Nashville Banner, 1/17/1967 - Dr. David Stewart: bullet entry in left temple; there was no tracheotomy incision

[Micah Mileto]

https://drive.google.com/open?id=14oRjrE9d-pjxSpvEpHBwqlYuDyNiPFpZ

[Andrew Prutsok]

Here he is saying the same thing at the nearby Lebanon, Tenn. Rotary Club. He was making the rounds.

[Micah Mileto]

1 hour ago, Andrew Prutsok said:

Here he is saying the same thing at the nearby Lebanon, Tenn. Rotary Club. He was making the rounds.

Here's a scan of the Lebanon Democrat, 3/30/1967 http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Subject%20Index%20Files/S%20Disk/Stewart%20David%20Dr/Item%2001.pdf

 

Transcript from Stewart's 4/10/1967 appearance on the Joe Dolan Show, KNEW radio, Oakland, CA https://archive.org/stream/nsia-AutopsyJFKNotesPressClippings/nsia-AutopsyJFKNotesPressClippings/Autopsy%20Notes%20PC%20038#mode/2up

Edited November 25, 2019 by Micah Mileto

[Lawrence Schnapf]

The older news pieces are very important especially those from 63-64 before the doctors were pressured to go along with the official story. the above is from 1967. would be interesting if he ever explained discrepancies with his sworn testimony......

[Micah Mileto]

2 minutes ago, Lawrence Schnapf said:

The older news pieces are very important especially those from 63-64 before the doctors were pressured to go along with the official story. the above is from 1967. would be interesting if he ever explained discrepancies with his sworn testimony......

Stewart didn't testify to the Warren Commission

[Micah Mileto]

17 hours ago, Micah Mileto said:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=14oRjrE9d-pjxSpvEpHBwqlYuDyNiPFpZ

full transcript, Nashville Banner, 1/17/1967:

 

Doctors Believed President Shot In Forehead: Physician

 

by Lewis Williams, Banner State Editor

 

Physicians at Parkland Memorial Hospital, Dallas, thought President John Kennedy had been struck in the left forehead by a bullet, a Gallatin doctor told THE BANNER today.

 

Dr. David Stewart, who moved to Gallatin a year ago from Dallas, where he served his residency in Parkland Hospital, said doctors who administered aid to the President there thought a bullet had struck him in the frontal part of the head "behind the hairline" and had caused the massive damage to the back of the victim's head.

 

"They were working frantically, of course, and nobody had time to make an extensive examination. There was some talk about that (apparent wound) but we never heard any more about it later on." Dr. Stewart said.

 

Stewart, a Gallatin native who served internship at Nashville General Hospital in 1959 and 1960 and was in the Air Force two years before going to Dallas' Parkland Hospital, said he was not in the emergency room when the President was brought there with Texas Gov. John Connally.

 

"I was upstairs in the operating room at the time and later helped care for Connally when they brought him up", he said "but I remember all the excitement just like it was yesterday. We got a call they were bringing the President there and that he was wounded and to 'get ready'. We just stood around waiting to see if it was true or whether it was a crank call.. there wasn't anything to get ready; we were always ready for emergencies."

 

The much-discussed and debated throat wound, which the Warren Commission said was an exit wound and many critics insist was an entrance wound, was used as a hole for insertion of a breathing tube, Stewart said, but "no incision was made."

 

Warren Commission conclusions inferred that doctors at the hospital performed a tracheotomy, thus obliterating the wound to such an extent it could not positively be identified as an entrance or an exit wound (Parkland doctors reported immediately after the assassination it was an entrance wound).

 

Dr. Stewart, however, quoted associates at the hospital as saying no tracheotomy was performed. "The hole was there and they just used it as it was to insert the tube," he declared. "It was not necessary to make an incision at all."

 

Dr. Stewart admitted he had no "first hand knowledge" of the President's wounds.

