JFK Doctors Back Warren Commission

by Lawrence K. Altman

San Francisco Chronicle, 5-20-92, page A1

Breaking a 28-year silence, the two pathologists who performed the autopsy on President John F. Kennedy have affirmed their original findings that he was hit by only two bullets, fired above and behind, and that one of them caused the massive head wound that killed him.

And five doctors who cared for the wounded president in the emergency room of a Dallas hospital said they observed nothing while treating Kennedy that contradicts the pathologists' findings.

The two pathologists and the other five doctors have not previously discussed the Kennedy assassination, except before the Warren Commission.

They made their assertions in interviews reported in the May 27 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr. George D. Lundberg, editor of the journal and a pathologist, and Dennis L. Breo, who interviewed the doctors for the journal, described the doctors' comments at a news conference yesterday.

The pathologists, Dr. James J. Humes and Dr. J. Thornton Boswell, both of whom are now retired from the Navy, said there was no doubt about the nature of the gunshot wounds, and they denied there had been any interference from military or political officials, a major contention of conspiracy theorists. A third pathologist involved in the autopsy, Dr. Pierre Finck, declined to be interviewed for the journal articles.

The pathologists, who were Navy medical officers at the time of the autopsy, said the bullets were fired by a high-velocity weapon.

"We documented our findings in spades," Boswell said. "It's all there in the records" that include X-rays from head to toe and 52 photographs.

"In 1963, we proved at the autopsy table that President Kennedy was struck from above and behind by the fatal shot," Humes said.

The autopsy results have been independently confirmed several times.

The interviews follow a new wave of conspiracy charges raised by Oliver Stone's movie "JFK" and a book, "J.F.K. Conspiracy of Silence" (Signet, 1992) by Dr. Charles A. Crenshaw, who was a junior member of the team that tried to save Kennedy's life at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Among Crenshaw's charges is that the bullets struck Kennedy from the front, that Kennedy's wounds were altered between the time his body left the hospital in Dallas and the autopsy in Bethesda and that his body was received in Bethesda in a body bag, not a coffin.

The pathologists said they were not aware of Crenshaw's book at the time of the interviews. Speaking to Crenshaw's charge that Kennedy's body arrived in a bag, Humes said that he and Boswell lifted Kennedy's body from the coffin directly onto the examining table.

The pathologists said the first bullet entered the back of Kennedy's neck and left through the front of the throat. The second bullet entered the back of his head and exploded the right side of his head, destroying a major portion of the brain.

The pathologists said they were temporarily baffled about the first bullet's exit wound, which was obliterated when the surgeons in Dallas had cut through it to create an airway for Kennedy in a procedure known as a tracheostomy.

Breo said the five doctors who led the team to save Kennedy's life in Dallas told him that Crenshaw did not participate in the effort in any meaningful way.

Also yesterday, Representative Joseph Kennedy, D-Mass., denounced the broadcasting of the autopsy photographs on national television. Kennedy said that he and his 11-year-old twin sons were stunned to see the gory photographs while watching the NBC nightly news Monday.