Original subtitles

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[tense music]

[tense music]

[gunshot]

[dramatic music]

[Whoopi Goldberg] The one physician present

at both Parkland Hospital

and the Bethesda morgue was George Burkley,

Kennedy's personal doctor.

Like Knudsen, he was a Navy officer

and as a rear admiral, he ranked above him.

Burkley signed the autopsy descriptive sheet

with a bullet in the back at the level of T-3.

And he also signed Kennedy's death certificate,

which also placed that wound in the back.

That death certificate

is not in the Warren Commission volumes,

and the descriptive sheet in the Commission volumes

does not have Burkley's signature.

Arlen Specter did not depose George Burkley,

but Burkley went further than that.

[Goldberg] Dr. Burkley did an interview

with the JFK Library in 1967

and was asked this question:

[Goldberg] In 1977, through his lawyer,

he wrote a letter to Richard Sprague,

chief counsel of the House Select Committee

on Assassinations.

He said he had information

indicating that others

besides Oswald must have participated

in the assassination.

He was willing to talk about it at this time.

Sprague, who had made clear his intention

to fully investigate the CIA's involvement,

was forced out two weeks later.

Dr. Burkley submitted a written statement

to the House Select Committee,

but there is no official record

of him being deposed as a witness.

-In 1982, he told JFK researcher Henry Hurt,

"I know there was more than one gunman."

And when Henry Hurt tried to recontact Burkley

for more details, Berkeley cut him off at the knees.

"I don't want to talk about it anymore."

The very next year, Burkley talked to Michael Kurtz,

another JFK researcher, told him that he knew

there was a conspiracy to kill the president,

and that he recalled an exit wound

in the back of President Kennedy's head.

Now, that's a very significant statement,

that the only doctor we know of who was present at both

Parkland for treatment, and at Bethesda during the autopsy,

told Michael Kurtz in 1983

that Kennedy had an exit wound in the back of his head.

When Kurtz tried to recontact Burkley,

Burkley cut him off the knees:

"I don't want to talk about this anymore."

Dr. Burkley was deceased

by the time the Review Board was impaneled.

So then Jeremy decided, well, we can ask

the executor of his estate,

his daughter, to sign a waiver

so that we could

go to the law firm that Mr. Illig used to work for,

because he was deceased also,

and see if there were any records

in the file of Mr. Illig that would have revealed

what it was he wanted to tell the HSCA in detail.

And she said she would do that.

And then Jeremy called her on the phone,

she had completely changed her mind

and adamantly refused to sign it,

and terminated the phone call.

-When I was a teenager,

Dr. Burkley and his family, four children,

and my father and our family of four children,

shared a duplex, lived together at the Newport Naval Hospital.

He had a son, George, who was my age, 16,

and we became buddies.

I looked him up again in 2012

and I asked him about what his dad had told him

and his siblings about his role in the Kennedy case.

That the only thing that he would say was that

he couldn't understand why the Warren Commission

never asked him to testify.

Dr. Burkley knew perfectly well

why he wasn't asked to testify before the Warren Commission.

The reason he didn't say anything to his children,

he didn't want them to know

that he was intimately involved in the cover-up.

Dr. Burkley's death certificate

makes the single bullet theory bogus.

And the way the Warren Commission dealt with it was,

they didn't publish the death certificate.

-If the ARRB had been a criminal investigation,

would you have granted Burkley immunity for his testimony?

-We should have re-deposed Humes and Boswell

after giving them immunity.

And if Burkley had still been around,

he would have been another candidate

because he was at the center of the photographic cover-up.

By the way, George Burkley was a Rear Admiral.

He was promoted to Vice Admiral by Lyndon Johnson.

So he promoted Burkley to the highest possible rank,

kept him on as military physician,

and the last person to walk out of the White House

with Lyndon Johnson the day he left office

was George Burkley.

[man] [on tape] using the most precise medical terminology

that you can use.

[Audrey Bell] [on tape] Okay, let's say

it was on the right rear.

[Goldberg] In addition to this large avulsion of wound

in the rear of the skull,

seven personnel at Parkland Hospital

saw cerebellum at the bottom of the skull.

[Cyril Wecht] The brain consists of two

large cerebral hemispheres.

And then lower down, posteriorly,

are two hemispheres, the cerebellum.

They differ in coloration.

They differ in the topographical markings.

-So seven doctors at Parkland Hospital

claim to have seen the cerebellum.

-In 1963, it was one of the top trauma centers

in the country, and it's still one of the top trauma centers.

Dr. Robert McClelland saw a clump of the cerebellum,

a large clump, fall out of the skull

onto the emergency room bed.

-In my mind, as surely

as you can ever be about any observation,

that was cerebellum that extruded onto the gurney

while I was standing there looking at it.

[Michael Chesser] Then we have Dr. Kemp Clark.

He went into detail with the Warren Commission

about the result of all this loss of cerebellar tissue

if President Kennedy had survived the-- the wound.

So there was no doubt that there was loss of cerebellar tissue.

[Goldberg] This reliable eyewitness

testimony indicates

that the wound in Kennedy's rear skull extended quite low.

And also, there was severe damage

to that sector of the brain.

Yet, in the autopsy report written at Bethesda

by James Humes, there is no mention of the cerebellum,

and he did not testify about it to the Warren Commission.

-So these guys, good old Texan, respected doctors,

and they've seen hundreds and thousands of brains,

especially the neurosurgeon,

saw cerebellum having been damaged,

significantly displaced, in the occipital area.

The doctors who did the autopsy,

read the autopsy report from Humes and Boswell.

The cerebellum is intact.

Who do you believe?

Do you believe these Texas doctors?

