The Curse of Too Much Evidence
While researching a woman who went deep on the JFK assassination, I was pulled in too.
TL;DR
- Sylvia Meagher, a UN employee, became deeply engrossed in the Warren Commission Report shortly after its 1964 release.
- She spent over a year indexing the report's 26 supplementary volumes and wrote her own analysis, published in 1967.
- Meagher considered herself a 'critic' of the report, driven by a desire to understand the evidence after the assassin was identified as a pro-Castro Marxist.
- Her extensive work and notes were later archived, attracting the author's interest.
- The article draws a parallel between Meagher's solitary research and the contemporary trend of public engagement with government document dumps and 'asking questions' of official narratives.
- The author recounts their own experience researching at the National Archives, getting sidetracked by fascinating, though not always directly relevant, documents.
- Examples of compelling, tangential discoveries include FBI investigations into a reporter's access to Jack Ruby's testimony and Paul Krassner's interactions with the FBI.