CHAPTER SIX

A NIGHT AT BETHESDA

    In February 1989, University of Wisconsin History Professor David Wrone showed this writer a draft of his own critique of David Lifton's Best Evidence, entitled "Anatomy of the Most Successful Assassination Fraud." Examining the movements of Kennedy's casket from its arrival aboard Air Force One at Love Field, Dallas, to its arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, Professor Wrone painstakingly established the absence of any moment when the casket was left unattended by President Kennedy's friends and staff or the Secret Service, and pointed to Lifton's failure to demonstrate the existence of any mysterious helicopter that his plotters could use to kidnap the body at Andrews. Noting that Lifton's two-casket theory was based on interviews with dramatis personae minor held sixteen and seventeen years after the event, Professor Wrone offered the professional historian's perspective:

"Evaluating witness testimony in a crime as complex and infamous as the assassination of President Kennedy calls for mature judgment associated with common sense and much experience. The mind through memory tends to expand time frames, collapse and even intertwine events often with selective enhancements and embellishments, to the absolutely convinced correctness of the individual."

    As we have already seen in the cases of Paul O'Connor and John Ebersole, not every witness statement running against the official doctrine can be taken as "absolute truth", to be pounded into a theory that pretends to reconcile all inconsistencies. It is unnecessary, however, to dismiss the witnesses whom Lifton interviews regarding the coffin movements (page 399 ff.) on the basis of the weakness of eyewitness testimony. It is Lifton's use of their "testimony" itself that is outrageous, as shown by an objective appraisal of his alleged reconstruction of the casket switch through the use of a "decoy ambulance" at Bethesda. In this chapter, I illustrate Mr. Lifton's use of the dispersal and juxtaposition of interview fragments throughout his text, which one must reassemble to make any sense of them.
    Lifton tells us that two coffins were delivered to the Bethesda morgue. First, the President's altered body arrived from parts unknown (presumably Walter Reed Army Hospital) in a pinkish gray metal casket. The bronze ceremonial casket that left Parkland Hospital bearing the President's remains arrived later. It was allegedly empty. Through sleight of hand, the body was replaced in the bronze casket in which it left Dallas. That casket was taken outside the hospital and brought back in bearing the body. The two caskets were switched somewhere in the middle of this farce without anyone noticing. Integral to the plot, according to Lifton, was the alleged deception foisted upon the military honor guard that was supposed to meet the President's casket at the hospital and carry it into the morgue. He alleges that, for a time, the honor guard lost track of their charge after the Navy ambulance that we all saw on television at Andrews Air Force Base arrived on the hospital grounds. The confusion allegedly resulted from the conspirators' use of an unmarked black hearse to spirit the body into the morgue. Lifton implies that the honor guard erroneously regarded this as a decoy ambulance.
    As author Thomas Powers succinctly noted about Lifton's theory, "This is something he figured out." (Powers, Thomas and Alan Rich, "Robbing the Grave", New York Magazine, February 23, 1981, p. 46)
    For simplicity's sake, we might do well to first review the report of FBI Agents Sibert and O'Neill. They wrote:

"On arrival at the Medical Center, the ambulance stopped in front of the main entrance, at which time Mrs. JACQUELINE KENNEDY and Attorney General ROBERT KENNEDY embarked from the ambulance and entered the building. The ambulance was thereafter driven around to the rear entrance where the President's body was removed and taken into the autopsy room. Bureau agents assisted in the moving of the casket to the autopsy room. A tight security was immediately placed around the autopsy room by the Naval facility and the U.S. Secret Service. Bureau agents made contact with ROY KELLERMAN…"

    Liftonites, scrutinizing this passage microscopically, contend for a distinction in Sibert and O'Neill's use of the words "body" and "casket".