Or do you believe the two career naval pathologists

working under military control?

Who do you believe as to whether or not

the cerebellum was damaged?

[Goldberg] There were many witnesses

at Parkland and Bethesda who, in addition to seeing

damaged cerebellum, also testified

to seeing a severely damaged brain.

-At Parkland, we have witnesses.

One, Dr. Midgett saw brain matter

sprayed all over the interior of the limousine.

[Goldberg] Interestingly,

the Secret Service washed out parts of the limo

before shipping it to Washington,

thus removing brain, blood, and tissue evidence

from the crime scene.

-Anybody who's seen the Zapruder film

can see Kennedy's head explodes

and debris flies all over the place.

Now Jackie Kennedy

climbed out onto the trunk of the limousine,

picked up a chunk of the president's brain,

had it with her, took it in, and gave it to

one of the doctors at Parkland Hospital.

-And then we have Dr. McClelland talking about

the large clump of the cerebellum

that fell out onto the emergency room bed.

-And when you look at the autopsy photographs

of the brain, which I've seen the originals of,

you can just see that the brain is disrupted.

But very little of the tissue is missing.

Then we look at the autopsy report of the brain,

at what they call the supplemental brain examination.

The brain in evidence, that's weighed there,

weighs 1,500 grams.

-Fifteen hundred grams is--

is above the average weight of an adult male brain.

There was one report of 8,000 autopsies,

and the average weight of an adult male brain

was 1,336 grams,

so they're saying that President Kennedy's brain

was well above the average weight.

-Where did all that brain tissue disappear to

that flies around Dealey Plaza, that's--

that Jackie has in her hand,

that everybody's picking off of their clothes?

-An FBI agent, Frank O'Neill, told the review board

that over half of the mass of the brain was missing.

He saw the brain removed at the autopsy.

A lot of the mass missing was in the back.

That's what mortician Tom Robinson said.

-So it's impossible for the actual weight

of President Kennedy's brain to be 1,500 grams.

This is just one more reason

why this cannot be President Kennedy's brain,

uh, the photographs that we have stored at the Archives.

-What's the purpose of sectioning a brain,

and how is it done?

-When a brain is to be examined in detail, uh, you--

you don't do it in the fresh state.

A fresh brain has the consistency

of a well-done soft-boiled egg.

I don't mean to be crude,

but this is the best metaphor I can think of.

You fix it in formalin, and in two weeks,

the consistency becomes that of a hard-boiled egg.

And now, think of slicing a hard-boiled egg.

They say, and look at the Warren Commission report,

look at the autopsy report, it says,

serial sections, parallel sections, of the brain

are not made in order to preserve the specimen.

Preserve the specimen? For whom?

For Jacqueline Kennedy's mantelpiece?

For the president's grandchildren?

For a museum? Preserve it for whom?

-Without sectioning the brain,

uh, there was no way for them to--

to properly trace the trajectory of the wounds.

-The review board had a consultant,

a renowned forensic pathologist.

He looked at the brain photographs

and he said, "This is a very well-fixed brain.

It's all gray. It's not pink at all.

It's been fixed for two or three weeks in formaldehyde."

It's been fixed at least two weeks,

maybe as long as three weeks.

I looked at Jeremy Gunn and he looked at me,

and the hair stood up on the back of my neck

because I knew that JFK's brain was examined

less than three days after he was killed.

-One can only imagine that they wanted

the damage to the brain to be consistent with

the hypothesis that Oswald had done the shooting.

So if you had a defect

going all the way to the back of the head,

like so many witnesses testified to it,

it might raise questions about whether that huge defect

could have been caused-- been caused by

a single shot to the head,

as Oswald was supposed to have done.

-There are two photographs of the brain at the Archives.

I viewed those in 2015.

The brain looked to me to be distorted.

My first thought was that the brain had been sitting

in a jar of formaldehyde for a long time.

At a teaching hospital, there was no shortage of brains.

Autopsies were very frequent.

Frequently, the brain was saved for teaching medical students,

so it would not have been difficult to find a brain,

a replacement for these photographs.

-Dr. Humes destroyed his original autopsy notes.

Now, Dr. Humes, the chief autopsy pathologist,

and what we all know as doctors,

notes taken while you're doing something

are much, are much more important,

and are likely to be closer to the truth

than anything you write later.

And he admitted that he-- he destroyed autopsy notes.

-You destroyed your original notes

in a medical legal autopsy?

And remember, that night, Oswald is still alive.

You're going to be asked, Doctor, at some point in time,

under oath, to give sworn testimony,

"Why did you destroy those notes, Doctor?

Doesn't a pathologist keep his notes?"

-And he said, "Well, I just destroyed my own autopsy notes

because they were splattered with the president's blood.

And I didn't want them to become objects of morbid curiosity."

The third doctor, Dr. Finck, who was there,

also wrote some notes

and complained bitterly about the fact

that his notes disappeared, too.

-He was so upset because he had to go home

and reconstruct all his notes from memory.

[Goldberg] Today, after almost 60 years,

due to an incomplete and questionable autopsy,

no one can say for sure what happened.

A riddle, like the Sphinx.

The complete set of autopsy and brain examination photographs

are housed at the National Archives,

but are only available to Congressional researchers

and those experts authorized by the Kennedy family.

-Who was the autopsy photographer?

-John Stringer.

He was a Navy civilian. He was widely respected.

He had written a textbook on medical photography

for the Navy.

So he was the photographer of record.

He photographed the autopsy itself,

and also photographed the president's brain

three days later.

-So the brain autopsy or autopsies,

there were probably two such events, occurred later,

and were not done on November 22nd.

