Wow... two links out of three posts ;-)

I'll try to watch the special (although I'll be at work, and that's kinda tough). I've never believed in the big conspiracy anyway, but this should be interesting.

Too bad it'll be like a fart in a winecup - the paranoid will simply believe this new documentary is all part of the conspiracy theory.

The truth is that the Kennedy assassination was the brain child of incoming football commissioner Pete Rozell as part of his plan to destroy the upstart AFL. What people don’t know is that they were aiming for Jackie and missed. The plan backfired and he eventually had to capitulate to the AFL-NFL merger.

It was the phone company.

You're forgetting the Cigarette Smoking Man, with a high-powered rifle, down in in the storm sewer... November 22, 1963.

And the date for the final alien invasion of earth has been set... the day the Mayan calendar comes to an end... December 22, 2012.

The Truth Is Out There.

They're gonna prove the magic bullet theory?

That's the most damning part of the Warren Commission report. This should be interesting if they can prove that.

The secret is that there is no magic bullet. Ballistics experts using full-scale models of the cars, dummies, lasers and computers last year in blocked-off Dalley Plaza already showed it. There was nothing odd, nothing unusual about the pattern of Oswald's bullets. Furthermore, they also determined that any theoretical shots fired from the grassy knoll, the overpass, or any of the other popular conspiracy theory locations could not possibly have hit the President the way he was hit.

I suspect that ABC will use footage from that investigation, amongst other things.

You mean Oliver Stone was wrong?

This stretches credibility. Next, you'll be saying that Michael Moore is full of cr*p.

Wait, I'm confused. There's three bullets fired. One of them misses completely. The third's path is the infamous head-shot. The second bullet zigs back and forth defying the laws of physics and logic, and ends up just falling out on a stretcher, completely pristine?

Sorry, as someone who has fired a weapon many many times, that's just complete bunk. It cannot cause that much damage and be pristine, even if it *could* double back on itself (now THAT's a shitload of english to let it spin itself backwards and then regenerate some forward momentum to start causing damage again)

If they can come up with a plausible reason for that little hiccup in the Warren Commission, then maybe, but my real-world experience tells me that the magic bullet isn't magic at all. The "magic" of the magic bullet is in how someone made the bullet magically appear on the gurney at the hospital.

Sometimes conspiracies actually happen. Sometimes they happen at the highest level of government. Remember Watergate? It was pretty vast. Someone who believes that the JFK assasination was a conspiracy doesn't necessarily believe every conspiracy theory and isn't necessarily a whacko.

"The funny thing to me is just how many people don't want to believe it."

That's because people like a good story with lots of intrigue, mystery, cover-ups and the rest of it. People are like that everywhere.

A lot of Muslims believe the Jews run the world and Mossad was behind 9/11. A lot of Americans believe in the man on the grassy knoll and that aliens crashed in New Mexico. They're just different flavors of the same theme.

Derek, the bullet wasn't pristine and its route was not as "doubled-back". That's a myth of the conspiracy nuts. Posner's book shows this.

This was exhaustively gone over in 1993, on the 30th anniversary of the assassination by "CBS Special Reports" and, I believe, U.S. News magazine. They reached the same conclusion. CBS's tone was almost apologetic, saying they had pursued every rumor, every angle, and every theory, and had never closed their investigation...and the only conclusion that made any sense and answered all questions was that Oswald acted alone.

See what I mean? "Magic bullet" trumps ballistics.

Every iota of evidence gathered from the day of the assasination until now confirms that Oswald, a screwball acting entirely alone, shot the President. Doesn't matter. Why?

As for myself, I was born almost exactly a year after the assasination so I have no connection to the events of the day and for years I was puzzled as to why the assasination seemed to grasp hold of the imagination of so many. I think I figured it out. Kennedy represented a gigantic hope in America and the future - to a large number of young, idealistic and impressionable (naive?) people in 1963, Kennedy was the hope and promise. He was cut down by a complete human zero, and Kennedy's legion of followers just couldn't grasp that. It was impossible - it must have been something else.

If you read William Manchester's "Death of a President", you can get a flavor of this. Manchester points out that immediately after the assasination, the word went rapidly around about how "they" had killed the President. Initially, this was taken to mean that the culture of hate propagated by Kennedy's enemies (and Kennedy, like our current President Bush, brought out among some an unreasoning hatred) had set the stage upon which Oswald acted. Later, as the disillusionment with Johnson, Vietnam and Nixon came into play, the story changed from a nebulous "they" to a more concrete "they" - "they" were no longer just people setting up situations, but became instead a specific group of people who conspired to kill Kennedy because Kennedy was going to do all the good things.

