Historiography  

Wasn't It a Little Crowded on that Grassy Knoll?

by David Ramsey Steele

The Lone Nut theory is unpopular, but it has the advantage of being right.

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Thousands of books have been published on the Kennedy assassination, and about 99% of them argue for a Conspiracy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (1978) concluded there had been a Conspiracy. The successful movie "JFK" (1991) laid out an imaginative Conspiracy scenario as history. Not surprisingly, most people now believe there was a Conspiracy.

A vast amount of evidence has been marshalled in support of the Conspiracy theory, and I admit I cannot refute it. Yet I maintain that Kennedy was killed by the Lone Nut Lee Oswald,* roughly as determined by the Warren Commission report in 1964, by Jim Moore in his book "Conspiracy of One" (1990), and by Gerald Posner in "Case Closed" (1993).¹ I have become steadily more convinced of this over recent years, and here I want to explain why, despite all the arguments of the Conspiracy theorists, many of them unanswerable, the Lone Nut theory is the better theory.*

John Kennedy was fatally shot in Dallas at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963. Many concluded, especially following the shooting of Oswald by Ruby two days later, that there had been a Conspiracy, but after publication of The Warren Commission Report (1964) the Lone Nut theory became widely accepted. This acceptance began to be seriously eroded by 1966, which saw the publication of the best-selling "Rush to Judgment."² As the Vietnam war got worse and the Watergate scandal came to the boil, majority opinion swung heavily back to the Conspiracy theory.

The Conspiracy Theory Transformed

At times popular support for the Conspiracy theory has exceeded 85%. Today the Conspiracy theory is not as popular as it was 20 years ago, but still far more popular than it was 39 years ago, immediately following publication of The Warren Commission Report. Meanwhile the factual arguments for a Conspiracy have been utterly transformed.

In the early years, Conspiracy theorists appealed to the publicly recognized evidence. They contended that if all this evidence were made available and properly interpreted, it would prove a Conspiracy. Some details of this evidence may have been tampered with, but most of it was assumed to be rock solid. Now, Conspiracy theorists generally maintain that the evidence itself was almost entirely fabricated by the Conspirators.

The two biggest examples of this radical change of approach are the autopsy pictures and the Zapruder film. Early Conspiracy theorists demanded the release of the autopsy photographs and x-rays, withheld from the public by request of the Kennedy family, but when these pictures were released in the 1970s they corroborated the Lone Nut theory. Conspiracy theorists then concluded that either the pictures or the wounds themselves, or both, must have been falsified.

The Zapruder film, a 26-second movie of the assassination made by a spectator, Abraham Zapruder, used to be regarded on all sides as a record of fact. Aspects of this film were frequently employed to advance a Conspiracy theory. Now it is accepted by almost everyone that the Zapruder film, taken at face value, corroborates the Lone Nut theory. Most Conspiracy theorists therefore claim the film to be either altered in detail or a complete fabrication.

Most Conspiracy theory books since the 1970s have simultaneously relied upon the Zapruder film and alleged it has been tampered with.³ In successive books, the trend has been to gradually rely less on the film as evidence and give more weight to tampering, culminating in recent allegations that Zapruder never made the Zapruder film but was paid by the Conspiracy to pretend that he had made it.⁴

The Body Snatchers

David Lifton's enormously successful 1988 book, "Best Evidence," showed the way to rescue the Conspiracy theory from the evidence. Lifton maintains that Kennedy's body was stolen on the plane between Parkland Hospital, Dallas, and Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, and elaborate alterations made in the corpse's wounds (in less than a couple of hours) so that the autopsy would be looking at reconstructed and therefore faked wounds.⁵ Since the official coffin was now empty, there had to be a further elaborately-planned conjuring trick, to get the body into Bethesda Naval Hospital for the autopsy. The body was then altered again for the autopsy photographs. This second alteration involved, not additional cutting or tissue damage, but extensive rebuilding and remodelling, to replace large areas of skull which had been missing before.⁶

Lifton realized that if this were true, the Zapruder film must have been seriously falsified.⁷ The Conspirators must have doctored the film to repair and conceal the enormous damage to the back of the head and add the eruption at the top right side of the head. Since the ballistics evidence is compatible only with a scenario of two hits from behind and none from anywhere else, the Conspirators must also have replaced the actual bullet fragments with planted fragments prior to analysis.⁸ This might be a more challenging task than Lifton appears to recognize: the bullet which was designated by the Conspirators as the one which would appear to have hit both Kennedy and Connally would have to have been fired, and minuscule flakes extruded from it on impact would have had to be recovered and each separately planted somehow in Kennedy's body. Lifton's theory also requires that Kennedy's jacket, shirt, and necktie be faked to produce a false entry wound at the back and exit wound at the front.

