Dr. Robert McClelland, a surgeon who tried to help revive a mortally wounded President John F. Kennedy in 1963 after he was shot in Dallas, died on Sept. 10 in an assisted living facility in that city. He was 89.

His granddaughter Megan Moss said the cause was kidney failure.

Dr. McClelland was in an operating room at Parkland Memorial Hospital on Nov. 22, 1963, showing surgical residents a film about hernia repair when a colleague, Dr. Charles Crenshaw, knocked on the door to tell him that Kennedy had been shot.

As the two men rushed to the emergency room, they saw Secret Service agents, nurses, doctors, reporters and other people crowded there shoulder to shoulder.

“I’d never seen anything like this before, and just as I stood there and took it in, the crowd spontaneously parted and made a little corridor down to the emergency operating rooms,” he told the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in 2013 during a joint interview with Dr. Ronald Jones, another former member of the trauma team. “There, sitting outside Trauma Room 1, on a folding chair, was Mrs. Kennedy, in her bloody clothing.”