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

brain was gone. I saw a part of his skull with hair on it lying in the seat… . The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car.” Two other Secret Service agents gave similar descriptions.
    Jacqueline Kennedy came to one of the doctors in the emergency room, her hands cupped one over the other. She was holding her husband’s brain matter in her hands. “From the front, there was nothing,” she later said of the wounds. “But from the back you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair and his skull on.”
    Dr. Robert McClelland, a general surgeon on the team that attended the dying President, was one of those best qualified to describe the head wound from memory. “I took the position at the head of the table,” McClelland told the Warren Commission, “I was in such a position that I could closely examine the head wound, and I noted that the right posteriorportion of the skull had been blasted. It had been shattered, apparently, by the force of the shot so that the parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seen to be fractured almost along its posterior half, as well as some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral half, and this sprung open the bones that I mentioned, in such a way that you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that probably a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out.” The wound McClelland described would look like the drawing below, a drawing that he approved for publication during the 1960s.

    The only neurosurgeon present at the President’s deathbed, Dr. Kemp Clark, described the wound as a “large, gaping loss of tissue” located at the “back of the head … toward the right side.” No less than eleven other Parkland doctors, and four nurses—including the supervising nurse—have described thisgaping wound at the back of the head. The same interpretation has been put on the description of the wound by twenty people who saw it at Bethesda Hospital in Washington, DC. Two of the technicians who X-rayed the President’s body during the autopsy recalled a posterior wound. One of them, Jerrol Custer, said it was enormous. “I could put both my hands in the wound.” The head of the Secret Service team, Roy Kellerman, who was assigned to the President that day and who attended the autopsy; two FBI agents assigned to the autopsy; and a mortician who prepared the body for burial, also recalled a wound at the back of the head.
    Drawings of the large head wound were made from memory for the Assassinations Committee by the FBI’s observers, James Sibert and Francis O’Neill, and by the mortician, Thomas Robinson. While they vary in locating the height of the wound, they place it at the rear or right rear of the head, not at the side.

    Wound position according to FBI Agent James Sibert

    Wound position according to FBI Agent Francis O’Neill

    Wound position according to mortician Thomas Robinson
    Not one of the Parkland or Bethesda witnesses have described a wound like the one in the autopsy picture, which shows a great hole above the right ear, and the rear of the head virtually unmarked (see Photo 8).
    What, then, to make of that photograph? After studying it, several of the Dallas medical staff expressed consternation. One, Dr.Fouad Bashour, insisted the photograph was wrong. “Why do they cover it up?” he said. “This is not the way it was!”
    In an interview with the author, the Dallas surgeon Robert McClelland offered an explanation. When he saw the President in the emergency room, he said, a great flap of scalp and hair had been “split and thrown backwards, so we had looked down into the hole.” In Photo 8, however, McClelland believes the scalp is being pulled forward, back to its normal position, to show what looks like a small entrance wound near the top of the skull. This is not visible in