Let's back up and review some key facts to peel through the evasive smoke, misleading omissions, and lame arguments being made by WC apologists in this thread:
-- Dr. Young hand-wrote his 21-page essay "What Price a Rose?" on 11/23/63, the day after the shooting. He sometimes called the essay an "epistle" or his "notes."
-- He brought a copy of "What Price a Rose?" with him to his 2001 Navy Office of Medical History oral history interviews and read from it.
-- During the third 2001 interview, he read a portion from "What Price a Rose?" that mentioned the finding of the deformed bullet:
The envelope contained three pieces of skull bone, one about three inches in diameter, another two inches in diameter and the third about one to one and a half inches in diameter. It also contained a brass slug about half a centimeter in diameter and distorted. These were found on the floor of the blood-spattered convertible. The convertible was splattered with considerable brain tissue. ("Oral History with CAPT (ret) James Morningstar Young, MC, USN," Interview 3, p. 51, https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Capt_James_Young_Interview.pdf; alternate link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uKNjrks72NYIJ7WXwumcuPPIxwMUyaLZ/view?usp=sharing)So in a recollection that Dr. Young wrote the day after the autopsy, he mentioned the finding of the bullet in the limo.And, mind you, we're talking about a senior Navy officer, a Navy captain, the equivalent of a full-bird colonel in the other military Services, who served as the chief aide to Admiral Burkley, the personal physician of President Kennedy.
-- When Dr. Young realized that the limo bullet had not been discussed by the Warren Commission (WC), he became concerned enough that he took the time to write to former President Gerald Ford, a former WC member, in late December 2000. You can find a photocopy of his letter to Ford here:
https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/government-integrity/navy-doctor-bullet-found-jfks-limousine-never-reported/ (Milicent Cranor article)
-- In his letter to President Ford, Dr. Young mentioned the finding of the deformed bullet in the limo. I quote from the letter:
Two of the corpsman left and returned sometime later with three varying sized pieces of President Kennedy's skull bones. In addition, they brought back in an envelope a spent misshapen bullet which they had found on the back floor of the "Queen Mary" [the nickname he thought was given to JFK's limo] where they had found the pieces of skull bones.
I have never seen anything written about that spent bullet in the Warren Report or elsewhere. Do you recall any testimony or comments which would clarify my concerns?About one week later, President Ford replied to Dr. Young's letter and advised him that he knew of no testimony about the deformed bullet. You can find a photocopy of Ford's letter in Milicent Cranor's article.
-- In the 2001 third interview transcript, Dr. Young explained why Chief Mills and Chief Martinell were sent to search the limo:
Doctor Burkley and I had requested them [Chiefs Mills and Martinell], at the request of Doctor Humes, to go down to the White House after three or four hours at the autopsy room. And Doctor Humes had said that he was missing some bones from the President's skull. And he wondered whether there might be some pieces left in the back of the Queen Mary and that he would like to get those pieces and bring them back to Bethesda so he could reconstruct the head. ("Oral History with CAPT (ret) James Morningstar Young, MC, USN," Interview 3, p. 51, https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Capt_James_Young_Interview.pdf; alternate link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uKNjrks72NYIJ7WXwumcuPPIxwMUyaLZ/view?usp=sharing)The nickname "Queen Mary" had been given to several presidential motorcade vehicles used from the 1930s through the 1960s. They were used in motorcades for FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower, and also for JFK. The follow-up vehicle in the Dallas motorcade was nicknamed "Queen Mary." For some reason, Dr. Young thought this was the nickname of JFK's limo.
-- A few pages later in the 2001 interview transcript, Dr. Young provided more information about the limo bullet and made it clear that he had seen the bullet:
Question: So the bullet, again, was a copper-jacketed bullet like a military bullet?
Answer: No, it was a brass jacket. That's what I've described it as, a brass-jacketed bullet. It didn't look like it. I don't know, maybe it's copper, I couldn't tell. But it was that color of brass and it was slightly bent on the end. It was not a straight bullet. In other words, it had hit something and it bent. . . . ("Oral History with CAPT (ret) James Morningstar Young, MC, USN," Interview 3, p. 54, emphasis added, https://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Capt_James_Young_Interview.pdf; alternate link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uKNjrks72NYIJ7WXwumcuPPIxwMUyaLZ/view?usp=sharing)So, clearly,
Dr. Young saw the deformed bullet.
-- Just after Dr. Young engaged with Arlen Specter about the bullet, he called Chief John Mills to verify his recollection. Dr. Mantik has made some cogent comments on this point:
Dr. Young also . . . recalled that he and Dr. Burkley were present during essentially the entire autopsy. Like most witnesses, Young recalled JFK’s right occipital defect, but he also added that it included the “middle cerebral areas” and that no skull covered either of these sites. (This agrees precisely with my reconstruction.)
More pertinent to the present discussion, however, he recalled that hospital corpsmen William Martinell and Thomas Mills brought an envelope into the morgue that contained three bone fragments and one “brass slug". . . . The latter had been found on the floor “in the back of the car.”
