Pat Speer

This doesn't trouble me all that much. Hoover was a figurehead, largely uninvolved in actual investigations. If he wanted to go see some ponies on his day off, well, that sends a bad message, but it didn't hinder the investigation. Not so, Lt. J.C. Day. By his own account, he'd lifted a print from the rifle found in the building on the evening of the 22nd. By his own account, he found one print on a box by the sniper's nest, using fingerprint powder. By his own admission, the best way to find prints on cardboard was through the use of chemicals. But did he come in on Saturday to compare his purported lift to Oswald's prints? Or to retrieve the boxes by the sniper's nest for further testing? No, he supposedly took the day off. He was tired, you see, and it had been a long week. Well, okay, did he jump right in on Sunday, so that Fritz et al would know if someone else had been handling those boxes, or if someone else's prints were on the rifle? No. If I'm not mistaken, he went to the building, and took more pictures of the building from different angles etc, and of the different floors, etc. Of course, Oswald was killed that afternoon. So did Day say "Huh, maybe someone else was involved! I better figure out if that's Oswald's print on the rifle, or if someone else's prints are on the boxes!" Nope, he did bupkus. He was either the worst crime scene investigator ever or lying through his teeth, IMO. Seeing as he had received specialized training and remained on the job for something like 25 years, we can probably assume he was at least remotely competent. Which means his story smells to high heaven...

The limo in this re-enactment is not in the Z-film gap. Holland proposed that the first shot was fired as the limo passed a highway sign. That sign is to Donaldson's right. The limo is well beyond her, at a point beyond where Holland needed it to be to support his theory. So they lied about it and pretended her recollections supported his theory. The same goes for the other two witnesses present on the program, James Tague and Tina Towner. Both said Holland's theory was nonsense. But the producers of the program hid that from their viewers.

It should be pointed out that Shaw never saw Kennedy's body and was repeating what he thought he heard from someone else.

A couple of things. It is my understanding that Ted Kennedy got along with Johnson, and did not suspect a conspiracy in JFK's death. But as I recall he also wanted all the records to come out, and approved of the HSCA's re-opening of the case. He probably could have shut it down if he'd wanted as much, but he did not. As for JFK's family, they are not a solid block. Robert Kennedy has said he suspects a conspiracy, and that his dad suspected a conspiracy. Caroline and most of her cousins have kept quiet. But one of JFK's cousins, the daughter of Joe Kennedy's sister Mary as I recall, Kerry McCarthy, was a frequent attendee at JFK Lancer conferences, and an outspoken supporter of the research community. She spoke at Lancer on the eve of the 50th anniversary. While the mainstream media was in town to attend an invite-only presentation of historians and blowhards in a blocked-off Dealey Plaza, JFK's actual freakin' cousin was speaking about her cousin's life just blocks away, and no one from the media attended. Lazy, lazy, lazy...

As I recall, Kirk, the RFK/Jackie letter was first exposed by Timothy Naftali in a book written after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the opening of their records. Naftali is a mainstream historian and has never been accused of making crap up. If I recall he followed up on this and tracked down William Walton, the artist friend of RFK and Jackie's who delivered the letter, and he confirmed the story. Now, that said, I would agree that Newsom's refusing to release Sirhan is by no means a shock. I can't think of a single politician with dreams of higher office who would do such a thing. Kennedy almost certainly would not have done such a thing. It doesn't matter what the truth is but Repubs have successfully painted Dems as soft on crime, and scared of war. So Dems sometimes take the hardcore stance for fear of looking soft on crime or afraid of war. They get bullied into it. Who among us can forget how Reagan and his ilk made Carter look weak when he wouldn't invade Iran to rescue some hostages, when, truth be told, it was Carter who tried to use the military to rescue the hostages and Reagan and his buddies who cut secret sweetheart deals with the Iranians (and even terrorists) in order to effect the release of hostages? We live in the upside down, where Donald Trump is probably the only politician in America who could release Sirhan and not pay a price.

