SCREWBALL "LOGIC": ROGER FEINMAN’S ABSURD ATTEMPT TO PROVE BEST EVIDENCE WAS A HOAX,
and Paint me in a False Light

By David S. Lifton
(c) Copyright 1993, by David S. Lifton. All rights reserved.
E-mail (as of 12/99):<dlifton@compuserve.com>
5/5/93

NOTE
    In April 1993, in Chicago, at the Midwest Symposium on Assassination Politics, I was one of four members of a panel of Warren Report critics, the purpose being to debate four representatives of JAMA. Serving on the same panel, with me, was Roger Feinman. When it came Roger’s turn to speak, he opened his remarks with an attack on me and Best Evidence: i.e., he attacked a co-panelist, rather than the other side. Then, after returning from Chicago, Feinman posted a 5,000 word attack on me and my work on the Compuserve Llibrary; moreover, he has been using the Compuserve bulletin board throughout much of April, 1993, to attack me and my book.
    I have written a two part response. My primary response to Feinman is titled: "BEYOND ME": WHO IS ROGER FEINMAN? (and why does he hate me so much?)…This companion essay, dealing more directly with my book, is titled: "SCREWBALL ‘LOGIC’: ROGER FEINMAN’S ABSURD ATTEMPT TO PROVE BEST EVIDENCE WAS A HOAX, and Paint me in a False Light."

PREFACE (written in May, 1993)
    Roger Feinman, age 45, is a Manhattan attorney. In the mid-seventies, before he went to law school, he worked for CBS News, a job from which he was fired in 1976. Recently, he has attacked me and my work on the Compuserve bulletin board. Here is an excerpt of what he has recently said about me and my book.

    In his 5,000 word Compuserve essay, Feinman attacks my book, which he simply cannot accept as the original work of a scholar, representing the honest effort of 15 years. He claims otherwise:
    "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…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."
    And another: "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?"
    And another: "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…Lifton's "solution" to the crime arose as the expedient method of overcoming the obstacle of the autopsy photography and concluding this odyssey."
    And still another: "…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."
    When I see Roger Feinman’s posts on Compuserve, I am reminded of these lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, "IF":

"If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves and make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, and stoop and build them up with worn out tools…"

    "Truth" and "twisted" are two words that come to mind in dealing with Roger Feinman’s essay, and particularly, his view of me and my work. And frankly, I don’t know whether to be angry with him, or just pity him. Angry, because so many of the remarks he makes are false and insulting; pity, because I know something about Feinman’s background, and why he is behaving this way. Yet I worry that people new to this case might read his nonsense and believe him. The "Big Lie" has worked in other situations in the past. I have no intention of letting that happen here.
    Consequently, I have written two responses to Feinman’s essay, both of which are being placed in the Compuserve library. One, the document you are now reading, addresses Feinman’s ridiculous charges about how Best Evidence came to be written. The other addresses the question of Roger Feinman himself—who he is, and how he came to mount this smear campaign against me and my book. That document is titled: "‘BEYOND ME’: Who is Roger Feinman? (and why does he hate me so much?)" In the Compuserve Library, these two documents are listed as "BESTEVID.2XX" and "BESTEVID.1XX," respectively.
    I advise any reader who wants additional background information on Feinman, and his campaign against me and Best Evidence, to read "BEYOND ME." Besides addressing Feinman’s absurd claims, it provides much interesting information about what was going on in the Kennedy assassination research movement during the 70s and 80s.

INTRODUCTION
    In his essay, Feinman makes a series of false claims about how I came to write Best Evidence, and about my path of discovery. Anyone who has read Best Evidence knows that, because it is written in the first person, and chronologically lays out the evidence while at the same time telling my own story of its discovery, the book is completely documented. Consequently, the book itself, and particularly the footnotes (which document the story of who I interviewed, and when)—constitute a detailed record of my path of discovery. Many people keep diaries, or journals. Although I, too, keep one, I don’t have to resort to it. Because of the close connection between my life and my work on the assassination, the footprints I left on the public record constitute just such an account.
    In short, my life and my work are inextricably related, and Feinman’s absurd attempt to hold me up to ridicule, and paint me in a false light, are not only without merit, they display a stunning degree of ignorance of the documentation published in my book, and make me wonder about his abilities to understand what he is reading—in short, about his basic competence when it comes to analyzing matters of fact.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BEST EVIDENCE
    Best Evidence presents a radical approach to the evidence in the Kennedy assassination, one that I believe will be vindicated, historically; one which, if there was a special prosecutor, could provide a valuable roadmap for a new investigation. The fundamental thesis of Best Evidence is that President Kennedy’s body was altered prior to autopsy—and by altered, I mean, the removal of bullets from the body and the alteration of wounds on the body so that the cadaver, at autopsy, was a medical forgery. Best Evidence explains why two groups of doctors who saw the body six hours apart—the emergency room doctors at Dallas and the autopsy doctors at Bethesda—arrived at completely different conclusions about the number and direction of the shots. The evidence for my work falls into three main categories—and in each case, Roger Feinman misrepresents and distorts not only the evidence, but the story of its discovery.

