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National calamities seem inevitably to inspire wild conspiracy theories. Fo instance, 17th Century Englishmen reacted to the great London fire by lynching a hroup of French immigrants who were believed to be Catholic conspirators who had started he fire. Only later was it discovered that those lynched were French Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution in France.
The JFK assassination was a horribly traumatic event for Americans of a certain age. Inevitably it inspired a perfervid assortment of wold and often mutually contradictory conspiracy theories. In the1990s my wife and I addressed all this in an aricle in the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL HISTORY. And in a pair of speeches. The speeches follow, first my wife’s and then mine.
Thirty years after the event, the Kennedy assassination still arouses controversy. Oliver Stone's brilliantly deceptive film "J.F.K." reinforces this, implying, without ever positively asserting, the involvement of nefarious elements in the Army, CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Mafia and the "military-industrial complex." When polled, 75-90% of Americans say they believe the assassination was the result of a conspiracy. But most haven't studied the case and their suspicion reflects little more than the old adage about smoke and fire. My focus here is on the small subset who create the smoke. They examine the case obsessively and insist they find evidence for a conspiracy. I call them the true believers.
The Kennedy assassination is a simple case of first degree murder, made to appear complex by the true believers' muddled attempts to solve the non-existent mystery. I cannot explain why they persist in their quest; I can only describe the phenomenon. But paranoid delusions of the world being secretly controlled by diabolical cabals have been with us throughout human history and you'll see parallels between true believers' arguments and many you encounter elsewhere. For instance, alien abduction believers resemble Kennedy true believers in pleading that skeptics should open their minds to other interpretations -- disbelievers should realize that the only basis for their scepticism is that they don't want to see. In fact, true believers call themselves the skeptical ones and disbelievers the gullible ones who uncritically accept whatever the government says. True believers also seem to share an eagerness to shift the burden of proof. We are somehow to prove there was no conspiracy while they feel no compunction to produce proof there was. There was one; they believe it; and so should we, for some unknown reason.
In a way alien abduction believers have an easier time than Kennedy conspiracy believers. At least the abductees themselves can bear personal witness to their claims, and rarely if ever will counter-witnesses be available. Kennedy true believers must make an independent showing of things to which they cannot personally swear. To do this they use irrational, circular arguments, violate Occam's Razor at every turn, jump to surprising conclusions and offer comically complex theories to try to make the ascertainable facts fit conspiracy, all the while rejecting the Warren Commission's simple, factually and scientifically based conclusions.
While some true believers claim Oswald was part of a conspiracy -- something which is at least possible to imagine -- many of them insist on Oswald's complete innocence despite the overwhelming evidence against him revealed by the Warren Commission and subsequently confirmed and expanded upon by disinterested experts. Let's review the undisputed facts of the case. And I emphasize these facts are undisputed. While other facts are in dispute, the dispute about the following comes only in analyzing and interpreting them:
On the morning of Nov. 22, 1963 Oswald brought a large paper bag to the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) and told a co-worker it contained curtain rods. None were ever seen or found. But an empty bag was found on the sixth floor of the TSBD with Oswald's prints and fibers from the blanket in which his wife says he kept his rifle. The rifle was also there, bearing his palmprint and fibers from his shirt. His prints were found on the boxes used to make the sniper's nest. His abandoned work orders were also found on the sixth floor, none having been filled. Oswald's alibi for his whereabouts during the shooting was that he was eating lunch with a co-employee, a claim which was denied by that co-employee whose own story was corroborated by others who watched the motorcade with him from the fifth floor. (Together, they heard someone above them working a rifle bolt and the shells hitting the floor between the shots.)
Among the TSBD employees, Oswald alone failed to report for the post-assassination roll call. He next appeared briefly at his rooming house from which he departed on foot wearing a jacket. Shortly thereafter, Patrolman J. D. Tippit stopped a pedestrian who shot and killed him. The shells the murderer ejected in reloading match the revolver Oswald was arrested with minutes later to the exclusion of all other guns. During that arrest Oswald tried to shoot the arresting officer.
Clearly, if the assassination was the result of a conspiracy Oswald was part of it. But there is no EVIDENCE for conspiracy. Since you cannot prove a negative, you cannot prove there was no conspiracy. But it can be shown to be unlikely. Conspiracy is inconsistent with Oswald's personality and habits. A perpetual loner and misfit, he had no close friend from childhood on. Typically, his "Fair Play For Cuba Committee" in New Orleans was his indeed: Not only was he its founder; he was its sole member!
