What if JFK's assassination hadn't been captured on film?

[bup]

@Amateur_Barbarian

The CTs and questions are about who was involved behind the three assassins, and their exact motivations. Not what the basic plan was, how it was to be carried out and how it was (and was not) executed.

That’s fundamentally different than JFK conspiracy theories, with their other gunmen, Oswald being eliminated by Ruby because he was going to expose people, and tin-foil stuff.

At least as far as I know. Booth and his co-conspirators met in a boarding house, and were either a rogue group of southern sympathizers, or a group clandestinely under the control of the confederate government.

Are there people that think Booth was a patsy, or that the orders came from Britain or Mexico or “Big Railroad?”

[SpoilerVirgin]

@bup

Are there people that think Booth was a patsy, or that the orders came from Britain or Mexico or “Big Railroad?”

See this page and this page for a sample of conspiracy theories pointing at usual suspects Vice President Andrew Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and the leaders of the Confederacy, along with not so usual suspects “The Rothschilds and International Bankers” and the Jesuits or the Catholic Church.

I like this quote from a page analyzing the conspiracy theories:

If the Kennedy assassination has been the greatest single source for conspiratorial expression in recent U.S. culture, Lincoln’s certainly deserves credit as the longest running.

[bup]

Well, I’ll leave it to the rest of the board to decide if nearly as many people believe those as believe JFK conspiracies. I’ve never heard of them, you think they are a counterpoint to my argument that the film actually causes more nutters.

[erysichthon]

@bup

I think there might be fewer conspiracy theories without the film.

There are more conspiracy theories about 9/11 than there are about The Oklahoma City bombing. There’s a lot more visual evidence available to nutters for 9/11.

Same with JFK. There’s no film of Martin Luther King Jr or Bobby Kennedy or Malcolm X being shot, and a lot fewer conspiracy theorists too.

Nutters go for the easy stuff.

Mark Fuhrman (yes, the notorious detective from the OJ trial) wrote a book about the JFK assassination. It’s a pretty short book and not a huge contribution to JFK scholarship, but he does make one very interesting point in it. Fuhrman says that the major problem with the JFK case is that we know too much about it. There’s a mountain of information out there, and inevitably there are going to be things that don’t seem to fit. Those little anomalies are what feed conspiracy theories.

I think there would still be a cottage industry of JFK conspiracy theories, simply because many people can’t accept the incongruity of a president being destroyed by a nonentity like Oswald. But those theories would have significantly less oxygen.

[Amateur_Barbarian]

@steveroo

Mark Fuhrman (yes, the notorious detective from the OJ trial) wrote a book about the JFK assassination. It’s a pretty short book and not a huge contribution to JFK scholarship, but he does make one very interesting point in it. Fuhrman says that the major problem with the JFK case is that we know too much about it. There’s a mountain of information out there, and inevitably there are going to be things that don’t seem to fit. Those little anomalies are what feed conspiracy theories.

Which was the specific purpose of Bugliosi’s book - he spends the first half meticulously assembling every bit of data over the four days or so of events, second by second, using multiple passes when there are parallel or complicated events. He documents every sentence and every datum - the book is 1600 pages and there are 1300 more pages of notes and references on CD.

The only way any CT can be constructed is by omitting or misstating the exhaustive facts in this book; Bugliosi then spends the second half of the book deconstructing every one of the major CTs.

So yes, it is a matter of too much information, but only in the sense that any one shovelful of it can be used to “prove” absolute nonsense. When taken together, no doubt can possibly remain. The 44-page introduction alone puts most CTs in their properly absurd light, and does an admirable job of explaining why they are so persistent and attractive.

(Note that I refer to the original book, Reclaiming History. From what I can tell, there have been several subsequent editions and renamings that bring the material down to a more manageable size; I think the most popular omits most of the second half and the secondary notes. Anyone got a clear handle on this?) RH remains the masterwork, though, and lives right here on my desktop shelf.

[JohnT]

You would have had the “who was behind Oswald?” CT’s even if the film never existed. However, the film (and Life’s buying and showing it) gave the general public the sort of forensic evidence it never had with any previous high-profile murder. Picture Joe Sixpack watching the Zapruder film on Walter Cronkite in 1977…

“Look, he’s grabbing his throat! Look, his head just exploded and fell back and to the left - dammit Mable, somebody else was there, shooting Kennedy from ahead!”

So, without the film the questions of who was behind Oswald would have dominated the CT discussion circuit, with a few people struggling to make the claim that Kennedy was shot from the front, their only evidence being some backfire on a radio recording and some eyewitnesses who may or may not be correct.

With the film and its misunderstood physics, the sort of people who “knew” Kennedy was shot from the front because they saw it on TV were psychologically free to question anything else about a case they know little about. And so they did.

In addition, the role of TV in promoting Kennedy CT’s cannot be stressed enough, especially once Geraldo Rivera showed it to the television public in 1975 on ABC.