Image of casket being delivered to Parkland Hospital

Dallas Morning News columnist Tony Zoppi hoped that helping carry a casket into Parkland Hospital would be his opportunity to get close to the president.  However, once inside, Secret Service agents took over and Zoppi was not allowed inside Trauma Room One.  Undeterred, Zoppi found a telephone and called the Morning News' city desk.  As he recalled in his 1992 oral history with the Museum, "John King answered the phone....  I said, 'The president is dead.'  Now, he had all his top reporters out there, and here I am a nightclub reporter.  His reaction was, 'How the hell do you know?'  I said, 'Because I just carried in his casket.'"  - Stephen Fagin, Curator  

This casket, an expensive 800 pound mahogany-colored Britannia model manufactured by the Elgin Casket Company, has had an interesting history.  It carried President Kennedy to Love Field for the return to Washington, but a handle was damaged in the narrow jet doorway.  This is the casket TV viewers saw being taken off of Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base a few hours later. 

Vernon Oneal eventually asked the White House for the casket to be returned or to be paid for.  He received a check; White House personnel had learned Oneal planned to exhibit it in his Dallas funeral home.  The casket eventually wound up in the basement of the National Archives when Bobby Kennedy was asked what he wanted done with it.  Fearing exploitation if the casket got into the public domain, a possibility noted by former Dallas mayor Earle Cabell,  Bobby ordered it destroyed.  On February 18, 1966, a military plane dumped the casket off the Delaware-Maryland coast in a former ammunition dump in 9000 feet of water. - Gary Mack, Curator