09-08-2013, 12:08 AM
[size=12]The doctors were also firmly convinced that this bullet (the lower back wound) did not exit in the front of the neck. Lipsey said the doctors followed the path of
the bullet for a short distance until they lost the track at which point they removed the organs in an attempt to locate it.
Just a few sentences before the report states the exact opposite... which in turn supports his claim there was yet another wound in the lower neck that DID exit the throat....
"Lipsey stated that he cannot recall
the doctors specifically saying that the wound in the throat
was caused by a bullet but he does feel the doctors were
convinced that a bullet exited from the front of the neck."
Since the throat and neck and upper back were never dissected and the probes all ranged downward from the lower back wound, AND there are witnesses to a fragment or bullet removed from the chest - at some point...
Lipsey acknowledging a "decoy casket" directly implies that a transfer of the body HAD to have occurred before that casket is loaded into the navy ambulance....
and that Lipsey has first hand knowledge to that effect.
http://www.225batonrouge.com/article/200.../311019964
[size=12]
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 theassassination of President John F. Kennedy 46 years ago this month.
The Baton Rouge businessman is not amused.
Such storylinessome from the left, some fromthe right and some from the ozoneupset Lipsey "greatly." So much so that ithas soured one of the nation's biggest gun distributors on interviews aboutthose momentous events in November 1963. To him, the matter is settled. "TheWarren Commission had it right."
To Lipsey, it is as obvious as the monstroustrophy polar bear that stands encased in the former big-game hunter's BatonRouge office: one gun, fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of theTexas 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 sayingthat. Lipsey was within feet of the corpse of John F. Kennedy when forensicpathologists, eight hours after the fatal shots were fired, sifted through hisravaged brain and body to determine what happened.
But Lipsey's observations, officiallyrendered in sworn testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations 30years ago, have been cited in two of those conspiracy subsetsspecifically, thehead-wound and body-switching theories.
Admittedly, Lipsey is not a doctor. But whenit 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 anddirection, Lipsey's box seat to history is undisputed.
It was Lipsey, less than two years out ofROTC 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 fromDallas.
There were two presidents aboard the Boeing707one was Jack Kennedy, zipped into a body bag, the victim of an assassin'sbullets; the other his alive and freshly sworn-in replacement, Lyndon BainesJohnson. The latter was headed to the White House, the former to a BethesdaNaval Hospital autopsy table. Two hearses awaited, says Lipsey, "but only onebody was on, and came off, that plane."
After helping heft Kennedy's body into one ofthose 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 notleave Kennedy's body during the autopsy procedure and do not allow the body tobe moved without authorization.
Lipsey told the House Select Committee onAssassinations in 1978 that he was a bit traumatized by the order. He had neverseen 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[B] carrying Kennedy's body arrived atBethesda Naval Hospital's rear entrance, a loading dock. Lipsey and Wehle hadhopped from Air Force One to the hospital in a helicopter. A "decoy" hearse,accompanied by Jacqueline Kennedy and presidential aides, had arrived at thefront of the hospital a few minutes earlier. As expected, it drew a mob ofawaiting reporters, photographers and onlookers.[/B]
The First Lady and aides were taken to thehospital's presidential suite to await the autopsy while the naval hearse withthe body slipped unnoticed around to the back. It was Lipsey's testimony aboutthe "decoy" hearse to House investigators in early 1978 that gave rise to thenotion that the body undergoing the autopsy wasn't Kennedy's. T[B]he body waswheeled quietly into a cramped room [/B]shortly before 8 p.m. (DJ: the ONLY wheeling done was by Greer/Kellerman/FBI at 7:17... Lipsey appears to be taking all the events and rolling htme into one)
For the next four hours, 1st Lt. RichardLipsey 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 honorguard and a good friend. Lipsey remembers being strangely detached from themomentous nature of the event, his eyes locked on the one certainty thatevening: the naked, bloody body on that table a mere eight feet away was thatof John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States of America.
