'Back, and to the left'

I LOVE JFK the movie. Utter hogwash for the most part, but still a great film. Great cast, well-made and eminently quotable.

An old co-worker of mine, when we would work the desk together and he would make a mistake, would always bust out with, in Pesci's butchered New Orleans accent, "I'm sorry Mister Garrison, I got confuuuuuused." We'd spend the next half-hour quoting lines from the movie.

I also LOVE the Sixth Floor Museum, one of the best of its kind I've been to. It's also helped by Dealey Plaza being almost perfectly preserved from how it looked in 1963 (I think they've replaced the fence, but that's about it).

My lone gripe is that you can't stand still for 5 seconds without being approached by some conspiracy nut who's trying to sell you his "what REALLY happened" book, JFK autopsy photos, or some other such garbage.

 

Use the thousand mile test. If the same sequence of events happened in a foreign country today, like China or Russia, or hell, even Germany, no one would think anything except conspiracy. Suuure, a low level mob guy walked into the police station and offed the killer all on his lonesome. It's the lone gunman theory that strains credulity and it's why a majority has never believed it.

 

I believe it.

If it isn't a lone gunman (Oswald was backed by mob/cuban loyalists/communists, etc) you are going to get THAT GUY to perform the biggest assasination since Archduke Ferdinand?

And it was totally lucky that he even had a chance to see the president.... He couldn't have known the parade route until, at best, a day before.. He just happened to work at a building the parade was going by... no one knew the bubble would be off the limo... Russia/Mob etc couldn't have put their eggs in the LHO basket. It was total random luck that he had the chance.

And "the majority of Americans believe..." is a terrible way to judge whether something actually happened or not.

 

I can see how believing in conspiracy theories might be somewhat comforting (if oddly so). The knowledge that a shadowy something or someone is "in charge", even if that something or someone is ultimately malevolent, at least suggests some kind of order in a universe that can otherwise seem random and chaotic.

Just to offer up a bit of the less conspiratorial view (and flag up some of the anomaly-hunting that exists around the subject), I commend to you this interview with Gerald Posner, author of "Case Closed". The interview starts around the 41:20 mark.
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/435

There's also the Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" episode on conspiracy theories. The JFK assassination section starts at 20:20, but the whole episode is worth watching.

And if anyone still doubts the ability of one random person who would otherwise amount to nothing to alter the course of human events with the pull of a trigger, and whose actions can reverberate for generations to follow, consider the case of Gravrilo Princip.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilo_Princip
http://www.dancarlin.com//disp.php/hharchive/Show-50---Blueprint-for-Armageddon-I/First%20World%20War-World%20War%20One-Great%20War

But then again, for all you know, I'm part of The Conspiracy, too.

 

There's a 'Rockford Files' episode which really has nothing to do with the JFK assassination, but it does set up an applicable parallel.

In the 'Rockford' episode, featuring Eugene and Mickey, the cement-head wannabe gangster hitmen, Eugene (the 'smarter' of the two) goes ahead and kills a guy, thinking it will get him in good with a mob boss, and ends up (inadvertently) pinning it on Rockford.

The mob boss is somewhat less than thrilled because the cops are well aware he did not like the guy and they come around questioning him. He summons the two cement-heads and says, "who asked ya? If I wanted this dude dead I would have taken care of it myself. The cops were here sniffing around asking ME about it today. I don't need this crap. Who gets to look good for this murder?"

"Oh, a private eye we know, this Rockford guy."

"Did you plan it that way?"

"(giggles) No, not really, it just kinda worked out that way." (Mob boss rolls eyes.)

"Well you better damn well hope it sticks on Rockford, because if it doesn't, guess who gets to be suspect no. 1? Me. And if THAT happens, I'm coming after you personally and feeding you to the cops, just for the aggravation factor."

As Rockford begins to unravel the case, at one point he says, "can you believe it, these geniuses committed a murder on spec!!!"

My guess is something pretty similar happened with Oswald -- he killed Kennedy 'on spec' in the hopes of making brownie points with any number of different people/organizations who wanted him dead.

Then after the fact, most of those organizations had a pretty great incentive to want Oswald to go away quickly.

And in turn, Ruby may have killed OSWALD 'on spec' -- hoping to get in good with people who wanted Oswald to disappear.


Of course, under this theory, neither Oswald or Ruby bothered to think about what was going to happen if they got caught. But screw-loose gunmen are funny that way.

 

Hell, there was some strange things said and done in the 48 hours before the assassination.

A found a book at my folks one time that was basically a collection all of the quirky evidence surrounding the killing, including interviews with journalists, both WH media and Texas media, and some of the things that were said the day before were chilling. For example, there was apparently a group of Texas newspapermen who had a betting pool on whether Kennedy would leave Dallas alive.

This book also picked apart the Zapruder film and also took a painstaking look at some other private photos taken in the moments before and after the shooting. As I recall, it made no judgement on who exactly was responsible for the assassination, only that the Warren Commission was seriously full of shit.

 

Good story on one of the reporters who covered and served as a pallbearer at Oswald's funeral:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/11/21/ex-ap-writer-recalls-serving-as-oswald-pallbearer-rare-talks-with-assassin/

 

Nice post, pretty boy. ;D

 

Put me in the non-believer camp. I think a lot has come out since the files were released in the 1990's that make it even harder to believe In the Warren report conclusions.

 

I used to give some credence to the conspiracy theories and "back and to the left." But for me, one thing completely trumps "back and to the left," and that's the fact that if you watch Zapruder film closely (I think it's more apparent in the more-recently enhanced video), when the head shot hits, the blood and brain that spurts out goes forward. To me, that's clearly because the shot was from the read, not from the front-right.

 

I'm not a neurologist and don't play one on teevee, but I would suspect having something like one-third of your brain blown out would probably result in a violent muscular reaction in probably very unpredictable directions. So IMO, 'back and to the left' is pretty much irrelevant.

From watching the Z film, it looks to me that the bullet strikes from behind.

 

I've found, when watching the Zapruder film at a slow frame rate, you can almost convince yourself the shot came from the front.

Yet now when I see the film at regular speed, I think the deadly shot in Frame 313 came from the Sixth Floor.