The Parkland Doctors, Part Six

[Fred Litwin]

https://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/post/the-parkland-doctors-part-six

The Parkland Doctors, Part Six 

A look at Dr. Robert McClelland and his various views of Kennedy's head wound. It changed over time.

[Tom Graves]

https://www.onthetrailofdelusion.com/post/the-parkland-doctors-part-six

The Parkland Doctors, Part Six 

A look at Dr. Robert McClelland and his various views of Kennedy's head wound. It changed over time.

Great work, Fred.

[Michael T. Griffith]

Great work, Fred.

Actually, I'm afraid it is not, as much as I respect Fred's great work on other historical issues. Have you read anything from the other side on this issue?

Well, let's read what other Parkland doctors wrote about the large head wound on 11/22, while their memories were still quite fresh (note that "right occipital-parietal" equals "right-rear part of the head"):

Dr. Kemp Clark, neurosurgeon:

Two external wounds, one in the lower third of the anterior neck, the other in the occipital region of the skull, were noted. . . .

There was a large wound in the right occipital-parietal region, from which profuse bleeding was occurring. . . .  There was considerable loss of scalp and bone tissue. Both cerebral and cerebellar tissue were extruding from the wound. (Summary report of Dr. Kemp Clark, 11/22/63, pp. 1-2, CE 392)

Dr. Marion T. Jenkins:

There was a great laceration on the right side of the head (temporal and occipital), causing a great defect in the skull plate so that there was herniation and laceration of great areas of the brain, even to the extent that the cerebellum had protruded from the wound. (Statement of Dr. Marion T. Jenkins, 11/22/63, p. 2, CE 392)

Dr. Charles Carrico:

Two wounds were noted. One small penetrating wound of the neck in lower 1/3. The other wound had avulsed the calvarium and shredded brain tissue present and profuse oozing. . . .

. . . wound of the trachea was seen immediately below the larynx. . . .

. . . attempt to control slow oozing from cerebral and cerebellar tissue. . . . (Admission note of Dr. Charles Carrico, 11/22/63, pp. 1-2, CE 392)

Dr. Charles Baxter:

The president had a wound in the midline of the neck. . . . wounds of the temporal and occipital bones . . . and the brain was lying on the table. (Admission note of Dr. Charles Baxter, 11/22/63, p. 1, CE 392)

Now let's read what other Parkland doctors, and also two of the nurses, told the WC a few months later:

Dr. Ronald Jones:

. . . he had a large wound in the right posterior side of the head. . . .

There was large defect in the back side of the head as the President lay on the cart with what appeared to be some brain hanging out of this wound with multiple pieces of skull noted with the brain. . . . (6 H 53-56)

Dr. Gene Akin:

The back of the right occipital-parietal portion of his head was shattered, with brain substance extruding. . . .

I assume the right occipital-parietal region was the exit, so to speak, that he had probably been hit on the other side of the head, or at least tangentially in the back of the head. . . . (6 H 65-67)

Dr. Paul Peters:

It was pointed out that an examination of the brain had been done. . . .

We saw the wound of entry in the throat and noted the large occipital wound. . . .

I noticed that there was a large defect in the occiput. . . . (6 H 70-71)

Nurse Patricia Hutton:

Mr. Kennedy was bleeding profusely from a wound in the back of his head. . . . A doctor asked me to place a pressure dressing on the head wound. This was no use, however, because of the massive opening on the back of the head. (21 H 216)

Nurse Diana Bowron, who helped treat Kennedy, who packed gauze squares into his head wound, and who wrapped his head in a sheet to prepare the body for the casket:

Mr. SPECTER. You saw the condition of his what?
Miss BOWRON. The back of his head.
Mr. SPECTER. And what was that condition?
Miss BOWRON. Well, it was very bad--you know.
Mr. SPECTER. How many holes did you see?
Miss BOWRON. I just saw one large hole. (6 H 136)

And two of the morticians who reassembled JFK's skull after the autopsy likewise described seeing a sizable hole in the back of the head, as you should know. One of them even drew two diagrams of the defect, placing it clearly in the back of the head and nowhere near the area above the right ear.

Let's consider two more key witnesses on the right-rear head wound: Secret Service agent Clint Hill and mortician Tom Robinson. Hill saw the wound in Dallas and at Bethesda. He saw it in Dallas for several minutes from just 2-3 feet away as he rode on the trunk of the limo on the way to Parkland. Robinson witnessed the autopsy and took part in the reconstruction of JFK's skull after the autopsy, so he naturally got a prolonged, up-close look at the wound.

