I'm hoping I'll live long enough to read a well-researched, scholarly assessment of the events surrounding the Kennedy assassination. Such a book will be written by an academic historian; the type of historian they interview on C-Span's "Booknotes" program. (If you don't watch "Booknotes," I recommend it highly -- it's on every Sunday at 8:00 eastern time.) But it'll probably be at least another 20, 30, or 40 years before it comes out.
Don't confuse me with the facts!
The problem with the existing literature, and with the investigations (Congressional and otherwise) that have taken place during the past 35 years, is that the investigators and authors always assume their conclusion -- either that there was a sinister conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy or that there wasn't. You never read anything by a former conspiracy buff who says, "I spent five years combing the evidence, and I've changed my mind -- Oswald did act alone!" And you never see a Warren Commission apologist say, "I've changed my mind -- the Commission was all wet; there was a huge conspiracy after all!" Everyone's mind is made up -- and evidence likely to change that mind gets ignored.
Max Holland's article in the December 7 issue of The Nation is a good example of what I'm talking about. Although Holland provides a pretty good survey of recent JFK assassination literature, his mind is clearly made up: there was no conspiracy. Holland doesn't seem to be much of a Kennedy fan or Kennedy basher -- but he's definitely a conspiracy basher. This shows up in how he characterizes various people who put forth one point of view or another. Oliver Stone, for instance, is "one of the worst purveyors of the kind of paranoid nonsense eschewed by [JFK himself]...." On the other hand, Dale Myers, author of a book that supports the Oswald-acted-alone theory (by examining the circumstances surrounding his arrest by an alert Dallas policeman, whom Oswald proceeded to shoot), is hailed as the author of "surely a definitive" account of the events in question. Well, maybe it's definitive -- but we'll be the judge of that.
I'm not a conspiracy buff, by any means -- I always take things at face value until presented with reason to do otherwise -- but Stone's popular but much-reviled film posed a series of questions and scenarios that none of the conspiracy-skeptics bothered to answer directly. After the film came out, for instance, former president Ford (who was a member of the Warren Commission) made public pronouncements blasting Stone -- but he made no attempt to rebut Stone's version of the events themselves. That's what keeps the conspiracy enthusiasts going -- the other side always responds with personal attacks in lieu of rebuttals.
For his part, Stone didn't exactly help his cause by portraying New Orleans prosecutor James Garrison as a hero (by more reasonable accounts, he was a nut). The conspiracy scenarios he portrayed in the film, involving Cuba, organized crime, and the CIA, weren't terribly convincing -- but they served to show that even if Oswald did act alone, it's certainly plausible for a reasonable individual to think that he might not have.
The conspiracy buffs like to think that if we could get enough CIA files declassified, this would tell all. What they're forgetting, though, is that whatever may or may not have been filed away at the CIA has probably already long-since been housecleaned of all incriminating evidence. That's what happened at the FBI after J. Edgar Hoover died -- so why should the CIA be any different? Of course, if the files have been cleaned out, all that does is provide more fodder for speculation and fantasy.
Follow the bouncing bullet?
I don't put much stock in the overcooked conspiracy theories. But I still don't get how a single bullet, fired from above, could have done all the damage the official explanation claims it did. When you look at Abraham Zapruder's famous film of the assassination, it's obvious that Kennedy's head snaps back and to the left, and that -- this is where it gets gory, so no one likes to talk about it -- well, his brain gets blown out (most of it was found to be missing at the autopsy). The, er, debris flies toward the back-left corner of the limousine. How, I ask you, could that happen if he'd been shot from above? Oliver Stone may be a nut, but that doesn't change the laws of physics.
Be that as it may, it's entirely possible that there wasn't any conspiracy. Maybe the bullet bounced. But as long as everyone who tries to explain the Kennedy assassination is an advocate for one explanation or another, what we get is no explanation. That's why it's going to take some time before we really get an authoritative account of the whole thing. When it arrives, it'll be written by a historian who probably wasn't even born in 1963. And it'll be written long after the people who have vested interests in one particular outcome of inquiry are dead.
The Assassination Records Review Board's final report is the best source of objective information out there. The Review Board was authorized by Congress in 1992, at the request of President Clinton. Their mandate wasn't to draw any conclusions about what actually happened or didn't happen, but simply to uncover and make public as much documentation as possible. The report itself states as follows:
The Review Board is certainly aware that there are a great many unresolved issues relating to the assassination of President Kennedy that will be addressed in the years to come. The massive public collection of documents that awaits the researchers will undoubtedly shed light not only on the assassination, but on its broader context as an episode of the Cold War. The community of professional historians, who initially exhibited comparatively slight interest in the Board's work, has begun paying attention with the new accessibility of records that reflect the Cold War context in which the assassination was enmeshed. Ultimately, it will be years before the JFK Collection at NARA can be judged properly. The test will be in the scholarship that is generated by historians and other researchers who study the extensive documentation of the event and its aftermath.
What that's saying is that it's historians -- not polemicists (Holland), apologists (Ford), or conspiracy buffs (Stone) -- who will eventually get the Kennedy assassination sorted out. Some day, we'll get a fat book that'll outline all of the arguments for and against each conspiracy theory. The author will be someone who didn't live through the Kennedy years, didn't like or dislike Kennedy as a politician and statesman, and has no great interest in seeing any particular explanation proven correct. The book will say, "This is what we know; this is what we think we know; this is what might have happened; this is what could conceivably have happened, although there's no evidence to suggest that it did; and this is what did not happen."
History sometimes takes a long time to become clear. For example, we know a lot more about Beethoven now -- 171 years after his death -- than was known at the time of his death, or even 50 years later. That's because in the years immediately following an event, the people who were around at the time feel they have a stake in a particular untruthful, biased version of reality. To take the Beethoven example further, his first biographer, Anton Schindler (a close friend), wrote a very inaccurate book that contained a very selective, rose-colored portrayal of its subject. Medical records and other historical documents were tampered with or destroyed, because they would otherwise have made Beethoven look bad. It's only in the 20th century, and in its latter years, in fact, that we've achieved a more balanced picture.
With JFK, we're not going to get an unbiased, no-spin, let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may historical document until the people who have a vested interest in one outcome or another are gone. I'm hoping I last long enough to read it.
Copyright © 1998 John J. Kafalas