Reclaiming History (22 page)

Dr. Perry steps over toward the ambulance gurney where the president is lying under the hot glare of an overhead lamp, a sheet over his lower extremities and trunk. He is surprised to find the president a bigger man than he thought, and is momentarily awed by the thought, “Here is the most important man in the world.” Perry quickly notes the deep blue color of his face and the short, jerky contractions of his chest and diaphragm as he struggles to draw a breath.
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12:43 p.m. (1:43 p.m. EST)

Robert Kennedy, the nation’s attorney general, had been in a good, even bouncy mood this morning. He called a meeting in his office with U.S. attorneys from around the country to report to him on his war against organized crime in their respective districts. As was his style, he loosened his tie, and with his suit coat hanging over a nearby chair, rolled up his shirt sleeves and got down to work with his associates. The news he received was encouraging. The mob was on the run. Breaking for lunch he got into his car with the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Robert Morgenthau, and Morgenthau’s chief deputy, Silvio Mollo, and drove to his Hickory Hill home in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. It was an unseasonably warm day for November 22, and the men and RFK’s wife, Ethel, took their lunch of clam chowder and tuna-fish sandwiches at an outdoor patio. When a pool-side extension phone rings nearby, Ethel leaves the table to answer it.

“It’s J. Edgar Hoover,” she says, holding the phone out toward her husband.

He knows something extraordinary has happened; Hoover never calls him, and certainly not at home. It is an open secret that there is no love lost between Hoover and RFK. Hoover had never been in a position before of having an attorney general who was closer to the president than he was, and he resented this. Also, RFK’s strong offensive against organized crime was, in effect, a slap in the face to Hoover in that it implied that the FBI had not been the gangbusters everyone had been brought up to think they were. RFK rises and crosses over to take the phone, “Hello?”

Morgenthau sees one of the workmen painting the new wing of the house spin and race toward them, clutching a transistor radio. He’s shouting something unintelligible.

“I have news for you,” Hoover says formally. “The president’s been shot. It’s believed to be fatal. I’ll call you back when I find out more.”

Bobby Kennedy turns away, his hand to his mouth. There is a look of shock and horror on his face. Ethel rushes to his side. For a few seconds he can’t speak. Then, he forces the words out: “Jack’s been shot. It may be fatal.”
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On the other side of Washington, the U.S. Senate press liaison officer, Richard Riedel, darts onto the Senate floor and gives the message of the president’s shooting to the first senator he encounters, S. L. Holland of Florida. He repeats the message to Senator Wayne Morse and then spots Senator Edward Kennedy on the dais, presiding over the chamber in a desultory debate over a bill on federal library services. He immediately rushes to the young senator.

“The most terrible thing has happened!” Riedel exclaims.

The senator, who is signing correspondence, looks up.

“What is it?”

“Your brother, the president,” Riedel says. “He’s been shot.”

Ted Kennedy gasps.

“No!” he says. “How do you know?”

“It’s on the ticker. Just came in on the ticker.”

Senator Kennedy quickly gathers up his papers and runs from the chamber. He knows he must get his sister Eunice and fly immediately to Hyannis Port to be with his mother and father. When Majority Leader Mike Mansfield learns the news, he is too overcome with grief to make a motion for adjournment.
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With the Senate in recess, senators and reporters rush to the “marble room,” the lobby behind the Senate chamber where UPI and AP printers (“tickers”) are slowly delivering the tragic and unfolding story on paper. A young CBS reporter, Roger Mudd, sees Richard B. Russell, the conservative, states-rights senator from Georgia who opposed civil rights legislation, bent over the cabinet enclosing the UPI ticker, reading the Teletype out loud to the crowd around him as tears are streaming down his face.
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A
t Parkland Hospital in Trauma Room Two, across the hall from the president, Dr. Robert R. Shaw attends to Governor Connally. Shaw, chief of thoracic surgery at Parkland, saw the motorcade fly past the intersection of Harry Hines and Industrial boulevards as he drove back to Parkland from Children’s Hospital. Continuing on to the medical school,
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where he expected to have lunch, he heard the news of the shooting on his car radio. At the medical school, he overheard a student telling three others that the president was dead on arrival at Parkland.