"High Treason" by Groden and Livingstone appeared the following year and also became a best-seller. The authors scornfully dismiss Lifton's account for various reasons, including the impossibility of performing the surgery in the limited time and testimony that Kennedy's casket was always under observation.⁹ Instead they propose that the body of someone else was substituted for Kennedy's just before the autopsy. The Conspirators faked the head and neck x-rays "by shooting a body in the manner in which they wished to have it appear that the President was killed." The Conspirators faked the autopsy photographs at a different time, and "No one among the conspirators realized the photographs were incompatible with the forged x-rays."¹⁰

Witnesses Against Oswald

I have said that I cannot answer many of the arguments for a Conspiracy. I am referring here to highly technical arguments involving medicine, ballistics, and photography.¹¹ Of course these physical arguments deserve to be addressed and answered by technical experts, and I am confident that in due course they will be.

Why am I so confident? Because of other arguments which trump the anomalies in the physical evidence. But before I get to those, it's worth pointing out that not all of the publicly recognized evidence can easily be dismissed as fraudulent, and much of this evidence favors the Lone Nut theory.

The Lone Nut theory requires that three and only three shots were fired from the sixth floor window of the Book Depository. If there were more than three shots, or if any shots came from some other location, then the Lone Nut theory is refuted: there must have been a multi-shooter Conspiracy or at least a coincidence of two separate assassination attempts, with a Conspiracy to cover up one of these.¹²

The evidence for precisely three shots from that location, and the evidence for Oswald's involvement, is quite powerful.* Though the many witnesses differed in the number of shots they thought they had heard and where they thought these shots had come from, the biggest number of witnesses who had decided views on the matter favored three shots, and a plurality also favored the direction of the Depository.*

The ceiling of the fifth story and floorboards on the sixth story were in disrepair, with actual gaps between the two floors. Three men working on the fifth floor, immediately underneath the sniper's nest, heard three very loud explosions directly above them, followed by the sound of the bolt action, and one of the three heard the cartridge cases landing on the floor. Several witnesses in the street saw the rifle sticking out of the sixth floor window, one actually saw it fire, and another saw the shooter's face and gave a description to the police, which may have led to the police picking Oswald up. Others saw a face like Oswald's in the window before the shooting, without seeing anything at the time of the shooting. Testimony as to shots from other locations tends to be a lot less definite, or to have become more sharply defined only years after the event.*

Conspiracy theorists have a difficult time with the eyewitnesses, notably Howard Brennan, who immediately following the shooting gave the shooter's description to the police. A few hours later Brennan failed to positively identify Oswald in a line-up, though he did say that Oswald most closely resembled the shooter. Brennan subsequently stated that he had really been in no doubt that the Oswald he saw in the line-up was the shooter but that he had been in fear for his life and the lives of his family from the presumed organized assassins, and annoyed with the authorities for allowing his own identity, as apparently the only witness to have seen the assassin, to become public knowledge. Therefore he had pretended to be unable to make a definite identification.

Stewart Galanor, in his beautifully succinct and predominantly fair statement of the case for Conspiracy, implies that the notion Brennan had refrained from making a positive identification when he could have done so originated from a Secret Service agent, who fed this suggestion to Brennan.¹³ But let's get this in perspective. By Brennan's own account, a police officer suggested to Brennan at the line-up who the suspect was. In any case, Brennan had just seen the arrested Oswald on TV.¹⁴ For both these reasons, any identification at the line-up would have been of small value. We do have Brennan's recollection that when he saw Oswald on TV he knew they had the right man. All this is precisely the kind of messy, unsatisfactory outcome you don't expect from a superbly orchestrated Conspiracy.

The fact remains that Brennan did report what he claimed to have seen to the police immediately after the shooting, giving a description of the sixth-floor shooter that led directly to a police radio bulletin incorporating that description, and thus perhaps to Oswald's apprehension.¹⁵ If Brennan had just been making it up, what are the odds that someone conforming to the description, and arrested in Oak Cliff, over two miles from Dealey Plaza, would turn out to have been a Depository employee who frequently worked alone on the sixth floor? Alternatively, if Brennan were in the pay of the Conspiracy, then surely his eyewitness evidence could have been made airtight.

There is considerable additional evidence implicating Oswald, beginning with the simple fact that he, alone of all Depository employees, left the building within a few minutes of the assassination. He took a taxi to his rented room in Oak Cliff, changed his clothes, and picked up his revolver. Conspiracy theorists usually feel compelled to deny that Oswald then shot a police officer who approached him on the street, though a dozen eyewitnesses positively identified Oswald for this shooting.¹⁶ And, to mention a circumstance no one disputes, what was Oswald doing, with a recently-fired revolver, sitting in a movie theater he had just run into without buying a ticket?

