by Barry Krusch
the Persian Gulf War . . .
9/11 . . .
And the Iraq/Afghanistan wars . . .
. . . which takes us to the present day.
But were all these historical events really disconnected? And if they were connected, were they somehow, someway, connected to the Kennedy assassination, and if so, how?
Well, if Lee Harvey Oswald was truly the assassin of President Kennedy, then people can make a case that those historical events were not connected to the assassination. But if he was not the assassin, the case they want to make is going to be more difficult. So the stakes are high.
Well, I have seen the evidence, and I have seen the light. So here I am, over forty years later, the kid with the book on the turtles now all grown up, writing a book defending a man who I once hated with a passion. But now I realize that my hatred was based on solely on the images I saw broadcast on the television, not on evidence that actually connected Oswald to the assassination.
Since reading that book on “Turtles”, I have read thousands of books, and over 100 of them on the Kennedy assassination. I’m older now. I know a lot more now. I question more now.
You might be interested in my qualifications to write a book on the Kennedy assassination, and there are at least five of them.
First, I do have direct personal experience with the assassination, and authors of books that are written in the future are going to lack this connection. So it is important to have a record written now by “one who was there,” in the sense that it affected his or her personal life.
Second, I went to law school for a year at the University of Georgia, worked as an investigator for Atlanta Legal Aid for four years, and was a paralegal for four years. Consequently, I have a deeper background in law than many authors who have written books on the Kennedy assassination, though not as nearly as deep as others, most notably attorney Mark Lane, a man to whom the American people owe a great debt for the work he did in bringing this issue to people’s attention. I saw Mr. Lane speak at Emory University in 1977, and that was the first time I knew that there was another side to this story. Mr. Lane almost single-handedly kept the issue alive for many years when most people wanted to forget it.
Third, I have written several books, two on constitutional law. One of them, The 21st Century Constitution, was called by Richard Bernstein in his book Amending America “the most thoughtful and thorough reframing of the Constitution yet attempted,” and I appeared on C-SPAN and the Tom Snyder radio show discussing the book. The book even landed me an entry into the Encyclopedia of Constitutional Amendments, Proposed Amendments, and Amending Issues, 1789-2002.
Fourth, I have been an instructional designer for twenty years specializing in instructional technology (first CD-ROM, now web-based training), and have a Masters degree in Education. I have written courses on a wide variety of topics for a wide variety of clients, including American Express, Bank of America, and Hartford Life. As far as I know, I’m the first instructional designer to write a book on the Kennedy assassination. My experience in writing courses, which involves evaluating and analyzing hundreds, sometimes thousands of pages of complex material that has to be converted into a course that could last anywhere from 2 to 4 hours, has proven to be very useful in helping me to understand and explain the complexities of what is in all likelihood the most complex murder case ever.
Fifth, and finally, I have extensive experience in the analysis of film, which began at Emory University with my friends Scott Greene and Bill Blagg. At least one, usually two times a week, we would go to a theater called The Silver Screen in Atlanta, Georgia, and watch foreign film double features. Many times we would go to the film more than one time. Scott was an art history major, and had an amazing ability to find nuances in films that I was simply unable to find. But, discussing these films with Scott for years built up my skills in this type of analysis as well. Eventually, I wrote a document called The Kubrick FAQ, which analyzed the films of Stanley Kubrick. I must have watched the films of Kubrick dozens of times, and on each go-round discovered something that I hadn’t seen before.
You might not think that experience very relevant, but I think of all the experience that I’ve had that I’ve listed, this has been the experience that has proven most valuable in finding the holes in The Case Against Oswald.
How This Book Is Different
Because there are hundreds of books on the Kennedy assassination, a fair question is “why another one?” Thus, I believe that every author who jumps into this field is obliged to provide an answer.
In my view, this book is different for at least three reasons:
How it was written.
What it seeks to achieve.
How it achieves what it seeks to achieve.
Details follow.
How This Book Was Written
I am not sure how other people have written books on the Kennedy assassination, but I am pretty confident that I am one of the few that use the method I ultimately deployed, because the method I ultimately deployed was not even available when hundreds of these books were written.
My first strategy in writing this book was a fairly standard one, to read a book, and as I read it, index it along the way. So, I would read book after book, and classify each point of evidence by topic. Then, I compiled those smaller indexes into one large master index which allowed me to find evidence using those topics.
This worked pretty well, but I found it was taking too long, so I came up with another strategy.
Whenever I got a book on the Kennedy assassination, I would scan it into the computer, and then use optical character recognition to create searchable text. Then, I would index the book. Finally, I would create a master index of all the books.
