JFK assassination: was any consensus ever reached as to who actually did it and why?

http://webpages.charter.net/cmvenuti/images/rubyshot.jpg

my guess is that in his warped and desperate mind he thought he would impress the cubans and soviets by killing kennedy, whose administration was ordering attempts on castro's life. he had unsuccessfully attempted a month earlier in mexico city to get a visa to cuba, and even allegedly offered a representative (at the soviet embassy if i remember correctly) to kill kennedy.

there are several other strands of evidence and counter-evidence though, and it gets really murky and complicated. depending oon who you believe oswald may have even been manipulated by both pro-castro and castro agents for various reasons, which may or may not have been related to the assassination. who knows?

but the evidence suggests oswald mostly likely killed kennedy, whatever his motivations.

From the Onion

http://www.prouty.org/nixon.html

George Bush Sr. was working for the CIA at the time, dealing with cubans, but that's another story.

I love me some conspiracy theories.

Former Texas first lady Connally dies

By Kelley Shannon, Associated Press Writer
September 2, 2006

AUSTIN, Texas -- Nellie Connally, the former Texas first lady who was riding in President Kennedy's limousine when he was assassinated, has died, a family friend said Saturday. The 87-year-old was the last living person who had been part of that fateful Dallas drive.

Connally, the widow of former Gov. John Connally, died late Friday of natural causes at an Austin assisted living center, said Julian Read, who served as the governor's press secretary in the 1960s.

As the limousine carrying the Connallys and the Kennedys wound its way through the friendly crowd in downtown Dallas, Nellie Connally turned to President Kennedy, who was in a seat behind her, and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you."

Almost immediately, she heard the first of what she later concluded were three gunshots in quick succession. A wounded John Connally slumped after the second shot, and, "I never looked back again. I was just trying to take care of him," she said.

She later said the most enduring image of that day was the bloodstained roses.

"It's the image of yellow roses and red roses and blood all over the car ... all over us," she said in a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. "I'll never forget it. ... It was so quick and so short, so potent."

Read said Connally had been sitting at her desk writing thank-you notes when she died.

"She has been extremely active and vital the past few days and weeks," he said. "It's a shock to all of us."

In 2003, she published a photo-filled book -- "From Love Field: Our Final Hours with President John F. Kennedy" -- based on 22 pages of handwritten notes she compiled about a week after the assassination and rediscovered in 1996.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Connally "the epitome of graciousness."

"Long before she was propelled into the national spotlight from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, she was a Texas icon," Perry said in a statement.

Connally, formerly Nellie Brill, met her husband at the University of Texas in Austin, and they married on Dec. 21, 1940.

John Connally managed several political campaigns for fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, including his 1964 presidential campaign. Connally was elected Texas governor as a Democrat in 1962 and won re-election twice, serving three two-year terms.

He was treasury secretary in the Nixon administration and ran for president as a Republican in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected. John Connally died in 1993.

Nellie Connally helped raise money for many charities. In 1989, Richard Nixon, Barbara Walters and Donald Trump turned out for a gala to honor her and raise money for diabetes research.

"I've never known a woman with Nellie's courage, compassion and character," Walters said. "For all her ups and downs, I've never heard a self-pitying word from her."

John and Nellie Connally suffered financial difficulties after he left office. Private business ventures after 1980 were less successful than John Connally's career as a politician and dealmaking Houston lawyer. An oil company in which he invested got into trouble, and $200 million worth of real estate projects went sour, and he ended up filing for bankruptcy.

Nellie Connally served on the Board of Visitors of The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center since 1984, and a fund in her name raised millions for research and patient programs. The Houston hospital's center for breast cancer also is named for Connally, a survivor of the disease for more than 15 years.

About a year ago, Connally moved back to Austin after decades in Houston.

Survivors include her daughter, Sharon Connally Ammann, two sons, John B. Connally III and Mark Connally, eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Funeral services are pending. She is to be buried near her late husband in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.

There was a documentary, maybe a couple of years ago, that pretty convincingly dealt with every doubt/conspiracy theory including the 'magic bullet' one. IIRC it was to do with the fact that the seats at the back were higher than the seats at the front, and that the front of the car was more narrow at the front. Or something. Anyway, by the end of the documentary I was completely won over to the Oswald-acting-along side.

1. Oswald did it and he was a lone gunman, without any assistance whatsoever.

2. Oswald was a patsy and INSERT CONSPIRACY HERE did it.

Why not

3. Oswald was solely responsible for physically shooting Kennedy, but he was aided/abetted/instructed in doing so by party or parties unknown.

I've always thought that this was the most likely explanation.

That's kinda what I believe too. With the CIA & FBI knowing all about it, but looking the other way.

wasn't like 30 minutes of Stone's JFK spent on this?

This documentary (that I mentioned earlier) looked into that as well, and the gist of it was that there had been so many supergrasses over the past 40 years that it was unthinkable that if the mob had been involved the truth wouldn't have come out by now.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. The conspiracy crowd likes to talk about the body count of mysterious deaths associated with the assassination, but what about the body count of just being a mid-level Mafia soldier in the 1960s? Most of those guys were probably dead or in jail by the mid-70s.

so did Oswald

So then, why did Jack Ruby whack Oswald?

There's a fair amount of errors in Case Closed though, which make it about as useful as the pro-conspiracy books. Posner is a dick forever though for his famous post-9/11 "focus and clarity" editorial in the Wall Street Journal where he reversed his opinion on Bush II and came out in support of him.

Still, I would have liked to have seen of his debates with Vincent Bugliosi.

-- xave (sl...), September 14th, 2006.

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK?

i agree, it's an interesting read.

for me, the most plausible scenario is the one discussed in this book:

Live By the Sword by Gus Russo

it more or less argues for Oswald acting alone, but creates context for his motivations.

here's the forward from the book for good measure.

Kennedy — An Unfinished Life, by Robert Dallek

You could also say much the same about 9/11.

The dude defected to the Soviet Union! Do people forget this? Also, some dude he was in the service with thought he was a fake commie working for the CIA to find real ones.

Kerry Thornley!

Later, the KGB figured that Oswald acted with potential mob help, and that the CIA and FBI didn't care since Kennedy was out of their hair.

Also the dude who wrote a BOOK about Oswald pre assasination!

Well, there's no convincing evidence for string theory, yet, and we're not giving up on that.

Berating conspiracy theorists for lacking evidence has always struck me as rather unscientific. You invent hypotheses and then gather evidence, right?, not the other way around. If you totally disregard hypotheses that lack evidence, no one would ever gather evidence and there'd be a moratorium on new ideas.

It's only been sixty years, and that's nuthin. Sometimes it takes centuries to solve a murder.

however, Squirrel Police OTFM about the scientific method

http://www.btinternet.com/~meirionhughes/Pub/images/jfk-peski.gif

45 years ago today

white album 40 yrs old vs JFK assassination 45 yrs old POLL

In re: thread title question. The Warren Commission Report was meant to lay the basis for a national consensus.

Obv it failed in its stated purpose. But it came close enough that it achieved its major unstated purpose, which was to quell the national grief and anger and prevent it from spilling into irrational mob action.

JFK was an inside job - wake up, sheeple!

Or maybe it wasn't and I'm mixing it up with that ninety-one one thing, I'm not sure.

the gunman is shooting from inside his head!

thats deep

The Wrong Guy, a dark comedy starring Dave Foley, includes a scene of a conspiracy theorist claiming no bullet struck Kennedy, insisting "his head just did that", and calls it "The No Bullet Theory".

OMG! Years later, people constructed urban legends based on that very JFK fact!

I forgot that the Weekly World News is no more.

this should be a poll

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m11iuxaeNV1qkuou9o1_1280.jpg

well, that's certainly something.

its sad he was presidetn

fighting morbid temptation to post on 'ws of shame' thread

the exit hole is obscured

what is that photo? it cant be genuine as nobody was that close at that particular moment

if it weren't for the fact that it occurred during JFK's assassination, that photo would be remembered as the best ass photo for a First Lady.

JFK looks like he's hiding from the wrath of Jackie's ass.

what is that photo? it cant be genuine as nobody was that close at that particular moment

― PSOD (Ste), Saturday, April 14, 2012 4:50 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, this. it doesn't trip any photoshopping wires for me. what's the story? according to google, this image only shows up on tumblrs.

I think it's fake, prob from a movie set or something?

I hate that I had to watch the zapruder film again, but by the time jackie is in that position, there's already a secret service dude clinging on the rear

I think I see 'spring break 2009' tattooed on her leg

jfk would have looked a lot messier than that tbbh

man, wikipedia shows too much

I watched the old James Woods film True Believer last night. The character on whom the main story hinges adamantly believes that AT & T was behind the Kennedy assassination. Yes, it's played for laughs.

