Episode 132: JFK - Destiny Betrayed, Part 3

In 2021, Oliver Stone released the docuseries JFK: Destiny Betrayed. In this episode, I will cover Episode 3 of this series.

⚠️ This episode discusses the autopsy. Please proceed with caution. 

➡️ Why were there 30+ people in the room when the autopsy is happening? Why was it described as "a three-ring circus"? 

➡️ Were the photographs altered? If so, by who?

➡️ Kennedy's plans for Vietnam. 

Links:

Part 1: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14705477

Part 2: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/19405219

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2289560/episodes/14393320

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_oQrb8I8hw

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/henry-ford-grand-cross-1938/

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Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

In episode three of Oliver Stone's series "JFK Destiny Betrayed," Sara Causey delves into the autopsy of President John F. Kennedy. She discusses Dr. George Berkeley Kennedy's role, noting his discrepancies with the Warren Commission's findings. Kennedy's death certificate, missing from the Commission volumes, indicates a bullet wound in the back, contradicting the single bullet theory. Causey highlights the cover-up, including the destruction of autopsy notes and the discrepancies in autopsy photographs. She also explores Kennedy's foreign policy, particularly his stance on Vietnam and his relationship with Nasser, suggesting a broader conspiracy involving military and intelligence agencies.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

JFK autopsy, conspiracy theories, Oliver Stone, George Berkeley Kennedy, Warren Commission, single bullet theory, cerebellum, brain examination, military cover-up, Bethesda morgue, Parkland hospital, Kennedy assassination, Vietnam War, Operation Northwoods, Cold War.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I will be covering episode three of Oliver Stone's series JFK Destiny Betrayed. If you missed the other episodes where I discussed part one and part two, I will be sure and drop links to those in the write-up for this one. We are still in the territory of the autopsy and some information about the body, so if you are squeamish about that kind of thing, use some caution, or you may even want to set this one out. In the meantime, I most definitely am going to crack open a frosty beverage of choice, and we will saddle up and take this ride.

The conspiracy board doesn't end here. You can find Sara's books on Amazon, exclusive merch, and the Simply Dag audio book are waiting for you at Sara Causey Dot Shop. And when the lights go down, the really interesting conversations begin. Become a member of con-sara-cy theories way after dark for exclusive members-only episodes you won't hear anywhere else. Now, back to the show.

In episode three of JFK Destiny Betrayed, we start out with the knowledge that the doctor who was present at both Parkland and the Bethesda morgue was George Berkeley Kennedy's personal physician. Like Knudsen, he was a Navy officer. Berkeley signed the autopsy descriptive sheet with a bullet in the back at the level of T3. He also signed Kennedy's death certificate, which also placed the wound in the back. This death certificate is not in the Warren Commission volumes, and the descriptive sheet in the Commission volumes does not have Berkeley's signature. Arlen Specter did not depose George Berkeley, but Berkeley went further than that. We now see footage of the press conference of Malcolm Kilduff saying, "Dr. Berkeley told me that it was a simple matter of a bullet right through the head, and he points at his temple when he says this. Dr. Berkeley did an interview with the JFK Library in 1967, and he was asked, "Do you agree with the Warren report on the number of bullets that entered the president's body? Berkeley replied that he did not wish to be quoted on that. In 1977, through his lawyer, he wrote a letter to Richard Sprague, chief counsel on the House Select Committee on Pop Pops, the HSCA. He said he had information indicating that others besides Oswald must have participated in the pop pop. He was willing to talk about it at that time. Sprague, who made clear his intention to fully investigate the Charlie India Alpha's involvement, was forced out two weeks later. Dr. Berkley submitted a written statement to the HSCA, but there is no official record of him being deposed as a witness, now we hear from Douglas Horn. In 1982, he told JFK researcher Henry Hurt, "I know there was more than one pop popper. When Henry Hurt tries to recontact Berkeley for more details, Berkeley cut him off. The following year, Berkeley talked to Michael Kurtz, another JFK researcher, and told him that he knew there was a conspiracy to kill the president, and that he recalled an exit wound in the back of Kennedy's head. Now that's a very significant statement that only the doctor we know of who was present at both Parkland and Bethesda told Michael in 1983 that Kennedy had an exit wound in the back of his head. When Kurtz tried to recontact Berkeley, he too was cut off. Doctor Berkeley was deceased by the time the review board was empaneled. So then they decide we can ask the executor of his estate to sign a waiver so that we could go to the law firm that his attorney used to work for because he was also deceased, and see if there are any records in the file that would have revealed what it was that Berkeley planned to tell or what he wanted to say to the HSCA in detail. Initially, the executor of Berkeley's estate agrees to do this, but then refuses, changes her mind completely, and refuses to sign the waiver. We go now to Dr. Donald Miller. Miller says that when he was a teenager, his family and Berkeley's family were neighbors sharing a duplex. And in 2012, he looks up one of Berkeley's sons that he had been friends with and asks him if his father had ever said much about the Kennedy case. The boy says no; that all his father would ever say was that he couldn't understand. Why he was never called to testify before the Warren Commission, Miller asserts that Berkeley was involved in a cover-up. As Miller says, the death certificate, as signed by Berkeley, makes the single bullet theory bogus, and the way the Warren Commission deals with this is by simply not publishing that death certificate. Wow! Now we're back to Douglas Horn. The AARB should have redeposed Humes and Boswell after giving them immunity. And if Berkeley had still been alive, he would have been another candidate because he was at the center of the photographic cover-up. By the way, George Berkeley was a rear admiral. He was promoted to vice admiral by Lyndon Johnson, so he promoted Berkeley to the highest possible rank and kept him on as a military physician. And the last person to walk out of the White House with LBJ the day he left office was George Berkeley.

