Kennedy was an ardent “cold warrior” but he strongly distrusted the CIA (with a lot of justification), particularly because of the failure of Operation Zapata and the subsequent embarrassment over the exposure of the Agency’s role in training DRF rebels for the abortive “Bay of Pigs” invasion, about which Kennedy did not feel he was fully informed and that planners had not made a realistic evaluation of the success of the plan or ability to cover up US involvement in it. Kennedy allegedly wanted to reduce CIA paramilitary and most of their covert ‘active’ capability in favor of Army Special Forces taking over operations with direct oversight versus Dulles, Bissell, et al essentially running their own essentially private operations to foster insurgency in ‘unfriendly’ foreign governments with dubious benefit to the US public.
Kennedy couldn’t ditch Lyndon Johnson; although he clearly didn’t like or trust him very much (again, with good reason) and often excluded him from critical councils, he needed Johnson to carry the South but disagreed with Johnson on expanding direct involvement in Southeast Asia and felt pressured by Johnson to back the Apollo program about which he had substantial reservations despite his now famous “We choose to go to the Moon” address. There is evidence that Kennedy planned to use allegations of Johnson’s prior perfidy to drop him from the 1964 ticket, although one can imagine that Johnson was collecting his own dossier on the Kennedy family to threaten retaliation.
However, neither of these are good arguments for either party orchestrating the assassination of a sitting president with all of the potential blow-back that reveal would have. When the CIA wanted to defy Carter, the mid-level management just went passive aggressive and refused to do most of what they were told, and behaved obstructively toward Carter’s chosen director. And frankly, the CIA is so inept at most of its operations to overthrow governments or assassinate unfriendly foreign leaders that it is difficult to believe that they could have gotten away with such a high profile assassination without someone coming forward. Johnson was a canny and unscrupulous political operator who lined his pockets and may or may not have had a murder covered up, but having Kennedy assassinated with such skill that no one has been able to come up with convincing evidence in the last sixty years beggars credibility, particularly when so many of his other activities have been detailed by legitimate researchers if largely ignored by the media.
I think the Kennedy assassinations theories have root in the propensity of people to believe that there was some reason and concerted plan for the killings rather than that they were just the acts of random people which aligned with what the purported conspirators might have wanted to see even if they lacked the wherewithal to achieve it. History, on the other hand, informs us that most world-shaking events happen for almost completely arbitrary reasons and by actors that one would not have guessed capable of creating such a stir. That life is actually that unpredictable and nobody is really in control is more disturbingly nihilistic than that there is an evil cabal organizing assassinations and political developments is perhaps the more existentially terrifying realization that conspiracy-minded people just can’t accept.
The assassination was thoroughly investigated but the Warren Commission report is kind of a mess (the almost 900 page report lacked an index and was generally poorly organized), this wasn’t helped that the unpublished records were ordered sealed for 75 years (ostensibly because they contained personal information and records that could not be legally released without obtaining permission) and CIA Director John McCone withheld records that they deemed to not be pertinent to the investigation including their monitoring of Lee Harvey Oswald and a lot of extra-legal plans for assassinating Fidel Castro, including some interactions with Mafia figures.
However, all of that information (aside from from income tax records) has been released, and despite many people, both legitimate historians and die-hard conspiracy nuts, going through it with a fine-tooth comb, nobody has come up with a smoking gun or even solid circumstantial evidence that indicates that anyone but Oswald acting on his own was responsible for the shooting. As you note, the sheer volume of information and the size of the report offers fodder for people to baselessly complain that this is just tall weeds for a cover-up of what actually happened, and I’m sure it is pretty easy to find in there some accounts of people that contradict one another or data that seems inconclusive or ‘curiously’ incomplete.
Which doesn’t prove anything except that it is really difficult to create an entirely self-consistent report from thousands of pieces of testimony and disparate information, especially centered around someone as inconsistent as Oswald. Even most attempts to portray some kind of conspiracy and cover up, such as Oliver Stone’s JFK, are themselves inconsistent in their motives and details.
I also think that Lee H. Oswald was the shooter. The evidence was and is overwhelming.