I love that movie.

could it be a cindy sherman piece?

that looks like a mannequin of jfk

Onlookers wearing bell bottoms

J Kennedy OnASSis

I think it's fake, prob from a movie set or something?

― swaghand (dayo), Saturday, April 14, 2012 5:03 PM Bookmark

Yeah, this. I'm thinking of Ant Farm's The Eternal Frame but I don't know that film well enough to be able to conclusively say if this is from that or not.

but it's clearly not the real thing, I mean everybody seems so nonchalant and the people in the background are in bell-bottoms for pete's sake.

They got the Dealey Plaza part right.

But that SS agent looks nothing like Clint Eastwood, sorry try again.

the real lee harvey oswald

http://www.jfk-online.com/jones.jpg

Is or isn't it fake? Someone get hold of Oliver Stone, we need to get to the mystery of this bottom. I mean, the bottom of this mystery.

salon runs these insane jfk conspiracy pieces every month or so. it's pretty hard to fathom why anyone still takes this stuff seriously.

"Back and to the left, back and to the left, move that ass girl back and to the left"

some good stuff here i didn't know. pretty scary imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kyjK214s-4

http://doughallstudio.com/1975-the-eternal-frame/the-eternal-frame/3261754

Frame from The Eternal Frame, mentioned above. Seems very possible this could be the source of the "mystery jpg." They performed it, I think, 10 or 12 times in one day, on the hour - - so there will inevitably be details that don't match.

http://doughallstudio.com/1975-the-eternal-frame/the-eternal-frame/3261754

from recent article on robert caro:

"I get letters, constantly, saying, 'I see your book's coming. I hope you're going to prove in this book that LBJ did it,"' the award-winning and ongoing biographer of Lyndon Johnson says during a recent interview at his midtown Manhattan office. "Did it," as in killed President Kennedy.

"When I talk at colleges, you can hardly have a lecture or a speech without one of the first questions being, 'Are you going to prove that Johnson did it?' Or, 'Are you going to show that Johnson was involved in it?' And when you say Johnson had nothing to with it, you can feel the audience doesn't accept it. You lose your audience."

^^^ truly sad assessment IMO.

honestly there are probably more unanswered questions about the lincoln assassination than the JFK assassination.

blame Ollie Stone and Donald Sutherland.

it was a national obsession well before that movie, wasn't it?

ever since rush to judgment at the very least. alot of one star reviews on amazon for the new one due to caro 'covering up lbj's role in the assasination'.

"I get letters, constantly, saying, 'I see your book's coming. I hope you're going to prove in this book that LBJ did it,"' the award-winning and ongoing biographer of Lyndon Johnson says during a recent interview at his midtown Manhattan office. "Did it," as in killed President Kennedy.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, May 7, 2012 7:59 PM (30 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tbf this would be p rad

I'm about three-quarters of the way through Bugliosi's JFK book. (The shorter of the two.) It's not an obsession or anything--I found it cheap and started reading to kill time the same day, kept on going. He's at the other end of the spectrum from the conspiracists: believes Oswald acted completely alone, proceeds from there. So you get detailed accounts of Jack Ruby, patriot, traipsing around Dallas as he works through his extreme grief over the president's assassination.

i've been reading about it since i was a teenager, and i've never stumbled on anything that convinced me it was anything but a long string of crazy coincidences -- like most other assassinations.

two major points the anti-conspiracists make:

1. the motorcade hadn't initially been scheduled to go through dealey plaza or anywhere else where anyone could have gotten a shot at kennedy, but the route was rescheduled at the last minute at the insistence of texas governor john connally. so in order for there to be a conspiracy, presumably he'd have to be in on it -- which is highly unlikely, since HE was also shot.

2. jack ruby left his dog in the car when he parked outside dallas police HQ, which indicates that he hadn't pre-meditated shooting oswald. (don't worry, someone rescued the dog.)

I guess I've been so conditioned to view Ruby as this shadowy, sinister figure that Bugliosi's portrayal of him is jarring. But my own knowledge of whatever happened is based on maybe three or four sources--one of them, yes, Stone's film, which I took as a synthesis of lots of other conspiracy theories--and various stray bits, so for all I know, it's just as valid as the more common version of Ruby.

1. he rescheduled the route specifically for that reason, got shot by accident OR to prove his loyalty to the conspiracy

2. he brought the dog because he knew someone would find it that way and rescue it, he couldn't just leave it locked up at home

DO YOU SEE

also i hope caro means "that one crazy guy in the audience" when he says "audience" and not, you know, the audience

don't get me wrong, i can totally understand the lasting skepticism about the assassination for ppl who lived through it, espec given the total mindfuck oh-god-is-this-actually-happening weirdness of ruby shooting oswald only two days later. but it's telling that so much conspiracy theory seems to rely way heavily on a sentimentalized version of JFK as the dude who was gonna save us all (rather than as the practical politico and seasoned cold war guy he was).

jack ruby left his dog in the car when he parked outside dallas police HQ, which indicates that he hadn't pre-meditated shooting oswald. (don't worry, someone rescued the dog.)

I love the bit in Slacker with the Conspiracy A-Go-Go guy who won't stop talking about Ruby's dog.

it was like Murder on the Orient Express; everybody did it.

Appreciate JFK's work on the missile crisis, but y'know, chickens coming home to roost.

an old professor of mine posted this a few months ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/opinion/the-umbrella-man.html

The JFK assassination doesn't bother me at all from a conspiracy standpoint, but the Oswald assassination does a little bit.

I read the Kerry Thornley biography awhile ago and aside from all the goofy fun-time beatnik Discordianism it's good into what it was like being on the receiving end of Garrison's witch hunt of an investigation.

I also think some sketchy/illegal shit might have gone down in the days afterward, when the CIA realizes that wackadoodle dude they were keeping tabs on just killed the President. xp

I remember when JFK had just come out, Mad Magazine did a piece about "less popular theories on the JFK assasination", or something like that. My favourites were "Zapruder had a gun in his camera", and "Aristoteles Onassis killed JFK so he could marry Jackie". I wonder if there are some conspiracy nuts out there who actually believe in one of those?

Okay, holy shit, apparently there actually are some theories that say Onassis had Kennedy killed, though not because he wanted to marry Jackie. And he had Robert Kennedy assassinated too.

The Rolling Stones contributed a rather specious conspiracy theory.

http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/LHO.html

"Zapruder had a gun in his camera"

― Tuomas, Tuesday, May 8, 2012 5:21 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hah

that's my favorite one

It was the guy from scanners in the trunk of the limo

i figure it was the mob using oswald
― disappointing goth fest line-up (orion), Wednesday, September 13, 2006 7:08 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i still stand by this (to the extent that i give the JFK assassination any thought at all). JFK was whacked.

so then the mob whacked oswald to keep him quiet - they must have had a lot of faith in jack ruby. also amazed w/ all the fbi sweeps of mob dudes in the late 70s and early 80s everyone kept their mouth shut about it.

i would like there to be a conspiracy as much as anyone. iirc that was the big elephant-in-the-room subplot of norman mailer's "harlot's ghost". they called the jfk file at the CIA "the crown jewels" in it. and i really liked the story james ellroy put together in the american tabloid trilogy.

but as chuck d said - in a very different original sense - 'Man to man/ I don't know if they can/ From what I know/ The parts don't fit'

it is hard for me to believe that our gov't couldn't something so trivial as watergate secret but they've kept the lid on jfk all this time

Fun and games, man. Fun and games.

yeah personally i find ufo / bermuda triangle / number stations stuff much more fun, jfk assassination is just depressing

it is hard for me to believe that our gov't couldn't something so trivial as watergate secret but they've kept the lid on jfk all this time

Even though I find aspects of the conspiracy argument compelling--and aspects of the lone-gunman argument baffling--to me this has always been the strongest argument for Oswald acting alone: most individuals have a hard time keeping a secret, and the idea that 10 or 50 or 100 could keep one for an open-ended period of time seems virtually unthinkable.

esp a secret THIS BIG that involves the cia, fbi and mafia working in collusion, three groups of people we know are actually quite bad at keeping secrets ... will be very interested to see what gets redacted in 2017 though when the rest of the files come out

funny how Ollie Stone had a character raise that same counterargumenet only to get shouted again.

