Doctors who treated JFK in 1963 after his assassination in Dallas have broken their silence 60 year later in a new documentary. In JFK: What The Doctors Saw, which premieres on Paramount+ on Nov. 14, seven physicians who were present in Parkland Hospital’s Trauma Room 1 with Kennedy’s body say their observations of his wounds were silenced. Some say they feared repercussions for speaking up.
Parkland medical residents and students Ronald Jones, Lawrence Klein, Kenneth Salyer, Peter Loeb and Goldstrich, as well as Assistant Professor of Surgery Robert McClelland and Chief of Medicine Donald Seldin, were all present in the trauma room where the President died and described what they experienced in What The Doctors Saw.
Klein said that when the doctors heard that Kennedy was being brought to the hospital with a gunshot wound, he thought “‘Oh, it’s gonna be like John Wayne, he’ll be sitting on the gurney and it’d be like it’s only a flesh wound.’ I had no idea.”
“I do remember that very early on, even when his clothes were still on, I saw the wound in his neck,” Goldstrich said. “We could tell that the wound was in the front of the neck, just above where the shirt and tie was,” Jones added. “So it was visible to you.”
“He had a major wound on his right side of his head that was wide open with brain and loss of skull, and with the whole scalp peeled back,” Salyer added.
Those observations, which each of the doctors and several other medical staff shared and made note of that day at Parkland Hospital, would ultimately be swept under the rug, said Robert K. Tanenbaum, the Deputy Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1976 and ’77.
“The Parkland doctors were a serious problem for the U.S. government,” he said in the documentary, “because they provided evidence that there was a shooter somewhere in the front.” The narrative widely circulated at the time was that Lee Harvey Oswald, who was accused of shooting Kennedy, acted alone.
“In all probability, there was a conspiracy, i.e. there was one more than one shooter,” McClelland said.
The doctors didn’t come forward because they were afraid to be ‘targets’
Another doctor on site, Dr. Malcolm Perry, who has since died, addressed the public after the doctors officially declared the President dead on November 22, 1963. “At the press conference, Dr. Perry, in describing the wound here [pointing to his throat], said he thought that it looked like an entrance wound,” McClelland recalled.
“When he left the room, someone came up to him. Dr. Perry thought ‘Maybe he was a secret service man.’ And he told Dr. Perry, ‘You must never, ever say that that was an entrance wound again if you know what’s good for you.'”
The warning was effective. The doctors haven’t together publicly shared their observations for decades. Said lawyer and investigative journalist Mark Crumpton in the doc, “A lot of people just decided to keep their mouths shut, including the Parkland doctors.”
The reunion footage featured in the documentary of all of the doctors in the same room discussing the day they treated Kennedy had been unreleased for ten years. Many of them have died since the footage was taped in 2013.
Goldstrich, who was a 4th-year medical resident at the time he helped treat the President, said “I didn’t tell anybody for over 30 years that I was present in Trauma Room 1.”
“Because so many people did die who’d been involved in the assassination,” added Jones.
After Kennedy’s body was taken from Dallas back to D.C., the doctors say their observations were dismissed and contradicted by the government
Several of the doctors tell the story of how the Secret Service denied the city’s medical examiner an autopsy of Kennedy’s body, even though it was state law since the murder took place in Dallas. The body was instead taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy.
Although it wasn’t unusual for the federal government to trump state laws in matters of national security, said Crumpton, the autopsy that did take place would raise a lot of questions.
In the 2013 reunion footage of all seven doctors, they discuss seeing Kennedy’s autopsy photos for the first time. The back of Kennedy’s head, which by all their accounts and many others, had had a large gaping wound was “sewed up.”
Looking at the photos, Salyer said, “Obviously this has been tampered with because they’ve replaced the scalp that was wide open when I saw the wound. They’ve done that at the autopsy. That’s the work in Washington.”
“When I first saw the autopsy pictures, my first thought was that I wanted to tell everybody that that didn’t reflect what actually transpired,” Goldstrich said.
He’d said earlier in the documentary, “I didn’t want to be a target for those that had killed our president.”
Article Originally Posted Here.