James C Jenkins - JFK Autopsy Pathologist

[Ron Bulman]

Jenkins book, At The Cold Shoulder Of History, came in yesterday.  I'm just getting started on it.  In the forward John Barbour mentions his 1981 interview of Garrison stating:  "...showing me Dr. McClelland's death certificate signed shortly after 1:30: "Death by gunshot wound to the right temple.".  

I guess I just missed this in all the years of reading books, websites, watching videos and going to see Dr. McClelland speak once.  I never remember hearing of him filling out a death certificate, much less that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the right temple.  I think that would have caught my attention.  Did I just miss it or is this something that's been ignored, suppressed, lost or destroyed?  Or is it something maybe available through say Mary Ferrell, City of Dallas death records or elsewhere?  Was Garrison's copy stolen by the CIA plant that stole other evidence from his office?

[Sandy Larsen]

27 minutes ago, Ron Bulman said:

In the forward John Barbour mentions his 1981 interview of Garrison stating:  "...showing me Dr. McClelland's death certificate signed shortly after 1:30: "Death by gunshot wound to the right temple.".

 

A Google search for the phrase "Death by gunshot wound to the right temple" bring up no relevant results other than Jenkins' book. So it seems that this death certificate is pretty much unknown to the world.

Of course, there is an extant death certificate for JFK. I don't know why another one would have been made.

 

[Ron Bulman]

I don't believe a death certificate by McClelland is unreasonable.  I know one by JFK's physician, Admiral Burkley was done after the fact,  after he was back in Washington, after he helped direct the autopsy.  However, I've thought for years JFK died in Dealy Plaza when his brains were publicly blown out there.  Yet he still had a faint pulse when he arrived at Parkland.  Thus he technically died there.  And the doctors in attendance, the hospital, and the city of Dallas would have officially would have wanted to proclaim in writing such for the record.  I.E., he was not still alive, officially, when he was put on Air force One and left the city for Washington.

I wish I'd known about this the one time I saw Dr. McClelland speak.  I'd of liked to asked him about it.  As well as that part about the right temple entrance wound.

[Pat Speer]

McClelland did not fill out a death certificate. But he has said an awful lot of stuff at odds with what most CTs presume he has said. And in this regard, he's not unlike Jenkins, who moved the large head wound to the back of the head for his book.

From Chapter 18d at patspeer.com.

The McClelland Dilemma

PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

ADMISSION NOTE

DATE AND HOUR Nov. 22, 1963 4:45 P.M. DOCTOR: Robert N. McClelland

Statement Regarding Assassination of President Kennedy

At approximately 12:45 PM on the above date I was called from the second floor of  Parkland Hospital and went immediately to the Emergency Operating Room. When I arrived President Kennedy was being attended by Drs Malcolm Perry, Charles Baxter, James Carrico, and Ronald Jones. The President was at the time comatose from a massive gunshot wound of the head with a fragment wound of the trachea. An endotracheal tube and assisted respiration was started immediately by Dr. Carrico on Duty in the EOR when the President arrived. Drs. Perry, Baxter, and I then performed a tracheotomy for respiratory distress and tracheal injury and Dr. Jones and Paul Peters inserted bilateral anterior chest tubes for pneumothoracis secondary to the tracheomediastinal injury. Simultaneously Dr. Jones had started 3 cut-downs giving blood and fluids immediately, In spite of this, at 12:55 he was pronounced dead by Dr. Kemp Clark the neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery who arrived immediately after I did. The cause of death was due to massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple. He was pronounced dead after external cardiac message failed and ECG activity was gone.

Robert N. McClelland M.D.
Asst. Prof. of Surgery
Southwestern Med.
School of Univ of Tex.
Dallas, Texas

(Note: in this, his earliest statement on the assassination, Dr. McClelland reveals that he was easily confused and prone to speculation. First of all, he gets himself all turned around and mistakenly says there was a wound in the left temple. He says nothing of a wound on the back of the head or behind the ear. As but one head wound was noted at Parkland, and as no competent doctor would mention a wound he did not see while failing to mention the one he did, it seems probable McClelland meant to say this wound was of the right temple, not left.

