ACT OF DESPERATION: "BEST EVIDENCE" AND THE DECLINE OF PRE- PUBLICATION REVIEW By Roger Bruce Feinman ------------------ (c) Copyright 1989, 1993 by Roger Bruce Feinman. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any printed media is prohibited without the author's express permission. ------------------ Why did Macmillan fail to make due inquiry before publishing David Lifton's "Best Evidence"? Other publishers have sought out responsible and authoritative experts in the case for pre-publication critiques and advices. If this was ever done by Macmillan, then the identity of such experts was and is unknown to Sylvia Meagher or Harold Weisberg. "Best Evidence" argues that President Kennedy's cadaver was secretly snatched by unknown plotters in the course of transit from Dallas, Texas, to Bethesda, Maryland; removed in a body bag by helicopter from Andrews Air Force Base to Walter Reed, where bullets were removed, false wounds inflicted, and existing wounds altered; and then shipped to the morgue at Bethesda Naval Medical School in time to be replaced in its original casket and presented for autopsy to the awaiting Navy pathologists. If Lifton had originally set out to prove his "Best Evidence" scenario, why did he spend 14-15 years prying information and ideas out of other researchers, pretending all the while that he had some great secret which he would never agree to reveal? The reason is that he had nothing. This semi-mythical manuscript which he told people he was working on (the one he would not even show to a staff attorney on the HSCA, even though he could have been assured that its contents would not be disseminated) could not have contained anything more than a pedestrian rehashing of a well-covered area which, by the late 1970's, many found just plain boring. If Lifton had this theory nailed down when he first found his agent, why did it take him nearly three years to rewrite his original manuscript? That manuscript would have been pure gold! It would not have required the addition of "the personal touch." If it needed work in matters of style or syntax, Macmillan would have rewritten the book for him and rushed it into print! The flimsiness of Lifton's support for the ""Best Evidence"" scenario, the careful juxtaposition of interview excerpts to make them seem more persuasive than they actually are, his near total dependency on HSCA-developed sources, and the obvious haste with which the later chapters of the book are formulated, relative to the earlier portion of the book, all tend to the conclusion that Lifton had an urgent need for cash. "Best Evidence" has nothing to do with laying responsibility at LBJ's door; in a sense, it is Lifton's admission of his inability to do so. It is simply an exercise in perverse logic gussied up with scholarly-sounding phrases (e.g., "a synthesis that was most intellectually satisfying"). It is not the body alteration/two-casket scenario which preceded Lifton's view of the physical/medico legal evidence, but vice versa. The seemingly insoluble dilemma of that evidence dictated that he invent this ghost story. Don't make the mistake of thinking for a moment that this highly intelligent man was not so shrewd that he didn't understand at every point the manipulations, fabrications and rationalizations he was engaging in for the sake of getting this book published. As regards Lifton and Macmillan, one hand washed the other. It is the latter's hands, however, which remain particularly soiled. This was their golden opportunity to profit from a controversial book on a topic of recent public consternation which was totally judgment-proof. To the best of my knowledge, no one has sued either Lifton or Macmillan for libel? How could one? Lifton safely boxes with shadows. It is difficult to separate Lifton's theory of the assassination and his concomitant conclusions about the medical evidence from his reconstruction of what he believes was done to the body of the President and how it was accomplished. The two areas are inextricably bound together; one predicates the other. To afford Lifton the full justice he is due, and to illustrate the grand sweep of his design, some abbreviated treatment of this aspect of his book is warranted. In Lifton's view, Kennedy was shot from one direction only: the front of the limousine (page 349-350)(all page references are to the hard cover edition). He never explains why the framing of Lee Harvey Oswald required that there be no rear shots, only front shots. (see around page 363) Why does Lifton insist upon rejecting any rear entry wounds? (page 340) Lifton's "logic" is that there were no shots fired from the rear because the shots were fired from the front, and because it would be easier to fabricate downward slanting trajectories by adding rear wounds to the President's body later on. He is, of course, impressed by the Zapruder film's depiction of a violent backward jerk of Kennedy's head and torso, but fails to explain how this justifies his assumption that there was no hit in the President's back below the neck. One assumption implicit in this argument is that Lifton's conspirators were willing to gamble that a front shooter would hit his target, and that there was never any intention on their part other than to shoot President Kennedy from the front. A further assumption is that the conspirators concluded it would be better to fabricate downward trajectories than to have them actually made by a rear shooter. The fact is that Lifton has always been an advocate of the grassy knoll assassin(s). His Ramparts piece ("The Case For Three Assassins", co-authored by David Welsh) in 1967 was one of the early "classics" of the genre. The dilemma which he and everyone else who has dealt with this evidence has had to grapple with is that, notwithstanding the Zapruder film, the Perry news conference, and abundant eye- and ear witness evidence, umpteen forensic specialists who examined the autopsy X-rays and photos prior to 1981 refused to lend their support to this theory. I believe Lifton reached a dead end until his agent persuaded him that he could sell a book cast in terms of a personal odyssey through the wilderness. Lifton's "solution" to the crime arose as the expedient method of overcoming the obstacle of the autopsy photography and concluding this odyssey. The chief problem that Lifton encountered in attempting to prove this thesis was the discrepancies between the accounts of the Parkland doctors, the accounts of the Bethesda doctors, and what the autopsy photos and X-rays allegedly show regarding the nature of the President's wounds. In groping for the unifying theme of this fugue, Lifton found his key in the report of two FBI agents who attended the autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, which has come to be known as the Sibert-O'Neill Report. Lifton became unhinged by the "surgery to the head area" reference in Sibert-O'Neill, which may have been someone's mere offhand (i.e., eyeball) reaction to seeing the wrapping on JFK's head when his body was removed from its Dallas coffin. Few of the hundreds of other researchers and writers who have pored over this document ever ascribed any greater significance to this language, but Lifton alleges that it signified to him (as early as 1966) a scheme to alter the President's wounds so as to conceal the true facts of the assassination. He spent the next fifteen years reasoning from this conclusion, which he dubs "trajectory reversal." The implication of Lifton's theory is that alteration/reconstruction was planned deliberately in advance of the assassination. His conspirators knew in advance that a false construction of the wounds and the concomitant planting of bullet shells at the scene of the crime (and of a bullet on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, see p. 345) would be necessary. They would have advance knowledge of how President Kennedy would actually be hit by their infallible marksmen, and what alterations to the President's body would be needed to conceal the true facts of the crime. Lifton does not conceive of ad hoc improvisation (pages 362-64). Why, in Lifton's world, is it necessary that alteration was pre-planned? Why did they have to plan to alter the body? The Main Weaknesses of Lifton's Theory -------------------------------------- After all, former Texas Governor John Connally was unquestionably struck from the rear. Would Lifton have us presume that Governor Connally volunteered to take a near fatal shot from behind in order to assist the conspirators in persuading the world that someone was indeed firing from the rear? Or, perhaps the assassins, throwing caution to the winds, chose to shoot Connally from the rear, but not JFK, to that same end, supremely confident in their ability to hit one but not the other by mistake. What if whoever shot Connally (assuming, as James Reston, Jr. does, that he was a deliberate target) had missed and instead shot Kennedy by mistake? Another even more pivotal weakness of Lifton's trajectory reversal idea (p. 343) is that it rests upon the assumption that the three bullet shells which were found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository near the window from which the Warren Commission alleged that Oswald fired the shots were planted by conspirators, and upon the further assumption that the plan called for the number of wounds inflicted during the shooting to correlate perfectly with the number of allegedly planted bullet shells. This, however, is not necessarily so: If more shells existed than wounds, it could be explained away that one or more of the shots fired had missed their target. If, however, less shells existed than wounds "attributable" to them, then the wounds would have to be correlated in such a way as to accommodate the number of shells. Moreover, Lifton makes no effort to address the weighty issue whether the three shells would have been planted before or after the shooting, let alone how or by whom. Lifton acknowledges this problem: "One fact of my hypothesis was that it demonstrated, in theory at least, that the plotters could know, once they saw the body, how much ammunition was needed, and so could coordinate the planting of bullets with the fabrication of trajectories." (page 359) Really? Did they know how many times John Connally was struck? Could they plant fragments in Connally's chest, wrist and thigh? Wasn't it necessary, in Lifton's world, to plant the three cartridge shells beforehand? How did they know a bullet fired from the front would not completely escape the limousine and later be recovered -- maybe hours or days after the shooting? How would they know how many bullet fragments to plant? Further Weaknesses ------------------ Bullets make tracks through the body, not just holes on the skin surface. Conspirators would have to chance that the autopsy pathologists would not be curious as to why fake rear bullet entries on the right side of the President's body and head did not make exits on the left front side of the body and head or lead through tracks to the left front side of the body and head. One of the earliest seeds