Tag Archives: jfk

JFK Assassination 48 Years Later

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Today is the 48th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, which means it’s the day when all the conspiracy theorists come out of their holes.

I don’t think there was a conspiracy at all. It seems pretty clear from the preponderance of the evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

And also, here’s a logical exercise:

There are tons of JFK assassination conspiracy theories out there. But if any one of the conspiracy theories is true, that means the rest of the conspiracy theories must be false. All but one of these conspiracy theories — all seemingly backed up by reams of circumstantial evidence and sinister occurrences — must be false. Because they can’t ALL be true.

Think about that. Most of the JFK conspiracy theories, by virtue of logic, MUST be false.

Once you realize that most of the theories must be false, you realize how silly this whole endeavor is. Because if we can conclude that all but one of these seemingly carefully argued conspiracy theories must be false, then there’s no reason to believe any of them at all.

If you examine any historical event through skeptical eyes, you will find seemingly strange occurrences, weird coincidences, and things that don’t appear to add up. If you examine anything down to the fractal level at which the JFK assassination has been examined, you will find something unexplainable.

I think the reason so many people under 50 believe the JFK assassination was a conspiracy is because the idea that it was a conspiracy is part of our cultural zeitgeist. They’ve been told it must be a conspiracy, and therefore they believe it is, because, “Hey, doesn’t everybody think so?”

No. Everybody doesn’t.

10 Years After the JFK Assassination

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Sunday, of course, is the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and I’ll probably write a more extensive post about it in a couple of days. In the meantime, I was curious to see how the 10th anniversary of JFK’s assassination was covered, so I dug into the New York Times archives and found an editorial dated November 22, 1973, which, in addition to being the 10th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, was also Thanksgiving Day. The nation was deep into Watergate. (And my mom was eight months pregnant with me.)

Here’s the text of the editorial (PDF here):

Ten Years Later

The shot that claimed the life of John F. Kennedy shortly after noon in Dallas ten years ago today will be remembered for more than the murder of a charismatic and promising young president; it marked the beginning of the end of an era filled with the ebullient optimism and confidence identified throughout the world with the spirit of America.

In retrospect, as remembrance of that tragedy coincides with Thanksgiving 1973, some of the Kennedy glitter may have been naively exuberant. The upbeat certainty that “we shall pay any price … to assure the survival and the success of liberty” around the globe seems extravagant today. A sadder but more realistic people has learned to question whether the world will ever again be this, or any, nation’s oyster – or can be made to conform to man’s noblest ideals and aspirations.

“The world is very different now,” John Kennedy said in his inaugural address. “For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.”

More than a decade seems to separate John F. Kennedy’s world from today’s realities. The nuclear threat remains as great as he perceived it then, but to it have been added more subtle threats of an environment abused by man’s thoughtlessness and greed. The abolition of human poverty is a goal as elusive as ever.

* * *

This is not to say that the idealism with which a young President captured the imagination of so many young Americans failed to leave its imprint on national policies and individual lives. Many seeds of racial justice planted during the short Kennedy years were brought to fruition by Lyndon Johnson’s landmark civil rights legislation. When President Kennedy refused to surrender to Governor Wallace’s defiant stand in the schoolhouse door, he could hardly have envisioned last week’s ceremony during which Mr. Wallace presided over the coronation of Alabama’s first black homecoming queen.

Progress toward racial equality at home has been matched by dramatic changes in America’s posture abroad. President Nixon has removed the diplomatic blindfold that for so long ignored the existence of 800 million Chinese. A constructive new pragmatism governs relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. These are no small accomplishments to mark on this Thanksgiving Day.

* * *

It would nevertheless be hypocritical to fail to recognize the deeply disturbing changes that have reshaped this country in the post-Kennedy decade. The brutal gunfire in Dallas was to become symbolic of an increasing resort to violence. Riots and fire ravaged urban ghettos. Political appeals to ignorance and selfishness needlessly divided the nation and substituted neglect for compassion.

If America is different now, the change needs to be measured and defined in terms of mood rather than of specific events and policies. Some of the exuberance has drained away. Years of a debilitating war have sapped American self-confidence and even self-respect. No nation is likely soon again to dominate the world’s economic scene or to hold out a credible promise to make the world safe for an ideal.

Americans have come up hard against inevitable limits. Even more jolting than the limits of power are the suddenly discovered limits of resources – energy, food, raw materials, everything. Americans face for the first time the possibility of an end to growth and expansion.

