As 50th Anniversary Of Assassination Approaches, Surgeon Who Treated JFK*Remembers
...Dr. McClelland says that he always believed the wound at the back of President Kennedy’s head was the exit wound. But it wasn’t until years later, when he saw the famous Abraham Zapruder video on television, that the doctor became convinced of it.
“That firmed up my thought that it was the exit wound,” he says, pointing to the backwards motion of the President’s body after he was shot, as well as the size of the hole in the back of JFK’s skull, as proof he was shot from the front.
He also says that in the heat of the moment, some of Kennedy’s wounds weren’t visible to everyone working on him, which may explain the conflicting testimony from medical staff following the assassination.
And like many, Dr. McClelland has struggled to fill in the blanks about the details of the assassination himself. He frequently references one book “of the 32,000 out there” on the event – JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass, which argues that military and intelligence agencies in the U.S. are responsible for President Kennedy’s assassination and the subsequent cover-up. According to Douglass, those organizations were upset by JFK’s evolving stance on the Cold War and, desperate to win, they plotted Kennedy’s death because he was “getting in the way” of their plans for a nuclear strike.
For McClelland, that book seems to offer answers to the questions he’s been grappling with over the last fifty years – in particular, why his colleague, Dr. Perry, who also treated the President that day, would never speak of the assassination (“If you ever even mentioned the assassination [to Dr. Perry], he would cloud up and say, ‘I don’t talk about that,’ period.”) If you take Douglass at his word, a Secret Service agent approached Perry shortly after he’d given a description of JFK’s wounds to the media – when he’d pointed to his neck and seemed to imply that the entrance wound was there. That agent supposedly threatened Perry, ordering him never to talk about the assassination again…”or else,” Dr. McClelland emphasizes.
...He is, however, sure of some things: There were at least two shooters (“absolutely”) and the assassination was likely a conspiracy involving government “elements.”
McClelland is not alone in his beliefs. A recent Gallup poll showed 61% of Americans still believe others besides Lee Harvey Oswald were involved in JFK’s assassination – whether it’s the CIA, Fidel Castro and the Cubans or organized crime groups such as the mafia. Most don’t believe a lone shooter could have inflicted wounds consistent with those that killed the President. And a House committee even corroborated those views in a 1979 investigation, officially concluding it was “highly probable” that Kennedy was killed by at least two shooters, most likely “as a result of a conspiracy.”
But despite the release of thousands of documents in the 1990s related to the assassination, many remain classified, not to be unsealed for years – if ever. “Now why do you think that is?” Dr. McClelland asks wryly.