The Ambulance Chase
    None of the witnesses Lifton cites in support of his decoy ambulance scenario remembers "the ambulance chase" in quite the same way. Lifton interviewed members of the casket honor guard with the following results:
    Corporal Timothy Cheek had only a vague recollection of trying to find the ambulance and finally catching up with it at the morgue entrance. Lifton quotes him, but does not cite his account in direct support of his thesis.
    James L. Felder echoes the decoy ambulance story, but he doesn't remember which of the two ambulances was the decoy. All he remembers is following the first ambulance from the front of Bethesda around back, losing it, returning to the front, seeing a second ambulance, returning to the rear again and unloading a coffin. Lifton quotes him, but does not cite him in direct support of his thesis.
    Douglas Mayfield (BE, page 408) tells about chasing an ambulance around back, losing it, returning to the front and picking it up again. (He doesn't speak in terms of two ambulances, and Lifton doesn't say whether he asked Mayfield about a second—or decoy ambulance.) Lifton quotes, but does not cite Mayfield in direct support of his thesis.
    Notice Lifton's persistent questioning and his highly suggestive, leading questions to Hubert Clark (BE, page 409). Clark says there was a decoy ambulance, but his recollection is vague, even under Lifton's prompting. Lifton does not cite him in direct support of his thesis.
    Richard Gaudreau (BE, page 414) does not have an independent recollection of there being more than one ambulance until Lifton prompts him. He clearly cannot remember the details. Lifton quotes, but does not cite Gaudreau in direct support of his thesis.
    From General Godfrey McHugh, Secret Service Agent William Greer and the presidential physician, Dr. George Burkley, Lifton produces nothing in support of his scenario.
    Another witness not interviewed by Lifton on his theory of an ambulance chase was Sorrell L. Schwartz. Schwartz was a pharmacologist at the Naval Medical Research Institute, a component of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. On the night of November 22, 1963, he was recruited to serve with the duty officer. He wrote to Time Magazine (Time, February 16, 1981, p. 4):

    "[W]e did not lose track of the ambulance containing the bronze casket after it arrived at the medical center. On that night there were a large number of spectators around, and our intention was to get the ambulance to the morgue before the crowd gathered. The honor guard, along with a Navy enlisted-man driver, the other duty officer and me, rode to the morgue on the guard truck at high speed, believing that the ambulance was following. When we got there, the ambulance was not seen. Since the Secret Service driver was unfamiliar with the grounds, we decided he was lost. Retracing our path, we found the ambulance still at the front of the hospital amid many onlookers. In our haste we had left without confirming that the ambulance was behind us. On the second try we did it right.
    "At no time was the ambulance out of sight of at least several hundred people, from its arrival at the center until the bronze coffin was unloaded at the morgue."

    Lifton's star witness is Dennis David, whom he interviewed in 1979.
    David says the first "ambulance" came onto the grounds of the hospital from the back gate, bearing the body (BE, page 571). He describes the first "ambulance" as an unmarked black Cadillac (i.e., a hearse) not a gray Navy ambulance (BE, page 575). David says the casket it carried was plain gray metal (page 579). The second ambulance was the empty one arriving with the official motorcade (BE, page 571). He did not, however, witness the arrival of the "second ambulance" at the morgue (BE, page 573). David says that, after the black hearse arrived, he went to the front of the hospital. He then went up to the balcony to the rotunda. From there he witnessed Jackie and Bobby's arrival. (Be, page 576)
    Although he tells Lifton that he supervised the entry of a casket, unloaded from the first ambulance by a group of sailors (BE, page 571), he admits that he has no personal knowledge that the body was in the first ambulance (BE, page 581); he simply alleges he was told this by Commander Boswell, one of the autopsy pathologists (BE, page 573). Furthermore, while Lifton cites his interview with David as support for the fact that Humes, Boswell, Admiral Kenney (Surgeon General of the Navy) and Captain Stover were in the morgue when the first casket arrived (BE, page 580), it is not until a full nine pages later, however, that Lifton discloses that David "had emphasized that he had never entered the autopsy room itself." (BE, page 589)
    It is on the basis of such testimony by a man who knows nothing, and for whose tale no corroboration is offered, that Lifton makes his case.

