Reclaiming History (321 page)

By now it has to be more than obvious to the reader of this book that Oswald acted alone in killing the president. Not only does all of his conduct speak unerringly only to this conclusion, but also, as I believe I have demonstrated, the various conspiracy theories are utterly vapid and bankrupt. Does what you have read prove beyond
all
doubt that there was no conspiracy in Kennedy’s assassination? Probably not, if only because such a degree of proof will perhaps always be unattainable. Why? Because, first, Oswald is dead (and absent a confession from a conspirator, only Oswald could tell us if he acted in concert with anyone), and second, it’s normally much more difficult to prove a negative than a positive. However, there is sufficient evidence to satisfy, beyond a
reasonable
doubt, the world’s leading skeptic that Oswald acted alone—that there was no conspiracy. That Oswald, a lone nut, killed Kennedy and was thereafter killed by another lone nut, Ruby. Two small men who wanted to become big, and succeeded. Or, to ennoble their ignoble deeds, as author David Lubin says, “the lethal tussle in the basement of city hall was a fight between two would-be paladins. Each regarded himself as a knight on a mission to avenge wrong and restore right.”
¹

If, as is the situation with the conspiracy theorists, there is no evidence to support your allegation, from a legal standpoint you’re out of court. But even if you’re out of court, if you can at least argue that “well, there’s no evidence of this, but logic and common sense tell you it is so,” you still have talking rights and you can still play the game, as it were. But when you not only have no evidence, but logic and common sense tell you it isn’t so, it’s time to fold your tent. No evidence plus no common sense equals go home, zipper your mouth up, take a walk, forget about it, get a life. Of course, the hard-core conspiracy theorists, who desperately want to cling to their illusions, are not going to do any of these things. If they were to accept the evidence of no conspiracy, those whose lives have been heavily immersed in the assassination for years would also have to accept that they have “wasted” the last twenty or thirty (or however many) years of their lives on something that has no merit. And consciously or subconsciously, it is difficult for anyone to do this. So they are prime candidates for being “in denial” and impervious to the points being made. It should be added that if these conspiracy theorists were to accept the truth, not only would they be invalidating a major part of their past, but many would be forfeiting their future. That’s why talking to them about logic and common sense is like talking to a man without ears. The bottom line is that they
want
there to be a conspiracy and are constitutionally allergic to anything that points away from it. In fact, if Oswald himself appeared in front of them and said, “Hey, guys, knock off all this silliness. I killed Kennedy and acted alone,” they’d probably tell him, “Look, we know a heck of a lot more about this case than you do, so go back to wherever you came from.”

It’s essentially become a religious belief with the theorists that there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy’s death, and with religious beliefs, the believer knows the truth, so there has to be an explanation for everything that seems to contradict that truth. Their reasoning, then, is to start the debate assuming the very point that has to be proved (Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy), and anything that is at odds with this belief has to have an explanation, no matter how ridiculous and far-out it may be. Nothing you tell the conspiracy theorists can shake their belief in a conspiracy. In situations where even they can’t come up with an explanation, they shield themselves from the evidence by either distorting or ignoring it. This type of intellectual carpentry by the buffs allows them to proceed forward with their fantasy, unfazed by the inconvenient interposition of reality.

The example I am about to give illustrates the religious obsession and startling illogic of conspiracy theorists. A very prominent and well-respected medical doctor who is a sincere and eloquent member of the new wave in the conspiracy community wrote me (on August 30, 2001) that “for nearly ten years now, I have slept, jogged, eaten, gone to the bathroom, and dreamed about this case.” This doctor went on to tell me, unbelievably, that it was terribly illogical of me to say that one shouldn’t reject the findings of the Warren Commission without bothering to first read the Warren Report. Such a reading was unnecessary, he said. The profound passion and equally profound irrationality reflected in that way of thinking are the norm, not the exception, in the ethos of the hard-core conspiracy community. The arguments that follow are not just for the conspiracy community, but mostly for the millions of Americans who, not knowing the facts, have been duped by the conspiracy theorists into buying their drivel, misinformation, and flat-out fabrications.
*

As with the evidence of Oswald’s guilt, which has already been presented in very abbreviated, summary form, here’s the evidence of
no
conspiracy. As you are reading this list, I would ask you to take a moment to ask yourself whether the individual point you are reading,
all alone and by itself
, clearly shows there was no conspiracy. I believe you will find this to be the case with many of the points.

