The assassin was Xraarql. Gur perj unq nppvqragnyyl vagreehcgrq gur nffnffvangvba, naq Xraarql raqrq hc ragveryl qvfperqvgrq. Fb gurl oevat uvz onpx va gvzr fb gung ur pna nffnffvangr uvzfrys.

Rush to Judgment brought up a number of interesting issues that should have been investigated at the time. Unfortunately, it also contains every woo-woo crackpot idea that was floating around at the time. Hard to tell them apart, sometimes.

The biggest objection that I see to the "standard" story is Lee Harvey Oswald's rifle. Seems to me, if you're going to shoot the President, you'll want the best hunting rifle you can find and so what if it costs a couple of months' rent. Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano wasn't worth the $12 that he paid for it. Looks to me like he was being pressured ...

If you want conspiracy theories (on JFK and others), then The Illuminatus! Trilogy is for you. (Warning -- if there's anything you find offensive, it's in those books.)

I sat in the living room of my family's house in San Francisco, on a gold-colored easy chair near a crackling fire, and read every one of those stories. I was born after Kennedy's assassination, but I got really caught up in it... the sense of this enormous historic event that so many people had witnessed, remembered so keenly, and shared the memories with each other.

It's now the 25th anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and I can still vividly remember right where I was.

One of them was disguised as a woman, but wasn't pulling it off. Like, her hair was red, but it was a little too red, y'know? And the other one, the tall, lanky one, his face was so blank and expressionless. He didn't even seem human. I think he was a mandroid.

It used to be a respectable word, no? Two or more people planning to commit a crime. If you and me make plans to knock over the corner liquor store, that's a conspiracy. If we get caught before pulling it off, we'll face conspiracy charges. A perfectly respectable word. But if you use it now, people look at you like you're Fox Mulder.

I'm not old enough or well-read enough to be certain, but I think the Kennedy assassination is to blame. The orthodox theory for the assassination holds that Oswald acted alone, which isn't a conspiracy. Most of the heterodox theories hold that Oswald had help of some kind. Therefore JFK assassination heterodoxy is pretty much always conspiracy-based, and since such heterodoxy is pretty popular, the word conspiracy has picked up a connotation of heterodoxy.

But I spent a chunk of last night watching unedited footage from the CBS feed from that day on YouTube, preparatory to writing a blog entry about it. Once the footage gets past the chunks of As The World Turns, punctuated by commercials and brief bulletins read by the unseen Uncle Walter behind a plain bulletin title card, it's fairly compelling viewing. The technology just wasn't there yet to do what needed to be done, and the info reported by CBS was slow, sparse, repetitive and sometimes contradictory. But Cronkite and Co. did their best, pulling together whatever they could gather from wire services, the Dallas CBS station and Dan Rather at the hospital. The grassy knoll was mentioned, as were conflicting stories about who had been shooting from which floor of the Texas School Book Depository, and whether that person was dead. Given the chaos of that day, it's not too surprising that conspiracies arose from it.

But it's kind of remarkable how much staying power they have. In 1992, Donald P. Bellisario felt the need to refute them in an episode of Quantum Leap, and somewhere around that time my friend Julie B (who comments here) took me to the scene of the crime. There was a JFK assassination museum and research center nearby, from which I bought a fired rifle casing as a souvenir. The person manning the cash register was incensed when I used that term. "It's not a souvenir," he insisted. "It's research evidence." Uh, whatever. But other than Sam Beckett's fictional involvement, I'm pretty sure Bellisario got it about right.

And the prize for the best comment thread reference to "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" goes to Serge @7. Well played!

The study linked above ("Phantom flashbulbs: False recollections of hearing the news about Challenger", in case the Google Books link doesn't work) was one of the key things that destroyed my faith in human beings.

Also: to those who haven't read it, I strongly recommend Don DeLillo's astonishing novel Libra. I think it's far and away his best book. His novels tend to be overburdened by abstraction, but that's not the case here: as he once said in a different context, you have to make allowances for the fact that everything you're seeing here tonight is real. The stream of Oswald's consciousness that flows through it is deeply creepy and eerily convincing. (Ruby's is even creepier.) And as with other great tragedies, the fact that you know how it's going to end makes everything in it more compelling.

The crazy conspiracy theory that Libra describes is one that it's not hard to believe in. The only one of Jim's points that it contradicts is the first one - a funny dig, but one that Mohammed Mossadegh and Jacobo Arenz - to say nothing of Ngo Dinh Diem - wouldn't find especially persuasive. A lot of the CIA's special operations failed, but that's the nature of special operations. Good thing, too: the CIA's successes have caused a lot more problems for us than their failures.

(As an aside: In his book about the Iranian hostage crisis, Mark Bowden reports that after Mossadegh, and SAVAK, the CIA loomed so large in the Iranian mind that the students who took the embassy believed absolutely that the CIA was just going to kill them. To this day, some of them are still confused about why that didn't happen.)

That, I have a memory of the Police Box in the scrapyard.

II recall correctly, Oswald was an expert marksman, and by that I mean achieved an "expert" rating on a rifle range, which, I can tell you from experience, is not stunningly difficult.

Anyway, one of the things Cronkite did was get a couple of folks who had achieved such a rating, and see if they could accurately reproduce the shot sequence with the same type and condition rifle. It took them a little practice, but they could.

NPR had a piece on yesterday implying that Johnson had something to do with it. His descendants should sue.

[It's been a few years since I needed to point out that it is not literally true that "if you were alive when JFK was assassinated, you know where you were when you heard about it." I was alive at the time; my conscious memory does not include learning that Kennedy was dead, any more than I remember learning that FDR was dead. Alive, yes. Using language or building that sort of memory, not yet. And the passing of that as a common statement is also a marker of passing time.]

Karen @11,

I hadn't watched those before, only seeing the snippets used in more recent programs. Seeing that hour go by in real-time is useful.

Novalis @14,

Another link--a review paper-- is The Ecological Study of Memory. He also covers flashbulb memories that don't change over time.

[This is one of my favorite studies. I find it comforting that many of those who speak with intense certainty aren't right, just certain. It also helps me understand my own two (that I know of) flashbulb memories which I feel to be true while knowing they aren't.]

Same with all the 9/11 and Anthrax conspiracies. I'd be willing to buy one or two people getting the idea that fake terrorist attacks would be a good idea. As far as we can tell, that's what Bruce Ivins's motivation for the anthrax attack was. But whole teams of demolition experts, spooks, and federal agents who were both sociopathic enough to be ok with killing all those people and discrete enough to keep it to themselves? Yeah right.

It's interesting, though, that even now, when there has been so much re-evaluation of Kennedy's presidency, people are still so invested in proving a vast conspiracy.

First, security then was pretty lax, in general, country-wide.

Second, Ruby was a police hanger-on...everyone knew him. No one thought twice about him being present.

Is there any reason to doubt the motive Ruby himself gave for shooing Oswald, that he'd seen Oswald on TV and he wanted to wipe that smirk off his face?

You keep running into accounts of people who must have been in the conspiracy if there were a conspiracy, being perfectly ordinary. Years ago I read a true-crime book about a case in Texas ... and the chief of police in this small town was the officer who let Ruby into the police garage that day. If there were a conspiracy ... he'd know and at any moment he could just call up Larry King Live and blow the whole thing, but instead, he's down in Texas not making a lot of money, working hard every day. What's his motivation? And if there was a conspiracy that was killing witnesses ... why was he still alive?

