Surgeon who was among the teams that tried to save the lives of John F Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald
Charles Crenshaw was a third year surgery resident at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, a city hospital, when President John F Kennedy was rushed to the emergency room after being shot on Friday 22 November 1963. Crenshaw, a junior member of the team, did a cutdown on Kennedy's right leg to insert an intravenous line and watched others trying to save the president.
Two days later, on Sunday 24 November 1963, Crenshaw was part of the team that tried to save Lee Harvey Oswald, thought to be the Kennedy assassin, after Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby.
The Warren Commission investigating Kennedy's death did not call Crenshaw because Parkland officials did not want to publicise the role of residents in providing care on weekends, says Bradley Kizzia, Crenshaw's lawyer and co-author. Crenshaw and others kept silent about what they felt were inconsistencies between their view of Kennedy's wounds and the official autopsy account because of pressure and fear for their careers, Kizzia says.
Charles Crenshaw completed his residency at Parkland and went on to a distinguished career at John Peter Smith Hospital in neighbouring Fort Worth, where he established the surgery department. When he became chairman emeritus in 1992, he had time to write his memoir of that day in Dallas—JFK: Conspiracy of Silence (1992)—adding his information to the record. This contradicted the official view that Oswald had acted alone. 
Crenshaw did not expect the firestorm that followed. One day his book was the number one paperback on the New York Times bestseller list; soon it dropped off the charts when the Journal of the American Medical Association held a press conference denouncing his book. Crenshaw asked for space for a rebuttal and then for a letter to the editor, but was denied. Eventually he sued the American Medical Association and won a settlement. He was dismayed that, although he had built a reputation as a skilled and caring surgeon, colleagues came out against his book.
In the last year of his life, Trauma Room One: The JFK Medical Coverup Exposed (Paraview Press, 2001) was published. In this, Crenshaw expanded on his first book and included photographic evidence that showed Kennedy had been shot twice from the front, not once from the back as the Warren Commission concluded. Oliver Stone, who produced the film JFK, wrote an introduction praising the book.
Crenshaw leaves a wife, Susan; two children; and two grandchildren.
Charles A Crenshaw, emeritus chief of surgery John Peter Smith Hospital, Fort Worth, Texas; b Paris, Texas, 1933; q University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, Dallas, 1960; died 15 November 2001.