Gerald R. Ford says he was doing nothing more than making a few changes in the interest of clarity and precision. Those who believe that John F. Kennedy was killed as part of a massive conspiracy see Ford's action as not so innocent.

What Ford did that summer of 1964, when he was a member of the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of the president, was to insert the words "at the back of his neck" in a key sentence describing where a bullet struck Kennedy.The effect was to strengthen the commission's conclusion that a single bullet passed through Kennedy and severely wounded Texas Gov. John Connally - a finding crucial to its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole gunman.

"My changes had nothing to do with a conspiracy theory," Ford said in Beaver Creek, Colo., following the revelation Wednesday. "My changes were only an attempt to be more precise."

Maybe so, but his editing is sure to strengthen the conviction within the conspiracy community that the Warren Commission altered facts to conform to its single-assassin theory.

"This is the most significant lie in the whole Warren Commission report," said Robert D. Morningstar, a computer systems specialist in New York City who said he has studied the assassination since it occurred and written an Internet book about it.

If the bullet struck Kennedy in the neck, as Ford's change suggested, the effect would be "raising the wound two or three inches," Morningstar said.

But if the bullet had entered Kennedy in the back, he said, that would have made it unlikely that a single bullet could have gone through Kennedy and hit Connally where he was wounded.

And that, in turn, would have strengthened the theory that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy, not of the lone malcontent described by the Warren Com-mission.

Without Ford's alteration, Morningstar said, "they could never have hoodwinked the public as to the true number of assassins."

The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that one bullet passed through Kennedy's body and wounded Connally and that a second bullet tore through Kennedy's head, killing him.

The assassination of the president occurred Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas; Oswald was arrested that day but was shot and killed two days later as he was being transferred from the city jail to the county jail.

Ford's handwritten notes were contained in 40,000 pages of records kept by J. Lee Rankin, chief counsel of the Warren Commission, and now made public by the Assassination Record Review Board, a government agency.

The staff of the commission had written: "A bullet had entered his back at a point slightly above the shoulder and to the right of the spine."

Ford suggested changing that to read: "A bullet had entered the back of his neck at a point slightly to the right of the spine."

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The final report said: "A bullet had entered the base of the back of his neck slightly to the right of the spine."

Ford, then House Republican leader and later elevated to the presidency with the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon, is the sole surviving member of the seven-member commission chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren.

James Lesar, a lawyer who runs the nongovernmental Assassination Archive Research Center, said that both Ford's description and the commission staff's conflict with the Kennedy death certificate, "which said the bullet entered in the upper back region, well below the neck."

But lawyer Gerald Posner, author of "Case Closed," a 1993 book that accepts the Warren conclusions, said the death certificate was based on erroneous drawings by the doctors who performed an autopsy on Kennedy.

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