Unhappy Anniversary: it’s almost 50 years since the JFK assassination
This essay by George F. Will reminds me that in about six weeks we’re going to be commemorating the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination.
I’ve been dreading it for quite some time, in no small measure because the usual trickle of essays on the subject is going to become a tsunami. The occasion will undoubtedly bring all the conspiracy theorists out of the woodwork to parade their pet notions of whodunit and why and how.
I’ve written a few pieces myself on the subject of the assassination, and I probably will recycle some of them as the day comes around. But right now, prompted by the Will essay, I’m wondering about something in particular: how many people in this country today would be able to correctly identify the political affiliation of Lee Harvey Oswald as Communist? My guess is: not so many.
Will points out that the story of the Kennedy assassination started to be rewritten almost from the moment it occurred, and that even after Oswald was captured and known to be a dedicated leftist, the killing of JFK was often described as a story of the effects of right-wing hatred. That serves the approved narrative much better than the truth.
Although conspiracy theorists have their own manifold and sundry motivations for believing all the things they believe, part of the effect of the cacophony of possibilities is to absolve the true culprit—the far left—of responsibility, and to assign guilt to almost anyone other than the person who actually did it. The need is to blame the right, the government, the CIA, the FBI, the Vice President, the Mafia, the Jews (we couldn’t leave them out, could we?), Castro (at least he’s on the left), and even Officer Tippit, one of Oswald’s victims. And that’s just the tip of the conspiracy iceberg.
It’s not innocuous, and it boggles the mind that even now, when the evidence of Oswald’s sole guilt is so clear and compelling that it is virtually a certainty, polls show that the majority of Americans still doubt it. In fact, belief in his guilt was never very high at any point:
According to the AP-GfK survey, conducted in mid-April, 59 percent of Americans think multiple people were involved in a conspiracy to kill the president, while 24 percent think Oswald acted alone, and 16 percent are unsure. A 2003 Gallup poll found that 75 percent of Americans felt there was a conspiracy.
The Oswald-acted-alone results, meanwhile, are the highest since the period three years after the assassination, when 36 percent said one man was responsible for Kennedy’s death.
A pathetic lack of critical thinking, I’m afraid.
[NOTE: I fully expect an outcry of disagreement from people coming to this blog in order to spout their favorite conspiracy theories. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel, so I’ll just refer them to some previous posts I’ve written on the subject (including comments): this, this, and this. Also please see the text of the Vincent Bugliosi tome about the assassination, Reclaiming History, the text of which is online and searchable. Read it, or at least selected parts of it, and you’ll learn a great deal.]
This is what happens when you allow leftists to write the history. Younger Americans probably got all their “knowledge” of the subject from the Oliver Stone POS movie, or from the sensationalist programs on History Channel.
In a sense, we have ourselves to blame. It’s too easy to just ignore propaganda like JFK instead of fighting back. We’re worried we’ll look like reactionary (a leftist term!) kooks.
After a couple of days to mull it over, conservatives should’ve publicly boycotted that movie.
A major reason there are so many conspiracy theories redirecting attention from comrade Oswald (he defected to the Soviet Union, renounced his citizenship, married a KGB Colonel’s daughter) was, well to redirect attention away from the fact that Oswald was a commie with ties to the Soviet Union and Cuba.
Just as the KGB tried to assassinate the Pope, they successfully killed JFK. And the “magic” bullet was just made of lead and copper, no magic involved, just circumstance.
This would be a meta “conspiracy” theory, wrapping them all up into one overarching theory.
The biggest problem with all the conspiracy theories is that there wasn’t anything about the assassination that required the assistance of another, conspiring assassin. Oswald happened to have a job in the TSBD, bought a rifle through the mail, and already knew how to shoot it. He didn’t need money, didn’t in fact HAVE an escape plan, didn’t need fake papers or any of the sort of nonsense that a Hollywood story of an assassination requires.
If it was a conspiracy, what in the hell were the other conspirators doing in support of the plot?
The problem is that the Kennedy Clan myth machine is intent on depicting the misadventures of a naé¯ve president as if it were some sort of Camelot. I survived the Kennedy Ear, and the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Berlin Wall and the Vietnam War were no Camelot, unless you are a Kennedy.