Now, hold it right there, some might be thinking. How do we know McClelland didn't see a small wound on the left temple? Well, first, there are his subsequent statements. And second, there are the words of Parkland nurse Diana Bowron, who told Harrison Livingstone in 1993: "When we prepared the body, I washed as much blood as I could from the hair; while doing this, I did not see any other wound either in the temples or in other parts of the head." Well, there it is. NO small entrance wound was noted by the doctors or nurses at Parkland.

 

In light of the fact many conspiracy theorists cite McClelland as the most reliable of the Parkland witnesses, McClelland's next statements are even more intriguing. McClelland was the prime source for the 12-18-63 article by Richard Dudman published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in which the Secret Service's visit to the Parkland doctors, and its attempt to get them to agree Kennedy's throat wound was an exit, was first revealed. And yet McClelland told Dudman that after being told of the wound on Kennedy's back "he and Dr. Perry fully accept the Navy Hospital’s explanation of the course of the bullets." And yet he told Dudman "I am fully satisfied that the two bullets that hit him were from behind." And yet he told Dudman "As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to suspect that any shots came from the front." Repeat...NO reason to suspect any shots came from the front... That's right...in the very article most conspiracy theorists believe first exposed the government's cover-up of Kennedy's wounds, Dr. McClelland, the man they consider the most credible of the Parkland witnesses, spelled out--and made CRYSTAL CLEAR--that he did not think the large head wound he observed was an exit wound on the far back of the head.

This is confirmed yet again by the first article on the wounds published in a medical journal. Three Patients at Parkland, published in the January 1964 Texas State Journal of Medicine, was based upon the Parkland doctors' 11-22 reports, and repeated their descriptions of Kennedy's wounds and treatment word for word. Well, almost. In one of its few deviations, it changed Dr. McClelland's initial claim Kennedy was pronounced dead "at 12:55" to his being "pronounced dead at 1:00." This was an obvious correction of an innocent mistake. In what one can only assume was another correction of an innocent mistake, moreover, it re-routed Dr. McClelland's initial claim "The cause of death was due to massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple" to the more acceptable "The cause of death, according to Dr. McClelland was the massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the right side of the head." Right side of the head. Not back of the head. While some might wish to believe the writer and/or editor of this article took it upon himself to make this change without consulting Dr. McClelland, and that he'd changed it to fit the "official" story, the fact of the matter is there was NO official story on the head wounds at this point, beyond the descriptions of the wound in the reports of McClelland's colleagues published elsewhere in the article. And these, in sum, described a wound on the back of the head. It seems likely, then, that McClelland himself was responsible for this change.

In any event, on March 21, 1964, Dr. McClelland testified before the Warren Commission. In contrast to his earlier statements, he now claimed: “As I took the position at the head of the table that l have already described, to help out with the tracheotomy, I was in such a position that I could very closely examine the head wound, and I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted. It had been shattered ... the parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seemed to be fractured almost along its right posterior half, as well as some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral half, and this sprung open the bones that I mentioned in such a way that you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that probably a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out.” 

Note that McClelland specifies both that he was at the head of the table helping out with the tracheotomy when he examined Kennedy's head wound, and that this put him in position to closely examine the wound. Here is Figure PR10.1, "Position for Tracheotomy", from the textbook Emergency Medicine (edited by Harold May, 1984):

 

This closely mirrors the position on the slide above. Note that in order to expose the neck the head is tilted sharply backwards in the tracheotomy position. So how in the heck could McClelland 1) closely examine a wound low on the back of Kennedy's head while Kennedy was in such a position and he (McClelland) was standing at the head of the table? and 2) claim his standing at the head of the table put him in "such a position that I could very closely examine the head wound"?

McClelland's words only make sense if the wound he was observing was on the front half of Kennedy's head. It seems likely then that McClelland, as Clark, was confused by the rotation of Kennedy’s head. 

