No matter where people stood when they heard the news that United States President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, November 22, 1963 recalls to those who lived through the events of that day a nation in mourning.

Where was I? In the girl’s locker room at Christopher Columbus Junior High in Las Vegas, Nevada, changing for P.E. class. The principal came on the intercom to announce that President Kennedy had died and school was dismissed.

People gathered around the televisions in their homes for the days following, grieving as if someone in their family had died.

C.S. Lewis, who died less than one hour before President John F. Kennedy was shot, wrote in The Magician's Nephew, “What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”

Years after the events of that date engraved in American history, two men told me their story. The men had no connection to one another except their own proximity to the death of President Kennedy.

By some odd twist of circumstance, they each told me their first-person story. Because I cared. Because I still care, and I want readers to know their stories.

While no one stood in exactly the same place and to this day Americans do not have all the facts about the death of President Kennedy, these men provide unique vantage points, personal newsreels of that ominous day.

David––“A primary source of data”

David is my brother-in-law, whom I have known for more than 50 years. David told me his story long after the events of November 22, 1963. He and my husband’s sister Cheri were living in the San Francisco area at the time. During our visit, they took us to the wine country in Napa Valley. I sat in the backseat of their car, listening, incredulous that David had never told us his story. Like a reporter who found herself at the scene of an accident, I took notes.

Persuading their teacher in “Problems of Democracy” class to let them do some first-hand research on their project, “Subversive Organizations in the U.S,” David and his friends skipped school. They could not have guessed how that one day in their lives would unfold.

On that day in 1963, David and his high school buddies were among the throngs that turned out to see President and Mrs. Kennedy arrive at Love Field in Dallas.

At Love Field, David said, contrary to expectations, there were no protest signs. “The sky was blue. He was the most handsome man I'd ever seen,” he said. “And she [First Lady, Jackie Kennedy] was stunning. I had never seen fashion like that. They both looked so happy.”

Afterward, David and his friends sped downtown to station themselves on Market Street under a viaduct where he said, “We knew the driver would slow down to make a hard right turn and we'd get a really good look at the president.” (Four high school seniors, they grew up in Dallas and knew how to navigate the surface streets to get wherever they wanted to go.)

By coincidence, he said, the street where these guys parked was “exactly the street to take to Parkland Hospital. We were standing about 15 feet from his car when it sped past us.”

“I saw his wound … there was no backside of his head. Horrible. Really emotional … 45 minutes earlier seeing this vibrant man and now,” as David told this story, he hesitated to say he remembers “a big bloody piece of nothing.”

The four boys jumped into their car and followed the president's limo to the hospital. “We thought it was weird that it [the limousine] didn't slow down. The Press Corps behind the limo got caught in traffic.”

Senator Ralph Yarborough and Mayor Earle Cabell were in the second car. David said he talked to Yarborough, “who was crying, inconsolable.” And later, it was Yarborough who told the press to talk to David and his friends.

“These boys saw him,” Yarborough said.

David said, “And then the press swamped us.” David's friend Will had used his student press pass to get into the hospital press conference. “He had an ABC News Press card and went to the official press conference.”

Meanwhile, in a second limo, in the backseat, the roses presented earlier to Jackie Kennedy lay strewn across the backseat.

The photo above shows David on the right looking down at Jackie’s roses. You can almost see in his expression and body language the wheels turning––should I or shouldn’t I? He did.

“I reached into the limo––I can’t believe I had the nerve. There was blood on the rose I got.” David has framed the blood stained rose as well as newspaper clippings and prints made from the film in his friend’s camera.

This picture of David next to the limo ran in the Houston Chronicle on the front page of the 25th Anniversary of the assassination, Sunday edition November 20, 1988.

The next thing David said he did was turn on the radio in the limo. “We didn’t know what was happening … We heard Walter Cronkite saying,” and here David couldn’t finish his sentence. After a pause, he said, “I knew he was dead.”

“When I testified, 10, 15 or 20 years later,” David said, “I flew into Dallas to the [Texas School Book Depository] museum to record a filmed testimony. The only thing interesting [to those who questioned him] was that President Johnson came out surrounded by Secret Service men, guns out, and loaded him into a VW Beetle with at least four agents with him. They covered him with their bodies.”

Behind the policeman, a man moves the glass bubble that could have shielded the president, but President Kennedy had asked that the bubble top be removed.

Crowd gathered outside Parkland Hospital Emergency Room.

At the hospital, David’s friend, Charles, took pictures with the camera he had brought with him that day. By the time reporters got there, people (Secret Service or local cops?) had cleaned up the car. They wiped off blood, took the top out of the trunk, put it on and drove away the limo Kennedy had been riding in. Charles, who later became a lawyer, started negotiating with reporters, who bid on his camera “sight unseen” and paid $700. for its film, with Charles retaining first prints and credits for any photos used.

Copies of these original photos add to the personal memorial David had made.

We Remember the History We Lived Through

Dr. Robert McClellan

I met Dr. Bob McClelland when a mutual friend introduced us. My friend knew I had been particularly interested in the Kennedy history. Sitting around my friend Norma’s kitchen table with her husband Royce, also a doctor, their son Todd, and my friend Pat, Dr. McClelland shared with us his first-hand testimony of that day in Trauma Room #1 at Parkland Hospital. Bob and Royce had been friends and colleagues for over 50 years, working and teaching at UT Southwestern Medical School and Parkland Hospital in Dallas. [1]

I took this picture of the shirt Dr. McClelland was wearing that day. He had preserved the shirt, he said, because he once saw a piece of clothing in a museum that was stained with President Lincoln’s blood after he had been shot.

