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Doctors who conducted the autopsy on President John F. Kennedy may have performed two brain examinations in the days following his assassination, possibly of two different brains, a staff report for the Assassinations Records Review Board said.
The report, summarizing perplexing discrepancies in the medical evidence, was among more than 400,000 pages of internal records that the now-defunct board compiled in its effort to make public as much information about the assassination as it could find. The papers were released yesterday at the National Archives.
The five-member panel, which closed down Sept. 30, was not set up to make findings about the assassination and did not take a position on the hypothesis set out in the 32-page report by Douglas Horne, the board's chief analyst for military records.
The central contention of the report is that brain photographs in the Kennedy records are not of Kennedy's brain and show much less damage than Kennedy sustained when he was shot in Dallas and brought to Parkland Hospital there on Nov. 22, 1963. The doctors at Parkland told reporters then that they thought Kennedy was shot from the front and not from behind as the Warren Commission later concluded.
"I am 90 to 95 percent certain that the photographs in the Archives are not of President Kennedy's brain," Horne, a former naval officer, said in an interview. "If they aren't, that can mean only one thing -- that there has been a cover-up of the medical evidence. . . . The second brain was consistent with a shot from behind. The first one was not."
The report points to, for instance, the testimonies of former FBI agent Francis X. O'Neill Jr., who was present at the Nov. 22, 1963, autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and of former Navy photographer John T. Stringer, who said he took photos at a supplementary brain examination two or three days later, probably on the morning of Nov. 25.
O'Neill told the board in a 1997 deposition that at the Nov. 22 autopsy "there was not too much of the brain left" when it was taken out of Kennedy's skull and "put in a white jar." He said "more than half of the brain was missing."
Shown the brain photographs deeded to the Archives by the Kennedy family, which were taken sometime after the autopsy, O'Neill said they did not square with what he saw. The "only section of the brain which is missing is this small section over here," O'Neill said of one photograph. "This looks almost like a complete brain."
Stringer said the photos he took at the "supplementary examination" conducted by J. Thornton Boswell and James Humes did not resemble those at the Archives. He said they seemed to be on "a different type of film" from the one he used. He said he also took photographs of "cross sections of the brain" that had been cut out to show the damage. No such photos are in the Archives collection.
Stringer has also said that some photos he took at the autopsy itself were missing. He said he "gave everything" from the brain examination to Humes, who gave the film to Kennedy's personal physician, the late Adm. George Burkley.
Now ill and unavailable for comment, Humes testified in a 1996 deposition that Kennedy's brain was not serially sectioned in the way Stringer described "because the next thing you know George Burkley wanted it." He said Burkley told him "flat out" that the Kennedy family wanted to inter the brain with the president's body and that Burkley said he was going to deliver it to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
The president's casket was buried on the afternoon of Nov. 25.
However, a third autopsy physician, Pierre Finck, said in a 1965 report, based on earlier notes, that Humes called him on Nov. 29, 1963, to "examine the brain" at Bethesda.
"Humes, Boswell and myself examined the formalin fixed brain," Finck wrote. "A U.S. Navy photographer was present." He said the photographer took pictures of the brain from below. Stringer, by contrast, said he did not shoot such "basilar, or inferior, views."
Horne said in his memo that this "second hypothesized examination" may have taken place as late as Dec. 2, 1963, in light of the recollections of Chief Petty Officer Chester H. Boyers. The officer in charge of the pathology department at Bethesda, Boyers told the House Assassinations Committee in 1978 that he processed brain tissue and prepared parafin blocks "of eight or 12 sections of the brain" on Dec. 2.
Boswell told a reporter yesterday that the brain was "examined in detail" at the Nov. 22 autopsy and once more "a few days later" after it had been "put in form and fixation."
"It was the same brain," he said of the Nov. 25 examination. "We decided it was destroyed enough that we didn't need to take sections." Asked about Stringer's recollection of photographing sections, Boswell said, "He's full of [expletive]."
Jeremy Gunn, former executive director and general counsel of the review board, said he thought it "highly plausible" that there were two different brain examinations.
