Who Shot JFK?

Listening to the radio yesterday morning I was reminded that we are once again at that time of the year: the anniversary of JFK's assassination. Apparently there is some major retrospective of the affair and the local NPR station's midmorning program had as a guest (quoting from the station's web page) "John Tunheim: U.S. District judge. He served as chairman on the Assassination Records Review Board that recommended public release of certain documents pertaining to the JFK assassination in 1998." There were several oddities about the program. First, though the guest was supposedly very knowledgeable about the Warren Commission report and thus the assassination, the interviewer's interest seemed to be in the lingering suspicion that there had been a conspiracy, not a lone gunman. She, the interviewer, kept at the "why do people believe in conspiracies?" etc. This, not being the Judge's area of expertise, caused a conflict since, given the host's predilection, her guest should have been a social psychologist or psychiatrist with expertise in paranoid delusion or mass psychology; her interest wasn't in the "truth" as she already "knew" the truth. Her interest was in why people still resist believing in that "truth": Oswald's (sole) guilt.

I had just turned 15 when Kennedy was killed (and, yes, I do remember where I was when I heard and rather a lot about the next few hours) and that event became part of my life and not just a bit of folklore (as the Viet Nam war must be to today's 15- or 21-year-olds). I also have had (subliminally from that event? never had thought of that before) a life-long attraction to spy and suspense novels salient enough to dishearten me that I can read them much faster than good writers can create them. But even given my deep affection for paranoid delusion I had never looked into those JFK conspiracy theories nor had much interest in them. Which was another oddity of the radio program: when callers asked about conflicting views from other experts, such as a noted pathologist on Kennedy's wounds, the Judge would acknowledge the contrarian's quality but he kept coming back to the "weight" of the evidence implicating Oswald and the lone gunman. The Judge didn't answer the objections; he side-stepped them. Simply put, this was not an illuminating hour, apparently its purpose being another attempt simply to quash suspicions of conspiracy, the duty of all right-thinking citizens.

One contrarian whose name never breached the air (a very interesting non-event in itself) is Mark Lane, an attorney, activist and author who was prominent in the conspiracy collective (he more or less created it) for decades. I had never read his books nor known much about him until this very year when serendipitously I ended up reading his "Plausible Denial" published in 1991. Given the present state of our nation (the destruction of democracy and civil rights and the growth of tyranny) I was reading up on the NSA (for example, James Bamford's books "Puzzle Palace" and "Body of Secrets"), thinking about a long-ago movie ("Twilight's Last Gleaming"), and one thing leading to another I heard about Mr. Lane and read the book. (Being "old" I'm a words-and-numbers person; I read the footnotes and bibliographies, and do my homework (as expressed in my life 40 years ago as "Now my sleep has gone since I cut my pillow open to see what was inside.")).

"Plausible Denial" recounts, including the broader events, a libel retrial that Lane defended in the 1980's. E. Howard Hunt, of the CIA, Bay of Pigs, White House Plumbers (Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office burglary, Watergate), was implicated in the Kennedy murder by the "Spotlight" published by the Liberty Lobby in 1978. Hunt sued, won, then lost on appeal and Lane was hired to defend the retrial. Lane chose a defense that the article was, in fact, true. Lane won. In fact, after the trial, the jury fore(wo)man stated Lane had convinced the jury that the CIA had killed Kennedy and Hunt had been involved. Amazing. I don't recall ever having read about this 21 years ago. That could be my memory lapse though Lane, in his book, says that very little about the verdict and juror interviews ever made it out to the public. A synopsis of the book might be that the evidence implicating Oswald is mighty skimpy (unlike the evidence implicating OJ in "his" murders), that evidence exists that he had both FBI and CIA connections (they taught him Russian, for example), that the evidence shows that the CIA began manufacturing and disseminating evidence of his guilt as early as October 1 (more than 7 weeks before the killing), that evidence exists that Hunt organized the murder using anti-Castro Cubans, that the evidence shows there were more gunmen (3 is the number posited), that Jack Ruby was an FBI informant,etc. It is a stunning indictment. Read it for yourselves. (My own questions, at the start, were simple: why would Oswald want to kill Kennedy and why would Ruby want to kill Oswald? As Lane notes, motive is not a necessary component of criminal prosecution yet it's the first and most potent issue for real people and real jurors.)

