Overview
Perhaps the most astounding fact about the JFK
assassination is that it is still so much a matter of controversy. It just won't
go away. After nearly 40 years, multiple annual meetings are still being held in
Dallas, books are still being published, and newsgroups are still going strong.
Why all the continuing interest? Why doesn't the JFK
assassination go away? There are several possible answers. Maybe the evidence
isn't definitive one way or the other. Maybe the hard-core group of
conspiracists just won't accept it the strength of the evidence. Maybe outspoken
people want to continue making money from it. Maybe it is because the two major
governmental investigations came to opposite conclusions—the first concluded
that it was the work of a lone assassin and the second proclaimed that they had
found 95% probability of conspiracy. Maybe it's just too hard to accept that one
mousey misfit did such a monstrous deed. And lastly, maybe there are just too
many coincidences for most people to swallow.
In fact, it's all of these things. The evidence falls just
short of being definitive that Lee Harvey Oswald shot the president—it is 99%,
or 99.9%, or whatever number very close to 100% you choose, but it cannot prove
conclusively that he did it. That opens the door for all kinds of speculation by
people who are not used to considering the totality of the evidence. There is
indeed a hard-core group of conspiracists who refuse to face the obvious facts
that they have nothing definitive to show for 40 years of plugging. They make a
lot of noise, and so do the minority among them who are in it for the money. The
squeaky wheel is getting the attention here. As for the two governmental
investigations, what is the average person supposed to think when they reach
opposite conclusions? Most of the public should not be expected to delve into
the details and find, much less accept, that the second investigation found
major new evidence for conspiracy at the eleventh hour and embraced it even
though it was completely wrong. As for the mousey misfit doing all this, it is
completely understandable why many would consider the scales of justice so
unbalanced, as William Manchester put it, even though that is exactly what the
evidence says happened. And as for the series of coincidences, it is true that
it is almost beyond belief that the president should just happen to ride by the
window where a former defector and malcontent worked, that that person should
bring his rifle into work that day without attracting undue attention, that he
should shoot out the window and kill the president in a moving vehicle, and that
he should just happened to be snuffed out two days later by another malcontent.
This is the stuff of fiction, not reality, and yet that is again exactly what the
evidence says happened. No wonder the JFK assassination won't go away!
In the face of all this weirdness, the serious student of the
assassination is called on to put aside all preconceptions and face the evidence
more squarely and probably more dispassionately and with more wisdom and
judgment than ever before in his life. Nothing less is good enough. Among other things, it
is necessary to begin by viewing the scene from a distance and asking some
high-level questions. We have already done this for the broadest one, concerning
why the assassination is still being debated fiercely. Another one is why conspiracy theorists continue to advance nearly as many conspiracy
theories as there are theorists, again with no particular point of view
prevailing. There seem to be two major possible answer here, that the evidence
for the right answer isn't strong enough, or that people with competing theories
cannot or will not accept it. This one is easier to deal with—the evidence is
not there for conspiracy in general, let alone for any particular theory of it.
The nature of the field
JFK assassination research is an unusual area. Perhaps its
core feature is that it is driven by amateurs, that is, by people who are not
doing it for a living. They may be "citizen investigators," as they
are sometimes called, or they may bring various degrees of professional skills
to the process. But it is not their living. This produces highly contrasting
pros and cons. On the pro side, the researchers bring great enthusiasm and
commitment to the task. They band together, support one another, and often work
in the field for decades. Many of its prominent citizens have been doing it for
the full 40 years. But their amateur status produces major cons as well. Many
folk are driven by predisposition, and allow their critical faculties to become
subordinated to it. They "know" that there was a conspiracy, no matter
the lack of supporting evidence for it. The citizens often come with a lack of
critical skills and formal training that strongly impedes their judgment and
their resulting work. Many of them do not recognize their deficiencies. Some
wouldn't regard them as deficiencies if they recognized them. This fills the
field with unsupportable and irrelevant arguments. It also creates internal
feuds that can be bitter and long-lasting. These fights are sad to see because
they sap the energies that should be turned to creative work. Worse, they are
often unnecessary, for they deal with matters that cannot be settled either way.
