"BEYOND ME": WHO IS ROGER FEINMAN?
(and why does he hate me so much?)

by David Lifton
(Copyright 1993, all rights reserved)

David Lifton
11500 West Olympic Blvd., Suite 400; L.A. CA 90064
TEL: (310) 445 2300; FAX: 310 445 2301
E-mail: (Dec. 1999):) <dlifton@compuserve.com>
5/5/93

PREFACE
    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 to his home from Chicago, Feinman posted a 5,000 word attack on me and my work on the Compuserve Library; 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. This essay, is my primary response to Feinman. A 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."

INTRODUCTION
    Roger Feinman, age 45, is a New York City attorney. In the mid-seventies, after graduating from Queens College and before he went to law school, he worked for CBS News, a job from which he was fired in 1976, when he was 28 years old. In an article explaining why he was fired, ("The Greatest Secret I Ever Learned About the Kennedy Assassination," published in Third Decade, July, 1992) Feinman recounted a lesson he had learned: "…I have learned never to tell anyone that he is wrong. Telling someone he’s wrong only makes him defensive. When he gets defensive, his adrenaline starts pumping a little faster, and calm discussion becomes even harder."
    Here are some excerpts from Roger Feinman’s recent writings (April, 1993) on Compuserve national bulletin board concerning me and my work, Best Evidence:

    In a subsequent Compuserve exchange, after he had calmed down, Feinman opined to someone who had come to my defense:

