Either the bullet hit the president in the back, came out of his neck, then struck the governor in the armpit, came out below his right nipple, went through his wrist, lodged in his thigh, and then turned up with a perfect nose and a slightly compressed tail on the governor’s stretcher; or else there were two assassins. For the former scenario – the single-bullet theory posited in the Warren Commission Report – to hold up, ‘it would oblige the bullet, angling downward as determined at the official autopsy, to reverse direction inside Kennedy’s body and reflect backward up from inside his back toward his neck bones, striking a vertebra, reflecting again at a high angle before exiting just below his Adam’s apple,’ Paul Chambers writes in Head Shot: The Science behind the JFK Assassination, published in 2010 and now appearing in an expanded edition. Chambers, a shock physicist, has worked for Nasa (optics branch), the Naval Surface Warfare Center (energetic materials and detonation department) and the Naval Research Laboratory (condensed matter and radiation division). He knows a lot about what happens to something when something else hits it very hard (high-velocity impacts, deformation of solids), and how the air behaves when an object goes faster than the speed of sound (sonic booms, echoes, acoustical signatures). He’s not interested in pinning the murder on Sam Giancana, Lyndon Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover, Castro, Khrushchev, Howard Hunt, Earl Warren, George H.W. Bush, Duong Van Minh, the John Birch Society, the Freemasons or Aristotle Onassis. ‘I am not a conspiracy theorist,’ he begins. ‘I am a conspiracy empiricist.’ He wants to know the truth because without it ‘another president could once more be cut down in his or her prime.’ One chapter of the book recounts the history of the scientific method, with digressions on Eratosthenes, Kepler, supernovas and the invention of the transistor. ‘In science,’ Chambers writes, ‘it’s important to keep an open mind and let the data speak for itself.’

LRB 24 May 2012 | PDF Download