427: Original Recipe

Ira Glass

Hey there, everybody. So I'm not going to beat around the bush. For this week's radio program, we think we may have found the original recipe for Coca-Cola. And I am not kidding. I am not kidding. One of the most famously guarded trade secrets on the planet, I have it right here, and I'm going to read it to you. I'm going to read it to the world. And I'm going to make my case for why I think it's real, despite whatever Coca-Cola might say. And that is just one of the two stories on today's program.

From WBEZ Chicago, it is This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

Probably the best story about how protective Coca-Cola is of its secret formula comes from this book that was written by Charles Howard Candler. His Dad, Asa, did not invent Coca-Cola, but founded the Coca-Cola company back in 1892.

And Charles, the son, wrote this. "One of the proudest moments of my life came when my father initiated me into the mysteries of the secret flavoring formula, inducting me into the holy of holies." Charles then says, "Incredibly there was no written formula and the labels had been removed from all the containers of the ingredients." So they were, quote, "identified only by sight, smell, and remembering where each was put on the shelf. And I thereupon experienced the thrill of making up, with his guidance, a batch of merchandise 7x." Merchandise 7x. Merchandise 7x is the cartoonishly super secret, cloak and dagger name they give the flavoring mixture in Coca-Cola.

Charles' dad, Asa, was so paranoid about anybody else getting hold of the secret formula for 7x that, even though he was president of Coca-Cola-- he's president of the company-- he would go through the company mail himself and remove the invoices for any ingredients that had been purchased, so that nobody in the accounting department could read what ingredients had been bought for the product. I learned all this from a history of Coca-Cola, a book written by investigative journalist and historian Mark Pendergrast.

Ira Glass

Of course this makes no sense at all. Why can't the two guys fly on a plane if the formula is sitting inside a bank vault? Coke's official line on this these days is that they simply do not talk about how many people know the recipe. Though the reason that most of us think that of it as one of the biggest trade secrets in the world is probably because that's the story Coca-Cola likes to tell.

Ira Glass

In this particular Coke commercial, I guess the premise is that each of the two guys only knows half the formula. It's just one of several commercials that have come out recently that poke fun at the myth of the super secret formula, while at the same time bolstering and selling that myth.

Coke even has this thrill ride at its museum in Atlanta, The World of Coca-Cola, where you follow two characters who are trying to unlock the secret formula for Coca-Cola. So with all this money, all this energy, all these millions of dollars spent over the years to convince us of just how impossibly, importantly, iconically secret the formula to Coca-Cola is, it was, a surprise when we stumbled across an article in Coke's hometown paper, the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 18, 1979. Not on the front page, but buried. Buried back on page 2B. One of their columnists, Charles Saulter, without any fanfare at all, published what looks like the original recipe for Coca-Cola.

He found it in a pharmacist's old book of recipes. All the recipes, including the one for Coca-Cola, are written by hand. Most of them are for various ointments and remedies.

And if that seems like a strange and random place to find this kind of thing, well, Coca-Cola was invented by a pharmacist, and it was originally sold at pharmacy soda fountains. The article says that the book passed from one pharmacist to another until it fell into the hands of one Everett Beal, who owned a drug store in Griffin, Georgia, 40 miles from Atlanta. He is mainly identified in the story as a fishing buddy of the columnist.

Ira Glass

Everett Beal passed away July 2010. I called his widow Judy at her home in Georgia so many times asking for an interview that at one point she said to me, "This is how you people won the war, isn't it?" "You people" meaning northerners.

Ira Glass

OK, let's just pause the tape right there to explain who these guys are. The Pemberton that she's talking about is John Pemberton, the guy who invented Coca-Cola in Atlanta back in 1886. Like I said, he was a pharmacist. But he was also a maker of patent medicines. He made something called Globe Flower Cough Syrup. He made a blood purifier called Extract of [? Stalengia. ?]

RR Evans-- that's the second person that she mentioned-- Judy says, was another pharmacist in Atlanta at the time.

