another. Certainly a lot of the people were very excited and made great preparation for him to come.
And thousands and thousands of people who were crowding the streets here are following the motorcade even further down main street towards Simmons Freeway. A wonderful welcome having been given to the president here in downtown Dalek. It appears as though something has happened in the motorcade. Bruce? Something, I repeat, has happened in the motorcade route. Ladies and gentlemen, here is a bulletin from the WQMR newsroom. The United Press says that a sniper seriously wounded President Kennedy in downtown Dallas today, perhaps fatally.
It’s not known for sure, but it is believed that President Kennedy has been shot. Stand by. Just a moment, please. Something has happened. There has been a shooting. There’s numerous people running up the hill alongside Elm Street. A presidential car coming up now. We know it’s the presidential car. You see misses Kennedy’s main suit? There’s a secret serviceman spread eagle over the top of the car. The president’s party were en route as fast as they could get there to Parkland Hospital.
The first time that I suspected that some major event had occurred was when the operator was paging through the loud speaker system. The president’s been shot, and they’re bringing him to the emergency room. They’ve called from the emergency room, said that they’re bringing President Kennedy in. He’d been shot. There was a bunch of other top notch people that were being paged. Kennedy apparently shot in head. He fell face down in backseat of his car.
Blood was on his head. Misses, Kennedy cried, oh, no. And tried to hold up his head. Connally remained half seated, slumped to the left. There was blood on his face and forehead. You got the doctor. The emergency at the parking hospital. The nurse ran in and said, the president has been shot. I ran downstairs as fast as I could and went into trauma room number one. We heard Kennedy had been shot, and he was being brought to the merchant’s room at Parkland Hospital.
When I heard that. Ran down three flights of stairs into the main quarter. And that’s when you get this tremendous rush of adrenaline in your body. I thought, oh, it’s going to be like John Wayne. He’ll be sitting on the gurney, and it’ll be like only a flesh wound. You know, I had no idea. The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by the shooting.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. You’ll excuse the fact that I’m out of breath. But about ten or 15 minutes ago, a tragic thing, from all indications at this point, has happened in the city of Dallas. Let me quote to you this. President Kennedy and Governor John Colony have been cut down by assassin’s bullets in downtown Dallas. They were riding an open automobile when the shots were fired. The president, his limp body carried in the arms of his wife Jacqueline, has rushed apart Parkland hospital.
I would have expected them to bring him to Parkland. First of all, it was probably the closest hospital, but it was the number one trauma hospital in that part of the country. Parkland is the designated trauma center for all of the greater Dallas Fort Worth area. I had taken care of already hundreds of patients with gunshot wounds and injuries and car accidents. We were seeing two to three gunshot wounds a day, plus stab wounds, plus blunt trauma such as automobile accidents.
And we were seeing about 5000 a year of those. That’s where I would have wanted to be if that had happened to me. There’s no doubt about that. Parkland’s well known for their care and those kind of emergencies, and that’s what they do best. Many, many police officers, maybe 20 or 25 motorcycle policemen. They’re approaching the entrance now to Parkland hospital, traveling at a high rate of speed.
Ready? Police cars converging on parkland from every angle, from every point. The official party, as I can see, is flowing around through the emergency room. Within half a minute, door came flying open and here came the gurney with Jackie and the two secret Service guys and had a terribly wounded man on their hands. The president was being wheeled on the gurney towards trauma room one. I remember the secret servicemen and the look on their face.
If you can imagine how relieved they were to pass off the mortally wounded president to the doctors to take care of him. And you just feel a flush coming over your body and you think, my goodness, I’m about to take care of the president of the United States. When I first walked into trauma room one and saw the president, the president was on a cart. He had his arms out there ready to be resuscitated.
I was looking at him thinking, he’s not going to make it, probably, but you really need to get an airway and an iv going, then do your examination. And that’s what we did. Doctor Caracol was the second year resident in charge of the emergency room and he was attempting to intubate the president, putting a tube into the windpipe. There had been an attempt by a couple of junior residents to get an iv going.
But because he was in such profound shock, the veins were collapsed. But I made a little nick in the vein and barehandedly threaded the catheter in and they said, Goldstrich go get the defibrillator. So I ran out of the room and got it out and pushed it as hard as I could on the wheels and got it back there. And I’m thinking, you know, maybe this is going to save his life.
I was just a fourth year medical student, I was never the guy in charge. We took over as more senior personnel. And Doctor Malcolm Perry was really the staff person that seemed to subsequently be the one that was looked as to being the lead surgeon that cared for President Kennedy. The next person that I recall coming in was Doctor Bob McClellan. Doctor Perry and Doctor Baxter had just walked into that room ahead of me and Doctor Perry was standing on the right side of the cart.
The president was lying on Doctor Baxter opposite him on the left side. So they motioned me on through and I pushed the door open to trauma room one, walked by misses Kennedy and was greeted by the horrific sight of President Kennedy lying on his back on a cart with an operating room light shining down on his bloody head. And I’ve still got that fixed in my mind to this moment.
The most dramatic things to me were the chaos in the emergency room. The Secret Service with their machine guns, looking around frantically, the president lying on a surgical bed, and with misses Kennedy sitting by with the flecks of the president’s brain on her skirt. The whole atmosphere together was very chaotic. The emergency room nurse, Doris Nelson was letting people in and there was a policeman or a secret Service agent, I’m not sure which.
That pit area was jammed with men in business suits, shoulder to shoulder. And this uniformed man had just sort of unobtrusively slipped in. And I noticed that handcuffed to his left wrist was a briefcase. And someone says there is the man with the nuclear code. We were maybe thinking this was the first stage of some kind of russian attack or whatnot. What was a wonderful welcome in downtown Dallas has become a scene of indiscretion, horror.
As hundreds of people crowd outside the back door to the emergency room here at Parkland Hospital. And people are wondering, is our president going to live? There is no certain road to the presidency. There are no guarantees. The question really is which candidate can meet the problems that the United States is going to face in the sixties. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation.
