×

A witness to history

Over the last three decades, Richard A. Lipsey has watched as his eyewitness-to-history observations have been turned, twisted and tortured in support of conspiracy tales surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 46 years ago this month.

The Baton Rouge businessman is not amused.

Such storylines—some from the left, some from the right and some from the ozone—upset Lipsey “greatly.” So much so that it has soured one of the nation’s biggest gun distributors on interviews about those momentous events in November 1963. To him, the matter is settled. “The Warren Commission had it right.”

To Lipsey, it is as obvious as the monstrous trophy polar bear that stands encased in the former big-game hunter’s Baton Rouge office: one gun, fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository.

Forget grassy knolls, multiple gunmen, muddled wound analyses and switched bodies, intones Lipsey. “It’s ridiculous.”

He has pretty good bona fides for saying that. Lipsey was within feet of the corpse of John F. Kennedy when forensic pathologists, eight hours after the fatal shots were fired, sifted through his ravaged brain and body to determine what happened.

But Lipsey’s observations, officially rendered in sworn testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations 30 years ago, have been cited in two of those conspiracy subsets—specifically, the head-wound and body-switching theories.

Admittedly, Lipsey is not a doctor. But when it comes to disputes over whether it was actually Kennedy’s body on the table, or if the wounds were caused by the same gun, or a bullet’s trajectory and direction, Lipsey’s box seat to history is undisputed.

It was Lipsey, less than two years out of ROTC training at LSU, who waited at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., in the darkening hours of Nov. 22 to greet Air Force One upon its return from Dallas.

There were two presidents aboard the Boeing 707—one was Jack Kennedy, zipped into a body bag, the victim of an assassin’s bullets; the other his alive and freshly sworn-in replacement, Lyndon Baines Johnson. The latter was headed to the White House, the former to a Bethesda Naval Hospital autopsy table. Two hearses awaited, says Lipsey, “but only one body was on, and came off, that plane.”

After helping heft Kennedy’s body into one of those hearses, Maj. Gen. Philip C. Wehle, commander of the Washington, D.C., military district, gave his 24-year-old aide a sidearm and an order: Do not leave Kennedy’s body during the autopsy procedure and do not allow the body to be moved without authorization.

Lipsey told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 that he was a bit traumatized by the order. He had never seen a dead man, let alone an autopsy. “(But) I couldn’t tell the general, ‘No, I’m not going in the room,’” he said.

The hearse carrying Kennedy’s body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital’s rear entrance, a loading dock. Lipsey and Wehle had hopped from Air Force One to the hospital in a helicopter. A “decoy” hearse, accompanied by Jacqueline Kennedy and presidential aides, had arrived at the front of the hospital a few minutes earlier. As expected, it drew a mob of awaiting reporters, photographers and onlookers.

The First Lady and aides were taken to the hospital’s presidential suite to await the autopsy while the naval hearse with the body slipped unnoticed around to the back. It was Lipsey’s testimony about the “decoy” hearse to House investigators in early 1978 that gave rise to the notion that the body undergoing the autopsy wasn’t Kennedy’s. The body was wheeled quietly into a cramped room shortly before 8 p.m.

For the next four hours, 1st Lt. Richard Lipsey stood watch over the slain commander-in-chief, listening and observing. Beside him part of the night was 1st Lt. Sam Bird, head of the Capitol honor guard and a good friend. Lipsey remembers being strangely detached from the momentous nature of the event, his eyes locked on the one certainty that evening: the naked, bloody body on that table a mere eight feet away was that of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States of America.

Just 48 hours earlier, Lipsey had been at Kennedy’s side at a White House reception for then-Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, a responsibility Lipsey was given regularly in his role as Wehle’s principal military aide. He stood close to President Kennedy on those occasions. He knew the President. There had been no switching of bodies.

Telling the story is not easy for Lipsey. In fact, until 1978, it was forbidden. The night of the autopsy, a State Department official ordered him to sign a confidentiality agreement under the Official Secrets Act. He was not to reveal any detail about what he saw or heard at the autopsy for 15 years, not even to his spouse, Susan, whom he married 13 months after the assassination. He kept a confessional-like seal on details of the autopsy until Jan. 18, 1978, when a pair of congressional investigators from the House Select Committee on Assassinations showed up at his office to take his sworn deposition.

Even after the 15 years had expired, Lipsey remained reluctant to discuss the matter in detail. What discussions there were tended to be non-publicized overviews for various civic clubs and a self-sanitized interview with the now-defunct Gris Gris magazine and The Advocate a number of years ago.

Two years after Lipsey’s sworn statement, author David Lifton interviewed Lipsey for his 1981 book, Best Evidence. Lipsey asserts that Lifton distorted his testimony and took it out of context to fit conspiracy premises. Other conspiracy high priests and disciples who smoke this sort of stuff also have misused his testimony, he complains.

