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America’s most controversial pathologist dissects
JFK’s assassination in explosive new book
The 1963 killing of the iconic US president has been pored over many times.
But one man thinks the ‘truth’ is in plain sight
Chris Sweeney is an author and columnist who has written for newspapers such as The Times, Daily Express, The Sun and the Daily Record, along with several international-selling magazines.
Texas Governor John Connolly adjusts his tie as President and Mrs. Kennedy, in a pink outfit, settled in rear seats,
prepared for motorcade into city from airport, Nov. 22. © Bettmann / Getty Images
Dr. Cyril Wecht is no nonsense, blunt and doesn’t shirk voicing an opinion. When I spoke to him about his new book, ‘The JFK Assassination Dissected,’ I was forewarned that, despite being a nonagerian, he’s still a formidable presence.
The veteran forensic pathologist turns 91 next month, yet continues to work solidly out of his Pittsburgh office. He’s performed 21,000 autopsies and been consulted on more than 41,000 other deaths. He also continues to teach at the city’s Duquesne University, but sees his deep dive into the murder of America’s most iconic president as his legacy project.
“It’s kind of a gift to myself to get it out there, before I will be unable to read it lying in my coffin,” he says matter of factly.
With a mission statement like that it’s hardly surprising the book, which took six years to write, is not a confirmation of the official account of what happened in Dallas back on that fateful day in 1963.
His contention is that a small group, perhaps of around six military and CIA powerbrokers, were behind the assassination: “They are people who saw America going to hell in a basket and they were looking at five more years of John Kennedy likely followed by eight years of Robert Kennedy. Thirteen years is a lifetime in the socio-political development of a country. There was no way they could defeat the Kennedys at the polls, no way they could have dealt with him in any way – there was only one way to deal with it and save America as they saw it, in their super patriotic zeal, and that was to eliminate him.”
The official record of what took place on that fateful day is that Lee Harvey Oswald, working as a lone assassin, shot JFK as the president rode by adoring crowds in an open top car. Two days later, Oswald, a former US Marine who had embraced Marxism and defected for a time to the Soviet Union, was shot dead himself in police custody by Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner.
The 888-page final report from the 10-month long Warren Commission in September 1964 judged that Oswald acted alone and there was no conspiracy, foreign or domestic.
Wecht doesn’t mince his words: “The Warren Commission report is pure bullshit.”
We all knew that! Well, most of us.
The smoking gun in Wecht’s book is that he claims to prove comprehensively that there was a second shooter.
“I get into some of the very specific technical findings explaining why there were two shooters, one from the rear and one from the front, simultaneous shots not just one from the rear,” he says.
Part of his proof is provided by an acoustical study, thanks to a police motorcycle officer who made an unwitting mistake: “He was riding off the left rear tyre of the Presidential limousine and was splattered with blood, brain and tissue so much, that he thought he had been shot.
“He had his motorcycle radio in the transmitting instead of the receiving mode which he should have had, and it was fortunate as the sounds at Dealey Plaza that day were recorded as they were transmitted from his radio. That acoustical study was performed by the top notch acoustic experts here in the United States and they conclusively show there were shots from the rear and the front – there were four shots, if not five – quite different from what the Warren Commission has portrayed.”
While he’s certain of a second person firing, Wecht doesn’t have any potential suspects.
“If I had the names I would disclose them. I haven’t been hesitant or fearful of anything. By now if anybody was going to knock me off, it would have happened.”
Another aspect that rankles with Wecht is geometry. JFK was accompanied that day by Texas governor John Connally, who was also shot but not killed.
In one breathless diatribe, Wecht recounts without pause the journey of Exhibit 399, the bullet that killed the 35th US president, explaining how it had to change angle and direction on several occasions as it went through both men.
Wecht explains: “I say to the Warren Commission defenders and sycophants, if you want Oswald as a shooter, fine. I want the second shooter because in the laws of the United States federal government, two or more people involved in a planning, execution, coverup of a crime makes it a conspiracy. The case has to be reinvestigated.”
The book takes no issue with JFK’s security detail or the medical staff who treated him.
Wecht believes strings were pulled from above, creating the conditions for a coverup that involved Kennedy’s body quickly being taken back to Washington for an autopsy.
“To begin with, you have the body of the president spirited out of Parkland Hospital in Dallas in violation of the laws of that county and the state of Texas. The autopsy should have been done by the local medical examiner, who was a board-certified, experienced, qualified forensics pathologist. I happen to know him, we met when we were both in the Air Force many years ago at different bases and [at] national conferences.”