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” one of the three asked.

“No, I’m not. I saw him. And Governor Connally has been shot through the chest.”

Shaw sprinted over to the hospital’s emergency room, where he found the governor being attended by three doctors. Now, Connally complains of difficulty breathing due to a deep pain in the right side of his chest. He has apparently been conscious, except for brief moments, since the shooting. Shaw notes that the team has already put a tight occlusive dressing over the large sucking wound in the chest, and a rubber tube, connected to a water seal bottle, between the second and third ribs—an attempt to expand the collapsed right lung. Shaw steps outside for a moment to relay to Nellie Connally that a sample of the governor’s blood has been sent for cross-matching, and that a regular operating room two floors above has been alerted. A few minutes later, the team transports the governor upstairs by elevator.
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Across the hall, in Trauma Room One, Dr. Perry orchestrates the treatment of the president. Dr. Carrico finishes hooking up the respirator and flips the switch, pumping air into the president’s lungs. Carrico listens briefly to the president’s chest. His breathing is better, but still inadequate. Air is leaking from the small hole in the throat.
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Dr. Perry examines the chest briefly but can see no wound. He pushes up the body brace on the president’s left side to feel for his femoral pulse.
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There is none. Perry can see that the president is still struggling to breathe, despite the endotracheal tube Dr. Carrico inserted in his throat. Perry knows that a more effective air passage must be made immediately. He asks someone to bring him a tracheotomy tray as he snaps on a pair of surgical gloves, but finds there is already one there. Perry gestures toward a small hole in the throat. “Did you start a tracheotomy?” he asks Carrico.

“No,” Carrico replies, shaking his head. “That’s a wound.” Carrico had previously observed foamy blood oozing, with each attempt at respiration, from a small, fairly round wound in the front of the president’s throat just below and to the right of the Adam’s apple.
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Commencing a tracheotomy (incision into the windpipe), Dr. Perry grabs a scalpel and makes a quick, large incision directly through the hole in the throat.
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†

Other doctors are now arriving en masse. Dr. William Kemp Clark, the hospital’s senior neurosurgeon, pushes his way in and helps to withdraw Dr. Carrico’s endotracheal tube as Dr. Perry is about to insert a plastic tracheotomy tube directly into the windpipe.
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Drs. Charles R. Baxter and Robert N. McClelland, both general surgeons, along with urologist Dr. Paul C. Peters, assist Perry in inserting the tracheotomy tube, while Dr. Marion T. Jenkins, professor and chairman of Parkland’s Department of Anesthesiology, and his assistant, Dr. Adolph H. Giesecke Jr., hook up the tube to an anesthesia machine, which they had brought down from the Anesthesia Department on the second floor in order to better control the president’s circulation.
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Perry asks Dr. Peters to make an incision in the chest and insert a tube to drain any blood or air that might be accumulating in the right side of the chest cavity.
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Meanwhile, Dr. Ronald C. Jones inserts a chest tube into the left side of the chest, then, along with several other doctors (including surgery interns and residents Drs. Don T. Curtis, Kenneth E. Salyer, Martin C. White, and Charles A. Crenshaw),
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makes additional cutdowns on the president’s right and left arms and legs in order to quickly infuse blood and fluids into the circulatory system.
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The pace is very quick and intense. Dr. Clark works his way around closer to the president’s massive head wound. He exchanges a desperate glance with Perry. Both know there is no chance of saving the president. They are only going through the motions.
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Admiral George Burkley, the president’s personal physician, rushes into the room and immediately sees that the president’s condition is hopeless and death is certain. Whatever life might still exist in the motionless body on the gurney will be impossible to sustain no matter what the Parkland doctors do. He sees that the surgical team is working to supply type O RH-negative blood. He informs them that Kennedy’s type is O RH-positive
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and asks Dr. Peters to administer steroids to the president, essential because of the president’s adrenal deficiency, which leaves his body unable to cope with stress and trauma. He hands over three 100-milligram vials of Solu-Cortef, muttering, “Either intravenously or intramuscularly.”
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Burkley knows there is really no need for it, but knows also that they have to do everything they can.
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The president’s personal physician steps out into the corridor, where Mrs. Kennedy is sitting on a folding chair, dazed. Afraid that her husband’s death is imminent, she wants to go into the operating room.

