Tag: Autopsy

William Matson Law’s ‘In The Eye of History’

I mentioned William Matson Law the 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.

In his own words: …

Former JFK investigator: Don’t hold your breath for 2017

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.

‘Dr. Finck … looked for his notes and could not find them anywhere’

“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:

Dec 18 1963: The Times and Post’s stories on the JFK autopsy that wasn’t

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.

JFK Postcard
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: …

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