Reclaiming History (228 page)

There are several other ways in which the conspiracy community operates in defiance of logic and common sense. A few: Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists are constantly scavenging for something, whether in the eighteen thousand pages of the Warren Commission volumes or anywhere else, that supports their theory. If they find it, they embrace it as the absolute truth even if it is inconsistent with the overwhelming weight of the evidence, including physical, scientific evidence—indeed, even if there are twenty other pieces of evidence showing that their point is wrong. And if someone rejects their “truth” as being erroneous or fraudulent, they simply accuse them of being part of the cover-up or groveling apologists for the Warren Commission.

Also, as former Warren Commission assistant counsel W. David Slawson put it, they love to “prove” their version of events occurred by “showing that it
could
have happened that way, without offering any evidence that it actually did.”

The dreadful illogic and superficiality of the conspiracy theorists’ modus operandi has inevitably resulted in the following situation: Though they have dedicated their existence to trying to poke holes in the Warren Commission’s findings, akin to a defense attorney in a criminal trial trying to raise a reasonable doubt of the defendant’s guilt in the jury’s mind, they have failed abysmally to tell us (if the Warren Commission was wrong) what actually did happen. In other words, other than blithely tossing out names, they have failed to offer any credible
evidence
of who, if not Oswald, killed Kennedy. Nor have they offered any credible
evidence
at all of who the conspirators behind the assassination were. So after more than forty years, if we were to rely on these silly people, we’d have an assassination without an assassin (since, they assure us, Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy), and a conspiracy without conspirators. Not a simple achievement.

To elaborate further on this point, the conspiracy theorists claim to have found a million problems with the Warren Commission’s conclusions that Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone, but not one of them has ever offered a coherent and logical alternative theory as to what did happen. All they can do is point out that such and such a group had a motive; claim that Oswald was a poor shot; allege that Oswald left the Book Depository Building after the shooting in Dealey Plaza because he probably sensed he was being framed; and so on. Their charges, which they have repeated in book after book, usually citing each other as the primary source, could be condensed and put into a thousand-page book titled
Discrepancies, Supposed Coincidences, and Unanswered Questions
. However, the totality of what they have written, with any semblance of credibility, as to what precisely did happen would fill only a page or so of a companion book, if that. And if that is all that the conspiracy community can produce after more than forty years, shouldn’t they be finally asking themselves if the reason why they have failed to come up with anything is that nothing exists? Not even Houdini could pull a rabbit out of the hat when there was no rabbit in the hat.

But telling the conspiracy theorists they have failed doesn’t phase them at all. In fact, it’s like waving a red flag in front of a bull. They are so tenacious and desperate to prove a conspiracy that out of their ranks came a book, published in 2002, that actually contained a purported official CIA internal document in which the CIA confesses to the murder and implicates the FBI and Joint Chiefs of Staff as co-conspirators. In that book,
Regicide
, conspiracy theorist Gregory Douglas claims that Robert T. Crowley, a former CIA assistant deputy director of plans, gave him the document in 1996 with the understanding that it not be published in his lifetime (Crowley died in 2000). Crowley said he was part of the conspiracy, but he apparently had no fear that Douglas would turn on him for fame and fortune, in which case he’d be prosecuted, convicted, and most likely executed. Crowley also apparently didn’t mind his surviving family and descendants having to live with the infamy that he had helped orchestrate the murder of Kennedy. After all, it was important to this nation’s history that all Americans know what happened. That is why Crowley didn’t give the explosive document to publications with a small circulation like the
New York Times, Time
, or
Newsweek
, but to Douglas, who had the document published in his book by a giant, international media conglomerate, the Monte Sano Media company of Huntsville, Alabama, which, by the way, isn’t listed in the phone directory.