i've never read a dedicated book so i basically know nothing but i always assumed that the assassination was a zeitgeist thing: a spirit of hate for kennedy floating thickly around, and this weird insecure perennial patsy who wanted to be Part Of History hanging out in a series of rooms drinking while people he wanted to impress grumbled SOMEONE SHOULD SHOOT THE SONUVABITCH. when there's evidence that lbj or dick helms or whoever are Covering Stuff Up i suspect it's not secrets about dealey plaza they're concealing but secrets about the state of the union 1963. (i like the delivery in stone's nixon of "i don't think you understand how much people hate kennedy down here!") but most of that stuff isn't even secret at this point. idk. for me all the lessons that ought to be learned from the assassination have to do with the way the spirit of a time can become so pressurized and toxic that it suddenly spurts out some violence (which then begets violence, which then etc, and suddenly you have The Sixties). the national need to believe in a conspiracy seems like a fear of history: surely someone else must have done this to us. so basically i'm in mick jagger's camp.

fear of history, fear of random universe, think you nailed it there

^^^this, plus also treasure maps and secret doors for the next generation

http://www.everywoodyallenmovie.com/images/crimes-and-misdemeanors-7.jpg

"Who did this terrible thing to our city? My GOD it was me!"

http://www.everywoodyallenmovie.com/images/crimes-and-misdemeanors-7.jpg

ok just imagine Alan Alda playing X, sitting on that bench with Kevin Costner.

haha i thought that was mike love for a second b/c i'm listening to the beach boys thread in another tab and i was like, yeah, i could get behind the idea that mike love masterminded the kennedy assassination

http://pdxretro.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Mike-love-yng1.jpg

"A devastating national trauma will cause people to drown their sorrows in refreshing songs about surf, sun and fun... We'll make millions, if everyone can just keep quiet."

http://cdn2.dailycaller.com/2011/05/jfk.jpg

"I loved like the warmth of the sun / Within me at night / It won't ever die."

i heard crosby stills and nash did it

before they could end the vietnam war ... they had to start it

"everywoodyallenmovie.com" an important resource of which i was previously unaware

i heard crosby stills and nash did it

Grassy knoll and Oswald's schemin'
THREE SHOT IN MO-TOR-CADE

this summer I hear the gunning
Jack dead in DEALEY-O

I like this new (?) pop-music-centric conspiracy theory. Too bad Paul McCartney hadn't died yet - one of his doubles would fit the pattern perfectly.

funny how Ollie Stone had a character raise that same counterargumenet only to get shouted again.

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

stone in the director's cut later discredited this character when he tried to set up garrison in a gay bathroom sting!

The other thing about the assassination, beyond it exerting a continuing fascination-magnetism in the American psyche, etc., is that it's never one HUNDRED percent easy to dismiss conspiracy theories, because of everything else that it turned out the government really was doing, e.g. COINTELPRO, which is partially on record but still mostly redacted and/or classified. Like, it's a ripe atmosphere for conspiracy theories when you have actual conspiracies going on, and everybody (since the, what, early 70s?) now knows at least the outlines of it.

Totally. CIA, mafia, they were all off the freaking chain as far as over-extending their reach, and it's not like batshit stuff didn't really happen.

But I agree that the parties involved are no known for their secret-keeping abilities, so single gunman is still the most rational theory that holds any water.

Part of me does love the conspiracy though. Oswald was such a fuckin mook

some good stuff here i didn't know. pretty scary imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kyjK214s-4

― piscesx, Wednesday, April 18, 2012 7:44 AM

hmmmmm - http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/nagell1.htm

parallax view is dope tho

pakula is dope

you're referring, i believe, to chairing the special operations group. as vice president. as you know, that was... unique. not so much an operation as... an organic phenomenon. it grew. changed shape. it developed... appetites. it's not unusual in such cases that things are not committed to paper. that could be very embarrassing!

it's a shame you didn't take similar precautions, dick!

xp re pakula: if you like wide angle shots of soul deadening 70s corporate architecture, he's your go to man

xp re pakula: if you like wide angle shots of soul deadening 70s corporate architecture, he's your go to man

He was your go-to guy for that sort of thing. Rollover is practically a filmed catalog of office interiors and exteriors.

The other thing about the assassination, beyond it exerting a continuing fascination-magnetism in the American psyche, etc., is that it's never one HUNDRED percent easy to dismiss conspiracy theories, because of everything else that it turned out the government really was doing, e.g. COINTELPRO, which is partially on record but still mostly redacted and/or classified. Like, it's a ripe atmosphere for conspiracy theories when you have actual conspiracies going on, and everybody (since the, what, early 70s?) now knows at least the outlines of it.

― Doctor Casino, Tuesday, May 8, 2012 7:19 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally. CIA, mafia, they were all off the freaking chain as far as over-extending their reach, and it's not like batshit stuff didn't really happen.

But I agree that the parties involved are no known for their secret-keeping abilities, so single gunman is still the most rational theory that holds any water.

Part of me does love the conspiracy though. Oswald was such a fuckin mook

― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl), Tuesday, May 8, 2012 7:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM, not to mention the Castro assassination plots the CIA kept from the Warren Commission. Oswald may have acted alone, but he wasn't living in a vacuum.

I heard some Robert MacNeil-produced radio hour on WNYC last night, and damn it's gonna be quite a week for geezer hagiography!

even redoubtable lib anchors invite experts to gas off about CAMELOT.

Let's not give the Goodwins more employment.

um you guys Frontline is doing like 2 hours on Lee Harvey Oswald tomorrow night (I think)!

someone less lazy than me can google for the factual information

I understand Arthur Schlesinger is going to be briefly resurrected to do some talk shows.

Surely LIFE will publish souvenir editions of Krassner's "The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book"

:D

"Lemme at that throat wound, Lady Bird!"

ahahah

i still get a kick out of that damn story.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/jfk-warmonger/

^^^ most assuredly do not endorse this dude's views in general or even all of that article but it's kind of nice to see someone stating the obvious in the face of a million sentimental liberals portraying JFK as a closet peacenik who was going to Save Us All. (surely the only thing oliver stone and arthur schlesinger could find to agree on...)

Was reading about Nellie Connally's recollection of 11/22:

• Sen. Ralph Yarborough yelling at everyone, getting pissy because he had to ride in the same car as LBJ.

• The governor not being told of JFK's death until that Sunday.

• Parkland calming down after everyone's gone back to Washington until Sunday when they bring Oswald in. "You brought the man who shot my husband here?"

Fun weekend, it sounds like.

was there ever proven to be anything offically 'fishy' about Nixon flying out of Dallas the same day or was that just, you know, coincidence?

he had to return a movie

The Oswald assassination bothers me a little bit.

yeah it bothered Jackie too.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115632/castros-reaction-jfk-assassination

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DD2KWCimBQ

do any of the books about this talk about how it's weird that zapruder didn't even flinch when the final shot happened? did he have really bad eyesight or something

tripod?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Sitzman

Two recent JFK bits from ye olde Gawker network blogs:

http://io9.com/artist-discovers-unseen-color-photos-of-jfks-final-mom-1465070605

http://gizmodo.com/stabilized-footage-of-the-jfk-assassination-is-unsettli-1465136863

That second one is especially cool but unsettling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqk3sdfXFkc

least zapruder didn't have an iphone

http://i.imgur.com/fVAcL3K.jpg

hey, I have a black umbrella with me today, total coincidence.

http://observer.com/2013/11/who-killed-jfk-and-why-do-we-want-to-keep-reading-about-him-or-her-or-them-the-enduring-charm-of-kennedy-conspiracy-books/

my friend wrote this, it's great and has an absolutely stupendous opening paragraph

thinking i really missed the boat by not writing a kennedy book to release this quarter

^^^

We're reading echoes. ECHOES.

slapping together a whole book of "alternate history" to sell to fantasizing olds is so ugh

Skimming the book to see how Mr. Greenfield maneuvers Kennedy through civil rights (a bill dies in Congress in ’64, but Kennedy manages to sign a voting rights act in his second term) and Vietnam (he withdraws U.S. forces)

of course he does

Known to millions simply by her middle name, Kennedy helped bring the cutting edge of culture into our living rooms during the 1990s through her outrageous segments as an MTV VJ, host of Alternative Nation, and on-the-spot correspondent for MTV News. She interviewed everyone from fame-averse Seattle rock musicians to vapid celebrities and politicians, asking the taboo questions no one else would as she navigated between true artists and phony poseurs. In The Kennedy Chronicles, she gives us a backstage pass at the last golden years of the cable network that defined a generation.

ya done shot the rong Kennedy

I have zero doubt there was a conspiracy, and the truth is probably as nutty as (but different from) Oliver Stone's.

