> Landis saw and did something that he has kept secret for six decades, he says now. He claims he spotted a bullet resting on the top of the back of the seat. He says he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and brought it into the hospital. Then, upon entering Trauma Room No. 1 (at that stage, he was the only nonmedical person in the room besides Mrs. Kennedy, and both stayed for only a short period), he insists, he placed the bullet on a white cotton blanket on the president’s stretcher.
The revelation is that the bullet was not lodged in JFK and did not fall out while shaking about on the gurney.
I would probably add some major points to this synopsis. The bullet was believed to have been on Connally’s stretcher. It is the “magic bullet”. The pristine bullet that was supposed to have hit JFK and Connally both. The assumption here is that it did not penetrate through JFK. That it came from the wound in his back. This would upend the investigative findings that the bullet in this back was responsible for the neck wound and the injury to the governor. It’s a rather drastic change to the record.
To add to that. The author details how this new detail subsequently alters the version of events. Namely it suggests that the bullet that hit JFK in the back and hit Connally were two different bullets and that they could not have been fired at that rate (the rate suggested by the video evidence) with the weapon used by Oswald
The stories all say that the FBI reported the minimum time to fire that rifle was 2.25 seconds. How was that determined? How can a supposedly experimental result like that have no error bars? Was it determined by repeated firings of the gun found in the sniper's nest, or by another similar gun presumed to be an exact duplicate (of a 20-year old mail order gun?) for purposes of that measurement? It is known that Oswald spent some considerable time (maybe and hour or several, I don't remember) 'dry firing' the rifle the night before. Could he perhaps have developed speed superior to that of whomever the FBI asked to do that experiment? Has the 2.25 second minimum ever been replicated? How could the person trying to fire the gun as fast as possible for the FBI ever have as much adrenaline flowing as Oswald, the man who had previously tried and failed to kill General Walker must have had.
Didn't the same thing happen to one of his relatives/descendants at a hotel in California? One guy went down for it but there were multiple firings from seperate angles and placements and witnesses reported hearing multiple shots from different orientations?
So the shooter was working with Oswald, or it was a coincidence? I'd like to know who would sign up for anything with Oswald -- probably the most unreliable and untethered person you would have been able to find in the SW USA at the time.
All of these conspiracy theories would die if those taking them seriously would just sit down and read the Warren report. If you can then find something specific in the evidence or conclusions that is wrong or illogical or seems like it was covered up in the report, please point it out.
This very article points out Arlen Specter heavily influenced people on the ground during the day of the assassination. This behavior is well-documented. Why do you take the Warren Report as gospel?
“ Arlen Specter, who had traveled to Dallas to take Tomlinson’s deposition in March 1964, was thunderstruck when Tomlinson relayed this scenario. To judge from a transcript of that conversation, Specter spent much of the remainder of his time with Tomlinson essentially trying to talk him out of his recollection, causing a distressed Tomlinson to say he just was not sure about his memory.
But the Q&A itself clearly suggests that Tomlinson, unprompted and unbadgered, had a cogent recollection that a bullet, wherever else it ultimately ended up, had come from the stretcher that had already been left in the hall in front of the men’s room.
In its final report, the Warren Commission mentioned nothing about this detail from Tomlinson’s account. Instead, the panel largely dismissed Tomlinson’s testimony, writing that even though he was “not certain whether the bullet came from the Connally stretcher or the adjacent one,” the commission “has concluded that the bullet came from the Governor’s stretcher.”
As sibling points out, Oswald may have been a scapegoat or patsy.
One potential conclusion is Oswald as the patsy for the real assassin. So nobody was "working with him" except in the sense of wanting him to take the fall.
The revelation is that the bullet was not lodged
in JFK and did not fall out while shaking about
on the gurney.
I'm sorry, this is not correct.
This pristine bullet was previously thought to have been found on Connally's stretcher, not JFK's stretcher.
It was thought that this bullet traveled into JFK from the rear, exited his throat, and then wounded Connally.
If Landis' claim is true, that would upend entirely the Warren commission's findings. Of course, we probably can't really know the truth at this point. But the article makes a solid case for it being quite likely true.
> If Landis' claim is true, that would upend entirely the Warren commission's findings.
Not so. Three shots were fired according to about 85% of the witnesses. Previously, we had a missing bullet. The bullet Landis found might be that missing bullet, previously explained as having vanished someplace in Dealey Plaza. Oswald may have fired it while his view of the limo was partially obscured by the tree. If it made some slight contact with the tree, it might have caused the small bit of flying debris that nicked one of the spectators, then continuing its flight at a lesser speed, hit Kennedy's back, popped out of his back, and been found by Landis. The other magic bullet the Warren Commission may have figured out pretty accurately. Which bullet was the one found at Parkland? Given all the unanticipated mayhem that day, it could have been either one, but one would not expect that both of two wandering bullets would have been found. Many's the detective who has been baffled by red-headed identical twins.
Landis' behaviour strikes me as being very peculiar. Shouldn't he have attempted to preserve evidence on the bullet rather than simply putting it into his pocket?
> he said he grabbed it to thwart souvenir hunters. Then, for reasons that still seem fuzzy even to him, he said he entered the hospital and placed it next to Kennedy on the president’s stretcher, assuming it could somehow help doctors figure out what happened.
From the NYT article. It also mentions that crime scene integrity wasn't as much of a thing at the time, which seems questionable at best. But still, if you believe the choice is between keeping or losing the bullet, you definitely take it.
Shock is the only explanation that makes any sense to me. However, remaining "largely silent" for 60 years about it implies that there's other factors at play.
Depends. If you realize after they’ve gone through a whole investigation and produced a report, do you want to go up to them and tell them all their conclusions are pointless because of something you did?
I am also skeptical of Landis, but what do you mean about preserving evidence?
It's a bullet. It just was next to an explosion that cleared it most most evidence. Then the barrel rifling altered the metal. That would not be harmed by picking it up. Then it went through jfk. Okay, we already know his DNA is on it.
The real question is why are you picking up random things from a crime scene and then putting them down in a hospital stretcher.
> The real question is why are you picking up random things
Probably seemed like a good idea at the time. My wife was in car accident once where the airbag deployed. For some reason her immediate reaction was to roll down the window. People in stressful and perilous situations sometimes do things that make no sense.
> I am also skeptical of Landis, but what do you mean about preserving evidence?
I don't really know, but it hardly seems like good practise to pick up a bullet. Don't crime scene investigators usually take calibrated pictures of important items such as bullets and often try to determine the trajectory?
There's also the chain of custody to think about - the bullet could easily have been swapped with a different bullet after he left it on the stretcher.
"I don't really know, but it hardly seems like good practise to pick up a bullet"
Of course it's not but that was no ordinary crime scene. There were thousands of people about, what would happen to the vehicle etc., etc? There's no way the crime scene could be secured in such a short time. And JFK had to be rushed to hospital. Nothing was certain.
He saw the bullet as evidence and on the spur of the moment secured it. After that he was likely in shock and thus his actions were more that of an automaton.
Are you from some other timeline where there was explosion at Kennedy assassination?
The bullet they are talking about is the "magic bullet" that hit Kennedy and Connally. The bullet that hit Kennedy's head distinegrated and they found fragments.
> Are you from some other timeline where there was explosion at Kennedy assassination?
> The bullet they are talking about is the "magic bullet" that hit Kennedy and Connally. The bullet that hit Kennedy's head distinegrated and they found fragments.
The explosion they are referring to is the one inside the firearm when the firing pin strikes the cartridge.
Note that he was pretty young and his only "law enforcement" experience was from working in the Secret Service. Presumably all of his training and experience was for things involving VIP protection activities. It shouldn't be surprising that he didn't know much at all about crime scene investigation.
He is at the end of his life and has nothing to lose? Imagine knowing the murder was a planned Dulles op. Then imagine, they killed Jack, Bobby, Martin, and Lennon. They tried to kill George Wallace and Regan. Might be good to keep quiet
And how does that upend anything? That it fell out already in the car does not seem dramatically different from it falling out after shaking Kennedy a bit.
If the story in the article is true, the bullet Landis found - i.e. the famous "magic bullet" - could not have wounded both Kennedy and Governor Connally and have been shot from the Book Depository (to Kennedy's rear) as the so-called single-bullet theory[0] requires, so it upends the Warren Commission's version of the assassination completely.
look at the arms. Kennedy is resting his arm on the car frame and Connally cannot. The seat he is in is not lined up with where Kennedy is. The bullet needs no magic to go in a straight line.
I used to be passingly interested in the conspiracy part of the JFK assassination until I watched this EXTENSIVE in length and sourced video on the assassination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DC8tO16xdrY
I personally believe it's somewhat possible that there was some CIA involvement in JFK's assassination. I did not watch the entire video, but the part that addresses potential CIA involvement seems to have 2 main flaws IMO:
1. It only addresses the Vietnam War as a potential motive and "debunks" this motive. Geopolitics is complicated, and there are countless other potential motives, especially surrounding Cuba and the CIA's involvement there (Bay of Pigs, etc). The parts of the video I watched (including part 2) did not seem to address this at all. Eliminating one motive does not by any means eliminate the possibility of CIA involvement.
2. The video's creator seems to assume that CIA's involvement would consist of "hiring" Oswald to perform the assassination and that Oswald would have full awareness of the plans, etc. This is not the only scheme in which a conspiracy may have taken place, and in fact seems like a highly unlikely and unsophisticated scheme. It seems much more likely that Oswald was "used" rather than "hired" and that he was either convinced or coerced to shoot Kennedy. This is how murderous intelligence organizations do their dirty work (the CIA is known to have killed people) - via coercion, power, politics, propaganda, and not via direct orders or contracts. Assuming my theory is correct (of which I do not have certainty), Oswald likely had his own motives to wanting to shoot Kennedy, but it required a conspiracy to actually get him to carry through with it. This model of the relationships and dynamics involved seems entirely foreign to the video's creator and is completely unaddressed.
In general, discourse around the JFK assassination and potential conspiracies focuses way too much on the shooting itself - ballistic physics, positions of possible shooters, analysis of film. This is a complete distraction from the more important question which is around Lee Harvey Oswald's incredibly suspicious relationships and contacts with known CIA people.
This is what’s fascinating and terrifying about conspiracy theories. You’re clearly an intelligent person who can articulate their thoughts. But none of this is well reasoned. In the face of compelling evidence you propose vague, unsubstantiated alternative theories. This is a bottomless pit. It’s not hard to make up a fantasy to explain reality. But that way lies madness. Reasonable people can disagree and arrive at the truth. But constantly inventing unsubstantiated counter arguments simply delays the inevitable conclusion to the detriment of everyone.
Conjecture: A is not the culprit because motive xyz does not check out.
Reasoning: That doesn't exonerate A, who could have other motives.
Without agreeing with it, that looks perfectly well reasoned to me.