Matt_SE has a point I agree with. Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists often utilize tactics that drag conversations down into a gutter, making it hard to have civilized, honest conversations with them. As aerospace engineer and moon-hoax-buster Jay Windley once said of 9/11 Truthers (but which applies to pretty much any proselytizing conspiracy “evangelizer”): “Remember that the goal of conspiracy rhetoric is to bog down the discussion, not to make progress toward a solution.”
Again, I agree with Matt_SE’s irritation over the hijacking of the popular sense of the historical narrative. But at the same time, I’ve often found it more productive to talk to conspiracy evangelizer’s audience instead of the myth peddler him/herself. As the saying goes: You can’t reason a man out of a position he never reasoned himself into to begin with”. And that’s true. But often, the audience is less gullible than the CT salesperson is willing to admit, and all they need is the truth instead of the myth.
Diana West: Call your office.
Even more annoying to me is the harping on about (And yes, I said harping) the wonders of Camelot. It makes me want to puke.
I wasn’t old enough then to see it for what it was; but, let me throw this question out there – was it as bad as the MSM praising Obama or not as bad?
Will the next generation have to deal with the “Wonders of Obama” while their kids and grandkids get offers of Ambassadorship just for being an “Obama.” My God, that makes me want to puke even more. I was hoping that we would be done with Obama in just 3 more (albeit long) years.
Camelot. The romanticization of the presidency started with JFK. And the boomers were at the age of idolizing celebrity…unfortunately for the rest of us, they seemed to stay there.
It’s been said before, but sometimes the best outcome for celebrities is to die young. Then, you don’t have to see their decline (think Fat Elvis).
JFK died before he could screw too many things up, and his family had a self-interest in perpetuating the legend.
Thankfully for us, the current generation will get to see the entire EPIC FAIL that is the Obama administration. We conservatives should just be ready to smack down the hagiography when we see it this time.
One of the first cracks in the edifice of my inherited liberal beliefs came in the 1970s from hearing a childhood friend tell me about his summer working at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport. As he put it, while the Kennedys present themselves as rich people with a conscience, their behavior which he witnessed shows that they are merely rich people.
In looking at the inherited liberal beliefs from my childhood, I later saw there were at least two examples where the liberal narrative either deliberately or unknowingly was wrong. One example was the spin put on the JFK assassination, blaming it on right wing hatred in Texas when a Commie had killed JFK. I am not sure when I was aware of liberal duplicity on the assassination, but it definitely didn’t occur until adulthood.
Another false liberal narrative was that Soviet spies such as Alger Hiss or the Rosenbergs were innocent. Time and again during my liberal childhood I heard from adults about their innocence. Allen Weinstein’s book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case which came out in 1978, demolished the liberal myth of Alger Hiss’s innocence. The Rosenbergs came later, courtesy of Ron Radosh.
Like the Who sang, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
I was a college freshman at the time and here’s my two cents worth about JFK’s death. In 1989 I was asked by a writer to review two boxes of files that had come into the possession of a relative of a Lead Dallas Detective who was working the Ruby case when it was taken away by the FBI. This box had some original police reports and interviews and a whole lot of copies of stuff and it was thought that it might contain the missing information about what really occurred that weekend.
I have some knowledge of guns an I am familiar with older military weapons so I was sure I could discover something that had been missed or overlooked in this raw data. Long story short, two months of work and I had a lot of insight into small errors that might have been avoided, with hindsight, and no revelation and just a sorry sad story about a crazy, mis-guided son-of-a- bitch who changed the world with a few easy shots with a cheap Italian rifle with a decent scope.
Then to make matters worse another nut job Ruby knocked off Oswald and really screwed up events. I wanted to find out the real story which I knew could not be that simple and the more I looked the more clear it became that a few easy shots from the Book Depository by an Expert Marine Marksman (the movie really had that wrong) killed the president. There was an interview with people on a gun range where Oswald was practicing and when he had made several holes in the center of his target he started shooting the center of other targets adjacent to his showing off. That behavior is terrible etiquette on a gun range and he was asked by some angry men to leave the range. Oswald was a reasonably good shot with his rifle.
A bit later I worked with a man who tole me he was going through a divorce in the fall of 1963 and he was a regular at Ruby’s strip club. He said he knew Ruby very well and that Ruby was too nutty to be part of a conspiracy. When he saw the shooting of Oswald on TV he said he recognized Ruby at once and his reaction was dismay but not surprise since Ruby was know for erratic behavior and being flat-out nuts.
