As the 44th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy approaches, you may get caught up in an eruption of the perennial and sometimes tedious conspiracy debate. You want to keep an open mind and make sure you don't fall for any JFK assassination myths. You can, for example, say with confidence that a lot of the crazy JFK conspiracy scenarios have been debunked over the years. No, neither the KGB, the Masons, the Mossad, nor the Red Chinese were behind the gunfire that killed the liberal statesman. No, Abraham Zapruder's famous home movie assassination was not secretly altered to hide evidence of a conspiracy. And, no, the legendary three tramps photographed that day did not whack Jack. They were just a trio of homeless guys in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But no sooner were these fables dispatched by scrupulous JFK researchers, than public discourse on the JFK story was engulfed by a new set of assertions imbued with an anti-conspiratorial animus that is also unhinged from the historical record. These too need the truth squad treatment.
Myth #1 JFK conspiratorial suspicions, like the idea of a gunshot from the so-called grassy knoll, were ginned up after the fact by demagogues like Oliver Stone.
In fact, a significant minority of eyewitnesses at the scene of the crime thought at least one of the gunshots that hit Kennedy came from the knoll, which was actually a grassy embankment bordering a parking lot overlooking the route of JFK's motorcade through downtown Dallas. A survey of eyewitness statements, compiled by conspiracy skeptic John McAdams of Marquette University, found that 42 of 103 bystanders said that the gunfire came from the knoll or from two different directions. To be sure, a larger number said that shots came from a high window of the Texas School Book Depository. And yes, the parking lot on the knoll was searched within minutes and no gunman or ballistic debris was found. And, yes, ear witness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
The fact remains that more than 30 people in the vicinity of Kennedy's limousine--including Dallas sheriff Bill Decker, Secret Service agent Roy Kellerman and a presidential aide David Powers--independently said that they thought a gunshot came from the knoll. Within a week of the crime, pollsters found 62 percent of respondents nationwide said they thought two or more people were responsible. In Dallas, the figure was 66 percent.
Myth #2: JFK conspiracy theories are mostly held by anti-American leftists and credulous liberals.
Try telling that to Bruce Willis. "They still haven't caught the guy that killed [President] Kennedy," the leading Republican in Hollywood told Vanity Fair last spring. Willis was merely voicing a view that has long circulated on the American right. In September 1964, Warren Commission member Senator Richard Russell, a paleoconservative from Georgia, rejected the so-called single bullet theory and attempted to put a dissent into the commission's final report (only to be slapped down by liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren.) By the late 1960s, conservative figures ranging from former congresswoman Clare Booth Luce to columnist William F. Buckley to Nixon White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman dissented publicly or privately from the Warren report. Mary Ferrell, one of the best-informed JFK researchers, was so adamantly opposed to legal abortion that she told friends that she never voted for a Democrat after 1980. Today, the best JFK assassination Web site, MaryFerrell.org, is named after her.
Myth #3: No reputable historian believes in a JFK conspiracy
Wrong. I know of four tenured academic historians who have written directly on the JFK assassination in the past five years. Three of them (Gerald McKnight of Hood College, David Wrone of the University of Wisconsin-Steven Points, Michael Kurtz of Southeast Louisiana University) came to conspiratorial conclusions, while one (Robert Dallek of UCLA) vouched for the lone gunman theory. A forthcoming book by Naval War College historian David Kaiser on Kennedy's Cuba policy and the assassination, to be published by Harvard University Press next year, is likely to demolish this myth once and for all. (Full disclosure: Kaiser is a friend and the book will cite my JFK reporting.)
Myth #4: Serious people of power in Washington overwhelmingly believe there was no conspiracy.
Hardly. The slain president's own brother Bobby Kennedy was, in the words of journalist David Talbot, "America's first conspiracy theorist." He and First Lady Jackie Kennedy quickly concluded that JFK was the victim of a major domestic plot. Lyndon Johnson suspected that the assassination resulted from the struggle for power in Cuba. Richard Nixon hounded the CIA for files on "the whole Bay of Pigs thing," which his aides understood to mean Kennedy's assassination. George H.W. Bush, upon becoming CIA director in 1976 immediately asked for the JFK assassination file, not exactly the action of someone who thought he knew the whole story. Bill Clinton and Al Gore both said publicly in 1992 that they believed there had been a conspiracy. (Once in office, Clinton recanted.) George W. Bush, to be sure, is a firm believer in the lone nut theory. But, when it comes to providing credible explanations of U.S. intelligence failures that culminated in national catastrophe, Bush's track record is not reassuring.
