Dallas hospital room where JFK died now stored in Kansas

It is the end — at least for now — in the long and sometimes strange journey of Parkland Memorial Hospital Trauma Room No. 1, where President John F. Kennedy died on Nov. 22, 1963.

The entire room was purchased by the federal government 35 years ago, when Parkland officials decided to modernize their emergency facilities.

It was dismantled and the contents — all of them, the examination table, clocks, floor tiling, lockers, trash cans, surgical instruments, gloves, cotton balls, even a towel dispenser — were placed in a locked vault in a Fort Worth warehouse run by the National Archives and Records Administration.

The artifacts lay undisturbed there until September, when they were moved to an archives facility in Lenexa, Kan., a suburb of Kansas City, Mo.

"It's in a secure location," Reed Whitaker, the agency's Central Plains Region administrator, confirmed this month.

And in a comment guaranteed to get the conspiracy theorists going, he added:

"Basically, it's not to be examined, not to be shown to the press, not to be photographed, not to be exhibited to the public."

The artifacts were moved after archives officials in Fort Worth began last year to relocate their records to a new facility south of the city.

It was not a question of having space for the trauma room materials. The problem was that their odd shape wouldn't fit into the standardized spaces of the new facility, said Preston Huff, Fort Worth regional administrator.

"We're just not set up for artifacts like that," Huff said.

In September, Huff rented a truck and, accompanied by other archive employees for security, drove the artifacts to Lenexa.

"I was going up there anyway to be on a panel," he said. "I'm an administrator. I usually don't drive a truck, but I know how to drive one, so I did."

In Lenexa, the materials were placed in a 600,000-square-foot underground storage facility, one of two used there by the agency's regional office, where they are universally known as "The Caves."

The dismantled Trauma Room No. 1 will be stored there indefinitely — if not out of mind, then certainly out of sight.

Under the sale agreement between Parkland and the federal government, archives officials agreed to close the trauma room and its contents to the public, saying that they wanted to shield the pieces from exploitation. A formal request in 2000 from The Dallas Morning News to view and photograph the artifacts was summarily rejected.

At the time, officials said photographs of the materials could prove painful to the Kennedy family.

Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman at the archives' national offices in Washington, D.C., acknowledged that the treatment of the trauma room materials is highly unusual.

For one thing, nearly all other presidential artifacts are stored in the nation's 12 presidential libraries, which are operated by the National Archives and are typically intended for public display.

For another, the regional centers, such as those in Fort Worth and Lenexa, exclusively store government documents. Except for those deemed classified, all such documents are open to the public.

"We pride ourselves on not just being a place for storage, but a resource for research," Cooper said. "This really is a unique situation."

Although the ban was instituted to preserve the dignity of articles associated with a national tragedy, Cooper said even academic historians are forbidden access.

"There's no reason to show it to researchers," she said. "There's nothing there to see. It's just things like ceiling tiles and floor tiles. It's just not very interesting."

The policy calls to mind the final scene in the 1981 movie "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when a crate containing the biblical ark of the covenant, which supposedly bestowed military invincibility on whoever possessed it, was unceremoniously stowed away in an anonymous government warehouse.

The difference is that the exact significance of Trauma Room No. 1 is unclear.

"Basically, this stuff has little, if any, historical value," Whitaker said. "Besides, who really wants to see an operating room? I wouldn't."

Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, disagrees that the trauma room lacks historical value. He said future historians might benefit from having access to the artifacts.

"One of the questions is, `What kind of treatment did the president receive? Was there anything more that could have been done?' This would be a hands-on way of seeing what treatment was available in 1963," he said.

Still, Mack declined to criticize archives officials.

"I think that anytime someone treats something dealing with the Kennedy assassination with dignity and respect, it's a good thing," he said. "And I think that is what's happening here."