Original subtitles

[tense music]

[tense music]

[gunshot]

[dramatic music]

[Whoopi Goldberg] The evening of the assassination,

the body of President Kennedy was returned to Washington.

The autopsy was performed at Bethesda Medical Center,

a naval institution.

And there has always been a question

about the practices of the men who performed

what was one of the most important

and confusing autopsies of the 20th century.

-Would Milton Helpern in New York

have been a good choice to do the autopsy?

-I know this directly from Milton,

this is not hearsay.

He had his bag packed.

And he had already contacted two other top forensic pathologists

to see if they would be available.

All of the top forensic pathologists

in the United States were within one-hour drive

or flying time from D.C.

Not one of them was called upon.

The autopsy should have been done,

legally speaking, in Dallas.

And there was a forensic pathologist, Earl Rose.

He was there to assume jurisdiction

and to do the autopsy.

He was pushed up against the wall and threatened.

Hands on guns, a lot of expletives and so on,

he followed them out to the driveway,

and they took the body illegally out of Dallas,

in violation of the laws of Dallas and the state of Texas.

-There were two Navy pathologists,

Commander James Humes,

and his associate, Jay Thornton Boswell.

These two military pathologists who had never done

a single gunshot wound autopsy in their entire careers.

And this is something that really has to be emphasized

to every American-- I don't care,

Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative.

This is your president.

And you've got multiple gunshot wounds

to determine angles, trajectory, range, sequence.

And then you've got to correlate

with the multiple gunshot wounds in Connally.

This is a formidable task that would have required

two or three major forensic pathologists to undertake.

So they called Humes and Boswell.

-They realize they're over their head.

They called in an expert

from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology,

a guy named Pierre Finck.

Dr. Humes and Boswell started the autopsy

before their forensics consultant even got there.

They took the brain out.

Obviously, some key clues would've been lost

by doing that.

But they realized they were in over their head,

so they asked to have a medical examiner

because Dr. Finck,

who is a forensic pathologist, wasn't doing autopsies.

He hadn't done one in more than two years.

So they asked for permission to bring in somebody

who knew what they were doing. Permission was denied.

[Goldberg] After Air Force One

left Dallas for Washington,

two of the key doctors who had tried to save

Kennedy's life at Parkland Hospital

held a press conference.

They were Dr. Malcolm Perry and Dr. Kemp Clark.

-What were the two major points of evidence

revealed by Kemp Clark and Malcolm Perry

at the press conference?

-Dr. Perry performed the tracheotomy

to help Kennedy breathe.

And at a press conference

right after the failed resuscitation efforts in Dallas,

he was asked, he said, well, where was the bullet?

He said the bullet looked like it was coming at him.

He had an entrance wound in the throat.

Kemp Clark was the head of neurosurgery at Parkland.

He said that the president had a gaping wound

in the occipital parietal area,

that's, you know, the right rear of the head.

And so the description he gave of that

was entirely consistent with an exit wound.

And he made that clear in the press conference.

[Goldberg] What Clark and Perry both revealed

at that press conference

would indicate an assassin from the front,

but no news footage has survived.

Although Assistant White House Press Secretary

Malcolm Kilduff's statement that day

seems to support this conclusion.

-Dr. Burkley told me that it was

a simple matter of a bullet right through the head.

[reporter] President Kennedy, we are now informed,

was shot in the right temple.

It was a simple matter of a bullet

right through the head, said Dr. George Burkley,

the White House medical officer.

-We have a transcript today

of what they said at the press conference.

So it's White House transcript 1327-C.

That's a very important historical document

because the Secret Service confiscated the videotapes

from the local TV stations.

[Goldberg] The Secret Service also lied

to the Warren Commission

about there being no recordings or transcripts

of the news conference.

There is, however, a surviving clip of Dr. Perry

recorded not long afterward, where he confirms

having seen a large wound in the back of the head.

The day after the shooting

and the Parkland press conference,

Dr. Perry was seen by nurse Audrey Bell,

who had been with him in the operating room.

[Audrey Bell] Saturday morning when I got over there,

Dr. Perry came up to the office.

I said, you look awful.

Did you get any sleep last night?

He said, well, not too much.

Between the calls from Bethesda that came in during the night.

I said, what about?

He said, oh, whether that was an entrance wound

or an exit wound in the throat.

He said, they were wanting me to change my mind.

-In his Warren Commission testimony,

he basically retracted what he had said,

and they forced him to back down

and sort of intimidated him on the witness stand.

It was really quite embarrassing for me as a physician

to see how someone else who was telling the truth

was basically forced to recant his own opinion.

-In 1975, Dr. Shires hired me on the faculty

at the University of Washington in the cardiac surgery division.

So I got to know Malcolm when I joined the faculty.

We developed a professional relationship,

and we would operate together on complex cases.

And I was particularly interested in

Dr. Perry's position

with the JFK assassination because

he did the tracheotomy on him after he was shot.

The problem is that Malcolm categorically refused

to ever discuss the assassination.

And he wouldn't answer my questions about that neck wound.

And then one night, after we had operated together

for many hours on a complex case,

we were sitting in the surgeon's lounge alone,

drinking coffee.

And I once again asked him about that neck wound.

And this time, he said, it was an entrance wound,

unquestionably an entrance wound.