Every time i see a picture of him and Jackie in the limo, I think about how he's the one guy who's missed out on all this.

ha this is great:

The morning he was killed, the president turned to his wife and quipped, “You know, we’re heading into nut country.” Oswald, in addition to being too small, was not even the right kind of nut—a poor, self-educated, left-leaning kook who couldn’t hold down a job in a city of rich, white racists who were furious with the president.

always nice to see the right wing counter-ritual of "oswald was a communist" at these times

I always remember him as a resident of Texas.

also as the guy who mighta gone in this wrecka stowe that morning

http://frontrow.dmagazine.com/2013/11/the-oak-cliff-record-store-that-was-dragged-into-the-jfk-assassination-saga-survives/

wtf that is the second time today someone has made a wrecka stow joke/ref to me

Jeez, right-wingers are still doing this?? Even when I was a child and every union member and FDR fan was a " Communist" I didn't even hear that one. I knew he was a communist but also a really angry and anti-social loner. You're missing a lot of history if you avoid Oswald.

One of my favorite anti-communists, Fred Schwarz, blamed Maoism for it. Sounds crazy now.

TV coverage is blessedly conspiracist-free - think of all the people who would be hurt and offended.

but TV coverage is not pomp or fatuity free, alas

hey that's a great article, thanks Morbs xxxp

here we go, "new footage"

http://www.thewrap.com/jfk-assassination-new-footage-producer-stephen-bowen-lee-harvey-oswald

i wonder if pruitt taylor vince and vincent d'onofrio will be in the footage

i used to have arguments with a mate of mine about whether 9/11 was a conspiracy or not. i didnt think it was and he did as he'd recently seen "zeitgeist" and was now all about 9/11 being a conspiracy. then he would ask, "did you think the kennedy assassination was a conspiracy?". id say "yeah i think its likely" and then i was hit with "ahhh well if the US government would do that why wouldnt something like 9/11 be a conspiracy??" GROAN

well there actually are precedents for political leaders being killed by conspiracies, there's not really any precedent for a conspiracy as airtight and leak-proof as a government-planned 9/11 would have had to be. oh and plus there is actually no evidence at all that 9/11 was a conspiracy.

rip capnlorax

the lincoln assassination was a conspiracy: booth and five of his friends.

yes, incl the one who stabbed Seward.

is anyone watchin the CBS News webcast from 11/22/63?

I feel like it's been on for 50 years the entire month of November

Sunday morning w/ Jack Ruby could be innaresting

there are some plausible theories that booth had connections to the confederate secret service.

I wonder if there are any other interesting comparisons one could make between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations.

Meryl Streep showed interest in playing the heroes in each film adaptation.

GARFIELD was SHOT by an ASSAILANT in a TRAIN STATION while MCKINLEY was SHOT by an ASSAILANT STATIONED in a TRAIN of PEOPLE.

Time for FR33M4$0RY!!!!

I'm watching the CBS coverage from Saturday morning, and Marvin Kalb said, I think, that words explicitly referring to the "international Communist conspiracy" were in Oswald's original indictment's text. Then those words disappeared; "we do not know if that was at an official request."

Then Cronkite talked about LBJ's history of heart attacks.

Texas Theatre rescreens double bill, stops "War Is Hell" at point Oswald was arrested

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-texas-theatre--kennedy-assassination-20131122,0,6120322.story#axzz2lTyWzc16

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFM02ItYKbY

pretty clear to me now

comments on that are quality

i used to have arguments with a mate of mine about whether 9/11 was a conspiracy or not.

i'd say a dozen guys from saudi arabia, egypt, and elsewhere spending years traveling around the world plotting three hijackings is the definition of a conspiracy.

or does the word "conspiracy" have to mean "crazypants theory" now?

outlandish conspiracy theories about Reptilians/Illuminati theories exist to make the REAL conspiracies like Chemtrails and the moon landing hoax look ridiculous

The real puppet masters sit back and laugh while we squirm

nicholson baker (and a lot of other people, apparently): the mob did it

http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/dallas-killers-club/

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a38623/cia-jfk-conspiracy-theories/

Man, Libra is looking less and less like fiction as time goes on

it's like Joseph Heller fanfic at this point

Barring a presidential block, the final files will be released on October 26, 2017.

Which is also Hillary Clinton's 70th birthday.

about a year ago I was finally convinced, for once and for all, that LHO did it, and did it alone. but now i've forgotten exactly what convinced me.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/de/fa/0b/defa0bf928955f8117865c2b2b317681.gif

I tried to think of a good President Trump joke but couldn't.

Kennedy's as dead as that crab meat, the government's alive and breathing. You gonna line up with a dead man, Jimbo?

:D

fuck yeah!

about a year ago I was finally convinced, for once and for all, that LHO did it, and did it alone. but now i've forgotten exactly what convinced me.

― rip van wanko, Thursday, January 28, 2016 12:47 AM (1 hour ago)

haha tbh i am a relatively recent convert to the idea that it was a conspiracy and oswald was a patsy. it seems oddly fitting that most everyone who takes an interest in this subject ends up going back and forth from version to version indefinitely.

always loved the house special committee on assassinations' supposedly debunked conclusion: that it was probably a conspiracy, but definitely did not involve any of the parties in an attached comprehensive and ideologically plural list of suggested parties to the kennedy assassination: castro, exiled cubans, the cia, organized crime, the ussr, etc.

...and this guy Bertrand!

that is precisely the point of a long dining table

that is precisely the point of two brothers

http://i.imgur.com/fN02cmA.jpg

RIP Mark Lane

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/us/mark-lane-who-asserted-that-kennedy-was-killed-in-conspiracy-dies-at-89.html

oliver stone says one of the conspirators contacted him after he made his film to confess his role in the assassination:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3762617/JFK-assassination-inside-job-Ex-government-agent-claimed-team-killed-president-remarkable-deathbed-confession-director-Oliver-Stone.html

hearing him talk is weird.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY8fRTLtgzA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FDDuRSgzFk

i guess i never got why he played the innocent card and didn't yell stuff like DEATH TO THE TYRANTS USSR IS #1 or something.

maybe cuz he was innocent?

lol

yeah oswald's behavior after his arrest does not make much sense if you assume he was a sincere castro supporter/wannabe commie hero

i mean did he think he was gonna get away with it?

OTOH if the plan was to fundamentally destabilize the American government, making it seem like a rogue faction within it assassinated the president is a good idea.

Surely LIFE will publish souvenir editions of Krassner's "The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book"

:D

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, November 18, 2013

http://www.ep.tc/realist/74/

lol yay thx morbz

happy anniversary!!!

unlike Kathy Griffin, Krassner didn't apologize.

hero

https://news.clickhole.com/a-piece-of-history-the-massive-ass-implants-that-kille-1825121298

say what you like about trump, but at least he’s naturally dummy thicc

buttbuttinated

guys I finally read Libra
i dunno what I’ve been doing with my life until now. i really love the psychological portrait of Oswald, and Ruby as well.

can anyone recommend a good nonfic that’s not completely crackpot but maybe allows for ~some~ conspiracy?

or something that is a good followup to Libra.

or just a good nonfic.

haha i read a bunch of books on this a few years ago and i kinda couldn't stop for a while -- it's like the nonfiction equivalent of potato chips.

"not in your lifetime" by anthony summers is a good one, probably the best place to begin. he reviews all the basic stuff -- single bullet, oswald's weird background, all the major theories -- in a sober and objective way. i think this is the one that finally tilted me toward thinking it was probably a conspiracy.

david talbot's biography of allen dulles from a couple years back is great, and touches on the jfk assassination in a couple of chapters (he doesn't push a conspiracy theory too hard, but everything he writes about is firmly in "huh, that looks suspicious..." territory.)

this one's a bit more offbeat but gaeton fonzi's "the last investigation" is a memoir by someone who worked on the church committee and the HSCA investigation and ended up focusing on oswald's alleged CIA connections. pretty gripping stuff imo.

gerald posner's "case closed" is a very readable defense of the official account that a lot of ppl credit with convincing them that all of the conspiracy theories were wrong. my main issue with it is that posner is so eager to wrap up all of the loose ends that he leaves you thinking it's a lot more open-and-shut than it really is -- he is far too dismissive of, eg, jack ruby's mafia ties. but it's worth reading. there's also the doorstop-sized vincent bugliosi book that i abandoned after a while because i realized it was basically 10 percent information and 90 percent bugliosi making fun of people, which normally i'd be down for, but not for 3,000 pages.

oh shit i love Anthony Summers, i didnt know he had a jfk book.

thx for the recs, these all look great!

there’s just something about it, all the names & places, you can’t just casually read about it- it really sucks you in

I posted about this book on one of the Kennedy threads.

http://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/713VTXJrg6L.jpg

Thought it was excellent--captured the gathering insanity in Dallas (i.e., the months leading up to the assassination) better than anything else I've read or seen.

