Dr. Robert McClelland RIP
Dr. McClelland's drawing of Kennedy's wounds.
BK Notes:
As his DMN obit implies - that Dr. McClelland was "the lone dissenting voice among operating room doctors" is not true. Yes four of them wrote an article that promoted their views - but there were more than four people in that room and most of them said the gunshot wound to the head that caused death was a large exit wound to the rear of the head.
I met Dr. McClelland in Dallas last November at the CAPA meeting at the Old Red Courthouse at Dealey Plaza, when five of the former Parkland doctors were reunited as part of CAPA's Last Living Witness program.
All five were in agreement that the President was killed by a gun shot to the head that tore out a large portion of the back of his head - clearly an exit wound.
When Dr. McClelland addressed the 2013 Wecht Conference in Pittsburgh via Skype, he said he stood at the end of the gurney above JFK's head for quite a long time - long enough to see the massive damage to the back of JFK's head and conclude that there was no way to save him.
CAPA gave Dr. McClelland a "Profiles in Courage" award at the November 2018 event in Dallas.
The DMN just can't get over that they blew it.
Dallas
Morning News
SEPTEMBER
14, 2019
Robert
McClelland, surgeon who tried to save JFK and believed there was a second
shooter, dies at 89.
A
skilled surgeon at UT Southwestern whose true passion was teaching, he's among
the luminaries whose images grace Parkland's walls today.
Photo: Dr.
Robert McClelland holds the blod-stained shirt he was wearing on Nov. 22, 1963,
when he treated President John F. Kennedy in the emergency room at Parkland
Memorial Hospital in Dallas.(LM Otero / AP)
By Marc
Ramirez
Sep 14,
2019
Inextricably
linked to the death of John F. Kennedy, surgeon Robert McClelland dutifully
preserved the blood-soaked white dress shirt he wore the day he tried
to save the president's life in 1963.
For the
rest of his life, the retired professor emeritus of UT Southwestern's
medical school also clung staunchly to a contentious opinion forged firsthand:
that one of the shots that had struck Kennedy had come from the front,
which would require the existence of a second gunman.
Robert
Nelson McClelland, the lone dissenting voice among the operating-room
doctors who tried to save the president at Parkland Memorial Hospital, died
Tuesday of renal failure. He was 89.
A
celebration of his life is set for 1 p.m. Monday at Highland Park United
Methodist Church's Cox Chapel, 3300 Mockingbird Lane in Dallas.
A
skilled surgeon whose true passion was teaching, he's among the luminaries
whose images grace Parkland's walls today. In a note to campus colleagues, Dr.
William Turner of the campus's department of surgery, called McClelland
"the titan among those giants," saying the institution had "lost
one of its heroes."
When it
comes to making your retirement income last, consider these questions.
An
insatiably curious reader who doted on his seven grandchildren, McClelland was
a driving force in surgical education at UT Southwestern for decades and
oversaw the launch of its liver surgery program.
He was
modest and unassuming despite his accomplishments and role in history. But he
also had an irreverent side, allowing his grandkids as young children to watch
the cheeky television show South Park with him, to the occasional
dismay of their parents.
"I
would get angry," said daughter Alison McClelland of Dallas. "His
defense was that it was philosophical."
Photo: Dr.
Robert McClelland spoke as students Sylvia Mualcin (left) and Kayla Conner
listened on stage during a presentation at Lewisville High School-Harmon Campus
in November 2013.(File photo)
Dr.
Robert McClelland acted as a juror in a mock trisl for Lee Harvey
Oswald at the old criminal courts building in Dallas on June 21, 2013.(File
photo)
Robert
McClelland was born Nov. 20, 1929, in Gilmer, the same East Texas town that
spawned musicians Don Henley and Johnny Mathis. His intellect and curiosity
were evident early, his passion for discovery stoked by a chemistry set he got
at age 11.
He
graduated in 1947 as valedictorian of Gilmer High and, as the grandson of a
physician, was further inspired to pursue medicine through the mentorship of
two local physicians.
After
studying at the University of Texas in Austin, he earned his doctorate at the
school's medical branch in Galveston in 1954. He spent two years in Germany as
a general medical officer for the U.S. Air Force, then returned to Texas to
begin residency at what is now UT Southwestern.
