I saw the author of this book, Manning Marable, speak in Rochester a few weeks ago. Marable died earlier today, at age 60. The book sounds fascinating:
The book’s account of the assassination of Malcolm X, then 39, on Feb. 21, 1965, is likely to be its most incendiary claim. Mr. Marable contends that although Malcolm X embraced mainstream Islam at least two years before his death, law-enforcement authorities continued to see him as a dangerous rabble-rouser.
“They had the mentality of wanting an assassination,” Gerry Fulcher, a former New York City police detective who participated in the surveillance of Malcolm X, told Mr. Marable for the book.
That is why “law-enforcement agencies acted with reticence when it came to intervening with Malcolm’s fate,” the book asserts. “Rather than investigate the threats on his life, they stood back.” Paul Browne, a spokesman for the Police Department, did not respond to e-mail and telephone requests for comment this week.
Based on his new material, Mr. Marable concluded that only one of the three men convicted of killing Malcolm X was involved in the assassination, and that the other two were at home that day. The real assassination squad, he writes, had four other members, with connections to the rival Nation of Islam’s Newark mosque — two of whom are still alive and have never been charged.
Update. I don’t want to go all birther on you here, but I have always been skeptical of the official story of the JFK assassination. It seems unlikely to me that Oswald acted alone. For that reason, I find research into high-level 1960s assassinations — awfully, there were so many — very interesting.
Gin & Tonic
I read that too. The publication date of the book is Monday. The author died today. How bittersweet is that? He finished the work, knew it was done, yet didn’t live to participate in its release.
Guster
Skeptical of the JFK assassination story why?
Little Boots
yeah, I’m leery of almost every conspiracy theory of the last 40 years, but Kennedy? that just screams conspiracy, and I do not believe anyone who doesn’t think so.
Gina
This does look good. How totally suck-a-delic that Marable died just before publication day. You were lucky to be able to hear him speak.
JPL
The Oswald theory never made sense.
Old Dan and Little Ann
Back. And to the left. Back. And to the left.
beltane
Whatever the circumstances surrounding the assassinations of the 1960s, the net effect was that the American left was rendered toothless and cowed in the aftermath. I was born right between the assassinations of MLK and RFK and all I’ve witnessed in my lifetime is the steady progression of right-wing ideology. I know history isn’t static and that this too shall pass but it sure is taking a long time.
General Stuck
You and me both. No matter how many times I watch the Magruder film, and how many times I have heard that spray from a bullet impact can travel backwards toward the direction of of where Oswald was firing from, you will not convince me that Kennedy was not also shot from the front. The head shot.
The rest of the skepticism about Oswald too dumb to act alone is also valid, especially since his claim to be “a patsy” seemed truthful to me.
I was young then, but it became so commonplace to hear of leaders of all sorts being assassinated, by the time RFK was gunned down, I was pretty numb to it all. Added onto all the bombings and shootouts, bankrobberies by militants of all stripes, against a backdrop of 200 to 500 GI’s KIA in Vietnam a week, and a few of them my friends. But still, I am far more worried for my country today, than then. Maybe it’s being older, I don’t know. But I had a sense back then that some good changes were happening, that were needed, in spite of all the violence and unrest. I don’t have that feeling so much these days. Mostly a sense of impending doom, and a ticking clock with a chance for redemption of our country, but time is running out.
JPL
When Oswald was charged, the media pointed to the fact that his wife was Russian. For many that proved he had to be the shooter. It was only a few years from duck and cover.
Joseph Nobles
For people that want to look at the actual evidence, I highly recommend Bugliosi’s encyclopedia “Reclaiming History.” Oswald had sole possession of the murder weapon, and he’s unequivocably the murderer of Officer Tippit.
Comrade DougJ
@Guster:
The ballistic report doesn’t seem plausible and I don’t see any reason to think there wasn’t a second shooter. Also too, getting killed before trial like that seems fishy.
Comrade DougJ
@Joseph Nobles:
Thanks, that is very interesting.
Double J
James Ellroy’s USA Trilogy. Historical fiction that seems frighteningly close to the truth. At the very least least it’s savage writing from an true American character. Ellroy’s life reads like a piece of fiction.
Incoherent Dennis SGMM
Back in the day, I dated a young woman whose father taught a seminar at Berkeley on the JFK assassination. He was not a conspiracy nut, he was an academic who was interested in finding out what he could about the events surrounding the assassination. The more he researched, the more he became convinced that the lone gunman explanation was bs.
Subsequent investigations have either disputed the Warren commission or supported it. For me, the most convincing argument against the lone gunman theory was the fact that the unredacted records from the Warren Commission’s investigation will not be released until 2017.
Gin & Tonic
@General Stuck:
Zapruder. Magruder was Watergate.
cmorenc
The assassination that turned out to be the real long-term damper on the evolution toward a progressive-minded US was the night RFK got shot. IMHO had he survived, he would have handily beaten Nixon in 1968.
