WHY PAT SPEER OWES THE FAMILY OF DR. ROBERT McCLELLAND AN APOLOGY

[Keven Hofeling]

On 1/4/2024 at 4:17 AM, Pat Speer said:

Boy, you really like that Kool-Aid. 

I've discussed this stuff ad nauseam, for decades now. And you are screaming out long-debunked nonsense as if it's news. But I'll grant you this, you may be right about that one image of McClelland. I don't remember where I got it but it was purported to be a depiction of him pointing out the wound location. I'll double-check it to see if you're right. And pull it from my website if it turns out to be a misrepresentation. 

But that one image has little to do with my problem with McClelland...as a witness. I met the man and he was soft-voiced and pleasant. I said hello and introduced myself, and asked him one question, as I remember. I asked him if he'd ever been pressured to change his impressions of the head wound. And he said no. Which is as I expected seeing as McClelland's early statements on the head wound were not the least bit controversial, and he only got controversial under the questioning of Arlen Specter. In any event, his weakness as a back of the head witness comes not from his putting his hand a bit high on his head. in one image, or having someone screen grab his hand before it moved into position, but from his own statements, from day one.

1. His initial report described but one head wound, a wound "of the left temple". While some silly people wish to believe his latter-day claim he was describing a presumed entrance location, this doesn't pass a smell test, seeing as he failed to see such a wound, failed to say the wound was a presumed entrance, and failed to say anything about cerebellum or occipital which would indicate the fatal wound was on the back of the head. IF he was in fact describing a wound he did not see while failing to describe the wound he did see, he can only be described as grossly incompetent, and throughly unreliable. By assuming he saw a wound by the right temple--which was in keeping with the statements of the witnesses then on TV--and screwed up and wrote left temple as a result of his viewing the body upside down, etc, I am actually showing him a kindness.

2. When journalist Richard Dudman, who had thought he saw a bullet hole through the windshield outside Parkland, approached McClelland a few weeks later, and asked McClelland if he thought any shots came from the front, McClelland assured him that there was NOTHING about the head wound to suggest the bullet had come from the front.

3. When the initial reports of the Parkland staff were published in a Texas medical journal, but a few weeks after that, McClelland's report was slightly revised. The time of JFK's death was revised to match the official story, and McClelland's description of the wound had been changed from left temple to right side of the head. I believe McClelland was behind these changes. He most certainly never denounced the revisions. 

4. In any event, this article was quite the talk at Parkland, and those reading it, including McClelland, would have to have noticed his report was at odds with the others, some of which reported the presence of cerebellum. Well, it's not much of a surprise then that in his WC testimony McClelland's descriptions were much like the others', only more so.

5. After reading his testimony, Josiah Thompson hired an artist to make a sketch demonstrating the wounds as described by McClelland. McClelland was later shown this drawing by the Boston Globe, and the ARRB. Both times he said the drawing was inaccurate, and presented a wound too low on the back of the head. Even so, due in no small part to so many ill-informed people assuming he'd made the drawing, or had supervised the drawing, it came to be called the McClelland drawing. 

6. By the time of Jim Garrison's investigation, McClelland was still convinced all shots came from behind. To such an extent even, that he refused to cooperate with Garrison, and denounced him to Harold Weisberg, whilst simultaneously singing the praises of Arlen Specter. 

7. And then. McClelland saw the Zapruder film on TV. By his own admission, this, and not the nature of the President's wounds, led him down conspiracy road. He was soon tracked down by CT writers, and became pretty much a darling among the CT crowd.

8. And his already questionable memory suffered as a result. Over the next years and decades, he began claiming he'd drawn the "McClelland" drawing, or had signed off on it, or some such thing, anything but admit the truth--that Thompson had had it created without even talking to him. In the end, in fact, he started creating, and presumably selling (as eBay is littered with them) his own hand-drawn facsimiles of the famous drawing, some of which included an entrance wound on the forehead, which he admitted he did not see, and an entrance wound on the back, which he admitted he did not see.

The man gloried in attention. Now, one last bit. The most recent chapter in the ongoing back of the head wound hoax is this crappy film, built on interviews of the Parkland doctors When promoting the original version of the film, which failed to arouse interest because it wasn't conspiratorial enough, three of the seven doctors interviewed in the film attended the JFK Lancer conference in Dallas. None of these doctors said the back of the head was blown out, which really angered the crowd. In any event, after their presentation, I went over and chatted with them. And Salyer, in particular, was most adamant that the back of the head was not blown out and that it astounded him that so many people want to believe such a thing. Now, here's the point. Without my bringing it up, he singled out McClelland, and said he respected him and that they were friends, but that he just couldn't understand why McCllelland (I believe he called him Bob)would say the things he was saying. He frowned and shook his head, seemingly puzzled and horrified by the complexities of the human mind. 

Quote

1. His initial report described but one head wound, a wound "of the left temple". While some silly people wish to believe his latter-day claim he was describing a presumed entrance location, this doesn't pass a smell test, seeing as he failed to see such a wound, failed to say the wound was a presumed entrance, and failed to say anything about cerebellum or occipital which would indicate the fatal wound was on the back of the head. IF he was in fact describing a wound he did not see while failing to describe the wound he did see, he can only be described as grossly in
competent, and throughly unreliable. By assuming he saw a wound by the right temple--which was in keeping with the statements of the witnesses then on TV--and screwed up and wrote left temple as a result of his viewing the body upside down, etc, I am actually showing him a kindness.

___________

About ten years ago, Dr. Gary Aguilar schooled Mr. Speer on the circumstances that led to Dr. Robert McClelland mistakenly reporting that President Kennedy had died as the result of a gunshot wound "of"  the left temple, and Sandy Larsen just a week or so ago more succinctly and very effectively schooled him again by presenting the following in a post as exhibits:

___________

Exhibit 2

It was getting late in the evening, Dallas time, but before I ended the interview. I reminded Dr. McClelland of the fact that in his Parkland Hospital admission note at 4:45 p.m. on the day of the assassination, he had written that the president died "from a gunshot wound of the left temple." "Yes," he said, "that was a mistake. I never saw any wound to the president's left temple. Dr. Jenkins had told me there was a wound there, though he later denied telling me this.

(Vincent Bugliosi, "Reclaiming History." p. 406)

Exhibit 3

"I'll tell you how that happened," Jenkins explained, "When Bob McClelland came into the room, he asked me, 'Where are his wounds?' And at that time I was operating a breathing bag with my right hand, and was trying to take the President's temporal pulse, and I had my finger on his left temple. Bob thought I pointed to the left temple as the wound.

