Posted on 11/25/2003 1:51:37 PM PST by veronica
I paid no attention to the many television programs broadcast this past week on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. The reason for my lack of interest was that the questions about the assassination that had obsessed me all my life—and not only the factual questions, but the deeper moral and emotional issues left by Kennedy’s killing—were resolved for me by Gerald Posner’s 1993 book Case Closed. Here is a letter I wrote to Posner about his book ten years ago, shortly after the 30th anniversary of the assassination: December 15, 1993
Dear Mr. Posner:
I would like to tell you how deeply grateful I am to you for your magnificent book, Case Closed.
Over the years, I had shared the general sense that we did not have the truth about the Kennedy assassination. While I never gave credence to the various wild conspiracy theories, I did feel that there was probably a second gunman, and perhaps Mafia involvement. But it seemed impossible ever to get closer to the truth. A year or two ago there were new television programs and articles about the assassination with some interesting information, but trying to follow the issues that were raised only led one into a morass of confusion.
One of the problems was that, while the conspiracy proponents seemed a contemptible bunch (especially Oliver Stone, who I think is truly evil), the defenders of the Warren Commission report, such as David Belin, also seemed fishy. They just went after the most obvious weaknesses in the conspiracy theories while blandly and self-righteously insisting on the “total correctness” of the obviously flawed Warren report. (It was that same sort of bland defense of the Warren report, the glossing over of its many troubling flaws and gaps, that had helped set off the conspiracy paranoia, along with the general suspicion of our government, back in the mid 1960s.) The Warren defenders never responded to the hard questions that continued to trouble me and everyone else who thought about the issue; and they never seemed to appreciate the fact—which you certainly bring out in your book—that there were many odd events surrounding the assassination that could reasonably give rise to suspicions of a conspiracy. It was all terribly, deeply frustrating. It seemed that this mystery would last forever, and that there was no point in even trying to figure it out.
Then one day this past September, at the National Airport in Washington, D.C., I picked up the U.S. News and World Report with the long excerpt from Case Closed. Reading the article on the shuttle flight back to New York, I experienced an epiphany. The clarity of your presentation, your story of Oswald, the fascinating new information about the timing of the shots and many other things all added up to an account that for the first time in all these years had the ring of truth. The magazine excerpt, of course, did not answer all my questions (I had to wait to read the book for that), but it did satisfy me that Oswald did it alone. Oswald emerged as a totally believable, real person, not this shadowy figure upon whom the conspiracy theorists could cast any fantasy they wanted.
There is another, perhaps unintended, benefit of Case Closed. Reading it made me realize that for years, all the bedeviling issues surrounding the assassination had blocked the assassination itself—the horror and tragedy and poignancy of it—from full consciousness. The conspiracy theories had become the main historical event, not Kennedy’s terrible death and what it did to the country. But your account, by clearing away those questions, has restored the assassination itself as an event in my experience and I think our collective experience as well. It was as though I began feeling the trauma and the meaning of Kennedy’s death afresh, undiminished after three decades.
Apart from the tragedy of the event itself, it was truly a fateful turning point in our country’s history—but, I believe, in a sense exactly opposite to what Oliver Stone imagines. Rather than marking the rise of Stone’s fictional militaristic right-wing to national power, it marked the rise to influence of a left-wing culture of alienation typified by people like Oliver Stone himself. These members of the adversary culture, unable to absorb Kennedy’s murder as the terrible event it was, chose to see it as a confirmation that America itself was evil, that America would always block the exaggerated hopes for unlimited individual fulfillment and social progress that Kennedy seemed to personify for many people. It was shortly after Kennedy’s death that the deadly notion became current that the “system” was blame for everything, thus turning Americans against their own country. Of course, the rise of black rage, the Vietnam war and so on were also important parts of this historic catastrophe, but the Kennedy assassination was crucial.
The unresolved assassination puzzle also fed the alienating notion that truth is indeterminable, that all we can know are self-serving narratives. This idea opens the gates to all kinds of viciousness. For example, the egregious Stone could present his paranoid fantasy as a revelation of “hidden truth” to a mass audience of millions of unformed, suggestible minds, and at the same time cover himself with the elites by saying that his movie was a mere “counter-myth,” not intended to be a factual presentation. Thus he got to convince millions of people that horrible lies were the truth, while denying that that he was doing anything of the kind. With Case Closed, you have not only uncovered the specific truth of the assassination; you’ve demonstrated that truth itself exists and can be known.
But for me, what is most remarkable about Case Closed is that this old festering sore of uncertainty and discouragement surrounding the assassination, which I never expected to be cured, has been cured. In bringing the truth to light out of all that confusion, you have performed not only a great public service, but a heroic act.
