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Michael Miner’s excellent discussion of the JAMA-JFK affair [March 5] left much unsaid, not the least of which was that, whereas the journalists at the Chicago Headline Club honored Dennis Breo’s JFK articles in JAMA with the prestigious Lisagor award, the same articles earned a rebuke by Johns Hopkins’s Wayne Smith in one of journalism’s premier peer-reviewed periodicals, the Columbia Journalism Review. How could two groups of respected journalists have reached such opposing conclusions? Perhaps the best explanation–that the Chicago journalists, unwisely, relied on JAMA’s estimable scientific reputation to take Breo’s JFK assertions in JAMA at face value–is one that raises new questions about the wisdom of awarding Breo the Lisagor in the first place.
Most journalists would be right to believe JAMA’s editors would not let so flawed a series as Breo’s into print. But in this extraordinary case, the responsible editor, who was also identified in Charles Crenshaw’s successful lawsuit as one of Breo’s “peer-reviewers,” was the powerful JAMA editor himself, George Lundberg, MD, who, as it turned out, happened to be a personal friend of JFK’s pathologists! And so Breo’s “historic” interview articles consisted of little more than gushing praise for the self-serving, and unchallenged, statements from the very pathologists whose legitimate peers–excluded from the questioning and stonewalled in JAMA’s letters section–believe bungled the autopsy of the century.
San Francisco