Now, I do think that some loose ends remain, but not ends that exculpate Oswald. However, I do think that there are groups that still need scrutiny:
While connections to the CIA and other intelligence groups are usually dismissed, Oswald could had been more involved or used by intelligence groups, Not to kill Kennedy, Oswald figured that on his own, this does not omit that he was the shooter, only that items that later fueled conspiracies came as a result of scrubbing those connections to intelligence or counter ones. To me it is like when organizations cover their butts when one member turns out to be a crazy wacko, don’t think that the CIA and other groups in those days where too worried about trying to keep the criminally insane out of their organizations.
I have noticed more than a few articles pointing at Discordianism, as being an influence to Oswald. Again, Oswald was the lone shooter, but some guys just want/ed to see the world burn. And influence(d) others to do it.
Kennedy may had been a victim of Stochastic terrorism; it is not just a recent thing as Henry II showed to Becket in 1170, While the killer was Oswald, I do think that some groups avoided public scrutiny.
[Stochastic terrorism refers to political or media figures publicly demonizing a person or group, inspiring their supporters to commit a violent act against the target of the speech. Unlike incitement to terrorism, this is done using indirect, vague or coded language, which allows the instigator to plausibly disclaim responsibility for the resulting violence. Global trends point to increasing violent rhetoric and political violence, including more evidence of stochastic terrorism.
It is in this manner that the stochastic terrorist is thought to randomly incite individuals predisposed to acts of violence. Because stochastic terrorists do not target and incite individual perpetrators of terror with their message, the perpetrator may be labeled a lone wolf by law enforcement, while the inciters avoid legal culpability and public scrutiny.[31][32]](Lone wolf attack - Wikipedia)
Oliver Stone’s documentary is especially devastating on the pristine bullet, both physically and in terms of the chain of custody. Without that bullet ,a second shooter is required.
Secondly, this 1979 WAPO article - whose veracity I cannot vouch for - would seem to contradict your assertion. I am posting it as food for thought.
“What is important, though, is that the committee has established that Marcello, Trafficante and Hoffa all had motive, means and opportunity to assassinate the president, that the three were sufficiently close for individual motivates to have combined to produce an assassination conspiracy, and that they had access to Oswald and Ruby in the half year preceding the assassination.”
Interestingly, the article makes no mention of RFK’s contemporaneous “crusade” against the mob. I am inclined to believe that ending it was the true motive for clipping JFK (“cut off the head and the tail dies”).
FTR, I think Oswald was the lone gunman and that Ruby was not involved in the conspiracy to assassinate JFK. I also believe there were several more or less unrelated gov’t cover ups, either to hide embarrassing revelations about what certain parties knew (or should have known) pre-assassination or to ensure the investigation did not incriminate Cuba or the Soviets potentially leading to WWIII.
That said, “What doesn’t seem to add up,” said JFK Subcommittee Chairman Richardson Preyer (D-N.C.) in early January, “is how other conspirators might have picked somebody as unstable as Oswald to carry out their plot.”
This statement gets me wondering just how “unstable” Oswald truly was and how much it might have been exaggerated by those with an interest in presenting him to the world as a “lone nut.”
If authentic, its pristine condition is powerful evidence that it didn’t bounce off several bones and organs in both Connally and Kennedy, so an additional bullet is required. If inauthentic, well, then that alone is proof that the Warren Commission was manufacturing evidence wholesale and opens the door to multiple shooters.
It is far less speculative than the Costner film. Mostly clips of pathologists, eyewitnesses, government employees, whose damaging testimony was excluded from the Warren Commission Report showing it to be a fatally flawed product that at the very least was riddled with evidentiary problems.
You lost me at “documentary”. It was a good yarn, but it was no better than the original movie.
The earliest use of the term “magic bullet theory” is found in Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane, one of the first bestsellers to criticize the Warren Commission. Most conspiracy proponents who use the term “magic bullet theory” as a criticism of the Warren Commission’s “single bullet theory” will typically rely on a diagram of JFK and Gov. John Connally that looks something like this:
The problem with such a diagram is that you can prove or disprove any bullet trajectory you want simply by manipulating Kennedy and Connally’s relative positions by only slightly modifying the diagram.
On the other hand, if you go by this diagram, the single bullet theory looks totally plausible, and no violations of the laws of physics are required to explain the bullet trajectory.