I realize RFK was more of a mixed bag politically and personally than appears in the glowing after-image of martyrdom (particularly that he did’t decide to challenge LBJ until McCarthy had demonstrated that LBJ might unexpectedly be more vulnerable than democratic party insiders realized). But had he won, there would have been, for one thing, no William Rehnquist or Warren Burger on the Supreme Court, and very probably a bit more than a decade later, no Antonin Scalia to put the brakes and reverse on the accomplishments of the Warren Court. And that’s just one f’rinstance.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Comrade DougJ:
Yeah, to me the whole getting killed by Jack Ruby thing is what makes it so suspicious. Ruby was a corrupt mofo, not some sad fan of JFKs who wanted to take it out on LHO. Its just too…tidy and non-coincidental.
General Stuck
@Gin & Tonic:
OOps, thanks. It does rhyme a little though.
Gian
for those who might like the flick, one of the best hollywood takes on the political murder spree of the 60s is called the parallax view. It’s dated in that the reporter character actually wants to seek the truth. But as for finding a crazy seeming “patsy”, well it’s an interesting take:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071970/
Amanda in the South Bay
@cmorenc:
TBH, for me, having been born in 1979, all this romantic talk about the 60s never made sense. How all the assassinations did this that and the other thing, the same old cliched story told a bazillion times in countless tv shows and movies.
General Stuck
@Gian:
Terrific film, with the trademark paranoia of political movies of that time. And no happy ending.
Little Boots
@Amanda in the South Bay:
agree, the Jack Ruby thing is the most suspicious of all of it. everyone can screw up in the heat of the moment, but that gangster asshole Jack Ruby showing up to kill Oswald, that is bizarre beyond belief.
Paul
@General Stuck:
Me three. No matter how many times I watch the MacGruber film.
nick
Oswald was a U.S. intelligence asset at the time of the assassination. The book to read is the very current “JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters.”
Pick it up and read the 10 page chronology at the beginning. Heavily footnoted, it’s clear that Kennedy was assassinated by forces in our own government (CIA and military).
Gin & Tonic
@Amanda in the South Bay
Cliches are based on truth. MLK and RFK shot down within two months of each other was transformative. Too bad it seems like ancient history.
Little Boots
@Gin & Tonic:
it’s a weird and unpleasant thought, but I’m surprised there haven’t been more assassinations since then. they showed us that a few assassinations can change everything, and yet, by and large that doesn’t happen.
Incoherent Dennis SGMM
@Amanda in the South Bay:
I suspect that it’s like any other cataclysmic event: if you weren’t around then it’s difficult to share the feelings of those who were. I was in High School at the time and the Cuban Missile Crisis was still fresh in everyone’s mind on top of the Cold War paranoia that had been going on since the Forties.
Years hence, someone will post on the equivalent of then’s blog, “I don’t see what the big deal was; all they did was knock down a couple of buildings.”
And so it goes.
Joseph Nobles
@Comrade DougJ: You’re welcome. In fact, the much-maligned Warren Commission report is actually quite a good read.
http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/
Amanda in the South Bay
@Incoherent Dennis SGMM:
I think part of it is, well, not so much generational warfare, but lets face it-its a baby boomer world. That particular generation has run things since at least the 80s. Maybe not so much politically as culturally-I think the 60s have been pretty thoroughly tapped as a source of inspiration for Hollywood since the 80s. Fresh faced innocence ruined by JFK’s assassination, LBJ and the Great Society, pimple faced small town boy fights in Vietnam, families divided with college student radicals, acid with the hippies, then…they all become suburban yuppies in the 80s?
Hehe, I kid on the last part.
PTirebiter
@Little Boots: and dying of cancer at the time… I don’t lose any sleep over it but it is awfully weird. Have they ever had a military sniper try to replicate LHO’s shots with a cheap rifle?
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
The DFHs who raised me were (and still are) certain Farrakhan was involved in X’s assassination. Now, I can’t see that slimy little weasel pulling the trigger, but I can see him urging someone else to do so.
And everyone knows the Cigarette Smoking Man killed JFK.
Mark S.
I’ve long wondered why the RFK assassination doesn’t get much play. Did everyone just conclude Sirhan Sirhan was a nut and that was all there was to it?
Incoherent Dennis SGMM
@Amanda in the South Bay:
It’s difficult not to have an influence when there are so many of us. We were for years the sought-after demographic simply because of our numbers and purchasing power. We moved through the years like a gravitational anomaly, warping culture, standards and business as we went. The fact that a few of us, and that includes me, remained unrepentant hippies has been lost to the larger numbers of us who became old assholes with an entitlement chip on our shoulders.
Incoherent Dennis SGMM
@PTirebiter:
It was a long time ago but, IIRC, they took a Mannlicher Carracano rifle identical to Oswald’s and proved that an accomplished marksman could put the rounds into a moving target at the same range and the same rate that Oswald was purported to have done.
Little Boots
@PTirebiter:
I don’t follow all this in any serious way, but that I think they have done, and nobody can replicate what Oswald did. I mean, luck is luck, and maybe it all worked out the first time, but nobody can duplicate it, as far as I know.
Incoherent Dennis SGMM
Ah, here’s the
It’s an excerpt from Vincent Buliosi’s book, mentioned above.
