Conspiracies: The Facts * the Theories * the Evidence (23 page)

not
show the real injuries, but have been switched to cover up proof of the additional gunmen.

One useful witness who might have revealed more would,

of course, have been Lee Harvey Oswald, but he was himself

infamously – and expediently – shot dead just two days after his

capture, at the hands of outraged nightclub owner Jack Ruby,

supposedly striking a vengeful blow on behalf of the citizenry.

But, just as some say that Kennedy himself had been left oddly

vulnerable by an unusual lack of protective agents on the day of

his shooting, so too has concern been raised at the seemingly

lax security at the police headquarters from where Oswald was

being brought out to be taken to the county jail. With a melee

of jostling press reporters and cameramen waiting for him, this

apparent carelessness allowed Ruby simply to step from the crowd

and shoot Oswald in the stomach at point-blank range.

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Far from being an incensed member of the public, it has been

alleged that Ruby had personal connections to Oswald and was

party to inside knowledge of the JFK assassination plot. It is

worthy of note that Rose Cherami, a self-confessed drug addict

who had worked as a stripper for Ruby, told police in advance of

22 November that she knew there were plans to kill Kennedy. She

also claimed, in the aftermath of both shootings, that Ruby and

Oswald had once had a gay relationship. Doubters poured scorn

on her stories, but her sudden ‘accidental’ death under the wheels of a car two years later made some take them more seriously.

Ruby himself was quickly convicted of Oswald’s murder

and might have added important details of his own at a second

impending appeal trial, having hinted that he knew far more than

he had been allowed to say at the first. However, he apparently

died of cancer in late 1966, before he had the chance. At a televised news conference in 1965, Ruby had said:

Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to

the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what
occurred, my motives. The people who had so much to gain, and
had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m
in, will never let the true facts come above board to the world.

When a reporter then queried, ‘Are these people in very high

positions, Jack?’, Ruby responded with a ‘Yes.’

By this time, Ruby had clearly become a conspiracy theorist

himself, believing that cancer cel s had been deliberately injected into his body by prison doctors. Later, Ruby apparently told

his psychiatrist, Werner Teuter, that JFK’s killing was ‘an act of overthrowing the government’. Ruby claimed to know ‘who had

President Kennedy killed’, but feared for his own life, stating,

I am doomed. I do not want to die. But I am not insane. I

was framed to kill Oswald.

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As with so many other events where answers to awkward questions

might be too readily available from named witnesses (see below),

it should be recorded here that an above-average number of other

key witnesses in connection with the killing of Kennedy appear

to have met strange demises.2 The further death of Robert F

Kennedy, dying shortly after being gunned down in a Los Angeles

hotel in 1968, created yet another tier of conspiratorial allegations.

The Warren Commission

Set up just weeks after JFK’s assassination to provide a full

investigation into the event and those following it, the Warren

Commission predictably concluded that both Oswald and Ruby

were the sole players. Its final report, delivered just ten months after Dealey Plaza’s darkest hour, was heavily criticized even

at the time for its sloppiness and inconsistent analysis, with all interviews held in suspiciously closed sessions. Remarkably, only one transcript out of the 94 witness testimonies was actual y read by every member of the commission, when it might have been

assumed that each would have wanted to see all of them in order

to make a valid judgement. Overal , the Warren Report felt less

than convincing and failed to inspire confidence in anyone but the staunchest
patriots. Its verdict was unsurprising to some minds, given that it had been set up by the very man that they, rightly

or wrongly, believed may even have been responsible for the

shooting – President Johnson.

When the Watergate scandal brought public trust crashing

down further, the public scepticism about the Warren Report

accelerated massively and became damaging. This may explain

why a further inquiry, using new evidence, was mounted by the

House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late

1970s. Its final report in 1979, while backing up some of the

Warren Commission’s findings as regards bullets and wounds, did

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make some attempt to take on board the other theories which had

been bubbling under, and accepted the likelihood that another

gunman had been involved, although the main responsibility was

still left with Oswald. The HSCA’s main concession, therefore, was to acknowledge that a wider conspiracy had ‘probably’ been at

work, although it failed to follow up any of the implications of

this conclusion, seemingly in the hope that history would soon

confine the whole business to the eternal grey box of unsolved

mysteries and move on – a strategy that mostly appears to have

worked.

Important Lessons

Here, perhaps, is the greatest lesson to be learned from the shooting of JFK. There
are
still people who insist on the lone gunman theory and dismiss all other speculation as poison from the treasonous

fringe, but the overwhelming mass of observers suspect that

something more insidious was at work. This conspiracy theory,

for once, resides firmly in the mainstream. Yet the vast mythology that has grown up around the ‘curse of the Kennedys’, with all

its affairs and scandals, Cuban missiles, Marilyn Monroe and

the Mafia, has swallowed up the magic bullet, grassy knoll and

mysterious tramps with it, allowing the more serious inferences

to go unaddressed. This is of concern, because if a secret cabal

capable of removing the leader of the world’s greatest superpower was at work even then, what might it be doing today? For all the

fingers pointed at the likes of Johnson and the CIA, lurking in

the background is always the idea that, beyond the selfish egos of individuals, the wider New World Order plan lies.