 BEST EVIDENCE—THREE CATEGORIES OF EVIDENCE:

Category I: What the doctors said at Bethesda, according to the FBI
Category II: Wound alteration
Category III: Evidence of interception of the body

THE EVIDENCE—CATEGORY ONE: What the doctors said at Bethesda, according to the FBI
    This is the evidence that the doctors at Bethesda recognized there had been alteration in the area of the head, and said so aloud (i.e., their statement, as recorded by the FBI, that there had been "surgery of the head area, namely in the top of the skull." ) This is discussed and analyzed in detailed in Chapter 12. Contrary to Feinman’s attempt to misrepresent this as an FBI error, Chapter 12 follows the documentary trail of evidence, starting with my discovery of the "surgery" statement in the widely published Sibert and O’Neill report in October of 1966, my call to the FBI about this matter in November 1966, and then goes on to present statements from 1966 FBI internal documents (with my name in them) generated as a result of my phone call and letter (now available under the Freedom of Information Act), stating that the agents wrote down the statement because one of the doctors said it. All this is laid out in Chapter 12 of BEST EVIDENCE.
    The FBI documents themselves tell the story of my involvement. Feinman’s denial of that evidence is ludicrous. (Does he think I connived with the FBI to create a false trail of discovery for my own literary purposes, 13 years later?)

THE EVIDENCE—CATEGORY TWO: Changes in the size and shape of the wounds between Dallas and Bethesda
    President Kennedy’s body was seen by two groups of doctors, and both sets of observations are in the record. Best Evidence analyzes those observations, and presents the case that both in the area of the head and the neck, the wounds were different (which explains why the Dallas and Bethesda doctors arrived at different conclusions concerning the number and direction of the shots). The conclusion of Best Evidence: these differences cannot be explained by observational error. Both the throat wound and the head wound were altered. The throat wound data is presented in Chapter 11; the head wound data, in Chapter 13.
    Moreover, as anyone can see from just reading these two chapters (and looking at the footnotes, which sometimes include references to my 1966 interviews with the Dallas doctors), this material was put together starting in the fall of 1966. Moreover, in October 1966 I brought this matter to the attention of a Warren Commission attorney, Wesley Liebeler, who was quite amazed at the existence of this FBI statement and fully understood its legal and historical implications (See my Chapter 9, where I described what occurred at our meeting). Then I assisted Liebeler who drafted a memorandum on the subject which went to the White House, the Justice Department, the Kennedy family attorney, and every member of the Warren Commission.
     In Best Evidence, my own experiences during this extraordinary period of my life are faithfully recorded.
     The story of that November 1966 memorandum is set forth in Chapter 10 of Best Evidence ("The Liebeler Memorandum") and the memo itself is now available at the Gerald Ford Library, at the Richard Russell library, and at the Justice Department, under the Freedom of Information Act. Finally, I should point out that at the recent Midwest Symposium on Assassination Politics, I played portions of one of my November 1966 conversations with Commander Humes, in which I confronted Dr. Humes with the implications of body alteration and head surgery, as set forth in the Sibert and O’Neill FBI report.
    Aside from the fact that the tape is directly quoted, in detail, in my Chapter 10, Roger Feinman was in the audience and could hear that crystal-clear tape, as it was played. He can hardly make the claim, in good faith, that, 10 years after that conversation, I had no evidence, or that I was making up an account to suit a publisher. That is simply a lie.
    While anyone is free to argue with my interpretation of the evidence (and Best Evidence doesn’t claim that it proves a theory, in the sense that a geometric theorem can be "proved"), to make the claim that I didn’t discover the things I did, when the incontrovertible facts prove otherwise, simply amazes me. What Feinman is saying is that my life didn’t happen as it really did.
    Is Feinman joking? Does he understand what he is really saying? Or does he simply not care? In his July 1992 Third Decade article, writing about his choice of profession, Feinman wisecracked: "I wanted to become a lawyer and get away with lots of stuff, too." Well, I will not permit him to get away with re-writing the history of my life.
    Feinman’s false statements about the sequence of discoveries that I made and insights that I had pervade his entire essay. And that same outrageous pattern again occurs when he attempts to deal with the third major area of my work.

