He Died
Steve Donoghue
Reclaiming History
By Vincent Bugliosi
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Like all living things, nations accumulate scars as they grow older, and some scars are worse than others. Some wounds seem deep at the time of their making, only to heal properly and fade from attention. Like a seasoned prizefighter, the nation may look at these scars with rueful detachment, remembering a time when those wounds seemed bottomless, mortal. The War of 1812, the great Chicago fire, American dough boys fighting in the trenches of World War I, the sinking of the Lusitania, even the loss of the Lindbergh baby - all at one time engulf the nation in turmoil, and yet all are harmless history book entries now, leeched of their ability to hurt. |
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But time’s passage alone is no guarantor of healing, as is surely demonstrated by the American Civil War, which inflicted a wound so deep it crossed political, social, geographical, and most of all racial arenas. The cataclysmic battles, the rampant devastation, the epic heroism, the unstoppered cauldron of racial intolerance, the martyred president, all combined to create a wound so ragged it could not possibly scar perfectly, and it hasn’t. Its battlefields, most especially Gettysburg, still possess the power to hush the visitor’s heart, even a century later. And surely no nation has ever erected a sadder monument than the Lincoln Memorial.
Likewise the Vietnam War, blundered into, blundered through, and blundered out of at such grievous, bloody cost that the recoiling country failed even in its most basic moral imperative, honoring those who it sent off to fight. News footage of the last desperate Americans being evacuated from a rooftop dealt a blow to the central fabric of American self-confidence, and the country’s conception of warfare - indeed, its certainty that it could ever have such conceptions again - was abruptly ripped away.
There are race riots and lynchings; there are Iranian hostages and space shuttles exploding, and there is what must certainly be reckoned as one of the worst experienced in modern American history, the disgrace and resignation of President Nixon, which forever ended the simple trust existing between the citizens of the United States and their government.
It need hardly be added here that the list of national scars includes that awe-inspiring morning of September 11, 2001, when the nation’s foremost city suffered a wound from which the country has yet to recover. The film footage – so compulsively re-watched by so many people on that terrible morning – would forever alter America’s estimate of its own vulnerability in a new and chaotic world.
One of the worst scars the nation has ever sustained was the shooting of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963 in Dallas.
In order for a scar to irritate, something must be wrong with the healing process, and in the popular imagination, every single aspect of Kennedy’s assassination was wrong. A vigorous young leader shot dead in broad daylight by a disaffected loner with a rifle? Conflicting eye and earwitness testimony as to the number of shots fired, or their directions? A botched autopsy of the president’s body? Shadowy hints of vast conspiracies cropping up almost immediately? The government’s hand-picked investigatory commission ignoring witnesses or evidence? The hard finger pointed at new president Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the conflict in Vietnam? Right from the beginning, there was no chance this wound would heal properly. From the instant it happened, the assassination of President Kennedy formed a scar that successive generations of Americans would feel compelled to scratch and pick at. Indeed, they would feel it was their duty to do just that.
So we go back to Dealey Plaza.
The Book
The Virgil of our descent this time around is celebrated trial lawyer and crime writer Vincent Bugliosi, who prosecuted Charles Manson and wrote a damning account of the trial of O.J. Simpson. Bugliosi’s book, Reclaiming History, is the result of 21 years of painstaking reading and research, and its stated goal is simple: to reverse the American public’s opinion of what happened on that day in Dallas. He cites poll after poll showing that generally 75 percent of Americans believe there was some sort of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, and he views this as astonishing and dismaying (the unofficial straw poll I conducted on 310 people in the writing of this review yielded a far more dismaying figure: fully 100 percent believed in some sort of conspiracy, and 261 spoke of it as though it were a proven and documented fact, like the sun coming up in the morning). He pulls no punches about who he considers responsible:
… the majority of them [serious published conspiracy advocates] knowingly mislead their readers by lies, omissions, and deliberately distorting the official record. I realize this is an astonishing charge I am making. Unfortunately, it happens to be the truth. In any other field, such as the scientific or literary disciplines, even a fraction of these lies, distortions, and omissions by a member would cause the author to be ostracized by his colleagues and peers. But in the conspiracy community of the Kennedy assassination, where one’s peers have turned their mother’s pictures against the wall and are telling even bigger lies themselves, and where the American public is unaware of these lies, not only is this type of deception routinely accepted by most members of the community, but the perpetrators are treated as celebrities who lecture for handsome fees and sign autographs at conventions of Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists.
These critics and their theories, no matter how outlandish, are Bugliosi’s targets, and to attack each and every one of them, he has chosen to write what may well be the world’s longest book. It’s 1,612 pages long and would have been at least twice that length, except that the author has consigned his endnotes and source notes to a computer disc attached to the rear cover of every copy. These end matters constitute another 1,700 pages of Bugliosi’s book; had they been printed conventionally with the text, the book would be the size and weight of a microwave oven. It would be virtually unbindable, practically unshippable, and certainly unsellable.
Even as is, Reclaiming History is so big (it stands taller than a normal hardcover) and so heavy (nearly six pounds) that its physical dimensions reshape the experience of reading it in ways so basic and profound that they deserve brief mention at the start of any review.
The book can’t be lifted comfortably with one hand; the shape and weight make it awkward even to hold in one hand, unless it’s propped against the holder’s body in a pose reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty. Its size and weight prevent it from being read peripatetically; a commuter bringing it along would have to jettison all other luggage. Its bulk makes it uncomfortable to read in bed (that tried and true reader’s practice): the press of it is uncomfortable, and supporting body parts begin to go numb. Neither can it be placed just anywhere with impunity; my nightstand creaked audibly upon receiving it, and more than one end-table immediately buckled sideways to the floor.
The effect of all this, intentional or otherwise, is to shift the reader’s mindframe just a bit, but a crucial bit. This book’s sheer physical dimensions prevent it from being casually regarded by its reader. It must be awaredly transported and read while sitting up - in other words, it literally commands attention.
It is extremely unlikely that the 21st century publishing world will see another volume like this. Soaring publication costs and the proliferation of electronic media have already, in 2007, conspired to make Bugliosi’s monstrous tome feel distinctly anachronistic; future decades will only hasten this trend, until readers will inevitably see the true ancestor of this book: the mammoth, desk-chained, iron-bound monastery volumes of the Middle Ages. Volumes that could not be treated lightly, and rightfully so, since they were believed to hold not truths but the Truth.
Bugliosi is writing about a crime, and the path to the truth of any crime lies in evidence, so that’s where he takes us, and that’s where we follow.
The Evidence
The crux of any case is evidence, and nearly all murder trials are won or lost on he basis of far less evidence than is available in the JFK assassination. The deed was done in broad daylight, in front of hundreds of witnesses, with copious photographic testimony and live film taken close up. Dealey Plaza was thronged with police and Secret Service and all three people in the President’s car survived with clear memories of what they went through. A suspect who left the scene of the crime pulled a gun on the police when they tried to arrest him. These many elements should coalesce into a courtroom case of unusual certainty.
Bugliosi states over and over (there is nothing that he doesn’t state over and over) that if he, as a prosecutor, had this much evidence against a suspect, in any other trial a guilty verdict would have been an easy thing to obtain.
Bugliosi defends the findings of the Warren Commission, and since we need a place to start we will start there, with the case those eminences put together. That case runs like this:
Lee Harvey Oswald, a disaffected, antisocial radical, gets a ride to work at the Texas Book Depository (situated at the location of a slow turn on the visiting President’s announced motorcade route) on the morning of November 22, 1964, by a co-worker who sees Oswald lug a long paper-wrapped object into the building (Oswald claims it contains curtain rods for his apartment, but, it may seem faintly absurd to point out, no curtain rods were subsequently found in the Book Depository). When the building is emptying out so workers can watch the presidential motorcade pass by on its way Dallas’ Trade Mart, Oswald tells his co-workers to send the elevator down, that he’s going to continue working on the sixth floor. As the motorcade approaches the corner of Houston and Elm, multiple eyewitnesses see someone fitting Oswald’s description poised with a gun in a window of the sixth floor of the Book Depository. Indeed, several of those witnesses identified someone fitting Oswald’s description either immediately after firing or actually during the act of firing. Three shell casings were ejected during the firing (employees on the fifth floor not only heard the thunderous report of the shots but heard the casings hit the floor), and the only bullets or bullet fragments recovered were positive matches with Oswald’s rifle.
Oswald leaves the Book Depository through an increasing police cordon and makes his way to the rooming house where he lives. He pauses there for minutes only, and minutes later is seen by multiple witnesses shooting and killing Dallas Police office J.D. Tippit, who’d pulled over his patrol car and had exited it in order to speak with Oswald (almost certainly because Oswald matched the description of the President’s shooter sent over Tippit’s police radio) It’s for this crime that Oswald is later arrested, and while he’s in police custody the case against him for the murder of the President ripens into a separate charge.
Oswald is questioned at length by Dallas police (and, later, FBI and Secret Service), and a day later, while he is being transferred from one jail to another, he is shot dead by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
The sad, sordid story degenerates into aftermath from that point: the arrest of Ruby, the funeral procession with its crepe-draped caissons, the black-veiled widow and the little son saluting, the eternal flame. But on this point Bugliosi is unassailably correct: the case against Oswald is so strong that were it any other suspect, having committed any other crime, there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind where the guilt lay.
The Zapruder Film
The 26 seconds of 18mm film footage taken of the assassination by Abraham Zapruder has been rightly called the most famous home movie in history. Critics of the Warren Commission and defenders alike have been drawn to consider it the key to the JFK assassination. It records the whole compact nightmare in more or less viewable clarity, which would lead you to suppose it would silence more criticism than it would instigate. But of course this is not the case. Bugliosi himself points to the inherent subjectivity of film viewing, and about the Zapruder film he couldn’t be more correct. Its images have been the most hotly debated in the history of moving pictures.
