I don’t remember where I was at the time. It was about 18 months before I was born, so depending on your belief in reincarnation…
I’m about 70-30 on the “Oswald acted alone” front. (I used to be about 60-40, but as I get older, I get more skeptical of conspiracy theories.)
My main reason for leaning that way is that I just can’t believe anybody would be able to keep a conspiracy the size of the alleged JFK one secret for 50 years.
“But altered evidence! Faked documents!” Well, maybe. But once you start letting all that stuff in, you’re really going down the rabbit hole to the point where truth and fiction are completely inseparable and indistinguishable. That way lies madness. Maybe I’m naive, maybe I just want to bury my head in the sand, but I’d rather believe Oswald acted alone than believe in a giant national conspiracy led by The Cigarette Smoking Man (or someone like him). “Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.”
I wish I could recommend a good JFK book to you, but I’m not that well read in the literature. Heck, I haven’t even been to Dallas and toured the Sixth Floor Museum, though that is on the agenda for sometime soon.
Bill James
On the other hand, James also recommends Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK
(And I owe you guys a longer discussion of Popular Crime.)
Here are two of my favorite related videos. CBS News hires sharpshooters and attempts to recreate the shooting. (Bonus: the dulcet tones of Dan Rather, for those of you who have been missing the sound of his voice.)
And I’ve referenced this before, but I don’t think I’ve ever embedded it, and the link I did use is broken, so: Penn and Teller explain why JFK’s head moved the way it did, using a honeydew melon, fiberglass tape, a Carcano rifle, and a pink pillbox hat.
It can’t be said enough that Kennedy was killed by a hardcore Communist defector to the Soviet Union, especially given all the “Dallas City of Hate” blather. Dallas didn’t make Oswald an ardent communist…
“I just can’t believe anybody would be able to keep a conspiracy the size of the alleged JFK one secret”
Assuming that would require a rather novel definition of the word “secret”, I think. 🙂
If I wanted to keep such a conspiracy — well, let’s use the word “protected”, so as not to do _too_ much harm to the utility of the language, shall we? — anyway, if I wanted to protect such a conspiracy, I’d take a clue from the Air Force, which has spent 60-odd years now, passively encouraging all sorts of crazy notions about visitors and artifacts from outer space being stored and/or experimented upon and/or used by and/or with and/or against American military hardware, out in the Nevada desert, so as to keep all the people who might otherwise get wind of their _real_ secret projects too distracted by the hunt for space aliens that don’t exist.
In the case of the Kennedy assassination? That’d probably look like, oh, a few thousand false conspiracy theories, each one just plausible enough to snare some meaningful fraction of the credulous would-be believers, but all mutually-contradictory, so as to utterly discredit the notion of conspiracy in the minds of anyone inclined to look at the evidence without prejudice.
Which looks…well, kinda like the situation we have now.
(Just for the record, I am not actually a subscriber to any given JFK conspiracy theory, and indeed most of the popular ones are obviously nuts. There is no credible evidence of the participation of any shooters other than Oswald. I’m a lot more open-minded, though, about the notion that other parties may have been pulling strings behind the scenes. And, of course, it’s also possible that the Warren Report was completely correct. But the fact remains, that if someone _did_ want to hide a real conspiracy for an extended period, the best way to do it would be to bury it in a mountain of imaginary conspiracies. “With this much horseshit lying around, there’s got to be a pony here _somewhere_.” 🙂 )
Sorry WCD, the evidence says otherwise…
http://armedlaughing.wordpress.com/2013/11/22/jfk-50-years-later/
At a minimum, many accessories after the fact, covering their own asses.
But there’s so much more.
And Posner is a WC syncophant/apologist. Mortal Error says don’t believe the WC – except the parts we need to prove out case!
Thanks for keeping the debate alive.
gfa