His landlady in Dallas said that he never left his roominghouse at night, never received a visitor, and got no phone calls. Nor did he get any calls or visitors at the house where his wife was staying (and where he stayed during weekends). If he was in cahoots with someone, when and how did they cahoot?
Such questions neither occur to true believers nor discomfit them when raised by others. Nor does it faze them that their view is virtually bereft of support from technical experts, while the Warren Commission's conclusions are endorsed by almost every forensic pathologist, medical analyst, criminalist, ballistician and otherwise qualified evaluator who studies the case. In my experience, true believers are confident that they are far more perceptive and better informed than those who disagree. Knowing better than experts, they have no problem in dismissing them, including Nobel laureate, Luis Alvarez, as foolish and naive or even as participants in the supposed conspiracy.
Naturally, the media -- being trained in fact-finding and evaluation -- often treats true believers as derisively as it does Holocaust deniers, alien abductees and Elvis-sighters. The true believers complain bitterly of this, for they see themselves as crusaders for a cause, exposing the powerful, sinister forces which have been kept hidden from them for 30 years. In lieu of evidence for a conspiracy they offer suspicions, questions, allegations and innuendos. Or, as they themselves put it, they offer a "different sytle of thinking." I am going to describe the elements of that "different style of thinking," starting with a quotation from the bible of true believer thought, Jim Marrs' best-selling book Crossfire:
Was the Oswald killed in Dallas the same Oswald born in New Orleans in 1939? Bizarre as it may sound, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the man killed by [Jack] Ruby was not the original Lee Harvey Oswald. [P. 546.]
In seven pages of the sustained innuendos which true believers confuse with evidence, Marrs suggests: a) that the body buried in Oswald's grave is not the real Oswald; and b) that the refusal by Texas officials to dig up Oswald's body and check his identity was part of the cover-up. Belatedly, Marrs admits that the body eventually was exhumed and absolutely confirmed as Oswald's. But Marrs doubts the expert identification, and he suggests that, if the body is Oswald's, the delay of the exhumation until 1981 (due to opposition from Oswald's family) allowed the conspirators to substitute Oswald's body for the ringer. However, none of this really impacts Marrs' bottom line: If the body in Oswald's grave is not Oswald's, he suggests this evidences a conspiracy. But if the body is Oswald's, this evidences -- Guess what? -- Yes, a conspiracy! [P. 553]
The famous film made of the motorcade in Dealey Plaza by Dallas dressmaker, Abraham Zapruder, provides multiple opportunities for the true believers' blithe willingness to espouse any theory to support conspiracy, no matter how absurd and inconsistent, both externally and internally. Some true believers claim that the film shows the Secret Service agent who drove the President's limousine turn and shoot him. Others argue that the film has been altered to eliminate all evidence of conspiracy and offer for sale an "original, uncut" version. Yet others contemptuously reject that not because of the premium prices charged but because, as they solemnly affirm, Abraham Zapruder himself was one of the conspirators and his film a hoax from start to finish.
Marrs' treatment of Robert Oswald's opposition to exhumation illustrates the true believers' monomaniacal fixation on interpreting every happening with a sinister connotation. Marrs can't even entertain the thought that Robert Oswald, who has always accepted his brother's guilt, might have a deep emotional aversion to exhumation and/or to its attendant refocusing of publicity on him and his family, not to mention antagonism toward those he views as nuts who have artificially prolonged the controversy all these years. Instead, Marrs actually expresses surprise at Robert Oswald's resistance to having his brother's body exhumed, implying that Robert may be one of the conspirators himself.
One of the endless questions true believers deem an adequate substitute for evidence is why the doctor in charge of the autopsy destroyed his original handwritten autopsy notes after transcribing them -- the implication being that they must somehow have revealed that bullets came from multiple assassins. Dr. Humes has explained that he did not want the notes, which had the President's blood on them, to wind up a macabre souvenir like some items from Lincoln's and other assassinations.
