by Hugh Pearson
With this experience under his belt, by 1958, when he finished his formal training, Cordice’s knowledge of cardiovascular and thoracic surgery was far superior to Maynard’s. And the same was true for Naclerio. Both men had been having fun in the operating room, often all day and all night. One night both were on call when a stab wound to the neck came into the emergency room (a very dangerous injury because it involves the trachea and the carotid artery). At the same time, a heart wound came in. The two surgeons had to decide which case to operate on first. They noticed that the patient with the heart wound had some blood pressure. So they tamponated it (meaning that they stopped the bleeding, rendering the case far less dangerous than the neck wound). The next day Cordice told Maynard about the two cases. Maynard asked which they operated on first, in effect, revealing his lack of knowledge of which was more urgent. Cordice told him they did the neck wound first because they suspected that the patient had a carotid injury that might bleed out. As time went on, these exchanges between Cordice and Maynard grew more and more frequent. Like Naclerio, he became vital to the division’s success.
Yet Little Napoleon had a difficult time coming to terms with this. That kind of thing was hardly unusual in the world of academic medicine. The younger guys were always becoming the victims of jealousy on the part of their elders. When Cordice returned to Harlem Hospital in 1958 as a junior attending, Maynard began limiting his horizons. One day the secretary of the prestigious New York Surgical Society, a surgeon named Jerry Lord, became aware of how good Cordice was in the operating room because after finishing his training, Cordice was also admitted to the staff of Columbus Hospital on 18th Street, where Lord was also on staff. Aubré Maynard was only the second Negro to be invited to join the society (the first had been Wright). After discovering how good Cordice was, and knowing he was on the staff of Harlem Hospital, Lord began wondering why Maynard hadn’t nominated him for the surgical society. A surgeon had to have three society members nominate him. And usually the chief of his department was one of them. So Lord asked Cordice about this. John responded that he didn’t know why Maynard hadn’t nominated him. One day at a surgical society meeting, Lord confronted Maynard on the issue.
“How dare you tell me whom I should recommend for nomination to the surgical society!” Maynard is said to have replied. A month later he walked up to Cordice and told him he wasn’t ready to be nominated for the New York Surgical Society.
On September 20, 1958, this was the man Cordice, Naclerio, Mayer, and Leo Maitland, Chief Resident of Surgery, waited for as Martin Luther King, Jr., lay on an operating room gurney awaiting removal of the letter opener that Izola Curry had plunged into his chest. Though Maynard had established the Division of Thoracic Surgery, Naclerio and Cordice knew more about what to do. Still, Maynard was now chairman of the entire department and accountable for anything that went wrong. The two surgeons decided what to do in light of this. They would wait for his arrival before opening King’s chest. Then, when it was time to actually remove the letter opener, they would leave that to Maynard in what would amount to a ceremonial gesture of respect for their chairman. Little did they know this wouldn’t be the story the rest of the world would hear.
TWELVE
saving king
WORD OF WHAT happened to King made its way onto the newswires, spreading across the country, and causing Southern racists to laugh out loud with glee that “one of his own people” had apparently done in King. J. B. White, a Bainbridge, Georgia, coal dealer, immediately began taking up a collection among friends to send to Curry as a legal defense fund. After Curry was handed over to police, she was taken to Harlem Hospital, where the prostrate King identified her as his assailant. Upon seeing King, Curry once again spewed epithets against Negro preachers, accusing King of causing her to lapse in her Catholicism. After her identity was confirmed, she was driven to the local 123rd Street Precinct for booking on charges of felonious assault, then temporarily locked up until being transferred to the East 67th Street stationhouse, which had facilities for keeping women.
