CHAPTER 4

BURKLEY, NOT BORGIA — A FIGURE OF SPEECH?

As stated earlier, if I had been really concerned about Donahue's lies about me I'd not have delayed this writing for five year. Much of what is in books about the assassination is trash at best and is valueless in informing people or in recording our history. That I delayed for five years is also a reflection of my belief, that as this as this form of trash goes, Donahue's is about the trashiest.

On its first page, it says that "over the course of twenty-five years" what Donahue did was "investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy."1 Typical of Donahue, whether he says it himself or says it through his mouthpiece Menninger, this is not true. Donahue never investigated the assassination. What he did, in fact, is not reasonably called investigating. He looked for what he could make appear supported his incredible, his stupid, his impossible, his childish preconception that Hickey fired the fatal shot. There is nothing else in this book other than the venom of which we have seen typical samples and the puffing up of the phony hero who made it all up beginning with what we come to, his deliberate misrepresentation of what got him off and running on what exists in his imagination only.

With the nothingness in this book that Donahue represents as his "investigation" of the assassination I saw no purpose in addressing his rehashed junk ahead of that of others who also specialized in various kinds of it as each sought to rewrite our tragic history his own way.

What decided me to let other writing wait and return to this particular stinker with his special malodorousness was what I found to be incredible in the libel lawsuit that Hickey had finally filed.

For such matters each state has its own time limits for filing. They are not the same. Hickey's lawyers filed against the book and its publisher in three states which had different statutes of limitations that had not yet run. What actually happened, without a peep from those who claim to live by their dedication of "states" rights, is that two of the judges in states were where the statute of limitations runs longer and had not expired referred the litigation in those states back to were the statute was of shorter period. And there the judge held that the announced date of publication was not the date of publication and therefore the statute had just run out by a day or so.

In effect that judge, whether or not he decided correctly on the law where he sits, decided for two states in which he has no authority and in doing that he threw Hickey's cases out of the courts in those two states in which the statute of limitations had not expired!

(It was Hickey's emotional state that kept him from deciding to file as long as be did. Part, if not all, of that emotional problem came from Donahue's outrageous libel of him, his accusation that Hickey blew the brains out of the President whose life he was to be engaged in protecting.)

While the case is under appeal, it seemed to me that not only in the interest of our history but in fairness to Hickey and his family, if only as a record for our history, the irrational, dishonest, impossible Donahue fabrication, to make himself famous and Hickey into a murderer, deserved attention. It gets herein less attention than is possible, Donahue is that ignorant of the official evidence of the assassination and that dishonest in what he said and did.

Early on Donahue has his own recounting of the supposed duplication of the shooting attributed to Oswald done for CBS News by Maryland's H. P. White company. Among those used as shooters, modest Donahue is described as "A weapons engineer."2 Each of the men used in the testing "test-fired the Carcano." There is no evidence that Oswald ever did that. In fact, other than once with a boy's .22 caliber rifle with his brother, there is no evidence that Oswald ever fired any rifle after his two only firings in the Marines, once when he entered the Corps and once before his discharge . That was several years before the assassination.

Shooting is a mechanical skill. Like concert piano players and violinists, real shooters require daily practicing. Without a peep of contradiction from Donahue, who read my first book, I went into that at some length and in some detail (Whitewash, 150-1) with the Warren Commission witness who had spent six years doing that for the Navy as my authority. I quoted his Warren Commission testimony on that.

With his usual contempt for truth Donahue describes the situation of the White test as "a functional mock-up of Dealey Plaza site.3" That it had a sixty-foot tower for the shooters to duplicate the height from which Oswald allegedly fired is not the same as having to shoot through a window whose sill is only slightly more than a foot above the floor.

Instead of a car, White used a cart driven by an electric motor on rails that were straight whereas the street in Dallas was curved and had trees along it.

Donahue does not say whether the target mounted in that cart was actual size or larger. One of the CBS producers, outraged by the designed dishonesty of the whole thing, leaked details to Sylvia Meagher, who informed me. She told me the target was twice life-size.

