[1] In autumn 1964, around the time the Warren Report was published, Lifton became interested in the JFK case after attending a lecture on the topic of the conspiracy to cover up the Kennedy assassination by Mark Lane.
[10] In the updated 1988 edition of Best Evidence, Lifton was responsible for the first publication of a series of autopsy photographs taken of President Kennedy at Bethesda Naval Medical Center.
Lifton had acquired these photos after the initial publication of Best Evidence, from a former Secret Service employee who had made private copies with the permission of Agent Roy Kellerman.
Lifton also used the photos during his appearance on the October 1988 PBS Nova episode Who Shot President Kennedy?, which marked the first time they were shown on television.
It is not written just as a theory of what took place on November 22, 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 factual conflicts in the record.
[1][11] The central thesis of the book is that President Kennedy’s body had been altered between the Dallas hospital and the autopsy site at Bethesda for the purpose of creating erroneous conclusions about the number and direction of the shots.
He read, according to a report by FBI agents Siebert and O'Neill who attended the autopsy and took notes on everything they observed, that it was "apparent that a tracheotomy had been performed...as well as surgery of the head area, namely, in the top of the skull.
Yet there is virtually no factual claim in Lifton's book that is not supported by the public record or his own interviews, many of them with the lowly hospital and military bystanders whom official probes had overlooked.
[15] Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Harrison Salisbury wrote: "...no one before Mr. Lifton has constructed a theory so complicated, so quirky, in such violation of every law of common sense and reason.
"[17] Author and lawyer Gerald Posner has described Lifton's book as "one of the most unusual conspiracy theories" that "relies on an elaborate shell game involving rapid exchanges of coffins, a decoy ambulance, and a switched body shroud.
"[18] Vincent Bugliosi devoted twelve pages to Lifton's theory in his 2007 book, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F.
[9] Bugliosi prefaced his comments stating that the "theory is so unhinged that it really doesn't deserve one word in any serious treatment of the assassination", but that he was "forced to devote some time to talking about nonsense of a most exquisite nature" due to the number of people who treated it seriously.
According to a Los Angeles Times article about Mr. Lifton: "The Orlando Sentinel Star went so far as to compare the book in stature and import to William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.