I took that admission as a given in confidence.

So it was sort of tacitly in confidence.

And then, when he testified

in front of the House Select Committee on Assassinations

a year later, he once again said

that it was consistent with an exit wound,

which, of course, was required

if the single bullet theory would hold water.

One of the main reasons he changed his testimony

and publicly agreed it was an exit wound is,

a Secret Service agent put the pressure on him,

and that person was Elmer Moore.

He apparently was also in charge

of getting the doctors at Parkland,

in addition to Dr. Perry, to change their testimony

and agree that there was no big hole

in the back of Kennedy's head

and that the bullet wound in the neck was an exit wound.

In 1970, Elmer Moore was the head

of the Secret Service office in Seattle,

and a graduate student named Jim Gochenaur

became friends with him.

And he admitted to Gochenaur that he regretted

putting pressure on Dr. Perry.

-So I asked him directly.

I said, Mr. Moore, did you pressure Dr. Perry?

He stopped for a minute.

He says, well, I was ordered to do that.

He expanded on it,

and he said that Inspector Kelley had ordered him to

talk with Perry and

convince him that it could be either an exit

or an entry wound--

not an entry wound.

And I thought it was pretty interesting

that he would admit to something that's pretty close to a felony.

[Goldberg] Charles Crenshaw, a third-year resident,

was in the emergency room at Parkland that day.

He too, later said in public

that he felt the wounds in Kennedy

originated from the front.

-From here

-[interviewer] Right. -Through.

[Gary Aguilar] Charles Crenshaw wrote a book,

"Conspiracy of Silence" in the wake of the film "JFK,"

saying, look, I was at Parkland Hospital.

I saw Kennedy, and was involved in the treatment.

And Kennedy's wounds were not consistent with a shot

from above and behind because he had a defect

involving the right rear of his head.

-I looked at the wound again.

I wanted to know and remember this the rest of my life.

And the rest of my life,

I will always know he was shot from the front.

[Goldberg] Arlen Specter was a Yale Law School graduate

working in the Philadelphia District Attorney's office

when he was asked to serve on the Warren Commission.

Specter was placed in charge of medical evidence,

and when he questioned Humes and Boswell

before the Commission, they said two shots hit the president,

one in the neck, one low in the rear skull,

entirely supporting the Commission's final conclusions.

However, when interviewed by

the Assassination Records Review Board,

Humes and Boswell admitted to meeting with Specter

eight to ten times in advance of their testimony.

And it is important to note

that the wound drawings presented in the Warren Report

were created in the days before that testimony

and were not based on the autopsy photos.

Instead, Harold Rydberg, the 23-year-old head

of the Medical Illustration Department at Bethesda,

was given verbal instructions by Humes and Boswell who said:

"We'll tell you what to draw."

-The Warren Commission heard testimony

from a number of witnesses,

including Parkland doctors, by the way,

and including a Secret Service agent, Clint Hill,

that the right rear quadrant of the head was missing.

[Goldberg] Hill was the only Secret Service agent

to run to the presidential limousine during the shooting.

He later said that there was blood and brain tissue

hurtling back over the trunk of the car.

And as he approached the president,

he saw a large wound in the rear of the skull,

which he could see through with no brain there.

-The two FBI agents at the autopsy,

Frank O'Neill and James Sibert,

they reported what they heard during the autopsy,

what they heard the pathologists say--

specifically, Dr. Humes.

They were interviewed by Arlen Specter in early 1964.

He proceeded to write very unfavorable comments

about them in a summary memo for the record.

We know with confidence

why he didn't like what they had to say

because they were providing evidence

that the single bullet theory could not be true.

[Goldberg] This was as far as

the investigation would go.

Neither Sibert nor O'Neill were asked to testify

for the Warren Commission,

and their written notes became classified.

In 1997, their depositions were taken

by the Assassination Records Review Board.

-Both Sibert and O'Neill,

were shown the photographs of the back of JFK's head,

the autopsy photographs,

that are the most controversial.

And they both said that they didn't see

anything like that at the autopsy.

O'Neill had said "it looks like it's been doctored.

I don't mean the photo's been doctored,

it looks like the head has been put back together,

you know, by embalmers and then photographed."

That was what he said, under oath.

Sibert did not remember drawing a diagram of the wound

for the House committee, so he drew a new one

for the Review Board.

And it's one of our most important wound diagrams.

And it shows what could only be an exit defect

in the right rear of the skull.

[Goldberg] In 1979, the House Select Committee report

stated that 26 people

present at the autopsy in Bethesda

all disagreed with the Parkland doctor's description

of Kennedy's head wound.

-When you went through the declassified affidavits

that the House Select Committee prepared,

what did you find about the alleged differences

between the Parkland and Bethesda witnesses

on this issue?

-Not only were-- were we allowed to see their statements,

but we were allowed to see the sketches

where they had drawn the big hole

on the back of the head.

And this was totally opposite

of what the House Select Committee had told us.

-When the Assassination Records Review Board came along,

out come those witness statements,

out come the diagrams.

And lo and behold, it turns out

that the witnesses at the autopsy

all agreed with the doctors at Dallas

that that defect involved the rear of the head.

And the summary statement

basically misrepresented that truth.

They basically lied about what was there.

