I don’t know why I first read this as Ike and Tina Turner.
With that out of the way, can anyone recommend a substantive book on this topic?
mmm
No, no, you’re on to something. It is absolutely within the realm of possibility that Ike and/or Tina Turner were deeply involved in the assassination, not least because the mob had access to them. As, presumably, did the FBI and the CIA. “Tina Turner” is not even her birth name, so the use of false identities was part of her training and she became a Swiss citizen: why? Presumably to avoid extradition for questioning about the assassination. Case closed!
Conspiracy thinking is a luxury I allow myself, sort of like rice pudding at Thanksgiving, for its rarity. I couldn’t live with myself if I subscribed to conspiracies willy-nilly, but I figure one or two small ones couldn’t really hurt me on special occasions as a treat. But I’m one of the most dogmatic, stubborn (and may I add, educated) people in the world when it comes to defending Bill Shakespeare’s honour. I have torn Shakespeare conspiracists to shreds the moment “Earl of Essex” appears on their drool-smeared lips, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.
Ike and Tina? Sure–plenty of good books on that subject.
Oh, assassination books? The most convincing I’ve read is MORTAL ERROR by a guy improbably named Bonar Menninger, which is more a “colossal fuckup” book than a conspiracy book, other than the conspiracies involved in the coverup. (A bit heavy on the ballistics for my taste, but very straightforward.) A terrific LHO book, though fictional in parts, is Mailer’s OSWALD’S TALE or DeLillo’s LIBRA. The standard non-conspiracy book is Gerald Posner’s CASE CLOSED, which purports to be a non-fiction version of the WC Report (as Woody Allen put it).
Not a book, but here is a single web page that addresses and tries to account for the major “suspicious circumstances.” I found it persuasive and a great antidote to the lure of the rabbit hole.
“The Unofficial JFK Assassination FAQ”; especially Section 9, “Myths and Facts of the Assassination”
Vincent Bugliosi (who prosecuted Charles Manson) wrote a doorstop.
This is good, thanks.
mmm
This is one of the more absurd theories, in my opinion - that the fatal bullet was fired by a secret service agent in the motorcade, on accident.
In 1963, many adult men (most?) had military experience from having served in WWII. If a man had been shot, at close range, in front of them, I’d think they’d have immediately recognized it. (Especially the other people in the motorcade itself)
And, as we’ve endured so many stories of school shootings, we’ve come to understand just how mutilated a body shot by an automatic weapon at close range would get. It’s just fundamentally different than a sniper’s head shot.
Moreover, I believe the theory is that the shooter was in front of Kennedy. The entire back of his head would have been blown off - not the front temple, as actually occurred.
Ultimately, we have video of the shooting. Nobody shoots Kennedy from the motorcade. It’s obvious, at least to me.
I’m not surprised you thought that book went heavy on ballistics: it had to be obscure, because your lying eyes would have told you otherwise.
This is a completely unimportant side issue, but I’ll point it out anyway. I don’t think the two words rhyme. It’s a made-up name, so there is no “correct” pronunciation, but I guess most people would assume that Hidell is pronounced Hie-dell, with the first syllable rhyming with “pie”. But Fidel, as in Castro’s first name, is pronounced Fee-del, with the first syllable pronounced like the word “fee”.
This is the beauty part, to me. Menninger’s thesis is simple, clean, well-documented (as far as I can tell–I’m far from a ballistics expert, though I have heard from some folks who’ve trained with weapons who tell me he makes sense), and self-contained, requiring no elaborate, far-reaching conspiracies to hold up for 60 years. A rookie Secret Service agent in the car behind JFK whipped out an AR-15 (which was immediately and very conveniently destroyed) the second he heard a shot fired, and in picking it up, inadvertently blew the fatal shot into JFK’s head, not even realizing himself that he’d set off the gun’s hair-trigger. The Secret Service, realizing their fuckup, destroyed the evidence and the secret remained closely held by those few officials whose careers would have been wrecked if it were known what had happened.
You described the bullet as “pristine”. Do you still believe that’s an accurate description?
It’s not remotely “clean”.
No eyewitnesses reported seeing the flash of an automatic rifle in the motorcade. Nobody spontaneously yelled out when it went off, and none of the pictures or footage of the incident shows it happening.
And with reporters streaming around the scene, there’s no evidence of any weapon being secreted away, and no later evidence of any kind of it being destroyed or the incident being documented in any way.
But we can imagine it. So there’s that, I guess.
I’ve not seen a photo, but the wikipedia article on the assassination of Kennedy has these two drawings which show how slight differences in the seats mean the “magic bullet” critique doesn’t hold up. As you say, that critique assumes a certain seating arrangement; if that’s not correct, the “magic bullet” critique falls apart.
Fortunately, the Marines kept pretty good records. A score of 200 on the range would have gotten you a qualification as a “sharpshooter.”
Like all Marines, Oswald was trained and tested in shooting. In December 1956, he scored 212, which was slightly above the requirements for the designation of sharpshooter.[20] In May 1959 he scored 191, which reduced his rating to marksman.[20][40]
Oswald was court-martialed after he accidentally shot himself in the elbow with an unauthorized .22 caliber handgun.
Okay, the guy wasn’t Annie Oakley, even on his best day. But, as has been frequently noted, the target was less than 100 yards away, and moving literally at walking speed. And even a score of 191 on a rifle range is pretty damn good. Give the shooter a stable platform (e.g., some boxes of books stacked up) and a good view (like out an open window) and a pretty damn good shooter has a pretty damn good chance of hitting the target.
Thanks for that-- I really had no idea what the term meant to the Marines in the 50s, just an inkling that it probably meant he was good enough to qualify, but not the best shot in his platoon.
However, the film continually used the word the way a layperson would, someone highly skilled in precision use of firearms.
Which is cheating.
Oliver Stone?
Say it ain’t so!
Well, I, for one, was SHOCKED! Shocked, I tell you!
Just to add, in addition being walking speed the motion of the target was almost directly at him, with almost zero deflection. It was an extraordinarily easy shot to make, if anything the fact that Oswald missed one of his shots is indicative of sub-par shooting skills.
That was kind of my point. Most conspiracy theories have Oswald making the kill shot, but the “grassy knoll” shooter, and possibly a third shooter, making the shots that miss, and don’t bother them with spent shells on the floor where Oswald was.
But more to the point, the head of the conspiracy would not choose a poor or mediocre shot to attempt the kill shot-- reinterpreting the word “marksman” lets the theorists have Oswald as a good candidate for the chosen shooter, before the deed is done.
Oh-- no one has brought it up yet, but a lot of theorists include Jack Ruby, and have him appointed to kill Oswald to keep him from talking. The best refutation of that I know of, backs up Ruby’s story that he killed Oswald on impulse.
His dogs were in his car.
You don’t leave your dogs in the car if there’s a pretty good chance you aren’t coming back, and apparently that was really the case here, in that Ruby had a Koothrappaliesque attachment to his dogs.
Another small element that makes Oswald’s shooting less impressive is that the conspiratorialists trying to replicate the ‘amazing’ shooting performance of Oswald would tell a test shooter to make three shots within a head-and-back shaped area from Oswald’s distance, then start a stopwatch and tell them to start. If the shooter couldn’t do it, it was proof that Oswald couldn’t have done it either.
But the subtlety here is that you need to start the stopwatch after the first shot, which the shooter can set up for as long as he likes first, and then the shooter only had to make two more shots in the time window. Doing that, the shots become almost trivial for someone with shooting experience.