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Jfk: Conspiracy of Silence (Signet) by Charles A. Crenshaw
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February 14, 2024
Read it about 10-15 years ago.
It is a pretty great and eye-opening book.
Reservations: Why did he wait until 1992 to write it, and how much money did he make from it?
His explanation of intimidation rings true.
I remember when JFK was assassinated, I was 8 years old. For most of my life, I never seriously questioned the standard story.
I have always thought the explanations of what happened were fairly shaky though, but we were overwhelmed with mainstream media supporting Warren Commission findings, and still are. The fact that Oswalt was murdered on TV 2 days after by a sketchy guy Ruby with mob ties has always left an element of doubt. Also, that Oswalt's interview sessions for his time in custody have been lost and never shared.
Right after I read this book, my wife and I celebrated our anniversary in Texas hill country as we often do. A lot of doctors from hospitals in Temple Texas were staying there at the same Bed and Breakfast, and taking fly fishing lessons from the proprietor. I talked to a couple of doctors, but none, would comment on this book. Dr Crenshaw left Parkland for Temple. Oddly, the property next door to this B&B was for sale because the owner had just died. I was told she was a judge in the JFK aftermath stuff, but I can't see where it was the tool Sarah Hughes that swore LBJ in on Air Force One with a still bloody Jackie beside him.
My eyes were opened by this book, and a little later I got a semi-retired sort of job where I could watch YouTube videos and started looking into the JFK mess. I also have read a lot of books about it and have come to some very sobering conclusions as to what happened.
I turned a corner after reading this book.
It is a pretty great and eye-opening book.
Reservations: Why did he wait until 1992 to write it, and how much money did he make from it?
His explanation of intimidation rings true.
I remember when JFK was assassinated, I was 8 years old. For most of my life, I never seriously questioned the standard story.
I have always thought the explanations of what happened were fairly shaky though, but we were overwhelmed with mainstream media supporting Warren Commission findings, and still are. The fact that Oswalt was murdered on TV 2 days after by a sketchy guy Ruby with mob ties has always left an element of doubt. Also, that Oswalt's interview sessions for his time in custody have been lost and never shared.
Right after I read this book, my wife and I celebrated our anniversary in Texas hill country as we often do. A lot of doctors from hospitals in Temple Texas were staying there at the same Bed and Breakfast, and taking fly fishing lessons from the proprietor. I talked to a couple of doctors, but none, would comment on this book. Dr Crenshaw left Parkland for Temple. Oddly, the property next door to this B&B was for sale because the owner had just died. I was told she was a judge in the JFK aftermath stuff, but I can't see where it was the tool Sarah Hughes that swore LBJ in on Air Force One with a still bloody Jackie beside him.
My eyes were opened by this book, and a little later I got a semi-retired sort of job where I could watch YouTube videos and started looking into the JFK mess. I also have read a lot of books about it and have come to some very sobering conclusions as to what happened.
I turned a corner after reading this book.
April 14, 2024
A DOCTOR AT PARKLAND HOSPITAL CLAIMS HE PARTICIPATED IN A ‘CONSPIRACY’
Charles Crenshaw (1933–2001) was a third year surgery resident at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, when President John F. Kennedy was rushed to the emergency room after being shot … Two days later, Crenshaw was part of the team that tried to save Lee Harvey Oswald, after he was shot by Jack Ruby.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 1992 book, “Parkland Hospital, and the U.S. government have never been overly subtle about their desire for us doctors to keep quiet and not divulge what we heard, saw, and felt that November weekend in 1963… the doctors who witnessed President Kennedy’s death have always felt the necessity to continue what has evolved over the years as a conspiracy of silence… Through the years, there have been a thousand instances when I have wanted to shout to the world that the wound to Kennedy’s hear and throat that I examined were caused by bullets that struck him from the front, not the back, as the public has been to believe… only to restrain myself---until now…
“I do not understand why the Warren Commission did not interview every doctor in President Kennedy’s room… I would have told them that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the bullet that killed President Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll area. I would have also [told them] about the call I received from Lyndon Johnson while we were operating on Lee Harvey Oswald. President Johnson told me that a man in the operating room would get a deathbed confession from Oswald… I told [a friend] that I believed the Warren Report to be a fable, a virtual insult to the intelligence of the American people. Having read almost every book that had been published on Kennedy’s death, in addition to having had an intense personal experience with the case, I considered myself one of only a few men who could make that claim. He asked me if I had ever considered letting someone help me write a book on the subject…” (Pg. 3-6)
He continues, “I knew I had to speak out… because the democratic process … was being callously and maliciously circumvented by a handful of cowards. My silence has protected them… Efforts to suppress and distort the truth about the assassination on the part of government officials and agents … have been well documented in previous works on this subject. That these efforts included threats, intimidation, falsification and destruction of evidence, and even death, have played no small role in my silence of the past twenty-eight years. I am fifty-nine years old. My medical career is over, and I no longer fear the ‘men in suits’ nor the criticism of my peers.” (Pg. 9)
