A doctor whose book is being released Monday said in television interviews to be aired this week that the bullet that killed President John F. Kennedy came from in front of Kennedy.
Dr. Charles Crenshaw, now head of surgery at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, said he was "afraid" to speak out against the Warren Commission's findings that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin and fired from behind.Crenshaw's statement that the fatal shot "had to have come from the front" means that Oswald could not have been Kennedy's killer.
The physician, a resident at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas at the time of the assassination, also tells of a telephone call he took from President Lyndon B. Johnson demanding a "deathbed statement" from Oswald after he was shot by Jack Ruby.
Crenshaw breaks a 29-year silence in the interviews and release of his book, "J-F-K: Conspiracy of Silence."
In an interview with ABC's "20/20" to be aired Friday, Cren-shaw said that he looked at Kennedy's wounds before the body was placed in the coffin.
"I wanted to know and remember this for the rest of my life. And the rest of my life I will always know he was shot from the front," Crenshaw said.
He said if he had gone public with what he claims to have seen, he would have been "a pariah of the medical community" and could have lost his job.