(Gerald Posner, "Case Closed." p. 313)

___________

Sandy has recently written the following summary of the circumstances that led to Dr. McClelland's "left temple" mistake, and the aftermath which has resulted in much confusion:

___________

When Dr. McClelland arrived at the operating room, Dr. Marion Jenkins and several other doctors were already attending to President Kennedy. Dr. McClelland asked Dr. Jenkins where Kennedy's wounds were. Jenkins pointed to what he thought was a small entrance wound on the left temple.

Later, McClelland got a good view of the gaping wound on the back of Kennedy's head. (According to his testimony before the Warren Commission.)

So McClelland thought there were two wounds.

Some time later, Dr. Jenkins changed his mind about there being a small wound on the left temple, and he denied ever thinking so to Gerald Posner. And in fact, he blamed McClelland for ever thinking there was a wound there. Jenkins told Posner that he had been busy operating a breathing bag with his right hand and checking for a pulse on Kennedy's left temple, with a finger on his other hand. According to Jenkins, McClelland mistakenly thought that he was pointing to a small wound on the left temple.

McClelland never understood why Jenkins denied showing him where the left-temple wound was. Had he (or if he) ever read Case Closed, he would have seen why. He would have seen that Jenkins was a bald-face l.i.a.r.

___________

Mr. Speer raises all kinds of issues about Dr. McClelland's first day Admission Note, claiming that McClelland omitted mention of the large avulsive back of the head wound with extruded macerated cerebellar tissue, that McClelland's phrasing in the Note that President Kennedy died "from a gunshot wound [OF] the left temple" means that Dr. McClelland was aware of only one large wound that McClelland mistakenly placed at the left rather than the right temple (as Speer essentially alleges about all of the back-of-the-head wound witnesses), and that McClelland's lack of specificity about the back-of-the-head wound constituted medical malpractice, and ultimately means that McClelland didn't see the large avulsive back-of-the-head wound at all.

In post after post Speer rails on about how if we all read medical journals like he claims he does, that we would know that the use of the word "of" instead of "to" the left temple automatically means that McClelland was referring to one wound only. What Mr. Speer either doesn't know or won't tell you is that during the time period that McClelland attended medical school, it was very common in the medical profession to describe bullet wounds by use of the word "of," as in a bullet wound "of" the brain. See a 1942 article via the following link for an example of the use of the word "of" in the medical phraseology of the era: 'GUNSHOT WOUNDS OF THE BRAINREPORT OF TWO UNUSUAL COMPLICATIONS; BIFRONTAL PNEUMOCEPHALUS AND LOOSE BULLET IN THE LATERAL VENTRICLE':   https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/545730

Contrary to Speer's claim, Dr. McClelland's first day Admittance Note (See below) clearly notes that there were two wounds, "a massive gunshot wound of the head," AND "a gunshot wound of the left temple." We know this because none of the doctors who filed Admittance Notes along with Dr. McClelland's reported frontal wounds of the left or the right temple, much less a large frontal wound. Instead, their Admittance Notes contain terms like "back of the head,""occipital," "posterior," and "cerebellum" to describe the large head wound. Thus, McClelland's reference to a "massive" gunshot wound to the head necessarily denotes the large back-of-the-head wound reported by the other doctors, and the none of them reported the left temple wound that McClelland mistakenly reported (See  COMMISSION EXHIBIT NO. 392: APPENDIX VIII - MEDICAL REPORTS FROM DOCTORS AT PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, DALLAS, TEXAS: https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/jfkinfo/app8.htm

As for Speer's allegation that McClelland's lack of specificity about the back-of-the-head wound constituted medical malpractice, inspection of the Admittance Notes of the other doctors reveals that they too, in varying ways, were brief and abbreviated. These Parkland doctors were simply reporting the brief resuscitation efforts of the trauma team, and the death of the President. Speer takes the matter out of context by expecting that McClelland should have written an autopsy report, or exercised the degree of specificity that would be expected for a patient about to go into surgery or receive further treatment. This point is made abundantly clear by the much greater specificity of the reports concerning Governor Connelly which are also included in Commission Exhibit No. 392. Mr. Speer's allegations that McClelland's admittance Note constitutes medical malpractice are arguably libelous, and I am forced to wonder whether he waited until after McClelland's death to make them. The honorable thing for Mr. Speer to do would be to scrub his social media of these allegations and to immediately publicly apologize to Dr. McClelland's family. We shall see...

And utterly ridiculous is the notion that Dr. McClelland didn't see the wounds that day. With all of the accounts by many other witnesses in half a dozen investigations, McClelland's whereabouts and actions during the attempt to resuscitate President Kennedy that day in Trauma Room One are probably the most well documented in the history of medicine. Mr. Speer insults our intelligence by suggesting otherwise. 

___________

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.

COMMISSION EXHIBIT NO. 392: APPENDIX VIII - MEDICAL REPORTS FROM DOCTORS AT PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, DALLAS, TEXAS: https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/jfkinfo/app8.htm

 

LINKS TO ORIGINAL DOCUMENT: 

PAGE 1: https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0019a.htm

PAGE 2: https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0019b.htm

___________

Quote

3. When the initial reports of the Parkland staff were published in a Texas medical journal, but a few weeks after that, McClelland's report was slightly revised. The time of JFK's death was revised to match the official story, and McClelland's description of the wound had been changed from left temple to right side of the head. I believe McClelland was behind these changes. He most certainly never denounced the revisions. 

Such updates and revisions are common in the learned professions, particularly in matters involving such things as time of death, and given Acting White House Press Secretary Malcolm Perry's public announcement that President Kennedy had died as the result of a bullet that "entered the right temple," it could have been a Journal editor who changed it from the left temple to the right temple. You are grasping at straws.

Quote

"5. After reading his testimony, Josiah Thompson hired an artist to make a sketch demonstrating the wounds as described by McClelland. McClelland was later shown this drawing by the Boston Globe, and the ARRB. Both times he said the drawing was inaccurate, and presented a wound too low on the back of the head. Even so, due in no small part to so many ill-informed people assuming he'd made the drawing, or had supervised the drawing, it came to be called the McClelland drawing."