He reports a 1990 meeting with “J. Gary Shaw, who… is one of the world’s top authorities on the Kennedy assassination… he removed several 8x10 photographs, handed them to me, and asked, ‘Does that look like the same body that you helped place in the casket at Parkland Hospital in 1963?’ I was amazed… the spot where Dr. Malcolm Perry had performed a tracheostomy … to help the President breathe. The opening was larger and jagged---significantly different from the way it had looked to me in Dallas. There was no doubt in my mind---someone had tampered with the body, or the photographs… ‘it appears that someone performed some surgery on the President between the time his body left Parkland Hospital and when these photographs were taken.’” (Pg. 10-11)
He observes, “Of course, not all the citizens of Dallas loved the President, as could be said of any city. But Dallas has received undue condemnation for its perceived role in President Kennedy’s death. While Dallas had its radical element, the city itself was incidental in the assassination. The executioners of John Kennedy were determined to eliminate him whether it be in Chicago, Miami, Dallas, or any other location. They were ‘sitting on go.’” (Pg. 63-64)
He states of the President’s body, “I walked to the President’s head to get a closer look. His entire right cerebral hemisphere appeared to be gone. It looked like a crater---an empty cavity. All I could see there was mangled, bloody tissue. From the damage I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that the bullet had entered his head through the front, and as it surgically passed through the cranium, the missile obliterated part of the temporal and all the parietal and occipital lobes before it lacerated the cerebellum… Several years later when I viewed slow-motion films of the bullet striking the President, the physics of the hear being thrown back provided final and complete confirmation of a frontal entry by the bullet to the cranium. When I saw the severity of the head wound, I thought that everything we had done for him during those twenty minutes was a complete waste of time…” (Pg. 86-87)
Later, he adds, “a bronze casket was being wheeled toward Trauma Room 1 by two male employees from the Oneal Funeral home. I opened the door… then followed them in. I was the only doctor in the room… Before I directed that the body be moved, I turned down the sheet and took one last, long look at President Kennedy’s head wound. I was the last doctor at Parkland to see it. After making my final examination, in lightly stroked his reddish-brown hair. I felt so terribly sorry for him… Four of us lifted the President into the casket and placed his neatly folded clothes at his feet… It wasn’t until years later, when I saw the autopsy photos of John Kennedy taken at Bethesda Naval Hospital, that I realized that there was something rotten in American in 1963. The very last… thought one wants to have of his government is that he cannot trust the people who run it. But that is exactly what I believed when I examined the official autopsy photographs taken in Maryland … The doctors there had recorded the condition of John F. Kennedy’s cranium, a state that had substantially changed during a period of six hours and over a distance of 1,500 miles. Great effort had been made to reconstruct the back of the President’s head, and the incision … in his throat … had been enlarged and mangled, as if someone had conducted another procedure. It looked to be the work of a butcher. No doubt, someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to show a different story than we had seen at Parkland.
“More disturbingly, there were two eyewitnesses present at the autopsy… who swear that President Kenney arrived at the Naval medical facility sipped in a gray body bag inside a cheap coffin---one of great material. And… these men… claim there was no brain when the body came out of the gray bag. As the last doctor to see President Kennedy before his body left Parkland, I can unequivocally report that there was no gray body bag, and that he still had the left side of his brain… I had absolutely no doubt that I was viewing two frontal-entry bullet wounds… And beyond absurdity is the magic bullet theory…” (Pg. 111-112)
He recounts the Secret Service men taking control of the casket from the Parkland staff, to take it back to Washington; Dr. Rose protested, “‘You are not taking the body anywhere. There’s a law here. We’re going to enforce it… You can’t lose the chain of evidence.’ … Had Dr. Rose not stepped aside, I’m sure that those thugs would have shot him. They would have killed me any anyone else who got in their way…” (Pg. 118-120)
He recounts, “In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated the records of the President’s postmortem examination and reported it to be fraught with procedural errors… These glaring procedural inaccuracies and errors are blamed on the inexperience of the autopsy team.. But was inexperience and improper procedure the culprit---or was the autopsy purposefully falsified in order to frame Oswald as the lone assassin and declare NO CONSPIRACY… Another of the more important evidentiary aspects of any investigation involving gunshots are the bullets and bullet fragments connected with the crime. In this area, as with the postmortem examination of the President, the evidence is incomplete, distorted, and outright erroneous.” (Pg. 130-133)