Ira Glass

This book of recipes, Judy says, originally belonged to Evans. She says his name is all over the book. Apparently after his friend Pemberton invented Coke, Evans copied down the formula in this book, calling it Cocoa-Cola

Ira Glass

And after Evans died, the book started its travels.

Ira Glass

Everett was so intrigued by the Coke recipe that he spent the last year of his life while he struggled with cancer researching and writing his own book, a history of the inventor of Coca-Cola, that's still unpublished.

Interestingly, just like the characters in Lord of the Rings when they get a hold of the ring, once Everett had the secret formula, like the people at Coca-Cola, he started to get protective. The recipe book now sits in a bank vault. Take his reaction when his fishing buddy, Charles, did the 1979 newspaper story about the recipe book. the newspaper published a photo that was big enough that you can read all the ingredients and the amounts, the entire recipe.

Ira Glass

We sent a copy of that photo where you can see the recipe for Coca-Cola to that historian of Coca-Cola, the guy who wrote that book, Mark Pendergrast.

Ira Glass

This was an amazing discovery. In Mark's book he tells the story of looking through Coca-Cola's archives and being shown the yellowing pages of an old notebook that belonged to the inventor of Coca-Cola, John Pemberton. The Coke people told him that it was from way before Pemberton moved to Atlanta, way before he invented Coke.

Ira Glass

New York Times May 2, 1993, the year Mark's book was published, Coca-Cola calls the recipe in his book, quote, "The latest in a long line of previous unsuccessful attempts to reveal a 107 year old mystery."

But here's where things get interesting. When you compare these two recipes, the one that Mark found in John Pemberton's own notebook, stored deep inside Coca-Cola's very own archives, and the one from the 1979 newspaper clipping found 40 miles away in Griffin, Georgia--

Ira Glass

--not only do they match up ingredient for ingredient, identical--

Ira Glass

--the recipe in the newspaper fills in things that the one in the Coke archive leaves blank. The recipe from Coke's archive just lists numbers next to each ingredient. But the newspaper says what the numbers stand for: ounces and drops and drams. The recipe that was found in Coke's archive is just labeled X. The newspaper one says clearly, this recipe is Cocoa-Cola.

I got into this wondering if it might be possible that this super secret recipe had been hiding in plain sight in an old newspaper clipping for decades. But once I learned that it actually matched this recipe in Coke's own archives, written by the creator of Coke, it was hard not to get very excited. These last two weeks I've been carrying around a printout of the recipe everywhere I go, this one that I have right here with me in the studio today. And I've been telling everybody I see, I think I may have found the secret formula for Coke. And then I just watch them freak out.

So now, right here on the radio, I will read you the formula. You have heard the facts. You can draw your own conclusions as to what this is.

Oh, wait, but first--

Ira Glass

Great. Here we go. The 7x formula is just one element in these two recipes. It's made from 20 drops of orange oil, 30 of lemon oil, 10 of nutmeg oil, 5 of coriander oil, 10 of neroli oil-- neroli's a kind of orangey flavor-- 10 of cinnamon oil, and 8 ounces of alcohol. You mix that together, and then you take a little bit of that flavoring. One recipe says two ounces, the other says two and a half. You put that into another container where you're going to mix the syrup for the soda.

The other ingredients, 3 ounces citric acid, 1 ounce caffeine, 2 and a 1/2 gallons of water. The recipe calls that aqua. 2 pints of lime juice, an ounce of vanilla, 1 and 1/2 ounces of caramel coloring. And then we arrive at the two most controversial ingredients in Coca-Cola. 30 pounds of sugar-- pounds-- and at the very top of the page, first ingredient, FE coca, which stands for fluid extract of coca. That'll be the flavor of the coca leaf, which includes a small amount of cocaine.

In fact, Mark says that cocaine figures in a big way in the creation of Coca-Cola. Before he invented Coke, John Pemberton had a hit with another drink called French Wine Coca. It's ingredients: wine, cocaine, and caffeine. Hard to see why people went for that one, right?