Gunn took the testimony of Parkland doctors in August but could not show them the photographs. Steve Tilley, custodian of the JFK collection at the Archives, said there wasn't enough time to provide security for the photographs to be taken to Dallas.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The latest batch of John F. Kennedy assassination documents raises new questions about an examination of the president's brain and lays out unresolved discrepancies in other medical evidence.
The more than 400,000 pages of records being made public at the National Archives today were compiled in the past four years by the Assassination Records Review Board, an independent panel that Congress set up to collect and release material related to Kennedy's death in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Congress did not direct the review board to reinvestigate the assassination, and the panel issued no formal opinions on any aspect of the controversial murder. But in the board's effort to expand and clarify the record, details surfaced that:
Although the Warren Commission concluded that Kennedy was shot from behind by a single gunman, how Kennedy was assassinated and from what direction he was shot have nonetheless been hotly debated for 35 years. The review board studied old testimony and medical evidence and re-interviewed witnesses, but still was unable to resolve certain issues.
"There are questions about the supplemental brain exam and the photos that were taken. There are inconsistencies in the testimony of the autopsy doctors about when that exam took place," said Jeremy Gunn, executive director and general counsel of the board, which closed out its work in September. "These are serious issues. The records are now out there for the public to evaluate."
Three military pathologists agree they conducted an autopsy of Kennedy's entire body at Bethesda immediately after it was flown back from Dallas. But the doctors offer conflicting recollections about the timing of a subsequent brain exam.
Two doctors, J. Thornton Boswell and James Humes, told the review board that the brain exam occurred two or three days after Kennedy's death. Initially, Humes told the Warren Commission that he, Boswell and a third pathologist, Dr. Pierre Finck, were present when the brain was examined. But when he testified to the review board in 1996, Humes did not list Finck among those present. Boswell maintains Finck was not there.
On the other hand, Finck says the brain exam did not occur until much later. In a memo he wrote to his commanding officer 14 months after Kennedy was assassinated, Finck said Humes did not call him until Nov. 29, 1963 -- seven days after Kennedy's death -- to say it was time to examine the brain. In the memo, Finck said all three pathologists examined the brain together and that "color and black-and-white photographs are taken by the U.S. Navy photographer."
The conflicting testimony caused Douglas Horne, chief analyst for military records, to conclude in a 32-page memo that two separate brain exams may have been conducted, "contrary to the official record as it has been presented to the American people."
"If true, Dr. Finck's account of a brain exam separate and distinct from the first one would mean that Drs. Humes and Boswell were present at two different brain exams," he writes.
Humes was ill and could not be interviewed. In a telephone interview, Boswell reiterated that the brain was examined at the initial autopsy of the body and only once more at a separate brain exam a few day later.
"I doubt very much that we would have called him (Finck) back over for that," Boswell said.
Boswell added that the only photos of the brain were taken at the autopsy.
This conflicts with testimony the board obtained from Navy photographer John Stringer, who said he took pictures of the brain two or three days after the autopsy. Stringer also testified that official photos of the brain preserved at the archives do not match those he remembers taking. He cites discrepancies in the angles from which they were shot and the type of film used.
In addition, former FBI Agent Francis O'Neill Jr., who watched doctors remove Kennedy's brain the night he died, told the review board that the archives' photos do not resemble what he saw. "I did not recall it (the brain) being that large," O'Neill said.
Throughout the years, doctors who treated Kennedy in Dallas said his head wound was about the size of a large egg at the back of the head, behind his right ear. The Dallas doctors told reporters then that they believed Kennedy was shot from the front -- a belief that conflicted with the Warren Commission's later conclusion of a single shooter firing from behind.
Humes, chief pathologist for the autopsy at Bethesda, agreed there was a wound to the right rear of Kennedy's head, but he told the board that it was a small entry wound, not an egg-sized exit wound. In contrast to observations in Dallas, Humes said there also was massive damage to the top of Kennedy's skull and right side forward of the ear.