Dr. McLelland probably grew tired of having to explain the origins of the drawing from Thompson's book and decided just to ratify it instead, but I disagree that this has sinister implications of the variety Mr. Speer is trying to sell us. Incidentally, there is an actual McClelland drawing that he sketched in TMWKK, which is as follows:

I have recently enhanced Dr. McClelland's drawing using standard editing software (which you will see below I am not at all masterful at using), and the results were surprising to me, as it does differ significantly from the 'Six Seconds in Dallas' sketch. In my view, the utility of that sketch has always been as an APROXIMATION of the location of the BOH wounds, and not so much as to its specific dimensions, given the variation between the various witness sketches, human memory being what it is and is not. Because we have been deprived of the genuine BOH autopsy photographs showing the actual large avulsive wound (which John Stringer in 1972 assured David Lifton he did indeed take), we are relegated to having to accept a general approximation of the wound, which just has to meet certain criteria, such as being behind JFK's right ear, and being low enough to account for the extruding macerated cerebellum, which to McClelland's credit the drawing from the Thompson book does meet.

The BOH sketch Dr. McClelland made by his own hand in TMWKK is as follows:

 

Quote

7. And then. McClelland saw the Zapruder film on TV. By his own admission, this, and not the nature of the President's wounds, led him down conspiracy road. He was soon tracked down by CT writers, and became pretty much a darling among the CT crowd.

Dr. McClelland frequently gave of his valuable time and wisdom to JFK researchers, as in the following example of notes he made for researcher and author, Vince Palamara, concerning the extant Zapruder film:

What is particularly interesting is that when some researchers confronted Dr. McClelland about the Grand Canyon sized discrepancy between the drawing from the Thompson book and the depictions of the back-of-the-head wound in the extant Zapruder film, McClelland was unable to offer any explanation. Dr. Paul Peters, on the other hand, when confronted with the same question was more bold with his answer:

___________

PAUL PETERS, MD:

"...When shown enlarged Zapruder film frames depicting a right-anterior wound, Peters wrote, "The wound which you marked...I never saw and I don't think there was such a wound. I think that was simply an artifact of copying Zapruder's movie... The only wound I saw on President Kennedy's head was in the occipitoparietal area on the right side." (Personal letter to Wallace Milam 4-14-80, copy, courtesy of Wallace Milam to author Aguilar; also in Lifton, BE: 557)..."

http://www.assassinationweb.com/ag6.htm

___________

These reactions of McClelland and Peters highlight a much underappreciated fact about the headwound depictions in the extant Zapruder film which is that President Kennedy's forehead is shown as being completely blown away, so much so that in Z-335 and Z-337 we are seeing the First Ladies pink shoulder pad exactly where the Presidents forehead should be:

Conversely, Zapruder film authenticity apologists, like Mr. Speer, when confronted with the same discrepancy routinely respond that it is just an "optical illusion," and that JFK's forehead is tucked away behind the "blob" object being depicted as hanging down from JFK's head. But upon close inspection, it is undeniable that we are indeed seeing a huge cavernous wound in JFK's forehead, about the size of a grapefruit, in the Zapruder film frames leading up to Z-335 which none of the witnesses at Dealey Plaza, Parkland Hospital, and the Bethesda autopsy ever reported, as can be seen in the following selected frames which have been highlighted only to provide emphasis: 

Quote

 

8. And his already questionable memory suffered as a result. Over the next years and decades, he began claiming he'd drawn the "McClelland" drawing, or had signed off on it, or some such thing, anything but admit the truth--that Thompson had had it created without even talking to him. In the end, in fact, he started creating, and presumably selling (as eBay is littered with them) his own hand-drawn facsimiles of the famous drawing, some of which included an entrance wound on the forehead, which he admitted he did not see, and an entrance wound on the back, which he admitted he did not see.

The man gloried in attention. 

 

More than anything else, it was Mr. Speer's allegation that Dr. McClelland "presumably" sought to profit from the assassination by selling his notes and drawings of President Kennedy's large avulsive back-of-the-head wound that inspired the creation of this particular thread on the Education Forum. The allegation is both defamatory and unconscionable, and if Speer had any evidence to support it you can be assured he
would be shouting it from the rooftops. And I once again implore Mr. Speer to scrub his social media of this scandalous allegation and to immediately issue a public apology to the McClelland family. Dr. McClelland was a devoted servant of the public good, and he and his family deserve better than this...

Edited January 31 by Keven Hofeling

[Pat Speer]

7 hours ago, Michael Crane said:

It's hard to convince the public of an entry wound in back of the head when it appears that he got hit by something the size of a rocket propelled grenade.

 

 

That's why we have a black blob on the Zapruder film an not a single legitimate back of the head photo or x-ray.

So...they swapped out photos proving a shot came from the front for photos proving there were two shooters?

That's a really weird way of proving there weren't two shooters...

[Pat Speer]

4 hours ago, Keven Hofeling said:

___________

About ten years ago, Dr. Gary Aguilar schooled Mr. Speer on the circumstances that led to Dr. Robert McClelland mistakenly reporting that President Kennedy had died as the result of a gunshot wound "of"  the left temple, and Sandy Larsen just a week or so ago more succinctly and very effectively schooled him again by presenting the following in a post as exhibits:

___________

Exhibit 2

It was getting late in the evening, Dallas time, but before I ended the interview. I reminded Dr. McClelland of the fact that in his Parkland Hospital admission note at 4:45 p.m. on the day of the assassination, he had written that the president died "from a gunshot wound of the left temple." "Yes," he said, "that was a mistake. I never saw any wound to the president's left temple. Dr. Jenkins had told me there was a wound there, though he later denied telling me this.

(Vincent Bugliosi, "Reclaiming History." p. 406)

Exhibit 3

"I'll tell you how that happened," Jenkins explained, "When Bob McClelland came into the room, he asked me, 'Where are his wounds?' And at that time I was operating a breathing bag with my right hand, and was trying to take the President's temporal pulse, and I had my finger on his left temple. Bob thought I pointed to the left temple as the wound.

(Gerald Posner, "Case Closed." p. 313)

___________

Sandy has recently written the following summary of the circumstances that led to Dr. McClelland's left temple mistake, and the aftermath which has led to confusion:

___________

 

When Dr. McClelland arrived at the operating room, Dr. Marion Jenkins and several other doctors were already attending to President Kennedy. Dr. McClelland asked Dr. Jenkins where Kennedy's wounds were. Jenkins pointed to what he thought was a small entrance wound on the left temple.