Compelling evidence exonerating the CIA you say? Well ok, I'll believe that when I see it, just like any other evidence from gravity onward. The CIA's docs haven't been declassified and released.
The meta argument is the one which is unreasonable. Forming reasonable small arguments is easy. People engage them easily. But because so many can be created so cheaply it’s possible for people’s minds to cloud.
Ok so you acknowledge it was well reasoned and you are apologising to op for saying it wasn't. And moving forward you've come to:
So many well reasoned arguments can be created so it is possible for people's minds to cloud.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here but it seems like it's not contributing anything much to the discussion. Perhaps your mind clouded before you wrote it?
edit: did you edit your original post /after/ I replied?
I would say that a compelling argument against the CIA being involved is that they would have done a way better job of covering their tracks if it really was them. Think about it: Professional spooks who know they would probably receive a death sentence for treason if caught planning an assassination attempt on the president.
And think about the number of people involved in an organisation like that who pledged allegiance to serve their country and now have to go along with killing the president. Just so incredibly unlikely. People watch too many cloak and dagger movies.
Conspiracies have several variables, from feasibility in general, to number of collaborators, to motives, to methods of discovery.
Assassinating a popular, progressive president in the 1960s was very doable and didn't take a lot of people to pull off. It will never be settled as to the true motive of the killing.
Compare this to "the moon landing was faked" or "9/11 towers were not only an inside job, but imploded" and they are much less plausible.
People DO conspire. History is filled with examples both large and small.
Suspecting a group of people of conspiring is not scary, there are lots of crazy theories out there that do no harm, ancient aliens, crystal skulls, all kinds of stuff.
"conspiracy theory" is a term with a lot of power, I would argue that people in power who actually do conspire have a pretty good incentive to call things that might expose them by that term. This ensures that the media cannot cover the topic without hurting their own reputation and that people who discuss it will be in the out-group and less likely to be taken seriously. In fact, they also have an incentive to play up the craziest ones (pizzagate, birds aren't real) to discredit and cover what might actually be a real case of conspiring.
You cannot stop people from coming up with crazy theories and talking to each other about them, particularly in the age of the Internet. The only thing you can do is discuss and provide evidence against them. Using that label only emboldens believers nowadays, since they become more convinced that the powerful are using the power of the term to suppress them.
Seems well-reasoned enough to me. That doesn't make it true, but given that the official story has some practical problems, it doesn't seem like something we can dismiss out of hand.
I think this comes down to a philosophical difference in how we approach truth in the face of uncertainty. The truth here is clearly uncertain (and probably unknowable) at this point. I approach uncertain situations with a Bayesian perspective, meaning I have a certain preconceived understanding of the dynamics at play and I allow facts to shift that conception to ultimately form a conclusion consisting of how likely I believe each scenario.
In this case, history dictates that my Bayesian priors should be strongly shifted towards at least some "conspiracy" at play considering the how other leaders have been killed in the past by some conspiracy. History also dictates specifically that the CIA is capable of similar conspiracies (although this would probably be the biggest/most dramatic). The facts paint a pretty clear picture of how the assassination actually happened, but an entirely unclear picture of the motivations. Other tidbits of information strengthen and weaken these prior understandings (in my opinion they strengthen overall), but since they are only vague tidbits, the shift in understanding is small.
I believe you call this "unsubstantiated" because you do not allow history to form a prior understanding of the dynamics at play. You also seem reticent to allow for fuzzy truths or uncertainties to exist. This is entirely incongruous to the way I, and many other folks on HN, perceive the world, hence the disagreement. There fundamentally is a bottomless pit of possibilities of what happened, but this is the method in which I and many other narrow down that pit to vague likelihoods.
> It’s not hard to make up a fantasy to explain reality.
Unfortunately this isn't limited to conspiracy theories. We spent the better part of the years with leaders and scientists forcing similarly baseless explanations down or throat rather than taking the time to collect the data that actually supported the politically favorable talking points. There were countless fantasies made up to explain the risks of the specific virus, efficacy of masks, net benefit of vaccination, etc.
> This is a complete distraction from the more important question which is around Lee Harvey Oswald's incredibly suspicious relationships and contacts with known CIA people.
Distraction is the point.
Distraction from several key points which beg a series of questions.
- Dulles formed the CIA from the OSS.
- Dulles hated Castro and thought he'd trigger a full scale invasion by launching the Bay of Pigs "raid"
- Dulles was not all that happy when that plan, not only failed, but triggered his dismissal from the agency he formed and headed up, by JFK.
- Dulles, may not have been a psychopath, but he calmly watched his sister almost drown in the ocean, before their finally mother rushed to save her.
JFK was forced to go along with the bay of pigs (he was against it) on the other hand he got us too close to the brink of annihilation --one can imagine these two things would displease some people --whether that rises to assassination by an internal faction is unknown --though maybe if they released all material that was supposed to be released we'd maybe have a better idea.
I suppose it's impossible to prove the specifics of the conspiracy, but that Jack Ruby, a guy running strip clubs for the mafia, takes it upon himself to publically shoot Lee Harvey Oswald kind of proves to me that there was some kind of conspiracy. What other explanation could there possibly be? What Oswald might have said if we were kept alive... no one will ever know. But if there was nothing there, why did Jack Ruby kill him? Temporary insanity, deeply patriotic fan of JFK, or tying up loose ends on orders -- what makes more sense?
"But if there was nothing there, why did Jack Ruby kill him?"
I was a teenager living outside the US when I learned about JFK's assassination. It was a Saturday morning where I was and I remember it vividly more from the shock reaction of my parents than from the radio news report (I heard the news first and told them about it).
From that moment onwards the news coverage was intense. When Ruby shot Oswald we were struck with a sense of disbelief—even with my naïve sense of US politics, law enforcement, etc. the first things that came to mind were why would the seemingly sleazy Ruby want to shoot Oswald at all, second, how did US law enforcement let it actually happen. Either the US was in more chaos than the news was reporting and it was a free-for-all over there, or that Ruby's ulterior motive was more than just loyalty to the US/JFK.
I wasn't alone in thinking this, many were of this opinion and it was the first thing that came to our minds. I'd stress we'd formed that opinion within days if not hours of the news—that's well before any of the conspiracy theories or 'grassy knoll' stories emerged.
Some who knew Ruby theorized that he wanted to be a national hero by killing JFK's killer. Those who knew him said he was fairly emotional and hot-headed too.
> But if there was nothing there, why did Jack Ruby kill him?
That line of thinking can power any conspiracy theory.
Do you really think there are only 3 options for his motives? Why not “an impulsive criminal businessman with a gun filled with rage in the hours after a presidential assassination in his town during a Cold War looks for a way he can personally feel some modicum of control in a world that is mostly chaotic”.
You can't just stick with one theory and keep fitting other facts to that theory forever - there is going to be a breaking point.
To keep going with that particular bank robber story - Jake.
In the example barring other facts, it is 99.9% probable that Jake indeed is the bank robber.
What if instead of finding $9k out of $10k, police only find $5k out of $100k on Jake?
What if not only talking to his girlfriend about robbing the bank he also talked about robbing the bank at the bar the previous week?
What if there was an amateur theatre troupe at that bar that night?
What if one of those actors was also an accomplished make up artist and high speed driver?
Okay, the story keeps getting sillier.
Even with these new facts the prosecution would still win.
Let's add a new fact security cameras at a bar also show Jake, with similar timestamps to the bank's cameras.
There are 3 more patrons that are willing to swear it was Jake.
An old lady reports that she saw a car drive up at a high speed to Jake's car and leave a package.
At that point we have a problem with being so sure on Jake being the guilty one. There is some reasonable doubt now.
My point is you can never be 100% sure. All you can do is adjust priors.
With JFK as it currently stands we might say 95% chance that Oswald was the lone gunman and 80% that he acted completely alone.
We can also say there is a 40% probability there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK, there might have been even more than one, but those might have had nothing to do with Oswald.
The article suggests that Landis' come to Jesus moment came after reading Josih Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas. Three years ago Thompson wrote another book, Last Seconds in Dallas in which he and an audio expert examined recently released magnetophone recordings. The inescapable conclusion is that there were two gunmen.
The second gunmen doesn't require a conspiracy to explain. Oswald fired two shots: one in Kennedy's back which did not fully penetrate, and one through his neck which hit Connally.
Then, in the ensuing confusion, a Secret Service agent following the motorcade accidentally discharged his AR-15 in the back of Kennedy's head, killing him.
The agent who pulled the trigger on the ground doesn't even need to realize he had done it; it's possible to accidentally discharge without realizing it.
I don’t want to turn into a conspiration loonie but it might have been easy to make that little mishap disappear.
The quality of the secret service back then was nothing compared to what it is now. I mean one of the reasons the secret service agent in the article didn’t come forward was because he got drunk with other secret service agents the night before the shooting and he didn’t want it to surface.
I didn't read the article but a few months ago I randomly came across https://www.posner.com/case-closed and gave it a read. I haven't really read much else about the Kennedy assassination and the various conspiracy theories (certainly no other 400p books on the subject) but came away from the reading pretty impressed with the thoroughness of the argument. Spoiler alert, the argument is that the official story that Oswald acted alone is almost certainly correct and evidence to the contrary is entirely unconvincing when examined in detail.
How does this book account for the magic bullet, an exit wound to the back of the head, gun smoke seem from another location, eyewitness reports of Oswald that make it impossible for him to make the shots in those timeframes, or the eyewitness reports of a "police officer" near the grassy knoll that was never accounted for or found?
The magic bullet and exit wound - as seen on film kept from Americans for years - were enough to convince me the lone gunman theory was nonsense, but the rest of it also needs some accounting for.
The magic bullet took a straight trajectory through Kennedy and Connolly. Modern theory is that they weren't seated in a straight line and Connolly was turned.
Oswald could definitely have made the shots. He was a trained Marine marksman. There have been multiple tests showing that it is possible to make the shots.
Kennedy had a small entry in back of the head. The explosion on top and side of head was not the entry wound. There isn't an exit wound because it was probably in damaged area so could say explosion was the exit wound. Remember that he was hit with rifle bullet that causes lots more damage than handgun.
But you can see from video evidence that they were sat aligned and Connolly was not turned.
If you are in the room, you might be able to make the shots - although the FBI failed to, and Oswald was a lousy shot - but my main problem is that he could not have moved through the building as needed without being seen by some people, and not by others who did.
The photos of Kennedy do not show a small wound in the back of the head. They are distressing for a number of reasons, not least they clearly show the back of the head has exploded out.
On the contrary, what you can see in the Zapruder film is comletely consistent with the bullet trajectories lining up. [0]
This documentary I watched recently is long, but it puts all the eyewitness testimony of Oswald in the depository building into one big spacial timeline [1]. There are some inconsistencies (like you would expect when aggregating a bunch of eyewitness testimony from fallible humans) but there's nothing there that made me think there was something nefarious going on. Anything specific you had in mind?
