Although the media through numerous interviews, including the interviews and shooting for the 11/23/97 60 Minutes segment, were fully aware of the number of persons who authenticated documents from the Cusack Papers, the reported stories make it appear as if 60 Minutes "expert" Duayne Dillon was the first to look at handwriting. This, of course, is not true. There were at least 12 experts (mostly Kennedy handwriting experts) who authenticated some of the Cusack Papers prior to 60 Minutes' retention of Mr. Dillon during November, 1997. The other 3 experts of the 15 in the list below were retained recently by ABC (Gerald Richards and Linda Hart) and 60 Minutes (Duayne Dillon).
For the convenience of persons interested in the actual facts of which experts were retained or used, and when and by whom, a chronology of the use of experts (or purported experts) for any part of the Cusack Papers by the Cusack and Cloud Plaintiffs (consisting of 3 individuals and 3 corporations), NBC, ABC, CBS and any other persons known to such Plaintiffs follows:
It should be noted that no one expert (or purported expert) has seen all of the Cusack Papers, and that no one expert has seen more than 10% of the papers, except Robert L. White, a specialist in Kennedy memorabilia, who can read JFK's handwriting better than any other living American, and who owns the largest private collection of Kennedy memorabilia. Mr. White, who is not a forensic expert, saw about 66-2/3% (or 230 documents) of the entire collection of Cusack Papers, consisting of about 350 documents (or more than 700 pages of documents). Also note that the number of documents given below may differ because some documents contain more than one page (e.g., an agreement with handwriting on some but not all of the pages, or handwriting on two sides of a card).
[Note: this is a second draft of this website page, with the xxx's to be removed when the information is obtained/verified.]
It should be noted that the experts used by the Plaintiffs have experience with Kennedy handwriting, whereas 60 Minutes' "expert" Duayne Dillon, has no such experience. The experience or expertise of ABC's experts, Linda Hart and Gerald Richards is apparently not in handwriting but in analyzing typewritten materials (sometimes referred to as "forensic" experts).
Thus, the only handwriting expert who has said any of the handwriting or signatures in any of the Cusack Papers is not authentic (with one exception, ABC's Linda Hart, who said she looked at no samples of Kennedy's handwriting and made no comparisons) is Duayne Dillon, who was retained by 60 Minutes under the circumstances described in our letter of complaint to 60 Minutes, which will be posted on this website after its completion and delivery to 60 Minutes.
Finally, it should be noted that the number of Documents seen by plaintiffs' experts adds up to more than the total number of Documents (350) because some Documents were authenticated by more than one of Plaintiffs' experts.
If anyone knows of any other experts who have seen any of the Cusack Papers whose name has been omitted from this list, or if anyone has any corrections to the above information, please communicate the missing or corrected information to the plaintiffs' attorney, Carl E. Person, by telephone (212-307-4444), fax (212-307-0247) or e-mail (carlpers@ix.netcom.com).
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