Later, McClelland got a good view of the gaping wound on the back of Kennedy's head. (According to his testimony before the Warren Commission.)

So McClelland thought there were two wounds.

Some time later, Dr. Jenkins changed his mind about there being a small wound on the left temple, and he denied ever thinking so to Gerald Posner. And in fact, he blamed McClelland for ever thinking there was a wound there. Jenkins told Posner that he had been busy operating a breathing bag with his right hand and checking for a pulse on Kennedy's left temple, with a finger on his other hand. According to Jenkins, McClelland mistakenly thought that he was pointing to a small wound on the left temple.

McClelland never understood why Jenkins denied showing him where the left-temple wound was. Had he (or if he) ever read Case Closed, he would have seen why. He would have seen that Jenkins was a bald-face l.i.a.r.

___________

Mr. Speer raises all kinds of issues about Dr. McClelland's first day Admission Note, claiming that McClelland omitted mention of the large avulsive back of the head wound with extruded macerated cerebellar tissue, that McClelland's phrasing in the Note that President Kennedy died "from a gunshot wound [OF] the left temple" means that Dr. McClelland was aware of only one large wound that McClelland mistakenly placed at the left rather than the right temple (as Speer essentially alleges about all of the back-of-the-head wound witnesses), and that McClelland's lack of specificity about the back-of-the-head wound constituted medical malpractice, and ultimately means that McClelland didn't see the large avulsive back-of-the-head wound at all.

In post after post Speer rails on about how if we all read medical journals like he claims he does, that we would know that the use of the word "of" instead of "to" the left temple automatically means that McClelland was referring to one wound only. What Mr. Speer either doesn't know or won't tell you is that during the time period that McClelland attended medical school, it was very common in the medical profession to describe bullet wounds by use of the word "of," as in a bullet wound "of" the brain. See a 1942 article via the following link for an example of the use of the word "of" in the medical phraseology of the era: 'GUNSHOT WOUNDS OF THE BRAINREPORT OF TWO UNUSUAL COMPLICATIONS; BIFRONTAL PNEUMOCEPHALUS AND LOOSE BULLET IN THE LATERAL VENTRICLE':   https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/545730

Contrary to Speer's claim, Dr. McClelland's first day Admittance Note (See below) clearly notes that there were two wounds, "a massive gunshot wound of the head," AND "a gunshot wound of the left temple." We know this because none of the doctors who filed Admittance Notes along with Dr. McClelland's reported frontal wounds of the left or the right temple, much less a large frontal wound. Instead, their Admittance Notes contain terms like "back of the head,""occipital," "posterior," and "cerebellum" to describe the large head wound. Thus, McClelland's reference to a "massive" gunshot wound to the head necessarily denotes the large back-of-the-head wound reported by the other doctors, and the none of them reported the left temple wound that McClelland mistakenly reported (See  COMMISSION EXHIBIT NO. 392: APPENDIX VIII - MEDICAL REPORTS FROM DOCTORS AT PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, DALLAS, TEXAS: https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/jfkinfo/app8.htm

As for Speer's allegation that McClelland's lack of specificity about the back-of-the-head wound constituted medical malpractice, inspection of the Admittance Notes of the other doctors reveals that they too, in varying ways, were brief and abbreviated. These Parkland doctors were simply reporting the brief resuscitation efforts of the trauma team, and the death of the President. Speer takes the matter out of context by expecting that McClelland should have written an autopsy report, or exercised the degree of specificity that would be expected for a patient about to go into surgery or receive further treatment. This point is made abundantly clear by the much greater specificity of the reports concerning Governor Connelly which are also included in Commission Exhibit No. 392. Mr. Speer's allegations that McClelland's admittance Note constitutes medical malpractice are arguably libelous, and I am forced to wonder whether he waited until after McClelland's death to make them. The honorable thing for Mr. Speer to do would be to scrub his social media of these allegations and to immediately publicly apologize to Dr. McClelland's family. We shall see...

And utterly ridiculous is the notion that Dr. McClelland didn't see the wounds that day. With all of the accounts by many other witnesses in half a dozen investigations, McClelland's whereabouts and actions during the attempt to resuscitate President Kennedy that day in Trauma Room One are probably the most well documented in the history of medicine. Mr. Speer insults our intelligence by suggesting otherwise. 

___________

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.

COMMISSION EXHIBIT NO. 392: APPENDIX VIII - MEDICAL REPORTS FROM DOCTORS AT PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, DALLAS, TEXAS: https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/jfkinfo/app8.htm

 

LINKS TO ORIGINAL DOCUMENT: 

PAGE 1: https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0019a.htm

PAGE 2: https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0019b.htm

___________

Such updates and revisions are common in the learned professions, particularly in matters involving such things as time of death, and given Acting White House Press Secretary Malcolm Perry's public announcement that President Kennedy had died as the result of a bullet that "entered the right temple," it could have been a Journal editor who changed it from the left temple to the right temple. You are grasping at straws.

Dr. McLelland probably grew tired of having to explain the origins of the drawing from Thompson's book and decided just to ratify it instead, but I disagree that this has sinister implications of the variety Mr. Speer is trying to sell us. Incidentally, there is an actual McClelland drawing that he sketched in TMWKK, which is as follows:

I have recently enhanced Dr. McClelland's drawing using standard editing software (which you will see below I am not at all masterful at using), and the results were surprising to me, as it does differ significantly from the 'Six Seconds in Dallas' sketch. In my view, the utility of that sketch has always been as an APROXIMATION of the location of the BOH wounds, and not so much as to its specific dimensions, given the variation between the various witness sketches, human memory being what it is and is not. Because we have been deprived of the genuine BOH autopsy photographs showing the actual large avulsive wound (which John Stringer in 1972 assured David Lifton he did indeed take), we are relegated to having to accept a general approximation of the wound, which just has to meet certain criteria, such as being behind JFK's right ear, and being low enough to account for the extruding macerated cerebellum, which to McClelland's credit the drawing from the Thompson book does meet.

