JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (97 page)

As Crenshaw also recognized, the hole in JFK’s throat was an entry wound. Doctors Malcolm Perry and Kemp Clark drew that same conclusion at a press conference in a classroom at Parkland Hospital at 3:15 that afternoon, cited in the
New York
Times
the following day.
[542]

Dr. Perry said repeatedly at the press conference that the throat wound he had seen was an entrance wound:

Question: “Where was the entrance wound?”

Perry: “There was an
entrance
wound in the neck.”

Question: “Which way was the bullet coming on the neck wound? At him?”

Perry: “It appeared to be
coming at him
.” (emphasis added)

Question: “Doctor, describe the entrance wound. You think from the front in the throat?”

Perry: “The wound appeared to be an
entrance
wound in the front of the throat; yes, that is correct.” (emphasis added)
[543]

With the suspect, Lee Harvey Oswald, having already been located in the Texas School Book Depository to the rear of Kennedy, the implication of an entrance wound in the throat was obvious. Someone other than Oswald had shot the president from the front.

Inspired by the doctors’ testimony, historian Staughton Lynd and Jack Minnis, research director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wrote the first published critique of the JFK assassination. Appearing in the December 21, 1963, issue of the
New Republic
, their article concluded: “The central problem—the fact that the President was wounded in the front of the throat, ‘the midsection of the front part of his neck,’ according to ‘staff doctors’ at Parkland Hospital on November 23 (
New York Times
, November 24)—remains.”
[544]

The problem that the throat wound raised, which Lynd and Minnis underscored, remains to this day.

After the doctors had covered JFK’s body with a sheet, the Secret Service took over. Somber men in suits led by Agent Roy Kellerman took possession of the coffin containing the president’s body. They almost ran over Dallas Coroner Earl Rose when he tried to block their way. Rose resisted them, saying that Texas law and the chain of evidence required him to perform an autopsy before the body left Parkland. Kellerman and the Secret Service pushed ahead with the coffin. Rose stood aside. The body was taken away.
[545]

When the government took charge with its official story of a lone assassin firing from the rear, the doctors were pressured by the Warren Commission to change their initial observations of Kennedy’s body. The Warren Commission’s staff counsel Arlen Specter, a future U.S. senator, confronted the Dallas doctors with a question that contained the answer the Commission was seeking:

“
Assuming
. . . that the bullet passed through the President’s body, going in between the strap muscles of the shoulder without violating the pleura space and
exited at a point in the midline of the neck,
would the hole which you saw on the President’s throat
be consistent with an exit point
, assuming the factors which I have just given to you?”
[546]

As Charles Crenshaw (who was not asked to testify) pointed out later, Specter had asked the doctors, “If the bullet
exited
from the front of Kennedy’s throat, could the wound in the front of Kennedy’s throat have been an
exit
wound?”
[547]

The doctors went along with Specter’s show of logic: Yes, assuming the bullet exited from the front of Kennedy’s throat, that wound could indeed have been an exit wound. Pressed further by Warren Commission member Gerald Ford, who would later become president, Dr. Malcolm Perry repudiated as “inaccurate” the press reports of his clear description of the hole in the throat as an entrance wound.
[548]

This was not enough for Allen Dulles, who wanted the Warren Commission to draw extensively on the doctors’ denial of their earliest press statements as a way to counteract the “false rumors” of the hole in the throat as an entrance wound. The Commission, Dulles felt, needed “to deal with a great many of the false rumors that have been spread on the basis of false interpretation of these appearances before television, radio, and so forth.”
[549]

Dr. Perry’s retraction was not only manipulated but given under stress. He had been threatened beforehand by “the men in suits,” specifically the Secret Service. As Dallas Secret Service agent Elmer Moore would admit to a friend years later, he “had been ordered to tell Dr. Perry to change his testimony.” Moore said that in threatening Perry, he acted “on orders from Washington and Mr. Kelly of the Secret Service Headquarters.”
[550]

Moore confessed his intimidation of Dr. Perry to a University of Washington graduate student, Jim Gochenaur, with whom he became friendly in Seattle in 1970. Moore told Gochenaur he “had badgered Dr. Perry” into “making a flat statement that there was no entry wound in the neck.”
[551]
Moore admitted, “I regret what I had to do with Dr. Perry.”
[552]
However, with his fellow agents, he had been given “marching orders from Washington.” He felt he had no choice: “I did everything I was told, we all did everything we were told, or we’d get our heads cut off.”
[553]
In the cover-up, the men in suits were both the intimidators and the intimidated.

With the power of the government marshaled against what the Parkland doctors had seen, they entered into what Charles Crenshaw called “a conspiracy of silence.”
[554]
When Crenshaw finally broke his own silence in 1992, he wrote:

“I believe there was a common denominator in our silence—a fearful perception that to come forward with what we believed to be the medical truth would be asking for trouble. Although we never admitted it to one another, we realized that the inertia of the established story was so powerful, so thoroughly presented, so adamantly accepted, that it would bury anyone who stood in its path . . . I was as afraid of the men in suits as I was of the men who had assassinated the President . . . I reasoned that anyone who would go so far as to eliminate the President of the United States would surely not hesitate to kill a doctor.”
[555]

In the case of Dr. Crenshaw, the cost of speaking up almost thirty years later was the assassination of his character.

