Posted on 11/24/2004 12:03:50 PM PST by weegee
JFK and the corset that helped to kill a president
Back brace made Kennedy an almost stationary target
By JAMES RESTON JR.
Two years ago, 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 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 a half-hour later.
Before the Warren Commission, Carrico told of removing Kennedy's back brace in the first seconds after his arrival. 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 such as Ritalin, and gamma globulin injections, the simple corset needs to be emphasized, tragically, in the context of those medical strategies Kennedy used to create the illusion of the vigorous leader.
--Reston's forthcoming book is on the Spain of Christopher Columbus and will be published by Doubleday next year.
The corset did not kill Kennedy and neither did Oswald. I am conviced he was set up as a patsy and although in the Texas Book Depository that day, he was not on the sixth floor.
I still believe the fatal headshot came from the front not the rear. I am not so sure the first shot that penetrated his throat back to front would also not have been fatal. It pierced his trachea and larynx and it is possible he could have drown in his own blood before he got to Parkland.
Again, all this is still conjecture on my part, no one will ever really know for sure. It happened 41 years ago, all the players are either very old or dead and a lot of vital evidence was either lost or buried by the conspirators.
IF my aunt had a Penis , she would have been my Uncle.
How do you think he screwed his back Up? In a PT boat or sumpn'?
He thought the whole thing up on a moment's notice, and did it all by himself with no outside help whatsoever.
It was also not Oswald's first assassination attempt on a notable public figure.
I have stood on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository also, and my first reaction looking out the window was the same as yours. What an easy shot it would have been for Oswald.
Yeah, and if a frog had wings, he wouldn't bump his ass when he hops.
With no bones struck and the spinal cord intact, the president almost certainly would have survived the wound from the first bullet. Bunk. The President's arm drawn up with the elbows to the side is neurologic reflex to a devastating spinal cord injury. It was described in the medical literature about 100 years ago. Survive? Perhaps. Recover? No. He would have been quadriplegic. The cord injury resulted form the compression wave as the bullet passed within inches of the spinal cord.
most experts agree with the Warren Commission that Oswald's first bullet passed cleanly through Kennedy's lower neck Bunk. Neither remark is true. The Warren Commission doesn't conclude what happened to the first bullet, and most experts certainly don't agree the first bullet hit Kennedy. For us nonconspiracy people, the second and third shots hit Kennedy.
It would change their minds.
Ah, but what if there were two shooters on the 6th floor?
That's a new one. What if there were a whole battalion of Marine snipers on the 6th floor?
.
...The week before JFK'S head was blow off in Dallas...
...JFK had re-injured his back while "Playing" around with the "Ladies" in friend BING CROSBY's Palm Springs home Pool =
A very timely JFK Historical Corset period..?
.
When did Oswald become left handed and what source of info. does this come from please?
If your Aunt had testacles, she would be your 'Nutty Aunt'
Boy thats the truth, when you're actually there and you see the real distance, (it looks like a long shot in all the pictures), you can see how easy a shot it would have been.
It was Oliver Stone.
Perhaps the force of the bullet sent JFK's body forward: JFK's rso banged forward against the corset, then jerked back from the force of banging against the corset that didn't "give".
12 days before he was shot Lincoln was in Monroe, Maryland.
12 days before he was shot, Kennedy was in Marilyn Monroe.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.