In my notes, I've written I go back yet again to the basic feeling that JFK was surrounded by snakes and manipulators and false friends, some of these people may have been paid off. Some of them may have been threatened or had their families threatened. It may not have been that they wanted to betray him. They may have felt forced into it, but it certainly seems to me that he had an abundance of false friends and backstabbers in his immediate and non-immediate circles. The documentary plays a tape from the AARB dated March 21,997, The question, using the most precise medical terminology that you can use, and then Audrey Bell responds, "Let's say it was on the right rear. He shifted the head a little bit to the left and lifted up a kind of matted area, the flap, and you could see the hole. And there was brain and spinal fluid dripping down out of it. Then I noticed it was dripping down into a bucket. So this is why I kind of put a gore warning at the at the beginning of an episode like this, you know that's a really terrible thing to even have to think about. We're told that seven people at Parkland saw the cerebellum at the bottom of the skull. We go now to Dr. Cyril Wecht, and by the way, I've recently gone down the Natalie Wood rabbit hole. I think probably by the end of this month, I'm going to release an episode about what I've learned going down that rabbit hole. There's an intersection, interestingly enough, between Noguchi and Cyril Wecht, and where Cyril Wecht is is so much more critical of the autopsy of JFK. He seems to cut Noguchi when he's doing the Natalie Wood autopsy a bit of slack, and and I just I find that really interesting and almost a bit disappointing. From Cyril Wecht, it's like I sort of expected better than that because when we start going down the the Natalie Wood rabbit hole, it's like there were a lot of things that got missed that should have been brought to light. But I digress. So Cyril Wecht says the brain consists of two large cerebral hemispheres, and the lower down posterior are two hemispheres, the cerebellum. They differ in color and topographical markings. We go now to Dr. Michael Chesser. In 1963, Parkland was one of the top trauma centers in the country. Dr. Robert McClellan saw a clump of cerebellum fall out of the skull onto the ER bed, Dr. Robert McClellan. Now, in my mind, as sure as you can ever be about any observation, that was cerebellum that extruded onto the gurney while I was standing there looking at it, Dr. Michael Chesser. Then we have Dr. Kemp Clark. He went into detail with the Warren Commission about the result of the loss of cerebellum tissue, if President Kennedy had survived the wound, so there was no doubt that there was a loss of cerebellum tissue. These testimonies indicate that the wound was quite low and there was severe damage to that sector of the brain. Yet, in the Bethesda autopsy report written by Humes, there is no mention of the cerebellum, and he did not testify about it to the Warren Commission. Now we're back to Dr. Cyril Wecht. The doctors at Parkland have seen hundreds, or probably 1000s, of brains, especially the neurosurgeon. He saw damaged cerebellum. The doctors who did the autopsy, when you read the report, it states that the cerebellum is intact. A copy of this document is shown to us on the screen, and it says when viewed from the vertex, the left cerebral hemisphere is intact. And so Wecht asks, who do you believe? Do you believe the doctors in Texas, or do you believe the two career naval pathologists working under military control. There were many witnesses at Parkland and Bethesda who testified that they saw a severely damaged brain. One of the witnesses described brain matter spraying all over the interior of the limousine. The secret, the shush. So I almost caught myself there. Almost. The shush service washed out parts of the limo before shipping it to Washington, thus removing important evidence. We go now to Dr. Gary Aguilar. Anyone who's seen the Zapruder film can see JFK's head explode and matter flies all over the place.

Jackie crawls out and picks up a chunk of brain and takes it with her and gives it to one of the doctors at Parkland. Now we're back to Dr. Michael Chesser. Then we have Dr. McClellan talking about the large clump of cerebellum that fell out onto the emergency room bed. Dr. Gary Aguilar, I've seen the original autopsy photos, and the brain is disrupted, but very little of the tissue is missing. Then we look at the autopsy report of the brain, what they call the supplemental brain examination. The brain and evidence is weighed there at 1,500 grams. Dr. Michael Chesser, 1,500 grams is about 3.3 pounds. This would be above average weight for an adult male brain. There was one report of 8,000 autopsies and the average weight of an adult male brain was 1336 grams, so 1,336 grams. So they're saying that JFK's brain was well above the average weight. Now, obviously, this begs the question: How could someone with a catastrophic brain injury have a relatively intact brain at the autopsy, so much so that it weighs more than the average adult male's brain that has not had a catastrophic brain injury. Makes no sense. Now we go back to Douglas Horn. Foxtrot Bravo India agent Frank O'Neill told the review board that over half of the mass of the brain was missing. He saw the brain removed at the autopsy. A lot of the mass missing was in the back. That's what mortician Tom Robinson said. A sectioning of the brain was not performed. We're told it was for preservation purposes, but Cyril Wecht asks preserving it for who? Without doing this, there was no way to properly trace the trajectory of the wounds. Back to Douglas Horn, the review board had a consultant, a renowned forensic pathologist Robert Kirschner. He looks at the brain photographs and he said, "This is a very well fixed brain. It's all gray. It's not pink at all. It's been fixed for two to three weeks in formaldehyde. It's been fixed at least two weeks, maybe as long as three weeks. I looked at Jeremy Gunn, and he looked back at me, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck because I knew that JFK's brain was examined less than three days after he was killed. According to the Federalist Society, he was also now I put in in my notes. According to the Federalist Society, he was also the executive director of the JFK Pop Pop Records Review Boards and a senior fellow at the United States Institute of Peace. Now we're back to Gary Aguilar. One can only imagine that they wanted the damage to the brain to be consistent with the hypothesis that Oswald had done all the shooting. So, if you had a defect going all the way to the back of the head, as so many witnesses testified to, it might raise questions about whether the huge defect could have been caused by a single pop pop, like a single wound to the head, as Oswald was supposed to have done. Dr. Michael Chesser, there are two photographs of the brain at the archives. I viewed those in 2015. The brain looked to me to be distorted. My first thought was that the brain had been sitting in a jar of formaldehyde for a long time. At a teaching hospital, there was no shortage of brains. Autopsies were performed frequently. The brains were saved for teaching medical students, so it would not have been difficult to find a brain as a replacement to use in these photographs. Dr. Gary Aguilar, Dr. Humes destroyed his original autopsy notes. Humes was the chief autopsy pathologist, and what we know as doctors is that notes taken while you're doing something are much more important and are likely to be closer to the truth than anything you write later. And he admitted that he destroyed autopsy notes. Doctor Cyril Wecht, remember that night Oswald is still alive. You're going to be asked at some point in time under oath to give sworn testimony, why did you destroy those notes? Doesn't a pathologist keep his notes? Dr. Gary Aguilar, Hume says he destroyed the notes because they were stained with the president's blood and he did not want them to become objects of morbid curiosity.

