William of Occam, Wikipedia… just how far does this conspiracy go? 
Well, Sir Isaac Newton gets mentioned a lot.
Maybe this will help clarify the point at hand: only two percent of the “earwitnesses” said they thought the shots came from two different directions.
‘Oh, and Maria: I loved you on the kitchen table before I went to work. Man, those roofies really worked!’
Maybe there was only one shooter, but the Postman always rings twice.
You know, it’s sad to think of this way, but JFK is dead ***because ***Oswald was a lousy shot.
If Oswald had been a true marksman, he would have hit Gen. Walker in April and been in custody awaiting trial when Kennedy’s motorcade rolled through Dealey Plaza.
That doesn’t follow.
How would the Dallas police ever have connected that crime to Oswald?
There was no prior interaction between them at all. Walker was just someone spouting right-wing views, and Oswald was an anonymous left-winger who was upset enough to come and shoot at him. In police terms, that’s a stranger-on-stranger murder, which is generally the hardest type to solve. The only physical evidence left at the Walker scene was the bullets; they identified only the caliber of the weapon, not the actual (rather rare) brand. And Oswald was clearly a loner type; not one to brag to anybody about his actions – the other common way that such crimes are solved.
Presumably the police would have worked harder on the case if it had been a murder rather than an attempt. But I don’t see anything in the way of physical evidence or anything else that would have led them to solve it in those 7 months.
Well, JFK was only alive to get killed because Richard Pavlick changed his mind.
Come on. This guy wasn’t Ernst Blofeld. Look at how quickly he attracted law enforcement’s attention after the assassination (or the Tippet murder if you believe the “patsy” scenario.) The evidence uncovered after the Kennedy and Tippit murders points to Oswald’s involvement in the Walker shooting. The note he left Marina indicates that he believed it likely that he would be arrested.
He kept the evidence of his plans through two moves (New Orleans and back to Dallas) when common sense should have told him to destroy it.
He admitted to his wife that he’d taken a shot at Gen. Walker immediately after doing so.
I have no doubt that the Dallas PD would have had any trouble following the trail back to him.
The other night I spent some time pondering the question, Why are so many conspiracy folks determined to exonerate Lee Harvey Oswald? It seems an absurd thing to do, given the forensic evidence against him. A few thoughts:
If one admits Oswald’s involvement, that’s pretty much the whole ball game. Given the evidence, if one conceeds his guilt, there just isn’t any good reason to look for any other perps. There is more than enough evidence to show that he really could have done it all on his own. End of story; conspiracy theorists are forced to find a new hobby.
It is impossible to make the case that Oswald was framed. There is simply too much evidence against Oswald for this to have been a set-up. What happens in a typical framing? There are no more than a few pieces of “evidence” pointing to the patsy - a gun is planted, a witness or two lies. That’s it. The evidence against Oswald is several times greater than any framer would bother with, or could even pull off. And, of course, Oswald’s post-assassination behavior shows clearly that he was not an innocent bystander. For crying out loud - forty-five minutes after the assassination he kills a cop! (And of his involvement in the Tippit slaying there can be no doubt.) Even his wife thought his behavior showed his guilt. The Lee that Marina knew would have been raising unshirted hell about his incarceration. Instead, his conversation with Marina in jail is almost surreally calm - they’re treating me OK; buy Junie some shoes; etc.
Nor does it work to “split the baby” - to accept Oswald’s involvement but suppose that he was a part of some conspiracy. Given what is known of him (and I think we know more about Lee than about any other two-bit punk who slithered the face of the earth) it just makes no sense that any serious conspiracy group (CIA, KGB, the mob, etc.) would make use of the services of such a pathetic loser. Nor would such a self-centered asshole be inclined to do the bidding of someone else. (And, of course, no one has ever produced any credible evidence that Oswald was a member of any conspiracy, nor any credible evidence that anyone else who may have wanted Kennedy dead actually did anything on 22 November 1963 to bring that about. C’mon, CTs, give us the goods! We want names, dates, specific actions, hard evidence!)
This insistance on Oswald’s innocence sometimes puts CTs in a decidedly awkward position. Consider David Lifton, who in Best Evidence says that no shots were fired from behind the motorcade. Needless to say, he says nothing about the fact that John Connally was shot from behind (if he wasn’t, the only other way the trajectory through his body could have been effected is if he had had a rifle hidden under his Stetson and pulled the trigger himself). A few years back someone in a Usenet group asked Lifton about Connally. Lifton ducked. (The questioner posted under a pseudonym and Lifton whined, I ain’t answerin’ your question 'til you give us your real name! :rolleyes: ) So apparently he still thinks no shots were fired from behind. Is there anything in DSM-IV that describes this sort of behavior?
