A hydra-headed monster

There's a new book out on the JFK assassination. No surprise that it argues for a conspiracy. What is surprising is that this one comes from a respectable university press and is written by a historian at the Naval War College.

Unfortunately, the book sounds deeply flawed. Washington Decoded has a long detailed review/refutation.

An island of sanity

Now that the JFK assassination is back in the news, it is worth noting that Dale Myers's has a tremendous website/blog that sorts out the facts from the garbage.

Secrets of a homicide

JFK: The conspiracy puzzle

The vast majority of Americans believe that JFK was murdered by a conspiracy that may or may not have included Lee Harvey Oswald. This has been true for decades.

That is sad on many levels. It is also puzzling. The belief in conspiracy took hold at a time when the MSM was powerful and trusted and the MSM initially defended the Warren Commission.

For example, CBS News and Walter Cronkite (“the most trusted man in America”) did a four part special report on the assassination in 1967. They rebutted the charges made by Mark Lane and other “critics”, yet the conspiracy train kept moving on and gathering steam.

In that same year, NBC News and The Saturday Evening Post ran big stories that were harshly (and rightly) critical of Jim Garrison and his so-called “investigation”. Once again, the conspiracy theories kept finding adherents.

It is astounding when you think about it. A handful of cranks, frauds, and charlatans managed to convince a majority of the public that there was a conspiracy in Dallas. For some reason, they were more persuasive and more influential than the MSM at the height of its power.

Forty-five years in Dallas: Time to put the conspiracy theories in their place

OK. So we know Oswald did it. Why do so many people believe otherwise?

That, in my mind, is the only important question left when it comes to the JFK assassination.

Bryan Burrough, in his review of Bugliosi's Reclaiming History describes the appropriate response to the conspiracy theorists:

What Bugliosi has done is a public service; these people should be ridiculed, even shunned. It’s time we marginalized Kennedy conspiracy theorists the way we’ve marginalized smokers; next time one of your co-workers starts in about Oswald and the C.I.A., make him stand in the rain with the other outcasts.

Oswald’s Ghost After watching it and thinking about it a few days, I have three big problems with the documentary. While it does, finally seem to come down on the side of Oswald as Lone Gunman, it does so subtly and quietly. I wish the director had been more clear and forthright about the manifest problems with the conspiracy theories. The film uses Tom Hayden and Todd Gittlin as talking heads who spend most of their time talking about the impact the “unanswered questions” surrounding the assassination on the politics. Since both men were leaders in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) we get a heavy does of New Left perspective and apologetics. Hayden is especially problematic because he is more propagandist and activist rather than sober historian. Morevover, the famed socialist Irving Howe said of him: “Tom Hayden gives opportunism a bad name.” I can’t help wondering if Gitlin’s and Hayden’s explanation is the whole story. The New Left was quite willing to seize an issue and use it to their own end: From The Roots of Radicalism by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter: (1982)

Quoting Mark Rudd (SDS president at Columbia): "We manufactured the issues. The Institute of Defense Analysis is nothing at Columbia. And the gym issue is bull. It doesn't mean anything to anybody. I had never been to the gym site before the demonstration began. I didn't even know how to get there." "Even Berkeley had a slogan that "the issue is not the issue," meaning that the real issue was not free speech on campus but thoroughgoing social change." Mike Goldfield in New Left Notes (1966): "You have to realize that the issue didn't matter. The issues were never the issues....It was the revolution that was everything. The only thing that mattered was what you were doing for the revolution. That is why dope was good. Anything that undermined the system contributed to the revolution and was therefore good."

