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  • 5/27/2025
At Tuesday's House Oversight Committee hearing, Dr. Don Curtis, who attempted to save President John F. Kennedy at the hospital after he was shot, spoke to Rep. Eli Crane (R-AZ) about what he saw.
Transcript
00:00Mr. Crane for five minutes. Thank you, Ms. Chairwoman. Thank you guys for coming today.
00:05I want to start with you, Dr. Curtis. As a dental surgeon who was present in the hospital room the
00:12day President Kennedy was shot, you were able to observe his wounds and maybe some of his
00:17medical records. Is that correct? Can you not hear me, Dr. Curtis? So you were there in the
00:31emergency room the day that the President was brought in? Yes. How old were you, sir? How old
00:37was I? Yeah. 26. 26. And what did you observe when they brought the President in? The President
00:46was already in the room before I arrived. And what I observed about him that he had probably
00:53already deceased. Since you were a dental surgeon, why did they bring you into the operation room?
01:02That's one thing Arlen Spector asked me. What is a dentist doing operating on the President?
01:10Then I had to qualify myself. The training that I have would encompass those particular procedures.
01:22And that's a simple procedure. And I did it well. And I just knew how to do it. There was nobody else
01:30there to do it. And I did it. Because Dr. Kerko asked me to do it.
01:40Can you tell us about the wounds that you observed on the President and how they differ from what came
01:46out in some of the reporting? The wounds on the President were to his throat
01:51and to his head and to his back. The wound to his throat would have killed him. The wound to his head
02:01definitely would have killed him. The wound to his back would not have killed him.
02:06Did the wounds to his throat and his head look like completely separate wounds?
02:10There were two separate wounds. Let me show it to you. The blue wound was sent from the railroad
02:23trestle all the way over to kill him right here. And that went to his throat. And the way that killed
02:29him is that it obstructed the trachea and he couldn't breathe. So he would have been dead before
02:38he reached the hospital just simply because of that wound. The other wound that he had to his head
02:45would have killed him instantly because it removed about a third of his brain.
02:50Thank you. Mr. Hardway, I want to move to you next. You talked about the obstruction of a federal
02:59investigation that you yourself witnessed. You were on the House Select Committee for assassination.
03:06Is that correct? Yes, sir. What year would that have been? 1977-1978. The obstruction occurred
03:12entirely in 1978. What was your role in that investigation? My role was a researcher with
03:19primary responsibility for researching Lee Harvey Oswald's activities in Mexico City and the CIA
03:26response to that. We've heard about some of the administrative roadblocks that the CIA put up for
03:33you. Did you have any direct verbal communication with anybody at the CIA? Oh, yeah. Frequently.
03:41Can you tell us about some of those conversation and how it might have been conceived as obstruction?
03:49Well, when we first started, we had unlimited, unexpurgated access. We had two clerks assigned to us.
03:57We had our office at the CIA. Pretty much went to work out there every morning. We'd ask for a file.
04:03They would go get it. We would review it. It was unredacted and given to us in its original state.
04:13After they brought George Joannidis in, he began slowly tightening down the process. We were no longer
04:19working with two clerks who went and got our files. We had to file formally requests through him to get
04:27the files and we started experiencing significant delays in the files that we would get.
04:35We started noticing that the files we would get would have obvious things missing from them.
04:41Then he went so far as to actually start putting parts of the files in envelopes and leaving them
04:47in the files so that what we would get is we would sign that we'd seen the files, but we weren't allowed
04:53to open the stuff that he had placed in envelopes. That came back to Hannah's later in dealing with the
04:59final report and some of the things we were trying to get out of them when they would tell
05:03the chairman of the committee. He's seen that. Here's where he signed for the file. I would have
05:09to explain to Chairman Stokes that no, that was not in the file when I saw it because that was what I
05:16was looking for and it was not there. It must have been in one of the envelopes. He eventually just shut
05:23us down. It culminated on one file that I really wanted to see. When it was presented to me, Mr.
05:30Joe Aniti showed up himself to give it to me. He was actually bouncing on his toes. Him and Scott
05:36Breckinridge brought the file to me at the CIA, called me back out there to see it. It had not
05:42just been redacted, it had been retyped with the redactions in white space as it had been retyped. It
05:48was a report on a debriefing of a certain person. I exploded. I acted like a very angry 24-year-old
05:58and had choice words for both of them and stormed out of the office and went back to the headquarters.
06:07I subsequently, thanks to Judge Tunheim's work, saw the memorandum to the record that Mr. Breckinridge
06:15wrote and the memorandum for the record says that the file was shown to me and, quote,
06:23no objections were recorded, close quote. Notice the way, you have to watch what the CIA says.
06:32He didn't say that I didn't make any, which is what everyone infers from what he said. What he said
06:38was none were recorded and that's because he made the record. Thank you. I yield back.
06:44Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for your leadership on this committee.

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