CHAPTER ONE
YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND ME, YOU NEVER DID, I HATE YOU
(When is a Critic a Critic?)
During the noon hour on Friday, November 22, 1963, in
Dallas, Texas, Malcolm Perry, an assistant professor of surgery and attending
surgeon, left the Southwestern Medical School for its teaching facility,
Parkland Hospital, and his usual one o'clock rounds with the residents. (3H
366). He was eating lunch in the second-floor cafeteria with Dr. Ronald Coy
Jones, the chief surgical resident (3H 367), when the hospital's operator
sounded an emergency page for Dr. Tom Shires, chief of the emergency surgical
service. Perry knew that Shires was delivering a paper at a meeting in Galveston
(ibid.), so after the second emergency call he asked Jones to pick up the phone.
(6H 52).
The operator told Jones that President Kennedy had been
shot and was being brought to the emergency room. We don't know what thoughts
passed through their minds at that moment, only that Perry and Jones immediately
dashed down one flight of stairs from the cafeteria to the emergency room area,
and into a little cubicle known as Trauma Room 1.
When he entered TR 1 and saw John F. Kennedy lying before
him on a stretcher carriage, dying, Perry's first thought was that the President
was a larger man than he had imagined (New York Times, November 28,
1963). He saw the gaping wound in the President's skull, and he knew that it was
mortal. (ibid.) But there was no time for further reflection.
Dr. Charles Carrico had already arrived at the President's
side. (6H 2, 3H 359, 3H 367) Because of Kennedy's inadequate respiration and an
injury to his throat, Carrico inserted a breathing tube into the mouth and down
the trachea past the injury. He then attached the tube to a mechanical
respirator. (6H 3) It became obvious, however, that this procedure would not
secure an airway. The President's breathing was still spasmodic, and there was a
leakage of air around the tracheal wound. (ibid.)
Dr. Perry, who was the senior attending physician at the
time, decided to perform a tracheostomy, the insertion of a breathing tube
directly into the windpipe through an incision in the throat. Since the throat
wound's location coincided with the spot normally used for a tracheostomy, Perry
made his incision directly through the wound as an expedient. (3H 369)
Other emergency procedures were attempted, but the battle
had been lost from the beginning. The chief of neurosurgery at Parkland, Dr.
Kemp Clark, pronounced President Kennedy dead at 1:00 p.m.
A little more than an hour later, in a second-floor nurses'
classroom which had been hastily converted into a makeshift press center, Drs.
Perry and Clark were confronted with a battery of klieg lights, a bewildering
array of cables, whirring cameras and spinning tape decks, and a horde of
newsmen hungry for a story. The world already knew that President Kennedy was
dead. It needed to know how he died.
Clark, who had arrived in TR 1 as Perry was performing the
tracheostomy, had not seen the throat wound in its undeformed state. (6H 20) As
a neurosurgeon, he spoke mostly about the President's head injury. Perry spoke
about the emergency procedures, and about the wound in Kennedy's throat. The
reporters were unfamiliar with medical terms, such as "moribund" (near
death), "endotracheal tube" (oral breathing tube), and
"tracheostomy," and they frequently interrupted to get the correct
spellings.
Following the press conference, the news media widely
quoted Perry as having identified the throat wound as one of entrance. A UPI
report published in The New York World Telegram & Sun on the afternoon of
the assassination said, "There was an entrance wound below his Adam's
apple. There was another wound in the back of his head." (NYWT&S,
November 22, 1963). Tom Wicker of The New York Times: "Mr. Kennedy was hit
by a bullet in the throat, just below the Adam's apple, they said. This wound
had the appearance of a bullet's entry." (New York Times, November
23, 1963) Other newspapers and the television networks concurred. (See, e.g., Dallas
Times Herald, November 24, 1963; NBC, Seventy Hours and Thirty Minutes,
Random House. New York: 1966, p. 11; CBS News, The Assassination of President
Kennedy as Broadcast over the CBS Television Network, unpublished transcript
of coverage on November 22, 1963, pp. 51, 97).
The question whether Perry's observation was correct or
mistaken belies two basic points: First, Perry was reported to have made this
statement by several highly respected members of the White House press corps and
local reporters. Second, Perry's identification of the throat wound as an entry
was conjecture—unknowing and unintentional, to be sure, but conjecture
nonetheless in the strict sense of the word. As he later told the Warren
Commission, Perry did not examine the President so thoroughly as to ascertain
the trajectory of the missile(s) that struck the President, or the pathway of
the bullet through the body. (6H 15, 3H 373, 3H 374) He did not know the
position in which the President had been sitting when he was shot. His
conjecture, however, was based upon his professional medical experience in
dealing with gunshot victims and his personal experience as a hunter. (3H 366,
6H 18) From the undisturbed appearance of the wound, Perry had concluded that
afternoon that, in the words of one reporter in Dallas, "A bullet struck
him in the front as he faced the assailant." (NBC, op. cit., p. 11) The
reporters at the news conference did not know this, and they had no alternative
but to report what Perry said and what they heard.