Little Boots
@Incoherent Dennis SGMM:
but wasn’t Oswald a famously bad shot?
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
Whoa! LHO and Dan Savage. Separated at birth.
Incoherent Dennis SGMM
The link regarding the ability to match Oswald’s shot.
They did duplicate it. Oswald was classified as a “Marksman” by USMC standards of the time because he scored 212 out of 290 on a marksmanship test.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
My LHO and Dan Savage “separated at birth” post above is moderated. Pity. Because it’s eerie.
Matt
Discovery Channel aired a special where someone tried to recreate the “magic bullet” shot.
I generally take the same view on conspiracies that the Coen brothers did in Burn After Reading: Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing.
Little Boots
@Matt:
In a sense, yeah, but there really have been conspiracies, like Watergate. they happen. it doesn’t mean that the killing of Kennedy was one, but it is equally silly to believe that America is magically immune to anything as “european” as conspiracies.
Dr. Squid
@Old Dan and Little Ann: Uh, yeah. Because no human has ever turned his body ever.
I try not to follow the CTs, but Oliver Stone is a fucking moron.
PTirebiter
@Little Boots:
True enough, but the mind abhors a vacuum. I live in the area and every so often take visiting friends down for the tour. Listening to the Dealey Plaza conspiracy touts arguing on the knoll can be a hoot. Sometimes we follow it up with a pizza at Campisi’s with the hope of seeing Jack Ruby’s ghost. Good times.
cmorenc
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Something that’s hard for many folks born much too young to have lived through the 1960s to appreciate is just how dramatic the social changes were in American society during that decade, and how traumatically wrenching and challenging the civil rights transformation (incomplete though it was) and the Vietnam war were to the confident, positive self-image the US had of itself ever since World War II. I grew up an upper-middle class white kid in a small southern town, and went to rigidly segregated schools up through the 10th grade, and vividly remember when our high school was first integrated my junior year (far more peacefully than in many locations). I remember a nation nearly uniformly gung-ho behind the intervention in Vietnam back in 1963 through 1966, to save the world from the rest of Asia falling to communist domination and world takeover, when the US was a country whose population still implicitly trusted our leadership in the Presidency, congress, and the military to be honest, straight-shooters about the bona fide need to go to war (still part of the WW2 mindset)…and how that dramatically began to crumble around 1967 through 1969. I remember when America’s self-image of the good life and family was aptly captured by tv shows like “Ozzie and Harriet”, “Leave it to Beaver” and the original “Andy Griffith Show”, and how confidence was lost that this was really an accurate picture against crass materialism (the hippies came along and acquired a bad image because among the true revolutionaries working toward a different bona fide sustainable lifestyle were plenty of people simply along for a big party with no responsibilities and no baths).
The big events such as the JFK, MLK, and RFK assasinations are dramatic turning points, and yes, the whole “Camelot” shtick about the JFK white house and thousand-day era was partly overblown nostalgic hype. Bill Clinton was a virgin choirboy compared to JFK’s womanizing, which neither the press nor the opposition considered fair game back in that day (many of them had mistresses too).
Little Boots
@PTirebiter:
I was in Dallas once and went to that Conspiracy Museum that tied in everything, and I mean everything, from Lincoln’s assassination to the Kennedys. that was … special.
DonkeyKong
Oh jeez, sorry people but the shot from the the Book Depository in Dallas was an easy shot. I’ve been to the building. The shot was 65 yards by a trained marine. Sickeningly easy.
As far as the the dipshit forensics of this thread, ponder this. When Paul Snyder raped Dorthy Stratton and put a shotgun to his cheek to blow his head off, he fell forward.
So watch the MacGrubber, Protruder,McGruder film umtil your eyes bleed.
My favorite take on the conspiracy mindset is the first person who questioned the Warren Report, Mark Lane. Lane got so deep in his mindset he ended up as procounsel to Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple.
He barely escaped with his life out of Jonestown only to write a book that blamed the sordid event on…..you guessed it, the CIA.
Arundel
The idea that a working-class nobody like Oswald could defect to the USSR, denounce America, then change his mind and come back with a Russian wife, and settle in Dallas of all places at the very height of the Cold War paranoia.. it is indeed interesting and improbable! With a stint of pro-Cuba activism in New Orleans. Nothing to look at here, not suspicious at all!
I definitely had my JFK questions/obsession in my early twenties (the early 90’s). I wonder if that’s been a rite of passage since the assasination, like the flashback scene in Annie Hall where Woody can’t get it on with Alison Portchnik because the mystery makes no sense to him. Anyway, I was embarrassed by the indie movie Slacker, the scene where apparently my library-scouring curiousity about JFK’s assassination was widely shared among my cohort, a cliché. But it was a true curiousity- something monstrous and secret and queer but not in a good way had happened 30 years earlier (then). 1993 also saw the controversial publication of, “The Killing of the President”, a lavish picture-book with gruesome autopsy photos. But also intriguing accounts and photos of underworld types like Jack Ruby. It’s an seriously good and fascinating book.