The BOH sketch Dr. McClelland made by his own hand in TMWKK is as follows:

 

Dr. McClelland frequently gave of his valuable time and wisdom to JFK researchers, as in the following example of notes he made for researcher and author, Vince Palamara, concerning the extant Zapruder film:

What is particularly interesting is that when some researchers confronted Dr. McClelland about the Grand Canyon sized discrepancy between the drawing from the Thompson book and the depictions of the back-of-the-head wound in the extant Zapruder film, McClelland was unable to offer any explanation. Dr. Paul Peters, on the other hand, when confronted with the same question was more bold with his answer:

___________

PAUL PETERS, MD:

"...When shown enlarged Zapruder film frames depicting a right-anterior wound, Peters wrote, "The wound which you marked...I never saw and I don't think there was such a wound. I think that was simply an artifact of copying Zapruder's movie... The only wound I saw on President Kennedy's head was in the occipitoparietal area on the right side." (Personal letter to Wallace Milam 4-14-80, copy, courtesy of Wallace Milam to author Aguilar; also in Lifton, BE: 557)..."

http://www.assassinationweb.com/ag6.htm

___________

These reactions of McClelland and Peters highlight a much underappreciated fact about the headwound depictions in the extant Zapruder film which is that President Kennedy's forehead is shown as being completely blown away, so much so that in Z-335 and Z-337 we are seeing the First Ladies pink shoulder pad exactly where the Presidents forehead should be:

Conversely, Zapruder film authenticity apologists, like Mr. Speer, when confronted with the same discrepancy routinely respond that it is just an "optical illusion," and that JFK's forehead is tucked away behind the "blob" object being depicted as hanging down from JFK's head. But upon close inspection, it is undeniable that we are indeed seeing a huge cavernous wound in JFK's forehead, about the size of a grapefruit, in the Zapruder film frames leading up to Z-335 which none of the witnesses at Dealey Plaza, Parkland Hospital, and the Bethesda autopsy ever reported, as can be seen in the following selected frames which have been highlighted only to provide emphasis: 

More than anything else, it was Mr. Speer's allegation that Dr. McClelland "presumably" sought to profit from the assassination by selling his notes and drawings of President Kennedy's large avulsive back-of-the-head wound that inspired the creation of this particular thread on the Education Forum. The allegation is both defamatory and unconscionable, and if Speer had any evidence to support it you can be assured he would be shouting it from the rooftops. And I once again implore Mr. Speer to scrub his social media of this scandalous allegation and to immediately issue a public apology to the McClelland family. Dr. McClelland was a devoted servant of the public good, and he and his family deserve better than this...

If anyone owes anyone an apology it is you. To me. The GIF above proves my point. McClelland pointed out a location on the right side of the head...above the ear.

This is not where it is depicted in the drawing he came to take credit for, nor where it is claimed to have been by the best selling CTs. 

As far as the McClelland drawings actually drawn by him... I don't know for a fact he was selling them... but I found dozens of them for sale online when I first became aware of them... by people asking large sums of money. My assumption at the time was that he'd made these drawings and sold them at lectures, for a nominal fee, maybe as low as 20 or 30 bucks, but that scumbags were taking advantage of the situation and putting them up online and selling them for far more than that. If you know better, then, well let us know. It certainly doesn't make sense that he would create dozens of nearly identical drawings and then give them away free of charge to strangers. 

 

Edited January 6 by Pat Speer

[Pat Speer]

37 minutes ago, Keven Hofeling said:

___________

About ten years ago, Dr. Gary Aguilar schooled Mr. Speer on the circumstances that led to Dr. Robert McClelland mistakenly reporting that President Kennedy had died as the result of a gunshot wound "of"  the left temple, and Sandy Larsen just a week or so ago more succinctly and very effectively schooled him again by presenting the following in a post as exhibits:

___________

Exhibit 2

It was getting late in the evening, Dallas time, but before I ended the interview. I reminded Dr. McClelland of the fact that in his Parkland Hospital admission note at 4:45 p.m. on the day of the assassination, he had written that the president died "from a gunshot wound of the left temple." "Yes," he said, "that was a mistake. I never saw any wound to the president's left temple. Dr. Jenkins had told me there was a wound there, though he later denied telling me this.

(Vincent Bugliosi, "Reclaiming History." p. 406)

Exhibit 3

"I'll tell you how that happened," Jenkins explained, "When Bob McClelland came into the room, he asked me, 'Where are his wounds?' And at that time I was operating a breathing bag with my right hand, and was trying to take the President's temporal pulse, and I had my finger on his left temple. Bob thought I pointed to the left temple as the wound.

(Gerald Posner, "Case Closed." p. 313)

___________

Sandy has recently written the following summary of the circumstances that led to Dr. McClelland's left temple mistake, and the aftermath which has led to confusion:

___________

 

When Dr. McClelland arrived at the operating room, Dr. Marion Jenkins and several other doctors were already attending to President Kennedy. Dr. McClelland asked Dr. Jenkins where Kennedy's wounds were. Jenkins pointed to what he thought was a small entrance wound on the left temple.

Later, McClelland got a good view of the gaping wound on the back of Kennedy's head. (According to his testimony before the Warren Commission.)

So McClelland thought there were two wounds.

Some time later, Dr. Jenkins changed his mind about there being a small wound on the left temple, and he denied ever thinking so to Gerald Posner. And in fact, he blamed McClelland for ever thinking there was a wound there. Jenkins told Posner that he had been busy operating a breathing bag with his right hand and checking for a pulse on Kennedy's left temple, with a finger on his other hand. According to Jenkins, McClelland mistakenly thought that he was pointing to a small wound on the left temple.

McClelland never understood why Jenkins denied showing him where the left-temple wound was. Had he (or if he) ever read Case Closed, he would have seen why. He would have seen that Jenkins was a bald-face l.i.a.r.

___________

Mr. Speer raises all kinds of issues about Dr. McClelland's first day Admission Note, claiming that McClelland omitted mention of the large avulsive back of the head wound with extruded macerated cerebellar tissue, that McClelland's phrasing in the Note that President Kennedy died "from a gunshot wound [OF] the left temple" means that Dr. McClelland was aware of only one large wound that McClelland mistakenly placed at the left rather than the right temple (as Speer essentially alleges about all of the back-of-the-head wound witnesses), and that McClelland's lack of specificity about the back-of-the-head wound constituted medical malpractice, and ultimately means that McClelland didn't see the large avulsive back-of-the-head wound at all.