Meanwhile, as the hunt for Maynard continued, a crowd of thousands gathered in front of the hospital. About forty people walked into the emergency room and offered to give blood to save King. In an inner operating suite, Governor Harriman comforted King, who had been moved away from the notables who were gathering in the outer area of the operating suite. The surgeons from Mount Sinai, Columbia-Presbyterian, Bellevue, and New York Hospital remained in the outer suite discussing with one another what they would do in the same situation, talking with staff members who wouldn’t be part of the operating team, while Cordice, Naclerio, Maitland, and Mayer remained inside the inner sanctum waiting to see if Maynard would be found. Over an hour had passed and still there was no sign of him. Using his authority, the governor could have had King moved to another medical center. But the surgeons in the suite convinced him that this wouldn’t be wise.
Meanwhile the French film that Maynard had been watching at the Plaza Theater on 59th Street—La Parisienne, starring Bridgette Bardot—was finally over. Afterward, on this Saturday he was scheduled to make rounds at another hospital where he was on staff, a private facility named Manhattan General. Maynard retrieved his car from a parking garage and made his way there. Upon walking into the hospital lobby, the administrator of Manhattan General rushed up and told him he had to make his way to Harlem Hospital because a person of great importance had been rushed in with a stab wound to his chest (apparently he avoided telling Maynard who it was so as to ensure Maynard wouldn’t become nervous while making his way back to the hospital).
Maynard drove north up the FDR Drive along the banks of the East River, turning off at 135th Street. From there it was a straight shot to the hospital. He arrived to a front entrance so packed with onlookers that he couldn’t get through. He informed the police officers present who he was and told them to maintain crowd control. They formed a flying wedge and quickly got him through the crowd while telling him that the patient awaiting his arrival was Martin Luther King, Jr. Upon reaching the operating suite, Maynard waded through the crowd of notables into the inner operating sanctum, only to confront the stern countenance of Governor Harriman sitting on a stretcher flanked by his security men.
“Where have you been?” Harriman asked him with annoyance in his voice. Not far away King was lying on a stretcher, silent, prepared for surgery, with his eyes closed, the letter opener protruding from his chest. Maynard assured the governor that everything was under control, that while he was being located, King hadn’t been neglected. After this he made a preliminary examination of King and assured him that everything would be fine. Then he went into a room and consulted Cordice, Naclerio, Mayer, and Maitland, who brought him up to speed on the situation. Maynard greenlighted the surgical approach they had decided to take, then he returned to the outer part of the operating suite and talked to the surgeons from other hospitals as well as to reporters. The other surgeons immediately began offering their advice on how to proceed. Though like the rest of the staff he was miffed at this intrusion, Maynard remained calm and reiterated to all present that this was a Harlem Hospital case and that his team was accustomed to this type of trauma. Then he invited some of the more notable surgeons to scrub and observe the operation.
While Maynard was doing this, Naclerio, Cordice, Maitland, and Mayer went ahead and scrubbed, administered the anesthesia to King, and opened his right chest the way they had opened numerous other chests before King’s. They made what was called a curving intercosto-chondral (spangaro) incision, which didn’t require removal of any of King’s ribs, just an incision between the third and fourth interspace between the ribs. This incision was extended by a second one that would leave King with a cross-shaped scar he would joke about for the rest of his life (though to others it would appear to be shaped more like the letter T). Then they ligated the right internal mammary artery, inserted a rib spreader, spread the area between the third and fourth intercostal space, and view
ed the aorta and vessels branching off of it. The entire opening procedure took about ten minutes. At that point they couldn’t see the tip of the knife point, but they could feel it with their fingers coming through the inside of the manubrium, the top bone of the sternum, located in the middle of the chest where the left and right sides of the rib cage meet. They marveled at the strength of Curry to plunge a letter opener through this thick bone designed to protect the heart and aorta. Just as they expected, the tip of the letter opener was lying right at the point where the innominate artery branches off from the aorta. It was lying right in the crotch, close enough that the infamous line King would utter many times afterward could have been true: Had he sneezed violently enough, there’s a good chance he would have drowned in his own blood.
