The trouble with speculating
January 1999

    I suppose that people have always been fond of speculating. Let’s face it, it’s fun to let our minds roam at will. When we speculate widely enough, we can get a certain rush as we feel that we are considering every possible outcome. We might not know the answer, but we are confident that it lies somewhere on our list. That might not be power, but it can seem to be the next thing to it.
    I sense that we are increasingly living in an age of speculation. For example, consider the Sunday morning shows on current events. It seems to me that they give an inordinate fraction of their time to speculating, under the guise of predicting the future. What will the president do? How will Congress respond? What does this morning’s distinguished panel of experts think about the prospects for X or Y? What will the new year bring politically or economically? The list goes on and on—you can fill in the blanks as well as I can.
    The more I listen to such shows, the more I become disturbed by this trend toward speculating. Why? Not because I have anything against speculating per se, because it can be a helpful component of critical thinking. Instead, I am worried that the amount of speculation has become so great that it has pushed aside the gathering of facts about the here and now that could help us better understand our present condition. This necessary prerequisite for speculating is being increasingly abandoned, I sometimes fear. In short, I believe that we should be thinking more and speculating less. But speculating is easier than thinking, and we can never be criticized for failing to guess the future correctly. So we take the easy and safe route.
    The same thing happens in JFK research. We speculate too quickly and too much, I feel. And in the extreme, it can extract a heavy toll, far more significant than is generally imagined.
    Here is a concrete example of what I mean, the thing that prompted me to write this little essay. The summer 1998 issue of Kennedy Assassination Chronicles (Volume 4, Issue 3) carried an article by Milicent Cranor entitled "The Third Wound." What third wound? I thought. Then as I read the Introduction to the article, all became clear. This article is highly speculative, and even acknowledges that fact explicitly. Its first sentence sets the tone: "This report is about a constellation of statements suggesting the possibility of an unacknowledged third wound in John Kennedy’s body, high in the back of the neck (or very low in the skull)—within the hairline." (First two emphases added) Note the double layer of hypotheticals: "…suggesting the possibility of…" Midway through the Introduction the writer goes on to state: "In view of this constant revision of objective data, it is reasonable to consider—without making conclusions—certain alternative claims." (Emphasis added)
    Why did I react so strongly to this seemingly innocent sentence? After all, don’t we JFK researchers regularly speculate like this? Of course we do. But this particular article contained so much of it and so little else, and seemed to be grasping so far toward something so elusive, that I was struck by how little chance there was for any real payoff by thinking along these lines when so many more fruitful areas remained insufficiently explored. For a flavor of the article as a whole, consider this sampling of quotes from it:

• "If a bullet entered near the hairline in the back [the possibility examined in this article], and proceed to exit from the throat in the front [another double speculation], the would mean that a different bullet created the head damage."

• "If this is what happened, this may explain why the neck was not dissected, or if it was, why they [the autopsy doctors] would be reluctant to discuss their findings." [Original emphasis; three more hypotheticals]

• "A neck dissection may [might] have also demonstrated Jerrol Custer’s amazing statement that he took an x-ray of Kennedy’s neck that revealed many metal fragments in the C3–4 area (third-fourth cervical vertebra)."

• "There may have been yet another notch in the perimeter, representing half of the entrance wound, but one would not conclude this from the autopsy report or from Commander Humes (sic) testimony before the Warren Commission."

• "This amorphous white image in the ‘back of the head’ photo appears just above the hairline in the back of the head. For good reasons, many researchers suspect the hair has been drawn in. It may be that the white image is also some sort of falsification, either in the photograph, or in the head itself. Since the hair in the rest of this area appears cleaned and combed, it is hard to believe the image represents dried brain left behind. It is tempting to suspect it is a tag of torn scalp pulled outward by an exiting bullet." [Emphases added; ten speculations in one short paragraph.]

• "Was there something to hide? Could the witnesses quoted in this report have seen different aspects of it? Could it be the proposed third wound? If a bullet entered the throat, where did it exit? If a bullet exited the throat, where did it enter? If the back wound was as shallow as reported, then the third wound should be considered."

    So, then, what’s the problem with this article? Very simply that in speculating to an extreme and deliberately avoiding drawing any conclusions from that effort, it exposed the downside of speculating—every minute spent worrying about things that cannot be settled is one fewer minute that can be spent settling other things that have solid evidence behind them and can be settled. The tragedy of contemporary JFK research (in my view, at least) is that speculation has so captured the field that researchers have taken their eyes off several important things that can be settled, and that can in so doing can place the assassination in an entirely different light. That is the trouble with speculating.
    What are those important things that can be settled? For starters, they include JFK’s forward and backward movements immediately after the head shot, which together with ballistics show that he was hit in the head only once, and that from the rear. They also include the two sets of neutron-activation analyses of bullets and fragments recovered from the scene and from the men’s bodies, which when combined then the physics and the ballistics show that that that bullet from the rear came from Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle. The chemical analysis also shows that all the fragments can be explained just as well, if not better, by two bullets from the same rifle rather than by additional bullets or additional rifles, and thus show that there is no explicit ballistic evidence for more than two bullets, both from one rifle. All considerations of additional bullets, additional shots, or additional shooters are strictly speculative and should be treated as such. This is the kind of careful thinking about the strong available evidence that gets lost in the incessant rush to speculate about far-weaker evidence such as that for a third wound. What a tragedy!