Instead it was a pair of naval doctors, J. Thornton Boswell and James Humes, who carried it out at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland. In Wecht’s eyes, they were out of their depth: “They were career naval people who had never done a single gunshot wound autopsy in their entire careers. You realize how difficult a task it is to deal with somebody that has multiple gunshot wounds to differentiate between entrance and exit, angle, trajectory, sequence and in the JFK case you then have to correlate all of his wounds, with the several wounds in John Connally? That is a formidable task.
“The idea of having two pathologists who had never done a gunshot wound autopsy in their entire careers, who had no training in forensic pathology, is deplorable and despicable.”
Another area of suspicion in the book is what happened to JFK’s brain. It could not be examined straightaway. Wecht explains how a brain can’t be dissected immediately as it’s too fragile, so a chemical is used to harden it: “You go back in two weeks and you can cut it like a hard boiled egg, I don’t mean to be crude but just think of that, cutting a hard boiled egg in parallel fashion, slice by slice. You do that with a brain.”
The problem is that two weeks later, JFK’s whole brain was not there. “It’s in the autopsy report, [that] sections of the brain are not made in order to ‘preserve the specimen’. Preserve the specimen? For whom? For Jackie Kennedy’s mantelpiece?”
Wecht says some of the facts he references in the book are out there in plain sight for anyone to discover by researching. In fact, some of the material is covered in other books, too, but he believes his is the most comprehensive demolition of the official account of Kennedy’s death, stating: “My book lays it out from the beginning to the end so to speak and covers all the things that were done improperly, negligently, deliberately, surreptitiously, malevolently to show that this was a planned execution, for the overthrow of the government in the United States.”
There will be many naysayers who will understandably feel that a killing of this magnitude could not have remained a secret for almost 60 years. After all, there have been countless movies, documentaries, books and podcasts made of the assassination, so why should Wecht’s be the one that calls it right after all this time?
The veteran doctor welcomes the challenge: “I’m prepared to debate anybody, draw an audience... but [let’s] deal with the facts. [When] I’ve talked about engaging in conjecture of the names of the people or how many were there and so on, I point that out. But everything else is hard facts and if anybody wants to dispute this, call me a conspiracist, then deal with the facts.”
Also pertinent for Wecht is how all but one of the US media have ignored his book, but he has received numerous interview requests from overseas.
“Here in America, nobody has contacted me even to attack me, as they know if they attack me, I’m going to rebut and challenge them, so they just ignore it and it’ll go away, that’s the way they’ve dealt with this for almost 60 years.”
Wecht feels Americans can’t countenance their commander in chief being shot dead in a conspiracy carried out by shadowy internal actors. He points out how Russian or Chinese national security operatives are often portrayed as rogue in US media, but American ones are awarded an honorable and patriotic image. “The book is for anybody interested in the JFK assassination, anybody interested in a good murder mystery, anybody interested in the way things are covered up and the ways in which governments can lie.”
Wecht also makes much of the fact that papers related to the death have still not been released, despite The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act ordering all government documents to be publicly released by October 2017. Donald Trump postponed that, releasing some, but most were heavily redacted.
Biden released more last December, but they were dismissed as not containing any new information. More than 10,000 documents remain, which have yet to be seen by anyone outside of The White House. They are due to be finally unveiled on December 15, 2022, but that is not guaranteed.
For Wecht, all the secrecy is more than enough reason to justify his book. “The reason they give when they deign to explain why they are not releasing it all is that it would compromise our national security. An act committed in 1963, by one person according to them, is going to compromise our national security today, in 2022 – you like that? That’s the kind of BS you get from them.”
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Another glimpse at how Deep State works...
If you’re American and oppose war with Russia,
expect to be smeared as unpatriotic
Pro-war hawks in the West have resorted to overt hostility toward those
who argue against conflict in Ukraine
Lauren Chen is a political and social commentator. She began as a YouTuber, and has since gained millions of views on the platform and hundreds of thousands of followers. She has also appeared on Fox News, BlazeTV, RT, OANN, Newsmax, The Daily Wire, Rebel Media, PragerU and The Rubin Report.
Russian tanks leaving for Russia after joint exercises of the armed forces of Russia and Belarus near Brest.
© AFP / Handout / Russian Defence Ministry
On Tuesday, after weeks of international uncertainty and fears of conflict, Russia announced it would be pulling its troops back from the border with Ukraine. This news came after repeated assurances from President Vladimir Putin and officials that Moscow had no desire for war, and that troop movements and positioning were merely training exercises.