Then, in 1885, Atlanta voted for prohibition, and Pemberton realized that he was going to have to get rid of the wine in his bestselling drink. So he kept the two other ingredients, the cocaine and the caffeine. People loved those. But when you mix cocaine and caffeine together, they're bitter. So he pours in a ton of sugar to cut the bitterness and voila, Coca-Cola. Pemberton called it his temperance drink.

Ira Glass

1903 being the year that Coca-Cola rids itself of cocaine. So there's all this circumstantial evidence pointing to this recipe being the original recipe for Coca-Cola. Or at any rate, one of the original recipes. But the only way to tell for sure would be to make a batch. Taste it. The historian had never done that, the columnist back in 1979 never did it. That would be the final test. So we set out to do it.

Ira Glass

First obstacle in our path, kind of a huge one-- coca leaves are a Schedule II controlled substance. Totally illegal in the United States. When we asked the company that brings them in under special federal supervision and decocainizes them for Coca-Cola, this company Stepan, and asked them to sell us some, they stopped returning our calls. No coca leaves, no way to make the secret recipe.

But then, my fellow This American Life producer Ben Calhoun turned to an obscure back alley resource called the internet.

Ira Glass

So the hardest part was done, except for making the soda. For that we turned to professionals.

Ira Glass

Meet Eric Chastain and Mike Spear, respectively the VP of operations and the marketing director at Jones Soda in Seattle. Jones makes it living on flavors like cream soda and green apple soda. But they're also known for being willing to try anything. They have made turkey and gravy soda, they've made Brussels sprout soda. We sent them our recipe, and by the time that Ben and I got to their office, Mike and Eric had already made up a couple bottles of our recipe and were ready for a taste test. Our stuff versus real Coca-Cola.

Ira Glass

First, samples from our soda, the one from the 1979 newspaper, are poured into little cups. We're instructed to sniff first, then take a small sip, roll it around in our mouths. We really do not know what to expect.

Ira Glass

Ben says the flavor is like Froot Loops. To me, it's more like orange-flavored baby aspirin. Which means, we failed, right? We made the recipe. You would never mistake it for Coca-Cola. But then it occurred to us, maybe the original version of Coca-Cola did not taste like Coke today.

Charles Candler, that guy who was taken into the holy of holies to learn the secret recipe from his dad, wrote this, "The Pemberton product--" that is the original product-- "did not have an altogether agreeable taste. It was unstable. It contained too many things. Too much of some ingredients and too little of others. The bouquet of several of the volatile essential oils previously used was adversely affected by some ingredients."

That could be the lime and baby aspirin flavored mess that we had just tried. But there was another possibility. The soda guys thought that technology has gotten so much better at extracting flavors like orange oil and lemon oil from fruits in the last 125 years, it's possible that all our ingredients are much, much stronger than Pemberton worked with back in 1886.

Ira Glass

So Eric and Mike called the flavor company that they're working on with all this-- it's a company that specializes in beverage flavors called Sovereign down in Orange County, California-- and asked if they could do a version that tones down the citrus and other flavors.

Ira Glass

A few hours later we have flown south to Los Angeles. We are in Sovereign's lab, a room that smells like you're inside a bag of jelly beans. And we do a second taste test.

Ira Glass

In the lab with us and Mike from Jones Soda were David Ames, who runs the flavor company, and his staff. Going with the idea that our essential oils were much stronger than Pemberton's, they ended up cutting the amount of flavor in half. And then they tried it and they thought, oh, let's cut it in half again.

Ira Glass

We look at each other like, what had we done?

Ira Glass

Later I talked to Steve Warth, the guy who did the heavy lifting in converting that old formula into modern lab measurements. He's the one in charge of developing Sovereign's flavors. He says the ingredients in this old recipe were no surprise to him. Most of them are the same ingredients you use to make any cola.

Ira Glass

Steve said that if we ever decided to match Coca-Cola the way it tastes today, lots of things about the formula are widely known. We'd have to replace the citric acid in the old formula with phosphoric acid. That's what modern sodas use. We would replace the lime juice with lime oil. We'd swap this sugar for high fructose corn syrup.

