'As I fought to save JFK, Jackie slipped her ring on to his finger' (2024)

• Dr Robert McClelland treated President John F. Kennedy after he was shot
• He is one of only two doctors still alive who battled to save JFK's life
• Jackie took JKF's wedding ring and replaced it with hers, he reveals
  

By Caroline Graham for The Mail on Sunday and Claudia Joseph

Published: 17:00 EST, 9 November 2013 | Updated: 11:17 EST, 18 November 2013

The blood which stained his white cotton shirt may have faded from vibrant red to black, but Dr Robert McClelland’s memories of the day President John F. Kennedy was shot remain indelible – especially the heartbreaking sight of the First Lady saying her final goodbyes to her husband.

Dr McClelland is one of only two doctors still alive who battled to save the President after he suffered terrible gunshot injuries in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

‘It was horrifying to see President Kennedy lying on his back on the stretcher with the operating room light shining down on his bloody head,’ recalls Dr McClelland, now 84.

‘I can still see that in my mind’s eye as if it happened today. His face was greyish, his eyes were open and his head was covered in blood. I didn’t have time to put on gloves or scrubs. I operated with my bare hands.’

Dr McClelland had raced to Trauma Room One at the Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas after hearing the terrible news that the President’s motorcade had been attacked.

He recalls how, as he pushed through the crowds of police officers, Secret Service agents and hospital staff, he saw the President’s wife Jackie sitting on a chair outside the operating theatre, her pink Chanel wool suit covered in blood.

Once inside the theatre, Dr McClelland was joined by Dr Kenneth Salyer, then a junior surgeon. Dr Salyer went on to be one of the world’s leading craniofacial specialists.

In his newly released autobiography, A Life That Matters, Dr Salyer says the priority was to get the President breathing by inserting a tube down his throat and into his lungs. ‘The whole right-hand side of President Kennedy’s cranium had been blown away,’ he remembers.

‘Much of the right side of his brain had been destroyed as well, and the remainder was exposed by a gaping hole in his skull.

‘The team wasn’t having any success at getting a tube down through the President’s nose, so we focused instead on a small bullet wound in the President’s neck, through which he was sucking air.

‘By enlarging the size of the wound, we ultimately were able to insert a breathing tube into the President’s lung. Although none of us spoke about it, it was already certain to each of us that anything more we might do to assist the President would be in vain.

‘The injury was absolutely a fatal one, yet although his brain had been devastated, his heart was still beating, and his body continued to reflexively gasp for breath.

‘Our patient was fatally wounded, but he was also the President of the United States, and we were obligated to try every heroic procedure imaginable to save him.’

It was, adds Dr Salyer, a disastrous irony that the President’s bravery as a pilot during the Second World War, and the wounds he suffered then, had quite possibly sealed his fate.

‘We began to cut away the President’s clothes, and I remember my surprise at the size and thickness of the massive brace he wore around his chest and abdomen.

‘I knew the President had suffered a back injury during his service in the Second World War, but the brace was far more restrictive than anything I could have envisioned.

‘As I cut away the brace, which was tightly laced like a corset, with heavy shears, it was hard to imagine he could move while wearing it, and it seemed certain that the war injury was far more serious – and painful – than the public knew.

‘The brace had kept his body upright and out in the open which meant he was a target for subsequent shots. Had he not been wearing it he might have survived.’

In contrast, Texas governor John Connally, who was seated in the same limousine as the President that day in November 1963, slumped to the floor after a bullet hit him and survived.

The medical team put an intravenous line into the President’s right arm, gave him ‘massive amounts of blood’, massaged his heart, injected him with steroids (he suffered from Addison’s disease, a rare disorder of the adrenal glands) and inserted chest tubes, but nothing improved his condition.

‘We worked intensely, suggesting to one another anything we might still try, but each of us knew that all hope was lost,’ says Dr Salyer.

Doctors worked on the President for 12 minutes but the signal on his heart monitor remained flat. During that time Mrs Kennedy wandered in and out of the room.

‘She continued to stand erect and without assistance, her face expressing both her shock and her profound sorrow,’ says Dr Salyer.

At 1pm, after every monitor attached to the President’s body had flatlined, Dr Kemp Clark, the hospital’s chief of neurosurgery, announced in a ‘calm yet shaken voice’: ‘Gentlemen, President Kennedy has died.’

The room emptied, but Dr Salyer remained at the head of the operating table as both the First Lady and a priest approached the body.

‘As I stood at the table, Mrs Kennedy approached it, and I remember her looking at me as if [to ask] that was OK. I nodded and watched as she moved close to the President’s body.

‘She leaned across him to reach for his left hand, removed his wedding ring and placed it on one of her fingers, and then she simply held her husband’s hand in a final goodbye.

‘I was still standing beside the table, numb and disbelieving, when a few men entered the room with a wooden casket, placed the President’s body inside it, then carried him away.’

Dr McClelland recalls that moment slightly differently, suggesting that as well as taking her husband’s ring, Jackie Kennedy also placed her own ring on his hand. ‘She was very self-contained, not crying or hysterical or anything like that.

‘She stood there very dignified, very quiet, and walked slowly down to the end of the gurney where the President’s bare right foot was protruding out from the sheet that he was covered with.

‘She stood there for a moment, leaned over and kissed his foot, then walked out of the room. That was the last we saw of her.’

Dr McClelland’s suit, covered with the President’s blood, was sent to a dry cleaner by his wife. But he kept the stained white shirt from that day as it was – ‘to always remember’.

Additional reporting by Daniel Bates