Such sensitivities are simply incomprehensible to true believers. They ask why JFK's brain is missing -- implying it has been hidden because, again, examination would prove he was shot from multiple directions. The last person known to have had the brain is Robert Kennedy's secretary. A reasonable hypothesis is that RFK disposed of it personally, perhaps even seeing that it was later interred with his brother's body. As with Dr. Humes' destruction of the bloody autopsy notes, the purpose would be to preclude any possibility of JFK's brain ending up in a sideshow somewhere.
Another favorite true believer question is why was Oswald's interrogation not recorded. Naturally it doesn't satisfy them to point out that the Dallas PD never taped interrogations at that time -- that it didn't even OWN a tape recorder in 1963 -- and that a stenographer was only brought in when and if a suspect confessed. Innocent explanations, however, never sway true believers from their single-minded conviction that anything which is missing, lost, sealed or otherwise unavailable holds the key to the "truth" they seek so relentlessly.
A further aspect of their irrationality is the irrelevance of most of their questions. What difference does it make that we don't have either Humes' handwritten autopsy notes or the brain? The skull was never missing, and in addition to the transcribed notes, we have the photos and X-rays made during the autopsy. How could the brain or the original notes show more about the direction of the bullet than these things do?
And what difference does the non-recording of the interrogation make? No one cites the interrogation as either confirming Oswald's guilt or negating a conspiracy. The agents from multiple federal and local agencies who thronged the interrogation room agree that though Oswald was hostile and uncommunicative, he categorically denied any guilt. The evidence for his guilt rests on the overwhelming physical evidence -- not on some claim that he confessed during an unrecorded interrogation.
True believers do not -- indeed, WILL not -- understand that any major crime or tragedy is full of coincidences, anomalies, might-have-beens, and unanswered questions. In fact, true believers have dubbed the lone assassin theory the "coincidence theory." They have great difficulty with things like the single bullet theory, asking again and again -- How likely is it that one bullet would go through two men? I'm not even sure I'd label this a coincidence since a bullet exiting Kennedy had to go SOMEWHERE and John Connally was sitting right in front of him, but regardless of what we call that, let's look at some REAL coincidences and you determine their significance. Here are some examples of the host of weird coincidences you find when you compare the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations which I've taken from Dr. John Lattimer's book, Kennedy and Lincoln: Medical and Ballistic Comparisons of Their Assassinations: Both Presidents were shot in the back of the head, on the Friday before a major holiday, while seated beside their wives -- neither of whom were injured. Both were in the presence of another couple, and in each case that man was also wounded by the assassin. After both assassinations there were loud and insistent claims that the fatal shot must have come from a different direction. Each President in his thirties married a socially prominent twenty-four-year-old woman who spoke French fluently. While in the White House, each President had a family of three children, and both lost a child through death. Both Lincoln and Kennedy were second children; both had been boat captains; both were related to a U.S. Senator, Attorney General, ambassador to Great Britain, and the mayor of Boston. Each had been elected to Congress in the year '47 and were vice-presidential runners-up in the year '56. Each was elected president in '60. Before each was elected, a sister died. Both had a friend named Billy Graham and knew an Adlai Stevenson. President Kennedy had a secretary named Mrs. Lincoln and President Lincoln had a secretary named John Kennedy. The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters. Both were succeeded by Vice-Presidents named Johnson: Andrew born in 1808 and Lyndon in 1908, both of whom had 13 letters in their names and two daughters. Both assassins have fifteen letters in their names. Both murdered from their place of work. Booth shot Lincoln in a theatre and fled to a warehouse. Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and fled to a theatre. Both assassins were in their turn assassinated by shooters who used a Colt revolver and fired only one fatal shot. This is only a partial list. But does any of this prove any connection between the two murders? No, of course not. It just exemplifies the minor coincidences and ironies that surround any great public tragedy. But true believers see gathering unanswered questions as an end in itself, believing somehow that even if none of the anomalies implies anything in particular, the sheer number they come up with must have some significance. But when you are adding zeroes, it does not matter how many you add, the sum is still zero. This reminds me of the joke about the two hobos talking in a boxcar. The one says to the other: "Well, I knew I was losing money on each individual unit. But I thought I figured I'd make it up on the volume!"
Without proof that there was a second shooter there is simply no basis for either denying Oswald's guilt or seeing a conspiracy. Yes, others COULD have been involved, just as it is CONCEIVABLE that there are invisible aliens spying on you right now. But, absent proof of some other shooter in Dealey Plaza, conspiracy is as irrational and unfounded a speculation as invisible aliens.
