We Were There

by Allen Childs

  Robert Duchouquette, MD

  The whole nation cried, the day I met JFK. During my lunch hour that sunny autumn day, November 22, 1963, the youngest man ever to be elected as president of the United States was visiting Dallas, where I was a junior medical student at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School. I was in my car, wearing my OB-GYN scrubs, on the way to get a sandwich, only three blocks from Parkland Hospital. As I approached the stoplight on Harry Heinz Boulevard, three limousines careened around the corner, streaking northward toward the hospital, escorted by a bevy of police motorcycles. In the center of the back seat of the second limousine of the trio, Jackie Kennedy was pressed into its cushions, partially shielded and held upright by a Secret Service agent sprawled across the trunk. Jack was lying diagonally across her, from her waist to her shoulder, his head bloodied by the recent assault, as she held him.

  M. T. “Pepper” Jenkins, MD

  (excerpted from the Journal of the American Medical

  Association, May 1992)

  . . . I was standing with the front of my jacket against his head wound, an alignment that put me in the best position to carry out artificial ventilation. I was getting gushes of blood down my jacket and into my shoes. Jackie Kennedy was circling the room, walking behind my back. The Secret Service could not keep her out of the room. She looked shell shocked. As she circled and circled, I noticed her hands were cupped in front of her, as if she were cradling something. As she passed by, she nudged me with an elbow and handed me what she had been nursing with her hands—a large chunk of her husband’s brain tissue. I quickly handed it to a nurse.

  William Zedlitz, MD

  Just outside the trauma room door, Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy was sitting in a folding metal chair, dressed in a watermelon colored suit dress that was liberally spotted with darker splotches of red, along with bits of whitish tissue that represented the spray from the president’s head wound. I stopped and asked her if she would like to wait somewhere a little quieter and more private but she thanked me and said she would rather wait here until she knew the outcome of the resuscitation.

  Adel Nafrawi, MD

  It was lunch time when we heard the chiefs of services called “stat” to the ER, including the late Dr. Fouad Bashour. We had heard that President Kennedy was shot. I took the elevator down and as the doors opened I was confronted by two armed officers. I went to the room where the president lay. Dr. Kemp Clark, Dr. Perry and others were there and in the corner was Mrs. Kennedy in the now famous blood spattered dress.

  Then somebody called for a defibrillator so I went to the lab and wheeled in the refrigerator-size defibrillator. By that time Dr. Clark had called off the code. This is when Mrs. Kennedy moved toward the president, removed the wedding ring from his hand, kissed him and put the ring on her finger.

  On my way back I encountered the priest wondering where to go. I said, “That way, Father,” and showed him the room. God—those images are as vivid today as on that day.

  M.T. “Pepper” Jenkins, MD

  (excerpted from the Journal of the American Medical

  Association, May 1992)

  By this time, the Secret Service had allowed a catholic priest to enter the room to administer the Last Rites. All of the medical staff seemed to disappear, dissolve, fade from the room, except, I believe, for me and Dr. Baxter. I was busy disconnecting the electrocardiographic leads, removing the IVs and extracting the endotracheal tube. However, before I could finish these duties, Mrs. Kennedy returned to the president’s side and I retreated to a corner of the room. She kissed the president on the foot, on the leg, on the thigh, on the abdomen, on the chest, and then on the face. She still looked drawn, pale, shocked and remote. I doubt if she remembers any part of this. Then the priest began the Last Rites in deliberate, resonant and slow tones and then it was over.

  Norman Borge, MD

  (excerpted from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, November 1965)

  The First Lady, her bright pink suit marred by the darker stain of blood, was helped from the treatment room by two agents. In frenzy, she freed her arms and wrenched away from them. “I’m just as capable as you are!” Dr. Borge heard her say.

  But she didn’t say a thing as she sat by the door in a chair provided her by Borge. She only stared at the crowd without really seeing them, he recalled.

