"Dr. Perry had always refused to discuss the Kennedy assassination, but that night, after we had been operating together for many hours on a complex case, I once again asked him about it. This time, however, Dr. Perry told me that the bullet wound in Kennedy’s neck was, in fact, unquestionably a wound of entrance."

Reflections on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 50 Years Later

By Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD

Friday, November 22, 2013, is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He is the youngest person, at age 43, ever to be elected president and the only Catholic.

JFK became president at the height of the Cold War. It began in 1947 with the Truman Doctrine containing the spread of communism and passage of the National Security Act, establishing the CIA, Department of Defense, the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Council. The following year National Security Directive 10-2 created the doctrine of Plausible Deniability, which enabled the CIA to disclaim responsibility for committing crimes of state.

Shortly after taking office, Kennedy was confronted with the Nixon-CIA-planned Bay of Pigs invasion. Its planners knew this Cuban-1exile-led invasion would fail but did not tell JFK in order to get his approval for it. When it did begin to fail they banked on the new, young president agreeing to provide the necessary air support and U.S. troops required for the invasion to succeed. Kennedy refused to do this, fired CIA director Allen Dulles and his two chief deputies, and vowed “to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”

The Joint Chiefs of Staff then sought JFK’s approval to mount its Operation Northwoods, a U.S. military invasion of Cuba justified by acts of terrorism performed by U.S. military personnel. They would be disguised as Cuban terrorists killing Americans to make it look good. Kennedy angrily rejected this.

Then came the Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. The Joint Chiefs insisted that Kennedy let them bomb and invade Cuba. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis Lemay even wanted to carpet-bomb the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons. JFK enraged the military chiefs by promising Khrushchev that the U.S. would never invade Cuba and would secretly remove its nuclear weapons in Turkey along the Russian border if he, in turn, would remove his nuclear weapons from Cuba, which Khrushchev did, ending the crisis.

The red flag of Kennedy’s peaceful foreign policy intentions flew high in June 1963 in his signal American University Commencement Address promoting nuclear disarmament and peaceful coexistence with communists. On the topic of world peace he said, “What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children—not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women—not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” With regard to the Cold War he said, “Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union… If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. And we are all mortal.”

In September 1963, JFK overcame Senate opposition and got a nuclear test ban treaty with the Russians passed. And then what the powers brokers in the National Security establishment considered to be the last straw was when Kennedy announced his intention to pull all U.S. troops out of Vietnam by 1965, beginning with 1,000 coming home in December as stipulated in his National Security Action Memorandum 263. At the time there were 16,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam and 95 deaths. President Kennedy issued this memorandum on October 11. Six weeks later he was killed.

Everyone over the age of 60 remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard what happened to President John Kennedy on that Friday, November 22, 1963. I was a third-year medical student at the time eating lunch in the school’s main dining hall when a student ran in and yelled, “President Kennedy has been shot.”

The FBI immediately determined and announced that an assassin named Oswald killed President Kennedy, firing three bullets from a window in the Texas School Book

Depository.

First it was said that three bullets hit the president. But the next day, when it was learned that one had missed and grazed a bystander, the official story was changed to two bullets hitting the president.

A week later President Lyndon Johnson formed the seven-member Warren Commission, which endorsed the FBI’s conclusion that Lee Oswald did it alone and that no one else planned or participated in the attack. The Commission, however, had to explain how only two bullets could cause all the damage done to JFK and Governor Connally sitting in front of him in the limo. One bullet went through Kennedy’s head, killing him. The other one, according to the Commission’s “single bullet theory,” inflicted all the other wounds they sustained. It went in Kennedy’s back and out his neck, in and out of Connally’s chest, then in and out of his wrist, finally entering and coming to rest in his thigh.

I began my study of the Kennedy assassination in 1967, 46 years ago, after reading Six Seconds in Dallas: a micro-study of the 3Kennedy assassination by Josiah Thompson. I also have had the unique experience of personally knowing the two doctors who figure most importantly in the case. They are President Kennedy’s physician, Admiral George Burkley, and the Texas surgeon who performed a tracheotomy on Kennedy after he was shot, Dr. Malcolm Perry.

When I was a teenager my family lived next door to Dr. Burkley and his family. We shared a duplex on the grounds of the Newport Naval Hospital in Newport, Rhode Island, which housed its Chief of Medicine, Dr. Burkley, and Chief of Surgery, my dad, a career navy surgeon. It is still there, as a Google Earth view of that duplex on the hospital compound shows.

