Fifty Years In, The Myth Persists

If you weren't already persuaded that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone assassin of President John F. Kennedy, this should convince you:

Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist. We know that a leftist, a communist assassinated JFK. That is the official Warren report conclusion. And yet the media cannot let go of the fact that because there were a lot of white Republican businessmen in Dallas, that it was a climate of hate, a climate of fear, a climate of extremism in Dallas that led to Kennedy's death. Every conspiracy theory that you have heard that makes you think Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin was started by the Democrats. Every one.

You go back and look at these wacko movies that they made with all the focus in New Orleans and you will find wacko leftist filmmakers who started all of these conspiracy theories.

As it happens, however, Rush Limbaugh is not the only one in possession of The One True Explanation.™ Politico recently asked of Robin McNeil, Jim Lehrer, and Bob Schieffer  "what do you make of the findings of the Warren Commission?"  Here are the responses, of McNeil in full and exerpts of Lehrer and Schieffer:

(McNeil): It satisfied me because I never had the time or the inclination afterward to become an assassination student or an assassination buff. I have yet to see a bit of evidence that convinces me otherwise. I thought the Oliver Stone movie was ridiculous.

(Lehrer): But I didn’t have any theories that replaced the single-man theory, shooter, and for the last 50 years, I’ve been waiting to hear that story that, OK, somebody on their death bed makes a confession that they were Lee Harvey Oswald’s driver or they helped him get the gun or whatever. That’s not happened and 50 years later, I’m pretty well satisfied that, with the absence of any provable information to the contrary, it was true that it was just one guy, Lee Harvey Oswald. And it was just unbelievable, but it happened that one man did it.

(Schieffer): .I always try to keep an open mind as to whether there may have been someone else involved in some other way. There’s no question that Fidel Castro knew that the Kennedy administration were trying to kill him and sabotage things in Cuba, but there’s never been any evidence that has been shown to me that I found conclusive that there might have been anyone other than Oswald involved.

Actually, Jim Lehrer is correct- it is unbelievable that one man did it.  Politico, as has become the norm, queried interviewees about the findings of the Warren Commission, implying that Chief Justice Warren's group has presented the official government finding.  But as Kennedy assassination scholar Bob Katz reminds us

The House Select Committee on Assassinations, headed by Robert Blakey, a former Justice Department prosecutor, was a two-year probe that included hundreds of interviews, the discovery of new evidence, scientific tests on new and old evidence, plus the most extensive review of available FBI, CIA, Secret Service and Warren Commission files. The HSCA final report stated bluntly that President Kennedy "probably was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."

Didn't know that, huh? Not mentioned in your American history textbook? Well, why would that be?

Rarely (if ever) is anyone asked to comment on the House Select Committee on Investigations, as if the public is to assume that the Warren Commission conducted the official, and only, government investigation. The HCA in 1978 concluded

Scientific Acoustical Evidence Establishes a High Probability That Two Gunmen Fired at President John F. Kennedy; Other Scientific Evidence does not Preclude the Possibility of Two Gunmen Firing at the President; Scientific Evidence Negates Some Specific Conspiracy Allegations.

Perhaps nothing is any more remarkable that, after the Warren Commission- its findings and the committee itself- has been repeatedly debunked over the past half century, its supporters have been given a free pass while the burden of proof has been placed upon conspiracy theorists. The respondent is then expected to summon up a serious demeanor and remark that there has been no evidence presented to suggest a second gunman. And he or she does so without any hint of doubt, suggesting that all evidence has been released and put on public display. But David Talbot, founder of Salon and author, explains

We need the facts – as Jefferson Morley, one of the few journalists to devote serious effort to the Kennedy case, has demonstrated. Morley has been pursuing a lengthy Freedom of Information battle with the CIA to pry loose more than 1,500 documents that the agency is still concealing in defiance of the 1992 JFK Records Act. At long last, we need the government to come clean and provide the American people with what is legally theirs – every piece of classified information relating to the Kennedy assassination. Failing that, if the CIA continues to defy the law, the nation needs another Edward Snowden.









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Beware establishment figures with a vested interest in maintaining a convenient fiction without revealing their motive.

Consider the February 18, 2008 episode of MSNBC's Countdown. Keith Olberman was interviewing Gary Mack, the curator of the 6th Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas about the release of a transcript (among other documents) of a purported conversation between Lee Harvey Oswald and his assassin, Jack Ruby, approximately seven weeks before the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The documents were kept inside a courthouse safe under the supervision of then-Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade, who prosecuted Ruby and, according to one document, had signed a movie deal in 1967.

The Chicago Tribune reported the conversation as following:

"There is a way to get rid of him without killing him," Oswald says.

"How's that?" Ruby responds.

"I can shoot his brother," Oswald says.

After a discussion of the logistics of shooting the president, Ruby says the money for the operation's coming from the Mafia.

"Are you with the Mafia?" Oswald asked.

"You're asking too many questions," Ruby responds.

Later, Ruby gives a lengthy warning that Oswald must not get caught or say anything, noting that "if you do talk, then the boys will make me follow you, wherever you go, and kill you."

The papers, such as they are, describe a plot by La Cosa Nostra to assassinate the President, which would result in the Presidency being assumed by Lyndon Johnson, enemy to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a nemesis of organized crime.

Many people, including Mack, have cast doubt on the veracity of the conversation. The curator contended "virtually all the hard evidence leads directly to Lee Harvey Oswald and no one else, at least so far. The problem is that most people just are not convinced of the official story."

One problem, Gary. Although you may be enamored of the Warren Commission report, there is no one "offical story," despite what some experts imply. Perhaps you missed the conclusions of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which in the late 1970's investigated the assassinations of J.F.K. and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Committee concluded in part that: there were two gunmen, one on the grassy knoll, and the other Lee Harvey Oswald (who may have had ties with Jack Ruby, who fired three of four shots; both Oswald and Ruby had ties to La Cosa Nostra; the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had misled, and withheld information from, the Warren Commission; and the Warren Commission did not investigate the possibility of conspiracy.

So whatever one may think about the theory that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing John F. Kennedy, clearly there is not one "official" version of the assassination- a fact of which the "experts" are very much aware.