John K. Lattimer

From Philosopedia

John Kingsley Lattimer (14 October 1914 - 10 May 2007)

Lattimer was born in Mount Clemens, Michigan, the only child of Irvie and Gladys Lenfesty Lattimer. His family, when he was two, moved to the New York City.

A well-known urologist, ballistics expert, and collector of historical relics, Dr. Lattimer studied at Columbia University and for 25 years was chairman of the urology department at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. He wrote 375 papers helping to establish the subspecialty of pediatric urology and the application of streptomycin in the eradication of renal tuberculosis.. Among his patients were President Warren G. Harding, actresses Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn, musicians , and aviator Charles Lindbergh.

Contents 1 World War II 2 JFK Assassination 3 The Unique Objects in His Collections 4 Obituary 5 Books

World War II

Lattimer in World War II was a physician who treated casualties during the Normandy Invasion. When stationed later in Munich and during the war crimes trials, he treated Hermann Goering and Albert Speer.

JFK Assassination

In 1972, the family of President John F. Kennedy chose Dr. Lattimer to be the first nongovernmental medical specialist to review evidence in Kennedy's assassination.

He examined 65 X-rays, color photos, and black-and-white negatives taken during Kennedy's autopsy, and he was quoted by the Associated Press that the images "eliminate any doubt completely" about the validity of the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald fired all the shots that struck the President.

Wallace Milam, in an article based on research by Ms. Milicent Cranor, is highly critical of some of Lattimer's conclusions:

Lattimer's attempts to explain President Kennedy's behavior by using Dr. Thorburn's findings is a hoax. A study of Thorburn's "Case I" reveals numerous and significant differences. Either Dr. Lattimer never read Thorburn's report or he chose to ignore those portions which did not suit his purposes. In either case, the results have been both sad and comical:

• Other "researchers," with their own agendas, borrowed and perpetuated his "facts," apparently without bothering to check the source material either.

• A national gathering of forensic scientists viewed a videotape which offers the Thorburn position as a factual explanation for Kennedy's behavior and most were favorably impressed.

• The most proclaimed Kennedy assassination book of the 30th anniversary, Posner's Case Closed, presented Thorburn as gospel, and the prosecution in an ABA mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald offered it as evidence in court.

• Posner appeared in telecasts by both CBS and PBS, telling national audiences of Kennedy's "Thorburn reaction."

All of this because of Dr. Schlesinger's offhand suggestion in 1976 that Dr. Lattimer might want to "look into the Thorburn business"!

According to Milam, "When Lattimer's writings concerning this alleged spinal trauma are carefully examined, they reveal not only a pattern of misrepresentation and misinterpretation of his source materials, but an actual ALTERATION of those materials. John Lattimer has not only been wrong, he has engaged in deception." Cranor, called a conspiracist, continues to differ with Lattimer.

The Unique Objects in His Collections

An accomplished collegiate athlete and a noted educator and author, Lattimer also was an authority on the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln and a ballistics expert who once housed an extensive collection of historical weapons and memorabilia at his 30-room home.

• In his collection was a blood-stained collar that President Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater the night in 1865 when he was shot.

• Also included were medieval armor, Revolutionary War and Civil War rifles and swords, and drawings by Adolf Hitler.

• Included were Goering's hunting coat with expandable seams, designed to accommodate Goering's waistline, which shrank more than 100 pounds during the 10-month trial. He was also able to obtain Goering's state-of-the-art chronometer wristwatch, his seal ring, enormous "lederhosen," and his pen that was used to sign Nazi documents.

• "In order to keep the Army guards on his side, Goering gave them little gifts," says Dr. Lattimer of Goering's imprisonment. Of course, he explains, the guards weren't about to do anything illegal on Goering's behalf, but the little gifts he gave them were often quite unique. After the trial, Dr. Lattimer was able to purchase some of those "gifts" from the Army personnel or their families.

• Dr. Lattimer has the empty metal vial found in Goering's hand after his suicide. Goering sneaked three vials holding cyanide into prison, one of which was confiscated. "He was very clever because he hid this one in a jar of face cream." Goering killed himself two hours before he was to be executed by the tribunal.

• Dr. Lattimer's collection of political memorabilia is not limited to World War II relics. "I've been a collector all my life," he says. The first piece in his eclectic collection is the sword of Ethan Allen, which Dr. Lattimer inherited as a descendant of that early American revolutionary. He also owns a number of things relating to the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy, such as medical implements belonging to Lincoln's physician and a scrap of blood-stained leather from the car in which Kennedy was assassinated.

• Napoleon's penis, whether real or not, is in the collection. When Lattimer was contacted by the descendants of Ange Paul Vignali, a priest and doctor who had attended Napoléon on St. Helena and who conducted the autopsy when the Emperor died in 1821, he learned that in exile Napoléon had scorned Vignali, a fellow Corsican and “about twenty years ago I bought several things from the family, including the urological relic.” That relic, explained the eighty-year-old urologist, is Napoléon’s phallus. He paid $38,000 for it at a 1969 auction. It was said to have been removed by the priest who administered last rites. According to his daughter Evan, "Of course, the French don't want it here. But there's ironclad provenance."

