Reclaiming History
Page 179
It couldn’t have been more obvious within hours after the assassination that Oswald had murdered Kennedy, and within no more than a day or so thereafter that he had acted alone. And this is precisely the conclusion that virtually all local (Dallas), state (Texas), and federal (FBI and Secret Service) law enforcement agencies came to shortly after the assassination. Nothing has ever changed their conclusion or proved it wrong.
Apart from the fact that no group of conspirators would ever get someone like Oswald to kill for them, no evidence has ever surfaced even linking Oswald to any of the groups the conspiracy theorists believe to be behind the assassination. But remarkably, many in the debate treat this all-important fact as irrelevant and moot. The reason is grounded in a stark misconception. The biggest mistake, by far, that well-intentioned lay people make in concluding there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, and the biggest argument, by far, that conspiracy theorists use in their books to support their position of a conspiracy, is to maintain that such and such a group “had a motive” to kill Kennedy and, therefore, must have done it. For instance, one hears that organized crime killed Kennedy out of anger because, after they helped finance his 1960 presidential campaign, he betrayed them by allowing his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to continue his crusade to destroy them; or that they killed the president “to get Bobby Kennedy off their back.” Or, Castro had Kennedy killed to get even with him for the Bay of Pigs invasion or before Kennedy had him killed. Or, the military-industrial complex and the CIA killed Kennedy because he intended to withdraw American troops from Vietnam, and they were fiercely opposed to it.†You know, if the president of our country is doing something that a particular group (e.g., Wall Street or unions or environmentalists) doesn’t like, the group simply kills him. That’s what we routinely do in America, right?
Moreover, for some reason, believers in the conspiracy theory apparently never stop to realize that even assuming, for the sake of argument, that a particular group of people had a motive to kill Kennedy, they also had an even greater motive not to do it, namely, that if they did it and got caught, they could be tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Indeed, they would also know that the probability of their being caught and executed would be increased a hundred times over since their victim was the president of the United States, and his murder would ignite the most massive, dogged, and never-ending pursuit of his killer or killers by local, state, and federal law enforcement that had ever taken place.
But even if this apparently never-considered countervailing motive were treated as if it did not exist, a motive to commit a crime hardly gets one to first base in any criminal prosecution. I mean, if President Bush were assassinated tomorrow, there would be all types of people and groups who one could say would have had a motive to kill him. It is only one of the starting points of the investigation. Irrespective of the presence of motive, prosecutors still have to prove, by solid evidence, that the person or group who had a motive is the same person or group who committed the crime, a little fact that millions of Americans and most conspiracy theorists ignore. Taking the French proverb Qui en profite du crime en est coupable (“Whoever profits from the crime is guilty of it”) to heart, they are convinced that finding a motive is synonymous with finding the perpetrator. In their mind, finding that a particular group had a motive to kill Kennedy is enough to prove that the group did, in fact, do so—a non sequitur and broad jump of Olympian proportions. For example, Oliver Stone concluded that no fewer than ten separate groups or people had a motive to kill Kennedy, and this is why someone of his intelligence (with his thinking cap turned very tightly to the “off” position) directed a movie (JFK) in which, unbelievably, all ten were involved in Kennedy’s murder, the reductio ad absurdum of such an infantile, yet exceedingly prevalent mode of thinking.*
Many conspiracy theorists embellish the motive argument to prove that a particular group killed Kennedy, by saying that it had the “motive, means, and opportunity” to do so. They present this almost as a prosecutorial legal brief, but in my years as a prosecutor I never once used the phrase and personally don’t know any seasoned prosecutor who has, although I assume some do and I am aware of this legal colloquialism. Much more so than motive, “means and opportunity” are virtually worthless as evidence of guilt (unless, of course, you can show that no other living human, or very few other living humans, had the means or opportunity).
To illustrate how empty the concept of motive, means, and opportunity is, let’s take the Kennedy assassination. Any of the thousands of citizens of Dallas who hated Kennedy with a passion would have had a motive to kill him. And any of them who owned a gun or a rifle had the means. And if they were anywhere along Kennedy’s motorcade route, they would have the opportunity. Again, “motive, means, and opportunity” hardly gets one to first base. As indicated, even if all three are present, a prosecutor still has to show that the person or group who had them committed the crime. Indeed, a prosecutor’s focusing heavily on motive, means, and opportunity is almost an implied admission by him that he has very little evidence that the defendant did, in fact, commit the crime. “Yeah, okay,” a courthouse wag could say. “He had motive, means, and opportunity. But did he do it?” Motive, means, and opportunity are certainly helpful (and sometimes critical) to a prosecutor in proving his case, but are perhaps more helpful to the police who investigate the case in that the absence of any of them, particularly means and opportunity, enables the police to exclude those who may have otherwise been considered suspects to a crime.