I don’t have much more to add except for this amusing anecdote from Carly Simon. She and Jackie were movie-going buddies: Jackie was a famously seen-about presence in NYC, and loved movies. It was intricate though. Jackie couldn’t be seen going to a theater showing Oliver Stone’s “JFK”. Carly recounted that she was so stressed and nervous about this, finding a theater that didn’t also have “JFK” on the marquee. When she finally found Jackie (she would hide in a ladies-room stall until the movie started to avoid attention) that when they finally sat down, she just nervously blurted out the thing she shouldn’t say: “So, have you seen ‘JFK’ ?” Jackie replied, “Carly!! Of course not!” Not a big reveal there, I just love that taking Jackie to the movies was such a fraught and complicated thing. And can you imagine her going to see Oliver’s “JFK”?
Oh wait, I do have something to add- no way Oswald acted alone. Or acted at all.
Matt
@Little Boots:
Of course there are conspiracies. But human imperfection being a constant any conspiracy involving more than a few people will fall apart like Watergate.
And the larger conspiracy theories, like the one believed by 9/11 truthers, amount to little more than a religion for atheists. Providing an explanation for a random, chaotic, and frightening world.
Little Boots
@DonkeyKong:
do you find the Jack Ruby thing odd, at all?
PTirebiter
@Little Boots: Funny. It’s still there and still doing bang up bidness. For awhile there was a guy selling tours in a black 63 Lincoln convertible.
Love Field to Dealey Plaza and then on to Parkland Hospital.
He had a timed tape that played 60’s music until they passed the book depository where he cued another tape with gunshots followed by authentic radio reports. Apparently too tacky even for my fellow Dallasians.
Little Boots
@Matt:
9/11 was an honest to allah conspiracy. not that the U.S. government did it, but that a small group of conspirators pulled off a major killing. no question about it. no dispute even. a small group of fanatics hijacked 4 planes and killed a lot of people. could a small group of Americans have pulled off the killing of a President? sure, why not?
Roger Moore
@Little Boots:
Yes, there really have been conspiracies, but when the details come out we often discover that they were very different from what we thought. My gut feeling is that the only conspiracy was the Warren Commission itself. TPTB wanted the commission to conclude that Oswald acted alone because they were afraid that a hint of Russian or Cuban involvement would lead to a war, and they wanted results in a hurry. The Commission came back with the preordained, but substantially correct, answer but got there by a route so sloppy that it gave future conspiracy buffs plenty of room to spin their theories.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Matt: Being in a band will disabuse you of conspiracies, grand or otherwise. Getting 3-5 adults to cooperate on something they ostensibly enjoy and want to do? It borders on the impossible.
Little Boots
@Roger Moore:
they should have looked at the mafia a lot closer, I think, but did they even acknowledge the mafia then? I’m not sure. and Cuba. what a mess Cuba was. who could afford to look at Cuba, or still can?
DonkeyKong
There are things about the Kennedy assasination that are odd, but odd isnt evidence.
I’m alway up for some good ass muthufukin evidence!
Odd shit, not so much.
Little Boots
@DonkeyKong:
but Jack Ruby? come on? that shit is beyond weird.
Shelton Lankford
@Joseph Nobles:
The only legitimate function Bugliosi’s brick can possibly serve is as a doorstop, a purpose to which it is admirably suited due to its heft. As for information, why it should take 1648 pages to say “The Warren Commission was right” is the only mystery.
If you want to learn anything about JFK’s death and what it means to our history and our future, start with James Douglass’ “JFK and the Unspeakable – Why he died and why it matters”. Why do intelligent people default to the lone-nut theory when a Congressional select committee confirmed a conspiracy? Why did they lock up evidence for 70 years? (and likely longer) Critical thinking my ass.
DonkeyKong
John Wilkes Booth being in the crowd that showed up for John Browns hanging is weird. Darkly poetic,odd if you will, but that’s history.
Little Boots
@DonkeyKong:
yeah, but not all that weird, really. what would truly be weird is if some Pinkerton detective showed up to kill John Wilkes Booth before he could testify. then you’d have to ask, why? what the hell was that about?
And that’s what makes me really weirded out about Jack Ruby. why him? why then? what the hell was going on there?
DPirate
Sceptical? It’s utter horseshit!
I might add there are just as many assassinations today – likely more. They may not be as high profile as the Kennedy brothers’, possibly in part because the perpetrators have much more control over who reaches that level, but there are plenty of suspicious suicides and accidents occurring.
The madam in Florida, David Kelly, the Clinton advisor fellow, the Anthrax fall guy, some of these guys, these guys, to name just a few.
Joseph Nobles
@Shelton Lankford: Thank you for your opinion.
BTW, they determined a conspiracy based on evidence that was later proved to be untrue. So, no conspiracy.
joeyess
I used to feel this way, however, while he is a wanker, Gerald Posner wrote a really good book Case Closed that makes a compelling argument that Oswald did in fact act alone. I’ve seen a really good documentary on this subject as well.
joeyess
@Incoherent Dennis SGMM: That’s the documentary that I’m talking about.
mike the dealer
So much of the Warren Report/House Select Committee on Assassinations report had to mess with the physical evidence. Ford moved the wound in JFK’s back to his neck to make the magic bullet work, while the bullet holes in his shirt/jacket line up lower on his back. The HSCA moved the entrance of the headshot to the top of the head, rather then the base of the skull, where the autopsy doctors claimed it was, since it was the only way to make Oswald firing the headshot work.
