What JFK Conspiracy Bashers Get
Wrong
by Jefferson Morley
www.huffingtonpost.com, November
21, 2007
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
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