John F. Kennedy was killed by
You say he wasn’t a crackpot in the beginning, implying that you agree he turned into a crackpot later. At what point did the crackpottery start? No, he was a crackpot the whole time. Here are some selected works from Garrison:
Garrison was trying to follow up on a lead for a Clay Bertrand, and he “figured out” that this was really Clay Shaw. How did he know this?
Was there any other evidence against Shaw? Why, yes, using Garrison’s numerology skills:
Do you want more? I could go on and on and on. Garrison was a complete kook the whole time, and anyway, you’re getting much of your info from his book, which you admit was written after he became a kook.
Well, speaking of investigations that made mistakes because they were hurried, the 1978 HSCA came up with that result only because, at the last minute of their hearings, some audio experts testified that they had used a police radio recording to say with high confidence that there were shooters from at least two locations. The HSCA quickly added that bit to their report. And then, shortly thereafter, it was proved that the recording it was based on had been made minutes after the assassination, do didn’t record the gunshot noises at all.
I thought The Comedian did it.
I mean, as long as we can cite films.
Damn it, those homosexuals get everything. I want a secret heterosexual nickname.
Well, practice first. Maybe kill a small-town mayor, then a state senator. When you get to the Federal level, we’ll talk.
Garrison: “John Kennedy was everything that Dave Ferrie was not — a successful, handsome, popular, wealthy, virile man.”
With real hair, too.
And how do we really know she wasn’t born until three months later?
Has anyone seen her birth certificate? What’s she trying to hide?
michael corleon: “i know (it was oswald) but who gave the order? i know i didn’t.”
It does have a greater significance. President Kennedy was killed, by a lone gunman, because he was anti-communist.
I speculate that conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination were fueled by reluctance, on both the far right and the left, to accept that the President was killed for being against Communism. The far right did not want to accept that Kennedy, someone ever so slightly left of center, could be a real anti-communist martyr. And the left did not want to accept that Kennedy was killed because of views he shared with people on the right. As I said, that’s speculation, and certainly not meant to apply to any specific person on the thread.
As to how I know it was Oswald, the book that convinced me was Marina and Lee by Priscilla Johnson McMillan.
The assassination of Robert Kennedy also had larger significance. He was killed, by a lone gunman, for being sympathetic to Israel.
The movie, which I saw as a kid, got me interested in the assassination, so it has that going for it. I’ve read a few of the conspiracy books, and digested Bugliosi’s tome cover to cover, and the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Oswald did it.
He was a truant and a loner, with documented emotional problems, since childhood. He was always imagining himself more significant than he was, and craved attention.
He was also erratic. He defected to the Soviet Union, fer chrissake, found it lacking (ya think?), and came home a loser. He was abusive to his Russian wife. He tried unsuccussfully to defect to Cuba. He had attempted to kill a military general before he shot the President. And, as he had a job on the President’s parade route, he took the chance to make himself significant.
There’s proof he had purchased a rifle that matched the murder weapon. He changed his normal schedule to come home a day early in order to retrieve that rifle for the day of the motorcade. He left his wedding ring and all of his money for his wife (and he was very stingy with ever giving her money) when he left for work. He came to work with a package large enough to carry the rifle, and explained it as curtain rods, although he had no apparent need for any. He rushed from the car he came to work in - odd behavior - to get into work before the guy he rode with could join him. He did very little work all day. He lagged around the upstairs area while others went down to see the motorcade, and nobody was with him at the time of the shooting. He had military marksmanship training, although he needed 3 attempts to complete a fairly easy shot. He - without explanation to anyone he worked with - left the scene of one of the most famous murders in history to rush to his apartment and retrieve a gun. When approached by a police officer, he shot and killed him.
Yeah, it was Oswald.
Case closed.
You don’t need to go on and on. I’m familiar with a lot of this, and it is difficult to paint Garrison in a positive light no matter how much one might want to. I cannot disagree with your take. But, I didn’t say he was a kook when he wrote the book. I believe he unraveled. When this began, I can’t say.