Hayden and Gittlin’s narrative is debatable. Maybe the New left was energized by the conspiracy theories. OTOH, maybe The Movement promoted the theories because they fit their preconceived ideas about a corrupt power structure and also helped undermine the authority of the Establishment. That’s a key question for historians. Are we looking at an honest attempt to grapple with unanswered questions, or a species of “popular delusion”, or a cynical exercise in agit-prop. “Oswald’s Ghost” treats the conspiracy theorists and promoters as honest and never addresses the other possibilities. The movie basically ignores the toxic, noxious, consequences of the Grassy Knoll cult. Very little time is spent on Clay Shaw, the innocent man that Jim Garrison indicted in New Orleans as part of his crude, demagogic charade. Shaw was bankrupted and died a few years after the jury exonerated him. Or take the case of Dallas police officer J D Tippett. He was shot by Oswald shortly after the assassination. His murder is a problem for the conspiracy theorists. Rather than revise their opinion that Oswald was innocent, they perform contortions to exonerate LHO on this murder as well. Many of them suggest that Tippett was part of the plot (i.e. he helped kill JFK or helped those who did). Thus, the “buffs” smear a policeman who died in the line of duty so that they can still pretend that Oswald was a patsy. They have no evidence, of course, but that has never stopped the Church of the Grassy Knoll.

Oswald's Ghost

PSB Frontline ran an interesting documentary on the JFK assassination and the conspiracy theories that surround it.

Oswald's Ghost

Washington Decoded has an incisive review.

UPDATE:

According to the movie, 70% of the American public believes that the assassination was carried out by a conspiracy. That should be fairly sobering to those who are full-throated proponents of the "wisdom of crowds".

After all, here we have the most investigated crime in history. And yet, more people believe fairy tales than the honest, messy historical truth.

UPDATE 2

Just found a great example: Here is a journalist and true crime blogger who refuses to accept that the Lone Gunman was a Lone Gunman. Even more unbelievable is that he thinks Jim Garrison was a poor victim who was "hounded to his grave" for trying to find the truth. How can history stand a chance against such arrogant and invincible ignorance?

See also:

Bill Whittle takes on conspiracy thinking

Conspiracy theories, solved cold cases and the long silent witness

A recurring motif in conspiracy literature is the “witness” who waits for years before coming forward to tell their stories. With popular subjects such as the JFK assassination or the Roswell UFO there seems to be no end to these witnesses. The flow is not even constrained by the actuary tables because we now hear from witnesses even after they die.

“My father, on his deathbed in 2003, told me…”

Non-conspiracy types have a real problem with this sort of “evidence”. It is exceedingly difficult to falsify. The passage of time makes it nearly impossible to check any details of the story. Hence, we have to take the witness on faith.

For example, say some guy comes forward tomorrow and tells Montel Williams that on 9 December 1965 he hid on a hillside and watched as US military personnel hauled four body bags and a large, tarp-covered object from the woods near Kecksburg, PA. Had he told his story in 1965, we could check a host of details to test his veracity. The milk truck driver can tell us if dozens of army trucks lined Ankney Hill Road as the witness claims. The high school teacher can confirm or rebut the claim that the witness missed school on December 10 because military intelligence officers interrogated him for eight hours and threatened to send him to Vietnam if he talked about what he saw.

It seems eminently reasonable to ignore such tardy witnesses unless they can provide compelling evidence to substantiate the critical elements of their story.

So what do we do with cold criminal cases?

All too frequently, the crucial “evidence” that prosecutors use at trial is the uncorroborated testimony of witnesses who came forward years after the crime occurred. Just as with the Kecksburg example, it is nearly impossible to verify their story with any sort of physical evidence.

I’m not sure that I can see a clear distinction between the Grassy Knollers and the hero DA who convicts a man on the word of a witness who waits twenty years to tell their story.


More on this later.

Bill Whittle takes on conspiracy thinking

SEEING THE UNSEEN, Part 2

It’s called Occam’s Razor, and not Occam’s Hypothesis, or Occam’s Theorem, or Occam’s Bit of Useful Advice, because it is a razor it cuts cleanly and with great efficiency.

And though it pains me to say so, this culture is in desperate need of a shave.

It deserves to be read in full.

I think that he nails the personality of the average Grassy Knoller

I’ll tell you something. These conspiracy theorists that ignore that miserable, pathetic, self-aggrandizing egomaniac named Lee Harvey Oswald, or glorify him as a patsy and a hero, do so because deep down inside they realize something unpleasant about Lee Harvey Oswald and themselves.

