Update:
This story was first published in November 2021 and we're bringing it back for this year's commemoration of the JFK assassination in Dallas.
JFK assassination: 8 strange details about Kennedy’s 1961 Lincoln Continental limousine
From its surprising price tag and oddball features to whispers of its role in a Dallas conspiracy, the Kennedy “death car” remains a public fascination 60 years later.
On Nov. 22, Dallas will again be remembered as the place where John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963. Our images of him that day are forever locked with his limousine: A modified 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible. Its low-slung, angular lines and rear-hinged “suicide” doors were a bold design that personified Kennedy’s fresh appeal. The press later dubbed the vehicle the “death car.”
1. The Lincoln was leased, but received six-figure upgrades from the White House.
The car was fashioned from a stock 1961 Lincoln Continental four-door convertible — retail price $7,347 — that had rolled off the assembly line at parent company Ford’s plant in Wixom, Mich. The White House leased it from Ford for a token $500 a year and sent it off for $200,000 in modifications by elite custom coachbuilder Hess and Eisenhardt in Cincinnati, Ohio. (The firm’s other high-profile clients included the Queen of England.) In the process, the car gained Secret Service codenames — SS-100-X and X-100 — and the grille of a 1962 model, so it appeared right up-to-date.
2. The limo was stretched and loaded up with unusual features.
The car had a six-piece roof system composed mostly of clear plastic panels that were stowed in the trunk and a rear seat that could be hydraulically raised more than 10 inches for better visibility of its occupants. There were two radio telephones, akin to walkie-talkies or CB radios rigged to telephone handsets. The car’s most notable extra was its length, 3 1/2 feet of it, gained by cutting it in half and extending the rear passenger compartment to create more room and to fit a middle row of forward-facing jump seats that folded away when not in use.
3. Here’s how Kennedy’s 60s-era Lincoln limo would compare with a modern presidential Cadillac limo. This 2013 example was nicknamed “The Beast.”
4. The “bubble top” would not have helped Kennedy that day in Dallas.
Would the plastic bubble top have made a difference that day if used? Gary Mack, the late curator of Dallas’ Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, told us no, it wasn’t bulletproof. In fact, there was no protective armor on the vehicle. Mack says that for all of the car’s upgraded features, it served mostly as an “expensive, fancy limousine.”
5. After the Kennedy assassination, the limo was hastily put back into service.
Kennedy’s Lincoln, sensationally dubbed the “Death Car” in a 1964 Associated Press story, was hastily rebuilt after the assassination. Project name? The Quick Fix. The logic was straightforward, according to The Henry Ford museum’s curator of transportation Matt Anderson. “It takes four years or so to get one of these done, from the original planning to its delivery to the White House. They simply didn’t have the time to build a new car. The president [Lyndon B. Johnson] needed a limousine; this was the simplest, most effective way to do it.”
6. The rebuilt Kennedy limo was substantially fortified at the cost of nearly half a million.
The high-tech — for the time — features included two radiophones, a dial telephone, an AM-FM radio, a public-address system, an electronic siren and remote-control door locks. The car gained 17% more power with a new hand-built, high-compression V-8 engine. And with all of the added weight — the car now tipped the scale at 9,800 pounds, up from 7,822 — the team installed “the largest passenger-car air-conditioning unit ever built.” The ventilation system filled the trunk and was capable of producing 3 cubic tons of conditioned air, which was “sufficient for an average house.”
The final price tag for project Quick Fix was an estimated $500,000. The car went through extensive road testing and was delivered to the White House and LBJ’s fleet in late spring of 1964.
7. The limo stayed in service longer than you would expect and you can still view it today.
Improbably, the car stayed in service through President Richard Nixon’s administration and into 1977, Jimmy Carter’s administration’s first year. It was retired late that year and returned to Ford. The automaker donated it to The Henry Ford museum, where Anderson says it remains one of the museum’s most popular exhibits. On Nov. 22 each year, some people leave flowers near the car.
8. JFK’s limo remains part of assassination conspiracy lore
According to the late Sixth Floor Museum curator Gary Mack, while the car was parked outside Parkland Hospital that fateful day, something strange happened. There were odd reports by some hospital staff of a man in a suit inside the emergency area who asked for a bucket of water and some towels. “And the implication was that they were going to clean out the car — clean out the crime scene,” he says. The mysterious man was never identified, but Mack says “a bucket was photographed at the left rear door of the limo before being carried toward the emergency entrance.” And yet, photographs of the car’s backseat taken by the FBI after the car was flown back to Washington, D.C. reveal it does not appear to have been cleaned. Perhaps only the driver’s area was wiped down?
Mack points out one more remaining mystery connected with the car: the radio transmissions. Each vehicle in the motorcade that day was patched into a radio network, and he says the Secret Service was monitoring the chatter from a room at the Adolphus Hotel. The transmissions were being fed to Air Force One and, presumably, the White House Communications Agency. “Where are the tapes? No one knows,” Mack says. “The tapes could be important if, as one of the agents in the limo testified, he was on his radiotelephone during some of the assassination and his microphone could have picked up the sounds of the shots.”
Mack shared this information with the Assassination Records Review Board during its 1994 research stop in Dallas when they took testimony from several people. He says the board looked into it, but never could get a straight answer. “Now, you could assume that the Secret Service doesn’t want secrets out. Well, procedural things, sure. But it opens up the door to reasonable doubt. And that’s why people are still so fascinated with this subject because parts of it, to this day, just don’t make sense.”
