Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (3 page)

Robert Grossman

Now the chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas, in 1963 Robert Grossman was a thirty-year-old neurosurgery resident at Parkland Hospital in Dallas when President Kennedy was brought there immediately after being shot.

I
was sitting in my laboratory at South Western Medical School, talking with Kemp Clark. Kemp and I were the two neurosurgeons at Parkland. Kemp was the chairman. He was thirty-eight; I was thirty. That was my first job after finishing my training in neurosurgery. I’d been at Parkland for about five months at that time. I was on the faculty; I had finished my training. We were talking about the president’s visit and that it was controversial. There was some feeling that the president was not welcomed by certain groups in the community; I think that was a very small aspect of the community. There were huge crowds greeting him, very enthusiastic, and I think he and Jackie were actually much-loved figures. Kemp and I were sitting and talking about the trip. The phone rang, and someone said to me, “Come to the emergency room. President’s been shot.” I told Kemp. We thought it was a prank. Then we looked at each other and said, “We had better go and see.”

We started walking to the elevator and took the elevator down. The medical school building was across the parking lot from the hospital. When we got downstairs, we could see limos, police cars, and an ambulance at the entrance to the emergency room, so we started running. We ran into the entrance to Parkland, down the hall to Trauma Room One. We had no idea of how serious it was at the time.

There was the president of the United States lying motionless, surrounded by physicians—it was a tremendous emotional shock. It was very
clearly the president. He was a very striking, very handsome figure, even in that extreme situation. There was no sense of panic or of fear in the room. I think Parkland physicians were used to taking care of very serious injuries, and I think everyone was doing their job, was very contained. It was really quite businesslike.

The president had been seen first by Jim Carrico and Malcolm Perry. Jim was chief resident. Malcolm was on the faculty; he was a vascular surgeon. They had done an intubation and a tracheotomy because they had seen a wound in his throat. They thought at the time that it was an entrance wound. They started intravenous fluids. It was clear that he had a severe head wound. There was a great deal of bleeding from his head, but at that point no one had examined his head carefully.

Kemp and I went to the head of the gurney and stood behind the president. The assistant, if you have a right-handed surgeon, stands at the right hand of the surgeon. So Kemp was on the left, I was on the right, and we both picked his head up to examine the wound. The scalp had been shattered, and the skull had been shattered and lifted up like a plate of bone. You could see that the president’s brain tissue—which was badly disrupted in an area about the size of your hand, over what’s called the parietal boss—had been blown out where this was an exit wound. Lifting his head up, I could see an entrance wound with brain extruding
from it. It was immediately clear to me that he had been shot from behind, the bullet coming out through the parietal area and blasting the tissue outward.

It was clear that this was a fatal injury, and what was going through my mind was: How long would he live? Would he be in a coma for days, even weeks? People can be kept alive on respirators with life support. I was wondering whether he would be in that situation, with the whole country held in suspense, the whole world around us watching.

Everyone at Parkland, from the highest to the most unfortunate, is treated the same way. I don’t think it would’ve made any difference if it was somebody else. There was a tremendous effort to see if his heart could be started. An EKG was taken. There was no organized electrical activity in his heart, so I think people’s attention was really focused on whether he could be resuscitated. But after cardiac massage and artificial respiration, it was clear that his heart couldn’t be started. Dr. Clark Kemp, who was the most senior person in attendance, said we should stop resuscitation efforts.

Mrs. Kennedy was standing in one corner of the room. She had blood and brain on her dress; she was wearing that iconic pink outfit. I think there were some tears on her face. But she wasn’t out of control in any way. She was standing there quietly. The Secret Service agents must have been in the room, but they didn’t interfere or interrupt the medical care.

Dr. Clark made the call, I think, because the clear cause of death was the head wound. I think it devolved upon him to make that judgment.

Texas law was that a person who has been shot or murdered should have an autopsy in the county in which the murder occurred. Earl Rose, who was the coroner, stood in front of the Secret Service as they were wheeling the body out and tried to stop them. But the Secret Service wouldn’t have any of that. They pushed him out of the way and continued to take the president back to Washington.

It’s difficult to say whether an official autopsy would have made a difference in terms of findings. The autopsy records aren’t as detailed as one
would wish, and the physicians in Bethesda who did the autopsy were under a great deal of time pressure to complete it. The X-rays that were taken were not as complete, not as thorough as could’ve been done. The drawings that were made were rather crude. But whether it would’ve been done better in Dallas, no one can say.

