How Warren Commission Member Gerald Ford Altered the Official JFK Autopsy Diagram and Report to Conceal the Truth About Kennedy's Murder

Ford, then a Congressman, purposely altered the Kennedy autopsy records to conceal the fact that JFK had been shot from both the front and the back.

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The official inquiry into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Warren Commission appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, insisted that Kennedy was killed by three shots fired from the window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building by a single gunman.

This claim of only three shots fired, all of them from behind the President, has been contradicted over time. Parkland Hospital Emergency Room Dr. Charles A. Crenshaw said in his book, JFK - A Conspiracy of Silence, that Kennedy suffered an entry wound in his throat, as well as a blowout wound in the left rear of his head, both of them consistent with being shot at least twice from the front. By the time Kennedy's body reached the Bethesda Medical Center for the official autopsy, a tracheotomy had been performed on the dead President to obscure the frontal origin of the wound in his throat, and the blow-out wound described by multiple doctors at Parkland was no longer reflected in the final autopsy.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover conducted his investigation into the Kennedy assassination in less than a week and essentially handed Warren Commission Counsel Arlen Specter the conclusion that “lone nut” Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy, and had fired the fatal three shots from the Texas School Book Depository Building.

Both the claim of the Warren Commission that there were only three bullets fired, and that all three bullets had been fired from behind the President would require a shocking change in both the official autopsy diagram submitted by Kennedy's doctor, as well as denial of the physical evidence collected by the Warren Commission. 

In fact, Warren Commission member Gerald Ford, then a Congressman, purposely altered the Kennedy autopsy records to conceal the fact that JFK had been shot from both the front and the back, which would of course expose the existence of multiple gunmen and thus a conspiracy.  Both the Associated Press and the New York Times accurately reported that Ford had made the material change when Warren Commission records documenting this history were declassified in 1997.

According to the memoirs of one of Hoover's Deputies, at the behest of the FBI Director, Ford changed the description and autopsy diagram depiction of the location of the wound in Kennedy’s upper back to the base of his neck to accommodate the government’s now largely discredited “single-bullet theory,” holding that JFK had been shot solely from the rear and that one of only three bullets fired hit both Kennedy and Governor John Connally. In essence the description of the wound in JFK's upper back was moved to his rear neck to conceal that JFK had been shot in the throat from the front.

FBI documents declassified in 2006 detail even more about the  crucial role Ford played in doctoring the autopsy to accommodate the cover-up. Assistant FBI Director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach regularly met secretly with Ford to inform the FBI on the status of the Warren Commission investigation. “Ford indicated he would keep me thoroughly advised as to the activities of the Commission,” DeLoach wrote in a memo. “He stated this would have to be done on a confidential basis, however, he thought it should be done.” 

The Associated Press reported in 1997 that DeLoach wrote a memo on December 17, 1963, about a meeting with Ford in which the Deputy FBI Director laid out a problem. “Two members of the Commission brought up the fact that they still were not convinced that the president had been shot from the sixth floor window of the Texas Book Depository,” DeLoach wrote. “These members failed to understand the trajectory of the slugs that had killed the president. He [Ford] stated he felt this point would be discussed further but, of course, would represent no problem.” Indeed, we can now see what Ford meant by “no problem.” 

Here, more specifically, is the problem DeLoach described. The declassified initial draft of the Warren Commission report stated, “A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder to the right of the spine.” This description matches that of JFK’s personal physician, Admiral George G. Burkley, who attended the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, and noted that the wound was “in the upper posterior about even with the third thoracic vertebra.” 

In fact, autopsy photographs of JFK’s back show the wound in his back, two to three inches below the base of the neck. A diagram by Burkley included in the Warren Commission’s own report confirms this location. The actual physical evidence demonstrates that the first draft  of the Warren Commission report was indeed accurate.

Photographs of bullet holes in Kennedy’s shirt and suit jacket, almost six inches below the top of the collar, place the wound in the upper right back. As American history professor Michael L. Kurtz pointed out in his book The JFK Assassination Debates, “If a bullet fired from the sixth-floor window of the Depository building nearly sixty feet higher than the limousine entered the President’s back, with the president sitting in an upright position, it could hardly have exited from his throat at a point just above the Adam’s apple, then abruptly change course and drive downward into Governor Connally’s back.”

Ford did Hoover’s bidding. His handwritten edit on the classified document said, “A bullet had entered the base of the back of his neck slightly to the right of his spine.” This change was later revealed in declassified papers kept by the Warren Commission’s General Counsel and accepted in the final report. “A small change,” Ford told the Associated Press when it surfaced decades later in 1997.

Ford, a public supporter of the single-assassin theory, insisted that his edit had intended to clarify meaning, not change history. However, the effect of his alteration is clear. With this “small change,” he bolstered the commission’s false conclusion that a single bullet had passed through Kennedy and hit Governor Connally — thus solidifying what is now known as “the Magic Bullet theory.” Indeed, the Associated Press stated that Ford’s “small change” became “the crucial element” to determine that Lee Harvey Oswald had been the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy.

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