And since the conspiracy theorists have never claimed225 that the wound to the upper right back of the president was not an entrance wound but actually the wound of exit for the bullet that entered his throat, their conspicuous and glaring lack of a theory or even an argument at all as to what became of this bullet should alone convince them that their contention of a bullet striking the president in the throat from the front is entirely without merit. Talk about a magic bullet—this one didn’t change flight in midair as they claim the bullet in the Warren Commission’s single-bullet theory did. Instead, it simply vanished.
One of the most outlandish allegations made regarding the president’s wounds came from Parkland doctor Charles A. Crenshaw, who had become an icon to the conspiracy theorists before his death in 2001. A hardcover publisher sent Crenshaw’s unpublished manuscript about the Kennedy assassination to me in 1991 for my view of whether there was any merit to Crenshaw’s charges. I responded that I didn’t believe there was, and they passed on publishing it. But he got it published in paperback with a different publisher the next year and it became a New York Times best seller.
Although the four main Parkland doctors who attended to the dying president (Perry, Carrico, Jenkins, and Baxter) now all agree that, in Carrico’s words, “nothing we observed contradicts the autopsy finding that the bullets were fired from above and behind by a high-velocity bullet,”226 in Crenshaw’s book, JFK: Conspiracy of Silence, he says that before the president died, he observed “two frontal-entry bullet wounds,” charging that there was a later alteration of the wounds by someone to make it look like the shots came from the rear. “There was something rotten in America in 1963,” he writes. Crenshaw charges that Dr. Perry’s tracheotomy was later “enlarged and mangled, as if someone had conducted another procedure. It looked to be the work of a butcher. No doubt, someone had gone through a great deal of trouble to show a different story than we had seen at Parkland.”227
Even though the grief and mourning in the air of Trauma Room One must have been thick enough to cut, and even though the wound to Kennedy’s throat had been virtually obliterated by the tracheotomy, and even though the direction of fire wasn’t yet an issue to anyone, much less the people in Trauma Room One, Crenshaw, just a junior resident at Parkland, said that before “we placed him [Kennedy] in a coffin…I looked at the [neck] wound again. I wanted to know and remember this for the rest of my life. And the rest of my life I will always know he was shot from the front.”228
Crenshaw was even more unbelievable in his remarks when the FBI interviewed him in 1992. He claimed he supervised the placing of the president’s body into the coffin, but that prior to this, even though the president had already died, he moved the president’s head and placed his fist next to the large exit wound (which he first said was in the center of the back of the president’s head, then said it was in the right read of his head) in order to compare the wound’s relative size, and he found the wound to be about the size of his fist.229 The probability that Crenshaw, at that time, would have any reason or desire to do what he did, or that his superiors would permit a junior resident like him to disturb the president’s corpse to measure the exit wound with his fist, is virtually nonexistent.
Perhaps Crenshaw’s main charge is that all of his colleagues at Parkland knew the truth and deliberately engaged in a conspiracy of silence. “I believe,” he wrote, “there was a common denominator in our silence—a fearful perception that to come forward with what we believed to be the medical truth would be asking for trouble…I reasoned that anyone who would go so far as to eliminate the President of the United States would surely not hesitate to kill a doctor.”230 But he gave no reason why he decided, after almost twenty-nine years, to finally enlighten the world with his knowledge of what happened.
