On November 22, 1963, at 2:47 p.m. Central Time, Air Force One lifted off from Love Field in Dallas. The flight came nine minutes after Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president. Its destination was Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C., and the flight time was 2 hours and 22 minutes.
Aboard the plane were the new president, the body of the dead president, and the dead president's widow, still wearing her blood-stained suit. There were also Secret Service agents, military aides, and the White House Communication Agency. That agency was responsible for recording every radio transmission between the aircraft and the ground.
Every call, every order, and every conversation was said to be captured on tape for the historical record. The stated purpose was posterity and transparency. But in 1971, eight years after the assassination, the public finally gained access to the Air Force One tapes at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. Something was wrong.
The tape began with an announcement: "This recording has been edited and condensed." The official recording was 40 minutes long. Researchers knew the flight lasted 2 hours and 22 minutes. The question was immediate and troubling: where were the other 100 minutes?
The official version of events describes calls between the plane and the White House Situation Room, code name Crown. There were discussions about meeting the plane at Andrews, about ambulances, about security, and about logistics. On the surface, it was routine crisis management.
In 2011, something extraordinary happened. A longer version of the Air Force One tape surfaced. It was found in the estate of General Chester Ted Clifton Jr., Kennedy's senior military aide. The Clifton tape was 88 minutes long, more than twice as long as the LBJ Library version.
The Rob Collection, a Philadelphia historical documents dealer, acquired the tape. They offered it for sale for $500,000 and also donated a copy to the National Archives. For the first time, researchers could hear what had been hidden for decades.
The Clifton tape contained conversations completely erased from the official record. One involved General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff. LeMay hated Kennedy, who had humiliated him during the Cuban Missile Crisis by refusing to bomb Cuba. LeMay wanted war; Kennedy chose diplomacy.
On November 22, 1963, someone on Air Force One urgently tried to contact LeMay. The Clifton tape captures an aide saying, "The General is in a C-140. Trying to locate him. Trying to reach him. Trying to patch him through." In the official LBJ Library tape, there is no mention of LeMay at all.
The Clifton tape also reveals extended debate about the autopsy location. Walter Reed Hospital and Bethesda Naval Hospital were both considered. Texas law required the autopsy be performed in Dallas, and Dr. Earl Rose, the Dallas County Medical Examiner, insisted on it.
Secret Service Agent Roy Kellerman drew his weapon and said, "We are removing the body." And they did, against the law and by force. But where the body would be taken was not decided until late in the flight, according to the Clifton tape.
General Clifton clearly states on the tape that he wants an ambulance and limousine to take the body to Walter Reed Hospital under guard. Gerald Behn, head of the White House Secret Service detail, counters that Navy personnel are waiting at Bethesda. This conflict is extensively documented on the Clifton tape but barely mentioned in the LBJ version.
A third erased exchange involved Admiral George Berkeley, Kennedy's personal physician. On the Clifton tape, Berkeley says to Gerald Behn, "I have called General Heaton and asked him, but there's a problem." No previous conversation with General Heaton appears on the tape, meaning a call was made, recorded, and then cut out.
Forensic audio expert Ed Primrose analyzed the tapes using waveform analysis. He discovered that at multiple points, identical waveforms appear. The exact same audio repeats, copy-pasted. Someone says "black Cadillac," and minutes later the exact same voice says "black Cadillac" again.
The waveforms are identical down to the millisecond, not merely similar. Primrose concluded that this would be impossible unless the tape was edited, unless someone copied audio from one part and inserted it elsewhere to fill gaps and cover deletions.
The autopsy decision is where researchers believe the cover-up begins. Under Texas law, any homicide requires a local autopsy. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, so the autopsy should have been performed there by independent civilian pathologists at Parkland Hospital.
Instead, Secret Service agents seized the body, flew it to Washington, and took it to Bethesda Naval Hospital, a military facility. The reasoning offered by researchers is that military doctors follow orders while civilian doctors do not.
At Parkland, doctors saw entrance wounds in the front and exit wounds in the back, evidence of shots from the grassy knoll, from the front, not from Oswald. At Bethesda, the autopsy was botched. The pathologists, Commanders James Humes and J. Thornton Boswell, were not forensic experts and had no experience with gunshot wounds.
They produced an autopsy report that supported the official story: shots from behind, Oswald alone. The decision to take Kennedy's body to Bethesda instead of Walter Reed was critical, because Bethesda was controlled by the Navy, and the Navy took orders from the Pentagon.
According to the Clifton tape, the debate continued until late in the flight. General Clifton wanted Walter Reed. Gerald Behn pushed for Bethesda. Someone made the final call, but the conversation was cut, so we do not know who.
General Curtis LeMay despised John F. Kennedy. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, LeMay argued for bombing Cuba, for invading, for war. Kennedy refused and negotiated a peaceful settlement, which LeMay called the greatest defeat in our history.
Kennedy planned to force LeMay into retirement after the 1964 election. LeMay knew it. On November 22, 1963, LeMay was supposedly on a fishing trip in Canada, unreachable and out of communication. The Clifton tape proves that is a lie.
Someone on Air Force One was urgently trying to contact him, and they succeeded. He was in a C-140, a military transport plane. What they discussed is unknown because that conversation, if it was recorded, was erased.
In 1998, the Assassination Records Review Board, created by Congress after Oliver Stone's film JFK caused public outrage, demanded the unedited Air Force One tapes. The board wrote that the LBJ Library version was filled with crude breaks and chopped conversations.
The ARRB requested the original unedited master tapes. The White House Communications Agency should have had them, but WHCA claimed the originals were lost, destroyed, gone. The Clifton tape, the longer version, is still not complete. Forensic analysis shows it has also been edited, meaning an even longer version exists somewhere.
Ed Primeau, the audio forensic expert who analyzed both tapes, states unequivocally, "I believe 100% that there was editing done. What was taken out, who took them out, and where are they?" Jefferson Morley, former Washington Post reporter and JFK researcher, says, "What the tape tells us is that there was a longer recording that was never known before. So, what's on the missing portions?"
Based on what was discussed but erased, researchers believe several conversations are missing. One is the order to seize Kennedy's body from Dallas in violation of Texas law. Who gave that order remains unknown.
Another is conversations with General Curtis LeMay. Did LeMay know about the assassination in advance? Was he coordinating the cover-up? A third is the decision to take the body to Bethesda instead of Walter Reed. Who made that call, and why was Bethesda preferable?
A fourth is discussions about Lee Harvey Oswald. The official tape contains almost nothing about Oswald, but people on the plane knew he had been arrested. A fifth is conversations about the assassination itself, including who might be responsible and whether conspiracies were mentioned.
All of these conversations, if they were recorded, were erased deliberately by someone with access to the master tapes and the authority to destroy evidence. The most likely answer, according to researchers, is Lyndon Johnson. The tapes were stored at the LBJ Presidential Library, and Johnson controlled access and decided what would be released.
But there is another possibility: the military and the Pentagon. The same forces that wanted Kennedy dead might have wanted those tapes destroyed. If the tapes revealed military involvement, if they showed LeMay coordinating the cover-up, or if they showed Pentagon officials giving orders about the autopsy, they would prove a military coup. That could not be allowed.
The missing minutes, the erased calls, and the deleted orders point to a cover-up that began at 30,000 feet. It began while Kennedy's body lay in a casket, while his widow sat in shock, and while the new president prepared to take power.