[Goldberg] To make this even worse,

if one looks at the official back of the head photo,

there appears to be nothing missing.

But there likely was something.

This was a piece of bone

that did not arrive in Washington

until after the autopsy was over.

And if it came from the back of Kennedy's skull,

it created even more problems for that picture.

-The Harper fragment was a piece of fresh skull bone

that was found in Dealey Plaza,

not on the day of the assassination,

but later by Billy Harper.

-And reached down and picked it up.

And at that time knew that I had something

that most likely was significant.

-It was found in a position

where the FBI said that was to the left and rear

of where Jack Kennedy was when he was assassinated.

It was then taken in by this medical student

in to his professors.

And they looked at it and they said it looked like

it was occipital bone, which is back here.

[Goldberg] It measured approximately

three by two inches

and therefore would have fit neatly

in the rear skull wound visualized by Dr. McClelland.

This bone was given to the FBI on the 25th,

after the autopsy report had been written by Dr. Humes.

The FBI gave it to Kennedy's physician,

Admiral Burkley, at which point it disappears.

All we have today are the pictures

taken of it in Dallas.

This bit of evidence raises the question:

If the rear of the skull in the official autopsy,

was mostly filled in with bone fragments

found in the limousine,

where does the Harper fragment fit?

-Never realized Kennedy was so dangerous to the establishment.

Is that why?

-Well, that's the real question, isn't it?

Why?

The "how" and the "who" is just scenery for the public.

Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the Mafia,

keeps 'em guessing like some kind of polygon.

And prevents them from asking the most important question.

Why?

Why was Kennedy killed?

Who benefited?

Who has the power to cover it up?

Who?

[typewriter clinks]

[Donald Sutherland] At age 34,

Congressman John F. Kennedy

realized that if he were going to challenge

for a seat in the Senate, he needed to broaden

his knowledge of foreign affairs.

So he decided, in 1951, to take a seven-week journey

to the Middle East and Asia,

accompanied by his sister Patricia

and his brother Robert.

During their stop in Vietnam, Kennedy planned to meet

with Edmund Gullion. Gullion was a career diplomat

who had once helped Kennedy write a foreign policy speech.

Kennedy and his brother made it a point to seek him out,

meeting at a rooftop restaurant in Saigon.

-And it was one of the most important experiences

in his pre-presidential career.

[cannons booming]

A war was going on-- France versus the Viet Minh.

Eighty percent of their military material

was coming from the United States.

[Sutherland] And because of this, Kennedy wanted to see

what the status of this brutal, colonial war really was.

[Philip Muehlenbeck] When he met with the French generals,

that's when he formed the impression

that the war was going well, because that was, you know,

what the French generals were telling him.

His opinion started to change when he met Edmund Gullion.

He had told Kennedy that the French

were actually losing the war, and that the war was unwinnable.

In fact, he said that if the US were to replace the French,

that the US would also lose the war.

-Because Gullion made JFK understand

that nothing short of independence

would ever win in Vietnam.

And if independence had to come at the hands of the communists,

they would go with the communists

rather than stay a colony of any independent force.

[Sutherland] Gullion's warning that America

was backing an imminent French defeat

caused Kennedy to begin a six-year crusade

to formulate an alternative foreign policy,

one opposed to the confrontational

with-us-or-against-us

advocated by President Harry Truman.

Truman had broken away from his predecessor

Franklin Roosevelt's strategy of cooperation with the USSR,

creating a worldwide Cold War face-off,

later amplified by Dwight Eisenhower

and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.

-Can you describe the 1953 letter

that JFK sent to Dulles about Indochina?

-He sent a letter to John Foster Dulles,

who was then Secretary of State, asking him 47 questions

about American support for France in Vietnam.

One of those questions was,

"What specific evidence is there, Mr. Secretary,

that France is winning the war?"

[Sutherland] Foster Dulles' eventual answer to this letter

was codenamed Operation Vulture.

Vice President Richard Nixon was the main lobbyist

for the air operation in Congress.

Planned as a massive air armada,

it featured scores of bombers and fighter planes

designed to save the French position

at what would become the fatal siege

of Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954.

Vulture included the possibility of dropping

two or three atomic bombs.

[Aaron Good] The US leadership--

John Foster Dulles in particular--

took the initiative to offer the French

the use of the nuclear weapons.

And even the French themselves said

this is going too far for us.

This is going too far, and we can't be a party to this.

[Sutherland] Kennedy spoke on the Senate floor

in strong opposition to Vulture.

[John F. Kennedy] No amount of American military assistance

in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere

and at the same time nowhere;

an enemy of the people which has the sympathy

and covert support of the people.

[Sutherland] When Eisenhower could not get the British

to sign on to the project, he rejected it.

And as Ambassador Gullion predicted,

France lost its colonial war in Indochina.

Kennedy gave his support

to the liberal presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson

and began giving speeches

confronting the shared Cold War orthodoxies of both parties.

[John F. Kennedy] The determination of people

to control their national destinies.

In my opinion, the tragic failure

of both Republican and Democratic administrations

to comprehend the nature of this revolution

has reaped a bitter harvest today.

And it is by rights and by necessity

a major foreign policy campaign issue

that has nothing to do with anti-communism.

[Sutherland] Even for the liberal Stevenson,

that was too much.