The Zapruder home movie may well be the most horrifying, tragic film ever made, but in the realm of assassination studies, it has been reduced to a graph, a series of static seconds separated by obsessively counted frames. Frame 150: a smiling President waving to tumultuous, cheering crowds in Dealey Plaza; Frame 161: the first shot rings out, missing the motorcade and ricocheting to nick the cheek of James Tague (witnesses see sparks as the bullet strikes the curb, and even in the frenzied noise of the crowd, several people in the motorcade recognize the sound of a high-powered rifle); Frame 225: the President’s car emerges from obstruction behind the Stemmons Freeway sign, and the nightmare is clearly now in progress. Governor Connally is visibly shocked and stiffened, and the President is reacting violently, throwing his hands up to his throat (Bugliosi points out that this is prima facie evidence that both men were in fact hit by the same bullet, and under his relentless hammering it is hard to see how this could not be so, although like a good courtroom showman, he doesn’t draw attention to the fact that in Frame 264 Connally is both yelling something over his shoulder and holding his hat in his left hand - both of which would present challenges to a man with a collapsed lung and a shattered wrist).
Frame 313: a bullet ripping President John F. Kennedy’s head apart.
But we don’t pause, oh no - this is a courtroom, after all, an arena, and we have lots of work to do, lots of ground to cover. Far from supplying answers, the critics say, the Zapruder film asks questions, and we must answer them.
Most crucially, the reaction of the President’s body to the fatal head shot. The Zapruder film clearly shows his head jerk forward for an instant before rocketing backward, the force of it almost lifting the President out of his seat. Critics say such a reaction necessitates that Kennedy be shot from the front and right (this is the point around which Oliver Stone builds his sickly mantra in JFK: “back, and to the left, back, and to the left.”). There is much snide reference to high school physics, which is why you’ll find Isaac Newton’s name in the index of virtually every book written on the subject.
Bugliosi researches the question thoroughly, interviewing many experts and weighing all the various explanations put forward, but in the end, it’s Sir Isaac who has the final word. The President’s head is pushed forward (and downward, Bugliosi crows, further proof of the shot coming from the Book Depository’s sniper’s nest) by the impact of the bullet (the autopsy found the entrance wound, lost in a tangle of thick, blood-matted hair), and then hurled violently backward by the bullet’s explosion outward through the front right of the President’s head. The explosion hurls the body backward, no different than if a grenade had gone off in the front of the head.
Bugliosi points out that all of the bullet fragments, blood, skull fragments, and brain matter in the limousine were all arrayed forward of the President. He sounds exultant when he’s writing it: there’s no debris to the rear whatsoever. All the debris is in the front.
Bugliosi stresses repeatedly that the Zapruder film isn’t necessary to make an ironclad case against a shooter from the grassy knoll or anywhere other than the Book Depository. He reminds us of ballistics tests that prove the Oswald rifle and no other fired the bullets (and ejected the shell casings) collected from the scene. He reminds us that Oswald was seen bringing a large paper-wrapped object into the Book Depository, claiming it was “curtain rods.” He reminds us that several witnesses saw someone matching Oswald’s description crouched at a window on the sixth floor of the Book Depository at the time of the shooting, and that several witnesses saw this person shoot at the motorcade, pull the rifle back inside, and leave the window. He reminds us that the physics of the event are completely consistent with three shots being fired from the distance and elevation of the Book Depository window. He assures us that he could have convicted Oswald without ever having seen the Zapruder film.
And then he moves on to other matters, and we’re left wondering: well, what is the Zapruder film, then? Unnecessary to solving the case of the assassination, redundant to Bugliosi’s task of reclaiming history, those 26 silent seconds get shunted to the side in this enormous book, back to some evidence room where the curious can forever see a perfect sunny day bitten in half.
Bugliosi notes that there were many other, less famous films of the motorcade taken that day, as well as innumerable snapshots. Critics have generated a seemingly endless undergrowth of speculation and theorizing about every single one of these - indistinct blurs become coordinators on walkie-talkies, or riflemen leaning on car roofs, and things like purses, glasses, and umbrellas take on cryptic, mythic importance. Bugliosi never shirks from his task: none of these speculations goes unrefuted. But it’s clear he prefers less emotional evidence in the case he’s making. He’s prosecuted many murders, he tells us, and he prefers straightforward physical evidence, like bullets and bodies. Of bodies he attempts to give us our fill, when he turns his attention to the President’s autopsy.
The Autopsy
In any murder investigation, in any questionable death whatsoever, the single most important tool is usually the autopsy. As one prominent forensic scientist (apparently one of the only ones in the country Bugliosi didn’t get around to interviewing) once commented, ultimately, bodies don’t lie.
In most criminal cases, there is no intermediary step. The victim is killed, and his body in due time shows up on the coroner’s table and begins yielding up its secrets. In the case of President Kennedy, this didn’t happen - if it had, perhaps a great deal of the confusion surrounding his death, and hence a great deal of the justification for Bugliosi’s book, wouldn’t exist. We’ll never know, because before the doctors at Parkland Hospital - where the President was rushed minutes after being shot - were concerned with autopsying their charge, they were first, for thirty heartbreaking, heroic moments, concerned with saving him. This was the rigor of the Hippocratic Oath at its least satisfying, since every one of those doctors could tell at a glance that their patient would die no matter what they did. They couldn’t help their efforts; a national tragedy of unimaginable dimensions lay on their operating table, but it was the man who occupied them - a man with a heart still beating, with a kind of a pulse, a man with a shocked, stunned family that wanted him to live.
They massaged his chest; they ran a bloodline down one leg; they called for a blood supply; and most importantly, most tragically for all future enquiries, they performed a tracheotomy to help the dying man get more air.
The tragedy arises from the fact that there was a bullet wound precisely where tracheotomies are performed, and the doctors enlarged - and mostly destroyed - that wound in order to open the President’s throat.
This moment, this act, is crucial to the question of what happened that day in Dallas, and here’s why: the Warren Commission held that three shots and three shots only were fired in Dealey Plaza. Since one of those shots went wild, chipped a curb, and nicked James Tague, and since the other is caught immortally on the Zapruder film as the fatal head shot, the remaining bullet has to account for all the other wounds in Kennedy and Connally, something Report critics claim is physically impossible. The whole “magic bullet” storyline, that has metastasized all over the critical literature, was given life the instant that trachea incision was made. After that incision, it was no longer possible to tell what that original throat-wound looked like - that is, all-importantly, whether it was an exit or an entry wound.
If it was an exit wound, the Warren Commission is exonerated: the bullet came from above, behind, and to the right, from Oswald that is. The Commission claimed - and Bugliosi pit-bullishly defends, at greater length than the Commission used - that this did indeed happen, that the bullet struck the President below his right shoulder but exited his throat because, ballistically, a) the street was declining at an increasing angle and b) the President’s suit jacket was bunched up. This is the most crucial point Bugliosi will have to deal with, and he knows it, and he rises dramatically to the challenge. He points out that both the President and Governor Connally were turned when the shot was fired. He points out that the car was tilted at a downward angle. He points out that Connally’s jump seat was not directly in front of the President (as it’s been portrayed in innumerable re-enactments, despite the visual evidence of the Zapruder film) but several inches lower and further to the right. He knows he’s making a counter-intuitive argument (that a shot entering the President’s back could exit his throat), so he takes it slow, point by point, offering charts and diagrams.
It works, and it works in large part because Bugliosi doesn’t just rely on data - he invokes logic, something Commission critics, it must be admitted, rarely do. And the single most damning piece of logic he displays goes like this: we know the Oswald rifle fired the bullets, we know a shot struck Kennedy in the back, we know it exited his throat - if the first shot missed the motorcade and the third shot killed the President, the second shot had to have hit Connally. As Bugliosi points out, there was nowhere else for it to go - the inside of the car sustained no bullet damage, nor was anyone else in the car hit: the only remaining logical possibility is that the bullet went on to hit Governor Connally (Bugliosi uses similar logic to define the throat-wound as an exit: the President was hit in the back, but aside from the traumatic head-injury, there are no other wounds to the front of Kennedy’s body but the throat wound. Since no bullet was found in the President’s body, since, in other words, it had to go somewhere, Governor Connally’s body is the only possible place it could have gone).
If it was an entry wound, as roughly half the critics claim, everything changes. An entry wound of course couldn’t be consistent with Oswald shooting from above and behind; it would necessitate a second shooter, firing from a low, flat trajectory directly at the President as he waved to the gathered crowds. The critics say this is the only possible explanation for the number of witnesses (both those called by the Warren Commission and those, for whatever reason, not) who claim that at least one shot came from the grassy knoll, from in front of the President.
The essential problem arises from the fact that the Parkland doctors were only the first set of medical personnel to examine the President’s body. At the aggrieved insistence of Kennedy’s loyal retainers Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers (who couldn’t bear the thought of Jackie Kennedy waiting around in the hospital of the city that, as she saw it, had killed her husband), the body was taken from Parkland Hospital and moved to Bethesda, Maryland for a formal autopsy. This move may have been done for the best of motives (critics would howl in protest at this, since the body’s removal is the peg on which they hang their various governmental and military coups), but it was not only illegal under Texas law but an almost insuperable obstacle to getting at a non-debatable set of answers.
The Bethesda forensic specialists who conducted the formal autopsy have been vilified more than any other figures associated with the Kennedy assassination (although perhaps Bugliosi, with this book, will supplant them - the reader gets the impression this wouldn’t dismay him at all), and Bugliosi does his level best to restore their reputations. He digs through their various backgrounds and publication histories to demonstrate that they weren’t as inexperienced with gunshot wounds as critics have maintained from the start. This is valiant service, and these man, caught in a nightmare, no doubt deserve it. But the fact that Bugliosi’s argument is, by his own admission, counter-intuitive reduces all of this work to footnote status in the American imagination.
The Bethesda doctors were unaware of the President’s throat-wound – the emergency tracheotomy hid it and therefore forced them to come to their own conclusions. Their drawings of the President’s back wound differ markedly from such physical evidence as Kennedy’s bloody shirt, which has a bullet hole in a slightly different location. The lead pathologist at Bethesda admitted to burning his preliminary autopsy notes. And the Warren Commission was careless and clumsy in its treatment of the medical material presented to it. Paranoia creeps in at every one of those cracks, and Bugliosi cannot simply argue it away (indeed, he himself adds to it slightly, when, incredibly, he refuses to include Kennedy’s autopsy photos in his book, citing common decency - the same motive cited by O’Donnell and Powers for removing the President’s body from Parkland Hospital, and the same motive cited by Jack Ruby for shooting Oswald). His merrily combative personality is on display on every page of Reclaiming History, but never more valiantly - or perhaps more fruitlessly - than when dealing with this subject.
