Eyewitness to the Autopsy of JFK

For 1st Lt. Richard Lipsey, November 22, 1963, was an ordinary day until the news came over the radio—news that would change Lipsey’s life and that of the entire country.

“It was a nice cool clear day,” recalls Lipsey, owner of a firearms distributorship in Baton Rouge. “The driver and I were waiting for General Wehle when suddenly we heard on the car radio that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. It was 12:30 pm Dallas time, 1:30 Washington time. I jumped out and ran to the back door of the general’s house. He came running out, and we said at the same time, ‘Have you heard the president has been shot?’”

Lipsey, then twenty-four, was aide to Maj. Gen. Philip Wehle (pronounced Weal), commanding general of the military district of Washington. They jumped into the car and headed for their office at Fort McNair. One of the phones in the car rang.

“We had two telephones,” recalls Lipsey. “One was the old-fashioned kind where you had to pick up the receiver and hold for the operator. Plus a red phone we never used, hooked directly to the White House. That red phone rang. It was somebody telling us to come to the White House immediately.”

Washington traffic was in gridlock, but Wehle’s driver was undaunted. “We drove over curbs, down sidewalks, the wrong way down one-way streets,” says Lipsey. “When we got there everybody was standing around in total shock. Most were crying.”

Riding in a slow-moving motorcade through the streets of Dallas, Kennedy was fatally struck when three shots were fired from the Texas School Book Depository on Elm Street. His wife Jacqueline, wearing a pink Chanel suit and matching pillbox hat, was seated beside him. Riding with them were Texas governor John Connally, who was wounded, and his wife Nellie. The Lincoln Continental raced to Parkland Hospital, where doctors made a futile attempt to save Kennedy’s life. At 1 pm, he was pronounced dead.

Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president aboard Air Force One, which left for Washington at 2:47 pm Dallas time, carrying a bronze casket containing the body of JFK.

Lipsey and Wehle were at Andrews Air Force Base to meet the plane about 6 pm Washington time.   

“The autopsy was done at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland,” recalls Lipsey, who flew there in a helicopter. “General Wehle and I walked to the front door of the hospital. He told me to go to the morgue in back to meet the ambulance carrying Kennedy’s body.”

An honor guard lifted the heavy bronze casket from the hearse, took it into the morgue, and set it on the floor. “Then the honor guard left,” says Lipsey. “It was just myself and a couple of technicians in the room. We lifted the body out of the coffin and put it on a table. I had never seen a dead man before.”

For several hours Lipsey observed photographers shooting photos of the body, technicians X-raying it, and three doctors, assisted by technicians, performing an autopsy. “I was sitting ten feet away,” he says. “Autopsies are gory. They were trying to locate each fragment of bullet in the president’s body, entry wounds, exit wounds. There was no question in their minds that the bullets all came from the same direction.”  

The autopsy was completed around midnight, and Lipsey and Wehle returned to their quarters to shower, shave, and change into dress-blue uniforms. “Meanwhile, the car went to the White House to pick up the clothes Jackie wanted him buried in,” says Lipsey. “While I was at the autopsy, the general had been upstairs with Jackie planning the funeral. He went back upstairs and I went back to the morgue and sat there while Gawler Funeral Home put the president’s body back together. They did a remarkable job.

“I helped them clean the body, and then I helped dress him. We picked him up and put him in the casket.” (The bronze casket in which JFK had arrived was replaced by a mahogany casket.)

From there, Lipsey and Wehle went to the White House. “We went to the East Room and put the casket there. It was just Jackie, Bobby [Kennedy, JFK’s brother and his attorney general], and three or four White House servants. A Catholic priest held a private service that lasted about thirty minutes.

“Jackie had never changed clothes; she still had the pink suit on.” (With her husband’s blood staining her suit, Jackie Kennedy had repeatedly refused to change out of it, saying, “Let them see what they have done.”)

Several hours later, Lipsey returned to the White House, where “Jackie started receiving visitors,” including former presidents Eisenhower and Truman, Supreme Court justices, and cabinet members.

“General Wehle was in charge of everything to do with the funeral,” says Lipsey. “I followed him around, doing anything that needed to be done. We were still translating the notes from his meetings with Jackie at the hospital.