of doubt concerning the case was the eye- and ear witness testimony that sounds of gunshots attracted their attention to the knoll. Also, Lifton's conspirators would have had to consider the possibility that a grassy knoll assassin would be apprehended by police or aroused citizens before he could either conceal his weapon or escape or do both. What if Kennedy had lived? What if he had miraculously escaped from Elm Street with only a non-life-threatening throat wound? What if Jacqueline Kennedy or someone else in the limousine had been hit from the grassy knoll or front by mistake? What if an innocent bystander had been accidentally hit by a grassy knoll bullet? How does Lifton account for the fact that the President's back wound was too low to support a downward trajectory from the sixth floor of the Depository? How could such a crucial mistake arise in such an elaborate scheme? He answers that the back wound was a shallow one without an exit, and that it was artificially made by the conspirators during the alteration of Kennedy's body before anyone knew of the throat wound. It may be asked why, if the conspirators were ignorant of the throat wound, which could later be termed the exit for a bullet, they found it necessary to create the back wound at all? In other words, why deliberately create a wound for which there would be no apparent exit? Its sole purpose, according to Lifton, was to link the body to the allegedly planted bullet found on the stretcher at Parkland Hospital, not to conceal the true nature of any wounds to the front of the body. ( see fn. page 347, and pages 372-374). When the weaknesses and risks inherent in such a scheme are weighed, the argument appears preposterous: It commits the conspirators to using up one whole bullet out of three (i.e., the shells found in the depository). (Would not Lifton's conspirators have had to make absolutely sure, before planting the bullet, of how Kennedy indeed was hit? Wouldn't it be careless of them not to? In other words, Lifton wants it both ways: a careful, pre- planned scheme to alter the body, but with no immediate reconnaissance to determine what alterations would actually be needed or tolerable.) It assumes that no Parkland doctor, nurse or orderly would even have the opportunity to observe the President's back; It assumes the bullet would indeed be found and turned over to the Secret Service, not lost or pocketed by a souvenir hunter; It assumes Jacqueline Kennedy would be silent as to whatever she observed. Why not, as a more elegant and obvious solution, simply embed a slug in the back wound and have it found at autopsy!! Would this not have provided the strongest possible case against Oswald? The Ambulance Chase ------------------- In February 1989, University of Wisconsin History Professor David Wrone requested this writer's comments on a draft of his own critique of David Lifton's "Best Evidence". Examining the movements of Kennedy's casket from its arrival aboard Air Force One at Love Field, Dallas, to its arrival at Andrews Air Force Base, Professor Wrone painstakingly established the absence of any moment when the casket was left unattended by President Kennedy's friends and staff or the Secret Service, and also pointed to Lifton's failure to demonstrate the existence of any mysterious helicopter that his plotters could use to kidnap the body at Andrews. Noting that Lifton's two-casket theory was based on interviews with dramatis personae minor held sixteen and seventeen years after the event, Professor Wrone offered the professional historian's perspective: "Evaluating witness testimony in a crime as complex and infamous as the assassination of President Kennedy calls for mature judgment associated with common sense and much experience. The mind through memory tends to expand time frames, collapse and even intertwine events often with selective enhancements and embellishments, to the absolutely convinced correctness of the individual." It is not necessary, however, to dismiss the witnesses whom Lifton interviews regarding the coffin movements (page 399 ff.) on the basis of the weakness of eyewitness testimony. It is Lifton's use of their "testimony" itself that is outrageous, as shown by an objective appraisal of his alleged reconstruction of the casket switch via the use of a "decoy ambulance" at Bethesda: Corporal Cheek had only a vague recollection of trying to find the ambulance and finally catching up with it at the morgue entrance. Lifton quotes him, but does not cite his account in direct support of his thesis. Felder echoes the decoy ambulance story, but he doesn't remember which of the two ambulances was the decoy. All he remembers is following the first ambulance from the front of Bethesda around back, losing it, returning to the front, seeing a second ambulance, returning to the rear again and unloading a coffin. Lifton quotes him, but does not cite him in direct support of his thesis. Mayfield (page 408) tells about chasing an ambulance around back, losing it, returning to the front and picking it up again. (He doesn't speak in terms of two ambulances, and Lifton doesn't say whether he asked Mayfield about a second -- or decoy ambulance.) Lifton quotes, but does not cite Mayfield in direct support of his thesis. Notice Lifton's persistent questioning and his highly suggestive, leading questions to Clark (page 409). Clark says there was a decoy ambulance, but his recollection is vague, even under Lifton's prompting. Lifton does not cite him in direct support of his thesis. Gaudreau (page 414) does not