Who (or What) Killed JFK?

Prof. Bauerlein and Gerald Posner and everybody else who believes that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and/or actually assassinated John F. Kennedy should probably meet to have coffee and discuss this book.* In a phonebooth.*Consider the source: Encounter Books. Visit the website.

Or, Luther, we could talk about what MB actually said…The point is that the left was eager to read sweeping cultural and symbolic significance into the assassination as long as it was politically convenient. When it became inconvenient, not so much. That seems like a relevant anecdote to bring up at this point, when there’s been much recent handwringing over goofballs at Tea Parties (who seem to have produced little or no actual violence), and exaggerated attempts not to impose some broader meaning on the Fort Hood shooting. (And the latter is probably fine on the merits, as long as it’s just caution about incendiary speculation – but that contrasts with the apocalyptic discussions of the “violent” and “paranoid” right-wingers who have been taken to signify the end of democracy or some such poppycock.

To read this post as an attempt to defend conservatism is bizarre.

Agreed that the OP is not a “defense of conservatism.” But it IS an attack on liberals, albeit an indirect one. The book (from Prof. Bauerlein’s description of it and from what I can pick up on the Internet) says, essentially, that liberals rushed to judgment about who and what was behind the assassination of JFK. The left is given to attributing more to “larger forces” (e.g., a lot of crime to poverty), so it jumped in with an instant opinion that the assassination was due to “a climate of violence” surrounding the civil rights struggle. The right is given more to favoring judgments and causes involving individuals (e.g., Oswald as a bitter, bad little man). If you believe that Oswald, acting alone, was the assassin, then what Piereson says and Prof. Bauerlein affirms about the left’s reaction to the assassination is true.On the other hand, if Oswald wasn’t a lone wolf assassin, then it’s still very much up in the air whether the left was wrong. The conspiracy and anti-conspiracy literature on the JFK assassination could fill a small library (and I’ve read almost all of it). Granted, it’s not 100 percent certain whether there was a conspiracy (I’d say the odds are about 90 percent in favor of one) or, if there was one, whether it involved people on the right disgruntled over the Bay of Pigs, the civil rights movement, Kennedy’s starting to waffle on Vietnam, Communist Party agents, or just plain gangsters angry about RFK as attorney general or JFK’s liason with Judith Exner Campbell, or what. But there is simply not enough, or good enough the-dust-has-settled evidence to pin the assassination on Oswald alone. Which means it’s still to be determined whether the lefties who decried a “climate of violence” were really wrong.Whatever, the official/Posner explanation of the assassination and its immediate followup (Jack Ruby) has never passed, and likely never will pass “the smell test.” That is, it smells an awful lot like bulls**t.

Those 20somethings are almost 50 years removed from the JFK assassination. Was charliemarlow overheard, in the burger joint ca. 1960, saying something about William McKinley’s assassination 60 years before, to the effect that, “Yeah, he was shot by some Yugoslavian guy who was an antichrist, or something”? (Let us not be too self-satisfied here.)

Many of Encounter’s books are conservative, and some aren’t. I suggest that people read the first chapter of Piereson’s book to decide its merits. The point is not to “promote” Piereson’s “views,” but to comment upon a very good book. Questions, though: why the qualifier “unbelievably”? And do you really want to label Encounter authors “cronies”? And do you know that Encounter existed for years before Roger Kimball came in?