    "Beyond me..."; Beyond Roger Feinman? Well, let us attempt to journey to that land of the "beyond."
    [INSTRUCTION TO SOUNDMAN! Please begin playing the theme music from "The Twilight Zone."]
    VOICE: An alert reader, and especially anyone who has taken Psychology 101, may discern, at this point, that something is seriously out of kilter here: Roger Feinman does not seem to be in touch with his feelings.
    Moreover, inasmuch as Best Evidence was published 12 years ago, Feinman’s reaction, at this late date, seems peculiar. To borrow language from the Single Bullet Theory, Roger Feinman seems to be having a "delayed reaction."
    Why is that?
    This brings us to the subject of this essay: Just Who is Roger Feinman (and why does he hate me so much)?
    [SOUNDMAN: Please fade out the music. We are about to get serious.]
    Roger Feinman always wanted to write a book on the Kennedy assassination, but he never did. Instead, he became a lawyer (insurance law).
    Something else about Roger Feinman—he never out-grew his "ideological mother," Sylvia Meagher, author of Accessories After the Fact, the very fine critique of the Warren Report published in 1967. Roger met Sylvia in the Spring of 1975, when he was an employee at CBS News, and was just turning 27. In his July 1992 Third Decade article, Roger refers to her as "my best friend" and as someone who "became my only mentor on the assassination." Indeed, this relationship existed from about the time Roger turned 27, until Sylvia’s death, in 1989, when she was in her 60s, and Roger was 40. Prior to Sylvia, Roger had other heroes. Roger’s hero at CBS News, producer Joe Wershba, warned Feinman that "the Kennedy assassination is like a poison in the bloodstream: once it grabbed hold of you, it never let go. He knew that it was all too easy to become lost in the labyrinthine intricacies of the case…" Moreover, writes Roger: "Joe Wershba saw that I was lost in the case."
    One has to go back some 18 or 20 years to see the roots of Feinman’s anger towards me and Best Evidence because there is a major difference between Roger Feinman and me: I didn’t get lost, I found my way out of the labyrinth—psychologically, physically, and professionally. I have a book that has been in print now for twelve years, with four different publishers. And a video. And I’m now writing another book. But Roger’s anger is more than one man’s personal disagreement with another man’s book. It gets down to basic stuff, such as who he is, and certain life choices he has made: life choices about work, and life choices about what to believe. Life choices about who to make your best friend.
    Sylvia Meagher (pronounced "Marr") was a well respected researcher but—and this is an important but—from the outset, she clung to the idea that the Warren Commission was a deliberate cover-up; that the problem was with the investigators, not with the evidence. Hence, her book and its title: Accessories After the Fact: The Warren Commission, the Authorities, & The Report. (emphasis added). She believed the mistaken conclusions of the Warren Report, which she documented with considerable skill, were deliberate, as if the Warren Commission and its staff were a conspiracy of liars (i.e., the evidence was there for all to see, but the Commission attorneys had not told the truth). Sylvia actually believed—and told me so—that the Warren Commission attorneys could (and should) be disbarred for the Warren Report. They were the culprits.
    I had an active correspondence with Sylvia Meagher in 1965 and much of 1966, when I was a graduate student at UCLA, and about 27, the same age Roger was when he first met Sylvia some nine years later. In October 1966, in the aftermath of the first wave of books on the Kennedy assassination (Inquest by Edward Epstein; Rush to Judgment, by Mark Lane), UCLA law professor Wesley Liebeler, who I had come to know, decided to teach a law seminar on the Warren Commission. He invited me to attend, and to play devil’s advocate. It was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Sylvia Meagher. I know that to some Sylvia Meagher was a warm and charming lady. That was not the side I got to see. She was deeply angered by Liebeler’s law seminar and by my attending that class—and the result was not just disagreement, it was cold fury; screaming and shouting on the telephone, angry letters, and finally, a disruption of the relationship. (I know that on the pages of her book, Mrs. Meagher comes off as a paragon of reason, but that is not the way she was with me.) Frankly, I found her view of the Warren Commission staff intolerant.
    Moreover, I was constantly amazed at Sylvia’s propensity to confuse the messenger with the message—and by that I mean, to blame the investigators, but not the evidence. (It is almost like blaming the newspaper, for the news. And this mode of thinking, I believe, indicates a seriously flawed perception of reality.) Much of this was detailed in Best Evidence—where I described what happened between me and Mrs. Meagher, because I was acutely aware that a whole generation of researchers looked up to her, and followed her book; and were caught up in this mode of dealing with certain very serious issues (e.g., contradictions in the medical evidence) as if the Warren Commission was the problem, not the evidence. I believe that is a serious error. It was a central insight obtained from attending Liebeler’s class at UCLA that any group of conservative attorneys, starting with the Commission’s evidence, would arrive at the Commission’s conclusion (and to make this point, I often joke at lectures, "To start with the Commission’s evidence and arrive at the Commission’s conclusions, you don’t have to be a member of a conspiracy; you just have to have gone to law school.")
    The most important evidence in this assassination is the body of the President. In 1966, I made the discovery that the FBI reported surgery (in the Sibert and O’Neill report, a document discovered by Paul Hoch and then published in several books). I brought that discovery to Professor Liebeler, and he thought it important enough to send a memorandum to the White House, the Kennedy family, and other members of the Commission (See chapter 10, Best Evidence, "The Liebeler Memorandum"). When it was clear that the Government was not going to do anything about the situation, I decided to conduct my own investigation, see where it would lead, and write a book. During the time I was writing and researching my work, I was subject to a stream of anger and ridicule from Sylvia Meagher. One has to flash forward 10-15 years to when Best Evidence was being finalized and brought to publication (circa, 1975-1980), to pick up the Roger Feinman thread of the story. During part of this period, for several years prior to 1976, while I was researching the assassination and writing my manuscript, Roger, having graduated from Queens College, was working as an employee at CBS News. As everyone should know, CBS News played a major role in rehabilitating the Warren Report in a famous four hour CBS News Special, aired on successive nights in June, 1967; and then in a re-fashioned one-hour version, broadcast in 1975. Roger worked in a low level position at CBS, and during that employment (and "on my own time," as he was careful to note in a letter he wrote to me two years later) he became involved in researching the Kennedy assassination and met several critics of the Warren Report—notably, Sylvia Meagher. He disagreed with the way CBS handled the assassination. In his Third Decade article, Roger explains how he felt at the time: "Back then, I thought that the senior management of CBS News was part of the grand conspiracy to cover up the truth of the assassination. They were more than wrong, I felt. They seemed suspicious." (emphasis added). Roger’s manner of expressing his objections to CBS policy didn’t go over very well. As a much-chastened Roger Feinman tells it in 1992: "Eventually, they fired me."
    During his tenure at CBS, Roger acquired information about how CBS News had put together its four part series defending the Warren Report, broadcast in June 1967. It was information that he darkly hinted was "explosive." Unfortunately, Roger could never ignite his "explosion." One reason, maybe, was that there was not much to explode. Another, as I understood it, was that once he went to law school, he could really never own up to how he obtained his information and keep his professional credentials intact. Still another was that Roger just had a lot of trouble sitting down and writing. Roger could contemplate, he could argue, he could debate, he could pontificate—but he couldn’t sit down and write a book.
    Let me make clear that—aside from his very revealing article in Third Decade—I do not know Roger Feinman all that well, and he doesn’t know me very well either. Over the course of the last 17 years or so (and for 12 years, from 1979 until 1991, I had absolutely no contact with the man) I have had, maybe, 10 conversations with him, and more recently, particularly in preparation for the debate with Dr. George Lundberg and other representatives of JAMA at the Midwest Symposium on Assassination Politics, held in Chicago, I had some additional contact with Feinman. Since we were both on the same four-man panel facing reps from JAMA, there were some E-Mail exchanges (we both have MCI mailboxes). But returning to 1976-78 and to my first contacts with him, from the outset, I picked up on several things. One was his concern as to whether or not he was "obsessed" with the Kennedy assassination; another was his relationship with Sylvia Meagher; and another was the suspicion with which he treated me.
    I first crossed paths with Feinman around 1976, and the transaction wasn’t all that pleasant.

