Reclaiming History (8 page)

The supreme irony about the Kennedy assassination is that although belief in a conspiracy knows no ideological or political boundaries, most conspiracy theorists I have met look up to Kennedy and his legacy, and many revere him. How very odd, then, that so many of them have virtually dedicated their lives to exonerating the man who killed their hero. To counter the incontrovertible evidence pointing to the guilt of the person who cold-bloodedly murdered Kennedy, they come up with extraordinary and often ludicrous arguments. They defend Oswald with a protective passion normally reserved only for one’s immediate family. Indeed, in their mind, everyone (
any
person or group will do, for them) other than Oswald is responsible for Kennedy’s death. Obviously, the primary motivation of the conspiracy theorists is not to defend Oswald but to attack the Warren Commission, but in the process they go completely overboard in defending Lee Harvey Oswald the person.

But the very best testament to the validity of the Warren Commission’s findings is that after an unrelenting, close to forty-five-year effort, the Commission’s fiercest critics have not been able to produce
any new credible evidence
that would in any way justify a different conclusion.

No Warren Commission critic is more venerated by the conspiracy community than the late, legendary Harold Weisberg. Nor has any been remotely as prolific; Weisberg wrote an astonishing eight books on the case. By common consensus, Weisberg did more research on the assassination and accumulated more documents pertaining to the assassination (sixty file cabinets containing a quarter of a million pages as a result of a great many Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests and thirteen separate FOIA lawsuits)
⁸²
than any other human. His farm home in Frederick, Maryland, was a mecca to which nearly all serious conspiracy theorists eventually visited to pay homage and browse through his voluminous Kennedy-assassination basement library. As his friend and fellow researcher James Tague said, “Harold spent over 35 years, often seven days a week, in his quest for the truth in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”
⁸³
Always believing there was a massive federal effort to “whitewash” (the title of his first book on the assassination in 1965) the facts of Kennedy’s murder for the American public, and to prevent researchers like himself from finding out what really happened, Weisberg writes on the last page of his third book on the assassination (
Oswald in New Orleans
) that for the first time he saw “the shadow of a happy ending.” Till the end, he still believed that there was a conspiracy in the assassination, but candidly acknowledged to me in 1999, after devoting much of his life to the case, that “much as it looks like Oswald was some kind of agent for somebody,
I have not found a shred of evidence to support it
, and he never had an extra penny, so he had no loot from being an agent.”
⁸⁴

The vast conspiracy community, which disbelieves everything in the Warren Report except the page numbers, should (but won’t) be influenced in their thinking by such a dramatic admission from their most esteemed titan,
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one who relentlessly, obsessively and, as opposed to most of his peers, honestly put every aspect of the case under a microscope for almost four decades. Instead of spending literally thousands of their hours “seeing” traces, hints, and ephemeral shadows of a conspiracy from plain and unambiguous conduct and events, they should realize, as painful as it may be to them, that sometimes things are exactly as they appear to be, and nothing more. Even Sigmund Freud—celebrated for his ability to find the hidden meaning of dreams—noted that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Not the smallest speck of evidence has ever surfaced that any of the conspiracy community’s favorite groups (CIA, mob, etc.) was involved, in any way, in the assassination. Not only the Warren Commission, but the HSCA came to the same conclusion. Moreover, the idea itself overtaxes credulity. The very thought of CIA officials sitting around a conference table at their Langley, Virginia, headquarters, or the heads of the Mafia families gathering at a summit meeting in the Adirondacks, or the captains of industry, like the presidents of General Motors, IBM, Lockheed, and so on, meeting clandestinely with America’s top military leaders (Oliver Stone’s “military-industrial complex”) to actually plot the murder of the president of the United States, is much too far-fetched and preposterous on its face for even a Robert Ludlum novel. But conspiracy theorists, as suspicious as a cat in a new home, find occurrences and events everywhere that feed their suspicions and their already strong predilection to believe that the official version is wrong. However, as
Newsweek
magazine pointed out, “If
any
moment in history were to be scrutinized with the obsessiveness focused on 12:30 p.m., November 22, 1963, you could come up with weird coincidences, hidden connections, terrifying portents.”
⁸⁵