In my notes, I've written in modern times this would be like somebody saying I burned the notes because I didn't want some asshole to get a hold of them and sell them on auction on eBay because it would be so morbid and so disrespectful. And as excuses go, that's not a bad excuse. However, it is still an excuse. Because as Cyril Wecht points out, you're performing a medical legal autopsy. You don't simply destroy notes that are going to be important in the legal process. Notes that will be important in an historical context because you're scared that some kind of morbid treasure hunter will get a hold of them. Had Oswald lived, his defense attorney would have had an absolute field day with that information. Now we're back to Dr. Gary Aguilar. Dr. Pierre Fink also wrote notes and complained bitterly about the fact that his notes disappeared too. Douglas Horn, he was so upset because he had to go home and reconstruct all of his notes from memory, as the documentary points out. Due to an incomplete autopsy, no one can really say for sure what happened there. It remains a riddle. Now I've put in my notes. I personally think this kind of obfuscation is done on purpose. It reminds me of Richard Condon's book *Winter Kills* which I have covered on the podcast before, I'll drop a link to it in case you missed that episode. In *Winter Kills* the protagonist Mick is sent down so many rabbit holes of everybody blaming everybody else, and it's this clusterfuck that's been designed so that he will simply give up. You're never going to know the truth, and nothing you do is going to bring your deceased brother back. So why don't you just get a life and focus on something different? Because this is a vortex, and you'll get sucked down into it, and all you'll do is waste your time and waste your life. If the powers that be were already aware that Oswald was never going to live long enough to make it to trial anyway, they don't have any fear that destroying notes, conducting an autopsy like it's a clown car, not having a clear chain of command, not having a clear chain of custody on evidence, etc. etc. at all. Then, and it's like an additional fringe benefit of all this is that future generations will go into a corn maze, like in The Shining? They'll go into a damn corn maze that they can't get out of. This also reminds me of the idea that Kennedy himself and his basic character are just unknowable to future generations. We just don't know what he would have done. We don't know why his legacy seems so contradictory. You're never really going to know the guy, and so then the detractors and the smut peddlers and the people that are part of what I believe to be an orchestrated smear campaign against him can say whatever they want. Any gal can trot out, even if she's 1000 years old at this point, and claim that they had some wild, passionate sex affair that maybe she didn't even want it. She wasn't even interested, but oh, he was just a sexual deviant, and that Jack was some kind of a bastard the whole time. What I have noticed is that if someone intends to say something positive about JFK, his character, his policies, his legacies, whatever, then the standard operating procedure is supposed to be he is unknowable. You will never know the truth. You will not know his deepest intentions. However, if someone wants to paint him as a sex pervert, a mafia don, a creep, a murderer, a bloodthirsty war hawk in disguise, and so forth. Well, then, his character is knowable. His character is always clear and knowable if the author or the documentarian wants to present him as an utter piece of trash. His character is conveniently not knowable if the author or the documentarian wants to present him as something great. We're told that the complete collection of autopsy and brain exam photographs are kept at the National Archives, but are only available to congressional researchers and experts authorized by the Kennedy family. And I understand this is one of those issues where I see both sides of the argument.

