Features: The Warren Commission, The Truth, and Arlen Specter: Part 2

The fact that the bullet had not exited and yet could not be found on the body initially concerned Dr. Humes. However, as the autopsy continued the FBI agents were notified by the FBI Laboratory that a nearly whole copper-jacketed bullet had been found on a stretcher in Parkland Hospital.

Immediately following receipt of this information, this was made available to Dr. Humes who advised that in his opinion this accounted for no bullet being located which had entered the back region and that since external cardiac massage had been performed at Parkland Hospital, it was entirely possible that through such movement the bullet had worked its way back out of the point of entry and had fallen on the stretcher.

If the bullet which hit Kennedy in the back went only a short distance into his body, it could not have emerged from the front of his throat. "Further exploration during the autopsy disproved that theory," says the Commission Report and goes on to explain how on the morning after the autopsy Dr. Humes called Dr. Malcohn Perry at Parkland who confirmed that he had used a wound hole in the front of Kennedy’s throat as a point to make the tracheotomy incision.

If there was a bullet hole in the front of the neck, Dr. Humes concluded, it was obviously an exit wound caused by the bullet which went in the back. The Commission accepted that conclusion, again ignoring the FBI report’s contention that the angle of the back wound was 45 to 60 degrees downward.

Yet no doctor at Parkland Hospital who worked on Kennedy initially described the hole in the front of his neck as a wound of exit. Some said it would more resemble a wound of entry. Later, under questioning by Specter who asked them to consider it hypothetically in view of the back wound, most decided it could have been either an entrance or exit wound. However, one doctor — Ronald Coy Jones — maintained that if it were an exit wound it would have had to be  inflicted by a bullet of very low velocity, "to the point that you might think that this bullet barely made it through the soft tissues and just enough to drop out of the skin on the opposite side." Certainly it would not have had enough force left to smash through Connally.

Perhaps the FBI was mistaken about the back wound. That’s what it reportedly claims today. It simply made a gross error in one of the biggest  cases it ever handled. Besides, when its summary report was prepared, the normally thorough FBI had supposedly not bothered to check with the doctors or asked to see the autopsy report.

Yet the FBI submitted a supplement to its summary on January 13tb. By that time it had seen the official autopsy report. Nevertheless, it not only stuck to its original finding but repealed a key point:

Medical examination of the President’s body had revealed that the bullet which entered his back had penetrated to a distance of less than a finger length.

The final autopsy report does not corroborate this. In fact, it makes no mention of a wound in the back, only one at the base of the neck. And that, of course, was described as being higher than the hole in the front of the neck where the bullet was supposed to have come out, making it consistent with a shot fired from the sixth-floor of the Depository.