By “phrased slightly differently” you mean “I completely changed the meaning of your statement”.
Stranger
Compared to today, security in general was incredibly lax. imagine Oswald trying to get into a tall building on the motorcade route with a long thin package now. The Secret Service would be all over him before he got anywhere near.
I certainly can’t argue because they had the President of the United States riding in an open air convertible car traveling at a pretty slow speed.
If you have evidence for this assertion, you are welcome to share it.
Otherwise, this amounts to “well, it could have happened this way!”
Because, what, you KNOW for a fact that the “transcriptions” are identical to the contemporaneous notes?
Have you ever interviewed someone and then later transcribed your notes? I have. For a living. For years. Got pretty good at it.
Every time, I screwed some pooch or other. As did everyone who ever did my job. And I wasn’t even trying to be inaccurate. Imagine what I could do with those notes if I had a narrative to peddle.
Except for some semi-literate shitkicker Texas cop, I guess.
Right because you’re able to say that all police in Dallas were semi-literate, to fit your pre-conceived ideas.
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It’s quite unfair to imply that they were all completely illiterate. Please reconsider the extremity of your post.
Too small a sample. Ask Chat GPT about Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Bremmer, Sara Jane Moore, Squeaky Fromm, John Hinckley, Vladimir Arutyunian, Giuseppe Zangara, John Flammang Schrank, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, the five different assassination attempts on Gandhi before the successful one, and for that matter, everyone who’s tried to assassinate one or another members of the British royal family over the past 75 years See if there’s a consensus reason.
Moderating:
To all, let’s lower the temperature and raise the collegiality a bit. You’re in Great Debates, not Snark-a-Thon Pit.
Thanks.
And take a look at this photo of JFK campaigning in 1960 in West Virginia: standing on a high chair, surrounded by a crowd, with a boy behind him holding a realistic looking toy pistol.
We have to be really careful about judging events 60 years ago by current security standards. What happened 60 years ago in Dallas created our current security standards for public officials.
First off, I don’t contend that the transcriptions as given in the WCR are “identical”, to use your word, to the notes they were derived from. I submit that they are the best record we have of the Oswald interrogation - and keep in mind they don’t exactly show what would be considered perfect evidence for either the conspiracist or the lone-gunman theories. Again, if you have evidence that this is not the case, or that some nefarious force wanted to affect the transcriptions, why don’t you give it?
Or, to take this thread on a different and perhaps more productive tack, you mentioned before that you’re fine with Occam’s Razor in other contexts, but not this one. Perhaps you’d like to share some of your mindspace on why you’re attached to the conspiracist viewpoint on this particularly issue?
As I stated in my OP, this was an explicitly political trip, designed for maximum exposure. Kennedy had won Texas narrowly in 1960, and was helped across the finish line by the fact that Lyndon Johnson ran for, and won re-election to, his senate seat (he was replaced when he became vice president).
So he was trying to court voters. In fact, this explains (in part) why Jackie was with him (the other reason, perhaps, is that after she lost her newborn, just days after his birth, in August, and JFK felt some level of guilt for his womanizing, so she was getting quality time).
In one of the speeches he gave in Texas, he likened the trip to the one he did with her in Paris, where he described himself as “the man who accompanied Mrs. Kennedy.”
Point being, there was a reason they had no bubble top, and were driving slowly while waving to the crowds, and it had nothing to do with something nefarious, or even unprecedented.
You can see other parades where Kennedy is waving to people hanging out of windows.
If you had a narrative to peddle,‘wouldn’t you make it more favorable to you? Wouldn’t you include things like “he said he hated Kennedy” (he claimed no beef with the president) or even outright “confessed” (he denied the shootings, but lied about things known to be true).
The reports aren’t exactly self serving.
At the time of the JFK shooting, there was recent memory of an assassination attempt against Truman (by Puerto Rican nationalists) and FDR (by an Italian immigrant who may have been crazy).
FYI, I wasn’t disputing whether Oswald was the lone shooter, I was just asking whether he did it because of delusions of grandeur or whether he thought he was accomplishing something political/strategic by doing so.
e.g. we know that the assassination attempt against Reagan was because the shooter was trying to impress Jodie Foster, so it was not political. What were Oswalds likely reasons? (since he didn’t admit to the shooting, it’s hard to know for sure, but what do people think the reasons were)
Those are not “scare quotes.” They are normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill quotation marks whose function is to indicate the words between them came from another source, written or spoken.
I addressed this in post #91:
You also seem to neglect the fact that the plan was successful. JFK was clipped, RFK left gov’t soon after and the pressure he was putting on mob operations ceased. No member of the mob was ever charged in connection with the assassination. IMO, these facts make the question of whether or not it was an “ideal plan” moot.
Agreed.
You seem to have lost context here. My cite was only meant to rebut your assertion:
In addition, you are assuming the nature of the discussion between Oswald and his wife was limited to his uncle being a bookie. How do you know that? Were you there when they talked? Do you have a cite with the verbatim conversation?
