JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (123 page)

[
337
]. FBI Report by Special Agents Bardwell D. Odum and James P. Hosty, Jr., March 2, 1964. Commission Exhibit 2125,
WCH
, vol. 24, p. 697.

[
338
]. In an incident that we will examine later in detail, FBI agent James P. Hosty, Jr., testified to Congress that he flushed down the toilet a note written to him by Lee Harvey Oswald. He said he did so in obedience to an order from the Special Agent in Charge of the Dallas FBI office, J. Gordon Shanklin, who in turn denied even knowing about the Oswald note. The House committee concluded the incident was “a serious impeachment of Shanklin’s and Hosty’s credibility.” Hurt,
Reasonable Doubt
, p. 253. Filmed excerpts from Hosty’s testimony are included in the video
Two Men in Dallas
. Because J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were committed to covering up and even destroying vital evidence, as exemplified by Agent Hosty, it is impossible to determine from Hosty’s report just what vehicles Ruth Paine owned and why Oswald would have been so defensive about her station wagon. Hoover and his agents, like Oswald, were protecting Ruth Paine. As we saw, Hoover recommended in a letter to head Warren Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin that he not release certain FBI “reports and memoranda dealing with Michael and Ruth Paine and George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt.” The consequences, Hoover warned Rankin, could jeopardize the Warren Commission: “Making the contents of such documents available to the public could cause serious repercussions to the Commission.” J. Edgar Hoover Letter to J. Lee Rankin, October 23, 1964. FBI Record Number 124-10147-10006. Agency File Number 105-126128-1st NR 120.

[
339
]. Norman Cousins,
The Improbable Triumvirate: John F. Kennedy, Pope John, Nikita Khrushchev
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 128.

[
340
]. Ibid.

[
341
]. Schlesinger,
A Thousand Days
, pp. 909-10.

[
342
]. Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye”
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 285.

[
343
]. Robert F. Kennedy,
Thirteen Days
, p. 106.

[
344
]. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 285.

[
345
].
Public Papers of the Presidents: John F. Kennedy, 1963
, pp. 603, 605.

[
346
]. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 375.

[
347
]. Norman Cousins’s description of Kennedy’s response to the note handed him by Evelyn Lincoln at the test ban meeting on August 7, 1963, and the president’s abrupt departure, is found in Cousins’s memorandum to himself, “August 7, 1963.” It is preserved in Norman Cousins’s home records in Beverly Hills. Cousins surmised in his memorandum that the note to the president was about the premature birth of his son. I am grateful to Professor Lawrence S. Wittner, professor of history at the State University of New York, for generously sharing this document with me from his own research records.

[
348
]. Sally Bedell Smith,
Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House
(New York: Random House, 2004), p. 393.

[
349
]. Ibid., p. 394.

[
350
]. Sally Bedell Smith Interview of Dr. Judson Randolph; ibid., p. 395. Barbara Leaming,
Mrs. Kennedy: The Missing History of the Kennedy Years
(New York: Touchstone, 2001), p. 298.

[
351
]. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 377.

[
352
]. Ibid.

[
353
]. Cousins,
Improbable Triumvirate
, pp. 138-44.

[
354
]. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 378; Martin,
Hero for Our Time,
pp. 493, 497; Learning,
Grace and Power
, p. 399.

[
355
]. Learning,
Grace and Power
, p. 423.

[
356
]. O’Donnell and Powers,
“Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,”
p. 24. As a result of the media’s special interests, what is best-known to a new generation about John F. Kennedy, apart from his having been a president who got killed, is that he was a philanderer. But if that was his most notable trait, why even bother asking why he was killed?

It is true that Kennedy was a philanderer. He was notoriously unfaithful to Jacqueline throughout their ten-year marriage. She would have been justified many times in ending it, but instead kept on seeking a genuine relationship with her husband.

It is also true, as their friends have observed, that in the wake of Patrick’s death and in their last days together, especially in Texas, John and Jacqueline Kennedy were never more deeply together. Jacqueline had ample reason by then to be exhausted by her husband’s behavior. Yet she seems to have seen a new future for them after their shared pain of Patrick’s death. In his case, the death of their son seems to have finally broken him open to the depth of his wife’s love and to his own capacity to return it. It was much too late, but in the last moments of their marriage and his life, John F. Kennedy seems to have been falling in love with his wife.