The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country. And all who serve it. And the glow from that fire can truly light the world. We were talking about him that morning, the charisma that he created and the new excitement that he was presenting for our country. I remember thinking, this is really historical. I’m in the middle of something really historical. This is the president.
And I remember there was no expression there. There was no movement of his face. His eyes were open. And it was an impressive view that I’ll never forget because here was my hero. And it was a very sad situation. The first thing I noticed was a very small wound in his neck in the front. I do remember that very early on, even when his clothes were still on, I saw the wound in his neck.
We could tell that the, the wound was in the front of the neck, just above where the shirt and tie was. So it was visible to you. In my own mind, the wound was pretty small, maybe a nickel, maybe a dime. And that small wound, Malcolm originally thought it must be an entrance wound because it was so small. And as I walked by, Doctor Perry leaned across the president and handed me a surgical retractor and said, Bob, would you go and stand at the head of the cart and lean over and put that retractor in the wound and pull it open so he and Doctor Baxter could look down into the wound and see what they needed to see.
I saw Doctor Perry make the cut right through the wound that we thought was an entrance wound. So Doctor Perry expanded this and we helped retract and helped hold things and inserted the tube and got an airway control. Blood transfusions were began and I completed the tracheostomy. Respiration was assisted. We were trying to save our president and we were trying to do everything we could to save him.
The thing that really hit me when I got to the head of the cart was the wound in the back of his head. I said, my God, have you seen the back of his head? It’s gone. As you can imagine, there are many stories that are coming in now as to the actual condition of the president. This is Bob Hufaker. I am at Parkland Hospital where the scene is one of disbelief.
Senator Yarbrough said, I saw a secret Service man sitting on the rear of the presidential car and pounding the car with his hands in despair, anguish and pain. I knew something horrible had happened. What was striking even more than Kennedy was misses Kennedy with blood spots all over her pink coat. And that was kind of startling to see her like that. As I recall, Misses Kennedy was not emotional.
My impression was that she knew this could happen and it had happened and she was prepared for it. Everyone should be trying to help Jack in whatever way they could. And that was the way I could do it the best, by making it always a climate of affection. I was really focused on Jacqueline Kennedy. She took the center of attention because she was a beautiful lady and in a dramatic, very distraught condition, but she was still very much in command of herself and was not weeping or hysterical or anything as people might imagine.
I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself to this audience. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris and I’ve enjoyed it. She had this pink suit on and I wondered why she wore a pink suit with the red gloves. Of course, looking a little closer, you can see that the red gloves were actually blood and it was on her hands. She was splattered with blood.
And I usually don’t say this because it’s a bit gruesome. Was grey matter, was praying misses Kennedy. When she first came in with the president, the trauma, she was holding a large segment of his cerebrum in her hand and handed it to Doctor Jenkins when she came in. In fact, you’ve seen those pictures when she’s climbing back onto the rear of the car, people wonder why she was retaining this piece of brain that had been blown out of the president’s head onto the rear deck of the limousine and she was crawling back and came in with that piece of brain in her hand and handed it to Doctor Jenkins.
He had a major wound of his right side of his head that was wide open with brain and loss of skull and with the whole scalp peeled back. So it was a horrendous wound and it was obvious that probably this was a lethal wound. I could look down at Kennedy and it was apparent that the top of his head looked like it was blown off. It was all bloody.
And at that instant I felt like he was already dead. When I saw him, the back half of his right cerebral hemisphere was gone. And as I stood there, the right half of the cerebellum fell out of that hole in the back of his head onto the cart. So this was obvious that this was a mortal, fatal wound. My initial impression seeing two wounds was, how would you put it together? Well, a small wound here, a big wound back here.
We thought that there was an entrance wound in the neck and an exit wound in the back of the head at that particular time, because I’ve seen a fair number of gunshot wounds and usually the entrance wound is smaller than the exit wound. I thought that he had a lethal injury, but I felt that you never know. So, you know, here’s our president, so let’s do everything we can.
We were probably ten or 1212 minutes into the resuscitation. We’d done the tracheotomy. We’d gotten the iv going, we’d put in two chest tubes, and we’d gotten the heart tracing. By that time, we got the EKG machine in and there was just a straight line. Straight line. A straight line. He then obviously wasn’t breathing on his own at all. His head was cradled in Doctor Jenkins hands and he murmured to me, last rites.
Last rites. A call has been sent out from some of the top surgical specialists in Dallas, and a call also went out for a priest. And so we all agreed we should pronounce him. And officially we would have Doctor Kemp Clark make that announcement. Doctor Clark took the responsibility because it was primarily a brain injury and he’s a neurosurgeon. And we felt like that was the wound that caused the demise.
I think we all knew that the president was dead and it was just a matter of who was going to make the call. And with that, he pronounced the president dead. Then is when I was emotionally affected. I mean, to see somebody die is something that we saw a lot of. But it was shocking to see the most famous person in the world and his wife there. That’s imprinted in my mind, and it’s always been there.
It was almost like a machine that was roaring shut off, and there was a kind of stillness in the room. And you know that that person has left this world. They said, let’s make the time of death 01:00. And that was well before 01:00 and then they said, well, that’ll give Johnson time to get out of the hospital and get to Air Force one and maybe be sworn in.
I left trauma room one right after we had decided that he was dead. A gentleman walked up to me with a large badge in his hand, and he said, I’m with the FBI, and I need to call J. Edgar Hoover and tell him the condition of the president. And right behind him was another gentleman with a large badge. And he said, I’m with the secret Service and I need to call Joseph Kennedy and tell him the condition of his son.
And here they were asking me the condition of the president. And I knew he was dead. I didn’t want to be the first one to announce this to the world that he was dead. I think the most important part was Miss Kennedy said she didn’t want him pronounced. Until the priest arrived. A priest had not arrived. So I told them, I said, he’s not doing well. At that moment I was really in shock and I just stood there.
Everyone started exiting the room, everyone was leaving. And before long, Misses Kennedy then starts walking over towards the president and I’m just standing there. Doctor Baxter and I saw our opportunity to leave. But just as we began to do that, the door to trauma room one came open again and a priest came in. President Kennedy is on the inside of Parkland Hospital and two priests have just been sent in to the room with the president.