What we have learned of Oswald's life, outlook, and behavior fits the Lone Nut theory. Norman Mailer, an early proponent of the Conspiracy theory, more recently wrote a "novelized" life of Oswald which purports to avoid taking any position on whether he was the assassin, sticking to those facts about Oswald which can be verified by biographical research. Whether intentionally or inadvertently, Mailer's account leaves an overwhelming impression of Oswald's guilt.¹⁷

Oswald's failed assassination attempt on General Edwin Walker, the photographs of him with a rifle, a pistol, and a leftist paper taken by his wife Marina, and his unprecedented behavior the morning of the assassination, leaving his savings and wedding ring behind, were all corroborated by Marina. As soon as she heard that the assassination shots had come from the Depository where Oswald worked, she thought her husband had probably done it, and she accepted this for years, later becoming an adherent of David Lifton's conspiracy theory. After her conversion to the Conspiracy theory, Marina stated she had been afraid of deportation to Russia, and eager to tell her interrogators what she thought they wanted to hear. She did not however claim that they had given her an elaborate structure of lies to memorize and repeat back to them.* Marina's story fluctuated in details; she was a quirky and unpredictable witness. But there is all the difference in the world, for instance, between telling varying stories about Oswald's rifle and making up the very existence of a rifle if she had not known he possessed one.¹⁸

A Colossal Conspiracy

In the early years, Conspiracy theorists used to argue that the Conspiracy need not have been on a vast scale. They maintained that it could possibly have involved as few as a dozen people. This claim has gradually been abandoned. Years of close attention to all the details of the assassination have made it clear that if Oswald alone did not kill Kennedy then the majority of the physical and other evidence must have been systematically doctored or replaced, by advanced techniques not available to ordinary people, over a period of decades. This requires an immense and permanent Conspiracy.

Some Conspiracy theorists now hold that ever since the assassination there has been continual surveillance of conversations in Dealey Plaza, and continuous movement of such objects as lampposts in order to confuse researchers.¹⁹ Conspiracy theorists usually assume that the Conspiracy is still at work, and many believe that November 22, 1963 was a coup d'état which installed what is now the real government of the United States, though why this inscrutable despotism should don the masks of Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton is one of its many unfathomable secrets.

Conspiracy theorists reasonably point out that not all participants in the Conspiracy would have to be aware of its real purpose. For example, some lower-level people working for the Conspiracy might have been told that Kennedy had been killed by a Communist plot, and that this had to be covered up to avoid a thermonuclear war. But then you would expect that as inquiries into the assassination progressed and became public, and as the Soviet Union staggered to its ignominious collapse, some individuals would realize they had been deceived, and would go public with any relevant information they might possess.* The rewards available for Conspiracy advocates greatly dwarf those of Lone Nut theorists. Fame and riches would accrue to anyone who produced a halfway plausible story about his personal involvement in the Conspiracy.

Because of the transformation of the Conspiracy theory, the idea that the Mafia was a leading player in the Conspiracy has now gone out of fashion.²⁰ If almost all the physical and photographic evidence is a fabrication, this is obviously something way beyond the Mafia's capacities, though Conspiracy theorists usually still accord the Mafia a subordinate role.

My reproach to the Conspiracy theorists is that they don't take the Conspiracy seriously. They rarely make any sustained attempt to look at things from the Conspirators' point of view, and imagine how the Conspirators would rationally have executed their plan. Once we do this, we find that the hypothetical Conspiracy makes little sense.²¹

Typically, Conspiracy theorists chalk up any anomalies in the Lone Nut theory as plusses for the Conspiracy theory, but they are not interested in anomalies in the Conspiracy theory. The strategy of Conspiracy theorists is similar to that of defense attorneys in high-profile murder trials. Any discrepancies in the prosecution's case are given maximum emphasis, while the defense theory of what happened is not subject to the same scrutiny. The defense theory flows like wax into the cracks in the prosecution theory, and no one demands that it possess any inherent coherence comparable to that expected of a prosecution theory. In the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, such a bias is to some extent justified, to protect the rights of the accused by the doctrine of "beyond reasonable doubt." But in historical enquiry, any such bias has no place. The only issue is which theory is best, and any theory can be evaluated only by comparing it with its strongest competitor. Both theories ought then to be given the same critical scrutiny.

Two related arguments convince me of the truth of the Lone Nut theory: (1) There was no sufficient motive for a Conspiracy to kill Kennedy, and (2) Assuming that there were such a Conspiracy, it makes no sense to conduct the assassination in the way that the Conspirators must have done. Why kill Kennedy at all, and why do it by such a risky and gratuitously complicated method?

Where's the Motive?

Kennedy was not a wild radical and was not a serious threat to any major interest. His policies did not mark a sharp break from those of Eisenhower. He tried to invade Cuba, bungled it, and then denied it. He went to Berlin and proclaimed: "I'm a jam donut," an eccentric remark, but not dangerous.* In the Cuban Missile Crisis he took the middle course favored by the majority of his cabinet, which paid off in a kind of public victory. He talked of desegregation but shrank from doing much about it.

The usual claim is that Kennedy wanted to stop the U.S. intervention in Vietnam but the evidence points the other way.* Aside from that factual question, people who make such a claim look at history as though the historical actors had the benefit of later hindsight. Proponents of the Vietnam war did not aim for long-drawn-out slaughter, with eventual humiliating withdrawal. If what ultimately happened in Vietnam could have been foreseen, some proponents of the war would have opposed it, while others would have argued for a radically different manner of waging it. Vietnam became highly divisive in American politics later; it was not highly divisive in 1963, and nobody knew that it would become so, any more than people today suppose that Liberia will be the dominant American political issue in 2008.

