David Lifton died in Las Vegas on December 5th 2022.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nytimes/name/david-lifton-obituary?id=38395843David Lifton was born in New York on 20th September 1939. A graduate of the Cornell University School of Engineering Physics he worked as a computer engineer for North American Aviation in Los Angeles. Lifton worked on the Apollo space program but left the company in 1966.
Lifton now concentrated on his research into the assassination of John F. Kennedy and particularly the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. He has read all the material published by the Warren Commission. He also spent several months at the National Archives in Washington and interviewed many of the important witnesses in the case.
Lifton published an important article on the assassination in Ramparts. He also served as consultant on the Hollywood movies, Executive Action and Oliver Stone's JFK. Lifton ppeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations and as an expert witness before the Assassination Records Review Board.
In 1980 Lifton published Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Lifton claims that members of the Secret Service agents were involved in the killing of Kennedy. Their involvement was the key to the secret alteration of the President's wounds.
In the book Lifton argued that the wounds contained in the body of John F. Kennedy were altered somewhere between Parkland Hospital and Bethesda Hospital. Lifton believes that the wounds were altered in order to hide the fact that he had been shot from the front, e.g. the Grassy Knoll. The book was a bestseller and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in history.
In September, 1996, David Lifton gave evidence to the Assassination Records Review Board on the Zapruder Film of President Kennedy's assassination. "Despite the substantial price paid for the film, for all rights, it was not exploited by Time Life as a motion picture film, i.e., it was never shown on TV or sold in any documentary form as a moving pictures. No newsreels, no TV specials, nothing. Yet one of the most controversial aspects of the film were never addressed by the Warren Commission was the violent backward motion of the head depicted on the frames following the fatal shot. What this means has been debated back and forth over the years. Passions run high on both sides. For reasons I never understand, the Warren Commission failed to address the issue. In other words, if we're to believe the record, the Warren Commission apparently didn't notice the very thing which has fueled the assassination debate for three decades. And of course the public didn't even know it was an issue because Time Life chose not to show it as a motion picture film after paying $150,000 for those exclusive rights."
For many years prior to his death, he was working full-time on a major written work about Lee Harvey Oswald and details about the plan to assassinate JFK that were unearthed in the years following the publication of Best Evidence. His unfinished work, entitled Final Charade, was to explain "what was supposed to have happened on 11/22/63, but didn't because of unexpected events in Dallas that forced the perpetrators of JFK's murder to improvise in their desperate attempt to recover control over JFK's body in order to complete the alterations necessary before his autopsy that would allow his murder to be ruled 'an accident of history' and permit the levers of power to operate efficiently to achieve an orderly transition from the Kennedy administration to the Johnson administration. The perpetrators were nearly exposed in 1963, as the evidence reported in Best Evidence clearly documents. The sequence of bizarre, seemingly inexplicable events that happened at Parkland and Bethesda on the afternoon and evening of November 22-23, 1963 were not part of any plan to kill JFK and alter his body before autopsy; it was the best they could do under the circumstances and they succeeded in concealing the truth for almost 60 years."