The catholic priest comes in and does the last rites of the church and we would have had to push him out of the way in order to get out of the room. And so we rose against the wall and found ourselves inappropriately, we felt present at the president’s last rites. Misses Kennedy stood across next to Father Huber at the head of the president’s cart. He leaned over and said into the president’s left ear, I forgive you your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.
His wife was standing there during this entire time and I couldn’t hear what Misses Kennedy asked what Father Huber said to her. Very quietly he said, yes, I’ve given him conditional absolution. She grimaced when she heard that word, conditional. The first lady is in the emergency room with the president and the crowd outside is quiet and waiting for some word of the condition of the president. He’s covered up, but she takes his hand and she does a ring ceremony.
She changed a ring from her finger onto the president’s finger and a ring from his finger onto hers. She stood next to his bare foot that was protruding out from underneath the sheet. She stood there for a moment, then leaned over and kissed his foot and walked out of the room. Who was behind all of this? We didn’t know that. They certainly didn’t know it that day. When they were ushering Vice President Johnson out of the emergency room, he was rushed to Air Force one.
Mister and Misses Johnson hurried out of the emergency ward surrounded by secret service. Men were rushed off to the airport. I think they wanted him out of town as quickly as possible. But he couldn’t get out of town as quickly as possible because he wanted Misses Kennedy with him. And Misses Kennedy didn’t want to leave the president. It felt like a bad dream and I kept hoping that I would awaken at any minute and find out that I had just had a horrible nightmare.
Nothing will ever erase the picture of my one time in the presence of the president and the first lady. I went outside the hospital and stood with the crowd that had gathered. I didn’t say anything. I felt like an ordinary person who had great admiration and love and respect for President Kennedy. And my president had been assassinated and was dead. Ladies and gentlemen, official word. President. We repeat, it has just been announced President Kennedy is dead.
Just a moment, customer. We have a bulletin coming in. We now switch you directly to Parkland Hospital and KPU X news director Bill Hampton. The president of the United States is dead. A flash from Dallas. Two priests who were with President Kennedy say he is dead. With the greatest regret, this flash. Two priests who were with President Kennedy say he has died. Of bulletproof. From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official.
President Kennedy died at 01:00 p. m. Central Standard Time, 02:00 Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago. We went back upstairs and just kind of sat there and looked at one another as if, you know, did that really happen or was this a nightmare? The discussion was up in the operating room lounge just to try to talk and determine how Kennedy had been shot and where he had been shot and with what he had been shot.
How many times had he been shot? And we were just in the beginning of that when Doctor Perry got the call to see if he could come down and meet with the press. Arriving at the emergency room, Doctor Caracall had placed a tube in the president’s trachea to assist his breathing. But there was a neck wound anteriorly and a large wound of his head in the right posterior area.
So at the press conference, Doctor Perry, in describing the wound here, said that he thought that it looked like an entrance wound. So we were thinking there were two wounds, had to be an entrance wound and an exit wound. That was the only way we could put it together. And so I thought it was an entrance wound. When he left the room, someone came up to him who Doctor Perry thought maybe was a secret Service man.
And he told Doctor Perry, you must never, ever say that that was an entrance wound again, if you know what’s good for. We are told that the gunshot wound, the fatal wound inflicted on the president of the United States, entered at the base of the throat and came out at the base of the neck on the backside. Nelson John F. Kennedy died at approximately 01:00 central Standard Time today here in Dallas.
He died of a gunshot wound in the brain. It’s a simple matter, Tom, of a bullet right through the head. Inside trauma room one, we have the parkland doctors and staff trying to save the president’s life. Can they notice and they make note of the fact that the back of the president’s head was missing. And within three to 5 hours, most of the staff at Parkland memorialized their observations by writing down what in fact they observed.
Wrote on a progress note sheet of paper like you would put in a patient’s chart. I just said this was an entrance wound. We were asked to turn it into Doctor Clark, the chief of neurosurgery, and I gave it to his secretary. There was no motive to lie. They had no interest in anything other than telling the truth. The first wound described a wound in the back of the head and which seemed to indicate a shot from behind.
But the doctors also said there was a wound in the throat at the front, which seemed to indicate a shot from the other direction. There was no outside influences at all to tell them what to do or not to do as it related to their observations. So we have to say that if we’re dealing with trustworthy people, the Parkland doctors are about as trustworthy as you can yet.
This is situation room. Relay to wayside. We have report quoting Mister Kilduff in Dallas that the president is dead. That he died about 35 minutes ago. Front office desires plane return Washington, this is situation room. Out. Doctor Earl Rose, who was the medical examiner at that time, had requested that the autopsy be done in Dallas County. I think it was his opinion that if a murder occurs in Dallas county, the autopsy is done in Dallas County.
Doctor Rose had been sitting in his office, which looked out onto a corridor that led to the exit of the loading dock at Parkland. And he saw this little procession coming along down the corridor, heading toward the exit. And that consisted of the president, who had now been placed in his coffin. And misses Kennedy was walking along the left side of that cart. Two secret servicemen were heading up the little procession, one of whom was carrying a Thompson submachine gun.
Well, when Doctor Rose saw that, he stepped out of his office into the corridor, held his hand up to ask them to stop, because he said, I’m required by law to tell you that any murder that’s committed in the state of Texas, the victim must undergo a post mortem exam in this state. And they have a loud conversation and I hear them saying, we’re doing the autopsy here.
This is the state of Texas. The law is that he has the autopsy and the secret Service says, no way we’re taking him away. Then the secret Service man with the submachine gun walked slowly over to doctor Rose and put his hands underneath his armpits and gently lifted him up off the floor and placed him over against the wall of the corridor, and then shook his finger in his face as if to say, stand out of our way.
And then they turned around and headed out the rear entrance to the ambulance. They were not about to leave the president’s body there for any purpose. They took him out of Dallas. Within 30 or 40 minutes, he was gone. Everything changed as soon as JFK’s body left Parkland hospital. So the Parkland physicians were no longer a part of the story. So that’s a problem. I’m Doug Horne, and I was successful in obtaining a job with the assassination Records review board in 1995.