It was
there that he would meet Connie Logan, a head nurse at Parkland whom he'd
noticed several times at church and finally got the nerve to ask out. They
married in May 1958 and settled in Highland Park, where they raised three
children.
Dr.
Robert McClelland joined the faculty at UT Southwestern and Parkland in 1962
and spent his entire career there.
He
completed his residency in 1962 and joined the faculty at UT Southwestern and
Parkland, where the following year, that momentous November day became forever
tied to his life story.
He was
34 then, screening a film on hernia repair for hospital interns and residents,
when a colleague burst in and asked him to help operate on the president of the
United States.
As
Kennedy lay wounded on the operating table in Trauma Room One, McClelland
assisted as surgeons Malcolm Perry and Charles Baxter performed a tracheotomy
in an attempt to save the president. For 10 minutes, he stood above Kennedy's
head and stared at "that terrible hole," as he put it, tackling his
duty as instinctively as a fireman slides down a pole.
But from
his vantage point, one shot seemed to have come from the front — which would
mean Lee Harvey Oswald, whom McClelland would be called to operate on just two
days later, wasn't the only gunman.
"The
shot that killed [Kennedy] probably was from the back, but I have to
honestly say what I think," McLelland told The News.
The
other four attending physicians would eventually pen a joint article in The
Journal of the American Medical Association concluding there were two
shots, from the back and above. The journal's editor noted McClelland's
differing opinion, emphasizing, however, that he wasn't an "expert in
forensic pathology and ballistic wounds."
Photo: From
left: Drs. Robert McClelland, Kenneth Salyer and Ronald Jones were all in the
emergency room at Parkland Memorial Hospital when President John F. Kennedy was
brought there on Nov. 22, 1963.(File photo)
McClelland never
wavered, and a scene from Oliver Stone's JFK depicts him offering his
dissenting opinion in court, which McClelland said never actually happened.
However, he did once act as a juror in a 2013 mock trial giving
Oswald his chance in the courtroom. (The trial ended in a hung jury, with the
vote 9-3 in favor of a guilty verdict.)
McClelland
would go on to spend his entire career at UT Southwestern, where generations of
students and residents knew him as "Dr. Mac" and called him for
years afterward seeking advice about difficult cases.
In 1974,
he launched the medical journal Selected Readings in General Surgery after
requests from former residents for copies of papers discussed in a journal club
he'd started. The club eventually became a Saturday morning event, led by
McClelland, for the school's surgery department, with the compilations earning
national and worldwide subscribers as they covered the entire field of general
surgery.
A
prodigious reader, he consumed history books and subscribed to dozens of
medical journals.
"He
was a very sharp man," said Scot Sandlin, who with others occasionally met
McClelland in his later years for breakfast gatherings at the Flying Fish at
Preston Center. "A very factual kind of guy."
McClelland's
grandson, William Yoste of Oxford, Miss., with whom he would go to movies and
enjoy Goff's Hamburgers, recalled the tales "Pop" would tell him as a
child before he went to sleep.
"Instead
of reading me bedtime stories about the rabbit and the hare, he would tell me about
growing up in Gilmer, or coming to Dallas before it was anything," Yoste
said. "Everything he said to anybody just left you wanting more, hoping
that when one story ended another would begin."
McClelland
adored his hundreds of books more than any other material thing.
"When
we moved him, his only requirement was that he had to have a place with
bookcases in every room," said daughter Alison, whose memories of her
father as a child were of him behind a pile of journals on his huge office
desk, blaring classical music while flanked by his Siamese cat, Bandit.
"We
needed to have custom bookcases built. He would give anybody the shirt off his
back, but he would never loan out his books."
Until
last weekend, McClelland had remained engaged, reading constantly and asking a
million questions about what his family members were up to. Then things took a
sudden turn.
By
Tuesday afternoon a hospital bed had been wheeled in, around which the family
gathered, playing Mozart and screening South Park on the TV in tribute.
McClelland died peacefully that evening.
In
addition to daughter Alison and grandson William, McClelland is survived by his
wife, Connie, of Dallas; son Chris McClelland and daughter Julie Barrett of New
York City; six grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
The
family requests that memorial contributions be made to the Parkland Surgical
Society Robert N. McClelland Lectureship Fund at the Southwestern Medical
Foundation, 3889 Maple Ave., Suite 100, Dallas, TX 75219.
