Don't take my word for it. Here you go:
Horne referred to it as the Boyajian report. Roger Boyajian was a Marine Sgt. on duty at Bethesda on the 22nd. He led a small detail of men that day called the Honor Guard.[66] According to Horne, Boyajian wrote a report the next day that proves that it was his detail that actually brought in Kennedy’s casket at the earlier time of 6:35. Therefore Lifton and his body switching idea are upheld. In my review of Horne’s series, I did not mention Boyajian or his report. This was supposed to be dealt with by Gary Aguilar in another review of Horne’s series. Unfortunately Aguilar was going through a long and complicated divorce process that entailed him having to relocate. So he never got around to writing his review.
Well, Livingstone deals with the issue at length here, and in my opinion he does a good job with it. It would appear that Horne oversold the document and Livingstone uses the opportunity to really pile onto Horne with a lot of invective. I wouldn’t go as far as he does in that regard but let us spell out some of the problems that the document has and that Horne did not elucidate very well.
First, the actual report does not say that the casket picked up by Boyajian’s men was President Kennedy’s.[67] In the one sentence that deals with the issue it is referred to only as “the casket”. As Livingstone properly notes, this is a serious fault with Horne’s claim. It is hard to believe that if Boyajian knew he was handling JFK’s casket, would he not write that down and specifically note that fact?
Further, there is a real problem of authentication as this report is not signed by Boyajian and there is no trace in the record as to why he did not sign it. There is a second page to the report that lists the ten men in the detail – none of which signed the document either. What makes it all a bit worse is that when the ARRB questioned Boyajian about whether he recalled picking up Kennedy’s casket, Boyajian couldn’t recall doing so.[68] In fact, he could not recall much at all about that day. And importantly, it does not appear that the report the ARRB had was the original document leading us to question as to whether or not that original was ever filed with the military.[69] All of this seems strange if the casket really was Kennedy’s.
Additionally, Livingstone shows, if one lives in the area, as he did, it is very hard to understand how Horne could buy into this idea without questions. After all, Horne did live in Washington while working for the ARRB. As Livingstone describes it, the route through downtown Washington from Andrews AFB to Bethesda is about 18 miles.[70] But yet for the Boyajian report to say what Horne declares it says, somehow this transport traversed the 18 miles in about 20 minutes.[71] Unless the driver was proceeding at a continuous 60 MPH on city streets, this does not seem possible.
AF1
There was no trap door near where the coffin was located on the return trip from Dallas on November 22, 1963. The square grille in the near foreground was directly under the bathroom in the Presidential suite in 1963. The space where a trapdoor was claimed to have been would have been all the way at the rear of the cargo hold in the middle. In addition, according to Boeing diagrams and blueprints, there are any number of control cables and wires running through the floor down the center aisle which would have precluded any kind of trap door being in that area. Boeing's diagrams from 1962 (when the plane was placed into service (in October, 1962)) do not show any trap door in the rear of the plane leading to the rear cargo hold. (Photo Courtesy Jamie Sawa)
As Livingstone explains, Boyajian did not pick up Kennedy’s casket. Bethesda is also a morgue. It did not stop being so just because Kennedy was being transported there that day. Other military men died that day. After all, America was involved in a war. Livingstone interviewed several people who identified another person’s body being delivered to the morgue that day. There was no autopsy done and his body was being stored in the “Cold Room” for burial at Arlington.[72] The weight of the evidence seems to dictate that it was this person’s body that Boyajian’s detail picked up.
There are other good points that Livingstone develops to counter some of the excesses in Horne’s books. For instance, the issue of Roy Kellerman having blood on his shirt aboard Air Force One does not mean that Kellerman was somehow performing surgery on JFK’s body in a secret compartment. Kellerman helped get Kennedy’s body out of the limousine and onto a gurney at Parkland. [73] And concerning the alleged secret compartment, Livingstone supplies some good photos illustrating the work of James Sawa showing that there was “no trap door leading from the rear baggage compartment up to the rear of the aircraft.” This vitiates one of the earlier theories Lifton had about secret surgery on board Air Force One.[74]
When I reviewed Horne’s series, I concluded that he needed a tough-minded editor to reduce the size and scope of the book to highlight the good things he had done. Livingstone says the same about Horne.[75] Yet he does not note the irony that this same criticism could be easily applied to Kaleidoscope. This book could effortlessly have been reduced in size by at least one half. Probably even more. And it would have been much more valuable and pointed. What is worse is Livingstone had a valuable model in front of him that he knew about – one that avoided all the conspiracy bantering about the JFK research community. The late Roger Feinman wrote The Signal and the Noise, a long critique of Best Evidence, back in the nineties. [76] It was much shorter than Kaleidoscope. But Feinman avoided most of the pitfalls that Livingstone did not. Livingstone, who much admired Feinman’s work, seemed to forget what made Roger’s critique valuable when he wrote Kaleidoscope.
Source -
https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/livingstone-harrison-e-kaleidoscope