When Kennedy was killed, the presidential election was less than a year away, and it was entirely possible he would not be re-elected. What was so urgent about immediately getting rid of Kennedy, who might lose the election in 1964? Why not wait and see? And if some policy of Kennedy's really were felt to be so appalling, why wouldn't an immensely powerful Conspiracy instead blackmail this eminently blackmailable politician — or, rather than blackmail him, simply terminate his political career by making some of his private life public? Twyman argues ("Bloody Treason," p. 34) that exposure could not be used because this "would have brought down both Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover along with the Kennedys." So, if the public had been made aware of Kennedy's sexual activities in the White House, the Kennedys would have retaliated by publicizing, for example, Hoover's homosexuality and ties to organized crime, but the Kennedys would not retaliate in this way if Jack were murdered? And Hoover's control of files and agents sufficient to falsify almost all the evidence in the assassination case would not have enabled him to eliminate evidence of his active homosexuality (evidence which has still not turned up, this being a matter of surmise) and suitably doctor the records of his contacts with organized crime?

Twyman's implicit counter to this line of reasoning is to lay all the emphasis on the supposition that with Kennedy's re-election, Hoover and Johnson would be out of office and therefore impotent. But does this really work? A re-elected Kennedy asks for Hoover's resignation and Hoover (with all his loyal people in the upper echelons of the FBI, beginning with his presumed lover Assistant Director Clyde Tolson) responds that if he does not keep his job, items x, y, and z will be fed to the press. At that point Kennedy holds no cards, and withdraws the request for resignation. The Kennedy White House could never take on the FBI in a blackmailing contest. Furthermore, as Twyman fully acknowledges, Hoover and Johnson are not enough: other powerful interests have to be in the Conspiracy.

Judging by what actually occurred following the assassination, the likely political motive for a Conspiracy would have been to ensure that civil rights and racial integration were rammed through by the more resolute Johnson. But this motive is not popular with Conspiracy theorists, and it is, of course, preposterous. Why would high-level intelligence operatives favor acceleration of these policies so strongly that they would be willing to kill the president?

There did not exist a sufficiently powerful motive for the killing of Kennedy. There are always people who want the president out of the way, and Lyndon Johnson is the natural suspect, especially as the Kennedys might have succeeded in replacing him as vice president. But mere personal ambition or animus cannot account for a Conspiracy on so huge a scale. If Johnson were behind the hypothetical Conspiracy, he would need the collaboration of highly-placed intelligence chiefs, and no one has suggested a credible motive for such people to want Kennedy replaced with Johnson, and to want this so desperately they would kill the president.

Mark Lane has proposed that Kennedy planned to dismantle the Central Intelligence Agency, and that therefore the CIA had him killed.²² The direct evidence that this was Kennedy's intention is flimsy,* and Kennedy took no steps to accomplish it, which presumably explains why those who advance this theory believe that he was planning to do it only after the 1964 election.²³ Again, the CIA would merely have had to make public one percent of what was known by insiders about Kennedy's private life to render him instantly un-re-electable.

An Over-complex Plot

Let's now assume that a sufficient motive existed and that a Conspiracy to kill Kennedy was indeed planned. Why, on those assumptions, would the Conspirators choose to conduct the assassination in the manner in which it was supposedly conducted?

If we assume that all the evidence which seems to point to Oswald is faked, that Oswald was entirely innocent,* we can develop a scenario which explains the apparent evidence against Oswald as the work of the Conspirators. We can always do this with any crime, provided we postulate a Conspiracy sufficiently powerful. All difficulties can be dissolved by asserting that the available evidence has been falsified, even if the means to do so would border on the supernatural.

But if we begin differently, assume that there was a powerful and far-sighted Conspiracy to kill Kennedy, and then ask how the Conspirators would set about their task, we encounter serious problems in explaining why they would decide to handle things the way they are supposed to have done.

Take Lifton's theory that Kennedy's body was stolen and the wounds altered, so that front-entry wounds were made to look like rear-entry wounds. (Some such theory is essential for a Conspiracy, because the autopsy pictures are incompatible with anything other than two shots hitting Kennedy from the rear.) Lifton volunteers that the alteration of the dead man's wounds could only have been planned well ahead of time. Surgical teams had to be standing by ready to alter the wounds. The body had to be stolen and then switched back, and despite the fact that, according to Lifton, it arrived at Bethesda with different wrappings and in a different coffin, all the people most directly involved had to be made to swear that the body, its wrappings, and its casket were exactly the same when they arrived at Bethesda as when they had left Parkland. This prodigy of prestidigitation, worthy of an army of Houdinis, must have been planned with extraordinary precision, and with innumerable alternative plans to take account of the various uncontrollable twists and turns that events might take.