The Back Gate and the Recollections of Dr. Russell Madison
    Dennis David told Lifton that the first "ambulance" came onto the hospital grounds from the back gate. According to Dennis David, it was allegedly an unmarked black Cadillac. (BE, p. 575) This is the one he says had the body. (BE, p. 571)
    On the day of the assassination, Dr. Russell Madison was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force attached to the Air Force Radiological Institute, a satellite unit of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology operating at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Madison always drove to and from work. He was accustomed to using the back gate of the hospital grounds at the end of each day because it was the closest gate to the radiological research unit where he worked. It was also closer to his home, and enabled him to avoid heavy rush hour traffic on Wisconsin Avenue.
    The night of the assassination was different from all other nights in Madison's experience. He left work at approximately 6:30 p.m., but when he headed for the back gate, "It was locked, because I'd usually go out that way and I couldn't get out." Also, no guard was posted at the gate. Madison turned around and drove out the front gate of the Medical Center grounds. He did notice that the helipad at the rear of the hospital was lit. Did he see any activity that aroused his interest? "Absolutely not, there was nobody around." It was the only time that he was unable to use the back gate. (Author's interview with Russell Madison, May 25, 1993)
    According to the report of the casket team leader, the casket team unloaded the casket into the morgue at 8:00 p.m., one hour and five minutes after the Secret Service reported it had arrived at the front of the hospital. (BE, p. 406). According to Humes, he received the body at 7:35 p.m., so Lifton's question is: What did the casket team carry in? Sibert and O'Neill say that the preparations for the autopsy began at 7:17 p.m., and the autopsy itself began at 8:15 p.m. (BE, p. 484) These are the bases for Lifton's finding time unaccounted for (approximately 45 minutes) and concluding that there were two separate casket entries.
    Paul O'Connor (interviewed by Lifton on August 25, 1979) (BE, p. 598), stated he saw a gray shipping casket enter the morgue at 8:00 p.m. Lifton arbitrarily concludes that O'Connor was describing events he witnessed at least an hour earlier, and that his testimony dovetails with that of Dennis David (BE, p. 605), except that O'Connor said he thought the body was brought in by helicopter, one that may have landed in the rear of the hospital (id.). Lifton quotes O'Connor in his book, but does not use him in direct support of the musical caskets thesis. When I questioned O'Connor, he stuck by his original story notwithstanding Mr. Lifton's revision, saying that, at about 8 o'clock in the evening, the back door of the hospital burst open and six men came in carrying a "pinkish gray, nondescript, cheap, shipping casket."
    Lifton does rely upon O'Connor for the allegation that the President's body was in a combat-style body bag. According to one of Mr. Lifton's own witnesses, Hospital Corpsman James Metzler, there was no body bag. (Livingstone, Harrison, High Treason 2. Carroll & Graf, New York: 1991, p. 89) Before it left Parkland Hospital, the President's body was wrapped in rubberized plastic sheeting, besides a hospital bed sheet, to protect the Oneal Funeral Home's casket from seepage. When the casket was opened in the Bethesda morgue, the plastic stuck against the President's throat and the back of his skull. (Bishop, Jim, The Day Kennedy Was Shot. Funk & Wagnall’s, New York: 1968, p. 452)
    For Donald Rebentisch, a petty officer who was stationed at Bethesda on the night of the autopsy, there was no big secret. Rebentisch was studying dental and medical equipment repair at the hospital at the time. According to Rebentisch, two ambulances carrying two caskets were employed—one of them empty and one with the body of Kennedy—in a deliberate charade to slip the President's body into Bethesda Naval Hospital. Rebentisch says his commanding officers told him the secrecy was planned to avoid the media and other onlookers. The empty casket was brought in the front door while the casket carrying Kennedy's body was driven in a 1958 Chevrolet hearse to the back of the hospital where medical officials were to perform an autopsy:

    "It was about 4:30 p.m., when our chief petty officer came to me and about five other petty officers and told us to go to the back of the hospital. I'm talking about the loading ramps where they used to bring in supplies.
    "He told all of us that we were going to be there and we were going to bring the President's casket into the mortuary. We were told not to leave our posts.
    "The chief said we got all the…ghouls and reporters and the TV and everybody at the front of the hospital He said there would be an empty casket in the ambulance. He said the President's body would really come in the back.
    "This made sense to me. I felt there was nothing wrong with this. I just bought it, as did the rest of us."

    Rebentisch said he and five other officers took the President's casket out of the black hearse and pushed it through a rear freight entrance, 35 or 40 minutes before another coffin was taken through a mass of reporters and photographers at the front door. "Rebentisch said he doubted most of Lifton's claims." (The Associated Press, January 23, 1981, AM Cycle) Robert Muma, who was a Bethesda staff dental technician, corroborated Rebentisch's account:

"There were two ambulances that came in. One was lighted. It came up to the front door. The second one they kept dark and it went around to the back. That was the one that had Kennedy in it. It was common knowledge that there were two caskets." (The Associated Press, January 23, 1981, AM Cycle)

    Another of Rebentisch's associates, Paul Neigler, also corroborated the former petty officer's story. (United Press International, January 24, 1981, AM cycle)
    In an "Epilogue" to his Dell and subsequent paperback editions of Best Evidence, Lifton refers to Donald Rebentisch surfacing after the initial publication of his book. He chortles at the notion that a mere security measure might have been employed. Nevertheless, he omits to mention the front entry of the bronze ceremonial casket, and he also fails to grapple with the fact that Rebentisch and his colleagues were stationed at the back of the hospital from 4:30 p.m. that afternoon until they carried the casket containing the President's remains. None of them mentioned the comings and goings of more than one vehicle or more than one casket.

