Why is “maybe there was a second guy shooting from the grassy knoll who escaped justice?” a conspiracy theory? It wouldn’t require a conspiracy, just Oswald had a buddy the cops never found also shooting at the president, or by incredible coincidence, at the exact same time, another assassin was trying to kill the President.
Strictly speaking, that part need not be a conspiracy theory. But the conspiracy slips in as soon as you question how the authorities never figured this out.
IOW, CTers believe “the only way the grassy knoll shooter got away was through official connivance.” And that’s where the alternative theory becomes a Conspiracy Theory.
Another feature of the thing we call a capital-C “Conspiracy Theory” is that it contains a lot of counterfactual beliefs that are easily disproven but refuse to be set aside by true believers.
The idea of an actual grassy knoll shooter is ludicrous. There was nowhere to stand not in plain sight of hundreds of spectators. The shooter would have been shoulder to shoulder with several bystanders. and yet all of them saw & heard nothing nearby.
To persist in the belief in a grassy knoll shooter in the face of this evidence is as adult and as logical as persisting in believing Santa Claus really does deliver all those presents worldwide.
Yet somehow CT believers continue to believe.
In an ideal world we’d maybe have a different term for “theories of events based on abject falsenesses and magical thinking that don’t necessarily involve a formal conspiracy”. But in our real world so few of those exist that aren’t also wrapped up in paranoia and conspiratorial thinking that there’s no point in a separate name. “Conspiracy Theory” covers them all very nicely.
Because “conspiracy theory” is an idiomatic phrase which can’t be understood simply by defining each of its constituent words.
In keeping with the Straight Dope tradition to offer up straight dope, I’d like to take up the “grassy knoll” idea, something which has entered the English language as a meme, as well as offer up some data which might refute the blanket statement that no one saw or heard anything. The following data can all be footnoted if anyone is interested.
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The Select Committee on Assassinations of the House of Representatives commissioned an acoustical analysis of a Dictabelt recording from a motor-cycle microphone in the presidential motorcade that day in Dallas. The test, carried out by professionals, verified a 95-percent certainty that a rifle shot had been fired from the grassy knoll.
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Many folks actually ran towards the grassy knoll after the shooting. The police, the FBI and the Secret Service interviewed ninety people about where they thought the shots had come from. Fifty-eight said the grassy knoll.
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Twenty two of the twenty-five witnesses who filled out affidavits on November 22nd and 23rd regarding the origin of the shots affirmed that shots had been fired from the grass knoll
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Three Dallas Police Department officers said that they had encountered men who identified themselves as Secret Service agents just following the assassination. One of the officers, who had been directed to the grassy knoll by a woman who
heard the shots, ran into someone who flashed him secret service credentials. This person could only have been a counterfeit agent because all the Secret Service agents with the motorcade proceeded instantly to Parkland Hospital. -
Gordon Arnold was a soldier on military leave in Dallas who stopped to watch the presidential motorcade. He saw someone who claimed to be a Secret Service agent behind the fence on the grassy knoll just before the shooting. This “agent” flashed a badge and informed the soldier that he (Arnold) did not belong in that area.
Arnold said: “I walked around the front of the fence and found a little mound of dirt to stand on to see the motorcade . . . Just after the car turned onto Elm and started toward me, a shot went off from over my left shoulder. I felt the bullet rather than heard it, and it went right past my left ear… I had just gotten out of basic training. In my mind, live ammunition was being fired. It was being fired over my head. And I hit the dirt”.
There is actually a photograph of Mr. Arnold standing in front of the fence and filming the motorcade. There is another figure in the photo behind him, standing behind the fence. There is another photograph taken at the same time from a different angle at
by another witness. The man behind the fence is seen to be holding an elongated
object.
Anyway, I spent some time writing this post. This information is freely available. Few in government are interested in a re-opening of the hit on President Kennedy because government(s) and its actors always have skeletons in the closet. They are too busy seeking advantage by blackmailing each other over sexual and financial peccadilloes.
The basic links run right through the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy hit and Watergate. If you spend 5 minutes on this, you can see that the actors in these dramas are all the same folks.
I’m sure someone has a counter argument against all this data. But please, don’t just say the magic words “Conspiracy Theory”.
I was in Texas in the 1970s when they did some sort of sound re-creation and analysis. Don’t know if that’s the same one you’re mentioning, but I recall all the headlines the next day saying a second shooter had been ruled out based on the results.
Yeah, I’ve been reading James Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy too. A good series, but there’s a reason it’s in the Fiction section.
The magic word is “cite”, not “Conspiracy Theory”. Where is the evidence for anything you claim?
You seem to give a lot of credence to what people say, when physical evidence is far more persuasive. Just as lots of people may “confess” (and I’m still waiting for the exhaustive list), lots of people may claim “eyewitness testimony”; if the forensic evidence doesn’t match, however, then they are either mistaken or (especially if there is money or publicity to be gained) lying.
Take Gordon Arnold, for example. He didn’t report his testimony until 1978. He garnered attention in the book “The Men Who Killed Kennedy”. Yet his story is inaccurate (i.e. there was no mound of dirt on which to stand), or, as debunked here, periodically changing. You say that there are pictures of him - why do I guess that you have been convinced by blurry images like this one?
Moreover, even if everybody in Dealey Plaza thought they heard shots behind the fence, it wouldn’t matter, since the physical evidence demonstrates that a) JFK was shot from behind, and b) the angle of the shots from the grassy knoll, vis a vis the wounds, makes for an impossible trajectory. In reality, there are acoustic reasons why the origin of sounds in the area were hard to ascertain.