Just 48 hours earlier, Lipsey had been atKennedy's side at a White House reception for then-Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, aresponsibility Lipsey was given regularly in his role as Wehle's principalmilitary aide. He stood close to President Kennedy on those occasions. He knewthe President. There had been no switching of bodies.
Telling the story is not easy for Lipsey. Infact, until 1978, it was forbidden. The night of the autopsy, a StateDepartment official ordered him to sign a confidentiality agreement under theOfficial Secrets Act. He was not to reveal any detail about what he saw orheard at the autopsy for 15 years, not even to his spouse, Susan, whom hemarried 13 months after the assassination. He kept a confessional-like seal ondetails of the autopsy until Jan. 18, 1978, when a pair of congressionalinvestigators from the House Select Committee on Assassinations showed up athis office to take his sworn deposition.
Even after the 15 years had expired, Lipseyremained reluctant to discuss the matter in detail. What discussions there weretended to be non-publicized overviews for various civic clubs and a self-sanitizedinterview with the now-defunct Gris Gris magazine and The Advocate a number ofyears ago.
Two years after Lipsey's sworn statement,author David Lifton interviewed Lipsey for his 1981 book, Best Evidence. Lipseyasserts that Lifton distorted his testimony and took it out of context to fitconspiracy premises. Other conspiracy high priests and disciples who smoke thissort of stuff also have misused his testimony, he complains.
Lipsey was born in Selma, Ala., and movedwith his family to Baton Rouge as a four-year-old in 1943. His father Joeoperated a hide and fur business that morphed into an Army/Navy surplus storethen to a sporting goods company. Richard joined his father in the businessventures immediately upon leaving the Army and later purchased Steinberg'sSporting 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-gamehunter, although now, at 70, he limits his hunting to doves, ducks andpheasants. Numerous big-game trophies dominate his Baton Rouge office,attesting to his expertise with rifles.
Following his 1961 graduation from LSU andsix months of basic training in Georgia, 2nd Lt. Richard Lipsey was sent toFort 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 instructorat West Point, was promoted to major general and given command of the militaryin the nation's capital. He asked Lipsey to accompany him as his aidean offerthat included a promotion to 1st lieutenant.
Lipsey found himself often accompanying andoccasionally standing in for Wehle at Kennedy White House social and stateevents. The president and he got along well, says Lipsey, so much so that thepresident suggested Lipsey become his fulltime military aide. History wouldrender that invitation moot.
Just five weeks after the assassination, histwo-year tour of duty was ending. In spite of a plea from Wehle, Lipsey did notre-up, choosing instead to leave Washington for Baton Rouge to join hisfather's business. He kept his silence about the autopsy.
When the congressional investigators, ontheir quest for once-and-for-all answers to the whirlpool of accusations stillswirling more than a decade later, arrived and began asking questions, he wascaught a bit off-guard, he remembers. He notes that some of his responses werenot as clean and concise as they could have been.
Two score and six years later, a less-rattledmemory serves. Dramatic mental pictures seem to come to him like they werescenes from the last Tiger home football game (events that Susan and Richardrarely miss). At first there was nothing special about that 1963 day.
"I was accompanying the military chauffeur topick up Gen. Wehle, who had gone home for lunch, when the bulletin from Dallascame over the radio: the president had been shot. Just as we parked at thehouse, the news flashed that Kennedy had died. The general must have heard thesame report, because he came running out of his door as I was running towardit.
"We headed for the White House. The chauffeurhad to take to sidewalks at times to get around noon traffic, which was stalledas drivers stopped to listen to assassination bulletins. We made it to theWhite House in 10 minutes. The people therethe domestic staff, the clerks andsecretaries, aideswere just standing around in shock.
"As part of his military commanderresponsibilities, Gen. Wehle handled state functions. In this case, he would bein charge of the public funeral procession and services. We talked with thechief of protocol and then raced back to military headquarters at nearby Ft.McNair. Planning was already underway when we got there."
It w[B]as decided [/B]that Lipsey would accompanyWehle to Andrews Air Force Base to meet Air Force One, oversee the loading andtransporting of Kennedy's body to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and take a militaryhelicopter to the hospital to meet the body as it arrived for the autopsy. Itwas there that Lipsey received the loaded Colt .45 automatic and his orders.
