British author John Sparrow observes how conspiracy theorists and critics of the Warren Commission, when faced with the overwhelming evidence of Oswald’s guilt, are “compelled, in order to supplant the story told by the [Warren] Commission, to treat as [erroneous] or perjured the testimony of witness after witness, and to brand as accomplices in the conspiracy one party after another, each less likely than the last, until the structure becomes top-heavy and collapses under its own weight.”115
I can tell the readers of this book that if anyone in the future maintains to them that Oswald was just a patsy and did not kill Kennedy, that person is either unaware of the evidence against Oswald or simply a very silly person. Indeed, any denial of Oswald’s guilt is not worthy of serious discussion.
Since we can be absolutely sure that Oswald killed Kennedy, he could not have been a “patsy” (i.e., he could not have been “framed”) as many conspiracy theorists love to say. By definition, you can’t frame someone who is guilty; you frame innocent people. To frame, per the dictionary, means “to incriminate an innocent person through the use of false evidence.” Since we know Oswald was guilty, we thereby know that no other person or persons killed Kennedy and framed Oswald for the murder they committed.* Therefore, the only remaining issue worthy of discussion is whether Oswald acted alone, that is, whether he was a part of a conspiracy to murder the president.
BOOK TWO
Delusions of Conspiracy What Did Not Happen
Introduction to Conspiracy
One never speaks of this assassination without making reckless judgments…The absurdity of the accusations, the total lack of evidence, nothing stops them…One must read everything with mistrust.
—Voltaire, speaking about the incredible stories and conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of King Henri IV of France1
Populus vult decipi
—“The public is ready to be deceived.”
The following was posted on the Internet on June 22, 2002:
How can Mr. Bugliosi possibly prove the preposterous negative* that a conspiracy did not exist in the murder of J.F.K. and that one doesn’t continue to exist in the cover up? I don’t feel that his work, long in progress, whether it is two volumes or twenty-six volumes, can successfully navigate the mire of evidence and controversial evidence which confronts him. It seems to me that the evidence is conspiracy and the controversial evidence is the Warren Report. Perhaps we will never see this work! I have very much been an admirer of Mr. B’s previous work and have purchased and read everything to date that he has published. Perhaps also Mr. Bugliosi’s ego cannot tolerate the forthcoming mass of criticism which he must acknowledge will arise. Had he, on the other hand, decided to take the opposite tack in this study, his book would have long since been published and probably given conspiracy an even greater impetus than Oliver Stone’s movie.
James Fetzer, PhD, is the editor of the only exclusively scientific books (three) on the assassination. David Mantik, MD, PhD, is among the leading conspiracy researchers and writers in the current conspiracy community. They are both good and sincere men. Dr. Fetzer wrote me on January 23, 2001: “What Would It Take, David Mantik has asked me to inquire of you. What would it take to convince you of the existence of a conspiracy and cover-up in the death of JFK? What would it take to persuade you of Oswald’s innocence, which is not necessarily the same thing? Are none of our major discoveries—our ‘16 smoking guns,’ for example—convincing? And, if not, why? And, if not, then what would it take?”
Only evidence, Drs. Fetzer and Mantik. Only evidence.
Over the past forty-four years, close to one thousand books have been published on the assassination. What follows is the first anti-conspiracy book. Lest there be any confusion, several books have taken an anti-conspiracy position, but the mere taking of the position with very little supporting text does not make the book an anti-conspiracy book. Let me illustrate this (as I must do to support what would seem to be an otherwise incredible assertion—that this is the first anti-conspiracy book) with reference to the two best-known books with an anti-conspiracy position. In his book Conspiracy of One, Jim Moore devotes one sentence (not one page) to rebut the main argument of the conspiracy theorists that the CIA was behind Kennedy’s murder; nothing to the FBI, or Castro, or anti-Castro Cuban exiles; two sentences to organized crime; nothing to the military-industrial complex or KGB; and so on. In all deference to Mr. Moore, who wrote a fine book, if you title it Conspiracy of One, meaning you believe Oswald acted alone and there was no conspiracy, you have to set forth the various conspiracy theories (e.g., CIA, organized crime, KGB, etc.) and then attempt to refute them. Three sentences (I may have missed a few others) in an entire book just won’t do.
Gerald Posner, in Case Closed, does much better than Moore, but again, his book cannot be considered an anti-conspiracy book (except in the sense of maintaining throughout, as Posner’s and Moore’s books and several others do, that Oswald killed Kennedy and had no confederates, and seeking to show the fallacy of many contentions made by the conspiracy community). Posner devotes only approximately 50 pages of his 607-page book (again, I may be off by a few pages) to refuting the various conspiracy theories. But at least half of those pages are spent on rebutting New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison’s charges; Posner does not address and try to disprove the theories of right-wing, military-industrial complex, or anti-Castro Cuban exile involvement in the assassination, and though he makes several passing references to the CIA (“CIA domestic spying,” “CIA received information,” etc.), I could not collectively find more than two or three full pages in his entire book, if that, where it could inferentially be said he was attacking one of the very most important allegations of all, that of CIA complicity in the assassination. Devoting approximately 8 percent of one’s book, as Posner does, to presenting evidence and arguments to refute the many conspiracy theories in the murder of John F. Kennedy would not seem to qualify it as an anti-conspiracy book.
