The namesake for COPA's new Sylvia Meagher Lifetime Achievement Award was one of the leading authorities on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Sylvia Meagher wrote extensively on the Kennedy case, but is best remembered for two major works: the Subject Index to the Warren Report and Hearings and Exhibits, published in 1966, and her crowning achievement, Accessories After the Fact.
Of the former volume, Peter Dale Scott has written that it "may someday be remembered as the only index to have altered the history of U.S. politics." Meagher's Subject Index filled a serious gap left by the Warren Commission, which supplied only a name index to the first fifteen volumes of its Hearings and Exhibits. Navigating the entire twenty-six volumes without a subject index would be, as Meagher observed, "tantamount to a search for information in the Encylopedia Britannica if the contents were untitled, unalphabetized, and in random sequence." She later co-authored (with Gary Owen) the Master Index to the JFK Assassination Investigations, which incorporated the House Select Committee on Assassinations volumes as well as the Warren Commission's.
Accessories After the Fact appeared one year after the Subject Index, and may be the best evaluation of the Warren Commission ever published--a dispassionate analysis of the Commission's work that weighed the conclusions of its Report against the raw data of the twenty-six volumes. "Study of the Hearings and Exhibits has destroyed the grounds for confidence in the Warren Report," Meagher wrote in her Forword. "Study has shown the Report to contain (1) statements of fact which are inaccurate and untrue, in the light of the official Exhibits and objective verification; (2) statements for which the citations fail to provide authentication; (3) misrepresentation of the testimony; (4) omission of references to testimony inimical to findings in the Report; (5) suppression of findings favorable to Oswald; (6) incomplete investigation of suspicious circumstances which remain unexplained; (7) misleading statements resulting from inadequate attention to the contents of Exhibits; (8) failure to obtain testimony from crucial witnesses; and (9) assertions which are diametrically opposite to the logical inferences to be drawn from the relevant testimony or evidence." None of the charges were made lightly, of course, and all were backed up in the ensuing chapters of Accessories After the Fact.
Speaking at the Awards Ceremony at the COPA Conference, Dr. Cyril Wecht said of Meagher, "I have known few people with as much courage and strength, and candor, and absolute, total honesty---sometimes, perhaps, even a little too unyielding---but alway the highest morals and principals."
In naming their award for excellence in JFK research for Sylvia Meagher, Fair Play believes that COPA is properly honoring the memory of this outstanding researcher.
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