Little Boots
@joeyess:
but nobody really thinks he acted alone, completely. even the least conspiratorial person gets that he was either immersed in an ideology or was at least for awhile surrounded by people who thought he should kill Kennedy. Nobody ever acts alone, really, in a situation like that.
joeyess
@Matt: This is the show I was talking about. Sorry.
joeyess
@Little Boots: agreed, but I do think he was the sole shooter.
Little Boots
@joeyess:
maybe, but that still doesn’t change the overall problem. was there a whole group behind him? did they all disappear after the assassination or what?
DonkeyKong
If dark forces wanted Kennedy destroyed, there was plenty of evidence, photo and otherwise of him fuckin around on his wife. the press even knew about it.
Kennedy won on the margins and something like that would have destroyed him. It almost destroyed Bill Clinton’s presidency.
You don’t have to shoot president’s to neutralize them, and that was true of Kennedy.
As far as the what if’s of 1968, look at the primary scores for Humphrey and Robert Kennedy. Bobby never would have caught up.
And Nixon won in 1968 because of George Wallace’s 3rd party run. He swept the deep south that normaly voted democratic. Wallace got the highest youth vote during the primary’s. Those fuckers grew up to be teabagger’s
OK, I’m done blowin your minds ya dig?
Mnemosyne
I saw a documentary on TV about the assassination one time, and they had an interesting point: most of the “second shooter” theories assume that Connally was sitting directly in front of and at the same level as Kennedy. But he wasn’t. He was sitting in a jump seat in the limo that was at a 90 degree angle to Kennedy’s seat and slightly below it.
Once you account for the actual position of the people, the “magic bullet” is actually a straight shot.
ETA: It sounds like I saw the same documentary that Matt did.
Little Boots
@DonkeyKong:
different era, altogether. obviously, nobody in power cared in 1963 or else anybody who did could not do anything about it then. yes, Nixon, or LBJ, would have used it if he could, but for cultural reasons, he couldn’t. And so, whoever really hated what Kennedy was doing, and I think the obvious candidates are the Mafia, had to do something else.
Little Boots
@DonkeyKong:
as for 1968, please come to Nixonland. I think those are interesting points.
DonkeyKong
Nixonland is on my reading list and I’ve been a luker on that thread. Juicy stuff.
Mike Furlan
Also too.
The bullet the almost killed President Reagan entered his body from the oppposite side, the side facing away from John Hinckley Jr.
I have always been skeptical of the official story of the Reagan assassination attempt. It seems unlikely to me that Hinckley acted alone.
Little Boots
everyone come to the new thread. we’ll eat. we’ll talk assassination and conspiracy. it’ll be a good thing.
Anne Laurie
@Gin & Tonic:
I’ll repeat myself from the NIXONLAND discussion: In my working-class, ‘white ethnic’ Bronx neighborhood, RFK’s assassination seriously freaked out all the grown-ups, who were the parents & grandparents of us nascent baby-boomers. People really, seriously assumed that JFK’s murder might have been a fluke, and MLK’s murder was probably just a bunch of ignernt good-ol-boys getting their short-sighted revenge at the expense of the social order for the rest of us. But Bobby’s murder? That, “everyone” assumed, was payback — the third data point outlining the shape of a monsterous future. Most of my neighbors, Archie Bunker’s real-life cousins & co-workers, could no more put words to their new perceptions of conspiracy than my dog can teach trigonometry. But, from everything I’ve read, one reason that American politics in general went so horribly wrong starting in 1968 is that a lot of Americans became convinced that they were at the mercy of dark forces, that only hunkering down and/or lashing out might possibly offer some protection against the Smoke Monster howling in the darkness and picking off the stragglers. America didn’t turn into Nixonland just because one damaged political paranoid won an election or two; Nixon won those elections because voters perceived America as turning into a nightmare hall of mirrors where paranoia was the only possible chance of preservation.
Mark S.
@DonkeyKong:
There’s that, and there’s also the fact that Kennedy was an extremely sick man:
He also had severe back problems and took truckloads of drugs for all of this. Would it have been impossible for the CIA or whoever to overdose him if they wanted to? That sounds a lot easier than shooting him in front of hundreds of people in broad daylight.
Also, when you look at the potential suspects (USSR, Cuba, CIA, Mafia), it seems like they all had a hell of a lot more to lose killing JFK than any conceivable benefit they would have gotten out of it.
Mnemosyne
If you haven’t read it, G really liked Don DeLillo’s novel Libra, which postulates that all of the conspiracy theories are true and that plots by the CIA, Mafia, Cubans and others all culminated in the assassination.
Joseph Nobles
@Mark S.: I’ve heared it posited the back brace kept Kennedy from evading any shots after the first one rang out. Of course, I doubt he would have moved in any way that would have put Jackie in any more danger than she was in.
