Read Online Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination by Anthony Summers - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Anthony Summers
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knoll) missed.
Shot 4(from the Depository) hit Kennedy in the head, killing him.
Tests done later—one of them reported in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons in 1994—appeared to validate the notion that a bullet could cause serious damage without losing any more of its metal content than did the magic bullet. 5 For a number of reasons, though, the magic bullet controversy has not gone away.
First, there is doubt as to whether the bullet in question was really found on Governor Connally’s stretcher. While tests appear to link the magic bullet to fragments removed from Connally’s arm, moreover, no fragments survived from his chest—or indeed from the President’s throat wound. Statements by a former Parkland Hospital operating-room supervisor, and by a policeman whoguarded the Governor’s room, refer to the retrieval of more fragments than could possibly have come from the magic bullet. 6
Nurse Audrey Bell, the supervisor, said she handled “four or five bullet fragments” after their removal, placed them in a “foreign body envelope,” and handed them over to the authorities. Contemporary reports confirm that she did hand over fragments. Bell, meanwhile, said that “the smallest was the size of the striking end of a match and the largest at least twice that big. I have seen the picture of the magic bullet, and I can’t see how it could be the bullet from which the fragments I saw came.”
In the wake of Bell’s comments came another from a patrolman who guarded Connally’s room, Charles Harbison. He stated that on November 25 or 26, when the Governor was being moved, somebody—he thought it was a doctor—gave him fragments. Since he recalled “more than three,” and since he and Bell refer to different incidents, could they all have come from the magic bullet?
Dr. Pierre Finck, one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on the President—otherwise a staunch defender of the Warren Commission findings—expressed doubt on this one. “There are,” he testified, “too many fragments.”
X-rays, moreover, show that one fragment remained buried in Connally’s thigh. His doctors had chosen to leave it there. In 1993, when he died, the FBI saw merit in the suggestion that the fragment be removed from his body. Connally’s grieving family objected, however, and the fragment was buried with him. Modern tests might have gone far to resolve doubts about the magic bullet.
A more thorough and efficient autopsy might have established whether—as official probes have found—the bullet did indeed go through the President’s back and upper chest before exiting his throat. As reported earlier, photographs taken of the interiorchest at autopsy could not be found.
A statement by former Bethesda laboratory technician James Jenkins, who was at the autopsy, raised further doubt. “What sticks out in my mind,” he recalled years later, “is the fact that Commander Humes [the presiding surgeon] put his little finger in [the back wound] and, you know, said that … he could probe the bottom of it with his finger, which would mean to me it was very shallow.”
Later, when the surgeons had opened the President’s chest, Jenkins watched as they tried to track the wound again, using a metal probe. “I remember looking inside the chest cavity and I could see the probe … through the pleura [the lining of the chest cavity]… . You could actually see where it was making an indentation … where it was pushing the skin up… . There was no entry into the chest cavity… . No way that could have exited in the front because it was then low in the chest cavity … somewhere around the junction of the descending aorta [the main artery carrying blood from the heart] or the bronchus in the lungs… .”
As for the throat wound, numerous Dallas doctors and nurses who saw it before a tracheotomy incision obscured it, believed it to be a wound of entry—not of exit, as official reports have suggested. They
Shot 4(from the Depository) hit Kennedy in the head, killing him.
Tests done later—one of them reported in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons in 1994—appeared to validate the notion that a bullet could cause serious damage without losing any more of its metal content than did the magic bullet. 5 For a number of reasons, though, the magic bullet controversy has not gone away.
First, there is doubt as to whether the bullet in question was really found on Governor Connally’s stretcher. While tests appear to link the magic bullet to fragments removed from Connally’s arm, moreover, no fragments survived from his chest—or indeed from the President’s throat wound. Statements by a former Parkland Hospital operating-room supervisor, and by a policeman whoguarded the Governor’s room, refer to the retrieval of more fragments than could possibly have come from the magic bullet. 6
Nurse Audrey Bell, the supervisor, said she handled “four or five bullet fragments” after their removal, placed them in a “foreign body envelope,” and handed them over to the authorities. Contemporary reports confirm that she did hand over fragments. Bell, meanwhile, said that “the smallest was the size of the striking end of a match and the largest at least twice that big. I have seen the picture of the magic bullet, and I can’t see how it could be the bullet from which the fragments I saw came.”
In the wake of Bell’s comments came another from a patrolman who guarded Connally’s room, Charles Harbison. He stated that on November 25 or 26, when the Governor was being moved, somebody—he thought it was a doctor—gave him fragments. Since he recalled “more than three,” and since he and Bell refer to different incidents, could they all have come from the magic bullet?
Dr. Pierre Finck, one of the doctors who performed the autopsy on the President—otherwise a staunch defender of the Warren Commission findings—expressed doubt on this one. “There are,” he testified, “too many fragments.”
X-rays, moreover, show that one fragment remained buried in Connally’s thigh. His doctors had chosen to leave it there. In 1993, when he died, the FBI saw merit in the suggestion that the fragment be removed from his body. Connally’s grieving family objected, however, and the fragment was buried with him. Modern tests might have gone far to resolve doubts about the magic bullet.
A more thorough and efficient autopsy might have established whether—as official probes have found—the bullet did indeed go through the President’s back and upper chest before exiting his throat. As reported earlier, photographs taken of the interiorchest at autopsy could not be found.
A statement by former Bethesda laboratory technician James Jenkins, who was at the autopsy, raised further doubt. “What sticks out in my mind,” he recalled years later, “is the fact that Commander Humes [the presiding surgeon] put his little finger in [the back wound] and, you know, said that … he could probe the bottom of it with his finger, which would mean to me it was very shallow.”
Later, when the surgeons had opened the President’s chest, Jenkins watched as they tried to track the wound again, using a metal probe. “I remember looking inside the chest cavity and I could see the probe … through the pleura [the lining of the chest cavity]… . You could actually see where it was making an indentation … where it was pushing the skin up… . There was no entry into the chest cavity… . No way that could have exited in the front because it was then low in the chest cavity … somewhere around the junction of the descending aorta [the main artery carrying blood from the heart] or the bronchus in the lungs… .”
As for the throat wound, numerous Dallas doctors and nurses who saw it before a tracheotomy incision obscured it, believed it to be a wound of entry—not of exit, as official reports have suggested. They
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