As for Tippets, I think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I became acquainted with a woman who, in here youth, was a classmate of Tippet’s grade school daughter and she was in the class when the daughter was taken out and told that her father had been killed. This lady did not live far from the Tippet family and her take on Tippet was that he was a working class policeman who stopped the wrong guy at the wrong time.
In the mid 1990’s I had a conversation with a man who was with the FBI at the time and when I asked him where he was during the investigation. He tole me that he knew the primary FBI agents but he was just a minor part of the activities however, he was certain Oswald acted alone because he said that for all the actors in a real conspiracy to remain that silent for so long was an impossibility. According to him over time people like to tell stories and talk and in all of his FBI time nothing was discovered that would indicate Oswald had help.
I was reluctant to believe that Oswald could have acted alone and I do think the death of JFK was an unfortunate turning point in the life of our nation but now I am certain that it just happened and the nut-job with an inexpensive rifle acted alone.
“. . . when the evidence of Oswald’s sole guilt is so clear and compelling that it is virtually a certainty . . . .”
And that evidence was complied and presented by a government that, today, I trust less and less. I’m not sure that govt machinations have gotten any worse in the past 50 years (i.e., the govt was “honest” back then); it might just be that in this 24/7 internet news world that there is more sunshine on the activities that govt does and has always done.
The one single issue that has always bothered me about the Kennedy asassination is that FBI sharpshooters who were much more highly trained and proficient than Oswald could not duplicate the speed and accuracy of “his” three shots. Occam’s razor applies here.
Which brings up another point: What happened to Occam’s Beard? Haven’t heard a peep from him/her in quite a while. Anyone?
With the possible exception of John Wilkes Booth, every presidential assassination and attempted assassination was done by a leftist. This includes the deranged Hinckley.
In fact, in the last two presidential elections, every single act of violence was committed by a leftist.
This is no aberration. Socialism romanticizes and encourages violence against its opponents. The red flag stands for the blood and fire of violent revolution. Obama’s own rhetorical is unfailingly violent, as is that of Pelosi and Reid.
Gringo’s comment brings to mind why leftists are so terrifying: It’s the combination of their deceitfulness and their statist/totalitarian mindset. They want top-down control over society and will resort to just about any kind of perversion of the truth in order to get there.
T:
Actually, if you read Bugliosi’s book (or any factual and up-to-date website on the assassination) you’ll find that the shooting necessary for the assassination was EASY to replicate and the conclusion is that he absolutely had the skills and the weapon to do it. Do your homework.
Matt_SE wrote (@11:14):
Nope. It started long before that. The press idolized FDR, too. Lord knows how many presidents from Geo. Washington on were idolized by the media of their time.
It just goes to show that the current team of Obama media sycophants is nothing new and the media has never been anything other than corrupt in its attempt to deliver unsubstantiated opinion as reportage. Nothing new under the sun.
T:
I contacted Occam’s Beard and have not heard back from him. It is concerning.
FDR is better known as the President for Life. The first one, at least.
@T
FDR. Yeah, I forgot about him. Point taken. I guess I let my disdain for the boomers get the better of me.
@bob sykes
Liberals have been compared to teenagers: too emotional, with poor impulse control and an inability to see the consequences of their actions. This, coupled with a rejection that emotions even need modulation and a sense of self-righteousness.
That’s a powder-keg. Good thing that most of them hate guns, huh?
It’s interesting that chapter 2 of the “Hunger Games” films opens on November 22.
Chapter 2…in November, the 11th month.
2 x 11 = 22.
Waitaminute…they’re trying to teach us math. CONSPIRACY!!!1!!!1!
As further support for the lone gunman theory, consider what Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin relates. From the Amazon blurb on the book:
Because he had been trained in Moscow during the Depression years, where he had made friends Mikhail Suslov, the long-time CPSU ideologue who played a leading role in deposing Khrushchev, Morris Childs was readily accepted as the intermediary between the CPUSA and the Soviet hierarchy. Morris Childs was also the bagman for funding the CPUSA. During his training in Moscow during the Depression years, Morris Childs realized he still understood the Russian language, which he had heard his immigrant parents speaking in the US. He never let on to the Soviets that he understood Russian, so he always heard what the Soviets said in Russian before he heard the English translation.