CATEGORY THREE: Evidence that the body was intercepted—i.e., that the body did not make an uninterrupted journey between Dallas and Bethesda.
    The evidence of interception concerns two areas of my investigation, which (for the purposes of this essay) I will designate as area A and area B. Area A concerns the evidence that something occurred at Bethesda in the hour preceding the start of the autopsy. Area B concerns the evidence that something occurred shortly before the takeoff of Air Force One from Dallas. There is an important logical relationship between these two areas of evidence—discovered 12 years apart—which correspond to different chapters in my book (and which, indeed, correspond to two different times of the day, on November 22, 1963).
    The "ambulance chase" evidence (Area A), discovered in 1967, led me to believe, for many years, that President Kennedy’s body had been altered just prior to autopsy, somewhere in the vicinity of Bethesda Naval Hospital (See Chapter 16 of Best Evidence). The 1979 discoveries (Area B) set forth in Chapters 25 and 26 forced me to conclude otherwise: that the subterfuge began much earlier in the day, prior to the takeoff of Air Force One. The principle is the same (that the body had been intercepted) but the details are different.
    Later in Best Evidence, I explain how both are manifestations of the same problem—that the body was intercepted (Area A evidence), and then re-introduced (Area B evidence) into the coffin in which it had started its journey.

AREA A: The ambulance chase at Bethesda (See chapter 16)
    As described in Chapter 16 of my book, I discovered, in 1967, from interviews with members of the multi-service casket team (the uniformed honor guard that met Air Force One, when it landed at Andrews), that there had been a "break" in the chain of possession on President Kennedy’s body. The suspicious circumstances revolved around the use of a "decoy" ambulance and an ambulance chase that took place during this critical period.
    After the telephone interviews, I then conducted an in-person tape recorded interview with one member of the team, James Felder, in early 1968.
    In short, by the end of December 1967, I not only had a case that the wounds were different in two areas of the body, but I had the beginnings of a theory as to when and where the body had been intercepted—on the east coast, at Bethesda, in connection with the events surrounding the ambulance chase.
    Does Feinman believe that I made up these 1967 interviews? If he does, what is his evidence? Who is the voice on the phone?

BRIEFING OF DOCTOR CYRIL WECHT—JANUARY 1971
    As described in detail in Chapter 20 of my book, I tried, in January 1971, to solicit Dr. Wecht’s help in connection with my work. At that time, I gathered together all my interview tapes and documents and flew from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh for a day-long meeting with Dr. Wecht, who was then Coroner of Allegheny County. When it was over, he requested that I send him what we had discussed in written form. Consequently, I spent about a month writing a series of lengthy memoranda. In many key areas, those memos correspond exactly to what is in Best Evidence, chapter by chapter. Memos on the alteration of the neck wound (Chapter 11), on the alteration of the head wound (Chapter 13), on the statement in the Sibert and O’Neill report re surgery (Chapter 12), on the theory of a Pre-Autopsy autopsy (Chapter 18), and even on Trajectory Reversal (Chapter 14).
    Indeed, when I came to actually draft the chapters, I used these "Summary Research Memos", written from David Lifton to Dr. Cyril Wecht, and drafted in February of 1971, as my guide.
    These memos were written five years before I met my agent, Peter Shepherd (in 1976), and five years before the House Assassinations Committee.
    My detailed briefing of Dr. Wecht in January of 1971, and the written record created after that briefing clearly refute Feinman’s ridiculous claim that basic parts of my theory were conceived, at the last minute, because my literary agent dreamed up the idea to inject a personal narrative, and that I did so out of an "urgent need for cash." And then, because my "personal story" needed an ending, I dreamed up the trajectory reversal theory about the alteration of the President’s wounds.
    Only by twisting one’s mind into a pretzel is it possible to follow Feinman’s convoluted reasoning.
    Now let us revisit some of Feinman’s complaints. (In them, I hear the voice of a whiny envious child):

(1) "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? [My response: I did no such thing. My book is totally original.] The reason is that he had nothing. This semi-mythical manuscript which he told people he was working on…could not have contained anything more than a pedestrian rehashing of a well-covered area which, by the late 1970s, many found just plain boring." [Response: Oh really? If so, then why did Time Magazine devote two full pages to Best Evidence as a news story (See Jan 12, 1981 Time).]

