Friday, November 22, 1963, didn’t just change American politics; it created a medical mystery that basically refuses to die. When people talk about the autopsy John F Kennedy underwent at Bethesda Naval Hospital, they aren't usually looking for a clinical report. They’re looking for the truth about how many bullets hit the President and where they came from.
It was a mess. Honestly, that’s the only way to describe the atmosphere at Bethesda that night. You had a grieving widow in her blood-stained suit sitting in a hallway while high-ranking military brass and Secret Service agents paced the rooms. This wasn't a standard forensic procedure performed by a veteran medical examiner in a quiet city morgue. It was a high-pressure, chaotic event led by military pathologists who, truth be told, weren't primarily trained in forensic ballistics.
The result? A medical record filled with gaps, retracted statements, and missing physical evidence that has fueled sixty years of skepticism.
What Actually Happened During the Autopsy John F Kennedy Procedures
The autopsy started late. Around 8:00 PM.
Dr. James Humes and Dr. J. Thornton Boswell were the leads. Later, they were joined by Dr. Pierre Finck. Here’s the thing: Humes and Boswell were general pathologists. They did hospital work. They didn't spend their days looking at gunshot wounds or analyzing trajectory paths. That matters because the first few hours of any autopsy are the most critical for documenting the body before anything is altered.
They found two main wounds. There was a small entry wound at the base of the neck/upper back and a massive, devastating wound to the right side of the head.
But they missed something huge initially.
They didn’t know about the tracheotomy. Down in Dallas, at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dr. Malcolm Perry had performed a quick, emergency tracheotomy right through a small hole in JFK’s throat to try and get him breathing. When the body arrived in Maryland, the pathologists at Bethesda just saw a surgical slit. They didn't realize it was covering a bullet hole. They didn't even call the Dallas doctors until the next morning. Imagine that. You’re performing the most important autopsy in human history and you don’t pick up the phone to ask the first responders what they saw.
The Mystery of the Moving Wound
This is where the autopsy John F Kennedy files get really weird and where the conspiracy theories get their legs. The location of the back wound is a massive point of contention.
The official Warren Commission report placed the wound at the back of the neck so the "Single Bullet Theory" would work—the idea that one bullet went through JFK and then hit Governor Connally. But the autopsy descriptive sheet, hand-drawn by Dr. Boswell, shows the wound significantly lower, near the third thoracic vertebra.
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If the bullet hit that low, it couldn't have exited the throat and hit Connally the way the government claimed.
Humes later burned his original notes. He admitted it. He said he burned them because they were stained with the President's blood and he didn't want them to become a "ghoulish" souvenir. But for researchers, that's a red flag the size of a house. When you destroy primary records, you destroy the only untainted link to the truth.
The Missing Brain and the Photographers
If you want to talk about the autopsy John F Kennedy evidence, you have to talk about what went missing.
Standard procedure dictates that the brain is preserved in formalin and then examined days later (a "supplemental exam") to track the bullet's path through the tissue. They did this. But then, the brain vanished. To this day, nobody knows where it is. It’s not in the National Archives. Some people think Robert Kennedy had it buried to protect his brother’s privacy. Others think it was stolen because it proved a shot came from the front.
Then there are the photos.
John Stringer was the official photographer. Years later, when shown the photos in the official archives, he basically said, "These aren't all mine." He noted that the type of film used in some of the shots didn't match the film he had that night.
- The angles were off.
- The numbering was inconsistent.
- Some images of the interior of the skull were just gone.
It creates this feeling that the medical evidence was "curated" rather than recorded.
The Dallas vs. Bethesda Conflict
There is a huge disconnect between what the doctors saw in Dallas and what the pathologists saw in Bethesda.
In Dallas, the doctors—people like Dr. Robert McClelland—were adamant. They saw a large hole in the back of Kennedy’s head. In the medical world, a massive blowout in the back of the skull usually means an exit wound. An exit wound in the back means a shot from the front (the Grassy Knoll).