Of course, Perry's observation conflicted with the official
theory of the assassination, that President Kennedy was shot only from the rear
as his limousine passed the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book
Depository Building in which the lone assassin lurked. Perry's comments
therefore immediately led to the question that attorney Mark Lane and others
have been asking for nearly thirty years: How could accused assassin Lee Harvey
Oswald have shot the President in the throat from behind?
The Warren Commission labored to cast doubt that the
reporters at the press conference had quoted Perry accurately, an effort in
which Perry himself acquiesced. For years after the assassination independent
researchers searched in vain for proof of his original statement. Lane, in
particular, was eager to include film footage of the Parkland news conference in
his documentary on the Warren Report. In his book of the same title, Rush to
Judgment, Lane reported that the three major networks and local Dallas
stations no longer had television and radio tapes of the briefing. (Lane, Mark. Rush
to Judgment. Dell Publishing Co., New York: 1975, p. 53) Elaborating on that
claim in an interview with Playboy Magazine, Lane said that the local Dallas
stations were visited after the assassination by FBI and Secret Service agents
and asked to surrender all of their tapes. (Playboy, February 1967, p.
50).
Then, on June 26, 1967, in the second of four nightly CBS
News programs on the Warren Report, anchorman Walter Cronkite referred to
"the transcript of that news conference" without giving his audience
any additional identification or indication of its source. Since that night,
there has been no further word from CBS about the document.
The transcript of the Parkland Hospital news conference to
which CBS referred was not of the network's own making: it was a non-classified
government document unseen by the Warren Commission.
Arlen Specter, the Warren Commission staff lawyer who
developed the medical evidence in the assassination, made a feeble and somewhat
transparent attempt to obtain for that investigation a recording or transcript
of the statements made by Dr. Perry on November 22, 1963. Although Specter told
the Commission that, "[W]e have been trying diligently to get the tape
records of the television interview, and we were unsuccessful," (3H 378)
there is no evidence that the Commission considered using its subpoena power at
any time. Instead of inquiring on its own, the panel asked the Secret Service to
undertake a search. The performance of the Secret Service was equally
lackluster, for a reason I shall presently discuss. On March 25, 1964, Secret
Service Director James J. Rowley wrote the Commission that no videotape
recording or transcript could be found at the television networks or the Dallas
stations. (CD 678)
Specter understandably did not press the issue. Perry's
statement about an entrance wound in President Kennedy's throat was directly at
odds with the official report issued by three military pathologists who
conducted the Kennedy autopsy at Bethesda Naval Medical Center on the night of
the assassination. They concluded that the President was shot twice from the
rear.
One of the peculiarities of this case is that, on the
weekend of the assassination, neither the Parkland group nor the Bethesda group
of doctors had seen all the President's wounds. The autopsy surgeons found a
wound on the upper right-hand side of his back. The Parkland doctors were
unaware of this wound at the time they treated the President, since they did not
turn him over on his stomach. (6H 3, 6H 5, 3H 382) On the other hand, the
Parkland doctors were the only ones who had observed the throat wound in its
original state. Due to the tracheostomy that had been performed through this
site, the Bethesda doctors said they did not regard it as a bullet wound while
the President's body was in their hands. Only later did they infer, rather than
actually trace, a path from the back wound to the throat wound. (2H 368)
Specter, as middleman, played one group against the other
to coax support for his single-bullet theory that one shot, fired from the rear,
hit both President Kennedy and Governor John Connally, who sat in front of
Kennedy in the presidential limousine during the ill-fated motorcade through
Dallas. It was a theory that both the Commission's critics and supporters agreed
was the cornerstone of the case for a lone gunman. Verification of Perry's
statement about an entrance wound in the throat through the production of a
transcript would only have gotten in the way of Specter's strategy.
In Dr. Perry's case, the strategy was two-pronged:
First, without ever asking Perry to deny that he had formed
an initial opinion at Parkland Hospital on November 22, to establish that the
doctor's earlier comments on the throat wound had been misquoted and
misinterpreted by the press; and
Second, to elicit Perry's opinion of the possibility of the
throat wound being one of exit by asking him to assume as true the autopsy
findings and other information that Specter provided.
Both tactics lured Perry into embracing the autopsy
findings without recanting his original statements, while still maintaining his
professional pride. The second also led Perry, in his testimony before the
Warren Commission, into the very sort of speculation that the press had
solicited.
Perry offered little resistance. He did not stand up to the
authorities as Robert Redford and Warren Beatty do in the movies. Perry knew
that his "entrance wound" statement at Parkland had thrown a wrench
into the works. The morning after the assassination (i.e., the morning following
the autopsy), Perry told Clark that "he had been asked by Bethesda to
confine his remarks to that which he knew from having examined the President.”