  What really struck him, he said, was her graciousness when he offered her a drink of water. “She sat there rigidly, her hands clasped in her lap,” Dr. Borge said, “and I didn’t notice her looking at me because I was trying to keep the water from spilling.”

  But when he glanced at her face, she smiled broadly and said, “Thank you very much. I appreciate it”

  “How, could anyone conjure up such a gracious appearance after what had happened?” Dr. Borge speculated.

  When the bronze-trimmed brown metal coffin was pushed into the room, Mrs. Kennedy followed it with her eyes. “Her attention seemed to focus on the immediate presence of the president’s body,” Dr. Borge observed. “She communicated to no one except to be gracious.” Dr. Borge watched as the First Lady followed the casket bearing her husband’s body outside, on her way to the swearing in of the new president

  In that brief space of time, his life had touched a great national tragedy at its roots. They would be planted in his mind forever.

  Ron Jones, MD

  (oral history courtesy of the Sixth Floor Museum)

  My impression when I saw her was that she was very composed under the circumstances. And she appeared to be in a situation where she knew that this could happen, it had happened, and she realized this, and she was ready to accept this. It seemed as though she was almost prepared mentally that something like this could take place. I’m sure she was shocked by this, but she was holding up very well emotionally. And as I said, it just seemed as though she knew that this could happen. It had happened.

  Robert McClelland, MD

  (oral history courtesy of the Sixth Floor Museum)

  As he [the priest] took his little cloth off his neck and was putting his things back in his little bag, after having anointed the president and whatnot, she came in and leaned over and asked him . . . and we could hear her because, again, we were still trapped back there. We felt like we were intruding, but there was no way we could get out without knocking both her and Father Hubert down. And she said, “Have you given him the Last Rites?” And he said, “I’ve given him conditional Last Rites.” She grimaced a little bit then, as if she didn’t much like to hear that. And . . . but that’s what he had done. I heard . . . I’m not a Catholic, but he leaned over to him and, as I recall, the first thing he did was anoint his forehead with oil, and he said, “If thou livest . . .” Those were the first words he said, and then he went through, you know, the rest of the thing. And he did it in English. You know, that was around the time I think that they shifted from the Latin . . . at least, a lot of them did.

  So, she, you know, after that, she kind of stood there for a minute, and she took a ring off and put it on his finger. I can’t remember which finger. I don’t know. It was a ring, that’s all I can say. And she put it on one of his fingers, and I don’t know which one she took it off of and which one she put it on, and then she turned and walked slowly out of the room. And as . . . his foot . . . he had already been covered up with a sheet at that time, and his foot was sticking out . . . his right foot was sticking out from underneath the sheet and the lower leg. And as she passed by, she kind of, almost as an afterthought, she leaned over and kissed his foot, and then she walked out of the room. That was it.

  Kemp Clark, MD

  (excerpted from his testimony at the Warren

  Commission Hearings)

  Mr. SPECTER. Did you advise anyone else in the presidential party of the death of the president?

  Dr. CLARK. Yes; I told Mrs. Kennedy, the president’s wife, of his death.

  Mr. SPECTER. And what, if anything, did she respond to you?

  Dr. CLARK. Sh
e told me that she knew it and thanked me for our efforts.

  Still wearing the bloodstained pink suit, the First Lady, no longer the First Lady, enters the hearse bearing the mortal remains of the thirty-fifth president of the United States.

  Chapter 8

  WHAT DID KEMP

  CLARK SAY?

  William Kemp Clark, MD, chairman of neurosurgery, was from an aristocratic, “old Dallas” family. My friend, Dr. Barry Silberg, rented the garage apartment of the family’s north Dallas estate. I knew Clark because he had been assigned to be my faculty advisor, and I met with him once or twice a year. One on one, he seemed friendly and relaxed, though I know his ferocity in the operating room led some to call him “The Cobra.” For the rest of us, his name being so close to Clark Kent, mild mannered reporter for the Metropolitan Daily News, that we called him “Man Super.”

