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