As far as the autopsy photos go, I know the photo you're referring to, and you're misinterpreting it.
Here are some medical illustrations [still kinda graphic, but not photographs] of the part that "exploded out" [2] and what the actual hole in the back of his head looked like when you held that part back in place [3]:
> But you can see from video evidence that they were sat aligned and Connolly was not turned.
I just looked up the Zapruder film right now [1]. In the seconds before the fatal shot, you can clearly see Connolly turn around to face JFK (you can see the rotation of the shoulder pretty clearly as the car passes the road sign). At the moment of the fatal shot, he appears to be in the middle of turning back to his original position. Now I can't tell from the Zapruder film whether or not they were aligned or instead offset by several inches, but it is very clear that Connolly was not facing forward at the time of fatal shot.
The autopsy of Kennedy shows small wound in the back of head, top and side blown off, and no wound in the front. The bullet fragments were in his head, which makes a forward shot impossible. The video is deceptive because it is from behind and doesn't see full explosion.
Oswald was a good shot, he was rated sharpshooter and marksman in the Marines. Lots of people left to watch the motorcade. Memories are always unreliable. Oswald was supposed to be working.
It is possible that FBI was working from bad info or incompetent. It was thought that the last two shots were rapid fire. But there is better info now that the shots were spaced out with plenty of time for bolt action rifle, and the "rapid fire" was echos. Lots of people have recreated the shots, some not that good shots.
What you are saying is that most people are able to deduce proper bullet trajectories through soft targets by watching a single section of film shot from a distance -- and that this ability is so good as to render all of the other evidence moot.
> gun smoke seem from another location, eyewitness reports of Oswald that make it impossible for him to make the shots in those timeframes, or the eyewitness reports of a "police officer" near the grassy knoll that was never accounted for or found
Not sure what specifically you are referring to with all of them, but in general it covers the various eyewitness reports used to establish multiple shooters. In short (and would really recommend reading the book if you are interested in the subject) they are not credible. Often inconsistent (both internally as the stories are told on different occasions) and also mutually inconsistent. There were a lot of people there that day and it was quite chaotic after the assassination. It doesn't seem that implausible to me that there would be a lot of conflicting information from eyewitnesses. But the eyewitness testimony taken as a whole is completely consistent with Oswald firing all three shots from the Book Depository.
> magic bullet
From memory, there was nothing "magical" about the magic bullet. The injuries on both Kennedy and Connelly and the video evidence are completely consistent with the official story that a bullet hit Kennedy in the back of the neck, exited through his throat and then hit Connelly in the the thigh.
> exit wound
I assume you mean the story that there was an exit wound on the back of Kennedy's head. But according to the actual autopsy that was not the case. He had an entry wound on the back of his head and exit wound on the side/front (again consistent with the official story). The story of a rear exit wound is from two doctors who treated Kennedy at the hospital in Dallas. They were not doing an autopsy. They were administering emergency medicine to a man whose head was covered in blood and brain fragments. And there accounts have been directly contradicted by other doctors who were there.
Another commenter linked a video which I’ll re-link[0]. Essentially the conclusion of the HSCA was, as you say, literally entirely based on that recording. If the recording hadn’t been there, the HSCA actually was on the verge of concluding the same as Warren. (In other words, if the recording evidence wasn’t there they would’ve concluded Oswald lone).
The recording was, indeed, later found to not even be from the time of the shots but from an entirely different point in time, after police already noticed Kennedy shot. In that very recording, police officers say things in reaction to the shooting. After those voices, the “shots” from which the conclusion was drawn appear. Painfully obviously, that doesn’t make any sense.
Also the recording was in an entirely different point in space too, as it wasn’t even from a bike in the motorcade, as the HSCA thought but it from a different 3-wheeled-motorcycle stationed where Kennedy would’ve been arriving.
Drawing conclusions from that recording about the Kennedy shooting is probably less reliable than drawing them from the Live Aid concert version recording of Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen.
In summary, after adjusting for that lone error in HSCA, Warren and HSCA concluded the same.
To those who haven't seen it, I'd really recommend Lemmino's video on the assassination https://youtu.be/5u7euN1HTuU?feature=shared
He dives pretty deep into the details, and it helped me form my own opinion of what probably happened
So, in the beginning, they play recordings. But the recordings, in particular that of Oswald's wife, sound pretty unnatural, including the interviewer. On the website linked, there are sources, but they are text only. Were those interviews "recreated" for the video, as far as you know?
Edit: it is mentioned (not very clearly) at the end that the recordings were "voiced" by other people. So that answers my question.
I watched it as well. I don't have a strong opinion on what actually happened, but the details in the video of how LHO came to be employed at the book depository and his movements in the days preceding the assassination make it seem pretty improbable that his position there and the assassination were part of some carefully coordinated plan.
For example, if there were actually multiple gunmen in different locations, who all fired within a few seconds, they would have to have had some way to coordinate not only the fact that they would shoot at the motorcade that day, but to precisely synchronize exactly when they all fired. How would they do that? Did LHO even have a watch? Were there other gunmen sitting around somewhere with their guns ready and on target and fingers on triggers, ready to fire within a split second of when some other shooter fired?
I would also note, I've watched training videos on how to respond to mass shooter situations. One of the main points is to discount any claims of additional shooters in other locations until you hear shots yourself. It seems it's quite common in mass shooter situations for witnesses to falsely report additional shooters in other locations.
I didn't read all the source material researched for the video myself, so I'd take all this with a grain of salt, but I personally consider Lemmino reliable. Based on his presentation of the evidence I think it was just Lee Harvey Oswald taking an attack of opportunity.
It seems likely he was working at the building by happenstance, heard/read that the motercade would pass by, and hasily planned the assassination in secret.
He had a motive that doesn't require any conspiracy as he was self admittedly a marxist and was described as "unstable".
To me, his murder of a police officer immediately following the assassination is indicative of mental instability rather than a carefully planned conspiracy.
I also consider the reports of multiple gunshots unreliable; I remember being nearby Parliment in Ottawa during the 2014 shootings at Parliment Hill. There was incredible confusion when it started, and rumours and miscommunications travelled at lightning speed since everyone feared for their lives. At first there were reports of multiple gunman in several different locations near the actual shooting because of echoes off of nearby buildings and return fire from police. Really it was a lone gunman, and despite those inital reports I'm not aware of any conspiracies about the whole event.
I think the true conspiracy, if any, was that any of the people involved who failed in their role to prevent the assassination of the president by a lone unstable man, or to conduct a flawless investigation following it, were incentivized to bend evidence and testimoney in their favour (whether unconsciously or intentionally). I don't think this was done out of malice, rather, who would want to admit to any actions that could conceivably invite criticism? In the article itself he provides several (perhaps reasonable) reasons for why he moved the bullet at all, probably to defend against criticism that leaving all evidence in place (seems to me) would have been the best course of action.
As for the article itself, human memory is notoriously unreliable (even shortly after shocking events like this), so even if he beleives he is telling the truth, and isn't interested in the profit motive, I don't think it's compelling enough evidence to believe in a conspiracy beyond human fallacy.
What I find most intriguing about the JFK assassination is the fact that parts of it still can't be declassified.
In 1992, Congress passed a law saying everything was to be declassified in 25 years. October 2017 came and went, and the FBI blocked around 7,500 documents from release. The DEA didn't want CI names related to organized crime in them. The State Department blocked some due to "national security and foreign affairs concerns".
Trump claimed while running for President that he was now going to release everything, yet the FBI and CIA stepped in again and those plans changed.
Trump finally said he couldn't release them due to some being "of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure".
What’s the anti-conspiratorial explanation for that? I can imagine a million different things they’d love to hide, but what would the legitimate, honest/harmless reason?
Hypothetical: They checked with an agent who is deep / high up in some foreign agency and he said "wasnt us." that agent retired but helped recruit others. those may have retired and helped recruit others.
Just that one connection in a file, "we asked agent $name and he said $agency knew nothing" might be justifiable to keep secret if theres a connection to someone still active.
> Hypothetical: They checked with an agent who is deep / high up in some foreign agency and he said "wasnt us." that agent retired but helped recruit others. those may have retired and helped recruit others.
> Just that one connection in a file, "we asked agent $name and he said $agency knew nothing" might be justifiable to keep secret if theres a connection to someone still active.
The names of the agents would be redacted at first place on declassified material.
It’s not just names but also things like places, times, methods of communication, etc. which could be use to narrow things down. If there was a high-level KGB officer whose cooperation hadn’t previously been recognized they don’t want to inspire new investigation into what else that person or their handlers did.
The anti-conspiratorial explanation would be that the government flagrantly broke tons of laws over the years, both in the US and abroad, and that they don't want to publish details about that (even though none of those details actually involve trying to kill Kennedy).
Not directly related to this article, but I found the lone gunman theory much easier to accept after visiting the museum in the former book depository in Dallas. You can look down onto the plaza from the exact spot Oswald shot from, and you can easily imagine how the bullet fired from there would go through JFK and into the governor sitting in front of him.
Not that this proves anything, it was just a "oh, I can tangibly see it" feeling that I didn't get from reading about it. For some reason the view from Oswald's window isn't in popular knowledge although you can find plenty of pictures.
Years ago, on Discovery or History channel, I watched a show where they replicated the “magic bullet” shot. The magic bullet was the one that hit the President and the Governor, that apparently went all zig zag, and left a pristine bullet.
For the experiment they had all the measurements and distances, detailed ballistic dummies (with bones and whatnot), positioned properly (the Governor was on a smaller, lower jump seat, and sitting below the President), and they shot from a tower.
They had the same rifle, though not the actual rifle, and they had period ammunition from the same lot that Oswald used. Who knows where they dug that up. I also can’t speak to the atmospheric conditions but those would affect accuracy, not impact.
Only thing hey didn’t mimic was the actual motion. It was a stationary shot.
Sorry to be graphic here, but as I recall this was the shot that hit The President in the throat, passed through him and continued on to hit the Governor, twice, I believe. Through his arm and into his leg.
And you know what?
They did it. They replicated the shot. Was it 100%? No. But I’d call it 90+%.
The damage to the dummies was very similar, including deflection off the bones. They recovered the bullet and it was not perfect, but it was in very good shape. It was simple ball ammunition and did not expand like modern bullets can.
It was, to me, a very convincing demonstration about how little magic was in the original bullet.
Recently it was revealed that the car had been modified and the back seat was quite a bit higher than is normal for that model, and the original bullet trajectory analysis was therefore inaccurate.
A few years after the Warren Commission, Dan Rather and CBS News recreated the shooting with marksmen on a tower, and did use a moving target. Several hit with two shots; one with all three.
