JFK Assassination Figure. A surgeon, he performed a tracheotomy on the fatally injured President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in the process cutting through a bullet wound, destroying forensic evidence, and helping to ignite the subsequent controversy. Raised in northeastern Texas by his physician grandfather, he graduated from Plano High School in 1947 and from the University of Texas in 1951, then received his M.D. from Southwestern Medical School in 1955. Following internship at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco and two years' Air Force service in Seattle, Dr. Perry moved to Dallas for his surgical residency at Parkland Hospital, then took a vascular surgery fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco. He returned to Parkland in September of 1963 and on November 22nd was the senior surgical attending present, the chairman being out of town. Called to the emergency room, he assumed command of the resuscitation effort; realizing that if JFK was to have any chance of survival an open airway had to be established, he performed a tracheotomy in the lower anterior neck, the usual position for an emergency procedure. Unfortunately, there was a bullet hole in his way which he obliterated in the surgery. After the President's death, a news conference was held during which Dr. Perry three times referred to the wound as an "entrance" wound, and once stated that it could be either an entrance or an exit wound. Two days later, he assisted in the futile effort to save alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald after Jack Ruby shot him on national television. Summoned before the Warren Commission, Dr. Perry called President Kennedy's neck wound an "exit". Contention over "Who killed Kennedy?" started immediately after the President's demise and has continued unabated; it was even revealed that on the night of November 22nd Dr. Perry had received a telephone inquiry from Dr. Jim Humes, the Bethesda autopsy prosector, asking why a tracheotomy had been performed, the attendant implication being that resuscitation should not have been attempted on a patient with obviously non-survivable injuries. Indeed some conspiracy theorists have even charged that "tampering" with the neck wound was part of "the plot", that the bullet in some manner became "magic", or that the Dallas doctors were, perhaps, "gotten to". For the rest of his life Dr. Perry refused to discuss the entire matter, though, when pressed, he defended the Warren Report. He went on to a distinguished career as a vascular surgeon, holding various academic appointments in Washington, New York, Tennessee, and Texas, prior to his 2000 retirement as emeritus professor of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. Dr. Perry died of lung cancer and though he had performed countless difficult surgical procedures his life remained defined by a simple one. Looking back, he said: "It was a bad weekend. A bad weekend, and a bad aftermath".