Dallas 1963

http://www.amazon.ca/Dallas-1963-Bill-Minutaglio/dp/1455522090

ooooh this looks great too

thx clemenza

thanks for reviving this VG! i have only read white noise and underworld, but i like delillo a lot and and also have a general interest in the JFK stuff, so it's probably next up for him

this is the only DeLillo i’ve read

it’s really astonishing how well he was able to great a believable & sympathetic character out of the mosaic of weird details of Oswald’s life. And somehow make Oswald make a weird kind of fictitious sense

i was even like, whoa maybe I finally ~get~ Jack Ruby lol

haha, that sounds awesome! i don't much about him, other than the obvious things. what made you read Libra?

i rewatched JFK a couple of weeks ago & was like... ok I think i’m finally ready to ~do~ this

i bought Libra a year or two ago but for some reason kept avoiding reading it, seemed intimidating somehow? idk

i always think "i love JFK", but tbh i only saw it once, shortly after it became available at blockbuster. so i was pretty young. but it was my first exposure to the whole thing, and also first exposure to "conspiracy theories" in general, apart from UFOs. it's interesting to compare the contemporary conspiracy theory scene with that of the 1960s and JFK. QAnon and all of that stuff is soooo fucking stupid; it's an insult that it's still in the same general category as JFK. although, i guess it's me lumping them into the same category. i'm a little drunk! JFK forever!

honestly though if i had to say what i REALLY thought about JFK, in a serious situation, i don't think the official version is true. not just a pedantic disagreement. but much of that may be due to kevin costner's performance, i admit

Libra is an incredible book.

i feel like i'm the last person on earth who genuinely believes that it was lee harvey oswald, acting alone.

I read the Bugliosi JFK book, which was very evidence-oriented, and he came to that conclusion.

(Actually, wait--he concluded Oswald did it, but I can't remember if he extended that to acting alone.)

Can't find the video of the guy who spent a decade constucting a 3d map of the scene in order to prove it was a conspiracy / grassy knoll, etc., but instead it showed that it really was Oswald.

now that aliens are making themselves known i feel we're only a short span from discovering everything

jfk: "for the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace"
aliens: "omg drag his ass"

I always get a reminder from various talk of JFK on here that I must read Harlot's Ghost (even when it isn't mentioned).

oh you must!

my belief _isn't_ based on the evidence, not really, it's more of a, uh, epistemological? (if i'm using the word correctly) argument about the nature of conspiracy, the limits of human knowledge, our capacity to perceive scope.

honestly the keystone to my theory is the errol morris film about the umbrella man. i didn't know about the umbrella man before that film. nobody ever seemed to mention it. here is a man standing right by where kennedy was shot holding an open umbrella, on a perfectly sunny day. surely he had to be involved somehow, right?

except that no, he wasn't, and everybody agrees that he wasn't, at least ever since he testified before congress and came up with a rationale for his behaviour that was so bizarre, illogical, and implausible that everybody immediately accepted that it had to be true, because who would make up shit like that?

so my theory on the assassination is a sort of extrapolation from that. there are lots of curious "coincidences" and unexplained events, and the deeper you look into the assassination the more of these you find. my belief is that if you look deeply enough into _anything_ you will find the same sort of deep weirdness and implausibility, because the world just doesn't make as much sense as we assume it does, people just don't make as much sense as we assume they do. people do weird or stupid things all the time for inscrutable reasons or for no reason at all. most of what people did in dallas on that day, and in the months prior, had nothing to do with what happened in dealey plaza on november 22, 1963, but conspiracy theorists, because of their particular interest, will assume the opposite.

i recognize that's not an airtight argument against conspiracy. my argument against conspiracy is the statistical one, based on the old saw that "three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead". i forget who, i don't have a cite, but somebody did a meta-analysis of conspiracies that have leaked, and how long it took them to leak, and how many people were involved, and i found their reasoning convincing, and i find it accordingly extremely unlikely that more than, let's say, six people, inclusive of oswald, knew about the plot to assassinate kennedy.

most of the kennedy conspiracy theories i know assume the involvement of more than six people. because, what interests me more about whether conspiracy theories are true is _why_ people believe them, _why_ people propagate them. conspiracy theories, it seems to me, fill a deep psychological need in the people who believe them. in the kennedy case, it strikes me as a belief in the fundamentally orderly, rational, and predictable nature of the world. presidents are important, more important than us everyday people. particularly kennedy, who even while he was alive had a mythos built around him, and everything that's been said about him since, even the "humanizing" stuff like the addison's and whatever, only adds to that mythos, only makes him less ordinary. he was a hero (or i guess a villain, to some people), and a hero's life, a hero's death, should have meaning. that someone as Great as that should be killed by some random deranged person with a sketchy history and no comprehensible motive devastates some unspoken belief at the heart of our world. better to believe it was LBJ, the CIA, all the people who had _motive_, because _motive_ is what determines what has happened, right? motive matters, right?

not really. when something has happened, all that matters is that it happened. why it happened, who benefits, these questions are all basically irrelevant in the face of evidence.

and so people pick at the evidence, people look at what they say happened and talk about how "unlikely" it is, and yes, it is unlikely, but the secret is unlikely and improbable things happen all the time. you can't argue against physical evidence by pointing out how unlikely it is. it might be in fact infinitely improbable and maybe somewhere on the other side of the world there's a sperm whale and a pot of petunias thinking "oh no, not again", but it's like the monty hall problem, whatever has happened has a probability of 1. you can't say there was another shooter by saying how unlikely the trajectory of the bullet was, there are a lot of bullet trajectories that would be difficult to replicate and oswald wasn't trying to make a replicable shot in the first place. the only way you can prove a second shooter is with positive evidence, and the positive evidence for a conspiracy is weaker than the positive evidence for bigfoot. it's all supposition and motive and weird coincidence.

ok, i've gone off as a substitute for going off about what's really on my mind, really burdening me, and now i'm going to duck out of this thread because i know what happens when you say this stuff, a swarm of theorists will be there with their non sequiturs and whatabouts and nobody, myself included, cares enough to stand up to that barrage, and that's why everybody believes there was a conspiracy to kill jfk. and also why a lot of other things have happened, continue to happen, which are, i suppose, outside the scope of this discussion.

before i go... you know what fascinates me about the kennedy assassination? the conspiracy theories people _don't_ believe. the conspiracy theory is pretty strictly bounded in certain respects. nobody, for instance, believes that kennedy was assassinated because he was catholic. it just literally never crosses anybody's mind that this could have been a motive. of course there's no evidence for it, but there's no evidence for most of people's conspiracy theories about the assassination. as far as i can tell nobody dares to suggest the theory because we've decided, collectively, to completely erase america's history of anti-catholic prejudice.

Er, I think Oswald getting shot live on televison two days after the assassination might have helped fuel a few conspracy theories.

nobody, for instance, believes that kennedy was assassinated because he was catholic

You never met my dad.

everyone is always erasing the anti-catholic bias in anglo-countries. proddy bastards!

I also believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and acted alone.

i feel like i'm the last person on earth who genuinely believes that it was lee harvey oswald, acting alone.

I'd describe my thinking as the preponderance of evidence supports the idea that Oswald fired the shot and had no direct co-conspirators, but there are so many intricacies surrounding the event that cannot be easily disposed of that 'preponderance' is as near as I can get to a conclusion.

many xposts I havent read Harlot’s Ghost yet either, feels like a good time to give it a whirl maybe

the stylistic template of all conspiracy theory thinking is antisemitism and there's nothing cute or fun to me about conspiracy theories. Some guy shot the president.

xxposts to rushomancy

it’s totally fine not to buy into the conspiracy! I am sure you’ll get no heavy blowback itt. Besides it’s a great post, it’s always good to get some “cross-breeze” opinions

i think the assasination a hard thing to be a true believer about anyway because it’s such an “if this then that” precarious tower of coincidences — if you’re 100% sure it was a conspiracy then maybe you’re a bit nuts lol

speaking for myself, i dunno that i really hang my hat on conspiracy, but i feel like the lone gunman has an element of “you will eat the conventional wisdom and you will like it” which def gives me pause. This is one of the few happenstances where I really enjoy the not-knowing. I am not usually like that.

i think i just perversely enjoy the shadowy world of people on the periphery, the weird fragments of facts that turn to air when you examine them. it feels very Chandler yknow? like, it all FEELS so foreboding but all of it could just as easily be a barrel of red herrings

speaking for myself, i dunno that i really hang my hat on conspiracy, but i feel like the lone gunman has an element of “you will eat the conventional wisdom and you will like it” which def gives me pause. This is one of the few happenstances where I really enjoy the not-knowing. I am not usually like that.

