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Posted on Thu, Nov. 21, 2002 | |
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Museum curator seeks to solve JFK mystery Knight Ridder Newspapers DALLAS - (KRT) - It was 39 years ago today, a Friday, in fact, that President John F. Kennedy was slain on the streets of Dallas. For researchers such as Gary Mack, the echoes of gunfire in Dealey Plaza remain as haunting as ever. Maybe more so. "There's crazy stuff going on," Mack says. "It's so screwy, now, that there are people out there who are actually confessing to having a role in the crime. "There are people who claim they were on the grassy knoll firing away." It's little wonder then, Mack says, that polls conducted by Gallup and Zogby International over the years show that a vast majority of Americans believe Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy. Mack, 56, is curator of the Sixth Floor Museum, located in the old Texas School Book Depository overlooking Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was fatally shot on Nov. 22, 1963. For 27 years, Mack - with relentless curiosity, an academic's eye and an investigator's skepticism - has sought answers to the JFK mystery. He joined the Sixth Floor Museum as an archivist in 1994. Founded by the Dallas County Historical Foundation and funded by visitor fees, the nonprofit museum is one of the most popular historic sites in North Texas with 450,000 visitors a year. "My role as curator is to be able to put this story in context and to present it objectively and accurately," Mack says. "Whatever history records is what the museum exhibits eventually will include. "The museum's role is to educate and inform its visitors in a way that does not push any one point of view or any particular theory." But one widely known conspiracy theorist sings Mack's praises. "Gary is an excellent researcher," says Jim Marrs, whose book "Crossfire" was the basis in part for Oliver Stone's controversial movie, "JFK." Today, Marrs teaches a class on the assassination at UT-Arlington. Says Mack, with a humorless laugh, "The important thing is President Kennedy's life and legacy ... but Oliver Stone's movie is what most people think of first." It was in 1975 in Wichita, Kan., where he worked at a radio station, that Mack first saw Abraham Zapruder's film of the assassination. "It changed my life," he says. He's been hooked ever since. "I don't know that (Lee Harvey) Oswald did anything that day, but I know the Warren Commission decided he killed President Kennedy," he says. "I know that the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late seventies also said he killed President Kennedy, but that he had a second shooter working with him. "So there are two official versions of history, and I don't know which one's right." He's hardly alone. Almost four decades later, after numerous books, movies, TV documentaries, independent investigative efforts, scattered "confessions" and two formal governmental investigations, including the Warren Commission in the 1960s, millions of Americans still ask: "Who killed JFK?" Mack believes that new information on the assassination still could surface. "There were people in Dealey Plaza with cameras whose pictures have never been seen. Maybe one of those pictures will turn up and you can see the face of a guy who can answer some of the questions raised through the years," he says. But, he adds, "I'm not even sure if the truth came out today that people would believe it." Conflicting medical evidence, the location of the fatal head wound and the so-called "single-bullet theory"_ the Warren Commission's proposal that the same bullet killed Kennedy and struck Texas Gov. John Connally - are among the most familiar areas of dispute. But Mack says acoustical evidence - sound recordings from that day in Dealey Plaza - gathered in the late 1970s by the House Assassinations Committee offers the greatest potential of resolving the conspiracy puzzle. In November 1994, when testifying before the Assassination Records Review Board, Mack stressed that the acoustics issue, "despite its difficulties," was far from dead. He praised review board members for their efforts in obtaining the release of secret, JFK-related information and documents, then told them: "I don't think (the information and documents) is going to tell us whether there was or was not a conspiracy to kill the president," he testified, "but the acoustics evidence can certainly do that." Nothing has happened to change his mind, Mack says. "Based on everything I know about this subject," he says, acoustics could provide a breakthrough. "Unless there's something totally new out there that no one knows about, the acoustics evidence is the only hard evidence that has the potential to answer "the" question: "How many shots were fired that day and where did they come from?" The acoustics came from a motorcycle officer's radio microphone, which clicked on a few minutes before the assassination and may have inadvertently allowed the sound of the shots to be recorded by police dispatchers. "Along with the motorcycle noise, you can hear some pops and clicks that may or may not be shots," Mack says. "The House Assassinations Committee found some acoustics experts to analyze the recordings ... and they concluded there were four shots. They could tell from the data that the third of the four came from the grassy knoll and the other three came from the window of the Texas School Book Depository. "Because that information was so convincing, and the people who did the work were so well-respected in their fields, the committee concluded there was a conspiracy because there were two shooters." Three years later, after a follow-up study, another group of scientists decided there were no shots on that recording. Thus, Mack says, the potential key to a great puzzle remains in limbo because of the conflicting interpretations. Marrs describes the dispute over the acoustics as part of the "continuing pattern of cover-up by obfuscation" of the assassination. But Mack acknowledges that the intricacies of the acoustics evidence are difficult for the public to grasp and that the Assassination Committee's findings are not definitive and remain in dispute. Of course, conspiracy theorists have said the same thing for years about the Warren Report, which concluded that Oswald, acting alone, killed Kennedy. " ... It seems to me, as one who's studied this long before the Sixth Floor Museum was ever dreamed of, that if there's some solid evidence out there, then reasonable efforts ought to be made to find the answer," Mack says. The annual JFK "November in Dallas" research conference, which is open to the public, begins Friday at the Dallas Radisson and includes a keynote address by Texas researcher Don Thomas, who has conducted his own detailed study of "echo correlation" in Dealey Plaza. Thomas' findings would tend to support Mack, who says: "I personally believe the original acoustics study was correct, that there are shots on there and the original scientists came to the right conclusion. "But I can't prove it either way." Marrs, meanwhile, has labeled the assassination "one of the world's greatest murder mysteries" and argues that there were two conspiracies. "One was the conspiracy to kill the president," he said during an appearance before the same Assassinations Records and Review Board that heard Mack in 1994. "Who did it, who committed it, how many gunmen, from which trajectory, how many shots, we don't know," he said. "But the second conspiracy was the conspiracy to cover up the first conspiracy, and this one was not quite so successful." Marrs insists that "officials high within the U.S. government committed acts designed not to find truthful answers but rather to hide the truth from the American public." Mack is less cynical, and is concerned that many Americans formed their concept of the assassination from Stone's "JFK." "What it's come down to now is, the Oliver Stone film has made it very easy for people to think they, too, can solve the crime of the century," he said. History, he says, will probably record that the movie was one of the best and one of the worst things to happen to the Kennedy assassination story. "The best thing about it is it made the subject legitimate again," he said. "Stone gave people a reason to reconsider." On the other hand, Mack says, Stone based his story on a flawed theory. "To read the Oliver Stone version of history, you get ... the opinion that nothing was investigated. Or what was investigated was not investigated properly. That's not true. They dug up a mountain of information, some of which is relevant." Recalling that government investigators have collected millions of pages of assassination-related documents over the years, Mack poses this question: "If there's just one guy, how come there's so many pages?" --- |
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