JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (91 page)

The Senate approved the treaty by a decisive margin, 80 to 19, in September. The miracle had happened. It did so with such apparent ease, through a unique coalition created by the president, that future historians would view Kennedy’s success with the test ban treaty, less than a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, as no great accomplishment.

John and Jacqueline Kennedy’s closest friends said Patrick’s death affected them profoundly and brought them closer together
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—eventually in Dallas. In late October, Jackie surprised her husband by agreeing readily to go with him to Texas,
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on a political trip she did not look forward to happily—into a part of the country where they anticipated a hostile reception. She surprised him again on the trip, after their warm receptions in San Antonio, Houston, and Fort Worth, by saying she’d go anywhere with him that year.

JFK smiled, turned to Kenny O’Donnell, and said, “Did you hear
that
?”
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Then they prepared to board their plane to Dallas.

Three hours later, Jackie Kennedy was sitting beside JFK in the back seat of the limousine as it was driven into Dealey Plaza. The following week, she described to writer Theodore H. White the death of her husband, as seen by the closest witness, herself. Her immediate description of the assassination would not be released to the American public until 1995:

“They were gunning the motorcycles; there were these little backfires; there was one noise like that; I thought it was a backfire. Then next I saw [Governor] Connally [in the seat in front, who had just been shot] grabbing his arms and saying ‘no no nononono,’ with his fist beating—then Jack turned and I turned—all I remember was a blue gray building up ahead; then Jack turned back, so neatly; his last expression was so neat; he had his hand out, I could see a piece of his skull coming off; it was flesh colored not white—he was holding out his hand—and I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching itself from his head . . . ”
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Her instinctive response to the fatal shot that blew out the back of his head was to climb on the trunk of the car to try to retrieve a portion of his skull. Secret Service Agent Clint Hill, who ran from the car behind and climbed on the limousine, testified to Jacqueline Kennedy’s instinctive effort to put her husband’s head back together.

After “the second noise that I had heard had removed a portion of the President’s head,” Hill said, “Mrs. Kennedy had jumped up from the seat and was, it appeared to me, reaching for something coming off the right rear bumper of the car.”
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Hill grabbed her, put her back in her seat, and crawled up on top of the back seat. From his position looking down at the President’s head, he saw, as they arrived at Parkland Hospital, that “the right rear portion of his head was missing.”
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If “the right rear portion of his head was missing,” as the Parkland doctors and nurses would soon confirm, then the shot causing that massive exit wound must have come from the front—not from the Texas School Book Depository in the rear where Oswald was.

Jacqueline Kennedy recalled vividly what she was doing in the car on the way to the hospital:

“I was trying to hold his hair on. But from the front there was nothing. I suppose there must have been. But from the back, you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair on, and his skull on.”
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However, this description of her attempt to hold her husband’s hair and skull together over a gaping wound was deleted from her Warren Commission testimony, ostensibly because it would have been “in poor taste.”
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Perhaps more important to the censors, it could also have led to widespread recognition of evidence for a shot from the front.

At least part of the “something” that Clint Hill said Mrs. Kennedy was reaching for so desperately from the trunk of the limousine may have been found the next day by a Dallas premedical student. At 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 23, William Allen Harper was taking photographs in the triangular grassy area in the center of Dealey Plaza. About twenty-five feet behind and to the left of the point on Elm Street where a shot had blown out the back of the president’s skull, Harper discovered a large bone fragment in the grass. He took what would become known as the “Harper fragment” to his uncle, Dr. Jack C. Harper, at Methodist Hospital, who turned it over to Dr. A. B. Cairns, the hospital’s chief pathologist.
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Dr. Cairns, Dr. Harper, and another pathologist, Dr. Gerard Noteboom, examined closely the five-by-seven-centimeter bone fragment. They agreed that it came from the occiput, the lower back part of a human skull.
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The pathologists also noted evidence of a lead deposit on the fragment, suggesting the impact of a bullet.
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Their fortuitous examination of the bone, and identification of its origin, would become a critical clue to a government cover-up.

Nine years later, a UCLA graduate student in physics named David Lifton compared the Dallas pathologists’ identification of the Harper fragment with the official government X-rays of the slain president’s head. Lifton was puzzled, then electrified by what the comparison revealed. He realized that if Dr. Cairns and his colleagues were correct, “the X-rays could not possibly be authentic, for nature provides us with only one occipital bone, and President Kennedy’s occipital bone could not be lying on the grass of Dealey Plaza, and appear simultaneously in the X-rays of his skull taken that night at Bethesda [Naval Hospital].”
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The autopsy X-rays had been used as incontrovertible proof that there was no exit wound in the rear of the skull—and therefore no assassin in front. Yet twenty-one doctors, nurses, and Secret Service agents at Parkland Hospital in Dallas had all, in their earliest statements, said they had seen a large wound in the right rear portion of JFK’s skull.
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According to the X-rays’ “more scientific” proof, they all had to be wrong. On the other hand, the Warren Commission had ignored Dr. Cairns’s statement in an FBI interview that the Harper fragment “looked like it came from the occipital region of the skull,”
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precisely where the X-rays showed an intact skull. Something strange was going on in the X-ray darkroom.

