Lifton and Morningstar, nice but no cigar.

[David Lifton]

and Mike.. both Zap and Sitzman tell us how Zap films the limo coming down Houton and turning onto Elm.. no breaks, no stops...

the mathematics of the corner turn, frame #'s and other films that also do NOT capture the extra wide turn as described by Truly and the fact that the transition from a camera at full stop to instant start and instantly having a perfect interprocket image EXACTLY on the frame lines seems a bit too much to swallow,,,

There is no start up lightened frames as we see on Z001... looks much more like a splice and reflim than a start/stop of the camera.

I am talking about the images we see on Zapruder frame 313 which show ejected bone from the head area. Surely you are not going to say that the people who altered the film added the ejected bone in order to cover up the fact that someone operated on the top of the presidents head sometime between Parkland and Bethesda?

The people who altered the Zapruder film had complete control of the imagery--iinsofar as that was possible given the technology of 1963. This means that they were able to (a) delete frames (and, in principal, at least) delete any "event" they chose to; and (b ), directly responiding to your question, they could pictorially edit any frame, or sequence of frames. This means, with regard to the head shot, that the details of the wounding could be altered. In writing this post, I'm not writing a "master's thesis" as to how such film editing is done, and exactly what equipment was employed. I'm simply asserting my belief that this is what was done. A small group of fully qualified professionals altered the film, and were given the "World War 3" (cock and bull) cover story: i.e., that is this 'n that weren't done, and done quickly, there could be a war with Russia, etc. etc.

If you've read Pig on a Leash, you know that my first exposure to all this occurred in November, 1971, when I went to Dallas with the purpose of interviewing about five of the critical car stop witneses. I am sorry that the film technology available today didn't exist at that time, to record those interviews on camera, because--as Marshall McLuhan said decades ago," The medium is the message." But I was there, I conduted these interviews, and they left no doubt in my mind that the car stopped (momentarily) during the shooting.

Today I know more about this situation, and will be writing more about it in the future.

As I have said many tims (and will repeat here), the most critical evidence in this case--the autopsy and the Zapruder film--were altered so as to present a false picture of what happened to all official investigating bodies, and to the world.

BEST EVIDENCE deals with the interception and alteration of the President's body which is at the heart of the false autopsy.

Much more will be published about that situation in the future, and all I'm saying right now is that a comparable situation exists with regard to the Zapruder film.

DSL

Edited August 17, 2012 by David Lifton

[Daniel Gallup]

We have information that was not available to the autopsy doctors. We know how the head wounds were elaborated.

In this post I present evidence which shows that there were two separate wounds to the head. The back of the head profile is normal at the time of the Moorman photo but is definitely not normal at the time of Zapruder frame 337.

http://educationforu...=45#entry256195

BTW, if the Zapruder film is a fake then the Moorman photo must also be a fake because the Moorman photo also shows missing skull on the top of the head.

Once again, Mike, I believe your interpretation of the Moorman photo is just that-- your interpretation. There are strange things about that photo, especially with regards to the apperances of Kennedy's right shoulder, but again these are matters of photographic interpretation. You are the first person I have found who is dogmatic on the issue of missing skull from top of the skull in Moorman. If you can see this so clearly, why couldn't the Dallas doctors and nurses see it? Ah yes, the urban legend that Jackie restored the top of the skull it its natural shape and form, even though she makes no mention of this area in her WC testimony. Instead she makes mention of the back of the head, precisely where Clint Hill, Nurse Bowron who rushed to the limo as it came to a halt at Parkland, and all the Dallas doctors and nurses located the wound.

[Mike Rago]

We have information that was not available to the autopsy doctors. We know how the head wounds were elaborated.

In this post I present evidence which shows that there were two separate wounds to the head. The back of the head profile is normal at the time of the Moorman photo but is definitely not normal at the time of Zapruder frame 337.

http://educationforu...=45#entry256195

BTW, if the Zapruder film is a fake then the Moorman photo must also be a fake because the Moorman photo also shows missing skull on the top of the head.

Once again, Mike, I believe your interpretation of the Moorman photo is just that-- your interpretation. There are strange things about that photo, especially with regards to the apperances of Kennedy's right shoulder, but again these are matters of photographic interpretation. You are the first person I have found who is dogmatic on the issue of missing skull from top of the skull in Moorman. If you can see this so clearly, why couldn't the Dallas doctors and nurses see it? Ah yes, the urban legend that Jackie restored the top of the skull it its natural shape and form, even though she makes no mention of this area in her WC testimony. Instead she makes mention of the back of the head, precisely where Clint Hill, Nurse Bowron who rushed to the limo as it came to a halt at Parkland, and all the Dallas doctors and nurses located the wound.

Thanks for bring up the Moorman photo. Yes, I do believe the Moorman photo shows missing skull. Frankly I think it is obvious. And we know that the Moorman photo was published nationally a day after the assassination so would not have been altered. That evidence has always been there, hidden away in the photographic record.

The Zapruder film shows skull fragments being ejected from the presidents head. The Moorman photo confirms that.

Edited August 6, 2012 by Mike Rago

[Pat Speer]

I don't know what Dr. McClelland said in later years, but he clearly believed, in November 1963, that a bullet exited from the wound he described at the back of the head; repeated essentially the same thing when he testified (1964); and certainly said that to me and Pat Valentino when we conducted a detailed filmed interview in 1989.

The problem with this case is that many folks said one thing in 1963/1964, and then, years later, read books or articles, formed opinions about what happened, and then those opinions affected their own recollections. Always its best to deal with the earliest recorded recollection. That's true in a simple auto accident, and its also true in the case of the Kennedy assassination.

DSL

7/30/12; 4 AM PDT

Los Angeles, California

The reasons you think we should believe McClelland saw a wound on the far back of Kennedy's head are the very reasons I don't believe he saw such a wound: his earliest statements.

"The cause of death was due to massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple." Dr. McClelland's report on the death of President Kennedy, written on 11-22-63.

"I am fully satisfied that the two bullets that hit him were from behind." Dr. Robert McClelland, as quoted by Richard Dudman in the 12-18-63 St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

If you know of any statements by McClelland made prior to his Warren Commission testimony, in which he indicated he saw an exit wound on the far back of Kennedy's head, I'd appreciate your bringing them to my attention.

Pat, "gunshot of the left temple" does not specifiy the direction; in fact, in plain and simple language, the closest meaning would be: "gunshot wound to the left temple." As for Dudman's dispatch, this is three weeks after the assassination, and we are dependent upon Dudman's accurate reporting, how he stated the question,etc. Recall Pat, that the Dallas doctors to the best of our knowledge were not aware of any wound in the back on the day of the assassination. Carrico did a manual examination underneath his clothing and found nothing. Rather, the witnesses to the anterior throat wound were unanimous in describing it as having the appearance of an entrance wound, at least that day. Then the Secret Service came and presented Perry with the autopsy report that it was an exit wound. I am rather certain this is prior to Dec. 18. Depending on the dates when pressure was exerted on the Dallas doctors to change their original opinion, McClelland's utterance to Dudman may simply reflect that pressure, and a desire to avoid controversy. That he gave the WC such a careful description of the wound in the back of the head I think is sufficient to challenge your interpretation of his report.

McClelland is still alive. He has spoken on what he witnessed many times. He has made it quite clear that he did not see an entrance on the left temple, and that he, in fact, did not see an "entrance" anywhere on Kennedy's head. He saw ONE head wound and only one head wound. His testimony indicated that this wound was toward the back of Kennedy's head. And yet prior to his testimony, McClelland had told Dudman--whose reporting on this has never been questioned--that he'd seen no evidence the shot came from the front.

This was no one time thing, mind you. McClelland has repeated many times since that he didn't believe the fatal head shot was fired from the front until he saw the Zapruder film, and noticed the back-and-to-the-left motion of Kennedy's head.

McClelland's statements, taken in sum, do not support that he saw a gaping hole low on the back of Kennedy's head.

Your post(s) are very misleading.

McClelland talked aboutt he gaping hole in the back of JFK's head in this Warren Commision testimony (which if so detailed that JK researcher used to refer to it as a "gift to history"); in his interview with Stanhope Gould and Sylvia Chase, in the fall of 1988 (in a major TV documentary in which I was the medical consultant); in the Spring 1989 filmed interview filmed by me (and Pat Valentino) in which he affirmed the accuracy of the so-called "McClelland drawing."

So. . .what on earth are you talking about?

As to his original written statement that JFK died of a gunshot wound of the left temple, the only reasonable inference is that, in that document, written on the afternoon of 11/22/63, he was talking of an entry bullet wound which he believed he saw.

Admittedly, he did not mention the gaping exit wound at the back of the head in that original written statement; but he certainly was NOT talking about a bullet exit wound in the left temple (or do you believe that is what he was reporting?)

As to the exit wound at the bak of the head, and what McClelland said about that: I don't know what venue you are taking your quotes from, but they are contrary to (a) McClelland's Warren Commission testimony; (b ) his 1988 interview with Stanhope Gould and Sylvia Chase; and my own Spring 1989 filmed interview.

Stanhope, you may know (or perhaps you don't) was the producer of the awrd winning Watergate coverage, during the Cronkite era at CBS-TV network.

After the interviews of the key Best Evidence witnesses, he made a public statement in SanFrancisco that David Lifton's book and video presented couroom quality evidence that President Kennedy's body had been intercepted between Dallas and Bethesda.

I truly to not have the time to waste debating what has been established decades ago. Only by putting on some peculiar lense is it possible for you to filter the data so that:

(a) There was not a gaping exit wound at the back of the head (despite McClelland's WC testimony, and the filmed interviews I ahve cited)

(b ) McClelland, who was a key witness to this,and made clear that he was, in a nmber of venues, said the opposite (!).

Have some respect for the data, please.

Have you bothered to watch the TV documentary which features his observations that there was a bullet exit woiund at the bak of JFK's head,and taht he saw the erebellum exposed and damaged. . .? Do you think he made all that up??

DSL

Yes, David. Let us all have some respect for the data. YOU said "Always its best to deal with the earliest recorded recollection." I then pointed out that McClelland's earliest recollections were that the wound was of the left temple, and that he was fully satisfied the shots came from behind.

Your claim that "the only reasonable inference" about McClelland's initial claim the wound was of the left temple "is that, in that document, written on the afternoon of 11/22/63, he was talking of an entry bullet wound which he believed he saw" is also off target.

McClelland saw ONE wound, a large one. All of the Parkland doctors described this one wound, albeit in different ways. None of them described this wound as an entrance wound for a bullet exiting elsewhere on the skull. This means the only reasonable inference from McClelland's statement is that he confused his left with his right, and meant to say the wound was of the right temple.

Yes, David, the data suggests he saw the wound depicted in the autopsy photos, and no amount of spin can change that.

