The Kennedy Assassination: 47 Years Later, What Do We Really
Know?
Despite the enduring popularity of conspiracy theories about
President John F. Kennedy's death on November
22, 1963 , it's a mainstream consensus that these theories have
always been essentially the work
of cranks, popularized by a national appetite for mystery and
entertainment. In recent years, this consensus has been reinforced by Vincent
Bugliosi's massive, critically acclaimed book, Reclaiming
History, along with Tom Hanks's related
HBO special.
But for all the crazy ideas out there, there remain sober and careful alternative views of the assassination. These theories may or may not ultimately be right, but they represent the continuation of serious discussion of the subject. As the debate continues past the 47th anniversary of President Kennedy's death, let's take stock of five common myths about the state of the debate itself.
1. The belief that secret plotters killed Kennedy was first made popular by Oliver Stone's 1992 movie, JFK.
Popular belief in a conspiracy was widespread within a week of Kennedy's murder. Between November 25 and 29, 1963,University
of Chicago pollsters asked
more than 1,000 Americans whom they thought was responsible for the president's
death. By then, the chief suspect, Oswald -- a leftist who had lived for a time
in Soviet Union -- had been shot dead while in police
custody by Jack Ruby, a local hoodlum with organized crime connections.
While the White House, the FBI, and the Dallas Police Department all affirmed that Oswald had acted alone, 62 percent of respondents said they believed that more than one person was involved in the assassination. Only 24 percent thought Oswald had acted alone. Another poll taken inDallas
during the same week found 66 percent of respondents believing that there had
been a plot. There were no JFK conspiracy theories in print at that time.
Oliver Stone was in high school.
2. All serious historians believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy, alone and unaided.
Since 2000, five tenured academic historians have published books on JFK's assassination. Four of the five concluded that a conspiracy was behind the 35th president's murder.
David Kaiser, a diplomatic historian at the Naval War College, and the author of a 2008 book, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, concluded that Kennedy was killed in plot involving disgruntledCIA
operatives and organized crime figures. Michael Kurtz of Southeastern
Louisiana University
came to the same conclusion in his 2006 book, The
JFK Assassination Debates: Lone Gunman Versus Conspiracy.
In a 2005 book, Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, Gerald McKnight ofHood College
suggested that a high-level plot involving senior U.S.
intelligence officials was probably responsible for the president's death. In
his 2003 book about photographic evidence,The
Zapruder Film: Reframing JFK's Assassination, David Wrone of the University
of Wisconsin-Stevens Point argued that the famous amateur film footage of the
assassination proves that Kennedy was hit by gunfire from two different
directions. Wrone did not advocate a theory of who was responsible.
A fifth historian, Robert Dallek of UCLA, wrote a 2003 biography of Kennedy, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. While not about the assassination as such, An Unfinished Life embraced the Warren Commission's lone-gunman finding, relying squarely on Gerald Posner's 1994 anti-conspiratorial best-seller Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK.
3. No one high-up in theU.S.
government ever thought there was a conspiracy behind JFK's murder.
In fact, many seniorU.S.
officials concluded that
there had been a plot but rarely talked about it openly.
Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, publicly endorsed the Warren Commissions conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Privately, LBJ told many people, ranging from Atlantic contributor Leo Janos toCIA director Richard
Helms, that he did not believe the lone-gunman explanation.
The president's brother Robert and widow Jacqueline also believed that he had been killed by political enemies, according to historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Tim Naftali. In their 1999 book on the Cuban missile crisis, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964, they reported that William Walton -- a friend of the First Lady -- went to Moscow on a previously scheduled trip a week after JFK's murder. Walton carried a message from RFK and Jackie for their friend, Georgi Bolshakov, a Russian diplomat who had served as a back-channel link between the White House and the Kremlin during the October 1962 crisis: RFK and Jackie wanted the Soviet leadership to know that "despite Oswald's connections to the communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents."
In the Senate, Democrats Richard Russell ofGeorgia
and Russell Long of
Louisiana both rejected
official accounts of the
assassination. In the executive branch, Joseph
Califano, the General Counsel of Army in 1963 and later Secretary
of Health Education and
Welfare, concluded that Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy.* In the White
House, H.R.
Haldeman, chief of staff to President Richard Nixon, wanted to reopen the
JFK investigation in 1969. Nixon wasn't interested.
Suspicion persisted in the upper echelons of theU.S.
national security agencies, as well. Col.
L. Fletcher Prouty, chief of Pentagon special operations in 1963 (and later
an adviser to Stone), believed that there had been a plot.
Winston Scott, chief of theCIA 's
station in Mexico City at the time
of Kennedy's murder and an ultra-conservative Agency loyalist, rejected the
Warren Commission's findings about a trip that Oswald had taken to Mexico
six weeks before the assassination. Scott concluded in an unpublished memoir
that Oswald had, indeed, been just a patsy.
None of these figures was a paranoid fantasist. To the contrary, they constituted a cross section of the American power elite in 1963. Neither did they talk about a JFK conspiracy for public consumption; they talked about it only reservedly, in confined circles.
4.Former Los Angeles
County prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi
refuted all JFK conspiracy theories in Reclaiming History.