have an independent recollection of there being more than one ambulance until Lifton prompts him. He clearly cannot remember the details. Lifton quotes, but does not cite Gaudreau in direct support of his thesis. From General McHugh, Secret Service Agent Greer and the presidential physician, Dr. George Burkley, Lifton produces nothing in support of his scenario. His star witness is Dennis David, whom he interviewed in 1979. David says the first "ambulance" came onto the grounds of the hospital from the back gate, bearing the body (page 571). He describes the first "ambulance" as an unmarked black Cadillac (i.e., a hearse), not a gray Navy ambulance (page 575). David says the casket it carried was plain gray metal (page 579). The second ambulance was the empty one arriving with the official motorcade (page 571). He did not, however, witness the arrival of the "second ambulance" at the morgue (page 573). David says that, after the black hearse arrived, he went to the front of the hospital and up to the balcony to the rotunda. From there he witnessed Jackie and Bobby's arrival. (Page 576). Although he tells Lifton that he supervised the entry of a casket, unloaded from the first ambulance by a group of sailors (page 571), he admits that he has no personal knowledge that the body was in the first ambulance (page 581); he simply alleges he was told this by Commander Boswell, one of the autopsy pathologists (page 573). Furthermore, while Lifton cites his interview with David as support for the fact that Humes, Boswell, Admiral Kennedy (Surgeon General of the Navy) and Captain Stover were in the morgue when the first casket arrived (page 580), it is not until a full nine pages later, however, that Lifton discloses that David "had emphasized that he had never entered the autopsy room itself." (page 589) It is on the basis of such testimony by a man who knows nothing, and for whose tale no corroboration is offered, that Lifton makes his case. Paul O'Connor (interviewed by Lifton on August 25, 1979) ( p. 598), stated he saw a gray shipping casket enter the morgue at 8 p.m. Lifton arbitrarily concludes that O'Connor was describing events he witnessed at least an hour earlier than 8:00 p.m., and that his testimony dovetails with that of Dennis David (page 605), except that O'Connor said he thought the body was brought in by helicopter, one that may have landed in the rear of the hospital. Lifton quotes O'Connor in his book, but does not use him in direct support of the musical caskets thesis. The two-casket entries/two audiences -- Lifton's developing theory (pages 585-586): ------------------------------------------- STEP ONE: 6:45 entry (gray casket) (first entry of the body). What evidence does he have that the body was taken in at 6:45? His only source is Dennis David. STEP TWO: 7:05-7:17 pm; Navy ambulance and MDW "chase" Source: inference liberally drawn from Sibert & O'Neill- related FBI documents. Lifton's Conclusion: the empty Dallas casket is brought to the morgue; Sibert & O'Neill barred; JFK's body transferred to the Dallas casket and put in the "correct" ambulance. 43 minutes elapse before, STEP THREE: 8:00 p.m. casket team entry; MDW casket team and McHugh bring Dallas casket to morgue. Sources: casket team interviews, Wehle, McHugh, et. al. Conclusion: President's body is brought to the morgue in the Dallas casket for the official autopsy. The body has already been altered. Queries: What happened to the empty plain gray metal casket? Where did it go? What if the casket team had caught up with the Navy ambulance before or during Step Two? If the body had been altered at Walter Reed, why the first entry?: Why not simply transfer the body from hearse to ambulance? How does McHugh get into the "correct" ambulance? Isn't Lifton ignoring the time that was required for initial X-raying and photographing of the remains (7:17 p.m. - 8:15 p.m.)? Summary ------- Lifton's conspiracy theory, which earns a new definition for "internal logic", requires assassins firing frangible bullets only from somewhere in front of Kennedy for the purpose of leaving the rear of his body unmarked, and for leaving only shallow entrance wounds later to be enlarged to appear as exits, and further calls for post hac accessories to the crime manually creating rear entrance wounds to mislead the autopsy surgeons. His assassins could not risk firing from behind Kennedy for fear of creating undesired trajectories (although rear- to-front trajectories are exactly what they wanted!) In Lifton's arcane world, everyone purposefully acts in a certain way to achieve diametrically opposite results. Lifton ignores that the autopsy X-rays and photos were secreted away, and that physical specimens from the autopsy are still missing, and that the chain of possession of all these items is muddled. Why would these events have occurred if, as Lifton asserts, a perfectly planned medical forgery framing Lee Harvey Oswald went undetected? Certainly it could not have been Lifton's personal qualities which endeared him to Macmillan. Lifton proudly admits how he misrepresented himself as a law student so as to get witnesses to talk (page 398). He also freely admits to surreptitiously taping his interstate telephone conversations. Liftoon claims to enjoy a profound psycho linguistic empathy and rapport with Dr. Humes, the chief autopsy pathologist. No matter what Humes has said in his testimony, Lifton always seems to know what he really means. As Professor Wrone has concluded, "In hiding his determinative philosophy, his irrationalities, aberrations, and