David Lifton

David Samuel Lifton (September 20, 1939 – December 6, 2022) 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 a Jewish family in Rockaway Beach, New York. While there, he worked nights as a computer engineer for North American Aviation, a contractor for the Apollo program. In the Q&A section, Lifton tried to show Dulles evidence that:

Also in December 1965, Lifton was the first to report that Zapruder frames 314 and 315, as printed in volume 18 of the Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits, were reversed; this made it unclear which direction JFK's head moved in reaction to the fatal shot. Lifton wanted to inform the FBI's photo expert Lyndal Shaneyfelt about the discrepancy, but was worried that doing so might jeopardize his own security clearance, required for his aerospace job at North American Aviation. And so Lifton drafted the letter to Shaneyfelt, but asked his girlfriend Judith Schmidt to sign and send it. To their great surprise, a few weeks later she received a signed letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover stating that frames 314 and 315 had been swapped due to a "printing error", and that the error did not exist in the original Warren Commission exhibits.

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.

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 Warren Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler. It contains his "devil's advocate" criticisms after reviewing a draft of the Warren Report chapter on accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

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 by March 1981 it rose to number 4 on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, and remained on the list for several months.

Later Life In 1991 the 37-minute documentary film Best Evidence: The Research Video, produced and directed by Lifton, was released. The production presents the arguments in Lifton's book in documentary-form, with excerpts from his interviews of people connected with JFK's autopsy. In 1993, Lifton was portrayed by Robert Picardo in the television movie Fatal Deception: Mrs. Lee Harvey Oswald.

Lifton 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 his witness interviews.

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, tentatively titled Final Charade: Lee Oswald and the Assassination of President Kennedy.

Lifton was interviewed for the 2022 documentary The Assassination & Mrs. Paine about Ruth Paine.

Death David Lifton died on December 6, 2022, in hospice care in Las Vegas, Nevada, at age 83.

In a eulogy posted on the kennedysandking.com assassination website (successor to the ctka.net website that lobbied for declassification of all JFK files), researcher and author James DiEugenio commented on Lifton's unpublished manuscript: