Surgeon who tried to save JFK, believed there was a second shooter, dies at 89
Dallas — Inextricably linked to the death of John F. Kennedy, surgeon Robert McClelland dutifully preserved the bloodsoaked white dress shirt he wore the day he tried to save the president’s life in 1963.
For the rest of his life, the retired professor emeritus of the University of Texas Southwestern’s medical school also clung staunchly to a contentious opinion forged firsthand: that one of the shots that had struck Kennedy had come from the front, which would require the existence of a second gunman.
Robert Nelson McClelland, the lone dissenting voice among the operating-room doctors who tried to save the president at Parkland Memorial Hospital, died Sept. 10 of renal failure. He was 89.
A skilled surgeon whose true passion was teaching, he’s among the luminaries whose images grace Parkland’s walls today. In a note to campus colleagues, Dr. William Turner of the campus’s department of surgery, called McClelland “the titan among those giants,” saying the institution had “lost one of its heroes.”
An insatiably curious reader who doted on his seven grandchildren, McClelland was a driving force in surgical education at UT Southwestern for decades and oversaw the launch of its liver surgery program.
He was modest and unassuming despite his accomplishments and role in history. But he also had an irreverent side, allowing his grandkids as young children to watch the cheeky television show “South Park” with him, to the occasional dismay of their parents.
“I would get angry,” said daughter Alison McClelland of Dallas. “His defense was that it was philosophical.”
Robert McClelland was born Nov. 20, 1929, in Gilmer, the same East Texas town that spawned musicians Don Henley and Johnny Mathis. His intellect and curiosity were evident early, his passion for discovery stoked by a chemistry set he got at age 11.
He graduated in 1947 as valedictorian of Gilmer High and, as the grandson of a physician, was further inspired to pursue medicine through the mentorship of two local physicians.
After studying at the University of Texas in Austin, he earned his doctorate at the school’s medical branch in Galveston in 1954. He spent two years in Germany as a general medical officer for the U.S. Air Force, then returned to Texas to begin residency at what is now UT Southwestern.
It was there that he would meet Connie Logan, a head nurse at Parkland whom he’d noticed several times at church and finally got the nerve to ask out. They married in May 1958 and settled in Highland Park, where they raised three children.
He completed his residency in 1962 and joined the faculty at UT Southwestern and Parkland, where the following year, that momentous November day became forever tied to his life story.
He was 34 then, screening a film on hernia repair for hospital interns and residents, when a colleague burst in and asked him to help operate on the president of the United States.
As Kennedy lay wounded on the operating table in Trauma Room One, McClelland assisted as surgeons Malcolm Perry and Charles Baxter performed a tracheotomy in an attempt to save the president. For 10 minutes, he stood above Kennedy’s head and stared at “that terrible hole,” as he put it, tackling his duty as instinctively as a fireman slides down a pole.
But from his vantage point, one shot seemed to have come from the front — which would mean Lee Harvey Oswald, whom McClelland would be called to operate on just two days later, wasn’t the only gunman.
“The shot that killed (Kennedy) probably was from the back, but I have to honestly say what I think,” McClelland told The News.