Arlen Specter and The "Magic" Bullet

SAVE AS FAVORITE

VIEW FAVORITES

By Jim Fetzer (about the author) Page 1 of 3 page(s)

opednews.com Permalink

For OpEdNews: Jim Fetzer - Writer

Madison, WI (OpEdNews) May 1, 2009 – Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) has switched parties to join the Democrats and, when Al Franken eventually prevails in his contest with Norman Coleman for the Minnesota seat, potentially provides a 60th vote in the Senate for cloture, which terminates filibusters. The GOP, especially, has used this maneuver effectively in the past to defeat legislation, without regard for its popularity or benefits for the American people. This occasion therefore invites consideration of Specter’s history as a public servant, where his role as a junior counselor to the Warren Commission in its investigation of the death of President John F. Kennedy, especially, deserves public scrutiny. My purpose here is not to support or to oppose him but to explain his role in the inquiry.

The afternoon and evening of the assassination, radio and television reported two wounds to the body, one to the throat, the other to the right temple, which caused a massive blowout to the back of the head. Those who watch, “JFK: As It Happened”, NBC footage from November 22, 1963, as broadcast over A&E (1988), for example, can observe as Chet Huntley reported that he had a wound to the throat and that his death was “a simple matter” of a bullet right through the head, later adding that it “entered his right temple”, attributing that finding to Admiral George Burkley, the president’s personal physician. Later, Frank McGee, told the shots had been fired from above and behind, remarked, “This is incongruous. How can the man have been shot from in front from behind?”

The Secret Service and the FBI would conclude by the end of the day that there had been three shots with three hits: a shot to JFK’s back (about 5 ½ inches below the collar), a shot to Connally’s back (which shattered a rib, exited his chest, hit his right wrist and embedded itself in his left thigh), and a shot that hit JFK in the back of the head, killing him. When it turned out that a distant bystander named James Tague had been injured by fragments from a shot that hit the curbing beside him in the vicinity of the Triple Underpass, however, there were only two bullets available to account for all of these wounds. The commission would eventually solve all of these problems by simply reversing the trajectories of the shots, so they were no longer coming from in front but were now fired from above and behind, and by “relocating” the wound to JFK’s back.

Early Reports

There was ample proof that the bullet that hit JFK in the throat was fired from in front rather than from behind. During the Parkland Press Conference that began at 3:16 PM that afternoon, Kemp Clark, M.D., Director of Neurosurgery, who had declared him dead at 1 PM, and Malcolm Perry, M.D., who had performed a tracheotomy incision through the wound, met together with reporters to discuss the medical treatment the president had received. In response to questions, Dr. Perry explained—three times, in fact—that the bullet had been coming toward him and that the wound was a wound of entry. This might have undermined the commission’s conclusions but a transcript of the conference was never made available to its members on the purported grounds that it was part of hundreds of hours of television footage and difficult to locate. Procrastination appears to have worked and, to the best of my knowledge, it was only brought to the attention of the public when I published it in ASSASSINATION SCIENCE (1998). (See Appendix C.)

In the meanwhile, Robert B. Livingston, M.D., the Scientific Director of the National Institute for Mental Health and of the National Institute for Neurological Diseases and Blindness, heard descriptions of the throat wound over the radio, which he recognized had to be an entry wound from a shot fired from in front. Livingston, who was both a world authority on the human brain and an expert on wound ballistics, having managed an emergency medical hospital for injured Okinawans and Japanese prisoners of war during the Battle of Okinawa, was well positioned to make that observation. (See pp. 161-166 of ASSASSINATION SCIENCE.) Charles Crenshaw, M.D., would later draw diagrams of the wounds he had observed during the President’s treatment at Parkland (See Appendix A). Bob also took keen interest in reports of large quantities of cerebral and of cerebellar tissue extruding from the wound at the back of the president’s head.

Livingston knew several members of the cabinet—including Elliott Richardson and Robert McNamara—and other principals personally and given his position as the nation’s leading expert on the human brain, he decided to call the Bethesda Naval Hospital, which is located across the street from the National Institutes of Health, and asked the Officer of the Day to connect him with the physician who would conduct the autopsy. He explained to James Humes, USN/MC, that reports from Dallas indicated to him that the injury to the throat was a wound of entrance, that the neck needed to be dissected very carefully, and that, if there were any indications of shots from behind, that there must have been at least two shooters and therefore a conspiracy. Before they had concluded their conversation, however, Dr. Humes was called away from the phone and returned to tell him that the FBI would not allow them to continue speaking.

