The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 105, July 2001 - April, 2002 Page: 259
741 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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"Just As I Have Written It"
knowledge sufficient and appropriate to settle the question of authentic-
ity, in fact pronounced the diaries genuine. Of course, the deck was
stacked against the historian. He was supplied with very few pages of the
diary, and some of the documents he was given as exemplars of Hitler's
handwriting were in fact themselves Kujau forgeries.
What finally exposed the hoax was analysis of the handwriting and
study of the physical characteristics of the diaries. Scrutiny of the hand-
writing demonstrated that documented characteristics of Hitler's writing
either were violated or were not present at all. The diaries were written in
cheap, old fashioned, black school-notebooks, though Hitler, appreciat-
ing the best, always used beautifully bound leather writing folders and
desk appointments. Ribbons, seals, and initials lent a colorful, dramatic
touch to the diaries, but Kujau misread one of the initials and used an F
where an A was needed. It was easy to do, because Kujau used the often
difficult to read Old English typeface, another giveaway, since the Nazis
disapproved of that typeface. Over the purported thirteen years of the di-
aries, the ink never changed, and the same typewriter produced all of the
labels. Analysis of the paper revealed the presence of brighteners intro-
duced after 1945, and similarly, the binding, glue, and thread of the
books contained chemicals developed only later.
More recent has been the exposure of the Cusack-Kennedy forgeries.
Lex Cusack Jr., the son of a highly respected, well-placed, very discreet
New York lawyer, claimed to have found among his father's papers docu-
ments in the handwritings of John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe,
among others, establishing Kennedy's liaison with Monroe and his con-
nection with the Mafia-impeccable provenance. And since John
Kennedy had nineteen different styles of handwriting, exposing forgery
of his penmanship is especially challenging. These documents were re-
vealed as fakes by incongruities such as the presence of a zip code in the
return address on the stationery of the senior Cusack, though the zip
code had not begun to be used as of the purported date of the letter writ-
ten on that paper. Further, the pica typeface in which the letter was typed
had not been released as of the purported date of the letter. More damn-
ing yet, some of the typed documents had corrections made using lift-off
correcting tape, the technology of which lay a decade in the future as of
the purported date of the letter on which it appeared.8
Clearly, examination of the physical characteristics of a questioned
document can be, and often is, as important in arriving at a conclusion on
the authenticity of a document as any other line of investigation.
See Robert Harris, SelltngHtler: The Story of the HztlerDianes (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986).
" See "The JFK-Marilyn Hoax," Newsweek (Oct. 6, 1997), 36-38; David Samuels, "Fakes: Who
Forged theJ.F.K.-Marilyn Monroe Papers?" The New Yorker (Nov. 3, 1997), 62-69, 71-75.2001
259
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 105, July 2001 - April, 2002, periodical, 2002; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101222/m1/289/: accessed May 3, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.