I can understand somebody saying they ought to be more broadly available because you're talking about a public figure. You're talking about somebody that was the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, who was murdered in broad daylight, and then there was obviously this massive cover-up. Researchers ought to have the right to see whatever they want to see. There is that like what I would call classically liberal, you know, like people should be as free as possible. There should be freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion. If you want to say, "Don't yell fire in a crowded theater and cause people to stampede, that's a limitation. Well, okay, I do kind of begrudgingly see the point there, but it's like we do we do in my mind have the right to free speech, and the press has a right to its freedom as well-freedom to question people in power. So I I very much see that side of it, and then I also see the family side of it. Like would I want to see terrible photographs of Dag after the the crash of the Albertina? Fuck no, absolutely not. I don't ever want those images in my head. That would be like Malcolm McDowell. I know I keep talking about a Clockwork Orange. I will get to the recording of those episodes, but what I want to do is go back and reread the novel. I haven't read the novel in years, and I'd like to go back and reread the novel and then also watch Kubrick's film. I haven't. I have a copy of it. I just needed to do those things when I have time. But I'd have to be like Malcolm McDowell with the eye spreaders, because I would not willingly look at any of that shit. I just don't want to fucking see it ever, so I get the family's point of like we we don't want a lot of people getting in there and being gore fanatics about this. I I see both sides and it's a complicated issue. Now we go back to Douglas Horn. John Stringer was the autopsy photographer. He photographed the autopsy itself and JFK's brain three days later, we were very careful to question him at the beginning of his deposition about all of the photos he took, including what kind of film he used. Jeremy Gunn showed Stringer the color transparencies, and Stringer noted they were not Kodak. So there's a discrepancy between the existing photos and what Stringer says he used. Half the photos are taken from above, the others are taken from the bottom. Stringer said he didn't take any photos with a view from the bottom. Jeremy Gunn, that he keeps talking about, by the way, was general counsel and associate director for research and analysis for the Pop Pop Records Review Board, the ARRB. Dr. David Mantich, the brain autopsy or autopsies, there were probably two, occurred later. Stringer reported that he was present at the brain autopsy, which apparently occurred on the Monday after. Dr. Gary Aguilar, Stringer, and two others testified that they took photos with a portion of Kennedy's scalp pulled back, but there are no such photos in the file, Douglas Horne. This is evidence that impugns the authenticity of the brain photographs in the National Archives. If there was a trial today, those photos would not be admissible as evidence. So, if Stringer didn't take the photos, who did? And I would also immediately piggyback with the question: Why? Who else did, and then for what purpose? Robert Knudson was a Navy photographer detailed to the White House in 1958. In his obituary, he is credited with photographing JFK's autopsy, except officially he was not. Douglas Horne Knudson was not interviewed by the Warren Commission in 1978, the HSCA deposed him. However, it wasn't published, and instead it was buried. It was released in 1993. They buried it because everything he told them about the autopsy photography contradicted the Warren report. He said Berkeley had him develop black and white negatives on November 23, and I saw photos of probes in the body. No such photos with probes are present in the file. Dr. David Mantic. He never said he took photos of the brain. He implied that he was very busy taking photos of the body. His wife was later interviewed by the ARRB.

He told her the photos were deliberately burned by the service, and that one photo in particular in particular had been severely altered. Mantic speculates that it was probably the photo of the back of JFK's head. Gloria Knudsen was so disturbed by this after his death in 1989 that she contacted some of his colleagues in the Navy, and they assured her that he had told them the same thing. He had told his colleagues that he saw photos of the back of JFK's head that showed a large wound low in the back of the head. Douglas Horn Stringer is still the autopsy photographer of record. I think they both took pictures, and I personally think that many of Stringer's pictures never made it into the official collection, and a lot of the ones we're looking at are Robert Knudson's pictures. Dr. David Mantic, Saundra Spencer worked at the Anacostia Naval Photography Center, which is quite separate from the Bethesda lab. That weekend, she received film from James Fox in the service and from Robert Knudsen, Douglas Horne. The photos Saundra developed, which never made it into the official record. The only evidence we have of them is her testimony, and we see on the screen a photograph of a newspaper article where she is quoted as saying, "Process them and try not to observe too much. Don't peruse. Saundra was visibly upset when she looked at the official autopsy photos. She started to cry. She said, "I developed pictures of him and his family for almost three years, and he never looked like this. She said, "He did not look like this in the photographs I developed on." He looks terrible in these photos. He's all beat up, and there's blood everywhere, and an open body cavity. There were no open body cavities. It was very cleaned up, very respectful. In one of the photographs she developed, there was an intact brain sitting next to JFK's body. Strange that it's intact because we know from Foxtrot Bravo India agent Frank O'Neill, that the brain was more than half missing when it was removed from the cranium. Dr. David Mantic, Jeremy Gunn once made a comment that it's as if the autopsy materials were designed to hide what was really happening as opposed to revealing the truth. Yeah, do you think so? Douglas Horn, on november 1, 1966, the National Archives and a Department of Justice official met with Humes, Boswell, John Stringer, and the radiologist Ebersole. They looked at the autopsy photos for the first time, and they created an inventory saying, "This is what the pictures describe. During the discussion with the DOJ witness Belcher, it was noted that they were discussing missing photos. Jeremy Gunn asked why they signed an inventory which they knew not to be true. Stringer replied, "Some people do object, but they don't last very long. An inventory submitted in 1965 listed microscopic tissue slides and a stainless steel container containing gross material, presuming the brain, or presumably the brain, I should say. Now Cyril Wecht. In August of '72, I'm at the National Archives, and I have the executive agreement of April 1965 and the inventory of October 1966. Some X-rays and photos are missing, and a large metal box that obviously contained the brain listed in '65, but no longer listed in '66. Goodbye, brain, mr. Prosecutor. If you don't have the brain, you're out of here. Dr. Gary Aguilar, the tissue slides that they'd had taken have disappeared from evidence. When you do a biopsy of the tissue, you can tell whether a bullet entered or exited by whether you find dust particles from the lead. After the film JFK was released, several doctors went to the National Archives to look at the X-rays of JFK's skull. They saw details that presented yet another problem with the narrative that JFK was only popped from behind. Dr. David Mantic, the government investigations claimed there was no evidence of a shot from the front. We have seen tiny metal fragments right at the forehead. Larger bullet fragments travel farther, where smaller ones tend to stay near the entry site. That's what we see on these X-rays. In other words, they are consistent with a frontal bullet. Dr.

