4. “What Are You Doing?”
Anyone who looked at Kennedy’s state knew he was either unsavable or already gone. Given his motionless body and massive head wound, it didn’t take a doctor or a nurse to understand that JFK was no longer with us. Still, this was the President of the United States, not to mention that his wife was right there at his side.
So the medical staff at Parkland was going to treat Kennedy as if there were chances to bring him back to life. While Dr. Charles Baxter was performing closed-chest compression (he was trying to restore some semblance of a regular heartbeat), neurosurgeon William Kemp Clark suddenly entered the trauma room.
According to Joe Goldstrich, Clark saw what Baxter was doing and reacted quickly, “My God, Charlie, what are you doing? His brains are all over the floor.” It was obvious that Clark hadn’t seen Kennedy’s wife before he blurted out those words.
“I was standing between them when he did see her”, Goldstrich recalls. “I saw her face when she heard what Dr. Clark had said. That’s another memory that will stay with me forever”.
9 Responses
It is so sad the first a Great President was assassinated , and that his would be killer killed, so that no one would really know who was responsible for this tragedy even after all these years
Regardless of circumstances these many years later, still the biggest travesty in our wonderful country’s history. Beyond sad…power politics greed and ultimately murder of one of the most caring and brilliant man in the world. Johnson really wanted that Presidency and look what he did. Despicable.
How can we believe any of this when you don’t even know the date that he was killed?
I was in class at St. Patrick elementary school when Sister Angela came in and told us of the horror!
Thank you for this information that i am pretty sure no one really knew That was a day that I REMEMBER WAS HORRIBLE. That was a day for History and it was History.
i REMEMBER THAT DAY LIKE IT WAS YESTERDAY. The next 3 days were like everyone in the world was surrounded by fog. The TV proceedings were in Black and White because the colored TVs were very expensive. I really truly believe that it was the first time in my life that the TV stations were on all night. Back then most stations were only broadcasting until 1:00 am. It had just been a few months earlier that we had all as families gathered to watch the intervention of the US and Russia deal in Cuba. Tensions were high, and almost everybody we knew had thought that the assassination was directly related to the Cuba incident. Tensions were high and everyone thought we were going to go into a nuclear war with Russian. I had read a story later in life that in fact it had almost happened, but there was a senator from I believe North Dakota that had a cooler prevailing thought, and he along had saved the earth from nuclear devastation. Trying times for a man who loved by many, many Americans and still to this day.
No surprise to most Americans
I was small at that time but I remembered the shock
I think we watched it a school.The funeral,