Dr.Richard Mudd

[Ed Steers]

I am a little late coming to this discussion. Dr. Mudd and I exchanged several letters over the years and when he became bed-ridden he would call me occasionally on Sunday mornings and we would talk. We remained good friends to the end and enjoyed our "verbal arm wrestling." In one of the letters he wrote me he stated, "I have always felt that my grandfather had known about the Lincoln kidnapping plan." He always maintained that there were two plots, not one. While his grandfather knew about the one, he did not know about the other. Hence, he was innocent. He did not accept the legal concept of "vicarious liability."