How the JFK conspiracy was born

Published on Sunday 23 November 2003 00:00

DR MALCOLM Perry was having salmon croquettes for lunch in the hospital canteen when the call came.

"President Kennedy has been shot," said the woman’s voice when he answered the pager. For the next three days Perry was at the epicentre of one of the most dramatic events of the 20th century.

Leaving his lunch unfinished, Perry walked calmly through the corridors of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Jack Kennedy was already lying bleeding in Emergency Room One having been rushed there from Dealey Plaza.

In the corner he noticed a dark-haired woman standing with her husband’s blood splattered down the front of her clothes.

Speaking from his Texas ranch after years of silence about his experiences, Perry has now recalled the events of that "bad weekend" in November 1963 when he not only watched Kennedy die, but also operated on a dying Lee Harvey Oswald.

And on the 40th anniversary of the assassination he has also admitted that he inadvertently sparked many of the hundreds of conspiracy theories about whether or not Oswald could have acted alone when he fired at the president’s motorcade from the sixth floor of the book depository.

The pager call was where it all started. "Dr Tom Shires," the woman’s voice said. Perry knew nobody usually called Shires, who was the hospital’s chief resident in surgery, for an emergency. And he was out of town for the day anyway. He put down his fork and went to the phone.

"This is Dr Perry taking Dr Shires’ page," said the doctor. "President Kennedy has been shot," the operator said. "They are bringing him into the emergency room right now."

Perry walked out of the cafeteria, down a flight of stairs, and pushed through a brown door. A nurse pointed him to Emergency Room One and Perry walked in. The room was narrow and had grey-tiled walls and a cream-coloured ceiling.

In the centre, on an aluminium hospital trolley, the president of the United States was on his back with a huge lamp glaring on his face.

Kennedy had been stripped of his jacket, shirt and T-shirt. A staff doctor was starting to place a tube down his throat to try to get him to draw breath.

Perry, then 34, threw his dark blue jacket on the floor and held out his hands while a nurse helped him put on surgical gloves. His first thought was that the president was bigger than he had imagined him to be.

He then stepped up to the aluminium trolley for what he knew only too well would be a hopeless attempt to keep Kennedy alive. The president’s chest was not moving and there was no heartbeat. The wound in the throat was small and neat, but blood was running out of it too fast. There was also a wound in the back of the head that had a huge flap. Blood covered the floor.

Perry called for a scalpel. He was going to perform a tracheotomy, opening the throat and inserting a tube into the windpipe. There was no anaesthesia but Kennedy could feel nothing now.

Other doctors and nurses were in the room by this time, along with the blood-stained Jacqueline Kennedy, but Perry concentrated only on the throat with the hole in it, and the chest, shining under the huge light.

As he finished the tracheotomy, Perry saw Dr Kemp Clark, chief of neurosurgery, coming through the door. Clark looked at Kennedy and then at Perry. His look told Perry something he already knew - there was no way to save the patient.

Despite this, Perry started to massage the president’s chest with his long fingers, trying to force a heartbeat. The trolley was too high and Perry, although 6ft 2in tall, was up on his toes to get better leverage. "Will somebody please get me a stool?" he said.

One was placed under him and for 10 minutes Perry continued to massage Kennedy’s chest. Over in a corner of the room, Clark kept watching the electrocardiogram. There was no response. Eventually he turned to Perry and said: "It’s too late, Mac." The IBM clock on the wall said it was 1pm on November 22, 1963 - the president was dead.

What followed was to haunt Perry for years to come. At the press conference where Kennedy’s death was announced, Perry faced a hysterical media pack. During his description of what happened in Emergency Room One he said that the hole in Kennedy’s throat looked like an entrance wound. Immediately after that he added: "Neither Dr Clark nor I know how many bullets there were or where they came from."

But it was too late. Many took the entrance wound statement to mean that the shot must have come from the front, not the back, and so Oswald could not have been a lone gunman.

"I shouldn’t have said anything," Perry says. "I was naive. I didn’t know how much trouble I could get into. I shouldn’t have surmised. If I hadn’t said that, there wouldn’t have been a conspiracy theory."

Of course, the drama wasn’t over yet for Perry because on the Sunday after the Friday on which Kennedy had died he was back at work operating on Lee Harvey Oswald who was shot in a Dallas police station by Jack Ruby.

"It was a bad weekend," he remembers. "A bad weekend and a bad aftermath."

Perry had one more moment in the spotlight when he appeared at the Warren Commission set up to investigate Kennedy’s death. He clarified his views about the throat wound, but he believes it was too late by then because the conspiracy theories had already begun to grow.

Since then he has hardly mentioned the events at Parkland. From 1978 until 1988 he was the head of vascular surgery at a hospital in New York where even those who knew who he was never mentioned the Kennedy shooting in front of him. It was the same in the elegant suburb of Larchmont where he lived. "They were wonderful neighbours," said Perry. "Nobody ever said, ‘Are you that person?’ I was discreet. I said little about those things."

LEGACY OF SUSPICION

FORTY years after the assassination of President Kennedy 51% of the US population still believe that there was a second gunman and that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone.

According to an ABC poll conducted earlier this month, 32% now accept Oswald was the lone killer when he fired from the Texas Book Depository in Dallas.

In other questions the poll asked, it was revealed that 70% of people said they thought the assassination was part of a broader plot, and more than two-thirds believed there was a government cover-up.

In 1966, three years after Kennedy’s death, 46% of people surveyed in a Harris poll believed the killing was part of a broader plot. By 1983, that number had reached 80% in an ABC poll.