I sometimes think this “Oswald didn’t do it” meme stems largely from the early work of Sylvia Meagher, whose starting point was an a priori of Oswald’s innocence. Presumably her seminal work influenced many who followed (and apparently were too dumb or too lazy to think through the question for themselves). I suspect this is why Lifton thinks as he does on the matter. He and Meagher were associated early on, until she shunned him for “cooperating” with that scoundrel (in her eyes), former Warren staffer Wes Liebeler. (Does anyone know of a good history of the early years of the conspiracy movement? It would be fascinating to see how these folks interacted and influenced each other.)
I see the behavior as an implicit rejection of chaos. The human brain is hard-wired to see patterns, even where patterns do not exist. We believe the full moon causes babies to be born and crime to be committed in greater numbers; we believe tapping a can of soda makes the fizz go down. We see false correlations everywhere because we want to believe in cause and effect.
Oswald’s action was just so random — the kind of thing that happens in a world where billions of people jostle each other daily on the street. Significantly, the U.S. hadn’t seen a random lunatic with a gun shoot a President for 62 years, but within 5 years: JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X.
It looked like a pattern, so people began to try to make sense out of senselessness.
OMG that’s it! There in on it. The conspiracy theorists are part of the conspiracy. Brilliant! Who would have thought.
Why is that black helicopter circ
Update Without Substance
I haven’t left this thread permanently. I have been too busy to give the questions asked of me my full attention and will be along eventually (probably by the time the next one of these threads comes along) to address them. Please take pleasure in your small triumphs of pointing me to evidence that contradicts SOME of my beliefs and remember that I can sometimes change my mind.
Yeah. All people who had or were an impediment to Tricky Dick Nixon’s plans.
And of course, Nixon was there in Dallas the day JFK was assassinated.
If there wasn’t so much solid, detailed evidence of Oswalds guilt, I could make a conspiracy theory about Nixon and his ‘plumbers’, too. I’d enjoy blaming it on him – I’m sure he would have tried it if he thought he could have gotten away with it. And blaming Nixon is more satisfying than accepting that some no-account, mediocre jerk was able to kill our President. But facts are facts.
Ah, heck, take all the time you need. On this topic it’s hard to find someone who will keep his mind slightly ajar, much less open. Your willingness to grapple with the evidence is refreshing.
Actually, t-bonham@scc.net, I think somebody has tried to implicate Nixon in the JFK assassination, but I forget the details (if I ever knew them).
Watchmen hints vaguely at this, I mention for the heck of it.
As for a “no-account, mediocre jerk [who] was able to kill [your] President”, I don’t think John Hinckley was a winner by any measure and he came within a whisker of putting Reagan in the ground. Giuseppe Zangara and the aforementioned Richard Pavlick were no prizes, either.
I see Sara Jane Moore (the second woman to point a gun at Gerald Ford in September of 1975) is up for parole next month. Squeaky Fromme (the first woman to point a gun at Gerald Ford in September of 1975) won’t be paroled anytime soon, in large part because of her choice of friends, I expect.
… and Charles Guiteau (the assassin of Pres. Garfield) was not exactly a happenin’ kind of guy either.
Compared with those winners, Oswald barely qualifies as dysfunctional. A bit odder than average, but no Hinkley (good background but a delusional nutbar) or Pavlick (crazier than a shithouse rat and mean).
I downloaded the Zapruder film (love those Internets and fast connection!) and have spent some time going through it frame by frame. Nothing like munching on my lunch while repeatedly watching the president’s head get blown off to announce to my co-workers I’m a gruesome nut.
I have a feeling that interest in the Kennedy assassination is about to nosedive, simply because it was so long ago. everybody on the warren Commission is gone, and just about everybody connected with it as well. So i expect that the story will soon neter the “myth” phase-we will probably see future historians wondering if the event was so significant. We know all the facts-and when public interest ceases 9as it soon will), there will be nothing left for the myth makers. Consider the “ROSWELL” “incident”-how long can you keep something going , based on a few faded photos/newspaper clippings?
Stiil the assassination industry has made lots of people rich!-Will any public library carry these books 50 years from now?
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If the last shot had not hit JFK in the head, thereby blowing his brains out, was the shot that went through his neck region a fatal shot? Could the Dr’s have saved him with just that wound?
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Probably not. They’ll mostly be out of copyright and public domain, and so people will get them as e-books for free from Proect Gutenberg.
P.S. The complete Warren Commission Report (all 28 volumes) is working it’s way thru Distributed Proofreading (I’m helping proof it), and will be available online.