Shortly after the JFK assassination, Morris Childs was in Moscow. He heard Boris Ponomarev, chief of the International Department say in Russian that the KGB had informed the Politburo that Oswald was not a KGB agent or informant after he left the USSR. The KGB file on Oswald which the Politburo had confiscated corroborated that. And why would the KGB have one of their agents go to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City to try to get to Cuba? [page 100-101 in hardbound]
Morris Childs heard the Soviets say among themselves in Russian, “What shall we tell the American?” What they ended up telling the American in English corresponded to what they discussed among themselves. Morris Childs also noted the shock among Ponomarev and his cohorts- that couldn’t be faked.
While the Soviets had nothing to do with killing JFK, I still suspect that Castro had something to do with it.
The one single issue that has always bothered me about the Kennedy asassination is that FBI sharpshooters who were much more highly trained and proficient than Oswald could not duplicate the speed and accuracy of “his” three shots. Occam’s razor applies here.
Well, that depends on if they were really qualified and what they were asked to duplicate.
There’s a difference between being romanticized and being idolized. Washington was the first president to be idolized, so that’s nothing new. FDR was idolized more than he was romanticized, I think. People loved him for what he actually was, not because of some imagined impression of what he was. JFK, on the other hand, was undoubtedly romanticized to an unprecedented degree: He appealed to people’s fairy-tale fantasies of a young, handsome prince. Practically nothing about his actual achievements or abilities warranted the adulation he received in life, let alone in death.
As for “president for life,” we have had exactly eight of them so far: William Henry Harrison, Taylor, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, FDR, and JFK.
To have an honest debate, people must forward honest points. Perhaps T just took this claim at face value, but the point is that even if T is well intentioned, the claim itself is based in a dishonesty:
This claim about the “FBI sharpshooters” is a lie originally made by Craig Zirbel and forwarded by credulous conspiracy addicts. It happens to be not only incorrect, but nearly the exact opposite of what actually happened. In the first experiment, the FBI employed a master marksman who ran 4 iterations of tests, and each time either hit the target well within the conspiratorially claimed 5.6 seconds, or was only off by fractions of a second of the claim. Which itself is incorrect; the Warren Commision never gave a 5.6 second window, and an analysis of the Zapruder film demonstrates Oswald had almost 8 1/2 seconds. In another experiment, three different marksmen conducted a series of experiments eventually amounting to 18 shots fired. 13 hit, and in one case pulled off the shots in 4 1/2 seconds.
This is what I mean about debate tactics. 9/11 truthers will ask you questions about how the jet fuel melted the Twin Towers steel. Apollo hoaxers will claim that no one could survive the Van Allen belt’s radiation. JFK CT’ists will claim that FBI sharpshooters couldn’t replicate the shots. In all cases, the misrepresentation lies in the presentation of the claim. Some of it is simple fudging (yes, if you stayed in the radiation belt long enough without protection, you would get irradiated, but the Apollo flights were too fast plus shielded), some of it is convenient misanalysis (some people *did* think molten aluminum, lead, copper, etc. was molten steel from far off), some of it convenient misquoting of intial impressions that were later corrected (again, molten steel on 9/11), and some of it is outright lying (FBI sharpshooters failing to replicate the shots). All of it is based on a dishonesty. Perhaps unintentional, if one fails to double-check a claim. But sometimes intentional, when someone simply refuses to correct error.
I will not judge T’s motivations here. However, regardless of whether it’s well- or ill-intended, the claim itself is simply, demonstrably incorrect. As are so many (too many!) conspiratorial claims. The lesson is, as Neo mentioned above, to think more critically about what you’re told or read. And understand that too much that’s forwarded as “what actually happened” tends to melt under the light of reality.
Thank you. I’ve been saying this for years. Kennedy yearning has been nothing more than style over substance, but try making that argument in the light of the current hagiographization of him.
Link?
If I remember right, Occams Beard has a rich disdain for Kennedy.
Rush is holding forth very nicely on this issue. Let the re-narrating begin!
Another point: only we oldsters care about this.
I have a theory that it only takes 2 generations (20 yrs on average per generation) for the culture to either forget or denigrate an event or person. Certainly by the third generation.
I doubt the current generation spends much time thinking about JFK.
Heck, in 27 years 9/11 will be a distant memory, too.
Charles J. Guiteau, who assassinated President Garfield, was also not a leftist. He was simply a disappointed office-seeker (and known as a loyal Republican).
To my Democratic-voting but pre-PC parents, JFK and his siblings were just “shanty Irish with money”–rich, but still low-class. The repellent behavior of JFK and his various relatives over the years has largely borne this out (think of a liquored-up Teddy chasing skirts and leaving girls to drown).