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl)

ha, that's the other thing i didn't get into! looking into it, i do legit believe that purpose of the warren commission was a whitewash. i don't believe lyndon johnson was nearly as interested in finding out what "really happened" as he was in keeping people from freaking out about, you know, the fact that the president had just fucking been shot and killed, like, what, a year after the goddamn cuban missile crisis? people were freaking out back then almost as much as we are now, and johnson's chief interest as president would probably be to control that so he could get on with passing the civil rights act of 1964.

(i also note that caro has said that he has found no evidence that lbj was involved in any conspiracy. yeah, he knew, absolutely knew, that the only way he would be president would be if jfk were somehow to die, he did not get along personally at all with jfk and particularly with bobby, was frustrated at being sidelined in the administration, was uncommonly driven towards power, would do pretty much anything to be president. caro establishes all of those things. except that he didn't do it, and coming from caro, who has made johnson his life's work, who has documented in exhausting detail all the nasty things lbj _did_ do in the pursuit of power, well, i find that really persuasive.)

so yeah, when people look at the warren commission report and say "come on, look at all the leads they ignored or declined to follow up on, they obviously weren't really trying to do a good-faith investigation" - i agree! but that doesn't mean that the commission's conclusion was factually incorrect.

"very Chandler" bingo!

i feel like i'm the last person on earth who genuinely believes that it was lee harvey oswald, acting alone.
No, I'm right there with you. I think the reason so many people dismiss that is because they can't believe such an insignificant loser like Oswald could take out the leader of the free world on his own. But he had the means and motivation, security was lax back then and he was a good shot. It's as simple as that.

the stylistic template of all conspiracy theory thinking is antisemitism and there's nothing cute or fun to me about conspiracy theories. Some guy shot the president.

― silby

agreed in principle. to me, i see the deepest historical roots of conspiracy thinking in the roman republic, in things like the catiline conspiracy (a conspiracy that may or may not have ever existed), of caesar's infamous statement that his wife must be "above suspicion" (in this case cruel and absurd, particularly because in other cases suspicion, proven or no, is grounds for action; his reasoning here was perverse and malicious). above all, the roots of conspiracy, for me, are in cicero's frequent invocation of cassius' maxim, "who benefits?" he used this maxim to ensure perverse outcomes, make a mockery of supposed "reasonable" jurisprudence, by appealing to shadowy conspiracies rather than evidence.

probably conspiratorial thinking predates the roman republic as well, and it is just particularly well-documented through the primary sources of the era. certainly in this day and age conspiracy theories are difficult to separate from anti-semitism, racism, prejudice and ethnic/racial hatred, and if they persist it is because of, well, the continuation of actual conspiracies. jeffrey epstein, the catholic church's organized coverup of child sexual abuse, watergate, as far as i can tell everything the president has ever done in his fucking life. these certain and unusual cases where it is justified to question the _credibility_ of the claimant.

i like errol morris's umbrella man film, it's really well-done and thought-provoking, if i were a teacher i'd probably show it to every class no matter what the subject was, but i also kind of think that he did viewers a disservice by not revealing that josiah thompson -- the professor in the film who amiably and amusingly explains why the "umbrella man" theory is bunk -- does not believe that oswald acted alone.

i think it was probably a conspiracy because ruby shot oswald (which required him to be there at exactly the right time and have his gun pulled at the exact moment necessary to commit a murder in front of dozens of police officers, which doesn't really jibe for me with ruby's claim that he just kinda happened to be there and just spontaneously got mad at oswald and just had to shoot him right then and there). combine this with oswald insisting that he was a "patsy" and that he didn't shoot anybody (inexplicable if you assume that he was either someone who wanted attention or someone who did it to bring attention to a political cause) and it all looks, well, suspicious!

i think this is why ppl believed in a conspiracy in 1963, and i think we still think that because the basic problems with the case were never resolved to everybody's satisfaction. i have never believed the "we just can't accept that a random nobody could kill the president" thing was true. (for one thing, lincoln's assassination was a conspiracy that involved a lot of ppl, yet almost everyone thinks of john wilkes booth and nobody else.) i also think that plenty of conspiracies either never come to light or, if they do, are largely ignored -- there is strong evidence for the "october surprise" theory that reagan made a secret deal with iran to win the 1980 election, but it doesn't get much attention these days.

oh fwiw i do not think that lbj was involved in any conspiracy. otoh i find it interesting that he told a bunch of ppl that he thought that oswald hadn't acted alone! apparently rfk felt the same way.

i like errol morris's umbrella man film, it's really well-done and thought-provoking, if i were a teacher i'd probably show it to every class no matter what the subject was, but i also kind of think that he did viewers a disservice by not revealing that josiah thompson -- the professor in the film who amiably and amusingly explains why the "umbrella man" theory is bunk -- does not believe that oswald acted alone.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

i agree with morris on this one! the basic issue, again, is one of scope. which is why i think caro is right to not dismiss out of hand the idea that there was a conspiracy, because the nature of the conspiracies is so broad and so diverse that dismissing all of them requires a sort of analogue to "strong" atheism. the conspiracy, at this point, is a sort of secular religion, and like religion shares the fallacy in that all the believers read this byzantine, arcane text, and they all come to different conclusions, yet all of them think they believe the same things, share the same bond.

what are the articles of faith, what is the creed of the kennedy conspiracy? it is not, simply, a negative creed, it is not just "john f. kennedy was not killed by lee harvey oswald acting alone". there is, universally, a They in this creed.

1. They killed John F. Kennedy, because he was dangerous to Them.
2. They covered it up, because the success of Their plan required that the truth never be known.
3. Those who deny the Conspiracy are either unwitting dupes or active agents of Their secret plan. Those who deny the Conspiracy are not to be trusted. Either they are maliciously upholding the values of the Conspiracy, or they are too gullible and/or unreasonable to be trusted.
4. The fight against the Conspiracy requires that one spread the truth about it, for the truth shall set you free.

What _isn't_ part of the conspiracy proper is who They are and what They wanted. I guess most often the theory is something something Vietnam, and that's a whole other false consensus there. Everybody agrees that Vietnam was bad, some people because it was a war of aggression that we had no business fighting in the first place, some people because namby-pamby liberals undermined the heroic efforts of Our Brave Troops. Honestly? I think these days it's probably more the latter, that the real issue people these days have with Vietnam is that we lost, and so we have our own homegrown Dolchstosslegende.

But I guess now we're getting back to what silby was saying...

yeah They is overtly or subtly always one group

I think that jfk is the one conspiracy area I haven't ever heard "the jews" implicated in.

usual suspects = mafia, cia, cuban exiles, communists of some variety

I mean I'm sure I can google and find plenty

xxpost: i don't really disagree w/ you but at the same time i don't feel that i'm subscribing to any creed by not fully accepting the conclusions of the warren commission. (which, remember, was not the last word! the HSCA in the late 1970s concluded that there had been a conspiracy but could not officially agree on a culprit. robert blakey, who was in charge of the committee, has since said that he thinks it was the mafia.) i don't think of the killers as being "they," just as specific ppl who did it and somehow got away with it. and i don't think that the same ppl who committed the crime necessarily covered it up -- as you noted LBJ had good reason to want the whole thing to be over and done with as fast as possible.

i try to avoid thinking too much about "why" in this matter because we don't know, beyond doubt, who did it. (tbh even if oswald was the lone killer, we don't know why, cuz he never said.) but certainly jfk, like any president, had a lot of enemies. (at least one of whom, allen dulles, was on the warren commission.)

my accepting the conclusions of the warren commission isn't meant as an endorsement of the warren commission. i just haven't heard any theory that has _more_ evidence for it than "lee harvey oswald, acting alone" does. all of them seem to rely, in some manner or another, on all of the conspirators of being hyper-competent and professional, golgo-13 on the grassy knoll, and i just am not persuaded. where are the overenthusiastic idiots? where are the botched coverups? well, all the idiots seem to be the ones haplessly trying to foist the lone gunman theory on the public, and this, more than anything else, is why i accept the theory. i don't _never_ attribute to malice alone what can be explained by incompetence because fucking _everything_ can be explained by incompetence... i just tend to find incompetence, in most cases, to be a more compelling explanation. if somebody could make a plausible case for an _incompetently_ malicious conspiracy i would be more likely to accept it.

it is hard to make the case w/o getting into the weeds, and tbh it's been a few years and my grasp of this subject is not as embarrassingly strong as it was in, like, 2015. but a couple of the books i recommended earlier do make a strong case for conspiracy. i prob would not have ever been persuaded that there was anything to it if i had not bothered to dig into the details.

imo if there was a conspiracy it was not particularly competent, given that most of the public doesn't buy the official account!

so, if their competence was mediocre enough to have been seen through, one presumes they would stand out among the half dozen suspected entities as the true culprits. So, who are They?

i think the biggest wrinkle in the conspiracy theory, and an argument for lone gunmen is the paternalism that the government & agencies had at that time about unnecessarily scaring or upsetting The Public

get a quick, clean decidion that looks official on paper so that people can go on with their lives& not be unsettled by any kind of ugly truth

it really fucked everything up from start to finish: the more they tried to hide facts or cut corners the more it looked suspicious, because they completely underrated the public’s desire to know, even then.

they thought the public shouldn’t know. it’s not their job.