I was kicked upstairs and became the chief analyst for military records. The review board was tasked with ensuring that proper searches were done by all the agencies of the government for assassination records. This country has not been told the truth about the JFK assassination. This is why I decided I wanted to go work for the review board. The Parkland observations that I think constitute some of the very best evidence we have of what really happened to President Kennedy.
Some of the Parkland doctors believe, based on what they saw in trauma room one, that President Kennedy was shot from the front, they have not deviated from what they observed in 19, 63, 60 years ago. Well, the Parkland doctors are the first ones that saw the president. When he came in, they saw his body. And the observation, for the most part, is that there was a large head wound in the rear and there was an entry wound in the throat.
This is the prevailing wisdom coming out of Parkland that day. My name is Matt Crumpton, and I am an attorney. So I’ve got a background in looking at evidence and analyzing it. And I was always interested in the case where I started to do a deep dive in the same way that a jury would look at a case. And years later, I continued to look at it. As the case progressed, more and more records came out.
This is a beast of a subject. There are people who have spent their whole lives doing this, and Doug Horn was very, very involved in the granular details. He’s had access to, you know, information that the vast majority of people in this case have not had access to. I think the medical evidence in the Kennedy assassination is the most enduring mystery. And if you’re a person like me who has studied it for decades, you certainly think it’s probably the most interesting evidence, because it’s fraught with conflict and contradiction, and there are some real mysteries to try to unravel here.
And the only way to do that is to go issue by issue. So we start with the body. Parkland was stunned by what happened. When the Secret Service essentially takes a body out of town. They didn’t expect that to happen. When it comes to matters of national security, they step on the toes of the state government all the time. So even if it wasn’t a conspiracy, the federal government wanted to have absolute control over the body of the president of the United States.
They don’t care what some county coroner in Dallas says to them. The Secret Service knew that it was going to move the body to Washington for the autopsy. That was their intention right away. Washington DC was controlling the narrative on what had happened to JFK. In daily Pleisant. The president has been dead for about an hour and seven minutes. Body with some police motorcycle escort is now pulling away from the hospital.
Misses John F. Kennedy left the hospital at approximately the same time the coffin carrying the body of her husband left. The coffin went to a private air installation at Dallas’s Love Field. Lyndon Johnson actually told Kennedy’s press secretary, Malcolm Kilduff at the hospital that he wanted to get out of there as soon as possible because he didn’t know if the Russians were behind this and it was an international conspiracy and that he was in danger and they were trying to take down the whole government.
There was Lyndon Johnson running around on the floor saying, there’s been a conspiracy. I gotta get out the Air Force run right away. At the time JFK was assassinated, it’s just the height of the cold war. Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right. Not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom. So the biggest fear was, was the USSR involved? Did they play a role in the assassination? That’s what was on everyone’s mind.
Vice President Johnson is expected to be sworn in as president to board an airliner before flying back to the nation’s capital. The bronze casket was put on Air Force one, the president’s plane, where the swearing in ceremonies were held. Lyndon B. Johnson has been sworn in as the president of the United States. Roger, the president is on board. The body is on board. And on board the body will go to Bethesda Naval Hospital.
We are told once that body was placed on the airplane at love Field, everything changed. And the federal government controlled the narrative that was given to the american people about what had happened. I went home and told my wife what happened and started being in shock, staying in shock. I started watching television, I watched every bit of what was going on. I couldn’t believe that indeed, I was a part of that.
I really hadn’t realized that this had been on television. And that’s when I realized it. Everybody in the world knew about it by that time. Walter Cronkite was following it. Everybody around the world was following it in Dallas. And a suspect in a Dallas theater pulled a gun, shot one policeman, wounded another, and but was captured. And when he was captured, he yelled, it’s all over now. And screaming hysterically, was taken into custody by the police.
The man has been identified as Lee H. Oswald. Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested. And so we were beginning to try to put some of this together, because when I went home that afternoon, I didn’t know anything about Lee Harvey Oswald and that he was the accused assassin. The man was brought immediately to police headquarters. That man had to have been an employee of the building from which the shot is believed.
This is 24 year old Lee H. Oswald. Now, here is the gun that police say was used to kill the president. Did you kill the president? No, I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet. The first thing I heard about was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that question. Within an hour of the assassination, Oswald was arrested.
And it was all across the media that Oswald was the shooter, firing three shots from behind, hitting President Kennedy and then Governor John Connally. And it makes sense that it’s Oswald because he worked at the Texas school book depository. So, I mean, you’ve got to take a really close look at Oswald. In Dallas, Texas. Three shots were fired at President Kennedy’s motorcade in. In downtown Dallas. News media said that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.
Case closed. And as we know, it was not case closed at that particular point. It was a two hour and 13 minutes flight to get from Dallas, Texas, to Andrews Air Force Base, south of Washington, DC. Everybody aboard Air Force one, everyone aboard Air Force one, with the exception of the body, will be choppered into the south ground. The body will be choppered to the Naval Medical center at Bethesda.
Over. The secret Service in the White House situation room ordered that the autopsy be done at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Here is the plane now made the flight back from Vallis. What you see is a spot special truck that has been moved up to the rear of the presidential jet on which the coffin will be brought out. The casket is of dark brown in color, slightly reddish. A navy ambulance is being drawn up just near the truck behind the casket is misses Jacqueline Kennedy.
To her right is her brother in law, the attorney general, Robert Kennedy. Misses Kennedy is apparently getting into the ambulance. And the Navy ambulance moves off with the casket now being dramatized here at Andrews Air Force Base as the new president addresses the microphone. Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States. I will do my best. That is all I can do. I ask for your help and God’s.
So at 620, London leaves. At 621. The lights go out and there’s no more tv coverage. And so it would have been after that that the president’s body, either in sheets or a body bag, it’s unclear, would have been placed in a helicopter and quickly flown to Bethesda Naval Hospital. This is Doug Horne’s theory, that the body was switched out of the bronze casket on the plane and put into a shipping casket.
