The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [68]
He thinks about a trip to Washington, where he visited the Armed Forces Pathology Museum. There, hanging in a display, was the shirt Lincoln was wearing when he was shot in 1865. Blood had poured from the left side of his head, down his arm, collecting at the cuff of the shirt.
McClelland opens the bag and pulls out the folded shirt.
The day after he worked on Kennedy, he took his suit to the cleaners. When he explained the blood-drenched clothing, they told him they didn’t want to clean it. It was part of history, they told him. “I only have two suits,” the young doctor said. “You have to clean it.”
But he folded the shirt he had been wearing and put it in a bag. He eventually got a nice box to keep it in. As he unfolds the shirt and holds it up, there, on the left sleeve, mostly around the cuff, is a brown stain. Because he had a suit on, much of the shirt is clean. But as with the Lincoln shirt, a pool of blood had collected on the left side. Like the event itself, the blood started at his hands and worked its way up, onto him.
He thinks about the tragic event. Things that seem disparate, but somehow come together. “Jungian synchronicity” he calls it. Meaningful coincidences.
Rarely, he takes the shirt out for someone. For his daughter, a school teacher in nearby Plano, and her class. For a cousin’s kid’s show and tell. The class didn’t believe it was really Kennedy’s blood, of course. He begins his story of one of the most important days in American history. He says the same things. The same way. With the same inflections and the same dialogue.
He starts with “I feel like a broken record.”
Then: “There was a little knock on the door.”
MICHAEL J. MOONEY is a staff writer at New Times, a Village Voice Media alt-weekly in Fort Lauderdale, where he writes about crime, sports, and the eccentric characters of South Florida. Before moving to Florida, he was a feature writer at the Dallas Morning News. His writing has also appeared in D Magazine, Condé Nast Portfolio, and other newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. His story “Royal Flushed” was selected for The Best American Sports Writing 2009.
Coda
I first heard about Dr. McClelland from my good friend, Andrew Jennings. I was at the other end of the call he made as he was leaving Dr. McClelland’s office. By the time Andrew was done recounting his conversation, I was already composing a letter to the doctor. Writing this piece was a challenge because so many of the key participants were dead or had long ago stopped talking about the assassination. Dr. McClelland was very generous with his time though. We went over his experiences several times and his remarkable memory for details personalized events that seemed distant and unimaginable. Most people who grew up around Dallas have been to the Sixth Floor Museum at least once, usually on a class field trip or to entertain out-of-towners. Everyone’s seen the window where Oswald perched and the grassy hill across the street. But hearing Dr. McClelland’s story reminded me that history is comprised of real human beings, with bones that shatter, blood that stains, and hearts that get cold and flabby when they stop beating.
After “The Day Kennedy Died” was published, I received a number of e-mails from people around the world who wanted help either proving or disproving one theory or another. I also heard from plenty of people wanting to know why it is that the media can’t just “move on” or “get over it.” When it comes to the events of November 1963, Dallas is still torn. While some people can’t seem to get enough of the Kennedy assassination, others can’t get far enough away from it. Some still feel shame, a collective guilt. It was years before any of the doctors involved would speak about what happened. Even for generations who weren’t born at the time, the city struggles with how to deal with this part of history.
Dr. McClelland is now retired from teaching. He hasn’t decided what—if anything—he will eventually do with the bloody shirt.
Mark Arax
THE ZANKOU CHICKEN MURDERS
FROM Los Angeles magazine