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But in 1968 Ramsey Clark, then Attorney General, appointed an independent panel of four professors of medicine to study the autopsy materials. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller's Commission on CIA Activities within the U.S. selected another panel of five physicians to do the same thing last spring. All of the experts on both panels concluded that Kennedy had been struck from above and behind by two shots.
Four other experts have individually seen the available autopsy evidence since. One, Dr. Cyril Wecht, coroner of Pennsylvania's Allegheny County, still challenges the single-assassin conclusion. To the dismay of some of his fellow critics, Wecht abandoned his earlier tentative opinion that shots could have struck Kennedy from the front; he too decided they had come from behind and above the President's car. But he does not believe the bullet that struck Kennedy high in his back also injured Connally. Based on his estimate of the bullet trajectories, Wecht contends that two assassins must have been firing from different positions in the Book Depository.
All of the doctors rule out shots from ahead of Kennedy's car because they can find no exit wounds on X rays and photos of his back or the rear or left side of his head. A small hole in the rear of Kennedy's skull, they say, is clearly an entrance wound; part of the bone is pushed inward. Discoloration of flesh and the lack of jagged skin edges similarly identify the back wound as one of entrance.
The autopsy reviews confirm irrefutably that Kennedy was hit in the back of his neck. They ought to still the argument raised by a rough autopsy sketch in the Warren Commission report; prepared by Commander James J. Humes, it placed Kennedy's back wound too low to be consistent with the exit wound in his throat (partially obscured by a tracheotomy incision). The hole in Kennedy's suit jacket also had seemed too low. Since Kennedy was seen in the Zapruder film to be waving before he was first struck in the back of the neck, the experts believe that his raised right arm bunched up the top of the jacket; unfolded, the jacket thus shows a hole lower than the one in his back (see diagram page 33).
There has been little medical argument over Connally's wounds. His doctors agree that a single bullet struck the right side of his back, fractured a rib, then hit the upper side of his right wrist and shallowly penetrated his left thigh. For this bullet to have come from ahead of the car, the shot would have had to be fired from near the level of the floor.
That does not, however, rule out Wecht's theory that more than one gunman may have been firing from the rear, two shots striking Kennedy and a third inflicting Connally's wounds. Since most witnesses in Dealey Plaza thought they had heard three shots (a minority estimated four, a few five), the FBI and the Warren Commission staff at first had also assumed that three separate shots had inflicted the wounds on Kennedy and Connally, though they thought one rifleman could have done all of the shooting. The Zapruder film and the known characteristics of Oswald's rifle forced them to reconsider; this resulted in the theory that a single bullet struck both Kennedy and Connally.