And so the bronze casket is taken to Bethesda in the ambulance with Jackie and RFK in it. But that casket is actually empty is what the theory says. The secret Service decided while the plane was en route to Washington that the body would go by helicopter. Now, the shipping casket arrived 20 minutes before the Dallas bronze casket to Bethesda. This is a. This is a shell game. Now, this is obviously a very controversial theory.
The idea is that the body arrived 20 minutes early to Bethesda. Sergeant Boyzhen and his marines were sent to Bethesda to provide physical security for the president’s autopsy, and he wrote that the casket arrived at 1830, 5 hours. That’s military time, for 06:35 p. m. And when the motorcade arrived at 655, secret service agents recorded that time in their reports, and all the newspapermen recorded that time in their reports.
So these two times are firmly established. The primary documents that are relied on for this assertion would be the boisean report. I think it makes this not a crazy thing. The person who was in charge of the working party who offloaded the shipping casket at 635 was petty officer Dennis David. As I recall, it was a black, unmarked ambulance, and we offloaded a casket and it was carried into the autopsy room.
This casket is a plain, gray box, if you will. Metal box. Anybody’s ever been to Vietnam would know what I’m talking about. We ship hundreds of bodies out of there in the same type of casket. It’s just a plain shipping casket. It definitely wasn’t the fancy casket that they showed on tv, which I saw later on. So the question that really matters is, what happened to President Kennedy’s body at the hospital between the time it really arrived 06:35 p.
m. And the time the official autopsy started, which was shortly after 08:00. The theory is that between 630 and eight, the body was physically tampered with so that any evidence that would show a front shot like the wound here, any of that evidence, would be obscured. Any shots that aren’t consistent with coming from the 6th floor sniper’s nest of the school book depository had to be removed because some of the parkland doctors believe that President Kennedy was shot from the front.
By the time JFK’s body arrives at Bethesda, the narrative is clearly that the president was shot by a lone gunman from above and behind. And so the body needs to support that narrative. And one way to support it is, is to remove all of the metal in the body that indicates there was a crossfire. You’re going to sanitize the crime scene. In effect, 24 year old Lee Harvey Oswald charged with the murder of the president.
Oswald was arrested less than 2 hours after the president was shot. Police say Oswald worked in the building from which the shots that killed the president were fired. That gun is a powerful military rifle which police found in the building. He has not confessed, he has made no statement. Charges of murder have been accepted against him. I don’t know what this is all about. I’m just a passing president.
Investigation and arrest has been rapid, to say the least. The pathologists for President Kennedy’s autopsy were two Navy pathologists, Commander James J. Humes and Commander J. Thornton Boswell. Humes and Boswell were not very well versed at all on gunshots. They had not done many gunshots at all. The problem is they weren’t forensic pathologists. They were people that would do an autopsy. If you’re ant died of a heart attack, not a high level government official that gets shot in the head where you need to know the entrance wound, the exit wound, the bullet path, so you can determine later whence the bullets came.
It is hard to believe that you’ve got the president of the United States and the autopsy is going to be done by no practicing forensic pathologist. I believe that Humes and Boswell were chosen to do the autopsy because they were under military control. The results of the autopsy could be controlled by the military, which means controlled by the federal government. James Jenkins was a hospital corpsman who was assisting with the autopsy, and he’s on record saying that he believed that the military was really in control autopsy.
There’s so many people that are now gone. You know, when I’m gone. There will be nobody else from the autopsy team at all. It was my job to do for them what they requested without actually being told to do it every time. So my. The focus was on exactly what was going on at that table. Doing what I was asked to do, listening to what they were doing and anticipating requests.
In those days, the military was if you were told to do something, you did it or else. And the or else was not pleasant. Military doctors follow orders. If you don’t, your career is over. I believe that Humes and Boswell received a very firm set of instructions before President Kennedy’s body arrived at 635. You will not report shots from the front. You will only report shots from behind.
We already have a man arrested. That’s the way it has to be. You’ll be doing a patriotic duty for your country. They’re engaged in a charade. The charade is to pretend like you’re doing a real autopsy and come up with results that say there was one shooter from above and behind and there were no gunmen from the front. Humes had one paramount task he had to perform before the autopsy began at 08:00 that was to remove President Kennedy’s brain and remove any evidence in the form of shots from the front.
So in any standard autopsy, when there’s a gunshot wound involved, the tracks of the wound would be dissected so that we could see the trajectory and see where the bullet actually went within the body. After doctor Humes removed President Kennedy’s brain to take out all the bullet fragments he could find, he then put the brain back in the head so that it could be inside the body. At the beginning of the 08:00 autopsy, there were no metal fractions, no fragments, no bullets, no partial bullets, anything of significance that were found.
It was very tense that night. The atmosphere was very tense, and it was not so much. The fact is that the president had been. It was a contention between the military officers that doctor Humes had come in with and Doctor Humes himself. He was constantly being called back to talk to one of the people. It was jam packed. It was very hysterical. We were interfered with constantly. Yes, you said that the scene in the autopsy room was somewhat like trying to do delicate neurosurgery in a three ring circus.
At times. It was when there was a lot of people around, other people that secret service, the FBI, who wouldn’t normally be present. When I got to review the autopsy report, the x rays, and most significantly, the photographs that were taken, it was the first time that I really cried, had tears in my eyes, because he was such a young person, had done so much for the country, and was just taken out of the prime of his life.
My name is Michael Bodden. I am a physician and forensic pathologist, and I was asked to head the forensic pathology unit that would investigate the autopsy findings that House select committee assassinations investigation took place 15 years after the death of President Kennedy. And in the course of our investigation, the bottom line was we determined that President Kennedy had been struck by two bullets from behind and only two bullets from behind.
I simply cannot agree with his reasoning because he had to overrule and abandon the personal observations of the parkland doctors who said there was a large exit wound in the right rear of the head. He examined photographs of the brain. And when doctor Bodden noted that there was no damage to the right cerebellum, the central conclusions were unanimously agreed to by eight of the panel members. Bethesda was kind of a secret autopsy.
