‘Startlingly New Evidence:’ The Fact Pattern of JFK’s Autopsy

Edward Curtin, a sociology professor in Massachusetts, highlights one of the most important findings of Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited: the fraud of JFK’s autopsy.

Obamas Clintons JFK
The Obamas and the Clintons at JFK’s grave, Nov. 18, 2013. (Photo: PBS)

The theory of the lone gunman holds that JFK’s autopsy was bungled. It’s a reassuring excuse of the sort often heard in the wake of a Washington scandal. “Mistakes were made,” said President Ronald Reagan when the Iran-contra conspiracy–a CIA operation to deceive a Democratic Congress–was exposed.

The autopsy of the murdered president, however, was no mistake. The factual record that emerged since the 1990s– the record painstakingly presented in JFK Revisited–shows that the president’s body and the documentation of the autopsy, were doctored to prevent an accurate accounting of Kennedy’s wounds.

Curtin notes the definitive testimony comes, not from conspiracy theorists, but from two FBI agents who had attended hundreds of autopsies.  The Washington Post will avert its innocent eyes, but the “bungled autopsy” excuse is no longer factually supportable.

That one of the autopsy doctors burned his notes and another had his disappear might not be new knowledge, but to learn that two honest FBI agents who witnessed the autopsy and were not called as witnesses by the Warren Commission – James Sibert and Francis X. O’Neill, Jr. – were shown the autopsy photos in depositions taken by the Assassinations Record Review Board in 1997 and claimed that Kennedy’s head had been doctored to conceal his gaping rear head wound is startlingly new evidence.As is the important diagram Sibert drew of a large head wound in the back of the head supporting a shot from the front.

Source: JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass by Oliver Stone – Edward Curtin

Such this is the state of the JFK debate. The much-maligned Oliver Stone presents new evidence not available at the time of his controversial movie, in the form of the sworn testimony of two FBI agents, to make his case.

All of his critics–the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, Max Boot, Gerald Posner–avoid mentioning his presentation of the facts. Instead, they denounce him for the theory behind the movie he made 30 years ago. Tis a curious phenomenon, worth pondering: The stronger the JFK evidence, the stronger the JFK denial.

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