The Day Kennedy Was Shot (67 page)

The witnesses sat quietly. The doctors waited. They had schematic drawings of a male body, front and back; they had drawings of the human head looking down at the top of the skull. They made terse notes, early impressions, and dots to represent wound punctures. None of these were exact; they did not even agree precisely with each other. Neither Humes nor Boswell realized that, outside this room, in the world of darkness, were laymen writers who could and would distort the early misconceptions, the burning of erroneous notes, the underdeveloped photographs into a malicious and mysterious plot to deny the American people its right to know the truth about the wounds.

It is difficult to search for sympathy for the United States Navy, the most pontifical of the American forces, because the senior officers had decreed, without warrant, that the main fo
cus of the night must be centered on secrecy. A Marine guard was posted outside the autopsy room as though some unauthorized citizen might try to force his way into a scene which no sane layman would want to witness. Heads had been counted; names had been recorded; the mutilation of the dead, which is a scientific concomitant of a search for truth, was to be executed with such aggressive secrecy that, for years to come, no outsider would be permitted to see this room, even when it was empty.

In addition, the United States Navy did not assign the best qualified physicians to conduct the autopsy because they were not available. Commander James Joseph Humes, a product of Villanova University and Jefferson Medical College, functioned as director of laboratories of the Naval Medical School. He was an administrator. Among his confreres, Humes was known to be an excellent pathologist, an expert in the nature and cause of disease and the changes it brings to the body. It could be regarded as an imposition to order him to autopsy a body and qualify as an expert in missile trajectories and damage.

To assist Humes, Commander J. Thornton Boswell had been ordered to report to the autopsy room. Among the physicians available at the center, Boswell enjoyed the confidence of the officers, but he, too, was hardly a monumental choice for an autopsy involving violent death. This is not to say that Humes and Boswell were unqualified to conduct an autopsy; it was not their specialty. Humes was so conscious of this that, when he was offered an opportunity to secure the services of a qualified second assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Finck, he agreed. The colonel was chief of the Wounds Ballistics Branch of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. He had a career of four hundred cases of bullet wounds and two hundred autopsies. Although Finck was the most experienced, Commander Humes was in charge of the work.

The preparatory examination and the photography were complete by the time Colonel Finck arrived. Quickly, he
gowned and masked and came into the autopsy room just as the X-rays were being placed on big illuminated opaque screens. Dr. Humes invited the laymen witnesses to come over to the screens and listen to a dissertation on the initial findings. Kellerman, Greer, Dr. Burkley, Sibert, O'Neill, and the others looked at the big negatives. A radiologist with a pointer took the frames one by one. Where there was no pathological finding, as in the abdomen, it was so stated and the doctor moved on to the more dramatic studies.

Most puzzling was the wound in the right strap muscles. It was almost certainly a wound of entry, because the hole was small and round, slightly elliptical, with no ragged serration which usually attends a wound of exit. The exit is often larger than a wound of entry because the missile, after striking the resistance of a body, sometimes begins a tumbling effect in its progress.

Humes or Boswell, on the schematic drawing of the body, seem to have made the wound of entry slightly lower on the body than it was. On the X-rays, it appeared at the lower end of the sloping muscle branch which extends from the neck toward the shoulder. It was hardly possible that a metal missile, moving at close to a half mile per second, could pierce the fleshy muscles less than one inch and stop. In addition, there was the question of what had happened to such a bullet.

The FBI and Secret Service men listened and made notes. The driver of the car, Greer, asked if he had permission to speak. The doctors listened. He said that a bullet had been found on a stretcher—or rather as it fell from a stretcher—in Parkland Memorial Hospital and had been sent on to the FBI laboratory for examination. Could this be the bullet that went into the neck and, in the jostling of the President on the stretcher, fell out?

The doctors agreed that it was a possibility. They could hardly subscribe to a thesis which depicted a dying bullet which did not have the energy to go through boneless masses of flesh, but it must be considered. If some foreign object had slowed the
bullet—like hitting the back of the car—it could not have made that clean 6-millimeter circle; it would have been tumbling end over end and a large ugly entrance would have resulted.