And it seems just as likely McClelland is not the man many if not most conspiracy theorists assume him to be. Notes on a 12-1-71 interview of McClelland by researcher Harold Weisberg reveal that McClelland "volunteered at some length about Garrison's men, describing Garrison as a psychopath, and seemed proud that he had talked them out of calling him as a witness...McC was quite bitter about Garrison and Lane, but he was without complaint about Specter and the Warren Commission..."

So there it is. Dr. Robert McClelland--whom many conspiracy theorists believe an unshakeable truth-teller--was a supporter of the Warren Commission's for years and years after the assassination--to such an extent even that he refused to cooperate with Jim Garrison's attempts to re-open the case. Well, is it any wonder then that McClelland, while continuing to insist he saw a wound on the back of Kennedy's head, repeatedly defended the legitimacy of the autopsy photos? And that he told the producers of the television show Nova in 1988 that "I find no discrepancy between the wounds as they're shown very vividly in these photographs and what I remember very vividly?"

And is it any wonder then that in both his Nova appearance and ARRB testimony McClelland ventured that the back of the head photo depicts sagging scalp pulled over a large occipito-parietal wound? Now this is strange indeed. Scalp overlying explosive wounds to the skull does not stretch and sag, it tears. No such tears were noted on the back of Kennedy's head at autopsy, and none are shown in the autopsy photos whose legitimacy McClelland defends. 

And it's not as if NOVA was the end of McClelland's strange ride...in which he defended the authenticity of the autopsy photos, while describing wounds at odds with the autopsy photos. A May 19, 1992 Newsday article by Steve Wick for which Dr. Humes was interviewed--and in which Humes claimed there was no conspiracy and all the shots came from the rear--also featured some quotes from McClelland, in which he similarly argued those claiming there was an exit wound on the back of Kennedy's head were mistaken. McClelland told Newsday: "I saw the wound more closely than anybody...There was a massive wound on the back rear portion of his head. There's no way you can tell, based on a wound that size, which way he was shot."

I mean, McClelland is as erratic as can be. Where he once assured journalists suspecting shots came from the front that "there is no reason to suspect that any shots came from the front," and where he later told researchers he'd created a drawing in which an exit wound behind Kennedy's right ear was depicted, he now tells crowds --such at that at the 2013 Wecht conference--that 1) "the whole right side of his skull was gone;" 2) the appearance of this wound--and not its location--suggested it was an exit wound; 3) it was Kennedy's response to this shot in the Zapruder film that convinced him the shot came from the front...and 4) he'd never been pressured into lying about Kennedy's wounds! The man's recollections are just not reliable.

[Sandy Larsen]

6 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

McClelland did not fill out a death certificate. But he has said an awful lot of stuff at odds with what most CTs presume he has said. And in this regard, he's not unlike Jenkins, who moved the large head wound to the back of the head for his book.

From Chapter 18d at patspeer.com.

The McClelland Dilemma

PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL

ADMISSION NOTE

DATE AND HOUR Nov. 22, 1963 4:45 P.M. DOCTOR: Robert N. McClelland

Statement Regarding Assassination of President Kennedy

At approximately 12:45 PM on the above date I was called from the second floor of  Parkland Hospital and went immediately to the Emergency Operating Room. When I arrived President Kennedy was being attended by Drs Malcolm Perry, Charles Baxter, James Carrico, and Ronald Jones. The President was at the time comatose from a massive gunshot wound of the head with a fragment wound of the trachea. An endotracheal tube and assisted respiration was started immediately by Dr. Carrico on Duty in the EOR when the President arrived. Drs. Perry, Baxter, and I then performed a tracheotomy for respiratory distress and tracheal injury and Dr. Jones and Paul Peters inserted bilateral anterior chest tubes for pneumothoracis secondary to the tracheomediastinal injury. Simultaneously Dr. Jones had started 3 cut-downs giving blood and fluids immediately, In spite of this, at 12:55 he was pronounced dead by Dr. Kemp Clark the neurosurgeon and professor of neurosurgery who arrived immediately after I did. The cause of death was due to massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple. He was pronounced dead after external cardiac message failed and ECG activity was gone.