Michael Chesser, when you look at the X-rays stored at the archives on the lateral X-ray, there's a fragment trail that expands from front to back and dozens of tiny dust-like fragment particles. Because three shells were found on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, the Warren Commission was limited to only three shots. CE 399, our so-called magic bullet, is problematic because of its pristine condition. Doctor Randolph Robertson. It was James Young who ordered Chief Mills and Martinell, their assistants, to go to the White House and retrieve what they knew were skull fragments in the limo at the time. They brought back an additional envelope with a bullet with a bent tip. He described a bullet, brass-colored, about five millimeters in diameter. The presidential limo, while en route to Washington, was inspected, and a three-inch triangular piece of bone was discovered on the floor near the rear jump seat. During the autopsy, Young sent two assistants to meet the limo when it arrived at the White House garage. As part of a naval oral history project, Jan Herman, who had interviewed Dr. Young on the subject, got in touch with one of the two men who had gone to the limo to retrieve the skull fragments. Doctor Randolph Robertson Herman called up Mills and says, "Do you remember Doctor Young asking you about this bent bullet? He remembered, but said he would rather not discuss it. The bullet went from Mills and Martinell to Young to Humes, and it disappeared. The reports of the extra bullet substantiate some claims that there was a fourth shot hitting the limo at Zapruder frame 328. There is no way the fatal headshot and one at 328 could have been fired from the same boomstick. Doctor David Mantic, there is a lot of damage in the car. The chrome strip which went around the windshield was dented from the inside, which suggests a projectile from the rear. Six witnesses reported a through-and-through hole in the windshield. After the shush service tried to scrub the interior at Parkland, the limo was then flown to Washington. The interior was completely cleaned within 36 hours. The windshield was replaced within 72 hours. The car was shipped first to the Ford factory in Michigan, and I'm just gonna butt in and say, I mean, you know, old Henry and his police during the war. If you're not familiar, you better look it up. I'm just saying, you know, can't swing a dead cat without hitting them fascists. The car was shipped first to the Ford factory in Michigan, and then to Cincinnati, where it was rebuilt. At Clay Shaw's trial, Pierre Fink revealed that the wound in JFK's back was not dissected because it was an army general who ordered them not to. The failure to do that led to a long trial, or excuse me, led to a long trail trying to assess and locate this wound. Dr. Donald Miller, the face sheet for the autopsy, where it shows the front and back silhouette of the body, showed the bullet wound in the back at the level of thoracic vertebrae T3. Both Sebert and O' disagreed with the Warren report's depiction of the rear skull wound and the back wound. When the review board showed them the pictures in 1997, in a 2000 interview, Sebert said of the commission drawings ordered by Arlen Specter, "What a liar! I feel he got his orders from above. How far above? I don't know. They got that single bullet theory by moving that back wound up to the base of the neck. Dr. Cyril Wecht, Darrell Tomlinson, a maintenance man at Parkland, passing by the ER, found the stretchers and a bullet. Humes and Boswell missed the bullet hole in JFK's neck because of the tracheotomy. Wecht says they found no bullet from the back wound. We're told that the bullet came out during CPR. It went out like a car in reverse. The wound in the back has to be moved up in order to align with the neck wound. Gerald Ford does this by simply altering the report to say the back of the neck instead of the back. In 1979, the HSCA moved it lower because they had pictures from the autopsy. Perhaps the Warren Commission thought no one would ever see them.

Ford says his edit had nothing to do with the conspiracy theory, but was just his efforts to be precise. Ford had a conversation with Valerie Giscard Distain, allegedly admitting that the murder was not the work of one person; it was something set up, but we were not able to discover by whom. In the 1960 campaign, JFK was advised by Stuart Symington, a former Air Force secretary, that military intelligence stated that the Russians had a significant advantage in long-range atomic missiles. He used the issue against Nixon even after being told it was inaccurate. When he got into office, he was told by Robert McNamara that it was not only false, but that America was the one that had the huge advantage. This led to a meeting in the summer of 1961 that that included JFK, Allen Dulles, oh that old fucker Allen Dulles, and Lyman Limnitzer. In 1993, the first official document describing the meeting was declassified. Dulles and Lemnitzer were advising Kennedy about a first strike nuclear attack on the USSR, which would occur in the fall of 1963, a time when they predicted America would be at its best possible advantage against Russian counterstrike capabilities. You know, is this another reason why Dag had to be gotten out of the way? We we don't want the world's top diplomat screwing up our plans. Now we go to Dr. James Galbraith. The importance of that meeting showed that the strategic planners did think of the military force that we were deploying at the time as a first strike, not as a retaliatory force. I think this tied Kennedy, Johnson, and McNamara together over this period. They simply had to keep those missiles in their silos. When I called up Walt Rostow, he referred to the meeting as the one where they wanted to blow up the world. After that meeting, JFK said to Dean Rusk, "And we call ourselves the human race. JFK sent Arthur Schlesinger on a tour of Latin America to come up with a plan to change the Yankee gringo image and to neutralize the appeal of communism. Kennedy organized a conference in Uruguay, inviting representatives from Latin America to propose projects and establish the Alliance for Progress. And they play a clip from RFK's excuse me they play a clip from JFK's visit to Venezuela and Colombia in December of 1961. Now we go to RFK Jr. They tried to create a program that would tie USA not to military control and support of U.S. corporations, but rather to initiatives that would democratize the country and raise poor people out of poverty. One of the least acknowledged aspects of JFK's foreign policy was his perspective regarding the Middle East. As part of an effort to bring balance to the region, JFK forged a relationship with Nasser of Egypt. Philip Mullenbeck, Kennedy's overall policy towards the Middle East had a few pillars. One was to make an even more even-handed approach towards Israel on the Palestine issue. Second, to support progressive nationalists in places like Egypt and Syria, as opposed to what Kennedy referred to as relics of the past, monarchies in places like Saudi Arabia or Jordan. Nasser was one of the foreign leaders that Kennedy had the most personal correspondence with. They sent over a dozen letters between each other. In those letters, Kennedy would disclose to Nasser some things he was going to do in advance, and Nassar appreciated this communication. Robert Rakoff, Kennedy discerned that Nasser actually had qualities that made him an appealing ally for the U.S. The idea was that Nasser would keep the Arab-Israeli conflict in the icebox. The United Nations had abandoned their plan to repatriate Palestinian refugees. Kennedy took it up as a cause with Israel. This would have allowed the refugees a choice of staying where they were, moving elsewhere, or going back to Israel, all at the UN's expense. The other problem was the construction of the atomic reactor at Dimona. JFK was strongly against any proliferation of nuclear weaponry. He had been assured by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion that Dimona was designed for peaceful uses of atomic energy. In the spring of 1963, JFK demanded full inspections of the Dimona reactor by the United States and threatened to place American aid for Israel in limbo if no agreement was reached. And at the time of JFK's murder, negotiations were in process for biannual inspections.