Greer's question should have taught caution to the doctors, because it pointed up what they did not know about the events in Dallas. The superior officers—Captain Canada and Admiral Galloway—medically oriented, could easily have recessed the proceedings for fifteen minutes or a half hour. All that would be required was to phone Parkland Memorial Hospital and ask for Dr. Clark or Dr. Carrico—whether at home or in the hospital. If not those, then any of the other attending physicians could have helped. Bethesda might have said: “You had the body of the President. What were your wound findings and what methods and treatment were employed?”

The news that an exit wound had been found in the lower front of the neck—one which frayed the back of the knot on the President's tie—would have settled, beyond doubt, that the bullet had gone through the back of the neck muscles and out the trachea. The Texas doctors could have stated that the exit wound had been enlarged to form a tracheostomy. The mystery could have been dissolved at once. No one pursued it.

Colonel Finck studied the X-rays of the head carefully. There was a hole about 6 millimeters in size in the lower right-hand section of the back of the head. It was round and consistent with an entry wound. If this portion of the head was hit by a 6.5-millimeter bullet, the hole in scalp and skull would shrink to 6 millimeters after the missile passed. Once inside the brain, it would bevel the inside of the skull, tumble, causing the massive hole in the upper right side as the wound of exit. If, after he had been hit in the neck, his head fell forward and the body tilted to the left, as witnesses swore, then the small hole in the skull would result in the big one.

The X-rays showed the metal fragments still in the head. There was a comparatively large piece of bullet—7 by 2 millimeters—
behind the right eye. There were a few grains inside the “cone effect” entrance wound. The remainder of this bullet, emerged with flying skull and hair, apparently broke into two sections, and they were found on the front seat of the car. The first bullet, which missed target and car, was torn to flying grains when it hit the roadway, nicked a curb, and peppered the face of Mr. Tague on Commerce Street.

Greer's thesis had a supporter. Roy Kellerman, Agent-in-Charge, said he remembered a Parkland doctor astride the chest of the dead President, applying artificial respiration. Kellerman, a solemn man and a deliberate one, thought the bullet in the back of the shoulder might have been squeezed out by manual pressure. If so, the man who found a bullet on a stretcher in the hall was mistaken in thinking it came from Governor Connally's cart.

Medical judgment was reserved. Colonel Finck was not convinced. In all of his experience with bullet wounds he could not recall a missile entering flesh and stopping short. The X-rays showed no bullet path to the throat because the shot, instead of tearing through the strap muscles, had separated two layers and furrowed between, leaving insignificant bruises on the under side of one and the upper side of another. It emerged from the throat with most of its speed intact to hit the Governor.

The prisoner was on the private elevator heading down for another lineup. The fawn-hatted detectives hopped in beside Lee Harvey Oswald and the door was closed. They could still hear the shouts of reporters in the corridor. “Why did you shoot the President?” “Bastard!” “Son of a bitch!” None of the older reporters could remember a story in which the journalists expressed personal venom. Reporters at Rheims who had witnessed the surrender of Germany expressed no hatred. Others, aboard the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, had watched with equanimity as the Japanese signed the document of surrender. Some had
put in considerable time at the Nuremberg trials without rancor. In this case, the police had nothing more than a suspect, but the press reacted toward him as the French underground had toward the Parisian women who had slept with German officers.

Oswald neither smiled nor frowned. The sullen mask had been pasted on tight and it showed nothing. The onset of personal hostility did not alarm Will Fritz. He assumed that Chief Jesse Curry knew what he was doing. Chief Curry assumed that Captain Talbert had charge of the security of police headquarters. The chief passed an order that, if the press was admitted to any of the lineups, they would have to stand behind the witnesses in silence. He did not want them to address any questions to the prisoner.

Off the edge of the lineup room, Oswald stood quietly as Don Ables, the jail clerk, nodded to him. Two of the men were new. Both were prisoners. Again Oswald was the number two man, shackled to three others. He was intelligent and he must have known that he would again be the only man in those lights with real bruises.

