The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [65]
At approximately 1 p.m., Dr. Kemp Clark pronounced John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, dead. Everyone seemed to agree the cause was the massive brain injury, and Clark was the neurosurgeon, so Clark called the death. A blanket was put over the body, and the body was put into a wooden coffin and taken to the airport, a violation of Texas state law at the time.
The doctors were taken upstairs to fill out brief reports for the Secret Service. Each was instructed to write about a page describing what had happened. McClelland was the only doctor to mention a wound in the temple, the place he believed Jenkins was nodding at earlier. He would later clarify for the Warren Commission that he did not see such a wound. He would give his testimony to the assistant counsel of the President’s Commission, Arlen Specter, four months after the assassination. Before McClelland finished his report, Lyndon B. Johnson had been sworn in as president aboard Air Force One.
Years later, when Senator Arlen Specter ran for president himself, he stopped by Parkland for a photo-op with the doctors he questioned in March of 1964.
The rest of the day, doctors discussed the day’s events by the coffee pot. Surgeons drink coffee like cars drink gas. They looked at each other with solemn glances, many still wearing blood-splattered suits. “Did that just happen?” they asked one another. “Did the president just die in our hands?”
McClelland got home about 6 p.m. His mother was visiting from East Texas. She met him at the door and hugged him.
AFTER TELLING HIS TALE, more than half the scheduled hour has passed. “Wow,” one of the students says. That’s all they can muster. Wow. And again, perhaps not noticing the amazement of the students, perhaps so used to it from telling the story over the years, McClelland drops a second bombshell.
“I worked on Oswald, too,” he says.
“You’re kidding.”
That Sunday, with McClelland’s mother still in town, the family decided to go out to lunch. As his wife was upstairs getting ready with their 2-year-old and infant, McClelland decided to watch television. As he switched on his Admiral, before the picture flickered to life, he heard an announcer: “He’s been shot. He’s been shot.”
When the picture came in, Lee Harvey Oswald was on the floor, a sheriff’s deputy leaning over him. The crowd had the gunman, Jack Ruby. McClelland called upstairs to his wife.
“They’ve shot Oswald!”
“Who’s that?” she called back.
“Don’t you remember? That’s the guy they said shot—”
“Oh.”
“Well, I’ve gotta go.”
He headed for the hospital. Coming down Beverly Drive, just before Preston Road, McClelland began flashing his headlights. He saw the car of Shires, his boss, on his way home from Parkland after seeing his patient, Governor Connally.
Shires stopped and stuck his head out the window. “Did you hear what I just—”
“I just saw it on television,” McClelland said.
“I just heard it on the radio.”
McClelland followed Shires to Parkland. When they arrived and changed clothes—something they didn’t take the time for with Kennedy—Oswald was just being wheeled in. 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