Obfuscating the Throat Wound

The interruption of their conversation bothered Livingston considerably, since he knew from direct personal experience that he had directed Humes’ attention to the small neck wound of bullet entry and explained its significance for the autopsy that Humes was to conduct. That Humes would subsequently testify to the Warren Commission that he had only learned of the next wound the day after the autopsy when he talked to Perry over the phone means, in his words, “that the autopsy (and Dr. Humes) were already under explicit non-medical control prior to the start of the autopsy” (p. 163). Indeed, Humes would eventually concede that he had been directed to destroy and rewrite his autopsy report, which would now include the seeds of the “magic bullet” hypothesis—that the same bullet that caused JFK’s throat wound had also caused all the wounds to Connally—by suggesting that the wound to the president’s back at the upper right was “presumably of entry” and that the wound to the throat was “presumably of exit” (see Appendix F, especially p. 433). In spite of Dr. Livingston’s admonitions, the neck was not subject to dissection and the body was released for preparation for burial before Humes would acknowledge having received any information about any “neck wound”.

It would fall to Arlen Specter, then a junior counsel to the commission, to refine what would become the official account of the death of JFK based upon three shots with two hits and one miss. He proved quite adept at doing this. As Mark Lane, RUSH TO JUDGMENT (1967), observed, when he finally questioned the medical witnesses from Parkland, he did not ask them what they had observed or what they had inferred from what they observed, but instead resorted to a hypothetical question. Thus, in querying Malcolm Perry, who had observed this wound “up close and personal”, Specter asked—here I paraphrase—“If we assume that the bullet entered here (at the base of the back of the neck), traversed the neck without hitting any bony structures, and came out here (at the throat just above the tie), would that be consistent with describing it as a wound of exit?” Specter actually made the question even more complex, but this was the point. And Perry replied, “Yes,” that [this was a wound of exit] would be consistent with the assumptions that he had been asked to assume, but that he was not in the position to vouch for or verify the assumptions he had been asked to make (Appendix 2, pp. 403-404). And no doubt that was the case because Malcolm Perry knew they were false.

An excellent discussion of the Parkland physicians observations of the throat wound may be found in Sylvia Meager, ACCESSORIES AFTER THE FACT (1967), pp. 149-154, where she explains that other physicians who had been present, including Charles Carrico, M.D., described a “small penetrating wound” of the anterior neck (throat)” and Ronald Jones, M.D., “a small hole in anterior midline of neck thought to be a bullet entrance wound”, and Paul C. Peters, M.D., “we saw the wound of entry in the throat”, among others, which combined with Perry’s reports during the press conference and Crenshaw’s diagram makes the matter beyond dispute. But that did not preclude a substantial and sustained effort to obfuscate and obscure these reports, in relation to which, as Meagher also explains, Arlen Specter took a leading role. An article about the entry wound to the throat was even published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (December 21, 1963), by Richard Dudman, which I reprinted in ASSASSINATION SCIENCE, p. 167.

Obfuscating the Back Wound

Although THE WARREN REPORT (1964) suggested that the “magic bullet” theory was not essential to its findings, it concluded “there is very persuasive evidence that the same bullet which pierced the President’s throat also caused Governor Connally’s wounds”, while acknowledging that the governor’s own testimony “and certain other factors” have given rise to “some difference of opinion”. He explained that, when shots were first fired, he turned to his right to see what was going on, then turned back to his left when he felt a "doubling-up" in his chest, which suggests that he was shot from the side.

In fact, to his dying day, John Connally would insist that he was not hit by the same bullet that hit JFK. While the report asserts that there is “no question in the mind of any member of the commission” that all the shots were fired from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, the evidence overwhelmingly contradicts that claim. Moreover, as Michael Baden, M.D., the chair of the medical panel that reviewed the autopsy evidence for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) when it reconsidered the case in 1977-78, would observe on the 40th observance of the death of JFK, if the “magic bullet” theory is false, then there had to have been at least six shots from three directions”, which means that the “magic bullet” represents the difference between a lone assassin and a conspiracy.

As I explained in a presentation during an international conference held at Cambridge University, which has been published following peer-review in the International Journal of the Humanities (2005-06), which is easily accessible via a google search by its title, “Reasoning about Assassinations”, but is also archived at assassinationscience.com , the available relevant evidence demonstrates that the shot that hit the president in the back was not at the base of his neck but about 5 ½ inches below the collar as follows:

1 | 2 | 3