Reclaiming History (99 page)

Dr. Robert McClelland, who would later become the main Parkland doctor the conspiracy theorists would cite for the proposition that the large exit wound was not just to the occipital parietal area but completely to the rear of the president’s head, originally told the Warren Commission that the “
right posterior
portion of the skull had been extremely blasted…The parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seemed to be fractured almost along its
right
posterior half,” with “some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral half.”
¹⁴⁴
Two months before McClelland’s Warren Commission testimony on March 21, 1964, the
Texas State Journal of Medicine
contacted the Parkland doctors who had actually treated the president (which the journal concluded numbered only seven) and asked them to record their separate impressions for the journal’s readers. McClelland wrote that “the cause of death was the massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the right side of the head.”
¹⁴⁵
McClelland’s view would soon change radically.

McClelland eventually drew a sketch for conspiracy theorists, which appears in their books,
¹⁴⁶
showing the massive gaping wound to the president as being
solely
in the occipital (rear bone) area of the president’s head. To fortify his position about seeing a large hole in back of Kennedy’s head, he has also said he saw a piece of cerebellum (a portion of the brain located to the rear of the cerebrum, the front part of the brain) fall out of the back of the president’s head onto his stretcher.
¹⁴⁷
But although the autopsy report notes that “the major portion” of the right cerebrum was “exuding” from the large defect on the right side of the president’s head, there isn’t one word in the report indicating that any part of the cerebellum was missing or even lacerated.
¹⁴⁸
And Dr. Michael Baden of the HSCA told me that “X-rays and autopsy photos show that although there was damage to the cerebrum, the cerebellum was intact. Any doctors at Parkland, none of whom were pathologists, who said they saw damage to the cerebellum were wrong. They saw some brain tissue on Kennedy’s hair and they incorrectly assumed it was cerebellum tissue.”
¹⁴⁹
Indeed, with the entry wound to the president’s head being as high up as it was, it would have been virtually impossible for the cerebellum, in the lower part of the brain, to have been damaged, at least by the bullet.
¹⁵⁰

The relevance of this issue, of course, is that since the cerebellum is located near the back of the head, finding pieces of cerebellum on the stretcher would be consistent with there being a large exit wound to the rear or right rear of the president’s head, where conspiracy theorists claim the head exit wound was. Cerebellum certainly wouldn’t likely have been expelled from any defect in the right front of the president’s head, where the Warren Commission and the autopsy surgeons concluded the exit wound was. Yet several Parkland doctors claim they saw damaged and exposed cerebellum tissue (e.g., Dr. Charles Carrico,
¹⁵¹
Dr. William Kemp Clark,
¹⁵²
Dr. Charles Baxter,
¹⁵³
Dr. Malcolm Perry,
¹⁵⁴
and Dr. Marion Jenkins).
¹⁵⁵
In his hospital report dated November 22, 1963, Dr. Jenkins wrote that “the cerebellum had protruded from the [head] wound,”
¹⁵⁶
and later testified to the Warren Commission in 1964 that the “cerebellum…was herniated from the wound.”
¹⁵⁷
However, Jenkins changed his mind after seeing autopsy photographs in 1988, telling author Gerald Posner that “the photos showed the President’s brain was crenelated from the trauma, and it
resembled
cerebellum, but it was
not
cerebellar tissue. I think it has thrown off a lot of people that saw it.”
¹⁵⁸
And after interviewing Jenkins in 1992, Dennis Breo reported in
JAMA
that when Jenkins wrote in his 1963 report that the “cerebellum had been blown out, he meant cerebrum.”
¹⁵⁹

When I spoke to Dr. Carrico, one of the doctors who testified he had seen damaged cerebellar tissue, I asked him if there was any possibility that the Parkland doctors were confused about the cerebellum being damaged.

“Oh, absolutely,” he immediately replied.

“Why?” I asked.