By now Maynard had scrubbed and entered the surgical field. Naclerio and Cordice demonstrated to him what they had before them. With his gloved hand, Maynard grabbed the protruding unsterile gauze-covered blade of the letter opener, attempting to extricate it from King’s chest. But the gauze slipped off and the blade knicked Maynard’s glove. It was torn. So Maynard had to leave the surgical field to change gloves. While he did so, Naclerio, Cordice, and Maitland looked around at the adjacent tissues to ensure that nothing more was damaged than what they could already see. Maynard returned wearing new gloves. At that point Cordice took what was called a Kocher clamp—a sturdy surgical clamp with twin jaws—and placed it on the unsterile protruding section of the blade of the letter opener, which had been covered once more with gauze. Then he handed it to Maynard, telling him, “Look, if you’re going to pull on it, pull on it with this.”
Maynard appeared a bit flustered. He took the Kocher clamp off. Calmly, Cordice took a second clamp and placed it around the blade and invited Maynard to pull the blade out of King’s chest. Either Cordice or Naclerio could have easily done it. Maynard removed the clamp again. Cordice placed a third Kocher clamp around the blade. By now he and Naclerio had grown impatient with Maynard’s lack of recognition that they were trying their best to be respectful to the chairman of their department, whom they had waited for so patiently, this man who wasn’t as skilled at thoracic surgery as they were. After placing this third clamp around the blade, both Naclerio and Cordice said, “Go on, take it out.” Maynard began tugging on the blade. Finally, with a fair amount of effort it came out.
After this, Maynard walked outside to discuss the success of the operation with the governor and reporters, leaving Cordice, Maitland, and Naclerio to close King’s chest. It was determined that about six centimeters of the blade had invaded the superior mediastinal compartment covering the innominate artery, aorta and other blood vessels, and the vital organs. This meant that the mediastinal tissue was contaminated. But experience taught Cordice, Maitland and Naclerio that all they needed to do was allow the body to take care of correcting the contamination on its own. So they closed the chest properly. This fact would be a very important one in light of the false description of the operation given by Maynard. At the press conference held in the office of the superintendent of the hospital after the entire operation was over—with Maynard, Cordice, Naclerio, and Dr. Farrow Allen present (Allen had scrubbed but did not participate in the operation)—Maynard gave the clear impression that he had been in command of the entire operation from start to finish. He told the reporters that a portion of King’s second rib and part of his breastplate (sternum) had had to be removed. He said that the blade had cut a number of blood vessels, and that its location caused “considerable difficulty.”
Of course, most of this was a fabrication. But Cordice, Naclerio, Maitland, and Allen said nothing. A few days later Maynard gave a further fabrication of what had happened to a reporter for the Amsterdam News. He would tell James Hicks that rather than pulling out the blade, it had been “pushed up from below.” Several years later in a book he would write about his experience as a Harlem Hospital surgeon, Maynard would similarly fabricate details. Contrary to what Maynard stated on the day of the operation and wrote later, no removal of any portion of any of King’s ribs took place. This wasn’t necessary. And no vital blood vessels had been severed. In providing his written description of the operation, Maynard would also claim that he left a “cluster of Penrose drains”—which constituted rubber tubes allowing drainage to the outside—in the area of the superior mediastinum of King’s chest. He would describe this procedure as an “on-the-spot innovative technique” that he came up with. He would claim that on the third postoperative day, he called in Dr. Robert Wylie, Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, to examine the postoperative progress of King. And that upon examining King’s right chest, Wylie “seemed particularly impressed with my innovative prophylactic drainage of the superior mediastinum” (the alleged cluster of Pemrose drains). In fact, not only had Maynard left the patient to be closed by the other surgeons but to do what he described, leaving Pemrose drains in the chest, would have been the worst possible thing that could have been done because leaving such tubes there would have left the mediastinum open to contamination.