1. Perhaps the most powerful single piece of evidence that there was no conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy is simply the fact that after all these years there is
no credible evidence
, direct or circumstantial, that any of the persons or groups suspected by conspiracy theorists (e.g., organized crime, CIA, KGB, FBI, military-industrial complex, Castro, LBJ, etc.) or anyone else conspired with Oswald to kill Kennedy. And when there is
no evidence
of something, although not conclusive, this itself is very, very persuasive evidence that the alleged “something” does not exist. Particularly here where the search for the “something” (conspiracy) has been the greatest and most comprehensive search for anything in American, perhaps world, history.

I mean, way back in 1965,
before
over forty additional years of microscopic investigation of the case by governmental groups and thousands of researchers, Dwight Macdonald wrote, “I can’t believe that among the many hundreds of detectives, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Secret Service agents, and [counsel] for the Warren Commission…not one would be bright or lucky enough to discover or stumble across some clue [of a conspiracy] if there were any there.”
²
But not one clue of a conspiracy has ever surfaced. And this is so despite the fact that the two people the conspirators would have had to rely on the most not to leave a clue, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, were notoriously unreliable.

A conspiracy is nothing more than a criminal partnership. And although conspiracies obviously aren’t proved by the transcript of a stenographer who typed up a conversation between the partners agreeing to commit the crime, there has to be some substantive evidence of the conspiracy or partnership’s existence. And in the conspiracy prosecutions I have conducted, I have always been able to present direct evidence of the co-conspirators acting in concert before, during, or after the crime, and/or circumstantial evidence from which a reasonable inference of concert or meeting of the minds could be made. In the Oswald case, if, for instance, Oswald had disappeared for a few days before the assassination without adequate explanation, or within these few days he was seen in the company of a stranger, or there was evidence he had come into some serious money, or he had made any statement to anyone, such as Marina, suggesting, even vaguely, a conspiratorial relationship, or someone had called him at the Paine residence and he left the room and took the call in another room, or he was seen getting in a car after the shooting in Dealey Plaza, or any of a hundred other possible events or circumstances had occurred, that would be one thing. But here, there is
nothing, nothing
. Just completely foundationless speculation and conjecture.

Traditionally, the way to reach a conclusion in a criminal case is to draw reasonable inferences from solid evidence. So the evidence is the foundation on which all inferences and conclusions are based. Conspiracy theorists, in contrast, make completely baseless assumptions and then proceed to make further assumptions based on these assumptions. As an example, they assume, without any evidence, that there was a conspiracy in the assassination and that Oswald was an unwitting participant. They then proceed to assume, again without any evidence, that Oswald became aware of this conspiracy at the time of the shooting in Dealey Plaza, and believe that he was being set up to take the fall for the assassination, and
this
is why he fled the Book Depository Building.
But where is there any evidence to support either of these two assumptions?
*

This is particularly startling and noteworthy when one stops to realize that those making the allegation of conspiracy necessarily have the burden of proof. I mean, it makes no sense for A to say to B, “I allege that there is a conspiracy here. Now you prove there isn’t.” The alleger always, by definition, has the burden of proof. To say that those alleging a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination have not met their burden of proof would be the understatement of the millennium. Here, the absence of any credible evidence of a conspiracy is bad enough for the conspiracy theorists, but, as demonstrated on these pages, there is much, much evidence pointing irresistibly in the direction of
no
conspiracy.

2.
Not only is there no credible evidence
that organized crime, the CIA, Castro, LBJ, and so on, conspired with Oswald to murder the president, but such a plan would be incredibly reckless, irrational, and dangerous for any of these persons or groups to even entertain, and hence, unlikely and far-fetched.

