82 The EconomistSeptember 28th 2019
H
e had probablytold the story 8,000 times but, each time he
was asked, Robert McClelland, “Dr Mac” to his colleagues and
students, would willingly begin again in his quiet, undramatic
way. At around 12.30 on November 22nd 1963, as he was showing
residents a film on how to repair a hiatus hernia at the Parkland
Memorial Hospital in Dallas, a little knock came at the door. And
he and a colleague were called away to the emergency room two
floors down. They half-grumbled on the way that they were often
called out to situations described as “terrible”, to find they really
weren’t that bad. This one was.
First, the elevator doors opened on a crowd of men in dark suits
and hats, shoulder to shoulder. He was in a suit himself; no time to
scrub up. Then he saw Jackie Kennedy, sitting on a folding chair in
bloody clothing; and next, along in Trauma Room 1, President Ken-
nedy himself, lying on a cart with the operating light full on him,
his head a mass of blood and blood clots, his face cyanotic, swollen
blue-black, with the eyes protuberant. He had been shot as his mo-
torcade drove through Dallas. For a moment, Dr McClelland stood
dumbfounded. Those wounds were surely mortal. But then he
pulled on his surgical gloves, determined like his colleagues to
make all possible attempts to revive him. That was his job.
Most vital was to establish an airway, then replace the blood. A
tracheotomy had been begun through the wound in the anterior of
the president’s neck, so he joined in, using a retractor to hold the
incision open. Meanwhile, unmatched blood and fluids were be-
ing pumped into the president and an anesthesia machine was as-
sisting his breathing, for they all saw a possible agonal respiration,
and his heart was working. Yet Dr McClelland, standing for ten
minutes at his post at the president’s head, found himself staringdeep into the occipital part of the skull, where both bone and brain
had been blasted away. He told his colleagues that the back of the
head was gone. Such a wound could not be repaired, then or de-
cades later for that matter. At 1pm Kennedy was pronounced dead.
Afterwards they were asked to write reports on a single sheet of
paper. Then it was back to work. They were shaken, but barely
talked about it. He took his bloodied suit to the cleaner’s—had to,
as he only had two—but kept his shirt unwashed in a box. He had
seen Lincoln’s bloody shirt on display in Washington, and was fas-
cinated both by the man and by the surgeon’s attempts to save him
after that pistol shot a century before. On his own shirt the presi-
dent’s blood had pooled at the cuff above his surgical gloves.
Resuscitation was not his speciality. He was, and increasingly
became over the next six decades, an expert in hepato-pancreato-
biliary surgery, specialising in resections of the liver, and famous
round Dallas-Fort Worth for turning up at hospitals with Lin
clamps in his car, ready to control any bleeding from the portal
vein. But gunshot trauma was hardly unusual at Parkland. In 1963
he had been only a year in the surgical faculty, but he had also done
a summer job and a general-surgery residency there, before be-
coming a full-time instructor of surgery in the next-door Universi-
ty of Texas Southwestern Medical School. In that time he had seen
at least 200 gunshot wounds, for it was a city-county hospital for
indigent patients, many of whom got mixed up in shootings.
Two days later he was busy on yet another. The tv news told
him that Lee Harvey Oswald, arrested for the killing of Kennedy,
had been shot in turn, and he raced to Parkland to save him if he
could. This was a pistol shot at close range to the abdomen, surviv-
able if straight front-to-back. But Oswald had flinched aside—as
anyone would—and the bullet had gone across the left side to the
back, injuring the aorta and vena cava and causing such blood loss
that he was white as a piece of paper. Again, Dr McClelland thought
him unsalvageable. But he tried, opening Oswald’s chest to mas-
sage his heart for fully 40 minutes, taking turns, before the heart
grew flabbier and flabbier and then arrested for good.
He was often asked why he had made such efforts to save him.
First, because that was his job; second, because Oswald had been
accused but not convicted. And he did not believe that Oswald had
acted alone. He was no expert in physics or ballistics, and his
knowledge of how bodies reacted to bullets was drawn mainly
from deer-hunting in East Texas where he had grown up, eager to
be a doctor like his grandfather. Still less did he have time for those
nuts, conspiracy theorists. But he lived and breathed first-hand
surgical experience. His office groaned with medical journals, and
in 1974, with $2,700 from the bank, he started Selected Readings in
General Surgery, a collection of the most useful new articles to save
weary students searching. It became so popular that, at one time,
some 60% of America’s general-surgery residents were taking it.
He would also happily scrub up and sit in on procedures if any
resident asked him, working quietly on his laptop, assisting if
needed. And it was as a surgeon that he formed his opinion about
the Kennedy assassination, simply from what he saw that day. The
neck wound might have been entry or exit, but the back of the head
clearly showed a huge exit wound; so the first bullet probably came
from the back, and the second from the front, from different gun-
men. He refused to speculate beyond that; he was no more quali-
fied to do that than anyone else. On that day he just did what he was
trained to do, the best way he could, as they all did.
Several other aspects went on troubling him. There was no
post-mortem in Texas, against state law; the body went at once to
Bethesda. He was shown autopsy pictures at the National Archives
in which the exit wound was covered up. A colleague in Trauma
Room 1 was sworn to silence. As the official account of the lone
gunman settled in stone, he felt impelled to live and relive a story
that was clearer in his mind’s eye than the faces of his listeners:
how he had stood staring into Kennedy’s empty skull, how he had
held Oswald’s struggling heart in his hands. 7Robert McClelland, doctor of medicine, died on September
10th, aged 89To save a life
Obituary Robert McClelland