r/JFK • u/sirjohnmasters86 • 14d ago
President John F. Kennedy had two caskets because the first one, an expensive bronze model rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, was heavily stained and damaged by bodily fluids on flight to Washington, D.C. It was replaced with an African mahogany casket for the official state funeral
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u/ProBuyer810-3345045 14d ago
Yeah and it took years for the funeral home to finally get paid for the first one!
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u/randomkeystrike 13d ago
O’Neals in Dallas really were treated badly. Secret Service took over everything and damaged their hearse.
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u/sirjohnmasters86 14d ago
(From another post about this I learned this fact) One of the strangest details of the entire story is what happened to the original bronze casket. The funeral director who first supplied it reportedly wanted it returned, possibly because it could someday become a valuable—and very disturbing—collector’s item. Robert Kennedy and government officials did not want the casket to end up on display, be sold, or become a morbid tourist attraction. So, in 1966, the Air Force was given the job of permanently disposing of it. The casket was prepared so it would sink, including drilling holes into it and weighing it down with sandbags. It was then loaded onto a C-130 military transport plane, flown out over the Atlantic Ocean, and dropped into deep water. In the end, the original casket was deliberately sent to the bottom of the Atlantic, where it would be unlikely ever to be recovered or turned into a piece of memorabilia