Summary: Best Evidence

The GIST

Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy by David S. Lifton is a 1980 book that tells the story of one man's long attempt to solve what he saw as the central puzzle of the Kennedy assassination. On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, the doctors and nurses at Parkland Hospital in Dallas described the president's wounds one way. That night, the autopsy doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland described them quite differently. Lifton's answer to the contradiction is a startling claim about the case: that in the hours between the two hospitals, conspirators secretly altered the president's body so it would match the official story of a lone gunman firing from behind.

The book matters because of what it did and how it was received. Mainstream reviewers called it bizarre. It climbed anyway to number four on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list in March 1981. Macmillan distributed 100,000 copies in hardback, seven paperback reprintings added more than 200,000, and the book was reissued in expanded form in 1988 and again in 1992. It is written as a first-person narrative of a personal quest, and even a critic who called its theory bizarre conceded how carefully it was researched. Whether you finish it persuaded or appalled, it is one of the most durable books in the long argument over what happened in Dallas.

The Big Ideas

Two Hospitals, Two Sets of Wounds

Lifton's starting point is a conflict in the record. The medical staff in Dallas who first saw Kennedy reported signs that he had been shot from the front. The Bethesda autopsy concluded the opposite, that every entrance wound was in the back of the body and the rear of the skull.

The head wound is the sharpest example. People who saw the president in Dallas, medical personnel among them, described a fatal wound consistent with a bullet that entered at the right temple and left through a cavity at the back of the skull. The autopsy recorded instead a massive exit wound in the right front of the head, roughly four times the size the Dallas staff had reported, which would point to a shot from behind. The same body had been examined a few hours apart. Lifton's eventual answer was that the body itself had been changed in between.

It was discrepancies of this kind that set him on his way. He was a graduate student in engineering at UCLA in the mid-1960s, and he left his master's program to put his energy into researching the assassination.

The Autopsy as "Best Evidence"

The title comes from what a murder investigation normally treats as its best evidence: the official autopsy report, the X-rays and the photographs. The Warren Commission relied on exactly that.

Lifton felt the force of that evidence in his exchanges with one of the Commission's own lawyers. In 1966 he sat in on the UCLA Law School lectures of Wesley Liebeler, a former Warren Commission counsel, and talked with him one-on-one several times. Lifton was arguing that more than one gunman had fired at the president. Liebeler kept pressing him with a pointed challenge. If there were other assassins, where were their bullets? Why had the autopsy not found them?

Lifton had no satisfactory reply. The only way he could account for the missing bullets was to suppose a large conspiracy that began with the autopsy surgeons themselves. He recalls these exchanges in a chapter titled "Redefining the Problem: The Autopsy as 'Best Evidence'." Liebeler's taunt became a question his later research had to answer.

The Sentence That Changed Everything

The turning point came in late October 1966. Lifton was studying a report written by two FBI agents, James Sibert and Francis O'Neill, who had been present at Bethesda and taken notes on what they saw. They recorded that before the autopsy began it was apparent there had been "surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull."

Lifton knew that no surgery of that kind had been performed at Parkland. The agents' remark sharpened and focused his research, and led him in the end to his answer: deliberate fraud, or what he calls a "medical forgery" to the body of the president.

The idea answered Liebeler too. If the body had been tampered with before the autopsy, the other bullets were not found because they had already been removed. "I was amazed at the simplicity of the concept," Lifton writes. It also meant he no longer needed a large conspiracy that started with the autopsy surgeons. The autopsy doctors, the FBI Laboratory and many other officials and agencies could have been fooled, because the ballistic link between the shooting and any other gunman's weapon would have been cut before the investigation even began. In his words, "The entire investigative apparatus of the U.S. government could have been misled."

From that realization his whole view of the case shifted. As he puts it: "I was no longer interested in who put the bullets into the President's body, but who took them out."

Following the Body

To support the hypothesis, Lifton has to look at how, when and where the alteration could have happened. Much of Best Evidence is taken up with his effort to trace the chain of custody of the president's body on November 22, drawing on Warren Commission documents and on his own interviews with dozens of witnesses, people who were in Dallas or at Bethesda.

The scenario he puts forward runs as follows. While Air Force One was flying from Dallas to Washington, unnamed conspirators aboard took the body out of its original bronze casket and put it in a shipping casket. When the plane landed at Andrews Air Force Base, that shipping casket was quietly removed by helicopter from the side of the aircraft the television cameras could not see. It was taken to an unknown location, most likely Walter Reed Army Medical Center. There the body was surgically altered and bullets were taken out, so that it would look as if Kennedy had been hit only from the rear by one gunman. Then it was brought to Bethesda before the autopsy began.