Marc
Ramirez
. Marc
Ramirez is a veteran narrative/lifestyles journalist and food/drink enthusiast.
In addition to the Dallas Morning News, he has worked for the Seattle Times,
The Wall Street Journal and Phoenix New Times and has degrees from the
University of Notre Dame and the University of California-Berkeley. When life
gives him lemons, he makes Aviations.
Please Support JFKCountercoup:
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Dr. McClelland's sketch of JFK's wounds, as he observed them on Nov. 22, 1963
Dr. McClelland stood for a half hour at the end of the gurney with JFK's head directly in front of him.
Dr. McClelland's sketch of JFK's wounds, as he observed them on Nov. 22, 1963
Dr. McClelland stood for a half hour at the end of the gurney with JFK's head directly in front of him.
Dr. Robert McClelland - Evidence of Conspiracy
Surgeon in ER insists 2 gunmen shot JFK
Dr. McClelland's drawing of JFK's wounds.
Doctor first to see Kennedy's wound
MICHAEL A. FUOCO
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
OCT 17, 2013
A surgeon who half a century ago was among the
doctors who tried to save President John F. Kennedy's life said Thursday that
the Warren Commission got it wrong in determining a lone gunman assassinated
JFK in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Speaking via teleconference to a Duquesne University
symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Robert N.
McClelland said he was the first doctor in Parkland Hospital's Trauma Room One
to notice the massive wound in the back of Kennedy's skull and that a trauma of
that size had to be an exit wound.
"The whole right side of his skull was gone. I
could look inside his skull cavity. Obviously, it was a mortal wound," he
told a spellbound audience of legal, medical, forensic and investigative
experts and the public who packed the university's Power Ballroom.
Dr. McClelland, now 83 and professor emeritus at the
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said that because it was an
exit wound, it logically followed that it had been fired from in front of the
president's limousine. And, in turn, that meant a second gunman was involved in
the assassination, contradicting the Warren Commission's finding that there was
but one assassin.
The Warren Commission determined that Lee Harvey
Oswald acted alone when he fired three times with a high-powered rifle on the
president's motorcade in Dealey Plaza from the sixth floor of the Texas School
Book Depository. The commission said that one bullet missed, another went
through the president's neck and also wounded Texas Gov. John Connolly -- the
so-called "single bullet theory" -- and the third caused the fatal
head wound.
But Dr. McClelland was resolute. "Having seen
what I saw" in the emergency room and then viewing the Zapruder film of
the assassination, he said, he believes JFK "was initially hit from a
bullet fired from the sixth floor that went through his back and out through
his neck. The next injury was caused by somebody behind the picket fence on the
grassy knoll firing a shot that blew out the right side of his head."
Speaking on the first day of the three-day symposium
sponsored by the university's Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and
Law, Dr. McClelland also recounted how two days after Kennedy's assassination
he and other surgeons tried in vain to save Oswald's life after he was shot by
Jack Ruby while being transferred from Dallas police headquarters to the county
jail.
In his address, Dr. Wecht, the renowned forensic
pathologist and longtime critic of the Warren Report, railed against what he
called was the "inept, inexplicable, totally incompetent" autopsy
performed on the president by Navy pathologists James J. Humes and J. Thornton
Boswell. They concluded the president had been struck by two bullets, fired
from above and behind, with the fatal shot being the one that struck his head.
"They had never done a single gunshot wound
autopsy before. If you heard of this in another country, you'd say
condescendingly and dismissively, 'What do you expect from that country?' but
this was our country," Dr. Wecht said. "This should bother you so
much; this should be so distressing, even 50 years later."
Dr. Wecht, who used a skull and dissected a brain
during his address to illustrate his criticism of the autopsy and what wasn't
done, said the "cold case" needs to be reopened.
"The Warren Commission Report is scientifically
absurd," he said. The burden of the report's detractors is not to have all
the answers about the assassination, he said, but to point out defects in the
investigation, which they have done. He received a standing ovation.
Among the speakers today will be Academy
Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone, director of the controversial 1991 film
"JFK" and director/narrator of the Showtime docu-series "Oliver
Stone's Untold History of the United States."