To create something out of nothing requires considerable powers of imagination, and the conspiracy theorists have indeed soared on the wings of their dreams, wishes, and fantasies. As writer Joe Patoski says, “They have accepted all supposed evidence that supports their thesis, no matter how shaky, and ignored all evidence that undermines it, no matter how certain.” Any district attorney or police detective in the country will tell you that contrary to literature and the big screen—where murder cases are eventually all wrapped up neatly—in virtually every criminal case with any complexity to it at all, there are unexplained discrepancies, unanswered questions, things that don’t quite fit. And if these cases were put under the high-powered microscope the Kennedy assassination was, there would be even more. That’s true because of the nature of life. Things don’t happen in life with mathematical precision and in apple-pie order. As Walter Cronkite put it in a June 27, 1967, CBS special on the assassination, “Only in fiction do we find all the loose ends neatly tied. Real life is not all that tidy.”
⁸⁶

Law enforcement veterans will also tell you that because of the fallibility of human beings, it is routine, for instance, for five witnesses to observe the same robbery yet give five different physical descriptions of the robber, and for even their own experts to make errors (in forensic analysis of blood, hair, fingerprints, etc.) that are caught and proved to be errors by other experts. Ignoring these realities, the almost unwavering modus operandi of the conspiracy theorists in this case has been to focus only on the inevitable discrepancies and inconsistencies arising out of the statements and work of hundreds upon hundreds of people, as if the discrepancies themselves prove a conspiracy, never bothering to tell their readers, number one, what they believe precisely did happen, and number two, what solid and irrefutable evidence they have to prove it. I mean, do discrepancies and inconsistencies add up to life as we know it, or to conspiracy, as the theorists would want us to believe?

The conspiracy community regularly seizes on one slip of the tongue, misunderstanding, or slight discrepancy to defeat twenty pieces of solid evidence; accepts one witness of theirs, even if he or she is a provable nut, as being far more credible than ten normal witnesses on the other side; treats rumors, even questions, as the equivalent of proof; leaps from the most minuscule of discoveries to the grandest of conclusions; and insists, as the late lawyer Louis Nizer once observed, that the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained.

All humans make mistakes. But there is no room or allowance in the fevered world of conspiracy theorists for mistakes, human errors, anomalies, or plain incompetence, though the latter, from the highest levels on down, is endemic in our society. Every single piece of evidence that isn’t 100 percent consistent with all the other evidence pointing toward Oswald’s guilt and the absence of a conspiracy is by itself proof of Oswald’s innocence and the existence of a conspiracy. There is also no such thing for these people as a coincidence. With both feet planted firmly in the air, the conspiracy theorists have created a cottage industry that thrives to this very day, and whose hallmark, with noted exceptions, has been absurdity and silliness. Believe it or not, a conspiracy theory that was floating around in the conspiracy community for a time was that the assassin of JFK was really the Secret Service agent driving the presidential limousine, who turned around in his seat (while his fellow agent in the passenger seat leaned over and steered the car for him) and shot Kennedy at point-blank range. Despite the absurdity of their allegations and the total lack of evidence to support their charges, the conspiracy theorists have not only convinced the vast majority of Americans that the Warren Commission was wrong, but have succeeded in convincing virtually all Americans that there will never be a satisfactory resolution of this case.
Indeed, this is even the belief of those who agree that Oswald killed Kennedy and he acted alone
. One example of this latter group is Dan Rather, who says that people will be talking about the assassination “a hundred years from now, a thousand years from now, in somewhat the same way people discuss ‘The Iliad.’ Different people read Homer’s description of the wars and come to different conclusions, and so shall it be with much about Kennedy’s death.”
⁸⁷
Author Bob Katz seconds Rather when he states what has become the conventional wisdom: “The truth in this case lies buried forever. The unsolved murder of the twentieth century has entered the realm of myth.”
⁸⁸

But I don’t believe for one moment that the truth in this case has been buried forever or that there
has
to be substantial questions about this case for thousands of years to come. If I did, I would never have started working on this book, which has consumed so many years of my life. I firmly believe that the evidence in this case enables all sensible people who look at it to be completely satisfied as to exactly what happened.

