The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [66]
They worked on Oswald for an hour when his heart arrested. The blood loss was just too much, and the brief but severe shock too damaging. Perry opened Oswald’s chest, and he and McClelland, who was also assisting, took turns administering an open heart massage.
(“You pumped Oswald’s heart in your hands?” a student asks. “We took turns, each going until we got tired. We went for, oh, about 40 minutes.”)
The heart got flabbier and flabbier. They squeezed and pumped. The blood around his heart collected on their gloves. Then, no more. Almost two hours after being shot, Lee Harvey Oswald was pronounced dead. The first live homicide on public television was witnessed by 20 million viewers.
The entire emergency room was in a daze. First the president. Two days later, in the room next door, the president’s assassin. It was as if the community had tumbled into one of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone episodes.
For McClelland, it got stranger. One of the sheriff’s deputies who had been escorting Oswald during his public transfer—the taller deputy America saw in the Stetson hat—was waiting outside the trauma room to see how Oswald was doing. He told the doctors something odd had happened, even more odd than the public murder.
After the shot, the deputy explained to McClelland, when Oswald was on the ground, he got on his hands and knees and put his face right over Oswald’s.
“I said, ‘Son, you’re hurt real bad. Do you wanna say anything?’” the deputy said. “He looked at me for a second. He waited, like he was thinking. Then he shook his head back and forth just as wide as he could. Then he closed his eyes.”
They would never open again. Looking back, McClelland would wonder if Oswald was tempted to say something. If maybe he was worried he would regret it. He didn’t know he was going to die, McClelland thought.
THE STUDENTS BEGIN TO REALIZE McClelland is not just a living portal to the history in their textbooks. He might also be the most credible conspiracy theorist alive. He explains that too many things don’t add up. Doctors at Parkland reported seeing the president’s body put into a coffin with a blanket over it. But that it somehow got into a body bag by the time it got to Washington. He says he’s from East Texas and has seen enough deer hunting to know a body moves in the direction of the bullet. That the president moved backward because he was shot from the front.
He mentions an odd phone call the operator at the emergency room got when Oswald was in surgery. Someone claiming to be from the White House inquired about Oswald’s condition. He talks about a British documentarian’s theory that three hitmen flew from Corsica to Marseille to Mexico City and drove across the border and up to Dallas to murder the president.
“Were you ever scared?” a student asks.
“No. Maybe I should have been. Maybe I was just too dumb to be scared.” His voice is soft, and he smiles.
There are other coincidences, he says. One extraordinary one, in fact.
“I’d actually met Kennedy before that,” he says.
“You what?”
Almost two years exactly before the assassination, McClelland was a resident at Parkland. His new wife was a nurse at Baylor hospital, across Dallas from Parkland. She asked him one day if he could pick up her paycheck. He took off work a little early and ventured to Baylor, where he hardly ever went.
He parked across the street from the hospital, got out and looked to his left, where a group of school children were running from an elementary school. As they ran in his direction, a pack of motorcycle police rounded the corner from Washington Avenue onto Gaston