So the curious and rather remarkable fact remains that with the majority of Americans believing there was a conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy, and with hundreds upon hundreds of books having been written on the president’s murder, no previous author has seen fit to tackle the issue head-on and knock down all the various alleged conspiracies. That clearly is not a boast, just a plain fact that I believe is worth noting about the Kennedy case.
Before going any further, I should define just what a conspiracy is, something that virtually all readers already have a general sense of. The main element of a criminal conspiracy is simply two or more people getting together (they don’t have to physically meet or utter any magic words—all that is required is a “meeting of the minds,” which can be proved by the circumstantial evidence of their words and/or conduct) and agreeing to commit a crime. (To the ever suspicious conspiracy theorists, the definition of a conspiracy is two people talking to each other on a street corner.) For a conspiracy to exist under the law, the prosecutor has to prove one additional element of the crime of conspiracy: that at least one member of the conspiracy committed some “overt act” to carry out the object of the conspiracy (the overt act doesn’t have to be unlawful; e.g., in a conspiracy to commit a bank robbery, buying gas for the getaway car would suffice). The purpose of this requirement is to allow the individuals who have agreed to commit the crime an opportunity to terminate the agreement before any decisive action is taken in furtherance of it. Once a conspiracy is formed, under the vicarious liability theory of conspiracy each member of the conspiracy is criminally responsible for all crimes committed by the co-conspirators to further the object of the conspiracy, whether or not they themselves committed the crimes. Hence, if A and B conspire to rob a bank or burglarize a home or murder John Jones, and A commits the robbery or burglary or murder while B is in Madagascar playing volleyball, B is equally criminally responsible for the robbery, burglary, or murder. And if, for instance, A and B conspire to rob a bank, and A kills the ban
k teller who resists the robbery, B (whether driving the getaway car or playing in Madagascar) is responsible not just for the robbery, the only thing B agreed to, but also the murder, since the murder was committed by A “to further the object of the conspiracy,” which was robbery.
The belief in conspiracy (derived from the Latin word conspirare, “to breathe together”) has appealed to those of liberal as well as conservative mind, to the uneducated as well as the intellectual elite,* and has been with humanity—if not in name, then in the sensing of it—since the beginning of time. Witness, for example, the title of a 1798 book by one John Robison, a professor of natural philosophy who was the secretary to the Royal Society of Edinburgh: Proofs Of A Conspiracy Against All The Religions And Governments Of Europe, Carried On In The Secret Meetings Of Free Masons, Illuminati, And Reading Societies.
When the term conspiracy is applied by one group of people to another (e.g., by Hitler’s regime to those in the Third Reich trying to kill him and thereby end the Second World War), the emphasis is always on the hidden, the concealed, not that which is in the open. No one would have said that the Ku Klux Klan was “conspiring” against blacks, or that today’s political parties (Democrat and Republican) are “conspiring” against each other. Thus, with the Kennedy case, the main belief is that hidden elements in the CIA, military-industrial complex, organized crime, and so forth, got together for the purpose of killing Kennedy. And it has been the objective of thousands of assassination researchers since 1963—in most cases their raison d’etre—to bring these hidden conspirators out into the open so they can face justice.
What causes such a ready suspicion of conspiracy? This has been the subject of several books, which generally conclude that its genesis is in such realities as innate human paranoia and cultural dispositions toward paranoia.* With respect to the latter, many of the conspiracy allegations in the Kennedy case (accepted by millions of Americans far outside the conspiracy community) may be influenced by a distrust of those in power that arguably has deep roots in the thinking that gave birth to this nation. The Declaration of Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, asserts, in its Bill of Indictment, that the “history of the present King of Great Britain [King George III] is a history of repeated injuries…abuses and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.” In the Kennedy case, the belief in conspiracy has certainly been aided and abetted by the confluence of other historical events, such as the cold war intrigue of spies and secret agents, as well as the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, the latter two generating an increased distrust of the federal government.2
In his book The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, Richard Hofstadter writes that “the typical procedure of the higher paranoid scholarship is to start with defensible assumptions.” He goes on to say, in an observation tailor-made for the conspiracy theorists in the Kennedy case, that “the paranoid mentality is far more coherent than the real world, since it leaves no room for mistakes, failures or ambiguities…It believes it is up against an enemy who is as infallibly rational as he is totally evil, and it seeks to match his imputed total competence with its own, leaving nothing unexplained and comprehending all of reality in one overreaching, consistent theory.” Hofstadter says the “qualities” of the paranoid style are “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” and a “heroic striving for ‘evidence’ to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.”3
Author Mark Fenster feels that one reason for the success of major conspiracy theories is that they tell a “gripping, dramatic story…The conspiracy narrative is compelling in its…focus on the actions of the perpetrators of the evil conspiracy and [on] the defender of the moral order.”4