I want to assure the readers of this book that I commenced my investigation of this case with an open mind. But after being exposed to the evidence, I have become satisfied beyond
all
doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, and beyond all
reasonable
doubt that he acted alone. I am very confident that the overwhelming majority of objective readers of this book will end up feeling the same way.

As one gets further into this book and starts to learn more about Oswald, it will become increasingly obvious that if any group such as the CIA or organized crime had wanted to kill the president, the unreliable and unpredictable loner and loser Lee Harvey Oswald would have been the last man on earth whom it would have entrusted with such a monumental undertaking.

A
ny reader of this book has to be struck by three things, one of which is its abnormal length.
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In defense of its length, in addition to the point I made previously that conspiracy theorists have transformed Kennedy’s murder into the most complex murder case ever, I would remind the reader that more words have been written about Kennedy’s assassination than any other single, one-day event in history. Obviously, more words have been written about Christ, but not about his life and death, since so very little is known. Instead, they have been written mostly about the ramifications of his life and death and their profound influence on history. The scope and breadth of issues flowing from the Kennedy assassination are so enormous that typically authors write entire books on just one aspect of the case alone, such as organized crime, or the CIA, or Castro, or Jack Ruby, or Oswald’s guilt or innocence in Kennedy’s murder, or the murder of Officer Tippit, or the prosecution of Clay Shaw in New Orleans for Kennedy’s murder, or the mind of Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Warren Commission, et cetera, et cetera.

When looked upon in the above light, and with my objective being to compress the essence of the vast and limitless words and literature on the assassination into one single volume, one could possibly say about the seemingly inordinate length of this book, “Is that all you have to say, Mr. Bugliosi?” On the other hand, I suspect that at some point in their reading of this book, many other readers will say to themselves, “Why does he [yours truly] keep piling one argument upon another to prove his point? He’s already made it twelve ways from Sunday, so why go on?” To those readers I say that the Warren Commission also made its point, and well, over forty years ago, yet today the overwhelming majority of Americans do not accept its conclusion that Oswald acted alone, a great number not even believing he killed Kennedy. Hence, the overkill in this book is historically necessary.

What about the companion CD-ROM of endnotes numbering 954 pages? With forty official volumes, 933 books, and literally hundreds of millions of other words written in newspapers and magazines about the most important murder case in our history, one of my very biggest tasks for you, the reader, was to separate the wheat from the chaff out of the virtually endless allegations, controversies, and issues surrounding the case. I believe I have done this, and it is this wheat, as it were, that constitutes this very long book.
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The endnotes are for the following people: those lay readers who want to know more about a matter in the main text; conspiracy theorists and serious, longtime students of the assassination; and scholars and future historians. To put the material presently in the endnotes into the main body of the text would have substantially slowed down and interrupted the flow of the narrative and interfered with the average reader’s enjoyment of the book. And if the truth be told, and the reader promises not to tell, I had a big inducement to put whatever I could in an endnote. Since the book is already uncommonly long, and therefore heavy, whatever I could put in an endnote helped enable me to put out a book that wasn’t prohibitively long and unmanageable.

Readers might be interested to know that I commenced my work on this book following the London trial in 1986. So I have been working on this book for twenty-one years. Most of the early years were devoted to research, reading, and writing, not interviewing witnesses to fill in the holes, which I did do much of to supplement my continuing reading, writing, and research in later years.