That's one big problem I have with conspiracy theories: I look at the people and I ask, one by one, "What's his motivation?"

The other thing about Oswald: That wound he received would be perfectly survivable today, with fast and efficient EMS: Two liters of Lactated Ringers running wide open, high-flow oxygen, and a fast trip to the nearest Level One Trauma Center. We could do this.

----------

Oh, the joke about the CIA in the first question. A long time ago, in another life, I was in an office that would deal (from time to time) with the company. And any time one of us talked with one of them, the person who'd just put down the phone would look up at the ceiling and say, "How do we know that the CIA didn't kill Kennedy?" To which someone else in the office would reply, "Kennedy's dead, isn't he?"

Interservice rivalry. That's what that one is. (But they did a bad job of keeping anything secret, and lots of the things they did were ... well, another of our jokes was: Q. What's the difference between a CIA officer and a narcotraficante? A. The narcotraficante has a job.)

It took me a while to figure out why Oswald was the one the writer seized on: apart from the fact that his act comes exactly in the middle of the assassinations (there were four before him, and four afterwards), his is the only assassination of the nine featured in the show that has no motive attached to it. The sequence in which the other assassins talk to him is preceded by the chilling and powerful "Another National Anthem", in which the assassins recite their reasons over and over again: "I did it because..." But with Oswald, there is no "because", or at least not one that he claimed; he never claimed responsibility, and he died soon afterwards, which gave the assassination an air of mystery.

(The first JFK conspiracy theorist was Oswald himself, who claimed he was a patsy.)

Kennedy's assassination traumatized the western world because it was so public and he was so prominent, but we all know that equally pointless and tragic things happen many times every day. And as the world becomes more media-saturated, it's getting harder and harder to just quietly ignore that fact; it's shoved in our faces more and more. Hence the popularity of conspiracy theories in recent decades.

We might not like to admit it, but deep inside most of us there's a small, chaos-fearing creature that would rather believe evil people are running things than that nobody is running things.

There's an obvious data availability bias here, but a lot of conspiracies wound up being unraveled, when they were, by people finding lots of incriminating written documents, or large numbers of people who were both in-the-know and findable basically by looking at an org chart for some legitimate enterprise. That's because you pretty much can't run an organization of even 20 people without some written records, correspondence, meeting minutes ("what *did* we decide at the last evil overlords' meeting, again?"), budgets that require some bookkeeping ("you spent HOW MUCH for a flamethrower?"), organization charts, etc. If EvilCorp, inc. is poisoning the widows and orphans for a profit, a whole set of people have to be being told it's okay to load those barrels (the ones marked "Danger: Poisonous to Widows and Orphans") onto the truck at 10 PM every night, someone has to be dealing with the disappearance of the widow-and-orphan-toxin from the warehouse, someone has to be collecting on their life insurance policies or whatever the scam is, etc. All those people end up being witnesses.

Further, the participants need a method, motive, and opportunity, and you have to answer the question of why nobody talked, why people bothered to do what they were asked to do, what happened when you had to get rid of that lady who was plainly too dumb to be involved in your conspiracy, or that guy who developed the drug problem, etc.

One thing I'm certain of is that the existence of dumb conspiracy theories tells you nothing about the correctness of the official story for some event. The folks making up/buying into the conspiracy theories are (I think) looking for some combination of entertainment and validation of their worldview, a completely different pursuit than trying to understand the world as it is.

In fact, the official story in many cases where some criminal or just plain nasty thing happens is often full of holes. News reports in particular have this tendency to leave obvious unopened questions because the reporter wasn't interested, didn't have a source willing to help him look into some question, or wasn't bright enough to ask the question in the first place.) But finding a cool conspiracy theory is sort-of the opposite of figuring out what really did happen.

(And there's at least one book out there involving a postmortem conversation between the three of them; I haven't read it myself, but it sounds like an interesting premise.)

Hence Deep Throat (now known to be Mark Felt) had to tell Woodstein "Follow the Money."

This reminds me of the SciFi Channel's TV series of a few years ago, The Third Wave, about a sneaky alien invasion. Whenever they'd advertise the show, they'd treat us to a board meeting of the aliens and one of them saying "Our goal - to dominate this species." If I were one of the lesser aliens, I'd raise my hand and ask if it was really necessary to take time off the invasion so that the boss could state the obvious reason why we crossed many light-years to come to Earth.

I came out of the day convinced once and for all that grown-ups were really stupid.

John Mark Ockerbloom @31: I've read it. (Between Heaven and Hell by Peter Kreeft.) It consists mostly of Lewis lecturing the other two on the afterlife with a degree of pomposity that the earthly Lewis never quite achieved. My advice: Spare yourself. Hope that you die on a different day.

The best description I've seen for the, "Magic Bullet" was from a ballistitician who posited one of the guys in the motorcade wasn't completely familiar with his, new, rifle, and accidentaly fired a shot from behind, which hit both Kennedy and the Gov. The difference in starting point (and the non-typical arrangement of the seats in the president's car) made it seem the bullet was behaving all wrong, if we posit Oswald fired it.

Me... I kind of like that idea, it avoids the needful oddities of the conspiracy theories, and ties up the loose ends (the loose end which bothers me most is the rate of fire. I've used a carcano, and it would take me a long time to get to cycling it as quickly as Oswald needed to fire it, and the rifle rises enough that he'd need to regain the, moving, target.

Add one outside shooter and the bullets make more sense. Accident is better (see Occam) than plot to explain an extra shot.

I majored in Criminalistics* in the School of Criminal Justice, so a lot of our instructors were former police officers. One of them told us that Oswald had been given a standard paraffin test, which confirmed that he had fired a gun recently. Then, someone fished the wax cast out of the trash (Note: The chain of evidence has been broken (to say the least) at this point.) He examined it for the pattern of residue, using a technique that was not yet confirmed, and determined that the pattern indicated that Oswald had fired a rifle.

Now, I've never seen a hint of that act from that day to this. (In fact, I don't even recall a comment to the effect that Oswald had been tested for GSR at all, but it would have been as standard as fingerprinting him, and no one mentions that either.) Nor have I seen any mention of a test for determining residue pattern.

Make of it what you will

* The actual title was "Police Science." But if you put that on a form, it gets abbreviated to "Pol. Sci." which must be "Political Science" and we have a numeric code for that.

Also rather convincing (at least so far) that Oswald acted alone.

Challenger I remember, too. I'd been in the vault and had come back to the office for my lunch. The TV that normally stayed in the conference room had been moved into the secretarial area (our offices were around that) and the secretaries were crying. I asked what had happened and as someone started telling me, the tape started again. That was very important -- we worked on missiles -- and many of us just sat there with disbelief and then grief on our faces.

It was many years before I got straight the difference between John and Robert.

Until I learned the civil service application process I had a really hard time understanding the description of the Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau as "a disgruntled office seeker," which I read in most history books.

The story of a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln as he travels on the Ohio & Baltimore Railway to his inauguration in 1861. A discredited detective tries in the face of disbelief to foil the plotters, who hate the President's policies.

The detective, played by Dick Powell, is called John Kennedy.

