Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. KennedyUnited States. Warren Commission
History
Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
United States. Warren Commission
Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963 -- Assassination; Oswald, Lee Harvey
The conclusion that the Governor’s wrist was not struck by a pristine
bullet was based upon the following: (1) greater damage was inflicted
on the test material than on the Governor’s wrist;[C3-247] (2) the
test material had a smaller entry wound and a larger exit wound,
characteristic of a pristine bullet, while the Governor’s wrist had
a larger entry wound as compared with its exit wound, indicating a
bullet which was tumbling;[C3-248] (3) cloth was carried into the
wrist wound, which is characteristic of an irregular missile;[C3-249]
(4) the partial cutting of a radial nerve and tendon leading to the
Governor’s thumb further suggested that the bullet which struck him was
not pristine, since such a bullet would merely push aside a tendon and
nerve rather than catch and tear them;[C3-250] (5) the bullet found
on the Governor’s stretcher probably did not pass through the wrist
as a pristine bullet because its nose was not considerably flattened,
as was the case with the pristine bullet which struck the simulated
wrist;[C3-251] and (6) the bullet which caused the Governor’s thigh
injury and then fell out of the wound had a “very low velocity,”
whereas the pristine bullets fired during the tests possessed a very
high exit velocity.[C3-252]
All the evidence indicated that the bullet found on the Governor’s
stretcher could have caused all his wounds. The weight of the whole
bullet prior to firing was approximately 160-161 grains and that of the
recovered bullet was 158.6 grains.[C3-253] An X-ray of the Governor’s
wrist showed very minute metallic fragments, and two or three of these
fragments were removed from his wrist.[C3-254] All these fragments were
sufficiently small and light so that the nearly whole bullet found on
the stretcher could have deposited those pieces of metal as it tumbled
through his wrist.[C3-255] In their testimony, the three doctors who
attended Governor Connally at Parkland Hospital expressed independently
their opinion that a single bullet had passed through his chest;
tumbled through his wrist with very little exit velocity, leaving small
metallic fragments from the rear portion of the bullet; punctured his
left thigh after the bullet had lost virtually all of its velocity; and
had fallen out of the thigh wound.[C3-256]
Governor Connally himself thought it likely that all his wounds were
caused by a single bullet. In his testimony before the Commission, he
repositioned himself as he recalled his position on the jump seat, with
his right palm on his left thigh, and said:
I * * * wound up the next day realizing I was hit in three
places, and I was not conscious of having been hit but by one
bullet, so I tried to reconstruct how I could have been hit
in three places by the same bullet, and I merely, I know it
penetrated from the back through the chest first.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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