(2) "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?" [Roger: Please speak to me privately, and I will explain to you how difficult writing can be, especially when dealing with material as complicated as Best Evidence, which I don’t think you understand.]

(3) "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."

    This last one is a real stunner. Feinman is so off base he actually believes I made up the theory in my book, to provide the ending to a personal account, rather than the reverse: that I started with the evidence, formulated the theory, and then, years later, decided to blend the story of my journey with my analysis of the evidence, in order to make it easier to read, and to find a publisher.
    Roger Feinman’s problem, really, is that he doesn’t understand or appreciate the incredible amount of work—thinking, record keeping, researching, and writing—that went into writing Best Evidence. One reason for that is that he has never written a book himself. Indeed, except for his ravings on the Compuserve bulletin board, and one article in Third Decade, I know of nothing else of his that has ever been published. The other problem is that, from what I can see, Roger Feinman is simply not a very good thinker. He does not reason logically, and he is not particularly original. He cannot truly comprehend what I found, much less my own process of discovery; nor does he understand the work involved in writing what is a complex manuscript.
    When I see Feinman glibly reversing cause and effect (see his point 3 above), I wonder how he got through law school, and how he can function in his chosen profession.
    As stated previously, the ambulance chase evidence led me to believe that President Kennedy’s body had been intercepted on the east coast, practically on the doorstep of Bethesda Naval Hospital, about an hour prior to autopsy. But in 1979, I discovered other evidence, and that changed my view completely. It also led to the final chapters of Best Evidence.

EVIDENCE OF INTERCEPTION—AREA B
    Evidence of an intercept in Dallas, prior to the takeoff of Air Force One from Love Field.
    Working off a newspaper lead supplied by Wallace Milam, I located and interviewed Dennis David (the Officer of the Day at Bethesda) in July 1979 (see Chapter 25). Dennis David’s account, if accurate, established that the body arrived at Bethesda BEFORE the Navy ambulance carrying the Dallas casket. This meant the Dallas casket was empty.
    Contrary to Feinman’s statement that Dennis Davis is a "man who knows nothing" (because he didn’t actually enter the morgue) his statement (supported by others I located) implied that the Dallas casket was empty.
    If so, then the subterfuge had started in Dallas, at some time prior to the take off of Air Force One. My analysis for this is set forth in Chapters 25, 28 and 31.
    Within a month of interviewing Dennis David, the report of the House Assassinations Committee was released, and that led to the discovery that a medical technician named Paul O’Connor said the body had arrived in a body bag. I located O’Connor and interviewed him in August 1979. Dennis David and Paul O’Connor didn’t know each other. I located them both in the summer of 1979. Both said the body arrived at Bethesda in a shipping casket—Dennis David because he was a witness to that casket being off loaded from a black hearse and being brought to the room; Paul O’Connor because, inside the room, he opened the casket.
    Paul O’Connor said three things that were particularly important:

(1) the coffin brought to the room was a shipping casket (corroborating Dennis David);
(2) the body—inside the coffin—was in a body bag;
(3) The cranium was empty (corroborating the FBI report which stated that surgery had occurred prior to the arrival of the body in the Bethesda morgue).