Seeing the president dying in front of you—the feeling is one of awe. Everyone was concerned. There wasn’t much discussion in the room obviously. Everyone was concentrating on the medical aspect. But I think everyone was concerned:
What does this mean for the country? Was this the start of World War III?
I think that was the first thought everyone must’ve had. Was this a deliberate attack? What better way to destabilize the country than to kill the president. Was this a deliberate attempt by Russia? We were at the height of the Cold War. We’d just had the Cuban Missile Crisis. Was it the Cubans? Was it the Russians? We had fought the Chinese and North Koreans. Was China or North Korea behind this? Was it a right-wing hate group, a left-wing group? All those thoughts were going through our minds.

I got home later that afternoon—I don’t remember the exact time. I told Ellen, my wife, about what had happened. We had two young daughters: Amy, who was about three, and Kate, who was one. They were too young to remember of course. But I told Ellen and waited to go in the next day. As you know, Oswald was captured and then shot, and I was asked by the surgical service to examine him. He was in deep shock. The question was whether the bullet had penetrated his spine or the shock was simply due to abdominal bleeding. I examined him. As best as I could determine, the bullet had not entered his spine.

I don’t think Oswald could have been saved, even if he’d gotten better treatment en route to the hospital. He had lost a great deal of blood and, even if re-infused, if the person has been in shock too long, the nervous system will not recover. I don’t think he would’ve recovered.

Later that Sunday, we were very much focused on what the president’s death meant for the country rather than on any personal change or effect
on us. It made me proud to be an American because unlike in many countries in the world, where an assassination might result in a military takeover, nothing like that happened. Everything was orderly. Our Constitution was respected. Everyone knew what he or she should do and followed through properly.

There are some unanswered questions, and I think that probably the most controversial aspect of the Warren Commission report is the question of the order of the shots: whether there was one shot that hit both the president and Governor Connally or whether there were separate shots. I think no one can give a definitive answer to that.

At the time this was thought to be an entry wound, but actually it was an exit wound. We should’ve undressed the president and examined his entire body, but we didn’t do that out of respect for him. There would be an autopsy in Washington, and the thought was that they would do whatever was necessary. I think if we had examined him, we would’ve seen the entry wound, which was in his upper back.

That bullet had come out through his throat, so he clearly was shot twice. I guess the question is whether there was a separate shot that hit Connally. But I think that’s the most controversial aspect. Out of respect for the president, nobody wanted to undress him and examine him completely. I think everyone was in such a state of shock that the notes made by the physicians weren’t detailed. Nowadays, with everyone having a smart phone with a camera, we would’ve photographed the body. We would’ve photographed the wounds.

I always drew the pathology of the operations that I did—I learned that from my residency chairman, Jay Lawrence Poole, at Columbia. He
was a wonderful medical artist, and he would draw the anatomy of the tumors, the aneurysm we operated on. I should’ve made a drawing of what I saw, but it just never crossed my mind. I suppose I was in shock from the events. I don’t think there ever has been a protocol for reporting what you have seen, except to dictate it. Even the dictated notes were not very detailed, because it was really like being in the center of a hurricane and more wondering about the implications of what had happened.

I went back into the hospital the next day and made rounds. I don’t remember really watching television that much afterward. The atmosphere in the hospital was actually fairly calm; I think people were keeping their concerns to themselves. There wasn’t an atmosphere of panic or chaos in any way. It was very professional.

I can still visualize picking the president’s head up. He had very thick hair, but even with that you could see the blasted out area of his skull and his brain. It seems like yesterday.

I have a photograph of President Kennedy that has never been published. It was taken by a friend when Kennedy came to talk at Rice University a year before, when he talked about putting a man on the moon. My friend was the photographer for the
Rice Thresher,
the university newspaper, and took a wonderful photograph of the president in the car, which I have at home. That’s the way I’ll remember him, not as he was on the gurney but as a vital human being. Robert Dalleck’s book
An Unfinished Life
—that is the sad part, because we don’t know what he might have accomplished had he lived. He really did have an unfinished life.

Robert Caro

In 1963 Lyndon Baines Johnson biographer Robert Caro was a twenty-eight-year-old reporter for
Newsday.
In 1974 he wrote
The Power Broker
,
a biography of New York City urban planner Robert Moses, which the
Modern Library
chose as one of the hundred greatest nonfiction books of the twentieth century. To date he has written four of five planned volumes of
The Years of Lyndon Johnson
(1982, 1990, 2002, 2012), a landmark biography of the former president. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other literary awards.