RONG lol

i kinda glibly summarized allthat though, i think there’s way more to it

i look at it in the context of, you know, everybody freaked out when FEMA bought a bunch of coffins and before you knew it we had a bunch of stupid fucking rumors about "FEMA death camps", because what could FEMA possibly need that many coffins for?

raise your hand anybody who still doesn't have any idea what FEMA could possibly have needed all those coffins for

Warren (to other Commission members): So, it's agreed then, gentlemen. We will carefully explain why, despite the many assassination attempts by the CIA ordered by JFK against Castro, we have ruled out Cuban involvement. Also, despite JFK sharing a mistress with Sam Giancana, RFK's vendetta against the mafia, the CIA's backdoor mafia connections, and CIA anger over the Bay of Pigs, we see no reason to think the mafia or CIA were involved either. It all goes into the report, because this was our remit, gentlemen, and the public deserves to know we aired all the dirty laundry before coming to a conclusion.

Other Commission members: u mad?

reading about the sex pest president JFK this morning pic.twitter.com/sFDKDl6qJ5

— roland barfs (@rolandbarfs) May 2, 2020

It's like a horror film where you're punished for having sex

damn

can you imagine if Oliver Stone had known about any of that when he was making JFK

Assumed this thread was revived for the revelation that Sir Alex Ferguson is obsessed with JFK’s assassination.

Hitchens reviewing several bios:

What several of these books combine to show—sometimes but not always unintentionally—is that the three years of the JFK regime were consumed by extraordinary hyperactivity on two fronts, and by extraordinary torpidity on two others. The hyperactivity consisted of continuous and stressful “crisis management,” often necessitated by self-induced crises, and reflected a picture of narcotic and sexual debauchery within the White House that still has the power to make one whistle. The torpor concerned two “macro” subjects—the pursuit of a nuclear test-ban treaty and the adoption by the administration and Congress of a serious position on civil rights—that really were both urgent and overdue.

But at least Joe Kennedy, Sr. lived to see a son in the White House. It was like the Make-A-Wish Foundation for the super-rich.

Was RFK at all dogged by the vices and hungers that characterised JFK's time in the WEhite House?

He couldn't keep it in his pants either afaik.

dogged eh

they're filthy animals

🤔🚀🤯🛸
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ObvK4NR_LI

this got me crying. 😭😭 pic.twitter.com/fsxVQ2txI6

— 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐩𝐮𝐬𝐬𝐲 𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧. (@arisaidthat) September 12, 2020

i feel very old

Leon Czolgosz shot President McKinley 53 years before I was born and when I finally learned about it in grade school it felt like an impossibly remote event of ancient history. It's been 57 years since Oswald shot President Kennedy. I'm sure that Kids These Days feel the same as I did then. btw, I was 9 when Kennedy was killed, so it is a real memory for me, not something that feels utterly remote and irrelevant.

i have it on good authority that Gene Rayburn was seen running away from the depository looking distraught and nobody ever questioned him

Does Sada Baby get paid from all the tiktok plays?

Apparently TikTok does pay a tiny amount (less than Spotify!) now, but it's basically "exposure"

trueanon podcast has a 6 part deep dive into the jfk assasination

not exactly new but covers all the bases on a deep enough level to scratch an itch, and now finds me seeking out the peter dale scott book

idk why i am so addicted to this part of history but man i am so hooked

Cleaning house and going through my books, and the question came to mind:

Lots of people think Ruby was a hero for bumping off Oswald, but was this just the mob doing their mob thing - being macho and trigger happy, and isn't he in fact responsibke for a lot of the conspiracy bullshit when he whacked the guy?

Oh and I don't know if Peter Dale Scott proves anything, but is fascinating document of how fuckedly paranoid and spooked up the ass US was at the time, so is worthwhile reading and certainly a trip.

VG i love this stuff too, i didn't read peter dale scott but did read the devil's chessboard which i think relies on it. also read the book about the bush family, family of secrets, it has stuff about the hilarious letters barbara bush was writing at the time.

everything everyone says above is of course true but the killing shot was still the secret service guy in the car behind as he toppled backwards when the motorcade sped up and squeezed out a round by mistake from his badly designed automatic rifle

correct theory bcz banter outcome sorry if this offends

ordered JFK and the unspeakable yesterday, looking forward to it. i enjoy these approaches that are less forensic and more broadly political

meteors did it IMO

JFK killed himself

with Thurston Moore's big fuckin dick

Oh no! Lucy pulls the football away again

The White House said Friday it would delay the release of long-classified documents related to the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy. President Joe Biden wrote in a statement that the remaining files "shall be withheld from full public disclosure" until December 15 next year -- nearly 60 years after Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Texas in 1963.

In 2017, former president Donald Trump released several thousand secret files on the assassination, but withheld others on national security grounds.

The White House said the national archivist needs more time for a review into that redaction, which was slowed by the pandemic.

GOD DAMMIT

David Mamet joins in with his own assassination movie

Set in 1963 and scripted by Mamet and Nicholas Celozzi, Assassination is set during a “crucial justice hearing against organized crime, when the head of the Chicago mob orders the assassination of President John F. Kennedy Jr., creating a deadly conspiracy while altering the fate of a nation.” With a cast featuring Al Pacino, Viggo Mortensen, John Travolta, Shia LaBeouf, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Courtney Love, production will kick off this September in Vancouver, with cinematographer Robert Elswit (Inherent Vice, There Will Be Blood) on board.

Taking the point of view of the mob, the film is rumored to take place in the two days leading up to the assassination and will imagine a story in which Chicago mob kingpin Sam Giancana ordered the hit to get back at JFK who turned his back on the mafia after they assisted with his election. In scripting the film, Celozzi reportedly drew inspiration from his great uncle Giancana, who was murdered in 1975.

Cuban gay mafia is the only conspiracy I will accept.

It's been decades since I saw JFK or thought about the assassination in any depth but given how antsy the mob gets over even whacking one of their own* the idea that they'd straight-up take out the President of the USA has always seemed v difficult to swallow.

(* my knowledge of the inner machinations of the mob is entirely gleaned from watching movies and The Sopranos)

I always thought the theory was they sent Ruby to take out Oswald to make people think they were also involved in taking out JFK when in fact they had nothing to do with it.

fuck yeah!

My dad's theory, after a few beers, was JFK was killed because he was a Catholic.

... usually in between verses from that song about how the British murdered James Connolly.

Is the prevailing theory now that the whole thing was a complete fuck-up on someone's part? Because most things are, despite the best efforts of conspiracy theorists to convince you that some shadowy cabal are in total control of their actions.

over/under on how many times the word "cocksucker" appears in this film

gonna guess "not enough"

felt like the irishman already told this story in a compelling way by merely hinting at it as a likely reason. in fact what i sort appreciated about that film was how it overlapped with the oliver stone JFK narrative for precisely one scene (frank delivering a truck shipment to david ferrie) and as with everything else in his life, frank was watching it all from the outside looking in and not knowing all the details, or caring to.

When are we ever getting our "his head just DID that" movie

The Behind The Bastards episodes on the Illuminati had some interesting stuff about a one time friend of Lee Harvey Oswald's who looked a lot like him who wound up convincing himself that he had been involved. Kerry Wendell Thornley.
He turns up in the 3rd of 4 parts on the history. Also apparently very influential in the rise of the underground magazine but pretty unstable.

Shia LaBeouf... and Courtney Love

this is the real crime

https://i.imgur.com/OFVJXdK.gif

the thornley brothers were named tom dick and kerry

no wonder the church of the subgenius beckoned

trueanon podcast has a 6 part deep dive

Hah. Dave Emory has hundreds of hours on it. He goes so far down the rabbit hole he comes out the other side.

