How the JFK conspiracy was born
JIMMY BRESLIN in TEXAS
DR MALCOLM Perry was having salmon croquettes for lunch in the hospital canteen when the call came.
"President Kennedy has been shot," said the woman’s voice when he answered the pager. For the next three days Perry was at the epicentre of one of the most dramatic events of the 20th century.
Leaving his lunch unfinished, Perry walked calmly through the corridors of Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Jack Kennedy was already lying bleeding in Emergency Room One having been rushed there from Dealey Plaza.
I shouldn’t have said anything. I didn’t know how much trouble I could get into
In the corner he noticed a dark-haired woman standing with her husband’s blood splattered down the front of her clothes.
Speaking from his Texas ranch after years of silence about his experiences, Perry has now recalled the events of that "bad weekend" in November 1963 when he not only watched Kennedy die, but also operated on a dying Lee Harvey Oswald.
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"I shouldn’t have said anything," Perry says. "I was naive. I didn’t know how much trouble I could get into. I shouldn’t have surmised. If I hadn’t said that, there wouldn’t have been a conspiracy theory."
Of course, the drama wasn’t over yet for Perry because on the Sunday after the Friday on which Kennedy had died he was back at work operating on Lee Harvey Oswald who was shot in a Dallas police station by Jack Ruby.
"It was a bad weekend," he remembers. "A bad weekend and a bad aftermath."
Perry had one more moment in the spotlight when he appeared at the Warren Commission set up to investigate Kennedy’s death. He clarified his views about the throat wound, but he believes it was too late by then because the conspiracy theories had already begun to grow. Since then he has hardly mentioned the events at Parkland. From 1978 until 1988 he was the head of vascular surgery at a hospital in New York where even those who knew who he was never mentioned the Kennedy shooting in front of him. It was the same in the elegant suburb of Larchmont where he lived. "They were wonderful neighbours," said Perry. "Nobody ever said, ‘Are you that person?’ I was discreet. I said little about those things."
LEGACY OF SUSPICION
FORTY years after the assassination of President Kennedy 51% of the US population still believe that there was a second gunman and that Lee Harvey Oswald could not have acted alone. According to an ABC poll conducted earlier this month, 32% now accept Oswald was the lone killer when he fired from the Texas Book Depository in Dallas. In other questions the poll asked, it was revealed that 70% of people said they thought the assassination was part of a broader plot, and more than two-thirds believed there was a government cover-up. In 1966, three years after Kennedy’s death, 46% of people surveyed in a Harris poll believed the killing was part of a broader plot. By 1983, that number had reached 80% in an ABC poll.
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Page 1 of 2
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