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

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