The existence of communism so close to America kept Cuba on Kennedy's plate. In late 1961, he authorized covert efforts under the name Operation Mongoose. General Edward Lansdale ran the day-to-day operations of the project, but RFK was above him to ensure it would not spin out of control as the Bay of Pigs had. The idea was to keep pressure on Castro to not export communism further into Latin America and endanger the Alliance for Progress. Despite later accusations of Kennedy's complicity in pop-pop plots, there is no known document that's emerged from the mongoose files showing that he knew of any such attempts. This seems to be a remnant of the Eisenhower plan, and this is something that we hear fairly often as a supposed justification. You live by the sword, you die by the sword. If JFK was planning to murder Castro, but that plan was turned on him, and so instead, the mafia and the Charlie India Alpha, or maybe some of Castro's resources, got him. Maybe he had it coming. You know, this is an excuse that we hear. Douglas Horn, Lansdale, in February of 1962, requests that they come up with pretexts for a U.S. invasion of Cuba. The following month, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a plan to Kennedy called Operation Northwoods, where the Charlie India Alpha would secretly perform T-word acts in the United States, and blame them on Castro to justify bombings and an invasion of Cuba. JFK declines to do this. So let's think about that again, and and in some episode, I really need to talk about Operation Sea Spray and what was done there in the Tuskegee experiments. You know, you're willing to sacrifice your own people in the name of warfare. So I'm going to read this again. The following month, the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a plan to Kennedy called Operation Northwoods, where the Charlie India Alpha would secretly perform T-word acts in the United States, and blame them on Castro to justify bombings and an invasion of Cuba. Hmm. I wonder if they might have done other things like that in other points in time in history. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Does jet fuel melts still beams. I don't know, man. Just saying. Now we go to John Newman. It takes only a few days before there's a face-to-face showdown between Kennedy and Lemnitzer. Lemnitzer says we have a pretext we can do this, but Kennedy rebukes him. Douglas Horn. The pretexts were outrageous. Fake an attack by Cubans against soldiers at Guantanamo Bay, sink a U.S. ship and blame it on Cuba. Take an airliner and fly it over Cuba with no people on board, and play a tape recording with fake victims screaming. Blow up the airplane with fake casualties and use this to start a war. Hmm, very wag the dog. Maybe we don't even need real dead people. Maybe we just need fake dead people and enough media cooperation to sell the story. John Newman. Within a matter of weeks, Limnitzer says, "To hell with the pretext. Let's just invade anyway. And you see plans being sent to McNamara and Kennedy from Limnitzer that basically say. We have to go in. Who cares? And then Kennedy has to fire Lemnitzer and Douglas Horn. The North Woods plan was our big find in the way of military records. They're universally recognized today for their importance, and they came out of the JFK Records Act. Throughout 1961, JFK rejected a total of nine attempts by his military advisers to send American ground troops into Vietnam, and both General Douglas MacArthur and Charles de Gaulle strongly agreed with him about not doing so. John Newman: The issues of what to do in Cuba and in Vietnam were intertwined because you can't do all these things at once. We don't have enough soldiers or forces to do them, and it's not just Cuba and Vietnam. It's also Cuba and Berlin and Laos and Vietnam. JFK was actually most concerned about Berlin and was unwilling to put troops in Cuba. He would not be able to react with Khrushchev. He would not be able to react if Khrushchev did something in Berlin. With that as a context, when it comes to JFK, with that as a context, when it comes to Vietnam, sorry, I'm having a dyslexia moment here.