The thrust is that the Warren Commission was a whitewash managed by the CIA (Allen Dulles, ex-director, effectively ran the investigation), where its mandate was not to discover who shot Kennedy but to amass evidence of Oswald's guilt, where the Commission members were channeled into doing a quick, cursory investigation and even then the evidence was sealed. Seems to me that we recently had a similar commission investigating 911. Regardless of one's opinions on that matter, it is incontrovertible that the 911 investigation was narrow and well-circumscribed: it did not investigate the evidence nor follow the evidentiary trail; rather it began with a scenario and marshalled evidence to support that scenario and then it stopped. For example, it never investigated why WTC 7 collapsed (there being no plane collision with Al Qaeda hijackers involved, why bother?).

In both investigations it seems obvious, at least to me, that the goal was to find a simple, well-bounded explanation that would convince the public and put worry and suspicions to rest. This view does not mean the reports' findings are wrong; only that one should not put too much faith in them. And our own knowledge of the events and the follow-up is provided by the media, whose journalists have a smug belief in their own mission and competence and accuracy, not too well-founded. I recall the recent Lebanon War and our mainstream journalists' coverage of it. The Israelis were good; they acted only in self-defense; Hezbollah was bad; Hezbollah were murderous terrorists. Very neat and simple. I remember thinking that the world isn't that simple and that a few bright 9th graders would probably outshine professional reporters. Being young and insufficiently trained in "correct thinking" they might have asked questions such as what is Hezbollah and where did they come from and why did they act as they did? These questions are not fit for professionals; it must take many years of channeling and practice to hold such narrow views of international relations. The Israelis' ever-present innocence doesn't even accord with their own acknowledged history which the Bible recounts as numerous examples of their straying from God's way and God smiting them for their behavior.

Being in the 21st century one might ponder what the theme and most salient events were of the 20th, and for my money ($8 without the popcorn) it was the century of the movies with good ole Tom Edison (his lab created motion pictures) as the hero/villain. And for all the delight that great cinematography and special effects create in their mesmerizing way, movies are driven by the scripts. Gore Vidal, a screenwriter, noted that fact. Movies tell stories, or provide the "narrative" to use the more academic term. I suppose that TV and movies are our modern churches and man, do we worship big-time. Want to understand the world? Let the visual electronic media explain it to you in 10, 30, 90 and 120 minute versions, with all the loose ends neatly tied up. I suppose books and newspapers and radio are for us "old" folks, the atavistic ones amongst you.

I was watching the CBS Evening News brought to me by Bob Schieffer (that placeholder twixt Dan (60 Minutes aggressiveness) Rather and Katie (Today Show pablum) Couric. Nice to know we'll have Katie to make us feel good about ourselves once again; flash them pearlies, Katie!) the day Bill Gates announced his intention to retire from daily involvement with Microsoft . Mr. Schieffer stated that the man who had brought the internet to so many of us was retiring. This was news to me. The internet, its workings, technology and history, is something about which I actually have some knowledge and expertise, and we, in the know, know that Bill Gates and his company basically missed the boat on the internet and had to be dragged to it screaming and kicking all the way. Mr. Schieffer (did anyone later clue him in?) was advertising his ignorance for all to see and hear. But for those not in the know, good ole Bob gave them the story, the narrative, and for them his explanation was simple, well-bounded, the close of a chapter in our collective lives with a sigh but no loose ends. The unfortunate thing is that tv and movies are not reality but only a part of that reality and other parts have the nasty aspect of intruding on our delusions, such as that we are in the right about Iraq and the Mideast and that we are winning and that victory is within our grasp. Our overall political behavior and beliefs are certainly delusional, and if conspiracy buffs are delusional at least they aren't the ones dropping the bombs.