All language subtitles for JFK - Destiny Betrayed -S01E03 - Chapter Three

[♪♪♪]

[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]