In post after post Speer rails on about how if we all read medical journals like he claims he does, that we would know that the use of the word "of" instead of "to" the left temple automatically means that McClelland was referring to one wound only. What Mr. Speer either doesn't know or won't tell you is that during the time period that McClelland attended medical school, it was very common in the medical profession to describe bullet wounds by use of the word "of," as in a bullet wound "of" the brain. See a 1942 article via the following link for an example of the use of the word "of" in the medical phraseology of the era: 'GUNSHOT WOUNDS OF THE BRAINREPORT OF TWO UNUSUAL COMPLICATIONS; BIFRONTAL PNEUMOCEPHALUS AND LOOSE BULLET IN THE LATERAL VENTRICLE':   https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstract/545730

Contrary to Speer's claim, Dr. McClelland's first day Admittance Note (See below) clearly notes that there were two wounds, "a massive gunshot wound of the head," AND "a gunshot wound of the left temple." We know this because none of the doctors who filed Admittance Notes along with Dr. McClelland's reported frontal wounds of the left or the right temple, much less a large frontal wound. Instead, their Admittance Notes contain terms like "back of the head,""occipital," "posterior," and "cerebellum" to describe the large head wound. Thus, McClelland's reference to a "massive" gunshot wound to the head necessarily denotes the large back-of-the-head wound reported by the other doctors, and the none of them reported the left temple wound that McClelland mistakenly reported (See  COMMISSION EXHIBIT NO. 392: APPENDIX VIII - MEDICAL REPORTS FROM DOCTORS AT PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, DALLAS, TEXAS: https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/jfkinfo/app8.htm

As for Speer's allegation that McClelland's lack of specificity about the back-of-the-head wound constituted medical malpractice, inspection of the Admittance Notes of the other doctors reveals that they too, in varying ways, were brief and abbreviated. These Parkland doctors were simply reporting the brief resuscitation efforts of the trauma team, and the death of the President. Speer takes the matter out of context by expecting that McClelland should have written an autopsy report, or exercised the degree of specificity that would be expected for a patient about to go into surgery or receive further treatment. This point is made abundantly clear by the much greater specificity of the reports concerning Governor Connelly which are also included in Commission Exhibit No. 392. Mr. Speer's allegations that McClelland's admittance Note constitutes medical malpractice are arguably libelous, and I am forced to wonder whether he waited until after McClelland's death to make them. The honorable thing for Mr. Speer to do would be to scrub his social media of these allegations and to immediately publicly apologize to Dr. McClelland's family. We shall see...

And utterly ridiculous is the notion that Dr. McClelland didn't see the wounds that day. With all of the accounts by many other witnesses in half a dozen investigations, McClelland's whereabouts and actions during the attempt to resuscitate President Kennedy that day in Trauma Room One are probably the most well documented in the history of medicine. Mr. Speer insults our intelligence by suggesting otherwise. 

___________

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.

COMMISSION EXHIBIT NO. 392: APPENDIX VIII - MEDICAL REPORTS FROM DOCTORS AT PARKLAND MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, DALLAS, TEXAS: https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/jfkinfo/app8.htm

 

LINKS TO ORIGINAL DOCUMENT: 

PAGE 1: https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0019a.htm

PAGE 2: https://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0019b.htm

___________

Such updates and revisions are common in the learned professions, particularly in matters involving such things as time of death, and given Acting White House Press Secretary Malcolm Perry's public announcement that President Kennedy had died as the result of a bullet that "entered the right temple," it could have been a Journal editor who changed it from the left temple to the right temple. You are grasping at straws.

Dr. McLelland probably grew tired of having to explain the origins of the drawing from Thompson's book and decided just to ratify it instead, but I disagree that this has sinister implications of the variety Mr. Speer is trying to sell us. Incidentally, there is an actual McClelland drawing that he sketched in TMWKK, which is as follows:

I have recently enhanced Dr. McClelland's drawing using standard editing software (which you will see below I am not at all masterful at using), and the results were surprising to me, as it does differ significantly from the 'Six Seconds in Dallas' sketch. In my view, the utility of that sketch has always been as an APROXIMATION of the location of the BOH wounds, and not so much as to its specific dimensions, given the variation between the various witness sketches, human memory being what it is and is not. Because we have been deprived of the genuine BOH autopsy photographs showing the actual large avulsive wound (which John Stringer in 1972 assured David Lifton he did indeed take), we are relegated to having to accept a general approximation of the wound, which just has to meet certain criteria, such as being behind JFK's right ear, and being low enough to account for the extruding macerated cerebellum, which to McClelland's credit the drawing from the Thompson book does meet.

The BOH sketch Dr. McClelland made by his own hand in TMWKK is as follows:

 

Dr. McClelland frequently gave of his valuable time and wisdom to JFK researchers, as in the following example of notes he made for researcher and author, Vince Palamara, concerning the extant Zapruder film:

What is particularly interesting is that when some researchers confronted Dr. McClelland about the Grand Canyon sized discrepancy between the drawing from the Thompson book and the depictions of the back-of-the-head wound in the extant Zapruder film, McClelland was unable to offer any explanation. Dr. Paul Peters, on the other hand, when confronted with the same question was more bold with his answer:

___________

PAUL PETERS, MD:

"...When shown enlarged Zapruder film frames depicting a right-anterior wound, Peters wrote, "The wound which you marked...I never saw and I don't think there was such a wound. I think that was simply an artifact of copying Zapruder's movie... The only wound I saw on President Kennedy's head was in the occipitoparietal area on the right side." (Personal letter to Wallace Milam 4-14-80, copy, courtesy of Wallace Milam to author Aguilar; also in Lifton, BE: 557)..."

http://www.assassinationweb.com/ag6.htm

___________

These reactions of McClelland and Peters highlight a much underappreciated fact about the headwound depictions in the extant Zapruder film which is that President Kennedy's forehead is shown as being completely blown away, so much so that in Z-335 and Z-337 we are seeing the First Ladies pink shoulder pad exactly where the Presidents forehead should be:

Conversely, Zapruder film authenticity apologists, like Mr. Speer, when confronted with the same discrepancy routinely respond that it is just an "optical illusion," and that JFK's forehead is tucked away behind the "blob" object being depicted as hanging down from JFK's head. But upon close inspection, it is undeniable that we are indeed seeing a huge cavernous wound in JFK's forehead, about the size of a grapefruit, in the Zapruder film frames leading up to Z-335 which none of the witnesses at Dealey Plaza, Parkland Hospital, and the Bethesda autopsy ever reported, as can be seen in the following selected frames which have been highlighted only to provide emphasis: 

More than anything else, it was Mr. Speer's allegation that Dr. McClelland "presumably" sought to profit from the assassination by selling his notes and drawings of President Kennedy's large avulsive back-of-the-head wound that inspired the creation of this particular thread on the Education Forum. The allegation is both defamatory and unconscionable, and if Speer had any evidence to support it you can be assured he would be shouting it from the rooftops. And I once again implore Mr. Speer to scrub his social media of this scandalous allegation and to immediately issue a public apology to the McClelland family. Dr. McClelland was a devoted servant of the public good, and he and his family deserve better than this...