“He told me how uncommonly composed she was. She could sit there and think of all the details.”

Lipsey describes the days between the Friday assassination and the Monday funeral as “surreal.” He had been in Washington for just over a year. Wehle had asked him to be his aide when both were stationed at Fort Polk, Louisiana. When Wehle was reassigned to Washington, he took Lipsey with him.

It was heady stuff for a young man who had grown up in Baton Rouge, where his family owned Steinberg’s Sports Center. He attended the LSU Laboratory School for twelve years and then went to LSU, where he majored in history and government and enrolled in the ROTC, graduating in 1961.

In the 1960 election, he had voted for Richard Nixon. “I was head of the Young Republicans at LSU,” he says with a smile.

But Lipsey found the Democrat Kennedy easy to like.

“Two days after we got to Washington, General Wehle took me to the Oval Office. We shook hands with President Kennedy. He was affable; he could not have been nicer. He invited General Wehle to sit down. I was standing at attention. The president gestured at his rocking chair and said, ‘Sit in my chair.’

“I often met with Kennedy in the Oval Office. I’d give him a briefing book, and he would scan it, sometimes ask a question. He was a real speed-reader with a photographic memory. He could skim through those things.

“He always called me Lieutenant Lipsey. As time went by, and I saw him more often, he’d call me Richard when we were alone. But he was always Mr. President, and I always stood at attention, even when he said, ‘Relax.’ You don’t relax around the president.

“I found him sociable, charming. But he always had control of the situation. There was no doubt when you were in his presence who was in charge.”

Lipsey’s two-year tour of duty ended in January 1964. He had thirty days of leave coming. Wehle released him early so he could spend the holidays with his family in Baton Rouge. In late December 1963, Lipsey left Washington for good.

In the fifty years since the assassination, scores of books have been written, many contending that it was the result of a conspiracy. Others advance the so-called Lone Nut theory—that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible.

Oswald, twenty-four, worked in the book depository. He was arrested within hours of the shooting, after first killing Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. In a shocking turn of events, Oswald was himself shot dead on Sunday, November 24, by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

Oswald was in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters en route to a more secure county jail. A crowd of police and press, with television cameras rolling, had gathered to witness his departure. As Oswald entered the room, Ruby emerged from the crowd and killed Oswald with a single shot from a .38 revolver. Detained and charged with first-degree murder, Ruby would die in jail, of lung cancer, in 1967.

Lipsey is adamant in his belief that Oswald alone killed Kennedy.

“The fact is, Oswald shot him, period,” says Lipsey. “There were no other shots [fired] from other directions. There wasn’t a conspiracy. That discussion will go on to the end of history.”

Lipsey cites one book he believes captures the truth of the event, Gerald Posner’s Case Closed. “It’s an excellent book with a lot of detail. In my opinion, it’s accurate.

“Oswald was miserable in the United States. He made a miserable marine. He moved to Russia and found out it wasn’t so great. He was a miserable failure at everything. He ends up in Dallas, where he reads in the newspaper that the president is coming.

“He works at the book warehouse and knows right where the president is going by. He has a cheap rifle he got by mail order, under an alias. He’s been in the marines; he’s a good shooter. He takes the gun to work with him and hides it on the sixth floor.

“It’s a simple fifty-yard shot that anybody could do with very little practice, but [he was] a marine [who] had shot thousands of rounds. His gun had a telescope on it. Bam, click, click; bam, click, click; bam, click, click. In eleven seconds, three shots are fired. Two hit the president and killed him. He puts the gun down and walks downstairs, right past his supervisor. Sixty seconds later the police run in and lock the door. Nobody can leave. They count heads; the only person missing is Oswald.”

As for Ruby, “He was one of those guys who like to hang around police stations. He’s friends with all the detectives and the police. He decides Oswald ought to be shot for killing the president. While he’s in jail he has cancer. There’s lots of opportunity for people to talk to him; he’s a dying man. Why not tell them [if there was a conspiracy]? But all he ever says is ‘The guy deserved to die, and I shot him.’ That’s where the story ends.”

But Lipsey, who has granted few interviews, realizes the story will never really end. “Long after we’re gone, they’re still going to be talking about it,” he says. “It was such an emotional period for everybody.”

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.