The Kennedy Assassination And The Persistence Of Conspiracy Theories -- Part V

From reading the comments on this series, it appears that several people are eagerly awaiting my pronouncement of which theory of the Kennedy assassination I think is correct. Unfortunately for those commenters, as I said back in Part I, “I don’t have any clear belief as to whether the official version of the events is correct or whether there was a conspiracy.” That remains the case. I have not intended this series as the way to advocate for my own preferred theory, although perhaps inevitably it would be perceived that way. Instead I have intended this series to use the Kennedy assassination as a vehicle to explore the question of how we know what we think we know.

The Kennedy assassination provides an excellent illustration of the proposition that, in considering the truth of a hypothesis, the accumulation of facts consistent with the hypothesis is not nearly as important as those facts, even if few in number, that are at least arguably inconsistent with the hypothesis. Advocates of a hypothesis are most effective if they spend their time dealing with and explaining the facts that are potentially inconsistent. These arguably inconsistent facts are what I have called in this series the “anomalies.”

This focus on such anomalies now comes up in the context of new congressional hearings that opened today, in light of a new and supposedly final release of tens of thousands of previously-classified government documents relating to the assassination. Unfortunately, for reasons discussed in these posts, those documents are unlikely to shed much if any light on the important anomalies in this case. More information on those things, if it can still be found at all, is likely lurking in places outside of anything previously collected by the government and designated as relating to the Kennedy assassination.

So for today, I will discuss the last two “anomalies” identified in Part II of this series. Those are (1) the trajectory of the fatal bullet, and (2) Jack Ruby.

The trajectory of the fatal bullet

You would think that this would be the easiest of the anomalies to put to bed; but remarkably, it has been the hardest. The persistent controversy over the source of the fatal bullet is a lesson in the mistake of having the government try to establish an official narrative that is not to be questioned by skeptics. That approach only adds fuel to the conspiracy fire.

I should first mention this: proof of existence of a second shooter in front of Kennedy’s limousine would be definitive in establishing a conspiracy; but even if there was only one shooter, and that shooter was on the 6th floor of the Texas Book Depository, that does not definitively establish that there was no conspiracy. Conspiracy theories not involving a second shooter include: (1) The CIA (or other entity) recruited Oswald to be the assassin, and (2) A professional assassin at the behest of the CIA (or other entity) shot Kennedy from the 6th floor, while Oswald was in the building lunch room when the shots were fired. Theory number (2) gets some support from accounts of eyewitnesses who placed Oswald in the building’s second-floor lunch room at or about the time of the shots. (The Warren Commission says that the timing of these observations is not definitive.)

But even short of getting to those two theories, the second shooter theory persists. To their credit, official narrative supporters have not neglected this anomaly. However, the way the government proceeded with the investigation allowed the skepticism to persist, and at this point probably precludes the possibility of new information coming out today to silence the skeptics.

The Texas Book Depository 6th floor sniper’s nest was above and behind Kennedy’s location at the time of the shots. Among facts cited by skeptics are: (a) eyewitness accounts from two doctors at the hospital where Kennedy was taken, and from a Secret Service agent who accompanied Kennedy, that the fatal shot had hit Kennedy from the front and that pieces of his brains were found on the trunk of his limousine, thus in back of him; (b) there was not enough time for Oswald to get off three shots from the particular rifle that he had.

To (a), the official narrators’ biggest response is the Autopsy Report. It now can be easily found online; here is a link. The conclusion:

It is our opinion that the deceased died of two perforating gunshot wounds. . . . The projectiles were fired from a point behind and somewhat above the level of the deceased.

That sounds pretty good. Could there even be a response? Commenter max in the thread following Part IV of this series gives the response of the second-shooter conspiracy theorists. It is as good a short version of that narrative as I have seen, so I will quote it:

Former Secret Service agent Clint Hill recently passed away. He was the Secret Service agent who jumped on the back of the JFK limousine after Kennedy had been shot in Dallas in November 1963. . . . As the limo then proceeded to Parkland Hospital, Hill covered JFK’s body with his own body in an attempt to protect him from any more shots. In the process, Hill was in a position to view the back of the president’s head all the way to Parkland. . . . Here is what Hill told the Warren Commission about the wound in the back of President Kennedy’s head: “The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car. His brain was exposed. . . . There was so much blood you could not tell if there had been any other wound or not, except for the one large gaping wound in the right rear portion of the head.”