That first line is laughable. Gary never schooled me on anything. If anything the reverse is true.  He has routinely used material from my website, or material I've shared with him or provided him. And I've been fine with it because we are friends, and even glad for it because I learned a lot from his articles, and thought the best way to repay him for that was by showing him stuff that will help us in our mutual desire to stop the lone-nut parade. 

From glancing through the rest of your nonsense, I see you are citing Peters. I hope you understand that Peters was not a low on the back of the head witness, and insisted to the end that the wound he saw was near the crown, and that he saw cerebellum by looking down into the skull from above, and not from behind. 

if you were as diligent about learning about this stuff as you are in repeating nonsense in an attempt to smear me, you would know, moreover, that I have gone through all the purported back of the head witnesses over and over and over again and shown that they are NOT low on the back of the head witnesses, but chiefly high on the back of the head witnesses.

Since this is so, for that matter, you and millions of other devotees, should wonder why the heck Lifton, Livingstone, Groden, Mantik et al, have been using these witnesses to push an agenda--that the area low on the back of the head incorporating the occipital bone--was blown out of JFK's head, when these witnesses actually maintained the exact opposite, that there was no hole low on the back of the head. 

I mean, just ask McClelland...that is, the 1988 McClelland, the one who placed the wound above his ear.  

 

Edited January 6 by Pat Speer

[Michael Crane]

17 hours ago, Pat Speer said:

So...they swapped out photos proving a shot came from the front for photos proving there were two shooters?

That's a really weird way of proving there weren't two shooters...

For whatever reason,I'm having trouble comprehending what you are asking.

What I'm saying is....bullets enter making a small hole or smaller hole than an exiting hole.

When you have the Grand Canyon entry wound looking you in the face...than it's easy to tell that the bullet wound was an exit wound which means a frontal shooter.

Edited January 7 by Michael Crane

[Sandy Larsen]

15 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

The GIF above proves my point. McClelland pointed out a location on the right side of the head...above the ear.

 

And as Keven has shown everybody including you, when McClelland pointed to the right side of his head --  with his index finger and thumb on he back of his head and his other three fingers on the top of his head -- he specifically said the wound was on the BACK of his head.

And so your cherry picking and mischaracterization continues.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

 

 

[Pat Speer]

1 minute ago, Michael Crane said:

For whatever reason,I'm having trouble comprehending what you are asking.

What I'm saying is....bullets enter making a small hole or smaller hole that an exiting hole.

When you have the Grand Canyon looking you in the face...than it's easy to tell that the bullet hole was an exit hole which means a frontal shooter.

I spent years reading dozens of forensic articles and textbooks, and you are almost right. Entrance holes are usually smaller than exit holes. That is why the autopsy doctors had no problem claiming the small wound they saw was an entrance and the large wound they saw was an exit. Only they failed to track these wounds. And the brain photos prove these wounds were not connected. 

 

[Michael Crane]

Patrick,Patrick,Patrick...

You are aware of the ARRB deposition of the photographer that said the photos in the archives are not his right?

Stringer right? or was it somebody else? I have no files saved on anything.It's all from memory.I do have some threads saved on a different forum that I can refer to about certain subjects.

Edited January 6 by Michael Crane

[Pat Speer]

Just now, Sandy Larsen said:

 

And as Keven has shown everybody including you, when McClelland pointed to the right side of his head --  with his index finger and thumb on he back of his head and his other three fingers on the top of his head -- he specifically said the wound was on the BACK of his head.

And so your cherry picking and mischaracterization continues.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

 

 

Wait. You know what those saying "back of the head" mean even when they point it out in a location other than where you want them to point?  Like Clint Hill? Who continues to say back of the head to this day while pointing out an area above and slightly behind his ear? 

Despite your wanting it so, the expression "back of the head" DOES NOT mean the far back of the head. It depends who is using the term, but it can mean the rear half of the head, or pretty much anywhere back of the face. I was mugged once. I was hit repeatedly on the back of my head. The mugger was wearing a ring. The scabs and scars were above and behind my ear. But none of them were on the far back of the head. And yet my description of the attack was, and remains, that he struck me on the back of the head. And this only makes sense. if someone runs up behind you and hits you with a 2 by 4, and knocks you out. Do you say he ran up from behind me and struck me at the top of my head slightly forward of the far back of the head so you know mostly on the side of the head, or do you say the bastard hit me on the back of the head? Most would say the latter. 

[Pat Speer]

2 hours ago, Michael Crane said:

Patrick,Patrick,Patrick...

You are aware of the ARRB deposition of the photographer that said the photos in the archives are not his right?

Stringer right? or was it somebody else? I have no files saved on anything.It's all from memory.I do have some threads saved on a different forum that I can refer to about certain subjects.

Geez, Michael, I have been over this dozens of times. Don't swallow the vomit. Read the transcripts. Stringer said he took the back of the head photos and that they reflect what he saw on the night of the shooting. He had a problem with the brain photos, however, in that he felt they were taken with a different kind of film than he was using at the time. That's it. He was 78, and didn't remember using that kind of film. That's it. While people have pretended he said the photos were faked, and were of a different brain than Kennedy's, he never said that. It wasn't the condition of the brain that bothered him. It was the type of film. Stringer was, and is, a strong witness for there being NO blowout on the back of the head, and untrustworthy people have tried to twist him into being a strong witness for a blowout wound low on the back of the head. It's a con. He authenticated the back of the head photos numerous times. But no one on this side of the fence mentions that. 

Edited January 6 by Pat Speer

[Michael Crane]

Well,your last sentence said brain photos so...

I'll have to go back,because I believe that he said that he did not take those kind of views? Basilar views or whatever the hell kind of views they call them?

Edited January 6 by Michael Crane

[Keven Hofeling]

On 1/6/2024 at 12:02 AM, Pat Speer said:

If anyone owes anyone an apology it is you. To me. The GIF above proves my point. McClelland pointed out a location on the right side of the head...above the ear.

