Decapitation of the Union

[John Fazio]

(10-04-2015 12:08 PM)MajGenl.Meade Wrote:  Sorry, John. I can't let your new definition of 'hearsay' escape unscathed. (Nice segue to make the glass the central point when it's peripheral)

The point about Weichmann and the pane of glass is not that he wasn't the perpetrator but that he did not witness anything that he wrote about in connection with Meadville, Booth's illness and travels at the time.

All he is doing is regurgitating other people's words - at what remove we do not know. I discount all that he writes that is not his personal knowledge but is ex post facto parroting/creative writing

noun: hearsay
information received from other people that one cannot adequately substantiate; rumor.

•Law
the report of another person's words by a witness, usually disallowed as evidence in a court of law.

Holman:

You miss my point completely. A strict application of your hearsay rule (feebly defined, incidentally) would wipe out almost everything written about the assassination, because almost everything written about it comes from sources which did not perpetrate the events described, but merely repeated in some form what was written by someone else. In paraphrasing the Century Magazine article (assuming he did not have access to additional information to supplement it, a distinct possibility), Weichmann was doing nothing more than every assassination historian since Holland has done: incorporating, analyzing, redacting and supplementing the findings and the works of others, i.e. nothing more nor less than you and I do.


John