Taking a secret to the grave

County View
John Healy

From UFOs to the moon landings, from Shergar to the Bermuda triangle, the world has never been short of conspiracy theories. And for every conspiracy theorist, there is always an audience ready to give willing credence. But without doubt, the mother of all conspiracy theories has been the Kennedy assassination, an event which at last count had spawned over a thousand books and countless documentaries, from the marginally credible to the outright bizarre.
But not all such theories can be easily discounted. Last month saw the death of a man who, more than most, was qualified to speak about the death of John F Kennedy but who, for nearly 60 years, had kept his silence.
Dr Robert McClelland was giving a lecture to medical students at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas on that fateful November morning in 1963 when a knock came to the lecture room door. Hurriedly, he was asked to come to the emergency room two floors down to help in a sudden crisis. His first sight was of Jackie Kennedy, seated in a folding chair in the foyer in blood stained clothing. Inside, President Kennedy lay on a trolley, the operating lights at full beam above him, his head a mass of blood and blood clots.
Surely, thought McClelland, these wounds were mortal, but yet his instinct was to do all he could to save a life. The emergency team worked on the fallen president; his neck wound was staunched, blood and fluids were pumped into his body, he was hooked to a ventilating machine. Dr McClelland found himself at the president’s head, staring into the back of the skull where bone and brain had been blasted away. The back of the head was gone, and the doctor knew Kennedy was dead.
Two days later, at the same hospital and the same emergency room, Dr McClelland was called on again. This time it was in a vain attempt to save the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, accused of the Kennedy murder, and who had been shot at close range in a Dallas police station. The doctor and his team worked on the patient’s heart for an hour before finally accepting that Oswald was beyond hope.
Asked why he had made such efforts to save Oswald, McClelland said he did so because that was his job, and secondly because Oswald had been accused but not convicted. But, most crucially of all, he believed that Oswald had not acted alone.
Dr McClelland was, by his own admission, no expert in physics or ballistics. But it was as a surgeon that he had formed his opinion about the Kennedy assassination, based on what he had seen with his own eyes that morning. There was a neck wound, which might have been entry or exit, but the back of the head clearly showed a huge exit wound. The first bullet had come from the back, and the second from the front, from two different gunmen. Beyond that he refused to speculate; he was, he said, no more qualified to do so than anyone else.
But there were other aspects of the Kennedy killing which troubled him greatly. There had been no post-mortem carried out in Texas, contrary to state law. The body had been sent at once to Maryland. Later, he was shown autopsy pictures at the National Archives in which the exit wound was covered up. A colleague in the trauma room that day had been sworn to silence. The members of the medical team were told to write their reports on a single sheet of paper.
Many times in the ensuing 56 years he had been asked to tell his story. Each time, he did so without embellishment, patiently and factually recounting his memory of that terrible day.
It was a fame he would rather not have had. And apart from that, Dr McClelland took his opinions to the grave.