If all the groups and people who Oliver Stone, in his movie, alleges were involved in Kennedy’s murder (e.g., FBI, CIA, Secret Service, military-industrial complex, LBJ, etc.) actually were, a coup d’état would necessarily have taken place. And, indeed, in Stone’s movie New Orleans DA Jim Garrison tells his staff that the assassination of President Kennedy “was a military-style ambush from start to finish, a coup d’état with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings.” It’s a notion that many conspiracy theorists readily subscribe to. In fact, one of their books on the Kennedy assassination, by Alan Weberman and Michael Canfield, is specifically titled Coup d’État in America. Kennedy’s assassination, writes conspiracy writer James H. Fetzer, could very well have been “the result of a coup d’état involving the CIA, the mob, anti-Castro Cubans, and powerful politicians, such as LBJ, Richard Nixon, and J. Edgar Hoover, fully financed by Texas oil men and elements of the military-industrial complex.”16 “There can be no doubts,” conspiracy author L. Fletcher Prouty writes, that the Kennedy assassination “was the result of a coup d’état.”17 Conspiracy icon Vincent Salandria concludes that “the killing of Kennedy represented a coup d’état.”18 I suppose that since a coup d’état is defined as a sudden, unconstitutional change of state policy and leadership “by a group of persons in authority,” a coup would actually be required in order to pull off the massive conspiracy contemplated by conspiracy theorists; that is, you couldn’t even have a coup without the involvement, cooperation, and complicity of groups like the FBI, CIA, and military-industrial complex.
In addition to the fact that the aforementioned groups and people would find it impossible to agree on who should be seated where at a presidential swearing-in ceremony, much less on how, when, and where to murder the president, what the conspiracy theorists fail to realize is that there is absolutely no history of coup d’états in America. They are talking about the United States of America, the most powerful, democratic, and economically stable country in the world, as if it were no different from Nicaragua or Tanzania—in effect, comparing us with banana republics and Third World countries whose weak, vulnerable, undemocratic, and economically unstable conditions lend themselves to, and are fertile soil for, one coup after another. For instance, in the year Kennedy was killed alone, there were attempted but unsuccessful coups in Argentina and Turkey and successful coups in the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, South Vietnam, (Republic), Iraq, Syria, Congo (Bra
zzaville), and Tanzania.19
Even if a coup against Kennedy by powers in America were feasible (and the very thought is repellant to our minds), what Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the Warren Commission in discounting Russian participation in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy, though not directly applicable, is instructive: “Although there are grave differences between the Communist world and the free world,…even from their point of view there needs to be some shape and form to international relations, that it is not in their interest to have this world structure dissolve into complete anarchy, that great states…have to be in a position to deal with each other…and that requires the maintenance of correct relations.”20
What Rusk was saying is that with respect to stable foreign nations (as opposed to, say, banana republics or Third World countries), it is in the best interests of even adversaries to accept the “legitimacy” of their opposition. And what Rusk observed between these stable foreign nations is equally applicable internally. Even though, as with every president, our elected leader has many factions in the country opposed to his stewardship of government, these factions would have many more reasons to accept the continued legitimacy invested in the president by our constitutional process than to embrace fascistic principles that would only ultimately promote the insecurity and illegitimacy of their own positions. Why would they want to live in an environment where in the future their political opposition would likely do the same thing to them as they did to Kennedy? The notion that major federal agencies of government (or even one such agency) would decide to murder Kennedy because they didn’t agree with certain policies of his is sufficiently demented to be excluded at the portals of any respectable mental institution short of an insane asylum.
Because conspiracy theorists believe that once they find a motive, they have found a perpetrator, many books of theirs on the Kennedy assassination devote several hundred pages to a specific group’s motive to kill the president, but remarkably never get around to spending any time on whether Oswald, who all the evidence shows to be the triggerman, had any actual and direct connection to the group, or more importantly, even if he did, whether there is any evidence that the group got him to kill Kennedy for them. These conspiracy theorists get so caught up in their fertile delusions that while they spend entire chapters on arcane relationships of groups like the mob and CIA with various people, groups, and events wholly unrelated to the assassination, many don’t even bother to devote one single sentence in their long books to scrutinizing Oswald’s activities during the critical days and weeks leading up to the assassination, an exceedingly important source of information from which to infer the existence or nonexistence of a conspiracy. It’s as if these authors believe there’s no need to connect Oswald to the CIA or the mob, or show that they got him to kill Kennedy for them. If, as I say, they can prove that one of these groups had a motive to kill Kennedy, then, if Oswald was the assassin, he must have killed Kennedy for them. This crazy, incredibly childlike reasoning is the mentality that has driven and informed virtually all of the pro-conspiracy sentiment in the Kennedy assassination from the very beginning.
Though many people have not stopped to realize it, the issue of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination is two-pronged, the first of which can be disposed of in one sentence: since we know Oswald killed Kennedy, we also know that no group of conspirators killed Kennedy and framed Oswald for the murder they committed. You can only frame an innocent person, not a guilty one, so this type of conspiracy has been taken off the table by the conclusive establishment of Oswald’s guilt.