Along the way he turns up anomalies that had not been reported before. There was a decoy ambulance and a decoy helicopter in use that night. The reported explanation was security, and a wish to keep crowds of reporters and onlookers from swarming Jacqueline Kennedy when she arrived with her husband's casket at the front of the hospital. Lifton proposes a darker purpose: that the conspirators used the decoys to hold the body apart for a time, operate on it and slip the casket back into Bethesda. He also hears from witnesses that more than one casket said to contain the president arrived at the hospital morgue at different times that night.

Reasonable Doubt, Not a Final Answer

Lifton acknowledges the limits of what he can show. He had no power of subpoena. He could only talk to witnesses who agreed to talk to him, and he admits that an exact account of the chain of custody of the body is impossible.

Over time his attitude changed. "I found it far easier to document that something out of the ordinary had happened than to establish the details of that event," he writes. The details came to matter less to him than establishing that there had been a significant break in the chain of possession of the body. Legally, he says, that break was the ground for impeaching the body as evidence. His aim, as he explains it, is to raise a reasonable doubt.

The implications he draws are stated plainly. The assassination was the work of a conspiracy, an inside job that involved, at a minimum, a number of Secret Service men, the ones who controlled the crime scene and had access to the body. And Lee Harvey Oswald was what he claimed to be after his arrest: "a patsy."

The Fight Over the Book

The making of Best Evidence is a story of persistence. Lifton spent ten years gathering notes, memos and files before he began writing in the summer of 1975 with a friend's encouragement. More than twenty publishers turned the manuscript down before Macmillan accepted it in 1978 with a $10,000 advance. He kept revising, and was still recording interviews with witnesses in October 1980. Because the content was so controversial, Macmillan had it checked for possible factual errors by its in-house counsel, an outside law firm, a forensic pathologist and a neurosurgeon.

Many reviews in the mainstream press were brutal. Robert Sherrill in The Washington Post wrote that Lifton could claim to have developed "probably the grisliest and most bizarre of the countless Kennedy assassination cover-up plots." Harrison Salisbury in The New York Times said no one before had built a theory so complicated or so contrary to common sense. Gerald Posner described it as a theory that "relies on an elaborate shell game involving rapid exchanges of coffins, a decoy ambulance, and a switched body shroud," and Vincent Bugliosi, who gave it twelve pages in Reclaiming History, called the theory unhinged.

Yet respect runs through some of the criticism. Ed Magnuson of Time called the theory preposterous while granting that the book was "meticulously researched" and that almost every factual claim was backed by the public record or by Lifton's interviews, many with low-ranking hospital and military bystanders the official inquiries had overlooked. Historian Stephen E. Ambrose wrote that Lifton's account is "almost impossible to follow, almost impossible to believe and almost impossible to refute." In 1990 Edwin McDowell of The New York Times called it "one of the most durable" of the dozens of books about the assassination. The expanded 1988 edition added autopsy photographs Lifton had obtained from a former Secret Service employee, which he showed on a PBS Nova episode that year, the first time they had appeared on television. He said they were consistent with his thesis.

Putting It to Work

• Start from the conflict in the record. Lifton's quest begins where two accounts of the same wounds sharply differ, and he does not let go. It is a useful discipline for reading any contested history.
• Ask about chain of custody. The book's central point is that even the best evidence can be questioned if there is a break in its handling that cannot be accounted for.
• Read primary documents closely. His turning point came from one sentence in an FBI report.
• Talk to the people nobody asked. Many of his witnesses were low-ranking hospital and military bystanders that official inquiries had overlooked.
• Separate showing that something happened from explaining it. Lifton himself distinguishes between documenting that something out of the ordinary happened and establishing its details. Readers can hold him to the same standard.
• Read the critics too. Reviewers and later authors rejected the theory outright. The book is best approached as an argument to be weighed, not a verdict.

Who Should Read It

This is for readers fascinated by the Kennedy assassination who want to understand one of its most durable and most disputed theories from the source. It will also appeal to anyone who enjoys an investigation told as a personal quest, and to those interested in how evidence, medicine and law meet. Skeptics will find plenty to argue with, and that is part of the appeal. Be prepared for grim medical detail and, in the expanded edition, graphic autopsy photographs.

This has been a summary of Best Evidence by David Lifton, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.