The Future of Freedom Foundation
June 23, 2025
One of the things that has long fascinated me about the JFK assassination has been the extreme reluctance of the mainstream press to aggressively investigate the assassination. Let me provide just one example of this phenomenon. It involves the autopsy that the military conducted on the body of President Kennedy on the very evening of the assassination.
Beginning in the 1970s, a team of Navy enlisted men began telling a remarkable story. They said that on the evening of the autopsy, they had carried President Kennedy's body into the Bethesda Navy Hospital morgue in a cheap shipping casket.
Why was this a problem? The president's body had been carried into the morgue at 8 p.m. by a military color guard consisting of members of the various armed forces, not by a team of sailors. Moreover, at the 8 p.m. entry, the body was inside the heavy, ornate casket into which the president's body had been placed at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. The autopsy officially began at 8:15 p.m.
Moreover, one of the sailors stated that he had gone to next floor up in the Bethesda facility and witnessed Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy entering through the front door. Why was that significant? Because the vehicle in which they had just arrived at 6:55 p.m. contained the Dallas casket. That sailor knew that the Dallas casket had to be empty because he knew that the president's body was downstairs in the morgue.
That team of Navy sailors stated that they had been forced by high military officials to sign sworn secrecy oaths as to what they had witnessed. They were threatened with severe sanctions if they ever revealed what they had seen or done.
Wouldn't you think that this would be something worth investigating? After all, sneaking the president's body into a morgue in a shipping casket and then later bringing it back in inside the heavy ornate Dallas casket would not ordinarily be considered something normal. I would think that any reasonable person would conclude that this is rather unusual - something worth investigating.
After all, let's assume that that team of Navy soldiers was lying. Wouldn't that be a story in and of itself? Why would they lie about something like that? What would motivate them to make up this fantastical story? When would they have gotten together to jointly concoct the tale? Why didn't the Pentagon or the officials involved in the autopsy openly and publicly condemn them for supposedly making up the story?
Wouldn't you think that some mainstream newspaper would say to its investigative reporter: "Go out and interview these guys. Let's get to the bottom of this"?
Nope. Nothing. Just passivity and silence.
In the 1990s, a Marine sergeant named Roger Boyajian told the Assassination Records Review Board that he been in charge of a Marine detail that provided security at the Bethesda morgue on the evening of the autopsy. He stated that the shipping casket had been brought into the Bethesda morgue at 6:35 p.m.
Why was that time important? Two reasons: (1) The vehicle carrying the (empty) Dallas casket, Mrs. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy didn't arrive at the front of the facility until 6:55 p.m., while the shipping casket containing the president's body had been secretly carried into the morgue at 6:35 p.m. (2) Boyajian's statement corroborated the statements of that Navy team that had carried the president's body into the morgue in a shipping casket.
There was something significant about what Boyajian stated: He had retained a copy of his written after-action report that he had delivered to his superiors during the week following the autopsy. The military had kept that report secret. Boyajian gave a copy of his report to the ARRB.
So, wouldn't you think that this was now something the mainstream press would deem worthy of investigation? Even if they assumed that former Marine Sgt. Boyajian was lying and had made the whole thing up, wouldn't that be worth investigating, especially since that would have necessarily have meant that he would have been conspiring with that Navy team to concoct this false story?
Nope. Nothing but passivity and silence.
In the late 1960s, one of the military pathologists who participated in the autopsy, Dr. Pierre Finck, gave sworn testimony in the trial of a man named Clay Shaw, who was charged with having participated in the assassination of President Kennedy. Finck testified under oath that he had received a telephone call at 8 p.m. from Dr. James Humes, one of the military pathologists who was conducting the Kennedy autopsy. Finck testified that during that 8 p.m. telephone conversation, Humes told him that they already had x-rays of the president's head.
Why is that a problem? Because the official entry time of the president's body into the Bethesda morgue was 8 p.m. How could they already have x-rays of the president's head, given that that telephone conversation took place at 8 p.m.? The only way they could already have such x-rays if the body had been bought in earlier than the official 8 p.m. entry time. Thus, Finck's sworn testimony corroborated the statements of that team of Navy soldiers and Marine Sgt. Boyajian that established that the president's body had been secretly brought into the Bethesda morgue in a shipping casket earlier - i.e., 6:35 p.m. - than the official entry time of 8 p.m. in the Dallas casket.
Now, given that Finck's sworn testimony establishes beyond any reasonable doubt the secret earlier introduction of the president's body into the Bethesda morgue, wouldn't you think that this would now be something that the mainstream press would want to investigate?
Nope. Just continued passivity and silence.
Why? Why the passivity and silence in the face of something that screams out for investigation?
There are at least three possibilities.
One possibility is Operation Mockingbird, the secret operation of the CIA to infiltrate the mainstream media and acquire assets. The CIA was clearly successful in this endeavor with respect to commentary writers. But there is also the possibility that they were just as successful in acquiring assets within the part of the newspapers that determined what was gong to be investigated. For that matter, Operation Mockingbird could have also extended to newspaper publishers who were in charge of the overall operations of the newspaper.
Another possibility is fear. The mainstream press had to know that the early introduction of the president's body into the morgue clearly meant that something dark or criminal was taking place. After all, there would be no innocent explanation for the early secret introduction of the president's body into the morgue. The press had to know that it would obviously be extremely dangerous to aggressively investigate any force within the government that was sufficiently powerful to assassinate the president and get away with it.
A third possibility is simply the reluctance to investigate an event that would prove that the United States had experienced a national-security coup, much like the coup that the U.S. national-security establishment fomented and supported in Chile ten years later. The press might well have concluded that the Kennedy assassination was now a fait accompli and that no investigation was going to bring the president back. Therefore, better to let sleeping dogs lie and let the American people maintain the innocent impression that this was just a lone-nut assassination rather than a coup d'état based on the principles of national security.
I submit that the widespread distrust among the American people of the mainstream media began on November 22, 1963. It is a distrust that is well-deserved.
For more on the fraudulent nature of the Kennedy autopsy, see my book The Kennedy Autopsy, which is a synopsis of Douglas Horne's watershed 5-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.