After comparing the Harper fragment’s place in the skull with what the president’s X-rays showed was supposedly still there, David Lifton wrote to Dr. Cyril Wecht, a Warren Commission dissenter, that the Harper fragment “was the medical equivalent of the legendary piece-of-a-dollar-bill which one carries to a rendezvous with an unknown person, where the trustworthiness of one’s counterpart is vouched for by the fact that he can produce the other half . . . [W]hen one goes to a rendezvous with one-half of a dollar bill, and the other party produces the
same
half, that can only mean one thing.”
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Dr. David W. Mantik, a radiation oncologist with a Ph.D. in physics, tested the autopsy X-rays at the National Archives in 1993-95 to determine their authenticity. He used an optical densitometer to measure the levels of light on different areas of the official X-rays, in which the denser parts of the skull would ordinarily produce whiter images on the X-rays and the more vacant parts would produce darker images. Mantik was puzzled by the X-rays’ remarkable contrast between the front and back of Kennedy’s skull, apparent even to the naked eye. By taking optical density measurements of the X-rays, what he discovered was, as he put it, “quite astonishing. The posterior white area transmits almost one thousand times more light than the dark area!”
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There was far too much bone density being shown in the rear of JFK’s skull relative to the front. The X-ray had to have been a composite. The optical density data indicated a forgery in which a patch had been placed over an original X-ray to cover the rear part of the skull—corresponding to the gap left in part by the Harper fragment, evidence of an exit wound. The obvious purpose was to cover up evidence of a shot from the front that, judging from the original Parkland observations, had created an exit hole the size of one’s fist in the back of the head.
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Dr. Mantik’s optical density tests confirmed a radical hypothesis. The autopsy’s skull X-rays, in which the Harper fragment had so wondrously rejoined a dead president’s skull in spite of the fragment’s simultaneous existence elsewhere, had indeed been cleverly altered. Precisely where the government had rested its case for a lone assassin on a claim of scientific evidence—in its autopsy X-rays—the public could now see for itself was evidence of fakery. The scientific evidence claimed by Warren Commission apologists had been forged in the X-ray darkroom. Thanks to Dr. Mantik’s experiments conducted during his visits to the National Archives (now available to anyone who Googles “Twenty Conclusions after Nine Visits”), the unspeakable has been probed, verified, and documented.

In the case of the government’s X-rays, their exact duplication of the Harper fragment, as if that bullet-blasted bone were still in the slain president’s skull, has turned out to be a revelation of the cover-up. When the government’s “best evidence” was finally examined independently, the tests showed the X-rays were a hoax. The bottom line of the
Warren Report
was a forgery. A fragment of the head that Jacqueline Kennedy had tried unsuccessfully to put together again has come back decades later to haunt the government’s cover-up.

Where was Lee Harvey Oswald when President John F. Kennedy was shot in Dealey Plaza?
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According to
The Warren Report
’s record of Oswald’s interrogation, when he was asked “what part of the building he was in at the time the president was shot,” “he said that he was having his lunch about that time on the first floor.”
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Oswald added that “he went to the second floor where the Coca Cola machine was located and obtained a bottle of Coca Cola for his lunch.”
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A key witness, whose testimony was covered up by the FBI, placed Oswald in fact in the second floor lunchroom (which had the Coca Cola machine) at 12:15 p.m.

Carolyn Arnold was the secretary to the Depository vice president. She knew Oswald because he was in the habit of stopping by her desk on the second floor, asking her for change in nickels and dimes.
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In an interview with Dallas reporter Earl Golz, Arnold said “she saw Oswald in the 2nd-floor lunchroom as she was on her way out of the Depository to watch the presidential motorcade Nov. 22, 1963.”
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Arnold told author Anthony Summers the time of her seeing Oswald was “about 12:15. It may have been slightly later.”
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She told Earl Golz she actually left the building at 12:25 p.m., five minutes before the president was shot.
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Carolyn Arnold was especially conscious of what she was doing at the time because she was pregnant. Before she went outside to see the president, she had a craving for a glass of water. When she walked into the lunchroom to quench her thirst, she saw Oswald.
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In retrospect, it was her most memorable experience in an unforgettable day.

“I do not recall that he [Oswald] was doing anything,” she said. “I just recall that he was sitting there in one of the booth seats on the right hand side of the room as you go in. He was alone as usual and appeared to be having lunch. I did not speak to him but I recognized him clearly.”
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The motorcade was running late. The president had been scheduled to pass the Depository at 12:25 p.m.,
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ten minutes after Carolyn Arnold saw Oswald sitting in the booth seat of the second-floor lunchroom. If an assassin planned to shoot President Kennedy from a sixth-floor window at 12:25, would he have been sitting in the second-floor lunchroom at 12:15?

At 12:31 p.m., Dallas Patrolman M. L. Baker, accompanied by Depository superintendent Roy Truly, rushed up the Depository stairs. About a minute and a quarter to a minute and a half after the first shot was fired in Dealey Plaza, Baker pushed open the door of the second-floor lunchroom.
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With his revolver drawn, he confronted Lee Harvey Oswald, who was walking toward a Coca Cola machine.
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“Come here,” Baker said. Oswald turned and walked toward him.
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Baker turned to Truly and said, “Do you know this man? Does he work here?”
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Truly said yes. Baker turned around, went out, and continued climbing the stairs. Oswald apparently finished buying a drink from the vending machine. Within a minute, Mrs. R. A. Reid, clerical supervisor for the Depository, saw him walk through the clerical office on the second floor. He was holding a bottle of Coca Cola.
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