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The Assassination of John F. Kennedy

2014; Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Volume: 133; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1097/prs.0000000000000205

1529-4242

J. Arthur Jensen,

History, Medicine, and Leadership

Sir: Thank you for publishing “The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: Revisiting the Medical Data.”1 The central conclusion of this study is that the assassination remains controversial and that some of the controversy must be attributable to the “reporting and handling of the medical evidence.” With the greatest respect for you and Dr. Robert McClelland, let me argue that your text and on-line interviews perpetuate the central misunderstanding of the assassination and thereby push resolution of this so-called controversy further into the future. The nearly half-century of criticism of The Warren Report has left many Americans confused about the basic facts of the case: eyewitnesses waiting for President Kennedy’s motorcade next to the Texas School Book Depository saw a man on the sixth floor point a rifle and shoot at the president; the man was later identified in a police lineup as Lee Harvey Oswald; the murder weapon was found and traced to Oswald; his palm prints and fingerprints were on the rifle; and extensive ballistics tests proved that a recovered bullet had come from his rifle. Very few murders present such a clear chain of evidence. If we cannot conclude that Oswald shot President Kennedy, we cannot conclude that responsibility for any murder can ever be established. Your article/interview with Dr. McClelland leaves the impression that there is evidence that President Kennedy was shot from the front: you publish an illustration that clearly shows an exit wound in the President’s occipital area. Dr. McClelland, in the online interview, asserts that as an eyewitness to President Kennedy’s damaged cranium, he can attest that there was a large posterior exit wound and that a bullet must have pierced the president’s skull just above his anterior hairline. The question of whether the president was shot from the front or from the rear is resolved by the pathologists’ report2: “The fatal missile entered the skull above and to the right of the external occipital protuberance…. A portion of the projectile made its exit through the parietal bone on the right.…” All other details of the investigation are irrelevant to the discussion of what caused President Kennedy’s death: the president died from a bullet wound to his occipital skull. To dispute this essential finding is to dispute the examination of the president made by three senior pathologists at the Bethesda Naval Hospital on the day that he died; it is to dispute the photographs and radiographs taken by these pathologists; and it is to dispute the review of the physical findings, photographs, radiographs, and the gross and microscopic examination of the president’s brain conducted by the Chief Justice of the United States and the members of his commission. Dr. McClelland was a material witness to an important historical moment. He has a right to report what he saw. But in the panic and tragedy of the moment, with blood flowing from the large defect on the president’s unshaven head, Dr. McClelland was not in a position to measure the wound, nor was he in a position to examine the president’s scalp for other wounds, nor was he aware that a small wound was posterior to the large, bleeding wound that he witnessed. For him to conclude that the bullet must have come from the front of the president is irresponsible. This conclusion overrides the observations and conclusions of the pathologists and all other experts who had the opportunity to review the autopsy findings, radiographs, and photographs that were obtained when the rush to treat had ended, when blood had been washed away, and when trained and certified experts could move the body and study the wounds. It is not surprising that the Kennedy family did not allow photographs of the dead president to be released to the public. Through the various commissions and investigations, the public’s right to know has been met, the entertainer’s right to dramatize has been protected, and the historian’s obligation to sift truth has been preserved. The Kennedy family should be forgiven for not giving the media the right to sell pictures of the dead president. By any standard of decency, we should acknowledge that John Kennedy and his family gave enough. DISCLOSURE The author has no financial interest to declare in relation to the content of this communication. J. Arthur Jensen, M.D. University of California, Los Angeles Santa Monica, Calif.