This is not to say that the field is devoid of trained,
competent people. There are some—the bright lights—but they are few and far
between. Professionals, especially in academia, stay away in droves because work
in the JFK assassination poisons careers. The professional world views this
field as populated by cranks, buffs, and UFO people. And they are largely right.
Attend any JFK conference and you will see. From the very first one I attended
(in 1993) to the most recent one (2001), I have nearly always been struck by the
deadness of the hall when I entered. It's a creepy feeling that is hard to
describe. The speaker is carrying on about one or another arcane detail, usually
billed as a great new discovery, while the audience listens silently,
unable to evaluate it critically or to place it into perspective. Questions are
seldom probing or helpful. Genuine critical discourse is all but absent because
the conferences are aimed at those who already believe in conspiracy, to provide
a sort of support group for keeping the troops going for another year.
Nonconspiracists or fence-sitters are discouraged from attending. The
conferences are aimed at giving aid and comfort to the flock, not at challenging
them in any meaningful way.
These conferences also give me the creeps, for I see how they
have purposely so narrowed their world view that nothing of substance can ever get
done there. And that's exactly what happens. It's like discussing whether there
are 99, 100, or 101 angels in the head of a pin when you don't know for sure
whether there are angels or even whether you really have a pin. Everything is
done ad hoc, without recognizing or adhering to, say, the accepted
principles of evidence-gathering or critical thinking. They sometimes give lip
service to to some of these things, but they rarely follow them in practice.
Form is devoid of function, as in loading up their papers with academic-looking
footnotes but keeping the references to like-minded publications produced by the
flock.
It is not too strong to call JFK assassination research an
intellectual desert. It almost is too strong even to call it "research,"
for it violates too many of the accepted procedures of real research to qualify
as such. It's much
more like a seminary, where the students all fundamentally believe the same
thing and the precepts are discussed rather than challenged. For lack of a
better word, however, I will continue to use "research" for this
field.
The desert is nearly all barren wasteland, with hardly a
defensible idea in sight. The genuine inquirer is dessicated and weakened by the
hot, searing winds of ill-conceived conspiracies and nasty personal vendettas.
On those rare occasions when the oasis of a sound idea appears on the horizon
and the inquirer struggles toward it, it soon disappears into the heat waves and
reveals itself for the mirage that it was. Like a real desert, there are genuine
oases to be found, but they are few and far between. They are worth pursuing,
however.
In such a bleak situation, genuine inquirers must turn away
from the desert and make their own fresh, cool waters of reason. Like good
academics everywhere, they must focus on principles of sound thinking rather
than allowing themselves to become caught up in minutiae. They must construct an
orderly framework of thinking and choosing evidence, drawn from the best
classical procedures available, and stick to it. After a while, order will
gradually replace disorder, and the simple, coherent picture of what really
happened in Dallas on that terrible day will begin to emerge.
Predisposition among the movers and shakers
I have always been fascinated by the general predisposition
toward conspiracy shown by many of the most influential JFK writers. By this I
mean that the writers tend to jump toward a conspiratorial interpretation of
things almost by default. To put it another way, many of the major JFK writers
have espoused conspiracies of similar rank for other major events in America and
the world. This means that they are approaching the JFK assassination with the
same mindset they bring to everything else—it's just one more example of the
general way they think.