BTW, I highly recommend Sarah Vowell's book "Assassination Vacation". It's not about JFK, but goes into Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. It's quirky, and I enjoyed it a lot. Garfield's assassin wasn't just a disgruntled office seeker. He had completely parted ways with reality, and was showing up daily to demand a post as ambassador.

I do remember RFK, because my memory of that is too bad to be made up. I heard it early in the morning on the radio, and when my mother -- a conservative -- woke up and came into the kitchen, I callously said to her, "Well, you don't have to worry about Bobby Kennedy becoming president any more." She burst into tears while I stood there like an idiot.

I trust my memory on the Challenger, because I was on the phone with a colleague when the news came on the radio, and I passed the information along to her as I was hearing it.

I looked them up and found this 1961 article in Time Magazine about the U.S. ultra-right. In reading this short article, I again got a sense of history not just rhyming but repeating itself then to now. The Democratic candidates are treasonous, Buckley at the National Review is condemned for being too restrained (in attacking the enemy), there are statements of 'You're either for us or against us,' people not agreeing with them are accused of "being uninformed about [the enemy]."

It's an interesting reminder.

---------------
* The group had protested Adelaide Stevenson's talk there two weeks earlier--one reason why Dallas had a large police presence on the 23rd. People at the lunch Kennedy was going to had undergone much more security than was usual.

As part of an Army Reserve "sneaker range" years ago, I watched (and participated) as a group of 30-odd reservists made a series of shots over a similar distance at a similarly obscured moving target using iron sights. The target was visible from the firing position for 10 seconds. No-one failed to get _at least_ one bullet into the target, half got two (out of three rounds fired). A few of us got all 3, mostly by "anticipating" when the target would appear and already slowly "leading" it (just as Oswald would have been able to do).

We were using semi-automatic 7.62mm assault rifles, make of that difference what you will.

This particular station on the sneaker range was known as "Oswald".

The winning contestant is Bill Nye (yes, the science guy). After two other players run out of time trying to stammer through explanations involving the Cubans, Oswald, the Mafia, freemasons, and the CIA, Bill, on his turn, just looks at the host, says "a tiger got him", and wins the prize.

Further hilarious spoiler: Bar bs gurz, jub unccraf gb or Wbua Qvyyvatre, vf frag gb fgbc gur nffnffva ur'f rkcrpgvat, naq ernyvmrf gurer ner jnl gbb znal nffnffvaf va jnl gbb znal qvssrerag cynprf sbe uvz gb or noyr gb ernpu gurz nyy orsber vg'f gbb yngr. Fb ur fubbgf ng gur Cerfvqrag uvzfrys, orpnhfr ng yrnfg gung jnl vg'yy rvgure perngr na vafbyhoyr zlfgrel be n ovmneer urnqyvar.

Have you seen the attendees lists? Looks pretty much like the Old World Order who have been failing to adequately run things for quite some time.

Folks, the global conspiracy exists, and it's run on the same lines as every other committee.

And I've met Photoshop and ILM chap John Knoll a couple of times.

novaolis @ #14 "But is that really where you were? reminds me of a cartoon I saw around about the 20th anniversary. The guy is in his armchair in his living room watching the anniversary programmes on TV and says "I remember where I was when I heard about JFK being shot. I was right here in this chair watching TV".

I read William Manchester's "The Death of a President" a few years ago, which I found detailed, relentless and gripping. Presumably it is dismissed by the conspiracy crowd as it has no wacky ideas that I recall.

As we listened distractedly to the lecturer, more people began trickling in with the real news, whispering it from back row to front: Kennedy was dead. The speaker, of course, was the last to learn. We broke for the exits, and that was the end of study for the next three days.

We all assumed Johnson was behind it on the cui bono theory. Assassination conspiracies are rare but hardly unknown; in most countries other than the US, they're the norm. And Lincoln was the victim of one.

Often, important decisions aren't made in the official institutions that are legally in charge, but in personal talks between individual powerful people who know each other more or less well. So, in a way, the world isn't run by official institutions, but by informal social networks.

Now, if someone figures out that many decisions aren't really made in official institutions, but at the same time, he doesn't really understand what social networks are or how they work, he might end up thinking that there must be some other, hidden institutions where all those important decisions are really made (High Council of the Ancient Order of the Sacred Nourishing Soup etc.).

Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marine, and had qualified as "expert marksman" on the range. In Death of a President, William Manchester (a former Marine) attests that this would not be a difficult shot for someone with the afore-mentioned training.

If you have not read this book, I highly recommend it.

And yes, I remember where I was when I heard the news for JFK, Apollo One, MLK, RFK...

Shortly after the Civil War, a man pulls himself out of a grave in the South wearing Southern clothing but carrying Northern gold and carrying a US Army revolver. He has no memory save for some gorgeous brunette and being beaten over the head by a man in a derby just before John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln. He calls himself "Lazarus" after the man Jesus resurrected until he can figure out who he is and why he was buried alive and left for dead.

As for Kennedy: my mother remembers that she was in school, some announcement was made over the PA system but it was garbled (as PA systems often are) and everyone was shouting and laughing at the end of the day and ignoring it. She rode the bus home and the bus driver, who was known to be mean, shouted at them "You kids shut up! Don't you know the President's been shot?" and they all laughed, thinking he was just saying that to shut them up. It wasn't until she opened her front door and saw her mother weeping on the couch that she knew it was true.

There were still all kinds of speculation, at various levels of sanity, on the *nature* of the Lincoln conspiracy. One interesting overview of 6 different Lincoln assassination conspiracy theories is here.

DBratman@36: That's too bad about the book. I was hoping it would be more in the "Meeting of the Minds" style. I've only caught a bit of that series, and that was a while ago, but I recall most of the Famous Dead Persons there held their own, rather than just being a straight man that the Authoritative Character can play off.

The latter style goes back at least as far as Plato ("Why, that is most true, Socrates!") but it gets kind of tiresome after a while even if you agree with the authorial stand-in.

Joke from the time:

Q. What did the Dallas Police Chief do when an elephant walked into his office?
A. Nothing. He didn't notice.

I'm just barely too young to have remembered the JFK assassination, but of course I distinctly remember 9/11. One of the most striking memories was not seeing a contrail in the sky, but hearing the thundering of military jets in the distance.

1. star of a TV show about Crime Scene Investigation

Dum di dum dum, dummmmmm

Two of the things RAW pointed out are that real conspiracies don't last more than ten years before everybody's stabbing everybody else in the back; and that the more you look for evidence, the more evidence you'll find.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that Oswald acted alone, but there are still oddities, and bizarre coincidences. I hope that it's really just coincidence how many oddly connected people went through Jim Garrison's office.
At the same time, it's a matter of record that "The attempted burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in June 1972 had suddenly brought [Kennedy assassination researcher Mae Brussell's] eight-and-a-half years of dedicated conspiracy research to an astounding climax. She recognized names, modus operandi, patterns of cover-up. She could trace linear connections leading inevitably from the assassination of JFK to the Watergate break-in, and all the killings in between." (Paul Krassner) The first reportage of the White House and CIA connections of the burglars was in The Realist . . .

The brilliant thing, though, is that he then creates another camera which he can move around where he likes and find out information that wouldn't be known from the angle that the Zapruder film was shot. Better than that, he took and marked the entry and exit wounds on the models of the people involved and drew lines between them, in order to find the origin of the shot(s) that created them.