They are Oswald.

Whittle knows his conspiracy theories and he understands the importance of critical thinking.

Heinlein said something important on the latter point:

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.

Loony literature can look very scholarly with hundreds of footnotes and long appendices. It is the logic and critical thinking that is missing. Sometimes, basic honesty in handling the sources is a little scarce as well.

The sad thing is that the same weakness shows up in many respectable academic departments. How many trees have died so that historians could argue that Stalin was not a mass murderer or that Alger Hiss was a victim of anti-Communist paranoia?

It happens right before our eyes in the blogosphere. There are plenty of blogs that refuse to believe the NC Attorney General in the Duke lacrosse case. They ignore the evidence and write of dark, formless conspiracies. Or, they ignore most of the evidence and twist a few points to create the shadow of a hint of a doubt that maybe something illegal happened. They sound like Birchers and are too far gone to realize it.

Whittle is right that such thinking usually grows out of the limited mind and stunted personality of the conspiracist. The possession of dangerous, secret knowledge is intoxicating and gives meaning to those whose achievements fall short of their self-esteem.

The late Michael Kelly touched on another part of the appeal. Knowingness is an attribute that is easy to acquire. Knowledge requires hard study and hard thinking. Knowingness is the lazy way out.

Photon Courier discusses this as it applies to academia.

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THEORY

This is especially apt:

Why is theory (which would often more accurately be called meta-theory) so attractive to so many denizens of university humanities departments? To some extent, the explanation lies in simple intellectual fad-following. But I think there is a deeper reason. Becoming an alcolyte of some all-encompassing theory can spare you from the effort of learning about anything else. For example: if everything is about (for example) power relationships--all literature, all history, all science, even all mathematics--you don't need to actually learn much about medieval poetry, or about the Second Law of thermodynamics, or about isolationism in the 1930s. You can look smugly down on those poor drudges who do study such things, while enjoying "that intellectual sweep of comprehension known only to adolescents, psychopaths and college professors" (the phrase is from Andrew Klavan's unusual novel True Crime.)

To go back to Heinlein and the academy, i've come to believe that the really fuzzy fields like sociology use scholarship and theory to avoid both logic and data.

Ideological commitment plays a role, too. Oswald was inconvenient for the Left. If JFK was murdered by a right-winger in a right-wing city, it confirms the Left's view of the world. But if he died at the hands of a communist revolutionary wannabe, then things get messy. It is no wonder that so manny tried to remove Oswald from the picture. (It is worth noting that the first attempts to paint Oswald as a patsy came from Communist propagandist here and in Western Europe.)

Lastly, we the problem that Howard Gardner identified: it is hard to change our minds once we have taken a position in public. Many find it easier to invent conspiracies than to admit that they were wrong.

Kecksburg

So Bryant Gumble is a serious journalist? Then what's he doing hosting junk like this?

Yeah, i watched it. Not often my former neck of the woods ends up on a cable special with a big name journalist fronting the whole deal.

But for anyone who saw it and thinks there's fire beneath the smoke... especially the stuff about the men in black.... please take a look at this and this. The MIB thing is a hoax and the hoaxer's friend spills the story.

And another thing while i am at it--- why didn't Bryant track down one of the 75-100 soldiers who were in those woods?

Mothman

I watched "The Mothman Prophesies" this weekend. Not a great movie by any means. The only reason I watched it was that it was "based" on events that supposedly took place in Point Pleasant W.Va. back in 1966-67. If you want the scary version of those events, click here. If you want to read how a few puzzling events can be used to create a hoax read this. (It is an insider's account by a journalist who knew the chief hoaxer.)

I was intrigued when i heard of the movie and its inspiration because i went to school in southeast Ohio and yet had never heard of Mothman. No one I knew from the area around Point Pleasant ever mentioned it that i recall. The same is true for the Kecksburg UFO. It wasn't a topic of local conversation for twenty years but then Unsolved Mysteries features it and "witnesses" come out of the woodwork. Of course, their accounts all fit neatly into the TV storyline.