Dr Robert McClelland

The testimony of Dr. Robert Nelson McClelland was taken on March 21, 1964, at Parkland Memorial Hospital , Dallas , Tex. , by Mr. Arlen Specter, assistant counsel of the President's Commission.

Mr. SPECTER. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you give in these proceedings will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God ?

Mr. SPECTER. Dr. McClelland, the purpose of this proceeding is to take your deposition in connection with an investigation which is being conducted by the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, and the specific purpose of our requesting you to answer questions relates to the topic of the medical care which President Kennedy received at Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Mr. SPECTER. Have you received a letter from the Commission which enclosed a copy of the Executive order creating the Commission, and a copy of the Congressional Resolution pertaining to the Commission, and a copy of the procedures for taking testimony under the Commission?

Mr. SPECTER. And is it satisfactory with you to answer these questions for us today, even though you haven't had the 3 days between the time of the receipt of the letter and today?

Mr. SPECTER. Would you outline briefly your educational background, starting with your graduation from college, please?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Since graduation from college I attended medical school at the University of Texas , medical branch in Galveston , Tex. , and received the M.D. degree from that school in 1954. I then went to Kansas City , Kans. , where I did a rotating internship at the University of Kansas Medical Center from June 1954 to June 1955. Following that period I was a general medical officer in the Air Force for 2 years in Germany, and subsequent to my release from active duty, I became a general surgery resident at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas in August of 1957. I remained at Parkland from that date to August 1959, at which time I entered private practice for ten months, and then reentered my general surgery training program at Parkland in June 1960. I completed my 4 years of, general surgical training in June 1962. Following that time I became a full-time instructor of surgery on the staff of the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical School, and I am at the present time an associate professor of surgery at that school.

Mr. SPECTER. Dr. McClelland, in connection with your duties at Parkland Hospital, or before, have you had any experience with gunshot wounds?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Largely during residency training and subsequent to that in my capacity here on the staff.

Mr. SPECTER. And what has provided the opportunity for your experience here at Parkland in residency training and on the staff with respect to acquiring knowledge of gunshot wounds?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Largely this has been related to the type of hospital which Parkland is; namely, City-County Hospital which receives all of the indigent patients of this county, many of whom are involved frequently in shooting altercations, so that we do see a large number of that type patient almost daily.

Mr. SPECTER. Could you approximate for me the total number of gunshot wounds which you have had an opportunity to observe?

Dr. McCLELLAND. At that time I 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, where I was notified of the fact that President Kennedy was being brought to the Parkland emergency room after having been shot.

Mr. SPECTER. And what action, if any, did you take following that notification?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Immediately upon hearing that, I accompanied the Resident, Dr. Crenshaw, who brought this news to me, to the emergency room, and down to the trauma room 1 where President Kennedy had been taken immediately upon arrival.

Mr. SPECTER. And approximately what time did you arrive in Emergency Room 1?

Dr. McCLELLAND. This is a mere approximation, but I would approximate or estimate, rather, about 12:40.

Dr. McCLELLAND. At the time I arrived, Dr. Perry---would you like the full names of all these?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Dr. Malcolm Perry, Dr. Charles Baxter, Dr. Charles Crenshaw, Dr. James Carrico, Dr. Paul Peters.

Dr. McCLELLAND. Starting with the ones who were present, I'm sorry, the ones who were present when I arrived were Drs. Carrico, Perry and Baxter. The others I mentioned arrived subsequently or about the same time that I did.

Mr. SPECTER. Then, what other doctors, if any, arrived after you did, in addition to those whom you have already mentioned?

Dr. McCLELLAND. In addition, the ones that arrived afterwards, were Dr. Kenneth Salyer.

Dr. McCLELLAND. S-a-l-y-e-r, Dr. Fouad, F-o-u-a-d Bashour, Dr. Donald Seldin-----

Mr. SPECTER. What did you observe as to President Kennedy's condition at that time?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Well, on initially coming into the room and inspecting him from a distance of only 2 or 3 feet as I put on a pair of surgical gloves, it was obvious that he had sustained a probably mortal head injury, and that his face was extremely swollen and suffused with blood appeared cyanotic

Mr. SPECTER. "Cyanotic"---may I interrupt-just what do you mean by that in lay terms?

Dr. McCLELLAND. This mean bluish discoloration, bluish-black discoloration of the tissue. The eyes were somewhat protuberant, which is usually seen after massive head injuries denoting increased intracranial pressure, and it seemed that he perhaps was not making, at the time at least, spontaneous respiratory movements, but was receiving artificial respiration from a machine, an anesthesia machine.

Dr. McCLELLAND. The machine---there was a changeover, just as I came in, one of the doctors in the room, I don't recall which one, had been operating what we call an intermittent positive pressure breathing machine.

