JFK's Brain Is Missing!!

Has anyone called the Russians??

So I’m driving into downtown Portland early on a Sunday morning and listening to one of the country music stations in Portland. Because it’s Sunday morning and there’s not much traffic, I’m not paying attention to anything except what’s in front of me when I hear one of those things that becomes an absolute “WTF??” moment:

JFK’S BRAIN HAS BEEN MISSING FOR 55 YEARS!!

I may or may not have been vaguely aware of this previously. Still, it’s the kind of trivia that occasionally escapes my attention. I usually let nuggets like this slide into what irrelevancy bucket my ADD brain stores such information.

(This answers the question, “Where does your inspiration come from?” Unfortunately, you thought the correct answer was, “All the drugs I did in the ‘60s.”)

On this morning, though, this little turdlet of information would not let go, so I soon found myself Googling “JFK’S BRAIN HAS BEEN MISSING FOR 55 YEARS.” It’s a real thing (again, I sorta knew this), but it could’ve been rattling around in the remainder bin of my brain collecting dust for decades.

WHAT HAPPENED TO JFK’S BRAIN??

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been surrounded by controversy and conspiracy theories since the day of his death. Most everyone agrees that JFK died on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas. And that is about all historians and theorists agree on.

My very first memory is the day JFK died. I remember someone parking me in front of a television on the day he was shot. There was a camera focused on Parkland Hospital in Dallas…and many very distressed adults around me. Of course, I had NO idea what was happening, but I had the sense (as much as a three-and-a-half-year-old can have) that this was all a very bad and serious BFD.

Since that day, the shooting of JFK has been a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. People have made careers out of constructing conspiracies around JFK’s assassination. Throw in the Case of The Disappearing Brain, and what you have is an information vacuum into which has rushed a surplus of possible scenarios, almost all of them sinister and probably none of them accurate.

The conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of JFK are fascinating/horrific by themselves, but what about those concerning the disappearance of his brain?

Why would anyone take it (even if you’re looking for bookends, you’d need two brains)? And where is it today? Does anyone even know?

Though the 35th president’s body is interred at Arlington National Cemetery, his brain has been missing since 1966. Was it stolen to conceal evidence? Taken by his brother? Or was the brain actually replaced even before it went missing?….

On Nov. 22, 1963, the president was assassinated while driving through Dallas, Texas. That night, an autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital in D.C. determined that the president had been shot twice from above and behind.

“There was not much of the brain left,” recalled FBI agent Francis X. O’Neill Jr., who was present at the autopsy. “More than half of the brain was missing.”

The statement that more than half the brain was missing tracks if you watch the Zapruder film and close-ups derived from it if you have the stomach for it. In it, you can see the top of the President’s head disintegrate and disappear instantly. Some ended up on the back of the President’s car, some on his wife, Jacqueline, and some was scattered to the wind.

That said, a bit more than half his brain was left intact. So what happened to the remainder of his brain?

[Agent O’Neill] watched as the doctors removed the brain and put it “in a white jar.” The doctors also noted in their autopsy report that “The brain is preserved and removed for further study.”

According to James Swanson in End of Days: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, the brain was eventually put in a stainless steel container with a screw-top lid and moved to the National Archives.

There, it was “placed in a secure room designated for the use of JFK’s devoted former secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, while she organized his presidential papers.”

In the assassination's aftermath, the disposition of the PresideJFK'sbrain may or may not have been a matter of the highest priority.

Still, we know the chain of custody of JFK’s brain in the immediate aftermath of his assassination, but things go cold after that. Why no one thought of it for two-plus years is hard to know, but for whatever reason, JFK’s brain was discovered missing in 1966.

Cue the conspiracy theories.

[D]uring JFK’s autopsy, his brain was placed in a stainless-steal container with a screw-top lid. According to James Swanson’s End of Days: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy…per the New York Post, the container was, at the time, “stored in a file cabinet in the office of the Secret Service.” Eventually, it made its way to a “footlocker,” along with other evidence, and then to the National Archives, where it was placed in a “secure room” under the jurisdiction of JFK’s former secretary. But—cue the dramatic chord progression—the brain disappeared! “In October 1966, it was discovered that the brain, the tissue slides and other autopsy materials were missing—and they have never been seen since,” Swanson said.

So, who has the brain? Crazy as it may seem, over four decades later, no one knows. An investigation was started by the Attorney General at the time, and yet a thief was never identified. But Swanson has a theory! The author clams [sic] there was “compelling evidence” that indicated JFK’s brother Robert pilfered the brain, with the help of his assistant. While some conspiracy theorists have espoused the view that the brain was stolen to cover up potential evidence that Kennedy was shot from the front rather than the back (i.e. supporting the “grassy knoll” theory), Swanson has a different explanation.