“Looking at the shredded pieces of brain on the gurney, it looked like some of it had the characteristics of cerebellum, which kind of has a wavy surface. But because these brain pieces were shredded, this could easily have led to confusion as to whether it was all cerebrum—which has broader bands across the surface—or some cerebellum.”
¹⁶⁰

And in a telephone conversation in 1994, Dr. Boswell, in response to Parkland doctor Kemp Clark’s claiming to have seen “exposed…cerebellar tissue,” told Dr. Gary Aguilar, “He was wrong. The right side of the cerebrum was so fragmented. I think what he saw and misinterpreted as cerebellum was that.”
¹⁶¹
Parkland doctor Robert Grossman, who said he was present in Trauma Room One during the effort to resuscitate the president,
¹⁶²
would later write that “the autopsy demonstrated that the cerebellum was intact and that the physicians, including myself, who had thought that they had observed cerebellar tissue must have mistaken macerated brain for cerebellar folia.”
¹⁶³
It bears repeating that the autopsy report only mentioned damage to the cerebrum, not the cerebellum.

W
hen I spoke over the telephone to Dr. McClelland in late September and early October of 2002, McClelland, a respected Dallas surgeon whom no one accuses of trying to deliberately mislead anyone, only of being completely wrong in what he thought he saw (the most honest people in the world can think they saw the darndest things), said he was positive the president had a “massive hole to the back of his head.” He said at the time of his observation he was holding a metal retractor that was pulling the skin away from the president’s trachea so Drs. Perry and Carrico could perform their tracheotomy. “I had nothing else to do or to distract me so I fixated on this large, gaping hole to the back of the president’s head for ten to twelve minutes.” When I wondered how he could see the large hole when the president was always lying on his back, he said the wound was so large that he nevertheless could see “most of it.” If what he said was true, I asked, how is it possible that on the Zapruder film itself, the explosion is clearly to the right frontal portion of the president’s head with a large amount of brain matter spraying out, and the back of his head appears to be completely intact? Dr. McClelland gave an answer that deserves some type of an award for inventiveness: “What the explanation for this is, I just don’t know, but what I believe happened is that the spray of brain matter and blood was kind of like a bloodscreen, similar to a smokescreen, that precluded a clear view of the occipital area.”

If, I pursued the matter, the exit wound was to the back of the president’s head, where was the entrance wound for this bullet? McClelland, who believes the shot to the head came from the grassy knoll, said he believed the president was struck “around the hairline near the middle of his forehead.” If that was so, I asked, how was it that seventeen pathologists, including Dr. Wecht, all agreed that the president was only struck twice, both times from the rear, and none of them—from photographs, X-rays, and personal observation (by the three autopsy surgeons)—saw any entrance wound to the president’s forehead? Again, McClelland, who acknowledged, “I’m not a pathologist and I’ve never conducted an autopsy,” said, “I don’t know the answer to your question.” But he remained sincerely inventive in his imagination. “What I believe happened is that none of the pathologists saw the entrance wound because it became a part of the destruction to the whole right side and top of the president’s head. In other words, it was no longer a separate hole that could be identified.” (Of course, none of the autopsy photographs show any such massive injury to the president’s forehead extending to the right side of his head, and none is referred to in the autopsy report, nor in the reports of the Clark Panel and Rockefeller Commission. As the HSCA said, “There is no evidence that the president was struck by a bullet entering the front of his head.”)
¹⁶⁴

“So you do acknowledge,” I said, “the explosion to the
right front part
of the president’s head?”

“Oh, yes,” the doctor said, “but that’s not where the bullet exited. It exited in the occipital region of his head, leaving a hole so big I could put my fist in it.”

When I pointed out to the doctor again that not only didn’t the Zapruder film show any large hole to the back of the president’s head but autopsy photographs never showed any large hole there either, he said that although it was pure “supposition” on his part, at the time the photographs were taken, someone “could have pulled a flap of the president’s skin, attached to the base of his neck, forward,” thereby covering the large defect. When I asked him if he saw any such loose flap of skin at Parkland, he acknowledged, “I did not.”

