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

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