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In the Eye of History
Disclosures in the JFK Assassination Medical Evidence
By William Matson Law Trine Day
Copyright © 2015 William Matson Law
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63424-047-5
CHAPTER 1
Hotel California
"On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair, warm smell of colitas rising up in the air." I reached over and cranked the volume on my car radio up and at the same time I pushed the accelerator pedal almost to the floor so I could take the steep grade leading out of my little central Oregon town.
I smiled listening to the Eagles singing "Hotel California." I had spent the last couple of years working with filmmaker Mark Sobel on a documentary on the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and trying to write about the experience. Kennedy had run for the democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States and had been shot in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador hotel in the early morning hours of June 5, 1968, and I had read somewhere that the song had been inspired by the event.
"Last thing I remember, I was running for the door I had to find the passage back to the place I was before. Relax said the night man, we are programmed to receive, you can check-out anytime you like, but you can never leave."
Robert Francis Kennedy never got to leave Hotel California in a very real sense. Just as Robert Kennedy's brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy has never really left Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.
Both Kennedy brothers are locked in the collective consciousness of the world: JFK riding into ambush in Dealey Plaza, November 22, 1963, and Robert Kennedy, lying in a pool of his own blood on a dirty pantry floor on June 5, 1968. My book on John Kennedy's autopsy had been published a couple of years before, and I was pleased that the book had garnered mostly positive reviews from the public, but I was more gratified that the autopsy personnel Paul O'Connor and Jim Jenkins had thought that I had done a good job of letting them tell their story, and Dennis David, who had been on the periphery of the Kennedy autopsy, had said the same.
It was Dennis David who had alerted me to the fact that Vincent Bugliosi had just published his opus, Reclaiming History, his twenty year study of the JFK assassination. From the tone of David's email I had the impression that I had not come out on the favorite end of the assassination stick, as it were, with Bugliosi, and another not so promising note from the publisher at JFK Lancer persuaded me that I would have to see (rather read) for myself what all the noise was about, so I drove the forty miles to the "local" Barnes and Noble.
During the drive, I had time to reflect on what time had wrought since my book had been published. Dennis David had lost his beloved wife Dorothy to cancer. Dennis called me just after Dorothy's passing. He hadn't even arrived home from the hospital when he phoned me to tell me of the news. "We just lost mama," he'd said, his voice catching in his throat. I listened, stunned. I had known of "Dot's" illness of course, but one is never prepared for that kind of news. I'm happy to report as of this writing that Dennis David has remarried, is doing very well and has moved to Indiana.
James Jenkins has continued to live in the Deep South, spending his time between Alabama and Mississippi. He continues to live with his wife Jackie, two dogs, and in his words "several cats."
Paul O'Connor called me one day in June of 2006, and started off the conversation with his normal salutation: "How you doing, buddy?"
"I'm good," I said. "What's new with you?"
"Buddy," O'Connor said, "You're never going to guess what happened?" I started to chuckle and waited for what I was sure was going to be one of Paul's latest stories of the trials of dealing with crazy researchers of the Kennedy assassination who had called Paul to give him their ideas of "what had really happened" to JFK. Paul had received several of these calls over the years and he would often call me and tell me of his telephone adventures and we would have a good laugh or have a serious conversation about the assassination. I heard Paul say: "I was walking in the door of my own house and I tripped and fell and I fractured my hip and I didn't know it, and I tried to get up and fell again and broke my wrist!" And then I heard an explosion of laughter from O'Connor.
I was taken aback, and said, "Oh God, Paul, are you all right?"
"Yeah, I'm okay," I heard him say. "My son was with me." He was still recovering from the fall, but was feeling well enough to call me and tell me of his plight. We talked about what was going on in our lives at the moment and we tried to firm up a date for going on vacation together with our families to the Smoky Mountains of West Virginia. "Where you live reminds me a lot of the Smokys," Paul told me. "We'll have a great time," he said. I agreed we would. I wish we had had time to take that trip. I had no idea it would be the last time I would talk to Paul O'Connor. About a month and a half later I came home to find James Jenkins had called me, but had not left a message. I had an uneasy feeling. I didn't take Jim's call as a good sign. Jim Jenkins and I had formed a bit of a bond over the years, but I still had to be the one to initiate contact between us, but when I did call, Jim always to took my call or called me back if I got his answering machine. And he always seemed genuinely glad to hear from me.
A day went by and Jenkins called me the next morning. "William," Jim said after I answered the phone, "I wish we were talking under different circumstances, but I called to tell you Paul has died." I shouldn't have been shocked or surprised given Paul O'Connor's many health problems over the years, but I was. After Jim and I ended our phone conversation, I sat on the side of my bed stunned. And before I realized what had happened, I felt hot tears sting my eyes and trickle down my face. I had talked to O'Connor years before about his feelings about death. Paul had told me of the time he had had an operation. "I died on the operating table and I felt myself drifting. It was dark and quiet and from a long, long way up I heard the doctor calling my name. I heard him say: "Hey, O'Connor, are you in there?" and it brought me back. If that's what death is like, it's real calm, real peaceful and I don't have any fear of it."
