The National Archives

has the complete Warren Commission Report online, for those who would like to read it and all of those exhibits.

After all of these years, there is still no evidence of a conspiracy.

That doesn't mean they will die out completely, however, no matter how utterly stupid they are.

Richard Hofstadter Had It Right

about our paranoid culture and its tendency to embrace everything regarding conspiracy. Of course the historian was talking about the John Birch Society and other far-right groups, not about the batshit JFK conspiracy theorists:

What are we to make of this event – rightly or wrongly, the most intensely-studied event in U.S. history – fifty years after the fact? On first glance, the assassination and its aftermath are a historian’s dream: millions of pages of testimony, thousands of eyewitnesses, multiple autopsies and ballistics reports; there’s even a Kodachrome film that frames the event down to the fraction of a second. Yet I can think of very few details from that day, even small ones, that remain completely uncontested by either buffs or scholars. I’m not sure this can be said about any historical event, even 9/11. Within three years of the assassination, 200 books had appeared; the bibliography is now well over 3,000 even without counting films, documentaries, blogs and newsletters. Finally, a very strong majority of these sources are saturated with conspiracy thinking. American citizens still mutiny against the official account that pointed to Lee Oswald (as he was known then) as a “lone gunman.” And to my eyes, a vast percentage of those focus on a single type of conspiracy, from both right and left: that a coup d’état robbed our nation of more peaceful and prosperous future.

It eventually became big business. No relatively routine murder case, apart from who one of the victims was, has had so much written about it.

In the end, there was NO mystery at all.

Hofstadter's classic essay is here.

As Long As There Is Money To Be Made, the Conspiracy Industry Will Continue

A reporter has spent a lifetime refuting the nutjobs who peddle in conspiracies, and they continue, with recycled nonsense as well as new, more creative conspiracies.

There is simply nothing out there to show there was any kind of conspiracy.

And in all that time, you never came across any conspiracies theories that you thought were valid?

Really, I have not. I’ve seen all kinds of mistakes made by officials, and I’ve seen all kinds of really weird claims that were nothing more than imagination. I did worry a little bit at first about how Oswald got back from the Soviet Union so easily and who paid for it. And after a few days, maybe two weeks, I found out he didn’t get out very easily. He had to go to Moscow several times. He wrote many, many letters trying to get out. And his brother, Robert, paid $600 of his fare back, and the American Red Cross paid the rest. So then I wasn’t too leery of the whole deal. But all these others, my God, you wouldn’t believe—five people have told me they killed the president.

No kidding?

Really. One was in a mental institution at the time, and another claimed his dad did it, and it just goes on. There’s a guy in prison in Illinois who says he did it. He was in prison then. It’s just amazing. We love a mystery, don’t we?

Why Is It JFK Conspiricies Thrive Despite There Being NO Evidence Of One?

It's almost a normal thing when it comes to American politics. Even recent events like 9/11 have conspiracy theories running amuck.

Of course 9/11 was a conspiracy in that it was an organized terrorist attack; however, the nutjobs there aren't talking about that but instead try to pin it on the Bush administration being actively involved.

The question of whether Oswald acted alone has produced reams of books that get longer and more convoluted by the year, bent on proving that the Warren Commission was incorrect in its assessment of Oswald as the lone conspirator. Whether it was the bizarre counter-assassination by Jack Ruby or Frame 313 in the Abraham Zapruder film footage of the actual assassination, evidence suggests that Oswald was part of perhaps the greatest American political conspiracy, these authors say.

The Kennedy assassination, however, has no small amount of competition when it comes to American conspiracy theories. In the 18th century, Roman Catholics were rumored to be setting up a shadow government west of the Alleghenies to destroy US liberties. Slave conspiracy paranoia "was one of the most significant cultural phenomena of pre-Civil War America," according to "Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia." And, of course, Sen. Joseph McCarthy was convinced that Communists were corrupting the nation in the 1950s.

A lot of this nonsense is a direct result of the distrust in government that was in large part brought about because of the assassinations and general social upheaval of the 1960s and early 1970s. Watergate was the end of that era of upheaval and really was a conspiracy, but the end result was mistrust of government running rampant.

Getting back to the JFK assassination, it really is LONG overdue to put the idiotic conspiracy theories to rest. They get stupider and stupider with time:

Records show that Oswald was the buyer and owner of the rifle used to kill Kennedy. No other weapon has been found that can be linked to the assassination.

No bullet other than those from Oswald’s rifle has ever been recovered and linked to the assassination.

Oswald was the only Texas School Book Depository employee who turned up missing after the assassination.

Forty-five minutes after Kennedy was shot, Oswald shot and killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit with a .38-caliber revolver at the intersection of 10th Street and Patton Avenue in Oak Cliff.

Minutes after Tippit was shot, Oswald pulled the same revolver on a Dallas police officer attempting to arrest him at the Texas Theatre on Jefferson Boulevard in Oak Cliff.

