We Were There

by Allen Childs

  And that again was a pretty significant impact having just gone through this trauma for the weekend up until that, having Connally in the hospital and all the security that was around. There was security in the operating room on all the floors. Connally’s rooms were heavily secured. And here we had to deal with another episode. Again, that was not a great deal of surprise because it had been pretty well publicized, as I recall, in the newspapers and TV when Oswald was to be moved and how he was to be moved, where he was to be moved, the time that he was going to be moved.

  And so, that was pretty well known. I walked out in the hall, and as I was going down the hall, the office door to Dr. Jenkins’s office was open and he was in there—the chairman of anesthesia—and across the desk was Dr. Perry. So here the three of us were again in the same situation we had been in on Friday morning. And I went in and told them that Oswald had been shot and that they were bringing him to the emergency room.

  I thought we would call Dr. Tom Shires who was chairman of the department of surgery at that time, and so I made a phone call to his home. And Mrs. Shires answered and said, “He’s not here.” And so, I hung up, called again because I thought maybe he was there but on Sunday morning he wasn’t answering, and I said, “They’ve shot Oswald is the reason I was calling, and I just wondered if he could come out.” And she said, “I really had seen that before you called the first time [smiling] and knew why you were calling, but he really isn’t here.”

  So, Dr. Jenkins and Dr. Perry and I went to the emergency room, and we got to the emergency room before Oswald arrived—just shortly before. He was wheeled in on a cart, and because there had been all the questions of whether the president was alive or not when he came to the emergency room, I listened to the heart. Lee Harvey Oswald was alive when he came into the emergency room. He was not moving. He had shallow respirations, but he had a heartbeat. And so, we immediately started resuscitation.

  And Dr. Jenkins put an endotracheal tube in to get an airway. And it so happened [smiling and shaking head] that I could see the vein in his arm in the same place that I saw one on Kennedy. And so, I did a cutdown on the arm and put in a catheter. And looking at his injuries, he had been shot one time just above the ribcage in the . . . what appeared to be probably the left chest perhaps. Not knowing for sure whether it had entered the chest, decided to put a chest tube in place. Put a tube in the chest. Made a small incision the same way on the left side as we had with Kennedy and put that tube in. And within about six or seven minutes from the time that he came into the emergency room, we had the IV going, the endotracheal tube in, the chest tube in, and we were on our way up the elevator to the operating room [nodding].

  And at that time, we had an elevator that was designed to go directly from the emergency room to the second floor and open directly into the operating room. However, you could get access to that elevator on the first floor. And as I recall, either Mr. Fritz or Curry was on that elevator as we took Oswald up, and the elevator stopped not on the second floor but on that first floor. And as the doors opened, news people were there and cameras were flashing, getting . . . trying to get pictures of Oswald on that stretcher. And that really perturbed the police that were on the elevator, and as I recall, whoever was on there with us said, “I’m going to get off and arrest those people.” And then he realized, “No, I have to stay with Oswald and get him to the operating room.” But that really frustrated the police that there was that intervention and time delay of a minute maybe at that point.

  We went on into the operating suite, and Dr. Shires had actually been going home, heard it on the radio—he had been to Parkland earlier that morning—turned around, and was in the emergency room before we took Oswald up to the OR. So, Dr. Shires was the surgeon, Dr. Perry was first assistant, Dr. Robert McClelland was second assistant, and I was the third assistant. So, the four of us operated on Oswald.

  It took, as I recall, close to an hour before we finally . . . before he finally died. We did not have any blood pressure palpable or measurable when we got him to the operating room. Dr. Jenkins was the anesthesiologist and I don’t believe gave any anesthetic but just gave oxygen. And we . . . an incision was made in the midline, and his abdomen was opened. And there was a tremendous amount of blood in the abdomen [shaking head], and his injuries had been from the . . . where the missile entered, it had gone through the lower part of his left chest and through the diaphragm and the spleen, and as I recall, had gone behind the abdominal cavity in an area that we call the retro peritoneum. And then the retro peritoneum, behind the stomach area is where your aorta is, which is the main artery from the heart, and the inferior vena cava, which brings back all the blood from the lower part of the body to the heart. And he had blown apart the . . . a major vessel off of the aorta, which is the superior mesenteric artery, which supplies the intestine with its blood supply—a large, major vessel. Plus, now the aorta is now open, and every time the heart beats, you get a tremendous amount of blood loss. He had also gone through that inferior vena cava, the major vein, and on into the right kidney and probably the pancreas and had injured the right renal artery and vein. So, he had a tremendous amount of blood vessel damage, and as exposure was obtained and the vessels were identified and were occluded—were clamped—that took, you know, thirty minutes or so, and he . . . I think Dr. Jenkins had told us that his pressure eventually got up to about 60 millimeters of mercury, which is only about half [smiling] what a normal person’s blood pressure would be.

  So, he really never showed any signs of rapid recovery to say the least, but we did get control of this massive bleeding. But, about the time we got control, his blood pressure dropped again, and then he died. We opened the left chest, and the chest tube was in place. And we did some open cardiac massage, but we were never able to resuscitate him, and he died shortly after 1:00 p.m. that day [nodding].

