In the Eye of History

William Matson Law set out on a personal quest to to better understand the circumstances underpinning the assassination of John F. Kennedy. His investigation began with a key component of the events of November 22, 1963, and the days that followed: the autopsy of the president's body at the National Naval Medical Center, Bethesda, Maryland. He contacted those who were involved at Bethesda in various aspects of the aftermath of the assassination; In the Eye of History: Disclosures in the JFK Assassination Medical Evidence comprises "conversations" with eight individuals who agreed to talk: Dennis David, Paul O'Connor, James Jenkins, Jerrol Custer, Ex-FBI Special Agents James Sibert and Frances O'Neill, Harold Rydberg, and Saundra Spencer.

For the first time, these eyewitnesses relate their stories comprehensively in their own words. Law allows them to tell it as they remember it without attempting to fit any pro- or anti-conspiracy agenda. The reader is the judge of these eyewitness accounts and their implications.

Dennis David describes observing the arrival at Bethesda Naval Hospital of the navy ambulance carrying Jackie Kennedy with the official casket purportedly carrying the president's body -- some time after he had supervised the unloading of a shipping casket that he'd been told contained the body of the president. Autopsy technician Paul O'Connor helped remove the president's body -- he recalls that it was in a body bag -- from a shipping casket; this contrasts with the placement of the president's body in an ornate casket in Dallas, after wrapping only in sheets and towels. O'Connor's associate, James Jenkins, emerged from the autopsy convinced that the president had been shot from two directions. X-ray technician Jerrol Custer recalls seeing Mrs. Kennedy enter the Naval Hospital, having just arrived with her husband's body -- yet Custer was on his way to the darkroom to develop X-ray plates already taken of the president's corpse. Ex-FBI Special Agents James Sibert and Frances O'Neill pour scorn on the single-bullet theory -- the sine qua non of the Warren Report -- yet are reluctant to conclude that more than one sniper was involved. Harold Rydberg describes how he illustrated the president's wounds solely from verbal descriptions and provides first-hand impressions of the personalities of the autopsy doctors. Saundra Spencer compares and contrasts the extant photographs from the Kennedy autopsy with those that she developed; the differences are startling. And there is discussion of the 1966 death of William Pitzer in whose possession Dennis David claims to have seen a secret movie of the Kennedy autopsy.