Dr. McCLELLAND. It was in use as I arrived, yes, and about the same time I arrived----this would be one other doctor who came in the room that I forgot about----Dr. Jenkins, M. T. Jenkins, professor of anesthesiology, came into the room with a larger anesthesia machine, which is a better type machine with which to maintain control of respiration, and this was then attached to the tube in the President's tracheotom; anyway, respiratory movements were being made for him with these two machines, which were in the process of being changed when I came in.

Then, as I took my post to help with the tracheotomy, I was standing at the end of the stretcher on which the President was lying, immediately at his head, for purposes of holding a tracheotom, or a retractory in the neck line.

Mr. SPECTER. What did you observe, if anything, as to the status of the neck wound when you first arrived?

Dr. McCLELLAND. The neck wound, when I first arrived, was at this time converted into a tracheotomy incision. The skin incision had been made by Dr. Perry, and he told me---although I did not see that---that he had made the incision through a very small, perhaps less than one quarter inch in diameter wound in the neck.

Mr. SPECTER. Do you recall whether he described it any more precisely than that?

Dr. MCCLELLAND. As well as I can recall, the description that he gave was essentially as I have just described, that it was a very small injury, with clear

cut, although somewhat irregular margins of less than a quarter inch in diameter, with minimal tissue damage surrounding it on the skin.

Mr. SPECTER. Now, was there anything left for you to observe of that bullet wound, or had the incision obliterated it?

Dr. McCLELLAND. The incision had obliterated it, essentially, the skin portion, that is.

Mr. SPECTER. Before proceeding to describe what you did in connection with the tracheostomy, will you more fully describe your observation with respect to the head wound?

Dr. MCCLELLAND. As I took the position at the head of the table that I have already described, to help out with the tracheotomy, I was in such a position that I could very closely examine the head wound, and I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted. It had been shattered, apparently, by the force of the shot so that the parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seemed to be fractured almost along its right posterior half, as well as some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral haft, and this sprung open the bones that I mentioned in such a way that you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that probably a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out. There was a large amount of bleeding which was occurring mainly from the large venous channels in the skull which had been blasted open.

Dr. McCLELLAND. I really couldn't say, because as I mentioned in the hectic activity---I really couldn't say what his blood pressure was or what his pulse was or anything of that sort. The only thing I could say that would perhaps give evidence---this is not vital activity---at most, is that maybe he made one or two spontaneous respiratory movements but it would be difficult to say, since the machine was being used on him, whether these were true spontaneous respirations or not.

Mr. SPECTER. Would you now describe the activity and part that you performed in the treatment which followed your arrival?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Yes; as I say, all I did was simply assist Dr. Perry and Dr. Baxter in doing the tracheotomy. All three of us worked together in making an incision in the neck, tracting the neck muscles out of the way, and making a small opening into the trachea near the spot where the trachea had already been blasted or torn open by the fragment of the bullet, and inserting a large metal tracheotomy tube into this hole, and after this the breathing apparatus was attached to this instead of the previous tube which had been placed here.

Mr. SPECTER. In conducting that operation, did you observe any interior damage to the President?

Dr. McCLELLAND. That damage consisted mainly of a large amount of contusion and hematoma formation in the tissue lateral to the right side of the trachea and the swelling and bleeding around this site was to such extent that the trachea was somewhat deviated to the left side, not a great deal, but to a degree at least that it required partial cutting of some of the neck muscles in order to get good enough exposure to put in the tracheotomy tube, but there was a good deal of soft tissue damage anal damage to the trachea itself where apparently the missile had gone between the trachea on the right side and the strap muscles which were applied closely to it.

Mr. SPECTER. What other treatment was given to President Kennedy at the time you were performing the procedures you have just described?

Dr. McCLELLAND. To the best of my knowledge, the other treatment had consisted of the placement of cutdown sites in his extremities, namely, the making of incisions over large veins in the arms and, I believe, in the leg; however, I'm not sure about that, since I was not paying too much attention to that part of the activity, and large plastic tubes were placed into these veins for the giving of blood and fluids, and as I recall, he received a certain amount of blood, but I don't know exactly how much, since I was not actually giving the blood.

In addition to that, of course, while we were working on the tracheotomy incision, the other physicians that I have mentioned were attaching the President rapidly to a cardiac monitor, that is to say, an electrocardiogram, for checking the presence of cardiac activity, and in addition, chest tubes were being placed in the right and left chest---both, as I recall.

Dr. McCLELLAND. One of the tubes, I believe, was placed by Dr. Peters. The other one, I'm not right certain, I don't really recall---I perhaps better not say.

Mr. SPECTER. Do you know about how long that took in placing those chest tubes?

Dr. McCLELLAND. As well as I am aware, the tubes were both placed in. What this involves is simply putting a trocar, a large hollow tube, and that is put into the small incision, into the anterior chest wall and slipping the tube into the chest between a group of ribs for purposes of relieving any collection of air or fluid which is present in the lungs. The reason this was done was because it was felt that there was probably quite possibly a mediastinal injury with perhaps suffusion of blood and sir into one or both pleural cavities.

