The article involved an interview with Dr. Don Teal Curtis of Amarillo, who, as a first year resident at Parkland Hospital on November 22, 1963, was among the team of doctors that treated President Kennedy.
The article states:
As he was beginning the cut-down procedure and another doctor was beginning the tracheotomy, a third doctor moved around to the president’s head and lifted it so he could examine the president for any wounds that were not visible from his position, lying on his back. As soon as the doctor lifted the president’ head, he said, “Stop resuscitation. This is not compatible with life.”
Curtis reported that each senior physician, and there were several in the room by then, looked at Kennedy’s head.
Curtis also looked, and he told the audience “the posterior part of his head was blown out.”
Curtis, who had become very familiar with entrance and exit wounds during his trauma room work at Parkland, said that there was no doubt in his mind that the exit wound on the president’s head was at the back. (emphasis added.)
Why is Curtis’ description of Kennedy’s head wound so important?
Because it confirms what so many other witnesses have stated over the past 50 years: Kennedy had a large exit wound in the back of his head, which means that a shot hit him from the front.
Why is that important?
Because Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin, was situated behind Kennedy. Thus, there is no way that he could have fired a shot in which the bullet entered Kennedy from the front and exited through the rear of his head. That means that someone fired from the front of Kennedy.
Yet, do the autopsy photographs, which the government steadfastly kept secret for many years, reflect the exit hole in the back of Kennedy’s head?
No. That’s the problem. The photographs depict no such thing. They depict the back of Kennedy’s head to be intact. See my article “JFK and the Deferentials,” which includes a rendering of the official autopsy photograph of the back of Kennedy’s head by House Select Committee illustrator Ida Dox in 1978.
Was Curtis the only one who saw the exit hole in the back of Kennedy’s head?
Take a look at this article about Dr. Robert McClelland, who was a 34-year-old surgeon at Parkland who also treated the president. The article stated:
Two other doctors were already treating Kennedy, Dr. Perry and Dr. Jenkins, and they ordered Dr. McClelland to hold the patient’s head.
So, he stood, holding the bleeding, injured head of the President of the United States. The wound was huge, gaping.
“My first reaction was, ‘My God, have you seen the back of the President’s head?’” McClelland says. They hadn’t. (emphasis added.)
I recently watched Dr. McClelland deliver a talk via Skype at a JFK conference at Duquesne University. (They should have the DVDs from that conference ready for sale soon. All the talks are worth watching, but I especially recommend you purchase the one with Dr. McClelland’s talk.) Once you see Dr. McClelland speaking, you will immediately know that this is a man who is professional and competent and is speaking the truth about the exit wound that he saw in the back on Kennedy’s head.
There were many other credible and reputable people who stated the same thing, as I detailed in my article “JFK and the Deferentials.” They include the two FBI agents, James Sibert and Frank O’Neil, who attended the autopsy but who were not invited to testify before the Warren Commission.
In the 1990s, Sibert and O’Neil appeared before the Assassination Records Review Board to give sworn testimony:
Gunn: Mr. Sibert, does that photograph correspond to your recollection of the back of the head?
Sibert: Well, I don’t have a recollection of it being that intact…. I don’t remember seeing anything that was like this photo.
Gunn: But do you see anything that corresponds in photograph 42 to what you observed during the night of the autopsy?
Sibert: No, I don’t recall anything like this at all during the autopsy. There was much — well, the wound was more pronounced. And it looks like it could have been reconstructed or something, as compared to what my recollection was.” (Horne, Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, Volume I, pages 30-31.)
Gunn: ….I’d like to ask you whether that photograph resembles what you saw from the back of the head at the time of the autopsy.
O’Neill: This looks like it’s been doctored in some way. Let me rephrase that, when I say “doctored.” Like the stuff has been pushed back in, and it looks like more towards the end than at the beginning [of the autopsy]….
O’Neill: Quite frankly, I thought that there was a larger opening in the back … opening in the back of the head. (Volume I, page 31.) (emphasis added.)