Joey Maloney
@PTirebiter:
I’m sure “Watermelon” Dan Burton is ready and eager to help with this.
Joseph Nobles
“heared it posited”
rrrrrrrrr
Thlayli
Historian Arthur Schlesinger put it something like this:
Murdering a President is a really big deal. You would think that carrying it off would be a really big operation, with lots of people working together. It is not the sort of thing that could be done by a random schmo with a deer rifle.
So when a random schmo with a deer rifle shot Kennedy, people’s reaction was “That’s unpossible! It was the CIA … or the Mafia … or the Cubans … you know, somebody big!”
Also, too: wasn’t this a post on Malcolm X? Funny how the little aside at the end is getting all the comments.
Nick
Oswald was a CIA asset at the time of the assassination. That’s been established.
http://www.law.uga.edu/dwilkes_more/jfk_22destiny.html
Think about it: Kennedy was allegedly killed by a CIA asset, a man who was involved in U.S. intelligence work, probably from before his ‘defection’ to the USSR, and who had contact with intelligence operatives within 2 months of the assassination (that we know of).
“I’m a patsy.”
This was a U.S. intelligence job. “JFK and the Unspeakable, published within the past couple years, lays out the strongly documented case. Whether there were one or two shooters is a distraction, once you understand Oswald was an intelligence asset.
Cris
RIP Manning Marable. He was a regular speaker on David Barsamian’s Alternative Radio program, my preferred source for thoughtful left-wing anti-establishmentarianism.
alwhite
Sorry for the long post
I am not big on conspiracy stuff – too many things happen by coincidence and too many things have to go perfectly for a conspiracy to work. There is a great book on the Kennedy assassination that gets no attention, “Fatal Error” that is not a conspiracy book and actually make a scientific case for what happened.
The author was a cop and expert marksman – when he retired he own a gun store and worked on the side as a ballistics expert. He was one of a group of marksmen CBS brought in to test The Warren Report & the only one to get three hits on a moving target in the time given.
On one of the anniversaries a magazine asked him to write an article so he chose the thing he knew best, ballistics and dug into all the info including the just released autopsy report & photos. I’m not going to give you all the details but here is summary.
Oswald’s first shot hit the street & shattered (FMJ ammo has a copper jacket over the whole thing and does not deform like softer stuff) Kennedy has bits of copper on the back of his head from that shot. Kennedy is heard to say “I’m hit!”. Oswald’s second shot severs JFKs spine and kills him. The autopsy makes it clear his suit coat was lifted so entrance & exit wounds make sense. Gov. Connelly was sitting in a jump seat – inboard and lower than JFK – the bullet left the President & went through Connelly as described.
If you look at the film Kennedy is “posturing”, fists clenched and raised, a clear sign of spinal cord injury. He might have lived a short while but the state of medicine at the time means he was really on his way out no matter what.
The third shot was an accident. It came from the Secret Service chase car behind the President. They were carrying the then new AR15 which makes a distinct wound. The inside front of JFKs skull was peppered with copper bits (called copper salting) which means the shot came from behind. The round makes a more explosive wound than the type used by Oswald. When the first shot was fired the agent grabbed the gun (which after initial denials was reported to have a round chambered) the motorcade accelerated, he was thrown back and accidentally discharged the rifle.
There is a lot more technical detail in the book, the only speculation the author makes is the who and why of the decision to not come clean on what really happened.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
Everything you wanted to know about the Kennedy assassination but was afraid to ask.
Oswald planned it out so he could get away with murder. Turns out he was more right than he thought.
The Sheriff's A Ni-
On that note: Lennon, Reagan, Sadat, and John Paul II all get shot within the space of a year or so – and each one was an open and shut case.
nancydarling
@alwhite: @The Sheriff’s A Ni-: Thanks for the sanity. Reading this post and comments, I kept expecting it to morph into “the moon landing was a hoax thread” or something about the twin towers.
OGLiberal
@DonkeyKong: “Wallace got the highest youth vote during the primary’s. Those fuckers grew up to be teabagger’s”
Exactly. When you look at pictures from various civil rights events, you might see some older white Southern men and women in the background with looks of disgust and maybe even shouting something nasty but the thugs who beat up peaceful marchers or heckled and dumped food on the protesters sitting at lunch counters – just to name a couple of examples – all looked like they were under 30 – ie, the Social Security collecting, Medicare using, scooter riding tea baggers of today.
Reading Hampton Sides book about the manhunt for James Earl Ray. Ray was a big Wallace fan – even worked for his campaign out in Los Angeles just a few months before he shot MLK.
Judas Escargot (aka "your liberal-interventionist pal, who's fun to be with")
@Little Boots:
did they even acknowledge the mafia then?
RFK sure did, when he was AG under his brother.
And The Parallax View is one of those movies, like Network, that eerily presages contemporary tropes.