“My conclusion is that Robert Kennedy did take his brother’s brain—not to conceal evidence of a conspiracy but perhaps to conceal evidence of the true extent of President Kennedy’s illnesses, or perhaps to conceal evidence of the number of medications that President Kennedy was taking,” he said.

Fifty-six years later, all we have are accusatiJFK'sconspiracy theories, and precious little hard ewho'vee. We have theories based on things that might have been true, could be true, or that someone thinks should have been true. What all these theories have in commowho'sthat none of them have a sJFK'sof convincing evidence to support them.

Since when has a lack of evidence ever stopped the conception of a conspiracy theory? Just ask your local QAnon chapter at their monthly meeting.

JFK’s brother, Robert, iJFK's culprit named b” most who’ve investigated or formulated a theory. Some folks think RFK stole his brother’s brain, others are relatively certain, and I even ran across one blogger and crime writer who’s convinced that RFK stole JFK’s brain to keep it from being”put on public display. Royal Canadian MoI'ved Police (RCMP) Serious Crimes detective and investigator with the British Columbia Coroners Service Garry Rodgers has this to say about JFK’s missing brain:

National Archive records confirmed they received the John Fitzgerald Kennedy autopsy materials in February of 1965. They were released to the Archives by Robert F. Kennedy’s signature, and that included the brain which was contained in a stainless steel receptacle. The effects were logged into the archives and stayed in safekeeping. That was until October 31st, 1966 when someone noticed President Kennedy’s brain and other tissues had vanished. Yes, it was Halloween, and someone had stolen them.

Meanwhile—unknown to the public—the Kennedy family prepared for President Kennedy’s permanent resting place. Somewhere in 1965, the family had Jack Kennedy exhumed and stored in a secure and secret location while they re-designed and built the Arlington grave site. They moved the grave slightly away from the original location and built a solid base that could withstand the millions of visitors who visited the shrine. That included a modern, natural gas eternal flame to replace the old and hastily-built propane torch along with granite flagstones brought in from New England.

In the middle of the night on March 14th, 1967 the Kennedy family re-interred JFK’s body in the new facility. Present were Jackie Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Edward (Ted) Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson. Also re-interred were the two Kennedy children who died at birth and were moved from their Massachusetts burial spots to be placed with their father.

Nothing was said about the missing brain for years—publicly. The vast majority of citizens never knew it was gone, let alone being stolen. That cat came out of the bag during The JFK Assassination Records Review Board proceedings that took place between 1992 and 1998 which were only recently released under the 2016 Freedom of Information Act.

There, in the files of the 1977 Rockefeller Commission, was the answer as to who stole President Kennedy’s brain. This commission was the first official inquiry after the Warren Commission, and it formed to quell conspiracy rumors. Unfortunately, it probably did more harm than good just as what happened during the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations that concluded President Kennedy’s assassination was “probably the result of a conspiracy”. They based this erroneous conclusion solely on the bogus interpretation of a Dallas PD dispatch recording that allegedly caught four shots rather than three.

The Rockefeller Commission took evidence from United States Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall and questioned him about the brain’s whereabouts. This is what Marshall told the commissioners:

“Robert Kennedy obtained and disposed of these materials himself, without permission or informing anyone else. He was concerned thaJFK'sse materials would be placed on public display and wished to dispose of them to eliminate such a possibility.”

Of course, in the interest of brevity, I’ve skipped over the adventure that was the lead-up to and the aftermath of the autopsy of JFK. And the actual autopsy itself was a matter of some controversy. The doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital had little experience with headshot wounds. As a rJFK's, some critics have called JFK’s autopsy the worst postmortem exam ever conducted, but Det. Rodgers is a bit more confident. He believes the doctors mostly got it right and the postmortem shows that JFK was shot twice.

Of course, that flies in the face of those who believe JFK was shot three times. Other discrepancies have servedthat'sel conspiracy theorists for close to six decades, with no JFK'sution in sight.

As for the location of JFK’s brain, that seems- at least from where I sit- the least sinister part of this equation. If someone had planned something untoward for it- like selling it on eBay- I think it would have happened long ago. But, no, at this point, JFK’s brain is almost certainly buried with him, and his brother most likely did that.

Will anyone ever be able to prove any of this? Of course not; that’s why we have conspiracy theories. If we could prove where JFK’s brain was, none of this would be any fun, would it? People would have to fixate on other, less helpful and harmful things, like QAnon and why Hillary Clinton is (allegedly) raping and murdering children in the basement of a Washington pizzeria that has no basement.

Yeah, I’ll take the controversy over JFK’s brain any day.