Dr. Burkley’s son, George W., was my age and we became friends. (Once we sailed up Narragansett Bay in his small Snipe sailboat and camped out on an uninhabited island. But this adventure was cut short the next morning when a Navy launch arrived to tow us back home, sent by our fathers after a hurricane warning was issued.) Dr. Perry moved from Texas to the University of Washington in 1974, and we worked together there for several years. The arrow in the accompanying figure points to where our offices were located in the medical center, next to each other.

When Kennedy was shot he was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Dr. Tom Shires was the Chief of Surgery there, but he was 300 miles away in Galveston at a surgery meeting. He immediately flew back to Dallas and operated on Governor Connally. Two days later he and Dr. Perry operated on Oswald after he was shot, but they were unable to save him because the bullet Jack Ruby shot into Oswald’s abdomen tore his aorta and vena cava, and he bled to death on the operating table.

Dr. Shires moved to Seattle in 1974 to be the Chair of Surgery at the University of Washington, and he brought several Parkland surgeons with him, which included Dr. Perry and Dr. Jim Carrico. Dr. Carrico was the first doctor to see Kennedy when he was brought to the hospital. He inserted a tube through Kennedy’s mouth into his trachea to supply oxygen to his lungs. When that didn’t work very well Dr. Perry performed a tracheotomy.

I was the last UW faculty surgeon that Dr. Shires hired before he moved on to Cornell in 1975. Dr. Perry joined Dr. Shires at Cornell in 1978. Dr. Carrico stayed on and became Chair of the UW’s Department of Surgery in 1983, holding that position until 1990.

Dr. Perry was the first physician to speak publicly about the President’s injuries in a televised news conference an hour after his death. A newsman asked him, “Where was the entrance wound?” Dr. Perry informed the American public and the world that “There was an entrance wound in the neck…It [the bullet] appeared to be coming at him…,” which he repeated two more times at the news conference.

This did not sit well with the Warren Commission. The bullet hole in Kennedy’s neck had to be an exit wound for Oswald to be the assassin. Presented with its single bullet theory when testifying before the Commission several months later, Dr. Perry obligingly changed his view of the matter and said that the bullet wound he observed in the neck “certainly would be consistent with an exit wound.”

Dr. Burkley filled out Kennedy’s Death Certificate. In the “Summary of Facts Relating to Death,” he states, “A second wound occurred in the posterior back at about the level of the third thoracic vertebra.” The 3rd thoracic vertebra is 5 ½ inches below the neck.

This also did not sit well with the Warren Commission. The bullet wound in JFK’s back had to be at a much higher location in order for it to exit through his neck, particularly when shot from the sixth floor of a building behind him. The Warren Commission handled this by completely ignoring Kennedy’s Death Certificate and not having Dr. Burkley testify. The Death Certificate is not in the Warren Report or its 26 volumes of Hearings and Exhibits. In those 17,816-pages of Hearings and Exhibits, however, you will instead find things like a certificate of smallpox vaccination for Oswald’s daughter, June (Commission Exhibit 73A); Jack Ruby’s income tax returns (CE 713-719)—but not Oswald’s tax returns, said to be withheld for “national security;” and the condition of Marina Oswald’s teeth (CE 1403). One exhibit that I particularly like is a fragment of an aria from Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades, which is Commission Exhibit 53.

Right after the assassination, Malcolm Kilduff, Acting White House Press Secretary, said to reporters, “Dr. Burkley told me, it is a simple matter… of a bullet right through the head.” Asked, “Can you say where the bullet entered his head?” he replied, It is my understanding [from Dr. Burkley] that it entered in the temple, the right temple.”

The Warren Report was published on September 27, 1964 saying Oswald was the lone assassin. Books critiquing the Warren Report soon followed.

The first five, published in 1965-1967, were Whitewash by Harold Weisberg, Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane, The Second Oswald by Richard Popkin;, Accessories After the Fact by Sylvia Meagher, and my introduction to the subject, Six Seconds in Dallas.

Dr. Perry publicly changed his view of the neck wound for the Warren Commission after a Secret Service Agent came to Dallas, threatened him, and coerced him to testify that it was an exit wound. In 1970, that Agent, Elmer Moore, confessed to a friend that he had acted “on orders from Washington.” He regretted that he had “badgered Dr. Perry into making a flat statement that there was no entry wound in the neck.” As ordered, he said, “I did everything I was told, we all did everything we were told, or we’d get our heads cut off.” The friend he admitted this to was (appropriately enough) a University of Washington graduate student named Jim Gochenaur.