Now, do I think it silly or wacky that you and others explored the possibility McClelland's testimony about this wound was accurate? No, not at all. There is an inconsistency in the record, that you, to your credit, tried to explain.

But the Parkland doctors by and large disavowed the statements and testimony in which they'd placed the wound on the back of the head, and said they'd been mistaken.

You can't just assume they all lied, in my opinion. Not when McClelland stood by his Warren Commission testimony, with no negative ramifications.

At least I can't.

Edited August 7, 2012 by Pat Speer

[Daniel Gallup]

Pat, you have not answered my point about pressure the Secret Service applied to the Dallas doctors, within a week, if memory serves, of the assassination, and well before Dudman's interview with McClelland. If your interpreation of McClelland is correct, he should have rejoiced at having his exit wound in the front of the head corroborated by Bethesda, or at least whatever the Secret Service might have told him. But more to the point, since criticism of McClelland over the years has been his staunch refusal to budge from his WC testimony which is quite explicit about where the wound was and the type of brain tissue "blasted out," why wouldn't he simply say, "Oh, I'm sorry, Pat's right. I really saw only one wound, and it was in the left (or right) temple, right where the autopsy pictures show it." He'd be off the hook and the Establishment would love him. His fellow Dallas doctors who knuckled under would embrace him. But Pat, that's not really what he's done, has he? And we have to ask ourselves "Why?" Whether McClelland thought he was shot from the front or back does nothing to mitigate the force of his WC testimony, and his subsequent reiteration of same to various authors over the years. Could it be that Pat Speer's interpretation of the events surrounding McClelland have led him to a false conclusion, or is McClelland just pulling our collective chains?

[James R Gordon]

But the Parkland doctors by and large disavowed the statements and testimony in which they'd placed the wound on the back of the head, and said they'd been mistaken.

Pat,

That is a fair point that you make. However, this change in position by the Parkland doctors, how much of it was based on an actual change of view and how much on having read the Autopsy report?

In normal circumstances, as I know you are aware of because you have said it numerous times, the autopsy report tops observation. The change in the Parkland doctors views was because the Autopsy report said something different to what they initially witnessed.

In his WC testimony Malcolm Perry commented that the Pleural cavity had not been damaged. When being interviewed by the HSCA he was asked how he knew the cavity had not been damaged. He replied that he had read it in the autopsy report.

I feel there are now areas in the medical testimony when we may need to go back to the Parkland doctors view. I say this because, in my view, in the essential Bethesda record there are all sorts of conflicts that don't make sense. In normal circumstances one would never dream of questioning an autopsy report or the testimony of the autopsy pathologist. However in this case I am beginning to do so.

I absolutely agree with you analysis of McClelland's observation of the left temple.

James

[Pat Speer]

Pat, you have not answered my point about pressure the Secret Service applied to the Dallas doctors, within a week, if memory serves, of the assassination, and well before Dudman's interview with McClelland. If your interpreation of McClelland is correct, he should have rejoiced at having his exit wound in the front of the head corroborated by Bethesda, or at least whatever the Secret Service might have told him. But more to the point, since criticism of McClelland over the years has been his staunch refusal to budge from his WC testimony which is quite explicit about where the wound was and the type of brain tissue "blasted out," why wouldn't he simply say, "Oh, I'm sorry, Pat's right. I really saw only one wound, and it was in the left (or right) temple, right where the autopsy pictures show it." He'd be off the hook and the Establishment would love him. His fellow Dallas doctors who knuckled under would embrace him. But Pat, that's not really what he's done, has he? And we have to ask ourselves "Why?" Whether McClelland thought he was shot from the front or back does nothing to mitigate the force of his WC testimony, and his subsequent reiteration of same to various authors over the years. Could it be that Pat Speer's interpretation of the events surrounding McClelland have led him to a false conclusion, or is McClelland just pulling our collective chains?

Daniel, it was McClelland who blew the whistle regarding the Secret Service's trip to Parkland. He blew the whistle to Bill Burrus on 12-11...and Richard Dudman a week later, in the very article I've cited.

What you seem to be missing is that the SS trip to Parkland had nothing to do with the head wound, as no one, at that time, even realized the Parkland doctors described the head wound in a different manner than the Bethesda doctors. The problem at that time was the throat wound. The Parkland doctors had described it as an entrance, in the first press conference, and afterwards. The SS thought they should stop doing this. So Elmer Moore paid Parkland a visit with a copy of the Bethesda autopsy report.

McClelland was excited about this, and, apparently, called Burrus.

In this context, then, I don't see how you can ignore McClelland's claim he was satisfied no shots came from the front. Dudman was at that time pushing that a shot came through the windshield. He would have been glad to publish McClelland's claim the BACK of Kennedy's head was blown off, should McClelland have claimed as much.

As far as the rest of your post, I'm really not sure what you're talking about. McClelland, unlike Crenshaw, was never kicked around by his fellow doctors. He said he thought he saw cerebellum. He never said the doctors who'd said they'd seen cerebellum--but then admitted they could have been mistaken--were lying because they were scared. And therein lies the difference.

P.S. Here's a little background on Moore's trip to Parkland. Note that no one mentions the head wound.

From patspeer.com, chapter 1b:

a 12-13 teletype message from Gordon Shanklin of the Dallas FBI office to Hoover revealed that the FBI still hadn't even read the autopsy report. The message reads "An article appearing in the evening Dallas Texas newspaper prepared by staff writer Bill Burrus dateline Bethesda Maryland reflects a still unannounced autopsy report from the US Naval Hospital reflecting President Kennedy was shot in the back and the bullet, which had a hard metal jacket, exited through his throat. This does not agree with the autopsy findings at the Bethesda Hospital as reported on page two eight four of the report of SA Robert P. Gemberling at Dallas on December 10, last, which reflects an opening was found in the back, that appeared to be a bullet hole, and probing of this hole determined the distance traveled by this missile was short as the end of the opening could be felt by the examining doctor's finger. The Bureau may want to have Baltimore obtain the unannounced autopsy report from Bethesda, Maryland, and disseminate to the Bureau and Dallas."

The Burrus article referenced by Shanklin ran in the 12-12 Dallas-Times Herald. It seems clear the emergency room doctors of Parkland Hospital were his primary source. The records of Secret Service Agent Elmer Moore reflect that he spoke to these doctors on 12-11. On 12-18, one of the few members of the media to smell conspiracy, Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote an article about this friendly visit by the Secret Service to the doctors. It reads: "Secret Service Gets Revision of Kennedy Wound. After visit by agents, doctors say shot was from rear...(the Secret Service) obtained a reversal of their original view that the bullet in his (Kennedy's) neck entered from the front. The investigators did so by showing the surgeons a document described as an autopsy report from the United States Naval Hospital at Bethesda. The surgeons changed their original view to conform with the report they were shown." Months later, after speaking to one of the Dallas doctors, Dr. Robert McClelland, Mark Lane would relate "the agents had a copy of the autopsy report on their laps but refused to allow the physicians to see it" and that "after a three hour session with the physicians the Secret Service Agents were able to leave the room and to state that the physicians in the Parkland Memorial Hospital all announced and agreed that they were in error when they said that the bullet wound in the throat was an entrance wound."

p.p.s. Here's a discussion of McClelland.

PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

ADMISSION NOTE

DATE AND HOUR Nov. 22, 1963 4:45 P.M. DOCTOR: Robert N. McClelland

Statement Regarding Assassination of President Kennedy

At approximately 12:45 PM on the above date I was called from the second floor of Parkland Hospital and went immediately to the Emergency Operating Room. When I arrived President Kennedy was being attended by Drs Malcolm Perry, Charles Baxter, James Carrico, and Ronald Jones. The President was at the time comatose from a massive gunshot wound of the head with a fragment wound of the trachea. An endotracheal tube and assisted respiration was started immediately by Dr. Carrico on Duty in the EOR when the President arrived. Drs. Perry, Baxter, and I then performed a tracheotomy for respiratory distress and tracheal injury and Dr. Jones and Paul Peters inserted bilateral anterior chest tubes for pneumothoracis secondary to the tracheomediastinal injury. Simultaneously Dr. Jones had started 3 cut-downs giving blood and fluids immediately, In spite of this, at 12:55 he was pronounced dead by Dr. Kemp Clark the neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery who arrived immediately after I did. The cause of death was due to massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple. He was pronounced dead after external cardiac message failed and ECG activity was gone.

Robert N. McClelland M.D.

Asst. Prof. of Surgery

Southwestern Med.

School of Univ of Tex.

Dallas, Texas

(Note: in this, his earliest statement on the assassination, Dr. McClelland reveals that he was easily confused and prone to speculation. First of all, he gets himself all turned around and mistakenly says there was a wound in the left temple. He says nothing of a wound on the back of the head or behind the ear. As but one head wound was noted at Parkland, and as no competent doctor would mention a wound he did not see while failing to mention the one he did, it seems probable McClelland meant to say this wound was of the right temple, not left. Second of all, he states, without offering any supporting evidence, that the throat wound was a fragment wound. This shows he was prone to speculation.

In light of the fact many conspiracy theorists cite McClelland as the most reliable of the Parkland witnesses, McClelland's next statements are even more intriguing. McClelland was the prime source for the 12-18-63 article by Richard Dudman published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in which the Secret Service's visit to the Parkland doctors, and its attempt to get them to agree Kennedy's throat wound was an exit, was first revealed. And yet McClelland told Dudman that after being told of the wound on Kennedy's back "he and Dr. Perry fully accept the Navy Hospital’s explanation of the course of the bullets." And yet he told Dudman "I am fully satisfied that the two bullets that hit him were from behind." And yet he told Dudman "As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to suspect that any shots came from the front." Repeat...NO reason to suspect any shots came from the front... That's right...in the very article most conspiracy theorists believe first exposed the government's cover-up of Kennedy's wounds, Dr. McClelland, the man they consider the most credible of the Parkland witnesses, spelled out--and made CRYSTAL CLEAR--that he did not think the large head wound he observed was an exit wound on the far back of the head.

This is confirmed yet again by the first article on the wounds published in a medical journal. Three Patients at Parkland, published in the January 1964 Texas State Journal of Medicine, was based upon the Parkland doctors' 11-22 reports, and repeated their descriptions of Kennedy's wounds and treatment word for word. Well, almost. In one of its few deviations, it changed Dr. McClelland's initial claim Kennedy was pronounced dead "at 12:55" to his being "pronounced dead at 1:00." This was an obvious correction of an innocent mistake. In what one can only assume was another correction of an innocent mistake, moreover, it re-routed Dr. McClelland's initial claim "The cause of death was due to massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple" to the more acceptable "The cause of death, according to Dr. McClelland was the massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the right side of the head." Right side of the head. Not back of the head. While some might wish to believe the writer and/or editor of this article took it upon himself to make this change without consulting Dr. McClelland, and that he'd changed it to fit the "official" story, the fact of the matter is there was NO official story on the head wounds at this point, beyond the descriptions of the wound in the reports of McClelland's colleagues published elsewhere in the article. And these, in sum, described a wound on the back of the head. It seems likely, then, that McClelland himself was responsible for this change.

