Posted on 11/15/2003 3:04:13 PM PST by Destro
JFK: Case Not Closed
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
On Sunday, Nov. 16, FOX News Channel will present a one-hour special commemorating the 40th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination.
Join Greta Van Susteren for FOX News Channel's anniversary special — JFK: Case Not Closed .
One week after President John F. Kennedy (search) was assassinated, a nation-wide poll revealed that 62% of Americans believed a conspiracy was involved. And now, 40 years later? What do we believe?
A recent FOX News poll found that many Americans today do not believe Lee Harvey Oswald (search) was a lone gunman. And there may be some evidence to prove it...
President Kennedy's assassination may have turned Dealey Plaza (search) into the world's most famous crime scene, but in 1963 — crime scene investigation was not a sophisticated forensic science.
Cops made some surprising mistakes — mistakes that led to confusion for the investigators and fodder for conspiracy theorists.
Our special will examine the forensic evidence, the autopsy and the single bullet theory, including accounts from the people who were there.
You'll watch footage never before seen on TV and hear eyewitness testimony from people who've never spoken about it until now...
It's a one-hour special on American history that you don't want to miss... only on FOX News Channel.
The Zapruder Film Reframing JFK’s Assassination
David R. Wrone
November 2003
400 pages, 40 photographs, 22 in full color, 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 Cloth ISBN 0-7006-1291-2, $29.95 (t)
It is the most famous home movie of all time, the most closely analyzed 26 seconds of film ever shot, the most disturbing visual record of what many have called “the crime of the century.”
In 486 frames—a mere six feet of celluloid—Abraham Zapruder’s iconic film captures from beginning to end the murder of President John F. Kennedy in broad daylight. The film has become nearly synonymous with the assassination itself and has generated decades of debate among conspiracy theorists and defenders of the Warren Commission’s official report. Until now, however, no scholar has produced a comprehensive book-length study of the film and its relation to the tragic events of November 22, 1963.
David Wrone, one of our nation’s foremost authorities on the assassination, re-examines Zapruder’s film with a fresh eye and a deep knowledge of the forensic evidence. He traces the film’s forty-year history from its creation on the “grassy knoll” by Dallas dressmaker Zapruder through its initial sale to Life magazine, analysis by the Warren Commission and countless assassination researchers, licensing by the Zapruder family, legal battles over bootleg copies, and sale to the federal government for sixteen million dollars.
Wrone’s major contribution, however, is to demonstrate how the film itself necessarily refutes the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman and single-bullet theories. The film, he notes, provides a scientifically precise timeline of events, as well as crucial clues regarding the timing, number, origins, and impact of the shots fired that day. Analyzing it frame-by-frame in relation to other evidence—including two key photos by Phil Willis and Ike Altgens—he builds a convincing case against the official findings.
Without fanfare, he concludes that more than three gunshots were fired from more than one direction and that most likely none were fired by alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. If true, then JFK’s death was the result of a conspiracy, for the Commission’s nonconspiracy conclusion requires a maximum of three shots and one gunman.
Wrone, however, does not speculate as to who actually shot JFK or why—or even if Oswald was involved. In fact, he is just as critical of the legion of conspiracy theorists as he is of the Warren Commission (which, he reveals, crushed dissent within its own ranks).
Doggedly pursuing the evidence wherever it leads, Wrone has produced a meticulous, clear-eyed, and provocative new reading of this remarkable cinematic Rosetta Stone.
“An important, valuable, and compelling addition to the literature on the assassination that argues convincingly that the film is both authentic and contains evidence of a conspiracy.”--Michael L. Kurtz, author of Crime of the Century: The Kennedy Assassination from a Historian’s Perspective
“The vivid images captured by the Zapruder film are eminently recognizable, perhaps more so than any other film footage ever captured, so much so that anyone who reflects on JFK’s assassination quite likely does so from Abraham Zapruder’s vantage point.”--Walter E. Dellinger III, Maggs Professor of Law at Duke University and former Solicitor General of the United States
“Wrone’s knowledge of the assassination’s evidentiary base is unparalleled.”--James H. Lesar, founder and president of the Assassination Archives and Research Center
DAVID R. WRONE is professor emeritus of history at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point.
I think you may be confusing hatred of Teddy and most of the rest of the present-day litter for hatred of JFK. I don't believe there is any significant hatred of JFK among conservatives, and from what I have read around here, most freepers respected JFK, Jr. as well.
Scott Peterson led the plot to kill him??!!
The bullet and the fragments foun came from LHO's rifle and no other. The palm print on the rifle was LHO's. The thread caught in the buttplate matched the type of shirt LHO was wearing. The empty cases came from the rifle and no other. No curtain rods were found in the depository. Shall I go on?
Not necessary. You need to study the Zapruder film. None of the other so called evidence you posted supports the conclusion.
I owned one of those rifles in 1963 and my experience with it makes me doubt the official "story" of the shooting. I didn't believe it then and I don't believe it now.
The title of this book is absolutely presumptuous: the case is not closed; too many questions remain unanswered; and there has been no new evidence in the four decades since the assassination to convict Oswald in the court of history. Much of what Posner gives us in CASE CLOSED is, for the most part, a re-hash of Warren Commission testimony supplemented with some later interviews. But here and there you will come across moments when you have to nod your head and say to yourself, "I hadn't thought about that. Maybe the _____(fill in a conspiracy theory)__________ isn't probable."
I give the book this much credit: it de-bunks a lot of the kookier conspiracy theories that are out there. As some one who believes there was some kind of limited conspiracy, I thought this was good for one reason: it makes the case for the more logical and probable conspiracy theories that much more compelling. Without realizing it, by knocking down some of the more elaborate theories, the ones he left standing seem to stand taller. It makes you wonder why Posner didn't go after them. (Notice how he knocks one conspiracy writer down after another, but couldn't touch Sylvia Meagher's works or Josiah Thompson's Six Seconds in Dallas.)
But the ultimate flaw for Posner's book, looking at it from an Oswald-did-it-alone theory, is that it spends 99/100ths of the time discussing Oswald's profile as an assassin, but only spends two pages (with illustrations) on the single-bullet theory and two pages on Oswald's escape from the sixth floor. These nuts-and-bolts of the assassination are glossed over unconvincingly, which is terribly damaging to his cause. These elements of the murder are the means and opportunity to prove the case against Oswald. It's at this point when Posner's reasoning turns into a tantrum. The tone of the concluding chapter is so defensive that you sense that Posner himself knows he didn't convince the skeptics. To call his book CASE CLOSED, convincing the skeptics should have been his primary goal.
Rocco Dormarunno, author of The Five Points Concluded
Excellent choice of words. Kennedy's family, unfortunately, chose to move left with their party instead of bailing out when the Democratic no longer stood for what JFK stood for.
The explanation given was that she was crawling out there to retrieve a piece of JFK's brain which had been blown backward out of the car.
Anybody else remember this? Hmmmm....
Point of impact
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