Markets immediately responded to this development with renewed optimism, as the Dow jumped 400 points, European stocks closed higher on Tuesday, and natural gas and power prices fell. However, one group curiously silent in light of the seemingly positive turn of events was the war hawks, goaded by Western media, intelligence, and politicians, (ie Deep State) who in the preceding hours had all but assured the public that an invasion and armed conflict were inevitable.
And while the establishment neo-cons and neo-libs may say that their hawkish warnings and preparations were simply the logical conclusion given the information available at the time, it’s important to remember that throughout the recent hysteria, there have been voices who attempted to pull back the mounting calls for war. However, rather than address their reasoning, the pro-war camp instead resorted to smears in order to justify their peculiar need to stoke tensions with another global superpower.
Specifically, in one attempt to contextualize the intelligence communities’ assurances that Russia’s troop actions were a build-up to aggression against Ukraine, Green Party member and former presidential candidate Jill Stein reminded her social media followers of how officials had not just been wrong about previous conflicts, but had actually lied to the public to garner support for action in Vietnam and Iraq, among other wars. Similarly, many of these same insiders had also been less than truthful about recent stories involving Julian Assange and Russiagate.
The general response to Dr. Stein’s post was positive overall, in keeping with polling which suggests the American public has no interest in involving their country in new foreign engagements. However, the reaction from the pro-war camp was to accuse Dr. Stein of being a Russian asset. Because, of course, what other reason could there be for someone to oppose costly military intervention based on shaky intelligence other than disloyalty to their own country?
And in this same vein, Tulsi Gabbard, another vocal anti-war advocate who has fiercely criticized interventionist American foreign policy, has also spent weeks warning of the conflicting interests motivating those banging the war drums. Often, as Gabbard has pointed out, officials who are most supportive of American military action overseas are also those who stand to gain monetarily through defense contracts and spending (ie Deep State).
What’s more, Gabbard has even gone so far as to suggest that by encouraging Ukraine to join NATO, certain American actors might actually be trying to spark a new Cold War, not to benefit US security interests, but rather the military industrial complex. After all, historically, American policy has considered breaches in spheres of influence occurring in countries close to them, such as Cuba, to be acts of aggression. What makes Western encroachment in Ukraine any different?
As with Dr. Stein, however, sadly Gabbard’s criticisms were met with the usual accusations of being a foreign asset, with little to no attempt to address the actual substance of her position.
Across the aisle on the political right, one of the most prominent anti-war voices that has emerged is Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who has likewise been attacked for his views. Carlson has frequently devoted time on his program to questioning whether, regardless of Russia’s intentions, involving the US in Ukrainian affairs is in America’s best interests, especially at a time when domestic problems abound. Additionally, Carlson has been skeptical of political attempts to paint Ukraine as a Western-style democracy in order to garner public support for any potential alliances or interventions.
It's a very old political technique when there is trouble on the homefront - start a war.
For his efforts, Carlson has received especially vicious condemnation from the likes of David Frum, who in 2003 accused those who were against military action in Iraq of being “unpatriotic.” In a scathing article in The Athletic, Frum accused Carlson and others on the antiwar right of spouting “Vladimir Putin’s talking points,” and ironically likened his position to “isolationists who hoped to profit politically from that passivity.”
Russia’s troop withdrawal may have temporarily neutered the pro-war momentum building in Western discourse. However, the overt hostility toward those who argue against escalating tensions with Russia may signal that it’s only a matter of time before establishment forces are once more arguing that it is not just beneficiary, but rather necessary, for Western militaries to strike before Russian forces can do the same.
Why isn’t America listening to the advice on NATO expansion
of its foremost 20th century expert on Russia?
“Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy
in the entire post-Cold War era,” George Kennan said
Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. He is the author of 'Midnight in the American Empire,' How Corporations and Their Political Servants are Destroying the American Dream. @Robert_Bridge
The US diplomat George Kennan, an astute observer of Soviet Russia under Stalin, offered his observations later in life on the question of NATO expansion. The tragedy of our times is that those views are being ignored.
“Americans will always do the right thing,
but only after all other possibilities are exhausted.”
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill once famously quipped that the “Americans will always do the right thing, but only after all other possibilities are exhausted.” That bit of dry British humor cuts to the heart of the current crisis in Ukraine, which is loaded with enough geopolitical dynamite to bring down a sizable chunk of the neighborhood. Yet, had the West taken the advice of one of its leading statesmen with regards to reckless military expansion toward Russia, the world would be a more peaceful and predictable place today.