And it’s the subject of that personality that brings us back around to Reclaiming History itself.
The Book Again
The sheer amount of research Bugliosi has done is so staggering that the more one is aware of it, the more one stands in awe. Sifting through the fine print of his prodigious endnotes prompts amazement that even two decades would be enough time to assemble and read all this information. At the end of such labors, the reader is exhausted and would be forgiven for expecting to encounter a similar exhaustion on the page.
The single most amazing thing about Bugliosi’s book is that this never, not once happens. Even more astounding than the herculean research and preparation - indeed, far more astounding than that - is the fact that for the unimaginable stretch of some 3,500 pages, Reclaiming History is, miraculously, a wonderful read.
In large part this is due to the overall tone he takes throughout - amiable, somewhat baffled, a no-nonsense commonsense everyman. He’s fond of folksy turns of phrase (“there ought to be a law,“ for instance, or at one point saying proof of Oswald’s innocence was as rare as “a hundred dollar bill on the floor of a flophouse”), and like all good courtroom lawyers, he doesn’t hesitate to address the jury directly. He’s a bully, true - but he’s a respectful bully, a fair one. Every crackpot theory he encounters gets an even-handed recitation before he cheerfully demolishes it. Indeed, the fairness of his summations only fuels the haymakers that inevitably follow. Examples are innumerable, but one will suffice:
Even the zany [Jim] Garrison would have never believed that the latest big rage in the conspiracy community today is its charge that the [Zapruder] film, through alteration, is a forgery, created by photographic experts (hired by the “conspirators”) in an effort to conceal the truth about the shootings in Dallas and frame Oswald. Can you imagine that, folks? The deliriously wacky conspiracy buffs are now claiming that the Zapruder film itself, the film of the assassination, is a hoax, a fraud, a forgery. What’s next? Kennedy is still alive in a suite on the top floor of Parkland Hospital? G. Gordon Liddy was the grassy knoll assassin? Oswald was, as rumored, Ruby’s illegitimate son? Just stay tuned to the buffs’ wacko network.
(The special pleading here is meant to be ironic, since Bugliosi knows perfectly well that the three “wacko” hypotheticals he proposes have all been put forth by one critic or another - indeed, books have been written arguing each one.)
It’s this smart, sarcastic, personable voice that sustains the reader through such vast, unliftable tracts of verbiage, through the seemingly endless turning of pages. Bugliosi doesn’t merely write about his subject, about every single fugitive permutation of his subject - he leaps upon the task, always energetic, always enthusiastic to explore, to explain, to debunk or refute.
The book has flaws, of course - books this size can hardly avoid them (even Tale of Genji has the occasional plot-hole). In fact, its size is one of its flaws. Speaking both as a bone-weary reviewer and as a common reader, I can attest without hesitation: this thing is at least twice as long as it needs to be. Bugliosi’s fierce desire to cover his subject definitively is commendable, but the sheer length of this book can’t be seen as anything but a weapon, a truncheon designed to preemptively intimidate critics into silence. 317 pages are given over to a minute-by-minute recounting of the whole event, from soup to nuts, and although it’s purely, viscerally wonderful, only a tenth of it is necessary in a book whose specific subject is the assassination. 276 and 94 pages respectively are devoted to complete biographical details on insects like Oswald and Ruby. 464 pages are devoted to hopping from one named Commission critic to the next, even though their “theories” easily have enough elements in common to warrant at least some grouping. A book of, say, 900 pages would feel positively sleek beside this behemoth, and in the process it would avoid giving the reader the distinct impression that Bugliosi not only loves a good fight but is pretty fond of the sound of his own voice too.
Bugliosi claims to have entered upon his subject with an open mind, but this is offered with a wink and a nod, and no conceivable reader will believe it after about three pages in. His a priori stance is that the Warren Commission, though battered and dented over the years, is still fundamentally sound - in other words, that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, and that he acted alone. This foundation more than once leads him into logical culs-de-sac from which exit can only be gained by shouting a little louder.
Studying the Kennedy assassination for any length of time (be it 21 years or 21 days) produces a weirdly obsessive myopia on the part of the student. Dark tunnels lead to darker tunnels, and these lead to mazes and more mazes, and soon all memory of clean air is forgotten. The “wackos” Bugliosi has had to deal with in the writing of his book are all in the grip of this myopia, and the single biggest vulnerability of Reclaiming History is Bugliosi’s unwillingness to entertain the possibility that he is too.
This stubbornness forces him to repeat over and over that “no reasonable person” could possibly look at the evidence he’s assembled and fail to come to his same conclusions. If anyone can look at the evidence and still consider conspiracy a valid idea, well, then they must be a wacko. Now, months after the completion of his opus and presumably freed from the dark tunnels of its servitude, he must see that this isn’t the case. For good or ill, a great many “reasonable people” have looked at his evidence over the years and made up their minds differently as to what it all means. As the assassination’s ultimate historian, it might have behooved Bugliosi to examine this phenomenon, rather than reflexively mock it.
But the fact remains, Reclaiming History, in addition to being the longest book ever written on the subject of the Kennedy assassination, is also the most enjoyable of them all to read. That’s a singular triumph.
The Truth
It might very well be that Bugliosi has written the world’s longest book; it’s certain, however, that he’s written the world’s longest completely irrelevant book. His goal, stated at the outset of this immense journey, is to reverse the polarity of public thinking, to reclaim the history of the JFK assassination for the cause of truth. He attacks this task with the zeal of a trial lawyer, and his central belief is that of a trial lawyer as well: that if he builds his case thoroughly enough, marshals his facts into mountains high enough, he will banish all reasonable doubt from the mind of “any reasonable person” he so repeatedly invokes, and a guilty verdict will be turned in.
The jury trial system inspires an often evangelical faith in its adherents, which Bugliosi obviously is: they esteem it for the egalitarian promise it holds forth. A crime is committed. Whether it’s caught on film or seen by nobody, a jury of people with nothing to gain or lose by the outcome is empanelled, and a case is made for and against the suspect’s innocence by a defense attorney and prosecutor. In the American system of jurisprudence (a slowly evolving thing, still obviously far from perfect - but if Bugliosi can deal in abstract perfections, we’re entitled to answer him in kind), they also are fundamentally disinterested - the defense counsel could be certain of their client’s guilt, just as the prosecutor could be sure of their innocence, and it wouldn’t matter. Ideally, they’ll each make the most passionate ethical case they can regardless of what they believe. They make their points without holding anything back because that’s all they need to do - the deciding is left to other people, the people in the jury box. The jurors don’t care about the histrionics on either side of the aisle, because they don’t have anything at stake but a day’s time spent.
Under this system, the truth is given a disproportionate chance of winning the day - because ideally, none of the segmented parts of the system cares about the ultimate truth of the trial except those men and women in the jury room, whose carefully-cultivated impartiality is hoped to stand fast on the side of fact, against inflamed rhetoric or snide innuendo.
This is the dream of the courtroom. But Bugliosi is fatally, querulously naive in trying to import it to the realm of cultural consciousness. A large part of his virtually supernatural verbosity on the subject is the overreaching of somebody who knows that on some level he’s preaching to a deaf audience, that on some level, he’s pleading a doomed cause.
Pontius Pilate approached the scourged Jesus and asked, “What is the truth?” Pilate famously didn’t pause for a response, but it’s easy to imagine, given our sad, ragged world’s history, how the following exchange might have gone:
Jesus: There is only one truth, and all else are vain, or parts of It.
Pilate: As the Governor General of this province, the truth is what I say it is.
And there you have it: verifiable truth vs. ordained truth, each unwilling to cede any viability to the other. In our religiously fractured age, we should perhaps hardly expect things to be otherwise, but nevertheless after 1,600 pages we hope to hold Bugliosi to a higher standard than the one he himself carves out. We have the right to hope that after all that effort – or prior to it – he himself will have known the limitations of the case he’s trying to make.
The most fatal of those limitations, the one controlling all the others, is the one Bugliosi is either deaf to or uninterested in, but it’s something his putative subject, the slain president, could have told him in one rueful sentence:
There are two kinds of truth.
There’s the truth of the courtroom, Bugliosi’s truth - it’s the logical summation of testimony and evidence, the product of disinterested inquiry and fair deliberation. Not only is it the inevitable outcome of the jury system, it’s the outcome all involved want.
But there’s a second kind of truth, and Bugliosi must know this, if he’s as familiar with national polls as he claims to be.
Americans believe a vast conspiracy acted to kill - no, to strike down - President Kennedy. They’ve seen as much evidence as they care to, and it hasn’t made a difference, and it never will.
On one level, of course, this is terrible, and Bugliosi rightly rages against it. The truth, after all, should be inviolate (he argues, and argues); it’s demonstrable, and it should be more important than anything else. He set himself the task of establishing the truth of the Kennedy assassination. He decked his results out in a tome worthy of the Abbey of St. Germaine, and he clearly expects his results to inspire the same kind of genuflection.
Useless, useless, we might tell him. Those are reportedly the last words of Lincoln’s assassin John Wilkes Booth, when he was shot to death after an extensive federal manhunt. But those aren’t the words Booth shouted into acoustically perfect silence from the stage in Ford’s Theater. Those words, obviously long-prepared and shouted by a trained actor, were “Sic Semper Tyrannus” - or so they’re enshrined in America’s cultural consciousness, despite the fact that scores of witnesses said they heard something entirely different. On a level quite unconnected with the provable truth, it’s important that the slayer of President Lincoln shout something despicable to cap the deed.
And so it is with John Kennedy. Bugliosi has written a huge and harrowing book that proves conclusively the guilt of one single man, poor, pathetic Lee Harvey Oswald, who bought a cheap rifle and without much effort killed the President of the United States - a young president, charismatic, forward-thinking, not a grim-faced grandee like William McKinley but a vigorous harbinger of change, of renewal. To Americans, such a wound is bitter, unbearable - and it’s from this seeping recoil that all convictions of conspiracy spring and always will. Because to live without such convictions of conspiracy is to live in a world where right is meaningless and might can be bought for $12 from a catalogue. That may very well be the world, but no one can live in it.
Bugliosi has piled up his facts and proven his case. He has written a very long book that tears away all the cobwebs of doubt and deceit to arrive at the truth. But it’s Pilate’s truth, Roman truth, the truth of roads and aqueducts. It may be useful, but, paradoxically, nobody will ever find it satisfying. The other truth, summarized as Such Things Can’t Happen, will always live and will have its rebuttals. After which we can hope in vain for silence.