He would not be able to react with Khrushchev if Khrushchev did something in Berlin. Okay, so JFK tells Linitzer, if we're not going into Cuba, why would we go into Vietnam? Near the end of this first year in office, JFK received a report from Walt Rostow and Maxwell Taylor, that called for increased training of South Vietnamese troops, increased bombings of the North, and the use of U.S. combat troops. James K. Galbraith, at meetings later in November, the National Security Meeting, where this was thrashed out, Robert Kennedy was very explicit in saying, "No, we are not sending combat troops, and it was clear from that point forward that this was the red line that JFK would not cross. A third influence on JFK's reluctance to commit American ground troops to Vietnam was John Kenneth Galbraith, his ambassador to India. So now we go back to Galbraith's son. My father went to see Walt Rostow. Rostow gestured on his desk to the pile of papers, the Rostow-Taylor report was plainly visible, and he read it. He proceeded to counter their advice as best he could with direct advice to the president, John Newman. It isn't until later in that month where the Vietnam decision was finally arrived at, which is in Sam 111, where Kennedy says no combat troops, but we will increase the advisors, and that was his signal that there was a decision to never cross that line. In October 1962, U-2 surveillance flights detected Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba, 90 miles off the U.S. coast. To this day, scholars debate Khrushchev's motivation: Was it because he feared a U.S. invasion of Cuba? Was it because of American missiles in Turkey? Was it, as Kennedy believed, a negotiating tool over Berlin? Despite pressure from his military advisers, JFK chose the least provocative alternative. His military advisers, of course, are not happy with his refusal to attack the USSR, Curtis Lemay, old bombs away Lemay, compares it to the appeasement at Munich to deliberately insult JFK. As the crisis progressed into its second week, a U-2 plane was shot down, and JFK's civilian advisers started to side with Lemay, who wanted Kennedy to bomb the missile silos and invade the island. They did not know that the Cubans had short-range tactical missiles in place. We hear the recording of Lemay telling JFK that he's in a pretty bad fix. To which Kennedy replies, "You're in there with me. RFK Sr meets with Ambassador Dobrynin. RFK warns the Soviets that he is not sure he can control the military much longer, and that a deal could be made-a no-invasion pledge and a withdrawal of American missiles from Turkey. Most Americans were happy over the end of the crisis, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Lemay felt that they had been defeated by the Soviets and were denied the opportunity to topple Castro. JFK said, "If we followed the Pentagon's advice, nobody would be around to tell the generals they were wrong. Now we hear from David Talbott. The main goal of the Kennedy administration is how to work around the State Department, the Charlie India Alpha, the Pentagon, and how the Kennedy White House can pursue its own policy of peace with the rest of the world, with Castro in Cuba and Khrushchev in Moscow, and so on, and avoid the horrendous mistakes of the past that almost pulled us into nuclear war. In the midst of these debates, Kennedy sent Galbraith to Saigon to write a report that would differ in its recommendations from what Taylor and Rostow had told him. Now we go to James Galbraith Jr. Kennedy knew what he wanted, and he knew my father would deliver it, which he did. He was very detailed and skeptical about the efficiency of the South Vietnamese government, about the capacity of any military force to prevail in the security situation that existed in South Vietnam at the time. So Kennedy tells Galbraith to. Deliver his report to McNamara, and he in turn gives instructions to begin the withdrawal to General Harkins, the commanding general of all forces in Vietnam. The Pentagon drags its feet on formulating plans, and McNamara calls for a meeting in May of 1963. One of the most important finds of the review board are the notes from this meeting. Douglas Horn, McNamara says it's not fast enough. I want you to accelerate it.

I want to pull out 1,000 men in December by the end of the year, and I want you to pull out complete units, not just individuals. After the withdrawal plan was approved, Kennedy sent McNamara and Taylor to Saigon in September of 63. He planned on using their report as the basis to formally order the withdrawal to begin. Kennedy controlled the report since it was actually being written under the supervision of Bobby. But still, men like Under Secretary of State William Sullivan and Maxwell Taylor tried to remove the recommendation for withdrawal. Kennedy insisted that it stay in. John Newman, Kennedy takes that secretly three days later and actually issues the order himself at a secret level. It doesn't become an NSAM yet, but it should. Once it leaks out to the newspapers, his opponents find out, and McGeorge Bundy says we might as well put it on paper. They did, and it was NSAM 2631. thing McNamara said in the secret debrief: We had agreed, the president and I, that we had trained them. We had given them everything we could, and if they couldn't win, it's on them. We had to get out, even if it meant they were going to be defeated. So McNamara and Kennedy decided they were willing to pull out of Vietnam in a losing scenario. That's very important. Douglas Horn, on the Air Force One tapes, the Clifton tapes, it's revealed that Colonel Dorman, General Lemay's aide, was desperately trying to contact Lemay on the radio on November 22nd, a logbook was recovered by the ARRB from the Air Force command post at Andrews. It records in-flight conversations between a command post at Andrews and Air Force One as it is flying from Texas back to Washington. It shows that Lemay, at the time of the pop-pop, was in Canada. This is really interesting because his official biographer says he was hunting in Michigan. I'm gonna butt in here just for a second, particularly as someone who knows what it's like to be a biographer on the fringe, and say, can you always trust the official biographer? Can you? You know, because sometimes, and you know, and I can't say for whoever it is they're they're talking to in reference to LeMay, I'm just saying that you know sometimes, theoretically, we have to remember that official canon can be co-opted and it most certainly can be shaped by intelligence agencies. So somebody being a quote-unquote official biographer in my mind doesn't mean jack crap. So the official biographer says that he was hunting in Michigan, but we know that's not true. He was in Toronto for reasons unknown, without his aide Colonel Dorman, who went with him everywhere. This logbook reveals that he was ordered by Secretary Zucker to land at Andrews Air Force Base because of all the federal officials that were going to meet the president's body at Andrews. A transmission was made from LeMay's plane back to this command post. It says General LeMay will not go to Andrews. He will go to DCA National Airport. His plane lands at 5:15 p.m. Well before the autopsy started, very few people in the Pentagon had a worse relationship with JFK than LeMay. During the missile crisis, he opposed JFK's solution of a blockade. When Kennedy left the room, LeMay openly ridiculed him. LeMay was the strongest against the Test Ban Treaty Kennedy was working on and signed in 1963. He wanted to escalate the Vietnam War with both naval and air power by carrying the war north. He advocated bombing North Vietnam back to the Stone Age if need be, and was willing to use atomic weapons if the Chinese intervened. Douglas Horn, there were a lot of people at the Bethesda morgue. The latest count, by all the researchers I know of, is about 33 people. Holy crap! That's why I call it a clown car autopsy. 33 people. This is like the autopsies of autopsies in American history, and you've got 33 people crowded in there like it's a show. There was a gallery of bleachers, and apparently all three rows were filled with people. Dr. Humes had complained after the fact, and Tom Robinson, the mortician from the funeral home, they both equated it to a three-ring circus. Paul O'Connor was a Navy corpsman helping the pathologists in 1999. He told me, and in 1992 he told others that Dr.