Robert N. McClelland M.D.
Asst. Prof. of Surgery
Southwestern Med.
School of Univ of Tex.
Dallas, Texas

(Note: in this, his earliest statement on the assassination, Dr. McClelland reveals that he was easily confused and prone to speculation. First of all, he gets himself all turned around and mistakenly says there was a wound in the left temple. He says nothing of a wound on the back of the head or behind the ear. As but one head wound was noted at Parkland, and as no competent doctor would mention a wound he did not see while failing to mention the one he did, it seems probable McClelland meant to say this wound was of the right temple, not left.

Now, hold it right there, some might be thinking. How do we know McClelland didn't see a small wound on the left temple? Well, first, there are his subsequent statements. And second, there are the words of Parkland nurse Diana Bowron, who told Harrison Livingstone in 1993: "When we prepared the body, I washed as much blood as I could from the hair; while doing this, I did not see any other wound either in the temples or in other parts of the head." Well, there it is. NO small entrance wound was noted by the doctors or nurses at Parkland.

 

In light of the fact many conspiracy theorists cite McClelland as the most reliable of the Parkland witnesses, McClelland's next statements are even more intriguing. McClelland was the prime source for the 12-18-63 article by Richard Dudman published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, in which the Secret Service's visit to the Parkland doctors, and its attempt to get them to agree Kennedy's throat wound was an exit, was first revealed. And yet McClelland told Dudman that after being told of the wound on Kennedy's back "he and Dr. Perry fully accept the Navy Hospital’s explanation of the course of the bullets." And yet he told Dudman "I am fully satisfied that the two bullets that hit him were from behind." And yet he told Dudman "As far as I am concerned, there is no reason to suspect that any shots came from the front." Repeat...NO reason to suspect any shots came from the front... That's right...in the very article most conspiracy theorists believe first exposed the government's cover-up of Kennedy's wounds, Dr. McClelland, the man they consider the most credible of the Parkland witnesses, spelled out--and made CRYSTAL CLEAR--that he did not think the large head wound he observed was an exit wound on the far back of the head.

This is confirmed yet again by the first article on the wounds published in a medical journal. Three Patients at Parkland, published in the January 1964 Texas State Journal of Medicine, was based upon the Parkland doctors' 11-22 reports, and repeated their descriptions of Kennedy's wounds and treatment word for word. Well, almost. In one of its few deviations, it changed Dr. McClelland's initial claim Kennedy was pronounced dead "at 12:55" to his being "pronounced dead at 1:00." This was an obvious correction of an innocent mistake. In what one can only assume was another correction of an innocent mistake, moreover, it re-routed Dr. McClelland's initial claim "The cause of death was due to massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the left temple" to the more acceptable "The cause of death, according to Dr. McClelland was the massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound of the right side of the head." Right side of the head. Not back of the head. While some might wish to believe the writer and/or editor of this article took it upon himself to make this change without consulting Dr. McClelland, and that he'd changed it to fit the "official" story, the fact of the matter is there was NO official story on the head wounds at this point, beyond the descriptions of the wound in the reports of McClelland's colleagues published elsewhere in the article. And these, in sum, described a wound on the back of the head. It seems likely, then, that McClelland himself was responsible for this change.

In any event, on March 21, 1964, Dr. McClelland testified before the Warren Commission. In contrast to his earlier statements, he now claimed: “As I took the position at the head of the table that l have already described, to help out with the tracheotomy, I was in such a position that I could very closely examine the head wound, and I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted. It had been shattered ... the parietal bone was protruded up through the scalp and seemed to be fractured almost along its right posterior half, as well as some of the occipital bone being fractured in its lateral half, and this sprung open the bones that I mentioned in such a way that you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that probably a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out.” 