By having this electronic master index, I was able to search the contents of over 100 books simultaneously by keyword. This made it extremely easy to locate the sources of information for any particular topic, which in a case like this, would be impossible to do if you did not have this method, since we are talking about searching literally tens of thousands of pages.
I not only did this with the books, I also did it with the most important relevant documents in the case, including the records of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
Because I was able to locate information quickly, this book has dozens of compare and contrast scenarios that would have been extraordinarily difficult, you might even say practically impossible, to discover any other way.
Because of this method, and because I was also able to build on the hard work of all the fantastic researchers and writers who came before me, this book only took three years to write, when it should have taken over a hundred years to write. In an acknowledgments section coming up, I will be thanking many of these authors.
Now let’s go to the second reason this book is different.
What This Book Seeks to Achieve
It is amazing how many excellent books have been written about this topic. And yet, even though the authors of those books presented to me compelling evidence that there was no Case Against Oswald, we are still, to this day, debating the topic. It is almost as if people thought that whether or not the Holocaust existed was a legitimate topic for debate. That would be crazy, right? Well, that’s the way it is with the Kennedy assassination.
If everyone read those books, there would be no need for this book. But everyone has not read those books, and many of them are now out of print. So it looks like we are going to need at least one more book.
Yes, brilliant as these books were and are, due to a variety of circumstances including the out-of-print status of some of these books as well as the relatively high cost of some of the others, the books as a group only been able to get the ball to the one-yard line (through no fault of their own), with some very determined, very well-financed people trying to move that ball back to the five, ten, or even twenty yard line.
Because the ball has never crossed the goal, there is always t
his back-and-forth motion, and there always will be, until someone proves the point definitively, that there is no case at all.
But how do you write a book that conclusively proves that there is no case against Oswald? How could such a thing be done?
Well, in thinking about this, I decided to structure the book logically, categorizing all the evidence by topic, the topics related to key facts in the assassination which had to be true if Oswald was indeed the culprit. With the evidence categorized by factual topic, people could then make up their mind as to whether or not the evidence supported that particular fact.
So, with this method, it would be very easy for people to determine the strength or weakness of the case.
If this book is successful, it is going to break a decades-old logjam, and allow the intellectual efforts of people to be focused in what I view as the right direction, creating a short-list of suspects in the murders, and then deciding what would be the appropriate action to take.
Now the question is, how do I prove it? That takes us to the third reason this book is different, how it achieves what it seeks to achieve, and to that point, there are two methods:
The Amazon Virtual Jury
The JFK Challenge
Let me discuss them.
The Amazon Virtual Jury
So, let us say that I am able to write a book which proves on paper that no jury would have returned a “guilty” verdict against Oswald. Oswald never had a trial, and no court is going to be trying him ever again, so how do I ultimately prove this when we don’t have a jury?
The answer I came up with was to create a virtual jury, a jury comprised of people who have read the books, and can then cast their votes online based on the evidence that they have seen.
But here there is a problem as well. How do you create a system of online voting that people can trust? For example, if you created an online survey using websites like Zoomerang, could that result really be trusted? People could vote, but you don’t know if they have actually seen the evidence. In addition, and even worse, multiple people could vote over and over, which would skew the results. How could you ensure integrity?
Creating a system with robust authentication would be extremely difficult to do, but luckily, there is no need to do it, because there is already a system out there which can guarantee authentication, and in this case, guarantee that at the very least people possess the book they say they have read.
The system is maintained by Amazon. It is actually a system designed to ensure the integrity of book reviews.
For book reviews, Amazon has a feature they call the Amazon verified purchase. This means that if someone reviews a book, and the “Amazon Verified Purchase” logo appears, you know that individual purchased the book:
In addition, Amazon authenticates each review by account. One account, one vote. People don’t get to review a book multiple times, they can only review it once.
Even better, there is something called the “Real Name” feature:
If someone posts a review, and the “Real Name” logo appears underneath the name, you know that individual is who they say they are. That prevents people from hiding under aliases to evade the responsibility of posting false reviews.
And, of course, there is the star rating system, which has a 1-5 scale that allows readers to rate the books, but in this case,
can also allow people to evaluate the strength of the case I am making against The Case Against Oswald.
This was quite an “aha!” moment for me when I realized that the Amazon reviewing system could be used as a mechanism for people to vote in a Virtual Jury, a jury whose results would be visible to people world-wide.
So, here is how the Amazon Virtual Jury system will work. Every purchaser of Volumes 2 and 3 has a right to vote based on what they read in those volumes. The “reviews” of those books are actually only sideways reviews. They are really reviews of how well I make the case against The Case Against Oswald, which I guess you could argue is a type of book review.