“I’m going in there,” she murmurs.

Doris Nelson, the strong-muscled supervising nurse with plenty of starch in her collar, hears her and bars the door, the policy of the hospital, as with most hospitals, being not to allow relatives into an operating room.

“You can’t come in here,” she says sharply, setting her rubber-soled shoes against the frame of the door.

“I’m coming in, and I’m staying,” Mrs. Kennedy says and pushes. The nurse, considerably stronger, pushes back. Jackie Kennedy always used to bow to medical advice. She was young, and the doctors, she thought, always knew best. When she heard her husband calling her after his back operation in 1954, she tried to go to him, but no one would admit her and she backed off. Then, after the operation, when a specialist’s treatments began to fail, they talked her out of bringing in a consultant. The president subsequently suffered through four months of intense pain. She vowed then and there not to allow doctors and nurses to intimidate her.

“I’m
going
to get in that room,” she whispers fiercely to the nurse blocking the door.

The commotion attracts Admiral Burkley, who suggests that Mrs. Kennedy take a sedative.

“I want to be in there when he dies,” she tells him, and she refuses the sedation,
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wanting, it seems, to soak up as much pain as she can. To cheat pain at a moment like this, when her husband has suffered the most horrible wounds and was near death, would have diminished her and what they had meant to each other.

The admiral nods understandingly.

“It’s her right, it’s her prerogative,” he says as he leads her past the nurse, who mistakenly believes he is a Secret Service agent.

Looking shell-shocked, Mrs. Kennedy aimlessly circles the hospital gurney where technicians work feverishly on her husband’s body. Her hands are cupped in front of her, as if cradling something. As she passes Dr. Jenkins, she nudges him with her elbow and hands him what she has been nursing—a large chunk of brain tissue. Jenkins quickly gives it to a nearby nurse.
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The president’s physician ushers Mrs. Kennedy into a corner of the trauma room, now overflowing with people. She rests her cheek on Admiral Burkley’s shoulder, then drops briefly to the floor, closes her eyes and prays.
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T
he McWatters bus carrying Lee Oswald rumbles west on Elm Street, the smell of diesel exhaust permeating the floorboards. Between Poydras and Lamar, the driver pumps the air brakes as the bus rolls up behind traffic that is stalled for four blocks from the assassination scene. From the looks of it, they won’t be going anywhere soon. A man climbs out of a car stopped in front of the bus, and walks back. McWatters pulls the lever next to him and the front doors hiss open.

“I heard over my car radio that the president has been shot,” the man says.

The passengers are astonished. Some don’t believe it.

The woman across from Mrs. Bledsoe realizes in panic that the bus may not move for a very long time, and she has to catch a train at Union Station, four blocks away. She decides to walk, even if it means lugging her suitcase all that way. She asks McWatters if she can have a transfer so she can get back on the bus if it breaks free from traffic, and McWatters is happy to oblige.

Oswald gets up and asks McWatters for a transfer too, following the woman off the bus. He walks right past his former landlady again, and this time Mary Bledsoe thinks he might have recognized her. In any event, she is happy enough to see the last of him.
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T
he area around the entrance to the Depository is quickly growing chaotic. Dealey Plaza witnesses are offering various bits of information. Inspector Sawyer knows he will need help to handle the situation, and reaches for his car radio.

“We need more manpower down here at this Texas School Book Depository,” he says and instructs the dispatcher to have some squad cars pick up the officers stationed along the motorcade route and bring them down to the Depository.
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Officer E. W. Barnett, with Howard Brennan in tow, tells Sawyer that he has an eyewitness who saw the gunman.

“What did you see?” Sawyer asks Brennan.

The steelworker gives him a description of the man in the window and the inspector mashes the button on his car radio again: “The wanted person in this is a slender white male about thirty. Five foot ten. A hundred and sixty-five. And carrying a—what looked like—a 30-30 or some type of Winchester.”