It was getting late in the evening, Dallas time, but before I ended the interview I reminded Dr. McClelland of the fact that in his Parkland Hospital admission note at 4:45 p.m. on the day of the assassination, he had written that the president died “from a gunshot wound of the
left
temple.”
¹⁶⁵
“Yes,” he said, “that was a mistake. I never saw any wound to the president’s left temple. Dr. Jenkins had told me there was a wound there, though he later denied telling me this.”
*
Since there was no bullet wound to the left side of the president’s body, and since the conspiracy theorists allege that Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll to his
right
front, conspiracy author Robert Groden solves the problem and avoids having his star witness, Dr. McClelland, look very confused and noncredible simply by changing McClelland’s words “left temple” to “right temple” in his book,
The Killing of a President
.
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When I called Dr. McClelland the following evening to discuss further one of the points he had made, he quickly told me he was glad I had called because “since we hung up last night, I’ve had some second thoughts about the exact location of the exit wound.” Unlike the many conspiracy theorists who have exploited Dr. McClelland’s obvious errors to their benefit, he told me, “I don’t question the integrity of all the pathologists who disagree with me” (he wasn’t so kind to his colleague, Dr. Charles Crenshaw: “Chuck had a lot of problems and fabricated a lot of things”), saying, for instance, that he and the three autopsy surgeons were “obviously looking at the same head and the same wound,” but that the area on the head where they placed the wound differed because of “the different positions from which we viewed it and also because of the different interpretations of what we saw, which is normal.” But he made a major concession in an effort to reconcile his position with theirs. “I have to say that the sketch I first drew for Josiah Thompson’s book a few years after the assassination was misleading. Since last night, I’ve been thinking that I placed the large hole in the president’s head farther back than it really was, maybe. It may have been a bit more forward.” When I asked him where he now put it, he said, “Partially in the occipital region and partly in the right back part of the parietal bone” (which I told him was actually consistent with the original position he took in his Warren Commission testimony), but he still insisted that this large exit wound was not to the right frontal area of the president’s skull as concluded by all the pathologists.

Dr. McClelland told me he believes there were two gunmen, Oswald and someone else, and further believes that “the CIA and FBI, mostly the CIA, were behind the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, and they brought in the Mafia, who carried out the killing.” He said he didn’t know but suspects that “the Warren Commission covered up the conspiracy.” On that note, I thanked the good doctor for his time and bid him a good night.
¹⁶⁷

Even apart from Dr. McClelland’s wandering completely off the reservation in the sketch he drew for Josiah Thompson, what is the explanation for several of the other Parkland doctors erroneously thinking that the large exit wound was to the right rear of the president’s head as opposed to the right frontal region, where all the medical and scientific evidence proved it to be? Dr. Michael Baden, the chief forensic pathologist for the HSCA, has what I believe to be the answer, one whose logic is solid.
*
“The head exit wound was not in the parietal-occipital area, as the Parkland doctors said. They were wrong,” he told me. “That’s why we have autopsies, photographs, and X-rays to determine things like this.
Since the thick growth of hair on Kennedy’s head hadn’t been shaved
*
at Parkland, there’s no way for the doctors to have seen the margins of the wound in the skin of the scalp. All they saw was blood and brain tissue adhering to the hair. And that may have been mostly in the occipital area because he was lying on his back and gravity would push his hair, blood, and brain tissue backward
, so many of them probably assumed the exit wound was in the back of the head. But clearly, from the autopsy X-rays and photographs and the observations of the autopsy surgeons, the exit wound and defect was not in the occipital area. There was no defect or wound to the rear of Kennedy’s head other than the entrance wound in the upper right part of his head.”
¹⁶⁸

Indeed, in a letter to conspiracy theorist Vince Palamara on October 13, 1998, Dr. Ronald Jones wrote that “President Kennedy had very thick dark hair that
covered the injured area
.” Where was that injured area? Jones said it was only his “opinion” (i.e., without being able to see it) that the large defect “was in the occipital area in the back of the head.”

A few other explanatory observations relative to Dr. Baden’s comments: Dr. Marion Jenkins, the Parkland anesthesiologist, says, “I was standing at the head of the [cart] in the position the anesthesiologist most often assumes closest to the patient’s head…The President’s great shock of hair and the location of the head wound was such that it was not visible to those standing [on] each side of the gurney where they were carrying out their resuscitative maneuvers.”
¹⁶⁹
And Dr. Carrico, the first Parkland doctor to treat the president, told me, “The president was lying on his back, so we couldn’t see the rear portion of his head. Consequently, what we did see appeared to be further back than it was since we were not viewing it in relation to his whole head. But really, none of us were looking closely at where the defect was and making mental notes. We were just trying to save his life.”
¹⁷⁰
And Dr. Charles Baxter told author Gerald Posner that Kennedy “had such a bushy head of hair, and blood and all in it, you couldn’t tell what was wound versus dried blood or dangling tissue.”
¹⁷¹