Maynard wrote other falsehoods about the operation. For instance, he would claim that a hammer and chisel were used to remove bits of the breastbone that the blade had penetrated, in order to loosen the area around the blade. And then, rather than pushing out the blade, as he allegedly told Hicks, he later wrote that the blade was grabbed and, using a seesaw motion, loosened and extricated. Again, as described earlier, this was not done, just as his description to Hicks of how the blade was removed was false too. Using a hammer and chisel to chip away bits of the sternum would have been too dangerous. And to use a seesaw motion to remove the blade also would have been too dangerous, given the fact that the blade was so close to the aorta and the innominate artery. To try to remove it that way would have risked tearing the aorta or innominate artery, causing the massive hemorrhaging everyone feared.
Yet Maynard successfully fabricated not only his level of involvement in the operation on King, but the details of what took place. And accounts giving him a larger role in the operation than he deserves would become part of history. For years to come, even though so many colleagues hated him, out of respect for Maynard’s position as Chairman of the Department of Surgery, no one felt compelled to correct the record.
THIRTEEN
convalescence
THE FOLLOWING DAY King’s wife, Coretta, as well as his mother, brother, and father arrived at the hospital. While the others flew in from Montgomery and Atlanta, Martin senior arrived from the Midwest, where church work had taken him. They were all joined later by Ralph Abernathy and others. When they reached the hospital, the staff told them they could sit beside King and visit two at a time. Now he had security in the form of two New York City police officers on either side of the door to his room. King lay in his bed, his right chest bandaged from the shoulder down. An oxygen tube entered his left nostril, taped to his face, the tape forming a wishbone from his forehead to the bottom of his eyes. Photos of Emil Naclerio checking on him at bedside would be splashed across newspapers around the world. They would become part of the stock photos of the King oeuvre through the years, paged through whenever people considered his life in photo-essay collections.
Plenty of others would stop by his bedside. Governor Harriman returned. Ever worried about the Negro vote in the race against Rockefeller (given that the voting would take place in a little more than a month), doing his best to make the most out of a show of public concern, the governor posed for a public photo opportunity with Coretta, Abernathy, and M. L. King, Sr., and his wife.
Charles Felton would return to visit King too. He brought along another resident in the hospital named Bob Wilson, who had been a medical student at Boston University and roomed with King while King studied theology there. Periodically during King’s stay they’d go up and Wilson and King would reminisce about their days in Boston. King also gave a few media interviews. In one, a reporter from the Am
sterdam News asked him the proverbial questions leaders like him were expected to answer about what Negroes must do next. Dutifully, referring to the hot-button issue of school integration, King replied, “Our next stop is to implement what the courts have written on the books. If we Negroes do not implement the court’s decision, [that decision] will prove meaningless.”
Meanwhile after her arraignment, Izola Curry was transferred to Bellevue Hospital by magistrate Vincent P. Rao, for the purpose of undergoing a battery of mental tests. While sitting in her room at the mental hospital, she smoked cigarettes and read her mail. Curry was the recipient of hundreds of letters, some critical of what she had done, others commending her. In addition she received envelopes containing donations from racists for her “legal defense fund.” For some reason the donations were particularly plentiful from King’s home state of Georgia. There was $12.13 from a group in the town of Crottersville, calling itself “the people of Georgia”; she received a $15 donation from a magistrate in the town of College Park who obviously disagreed with the actions of his New York counterpart in sending Curry to Bellevue; and there were two $5 donations from a White Citizens Council group in the town of Bainbridge. The coal dealer J. B. White of that town would claim to have sent her “a substantial amount.”
Speaking to a reporter about what he and six of his friends had done, White described how they were all sitting around in a drugstore when they heard the news. He would tell of how they found the stabbing particularly hilarious because it had taken place in the “cradle of integration.” White opined that there were some good Negroes who knew their place and that their ranks included Curry. Yet he would also say that the races weren’t meant to mix, that if God had meant that to be the case, he would have made everyone the same color. Clearly he had no understanding of what the deranged Curry had stated regarding her personal philosophy, which was that Negroes should appeal directly to the federal government for their civil rights, bypassing Negro preachers and organizations such as the NAACP.