"I don't know what he expected me to do ifsomebody tried to take the body," he says today, quietly chuckling.
Witnessing an autopsy is not an activity forthe squeamish. The pathologist cracks open the head and body cavities. Thebrains, innards and whatever else is floating around amid the blood and gutsare unceremoniously dumped into nearby pans on stainless steel racks to bescoured by pathologists. When the investigation is finished, everything isdumped back into the empty body and the anatomical chaos sewn shut. Kennedy'sautopsy took about four hours.
Strangely, Lipsey wasn't repulsed by theblood and gore, although he can still recollect the smell of formaldehydepermeating the small, sterile room. It was like a textbook demonstration tohim. Lt. Sam Bird sent one of his soldiers to bring them some food. "We satthere watching the autopsy eating hamburgers. Neither of us had eaten sincemorning," Lipsey says.
Besides three pathologistsThornton Boswell,chief of pathology at Bethesda; James Humes, director of laboratories atBethesda; and Pierre Finck, chief of wound ballistics pathology at Walter ReedMedical Center, Marine officers allsome three dozen individuals were presentin the room that night, most of them drifting in and out. They included fiveSecret Service and FBI agents, 18 medical tech personnel from the hospital(mostly curious interlopers), six military officers and, later, fourmorticians.
Lipsey remembers everything being calm,orderly and by the booknot the screaming chaos depicted in Oliver Stone'smovie 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 roomthroughout the procedure, save for two brief latrine breaks during which Wehlewould spell him.
After Lipsey helped lay the corpse on thetable and undress it, a task made more difficult by rigor mortis, the youngofficer took his seat in the middle of the first of two rows of chairs locatedbehind a brass rail. The body was X-rayed. As he sat focused on the corpse,there wasand there remainsabsolute certainty about who was on that table.
"One of the bullets took out much ofKennedy's upper right face, but if you saw him from the left side he lookedlike normal," Lipsey says. "I was amazed at what a remarkable physical specimenhe was. Not an ounce of body fat on him."
The doctors concluded there were three entrywounds: one in the lower neck, one in the upper neck/lower skull region and oneat the rear crown of the head. Several years later, second opinions by doctorsdetermined Kennedy was hit by only two bullets. But the central lone-gunmanhypothesis has remained the same throughout subsequent re-examinations of theautopsy results.
At the original autopsy, pathologists couldfind only two exit woundsthe right side of the head and the lower throat. Thelatter slug entered near the base of the neck between the shoulder blade andspine, exiting through the lower throat. The doctors did not then know that theexit wound they were isolating was where a tracheotomy had been performedseveral hours earlier by the emergency medical team at Parkland Hospital inDallas. But the Bethesda pathologists ultimately were right, in any case.X-rays reviewed later by other doctors in government investigations clearlyshowed the bullet exiting through the neck where Parkland doctors shortlythereafter would make their tracheotomy incision.
No official investigation wavered on theconclusion that projectiles passed through the body from back to front and weremade by the same high-caliber rifle located above and slightly to the right ofthe moving target. That trajectory would put the shooter in the upper floors ofthe Texas Book Depository.
"There was no shot from the grassy knoll,"Lipsey still insists. "There was no question in the (pathologists') minds," hesaid in earlier testimony to the House Committee. "The bullets came from thesame 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 heardin Dealey Plaza that day, and the Bethesda team believed it had located threebullet 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 oneof Oswald's shots missed. The third bullet also might have been the one foundon the floor of the presidential limo or could be explained by any number ofother possibilities.
When the pathologists finished, they handedoff Kennedy's body to a quartet of morticians, who, Lipsey recalls, workedmagic. "(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 theWhite House to fetch clothes for the corpse. He helped the morticians dress thepresident and lift him into the casket, which had been wheeled back into theroom.
It was around 3:30 a.m. when Lipsey slowlyclosed 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 WhiteHouse. Behind the hearse were Mrs. Kennedy, a few aides and a Catholic priest.