You can see this simply by toting up the other books they
have written. Jim Marrs, for example, the author of the noted Crossfire,
whose basic idea was featured in Oliver Stone's JFK, has since written Alien
Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence Among Us, Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden
History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great
Pyramids, The War on Freedom: The 9/11 Conspiracies, and PSI Spies
(remote viewing applied to various topics, including JFK), and is producing a
series of videos on crop circles, the face on Mars, the moon hoax, UFOs, and the
origins of mankind as recounted in the ancient Sumerian tablets. Sylvia Meagher, author of
Accessories After The Fact, came to the
assassination from a strong interest in UFOs. Paris Flammonde, author of The
Kennedy Conspiracy: An Uncommissioned Report on the Jim Garrison Investigation,
also had a long-time interest in UFOs and wrote The Age of Flying Saucers. Anthony Summers, author of Conspiracy and its
follow-up Not In Your Lifetime, also wrote Official and Confidential:
The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, in which he alleged on the flimsiest of
evidence that J. Edgar Hoover was a closet homosexual, Goddess: The Secret
Lives of Marilyn Monroe, and The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of
Richard Nixon. Anthony Summers finds secrets and conspiracies everywhere,
even when the evidence doesn't. Mark
Lane, author of Rush to Judgement, A Citizen's Dissent, and Plausible
Denial, also wrote Murder in Memphis: The FBI and the Assassination of
Martin Luther King with Dick Gregory. Harold Weisberg, author of the Whitewash
series, Post-Mortem, and Never Again!, also wrote Martin Luther
King: The Assassination. Philip H. Melanson, author of Spy Saga, also
wrote The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination: New Revelations On The Conspiracy
and Cover-Up and Who Killed Martin Luther King? and Who Killed
Robert Kennedy? William Turner, author of Deadly Secrets, also wrote The
Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy: The Conspiracy and Coverup (with Jonn
Christian). James Fetzer, editor of Assassination Science and Murder
in Dealey Plaza, is now deeply into other putative conspiracies such as
foreknowledge of 9/11 by the Bush administration, the airplane crash that killed
Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, the Bali blast, and all sorts of other such
ideas, to the point that he has started appearing regularly on the Internet-based
BLACK OP RADIO.
But it doesn't end there. COPA, the Coalition on Political
Assassinations, which grew out of an idea of Cyril Wecht's at the time of the
1993 ASK conference in Dallas, now does nearly as much with the MLK and RFK
assassinations as with JFK. JFK Lancer is also starting to broaden into these
assassinations as well. Go to nearly any conspiracy site on the Web and you will
find the JFK assassination along with flying saucers, the Bilderbergers, and a
whole lot more. I will never forget my surprise at the first JFK conference I
ever attended, in Providence in 1993, to see at the table of exhibitors
representatives of Paranoia magazine, including the cult figure Jeanne
d'Arc, a local girl who made the big time. That was my introduction to the broader world of
JFK and conspiracy.
Of course, not every JFK researcher fits into this category.
Some take great umbrage whenever the link between JFK and other conspiracies is
brought up. I recall, for example, how when Charlie Drago (an arch-conspiracist) and
I were planning the Providence JFK Conference of spring 1999, he told me very
seriously that mentioning UFOs would be a deal-breaker. These things should not
be kept under the rug. They are real, and part of the larger JFK scene. The
fact remains that a considerable fraction of JFK conspiracists tend to turn to
conspiratorial explanations for unexplained events in the world. This is part of
the "two cultures" of JFK discussed below.
A failed quest
It is time to call a spade a spade. In spite of 40 long, hard
years of searching, including two major governmental investigations, one act to
open the official files, and innumerable conferences, books, and videos, the JFK
conspiracists have utterly failed to produce any hard evidence of a conspiracy or
the conspirators. As Allen Dulles said so long ago, they have not yet named names or
brought persons forward. In any other field of endeavor, their plug would have
been long since pulled. The business world would have withdrawn their venture
capital after two or three years because they failed to produce a product or a
proof of concept. The academic world would have not renewed their research
grants. But since the conspiracists are self-funded, they continue as long as
their meager funds hold out. But this kind of continuance should not be confused
with meaningful progress. There is none.