SUMMER OF 1976: FEINMAN AND TRANSCRIPT 1327-C
    I was living at the time in Los Angeles and was working on a section of my manuscript concerning the throat wound. As everyone knows, the Dallas doctors held a press conference after the President’s death, and Dr. Perry was quoted as saying he thought the wound at the front of the throat was an entrance wound. The Bethesda doctors designated it an exit in their autopsy report, and the question arose as to whether the Dallas doctors were correct, or whether they had been misquoted. No film or audio tape could be found of the press conference, nor was there any transcript—at least, these were the facts as presented in the Warren Report.
    However, in the four part CBS News Special aired in June 1967, Walter Cronkite made reference to a transcript. What transcript? Who had it? In 1968, I tried vigorously to obtain that transcript from CBS, and was in touch with one of the show’s producers—but to no avail.
    Subsequently, around 1976, I heard that there was a young man in his 20s, that he worked in a low level position at CBS news, that he was an assassination buff of sorts, that he had discovered the transcript in CBS’ files, and that he had a copy. His name was Roger Feinman. At the same time, I learned that he was a friend of Sylvia Meagher (whose book had been published in 1967). I saw trouble ahead.
    When I telephoned Feinman for a copy (summer, 1976), there was a certain amount of tension. He didn’t want to make available the copy he had, nor explain to me where it could be obtained. I made clear to Feinman that matters of truth were more important to me than where this document originated; that it was vital to my work; that I was more than willing to protect a source (i.e., Roger), but that I had to have the document. After some bickering, Roger revealed that the document was publicly available at the JFK library (actually, as it turned out, it was the LBJ library). As was explained to me—perhaps by Roger, or maybe someone else I spoke with—CBS had obtained its copy from White House files during the preparation of its four part (June 1967) documentary, Roger had found the document at CBS, and then, tracing its origins, had learned that, for record keeping purposes, it was considered a White House Press Conference designated "1327-C;" moreover, that its transcript was, therefore, officially available at the Presidential library. I immediately sent for a copy (this is August, 1976), and so I soon received two copies in the mail—one from the LBJ library, in response to my direct request to the Archivist, and one from Roger Feinman, who was very careful to send me a copy of his "LBJ Library copy", and not anything he had access to from CBS files. (Later, Roger would charge on Compuserve that I deliberately "duplicated" his effort to create the impression that I "discovered" the transcript myself. (Pure nonsense. As a writer, I needed my own copy from the National Archives. I have never claimed credit for Feinman’s discovery.)
    The transcript was important. It proved, once and for all, that Dr. Perry said—three times—that the wound at the front of the throat was an entrance. Because the story of how this transcript came to exist was interesting, I wanted to tell that story, and of course give full credit to Feinman in my book.
    In October 1976, I moved from L.A. to New York City, in connection with my stepped up efforts to find a publisher. Sometime in 1976 or 1977, after a meeting with my literary agent, I met Feinman for the first (and only time, until 1991) in a New York City coffee shop. I was 37; he was about 28.
    There was a lot of uncertainty in both our lives. I had not yet found a publisher for the several hundred page rather technical manuscript (originally titled "Scenario for Treason") that I had brought to New York City. However, there was some significant interest, notably, at W.W. Norton where Evan Thomas, William Manchester’s editor, wanted to give it a green light (but had been overruled by the President of Norton, George Brockway, who believed the Warren Report). At a meeting with Thomas, I had talked at some length about my own personal journey in researching the case, and, upon hearing some of my "war stories," Evan had raised the possibility of my manuscript being more accessible to the average reader (and more salable to a publisher) if it could be recast in the form of a personal narrative. Peter Shepherd, my literary agent, thought this was a good idea, and we (Peter and I) had extensive discussions about how to go about it. Peter said that if I would write it, he would guide me in doing so. Writing is hard, it was an arduous process—and taking a lot of time. Writing "on spec"—i.e., without a publishing contract (but with the hope of obtaining one)—was a major gamble, a major personal decision entailing some major risks. As I say, it was a major crossroads in my life. Roger, it seemed, was at a cross roads of sorts in his own life. Having been fired from CBS News, he was trying to decide whether to go to law school, which law school, etc. He was also involved in a legal action against CBS, and also very interested in writing about the assassination.
    I felt a little bit sorry for him. He had received rejections from four magazines on one piece he submitted: The Village Voice, New Times, New York, and the New Yorker. On one or more occasions, he had submitted under a pseudonym. When I looked at Roger Feinman, I saw a very fresh faced naive young man, who thought he knew much more than he did. Moreover, while he obviously didn’t trust me (and I had my own idea where that attitude stemmed from) he was also curious about me. Meanwhile, I was also engaged in another writing project. Along with Jeff Cohen (now the head of FAIR), I had written a major piece on the King assassination, which was a cover story in New Times magazine. When I was flown down to Washington and briefed the Committee on my King work, Roger asked me whether I had told the Committee, in my talk, about him; I told him I had not, but would gladly mention his name in a follow-up communication (which I did). Although Roger never told me what he was doing at the time, it is now clear, from his July 1992 Third Decade article, that he was apparently pursuing with the House Select Committee on Assassinations his theory that certain high level CBS executives were involved in the grand cover-up. As Feinman wrote in July 1992, "I was…frightened by the experience that I had with these men."

