Read Reclaiming History Online
Authors: Vincent Bugliosi
Several points should be kept in mind about the observations of Drs. Perry and Carrico. Neither was a pathologist. In fact, of the many doctors in the resuscitation room at Parkland Hospital, none were pathologists,
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much less forensic pathologists, whose specialty is determining, for legal purposes, the cause of death and, among other things, the nature (e.g., entrance as opposed to exit) of wounds. To do this, forensic pathologists examine the track of the bullet through the victim’s body, examine the victim’s clothing, take measurements and photographs, and so on. The Parkland doctors did none of these things. In fact, as recently as 1992, all four of the principal doctors on the medical team that treated the president at Parkland (Drs. Marion “Pepper” Jenkins and Charles Baxter as well as Perry and Carrico) emphasized, in an interview with
JAMA
, that their experiences in the trauma room at Parkland Hospital did not qualify them to reach conclusions about the direction from which the fatal missiles were fired—that is, whether the wounds were entry or exit wounds.
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Indeed, Dr. Perry, thirty-four years old at the time, had just completed his residency the previous year, and Dr. Carrico, only twenty-eight, was still a resident at Parkland, which means he hadn’t even yet completed all of his training to become certified in his specialty of surgery.
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Why, one may ask, were such young and relatively inexperienced doctors given the responsibility of saving the president’s life? (The conspiracy theorists have overlooked a natural argument for them: Parkland Hospital may have been in on the conspiracy to make sure the president died.) The reason is that nearly all the senior doctors at Parkland were attending a medical conference in Galveston, and only relatively junior doctors were available at Parkland to treat the president.
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Most importantly by far, the Parkland doctors, as previously alluded to, weren’t there to determine the nature of the president’s wounds. Dr. Perry said that whether the wounds were entrance or exit wounds “really made very little difference [to us]. Some things must take precedence and priority, and in this instance the airway and the bleeding [had to] be controlled.”
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“We were trying to save a life, not worrying about entry and exit wounds,” Dr. Carrico told
JAMA
in the 1992 interview, echoing his 1964 testimony before the Warren Commission that “this was an acutely ill patient and all we had time to do was to determine what things were life-threatening right then and attempt to resuscitate him…after which a more complete examination would be carried out [by others].”
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Question by Warren Commission counsel: “Why did you not make an effort to determine the track of the bullets?”
Carrico: “The time to do this was not available. The examination conducted was to try to establish what life-threatening situations were present and to correct these.”
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New York Times
White House correspondent Tom Wicker, who was at the press conference at Parkland when the media was informed of Kennedy’s death, wrote that the doctors “gave us copious details, particularly as to the efforts they had made to resuscitate the president. They were less explicit about the wounds, explaining that the body had been in their hands only a short time and they had little time to examine [them] closely.”
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Illustrating the rushed circumstances, Dr. Perry told
JAMA
in the 1992 interview, “Jim [Carrico] was having trouble inserting the endotracheal tube because of the wound to the trachea and I didn’t even wipe off the blood before doing a ‘trach.’ I grabbed a knife and made a quick and large incision.”
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Briefly, the following Parkland doctors, in addition to Perry and Carrico, gave an opinion on the nature of the president’s throat wound, or passed on hearsay information about the wound:
Dr. Charles Baxter: “We…did not determine at that time whether this represented an entry or an exit wound. Judging from the caliber of the rifle that [was] later found…this would more resemble a wound of entry. However…depending upon what a bullet of such caliber would pass through, the tissues it would pass through on the way to the [throat], I think that the wound could well represent either an exit or entry wound.”
212Dr. Marion Jenkins: “I thought this was a wound of exit because it was not a clean wound, and by ‘clean,’ [I mean] clearly demarcated, round.”
213Dr. Robert McClelland: “The neck wound, when I first arrived, was [already] converted into a tracheotomy incision…The description that [Dr. Perry] gave me was…a very small injury, with clear-cut, although somewhat irregular margins.”
