A surgeon who half a century ago was among the doctors who tried to
save President John F. Kennedy's life said Thursday that the Warren Commission
got it wrong in determining a lone gunman assassinated JFK in Dallas on Nov. 22,
1963.
Speaking via teleconference to a Duquesne University symposium
marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Robert N. McClelland said he
was the first doctor in Parkland Hospital's Trauma Room One to notice the
massive wound in the back of Kennedy's skull and that a trauma of that size had
to be an exit wound.
"The whole right side of his skull was gone. I could
look inside his skull cavity. Obviously, it was a mortal wound," he told a
spellbound audience of legal, medical, forensic and investigative experts and
the public who packed the university's Power Ballroom.
Dr. McClelland,
now 83 and professor emeritus at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical
Center, said that because it was an exit wound, it logically followed that it
had been fired from in front of the president's limousine. And, in turn, that
meant a second gunman was involved in the assassination, contradicting the
Warren Commission's finding that there was but one assassin.
The Warren
Commission determined that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he fired three
times with a high-powered rifle on the president's motorcade in Dealey Plaza
from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. The commission said
that one bullet missed, another went through the president's neck and also
wounded Texas Gov. John Connolly -- the so-called "single bullet theory" -- and
the third caused the fatal head wound.
But Dr. McClelland was resolute.
"Having seen what I saw" in the emergency room and then viewing the Zapruder
film of the assassination, he said, he believes JFK "was initially hit from a
bullet fired from the sixth floor that went through his back and out through his
neck. The next injury was caused by somebody behind the picket fence on the
grassy knoll firing a shot that blew out the right side of his
head."
Speaking on the first day of the three-day symposium sponsored by
the university's Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law, Dr.
McClelland also recounted how two days after Kennedy's assassination he and
other surgeons tried in vain to save Oswald's life after he was shot by Jack
Ruby while being transferred from Dallas police headquarters to the county
jail.
In his address, Dr. Wecht, the renowned forensic pathologist and
longtime critic of the Warren Report, railed against what he called was the
"inept, inexplicable, totally incompetent" autopsy performed on the president by
Navy pathologists James J. Humes and J. Thornton Boswell. They concluded the
president had been struck by two bullets, fired from above and behind, with the
fatal shot being the one that struck his head.
"They had never done a
single gunshot wound autopsy before. If you heard of this in another country,
you'd say condescendingly and dismissively, 'What do you expect from that
country?' but this was our country," Dr. Wecht said. "This should bother you so
much; this should be so distressing, even 50 years later."
Dr. Wecht, who
used a skull and dissected a brain during his address to illustrate his
criticism of the autopsy and what wasn't done, said the "cold case" needs to be
reopened.
"The Warren Commission Report is scientifically absurd," he
said. The burden of the report's detractors is not to have all the answers about
the assassination, he said, but to point out defects in the investigation, which
they have done. He received a standing ovation.
Among the speakers today
will be Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone, director of the
controversial 1991 film "JFK" and director/narrator of the Showtime docu-series
"Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States." ++
Why
Robert Reich Cares so Passionately about Economic Inequality
Paul
Solman, PBS Newshour with Robert Reich
[open for YouTube]
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/10/why-robert-reich-cares-so-passionately-about-economic-inequality.html
[...]
Friday night's NewsHour featured about six-and-a-half
minutes of an interview with newly minted movie star Robert Reich, professor of
public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. We thought some folks
might be interested in the entire discussion and therefore are presenting it in
two installments, edited slightly for ease of reading.
Here is the
first:
Paul Solman: What's the basic argument here?
Robert Reich:
The argument is that inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class
and poor. The rich would do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing
economy then they're doing now with a large share of an economy that is barely
growing at all. It's not growing because there's not enough purchasing power in
the middle class, and the lower-middle class and everybody aspiring to join the
middle class, to keep the economy going.