The single, straight line went to the depository window.

He also did the motion of a cop on a motorbike because of where he was in the motorcade, but I don't remember the details of that. Something about the cop hearing a shot and where he was when he heard it as opposed to his memory and his statement. I think it was to disprove the grassy knoll concept because he had clear view of it or something.

Really fascinating. Wish I could remember more to find clips of it.

Many of students suceed shooting from the left shoulder, looking over the scope and reaching over the rifle to work the bolt with the trigger hand - and this regardless of whether the student be left handed by nature.

There is by actual test nothing unusual or remarkable about the shooting that in any way conflicts with a Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone hypothesis.

It is certainly true that there is strong reason to believe the Warren Commission Report really was a rush to judgment. One of the members dined out for years on that story - emphasizing that he saw nothing at all in the whole process to contradict the eventual report but that the report as issued was railroaded by his normal academic standards.

For my money Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone that day. For my money Jack Valenti had no suspicion of a conspiracy which for me limits the possibilities. For my money the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone says nothing about the possibility of unrelated conspiracies. I'd find it very very easy to believe some of the Brigade 2506 folks would have supported such an effort - and maybe some survivors of the Alabama guard types would have supported it. At the time I'd have been seriously tempted myself though I have since regretted that.

Good times. Good times.

So tell us: how MUCH of your money? What did a single-shooter assassination run back then? :-)

The M-14 also has a lot less recoil, so two out of three is about what I'd expect a decent shot to be able to put onto a man-sized target at 100-200 meters.

My favorite, "it could happen" theory (which is to say the conspiracy theory which has the most ties up loose ends, and gives a reason for the plot; not a theory I actually believe. The phrase, "It could happen," was one I heard a lot when I was working security in ERs, right after someone told a, barely, plausible whopper) is that the Addison's was getting worse and there was no way to remove him, so Bobby says, OK, we shoot him, but only if we put in an amendment making never needful again.

It's no more daft than any other, and gives the plotters a small bit of nobility (which also explains why they didn't talk), while keeping the number in the know small (and so more likely to keep quiet).

Chris Gherrib: I don't think I've ever said it was a bad weapon. For what it is (a Mannlicher, split-pin, bolt-action), it has some good traits, and some poor ones. The action is "sloppy", which means it can be (though not always, which figures into the reputation) cycled quickly. The long period it was in service (production dates are 1891-1945, roughly equivalent to the Moisin-Nagant of the Soviet Union, made famous in the propoganda about Vladimir Yaitseff) means there is a large variability in available models, which colors the reports of those who review it (both of the models I've handled were worn in such a way that, absent a great deal of practice they were relatively slow to cycle). The actual action was based on the German 1888 Commission Model.

Further there were a number of variations. No small part of the reputation comes from the reports of poor performance in the N. African campaigns of Mussolini. Those led to the actual design model Oswald purchased. But problems with the manufacture of ammunition for the new design led to a rebarrelling; which, of course, made for no small amount of variation in the accuracy of the retooled weapons (since it was being done in haste; there was a war on). On the plus side it's a "gain twist" pattern, which means the rate of spin is increased as the bullet moves down the barrel. This is a fundamentally sound design, with a longer lived barrel than in comparable "constant twist" weapons.

The battle-sight for the weapon was 200 meters. Shots at less than that are hard to make, because the issued sights don't, usually, allow for that muuch height (to depress the muzzle). Since a lot of causal/sport shooters are looking for 50-150 meter shots, this adds to the myth of it's basic inaccuracy.

One of the other quirks is that it's a bloc-clip loaded weapon. With issued ammo this isn't a problem, but the clips' lips tended to get a little bent if refilled, which made it much stiffer to operate. With a little more spreading the weapon wouldn't reliably feed. Since most people aren't able to obtain (esp. today) new clips (they are pricey, and the ammo is too, so people scrimp on the clips to get more ammo), that problem becomes ascribed to the weapon itself.

To add further to the problem, the primers originally designed were very corrosive. That (and the need to pay royalties to Nobel) led to a new primer for live rounds, but blanks continued to use it, which means rifles which were used in lots of training probably have worn throats, which will degrade accuracy. Add a ballistically poor bullet design (heavy, and round nosed) and the basic soundness of the design suffered some in practice.

As I recall the recovered bullets, Oswald used that heavy, and problematic, round. That said, one of the more notable charactaristics of the round is that it was very stable (a heavy bullet, and a high rate of twist), and prone to going completely through a person, without tumbling; which is what happened with the shots Oswald got into Kennedy.

alkali, #73: That's exactly why one of the slang terms for a gun is "equalizer". If you've got the shot, it doesn't matter how big he is or how little you are.

Cyril Knowlton Nash, O.C., O.Ont. (born November 18, 1927), commonly known as Knowlton Nash, is a journalist, author, and former long-serving senior anchorman of CBC Television's flagship news program, The National. He was born in Toronto, Ontario.

He said one of the first training sessions was a detailed presentation on where SF snipers were hidden there in Dallas (one firing from the sewer) and how they left the world to think whatever it wanted.

Proof? None. But an interesting idea.

Way too many loose ends exist for a neatly wrapped package.

Yes, but was Knowlton ever grassy?

The TV programme his work features in may be Peter Jennings Reporting: The Kennedy Assassination - Beyond Conspiracy http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387490/ which has Dale Myers appearing; I guess it could be some other recut version. I remember seeing this in the UK.

FTFY. He may have been telling the truth, I suppose, but when someone says "I used to be a supersecret guy who did a job that could get me executed or at least a long prison term, with no statute of limitations, and that required a degree of discretion that I'm showing I don't have by telling you all this" the most reasonable hypothesis is that they're lying. A rebuttable presumption, even.

Also, if he'd been in the Special Forces he'd probably have named them correctly. There's no "US Government Special Forces."

Ooo, that we know of! There COULD be! But then there could be a sacred green cat named Mota living on Mars, too. Prove there isn't!

snoopy 87: You can't look at all of the facts and say, 'Yup, one guy.'

Well, if all the existing theories except one have been debunked, the one that's still standing is most probably true. True beyond a reasonable doubt, in fact. Nearly half a century of wild speculation, claims and counterclaims, and tinfoil-hat-wearing nutbars babbling incoherently have not come up with an alternative theory that held water better than a cheap wire strainer. With a hole in it.

Occam's razor sez: let's go with this hypothesis, since all the others are total bullshit.

Both of you: hmm, two consecutive first-time posts on the same thread, with single-word, all-lower-case names, and similar viewpoints. You two know each other?

At any rate, welcome to Making Light!

(Bugliosi's book is definitely worth taking a look at. There's a lot of evidence FOR Oswald there.)

Xopher: re the SF guy, what you said.

Snoopy: Yes, we can, and most of us do (even me, who happens to think an accidental gunshot [which wasn't the proximate cause of Kennedy's death] ties up the loose ends. I think Oswald was acting alone).

darms: re the brace affecting the bullet path. Nope. Even if he had a steel one on, the most it would do is deflect the bullet to a different straight line. It would also have deformed either the bullet (which doesn't seem, from the photos to have such an impact), or the brace. If it did the latter, there would; probably, have been ragged edges,and tissue damage the autopsy didn't record.