I think what drives much conspiracy-theorizing are two facts: 1) people have terrible intuition about physics outside a very narrow range of everyday conditions, 2) people are viscerally unaware of fact 1).
For instance, I recall sitting next to a table of 9/11-truthers meeting up at a coffee shop. Their discussions kept circling back to the sheer implausibility of a fire causing structural beams to buckle. People don't have intuition for jet-fuel-hot fires; nor skyscraper-high gravitational potential energy. Similarly, the dynamics of a high-speed bullet is so far outside people's intuitions that they derisively call its behavior "magic."
I'd like to hope that at least problem 2) could be ameliorated if good laboratory-based educational experiences were widespread enough; the terribleness of everyday intuitions smacks you in the face quickly when you try to do even a basic experiment. On the other hand, maybe the old dictum holds true that education benefits those most who need it least.
> For instance, I recall sitting next to a table of 9/11-truthers meeting up at a coffee shop. Their discussions kept circling back to the sheer implausibility of a fire causing structural beams to buckle. People don't have intuition for jet-fuel-hot fires; nor skyscraper-high gravitational potential energy.
They might, if they think for a few minutes about how metalworking works.
> I'd like to hope that at least problem 2) could be ameliorated if good laboratory-based educational experiences were widespread enough
I think a lot of this comes from people being alienated from working with the physical world. Blacksmiths probably have extremely accurate everyday intuitions about how metal behaves under extreme heat.
You can get this view only when the aircraft is flying directly towards you, any change in direction will reveal its true shape. For me this isn't very convincing.
Furor which may well have been caused by unacknowledged aircraft like the above.
But who knows, maybe an intelligence or sapience from another world just
wants to confuse people, or something similar in the long probability tail of life experience in this universe.
I think the suspicious stuff about the JFK assassination is not the shot itself, but the fact that Oswald had a friend and mentor who was a CIA handler and Oswald himself was inexplicably murdered by Ruby before any real investigation could happen. Ruby's offered explanation - that he wanted to save Jackie a trial, doesn't seem plausible.
"I think the suspicious stuff about the JFK assassination is not the shot itself, but..."
...who ordered the murder. Shooter is the least important factor considering how many enemies JFK had in the establishment. It is too easy to blackmail someone in performing the murder.
The hit was ordered by Sam Giancana, the Chicago mafia boss. Jack Ruby was his lackey.
From wikipedia: Ruby was known to have been acquainted with both the police and the Mafia. The HSCA said that Ruby had known Chicago mobster Sam Giancana (1908–1975) and Joseph Campisi (1918–1990) since 1947, and had been seen with them on many occasions.
It's so good that you mentioned him, because this is from the first article of the top of Google's search:
"In July 1974, however, he was seized by police in Mexico City and shipped back to Chicago. One year later he was bullet-riddled in his home in Oak Park, Ill., by unknown assailants. He had been scheduled to appear before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss his alleged involvement in a Central Intelligence Agency plot to assassinate Fidel Castro in the early 1960s."
Ruby's mob associations are probably exactly normal for someone in his line of work, but also they tell us they he wasn't committed to the rule of law. That's consistent with his statement about saving Jackie from a trial - he thought retribution was owed, not justice.
The problem is, the Secret Service could see that too, and Dallas wasn't exactly a "friendly" city. The decision to take such a route in a vehicle without cover or without securing the building remains unexplained.
So, yea, the depository is a perfect location to shoot onto that route. This in and of itself is a massive problem.
You, like many people, fall into the trap of seeing the events of 1963 through a modern lens, a lens that itself was greatly influenced by these events.
Presidential security in 1963 wasn't what it is today. For example, JFK would stop his car to go mingle with the crowd. There's a photo on this audio recording from Miami in 1963 [1].
There are parallels with 9/11. Prior to 9-11, people would generally go along peacefully with hijackers. Why? Because they knew the "routine". The hijackers would fly the plane somewhere, land it, make demands, make noise for their political cause and, more often than not, people would get to go home. Harrowing for sure. But the general public didn't conceive of planes being used as cruise missiles. We all know post-9/11 was so much security theater but it was also largely unnecessary because people were now aware they could be used as a missile so were less likely to simply go along with demands.
JFK's assassination changed the threat modelling and protection by the Secret Service of the president. In spite of that, Ronald Reagan was shot by an assailant [2] without any great planning or mass conspiracy.
Now it's all bulletproof motorcades with armor plating to survive running over a land mine. It's Secret Service vetting every audience member at a live event. It's mapping out and securing any potential sniper positions. None of that was true to the same degree in 1963.
The featured article is about a 23 year old secret service agent hired directly from college and quickly assigned to protect the first lady - what if the secret service before 1963 was just not that competent? How much does that explain for us?
Oswald was temporary employee at the Book Depository. He carried a long package into the building in the morning. I don't think there was security since would have likely searched the package. But his employee status would have gotten him in and given him reason to be there in any search.
I had the exact same reaction. There are X’s on the road where Kennedy was hit, and standing at the window next to Oswald’s position, two things were immediately obvious to me: that both X’s were in line with his position (so he wouldn’t have needed to shift his point of aim unlike a shooter from the grassy knoll) and that I could have probably made the same shots.
I had the opposite feeling. Looking from the window, to your left, a winding road. To your right, the freeway entrance. With a bolt action rifle, Oswald had to shoot, eject the casing, reload, acquire the target of an accelerating vehicle, shoot, eject the casing, reload, acquire the target of an accelerating vehicle and fire again. One of the Marine Corps' top snipers said, "I can't do it." If he can't, how could Oswald?
The Carcano M91/38 is a magazine fed rifle, it isn't manually reloaded. You can work the bolt while remaining on target. That's not a particularly hard thing to do, either- I was able to learn that skill the first afternoon I shot a magzine fed bolt action.
EDIT: Here's a video of someone replicating the shots with that rifle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghmY6HmR4fs The comments also point out other factors that could have made the shot easier.
One of the cable networks had a guy make the shot from the exact same height and distance. After I watch that episode I'm convinced it happened that way. What really makes it a conspiracy is how RFK covered up the political on goings in the White House. JFK was doing thing politically not popular in America, in an effort to cover this up RFK rushed the funeral, medical exam and burial to put those things to rest.
Thank you for sharing this context and the video. It is also interesting anachronism to see Americans casually handling firearms with competence on a TV broadcast
They weren’t exactly bullseye hits. He got the bullets in the right vicinity, which is admittedly an impressive feat, but it was pure chance that they managed to strike in a way that caused a lethal blow. If one was going through the effort of conspiring with 1-2 other gunmen, then it should have featured better and more intentional targeting, from spaces anywhere along the motorcade route that wouldn’t be so difficult to enter/exit. Or, if we’re talking about a broader planned conspiracy, use a blunter instrument like an IED or another vehicle, or both. Why opt for a sniper at all? The chances of success seem too little for a professional hit, but about right for an unstable radicalized former soldier looking for revolutionary glory.
Also, the car only started accelerating after the hit was made, and it was fairly axial to the bullet trajectory. I dunno know about you, but I can reload a bolt action rifle without dropping aim in under a second. It’s using the rifle as it was designed to be used.
It wasn’t a good shot. It was a lucky shot. One he clearly didn’t fully prepare to land, otherwise he probably wouldn’t have been arrested shortly after in a nearby movie theater. It was hardly sophisticated, and its success hinged almost entirely on blind luck and circumstance, which is the most difficult scenario to protect against.
The problem with conversations about this topic and similar topics (9/11) is that almost no-one who cares about the topic deeply enough to have an argument about it online is interested because they're just super into ballistics and forensics and don't care about the political implications. It's all motivated reasoning because they don't like the _implications_ of the official story for whatever reason (or, alternatively, the conspiratorial reading), or they're selling something to the people who don't like the official story (or the conspiracy).
You think you're having an argument with someone about the facts and what you're actually doing is having a conversation with someone who is deeply invested in defending their _entire world view_ which means they just can't accept whatever argument you're trying to make. You can go after each argument they make and dispense with them in turn, and they'll continue to invent new ones -- for decades if they have to. It's like trying to argue with a christian fundamentalist about the logical impossibilities of noah's ark. And it really doesn't matter _who is right_. Nobody is going to be arguing in good faith about it. Probably if you're about to comment on this post, you've got some motivated reasoning behind it that has nothing to do with finding out what really happened.
> Probably if you're about to comment on this post, you've got some motivated reasoning behind it that has nothing to do with finding out what really happened.
I'm not sure that's true in this case. I remember 9/11, but I wasn't even born yet when the Kennedy assassination happened. I doubt that many people under age 70 remember that personally. It doesn't really have emotional salience for most people now. For me, it's merely a curiosity, and I can't say that the truth of the matter is important to me either way.
Even if there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, I don't see how it's relevant to current politics, and the possible players involved are no longer relevant either. Joe Biden himself, old as he is, was only 21 at the time and still in college.
> I doubt that many people under age 70 remember that personally.
I think OP's point is that personal remembrance, direct knowledge/witness, or subject matter expertise is not a requirement when it comes to defending one's strongly invested world view. Instead of looking at evidence, people start with a vague belief about the world and then draw the lines between everything that happens and that world view.
For example: "There are inscrutable elites that operate in secret to control the world." This is a vague and close to impossible-to-prove assertion, but people believe it strongly, and they use this world view to explain everything they have questions about. JFK was obviously assassinated for going against the Shadowy Elite! If you take your belief as a given, many wild explanations simply follow logically. 9/11 was orchestrated by this Elite to [do whatever The Elite does, there are a wide range of speculation even among the "shadowy elite" believers]. COVID was planned by The Elite. It goes on and on, and everything makes sense when you're working from that one assumption.
If you argue with someone against any of these particular things, you're not going to get anywhere because disproving even one of these calls into question the world view that all his other beliefs are pinned to.
EDIT: Parent commenter I see what you're saying now and yea I totally agree!
> If you argue with someone against any of these particular things, you're not going to get anywhere because disproving even one of these calls into question the world view that all his other beliefs are pinned to.
I don't dispute that there are people like this. What I was disputing, specifically, was the overgeneralization, applying this characterization to everyone: "Nobody is going to be arguing in good faith about it. Probably if you're about to comment on this post, you've got some motivated reasoning behind it that has nothing to do with finding out what really happened."
Even among those who are into a "Shadowy Elite" conspiracy theory, I don't see a lot of emotional investment remaining nowadays in the JFK conspiracy specifically. Of course they're obsessed now with Covid, for example. JFK is old news, not salient.
The thing about the shadowy elite is that it's non-falsifiable.
We can certainly have a discussion, but it's outside the realm of logic, because there's no possible evidence that could disprove it. That doesn't make it true or false, but it does make it useless to discuss in the terms of logic, and trying will just lead to frustration.