FEINMAN’S ‘CONSPIRACY’
    From Feinman’s standpoint, one indicator of sinister activity was something he learned had happened at the time of the four June 1967 programs: CBS’ employment, in an important position, of a Warren Commissioner’s daughter (Ellen McCloy, daughter of John McCloy), in the office of CBS News President Richard Salant. Indeed, Ellen McCloy was Salant’s administrative assistant. Not only was Salant the immediate superior of Ellen McCloy, there was, as a result, a line of communication, through his daughter, between those working on the show and John McCloy. Here and there, McCloy’s advice was sought, and, probably as a result of his daughter’s connection, McCloy did something he never did before and would never do again: he granted a fairly lengthy filmed interview, one that was excerpted, in part, on the show, and was an entire episode on CBS’ Face the Nation in June 1967. Feinman thought the back-door connection to John McCloy via his daughter, Ellen, had been improper—and what particularly irked Roger was that, years later in the mid-seventies, when Roger was at CBS and had learned about all this, John McCloy had refused to grant him, Roger, an interview. McCloy corresponded with Salant about Roger’s interview request resulting in letters which, in Roger’s own words, "contained defamatory remarks and private information about me." Roger later wrote that "McCloy’s refusal to speak with me" on top of the fact that Ellen McCloy had been employed by Salant, "upset me further."*
    Feinman appears to have thought of himself, at CBS, as something of an insider. For example, in his Third Decade article, Feinman revealed that he had access to "a small snippet" of the June 1967 McCloy interview that was never broadcast or released publicly, because, in Feinman’s words, "McCloy had taken a badly worded jab" at Jim Garrison. At some point, Roger was fired. He believes he was fired "for asking questions about CBS’s handling of the Warren Report." Exactly what questions Roger asked I don’t know, because he had never discussed this with me, nor has he made any memos he may have written at the time (or any other information to which he may have had access) available. But one thing seems clear. In Roger’s world, CBS’ behavior toward him and their alleged cover-up of the JFK assassination had to some extent merged; and, in any event, become so intertwined that he brought what was, at least partially, his own grievance with his employer to a Congressional committee investigating the Kennedy assassination. Writing in Third Decade, he explained it this way: "I decided as a matter of conscience that I had to submit my evidence concerning the McCloy-CBS dealings to the House Select Committee especially since McCloy was expected to be called as a witness."
    So Roger sent the House Committee what he felt were crucial documents. As he himself admits (again, in Third Decade, these are Roger’s own words): "I sent Professor Blakey a small collection of documents, carefully selected and arranged to make these dealings seem as conspiratorial as I thought they were." Roger had obtained the correspondence between John McCloy and others generated as a result of McCloy’s refusal to see Roger and connected with the employment of McCloy’s daughter at CBS. As previously noted, "The materials contained defamatory remarks and private information about me…" wrote Feinman, adding: "Looking at these documents in isolation and in the abstract, one might hastily conclude [this was, Roger’s interpretation, remember—DL] that criminal activity had occurred in connection with the 1967 CBS broadcasts."
    In understanding the difference between Roger Feinman and myself, one must understand this vast difference in perspective. When I think of "criminal activity," I think of the secret alteration of John Kennedy’s body, activity that would mislead the autopsy doctors, the FBI, and the Warren Commission. When I talk of criminal activity, I am not talking of how CBS or the New York Times did or did not show bias in their coverage, and even "covered up" the event. Roger Feinman’s idea of "criminal activity"—at least back then—concerned why CBS News agreed with the Warren Report (and maybe, even, why CBS News fired him). Roger was doing with CBS exactly what Sylvia Meagher was doing with the Warren Commission attorneys. Roger was dealing with the messenger; rather than the message. I was (and still am) dealing with the message—i.e., the evidence. Moreover, if there is one thing I have learned over the years it is this: one sure way to get trapped in the labyrinth is to confuse the two—to focus on the messenger, rather than the message. It is a sure-fire prescription for becoming trapped in an endless wilderness of mirrors, and one of your own making.
    Roger never heard back from the Committee. In 1992, he wrote that when the Committee’s evidence was published, he looked in vain to see if what he had sent in had been utilized. There was nothing there. He wrote: "No one on Blakey’s staff ever wrote or called me." I wonder why. But returning to 1977: Roger was applying to law schools, and it was discouraging. He had taken the LSAT and scored comfortably above average, but not exceptionally high. Sometime around 1977, Feinman was accepted at Yeshiva University, where he began in 1978, at age 30. Roger was starting law school at the same time as my manuscript, recast as a personal narrative and now titled Best Evidence, was being submitted to publishers. Both our journeys would take about three years. Best Evidence was published in 1981, the same year Feinman graduated from law school.