Humes, during the autopsy, complained that someone was smoking a cigar. Tell them to put the damn thing out. So O'Connor went over to the gallery, and there was Lemay sitting in his uniform with a cigar in his hand. And Lemay looked at him after he asked him to put the cigar out and blew smoke in his face. Did Lemay go to the autopsy to gloat over the death of his nemesis? And now we get to Dr. Gary Aguilar at the end of the episode, closing us out. But these three autopsy pathologists, who are not really credentialed to do that. Kind of an autopsy were given the body and told, "Here's the body. He was shot from behind. He fell forward, which they wrote in their autopsy report. Figure out how the wounds fit the known circumstances of the pop pop. But what this really speaks to is that the autopsy was not in control. The surgeons that were charged with doing it were not in control. It was in the control of the people who were there, who told them what they could and could not do. 'Twas ever thus. Next month, I will wrap up this little mini series as we're going through by looking at the final episode, which is JFK Destiny Betrayed Part Four. It is difficult to talk about some of the brutality here, bodies and bodies being battered before and after the fact, and bullets and wounds and all of that. And I hate that we even have to go there. I hate that this happened. I hate that there was the cover-up. I hate that there's still all of these lies about it, all of these decades later, I hate every bit of it. Next month in September, I will also be talking about Neil Jordan's film Michael Collins. Earlier, I had Patty Cullivan on the show to kind of give us a different perspective. He has his own ideas, and and one of the things that he said in that episode that we did together was basically everything in the film is a lie. It's a cute little film of high school history, and that's about it. But I really want to go back because Neil Jordan released that film in September of 1996, and for me, it was just earth-shattering in some respects. I I just was stunned by how much Michael Collins accomplished at such a young age, I was surprised by it when I was still just a young person myself in the 1990s. But now, being well into my 40s and being a perimenopausal Gen X woman, I'm like God. I think back to my early 30s, and I I realize how much I didn't know about much of anything. And yet, for somebody to have wrested Ireland from British control is just amazing to me still yet, and so I want to do an homage. I want I want to talk about Neil Jordan's film and how it has held up through the decades, or has it held up? You know, I want to take a look at that and commemorate the anniversary of the film's release. The reason why I'm talking about that here is because there's a great line. Well, there are a number of great lines. I actually have a copy of the screenplay because you know screenplays versus what actually shows up in the finished product are two different things. But Neil Jordan has a number of great lines that he wrote in the screenplay. But one that made it through was, "I hate them for making hate necessary. I hate that we're in a circumstance where we're talking about botched autopsies and clown car autopsies and pieces of brain matter getting blown all over the place. It's horrible. It's disgusting and it's barbaric, and yet all of it is completely and totally unnecessary. But you know they were going to make sure that they got that war, and one of the reasons I think why Oliver Stone in this series drills down on what was actually happening behind the scenes with these reports and McNamara and Galbraith and the Insams, because we have these people, Noam Chomsky being one of them, we have these people that will say he wasn't going to do anything different in Vietnam? The Vietnam War would have still happened exactly as it happened if JFK hadn't been popped.

So all of these people, these kind of Hollywood liberals, putting on their cry faces about oh JFK was going to stop Vietnam. It's all just a bunch of bunk. I think Oliver Stone gives us a compelling case, at the least, that it wasn't a lot of bunk. And if you go back and look at the old interview that Kennedy did with Cronkite, he doesn't say anything contradictory there. If you've never seen it, I will drop a link to it so you can watch it on YouTube. It's from September 2nd, 1963, President JFK's interview with Walter Cronkite, and he very clearly says, in the end, it's their war to win or lose. Like we can offer a certain amount of support, but that's it. We're we're not going to go in with some kind of full-scale incursion. And it's also worth remembering. And I did a podcast episode specifically about this. That Noam Chomsky was the one who said, "Well, people die every day. If one of them just happened to be JFK, I'm going to be the president. I mean, who cares? If it hadn't have been Oswald, it could have been the mafia. It could have been a jealous husband. I mean, who knows and who cares? That's what they really think. You know, they're they're telling you what they really think when they make statements like that. Who knows and who cares? And they want you to just let it go, let it go, little peon. Quit talking about it. Quit worrying about it. It's not going to bring it back. It's not going to accomplish anything. At the very least, we should be inconvenient. We should be difficult to dismiss. In the meantime, take good care of yourself. Stay a little bit crazy, and I will see you in the next.

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