(6H 23)
Even if Perry, four months after the assassination, felt
sure of what he saw in TR 1, he would have been stepping out on a fragile and
lonely limb to say so. Having a transcript of his Parkland remarks before him as
he testified would have been of as little help to him as it would to Specter.
Specter, the middleman, held the cards—and the autopsy report.
Specter asked Perry, not did he form an opinion at Parkland
whether the throat wound was an entry or exit, not did he have a basis, but did
he have a sufficient basis to form such an opinion?
"No, sir. I was unable to determine that since I did
not ascertain the exact trajectory of the missile." (3H 373).
Were sufficient facts available then to form an opinion as
to the source or direction of the cause of the wound?
No, Perry replied, "although several leading questions
were directed toward me at the several conferences." (6H 15)
"Often questions were directed as to—in such a
manner as this: 'Doctor, is it possible that if he were in such and such a
position and the bullet entered here, could it have done that?' And my reply,
'Of course, if it were possible, yes, that is possible, but similarly, it did
not have to be so, necessarily.'" (ibid.)
"...I could not categorically state about the nature
of the neck wound…"(6H 12)
He could not come to a conclusive opinion from the
physical characteristics of the wound in and of themselves. (6H 15) In general,
Perry testified that he spoke only in terms of possibilities (3H 375,
376).
So, too, in his appearance before the Warren Commission:
Would Perry please assume that the President was struck by a copper-jacketed
bullet? Now, would he also assume that it was fired at muzzle velocity of
approximately 2000 feet per second? Add that the bullet entered the President's
back (a wound Perry had never seen), that it went through the muscle tissue as
described by the official autopsy report (a path that neither Perry nor the
autopsy surgeons themselves traced), and that it exited the throat (a fact that
the autopsy pathologists merely assumed). Would the wound he observed in the
throat be consistent with an exit wound?
"Certainly would be consistent with an exit
wound." (3H 373)
By the appearance of the neck wound alone, could it have
been either an entrance or an exit wound?
"It could have been either." (ibid.)
If, that is, the hypothesis posed to Perry by Specter were
true?
"That is correct, sir. I have no way to authenticate
either by own knowledge." (6H 15)
In this manner, Specter sought to dispel the confusion and
to reconcile the Parkland doctors' testimony to the autopsy report. Having thus
neutralized Perry, the Commission was not above overkill. The Warren Report's
section on the wounds said:
“At the news conference, Dr. Perry answered a series of
hypothetical questions and stated to the press that a variety of possibilities
could account for the President's wounds. He stated that a single bullet could
have caused the President's wounds by entering through the throat, striking the
spine, and being deflected upward with the point of exit being through the
head.” (WR 90)
The Report presented this information as factual, without
attributing these statements to Perry's testimony. Perry issued no such
reconstruction at the news conference, although at least one press account
alleged that he did (UPI dispatch published in Dallas Times Herald,
November 24, 1963). In his testimony, Perry simply thought he remembered
(perhaps under the influence of what he had read in the press since the
assassination) positing the course of a bullet. (3H 375, 376, 6H 13) The Report
continued:
“Dr. Perry said his answers at the press conference were
intended to convey his theory about what could have happened, based on his
limited knowledge at the time, rather than his professional opinion about what
did happen…” (WR 90)
Perry, however, had denied holding any theory of the
wounds, either at the time of the assassination or at the time he testified. (6H
12, 15) Neither did he advance any theory during the press conference.
The transcript of that press conference gives the game
away. It reveals that both Drs. Perry and Clark repeatedly and emphatically
declined to speculate on the trajectory of the shots or their course through the
President's body. They confined themselves to what they had observed and done.
They spoke of a head wound and a neck wound, without saying whether the wounds
were made by one, two or more bullets.
Dr. Perry described the neck wound as an entrance wound.
His opinion was definite. It left no room for doubt. He had arrived at that
judgment independent of the factors that Arlen Specter would later ask him to
assume, and before the best evidence, President Kennedy's body, had been
transported behind military lines.
Dr. Perry had an opinion on November 22. On the basis of
the hypothesis later given to him by Specter, Perry decided that his was not
"the correct opinion." Unlike testimony, however, the Perry transcript
could not be shaded through the use of hypothetical questions. Unlike the
Zapruder film with its unmistakable depiction of the violent backward thrust of
Kennedy's body, it could not be ignored. Unlike scientific tests, it could not
be misinterpreted. Therefore, the Perry transcript had to be buried.
