Kennedy: Shot From the Front (Obscured by Tracheotomy) or From Behind?

Earl Rose, Coroner When Kennedy Was Shot, Dies at 85

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: May 2, 2012

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Earl Rose, who as the Dallas County medical examiner when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated insisted that he should do the autopsy, only to be overruled in a confrontation with presidential aides, died on Tuesday in Iowa City. He was 85.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Dr. Rose was thrust into the thick of a 20th-century American nightmare. He performed an autopsy on J. D. Tippit, the police officer who was believed to have been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, the lone suspect in the assassination. Two days later, he performed an autopsy on Oswald himself after the nightclub owner Jack Ruby shot him in the basement of Dallas police headquarters. Four years later, Dr. Rose performed an autopsy on Ruby, determining that he had died of a blood clot in a lung.

But it was the autopsy he did not do that has become the most historic. After demanding to conduct an autopsy on the president, as he was legally required to do in any murder, Dr. Rose reluctantly stepped aside to allow the president’s body to be returned to Washington, as the president’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, and his aides insisted.

The autopsy was later performed at Bethesda National Naval Medical Center in Maryland. The pathologists there did not know that a doctor at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, where the stricken president had been taken, had performed a tracheotomy on Kennedy that obscured a gunshot wound in his neck. Nor did they have access to the clothing the president was wearing.

A forensic panel commissioned by Congress determined in 1978 that the Bethesda doctors had failed to dissect a wound in Kennedy’s upper back and had only probed it with a finger. The same year, pathologists involved in the autopsy admitted that they had been in “hurry up” mode. Conspiracy theorists have questioned whether high-ranking civilian and military officials who were present during the autopsy may have influenced its results.

Dr. Rose said in 1992 that an autopsy performed in Dallas “would have been free of any perceptions of outside influence.”

His confrontation with the president’s party occurred outside Trauma Room 1 at Parkland. Dr. Rose, a physician and lawyer who had become county medical examiner less than six months earlier, informed the Secret Service and other aides traveling with Kennedy that state law required that an autopsy in a murder be performed in the county where the crime had taken place.

He said that it would take no more than 45 minutes, and that the doctors who had treated the president were there to advise. Critical evidence could be gathered at a time when the assassin or assassins were still at large. “You can’t break the chain of evidence,” Dr. Rose was quoted as telling them.

Dr. George Burkley, Kennedy’s physician, reminded Dr. Rose that the country was dealing with the president and said he must waive local laws. At the time, however, there was no federal law expressly addressing assassinations. Any suspect would have been tried in a Texas state court.

But historians have said that Mrs. Kennedy insisted on returning to Washington as soon as possible and that she would not leave without her husband’s body. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was to be shortly sworn in as the 36th president aboard Air Force One, supported the first lady’s decision.

As Mrs. Kennedy emerged from the trauma room beside a gurney carrying the casket, tension mounted. Roy Kellerman, head of the White House Secret Service detail, squared off against Dr. Rose. Obscenities were shouted. Unconfirmed accounts said Mr. Kellerman had pointed a gun at Dr. Rose. Years later, Dr. Rose said that might have happened but that he was not sure.

“Finally, without saying any more, I simply stood aside,” Dr. Rose said.

Earl Forrest Rose was born on Sept. 23, 1926, in Eagle Butte, S.D. His father worked on a ranch, and Earl rode his horse five miles to school. He dropped out of high school in 1944 to join the Navy, where he served on a submarine in the South Pacific.

He graduated from Yankton College, now closed, in 1949, and went on to study medicine at the University of South Dakota for two years before finishing his medical studies at the University of Nebraska. He earned his law degree from Southern Methodist University while working as medical examiner in Dallas.

After working in private medical practice in Lemmon, S.D., in the mid-1950s, Dr. Rose continued his medical education, completing residencies in surgical pathology at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, in clinical pathology at DePaul Hospital in St. Louis, and in forensic pathology at the University of Virginia.

He moved to Dallas in June 1963 at the age of 36, hired by the county to establish a scientifically valid medical examiner’s system to replace its existing system of elected lay coroners.

Dr. Rose taught pathology at the University of Iowa from 1968 until his retirement in the early 1990s. He took writing courses, carved sculptures from cow bones and, with his wife, was a mediator in small claims court. Each Nov. 22, he could count on hearing from assassination buffs. He personally rejected conspiracy theories, however, believing that the Warren Commission had rightly concluded that three shots were fired by a single assassin and that Kennedy was struck from the rear by two of them.

In addition to his wife, the former Marilyn Preheim, Dr. Rose is survived by his daughters Elise, Cecile, Karen, Miriam and Carol Rose, and 12 grandchildren. His son, Forrest, died in 2005.

After witnessing several executions, Dr. Rose became an outspoken opponent of capital punishment. Several years ago he wrote that the most poignant tragedies usually do not involve important people. “Rather,” he wrote, “the most tragic deaths involve the people who have no reserve of emotional support, many of whom are poor.”