When he was confronted by reporters on the day of the shooting, he states that he thought, “if I tell them the medical truth, that President Kennedy was shot from the front, they have more than one gunman, they have a conspiracy… Then I remembered Agent Hill waving his pistol… The people involved in this game played for keeps. For the first time, I sensed the pervasive influence of corruption… I replied, ‘An official statement was made yesterday. I have nothing to add…’ I turned and threaded my way through the crowd of people… At that moment I entered the ‘conspiracy of silence.’ I wasn’t asked or told to do so, nor was any overt pressure ever placed upon me. I was acting from an instinctive survival feeling… I believe there was a common denominator in our silence---a fearful perception that to come forward with what we believed to be the medical truth would be asking for trouble… the inertia of the established story was so powerful…. That it would bury anyone who stood in its path… I reasoned that anyone who would go so far as to eliminate the President of the United States would surely not hesitate to kill a doctor…” (Pg. 152-154)
He concludes, “The true conspiracy of silence and the fraternal doctrine that gives it life is found more explicitly in the actions and inactions of other groups and individuals… Included in… this association are the President’s family and aides, the new President and his aides, government employees, military officials, the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA, Texas law enforcement personnel, local and national news media, Dealey Plaza witnesses… Many of the people in these groups knew they were telling lies that were accepted as fact; they knew that their silence was ordered; they knew that the evidence was fabricated, falsified, and destroyed; and they knew that witnesses were intimidate, ignored, and inadequately interrogated… Due to their active or passive participation in the continuing cover-up, we are faced, twenty-eight years after the fact, with the still unsolved murder of one of the world’s greatest leaders.” (Pg. 201-203)
Crenshaw’s account is one of the least compelling among JFK conspiracy theories.
Charles Crenshaw (1933–2001) was a third year surgery resident at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, when President John F. Kennedy was rushed to the emergency room after being shot … Two days later, Crenshaw was part of the team that tried to save Lee Harvey Oswald, after he was shot by Jack Ruby.
He wrote in the Introduction to this 1992 book, “Parkland Hospital, and the U.S. government have never been overly subtle about their desire for us doctors to keep quiet and not divulge what we heard, saw, and felt that November weekend in 1963… the doctors who witnessed President Kennedy’s death have always felt the necessity to continue what has evolved over the years as a conspiracy of silence… Through the years, there have been a thousand instances when I have wanted to shout to the world that the wound to Kennedy’s hear and throat that I examined were caused by bullets that struck him from the front, not the back, as the public has been to believe… only to restrain myself---until now…
“I do not understand why the Warren Commission did not interview every doctor in President Kennedy’s room… I would have told them that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the bullet that killed President Kennedy was shot from the grassy knoll area. I would have also [told them] about the call I received from Lyndon Johnson while we were operating on Lee Harvey Oswald. President Johnson told me that a man in the operating room would get a deathbed confession from Oswald… I told [a friend] that I believed the Warren Report to be a fable, a virtual insult to the intelligence of the American people. Having read almost every book that had been published on Kennedy’s death, in addition to having had an intense personal experience with the case, I considered myself one of only a few men who could make that claim. He asked me if I had ever considered letting someone help me write a book on the subject…” (Pg. 3-6)
He continues, “I knew I had to speak out… because the democratic process … was being callously and maliciously circumvented by a handful of cowards. My silence has protected them… Efforts to suppress and distort the truth about the assassination on the part of government officials and agents … have been well documented in previous works on this subject. That these efforts included threats, intimidation, falsification and destruction of evidence, and even death, have played no small role in my silence of the past twenty-eight years. I am fifty-nine years old. My medical career is over, and I no longer fear the ‘men in suits’ nor the criticism of my peers.” (Pg. 9)
He reports a 1990 meeting with “J. Gary Shaw, who… is one of the world’s top authorities on the Kennedy assassination… he removed several 8x10 photographs, handed them to me, and asked, ‘Does that look like the same body that you helped place in the casket at Parkland Hospital in 1963?’ I was amazed… the spot where Dr. Malcolm Perry had performed a tracheostomy … to help the President breathe. The opening was larger and jagged---significantly different from the way it had looked to me in Dallas. There was no doubt in my mind---someone had tampered with the body, or the photographs… ‘it appears that someone performed some surgery on the President between the time his body left Parkland Hospital and when these photographs were taken.’” (Pg. 10-11)
He observes, “Of course, not all the citizens of Dallas loved the President, as could be said of any city. But Dallas has received undue condemnation for its perceived role in President Kennedy’s death. While Dallas had its radical element, the city itself was incidental in the assassination. The executioners of John Kennedy were determined to eliminate him whether it be in Chicago, Miami, Dallas, or any other location. They were ‘sitting on go.’” (Pg. 63-64)
