In the Cross Hairs
One
day, he
made a delivery
to Maryland's
medical school.
"I said,
'Gee,
maybe I will be a
doctor.' I thought
it would be a
good
career. I
could do some
good."
Dr. Robert R. Artwohl’s life has been anything but typical. He has surfed the waves off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, managed a warehouse that manufactured nuts and bolts, became a nationally recognized authority on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and was even accused of being a CIA operative.
His life, these days, is more in the mainstream. Dr. Artwohl, 54, is married, has three children, two dogs, a sprawling house in Anchorage, Alaska, and a thriving medical practice in vascular and general surgery. “I’m pretty busy,” says Dr. Artwohl, a 1980 graduate.
But before the children, the dogs and the house in Alaska, there was the Kennedy assassination. It became part of Dr. Artwohl’s life after watching Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK. His wife, Yolanda Garfield, an artist, was “completely bored with it,” Dr. Artwohl says. “I was totally into it.”
The movie troubled Dr. Artwohl. “How could my country do this, assassinate the president of the United States in an undeclared coup?” he wondered. Initially, he firmly believed Kennedy’s death was a result of a conspiracy.
Dr. Artwohl, began his own investigation to draw a firmer conclusion. He bought a computer and modem, and began talking with people on-line. He learned about forensic pathology and ballistics, and he read everything he could get his hands on, including the Warren Commission report. He watched the Zapruder film, which
captured the assassination, countless times. In a conference room at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., Dr. Artwohl inspected Kennedy’s jacket, tie, and the shirt with the bullet hole. He even examined Kennedy’s X-rays and the autopsy pictures.
After reviewing the evidence, Dr. Artwohl changed his position. He believes the president was gunned down by a single person—Lee Harvey Oswald. “When you put it all together it makes perfect sense,” Dr. Artwohl contends. “The Warren Commission got it right. The single bullet theory was the single best explanation of what happened.”
The more vocal Dr. Artwohl became with his position, the more criticism he encountered. A rumor spread among Kennedy assassination theorists that Dr. Artwohl was a CIA operative who was planting seeds of misinformation. Others claimed his last name was fictitious, and when spelled backward was an anagram for “Lee Harvey Oswald Was The Real Assassin.”
“I became aware this was just how the conspiracy people used things,” he says. “Anything that doesn’t support their party line becomes suspect.”
Dr. Artwohl became well known in Kennedy assassination circles. His views of the assassination appeared in an article in JAMA. At a dinner he explained the single bullet theory to famed author, Norman Mailer. He attended conferences as a panelist. At one such event in Dallas, a member of the audience shook his finger at Dr. Artwohl and asked “Who are you Dr. Artwohl? Just who are you?”
One of three children, Dr. Artwohl is the son of a World War II fighter pilot. His father was career Air Force, and his mother, a housewife. The family lived in Rio; Madrid, Spain; Arlington, Va.; and Boca Raton, Fla. After graduating from high school, Dr. Artwohl attended Mercer University in Macon, Ga., but dropped out after two years.
“ I just couldn’t handle college,” he says.
For three and a half years, he worked odd jobs, one as an orderly at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore. He liked the work, got to know various parts of the hospital, and the doctors at Union thought he had potential. But the young Artwohl wasn’t sure. Instead, he wound up managing a warehouse in Baltimore that made industrial fasteners. Dr. Artwohl wondered if he was living up to his potential. “I guess I was sitting there in a warehouse becoming an expert in industrial fasteners. I said,
‘ I don’t want to do this the rest of my life.’”
One day, he made a delivery to Maryland’s medical school. “I said. ‘Gee, maybe I will be a doctor.’ I thought it would be a good career. I could do some good.” When he broke the news to his parents, his father was skeptical. His boss just laughed. “He offered me a raise. He said I was crazy and didn’t think I would ever get into med school,” Dr. Artwohl recalls.
Dr. Artwohl returned to college in 1972 and received a degree in biology from UMBC. He applied to medical school at Maryland, but was rejected. “I think I was rejected twice,” he says.
He was accepted in 1976 and graduated in 1980. Dr. Artwohl spent two years at the National Institute of Health and completed a surgical residency at Maryland in 1986. But he wasn’t sure what to do next. He saw an advertisement for a cosmetic surgery fellowship in Philadelphia, but he soured on the program and dropped out. He tried plastic surgery, but that didn’t work out either. So, he came back to Baltimore in 1987 and landed a job in the emergency room at Union Memorial, spending eight years there.
Although he had taken his written boards and passed them, he had not sat for his orals within five years. He moved to Phoenix, Ariz., where he undertook a two-year retraining program primarily to learn laparoscopic techniques. One of his rotations involved a trip to Anchorage. “I became very enchanted with the place,” he says. “It was one of the few places left in the country where I could go and set up my own practice and start making a living right away.”
The amount of time Dr. Artwohl presently spends on the Kennedy assassination is waning, although ABC News recently interviewed him for a documentary on the forty-year anniversary. “I really haven’t done much lately. Occasionally, I surf the net to see who is maligning me,” Dr. Artwohl concludes with a laugh. Currently, he’s writing a murder mystery.