The Lincoln collection is so extensive that pieces have appeared at the Smithsonian Institution and the New York Historical Society. The "Lattimer Family Collection of Significant Lincolniana and Assassination Relics" has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Arts & Antiques Pavilion titled "Lincoln in New York."

Obituary

Dennis Hevesi, writing the obituary for Lattimer in The New York Times, included the following:

Dr. Lattimer wrote several articles in medical journals describing experiments he had conducted with rifles, scopes and ammunition similar to those used by President Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Then, in 1972, the Kennedy family chose Dr. Lattimer to be the first nongovernmental expert to examine 65 X-rays, color photos and black-and-white negatives taken during the autopsy.

A front-page New York Times article, with a photograph of Dr. Lattimer, quoted him saying that the images “eliminate any doubt completely” about the validity of the Warren Commission’s conclusion that Oswald fired all the shots that struck the president.

Dr. Lattimer’s wartime experiences also prompted him to write a somewhat controversial book based, in large part, on his assignment to the medical team at the Nuremberg trials. The book, Hitler’s Fatal Sickness and Other Secrets of the Nazi Leaders (Hippocrene Books, 1999), records his professional impressions of the men and their conditions.

It includes a long chapter concluding that Hitler suffered from advanced Parkinson’s disease — probably the “faster moving post-encephalitic” type, Dr. Lattimer wrote — based on reports of Hitler’s tremors, first in the left hand, then spreading to other limbs, and his well-documented attacks of rage.

It includes a long chapter concluding that Hitler suffered from advanced Parkinson’s disease — probably the “faster moving post-encephalitic” type, Dr. Lattimer wrote — based on reports of Hitler’s tremors, first in the left hand, then spreading to other limbs, and his well-documented attacks of rage.

Dr. Lattimer theorized that the disease prompted him to make bizarre judgments that eventually cost Germany the war. Among the more macabre relics that Dr. Lattimer collected, in this case from his service at Nuremberg, is a glass ampoule that contained the dose of cyanide taken by Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe commander, to commit suicide rather than go to the gallows.

And although there is some dispute about its authenticity, Dr. Lattimer also had in his collection what is said to be Napoleon’s penis, which a long tradition holds was removed by the priest who administered the last rites. Dr. Lattimer bought it at an auction in 1969. Asked about its authenticity, his daughter said: “Of course, the French don’t want it here. But there’s ironclad provenance.”

John Kingsley Lattimer was born in Mount Clemens, Mich., on Oct. 14, 1914, the only child of Irvie and Gladys Lenfesty Lattimer. His family moved to New York when he was 2.

Besides his daughter, Evan of Kansas City, Mo., Dr. Lattimer is survived by his wife of 59 years, the former Jamie Hill; two sons, Jon, of Kona, Hawaii, and D. Gary Lattimer, of Honolulu; and one grandson.

A lanky 6-foot-4, Dr. Lattimer was a track star at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1935. He won eight metropolitan area Amateur Athletic Union hurdling championships. He graduated from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia in 1938.

Among Dr. Lattimer’s most prized possessions was a sword that belonged to Ethan Allen, who in the predawn hours of May 10, 1775, led a band of Green Mountain Boys in capturing strategic Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain in upstate New York — a turning point in the Revolution. Two hundred years later to the hour, Dr. Lattimer — Ethan Allen’s sword in hand — led a re-enactment of that battle.

For several years in the 1980s, Dr. Lattimer was chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Medieval Festival, held outside the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park in Manhattan. At the 1983 festival, clad in armor and bearing a shield, he told a reporter about his fascination with medieval armaments.

“In my front hall, I have a suit of armor from a Knight of Malta, with the Maltese Cross,” he said. “I also have a beheading ax.”

At the age of 92, he died at a hospice near his 1895 Federal-style home home in Englewood, New Jersey. The house, according to Dennis Hevesi, "was a virtual military museum until his collection went into storage last year. Its third floor was lined with medieval armor, Revolutionary and Civil War rifles and swords, a pile of cannonballs, World War II machine guns and German Lugers, and drawings by Adolf Hitler."

Books

Autopsy of Abraham Lincoln: Retrieval of a Lost Report (1965)

Lincoln and Kennedy: Medical and Ballistic Comparisons of Their Assassinations (1980)

Urology and Psychosocial Aspects of Chronic, Critical, and Terminal Illness (1983)

This Was Early Englewood; From the Big Bang to the George Washington (1990)

The Great American Gun Debate : Essays on Firearms and Violence (1996, with Don B. Kates; Gary Kleck; James R. Boen)

Hitler's Fatal Sickness and Other Secrets of the Nazi Leaders: Why Hitler Threw Victory Away (1999)

Hitler and the Nazi Leaders: A Unique Insight into Evil (2001)