What would we do differently if the shadowy elite was behind JFK's death? What would we do differently if the shadowy elite wasn't behind it? What ends were gotten by the shadowy elite through the means of mysterious assasinations to help the Rolling Stones sell records?
These are all reasonable questions to ask, but the philosophy of logic won't help us come to answers.
Minor quibble, logic is generally perfectly fine with things that are non-falsifiable, so long as a truth value can be hypothesized, we can use logic just fine.
It's science that doesn't have anything to say about unfalsifiable situations (metaphysics, negative statements, etc).
We've really left the realm of empiricism, not logic.
I think the issue is not one of expertise, but that many people are arguing without being aware of facts contrary to their own view. For instance a critical component to the conspiratorial view is Operation Northwoods [1]. And it tends to paint a far different than picture than you are claiming. Operation Northwoods was a planned CIA operation where they were going to carry out terrorist attacks against both civilian and military US targets (notably they even proposed the use of remote controlled civilian aircraft) and blame it on Cuba, so we could start a war with them. This plan successfully made its way all the way up the chain of the command and was one signature away from being executed. The problem is that JFK rejected it, vigorously.
The CIA and the military wanted global escalation and military conflict. Kennedy, by contrast, was working more towards reconciliation and global peace through good faith. Just prior to Operation Northwoods, he had recently removed the head of the CIA (following the Bay of Pigs catastrophe), and following the Joint Chief of Staffs presentation of Operation Northwoods to him, JFK also removed him from power as well. JFK would then go to on to pass a unilateral nuclear test ban as a show of good faith to the USSR, and was reportedly not only looking to withdraw from Vietnam, but also to completely dismantle the CIA. Less than 6 months later, he would be assassinated.
That's hardly a tale of some 'shadowy elite trying to control the world.' In fact the assassination becomes so utterly predictable in this context that one has to consider that if it was a simple lone-wolf then the CIA and military effectively won some sort of one in a quadrillion type lottery (at least from their rather sociopathic worldviews). For that assassin to then to be assassinated, after initially claiming he was a "patsy", and all the other weirdness around it all, I think Occam's Razor starts pointing in a pretty clear direction.
>the possible players involved are no longer relevant either.
If the conspiracy was on the part of the spy agencies, as claimed, then the agencies involved are absolutely still relevant. If the CIA or whatever back then was willing to kill someone because he threatened to reduce their power, given the intelligence agencies have even more power now than they did back then there's no reason to think they wouldn't do it again if threatened.
> I doubt that many people under age 70 remember that personally.
Jesus of Nazarath was reportedly crucified in Judea almost 2000 years ago, and people have all sorts of opinions on that event.
Events like these just have a way of getting out of hand. Honestly, I think my grandma, who was a JFK fan-girl, would probably be incredibly confused by the ideology of modern JFK conspiracy theorists.
> Even if there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, I don't see how it's relevant to current politics...
A group with that much power - to kill a president then get it covered up - is not going to just fade away quietly. It'd have to be a powerful group and powerful groups have a habit of lasting beyond the lives of the members.
If it turned out that there was a conspiracy it is actually quite likely that the group that organised it are still active. Picking on one from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination_... that would make a good story ... if it was the Israelis there'd be no reason to believe they stopped. It'd put Jeff Epstein's kompromat operation in a new light if they were trying to manage US politics.
> A group with that much power - to kill a president then get it covered up - is not going to just fade away quietly. It'd have to be a powerful group and powerful groups have a habit of lasting beyond the lives of the members.
> If it turned out that there was a conspiracy it is actually quite likely that the group that organised it are still active.
I don't think these are correct assumptions. Sixty years is a long time, and the world has changed a lot. The Soviet Union is a shell of its former self (hence the current Ukraine conflict), Fidel Castro is dead, etc.
> if it was the Israelis
IMO this is one of the dumber and least plausible of the conspiracy theories.
What are we even to conclude from this, though? Of course Israel still exists, but what exactly are you trying to imply about the current situation? Netanyahu, by the way, was 14 years old in 1963 and was actually living in Pennsylvania, US at the time.
If the JFK and RFK assassinations were done by secret services it seems to make a lot of sense (psychologically) that they'd use people that were the "opposite" of themselves as patsies.
So some right-wing CIA people (and their Mafia/Anti-Castro helpers) used a left-wing communist Oswald as the patsy for JFK. There was a lot of motive for these people to kill JFK
And then some Jewish Israel Mossad people copycatted for the RFK assassination, using a Muslim Palestinian as their patsy. There was a lot of motive for these people to kill RFK. (And I shouldn't have to say this, but I'm Jewish, so this isn't an antisemitic thing.)
But I agree with the point that it mostly doesn't have much impact on the modern world. Whoever was involved in these assassinations doesn't hold power any more. They're dead.
No kind of reconciliation process is truly required to prevent this kind of thing in the future. The world has changed and that's why these kind of political assassinations aren't used in the west today.
Not because there aren't people that wouldn't love to have this tool. It's just not as viable as it was in the time before mass surveillance and uncontrollable information flows.
Try to imagine pulling off the RFK or JFK assassinations with a large number of uncontrolled smartphones posting and even live streaming to the internet.
It's not some grand conspiracy, just some guy with a gun.
I can imagine pulling off JFK 2.0... but I don't want to.
Surveillance cements consequences.
If it was Israel, then who cares? Are we doing diplomacy by assassination now? The reality of politically motivated, err, unpleasantness, has existed forever.
Let's not forget the 20yr war that happened straight after 9/11. Less killing the better, and a death in cabinet doesn't always get the change 'the powerful group' may want.
I'd be more worried about getting on a submarine with a console controller now.
Of course actual unhinged will try to assassinate people. That's to be expected in a world with so many people.
What has changed is that covert political assassinations by the secret services of nation states is no longer a viable strategy the way it was when JFK and RFK were killed.
True, Mossad directly is probably a stretch. Though if they do it right, we should never know that they did it.
Soo.. an intelligence firm that needs to be advertized or spoken of.. is a little strange.
As catch rates go up, the more unhinged your assassin needs to be, so why not take a step back and influence the 'unhinged' single adult male, via the internet and never even raise an eyebrow?
The atmosphere of ambiguity around the world, is thick and dense lately...
The problem with the unhinged is that they're also incompetent, generally. Abe was only susceptible to an unhinged assassin because its Japan and violence/guns are so rare, security is/was so lax. Getting close to Abe, even when he as the PM, was incredibly easy. Hopefully the lesson has been learned there, as it already has been in most other countries.
I'm sure the secret services have come up with creative things. The Russians sometimes use poison when abroad, but even that is usually discovered now due to sophisticated hospitals.
The old tricks of discrediting, bribing, and blackmailing are probably still just as effective as ever. Maybe more so.
Eh, at this point with all of the myths and legends surrounding the JFK assassination, it would be novel if even something as banal as the friendly fire theory turned out to be true.
"Nobody is going to be arguing in good faith about it."
Saying that "nobody" is willing to discuss this in good faith is going way too far. Just because I don't expect anyone to be able to convince me that it wasn't a conspiracy doesn't mean I'm not open to the possibility.
All good faith means, in this context, is that one is willing to maintain intellectual honesty. That may be hard for many but far from all.
The "why" (motive) is the most clear part: JFK was not willing to invade Cuba and depose Castro. To say this this really pissed off the DoD, CIA, Mafia, and Cuban rebels is putting it extremely mildly. They hated JFK with a murderous passion.
This seems like one outlook but either case wouldn't drastically change my skepticism of government. That it happened exactly as the official report says or it turns out that the CIA lied and there was a second shooter. I've seen an attempted coup (and the GOP attempt to minimize that and continued support of the dictator-in-waiting) which I thought would never happen in my lifetime despite noticing the polarization we're all seeing. Nothing really surprises me much any longer when it comes to politics and how dirty it can be or if they didn't lie at all.
> Probably if you're about to comment on this post, you've got some motivated reasoning behind it that has nothing to do with finding out what really happened.
Is that a recursive statement or are you somehow the only one with clean hands?
Even if Landis is being honest to the best of his ability, this account seems suspect for one simple reason: human memory is incredibly unreliable even in routine cases. Considering the stress and trauma around witnessing and being so close to an awful event like that, as well as the amount of time that has passed, I don't see how we can consider this story to be even remotely reliable.
He may truly remember these events as he is describing them, even if what he's described never actually happened. That's unfortunately how (poorly) human memory works.
I am reminded of an incident relayed to me by an office worker in the early 2000s. A colleague had left the building at lunchtime and had been witness to some kind of shooting incident where robbers or gang members on motorcycles had opened fire on someone or something else - I don’t think it was ever discovered what the target or cause was. This was in South America, so not a wholly unusual scenario. But the debrief of the employee was eye-opening. He described everything that had happened from his perspective: he heard gunshots, hid behind a bin, and waited until it was over. He said there were dozens of gunshots and he had stayed in hiding for about ten minutes, until he heard the bikes speed away.
However, upon reviewing the CCTV footage, it became clear that the whole incident, from bike arrival to employee emerging from behind the bin, lasted about 11 seconds.
The colleague was astounded to see the footage and couldn’t explain why he had felt it was so much longer.
I think there’s a good chance that stressful situations play havoc with human memory formation.
A really interesting example here in a PBS doco of someone's experience of time 'stretching out' in a dangerous situation. It includes footage of the entire event, the individual's recollection, and a possible explanation:
I experienced it one time when I accidentally put the car into a a skid at 70mph. I remember calmly realising the car was moving sideways. Having time to ponder that for a few moments. Then deciding to start steering into the skid. Then think about that for a while. Release the break a bit. Finally we did a full 360 and ended up in the middle of the road again.
It seemed like it took a minute or more but was probably a few seconds if that.
Brains are awesome! (My younger self driving ability, much less so)
My understanding of time dilation is that at the time the event is actually happening, things occur at normal speed, it's just that our memory of the event is time-dilated and so we remember everything slowing down and taking a long time.
There's an interesting dialog about this in Catch-22, the novel, but it intentionally revolves around boredom, not fear (which of course also is a primary subject of the novel)
I assume you were also aiming at a point of absurdity, because I don't want to imagine that you'd like to lenghten your perceived lifespan i.e. by being tortured...
My theory is that in a really stressful situation the mind hyperfocuses and "processes more frames per second" to react quicker. Just like with movies this mean that replayed at normal speed the movie serms very slow, hence the long timespan memory.
I remember with 100 percent clarity doing great in sophomore high school math. I loved it and I went on to get a PhD. Then my mom passed and I got a box of stuff with my name on it from her house. It included my report card. C.
Sorry that came off like a reddit comment. The first part was just me joking. I don't actually believe in the simulation hypothesis although it is fun to think about.