Ira Glass

That's because even if you know that there's say, cinnamon, in a drink, you don't know where it came from-- Sri Lanka, Indonesia. And that can make all the difference in the flavor. I asked the flavor guys at Sovereign if they could pick out the real Coca-Cola from our formula in a blind taste test.

Ira Glass

So we marked the little plastic cups which had real Coca-Cola with a Sharpie, just a little dot on the bottom of the cup. The cups with our formula had no dot. Everyone tasted. David, the guy who runs the company, was sure that he was drinking our formula. And then he flipped over the cup and saw--

Ira Glass

Meaning he thought our formula was Coca-Cola.

Ira Glass

Ben and I put on lab coats and we set up a table in aisle 2B of a supermarket one afternoon with bottles of our soda-- that is, the formula from the 1979 newspaper article-- and Coca-Cola. Taste test time.

One of the first people who came up to us was actually a woman who had worked supermarket tastings herself.

Ira Glass

So Ben and I smiled. With each person we would give them our formula first.

Ira Glass

And then we gave a real Coke second.

Ira Glass

And before we told people what they were, we asked which they liked better.

Ira Glass

60% of the people preferred our formula over Coca-Cola.

Ira Glass

Though, to be fair to Coca-Cola, people who said they drank a lot of soft drinks, they always preferred the Coke.

Ira Glass

And when we asked people to guess which of the two drinks was Coca-Cola, to our surprise actually, of the 30 people that we polled, 28 could tell which was Coca-Cola. Our formula was that different. People saw a family resemblance though.

Ira Glass

There was just one more person that I wanted to taste the soda that we made and look at the recipe. And that was the Coca-Cola's corporation resident expert on the history of the product and its early formulas.

Ira Glass

I told Phil everything that we knew about the recipe-- the newspaper article it came from, how it matched a recipe deep in his own archives. He was not impressed. Very, very not impressed.

Ira Glass

We went around and around on this. To me, the fact that the recipe showed up over and over gave it credibility. Coke's inventor John Pemberton was known to have sold the recipe to several different people back in the early days. And the fact that it had appeared in his own notebook in Coke's archive seemed like the clincher.

But Phil said that no, no, that notebook, if we were to look at it more closely, was full of all kinds of failed attempts at soda recipes and variations on recipes. So it was hard for him to believe that the real formula for Coke was stuck in there among that stuff.

Ira Glass

I asked him if anybody at Coca-Cola who had access to the original recipe, which he says they still have, actually checked to see if it matched the one in that notebook. And he politely side-stepped that question and we moved on.

Ira Glass

So we put it to him. Was the secret formula really a secret? He said that even if somebody cracked the entire manufacturing process, which he said they'd have to do, and produce something very, very close, Coke has this whole of this thing nobody can touch.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, "Original Recipe." Stories of people going to great lengths to find the authentic original item. We have arrived at act two of our show. Act two, "Ask not what your handwriting analyst can do for you; ask what you can do for your handwriting analyst."

When you find an old, authentic original it can, of course, mean lots and lots of money. Jake Halpern tells what happened when somebody stumbled onto a trove of astounding papers, which lots of people thought was worth millions.

Jake Halpern

John Reznikoff buys and sells relics and documents. He's got a sprawling office in Westport, Connecticut that's floor to ceiling history. Old documents hanging everywhere signed by Thomas Jefferson or James Madison or John Hancock. He's got Abraham Lincoln's spectacles in a file cabinet. And in the middle of the room, as if some movers just dumped it there, something that looks like an old school desk.

Jake Halpern

By the way, $325,000, if you're interested. In a back room there's Annie Oakley's gun leaning up against the shelf where Earnest Hemingway's typewriter sits, alongside Franklin Roosevelt's chess set. It's like what you'd see if the Smithsonian had a going out of business sale. The strangest thing that he bought and sold recently was President Obama's old Jeep. It helped that Obama had mentioned the car in a speech at Chrysler.

Jake Halpern

It sold for a lot, though John wouldn't say how much. When the guy who bought it had it repaired, John asked if he could keep the spare parts. He stores them in a closet in his office.