–
A leading member of the United Irishmen, Steve Donoghue was forced into hiding in the wilderness of northern Donegal following the failed Rebellion of ‘98. From there he wrote a series of popular anti-British philippics under the pseudonym “Cato.” Sadly, these works have not survived; however, he now hosts the literary blog Stevereads.
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40 Comments currently posted.
Kevin Caron says:
Ray Grimes says:
Bugliosi may be right, but you are absolutely right. His work may be well writen and with gusto but your review is superb.
John Glenn says:
“Bugliosi points out that all of the bullet fragments, blood, skull fragments, and brain matter in the limousine were all arrayed forward of the President. He sounds exultant when he’s writing it: there’s no debris to the rear whatsoever. All the debris is in the front.”
1. Any fool can watch the Zapruder film and see Jackie Kennedy climb out onto the trunk of the limo to retrieve pieces of her husband’s head. This alone tells us that the above sentence is a lie and this book is a lie.
2. The pristine bullet. This bullet was compltely intact and without it the entire single shooter lie falls apart. This bullet is supposed to be the same bullet that went through JFK then hung in mid air for over a second then went though the front seat of the limo then Connely’s back shatterd his rib then hit his wrist exploded a bone where it left behind several x-rayable bullet fragments (that were burried with Connely when he died) then went through his thigh and was found very slightly distorted but entirely intact laying clean as a whistle on a stretcher in Parkland Memorial Hospital.
3. What an incredible shot Oswald supposedly pulled off. He was awarded a sharp shooter badge in the Marines which meant he could pull the trigger and not shoot himself but this has been mentioned millions of times to convince the public that he was some sort of crack shot. He was never known to be much of a marksman yet this feat of shooting given the amount of time he had to take these shots has never been duplicated even by some of the worlds best marksman using properly operating rifles. Oswalds rifle was a 13 dollar piece of mail order junk with a worthless scope which was flopping about on its mounts. Ridiculous.
Lisa Pease says:
Bugliosi’s book is replete with omissions that would significantly challenge his conclusions. The only way Bugliosi could have written what he did was if a) he is a man of little to no imagination, who believes everything the government tells him, or b) he is a liar.
I’m compiling my own review, and will leave it to my readers to answer that question for themselves. But for all his 1600+ pages, his book is stunning for what he leaves out.
Just as an example: in the Jack Ruby chapter, Bugliosi attacks one premise, and not the strongest one possible: that Jack Ruby killed Oswald on behalf of the Mob. But I agree that Ruby did not kill Oswald on behalf of the Mob. Indeed, a mob lawyer told Melvin Belli that Ruby had another “powerful” sponsor. There is a good deal of evidence that Ruby was running guns to Cuba as part of the CIA’s anti-Castro effort. But Bugliosi completely omits that evidence.
Nowhere does Bugliosi mention either the FBI’s initial speculation that the lot from which the bullets were purchased bore the fingerprints of a CIA purchase. I have a document from the FBI’s files in this regard.
Bugliosi will set up a single premise - that Oswald killed Kennedy, and uses that to shoot down the notion that the CIA was involved, because why would they choose Oswald to kill Kennedy? Never given a moments consideration is that the CIA set Oswald up as their patsy, despite AN ENORMOUS body of evidence showing the CIA moving Oswald around like a pawn on a chessboard from before the time of his visit to the Soviet Union. Nowhere does Bugliosi address the fact that the CIA had files on Oswald that dated back to 1957, a good six years before the Kennedy assassination!
I’ll have much more to say on this. Heft does not make truth. I’m sorry the reviewer here was so easily persuaded. No one in their right mind would serve as a juror on a trial where only one side was allowed to present their case. But that’s what Bugliosi does. He has carefully selected only the evidence that makes his case, and left out so much more. I don’t fault him for that. But I completely fault any who read the book and think, mistakenly, they’ve gotten a full picture of the case.
Kennedy was shot from in front. Oswald was behind. And the shot in Kennedy’s back didn’t exit, which led to great consternation among the doctors because they couldn’t figure out where the bullet could possibly have gone if it didn’t exit the body. Observing this, an FBI agent queried about the possible use of ice bullets. This is all in the official record, but it is not in Bugliosi’s book.
indy shenandoah says:
Yes, all conspiracies are wacko, invented fabrications right? I guess that means, since it is now fashionable to debase and ridicule the word “conspiracy”, that the Declaration of Independence must have been perpetrated, written and wholly administered by Jefferson alone, god forbid that others might have helped him:-) On that note, I will add that Warren Commission “Buffs” can proudly stand by one of the most blatant Walt Disney fantasies ever written and then passed off as a valid, authoritative final exegesis on the crime of the century, and lets not forget it included JFk’s number one FAN, Mr. Allen Dulles, arguably the most powerful CIA director in history and the most active architect of the Commissions story (yes, its is a story, just like the one about Jesus). Dulles didn’t have an ax to grind with JFK….or did he? I respect Bugliosi but his book is the most aggressively biased book one could ever read, equally and more so than the most passionate pro-conspiracy titles. At least he is not as shameless as the darling of anti-conspiracy “BUFFS” Gerald Posner, who’s essays have been consistently riddled with contradictions and egregious errors. Of course, what is acceptable in the world of pro Warren fans is unacceptable coming from inquiring minds who dare to ask the question.
With that said, I can’t even begin to show my pity for citizens that live in denial about the JFK murder. It is denial, a form of childish denial, worse then any crazy, wacko conspiracy BUFF, that presupposes and naively assumes with religious zeal that our government consists of a bunch of bungling boy scouts who would NEVER, entertain the idea of whacking one of their own - no, that only happens in the movies right? These people have accepted the Warren Commission as the Gospels of the 20th century.
People have been murdered over much less money (in this case billions in defense contracting) or social taboos and its a fact that our benign government has had to keep up with the Jone’s around the world and that means keeping their corporate handlers happy, expanding and making money. To ensure this, various segments of our government have worked out various, hidden black ops (we all know that word right?) to carry out tasks around the world involving kidnapping, drugs, disinformation and, oh yes, I forgot, murder!
I won’t even attempt to go after Bugliosi’s assertions point by point because, like you actually stated, why bother? The zealots that support Warren also refuse to give a millimeter when it comes to accepting the slightest flaw as if they themselves will be discredited as valid human beings. There in lies the rub. I will say only the following to appeal to any shred of logic or intellect remaining in our generally brain dead public. We have heard it all, over and over so lets look at a few things dispassionately if possible and with a mind not prone to make the obligatory condescending remarks concerning “conspiracy buffs” as if to make them sound like children who make tinker toy monuments to Superman and his Kryptonite home.
1. Bugliosi does NOT prove provide irrefutable, definitive proof of how JFK’s head snaps backward from an alleged rear occipital entrance wound and sites the grossly, dubious offering known as a “neuromuscular reaction”. I worked for NIH and showed the Zapruder film to TWO of their best pathologists and one neurobiologist. Here is what they said regarding the head shot and neither of them were either interested in the JFK case or had a political agenda to grind. They all agreed that the head shot revealed an evulsion of parietal material as well as the right front temporal area. They also noted that his hair, despite the glossing over by Bugliosi, was “puffed and bulged” consistent with how his hair would look in response to a large exit wound through the occipital area. You don’t see the back coming off because its TOO fast for the frames but the other material on his right front is almost facing the camera and therefore is more visible. They concluded that “it looked almost as if his head was being hit by two bullets due to the usually explosive force of the temporal evulsion and NOT just temporal but additional skull and brain material exiting through his parietal area (on top of his head). They most importantly said the following “a neuromuscular reaction, of that level of violence is wholly inconsistent with a rear shot and completely consistent with a multiple impact head wound”. One pathologist said “to base their head wound findings on the presumption or theory that its a freak, and rare neuromuscular response, is pulling at straws and inconsistent with true and objective scientific scrutiny”. They did not want their names mentioned, unfortunately.
Bugliosi forgot to mention that the TWO motorcycle officers off to the left rear of the limo have testified more than once to being sprayed by “brain matter” blood and other unsavory reminders that the fatal rocket did not come from behind.
Bugliosi doesn’t mention the “Billy Harper” fragment found 35 feet behind the limo (and by the way doesn’t mention that the limo was hurried off to be destroyed and re-built before any thorough examination of the car could be done.
If you think that was bad, don’t even ask what they said about the greatest fairy tale of all, the SINGLE BULLET THEORY, written by the best fiction duo of all time, Alan Dulles and Arlen Spector. Poor John Conally had to pass on with out ever receiving the respect he deserved for always questioning the single bullet theory - he KNEW he was hit by a separate bullet. Beyond that, I won’t even bother with the murky past of Oswald and his very well, documented relationships with the CIA as a “domestic contact”. It would do any good - right? Lets also not even get into the fact that the alleged weapon, Mannlicher-Carcano was found to have a misaligned scope and rusty bolt. Does a high level violinist use a Stradivarius or a Indonesian made inferior instrument lacking timbre, string response and action? I rest my case.
In closing, I am not interested in who everyone thinks perpetrated this crime or how many shooters were present or not present, however, what is important is that the Warren supporters NOT ridicule and chide the real scholars, investigators and writers who have also devoted their lives to sifting through the sand and finding enough “circumstantial” evidence (and there is PLENTY) to put this thing in doubt. What is amazing is that Warren fans like Bugliosi consistently either omit or downplay the fact that the HSCA findings were that there was a “conspiracy” and that there was most likely at least two shooters. That was an official Federal Government investigation, so why is that always ignored in favor of the older and much more flawed Warren fantasy. Speaking of Warren, there were three dissenters on that panel, namely Senator Russell, Congressman Boggs and John McCloy that were arm twisted by Alan Dulles to sign off on the whole fairy tale. Mostly note worthy was the fact that Russell and Boggs complained that the investigation was a whitewash and riddled with errors and lack of proper investigatory protocol.
Mr. Bugliosi, could have at least said this: This book contains my assertions and beliefs as to what “allegedly” happened on November 22, 1963 and I will try and support to the best of my ability, each fact with the evidence at hand, acknowledging the fact that some evidence is subjective and based upon hypothetical theories and not indisputable fact. It is also true that even though there is sufficient circumstantial evidence to conclude Oswald was the lone hit-man, there is an equal and possibly disproportionate collection of circumstantial evidence that he didn’t participate in the actual killing of John F. Kennedy.