While some conspiracy theorists attempt to minimize Oswald’s involvement in the assassination, the record has been clear right from the start that he was a communist. Even the MSM couldn’t hide that little fact, which was so central to Oswald’s life.
E.M.H.,
I appreciate the information. You are correct that I accepted the claim at face value. The information you present here is the first time I’ve encountered it.
Perhaps shoddy thinking on my part but in reality I have not had a particularly strong intellectual curiosity about the topic to follow it up with substantial reading/research; as a historic event it just hasn’t fascinated me all that much. Even if I could have definitively proven/decided for myself one way or the other, there was no effect I could have on the outcome anyway. Mea culpa.
T. Graceful response. For those interested, if you are, it would be interesting to know where you got the misinformation.
My God, the level of vitriol, misinformation, and historical ignorance makes me wonder about the sanity of the right wing. The irony, lost on all neocons, is that they are alive today only because JFK resisted the raging hawks in his own military and the slimy conservative rats who formed his intelligence counsel. They clamored for nuclear war in 1961-62. A holocaust that would have left the globe in ashes. Kennedy, alone, resisted and the world survived. Rather than listening to Rush Goebbels spew his racist, misogynist fascist bile all day, read something historically accurate and enlightening like James Douglass’s “JFK And The Unspeakable.”
Tim Fleming
author, “The President’s Mortician”
I was in college when Kennedy was elected president and I remember the gushing adulation of the media. My mother sarcastically referred to it as Kennedy worship.
One of my classmates walked in to a room occupied by me with several more classmates, said “Kennedy’s been shot and killed.” I responded to my peers with, “That’s too bad. Now he will be a martyr.”
My, I was cynical and sardonic even in my college years. Just look at me now.
Tim Fleming
When I see: ” racist, misogynist fascist bile” I see irrefutable indicators that all is BS. Irrefutable. You need to get a new way to peddle this stuff. Don’t give away the plan so fast.
What T said. Life magazine -a HUGE media organ back in the day- was one big wet kiss to FDR, week in and week out.
Richard Aubrey,
I wish I could accommodate you with a source, but it was a piece of information (apparently mis-information) that I picked up in one of the numerous documentaries aired on the assassination years ago. It’s now just a false factoid that sits in the dustbin of my memory. As I said above, sloppy thinking on my part fueled by an overall lack of interest.
Tim Fleming,
“[Neocons] clamored for nuclear war in 1961-62.”
You are either being sarcastic (and very poorly so) or you are a moron. No one, let me repeat, no one clamors for nuclear war. Democrats, however, gleefully push the vacuous myth that Republicans and conservatives do so because that myth fuels the Democrats’ own sense of moral and cultural superiority. Without the myth of their own superiority Progressives have nothing.
T. Lot of that going around. Hardly inadvertent.
As regards progs’ myths: I think they know better but hope somebody out there doesn’t, can be convinced. Their desperation, obvious when you hear them, tells me they’re not doing as well as they would like.
Tim Fleming’s rant is an illustration of one reason why I became an apostate and left the libs: the self-righteous sneering gets tiresome. [Also see my comment @ 11:16 a.m.]
As an author, with several books listed in Amazon, Tim Fleming certainly knows how to turn off potential book buyers.
Andate, pues.
“Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of J.F.K.” (NY,1993)stands as the absolute best and most thorough work on the subject. One lone pathetic, piece of shit slimebag communist.
It has amused this 30-year neoconservative countless times that President Kennedy was a rock-ribbed neocon(in modern terms)and would have been scathing in expressing horror at his old party.
Gringo,
It’s always about self-righteousness on the left.
Every argument, every discussion with a Progressive has at its core a need and an attempt to demonstrate their moral/cultural superiority and their opponents’ deficiency of the same. As their adversaries awaken to that fact it becomes easier and easier to win arguments with them because one argues not with the facts of the issue, but against the false Progressive premise.
You know you’ve won the discussion when they shut down and either walk away or start calling you names.
T – Could not agree more. However did you ever win and argument with an idiot. He/she has a whole lot more practice than most of us, especially a blog troll.
OldTexan,
One does not win an argument w/ a Progressive by changing their mind. One wins by backing them into a rhetorical corner re: their moral/cultural superiority where they have no comeback, no justification for their argument and nothing more to say. When faced with the contradiction of their premise they either shut down and walk away (“I still don’t believe it”) or they start calling you names.
