No Altered Photos for the Warren Commission

[Anthony Frank]

In June 1967, Warren Commission member John J. McCloy, "in his first public comment on the investigation," said that he thinks "the commission should have studied the photographs and X-rays taken of President Kennedy after his assassination."

"He said that the Warren Commission had ‘all the facilities we needed’ and made its own choice not to subpoena the photographs."

[New York Times, 6-29-67, page 18]

He said they made the decision not to because “we were perhaps a little oversensitive to what we understood were the sensitivities of the Kennedy family,” as though it made sense that in the course of investigating a Presidential assassination, they would refrain from looking at the photographs and X-rays based on such bizarre logic. (An army pathologist refrained from dissecting Kennedy’s neck to trace the path of the bullet because “the family wanted no examination of the neck organs,” as if within ten or twelve hours of President Kennedy’s horridly violent and bloody assassination, the Kennedy family actually said something about not wanting the neck organs examined.)

“Mr. McCloy, a lawyer and diplomat, nevertheless insists that the seven man commission ‘had the best evidence; the pathology in respect to the President’s wounds.’”

Edited July 12, 2004 by Anthony Frank