The autopsy face sheet prepared at Bethesda did provide enough inconsistencies and errors to fuel the conspiracists’ fire about a “magic bullet.” These fires continued to burn even after the doctors who’d prepared the sheet explained that it was a rough approximation and not intended as accurate. They continued to burn even though the seven doctors who reviewed the medical record for the Warren Commission, and eight of the nine doctors who, using enhanced photos and X-rays, evaluated for the HSCA agreed that one bullet did all the claimed damage. And the fires were not extinguished even though 3-D computer modeling, applied and re-applied as it improved in 1976, ‘82, ‘92, and 2003, concluded that Kennedy and Connolly’s wounds were in alignment with a single shot fired from a southeast corner window on the sixth floor of the book depository.
The conspiracists cling to their belief based on claims that x-rays have been doctored and photos altered and that someone else’s body parts were substituted for Kennedy’s, as well as a blindness to – and distortion of – the plainly observable. To make their case, they place Connolly directly in front of and on an equal level with Kennedy, when photographs show the governor on a jump seat, below the president to his left, and turned to his own right when struck. Photos show Kennedy’s back – but not his head – inclined forward, establishing a posture consistent with an entry wound in his rear and exit wound in his throat just where the Warren Commission put it. And no disrespect to Salandria’s great-grandfather, but Kennedy’s jacket was clearly bunched up over his shoulders at the time the shot was fired.
One other thing, if the same bullet didn’t hit Kennedy and Connolly, who shot the governor? Since he was struck in the back, the shooter had to have been behind the limo. From the time between the visible reactions of both men established by the Zapruder film, Oswald couldn’t have gotten off separate shots to hit each man separately. No one claimed to have seen a second rifleman behind the car. And what happened to the bullet which hit Kennedy if it didn’t end up in Connolly? The FBI swept the car and didn’t find a trace of it.
Oh, that’s right, we can’t trust the FBI not to have pocketed it – except when it comes to trusting its initially voiced separate-bullet theory. And as McAdams points out, the Warren Commission was thinking separate bullets hit Kennedy and Connolly as late as April 1964, so how could the FBI have been hiding evidence in late 1963 to bolster a theory that hadn’t yet been arrived at?
magic bullet
Whodunnit xxiv: The Magic Bullet (a)
Could Oswald’s second shot have entered Kennedy’s back and, as Salandria described its path – pass through his custom-tailored jacket and shirt, improbably “bunched together” in the Warren Commission’s formulation in order, the cospiracists suggest, to make the bullet holes in the garments align, and then turn in mid-air, strike Connolly in the back, travel down through his chest to fracture a rib and wrist, before ending up in his femur? (The “bunched” jacket particularly troubled Salandria, since he felt the accusation insulted the memory of his great-grandfather, a master tailor.)
The answer is “Duh, yea,” (though the actual bullet didn’t have to perform the contortions Salandria demanded of it). And I say this despite the governor and his wife believing separate shots struck him and Kennedy, and despite the F.B.I.’s having initially concluded the same thing, and despite, according to Bugliosi, the single-bullet business caused the “biggest disagreement” among the Warren commissioners. First of all, one may wonder how much credence to give the Connollys’ recall, their having been shot at – and hit – and all, while forming the memories they drew upon. Second, doesn’t it seem odd to see the F.B.I. being relied upon as a font of truth, since, according to Douglass, it had joined the cover-up by November 22. Third, the most skeptical commissioners, Russell, Cooper, and Boggs, had the worst attendance records. Russell, the record-setter, missed 88 of 94 sessions; and if anyone was going to cover things up to protect the joint chiefs, it would seem to have been he, the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Finally, “magic” or not, more than a little positive evidence says the second bullet did it.