Paul O'Connor was a person who enjoyed his life, and had learned to live with pain on a daily basis, and tried hard to have a sense of humor about his troubles. He liked to share funny memories of his time in the service and was a natural at telling them.
In the late-1990s I had arranged to have Paul and Dennis David attend a conference on the Kennedy assassination with me. (I was still working on the book at the time.) Paul and Dennis were sharing a room together at the hotel where the conference was being held and as luck would have it their flights had delivered them to Dallas earlier than my flight. Somehow, I had overlooked booking myself a room. The hotel at that point was full with little option left to me. I asked for the room number where Paul and Dennis were ensconced. I took the elevator up to their floor, trudged down the hallway and to the door of their room. I pounded on the door and Dennis opened it. He looked at me standing there with my suitcase in one had, my briefcase clutched in the other and said "Hey, we wondered when you were going to get here." I walked into the hotel room. Paul was sitting at a table having a drink, and if I remembered right, smoking a cigarette. "Hey Buddy, how are ya?" Paul rose from where he was sitting to give me a hug. "Jesus, you've gotten fat!" he said laughing. I'd admitted I put on a few pounds since we had last seen each other. I explained my plight.
"That's no problem," Dennis David said taking the comforter off his bed and throwing it to me, and Paul gave me one of the pillows from his bed.
We stayed up till the early morning hours, O'Connor and David sitting around in their skivvies telling stories of their time in the military. At one point Paul got down on his hands and knees and began crawling toward me, making sounds like an animal to illustrate a funny prank he and some of the other enlisted men had played on a buddy while Paul was stationed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, leaving Dennis and I howling with laughter.
Paul Kelly O'Connor was that rare individual who was comfortable in his own skin. He liked country and western music and "some" of the old rock and roll.. He liked a good beer now and then and anchovies on his pizza. He could be a total gentlemen while in the presence of women and use "colorful" language like the old swabbie he used to be and in his heart, still was, when he was in the company of men he considered his "buddies." Paul loved to study history. I still remember, when being driven at night from Portland to the town I live, my brother-in-law Bob drove on a stretch of freeway that ran along the side of the Columbia River where Lewis and Clark had once made an encampment while on their search of the Northwest Territories. When Bob pointed out the general area to Paul, Paul said, "Really." Like a little kid, craning his neck, his eyes wide behind the brown frames of his glasses, peering into the night.
Paul O'Connor knew his own place in history due to his involvement in President Kennedy's autopsy. Sometimes relishing the attention it brought him, sometimes hating it for the same reason. He paid a price for being part of the Kennedy legacy, having to put up with endless questions from people like me. Some he considered reasonable researchers, and some he considered to be – in his words "cuckoos and nuts." He had to live with naysayers questioning his motives and his memory. Paul O'Connor always had an answer to those questions. "We were there, they weren't," he would say. And sometimes he would add: "They don't know shit."
Paul's wife told me later that she'd come home to find him dead in his bed. Paul had died in his sleep. The cause of death was listed as natural causes.
I had fought with myself whether to attend the funeral or not. I did not attend. I'd lost too many people I had loved in years past, and unlike Paul, I had not learned, nor have I, to accept the deaths of those close to me. Paul O'Connor left us too soon, before we could say good-bye and before we were willing to let him go. But wherever Paul is now, I hope it's calm. I hope it's peaceful.
Arriving at the bookstore, I paid the $50.00, minus the 20% discount (I recently had a friend of mine living in California who told me he'd found a copy of Bugliosi's book in a discount bin for $2.00. I guess I should have waited) and lugged the monstrous tome to my car. Once home, I started to leaf through the 1600-plus pages, paying close attention to the section with Bugliosi's writing on the autopsy.
I remembered a call I received some months earlier from Andy Winiarczyk, owner of The Last Hurrah bookshop in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. "There's good news and bad news," Andy opined. Feeling like I was in an old Bud Abbott/Lou Costello routine, I said: "Okay, give me the good news first." "Vincent Bugliosi just bought a copy of your book," he replied. Feeling a bit shocked that the great attorney-prosecutor of Charles Mason and author of Helter Skelter had bothered with my little oral history offering, I asked, "O.K., what's the bad news?" Dead-pan Andy answered, "Vincent Bugliosi bought a copy of your book." I started to laugh as Andy continued "and he's been pouring through it looking for information. He wants to know if you have dates and times for the interviews you did." Some I did and some I didn't and I told Andy so. "Well, he wants to talk to you. Is it O.K. if I give him your phone number?" I said, "Yes," and I'd waited for Bugliosi to call me, but he never did. I'd wondered how he was going to deal with what the Navy corpsmen had told me. Andy had told me that Bugliosi had already made up his mind that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone and I remembered thinking, "Well he's going to have a hell of a time dealing with the medical testimony of 'the boys' as I came to think of them as a group."