John Stringer reports that he was present

at the brain autopsy,

which apparently occurred on the Monday after,

which would have been November 25th.

-We were very careful to question Mr. Stringer

at the very beginning of his deposition

about all the photographs he took,

and ask him what kind of film he used for black and white.

What kind of film he used for color.

Jeremy Gunn showed Stringer

the color positive transparencies of the brain.

And Stringer immediately noted, "Well, these aren't Kodak.

These might be ANSCO." "Also," he says,

"I don't see the name of the manufacturer on here, but"

he said, "these might be ANSCO," he says,

"but these don't have the right notches in the corner."

So Jeremy Gunn said, "Did you use this film

with these notches in it when you shot the brain?"

And he says, "Not as far as I know."

Half of the brain photos are taken of a brain from above.

Superior views.

Which is what Stringer said he shot

of the complete organ.

But the other half of the brain photos in the Archives

are taken of the bottom, called basilar views.

"Did you take basilar views?"

And Stringer said, "No, not as far as I know."

-He testified to, as did, uh,

uh, two of the autopsy pathologists,

that they took photographs of Jack Kennedy's head

by peeling back the scalp to demonstrate

the entrance wound in the back of the skull,

both from the inside of the skull

and the outside of the skull.

There are no such photographs in the file.

-What we have here is evidence

that impugns the authenticity of the brain photographs

in the National Archives.

If there was a trial today, these brain photographs

would not be admissible as evidence.

[Goldberg] Doesn't this all lead to the question,

if Stringer did not take these photographs,

then who did?

Robert Knudsen was one of the most fascinating stories

that the Review Board encountered.

Knudsen was a Navy photographer

who was detailed to the White House in 1958.

If you read his obituaries in The New York Times

and the Washington Post, you will see

that he is credited with

photographing Kennedy's autopsy,

except officially, he was not.

[Douglas Horne] Robert Knudsen was not interviewed

by the Warren Commission.

So they finally found Robert Knudsen in 1978.

And to its credit, the House Select Committee

did a deposition of him.

To their discredit, they never published it,

they buried it for 50 years.

And it got released in 1993.

And I know why they buried it.

Because everything he told them about autopsy photography

contradicted what they thought they knew in the official record.

-What did Knudsen tell them?

-So he says, "Berkeley had me develop

these black and white negatives on Saturday, November 23rd,

and that's when I saw photographs

of probes in the body."

"Well, they didn't like that."

They really didn't know whether to believe him or not,

because there are no pictures of probes in the body,

in the official collection.

But he was sure that he developed those negatives

and saw them.

-He has never said he took photographs of the brain,

but he implies that he was very busy

taking photographs of the body.

His wife was interviewed later

by the Assassination Records Review Board.

He told her that the photographs had been burned,

deliberately, by the Secret Service,

and that one photograph in particular,

presumably the back of the head,

had been severely altered.

Gloria Knudsen was so disturbed by this after his death in 1989

that she actually contacted some of his colleagues

there in the Navy, and they assured her

that this was what he had told them, too.

In fact, he had told them

that he had seen photographs of the back of JFK's head

that showed a large wound, low in the back of the head.

-Stringer's still the autopsy photographer of record.

I think they both took pictures. And I personally think

that many of John Stringer's pictures

never made it into the official collection.

And a lot of the ones we're looking at

are Robert Knudsen's pictures.

[David Mantik] Saundra Spencer worked

at the Anacostia Facility, the Naval Photographic Center,

which is quite separate from the Bethesda lab.

And that weekend, she received film from both James Fox

in the Secret Service, and from Robert Knudsen.

[Douglas Horne] The photographs that Saundra Spencer developed,

which never made it into the official record.

The only evidence we have of them is her testimony.

Saundra Spencer was visibly upset

when she looked at the official autopsy photographs.

She started to cry.

[Oliver Stone] In front of the Review Board?

[Douglas Horne] Yes, she started to cry

in front of Jeremy and I,

and the person from the Archives.

Because, she said, "I developed pictures

of him and his family for almost three years,

and he never looked like this."

And she said, "He did not look this bad

in the photographs I developed on Sunday."

She said, "He looks terrible in these photographs.

He's all beat up.

There's blood everywhere, that open body cavity."

She said, "There were no open body cavities.

It was very cleaned up. It was very respectful."

And in one of the photographs she developed,

there was a brain, an intact brain

sitting next to the body, the nude body of the president.

Strange, first of all, that it's intact

because we know from FBI Agent Frank O'Neill

that the brain was more than half missing

when they removed it from the cranium.

[David Mantik] Jeremy Gunn once made a comment.

He said, "It's as if the autopsy materials

were designed to hide what was really happening

as opposed to what they should usually do.

They're supposed to reveal the full extent of things."

[Douglas Horne] On November 1st, 1966,

the National Archives

and an official from the Department of Justice

met with Humes, Boswell,

photographer John Stringer and the radiologist Ebersole.

And they looked at the autopsy photographs

for the first time.

And they created a catalog, an inventory, simply saying:

this is what this picture describes.

During this discussion, the DOJ witness, Mr. Belcher,

who was an attorney,

noted they were discussing missing photographs.

Jeremy Gunn, my boss, the General Counsel,

did ask why these people signed an inventory

which they knew not to be true.

And Stringer said, "Well, some people do object,

but they don't last very long."

[Goldberg] An inventory of autopsy materials

submitted in 1965 to the National Archives

listed microscopic tissue slides,

and a stainless steel container

containing gross material, presumably the brain.

-In August of '72,

I'm there at the National Archives,

and I'm looking.

I have the executive agreement of April '65

and I have the inventory of October '66,

a year and a half later. Ah-ha!