The Parkland news conference was actually a White House
news conference, because it was conducted by Wayne Hawks, a member of the White
House transportation staff. Hawks was acting in place of Malcolm Kilduff, the
assistant White House Press Secretary who accompanied President Kennedy to
Dallas, and who left Parkland Hospital with President Johnson a few minutes
before the press conference began. The transcript of the news conference was on
file in the White House Press office, under the nose of the White House Detail
of the Secret Service, which had purportedly sought it for the Warren
Commission.
Arlen Specter knew about Hawks' role in the press
conference, because Malcolm Perry told him about it on the first day of his
testimony. (6H 7) That was March 25, 1964, the same day that Secret Service
Chief Rowley wrote the Commission to say he had been unsuccessful in locating a
videotape recording. (CD 678) Since Perry did not testify again until five days
later (March 30, 1964), Specter could have obtained the transcript for that
session. He did not.
Several authors have devoted lengthy books to cataloging
the Warren Commission's penchant for willfully disregarding eyewitness accounts
of the shooting, ignoring physical evidence that was inconvenient to its
predetermined conclusions, as well as its misrepresentation, obfuscation and
prevarication relating to evidence that it did receive. I have recounted the
tale of Malcolm Perry and the transcript of his news conference only because it
is one with which David Lifton, the author of Best Evidence is all too
familiar. He tells us in his book that he cashed a tax refund check to buy a set
of the Commission's 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits. He read all the
newspaper and magazine accounts that he could find. He read many books about the
assassination that were published before his. Still, there is substantial cause
for restless doubt that he pursued his readings and investigations with the same
purpose, intent and understandings that the overwhelming majority of other
writers, researchers and critics shared.
For the benefit of those few who may never have heard about
Best Evidence, let alone undertaken the wearying task of reading the book
through to its end, Lifton theorizes that while Jacqueline Kennedy went to the
front of Air Force One for the swearing-in of Lyndon Johnson, shortly before the
plane took off from Love Field in Dallas to return to Washington, somebody
transferred JFK's remains from a coffin to a body bag, which was secreted
away—somewhere. He further theorizes that, when the plane landed at Andrews
Air Force Base in Washington, the body bag was secretly off loaded from the
right side of the plane as some 3000 spectators and millions of television
viewers watched an empty bronze ceremonial casket being unloaded and placed in
an ambulance on the left side, the area being illuminated by klieg lights. While
the ambulance drove to Bethesda, the body was flown by helicopter to Walter Reed
Army Hospital for alteration (e.g., the addition or modification of wounds, and
the removal of bullets), then taken to Bethesda in a gray metal shipping casket
before the arrival of the empty "original" coffin. Somehow, someone
managed to re-casket the body in its original coffin without anyone else
noticing. According to Lifton, the body in the gray metal casket was sheathed in
a body bag, with the head wrapped in a sheet. The President's throat wound was
sutured and his skull had no brain.
The autopsy pathologists at Bethesda, according to Lifton,
were deceived by the "medical forgery" into believing that the
President had been shot from behind, rather than from in front of the limousine
in which he rode through downtown Dallas. Specifically, Lifton alleges a plot
that enlarged JFK's head wound and added two rear wounds, one in the head and
one in the upper back. He alleges that neither of those rear wounds were seen by
the nurses and doctors who handled the President's body at Parkland.
Lifton pretends to posit only a small, high-level plot
involving a clique of officials. ("America's Unsolved Mystery," Palm
Beach Post, November 22, 1991, p. 1D) With the briefest reflection, however,
the Best Evidence thesis clearly requires not only a group of assassins,
but legions who could plant a phony bullet at Parkland Hospital, plant phony
bullet fragments in the President's limousine, steal and then alter the
President's corpse, alter the Zapruder film, and alter the autopsy X-rays and
photographs. It would have required utilization of the type of sophisticated
project management computer software that did not even exist in 1963 to
coordinate and move the President's body, hordes of unidentified conspirators,
coffins, coffin guard teams, doctors, Secret Service Agents, F.B.I. agents, and
Kennedy staffers, as well as to conduct the complex array of operations that he
envisions. Still, he insists that it was a small plot.
People are entitled to their sincerely held beliefs on the
subject of President Kennedy's assassination. Nevertheless, when a prominent
writer about the assassination dares to suggest, as David Lifton did in passing
in a footnote to his book ("The critics' conclusion that the Commission
‘covered up’ had created blind spots in their research effort. My friendship
with Liebeler caused me to put aside my suspicions and realize that a person
could, in good faith, hold the Commission's position." [Hard cover, p. 299
fn]), and now does again in essays published both privately and on the on-line
Compuserve Information Service, that the Warren Commission and its various
counsel were as honest and objective in their account of the evidence as
newspaper reporters attempting to simply report news, it seems not only fair but
urgent that those who are familiar with the record question that writer's bona
fides as a critic, as well as the true nature of the role that he appears to
perform in this controversy. Indeed, Mr. Lifton does not stop at exonerating the
Warren Commission; he insists that neither the doctors who treated Kennedy at
Parkland Hospital, nor the surgeons who performed the autopsy at Bethesda lied
about the events of November 22. While his book implies that the latter's
military superiors (or other unidentified attendees at the autopsy) were
involved in a body swipe that appears to resemble a game of musical caskets, Mr.
