Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Read Online Free PDF Page A

the world would learn that Kennedy suffered from a progressive disease of the adrenal glands, wanted to prevent several routine procedures. The organs of the neck were not examined.
    To this day, the precise nature of the President’s injuries remains unclear. The autopsy doctors described four wounds: a small wound at the back of the skull; a massive defect in the right side of the skull; a small hole near the base of the neck, slightly to the right of the spine; and a hole in the throat.
    The throat wound had been obscured by the Dallas doctors when they performed a tracheotomy to insert an airway, during the hopeless bid to save the President’s life. Unnecessary confusion reigns over the injury supposedly located near the back of the neck. The Autopsy Descriptive Sheet placed it five and a half inches below the tip of the right mastoid process, a bump at the base of the skull. The autopsists’ working sketch, the death certificate, a report by FBI agents present at the autopsy, the statements of several Secret Service agents, and the holes in Kennedy’s jacket and shirt are consistent with a wound some six inches lower than reported.
    The doctors failed to dissect this wound, an elementaryprocedure that might have established the path of the bullet. The hole was merely probed, not opened up and tracked to its destination. Documents suggest that photographs and X-rays were taken during the probing attempt. If so, however, the current location of those images remains unknown.
    There is also confusion about the fatal injuries to Kennedy’s head. With the body long buried, forensic scientists in later years have had to base their findings on the extensive surviving X-rays and photographs—access to them is restricted to experts and doctors approved by the Kennedy family. They were examined in 1966 by the original autopsy doctors—astonishingly for the first time. They had never until then seen the pictures of the postmortem they had themselves supervised. The same material, and the President’s clothing, has since been much scrutinized—by an Attorney General’s medical panel in 1968, the Rockefeller Commission panel, pathologists for the Assassinations Committee in the 1970s, and by some of the Dallas doctors and other interested physicians.
    The autopsy doctors located the small wound at the back of the skull as being two and a half centimeters to the right and slightly above the protuberance at the back of the skull. Other medical panels, working with the X-rays and photographs, decided that this had been a serious mistake, that the small wound was in fact four inches higher than described. Dr. Michael Baden, head of the Assassinations Committee panel, said that it could be seen in the photographs, above the hairline. It is unclear how such a conflict arose, unless—perhaps—from misinterpretation of the photographs (see Photo 7).
    There has been lasting disagreement as to the true location of even the fatal wound, the massive defect described by the autopsy doctors as a hole thirteen centimeters wide, extending bothforward and back, on the right side of the head. Some of the autopsy photographs became available to the public in spite of the restrictions, 4 and one of them (seePhoto 8) shows a large flap of scalp and bone laid open, like a hatch cover, beside a terrible hole directly above the dead man’s right ear. This conflicts with the majority of the human testimony on the location of the wound.
    Seventeen of the medical staff who observed the President in Dallas were to describe the massive defect as having been more at the back of the head than at the side. A large bone fragment, found in Dealey Plaza after the assassination, was identified at the time as belonging to the back of the skull.
    The Secret Service agent who climbed into the President’s limousine as the shooting ended, Clint Hill, said, “I noticed a portion of the President’s head on the right rear side was missing… . Part of his