In front, behind the dark curtain, Troy Lee sat watching. He had come to police headquarters with his wife and his sister-in-law. One was the former Barbara Davis; the other was Virginia Davis. They were young girls, laden with the responsibility of marriage, babies, rent, and husbands. They told the police officers, again and again, that they had been trying to doze off after lunch when Officer Tippit had been shot.

They heard the explosions and jumped up and ran to the screen door. A policeman, on the outside of his car, had fallen beside the front wheel. Through the screen door they had seen a young man, not walking but not running either, cutting cater-cornered across their lawn. One hand was held high and he was pulling empty shells from a revolver. The sisters were nervous. Troy Lee told them to be calm and to tell the policemen if there was anybody up on that stage that they recognized.

The lights went on and four men, walking in profile, trooped onstage. The women's eyes flickered across the brightly lit faces. Virginia leaned across Barbara and whispered to the detective: “That's him.” She nodded her head positively. “Which is him?” “That second boy.” Barbara Davis agreed. “Yes,” she said quietly. “That's the one. The second one counting from this side.” They pointed and whispered and Troy Lee leaned across the policeman to listen.

The policeman made a few notes in a small loose-leaf. “What did you see him doing?” he said. “I have to write up a statement.” The girls again told the story of the nap, the fusillade of shots, and the trotting “boy.” Onstage, a lieutenant asked each of the four men to face front, to turn left, to turn completely to the right. The Davis girls were so excited that they were giving their statements simultaneously.

The eyes of Marguerite Oswald stared at the furnishings of the Paine house. She nuzzled little Rachel to her bosom and studied the living room. To her, life was a sequence of frustrations. On the way home, she had tried to communicate with her daughter-in-law, but the best she could do was to pat Marina's hand. There was so much that she wanted to say. She had never protested Lee's choice of a Russian girl as a wife. But truly the girl was a foreigner.

Marguerite saw the couch she would occupy, and she looked into the kitchen on the edge of the garage. Marina was in the bathroom composing herself. The Paine children and June Oswald frolicked on the floor. Someone would have to get something to eat for the little ones. It must be close to bedtime. Two men knocked on the front door and Ruth Paine admitted them with her friendly cry.

One was holding a camera. Marina emerged into the living room looking brighter. Mrs. Paine introduced Marina to the men, Allan Grant and Tommy Thompson of
Life
magazine.
Marguerite Oswald was not introduced. It was an affront—conscious or subconscious—which could not be dismissed. The bud of friendship between Marguerite and Ruth began to wither. Mrs. Paine dropped to the floor with the children, tucked her legs under her skirt, and said gaily: “Now, I hope you have good color film, because I want good pictures.”

This somewhat obtusely, involved another facet of Marguerite Oswald's character. It concerned economics. She never lost sight of a dollar, real or fancied. It might be true that her son, her flesh and blood, was in dire peril on this night, but it could not be permitted to obscure the realities. She would be prepared, from time to time, to sell her story and her opinions; she would be ready to sell letters or mementos from her son, but she was not ready to give anything away.

Her glance became hard. Tommy Thompson was saying: “Tell me, are Marina and Lee separated, since Lee lives in Dallas?” Ruth Paine wore her holiday smile. “No,” she said, speaking to millions of people beyond the pages of next week's
Life
, “they are a happy family. Lee lives in Dallas because of necessity. He works in Dallas, and this is Irving. He has no transportation and he comes to see his family every weekend.” “What type of family man is he?” “A normal family man. He plays with his children. Last night he even fed June. . . .”

Marina did not understand the conversation. Marguerite Oswald didn't think it was Ruth Paine's story to tell. “Mrs. Paine,” said Thompson, “can you tell me how Lee got the money to return to the United States?” “Oh, yes,” Ruth said. “He saved the money to come back.” Marguerite began to fume. This type of publicity was uncalled for. Her beloved son should be protected from outsiders. And yet she felt that she was on brittle footing because this was Mrs. Paine's home. Marguerite could be expelled.