In any event, on March 21, 1964, Dr. McClelland, testified before the Warren Commission. In contrast to his earlier statements, he now claimed: “As I took the position at the head of the table that l have already described, to help out with the tracheotomy, I was in such a position that I could very closely examine the head wound, and I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted. It had been shattered ... the parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seemed to be fractured almost along its right posterior half, as well as some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral half, and this sprung open the bones that I mentioned in such a way that you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that probably a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out.”

Since Kennedy was by all reports lying on his back, it is impossible to understand how McClelland could look down into a wound on the back of Kennedy’s head. It seems likely then that McClelland, as Clark, was confused by the rotation of Kennedy’s skull. Incidentally, McClelland, while insisting that the wound he saw was posterior, would nevertheless come to defend the legitimacy of the autopsy photos, telling the television show Nova in 1988 that ""I find no discrepancy between the wounds as they're shown very vividly in these photographs and what I remember very vividly." He has tried to explain this inconsistency. In both his Nova appearance and ARRB testimony he ventured that the back of the head photo depicts sagging scalp pulled over a large occipito-parietal wound. Of course, this assertion is utterly fantastic and unsupported by every book on wound ballistics. Scalp overlying explosive wounds to the skull does not stretch and sag, it tears. No such tears were noted on the back of Kennedy's head at autopsy, and none are shown in the autopsy photos whose legitimacy McClelland defends.

[David Lifton]

Pat, you have not answered my point about pressure the Secret Service applied to the Dallas doctors, within a week, if memory serves, of the assassination, and well before Dudman's interview with McClelland. If your interpreation of McClelland is correct, he should have rejoiced at having his exit wound in the front of the head corroborated by Bethesda, or at least whatever the Secret Service might have told him. But more to the point, since criticism of McClelland over the years has been his staunch refusal to budge from his WC testimony which is quite explicit about where the wound was and the type of brain tissue "blasted out," why wouldn't he simply say, "Oh, I'm sorry, Pat's right. I really saw only one wound, and it was in the left (or right) temple, right where the autopsy pictures show it." He'd be off the hook and the Establishment would love him. His fellow Dallas doctors who knuckled under would embrace him. But Pat, that's not really what he's done, has he? And we have to ask ourselves "Why?" Whether McClelland thought he was shot from the front or back does nothing to mitigate the force of his WC testimony, and his subsequent reiteration of same to various authors over the years. Could it be that Pat Speer's interpretation of the events surrounding McClelland have led him to a false conclusion, or is McClelland just pulling our collective chains?

Daniel, it was McClelland who blew the whistle regarding the Secret Service's trip to Parkland. He blew the whistle to Bill Burrus on 12-11...and Richard Dudman a week later, in the very article I've cited.

What you seem to be missing is that the SS trip to Parkland had nothing to do with the head wound, as no one, at that time, even realized the Parkland doctors described the head wound in a different manner than the Bethesda doctors. The problem at that time was the throat wound. The Parkland doctors had described it as an entrance, in the first press conference, and afterwards. The SS thought they should stop doing this. So Elmer Moore paid Parkland a visit with a copy of the Bethesda autopsy report.

McClelland was excited about this, and, apparently, called Burrus.

In this context, then, I don't see how you can ignore McClelland's claim he was satisfied no shots came from the front. Dudman was at that time pushing that a shot came through the windshield. He would have been glad to publish McClelland's claim the BACK of Kennedy's head was blown off, should McClelland have claimed as much.

As far as the rest of your post, I'm really not sure what you're talking about. McClelland, unlike Crenshaw, was never kicked around by his fellow doctors. He said he thought he saw cerebellum. He never said the doctors who'd said they'd seen cerebellum--but then admitted they could have been mistaken--were lying because they were scared. And therein lies the difference.

P.S. Here's a little background on Moore's trip to Parkland. Note that no one mentions the head wound.

From patspeer.com, chapter 1b:

a 12-13 teletype message from Gordon Shanklin of the Dallas FBI office to Hoover revealed that the FBI still hadn't even read the autopsy report. The message reads "An article appearing in the evening Dallas Texas newspaper prepared by staff writer Bill Burrus dateline Bethesda Maryland reflects a still unannounced autopsy report from the US Naval Hospital reflecting President Kennedy was shot in the back and the bullet, which had a hard metal jacket, exited through his throat. This does not agree with the autopsy findings at the Bethesda Hospital as reported on page two eight four of the report of SA Robert P. Gemberling at Dallas on December 10, last, which reflects an opening was found in the back, that appeared to be a bullet hole, and probing of this hole determined the distance traveled by this missile was short as the end of the opening could be felt by the examining doctor's finger. The Bureau may want to have Baltimore obtain the unannounced autopsy report from Bethesda, Maryland, and disseminate to the Bureau and Dallas."

The Burrus article referenced by Shanklin ran in the 12-12 Dallas-Times Herald. It seems clear the emergency room doctors of Parkland Hospital were his primary source. The records of Secret Service Agent Elmer Moore reflect that he spoke to these doctors on 12-11. On 12-18, one of the few members of the media to smell conspiracy, Richard Dudman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote an article about this friendly visit by the Secret Service to the doctors. It reads: "Secret Service Gets Revision of Kennedy Wound. After visit by agents, doctors say shot was from rear...(the Secret Service) obtained a reversal of their original view that the bullet in his (Kennedy's) neck entered from the front. The investigators did so by showing the surgeons a document described as an autopsy report from the United States Naval Hospital at Bethesda. The surgeons changed their original view to conform with the report they were shown." Months later, after speaking to one of the Dallas doctors, Dr. Robert McClelland, Mark Lane would relate "the agents had a copy of the autopsy report on their laps but refused to allow the physicians to see it" and that "after a three hour session with the physicians the Secret Service Agents were able to leave the room and to state that the physicians in the Parkland Memorial Hospital all announced and agreed that they were in error when they said that the bullet wound in the throat was an entrance wound."

p.p.s. Here's a discussion of McClelland.

PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

ADMISSION NOTE

DATE AND HOUR Nov. 22, 1963 4:45 P.M. DOCTOR: Robert N. McClelland

Statement Regarding Assassination of President Kennedy

At approximately 12:45 PM on the above date I was called from the second floor of Parkland Hospital and went immediately to the Emergency Operating Room. When I arrived President Kennedy was being attended by Drs Malcolm Perry, Charles Baxter, James Carrico, and Ronald Jones. The President was at the time comatose from a massive gunshot wound of the head with a fragment wound of the trachea. An endotracheal tube and assisted respiration was started immediately by Dr. Carrico on Duty in the EOR when the President arrived. Drs. Perry, Baxter, and I then performed a tracheotomy for respiratory distress and tracheal injury and Dr. Jones and Paul Peters inserted bilateral anterior chest tubes for pneumothoracis secondary to the tracheomediastinal injury. Simultaneously Dr. Jones had started 3 cut-downs giving blood and fluids immediately, In spite of this, at 12:55 he was pronounced dead by Dr. Kemp Clark the neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery who arrived immediately after I did. The cause of death was due to massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple. He was pronounced dead after external cardiac message failed and ECG activity was gone.

Robert N. McClelland M.D.

Asst. Prof. of Surgery

Southwestern Med.

School of Univ of Tex.

Dallas, Texas

(Note: in this, his earliest statement on the assassination, Dr. McClelland reveals that he was easily confused and prone to speculation. First of all, he gets himself all turned around and mistakenly says there was a wound in the left temple. He says nothing of a wound on the back of the head or behind the ear. As but one head wound was noted at Parkland, and as no competent doctor would mention a wound he did not see while failing to mention the one he did, it seems probable McClelland meant to say this wound was of the right temple, not left. Second of all, he states, without offering any supporting evidence, that the throat wound was a fragment wound. This shows he was prone to speculation.

In light of the fact many conspiracy theorists cite McClelland as the most reliable of the Parkland witnesses, McClelland's next statements are even more intriguing. McClelland was the prime source for the 12-18-63 article by Richard Dudman published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in which the Secret Service's visit to the Parkland doctors, and its attempt to get them to agree Kennedy's throat wound was an exit, was first revealed. And yet McClelland told Dudman that after being told of the wound on Kennedy's back "he and Dr. Perry fully accept the Navy Hospital’s explanation of the course of the bullets." And yet he told Dudman "I am fully satisfied that the two bullets that hit him were from behind." And yet he told Dudman "As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to suspect that any shots came from the front." Repeat...NO reason to suspect any shots came from the front... That's right...in the very article most conspiracy theorists believe first exposed the government's cover-up of Kennedy's wounds, Dr. McClelland, the man they consider the most credible of the Parkland witnesses, spelled out--and made CRYSTAL CLEAR--that he did not think the large head wound he observed was an exit wound on the far back of the head.

This is confirmed yet again by the first article on the wounds published in a medical journal. Three Patients at Parkland, published in the January 1964 Texas State Journal of Medicine, was based upon the Parkland doctors' 11-22 reports, and repeated their descriptions of Kennedy's wounds and treatment word for word. Well, almost. In one of its few deviations, it changed Dr. McClelland's initial claim Kennedy was pronounced dead "at 12:55" to his being "pronounced dead at 1:00." This was an obvious correction of an innocent mistake. In what one can only assume was another correction of an innocent mistake, moreover, it re-routed Dr. McClelland's initial claim "The cause of death was due to massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple" to the more acceptable "The cause of death, according to Dr. McClelland was the massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the right side of the head." Right side of the head. Not back of the head. While some might wish to believe the writer and/or editor of this article took it upon himself to make this change without consulting Dr. McClelland, and that he'd changed it to fit the "official" story, the fact of the matter is there was NO official story on the head wounds at this point, beyond the descriptions of the wound in the reports of McClelland's colleagues published elsewhere in the article. And these, in sum, described a wound on the back of the head. It seems likely, then, that McClelland himself was responsible for this change.

In any event, on March 21, 1964, Dr. McClelland, testified before the Warren Commission. In contrast to his earlier statements, he now claimed: “As I took the position at the head of the table that l have already described, to help out with the tracheotomy, I was in such a position that I could very closely examine the head wound, and I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted. It had been shattered ... the parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seemed to be fractured almost along its right posterior half, as well as some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral half, and this sprung open the bones that I mentioned in such a way that you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that probably a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out.”

Since Kennedy was by all reports lying on his back, it is impossible to understand how McClelland could look down into a wound on the back of Kennedy’s head. It seems likely then that McClelland, as Clark, was confused by the rotation of Kennedy’s skull. Incidentally, McClelland, while insisting that the wound he saw was posterior, would nevertheless come to defend the legitimacy of the autopsy photos, telling the television show Nova in 1988 that ""I find no discrepancy between the wounds as they're shown very vividly in these photographs and what I remember very vividly." He has tried to explain this inconsistency. In both his Nova appearance and ARRB testimony he ventured that the back of the head photo depicts sagging scalp pulled over a large occipito-parietal wound. Of course, this assertion is utterly fantastic and unsupported by every book on wound ballistics. Scalp overlying explosive wounds to the skull does not stretch and sag, it tears. No such tears were noted on the back of Kennedy's head at autopsy, and none are shown in the autopsy photos whose legitimacy McClelland defends.

Pat,

Where do you get the idea that Dr. McClelland was Burrus' source?

I interviewed Burrus at length--in person, in New York City--in 1977 or 1978. It was all tape recorded and I spent an hour or more with him, and then spent hours transcribing it Let me assure you that Dr. McClelland was NOT Burrus' source. (Where are you getting that idea from??)

Furthermore, the person who was Burrus' source --and I am doing this from memory, today, in 2012--was providing Burrus with authoritative information about the Bethesda autopsy conclusion. The source was either Dr. Clark or, more likely, Dr. Tom Shires. One or the other, and I have a sheaf full of notes about this, and about the identity of a third party who (I learned, from Burrus) knew who the source was, and who I was attempting to contact. (But there were 100 other things going on at the time, and I never did.)

In addition, this article was either the same one--or within a day of the one--that reported the curb shot, and raised the possibility that a single bullet passed back to front through Kennedy's neck, and then went on to strike Connally. (Yes, in mid-December, 1963--and that was either in the Dallas Times Herald or the Dallas Morning News. Again, the Single Bullet Theory was already formulated, conceptually, and was being "floated" in this news account).

Now, focusing on McClelland. . . :

For reasons I do not understand, you are either misreporting or misunderstanding what McClelland (a) told the Warren Commission, when under oath; and (b ) told Dudman and (c ) told me, when I interviewed him, on camera, in 1989.

On November 22, McClelland said the President died of a gunshot wound of the left temple. I have always assumed that sentence applied to the bullet entrance wound on JFK's head. (Certainly, he was not referring to an exit wound!)

The thrust of the Dudman stories, in mid-December, was that one or more Secret Service agents were visiting Parkland Hospital and showing the Dallas doctors the Bethesda autopsy report, in order to stop them from continuing to state that Kennedy was struck from the front. This is obvious--and its part of the public record. That's what Dudman's story is all about.

When under oath during his Warren Commission deposition, McClelland was desribing, in detail, the bullet exit wound at the rear of the President's head.

In the fall of 1988, he described the same bullet exit wound when interviewed by Stanhope Gould and Sylvia Chase in their interview of McClelland for their KRON-TV documentary. Six months later, in 1989, when I (and Pat Valentino) interviewed him, on camera, he described in detail the same bullet exit wound at the rear of JFK's head.

You're behaving like a philosopher who is playing games with the English language, because you apparently don't like what's been stated in plain English.

In the face of a plethora of evidence that the President's body was intercepted--and the wounds altered--here you are whining and attempting to impeach McClelland's testimony by asserting as a fact that McClelland couldn't have observed what he said he did.

From your post: "Since Kennedy was by all lreports lying on his back, it is impoossible to understand how McClelland could look down into a wound on the back of Kennedy's head..."

Yet he testified, and quite explicitly, that he could see exactly what he testifed to.

Why should anyone care about your hypotheses--and conjecture(s)--about what McClelland could "not have seen" when he testified under oath, in March, 1964, as to what he did in fact see??

For reasons I don't understand, you have spent hundreds of hours of your time writing tendentious posts and text attempting to claim the historical record is something other than it is.

Of course, you're entitled to do this--but I hope people reading your posts understand the game you are playing.

One other thing: for anyone who wants a vivid description of the wound at the back of President Kennedy's head, just see Chapter 13, of Best Evidence, and the account of Dr. Peters, who described to me, in November, 1966, his vivid recollection that (a) it was size of a "hen's egg" and (b ) how he could see the occipital lobes of the brain resting on the foramen magnum (the hole in the base of the skull, through which the spinal cord enters and goes to the brain.

Here's my quesiton to you, Pat Speer: Why to you keep playing these games, and ignoring the accounts of the witnesses who were there, and attempting to substitute, instead, your various theories, conjectures, and hypotheses as to why they couldn't have seen what they testified they observed?

Do you really believe your conjectures about what this or that witness could "not have seen" really trump the sworn statements of what they did in fact see?

DSL

8/10/12; 12:10 AM

Los Angeles, California

Edited August 17, 2012 by David Lifton

[Pat Speer]

My responses in bold.

Pat,

Where do you get the idea that Dr. McClelland was Burrus' source?

Since McClelland spoke on the record with Dudman, I assumed he had spoken to Burrus as well.

I interviewed Burrus at length--in person, in New York City--in 1977 or 1978. It was all tape recorded and I spent an hour or more with him, and then spent hours transcribing it Let me assure you that Dr. McClelland was NOT Burrus' source. (Where are you getting that idea from??)

Furthermore, the person who was Burrus' source --and I am doing this from memory, today, in 2012--was providing Burrus with authoritative information about the Bethesda autopsy conclusion. The source was either Dr. Clark or, more likely, Dr. Tom Shires. One or the other, and I have a sheaf full of notes about this, and about the identity of a third party who (I learned, from Burrus) knew who the source was, and who I was attempting to contact. (But there were 100 other things going on at the time, and I never did.)

The record indicates that Elmer Moore spoke to a number of the Parkland doctors, and used the autopsy report to convince them the neck wound had been an exit, not an entrance. He told them all the same thing. McClelland was one of these doctors.

In addition, this article was either the same one--or within a day of the one--that reported the curb shot, and raised the possibility that a single bullet passed back to front through Kennedy's neck, and then went on to strike Connally. (Yes, in mid-December, 1963--and that was either in the Dallas Times Herald or the Dallas Morning News. Again, the Single Bullet Theory was already formulated, conceptually, and was being "floated" in this news account).

Now, focusing on McClelland. . . :

For reasons I do not understand, you are either misreporting or misunderstanding what McClelland (a) told the Warren Commission, when under oath; and (b ) told Dudman and (c ) told me, when I interviewed him, on camera, in 1989.

Not at all. What a strange charge. I have never disputed that McClelland came to believe the wound was on the far back of Kennedy's head. His earliest statements, however, do not support that. His statement to Dudman that "As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to suspect that any shots came from the front," is, in my impression, thoroughly at odds with his subsequent testimony.

On November 22, McClelland said the President died of a gunshot wound of the left temple. I have always assumed that sentence applied to the bullet entrance wound on JFK's head. (Certainly, he was not referring to an exit wound!)

Your assumption is, in my opinion, 100% incorrect. Clark--the expert--inspected the head wound and thought it was either a wound of both entrance and exit, or an exit for a bullet entering Kennedy's throat. No one else at Parkland assumed the bullet creating this wound entered elsewhere on the skull, or claimed to see such an entrance. They saw one wound, and one wound only. Unless you believe that McClelland, and McClelland alone, observed a large wound on Kennedy's left temple, the most logical assumption then is that he confused his right with his left.

The thrust of the Dudman stories, in mid-December, was that one or more Secret Service agents were visiting Parkland Hospital and showing the Dallas doctors the Bethesda autopsy report, in order to stop them from continuing to state that Kennedy was struck from the front. This is obvious--and its part of the public record. That's what Dudman's story is all about.

Yep. Moore tried to get them to agree that the throat wound was an exit. There is no evidence whatsoever, however, to indicate that he tried to get them to change their opinions regarding the head wound. Nor that Specter tried to get them change their opinions regarding the head wound for their Warren Commission testimony. The Parkland/Bethesda split which you subsequently identified had apparently gone unnoticed.

When under oath during his Warren Commission deposition, McClelland was desribing, in detail, the bullet exit wound at the rear of the President's head.

In the fall of 1988, he described the same bullet exit wound when interviewed by Stanhope Gould and Sylvia Chase in their interview of McClelland for their KRON-TV documentary. Six months later, in 1989, when I (and Pat Valentino) interviewed him, on camera, he described in detail the same bullet exit wound at the rear of JFK's head.

You're behaving like a philosopher who is playing games with the English language, because you apparently don't like what's been stated in plain English.

I beg to differ. We have a bunch of people witnessing something, and then describing it in different ways. Many of them, over the years, contradicted themselves. The only way to understand what really happened then is to analyze the sum of the witness statements. Cherry-picking a few here and there, or prioritizing these statements based upon one's personal connection to them, might lead one to a desired result, but not to where the judgment of history should ultimately reside.

In the face of a plethora of evidence that the President's body was intercepted--and the wounds altered--here you are whining and attempting to impeach McClelland's testimony by asserting as a fact that McClelland couldn't have observed what he said he did.

From your post: "Since Kennedy was by all lreports lying on his back, it is impoossible to understand how McClelland could look down into a wound on the back of Kennedy's head..."

Yet he testified, and quite explicitly, that he could see exactly what he testifed to.

And yet a number of his co-workers--Carrico and Jenkins come to mind--said he couldn't have seen what he said he saw... Which leads us back to credibility--and the fact McClelland ORIGINALLY claimed the wound was of the left temple.

Why should anyone care about your hypotheses--and conjecture(s)--about what McClelland could "not have seen" when he testified under oath, in March, 1964, as to what he did in fact see??

It's not my hypothesis, but the hypothesis of those with him in the room.

For reasons I don't understand, you have spent hundreds of hours of your time writing tendentious posts and text attempting to claim the historical record is something other than it is.

For you, the historical record stopped with the publication of Best Evidence. For me, it continued after. It's amazing to me that someone claiming to have such concern for the historical record refuses to acknowledge that the vast majority of Parkland and Bethesda witnesses rejected your body alteration theory, and that very few of these witnesses ever even identified themselves as conspiracy theorists. McClelland is, of course, one of these few. And yet, the notes to a 1969 interview with McClelland, found in the Weisberg Archives, reflect that he felt nothing but disgust for the likes of Lane and Garrison at that time, and far preferred the likes of Arlen Specter. So...let's see...IF McClelland felt sure--I mean 100% positive--that the wound he saw was an exit wound on the far back of Kennedy's head, how is it that he was not a conspiracy theorist in 1969? I mean, how can that be? That's the kind of question I've been willing to ask, that apparently you have not.

Of course, you're entitled to do this--but I hope people reading your posts understand the game you are playing.

I'm not the one playing games, David. It is my contention, and has been my contention since 2004, that the medical evidence is the key to understanding the assassination, and re-opening its investigation. And I have tried my best to explain why I know this to be true.

One other thing: for anyone who wants a vivid description of the wound at the back of President Kennedy's head, just see Chapter 13, of Best Evidence, and the account of Dr. Peters, who described to me, in January, 1967, his vivid recollection that (a) it was size of a "hen's egg" and (b ) how he could see the occipital lobes of the brain resting on the foramen magnum (the hole in the base of the skull, through which the spinal cord enters and goes to the brain.

I read a 1981 interview of Peters just the other day. He said he'd been mistaken when he said such things to you. He said many similar things over the years.

Here's my quesiton to you, Pat Speer: Why to you keep playing these games, and ignoring the accounts of the witnesses who were there, and attempting to substitute, instead, your various theories, conjectures, and hypotheses as to why they couldn't have seen what they testified they observed?

Do you really believe your conjectures about what this or that witness could "not have seen" really trump the sworn statements of what they did in fact see?

Do you really believe you can ignore the statements of these witnesses when they said you got it wrong? I mean, let's get real here. You don't trust the Parkland witnesses as unimpeachable sources of truth any more than I do. Let's look at McClelland. He is on record as saying he believes the autopsy photos are authentic. But do you believe him? Of course not. He has also said that he saw nothing at Parkland which would convince him the fatal shot came from the front, but that the back and to the left movement of Kennedy's head in the Zapruder film had nevertheless convinced him that the fatal shot came from the front. So...do you trust him on this? I suspect not.

DSL

8/10/12; 12:10 AM

Los Angeles, California

[James R Gordon]

On November 22, McClelland said the President died of a gunshot wound of the left temple. I have always assumed that sentence applied to the bullet entrance wound on JFK's head. (Certainly, he was not referring to an exit wound!)

David,

Earlier in this thread Pat suggested that Robert McClelland had made a slip of the tongue and really meant to say the wound was in the right temple. I tended to agree with Pat.

In this post by you, you make it very clear that this was not a slip of the tongue but an observation that McCellend was very definite about.

If the entry wound to Kennedy's head was actually on the left temple, as opposed to the right temple, that means the gunman had to be in South Plaza.

Because of the angle and position of Kennedy's head at Z 312 / Z 313 the left temple was hidden from any gunman in the North Plaza. Only someone positioned in the South Plaza could strike the left temple.

And there lies the contradiction with an entry wound in the left temple. I do not dispute your research and evidence, I know you have meticulously collected and analysed what the evidence demonstrates and are very proud of what your research has shown.

However if the left temple is the entry point, then the geography of the plaza insists that the gunman was somewhere in the South of the plaza.

I have a problem with that. There is a brevity of evidence to suggest any gunman was in the South of the Plaza.

James

[Daniel Gallup]

Pat, you have not answered my point about pressure the Secret Service applied to the Dallas doctors, within a week, if memory serves, of the assassination, and well before Dudman's interview with McClelland. If your interpreation of McClelland is correct, he should have rejoiced at having his exit wound in the front of the head corroborated by Bethesda, or at least whatever the Secret Service might have told him. But more to the point, since criticism of McClelland over the years has been his staunch refusal to budge from his WC testimony which is quite explicit about where the wound was and the type of brain tissue "blasted out," why wouldn't he simply say, "Oh, I'm sorry, Pat's right. I really saw only one wound, and it was in the left (or right) temple, right where the autopsy pictures show it." He'd be off the hook and the Establishment would love him. His fellow Dallas doctors who knuckled under would embrace him. But Pat, that's not really what he's done, has he? And we have to ask ourselves "Why?" Whether McClelland thought he was shot from the front or back does nothing to mitigate the force of his WC testimony, and his subsequent reiteration of same to various authors over the years. Could it be that Pat Speer's interpretation of the events surrounding McClelland have led him to a false conclusion, or is McClelland just pulling our collective chains?

Pat: "What you seem to be missing is that the SS trip to Parkland had nothing to do with the head wound, as no one, at that time, even realized the Parkland doctors described the head wound in a different manner than the Bethesda doctors. The problem at that time was the throat wound. The Parkland doctors had described it as an entrance, in the first press conference, and afterwards. The SS thought they should stop doing this. So Elmer Moore paid Parkland a visit with a copy of the Bethesda autopsy report."

My reply: Moore's visit to Parkland with the Bethesda report resulted in the Parkland doctors changing their mind about the direction of the throat shot. But, as far as I know, and I may be wrong here, they never changed their description of the way the anterior throat wound looked. Perry's press conference, and the corroborative testimony of others, indicated that the wound had all the marks of an entrance wound. This distinction is important, and IMO, determinative. The pressure exerted by Moore is irrelevant to the nature of the wounding. That later Dallas doctors change their mind is irrelevant to the nature of the wounding. Their earliest observations are the most important, before pressure of one sort or another forced them to deny they saw what they saw. I have Brad Parker's First on the Scene in front of me and Brad is quite good at chronicling the pressure and changes various doctors made in their views of the wounding. But I digress. The issue is McClelland, and your claim that he changed his mind, based on his statements to Dudman.

In 1997, Brad Parker writes: "After Charles Chrenshaw, M.D., perhaps no Parkland physician-witness to John F. Kennedy's wounds has drawn more criticism than Robert McClelland, M.D....While his detractors have argued that Dr. McClelland was in no position to observe the wound in detail...During the traceotomy, Dr. McClelland's role was to hold the retractor while Drs. Baxter and Perry worked to insert the trach tube....However Dr. McClelland commented to the author, 'All I was doing was holding a retractor, which doesn't take much attention to do that.' Therefore, he says, (McClelland) he had ample time to examine the massive head injury sustained by the President.." This from a 1992 interview of McClelland by Parker. from pp. 6-7.

So McClelland claims he had ample time to view the posterior head wound, and gave a precise desciption of it to the WC. Therefore, I reiterate again, by the time Dudman comes along, McClelland has experienced pressure from Moore who has the Bethesda autopsy report, and that Pat, has more in it that the SBT. It has all wound coming from the back. Put yourself in McClelland's shoes: an official autopsy trumps anything interpretation he might have had on how Kennedy was shot. And he was doubtless embarassed by some of his speculations, which you note above. This is sufficient to explain his comments to Dudman on the interpretation of the wounding, but not the nature of the wounding itself. I view this distinction has crucial, and whatever he told Dudman was with a view to conforming his interpretation of the shooting to the Bethesda autopsy. But when it came time under oath to describe what he saw, and not to speculate on the direction of the shots, he did so eloquently before the WC. And he has not varied through the years what he said under oath.

On one last point I think you are dead wrong. You state that by the time Moore visited Dallas, there was not an awareness of the difference between the autopsy report, wherein Humes describes the head wound whose exit was "chiefly parietal," with the Dallas' view as the wounding as posterior (right/rear). In the press conference, 11/22/63, Perry distinctly says, "A missle had gone in or out of the back of his head..." and when asked about the bullet's course, he replied, "We were too busy to be absolutely sure or the track, but the back of his head." There is deliberate ambiguity on Perry's part up to this point. But then Dr. Clark left no doubt that the wound in the back of the head was an exit wound, for he said "The head wound could have been either the exit wound from the neck or it could have been a tangent wound, as it was simply a large, gaping loss of tissue. Perry later agrees with Clark that the head wound could have been caused by the bullet entering the neck. This implies directly that to Clark and Perry, the head wound looked like an exit wound, and its location in the back of his head. That there is no doubt about Perry's meaning, here is the next question: " Would the bullet have had to travel up from the neck wound to exit through the back?"

The Secret Service was not stupid; the press conference yielded enough information for anyone with room temperature IQ to see that these statements directly contradicted the autopsy report as to the direction of the shot(s). So Pat, you argue that the issue was the throat wound; I think if McClelland saw the Bethesda report he would want nothing better than to quell controversy, his embarassing speculations, and get with the program. But when it came time under oath to describe what he saw, he recalled what he was certain about: the location of the wound and its desciption.

Edited August 10, 2012 by Daniel Gallup

[Paul Rigby]

Left temple entry

1) Elm St eyewitness:

Norman Similas: “I could see a hole in the President's left temple...,” Jack Bell, “10 Feet from the President,” NYT, 23 November 1963, p.5, citing “‘I saw president fall’ – Willowdale man,” Toronto Daily Star, (All Star Night edition), Friday, 22 November 1963, pp.1&13

2) Parkland medical staff:

a) Dr. Robert McClelland: "The cause of death was due to a massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple," Commission Exhibit 392. [‘Admission Note,’ written 22 Nov 1963 at 4.45 pm, reproduced in WCR572, & 17WCH11-12: cited in Lifton’s Best Evidence, p.55; and Meagher’s Accessories After the Fact, pp.159-160.]

Dr. Marion Jenkins: "I don't know whether this is right or not, but I thought there was a wound on the left temporal area, right in the hairline and right above the zygomatic process," 6WH48. [Cited by Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After The Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities, & The Report (New York: Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), p. 40.]

c) Dr. Robert Shaw: "The third bullet struck the President on the left side of the head in the region of the left temporal region and made a large wound of exit on the right side of the head," Letter from Dr. Shaw to Larry Ross, "Did Two Gunmen Cut Down Kennedy?", Today (British magazine), 15 February 1964, p.4.

d) Dr. David Stewart: “This was the finding of all the physicians who were in attendance. There was a small wound in the left front of the President’s head and there was a quite massive wound of exit at the right back side of the head, and it was felt by all the physicians at the time to be a wound of entry which went in the front,” The Joe Dolan (Radio) Show, KNEW (Oakland, California), at 08:15hrs on 10 April 1967. (Cited by Harold Weisberg. Selections from Whitewash (NY: Carroll & Graf/Richard Gallen, 1994), pp.331-2.)

3) Parkland non-medical staff:

Father Oscar Huber: “terrible wound” over Kennedy's left eye [AP despatch, Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin, 24 November 1963]*

4) Bethesda: Drs. Humes & Boswell:

“The autopsy documents also provide some cryptic indications of damage to the left side of the head. The notorious face-sheet on which Dr. J. Thornton Boswell committed his unfortunate 'diagram error' consists of front and back outlines of a male figure. On the front figure, the autopsy surgeons entered the tracheotomy incision (6.5 cm), the four cut-downs made in the Parkland emergency room for administration of infusions (2 cms. Each), and a small circle at the right eye, with the marginal notation '0.8 cm,' apparently representing damage produced by the two bullet fragments that lodged there. Dr. Humes testified that the fragments measured 7 by 2 mm and 3 by 1 mm respectively (2H354). Although he said nothing about the damage at the left eye, the diagram shows a small dot at that site, labeled '0.4 cm' (CE 397, Vol XVII, p.45). Neither Arlen Specter, who conducted the questioning of the autopsy surgeons, nor the Commission members and lawyers present asked any questions about this indication on the diagram of damage at the left eye.