214Dr. Ronald Jones: “[The] small hole in anterior midline of neck [was] thought to be a bullet entrance wound.”
215Dr. Gene Akin: “[The wound] was slightly ragged around the edges…The thought flashed through my mind that this might have been an entrance wound. I immediately thought it could also have been an exit wound.”
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Undoubtedly, one of the main reasons, if not
the
main reason, why the Parkland doctors were clearly confused as to whether the throat wound was a wound of entry or exit, with several actually believing it was an entry wound, is the simple fact that none of them were aware at the time of the corresponding wound (the real entrance wound) in the president’s back. “We were not aware,” Dr. Carrico testified before the Warren Commission, “of the missile wound to the back…
We knew of no other entrance wound
.”
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Common sense tells us that seeing only the wound to the front of the president’s neck, the Parkland doctors would instinctively have been more inclined to think of it as an entrance wound. Almost anyone would be so predisposed. But if the Parkland doctors had been aware of the corresponding wound to the president’s back, and particularly that it was small and oval with clean and not ragged edges,
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the very strong likelihood is that they all would have concluded that the throat wound was the exit wound every pathologist later found it to be.
Why weren’t the Parkland doctors aware of the wound to the president’s back? Because they did not turn the president’s body over. Why didn’t they? Again, they weren’t there to examine bullet wounds and their trajectory, but were engaged in a frantic effort to save the president’s life. And turning the president’s body over to examine his back for bullet wounds when you’re right in the middle of an attempt to save his life would be clearly counterproductive. As Dr. Perry testified when asked by Commission counsel Arlen Specter why he didn’t turn the president’s body over, “At that point it was necessary to attend to the emergent procedure, and a satisfactory effective airway is uppermost in such a condition.”
Specter: “Did you
ever
turn him over?”
Dr. Perry: “I did not.”
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When Specter asked Dr. Carrico, “Why did you not take the time to turn him over?” Carrico replied, “[A] thorough inspection would have involved…considerable time which at this juncture was not available. [It] would have involved washing and cleaning the back, and this is not practical in treating an acutely injured patient. You have to determine which things…are immediately life-threatening and cope with them.”
Specter: “Was any effort made to inspect the president’s back
after
he had expired?”
Carrico: “No, sir.”
Specter: “And why was no effort made at that time to inspect his back?”
Carrico: “I suppose nobody really had the heart to do it.”
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Carrico told me, “Once the president died, we discontinued all examination of the president’s body. That was for the medical examiner. It would have been needless meddling on our part.”
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Dr. Jenkins spoke similarly. Explaining why the president’s body was never turned over, he said, “I think as we pronounced the president dead, those…who were there just sort of melted away; well, I guess ‘melted’ is the wrong word, but we felt like we were intruders and left. I’m sure that this [would have been] beyond our prerogative and…[it] would have been meddlesome on anybody’s part after death to have done any further search.”
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The very nature of an emergency trauma room at a hospital is such that forensically precise and accurate descriptions of the character of a gunshot wound cannot be expected. In fact, a 1993 article in
JAMA
reported that “the odds that a trauma specialist will correctly interpret certain fatal gunshot wounds are no better than the flip of a coin.” A study conducted by investigators at Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, from 1987 to 1992, compared the post-mortem findings of a board-certified forensic pathologist with the medical records of emergency medicine physicians, trauma surgeons, and neurosurgeons. It was discovered that out of forty-six cases, trauma specialists made errors in 52 percent, either in differentiating the exit and entrance wound or in determining the number of bullets. In 15 percent of the cases, the trauma specialist made both types of error. As expected, multiple gunshot wounds (the situation with the president) were more often misinterpreted, accounting for 74 percent of the errors. Even single gunshot wounds were misclassified in 37 percent of the cases.