  There are almost as many reports of what Clark said when he called off the resuscitation as there are of his location when the news flashed through the hospital. Wherever he was, it was he who initiated closed chest cardiac massage. There were several reports I received of statements overheard by Jackie such as, “My God, Charlie! What are you doing? His brains are all over the table.”

  The Parkland Hospital Our Heritage collection quotes Clark as having said, “My God, the whole right side of his head is shot off. We’ve nothing to work with.”

  After someone relieved Clark of the chest compressions, and he was able to see the devastating defect in the cranial vault and the exposed brain tissue, he may well have said something more forceful than, “There’s nothing more to be done.”

  Ken Wallace, M.D

  Carrico told me a few days later that Clark said, “Goddamit Carrico, what are you doing? Can’t you see his brains are blown out?” Jackie, sitting outside the open door, heard the comment.

  Adel Nafrawi, MD

  I went to the room where the president lay. Dr. Kemp Clark, Dr. Perry and others were there and in the corner was Mrs. Kennedy, in the now famous blood spattered dress. “Come on, you guys, you see head injuries every day,” sounded Dr. Clark to the medical people taking care of the president.

  Rex Cole, MD

  I heard that heroic measures were being utilized to try to save the president when Kemp Clark arrived, picked up the president’s head, saw the exit wound and said something like, “Why are you wasting your time?”

  Joe D. Goldstrich, MD

  Clark arrived about four minutes after me. He said, “My God, Charlie, what are you doing? His brains are all over the table.” This was overheard by Jackie Kennedy.

  M.T. “Pepper” Jenkins, MD

  (from the Journal of the American Medical Association, May 1992)

  It was Kemp Clark, a Parkland Hospital neurosurgeon, who most closely observed Kennedy’s massive head wound. He told Perry, “It’s too late, Mac. There’s nothing more to be done.”

  It was Clark who pronounced the president dead at 1:00 p.m., only 25 minutes after he was wheeled into the emergency room.

  Chapter 9

  THE SECRET SERVICE

  After nearly five decades of silence, the Secret Service agents who were guarding the president that November day have spoken. Their book, The Kennedy Detail, by Agent Gerald Blaine, includes the account of Agent Clint Hill who was ten feet from JFK when he, “. . . heard the first shot, saw the president grab his throat, lurch to the left.” Hill was “desperately trying to throw his body in front of the gunfire, when the president’s head exploded before his eyes. Covered with blood and pieces of the president’s brain, Agent Hill pushed Jackie Kennedy into the back seat, while clinging to the trunk of the open-top limousine as it sped away from Dealey Plaza to Parkland Hospital.”

  Classmates Cervando Martinez and David Haymes, from their vantage point near the Trade Mart, saw Agent Hill on the trunk, as the sirens wailed and the motorcade raced toward the hospital. Moments later, Agent Hill, his white shirt bloodstained, asked a senior medical student which loading dock door led to the emergency room.

  Many reports I received recall the clamor and chaos of the ER, and how the Secret Service struggled for control of the unfamiliar setting. After they established a perimeter, Bill Scroggie saw a man try to push his way past without identifying himself, and the Secret Service agent, “flattened the guy. I later learned he was an FBI agent,” Scroggie said.

  No one had ever seen guns drawn in the Parkland ER. Dr. Earl Rose, who was the Dallas County Medical Examiner, faced one when he tried to enforce Texas law. Ironically the most intense scene of these historic moments was after the president died. Though Rose made it abundantly clear the body could not be moved until an autopsy was performed, the Secret Service, weapons in evidence, pushed past him. This spiriting away of the body destroyed the chain of evidence, and gave rise to many conspiracy theories.