  Again, several people did come into the operating room and were in the hall outside the operating room. I do recall one of the radiology residents, as I recall, trying to take pictures during the operation, and his camera and film [smiling] was confiscated very quickly by the police. And I’m not sure [smiling] he ever saw those pictures, or even got his camera back. But there was fairly tight security going on at that time because we still had Governor Connally in the hospital and not far away on that same floor [nodding].

  My thinking at that time was that he probably was the assassin, but I had to go on was what everybody else had to go on and that was the television and news media. And I thought very likely that he was probably the one that had shot the president, and I think that’s the way we approached him. But by the same token, it didn’t influence what we did.

  But in one sense, it’s a little ironic that you go through resuscitation of somebody [smiling], knowing that if they are guilty, that they’re probably going to get a death sentence, too. But you would’ve liked to have saved Oswald because he might’ve been able to furnish you with a tremendous amount of information [smiling]. And it might or might not have made any difference in the outcome of how this evolved and what was behind the assassination. But for over and above the fact that you wanted to save a life on an individual, you always wanted to save it for that reason as well.

  Robert McClelland, MD

  (oral history courtesy of the Sixth Floor Museum)

  Sunday morning, of course, I was . . . we were getting up and were going to lunch with my mother who was visiting there, and my children . . . my two children and my wife, and as I said, I didn’t have the TV on. I was downstairs in the living room waiting for them and so, just to kill time, I leaned over and turned the TV on. And as the screen was, you know, filling up with the picture, I could hear the sound first. And they were saying, “He’s been shot! He’s been shot!” And then the picture came on, and I saw all this scuffling, you know, going around. And then it became clear very quickly who they were talking about. And I thought, “Well, my goodness. What next?” [chuckling] You know, and so I walked over to t
he foot of the stairs and yelled up to my wife and told her, I said, “You all will have to go to lunch without me. I’ve got to go back to Parkland.” I said, “They’ve shot Oswald.”

  And so, I got in my car and drove back out there, and as I was driving toward Parkland on Beverly, I’d just gotten past Preston and was driving down Beverly, I saw Dr. Shire’s car. I recognized it coming toward me, toward his house. He had been to Parkland, and so I guess he had had his radio on. But anyway, he flashed his lights at me and stopped, and I stopped, and so we exchanged information with one another about what he had just heard and what I had just seen. So, he turned around and followed me, and we both got out to Parkland about the same time, and we drove out pretty quickly, of course. And we got there, and I remember walking in the . . . we pulled up and parked right behind the emergency room, which we could do at that time, and ran in there, and they had just gotten there with Oswald, and everybody was still pretty much on tenterhooks from what all had been going on the last two days, and the residents there in the emergency room had gotten, you know, a call that they were bringing him in.

  So, they very quickly . . . probably more quickly than had ever been done before or since, got an inter-tracheal tube into him, did cutdowns, as I recall, on him, began to pump uncrossed matched blood into him because he looked like, when I walked into the room and they were doing all this, he was bled out and looked like he was just about gone himself. But they got him pumped back up and got him upstairs, and we had his abdomen open. I think someone who had looked at the time said it was around thirty minutes from the time he was shot, we had his abdomen open in the operating room and were exploring him, and Dr. Shires was the surgeon and Dr. Perry and I were helping him, and he got a clamp on his aorta and venacava right up underneath the diaphragm and got the bleeding stopped because he had been shot through both the aorta and venacava which is a . . . he really probably wouldn’t normally have even made it up to the operating room had it not been under the circumstances that it was, and then after that, we were able to be able to expose . . . try to expose the wounds after he had gotten a clamp on up above them. And we worked on him for a good while. I can’t remember exactly, but then he arrested, and we first tried closed-chest massage, which they really had only started doing that not too long before that. There had been some papers written about it, and that didn’t seem to be working, and so we opened his chest and Dr. Perry and I took turns massaging his heart and finally it just got flabbier and flabbier, and we couldn’t get any activity. So, he was declared dead.

  Robert McClelland, MD

  (excerpted from D Magazine, October 28, 2008)

  When Kennedy arrived, every faculty member on site was called into the emergency room. With Oswald, there were only a few doctors working on him. Twenty-eight minutes after Jack Ruby’s shot, they were inside Oswald’s abdomen. “He was as white as this piece of paper,” McClelland tells the med students. “He had lost so much blood. If he hadn’t turned when he saw Ruby coming, he might have been all right.” When Oswald saw the gun in Ruby’s hand, he had cringed slightly, flinching. Because of this, the bullets went through his aorta and inferior vena cava, the two main blood vessels in the back of the abdominal cavity. There was enormous loss of blood. The medical team pumped pint after pint of untyped blood, sixteen in all, through his body. Shires and Perry eventually got a vascular clamp to stop the bleeding, and the two set about clearing away intestines to get enough room to repair the damage.

