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.
I mentioned William Matson Lawthe other day, and I thought I should amplify. I want to recommend Law’s JFK research. It is lucid, original, factual and untainted by speculation. It is amazing that no one else had thought to conduct these essential interviews. Law went where news organizations and congressional investigations did not tread. The story he tells of the Kennedy autopsy speaks for itself.
At the request of a reader, I am posting a link to an online conference on JFK’s 100th birthday on May 29. At least one of the speakers, William Law, has done fine work–on the autopsy of the president–and written a fine book about it, In the Eye of History, I would like to hear the latest on Law’s research.
As general counsel for the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the mid-1990s, Jeremy Gunn had unparalleled access to the government’s records on the JFK assassination. Last year he gave an interesting talk about “Seeking the Truth in the Kennedy Assassination” at the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England in Portland, Maine.
As a person who was hired by Jeremy Gunn in 1995, and who worked closely under him (and with him) from August of 1995 until his abrupt resignation from the Assassination Records Review Board in July of 1998, I watched his presentation with great interest.
“I clearly heard Dr. Finck … complain that he had been unable to locate the handwritten notes that he had taken during the autopsy …. Dr. Finck concluded his story by angrily stating that he had to reconstruct his notes from memory shortly after the autopsy.”
— Affidavit of Leonard D. Saslaw, Ph.D. In 1996, Dr. Saslaw signed an affidavit recounting that JFK autopsy pathologist Dr. Pierre Finck had “with considerable irritation” told of his post-washup search for the notes he had taken during the autopsy.
The missing Finck notes join the litany of missing materials from the JFK autopsy, among them:
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The first newspaper accounts of JFK’s autopsy, published on December 18, 1963, gave a consistent account of the gunfire that was widely believed at the time (and became the basis for the postcard from Dallas reproduced here). But these accounts, published in the Washington Post and New York Times, vary dramatically from what pathologists later said. This version of the gunfire that struck JFK would be abandoned and forgotten by the two newspapers and defenders of the official story, all of whom later settled on a very different ballistic theory.
The original story of gunfire that was abandoned.
One possibility for this major discrepancy is that the Post and the Times stories were based on the original autopsy report that was later rewritten surreptitiously.
The Times story came from the Associated Press and was attributed to “a reliable source familiar with the autopsy findings.” The Post story was based on “the unofficial report of pathologists,” The stories were consistent with each other, both asserting that: …