JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters

by James W. Douglass

Out of fear for his life and concern for his military retirement benefits, Vinson maintained his silence during the twenty years he worked in Wichita, Kansas, first as an accountant, then as an administrative assistant and supervisor in the Wichita Public Works Department. In 1976 when he asked a lawyer friend in Wichita if he should reveal his secret, the lawyer said, “Don’t tell a soul. For your own safety.”[512] Yet Vinson’s conscience continued to push him toward speaking out on what he knew.

On November 23, 1993, Robert Vinson told the story of his flight from Dallas to news anchor Larry Hatteberg on Wichita’s KAKE-TV Channel 10 News. Viewers gave “an incredible response” to Vinson’s story, Hatteberg told me, as they have to its several re-runs on the Wichita channel.[514] One of those responding initially to Vinson was Wichita civil liberties lawyer James P. Johnston, who had studied the Kennedy assassination.

In a colossal CIA blunder, Robert Vinson’s providential presence on the second Oswald’s flight from Dallas has enabled us to see the planning for the Oak Cliff follow-up to the assassination. First, in Dealey Plaza, came the killing of JFK by snipers firing from the grassy knoll and the Texas School Book Depository. Then in Oak Cliff, the scenario continued with Oswald’s “escape” in a taxi, while the second Oswald was driven into the same area in the Rambler station wagon by the man Roger Craig described as “a husky looking Latin”[518]—corresponding to Robert Vinson’s description of the Oswald companion who got on the C-54, standing 6’ to 6’1”, weighing 180 to 190 pounds, whom Vinson, like Craig, said looked Latino,

Robert Vinson has said that since November 22, 1963, “Every time I’d see an article on the assassination, I stop and wonder if I have the answer to this puzzle. Could this small piece of information fit into the larger picture to help us learn what happened?”[520]

afternoon of November 22, 1963. The interlocking testimonies of Wise, White, Burroughs, Haire, and Vinson have given us a back-stage view of the double Oswald drama directed by the CIA.

The man who announced President Kennedy’s death to the world at Parkland Hospital on the afternoon of November 22 was Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff. Shortly before his own death four decades later, Malcolm Kilduff told me in an interview that President Kennedy made a powerful statement to him on Vietnam just before they departed for Texas.[521]

The annual report The United States in World Affairs, published for the Council on Foreign Relations, noted for the period just before Kennedy’s assassination the emergence of “new proposals for a negotiated settlement involving the reunification of all of Vietnam, as envisaged in the 1954 agreements, and its neutralization on something like the Laotian pattern.”[530]

“[Kennedy] began to instruct me, as Assistant Secretary for Far Eastern Affairs, to position ourselves to do in Vietnam what we had done in Laos, i.e., to negotiate the neutralization of Vietnam. He had made a decision on this. He did not make it public of course, but he had certainly communicated it to me as I say, in four-letter words, good earthy anglo-saxon four-letter words, and every time that I failed to do something [in a way] he felt endangered this position, he let me know in very clear language.”[534]

“Vietnam is not worth another American life,” and “after I come back from Texas, that’s going to change.”

When Malcolm Kilduff announced the death of President Kennedy at Parkland Hospital the next day, he was announcing also in effect the death of over 50,000 American soldiers and three million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians from a war that would continue until 1975. Who or what assassinated President

death, the ongoing, deepening historical hypothesis of this book has been that the CIA coordinated and carried out the president’s murder. That hypothesis has been strengthened as the documents, witnesses, and converging lines of inquiry have pointed more conclusively at the CIA. Yet understanding that the CIA coordinated the assassination does not mean that we can limit the responsibility to the CIA. To tell the truth at the heart of darkness in this story, one must see and accept a responsibility that goes deeper and far beyond the Central Intelligence Agency.

Thomas Merton described it rightly as the unspeakable. Let us continue to follow the story as far as we can, in the hope that the unspeakable, if not spoken, can at least be glimpsed in the shadows.

