David Lifton
David Samuel Lifton was an American author who wrote the 1980 bestseller Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, a work that puts forth evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
Biography
Lifton grew up in Rockaway Beach, New York. He graduated from Cornell University's School of Engineering Physics in 1962, and then enrolled in UCLA to pursue an advanced degree in engineering. While there, he worked nights as a computer engineer for North American Aviation, a contractor for the Apollo program.Early JFK assassination interest
In autumn 1964, at roughly the time when the Warren Report was published, Lifton attended a lecture on the JFK assassination given by Warren Commission critic Mark Lane. Lifton's interest was piqued. He purchased the 26-volume set of Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, and started his own research on the case.In May 1965, he became fascinated by a photograph he chanced upon in a Hollywood bookstore. He was flipping through a commemorative magazine, Four Dark Days in History, that included a reproduction of a Polaroid photo taken by Mary Moorman at the moment of the fatal JFK assassination shot. She was standing on the opposite side of the street from the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza. Her photo was not part of the Warren Commission's published evidence: "Lifton was stunned to see, obscured in the shadows of the knoll, what he took to be a puff of smoke and the figure of a gunman in the act of shooting." He acquired a copy of the negative, had it enlarged, and shared it with assassination researchers Ray Marcus and Maggie Field. Although the enlarged photo's images were still murky, Marcus and Field agreed that Lifton had made an important discovery.
In December 1965, ex-CIA Director and Warren Commission member Allen Dulles spoke at UCLA to a group of students, including Lifton who arrived at the event with two of the 26 volumes. In the Q&A section, Lifton tried to show Dulles evidence that:
In 1966, Lifton was dismissed from UCLA graduate school for neglecting his studies. He quit the aerospace job and began devoting all his time to the Kennedy assassination.
The January 1967 issue of Ramparts magazine presented a lengthy "special report" article, titled "The Case for Three Assassins", co-written by Lifton and David Welsh. The article laid out the scenario that more than one assassin was firing at Kennedy based on anomalies in the medical evidence.
In 1968, Lifton edited and wrote an introduction to the book, Document Addendum to the Warren Report, which anthologized three assassination-related documents that were not part of the Warren Commission's 26 volumes. Among them is the "Liebeler Memorandum", named after former Warren Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler, who Lifton became acquainted with at UCLA. The memo contains Liebeler's "devil's advocate" criticisms after reviewing a draft of the Warren Report chapter on accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. Lifton was credited as a researcher for the 1973 film Executive Action.
''Best Evidence''
Lifton is most known for his 1980 book, Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. It chronicles the author's 15-year search for the truth about the JFK assassination. He describes his quest to resolve what he considered a troubling contradiction in the assassination record: the differing descriptions of President Kennedy's gunshot wounds, when comparing the accounts by Dallas medical personnel immediately after the shooting vs. the findings by autopsy doctors at Bethesda Naval Hospital later in the evening. Lifton's controversial conclusion was that JFK's body was surgically altered prior to the autopsy so that it would conform to the government's narrative of a lone gunman shooting from behind. The book identifies several breaks in the body's chain of custody on November 22, when the pre-autopsy surgery could have occurred.Best Evidence was widely criticized in the mainstream press as "bizarre", but it rose to #4 on The New York Times bestseller list. In 1988, Lifton put out an expanded edition, which included graphic autopsy photos he had recently obtained, and it led to another period of robust sales.
Later Life
In 1991 the documentary Best Evidence: The Research Video, produced and directed by Lifton, was released. The production presents the arguments in Lifton's book in documentary-form. In 1993, Lifton was played by Robert Picardo in the television movie Fatal Deception: Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald. He testified at the Assassination Records Review Board's "Review Board Experts' Conference" in May 1995 and on 17 September 1996 at a public hearing of the Board in Los Angeles. He also provided the Board with various materials including 35mm interpositives of the Zapruder film, alongside copies of audiotapes, videotapes, and transcripts of witness interviews he conducted.Lifton lived most of his adult life in West Los Angeles. As of 2010, he was working there full-time on a major volume about Oswald titled Final Charade.
On the assassination website, researcher and author James DiEugenio commented on Lifton's unpublished manuscript a few weeks after his death:
He was interviewed for the 2022 documentary The Assassination & Mrs. Paine about Ruth Paine.