First Published October 17, 2013
By Mark Hodge, The Sun
June 21, 2017
Signed drawing entitled ''President Kennedy's
Wounds," rendered by Dr. Robert McClelland, one of the physicians who
attended to John F. Kennedy at Parkland Hospital after the President was
shot.Nate D Sanders Auctions
A fascinating drawing by the surgeon who
tried to save John F. Kennedy’s life could sensationally prove Kennedy was shot
by two different gunmen.
Dr. Robert McClelland held JFK’s head as he went
into theater at Parkland Hospital after he was gunned down while traveling
through Dallas, Texas, in an open-top convertible in 1963.
Nothing could be done to save the President and he
died, aged just 46, 20 minutes after arrival, sparking an unprecedented
outpouring of grief across America.
McClelland later drew a rudimentary sketch of the
right side of Kennedy’s head and noted the entrance and exit wounds of the
bullets, supposedly fired by lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.
The surgeon noted two different entrance wounds –
one low in the neck and one at his hairline – which crucially came from
different directions, suggesting there were two separate shooters.
He noted that the horrific fatal wound to the back
of the President’s head was from a bullet exiting the skull rather than
entering it.
This is in conflict to the lone gunman theory as
Oswald was behind Kennedy’s motorcade when he fired the shots from the sixth
floor of a book depository building.
McClelland has previously questioned the conclusion
of the Warren Commission report into the assassination, which found that Oswald
acted alone.
The respected surgeon’s drawing, which has been put
up for auction, appears to support the theory that a second shooter stood on
the grassy knoll in front of the motorcade.
McClelland’s sketch, which he signed, shows a large
four to five inch exit wound at the back of JFK’s head.
This, he suggests, correlates to an entry wound at
Kennedy’s hairline, although he admits he didn’t see that wound properly.
Yet, he is adamant that he saw “clearly” another
entry wound low in the neck.
McClelland believed the first bullet hit Kennedy in
the back, not in the front as was assumed at the time.
He also insists the second shot hit the iconic
Democrat throwing his head violently backward which would only happen if he was
struck by a bullet from the front and not above and behind.
President John F. Kennedy is struck by an assassin’s
bullet as he travels through Dallas in a motorcade.Getty Images
The compelling drawing – which has been in the hands
of a private collector for years – has emerged for auction 54 years after JFK’s
assassination and is tipped to sell for nearly $4,000.
Michael Kirk, auctioneer at US-based Nate D.
Sanders, which is selling the sketch, said the drawing is credible proof that
more than one killer was involved in the infamous assassination.
He said: “McClelland saw Kennedy’s wounds first hand
when he was brought into the emergency room and he has always been of the mind
that they were consistent with two shooters.
“He is a credible surgeon who has believed for more
than 50 years that the wound that did the most damage could not have come from
a bullet above and behind, but only from a shooter stood in front of Kennedy.
There are legions of people who believe that there
was something more than was reported in the Warren Commission which concluded
Oswald was acting alone and this diagram gives credence to their theory.”
Kennedy was assassinated while traveling through
Dallas, Texas, in an open-top convertible on November 22, 1963.
President John F. Kennedy’s murderer, Lee Harvey
Oswald, speaks during a press conference after his arrest in Dallas. Lee Harvey
Oswald was killed by Jack Ruby on the eve of Kennedy’s burial.AFP/Getty Images
As their vehicle passed the Texas School Book
Depository Building, former marine Oswald fired three shots from the sixth
floor, fatally wounding President Kennedy.
Kennedy was pronounced dead 30 minutes later at
Parkland Hospital. He was 46 years old.
Less than an hour after Kennedy was shot, Oswald
killed a policeman who questioned him on the street near his dormitory in Dallas.
Thirty minutes later, Oswald was arrested in a movie
theater by police responding to reports of a suspect.
On November 24, he was brought to the basement of
the Dallas police headquarters on his way to a more secure county jail.
As Oswald came into the room, nightclub owner Jack
Ruby emerged from the crowd and fatally wounded him with a single shot from a
concealed revolver.
In a twist of fate, McClelland also operated on
Oswald after the prime suspect was fatally shot in the abdomen two days later.
The Warren Commission was a nearly year-long
investigation led by Chief Justice Earl Warren that concluded Oswald acted
alone in assassinating Kennedy and that there was no conspiracy involved.
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