Hill’s testimony about the massive wound in the back of JFK’s head matched what the treating physicians at Parkland stated. For example, Dr. Robert McClelland stated, “As I took the position at the head of the table that I have already described to help out with the tracheotomy, I was in such a position that I could very closely examine the head wound, and I noted that the right posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted. It had been shattered, apparently, by the force of the shot so that … you could actually look down into the skull cavity itself and see that probably a third or so, at least, of the brain tissue, posterior cerebral tissue and some of the cerebellar tissue had been blasted out.”

Note that if this eyewitness testimony is true, it follows that the Kennedy autopsy was not merely erroneous, but fraudulent. Also that the autopsy photographs (easily to be found on the internet, but I won’t link to them) were equally fraudulent. If that seems implausible, consider that the Dallas authorities, who had jurisdiction, intended to do the autopsy on the body, but the body was taken by force from them by the Secret Service and immediately flown to Washington, where the autopsy was performed that night at the Bethesda Naval Hospital by doctors employed by the U.S. military. As commenter max notes, this means that a viable second-shooter conspiracy theory must acknowledge some involvement of the military, not just the CIA and/or FBI. After the autopsy, the body was promptly buried, and has never been exhumed for further examination.

The response to the Hill and McClelland testimony from the Warren Commission and its supporters is that these witness are simply mistaken; eyewitness testimony can be unreliable, and particularly so in situations of shock and trauma. But then, these were not people who just got a quick glimpse, and they were not flaky witnesses. McClelland went on to a long and distinguished career as a surgeon and faculty member at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

And then there is skeptics’ point (b), that there was not enough time for a shooter to get off the three shots fired at Kennedy using the rifle that Oswald had purchased. Commenters who support the official narrative send me this link to a video made by author Gerald Posner together with CBS News some time in the 90s (I can’t find an exact date). Posner is a supporter of the Warren Commission narrative, and in 1993 published the book “Case Closed” setting forth his conclusions. The Posner/CBS video shows what appears to be a careful re-enactment of the timing of the shootings, using the same make and model rifle. The video appears to show that the task of getting the three shots off could be done, although with no time to spare or margin for error. The CBS News guy who presents the video is none other than Dan Rather. Really? This is the same guy who in September 2004 was caught red-handed presenting a fraudulent news story about George W. Bush allegedly avoiding the draft, in a blatant effort to affect the 2004 election. Let’s say that that is a serious negative to the credibility of the video.

More importantly, the video, even if reliable, goes only part way to foreclosing various alternatives to the “Oswald acted alone” theory. The fact that someone in the 6th floor of the Texas Book Depository could have fired all the shots does not necessarily mean that that is what occurred, and it does not refute the eyewitness testimony about Kennedy getting hit by a shot from in front of him. Nor does the video preclude the theory that there was an additional assassin in the Texas Book Depository itself.

Jack Ruby

And finally, we have the most perplexing anomaly of them all — Jack Ruby. Just two days after the assassination, on November 24, as Oswald was getting transferred from one jail to another, Ruby stepped out of a crowd of (mostly) reporters at the Dallas police station and shot Oswald dead at point-blank range. The event was broadcast live on national television.

There has never been a satisfactory explanation of Ruby’s motive for the shooting. That lack is probably the single biggest reason for the persistence and acceptance of conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination. The circumstances of the Oswald killing reek of a hit intended to take out Oswald before he could talk and spill the beans on his co-conspirators.

Ruby is often referred to as a “nightclub owner,” but the nightclub would be more accurately described as a strip joint. Wikipedia’s biography of Ruby cites Warren Commission theory supporter Gerald Posner for the proposition that Ruby’s business was unsuccessful and he was heavily in debt. OK, but in debt to whom? An obvious hypothesis would be “the Mob.” The same Wikipedia article says there is no “definitive proof” of that. That’s a long way from saying that it’s been ruled out. What efforts have been made to find out?

For various reasons — perhaps legitimate ones, but none of them satisfactory — there was never an adequate examination of the facts surrounding Ruby, and of how he came to be in the Dallas police station with a loaded gun in his pocket just as Oswald was being escorted down the hall. After the shooting, Ruby was immediately arrested, and promptly charged by state prosecutors with capital murder. Ruby’s lawyers sought to limit how much he would talk in advance of the trial (which would be the norm). He did make a confession while held in jail, in which he gave as his motives the desire to “redeem” Dallas and to save Jackie Kennedy from the “discomfiture” of having to return to Dallas for a trial. It is not hard to understand why that explanation has never satisfied anybody.