3. And if there’s
no credible evidence
that any of the aforementioned persons or groups were behind the assassination, what other person or group in our society would possibly be behind Oswald’s act? The Des Moines Rotary Club? The Boston Symphony? Some U.S. senators? The Miami City Council? The United States Department of Indian Affairs? The Southern Baptist Christian Conference? I hope the reader isn’t thinking how silly I am. The buffs are silly. I’m a rather serious person.

4. As mentioned in the introduction of this book, we all know from our own experiences in life that it is almost impossible to keep a secret. And that’s when only a few people, even two, are involved, and even if the matter that one wishes to remain undisclosed isn’t terribly important. Somehow or other the information gets out, and it does so rather quickly, whether induced by one’s conscience, as in a death-bed confession, or through a former wife or mistress, or inadvertently, or simply because people can’t keep their mouths shut.
†
As I told the jury in London, “I’ll stipulate that three people can keep a secret, but only if two are dead.” On a national scale we see this phenomenon at work with one presidential administration after another being unable to control, frequently for even a few days, “leaks” to the media on matters they did not want known. (One example among thousands:
USA Today
reported on July 19, 2002, that “recent news leaks [of classified information from a congressional probe of 9-11 intelligence failures] have infuriated the White House and prompted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to issue a memo warning that staffers who spill secrets are jeopardizing American lives.”)
³
In the Kennedy case itself, we saw that although only a few members of the FBI’s Dallas office were involved, they were unable to keep secret their effort to suppress Oswald’s leaving a threatening note at the Dallas office about ten days or so before the assassination.

When we apply this literal rule of life to the alleged massive conspiracy the conspiracy theorists claim existed in the murder of the president of the United States—massive not only in the considerable number of people who would have had to be involved
*
but also in the great number of details and matters that would have had to be suppressed, any one of which could have exposed the plot or given rise to an inference of its existence, and which allegedly included the doctoring of many photographs and X-rays, even the Zapruder film itself, and the murder of over a hundred people to silence them, and
then
the cover-up of each of
these
murders—we can be certain that if such a conspiracy took place, its existence would have broken out of its original shell in a thousand different ways, and relatively quickly. Yet after forty-four long years, not one
credible
word, not one syllable has ever surfaced about any conspiracy to kill Kennedy. (There
have
been noncredible confessions of guilt in the Kennedy case, nearly all of which have been discussed in depth in this book—for example, Chicago mobster Sam Giancana allegedly telling his brother Chuck that he was behind the murders of JFK, RFK, and Marilyn Monroe, that he met with LBJ and Richard Nixon in Dallas before the assassination and told them he and the CIA were planning to murder JFK, and that Jack Ruby coordinated the whole assassination for Sam. Because none of these confessions are even remotely credible—indeed, many are downright amusing—no serious person has ever paid any attention to them.) The reason why not the slightest trace of a conspiracy has ever been uncovered, of course, is that no such conspiracy ever existed.

When we add to the above the allegation by conspiracy theorists that a
second
massive conspiracy existed—by the Warren Commission
*
and its leading assistant counsels to suppress the truth about the assassination from the American people—and not one word has ever leaked in over forty years of the existence of
that
conspiracy either, the only reasonable conclusion is that only people who subscribe to rules of absurdity, not rules of life, could possibly believe that a conspiracy to kill Kennedy ever existed. The conspiracy argument in the Kennedy assassination requires the belief that for over forty years a great number of people have been able to keep silent about the plot behind the most important and investigated murder of the twentieth century. In other words, it requires a belief in the impossible. Political columnist Charles Krauthammer, writing in 1992, pointed out the absurdity of the cover-up premise: “That in a country where the fixing of a handful of game shows could not be held secret, a near-universal assassination conspiracy has remained airtight for 28 years.”
⁴
How, sensible people ask, could such a vast conspiracy remain leakproof for almost four and a half decades, or even four and a half days? British writer D. M. Thomas marvels at the absurdity of the notion that “a network of conspirators killed Kennedy, corrupted the medical and legal investigations, and buried the truth, all without a hitch.”