So, if he was wearing such a brace, the bullets 1: probably didn't hit it, and 2: can't explain the "Magic Bullet". The biggest thing people don't understand is about the seats.

They were staggered, both laterally (Connally was inboard of Kennedy) and vertically (connally was sitting higher than Kennedy). That means the straight line most people think the bullet didn't take, isn't the same as the straight line it needed to take to inflict those injuries (and is why that ballistician thinks a negligent discharge from ground level did that piece of damage).

Like 9/11. Like Kennedy. Like the moon landing. There are oodles of information about all of those, and some people just love connecting the dots.

And I think there's a personality type that's drawn to it - perhaps someone who isn't comfortable with the randomness that pervades so much of life.

If it hit otherwise it might merely have bent/deformed the brace; with a new line of flight, until something else got in the way. In that case I would expect to see some deformation of the bullet.

you're suggesting a conspiracy here? ;-)

FWIW, I've commented on several threads over the past two years.

Re: the Guy in the living room: as I said in the comment, "Proof? None. But an interesting idea."

Not using your current e-mail address, according to your View All By. Have you changed the address you use for commenting since the last time you said something here? Your name does seem vaguely familiar.

One gets to float an idea (even a bizarre one, which, to be honest, a guy claiming the SF killed Kennedy [who was their patron] most certainly is) and then disavow it.

For me (as a guy who spent eight years in an army which had a lot of people in it who were unhappy with who they had as a CinC, I don't buy it. I esp. don't buy it as an SF plot. No, I don't have proof either, but I'm not arguing for the unprovable either...).

And no, I don't think you a driveby, I place the nom de lumiere, I just think what he told you was nonsense, and he dressed it up with a spurious claim of legitimacy.

Been a long time since we've heard sentiments like that from the leader of the free world.

Was there a conspiracy? As much as I'd like to attach some meaning to this meaningless act, I keep recalling the old adage, sometimes attributed to Robert Heinlein: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

He's the executive of a big power, but that's it. The idea that he's got some magic juju, just because he (and someday she) is sitting in the Oval Office is bad for him, and for us.

It's an arrogation of power we don't have, and a place he can only hold on the sufference of the rest of the world. A bad one (as we just had) can most decidedly cost us the ability to affect the rest of the world (even that "free" part).

I can assure you, Canadians, Brits, Germans (and most decidedly) the French do not see him as their "leader".

Ok, I'll get off my polemical soapbox, but it's always bothered me some, and the past eight years have moved me from annoyed by it to appalled. I am so glad it's not true, because if it were... oh gods the mess Bush would have made.

It was Oswald, and Oswald alone.

cherish, if you're changing your email because of spambots harvesting addresses, perhaps you can try making an easily-human-detected change to it when you enter it here – check my name in this entry for one attempt.

Any of you seen 'Burn After Reading?' (Not sure if that's on a train line, it will be on a through road.) The ex-Special Forces bloke you mention reminds me of Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney's character) in that. There's a wonderful conspiracy moment involving a black helicopter & Men In Black with earpieces. It is a deeply bleak – unattached in a buddhist kind of way – comedy.

That's also part of the "America is the bestest country ever" myth, which only survives because a lot of people never look at objective rankings of the US against other countries. In far too many of the areas which affect quality of life most strongly, we're not only not the best, we're not even in the top 10.

I used to be an interplanetary assassin for the Ylluminati. I killed that cat.

I submit this detail as a gloss to Terry Karney's intervention above.

but your post totally misses the mark.

maybe we can call it a 'magic' post and pretend it kills two birds with one stone.

this is the sort of thing i'd expect to see at 'daily kos' with bright, shiny officers of normalcy enforcing the mantra of 'positive thought.'

hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to be made from napalm, agent orange, white phospherous, torture equipment, artillery shells, cluster bombs, bullets, backpacks, bandages, boots, you name it

you think those guys are going to allow one 'prick' like kennedy to stand in their way

pg.110 'Vietnam: the 10,000 Day War'
Dec.3, 1963 kennedy's plan to begin withdrawing forces from vietnam.

didn't happen.

Can you refute anything in the post?

I can, and I did.

Nothing outside of fiction has all the loose ends tied up in a bow knot.

The problem with the Kennedy Conspiracy Theorists is that they're unacquainted with reality.

Yeterday morning, I made the hotel reservation for our customary Holidays ride to/from the Bay Area. When I called the hotel in Kingman, they still had my family name in their computer system, but, even though it's an unusual name, they also had an entry for someone else identically named. Not only that, but her first name is the same as one of my sisters's.

Carol, 58: pat greene beat me to the ID, but here is the text of McGinley's poem "The Giveaway." McGinley is a bit underrated these days, I think.

Thanks, both of you!

I was a senior in high school, just coming out of the dining room after lunch. I saw my English teacher, whom I liked, standing there crying. Hes said "The President has been shot". I thought he was joking, because the idea was just unbelievable, and I said, "Right, tell me another one." At which point the fact that he was crying registered, and I realized that he was very serious, that this wasn't a joke, and that the world was not at all what I had thought it was.

The words are probably not accurate after 45 years, but the image of my teacher, who was a very cheerful man, crying in front of dozens of students is, I think, very accurate. And I remember all too well that feeling of having been snarky to someone I liked who was in great distress.

you think those guys are going to allow one 'prick' like kennedy to stand in their way

Makes me wonder why the attempts on Nixon were so late and so incompetent.

Local custom is that we use one just one screen name here. Find one you like and stick with it. Otherwise ... well, we have very few banning offenses here. Sockpuppetry is one of them.

Regarding the magic bullet - one other thing people forget is that Kennedy's car was on a downslope. "Deally Plaza" is an impressive name for what's really a small strip of grass where two city streets feed into a railroad underpass.

if you are powerful enough to kill the President, and then cover it up so successfully for forty years, why are you not powerful enough to simply persuade a few congressmen to vote for more military spending?

In any case, it's not like Kennedy was some sort of anti-military type. Had he lived, he was planning to make a speech that evening in which he would boast: "In the past 3 years we have increased our defense budget by over 20%; increased the program for acquisition of Polaris submarines from 24 to 41; increased our Minuteman missile purchase program by more than 75 percent; doubled the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert; doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces; increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by 60 percent; added 5 combat ready divisions and 5 tactical fighter wings to our Armed Forces; increased our strategic airlift capabilities by 75 percent; and increased our special counter-insurgency forces by 600 percent. We can truly say today, with pride in our voices and peace in our hearts, that the defensive forces of the United States are, without a doubt, the most powerful and resourceful forces anywhere in the world."

Kennedy's presidency was great news for the defence industry! Certainly compared to Ike - military spending had actually been falling for a lot of Ike's presidency, as Korea came to an end and the Army and Navy were wound down in favour of a cheap, nuclear-driven tripwire/massive retaliation strategy. Kennedy, on the other hand, believed in 'flexible response' - so more of everything.

Persuading Kennedy to spend more on defence would have been pushing on an open door.

Oh, you can't blame BushCo for that. JFK stopped being the Leader of the Free World on November 22, 1963! (Yes, I know, I'm only teasing.)

he planned to withdraw from vietnam incrementally beginning in dec.1963.

http://tapes.millercenter.virginia.edu/exhibits/vietnam_withdrawal/

this wouldn't be acceptable to those who (although they had already gotten plenty) saw a goldmine at the end of the napalm rainbow.