If the vast majority of people believe that JFK’s death was a

conspiracy, but feel that too much time has passed and too much

confusion been stirred into the mix for it real y to matter any

more, as would seem to be the case, then it stands to reason that 141

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similar tactics might well be employed on a regular basis. There is probably an art to obfuscating just long enough that the murkier

points of an atrocity become confined to an unreachable past. By

such strategies, murder becomes nostalgia. Something similar is

possibly being attempted over 9/11, creating an urgency among

truthseekers to keep the many questions about that more recent

atrocity fresh and alive while it is still in full living memory.

A crucial point remains: especial y with the Kennedy case,

certain events turn most of us into conspiracy theorists. The

question is, can those theories produce enough proven evidence

in time to prevent such crimes from occurring again? Already,

even a more recent assassination theory, this time involving a

member of the British Royal Family, has begun to fade into a hazy realm of myth.

ii) Diana, prinCess of Wales

Mass Mourning

Those who hold to the Kennedy lone gunman hypothesis might

argue that without proven evidence of others being involved it

cannot be described as a conspiracy. Only when the presence of

supplementary plotters or assassins is assumed does it cross into that category. What no one doubts, however, is that the President
was
unlawful y killed. Yet, when even establishing this becomes an uphill struggle in the face of official denial, it is curious to observe that the public doesn’t lose its natural propensity towards conspiracy thinking.

Of all recent history’s major upsets, the death of Diana,

Princess of Wales in a car crash at the Pont de l’Alma underpass

shortly after midnight in Paris on 31 August 1997 had the most

direct impact on the people of Britain, and many beyond. Scenes

of characteristical y restrained but still acute mass hysteria

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followed the announcement, and an atmosphere of intense

national mourning, not seen since the death of Queen Victoria

nearly a century before, gripped the nation. This culminated

in the televised funeral, which saw streets across the nation

empty and an eerie silence descend, outpourings of grief being

expressed even by usual y stoic individuals. Just briefly, the ‘stiff upper lip’ slipped, as something very profound was touched in

the collective – a phenomenon which has been oft-debated in

the years since.

It was easy to forget, during all of this, that Diana had not been so well regarded in the years leading to her end. In the glory days of her doomed marriage to Prince Charles, heir to the throne,

something of her innocent and apparently caring nature had

seemed to speak to the people, bringing a new human quality to

an often-remote Royal Family. Diana’s popularity consequently

soared to almost surreal heights, creating expectations that

no public figure could live up to indefinitely. But, sure enough, since the break-up of the marriage, her criticism of the royals,

tales of multiple affairs, illegal y taped phone cal s to lovers

(‘Squidgygate’) and very public personal revelations made in

books and interviews, actively encouraged by Diana herself, had

sullied her image. Yet something in her very fragility, together

with the admissions of everyday failings, still ensured that a streak of sympathy towards the Princess remained. With the shocking

news of her death, the view of Diana as a superstar martyr to

the modern world increased a hundredfold, enhanced by the

accusations that ‘paparazzi’ photographers may have contributed

to the crash by pursuing her vehicle. The gaping hole left in the public psyche by the sudden absence of the ‘People’s Princess’

starkly il ustrated just how many collective fantasies had been

projected onto Diana, making her loss feel an all the more bitter blow to people who had, almost without realizing it, vicariously

lived through this poster-girl for the masses.

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Murder Pol s

So was it, then, a deep state of psychological denial and anger

that compelled people almost immediately to seek external

responsibility for Diana’s death? Or did this occur because there was actual evidence to suggest that the devastating crash, which

killed Diana, her lover Dodi Al-Fayed and the driver of the car,

Henri Paul, may have been contrived – an assassination made

to look like an accident? Pol s taken in 2007, ten years after the event, showed that a remarkable proportion of British people

believed that Diana was murdered. Some reports alleged a 90 per

cent adherence to this view, while more moderate pol s said one

in three, but either way the results were telling. For all the official inquiries which have since said otherwise, little has changed in

this regard. The strength of views lessens somewhat beyond

Britain’s borders, but those within them would not appear to care what outsiders think.3 The combined gut of Diana’s own people

knows its own mind in this regard, and this hugely significant

statistic must make belief in her assassination one of the most

subscribed-to conspiracy theories of all time in any one country, even more so than with Kennedy in the USA.

Do statistics make a belief right, though? The verdicts of at

least three French and UK inquests or judicial inquiries are

clear on what happened: the driver, Henri Paul, was three times

over the French alcohol limit for driving and consequently lost

control of the car as it sought to speed away from over-eager

photographers. This scenario seems acceptably probable at

first glance, but, as we have seen, things are frequently not that straightforward, and the Diana case, in the details around both

the crash and its aftermath, does present a number of anomalies

that deserve some thought.

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Assassination Evidence?

The main piece of evidence for the official verdicts – the blood test carried out on Henri Paul – has come under heavy criticism from