I have no idea what they discussed, but unlike you, I am not willing to characterize it with limitations.
Agreed. Nor does the evidence preclude the possibility there was coordination. As such, the SCR’s conclusion on the issue of mob involvement in the assassination stands.
You don’t think it’s possible any such approaches escaped detection by the feds? You think they were able to monitor Oswald 100% of the time?
Maybe they wanted to be insulated because they didn’t want to be busted for plotting to kill the president? Just a guess….
Ruby clipped Oswald. No money was involved. He had ideological reasons for doing it. Many assassins are motivated by ideology, not money.
Sources I looked at found Oswald’s motive too shrouded in uncertainty to make a definitive assertion. Ideological as well as psychological reasons (related to self-esteem) are most often mentioned.
What do you base this on, because it’s not really true.
RFK stayed on as attorney general until he ran for Senator, a role he held until he was killed.
But, you say, the pressure on the mob ceased.
Tell that to Arkansas Senator John McClellan.
It’s funny to me. The very time when the mob killed Jack Kennedy (and not Bobby, who would have had much less security) to ease their pressure, an entirely different government official was exposing all of their secrets.
Senator McClellan, by the way, died in 1977 at age 81.
No, of course I have no cite. Nobody does. It’s not documented. Claims it happened are the best we’ve got.
I characterize my analysis with limitations to credible evidence. It doesn’t let me imagine as many possible outcomes, but it proves more reliable when navigating the real world.
Well, of course. But those people are invariably lone gunmen. You were asserting that the mob independently orchestrated the hit. I guess they were sending out leaflets or something.
Well, why am I not surprised? If you are building a conspiracy theory, you need some mystery.
In reality, it’s pretty obvious that Oswald was a disgruntled young man. He found salvation in Marxism, but was eternally frustrated by his failure to live in the utopia it promised. Cuba was his newest hope.
Kennedy was very publicly agains the Cuban revolution.
My guess is that Oswald hoped to get to Cuba, but had no real plan for doing so. But, more than that, he craved importance. Killing Kennedy would elevate him to a famous person that people would want to hear from.
At the end of the day, he got what he wanted.
So… you decided to use not-scare quotes to quote a single word I used which was quoting you? The other source, written or spoken, was yourself?
No, you actually didn’t. You handwaved it away and started using not-scare quotes to quote me quoting you for some bizarre reason. And only the word ‘ideal’.
No, you seem to have neglected that you have yet to established that there was a plan. Your evidence that the mob was behind the ‘hit’ on JFK is that JFK was clipped and that they were never charged in connection to the assassination? Seriously? Here’s another scenario that fits those facts perfectly and has the added bonus of not requiring leaps of faith across the Grand Canyon: The mob had nothing to do with the ‘hit’, Oswald was acting alone, and the reason the mob was never charged in connection to the assassination was that they had no connection to the assassination. It has the added bonus of explaining the reason behind the mob not having any connection to the assassination.
Or, using your own logic, I can prove that JFK was assassinated by Cthulhu worshipers. Why? The plan clearly was successful, JFK was clipped, and no Cthulhu worshipper was ever charged in connection with the assassination. QED.
I might re-watch the Stone documentary to catch the names of the witnesses who claim they wanted to testify to the WC but were refused because their testimony contradicted the WC’s pre-ordained findings. If I do, I hope the WC’s defenders will respond substantively and not just dismiss these witnesses with “Who’s he?”
Please do. I don’t have HBO.
But please also bear in mind how Stone works; if one person says something he wants, he jumps at it. That person is never mistaken, or confused, or wrong. If they estimated a distance or time one way, and if the Commission concludes that they must have been wrong, it’s a coverup and proof of the conspiracy. And everybody else who might contradict them is ignored, or in on it.
That’s not how real investigations, or the real world, works. Eyewitness testimony is sometimes unreliable, and there are always going to be recollections that vary. In this case, especially, people have been heavily influenced by later reporting and discussion (that’s also why the statements made to the House Select Committee on Assassinations - which operated in the late 70s - must be considered less reliable than statements made to the Warren Commission in 1964).
Moreover, if you (or Stone) claims to have negated some facet of the official story, you have to follow through on that new development. It’s not enough to say that some witnesses statement means that Oswald was not on the 6th floor, for example. You also have to account for the long paper bag he brought, the rifle he ordered, the presence of those objects on the 6th floor, the alias he used, the fact that he fled, the fact that he grabbed a gun, the fact that he tried to kill the cops who arrested him, et al.
Stone wants to poke holes, and question the official story, but he will never be able to account for all of the known facts.
Here’s a review that points out several flaws.
I quite liked the Oliver Stone movie. He’s a good director. But his premise that it is a documentary is false.
I’m not talking about the movie JFK starring Kevin Costner and a cast of thousands. He made an actual documentary in 2021 that was mostly interviews with witnesses, pathologists, etc., referenced above.