A surgery was scheduled for the afternoon, and Don Curtis thought it
best to get a bite to eat in the Parkland Hospital cafeteria while he
could. At about 12:30 p.m., the same ahead seemed routine, or as routine
as it could be in a hospital.
Curtis, who grew up in Amarillo, was 26. He was a resident in oral and maxillofacial surgery at Parkland in Dallas.
But Curtis soon felt the weight of history was thrust upon him.
“I saw what I thought was the president’s car, and it looked like it
had just arrived at the ER entrance,” Curtis said. “I was walking down
the hall, and a policeman ran up to me and said, ‘Are you a doctor?’ I
said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘Hurry, come with me.’”
In a matter of seconds, about 12:45 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1963, young Dr.
Curtis was in Trauma Room 1 along with Dr. Charles Carrico and a nurse
futilely attempting to save the life of President John F. Kennedy.
Curtis didn’t have time to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the
moment. He didn’t have time for anxiety. All he could do was be a
doctor.
Carrico was at the president’s head. He placed an endotracheal tube
down the president’s throat and applied a respirator into the tube to
maintain artificial respiration.
Curtis then unbuttoned Kennedy’s bloody shirt and saw what he was
certain was a bullet entrance wound in the pretracheal area of the
throat. There was large swelling and blood on the president’s neck.
Curtis then moved toward Kennedy’s ankle to perform a cutdown, where an incision is made and a vein is dissected for a catheter.
“I pulled the president’s pants leg up and saw a piece of his brain
and that gave me a clue his prognosis was not good,” Curtis said.
By then, the trauma room was filled with every senior doctor as they watched their colleagues work on the president.
Another doctor stepped in to replace Dr. Kemp Clark, a neurosurgeon
who’d been working on Kennedy. He pulled up the president’s head to
examine the back. Then came the words that will always stay with Curtis.
“He said, ‘Stop. Stop resuscitation. This is incompatible with life.’”
The room was quiet.
“No one knew what to say,” Curtis said. “We just stood there looking at each other.”
With all the hospital chiefs there, Curtis — a first-year resident —
thought it best to now excuse himself. But Jackie Kennedy, the
presidents’s wife, blocked his exit.
So he remained as each chief examined the fatal head wound and left.
Curtis, too, said he “got a good look at it.” The cerebellum of the
brain was gone.
Curtis went to tell the patient scheduled for afternoon surgery it
was postponed. He made his rounds and then went home. In a meeting the
following Monday, one day after assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was killed,
the doctors there came to an understanding they would mention as little
of what they had seen as possible.
That is until President Lyndon Johnson put together the Warren
Commission, a group charged with investigating the assassination. In
short time, Curtis had a pre-interview with special counsel Arlen
Specter.
To Curtis, it seemed the future Pennsylvania senator was trying to
sway, if not intimidate, him about Kennedy’s wounds. Curtis, along with
several other Parkland doctors, he said, thought the throat wound was an
entrance wound, not an exit one, which would mean more than one
assassin.
Specter kept pushing that he see it as an exit wound or a hematoma.
Curtis believed later that narrative fit the official Warren report
version that Oswald acted alone.
Fifty years ago, there were no burgeoning conspiracy controversies.
Curtis, familiar with gunshot wounds from his trauma room work at
Parkland, just knew what he saw.
In the official deposition with the Warren Commission on March 24,
1964, Specter asked Curtis 57 questions. Specter’s questions danced
around the throat wound.
Curtis tried to put that time behind him. He went on to a long and distinguished career in Amarillo.
It unnerved him, he said, that of around 1,400 people called to
testify before the Warren Commission, 118 died unusual and sometimes
mysterious deaths. Oliver Stone’s 1991 conspiracy-centric movie, “JFK,”
didn’t help.
When the Warren Commission released its report in September 1964,
more than 80 percent of Americans believed the veracity of its
conclusion that Oswald was a lone demented gunman. Since then,
conspiracies have sprouted and never gone away. According to a Gallup
poll last month, 61 percent of Americans — including Curtis — believe
the assassination was a conspiracy, though that’s down from 75 percent
in 2003.
There are those who have known Curtis for 40 years who didn’t know his place in history.
Only as the 50th anniversary approached has he broken his silence,
first with a civic club or two, then two weeks ago, at an event at West
Texas A&M University.
He could be the only living witness to the events in Trauma Room 1 at
Parkland on that day a half-century ago. It’s a notion that has
impacted him.
“Through the years, it has been of little interest to me,” Curtis
said, “but it has become worrisome to me in the last year. It was a
terrible event. And it is still worrisome to me that I can’t reconcile
my knowledge of what I saw with the findings of the government.”
• Jon Mark Beilue is an AGN Media columnist. He can be reached at
jon.beilue@amarillo.com or (806) 345-3318. His blog and video blog appear on amarillo.com.