Note that McClelland specifies both that he was at the head of the table helping out with the tracheotomy when he examined Kennedy's head wound, and that this put him in position to closely examine the wound. Here is Figure PR10.1, "Position for Tracheotomy", from the textbook Emergency Medicine (edited by Harold May, 1984):

 

This closely mirrors the position on the slide above. Note that in order to expose the neck the head is tilted sharply backwards in the tracheotomy position. So how in the heck could McClelland 1) closely examine a wound low on the back of Kennedy's head while Kennedy was in such a position and he (McClelland) was standing at the head of the table? and 2) claim his standing at the head of the table put him in "such a position that I could very closely examine the head wound"?

McClelland's words only make sense if the wound he was observing was on the front half of Kennedy's head. It seems likely then that McClelland, as Clark, was confused by the rotation of Kennedy’s head. 

And it seems just as likely McClelland is not the man many if not most conspiracy theorists assume him to be. Notes on a 12-1-71 interview of McClelland by researcher Harold Weisberg reveal that McClelland "volunteered at some length about Garrison's men, describing Garrison as a psychopath, and seemed proud that he had talked them out of calling him as a witness...McC was quite bitter about Garrison and Lane, but he was without complaint about Specter and the Warren Commission..."

So there it is. Dr. Robert McClelland--whom many conspiracy theorists believe an unshakeable truth-teller--was a supporter of the Warren Commission's for years and years after the assassination--to such an extent even that he refused to cooperate with Jim Garrison's attempts to re-open the case. Well, is it any wonder then that McClelland, while continuing to insist he saw a wound on the back of Kennedy's head, repeatedly defended the legitimacy of the autopsy photos? And that he told the producers of the television show Nova in 1988 that "I find no discrepancy between the wounds as they're shown very vividly in these photographs and what I remember very vividly?"

And is it any wonder then that in both his Nova appearance and ARRB testimony McClelland ventured that the back of the head photo depicts sagging scalp pulled over a large occipito-parietal wound? Now this is strange indeed. Scalp overlying explosive wounds to the skull does not stretch and sag, it tears. No such tears were noted on the back of Kennedy's head at autopsy, and none are shown in the autopsy photos whose legitimacy McClelland defends. 

And it's not as if NOVA was the end of McClelland's strange ride...in which he defended the authenticity of the autopsy photos, while describing wounds at odds with the autopsy photos. A May 19, 1992 Newsday article by Steve Wick for which Dr. Humes was interviewed--and in which Humes claimed there was no conspiracy and all the shots came from the rear--also featured some quotes from McClelland, in which he similarly argued those claiming there was an exit wound on the back of Kennedy's head were mistaken. McClelland told Newsday: "I saw the wound more closely than anybody...There was a massive wound on the back rear portion of his head. There's no way you can tell, based on a wound that size, which way he was shot."

I mean, McClelland is as erratic as can be. Where he once assured journalists suspecting shots came from the front that "there is no reason to suspect that any shots came from the front," and where he later told researchers he'd created a drawing in which an exit wound behind Kennedy's right ear was depicted, he now tells crowds --such at that at the 2013 Wecht conference--that 1) "the whole right side of his skull was gone;" 2) the appearance of this wound--and not its location--suggested it was an exit wound; 3) it was Kennedy's response to this shot in the Zapruder film that convinced him the shot came from the front...and 4) he'd never been pressured into lying about Kennedy's wounds! The man's recollections are just not reliable.

I'm sure it won't come as a surprise to Pat (and a lot of other forum members) that I vehemently disagree with him on this... in fact nearly everything he wrote about McClelland and pasted here. If anybody is interested, they can read my exchange with him on this very topic almost precisely one year ago today:    (Maybe we should make this an annual tradition.  )
 

McClelland always insisted that there was a large hole on the back of the head and that he saw cerebellar tissue oozing from it. He said, “That’s where there was a massive hole in the back of his head. I looked at that hole from 18 inches for about 12 minutes.”