Myth #5. Scientists unequivocally support the lone gunman theory.
The latest peer-reviewed articles indicate otherwise. One piece of scientific analysis, "bullet lead analysis," that was long used to buttress the so-called "single bullet" theory has been decisively debunked, as a recent front page series in the Washington Post shows. A study of the JFK ballistics evidence, published in the Journal of Forensic Science in 2006, concluded that its findings "considerably weaken support for the single-bullet theory." A pair of articles on the medical evidence, published in Neurosurgery in 2004, offered a split decision. One supported the official story; the other provided strong evidence based on sworn testimony from multiple eyewitnesses that the photographic record of JFK's autopsy has been tampered with. The-called acoustic evidence a Dallas Police Department radio recording that some scientists say contains evidence of a shot from the grassy knoll has been called into question but not refuted by other scientists. The issue remains unresolved. My own review of the crime scene evidence, published this month on Playboy.com, concludes that the scientific case for Oswald's sole guilt has been weakened in recent years.
Myth #6: There is nothing significant to be found in the new JFK files identified since Oliver Stone's JFK
Depends on how closely you care to look. The long suppressed CIA records made public since the 1990s certainly do not confirm Stone's depiction of the assassination as a virtual coup d'etat by the CIA and the Pentagon but they do raise new questions about the Dallas tragedy. They demonstrate that a handful of top CIA officials had much greater knowledge of Oswald's travels and political activities in the weeks before Kennedy was killed than they ever let on. At least one of these operatives-- an undercover officer named George Joannides--remained quiet about what he knew of Oswald's Cuban contacts to perhaps a criminal extent.
As I reported in the Huffington Post, CIA attorneys appeared in federal court on last month seeking to block release of dozens of secret records on Joannides's actions in 1963. At the time Joannides served in Miami as the chief of psychological warfare operations aimed at overthrowing Fidel Castro. The CIA argues that release of any portion of more than 30 documents about Joannides--some of them 45 years old-- would harm U.S. national security and foreign policy in 2007. Don't take my word that these records are significant. Just ask the CIA's lawyers.
When you strip away all the tall tales of JFK's assassination, the unsatisfying and infuriating truth is that we still don't have the full story. And that's no myth.
Jefferson Morley, former staff writer at washingtonpost.com, is author of the forthcoming book Our Man in Mexico, a biography of CIA spy Winston Scott. He is the editorial director of newjournalist.org, a national network of online state news sites. His most recent report on new developments in the Kennedy assassination story will be published this month in Playboy.com
Your own common sense will tell you the same thing. Any President of the United States is well-protected by some of the smartest minds in the security industry. Parade routes are carefully screened weeks ahead of time. A building with such an obvious location as the Book Depository would as a simple matter of course be locked-down. And yet, on this day, it was not. It had a patsy inside.
On this day, quite obviously, the poor man was caught in a cross-fire. Yet it was a crossfire good enough that they blasted Kennedy and the Governor but didn't touch a hair on Jackie's head. (In fact, her grab for a chunk of Kennedy's cranium probably blocked a shot that would have done-in the Governor...)
You don't just get to "catch the President of the United States in a cross-fire." It just doesn't happen that way. The Secret Service is a very dedicated and professional organization. Unless... unless it's very, very big and it comes from the very top. And then, you quickly understand, it's a "right-hand man coup d'etat." Certainly plenty of historical precedent exists for THAT!
Put these twos and twos together and you've got an official story with just as many "pieces missing" as poor Mr. Kennedy's head.
The wink. "Taking out those S.O.B's". Read these two articles and make your own interpretations:
http://www.rense.com/general40/thewnk.htm
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2006/300806jfk.htm
I'm not a Prison Planet/Alex Jones conspiracy theorist... that's just one of the top articles when I search. Pretty juicy claims being made.
Operation Northwoods.
Wouldn't that give Castro motivation?
Or, if JFK was seeking detente with Castro,
would he reveal Northwoods to Castro, pissing off the CIA and the Bay of Pigs crowd?
