Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK. - book reviews

Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK edited by James E. Fetzer (Chicago: Catfeet Press, 1998); 472 pp,; $36,95 cloth; $18,95 paper,

Kennedy assassination theorists are like members of religious sects. Passionately pouring over relics and holy books, members seek portents and passages to support their sects' dogmas. The mainline establishment sect espouses the Oswald-was-the-lone-crazygunman dogma. Dissident sects quarrel with every aspect of the mainline dogma. One sect believes that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone gunman working for a conspiracy. Another sect believes that Oswald was part of a conspiracy but not the only gunman. Still another sect believes that Oswald was not the gunman at all but the patsy of a conspiracy. Sects which believe in a conspiracy argue about the identity of the conspirators. Organized crime, Fidel Castro, anti-Castro Cubans, the Diems of Vietnam, the CIA, Lyndon Johnson, and the military industrial complex, either singly or in some combination, are the favorites of one or another sect.

In this debate, the "relics" are the bullets removed from John Kennedy and John Connally, the autopsy x-rays and photographs, the Zapruder film of the assassination, a motorcycle police officer's inadvertent recording of the assassination, and some photographs of tramps in Dallas, Texas, on the day of the assassination. The "holy books" are a report on JFK's autopsy, the Warren Commission report that supports the mainline doctrine, and the 1978 congressional report that supports the dissident belief that Oswald didn't act alone.

James Fetzer's Assassination Science is yet another sectarian attempt to win converts. Like the Christian devotees who claim to use science to prove "the miracle" of the Shroud of Turin, Fetzer's colleagues use new scientific techniques to reexamine the holy relics of the Kennedy assassination. They focus on the results of Kennedy's autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital and Abraham Zapruder's film.

Fetzer's book derives from a 1992 book, JFK: Conspiracy of Silence, by Charles Crenshaw. Crenshaw was a surgical resident in the Parkland Hospital emergency room in Dallas where Kennedy was taken and treated after he was shot. In his book, Crenshaw claims that the wounds he saw could only have come from bullets shot from in front of Kennedy. Therefore, Oswald, who fired at the president from behind, could not have been a lone assassin.

In May 1992, the Journal of the American Medical Association published two articles based on interviews with physicians who treated Kennedy in Dallas and with the military physicians who did Kennedy's autopsy. The physicians criticized Crenshaw and supported the mainline doctrine. In their zeal to defend the mainline doctrine, the JAMA editors unfairly criticized Crenshaw, even accusing him of lying about being in the emergency room. Then they refused to apologize or publish Crenshaw's reply, even after the New York Times noted the errors in the journal articles. After Crenshaw sued, JAMA eventually agreed to pay him $213,000 in damages and legal costs and to publish a short rebuttal by him.

Assassination Science repeats Crenshaw's criticisms of the Warren report and his belief that Kennedy was shot from in front. Fetzer adds the observations of several other scientists and physicians who support this claim.

Robert Livingston, a physician and a scientific director at the National Institutes for Health when Kennedy was shot, claims that he tried unsuccessfully to advise the autopsy physicians based on his expertise in gunshot wounds and neurology. Livingston might be dismissed as a publicity seeker and scientific busybody who tried to interfere with the autopsy, but his skepticism about the competency of the autopsy physicians seems reasonable. For example, they testified to the Warren Commission that they did not see a gunshot wound in the neck during the autopsy, yet it is clearly visible in the gory autopsy photographs Fetzer reprints in his book.

David Mantik, another physician, also questions the autopsy physicians' competence. Like Livingston, Mantik finds disparities between the autopsy report and the autopsy photographs. He reports that even the autopsy photographer doubts the authenticity of one of the photographs included in the report. Also, Mantik's quarrels with the way the physicians measured--or, in Mantik's opinion, mismeasured--Kennedy's wounds. He notes that two of the three autopsy physicians had no experience with gunshot wounds.

Mantik, whose specialty is radiology, goes beyond questions of competency. He claims that his optical densitometry studies of the autopsy x-rays show that they were altered to conceal evidence that Kennedy was shot from in front.

Fetzer and his colleagues raise interesting technical questions about the Kennedy autopsy and investigation. Even the second half of the book, which contains a tediously detailed analysis of the Zapruder film, is useful because Fetzer and his fellow skeptics deal with facts and questions about possible tampering with the film. The questions they raise about the evidence are limited and can be interpreted in many ways. Some of the problems they raise could be meaningless anomalies, while others could be evidence of incompetence. They do not necessarily have to disprove the Warren Commission's conclusions. Nevertheless, Fetzer uses them to leap into the world of myth and faith.

Fetzer contends that the evidence in his book regarding the technical problems with the autopsy and the Zapruder film proves that Oswald did not act alone. Furthermore, he argues, people inside the government must have organized this conspiracy because the Cubans, the Diems, organized crime, and Castro were not capable of controlling the autopsy or altering all of the evidence Fetzer and his contributers claim were altered. With virtually no supporting evidence, Fetzer then declares that the Secret Service and the mayor of Dallas deliberately set up JFK for assassination and that the CIA and FBI collaborated in the coverup. He contends that these agencies and officials worked for a conspiracy that included oil company executives, the president of Chase Manhattan bank, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, and Lyndon Johnson. Fetzer has very little real evidence for any of these claims other-than dubious testimony from a forger and a woman who claims she was Johnson's mistress.

Fetzer also offers a preposterous tale from a supposed CIA official who maintains that the CIA gave a copy of the Zapruder film to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, to edit: "He advised us that instructions for this undertaking would have had to emanate from a level of government at least equivalent to that of Lyndon B. Johnson or of J. Edgar Hoover." This is nonsense. The CIA director's control over the NSA has often been more nominal than real. But more important, Hoover had neither official nor informal authority over the CIA. The CIA and Hoover were opponents. Hoover had a long history of opposition to the CIA precisely because it did not answer to him. No CIA official would take orders from him. That Fetzer would believe such drivel calls into question his judgment on other matters.

Assassination Science is an example of what happens when public events become matters of faith rather than reasoned debate. Intelligent writers and scientists like those in this book take facts and use them to support their myths. That is too bad. We need careful examination of evidence in the spirit of some of Fetzer's contributors. What we do not need is the creation of fables, either by the Warren Commission or by Fetzer.

Burton Levine is a writer living in Hamden, Connecticut, who often writes about spies, secrecy, and deception in American life.

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