The people doing the autopsy were not trained. And then the many politicians and other people who were there were not knowledgeable about how an autopsy should be done. I agree with Doctor botten about one thing. The autopsy was under the thumb of military authority. Jim Jenkins saw doctor Humes remove the brain shortly after 08:00, at which point doctor Hume says, the brain’s fallen out in my hands. You know, it almost fell out in his hand.
And at that time, I noticed the brainstem hadn’t been torn. It had been severed, but it had been severed on two different sides. I just assumed that the bullet had severed the brainstem. And I was a little surprised when I saw that it had been actually surgically cut. Jim Jenkins opinion was that this brain must have been removed earlier that evening. The audience was extremely disturbed by this, to the point where doctor Humes, I think, panicked.
And so he announced that it’s apparent there’s been surgery of the head area. And at this point, Doctor Boswell looks up and says to the gallery in the morgue, was there surgery in Dallas? So he’s playing along with Hume. These guys knew there was no surgery in Dallas. They did it themselves. So the FBI agents heard him say that and put it in their written report. It was just a real short statement.
Hume said, there’s been a surgery in the head area. They’re just literally saying what Doctor Hume said, which is it appears there was surgery done. So the question is, what does that mean? And that goes into the theory of body alteration to obscure any evidence that would lead them to the conclusion of shots from the front or from any other direction. The third pathologist was a forensic pathologist.
This is Pierre Fink from the army, but generally he wasn’t conducting autopsies himself either. Doctor Humes and Doctor Fink, they began to examine the head and they found a wound. It was on the right side of the head. It was slightly above the ear and forward of the ear, just barely in the hairline. I thought he was shot from the front because entrance wounds are small and exit wounds are large.
And it was a small wound. And doctor Fink made a comment that probably was from a bullet. That was the wound they were examining when doctor Humes was called to talk with the individuals in the gallery. It was just below his hairline, right up here. And the entry wound was about the size of a dime. It was clearly wound of entrance, not of exit. And he came back and no time during the autopsy did they ever go back to this one.
It was not listed in the autopsy. They never made it into the official record. That bullet would have been removed during the surgery. The parkland doctors said that there was an exit wound in the back right side of Kennedy’s head. The entrance wound would have been about here, whereas that’s not what the autopsy showed in Bethesda. The autopsy report determined that the bullet had entered the back of the head and exited the right side of the skull.
And the parkland doctors thought there was a big hole there. But the autopsy showed there was just a normal half an inch bullet wound in the back of the head. I tend to believe what the Parkland doctor said, which causes some problems and confusion when you go look at the autopsy. When President Kennedy arrives at Bethesda, doctor Humes, as normally, looks at the front of the body, then turns the body over to examine the back.
That back wound was located right at the top of the shoulder blade, back here, halfway between the top of that point and the spinal column. The bullet that goes in the back goes in a few inches. And the doctor Humes probed it, which you’re not supposed to do with bullet wounds because he can make artificial tracks. Doctor Humes could not find any point of exit anywhere else in the body.
In other words, it dead ended. They found that the wound didn’t go anywhere. They weren’t really interested, it seems that on how it happened, where it happened from. Nobody had mentioned whether he had got shot in the front or the back or the side or what I was told, find out what killed the man. My focus was on his wounds. I first saw the neck wound when Doctor Bosnia and I unwrapped the body.
It looked like a gaping gash. We didn’t examine it. We were told not to bother with it. It was a trache, so we didn’t examine it specifically. Pierre Fink was told to stop when they were looking at the neck wound. It’s just a tracheotomy. Stop. Move on. There was a big, gaping tracheotomy wound in the anterior neck. They obliterated, literally obliterated, that wound. The problem is, the first thing that Bethesda didn’t do was call Parkland emergency department and ask them, what did you do to the body? Had they called us first, yes, they would have known that there was a wound in the neck.
They didn’t have all the information. That Saturday morning after the assassination, on Friday, we were just sitting in our office talking. Doctor Perry got a phone call from Washington, from doctor Boswell, one of the pathologists. The call was that we have a rifle injury to the back, but we don’t see an exit wound, and we also have a gunshot wound to the head. We didn’t know when we were called from Bethesda that there was a gunshot wound to the back, just to the right of the midline.
We didn’t know there was a wound in the back because after the president died, we didn’t feel like it was appropriate for us to do any more examining or turning of the body or whatever. The naval hospital in Bethesda didn’t know that there was a wound in the front of the neck because doctor Perry’s incision had gone through it, and they didn’t pick up on the fact that there was a little divot in the bottom part of that wound.
That was what we thought was the entrance wound. But Bethesda, they said it was their opinion that the neck wound came from the back and out the front. We had an entrance wound high in the post, sheer back above the scapula. We didn’t know where the exit wound was at that time. Of course, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it had to go out from the neck.
It was the only place it could go after it was not found anywhere as an x rays. If the autopsy had been done in Dallas, Doctor Rose would have immediately been told that that was a wound, and so he could have put that together. I just think the clarification would have been a little better up front if it had been done in Dallas county. So when the Bethesda pathologists called Parkland, they both found out something that the other didn’t know.
So the Parkland doctors were not aware of the wound in Kennedy’s back. And the Bethesda autopsy doctors were not aware that the tracheotomy was done over an existing wound in Kennedy’s throat. Humes originally concluded one shot to the head from behind and one shot in the upper back from behind, which did not exit the body. He changed his conclusions following the phone calls to doctor Perry and decided that a bullet transited President Kennedy’s body from high on his back and came out the throat.
The problem is that the evidence shows that the wound was actually lower and to the right such that the exit wound, if there was one, would have been closer to the president’s chest. It wouldn’t have been at his throat. So we have to explain this inconsistency somehow. This is something that anyone who studied the case agrees that this is a major issue and it’s determined that the Warren Commission’s going to figure out what happened.
