Medical Analysis of the Jfk Assassination

Dr. Charles Crenshaw's book Conspiracy of Silence caused a minor sensation when it was released in 1992, even attracting the attention of the New York Times. Coauthored by Jens Hansen and Gary Shaw, it told several conspiratorial stories about the assassination, and especially about the role of Dr. Crenshaw, then a resident physician at Parkland Hospital, in the care of John Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald.

It has since been reprinted as Trauma Room One.

Among the "interesting" things that Crenshaw claims are:

The back of Kennedy's head was blown out, clearly implying a shot from the Grassy Knoll in front of Kennedy.

A small wound in Kennedy's throat was an entrance wound, proving a shot from the front, and not from the Sniper's Nest behind Kennedy.

Parkland doctors, knowing there was a conspiracy, have feared to speak out.

The President's body was altered between Parkland Hospital and the autopsy at Bethesda.

And the most sensational: Lyndon Johnson called the operating room were Oswald was being treated and demanded a confession be extracted from the accused assassin.

Conspiracy authors, wanting to push the idea of a shot from the Grassy Knoll, have lapped up Crenshaw's account. For example, Gary Aguilar quotes Crenshaw as follows:

He, with co-authors, Jens Hansen and Gary Shaw, recently published a book, "Conspiracy of Silence" (Crenshaw, CA, Hansen, J, Shaw, G. "Conspiracy of Silence". 1992, New York, Signet). Crenshaw has claimed both in his book and in public interviews that the President's head wound was posterior on the right side. In "Conspiracy of Silence" he wrote, "I walked to the President's head to get a closer look. His entire right cerebral hemisphere appeared to be gone. It looked like a craterÐ'--an empty cavity. "

Conspiracy writer Gary Aguilar accepts Crenshaw's account. His essay on supposed "back of the head" witnesses is useful and interesting Ð'-- although many of his assessments of the testimony are to be treated skeptically.

How does Crenshaw know such things? According to the book, he had a central role in treating Kennedy. Yet when the New York Times called up Crenshaw in response

to his book, he backed away from the book's claims as to how central he was, saying that Hansen and Shaw "took poetic license" on this issue. Crenshaw "admitted . . .that the role he played in Kennedy's case was minor." See the Times of May 26, 1992.

It hardly inspires confidence in the book when Crenshaw says things like this.

Aguilar then quotes the following passage, where Crenshaw further described the wound:

All I could see there was mangled, bloody tissue. From the damage I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that the bullet had entered his head through the front, and as it surgically passed through his cranium, the missile obliterated part of the temporal and all the parietal and occipital lobes before it lacerated the cerebellum. (Emphasis added, p. 86).

In the first place, as Hank Sienzant has pointed out, Crenshaw cites several descriptions of the head wound in his book, and they are far from being "back of the head" descriptions:

Pg 2: "The entire right hemisphere of President Kennedy's brain was obliterated. . . . "

Pg 78: "Then I noticed that the entire right hemisphere of his brain was missing, beginning at his hairline and extending all the way behind his right ear."

Pg 86: "His entire right cerebral hemisphere appeared to be gone. It looked like a crater, an empty cavity."

Pg 87: (Quoting Kemp Clark): "My God, the whole right side of his head is shot off... We've got nothing to work with."

Pg 89: "... there is still nothing that can save a victim who loses the entire right side of his brain."

In some passages (see p. 132), Crenshaw says that the damage extended around to the back. But his description is mostly "side."

Even more striking is Crenshaw's claim that there was "no doubt in his mind" about the trajectory being front-to-back. Compare this to other, more senior doctors, in the ER.

In another part of the essay, Aguilar quotes Ronald Jones:

Specter asked Jones to speculate from his observations the nature of JFK's wounding. He asked, "Dr. Jones, did you have any speculative thought as to accounting for the point of wounds (sic) which you observed on the President, as you thought about it when you were treating the President that day, or shortly thereafter?" Jones answered, "With no history as to the number of times that the President had been shot or knowing the direction from which he had been shot, and seeing the wound in the midline of the neck, and what appeared to be an exit wound in the posterior portion of the skull, the only speculation that I could have as far as to how this could occur with a single wound would be that it would enter the anterior neck and possibly strike a vertebral body and then change its course and exit in the region of the posterior portion of the head." (WC.V.6:56)

And then there was Paul Peters:

Peters told author Lifton on 11-12-66, "I was trying to think how he could have had a hole in his neck and a hole in the occiput, and the only answer we could think (of) was perhaps the bullet had gone in through the front, hit the bony spinal column, and exited through the back of the head, since a wound of exit is always bigger than a wound of entry." (Lifton D. Best Evidence. p317. Peters repeated this speculation in a speech on the subject on 4/2/92, in a talk entitled, "Who Killed JFK?", given at the 14th annual meeting of the Wilk- Amite Medical Society, at Centreville Academy, Centreville, Mississippi, according to a transcript furnished by Claude B. Slaton, of Zachary, Louisiana.)

So while doctors like Jones and Peters were engaging in rather wild speculation as to the trajectory Crenshaw, a very junior bit player, had "no doubt."

In fact, nobody at Parkland could offer more than a wild guess about the trajectory, since nobody did (or had any need to do) the sort of forensic