Thirteen years later, Dr. Perry and I performed surgery on a patient with a thoracoabdominal aneurysm. I removed the thoracic, or chest part of the aneurysm, and Dr. Perry, the abdominal part. When the residents were closing the incisions Malcolm and I sat together alone in the surgeons’ lounge drinking coffee. Dr. Perry had always refused to discuss the Kennedy assassination, but that night, after we had been operating together for many hours on a complex case, I once again asked him about it. This time, however, Dr. Perry told me that the bullet wound in Kennedy’s neck was, in fact, unquestionably a wound of entrance.

A year later, when called to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) Dr. Perry once again publicly supported the government’s single-bullet-theory official truth and agreed with the committee that the bullet wound in the neck must be an exit wound, explaining that the wound was so small that he had initially mistaken it for an entrance wound. But in 1986, Dr. Perry told another physician, Dr. Robert Artwohl, that it was in fact an entrance wound.

Then Oliver Stone’s movie JFK came out in December 1991 making a mockery of the so-called “magic bullet theory.” Next, in April 1992, the book JFK: Conspiracy of Silence by Dr. Charles Crenshaw is published. Dr. Crenshaw criticizes his colleagues at Parkland Hospital for not speaking out about true facts of Kennedy’s bullet wounds. Countering this, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association had a journalist write an article vindicating the autopsy report and the single bullet theory. It was published in JAMA in May 1992. Drs. Perry and Carrico and two other doctors involved in Kennedy’s care at Parkland, shown in the photo above, were interviewed, along with two of the three pathologists who performed the autopsy. Drs. Perry and Carrico gave their unqualified endorsement to the autopsy findings and said that Dr. Crenshaw didn’t know what he was talking about, although he was one of the doctors in the emergency room attending Kennedy at Parkland. Dr. Crenshaw sued and won a substantial settlement from JAMA. The journalist who wrote the article was sacked, and not long thereafter the editor of the journal, Dr. George Lundberg, resigned. Sadly, both Dr. Perry and Dr. Carrico, two leading American surgeons and former colleagues of mine at the University of Washington, disavowed their initial testimony on the bullet wounds and perjured themselves. (Dr. Carrico died in 2002, at age 67, from colon cancer. Dr. Perry died in 2009, at age 80, from lung cancer.)

Dr. Burkley also struggled with the truth on the JFK assassination. He knew what happened. Indeed, he was the only physician in the president’s Dallas motorcade, with Kennedy at Parkland Hospital, with the body on the flight back on Air Force 1 (with Jacqueline Kennedy and President Lyndon Johnson), and at the autopsy, done (by military pathologists) at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. And after the autopsy Dr. Burkley took possession of JFK’s brain. To ensure his silence President Johnson made Dr. Burkley his personal physician and promoted him to the rank of Rear Admiral to Vice Admiral.

In 1967, when asked if he agreed with the Warren Commission on how many bullets struck Kennedy, Dr. Burkley replied, “I would not care to be quoted on that.” But in 1977 he told his lawyer, William Illig, to contact Richard Sprague, Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations and said that he would explain to him why there must have been more than one shooter. When Sprague was ousted and the HSCA reverted to a cover-up mode, however, Dr. Burkley laid low. In 1978 he signed an incorrect and untruthful Affidavit for the HSCA, which states that on Air Force One to Bethesda the Dallas casket was constantly observed and not opened or disturbed. But in 1982 he told researcher Henry Hurt that JFK was the target of a conspiracy, although he refused to elaborate. In 1983 he admitted to another researcher that JFK had a large wound in the back of the head that had “all the appearance of an exit wound.”

After Dr. Burkley died (in 1991, at age 88), his daughter, Nancy Denlea, the executor of his estate, at first agreed to release her father’s attorney-client file on JFK’s death to the newly formed Assassination Records Review Board. But then she suddenly reneged and refused to sign a waiver of confidentiality that the ARRB needed to review the files.

I contacted Dr. Burkley’s son George W., my old teenage buddy, not long ago. He is a retired Marine Corps pilot living in Hawaii. All he would say was: “Dad never voiced much of an opinion about a conspiracy but frequently questioned why the Warren Commission never asked him to testify. Dad was [a] very close hold when it came to his professional life.” Dr. Burkley was an honorable man who fell prey to the cover-up.

The 17th Century British philosopher Francis Bacon, whose writings were instrumental in the development of the scientific method, said “Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.” This certainly pertains to the Kennedy Assassination...

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