Yet it could not avoid being risky. And it was all required for one reason and one reason only: to make front-entry wounds look like rear-entry wounds. But why would intelligent conspirators take this tack at all? They must have planned the operation so that they would be compelled to accomplish the extraordinary feat of snitching the cadaver and altering the wounds, not to mention falsifying all the film, photographic, and ballistics evidence, when they could far more easily have planned it so that this problem just didn't arise.

If you're writing a murder mystery, it's good to construct a deceptive mise en sc�ne which baffles the reader, but you have to guard against the narrative weakness of having the murderer do things just to make the story more engrossing. What the murderer does has to be credible given the murderer's aims and beliefs, and it's a badly constructed mystery story in which the murderer betrays the altruistic aim of helping the author by executing an ingenious plot purely for its entertainment value.

Making Things Difficult

Why did the Conspirators decide to shoot the president from a different direction than the one posited in the official public account? The Conspirators would not want to mislead us about the direction of the shots, except as this furthered their Conspiracy, but to read the Conspiracy theorists you might think that misleading us about the direction of the shots was an evil end in itself. If the Conspirators did mislead us about the direction of the shots, this must have been because they freely chose to plan the assassination in such a way that they would have to mislead us about the direction of the shots, and there is no credible reason for them to make this choice, as they could have much more easily arranged to allow the shots to appear to come from the direction they did in fact come from.*

Similarly, Conspiracy theorists assume that there were numerous shooters in Dealey Plaza. To intelligent Conspirators possessed of vast resources, this would have appeared as a stupidly redundant complication. One well-aimed shot is all it takes, or two or three indifferently aimed ones. Fictional assassinations inspired by the Conspiracy theory, such as The Parallax View, generally involve just one shot, revealing the filmmaker's intuitive grasp of what makes for a believable assassination Conspiracy.

The method of reconstructing what would be likely to happen given the Conspiracy theorists' assumptions can be applied to minor details as well as to the broad framework of the assassination. We then see that flaws in the evidence which supposedly point to a Conspiracy would never have been permitted to appear if there really had been a Conspiracy. For example, Conspiracy theorists have always made much of the fact that pathologist Dr. James Humes copied out his original autopsy notes and then burned them. Humes says that the notes were covered with Kennedy's blood. Anxious to avoid sensational exploitation, he made a copy and destroyed the original. If Humes were lying about the copy being true to the original, because the original contained material pointing to a Conspiracy, why would Humes admit the copy was not the original? Why let on that the original had been burned?

The biologist J.B.S. Haldane was asked what he had learned from a lifetime's study of the natural world about the mind and character of its Creator. He gave the unexpected reply: "An inordinate fondness for beetles." If we ask ourselves what we can discern about the motives and aptitudes of the Conspirators from studying their handiwork, the answer must be: an all-consuming passion for doing everything in the most difficult and costly way imaginable.

Picture the first planning meeting of the Conspirators. "So that's carried then, nem. con. We'll kill the president. Please come to order; we have a lot of business to get through. Thank you. Next item, gentlemen, how do we do it? Anyone got any ideas? Chair recognizes the gentleman from Langley."

"Well, we could kill him, as the motorcade comes through Dealey Plaza. This would be real neat* because we would do it in full view of hundreds of people. Just for the hell of it, we could place several shooters in positions where they might be easily spotted, and put our non-shooting patsy in a terrific concealed position where he could hardly miss. Then we could have our patsy run around all over the place, trusting to luck that he would not do anything which would give him an alibi, have him shoot a policeman and then have him picked up, and shot later by a loony strip-club owner. Meanwhile, we would be stealing the body of the president, having a crack team of surgeons alter the wounds so that the shots would seem to have come from the patsy's location. We would also make sure we got our hands on the hundreds of still photographs and the several movies of this event, and substitute fakes which we would have prudently concocted in advance, and we would remove all the real bullets and substitute fake ones. . . . How am I doing?"

Surely this guy's career as a Conspirator would be over at that point. I have heard some dumb suggestions in meetings, but this one fairly bristles with absurdities. If you're going to shoot the president in public and frame an innocent patsy, you obviously have the patsy killed right away, in fact probably before the assassination, though the story would be that he was killed in an exchange of fire immediately afterwards. The public would readily have accepted that it was necessary to shoot the sniper. The mere fact that Oswald was free to move around at will at the time of the assassination goes against the hypothesis that he was a preselected fall guy. The actual shooting of the president would of course be done from the patsy's real location (or at least what could be represented as such), and if for some unknown reason you wanted the real assassins to be somewhere else, you wouldn't put them in an exposed public place like the Grassy Knoll, where anyone might stumble upon them.

A well-conducted Conspiracy would not merely plan for what actually happened, since this would be uncertain before the event. The Conspiracy would plan for what conceivably might happen. For example, if there had been a sniper on the Grassy Knoll, he might so easily have been caught unambiguously on film, and the filmer might have published the film before it could be intercepted by the FBI or Secret Service.²⁴ This is just one of many possible accidents which could not be ruled out. Their possibility would occur to any prudent Conspirator and this would guarantee that he would never be so careless as to put a shooter on the Knoll.

