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The controversy over the autopsy centers on the report issued by a three-man team of surgeons after an autopsy performed on Kennedy's body at Bethesda Naval Hospital. The doctors found an opening in the right rear of the President's skull, which they diagnosed as an entrance wound. The exit point was a gaping hole where the side of the skull had been blown out. That accounted for one shot, which the surgeons decided had come from above and behind.
There was another wound in the back of the President's neck, approximately 5½ in. below the right mastoid process. The doctors immediately saw that it was a wound of entrance, but they became puzzled when they could find neither a bullet, an extended bullet path, nor an exit wound in the throat. Later they testified that they had cleared up the mystery, after surgical examination of the body was completed, by calling the Dallas doctors who had attended the President. They then learned that the incision for an emergency-room tracheotomy had been made over a bullet wound in the front of Kennedy's neck. Since they also had found suspicious bruises on the top of the right lung and neck muscles, the autopsy team concluded that the bullet had gone through.
While doing his thesis research, Author Epstein turned up a "supplemental" FBI report dated Jan. 13, 1964 that threw some doubt on all this. The report said that the bullet that struck Kennedy's neck had penetrated "less than a finger-length"—a conclusion that, if true, meant it could not have gone through and hit Connally. This report is the basis for the belief that after Jan. 13 the autopsy report was changed for some devious reason, most likely to rule out the existence of a second assassin. The facts, however, are much simpler: FBI reports are dated when they are submitted, not when the information is gathered. Two FBI agents present at the autopsy in November had overheard and recorded the doctors' puzzled comments about the neck wound during the surgical examination; the clarifying Dallas call was not made until later, thus was not included in the report.
The critics have whipped up a bewildering barrage of other doubts—the location of the bullet hole in Kennedy's clothes, Oswald's relations with Cuban Communists, the fact that the autopsy X rays and photographs were not released (in the case of the photos, at the Kennedy family's request), Jack Ruby's friendship with the Dallas cops. There are plenty of explanations available to clear up any significant suspicions, but the most compelling refutation of most of the critics' charges is that any evidence-tampering of the sort they suspect would have required a conspiratorial web so vast and complex as to be unbelievable. A subversive plot to conceal significant information would almost certainly have had to include the commission and its staff, several FBI agents and Secret Service men, the hospital doctors and nurses in Dallas, some Dallas policemen, the autopsy surgeons, the lab men who developed the X rays and photos and, of course, the Kennedy family.
Some Confusion & Forgetfulness