Lipsey was born in Selma, Ala., and moved with his family to Baton Rouge as a four-year-old in 1943. His father Joe operated a hide and fur business that morphed into an Army/Navy surplus store then to a sporting goods company. Richard joined his father in the business ventures immediately upon leaving the Army and later purchased Steinberg’s Sporting Goods, which evolved into S&S Sporting Goods, then Lipsey’s Inc., which would grow to become the nation’s third-largest gun wholesaler.

Lipsey has been an international big-game hunter, although now, at 70, he limits his hunting to doves, ducks and pheasants. Numerous big-game trophies dominate his Baton Rouge office, attesting to his expertise with rifles.

Following his 1961 graduation from LSU and six months of basic training in Georgia, 2nd Lt. Richard Lipsey was sent to Fort Polk in March 1962, where he soon became an aide to the base commander, Brig. Gen. Philip Wehle. Four months later, Wehle, a former English instructor at West Point, was promoted to major general and given command of the military in the nation’s capital. He asked Lipsey to accompany him as his aide—an offer that included a promotion to 1st lieutenant.

Lipsey found himself often accompanying and occasionally standing in for Wehle at Kennedy White House social and state events. The president and he got along well, says Lipsey, so much so that the president suggested Lipsey become his fulltime military aide. History would render that invitation moot.

Just five weeks after the assassination, his two-year tour of duty was ending. In spite of a plea from Wehle, Lipsey did not re-up, choosing instead to leave Washington for Baton Rouge to join his father’s business. He kept his silence about the autopsy.

When the congressional investigators, on their quest for once-and-for-all answers to the whirlpool of accusations still swirling more than a decade later, arrived and began asking questions, he was caught a bit off-guard, he remembers. He notes that some of his responses were not as clean and concise as they could have been.

Two score and six years later, a less-rattled memory serves. Dramatic mental pictures seem to come to him like they were scenes from the last Tiger home football game (events that Susan and Richard rarely miss). At first there was nothing special about that 1963 day.

“I was accompanying the military chauffeur to pick up Gen. Wehle, who had gone home for lunch, when the bulletin from Dallas came over the radio: the president had been shot. Just as we parked at the house, the news flashed that Kennedy had died. The general must have heard the same report, because he came running out of his door as I was running toward it.

“We headed for the White House. The chauffeur had to take to sidewalks at times to get around noon traffic, which was stalled as drivers stopped to listen to assassination bulletins. We made it to the White House in 10 minutes. The people there—the domestic staff, the clerks and secretaries, aides—were just standing around in shock.

“As part of his military commander responsibilities, Gen. Wehle handled state functions. In this case, he would be in charge of the public funeral procession and services. We talked with the chief of protocol and then raced back to military headquarters at nearby Ft. McNair. Planning was already underway when we got there.”

It was decided that Lipsey would accompany Wehle to Andrews Air Force Base to meet Air Force One, oversee the loading and transporting of Kennedy’s body to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and take a military helicopter to the hospital to meet the body as it arrived for the autopsy. It was there that Lipsey received the loaded Colt .45 automatic and his orders.

“I don’t know what he expected me to do if somebody tried to take the body,” he says today, quietly chuckling.

Witnessing an autopsy is not an activity for the squeamish. The pathologist cracks open the head and body cavities. The brains, innards and whatever else is floating around amid the blood and guts are unceremoniously dumped into nearby pans on stainless steel racks to be scoured by pathologists. When the investigation is finished, everything is dumped back into the empty body and the anatomical chaos sewn shut. Kennedy’s autopsy took about four hours.

Strangely, Lipsey wasn’t repulsed by the blood and gore, although he can still recollect the smell of formaldehyde permeating the small, sterile room. It was like a textbook demonstration to him. Lt. Sam Bird sent one of his soldiers to bring them some food. “We sat there watching the autopsy eating hamburgers. Neither of us had eaten since morning,” Lipsey says.

Besides three pathologists—Thornton Boswell, chief of pathology at Bethesda; James Humes, director of laboratories at Bethesda; and Pierre Finck, chief of wound ballistics pathology at Walter Reed Medical Center, Marine officers all—some three dozen individuals were present in the room that night, most of them drifting in and out. They included five Secret Service and FBI agents, 18 medical tech personnel from the hospital (mostly curious interlopers), six military officers and, later, four morticians.

Lipsey remembers everything being calm, orderly and by the book—not the screaming chaos depicted in Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. Lipsey barely noticed as most of the night’s visitors came and went. Along with the pathology team, he was the only person to remain in the room throughout the procedure, save for two brief latrine breaks during which Wehle would spell him.

After Lipsey helped lay the corpse on the table and undress it, a task made more difficult by rigor mortis, the young officer took his seat in the middle of the first of two rows of chairs located behind a brass rail. The body was X-rayed. As he sat focused on the corpse, there was—and there remains—absolute certainty about who was on that table.