The second part was just me agreeing with their comment that it's crazy how bad our own memory is and how it's difficult to come to grips with. Like when my mom, sister, and I are all arguing over a past event and remember it very differently. The true events are (to my knowledge) absolute, but in a philosophical sense, we're all living in our own reality as our memories are telling us the events unfolded differently even though they didn't.
yep possibly "oh shit I'm gonna fail, I better study like crazy" gets 100 on the final and brings a D up to C, and realizes he can do math pretty well when he tries.
Interesting! Without going into personal details, can you explain what sort of incongruence he found between his diary and his memory?
I sometimes keep a diary, for example when I go on long trips that are different from my day-to-day life. I try to be as accurate as possible, but sometimes i notice what i write isn't fully representative of my state of mind at the time, simply because when you're writing stuff down (especially when you're writing with a pen and paper (slow!)), you can never fully capture all the concurrent thoughts and emotions you're experiencing, so its impossible for a diary to be fully accurate. Undoubtedly, e.g. Elizabeth Loftus has done a lot of prominent research in that field, our memories tend to be fallible, but maybe that's part of the reason?
When I was writing a paper on the history of D, I had kept a lot of records, such as emails. I was often surprised when the details didn't quite line up with my memories.
This is one reason why one cannot get a fair trial 40 years after the fact, if any of it relies on eyewitness testimony.
I agree. Having gone through stuff I know how my mind can distort / hallucinate stuff in confusing / high stress situations. Even without questioning the person's honesty.. your brain is not a high quality source of information.
Totally, that's why I don't trust anything anyone says, ever. I can't trust that my fallible brain is hearing what people are saying correctly, so even if they're right my understanding of what they're saying may still be wrong.
The JFK assassination has been such a recurrent theme for so long that I reckon I might have memories of it, even though it happened decades before I was born.
I didn’t see it live, it was on a news replay minutes after it happened. I remember thinking I have to tell my brother and my dad, but what will I say? It felt a bit like when you stub your toe and it doesn’t hurt yet, you know something bad has happened and this is the pause before the impact hits when you tell everyone. I seem to remember them asking what exactly had happened, and I struggled to explain what I’d seen on the few seconds of replay I’d seen, and couldn’t really describe it.
Years later we discussed it and they were both adamant we all watched it live on TV. Am I misremembering, or them, or all of us? Tough one.
With 9/11 I seem to remember one of the impacts only being seen from the explosion, but you couldn’t see the plane itself. Maybe that was the second one?
> With 9/11 I seem to remember one of the impacts only being seen from the explosion, but you couldn’t see the plane itself. Maybe that was the second one?
There is an archive of several news channel and their coverage of 9/11 at https://archive.org/details/911/day/20010911#/. Some of the news channels had better viewpoints and saw the second plane hit on live footage [1]. The NEWSNW channel has a very solid view of the second plane as it hits, which causes the reporter there to react mid-sentence. Note that's the live coverage; since there's so many cameras pointed out the towers by that time, there's several different angles of the actual moment of impact (although most news channels were focusing on the views that best showed the damage at the first tower when it happened live).
There's only three known recordings of the first tower being hit (the best quality one being from someone shooting a documentary film who heard the plane, looked up with the camera, and recorded it as it hit). The hit of the Pentagon is only recorded by a security camera, where there is but one frame with part of the plane being just barely in the view before the impact.
[1] This takes place in the first or second clip of the second row of the 9:00-9:10 segment, depending on how bad the delay is.
Thanks, that's great. After this amount of time I can't say what memories of seeing a plane impact is which tower. I suppose I must have seen footage of the second impact, I just know I didn't see it live.
I honestly don't think there was a conspiracy... but I wouldn't be surprised to learn there was more to it, at the same time. I never gave it much thought but one day I saw a documentary and its like "damn, there's a lot of weird stuff to this." However, I think it also shows just how bad people's memory is _or_ how bad people are at extracting details from witnesses.
The recollections of an 88 year old person about an event 60 years ago are simply not credible. He may truly remember picking up the bullet, but that doesn't mean it actually happened. Since he didn't mention it in his memos at the time, it probably didn't.
> The recollections of an 88 year old person about an event 60 years ago are simply not credible.
My experience with aging family members is that their memory of old events tends to improve as their short-term memory seems to get worse. I've had family memebers not remember where an object is, and from their nursing home bed, when asked about "what happened to ___?" reply with remarkable accuracy - to the point we were able to find several family heirlooms (photos from WWII that were lost in the 1960s, an old service rifle, old writings, paintings) right where they said it was. I wonder if perhaps that is the case here.
I have had aging family members who remembered things that cannot possibly have happened. Going beyond anecdotes, false memories are a well known and empirically studied effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory
> He claims he spotted a bullet resting on the top of the back of the seat. He says he picked it up, put it in his pocket, and brought it into the hospital. Then, upon entering Trauma Room No. 1 (at that stage, he was the only nonmedical person in the room besides Mrs. Kennedy, and both stayed for only a short period), he insists, he placed the bullet on a white cotton blanket on the president’s stretcher.
> ...
> Yet the bullet that Landis now claims to have discovered that morning emerged largely intact and only moderately damaged, its base having been squeezed in.
"As an international superstar, [Jackie Kennedy] was the Princess Di of her era..."
Interesting turn of phrase. Princess Di was far closer a contemporary of Jackie Kennedy than either are today. I can't imagine there is a large audience of people who would understand the reference to Princess Di but not Jackie Kennedy. Like saying "Will Rogers was the Red Skelton of his era". Iykyk.
Wasn't there a documented operation that JFK didn't want to sign/rejected, that pertained to the CIA wanting to set up false flags to justify war against Cuba?
Knowing nothing much about this there are still some obvious points to make.
The CIA will not be one singular entity of one mind and focus. There will be factions in that organisation, there will be rogue elements. There does not have to be a grand master plan but there could be. There does not have to be uniform competence and there will not be. Operations go wrong all the time. Pieces will be moved into position at vast expense then not used for so many possible reasons. Further if it were a cia operation (and I have no idea about that) it may not have been intended to actually kill anyone and Oswald surprised people by his effectiveness.
All sorts of wild stuff is plausible and you need evidence to assess it. Every huckster will trade on the doubt, there will be wishful thinking and genuine, directed official misinformation. Treating the CIA as an entity all marching in lock-step of one mind and purpose is an assumption that stretches plausibility and certainly requires evidence. Chaos is almost certainly a major factor in any explanation and indeed counts as the entirety of the official version of what happened and its aftermath.
Such a statement about the "magic bullet" leaves me with tremendous doubt. This idea that he put a pristine bullet that he found in the limousine, which later became the magic bullet, but somehow it got switched, just seems too far-fetched for me.
All these years he never told anyone? It is completely different from his written statement at the time. After all these years, I call BS.
It's wild that people still talk about the Warren Commission as having any relevance. The House Select Committee on Assassinations is the last thing the government 'officially' said on the case and they concluded there was a conspiracy and most likely not a lone gunman.
If I'm the CIA and I have exclusive access to the President's food, transportation, calendar, etc...this isn't how I take him out. Plane malfunction, opiate overdose in bathtub, food poisoning.
Plenty of other options with way higher probability for success.
Don DeLillo's 'Libra' is sterling, convincingly colors the multiple-shooter narrative, and adds lots of depth to Oswald the man - a whole biography really. It is a novel, therefore fiction; but, by now, what of the assassination's narrative isn't in question? Highly recommended.
Isn't it pretty common knowledge now that CIA played an active role in Kennedy's assassination? Current Kennedy in 2023 running for President talks about this.
I seem to recall the bullet on the gurney story to figure fairly prominently in the latest JFK documentary by Oliver Stone. Am I mistaken? When I read this accounting it didn’t strike me as totally new but rather a vindication of a story that had been relegated to being a conspiracy?
I highly suggest people go watch "inside the book Depository" [1]. It's long but it gives a good overview of the sequence of events and the discrepancies.
Thing is, it's not a conspiracy theorist video. The best part of the video is the last segment where the creator uses all the examples to show just how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, even when fresh let alone decades later. They go on to say that pretty much any conspiracy theory relies on cherry-picking certain details as irrefutable while ignoring others and this is esentially an arbitrary decision based on whatever narrative someone is pushing.
Additionally, the details supposedly changed never make sense for a conspiracy that is supposedly powerful enough to arrange all this.
Lastly, people often see things through a modern lens. Presidential security is a big one. JFK used to stop his motorcade and go into the crowd. Anyone with a handgun could've ended him. These people weren't all frisked and vetted. It was a different time. JFK's assassination is probably a big part of why presidential security changed. So the idea that you needed to have or be a sniper (or a team of snipers) is a silly one and based on modern assumptions.
Myths in this area persist too despite them being debunked. One that springs to mind is that you couldn't fire Oswald's rifle fast enough. CBS and the FBI tested and debunked this in the 1960s [2].
When this happens you'll often find the conspiracy theory moves the goalposts from it being "impossible" to "very hard". I'm sure it was hard but Oswald was also irrefutably a Marine-trained shooter.
Personally my theory is that any mystery surrounding JFK is much like that of 9-11: intelligence agencies caught with their pants down, not wanting to upset allies and/or not wanting to expose intelligence assets.
The last point I'll make is a study was recently done on the link between narcissism and conspiracy theories [3]. Now this has a lot of relevance to why who gets sucked into QAnon and their political leanings. But it's relevant beyond that.
A lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea that random things happen. They'd rather believe it's all part of a plan. It's almost preferable if it's a nefarious force as some people love to LARP as being oppressed or even just being brave warriors standing up for what's righteous. But this shares a lot of the psychology with those for a predilection for religion. And narcissim is the definition of main character syndrome.
if there were a way to set user-level filters on HN, i'd set one which drops all titles with subjunctive verbs (like the "could" here), everything about Elon Musk, etc.
It would be interesting to analyze a collection of user-defined user-level customization filters, as some sort of zeitgeist.
At this point the effects of the JFK assassination are so far back in history that new knowledge of possibly real and alternative sequences of events should have little impact on society as it is now. Let’s say it was orchestrated by political enemies—what effect would this have on things today? The state of US government is so dramatically different from back then.
This kind of discussion is really only interesting from a historical perspective. It doesn’t really have any bearing on modern politics or society.
>This kind of discussion is really only interesting from a historical perspective. It doesn’t really have any bearing on modern politics or society.
This is completely untrue. Some of his family members suspect he was murdered by the US intelligence agencies for planning to curb their power. Given the intelligence agencies have even more power now than back then, and are still not held accountable for their actions, if they were indeed responsible for killing JFK that heightens the need for the public to come out in mass in support of candidates committed to breaking up or disbanding those agencies.
RFK Jr. simultaneously believes that his father and uncle were killed by the intelligence state, and that they ought to be providing him protection, and that they want to kill him. I find his opinions pretty confusing on this matter
The secret service is under the DHS, not the CIA or FBI, which have been the organizations criticized by RFK, and JFK for that matter.
The DHS didn't even exist back then, the SS was absorbed into it some time after it was created in 2002.