Turning back to the male outline of the figure – the one Dr. Boswell did not realize would become a public document even though it had to be assumed at the time of the autopsy that findings would become evidence at the trial of the accused assassin – we find a small circle at the back of the head about equidistant from the ears and level with the top of the ears. Apparently this represents the small entrance wound which the autopsy surgeons and the Warren Commission say entered the back of the head and exploded out through the right side, carrying large large segments of the skull. But an arrow at the wound on the diagram points to the front and left and not to the front and right.

A forensic pathologist who was asked to interpret this feature said that it signified that a missile had entered the back of the head traveling to the left and front. As if in confirmation, an autopsy diagram of the skull (CE 397, Vol XVII, p.46) shows a large rectangle marked '3 cm' at the site of the left eye, with a ragged lateral margin, seemingly to indicate fracture or missing bone.

The autopsy surgeons were not questioned about any of the three diagram indications of bullet damage at the left eye or left temple. Nevertheless, when Dr. Jenkins testified that he thought there was a wound in the left temporal area, Arlen Specter replied, 'The autopsy report disclosed no such developments,'” Sylvia Meagher. Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, The Authorities & The Report (NY, Vintage Books, 1992 reprint), pp.161-2.

5) JFK shot in the face/front of the head/forehead:

a) Alan Smith: “The car was ten feet from me when a bullet hit the President in the forehead…the car went about five feet and stopped,” Jack Bell, “Eyewitnesses describe scene of assassination: Sounds of shooting brought car to a halt,” NYT, 23 November 1963, p.5.

James Chaney: “When the second shot came, I looked back in time to see the President struck in the face,” Anthony Summers’ The Kennedy Conspiracy (London: Sphere, 1992), p.23, citing, on p.543, an “unidentified film interview in police station and taped interview for KLIF, Dallas, on record ‘The Fateful Hours,’ Capitol Records.” See also: 22 November 1963, WFAA-TV, video packet, & Houston Chronicle, 24 November 1963.

c) Dr. Perry: “When asked to specify the nature of the wound, Dr. Perry said that the entrance wound was in the front of the head,” Post-Dispatch News Services, “Priest Who Gave Last Rites ‘Didn’t See Any Sign of Life,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 24 November 1963, p.23A; also Associated Press despatch, shortly after 2 pm, quoted by WOR Radio, New York, at 2:43 pm, CST (Fred Newcomb & Perry Adams. Murder from Within, p.154, n.58): ‘Dr. Perry said the entrance wound—which is the medical description—the entrance wound was in the front of the head’” See also: AP, “Treatment Described,” Albuquerque Tribune, 22 November 1963, p.58: “When asked to specify, Perry said the entrance wound was in the front of the head.”

[Pat Speer]

Pat, you have not answered my point about pressure the Secret Service applied to the Dallas doctors, within a week, if memory serves, of the assassination, and well before Dudman's interview with McClelland. If your interpreation of McClelland is correct, he should have rejoiced at having his exit wound in the front of the head corroborated by Bethesda, or at least whatever the Secret Service might have told him. But more to the point, since criticism of McClelland over the years has been his staunch refusal to budge from his WC testimony which is quite explicit about where the wound was and the type of brain tissue "blasted out," why wouldn't he simply say, "Oh, I'm sorry, Pat's right. I really saw only one wound, and it was in the left (or right) temple, right where the autopsy pictures show it." He'd be off the hook and the Establishment would love him. His fellow Dallas doctors who knuckled under would embrace him. But Pat, that's not really what he's done, has he? And we have to ask ourselves "Why?" Whether McClelland thought he was shot from the front or back does nothing to mitigate the force of his WC testimony, and his subsequent reiteration of same to various authors over the years. Could it be that Pat Speer's interpretation of the events surrounding McClelland have led him to a false conclusion, or is McClelland just pulling our collective chains?

Pat: "What you seem to be missing is that the SS trip to Parkland had nothing to do with the head wound, as no one, at that time, even realized the Parkland doctors described the head wound in a different manner than the Bethesda doctors. The problem at that time was the throat wound. The Parkland doctors had described it as an entrance, in the first press conference, and afterwards. The SS thought they should stop doing this. So Elmer Moore paid Parkland a visit with a copy of the Bethesda autopsy report."

My reply: Moore's visit to Parkland with the Bethesda report resulted in the Parkland doctors changing their mind about the direction of the throat shot. But, as far as I know, and I may be wrong here, they never changed their description of the way the anterior throat wound looked. Perry's press conference, and the corroborative testimony of others, indicated that the wound had all the marks of an entrance wound. This distinction is important, and IMO, determinative. The pressure exerted by Moore is irrelevant to the nature of the wounding. That later Dallas doctors change their mind is irrelevant to the nature of the wounding. Their earliest observations are the most important, before pressure of one sort or another forced them to deny they saw what they saw. I have Brad Parker's First on the Scene in front of me and Brad is quite good at chronicling the pressure and changes various doctors made in their views of the wounding. But I digress. The issue is McClelland, and your claim that he changed his mind, based on his statements to Dudman.

In 1997, Brad Parker writes: "After Charles Chrenshaw, M.D., perhaps no Parkland physician-witness to John F. Kennedy's wounds has drawn more criticism than Robert McClelland, M.D....While his detractors have argued that Dr. McClelland was in no position to observe the wound in detail...During the traceotomy, Dr. McClelland's role was to hold the retractor while Drs. Baxter and Perry worked to insert the trach tube....However Dr. McClelland commented to the author, 'All I was doing was holding a retractor, which doesn't take much attention to do that.' Therefore, he says, (McClelland) he had ample time to examine the massive head injury sustained by the President.." This from a 1992 interview of McClelland by Parker. from pp. 6-7.

So McClelland claims he had ample time to view the posterior head wound, and gave a precise desciption of it to the WC. Therefore, I reiterate again, by the time Dudman comes along, McClelland has experienced pressure from Moore who has the Bethesda autopsy report, and that Pat, has more in it that the SBT. It has all wound coming from the back. Put yourself in McClelland's shoes: an official autopsy trumps anything interpretation he might have had on how Kennedy was shot. And he was doubtless embarassed by some of his speculations, which you note above. This is sufficient to explain his comments to Dudman on the interpretation of the wounding, but not the nature of the wounding itself. I view this distinction has crucial, and whatever he told Dudman was with a view to conforming his interpretation of the shooting to the Bethesda autopsy. But when it came time under oath to describe what he saw, and not to speculate on the direction of the shots, he did so eloquently before the WC. And he has not varied through the years what he said under oath.

On one last point I think you are dead wrong. You state that by the time Moore visited Dallas, there was not an awareness of the difference between the autopsy report, wherein Humes describes the head wound whose exit was "chiefly parietal," with the Dallas' view as the wounding as posterior (right/rear). In the press conference, 11/22/63, Perry distinctly says, "A missle had gone in or out of the back of his head..." and when asked about the bullet's course, he replied, "We were too busy to be absolutely sure or the track, but the back of his head." There is deliberate ambiguity on Perry's part up to this point. But then Dr. Clark left no doubt that the wound in the back of the head was an exit wound, for he said "The head wound could have been either the exit wound from the neck or it could have been a tangent wound, as it was simply a large, gaping loss of tissue. Perry later agrees with Clark that the head wound could have been caused by the bullet entering the neck. This implies directly that to Clark and Perry, the head wound looked like an exit wound, and its location in the back of his head. That there is no doubt about Perry's meaning, here is the next question: " Would the bullet have had to travel up from the neck wound to exit through the back?"

The Secret Service was not stupid; the press conference yielded enough information for anyone with room temperature IQ to see that these statements directly contradicted the autopsy report as to the direction of the shot(s). So Pat, you argue that the issue was the throat wound; I think if McClelland saw the Bethesda report he would want nothing better than to quell controversy, his embarassing speculations, and get with the program. But when it came time under oath to describe what he saw, he recalled what he was certain about: the location of the wound and its desciption.

McClelland is alive. I caught his presentation at the Lancer Conference a few years ago. I've viewed several other interviews of him. I've read his ARRB and Warren Commission testimony. And he's never said anything about feeling pressure or being pressured to change his interpretation of the head wounds in the days after the assassination. He has said--numerous times--that the wound he saw could have been created by a shot from behind, and that he only came to believe it came from the front after viewing the Zapruder film. Notes on a 1969 interview of McCelland in the Weisberg Archives reflect that at that time--2 years after the so-called McClelland drawing was published in Six Seconds in Dallas--he was not as yet a conspiracy theorist, and had nothing but contempt for men like Mark Lane and Jim Garrison, and nothing but respect for men like Arlen Specter.

Now, ask yourself, could he possibly have taken such a position if he knew, for a fact, that Kennedy's large head wound was a gaping hole on the far back of his head?

I urge you to read as much on McClelland as you can, and watch as many interviews of him as you can, and feel confident that if you do so, you will come to believe, as I, that, he is not a credible witness for a wound on the far back of Kennedy's head.

As far as the large head wound's being an exit---the Parkland doctors were not aware of any wounds outside the throat wound and large head wound, and believed the throat wound an entrance. This, in turn, led them to the possibility the large head wound was an exit for the bullet striking the throat. As to the nature of the wound itself, the only expert on skull trauma to inspect the wound was Clark, and his statements and testimony make clear he thought the wound was a tangential wound of both entrance and exit. For what it's worth, my extensive study of the medical evidence has led me to conclude he was correct on this point.

To give but one reason--Dr. Clark reported and testified that the large head wound was a defect of both bone and scalp. The autopsy report said the same thing. The top book on Forensic Pathology, Medicolegal Investigation of Death, however, specifies that missing scalp is symptomatic of an entrance, but not an exit. This book was written by the Clark Panel's Dr. Fisher, along with the HSCA Panel's Dr. Spitz. This fact--that the autopsy report said there was a significant amount of missing scalp at the large defect--concerned the HSCA Panel so much that they inserted a little disclaimer saying they assumed the autopsy doctors were mistaken about this. They left out of their report, however, that Dr. Clark's report, written the same day as the autopsy report without his being in contact with the autopsists, also specified that a significant amount of scalp was missing from the large defect.

The large defect was above Kennedy's right ear, and was a wound of both entrance and exit. You can bet the farm on it.

