Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination (37 page)

Let me quickly give just a couple pieces of evidence. The murder weapon, a 6.5mm Mannlicher-Carcano, was proven by firearms tests to be the murder weapon. So, one, Oswald owned and possessed the murder weapon. Two, he was the only employee at the Book Depository Building who fled the Book Depository Building after the shooting in Dealey Plaza. Forty-five minutes later he shoots and kills Officer J. D. Tippit of the Dallas police department, who stopped him on the street for questioning.

Half an hour later at the Texas Theatre, he resists arrest by pulling a gun on the arresting officer. During his interrogation over a three-day period, he told one provable lie after another, all of which showed a consciousness of guilt. It’s not even possible for this man to be innocent. I have no doubt that he’s guilty. I’m satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that he acted alone.

People say, “Ruby silenced Oswald for the Mob.” Doesn’t that presuppose that Oswald killed JFK for the Mob? If he hadn’t, there’d be no reason to silence him. Jack Ruby had all types of problems. He had organic brain damage. He’d be the last person to use as a hit man. He loved the Dallas Police Department. He’d hang
out at police headquarters. He loved them. He was a big blabbermouth. Again, you don’t use a blabbermouth as a hit man, constantly going to the Dallas Police Department to talk about things he had heard at his girly club, the Carousel Club. Someone who knew Jack really well, Jack Revell, who was a detective for the Dallas Police Department, told the House Select Committee, “Jack Ruby was a buffoon.” He said, “If Jack Ruby killed Oswald for the Mob, and if he was a member of the Mob, then the Mafia needs someone new to be their recruiting officer.”

Why did he do it? Jack Ruby loved JFK. When I say, “loved JFK,” his psychiatrist also said it, and he wasn’t talking about in a loose layman’s sense but talking about how he literally loved the man. He cried over the assassination weekend, cried constantly over the death of JFK. He thought JFK was the greatest man who was ever born. His sister Eva was there at the time. She moved to L.A., and I used to talk to her from time to time, and this is what she said: “Jack cried harder when Kennedy died than when Ma and Pa died.” He hated Oswald. When he shot him, he said, “Someone had to kill that SOB, and you guys couldn’t do it.” He loved Kennedy. That’s one of the reasons he did what he did.

The second reason: Jack fantasized about being a hero. He used to tell people, “I can dream about the Dallas Police Department being overcome by some terrible bad men, and then I come and I save them.” If you talk to people who knew him at the Carousel Club, you know what they say? “Jack wanted to become a hero.” The prosecutor in his trial told me, “Jack wanted to become a hero.” Several members of the jury said, “Jack wanted to become a hero.” He asked his lawyer, “Where’s the author that’s going to write a big book and a movie about me?” He thought he was going to get a slap on the wrist because he killed the guy who killed the president, and there was all this animus against Oswald. He thought that within a short period of time, he’d be back at the Carousel Club greeting people at the door from all over the world, wanting to shake the hand of the man who killed the man who killed the president. But he was a man of rather low intellect, with a violent temper. He was constantly getting in fights at the Carousel Club. He was not a hit man for the Mob. No evidence. The FBI checked it out. No evidence that he was ever associated with the Mob.

As far as the people are concerned, there’s been a decreasing trust by the American people in their government down through the years, and it all started with the Kennedy assassination and the conspiracy community’s allegation that the US government was concealing the truth from the American people. At the time of the assassination, polls showed that about 76 percent of the American people had trust in their government to do the right thing for them. That number dropped precipitously after the Kennedy assassination, all the way down to 19 percent in the early ’90s. Today I think I’ve heard it’s somewhere around 40 percent, so I don’t think there’s any question that it hurt the American psyche. When you have the trust and the confidence of the American people in their government undermined to the extent that they actually believe, in effect, that their government was an accessory after the fact to Kennedy’s murder—in the sense that the government was concealing the truth to protect those involved—that has to have a deleterious effect on the nation’s psyche that has manifested itself through the years, and that distrust was fortified by subsequent events like Watergate and Iran-Contra. But it all started with the Kennedy assassination.

Now as far as what happened having an effect on history, it’s my belief—no one knows—but we may never have had the Vietnam War, whose cataclysmic consequences resonate to this very day. There’s a substantial division of opinion among Kennedy’s advisors and close associates as to whether he would have gone to war. Whether he would have gone to war is a question whose answer is lost to history. However, let me give you one strong piece of circumstantial evidence pointing to the direction that he would not have gone to war. On October 11, 1963, about a month and a half before the assassination, he issued National Security Action Memorandum number 263, which ordered one thousand American troops in Vietnam home from the 16,500 who were already there, and he wanted them home by the end of the year. Now that may not be dispositive or conclusive, but it certainly shows he was not eager at that point to escalate our involvement in Vietnam. Of course he said contradictory things, but he actually believed at that time, as most American leaders did, in the Domino Theory. They take South Vietnam, and next thing you know they’re at our door ninety miles away in Cuba. It wasn’t real, but
it was perceived to be real at that point. But he said many contradictory things. He talked to people like Sorensen and Schlesinger. They actually heard him say, “Withdrawal is the viable alternative here.”

There are two realities in the Kennedy case. One is that at its core this is a very simple case—not just simple, it’s a
very
simple case at its core. In fact, within hours of the shooting in Dealey Plaza, Dallas law enforcement, I’m talking about the Dallas PD, Dallas Sheriff’s Office, local office of the FBI, they already knew—not believed—they already knew that Oswald had killed Kennedy. Within about a day or so thereafter, when they learned who he was and his background, they were convinced he acted alone. That reality exists at this very moment. This is a very simple case.