In addition to some X-rays and some photos that are missing,

there's a large metal box that obviously contained the brain,

listed in '65, no longer listed in '66.

[smacks kiss] Goodbye, brain.

-And the tissue slides

that they'd taken have disappeared from evidence.

And people say, well, what difference do the tissue slides make?

I'll tell you what evidence they make.

When you do a little biopsy of that tissue around there,

you can tell whether the bullet entered there, or exited there,

by whether you find dust particles from the lead.

-You don't have the brain.

This is the heart, no pun intended,

of the defendant's case.

Mr. Prosecutor, you don't have the brain.

You're out of here.

And as we sit and talk here today,

all these years later, that brain remains missing.

-I'd hate to be in your shoes today.

You have a lot to think about.

You've seen much hidden evidence

the American public has never seen.

You know, going back to when we were children,

I think that most of us in this courtroom

thought that justice came into being automatically.

That virtue was its own reward.

That good will triumph over evil.

But as we get older, we know this just isn't true.

Individual human beings have to create justice,

and this is not easy

because the truth often poses a threat to power,

and one often has to fight power at great risk to themselves.

[Goldberg] After the film JFK was released,

several doctors went to the National Archives

to view the X-rays of Kennedy's skull.

They saw details in these X-rays

which presented yet another problem

for the Warren Report's claim

that Kennedy was only shot from the rear.

-Well, the government investigations did claim

that there was no evidence of a shot from the front.

But they didn't tell us a few things

that were very important,

which we have learned only in recent years.

We have seen tiny metal fragments right at the forehead.

-When you look at the X-rays

that are stored at the Archives now,

on the lateral X-ray, there is a fragment trail

that actually expands from front to back,

and there are dozens of very tiny

dust-like fragment particles up in this location.

-Now, why is that important?

Well, what we know is that the larger bullet fragments travel farther,

whereas the smaller ones tend to stay near the entry site.

That's what we see on these X-rays.

In other words, we can reasonably interpret these

as being consistent with a frontal bullet,

but being radically inconsistent with a posterior bullet.

-And that's not evidence you can erase.

You can't make that disappear, but that's--

that's, you know, incontrovertible evidence

he was shot from the right front by a non-jacketed bullet.

[Goldberg] This new X-ray evidence,

combined with the Review Board's declassification of 40 witnesses

who saw a hole in the back of Kennedy's head,

constitutes powerful evidence of a shot from the front.

Because three shells were found on the sixth floor

of the Texas School Book Depository,

the Warren Commission was limited to only three shots.

But one of the problems with CE 399,

as Joseph Dolce said, was its nearly-pristine condition.

Especially when compared with bullets the commission tested.

-"No, it could not have caused all the wounds.

Because our experiments have showed, beyond any doubt,

that merely shooting the wrist

deformed the bullet drastically."

[Goldberg] As it turns out,

there was an extra bullet, and it was misshapen.

After the assassination,

the motorcade raced to Parkland Hospital,

where the emergency room doctors

tried to save the president's life.

After he was pronounced dead,

Kennedy's personal physician, George Burkley,

got in contact with his assistant, James Young

in the White House, and told him to prepare for the autopsy.

-It was James Young who ordered Chiefs Mills and Martinell,

their assistants, to go to the White House

and retrieve what they knew were skull fragments

in the limousine at that time.

[Goldberg] The presidential limousine,

while en route to Washington, was inspected,

and a three-inch triangular piece of bone

was discovered on the floor near the rear jump seat.

During the autopsy, Young sent his two assistants

to meet the limo when it arrived at the White House garage.

[Randolph Robertson] And they brought back an additional envelope

with the bullet with the bent tip.

He described the bullet, brass-colored,

about five millimeters in diameter.

[Goldberg] As part of a Naval oral history project,

Jan Herman, who had interviewed Dr. Young on this subject,

got in touch with Thomas Mills, one of the two men

who had gone to the limo to retrieve the skull fragments.

-Jan Herman called up Mills, says, "Hey, do you remember

Dr. Young calling you, asking about this bent bullet?"

He said, "Yeah, I remember that and him calling me.

And, yeah, he's remembered it."

He says, "Can you shed any light on it?"

And he says, "I would rather not talk about that."

-You know what happened to this bullet?

-It went from Mills and Martinell to Young to Humes,

it disappears.

That evening, there may have been as little as four people

who saw that bullet before it disappeared.

[Goldberg] The reports of this extra bullet

substantiate some researchers' claim

that there was a fourth shot

hitting the limo at Zapruder frame 328.

[Randolph Robertson] The bullet itself is important, but what's more important is

when it struck,

and where it came from.

And previously at 313,

when the bullet went forward through JFK's head,

a small fragment had cracked the windshield

from the inner surface.

Later, the final shot was at 328 was when it struck.

Both times, there were flares of reflected light

as the glass was deformed from the impacts

of one of a fragment, and two of a whole bullet.

And these two events occurred in 0.9 seconds.

So, therefore, they couldn't have been shot

from the same rifle.

[Goldberg] The Warren Commission's contention

is that only three shots were fired,

and that one of them had missed its target completely.

So how does one account for the extensive damage

to the limousine?

-There is a lot of damage in the car.

The chrome strip, which went around the windshield,

was dented from the inside,

which suggests a projectile from the rear.

Six witnesses reported a through and through hole

in the windshield.

[Goldberg] After the Secret Service

tried to scrub down the interior at Parkland Hospital,

the presidential limo was then flown to Washington.

The interior was completely cleaned up within 36 hours

and the windshield

was replaced within 48 to 72 hours.

The car was then shipped first to the Ford factory in Michigan,

and then to Cincinnati,

where it was extensively rebuilt by a car restoration company.

