Now, a Two-Casket Argument

A bizarre new Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory Millions of Americans will never forget the mournful scene on their TV screens on the night of Nov. 22, 1963, the polished bronze casket glistening in the floodlights at Andrews Air Force Base as it was taken from Air Force One and put aboard the gray Navy ambulance that was to take it, Jacqueline Kennedy and Robert Kennedy to the Bethesda Navel Hospital. Then, 45 minutes later, other cameras caught the arrival of the car at the hospitals front entrance, and followed the grieving wife and brother as they entered the building where the official autopsy on the body of the murdered John F. Kennedy was to be performed. Two Navy men at Bethesda had special reasons for remembering the scene. As Technician Jerol F. Custer passed near Mrs. Kennedy in the lobby, he was carrying X-ray films of her husband’s body that had already been taken in the hospital’s morgue. Looking down the lobby from a second-floor balcony, Chief Hospital Corpsman Dennis DavidKnew the bronze casket was empty; about 15 minutes earlier, he had watched a black, unmarked hearse arrive through a gate at the back of the hospital and ordered some sailors to help men in civilian clothes carry a plain gray casket into the morgue. “You could see the strain” on the seven or eight men holding it, he recalled. “There was obviously something in it.” Two caskets? Two Vehicles? A quiet arrival at the back gate while crowds and cameras focused on the front entrance? In all the assination probes, including the 26 volumes of evidence compiled by the Warren Commission, there had never been even a hint of deceptive handling of the President’s body. But David S. Lifton, 41, one of the most persistent of the unofficial assassination researchers. not only has a “two-casket” arguement; in Best Evidence, a meticulously researched, 700-page book to be published this month by Macmillian, he parts with previous conspiracy theorists by proposing a startlingly different idea of what really happened. Lifton, a freelance writer who was once a computer engineer with the Apollo space program, first began studying the assassination some 15 years ago when he was a graduate student in physics at U.C.L.A. In his research, he concluded that neither the FBI, nor the Warren Commission, nor the doctors who first viewed Kennedy’s body at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, not the surgeons who performed the autopsy at Bethesda lied about the events of Nov. 22. But he did find that as officials concentrated on what they considered “the best evidence” they had on the crime—Kennedy’s wounds—they presented clashing views. Why? Because, Lifton contends, the corpse in fact was altered between the time it was taken from Parkland on the afternoon of the murder and was X-rayed and photographed that same night at Bethesda and then opened during the autopsy. To support this claim, Lifton spins out a narrative that sounds more fanciful than the wildest plot-against-the-President suspense novel. In Lifton’s view, Lee Harvey Oswald was framed by assassination plotters, who not only placed his rifle on the Texas School Book Depository’s sixth floor but also planted two fragments of bullets in the Kennedy limousine and the celebrated “pristine” bullet “399” on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital. Following their plan, the conspirators got control of the body after it left Dallas long enough to retrieve the actual lethal bullets; these, Lifton says, were fired from the front of the motorcade in Dealey Plaza, not from the book depository behind the presidential convertible. The schemers, Lifton continues, enlarged Kennedy’s head wound to conceal evidence that he had been shot from the front; they added two back wounds, which had not been seen by some 13 nurses and doctors handling the body at Parkland. Yes, writes Lifton, this had to be a plot “involving the Executive Branch of the Government” and including at least the Secret Service, which had control of the body and all medical evidence on the fateful weekend.

Preposterous? Absolutely. Yet there is virtually no factual claim in Lifton’s book that is not supported by the public record or his own interviews, many of them with the lowly hospital and military bystanders whom official probes had overlooked. Even the reader who does not accept Best Evidence’s sensational conclusions—and there is no logical reason for doing so—is likely to admit that Lifton has turned up intriguing new evidence of some strange doings with Kennedy’s body in the twelve hours following the shooting. The reports by the Bethesda corpsmen, Custer and David, placed the time at which Kennedy’s body was first delivered to the morgue at about 6:45 p.m. When the plain “shipping casket,” as some witnesses called the coffin that arrived then, was opened, Kennedy’s corpse was in a rubber body bag. Paul K. O’Connor, a Navy technician who helped lift the body onto the autopsy table, Floyd Reibe, a Navy photographer’s assistant, and Captain John Stover, commanding officer of the medical school at Bethesda, all confirmed this to Lifton.

That was puzzling because records indicated that the body had been wrapped in a sheet when it left Dallas. Also peculiar was the odyssey of the bronze casket.

Lifton tracked down all seven members of a military honor guard assigned to meet the coffin at Bethesda. As they watched the motorcade arrive at the front entrance and awaited orders, the gray Navy ambulance carrying the casket sat virtually unattended. Then at 7:05 p.m., Lifton relates, the ambulance suddenly took off at high speed. The honor guard tried to follow in a pickup truck but lost it. Seaman Hubert Clark recalls himself and his mates wondering “where in the hell” the ambulance had gone.

About 7:10 p.m., according to a report filed by two FBI agents, a gray Navy ambulance arrived at the rear loading dock near the hospital’s morgue. The agents, James Sibert and Francis O’Neill, helped move the bronze casket from it to the morgue. But at the entrance, they were briefly stopped by the Secret Service; Lifton says the agents were stalled so they would not discover that Kennedy’s body was already in the morgue.

At 8 p.m., the honor guard members finally found the ambulance at the rear loading platform. The bronze casket was back in the vehicle and they helped carry this casket into an anteroom outside the morgue. On this second entrance into the hospital, says Lifton, Kennedy’s body was back in the casket. Lifton found several witnesses, including Hospital Corpsman James Metzler, who saw the casket opened in the autopsy room at this time —and now the corpse was wrapped in a sheet, just as it had left Dallas.

