S. government. .
An hour after the shooting the Secret Service and the Dallas County medical examiner, Dr. Earl Rose, had a conflict of who should perform the autopsy of the president's body. Dr. Rose insisted he do it, citing that it was against Texas law to remove the body from the state without an autopsy. However, Kenneth O"Donnell, special assistant to the president, disregarded his orders, and held him and Judge Ward up against the wall at gunpoint while they removed the body. Later that evening at Bethesda Naval Hospital, three army doctors performed the official autopsy on President Kennedy. Amazingly, during the reporting of the Kennedy assassination case in 1978 by the Congress's assassination committee, it was determined that the three doctors, "had insufficient training and experience to evaluate a death from gunshot wounds."(Summers,42-44) The chairman of the committee's medical panel, Dr. Michael Baden, went on to say that the "autopsy was deficient in the qualifications of the pathologists the failure to inspect the clothing the inadequate documentation of the injuries, lack of proper preservation of evidence, and the incompleteness of the autopsy." (Summers, 45) During this incredibly botched autopsy there remains much confusion over where the wounds actually were, and which wounds were exit wounds and which were entry wounds. This medical evidence is essential for figuring out where the shots were fired from and how many shots hit the president. While the assassinations committee officially stated that these errors were due to the pressure in which the doctors were forced to perform the autopsy, Dr. Pierre Finck, the second doctor performing the autopsy, remembers a different story. Had Texas been observed and the autopsy conducted in Dallas, the country might have been spared the enduring confusion spawned by the events at Bethesda Hospital. (Hurt, 36) .
Finck testified under oath that an Army General instructed him not examine the bullet wounds closely, and that the brain was not to be looked at closely at that time.