CONVERSATIONS WITH FEINMAN, CIRCA 1978-79
    During this period, we had about three conversations on the telephone. I was relatively oblivious to the main thrust of Feinman’s activity, and the extent to which he saw the CBS "cover-up" as central to the case. While attending law school, Feinman was obviously attempting to study the medical evidence very closely ("I continued working on the case in between law school classes.," he writes) and I was curious whether he would stumble across the surgery hypothesis, which, after all, was the subject of my own manuscript. I was surprised that he did not—after all, whether one agrees with the evidence supporting it or not, the dimensions of the wounds are reported as different at Dallas and at Bethesda, the doctors did come to different conclusions about the number and direction of shots, and the FBI did report "surgery of the head area." So I always wondered whether he would have the key insight I had ten years earlier (see Best Evidence, Chapter 7, "Breakthrough"); that after all, the body, itself, was evidence, and one could tamper with the body and thereby alter the basic facts. I wondered whether the phone would ring one day, whether it would be Roger Feinman, and whether he would say: "Guess what I found! You know those different wound dimensions—did you know that the FBI reported surgery? etc."? But that never happened. Instead, once again, Roger Feinman was following the messenger, not the message. It is a very paranoid style of reasoning. (And perhaps in employing this metaphor, I should use the plural, because in this case, the word "messenger" applies to the three autopsy doctors and their report.) Feinman apparently believed that certain things weren’t known at the autopsy because the doctors were "pretending" not to know them. (I have dubbed this the "sham" hypothesis or the "method actor" hypothesis.) The doctor bends over a body that has been shot from the front, for example, and "pretends" that it has been shot from the rear, when he knows better. There are several variants of this theme, depending on what you think the doctors are hiding, what they are "pretending not to know."