Jake Halpern

Sucker, right? $500 for a spark plug? But five minutes in John's office and you realize, people will buy anything connected to historical figures, assuming it's real.

This business, especially the rare document business, can be risky. There are so many fakes out there. So John is a fanatic about authenticity. He's studied fakes to see how they're made. He owns a huge collection of forgeries he bought from another collector and he uses it as a reference. He can sometimes even identify a particular forger. And part of his office looks like a lab on CSI. He's got a special high-powered magnifier called a proscope, and a video spectral comparator, a $30,000 machine used to analyze ink.

John's called as an expert witness on handwriting in all kinds of court cases. He's a go-to guy in his field for spotting fake autographs.

Jake Halpern

13 years ago. That's when John's career all but collapsed in a scandal so deep and far-reaching that people are still arguing about what exactly happened. Even John himself isn't entirely sure. He made mistakes he didn't know he could make. Mistakes he didn't even suspect. And for years, he didn't talk about it, until now.

It all started in 1992, when John got a call from a guy named Lawrence X. Cusack III.

Jake Halpern

The two of them hit it off. They started to hang out on the weekends. John was engaged at the time and Cusack-- everyone called him Lex-- had a pretty young wife. They'd all have dinner at an Italian place. To John, Lex was a kind of worldly older brother. They started confiding in each other.

Jake Halpern

John had a particular reverence for soldiers. His own dad had served in the Pacific in World War II, and John still talks about the time when he was eight and his father took out his army uniform covered in medals and ribbons, laid it out on the family's ping pong table. Ever since, John had been sort of obsessed with the military. He'd never joined himself, but he was eager to listen to someone like Lex, who told him he'd been in the Navy flying F-16's during Vietnam.

Lex was quiet about it. John had to pry the details out of him. That he'd been downed in Cambodia and survived by hiding in a swamp, breathing through a reed. What really struck John, what blew him away, was when they visited the naval academy in Annapolis. Lex's sister-in-law had been admitted, so they went down for plebe weekend.

Jake Halpern

A few months after they met, Lex got to talking about his father, also named Lawrence Cusack, who died in 1985. Cusack Senior had been a distinguished lawyer. He'd worked for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York for many years, and he was personal counsel to John Cardinal O'Connor, the archbishop. As Lex explained it, he had some pretty high-powered clients.

Jake Halpern

A month or so later, Lex mentioned something else interesting.

Jake Halpern

JFK and Marilyn Monroe-- this was arguably the most storied love affair and cover up of the 20th century. We've all heard the rumors about it for 50 years. But it's just that-- rumors. No one ever had any hard and fast proof, until-- maybe-- now. He forced himself to be patient as Lex searched through his father's extensive and mysterious files. John can't quite remember how long he waited. Maybe weeks or even months, until one day Lex finally shows up at his office with a discovery in hand.

Jake Halpern

In other words, jackpot.

Jake Halpern

And there were other documents like this one. Lex kept finding them. Letters on Kennedy's US Senate stationary, on White House stationary. There were index cards and personal notes. The documents prove JFK's relationship not just with Marilyn Monroe, but with other, sketchier characters as well.

Jake Halpern

In all, Lex unearthed more than 300 documents, a whole archive. And John, of course, considered that maybe, like the Holy Grail, it was too good to be true. So he set about authenticating the papers. He went to at least half a dozen experts in the field, not just handwriting experts, but people who specialize in Kennedy documents. But John didn't want the contents of the papers to get out. He wanted to protect their value, so he sent the experts only a few documents each. Or sometimes portions of documents he'd Xeroxed, excluding the juicy parts.

Jake Halpern

One of these experts was John's mentor and a giant in the field, Charles Hamilton.

Jake Halpern

So the papers were authenticated and John laid the groundwork to sell them. He enlisted another dealer of historical papers and artifacts, a well-connected guy named Tom Cloud, to handle the actual sales. Lex would get most of the money. Tom and John would make up to 20%, which they would split evenly.