Mr. SPECTER. What effect did this medical treatment have on President Kennedy?

Dr. McCLELLAND. As near as we could tell, unfortunately, none. We felt that from the time we saw him, most of us agreed, all of us agreed rather, that this was a moral wound, but that in spite of this feeling that all attempts possible should be made to revive him, as far as establishing the airway breathing for him, and replacing blood and what not, but unfortunately the loss of blood and the loss of cerebral and cerebellar tissues were so great that the efforts were of no avail.

Dr. McCLELLAND. The cause of death, I would say, would be massive head injuries with loss of large amounts of cerebral and cerebellar tissues and massive blood loss.

Mr. SPECTER. Did you observe anything in the nature of a wound on his body other than that which you have already described for me?

Mr. SPECTER. In what position was President Kennedy maintained from the time you saw him until the pronouncement of death ?

Mr. SPECTER. In the trauma room No. 1 you described, is there any table onto which he could be placed from the stretcher?

Dr. McCLELLAND. No; generally we do not move patients from the stretcher until they are ready to go into the operating room and then they are moved onto the operating table.

Mr. SPECTER. Well, in fact, was he left on the stretcher all during the course of these procedures until he was pronounced dead?

Mr. SPECTER. Then, at any time was he positioned in a way where you could have seen the back of his body?

Mr. SPECTER. Have you had discussions with the other doctors who attended President Kennedy as to the possible nature of the wound which was inflicted on him?

other doctors whom you talked this over with, with respect to the nature of the wound, source of the wounds, and that sort of thing?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Immediately we had essentially no facts. We knew nothing of the number of bullets that had supposedly been fired. We knew nothing of the site from which the bullet had been fired, essentially none of the circumstances in the first few minutes, say, 20 or 30 minutes after the President was brought in, so that our initial impressions were based upon extremely incomplete information.

Dr. McCLELLAND. The initial impression that we had was that perhaps the wound in the neck, the anterior part of the neck, was an entrance wound and that it had perhaps taken a trajectory off the anterior vertebral body and again into the skull itself, exiting out the back, to produce the massive injury in the head. However, this required some straining of the imagination to imagine that this would happen, and it was much easier to explain the apparent trajectory by means of two bullets, which we later found out apparently had been fired, than by just one then, on which basis we were originally taking to explain it.

Mr. SPECTER. Through the use of the pronoun "we" in your last answer, to whom do you mean by "we"?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Essentially all of the doctors that have previously been mentioned here.

Mr. SPECTER. Did you observe the condition of the back of the President's head ?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Well, partially; not, of course, as I say, we did not lift his head up since it was so greatly damaged. We attempted to avoid moving him any more than it was absolutely necessary, but I could see, of course, all the extent of the wound.

Mr. SPECTER. Did you observe a small gunshot wound below the large opening on the back of the head ?

Mr. SPECTER. Based on the experience that you have described for us with gunshot wounds and your general medical experience, would you characterize the description of the wound that Dr. Perry gave you as being a wound of entrance or a wound of exit, or was the description which you got from Dr. Perry and Dr. Baxter and Dr. Carrico who were there before, equally consistent with whether or not it was a wound of entrance or a wound of exit, or how would you characterize it in your words?

Dr. McCLELLAND. I would say it would be equally consistent with either type wound, either an entrance or an exit type wound. It would be quite difficult to say--impossible.

Mr. SPECTER. Dr. McClelland, I show you now a statement or a report which has been furnished to the Commission by Parkland Hospital and has been identified in a previous Commission hearing as Commission Exhibit No. 392, and I direct your attention specifically to a page, "Third Report", which was made by you, and I would ask you first of all if this is your signature which appears at the bottom of Page 2, and next, whether in fact you did make this report

Mr. SPECTER. And are all the facts set forth true and correct to the best of your knowledge, information and belief?

Mr. SPECTER. Dr. McCLELLAND, did you and I sit down together for just a few minutes before I started to take your deposition today?

Mr. SPECTER. And, during the course of our conversations at that time, we cover the same material in question form here and to which you have responded in answer form with the court reporter here today?

Mr. SPECTER. And has the information which you have given me on record been the same as that which you gave me off of the record in advance?

Mr. SPECTER. Do you have any interest, Dr. McClelland in reading your testimony over or signing it at the end, or would you be willing to waive such signature of the testimony?

Mr. SPECTER. Thank you so much for coming and giving us your deposition today.

The testimony of Dr. Robert M. McCLELLAND was taken at 3:25 p.m., March 25, 1964, at Parkland Memorial Hospital , Dallas , Tex. , by Mr. Arlen Specter, assistant counsel of the President's Commission.

Mr. SPECTER. May the record show that Dr. Robert M. McClelland has return to have a brief additional deposition concerning a translation of "L' Express which has been called to my attention in the intervening time which has elapsed between March 21, when I took Dr. McClelland's deposition on the first occasion, and today.