Maybe. As you know, I'm a big picture guy. I try to look at all the information and not just base it on one latter-day statement. in this case, however, McClelland backs up the recollections of Humes and Perry, in that Humes said he called the hospital, and Perry indicated he'd received the calls from Humes while at the hospital. (You're probably all over this, but do we know at what point Perry left Parkland on Friday night? Because it would almost certainly have been before the beginning of the autopsy. If so, it follows that any call to Perry at the hospital re the autopsy would have been performed on Saturday, not Friday.) It just makes sense, IMO. The autopsy was not performed ideally, or under ideal conditions. Calling Perry to discuss the wounds should have been done on Friday night. But was that Humes' SOP? No, he had not done a forensic autopsy, and had no SOP. It seems probable, then, that Humes didn't want to disturb Perry at home, that he went to bed in the early morning of the 23rd, and called Perry later that morning. Now, does this mean I think everything was on the up and up? Absolutely not. By the end of the autopsy, the doctors knew about three wounds, seemingly unrelated. A back wound that they couldn't track through the body. A small wound on the back of the head that they never tracked through the brain. And a large gaping wound on the top of the head. And then, of course, there were the wounds to Connally. And yet, the newspaper and radio reports said but three shots were fired. So Humes started trying to make things fit, as opposed to what he was supposed to do--report on what he saw. So he reported that the back of the head wound connected to the top of the head wound, without tracking these wounds, and then, after confirming with Perry that the tracheotomy obscured a neck wound, that the back wound connected to the throat wound. More problematic by far, IMO, than the possibility Humes called Perry on Friday is that several witnesses said they saw Humes (or Finck, I forget) probe the wound on the back of the head and that it came out at the throat. Now, tellingly, the HSCA pathology panel dismissed this possibility without investigation. But I think there may be something there. Humes would later be dismissive of probing wounds in the neck, saying you'd be as likely to create a false track as an actual track. This doesn't come from Forensic books and journals. As a result, I believe he was talking from personal experience, in that he probed the back of the head wound and saw the probe come out the throat wound, and then decided that this must have been a mistake, seeing as it suggested Kennedy had been hit three times: back, back of the head/throat, and top of the head. If so, it follows that he then decided to pretend no probing of wound on the back of the head, or neck, had been performed. That this is so, moreover, is added credence by the fact they never got around to probing the brain to see if a bullet entered low on the back of the head by the cerebellum, and then exploded from the top of the cerebrum. This demands explanation and only makes sense once one realizes the damage to the brain described in the supplemental autopsy report is incompatible with the trajectory Humes pushed in his initial report, and suggests instead that the large brain wound was caused a by a tangential blow to the top of the head, that is, a different bullet than that causing the small wound low on the back of the head. The Clark Panel and then HSCA FPP of course recognized this problem, and decided the best way to resolve this issue was claim the bullet entering the back of the head did so four inches higher than determined at autopsy. Desperate times require desperate measures. Of course, all this--the true story of Kennedy's wounds, IMO--has been buried under a mountain of mud for decades now, as but a handful of those on the LN side of the fence will even look at this (John Canal was an exception) and but a handful of those on the CT side of the fence will stomach any evidence based on the official evidence they just know--because the likes of Livingstone and Groden have told them so--are fake.

You couldn't be more wrong, Sandy. While I'm friends with Dr. Aguilar I decided to double-check his list of "back of the head" witnesses 15 years ago or so, and was extremely annoyed that John McAdams was largely correct on this point and that many of the statements had been taken out of context, or only told part of the story. I then took another look at Groden's "back of the head photos" and realized that these witnesses were for the most part not pointing to the wound location shown in the so-called McClelland drawing, and that the location many of them were pointing to was as close or closer to the wound location shown in the autopsy photos than the wound location shown in the so-called McClelland drawing. Around this time, Tink Thompson joined this forum and confirmed, moreover, that McClelland had had nothing to do with the creation of the McClelland drawing, beyond that an artist had made the drawing in an attempt to depict the wound described by McClelland in his testimony. Well, this was a problem seeing as McClelland had in recent years become a darling of the CT research community, whilst simultaneously claiming he'd either drawn the McClelland drawing himself, or had advised Thompson on the creation of the drawing. And here was Thompson confirming that the man's memory was shot. I then started wondering if the so-called blow-out wound on the back of the head was a CT myth, much as the single bullet "fact" was an LN myth. I spent six months reading dozens if not hundreds of articles on cognitive psychology and memory, and consulted with two of the top professors in this field. This convinced me that the impressions of some of the doctors could have been mistaken, and that the other doctors could have been engaged in group-think. This became clearer when I started writing about this topic in chapters 18c and 18d. I found that, oh by gosh by golly, the only "back of the head witnesses" to place the head wound below the level of the ear on the back of the head were witnesses who made no early statements, and who were almost certainly familiar with the McClelland drawing prior to their ever demonstrating the wound location. While writing these chapters, moreover, I also came to realize that Harry Livingstone and Robert Groden had been grossly deceptive in their presentation of the back of the head witnesses in their books. While researching Livingstone, for example, I discovered that many of the Parkland witnesses were shown the autopsy photos and McClelland drawing in the early 80's, and thought the autopsy photos more accurate. Well, this was the opposite of what Livingstone and Groden had reported. Even worse, I later came to realize that Groden had found an autopsy photo showing a large head wound on the back of a head, and had then photo-shopped this wound onto a photo of the back of Kennedy's head, and had then sold this image from his stand in Dealey Plaza while claiming it was a previously unseen photo of Kennedy before the doctoring of the official autopsy photos. In short, then, I acknowledge that there is some disagreement on the location of Kennedy's large head wound. But the idea that ALL the witnesses placed it in the same spot, and this spot is shown in the McClelland drawing, is just not true. It is also crystal freaking clear that the widespread belief the medical evidence is fake is a huge red herring preventing people from realizing that the autopsy photos and x-rays when assumed to be authentic are clear-cut evidence for multiple head shots, and almost certainly multiple shooters.