President Johnson quickly appointed a commission to discover the real facts of the assassination. A commission of seven Americans so distinguished that their conclusions must be above suspicion. Or so it was thought. What my general impression was that the Warren commission was set up perhaps to kind of get this over with. I, like many other people, thought that this was a kind of a slapdash study that was done to just kind of COVID things up, you know, sort of look at what happened and make a fairly quick conclusion and get it out of the people in the country’s minds.
The Warren Commission did interview the Parkland doctors, not all of them, but many of them. And they got their perspective, including that those doctors thought there was an exit wound in the back of the president’s head. The assassination of President Kennedy was inevitable, a mystery story on a grand scale. Parkland hospital doctors were quoted as saying they thought at least one bullet entered Mister Kennedy’s neck from the front.
All this mattered because if there were any shots from the overpass, if there were more than three shots, then Oswald had to have had an accomplice. There were concerns in the United States about there being a conspiracy, about there being two shooters, one shooting President Kennedy, one shooting governor Connally, or whether there was a conspiracy, be it of Russians or Cubans, Castro or some rogue government agency. We got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour.
I think the problem is that they’re left with only two bullets to do all of the damage to two men. The known wounds were a shot in the back and a shot in the head, and they’re trying to account for those two wounds plus Governor Connally’s wounds. With two bullets, the only way to do that is to have one bullet strike both men. So an ambitious junior counselor, Arlan Specter, invents the single bullet theory to solve a shortage of evidence.
In the 1960s, Spector gained national attention for his work on the Warren Commission, investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As co author of the single bullet Theory, supporting the belief there was only one shooter involved, he decides he wants a bullet that hit President Kennedy first to be the one that hit Governor Connally, and he twisted himself in knots trying to sell that story. The possibility of one bullet having inflicted the wounds on both the president’s neck and the governor’s body came in a very gradual way.
The trajectory was such that it was almost certain that the bullet, which came out of the president’s neck with great velocity, would have had to have hit either the car or someone in the car. Well, the single bullet theory is sheer, absolute, unadulterated nonsense. You have the bullet coming out of John Kennedy, moving then downward and to the left, and yet it slams into John Connally behind the right armpit.
Well, Connally was sitting directly in front of Kennedy, so you’ve got to have the bullet coming out of Kennedy stopping abruptly in midair, turning to the right, coming back about 20 inches, stopping again, turning around now to the left and going into Connolly. So that’s the single bullet theory. It is better than any rollercoaster ride that anybody has ever seen anywhere in the world. It is a bullet that rightfully deserves the characterization that we critics have given to it.
A magic bullet. The big issue was, is this an entrance wound or an exit wound? It was very small, and we were always taught that an exit wound is larger than an entrance wound. To me, it’s just inconceivable that the first shot that went through his neck entered my back. I don’t believe that. I never will believe that. They can’t run enough tests to make me believe that.
I don’t think my impressions have changed from the day of the assassination. I’ve always thought that this looked like an entrance wound without a single bullet theory. To wound both men, there has to be at least one additional assassin, and the Warren commission couldn’t have that. The Warren report hinges on the single bullet theory being true. If it’s not true, then we’re left with either a conspiracy or just a bunch of question marks as if it was never investigated at all.
On September 24, 1964, the commission presented its findings in the form of this report to the president. We concluded that in the absence of solid evidence, there was no second gunman. I don’t remember the exact moment that I heard the results of the Warren Commission, but I was aware that it wasn’t the full truth. The conclusion of the Warren report is that the Parkland doctors must have just been incorrect in their conclusion.
Even President Lyndon Johnson had serious questions about the single bullet theory. He told Senator Richard Russell, who’s on the Warren commission, during a recorded phone call, that he didn’t believe it. The commission believed that the same bullet that hit Conley. Well, I don’t believe it. I don’t either. The problem is, the inconsistency is that Johnson still believed that Oswald acted alone. The Warren commission started with a conclusion that Oswald did it and he did it alone.
And they then worked to confirm that, and then they disregarded substantial evidence to the contrary. Certain people in our government tampered with, with critical evidence in order to make sure the american people would not know the truth about who murdered the president. And that’s about as bad as it gets. I’m talking about photographs that don’t look correct, that look like they must have been altered. The photographs and x rays that we see are not consistent with what the Parkland doctors and many other people who were there at Bethesda say.
When I saw the autopsy pictures, my first response was, I wanted to tell everybody that that didn’t reflect what actually transpired. I noted a wound when I came into the room, which was at the right posterior portion of the head. There was a massive wound at the back of his head. The two pictures that I’ve seen that you showed me are supposedly from the archives, are not what I saw that night.
And I don’t know where those pictures came from. It had a big hole in it. This whole area was gone. This part of the head was gone. There was no scalp there. How could all these people, including the doctors at Parkland, conclude that their back of the head was missing? And then we go to Bethesda, and all of a sudden it’s patched up. What happened? In order to probe that, you had to go back to Parkland and speak to these doctors? When I saw the autopsy pictures, I thought somebody had really tampered with the whole thing.
And it made me very suspicious because it didn’t look anything like what I saw there. And they had also completely sewed up the temporal parietal side of his head, and it was closed. And I said, how can they do. Why would they do that? The cerebellum was not protruding. We examined the cerebellum photographically, and it was intact. Maybe the left lobe was, but the right lobe had fallen out.
I saw that he’s wrong. There was no gaping hole, and there was no cerebellum that fell out on the car, period. Andrew Purdy was counsel to the House assassinations committee. He says the Dallas doctors are wrong. When you think of the body as being face up, and you think, particularly in Dallas, of the amount of blood that was involved there, people couldn’t distinguish where things were. It must have been a terrible, tragic sight.
It was very hard for people to recollect exactly where what was when. That wasn’t their purpose. Their purpose was to save the president’s life. And these recollections afterwards are faulty. Who is that last guy? Who is that guy? Is he a neurosurgeon? The wound when we were taking care of the president was not that bloody. Actually, he had already bled out significantly at the time of the injury.