Here’s the thing from my POV. Reading the Garrison account in OTT can be worthwhile if you can separate the facts of the investigation from the personal feelings of Garrison. I think by reading the book (and the other book he wrote on the subject “Heritage of Stone”) and concentrating on what his investigation found, there is, in my opinion, a compelling case to dig deeper.
A homosexual conspiracy? No. Some connection with a mystery PO box number? What? Clearly, he looks (because he is) grasping at straws. Why he went down this path is not clear to me because I believe the evidence that he puts forth in OTT stands on its own. I don’t think I’ve read any account of the type of pressure put on Garrison as his investigation went public and as the trial date approached. Perhaps this drove him over the edge. I don’t know. And to be honest, I don’t know what the man was like before he started to investigate the assassination.
My personal opinion is, however, that regardless of where he ended up, in the beginning of his investigation he was in control of his faculties. And I believe his investigation was a far more honest attempt to solve the crime than the WC ever put forth.
The audio recording is a fascinating piece of history, in that it is a microcosm of the investigation as a whole. If I remember correctly, the discovered dictabelt recording allegedly proving a 4th shot was a very large reason why the HSCA re-opened the case in the first place. And yet, some guy listening to a flexible plastic copy of the recording (he found in his Gallery adult magazine of all places!) refuted the evidence of a 4th shot heard on that dictabelt recording.
I’m sorry, but the only on-going mental illness which is caused by extreme stress is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The end result of PTSD is nightmares, flashbacks, and fear.
I’m not sure that I’ve heard of anyone getting PTSD from being overworked, and even if they did, the result would be a fear of working long hours and having bosses looking over your shoulder, not being a general nutsoid. That only happens in Hollywood and Steven King novels.
I find this hard to believe. If you read Garrison, I don’t know how you could have found him unpersuasive on his own. Sure, after reading Bugliosi you may have had that opinion, but reading OTT as a stand-alone exercise shouldn’t have evoked skepticism unless you already had your answer. It is the investigation that led up to Clay Shaw’s trial. The evidence he found to move forward. Until you read something that you believe directly refutes a “fact” that Garrison lays out, how can you put it in proper perspective? This is like saying I read TWR and found it unpersuasive. There are a ton of facts distorted, misinterpreted, suppressed and omitted in that report. This sole fact is responsible for all of the CT’s that have been concocted since and continue to thrive to this day.
That’s the thing, though. Speculation wouldn’t have run so rampant if the WC would have done a proper investigation. And when people started actually reading the WC, too many unanswered questions unexplored leads remained for a country that, up until the assassination, wasn’t so fond of conspiracy theories. I believe that the vast majority of people in this country used to believe what their government told them before the assassination. After the WR, the credibility of the government began a slide that it has yet to recover from.
I agree that if you are hanging onto and using information that you know to be untrue to promote your position, you are not credible. But in cases where the facts aren’t disputed but the *meaning or interpretation *of the facts are, who is lying and who is not becomes subjective based on your own personal POV.
And “Loon” is a subjective term. I’ll wager there is more evidence suggesting multiple shooters in Dallas than there is suggesting two people were placed in a garden and populated the entire planet… or a 900 year old guy building a boat, collecting a male and female of each species, and riding out a flood.
I think this is sort of extraordinary: you think Garrison’s arguments are so compelling that the only reason someone would find them unconvincing is that he was biased against them to begin with? At the very least you’re excluding the middle here. We don’t have to swallow a person’s arguments uncritically just to give them a fair shake.
September 11th proves that this is not how conspiracy theories really work. They don’t arise in response to flaws in an investigation or coverups.
I’m sorry you find Garrison persuasive, but maybe I had already run into too many CTs before I read him. I’m not going to go back and hash out all his odd claims at this point, but, no, I did not find him at all persuasive nearly 20 years prior to Bugliosi’s book.
