In his 77 years, Baton Rouge businessman Richard Lipsey has lived many lives.
He served in the U.S. Army, working as an aide to the commanding general of the Military District of Washington. He witnessed the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. Now, he’s the chairman of the country’s leading firearms distributor Lipsey’s, based here in Baton Rouge.
But as he tells 225 in a Q&A in the current issue, no amount of experience could have prepared him for Nov. 22, 1963—the day his life changed.
Lipsey worked for President John F. Kennedy and witnessed the autopsy of the president’s body following his very public assassination.
“I had never seen a dead man before. So, the first dead man I saw was the president of the United States,” Lipsey tells 225.
He was 22 or 23 at the time and fresh out of LSU. He had become an aide to Maj. Gen. Philip Wehle, the commanding general of the Military District of Washington.
Wehle was in charge of all the ceremonial duties of Washington, which included state funerals, Lipsey says. So when the president was assassinated, Wehle was in charge of the funeral.
“The body was brought back to Washington, and we took it to the naval hospital in Bethesda for the autopsy,” Lipsey recalls. “Gen. Wehle went upstairs with Jacqueline Kennedy to start planning the funeral. He told me, ‘Don’t leave the body.’ I went into the autopsy room when the body came around, and I stayed all during the autopsy, and then afterwards when the funeral home came in to restore the body. It was actually a rather calm scene, not the madhouse that is sometimes portrayed in movies and television.”
225 has the full story.
