Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film

Chapter 2: The Body

Chapter 2 The Body If the assassination debates were challenged by the shifting legibility of the film evidence, they were in fact haunted by a further, perhaps more troubling crisis of representation: the problems posed by Kennedy 's autopsy. In the years immediately following the assassination, both the Zapruder film and the images produced in connection with the president's autopsy remained sequestered texts, yet not in the same way. The government had chosen to make the infliction of wounds public, if only through the printing ofblack-and-white Zapruder stills in Volume 18 ofthe Warren Commission's exhibits. But it chose to keep the images of death private, for the commission refrained from publishing any of the photographs taken during the autopsy. Access to the Autopsy Perhaps the subsequent bootlegging ofthe Zapruder film, which challenged Life magazine's private posseSSion, ultimately made sense in light of the film's public production as the work of an amateur, made outdoors at a political function. The photographs and x rays exposed during the autopsy, on the other hand, were the work of medical professionals. These indoor pictures ofa corpse were to be viewed and analyzed by a limited number of government-sanctioned officials. Although both the Zapruder film and the autopsy images lay at the center of a struggle over public access, they were embedded in different discursive networks. Those networks that demanded public access to the film (and to other motorcade footage) occupied a more visible forum. Since the Zapruder film was held by Time-Life, requests for access to it came, not surprisingly, from its extremely visible competition in the journalistic community. In the name ofdemocratizing the evidence, the press could attempt to wrest monopoly ofthe scene from Life. The struggle over the autopsy was less visible. The graphic and explicit nature ofits imagery certainlywould have restricted its publication in mainstream periodicals or appearance on network television. Publishers and networks thus had far less incentive to fight with the government for access. Moreover, this type of representation demanded a level of interpretive expertise that the buffs did not generally possess. Making the medical evidence public would not instantly democratize the research because its images 55 would first have to be translated by the forensic pathologist or radiologist. During the seventies and eighties, when autopsy photos and reproductions ofthe x rays slowly became available for public inspection, defenders ofthe government's conclusions were extremely critical of those who sought to interpret the evidence with alayman's knowledge ofmedicine. Throughout the assassination debates, the few medical experts who were critical of the Warren Commission and who had access to the classified materials served as conduits for the critics whose research depended on the sequestered evidence.l While demanding access to the autopsy imagery, commission critics continued their struggle for historical authorship by challenging the legitimacy ofthe government's discourse - in this case the qualifications ofthe doctors who performed the official autopsy at Bethesda naval hospital in Washington on the night of the assassination. The commission's findings relied heavily on the report submitted by these doctors, but its members, with the exception of Earl Warren, never looked at the images produced at the autopsy . Critics pointed out that commission members had not examined this evidence and that the Secret Service had immediately taken custody of the autopsy photographs, preventing even the doctors who wrote the official autopsy report from seeing the crucial evidence. Critics argued further that the autopsy was inadequate because the hospital pathologists who conducted the procedure lacked adequate previous experience with the kind of medicolegal diagnosis required by the case.2 The Meaning of Autopsy The competing voices in the assassination debates believed that medical records of JFK's body, like the footage shot by Zapruder, could offer unequivocal testimony about the logistics ofthe shooting. In fact, their faith in this evidence tapped into ascience ofthe corpse that was some two centuries old. In his chapter "Open up a Few Corpses" from The Birth ofthe Clinic, Michel Foucault, discussing the meaning ofdeath and the role ofpathological anatomy in the discourses ofclinical knowledge, isolates the epistemological status of the autopsy. He quotes from a medical treatise by J.-L. Alibert: "When philosophy brought its torch into the midst of civilized peoples, it was at last permitted to cast one's searching gaze upon the inanimate remains ofthe human body, and these fragments, once the vile prey of worms, became the fruitful source ofthe most useful truthS:'3 Foucault uses...