Under those parameters, yes, I win arguments with leftists all the time (most recently vs a pro gun-control leftist who signed off on his last communique of our e-debate calling me a “dumbass”).
NeoConScum:
Actually, I have read both Posner’s and Bugliosi’s books (or at least, much of Bugliosi’s—it’s over a thousand pages long) and I have to say that although both are very good Bugliosi’s is much more thorough (much longer, too) and is actually the definitive work on the subject. For those who won’t read such a tome, they could just read the first 500 or so pages and get the gist of it. Posner’s book is excellent, too.
Well, to be fair, many political assassinations throughout history actually were conspiracies. To name three big ones off the top of my head:
1. Julius Caesar. Et tu, Brute?
2. Abraham Lincoln. While Booth alone fired the fatal shot, his plan was to decapitate the U.S. government. I think four people were imprisoned and four were hanged. It’s arguable whether Dr. Mudd and Mary Surratt deserved their fates, but there’s no doubt there was a conspiracy.
3. Archduke Francis Ferdinand. To hear Barbara Tuchman tell it, there was hardly anybody in Sarajevo that day who wasn’t trying to kill the Archduke. Gavrilo Princip just got lucky.
Tim Fleming, please report to your nearest IRS station for a routine ideology and loyalty test.
Your actions as monitored on the web by at least 4 agencies, have rendered you under the suspicion of collusion with Republican voter suppression groups.
Comply or else.
A President for Life is not merely someone who would have, upon their death, been a US President. That kind of category would even warrant a person being President for 5 days, to the title.
No, a President for Life is someone who, if they had not died or been stopped, would have continued to have been elected as the President of the United States of America. On that account, there are precious few candidates.
Kennedy was a Yankee bigot, to use Molly Ivins’s term. “We’re heading into Nut Country,” he told an aide as they prepared for the Dallas trip.
My parents couldn’t stand him (Goldwater Republicans), but when he was shot, they were shocked and appalled. They assembled us in the living room, an unprecedented seriousness on their faces, and said, “You children know we never were great admirers of President Kennedy. Still, he was our President — and no one gets to shoot our President.”
Principles before all. I never forgot it. (My big sister confirmed that yes, they did indeed do just that.)
So much for Nut Country. Boy, I’ll tell you where Nut Country is: everywhere limousine liberals congregate to spit and sneer at good, solid, kind-hearted American folk. (Or, as our uncle once remarked, “Nothing They think of us is half so bad as what we think of Them.”)
Oh, and we spent the entire day watching the funeral. Remember that? it was on live, on all three networks: I still remember the cadence of the muffled drums, and the riderless horse with the boots reversed in his stirrups. I remember being fascinated by the solemnity of it all: they broadcast every minute of the procession to the cemetery, and the interment there: live.
N-Neocon: Thanks, Mam, I’ll take a look at Vince. I had the obviously mistaken impression that he’s fallen off into the nutter, conspiracist sector. CBS News(of ALL things!!)did a very impressive walk back of the events of that day hosted by Walter Cronkite decades ago—shooting test from Oswald’s perch and all—and found the Warren Commission’s findings by far the best.
NeoConScum:
Apparently he’s fallen off the nutter re George Bush and Iraq. But most definitely not re the Kennedy assassination. And his enormous book is online, so it can be read for free that way.
I too have been thinking a lot lately about this year as being the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. I have to admit I am one of those who is fascinated by the whole mystery of it all- more so now since recently finishing a great political thriller, “No One Can Know” by Adrienne LaCava with a story plot that centers around JFK’s assassination. The book doesn’t take a position in the matter of who killed JFK, but it sucks you in and really made me start thinking of all of the possibilities.
http://adriennelacava.com/
I think the best move that anyone can make, be they on the left, right or centre, is to stop calling the Kennedy-assassination stories, as “theories.”
They are no such thing. They are narratives; the old Greek word for story is “myth”, and that is what these conspiracy-narrators are – mythmakers.
Recently, I read 9/11 `truther’ Ray Griffin’s `Debunking 9/11 Debunking’. It was just what I expected, and in fact it was more feeble than that.
Griffin’s `case’ for the Sept 11 attacks being an `inside job’, amounts to a lot of coloured water.
Finishing as much of it, as I could, I had an insight: conspiracy narrators are like pathological liars: ie. bulshitters.
In my experience, bulshitters are rarely caught in a lie. They are too careful with their mendacity for that.