America is confronted, worst of all, by a debilitating loss of confidence in its institutions. The descent from the idealism and, perhaps, the euphoria of Camelot, gradual at first, has gathered precipitous momentum. The recent political scandals have shaken the country’s faith in itself.

John F. Kennedy could still call for “a grand and global alliance” in the “struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.” The nation’s mood now calls for a more limited goal – a return to its basic principles. There are special grounds for thanksgiving today in the fact that the search for the road back has at least begun.

JFK

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Today is the 46th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I just finished reading Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by Vincent Bugliosi, an engrossing minute-by-minute narrative of November 22-25, 1963, encompassing Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ’s swearing in, the arrest and questioning of Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby’s killing of Oswald, and JFK’s funeral. It’s written in the present tense, which increases the sense of immediacy.

Four Days in November is actually an excerpt of a much, much larger book by Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, published in 2007, in which Bugliosi aims to shoot down all the conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination, one by one, and prove that Oswald did it and that he acted alone. Having finished Four Days in November, my interest is piqued, so I’ve decided to try reading the whole thing, or at least as much of it as I can before I get tired of it. So I took the big kahuna out of the library the other day.

I certainly won’t be able to carry it around with me on the subway. According to Amazon.com it weighs 5.6 pounds. And yes, it is massive, almost three inches thick. Maybe I’ll buy the Kindle version (just $12.55) and read it using the free iPhone Kindle app.

How many pages is Reclaiming History? Well, the Four Days in November portion of the book, which took me a week and a half to read, is 317 pages. But the entire book is more than 1,500 pages. More than 1,500 pages! (Excluding the bibliography and index.)

Oh, but wait! The book comes with a CD containing two PDF files, the Source Notes and the Endnotes, since the book was already so big. The Source Notes are 170 pages of citations, which are basically just one-line citations that don’t contain substantive information. But the Endnotes? The Endnotes run to 958 pages! And they are substantive, providing various asides on numerous topics for those who want it. One of those endnotes, perhaps the longest in the book, is 66 pages.

So if you include the book’s Introduction (36 pages), the main text (1,510 pages), and the Endnotes (958 pages), that’s 2,504 pages. As Bugliosi writes in the Introduction, “if this book (including endnotes) had been printed in an average-size font and with pages of normal length and width, at 1,535,791 words, and with a typical book length of 400 pages, and 300 words per page, this work would translate into around thirteen volumes.” Maybe more like eight volumes, since Four Days in November is about an eighth of the total, but that’s still massive.

Not to mention obsessive. But there are a lot of conspiracy theories to deal with.

I’m a novice when it comes to all the assassination conspiracy stuff, but it seems to me that it’s all bullshit and that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Of course, I know barely anything about the topic, so my opinion doesn’t count for anything. But conspiracy theories just seem silly.

For one thing, there are tons of conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination. Reams of books have been written. But as Bugliosi points out in his well-worth-reading Introduction, if one of the conspiracy theories is correct, then all the rest of them are incorrect. And if that’s so, then the tons of people who claim to have uncovered evidence or witnesses or inconsistencies that prove or support their pet theories are simply wrong. Therefore, there’s no reason to give credence to one of these theories just because someone puts forth what seems to be a well-argued case.

For another thing, the Warren Commission, which examined the assassination, did not conduct a superficial investigation. It was massive, including interviews with more than 500 witnesses, trips to numerous locations over several months, and examinations of evidence. And it did not have a predetermined goal in mind; it was open to finding conspiracies. It found none. Most people who discount the Warren Commission’s conclusions (and apparently that includes a majority of Americans) have not read the Warren Commission’s report, let alone the 26 volumes of supporting testimony and documentation, which together run to more than 18,000 pages. Most people don’t even know how extensive the investigation was. If the victim had been an ordinary person instead of the President of the United States, such a thorough investigation would convince most people. But because it’s JFK, his death apparently has to be a result of sinister forces.

I have only begun to dip into Bugliosi’s book, in which he claims to have settled the issue once and for all. And yet… I go online and find numerous criticisms of his book by conspiracy theorists who say he ignored this and ignored that. It actually upsets me. Not physically or emotionally, but intellectually. Because if Bugliosi can devote more than 20 years to this enormous volume and pick apart conspiracy theories one by one, and yet people can respond, “That idiot is totally ignoring X and Y and Z,” then what am I, a novice who is only a fraction of the way through this book, supposed to think? It just makes me frustrated.

I don’t know why I should even bother dipping my toes into the most obsessively studied one-day event in American history, an event people have devoted their entire lives to examining. All I can say is that I find it interesting, and I’ll read this book until I get sick of it. And then I’ll move on to something else.