Let's start with Agent Hill. The following comes from Hill's 11/30/1963 report, in which he described what he saw at very close range for several minutes as he rode on top of the limousine’s back seat on the way to Parkland Hospital:

As I lay over the top of the back seat I noticed a portion of the President's head on the right rear side was missing and he was bleeding profusely. Part of his brain was gone. (“The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, at Dallas, Texas: Statement of Special Agent Clint J. Hill,” 11/30/1963, p. 3, in CE 1024)

From Agent Hill's WC testimony:

Mr. SPECTER: What did you observe as to President Kennedy's condition on arrival at the hospital?

Mr. HILL: The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car. His brain was exposed. There was blood and bits of brain all over the entire rear portion of the car. Mrs. Kennedy was completely covered with blood. There was so much blood you could not tell if there had been any other wound or not except for the one large gaping wound in the right rear portion of the head. (2 H 141)

As for mortician Tom Robinson, he told the HSCA and the ARRB there was a large wound in the back of the head. He told the HSCA that the wound was "the size of a small orange ... circular ... ragged ...directly behind the back of the head pretty much between them [the ears]" (HSCA interview transcript, 1/12/77).

Robinson diagrammed the large head wound for the HSCA, which you can see here: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/jfk-what-the-doctors-saw-an-important-addition-and-a-missed-opportunity.

Robinson said the same thing to the ARRB:

He described a large open head wound in the back of the President's head centrally located right between the ears where the bone was gone as well as some scalp. (Meeting Report, ARRB, 6/21/96, p. 2)

Robinson noted that they used a piece of rubber to cover the back-of-head wound and that the wound was nearly the size of a large orange:

Robinson said that Ed Stroble (now deceased) had cut out a piece of rubber to cover the open wound in the back of the head so that the embalming fluid would not leak the piece of rubber was slightly larger than the hole in the back of the head and Robinson estimated that the rubber sheet was a circular patch about the size of a large orange. (p. 3)

Robinson also noted that the back-of-head wound was not visible when JFK’s body was lying in repose—i.e., with the back of the head resting on the pillow:

The scalp was sutured together and also onto the rubber sheet to the maximum extent possible, and the damage in the back of the head was obscured by the pillow in the casket when the body lay in repose. . . . (p. 3)

When Robinson was shown the autopsy back-of-head photo, it did not make him change his mind about the wound; rather, he said the hole was where he drew it but that it just did not show up in the photo:

When asked by ARRB where the hole in the back of the head was in relation to this photograph [the back-of-head photo] Robinson responded by placing his fingers in a circle just above the white spot in the hairline in the photograph and said, "The hole was right here where I said it was in my drawing but it just doesn't show up in this photo.” (p. 4)

BTW, both Hill and Robinson said a large amount of brain matter was missing. When interviewed by CBS News in 2013, Agent Hill said the following:

Scott Pelley: What did you see?
         
Clint Hill: Brain matter, blood, bone fragments all come out of the wound.… Then Mrs. Kennedy came up on the trunk. She was trying to grab some of that material and pull it back with her.… I got a hold of her and I put her in the backseat. … And when I did that, his body fell to its left into her lap. His face--his head was in her lap.

The right side of his face was up. I could see his eyes were fixed. I could see an area through the skull that there was no brain matter in that area at all. So I assumed it was a fatal wound. (Scott Pelley, “Agent Who Jumped on JFK's Limo Recounts Fateful Moments,” CBS News website, October 26, 2017)

Robinson also said the amount of brain missing in the back of the head was about the size of a closed fist. A closed fist would be equal in size to at least one third of an average male brain. (The male brain is typically about 5.5 inches wide, 6.5 inches long, and 3.6 inches high.) From the ARRB meeting report on the interview with Robinson:

Robinson said that he saw the brain removed from President Kennedy's body and that a large percentage of it was gone "in the back," from the "medulla," and that the portion of the brain that was missing was about the size of a closed fist. He described the condition of the brain in this area as the consistency of "soup." (Meeting Report: Interview of Tom Robinson, ARRB, 6/21/1996, p. 2)

Needless to say Hill's and Robinson's accounts of a large amount of missing brain prove the autopsy brain photos are fraudulent.

I present all of this material and more in A Comforting Lie: The Myth that a Lone Gunman Killed President Kennedy.

Fred's response to all of these 11/22 and early-1964 descriptions of a right-rear/right-occipital-parietal wound is to claim they do not address anything in his article on McClelland's allegedly changing accounts.