[
357
]. From Theodore H. White’s notes of his November 29, 1963, interview with Jacqueline Kennedy; released by White on May 26, 1995. Cited by Vincent Michael Palamara,
JFK: The Medical Evidence Reference
(self-published, 1998), p. 50. Had Jacqueline Kennedy’s words to White on her husband’s death been made public when she said them, in addition to her reflections on the play
Camelot
, U.S. journalists and their readers would have had more cause to deal with JFK’s assassination (and the reasons for it). Whether it was because of good taste, the cover-up, or both, the decades-long censorship of her immediate description of JFK’s wounds discouraged critical questions about his murder.

[
358
].
WCH
, vol. 2, pp. 138-39.

[
359
]. Ibid., p. 141.

[
360
]. Cited by Harold Weisberg in
Post Mortem: JFK Assassination Cover-up Smashed!
(published by Harold Weisberg, 1975), p. 380.

[
361
]. Ibid. Eight years after Jacqueline Kennedy gave her Warren Commission testimony, the government declassified her deleted words in belated response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by Warren Commission critic Harold Weisberg. Ibid., p. 379. After the passage of twenty-nine more years, in response to filmmaker Mark Sobel’s FOIA request, the government finally released in 2001 the court reporter’s original stenographic tape of Mrs. Kennedy’s interview. It was then discovered that even the “complete” Warren Commission transcript released to Weisberg had omitted two very specific descriptions by Jacqueline Kennedy of her husband’s head wound: “I could see a piece of his skull sort of wedge shaped like that, and I remember it was flesh colored with little ridges at the top.” Why had these details of the head wound been omitted from even the classified “complete” transcript? Unfortunately her interviewer, Chief Justice Earl Warren, asked no follow-up questions to the closest witness of the president’s wounds. “Warren Commission Suppressed Jackie’s Testimony on JFK’s Head Wound,”
Kennedy Assassination Chronicles,
vol. 7, Issue 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 18-19.

[
362
]. David S. Lifton,
Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 1980), p. 503. James H. Fetzer, editor,
Murder in Dealey Plaza: What We Know Now That We Didn’t Know Then about the Death of JFK
(Chicago: Catfeet Press, 2000), p. 41.

[
363
]. In an interview with the House Select Committee on Assassinations, “Dr. Harper said the consensus of the doctors who viewed the skull fragment was that it was part of the occipital region.” HSCA Memorandum on Interview Notes by Andy Purdy, August 17, 1977, p. 1. JFK Record Number 180-10093-10429.

[
364
]. Ibid., p. 2. Dr. Gerard Noteboom has reaffirmed the pathologists’ conclusion from their firsthand examination that the Harper fragment’s site of origin was the occiput, and “also recalled the lead deposit on the fragment.” Dr. David W. Mantik’s Interview of Dr. Gerard Noteboom, November 22, 1992, on Palm Springs radio show. Cited by Mantik in “Paradoxes of the JFK Assassination: The Medical Evidence Decoded,” in Fetzer,
Murder in Dealey Plaza
, p. 279.

[
365
]. Lifton,
Best Evidence
, p. 504. The way a later researcher defined the significance of the contradiction described by David Lifton was: “if the [Harper] fragment is occipital bone, the autopsy X-rays of John Kennedy’s skull cannot be authentic since the X-rays do not show sufficient bone loss in the occipital area.” Dr. Joseph N. Riley, “Anatomy of the Harper Fragment,”
JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly
(April 1996), p. 5. Dr. Riley’s article goes on to dissent from the on-site pathologists’ identification of the Harper fragment as occipital bone. Riley claims instead that the fragment’s anatomical features show that it is parietal bone, “consistent with the X-rays being authentic.” Ibid.

In a comprehensive essay on the JFK medical evidence, Dr. David W. Mantik counters Riley’s argument in detail, stating that “Riley has overlooked much valuable evidence.” Mantik concludes his analysis in favor of “the word of three Dallas pathologists who actually saw the real 3D bone. They all agreed that it was occipital, which is probably the best evidence we shall ever get on this question.” Fetzer,
Murder in Dealey Plaza
, pp. 280, 282. That is especially true since, as Mantik notes, after the Harper fragment was turned over to the FBI, the FBI “lost” it. Fortunately, Dr. Gerard Noteboom had taken 35mm transparency slides of the Harper fragment, which have been preserved. Ibid., p. 279. Gerard Noteboom, August 25, 1998, letter to Vince Palamara. Cited in Vincent Michael Palamara,
JFK: The Medical Evidence Reference
(Self-published; updated 2005), p. 57.