Anyone who doubts that little has changed
in the JFK critical community need only compare the early works with today’s
writings. The essence is the same. The grassy knoll popped up within weeks of
the assassination. Chimerical gunmen were being placed there just as early. Lee
Harvey Oswald, the person to whom all the physical evidence points, was being
absolved of guilt from the instant Jack Ruby shot him. Phantasmagoric plots
hatched back then have remained to the present, even though they have never been
anything other than overwrought imagination. The wheel turns and returns, and
turns again. The quest for conspiracy has
failed.
How can I be so sure of this strong
conclusion? Easy. Just travel to Dallas each November and attend the two
conferences of the faithful. Behind their pseudoacademic trappings lies the
ever-present declaration of war on the powers-that-be and their cover-up.
We’re going to win this thing, their leaders say, and the faithful repeat it
after them. We’re almost there. We’re going to carry the day and show the
American people what really happened in Dallas. Some go further and say that
conspiracy is already historical fact, but the American people just don’t get
it. But take a step or two back and ask why they continue to meet and pump up
the troops if they have found the conspiracy. The answer is obvious—they haven’t
found it. If they had, the world would know it and the meetings would turn into
celebrations of victory. They aren’t celebrating because they haven’t found
the prize—there is no conspiracy to show the world. Their mission of 40 years
has failed. They are in no material way closer now than at the beginning. It's
time to strike the tents and move on.
But something good can come from this
failure. We can learn some sobering lessons on how not to think about difficult
problems. We can analyze the critics’ writings and see where they went wrong.
We can use the results to help prevent the new generation from repeating past
errors. That is the main purpose of this Academic JFK Assassination Web Site.
The two cultures of JFK research
At the risk of seeming divisive and oversimplifying, I wish
to point out that JFK researchers can be considered as falling into two broad
groups. I recall one of the students in my JFK wondering why the conspiracists in the class
couldn't see the obvious—that the evidence so showed nearly unambiguously that a lone gunman did it. To the student
it was completely clear that there was no conspiracy, or at least no solid
evidence for one. To most of the others in
the class, however, it was very much the opposite—conspiracy was the obvious
explanation.
So it is in the broader JFK community. Even after 40 years of
trying, neither the conspiracists nor the nonconspiracists have been able to
convert the other, and each side wonders why the other doesn't see the obvious
truth. Why is there such an intractable gulf between the two camps? I believe it represents
something much deeper than the differences abut an assassination. I believe that
the
nonconspiracists tend to be the literalists, the realists, the scientists, the
data-driven, the conservatives, the modernists, the absolutists—call it what
you want. The conspiracists, by contrast, tend to be the humanists, the liberals, the
postmodernists, the relativists, etc. The nonconspiracists tend to hew more to
the actual data of the case and are loath to wander too far in their search for
truth. To them, nonconspiracy is more the default position, and they require
solid evidence to switch sides. The conspiracists, however, place less faith in
evidence because they fear they consider it limiting and probably tampered with
anyhow. They freely reach far and wide in their search for the truth, with their
default position being conspiracy. How do they know the truth when they
find it? As one person wrote to me, it just "feels right."
The conservative nonconspiracists, by contrast, tend to accept interpretations
that make rational, logical sense. Feelings and predisposition are less important to them.
Thus we should not be surprised that nobody can win an argument about the JFK
assassination, because what is at stake is not just an argument, but the whole
orientation of the persons debating. To lose an argument, especially one on
fundamentals, is to have one's basic outlook on life repudiated. Very few of us
can stand that.
The need for a new approach
After more than a decade spent studying the JFK case, I
remain struck by the contrast between the simple, clear solution and the
inability of so many people to grasp it. I have decided that a qualitatively new
approach is needed to explaining the evidence, because the traditional approach
of "I'm interpreting the evidence better than you are" is simply not
working, and shows no sign of getting anywhere in the near future. A qualitatively
different approach is needed, one that has no rejoinders. I have thought long
and hard about the required methodology, and have decided on the approach
embodied in this revised web site. The approach might be called the
"tough-love academic" way. It embodies several strong, direct
principles, which are based on centuries of legal and intellectual experience.