We've seen this from the
pioneering work of Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, looking back at tax
records. They've brought that research up to 2012 and they see that 95 percent
of the gains, the economic gains, since the recovery began in 2009, are going to
the top 1 percent. Meanwhile, median household income keeps dropping, adjusted
for inflation. Well, where are people going to get the money they need to keep
the economy going? We can't go back into debt like we were in before 2008. So
there's a fundamental threat to the economy.
There's also a very
fundamental threat to the democracy we live in because, as even Louis Brandeis,
the great jurist, understood in the late 19th century, when we last had this
extraordinary gap, "We can either live in a democracy," he said, "or we can have
a huge amount of wealth concentrated in few hands, but we can't have both."
Haven't We Heard This Before?
Paul Solman: I
first met you in the early 1980s and you were already beginning to talk about
this phenomenon of inequality, right?
Robert Reich: I am so boring,
Paul. I mean I really bore myself. And in this movie, I see myself talking about
this same issue, warning that unless we do something it's going to get
completely out of control, warning that the trend lines were going in the wrong
direction. I see myself doing this when I'm in my early 30s, in my 40s, in my
50s. If you ever want to get a sense of your own personal failure, look at
yourself trying to get across a point that nobody is listening to and the
situation gets worse and worse.
Paul Solman: Well people were listening.
I mean you got a fair degree of attention through all these decades. Wouldn't
you just say that the forces are bigger than you are?
Robert Reich: Well
yes, it would be grandiose of me, to say the least, to assume that I could do it
myself. But you know, I was even in President Clinton's cabinet at one point and
was frustrated because although I think the Clinton administration did a good
job with the economy, and I, as Secretary of Labor single-handedly created 22
million net new jobs [smilingly slyly], still....
Paul Solman: But you
couldn't get through the kind of infrastructure spending and so forth that you
wanted to. I remember you complaining about this.
Robert Reich: Yeah, we
couldn't. The deeper trends that started in the late 1970s in terms of the
impact of globalization and technological change in driving this wedge -- more
and more of the benefits of economic growth going to the very, very smaller,
smaller number of people -- that underlying trend we did not reverse. It just
continued to get worse and worse.
What's So Bad about Unequal
Distribution of Wealth?
Paul Solman: But is it necessarily a bad
thing?
Robert Reich: Well it's a bad thing in two regards, even if you
don't particularly worry about issues of fairness or public morality. It's bad,
number one, because no economy can continue to function when the vast middle
class and everybody else don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the
economy is capable of producing without going deeper and deeper into debt.
Seventy percent of the entire economy is basically consumer spending. And if
consumers don't have the wherewithal to spend because all the money's going to
the top, and the people at the top only spend a very small fraction of what they
earn, then the economy is almost inevitably destined to slow.
Paul
Solman: Well, I can imagine a future in which there's enormous productivity
generated by relatively few people. (That may be happening even as we speak.) So
there would be enough wealth to keep people fed and safely sheltered, and lots
of diversions like video games....
Robert Reich: Bread and circuses,
yes.
Paul Solman: Yes, bread and circuses, meaning Rome and the Roman
strategy of about 2,000 years ago.
Robert Reich: You're right. We're
approaching that already. The problem is that that would require redistribution.
Structural unemployment is already very high. We also see that the ranks of the
poor are growing. We're up to about 15 percent (of all families) under the
poverty line, and that's very conservative. And the poverty line understates the
true amount of poverty because it measures it as three times the breadbasket
that a family needs, but it doesn't consider all the other things that are
inflating far, far faster than food prices. You've also got 22 percent of
American children in poverty right now. Those trends are getting worse and
worse. So your scenario where yes, we're getting more productive and so people
may at least have adequate food and clothing and shelter...
Paul Solman:
And good medical care...
Robert Reich: But look at the fight over the
Affordable Care Act. In order to pull this off, we would have to have the kind
of social spending that we (supposedly) cannot afford. The wealthy have so much
political power, they've been managing to reduce their tax bills and enlarge
their tax benefits. And the middle class -- basically their incomes are
stagnating -- so they can't pay more taxes. So we can't even today finance the
social safety net that, under your premises, we would need to keep everybody up
to a minimum standard of living.