Dr. McCLELLAND, will you raise your right hand? Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you will give to the President's Commission in this deposition proceeding will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God ?

Mr. SPECTER. Dr. McClelland, I show you a translation from the French, of the magazine, "L' Express" issue of February 20, 1964, and ask you if you would read this item, with particular emphasis on a reference to a quotation or statement made by you to a reporter from the St, Louis Post Dispatch.

Mr. SPECTER. Did you talk to a reporter from the St. Louis Post Dispatch about this matter ?

Dr. McCLELLAND. As well as I recall, it was the day after the assassination, as nearly as I can recall, but I'm not certain about that.

Mr. SPECTER. Will you tell me as closely as you remember what he said to you and you said to him, please?

Dr. McCLELLAND. The main point he seemed to be making was to attempt to define something about the wound, the nature of the wound, and as near as I can recall, I indicated to him that the wound was a small undamaged--- appearing punctate area in the skin of the neck, the anterior part of the neck, which had the appearance of the usual entrance wound of a bullet, but that this certainly could not be----you couldn't make a statement to that effect with any complete degree of certainty, though we were, as I told him, experienced in seeing wounds of this nature, and usually felt that we could tell the difference between an entrance and an exit wound, and this was, I think, in essence what I told him about the nature of the wound.

Mr. SPECTER. Now, had you actually observed the wound prior to the time the tracheotomy was performed on that neck wound?

Dr. MCCLELLAND. No; my knowledge of the entrance wound, as I stated, in my former deposition, was merely from what Dr. Perry told me when I entered the room and began putting on a pair of surgical gloves to assist with the tracheotomy.

Dr. Perry looked up briefly and said that they had made an incision and were in the process of making an incision in the neck, which extended through the middle of the wound in question in the front of the neck.

Mr. SPECTER. Now, you have just characterized it in that last answer as an entrance wound.

Dr. McCLELLAND. Well, perhaps I shouldn't say the wound anyway, not the entrance wound--that might be a slip of the tongue.

Mr. SPECTER. Do you have a firm opinion at this time as to whether it is an entrance wound or exit wound or whatever?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Of course, my opinion now would be colored by everything that I've heard about it and seen since, but I'll say this, if I were simply looking at the wound again and had seen the wound in its unchanged state, and which I did not, and, of course, as I say, it had already been opened up by the tracheotomy incision when I saw the wound--but if I saw the wound in its state in which Dr. Perry described it to me, I would probably initially think this were an entrance wound, knowing nothing about the circumstances as I did at the time, but I really couldn't say--that's the whole point. This would merely be a calculated guess, and that's all, not knowing anything more than just seeing the wound itself.

Mr. SPECTER. But did you, in fact, see the wound prior to the time the incision was made?

Mr. SPECTER. So that any preliminary thought you had even, would be based upon what you had been told by Dr. Perry?

Mr. SPECTER. Now, did you tell Mr. Dudman of the St. Louis Post Dispatch that you did not in fact see the wound in the neck, but your only information of it came from what Dr. Perry had told you?

Dr. McCLELLAND. I don't recall whether I told him that or not. I really don't remember whether I said I had seen the wound myself or whether I was merely referring to our sort of collective opinion of it, or whether I told him I had not seen the wound and was merely going by Dr. Perry's report of it to me. I don't recall now, this far away in time exactly what I said to him.

Mr. SPECTER. Dr. McClelland, I want to ask you a few additional questions, and some of these questions may duplicate questions which I asked you last Saturday, and the reason for that is, we have not yet had a chance to transcribe the deposition of last Saturday, so I do not have before me the questions I asked you at that time and the answers you gave, and since last Saturday I have taken the depositions of many, many doctors on the same topics, so it is not possible for me to be absolutely certain of the specific questions which I asked you at that time, but permit me to ask you one or several more questions on the subject.

First, how many bullets do you think were involved in inflicting the wounds on President Kennedy which you observed?

Dr. MCCLELLAND. At the moment, of course, it was our impression before we had any other information from any other source at all, when we were just confronted with the acute emergency, the brief thoughts that ran through our minds were that this was one bullet, that perhaps entered through the front of the neck and then in some peculiar fashion which we really had, as I mentioned the other day, to strain to explain to ourselves, had coursed up the front of the vertebra and into the base of the skull and out the rear of the skull.

This would have been a very circuitous route for the bullet to have made, so that when .we did find later on what the circumstances were surrounding the

assassination, this was much more readily explainable to ourselves that the two wounds were made by two separate bullets.

Mr. SPECTER. And what is your view or opinion today as to how many bullets inflicted the injuries of President Kennedy?

Mr. SPECTER. Now, what would be the reason for your changing your opinion in that respect?

Dr. MCCLELLAND. Oh, just simply the later reports that we heard from all sources, of all the circumstances surrounding the assassination. Certainly no further first-hand information came to me and made me change my mind in that regard.

Mr. SPECTER. Dr. McClelland, let me ask you to assume a few additional facts, and based on a hypothetical situation which I will put to you and I'll ask you for an opinion.