By the way, there is not ONE shred of tangible physical, or archaeological evidence that Jesus ever walked on this planet but strangely the same debunker’s of various claims of UFOS, Bigfoot and JFK conspiracies, seem to have no problem believing a collection of erratic, fabricated texts written under Roman domination and spinned conveniently to exonerate the Romans and vilify the very people Jesus was supposed to represent - oh, yes, the Gospels.
indy shenandoah says:
WHY DID YOU DELETE MY COMMENTS?
Too much to handle?
David Von Pein says:
Vincent Bugliosi has written a tremendous book in “Reclaiming History”. It is comprehensive, readable, reasonable, and above all…FACTUAL in nature.
It’s a long one, true. But the JFK case (after 40+ years of conspiracy-tinged obfuscation) deserves a tome of this immense size. And I cannot think of a better person to write such a publication than Vincent T. Bugliosi, Esq.
My own 3-part review for the book begins on the webpage linked below:
Tom TB says:
Never under-estimate the power of a lone nut. Lee Harvey Oswald wanted immortality, and ironically the conspiricy theorists have tried to deny him his place in history. John Hinckley has never doubted that Oswald acted alone, as he alone almost killed Reagan.
Chris Hayden says:
I am reading Reclaiming history now. I am willing to grant everything that single assasin proponents say about all the evidence of a consipiracy that has proliferated since the assasination.
I still have two problems with laying it all on Lee Harvey Oswald:
1) Anybody who knows anything about guns knows that to make two head shots on a target moving away from him with a bolt action war surplus rifle would have been nearly impossible–and I know that FBI sharpshooters suppposedly obtained similar results but they were not firing on the President of the United States at high noon in downtown Dallas Texas in broad daylight.
2) Granted that Oswald performed this feat, then he is assasinated (live on camera) while in police custody in the basement of the Dallas Texas police station–after having committed the crime of the century the cops are so slipshod they allow this to happen.
Some might look at stills of the shooting and say that those cops appear to be holding Oswald up so Ruby can take the belly shot–but I can’t say that for sure.
What I do know is that those two things introduce a reasonable doubt that Oswald was the only gunman firing on that motorcade that day.
Who else was? That is where the defenders of the Warren Commission always get the consipiracy proponets. I don’t know, I have never seen iron clad evidence pointing them out and I doubt if that question will ever be answered now–but the fact that people looking at this almost fifty years later can’t provide other suspects is not proof that there were none.
David Von Pein says:
Chris,
Oswald didn’t make “two head shots”. He only made one head shot. His first shot missed the car completely and shot #2 hit JFK in the upper back, not his head.
One out of three = only a 33% success rate. Not that spectacular at all. And the target was virtually a standing-still target in Oswald’s sights.
Pamela Woods says:
I have never believed what the government said about Lee Harvey Oswald being the killer of President JFK. I believe they wanted to assassinate the president for wrong reasons. They could not control him and did not want to see a change in society, which JFK was bringing about. They(the CIA and FBI) wanted a puppet for a president someone they could control, even if it meant out of fear and the individual would receive a good paycheck, their protection, & prestige in the public’s eyes. Man’s selfishness is what has always ruined the world and it is continuing to do so. I thank God, who is and always has been in control, that he has a burning hell ready for those he watches and sees the evil in their heart and the evil they commit!
Matt Kenny says:
There is, in my mind, no doubt that there was a conspiracy involved in the Kennedy Assassination. For as large as this book is, its writings on Jack Ruby are seriously incomplete. Willfully.
Anyone whose read some of the legitimate researchers that Bugliosi refers to, like Posner, cuts and pastes to disparage the researcher while not addressing the most serious issues they raise (for example the Ruby connections - gambling, narcotics, DPD, FBI, - that Moldea, Scott, and others raise).
Thomas H. Purvis says:
1. LHO was an absolutely excellent shot at targets of 500 meters or less, when firing from a fixed positions.
He entered the USMC firing, as well as consistently firing in the upper ranges of “EXPERT” at targets in thise ranges.
Had he been in the US Army, he would have rated in the upper range of those firing “EXPERT”.
The USMC has 5 firing stations which one must qualify at, two of which are from the 1,000 yard position, and one of these is from the standing/unsupported position.
Due to this, as well as relatively high winds which affected his “windage” setting, the two qualification stations from the 1,000 yard firing position decreased his “average” score down to
“Sharpshooter” range, however he was erroneously awarded the lower qualification of “MARKSMAN”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_Qualification_Badge
Current rifle score ranges are 190 to 209 for marksman, 210 to 219 for sharpshooter, and 220 to 250 for expert.
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/folsom.htm
In the case of the “A” course, Oswald obtained a score of 212 which would, under regulations in effect at that time, have made him a sharpshooter. However, the score of 212 was erroneously designated with the abbreviation “MM” for marksman.
So much for that “Factoid” about his poor ability with a rifle.
Thomas H. Purvis says:
————————————————-
David Von Pein says:
Chris,
Oswald didn’t make “two head shots”. He only made one head shot. His first shot missed the car completely and shot #2 hit JFK in the upper back, not his head.
————————————————–
Chris,
Stick with the “two head shots”!
You just may ultimately find that you are by far more correct than most who expouse on the subject.
David Von Pein says:
Of course, Mr. Purvis has skewed things above. He’s mixing his fruits.
Chris incorrectly said earlier that OSWALD had made “two head shots”, which (naturally) is dead wrong.
Chris wasn’t talking about “two head shots” in the context of one shot coming from Oswald and one other head shot coming from the front.
And if there were two head shots (one from the front), as Mr. Purvis seems to be indicating…..Why was the LEFT side of JFK’s head completely intact after the shooting?
Lucky plotters….again.
There was no end to the good fortune of those JFK assassins, it would seem. Per Ollie Stone, THREE guns were popping away within a pre-planned 1-Patsy plot, and yet (amazingly) EVERY scrap of ballistics evidence recovered after the event either leads back to Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle conclusively or is at least consistent with his MC rifle.
You don’t get lucky like that every day of the week. The shooters must have been born under a (very!) lucky star–one and all.
Thomas H. Purvis says:
Chris;
Mr. Purvis’s “fruits” are just fine.
1. LHO was an absolutely excellent shot.
2. The 91/38 6.5mm Carcano was an excellent weapon.
3. Three shots were fired in the course of the assassination.
4. All shots fired, came from the location at the sixth floor window of the TSDB.
5. Lastly! Stick with your two head shot impact scenario, and you will always be far more correct than those who proclaim to know something about the assassination.
http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0449a.htm
The “other” headshot which no one has bothered to inform you of.
Thomas H. Purvis says:
And, just in case you have any other questions, the first headshot (second shot fired) at Z313 was located at stationing 4+65.3, approximately 30 feet back up Elm St., prior to the impact point of the third/last shot.
http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0464b.htm
David Von Pein says:
TOM UTTERED:
“The “other” headshot which no one has bothered to inform you of.”
DVP:
But, naturally, Mr. Purvis knows all about that “second” head shot.
Stick with Tom Purvis everybody! He knows WAY, WAY more than the WC, HSCA, et al!
After all….he’s Tom Purvis!
David Von Pein says:
And Mr. Purvis, btw, is also the same person who decided it was wise to completely misrepresent Dr. Humes’ testimony with respect to JFK’s clothing holes.
To get a good idea as to the tactics used by a typical CTer (like Mr. Purvis), go to the link below:
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.conspiracy.jfk/msg/bac6812ff9d8f836
Andy Schatner says:
All I can say to those who believe in the Warren Commission and Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History is to check your beliefs at the door and read the “Whitewash” books written by the late Harold Weisberg. These series of books, which were self-published in the late 60s up until the mid 70s, prove that Oswald didn’t shoot anybody on that fateful November day and that Kennedy was killed as a result of a conspiracy. And where does he get this supposed evidence? From the Warren Commissions own files! His Case Open book refutes the conclusions of Posner’s Case Closed and had Weisberg lived a little longer, he would probably have a response to Bugliosi’s book as well. To this day, not one Warren Commission defender has yet to refute any of Weisberg’s claims. All evidence Harold has uncovered through his Freedom Of Information suits is now held in the Weisberg Archives at Hood College, in Frederick Maryland and is available for any researcher to use. I find it interesting that not one Warren Commission defender bothers to read any of his books-probably because if they did, they would not be able defend the report anymore. One thing is certain. The Commission had no intention of solving the “crime of the century”. A Top Secret transcript Harold uncovered records the commission members own words {I’m paraphrasing here} saying that J. Edgar Hoover says their was a lone assassin and three bullets and that they have no other choice but to come to those conclusions as well, therefore guaranteeing that all good leads would eventually grow cold over time. I challenge anyone who disagrees to read at least one of his books before responding to this post.
Thomas H. Purvis says:
__________________________________________________
David Von Pein says:
TOM UTTERED:
“The “other” headshot which no one has bothered to inform you of.”
DVP:
But, naturally, Mr. Purvis knows all about that “second” head shot.
Stick with Tom Purvis everybody! He knows WAY, WAY more than the WC, HSCA, et al!
After all….he’s Tom Purvis!
__________________________________________________
http://history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wcvols/wh17/html/WH_Vol17_0449a.htm
Had Mr. Von Pein actually done all of his research/homework, then he would have recognized that the US Secret Service, during December 2/3/& 4th, 1963, with a first generation copy of the Zapruder film in their possession, completed an assassination re-enactment and survey of Dealy Plaza/Elm St.
During this work, the US Secret Service accurately determined the position of JFK at the point of impact of each of the three shots fired in the assassination.
The third/last/final shot impact point being located approximately 30-feet farther down Elm St. than the point of impact for the Z313 headshot impact.
Therefore, not unlike many of the CT/multiple assassin persuasion, Mr. Von Pein’s lack of research into the subject matter has resulted in his having to accept the Warren Commission’s subterfuge that of the three shots fired, one of the shots completely missed.
When in fact, multiple witness testimony has clearly demonstrated that JFK was struck by and reacted to the first shot fired.
Multiple witness testimony has clearly demonstrated that the Z313 head shot impact was in fact the second shot fired.