With the rifle in infinitely better condition than the one attributed to Oswald, Donahue says they discovered that "the bolt action was clumsy," the action "stiff" and they all had problems ejecting the empty cartridge cases and jamming, and this "weapons engineer" who calls himself a weapons examiner" actually says they placed another empty cartridge in place to be fired! He also says they all "had a lot of trouble stabilizing the rifle," what Oswald never had time to do and never had the opportunity, never did it, from the official evidence itself. Actually, according to Donahue, "The bolt action was so clumsy that after a man squeezed off a shot, ejected the empty cartridge and rammed in a new one with the stiff bolt mechanism, his rifle remained nowhere near on-target and he had to find the target in his scope all over again."4 This with the most experienced professionals and with practice whereas Oswald, who was officially rated by the Marines as a lousy shot and he had no practice at all with that weapon, according to the official evidence itself. Moreover, in the assassination, with all these and other problems with that junky rifle, Oswald had to have fired three shots in less than five seconds and with incredible accuracy.

With this as an inkling of reality, this, the Donahue version of that inkling, his book is based on his unquestioning assumption that Oswald was shooting that rifle from that sixth floor window. He conducted no investigation of that at all and yet as we saw on his first page, it is his proud boast that he "investigated" the assassination for twenty-five years.

More, Donahue found that as soon as he used the rifle "the weapon jammed and he was unable to free the bolt before the" substitute for the President's limousine had passed. Even the second time he used that rifle Donahue had trouble so to make it work at all, and that too slowly, he had to "fumble" with "the sticky bolt mechanism."

All of which, in Donahue's most basic assumption, proved it was a snap for the duffer, Oswald, who was rated officially by the Marines as a "poor" shot.

What, as he boasts, dominated by his compulsion to be fully honest and fully informative Donahue does not mention he knew not from his so-called investigation but because he read it in Whitewash5, where I report the Commission's evidence on similar testing done for it by the very best shots they could get from the National Rifle Association. Not one of them, all professionals, all rated as "master shooters" and all under much more favorable conditions, with the rifle overhauled and the sight adjusted to closer to where it could work, not a single one of them could duplicate the shooting attributed to Oswald!

Here we see Donahue at his impeccably most honest: he does not mention it.

He bases his book on what those associated with him in the White mock-up of reality for CBS News could not do and what the best shots in the country could not do for the Commission yet was easy for Oswald.

Without this kind of uncompromising honesty on Donahue's part he would not, of course, have had his book. So, he was, as we have seen, honest to a fault, in a manner of speaking.

Having provided this basis for his book, Donahue then has a chapter titled "The Warren Commission." He reflects his detailed knowledge of that Commission by saying that it "had at its disposal fourteen attorneys."6 This gross mistake comes from his lack of understanding of the simple ranking of those of the Commission's staff as identified in each of its volumes. These fourteen were not all the Commission's attorneys, nor was it all the attorneys "at its disposal." It drew on many who were not on its staff and those fourteen were not all the attorneys on its staff. There were, under a fifteenth lawyer, the general counsel, and his immediate assistants. Below these assistant counsel are a dozen more positions listed as "Staff members." All but one of them was an attorney and some of the others have risen in major firms and in major state assignments even though they were listed only as "staff members." Some were lawyers in government agencies.

As we are seeing, it is not safe to take Donahue's word on anything at all, no matter how simple or how obvious the fact is.

On the same page Donahue says "The Commission itself would interview 532 witnesses over the ten-month life of the investigation."7 This is typical of what Donahue makes up, ignorant as he is of the truth and caring as little for it as he does.

Those five hundred and twenty-two the Commission did list as "witnesses" it did list not say it interviewed. Not the Commission and not any of its staff.

Among the Commission's listed "witnesses" in its Report8 are newspaper stories!

Can even a Donahue imagine a newspaper story being "interviewed" by the "commission?"

Well, perhaps he does because he says so, quite specifically.

A rather large percentage of what is listed as "witnesses" is affidavits.

Can anyone other than Donahue — and he can imagine anything, as we have seen — imagine a written affidavit being interviewed?

Even if none of this, only the tiniest percentage of the people listed as witnesses was even seen by a single member of the Commission — yet Donahue says they all interviewed all of them, including the inanimate "witnesses."