At the trial of New Orleans businessman

Clay Shaw, autopsy Dr. Pierre Finck

shockingly revealed that the wound in Kennedy's back

was not dissected

because an Army general ordered them not to.

The failure to perform that standard practice

led to a long trail of folly and error,

assessing and locating this wound.

Did the bullet perforate the body?

Did it connect with the neck wound?

Or was it perhaps made by a piece of shrapnel

from the pavement in Dealey Plaza,

creating a shallow wound with no exit?

-The face sheet for the autopsy where it shows

the front and back silhouette of the body,

where you mark scars and bullet wounds and things,

the face sheet showed the bullet wound

in the back at the level of thoracic vertebra T-3

which is five and a half to six inches below,

exactly where Dr. Berkeley had it,

in the death certificate.

[Goldberg] That location coincided with

what the two FBI agents wrote in their report.

Both Sibert and O'Neill disagreed

with the Warren Report's depiction

of both the rear skull wound and the back wound

when the Review Board showed them the pictures in 1997.

This is what Sibert had to say

about the drawings commissioned by Arlen Specter:

"What a liar.

I feel he got his orders from above.

How far above? I don't know."

They got that single bullet theory

by moving that back wound up to the base of the neck."

The single-bullet theory evolved over time,

and began with a problem the doctors had at the autopsy,

finding an exit point for the back wound,

and ending when Arlen Specter decided

the bullet needed to hit two victims.

[Cyril Wecht] Darrell Tomlinson,

a maintenance man at Parkland Hospital,

passing by the ER, found the stretchers

blocking the way, bent down, moved the stretcher,

and there was a bullet.

Keep in mind, it really is a magic bullet

because on the night of the autopsy,

Friday, November 22nd, 1963, Humes and Boswell,

these two military pathologists,

they missed a bullet hole in the front of the president's neck,

the night of the autopsy.

They saw a tracheostomy.

Indeed, there was a tracheostomy.

The doctors at Parkland Hospital earlier that day

had determined that the bullet

had fortuitously ripped through the trachea.

So they enlarged that bullet hole.

Let me finish on Friday night.

What to do?

Hey, we've got a bullet hole in the president's back,

which they examined with the finger,

then with an instrument, then took X-rays,

then took out the lungs. No bullets.

God, I wish I were there to see them sweating

and have their underwear staining, uh,

and well, just like you say, a work of fiction.

A call came in from the FBI in Dallas

to the FBI in D.C.

A bullet was found!

Now we know, when the president

lay on the stretcher, supine position,

and pressure was applied to his chest

for cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

That pressure applied anteriorly, forced the bullet,

which had gone deeply into the tissues,

back out through, like a tunnel,

in and out, a car in reverse.

Bullets don't work that way.

When a bullet goes in, it produces damage.

The bullet becomes encased.

Bullets don't go in and out like that.

But that was their conclusion.

It wasn't until the next morning when Humes decided,

"Hey, maybe we oughta talk with the surgeons

at Parkland Hospital."

And now they learned for the first time

that there was a tracheostomy

superimposed upon a bullet wound.

So now, as of Saturday, November 23rd,

that magic bullet is from the front of the clothing.

The bullet going through six, seven inches of soft tissue

comes out, sees the starched white collar,

gets frightened to death,

plops into the front of his clothing.

And that's where the bullet came from,

found by Tomlinson at the hospital.

Four or five months later,

under Arlen Specter's single bullet theory,

that bullet has been rejuvenated,

it's been revitalized.

That bullet has now gone through Kennedy,

through Connally, piercing the lung,

destroying four inches of the right fifth rib,

exiting from the front of his chest,

going into the back of the wrist,

shattering the distal and the radius,

and in a six-foot-four guy like Connally,

that's a big, heavy bone, commuted fracture,

exits from the front of the wrist,

goes into the left thigh.

And now, as of April of 1964, the stretcher bullet

Commission Exhibit 399,

the hero of the Warren Commission report,

is now from Connally's left thigh.

Whatever you want, whatever you need,

this bullet happily and readily obliges you.

It is indeed a magic bullet.

[Goldberg] And in order to make the facts

fit the theory of one bullet doing all this damage,

the Warren Commission needed to raise the wound in the back

so that it would align with the alleged exit wound

in the front of Kennedy's neck.

Commissioner Gerald Ford did this

simply via the stroke of a pen,

changing the description in their report

from back to the back of the neck.

-As I recall, they said about Gerald Ford,

that he could not chew gum and walk at the same time.

Now, all of a sudden, he becomes a forensic pathologist,

and a photographer and a criminalist and an expert,

and he knows where the bullet hole was,

and he moved it up.

[Goldberg] But then in 1979,

the House Select Committee moved it lower in the back

because they had pictures from the autopsy.

It is conceivable that at the time,

the Warren Commission thought

no one would ever see the autopsy photos.

When the Review Board declassified the notation

showing what Ford had done, the former commissioner replied

that it had nothing to do with a conspiracy theory.

He was only trying to be more precise.

This is directly contradicted by a conversation Ford had

with French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.

According to d'Estaing, Ford told him

the assassination was not the work of one person.

"It was something set-up. We were sure it was set up.

But we were not able to discover by whom."

[reporter] Kennedy and his wife

have a two-year-old daughter, Caroline.

And Mrs. Kennedy is currently expecting the birth

of a second child.

For his running mate in 1960, Kennedy chose Lyndon B. Johnson,

leader of the Senate Majority.

[♪♪♪]

[Donald Sutherland] In the 1960 campaign,

Kennedy had been advised

by former Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington

that military intelligence stated that the Russians

had a significant advantage in long-range atomic missiles.

