Ok so I’m a little late to the game - I just finished watching “JFK.” Is there any reasonable refutation of all the evidence that Garrison made for the conspiracy? Is it now widely considered true that the CIA or some group of government people killed Kennedy? What is the current majority opinion on Lee Harvey Oswald regarding whether or not he was a double agent working for the US?
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm
The link above will provide info and links to the subject you reference. There is plenty of material taking Garrison’s theories (and tactics) to task. I find the site to be fairly well balanced and rational.
Of course, I also belive that Oswald did not act alone. The JFK thing is just one of those topics that will be debated for a long time.
I recommend you read Gerald Posner’s Case Closed. It may not be 100% accurate, but answers most of the questions raised in Oliver Stone’s mostly fictional take on the events.
I’ll second the McAdams link, and throw in an enthusiastic endorsement for Gerald Posner’s essential (and highly readable) book Case Closed. Plus, below are some old threads on the subject, which you may find interesting or useful.
Kennedy Assassination Recreation
The Kennedy Assassination: What Do the Historians Say?
Any Kennedy conspiracy theorists in here?
Another Kennedy assassination question
JFK Assassination Theories
Oops. Looks like only the first and last of those links are good–the rest were lost in the Diaspora last winter. They’re still cached over at Boardreader, however, so just search straightdope oswald kennedy minty green and they’ll pop up.
Difficult to make up one’s mind on Garrison.
He was not terribly prudent in his choice of witnesses.
There is a theory that his case was brought to take any attention off organised crime involvement.
I do not subscribe to this theory:why would the perpetrators , six years down the track with the heat off , condone any action to re-focus attention on the case?
Yet , even the HSCA viewed some of his claims seriusly.
Yes I agree WC about the Mc.Adams site.
Also , he took the time to reply to my enquiry about the “James Files” story.
(Read more on “jfkmurdersolved.com”)
You may also wish to read Rich Del Rosa’s forum (jfklancer.com I think).
Unfortunately it seems to prove the cliche that solving the case has become a “parlour game”.
Much discussion on the minutiae of shadows/shapes in photos but nothing groundbreaking.
Is there any theory which totally absolves Oswald of any complicity in the assassination?
I know of only one : that he thought he was working for the Dodd committee and was persuaded to bring his MC carbine to work that day to help its case.
(Read “Reasonable Doubt” by Henry Hurt)
Without question , he did bring the weapon to work and lied about it afterwards.
His actions immediately following the assassination are not those of a completely uninvolved person.
Also read “Mortal Error”(Bonar Menninger , St.Martin’s Press,1992)
which details the work of Howard Donahue.
You may well not be persuaded by his conclusions but he raises many intriguing points - many of which I have not seen answered-or even addressed - satisfactorily.
But I know of two professional ballisticians who studied his work.
They concluded that his theories were absolutely correct.
One of the big pieces of conspiracy evidence in the movie JFK was the fact that, despite being shot from behind and from the left side, the Zapruder film showed Kennedy’s head jerking “back and to the left,” i.e. toward the entry wound. Thus, so the theory goes, Kennedy was actually shot from the other direction.
There are a couple of counter-arguments for this:[ol][li]When the bullet exited Kennedy’s head, it carried some of his brain and skull matter with it, and actually had more momentum going out than it did coming in. (This is the so-called “jet effect” theory.)[/li]The very first frame in the Zapruder film after Kennedy’s head gets shot actually shows his head jerking forward. It’s only in the subsequent frames that his head jerks back. Kennedy’s head could have been knocked forward by the bullet, then his chin would have hit his chest and his head “rebounded” backwards.[/ol]
Another enthusiastic endorsement for Posner’s Case Closed here. Excellent refutations of most conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination, especially Stone’s fiction. Posner relates also the amusing anecdote that he could not find a gun that made as much smoke when discharged from a “second gunman” location, and had to artificially create the smoke. So even Stone should have realized that it was fiction, because he had to use special effects to accomplish what he claims somebody in 1963 did with a simple weapon.
Best evidence from Posner is the earwitnesses’ accounts. Though some disagreed on where the shots came from, they overwhelmingly reported that each shot they heard came from a single spot. Very few reported shots coming from different directions at once. It was this evidence that finally convinced me of a single shooter.
