By Michael Miner
In the name of truth and history, Lundberg decided to wade in. A former pathologist, he persuaded two of the physicians who’d performed Kennedy’s autopsy that it was time to break their silence. In April 1992 Lundberg and one of his top reporters, Dennis Breo, spent two days interviewing James Humes and J. Thornton Boswell in a Florida hotel. “I am tired,” Humes told Breo, “of being beaten upon by people who are supremely ignorant of the scientific facts of the president’s death.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
JAMA had a choice to make back then. The journal could have let the doctors’ testimony speak for itself. Instead, stirred by the movie, the book, public opinion polls, and perhaps by Humes’s bluntness, Lundberg and Breo not only published the testimony but told readers what to think about it. Breo went so far in his main story as to quote Lundberg saying, “I am extremely pleased that, finally, we are able to have published in the peer-reviewed literature the actual findings of what took place at the autopsy table….I completely believe that this information…is scientifically sound and, in my judgment, provides irrefutable evidence that President Kennedy was killed by only two bullets that struck him from above and behind.” And Breo concluded his main article by scorning “the growing industry of conspiracy theories from people who are ignorant of the essential facts and yet purport to know how President Kennedy must have been killed.”
An interview with Dr. Pierre Finck, the forensic pathologist, appeared on October 7, 1992. Like Humes and Boswell, Finck insisted that Kennedy had been shot just twice and from the rear. The same issue carried an essay, “Closing the Case in JAMA on the John F. Kennedy Autopsy,” written by Lundberg: “Based on solid, unequivocal forensic evidence as reported by Mr. Breo…I can state without reservation that John F. Kennedy was struck and killed by two, and only two, bullets fired from one high-velocity rifle.”
Then last November the Chicago Headline Club received a letter from a distinguished member making what he conceded was an “outlandish request.” Harris Meyer wanted Dennis Breo’s Lisagor revoked. “New information has come to light,” wrote Meyer, “about grave flaws and unethical practices in the reporting and editing process that produced the winning entry.”
“No.”
So Meyer asked the Headline Club to do the unthinkable. Some things are simply over and done with, and an award given five and a half years ago is likely to be one of them. To revoke the Lisagor would be like stripping Al Pacino of his 1992 Oscar because, on second thought, all he’d done in Scent of a Woman was flash a ham bone the size of a bathtub.