Regardless, one can want the usual protections given and needed and also hold the belief that some agencies are too powerful and corrupt and need to be broken up. (like breaking up the DHS and making the SS it's own entity)
I can completely understand a young man being irrevocably changed by such tragedies, even if he hadn't already been on the world stage just because he was born.
That being said, dude is either non-serious or damaged to the point I wouldn't let him run Bluth's Original Frozen Banana stand, and he wants to be President?
The U.S. tried that already recently (more than once if we're being honest), electing a non-serious and damaged human raised in a family where ambition was treasured over f*cking hugs. I'm not sure if anyone else is paying attention, but that went very very very wrong.
Why don't we stop putting people like this into power just to assuage our own insecurities? Wouldn't it be a better investment to try and find a way to change the culture to encourage mental health from the beginning of life rather than devolve our society due to late-life insecurity and low-information voters?
> This is completely untrue. Some of his family members suspect he was murdered by the US intelligence agencies for planning to curb their power. [...] the need for the public to come out in mass in support of candidates committed to breaking up or disbanding those agencies.
The people have some kind of obligation to that but what looks like dynastic power is fine?
>At this point the effects of the JFK assassination are so far back in history that new knowledge of possibly real and alternative sequences of events should have little impact on society as it is now. Let’s say it was orchestrated by political enemies—what effect would this have on things today? The state of US government is so dramatically different from back then.
Is it? If it happened before it could happen again. And if a presidental assasination happened and was covered up, what other things happened and got covered up in the between decades, and what things still happen and are being covered up now?
History tends to have repercursions, even after centuries.
Of course, there's a lot of evil things from that same time frame that have since been uncovered:
CREEP/Watergate, mkultra, cointelpro, or more recently Iran-Contra, Snowden.
It takes a long time for some coverups to be uncovered (Tuskegee syphilis experiment took decades) but I think we have to downgrade our expectations that an uncovering will happen as time goes on.
> should have little impact on society as it is now
If a US clandestine institution actually did this, and that institution still exists, then the news should have _massive_ impact on society as it is now. If anyone still involved is living, or if anyone involved with a cover up is currently employed, we have should expect unusually massive impacts.
Oh, well let's not bother asking questions then. I sure am glad we get to shut down all those archaeology departments and use the space for something else now we have all agreed we should only be curious about things that have a tangible bearing on modern society!
"This kind of discussion is really only interesting from a historical perspective. It doesn’t really have any bearing on modern politics or society."
That's like saying how rise of Nazism was just an episode in history that can and should be forgotten.
A lot of people have valid reasons to believe that deep state was responsible for JFK's death. If their fears are confirmed to be true, then that must have huge political impact on the current US establishment, considering how CIA still has too much power.
you have to remember this "elites vs the rest of us" is not a universal narrative, I wasn't around back then but I get the sense that a significant portion of the population believed that the government was actually doing work on behalf of the people, not in opposition..
"I’m from the government and I’m here to help." wasn't said til 1986
I don't know why people are so obsessed with this conspiracy theory. Occam's Razor says it was Oswald. Why invest time speculating and arguing over it when there is no way to verify anything?
This new revelation doesn't change anything, it's just hearsay.
If there were three shots, Occam's Razor says it wasn't Oswald alone. For it to have been Oswald alone, he would have needed to reload and re-aim in a superhuman way. So that isn't the simplest explanation.
There are a lot of people who didn't/don't like the US, and a lot of people who like the US but didn't like Kennedy!
It is not exactly outlandish to think that maybe >1 people wanted Kennedy dead.
A lot of sharpshooter/sniper types who have tried it seem to say it's pretty easy. Interestingly they tend to miss the first shot (like Oswald) due to the steeper downward angle.
The shots occurred in a span of several seconds, not simultaneously.
I don't see anything implausible about a second shooter having Kennedy in his sights, waiting for the initial shots to be fired, and pulling the trigger once he heard the initial shot.
There are a lot of implausible aspects to all of this, but that... doesn't seem like one.
But that needs a bigger conspiracy than just kill JFK.
I don't feel like "two dudes who both want to kill the president in a country where it's really easy to get a rifle and there are ~16mil WWII veterans and millions more who know how to use them" is a really big or implausible conspiracy.
What about that seems implausible to you?
As for coordinating their fire, what about that seems implausible?
"I'll shoot first, once JFK reaches point XYZ. When you hear my shot that's your signal to shoot. Be ready and have your finger on the trigger, because obviously Secret Service is going to floor the gas and GFTO ASAP as soon as the first shot is fired"
That seems entirely within the realm of plans two dudes could come up with. I don't think it necessarily points to some larger conspiracy.
People seem to go between lone gunman or giant conspiracy and exclude the middle. It could have been a conspiracy of say four people: two shooters, one insider providing info and cover, and someone behind and planning the whole thing.
Much easier to keep everything quiet too. The difficulty of keeping secrets increases exponentially with the number of people who know it.
Yeah. Given the weirdness of the magic bullet theory, especially if the revelations in the linked article are true, I think this sort of "small conspiracy of 2-4 people" is the simplest possible explanation.
I mean, sometimes a former military guy decides to do some killing and sometimes he has somebody working with him.
It’s an amazing bit of history. Leaders of major powers have regularly been assassinated in history. Here the leader of a globally hegemonic nation was assassinated on camera.
The bullet points seem to be mostly confusion at the scene and shitty police work afterwards.
What is the conspiracy. That he was not killed at that spot, but later by the secret service? Like "that guy fired blanks at him, lets kill the PM and frame him"?
I never really understood the logic because it is deeply oxymoronic. People that generally wanted him dead (ultra right) think that he was killed by the secret service (presumably left) and Yigal Amir (ultra right) was framed.
But it is something about putting blank bullets in order to gather support with a fake assassination and then he was really killed by the Shabak on order of Shimon Peres (but can’t say that’s verbatim)
It always seemed even less internally consistent than most JFK theories
I mean, that would be like a secret service sniper shooting JFK when Oswald missed, or something. Surely is is reasonable to believe that the risk of a secrete service assassination increases during a assassination attempt. But, there is not really anything that would indicate that.
During the 1WW the death rate of officers was about twice that of privates for a sample.
There's no way (for most of us with finite resources) to verify the vast majority of history, even recent history, even history that happened today. To me this is like saying "who cares what may or may not have happened in the past".
This particular conspiracy theory is interesting because the assumed enemy here—the Soviet Union—was ostensibly (and seeming authentically) unhappy to see this happen. So who wanted JFK dead and why?
What open questions? He clearly had access to the place where the shots were fired, and knew how to use a gun. The shot was not particularly difficult.
I look at it like the crazy general in Dr Strangelove that is trying to start a world war
I highly doubt that a secret in the caliber of “let’s kill the President” can be kept by so many people for such a long time.
In my experience large organizations of people just don’t work that way
I highly doubt that a secret in the caliber of “let’s
kill the President” can be kept by so many people for
such a long time.
Agree.
However, what if that wasn't the conspiracy?
What if the conspiracy was, "let's avoid war with the USSR"?
If the US Government knew of or suspected USSR involvement in JFK's assassination: their choices were essentially "war with the USSR", "look like fools who bowed down to the USSR", or "pretend that Oswald was a lone, crazy guy."
In other words: not a conspiracy per se where the government was en masse covering up some specific thing they knew to be true. I agree with you that feels implausible. Especially since presumably a significant portion of the government would have been opposed to the assassination or the cover-up.
But it might have been more of a concerted effort to look the other way. Like, "If we investigate Oswald and the investigation too closely, the trail might lead to Russia or one of its satellite states, and therefore war, and therefore nuclear war. So therefore let's all agree that Oswald was a lone gunman because it sure beats war with the USSR."
That does not seem impractical to me.
Remember, the country was still reeling from the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the chilling possibility of having narrowly avoided nuclear war.
A lot of those things were cleared up for me when I visited the site in Dallas. People claiming conspiracy are trying to make what he did much more difficult than it really was. He had a job that happened to be in the right place at the time, he had a standard gun anyone could buy, and plenty of time alone (he specifically did not have anything on his todo list for the day done despite being at work for a few hours). There is nothing about this a lone actor would have any trouble with, other than the initial luck of getting a job there in the first place and that type of coincidence isn't unlikely.
Why would the USSR assassinate a US president at all? Why would they risk war (and their recent backing down in the Cuban missile crisis shows they really didn't want war) for something that gives them no strategic gain against the US?
I agree with you completely: I don't think Russia tasked an unstable loner malcontent with knocking off JFK and possibly kickstarting WW3 in the process. Russia did not want that.
What I think the US government feared was a public perception that Russia (or Cuba, or whoever) might have been behind it.
That's when swathes of the public and various grandstanding politicians start rattling their sabers and thinking about war. Any official story besides "Oswald was a crazy lone gunman" would have looked awful for the US and increased the odds of war, a recurrence of McCarthyism, etc.
So I don't think the possibility of a second gunman was ever seriously entertained, even though there's some evidence for it.
> What if the conspiracy was, "let's avoid war with the USSR"?
I think this is a plausible line of thinking. My issue with the official story is that it feels stretched to cover too many datapoints. Like it kind of explains the data but not quite and indeed the obfuscation I’m detecting could just as well be coming from something like that as any new world order coup. tldr; Still fishy though.
This is very close to my feeling on the matter, and if I remember correctly there was even a case of cover up related to the fact that he visited the embassies (which can also be interpreted as not wanting to divulge their intelligence sources).
However, it seems like the well known facts about Oswald (the communist background) weren't a major issue at the time (at least from what I gathered), so maybe there wasn't anything to cover up
Anyway, if the US government doesn't want to stir the cold war issues around the assassination, is it a conspiracy or just common sense statesmanship?
[edit]: I think I misread you, I do not think the soviets were involved, I think this is an extremely risky move no one would do. I do think there were probably fears it would be perceived as a foreign assassination which drove some actions in the US government.
I do not think the soviets were involved, I think this
is an extremely risky move no one would do. I do think
there were probably fears it would be perceived as a
foreign assassination which drove some actions in the
US government.
I was vague on that because my post was overlong already and I don't have a clue or guess about who (if anybody) was involved besides Oswald.
But I agree with you: I cannot imagine that Khrushchev or the leadership of the USSR wanted open war. For the same reasons the USA didn't.
There is definitely a middle ground sort of possibility, where Oswald was involved with the USSR to some extent (informant, or whatever) but they truly had no idea he was going to shoot JFK. That seems completely possible.
Of course, the Soviet government was enormous and not monolithic. Maybe some within it wanted war, maybe some thought that they could prod Oswald into an assassination without getting "caught."
Seems possible, but zero idea how likely that is.
The simplest scenario is: Oswald worked in tandem with a second rando guy who had a rifle and wanted the president dead. No shortage of those in America, a land with cheap rifles and ~16 million WWII vets who were trained to use them.