Are We Ready for Another War on
Poverty?
Paul Solman: Do you think the wealthy are being
foolish? Maybe they'll just come to their senses and begin to redistribute a bit
more?
Robert Reich: Well maybe, and in my optimistic moments, I look
back at the progressive years 1901 to 1916 or the 1930s or the 1960s, when we
said, "equal opportunity is really important, we're gonna have a civil rights
act and a voting rights act and Medicare..."
Paul Solman: A war on
poverty.
Robert Reich: And a war on poverty. Every 30 or 40 or 50 years,
when capitalism gets off track, we don't go down the roads that other nations
have gone down, toward communism or socialism or fascism. We reform the system.
We save capitalism from its own excesses. We've done it before. The question is,
will we do it in time?
Paul Solman: And so part of the point of this
film is to issue the clarion call that we ought to be doing it
now?
Robert Reich: Yes, and also to give people a deeper understanding of
what's going on. Because right now, liberals are blaming big corporations and
the rich conservatives are blaming the poor and government; everybody is blaming
everybody else. It's a blame game and nobody is looking at the underlying
structure.
What I try to do in my courses -- what this film does -- is
give people a deeper understanding of what's happening, why it's happening, why
it's dangerous, why it's in all of our interests to reverse these
trends.
Is Wealth a Reward for Skill?
Paul
Solman: Is it not plausible that what's happening is that we're living in a more
and more skills-intensive world economy and that some people, perhaps because of
who their parents married and their natural endowments and certainly their
cultural environment, just have more of those skills than everybody else and
they're getting rewarded for it?
Robert Reich: Well, undoubtedly that's
part of the story. But if it were a matter of equal opportunity and anybody who
had endowments could make the most of themselves, and had a really fair shot at
making it in America, it would be one thing. But we know that 42 percent of poor
kids born into poverty are going to stay in poverty for their entire lifetimes.
That's a higher percentage than even in Britain, where 30 percent of people
born in poverty stay in poverty. And Britain's is traditionally a rigid class
society. We have less upward mobility than Britain; we have less upward mobility
than any other advanced country.
Paul Solman: So you mean natural
endowments can't explain it all?
Robert Reich: No, natural endowments
don't explain it all. The biggest gains have been in finance, on Wall Street.
Yes, some people with natural endowments do go to Wall Street, get their
MBA's....
Paul Solman: And were read to as kids and were brought up to be
ambitious and work hard and all the rest of it.
Robert Reich: But you
see, Paul, we know empirically that we have a school system and an education
system that is not very good, particularly for poorer and working class and
middle class kids. We also know that it's getting harder and harder to finance
higher education, especially public higher education. Where I teach at Berkeley,
the tuition and fees used to be zero in the 1960s early 1970s. They're now
$15-18,000 dollars a year.
Many kids are graduating deep in debt; their
families are also in debt. We know that under the tax code in the 1950s, the
highest marginal tax was 91 percent under Republican President Dwight
Eisenhower. Even when you got rid of all the deductions and included tax
credits, it was still over 50 percent.
Paul Solman: Although lots of
people were laundering the money, avoiding taxes with tax
shelters.
Robert Reich: Yeah, some people were, but even with tax
shelters, the marginal tax that actually was paid -- the effective tax rate in
the 1950s -- was so much higher than it is today. We had financial rules; we had
the Glass-Steagall Act, which discouraged risk-taking at commercial banks; we
prevented Wall Street from getting out of control and wreaking the kind of
damage it has. We had limits on the amount of money that could infect and
undermine our politics.
We also had investment in infrastructure: the
national highway-building program, the biggest infrastructure in American
history, perhaps in history up to that point. We don't do any of this anymore.
We have essentially bought into what, to me, is a very dangerous mythology, and
that is that the economy exists out there and we can't do anything about it. And
that's a mythology because an economy relies on rules -- rules about everything
from anti-trust to bankruptcy to taxes to how money can be spent politically.