ARRB drawings? Like this one, where Custer specified that the top and back of the head was shattered beneath the scalp, but that the occipital bone was intact? Or these ones, where Crenshaw and Bell demonstrated that they had no understanding of anatomy?

But who said it? I strongly suspect it was not Perry. FWIW, I was at the Lancer Conference when three of the doctors interviewed for the Parkland Doctors were in attendance. I talked with them after their presentation. Dr. Joe Goldstrich indicated that he didn't get a view of the head wound. But doctors Kenneth Salyer and Peter Loeb both said they got a look at the head wound and said it was on the right side of the head, where it is shown in the autopsy photos. Within the hour of my conversation with these men, I had talks with William Newman and James Jenkins. They also claimed the large wound they saw was on the top right side of the head where it is shown in the autopsy photos. So that was 4 for 4. 4 witnesses. 4 men telling me they did not believe the autopsy photos were fakes, and that people believe they are because "people will believe what they want to believe," to quote Jenkins. So much for the supposed unanimity of the early witnesses to Kennedy's head wound. It's smoke. People cherry-pick latter-day witnesses like Crenshaw, Bell and O'Donnell because it helps them believe what they want to believe. But we should do better. When one studies the medical evidence under the assumption it is authentic it is incredibly clear there were two head wounds, and that more than one shooter is likely. So no "faking" of the evidence was needed. Not when men like Humes, Fisher and Baden et al were willing to ignore the facts before them and concoct ridiculous scenarios in which one bullet hit the back and exited the neck, and one bullet transited the skull.

O.K. Back to square one. Where did Perry say he received threatening calls on the night of the shooting? It seems to me this is all second-hand info received decades after the fact. I've watched and read a number of Perry interviews and have no recollection of him saying such a thing. As to the disappearance of the Parkland transcript, I agree, this was no coincidence. But it wasn't because those making it disappear knew the shots came from the front, but because they were concerned what the public might think if Perry's initial perception was made public. So Specter put on a show, and "helped" Perry pretend the newspaper articles quoting him had misquoted him. It was all part of a dog and pony show. But it's silly, IMO, to pretend this was all part of the plot to kill the President. There was the plot to kill the President and then there was a coordinated effort to make Oswald look like a lone assassin. I see them as two separate events, with those involved in the second event not privy to what really happened, and presumably believing Oswald actually did the crime.

Thanks, Gary. it's clear to me the head nurse for the OR would not be wandering around the ER inspecting the wounds of a mortally wounded patient. I spent some time in ERs and ORs in the last year and there was no overlap. Once I was out of the ER I never saw those nurses and doctors again. And I never saw the floor nurses in the OR or at the recovery rooms, and never saw the OR/recovery room nurses once I was back in my room. It's a very regimented system. Now, Parkland back then was not nearly the size of Parkland today, but it was still quite large, roughly the size of the hospitals I've had the displeasure to visit. Now here's a thought. Did you create a timeline of Connally's and Kennedy's treatment? At what point was Connally taken to the OR? Because Bell would have been with him from that point, correct? Well, the thought occurs that Carrico may still have been with JFK when Connally was taken up to the OR. If so, that leaves a very small or nonexistent window for Bell to have visited the ER, and to have talked with Perry.