Its part and parcel with the desire among those who lack the mental courage to see the world as it is to demand a fantasy construct to explain away why the world is imperfect. Its not because we're imperfect - its because some baleful group is out there thwarting prefection. Because of this, I think that the Kennedy assasination will be viewed forever as a conspiracy...the people who have direct experience with the Kenendy years grows smaller and smaller, but new recruits to the world of conspiracy come in every day. Lately, the newest tack on the conspiracy is that the Elder Bush orchestrated the Kennedy assasination, and GW orchestrated the killing of JFK, Jr. So it goes.

I never had much interest in the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.

First, in order for such a conspiracy to have organized and carried out the murder of an American president, and Kennedy in particular, it necessarily would have involved a small army of people to be in on it. This would have included much of the Dallas police department along with segments of major agencies of the United States government and the state of Texas. Nobody anywhere successfully organizes conspiracies that require the permanent silence of thousands of persons.

Second, the only person who directly benefits from the death of a president in office is his vice president. Lyndon Johnson, after starting well, was all but driven from office by continually and increasingly souring results of the Viet Nam ware that he so greatly escalated in 1964 and 1965. He was an elected politician, not an agency administrator, and he was in no position to take part in organizing such a conspiracy. Moreover, had he played such a role in such a conspiracy, and had it been uncovered that he was responsible for the murder of his predecessor, he would have ended his days in the electric chair of a federal prison, and not back at the Johnson ranch in Texas.

Third, Kennedy was dead, no matter who shot him or why he or they did it. At about noon time on November 22, 1963. The moment this became known (I heard about it from a telephone call while I was lunching at my apartment that hour in Marina City, a downtown high-rise apartment complex on Chicago river across from Wacker Drive.) So "who" and "why" didn't really matter a whole lot. A new president took over. All the existing or evolving national policies were carried out. Not a few with less than desirable results. Life went on. We all got 40 years older. A new generation was born and a lot of the older ones died off. Now Kennedy is a cultural icon, whose reputation is a lot better that it probably would have been if he had survived, won re-election and served a second term.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

...giggle, giggle, giggle.

... I go from high to lows on your weblog Capt. Dean. Reminder: I'm the old gal that loves to fly old airplanes.

Ara! I agree w/ you! IT WAS THE PHONE COMPANY!

Mark! Passing air in a winecup!?! giggle, giggle.

Arnold! Classy! Living in a high rise at Marina City on the Chicago River. I know it very well. I worked for Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith, on Wacker Drive. That was in the 70's. I was in Texas when Kennedy was shot. I was in 8th grade singing away in choir!
Small world Arnold. Yep, we all got older.

No, no, no, no, no. You're all wrong. Everyone knows that it was the JOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOS!!!!!!

Good to hear from you, Janelle.

I was in the marketing department in the Chicago headquarters office of a multi-division manufacturing corporation from about January 1963 through November 1971. In order to make life easier and more interesting, I signed up to become one of the first tenants of Marina City in early 1963, with an apartment on the 39th floor facing due north.

It made life easier in that I could walk to my Michigan Avenue office and back. It made life more interesting insofar as the the parties you could organize if you actually lived in a place like that. Every 28-year-old punk with a good education and a paying job think's the world is his oyster, and that included me 40 years ago.

Back in 1963, you could rent a one-bedroom apartment way up in the towers for $181/month. Some time after I moved out four years later, the management of the buildings converted Marina City to condominiums. Probably about a half-million dollars each, or some such ridiculous price by now.

Sic transit gloria.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Dean,

There are also alot of people that WANT to believe that Oswald acted alone. It makes things so neat and easy. It's easy for the status quo to scream "conspiracy NUT!" I've flipped flopped on this topic so many times, but I'm looking forward to the upcoming program. I'll keep an open mind. I guess we will all have to wait for the secret report to be declassified.

Personally, I would have suspected the cable company (if they had cable back then) instead of the phone company, but they would have only been able to promise an assassination somewhere between the hours of nine and one.

Tim the Soldier

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Immediately after his assassination, it was blamed on the conservative "climate of hate" in Dallas, Texas. Later it turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist who belonged to Fair Play for Cuba (pro-Castro), had renounced his United States citizenship and resided in the Soviet Union for a time, and had previously attempted to assassinate General Edwin Anderson Walker, a homosexual conservative who was controversial for his anti-Communist "Pro-Blue" program to instill our fighting men with a faith in country, God, and self.

Arnold:

"...for such a conspiracy to have organized and carried out the murder of an American president, and Kennedy in particular, it necessarily would have involved a small army of people to be in on it"

Please explain how it would take either a small army or just a single gunman, but some number in between could not have carried it out.

