Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

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

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

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

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

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

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

  In his book, Loving God, former presidential assistant Charles Colson, in writing about Watergate, said, “With the most powerful office in the world at stake, a small band of hand-picked loyalists [of President Richard Nixon]…could not hold a conspiracy together for more than two weeks.”5

  5. Obviously, the more complicated a plot is, the greater the likelihood that something will go wrong and it won’t work. Everyone intuitively knows this, and hence we can assume that if there had been a plot to kill Kennedy, the plotters would have made it as uncomplicated as possible. But the massive conspiracy envisioned by most conspiracy theorists necessarily would be extremely complex, and this fact is greatly exacerbated by the ineptitude of human beings.

  I’m talking about the staggering incompetence at every level of our society, one that normally prevents any group, large or small, including the U.S. government and its agencies, from performing at anywhere near optimum capacity? Indeed, on a scale of one to ten, they normally operate below five. Incompetence is so widely prevalent that I expect it, and when I find competence I am always pleasantly surprised. Let’s look at just one example among a great many, this one at the CIA, the main federal agency conspiracy theorists suspect of being behind the assassination. In 1994, Aldrich Ames, chief of the CIA’s Soviet counterintelligence branch, pleaded guilty to the biggest espionage case in U.S. history. Ames furnished the Soviets U.S. secrets in return for more than $2 million. His perfidy led to the deaths of several Russian undercover agents working for the United States in the Soviet Union. Ames told his interrogators it was “really easy” to obtain the top-secret information even after he was transferred to anti-narcotics work in the early 1990s.

  In noting that it took an incredible nine years for Ames’s colleagues and superiors at CIA headquarters to catch him, syndicated columnist Mary McGrory wrote that “Ames and his wife did everything they could to arouse suspicion, living it up in the most provocative manner. What G5-14, on a salary of $69,000-plus, pays half a million in cash [$540,000] for a house in Arlington, Virginia, buys a bright red Jaguar [which he drove to work] and runs up Trumplike charges on his credit card?”6 A November 1994 report on the Ames case from the Senate Intelligence Committee found “gross negligence” (“negligence” being a euphemism here for incompetence) at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and reports from both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Select Co
mmittee on Intelligence “agreed that the agency [CIA] is in deep disarray,” a condition, they said, that long predated the Ames case.7

  I mean, in 1986 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with billions of dollars spent, and the finest scientific minds available, and with the space shuttle Challenger right in front of their noses for inspection, and with a defective pressure seal wrongly designed and about which they had been advised and warned on numerous occasions, sent seven astronauts to their death because of their dreadful incompetence. Speaking of NASA, on the first day of the Apollo 8 flight that circumnavigated the moon, when Colonel Frank Borman, the commander of the flight, was sending transmissions back to Cape Kennedy, he referred to the Apollo 8 flight as the Gemini 8 flight, a flight he had participated in three years earlier. That’s life in the real world.

  While we’re talking about incompetence, let’s look at an extreme example of it in the Kennedy case itself. Established procedure in the Secret Service during a presidential motorcade is to scan not only the crowds but also the roofs and windows of buildings as the motorcade goes along.8 But apparently, and unbelievably, not one of the sixteen Secret Service agents in the motorcade through Dealey Plaza was looking anywhere near the upper floors of the Book Depository Building. If they had, they would have seen (as several Dealey Plaza witnesses who never had any obligation to look for such things did) a figure or a rifle in the window where Oswald was. But there’s no evidence, from any of the reports of the agents, that they saw anything in Oswald’s window, or even saw the three black Book Depository employees in the two windows beneath Oswald’s window. Pardon my pique, but where in the hell were their heads when the president’s limousine passed by the Book Depository Building, other than up the proverbial place? Special Agent Roy Kellerman told the Warren Commission that in the Secret Service detail protecting the president, “when you are driving down [the] street…and you have buildings on either side of you, you are going to scan your eyes up and down” the buildings.9 Can you imagine that? Thirty-two trained eyes belonging to sixteen men whose duty and responsibility was to protect the president, and not one of these thirty-two eyes saw Oswald, or a rifle, or anything worthy of their attention in the sniper’s nest window. But several lay people did, and they were only there to watch the motorcade, not watch over the president’s security.

  The question is, How could the vast number of conspirators contemplated by the theorists have pulled off this incredibly complex conspiracy to such a degree of skill—never bumbling or slipping in any way that would reveal or even suggest their existence to one outside their group—that eternal secrecy would be guaranteed? Easy. You see, we know human beings are unable to keep their mouths shut and routinely incompetent, frequently stumbling over their own feet. But the conspirators envisioned by the theorists have their mouths permanently zippered and are extraordinarily competent, even prescient, being able to predict faultlessly all of the many uncontrollable variables in their mission to the point where everything worked perfectly, and with mathematical precision.

  As Richard White, professor of history at the University of Washington, and speaking in a generic sense, says, “You can’t trust the government to do anything right—except, of course, to conspire and cover up. Then it becomes diabolically efficient. The very people who are wildest for government conspiracies are often the same people who believe the government is incapable of delivering the mail efficiently.”10 In other words, the conspiracists believe that Murphy’s law (whatever can go wrong will go wrong) doesn’t apply to the alleged conspiracy in the assassination and cover-up.