Seeming almost to recognize this, true believers try fervently to prove there was a second shooter. They argue shots came from elsewhere and/or that Oswald didn't have time to make all the shots. But neither can be shown. They stress that some witnesses thought the shots came from the grassy knoll or other places besides the TSBD. But the origin of shots is very difficult to identify by ear, particularly in a natural echo chamber like Dealey Plaza. In fact, most of the earwitnesses who had an opinion thought the shots came from the TSBD. More important is that their disagreement is not over whether there were MULTIPLE shooters but over which direction a SINGLE set of shots came from. Whatever direction they think that was, the witnesses are virtually unanimous that shots were coming from ONLY ONE direction. Typically, this is ignored by true believers who just cite selected parts of the earwitness testimony as evidence of multiple shooters.
Eyewitness testimony of sudden, unexpected events is notoriously unreliable. Some witnesses who saw Officer Tippit's murderer flee identified his jacket as the same color as Oswald's; others said a different color. Of course the true believers, wanting to exonerate Oswald, arbitrarily choose to credit the latter and not the former. This is doubly advantageous for them for, using their logic, it gives rise to a proof of further skulduggery: since Oswald DIDN'T shoot Tippit, the fact that minutes later he was arrested with the murder gun proves it must have been planted on him.
If the size estimate given by the eyewitness who drove Oswald to work that day is credited, the paper bag Oswald brought to work was too short, by several inches, to hold his disassembled rifle. So this estimate becomes inviolable gospel even though the witness himself says he is just guestimating the size of an object observed only briefly and casually.
Bereft of any actual evidence to counter the overwhelming evidence supporting the Warren Commission's verdict, true believers take refuge in a postulate of massive fakery. Just as whatever is missing holds the truth, that which is extant is fraudulent. Documents have been forged, photos pieced together, X-rays faked, bullets planted, shells switched, doubles employed, bodies substituted, testimony altered, witnesses intimidated -- even killed. The list is endless. This raises another attribute of true believer faith: the almost systematic failure to follow the implications of their own claims. It simply never occurs to them what massive fakery implies -- not some workable secret conspiracy, but the active participation of hundreds or thousands of co- conspirators.
Consider the number of conspirators implied by the thesis of another best selling conspiracy book, David Lifton's ironically named, Best Evidence. Lifton actually claims that to obliterate evidence of multiple shooters, JFK's body was surgically altered while en route to the Bethesda autopsy. Even the most vocal medical critic of the Warren Commission, forensic pathologist, Cyril Wecht, dismisses Lifton out of hand, saying, "I could assemble a whole team of the best surgeons in the country and still not be able to accomplish in a day what Lifton says was done in a few hours." Furthermore, Jackie and others sat beside the casket throughout the trip back from Dallas. Yet neither they nor any of the dozens of people on Air Force One reported such villainous going's on. Did they all witness this surgery in silence? Were they ALL part of the conspiracy?
The bottom line is that each claim of tampering with evidence or witnesses necessitates postulating more conspirators. There had to be people correlating and executing the forging of documents, photos and X-rays, threatening witnesses, performing surgery on JFK's body, switching Oswald's body, putting his palmprint on the rifle -- or whatever the task at hand. To avoid dealing with this, true believers limit themselves to the vaguest suggestions about what happened without ever offering a detailed scenario, even by way of a guess or hypothesis. If they were to offer a detailed scenario, as the Warren Commission did, they would hopelessly embarrass themselves by what even they would have to admit was an absurdly unwieldy consortium of people and agencies.
Yet without hypothesizing the proverbial "cast of thousands" and explaining how all the evidence was corrupted, it remains to condemn Oswald without any suggestion of involvement by anyone else. The thought of a conspiracy in the Kennedy case may be more exciting and intriguing than having little ole Lee do it on his own, but it just doesn't hang together. You can't keep that many people quiet about ANYTHING for that long. Conspirators would be rushing to the Justice Department to bargain for immunity, selling tell-it-all autobiographies, making deathbed confessions, and leaving tell-tale information in their attics and/or in sealed envelopes to be opened after their deaths. If none of this has come about in thirty years, when can we expect it?