I cut about half of my earlier post on this thread because it had turned into a boring and inpenatrable knot, but yes to

I can, and I did.

Nothing outside of fiction has all the loose ends tied up in a bow knot.

I spent a whole semester in a history research/seminar class at WSU studying the JFK assassination. It was a debate-style class, with two research papers and two team presentations; we switched sides after midterms, so everyone studied both defenders and critics of the Warren Report. I came out of the experience with a high degree of certainty that no matter how flawed the official investigation, the conspiracy theorists were, as a group, operating under the assumption that any unexplained event was evidence of a cover-up, instead of being evidence that there is always noise and signal loss.

But at one point, the company's owner greeted me in earshot of her, with his usual "Paula Sue, how do you do!"

As soon as he was gone she was out of her cubicle and in front of me going "Your middle name cannot be Sue!" she was kind of angry about it.

I went, "Nope, but he's the owner this company and has called me that ever since I started." and just walked away.

While I do believe in a conspiracy to assassinate JFK, I'm not one to get down into the weeds arguing "facts" from (at best) dubious sources, instead I look at "big picture" items like who wanted him dead and what verifiable contacts did they have with parties we know were involved. "Follow the money" is a very good tool.

John Hinckley's father was one of George H. W. Bush's major contributors, and John Hinckley's brother was scheduled to have dinner with Neil Bush (H. W.'s son) the day after.

If Reagan had died, and if Hinckley had been killed in course of the event (before he could explain that he did it to impress Jody Foster) just imagine the conspiracy theory.

The books of Charles Fort are filled with even more unlikely coincidences.

Really? I'm not sure which it is, "leader" or "free world" (I suspect the former), but you are using the language heterodoxically and it's confusing. In 1963, JFK was the leader of the United States of America. Alec Douglas-Home was the leader of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Lester B. Pearson was the leader of Canada, Sir Robert Menzies was the leader of Australia, Charles de Gaulle was the leader of France, Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Jawaharlal Nehru were the leaders of India, etc etc etc ad nauseam.

While few here would argue that Bush Jr made a mess of every job he had, there is no such job as "leader of the free world" and never has been. It's a big place.

(this partly political broadcast was brought to you by Wikipedia's list fetish!)

Now, you might not agree with this trope. Feel free to disagree with and debunk it; I think it's a somewhat problematic trope myself. But could you at least acknowledge that this is in fact a bit of common rhetoric of several decades' vintage, even if you personally had never heard it before, and not some weird bit of linguistic heterodoxy that's just sprouted in this comment thread?

The question still stands: it's obviously wrong, but is the error in "leader" or "free world"? That is, is the claim that POTUS is the 'leader' of many countries around the world in some sense other than "head of government", or is the claim that the United States of America represents the entirety of the free world?

I was wrong to call it an "assault" rifle though, and regretted that as soon as I'd clicked "post" and realized that by trying to be descriptive, I'd been inaccurate.

is the error in "leader" or "free world"?

"Check as many as apply; use both sides of the paper as needed."

Both in the sense that neither claim is true, and in the sense that both usually seem to be implied in the usage.

That sounds like a song Buddy Holly would have written if he had not died in that plane crash.

Every change in the direction of the federal government effects a corresponding change that enriches one group of contractors and deprives another. By the logic, such as it is, of the above, any time a president issues an executive order or signs a piece of legislation there should be shots ringing out.

One of the (many) reasons that there aren't is that the president isn't a king. Interest groups that lose out because of what the president has done can turn to Congress and the courts. And if they can't get any traction there, well, it's a lot of people to shoot. There's a reason that presidential assassins, both failed and not, tend to be loonies: shooting the president doesn't make any sense.

This has the advantage of not requiring an actual conspiracy, while explaining the oddity of some of the actions of the players after the event.

But Kennedy was different. I've travelled around the Netherlands, here and there, and two Americans have lent their names to streets here more than all their compatriots combined: John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

And of the two, Kennedy has the numerical edge.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that more Dutch people, proportionately, live on streets named after him than do Americans.

Then you're not ever going to get anything right about anything in the world, except by accident.

instead I look at "big picture" items

Yeah, let's ignore all those annoying little "facts" and just look at "'big picture' items"- after all, what could possibly go wrong with that?

like who wanted him dead

Do you want people to go by no evidence other than "who wanted him dead" if anyone you don't like should ever die in an accident or of an unusual disease, or get killed?

and what verifiable contacts did they have with parties we know were involved.

Indirectly, everyone on Earth, except perhaps for some people who live very isolated, has verifiable contacts with everyone else.

I realise I'm trying to have a rational argument with someone who writes in all lower case, but here goes.

1) US involvement in VN in 1963 was comparatively tiny. 16,000 troops. Less than a division in strength. No one in the US arms industry was getting rich off VN; they were getting rich off US Cold War military spending generally. This was projects like nuclear submarines, nuclear missiles, strategic bombers, supersonic combat aircraft; not a few prop planes and Hueys for a counterinsurgency campaign in the backside of nowhere. The big ticket items not only weren't justified by VN; VN actually represented budget competition for them.

2) Kennedy wanted out of VN, yes. Why would anyone expect Johnson to be any different? If anything, in 1963 he was seen as less of a Cold Warrior than Kennedy. His first priority on becoming president was the Great Society, not Vietnam - he made a number of speeches on civil rights and anti-poverty issues as vice-president, and was generally more up-front on these matters than Kennedy - and he was also one of the prime movers behind the expansion of NASA and the start of the Apollo project, as head of the president's ad hoc committee on science.

The federal budget in the 1960s had three major line items: the military, the Great Society, and Apollo. If anything, replacing Kennedy with LBJ in 1963 should have been expected to shift spending away from the military - including, presumably, the continuation of JFK's intention to withdraw from VN - and towards NASA and the Great Society. If anything, the military-industrial complex should have wanted to keep JFK alive.

Now there's a conspiracy theory for you. Who stood to gain from the death of JFK? Martin Luther King, Harrison Storms and Neil Armstrong, that's who!

He was in Dallas, Texas.

This, though it is not about conspiracies per se, reminds me a bit of the Coen Brothers' "Blood Simple", where people take dangerously daft courses of action because they're got the wrong end of various sticks.

ftfy

Indeed.

When we moved from Toronto to the Bay Area in January 1989, my wife and I drove all the way across. Outside of Salt Lake City, we pulled over at a gas station, where I found that the attendant had the same French-Canadian family name as one of my Québec City buddies.

How likely is that?
Not very, but it happens.

How many jumps from the cop who let Ruby into the police garage to the cop who arrested George W. Bush for drunk driving? And how many more to Kevin Bacon?

Given that the etymology of my name is Lithuanian (though spelled as if it were German), I sometimes wonder how that happened.

A beetle tank

So was the elder Bush.

Thanks for making the point about the relative tinyness of spending on Vietnam versus the Cold War. Also consider the relative lifetimes of military programs. A small war like Vietnam, for which a supplier might sell a few millions of small arms and a few hundred thousand tonnes of explosives and such, can provide 2-5 years of peak sales, at most. A contract for a hi-tech warplane can last for 30 years or more* and deliver as much as US $1e10 in current dollars over the contract.