As I was to learn, it wasn't difficult for Vincent Bugliosi to deal with any of the things I had written or any of Jenkins's, O'Connor's, Custer's or David's testimony, or anyone else's testimony I had gathered for the book. He simply dealt with any problems that he faced with his preconceived "lone nut" scenario by largely ignoring anything he didn't like. For example, on page 385 of Reclaiming History Bugliosi writes about who was in the autopsy room during the Kennedy autopsy.
FBI Special Agents Francis X. O'Neill, Jr. and James W. Sibert recorded the names of all those present, including the admirals and generals of whom there were only four. In addition to their report, which identifies them, listen to what O'Neill said in an October 2001 interview:
"There was the commanding officer of the hospital, [Admiral Calvin B. Galloway]; there was a rear-admiral [Admiral George C. Burkley, the president's personal physician]. There was a general [Godfrey McHugh] who was on the (continued on page 386) airplane with Kennedy and was his military attaché; he was a general and there was a Major-General Philip Wehle [commanding officer of the U.S. Military District, Washington, D.C.] who tried to enter and I kicked him out and he came back and told me he was there to get another casket because the other one was broken. There was no-one else." If someone could find a likely conspirator in this group, who was covering up the assassination, please let me know, Bugliosi writes. Bugliosi has quoted directly from my book. I was the interviewer. It fits with his "Oswald did it alone" approach, and so he uses the passages from my interview with Frank O'Neill because it suits his purposes. In the following paragraph, he quotes from In the Eye of History again. This time, it's Paul O'Connor he cites. "Bethesda medical corpsman Paul Kelly O'Connor told an interviewer (me) that he remembers the "I am" (meaning "who is charge"), coming from the area of Admiral Burkley."
Question: "So you think Admiral Burkley is the one who said 'I'm in charge'?" "Yes." Bugliosi then goes on to explain to the reader that it was James Humes that was in charge of the autopsy.
First of all, just because the list of names made by Special Agent Sibert and O'Neill contain the names of certain individuals doesn't mean that the agents captured the names of everyone present in the morgue that night. James Sibert told Debra Conway and I on June 5, 2001 at his home in Florida that: "We went around. But if someone was busy or got away, we asked. Most of it was eye-to-eye contact." Hardly a fool-proof method of getting every name in the morgue the night of Friday, November 22, 1963. There could have been, and probably were, people in the Bethesda morgue we will never know. From what I've been told by Jenkins, O'Connor and Jerrol Custer, the morgue was over-crowded, described by some as "chaos." I doubt very much whether Sibert or O'Neill had time to get every name by asking each individual personally, and if the FBI agents did, for example, pass around a piece of paper for people to sign, anyone could put down whatever name they wished, or not put down anything. The agents wouldn't have known the difference. And if the FBI agents did have time to check everyone in the morgue, persons or person unknown still could have lied about who they were. Has anyone ever found out who George Bakeman was? Not to my knowledge. (For discussion of this see the Jerrol Custer Chapter.)
The mere fact that Frank O'Neill told me or anyone else that "that's all there was" concerning admirals and generals in the morgue does not make it so. Francis X. O'Neill, as I learned in my research for this book, had his own reasons and bias for going along with the lone-nut scenario, and therefore his statements cannot always be taken at face value. The point here is not to savage Frank O'Neill, but to simply point out that Vincent Bugliosi chooses to believe what he chooses to believe. Bugliosi knows from reading my book that O'Neill professes to me that Oswald assassinated JFK, and did it alone. He also said things or wrote things himself that lead a person to believe otherwise. Bugliosi uses none of the testimony from anyone I have interviewed that did not help him prove that he is "reclaiming history." That kind of research is called "cherry picking." In other words, he's being a lawyer. Bugliosi had a telephone conversation lasting a few minutes with James Sibert in 2000, but no face-to-face interview, and instead, uses Sibert's interviews with the House Select Committee as testimony he gave before the Records Review Board to make the point he wants to make.
Bugliosi did not write in his book of the fact that Jim Sibert's recollection of the casket entry (at least the one they were involved in) on that night differs markedly from Frank O'Neill's memory of the event. As I point out, O'Neill's version of the casket entry jibed with Jim Sibert's in interviews conducted with both agents by Andrew Purdy of the House Select Committee, but after O'Neill became aware of discrepancies pointed out by David S. Lifton in his seminal work on the assassination, Best Evidence, published in 1981, Frank O'Neill changed his version of the casket entry to match with the "official" version in the history of the event, i.e., the display casket taken in by a military honor guard, etc. I have spent many hours with former FBI Agent Jim Sibert, on three separate visits to his home in Florida. Does Vincent Bugliosi relay to the reader any of what James Sibert and I discussed? That Sibert literally despised Arlen Specter, the so-called father of the single-bullet theory? That Sibert came right out and called Specter a "liar"? That Sibert is "adamant" that the single-bullet scenario "did not happen?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In the Eye of History by William Matson Law. Copyright © 2015 William Matson Law. Excerpted by permission of Trine Day.
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