I happened to see a sign the last time I was in Dallas. It had nothing to do with this case, but it epitomizes the true believers' "different style of thinking": YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE IT TO SEE IT.
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[KATES SPEECH]
Valerie having discussed true believer reasoning deficits, I shall discuss examples of their infor mation deficits, both ignorance and misinformation on crucial issues.
NEWTON'S LAWS
True believers, like many ordinary people, derive their ideas of what bullets do from TV and movies where shooting victims are portrayed as being picked up and thrown backwards. Since the Zapruder film shows JFK flying backwards as the final shot hits, ignorant true believers think that proves that shot come from the front. In fact, bullets cannot pick victims up. If bullets had that much energy, Newton's law about "equal and opposite reaction" would mean the shooter would also be knocked down. Many shooting victims just fall forward in the direction they were traveling even though that is where the bullet came from. If victims exhibit violent body motion that is not from the force of the bullet but from neuro-muscular reaction which may throw the body in any number of directions.
SBT
Thus JFK's body motion after the shot provides no evidence as to whence the shot came from. Further technical errors impugn the true believers' arguments against the WC's theory that a single bullet pierced JFK's neck and then wounded Gov. Connally in front of him. First, Oliver Stone's farcical claim that the bullet could only have hit both men by changing direction in mid-air is only true if you assume that Kennedy and Connally were riding forward like graven images. But if they were behaving like politicians, turning and waving to the crowd, they line up perfectly for a shot from the TSBD.
The claim that the bullet could not have gone thru two men and remain undeformed is half falsehood and half ignorance. This is an FMJ (full metal jacket) military bullet specifically designed to retard deformation. It is slightly deformed to a degree which experienced military surgeons agree is entirely consistent with an FMJ inflicting these wounds.
RUBY
Another major ingredient inspiring conspiracy belief is the ignorance-based assumption that nothing else explains Jack Ruby murdering Oswald. In fact, aberrants like Ruby often react violently with the outpourings of national outrage and grief caused by assassinations. John Wilkes Booth was killed against orders by a mentally unbalanced soldier who had castrated himself out of religious mania some years before. President Garfield's assassin was shot at in his cell by a guard who was then acquitted by reason of insanity.
"INVINCIBLE IGNORANCE"
At this point, let me differentiate true believers from ordinary people. Deceived by casual reading in the vast literature of ignorance and falsehood true believers spew out, ordinary people understandably think there may be something to it. Doubtless we'll get reasonable questions from such people tonite.
But there is something fundamentally wrong w/ true believers who POUR over this case -- even write books about it -- and yet still can't follow Newton's Laws or Ruby's motivation. To borrow a phrase from theology, this is "invincible ignorance." Combined with true believers' reasoning deficits, their invincible ignorance reflects several other correlates of conspiracy true belief: First, people emotionally reject the grim truth that tragedies can just happen. Many people can't face the reality that utterly reasonless, unpredictable tragedy may be waiting around every corner. They cast about for a MEANINGFUL explanation, something that will make sense of senseless tragedy.
Second, many people need someone to blame. They want to believe that tragedies are caused not by the "fickle finger of fate", but by evil people they can hate. Millions fantasized that the Depression had been foisted on them by "Wall Street" -- some remote, set of greedy manipulators who benefitted from nefarious schemes which impoverished everyone else. Intellectually unsophisticated people particularly are susceptible to seeing great events as being orchestrated by insidious secret forces.
These tendencies are maximized when sudden, totally unexpected national calamities occur. The resulting confusion, ineptitude and mismanagement provide dark questions for those inclined to see evil forces at work. What happened, they ask, to the other man on the train platform when Garfield was shot? Why did the police allow him to slip away unidentified and unquestioned? How can we believe the Stalwarts played no part when they gained so much by Garfield's death?