They are discovered – and tell me if I am wrong here – when their auditors decide that, whatever the plausibility of what they are saying (again in my experience, adult pathological liars never lie about what is impossible), that what they are being told is simply untrue.
And it is the same with the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 conspiracy narratives: any aspect of them is plausible. It is simply the apparently endless concatenation of what is possible and plausible by conspiracy narrators, which makes them worthy of rejection on their face.
In other words, life is too short. You don’t need to refute every single point they bring up, in order to reject what they say.
Robbie,
Ref yr last graf.
No, you don’t, but they will insist that you must. Avoiding that frame can be made to look like acquiescing or ducking. Not a bad set of arrangements…for them.
Hence my recent epiphany: EKBA, buddy. An acronym meaning Everybody Knows Better Already. Implied, “even you”.
You know you’re bullshitting. Surprise. We know you’re bullshitting. And we know you know you’re bullshitting.
Next question?
“the apparently endless concatenation of what is possible and plausible by conspiracy narrators”
As someone said, the conspiracy theories usually wind up having to involve the entire hospital staff and half the Dallas PD.
But I think there is a psychological need on the part of many for a conspiracy theory. The President of the United States is presumably the most powerful man in the world. If he cannot protect himself from a misfit and loser like Oswald where does that leave the rest of us? It is much more comforting to think he was a victim of a vast diabolical conspiracy.
“Rush Goebbels”
Propagandize much, Timmy?
Obama can send them a look and the Leftists will bow down and worship the New man made God.
They are afraid of Rush because if they become a heretic, all the divine slave girls and gifts will evaporate into think air for our dear Demoncrats.
“…But I think there is a psychological need on the part of many for a conspiracy theory. The President of the United States is presumably the most powerful man in the world. If he cannot protect himself from a misfit and loser like Oswald where does that leave the rest of us? It is much more comforting to think he was a victim of a vast diabolical conspiracy…”
Right absolutely. I was born five years following the JFK murder, but I gather from testimony that I have read, and from my parents and others who remember, what an absolute shock that this event was.
It was, I would surmise, comparable to the feelings we all had on Sept 11, 2001 (I would also surmise that 9/11 was a greater shock, but then as I said I didn’t experience the events of Nov 22, 1963 directly).
My impression is that the conspiracy-narrators in the Kennedy murder, were those who were already adults in November 1963.
To compare the Kennedy murder to 9/11 again, I remember watching the live coverage of the World Trade Centre attacks, and actually seeing the first building collapse.
In spite of the fact that I just saw WTC 2 collapse, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that this is what happened. I kept waiting for the dust to clear, and there, I was sure, the building would still be standing.
Similarly, I think the conspiracy narrators (or fabulists, to use a less polite term) simply couldn’t bring themselves to believe that a nobody like Oswald could have carried it out on his own.
They have devoted (or did devote) some part of their remaining days attempting to “prove” just what they “knew” to be the case, when they first heard the news of Kennedy’s death, and just who was behind it.
But I don’t believe that the Kennedy conspiracy-narration has spawned a second-generation.
Perhaps I am wrong, none of them were born following Nov 63; to me, to most people in the world now, Kennedy’s death is just a fact of history, we have no memory of the “magic of Camelot”, no nostalgia about Jack and Jackie, and so on, and so we are not inspired to invent conspiracy fables about his death…
I think, too, the 9/11 conspiracy fables have lost purchase with the public now.
Sure, Ray Griffin or whomever will tout polls which say that “61 percent of the U.S. public believes that it was an “inside job”‘, or what-you-have. But I bet not one in ten of this 61% or 66% or 55% or whatever the figure is this month, would if challenged have any real knowledge about it.
When us, and the others who were alive and adults and who saw the whole thing, pass on, our children and their children won’t feel the need invent myths about that awful day. To them, in their lives, the reality of a destroyed WTC is just part of their experience. Remarkable as it seems, life goes on…
Robert Burns Glennie:
I don’t know whether you’ve read these two posts of mine, but they speak to your comment somewhat and you might like to read them: this and this one. Let me expand on the latter post by saying that I think the lasting legacy of the Kennedy assassination—even for those born subsequently—is the prevalence of conspiracy theories as an explanation for things, especially conspiracies involving government wrongdoing. And so in a very real way the 9/11 truthers are the direct heirs of the JFK conspiracy theorists. And the whole thing has become a big, big industry as well, in terms of book-selling.
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thanks, I think I did read them, a good re-read though.