Evelyn Lincoln - Saint or Sinner?

Evelyn Lincoln, Personal Secretary to President John F. Kennedy, with the President

Evelyn Maurine Norton Lincoln was the long-time personal secretary to President John F. Kennedy. She began her service to JFK when he was elected to the United States Senate in 1953 and served as his White House secretary for the 1,000 days of his presidency. Evelyn Lincoln was riding several cars behind Kennedy when he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. 

You might have heard her name mentioned in the list of historical coincidences regarding the assassinations of President Kennedy and President Lincoln. For example, Lincoln’s personal assistant was named Kennedy, and Kennedy’s secretary was named Lincoln. 

I have four things in common with Evelyn Lincoln. 

1. We shared a June 25 birthday. She was born in 1909, and I was born in 1950. 

2. She had a deep love of history and all things Washington, as I do. 

3. We both spent a portion of our careers in Room 409 of the National Archives Building in Washington DC. 

4. We each had a long-time friendship with a native of Catonsville, Maryland. I am from Catonsville, so of course have many longtime friends from that village outside Baltimore, Maryland. 

Evelyn Lincoln’s name would have disappeared into the annals of Washington administrative history had it not been for one key trait that we did not share. She was an on-the-job collector of history, a collector whose eye for artifacts ran from the casual to the deeply personal. Ironically, she had access to history because she was its trusted custodian. 

In October of 1988 I was named Director of Policy and Program Analysis at the Archives. The job came with a nice private office at the end of the fourth floor corridor of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. It wasn’t long after I moved into Room 409 that I learned of its historical significance.  

On the day after the Kennedy assassination, Evelyn Lincoln was given only 30 minutes notice to clean out her West Wing Office. Although Mrs. Kennedy was afforded all the time that she needed to make the difficult move with her two children, not so the White House staff. LBJ was coming in and key Kennedy people needed to get out. 

At the Kennedy family’s request, The National Archives immediately provided office space for Mrs. Lincoln. Her primary task was handling the flood of condolence mail for Mrs. Kennedy and other members of the family.

We wouldn’t even know which room she occupied were it not for her receipt of a mysterious trunk on April 26, 1965. That receipt put Room 409 on the map. 

When the trunk was delivered, Evelyn Lincoln did not receive it on behalf of the National Archives, but on behalf of Robert Kennedy and the Kennedy family. The accompanying inventory included a list of items associated with the autopsy of President Kennedy that had been conducted at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the evening of November 22, 1963. The inventory is reproduced here: 

It would appear from this document that the trunk was delivered to Mrs. Lincoln by Dr. George Burkley, Physician to President Kennedy, and Robert Bouck, US Secret Service. It has been reported that the Secret Service had taken custody of the autopsy materials, so this would fit with them being in the chain of custody. Mrs. Lincoln’s signature appears at the bottom of the inventory as having received the trunk in Room 409.

This inventory has been analyzed and poured over by every conspiracy theorist of the last 60 years. From Mark Lane to Jim Garrison and Oliver Stone, all have drawn implications from what is listed and what is not listed. Here are my highlights:

Please note that item #1, “One broken casket handle” is a clue associated with the original casket that I write about in https://www.constancelyhoping.com/post/a-president-s-casket 

The other item that has drawn intense speculation over the years is part of #9, “a stainless-steel container 7” in diameter x 8” containing gross material.”(hard to read) In this context the word “gross” is assumed to mean the pathological examination of an organ with the naked eye. The contents of that steel container has always been assumed to be the recoverable portion of the brain of John F. Kennedy. 

Mrs. Lincoln always claimed that she never opened the sealed trunk. It has been reported that the only person who accessed the trunk before its contents were accessioned by the Archives was Angela Novello, secretary and personal assistant to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. When the transfer of the contents of the trunk was finally made to the National Archives, neither the casket handle nor the stainless-steel container was included. 

It has always been assumed that the stainless steel container was removed by Ms. Novello so that it could be placed in the President’s casket when it was reinterred in 1967. This reinternment was part of the move of the casket from its temporary burial site to a more permanent shrine just a few feet away. The new location was designed to better accommodate the volume of foot traffic to the site and create a more suitable eternal flame structure.

That intriguing story was only a warm-up act for the controversy that would embroil Evelyn Lincoln in the years that followed.  