    The Dennis David/Paul O’Connor evidence was crucial--because it established (since the casket was different, and because it arrived shortly before Mrs. Kennedy, with the Dallas casket) that the subterfuge must have started in Dallas, prior to the takeoff of Air Force One. My reasoning: Because if the President’s body was in a shipping casket, then the Dallas casket must have been empty…at least, empty from the moment Air Force One took off (Jackie was with it from that moment, until the Bethesda front entrance).
    I have sometimes referred to the Dennis David/Paul O’Connor evidence as the basis for my "Air Force One insight."
    Feinman tries to change this sequence of what I discovered, and when I discovered it; that is, what I knew and when I knew it. He falsely claims that I had nothing until after the House Report was published. Had the House Committee report never occurred, I would still have the account of Dennis David (Chapter 25)—who I found in July 1979, and who is mentioned nowhere in the House Report.
    But more than that, Feinman’s claim ignores a whole sequence of events connected with my work, spanning some 15 years. Skipping all the research and investigation, Feinman’s screwball claim ignores the contract with Macmillan (based on the book as written out to Chapter 10) which was signed around Christmas, 1978; the manuscript, exactly as published, written out to chapter 23 by about August 1979. And, finally, had the House Committee report never occurred, as I mentioned, I would still have my "Air Force One insight," because of the account of Dennis David (Chapter 25)—who, to repeat, is someone I found, and who is mentioned nowhere in the House Report.
    Again I must say it is rather outrageous to read these false statements written by someone who hardly knows me, yet who writes and distributes an essay containing numerous false assertions about how events unfolded in my life, about what I knew and when I knew it, etc.—especially when I know, and the record indicates, otherwise! (And I am referring here not just to when I believed this or that, but to provable events: to the dates interviews occurred, to the dates manuscript material existed and was submitted to publishers, and, finally to the date a publishing contract was signed (Dec. 1978). Further, the close friends of mine named in my acknowledgments would all bear witness to the chronology of my 15 years of work, and the struggle to get Best Evidence published.
    I would like to return to Roger Feinman’s basic charge: that I invented the theory in order to fulfill a book contract. Feinman actually states: "It is not the body alteration/two casket scenario which preceded Lifton’s view of the physical/medical legal evidence, but vice versa. The seemingly insoluble dilemma of that evidence dictated that he invent this ghost story."
    Let me now summarize the sort of evidence Roger Feinman, attorney at law, must ignore, in making these fantastic charges:

     All this documentary evidence must be ignored by attorney Roger Feinman to sustain his asinine theory that I fabricated my book, in 1978, because of "an urgent need for cash," and because Peter Shepherd, my agent, who couldn’t find a publisher, suggested (wisely, as it turned out) that I recast what had been a rather elegant (but abstract) manuscript, into a first person narrative.
    To sum it all up—Roger Feinman is not just ignoring a pile of documentary evidence; he is ignoring my life, as I lived it.
    In a court of law, Feinman’s absurd charge wouldn’t stand a chance (and I personally think he is guilty of libel in promulgating such false and ridiculous accusations).
    But secondly, just consider the preposterous reversal of cause and effect that is going on in his (Feinman’s) head—that I didn’t write a book because I had evidence for a theory but that I came up with the theory, at the last minute, to find an ending for a book!
    In evaluating Feinman’s absurdity, I am reminded of a situation that is now taking place in my own family. A young cousin of mine from Denver, a doctor, age 42, has had serious heart disease all his life. He struggled to get through medical school, practiced many years, has a wonderful wife and two kids, and then learned he needed a heart transplant. While waiting for his transplant, he made the acquaintance of a Denver writer, who, impressed with his struggle, decided to record his experiences.
    Finally, the day came, cousin Joe got the crucial phone call; someone had died, the heart was harvested; it was right: the medical parameters matched.
    Accompanied by his wife and family and the Denver writer, Bobby went into the hospital, his chest was cut open, and he received his new heart. So far, he is living well; and in fact is now back skiing "expert" in Colorado. Moreover, the manuscript of his experiences, co-written with the Denver writer, is now with a major new York publisher. (It has since been published by Simon and Schuster). If Roger Feinman were evaluating this situation, he would ignore the history of my cousin’s heart condition, which goes back many years. Instead, he would undoubtedly post an essay on the Compuserve bulletin board saying that my cousin had his heart replaced, so he could write a book!
    This is the sort of nonsense, character assassination, and reckless disregard for truth which pervades Feinman’s essay as well as other writings on Compuserve.
    To conclude, I would like to pose the question many readers of Feinman’s ludicrous essay, and my response, may now be asking: Just who is Roger Feinman and why is he behaving this way? Indeed, that is a good question.
    Who is this man, and why does he behave this way? Why is it that he cannot grasp the fact that my life and my work are one and the same? The answer, in a nutshell, is that in Feinman’s life, they are not. To explore this breach further, and, moreover, to explore as well what happened to the Kennedy assassination research movement from the mid-60s to the late 70s, and even into the 80s (and specifically, what happened to Feinman during this period) I suggest you read the companion essay (to this piece), which I am posting separately on the net tonight (also on under the title, "Who is Roger Feinman?"
    The title of that essay is: "‘BEYOND ME’: Who is Roger Feinman (and why does he hate me so much)?"

David Lifton
Los Angeles, California
5/5/93
E-mail (as of 12/99): <dlifton@compuserve.com>

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