Oswald

R.A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Wed Nov 24 17:56:06 PST 2004


At 8:39 PM -0500 11/24/04, Steve Furlong wrote:
>A piece-of-shit boltie.

That and a corset...

Cheers,
RAH
-------

<http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-reston22nov22,0,7466969,print.story>

The Los Angeles Times


COMMENTARY

That 'Damned Girdle': the Hidden Factor That Might Have Killed Kennedy

If not for an elaborate corset, he likely would have survived the Dallas
shooting.
 By James Reston Jr.
 James Reston Jr.'s forthcoming book is on the Spain of Christopher
Columbus and will be published by Doubleday next year.

 November 22, 2004

 Two years ago, the historian Robert Dallek revealed new details about the
extraordinary range of shots, stimulants and pills President Kennedy took
to control his physical pain and present his youthful image to the world.
Important and interesting as these details are, they should not distract us
from the one medical remedy that probably killed the president: his corset.

 Members of Kennedy's inner circle had often witnessed the painful ritual
that Kennedy endured in his private quarters before he ventured in public,
when his valet would literally winch a steel-rodded canvas back brace
around the president's torso, pulling heavy straps and tightening the
thongs loop by loop as if it was a bizarre scene out of "Gone With the
Wind."

 Once in it, the president was planted upright, trapped and almost bolted
into a ramrod posture. Many would wonder how JFK could ever move in such a
contraption. And yet move he did, and, besides his painkillers, his corset
contributed to the youthful, high-shouldered military bearing that he
presented glamorously to the world.

 But this simple device imparted a fate almost Mephistophelean in its
horror to the sequence of events in Dallas 41 years ago.

 In researching my biography of Gov. John Connally of Texas 15 years ago, I
was put on to the critical importance of Kennedy's corset in the ghastly
six seconds in November 1963 by a former Texas senator, the late Ralph
Yarborough, who was in the motorcade that day.

 Yarborough growled softly about that "damned girdle," and this led me to
the remarks of two doctors, Charles James Carrico and Malcolm Oliver Perry,
buried in Volume 3 of the 26-volume set of testimony that attended the
Warren Commission report.

 In November 1963, Carrico was the youthful, 28-year-old resident in the
emergency room of Parkland Hospital who first received the injured
president in the trauma room; Perry came quickly to the emergency room to
supervise the case - and then to pronounce the president dead half an hour
later.

 Before the Warren Commission, Carrico told of removing Kennedy's back
brace in the first seconds after his body arrived in the hospital. He
described the device as made of coarse white fiber, with stays and buckles.

 Apart from the never-ending controversy over how many bullets Lee Harvey
Oswald actually fired from the Texas School Book Depository, most experts
agree with the Warren Commission that Oswald's first bullet passed cleanly
through Kennedy's lower neck, missing any bone, then entered Connally's
back, streaking through the governor's body and lodging in his thigh. This
was the first so-called magic bullet.

 When Connally was hit, he pivoted in pain to his left, his lithe body in
motion as it swiveled downward, ending up in the lap of his wife, Nellie.

 But because of the corset, Kennedy's body did not act as a normal body
would when the bullet passed through his throat. Held by his back brace,
Kennedy remained upright, according to the Warren Commission, for five more
seconds. This provided Oswald the opportunity to reload and shoot again at
an almost stationary target.

 The frames of the Zapruder film confirm this ramrod posture: Kennedy's
head turns only slightly in those eternal seconds, and his upper body
almost not at all, from frame 225 (when the first shot entered his neck) to
the fatal frame of 313.

 Without the corset, the force of the first bullet, traveling at a speed of
2,000 feet a second, would surely have driven the president's body forward,
making him writhe in pain like Connally, and probably down in the seat of
his limousine, beyond the view of Oswald's cross hairs for a second or
third shot.

 With no bones struck and the spinal cord intact, the president almost
certainly would have survived the wound from the first bullet. Both Carrico
and Perry testified to this likelihood (and apropos of the decades-long
controversy, both testified that the small, round, clean wound in the front
of Kennedy's neck was an exit wound rather than an entry wound).

 To Perry, under the questioning of then-assistant counsel - now senator
from Pennsylvania - Arlen Specter, the injury was "tolerable"; the
president would have recovered. Because the bullet had passed below the
larynx, the wound would not even have impaired his speech later.

 In the new focus on cortisone shots, codeine painkillers, barbiturates,
stimulants like Ritalin, and gamma globulin injections, the simple corset
needs to be emphasized, tragically, in the context of those medical
strategies President Kennedy used to create the illusion of the vigorous
leader.
-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'





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