[1] Rose was the medical examiner for Dallas County, Texas, at the time of the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy and he performed autopsies on J. D. Tippit, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jack Ruby.

[5] In the spring of 1944, at the end of his junior year, the 17-year-old Rose dropped out of high school and enlisted in the United States Navy where he served on a submarine, the USS Sea Devil, in the Pacific theater of World War II.

[3] On November 22, 1963, Rose was in his office at Parkland Memorial Hospital across the corridor from Trauma Room 1 when he received word that Kennedy was pronounced dead.

[2] Rose objected, insisting that Texas law required him to perform a post-mortem examination prior to the removal of the body.

[2][4] According to Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, the President's aides "had literally shoved [Rose] and the policeman aside to get out of the building.

"[4] In an interview with Journal of the American Medical Association, Rose stated that he stepped aside feeling that it was unwise to exacerbate the tension.

"[4] In a 1992 interview published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Rose said, "The law was broken" and that "[a] Texas autopsy would have assured a tight chain of custody on all the evidence.

[8] Rose removed the three bullets that had entered Tippit's chest and head, noting that there was massive hemorrhaging as a result of penetration of the lung and liver, as well as a large amount of damage to his brain.

[2] Announcing the results of the gross autopsy, Rose said: "The two things that we could determine were, first, that he died from a hemorrhage from a gunshot wound, and that otherwise he was a physically healthy male.

[11] Rose began the autopsy on Ruby an hour after his death, and a report released the following month indicated that three doctors from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School assisted him in the post-mortem examination.

[13] Rose indicated that the same type of cancer that affected Ruby's lungs was found in his brain, lymph nodes, liver, pancreas, pleura, ribs, and vertebra.

[11] In 1966, Rose performed autopsies on the crew of American Flyers Flight 280 and testified about his findings in a hearing before the Civil Aeronautics Board.

[2] Suffering from late-onset dementia and Parkinson's disease, Rose lost his long-term memory and the ability to converse over the last year of his life.

[1][3] Rose rejected the idea that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy and he supported the Warren Commission's conclusion that a single gunman shot the President.