Those rules define an economy and the rules now are rigged.
Paul Solman:
But a lot of people think, particularly the people who have benefited, that
they're getting their just desserts, that they're entitled to the fruits of
their abilities, their labor, their training. That point of view seems to me
more prevalent, or at least I hear it more in America than I used
to.
Robert Reich: Undoubtedly many people who are extraordinarily rich --
if they're in that top 1 percent, if they got 95 percent of the gains since the
recovery began -- they're going to say, "Well I deserve it." I mean, what do you
expect them to say?
Some of them, like Warren Buffet and Nick Hanauer,
who's in the film, say, "I should be taxed more; this is crazy." But many of
them say, "If I'm wealthy I must be really smart," and many other Americans, who
are not making it, say to themselves, "Well, you know, if I'm not making it I
must be stupid." In fact, there's a very poignant scene in the film in which one
labor union member is trying to decide where to go and what to do and he's
talking to me and he's saying, "Look, I would be paid more if I had the brains.
I don't have the brains and so I understand. I'm just not worth it."
Well, we're the richest economy in the history of the world, and yet,
the median household income is dropping. For the majority of Americans not to
get the benefits of this extraordinarily prosperous economy -- there's something
fundamentally wrong.
What's the Big Deal, for You,
Robert?
Paul Solman: Why do you care so much?
Robert
Reich: Because equal opportunity is a foundation-stone value and it's not just
my value, it's America's value. That's what this country is built on. If we
don't achieve it or at least don't aspire to it, then what do we have? So many
people feel like the game is rigged, Paul, that they're sort of giving up on
politics.
Paul Solman: Oh, for sure.
Robert Reich: They're
totally cynical. Well, if you give up on politics, you're giving up on
democracy, and if you give up on democracy, you're basically saying to the
moneyed interests -- the powerful people and institutions and society -- take it
all. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then we give up. Then then we are a 100
percent plutocracy. I have children, I have grandchildren, you have
grandchildren. What's the legacy we're leaving to these people?
Paul
Solman: You ran for class president your freshman year at Dartmouth,
right?
Robert Reich: Yes I did, I admit, and thank you for bringing that
up.
Paul Solman: Were you already, at that point, as a freshman in
college, committed to the notion that you had to do something politically to
represent or help the disenfranchised, the disadvantaged?
Robert Reich:
Something happened to me in the summer of 1964 before I began college, and I get
into it in the movie a little bit. To make a long story very short, because I
was always short for my age, I relied on a couple of bigger boys to be my
protectors from the bullies. And one of my protectors, named Michael Schwerner,
about 6, 7 years older than I, in the summer of '64, was brutally murdered by
the real bullies, in Mississippi, including the Sheriff of Neshoba County. When
one of my protectors from my little bullies was killed by the real bullies, I
think something just kind of shifted in my brain. I thought, "I've gotta do
something. I mean, I have to make sure that in whatever way I can, that people
have some degree of protection -- that the vulnerable people, of which there are
many, don't suffer the economic bullies."
Now it's not as if I worked
this all out; this is in retrospect that I understand what was going on, but
each of us I think, in our own way, finds ourselves doing stuff in life because
of things that happen to us, experiences that we've had. That really was a
turning point for me.
Paul Solman: You obviously were stunned -- you're
feeling it even now, I see [Reich was welling up], but how did you deal with it?
You were how old?
Robert Reich: By then I was starting college. I was
about 18 years old.
Paul Solman: But it remains shattering, I can
see.
Robert Reich: Well, it was a shattering experience not just for me
and for Mickey Schwerner's family and [James] Chaney's and [Andrew] Goodman's --
there were three civil rights workers who were murdered -- but for the country
too. We all went through that; that was part of the civil rights struggle, a
huge national struggle. ++
“I believe that unarmed truth and
unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right,
temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverend
Martin Luther King
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