FEINMAN’S "I’VE GOT A SECRET" HYPOTHESIS
    Feinman’s focus was on Doctor Burkley, and his posture at the autopsy. After all, he had been at Parkland. He should have known about the throat wound. Yet, both at the autopsy and in the report he wrote the next day, Burkley apparently treated that hole on the body (i.e., the wound at the front of the throat) as nothing more than a tracheotomy. (Note: In Best Evidence, I explain this in terms of Burkley’s honestly not knowing about the throat wound, because he arrived several minutes late in the Emergency room and the wound was hidden by the trach tube. See Chapter 14, "The ‘Low’ Back wound question…", p.375 in hard cover.)
    Because Dr. Burkley supposedly possessed this knowledge, yet hid it from the autopsy doctors, in my conversations with Feinman, I (or he, I don’t remember who) dubbed this the "I’ve-got-a-secret" hypothesis. Once or twice, I engaged Feinman in conversation on the subject, and once or twice, I thought that at any moment the truth just might dawn; I expected him to telephone me, and say: "Hey, wait a minute: I’ve got an idea. These doctors aren’t pretending at all! They are genuinely confused! You know something, they can’t find any bullets; (and did you know that FBI agents Sibert and O’Neill actually state the doctors ‘were at a loss to explain’ that?); by God, David, I think someone had altered the body! Have you ever considered that?"
    Frankly, I don’t know what I would have done had that happened, because, after all, I was rushing my own manuscript to completion; I had devoted some 10 years or more to studying the medical evidence; I had a mass of evidence indicating wound alteration and body interception. But I have great respect for, and love of scholarship and debate. And when a similar situation arose in a very late night phone call about a year before the appearance of my book with someone who was relatively new in my life, Wallace Milam, and when Wallace got very close to the key idea in my manuscript, I found it impossible to continue the relationship, yet keep such a secret, and so I said: "Wallace, I’m now going to tell you what my book is about, but I want you to honor my confidence until it is published." And he did.
    However, in the case of Feinman, I could not go down that path. I was getting the vibes of someone who was soaking up the animosity towards me from Sylvia Meagher (who was quite curious, to say the least, as to what was in my book), and who was extremely suspicious of me, perhaps envious of me, and, frankly, I didn’t want to pursue the relationship. Nevertheless, I did want to give Feinman proper credit for his discovery of Transcript 1327-C.
    However, dealing with Roger Feinman on the subject of Transcript 1327-C got very complicated.