Young was so concerned about his memory’s accuracy of this bullet that he telephoned Mills in Johnson City, Texas: "He [Mills] confirmed exactly what I had put down in my notes, that there was a bent brass slug that they had brought out that they had picked up off the floor of the Queen Mary [he meant the X-100]." (The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy: The Final Analysis, 2024, p. 331)WC apologists would have us believe that Dr. Young was just putting on a gigantic, elaborate act of pretending to be trying to learn what happened to a bullet that he never actually saw, taking this alleged elaborate ruse to such an extreme as to write to President Ford, call Specter's office, and talk with Specter on the phone!
An equally flimsy and ridiculous alternative explanation would be to argue that Dr. Young was hallucinating when he thought he saw a bullet and when he thought he called Chief Mills to verify his recollection, and that Chief Mills experienced an equally remarkable hallucination when he thought he recalled finding the bullet, giving it to Dr. Young, and later receiving a call from Dr. Young!
-- Dr. Mantik was quoting from the 2013 12-page U.S. Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery article that discussed Dr. Young's 2001 interviews. Let's read all of what the article quoted Dr. Young saying about the limo bullet and also about his 11/23/63 essay "What Price a Rose?":
Okay, well I'll continue on because I gave this copy [of his essay "What Price a Rose?"], of course this is all written in longhand, it's about 21 pages long on, you know, one of those tablet paper things, the lines and so forth. And I've got the blue lines on it and all, just as it was. I took it over to Kinko's and had them duplicate it and I have given a copy of this to each of my eight children, so now it's kind of history. . . .
But the most significant part of this is that after reading it, after having given it to our children, I reread it again before I gave it to them. And I came across this issue of the bullet that we had asked the two corpsmen to go down to the White House and pick up what was in the back of the car.
They picked up the bullet off of the floor in the back of the car. Well, I decided that this is something, you know, the third bullet has never been decided about ever, apparently. So what I did was I decided there was only person still alive from the original Warren Commission. I went through the entire Warren Commission book. I've got the whole report of the Warren Commission as a matter of fact. I went through the whole thing and there was nothing in it.
Now, at that particular time nobody said anything about this. And I know what we did. We brought that in, I mean Chief Martinell and Chief Mills went to the White House, went to the Queen Mary, got the stuff off of the floor in the back seat, brought it back out to us and we gave that to Commander Humes at the time.
[These statements, among others, refute John Corbett's juvenile argument that by "they" Young was referring to Secret Service agents.]
I don't know what happened to it, so I decided that what I would do is I would write to President Ford, which I did. I wrote to President Ford and asked him . . . I asked him about, you know, did he know anything about this particular bullet that was given to the autopsy surgeons and he wrote me back a very nice letter, said, “No, he didn't know anything about it, had not heard anything about it ever.” Well, at that point then I began to look around for other issues and I found that Senator Arlen Specter had been an Assistant Counsel to the Warren Commission.
So I made a telephone call to Senator Specter's office, got one of his individuals, told that individual about what I had and what I was concerned about, and I wanted to talk with Senator Specter. Well, he did call me back and we spent, oh God, half an hour on a Friday night about ten thirty at night, he called me back and we talked about it. And he said well send me the material, he said, and I'll see what we can do. So I have sent him a copy of “What Price a Rose?” and asked him to look into what happened to that bullet.
Now just to reassure myself, Chief Martinell unfortunately has died. Chief Mills had become a Lieutenant Commander in a Medical Service Corps and retired from the Navy.
However, I found him living in Johnson City, Texas, where he had been working for the Johnson family on the ranch and whatnot. But he had retired in Johnson City. I picked up the phone and I called him. He confirmed exactly what I had put down in my notes, that there was a bent brass slug that they had brought out that they had picked up off the floor of the Queen Mary. ("Navy Medicine and President Kennedy’s Autopsy: Recollections from a former White House Physician," U.S. Navy. Bureau of Medicine and Surgery Office of Medical History, 2013, p. 8, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3ANavy_Medicine_and_President_Kennedy%E2%80%99s_Autopsy-_Recollections_from_a_former_White_House_Physician_(IA_NMAndTheKennedyAssassination).pdf&page=8; alternate link: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rqe0dyk14mueg51ygpt6r/NM-and-the-Kennedy-Assassination.pdf?rlkey=lr37xkhv1y2sni7hqurx3f2yi&e=1&dl=0)-- When historian Jan Herman from the Navy's Office of Medical History called Chief Mills about Dr. Young's account, Mills acknowledged the finding of the bullet and that Dr. Young had later called him to verify his account, but he was reluctant to say anything further. Herman confirmed this to Dr. Randy Robertson, a diagnostic radiologist who has been studying the JFK medical evidence for many years (
https://aarclibrary.org/2017/09/08/white-house-physician-autopsy-eyewitness-questions-president-ford-about-missing-bullet/).
-- Finally, it is worth noting again that Dr. Young had no intention of providing pro-conspiracy evidence. He was an ardent believer in the WC's version of the shooting, as anyone can confirm by reading the transcript of his 2001 interviews. He assumed that the limo bullet was one of the bullets that Oswald allegedly fired.
Really, this thread is a prime example of the discrediting refusal of WC apologists to acknowledge solid, corroborated evidence that refutes the lone-gunman theory.