And, multiple witness testimony has clearly demonstrated the location of the Presidential Limo at the time of the third/last/final shot, to include having observed the impact of this shot to the head of JFK as well.
Of course, Mr. Von Pein does not wish to become even more confused with the facts which he quite obviously never bothered to research.
Thomas H. Purvis says:
__________________________________________________
“THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN ABSOLUTELY NO LOGICAL REASON UNDER THE MOON FOR THE WARREN COMMISSION OR THE FBI (ETC.) TO WANT TO ENGAGE IN THE KIND OF “INTENTIONAL MISREPRESENTION” THAT THOMAS H. PURVIS SAYS DID OCCUR WITH RESPECT TO PRESIDENT KENNEDY’S ASSASSINATION IN 1963.”
__________________________________________________
Failure to understand and/or recognize the potential reasons, does not mean that there were no reasons.
It merely means that one fails to recognize or understand the reasons.
__________________________________________________
“Therefore, why in the world would the WC, FBI (et al) have possessed any desire to put forth some kind of cockeyed ALTERNATE and FALSE shooting scenario that would STILL LEAD BACK TO THE VERY SAME LONE-ASSASSIN-NAMED-OSWALD CONCLUSION THAT TOM THINKS IS THE ACTUAL TRUTH?
It’s just…..idiotic.
__________________________________________________
Failure to understand and/or recognize the potential reasons, does not mean that there were no reasons.
It merely means that one fails to recognize or understand the reasons.
————————————————–
Lastly!
Dr. Humes insisted (quite correctly I might add) that the bullet entrance through the skull which he (as well as Finck & Boswell) observed, was slightly right of and slightly above the EOP of the skull.
The HSCA insisted (quite correctly I might add) that the bullet entrance through the skull which they observed in the anterior/posterior X-ray, was some 10 centimeters (approximately 4-inches) above/higher than that location as designated by the autopsy surgeons, and it was in fact in the upper rear/cowlick area of the skull.
In addition, the HSCA panel found that the measurements of the entrance wound which they observed, in fact differed from those measurements which the autopsy surgeons physically measured.
Now!
As a generally accepted fact, bullet entrance wounds through the skull do not normally move around by some four inches in location, and they do not normally change their physical dimensions.
In additon,Carcano type bullet entrance wounds which strike in the edge of the hairline, when fired on a downward angle with the body sitting erect, have never in recorded history known to have exited out the top of the skull.
And, if Mr. Von Pein would thoroughly research his supposedly understanding of the facts, he would thus find that the upper/cowlick entry wound across the top portion of JFK’s head/skull is in fact a result of the shot at Z313, which in fact struck at this high location.
Furthermore, that bullet which penetrated through the coat collar and thereafter struck JFK at the edge of the hairline of the neck, and thereafter “tunneled” through the soft flesh of the neck to strike JFK in the EOP region of the skull, did so after JFK was leaning well forward with his head down.
Now!
The mere fact that Mr. Von Pein does not understand the factual evidence is merely do to his complete lack of research into the facts of this evidence.
Had he bothered to even read the statements of Nellie Connally, she too told the world of exactly when the third/last/final shot occurred, as well as the fact that the impact of this shot, just as James Altgens also described, blew brain matter all over the inside of the car.
And, the impact of this shot occurred long after JBC was fully down in the seats with his head in Nellie Connally’s lap.
http://www.assassinationresearch.com/zfilm/
Anyone who desires to search into this fact will find that JBC was still sitting erect at the time of the Z313 impact to JFK’s head, as well as for a considerable length of time afterwards.
Furthermore, had Mr. Von “Pain” done his homework, he would have also found that in addition the the US Secret Service, that the FBI was also fully aware of the impact point of each of the three shots fired, and even in their February 7, 1964 survey work and assassination re-enactment, they left the third/last/final impact point to JFK in place on their survey plat.
That point being the impact location at approximately stationing 4+95, being that location down directly in front of James Altgens position, as well as being some 30 feet past the point of impact for the Z313 headshot which was located at survey stationing 4+65.3.
And, Mr. Von “Pain”, the US Secret Service as well as the FBI, to include the WC, all initially had surveyed in and plotted onto their survey plats the impact location for the first shot fired.
Which by they way, they also knew did not MISS!
Gerry Simone says:
This is particularly directed at Mr. David Von Pein.
One cannot conclude that Oswald had only a 33% success rate (to imply that he wasn’t that great of a shot).
If it was a stationary target, then it’s 1 out of 3. But it wasn’t.
The target was moving and at times partially obscured.
Each shot was like a different target, and for the target that was the farthest and hardest, he allegedly scored a direct hit.
Not bad for a guy who got Maggie’s Drawers.
Dan mostyn says:
There will never be an answer to this debate!
All the law enforcement agencies from Dallas P.D. to Washington dropped the ball!
Hijacking the body and transporting it to Maryland
was a big mistake. This was felony murder in the city of Dallas. Taking the body and having an autopsy done by Navy doctors who were not forensic
patholigists?…Come on your inviting everyone to say “this is bunk”.
Grassy knoll, Oswald the shooter, I don’t know.Thats the point, after all these years, nobody knows the “Truth”
Thomas H. Purvis says:
One last time for those who actually care!
1. Three shots were fired in the assassination shooting sequence.
2. All shots were fired from the 6.5mm Carcano rifle which was found on the sixth floor of the TSDB.
3. To an extremely high probability (beyond any reasonable doubt), LHO was the shooter.
4. Each of the three shots fired, struck JFK.
5. The Z313 headshot IS NOT the final shot in the shooting sequence. It is in fact the second shot fired.
6. LHO was a relatively good shooter, as is clearly demonstrated by his USMC Rangefire Record.
7. The maximum distance of any shot fired was approximately 98 yards (slope distance) from the windown to the target.
8. LHO repeatedly, in the USMC, demonstrated the abililty to shoot in those ranges of accuracy for EXPERT qualification during “Rapid Fire” shooting exercises at targets of 200+ yards.
9. The third/last/final shot fired in the shooting sequence, impacted the head of JFK some 30-feet farther down Elm St. than that location of the second shot impact at frame# 313 of the Zapruder film.
10. The WC is an intentional misrepresentation of the facts of the assassination in which the WC presented that all of the shots were fired within an approximate 5.6 to 5.9 second time frame window
(first shot to Z313 impact point), and that due to this “rushed” shooting scenario, one of the shots completely missed everything and everyone.
11. There was no “THE SHOT THAT MISSED”!
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wr/html/WCReport_0068a.htm
12. With the available evidence, which included a first generation copy of the Z-film, as well as availability of the witness testimonies, the US Secret Service as well as the FBI, easily resolved the shooting sequence of the shots fired.
http://www.history-matters.com/archive/jfk/wc/wr/html/WCReport_0068a.htm
13. There is absolutely nothing which is complicated in regards to the shooting sequence which occurred in Dealy Plaza on 11/22/63.
What is complicated is the extent to which certain members of the WC went to in order to make an entire shot “disappear”, and thereafter blame the wounds which the bullet created on CE399/aka the “Magic Bullet”.
14. CE399 is not “Magic”.
15. In event that one desires to see the TRUE “Magic Bullet”, then might I recommend that they search for the one which disappeared.
There is no Magic!
however:
“Politicians, not unlike Magicians, can make things disappear”
Tom
Bob Hauser says:
I was ascending the stairs to the upper bay of a barracks when I first heard the news filtering through a crowd of enlistees early that afternoon, that the prez had been shot and seriously wounded and that we would be furnished more details as they became available. And I can tell you that not one of the myriad people i knew on that base believed for one New York second that it was a “lone assassin”…most everybody stationed there ascribed it to the “mob”—-it was a “mob job”
Most people in this yuppie-ridden Me Generation era would have no clue as to just what the general and nationally pervasive sentiment of loathing there existed toward the entire Kennedy family—-there was far more sneering hatred and contempt for the Camelot myth in those days than you would ever realize after years of media flatulence about the Kennedy brats.
Bugliosi’s treatise is, according to what you’ve said, more lengthy than Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE and probably a good bit less illuminating judging from what I have read of Bugliosi’s renderings in the past. I would never purchase such an elephantine document nor would any public library even make one available in all likelihood and the entire boondoggle appears to amount to no more than a resurrection of the perennially suspect Warren Commission pablum with second and third hand “evidence”, now forty-five years stale, all to prove “beyond any reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty” that Lee Harvey Oswald did it all by himself.
The latest and most compelling thesis of the many out there is that it was a CIA hit in retaliation for Kennedy’s woeful last-second withdrawal of air support for the CIA Bay of Pigs disaster (and it deserved to be)…..it has been proven in court action that E Howard Hunt was in fact in Dallas at the time despite his denials. And I dare say that Vincent never once examines the mathematical probabilities of 26 key witnesses to the assassination all meeting untimely deaths within a span of three years—there was far more to the shooting than just the shooting itself and even if Bugliosi could prove, again, “beyond any reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty” that Oswald pulled the trigger, he has undoubtedly far from ruled out the possibility that there were no other principals involved—that’s just an insult to the intelligence.
Any excuse for a professional assassin would never have been seen with his face hanging out for the entire universe to observe while he blasted away at the prez and he wouldn’t have his rifle barrel protruding out through the window as was supposedly observed…and I would challenge Bugliosi to show how Oswald could have so blithely made it down three stories of the book depository and gotten lost in the crowd when the building would have been so immediately surrounded and cordoned off…and how the jewish mobster, Jack Rubinstein, could have so leisurely strolled up to the manacled Oswald, then being heavily escorted out of the basement parking garage of the dallas cop station and blast him with a loaded .38, then conveniently die of “cancer” in the hospital while awaiting the death penalty.
At this point in time, so long after the fact, I would not only draw into question Bugliosi’s logic but his supposed “evidence” as well, bearing in mind the fact that in police investigation which is NOT an exact science, the value of evidence decreases at an exponential rate…all of Bugliosi’s celeb status as an ambulance chaser and pop writer notwithstanding.
David Von Pein says:
To Bob Hauser:
OH BROTHER!
(Couldn’t you put a FEW more big, important-sounding highbrow words in your hunk-of-nonsense post above? You only used 49.)
And Oswald escaped the building so quickly because…..he was able to escape the building so quickly (within 3 minutes of firing his last bullet into JFK’s brain). Simple as that.