I got sucked into this thread because I didn't remember McClelland telling the ARRB that an "agent" told Perry not to say the throat wound appeared to be an entrance. I looked back through McClelland/Perry's joint interview with the ARRB and didn't find McClelland saying as much. Instead, I found McClelland's insistence the phone call with Humes took place on Saturday, mid-morning. If you could point out where McClelland said he saw an agent grab Perry I would be appreciative. Now, in an attempt to be clear, let me explain what I think happened. The doctors were told by their supervisors not to talk too much or share too many details about what they witnessed, beyond the basics of the President's care. This is not surprising. This is what one would expect from a prestigious hospital. I have spent much of the last year in a hospital and I would expect the doctors engaged in my treatment to keep mum for the most part, and not attempt to gain any publicity from my illness or any other patient's illness. So that was one form of pressure brought to bear on the doctors. Secondly, there was the Secret Service. The Secret Service, in the form of Elmer Moore, thought the doctors should know that, according to the autopsy, the throat wound was officially an exit wound. He later expressed concern he was wrong in doing so. But it's really simple when you think about it. There was a lot of conflicting info in the press. The SS and Moore thought they could minimize this by bringing the Parkland doctors in the loop and did so. Now, was this pressure? One might see it that way. But one might also see it as someone telling you you have toilet paper on your shoe, or that your fly is open. The Parkland staff, it seems to me, were appreciative of Moore's visit, and not fearful. To repeat myself, doctors routinely defer to the expertise of others. Perry's subsequent statements make clear he thought the throat wound looked like an entrance, but was willing to believe it was an exit. Even late in life, long after he'd acknowledged it could have been an exit, he insisted that it did look like an entrance. In other words, he felt his mistake was not in his observation, but in sharing his speculation with the media. The observations of ER doctors are not conclusions. They don't have time to make conclusions. They do their best to keep the patient alive. It is the job of pathologists and coroners to establish the exact cause of death. Now, not to get side-tracked, but, much as Cyril Wecht has challenged his fellow pathologists to find a bullet believed to have done as much damage as CE 399 and to have remained so pristine, I have challenged my fellow researchers to find one instance where the recollections of an emergency room doctor were presented in court to challenge the findings of a pathologist or coroner. And have received no response. And there's a reason why. It does not happen. An emergency room doctor challenging the findings of a pathologist or coroner in a court of law would be shredded by the opposing lawyer. What is your expertise? How many autopsies have you performed? How long did you study the patient? Did you open him up and study the bullet trajectories? Did you even turn the body over? Third, there's the WC. Specter's job was to make things add up. He knew there were problems. So he constructed a ludicrous question asking the Parkland staff if, assuming the bullet traveled on the trajectory outlined in the autopsy protocol, they would accept that the bullet traveled on the trajectory outlined in the autopsy protocol. It was a meaningless question, but it created the illusion there was no dispute about the throat wound, etc. Now, was this pressure? Of course it was. But did the doctors see it as much? Most would say no. Evidently he was charming and polite and just doing his job, which was to shut doors, not open them. And then there's what came after. What a lot of researchers miss is that many witnesses have succumbed to pressure from the research community. I personally witnessed people try to bully James Jenkins into saying the back of the head was missing, which he vehemently denied, only to later publish a book in which he succumbed to their pressure and wrote that the back of the head was missing. McClelland is another example. He demonstrated on camera his best recollection of the wound location numerous times. And always placed the wound at the top of the back of the head, within two inches or so of where he'd placed it before. And then later in life he sold (?) or provided drawings to people in which he depicted the wound on the far back of the head, at the level of the ear, which is to say low on the back of the head, inches lower than where he'd previously placed the wound. Well, why would he do this? Because that's where it is shown in the so-called "McClelland" drawing, a drawing made for Tink Thompson based on McClelland's testimony, the accuracy of which McClelland would disavow when asked by The Boston Globe and ARRB. Late in life, after becoming a darling for the CT community, however, he not only told people he had helped create the drawing for Thompson (which Thompson confirmed on this forum was simply not true) but that he drew it himself. And so, yeah, one can now find drawings by McClelland on eBay purporting to show where he saw the wound that closely mirrors the location shown in a drawing he did not create...whose accuracy he had previously disavowed. Now, did McClelland give in to pressure? You bet he did. It's human nature. My beef is that so many on my side of the fence, which is to say the CT side of the fence, are unwilling to recognize their double-standard--where every time a witness tells a government investigator or an Oswald did-it writer what he wants to hear that person is giving in to pressure, but every time a witness tells a CT writer what he wants to hear he/she is a courageous truth-teller. It's just not so. People try to please those questioning them, and people are highly prone to suggestion. So, if a writer approaches a witness and says "Hey, all the other witnesses said they saw blank, did you see blank?" it's highly likely the witness would say "Y'know, I think I saw blank." (There's a ton of clinical studies demonstrating this tendency, many of which I discuss on my website.) In other words, the latter-day statements of witnesses can not be taken at face value, and must be weighed against previous statements, with added weight to their earliest statements.