He used the issue against Richard Nixon,

even after he had been informed that it was inaccurate.

When he got into office,

he was told by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara

that this was not only false,

but America had a huge advantage.

This led to a meeting in the summer of 1961.

It included Kennedy, CIA Director Allen Dulles,

and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer.

In 1993, the first official document

describing the meeting was declassified.

Dulles and Lemnitzer were advising Kennedy

about the potential effects of a first-strike nuclear attack

on the USSR, which would occur in the fall of 1963,

a time when they predicted

America would have its optimum advantage

over Russian counter-strike capabilities.

The advisers wanted to press that advantage

to its ultimate nightmarish end.

-You're talking about mass murder, General, not war.

-Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed.

But I do say no more than ten to 20 million killed. Tops!

Uh, depending on the breaks.

-I will not go down in history

as the greatest mass murderer since Adolph Hitler!

-Perhaps, it might be better, Mr. President,

if you were more concerned with the American people

than with your image in the history books.

[James Galbraith] The importance of that meeting

was that it showed that the strategic planners

did, in fact, think of the military force

that we were deploying at the time

as a first strike force,

and not as a second-strike retaliatory force.

And the fact that this was the case

was what I think tied Kennedy, Johnson, and McNamara together

over this entire period,

that they simply had to keep those missiles in their silos.

When I called up Walt Rostow,

who was a close friend and colleague, by that time,

at the University of Texas.

I said, "Walt, I'm writing an article

on a meeting of the National Security Council

that took place on the 20th of July, 1961."

And he looked at me; without any further word,

he said, "You mean the one

where they wanted to blow up the world?"

[Sutherland] After the meeting,

Kennedy said to his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk,

"And we call ourselves the human race?"

After his inauguration,

Kennedy sent his aide, Arthur Schlesinger,

on a tour of Latin America

to come up with a plan to alter the Yankee gringo image

of the United States in the region,

and to also neutralize the appeal of communism.

Kennedy organized a huge conference

in Punta Del Este, Uruguay,

inviting representatives from Latin America,

to propose projects

and to establish the Alliance for Progress.

[John F. Kennedy] For no real progress is possible

unless the benefits of increased prosperity

are shared by the people themselves.

[applaud]

[Jacqueline Kennedy speaking in Spanish]

[cheering]

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] They tried to create a program

that would tie US aid

not to military control and authoritarian

support of US corporations, but rather to initiatives

that would democratize the country,

and that would raise the poor out of poverty.

[Sutherland] One of the least-acknowledged aspects

of Kennedy's foreign policy

was his perspective regarding the Middle East.

As part of an effort to bring balance to the region,

Kennedy had concentrated on forging a relationship

with Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.

[Philip Muehlenbeck] Kennedy's overall policy

towards the Middle East had a few pillars.

One was to take a more even-handed approach

towards Israel on the Palestine issue

than previous US presidents had.

A second issue was to support what he viewed as

the progressive nationalists in places like Egypt,

embodied by Nasser, and in Syria,

as opposed to what Kennedy referred to as

"relics of the past," monarchies

in places like Saudi Arabia or Jordan.

Nasser was one of the foreign leaders

that Kennedy had the most personal correspondence with.

They sent over a dozen letters between each other.

In those letters, Kennedy would disclose to Nasser

some things that he was going to do in advance,

like weapons sales to Israel.

So Nasser really appreciated his communication.

[Robert Rakove] Kennedy discerned that Nasser actually

had qualities that made him an appealing

ally for the United States that he actually could, um,

through the right inducements,

forge a partnership with Washington.

It wouldn't be close,

but if the United States was generous

in its support of Egyptian development,

Nasser might, as his-- as his ambassador promised,

keep the Arab-Israeli conflict in the ice box.

That was the phrase.

[Sutherland] The United Nations had abandoned

their plan to repatriate Palestinian refugees.

Kennedy took it up as a cause with Israel.

This would have allowed the refugees

a choice of staying where they were,

moving elsewhere, or relocating back to Israel,

all at the UN's expense.

The other problem Kennedy faced with Israel

was the construction of the atomic reactor at Dimona.

JFK was strongly against

any proliferation of nuclear weaponry.

He had been assured by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion

that Dimona was designed for peaceful uses of atomic energy.

In the spring of '63, Kennedy demanded full inspections

by the US of the Dimona reactor,

and threatened to place American aid for Israel in limbo

if no agreement was reached.

And at the time of his assassination,

negotiations were in process for biannual inspections.

The existence of communism so close to American shores

kept Cuba on Kennedy's plate.

And in late 1961, he authorized covert efforts

under the name Operation Mongoose.

General Edward Lansdale ran the day-to-day operations

of the project, but Robert Kennedy was above him

to ensure it would not spin out of control

as the Bay of Pigs had.

The idea was to keep pressure on Castro

so that he would not export communism

further into Latin America

and endanger the Alliance for Progress.

[Oliver Stone] And despite later accusations

of Kennedy's complicity in assassination plots,

there is no known document

that's emerged from the Mongoose files

showing that he knew of any such attempts.

This seems to be a remnant of the Eisenhower plan.

-General Lansdale requests of the Joint Staff

in February of '62, he requests that they come up with pretexts

for a US invasion of Cuba.

[Sutherland] The following month,

the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a plan to Kennedy

called Operation Northwoods,

whereby the CIA would secretly perform

terrorist acts in the United States and blame them on Castro

to justify bombings and an invasion of Cuba.

The president declined the recommendation.

-And it takes only a few days

before it's 'mano e mano,' a face-to-face showdown

between President Kennedy and General Lemnitzer.

Lemnitzer says, "We got a pretext.

