We Were There Read online

  We Were There

  Copyright © 2013 by Allen Childs, MD

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Material from the Parkland Papers is reprinted with permission from Parkland Health &; Hospital System.

  All material excerpted from the Journal of the American Medical Association is reprinted by permission, copyright © 1992 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.

  Excerpt on page 97 is from Fort Worth Star-Telegram, November 22, 1965 copyright © 1965 McClatchy. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-62636-108-9

  eISBN: 978-1-62873-568-0

  Printed in the United States

  For my loving grandchildren, Jackson Childs, Joshua Morgan, Stephanie Klarer, Erin Elizabeth, and Jacob Newton, Natalie Sunstrum Fellows, and Nicole and Aaron Mason Sunstrum.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter 1Written At the Time, Remembered For All Time

  Chapter 2Love Field and the Trade Mart

  Chapter 3Parkland and Southwestern

  Chapter 4“The Pit”

  Chapter 5Governor Connally

  Chapter 6Trauma Room 1

  Chapter 7Memories of the First Lady

  Chapter 8What Did Kemp Clark Say?

  Chapter 9The Secret Service

  Chapter 10The Grief

  Chapter 11Dallas

  Chapter 12Oswald and Ruby

  Chapter 13The Neck Wound and the Conspiracies

  Afterword

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Not a story would have been collected without the efforts of the UT Southwestern Alumni Association’s Julie Mages and director Wes Norred, who graciously sent out my request for memories of that November day. The collection became a book after a chance encounter over a lox and bagel brunch with Ambassador Stuart Eizenstat. He took the initiative to send the manuscript to his long time literary agent, the author and attorney, Ron Goldfarb. Ron worked for Robert Kennedy and was in his office when the news of the assassination reached them.

  Hope Eastman provided sustained and invaluable help in the preparation of this book, particularly with her insightful thematic suggestions. I am grateful for the artful editorial changes made by Holly Rubino, my editor at Skyhorse Publishing.

  And, to my co-authors, I thank you for the thoughtful, often touching memories you sent me. Looking back through the corridors of time, you have preserved for all time the historical fabric of that day at Parkland, half a century ago.

  INTRODUCTION

  Twice in a forty-five hour, thirty-one minute timeframe, Parkland Hospital was the center of worldwide attention. It was the temporary seat of the United States government, as well as the state of Texas. Our thirty-fifth president died in Trauma Room 1. At that moment, the ascendency of the thirty-sixth president of the United States occurred at Parkland. Two days later, it was the site of death of the president’s accused assassin. So reported a Parkland Hospital office memorandum dated November 27, 1963.

  And we were there.

  We forty-five physician alumni of Southwestern Medical School reached back nearly five decades and found the branding iron ­memories of November 22, 1963. It began at the forty-fifth reunion of the class of 1966. During our dinner meeting, twenty-four doctors and their significant others told stories for two hours, including fond memories of classmates who were no longer with us. Perhaps that grief led us to remember another sadness. First a trickle, then a flood of memories of that devastating day reawakened our common bond of that experience. Our classmate Kaye Wilkins said, “We ought to record these memories for posterity.” As class president, I agreed to collect and publish these recollections. I wrote a letter which the Alumni Association mailed to every student, intern, and resident who was at Parkland and Southwestern the day President John F. Kennedy died in Trauma Room 1.

  Like the patrons of Ford’s Theater who witnessed the assassination of President Lincoln, a blood spattered history had assaulted our senses. Some of us were in the emergency operating room, some in the hallway of the “pit,” and others stood a stricken vigil at the ER loading dock. So many of the main participants have died—Dr. M. T. “Pepper” Jenkins, the chief of anesthesiology, and surgeons Charles Baxter, Malcolm Perry, and alas, the first doctor to reach the dying president, Jim Carrico. I have included their own words from the oral history collections of the Sixth Floor Museum, which is in the Dallas County Administration Building (formerly the Texas School Book Depository).

  Earl Rose, who was a forensic pathologist and the Dallas County Medical Examiner at the time, spoke out forcefully against the conspiracy theorists. He was the one who stood in the path of Secret Service agents who were breaking the law by removing the president’s body from Parkland.

  In putting together this book, I was helped greatly by two surgeons in Trauma Room 1, Doctors Ron Jones and Robert McClelland. Jones did a cutdown on President Kennedy’s left arm, established an intravenous line in less than a minute, and also inserted a chest tube. He is now Chief of Surgery at Baylor Hospital, and he kindly sent me his memories as published in Baylor Reflections. Robert McClelland is, at age eighty-four, still teaching surgery at Southwestern. McClelland stood at the head of the table on which the dying president lay, and held a retractor for Doctors Baxter and Perry who were performing a tracheotomy. He told me to quote from an article published in D Magazine in 2008, in which he detailed his memories of not only the final moments of the president’s life, but also his own participation in the emergency surgery of Lee Harvey Oswald. McClelland’s oral history from the Sixth Floor Museum is particularly compelling.