There were a number of televised and newspaper interviews given after Crenshaw's book came out. They all rejected Crenshaw's version of events (that they were frightened into silence.) Some went too far and questioned whether he'd even been in the ER. But that got straightened out fairly quickly.

Yikes. I cannot stress to you how unreliable Bell is. Her story about Perry showing her Kennedy's head wound is absolute fruit loops. In any event, even if she was telling the truth as she remembered it, Perry and McClelland make it clear the phone call came in mid-morning on the 23rd.

The rest of the Parkland doctors, including McClelland, thought Crenshaw was full of it, and incredibly insulting when he implied they were scared to tell the truth. I think he was telling the truth as he saw it, but was not exactly reliable. As shown on my website, when asked to point out the location of the head wound on anatomy drawings showing the skull from behind and from the side, the two locations he picked out didn't come close to overlapping. In other words, he had a poor grasp of anatomy.

John is on a mole hunt, that may have implications regarding Oswald. IF the suspected mole was in a position to influence the investigation, well, that might prove interesting...

Wait. About ten minutes in, Judge says he found the Nixon letter about Ruby in the files. My understanding is that this letter was found by someone else, and that no one else has been able to replicate this "find." Is the Nixon letter about Rubenstein authentic, and, if so, is the Rubenstein mentioned in the letter, in fact, Ruby? Does anyone know? I know Roger Stone cites the letter in his book, but he's not exactly credible.

It's disappointing that Oliver was not up to snuff regarding the TSBD witnesses. When one reads all the testimony, it becomes quite clear that an elevator came down as Baker and Truly ran up the steps, and that Jack Dougherty took an elevator up before they came back down. Well, who took this elevator down to the first floor? Not Oswald. It's telling, IMO, that no one explained to Dougherty, who insisted he went back to work AFTER 12:30, that if this was so, the sound he heard above him was not a shot being fired, but the sound of Baker and Truly coming down from the roof. A shot from the southeast window of the sixth floor would have come to Dougherty, who was standing near the elevator when he heard this sound, from the southeast window of the fifth floor, after all, and not from above him. In any event, it's clear to me that Ball/Belin knew Dougherty's testimony was a problem and decided to confuse him and make him look stupid, as opposed to trying to make his recollections make sense. Ball just tortured the guy. For those not in the know about Ball, for that matter, this is what he was famous for. Defending criminals by asking all sorts of questions designed to confuse their victims, and making the victims look unreliable. He openly bragged about getting accused child molesters off by exposing their victims' lack of education and sophistication. And his reputation was well-known to his fellow-Californian Warren, who both hand-picked Ball to lead the charge against Oswald and agreed with Ball that they should pre-interview witnesses in order to cut down the number of problematic answers and help keep the record "clean". In any event, there's no real mystery as to how the assassin/assassins came down, as an elevator with unknown occupants made it to the first floor shortly after the shooting at a time when the back and side of the building were unguarded.

Years ago I found a post on a newsgroup by David Lifton in which he convincingly argued that Bell was not credible. This led me to go back and read her early statements and compare them with her latter-day statements. And he was absolutely correct. She was not Kennedy's nurse, she was Connally's nurse. Now, some might think, well, she floated back and forth or some such thing, but that's not the way it works. Having spent some time in hospitals, and having three nurses and a bio-med technician in the family, the idea that Connally's nurse would wander over to Kennedy's emergency room and walk up to the front of the table and be shown his head wound by the doctor trying to save Kennedy's life...is LUDICROUS. (Sorry about the all-caps, but I need to stress that Bell was as much as saying the moon is made out of cheese or that alien lizard people are impersonating Joe Biden. it's banana-splits, looney tunes, kind of stuff.) In any event, her latter-day statements, much as the statements of Joe O'Donnell, are simply not reliable and should be avoided.