Lifton nevertheless takes great pains in exonerating the White House physician,
Navy Admiral George G. Burkley, of any culpable knowledge or involvement.
In Mr. Lifton's view, the Warren Commission stands on equal
footing with the rest of the world vis-a-vis the Kennedy assassination: all of
us were merely deceived by invisible plotters who phonied up the evidence. He
writes:
"I was taken with the idea that the Commission had
been the victim of a monstrous deception, and was decidedly uncomfortable with
the notion that because the Warren Report was written in a one-sided fashion,
that meant the investigation was a fraud." (BE, Chapter 15)
These are, however, decidedly different views than those
that were ostensibly held by "the old Lifton," the one whose myriad
conspiracy theories merrily skipped along the farthest fringe of assassination
research and criticism of the Warren Commission during the Sixties. So
different, in fact, that one might be tempted to argue in his manner that David
Lifton is really dead, and that an imposter has taken his place. Were the
difference clearly based upon principle, exemplified by a frank confession of
error corrected through maturation and scholarly re-evaluation, one might lament
his defection from the critics' ranks without faulting this aspect of either his
book or his current dogma. Unfortunately, Mr. Lifton carefully conceals his
former beliefs about the Commission, as well as his gestalt view of the
assassination, and invents a completely false legend for himself which throws
the entire autobiographical aspect of Best Evidence, as well as the
marrow of his forensic argument, into serious question.
Sadly, the "disguise and deception" of Best
Evidence are by no one except David Lifton.
It was Lifton who once wrote of the early Warren Commission
critic, Edward Jay Epstein, some seven months before the latter's Inquest
was published, "[H]e seems to want the recognition of being an important
critic of [the Warren Commission's] work, yet somehow say it wasn't their fault.
I think he is deceiving himself about the character of some of those men and his
work will be the less hard hitting because of this." (Lifton, David. Letter
to Sylvia Meagher, November 21, 1965)
Indeed, Lifton criticized Epstein for overlooking what he
termed the Commission's "moral guilt." And he also accused the Warren
Commission of "sanctioning" a cover-up, excoriating Epstein for
"refusing to condemn" them. (ibid.)
Later, Lifton offered that some Warren Commission attorneys
"deceived themselves to the point that they actually believe their own 'big
lie'," and he referred to "constraints ... that prevented a completely
free and impartial inquiry." (Lifton, David. Letter to Sylvia Meagher,
December 5, 1965)
But who are the deceivers and who are the deceived?
At the beginning of his Chapter Two of Best Evidence,
Lifton gives us an account of his public confrontation with former CIA Director
and Warren Commissioner Allen Dulles over the backward snap of JFK's head in the
Z-film. One searches his narrative in vain for any thought or feeling in
reaction to this encounter. In fact, however, Lifton could scarcely conceal his
disgust with Dulles. Contemporaneously, he would write: "What I was
surprised at was the rather disgusting ease with which he lied through his teeth
when necessary." And Lifton conceded that such a man would lie "for
reasons of state." (Lifton, David. Notes and Comments on an Interview with
Allen Dulles, December 7, 1965)
The New Lifton castigates pioneering critic Mark Lane's
style of public speaking in Best Evidence, yet after hearing the very
debate between Lane and Liebeler that serves as his vehicle for such
denigration, the old, private Lifton explicitly agreed with Lane's
characterization of the Warren Report as "a moral crime, a hoax, and a
fraud." (Lifton, David. Letter to Sylvia Meagher, October 13, 1966)
And he continued:
"I also believe the Report was authored by people who,
at least at some level knew that what they were authoring was a complete cock
and bull story....The Report itself, as you put it, deliberately uses the
English language in the service of obfuscation and guile." (ibid.)
Should the merciful rationalize Mr. Lifton's conversion
from critic to apologist for the Warren Commission in terms of a transition from
the nascent, hastily formed judgments of a novice researcher to the deeper, more
intellectually mature insights of a scholar, they ought first to consider that
he expressed virtually the same sentiments again in 1969, and as late as
mid-March 1970 in correspondence with Sylvia Meagher, author of Accessories
After The Fact and two indices to the official investigations of the
assassination.
In Best Evidence, Lifton appraises Meagher and, with
seemingly pinpoint precision, describes his own state of mind as of November 4,
1966:
"Sylvia Meagher represented the view that the
Commission and its staff were conscious concealers of the truth—deliberate,
criminally culpable liars.
"I could no longer subscribe to that view, for it
failed to take into account falsified evidence. Many critics didn't allow for
that possibility."
