User:Ramcduff/sandbox

Horne, Doug

Fetzer, James ed.

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("David Lifton's Startling Study of JFK's Murder", The Washington Post, September 5, 1980, Style Section, p. C1)

Lifton’s book, released in 1988, is written in the first-person as a chronological narrative of his 15-year search for the truth about the Kennedy assassination. It is not written just as a theory of what took place on November 22nd, 1963, but also to highlight his personal quest to solve the puzzle through a meticulous and time-consuming search for new evidence that could finally resolve the many evidence conflicts in the record

The central thesis developed within the book is that President Kennedy’s body had been altered between the Dallas hospital and the autopsy site at Bethesda for the purposes of creating erroneous conclusions about the number and direction of the shots. He details evidence—using both the Warren Commission documents and original research and interviews with those involved at both Dallas and Bethesda—of a stark and radical change between the descriptions of the wounds by the medical staff at Dallas and those at Bethesda. For instance, nearly all the Dallas medical staff thought the head wound entered from the front and exited through an a 2-in. by 2.-in. hole in the exterior. The autopsy, on the contrary, reported a massive exit wound in the front (about 4x the size of the reports of the Dallas staff), which would indicate a shot from the rear.

It was these sort of conflicts that drove his quest. The Warren Commission had ultimately resolved them through relaying on what was considered the “best evidence”, the autopsy report and photos, but that didn’t satisfy Lifton

As he was methodically working through the 26-volume Warren Commission report and exhibits, he stumbled upon what would become the fulcrum of his narrative, the answer he was looking for. He read, according to a report by two FBI agents who attended the autopsy and took notes on everything they observed, it was "apparent that a tracheotomy had been performed (in Dallas, when the doctors were fighting to save the President's life) as well as surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull." Since Lifton knew that there was no surgery to the head in Dallas, this was the fact that focused his search, leading to the synthesis of the contradictory Dallas/Bethesda evidence to his ultimate conclusion that there was intentional fraud, that is, as Lifton puts it, a “medical forgery”.

Among the clear implications of the book, explicitly stated: the assassination was an “inside” job with, at minimum, a number of secret service men involved—the ones who controlled the scene and the evidence;  Oswald was, as he stated after his arrest, “a patsy”; the people of the United States of America were the victim of a coup d’état hidden in plain sight through the disguise and deception described throughout the manuscript.