We can do this." Kennedy rebukes him.

-Pretexts were outrageous.

Fake an attack by Cubans

against the Guantanamo Bay sentries.

Sink a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame it on Cuba.

The one that scares me the most was very sophisticated.

Take an airliner and fly it as a drone over Cuba

without any people in it with a tape recording

that would play, "We're under attack,

we're under attack by Cuban aircraft!

Oh, my God, they're gonna kill us!"

Blow up the airplane, blow up this huge drone,

[explosion]

and use that to start a war.

-Within a matter of weeks, Lemnitzer says,

"Well, to hell with the pretext.

To hell with it, let's just invade anyway."

And you see all these plans being sent to McNamara

and to Kennedy from Lemnitzer that basically say

we gotta go in, just never mind who cares.

There's no pretext. There's no rationale.

We just, we want to do it.

President Kennedy has to fire Lemnitzer.

-So the Northwoods plan was our big coup,

our big find in the way of military records.

They're universally recognized today for their importance.

And it's, it's one of those releases

that the Review Board members,

the board members themselves were justifiably proud of,

that came out of the JFK Records Act.

[Sutherland] Throughout 1961,

Kennedy rejected a total of nine attempts

by his military advisers

to send American ground troops into Vietnam,

and both General Douglas MacArthur

and French President Charles de Gaulle

strongly agreed with him about not doing so.

-The issue of what to do in Cuba,

and the issue of what to do in Vietnam,

were inextricably intertwined

because you can't do all these things at once.

We don't have enough soldiers.

We don't have enough forces to do them.

And it's not just Cuba and Vietnam.

It's Cuba and Berlin and Laos and Vietnam.

So Kennedy was most concerned actually about Berlin,

and was unwilling to put troops in Cuba

because he would not be able to react

if Khrushchev did something on Berlin.

And Kennedy understood that;

the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff understood that.

Now, with that as the context, when it comes to Vietnam,

Kennedy tells Lyman Lemnitzer,

"Look, if we're not going to go into Cuba,

what in the hell are we going to go into Vietnam for?"

[Sutherland] Near the end of his first year in office,

Kennedy received a report

from Walt Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor,

his foreign policy and military advisers,

that called for increased training

of South Vietnamese troops, increased bombings of the north,

and the use of US combat troops.

-At meetings later in November, I believe the 15th of November,

the National Security Council meeting

where this was thrashed out,

Robert Kennedy was very explicit in saying,

"No, we're not sending combat troops."

And it was clear from that point forward

that this was the red line

that John F. Kennedy would not cross.

[Sutherland] A third influence

on Kennedy's reluctance to commit American ground troops

was his ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith.

[James Galbraith] My father went to see Walt Rostow.

He went in to talk to him.

Rostow gestured on his desk to the pile of papers.

The report, the Rostow-Taylor report, was plainly visible.

My father asked to see it.

Walt said, in effect, that his security classification

wasn't sufficiently high.

Uh, my father did not think

that Walt Rostow's security classification

was higher than his.

And at a given moment, the phone rang.

Walt turned to-- to answer the phone, and--

and Dad picked up the report,

and walked out of the office and read it.

So, from that point forward,

he had an inside track on what was being,

at that time, very closely held recommendation

for a very strong combat intervention in Vietnam.

And of course, he-- he proceeded to counter it,

as best he could, with direct advice to the president.

-It isn't until later in that month

where the Vietnam decision is finally arrived that,

which is in NSAM 111 where Kennedy says

no combat troops, but we'll increase the advisers.

And that was his signal decision

in the Kennedy presidency

without respect to the withdrawal,

but never to cross that line.

[Sutherland] In October 1962, U-2 surveillance flights

detected Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba,

90 miles off the US coast.

To this day, scholars debate Khrushchev's motivation.

Was it because he feared a US invasion of Cuba?

Was it because of American missiles in Turkey?

Was it, as Kennedy believed, a negotiating tool over Berlin?

Despite pressure from his military advisors,

Kennedy chose the least-provocative alternative.

[John F. Kennedy] I have directed that the following

initial steps be taken immediately.

First, to halt this offensive buildup,

a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment

under shipment to Cuba is being initiated.

[Sutherland] Kennedy's military advisers,

led by Air Force General Curtis LeMay,

considered his refusal to attack as pure folly,

the equivalent of surrender--

[Sutherland] --a reference to Prime Minister

Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain,

and the appeasement of the Nazis in 1938

which eventually led to World War II.

As the crisis progressed into its second week,

a U-2 plane was shot down,

and Kennedy's civilian advisers began to side with LeMay,

who wanted Kennedy to bomb the missile silos

and invade the island.

They did not know that the Cubans

had short-range tactical nuclear missiles in place.

[Sutherland] Kennedy had his brother

meet with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin.

According to the Soviets, Robert Kennedy warned

that his brother was uncertain

he could control the military much longer,

and that a deal could be struck

along the lines Khrushchev had suggested--

a no-invasion pledge

and a withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey.

Most Americans felt elated over the end of the crisis,

but the Joint Chiefs of Staff and LeMay felt

that they had been defeated by the Soviets

and denied the opportunity to topple Castro.

Kennedy looked at it differently.

He said, "If we followed the Pentagon's advice,

nobody would be around to tell the generals they were wrong."

-The main, I think, goal of the Kennedy administration

is how to work around the State Department,

working around the CIA, working around the Pentagon,

how can the Kennedy White House pursue its own policy of peace

with the rest of the world? With Castro in Cuba,

with Khrushchev in Moscow, and so on,

and avoid the horrendous mistakes of the past

that almost got us into nuclear war.