OGLiberal
Like others here, the Ruby thing is the one item that I can’t get past. Why the hell did he shoot Oswald? I can even admit that the reason that he was able to get so close to Oswald was that he was buddies with a lot of cops and they wouldn’t have thought anything about his presence there nor would they have thought him likely to kill Oswald, or anybody. (dude had a long rap sheet but I don’t think any of it was violent) But why did he do it? To spare Jackie the pain of a trial, which was why Ruby said he did it? Please.
Oswald could have been the lone shooter and there still could have been a conspiracy. There could have been a conspiracy without Castro or LBJ or Carlos Marcello or Edward Lansdale involved and/or in the know. It could have been a small conspiracy. The Lincoln assassination was a conspiracy, a small one, with a lone shooter. (well, there was another dude who pistol whipped William Seward) I guess the reason why it’s easy to argue that Oswald did it alone with no co-conspirators is that nobody credible has come forward and said, “yeah, I was in on it.” And I’ll admit that just like I can’t get past Ruby, I can understand how the “no conspiracy” folks can’t get past the fact that no co-conspirators ever came forward.
dmbeaster
The Oswald did it scenario is the most consistent with all of the evidence, but there is plenty of weirdness to always create some uneasiness about what happened, with Jack Ruby probably being the oddest element. The conspiracy theories are far more unlikely than the classic Oswald theory. The second shooter scenario is wildly implausible, as it required near simultaneous action, and for the more exposed shooter(s) to escape unnoticed. I guess the Dallas police department was also in on it, so that they found Oswald but none of the others. For some reason, conspiracy theories never factor in the gigantic implausibility that a conspiracy involving a large number of actors will remain concealed over an extended period of time.
The predisposition of human beings to be suckered by conspiracy theory stuff is an interesting topic in its own right.
You can look at the JFK assassination theories (and conspiracy theories in general) as a larger lesson on how human beings perceive things. Basically, our brains are miswired so that we are predisposed to see causation even if none exists. Research has suggested that it was an evolutionary advantage to have this predisposition; that we were better off to suspect causation based on clues, even if wrong, than to miss the causal links altogether.
Two primary ways this manifests itself – our “horse sense” tells is there must be a causation when there is simply a temporal or spatial relationship. Second, in assessing probabilities, we wrongly think that anything that falls outside of the highest probability event is “unusual” and “non-random”, and hence there must be some causation at work to influence that (as opposed to realizing that if you factor in the sum of probabilities for all of the less likely events, it frequently is more likely that one of those events will occur than the highest probability event).
Also, I think we want to believe in some form of causation even when none exists, since believing in cruel randomness is a lot more unpleasant. It feels better to believe that large organized evil forces are at work to cause ugliness, than to accept that most of the time, shit happens for no particular reason.
YellowDog
I lived through those 60’s assassinations–I was in my 4th grade classroom when the news came that the president had been shot. I went through my JFK conspiracy phase in college and never gave up the notion that Oswald could not have been the lone gunman until I saw a show a few years ago in which the shooting was meticulously restaged. It may have been on the History channel, but it was not those breathless Bill Curtis-narrated conspiracy shows. The restaging included tests of what a shot from the side or front would have done. The conclusion was that a head shot from that direction would produce massive trauma, far more than was observed. We wantto think that CSI is the norm, but it is not. I am now willing to allow that Oswald was lucky, that the police were incompetent, there was genuine confusion and panic that day, and that, if there was a conspiracy, it was after the fact, to cover up the incompetence and panic. Ruby still bothers me, but, unlike Oswald, he had opportunity to confess and didn’t. The small-time hood and ne’er-do-well may have thought he would be hailed as a national hero. Sometimes shit happens all at once. I am more inclined to think that the MLK and RFK assassinations have elements that have never been revealed, but, here too, the cover-up may be of the aftermath and the incompetence or lack of interest on the part of government officials.
JGabriel
I think Oswald acted alone, but that there were probably other people involved in the motivational and planning stages.
.
Brachiator
Oh crap. What an odd and unexpected abuse of skepticism.
Supposedly unlikely shit happens all the time. JFK nuts always get hung up on their mental reveries and hypotheses, but never bring evidence of anything. Mere speculation is worthless.
It’s funny. Evidence of the Lincoln conspiracy was uncovered fairly quickly. Some of the Malcolm X stuff has been known, but was just ignored. But for decades Kennedy theory stuff is still just as dumb as nonsense about UFOs or Bigfoot.
Brachiator
Oh crap. What an odd and unexpected abuse of skepticism.
Supposedly unlikely shit happens all the time. JFK nuts always get hung up on their mental reveries and hypotheses, but never bring evidence of anything. Mere speculation is worthless.
It’s funny. Evidence of the Lincoln conspiracy was uncovered fairly quickly. Some of the Malcolm X stuff has been known, but was just ignored. But for decades Kennedy theory stuff is still just as dumb as nonsense about UFOs or Bigfoot.
Tehanu
@General Stuck:
I was young then too and I have the same feelings now. Some of those good changes stuck and are continuing despite the right’s worst efforts; some didn’t, and perhaps another generation will succeed where ours failed. But I also agree with you that the current outlook is pretty damn grim.