Assume, if you will, that President Kennedy was shot on the upper right posterior thorax just above the upper border of the scapula at a point 14 Cm. from the tip of the right acromion process and 14 cm. below a tip of the right mastoid process, assume further that that wound of entry was caused by a 6.5-mm. missile shot out of a rifle having a muzzle velocity of approximately 2,000 feet per second, being located 160 to 250 feet away from President Kennedy, that the bullet entered on the point that I described on the President's back, passed between two strap muscles on the posterior aspect of the President's body and moved through the fascial channel without violating the pleura cavity, and exited in the midline lower third anterior portion of the President's neck, would the hole which Dr. Perry described to you on the front side of the President's neck be consistent with the hole which such a bullet' might make in such a trajectory through .the President's body?

Mr. SPECTER. And what would your reasoning be for thinking that that would be a possible hole of exit on those factors as I have outlined them to you?

Dr. McCLELLAND. Well, I think my reasoning would be basically that the missile was traveling mainly through soft tissue, rather than exploding from a bony chamber and that by the time it reached the neck that it had already lost, because of the distance from which it was fired, even though the muzzle velocity was as you stated--would have already lost a good deal of it's initial velocity and kinetic strength and therefore would have perhaps made, particularly, if it were a fragment of the bullet as bullets do sometimes fragment, could have made a small hole like this in exiting. It certainly could have done that.

Mr. SPECTER. What would have happened then to the other portion of the bullet if it had fragmented?

Dr. McCLELLAND. It might have been left along, or portions of it along the missile track--sometimes will be left scattered up and down this. Other fragments will maybe scatter in the wound and sometimes there will be multiple fragments and sometimes maybe only a small fragment out of the main bullet, sometimes a bullet will split in half--this is extremely difficult for me to say just what would happen in a case lake that.

Mr. SPECTER. Well, assuming this situation--that the bullet did not fragment, because the autopsy report shows no fragmentation, that is, it cannot show the absence of fragmentation, but we do know that there were no bullets left in the body at any point, so that no fragment is left in.

Dr. McCLELLAND. I think even then you could make the statement that this wound could have resulted from this type bullet fired through this particular mass of soft tissue, losing that much velocity before it exited from the body. Where you would expect to see this really great hole that is left behind would be, for instance, from a very high velocity missile fired at close range with a heavy caliber bullet, such as a .45 pistol fired at close range, which would make a small entrance hole, relatively, and particularly if it entered some portion of the anatomy such as the head, where there was a sudden change in density from the brain to the skull cavity, as it entered. As it left the body, it would still have a great deal of force behind it and would blow up a large segment of tissue as it exited. But I don't think the bullet of this nature fired from that distance and going through this large area of homogenous soft tissue would necessarily

make the usual kind of exit wound like I just described, with a close range high velocity heavy caliber bullet.

This is why it would be difficult to say with certainty as has been implied in some newspaper articles that quoted me, that you could tell for sure that this was an entrance or an exit wound. I think this was blown up a good deal.

Dr. McCLELLAND. The President's body was not turned over because the initial things that were done as in all such cases of extreme emergency are to first establish an airway and second, to stop hemorrhage and replace blood, so that these were the initial things that were carried out immediately without taking time to do a very thorough physical examination, which of course would have required that these other emergency measures not be done immediately.

Mr. SPECTER Was any examination of the President's back made to your knowledge?

Mr. SPECTER. Do you have anything to add which you think might be helpful in any way to the Commission?

Dr. MCCLELLAND. No; I think not except again to emphasize perhaps that some of our statements to the press about the nature of the wound may have been misleading, possibly--probably ,because of our fault in tolling it in such a way that they misinterpreted our certainty of being able to tell entrance from exit wounds, which as we say, we generally can make an educated guess about these things but cannot be certain about them. I think they attributed too much certainty to us about that.

Mr. SPECTER Now, have you talked to anyone from the Federal Government about this matter since I took your deposition last Saturday?

Mr. SPECTER. And did you and I chat for a moment or two with my showing you this translation of "L' Express" prior to the time we went on the record here ?

Mr. SPECTER. And is the information which you gave to me in response to my questions the same that we put on the record here?

The Day Kennedy Died

Dr. Robert McClelland held JFK’s head in his hands. He massaged Oswald’s heart. Forty-five years later, his students are still riveted by the surgeon’s tales.

BLOOD TIES: Dr. McClelland cleaned the suit he wore when he helped try to revive JFK, but the blood-stained shirt he left unwashed.

In crumpled white coats filled with folded papers and stethoscopes and the various tools of the third-year medical student, they file into a cramped office. The walls are lined with books. Andrew Jennings and Jeff Konnert sit at opposite ends of the leather couch while Scott Paulson takes the leather chair. They face a 79-year-old man in a crisp, bright white jacket. Dr. Robert Nelson McClelland, not a large man, has thick glasses and tufts of white hair that match his coat.