They came up with a strategy. They quietly sell the documents to Tom Cloud's roster of wealthy clients on the condition that they not disclose what they'd bought to anyone for a few years. Meanwhile, John and Tom would find someone to write a book about the archive, which would then lead to a movie deal. Once the book and movie were released, of course the value of the documents would likely skyrocket and investors would be happy.

Everything started to fall into place. An acquaintance connected them with the perfect writer to publicize Lex's archive, Seymour Hersh, the famous investigative journalist who had won a Pulitzer for breaking the My Lai massacre story. Hersh, as it turns out, was already under contract to write a book about JFK's presidency called The Dark Side of Camelot. Cusack began sending copies of the documents in batches, and Hersh started checking that the names and other details in the documents were consistent with his own research.

Jake Halpern

And this was something they could use to build investor confidence, too. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Seymour Hersh is on board and has independently verified key parts of the archive. Hersh's book would come out in November of 1997. In addition, Hersh was working on a documentary about the archive in collaboration with ABC.

By the end of the summer of 1997, about 140 different investors had made purchases from Tom Cloud. The trust agreement between Kennedy and Monroe had alone sold for $450,000. At this point, the documents had already netted roughly $5 million. It was all going great. They were making a lot of money. John and his fiance got married. Lex's wife was a bridesmaid. And John had a baby boy. Then, one day, John's in Cape Cod and he gets a phone call.

Jake Halpern

Cloud is Tom Cloud, Lex and John's business partner. ABC's Peter Jennings had interviewed for Lex for a segment that would air on 20/20.

Jake Halpern

John and Lex had been excited about the segment. They saw it as a kind of phase one of their media launch.

Jake Halpern

What became clear very quickly was this wasn't just a puff piece hyping Hersh's book. It was an investigation. You might have heard something about it. It became huge news. What happened was that ABC had gotten wind of some suspicious inconsistencies in the archive. For starters, one of the letters from Cusack Senior, which was dated 1961, had a zip code in the letterhead. It turns out there were no zip codes in 1961. They weren't announced until 1962.

So ABC hired an expert of its own, a former documents examiner for the FBI. He did forensic analysis of the documents, scrutinizing the paper, the ink, the type. The examiner found that the typeface turned out to be something called Prestige Pica Selectric, which didn't exist until the early 1970s. And whoever typed these documents had also make corrections using a particular kind of lift-off correction tape.

Jake Halpern

Jennings takes all this evidence and calmly and methodically presents it to Lex. Lex appears stunned, almost as if he can't process what Jennings is saying.

Jake Halpern

By this time in the interview, there's a pregnant bead of sweat sliding its way down Lex's cheek. He looks desperate and trapped. If the camera panned out, you would half expect to see him manacled to the chair. So this is what Tom Cloud tells John when he calls him on that day in August.

Jake Halpern

Here's the interesting thing. It's not, oh no, the papers are fake, or oh no, I've been duped by Lex. Its oh no, we've told the truth, and now we're in for it because we've antagonized the Kennedys, the one family in America you do not antagonize. Plus the mob and God knows who else.

Jake Halpern

The notion of a conspiracy might sound a bit far-fetched and frightening, but it also offered some assurances. At least in this scenario, the world as John knew it remained constant. The papers were still real. The choices he had made were the right ones. And Lex Cusack was still his dear and trusted friend.

Jake Halpern

John hired a criminal defense lawyer and the two of them made a trip down to the US District Attorney's office in Manhattan. They met with the prosecutor, Paul Engelmayer. And even here, John didn't feel safe.

Jake Halpern

During this period, things got pretty dark for John. He began taking medication to reduce his anxiety and to prevent panic attacks. Still, he was paranoid. He became convinced that something terrible would happen to him, that his car would blow up when he turned the key.

Jake Halpern

And all this time, John is rehashing the Peter Jennings interview and the inconsistencies with the documents. The typeface and the zip code, the lift-off correction tape. What explained all that? The first chance he got he confronted Lex.

Jake Halpern

What especially bothered John was something else completely. During the 20/20 segment, Peter Jennings had reported that ABC could find no evidence that Lex was a retired naval officer.