“One of the bullets took out much of Kennedy’s upper right face, but if you saw him from the left side he looked like normal,” Lipsey says. “I was amazed at what a remarkable physical specimen he was. Not an ounce of body fat on him.”

The doctors concluded there were three entry wounds: one in the lower neck, one in the upper neck/lower skull region and one at the rear crown of the head. Several years later, second opinions by doctors determined Kennedy was hit by only two bullets. But the central lone-gunman hypothesis has remained the same throughout subsequent re-examinations of the autopsy results.

At the original autopsy, pathologists could find only two exit wounds—the right side of the head and the lower throat. The latter slug entered near the base of the neck between the shoulder blade and spine, exiting through the lower throat. The doctors did not then know that the exit wound they were isolating was where a tracheotomy had been performed several hours earlier by the emergency medical team at Parkland Hospital in Dallas. But the Bethesda pathologists ultimately were right, in any case. X-rays reviewed later by other doctors in government investigations clearly showed the bullet exiting through the neck where Parkland doctors shortly thereafter would make their tracheotomy incision.

No official investigation wavered on the conclusion that projectiles passed through the body from back to front and were made by the same high-caliber rifle located above and slightly to the right of the moving target. That trajectory would put the shooter in the upper floors of the Texas Book Depository.

“There was no shot from the grassy knoll,” Lipsey still insists. “There was no question in the (pathologists’) minds,” he said in earlier testimony to the House Committee. “The bullets came from the same direction … the same place … the same time. They weren’t different angles. They all had the same pattern to them.”

Most witnesses agree three shots were heard in Dealey Plaza that day, and the Bethesda team believed it had located three bullet entry wounds. But they could not locate fragments from the third bullet. As for what happened to the third bullet, Lipsey (and many others) figures one of Oswald’s shots missed. The third bullet also might have been the one found on the floor of the presidential limo or could be explained by any number of other possibilities.

When the pathologists finished, they handed off Kennedy’s body to a quartet of morticians, who, Lipsey recalls, worked magic. “(The body) wasn’t presentable that you would want to open the casket, but they did a super job.” An hour earlier, Lipsey had sent his driver to the White House to fetch clothes for the corpse. He helped the morticians dress the president and lift him into the casket, which had been wheeled back into the room.

It was around 3:30 a.m. when Lipsey slowly closed the casket lid. He is the last recorded person on earth to see JFK’s face. On the way out, he called his parents in Baton Rouge for a brief, you’ll-never-guess-where-I-am conversation. No details, though.

He and Wehle led the hearse to the White House. Behind the hearse were Mrs. Kennedy, a few aides and a Catholic priest.

A private service was held in one of the White House rooms around 4:30 a.m. After the truncated ceremony, the First Lady asked to be alone in the room, save for the priest. And all complied. It was rumored—but never substantiated— that Jackie opened the casket for a final look at her Jack.

“Events were happening so fast, and I was kept so busy, I was not conscious of the history passing in front of me,” Lipsey says. “I had a sense of shock, but I never got emotional about it at the time.”

That would come two nights after the state funeral. Lipsey and Bird held their own wake of sorts at the latter’s apartment. The 24-year-olds shared a bottle of Scotch, memories from the autopsy and Kennedy stories. And for the first time, Lipsey said recently, they choked up. “We got very emotional.”

Bird, who was chief of the Old Guard—the formal honor guard for state events—had recorded his recollections on a tape that they played that night. Lipsey did not keep a record, something he now regrets. That night was the last time he saw Bird, who later died from wounds suffered in Vietnam.

Richard Lipsey still thinks about that time in the autopsy room, still keeps some details to himself. He never gave much thought to returning to Bethesda and its autopsy chamber. He wonders aloud if it still exists as it did, a small, hermetically clean room with a faint smell of formaldehyde, the four walls forever keeping their silence about that terrible night so long ago.

The idea of a return to the scene begins to intrigue him. “You know, I just might do that the next time I am in Washington,” he says.

Meanwhile, he is convinced the Warren Commission’s “thorough and accurate” report on the assassination is the definitive word. The most factual book on the assassination, he says, is Gerald Posner’s 1993 work, Case Closed, which independently comes to the same conclusion as the Warren Commission—that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Still, there hangs about a shred of irony.

Oswald assassinated a president with a rifle obtained through the mail from a gun company. Lipsey does tens of millions of dollars worth of gun sales annually. Considering what he witnessed, does it give him pause?

“I can’t ship guns to individuals, only to licensed retail dealers,” he responds, further dismissing the thought by stressing that those retailers must follow strict federal laws concerning who can and cannot purchase a gun.

A short silence.

Then: “I agree with those gun laws.”