W
hen he comes to Congress in 1947—the summer after the first session—he has been sick all his life with the same symptoms: constant nausea, inability to gain weight. He’s so skinny that you can see the ribs, count the ribs on him. He has a constant pain in his stomach, which he defines as “like it’s a hard knot inside me,” and he has this yellowish tint. He’s been diagnosed with everything, including leukemia and hepatitis. None of the diagnoses was correct, so none of the treatment was correct. In 1947, after his first year in Congress, he goes to England to visit his sister and falls terribly ill. And for the first time they have the right diagnosis: Addison’s disease.

In 1947 Addison’s disease is often fatal, and the physician who treats him in London tells Pamela Churchill, whose house he was staying at, “You know that young friend of yours from America? He hasn’t got a year to live.” He’s brought back to America in the sick bay of the
Queen Elizabeth
on a stretcher. He’s so sick that when he gets to New York, a priest comes on board to administer the last rites. He’s flown into Boston, where he does gradually recover. In 1949 cortisone is starting to be used, and it’s a miracle drug to treat Addison’s disease, which really had no cure before.
Kennedy starts to change, to fill out. His face starts to fill out. But just about that time, his back, which has always been terribly bad, becomes so bad that he’s walking on crutches. When he campaigns for the first time for the Senate against Henry Cabot Lodge, he’s often on crutches. He’s ashamed of them. He tries to hide them. When he’s in the Senate, there’s a committee hearing; he tries to get there a little early to put the crutches under the table so nobody will see them. Sometimes there’s no room under the table, so you see the crutches standing against the wall behind him.

Doctors don’t want to operate because Addison’s disease has such terrible effects on the immune system. He decides to have the operation, and the surgeons at the Lahey Clinic in Boston refuse to operate because it’s too risky. His father says to him, “Don’t have the operation. Roosevelt was on crutches. You can still have a full life.” Jack Kennedy says to his mother, “I would rather die in the operation than live the rest of my life hobbling around on crutches with pain all the time.”

In ’54 he has an operation on his back despite these terrible risks. They only give him a 50/50 chance of surviving the operation. The operation doesn’t work, and four months later, in February ’55, he has a second operation. The incision doesn’t close. It’s eight inches long, so he basically has a hole in his back. At that time he goes to see a doctor named Janet Travell.

I was a reporter on
Newsday,
and for a brief time I covered Bobby Kennedy’s run against Kenneth Keating in ’64. Bobby always used to say about Dr. Travell, “Without her, my brother would never have been president.” She was Kennedy’s White House physician, and then she was Johnson’s White House physician. She told me this story, which she later recounted in her own memoir:

Jack Kennedy doesn’t want anyone to know he was sick, so when he comes back from the second operation, he first goes down to Palm Beach to get a tan. He comes back. He leaves the crutches on the plane; the photographers take pictures of him walking off the plane with this big grin. The
Herald Tribune
writes, “Tanned and fit, Jack Kennedy comes back to the Senate.” Dr. Travell has read all this and isn’t quite sure why he’s coming to see her. Her window faces the steps; she sees Jack Kennedy get out of his taxicab, and she sees this crippled man. He’s on crutches. It’s hard for him even to get down the three steps. When he’s talking to her, she says, he can’t turn. He can’t turn his head to talk to her unless he turns his entire body. When she asks him to describe his medical history, the symptoms, he does it in such a discouraged, tired voice, as if he has told this story too many times before. But she starts to do the things that need to be done: She treats him with injections, and she puts him in a rocking chair so that the muscles of his back are constantly in motion. This treatment is so outside normal medical procedures. She injects procaine and Novocain into the back spasm—and almost immediately starts to get him better.

But she sees his ambition. As soon as her treatments start to work, he starts to run for president, crisscrossing the country, seeing political leaders in all the states. Then his father calls Dr. Travell and says, “You know, he’s in terrible pain still. Can you come down to Palm Beach?” She comes down to Palm Beach and sees laid out on a table a big map of the United States, all the places he’s going to travel to, and she sees there are no days off, no time for rest, and he’s in pain. She says, “You must take time off for rest,” and he basically tells her, “I won’t take the time off.” His back gradually starts to get better. He stays in the rocking chair. He continues to be treated by her, and he crisscrosses the United States over and over again, learning the new forces in politics.

Johnson said for the record, “What was Jack Kennedy? Jack Kennedy was a sickly man, malaria ridden.” (He thought Kennedy had malaria.) “Yellow in cast,” he said, “sickly, weak, not a man’s man.” That was Lyndon Johnson’s estimation of Jack Kennedy. It couldn’t have been more wrong, but he was judging Kennedy on the fact that he didn’t really work or do very much in Congress or the Senate. That’s how Johnson looked at people. Everybody had the same view of Kennedy. Speaker of the House Sam
Rayburn said of Kennedy, “A nice boy, but he doesn’t like the grunt work. He doesn’t like to really work at congressional work.” No one understood that the real reason for this wasn’t a lack of willingness to work, wasn’t a lack of ambition. It was this terrible illness, and later his back, that drained his energy.