This is the students’ second meeting with the old doctor. He offers them soda and coffee. They are scheduled to talk about pancreatic surgery. Instead they will receive a lesson in living history. When they leave, one student will refer to this hour as the most fascinating conversation of his life.

As they get settled, ready to hear about surgical manipulation of the biliary tract, Jennings notices a magazine on the coffee table. From the cover, it appears the entire magazine is dedicated to conspiracy theories revolving around the John F. Kennedy assassination. Six floors and 44 years separate the place where they are sitting from that moment in November 1963 when the president of the United States was carted into the emergency room in a condition witnesses would later describe as “moribund.”

Andrew points to the magazine. “Were you here when they brought him in?” “Yeah, I helped put in the trache,” McClelland says matter-of-factly. The students gasp, as if the old East Texas doctor had put an ice-cold stethoscope to their chests. With no hesitation, McClelland continues, “So you’re here to talk about the pancreas—”

“Whoa! Whoa!” one of the three students interrupts.

“Is there any way you could tell us what happened?” asks another.

“We can read a book about pancreatic surgery, but this—”

“Well, I feel like a broken record,” McClelland says. “I’ve probably told this story 8,000 times.”

They plead with him.

He leans back in his chair, behind a desk covered with stacks of paper. He nods slowly. His eyes close for a moment as he transports himself back to that fall afternoon, just two days after his 34th birthday. The day that JFK died.

It was a little after “noontime,” he tells them. Everyone knew the president was in town that day. McClelland was in a second-floor conference room at Parkland Memorial Hospital , showing a film of an operation for a hiatal hernia to some of the residents and students.

He begins the narrative he’s told so many times. “I heard a little knock on the door,” McClelland says. At the door was Dr. Charles Crenshaw. He asked McClelland to step into the hall for a moment. When he returned, McClelland turned off the projector and left the students. The two doctors moved immediately to the elevator.

In the elevator, McClelland tried to reassure Crenshaw. He mentioned there had been a lot of alarming stories from the emergency room recently, and most cases turned out not to be too bad.

When the elevator doors opened, they turned right and saw a wall of dark suits and hats. (“Everyone wore hats in those days,” he tells the students. Their conceptions of that time come mostly from a film made in 1991.)

The open area at the center of the emergency room was called “the pit.” Neither doctor had ever seen the pit so jammed with people: Secret Service men, nurses, medical students, residents, reporters, photographers, and curious bystanders.

In the shuffle, the dark suits parted. About 50 feet away, McClelland could see Jackie Kennedy seated outside Trauma Room One. Her pink dress was covered in blood.

“This is really what they said it was,” he said quietly to Crenshaw.

McClelland thought for a moment that he might be the most senior faculty member on site. His boss, Dr. Tom Shires, chair of the department of surgery, was in Galveston at a meeting of the Western Surgical Association. Because it was near lunch, he worried the other doctors might be off the premises. (“The food was so bad at the hospital,” he tells the students, “we often went out to the hamburger place across the street.”)

His instincts were to move the other direction, but he forced himself to keep walking toward Trauma Room One, fighting through the crowd. A large woman named Doris Nelson stood in front of the doors, directing traffic, her voice bellowing above the bedlam. She was the nurse director of the emergency room. She told the Secret Service men who was allowed in and whom to keep out. When McClelland and Crenshaw arrived, she waved them in.

The first thing he saw was the president’s face, cyanotic—bluish-black, swollen, suffused with blood. The body was on a cart in the middle of the room, draped and surrounded by doctors and residents. Kennedy was completely motionless, a contrast to the commotion around him. McClelland was relieved there were so many other faculty members there.

Dr. James Carrico, a resident at the time, had inserted an endo-tracheal tube into the president’s trachea and secured an airway when the president first entered the emergency room. Many years later, Carrico would become the chief of surgery at Parkland . Dr. Malcolm Perry and Dr. Charles Baxter had arrived just before McClelland and had begun a tracheotomy, cutting into a quarter-size wound in the center of Kennedy’s throat. Dr. M.T. Jenkins, an anesthesiologist, was near the head of the cart, administering oxygen.

McClelland put on surgical gloves. None of the men in the room had changed clothes. At their wrists, the surgical gloves met business suits and pressed white shirt cuffs.

Jenkins had his hands full, but nodded down to Kennedy’s head. He said, “Bob, there’s a wound there.” The head was covered in blood and blood clots, tiny collections of dark red mass. McClelland thought he meant there was a wound at the president’s left temple. Later that gesture would cause some confusion.

McClelland moved to the head of the cart. “Bob, would you hold this retractor?” Perry asked. He handed McClelland an army-navy retractor, a straight metal bar with curves on each end to hold back tissue and allow visibility and access. McClelland leaned over the president’s blue face, over the gape in the back of his head, and took the tool.

