Doctor Who Examined JFK In Dallas Trauma Room Describes The 'Two Separate Wounds' He Observed

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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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