Although JFK was popular, and having been martyred, became larger than life, in Washington it was different. Could it be that many agreed with Nixon, and felt the only way to get rid of Kennedy and dirty tricks done by the mob, was to assasinate him?
Look at the ascendency of Everret Dirkson, following the assasination. Could they have done this, turning Bobby Kennedy the avenger against LBJ?
Just some speculation.
http://www.winstonsmith.net/jfkshortartretfromind.htm
Jerry Leonard
http://freedom4um.com/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=49506
JFK & Castro: The Secret Quest For Accommodation
http://www.cigaraficionado.com/Cigar/CA_Archives/CA_Show_Article/0,2322,320,00.html
showing that JFK and Castro were seeking detente, as Dr K would say. This counters the 'documentation' in Thom Hartmann's book Ultimate Sacrifice also.
The CIA and insiders did the deed, not Castro and not the Soviets.
The idea that Oswald was a "sharpshooter" means a damn thing.
I was in the military about the same time as Oswald, and at that time ( don't know about the present ) you qualified on the M1 as either a marksman, a sharpshooter, or an expert. I was a sharpshooter, and it was much less than any big deal.
Marksman was the lowest, and all you needed for that was to hit the target once in a while. Sharpshooter was the middle classification, and you had to be no better than a pretty good shot for that. The best shots were called experts, and very few qualified as such. Don't know the percentages, but a guess would be that about 50% of the troops qualified as sharpshooters, maybe more.
than a pretty good shot
Further, the CBS film of the moment immediately following the shooting you see all those people run towards the fence. They were not running there for government cheese.
2 vehicles arrived half an hour apart. 1 was a hearse that carried in a cheap coffin, with
the presidents body in a body bag and the back of his head missing, and the second was the ambulance that brought Jackie , the ornate coffin and the presidents body from Air Force One, which is it , there was only one president.
After all is aid and done, lifton comes to the conclusion the body was lifted and altered. And he has witnesses. he may be called a quack but his eveidence has been hailed as very precise.
i just wish these conspiracy theorists would put their ego's aside and sit together to patch one version together.
One guy called lifton a cook on one hand but then agrees with lifton that the body had been altered. I asked him about what he based his theory on, he says, liftons investigation in the matter.
Oliver Stone was NOT very far away from the Truth. Certainly not dead-on, but not far away at all.
PA Firefighter
Myth #1: The Magic Bullet zig-zagged around and even paused in mid-air. This was debunked at least 20 years ago by NOVA, and has been repeatedly debunked since then.
With no sound on the Zapruder film it's difficult to know when exactly the first shot was fired, and the limo passing behind the freeway sign obscures the exact timing of the second shot. The Warren Commission had to estimate when the shots were fired and they were wrong. Using their placement, you do end up with zig-zagging lines, but that only proves that they got the placement wrong, not that the shots didn't indeed come from the Depository Window.
The NOVA analysis, and many others, have since shown the real timing of the shots, and that the bullet trajectories all align perfectly with the sniper's nest found in the Depository.
Check out this demonstration:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kEh3Kgwhk0&feature=related
This corrected timeline also debunks
Myth #2: No one, not even sharpshooters, could get off three shots as fast as Oswald.
The corrected placement of the first two shots revealed that they were not bunched together as closely as those on the WC thought (they were 3.5 seconds apart, not 1.4 as stated in the WC Report). Instead of firing three shots in a mere 6 seconds, Oswald actually had 8 to 8.4 seconds.
Myth #3: Shooting at a target passing in front of you from right to left is easier than shooting at a target below you that is receding into the distance.
Anyone who makes this claim doesn't know anything about guns, or phenomena like apparent motion. The shot from the Grassy Knoll would've been ten times harder.
One of the major obstacles to finding the truth of this particular matter - as much as that is even possible at this stage - is the simple fact that 'JFK conspiracy (theorist)' has become such a bad word that anyone who dares bring anything akin to it up for discussion is very quickly labeled as some sort of kook or nutcase...or worse. The fact of the matter is that most of them are! But it sure has become the ultimate blocker of the truth.
I'm just wondering if you, or anyone here, are familiar with David S. Lifton and his book BEST EVIDENCE: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy?