Autopsy Doctors Say 1 Gunman Killed Kennedy

Two pathologists who conducted the autopsy of President John F. Kennedy broke almost three decades of silence Tuesday to make public their conclusion that he was struck by two bullets from a single high-velocity rifle fired by a lone assassin.

In what amounts to a powerful endorsement of the conclusions of the Warren Commission, Drs. James J. Humes and J. Thornton Boswell, who performed the autopsy at the U.S. Naval Center in Bethesda, Md., reviewed their findings in a detailed interview with the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

The interview was made public at a press conference at which the journal’s editor, Dr. George D. Lundberg, went out of his way to lambaste conspiracy theorists and question the motivation of those who have challenged the Warren Commission’s version of events.

“In 1963, we proved at the autopsy table that President Kennedy was struck from above and behind by the fatal shot,” Humes said in the interview. “The pattern of the exit and entrance wounds in the skull proves it, and if we stayed here until hell freezes over, nothing will change this proof.

” . . . The conspiracy buffs have totally ignored this central scientific fact,” he told the journal, “and everything else is hogwash. There was no interference with our autopsy, and there was no conspiracy to suppress the findings.”

The Warren Commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy with shots from the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he fired from the Texas School Book Depository as the President’s motorcade passed. But doubts that he acted alone persist among many Americans.

The former Navy pathologists’ public comments were prompted in large part by release of the Oliver Stone film “JFK,” Lundberg said.

Lundberg also participated in interviews with the chief physicians who struggled for 25 minutes to save the President’s life in Treatment Room One at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

The journal’s editor charged that the motion picture was a “grave insult to the military physicians involved,” labeling it “docu-fiction.”

Lundberg said that Humes explained to him that he finally decided to go public because “he just got tired of being beaten up in the media by so many people who didn’t know anything about” the assassination.

The editor said that, when “JFK” was released, Humes went to the movie and became so angered “at lies upon lies upon lies” that he finally accepted a longstanding invitation to be interviewed in the AMA Journal.

Referring to the conclusion about the bullet wounds, Humes said, “ . . . I will defend it until I die. This is the essence of our autopsy, and it is supreme ignorance to argue any other scenario.”

“The President was killed by a devastating gunshot wound to the head, fired from above and behind by a high-velocity rifle,” Humes said. “The other bullet that struck him in the back of the neck was also fired from above and behind. That’s it. Everything else is adventitious.”

Frank Mankiewicz, a spokesman for Stone, said Tuesday that he was sorry the AMA wanted to become involved in the controversy.

” . . . The Warren Commission and the AMA have been silent for 29 years. Nobody has tried to figure out this crime,” Mankiewicz said. “Now, when a first-class movie comes along, they are all scared that Americans have reached another conclusion. Open those files for everyone to look. Then we don’t need the AMA to tell us what happened.”

Lundberg, also a pathologist, lashed out at conspiracy theorists, charging that many of them were motivated by paranoia, profits, personal aggrandizement and desire for recognition.

“The main conspiracy theory rests on there being more than one gun and the bullets hitting the President in more than one direction,” he said. “We can categorically state that to be untrue.

“I can state without concern or question that President Kennedy was struck and killed by two, and only two, bullets fired from one high-velocity rifle. No other bullets struck the President. A single assassin fired both.”

The interviews also provided extraordinary portraits of grief and chaos as Kennedy was brought to Parkland Hospital. The doctors described arguments between the Secret Service and Dallas officials and told how a stricken Jacqueline Kennedy defied the Secret Service, refusing to leave the room. They said she actually handed one of the doctors some of her husband’s brain tissue.

The pathologists at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda recalled their shock at seeing Kennedy after opening the coffin--and being struck at how lifelike the body looked.

“He wasn’t that much older than me, and other than the head wound he looked perfectly normal,” Humes said. “He was a remarkable human specimen and looked as if he could have lived forever. It was very, very distressing.”

Humes told the journal that FBI and Secret Service agents milled around as the autopsy was conducted. At one point, FBI agents caught an unauthorized Navy corpsman taking pictures in the morgue. The film was seized and destroyed.

Humes and Boswell lifted Kennedy from the bronze coffin and placed his body on the examining table for the four-hour autopsy. Humes said Jacqueline Kennedy had selected Bethesda because her husband had served in the Navy.

As Adm. George Burkley, the President’s personal physician, stood at their side, the 10 members of the autopsy team began their work.

As part of the process, 14 X-rays and 52 photos were taken of the body from every angle as FBI agents and Secret Service personnel milled about the room, along with the President’s military aides.

“They were not generals and their influence on the autopsy was zero,” Humes told Lundberg and Dennis L. Breo, the medical journal’s national correspondent, who also conducted the interviews and wrote two articles appearing in the same issue--one with the pathologists and another with the physicians who tried to save Kennedy’s life.

“The people around the President were totally devastated. They were still in a state of shock and the reality of what had happened had not yet sunk in . . . . These people thought they had let the President down, and now their hero was gone,” Humes said.

Earlier, at Parkland Memorial Hospital, physicians had fought frantically to save Kennedy.

Eventually, Dr. William Kemp Clark, a neurosurgeon, told Dr. Malcolm Perry, a surgeon: “It’s too late, Mac. There’s nothing more to be done.”