Some in the anti-conspiracy community have questioned whether Crenshaw was even in Trauma Room One, and cite as support Dr. Perry’s statement to JAMA in the 1992 issue that “in 1963, Chuck Crenshaw was a junior resident and he absolutely did not participate in a meaningful way in the attempt to resuscitate the President…I do not remember even seeing him in the room.”231 However, as conspiracy theorists have pointed out, Dr. Crenshaw was present, a fact confirmed by several Parkland doctors and nurses in their testimony before the Warren Commission. Yet, rather than being supportive, their testimony undermines Crenshaw’s claims. For instance, two provided details that are quite damaging. Dr. Robert McClelland told the Commission that he was “showing a film on surgical techniques to a group of students and residents on the second floor of Parkland Hospital in the surgical suite [when] I was notified [by Dr. Charles Crenshaw] of the fact that President Kennedy was being brought to the Parkland emergency room after being shot.”232 McClelland then accompanied Crenshaw to Trauma Room One, where Kennedy had been taken. Contrary to Crenshaw’s later claims, McClelland testified that by the time they arrived, Dr. Perry had already made the tracheotomy incision through the throat wound,233 which would have precluded Crenshaw from seeing the wound and identifying it as a wound of entrance. When confronted with McClelland’s testimony in 1994, Crenshaw claimed that McClelland must have “looked away” just as Dr. Perry made the incision, but that he (Crenshaw) saw the bullet hole for a “fraction of a second.” This admitted split-second assessment of the bullet hole was made despite the fact that Crenshaw had no training or background as a pathologist, forensic or otherwise.234
And as to Crenshaw’s actual role in the resuscitation efforts, Dr. Kenneth E. Salyer told the Warren Commission, “Dr. Crenshaw participated to about the extent that I did. We were occupied in making sure an I.V. was going, and hanging up a bottle of blood…That’s the reason I remember him specifically because we were sort of working there together on that.”235 Yet, to listen to Crenshaw one would think he was one of the lead doctors. In his book, he says things like, “I removed the President’s shoes and right sock, and began cutting off his suit trousers…I made a small incision to expose the saphenous vein…I inserted a catheter toward the heart, then tied the space between the vessel and the catheter to prevent leakage,” and so on.236 Crenshaw ultimately blamed his coauthors, Jens Hansen and J. Gary Shaw, two longtime conspiracy theorists, for taking “poetic license” and inflating his role in the attempt to save Kennedy’s life.237
The four main Parkland doctors, in a May 27, 1992, interview in JAMA, were unanimous in their rejection of Crenshaw’s allegations about a cover-up by the Parkland doctors. Perry said, “When I first heard about Crenshaw’s claims, I was considering a lawsuit, but after I saw Charles on TV one day, all my anger melted. It was so pathetic to see him on TV saying this bogus stuff to reach out for his day in the sun that I ended up feeling sorry for him.” He added, “Crenshaw says that the rest of us are part of a conspiracy of silence and that he withheld his information for twenty-nine years because of a fear his career would be ruined. Well, if he really felt he had valuable information and kept it secret for all those years, I find that despicable.”238 Dr. Baxter said that when Crenshaw’s sensationalistic book came out, he and the other main Parkland doctors received calls from other members of the Parkland medical team who were on the scene on November 22, 1963, and “there has not been one call supporting [Crenshaw’s] position.” He added, “Charles and I grew up in Paris, Texas, and I’ve known him since he was three years old. His claims are ridiculous.” Dr. Jenkins said, “Crenshaw’s conclusions are dead-wrong.”239
But what would motivate Crenshaw to make the outrageous charges he made? Dr. Carrico pointed out that Crenshaw himself inadvertently has given us the answer. On page 15 of JFK: Conspiracy of Silence, Crenshaw writes, “Many of us have dreamed that history’s grand scheme will involve us in some far-reaching role or experience thrusting us into notoriety and dramatically changing our lives.” Carrico said, “There’s your answer, in Charles’ own words. I don’t have those kind of dreams.”240
Crenshaw also claims in his book that two days after the assassination, while he
was helping to save the life of Lee Harvey Oswald at Parkland Hospital, a nurse asked him to “take a telephone call in the supervisor’s office.” Crenshaw claims that none other than the president of the United States was on the line. He quotes President Johnson as telling him, “Dr. Crenshaw, I want a deathbed confession from the accused assassin. There’s a man in the operating room who will take the statement. I will expect full cooperation in this matter.” The man in the operating room, per Crenshaw, was a mysterious stranger, an Oliver Hardy look-alike “with a pistol hanging from his pocket.” Oswald died, Crenshaw said, before any attempt to extract a confession from him could be made.241 “Did that happen? Heavens no,” Dr. Baxter says. “Imagine that, the President of the United States personally calls for Chuck Crenshaw.”242
To be fair, Dr. Baxter’s characterization that LBJ personally called for Crenshaw is inaccurate—as indicated, Crenshaw simply said that a nurse had asked him to take the call. Also, Dr. Phillip E. Williams, an intern administering fluids to Oswald’s right leg, supported the basics of the story in 1992 (though he didn’t say whether Crenshaw was the one who took the call), telling the New York Times, “I vividly remember someone said, and I can’t say who it was, the White House is calling and President Johnson wants to know what the status of Oswald is.” Williams added, however, that he didn’t hear that LBJ wanted a confession and didn’t know whether it was Johnson himself or a presidential aide who was on the phone.243*
However, the administrator at the hospital, Charles Jack Price, who supervised, among others, all the switchboard operators at Parkland, said he did not believe that any call had ever come through from President Johnson,244 as Crenshaw alleged, and a switchboard operator who claimed, almost thirty years later, that Johnson called, failed to mention, in her detailed report to Price of the period November 22–24, 1963, receiving a call from the president of the United States, though she found the space in her report to mention the substance of calls from many everyday citizens. There’s not even a reference to receiving a call from anyone at the White House. (For further discussion, see endnote.)
