A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination Read Online Free Page A

this book was the first time they have talked in this much detail, certainly to any journalist, about the commission’s work. Many have kept their silence for decades, fearful of being dragged into ugly, and often unwinnable, public debates with the armies of conspiracy theorists. Without exception, all of these men—the one woman among the lawyers, Alfredda Scobey, died in 2001—retained pride in their individual work on the commission. Many, however, were outraged to discover how much evidence they were never permitted to see. It is evidence, they know, that is still rewriting the history of the Kennedy assassination.

President Kennedy’s coffin in the Capitol rotunda, November 25, 1963

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    THE HOME OF COMMANDER JAMES HUMES
    BETHESDA, MARYLAND
    SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1963
    Within hours of the return of the president’s body to Washington, evidence about the assassination began to disappear from the government’s files. Notes taken by military pathologists at the autopsy, as well as the original draft of the autopsy report, were incinerated.
    Navy Commander James Humes, MD, said later he was appalled that his handling of the hospital paperwork on the night of Saturday, November 23, might be portrayed as the first act of a government-wide cover-up. Still, he admitted, he should have known better. “What happened was my decision and mine alone,” he recalled. “Nobody else’s.”
    At about eleven that night, the thirty-eight-year-old pathologist took a seat at a card table in the family room of his home in Bethesda, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, and prepared to read through his notes from the morgue. He assumed he would be there for hours, writing and editing the final autopsy report. He had lit a fire in the fireplace, which provided some warmth on an early winter night.
    The night before, he had led the three-man team of pathologists who conducted the president’s autopsy at Bethesda Naval Medical Center. There had been no time during the day on Saturday to finish the paperwork, he said. So now he sat alone, hoping to find the energy to complete the report in peace. He needed to present a final copy to his colleagues for their signatures; they were under orders to deliver the report to the White House by Sunday night.
    Humes was exhausted. He had managed a few hours of sleep that afternoon, but he had not slept at all Friday night. “I was in the morgue from 7:30 in the evening until 5:30 in the morning,” he said later. “I never left the room.”
    It was on Friday afternoon, with the terrible reports still pouring in from Dallas, that Humes, Bethesda’s highest-ranking pathologist, learned that he would oversee the postmortem of the president. He was told to expect the arrival of the corpse in a few hours’ time. Jacqueline Kennedy had initially resisted the idea of having an autopsy; the vision of her husband’s body lying on a cold, steel dissecting table seemed one more horror in a day already full of them. “It doesn’t have to be done,” she told the president’s personal physician, Admiral George Burkley, as they flew in Air Force One from Dallas to Washington. She was sitting with the president’s casket in the rear compartment of the plane. Burkley, who had proved himself a loyal and discreet friend to the Kennedy family, gently convinced her that there had to be an autopsy. She had always taken comfort from the fact that he was a fellow Roman Catholic, and an especially devout one, and at this moment she would trust his advice above almost all others’. He reminded her that her husband had been the victim of a crime and that an autopsy was a legal necessity. He offered her the choice of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington or the navy’s hospital in Bethesda. The two hospitals were only eight miles apart. “Of course, the president was in the navy,” Burkley reminded her.
    “Of course,” she said. “Bethesda.”
    The selection was a decision that even some navy