The body arrived at 7:35 PM. It had been removed from Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas over the violent objections of the Dallas County Medical Examiner, who had legal jurisdiction over the case. Secret Service agents had drawn weapons. A Texas homicide had become a federal matter by force.

The question that no one asked, then or later: why was the autopsy being performed at a military hospital, by military doctors, under military supervision?

The question that should have been asked: who gave that order, and what were they trying to control?

The bronze casket was carried down the corridor by a Navy honor guard. The morgue at Bethesda was not designed for this—not designed for the cameras, the brass, the Secret Service, the crowd of officials who had materialized to witness what should have been a private medical procedure.

Commander James J. Humes, chief pathologist, had performed hundreds of autopsies. None on gunshot victims. None on homicide cases. None that would be scrutinized by history.

He was not the most qualified man for this job. He was the man who had been ordered to do it.

The gallery was full. This was the first anomaly. An autopsy is a medical procedure, not a performance. The room should have contained the pathologists, a technician, perhaps a law enforcement observer. Instead:

Curtis LeMay. The man who had wanted to bomb Cuba. The man who had called Kennedy's handling of the missile crisis "the greatest defeat in our history." The man who, according to multiple witnesses, sat in the gallery with a cigar clenched between his teeth, watching the autopsy like a man watching a problem being solved.

Commander Humes opened the body bag. And immediately, something was wrong.

The Dallas doctors had described a small entrance wound in the throat—used for a tracheotomy, now obscured. They had described a massive wound to the right rear of the skull—an exit wound, they assumed, from a shot fired from the front.

What Humes saw did not match what Dallas had described.

Then there was the matter of the back wound. Humes probed it with his finger. The wound was shallow—it did not transit the body. There was no exit wound. The bullet, wherever it went, was not inside the corpse.

A bullet that entered the back, traveled downward, and stopped after a few inches. No exit wound. The bullet not in the body.

This was a problem. This did not fit a shot from the sixth floor of the Book Depository, traveling downward through the neck and exiting the throat. This suggested something else—a shot from a different angle, a different weapon, a different scenario.

Lieutenant Colonel Pierre Finck, the Army's forensic pathology consultant, arrived late. He was the only person in the room with actual experience in gunshot wound analysis. Years later, at the Clay Shaw trial in New Orleans, he would describe what he found:

The procedure was being controlled. Not by the doctors, but by the uniforms in the gallery. Humes would later testify that he was given instructions. He could not say by whom. He was told to work quickly. He was told the family was waiting. He was told certain procedures were not necessary.

He did not dissect the back wound track.

He did not examine the brain in the manner protocol required.

He did not call Dallas to clarify the throat wound until the next morning—after the autopsy was complete.

And LeMay sat in the gallery, cigar glowing in the half-light, watching.

A homicide investigator who burns his notes has destroyed evidence. A pathologist who rewrites his report from memory has created a document that cannot be verified. This is not standard procedure. This is not any procedure. This is the behavior of a man who has been told what to conclude and needs to make sure his working notes don't contradict the final product.

The brain—the single piece of evidence that could have definitively established the number, direction, and trajectory of shots to the head—disappeared. The official explanation: perhaps Robert Kennedy took it, to prevent it from becoming a morbid curiosity. Perhaps it was misplaced.

Perhaps.

The autopsy concluded at 11:00 PM. The bronze casket was closed. The body was prepared for burial. The Warren Commission would later accept the Bethesda findings without question, despite the discrepancies with Dallas, despite the burned notes, despite the missing brain, despite the testimony of doctors who admitted they were following orders they could not attribute.

And Curtis LeMay, the man who had wanted nuclear war, the man who had called the President a coward, walked out of the gallery and into the night, his cigar finally extinguished, having witnessed something he would never discuss publicly.

The body told a story. The autopsy told a different story. And the men in the gallery made sure that only one story would survive.

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