I can’t believe the blithe dismissal of a point of view merely because of its position on the political “spectrum.” Look, I have my belief (not knowledge, just belief) about the Kennedy assassination; so have other people; there’s plenty to disagree about, and that’s fine. However, whether a person’s politics are left, right, middle, near the fringes or somewhere near center should have nothing to do with whether they have something to say. And that means not only (a) it’s not really bright to dismiss someone’s arguments without considering pros because we don’t agree with their politics but also (b) it’s not really bright to accept someone’s arguments without considering cons because we do agree with their politics.Taking the Kennedy assassination as an example, an incredible about of time and space and energy have been expended futilely because of simple ignorance of the workings of a bolt-action rifle. Briefly, some folks are so thoroughly anti-gun that they refuse (I think that word is carefully chosen) to understand how one works, at the most fundamental level. That is, in print, and I mean serious print, people have stated that you know who could not have fired three such shots because there wasn’t time to do so. This is demonstrably not true, for the simple reason that three shots require only two intervals between shots: Bang1 (operate bolt, unlocking the chamber, cocking the piece, ejecting spent casing, loading fresh cartridge, locking the chamber) Bang2 (operate bolt again ditto) Bang3.I can understand not liking guns, of course. But introductory analytic geometry teaches the concept of an interval, endpoints, and so on. When ideology determines whether evidence is accepted as valid, and when it causes one to swallow obvious nonsense, ideology becomes the enemy of truth. It’s hard enough understanding reality without blinkering ourselves with politics, left, right, or sideways.And regardless of our political convictions, name-calling isn’t very productive or useful. Some people need to spend more time talking with people they disagree with. Otherwise, we end up like Pauline Kael: “No one I know voted for Nixon.” Hmm.

dank,I understand and appreciate your point. I’ve seen and heard Piereson, Kimball and Kissel in person; I have had an exchange with Kimball. Those who find in him a kindred spirit would do well to read your comments.

Bizarre to me how many supposedly educated people want to pontificate endlessly about this case, drawing pictures and all the rest of it, without ever visiting. I went there and no question, I could have made that shot. Most people could have, no question about it. Dead simple. The same people discuss the martyred JFK as if he was some sort of saint, and this article is no exception. But here’s some facts on this “man of peace”. 1. JFK started the Vietnam war. 2. JFK provoked the Cuban missile crisis by planting missiles in Turkey first. 3. JFK turned the CIA into an assassination agency that reported personally to him. This was memorialized by LBJ after taking office as, “We’re running a goddam Murder, Inc!”

Let us not step into the (pardon the expression) quagmire of the particulars of the JFK assassination. Unless, that is, we want to help Prof. Bauerlein set a “Brainstorm” record for number of comments on a single post. There’s the improbable accuracy of the bolt-action rifle shots (with, remember, re-aiming each time), the crappy Mannlicher-Carcano rifle itself, firing through a sight-blocking tree, the wonderful “magic bullet” (the Posneresque explanations for which are truly Harry-Potter-quality inventive), the grassy knoll, the shot that hit the curb, the eye- and ear-witness accounts, the FBI’s flipping frames of the Zapruder film, the obviously faked Oswald backyard photograph, the whole Jack Ruby episode (including Mr. Ruby’s own mysterious demise), and on and on and on. There are arguments for and against each one of these things and more. My point in #1 and #7 is simply that it’s not, all things considered, an established “fact” that a “little Communist” was JFK’s assassin. Given that, it’s unreasonable at best, go off on the left for rushing to judgment about an anti-Castro, anti-Civil-Rights, or simply anti-Kennedy “climate of violence” being at bottom responsible for the murder. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. Almost seven years ago, by the way, a bunch of crackpot leftists were shouting, against a whole bunch of official explanations, that there was a conspiracy afoot to convince the American public that Iraq had to be immediately invaded because it had weapons of mass destruction. And guess what? There WAS such a conspiracy. (Please, no excuses about a good-faith misinterpretation of intelligence. If I were a Bush/Cheney fan, I’d rather think that my Administration had been diabolically clever rather than unbelievably stupid. But we don’t want to go there, either, do we.

