JFK was set up for Lee Harvey Oswald's “kill shot” to the head by the back brace he was wearing on the day of his assassination which kept him from recoiling after a first nonfatal bullet struck him, a study in the Journal of Neurosurgery suggests.
Kennedy had suffered from chronic back pain since his early 20s and underwent numerous failed surgeries before resorting to wearing the back brace that may have led to his death, said the paper published in September and just now catching mainstream light as more documents related to the assassination have been released.
Kennedy constantly wore the brace, said the paper which thoroughly detailed his health problems.
Dr. John Lattimer, a physician expert on the Kennedy assassination who had access to restricted materials and evidence, suggested the use of Kennedy’s “tightly bound lumbar brace returned the president to an upright position after the potentially survivable first shot and back into Lee Harvey Oswald’s scope sight, allowing the second obviously fatal shot to the head.”
If Kennedy had not been wearing the brace, “He might have crumpled forward and remained out of Oswald’s line of fire.”
Dr. Thomas Pait, a spinal neurosurgeon who co-authored the paper, explained that the brace was a “firmly bound corset, around his hips and lower back and higher up," CNN reported.
"He tightly laced it and put a wide Ace bandage around in a figure eight around his trunk. If you think about it, if you have that brace all the way up your chest, above your nipples, and real tight, are you going to be able to bend forward?"
The theory had been proposed before, but without as much evidence.
In a detailed report, CBS News had documented the fateful afternoon from the perspective of Dr. Kenneth Salyer, a 27-year-old resident at Parkland Hospital who was on call when Kennedy was shot.
"He was still breathing," said Salyer of when the former president was brought into hospital.
However, when Kennedy’s clothes were removed, the doctor said he was surprised to find the president wearing a corset like brace.
Salyer concluded that the brace had held Kennedy in an upright position, making it possible for Oswald to hit him with that second fatal shot.
"I think that would not have happened if he had gone down like John Connally did,” the doctor said, per CBS.
The Journal of Neurosurgey paper noted that Robert Hart, a contemporary orthopaedic spine specialist, remained unconvinced that the brace played any significant role in Kennedy’s death, but its authors believed it may still have played a role in setting up Oswald’s final shot.
“It’s impossible to know with certainty how significant a role the brace played in JFK’s death on Nov. 22, 1963,” the paper stated, adding that it remained a “fascinating and evocative footnote given its potential role in altering the course of U.S. and world history, and serves as yet another unanswered question surrounding that fateful day.”
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