The TSBD wasn’t sealed off for at least several minutes after LHO slipped out of the building (but only after being stopped by Patrolman Marrion Baker at 12:31 or 12:32).
The ONLY reason Oswald was let go by Baker was because he worked in the building.
Bugliosi rules. So does the WC. Oswald was guilty as Hitler. Only silly kooks want to let him have two “Free Murder” cards.
Ralph Ausenhus says:
Let’s hope Bugliosi doesn’t have the last word! Bugliosi is makeing flat-out conclusive statements which are not correct. Bugliosi is way off on Ruby. Basically Bugliosi doesn’t have all his facts. Now I will give Bugliosi credit for the prosecution of Charles Manson and Manson’s family of degenerates. Also,Bugliosi should have been the prosecutor for O.J. Simpson. I don’t believe Simpson would have walked if Bugliosi would have been the State Prosecutor in the matter.
Oswald wasn’t guilty. Oswald was set up. There was an element of the CIA(Black Ops)which coordinated the Kennedy assassination. Ruby was tied into the mob. Ruby has always had mob associations. The mob owned Ruby. Bugliosi hasn’t done his research or homework on Ruby. What about the umbrella man Mr. Bugliosi located in front of the Stemmons Freeway Sign on the side of the grassy knowel.
What about the bullet hole in the front windshield Mr. Bugliosi. What about the fact that Monday morning the Presidential limousine was in the Ford Rougue plant building getting fitted for a new front windshield on the 11/25/1963. You need to do more homework Mr. Bugliosi when addressing the Kennedy assissination. I am sorry but no attention should be placed on Bugliosi’s comments or remarks on the Kennedy assassination.
David Von Pein says:
Ralph needs to do HIS “homework”, I fear.
Mr. Bugliosi’s mega-book is a masterpiece, and will be for all time to come.
There’s no proof that Oswald was “set up” as the proverbial “patsy”. That’s wild speculation, and nothing more (despite the big-screen efforts of Oliver Stone and others).
And there was no “hole” in the windshield. And the limo was not sent to Michigan on November 25th for emergency conspiracy-removing covert repairs, as many CT-Kooks think. It just flat-out did not happen.
From VB’s book:
“The limousine was not, as the buffs allege without any supporting authority, immediately rebuilt. The rebuilding of the car did not commence until over a year later in Detroit.” — VB; Page 1276
And the windshield was examined by Robert Frazier of the FBI and was found to have no “hole” in it. Only a “crack”, with a smear of lead on the INSIDE of the glass. That’s the official version, and you’ll just have to live with it.
Per the conspiracy-happy theorists, I guess Frazier must have told one lie after another during his entire Warren Commission session in ‘64, because he told of all kinds of things the CTers just hate to hear regarding the evidence that makes Lee Oswald a double-murderer, including the stuff about the windshield, and Oswald’s bullets, and Oswald’s guns he used in the 2 Nov. 22 murders, and on and on.
The JFK conspiracy koks of the world must really hate the FBI’s Robert A. Frazier with a passion. Because his testimony single-handedly hangs Lee Harvey Oswald. And there’s nothing the CTers can do about it. And there’s no possible way they can prove that he was lying about any of this testimony that he gave in 1964 (though, Lord knows, the CTers have tried, and will continue to call Bob a rotten, dirty liar):
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/frazr1.htm
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/frazr2.htm
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/frazr3.htm
Also….
Vincent Bugliosi did lots of “Ruby homework” too. To believe that Vince worked for 20+ years on his massive JFK book WITHOUT having studied (in depth) one of the KEY figures in the November 22nd saga is just….mind-bogglingly silly.
He worked hard on probing INSIDE JACK RUBY, and that effort shows (greatly) in VB’s 74-page chapter in “Reclaiming History” devoted solely to Ruby (entitled “Ruby And The Mob”). That chapter is a fascinating odyssey into the life, and mindset, of Jacob L. Rubenstein. And that guy named Ruby was no “Mob hit man”.
Vince discovered that Ruby was about the last goof in Dallas that the “mob” would entrust to such an important “hit” as the Oswald “hit” that so many CTers think was pulled off by the mafia.
For one thing, the guy was getting up early every morning for weeks shortly prior to the assassination and going to local Dallas department stores in order to try and sell his “Twistboard” exerciser gadget to local merchants.
Do Mob hit men usually have to supplement their salaries in such an odd fashion?
Or do conspiracy theorists think that that was merely a clever “cover” being used by Ruby so that nobody would catch on to the massive “plot” that brewed all around him in late 1963?
Maybe it was similar to the “I’ll Take My Dog Downtown To A Killing And Leave The Pooch In The Car While I Go In The Basement And Shoot The Patsy” type of ruse, huh?
Try reading Chapter 22 of Bugliosi’s JFK book (”Ruby And The Mob”). It’s one of the best chapters in the massive tome — which surprised me greatly, in fact, because I was planning on being bored to tears when reading through that particular chapter of VB’s book. But I wasn’t at all. It’s a fabulous (and thorough) account of Jack Ruby’s life.
BTW, an extremely-inexpensive paperback edition of Bugliosi’s JFK book (re-titled “FOUR DAYS IN NOVEMBER”) is coming out in May 2008….for just $17.95 (before the normal take-home discounts). It’ll be abridged at 704 pages.
A Book Link:
Tom Lowry says:
[My comments]
John Glenn says:
“Bugliosi points out that all of the bullet fragments, blood, skull fragments, and brain matter in the limousine were all arrayed forward of the President. He sounds exultant when he’s writing it: there’s no debris to the rear whatsoever. All the debris is in the front.”
1. Any fool can watch the Zapruder film and see Jackie Kennedy climb out onto the trunk of the limo to retrieve pieces of her husband’s head. This alone tells us that the above sentence is a lie and this book is a lie.
[Mrs. Kennedy in her testimony doesn’t remember going out on the hood , for she had suffered from ACUTE AMNESIA AFTER EXTREME STRESS :
http://tinypic.com/view/?pic=490wbrr
And her actions show it :
1)She brushes her husbands head aside as she raises up to exit the limo .
2)She is not going on the back trunk to retrieve anything , she is trying to get out of the car completely and only stops when she is blocked by the SS agent . As he reaches out to grab her hand in a effort to to get into the limo she draws back her hand and makes no attempt to help him .
3)The piece of brain she handed to the Parkland Dr. is most likely from when she was putting his skull back together on the ride to the hospital and came off in her hand .]
2. The pristine bullet. This bullet was compltely intact and without it the entire single shooter lie falls apart. This bullet is supposed to be the same bullet that went through JFK then hung in mid air for over a second then went though the front seat of the limo then Connely’s back shatterd his rib then hit his wrist exploded a bone where it left behind several x-rayable bullet fragments (that were burried with Connely when he died) then went through his thigh and was found very slightly distorted but entirely intact laying clean as a whistle on a stretcher in Parkland Memorial Hospital.
[ Single Bullet Fact : When a bullet just like Commission Exhibit 399 is fired through a human wrist bone at 2,000 feed per second, it is almost certain to be badly mangled. But when CE 399 hit Connally’s wrist it had been slowed by transiting Kennedy’s torso and tumbling through Connally’s chest. When it finally hit the hard radius bone, it was traveling about 1,000 feet per second. Dr. Martin Fackler, President of the International Wound Ballistics Association, fired a round identical to Oswald’s bullet through a human wrist at 1,100 feet per second. Here is the resulting bullet : http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/bullet1.jpg
Fragments of lead :
http://tinypic.com/view/?pic=2s7vnk0 ]
3. What an incredible shot Oswald supposedly pulled off. He was awarded a sharp shooter badge in the Marines which meant he could pull the trigger and not shoot himself but this has been mentioned millions of times to convince the public that he was some sort of crack shot. He was never known to be much of a marksman yet this feat of shooting given the amount of time he had to take these shots has never been duplicated even by some of the worlds best marksman using properly operating rifles. Oswalds rifle was a 13 dollar piece of mail order junk with a worthless scope which was flopping about on its mounts. Ridiculous.
[ For firing in the bench rest position in the Marine Corp. LHO shot : Expert ! And here’s two examples : http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=52qekip
Appears Glen has had his brain wet sponged by the conspiracy apologist crowd . The real live co-conspirators in the Great JFK Assassination Hoaxing of America , that exist to this day .
)-: Sad face by conspiracy believers 
Tom Lowry says:
[My Comments]
Ralph Ausenhus says:
The mob owned Ruby. Bugliosi hasn’t done his research or homework on Ruby.
[ I’II believe you on that one if you answer me on this one :
What Sicilian message is given when you leave your own beloved dog in your car when you go out to do a hit for the mob on a presidential assassin live on National TV. ?
Take your time , this is important and can earn you 10 conspiracy browny points if you answer correctly . ]
What about the umbrella man Mr. Bugliosi located in front of the Stemmons Freeway Sign on the side of the grassy knowel
[ BTW , Its sPeLeD ‘Knoll’ !
The Umbrella Man : TUM
1) Was this fellow, standing in Dealey Plaza with an open umbrella and no rain in sight part of some conspiracy? The House Select Committee on Assassinations located the Umbrella Man — a fellow named Louis Witt who was engaged in a somewhat obscure form of political protest. Here are two graphics, one showing Louis Witt’s umbrella being opened before the House Select Committee on Assassinations :
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/umbrell1.jpg
to the general merriment of all assembled. The second shows the Umbrella Man’s umbrella in the Zapruder film in Dealey Plaza :
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/umbrell2.jpg
Both of these images are video captures from the NOVA documentary. Some conspiratorialists claim that the umbrellas are different, having a different number of spokes. Decide for yourself.