Warren Commission staff member Richard M. Mosk, in his article “Conspiracy Theories and the JFK Assassination: Cashing in on Political Paranoia,” adds that the Kennedy conspiracy theories “allow full scope for the exploitation of political prejudices. No target could be more welcome to the intellectual left than the Texas oil plutocracy, the radical right, the FBI and the CIA. [Likewise], the [political] right could not dream of better suspects than Castro or Russia.”5 Also, it is the view of many liberals and not a few moderates that a moral degeneration of American government started with Kennedy’s death(e.g., Vietnam, Cambodia, Watergate, etc.). The continuing angst of these believers requires something large in the body politic against whom they can apply their a priori reasoning. An emotionally disturbed misfit and non-entity like Oswald inherently lacks gravitas. But dark, powerful, sinister forces like the CIA and military-industrial complex, out to destroy our individual freedoms and American way of life, fit just fine. Thus, these people were (and are) much more receptive, even eager, to buy the conspiracy theory of the assassination. Indeed, apart from the belief in a conspiracy in the Kennedy case being literally forced on people by the one-sided bombardment of allegations, there is the natural sense among nearly all humans that great events have to have great causes. A lone nut just doesn’t work in the calculus of the Kennedy assassination. Or, as Boston University historian Robert Dallek put it, “It’s been very difficult to believe that someone as inconsequential as Oswald could have killed someone as consequential as Kennedy.”6
None of the above is to suggest that there aren’t such things as conspiracies. They happen all the time, and in very serious crimes. John Wilkes Booth was the leader of the conspiracy to kill Abraham Lincoln. The CIA conspired with organized crime to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. In the famous Dreyfus affair at the end of the nineteenth century in France (the case that most Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists so often compare to the Kennedy case), several high-ranking French military officers conspired to frame Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, for “high treason” in revealing French military secrets to Germany. (The French Supreme Court ultimately declared Dreyfus innocent in 1906.) I could name a great number of other conspiracies. So actual conspiracies are common. I myself have convicted criminal defendants of the crime of conspiracy to commit murder.
This book thus far has conclusively established one point, that Oswald killed Kennedy, and inferentially established another, that he acted alone. I say inferentially because if our thoughts are going to be governed by common sense on this issue, we would agree that no group of top-level conspirators would ever employ someone as unstable and unreliable as Oswald to commit the biggest murder in history, no such group would ever provide its hit man with, or allow him to use, a twelve-dollar rifle to get the job done, and any such group would help its hit man escape or have a car waiting for him to drive him to his death, not allow him to be wandering out in the street, catching cabs and buses to get away, as we know Oswald did.
Because of this reality, no matter what some person or group did or said before or after the assassination that might be deemed suspicious and indicative of a conspiracy, we know there is an innocent explanation for it that is unconnected to any conspiracy. And anyone who thinks it is connected, and that it points to some group as being the conspirators behind the assassination, necessarily has to be willing to also conclude that the subject conspiratorial group would get Oswald to murder Kennedy for them, and would only provide him with a cheap, mail-order rifle to get the job done, and would make no effort to immediately kill him or help him escape so he wouldn’t be arrested and interrogated by law enforcement, as Oswald was. For example, anyone who believes that the Secret Service’s spiriting Kennedy’s body away from Dallas in violation of Texas law (thereby preventing Texas authorities from examining it) is suspicious and points to a conspiracy (as so many conspiracy theorists do) has to be willing to also conclude that the Secret Service, Kennedy’s bodyguards, decided to murder Kennedy, hired Oswald to kill Kennedy, provided him with, or allowed him to use, the cheap rifle he had, and did not make any effort to help him escape. And anyone who is not willing to draw all of those inferences should imm
ediately put out of his or her mind any suspicious notion about the Secret Service’s conduct in removing Kennedy’s body from Texas.
What I am saying is that one of the principal frailties in the thinking processes of the theorists is that they rarely ever carry their suspicions, which are based on some discrepancy, anomaly, or contradiction they find, to their logical conclusion. If they did, they’d see the reductio ad absurdum of their position. But for them, if something looks suspicious, that’s enough. Instead of asking, “Where does this go?”—that is, where does the discrepancy, contradiction, or whatever, lead them?—they immediately give their minds a breather and conclude that what they find is itself proof of a conspiracy (or proof that Oswald is innocent). The discrepancy or contradiction is the entire story. And being the entire story, it by itself discredits the entire twenty-six volumes of the Warren Commission. Nothing else has to be shown or even argued.*
A few examples: If conspiracy theorists are told that Oswald’s Carcano rifle was a poor and inaccurate rifle and could not have been the murder weapon, they immediately conclude Oswald must be innocent, and hence, was framed. What they don’t bother to think about is that if they say this, what they are necessarily also saying is that one of the conspirators must have tapped each of the firearm experts for the Warren Commission and HSCA (a total of nine) on the shoulder and said, “Listen, this weapon [the Carcano] is not the murder weapon, but we want you to say it is,” and that all of these experts who were approached agreed to go along with this. But since this absurdity would never have happened, the argument that the Carcano was a poor and inaccurate rifle doesn’t, as they say in trial practice, “go anywhere.”
Reclaiming History Page 177