Well, he wasn’t there, so he wasn’t there. He’s not capable of rendering an opinion. He’s just going by autopsy. X ray, most likely. That’s a whole different perspective. And those x rays that I’ve seen are wrong. I was both on the right side and on the left side in the course of the treatment, and I didn’t see any facial damage or any area in the forehead. Any damage in the forehead area.
It just. It wasn’t there. No. That’s why it’s inconsistent with the pictures, the x ray pictures, which show orbital destruction. That would show things externally. But obviously this has been tampered with because they’ve replaced the scalp that was wide open when I saw the wound. I mean, they’ve done that at the autopsy. That’s the work in Washington. I had seen this massive hole in the back of the president’s head.
But then in one of the pictures, as I recall, it looked to me like they were pulling a flap of scalp up over this hole and covering it. In fact, I thought I could see the finger and the thumb of whoever was pulling this flap. And I thought that it was pulled up to cover that hole. Someone told me, oh, no, that wasn’t a flap. That’s just the way it looked.
I said, no, it didn’t. The government handled the problem of the Parkland doctors badly and dishonorably they should have shown them those photographs and said, is this the way President Kennedy looked in trauma room one? The Parkland doctors would have said, no, that’s not the way the president looked at Parkland Hospital. And you can see that in the Zapruder film. I think the Zapruder film had a lot to do with concerns about how the president was shot.
President Kennedy was the first person to be seen on a video being killed. This is one of the most important films that existed, exists in history. And nevertheless, the american people didn’t know about the Zapruder film until Robert Groden and Dick Gregory went on the Geraldo show. It was in 1975. This is very heavy. It’s the film shot by the Dallas dress manufacturer Abraham Zapruder. And it’s the execution of President Kennedy.
And now, before he goes behind the sign, the president is waving to the crowd. When he comes out from behind the sign, he is shot. Then Governor Connally is shot. He’s already been hit. He’s already been hit. And now at the bottom of the screen, the head shot. That’s the shot that blew off his head. It’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever seen in the movie. The Zapruder film is an eight millimeter film that was taken by Abraham Zapruder, who was in Dealey Plaza that day.
And he was standing on the grassy knoll on a concrete platform, so he had a better view as the president was coming down from Houston street, making his turn. He was about halfway down there. I had a shot, and he slumped to the side like this. Then I had another shot or two. I couldn’t say what was one or two. And I saw his head practically open up, all blood and everything.
And I kept on shooting. When you see the Zapruder film, you see the motorcade coming off of Houston street and making a slow turn onto Elm street, heading toward the triple underpass. And they look perfectly okay until they make that slow turn. And all of a sudden, both of the president’s hands go up to his neck like that, like something has happened, this bullet hole in his neck.
We thought, in fact, Doctor Perry said to the newsmen right after we got out of trauma room one that maybe we thought this was an entrance wound here in his neck, near his windpipe, just above his clavicle, and misses. Kennedy has realized something is wrong. And she’s leaning over to him as if to ask what’s wrong? And just as she does that, the president’s head literally explodes violently.
And he’s thrown backward and to the left. And that’s when I think a missile hit him from the picket fence. The fatal wound came from the front, I think, and other people believe that too. Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, who were riding in one of the cars behind, they were convinced that that fatal shot came from the grassy knoll and the picket fence. Self proclaimed eyewitnesses all claim seeing a second gunman shooting from behind the picket fence.
The shots that killed President Kennedy didn’t come from the book. They were talking about the fact that Mister Oswald was up in that school book. And I kept saying, no, he was not there. I saw this. I was standing here. I saw this. I saw the whole thing. I looked up right there in the bushes. This man was shooting with a rifle. And I saw a puff of smoke and a flash of light at the very instant that Kennedy’s head exploded.
This is the view of Elm street from the grassy knoll up behind the picket fence where some critics claim another gunman lay concealed, came from that picket fence and glanced over underneath that green tree and you could see a little puff of smoke. It looked like a puff of steam. The Zapruder film does not show the back of the president’s head getting blown out. We see the shot to the right temple and we know from the witnesses that there was a blast out of the head.
The Parkland doctors are telling us the truth. Truth beyond any and all doubt. The issue in retrospect was if Oswald was in the 6th floor depository, how could he have been shot from the front? And so was there more than one assailant. Harlan Specter came to Parkland and he said, we have people who will testify that they saw the president shot from the front, from the railroad track.
But he said, we don’t believe they have credible testimony. But I don’t want you to say anything else about that. There’s a Pruder film when he’s hitting, you see this whole flash of bone, you know, coming out. And that was compatible with what I saw from his right side where I was located. How could a gunshot from the rear peel the scalp from the front back? And my opinion is that this was a flap from the whole right side bunched up into the back of the.
At the base of the occiput. And you see that. And I think that kind of fell back into place a little bit. But then the missile went on through and blew out the back of his head. Yeah, it was temporal. And you can see that in the Zapruder film. But I saw that on him? Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s honorable that the Parkland physicians and nurses have maintained their original positions and have not deviated from what they observed in 19, 63, 60 years ago.
The evidence shows that the murder of the president was a straightforward shooting period. What’s more likely? Parkland doctors telling the truth or the autopsy telling the truth? In all probability, there was a conspiracy. That is, there was more than one shooter. And I think that shooter was behind the pickett fence on grassy knoll and then someone was in the 6th floor of the book depository that first day.
In the first 24 hours we, I think, all thought that that was an entrance wound. I’ve always entertain a strong possibility of there being more than one shooter. It was a lie. They really didn’t tell the truth about it. I didn’t ever think he would be in parkland on the gurney and we would be taking care of him and watch him take his last breath. Probably one of the most dramatic moments in us history and a pivotal moment for me and my whole life.
I’ve had a very interesting life. I’ve had a lot of intersections with events and people but none as dramatic and as strong as the events of that day. Sometimes the sadness comes out. The thought of the assassination and my participation in it as well as others never goes away. You replay that day in your mind. It certainly the most significant event that ever occurred in my life. I take my being there very seriously and I don’t really enjoy telling the story of what happened.
But it was a very important time and it was my destiny to be there in America. I think it was one of the most significant events of the century but also a loss of innocence. .
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