However, there’s another reality here: Because of the unceasing and fanatical obsession of thousands of Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists, not just in America but around the world, who put this case under a high-powered microscope and examined every conceivable piece of evidence from every angle, and split hairs and then proceeded to split the split hairs, and made hundreds upon hundreds of allegations, and along the way deliberately distorted the official record, this simple case has been transformed into its present form. What’s that form? It’s now the most complex murder case by far in world history.

One example: In my book I found it necessary in one end note—I’m not talking about the main text now, one end note in manuscript form—to allocate about 120 pages on acoustics, with fifty footnotes. It’s gotten totally out of hand. Right now, there’re many, many people around the country who are looking at some document from the archives or elsewhere for some inconsistency, some discrepancy, some contradiction, something that doesn’t add up, which in their mind equates to conspiracy. When you have thousands of people examining every word and comma of thousands of documents, otherwise intelligent people—now I’m choosing my words carefully again—when it comes to the Kennedy case, they’re certifiably psychotic, and I’ll say that publicly. When you have otherwise intelligent people looking at every word and comma, they can create a lot of mischief. You follow? And that’s precisely what they’ve done.

Now there are many reasons people believe in a conspiracy, but I’ll tell you the main one is the conspiracy theorists. On September 24, 1964, the Warren Commission issued their report. The conspiracy theorists had already been screaming conspiracy since the final bullet had come to rest. So they had about ten months of trying to poison the American public before the report was even issued. But still, when the Warren Commission came out with this report, only 31.6 percent of the American people rejected the findings of the Warren Commission. The majority accepted it. But over the years, and through their constant torrent and blizzard of books, radio and TV talk shows, movies, and college lectures, the shrill voice of the conspiracy theorists finally penetrated the consciousness of the American people and convinced the majority of Americans.

Right now the figure is around 75 percent that Oswald was either a member of a high-level conspiracy or just some patsy who was framed by an elaborate group of conspirators ranging from anti-Castro Cuban exiles to organized crime. I think it was Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister to the Third Reich, who said, “If you push something at someone long enough, eventually they’re going to start buying it, particularly if they’re not exposed to any contrary view.”

An example of how dominant the conspiracy theorists have been is that of the thousand books written on the assassination, I would wager that the percent of pro-conspiracy books is around 95 percent. That’s all they’ve heard basically, and it’s eventually taken its toll. The thing that occupies the American mind more than anything else is not even Oswald’s guilt. But if he is guilty, was there a conspiracy behind him? I can knock that out in about two minutes. That is what you hear people talking about: Conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy—he was part of a conspiracy.

I can summarize that in three points:

(1) The Warren Commission, the FBI, and the House Select Committee all conducted extensive examinations of the evidence in this case and concluded that there was no credible—let me italicize the word “credible”—no
credible
evidence that any of these groups like the CIA or Mob was behind the assassination.

One little footnote to this: In London, Spence was raising all these conspiracy theories and all that, and I told the jury, “Folks, let me tell
you something. I’ll stipulate that three people can keep a secret, but only if two are dead, and here we’re talking about fifty years later not one credible word or syllable has leaked out. Why? Because there’s nothing to leak out.”

(2) There’s no evidence that Oswald ever had any association of any kind whatsoever with any of these groups believed to be behind the assassination—by meeting with them in person, letter, phone, carrier pigeon, it didn’t make any difference. No evidence that he had any association with any of these groups. The FBI covered just about every breath Oswald ever breathed between the moment he came back from the Soviet Union on June 13, 1962, up until the day of the assassination, twenty-five thousand interviews. They found no evidence of any connection between Oswald and any of these groups.

(3) Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that one of these groups—and this is a prodigiously unlikely assumption—decided to kill the president of the United States. Oswald would have been one of the last people on the face of this Earth they would have gotten. Why? He’s not an expert shot; he’s a good shot, not an expert shot. He had a twelve-dollar mail-order rifle. He’s notoriously unreliable, extremely unstable. Here is a guy who defects to the Soviet Union, pre-Gorbachev. Even today, who in the world defects to the Soviet Union? He gets over there. He desperately tries to become a Soviet citizen. They turn him down. What does he do? He slashes his wrists, tries to commit suicide. Just the type of guy—I’m being sarcastic now—just the type of guy the CIA or Mob would want to rely upon to commit the biggest murder in American history.

Let’s take it a step further. Let’s assume that one of these groups for whatever reason wanted to kill the president. They decided they want Oswald to do it. Let’s see where that takes us. I’ll tell you where it takes us. There are two scenarios. I’ll give you the least likely first: After he shoots Kennedy and leaves the building, the least likely thing that would have happened, there would have been a car waiting for him to drive him down to Mexico, Guatemala, or what have you. They, the conspirators, certainly wouldn’t want their hit man to be apprehended and interrogated by the police. That’s the least-likely scenario. The most-likely scenario by far is that, if the CIA or Mob got Oswald to kill Kennedy for them, there would have been a car waiting for him to drive him to his death. You know that would have happened, and yet we know that Oswald’s in the street with thirteen dollars in his pocket trying to flag down buses and cabs. That fact alone tells any rational person that he acted alone.