Just to tie a couple of conspiracy theories together in a nice bowtie, a large portion of those 16,000 US troops in Vietnam were US Army Special Forces, a unit, as Terry pointed out, patronized (in the original sense of the word) by Kennedy, and specifically targeted at counterinsurgency missions. I bet there was quite a battle between the conspiracy that wanted to kill Kennedy for wanting to get out of Vietnam and the conspiracy that wanted to kill him for getting the SF in there in quantity.
/snark

* The B-52 bomber has been in service since 1955, 744 were built, and current plans are to continue it in service until sometime around 2040. Total cost to construct those planes was in the neighborhood of US $5e9 in 1955 dollars, but the real winners are the vendors who get to supply spare parts for 90 years of service, and upgrades to take advantage of new technology in avionics, engines, and airframes.

And there wasn't a card next to his body that read "CIA was here".

1a: The Mossad did it.

A: No. Kennedy is dead, not John F. Kennedy, barman of Limerick or John F. Kennedy, accountant of Cahirciveen.

In the 70's my grandfather took his family out to dinner at a very fancy French restaurant in New York. This particular restaurant was so snooty that they actually imported their waiters from France. My grandfather had spent some time in France during the war, and had gone back a couple times, so his French was passable, and he struck up a conversation with the waiter. It went something like this:

"Where in France are you from?"
"Brittany."
"What town in Brittany?"
"Oh, it's a tiny little town, no way you would have heard of it."
"What department is it in, then?"
"Moribhan Department."
"Actually, I spent some time in Moribhan and Cotes d'Armor [the department to the north]."
"Well it's a little town called Plouray."

*stunned silence*

It turns out, the waiter, as a young boy, had actually seen the B-17 my grandfather was co-piloting crash into a nearby field in April of 1944, and knew the people who still had some of my grandfather's parachute hanging up in their barn. [Some, because when you are a French farmer in a period of war-time rationing, and dozens of yards of white silk literally fall out of the sky onto your property, your first thought is not to preserve them for posterity.)

------------------------------

Anyway, to return to the actual subject:

I have to second the mention of Sondheim's Assassins here. The show really does make the case that there's something fundamentally American about taking pot-shots at our elected leaders.

But that's not my favorite fictional Kennedy conspiracy. My favorite is from 100 Bullets:

A jilted Joe Dimaggio taking revenge for the Kennedy-ordered assassination of Marilyn Monroe. (With the assistance of Agent Graves.)

Apologies if everyone already saw this.

It is extremely Eurocentric, let me just say right now. But it is pretty cool if your last name is of European origin. (One of my friends has a last name that shows only two hotspots: one in a particular part of Italy where her family originated, and one in a particular part of the U.S. where her extended family live.)

Also, click to zoom in on the map.

I loved Bubba Ho-Tep!

Elvis: No offense, Jack, but President Kennedy was a white man.
JFK: They dyed me this color! That's how clever they are!

"Here you are, alone with the President of the United States and the Leader of the Free World, and you ask a chicken-shit question like that."

and without attribution:
"The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business."

"Listen here. Listen. I know you're Elvis. There was a rumor, you know, that you hated me. But I thought about that. If you hated me, you could've finished me off the other night"
- John Kennedy.

She said she had images of spy satellites over the Pittsburgh suburbs until he explained: the guy had known her paternal grandfather during WWII and corresponded with him occasionally.

I am fairly neutral* on the particular conspiracy theory in Libra (non-crazy, less gripping than Tears of Autumn's), but I do like its implication, and one fitting in well with the facts: Oswald was involved with so many different parties and intelligence agencies that when it seemed likely that he had been the shooter, every single one of them woke up and said, 'Did one of our guys tell him to do this? Even if none did, can we prove that?,' and immediately began rocketing tinsel into the atmosphere just in case.

That is to say, none (or maybe just one) of the conspiracies existed, but maybe all of the cover-ups did.

===========================================
*'[If I should die] tell my wife "Hello."'
---Futurama

I recommend it.

(There was also Executive Action, which I do not recommend, but has an odd place in the world of nutbar conspiracy theories, in that it was being compared to The Exorcist by Wilson Bryan Key.

(One of Key's proofs that The Exorcist contained "subliminals" was that more people coughed during screenings of The Exorcist than during showings of Executive Action. (He counted!)

(He ignored the fact that The Exorcist was released in February to packed houses and lines around the block, while Executive Action was released in August to nearly-empty theaters.)

My favourite moment from the Illuminatus! version: after a few of the other shooters fire away, bar bs gur Qvyyvatre dhvaghcyrgf who just happens to be there (no conspiracy!) shrugs his shoulders, says, 'Why not?,' and joins in.

James, #179: I highly recommend the short story "The Winterberry" in the Resnick anthology Alternate Presidents. It'll break your heart.

OTOH, it shows there are 25 people with that name per million in Hawai'i, which seems wrong. There are about five people with our last name in the Oahu phone book; Oahu has 80% of the Hawai'i population.

Food for thought or further research, I guess.

I LOVE my in-laws' biggest coincidence story (They have several):

My father-in-law (and m-i-l, and their then-teenaged son who is now my husband) were in a game park in Zimbabwe. They saw one other car, and stopped by to see who was there.

It turns out to be someone my father-in-law went to elementary school with. In a one-room schoolhouse in rural Manitoba.

But the two clumps of moderate concentration in Argentina and India -- where the heck did those come from?

thanks! i was gonna stick my head up after ajay's comment, but i hadn't said anything previously in the thread, but i didn't want to come off too egotistical.

but who needs an ego when you've got your own tank? (i'd never seen a beetle tank before, though. man, those are cute.)

The fluorosphere bends back in upon itself

As for Irish names in India (Doyle @ 187), perhaps men of that name served in the British Army (as many of my Irish ancestors did)?

This leads me to my own coincidence story: I studied the clarinet in high school, and needed my own teacher to improve my technical abilities (really, I did). My first teacher was from the Bronx, nothing coincidental there; however, when he moved to Florida, he referred us to a guy in town who was named Xiques, pronounced "Hickies". When we met Mr. Xiques, he told us his family was Irish-Cuban. My Irish grandmother heard the name, remembered the family in her hometown that had sent a son to Cuba, and it was Hickeys -- she named all the people in that family, one of whom was my clarinet teacher's grandmother.

From a small town in the mid-center of Ireland to Cuba and then to a small town in the mid-Hudson Valley -- what are the odds?

As for my mother's name, no surprise to learn it's Irish (while I have no reason to believe Admiral Halsey is a relative, family lore is solid on William Drennan being ours)...

But the two clumps of moderate concentration in Argentina and India -- where the heck did those come from?

India - no doubt from the days of the Empire.
Argentina - Maybe from the Welsh immigrants

Interesting site, that. Searching my own last name, it's correctly shown with hotspots in the Norwegian west country and central mountains. Øvrebø is a pretty common placename wherever a homestead is higher in the terrain. In my case it's easy though - I still live there.

Unsurprisingly, it's a disjointed movie. But it's great fun. John Huston doesn't so much chew the scenery as suck it all into his maw and annihilate it.