A private service was held in one of theWhite House rooms around 4:30 a.m. After the truncated ceremony, the First Ladyasked to be alone in the room, save for the priest. And all complied. It wasrumoredbut never substantiated that Jackie opened the casket for a final lookat her Jack.
"Events were happening so fast, and I waskept 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 thetime."
That would come two nights after the statefuneral. Lipsey and Bird held their own wake of sorts at the latter'sapartment. The 24-year-olds shared a bottle of Scotch, memories from theautopsy and Kennedy stories. And for the first time, Lipsey said recently, theychoked up. "We got very emotional."
Bird, who was chief of the Old Guardtheformal honor guard for state eventshad recorded his recollections on a tapethat they played that night. Lipsey did not keep a record, something he nowregrets. That night was the last time he saw Bird, who later died from woundssuffered in Vietnam.
Richard Lipsey still thinks about that timein the autopsy room, still keeps some details to himself. He never gave muchthought to returning to Bethesda and its autopsy chamber. He wonders aloud ifit still exists as it did, a small, hermetically clean room with a faint smellof formaldehyde, the four walls forever keeping their silence about thatterrible night so long ago.
The idea of a return to the scene begins tointrigue him. "You know, I just might do that the next time I am inWashington," he says.
Meanwhile, he is convinced the WarrenCommission's "thorough and accurate" report on the assassination is thedefinitive word. The most factual book on the assassination, he says, is GeraldPosner's 1993 work, Case Closed, which independently comes to the sameconclusion as the Warren Commissionthat Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Still, there hangs about a shred of irony.
Oswald assassinated a president with a rifleobtained through the mail from a gun company. Lipsey does tens of millions ofdollars worth of gun sales annually. Considering what he witnessed, does itgive him pause?
"I can't ship guns to individuals, only tolicensed retail dealers," he responds, further dismissing the thought by stressingthat those retailers must follow strict federal laws concerning who can andcannot purchase a gun.
A short silence.
Then: "I agree with those gun laws."
http://businessreport.com/article/201203.../120309907
[/SIZE][/SIZE]
the bullet for a short distance until they lost the track at which point they removed the organs in an attempt to locate it.
Just a few sentences before the report states the exact opposite... which in turn supports his claim there was yet another wound in the lower neck that DID exit the throat....
"Lipsey stated that he cannot recall
the doctors specifically saying that the wound in the throat
was caused by a bullet but he does feel the doctors were
convinced that a bullet exited from the front of the neck."
Since the throat and neck and upper back were never dissected and the probes all ranged downward from the lower back wound, AND there are witnesses to a fragment or bullet removed from the chest - at some point...
Lipsey acknowledging a "decoy casket" directly implies that a transfer of the body HAD to have occurred before that casket is loaded into the navy ambulance....
and that Lipsey has first hand knowledge to that effect.
http://www.225batonrouge.com/article/200.../311019964
[size=12]
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 theassassination of President John F. Kennedy 46 years ago this month.
The Baton Rouge businessman is not amused.
Such storylinessome from the left, some fromthe right and some from the ozoneupset Lipsey "greatly." So much so that ithas soured one of the nation's biggest gun distributors on interviews aboutthose momentous events in November 1963. To him, the matter is settled. "TheWarren Commission had it right."
To Lipsey, it is as obvious as the monstroustrophy polar bear that stands encased in the former big-game hunter's BatonRouge office: one gun, fired by Lee Harvey Oswald from the sixth floor of theTexas 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 sayingthat. Lipsey was within feet of the corpse of John F. Kennedy when forensicpathologists, eight hours after the fatal shots were fired, sifted through hisravaged brain and body to determine what happened.
But Lipsey's observations, officiallyrendered in sworn testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations 30years ago, have been cited in two of those conspiracy subsetsspecifically, thehead-wound and body-switching theories.
Admittedly, Lipsey is not a doctor. But whenit 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 anddirection, Lipsey's box seat to history is undisputed.
It was Lipsey, less than two years out ofROTC 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 fromDallas.