Either Douglas (true name, Peter Stahl) is a fraud, or the person who forged the document is. Apart from the obvious insanity that the CIA would confess in writing to the assassination, the document, dated December 22, 1963, and referenced “Operation Zipper,” has no “To” or “From” line, no signature or even signature block, and is not even labeled or stamped “Top Secret” or any other level of confidentiality. You see, the CIA, like Crowley, wanted the world to know its agents had killed Kennedy. One wonders why the agency never called a press conference to announce its having murdered him. Laughably, the forger of the document couldn’t even get his grammatical tenses to be consistent. In the first paragraph of the document, he writes, “The removal of the President and the Attorney General from their positions because of high treason
has been
determined”—that is, the assassination hasn’t taken place yet. (That murder is contemplated is made clear in paragraph 4, which reads, “Removal by impeachment or other legal means is considered unfeasable [the forger had a spelling problem and no dictionary at his side] and too protracted,” and paragraph 5, which reads, “Therefore, an alternative solution has been found to effect this removal.”) But paragraph 7 of this very same document reads, “This operation, codenamed ZIPPER,
was
under the direction of James Angleton of the Agency, assisted by Robert Crowley and William Harvey, also of the Agency.” The forged, internal CIA document
*
is now suddenly in the past tense, speaking about the assassination that has already taken place, and uproariously informing its CIA readers that Angleton, Crowley, and Harvey are members of the CIA.
¹⁵
Can you imagine that, folks? The CIA has
confessed
to Kennedy’s murder! And in writing!

I
t couldn’t have been more obvious within hours after the assassination that Oswald had murdered Kennedy, and within no more than a day or so thereafter that he had acted alone. And this is precisely the conclusion that virtually all local (Dallas), state (Texas), and federal (FBI and Secret Service) law enforcement agencies came to shortly after the assassination. Nothing has ever changed their conclusion or proved it wrong.

Apart from the fact that no group of conspirators would ever get someone like Oswald to kill for them, no evidence has ever surfaced even linking Oswald to any of the groups the conspiracy theorists believe to be behind the assassination. But remarkably, many in the debate treat this all-important fact as irrelevant and moot. The reason is grounded in a stark misconception. The biggest mistake, by far, that well-intentioned lay people make in concluding there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, and the biggest argument, by far, that conspiracy theorists use in their books to support their position of a conspiracy, is to maintain that such and such a group “had a motive” to kill Kennedy and, therefore, must have done it. For instance, one hears that organized crime killed Kennedy out of anger because, after they helped finance his 1960 presidential campaign, he betrayed them by allowing his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to continue his crusade to destroy them; or that they killed the president “to get Bobby Kennedy off their back.” Or, Castro had Kennedy killed to get even with him for the Bay of Pigs invasion or before Kennedy had him killed. Or, the military-industrial complex and the CIA killed Kennedy because he intended to withdraw American troops from Vietnam, and they were fiercely opposed to it.
†
You know, if the president of our country is doing something that a particular group (e.g., Wall Street or unions or environmentalists) doesn’t like, the group simply kills him. That’s what we routinely do in America, right?

Moreover, for some reason, believers in the conspiracy theory apparently never stop to realize that even assuming, for the sake of argument, that a particular group of people had a motive to kill Kennedy, they also had an even greater motive
not
to do it, namely, that if they did it and got caught, they could be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Indeed, they would also know that the probability of their being caught and executed would be increased a hundred times over since their victim was the president of the United States, and his murder would ignite the most massive, dogged, and never-ending pursuit of his killer or killers by local, state, and federal law enforcement that had ever taken place.

But even if this apparently never-considered countervailing motive were treated as if it did not exist, a motive to commit a crime hardly gets one to first base in any criminal prosecution. I mean, if President Bush were assassinated tomorrow, there would be all types of people and groups who one could say would have had a motive to kill him. It is only one of the starting points of the investigation. Irrespective of the presence of motive, prosecutors still have to prove, by solid evidence, that the person or group who had a motive is the same person or group who committed the crime, a little fact that millions of Americans and most conspiracy theorists ignore. Taking the French proverb
Qui en profite du crime en est coupable
(“Whoever profits from the crime is guilty of it”) to heart, they are convinced that finding a motive is synonymous with finding the perpetrator. In their mind, finding that a particular group had a motive to kill Kennedy is enough to prove that the group did, in fact, do so—a non sequitur and broad jump of Olympian proportions. For example, Oliver Stone concluded that no fewer than ten separate groups or people had a motive to kill Kennedy, and this is why someone of his intelligence (with his thinking cap turned very tightly to the “off” position) directed a movie (
JFK
) in which, unbelievably,
all ten
were involved in Kennedy’s murder, the
reductio ad absurdum
of such an infantile, yet exceedingly prevalent mode of thinking.
*