The capper on all of this is that in 1992, assassination researcher David Perry received from the LBJ Foundation at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas, the “White House Detail” for November 24, 1963. The fifteen-page detail lists all telephone calls from the White House as well as all presidential appointments and activities on any given day. It does not show any phone call made from the White House, which would include calls from a mobile phone patched through the White House switchboard, to Parkland Hospital at any time on November 24, 1963.245†
As far out as Crenshaw’s LBJ phone call story is, apparently his first story about the alleged call was ten times worse. Author Gus Russo writes in an e-mail to John McAdams on August 25, 2003, “When Oliver Stone was in Dallas prepping for [his movie] JFK, a number of us were around as ‘technical advisors,’ which was a bit of a joke, since Stone only listened to people with crazy conspiracy info. One night at the Stoneleigh [Hotel]…Stone ushered Gary Shaw [a coauthor of Crenshaw’s later book, JFK: Conspiracy of Silence], Robert Groden and Crenshaw into his room. I was not invited, but I [later] pressed Shaw for info in the lobby. He was the first to tell me that LBJ ordered Oswald killed. Later, Crenshaw came down, and we happened to be in the Stoneleigh men’s room at the same time…It was there that he told me that Johnson had ordered the Parkland staff to ‘kill the son-of-a-bitch.’ It was decided to ‘drown Oswald in his own blood,’ i.e., transfuse him until his lungs collapsed.”246 Crenshaw told author Harrison Livingstone that his publisher had his two coauthors, Shaw and Jens Hansen, tone down in the book what Johnson actually told him.247
On November 22, 1992, Crenshaw and one of the two coauthors of his book, Gary Shaw, sued the American Medical Association, JAMA’s editor, George Lundberg, and the JAMA staff writer of the article who interviewed the Parkland doctors, Dennis Breo (there were other defendants, including the Dallas Morning News), for libel, asking for $35 million in damages. At the core of the lawsuit was Lundberg’s statement to the media at a New York City press conference on May 19, 1992, that “the recent Crenshaw book is a sad fabrication based upon unsubstantiated allegations.” In October of 1994, the defendants agreed to settle the case with Crenshaw and Shaw for monetary damages of $213,000 plus an agreement to publish a rebuttal article in JAMA by Crenshaw and Shaw, which they did in the May 24/31, 1995, edition. However, JAMA did not admit liability, made no apology, and published no retraction. Although conspiracy theorists see this settlement as a victory (i.e., that JAMA admitted Crenshaw was right), for anyone familiar with litigation, the above three facts could just as well indicate settlement of a “nuisance” lawsuit, a very common occurrence where the defendant settles the lawsuit with the plaintiff not because the defendant believes the suit has any merit, but because, in addition to the enormous aggravation and consumption of time of a protracted lawsuit, the legal fees for defending the case would end up costing more than the amount of the settlement. One of the defendants confirmed that this was in fact the case.248 What did come out of the depositions of Lundberg and Breo prior to the settlement is that Breo did not interview Crenshaw prior to his article, which he clearly should have done, and did not read the testimony of the Parkland doctors before the Warren Commission, some of whom, as we have seen, established Crenshaw’s presence at the autopsy.249
Before moving on to a key issue in the Kennedy case, let’s once again observe that all of the disagreements among the many Parkland and Bethesda witnesses we’ve seen are normal and to be expected. But conspiracy theorists, consistently divorcing themselves from life and human experience, invariably conclude that disagreements add up to conspiracy and cover-up, when all they really add up to is life. When today’s conspiracy theorists get tired playing with the sinister (in their mind) discrepancies in Kennedy’s autopsy, I can give them a good start with Lincoln’s autopsy, conducted by Assistant U.S. Surgeon General Dr. J. J. Woodward on April 15, 1865. In the first place, the autopsy report is only four paragraphs long, which, to me, is highly suspicious. Why so superficial? Whom was Woodward covering up for? By the way, Woodward said