Who are the three policemen who encountered Secret Service agents following the assassination? What are their names? Is this, like the trumpeting of Gordon Arnold, another “fact” gleaned from a conspiracy book? I’m guessing you read The Men Who Killed Kennedy, found it authoritative, and never thought to question its evidence.
Your reference to the Dictabelt recording analysis by the Select Committee on House Assassinations reflect that lack of curiosity. Their conclusion has been thoroughly debunked.
I am referring to the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) which was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The committee ordered an acoustical analysis of a Dictabelt recording that had been taken from a Dallas police officer’s motor-cycle microphone. He had been travelling in the presidential motorcade. The acoustical consulting firm Bolt, Beranek,and Newman concluded, that there were at least six sounds on the tape which were likely gunshots, and at least one was fired from the grassy knoll.
Following on from this, Mark Weiss, a professor at Queens College, and his research associate, Ernest Aschkenasy, who were both experienced acoustics analysts, were commissioned by the committee to do a simulation of this Dictabelt recording using microphones placed in Dealey Plaza and then used live-fire tests from the Texas School Book Depository, and the grassy knoll.
The principle behind these investigations is based on the timing of shock waves and their reflections off buildings and structures in Dealey Plaza. So when a projectile exceeds the speed of sound, as in a rifle shot, it produces a shock wave, a pressure wave, commonly known as a sonic boom. The pattern of shock waves coordinated with time is called an acoustical signature, which differs from one sound source to another due to echoes and reflections off structures in the area.
In short, this follow-up test was able to verify a 95-percent certainty that a rifle shot had been fired from the grassy knoll.
So…you ignore the rebuttal I gave. If you were being frank, you would at least acknowledge the disputed evidence.
I have no idea why someone would cite the Dictabelt recording, so many years after it was shown that it was recording at a different time. And the “analysis” was shaky anyway. No shots are audible on the recording! Only by using super-duper computer analysis are some faint pops detectable. I.e., the “shots” are background noise. Trying to extract further information about echoes to determine locations, etc. is obviously ridiculous. (Even if the time was right.)
The HSCA had a CT nut job on the investigative staff. This lead to problems such as this. You throw out the easily disproven stuff, and all the information they collected backed up the Warren Report.
The rest of the above list is just more of the same. Things that are completely debunked by a large margin. No one who believes such tripe can be persuaded with facts.
Note: The HSCA’s data on number of shots fired reported by witnesses: 75% 3 shots, 10% 2 shots, 3.5% 4 shots. Clearly there were at most 3 shots. Oswald got off 3 shots (3 spent cartridges), you need magic to explain a 4th shot. And magic doesn’t convince anyone with a bone of skepticism left in their body.
Bolding mine. You misspelled “common sense.” 
Agree completely. Which I why I declined to respond to bardos’ reply to my last post. The damn Dictabelt thing was debunked earlier in this very thread and it’s still being brought up again as “new evidence”.
Let’s see the footnotes. Let me guess: at least one of them points to certain protocols.
Unfortunately, the four “shots” occur after a dispatcher announces that the motorcade is heading to Parkland Hospital (ie, after JFK was hit). So, either the analysis was wrong, or the gunmen decided to celebrate their success by firing a few rounds after the assassination. You’re free to decide which alternative is more plausible.
Tell me if I’m wrong but there was at least one conspiracy. It/They just didn’t get acted on.
Can you tell us what you’re talking about?
From the evidence we have, we can say with a high degree of certainty that Oswald was the only shooter. Whether he conspired with others beforehand could possibly have occurred, but it seems highly unlikely.
What conspiracy didn’t get acted on?
That sure sounds like the testing that was in the news in the 1970s, and I clearly remember all the newspapers reporting the results showed NO second shooter and NO shooter from the grassy knoll. I was in Texas at the time, and it was especially big in the news there. You’re just plain wrong.
The Mob tapes sounded like they wanted to kill him and talked about it. That’s a conspiracy even if they used to say that about all the guys, and didn’t really do it.
First, could you please provide a cite that lets the rest of us hear the “mob tapes”, or at least unveil what source you used to develop this conclusion?
Second, it’s not a conspiracy if nobody in the mob acted on it.
Finally, I’m sure you’d agree that, for ANY president, there are legions of people who viscerally hate the person; if animosity was all that was needed to identify a group as being a participant, then I’m guessing that you also believe in a conspiracy to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981 (or Gerald Ford in the 1970’s). If not, why not? Is it only a suspicious conspiracy if the President dies from the attack?
This is from an interview with G. Robert Blakey:
Q: A number of Mafia leaders have been overheard either threatening or boasting about having a hand in killing Kennedy. What was the evidence?
A: We took very seriously the possibility that organized crime had a hand in the President’s death. I personally did not believe it at the time. I thought we could prove that they didn’t. The FBI had an illegal electronic surveillance on the major figures of organized crime in the major areas in this country… in New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo and elsewhere. We did a survey of that illegal electronic surveillance: Eight months before the assassination and six months after. We were looking for some indication in these men’s conversations that would connect them to the assassination - to either Lee Harvey Oswald, or to Jack Ruby. We found no evidence in it to connect them to Oswald or Ruby. On the other hand, what we did find, shockingly, is repeated conversations by these people that indicated the depth of their hatred for Kennedy, and actual discussions saying: “he ought to be killed,” “he ought to be whacked.”
I don’t know how to parse your definition of conspiracy. It is any plan to commit wrongdoing discussed among two or more people. Action is not required.
“He ought to be killed” or “He ought to be whacked” is an opinion, not a plan.
Depends on who’s talking doesn’t it?