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Even under the most optimum of circumstances, people’s perceptions of what they think they saw are more often than not seriously conflicting. For instance, there’s the famous law school experiment where the professor has someone run into the classroom and do several things (such as speak some words, pick up a book, turn over a small trash can, etc.), then immediately run out. The students, sitting calmly in their seats with nothing to do except observe what is taking place in front of them, give wildly divergent descriptions of the person, his clothing, and his conduct. Yet here we have the Parkland doctors, in the middle of their desperate attempt to save the life of the most powerful man on earth, and with absolutely no need or desire on their part to determine the correct physical characteristics of his wounds, and the conspiracy theorists expect them, in the chaotic frenzy of the moment, to make observations that should be treated like immutable mosaic truths, trumping photographs and X-rays and subsequent contrary conclusions by the autopsy surgeons and all other pathologists who have studied and examined the available evidence.
Though conspiracy theorists are almost unanimous in believing that the president was shot from the front and his throat wound was an entrance wound, they are strangely silent as to what happened to this bullet after it entered the president’s throat. Unlike the fatal head wound, which most conspiracists also say came from a shot from the front and exited to the rear of the president’s head, they don’t say what happened to the bullet that entered the president’s throat from the front. Since no bullet was found inside the president’s body at the time of the autopsy, by definition, it would have had to exit the president’s body. But where? Virtually the only argument the conspiracists have ever made about this bullet is the contention, by some of them, that it was the “missile” given to the FBI agents by Dr. Humes at the time of the autopsy. But they don’t even contend this anymore since the agents said it was not a bullet, only two fragments, and the naval corpsman who typed up the word
missile
has conceded that it was not a missile, only fragments, and he had made a mistake.
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Moreover, it would be virtually impossible for a bullet entering the soft tissue of the neck at a speed of two thousand feet per second to stop inside the neck and not exit the body.
And since the conspiracy theorists have never claimed
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that the wound to the upper right back of the president was not an entrance wound but actually the wound of exit for the bullet that entered his throat, their conspicuous and glaring lack of a theory or even an argument at all as to what became of this bullet should alone convince them that their contention of a bullet striking the president in the throat from the front is entirely without merit. Talk about a magic bullet—this one didn’t change flight in midair as they claim the bullet in the Warren Commission’s single-bullet theory did. Instead, it simply vanished.
O
ne of the most outlandish allegations made regarding the president’s wounds came from Parkland doctor Charles A. Crenshaw, who had become an icon to the conspiracy theorists before his death in 2001. A hardcover publisher sent Crenshaw’s unpublished manuscript about the Kennedy assassination to me in 1991 for my view of whether there was any merit to Crenshaw’s charges. I responded that I didn’t believe there was, and they passed on publishing it. But he got it published in paperback with a different publisher the next year and it became a
New York Times
best seller.
Although the four main Parkland doctors who attended to the dying president (Perry, Carrico, Jenkins, and Baxter) now all agree that, in Carrico’s words, “nothing we observed contradicts the autopsy finding that the bullets were fired from above and behind by a high-velocity bullet,”
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in Crenshaw’s book,
JFK: Conspiracy of Silence
, he says that before the president died, he observed “two frontal-entry bullet wounds,” charging that there was a later alteration of the wounds by someone to make it look like the shots came from the rear. “There was something rotten in America in 1963,” he writes. Crenshaw charges that Dr. Perry’s tracheotomy was later “enlarged and mangled, as if someone had conducted another procedure. It looked to be the work of a butcher. No doubt, someone had gone through a great deal of trouble to show a different story than we had seen at Parkland.”
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Even though the grief and mourning in the air of Trauma Room One must have been thick enough to cut, and even though the wound to Kennedy’s throat had been virtually obliterated by the tracheotomy, and even though the direction of fire wasn’t yet an issue to anyone, much less the people in Trauma Room One, Crenshaw, just a junior resident at Parkland, said that before “we placed him [Kennedy] in a coffin…I looked at the [neck] wound again. I wanted to know and remember this for the rest of my life. And the rest of my life I will always know he was shot from the front.”
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