When History Hit, a British history channel, asked me for an interview about the 58th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, I hastened to agree, especially when they said they’d throw in a hundred dollars for my trouble. “A hundred quid is always welcome,” I said to my new-found Cousins. Stateside news outlets are rarely so fair to free-lance talent. …
A cop runs toward the grassy knoll moments after President Kennedy was shot.
Last month the New York Times published a letter that seriously misstated the JFK medical evidence. Harris Meyer, senior report for Modern Healthcare, called out the Times with a call for a correction. Meyer’s letter contains important information that Dennis Breo, the author of the letter (and the newspaper of record) chose to omit, perhaps because the information calls into question Breo’s reporting on the subject.
Here’s Breo’s letter, “Mysteries, Solved and Unsolved,” in which he claims that he and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) had definitely resolved questions about JFK’s autopsy in 1992
Dr. Robert McClelland saw JFK’s wounds up close on November 22, 1963.
Dr. Robert McClelland, the surgeon who oversaw the effort to save President Kennedy’s life in 1963, died earlier this month at age 89. In his interviews, you sense a man of considerable dignity, humility, and integrity. It comes as no surprise that he self-published an anthology of writings on surgery to which thousands of doctors subscribed. He was both a teacher and doctor, an instructor and a healer. And it is those qualities that make McClelland one of the most important witnesses to JFK’s assassination.
In 1963, McClelland was 34 years old. He had just become the chief of surgery at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital. When the mortally wounded JFK was brought to Trauma Room One, McClelland stood over the dying president and participated in the efforts to save him. He observed the president’s fatal head wound for about 10 minutes from a distance of less than two feet.
“My God,” he recalled saying to his colleagues. “Have you seen the back of his head. There’s a wound in the back of his head that’s about five inches in diameter.”
The doctor who tried to save JFK’s life shows a memento of a terrible day to WFAA-TV in Dallas. On this occasion, he appropriately chose not share what he has said elsewhere at length: The nature of the president’s wounds indicated he had been shot from the front and the back. …