  Conspiracy theories have continued to rage for fifty years since that day, and were not put to rest by the Warren Commission’s conclusion that there was a single shooter and a single bullet that killed President Kennedy and injured Governor Connally. The doctors at Parkland were the only ones who saw the neck wound before the emergency tracheotomy, and they were unanimous that the neck wound was an entry wound. In time, most, but not all, no longer would believe this.

  Late in this project, I came upon a startling revelation in Dr. Ron Jones’s oral history. After taking his Warren Commission deposition at Parkland, chief counsel Arlen Specter told Jones, “We have people who would testify that they saw somebody shoot the president from the front. But we don’t want to interview them, and I don’t want you saying anything about that, either.”

  Senior Chest Surgery Resident James “Red” Duke was in charge of Governor Connally’s emergency care, after a brief encounter with the scene in Trauma Room 1. A bullet had punctured the Governor’s lung and shattered his wrist. A senior medical student, Bill Scro
ggie, had stumbled on the Governor unattended because all the attention was on the president. Scroggie, observing Connally’s respiratory distress, grabbed Duke, whose immediate intervention saved the Governor’s life. The living was almost lost in the struggle to save the dead.

  One of the more curious phenomena is how people’s memories were clear to them but conflicted with others. One is what Kemp Clark, the chief of neurosurgery, was reported to have said before he pronounced the president dead. Also, where he was before he was summoned to the ER is variously remembered. Because of his name, the students referred to Kemp Clark as “man super” Dr. Clark, a tall, trim, and mildly aloof professor of neurosurgery, told the Warren Commission that he was summoned from his laboratory by a phone call. Some students recall that he was giving a lecture to med students in the school’s auditorium. I and my medical school roommate, Dr. Rick Cohen, recall seeing him in the Parkland library, from which he hurried out after someone ran in to tell him something. The overhead pages for department chairmen to report to the ER began to blare just after that.

  A rich vein of recollection is reported from those of us who stood at the ER loading dock, before and after being herded back behind police barricades. We looked into the presidential limousine with its top down and saw the back seat covered in blood and the roses on the floor. There were about a hundred and fifty of us standing there when we received word that the president had died, about a half an hour before it was announced to the world. I think it was Kemp Clark who told some of the students as he was walking out of the ER. I can never forget how the wailing of the black people contrasted with the stunned, but dry-eyed silence of the medical students. Dr. Robert Duchouquette sent me his narrative poem which begins, “The whole nation cried the day I met JFK.”

  Yet, as I record in chapter 12, not everyone was sorrowful that sad November day. Rick Cohen reminded me that when he and I went back over to the school, some of our classmates were actually celebrating. I wish he hadn’t. None of them sent their memories to me. Particularly disturbing was Dr. Al Lindsey’s recollection of a fifth-grade class cheering when their tearful teacher told them the president had died. This was by no means confined to Dallas, but Lindsey recalled a prominent local minister saying, “The only thing worse than the assassination would be for Dallas not to acknowledge that it was a city full of hatred, a perfect environment for such an event to take place.”

  As the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination nears, articles have appeared such as Ross Douthat’s New York Times op-ed, “The Enduring Cult of Kennedy,” printed on November 27, 2011. In the article, Douthat commented, “No matter how many times the myths of Camelot are seemingly interred by history, they always come shambling back to life—in another television special, another Vanity Fair cover, another hardcover. . . .” The same can be said for conspiracy theories that do not loosen their grip on the public imagination. It is said that a thousand books have been published on the assassination. Among the “myths” the Times article explored is the conviction that JFK was a martyr to right-wing unreason. How can that notion square with the fact that Oswald was a leftist pro-Castro agitator whose other assassination target was the right-wing segregationist, General Edwin Walker?

  Adlai Stevenson II, when he was the US Ambassador to the United Nations, had tried to discourage JFK’s visit to Dallas. Stevenson had been spat upon and struck with a placard during his most recent public appearance there because of his political views. But, Vice President Lyndon Johnson prevailed upon the president to visit Dallas where his mission was to patch up some tattered alliances between fellow democrats: the conservative governor, John Connally, and the widely admired liberal senator, Ralph Yarborough.

  President and Mrs. Kennedy were greeted by an exuberant crowd at Love Field, and they looked happily immersed in it. My classmate David Haymes was so close he could take pictures of them in the crowd and riding in the limousine. The next he and fellow classmate Cervando Martinez saw of them, the presidential limousine was racing frantically, a Secret Service agent clinging precariously to the trunk. As the motorcade careened by, they saw Jackie covered with blood, shielding the president’s head in her lap.

  After the president was loaded onto a gurney, a wall of people entered the emergency room. His head was covered by two dozen roses, and he was noted to be motionless and mannequin-like as they rushed him into Trauma Room 1.

  First year student, Larry Dossey, held the telephone line open to CBS in New York City for their reporter, Robert Pierpoint. As this was long before cell or satellite phones, the pay phones in the ER were few and the only way to contact the outside world. For more than an hour, Dossey guarded the open line, and described to CBS what he was seeing in the ER, while Pierpoint went back and forth to Trauma Room 1. When Pierpoint told Walter Cronkite, who was broadcasting live, that the priests had administered the Last Rites to the president, Cronkite would then say, “I guess it doesn’t get any more official than that.”