Jake Halpern

Before you scream to yourself, how could he so stupid, consider that John's realization about Lex meant dismantling everything he understood about himself. John's entire career was based on knowing the real thing when he saw it. He could judge the authenticity of stamps, and signatures, and documents, and, most importantly, people. Especially friends. In other words, John was no dupe. No way. And not only was there a lot of money on the table, these documents were going to make his career. So while it might sound crazy that he'd believe that Lex was MI5, it made even less sense that John himself was a sucker.

Jake Halpern

John's lawyer told him that he had to clear his name, and the only way to do that was to secretly record Lex. He needed to get him on tape discussing their earlier conversation where Lex confessed and then recanted. Because that would show the prosecutor that John was innocent. After all, Lex wouldn't be confessing and making excuses if John were in on the scam.

John at first refused, arguing that Lex hadn't done anything wrong. His lawyer insisted. And he said, well, you don't have to do it if you don't want to. But tomorrow, if you don't do it, it's fine, but you need to get a new lawyer.

Jake Halpern

So John did it. His lawyer hired a private detective to wire John's office with a hidden microphone. He and Lex talked for an hour. They're both tense and emotional. Lex leaps from topic to topic, offering one wild, half-baked explanation after another, while John tries to pin him down.

Jake Halpern

Lex tells John he only confessed in order to protect his father's reputation. He didn't want anyone thinking his father had forged the documents, or that his father was somehow connected to the mob. Though, maybe his father did fake some papers for whatever reason.

Jake Halpern

Lex seems generally confused. The only thing Les essentially admits lying about is his navy career. He tells John it was more or less a joke that got out of hand until a number of people, including Lex's own wife, were under the impression that he'd actually fought in Vietnam. The thing barely hangs together.

As for the crisp, white lieutenant commander's uniform that John had seen him wearing that day in Annapolis--

Jake Halpern

Lex didn't want to comment for this story. So all I have to go on from him is the TV footage and the wire recording. There, Lex mostly comes across as pathetic. He doesn't show any of the smooth cunning of the Hollywood con man. Instead, his genius-- if that's what it is-- is his lack of finesse. If he's conning John, and his disguise is the pitiable friend who got in over his head, then he plays it very, very well. So well that after the secretly recorded meeting, John says he didn't feel relieved or justified. He felt awful.

Jake Halpern

John says the real aha moment for him finally came with an FBI agent told him point blank that Lex had never served in the military. In other words, Lex's best move, whether by luck or design, was that he hit John's Achilles' heel. He passed himself off as a decorated soldier. So Lex's deepest betrayal wasn't the JFK papers. It was claiming he breathed through a reed in Cambodia.

Lex was convicted in federal court of mail and wire fraud and served nearly 10 years in prison. He got out about three years ago. Seymour Hersh's reputation took a temporary hit, especially after he testified at trial that he quote unquote, "misstated things regarding his independent verifications."

John was cleared of any wrongdoing, but his life didn't just bounce right back. His business suffered. He had to resign as President of the Professional Autograph Dealers Association, an organization he founded. His marriage fell apart. The JFK papers nearly ruined him. And-- it's not surprising-- he's had a hard time trusting people since.

Jake Halpern

But in a weird way he's thankful too. His paranoia made him better at what he does. It was after the Cusack fiasco that he threw himself into studying fakes and forgeries, and made himself so good at spotting them.

When I show John a copy of one of the Cusack documents, he started to analyze the handwriting all over again. It was a document from an archive that had fooled so many experts and that some people in the field, even to this day, argue is real. He turned the paper upside down just as his mentor Charles Hamilton taught him to do, so you aren't distracted by the actual letters. You just see the lines, the curves, and the dots.

Jake Halpern

And perhaps Lex was a mastermind. But then again, we all want to think we can only be fooled by a genius.

Ira Glass

Jake Halpern is the author most recently of the book World's End.

[MUSIC- "I'M GONNA FILE MY CLAIM" BY MARILYN MONROE]

The song stylings of Marilyn Monroe.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia. In the mailroom this week, I was surprised to catch him opening a love letter he got from some random listener.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

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