This seems like a dodge. How do you explain the fact that McClelland's WC description of the head wound matches the 11/22 descriptions given by Clark, Jenkins, Carrico, and Baxter, and the WC descriptions given by Jones, Akin, Peters, Hutton, and Bowron? In any other case, such consistency among 10 witnesses would be considered powerful, convincing evidence.

Then, add to this remarkable agreement of accounts the fact that those 10 descriptions match Nurse Doris Nelson's and newsman Roy Stamp's descriptions of the head wound and also closely agree with the descriptions of the head wound given by numerous autopsy witnesses, including Ed Reed, Tom Robinson, Godfrey McHugh, Joe O'Donnell, Joe Hagen, and Robert Karnei.

Dr. Fitzpatrick's dismissal of the value of the Parkland descriptions of the head wound is downright ridiculous and shows how biased he is. Among other things, he ignores the fact that after JFK was pronounced dead, the Parkland doctors had several minutes to observe JFK's head wound while the last rites were being given and then while the nurses were cleaning the head and body, packing the head wound with gauze squares, and wrapping the head wound to prepare the body for placement in the coffin. He also ignores the fact that the three nurses who prepared the body for burial got an up-close, hands-on look at the head wound, and all three--Nelson, Hutton, and Bowron--said the wound was in the back of the head.

Dr. Fitzpatrick would also have us believe that the Parkland doctors who said they saw extruding and damaged cerebellar tissue, including the neurosurgeon, somehow mistook parietal-temporal brain tissue for cerebellar brain tissue, even though cerebellar tissue looks very different from any other part of the brain.

One must ask, If McClelland blundered or fabricated when he told the WC the large wound was in the right-rear part of the head, how do we explain the fact that his description closely agrees with the descriptions given on 11/22 by Clark, Jenkins, Carrico, and Baxter, and with the WC descriptions given by Jones, Akin, Peters, Hutton, and Bowron? Just a stunning, whopping coincidence? Did all those doctors and nurses amazingly make the same "mistake"? And is it also a whopping coincidence that newsman Roy Stamps and SS Agent Clint Hill likewise said the wound was in the back of the head?

[Tom Graves]

[...]

Griffith,

Which one of the "20 to 30" bad guys altered the autopsy photos?

[Jarrett Smith]

Griffith,

Which one of the "20 to 30" bad guys altered the autopsy photos?

The head was most likely semi-sutured up when the pics were taken. The hole in the back seen by Sam Kinney is clearly visible on Z-335.

[Tom Graves]

The head was most likely semi-sutured up when the pics were taken. The hole in the back seen by Sam Kinney is clearly visible on Z-335.

LOL!

Good one!

[Michael T. Griffith]

Griffith, Which one of the "20 to 30" bad guys altered the autopsy photos?

Once again you dodge dealing with facts by appealing to theoretical objections. One is left to assume that you believe that all of those witnesses, in three different locations, experienced the same mass hallucination, even though some of them actually handled JFK's skull, even though Hill saw the large head wound three separate times that day, and even though ambulance driver Aubrey Rike said he could feel the edges of a large wound in the back of JFK's head when he helped put the body into the casket.

Nah, according to you, not one of those witnesses, not even the neurosurgeon, not even the morticians who reassembled his skull, not even the nurses who cleaned his head and packed the large head wound with gauze squares--none of them could tell the difference between the area directly above the right ear and the occipital area 3-4 inches behind the right ear. Sounds totally plausible.

You still have not ventured to offer any credible explanation for the vanishing low fragment trail on the autopsy x-rays, the fact that the autopsy report says nothing about the high fragment trail seen on the skull x-rays, and the fact that the autopsy doctors reaffirmed the autopsy report and once again said nothing about the high fragment trail after viewing the autopsy x-rays and photos for five hours in 1966. "People make mistakes" does not even come close to credibly addressing the conflicts between the autopsy x-rays and the autopsy report.

[Tom Graves]

Once again you dodge dealing with facts by appealing to theoretical objections.

Griffith,

Once again you spread KGB*-encouraged (if not outright created), nation-rending, Trump-enabling / QAnon-enabling disinformation.

Why do you have a psychological need to believe the JFKA was a conspiracy?

Does Vladimir Putin pay you to do this?

How many bad guys do you figure were involved in the planning, the "patsy-ing," the shooting, the getting-away, and the all-important (clearly, clearly, clearly ongoing!!!) cover up?

"Just a few" (20-30), or oodles and gobs?

*Today's SVR and FSB