At 12:38 p.m. on Friday, November 22, 1963, Doctor Charles Crenshaw burst into Trauma

While Crenshaw assisted the other doctors, he stood by the president’s waist. It was then that he “noticed a small opening in the midline of his throat. It was small, about the size of the tip of my little finger. It was a bullet entry wound. There was no doubt in my mind,” he said, “about that wound, as I had seen dozens of them in the emergency room.”[537] Because the wound was impairing JFK’s ability to breathe, Dr. Malcolm Perry “decided to perform a tracheotomy [a surgical incision followed by the insertion of a tube] on the President’s throat, where the bullet had entered his neck.”[538]

“It looked,” he said, “like a crater—an empty cavity. All I could see there was mangled, bloody tissue. From the damage I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that the bullet had entered his head through the front

Twenty-one out of twenty-two witnesses at Parkland Hospital—most of them doctors and nurses, trained medical observers—agreed in their earliest statements that JFK’s massive head wound was located in the right rear of his skull,

demonstrating a fatal head shot from the front.[540] The exit wound in the back of his skull was unforgettable. Crenshaw said it “resembled a deep furrow in a freshly plowed field.”[541] As Crenshaw also recognized, the hole in JFK’s throat was an entry wound. Doctors Malcolm Perry and Kemp Clark drew that same conclusion at a press conference in a classroom at Parkland Hospital at 3:15 that afternoon, cited in the New York Times the following day.[542]

Rose resisted them, saying that Texas law and the chain of evidence required him to perform an autopsy before the body left Parkland. Kellerman and the Secret Service pushed ahead with the coffin. Rose stood aside. The body was taken away.[545]

Specter, a future U.S. senator, confronted the Dallas doctors with a question that contained the answer the Commission was seeking:

“Assuming . . . that the bullet passed through the President’s body, going in between the strap muscles of the shoulder without violating the pleura space and exited at a point in the midline of the neck, would the hole which you saw on the President’s throat be consistent with an exit point, assuming the factors which I have just given to you?”[546]

As Charles Crenshaw (who was not asked to testify) pointed out later, Specter had asked the doctors, “If the bullet exited from the front of Kennedy’s throat, could the wound in the front...

The doctors went along with Specter’s show of logic: Yes, assuming the bullet exited from the front of Kennedy’s throat, that wound could indeed have been an exit wound. Pressed further by Warren Commission member Gerald Ford, who would later become president, Dr. Malcolm Perry repudiated as “inaccurate” the press r...

Dr. Perry’s retraction was not only manipulated but given under stress. He had been threatened beforehand by “the men in suits,” specifically the Secret Service. As Dallas Secret Service agent Elmer Moore would admit to a friend years later, he “had been ordered to tell Dr. Perry to change his testimony.” Moore said that in threatening Perry, he acted “on orders from Washington and Mr. Kelly of the Secret Service Headquarters.”[550]

In the cover-up, the men in suits were both the intimidators and the intimidated.

With the power of the government marshaled against what the Parkland doctors had seen, they entered into what Charles Crenshaw called “a conspiracy of silence.”[554] When Crenshaw finally broke his own silence in 1992, he wrote: “I believe there was a common denominator in our silence—a

fearful perception that to come forward with what we believed to be the medical truth would be asking for trouble. Although we never admitted it to one another, we realized that the inertia of the established story was so powerful, so thoroughly presented, so adamantly accepted, that it would bury anyone who stood in its path . . . I was as afraid of the men in suits as I was of the men who had assassinated the President . . . I reasoned that anyone wh...

the director of the FBI’s Dallas office, who claimed “the documentation does not show that the doctor was involved in any way,”[556] and by a former Warren Commission attorney, who said the press should demand “full financial disclosure [of Crenshaw] because hundreds of thousands and millions have been made out of the assassination.”[557] Then, to his surprise, Crenshaw was denounced by the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

with President Kennedy.[558] JAMA’s editor promoted the articles by a New York press conference that received massive press coverage. Dr. Crenshaw submitted to JAMA a series of articles and letters responding to the charge that he was a liar. He pointed out that in testimony before the Warren Commission five different doctors and nurses had specifically mentioned seeing him working with them to revive the president.[559] They made it clear Crenshaw had been in Trauma Room One, doing exactly what he said he did in Conspiracy of Silence.[560]

Dr. Livingston then wondered aloud to his wife, who had overheard his end of the conversation, “why the FBI would want to interfere with a discussion between physicians relating to the important problem of how best to investigate and interpret the President’s wounds.”[566]

Finck described an autopsy carried out in strict obedience to military commands, watched by an audience from the entire

panoply of national security agencies: Question: “How many other military

Question: “Did you have an occasion to dissect the track of that particular bullet in the victim as it lay on the autopsy table?” Finck: “I did not dissect the track in the neck.” Question: “Why?” Finck: “This leads us into the disclosure of medical records.” Question: “Your Honor, I would like an answer from the

Colonel and I would ask The Court so to direct.” The Court: “That is correct, you should answer, Doctor.” Finck: “We didn’t remove the organs of the neck.” Question: “Why not, Doctor?” Finck: “For the reason that we were told to examine the head wounds and that the . . .” Question: “Are you saying someone told you not to dissect the track?” The Court: “Let him finish his answer.” Finck: “I was told that the family wanted an examination of the head, as I recall, the head and chest, but the prosecutors in this autopsy didn’t remove the organs of the neck, to my recollection.”