Sincerely yours,
Lawrence Auster
[...] "Fenster dabbles only lightly in psychology here. Conspiracy theorists, he argues, are desperate to make ephemera mean something. As he says, "conspiracy theory is life lived in significance: in reading the signs of the powerful."(1)
Kennedy Assassination Home Page
Lee Harvey Oswald's Paper Bag
Guinn’s neutron-activation Analysis
Warren Report: Table of Contents
One Hundred Errors of Fact and Judgment in Oliver Stone's JFK
The Academic JFK Assassination Web Site
HSCA (House Select Committee on Assassinations) Final Assassinations Report
A Critique of The Warren Report
Attempted assassination of General Walker
Oswald interviews, Acoustic studies and other information relating to the assassination of JFK
Queen of Diamonds
Zapruder 313
Head Wound
Photos and Illustrations of the JFK Assassination
Zapruder Head Shot
A Conspiracy Too Big? Intellectual Dishonesty in the JFK Assassination
The Single Bullet Strikes John Connally
Changed Motorcade Route in Dallas?
Zapruder frames 312-314 animated
Frame by Frame breakdown of the Zapruder Film
The Zapruder Film is Authentic
Free Republic threads on the Kennedy Assassination:
Case Closed: a letter to Gerald Posner (re: Kennedy assassination)
Warren (Commission) Was Right - The JFK case should be closed
Kennedy assassination solved!
Peter Jennings "JFK" Report: Oswald acted alone, go back to sleep...
Some Relevant Facts About the JFK Assassination
Who Killed JFK?
New Evidence in Kennedy Killing (Dallas not Mass)
Nellie Connally Disputes Warren Commission
JFK's fatal head wound: The truth for those who want to know (very graphic)
The Mystery of Marina Oswald
LBJ was behind JFK's assassination, upcoming book contends (I like this one best)
Thirty-nine years after JFK's assassination...
***New study of JFK assassination backs theory of "grassy knoll" Thread 2***
New study of JFK assassination backs....... Thread 3
New study of JFK assassination backs....... Thread 4
New study of JFK assassination ---- Thread 5
New study of JFK assassination ---- Thread 6
Echo correlation analysis and acoustic evidence in the Kennedy assassination
Let me know of any others not on the list.
The entire Zapruder film is only 26 seconds in length!! Where TF do you get 2 minutes from?
. . .There is no comfort to be found - save that maybe life's probabilities were better served; that is to say, Kennedy was really sick with Addison's Disease and almost as sick from his medications; he suffered chronic pain; he was addicted to women.
I am more tempted to believe that a kind of 'self-determined' fate does operate and by that, Kennedy's exit from this world, while in the seemingly 'worst' way; served him nonetheless.
Had he survived; this Kennedy's name might not be associated with a larger-than-life and enduring 'mythic reality'. Something, most mortals surely never acheive.
Perhaps, JFK needed that or wanted that; or he was groomed for that; or perhaps it was 'America' that needed the myth.
Could just be it was the synchonicity of 'needs' that made this horrific event possible or at least set the stage for it's happening.
I don't know whether there is a conspiracy or not. What I do know is that the Warren report offering is seriously flawed. I believed my government hook-line-and sinker until I saw the Zapruder film. I accepted the Posner explanation enough to take a much closer look at the two frames involved. I still think that the shot came from the 2 o'clock quadrant. That and the testimony of Nellie Connally backed up by the film makes me a skeptic of the Warren description of the events. No ephemera about it, Connally has a golf-ball sized hole in his chest the moment he was hit. From the film he is, as his wife described, turned to the right as he displays the effects of his wounding. He immediately goes down, as Kennedy had when he immediately reacted to the bullet through his neck.
Who cares about what the Zapruder film shows? As Richard Pryor would say, who are you gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?
The nonsensical single bullet theory? It's like manna from heaven, man.
Of course not. And birds never migrate to the south during the winter.
There are a lot of possibilities in this case, and the absence of evidence doesn't rule out involvement by others. It may just mean that the evidence was destroyed quickly and efficiently. It seems more than coincidental to me that Oswald was murdered shortly after the asassination. While that was an amateurish murder using a low-powered handgun, it could indicate that Oswald was involved in a conspiracy of relative amateurs. I think Oliver Stone's idea that US military or CIA people and Lyndon Johnson were involved is way out of bounds. But a small group of crackpots, one of whom was a trained sniper, could have been the guilty group.
Bravo. The thing is that you can show that animated GIF to conspiracy buffs and they won't have any way to refute it but a week later they'll say "the head moves backwards" as if they never saw that clip.
WARNING! Lone gunman believers, stay away from Barr McClennon's book Blood, Money & Power. You won't stay cured for long.
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