The basic idea is that you can’t prove any theory (whether it implies a conspiracy or not) about the trajectory of the bullets in the JFK assassination simply by pointing to a diagram. A diagram is only a description of reality. It can shape how we view that reality, but it cannot substitute for the reality itself.
So what does the historical evidence say about JFK and Conally’s positions in the limousine? This pre-assassination photograph taken by a Dallas news photographer, which was later published in Paris Match magazine, shows that JFK and Connally are not in a straight line, but that Connally is at a slightly lower elevation than JFK and slightly to JFK’s left.
In addition, a photo of JFK’s limo after the assassination shows that Connally’s seat was much lower than JFK’s and farther away from the edge of the car than JFK’s seat.
So, on balance, the photographic evidence provides more support for the “single bullet theory” than the “magic bullet theory.”
OK, granting your premise (“the bullet took a sharp turn–in mid-air, mind you…”) how does a bullet that struck multiple victims multiple times emerge looking brand-new out of the box?
FIGURE 1—THE BULLET: Bullet 399 (left) struck the fifth rib of Governor Connally a tangential blow and was flattened to the same degree as we then flattened our test bullet (right). This caused its soft lead core to extrude from the rear end of Bullet 399, some of which can still be seen (arrow left). We believe the remainder of the extruded lead was scraped off on to the Governor’s radius and femur, since the bullet was traveling almost backwards at that point. The extruded portion of the lead from our test bullet weighed exactly 2.1 grains: the same amount as was missing from Bullet 399. (Bullet 399 photo courtesy National Archives)
Not playing that game, the fact is, the bullet is distorted and matches test bullets used later with other bones or similar materials. Already, as Oliver Stone likes to do, piling “evidence” like that fails to reach a logical conclusion when two very clear affirmations from conspiracy minded guys are wrong to begin with.
In reality, after checking it, is clearer to me that mostly soft tissue was impacted until the bullet reached Connally, after two bones were impacted other fragments in other bones were the result of the bottom part of the bullet’s lead fragmenting.
FIGURE 3—FORTY-ONE FRAGMENTS: The extruded portion of soft gray lead from the rear end of our test bullet (right, and Figure 1) was sliced up to yield the 41 fragments seen here. Thus, the four fragments in Gov. Connally were by no means too many for two grains of lead, as claimed by critics of the Warren report.
Except we shouldn’t need the picture. The pristine bullet claim suffers from the typical thinking of conspiracy theorists. It tries to debunk one material fact, and then jumps to the conclusion that this rebuttal proves an entirely new sequence of events.
In reality, if there had been a second shooter, there would be far more evidence to support of that fact than simply the condition of a bullet. Namely, we would have seen an exit wound on Kennedy’s left side of his head. That simply does not exist.
Abraham Zapruder gave an interview in the days after the assassination. He pointed to his right temple as he described that he saw the presidents head basically blow off. This, of course, is consistent with the picture I posted in the OP and consistent with all of the other corroborating evidence pointing to a shot from Oswald.
I’m guessing physics. Not knowing the answer doesn’t mean what you think it means. You can’t just undermine one fact with a supposition about what things are supposed to be, and then think that you have therefore established a different sequence of events.
There is a photo of the limo out there taken right after the assassination which clearly shows just how much further inboard and how much lower Connolly was compared to Kennedy. This photo is now impossible to find, at least for me. I posted a link to the photo here years ago, and the link is now dead. It’s probably hard to find because none of the famous Kennedy conspiracy books bothered to include it.
This pisses me off, because the decades of the ‘magic bullet’ theory has been such a collossal waste of time. The photo clearly shows that there was no ‘magic’, and yet I have never seen it shown in any conspiracy boom that touts the ‘magic bullet’, which gives you some idea of the quality of the scholarship in those books. Like most conspiracy theorists, they make their case through cherry-picking evidence and ignoring evidence that contradicts their theory.
In short, the limo had ‘parade seating’ which hydraulically lifted the back seat about 8" in situations like this. And it had a second row of ‘jump seats’ in front of the back seat, which were placed almost on the floor and about a foot inboard of tye door to give people access to the back seat.
There was a company a few years ago that built a 3d represenation of the shooting. After putting models of Kennedy and Connoly where they were in the vehicle at the time of the shooting, they drew a line back through the positions of their wounds. The line went straight into the 6th floor window of the Texas School Book Repository.