His office wired Kennedy and specifically requested

that he make no more foreign policy statements

in any way associated with the campaign.

The next year, in 1957,

Kennedy found the perfect opportunity

to assault Foster Dulles, Nixon and Eisenhower

and to establish an alternative American foreign policy.

-Algeria became the last stand for France in its imperium.

There was about a million two hundred thousand French citizens

who were resident in North Africa generally,

but in Algeria specifically,

called Pieds-Noirs.

And they were completely behind the war effort,

and they were threatening French politicians.

And what had happened in the French Officer Corps

that was very, very critical and very dangerous

was that after the defeat in Vietnam,

a secret organization called the OAS,

the Organization de la Secrete,

threatened the government in Paris

that if there was any withdrawal or any negotiations

with the Algerian nationalists,

that that government would be overthrown.

[Sutherland] The Algerian conflict,

fought guerrilla-style, devolved into terror,

torture and atrocities on both sides.

France escalated the war--

a point counterpoint of terror act

followed by retaliation.

-Can you tell us how did support in Algeria

differ from Vietnam?

-In Algeria, it was support in a

in a political sense.

We supplied them through NATO

with some amount of weaponry and aircraft,

but not to the extent that we had in Vietnam.

It was a war that was so violent and so lethal

that the Americans stood aside.

They supported France, but they didn't want to be involved.

[Sutherland] It was against this backdrop

that Kennedy chose to express his differences

with the monster that Dulles and Eisenhower had created,

one now staggering out of control.

He attacked both Washington and Paris

for not seeing in Algeria,

a reprise of the 1954 French collapse in Vietnam.

-I am introducing a resolution which I believe outlines

the best hope for peace for the settlement in Algeria,

to achieve a solution which will recognize

the independent personality of Algeria

and establish the basis for a settlement

interdependent with France and the neighboring nations.

[Robert Rakove] Very few people, none with his prominence,

had been willing to say what he said,

which was to challenge a kind of default Euro-centrism

in American foreign policy,

to challenge the kind of "Europe First" outlook,

especially toward conflicts in the colonial world.

And Kennedy could even say,

look, this isn't even doing France any favors.

-That speech earned him the vitriol,

not only of Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller,

Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, et cetera,

but also Democrats like Adlai Stevenson,

because they saw that colonial empire

as the only thing that was holding

the European economy together.

And Europe was the bulwark against communism.

We had to support their colonial aspirations

and ambitions in Africa.

My uncle said, "No, we shouldn't be doing that.

That is going to, in the long run, weaken us.

And in any event, it's against every American ideal.

We should be supporting democracy

wherever it pops up in the world."

[Richard Mahoney] Well, Joe Kennedy, his father,

who had a very significant role in his son's career

at all times, took him aside and surprisingly said to him,

one day, people are going to see

that you really knew what you were talking about.

And in fact, that's exactly what happened.

The fourth republic fell. De Gaulle came in

and he immediately initiated talks

with the Algerian nationalists.

[Sutherland] In the archipelago nation of Indonesia,

President Sukarno had fought a long battle for independence

from the Dutch colonists.

A self-styled Nationalist,

he balanced the country's communist party, the PKI,

with his military, attempting to create

what he termed "guided democracy."

Partly as a reaction to the CIA-backed overthrow

of democratic governments in Guatemala and Iran,

Sukarno and other Third World leaders arranged a conference

in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955,

beginning what became known as the Non-Aligned Movement.

[Oliver Stone] And how did Kennedy's approach to the

Non-Aligned Movement differ from Dulles'?

-John Foster Dulles had said that

the policy of neutrality was immoral.

John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles

came from a Christian background,

and they felt, you know, what they had to say

was good enough for the rest of the world,

that they knew more than the president.

There were things they didn't tell Eisenhower

that they were doing under his administration.

[Sutherland] In 1958, Indonesian military dissidents

rebelled against Sukarno and at Eisenhower's direction,

the CIA initiated plans to assist them

in overthrowing their president.

[Bradley Simpson] The United States,

under John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles

who was the head of the CIA

saw support for the rebellion as a means of weakening Sukarno,

potentially breaking up the archipelago,

and weakening the Indonesian Communist Party.

And so, for more than a year,

the United States carried out what, up to that point,

was the largest and most destructive

covert operation of the Asian Cold War

in which thousands of US troops were involved,

in which millions of dollars in weapons and supplies

were given to the regional rebellions,

and in which thousands of people were killed.

[Sutherland] A CIA pilot, Alan Pope,

was shot down during the operation,

exposing US involvement, and the coup attempt failed.

[Robert Rakove] Kennedy, looking at the broad scope

of American history, American foreign policy

was fundamentally neutral.

World War I was the great exception,

until, of course, the Second World War.

He saw nothing wrong with it.

He could also draw from the experiences he'd had

traveling in the Middle East in the early 1950s.

He could draw from the example of Ireland

during the Second World War, which had achieved

a kind of difficult and controversial neutrality.

[Sutherland] Kennedy's interest in self-determination

for the Third World led him to become chairman

of the US Senate African Affairs Subcommittee in 1958.

-We had a delegation from Kenya come to our house on the Cape.

And the head of that delegation

was a man named Tom Mboya,

who was a great Labor leader in Africa.

Around 1959, the British said to Kenya,

"We're going to leave, we'll give you five years

to figure out how to rule this country."