BTW, Posner’s Killing the Dream, about the MLK assassination, is also excellent and well-researched and very readable. Both are enlightening reads.
clayton: I read your link and it was so dumb, I went back in time and convinced my younger self to give it a pass.
Thanks all for the links, comments, and book recs. Looking forward to solving this whole thing once and for all by Friday. 
… while the rest of us have had 39 years at it and still don’t have the answer? 
Sure we do. We even referred him to it: Case Closed.
I dunno that time travel theory makes a lot of sense and
:smack:
Sorry I was watching my collection of old “IN SEARCH OF…” Episodes all last night. My mind must have turned to mush.:
Actually, a great COMEDY could have been made about Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw, because Garrison himself was a buffoon, FAR from the model of rectitude portrayed by Kevin Costner.
All kinds of hilarious things happened during the trial that Oliver Stone never bothered to show us- like one of Garrison’s key witnesses testifying that he checked out his children every day to be sure the CIA hadn’t replaced them with lookalikes!
If the CIA wanted to discredit the conspiracy theorists, a bozo like Jim Garrison is just the kind of guy they’d want as prosecutor! He did more to make conspiracy theories look ridiculous than Gerald Posner could ever hope to do.
Yet, amazingly enough, Garrison still has his defenders. It’s quite sad, really. What’s worse is how Shaw’s name was dragged through the mud for so many years.
The buff’s are in a wane, it would seem. Ten years ago they were swelled with ranks from the Oliver Stone movie. Then the hated Posner broke both their fantasy and their combat high.
The internet was briefly their salvation for “getting the word out” until they had to realize that the "lone nutters’ could post too, and they had those handy facts on their side.
As a result, I’ve seen the “buffs” get more and more detached from reality as the years go by. A small, but signifigant percentage of them also subscribe to moon-hoax theories.
Bryan, it’s not supposed to be serious. It’s supposed to be stupid and a spoof of all the weird UFO connections and ghost theories.
I want people to say “what the F*CK was that and how could I have ever wasted my time on it?!”
When I was in Texas six months ago. We went to the museum they’ve created on the sixth floor, and I stood next the glassed off area from where Oswald shot.
My first thought was “fuck, I could have killed JFK from here.”
The visit immediately settled for me that Oswald acted alone. Dealey plaza is small. Had JFK been facing the other direction, Oswald could have seen JFK’s eyes as distinct features from where he knelt. Had I been the shooter, with my minimal army training, I would have stood a good chance of blowing his head off. For someone with Marine training, who’d been practicing, it wasn’t even a particularly lucky shot.
Moreover, if there was a shooter on the grassy knoll, the people standing in front and below would have known it. There’s maybe forty feet of lawn in front of the fence; it would be impossible not to hear clearly rifle shots from behind you at that distance.
Ok Hansel, Let’s say it wasn’t a terribly hard place to shoot from. That’s fine. But how do you explain the fact his head was blown back toward the direction of Oswald? When you hit something it doesn’t react by moving to you.
The entire movie can be basically summed up by the fact that Oswald’s shot is presented as being near impossible, especially the fact that he got off three shots in 5.6 seconds.
The shot, as hansel points out, was ridiculously easy, a 90-yard shot with virtually no deflection. Nobody who has been there would not realize that. And getting off three shots in 5.6 seconds gives you two 2.8 second reload-and-aim times - not short at all. (You don’t have to cock it three times - think about it.)
I mean, this isn’t even a debatable fact or something that could be presented as a believable urban myth. Saying “it was an impossible shot” is like saying “two plus two is fifteen.” Pick up a friggin’ rifle and try to hit something 90 yards away with three shots in 5.6 seconds; it’s easy. I’m amazed Oswald missed once.
And I’ll answer this, too, hope my first Submit didn’t go thru.
Why would you EXPECT Kennedy to be propelled in the direction the bullet was travelling? How many people have you seen get shot? In Hollywood movies, people always jerk backwards (or fly backwards) in the direction the bullet was travelling. In real life, this simply does not happen with any consistency. For a person to jerk TOWARDS the bullet, or to the side, is not remarkable at all. (Or to just go limp and fall down.) If the bullet goes clean through, it takes most of the kinetic energy with it. It’s not the slightest bit unusual that Kennedy’s muscles just reflexively jerked his head in that direction.