Free Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination by Anthony Summers

have described it as very small, no bigger than a pencil. Some of them wondered whether a bullet had entered there and lodged in the chest. At autopsy, Humes found a bloody bruise at the top of the right lung, but no bullet. The throat-wound area was merely probed with a finger, not sectioned. In sum, all opinion on the throat wound—and the back wound for that matter—is based not on evidence but on guesswork.
    Having reviewed the X-rays and photographs in 1988, and recalling his experience as a surgeon on the team that attended the dyingPresident, Dr. Robert McClelland was forthright. “I think he was shot from the front… . I think that the rifle bullet hit him in the side of the head and blew out the back of his head… . I certainly think that’s what happened, and that probably somewhere in the front part of the head, in the front part of the scalp, there probably was an entry wound, which—among all the blood and the laceration there and everything—was not seen, by us or anybody else perhaps, and it blew out the back part of his head… .”
    Mortician Thomas Robinson did tell Assassinations Committee staff that he recalled seeing a small wound “about a quarter of an inch … at the temples [sic] in the hairline to the right side of the head.”
    Another member of the Dallas medical team, Dr. Charles Crenshaw, claimed in a 1992 book that the wounds he saw indicated gunfire from the front.
    Others thought the massive damage to the President’s skull was perhaps the result of not one headshot but of two impacting almost simultaneously. Kennedy’s personal physician, Admiral George Burkley, attended the autopsy and was to tell the Assassinations Committee that he “conceded the possibility” of two such shots. Dr. Baden, head of the Committee’s medical panel, acknowledged the “remote” possibility that the fatal head wounds “could have been caused by a shot from the grassy knoll, and that medical evidence of it has been destroyed by a shot from the rear a fraction of a second later.”
    The Committee itself decided that notion was contrary to trajectory data and the time frame it had constructed from the Zapruder film and its acoustics findings. But the argument did not deterindependent medical observers who studied the X-ray evidence in 1994.
    Dr. Mantik, the Eisenhower Medical Center radiation therapist who expressed suspicion that some of the X-rays had been tampered with, thought the fakery was designed to divert attention from evidence indicating a shot from the front.
    Dr. Joseph Riley, an expert in neuroanatomy, concentrated on two key X-rays. He deemed them authentic, but felt they had been misinterpreted. “The autopsy evidence,” said Riley, “demonstrates conclusively that John Kennedy was struck in the head by two bullets, one from the rear and one from the right front.”
    As recently as 2006, moreover, a lengthy study performed in part by the Livermore National Laboratory under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy, challenged key evidence that had persuaded the Assassinations Committee that the single bullet theory was valid. Their findings, published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences —the periodical of record of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences—pointed to “inconsistencies” in the data used by Dr. Guinn, who tested bullet specimens for the Committee.
    The new calculations, the 2006 study reported, “considerably weaken support for the single-bullet theory.” Rather, the study suggested, “the extant evidence is consistent with any number between two and five rounds [not merely the four posited by the Committee] fired in Dealey Plaza.” 7
    These have been voices from a forensic and scientific tower of Babel. All this study of the evidence, and all the theorizing, may have been in vain. So poorly were the wounds reported by the autopsy surgeons, so shoddy was the handling of the brain and thecollection of bullet fragments, so elusive is the truth about the