-Caveat Lector-
JFK's Casket Was Dropped in Ocean
By KAREN GULLO
.c The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A bronze casket used to carry President Kennedy's body
from Dallas to Washington is in a watery grave -- 9,000 feet down in the
Atlantic Ocean, according to assassination documents.
Materials to be released Tuesday at the National Archives will show that in
early 1965 the casket was dropped from a military plane into an area where
unstable and outdated weapons and ammunition are dumped, Kermit Hall, a
member of the now-defunct Assassination Records Review Board, told The
Associated Press.
``The documents that will be released show it was dropped off the
Maryland-Delaware border in 9,000 feet of water,'' Hall said Friday night.
``There's actually a map in the documents that pinpoints the coordinates
where it was dropped.''
The revelation -- on the eve of what would have been President Kennedy's 82nd
birthday today -- that the casket was sunk resolves a lingering mystery about
its whereabouts. But it also fuels speculation among assassination
researchers that it was discarded to hide foul play.
``The coffin is evidence just like the body is evidence,'' said David Lifton,
who wrote a book about medical evidence in the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination.
``You don't destroy evidence.''
What happened to the bronze casket has been a lingering question over the
past three decades. Last year a document released by the archives showed that
a General Services Administration truck picked up the coffin on March 19,
1964.
In its effort to ferret assassination-related documents and information from
various government agencies, the review panel asked the GSA where the casket
was. The agency said in the summer of 1998 that it didn't know.
The documents from GSA and the Justice and Defense departments being released
next week, however, describe the disposition in detail, Hall said.
``Essentially what was going on was an effort to make sure the casket didn't
turn into a historic relic for the marketplace,'' he said.
Kennedy was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in a mahogany coffin that
had been purchased in Washington to replace the bronze one, which was missing
a handle and had been damaged.
In September 1965, former Texas Rep. Earle Cabell wrote to then-Attorney
General Nicholas Katzenbach recommending that the bronze casket be discarded
so it could never become a relic.
``It is an extremely handsome, expensive, all-bronze, silk-lined casket, and
fortunately, and properly, was paid for by the General Services
Administration, and presently is in the possession of GSA,'' Cabell wrote.
``This item has ... value for the morbidly curious. And I believe that I am
correct in stating that this morbid curiosity is that which we all seek to
stop.''
Katzenbach said in an interview Friday that he doesn't recall details about
the disposition of the casket. If anyone had asked him if it should be
disposed of, ``I'd have said that's a good idea,'' he said.
Lifton thinks there might have been a darker motive.
In conducting his research, Lifton talked with witnesses who said Kennedy's
body arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital in a gray metal shipping casket, not
the bronze one obtained in Dallas. That the bronze casket was dumped in the
ocean -- after the Warren Commission issued its report in 1964 -- makes him
wonder what clues it might have yielded to investigators.
``If it had been an ongoing murder investigation, this would be obstruction
of justice,'' Lifton said.
Douglas Horne, who was the chief analyst for military records at the
congressionally created review board, speculated that the bronze casket was
destroyed to end the two-coffin controversy.
``I think the way to get rid of the problem is you get rid of the casket. You
throw it out of an airplane,'' said Horne.
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