In reality, long after he professes to have arrived
at this conclusion, Lifton wrote to Meagher:
"There are instances where I think the WC staff was
deliberately dishonest, and I will not hesitate to say so (or, perhaps better,
demonstrate this as fact.) I don't think its [sic] all oversight, overwork or deception
by others." (Lifton, David. Letter to Sylvia Meagher, October 13, 1969)
(Emphasis supplied)
(The "deception by others" reference puzzles this
writer, since it seems to contradict Mr. Lifton's claim in Best Evidence
that he was developing its central theory of a deceived autopsy at the time.)
Mr. Lifton was then coordinating the ordering, reproduction
and distribution of major portions of the Warren Commission's unpublished files
to her and other critics, a subject that I shall later revisit. In a transmittal
memorandum covering approximately 2200 pages of documents known as "the
Gemberling reports" (after FBI Agent Robert Gemberling of the Dallas Field
Office), Mr. Lifton advised he had selected them with a bias toward revealing
that the Warren Commission's attorneys "were trying not to tell us
something," and that they would "sweep disagreeable information
(disagreeable in the sense that it was in conflict with the conclusions of the
particular area of the investigation that came under the aegis of the staff
attorney involved)" under the rug. (Lifton, David. Memorandum, March 13,
1970)
Chapter One of Best Evidence describes a November 2,
1965 meeting between David Lifton and Wesley Liebeler concerning letters that
Liebeler had received from various former Warren Commission staff attorneys in
response to his queries on behalf of Lifton about a splice in the Zapruder film.
As the two of them walked to a photocopy machine, Lifton wrote circa 1978,
"I kept up a running stream of comment that it was only a matter of time
now until the entire Warren Report came apart at the seams." But in his
contemporary record of this same conversation, Lifton follows the word
"seams" with a comma instead of a period, and continues his
self-quotation: "and that I feel sorry for the staff attorney's [sic] who
were 'used' and who still have their whole careers ahead of them." (Lifton,
David. "Interview with W.J.L.", November 30, 1965) (Lifton, David.
"Interview with W.J.L." [unpublished memorandum])
Lifton, who wrote in his book that, during the mid-Sixties
he thought Liebeler stood separate and apart from the other Warren Commission
staff attorneys, omitted his insight about their being "used" from his
book, but clearly entertained the belief in 1965 that certain staff attorneys
would be damaged were the Warren Report proved false. Today he argues that they
were honest men who were deceived by the evidence.
What happened to David Lifton between the time he left work
and school, co-wrote an article for Ramparts, also wrote those letters to Sylvia
Meagher and memoranda to his files, and the time when he found his literary
agent and publisher? Did an honest change come about in him? Did he formulate
his present-day hypocrisy on the basis of some changed analysis of the
26-volumes, or was it a pitiable effort to make his body swipe and alteration
scheme seem less demonist to his benefactors and the public? How was he
transformed from a young man who courted the approval of the major critics of an
earlier day to one who now lunges to disparage, defame and discredit them? Who
turned David Lifton? Or, was there any need to turn him, i.e., did he actually
feign at being a critic in his correspondence and dealings with Meagher (and/or
others) from the start?
In what must seem another lifetime, Mr. Lifton graduated
from the Cornell University School of Engineering and Physics in 1962 (New
York Times, January 12, 1981, Section C, p. 17). With his background in
math, physics, and engineering, he had planned to become a scientist.
("'JFK': Lone-Assassin Debate; Four Doubters Have Pursued Truth For
Decades," Sacramento Bee, January 7, 1992, p. F1) At the time of
President Kennedy's assassination, he was 24 years old and pursuing an advanced
degree in engineering at UCLA while working nights as a computer engineer at
North American Aviation, then a prime contractor for the Apollo space program.
("His J.F.K. Obsession: For David Lifton, The Assassination is a Labyrinth
Without End", Los Angeles Times, November 20, 1988, Magazine, p. 20)
In 1966, he was drummed out of UCLA for neglecting his
studies. (Ibid.) He allegedly quit his job with North American and asked his
parents for financial support to pursue his assassination research. (Ibid.) He
had no plans to write a book about the assassination, he claims that he just
wanted to devote maybe half a year to studying the matter (Ibid.)
Lifton's study of the assassination only began with his
purchase of a set of the Warren Commission volumes. He also obtained photocopies
of the Commission's working papers, i.e., interoffice memos and letters to
investigative agencies. ("His J.F.K. Obsession: For David Lifton, The
Assassination is a Labyrinth Without End", Los Angeles Times, November 20,
1988, Id.).