  Bill Scroggie, MD

  On the day President Kennedy was shot, I was a senior medical student and my duty station was the ER. I was eating lunch in the cafeteria with a classmate of mine when someone waved at us from the window that overlooked the loading dock for the ER. We went over and looked out and there was the Lincoln convertible that the president had been in. So far no news had spread about the shooting.

  I knew it was the president’s car, so I raced down the back stairs to the back door of the ER. There was a well-dressed man guarding the door (presumed Secret Service) and another fellow tried to push his way through without identifying himself. The Secret Service agent flattened the guy. I later learned it was an FBI agent.

  I was in scrubs and he let me go in.

  H. Wayne Smith, MD

  I talked with Jim Carrico a couple of days later. He related how terrified everyone was in the emergency room—personnel and patients—because the Secret Service agents had pretty well lost it and were brandishing firearms and talking/shouting loudly. Jim related how the law enforcement agencies set up the perimeters around the emergency room with Secret Service closest and next the FBI. One FBI agent approached the inner perimeter manned by the Secret Service and was told to halt—the FBI agent responded that he was FBI and kept walking—the Secret Service agent cold-cocked him right there in the hall. It was a wonder he did not get shot. It was a sad day indeed.

  Wayne Delaney, MD

  I was out of town assisting a surgeon in Frederick, Oklahoma doing surgery on my cousin when the event happened. I was interviewed later by the Secret Service or the FBI because of a comment attributed to me on that fateful day. It was their understanding that I had said when everyone entered the ER that all hell broke loose and there were guns drawn and people hitting the floor. They were a little reluctant to believe me saying I was out of town. There was a resident in the ER named George DeVaney, and I believe that was the mix-up. I have a faint recollection that it was still in error in the Warren Report.

  Ron Jones, MD

  (oral history courtesy of the Sixth Floor Museum)

  I think twice during the winter months the Secret Service came through. I remember once, I think, the Secret Service out of San Francisco came through and asked to meet with me, and they asked me if I had any other notes about what went on that day scribbled anywhere that I had not turned in. And I told them that I had written my brief notes and had turned them in to Mr. Jack Price, who was the hospital administrator. He was out of town that day. They indicated they didn’t have my notes and that they might be in his safe in his office. Dr. Kemp Clark had put together what he called “Dr. Clark’s Summary” and we thought that maybe he had taken some of our handwritten notes and had summarized them and submitted them to the Warren Commission because they said they didn’t have them. I think subsequently . . . that they were found. And . . . because I’ve seen them since, and they’re stamped “top secret” [smiling], which is sort of interesting, too [Bob Porter chuckles in the background]. So, they came twice, and it wasn’t until the spring when I received a letter from the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy that—tha
t was in March of 1964—that they were going to be in town two days later and would like to meet with me at Parkland Hospital. So, we were five or six months from the time of the assassination until my deposition was taken for the Warren Commission.

  Earl Rose, MD, as recalled by James Carrico, MD

  (oral history courtesy of the Sixth Floor Museum)

  I was a little surprised in a professional sense and kind of in this sense. As I said, what would usually have happened when a patient would come in and then die of a gunshot wound. We would have tried to keep him alive, we would have done all we needed to do medically, we probably would have spent more time after the patient was dead kind of trying to figure out the forensics themselves but it didn’t seem appropriate to do that with the president, but it really wouldn’t have mattered because when Earl Rose, who was the new county medical examiner, did his autopsy, if he had questions about the treatment, he would call us. In fact, he frequently called us down just to teach us. He’d call the house staff and say, “OK, here’s this patient you treated. Tell me what you did, and let me show you how to recognize exit wounds and entrance wounds, etc.” So, we kind of all assumed that there was no reason to roll the president over because Earl Rose would be doing the autopsy. When the president was taken away, we realized, “Gee, the body’s gone. Earl’s not going to do the autopsy, and these guys aren’t going to have any medical records to go by.” But that was kind of a medical surprise, if you will. Didn’t think about why they would have done that.