His testimony:

“To start,” he said, “with a worm’s-eye view in the OR, two days after my 34th birthday, I had been on the surgical faculty [of Southwestern Medical School] since 1962. I was in a conference room showing a movie to senior residents on how to repair hernias.”

Dr. Crenshaw said, “Mac, will you step out here? Got a call to ER. They’re bringing President Kennedy in.”

“He and I got on the elevator, rode two floors down, trying to cheer each other. The door to ‘the Pit’ opened,” a space he compared to the size of Norma’s kitchen and den, with patient cubicles separated by curtains off that hallway. “Trauma rooms 1, 2, 3, and 4 were opposite, where we took seriously injured patients.”

“What I saw … the area was jammed with people, men in business suits, a sea of hats … the crowd parted [to let them pass]. On a chair outside Trauma room 1, Mrs. Kennedy was sitting … I walked toward her. I forced myself. Oh, no,” I thought. “I was it, or so I thought.”

“There were four of us [doctors] inside now, and Doris Nelson, the nurse in charge of the ER.” Later, Parkland hospital records would indicate six doctors attended the president.

“A surgical drape on the president, I saw him lying, cut out of his clothing, covered in blood. It was a horrible sight. Dr. Malcolm Parry and Dr. Baxter were there, and I [was glad] I wasn’t by myself. Parry on one side and Baxter on the other,” Dr. McClelland stood at the end of the gurney, noting that the doctors were working on a wound “the size of my little finger in his neck.” … “Did a bullet hit the carotid artery? I wondered.”

“Dr. Carricho put a tube in the trach [tracheotomy]. He was a resident at the time, but later he was chief of the department.”

Here, at this point in the conversation, Dr. McClelland reached up and touched his own head near the crown, indicating where he saw “a huge hole in the back of the President's head.” He thought before he spoke, “The right side of his head is gone, meaning the right half of the cerebral hemisphere is gone. However, he was breathing and had good cardio on the monitor.”

The doctors completed exploration of the neck wound, about six minutes spent, he said, before they cut Kennedy’s chest open and Mac [Dr. McClelland’s nickname] massaged his heart.

As he spoke, Dr. McClellan looked at one of the countless books he had read about the assassination of JFK and brought with him that evening. The plastic bag contained the shirt he was wearing while he treated President Kennedy in the Parkland ER.

Dr. Clark, a neurosurgery professor, noted that the ECG monitor had straight-lined. “Mac, you can stop now. The President is gone.”

“Shows how news media can bend things,” Dr. McClelland said. “Mrs. Kennedy wasn't in the room when Dr. Clark made his pronouncement.” With that, he said, the crowd left the [trauma] room.

“Dr. Baxter and I were shoved up against the wall of the trauma room, after the others left. Just as we got around the cart, a priest came in. Couldn't knock him down, could we? Father Huber, there to administer Last Rites. He bent down to the President’s left ear, saying ‘If thou livest’ and then his voice dropped.”

“Next, the door opened and Mrs. Kennedy came in. I couldn't hear, but I surmised [that that the priest had given] ‘conditional absolution.’ She grimaced but said nothing. She exchanged the ring from her finger to his, and his to hers. She stood by the President's barefoot, leaned over and kissed his foot. Then she left the room.”

This detail, that Jackie had “kissed his foot,” I had never heard mentioned or written, was the most poignant, personal aspect of what Dr. McClelland witnessed that day. 

What's that mean?

Bob Shieffer said on CBS morning news, “Nobody knew what this meant.”

This meaning, the end of the innocence. The end of believing in idealism. The end in this country of trusting those in positions of authority who determined what we the people could be told.

Truth is Better Than Fiction

November 22, 1963 also marks the beginning of an era of unrest, of divergence from values that once held the disparate states and opinions of people together in something resembling a whole. One nation under God had elected a young, vibrant Roman Catholic president––a new day dawning. In hindsight, it became evident that John F. Kennedy had his concealed flaws.

The buffer of history helps interpret subsequent events. The nation was not attacked. Oswald, presumed guilty, met his death––equivalent to a lynching.

Most people believed Oswald got what he deserved. That’s how things were done in 1963. Find a patsy, which is how Oswald referred to himself. Hang him publicly. Quiet the crowds. Show everyone, “We got our shooter.”

No matter where a person stands today to reflect on events that occurred six decades ago, the conspiracy conversation continues. Whether Oswald was the lone shooter––a misanthropic loser who sought a place in history books, or a conscripted assassin––the country took a hit that day, one that continues to ooze as questions reopen the wound.

President-elect Trump has indicated he will open the sealed files after he has the authority to do so.

For my part, whatever got concealed from the public must have been dreadful. Conspiracy theories abound. Books, movies, articles and opinions suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone.

I have never found a place to stand where I can see and believe that the Warren Commission presented the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

[1] Dr. Robert McClellan died in 2019. Dr. Royce Laycock died in 2020.