There were two presidents aboard the Boeing707one was Jack Kennedy, zipped into a body bag, the victim of an assassin'sbullets; the other his alive and freshly sworn-in replacement, Lyndon BainesJohnson. The latter was headed to the White House, the former to a BethesdaNaval Hospital autopsy table. Two hearses awaited, says Lipsey, "but only onebody was on, and came off, that plane."
After helping heft Kennedy's body into one ofthose 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 notleave Kennedy's body during the autopsy procedure and do not allow the body tobe moved without authorization.
Lipsey told the House Select Committee onAssassinations in 1978 that he was a bit traumatized by the order. He had neverseen 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[B] carrying Kennedy's body arrived atBethesda Naval Hospital's rear entrance, a loading dock. Lipsey and Wehle hadhopped from Air Force One to the hospital in a helicopter. A "decoy" hearse,accompanied by Jacqueline Kennedy and presidential aides, had arrived at thefront of the hospital a few minutes earlier. As expected, it drew a mob ofawaiting reporters, photographers and onlookers.[/B]
The First Lady and aides were taken to thehospital's presidential suite to await the autopsy while the naval hearse withthe body slipped unnoticed around to the back. It was Lipsey's testimony aboutthe "decoy" hearse to House investigators in early 1978 that gave rise to thenotion that the body undergoing the autopsy wasn't Kennedy's. T[B]he body waswheeled quietly into a cramped room [/B]shortly before 8 p.m. (DJ: the ONLY wheeling done was by Greer/Kellerman/FBI at 7:17... Lipsey appears to be taking all the events and rolling htme into one)
For the next four hours, 1st Lt. RichardLipsey 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 honorguard and a good friend. Lipsey remembers being strangely detached from themomentous nature of the event, his eyes locked on the one certainty thatevening: the naked, bloody body on that table a mere eight feet away was thatof John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States of America.
Just 48 hours earlier, Lipsey had been atKennedy's side at a White House reception for then-Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, aresponsibility Lipsey was given regularly in his role as Wehle's principalmilitary aide. He stood close to President Kennedy on those occasions. He knewthe President. There had been no switching of bodies.
Telling the story is not easy for Lipsey. Infact, until 1978, it was forbidden. The night of the autopsy, a StateDepartment official ordered him to sign a confidentiality agreement under theOfficial Secrets Act. He was not to reveal any detail about what he saw orheard at the autopsy for 15 years, not even to his spouse, Susan, whom hemarried 13 months after the assassination. He kept a confessional-like seal ondetails of the autopsy until Jan. 18, 1978, when a pair of congressionalinvestigators from the House Select Committee on Assassinations showed up athis office to take his sworn deposition.
Even after the 15 years had expired, Lipseyremained reluctant to discuss the matter in detail. What discussions there weretended to be non-publicized overviews for various civic clubs and a self-sanitizedinterview with the now-defunct Gris Gris magazine and The Advocate a number ofyears ago.
Two years after Lipsey's sworn statement,author David Lifton interviewed Lipsey for his 1981 book, Best Evidence. Lipseyasserts that Lifton distorted his testimony and took it out of context to fitconspiracy premises. Other conspiracy high priests and disciples who smoke thissort of stuff also have misused his testimony, he complains.
Lipsey was born in Selma, Ala., and movedwith his family to Baton Rouge as a four-year-old in 1943. His father Joeoperated a hide and fur business that morphed into an Army/Navy surplus storethen to a sporting goods company. Richard joined his father in the businessventures immediately upon leaving the Army and later purchased Steinberg'sSporting 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-gamehunter, although now, at 70, he limits his hunting to doves, ducks andpheasants. Numerous big-game trophies dominate his Baton Rouge office,attesting to his expertise with rifles.
Following his 1961 graduation from LSU andsix months of basic training in Georgia, 2nd Lt. Richard Lipsey was sent toFort 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 instructorat West Point, was promoted to major general and given command of the militaryin the nation's capital. He asked Lipsey to accompany him as his aidean offerthat included a promotion to 1st lieutenant.