Edited August 11, 2012 by Pat Speer

[Daniel Gallup]

Pat, you have not answered my point about pressure the Secret Service applied to the Dallas doctors, within a week, if memory serves, of the assassination, and well before Dudman's interview with McClelland. If your interpreation of McClelland is correct, he should have rejoiced at having his exit wound in the front of the head corroborated by Bethesda, or at least whatever the Secret Service might have told him. But more to the point, since criticism of McClelland over the years has been his staunch refusal to budge from his WC testimony which is quite explicit about where the wound was and the type of brain tissue "blasted out," why wouldn't he simply say, "Oh, I'm sorry, Pat's right. I really saw only one wound, and it was in the left (or right) temple, right where the autopsy pictures show it." He'd be off the hook and the Establishment would love him. His fellow Dallas doctors who knuckled under would embrace him. But Pat, that's not really what he's done, has he? And we have to ask ourselves "Why?" Whether McClelland thought he was shot from the front or back does nothing to mitigate the force of his WC testimony, and his subsequent reiteration of same to various authors over the years. Could it be that Pat Speer's interpretation of the events surrounding McClelland have led him to a false conclusion, or is McClelland just pulling our collective chains?

Pat: "What you seem to be missing is that the SS trip to Parkland had nothing to do with the head wound, as no one, at that time, even realized the Parkland doctors described the head wound in a different manner than the Bethesda doctors. The problem at that time was the throat wound. The Parkland doctors had described it as an entrance, in the first press conference, and afterwards. The SS thought they should stop doing this. So Elmer Moore paid Parkland a visit with a copy of the Bethesda autopsy report."

My reply: Moore's visit to Parkland with the Bethesda report resulted in the Parkland doctors changing their mind about the direction of the throat shot. But, as far as I know, and I may be wrong here, they never changed their description of the way the anterior throat wound looked. Perry's press conference, and the corroborative testimony of others, indicated that the wound had all the marks of an entrance wound. This distinction is important, and IMO, determinative. The pressure exerted by Moore is irrelevant to the nature of the wounding. That later Dallas doctors change their mind is irrelevant to the nature of the wounding. Their earliest observations are the most important, before pressure of one sort or another forced them to deny they saw what they saw. I have Brad Parker's First on the Scene in front of me and Brad is quite good at chronicling the pressure and changes various doctors made in their views of the wounding. But I digress. The issue is McClelland, and your claim that he changed his mind, based on his statements to Dudman.

In 1997, Brad Parker writes: "After Charles Chrenshaw, M.D., perhaps no Parkland physician-witness to John F. Kennedy's wounds has drawn more criticism than Robert McClelland, M.D....While his detractors have argued that Dr. McClelland was in no position to observe the wound in detail...During the traceotomy, Dr. McClelland's role was to hold the retractor while Drs. Baxter and Perry worked to insert the trach tube....However Dr. McClelland commented to the author, 'All I was doing was holding a retractor, which doesn't take much attention to do that.' Therefore, he says, (McClelland) he had ample time to examine the massive head injury sustained by the President.." This from a 1992 interview of McClelland by Parker. from pp. 6-7.

So McClelland claims he had ample time to view the posterior head wound, and gave a precise desciption of it to the WC. Therefore, I reiterate again, by the time Dudman comes along, McClelland has experienced pressure from Moore who has the Bethesda autopsy report, and that Pat, has more in it that the SBT. It has all wound coming from the back. Put yourself in McClelland's shoes: an official autopsy trumps anything interpretation he might have had on how Kennedy was shot. And he was doubtless embarassed by some of his speculations, which you note above. This is sufficient to explain his comments to Dudman on the interpretation of the wounding, but not the nature of the wounding itself. I view this distinction has crucial, and whatever he told Dudman was with a view to conforming his interpretation of the shooting to the Bethesda autopsy. But when it came time under oath to describe what he saw, and not to speculate on the direction of the shots, he did so eloquently before the WC. And he has not varied through the years what he said under oath.

On one last point I think you are dead wrong. You state that by the time Moore visited Dallas, there was not an awareness of the difference between the autopsy report, wherein Humes describes the head wound whose exit was "chiefly parietal," with the Dallas' view as the wounding as posterior (right/rear). In the press conference, 11/22/63, Perry distinctly says, "A missle had gone in or out of the back of his head..." and when asked about the bullet's course, he replied, "We were too busy to be absolutely sure or the track, but the back of his head." There is deliberate ambiguity on Perry's part up to this point. But then Dr. Clark left no doubt that the wound in the back of the head was an exit wound, for he said "The head wound could have been either the exit wound from the neck or it could have been a tangent wound, as it was simply a large, gaping loss of tissue. Perry later agrees with Clark that the head wound could have been caused by the bullet entering the neck. This implies directly that to Clark and Perry, the head wound looked like an exit wound, and its location in the back of his head. That there is no doubt about Perry's meaning, here is the next question: " Would the bullet have had to travel up from the neck wound to exit through the back?"

The Secret Service was not stupid; the press conference yielded enough information for anyone with room temperature IQ to see that these statements directly contradicted the autopsy report as to the direction of the shot(s). So Pat, you argue that the issue was the throat wound; I think if McClelland saw the Bethesda report he would want nothing better than to quell controversy, his embarassing speculations, and get with the program. But when it came time under oath to describe what he saw, he recalled what he was certain about: the location of the wound and its desciption.

McClelland is alive. I caught his presentation at the Lancer Conference a few years ago. I've viewed several other interviews of him. I've read his ARRB and Warren Commission testimony. And he's never said anything about feeling pressure or being pressured to change his interpretation of the head wounds in the days after the assassination. He has said--numerous times--that the wound he saw could have been created by a shot from behind, and that he only came to believe it came from the front after viewing the Zapruder film. Notes on a 1969 interview of McCelland in the Weisberg Archives reflect that at that time--2 years after the so-called McClelland drawing was published in Six Seconds in Dallas--he was not as yet a conspiracy theorist, and had nothing but contempt for men like Mark Lane and Jim Garrison, and nothing but respect for men like Arlen Specter.

Now, ask yourself, could he possibly have taken such a position if he knew, for a fact, that Kennedy's large head wound was a gaping hole on the far back of his head?

I urge you to read as much on McClelland as you can, and watch as many interviews of him as you can, and feel confident that if you do so, you will come to believe, as I, that, he is not a credible witness for a wound on the far back of Kennedy's head.

As far as the large head wound's being an exit---the Parkland doctors were not aware of any wounds outside the throat wound and large head wound, and believed the throat wound an entrance. This, in turn, led them to the possibility the large head wound was an exit for the bullet striking the throat. As to the nature of the wound itself, the only expert on skull trauma to inspect the wound was Clark, and his statements and testimony make clear he thought the wound was a tangential wound of both entrance and exit. For what it's worth, my extensive study of the medical evidence has led me to conclude he was correct on this point.

To give but one reason--Dr. Clark reported and testified that the large head wound was a defect of both bone and scalp. The autopsy report said the same thing. The top book on Forensic Pathology, Medicolegal Investigation of Death, however, specifies that missing scalp is symptomatic of an entrance, but not an exit. This book was written by the Clark Panel's Dr. Fisher, along with the HSCA Panel's Dr. Spitz. This fact--that the autopsy report said there was a significant amount of missing scalp at the large defect--concerned the HSCA Panel so much that they inserted a little disclaimer saying they assumed the autopsy doctors were mistaken about this. They left out of their report, however, that Dr. Clark's report, written the same day as the autopsy report without his being in contact with the autopsists, also specified that a significant amount of scalp was missing from the large defect.

The large defect was above Kennedy's right ear, and was a wound of both entrance and exit. You can bet the farm on it.

Once again, Pat, I think you miss the forest for the trees. The McClelland drawing for Thompson was in 1966 shows bones sprung open in a manner required by an exiting bullet. It matters little that McClelland loved Specter. He can say what he wants about where the shot came from; the drawing itself is definitive. As for your contention that missing scalp is evidence of an entrance wound, you are going to have to argue with Humes about that, because he stated in the autopsy that the head wound, chiefly paretial, was devoid of both bone and scalp. This large wound was therefore an entrance wound? That's a new one for me. That bone blasted out by a high velocity bullet would not take scalp with it is utter nonesense, and contradicts the Dallas observation that both one and scalp were missing in the rear defect. Why do you suppose Tom Robinson had to place a piece of rubber to patch the hold in the back of the head? Had there been scalp there this would not have been necessary.

I stand by my observations that McClelland accurately described what he saw before the WC and has maintained that picture of the wounding ever since. I stand by my conviction that McClelland was influenced by the official autopsy and wanted to avoid controversy. He may have loved Specter but such was a necessary concession. I mean, what doctor is going to believe a murdered President would have a slipshod autopsy-- a deliberately false record of the way he was killed? It was just too insulting to the medical profession to even think such a thing.

You have also misquoted Clark. He gave the tangential wound as only one option. I quoted him accurately above. Go back and read the transcript of 11/22/63 at Parkland. And since it is clear cerebellum extruded from the wound, I will bet the farm the wound extended low enough behind the ears to lacerate the cerebellum. Of course, I have no farm, but I'll put my Harley on the line on that point.

[David Lifton]

My responses in bold.

Pat,

Where do you get the idea that Dr. McClelland was Burrus' source?

Since McClelland spoke on the record with Dudman, I assumed he had spoken to Burrus as well.

DSL INSERT: Well, you are wrong. Burrus' source was definitely not McClelland. Moreover, you fail to perceive something else: what was important about the Burrus story was not that the throat wound was (supposedly) explained as an exit, but that this was the first story that connected a rear (shoulder) entry, which no Dallas doctor or nurse reported, with the supposed "exit" at the front of the throat. That's what makes the Burrus story special--it was the first official attempt to "float" the "transiting neck trajectory in the public record. You appear to have missed that. You also apparently missed the fact that Burrus's story was datelined "Bethesda, Maryland." (See Chapter 7 of B.E.) END DSL INSERT

I interviewed Burrus at length--in person, in New York City--in 1977 or 1978. It was all tape recorded and I spent an hour or more with him, and then spent hours transcribing it Let me assure you that Dr. McClelland was NOT Burrus' source. (Where are you getting that idea from??)

Furthermore, the person who was Burrus' source --and I am doing this from memory, today, in 2012--was providing Burrus with authoritative information about the Bethesda autopsy conclusion. The source was either Dr. Clark or, more likely, Dr. Tom Shires. One or the other, and I have a sheaf full of notes about this, and about the identity of a third party who (I learned, from Burrus) knew who the source was, and who I was attempting to contact. (But there were 100 other things going on at the time, and I never did.)

The record indicates that Elmer Moore spoke to a number of the Parkland doctors, and used the autopsy report to convince them the neck wound had been an exit, not an entrance. He told them all the same thing. McClelland was one of these doctors.