Senator Richard Russell, for one example, was tied up with other obligations that he attended only six of the Commission's many hearings and at one of those six there was but a single witness!

Donahue then corrects himself to say that "94 testified in person before members" [the plural is his] of the Commission. He says that "61 submitted sworn affidavits" [is there any other kind] and "two gave statements," an apparent reference to those newspapers stories.9

Donahue is so careful he can't even get the number of pages in the Report right. He gives the Arabic number [888] and ignores those many pages with roman numbering [xxiv].10

As Donahue pretends to get into the Commission's evidence I find that my annotations along side what he wrote, which, of course, is Menninger writing what Donahue told him, are often the single word, "false." That is characteristic of what their account of what they give of the Commission's supposed evidence.

He also gets careless but in his careless mistakes he is something closer to the truth. He says that "the evidence seemed to indicate that one shot missed"11 and that it struck the "pavement." The unquestionable evidence is that one shot did miss and that it struck not any "pavement" but as the most ignorant who have paid any attention to the actual evidence know, it struck a curbstone.

With all of Donahue's ignorant mouthing off about spectrographic analysis, there is a full account of this in Post Mortem, which he has, along with pictures before, at the time of impact, and after that curbstone was patched as, literally it was, when Oswald could not have done it, because he was in jail or dead.

This Donahue-Menninger writing is all ignorance and mumbo jumbo so there is no point in wasting more time on it. What is not incorrect is all rehashed anyway.

On the first page of Donahue's third chapter, "The Critics," there again is the question, does he read what he pretends he read or, if he does, does he understand it? He has my first two books down as theorizing conspiracies.12 If he read them and says that, he is again a liar. If he did not read them, we have a better idea of whether his word can be taken for anything at all — it cannot be. There is no theorizing in any of my books.

He is cute in using some of what he did read in my first book as his own and in giving as his source note the citations in my book, as he does on page 22, for one example.

He is so confused as he cribs from the work of others that he actually says that someone saw "three cars drive down a dead-end street [sic — it is the well known Elm Street] running in front of the book depository and into the area behind the knoll."13 For doing that those three cars had to be helicopters because there is no access to that area from the dead end of the street or at any other point. The only access to that area for cars is from the opposite side, the side away from Elm Street. Moreover, if this were not so then those cars would have to have had mountain goats as tires to climb that grassy knoll and who can know what they would have had to be to get them over the high stockade-type fence?

Always flaunting his ignorance he seeks to palm off as expertise Donahue says that the "Doctors in Dallas initially told the press that the frontal wound in Kennedy's neck may have been one of entry.14 His source note on this is "Lane, Rush to Judgement, 37." Nothing like second-
hand or more remote sources if you are a whizzbang "investigator" like Donahue. He could not use the available official White House transcript of that, the first official press conference of the Johnson administration (which if he did not get it anyplace else he could have read or copied it when was here — if he had bothered to ask or to look inside a single file drawer.)

Drs. Malcolm Perry and William Kemp Clark, the former the cardiologist and cardiovascular surgeon and the latter the chief of neurosurgery, each stated unequivocally three times, in response to questions, that without any doubt at all that wound in the front of the President's neck was from the front. (And as we saw earlier, it was above the collar.) Not only is this in the readily-available official press conference transcript, it was in just about every newspaper in the world because all the news agencies reported it. (Lane quoted The New York Times.)

With his usual cheapskate scholarship, Donahue quotes the cheapest paperback reprint of Lane's book, not the original version — the hardback. Knowing Donahue pretty well by now, knowing the evidence, and having read Lane's book when it appeared, it happens I had the edition Donahue cites, I got it out. One hundred percent-Donahue is again a liar. He says that Lane said that those doctors said that front neck wound "may have been one of entry." Lane quoted them accurately, as I do above from their press conference transcript that I have. Except for the first three words, which relate to the preceding page, what follows is the top half of the Lane page that Donahue cites as his source:

. . . An entrance wound usually has no ragged edges and is small and round and neat. An exit wound usually has ragged edges and is large and elongated. Doctors can distinguish entrance from exit wounds as a rule, because a bullet causes considerable tissue damage as it comes out.