hasty, wrong judgments [Lifton] is dishonest with the reader. ..."Best Evidence" . . . is not the objective search of a scholar, plastic in formulation, changing with the evidence, honest with his past." Why does Lifton conceal the fact that he had gone down to lecture the staff of the House Committee for the better part of a day, and fully apprised them of the theory he was pursuing? Or that he refused their request to make his manuscript available? (page 554) Is it mere coincidence that this book appeared so soon after the House Committee investigation? There is a striking parallelism between the treatment accorded to Warren Commission critics by both HSCA Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey and David S. Lifton. Blakey held a weekend conference with several Warren Commission critics in September 1977, purportedly to elicit their views under conditions of strict secrecy. He never called upon them again throughout the course of the committee's investigation, but after the committee had issued its findings he cited this conference as evidence that he had given the critics their day. Lifton picked the brains of the critics for fifteen years, adopted some of their approaches to the evidence as his own, and then purported in his journal of self-discovery to dismiss all of them. ("I felt isolated and, for the first time, saw the other Warren Report critics as mere tourists engaged in an academic exercise. I had found something fundamental -- I had glimpsed the possibility of treason." ( page 240) Both the HSCA and Lifton exonerated everyone in sight of complicity in the murder of the cover-up of the crime, leaving only sinister ghosts to blame for the assassination. An odd official silence ----------------------- The sequestration of the House Committee's files created the very environment which made possible the publication of "Best Evidence". Lifton's allegations cast such a stain on the integrity and reputation of the national government and the rule of law that one might think a forthright response would by now have been made by the government. Perhaps the official silence is due in some measure to the fact that Lifton's book is not wholly without merit. He mounts, for example, a searing indictment of the House Select Committee on Assassinations for its refusal to make public the contents of its behind-the-scenes interviews with various dramatis personae in the assassination controversy, a brazen step beyond even the Warren Commission's penchant for secrecy. (None of this material is subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, which applies only to agencies of the Executive Branch.) He also offers a painstaking and up-to-date analysis of the gross variance between what the autopsy X-rays and photos show, what the Bethesda doctors wrote in their report, and what the Parkland doctors in Dallas observed while vainly attempting to save the President's life. At bottom, however, Lifton's book belies the conceit that the assassination of President Kennedy can be "solved" through evidence that is incomplete, ambiguous and thoroughly tainted. As the late Thomas Stamm suggested, preoccupation with such evidence is equivalent to focusing on the magician's diversionary technique, which is intended to conceal and cannot explain the mechanics of his tricks. The tragic irony of David Lifton's work is that, like the Warren Commission itself, he was constrained by the lack of solid fact to resort to speculative improbability in constructing a "logical" explanation for the assassination. It is noteworthy that this technique has achieved currency in several more recently published works. Sadly, Lifton's book inaugurated a trend in the publishing industry, whereby it has seemingly become impossible for a serious, responsible student of the assassination to see his work commercially published unless he posits a neat and fanciful solution to the crime, witness such books as Reasonable Doubt by Henry Hurt, Contract on America by David Scheim, Mafia Kingfish by John H. Davis, On the Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison, and - in the realm of fiction - Libra by Don DeLillo). To date, no critique of the methodology and conclusions of the House Select Committee on Assassinations comparable to earlier published books and articles about the Warren Commission's Report has appeared in print, and it has grown increasingly unlikely that any will in the foreseeable future. Thus, the public controversy initially stirred by Edward Jay Epstein's scholarly and understated book, Inquest, which began as a thesis for his Master's Degree at Cornell University, has been fueled by pap. It is, to borrow the title of a popular song, "running on empty." Serious, valid criticisms of the medical evidence in John Kennedy's assassination have been raised by several researchers and authors, and the subject is indeed worthy of further study. Unfortunately, the erstwhile House Select Committee and the Congress as a whole have blocked our access to those very materials which could appreciably advance our knowledge. These include staff counsel interviews, sworn depositions and affidavits of participants in the creation of the medical record -- resources which cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be regarded as highly classified or related to the protection of national security. The most logical step toward satiating our hunger for the solution to a case which cannot be solved through the available evidence is to demand access to that which continues to be withheld. END