Mboya looked around and said,

"There's not a single black child in this country

who has a college degree."

So he wrote letters to every college in America.

And he got a hundred of them, including Harvard,

to commit to give a scholarship

to one Kenyan child.

And he would choose the smartest kids in the country.

My uncle was so impressed by him

that he wrote him a $100,000 check

to bring these kids over.

In 2004, the Democratic convention

was in Boston, and I was asked to speak on the environment.

Right after I spoke, it was a young first-term,

first-year Democratic senator from Illinois

who nobody had ever heard of, who gave a speech

that blew the roof off the convention.

-The hope of a millworker's son

who dares to defy to odds;

the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name

who believes that America has a place for him too.

[cheers]

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] And I asked him about his life,

I knew nothing about him.

And he said that his father was Kenyan.

And I said, "Oh, have you ever heard of Tom Mboya?"

And he said to me,

"Tom Mboya is the reason I'm in this country"

because his father was the first kid

brought over on the airlift.

[Sutherland] Kennedy was now the man to see

for visiting African dignitaries.

During the 1960 campaign against Richard Nixon,

JFK mentioned Africa nearly 500 times.

The night of the election,

the Algerian rebels listened by radio

from their hillside camps,

hoping their American friend would win the seesaw battle.

It came as a shock to many, including Eisenhower and Nixon,

when Kennedy won a narrow victory.

[♪♪♪]

[hum of traffic]

[♪♪♪]

[Goldberg] The JFK case was such a massive confusion

that the Warren Commission version

of the firing sequence

differed from both the FBI's and the CIA's.

Although it never specified the order of the shots,

the Warren Report had one bullet going through Kennedy

and Governor Connally.

Another missing the car,

hitting a bystander on Commerce Street, James Tague.

And the final shot hitting Kennedy in the head.

The FBI concluded

that all three bullets struck inside the car,

two hitting Kennedy, and one hitting Connally.

The CIA analysis said

that the first shot did not come from the sixth-floor window,

and further, that two shooters were involved.

Their photographic analysis

based on the Zapruder film was closely held,

records showing that it only went to Director John McCone.

Like the FBI analysis, the Warren Commission

either never received it, or chose to ignore it.

-The Warren Commission put itself in a straitjacket.

They could not possibly allow more than three shots

because four shots or more

would have clearly indicated conspiracy

and they were not going there.

-When Oswald,

under the Warren Commission's conclusion,

had the best opportunity, it's a lineup,

and as the cars approached on Houston Street,

then getting closer and closer,

and there you are, Mr. Oswald.

It's coming right at you.

But you wait until the cars turn

and they're going down Elm Street

on a diagonal downward.

And the vision is

partially blocked by foliage on the trees.

And that's when you shoot.

-[echoing gunshot] -So somehow the first shot,

which he should have been better prepared for, he missed.

And then the second shot is the one that ultimately,

they said was the hero of the single bullet theory

that went into Kennedy's back

and produced the seven wounds in him and Connally.

And then the third shot hit, according to them,

Kennedy in the head.

[reporter] It appears as though something has happened.

-As they began to reflect upon this

into March, April of 1964, they were faced with

a seemingly impossible physical incongruity.

Because they had a problem

with the chronology of the Zapruder film,

which showed that Connally is hit about 1.5 seconds

after Kennedy is hit.

Well, the problem was the best marksman

they could find not worrying about re-aiming

and repositioning and a moving target,

2.3 seconds for this piece of junk,

the most inferior weapon of the genre,

the Mannlicher Carcano.

Now 2.3 seconds versus 1.5 seconds.

Arlen Specter, junior legal counsel,

later to become district attorney,

and then U.S. senator from Pennsylvania,

he is the one that gave birth to the single bullet theory.

[camera clicks]

Ah ha! What if one bullet made all seven wounds?

What if one bullet went into Kennedy's back and--

and came out his neck,

and then went into Connolly's back through his chest,

out the front of his chest,

into the back of his right wrist,

out the front of his right wrist and into his left thigh?

And that is the single bullet theory,

which Mark Lane, I think,

was the first one to dub as "the magic bullet theory."

CE 399 was the magic bullet,

and all government investigations so far

have treated that bullet

as absolutely foundational to this case;

never doubted that it was involved in the case,

and never really looked at the provenance of the bullet.

[Goldberg] The other problem is the lack of damage

to the bullet after going through two men,

smashing two bones, and making seven wounds.

Dr. Joseph Dolce was a much-honored

battlefield surgeon during World War II.

He worked for the Warren Commission.

-And so they gave us the original rifle,

the Mannlicher Carcano, plus 100 bullets, 6.5 millimeters.

And we went and we shot the cadaver wrists.

And in every instance,

the front or the tip of the bullet was smashed.

Under no circumstances do I feel that this bullet

could hit the wrist and still not be deformed.

[Goldberg] Dolce came to believe

that two bullets had struck Connally.

Since Arlen Specter

pre-screened the medical witnesses for the Commission,

Dolce's name is not in the Warren Report,

and his testimony is not in the volumes.

In September of 1978,

the House Select Committee on Assassinations

tried again to link CE 399 to the case

through the work of Dr. Vincent Guinn,

and a test called Neutron Activation Analysis,

which attempted to show that all fragments

and CE 399 came from only two bullets.

