John F. Kennedy document hoax

He claimed that his father had advised Kennedy on numerous sensitive and personal matters and that he found the papers in the archives of Cusack & Stiles.

[a] One of the collectors involved suggested showing them to the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who was in the process of writing The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), a history of the Kennedy presidency and his assassination.

It was during the checks of the documents by the NBC television network and then by ABC News in preparing the documentary that flaws in the forgeries led to their discovery.

The forgeries were uncovered in mid-1997, while Hersh was still writing The Dark Side of Camelot, and he removed a chapter and some additional material that had been based on the Cusack documents.

[4] Spoto judges that, on balance: if the phrase "love affair" describes a protracted intimacy sustained by some degree of frequency, then such a connection between these two is impossible to establish with any of the rudimentary tools of historico-critical studies.

[8][9][b] The publisher thought the book would sell well, and by August 1996 it had decided on a first print run of either 250,000 copies – an amount described by journalist Frederick M. Winship as "unusually large" – or 350,000.

[15] He was a lawyer for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, and in that role he acted as a personal representative for Cardinal Francis Spellman and testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Education in 1963.

[19] On an application for a firearms license made in 1992, he listed previous service with the US Marines, US Navy, National Security Agency, and at the Naval Air Station Pensacola, none of which was true.

[24][c] The two men became friends, and, during the course of their conversation, Reznikoff told Cusack that documents relating to Kennedy were highly sought-after and valuable.

[21][24][26] To give credibility to his story, Cusack claimed that between 1959 and 1963 his father had counseled Kennedy on numerous sensitive and personal matters.

The documents Cusack forged supposedly showed that Kennedy had dealings with organized crime, by paying Sam Giancana of the Chicago Outfit to fix the 1960 presidential election for him.

The plan was to build interest after the 1998 launch and then stage a high-profile auction to enable the original investors to resell for a high profit.

[19][32][33] According to journalists Evan Thomas and Mark Hosenball, Hersh then decided to change the focus of the book away from the assassination and towards the information in Cusack's Kennedy documents.

[34] After six months of negotiations, on July 3, 1995, Hersh signed an agreement that gave him complete and exclusive access to all of Cusack's documents prior to the planned auction.

Based on the documents and the agreement of former Secret Service members to appear on film – the agents he had been interviewing for his book – NBC paid Cusack and producer Mark Obenhaus $1 million for a television documentary that was to last either one[38][39] or two hours.

After ABC became involved, he continued to use experts in different fields, including those versed in fingerprint and handwriting analysis, and in the microscopic examination of the typewritten material.

[40] In May 1997, a member of Obenhaus's research team noticed that two of the letters, purportedly written in Kennedy's hand, but on Cusack Jr.'s office notepaper, showed the address with a ZIP Code.

These included Janet Des Rosiers, one of Kennedy's former secretaries, whose name appears in the papers; she denied that she had ever seen Monroe and also stated that what was supposed to be her own signature in the documents was not, in fact, hers.

No associates had any knowledge of a connection between the two men or had previously heard of Cusack Jr.[41][45][46] In mid-1997, the microscopic analysis results were shown to Hersh and Obenhaus.

They showed that many of the documents were printed on an IBM Selectric typewriter with a Prestige Pica font typeball, which was unavailable until 1973, ten years after Kennedy's death.

Another flaw was that the "y" in Monroe's signature had removed a tiny fragment of the typed line below; this was only possible with more modern plastic typewriter ribbons, which were not available in the early 1960s.

[30]As soon as it became clear in July 1997 that the documents were forgeries, Hersh wanted the news spread widely to ensure no-one else was fooled by them, and to make certain he was not legally liable for their promotion.

Interviewed by journalist Peter Jennings, a visibly sweating Cusack was confronted with the news about the irregularities in the papers; ABC did not tell him in advance that they knew the documents were forgeries.

[20][58][59][g] The indictment stated that investigators had found a notebook containing a handwritten draft of one of the forged documents, written in Cusack's handwriting.

[24] In 2001, he filed for a writ of habeas corpus but this was denied; the opinion stated: "The petitioner has not made a substantial showing of a denial of a federal right and appellate review is, therefore, not warranted.