Marina City may be a lot more than half mil, but sounds like it was great. I love Chicago. I've spent probably two or three months there total on business trips and loved it each time. But I got there once in March and the cold scared me off.

Anyway, I've always kept an open mind about the Kennedy assassination. It happened four days after I was born, so I heard about it later. Most of what I know is from the famous Nova special, and while I think it's possible for a single bullet to have hit Kennedy and Connolly, I found the part about the bullet too hard to believe. Isn't part of that bullet supposed to be in Connolly's leg?

Still, I'm open to the evidence. In general, though, I'm too pessimistic about human nature to believe in vast conspiracies. Perhaps a small one.

Doug...

Conspiracies typically are carried out by organized groups who active core believe they have something substantive to gain by their action. In the case of a conspiracy to assassinate the president of the United States, who could seriously expect to gain from the successful murder of this personage, and what could they have expected to gain?

The United States is not an ancient empire like Rome in its decline, in which governance and its policy was totally at the command and frequently at the whim of a single autocrat. Instead, it is a huge network of bureacracies, private interests, territorial governments, competing ideologies, lobbying groups, individual citizens, and news gatherers and disseminators, each of which has sufficient power to seriously compromise any effort to coordinate public policy and maintain its thrust in a given direction for any particular length of time. This is both a weakness and strength of a constitutionally organized republic functioning as a democracy.

The fact is, nearly all American policies, international, national, state and local, more or less continued unchanged by Kennedy's murder, even if the social tone of the decade was greatly affected by this event. No power group in or outside this country, or at least none with the resources needed to plot and carry out the murder the national leader, had anything they could have planned on achieving that would have been worth the consequences of the risk of exposure. This is true equally of the American mafia, the Soviet Union, Castro's Cuba, disgruntled Texas business interests, the friends of Lyndon Johnson, or any others. Therefore, for all these 40 years, I have concluded that Kennedy was in fact shot to death by a deranged marksman armed with a high-powered rifle equipped with a telescopic sight. All else is unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable conjecture good for little else than conspiracy movies.

As I wrote earlier: What difference did it make? There was still going to be a Viet Nam war. The United States was still going to lose it because the people here had no stomach for protracted conflict in southeast Asia. The Beatles were still fated to be the next big hit in popular music. Our space program was going to put Neil Armstrong on the moon regardless of what the competing Soviet space program did or did not do. The revolutionary developments in computer chips and processors were still going to evolve the desktop computer some 13 years later. Communism was still going to implode because of the way it ate the heart out of Russia's basic economic system. Castro was still going to remain in power in Cuba until he dies a natural death. The interstate highway system was still going to be completed. The civil rights struggles were still going to be won.

John Kennedy's life, presidency and death were marked perhaps equally by substance and stylistics. The country got along nicely with him. And we got along nicely without him. Which perhaps is the ultimate put-down of the democratically anointed.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

I'm satisfied that the forensic evidence points to Oswald as the lone shooter. No problem there.

But Ruby... that one has always bothered me. The guy was a minor thug, and he threw his life away for love of the President? It's hard to accept.

Maybe they can offer some more insight into this.

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Immediately after his assassination, it was blamed on the conservative "climate of hate" in Dallas, Texas. Later it turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist who belonged to Fair Play for Cuba (pro-Castro)

And yet as late as the early 1990s I could still find people trying to blame the assassination on right-wing hate of JFK. And the particular person I have in mind from then was not some kind of tinfoil-hat wacko who would now be a regular denizen of Democratic Underground.

Even if ABC built a time machine and documented every last thing that happened within five miles of Dealey Plaza during those six seconds, and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for the crime, people will cling to their misconceptions for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with facts.

If ABC built a time machine, wouldn't they just grab Oswald beforehand and see what happens? :) If there's still an assassination, repeat general principle.

I agree with the folks who said there's something to the idea that a pathetic loser like Oswald could take out a president like Kennedy, who represented a lot of good things to a lot of people. It somehow doesn't seem right. And why did Oswald did it, anyway? Just 'cuz?

Did Lee Harvey Oswald shoot Jack Kennedy? Let's ask him: Q. "Did you shoot the president?" "No sir, I did not shoot anybody."
and "I'm just a patsy."

Did Jack Ruby shoot Oswald out of his love for Jack Kennedy? His comment after being sentenced to death: "I'm the only one in the background that knows the truth"

"Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what accrued, my motive."

"The people had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in, will never let the true facts come above board's to the world."

Q: Are these people in very high positions Jack.

Ruby: "YES."