  The above deals with the murder and cover-up. But with the many groups supposedly involved in the conspiracy, like the CIA, mob, anti-Castro Cubans, and military-industrial complex, how could they handle all the logistical complexities and inevitable disagreements among themselves over details during the planning phase leading up to November 22, without anything they did out of the ordinary (and by definition, they would have had to do things out of the ordinary) coming to the attention of just one person outside their group?

  6. If Oswald conspired with anyone, they waited quite awhile to bring him aboard. The conspiracy couldn’t have been hatched before October 1, 1963, when we know Oswald was still in Mexico City desperately trying to get to Cuba. If he had succeeded in getting to Cuba, who believes he would have ended up killing Kennedy? No one I’ve ever heard of. And how believable is it that a plot to kill the president of the United States, the most powerful man on earth, would be born after October 1, just seven weeks before Kennedy’s death? To believe something like that is to be addicted to silliness. The absurdity of the notion that Oswald conspired with others to kill Kennedy can be spotlighted by the fact that on the very day, September 26, 1963, that it was announced in both Dallas newspapers that Kennedy was going to come to Texas on November 21 and 22 and that Dallas would likely be one of the cities he would visit,11 Oswald was on a bus traveling to Mexico City determined to get to Cuba.

  Indeed, since Kennedy’s motorcade route past the Book Depository Building wasn’t selected until November 18,12 and announced in a paper for the first time on the morning of November 19 in the Dallas Morning News,13 we not only thereby know that Oswald getting a job at the Book Depository Building on October 15 was unrelated to President Kennedy’s trip to Dallas and the assassination, but it would seem that any conspiracy involving Oswald as the hit man would have had to be hatched no earlier than November 19, just three days before Kennedy’s death (i.e., unless the argument is made—which I have yet to hear even the daffy conspiracy buffs make—that wherever Kennedy went when he came to Dallas, it was Oswald’s job to track him down and kill him). Surely no person with an ounce of sense could possibly believe that the CIA, mob, and so on, recruited Oswald to kill Kennedy just three days before the assassination.

  7. In the same vein, during the five-week period leading up to the assassination, we know Oswald was taking driving lessons from Ruth Paine and was about to apply for a learner’s permit. In fact, we know that as late as November 16, just six days before the assassination, Oswald went to the state’s license examination bureau in Dallas to get his driver’s permit, only leaving because the line was very long.14 How likely is it that Oswald would be taking driving lessons and going down to get a learner’s permit on November 16 if he was planning on murdering the president six days later? As mentioned earlier in this book, his leaving nearly all his money and his wedding ring behind on the morning of the assassination clearly demonstrated his awareness of what he could expect his life to be like after he pulled the trigger. The mundane exercise of learning to drive and looking forward to one day having a driving license speaks loudly for the proposition that Oswald’s intent to murder the president was formed somewhat on the spur of the moment not long before the day of the assassination, and as a necessary corollary and concomitant to this, against the proposition that a group like the CIA or organized crime conspired with Oswald to have him kill Kennedy for them.

  Other things Oswald did during the month leading up to the assassination clearly represented a person in the normal, humdrum rhythm of life, not someone preparing, with others, to murder the president of the United States. For example, we already know that on November 1, three weeks before the assassination, he rented a mail box at the Terminal Annex near the Book Depository Building. At $1.50 per month, he paid $3.00 for two months, the rental expiring on December 31, five weeks after the assassination.15 The relevance of this is clear since we know that Oswald was very tightfisted with his money, what precious little of it he had. And although to you and me $1.50 is nothing, everything in life is relative, and to Oswald it was something. Here’s someone who is paying $8.00 a week in rent, can’t live with his wife and daughters because he can’t afford an apartment for the three of them, and has a net worth of little over $200.00. He never would have just thrown away that extra $1.50 for the second month if he didn’t intend to use the mail box for that month of De
cember, particularly, as I say, when he was notorious for literally watching every penny.

  Also, on November 1 he sent a letter to Arnold Johnson, the director of information for the American Communist Party in New York City, in which he told Johnson of his being introduced, by a friend, to the local chapter of the ACLU, and asked Johnson to advise him “to what degree, if any” should he “attempt to heighten [the group’s] progressive tendencies?”16 Around that same time, Oswald sent a $2.00 registration fee to the ACLU in New York City to become a new member, the ACLU receiving the $2.00 on November 4.17 On November 9, Oswald wrote a letter to the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., asking it to “please inform us [him and Marina] of the arrival of our Soviet entrance visas as soon as they come [in],” mailing the letter on November 12.18

  Indeed, in the late evening of November 20, just two days before the assassination, Oswald took a load of his clothing to a “washateria” (laundromat) near his home.19 Though the thought of killing the president had probably already entered his mind, the act of washing a load of his clothing clearly reflects that no final decision (if one at all) had yet been made, and of course it automatically would have been made by this time if he had been the hit man in a conspiracy to murder the president. If by Wednesday evening he had already committed himself to killing Kennedy, his state of mind would have had to be that if he got caught, Dallas County would be doing his laundry at least for awhile, and if he was able to flee to Mexico or where have you, like the title of Billie Holiday’s song, he would be “traveling light” while getting there, not carrying a bundle of laundry in his arms.

  For all intents and purposes, Oswald’s conduct during the month before the assassination alone precludes the notion of a conspiracy.