In his excellent 5-volume book Inside the Assassination Records Review Board, Douglas P. Horne, who served on the ARRB, wrote that many of the autopsy witnesses at Bethesda supported what the people in Dallas had seen:
My own, more nuanced characterization follows. At the time the ARRB commenced its efforts, several autopsy eyewitnesses (Tom Robinson [from Joseph Gawler’s Sons, Inc. funeral home], [FBI agent] Frank O’Neill, [FBI agent] James Sibert, John Ebersole [Bethesda autopsy radiologist], Jan Gail Rudnicki [autopsy lab assistant]; x-ray technician Ed Reed; Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman; and Philip Wehle [commander of the Military District of Washington]) had given descriptions to the HSCA [House Select Committee on Assassinations] staff, or had drawn images for them, that were very reminiscent of the Dallas descriptions of the exit wound in the skull — indicating that a large portion of the back of the President’s head was missing… .(Italics in original; brackets added.]
Here’s something I just recently discovered about Jacqueline Kennedy in Philip Shenon’s new book on the JFK assassination, A Cruel and Shocking Act, a book which, interesting enough, points to many of the countless strange and unusual anomalies in the JFK case but then concludes with a defense of Warren Report’s lone-nut theory of the assassination.
Here is what Jacqueline Kennedy stated in her testimony before the Warren Commission:
Mr. RANKIN. Do you remember Mr. Hill coming to try to help on the car?
Mrs. KENNEDY. I don’t remember anything. I was just down like that. And finally I remember a voice behind me, or something, and then I remember the people in the front seat, or somebody, finally knew something was wrong, and a voice yelling, which must have been Mr. Hill, “Get to the hospital,”or maybe it was Mr. Kellerman, in the front seat. But someone yelling. I was just down and holding him Mr. RANKIN. Do you remember Mr. Hill coming to try to help on the car?
Mrs. KENNEDY. I don’t remember anything. I was just down like that. And finally I remember a voice behind me, or something, and then I remember the people in the front seat, or somebody, finally knew something was wrong, and a voice yelling, which must have been Mr. Hill, “Get to the hospital,”or maybe it was Mr. Kellerman, in the front seat. But someone yelling. I was just down and holding him. [Reference to wounds deleted.]
Do you notice that bracketed information? Those are not my brackets. They are the brackets of the Warren Commission.
Why would the Warren Commission delete Mrs. Kennedy’s reference to the wounds from her testimony? According to the website JFKLancer.com, assassination researchers had to file a lawsuit to get the government to disclose that portion of Mrs. Kennedy’s testimony. The government fiercely resisted the lawsuit but the researchers ultimately prevailed. Here is what Mrs. Kennedy stated that the government felt needed to be kept from the public:
I was trying to hold his hair on. From the front there was nothing — I suppose there must have been. But from the back you could see, you know, you were trying to hold his hair on, and his skull on.” (emphasis added)
Now, consider what Dr. Curtis says in that above-reference article in Canyon.com:
He detailed the membership of the Warren Commission and the intimidation tactics used by Arlen Specter, the counsel for the commission that interrogated him and the other medical staff, essentially forcing them into compromising their testimony to make it fit the “official version” that was essentially laid out by J. Edger Hoover, the director of the FBI and a Kennedy opponent, before the Warren Commission was organized.
With respect to the condition of the back of Kennedy’s head, somebody has to be lying. There is no way around it. Either Drs. McClelland and Curtis, FBI agents Sibert and O’Neil, Mrs. Kennedy, and all the other people who stated that the president had a large exit wound in the back of his head are lying or the government is lying with its official autopsy photographs that falsely and fraudulently depict the back of Kennedy’s head to be intact.
Isn’t it a shame that the U.S. national security state can’t just come clean after 50 years and admit that all these people were telling the truth about the back of Kennedy’s head and then explain to us why it felt it necessary to hide the fact that shots were fired at Kennedy from the front?