This is not where it is depicted in the drawing he came to take credit for, nor where it is claimed to have been the best selling CTs. 

As far as the McClelland drawings actually drawn by him... I don't know for a fact he was selling them... but I found dozens of them for sale online when I first became aware of them... by people asking large sums of money. My assumption at the time was that he'd made these drawings and sold them at lectures, for a nominal fee, maybe as low as 20 or 30 bucks, but that scumbags were taking advantage of the situation and putting them up online and selling them for far more than that. If you know better, then, well let us know. It certainly doesn't make sense that he would create dozens of nearly identical drawings and then give them away free of charge to strangers. 

 

Quote

If anyone owes anyone an apology it is you. To me. The GIF above proves my point. McClelland pointed out a location on the right side of the head...above the ear.

You must be referring to this GIF: The one in which Dr. McClelland is running his thumb up and down the back of his head, right? And what would he be trying to communicate with his thumb, Mr. Speer?

And why did Dr. McClelland say the following while rubbing the back of his head with his thumb if he was, as you wrote, "point[ing] out a location on the right side of the head...above the ear." Now that doesn't make any sense, does it? You don't think McClelland knows the difference between the "back part" of his head and the "right side above the ear" Mr. Speer?

"Almost a fifth or perhaps even a quarter of the right back part of the head in this area here [AT WHICH POINT MCLELLAND RAN HIS THUMB UP AND DOWN THE BACK OF HIS HEAD] had been blasted out along with probably most of the brain tissue in the area."

See SEGMENT WITH AUDIO ON YOUTUBE, CUED IN ADVANCE FOR YOU TO 26:08, AS FOLLOWS:

Quote

As far as the McClelland drawings actually drawn by him... I don't know for a fact he was selling them... but I found dozens of them for sale online when I first became aware of them... by people asking large sums of money. My assumption at the time was that he'd made these drawings and sold them at lectures, for a nominal fee, maybe as low as 20 or 30 bucks, but that scumbags were taking advantage of the situation and putting them up online and selling them for far more than that. If you know better, then, well let us know. It certainly doesn't make sense that he would create dozens of nearly identical drawings and then give them away free of charge to strangers. 

Well, imagine that. "Look over there at old man McClelland at the JFK conference selling his JFK drawings for twenty bucks a pop..."

You make all of this effort all over the web to validate the authenticity of the government's autopsy photographs and X-rays and you can't relate to someone being inspired by the truth, and devoted to a cause?

If you aren't typing the letters off of your computer keyboard due to being inspired by the truth (as you purport to see it) and devoted to a cause, then precisely why do you do it Mr. Speer? 

 

Edited January 15 by Keven Hofeling

[Michael Crane]

8 hours ago, Sandy Larsen said:

 

This is a Lifton/Horne theory that I -- after looking at the witness statements -- agree with.  I am not an expert on it and have forgotten who saw what, so I cannot defend it myself. Horne certainly could. And you can read what he has written on it if you want.

As I said, the body was brought in twice. There are corroborating witnesses to both entries, so there is no question that that happened.

The CASKET was actually brought in THREE times, and there were witnesses to all three entries. The men who carried the caskets in each time were different! As I recall, the military casket was brought in by the men-in-dark-suits who delivered it (at 6:30 PM). The decorative bronze casket was brought in by some of the techs and some other guys, Secret Service I believe (at something like 7:30 PM). The casket had to have been empty because the body was already inside the autopsy room at the time. But those carrying the casket thought the body was in it. The casket was left in the ante-room, and none of its pallbearers saw it being opened.

That casket had to have been secretly removed, including the body, because the third entry DID have witnesses who saw it being opened (at a little before 8:00 PM IIRC). This time the Honor Guard brought it in.

You likely would disagree with Lifton and Horne on this. But you would lose a debate with Horne. He knows all the testimony, and with help from Lifton's theory was able to reconcile all the conflicting, but corroborated, statements.

 

Sandy,I believe that yes,there were 3 casket entries,but they were not brought in next to the autopsy table.

The shipping casket was however brought into and sat down next to the autopsy table.

The other two were brought in and left in the cold/anterior room.

*Anybody that seen more than one casket entry and put on the autopsy table would scream bloody murder!!

**Jenkins finally opened up his mouth and without a doubt...would have described the body being put onto the autopsy table more than once.

*** I'm certainly curious of your witnesses to all 3 casket entries and actually taken out of the bronze casket?

****Once again,these are just my opinions....not facts.

 

Edited January 6 by Michael Crane

[Sandy Larsen]

31 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

Despite your wanting it so, the expression "back of the head" DOES NOT mean the far back of the head.

 

I've never said that I want (or believe) the wound to be "far back of the head."

Regardless, it doesn't matter whether a doctor said high on the back of the head or low. Since the back-of-head autopsy photos show a wound in neither location, the photos must be fraudulent.

That's a fact, end of discussion.

 

31 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

It depends who is using the term, but it can mean the rear half of the head, or pretty much anywhere back of the face.

 

Horse hockey!

The only person who would say that a point just behind the face is the back of the head is you.

 

31 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

I was mugged once. I was hit repeatedly on the back of my head. The mugger was wearing a ring. The scabs and scars were above and behind my ear. But none of them were on the far back of the head. And yet my description of the attack was, and remains, that he struck me on the back of the head.

 

If those scars are/were on top of your head, then you were not hit on the back of your head.

 

31 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

And this only makes sense. if someone runs up behind you and hits you with a 2 by 4, and knocks you out. Do you say he ran up from behind me and struck me at the top of my head slightly forward of the far back of the head so you know mostly on the side of the head, or do you say the bastard hit me on the back of the head? Most would say the latter. 

 

Most people would say he hit them on the head. NOT the back of the head.

 

[Michael Crane]

Sandy,

While I'm thinking about it...this is a discussion forum and I would like to expand on my opinion.

JFK's body was brought in one time in a shipping casket and placed onto the autopsy table.

There were more casket entries,but they did not contain JFK.

The caskets...The bronze and the mahogany were brought to the morgue and placed in the cold room.

I'm not 100% certain that the mahogany casket was placed in the cold room.

I do speculate that the FBI entry and the MDW Honor Guard entry only brought the casket so far then were turned/held back as in denied access to the main room (didn't see JFK/ put on table)

It's my firm belief that the autopsy attendees in the gallery were let into the actual morgue (with tables) after JFK was placed on the table.

Edited January 6 by Michael Crane