Lipsey found himself often accompanying andoccasionally standing in for Wehle at Kennedy White House social and stateevents. The president and he got along well, says Lipsey, so much so that thepresident suggested Lipsey become his fulltime military aide. History wouldrender that invitation moot.
Just five weeks after the assassination, histwo-year tour of duty was ending. In spite of a plea from Wehle, Lipsey did notre-up, choosing instead to leave Washington for Baton Rouge to join hisfather's business. He kept his silence about the autopsy.
When the congressional investigators, ontheir quest for once-and-for-all answers to the whirlpool of accusations stillswirling more than a decade later, arrived and began asking questions, he wascaught a bit off-guard, he remembers. He notes that some of his responses werenot as clean and concise as they could have been.
Two score and six years later, a less-rattledmemory serves. Dramatic mental pictures seem to come to him like they werescenes from the last Tiger home football game (events that Susan and Richardrarely miss). At first there was nothing special about that 1963 day.
"I was accompanying the military chauffeur topick up Gen. Wehle, who had gone home for lunch, when the bulletin from Dallascame over the radio: the president had been shot. Just as we parked at thehouse, the news flashed that Kennedy had died. The general must have heard thesame report, because he came running out of his door as I was running towardit.
"We headed for the White House. The chauffeurhad to take to sidewalks at times to get around noon traffic, which was stalledas drivers stopped to listen to assassination bulletins. We made it to theWhite House in 10 minutes. The people therethe domestic staff, the clerks andsecretaries, aideswere just standing around in shock.
"As part of his military commanderresponsibilities, Gen. Wehle handled state functions. In this case, he would bein charge of the public funeral procession and services. We talked with thechief of protocol and then raced back to military headquarters at nearby Ft.McNair. Planning was already underway when we got there."
It w[B]as decided [/B]that Lipsey would accompanyWehle to Andrews Air Force Base to meet Air Force One, oversee the loading andtransporting of Kennedy's body to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and take a militaryhelicopter to the hospital to meet the body as it arrived for the autopsy. Itwas there that Lipsey received the loaded Colt .45 automatic and his orders.
"I don't know what he expected me to do ifsomebody tried to take the body," he says today, quietly chuckling.
Witnessing an autopsy is not an activity forthe squeamish. The pathologist cracks open the head and body cavities. Thebrains, innards and whatever else is floating around amid the blood and gutsare unceremoniously dumped into nearby pans on stainless steel racks to bescoured by pathologists. When the investigation is finished, everything isdumped back into the empty body and the anatomical chaos sewn shut. Kennedy'sautopsy took about four hours.
Strangely, Lipsey wasn't repulsed by theblood and gore, although he can still recollect the smell of formaldehydepermeating the small, sterile room. It was like a textbook demonstration tohim. Lt. Sam Bird sent one of his soldiers to bring them some food. "We satthere watching the autopsy eating hamburgers. Neither of us had eaten sincemorning," Lipsey says.
Besides three pathologistsThornton Boswell,chief of pathology at Bethesda; James Humes, director of laboratories atBethesda; and Pierre Finck, chief of wound ballistics pathology at Walter ReedMedical Center, Marine officers allsome three dozen individuals were presentin the room that night, most of them drifting in and out. They included fiveSecret Service and FBI agents, 18 medical tech personnel from the hospital(mostly curious interlopers), six military officers and, later, fourmorticians.
Lipsey remembers everything being calm,orderly and by the booknot the screaming chaos depicted in Oliver Stone'smovie 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 roomthroughout the procedure, save for two brief latrine breaks during which Wehlewould spell him.
After Lipsey helped lay the corpse on thetable and undress it, a task made more difficult by rigor mortis, the youngofficer took his seat in the middle of the first of two rows of chairs locatedbehind a brass rail. The body was X-rayed. As he sat focused on the corpse,there wasand there remainsabsolute certainty about who was on that table.
"One of the bullets took out much ofKennedy's upper right face, but if you saw him from the left side he lookedlike normal," Lipsey says. "I was amazed at what a remarkable physical specimenhe was. Not an ounce of body fat on him."
