[Lapses such as support of Zapruder film alteration theories] on Lifton’s part are far too frequent. Other examples can be found in Best Evidence, the most startling of which is Lifton’s claim that his unnamed conspirators actually stole JFK’s corpse, altered it to fit with evidence implicating Oswald, and then surreptitiously returned it. In this far-fetched and unsubstantiated scenario, the conspirators – while the presidential party in Air Force One prepared to return to Washington in those minutes just prior to and during LBJ’s swearing-in ceremony in the front cabin – took the body from the bronze casket at the plane’s rear and put it in a body bag they had hidden in an unidentified place on the plane. When the plane reached Washington, they furtively removed the body from an opening on the darkened far side of the plane, while the empty bronze casket was removed on the other side in view of the crowd and in the light of cameras, then placed in an ambulance for the official motorcade. The covert team then supposedly transported the body by helicopter to Walter Reed Army Hospital, where they manipulated it to suggest only shots from the rear (thus making Oswald the sole assassin). Then they rushed the body in a plain gray shipping coffin by a black hearse to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the empty bronze casket had been taken and where the conspirators entered through a rear gate and then placed the body back in its original casket, without detection by the Secret Service, hospital officials, or the Kennedy family. Unfortunately for Lifton, the actual evidence contradicts his charges at every point.
First, no opportunity to steal the body existed on the plane. Lifton omits from his account that the
body was wet, dripping in blood and other fluids that, when lifted from the coffin, would have
left telltale signs and alerted aides, crew, and guards.
Parkland hospital nurse Doris Nelson
testified that when placing the corpse in the casket “extensive bleeding from the head [occurred]
and they had wrapped four sheets around it but it was still oozing through.”
The cloth beneath
the president was soaked, and a plastic form was laid on it to prevent seepage through the casket.
Further, when the pallbearers placed the coffin on board, steel wrapping cables were placed
around it and its lid to prevent shifting during takeoff and landing and in case of air disturbances
in flight, as must be done to cargo on airplanes for safety. Removing and replacing such cables
would have required time and opportunity that were unavailable to any would-be conspirators.
In addition, the casket was under ample armed guard at all times during the flight, a fact that
Lifton neglects to mention."
Secret Service agent Richard Johnsen discreetly stood a few feet
away in the hallway entrance,
while Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, JFK's aide, stood at
attention beside the casket throughout the trip and during the swearing-in ceremony.
Lifton, however, states that soon after the casket was placed on board, McHugh left it to check on
why the plane had not departed, allowing conspirators to steal the body. But immediately upon
the publication of Best Evidence, McHugh wrote a letter to Time magazine in which he denied
Lifton's claim that he had left the body unattended.
Finally, most of JFK's aides and clerical staff were in the rear of the plane, with key aides sitting
close by the casket from the moment it was secured at the rear of the plane.
But Lifton does not
mention this.
In fact, he asserts the Kennedy people all went forward to the swearing-in
ceremony, thus leaving the casket without protection. That assertion, however, runs counter to
evidence provided by LBJ’s secretary, Marie Fehner,
and by the Secret Service,
both of whom
were ordered to record the names of all attendees at the swearing-in ceremony. Both lists show
that the majority of JFK’s aides and staff were not present, a fact also confirmed by Cecil
Stoughton, White House photographer, who snapped over a dozen photographs of the
ceremony.
Especially given the tiny size of the forward cabin, how could it have been
otherwise?
No army helicopter at Andrews Air Force Base secretly ferried the corpse to Walter Reed
Hospital.
Aside from the presidential helicopter, the only other one present brought in
Lieutenant Sam Bird's casket team,
something noted both in William Manchester’s Death of a
President and in the Military District of Washington records for November 22, sources with
which Lifton was quite familiar.
Nor was the far side of the plane darkened to shield the furtive
removal of JFK’s corpse. Instead, it was bathed in klieg lights, and thousands of persons watched
along the fence that bent backward along that side, providing, in effect, a well-lit and very public
stage for any would-be body snatchers.