In addition, this article was either the same one--or within a day of the one--that reported the curb shot, and raised the possibility that a single bullet passed back to front through Kennedy's neck, and then went on to strike Connally. (Yes, in mid-December, 1963--and that was either in the Dallas Times Herald or the Dallas Morning News. Again, the Single Bullet Theory was already formulated, conceptually, and was being "floated" in this news account).

Now, focusing on McClelland. . . :

For reasons I do not understand, you are either misreporting or misunderstanding what McClelland (a) told the Warren Commission, when under oath; and (b ) told Dudman and (c ) told me, when I interviewed him, on camera, in 1989.

Not at all. What a strange charge. I have never disputed that McClelland came to believe the wound was on the far back of Kennedy's head. His earliest statements, however, do not support that. His statement to Dudman that "As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to suspect that any shots came from the front," is, in my impression, thoroughly at odds with his subsequent testimony.

On November 22, McClelland said the President died of a gunshot wound of the left temple. I have always assumed that sentence applied to the bullet entrance wound on JFK's head. (Certainly, he was not referring to an exit wound!)

Your assumption is, in my opinion, 100% incorrect. Clark--the expert--inspected the head wound and thought it was either a wound of both entrance and exit, or an exit for a bullet entering Kennedy's throat. No one else at Parkland assumed the bullet creating this wound entered elsewhere on the skull, or claimed to see such an entrance. They saw one wound, and one wound only. Unless you believe that McClelland, and McClelland alone, observed a large wound on Kennedy's left temple, the most logical assumption then is that he confused his right with his left.

The thrust of the Dudman stories, in mid-December, was that one or more Secret Service agents were visiting Parkland Hospital and showing the Dallas doctors the Bethesda autopsy report, in order to stop them from continuing to state that Kennedy was struck from the front. This is obvious--and its part of the public record. That's what Dudman's story is all about.

Yep. Moore tried to get them to agree that the throat wound was an exit. There is no evidence whatsoever, however, to indicate that he tried to get them to change their opinions regarding the head wound. Nor that Specter tried to get them change their opinions regarding the head wound for their Warren Commission testimony. The Parkland/Bethesda split which you subsequently identified had apparently gone unnoticed.

When under oath during his Warren Commission deposition, McClelland was desribing, in detail, the bullet exit wound at the rear of the President's head.

In the fall of 1988, he described the same bullet exit wound when interviewed by Stanhope Gould and Sylvia Chase in their interview of McClelland for their KRON-TV documentary. Six months later, in 1989, when I (and Pat Valentino) interviewed him, on camera, he described in detail the same bullet exit wound at the rear of JFK's head.

You're behaving like a philosopher who is playing games with the English language, because you apparently don't like what's been stated in plain English.

I beg to differ. We have a bunch of people witnessing something, and then describing it in different ways. Many of them, over the years, contradicted themselves. The only way to understand what really happened then is to analyze the sum of the witness statements. Cherry-picking a few here and there, or prioritizing these statements based upon one's personal connection to them, might lead one to a desired result, but not to where the judgment of history should ultimately reside.

In the face of a plethora of evidence that the President's body was intercepted--and the wounds altered--here you are whining and attempting to impeach McClelland's testimony by asserting as a fact that McClelland couldn't have observed what he said he did.

From your post: "Since Kennedy was by all lreports lying on his back, it is impoossible to understand how McClelland could look down into a wound on the back of Kennedy's head..."

Yet he testified, and quite explicitly, that he could see exactly what he testifed to.

And yet a number of his co-workers--Carrico and Jenkins come to mind--said he couldn't have seen what he said he saw... Which leads us back to credibility--and the fact McClelland ORIGINALLY claimed the wound was of the left temple.

Why should anyone care about your hypotheses--and conjecture(s)--about what McClelland could "not have seen" when he testified under oath, in March, 1964, as to what he did in fact see??

It's not my hypothesis, but the hypothesis of those with him in the room.

For reasons I don't understand, you have spent hundreds of hours of your time writing tendentious posts and text attempting to claim the historical record is something other than it is.

For you, the historical record stopped with the publication of Best Evidence. For me, it continued after. It's amazing to me that someone claiming to have such concern for the historical record refuses to acknowledge that the vast majority of Parkland and Bethesda witnesses rejected your body alteration theory, and that very few of these witnesses ever even identified themselves as conspiracy theorists. McClelland is, of course, one of these few. And yet, the notes to a 1969 interview with McClelland, found in the Weisberg Archives, reflect that he felt nothing but disgust for the likes of Lane and Garrison at that time, and far preferred the likes of Arlen Specter. So...let's see...IF McClelland felt sure--I mean 100% positive--that the wound he saw was an exit wound on the far back of Kennedy's head, how is it that he was not a conspiracy theorist in 1969? I mean, how can that be? That's the kind of question I've been willing to ask, that apparently you have not.

Of course, you're entitled to do this--but I hope people reading your posts understand the game you are playing.

I'm not the one playing games, David. It is my contention, and has been my contention since 2004, that the medical evidence is the key to understanding the assassination, and re-opening its investigation. And I have tried my best to explain why I know this to be true.

One other thing: for anyone who wants a vivid description of the wound at the back of President Kennedy's head, just see Chapter 13, of Best Evidence, and the account of Dr. Peters, who described to me, in January, 1967, his vivid recollection that (a) it was size of a "hen's egg" and (b ) how he could see the occipital lobes of the brain resting on the foramen magnum (the hole in the base of the skull, through which the spinal cord enters and goes to the brain.

I read a 1981 interview of Peters just the other day. He said he'd been mistaken when he said such things to you. He said many similar things over the years.

Here's my quesiton to you, Pat Speer: Why to you keep playing these games, and ignoring the accounts of the witnesses who were there, and attempting to substitute, instead, your various theories, conjectures, and hypotheses as to why they couldn't have seen what they testified they observed?

Do you really believe your conjectures about what this or that witness could "not have seen" really trump the sworn statements of what they did in fact see?

Do you really believe you can ignore the statements of these witnesses when they said you got it wrong? I mean, let's get real here. You don't trust the Parkland witnesses as unimpeachable sources of truth any more than I do. Let's look at McClelland. He is on record as saying he believes the autopsy photos are authentic. But do you believe him? Of course not. He has also said that he saw nothing at Parkland which would convince him the fatal shot came from the front, but that the back and to the left movement of Kennedy's head in the Zapruder film had nevertheless convinced him that the fatal shot came from the front. So...do you trust him on this? I suspect not.

DSL

8/10/12; 12:10 AM

Los Angeles, California

Pat: You keep ignoring the fact that the Dallas doctors are on record--both in interviews conducted within a few days of the assassination, as well as under oath before the Warren Commission--that it was their opinion that a bullet exited from the rear of the head.

Let me lay it out here, from BEST EVIDENCE:

Are you not aware of the fact that one doctor after another believed that a bullet exited from the rear of Kennedy's skull? And that this pervaded the accounts published in the press in the days immediately following President Kennedy's murder?

And what about the testimony of the Dallas doctors in their Warren Commission depositions. As I wrote in BEST EVIDENCE (Chapter 13, on the head wounding):

Quoting from B.E.:

Indeed, six Dallas doctors testified the wound in the rear of the head was an exit wound; and a seventh, Dr. Kemp Clark, said it ould be an exit wound, but it was also possible the wound was "tangential." Dr. Jones testified it 'appeared to be an exit wound in the posterior portion of the skull'; (6 WCH 56)); Dr. Perry referred to it as "avulsive"; (6 WCH 11)) Dr. Jenkins, referring to the region as "exploded," said "I would interpret it being a wound of exit" (1 WCH 50) and Dr. Akin said: "I assume that the right oipito-parietal region was the exit." (6 WCH 67) UNQUOTE

I then wrote two paragraphs laying out the testimony or public statements of those doctors who joined wound at the front of the throat (which they thought was an entry) with the wound at the back of the head (assumed to be an exit) and who then postulated that a bullet had entered at the President's throat, somehow was deflected up the spinal column, and then exited at the rear of the head.

One was Dr. Peters, in my November, 1966 telephone interview with him, as quoted in Chapter 13 of BEST EVIDENCE (see page 317 of the Macmillan or Carrol and Graf edition):

"I was trying to think how he could have had a hole in his neck and a hole in the occiput, and the only answer we could think [of] was perhaps the bullet had gone in through the front, hit the bony spinal olumn, and exited through the back of the head, since a wound of exit is always bigger than a wound of entry."

Next on the list was Dr. Malcolm Perry. And there I quoted from interviews he gave on Saturday, November 23, to John Geddie of the Dallas Morning News, and Herbert Blak, Medical Editor of the Boston Globe. Quoting these accounts (directly from page 317 of BEST EVIDENCE) --Now quoting:

Geddie reported: "The head wound, he [Perry] added, appeared to be 'an exit wound' caused when the bullet passed out." (Dallas Morning News, 11/24/63);

To Black, Perry acknowledged it was peculiar that "rather than entering" from behind, the bullet exited "despite the fact [that] the assassin shot from above down on to the President." But he assured Black that the wound he saw on the head was an exit."

"We know that the big damage is at the point of exit." He (Perry) offered this explanation: "It may have been that the President was looking up or sideways with his head thrown bak when the bullet or bullets struck him." (Boston Globe, 11/24/63)

Now here's my question, Pat Speer: I'm quoting you data from the record, the existing journalistic and testimonial record--and yet you come along, some 48 years later, and simply ignore it, and blithely mistate the record with these glib false statements.

Let me go back again, and re-state your false statement: ""None of them described this wound as an entrance wound for a bullet exiting elsewhere on the skull."

I think its time you set aside your cherished (and mistaken) beliefs--which apparently affect the way you interpret the record--and just at the data.

And by the way, before leaving the topic of the wound at the left temple, I ought to mention one other witness, one who I did not include in BEST EVIDENCE because he was not in the room, but who is a very important witness, and that is Dr. Dave Stewart. Steward knew Perry well, and told the Nashville, Tenn newspaper (cira 1967) of the left temporal wound. I then interviewed him in 1982 (by phone); and then Pat Valentino and did a very detailed (and professionally filmed) interview with him in 1989. Without getting into the details just now, you can add Stewart to the list of those who believe (in Stewart''s case, because of what he was told by Perry) that JFK was struck in the left temple.

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000105 EndHTML:0000003371 StartFragment:0000002328 EndFragment:0000003335

For now, I have one simple request: I wish you would stop saying that the Dallas doctors did not say that there was an exit wound at the back of the head--because that is obviously not true. When you make such statements, you are posting false information on the Internet, in a discussion group that is read probably all over the world. I would think that regardless of what theories and hypotheses you entertain about the Kennedy assassination, you would not want to be in the position of spreading false information on such an important matter.

DSL

8/16/12; 10:10 PM PDT

Los Angeles, California

Edited August 17, 2012 by David Lifton