For nearly 15 minutes, McClelland held the retractor as blood ran over its edges. As the other doctors labored on Kennedy’s throat and chest or milled around the room, McClelland stood staring at the leader of the free world. His face was 18 inches from the president’s head wound. Kennedy’s eyes bulged slightly from their sockets—the medical term is “protuberant”—common with massive head injuries and increased intracranial pressure. Blood oozed down his cheeks. Some of the hair at the front of his head was still combed.

McClelland looked into the head wound. Stray hairs at the back of the head covered parts of the hole, as did bits of bone, blood, and more blood clots. He watched as a piece of cerebellum slowly slipped from the back of the hole and dropped onto the cart.

(In the room with his students, Dr. McClelland softly touches the rear-right part of his own head. “Right back here,” he tells them. “About like this.” He puts his hands together to signify the size of the wound, about the size of a golf ball. “Clearer in my mind’s eye than maybe you are sitting in front of me right now.”)

Jenkins and McClelland would both testify later that the slimy chunk of tissue they saw plop on the cart was cerebellum. Jenkins, however, changed his mind and decided what he saw must have been cerebrum. It might seem like a minor nuance to casual observers, but no details of the biggest mystery in American history are minor. The difference between cerebellum and cerebrum could mean a difference in the location of the fatal head wound. It could mean a different bullet trajectory, which could indicate where the fatal shot originated.

For years the two would argue.

“You don’t remember, Bob,” Jenkins would say.

“Yes I do. You don’t remember. You were fiddling with the anesthesia machine. I was just standing there looking at it.”

As their fingers moved in and out of the president’s body, and through that afternoon, the doctors debated where the bullet came in and went out. Perry said he assumed the smaller hole in Kennedy’s neck was an entrance wound. They knew nothing of the events downtown, where some witnesses claimed a gunman by the infamous grassy knoll fired a shot from in front of the moving president. Lee Harvey Oswald fired from behind Kennedy as the limousine moved away from the book depository. At the time, the doctors hypothesized that perhaps a bullet entered at the front of the throat, ricocheted off the bony spinal column, and moved upward out the back of Kennedy’s head. At that point, the doctors were unaware of the wound in Kennedy’s back.

McClelland stared at the hole in the back of the president’s head. He looked at where the skull crumpled slightly around the edges. Knowing nothing else of the assassination at the time, he, too, assumed a bullet had come out of that opening.

He wouldn’t feel confident in his initial assessment until 11 and a half years later, when he and his wife watched an episode of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. As the couple got ready for bed, Carson introduced his guest, a young, ambitious television host named Geraldo Rivera. Rivera had with him footage of the assassination previously unseen by the public, footage known simply as “the Zapruder film.” Shot by Abraham Zapruder, an immigrant from the Ukraine , the 8-millimeter Kodachrome movie shows the motorcade through the duration of the assassination. As McClelland watched it for the first time, he saw the back of the president’s head blasted out. He saw the president swayed “back and to the left,” a phrase later repeated ad nauseum in Oliver Stone’s JFK. McClelland was convinced he had been standing over an exit wound.

At approximately 1 pm, Dr. Kemp Clark pronounced John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States , dead. Everyone seemed to agree the cause was the massive brain injury, and Clark was the neurosurgeon, so Clark called the death. A blanket was put over the body, and the body was put into a wooden coffin and taken to the airport, a violation of Texas state law at the time.

The doctors were taken upstairs to fill out brief reports for the Secret Service. Each was instructed to write about a page describing what had happened. McClelland was the only doctor to mention a wound in the temple, the place he believed Jenkins was nodding at earlier. He would later clarify for the Warren Commission that he did not see such a wound. He would give his testimony to the assistant counsel of the President’s Commission, Arlen Specter, four months after the assassination. Before McClelland finished his report, Lyndon B. Johnson had been sworn in as president aboard Air Force One.

Years later, when Senator Arlen Specter ran for president himself, he stopped by Parkland for a photo-op with the doctors he questioned in March of 1964.

The rest of the day, doctors discussed the day’s events by the coffee pot. Surgeons drink coffee like cars drink gas. They looked at each other with solemn glances, many still wearing blood-splattered suits. “Did that just happen?” they asked one another. “Did the president just die in our hands?”

McClelland got home about 6 pm. His mother was visiting from East Texas . She met him at the door and hugged him.

After telling his tale, more than half the scheduled hour has passed. “Wow,” one of the students says. That’s all they can muster. Wow. And again, perhaps not noticing the amazement of the students, perhaps so used to it from telling the story over the years, McClelland drops a second bombshell.

“I worked on Oswald, too,” he says.

“You’re kidding.”

That Sunday, with McClelland’s mother still in town, the family decided to go out to lunch. As his wife was upstairs getting ready with their 2-year-old and infant, McClelland decided to watch television. As he switched on his Admiral, before the picture flickered to life, he heard an announcer: “He’s been shot. He’s been shot.”