[Sutherland] In the midst of these debates,

Kennedy sent Galbraith to Saigon to write a report

that would differ in its recommendations

from what Taylor and Rostow had given to him.

-Kennedy knew what he wanted,

and he knew what my father would deliver, which he did,

which is a very detailed and skeptical report

about the efficiency of the South Vietnamese government,

about the capacity of any military force

to prevail in the security situation

that was existing in South Vietnam at that time.

[Sutherland] Kennedy told Galbraith to deliver his report

to Defense Secretary McNamara.

And he, in turn, gave instructions

to begin the withdrawal to General Harkins,

the commanding general of all forces in Vietnam.

The Pentagon dragged its feet on formulating plans,

and McNamara called for a meeting in May of 1963.

One of the most important finds of the Review Board

are the notes from this meeting.

[Douglas Horne] McNamara says, "It's not fast enough.

I want you to accelerate it."

He says, "I want to pull out a thousand men in December,

by the end of the year.

And I want you to pull out complete units,

not just individuals, because he didn't want it to be

an accounting exercise of pulling out,

delaying other individuals coming in and saying, we pulled out a thousand men.

He wanted units to come out, full units.

[Sutherland] After the withdrawal plan was approved,

Kennedy sent Secretary of Defense McNamara

and General Taylor to Saigon in September of '63.

He planned on using their report as the basis to formally order

the withdrawal to begin.

Kennedy controlled the report

since it was actually being written

under the supervision of Bobby Kennedy.

But still, men like

Undersecretary of State William Sullivan and Taylor

tried to remove the recommendation for withdrawal.

Kennedy insisted that it stay in.

-Then Kennedy takes that, secretly, three days later,

actually issues the order himself at the secret level.

It doesn't become an NSAM, yet. It should.

But once it leaks out into the newspapers,

his opponents find out what he's done,

then it's in the newspapers.

And McGeorge Bundy says to Kennedy,

"Hey, look, you know, if they're talking about it in the newspapers,

we might as well put it on paper."

And they put it, and it was NSAM 263.

And that's how it was actually written and why.

Well, here's one of the things McNamara said

in the secret debrief.

He said, "We had agreed, the president and I,

that we had trained them,

we had given them everything we could.

And if they couldn't win, too bad.

We had to get out even if they were going to be defeated."

So he and Kennedy, McNamara and Kennedy,

had decided that they were willing to pull out of Vietnam

in a losing scenario. That's very important.

-Can you tell us about the Air Force One tapes,

and General Curtis LeMay?

-On the new version of the Air Force One tapes,

the Clifton tapes,

it's revealed that Colonel Dorman,

General LeMay's aide, was desperately trying to

contact LeMay on the radio.

[man] Colonel Dorman, General LeMay's aide?

[man 2] Right.

-A logbook was recovered by the ARRB

from the Air Force Command Post at Andrews.

And it was given to us

by a civil servant named Chuck Holmes.

And this logbook records in-flight conversations

between a command post at Andrews and Air Force One

as it's flying from Texas back to Washington.

[man] Air Force One, this is the Air Force Command Post

in five, four requesting the names of these passengers

on board, please.

-So this log book shows that General LeMay

at the time of the assassination was in Canada.

This is really interesting

because his official biographer says he was hunting in Michigan.

But we know that's not true.

He was in Toronto, for reasons unknown,

without his aide, Colonel Dorman,

who went with him everywhere.

This log book reveals that he was ordered

by Secretary Zuckert to land at Andrews Air Force Base.

Because all the federal officials were going to meet

the president's body at Andrews Air Force Base.

A transmission was made from LeMay's plane

back to this command post.

And it says: "General LeMay will not go to Andrews.

General LeMay will go to DCA, National Airport."

According to this log, his plane lands at 5:15 p.m.,

well before the autopsy started.

[Goldberg] Very few people in the Pentagon

had a worse relationship with Kennedy than Curtis LeMay.

During the missile crisis,

he opposed Kennedy's solution of a blockade.

When Kennedy left the room after this conference,

LeMay openly ridiculed him.

LeMay was strongly against the test ban treaty

Kennedy was working on and signed in 1963.

He wanted to escalate the Vietnam War,

with both naval and air power, by carrying the war north.

He advocated bombing North Vietnam

back to the Stone Age, if need be,

and was willing to use atomic weapons

if the Chinese intervened.

[Douglas Horne] There were a lot of people at the Bethesda morgue.

The latest count by all the researchers

that I know of is about 33 people.

There was a gallery of bleachers.

Apparently all three rows were filled with people.

Both Dr. Humes has complained after the fact

and Tom Robinson, the mortician from Gawler's Funeral Home.

They both equated it to a three-ring circus.

-But these three autopsy pathologists

who are not really credentialed to do that kind of an autopsy,

were given a body, told here's the body,

he was shot from behind, he fell forward,

which they wrote in their autopsy report.

Figure out how the wounds fit

the known circumstances of the shooting.

But what this really speaks to is the fact

that the autopsy was not in the control of the surgeons

that were charged at doing it.

It was in the control of people who were there,

who were telling them what they could do and what they couldn't do.

[Douglas Horne] Paul O'Connor was a Navy corpsman,

helping the pathologists.

He told me in 1999. He told others this in 1992.

He's told several people

that Dr. Humes, during the autopsy,

complained that somebody was smoking a cigar,

tell him to put the damn thing out.

So O'Connor, he went over to the gallery,

the three rows of bleachers,

and there was General LeMay sitting in his uniform

with a big fat cigar in his hand,

and LeMay looked at him after he asked him to put it out,

and promptly blew smoke in his face.

Did LeMay go to the autopsy

to gloat over the death of his nemesis?

[dramatic music]