Now, a "Two-Casket" Argument

Monday, Jan. 19, 1981 By ED MAGNUSON

Article Tools

Reprints

(2 of 5)
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.