Alone among presidential assassinations, Lincoln's did involve a conspiracy: During the War, Booth's gang had been encouraged by Confederate intelligence agents in a hare-brained scheme to kidnap Lincoln to exchange for a general release of Confederate prisoners. The surrender having vitiated that, Booth, and a follower who attacked Seward, struck in revenge, self-consciously imitating the classical tyrannicides. But 19th Century true believers had other explanations. One was the familiar international "Jew-bankers" scenario: they killed Lincoln, an economic protectionist, to facilitate their taking over the American economy. Even more popular, given contemporary American paranoias, was the Catholic conspiracy explanation: supposedly the Church of Rome had supported secession to weaken the US (out of the Church's supposed perpetual hostility to free institutions) and so murdered Lincoln. Supposedly the conspirators were all Catholics. (Actually only Mudd, who was innocent, and the Surratts were.) Moreover, a la the movie "JFK", it was "proved" that Catholic priests a thousand miles away knew of the assassination before it occurred thus showing that the Church was behind it.1
It does not faze true believers that their ideas are rejected by those technically and intellectually qualified to evaluate them. JFK conspiracy believers don't care that the technical elements of their arguments are derisively rejected by almost all pathologists, criminalists, forensic scientists, ballistics experts and historians who examine them. True believers' intellectual attainments may not allow them to follow technical analyses or methods of proof. And the fact that those intellectually qualified to evaluate those claims reject them may actually promote false claims among believers. True believers may hold deep grudges against technically qualified people. To accept conspiracy theories assuages the true believers' egos: they congratulate themselves on understanding the world while those who have always excelled them are blind; conspiracy theory reassuringly explains those persons' successes as a product not of superior attainments but of inclusion in the conspiracy.
A further characteristic of true believers is fundamental historical ignorance or obliviousness. By this I do not mean that conspiracy believers are just woefully ignorant of mere historical fact so that they can swallow such ahistorical fantasies as right wingers murdering that ardent Cold Warrior JFK for fear that he was becoming George McGovern. True believers' ignorance of historical fact is but a symptom of their lack of what the British historian Namier called a "sense of how things do NOT happen."
THE DREYFUS CASE
To illustrate this lack I want to compare Stone's paranoid fantasies to a real conspiracy, the Dreyfus Affair. In 1894 a Jewish officer of the French General Staff was wrongly convicted of treason. Unlike the hideous traitors of JFK conspiracy fantasies the Dreyfus conspirators were patriotic officers. They knew a spy was selling secrets to the Germans and honestly believed it was Dreyfus. Their belief was reasonable for the chief investigator, Major Henry, under tremendous pressure to produce evidence when he could not get Dreyfus to confess, forged a legally inadmissible document implicating Dreyfus -- whom he sincerely believed was guilty. But when it looked like the court martial might acquit, the Minister of War ordered Henry to secretly provide the judges w/ the inadmissible investigation file which included this inadmissible document. And Henry complied rather than confessing that he had fabricated a document he had assumed would never be used, but would get the pressure off him.
This then was all the wrong-doing involved: a conspiracy by a few generals to conceal a procedural wrong (unknowingly) magnified by a single fabrication. NOT dozens of traitors conspiring to murder a president; NOT a cover-up with scores more murders and hundreds more fabrications carried out by hundreds more traitors.
Dreyfus is convicted and sent to Devil's Island. His family begins a decade-long struggle to clear him. Having first rallied France's comparatively weak Jewish community, this unimportant Jewish family rouses French liberalism generally to a struggle eventually dividing France more tumultuously than the Rosenberg case did this country. This would surprise JFK conspiracy believers except it never occurs to them to wonder why neither the Kennedys, the most powerful family in American politics, nor any member of JFK's administration, will be associated with them.
Before the Dreyfus controversy began gathering steam, the General Staff assigned the new head of military intelligence, the anti-semitic Col. Picquart, to review the secret file in order to perfect new and better security procedures. He discovers that the file was illegally given to the judges. He urges that the generals annul the verdict themselves before the Dreyfusards find out. When his superiors reply that no one will know if he doesn't tell, he bursts out "This is abominable! You would DISHONOR me."
That is how an anti-semitic officer reacts to being invited to conspire against a Jew. Yet true believers really think DOZENS of army, Secret Service, FBI and CIA officials happily conspired to kill a President and then hundreds more ran around covering it up. True believers get their ideas about how government operates from the movies, the same place they get their ideas about wound ballistics.
True believers actually claim scores of potential witnesses "died mysteriously" during the cover-up. The list includes Oswald's mother and J. Edgar Hoover, both of whom died of natural causes -- the mother dying 17 years after JFK, Hoover dying 8 years after.