The Conspiracy must have included highly placed people in intelligence and law enforcement. These would naturally tend to come up with a scenario where intelligence and law enforcement personnel would look at least competent. Confusion, sloppiness, and lack of direction on the parts of the FBI, the Secret Service, and even the police would tend to be eliminated at the planning stage. But all these are rife in the actual playing out of the events in Dallas 40 years ago.*

Why a Public Shooting?

If we accept the premise that a public shooting might be the Conspirators' chosen method, many of the details are incomprehensible. But why would the Conspirators opt for a public shooting?

In the movie "Godfather III," Pope John Paul I is assassinated. I don't know whether he really was or not, but the depicted method of the assassination is highly plausible. Something was slipped into his morning coffee and the public never learned that the death was other than natural. Surely this is the kind of thing we expect from a formidable, intelligently conducted Conspiracy.

One assassin acting alone is a Lone Nut. Two or three assassins acting together is a weak Conspiracy. Even a much larger number can still be judged weak if the Conspiracy has little or no access to people in political administration, police, or intelligence. A public shooting is the preferred method of a Lone Nut or a weak Conspiracy. This method might therefore be selected by a powerful Conspiracy which wished to represent the killing as done by a Lone Nut or a weak Conspiracy.

Twyman conjectures that the Conspirators wanted to lay the blame for the assassination on Cuban Communists,²⁵ but there are two difficulties with that hypothesis. Granted that the Conspirators would like to incriminate Castro in some way, it doesn't follow that they would make the assassination thousands of times more costly by tying it to this incrimination exercise. And if they were setting up Oswald as a Cuban agent, why is there no prima facie evidence of this Oswald role? The paper trail indicates that Oswald was pro-Castro and at one point wanted to move to Cuba, but was rebuffed by the Cuban authorities. The Oswald-Cuba relationship was entirely one-sided. The Conspirators oddly failed to plant any evidence showing Oswald's links with the Cuban government, or for that matter his involvement in any type of Conspiracy. In an elementary oversight, the Conspirators did not even ensure that Oswald came into any money; he was always close to broke.

Kennedy had fleeting sexual encounters with hundreds of partners and longer-term sexual relationships with a dozen more. It would have been a simple matter to supply him with an attractive and willing woman in the pay of the Conspiracy.* He took drugs for his complicated and dangerous medical conditions, as well as for recreational purposes. There are poisons which mimic the effects of natural diseases, and which would not be detected unless foul play were suspected and a deliberate search for traces of those specific poisons were made. If Kennedy had really been murdered by an immensely powerful Conspiracy, he would have passed away serenely in his sleep from seemingly natural causes, and we would never have heard of Lee Oswald or Jack Ruby, let alone Clay Shaw and David Ferrie.

Editor's Note: The above article purports to be the work of the Lone Nut David Ramsay Steele (notice the three names). Some allege there is evidence of a Second Writer, who wrote parts of the article from a diametrically opposite direction. The article was then intercepted while on its way to Liberty by email, and surgically modified by skillful insertion of the opposing arguments. Skeptics retort that Steele's troubled history of confused and contradictory reasoning is notorious. We take no position on the matter, but we do feel obliged to point out that on the day this article was submitted, one of our editors had a bad cold. The odds against this being pure coincidence have been estimated at 800 trillion to one. If you look closely at a photograph of Steele, you will eventually begin to notice a striking resemblance to the foliage at the top of the Grassy Knoll. Evidently there is much more here than meets the eye, and the case is still wide open.

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*	The Mel Gibson character in "Conspiracy Theory" wonders why assassins always have three names. The answer seems to be that police and other bureaucratic reports tend to rehabilitate disused middle names. Lee Harvey Oswald was commonly known as Lee Oswald.

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*	Predisposed to distrust the government, I tended to assume until 1992 that there had been a Conspiracy. I was wakened from my dogmatic slumber by Sheldon Richman's review of "JFK" (Liberty, March 1992) and then started to look into the subject.

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*	There is a difference between the views of most of the public and those of the active Conspiracy theorists. The former believe Oswald was part of the Conspiracy, that he "must've had help," while the latter maintain that Oswald was innocent.

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Ninety-eight percent of the hundreds of ear-witnesses thought that the shots they had heard had come from just one location. While witnesses unused to gunfire might easily get the direction of shots wrong, it seems unlikely that they would think that shots from different directions all came from the same place.

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*	After the shots rang out, some people started running. To a hardened cynic like me, one of the amusing aspects of Conspiracy speculations is the notion that these people would be running toward the sniper's perceived location, with the intention of "catching" him.

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Over the years Marina — remarried, older, wiser, in no fear of deportation, and aware that our culture favors the Conspiracy theorists — has many times been questioned about whether she was pressured into saying anything that wasn't true to the Warren Commission. She has always firmly denied this, despite her latterly acquired belief that Oswald was innocent of the killings.

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*	Many have confessed to being part of the Conspiracy, of course, just as many have confessed to being abducted by aliens, but none has produced names, dates, places, and other plausible touches.

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In German, if you want to describe your profession or your citizenship, you do not use the article. "I am a Berliner" would be "Ich bin Berliner." Upon hearing someone assert "Ich bin ein Berliner," the assumption would be that the speaker was claiming to be an object called a "Berliner," which happens to be a jam donut. Kennedy's posthumous admirers frequently dispute this serious charge of Quaylism, but they are wrong. It's clear from the context that Kennedy's speech-writer meant the sentence to be taken as "I am a citizen of Berlin," and to render this as "Ich bin ein Berliner" is most assuredly a comical error.

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There are still a few historians who oppose this conclusion, and the issue has some nuances we cannot explore here. Kennedy rapidly built up the number of "military advisers" in Vietnam from a few hundred to 16,000, then shortly before his assassination, he hesitantly agreed to the withdrawal of 1,000 of these, based on the mistaken premise that the South Vietnamese government (which had of course just been replaced in a Kennedy-instigated coup) was successfully subduing the insurgents. The general view, shared by Kennedy, Johnson, and nearly everyone else in ruling circles, was that it would be desirable to pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam provided that the South Vietnamese regime could crush the Vietcong rebels. Some maintain that, faced with the new situation encountered by Johnson, which posed the no-longer-avoidable choice of either hugely increasing American military commitment or acquiescing in the loss of South Vietnam to the Communists, Kennedy would have made the latter choice whereas we know that Johnson did make the former. But the Conspirators could not have known either of these decisions (the actual or the counterfactual) in advance. We do know that Johnson's advisors who favored escalation of the war when that situation arose (including McNamara, Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy) were without exception Kennedy men.

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*	It largely consists of the uncorroborated reminiscences of the fanciful L. Fletcher Prouty, former Pentagon liaison officer to the CIA and the real-life model for the Donald Sutherland character in "JFK."

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*	When arrested, Oswald claimed to be "a patsy." Whatever his motive for saying this, it should be considered along with uncontroversially false statements he made at the same time: for example that he had not used an assumed name when renting a room in Oak Cliff.

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Twyman claims that in order to persuade the real assassins that they would be able to escape alive, it was necessary for the shots of the decoy or patsy to come from somewhere else. But a little thought will show that this is not the case. After all, Oswald left the Depository and got well away, despite Twyman's belief that the Conspirators planned to have him bumped off at that point. If Oswald had kept away from his known haunts, and acquired a suit, a hat, and $50, this rank amateur would probably have made it as far as Mexico. How much easier it would have been to secure the escape of the assassins if there had been a faked gunfight, leading to the patsy's immediate death and therefore the speedy public acceptance that the sniper was no longer at large. The obvious disguise for the real assassins would have been as police or Secret Service, and getting them away would have been fairly straightforward.

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*	This is around 1962, remember.

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One of the more general conclusions arising from my rejection of the Assassination Conspiracy is that any high-level Conspiracy to create an enormous web of falsehood about specific, concrete occurrences is by no means child's play. When the U.S. invaded Iraq this year, Bush asserted that Iraq possessed newly developed weapons of mass destruction ready for immediate delivery against other countries. This was a calculated lie, but the administration probably supposed that these imaginary WMD would be forgotten after a brief and successful war, as the nonexistent Kosovo "mass graves" were forgotten after NATO's occupation of Kosovo, and as Bush's other big lie, that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11, was in fact forgotten. When the issue wouldn't go away after the American occupation of Iraq, the question arises why the administration didn't simply plant some of its own WMD in Iraq. The answer is that this would be difficult and risky: it could not be done without quite a number of people knowing that the object was public deception, and this operation might later be exposed. This doesn't, of course, imply that such a massive operation of deception could never happen or never has happened, merely that it would be difficult and risky, and less likely under a liberal-democratic than under a totalitarian political system.

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Kennedy's henchmen would not permit the Secret Service even to quickly check the purses of the new prostitutes who were supplied to Kennedy daily. Seymour M. Hersh, "The Dark Side of Camelot" (Little, Brown, 1997), p. 229. But even without such lax security, getting a female assassin into close personal contact with Kennedy would have been many times less costly than arranging for a shooter on the Grassy Knoll. An incidental benefit of the former method is that if assassination were ever suspected, the White House staff would have had a powerful self-interested motive to cover up the circumstances of the killing, to protect themselves from public disgrace.