A journalist named Seth Kantor in 1978 published a biography of Ruby titled “Who Was Jack Ruby?”, which I have read. Kantor had been a reporter for a Fort Worth newspaper in 1963, in which capacity he had been traveling with the Kennedy motorcade through Dallas on November 22, had gone to the Parkland hospital in Dallas with the motorcade and the wounded Kennedy, and had also been personally present at the shooting of Oswald in the police station on November 24. Kantor also knew Ruby personally. Kantor paints a picture of Ruby as very suspiciously hanging around the events relating to the assassination, at times when there would be no reason for him to do so unless he was up to something. For example, Kantor says that he saw Ruby, and had a brief conversation with him, at around 1:30 PM on the day of the Kennedy shooting, at the Parkland hospital, where Kennedy had been taken. Kantor spent several years in the 70s researching his biography of Ruby, and advocates that Ruby had much more extensive “mob” contacts than the Warren Commission acknowledges.

Ruby’s trial for murder began on February 10, 1964 — only 11 weeks after the shooting, a remarkably short time. Ruby’s defense at trial was insanity by reason that he had had a sudden attack of “psychomotor epilepsy” that had caused him to kill Oswald. That defense was about as absurd as Ruby’s description of his motive. On March 14 the jury returned a verdict of the death penalty. From that time forward, Ruby was on death row while his appeals proceeded, until October 1966, when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed his conviction on the grounds that the jailhouse confession was wrongly admitted into evidence and that the venue should have been moved outside Dallas. The prosecutors then planned to re-try him, but he died of cancer in prison before the re-trial could occur in 1967. Since re-trial was always in the cards until the end of Ruby’s life, access to him for interviews was always extremely limited. All the way to the time of his death, there was never the kind of detailed examination of him and the circumstances surrounding him that one would expect, given the extremely suspicious circumstances in which he was involved.

On June 7, 1964, Ruby was interviewed by the Warren Commission. Here is the transcript. In a strange decision, the Commission staff members assigned to the Ruby aspect of the case were not present, and the examination was conducted by none other than Chief Justice Earl Warren himself. It would be fair to say that the examination is superficial and brief. (In some places I have seen the words “shockingly inept.”). Ruby repeats his statement about his motive to save Jackie Kennedy from the trauma of a trial of Oswald. The transcript is only about 30 pages. If you look at the transcript, you will see that the first several pages are about Ruby requesting a lie-detector test. That was then administered in August 1964, again by Warren. The transcript of that one is even more superficial and brief. To be fair, Ruby denies being involved in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy. However, there are few questions, almost all conclusory and with answers that do not go beyond “yes” or “no.”

And then there is the story of Dorothy Kilgallen. For a summary, here is a 2017 book review by Donald Wilkes of a biography of Kilgallen by Mark Shaw titled “The Reporter Who Knew Too Much.” Kilgallen was a well-known criminal investigative reporter (as well as a regular panelist on the “What’s My Line?” TV show). In the early 1960s, she was perhaps best known for having been in 1959 the first to report on the CIA working with “the Mob” in Cuba in efforts to overthrow or assassinate Castro. In early 1964 she attended the Ruby trial, and was able to get two short (approximately 10 minutes each) interviews with Ruby during breaks in the trial, the only reporter to do that. She was an early and very public skeptic of the Warren Commission Report. In 1965 she had told friends that she was working on a book about the assassination, and she was known to carry around with her a folder containing materials she had gathered.

In November 1965, aged 52, Kilgallen was found dead in her Manhattan townhouse, under suspicious circumstances. She was in bed in a room where she did not sleep, wearing clothes she did not sleep in, and having taken an overdose of a powerful barbiturate called Tuinal for which she did not have a prescription. She was not known as an abuser of prescription drugs, nor had she been suicidal. According to Shaw’s book, her friends thought that her death had occurred elsewhere and the scene had been staged. Her file of materials on Ruby and the Kennedy assassination disappeared, and was never found. Make of this all what you will.

Conclusion

I hope you can see why what I would like is more detailed answers to the anomalies that I have identified. The official narrative of the assassination may actually be right, but its acceptance has been fatally undermined by failure sufficiently to address obvious questions that intelligent minds would want the answer to.

New President Johnson appointed the Warren Commission in late 1963 with a clear mission to put the conspiracy theories about the assassination to bed. It turns out that that was exactly the wrong approach. At this point it may well not be possible to get fully satisfactory answers to questions like Oswald’s history, George de Mohrenschildt, the “second shooter”, or Jack Ruby. Documents are gone; people have died. We may just have to live with ambiguity. But we certainly have no particular reason to trust the official government narrative.