During her long career, Evelyn Lincoln had collected doodles of  President Kennedy from meeting notes, marked up drafts of famous speeches, classified and unclassified presidential documents, oval office furnishings, clocks, and other accessories. And we are not talking about small numbers. She literally had locked file cabinets and steamer trunks filled with her collection at her Chevy Chase, Maryland apartment.  

On the deeply personal (macabre?) side of the ledger, she wound up with President Kennedy’s wallet, money clip and the watch he was wearing when he was assassinated. She had remained by Jackie Kennedy’s side through the ordeal of November 22, accompanying her all the way to Bethesda Naval Hospital late that night. Some have speculated that it was in the hospital that either the First Lady gave Lincoln those personal items or she simply took them. 

As the casket is loaded into the Navy ambulance at Andrews Air Force Base for transport to Bethesda Naval Hospital, Evelyn Lincoln, wearing her dark rimmed glasses, stands directly behind Mrs. Kennedy. She never left her side.

While she was the closest of trusted assistants, a decades-long debate both inside and outside the Kennedy family has challenged her proper ownership of many of these items. 

Robert L. White

A large portion of Evelyn Lincoln’s Kennedy holdings wound up in the collection of renowned Kennedyphile Robert L. White of Catonsville, MD. As a young boy, White had written a letter to the White House requesting an autograph from President Kennedy. There was something about the letter that caught the eye of Evelyn Lincoln. She not only fulfilled the request but started a lifelong correspondence and friendship with Robert White rooted in their devotion to JFK. 

White bought Kennedy memorabilia as it became available for sale over the years and stored it in his mother’s basement in Catonsville. When Evelyn Lincoln died in 1995, she bequeathed hundreds of items to White, adding to an estimated 25,000 items in his Kennedy collection. 

When it was a private collection available only to family and friends, White lived below the radar in relative anonymity. It was when he decided to go to major auction houses to cash in (albeit to fund a possible museum), that his holdings caught the attention of the National Archives and the Kennedy family. 

White had two problems. 

First, all papers created as a part of the Kennedy Administration had been transferred to the National Archives by the Kennedy family through a deed of gift. From George Washington on, the papers of the presidency were the President's personal property. Post-Watergate, the law was changed to make the records public property administered by the National Archives. The Kennedy deed of gift meant that much of Robert White's collection was the property of the federal government.

Second, the Kennedy family was shocked that the White holdings included such personal items, probably coming from the estate of Evelyn Lincoln. Jacqueline Kennedy was gone and with her the conversations associated with many of these mementoes. The new Kennedy generation questioned both the legitimacy of the chain of custody of these treasurers and Evelyn Lincoln’s decision to bequeath them to Robert White.

The Archives recovered some items and forced others off the auction block on behalf of the family. But the highest profile item was yet to come. 

Cuban Missile Crisis Map

In 2002, an Archives researcher saw a map for sale on the internet that appeared to be a government document. The map, with a price tag of $750,000, was billed as The Cuban Missile Crisis Map and was sourced as originally part of the Robert White Collection. The seller called it the most important Kennedy artifact in private hands.  

After some research, the Archives General Counsel identified the map as authentic and clearly a government document. He convinced the Justice Department to file for a temporary restraining order in New York City to block the sale. The order was granted. 

The background on the map is this.

In October of 1962 the CIA briefed President Kennedy on the U2 spy plane photos of the missiles in Cuba. During that initial briefing, the President had a map of Cuba in front of him on the table. As the briefing proceeded, Kennedy placed x’s, stars, and other markings to indicate suspected missile sites, anti-aircraft emplacements, and troop encampments. JFK was facing the first possibility of Armageddon in the history of the nuclear age. This annotated map is one of the most significant documents in the military history of the United States.  

Clearly, like many other pieces of Kennedy presidential history, Evelyn Lincoln had taken it off the table and placed it in her files. Either in a separate transaction or as part of the transfer to Robert White in 1995, this map was now in the hands of a private collector, who was looking for a quarter of a million dollar payday. 

The happy ending to the story is that the Archives and the Justice Department prevailed in the litigation and were successful in recovering the map which is now carefully preserved in the holdings of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, MA. 

The debate will doubtless continue as to the position of Evelyn Lincoln in Kennedy lore and history. Even if we give her the benefit of the doubt and anoint her intentions as pure, the belief that she could properly preserve vital information and precious treasures in a suburban Maryland apartment is clearly wrong. Private collecting is fine, but professional holdings maintenance and public access to archives will give us all the full benefit of our history.