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

Photo 8. “I don’t think they were trying to cover up the fact that there was a large hole,” said McClelland, “but that’s what they were doing… . They were covering up that great defect in the back and lateral part of the head by pulling that loose scalp flap up. You can see the hand pulling the scalp forward.” 5
    Dr. McClelland said the “great defect in the back” is visible on some photographs among the set of some fifty pictures he saw at the National Archives—pictures in which the torn scalp has been allowed to fall back on the President’s neck, pictures the public has never seen. His explanation may go a long way to resolve the apparent discrepancy. It certainly demonstrates that no outside researcher should form judgments on the basis of a set of photographs that may or may not be complete.
    According to the pathologist who directed the autopsy, Dr. Humes, his colleague Dr. Pierre Finck, and the former director of photography at the Naval Medical School, who was the principal cameraman at the autopsy, not even the “official” set of autopsy photographs at the National Archives is complete. Pictures they remembered being taken, or thought should have been taken, are not in the collection. Photographs of the interior chest are not there. Nor, according to Dr. Finck, are certain photographs of the skull injuries.
    With some pictures missing or possibly missing, and some showing injuries as witnesses do not recall having seen them, some have suspected forgery—notwithstanding a finding by a majority of the Assassinations Committee photographic panel that the pictures are authentic. 6
    Such doubts were encouraged by the comments of Floyd Reibe, a former Bethesda technician who himself took some of the autopsy photographs. He claimed that some of the photographs in the National Archives are “phony and not the photographs we took.”
    In 1994, the Assassination Records Review Board stated that a second set of autopsy photographs may have survived, photographs apparently made from the original negatives and thus presumably authentic. If so, they would be key evidence, but the matter was left unresolved.
    There are other problems with the autopsy record, not least the bizarre fact that the President’s brain is missing. Sometime after the assassination, it was sent to President Kennedy’s former secretary, along with the photographs and X-rays, for safekeeping. Safe it was not—at least not from the point of view of future investigators. In 1966, after the materials passed into the care of the National Archives, it was discovered that the brain was no longer with the photographs and X-rays. Also absent were tissue sections, blood smears, and a number of slides.
    The Assassinations Committee, which could find no trace of the missing material, favored the theory that Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother, disposed of it to avoid tasteless display in the future. A vial containing a part of the brain was destroyed by the Secret Service some six years after the assassination. Whatever the full facts, the result was to hamper the work of laterforensic pathologists.
    The autopsy X-rays also feature in the catalog of mismanagement. Dr. McClelland, the surgeon who worked on the dying President in Dallas, reviewed the set of X-rays at the National Archives in 1989. He was quoted afterward as saying that they showed head injuries different from those he saw in the emergency room in 1963. Jerrol Custer, a former Bethesda technician who made some of the autopsy X-rays in 1963, claimed—as did his colleague of the autopsy photos—that some of the X-rays were “fake.”
    A physicist and radiation therapist at the Eisenhower Medical Center, Dr. David Mantik, submitted the X-rays to a technique called optical densitometry. “This data,” he told the author, “provides powerful and quantitative evidence of alteration to some of the skull X-rays. They appear to me to be composites.”
    It is not for this