Nor did any vehicle, much less the alleged black hearse, pass through the back gate of Bethesda.
As proof to the contrary, Lifton cites some navy men at Bethesda who said they saw an
ambulance come up Fourteenth Street from Walter Reed Hospital.
But their testimony is
somewhat suspect because there is no Fourteenth Street leading out from Reed; a section of that
street was eliminated when the hospital was constructed.
Also, Colonel Russell Madison was stationed at Bethesda and left each day through that gate as a
shortcut home, except on the late afternoon of November 22, when he found the gates shut and
padlocked with no guard posted who could be countermanded by officers to open it.
That, of
course, made it fairly difficult for any body-snatching vehicle, already on a very tight schedule, to
deliver its goods as described by Lifton.
Officials never lost contact with the casket, so the replacement of the allegedly altered corpse
was impossible. General McHugh was always close to the coffin,
never losing contact with it
from the time it was unloaded from Air Force One until the ambulance parked at the mortuary
jetty, where he assisted in its removal. In addition, FBI agents James W. Sibert and Francis X.
O’Neill Jr. met the plane, watched the casket being removed and placed in the ambulance,
followed it in the third car of the motorcade, kept the casket constantly in sight from the airport
to the hospital, and then helped unload the casket and witnessed the autopsy. A key paragraph in
their official report states as follows:
The president’s body was removed from the casket in which it had been transported and
was placed on the autopsy table, at which time the complete body was wrapped in a sheet
and the head area contained an additional wrapping which was saturated with blood.
Following the removal of the wrapping, it was ascertained that the president’s clothing
had been removed and it was also apparent that a tracheotomy had been performed, as
well as surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull. 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 the adjacent room.
Their comment regarding the body’s condition matched the description testified to by the Dallas
nurses who placed him in the coffin, information also absent from Lifton’s account. Nurse Diana
Bowron: “We wrapped some extra sheets around his head so it wouldn’t look so bad.”
Nurse
Margaret Henchliffe: “We . . . wrapped him up in sheets [and] he was placed in the coffin.”
On “surgery to the head” Sibert and O'Neill were mistaken, as Sibert later testified before the
House Select Committee in 1977. “It was thought by the doctors [at the autopsy] that surgery had
possibly been performed in the head-area,” but “this was determined not to be correct following
detailed inspection and when the piece of bone found in the limousine was brought to the autopsy
room during the later stages of the autopsy.”
Admiral George Burkley, President Kennedy's physician, and two Secret Service men who had
been in the Parkland Hospital emergency room with JFK, as well as others, were in the autopsy
room, sitting in the amphitheater audience. They had seen the corpse at Parkland and would have
spotted any alterations immediately. Additionally, the X-ray photographs of the skull show
jagged lines, not the clean, sharp lines of an operation.
Nor was there any gray coffin used to spirit away JFK's corpse, although such coffins used for interring deceased military personnel were hardly unusual at Bethesda. The fact remains – based on witness testimony – that JFK’s body was indeed transported in a bronze casket, from which it was not removed until its arrival at Bethesda.
Finally, it should go without saying that the complex logistics involved in perpetrating such an incredible feat would have required a large cast of conspirators able to communicate with each other and respond at a moment’s notice to shifting events. Among other things, it was not until Air Force One approached Washington that Jacqueline Kennedy made the decision to use Bethesda for the autopsy, which would have required conspirators to place duplicate teams at both Walter Reed and Bethesda. Furthermore, some conspirators had to have been on board the airplane to steal the body, fly it to Walter Reed, work on it there, transport it to Bethesda, and switch it to the bronze casket. The large but indeterminate number of conspirators would most likely have had to include air traffic controllers, enlisted men, military officers, special technicians, and medical personnel, all working together covertly and able to maintain silence forever. Under the weight of all these improbabilities, Lifton’s erroneous claims collapse.
It never happened. The body was not stolen.
The Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination, © 2003 by the University Press of Kansas