JFK Relics Scattered Across U.S. Still Hold Mystique

Nov. 20, 2009 -- When Jeff Underwood gives tours of the Air Force plane that carried President Kennedy's body to Washington after his Nov. 22, 1963, assassination in Dallas, "people get real quiet. It's a highly emotional place," he says.

Underwood, historian and curator at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, says the plane's interior has been modified, but he shows visitors where the casket was and where Jackie Kennedy stood in her bloodied pink suit as Lyndon Johnson took the oath of office.

Places and objects linked to John F. Kennedy's death still stir strong sentiments 46 years later. "It's not just the assassination," Underwood says. "It reminds people of the last spurt of innocence before the death of a president."

Some artifacts from that day in Dallas are displayed in museums. Some are locked away in vaults. Some are in private hands and occasionally show up in auctions. The fedora worn by Jack Ruby when he shot assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was sold at auction to an anonymous buyer this month for $45,000.

Kennedy "was kind of a saint and these are his relics," says David Lubin, a Wake Forest University art professor and author of the 2003 book Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images. Tangible objects owned by historic figures impart "a direct physical connection … that you can't get in any other way," he says.

Some items had fates that fuel the mysterious aura that still surrounds the assassination. On Feb. 18, 1966, the casket that held Kennedy's body on the flight to Washington was weighted and dropped by an Air Force plane into the Atlantic Ocean in an area where test weapons firing left the sea bottom littered with munitions, making it dangerous for anyone to try to recover it.

The coffin's disposal was described by Steve Tilley, a senior archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration who was in charge of its Kennedy collection from 1993-2004. He believes people are fascinated by the assassination because "there was something about Jack Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy that people just took to." Their saga, Tilley says, "never ceases to amaze, to be interesting."