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Endnotes:

1. "The Warren Commission Report: Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy" (St. Martin's Press, undated [1964]); Jim Moore, "Conspiracy of One: The Definitive Book on the Kennedy Assassination" (Summit, 1990); Gerald Posner, "Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK" (Random House, 1993; revised edition Anchor Books, 1994).
2. Mark Lane, "Rush to Judgment" (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). Other Conspiracy-theory works published in 1966 include Edward Jay Epstein, "Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth" (Bantam) and Richard H. Popkin, "The Second Oswald" (Avon). Popkin is the outstanding historian of philosophical thought, author of "The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza" and "The High Road to Pyrrhonism". My theory is that "The Second Oswald" was really written by a second Popkin, who however was devious enough to make sure the royalties were mailed to the first Popkin.
3. Among numerous examples see Groden and Livingstone, "High Treason: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the New Evidence of Conspiracy" (Berkley, 1990 [1989]), pp. 117–18; Jim Marrs, "Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy" (Carroll and Graf, 1989), pp. 64–69, 86; Noel Twyman, "Bloody Treason: On Solving History's Greatest Murder Mystery, the Assassination of John F. Kennedy" (Laurel, 1997), pp. 117–166.
4. James H. Fetzer, ed., "Murder in Dealey Plaza: What We Know Now that We Didn't Know Then about the Death of JFK" (Catfeet Press, 2000); Fetzer, ed., "The Great Zapruder Film Hoax: Deceit and Deception in the Death of JFK" (Catfeet Press, 2003). A few Conspiracy theorists, notably Josiah Thompson, still insist on the reliability of the Zapruder film.
5. David S. Lifton, "Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of President Kennedy "(Carroll and Graf, 1988), pp. 582–83 and passim.
6. Lifton, pp. 560, 655–664, and compare the "Autopsy Photo 4," following page 682, with the right-hand drawing on page 310.
7. Lifton, pp. 555n–57n.
8. Lifton, p. 559.
9. Robert J. Groden and Harrison Edward Livingstone, "High Treason," pp. 39–41.
10. Groden and Livingstone, p. 83.
11. Examples of the arguments I have in mind are David Mantik's use of optical densitometry to analyze the autopsy x-rays, in James H. Fetzer, ed., "Assassination Science: Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK" (Catfeet Press, 1998), pp. 121–139, and John P. Costella's discussion of the anomalies in the Zapruder film (Fetzer, "Great Zapruder Film Hoax," pp. 164–221). I don't know enough about medical x-rays or film editing to answer these arguments, but for the reasons given in the text, I do not have to do this in order to decide that the Lone Nut theory is rationally preferable to the Conspiracy theory.
12. The single exception is the theory of Howard Donahue as presented by Bonar Menninger. In his well-argued book, "Mortal Error: The Shot that Killed JFK" (St. Martins, 1992), Menninger contends that Oswald was the only one who intended to kill Kennedy, and that an accidental discharge of a Secret Service agent's gun also hit Kennedy. The only Conspiracy, then, was to cover up this embarrassing accident. Menninger's book contains a knowledgeable and lucid discussion of the firearms aspect of the assassination. (I believe the totality of the evidence now excludes the Donahue-Menninger theory.)
13. Stewart Galanor, "Cover-Up" (Kestrel, 1998), p. 91. Galanor says that Brennan "was unable" to identify Oswald, which is misleading.
14. Howard L. Brennan and J. Edward Cherryholmes, "Eyewitness to History: The Kennedy Assassination As Seen by Howard Brennan" (Texian Press, 1969), p. 22.
15. Dale K. Myers, "With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J.D. Tippit" (Oak Cliff Press, 1998), pp. 63–65, doubts that the description was what made Tippit approach Oswald. Twyman, "Bloody Treason," p. 19, says "No one knows how the description was obtained," an untruth.
16. On Tippit's murder, see Myers, "With Malice." Highly selective accounts of Tippit's killing by Conspiracy theorists such as Twyman should be compared with Myers's detailed and sober study.
17. Norman Mailer, "Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery " (Random House, 1995).
18. For a fresh look at this often-told story, see Thomas Mallon, "Mrs. Paine's Garage and the Murder of John F. Kennedy" (Pantheon, 2002).
19. Fetzer, "Great Zapruder Film Hoax," pp. 223–234.
20. Among many works promoting this theory, see G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings, "The Plot to Kill the President" (Times Books, 1981); John H. Davis, "Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy" (McGraw-Hill, 1988); Seth Kantor, "Who Was Jack Ruby?" (Everest House, 1978); David Scheim, "Contract on America: The Mafia Murders of John and Robert Kennedy" (Shapolsky, 1988).
21. The closest approach to such an attempt is Twyman, "Bloody Treason" (currently the most impressive statement of the Conspiracy theory), pp. 25–64.
22. Lane, "Plausible Denial: Was the CIA Involved in the Assassination of JFK?" (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991), especially pp. 91–114.
23. For an excellent refutation of Kennedy as a Vietnam dove, Kennedy as anti-CIA, and similar legends, see Noam Chomsky, "Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture" (South End Press, 1993). Chomsky points out, pp. 144–45, that Johnson was more down on the CIA than Kennedy, and Nixon more so than Johnson. Note, however, that the argument from motive does not have to show what Kennedy would have done, but something much weaker: that the Conspirators could not have been confident in advance that Kennedy would concede defeat in Vietnam while Johnson would not, that Kennedy would abolish the CIA while Johnson would not, and so forth.
24. Conspiracy theorists claim that shooters can be discerned in photographs of the foliage at the top of the Knoll. See for instance the photographs in Fetzer, "Great Zapruder Film Hoax," pp. 50–53.
25. "Bloody Treason," pp. 57, 832.

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