Erasing the Past to Protect a Fairytale

5 John F. Kennedy's second brain

See also:
40. The original autopsy notes by Commander James J. Humes
109 Vial containing part of JFK brain


Doctors who conducted the autopsy on President John F. Kennedy may have performed two brain examinations
in the days following his assassination, possibly of two different brains, a staff report for the Assassinations
Records Review Board said.

The report, summarizing perplexing discrepancies in the medical evidence, was among more than 400,000 pages
of internal records that the now-defunct board compiled in its effort to make public as much information about
the assassination as it could find. The papers were released yesterday at the National Archives.

(...)

The central contention of the (Douglas Horne's 32 page-)report is that brain photographs in the Kennedy records
are not of Kennedy's brain and show much less damage than Kennedy sustained when he was shot in Dallas and
brought to Parkland Hospital there on Nov. 22, 1963.

(...)

The report points to, for instance, the testimonies of former FBI agent Francis X. O'Neill Jr., who was present at
the Nov. 22, 1963, autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and of former Navy photographer John T. Stringer, who
said he took photos at a supplementary brain examination two or three days later, probably on the morning of
Nov. 25.

O'Neill told the board in a 1997 deposition that at the Nov. 22 autopsy "there was not too much of the brain left"
when it was taken out of Kennedy's skull and "put in a white jar." He said "more than half of the brain was missing."

Shown the brain photographs deeded to the Archives by the Kennedy family, which were taken sometime after
the autopsy, O'Neill said they did not square with what he saw. The "only section of the brain which is missing is
this small section over here," O'Neill said of one photograph. "This looks almost like a complete brain."

(...)

Now ill and unavailable for comment, Humes testified in a 1996 deposition that Kennedy's brain was not sectioned
in the way Stringer described "because the next thing you know George Burkley wanted it." He said Burkley told
him "flat out" that the Kennedy family wanted to inter the brain with the president's body and that Burkley said he
was going to deliver it to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

The president's coffin was buried on the afternoon of Nov. 25.

However, a third autopsy physician, Pierre Finck, said in a 1965 report, based on earlier notes, that Humes called
him on Nov. 29, 1963, to "examine the brain" at Bethesda.

"Humes, Boswell and myself examined the formalin fixed brain," Finck wrote. "A U.S. Navy photographer was present."
He said the photographer took pictures of the brain from below. Stringer, by contrast, said he did not shoot such
"basilar, or inferior, views."

Horne said in his memo that this "second hypothesized examination" may have taken place as late as Dec. 2, 1963, in
light of the recollections of Chief Petty Officer Chester H. Boyers. The officer in charge of the pathology department
at Bethesda, Boyers told the House Assassinations Committee in 1978 that he processed brain tissue and prepared
paraffin blocks "of eight or 12 sections of the brain" on Dec. 2.

Boswell told a reporter yesterday that the brain was "examined in detail" at the Nov. 22 autopsy and once more "a few
days later" after it had been "put in form and fixation."

(...)

Jeremy Gunn, former executive director and general counsel of the review board, said he thought it "highly plausible"
that there were two different brain examinations.

Gunn took the testimony of Parkland doctors in August but could not show them the photographs. Steve Tilley,
custodian of the Archives' JFK collection, said there wasn't enough time to provide security for the photographs to be
taken to Dallas.

(George Lardner Jr, Archive Photos Not of JFK's Brain, Washington Post, November 10, 1998)


"A fun fact"

Drawing of the superiour surface of JFK's brain. Prepared by the HCSA, this is an accurately
rendered drawing of a photograph of JFK's brain (...) Because the brain that was photographed
weighed 1500 grams, the upper limit of normal for an undamaged, adult brain, doubts have
arisen about whether this was actually JFK's brain.

(Charles Crenshaw, J. Gary Shaw, Trauma Room One, 2001, s. 284)