In a memoir of his experiences during the Sixties, Warren
Hinckle, former editor of Ramparts magazine, remembers Lifton as "a pushy
UCLA engineering student who was known as 'Blowup,' since his specialty was
enlarging photographs of Dealey Plaza taken the morning of the assassination and
finding figures lurking in the background. Lifton did not like to hear no for an
answer and was persistent in insisting that one pick out the figure of a man
among a forest of black and white dots in a twenty times enlargement of a
Polaroid snapshot of Dealey Plaza he toted around like a billboard paster going
to work." (Hinckle, Warren. If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade, G.P.
Putnam's Sons; New York: 1974, p. 214)
Besides the expense he incurred in the reproduction of
official documents and photographs, during the 1960's and 70's Mr. Lifton seems
to have engaged in an extensive travel itinerary while pursuing his studies of
the assassination. He went to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., at
least three times, spending six weeks there the first trip, one month the
second. He also visited Dallas, the scene of the assassination, and made
additional trips to Florida, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Washington
and Bethesda to interview witnesses. ("His J.F.K. Obsession: For David
Lifton, The Assassination is a Labyrinth Without End", Los Angeles Times,
November 20, 1988, Id.; Lifton's own accounts of his travels in Best Evidence.)
He spent as much as $800 a month in long-distance phone
tolls over the fifteen years preceding the publication of his book. ("David
Lifton's Startling Study of JFK's Murder", The Washington Post, September
5, 1980, Style Section, p. C1) That comes to $9600 a year in long-distance bills
alone, figure a rounded $10,000 a year to include local charges, or $150,000 in
total for use of the telephone. Since man does not live by the telephone alone,
one must assume that, during his fifteen year sojourn, Mr. Lifton somehow
managed to absorb the same customary and usual expenses of most single people
living in a major urban center—such as Los Angeles—for rent, utilities,
food, clothing, his automobile, and a modicum of leisure activities. Add to
these the incidental, but nonetheless sizable, expenses of his research, such as
audio tape recorders; audio tapes; maintenance and repair; books, both local and
out-of-town newspapers, magazines; reproduction costs associated with
photographs, films, and microfilms, as well as thousands of pages of documents;
more than several file cabinets, file folders, etc., and one can only puzzle
over how he managed to make his own way during those years. His correspondence
with Sylvia Meagher discloses that, at various times, he also had one or two
girls transcribing audio tapes.
In retrospect, it seems ironic that Mr. Lifton would call
it "a miracle that so much evidence in the case has been turned up by a
group of freelancers working on a shoestring." ("For Conspiracists,
Vindication Day; Government is Beginning to Acknowledge What Really
Happened", The Washington Post, December 30, 1978, p. A4)
Whose shoestring?
During the fifteen years preceding the publication of Best
Evidence, Mr. Lifton wrote two articles for magazine publications, one for Ramparts
in 1967, and one for New Times in 1978. In between these assignments, he
served briefly as a consultant to the producers of the motion picture, Executive
Action. Also in 1978, he appeared as a critic/commentator on WETA-TV's
broadcasts of the House Select Committee on Assassinations hearings. Then,
Macmillan gave him a $10,000 advance for the book. (The New York Times,
January 12, 1981, Section C, p. 17) Before the publication of Best Evidence
in late 1980, Mr. Lifton is not known to have held any job—regular or
otherwise—following his departure from North American Aviation. His
correspondence with Sylvia Meagher tells of long days and nights allegedly spent
at the UCLA library, burning the candles at both ends in working on the case.
Therefore, it appears that during the twelve years between the time he left
North American and the time in 1978 when things began to pick up for him, he had
only one published magazine article, one brief consultancy to a motion picture
company, and no other ostensible source of income. It has been suggested that
his parents subsidized him during all this time as he investigated the
assassination of President Kennedy. If that is so, then Mr. Lifton is most
fortunate to have had parents possessed of a generosity, indulgence and patience
very rare in the middle-class milieu from which he sprang.
On a shoestring, Harold Weisberg mounted more than a dozen
difficult FOIA lawsuits. Mr. Lifton offered no help, he merely gleaned the field
that Weisberg sowed.
By the summer of 1975, nearly ten years after he began his
study of the Warren Commission volumes, Mr. Lifton reportedly had not written a
word of his manuscript. He is quoted as saying, "It was still in the form
of file material, conclusions, memos, but not a manuscript." ("His
J.F.K. Obsession: For David Lifton, The Assassination is a Labyrinth Without
End", Los Angeles Times, November 20, 1988, Magazine, p. 20) His
longtime research assistant, Patricia Lambert would tell him, "David, you
have to create a manuscript. You can't just have these thoughts, your files,
your research and your concepts. You have to tackle the process of writing every
day." (Ibid.) Mr. Lifton alleges in his Compuserve essays that he took
"a major gamble" in writing his book without a publishing contract,
although what he was risking by that time is unclear, as he appears not to have
had another gainful pursuit.