(He's convinced it was a CIA op, btw.)

I'm pretty sure it was a time travel unit trying to stave off the Woke Mind Virus for another few decades

interesting Louisiana footnote in the wikipedia entry for Kerry Thornley:

Garrison charged Thornley with perjury after Thornley denied that he had been in contact with Oswald in any manner since 1959. The perjury charge was eventually dropped by Garrison's successor Harry Connick Sr.

When are we ever getting our "his head just DID that" movie?

Where was Michael Ironside that day?

given how antsy the mob gets over even whacking one of their own

I don't know if they got antsy about whacking their own or not, but they got over it pretty quick especially around this time period

Is the prevailing theory now that the whole thing was a complete fuck-up on someone's part?

My personal theory is that They (CIA/Mafia/etc.) wanted to spook JFK with an attempt and their patsy accidentally pulled it off.

jfk's head wanted to spook him by showing it could just do that on its own and accidentally etc

I read somewhere that Paul Krassner's comments about compromising positions between LBJ and JFK's corpse became pretty widely known and believed to greater degree than he'd expected
https://soundcloud.com/eptc/episode-8-side-a-paul-krassner

that is read it somewhere over teh last several months and now found a soundfile supporting it

best JFK assassination book i've read is still Not In Your Lifetime by Anthony Summers. he's not deluded enough to subscribe to specific theories, but he does line up all the unusual aspects of the shooting, the possible motives of those who might be suspected, and seems to conclude that there's something to it, but it's impossible to know the real truth. he seems to lean more mob involvement/oswald involvement/oswald as minor CIA asset who lost it, and while he completely dismisses Oliver Stone and his theories, what's interesting is just what from the film he nails down as factual (such as the time when Oswald met a Cuban exile for a brief moment and later a phone call come to her, telling her things about Oswald she didn't even ask about.)

The Summers book is the most plausible; I appreciated how he didn't address every what-about. I told the story about the Silvia Odio incident in the other thread, still the eeriest of the purported Oswald encounters.

while he completely dismisses Oliver Stone and his theories, what's interesting is just what from the film he nails down as factual (such as the time when Oswald met a Cuban exile for a brief moment and later a phone call come to her, telling her things about Oswald she didn't even ask about.)

oh lol this is what I referred to -- I'm friends with her nephew!

i think it's kind of a shame that the jfk conspiracy has become the one conspiracy everybody in america apparently believes in some form or another. what interests me about conspiracy theories is less whether or not they're _true_ and more _why_ people believe them - and most of the time, the answer is "they're racist". in other words i feel like the legitimization of conspiracy theories the jfk conspiracy has enabled also enables racism and bigotry.

the thing i love about the jfk conspiracy theory is that the more you dig into it the less sense anything makes. it's like what happens if you repeat a word, any word, enough times. pharmacy, for instance. just say "pharmacy" enough times over and over and it becomes really strange and bizarre sounding. so that's what i like about it, it's a way to deconstruct the basic assumptions and associations we have about the nature of reality itself. i'm into that kinda shit.

we don't need no gates out there with that swamp! plenty of em gone in there. ain't none of em come out!

just say "pharmacy" enough times over and over and it becomes really strange and bizarre sounding.

specifically it loses meaning-- "semiotic satiation" iirc-- which might seem the opposite of the rabbit-hole disease (which is more like nabokov's "referential mania" in "signs and symbols")-- unless everything meaning the same thing and nothing meaning anything are on some mechanical level identical? (notes towards a horseshoe theory of conspiracy people / anti-conspiracy people.) anyway people in the mongoose/mob complex obviously had something to do w this lol

refs in the summers book to the stone movie are funny because he consistently condemns it in strong terms, laments its influence etc.; meanwhile i was scarcely turning a page without thinking "whoa i always assumed they made that up for the stone movie"

i feel like the legitimization of conspiracy theories the jfk conspiracy has enabled

I don't really know how to measure this but I think the effects of Iraq are far more consequential in terms of public trust or credulousness than the effects of JFK. 'Everything is fake' for me has its roots or at least its liftoff from Iraq. It existed before that, but far less prevalent. There are likely other factors like social media, like people knowing how to hone and weaponise this stuff, but Iraqs erosion of public trust meant the soil in which conspiratorial thinking could be watered reached almost all gardens

refs in the summers book to the stone movie are funny because he consistently condemns it in strong terms, laments its influence etc.; meanwhile i was scarcely turning a page without thinking "whoa i always assumed they made that up for the stone movie"

Haha yeah I mean based on having read that I believe fairly early in the book I thought it would be a takedown of conspiracy theory rather than an open-minded book musing about the possibilities. It does seem he draws the line with the specific named alleged conspirators in that film and the military industrial complex angle, but the other stuff that stone touches on he absolutely is willing to entertain as a likely possibility.

Specifically the mob, Cuban exiles, and Oswald floating like an unmoored buoy among all.

An inspired act of God shoo happen here and put a Texan in the White House!

I don't really know how to measure this but I think the effects of Iraq are far more consequential in terms of public trust or credulousness than the effects of JFK. 'Everything is fake' for me has its roots or at least its liftoff from Iraq. It existed before that, but far less prevalent. There are likely other factors like social media, like people knowing how to hone and weaponise this stuff, but Iraqs erosion of public trust meant the soil in which conspiratorial thinking could be watered reached almost all gardens

― anvil

i think it's different from person to person... for a lot of people iraq brought about that sort of shift in perspective, but for me it wasn't really until trump was elected president that i had that shift.

the complicated thing is that from a liberal perspective, a rejection of that worldview is... differences between us are _immaterial_ to them, i think that's where horseshoe theory comes from. the paradox is that material facts matter just as little to them as they do to any conspiracy-minded person.

i am at the point where i don't just ask myself _why_ people believe in conspiracies, but... whatever the term for it is, there's something in me that asks, you know, what even _is_ a conspiracy?

like, the thread revive about the bilderbergs, i'm looking at the alleged conspiracy and as far as i can tell it's literally just capitalism. is capitalism a conspiracy? i mean, there's an argument to be made!

three days after my egg cracked a lady named cassie labelle made a medium post titled "Being Trans Is Like Believing A Conspiracy Theory About Yourself". and maybe it's my background, i did the subgenius thing in the '90s, but i do have a tendency to look at it in those terms. like there was a coverup, right? some people knew the truth but they were dismissed as being "crazy" and didn't get listened to, and it was incredibly far-reaching, incredibly effective, it affected millions of lives, and one of them was mine. i was both a victim of this and complicit in the perpetuation of this state of affairs.

in some sense maybe the truth-value of a conspiracy theory _is_ relevant. believing a conspiracy theory like... there's a conspiracy theory, mia mulder did a video about it. it's a minor one, but it claims that every celebrity is secretly trans. except for elliot page who the conspiracy theory claims was amab and his "transition" was actually a detransition. anyway you look into it and you can kind of pretty clearly see the anxieties and insecurities that lead the person perpetuating it to believe it. believing something like that, or believing there was a cia conspiracy to kill jfk, to me that's different from saying something like "capitalism is bad", i mean you can't prove that in an absolute sense but there's a lot of evidence for that hypothesis, you know?

in some sense, just like what rumsfeld said about "known unknowns" basically makes sense, the idea of "alternative facts", i think there's a legitimate basis for that. it's a radical rejection of hegemonic narratives, and i've done that just as much as the people who say, i don't know, covid vaccines will turn you trans have done. the only way to differentiate the two is to take the truth-value of our respective beliefs into consideration.

idk. clearly i'm just rambling. hopefully some of that makes sense?

Back in 2002, during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq I heard Glenn Beck talking about how he'd been brought in to the Bush White House to look at evidence about Iraq's involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing. It was right then that I decided that all the talk about WMDs was bullshit, because if they had any actual evidence for that stuff then why would they be fucking around with conspiracy theories?

i think it's different from person to person... for a lot of people iraq brought about that sort of shift in perspective, but for me it wasn't really until trump was elected president that i had that shift

So far, I've lived through the bombing of Cambodia and the end of Vietnam, Iran-Contra, the CIA and cocaine trafficking, gaslighting of cancer victims downwind from nuclear tests, both Gulf Wars and dozens more I can't recall at the moment.. Go ahead, ask me about my perspective shift - worse every year and never once getting better.

like, the thread revive about the bilderbergs, i'm looking at the alleged conspiracy and as far as i can tell it's literally just capitalism. is capitalism a conspiracy? i mean, there's an argument to be made!

C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite to thread!