[David Mantik] Robert Blakey,

who was in charge of the investigation for the House,

claimed that their work with Neutron Activation Analysis

was the linchpin of the case against Oswald.

[Goldberg] Partly because of the renewed interest

in the JFK case, this test came under severe criticism.

-People who had deep experience

in Neutron Activation Analysis

at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory

re-looked at that

and said that those fragments that-that came out

might not have even come from Mannlicher Carcano bullets,

and they could have come from any one of five bullets,

not the two.

So that has been completely debunked.

So much so that Neutron Activation Analysis,

which the FBI used to use in prosecutions,

was given up more than ten years ago.

They don't do that anymore

because they know that it's junk science.

[Goldberg] Without this test, there was no proof

that CE 399 and the fragments in Governor Connally's wrist

are from the same bullet.

And even Connally refused

to accept the single bullet theory.

-Did the Warren Commission

do experiments with the alleged Oswald rifle on skulls?

[Gary Aguilar] They did human skull experiments in 1964,

at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

They filled human skulls with human-equivalent material,

and they were testified to under oath

by Larry Sturdivan, the House Select Committee.

He says, "As you can see, every skull, all ten of them,

moved away from the rifle."

[echoing gunshot]

-The trajectory from the sixth floor

of the Texas School Book Depository,

Z-312 or Z-313,

the trajectory would have resulted in

a blow-out through the face, and this was confirmed

even by the government's own data.

[Goldberg] And photos from the autopsy

clearly show Kennedy's face to be intact.

And the Warren Commission was aware of something else

that was wrong with their evidence.

-All kinds of ballistic tests

show that the bullets, in fact, came from that rifle.

That was his rifle.

You took a picture of him with it.

-No, no, no. -[interviewer] His palm prints,

and fingerprints were all over the School Book Depository.

[Marina Porter] You have been misinformed.

The ballistics test did not prove anything at all.

[reporter] This is the weapon that was used,

a rather well-worn military rifle.

[Goldberg] Is this really true,

or is it a myth that has been allowed to assume

the status of accepted fact since few have challenged it?

[Oliver Stone] Is the rifle in evidence today

the same rifle the commission said

Oswald ordered through the mail?

-The rifle that Lee Oswald allegedly ordered

under an alias of Alex Hidell

was obtained through Klein's Sporting Goods store

in Chicago as a mail order.

Got it out of American Rifleman magazine.

He wrote on the coupon he wanted a 36-inch model,

Mannlicher Carcano, 6.5 millimeter, for $19.95.

Robert Frazier was one of the examiners,

he was a firearms expert for the FBI,

and he testified that he did measure it,

and the measurement was 40.2 inches in length,

from barrel to stock.

There's a 4.2 inch difference in the one he ordered,

versus what they found in the Book Depository.

[Goldberg] Klein's may have indeed delivered

a different Mannlicher Carcano model to Oswald,

but there are other anomalies to this story.

The model that Oswald ordered,

showed these strap attachment points

on the bottom of the barrel and stock.

[Brian Edwards] In the photograph

is Lieutenant Carl Day

with the Dallas Police Department bringing a rifle

out of the Book Depository.

One of the straps at the back of the gun

is on the left side of the stock

embedded in the stock.

That's clearly not the rifle that was ordered,

or least appears in the Klein's Sporting goods store.

[Goldberg] The straps shown

in the so-called backyard photos

are on the bottom and not on the side of the stock.

-Marina Oswald took backyard photographs

of Lee Oswald holding a rifle and a pistol on his hip.

Um, and in that first photograph that she took three of,

Commission Exhibit 133A and 133B,

show a ring on the ring finger of the right hand.

133C, the ring appears on the left hand.

In effect, the Dallas Police showed Lee Oswald

one of the pictures while he was still in custody.

He said, "That's my face, but I don't remember

ever having that picture taken of me."

[Goldberg] There's also a question

of how Oswald received the rifle.

[Brian Edwards] If the rifle was sent from Klein's

to the post office box

rented under the name Lee Harvey Oswald,

using the alias of A.J. Hidell on the coupon,

it would have been sent back immediately

because Oswald's name was the only one

on that post office box.

He was only one authorized to receive mail.

Marina didn't even have, her name wasn't even on there.

So that rifle was addressed to a person

who didn't have the authority

to have any mail received at that box.

It should have been sent back.

[Goldberg] But after all of these questions are asked,

the underlying mystery remains:

Why would anyone use a rifle in an assassination

knowing there was a paper trail

that would lead right back to them?

-Was there a palm print found on the rifle?

-The foremost fingerprint expert the FBI had,

Sebastian Latona, uh, took that rifle

and attempted to lift prints off of the rifle,

the stock and/or the barrel.

Uh, he testified to the Warren Commission

that he found no usable prints anywhere on that rifle,

on the metal or the stock.

But yet, Lieutenant Day in Dallas,

before the rifle went to Washington,

said he found a partial palm print

on the trigger guard on the left side

and a partial print underneath the stock on the barrel.

But Sebastian Latona said there was no evidence

that a lift had even been attempted.

[Oliver Stone] No partials at all?

-Nothing that he could use in court.

There has to be eight points of identification.

He found nothing that would match that.