Joseph Nobles
Sadly, JFK theories have become too ubiquitous to make much difference anymore. The absolute worst they can do has already been done.
In fact, the main JFK conspiracy theorist who hurt the country the most was LBJ, not Oliver Stone. Check out Kathryn Olmstead’s “Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11” sometime. Johnson was certain he would find Castro at the end of the Oswald thread. After all, attempts on Castro’s life by the US were legion. There was a mission to pass off a possible assassination tool that very day in Paris, I believe it was. And if Castro had assassinated Kennedy, it meant war, and that meant the USSR would be involved, and that meant nukes.
So Oswald being a lone gunman was a very important US policy decision. Oswald was indeed the lone shooter, and whether he was put up to it by anyone else, we’ll never know for certain. I do not put much credit into theories that elements of the US government or US big business could have been behind Oswald. But the US government was indeed ready to avoid investigating the assassination of a US president too deeply to avoid the discovery of their own rank bullshit. Oswald was sick and he shot at a sick society, and the wound was never treated properly and it continues to fester.
Of course, faced with the choice of probable nuclear war and sitting on a thorough investigation behind Oswald, what else was LBJ to do? Which would have harmed the country more?
john f
@dmbeaster: This article in Salon I came across a few months seems to be the most plausible explanation by which Jack Ruby plays in all of this: G. Robert Blakey does agree that Oswald did pull the trigger but evaded the hit the local Mafioso’s had put in place that day, so Jack Ruby is later hired as Plan B.
Suzan
arrrrrrrrrggggggggggh
If you don’t believe the Warren Commission Report, read Reclaiming History by Bugliosi. If you don’t believe the Warren Commission Report after reading that, you might be nuts. (That book has changed may minds, IMHO, and is well worth the read.)
Peter VE
Try reading David Kaiser – The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Kaiser and his assistants reviewed all the public documentation – of which there is literally a truckload. Kaiser is careful not to draw any conclusions. But – Carlos Marcello and Santo Traficante were under heavy pressure from the AG (Bobby), despite helping the CIA in trying to kill Castro. They had a good reason to be mad at both brothers. The AG was also chasing Jimmy Hoffa, finally convicting him of Jury tampering in 1964 after an earlier aquittal. When the House Select Committee on Assassinations started subpoenaing testimony in 1975, Giancana, Roselli & Hoffa all got whacked. They were all associated with Traficante & Marcello, and all in line to testify (Roselli had already appeared once before ending up in an oil drum in Biscayne Bay).
Best guess: Marcello, Traficante & Hoffa hired Oswald, and planned to get him out of Dallas, then kill him. When Oswald killed Officer Tippet, Ruby was plan B.
PanurgeATL
@Joseph Nobles:
Of course, the way the narrative has come down, the society was perfectly fine (except for that civil rights business, we’ll admit) until Oswald and the DFHs spread the malaise (which lasted until Ronbo Reagan putatively healed it–or at least we decided to act as if he had). (If the ’80s don’t have a nickname yet, it should probably be “The Big Pretense.”)
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Yeah, sure you “kid”. ;-P GenX’s rap on the Boomers has always been that they Gave Up And Became Yuppies, which is a funny thing for a generation built on post-punk hippie-bashing to say. Beyond which, if the Boomers were really running things, wouldn’t we have the world they originally wanted by now?
Which leads me to…
@Tehanu:
Me three. OTOH, I refuse to put a countdown clock on the Hippie Dream. If it’s the right dream, you fight for it, period. Unfortunately, so many people gave up that it helped give the dream a bad name, which is why subsequent generations haven’t fought for it themselves even when it would be in their best interest to do so. Of course, considering how those “subsequent generations” have regarded DFHs themselves, I don’t think they should be pointing fingers at the Boomers.
Paul in KY
@PTirebiter: The shots weren’t that hard. Oswald was a good shot & he was aiming down & the rifle was well braced.
Paul in KY
@Little Boots: They have duplicated it. Remember, the 1st round is already in the chamber. All you have to do from the time the trigger is pulled the first time is to work the bolt twice & aim/fire 2 more shots in that time period.
Paul in KY
@JGabriel: That’s what I think. Oswald was the lone shooter, but he was put up to do it by others.
Jack Ruby stopping him from talking is a big tell (IMO).
Paul in KY
Was surprised that Mr. Marable has stuff in his book saying the people convicted of Malcolm X’s murder didn’t do it (at least 2 of them, anyway).
I thought the 3 men just stood up in a speech, unloaded their weapons into him & were all caught at the scene. Plus, they all confessed (were happy to do it). That’s what I thought happened.
FuzzyWuzzy
@Gin & Tonic: To extend the Bill Hicks (who also is the subject of a new work) theme; “then quit telling me about Jesus. It was a long time ago, get over it.”
FuzzyWuzzy
The thing is that there is no line between the CIA (and its predecessor, the OSS) and the various factions and mafias of the world. That seems to be the hurdle that people can’t get over-that the CIA would be using Special Forces instructors to train Cuban Mafia soldiers in Florida to assassinate Castro, only to be denied by Kennedy and then to turn their new skills around in a classic blowback maneuver.