Many conspiracy theorists embellish the motive argument to prove that a particular group killed Kennedy, by saying that it had the “motive, means, and opportunity” to do so. They present this almost as a prosecutorial legal brief, but in my years as a prosecutor I never once used the phrase and personally don’t know any seasoned prosecutor who has, although I assume some do and I am aware of this legal colloquialism. Much more so than motive, “means and opportunity” are virtually worthless as evidence of guilt (unless, of course, you can show that no other living human, or very few other living humans, had the means or opportunity).

To illustrate how empty the concept of motive, means, and opportunity is, let’s take the Kennedy assassination. Any of the thousands of citizens of Dallas who hated Kennedy with a passion would have had a motive to kill him. And any of them who owned a gun or a rifle had the means. And if they were anywhere along Kennedy’s motorcade route, they would have the opportunity. Again, “motive, means, and opportunity” hardly gets one to first base. As indicated, even if all three are present, a prosecutor still has to show that the person or group who had them committed the crime. Indeed, a prosecutor’s focusing heavily on motive, means, and opportunity is almost an implied admission by him that he has very little evidence that the defendant did, in fact, commit the crime. “Yeah, okay,” a courthouse wag could say. “He had motive, means, and opportunity. But did he do it?” Motive, means, and opportunity are certainly helpful (and sometimes critical) to a prosecutor in proving his case, but are perhaps more helpful to the police who investigate the case in that the absence of any of them, particularly means and opportunity, enables the police to exclude those who may have otherwise been considered suspects to a crime.

If all the groups and people who Oliver Stone, in his movie, alleges were involved in Kennedy’s murder (e.g., FBI, CIA, Secret Service, military-industrial complex, LBJ, etc.) actually
were
, a coup d’état would necessarily have taken place. And, indeed, in Stone’s movie New Orleans DA Jim Garrison tells his staff that the assassination of President Kennedy “was a military-style ambush from start to finish, a coup d’état with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings.” It’s a notion that many conspiracy theorists readily subscribe to. In fact, one of their books on the Kennedy assassination, by Alan Weberman and Michael Canfield, is specifically titled
Coup d’État in America
. Kennedy’s assassination, writes conspiracy writer James H. Fetzer, could very well have been “the result of a coup d’état involving the CIA, the mob, anti-Castro Cubans, and powerful politicians, such as LBJ, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover, fully financed by Texas oil men and elements of the military-industrial complex.”
¹⁶
“There can be no doubts,” conspiracy author L. Fletcher Prouty writes, that the Kennedy assassination “was the result of a coup d’état.”
¹⁷
Conspiracy icon Vincent Salandria concludes that “the killing of Kennedy represented a
coup d’état
.”
¹⁸
I suppose that since a coup d’état is defined as a sudden, unconstitutional change of state policy and leadership “by a group of persons in authority,” a coup would actually be required in order to pull off the massive conspiracy contemplated by conspiracy theorists; that is, you couldn’t even have a coup without the involvement, cooperation, and complicity of groups like the FBI, CIA, and military-industrial complex.

In addition to the fact that the aforementioned groups and people would find it impossible to agree on who should be seated where at a presidential swearing-in ceremony, much less on how, when, and where to murder the president, what the conspiracy theorists fail to realize is that there is absolutely no history of coup d’états in America. They are talking about the United States of America, the most powerful, democratic, and economically stable country in the world, as if it were no different from Nicaragua or Tanzania—in effect, comparing us with banana republics and Third World countries whose weak, vulnerable, undemocratic, and economically unstable conditions lend themselves to, and are fertile soil for, one coup after another. For instance, in the year Kennedy was killed alone, there were attempted but unsuccessful coups in Argentina and Turkey and successful coups in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, South Vietnam, (Republic), Iraq, Syria, Congo (Brazzaville), and Tanzania.
¹⁹