Really? You can’t read a CT and begin to spot the odd inconsistencies or the hype in the vast majority of them?
The Warren Commission errors are all of the sort that result from interviewing multiple witnesses in a limited time and getting a huge document prepared with limited editorial oversight. On the Trail of the Assassins, published 20 years after Garrison made his big trial in New Orleans, and with all that time to double check his facts, reads like a badly scripted episode of 60 Minutes with lots of “Ooooh! Look what I found” moments while only (his) part of the story is presented.
That is a possibility. I offer the WTC/Pentagon attacks as evidence that there would have been wild CTs, regardless. Even if the Warren Commission had spent ten years nailing every single source and testimony, there would have been CTs. In fact, there would have been more CTs, because people who enjoy CTs would have been out claiming that the Commission was sitting on information and trying to spin it.
There is no question that the Warren Report was a flawed document. Its flaws, however, do not provide any excuse for loons like Garrison to go off on their own and act like idiots.
For example, one of the “conspiracies” that has stayed out there right up until the present day has been that the Mob wanted to bump off JFK because they conspired with Daly to hand Illinois over to the Democrats in the 1960 election and felt that he “betrayed” them after they had “given” him the election. This despite the fact that JFK won enough electoral votes that he would have won, even if Illinois had gone to Nixon. This presumes that mobsters who have to count their cash from numerous illegal activities every single day are too stupid or innumerate to be able to tell the difference between a 303 to 219 victory and a 276 to 246 victory. Many people just enjoy CTs.
I suspect that the Gulf of Tonkin, and the Nixon presidency, (Watergate, claims to not be in Cambodia, etc.), have a whole lot more to do with distrusting the government than the Warren Report, but I am not sure that “trusting the government” is a goal that I support, anyway. There should always be watchdogs. It would just help if fewer of them were rabid.
So? One is a claim about a historical event and the others are mythology. Note that I have explicitly not criticized people who have bought into various CTs; I criticize the loons that perpetuate them. As noted in a concurrent thread, the notion that Genesis must be a factual account is a nineteenth century reaction of fear to various challenges to overall religious belief. In that way, biblical literalism resembles a CT and I have been quite critical of people like Gish and Hovind and the Institute for Creation Research, without ever getting upset that my wife’s grandfather believed that Genesis was a literal history.
(OTOH, there is no evidence for multiple shooters, so the lack of evidence is pretty equal on both sides. 
)
I think you’ve read too much into this. I’ve never used the word “compelling”. When I read OTT, I read it much more like a story, with him taking part in it in most if not all parts. He’s relaying interviews with people, revisiting testimony of the WC with people, and that sort of thing. I don’t remember him ever making any statement in OTT like the more bizarre examples that were given above, like the homosexual conspiracy, or that LHO was sexually frustrated, etc… even if everyone in this investigation WAS gay, what does that have to do with anything? I don’t remember Kennedy being tough on gay rights… I’m simply talking about the book, how it related to the movie JFK, and how, taken at face value on its own, would compel further investigation. I agree with your statement that you don’t have to swallow anyone’s arguments uncritically just to give them a fair shake… and I do believe in a middle ground that you speak of. Here’s the thing, though. Unless you have pre-existing knowledge of Garrison as a liar, there is no reason not to take his investigation at face value. As a starting point. Subsequent reading and investigation may prove to conflict with some or all of Garrison’s assertions, but those become debate points and should be hashed out if there is disagreement by conflicting sides.
I have no loyalty to Garrison. If someone wrote a book and went through each and every point he made and proved it to be a fabrication, I have no problem with that. Until that happens though, each theory can be taken and judged on its own merits. Each of us would prioritize them in a different order, with the probability of something like Oswald alone being much more likely than a conspiracy by the Soviets, for example.
This is a good point. I do wonder, however, if people would be less likely to even nibble on these CTs if the government gave them a feeling of general honesty. But, it’s like putting the tooth paste back in the tube. Now, no matter what the issue, story, scandal, etc, someone is going to be able to create a CT scenario that a lot of people are going to swallow.