He states of the President’s body, “I walked to the President’s head to get a closer look. His entire right cerebral hemisphere appeared to be gone. It looked like a crater---an empty cavity. All I could see there was mangled, bloody tissue. From the damage I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that the bullet had entered his head through the front, and as it surgically passed through the cranium, the missile obliterated part of the temporal and all the parietal and occipital lobes before it lacerated the cerebellum… Several years later when I viewed slow-motion films of the bullet striking the President, the physics of the hear being thrown back provided final and complete confirmation of a frontal entry by the bullet to the cranium. When I saw the severity of the head wound, I thought that everything we had done for him during those twenty minutes was a complete waste of time…” (Pg. 86-87)
Later, he adds, “a bronze casket was being wheeled toward Trauma Room 1 by two male employees from the Oneal Funeral home. I opened the door… then followed them in. I was the only doctor in the room… Before I directed that the body be moved, I turned down the sheet and took one last, long look at President Kennedy’s head wound. I was the last doctor at Parkland to see it. After making my final examination, in lightly stroked his reddish-brown hair. I felt so terribly sorry for him… Four of us lifted the President into the casket and placed his neatly folded clothes at his feet… It wasn’t until years later, when I saw the autopsy photos of John Kennedy taken at Bethesda Naval Hospital, that I realized that there was something rotten in American in 1963. The very last… thought one wants to have of his government is that he cannot trust the people who run it. But that is exactly what I believed when I examined the official autopsy photographs taken in Maryland … The doctors there had recorded the condition of John F. Kennedy’s cranium, a state that had substantially changed during a period of six hours and over a distance of 1,500 miles. Great effort had been made to reconstruct the back of the President’s head, and the incision … in his throat … had been enlarged and mangled, as if someone had conducted another procedure. It looked to be the work of a butcher. No doubt, someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to show a different story than we had seen at Parkland.
“More disturbingly, there were two eyewitnesses present at the autopsy… who swear that President Kenney arrived at the Naval medical facility sipped in a gray body bag inside a cheap coffin---one of great material. And… these men… claim there was no brain when the body came out of the gray bag. As the last doctor to see President Kennedy before his body left Parkland, I can unequivocally report that there was no gray body bag, and that he still had the left side of his brain… I had absolutely no doubt that I was viewing two frontal-entry bullet wounds… And beyond absurdity is the magic bullet theory…” (Pg. 111-112)
He recounts the Secret Service men taking control of the casket from the Parkland staff, to take it back to Washington; Dr. Rose protested, “‘You are not taking the body anywhere. There’s a law here. We’re going to enforce it… You can’t lose the chain of evidence.’ … Had Dr. Rose not stepped aside, I’m sure that those thugs would have shot him. They would have killed me any anyone else who got in their way…” (Pg. 118-120)
He recounts, “In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated the records of the President’s postmortem examination and reported it to be fraught with procedural errors… These glaring procedural inaccuracies and errors are blamed on the inexperience of the autopsy team.. But was inexperience and improper procedure the culprit---or was the autopsy purposefully falsified in order to frame Oswald as the lone assassin and declare NO CONSPIRACY… Another of the more important evidentiary aspects of any investigation involving gunshots are the bullets and bullet fragments connected with the crime. In this area, as with the postmortem examination of the President, the evidence is incomplete, distorted, and outright erroneous.” (Pg. 130-133)
When he was confronted by reporters on the day of the shooting, he states that he thought, “if I tell them the medical truth, that President Kennedy was shot from the front, they have more than one gunman, they have a conspiracy… Then I remembered Agent Hill waving his pistol… The people involved in this game played for keeps. For the first time, I sensed the pervasive influence of corruption… I replied, ‘An official statement was made yesterday. I have nothing to add…’ I turned and threaded my way through the crowd of people… At that moment I entered the ‘conspiracy of silence.’ I wasn’t asked or told to do so, nor was any overt pressure ever placed upon me. I was acting from an instinctive survival feeling… I believe there was a common denominator in our silence---a fearful perception that to come forward with what we believed to be the medical truth would be asking for trouble… the inertia of the established story was so powerful…. That it would bury anyone who stood in its path… I reasoned that anyone who would go so far as to eliminate the President of the United States would surely not hesitate to kill a doctor…” (Pg. 152-154)
He concludes, “The true conspiracy of silence and the fraternal doctrine that gives it life is found more explicitly in the actions and inactions of other groups and individuals… Included in… this association are the President’s family and aides, the new President and his aides, government employees, military officials, the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA, Texas law enforcement personnel, local and national news media, Dealey Plaza witnesses… Many of the people in these groups knew they were telling lies that were accepted as fact; they knew that their silence was ordered; they knew that the evidence was fabricated, falsified, and destroyed; and they knew that witnesses were intimidate, ignored, and inadequately interrogated… Due to their active or passive participation in the continuing cover-up, we are faced, twenty-eight years after the fact, with the still unsolved murder of one of the world’s greatest leaders.” (Pg. 201-203)
Crenshaw’s account is one of the least compelling among JFK conspiracy theories.
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