About one hour after the President's death was announced, two doctors who had struggled to save his life at Parkland Memorial Hospital held a press conference. Dr Malcolm Ferry, the physician in charge, said, 'There was an entrance wound below his Adam's apple.' His statement was published widely by the media. The New York Times reported:

Later in the afternoon, Dr Malcolm Perry, an attending surgeon, and Dr Kemp Clark, chief of neurosurgery at Parkland Hospital, gave more details. Mr. Kennedy was hit by a bullet in the throat, just below the Adam's apple, they said. This wound had the appearance of a bullet's entry.

Four days after the assassination, a doctor who had examined the President at Parkland Hospital again was quoted as stating that the bullet which struck the President in the throat. . . .

So it is obvious, the man is not only a liar when he speaks for himself, he is and again, and the word deliberate is appropriate, he is a deliberate liar in "quoting" Lane as we see in Lane's own words.

Donahue can't even quote straight; he can't quote without his inevitable lying that is for him indispensable as he phonies up a case with which to make him a name and some money. (A hardback first print of a hundred thousand is real money.)

This should be commentary enough for that Donahue chapter.

It is followed by "The Single Bullet Theory."15 If that "theory" does not stack, on that separate basis Donahue has no book because he subscribes to it and because he insists that other than Hickey firing the fatal shot all were fired by Oswald. His basis for subscribing to it is that without investigation, he assumed it.

His junk is again weary, but because we are evaluating his work we note one of what he regards as his "primary questions" that need to be "answered in the affirmative before the single bullet theory could be proven correct"16 as it never could be with honesty and with the real evidence. All he says is well known. He is rehashing years and years of similar trash by the similarly ignorant. We use the third of the four "primary questions" he poses:

Third, could the bullet recovered at Parkland, if it did come from Connally, really have done so much damage and remained essentially intact?17

Most of what Donahue parrots from books out more than two decades before his can be skipped, particularly because with his special needs he twisted and angled to be in accord with those special needs of his. Then he gets back to that same press conference about which he lied in his quotation of what he "quotes" Lanes as having said and as he knew very well, Lane did not.

Donahue says there was much confusion at Parkland Hospital and that:

The confusion would be compounded by the fact that the Dallas doctors never examined Kennedy's back and hence were unaware of the wound below the nape of his neck. Having seen only the wounds to the President's throat and head. doctors speculated at a wild [sic] news conference on the afternoon of the twenty-second that the neck injury could have been [sic] caused by a bullet entering from the front . . .

He has his source, of course — the identical source in the identical reprint of Lane's book — and he tells the identical lie about that.

To know about — to be absolutely certain about that wound in the front of the neck the doctors had no need to see anything else. They all, as did the nurses who in Dallas were also experienced with bullet wounds, recognized it as a wound of entrance.

But Donahue is selective in his parroting from other books, not infrequently using the work of others as his own work. He did not use what he had from another book to answer the question, "could the bullet 'found' at Parkland Hospital have come from Connally?" He had the answer in Post Mortem, where I quote Dr. Perry who was called in by the Connally doctors because Perry is an expert on veins and arteries and from the X-rays the Connally doctors feared the fragment remaining in Connally's thigh might later puncture his femoral artery and cause him to bleed to death. Perry had to make and did make a careful examination. From his examination of the wound he knew it had not been caused by a bullet — could not have been because the hole was too small — and that it was caused by a thin sliver of a bullet, which is what the X-rays show.

Knowing this, having read it in Post Mortem, the source he quotes elsewhere, Donahue, the soul of honesty that he is, does not answer his question, could that bullet "found" at Parkland Hospital have come from Connally? because he knew the answer: it was impossible. Which leaves the "finding" of that bullet to be explained.

As he rehashes away, Donahue says that "four Secret Service agents" were witnesses at the autopsy. In fact only two were, Greer and Kellerman. The other two were called in after it was over to be able to state where they saw wounds.

Donahue says that after he was told that a bullet had been found at Parkland Hospital, the chief autopsy pathologist, Dr. James "Humes consequently did no dissection to determine exactly where the bullet had gone."18 For this Donahue has no source. That is because there is no source, being another of the endless Donahue lies to cover up and make his concoction seem possible when it was not.