Anyway, if the US government doesn't want to
stir the cold war issues around the assassination,
is it a conspiracy or just common sense statesmanship?
Definitely common sense statesmanship.
Arguably a conspiracy as well but that depends on our definition of "conspiracy."
The only thing I'm really sure of is that it was in the US government's best interests to sell the idea that Oswald was a lone crazy guy. That was the least-bad scenario for America.
There may be forensics technicalities that are hard to explain but it seems that in any event that is highly ‘investigated’ people find too many patterns in the noise (9/11 for example)
Like most of those Cold War events, these cover ups look more like protecting intelligence sources and blunders than some large overarching cabal
I think the 9/11 and JFK conspiracy theories are dissimilar, almost opposite.
The official explanation for 9/11 is also the simplest possible explanation: terrorists carried out a very low tech and plausible hijacking attack that exploited some rather obvious holes in our airline security.
The 9/11 conspiracy theories are orders of magnitude more complex than this official narrative.
I don't think the JFK "second gunman" theory is more complex than the official truth. In it's simplest form (Oswald worked with another gunman, but there was no overarching conspiracy involving Russia or Martians or lizardmen or whatever pulling the strings) I would argue it's simpler than the official narrative.
While it is possible Oswald worked with another gunman, there is no reason for him to do that. Everything done is something anyone with basic gun knowledge could have done alone.
As I said elsewhere, the only evidence of a second gunman is we know Oswald was a good shot with a gun and so needing 3 shots (with a scoped rifle at close range - less than 100 meters) is something to question. But in the end it seems more likely he would have pulled the trigger himself and thus not needed help.
> Arguably a conspiracy as well but that depends on our definition of "conspiracy."
Not a conspiracy in the more surreptitious sense that most people consider. It would bear all the same hallmarks though, and I guess that’s what sets off people’s radars
I don’t think large organisations can act in such a coordinated manner at all but they can be manipulated.
Cartels with a lot to lose can take their secrets to the grave, in particular if their constituents have a lot to lose. Everyone else has “unfortunate accidents”.
So, just from the top of my head and rather recently:
1. the NSA lost all of its malwares/zero days to the Russians
2. The NSA lost a huge amount of documents detailing a large amount of their billion dollars sigint sources and tech catalog
3. China was able to steal US nuclear weapons design
4. The CIA itself lost its entire internal wiki
5. Top secret documents were on discord for over a month
Yet somehow these omnipotent organizations can keep the secret of how they killed the US president. Without a good answer as to what was their interest to do something so extreme in the first place
The key to all of those is they are digital files easily copied and deseminated online. It hard to hack a mechanical typewriter and or to exfiltrate physical documents locked in a filing cabinet in a secure facility. Then distributing them en mass the way the way digital channels like discord can is just not managable unless your a major news paper publisher. Digital information wants to be free, typewriten documents want to be locked in a documents warehouse missfiled and lost forever.
Jim Garrison was basically accused of among other things being an outright pederast in the New Orleans papers years ago so his credibility is a little suspect to say the least.
Point being why should we shove the whole thing under the rug with a lazy conclusion when it's still clearly possible that something more nefarious was going on back then than we may know?
Define conspiracy theory. The Deep State involving every government man at the time? Most likely no. A few people? Possibly. Not just Oswald? Probably. Oswald not involved at all? Unlikely, but possible. There are degrees of probability and likelyhood.
Occam's Razor says that the guy framed to be the fall guy on this literal world changing event was killed mere ours after the fact on live television, "ending the story".
It's amazing that people in 2023 can be just as accepting of the mainstream narrative as the average joes in the 60s, that were subjected to a top down narrative decided by the powers that be using 3 TV channels and 2 newspapers.
>It's amazing that people in 2023 can be just as accepting of the mainstream narrative as the average joes in the 60s, that were subjected to a top down narrative decided by the powers that be using 3 TV channels and 2 newspapers.
It's just HN crowd. The majority of Americans have always believed that others were involved.
How did killing Oswald end the story? You bringing it up proves that it only inflamed the issue and made it more attractive to conspiratorial readings!
In my town, there are "sudden killings" of let's say a particular person. No reason why they would be killed or they were a particular target, but everyone is saying " there is no reason to kill this person".
The authorities, in the coming weeks, months do a "shootout" where another person is killed and they declare "in an operation today, we killed the perpetrator of the previous killing. Case closed".
No one is arrested, no suspect is made public before the second shooting and no one asks why no due process was followed.
Its like clockwork and we can count out such instances in more than 2 dozen in the past 20 years if not less.
Oswald was a marine sharpshooter, and it took him 3 shots with a scoped rifle (probably at point blank range, though I don't know the ballistics of that gun). That suggests it wasn't Oswald. Though even then Oswald clearly would have been standing next to the unknown shooter urging him to do it.
Same; I always thought it essentially just meant "shot at such a close range that you can't miss". (Though I expect most people do actually use it that way, even if it's incorrect.)
For the record, a "marine sharpshooter" is an almost meaningless term. Virtually any physically healthy person is capable of meeting this bar with an hour or two of practice. It sounds way more impressive than it is. Oswald was in no way a highly skilled shooter. In fact, he had extremely basic firearms skills.
Seriously, one has to be a total bolo to not get an award for marksmanship. Everyone walks through the training and if orders are followed and one is not a total klutz, the award is Marksman "on a marksman/sharpshooter/expert scale."
During his Marine Corps service in December 1956, Oswald scored a rating of sharpshooter (twice achieving 48 and 49 out of 50 shots during rapid fire at a stationary target 200 yards [183 m] away using a standard issue M1 Garand semi-automatic rifle), although in May 1959, he qualified as a marksman (a lower classification than that of sharpshooter). [0]
While he was at San Diego, Oswald was trained in the use of the M-1 rifle. His practice scores were not very good, but when his company fired for record on December 21, he scored 212, 2 points above the score necessary to qualify as a "sharpshooter" on a marksman/sharpshooter/expert scale. He did not do nearly as well when he fired for record again shortly before he left the Marines. He practiced also with a riot gun and a .45-caliber pistol when he was in the Marines but no scores were recorded. [1]
It was not an "award for marksmanship" by any definition and it requires far less effort than learning to drive a car or ride a bicycle. What's the point in being obtuse here?
It sounds as silly as precisely identifying and numbering who killed Caesar.
Those murders changed the history. Just like those non-murders would have done.
History took its turns back then. Knowing the precise identity and number of killers won't give any extra useful detail. IMHO.
> Knowing the precise identity and number of killers won't give any extra useful detail.
Yes it does matter, if the official story established by the Warren commission is not true, it does matter to know why was Kennedy assassinated and by whom exactly, because Kennedy's death has had so many worldwide implications, that this isn't even just about USA.
If that story is ever debunked one day, factually, it will change the future of the USA. If the government lied about all that, then what other things the US government lied about? It will shake the very foundations of that country. It's literally the definition of a smoking gun, no pun.
> Kennedy's death has had so many worldwide implications
Which implications exactly?
> If the government lied about all that, then what other things the US government lied about? It will shake the very foundations of that country.
I mean... we already know that the government has lied about countless things.
However, Paul Landis is not claiming that the government lied. He's merely claiming that he himself withheld important information from the government.
Well why study history at all? Nothing in it has any more impact on us, no? Why try to determine who murdered a person even if it was decades later and the killer might be alive? It doesn’t matter anymore right?
I’m not in the conspiracy theorist crowd, but the “doesn’t matter anymore” crowd is disappointing.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
History is extremely important. It can help us make predictions about the future and understand circumstances in the past.
This specific incident has been researched to death. There is very little we will be able to understand about the sociopolitics of the past that we don't already know if the hand on the trigger changes. Every hypothetical scenario has been gamed to exhaustion, and which one reflects the reality we happen to be living in isn't going to change modern sociopolitics very much. What would change in a relationship with Russia if we found out a USSR plot killed Kennedy? The USSR is gone. What would change in people's trust in the FBI if we found out they killed Kennedy? That institution's reputation is already tarnished, and the people who would have made the decision to have him killed no longer work there. What would it matter if there was a conspiracy of a few people working with Oswald? We already know that it doesn't take more than one actor to kill a President from other assassination attempts.
Similarly, there is little to be gained studying this topic to exhaustion in terms of future predictions. Kennedy was a singular President existing in a singular time. A series of fairly unique circumstances led him to be universally hated and loved at the same time... Immensely popular, but his combination of willingness to challenge entrenched power and brash indifference to consequences made him dozens of enemies who would have had the resources to eliminate him.
Whether he was killed by a secret FBI project or a lone, angry man with firearm training changes none of those facts.
That rules quote does not apply in the slightest. Perhaps I was glib about it, but I replied directly to the message at hand. He questioned the validity of studying a (massive) historical event (it “changes nothing”, much like studying a lot of history). You continue the exact same line of reasoning (“isn’t going to change modern sociopolitics very much”, though I find the use of “very much” an interesting use of words in this case). That there is nothing to gain. You make two assumptions a) that if there was a second gunman that they couldn’t possibly be put to justice and b) there is no historical value to knowing the truth or understanding the truth that would come to light had a potential third actor that was tied. For example say the Soviet Union somehow was toed (I’m not saying they are) there is an incredible value to knowing that it is fact. And if the FBI was involved? You thinking the FBI reputation is tarnished now is opinion, the effect could even have legal repercussions to people still alive and to regulating agencies. You don’t know , but if you have some “war game” about the impact I would love to see it. But the biggest of all is understanding the history of our country and world history. Historians don’t pretend that knowing more about the military maneuvers of Alexander will effect us today even though his battles have been studied to death. But when we contradict that denial of understanding some truth of our own history we are told, “doesn’t matter”, there’s no modern sociopolitical gain.
Your opinion on JFK as a president is moot. The fact he could not continue being president is what changed the world. LBJ succeeded him and the rest is “history”.
It doesn’t need to play out in todays politics but as I said, why study history at all if the only point is to gain insight into how it effects us directly today??
Oh, I misunderstood your previous position. Yes, "because it's there" is always a fine reason to climb a mountain.
I guess I'm just personally burnt out on this topic because I've been watching people bandy conspiracy theories back and forth my entire life, and the odds of this changing the understanding of the day's events in any meaningful way aren't larger than the other "revelations" I've seen in my time. I guess upon further reflection, I do have some concern that people will take the stuff too seriously and do something foolish.
To give an analogy, the Titanic disaster is extremely well understood, but the disproportionate obsession with it has recently led to people getting killed again. One could certainly argue that they were free people making free choices and I would agree. But similar obsession in the political spectrum seems to have a nasty tendency to end up with somebody showing up in a pizza parlor with a firearm demanding to see the basement that doesn't exist. So it makes me twitchy.
https://archive.ph/W6A0z