[Tom Alyea] I was able to enter this building,

along with the Secret Service,

and shoot exclusive footage

of the finding of the assassin's gun

and dusting it for fingerprints.

[Debra Conway] Tom Alyea was the first reporter

that made it up to the sixth floor.

I would say that he was a friend to the Dallas police

because he worked as a photographer

on many crime scenes, and he probably knew

most of these officers that were there.

They found the shells that were ejected from the rifle,

and they found some, looked like someone's lunch.

[Brian Edwards] Alyea described the location of

these three shell casings,

were almost in a line, facing the same direction

within four or five inches of the front of the building.

-When you eject them from a rifle,

they're not going to land like that.

They're gonna be everywhere.

Captain Fritz was brought over,

and he picked up these three shell casings

and held them out in his hand, flat.

Alyea took motion picture film of it.

[Goldberg] This was before

Dallas police photographer,

Robert Studebaker,

took pictures of the shells on the floor.

So clearly, that was a staged photo.

The X's indicate

where Tom Alyea recalls the original placement.

The Warren Commission never interviewed Tom Alyea,

and they never questioned

if the crime scene had been altered.

-How important is chain of custody

in a legal proceeding?

-Chain of custody basically refers to

the integrity of evidence.

If I, uh, pick up a piece of evidence and I transfer it

to somebody else for holding or processing,

my name is the first name on this list.

The second person who touches this

and takes possession of it is next.

And if you don't do that, there's no way to prove

that the evidence you collected on Day 1

is the same one you get on Day 25 when you go to court.

-Can you walk us through

the magic bullet's chain of custody,

from the Parkland employees to the Secret Service

to the FBI?

-Well, the magic bullet was supposedly found

on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital,

and it went through several hands,

uh, before it got to the Secret Service.

Richard Johnsen was the first Secret Service agent

to handle it, and he carried it back to Washington, D.C.

When he got back to Washington, D.C.,

he gave it to the chief of the Secret Service,

who was James Rowley.

And at the White House,

James Rowley gave it to Elmer Lee Todd

and Todd then took it to the FBI lab

and gave it to Robert Frazier.

We have interesting information produced by John Hunt,

a private citizen who went to the archives

on four or five occasions

to track down the story about the magic bullet,

and what he found was truly astounding.

-He practically moved into the National Archives

in Washington, D.C.

They allowed him to set up a desk

with a computer and his own scanner.

And he also did something different.

He didn't interview policemen and FBI people,

and he wasn't swayed by their excuses.

He went straight to: This is what you told,

and you signed your name.

[Goldberg] Working with FBI

and Warren Commission documents,

John Hunt asked the most basic question:

Was CE 399, in evidence,

the same bullet that was found on the stretcher?

-At 7:30 at night, this is the day of the assassination,

November 22nd, 1963,

a bullet appears in the record, and

it's signed for by Robert Frazier,

who is the main investigator at the FBI lab.

And it's not just one document. There are multiple documents

that indicate that Frazier signed for a bullet

at 7:30 that night.

Now, here's where things get interesting.

Elmer Lee Todd received the bullet at the White House

from chief of the Secret Service, James Rowley.

And Todd documents, very clearly in writing,

that he got this bullet at 8:50 p.m.

How is that possible?

How can Robert Frazier receive the bullet in the lab

at 7:30 from Elmer Lee Todd

when Todd didn't get the bullet until 8:50?

-You would think that they would have handled it,

you know, like it would've been gold going to the bank.

There it is in the record.

Someone is lying about when they got the bullet.

[David Mantik] It gets worse, though.

Todd initialed that bullet.

-The one that he got at 8:50,

and everyone else who touched the bullet

after that initialed it too, including Robert Frazier.

I went to the archives to look at this bullet.

And specifically what we want to know is

do we see Todd's initials on this bullet?

He said he initialed the bullet.

It is not there.

Todd's initials are not on the magic bullet.

-I was very interested in finding out

what the Review Board would show us about this.

So we began scouring their evidence,

and we found out something very interesting.

We found out that the Warren Report

had, from the FBI, a report saying that the guys

that found the bullet later identified that

as the bullet they'd seen.

The internal record didn't show that at all.

The internal record said this bullet

didn't look like that bullet at all.

But the FBI reported to the Warren Commission

that it did, it lied.

We then talked to the FBI agent

that was supposed to have carried that bullet around.

His name was Bardwell Odum.

I got Bardwell Odum on the phone.

I sent him the documents

that said that he had done this.

He said, "I never had that bullet.

I never showed any bullet to anyone.

If I'd had the bullet, there'd be a 302.

I would have filed a report, particularly in that era,

everybody was very uptight about getting everything right."

So we scoured for 302 reports.

His name appears nowhere in the record.

This is just something that the FBI invented.

-In 1966, Josiah Thompson, who authored

"Six Seconds in Dallas," interviewed O.P. Wright,

who was head of maintenance at Parkland Hospital,

and who had handled the bullet.

He showed him a photograph of the magic bullet,

which has a rounded tip.

And O.P. Wright said, "No, it wasn't like that."

-Wright, who had worked as a policeman,

he knew bullets, and he said, "No, no,

the bullet that we found at Parkland had a pointed tip."

And he just pulled one out of his drawer

that had a pointed tip and showed it.

And it looks nothing like 399.

