A phone interview with Dr. Malcolm Perry who denies that he described the throat wound as a wound of entrance.
By Associated PressThursday, December 10, 2009
Malcolm O. Perry II, 80, who attended to President John F. Kennedy at Parkland Memorial Hospital after he was shot in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, died Dec. 5 in Tyler, Tex. He had lung cancer.
Dr. Perry was an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the teaching hospital for Parkland, and a vascular surgeon on the Parkland staff when he became the first staff surgeon to treat Kennedy.
In an extensive interview by the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination, Dr. Perry recalled taking the case over from the senior resident and checking the president's vital signs.
He found no vital signs but noted a convulsive effort to breathe. He performed a tracheotomy on the president while other staff doctors and surgeons gathered to help.
Dr. Perry and another surgeon performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Kennedy until no brain activity was detected on the trauma room instruments. At 1 p.m., Dr. Kemp Clark, the UT Southwestern neurosurgery chairman, declared Kennedy dead of a catastrophic head wound.
Dr. Robert McClelland was the last surgeon to attend to Kennedy in Trauma Room 1. McClelland, a longtime friend and colleague of Dr. Perry's, remembered that the shock of the situation faded quickly when they entered the trauma room.
"At Parkland, we're accustomed, all of us are, to treating many different cases," McClelland told the Associated Press on Monday. "Of course, it's the president," he said. Was it hard to put that aside? "No, not really. Everything was so rapidly happening that we were called on the peak of the moment."
Dr. Perry told the commission that the neck wound Kennedy suffered from the sniper's first rifle shot probably would not have been fatal.
However, he testified that neither he nor Clark could tell from where the bullets came.
The vascular surgeon also was one of the doctors to operate on presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who was shot by Jack Ruby two days after Kennedy's death.
After a long career, Dr. Perry retired in 2000 as professor emeritus of surgery at UT Southwestern. But McClelland, now 80, said that after the assassination, his friend never mentioned their role in the case and that they never discussed it, even between themselves.
"No, we didn't, for reasons he kept to himself," he said. "Immediately after, he had a bad experience with interviews that hurt him deeply. Whenever the subject threatened to come up, he'd raise an eyebrow and that would be that."
After a long career, Dr. Perry retired in 2000 as professor emeritus of surgery at UT Southwestern. But McClelland, now 80, said that after the assassination, his friend never mentioned their role in the case and that they never discussed it, even between themselves.
"No, we didn't, for reasons he kept to himself," he said. "Immediately after, he had a bad experience with interviews that hurt him deeply. Whenever the subject threatened to come up, he'd raise an eyebrow and that would be that."