But if Lifton has this triple entry of caskets (once by the gray casket and twice by the bronze) well documented, he admits to puzzlement at how the body got out of the morgue after its first entry, to rejoin the bronze coffin in which it had left Dallas. The report by the two FBI agents, which was never seen by the Warren Commission staff but had been sent directly to the National Archives, gave Lifton one clue. At one point, they wrote, “all personnel with the exception of medical officers needed in the taking of photographs and X rays were requested to leave the autopsy room and remain in an adjacent room.” At this time, argues Lifton, the body was put back into the bronze casket and rolled through a hallway to be placed back in the ambulance—all while the honor guard was trying to find it.

Lifton has no hard evidence to support this method of reuniting body and bronze coffin. But O’Connor did tell him that there was talk at the hospital afterward of a casket being rushed through the halls. Also several witnesses reported that the bronze coffin appeared damaged, including a broken handle, when it was carried into the morgue by the honor guard.

Did this happen in the rush to get it back aboard the ambulance? Lifton absolves the Navy doctors conducting the autopsy of any involvement. He implies that either their military superiors or a number of unidentified civilians present at the autopsy were directing the movements of the body.

But even if all that were true, what evidence was there that the body had been altered? Lifton cites a previously unnoticed line in the same Sibert-O’Neill FBI report. These agents saw the start of the autopsy and noted that “surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull,” had been performed.

Actually, no skull surgery had been done by the Dallas doctors who fought to save Kennedy’s life. When he found the agents’ reference, Lifton writes, “I was exhilarated, terrified … I had stumbled into a house of horrors.”

Lifton telephoned Sibert for an explanation, but was told he had to write to FBI headquarters. He finally received a letter saying that the agents got their information about the surgery from oral statements made by the autopsy doctors during the examination.

Later, in discussing the autopsy with Technician O’Connor, Lifton was told that on arrival at the morgue, Kennedy’s brain was not in the skull. “The cranium was empty,” O’Connor said. But the brain was not removed in Dallas. Lifton found other witnesses who saw a small object wrapped in a sheet being moved through the hospital halls on a cart. When asked what it was, the cart handler said it was a stillborn baby. Lifton found that Bethesda records showed no stillbirths that day.

His remarkable conjecture: Kennedy’s brain was on the cart, to be rejoined with the body for the autopsy.

Lifton further notes that Commander James Humes, the chief pathologist at the autopsy, reported that when he later removed the damaged brain from the skull, he found that none of the normal surgery procedures was needed to cut it loose. Lifton’s theory: the brain had been removed earlier by the plotters to retrieve any bullet fragments that would signify shots from other than Oswald’s rifle.

Lifton dwells at length on the anatomical differences as viewed through what he terms “three lenses”: 1) the Parkland doctors and nurses; 2) the Bethesda doctors; 3) the autopsy photographs and X rays. Those differences are a matter of public record. Official investigators have resolved them by considering the X rays and photographs the “best evidence” of how the body had been mortally injured. Lifton contends, with substantial evidence, that the skull was so shattered that parts of it fell apart at the autopsy. He argues that some photos and X rays were taken when the skull was literally desired effect. “reconstructed” to Contrary produce the photos, plot he claims, were in one case deliberately destroyed by a Secret Service agent, while others known to be taken did not appear in the final collection at the Archives.

The Dallas doctors found a 2-in. by 2¾-in. wound at the right rear of Kennedy’s head. They saw a small wound in the throat, where they made a tracheotomy incision of, at most, 3 cm in length.

They saw no wounds on the back. At first they concluded Kennedy had been shot from the front. The Bethesda doctors found a head wound that was much larger — more than five inches in its longest dimension — and extending more to the top and front of the skull than that seen at Dallas. They measured a throat incision up to 8 cm long. Unlike the Dallas doctors, they discovered a small, round “entry” wound at the bottom of the back of the head. They detected another shallow rear wound well below the collar line.

After much discussion, they reported that Kennedy apparently had been shot twice from the rear, one bullet going into his neck and exiting at his throat.

Lifton has great difficulty pinpointing when Kennedy’s body could have been spirited away for the removal of bullets and the addition of the two rear “wounds.” He found only one point in the public record when no one was reported in attendance at the bronze casket between the time it left Parkland land arrived at Andrews Air Force Base. That was between 2:18 and 2:32 p.m., when General Godfrey McHugh, Kennedy’s military aide, was angered by a delay in the takeoff of Air Force One from Dallas’ Love Field and had gone forward to argue with the pilot.

During these 14 minutes, Lifton conjectures, someone took the body out of its casket and hid it on the plane.

After landing at Andrews, Lifton theorizes, the body was slipped out a door on the plane’s right side while TV cameras were recording the un loading of the bronze casket on the left.

An Army helicopter departed at about that same moment from Air Force One’s right side. Lifton believes that i Kennedy’s body went with it, probably on a five-minute ride to the Army’s ” Walter Reed Hospital, then by helicopter to Bethesda, getting there ahead of the Kennedy motorcade. Such a trip would have allowed someone up to 30 minutes to work on the body.

Lifton does not speculate about why anyone in the Government would want to kill Kennedy. Nor does he explain why, if Oswald were innocent, he shot a policeman while apparently fleeing Dal las shortly after the assassination. Lif ton quotes Wesley Liebeler, a Warren Commission staff attorney who had at first been sympathetic to much of the author’s efforts, as warning about his book, “Well, I don’t think that anybody will ever believe anything you say.” In fact, some people are always ready to believe most anything about the assassination. But Lifton’s novel theory, both grim and fascinating as a mystery story, is all but impossible to accept as reality.