The doctors concluded there were three entrywounds: one in the lower neck, one in the upper neck/lower skull region and oneat the rear crown of the head. Several years later, second opinions by doctorsdetermined Kennedy was hit by only two bullets. But the central lone-gunmanhypothesis has remained the same throughout subsequent re-examinations of theautopsy results.
At the original autopsy, pathologists couldfind only two exit woundsthe right side of the head and the lower throat. Thelatter slug entered near the base of the neck between the shoulder blade andspine, exiting through the lower throat. The doctors did not then know that theexit wound they were isolating was where a tracheotomy had been performedseveral hours earlier by the emergency medical team at Parkland Hospital inDallas. But the Bethesda pathologists ultimately were right, in any case.X-rays reviewed later by other doctors in government investigations clearlyshowed the bullet exiting through the neck where Parkland doctors shortlythereafter would make their tracheotomy incision.
No official investigation wavered on theconclusion that projectiles passed through the body from back to front and weremade by the same high-caliber rifle located above and slightly to the right ofthe moving target. That trajectory would put the shooter in the upper floors ofthe Texas Book Depository.
"There was no shot from the grassy knoll,"Lipsey still insists. "There was no question in the (pathologists') minds," hesaid in earlier testimony to the House Committee. "The bullets came from thesame 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 heardin Dealey Plaza that day, and the Bethesda team believed it had located threebullet 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 oneof Oswald's shots missed. The third bullet also might have been the one foundon the floor of the presidential limo or could be explained by any number ofother possibilities.
When the pathologists finished, they handedoff Kennedy's body to a quartet of morticians, who, Lipsey recalls, workedmagic. "(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 theWhite House to fetch clothes for the corpse. He helped the morticians dress thepresident and lift him into the casket, which had been wheeled back into theroom.
It was around 3:30 a.m. when Lipsey slowlyclosed 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 WhiteHouse. Behind the hearse were Mrs. Kennedy, a few aides and a Catholic priest.
A private service was held in one of theWhite House rooms around 4:30 a.m. After the truncated ceremony, the First Ladyasked to be alone in the room, save for the priest. And all complied. It wasrumoredbut never substantiated that Jackie opened the casket for a final lookat her Jack.
"Events were happening so fast, and I waskept 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 thetime."
That would come two nights after the statefuneral. Lipsey and Bird held their own wake of sorts at the latter'sapartment. The 24-year-olds shared a bottle of Scotch, memories from theautopsy and Kennedy stories. And for the first time, Lipsey said recently, theychoked up. "We got very emotional."
Bird, who was chief of the Old Guardtheformal honor guard for state eventshad recorded his recollections on a tapethat they played that night. Lipsey did not keep a record, something he nowregrets. That night was the last time he saw Bird, who later died from woundssuffered in Vietnam.
Richard Lipsey still thinks about that timein the autopsy room, still keeps some details to himself. He never gave muchthought to returning to Bethesda and its autopsy chamber. He wonders aloud ifit still exists as it did, a small, hermetically clean room with a faint smellof formaldehyde, the four walls forever keeping their silence about thatterrible night so long ago.
The idea of a return to the scene begins tointrigue him. "You know, I just might do that the next time I am inWashington," he says.
Meanwhile, he is convinced the WarrenCommission's "thorough and accurate" report on the assassination is thedefinitive word. The most factual book on the assassination, he says, is GeraldPosner's 1993 work, Case Closed, which independently comes to the sameconclusion as the Warren Commissionthat Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Still, there hangs about a shred of irony.
Oswald assassinated a president with a rifleobtained through the mail from a gun company. Lipsey does tens of millions ofdollars worth of gun sales annually. Considering what he witnessed, does itgive him pause?
"I can't ship guns to individuals, only tolicensed retail dealers," he responds, further dismissing the thought by stressingthat those retailers must follow strict federal laws concerning who can andcannot purchase a gun.
A short silence.
Then: "I agree with those gun laws."
http://businessreport.com/article/201203.../120309907
[/SIZE][/SIZE]
Once in a while you get shown the light
in the strangest of places if you look at it right..... R. Hunter
in the strangest of places if you look at it right..... R. Hunter