McClelland's supposed self-contractions pointed out by Pat fall into two categories. One is where someone is reporting what McClelland believed. That is hearsay and can easily be countered with official McClelland statements and testimony. Second is where Pat makes a big deal about something McClelland said or didn't say. For example, Pat points out where McClelland said the gaping wound was on the right side of the head. According to Pat, the wound therefore couldn't be on the rear of the head because McClelland didn't say so. Well Pat, he didn't say the wound was at the top of the head either (where you believe it was). So are we to conclude that the gaping wound was on the right ear?

Nearly every medical professional at Parkland said in their early statements that there was a large wound on the back right side of the head. Don't take my word for it... read Dr. Aguilar's comprehensive list of medical witness statements here:  http://www.assassinationweb.com/ag6.htm .  Scroll down to the numbered list.

Since Pat believes that the autopsy photos are authentic, he has no choice than to discredit the Parkland witnesses. And that is what he is doing with McClelland here.

(My opinions.)

(Sorry to contradict you Pat... I have to defend what I strongly believe is correct.)

 

[Cliff Varnell]

18 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Since Pat believes that the autopsy photos are authentic, he has no choice than to discredit the Parkland witnesses. And that is what he is doing with McClelland here.

Pat concluded the autopsy photos were genuine before he did any research on the case.

Reaching a conclusion prior to investigation is academic malpractice.

[Ron Bulman]

"Dr. Finick and Humes started examining the head wounds.  They found a small wound on the right side of the head in the temporal area just forward of and slightly above the right ear. … Dr. Humes was called to the gallery to talk to one of the people who came in with him who seemed to be directing the autopsy.  I was later told this was Dr. Burkley (Admiral), the president's personal physician.  Dr. Humes came back to the table and immediately directed Dr. Finick away from the small wound in the temple to the large posterior head wound.  The temple wound was abandoned and never returned to that night."  Jenkins, Pg. 16, Cold Shoulder. 

[Cory Santos]

I believe In the new records release there is mention of the surgeon generals report documenting a frontal shot as well. 

[Sandy Larsen]

9 minutes ago, Cory Santos said:

I believe In the new records release there is mention of the surgeon generals report documenting a frontal shot as well. 

Wow, I'd love to see that.

 

[Cory Santos]

36 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Wow, I'd love to see that.

 

Sandy I’ll see if I can find it for you. 

[Ron Bulman]

47 minutes ago, Sandy Larsen said:

Wow, I'd love to see that.

 

Me too.  I never knew there was a surgeon general's report on the assassination or autopsy.

[James DiEugenio]

No there is not.  Someone asked me that question on a show once and I discovered that there is no such a report.  Its just something someone said at a dinner.

[Pat Speer]

4 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Pat concluded the autopsy photos were genuine before he did any research on the case.

Reaching a conclusion prior to investigation is academic malpractice.

Nonsense, Cliff. For years, I thought the back of the head photo was faked in some way to hide that there was a wound low on the back of the head. I did so UNTIL I began researching the case full-time and realized the irrefutable fact that many if not most of the conspiracy theorists to write about the medical evidence have grossly misrepresented the statements and/or credibility of the so-called Parkland witnesses, and have pretended these witnesses supported the accuracy of the so-called McClelland drawing, when they actually did not.

To bring this back to topic, moreover, it should be noted that, with his new book, James Jenkins has changed his recollections of the head wound location to a more agreeable location to these conspiracy theorists.

 

 

[Pat Speer]

5 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

McClelland always insisted that there was a large hole on the back of the head and that he saw cerebellar tissue oozing from it.

 

No, he didn't. The historical record is all we have, Sandy, and it is quite clear in that McClelland initially said the wound was of the temple, and that there was nothing about it to suggest the shot came from the front. Like it or not, this is a major blow to the widespread belief there was a "blow-out" wound low on the back of Kennedy's head.

[Cory Santos]

3 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

Me too.  I never knew there was a surgeon general's report on the assassination or autopsy.

Here you go. I note it mentions the throat.  There was another diagram with the head I recall in some document. That was a sketch by Dr.  McClelland. Of course there was an FBI document released mentioning a bullet still in his head.

 

 

Edited December 3, 2018 by Cory Santos