-It's conceivable that some mysterious bullet

showed up from who knows where.

Todd did not initial it,

and it ended up in the FBI lab as the magic bullet.

But then we have the second bullet that arrives at 8:50.

Is this possibly the pointed bullet

that was seen by O.P. Wright in Dallas,

and that then disappeared?

We don't have any idea where it is today.

That scenario would fit the known facts.

-So it appears that a different bullet

was found on that stretcher than 399.

399 shows up after it's been to the FBI lab.

And one can only surmise that--that somewhere in the FBI,

they realized they had to close the loop on Oswald's guilt.

And so they just switched it out,

because none of the four people,

either the guys at Parkland

or the two Secret Service agents,

could identify the bullet.

The guy who is supposed to have gotten confirmation

that they did identify the bullet said he never did it.

And the record supports that.

So there is--there's good reason to be very suspicious

about the magic bullet.

-The chain of custody doesn't start from the laboratory;

it starts from the crime scene.

Each piece of evidence should be photographed,

documented, and preserved, properly.

From the scene, evidence is collected,

sent to the laboratory.

We have to keep the chain of custody

when they enter the lab.

Who exam?

Who did the further analysis?

And each step have to maintain until submit to the court.

If this chain broke,

then my evidence become inadmissible.

[Goldberg] Sunday, November 24th, 1963,

Lee Harvey Oswald has been in detention for two days

after he was caught in a movie theater

just an hour after the assassination.

He's being questioned for long hours,

but there is no stenographer present,

and the police say there was no tape recorder in the room.

-I'd like some legal representation.

These police officers have not allowed me to--to have any.

[Goldberg] He's confessed to nothing.

He has, in fact, denied any guilt to his only audience,

the press and the spectators in the hallways.

[Goldberg] Lee Harvey Oswald,

while he was alive,

in the strongest terms, denied he committed the crime.

[reporter] Did you kill the President?

-No, I have not been charged with that.

In fact, nobody has said that to me yet.

First thing I heard about was when the newspaper reporters

in the hall, uh, asked me that question.

[Goldberg] It would be hard to say

that he shot Kennedy in some cause,

as a politically-inspired shooter would proclaim.

[reporter] How long have you been in residence?

[Lee Oswald] No, they're taking me in

because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union.

[reporter] What time did you leave--

[Lee Oswald] I'm just a patsy.

[reporter] Did you shoot the President?

[Goldberg] He's about to be transferred

to the county jail.

The FBI has called the Dallas police

on both Saturday and Sunday,

warning them of threats

to kill the alleged assassin of President Kennedy.

The police have decided to proceed

with the transfer anyway.

As you watch, listen for the two car horns.

One as Oswald emerges,

and the other the moment before Jack Ruby fires.

[long honk of car horn]

[short car honk]

[gunshot] [Lee Oswald screams]

[reporter] He's been shot. He's been shot. Lee Oswald

[Goldberg] It was the shocking

live murder of Lee Harvey Oswald

that terminated the Dallas police as investigators.

J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo to the newly sworn-in

President Johnson that evening, saying,

"The thing I am concerned about is having something issued

so we can convince the public

that Oswald is the real assassin."

The day before, he had told Johnson that

"the case, as it stands now,

isn't strong enough to be able to get a conviction."

The next day,

Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach

wrote a memo to the White House saying,

"The public must be satisfied

that Oswald did not have confederates

who were still at large, and that the evidence was such

that he would have been convicted at trial.

We need something to head off public speculation

or congressional hearings of the wrong sort."

With those two memos,

the FBI became the main investigatory arm

in the JFK case.

There was never any serious discussion

that independent investigators were needed.

The idea in Washington now

became to contain the crime to Oswald,

therefore, cutting off any connections

to a wider Russia-Cuba-communist conspiracy

which could provoke the threat of atomic war.

The day after he was murdered,

the New York Times pronounced Oswald

as the killer of President Kennedy.

The Warren Commission concluded

that Ruby shot Oswald acting alone.

It was not premeditated or planned,

and Ruby had no help entering the building.

[Goldberg] Two months after winning his appeal

and being granted a new trial outside of Dallas,

Jack Ruby was found riddled with cancer in his prison cell.

He was placed in the hospital,

and one month before his new trial was to begin,

he died.

The Warren Commission never exposed

Ruby's connections to the Mafia, the FBI,

or with gunrunning and gambling figures

in Miami and Cuba.

[Brian Edwards] On other parts of the--

of the case that the government put against Lee Oswald,

uh, obviously, he was dead.

He had no chance to have cross-examined witnesses.

Uh, he had no lawyer appointed.

-These people have given me a hearing

without legal representation or anything.

[reporter] Did you shoot the President?

-I didn't shoot anybody. No sir.

[Brian Edwards] Mark Lane, an attorney out of New York,

tried to get, uh, legal representation for Lee Oswald.

In fact, went to the commission and asked,

"Can I represent Lee Oswald?" And they denied it.

Because again this is, this is not a typical court hearing.

-I can tell you from my experiences,

having tried several hundred cases to verdict,

and being responsible for thousands of cases

as head of the criminal courts and running the Homicide Bureau

that I don't believe there's any courtroom in America

where Oswald would have been convicted

on the evidence that was presented

before the Warren Commission.

[♪♪♪]