President John F. Kennedy Assassination Figure. A cardiologist, he was President John F. Kennedy's personal physician and was in the Dallas motorcade on November 22, 1963. Raised in Western Pennsylvania, he attended local Catholic and public schools, received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and in 1928 earned his M.D. from the same institution. Following internship and internal medicine residency at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, he obtained a faculty appointment at his alma mater and during his years there completed a cardiology fellowship. Dr. Burkley joined the U.S. Navy in 1939 and served in the South Pacific during World War II; following the conflict he served as chief of medicine at the Naval Hospitals of Portsmouth, Virginia, Newport, Rhode Island, Memphis, Tennessee, and Charleston, South Carolina, before becoming Commanding Officer of the Washington Dispensary in 1957. He was posted as the physician at Camp David, a Navy facility, in 1959 and accompanied President Eisenhower on a major trip to the Far East. In August of 1961 Dr. Burkley was promoted to Rear Admiral and assigned to the White House, initially as assistant physician before becoming Physician to the President in June of 1963. Responsible for the day-to-day management of JFK's rather complex medical situation which included Addison's Disease he also provided care to the White House staff. After President Kennedy was killed Dr. Burkley remained as personal physician to Lyndon Johnson, receiving his third star as a Vice Admiral in January 1965, and retired at the end of the Johnson administration in January 1969. Today he remains controversial for a number of reasons: he received evidence collected by doctors who treated President Kennedy at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, selected Bethesda Naval Hospital as the site for the autopsy, to an extent supervised the postmortem examination performed by Drs. Humes, Boswell, and Finck, received the brain and other evidence as well as the Bethesda pathologists' reports, signed the death certificate, supervised the preparation of the President's body for burial, and was the only doctor who saw the fatal wounds both in the Dallas emergency room and in the Bethesda morgue. Further, as custodian of the evidence and reports he was responsible for transferring all material to the Kennedy family. Dr. Burkley was never called to testify by either the Warren Commission or the later House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). When asked in a 1967 inverview if he agreed with the Warren Commission as to the number of bullets that struck President Kennedy he replied "I would not care to be quoted on that". In 1976 his lawyer William Illig reached a staff member of the HSCA stating that the doctor had evidence that someone besides Lee Harvey Oswald must have been involved in the murder but again his statement was never taken. After retirement Dr. Burkley returned to Pennsylvania until the 1972 death of his wife then spent his final years in Southern California where he died of pneumonia in a nursing facility.