The Phony Burial Theory
    How, if at all, did Lifton's conspiracy distract the participants in the autopsy from the fact that there were two caskets in the morgue? He implies they were told that the gray shipping casket contained the remains of a military officer awaiting burial. Harold Weisberg discusses the theory:

    "To promulgate his case of a shell game with caskets, Lifton makes a big thing of his representation that there was no corpse of a colonel for another casket and seeks to support this by alleging that he colonel was not buried in Arlington, as had been reported. To make this appear credible he had an associate call Arlington Cemetery and ask if a colonel had been buried the next day. He claims the response was that nobody was buried the next day. Inference, the stories were false.
    "The falsity is Lifton's. He fails to inform that the next day was a Saturday and that there were not burials at all at Arlington on Saturdays. (Weisberg, Harold. Letter to Edwin McDowell [New York Times], February 4, 1981)

Overview of The Two-Casket Entries/Two Audiences—Lifton's Developing Theory (BE, pp. 585-586)

STEP ONE: 6:45 entry (gray casket) (first entry of the body).

a) What evidence does he have that the body was taken in at 6:45? His only source is Dennis David.
The Navy Ambulance arrives at the front entrance at 6:55 p.m. (I did not have this in my original essay and may not need it to make the point.)

STEP TWO: 7:05-7:17 p.m., Navy ambulance and MDW "chase"

a) Source: inference liberally drawn from Sibert & O'Neill-related FBI documents.
b) Lifton's conclusion: the empty Dallas casket is brought to the morgue; Sibert & O'Neill barred; JFK's body transferred to the Dallas casket and put in the "correct" ambulance.
c) 43 minutes elapse before,

STEP THREE: 8:00 p.m. casket team entry; MDW casket team and McHugh bring Dallas casket to morgue.

a) Sources: casket team interviews, Wehle, McHugh, et. al.
b) Conclusion: President's body is brought to the morgue in the Dallas casket for the official autopsy. The body has already been altered.

Queries:

a) What happened to the empty plain gray metal casket? Where did it go?
b) What if the casket team had caught up with the Navy ambulance before or during Step Two?
c) If the body had been altered at Walter Reed, why the first entry? Why not simply transfer the body from hearse to ambulance?
d) Who was the second casket entry intended to deceive?
e) How does McHugh get into the "correct" ambulance?
f) Isn't Lifton ignoring the time that was required for initial measuring, X-raying and photographing of the remains before the first incision (7:17 p.m.-8:15 p.m.)? Dr. Humes, Secret Service Agent Kellerman and the FBI team of Sibert and O'Neill, as well as other witnesses, have told us that there was a period of initial X-raying and photography. Secret Service Agent Kellerman's testimony before the Warren Commission seems to have accounted for this duration.
    Mr. Kellerman. Let's come back to the period of our arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, which was 5:58 p.m. at night. By the time it took us to take the body from the plane into the ambulance, and a couple of carloads of staff people who followed us, we may have spent 15 minutes there. And in driving from Andrews to the U.S. Naval Hospital, I would judge, a good 45 minutes. So there is 7 o'clock. We went immediately over, without too much delay on the outside of the hospital, into the morgue. The Navy people had their staff in readiness right then. There wasn't anybody to call. They were all there. So at the latest, 7:30, they began to work on the autopsy. And, as I said, we left the hospital at 3:56 in the morning. Let's give the undertaker people 2 hours. So they were through at 2 o'clock in the morning. I would judge offhand that they worked on the autopsy angle 4-1/2, 5 hours. (2H102-103)

Lifton concludes that the details are less important than establishing a break in the "chain of possession" (BE, p. 422). He is impatient with trifling details—and evidence.

Appraisal of the Facts
    If ever there was a scheme such as Lifton's to overthrow the Government of the United States, then only the Marx Brothers had the skill and impeccable timing to execute it. It seems that Lifton's theorized covert operation was an open secret to nearly every serviceman on duty at Bethesda that Friday night. Lifton has exploited the fading memories of men who were, even then, frightened and perplexed by the whirlwind of history surrounding them. In the process, he has tried to convert understandable security precautions into a hopeless maze of intrigue. Essentially, however, Best Evidence produces no direct evidence of a single assertion forming a link in Lifton's chain of irresponsible conjecture.
    Lifton manipulates his facts in the interest of his system by seizing upon the minor details that he has gleaned from the minor players in the drama of that tragic weekend. His industriousness summons the sage admonition of one of our finest writers of history:

"The contemporary has no perspective; everything is in the foreground and appears the same size. Little matters loom big, and great matters are sometimes missed because their outlines cannot be seen." (Barbara Tuchman, When Does History Happen, New York Times Book Review, March 8, 1964.)