When the picture came in, Lee Harvey Oswald was on the floor, a sheriff’s deputy leaning over him. The crowd had the gunman, Jack Ruby. McClelland called upstairs to his wife.

“They’ve shot Oswald!”

“Who’s that?” she called back.

“Don’t you remember? That’s the guy they said shot—”

“Oh.”

“Well, I’ve gotta go.”

He headed for the hospital. Coming down Beverly Drive , just before Preston Road , McClelland began flashing his headlights. He saw the car of Shires, his boss, on his way home from Parkland after seeing his patient Governor Connally.

Shires stopped and stuck his head out the window. “Did you hear what I just—”

“I just saw it on television,” McClelland said.

“I just heard it on the radio.”

McClelland followed Shires to Parkland . When they arrived and changed clothes—something they didn’t take the time for with Kennedy—Oswald was just being wheeled in. When Kennedy arrived, every faculty member on site was called into the emergency room. With Oswald, there were only a few doctors working on him. Twenty-eight minutes after Jack Ruby’s shot, they were inside Oswald’s abdomen.

(“He was as white as this piece of paper,” McClelland tells the med students. “He had lost so much blood. If he hadn’t turned when he saw Ruby coming, he might have been all right.”)

When Oswald saw the gun in Ruby’s hand, he had cringed slightly, flinching. Because of this, the bullets went through his aorta and inferior vena cava, the two main blood vessels in the back of the abdominal cavity. There was enormous loss of blood. The medical team pumped pint after pint of untyped blood, 16 in all, through his body. Shires and Perry eventually got a vascular clamp to stop the bleeding, and the two set about clearing away intestines to get enough room to repair the damage.

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 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 Avenue . Behind them was a limousine. He crossed the street toward the hospital’s side entrance. The children and the motorcade arrived at the same time he did.

Surrounded by children, a motorcycle cop got off his bike and gently nudged McClelland back and opened the car door. “How ’bout that,” McClelland thought to himself. “Hey, I know him. That’s the president of the United States .”

Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn had just been hospitalized with cancer at Baylor. A fellow Democrat, President Kennedy had come to pay Mr. Sam a final visit. That night, when he got home, McClelland told his wife, “You’ll never believe who I saw today.” News of the presidential visit made the front pages the next morning.

Two years later, as McClelland stared into the pale, swollen face of the same man, he thought back to that brief encounter.

Another coincidence: years after the Warren Commission’s report. After Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, tried to have the only trial related to the assassination, bringing conspiracy charges against Claw Shaw. After interest in the mystery had waxed and waned several times. A surgeon friend of McClelland’s called and told him about a stomach cancer patient he had operated on earlier that day. The doctor explained the patient wasn’t doing well, and he thought he might have leaked one of his suture lines. He asked if McClelland might be at Presbyterian that day, and if he could scrub-in on the surgery. McClelland had patients to see there anyway, so he agreed.

He arrived at Presbyterian and found the surgery schedule: the patient’s name in black marker on a white board was A. Zapruder.

Zapruder recovered eventually, and the two talked periodically. For some reason, though, they never discussed their mutual involvement in the events of November 22, 1963. Neither ever brought it up.

This happens every so often, he tells the students. He goes for years without talking about that week. He goes weeks without thinking about the blood clots. The face. The hole in the head. Sometimes it seems to come up over and over. The event is woven into his life, wrapped around his white hair, tied to his surgeon fingers. He’s been married 50 years. His children have children. He is one of the most renowned surgery scholars in the country. He knows the history of virtually every operation, from how doctors performed it in the Civil War to new experimental processes. He pores over medical journals (as past editor of Selected Readings in General Surgery, which he originated).

But new debates begin, like a recent one when two books about the assassination were released at the same time. One has 1,600 pages worth of evidence declaring the Warren Commission’s conclusion spot on, the other claiming to have irrefutable evidence that there were multiple shooters. He can list the documentaries, the biographies, the first-hand accounts like a catalogue.

As the students walk out, they thank him profusely. They have unshaven faces and disheveled hair. Surgery rotation is notoriously difficult because of the lack of sleep. But they walk past McClelland’s secretary, stirred by the story. Once, everyone in America could remember where they were when they heard the news of JFK’s death. For a younger generation, the event was 30 years in the past when they learned about the book depository and the Texas Theatre. For some, it might as well be Ford’s Theatre and John Wilkes Booth.

Andrew Jennings pulls out his cell phone. “I’m going to tell my grandkids about this,” the 24-year-old says. “People will say, ‘I know a guy who knows the guy who worked on Kennedy and Oswald.’ ”

Once in a while, at home, McClelland pulls a box from his shelves. He passes the Lincoln bust he purchased at the Petersen House in Washington, D.C., where Abraham Lincoln died, and the epic volumes he has of all Lincoln’s writings, and the history books he’s amassed over the years.

His hands glide over the wooden box, painted blue. He opens it. Inside is a transparent zip-lock bag with what once was a white shirt pressing against the sides.

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.”

Write to mjmooney@gmail.com.