I didn't recall McClelland telling that to the ARRB, Chris. So I went back and skimmed through the ARRB testimony of the Parkland doctors and found that both Perry and McClelland agreed that they had not been pressured to change their views. Perry even specified that he was always encouraged to tell the truth as he saw it. There's also this. (It's good to re-read these things because there's always something that you notice the second third and fourth time that you might have missed before.) McClelland claimed he was present when Humes called Perry and found out about the throat wound...and it was on Saturday morning.

Thanks, Micah, for helping refresh my memory and forcing me to clarify my point. McClelland was initially of the belief the throat wound was an entrance wound, which implies a shot came from the front. And Dudman was initially of the belief the crack he saw on the windshield was a bullet hole, which implies a shot came from the front. Dudman then wrote his New Republic article (which would have to have been written a week or more before the 12/21 date on the cover) calling the supposed trajectory of the bullets into question. The Secret Service then paid the Parkland doctors a visit and showed them the autopsy report. This led McClelland to call Dudman and tell him the following... Dudman quoting McClelland in a 12-18 article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: That after being told of Kennedy's back wound both "he and Dr. Perry fully accept the Navy Hospital’s explanation of the course of the bullets." "I am fully satisfied that the two bullets that hit him were from behind." "As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to suspect that any shots came from the front." Now, one could easily conclude McClelland was scared or some such thing, and telling Dudman what he knew the guv'ment wanted him to say. But he denied he was pressured into changing his views, and later admitted he saw nothing at the hospital to convince him a shot came from the front. He said instead that it was the Z-film that convinced him the fatal shot came from the front, and not the wound itself.

I've read some of Fred's articles and he makes some good points. He would have a heckuva lot more credibility, IMO, if he interspersed his JFK Revisited critiques with critiques of the numerous biased newspaper articles and TV specials released around the 50th, O'Reilly's book, Reclaiming History, Case Closed, Specter's autobiography, the Warren Report, etc. The point to be made, IMO, is that all sources on this case reveal some bias, and that that bias should be exposed when possible, not that "Oh these people are out to deceive you," and to leave those sharing your conclusions alone. McAdams once told me that men like Stone and Garrison were XXXXX, but that men like Baden and Specter who told numerous falsehoods were not XXXXX, because they did not need to lie. It was/is this juvenile attitude towards the truth that led me to stop writing on McAdams' newsgroup, as the good guy/bad guy thing pushed on his newsgroup and others is more akin to play acting than actually sharing information, IMO. Or maybe I'm missing something. Have Fred or yourself for that matter ever written a critique of Bugliosi, Posner, Specter or Belin where they came across as anything other than shining white knights who told the truth and helped cleanse the world of the filth spewed by the likes of Stone, Garrison, and Lane? Because, if so, perhaps we can start a website comprised of critiques in which LNs criticize LNs and CTs criticize CTs, and break through all this Cowboys and Indians nonsense.

My bad. I meant to say fired from anywhere other than behind. Discovering that Dudman article was one of the prime reasons I came to doubt there was a so-called "blow-out" wound low on the back of the skull, as shown in the so-called "McClelland" drawing. Such a wound would be presumed to be an exit wound and would undoubtedly lead the doctors viewing it to think the shot came from in front of or to the side of the victim.

Ok, let's be clear. I've been at two conferences where McClelland was interviewed and even had a short chat with him myself. And I've also watched him interviewed on TV or YouTube a dozen times or so. And he has said two things which run against the narrative holding that the doctors were threatened and/or the autopsy photos were faked. First, he specified that he was never threatened or pressured to change his views in any way. Second, he insisted that the throat wound in the autopsy photos was as he remembered and that there was no sign of tampering with the neck wound. There is of course a third thing he said that no one wants to deal with. He told Richard Dudman within a week or so of the shooting that while the small throat wound appeared to be an entrance, the head wound gave NO indication of having been fired from the front. And that's not all. He later told Weisberg that Jim Garrison was a crank but that Specter was a good guy. By his own admission, MClelland was not a CT prior to his viewing the Zapruder film in the 70's. I think it's safe to say his impression of a lot of things changed as a result.

While Sorensen was quite the wordsmith, JFK proved in his press conferences and interviews that he had a way with words as well. In retrospect, moreover, I think those focusing on JFK's reliance on Sorensen do so out of a class consciousness. They don't want to believe that someone as rich and spoiled as JFK could also be so handsome, clever, and wise. Heck, if I remember correctly, even Gore Vidal, in claiming JFK was over-rated, admitted he was one of the most charming men he'd ever met. And Gore met everybody.