Now, a Two-Casket Argument

(3 of 5)

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.