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

doctors questioned. The veteran army pathologists at Walter Reed had far more experience with tracing bullet wounds than did their counterparts in the navy. (It was a simple fact that soldiers were more likely than sailors to die from gunshots.) Commander J. Thornton Boswell, another Bethesda pathologist, was assigned to assist Humes, and he thought it “foolish” to do the autopsy at the navy hospital given the other resources nearby. He thought the president’s corpse should have been taken to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in downtown Washington, a Defense Department research center that handled complex medical-legal autopsies from all branches of the military. Neither Humes nor Boswell had credentials in forensic pathology, the branch of pathology that focuses on violent or unexpected deaths, so a third member was added to the team: Dr. Pierre Finck, a forensic pathologist from the Armed Forces Institute. Finck was a lieutenant colonel in the Army Medical Corps.
    What might recommend Bethesda was the autopsy room itself. The whole morgue had just been renovated and outfitted with sophisticated medical and communications equipment. “We had just moved into it a couple of months before,” Humes recalled. “It was all brand new.” The autopsy room was spacious by the standards of military hospitals, about twenty-five by thirty feet, with a steel dissecting table fixed to the floor in the center. The room also functioned as an auditorium, with a viewing stand along one wall that allowed as many as thirty people—usually medical residents or visiting doctors—to view procedures. There was, in addition, a closed-circuit television camera so audiences across the street at the National Institutes of Health and down the road at the medical clinic at Andrews Air Force Base could observe at a distance. (Humes said later he wished someone had switched on the camera that night, to end the “ludicrous speculation” about what had gone on.) The morgue included large refrigerated closets able to store as many as six corpses, as well as a shower area for the doctors. The night of the president’s autopsy, the pathologists would need every square inch of space.
    The president’s body arrived at about seven thirty p.m. The bronze casket was wheeled in from a loading ramp off the street. The corpse was gently removed from the casket and—after X-rays and photos of every part of the body—was placed on the autopsy table, where it would remain for most of the next ten hours. The wounds to the skull were not immediately visible since the head had been covered with sheets in Dallas. After removing the blood-soaked cloth, Humes ordered that all the sheets be laundered immediately. “We had a washing machine in the morgue, and he stuck those in,” Boswell recalled. Humes worried from the start that something taken from the autopsy room would turn up as a grizzly souvenir in some rural sideshow—“he didn’t want those appearing in a barn out in Kansas sometime.”
    The autopsy was a “three-ring circus,” Boswell complained. Dozens of people—navy doctors and orderlies, X-ray technicians and medical photographers, Secret Service and FBI agents, military officers and hospital administrators—were either in the morgue or pressing at the door to be let in. The pathologists said the Secret Service agents who had accompanied the body to Bethesda, including some who had been in Dallas that day, were frantic with nervous energy. The man they had sworn to protect, even at the cost of their own lives, was dead. What were they protecting now? “Those people were in such an emotional state that they were running around like chickens with their heads off, and we understood their situation,” Boswell said later.
    Burkley, the president’s physician, had accompanied the body to Bethesda, and initially he tried to take control of the autopsy. As a rear admiral, he would normally have been in a position to give orders to the