Fritz Leiber satirized that attitude in A Specter is Haunting Texas; there was an ]abstract[ window-and-rifle sculpture on the plaza, and the current ruler was held in contempt for hiding out instead of {taking it like a man,letting himself be sacrificed for the good of the crops,...}.

Possibly more surprising: my surname is shown as >3x as frequent in New Zealand as in the U.S., where there have been Hitchcocks since the 1630's. I wonder whether it's specific, or other very-Anglo names are similarly more frequent due to colonization patterns?

But the two clumps of moderate concentration in Argentina and India -- where the heck did those come from?

India is likely the result of the British Empire; descendants of colonial officials or soldiers who stayed on.

Possibly the Doyles in Argentina are the descendants of Confederate States revanchists.

The fun one was looking at my maternal grandfather's two names. His original surname doesn't show much, either, as it's mostly Poland and eastward, and eastward vanishes off the recorded map. However, the name he changed it to in order to sound more vaguely British is a really good way to pinpoint where my maternal relatives live. There are about three *people* who show up in the world in places my kin have not gone.

The other lines of my geneology all have pretty much the expected results; the English one everywhere that was part of the British empire to some degree (Plus Denmark), the Ukrainian one with a reasonable immigration spread. And all too numerous to identify.

(No point in searching for my married name, as it's unrelated to either my or my husband's actual genealogy)

"We are three wise men."
"What?"
"We are three wise men."
"Well, what are you doing creeping around a cow shed at two o'clock in the morning? That doesn't sound very wise to me."

As for concidences, Ireland is so small that eveyone here experiences them all the time. My favourite one is when I was best man for my friend. When our fathers saw each other, across a car park, their eyes narrowed and they both hunched down a little. It turned out grown up in adjacent parishes, and had played football against each other as teenagers. They both moved away from home for jobs, and hadn't met in 30 years or so. My friend and I'd met at college, and had no idea.

CHip @ 199: From memory, I think I have this: "Ever since the death of sainted Jack, the term of the President of Texas has been from inauguration to assassination." Makes you wonder that not a one of them died of natural causes--the rivals can't be that anxious. Possibly a cover-up, where Presidents of Texas dead for various ignoble reasons were posthumously assassinated for the good of the state?

Well, there is a reason why I don't call my wife 'Suzie'.

Possibly; though I suspect it's more likely that Argentina is where some of the ships leaving Liverpool during the famine years were heading. (The Doyle in my ancestry who left County Wicklow for America ended up a private in the Union army; he didn't move to Arkansas until after the war.)

There was another person with my first name, middle initial, and last name at my college. We were the presidents of competing political organizations. We got each other's phone calls and press inquiries.

So when the whole "Who Killed JFK" issue is settled, hopefully in my lifetime, it'll be something truly bizarre and out-there, like...

2/10 on the bizarro scale:
"Lee Harvey Oswald was working as an agent not of Soviet Russia, as you might have expected, but Turkey. The Turkish military was pissed off that JFK's deal with Chrustjov involved dismantling the missile bases in Turkey."

5/10 on the bizarro scale:
"JFK ordered his own assassination to make sure the space program wouldn't be shot down by political enemies, but would be pursued in honor of his memory."

9/10 on the bizarro scale:
"JFK never existed. The victim was an actor playing a part, and was killed when he threatened to expose the fraud."
:-P

However, this blog on 'The New Twilight Zone' (Postcards from the Zone) shows the story Profile in Silver to have been written by J. Neil Schulman.

The writer shows up in the comments section, and describes a scene that didn't make it into the episode.

Dick Nixon, Allen Dulles, G.H. Bush, and many others all had a definable and significant part in affecting a series of events that changed the course of mankind by eliminating JFK. With Kennedy gone, the US and entire world were effectively manipulated and taken in directions not possible had he lived. The forces that perpetrated this coup have continued to affect the world and it's people ever since!

Shoot! How many of you even know who Allen Dulles was? Do you know his expertise? How did he get on the Warren Commission... after being fired by JFK?

Be objective folks! Don't believe everything you're led to believe!

All of us.

*Yawn*

He won the Pulitzer Prize for writing Ad, Vice, and Consent, a dark comedy parodying Nabokov's Lolita, in which Humbert Humbert is a child psychologist working in advertising for Saturday morning cartoons. To console him after his loss of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Mark Lane, an airport near Washington, DC was named after him.

Later, when the Republicans came to power, that airport was towed to Maryland and a new airport named after Ronald Reagan was built, by newly enslaved ex-union members, in its place.

Geez, who do you think we are? A bunch of dummies?

Indeed! Had Dick Nixon not cleverly arranged to lose the presidential race in 1960, Kennedy would never have been in that car!

Actually, if I don't stop to think about it, I get the Dulles brothers mixed up, which has lead to some really embarrassing too-hasty comments on my part over the years . . .

I apparently share exactly the same name -- first and last -- as another woman. (It's not a terribly common last name.) I got the caroline.[lastname] gmail address, whereas she apparently got the caroline.[middleinitial].[lastname] address.

I got a flurry of emails intended for her a while back, when she had a baby. One of them said "You and Keith must be over the moon!"

This terrified me at first, because my boyfriend's name is Keith. I actually wondered for a moment whether I'd been pregnant and hadn't realized it, and then considered the possibility that I was receiving email from an alternate universe.

Instead, it's just a tremendous coincidence.

(I was just reminded of this because I got another email looking for her. Currently I'm having a very pleasant chat with the woman looking for her -- I was able to provide what I believe to be her email address, so that was nice.)

I was rather struck by a moment that came when he was talking about one of his key never-before-seen recently-declassified documents: an "uncensored" transcript of a 1985 conversation between jailed mob boss Carlos Marcello and "a reliable FBI informant", in which Marcello makes a "clear confession" of having arranged JFK's assassination.

Waldron: I'll read it to you, right out of the FBI file. Here's one of the best parts of it: Marcello simply says, "Yeah, I had the SOB killed, and I would do it again. He was a thorn in my side - I wish I could have done it myself."

Yes, very colourful, I'm sure. But as a clear confession of having had JFK killed, it lacks a certain something...

I heard a claim that GSR was found on JFK, that only happens if you were up close. The Governor was also a military officer, well ranked, and was likely trained well in the use of a side arm.

It would also explain why he was wounded.If he had fired the gun left handed and close to his side, to make it appear that he was shot. It kind of explains the weird angle.

BUT there is one MAJOR hole. Sound, wouldn't the people in the car have heard the gun go off if the Governor had fired inside the vehicle?

It's a shaky theory, but tell me what you think.

No other hypothesis fits all the facts or passes the laugh test.

A new theory suggests a secret oligarchy ordered the hit,

Decades before it even happened,
Before JFK was even elected,
While JFK was still in the Navy,

And that orchestrating the plot,
Was simply a chess match for a world order,
Which included,

The Cuban Missile Crisis,
The Bay of Pigs fiasco,
The racial riots in the south,

That the government was involved,

But somebody from the outside was pulling the strings,

That the motive,
Was based on old hatreds
Stretching back to the Civil War.

Attached is only a taste of the story,

Which the government won’t seem to let me finish.

For more information

contact Gabriel Soliz, 818-804-9663, PO Box 261416, Encino, Calif, 91426

WWW.STILLDIGGING.COM

And "still digging" is a good description for what this fruitcake is doing.