The Warren Commission in 1964 and the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s spent a combined four years investigating JFK’s murder and never found evidence linking the CIA, the Mafia, anti-Castro Cubans or any other group to the crime. Investigators conducted 25,000 interviews and never linked Oswald to any of those suspect groups.

The truth doesn't stop the nutjobs as long as there is money to make peddling whatever crazy theory about 11/22/63.

Debating the Flat-Earthers

No matter what the verdict of history is, that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to murder JFK, Officer J.D. Tippit, and wounded Governor Connolly, there will always be a cadre of crackpots and con artists who want to spew nonsense to the contrary. As long as there is money to be made peddling such bullshit, these conspiracy theories will continue.

If Jack Ruby hadn't gotten it into his unstable head that by killing Oswald he would be seen as a hero and allowed the criminal justice system to have continued, Oswald would have been tried, convicted, and likely executed for the easiest murder case ever prosecuted in the history of the United States.

This professor mentioned in the linked article has more patience than I do with these conspiracy nuts. I just ignore them because they are either totally ignorant or they have agendas they are trying to peddle.

Every momentous event in American history comes with its own corresponding conspiracy theory. They faked the moon landing. Edwin M. Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, put John Wilkes Booth up to it. Barack Obama was cloned from the DNA of an Egyptian pharaoh, or born in Kenya. Or both!

As rich as the American tradition of conspiracy theories is the sociological tradition of trying to understand why people believe them. Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics is the genre’s ne plus ultra. Hofstadter, writing in 1964, identifies right-wingers driven by rage as responsible for most of the era’s otherwise inexplicable political movements (McCarthyism and the John Birch Society). Any observer of American culture can follow this thread through to the present-day acolytes of conspiracy-geysers Glenn Beck and Alex Jones.

But the Warren Report skeptics fit another mold. They’re sorrowful, not angry. “If only Kennedy had lived,” begin so many of their idle thoughts. Kennedy would never have escalated the war in Vietnam; he would never have let 60,000 American soldiers and countless civilians die in Southeast Asia. They believe he would have defused Cold War tensions and shrunken the American nuclear arsenal. They believe he really would have scattered the CIA to the winds.

You will find precisely none of that in the Warren Report, which builds its case instead with an inquiry into forensics and Oswald’s background, like any other criminal investigation. It’s horribly unthinkable, what the commission contends — that a confused, strange man with a mail-order rifle could, acting on his own, reorient American history. Surely the universe contains more order and meaning.

But that is what happened. The assassination really was a grotesque example of American individualism. Few assassinations or attempted assassinations in American history are results of conspiracies; lone nuts are typically responsible.

Oswald was a deranged, lone nut who murdered, and in turn was murdered by a deranged, lone nut.

Truth really is a lot stranger than fiction.

The best book out there debunking the flat-earthers is a book written by Jim Moore called Conspiracy of One. Moore destroys the conspiracy mongers' arguments with the greatest of ease.

Etc. and Bullshit

It figures the tabloid report of Jackie O. claiming on tape LBJ had something to do with her husband's assassination is a bunch of bullshit.

The Kennedy family always accepted the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald alone killed the president. All the evidence points to it, after all.
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Another Elvis Presley mystery has been solved:

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It's a good clip.

Today Marks

44 years since JFK was assassinated in Dallas, and naturally some people are still trying to explain what happened there, even as we have always known what happened and who did it.

This piece takes a new look at the Zapruder film.

Yesterday

I picked up--with difficulty, as it is a 1,600-page book with a CD--Vincent Bugliosi's new book about the JFK assassination, a book that took him twenty years to write, Reclaiming History. As he notes in this interview of a couple of months ago, it took a tremendous toll on him, not least because he wrote THE ENTIRE BOOK IN LONGHAND (and had a secretary type it up for him).

The book, as he mentions, was not intended to be read from end to end, though it could be. It's intended to be a reference book, with sections on virtually every conceivable part of the assassination, including a major section on virtually every conspiracy theory out there. Bugliosi, just as he did in the 1987 docu-trial, On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald, demolishes the conspiracy theories with the greatest of ease.

The Kennedy/Tippit killings were routine murder cases. Thc cases would have been a prosecutor's dream. If it weren't for the prominence of Kennedy, it would have been a simple cut-and-dried murder conviction. But thanks to nutjob Jack Ruby, the American people were denied the opportunity to see Oswald tried, convicted, and probably executed in the most slam-dunk murder case in the history of the country. Instead, Ruby's murder of Oswald helped spring about the cottage industry of conspiracy theories of every stripe. The rebels without a cause looked at perceived holes in the Warren Commission investigation and report, and came up with their own explaination of "what really happened" that afternoon in Dallas. This despite the fact we already knew within 48 hours of the killing EVERYTHING there ever was to know about the case. As a result of the cottage industry, the American people have fallen sucker to this nonsense.

Hopefully, Bugliosi's book will set the record straight once and for all.