 

"I can't testify about these things, but they all came from my friends there and I pretty well accept them to be true. I know they have covered up some things and it makes me wonder if they havean't done the same thing about others..."

 

Dr. Stewart quoted a friend, Dr. James Corrico, who worked on the President's body at the hospital, as saying the President's personal physician handed him a quantity of the drug, Solu-Cortes, a cortisone-like medication, and told him "to put it into the IV (intravenous solution). "That's a drug usually given to Addison's Disease patients," Stewart said, "not gunshot victims."

 

The doctor continued: "A lot of us were concerned about the autopsy. The Dallas County coroner (Dr. Earl Rose) was planning an autopsy and we were told he had a sub-machinegun thrown on him and told not to touch the body. It's the law there that anyone- a hobo up to the President- who is killed must be given an autopsy before the body is taken from the county."

 

Dr. Stewart said he was also at the hospital when Lee Oswald was shot.

 

"They brought him in in desperate straits and he died about an hour later without saying a word," the doctor stated. "He was given 14 pints of blood and vigorous surgical treatment, but died from blood loss shock." The bullet fired by Jack Ruby penetrated Oswald's left lung, spleen and left kidney, he added.

 

Asked about the controversial "pristine" bullet the Warren Commission claimed passed through the President, struck Gov. Connally in the back, smashed his wrist and then buried itself in his left thigh, the Gallatin physician said, "I haven't seen the bullet, of course, but it wouldn't have been very pristine. The X-rays showed fragments of lead in the governor's thigh, for one thing."

 

"It leads me to wonder, Stewart said, "I would like to see someone penetrate al the subterfuge and the smokescreens thrown up about all this. I think they would do much better to start counting motives than bullets. I lived in Dallas four years and the people there are no different than anywhere else; some of them are bad, but most of them are good people and the 'climate of hate' that has been kicked around so much just didn't exist."

 

Dr. Stewart has high in his praise for three articles by Henry J. Taylor published recently in THE BANNER pointing out that Oswald was not, as he has been pictured, a "nut," but a hard, dedicated Communist.

 

"I wish Mr. Taylor would be encouraged to do more along this line," the doctor continued. "Had this knowledge been widely accepted three years ago, I'm certain that the whole course of American history would have been changed. However, it still isn't too late for adequate understanding to be of value."

 

Several Parkland Hospital physicians, nurses and witnesses to the assassination indicated, in statements to reporters at the time of the investigation of in actual testimony before the Warren Commission, that the President sustained a frontal wound in the upper left octant of the head. This theory was ignited by the commission itself and not mentioned in the autopsy report from Bethesda Naval Hospital.

 

Two witnesses to the shooting, James Altgrens and Norman Simalis, both near the President's car, made statements they saw a wound on the left forehead.

 

Dr. Robert McClelland of Parkland Hospital stated in a written report that death "was due to a massive head and brain injury from a gunshot wound IN THE LEFT TEMPLE." Doctors Geisecke and Jenkins told the commission they "noticed a left frontal wound" and several other Parkland physicians and a nurse who attended the doctors described a similar wound. Father Oscar L. Huber, pastor of Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Dallas, who administered last rites over the President,was quoted as saying he "noticed a terrible wound over his left eye."

 

Most of the physicians questioned by the commission were of the opinion that the throat wound was an entrance wound and that the massive damage to the back of the President's head was an exit wound.

 

Analysis of the famed Zapruder film of the assassination indicated the President was knocked backward and to the left by the impact of one bullet, defying Newton's law of conservation of momentum, if all shots had been fired from the rear as the commission claimed. Tissue from the victim's head splattered a motorcycle officer riding behind the car.

 

No less than 64 witnesses to the shooting claimed shots were fired from the "grassy knoll" in front of the Presidential car. Some of them claimed to have seen smoke rising from the area and at least two testified they smelled gunpowder in the vicinity, where officers converged when the shots were fired.

 

Edited November 25, 2019 by Micah Mileto