Let’s do a thought experiment.Suppose everything about the Kennedy assassination was the same, except that instead of Oswald being a Marxist, he was a right-winger. Instead of having joined the Young Peoples Socialist League at 16, he had joined the Young Republicans. Instead of posing with his guns, holding copies The Worker and The Militant (newspapers of the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party, respectively), he had posed with copies of Human Events and National Review. Instead of trying to assassinate the right-wing General Walker, he had tried to assassinate Martin Luther King.Is anyone reading this so naive as to think that these facts about Oswald’s politics would not have provided, and would still provide, justification for liberals to lecture us about right-wing “hate politics”, etc etc? Instead, the fact that Oswald was a Leftist has been conveniently forgotten. Believe me, if he had been any sort of a conservative, it would have been, and would remain, in the foreground of facts we know about him. (And if the real Oswald, the Marxist Oswald, had lived and somehow escaped punishment through a technicality, he would probably be made a “distinguished professor of education” like Bill Ayers.)

And by the way, why are “Cold War liberal” and “Civil Rights liberal” mutually exlusive? Wasn’t LBJ aggressively both (Vietnam escalation and the Voting Rights Act)?

The energy generated in attempting to “prove” that Lee Harvey Oswald was anything other than the extreme leftist he was is one of the marvels of our age. Miserably unhappy with himself and deeply alienated from everything American Oswald went so far as to immigrate to the Marxist-Leninist “utopia” of the Soviet Union to find relief. Unhappy there this deluded fanatic returned to the culture that he was at least familiar with where he involved himself in radical leftist causes. Had Oswald not decided to assassinate an obviously anti-communist president and waited a few more years he would have found a home in the radical protest movements of the 1960′s. This former U. S. Marine would been a Veteran Against the War and a natural for one of the Marxist sects that developed around SDS. The theology that has been created to disassociate the JFK assassination from its true origins would not exist and hundreds of deluded writers would have been spared participation in one of the most elaborate disinformation campaigns in American history. Think of it.

1. The photograph of Oswald is an obvious fake. The guy looks like a bobblehead doll, the lighting doesn’t match, etc., etc., etc. This isn’t just my lay opinion; the majority of forensic photography analysts had said so. As to why someone would “fake a photo which just confirms evidence that no one disputes,” that’s a problem for doug1943.2. And that “evidence that no one disputes” is indeed highly disputed. Oswald might well have been an alienated leftist who bought weapons, and he might well also have been the “patsy” that he described himself to be. Again, how convenient that the Dallas Police Department (or individuals within it) allowed Jack Ruby to pre-empt a trial in which all of the “evidence that no one disputes” would have been disputed. And how convenient that Ruby himself died. 3. As I said at the outset, my point is not that JFK was definitely assassinated by rightwing conspirators, but that, taken as a whole, the vast body of literature on the JFK assassination (including Government literature and reports) leads a reasonable observer to conclude that it is NOT a given that Oswald, acting alone or even at all, murdered JFK. Therefore, Prof. Bauerlein and Mr. Piereson are on thin ice, to say the least, in condemning the liberal left, for its interpretations of what, at bottom, caused the assassination.4. Re both #25 and 26: The if’s are endless. If Oswald had been a rightwinger, if Oswald had found a home in the radical protest movements of the later 1960s, if Oswald had been a Scientologist, if Oswald had been a CIA double or triple or quadruple agent, etc., etc. If Oswald’s grandother had had cojones, she’d have been his grandfather.

Kennedy started issuing currency outside of the Federal Reserve system. Six months later he was dead. Suggesting it has little to do with civil rights and everything to do with the bankers defending their territory.Redux: “US Federal Reserve” is a privately owned collective of bankers and make profit through issuing US currency. They were invented the same year as the IRS, which collects worker money to pay interest payment to the Federal Reserve bankers. Kennedy interrupted this system and said as much, and begin issuing currency outside of the Federal Reserve system. Six months later Kennedy was killed in a most public and humiliating manner followed up by magic story, lone gunman, who was immediately silenced.Fast Forward to 9/11/2001. Seen any magic stories there? Buildings blown up with high explosive, blow upward and outward?For God’s sake, if you believe in a God, stop being a dumbed down victim and attributing Kennedy’s assassination to “civil rights.”