In April 1992, Crenshaw came out with his book
JFK: Conspiracy of Silence
, which revealed what he had seen of President Kennedy’s wounds, contradicting the
Warren Report
. The book rose to number one on the
New York Times
best-seller list. Crenshaw was then attacked in print by the director of the FBI’s Dallas office, who claimed “the documentation does not show that the doctor was involved in any way,”
[556]
and by a former Warren Commission attorney, who said the press should demand “full financial disclosure [of Crenshaw] because hundreds of thousands and millions have been made out of the assassination.”
[557]
Then, to his surprise, Crenshaw was denounced by the prestigious
Journal of
the American Medical Association (JAMA)
.

In its May 27, 1992, issue,
JAMA
published two articles suggesting Dr. Crenshaw was not even in Trauma Room One with President Kennedy.
[558]
JAMA
’s editor promoted the articles by a New York press conference that received massive press coverage. Dr. Crenshaw submitted to
JAMA
a series of articles and letters responding to the charge that he was a liar. He pointed out that in testimony before the Warren Commission five different doctors and nurses had specifically mentioned seeing him working with them to revive the president.
[559]
They made it clear Crenshaw had been in Trauma Room One, doing exactly what he said he did in
Conspiracy of Silence
.
[560]

All of Dr. Crenshaw’s written efforts to set the record straight on
JAMA
’s pages were rejected by the editor. Crenshaw then sued the journal. In 1994, through court-ordered mediation,
JAMA
agreed to pay Dr. Crenshaw and his co-author, Gary Shaw, a sum of money.
JAMA
also agreed to publish their rebuttal article, which eventually appeared in an abbreviated version.
[561]
Then
JAMA
published still another piece attacking Crenshaw, Shaw, and their book.
[562]

However, even though Crenshaw’s rebuttal reached fewer readers than
JAMA
’s widely publicized attacks on his character, his book’s impact coincided with the public outcry created by Oliver Stone’s movie
JFK
. As a result, Charles Crenshaw’s witness to the truth of what he had seen in Trauma Room One helped create the Assassinations Records Review Board and its release of hundreds of thousands of assassination-related government documents to the American public.
[563]

Late Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963, Dr. Robert B. Livingston made a phone call from his home in Bethesda, Maryland, to the Bethesda Naval Hospital. Dr. Livingston was scientific director for two of the National Institutes of Health. Because his scientific responsibilities related to the president’s wounds and autopsy, Dr. Livingston paid careful attention to the news reports from Dallas. He learned that “there was a small frontal wound in the President’s throat.”
[564]

Dr. Livingston’s call was put through at Bethesda Hospital to Commander James Humes, the naval doctor chosen to head the autopsy team. Livingston has described their conversation:

“Dr. Humes said he had not heard much reporting from Dallas and Parkland Hospital because he had been occupied preparing to conduct the autopsy. I told him about reports describing the small wound in the President’s neck. I stressed that, in my experience, that would have to be a wound of entrance. I emphasized the importance of carefully tracing the path of this projectile and of establishing the location of the bullet or any fragments. I said carefully, that if that wound were confirmed as a wound of entrance, that would prove beyond peradventure of doubt that a bullet had been fired from in front of the President—hence that if there were shots from behind, there had to have been more than one gunman. At just that moment, there was an interruption in our conversation. Dr. Humes returned after a pause to say, ‘Dr. Livingston, I’m sorry, but I can’t talk with you any longer. The FBI won’t let me.’”
[565]

Dr. Livingston then wondered aloud to his wife, who had overheard his end of the conversation, “why the FBI would want to interfere with a discussion between physicians relating to the important problem of how best to investigate and interpret the President’s wounds.”
[566]

The FBI’s disruption of Dr. Livingston’s phone call to Dr. Humes was a sign of things to come. The autopsy itself would be totally disrupted by government authorities. The military control over the president’s autopsy from start to finish has been described by several of its participants.

Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Finck was the army doctor who assisted Humes and another navy doctor, Commander J. Thornton Boswell, in the autopsy. Finck became a reluctant witness to the military control over the doctors’ examination of the president’s body. Subpoenaed by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, Colonel Finck was questioned under oath about the president’s autopsy:

Question: “Was Dr. Humes running the show?”

Finck: “Well, I heard Dr. Humes stating that—he said, ‘Who is in charge here?’ and I heard an Army General, I don’t remember his name, stating, ‘I am.’ You must understand that in those circumstances, there were law enforcement officials, military people with various ranks, and you have to co-ordinate the operation according to directions.”

Question: “But you were one of the three qualified pathologists standing at that autopsy table, were you not, Doctor?”

Finck: “Yes, I was.”

Question: “Was this Army General a qualified pathologist?”

Finck: “No.”