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But the autopsy John F Kennedy report from Bethesda says the back of the head was intact and the blowout was on the top and right side.
How do you get two groups of highly trained surgeons seeing two different things? Some people suggest "body alteration" occurred during the flight from Dallas to D.C. Others think the stress of the situation caused "perceptual errors." But it’s hard to ignore nearly a dozen medical professionals in Texas who all described the same "occipital" (back of the head) wound.
Why the Single Bullet Theory Depends on the Autopsy
The "Magic Bullet" or Single Bullet Theory is the backbone of the lone-gunman conclusion. It says CE 399 (the bullet found on a stretcher at Parkland) passed through JFK's back, out his neck, through Connally's back, out his chest, through his wrist, and into his thigh.
For this to be physically possible, the entry wound in JFK's back had to be higher than the exit wound in his throat.
The Bethesda pathologists eventually settled on this "high" entry point. But again, the physical clothing—the suit jacket and the shirt—both show a bullet hole about five or six inches below the collar.
Physics is a stubborn thing.
If the hole in the shirt is six inches down, and the hole in the body is at the neck, the President’s shirt would have had to be bunched up in a way that just doesn't look right in the Zapruder film. This is why the autopsy John F Kennedy remains the most analyzed medical exam in history. Every inch matters.
The 1970s Re-examination (HSCA)
In the late 70s, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) took another look. They brought in a panel of forensic experts to review the photos and X-rays.
They concluded that the Warren Commission was mostly right about the shots, but they dropped a bombshell: there was a "high probability" of a second gunman based on acoustic evidence.
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While the medical panel stood by the "all shots from the rear" conclusion, they were critical of how the original autopsy was handled. They noted that the lack of proper documentation made it almost impossible to be 100% certain about anything. They basically told the world that the Bethesda team did a mediocre job on the most important case of the century.
What Most People Get Wrong About the X-rays
You'll often hear that the X-rays "prove" a conspiracy. It's more complicated.
The X-rays of JFK's skull show a "snowstorm" of tiny metal fragments. This is consistent with a high-velocity bullet fragmenting upon impact. However, some researchers, like Dr. David Mantik (a radiation oncologist), have spent years studying the original X-rays at the National Archives.
Mantik uses a technique called optical density analysis. He argues that one of the lateral X-rays is a composite—basically a "Photoshopped" version from the 60s—used to hide a wound in the back of the head.
Whether you believe that or not, it highlights a key point: even the "hard" scientific evidence in the autopsy John F Kennedy files is subject to intense interpretation.
Actionable Insights for the Curious
If you’re trying to wrap your head around this, don’t just read one book. You have to look at the primary sources.
- Read the ARRB Findings: The Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s declassified thousands of pages. Their interviews with the autopsy technicians (like James Sibert and Francis O'Neill) are fascinating because these men often contradicted the official report.
- Compare the Clothing to the Report: Look at the photos of the President’s shirt and jacket. Try to reconcile the physical holes in the fabric with the "high neck" wound described by the Warren Commission.
- Study the Parkland Doctors: Watch the interviews with Dr. Malcolm Perry and Dr. Robert McClelland. They were the ones who actually worked on the President while he was still technically alive. Their immediate, visceral reactions to the wounds are often more telling than a report written days later under political pressure.
- Understand the Chain of Custody: Look into how the body was moved. The fact that the body was forcibly removed from Dallas (against Texas law at the time) created a break in the legal chain of custody that would have made the autopsy evidence difficult to use in a standard murder trial.
The reality of the autopsy John F Kennedy is that it was a human failure. Whether that failure was caused by simple incompetence, a military "can-do" attitude that led doctors to overstate their certainty, or a deliberate cover-up is still being debated. What we know for sure is that the medical evidence is the only thing that could have truly settled the case, and because of how it was handled, it likely never will.
If you want to dig deeper, the National Archives website has digitized many of the autopsy-related documents. Just be prepared: once you start looking at the discrepancy between the Dallas observations and the Bethesda results, you'll see why this remains the ultimate American cold case.