The diplomatic doctrine of his era
George Kennan is perhaps best known as the US diplomat and historian who composed on February 22, 1946 the ‘Long Telegram’, a 5,400-word cable dispatched from the US embassy in Moscow to Washington that advised on the peaceful “containment” of the Soviet Union. That stroke of analytical brilliance, which Henry Kissinger hailed as “the diplomatic doctrine of his era,” provided the intellectual groundwork for grappling with the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin as ultimately enshrined in the ‘Truman Doctrine’.
Inside the fetid corridors of power, however, where the more hawkish Dean Acheson had replaced the ailing George Marshall in 1949 as secretary of state, Kennan and his more temperate views on how to deal with capitalism’s arch rival had already passed its expiration date. Such is the fickleness of fate, where the arrival of a single new actor on the global stage can alter the course of history’s river forever. Thus, having lost his influence with the Truman administration, Kennan eventually began teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study, where he remained until his death in 2005. Just because George Kennan was no longer with the State Department, however, didn’t mean that he stopped ruffling the feathers of predators.
In 1997, with Washington elves hard at work on a NATO membership drive for Central Europe, particularly those countries that once formed the core of the Soviet-era Warsaw Pact, Kennan pulled the alarm. Writing in the pages of the New York Times, he warned that ongoing NATO expansion toward Russia “would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”
"The most fateful error of American policy
in the entire post-cold-war era.”
George Kennan
Particularly perplexing to the former diplomat was that the US and its allies were expanding the military bloc at a time when Russia, then experiencing the severe birth pains of capitalism atop the smoldering ruins of communism, posed no threat to anyone aside from itself.
“It is … unfortunate that Russia should be confronted with such a challenge at a time when its executive power is in a state of high uncertainty and near-paralysis,” Kennan wrote.
He went on to express his frustration that, despite all of the “hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war,” relations between East and West are becoming predicated on the question of “who would be allied with whom” in some “improbable future military conflict.”
In other words, had Western dream weavers just let things work themselves out naturally, Russia and the West would have found the will and the way to live side-by-side in relative harmony. One example of such mutual cooperation is evident by the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a bilateral project between Moscow and Berlin that hinges on trust and goodwill above all. Who needs to travel around the world for war booty when capitalism offers more than enough opportunities for elitist pillage right at home? Yet the United States, having snorted from the mirror of power for so long, will never be satisfied with the spectacle of Russians and Europeans playing nice together.
As for the Russians, Kennan continued, they would be forced to accept NATO’s program of expansionism as a “military fait accompli,” thereby finding it imperative to search elsewhere for “guarantees of a secure and hopeful future for themselves.”
Needless to say, Kennan’s warnings fell on deaf ears. On March 12, 1999, then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, an acolyte of geopolitical guru and ultimate Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski, formally welcomed the former Warsaw Pact countries of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic into the NATO fold. Since 1949, NATO has grown from its original 12 members to thirty, two of which share a border with Russia in the Baltic States of Estonian and Latvia, which has been the site of massive NATO military exercises in the past.
So while it is impossible to say how things would be different between Russia and the West had the US heeded Kennan’s sage advice, it’s a good bet the world wouldn’t be perched on the precipice of a regional war over Ukraine, which has become a center of a standoff between Moscow and NATO.
"Against whom is this expansion intended?”
Vladimir Putin
Russia certainly does not feel more secure as NATO hardware moves inexorably toward its border. Vladimir Putin let these sentiments be known 15 years ago during the Munich Security Conference when he told the assembled attendees: “I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernization of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?”
Today, with Kiev actively pursuing NATO membership for Ukraine, and the West stubbornly refusing to acknowledge Moscow’s declared ‘red lines’, outlined in two draft treaties sent to Washington and NATO in December, the situation looks grim. What the West must understand, however, is that Russia is no longer the special needs country it was just 20 years ago. It has the ability – diplomatic or otherwise – to address the perceived threats on its territory. There has even been talk of Russia, taking its cue from NATO’s reckless expansion in Europe, building military alliances in South America and the Caribbean.
Last month, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reported that President Putin had spoken with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, for the purpose of stepping up collaboration in a range of areas, including military matters.
With each passing day it is becoming more apparent that had Kennan’s more realistic vision of regional cooperation been accepted, the world would not find itself at such a dangerous crossroads today. Fortunately, there is still time to reconsider the advice of America’s brilliant diplomat if it is peace that Washington truly desires.
Robert, you know darn well that it is not peace that America wants, it's a good war or two where they can keep the war inventory moving. War is great for business in countries where war machinery is manufactured and moral compasses belong to the lower classes.
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