    As Professor Wrone has concluded, "In hiding his determinative philosophy, his irrationalities, aberrations, and hasty, wrong judgments [Lifton] is dishonest with the reader…Best Evidence…is not the objective search of a scholar, plastic in formulation, changing with the evidence, honest with his past."
    Is it mere coincidence that this book appeared so soon after the House Committee investigation? There is a striking parallelism between the treatment accorded to Warren Commission critics by both HSCA Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey and David S. Lifton. Blakey held a weekend conference with several Warren Commission critics in September 1977, purportedly to elicit their views under conditions of strict secrecy. He never called upon them again throughout the committee's investigation, but after the committee had issued its findings, he cited this conference as evidence that he had given their critics their day.
    Lifton picked the brains of the critics for fifteen years, adopted some of their approaches to the evidence as his own, and then purported in his journal of self-discovery to dismiss all of them. ("I felt isolated and, for the first time, saw the other Warren Report critics as mere tourists engaged in an academic exercise. I had found something fundamental—I had glimpsed the possibility of treason.") (BE, page 240)
    Both the HSCA and Lifton exonerated everyone in sight of complicity in the murder, and of the cover-up of the crime, leaving only sinister ghosts to blame for the assassination.

An Odd Official Silence
    The sequestration of the House Committee's files created the very environment that fostered the publication of Best Evidence.
    Lifton's allegations cast such a stain on the integrity and reputation of the national government and the rule of law that one might think a forthright response would by now have been made by the government.
    Perhaps the official silence is due in some measure to the fact that Lifton's book is not wholly without merit.
    He mounts, for example, a searing indictment of the House Select Committee on Assassinations for its refusal to make public the contents of its behind-the-scenes interviews with various dramatis personae in the assassination controversy, a brazen step beyond even the Warren Commission's penchant for secrecy. (None of this material is subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, which applies only to agencies of the Executive Branch.)
    He also offers a painstaking and up-to-date analysis of the gross variance between what the autopsy X-rays and photos show, what the Bethesda doctors wrote in their report, and what the Parkland doctors in Dallas observed while vainly attempting to save the President's life.
    At bottom, however, Lifton's book belies the conceit that the assassination of President Kennedy can be "solved" through evidence that is incomplete, ambiguous and thoroughly tainted. As the late Thomas Stamm suggested, preoccupation with such evidence is equivalent to focusing on the magician's diversionary technique, which is intended to conceal and cannot explain the mechanics of his tricks. The tragic irony of David Lifton's work is that, like the Warren Commission itself, he was constrained by the lack of solid fact to resort to speculative improbability in constructing a "logical" explanation for the assassination.
    It is noteworthy that this technique achieved currency in several more recently published works.
    Sadly, Lifton's book inaugurated a trend in the publishing industry, whereby it has seemingly become impossible for a serious, responsible student of the assassination to see his work commercially published unless he posits a neat and fanciful solution to the crime, witness such books as Reasonable Doubt by Henry Hurt; Contract on America by David Scheim; Mafia Kingfish by John H. Davis; On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison, and—in the realm of fiction—Libra by Don DeLillo. To date, no critique of the methodology and conclusions of the House Select Committee on Assassinations comparable to earlier published books and articles about the Warren Commission's Report has appeared in print, and it has grown increasingly unlikely that any will in the near future. Thus, the public controversy initially stirred by Edward Jay Estonia's scholarly and understated book, Inquest, which began as a thesis for his Master's Degree at Cornell University, has been fueled by pap. It is, to borrow the title of a popular song, "running on empty."
    Serious valid criticisms of the medical evidence in John Kennedy's assassination have been raised by several researchers and authors, and the subject is indeed worthy of further study. Unfortunately, the erstwhile House Select Committee and the Congress as a whole blocked our access to those very materials which could appreciably advance our knowledge. These include staff counsel interviews, sworn depositions and affidavits of participants in the creation of the medical record—resources which cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be regarded as highly classified or related to the protection of national security. The most logical step toward satiating our hunger for the solution to a case which cannot be solved through the available evidence is to demand access to that which continues to be withheld.

Ahead to Chapter Seven
Back to Chapter Five
Back to Roger Feinman