Question: “You have said they did not. I want to know why didn’t you as an autopsy pathologist attempt to ascertain the track through the body which you had on the autopsy table in trying to ascertain the cause or causes of death? Why?”

Finck: “From what I recall I looked at the trachea, there was a tracheotomy wound the best I can remember, but I didn’t dissect or remove these organs.” Question: “Your Honor, I would ask Your Honor to direct the witness to answer my question.

Navy medical corpsman Paul O’Connor, who helped the doctors with the president’s autopsy, was dismayed, he said, by “the fact that we weren’t able to do certain critical things like probe the throat wound that we thought was a bullet wound. We found out it was a bullet wound years later.”[570]

In an interview years later, O’Connor described how the military command kept the three Bethesda doctors from probing the throat wound, which had been identified in Dallas to the world’s press as an entrance wound:

were going to check that out when Admiral Galloway, told them, ‘Leave it alone. Don’t touch it. It’s just a tracheotomy.’

“He stopped anybody from going further. Drs. Humes and Boswell, Dr. Finck, were told to leave it alone, let’s go to other things.”[571]

Paul O’Connor’s fellow hospital corpsman, James Jenkins, who also assisted in the autopsy, confirmed that the doctors were obeying military orders. Jenkins, too, said the pathologists’ failure to probe the president’s wounds was done at ...

“In retrospect, I think it was a controlling factor. They could control Humes, Boswell, and Finck because they were military . . . I think they were controlled. So were we. We were all military, we could be controlled. And if we weren’t controlled, we could be punished and that kept us away from the public.”[573]

“I was 19 or 20 years old, and all at once I understood that my country was not much better than a third world country. From that point on in time, I have had no trust, no respect for the government.”[574]

The process of killing President Kennedy and covering up the conspiracy relied on parties whom the plotters knew in advance they could count on to enter into a conspiracy of silence. Those few witnesses who courageously broke the silence, such as Dr. Charles Crenshaw, suffered the consequences of being isolated and singled out. But the Dallas and Bethesda doctors who changed their testimony under stress, who lied out of fear for their lives, or who followed orders in not probing wounds and then stonewalling questions, were not alone. They joined in a larger conspiracy of silence that would envelop our government, our media, our academic institutions, and virtually our entire society from November 22, 1963, to the present.

President Kennedy counted on our repression and denial of its reality. They knew that no one would want to deal with the elephant in the living room. The Dallas and Bethesda doctors who saw the truth staring up at them from the president’s dead body, and who then backed away from it, were not unique. They are symbolic of us all. Those who dared to break the conspiracy of silence risked consequences more severe than the assassination of one’s character. Dr. Crenshaw said he “reasoned that anyone who would go so far as to eliminate the President of the United States would surely not hesitate to kill a doctor.”[575]

taken pictures of what the doctors had seen. There was in fact such a photographer, documenting for history the wounds that the doctors saw—and would eventually deny seeing.

At 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, November 22, 1963, three hours after President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Lieutenant Commander William Bruce Pitzer received a phone call at his home in Takoma Park, Maryland. Lt. Cmdr. Pitzer was the head of the Audio-Visual Department of the Naval Medical School. In his audio-visual expertise, Pitzer worked closely with Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the president’s autopsy was about to take place.

Asked why, David said, “Because we both noted a small entry wound here [interviewer notes that David points to the right side of his forehead] from another photo, and a large exit wound back in this area [indicates right rear of head]. I had seen gunshot wounds before, and so had Bill. I’ve seen a lot of them since, and I can assure you that it definitely was an entry wound in the forehead.”[580]

That he and Pitzer were looking at an exit wound in the rear of Kennedy’s head was even more obvious: “It is inconceivable that anyone even vaguely acquainted with gunshot wounds would conclude that the massive wound in the rear of JFK’s skull could have occurred from a rear-entry projectile, unless it was from grenade or mortar shrapnel, which tears and rends

flesh and bone rather than pierc...

Pitzer did not tell David he had taken the film he was editing, but David assumed he had. “I never asked him,” David said. “He was head of the Audio-Visual Department. I jus...