FEINMAN AND TRANSCRIPT 1327-C—CIRCA SEPTEMBER 1978
    In September 1978, we had spoken about it again—this time, I read him the page of my manuscript, dealing with the matter and in which I named him—but this brought objections, and we came to no satisfactory conclusion. After that conversation, Roger wrote me long, litigious-sounding CYA ("cover your ass"), letter in which he told me the terms he wanted me to adhere to in crediting him, and they were not the truth. Even though he discovered the transcript at CBS news ["…and I am quite proud of it" he said recently, on Compuserve], in my book he wanted me to state he had found it at the LBJ library—which, while protecting Roger Feinman, also would hide the fact that CBS had this very crucial document during the time they were preparing their "pro-Warren Report" specials back in 1967.
    What chutzpah, I thought, that this fellow wants me to tailor the truth for sake of his personal record at CBS. Roger (who once exclaimed to me "You said I’d be protected in this!") had not found the document because he was hanging out in Austin, Texas, at the LBJ Library. He found it because he was working at CBS News, in New York City.
    I called him up, told him that I understood his problem with CBS, would try to accommodate him by adjusting the language to protect him, but that I was adamant about telling the truth—which was that the transcript had been at CBS all these years. Then, it turned out, Roger had another agenda. He was writing something, he said, and the talk turned to Roger’s "manuscript." It was his understanding, he said, that I was not going to touch on CBS having the Perry transcript because if I did, why then I would be "co-opting" stuff he was "working on." (In his 1992 article, Roger described it as a memo, which grew to a "planned book.") I told Roger that, like it or not, the Perry transcript was now a public document at the LBJ library, that the world couldn’t wait for Roger to write his book, and that if he had an unpublished manuscript that dealt with the subject, I’d be more than happy to give him full credit and list it in my bibliography. Just show it to me, I said. How about us meeting in a coffee shop? No, he said, he didn’t want to. I told him I could share some data that had to do with this hypothesis. No, he didn’t have the time. (I told Roger he was engaged in "reverse Chutzpah"). I also told him that based on the several page letter he had written me (which he claimed he composed in a half hour), that he should have no problem turning out a book length manuscript in just a few months.
    The next summer, in August 1979, as Best Evidence was moving along towards publication (I had signed a contract with Macmillan in December 1978), I made one final effort to deal with Roger Feinman and the question of whether I could both give him proper credit for discovering transcript 1327-C, but also tell the truth about the provenance of that document (which, to keep matters in perspective, was dealt with in one paragraph in an 1877 page triple-spaced manuscript). I telephoned him in August 1979. I inquired about his lawsuit about CBS, which I had heard had not turned out well for him. He refused to comment. I repeated my request that if he had a manuscript about the autopsy, and if he wanted to show it to me, I’d give him full credit in the text of my book, for anything I hadn’t already found and list his manuscript in the bibliography. No, he wouldn’t do that. In that conversation, Roger wanted access to my interview with Commander Humes and he also wanted access to interviews with persons at Gawlers Funeral Home (whose staff had embalmed Kennedy at Bethesda, after the autopsy). I told him he could read about it in my book.
    "Book" was a sore spot with Roger, and at that point, he barked: "Don’t call me again," and hung up. My memo to file written the same evening records the humorous episode which then ensued:
    "Phones in NYC don’t disconnect that easily. So I just held the connection open. What ensued was a comedy scene, in which Roger kept coming back on the line, attempting to use his phone; apparently, to call someone else about what had just happened. But I remained on the line. This went on for five minutes—then I forced him to continue the conversation again. He was exasperated: "Are you trying to f… up my phone?!" he screamed.
    Roger then hung up and stayed off the line, and that was the last I heard of him, for some 12 years. After all the veiled threats from Feinman, and seeing for myself his litigious personality, I deemed it best to tell the truth about transcript 1327-C, as I understood it, and describe how it was discovered by a CBS employee, but avoid the possibility of a frivolous lawsuit by not naming the CBS employee (see Ch 3 Best Evidence, p. 61 in the hard cover edition). At no time did I take credit for Roger Feinman’s discovery.

BEST EVIDENCE—THE PRE-PUBLICATION LEGAL REVIEW
    Meanwhile, in June, 1980, my new manuscript, which I had now retitled Best Evidence, was nearing publication. I spent many hours with the lawyers, going through the statements for factual accuracy. Contrary to what Feinman states, experts were consulted on medical matters, and the lawyers were extremely careful that every single statement of fact be checked against the record. And again, contrary to Feinman’s false statement, it was not just a matter of libel. I was working directly with the top executives at MacMillan (I was actually given the keys to the office, and, along with my associate, Pat Lambert, who was hired, flown in from California, and was functioning as editor, would work up there at night, often until 5 am.) At issue was the credibility of a major publishing house, in the publication of a serious charge against the Government. Then, at some point, a major law firm was retained. I met with two attorneys for hours on end, one of whom had a detailed, almost talmudic, approach to the evidence. Both were very impressed with the legal arguments, the logic in the book, and the level of factual documentation. We sometimes joked about the Warren Commission critics who were all running down the path of thinking the Commission had hidden some "secret," when the problem was that the President’s body had been altered—and the medical evidence for that was lying practically in full public view. I can also state that at no time did it even occur to anyone to give the manuscript to Harold Weisberg or Sylvia Meagher for "review"—a truly laughable suggestion in view of their oft stated views about the Warren Commission having been a deliberate cover-up, and, particularly, the hostility both had shown towards me.
    Moreover, in the case of Sylvia Meagher, it was not at all clear to me that she was even particularly current. She really hadn’t moved past her original stance, which was to compare the 26 volumes with the way the Report was written. And indeed, Feinman had told me, from his conversations with Sylvia Meagher, that her knowledge on the case was "shot." Roger said he was surprised at Sylvia’s naiveté—that she seemed to believe that a new investigation could clear things up by doing more honestly what the first investigation had failed to do. But she had no theory. This did not surprise me.

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