that the “ball” (slug) came to rest “in the white matter of the cerebrum just above the anterior portion of the left corpus striatum” (i.e., above the left eye). Baloney, said Dr. Charles Taft, acting assistant surgeon in the U.S. Army. He was present at the autopsy and said the bullet ended up above Lincoln’s right eye. But then Taft later contradicted himself and said it was the left eye.250 What does all this mean? One of two things. If Taft’s first version is correct, John Wilkes Booth may not have been in the location the authorities said the assassin was in at the time Lincoln’s killer pulled the trigger, meaning that Booth may not have killed Lincoln after all. (By the way, why did Taft later change his story? Did conspirators threaten him?) Or, since we know the bullet couldn’t have ended up in both places, maybe it didn’t end up in either, meaning that either Lincoln wasn’t shot in the head, or there was a giant cover-up. I, for one, demand a reinvestigation.
One of the few legitimate questions that critics have raised about the president’s wounds (legitimate in the sense that the solution, though simple, is not so obvious), and the very first and most troubling problem I had to deal with concerning the medical evidence in the docu-trial in London, was this: with respect to the president’s back wound, how could a bullet coming from Oswald’s rifle on the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, and fired on a downward trajectory* enter the president’s back, pass through soft tissue (and hence would not likely have been deflected upward or in any other direction), and yet emerge from an area of the throat that is slightly higher than the point of entry? I could see Gerry Spence arguing that it couldn’t; ergo, the shot did not come from up above on the sixth floor, where I was alleging Oswald was, but from his front, where Oswald was not; that is, if the throat wound was not an exit wound, it would have had to be an entrance wound. As author Edward Jay Epstein put it in his 1
966 book, Inquest, “The decisive question here is: Was the entrance wound in the back above or below the ‘exit’ wound in the throat? [If the shot was fired from above], the entrance wound…had to be above the exit wound.”251
Dr. Cyril Wecht, a member of the HSCA’s forensic pathology panel, testified, “The bullet wound of entrance on the president’s back—[when] lined up with the bullet wound of exit on the front of the president’s neck, drawing a straight line—showed that vertically the bullet had moved slightly upward. That is extremely important…How in the world can a bullet be fired from a sixth-floor window, strike the president in the back, and yet have a slightly upward direction?”252 The HSCA forensic panel did say that “when seen in the autopsy position, the outshoot wound was described as being at about the same height, (or slightly higher) relative to the inshoot wound.”253
When I asked my pathologist for the London trial, the chief medical examiner for Dallas County, Dr. Charles Petty, about this problem, he explained to me during preparation for the trial that from an analysis of the Zapruder film, the HSCA determined that at the time the president was struck in the back, his upper body (though not his head) was inclined forward at “an approximate angle of 11 to 18 degrees” relative to the horizontal plane,254 and because of this, Petty said, even though the bullet was at all times traveling downward (from the horizontal, i.e., relative to Elm Street) through the president’s body, from an anatomic standpoint (i.e., if the president had been seated ramrod straight—referred to medically as the “anatomic” or autopsy position) it was proceeding on a slightly upward path through his body.255 Therefore, diagrammatically, the bullet that struck the president appears to be going upward—in that it is exiting at a point on the president’s body higher than where it entered—“but it is only doing so anatomically,” he said, adding that “the president was not in an anatomic or autopsy position at the time he was shot. If he had been, the bullet, even anatomically speaking, would have exited at a lower point on his body then it entered, because it would have entered higher up.” As the HSCA photographic panel of experts concluded, “The bullet was moving…downward by 4.0° relative to Kennedy if he was sitting erect (not inclined forward or aft).”256
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