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Max Boot’s Rant Against Oliver Stone

Photograph Source: U.S. Naval War College – CC BY 2.0

Max Boot, a conservative who has long favored regime-change operations on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, is going after Hollywood producer and director Oliver Stone. His beef with Stone? He’s upset because Stone has long maintained that the U.S. national-security establishment employed one of its patented regime-change operations here at home, against President John F. Kennedy. 

The title of Boot’s piece, which was published in the Washington Post, is “Oliver Stone Just Can’t Stop Spreading Lies About JFK’s Assassination.” In his article, he attacks Stone not only for his 1991 movie JFK but also for Stone’s latest update to the movie, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass.

Interestingly, Boot makes a reference to Stone’s accusation “that Kennedy’s autopsy reports were falsified.”

Actually, the more accurate way to put it is that the U.S. national-security establishment conducted a fraudulent autopsy. That fraud was reflected in both the autopsy photographs as well as the final autopsy report.

But like many other proponents of the official lone-nut theory of the assassination, Boot doesn’t address any of the main features of the autopsy fraud in his rant against Stone.

Let’s take two examples. (Others are detailed in my two books The Kennedy Autopsy and The Kennedy Autopsy 2.) 

For 30 years, the national-security establishment had falsely claimed that there was only one brain examination in the Kennedy autopsy. 

It was a lie. And when people are lying about something that important, you know that they are up to something that is rotten and no good.

In the 1990s, the Assassination Records Review Board determined that there were two different brain examinations in the JFK autopsy, the second of which involved a brain that did not belong to Kennedy.

How did they determine this? The official photographer for the autopsy, John Stringer, was at the first brain exam. He stated that at that brain exam, the brain was “sectioned” or cut like a loaf of bread is cut. That’s standard procedure with an autopsy that involves a gunshot to the head. Stringer took photographs of the brain, which also is standard procedure.

One of the three military pathologists who conducted the autopsy, Col. Pierre Finck, stated that he attended the brain examination. But he was not at the brain exam that Stringer attended. Stringer verified that. That means that there was a second brain exam. At that second brain exam, a different photographer was present taking photographs. The brain at the second brain exam was not “sectioned.”  A sectioned brain cannot be reconstituted into a non-sectioned brand. That’s how we know that the brain at the second brain exam had to be a brain of someone other than Kennedy.

It’s also worth mentioning two other things about the brain exam. First, when Stringer was asked to examine the official photographs of Kennedy’s brain, he specifically denied that those were the photographs he took. Second, the autopsy report reflects that Kennedy’s brain weighed 1500 grams. An average brain weighs around 1350 grams. Everyone agrees that an extremely large portion of Kennedy’s brain was blown out by the shot that hit him in the head. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, there is no possibility that Kennedy’s brain could have weighed 1500 grams after having a large portion of it blown away by the gunshot.

What does Boot say about the two brain exams? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

There is something else worth noting. If it hadn’t been for Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, we would never have learned about this fraud. That’s because the national-security establishment would have continued lying about there being only one brain exam. It was Stone’s movie that led directly to the JFK Records Act and the ARRB whose job it was to enforce it. That’s how we learned about the fraud relating to the two brain exams.

The ARRB also discovered the existence of a woman named Saundra Spencer. She was a chief petty officer at the Navy’s photography laboratory in Washington in November 1963. She had a top-secret security clearance. She had worked closely with President Kennedy on both classified and unclassified photographs. She told a remarkable story to the ARRB.

On the weekend of the assassination, Spencer was asked to develop the Kennedy autopsy photographs. Since she was led to believe that the operation was classified, she had kept her secret for some 30 years. When the ARRB showed her the official autopsy photographs, she said that those were not the photographs she developed on the weekend of the assassination. The ones she developed showed a massive exit-sized hole in the back of JFK’s head. The official autopsy photographs show the back of JFK’s head to be intact — i.e., no massive exit-sized hole.

If Spencer’s testimony was true and accurate, then that could mean only one thing: the national-security establishment’s autopsy photograph was fraudulent.

What does Boot say about Saundra Spencer? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Spencer’s testimony matched what Dr. Robert McClelland, who was one of JFK’s treating physicians at Parkland Hospital, said. He stated that Kennedy had a massive exit-sized wound in the back of his head. McClelland wasn’t the only one who said that. So did the other treating physicians, nurses, a Secret Service agent, two FBI agents, and others. 

What does Boot say about Dr. McClelland and all those other witnesses who stated that JFK had a massive exit-sized wound in the back of his head? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. 

It’s again worth nothing that If Oliver Stone had not come out with his movie JFK,we would never have learned about Saundra Spencer and the role she played on the weekend of the assassination. 

What does a fraudulent autopsy have to do with the assassination? It tells us that the assassination was a regime-change operation, no different from other regime-change operations carried out by the national-security establishment, in places like Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1958), Congo (1961), Cuba (1960 to date), Chile (1970-73), and others.

That’s because, as I have repeatedly emphasized in the past, there is no innocent explanation for a fraudulent autopsy, especially when the scheme for a fraudulent autopsy was launched the minute that Kennedy was declared dead. That was when a team of Secret Service agents, operating on orders and brandishing guns, screaming and yelling profanities, and exercising violence, forced their way out of Parkland Hospital with Kennedy’s body, so that they could get it in the hands of new President Johnson, who, in turn, would dutifully deliver it into the hands of the national-security establishment. In the process, that Secret Service team refused to permit the Dallas County Medical Examiner to conduct the autopsy, which was required by state law. 

Thus, there is but one reason that the national-security establishment would carry out a fraudulent autopsy — to cover up its own regime-change operation. There is no other reasonable conclusion that can be drawn.

After the U.S. government was converted from a limited-government republic into a national-security state, conservatives as well as liberals reveled in the regime-change operations, including assassinations and assassination attempts, that were being carried about by the U.S. national-security establishment. The Cold War notion was that the national-security establishment was protecting “national security” by keeping us safe from the communists, who were supposedly coming to get us (much like the terrorists, the Muslims, the drug dealers, and the illegal immigrants are supposedly coming to get us today).

What they still have a hard time accepting is that the little monster they love when it regime-changes foreign leaders is the same little monster that regime-changed John Kennedy for doing precisely what those foreign leaders were doing during the Cold War racket — reaching out to those horrible Russians and to Cuban communist Fidel Castro in a spirit of peace and friendship.

If regime-changed foreign leaders like Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala, and Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, posed a grave threat to “national security” for reaching out to the Reds in a spirit of peace and friendship, why wouldn’t a U.S. president who was doing the same thing pose an even graver threat to “national security”? (See FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment; Why Kennedy Was Assassinated.) Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Max Boot doesn’t answer that question.