If they knew of the Dreyfus affair it would astound true believers to find that the conspirators didn't order the Devil's Island garrison to murder Dreyfus once the scope of the controversy became clear. After all, that would have ended the matter and the danger to their careers.
It would never occur to generals to try such a thing for, unlike true believers, they know how things don't happen. They know government officials lie and connive to cover their asses, but do not order murders -- for subordinates do not care enough about protecting them to carry such orders out. Even if the conspirators had ever imagined giving such an order, they knew not only that it would have been disobeyed but that word would have leaked out and ruined them more swiftly and surely than the controversy would.
It would further astound true believers to find that the generals didn't even kill Picquardt whom they could personally have murdered. They browbeat him into temporary silence instead and isolated him in French North Africa. But he found he could not live with the secret even to save his career -- unlike those faithful traitors whom the true believers claim have kept covering up the truth in the Kennedy case secret for 30 years without even one deathbed confession. Picquardt's account of the matter eventually reached Mrs. Dreyfus. He was thereafter arrested and imprisoned for breaching security procedures. But a new Minister of War (unaware of any problems and convinced of Dreyfus' guilt) initiated a new Army inquiry to confirm it. The new investigator discovered the fabricated document. Astoundingly, at least to true believers, he didn't cover for the generals either. Instead, he reported to the Minister of War who promptly had Major Henry arrested and he promptly killed himself.
The Affair dragged on for several more years, ending in the disgrace of the conspirators. Col. Picquart became Minister of War and Dreyfus as a Colonel served heroically in WWI.
JFK's POLITICS
Before concluding, I must address the absurd claim that the "military-industrial complex" had JFK assassinated to prevent him from turning into George McGovern. So pathetically ignorant of modern American history are true believers that they really can't distinguish the politics of John (who was, among other things, a life member of the National Rifle Association) from the politics his brother Teddy began espousing a decade after John's death.
JFK latest biographer's summary is "Ideologically, Kennedy was at best a sort of centrist Democrat.... He was militantly anti-Communist and committed to an aggressive foreign policy.
2 An earlier biographer compares JFK to Nelson Rockefeller: by accident of birth Rockefeller was a Republican and JFK a Democrat -- yet, by inclination, each belonged in the other's party.
Ike's speech against the military-industrial complex was actually a warning against JFK, it's patron. It was JFK who resumed nuclear testing which Eisenhower had stopped. It was JFK who called on every American family to build a fall-out shelter. He campaigned for President on the phony "missile gap", charging Eisenhower with inadequate military spending that had allowed the Russians to leap ahead. As president he vastly increased spending on missiles and every sort of high-tech weaponry along with the greatest expansion of conventional military forces and weapons systems since the end of WWII.
As to Cuba, what the CIA stonewalled about for years after JFK's death was the campaign of military sabotage and assassination he personally ordered when the Bay of Pigs showed the futility of overt invasion. His latest biographer says: JFK "approved Operation Mongoose, the clandestine exercise in terrorism and murder. Determined to win in Cuba at any cost, Jack had secret dealings w/ one of the top mobsters involved in the assassination attempts."
After WWII JFK had been one of those who pilloried Truman for having "lost China to the Communists." So he was deeply concerned not to provoke a similar campaign of vilification against himself by losing in Vietnam.
3 From the 1950s he had been espoused the domino theory, saying "that a Communist takeover in Indo-China would imperil Burma, Thailand and other independent states."4 Privately he told Dean Rusk, "'If we have to fight in SEAsia, lets fight in Vietnam. The Vietnamese, at least, are committed and will fight. There are a million refugees from Communism in S. Vietnam. Vietnam is the place.'"5 On many occasions JFK publicly rejected withdrawal, announcing his determination to stay in South Vietnam to defeat the "Communist aggression" against it because "For us to withdraw from this effort would begin a collapse not only of South Vietnam but of SEAsia. So we are going to stay there."6 This theme was emphatically reiterated in the speech he was going to give in Dallas that day.
Many 18th Century Americans actually thought witches had afflicted Salem. Many 19th Century Americans actually thought the Catholic Church murdered Lincoln. Many 1930s Americans thought the munitions makers had conspired to cause WWI. The idea that JFK was murdered by a right-wing conspiracy to stop his supposed plans to disengage in Vietnam or Cuba is modern America's contribution to this comic record of unreason. Thank you.
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