In 1958 Lyndon Johnson is going to be the next Democratic nominee. He is the mighty Senate majority leader; he runs the Senate. Someone wrote about him, “He stands there with his arm upraised, directing the votes to go faster and slower. He makes a gesture. Two more men run out of the cloakroom. He makes another gesture, another man comes out. My God, running the world. Power enveloped him.”

So Johnson thinks he’s going be the presidential nominee. In the beginning of 1958, he is going to be the presidential nominee. But Jack Kennedy is going around the country, and he’s learning that there’s a new force in politics. Johnson thinks it’s the senators, the old bulls, who are running things back in their states. But there’s a new generation of politicians, men who were veterans of the Second World War, like Jack Kennedy. Now they’re rising up. They identify with Kennedy. A new organization is starting up, and Johnson will not campaign. He thinks Kennedy will never get the required 761 votes on the first ballot—or any ballot. There’s no way Kennedy is going to get a majority. If Kennedy doesn’t get that majority, it’s going to go into the back room. What does the back room mean? They’re old-time politicians, and Johnson says, “They talk my language. They don’t talk Jack Kennedy’s language. If I can get it into the back rooms, I will be the nominee.” He doesn’t realize what’s happening. Jack Kennedy is taking the nomination away from him.

Kennedy had a great understanding of the world. He had traveled. He had been in England. He wrote
Why England Slept,
which analyzed what led up to the Second World War. He was a reader of history. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he kept referring to a book, Barbara Tuchman’s
The Guns of August,
about how the First World War came about because of miscalculations and follies. People rushed to do things, made the wrong decision. Throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis he was saying, “Let’s take time. Let’s not take this step because it’ll lead to other steps.” He kept pulling back the hawks, standing in their way. He said, “If we
can just give peace another day, maybe I can negotiate with Khrushchev. Maybe he’ll come around.”

It’s amazing. The newspapers and magazines have lists of vice presidents, and Lyndon Johnson’s name is on none of them. He has all this power as a majority leader. Why would he give up that power to be vice president, which is a powerless post? No one thinks there’s a chance of that, and Kennedy hasn’t even hinted at it. The labor leaders and liberal leaders are scared that Lyndon Johnson might become the vice presidential candidate. Kenny O’Donnell says he had given assurances, with Kennedy’s approval, to labor and liberal leaders that it wouldn’t be Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy is nominated one night. The next morning at eight o’clock, the telephone rings in Lyndon Johnson’s bedroom where he’s sleeping with Ladybird. It’s Jack Kennedy.

He says, “I want to come down and speak to you.” They make an appointment for ten o’clock, and someone says to Johnson, “What did he call about?” Johnson says, “He’s going to offer me the vice presidency.” At about the same time, Jack Kennedy is calling his brother Bobby. In the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, Kennedy has the corner suite on the ninth floor; 9333 is the number. Johnson is two floors down: 7333. Bobby Kennedy is in the middle, on the eighth floor. Jack Kennedy calls Bobby early in the morning and says, “Count up all the votes we’d get if I hold the big states in the North that I know I’m going to hold, and add Texas.” Bobby Kennedy calls in two of his aides, Kenny O’Donnell and Pierre Salinger, and tells them to count up those votes.

Salinger says, “You’re not thinking of nominating Lyndon Johnson, are you? You’re not going to do that?” And Bobby says, “Yes, we are.”

That is startling and also brilliant. Jack Kennedy always sees the big picture. Maybe no
one else had bothered to add that up. They were all focused on the nomination. No one had bothered to add up what Jack Kennedy was going to win once he got the nomination. Was he going be president of the United States or just a defeated nominee for president? He was going to have a tough race against Richard Nixon. Had Jack Kennedy been thinking about this all along? We will never know. But as soon as he’s nominated, the very next morning he’s offering the vice presidency to Lyndon Johnson.

Suddenly Johnson finds he has no power at all. During the three years of Kennedy’s presidency, Johnson spends very little time with the president. Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy’s secretary, put together from the presidential log just how little time Johnson was alone with Kennedy, although he wanted to be alone with him a lot. The first year, 1961, he’s alone with Kennedy ten hours and nineteen minutes. Second year, I don’t remember the number, but it’s less. The third year, in the whole year of 1963, the vice president is alone with the president only an hour and some minutes. Johnson is cut out of power completely.