Then Donahue adds that Dr. Pierre Finck "said that the autopsy doctors were ordered not to perform the bullet tracing procedure 'but I don't recall by whom.'"19

For this, of all the sources available to Donahue, he uses the never dependable Jim Marrs. He had the truth, for one of many examples, in Post Mortem,20 which, verbatim, quotes that Finck testimony which he then changed under oath, from the official transcript of the New Orleans trial at which, of all unlikely things, Finck was a defense witness.

First Finck testified, and it was under oath, that some general had given the autopsy prosectors the order not to track the path of the bullet through the President's body and then he changed his testimony to state, still under oath, that those orders had been issued by Admiral C. B. Galloway, who was in charge of that entire Navy medical installation at Bethesda.

Or, and with Donahue there is no end to the times it can be said, he lied still again.

Never tiring of lying, Donahue says that "On Sunday morning Humes burned his original autopsy notes."21 His source for that is supposed to be my first book. He uses the paperback reprint but it has the same language and that language proves that as he is, endlessly, a liar. I did not say that Humes burned his "original autopsy notes" and he did not. On the page Donahue cites, page 325 of that paperback reprint, the words of the original edition are repeated. It says not that Humes burned any notes but that he burned "an earlier draft" of his autopsy report!

The reference to those notes on that page are that they existed and were "part of Exhibit 397." I go into this in greater detail in Post Mortem which, as I say still again, Donahue had, and in it I identify the Commission file in which he testified those notes were when he testified before the Commission.

It is, of course, entirely improper to dispose of any record made during an autopsy, as Donahue does not say. That is not because he did not know. He also did not quote from the page he cites this language: "If the Commission had any question about the burning of historic papers," the transcript does not reveal it.

What Humes burned, as Post Mortem22 could not be more specific in stating, without any subsequent denial or protest, is the handwritten copy of the autopsy report he had written. Donahue also lied in saying he did that on "Sunday morning.'' As Humes testified in his published testimony and I repeated in Post Mortem, it was only after he knew that Oswald had been killed and because of that there would be no trial that Humes burned his autopsy report. He then knew that he would not be a witness at any trial and no defense counsel would give him any trial and no defense counsel would give him any tough questioning. That was after noon, not in the morning.

Donahue has no source for his Sunday morning lie. He just made that up, as he made up his myriad other lies, to serve his own purposes.

Donahue gets to the autopsy chart made by Dr. J. Thornton Boswell at the Navy hospital. It, in Donahue's words, purported to show the exact location of the President's various wounds. "The chart included front and rear drawings of a human body. On the rear view Boswell marked the back wound several inches below where the autopsy report described it to be. This was odd, since the marking placed the entrance wound far below [Donahue/Menninger's emphasis] the exit wound in the neck. In so doing it put the bullet on an upward trajectory, and thereby destroyed the assertion that Kennedy and Connally were hit by the same shot coming down from the book depository."23 Here they have a note reading "See illustration 6." The next words are, "Boswell would later say the drawing was only meant to mark the approximate location of the back wound and that obviously he had marked the wound too low."24

What Boswell actually said was that he had made a careless mistake on what was not intended to be a permanent record.

In fact that chart is a Navy form and is a required Navy autopsy record and Boswell and the others knew that. The problem they faced was that Boswell made his accurate notation before Oswald was killed and they knew there would be no trial. Because that was a required record it dared not be destroyed.

Donahue and Menninger have their illustrations after page 108. They add their caption to this chart, from which they removed all the Navy has printed on it which is required for the Navy's records and for the full report on any autopsy. Instead of what is on that official autopsy record, they have this caption: "6. Incorrect locations of Kennedy's back wound, as shown in Dr. Boswell's autopsy sketch."

This is, as we by now should expect from Donahue, all lies.