  Abram “Chic” Eisenstein, another medical student, saw the Secret Service commandeer a car to whisk away Lyndon Johnson. A Mexican-American man pulled up to the loading dock of the ER with his very soon-to-deliver wife, and the Secret Service allowed them in but stole their car.

  Many of us saw President Johnson, ghostly pale, surrounded by a ring of Secret Service men trundling him into that car. The delay in announcing JFK’s death was said to allow President Johnson time to get to Love Field, where he was to be sworn in aboard Air Force One. This delay was the first order issued by the new president, immediately after Assistant White House Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff was the first to address LBJ as “Mr. President.”

  And then those of us standing on the perimeter of the loading dock saw the bronze casket placed into the white hearse, and the former First Lady, her pink Chanel suit vividly stained with her husband’s blood, get in with the casket.

  Memories of Jackie Kennedy are in many of the narratives I received, and they reflect a primal sympathy for her. I have also included statements from Pepper Jenkins, the anesthesia chief, who said, “As she circled and circled, I noticed her hands were cupped in front of her, as if she were cradling something. As she passed, 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.” Christie Jenkins, the daughter of Dr. M. T. Pepper Jenkins (the anesthesiologist on the resuscitation team) has confirmed that Mrs. Kennedy nudged her father and handed him pieces of the president’s brain that she’d been holding. One of the most touching memories of the First Lady is from Adel Nafrawi, a surgery resident, who witnessed Jackie move toward the dead president, remove the wedding ring from his hand, kiss him, and put the ring on her finger.

  After Last Rites were administered, the Secret Service agents were struggling for control of the chaotic emergency room. Senior medical student Bill Scroggie noted, “There was a well-dressed man guarding the back door of the ER and another fellow tries to push his way through without identifying himself. The Secret Service agent flattened the guy. I later learned he was an FBI agent.” Then there was the historic confrontation in Trauma Room 1 between Dallas County Medical Examiner, Earl Rose, and the Secret Service over the custody of the president’s mortal remains. In addition to being a notable forensic pathologist, Rose held a law degree, and he challenged the legal authority of the Secret Service to remove the body. Many subsequent conspiracy theories center on the broken chain of evidence born of this confrontation. An article published in 1992 in the Journal of the American Medical Association quotes Rose as saying, “. . . I was in their way. I was face-to-face with Secret Service agent Roy H. Kellerman, and I was trying to explain to him that Texas law applied in the instant case of the death of the president, and that the law required an autopsy to be performed in Texas.”

  “No one was in charge of the situation,” Rose continued. “Agent Kellerman tried three tactics to have his way—he asserted his identity as representing the Secret Service; he appealed
for sympathy to Mrs. Kennedy; and he used body language to attempt to bully, or should I say, intimidate. . . . At no time did I feel I was in physical danger because he and the others were armed. I was not looking at Agent Kellerman’s gun, I was looking at his eyes, and they were very intense. His eyes said he meant to get the president’s body back to Washington.”

  In the wrung-out silence of the Parkland ER, after President Johnson, Jackie Kennedy, and the bronze casket had gone, Doctors Michael Ellsasser and Don Gilliard walked into Trauma Room 1 before it was cleaned. In a waste basket they found the two dozen red roses given to the First Lady at Love Field that morning. Each removed a single rose. Ellsasser preserved his and has kept it to this day.

  Like President Lincoln’s box at the Ford’s Theatre, the Parkland emergency operating room is lock-stitched into the fabric of history, preserved at the request of the Kennedy family. In 1973, the federal government purchased all of the equipment in Trauma Room 1 and it is now housed in the National Archives underground facility at Lenexa, Kansas. Many of the medical staff have their own mementos of that day. Robert McClelland still has the bloody shirt he wore while he cared for the dying president.

  Things were different when Lee Harvey Oswald was shot forty-eight hours later. Seeing a prostrate Oswald on his home TV, McClelland rushed to Parkland, where he encountered surgery chairman, Tom Shires, who was going home after tending to his post-operative patient, Governor Connally. McClelland flashed his headlights and when Shires pulled over, he told him what had happened to Oswald. Unlike with President Kennedy, McClelland had time to change into his scrubs before operating.

  Already deeply unsettled by the events two days prior, twenty-five million viewers recoiled in horror at the sight of Jack Ruby firing point blank at Oswald’s abdomen. At that moment, it did not seem to matter that he was the most hated man in the world. Minutes after this first televised assassination, a moribund and unconscious Oswald—“white as a piece of paper,” said McClelland—made it to the Parkland ER, accompanied by Secret Service agents. Dr. Harry Eastman, on duty in the psychiatry section, recalls, “Suddenly all doors were sealed with men in suits with machine guns drawn.” One was to stand by in case Oswald wished to make a death-bed confession. In his last conscious act, Oswald had declined to say anything when told by a sheriff at the jail that he was gravely injured.