In the course of 1,600 pages Bugliosi effectively refuted many unfounded conspiracy scenarios and reasserted the lone gunman conclusions of the Warren Commission. But he has never engaged the extensive scholarship of Commission skeptics such as journalist David Talbot, historian Kaiser, historian John Newman, or biographer Anthony Summers, or analyzed the innovative research of attorney William Simpich.
Kaiser, author of seven books onU.S.
history, notes that Bugliosi's prosecutorial approach limits the scope of his
historical analysis: "He falls back on the old argument 'no one could have
ever used Ruby and Oswald in a conspiracy' which relieves him of the necessity
of addressing any of the conspiracy evidence seriously."
5. All theCIA 's records related to the
Kennedy assassination have been made public.
The agency acknowledges that it currently holds thousands of pages on Kennedy's murder that the public has never seen. TheCIA
disclosed the existence of the still-secret JFK files while responding to a
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, filed as it happens
by me, seeking the release of other records related to the assassination.
In a sworn affidavit, Delores Nelson, theCIA 's
chief information officer, stated that the Agency has approximately 1,100
assassination-related documents that it plans to keep under wraps until 2017,
if not longer. These files -- containing more than 2,000 pages of material --
cannot be made public for reasons, Nelson says, of national security.
In other words, somewhere in theWashington
metropolitan area there is a collection of CIA
documents related to JFK's murder that, if collated, would stand about ten
inches tall. None of those documents has ever been seen by the U.S. Congress or
the National Archives,
let alone by journalists, historians, bloggers, Oliver Stone, Tom Hanks, or the
general public.
That's not a conspiracy theory or a myth. It's a fact.
But for all the crazy ideas out there, there remain sober and careful alternative views of the assassination. These theories may or may not ultimately be right, but they represent the continuation of serious discussion of the subject. As the debate continues past the 47th anniversary of President Kennedy's death, let's take stock of five common myths about the state of the debate itself.
1. The belief that secret plotters killed Kennedy was first made popular by Oliver Stone's 1992 movie, JFK.
Popular belief in a conspiracy was widespread within a week of Kennedy's murder. Between November 25 and 29, 1963,
While the White House, the FBI, and the Dallas Police Department all affirmed that Oswald had acted alone, 62 percent of respondents said they believed that more than one person was involved in the assassination. Only 24 percent thought Oswald had acted alone. Another poll taken in
2. All serious historians believe that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy, alone and unaided.
Since 2000, five tenured academic historians have published books on JFK's assassination. Four of the five concluded that a conspiracy was behind the 35th president's murder.
David Kaiser, a diplomatic historian at the Naval War College, and the author of a 2008 book, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy, concluded that Kennedy was killed in plot involving disgruntled
In a 2005 book, Breach of Trust: How the Warren Commission Failed the Nation and Why, Gerald McKnight of
A fifth historian, Robert Dallek of UCLA, wrote a 2003 biography of Kennedy, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. While not about the assassination as such, An Unfinished Life embraced the Warren Commission's lone-gunman finding, relying squarely on Gerald Posner's 1994 anti-conspiratorial best-seller Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK.
3. No one high-up in the
In fact, many senior
Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, publicly endorsed the Warren Commissions conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Privately, LBJ told many people, ranging from Atlantic contributor Leo Janos to
The president's brother Robert and widow Jacqueline also believed that he had been killed by political enemies, according to historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Tim Naftali. In their 1999 book on the Cuban missile crisis, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev, Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964, they reported that William Walton -- a friend of the First Lady -- went to Moscow on a previously scheduled trip a week after JFK's murder. Walton carried a message from RFK and Jackie for their friend, Georgi Bolshakov, a Russian diplomat who had served as a back-channel link between the White House and the Kremlin during the October 1962 crisis: RFK and Jackie wanted the Soviet leadership to know that "despite Oswald's connections to the communist world, the Kennedys believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents."
In the Senate, Democrats Richard Russell of
Suspicion persisted in the upper echelons of the
Winston Scott, chief of the
None of these figures was a paranoid fantasist. To the contrary, they constituted a cross section of the American power elite in 1963. Neither did they talk about a JFK conspiracy for public consumption; they talked about it only reservedly, in confined circles.
4.
In the course of 1,600 pages Bugliosi effectively refuted many unfounded conspiracy scenarios and reasserted the lone gunman conclusions of the Warren Commission. But he has never engaged the extensive scholarship of Commission skeptics such as journalist David Talbot, historian Kaiser, historian John Newman, or biographer Anthony Summers, or analyzed the innovative research of attorney William Simpich.
Kaiser, author of seven books on
5. All the
The agency acknowledges that it currently holds thousands of pages on Kennedy's murder that the public has never seen. The
In a sworn affidavit, Delores Nelson, the
In other words, somewhere in the
That's not a conspiracy theory or a myth. It's a fact.
_____________________________________________________________________________
* This sentence originally stated that Califano was
Secretary of the Army. We regret the error.
"All serious historians believe Oswald shot JFK, alone and unaided." - Mr. Kelly, sorry to say this statement insults the intelligence of mankind (which cannot be fooled).
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