Could people buy the book multiple times and cast multiple votes? In the first place, I doubt anyone would do that, and in the second place, the answer for the Kindle is “no”: Amazon will not let you buy a Kindle book twice; if you try to do that, it will tell you that you already purchased the book.
Now, I suppose that people could set up multiple accounts with multiple credit cards, but who is really going to be doing that? I feel pretty safe in saying that we don’t have to worry about that one.
Details on how the Amazon Virtual Jury voting will proceed will appear in the “About This Book” section at the beginning of volumes 2 and 3.
Well, good idea though this may be, it does have at least one flaw, a significant one which I have to address to ensure the integrity of the results. Here is what some people are going to say if the results of the Virtual Jury turn out like I expect:
“Oh, sure, look at all the people who say that they would be voting ‘not guilty’ if they were on the jury. So what? It doesn’t mean anything! It just proves that you have written a distorted, biased book, including only the evidence which supports your view and leaving out all the evidence which is against your view. Big deal, anyone can do that, so all you have proven is that you have written a distorted, biased book that has misled the American people, who are so gullible that they will fall for anything!”
Ouch! That is some charge, and I know it is coming. And, in fact, there is a certain amount of truth to what they’re saying. Anyone who writes a book on any topic, which of course would include the Kennedy assassination, is going to be leaving out information. That is inevitable. Do you know how many pages of official evidence there are in this case? Hundreds of thousands!! So, it is going to be extremely easy for them to demonstrate that I have left out evidence, since they have hundreds of thousands of examples to choose from.
However, what I would argue in return is just what I have argued, that it is impossible to include all the evidence, and so in fact I have to leave out evidence, if for no other reason than I know that no one is going to be reading a book that is hundreds of thousands of pages long! And, I can easily reply that every other book on this topic, every single one of them, no matter which side, is leaving out evidence as well. So, while this might appear to be at first glance a significant criticism, it is in fact no criticism at all.
The real criticism would be this:
“Yes, you left out evidence, but not just the evidence that everyone else leaves out, but real, material evidence that would actually change the way people voted.”
Because I knew this charge was coming, I knew I had to find a way to respond to it, otherwise the JFK merry-go-round would be circling for eternity. And the way I found is a second means of ensuring integrity called The JFK Challenge.
The JFK Challenge
As good as the Amazon Virtual Jury idea is, it does have the Achilles’ heel I just mentioned. Consequently, I have to back up the Virtual Jury concept with a much stronger concept, The JFK Challenge.
Here is how the challenge works: I make certain claims in the book. As a result of these claims, people will conclude that there is no case against Oswald. Others will challenge me, saying that I have either distorted or omitted information. To those people I say, “Fine. If you have purchased my book, you have the right to take me before an arbitrator and demonstrate before him or her the strength of what you’re saying. Prepare a rebuttal to my book, and I will prepare a counter-rebuttal, and we each have a second right of reply, and we will take all this material before an arbitrator. We will let them decide which one of us has distorted or omitted information.”
This is a much stronger concept! Suppose 100 people in the Virtual Jury vote “not guilty.” Then, one person claims that I have distorted or omitted information. Yet, curiously enough, that person refuses to take me before an arbitrator to prove his or her case. What does that tell you? I know what it tells me. It tells me they can talk the talk, but they can’t walk the walk.
It tells me who is real, and who was just posing. The JFK Challenge allows me to smoke out the phonies.
By the way, you should know that at the very beginning of this book, even before this book was written, I knew I was going to have a JFK Challenge. The amount I used in my mind was $5000 at risk. At each stage in the writing of the book, when I put a fact down, I asked myself “is there any evidence out there that should be included that someone is going to claim should be included for this point?” I did this over and over and over, multiple times a day.
That is why, when you read this book, you’re going to find every fact footnoted, and all the evidence in the case before your eyes in the form of screen captures. You will be able to check everything that I’ve said against the public record. This is how you are going to know that I did not distort information. Someone defending Oswald must have absolute integrity, and this is the check I placed against myself to ensure the integrity of the information I presented.
So, if you wanted to know why this book is different, you just read three very good reasons.
Other Ways This Book Is Different
Apart from these three points, there are other reasons this book is different:
Because it is going to be used as evidence before an arbitrator, there are far more illustrations in this book than most of the books on the Kennedy assassination. I can only think of a handful that have more.
I am going to allow future Kennedy researchers to use the images which I’ve created especially for this book without having to ask me permission first, and obviously at no charge. See the copyright notice.