2) What was the point of the umbrella in Dealey Plaza? Apparently it was an attempt to heckle Kennedy with a reminder of the appeasement policies of British Prime Minister Nevill Chamberlain, whose weak posture toward Hitler was supported by Kennedy’s father. Sounds pretty obscure to us today. But this 1930s British cartoon links the umbrella (Chamberlain’s trademark) with weakness toward Nazism :
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/umbrella.gif
One of the more bizarre theories about The Umbrella man comes from Robert Cutler. Cutler claimed that the umbrella was a weapon firing a flechette (poisoned dart) that hit Kennedy in the throat, paralyzing Kennedy to set him up for the head shot. Here is Cutler’s drawing of this concept : http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/piece1.gif
3) “But there were all those witnesses who heard shots from the Grassy Knoll, weren’t there?” Yes, according to Oliver Stone and the conspiracy books. But just what does a careful tabulation of the earwitness testimony show? Click here to check out various tabulations, including the definitive one from the House Select Committee:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/shots.htm
Paul May says:
Lisa Pease, an egomanical conspiracy theorist does NOT know the facts. She disavows any ability to use common sense. Why? Because her research abilites are notoriously poor. Jack Rub had but ONE love in his life. One. Her name was Sheba. He would take Sheba every place he went; even bringing her to his club at nights. Friends of Ruby say he referred to Sheba as his wife. In reality, Sheba was a dog. Not just a dog. JACK RUBY’S dog. To believe Ruby would leave the one thing he loved more than anything on hearth, his Sheba in his car while he premeditately eliminated Oswald in a Police Station, knowing he’d be captured is ludicrous. I suggest Lise Pease spend more time researching and less time attepting to sell JFK artifacts at her website.
Ronnie Joe Shewmake says:
Vincent T. Bugliosi is 100% correct. Oswald, an excellent shot acted alone in his quest for immortality. It has been 44 years and not one single shred of evidence has come to light which would make a “conspiracy theory” hold water. Why is there a debate at all? One reason: everybody loves a mystery. As Gerald Posner said: Case Closed>
Kay Jarvis says:
I saw the PBS show and I became really interested when the direction seemed to be going toward the “follow the power” investigation. Then, LBJ was discussed. “Follow the power” for me means, who ultimately profited and could those persons have pulled off the plot. Nixon hated Kennedy. J. Edgar Hoover hated the Kennedys. Nixon and Hoover were back in power only 5 years later. They might have hoped the nation would turn on all things Texan in the aftermath, which would have eliminated a chance for LBJ. but that didn’t happen. That took another 4 years, and the murder of RFK. Osward could be the shooter, but basically he was a patsy for Hoover & the CIA/FBI. Nixon became so very paranoid because he believed that his enemies would do to him what he did to them. Who else could have put those patsies into action? No one, you’re right. Not to mention, Were they twisted enough and evil enough to do it? Yes. Follow the power. That’s where it leads.
Richard Van Noord says:
The book is a complete regurgitation of the Warren Commission, complete with the total disregard of much eyewitness testimony and factual evidence. Bugliosi has been totally discredited.
Ron Yarbrough says:
When we look at why, then we know “who”. President Kennedy went “against the grain” of those whohave (and still do) run our country. He would have been easily won re-election, therefore, he was removed. If I wanted to re-read the Warren Commission findings, I would go to the library, and look under “children’s fairy-tales.”
But there is nothing anyone can do, we need to be grateful that we live in the greatest country in the world.
Claude Abraham says:
Mr. Bugliosi is a man a greatly respect. I thank him for prosecuting the Manson case and many others. But, his JFK theory is far fetched to say the least.
The single bullet, CE399 had no blood or tissue residue after allegedly passing throughr JFK, then JBC chest, breaking JBC wrist, and lodging in his leg. Forensic science does not support such a claim. The Z-film also shows the moment of impact on JBC, as his jacket lapel flops forward. But JFK is already reacting to the throat wound. Too much time has expired, as the CE399 bullet would be floating in air between the two impacts.
The driver side windshield crack was, according to the Warren Commision, herein WC, a result of the fatal head shot bullet fragmenting and one fragment veering left. Impossible. No x-ray or autopsy of the skull support this contention. The left side of the skull had no trajectory for the bullet path.
The two bullet fragments found in the front of the limo also lack tissue or blood resisdue. The windshield crack, photographed by Life magazine, indicates that the bullet struck the glass (drivers side) going LEFTward. This also refutes a head shot fragment veering left.
Single bullet theory is beyond far-fetched, an absolute heresy. The laws of physics negate it. The cracked windshield could not have been from the fatal head bullet.
The damage was greater than that of 3 bullets.
John Harris says:
It is hard to refute the cocksure thesis of Vincent Bugliosi’s “Reclaiming History”. Without delving into the specific arguments regarding Oswald’s marksmanship, ballistic evidence, Ruby’s connections to the mob, the vast array of so-called “coincidental deaths”, psychoanalysis of Oswald’s “character defect’s”, whether Kennedy planned to withdraw from Vietnam, or any of the other million or so loose ends to this mystery, the fact remains that no definitive proof has emerged to prove any kind of high level conspiracy.
However, the lack of “Proof” does not definitively rule out the possibility of conspiracy. It is also possible that Oswald was “allowed” to kill Kennedy by well placed conspirators who encouraged “loose cannon’s” like Oswald to thrive in an environment of hate. I submit for your attention some irrefutable facts regarding the assassination:
1) The Secret Service was never held to account for its criminal dereliction of duty with regard to the protection of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. At Love field, agents were ordered to stand down from riding on the back bumpers of the Lincoln Continental. This was a normal security precaution during motorcades and there are pictures of Kennedy with agents on the back of the car during his trip to Berlin. Certainly, with agents situated on the back of the car obscuring Oswald’s(or whoever’s)view of the back of the Lincoln, it might have rendered a very difficult shot virtually impossible. With the exception of agent Hill, the agent’s in the Secret Service follow up car seemed to be in a Comatose state,completely oblivious to the events unfolding around them. It has been reported that drinking while on duty was a commonplace activity for the agents assigned to Kennedy’s detail and Many of them were in fact drinking the night before 11/22/63. It has been suggested that Kennedy himself ordered the stand down but if that were the case why didn’t he order them to stand down in Berlin? How “convenient” it was for Oswald(or whoever) to have an unobstructed view of the president’s back and head, no?
2) It was well known that Kennedy, as he himself was quoted as saying, was going into “nut country” into Dallas. It has been established that Oswald was a well known blip on the respective radar’s of The FBI and the CIA. In the weeks prior to the the trip to Dallas, plots to assassinate Kennedy were uncovered in Miami and Chicago. The Dallas Police Chief complained that the FBI had failed to inform them about Oswald. In fact, they had interviewed Oswald a week before Kennedy came to Dallas. Drew Pearson wrote at the time that the FBI denied having any contact with Oswald. It has been established that FBI agent James Hosty had some kind of ongoing relationship with Oswald. Norman Mailer points out in his book about Oswald that in the year following the assassination many of the agents, including Hosty, were reassigned and censured because of the foulup in Dallas.
3) The case of Eugene B. Dinkin, an NSA code breaker stationed in Metz, France intercepted a code which claimed there was a plot to assasinate Kennedy on November twenty eighth. He later went awol. He has become, like Richard Case Nagell, another “nut”, or, “red herring” surrounding the case. That is the catagory you are generally consigned to if you diverge from the approved scenario’s. Dinken was later “debriefed” and possibly tortured(?)into recanting his assertions.
I wish I could delve more deeply into these leads but I have neither the time nor the energy right now to track them down. In 2013 there will be a plethora of books reexaming this question and I believe it is best left to the Historians rather than the Lawyers to examine this historical enigma and quagmire. Further information is readily available about the Secret Service by Vincent Palamira on line. Oddly enough, Bugliosi seems to give Palamira and his argument’s some credence. There is footage available on the web of the Secret Service stand down at Love Field. John Harris
curt says:
There is so much interest in this murder of a potentially great president. Is this a lone gunman case or a conspiracy? Well, the truth is that it might be one or the other or a little or a lot of both. Why? Well we’ve seen one person do these types of things, and we’ve seen what our government or our secret government can really do. Could they, the bush’s, rockefellers, and wealthy directors of america, get rid of a president like this, yes. Would they, probably. They do crap like that relentlessly on foriegn soil, so what’s to keep em’ from trying it here? Many of these politicians have direct connections to people put to death as a result of murder convictions etc… They have experience sending people to die in wars. Experience in army, marine specialists, and snipers. So exterminating one of their own, yeah, they could do it. THE MAIN THING IS THE LAST SHOT IN KENNEDY”S HEAD BACK AND TO THE LEFT. (that changes the whole official story) Zapruder probably would have been killed, as he held the main evidence in opposition to the officials, why did that film see the light of day? if it was a conspiracy, the bad guys would have got him right away. So in the end we just dont know, everything is possible.
Rich says:
Sorry to come to the party so late. If Posner’s book wasn’t filled up with enough cow manure, Bugliosi’s is loaded with tons of elephant turds. First and foremost, we all need to remember that Vince (short for convince i guess) Bugliosi’s claim to fame was the slam bam, thank you m’am conviction and depiction of good old crazy Charlie Manson, et als as Satan and his minions. For in one fell swoop, Mr. Bugliosi almost single-handedly managed to (1) restore a false sense of security for Californians who could go back to leaving their corvairs and porches unlocked again when doing lunch or whomever or whatever (2) establish a legal precedent that even casual marijuana use would lead to heavier abuse and cult membership, and(3) cause rumors of the impending break-up of The Beatles to simmer by creating a second wave of sales of The White Album. Secondly, V.B. is so obviously filled with remorse that he should have been prosecutor of OJ Simpson, that he gives us 20 years worth of persecuting pounds of flesh of JFK assassination conspiracy “wackos” in a volume that would have made the Inquisitors proud. I for one will never ever forget the audio and video of that day in November when I was but a student. Since 1963, I have devoured everything produced and/or published about it. However, after all the reading, viewing, listening, etc. I just cannot get two images out of my head (a) Jackie Kennedy nearly climbing out onto the rear of the car to retrieve Jack Kennedy’s brain matter and (b) Lee Harvey Oswald, black eye and all, in a white t-shirt, denying he had killed anybody let alone the President of the United States or a Dallas police officer. Somehow I knew even back then, and still believe now, that someone besides LHO shot JFK - from the front and most probably from the sides in a professionally- planned and well-executed ambush to accomplish but, please pardon the pun here, one aim - to murder John Kennedy. Quite frankly, simply put, and in short; the only thing Bugliosi’s book was good for was replacing some logs in my fireplace.
A great review, Steve. I’ve been a single-shooter-theory subscriber since reading an article about Gerald Posner’s “Case Closed”. Perhaps its good that I wasn’t included in your straw poll on the subject; I’d hate to throw off your numbers.