Lifton states that he completed a manuscript by August
1976. When he did try to produce a book, however, it turned out that he could
not find anyone interested in publishing it. (Ibid.) Indeed, twenty-three (23)
publishers, apparently not realizing the quality of his investigative skills,
rejected his first manuscript before he received a contract from Macmillan
Company in 1978. (Ibid.) About that time, Mr. Lifton, while keeping his Los
Angeles apartment, moved into his parents' house in Rockaway Beach, Queens, to
rewrite his manuscript under the tutelage of his New York literary agent, Peter
Shepherd.
It was Shepherd who, according to Lifton's
"Acknowledgments," encouraged him to revise "an abstract
evidentiary analysis" into "a personal narrative." He implies
that they expected this revision to take no more than "several
months." Lifton alludes to the availability of his files at his West Coast
abode. Presumably, by working assiduously to recast what he had already written,
Mr. Lifton might have fulfilled his original expectations if, that is, his
evidentiary analysis was substantively complete and the only remaining issue was
the form of his narrative. Instead, the project stretched out over four years.
Lifton and Shepherd had "hundreds of meetings." Lifton credits
Shepherd not only with conceiving the organizing principle of the book, but also
with "guiding" him and editing his manuscript.
Living in the same room he grew up in, Lifton may well have
recalled all the Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries he read as a child (ibid.),
possibly harboring dreams of becoming a great lawyer in the manner of the
protagonist, Perry Mason. We know that, as he slept in his childhood bedroom, he
gave some thought to his contemporaries raising families and pursuing careers.
(ibid.)
According to Mr. Lifton's "Compuserve essays" the
first ten chapters of his book were submitted to his publisher in August 1978. A
contract was consummated around that Christmas.
Even as he reworked his manuscript into a
semi-autobiographical account of his research, he continued researching for the
book despite the exhortations of his agent to finish the project. As Lifton
admits at the beginning of his Chapter 25, though, "there were certain
loose ends in my theory that I needed to investigate." Those "loose
ends" turned out to provide the core of the theory that Mr. Lifton
popularized.
The House Select Committee on Assassinations conducted its
investigation during the time Lifton began to work toward finishing the new
manuscript. During the summer of 1979, Mr. Lifton located one of the House
Committee's witnesses, Paul O'Connor. It was O'Connor whom Lifton claims
provided much of the most sensational revelations upon which the Best
Evidence theory turns: (1) JFK's body allegedly arrived at Bethesda Naval
Hospital in a military- issue pinkish-gray shipping casket, not the ceremonial
bronze casket in which it had left Parkland Hospital in Dallas; (2) The
President's body was in a body bag; (3) The President's cranium was empty, i.e.,
the brain had been removed.
Mr. Lifton also informs us that, in July 1979, he also
found Dennis David, upon whose recollections Mr. Lifton based his "Air
Force One Insight," which holds that the President's body had been
intercepted.
By August 1979, according to Mr. Lifton, he had completed
and submitted to Macmillan Chapter 23 of his book. The book has 32 chapters. Mr.
Lifton probably means to signify by omission that the last eleven chapters were
completed after August 1979.
Today, at 54 years old, living in the same West Los Angeles
apartment from which he conducted his research for Best Evidence, Mr.
Lifton has spent his entire adult life on the Kennedy assassination to the
exclusion of other experiences and accomplishments. His passion for this subject
would seem unusual in view of the odd behavior he displayed on the very night of
President Kennedy's murder: While most of us who are able to recall that weekend
sat at home with our families or friends in a state of shock and dumb anguish,
Mr. Lifton is reported to have gone out dancing, hardly an indication that the
assassination struck him in the deep, personal way that his long association
with the subject might suggest. ("His J.F.K. Obsession: For David Lifton,
The Assassination is a Labyrinth Without End", Los Angeles Times,
November 20, 1988, Id.)
In conversation with this writer, Harold Weisberg, the dean
of assassination authors and researchers, has expressed curiosity about the
possibility of a familial relationship between the late founder of Harold Ober
& Associates, the venerable New York City literary agency that housed Mr.
Lifton's agent, Peter Shepherd, and one Harold Ober who, Mr. Weisberg alleges,
formerly worked for the Central Intelligence Agency's covert domestic
intelligence operation. It bears mention that Messrs. Weisberg and Lifton had a
severe falling out during the era of the Garrison investigation, and there is no
love lost between them. I have not made any effort to investigate Mr. Weisberg's
hypothesis because, even if it proved correct, the connection with Mr. Lifton
and his book would seem tenuous at best, and probably completely
inconsequential. I record these musings merely as an example of the direction
toward which some critics' thinking about Mr. Lifton's work has leaned.
Furthermore, I see no need to spin my wheels in attempting to prove that Mr.
Lifton's is a "black book," for I have already satisfied myself that
it is a ridiculous book arguing for a ridiculous theory.