Has it been 20 years since JFK came out already? Good grief.
I don’t find him persuasive in the sense that he created a story out of whole cloth and I buy it hook, line and sinker. That’s possible, of course. L. Ron Hubbard did it and look at Scientology now! I find OTT to be a compelling investigative story, one that doesn’t make wholesale claims of fact out of nowhere.
I wonder, for example, what it was like to walk in Garrison’s shoes. If you, I, or anyone else that found themselves in his position, how would we have proceeded? If he’s telling the truth as to the investigation, I find it hard to believe that anyone with any sense of curiosity would not continue to dig into it, unless of course, it was simply too much work or you simply didn’t care enough.
How, for example, do you explain away the story of Fletcher Prouty (more or less represented by Donald Sutherland in JFK)? Especially if you read Prouty’s book, which parallels Garrison’s version pretty closely AFAIR? Was Prouty just spinning tales to make money with his own book? I guess that’s possible. It’s also possible that Garrison was telling the truth.
Does that make his book gospel? Of course not. But it’s a good story written by the guy that did the footwork. The actual work he did I don’t doubt. His interpretation of some of the work may be off, but that’s different, and you can’t tell that by reading his book in a vacuum.
Of course. That’s why I don’t believe there is a space ship and aliens inside Area 51, or that the hijacked airliners on 9/11 actually landed safely with all alive on board while empty, substitute planes flew into the buildings.
It IS his story, so what facts do you think he needed to check? His opinion is not capable of being fact-checked. Especially if he disagrees with the fundamental premise of the WC. (I also believe, but could be wrong… I’m lazy and don’t feel like checking right now) that “Heritage of Stone” was written much earlier than OTT, and it is pretty much a blueprint of OTT. So, 20 years isn’t exactly accurate.
Maybe you are right. Before Kennedy, what were the big CT’s floating around? Booth escaped and made it to India? Butch Cassidy lived and died an old man in Oklahoma some where? CT’s seem to be a product of and driven by TV, but again, I have no idea. But if there were no significant CT’s before Kennedy, I’m not sure there would have been so much fuss. But you may have the pulse of mass american thought.
Another point well taken. But it was more than Chicago and election totals. It was Cuba, and Kennedy’s failure to take it back. The mob’s investment in Havana casinos was a huge bone to choke on. Add Bobby Kennedy’s crusade against the mob, and there is some motivational factors there. Whether it was enough to kill him, well… I highly doubt it.
It would help if there were still watchdogs that have any credibility. The 4th estate has become complicit in government actions to the point of absurdity. There is no Woodward and Bernstein out there digging on a scandal, unless of course it involves someone’s genitalia.
I’m certainly glad you cut your wife’s grandfather some slack.
I’m curious: have you read the WR? ( which, I’d hasten to add, is only a summary of 20 something volumes of investigation done by the WC).
One of the problems many CTers have is that their knowledge of the Assassination comes from what the WC found, and they eagerly rely on its findings when they support their pet theory. When the WR refutes their ideas, though, it’s derided as flawed.
So, which is it? Do you discount the WC findings, or do you have another source for your facts of the case?
Sure there is. You could find the story illogical or incomplete, you could feel it doesn’t pass the sniff test, or that it has any number of other flaws. I haven’t read his book - in fact all my reading about the assassination has been on the web - and I’m not sure how what it is about Garrison’s account that makes you feel this way.
I think a lot of it is just human nature.
After the Clay Shaw trial, where Garrison failed to prove that Shaw had anything to do with the President’s death - his theory literally being that, as a wealthy gay man, Shaw was both powerful and a degenerate - Garrison then indicted Shaw for PERJURY for having professed his innocence, notwithstanding the vindication of trial.
Talk about abuse of power!
A court of law literally had to enjoin him from pursuing Shaw again. In legal terms, he was told “let it go, Garrison.”. By that time, of course, he had destroyed an innocent man.