The second issue, and the subject of this Book Two, involves whether Oswald was a part of a conspiracy—that is, did he kill Kennedy for others?
In the following sections on the various groups who have been accused of being behind the president’s murder, the reader will see that none of the conspiracy theories relating to these groups benefit from scrutiny, and that to accept any of them one has to knowingly abandon all conventional notions of logic and common sense. Again, this is not to suggest that there is no such thing as conspiracy to commit murder. It’s just that there is no evidence of such a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination.
I said in the introduction to this book that one of the reasons why everyday Americans believe in a conspiracy in this case is that they find it intellectually incongruous that a peasant can strike down a king, that something more just had to be involved. CBS commentator Eric Sevareid spoke of Americans finding it difficult to believe that “all that power and majesty [could be] wiped out in an instant by one skinny, weak-chinned little character. It was like believing that the Queen Mary had sunk without a trace because of a log floating somewhere in the Atlantic, or that AT&T’s stock had fallen to zero because a drunk somewhere tore out his telephone wires.”21
In explaining that what happened in Dallas was so horrendous, so incredible, so shattering that the American people demanded that the cause or reason for the murder equal the effect, no one, I think, has said it better than William Manchester, the author of the 1967 best seller, The Death of a President: “I think I understand why they feel that way. And I think, in a curious way, there is an aesthetic principle involved. If you take the murder of six million Jews in Europe and you put that at one end of the scale, at the other end you can put the Nazis, the greatest gang of criminals ever to seize control of a modern government. So there is a rough balance. Greatest crime, greatest criminals. But if you put the murder of the President of the United States at one end of the scale, and you put that waif Oswald on the other end, it just doesn’t balance. And you want to put something on Oswald’s side to make it balance. A conspiracy would do that beautifully. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence whatever of that.”22
It might be productive for the reader to keep Manchester’s words in mind as he or she reads what follows.
History of the Conspiracy Movement
Before I discuss the enormous issue of conspiracy in the murder of President Kennedy, a very brief history of the conspiracy movement in America with respect to the assassination is in order.
The very first conspiracy theorists consisted, essentially, of two groups. The first included those who love conspiracies and see one behind every tree and everywhere else in modern society. They are, for the most part, culturally paranoid people. To them there is always much more going on below the radar screen than on it, the powers that be are always up to something, and that something is always no good. Not infrequently, their charges happen to be true. This group was screaming conspiracy before the fatal bullet had even come to rest, although the first literary shot fired by this group is believed to be Mark Lane’s article, “Defense Brief for Oswald,” published in the December 19, 1963, edition of the National Guardian, a libertarian newsweekly.
The other group were not conspiracy lovers per se, but the millions among us who instinctively believe that any really important human event that is concomitantly harmful to the interest of many, including them, is never brought about by just one dirty hand.* The automatic and ubiquitous word they employ to express their angst is the anonymous they. After employing this pronoun, they usually don’t consume their lives with the issue, and go on to other matters of more immediate concern. The easy reliance on they to explain away all manner of major occurrences is not confined only to the man on the street. Thus, in the moments after the assassination, President Johnson would think, “If they shot our president, who would they shoot next?” And Jacqueline Kennedy cried, “They killed my husband.” Suffice it to say that they, whoever they are, have been responsible for more terrible and cataclysmic events than any group, tribe, or nation in world history.
Although the conspiracy movement throughout the years has had no political agenda, and its adherents run the gamut from members of the Far Left to the Far Right, this was not true at the beginning. Because Oswald was a known Marxist who had defected to Russia and was a pro-Castroite, the belief of many Americans in the wake of the assassination was that Russi
a, our bitter enemy in the cold war, was behind the president’s death. It probably was no coincidence, then, that the first four conspiracy books on the assassination* were written by old-line Communists or politically active leftists, the first two expressly seeking to deflect suspicion away from the Soviet Union.1
The first conspiracy book, Who Killed Kennedy?, was published in London in May of 1964 and written by Thomas Buchanan, an expatriate American Communist living in Paris who began writing a series of popular conspiracy articles titled the “Buchanan Report” for the Paris weekly L’Express on February 10, 1964. Per the February 29, 1968, Congressional Record, “In 1949 [actually, 1948], Buchanan was fired from the staff of a Washington newspaper [Washington Evening Star] for being a Communist party member, and is now a frequent contributor to left-wing newspapers and periodicals.” Challenging the anticipated findings of the Warren Commission, Buchanan, who argued that two gunmen, firing from different directions, killed Kennedy, pointed out in his book that “it seems clear that from the Chinese point of view, as from the Soviet and Cuban, no political advantage could have been anticipated from the death of Kennedy.” He added how ludicrous it was to believe a “plot by leaders of the Kremlin to dispatch a trained assassin to shoot down the only president since Roosevelt they respected.”2