  They worked on Oswald for an hour when his heart arrested. The blood loss was just too much, and the brief but severe shock too damaging. Perry opened Oswald’s chest, and he and McClelland, who was also assisting, took turns administering an open heart massage.

  “You pumped Oswald’s heart in your hands?” a student asks.

  “We took turns, each going until we got tired. We went for, oh, about forty minutes.”

  The heart got flabbier and flabbier. They squeezed and pumped. The blood around his heart collected on their gloves. Then, no more. Almost two hours after being shot, Lee Harvey Oswald was pronounced dead. The first live homicide on public television was witnessed by twenty million viewers.

  The entire emergency room was in a daze. First, the president. Two days later, in the room next door, the president’s assassin. It was as if the community had tumbled into one of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episodes.

  Chapter 13

  THE NECK WOUND AND THE CONSPIRACIES

  Lyndon Johnson’s first executive order as president was issued in the Parkland emergency room and was a conspiracy of sorts, albeit brief and in the interest of national security. The Associated Press reported that LBJ was waiting in a room adjacent to Trauma Room 1 when White House Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff simply walked up to Johnson and addressed him as “Mr. President.” Ladybird let out a short scream as the news hit. Jack Bell’s 1965 book reports that President Johnson then told Secretary Kilduff, “I think I had better get out of here . . . before you announce it. We don’t know whether this is a worldwide conspiracy, whether they are after me as they were President Kennedy. . . .” The press secretary was then ordered to delay the announcement of JFK’s death until the new president was safely aboard Air Force One.

  A Secret Service agent assigned to protect the First Lady was riding on the running board of the “back up” limousine ten feet behind the president when he was shot. After nearly five decades, the surviving agents who were in the motorcade that day have revealed what they saw, heard, and felt in those terrible moments. Clint Hill was the agent clinging to the trunk of the presidential limousine in the Zapruder film. He guided Jackie back into her seat and shielded her and the dying president with his body until they reached Parkland Hospital. Hill is quoted in The Kennedy Detail: “I heard the first shot, saw the president grab his throat, lurch to the left. . . .”

  Though accepting that a second shot, which blew out the back of the President’s head, came from above and to the right (the book depository), many conspiracy theorists will not let go of the neck wound as evidence of a second shooter.

  Years after the Warren Commission Report, the House Select Committee on Assassinations issued its final report in March 1979, concluding that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated “as a result of a conspiracy.” They didn’t, however, say which one. Based on “various scientific projects,” the House Committee suspected there were two gunmen. In JFK: Breaking the Silence, author Bill Sloan mentions the eyewitness account of the deaf-mute man, Ed Hoffman, who saw the motorcade from an overpass. Hoffman reports he had a clear view of the grassy knoll and his attention was arrested by the puff of white smoke from a rifle, fired by a man in a suit from behind the white fence. The police, overwhelmingly busy and without an interpreter, apparently never focused on what he had to say.

  Moreover, as was described in the highly scientific 2010 book Head Shot by G. Paul Chambers, the paraffin test of Oswald’s cheek showed no nitrates, a near impossibility if Oswald had recently fired a rifle. Though there seems little doubt Oswald killed Officer Tippit with a handgun, and thus the positive nitrate test of his hands, the negative findings on his face hang unexplained in the corridors of time.

  The conspiracy theories had something for everyone, as mentioned in a recent New York Times article: “Leftists could blame the CIA; the right wingers could blame the communists.” There were those who blamed the mafia, or the Cubans—though one had a choice here between the members of the Cuban government who were seeking revenge for CIA assassination plots against Castro, versus the right wing expatriates who believed Kennedy had done too little to overthrow communism on their island. It had been a year since the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion.

  Conspiracy theories have been fueled by questions regarding the autopsy done on the president. No autopsy was done in Dallas. Dr. Earl Rose’s unsuccessful standoff with the Secret Service led to the autopsy being done at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. One doctor alleged that the tracheotomy incision
was deliberately altered before the official autopsy photos were taken. Others present in Trauma Room 1 who reviewed those photos disagreed. Although Dr. Rose thought the Bethesda Naval Hospital autopsy was “less than optimal,” he warned, “Do not attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by distrust, inexperience, or ineptitude.”

  However, the fact remains that the Parkland surgeons were the only physicians to see the neck wound before the tracheotomy. Four of the attending surgeons, Kemp Clark, Charles Crenshaw, Robert McClelland, and Malcolm Perry, each an expert in the treatment of gunshot wounds believed at the time that the neck wound was an entry wound.

  There is also a problem with the type of autopsy performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital. It was undertaken at the request of Mrs. Kennedy and was not a forensic autopsy, as would have been performed by Dr. Rose at Parkland.

  Dr. McClelland and Dr. Ron Jones are the last survivors among the surgeons who struggled in vain to save the president. Dr. McClelland continues to believe what he told D Magazine in October 2008, that JFK was shot first from the front. That’s what he saw in the Zapruder film, the “lurch back and to the left,” just as Secret Service agent Clint Hill, revealed after nearly fifty years of silence in The Kennedy Detail.