There is no need to reinvent anything, just to explain how to do it properly.
Roughly speaking, they are:
1. There is only one true story of the assassination.
1.1. There are multiple perspectives
from which to view that story, however.
2. There is only one closest approach to the true story
available from the present evidence.
2.1 You and I are not entitled to
different "opinions" of it.
3. There is only one best way (the "right" way) to
use the evidence to approach the true story.
4. That right way is based on common sense and centuries of
legal and intellectual experience.
4.1 It is iterative (begins
broadly and narrows the eventual solution).
4.2. It begins with physical evidence
(mostly from the crime scene) because of its inherent strength.
4.3. It adds testimonial evidence as
necessary to fill in gaps.
4.4. It recognizes that some
testimonial evidence is more reliable than others.
4.5. It recognizes that in the
absence of direct physical evidence, the result will be probabilistic rather
than conclusive.
4.6. Judgment, based on experience,
learning, and wisdom, will usually be needed.
5. Much or most of the available evidence does not aid in
solving the basic case.
We know too much
The army of JFK conspiracy researchers is constantly turning
up new evidence. Newsgroups and the annual conferences present volumes of it, in
ever-increasing detail. But a careful look reveals that this abundant harvest of
new evidence has not revealed the conspiracy or the conspirators. In fact, JFK
research seems bogged down, hopeless bogged down in a morass of its own making.
What's wrong?
It's simple. The field has acquired too much information
about the assassination. How can there ever be too much evidence? Easy.
As with the easy availability of masses of information from the Internet,
information becomes confused with understanding, and becomes sought for its own
sake rather than for the enlightenment it brings. More is always better, right?
No! More is not necessarily better, and can easily become worse when quantity is
equated with quality. We need to seek the critical information that answers the
key question(s), and not more. We must not allow ourselves to become distracted
by information that is "interesting" rather than that which is
"important" (Herbert L. Packer's words).
Living as we do in the information age, it
is going against the grain to conceive of a downside to having ever-increasing
amounts of information at our fingertips. Yet, as a teacher of secondary and
college students for more decades than I care to admit, I have seen big changes
in students’ ability to turn information into understanding. Simply put, the
recent deluge of information and the easy means to get it is being accompanied
by a decrease in our ability to think about it. The information rather than the
thinking about it is becoming our world. (The same thing happens when we surround
ourselves with violence—it becomes our world and we start to act that way.)
Today's students head for the Internet to answer every question without ever
stopping to think first. It is harder and harder to get students to think about
the great principles behind the information, when they can just click a few
times and get something that passes for an answer. Furthermore, it doesn’t
help matters that we live in a culture where more, bigger, and faster are
automatically considered better. Our ability to process evidence is decreasing
rather than increasing.
If the JFK community continues to focus on the trivial at the expense of the meaningful,
it will remain as it has for nearly four decades, in a state of confusion where
it thinks the chaff is the wheat simply because it has more of it. The community must
learn that information is not the same thing as knowledge, that knowledge
is not the same thing as understanding, and that one principle is worth a
thousand pieces of evidence.
Ten steps
The vast majority of JFK researchers are ill-prepared for their
task. It is a cruel fact that the JFK
assassination demands far
more of its investigators than most crimes do. Here is a preliminary list of steps that researchers must follow
if they are to get the right answer. All ten steps are required. Although
some parts of the sequence may be rearranged, the order is close to the optimal
one. Roughly speaking, the first five steps are preparatory and the last five
are actual.
Twenty simple truths
The JFK assassination turns out to be very simple at its
core. Unfortunately, getting to that core is not quite so simple. Here are
twenty simple truths about the steps and the results. They are demonstrated in
the rest of this web site.