Sunday, November 24, 2013

Dr. Donald T. Curtis confirms the front entrance wound in JFK's throat

 Another Doctor in Trauma Room One with President Kennedy on November 22, 1963 attests to the fact that the wound in JFK's throat was an entrance wound!  There was a second shooter from the front of the president.

 Texas doctor tried to save Kennedy's life

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.


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