He knew it so it is not a mistake, it is a lie.	He has Post Mortem and in it I published, in facsimile, the President's own physician's copy of that required Navy body chart. In Donahue's book, the President's physician's name is mentioned one time only although Admiral George B, Burkley was the President's physician and was the only physician present at both the Parkland Hospital emergency room and at the Navy autopsy. The mention is to say that he argued with the Dallas coroner over taking the President's body away.25

Admiral Burkley's copy, the original of this body chart, is printed in Post Mortem26. It is identical in its location of those wounds as the one Boswell had, which is a xerox copy of it. At the bottom Burkley wrote, after examining the chart and knowing what he knew from having been there and seeing it, "verified." He signed his name after that.

Now if there be those addicted to the official and the Donahue lies and persist in thinking that maybe there was a mistake anyway, there is also what the Commission had and did not publish and in which, although he had it, too, in Post Mortem, Donahue had no interest, the official death certification. That was not written by Boswell. It was prepared by Burkley, and it places that back wound precisely where it is on that accurate body chart Boswell made because it was required. Burkley's words located that back wound "at the level of the third thoracic vertebra,27 which is where it also is on the President's clothing.

In short, the actual evidence that Donahue had to lie about to have his book, requires that the single-bullet fabrication be accepted as true when it is false and the proof of its falsity is the actual official evidence.

It "destroyed the assertion," to use Donahue's own words.

There is more that Donahue and Menninger distort and misrepresent to make their lies appear not to be lies but this is so definitive there is no point in wasting time on their related lies. Without which they have no book and do not get the small fortune from it.

Long before this was written Donahue had Post Mortem, so when he is not truthful about what is officially documented and definitive in it he is not untruthful by accident.

They refer to tests made for the Commission at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds of the Army in an effort to give life to this destruction of the basis of both the Report and of the Donahue/Menninger book. They refer to tests with goat meat and a buttoned shirt collar supposedly to establish the size of hole that would have been made by a bullet wound in the President's throat with his collar buttoned snugly. As we saw, that wound was above the collar. So, not a word of that can be relevant. Moreover, Donahue had borrowed that FBI lab picture from me and saw in it that there were no bullet holes in the front of the President's shirt collar. There were two slits that did not coincide or overlap. They were made by a scalpel, as the only official evidence proves, during the emergency procedures in Dallas. And as we also saw, had this official fabrication been true, there would have had to have been a hole in the knot of the President's tie and there is no hole in it.

To Donahue's knowledge from Post Mortem and from that picture he borrowed and he found to be so clear.

There is not and there never was any validity to that single bullet rewriting of our history and it is not even a theory.

All these documents I cite above and published in facsimile in Post Mortem are the official originals the Commission had and, instead of using them, hid them. I found that at the National Archives as, without subsequent denial or refutation, Post Mortem says, hidden in the one place nobody would ever think of looking for them, the place above all they did not belong. They were hidden with what was sent to the Government Printing Office to be printed, as not one of those vital papers was or was intended to be!

I held them all in my hands, these I cite and many more than are in facsimile in Post Mortem. What I refer to as the Burkley copy of that Navy autopsy body chart is, I repeat, the original. The blood stains and other stains from the President's body fluids are there, in dimmed but visible color. That they are stains and not xerox artifacts is obvious.

Because of that particular Donahue/Menninger lie, that what Humes burned was his notes, I published several receipts for those notes after he turned them in. I cite what Donahue had in Post Mortem,28 the Humes certification that he handed in his "autopsy notes" and "all working papers." Admiral Burkley wrote at the bottom of that page, "Accepted and Approved this date, George B. Burkley, Rear Adm. MCUSN, Physician to the President."

This is Burkley, not Borgia.

Humes delivered all this and more to Burkley at the White House that Sunday night, he testified.

On the next page is Admiral Galloway's memo to Burkley stating that with his note he sends all there is. And on the next page there is the Treasury receipt signed by the head of the White House Secret Service detail, Robert I. Bouck, and it includes, among the many listed items, "One copy of the autopsy report and the notes of the examining doctor, which is described in the letter of transmittal Nov 25, 1963 by Dr. Galloway."

There is no question about any of this: that was an accurate body chart and it was an absolute Navy requirement; those notes were not burned; and they did exist when they were transferred to the White House when Kennedy was no longer President, not being alive. Humes testified that he held them in his hands when he was a Warren Commission witness.

Burkley, not Borgia, may be no more than a figure of speech.