Impossible: The Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald (8 page)

Didn’t see that one coming, did you? I told you to prepare to be amazed!

Dr. Schotz’s extraordinarily provocative point takes us back to where we began. Studying the Kennedy assassination brings us out of the realm of mere history, and into the world of what has academically and euphemistically been termed the “social construction of reality”: just what is history anyway? Is it what
actually
occurred, or is it the version that we
are told
occurred? How do we decide which is the correct version of history? What version of history best conforms to the evidence? And if there is a version of history which best conforms to the evidence, why would anyone report a
different
version of history?

And, if a different version of history
is
reported, and
all
the evidence goes
against
that version, how do we explain the fact that so many people have been, and continue to be, perpetually fooled? If so,
the real story
of the Kennedy assassination would be that
we don’t know the real story
of the Kennedy assassination!

Think
The Matrix
.

Think
The Truman Show
.

Think
The Prisone
r.

This is what we are talking about, people!

If Schotz is right, then the citizens of America have a problem on their hands . . . the information they have been given in this case, and, by extension, possibly dozens or hundreds of other cases related to historical events, could possibly be describing a parallel (but opposing) world of
fiction
masquerading as a world of
fact
.

And since no evidence has been provided that there are parallel worlds, the apparent ability to convince us that what is true is
false
, and that what is false is
true
, has the most disturbing implications, to wit:

The authorities promulgating the Lone Assassin Scenario, if it is indeed false, would be functioning like the confederates in the Asch experiment, telling you that lines A or C are the correct answer when it’s really line B. And if the true facts of the matter are unavailable to you, your only option is to go along . . .

Think about it: what is the ultimate hat trick of political power? To convince you that a shot from the front came from the back . . . or that a shot over 5 inches below the collar “really” entered at the base of the neck!

With power like that — the power to convince you that what is demonstrably
false
is
true
— what
couldn’t
the mythmakers do?

The power to modify our view of reality is a power that we have granted to our authorities when we ignore the fine print and put away the fine-tooth comb. When our authorities have talked, we, good citizens all, have listened. But that’s a power we only want to grant to authorities who have
themselves
correctly viewed reality. If they have not, the risk of being fooled — and all the consequences which naturally flow — are great. If the mind can be changed, can the soul be far behind?

In this book, we are going to focus predominantly on the
physical
evidence that has been proposed to buttress The Case Against Oswald. Because of this exclusive focus, you won’t find extensive information here about many familiar names in Kennedy assassination literature, such as Guy Bannister, Allen Dulles, John McCloy, Henry Luce, David Rockefeller, Edward Lansdale, David Ferrie, David Atlee Phillips, James Files, Chauncey Holt, “Tosh” Plumlee, Phillip Twombly, Johnny Roselli, Charles Nicoletti, Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, Gerry Hemming, Charles Harrelson, George Bush Sr., E. Howard Hunt, William Harvey, Sam Giancana, Clay Shaw, Lloyd Cobb, Alton Ochsner, Walter Dornberger, Earle Cabell, William Gaudet, Donald Kendall, Richard Nixon, Cord Meyer, Frank Sturgis, Ed Butler, Donald Byrd, Clint Murchison, Curtis LeMay, William Reily, Judith Vary Baker, Mary Sherman, and a host of other personalities who may or may not be related in one way or another to the events of November 22, 1963. Understanding who these people are, and the role they played or possibly played, is important, but until you are absolutely convinced that The Case Against Oswald is completely impossible, their relationship to the case, if any, will be perpetually mysterious.

With that in mind, let us continue. You are about to enter a world where black is white, but so is red. Where a fact may be true one day, but false the next. Where the innocent are guilty, while the guilty frame our perception.

Welcome to the world of Kennedy assassination research!

Once again, prepare to be amazed, and brace yourself for a brush with the impossible.

You want a difficult, what some would call an
impossible
task? Try defending Lee Harvey Oswald. If the government and the mass media are to be believed, even
thinking
that he was not the sole assassin of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963 certifies you as a bona-fide la-la-lander, proud possessor of a lifetime complimentary membership with the Flat Earth Society. (And yes, there really is one; visit
http://theflatearthsociety.org
if you feel so inclined.) Do you think that characterization unfair? If so, you probably weren’t reading the
Dallas Observer
on July 6, 2000, and if you were, you certainly weren’t reading this article by Robert Wilonsky:
1

The Nut lives just outside a small town called Paradise
, a few miles northwest of Fort Worth. With his wife of more than 30 years, The Nut inhabits 25 acres of land deserving of its proximity to a town called Paradise, because even the still, damp air of summer feels light and sweet here. . . .

The Nut — with his short pants and denim shirt and hiking boots and straw hat and walking cane — and his four dogs walk up here when it’s time to think, to clear the brain and focus on shadow governments and assassinated Presidents and spacemen who live among us.

“This,” says The Nut, pointing toward the spectacular horizon, “is where I come to be alone.”

It is hard to reconcile such a placid, idyllic setting with the man who has lived on it since 1979. For a decade, The Nut — who has a name, Jim Marrs, a most appropriate moniker for a man who not long ago wrote a book titled
Alien Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence Among Us
— has been among the most high-profile of conspiracy theorists . . .

Now, if you were a rigorous fact-checker, you would want to make sure that Mr. Wilonsky wasn’t telling a tall one. He wasn’t:

Ouch!

Well, you might think that the unfortunately-named Marrs is just a blip, and maybe he is, but he is not the only blip. To hammer home the point that “conspiracy theorist” = nut job, we have this fine work by Kenn Thomas which first graced our shores on May 31, 2011:

It is hard for me to imagine how the Kennedy researchers in the forums I have been perusing over the last few months have missed this scholarly effort: on the other hand, maybe they believe, like me, that if there is one time it’s okay to judge a book by its cover, this is it.

While it is safe to say that
JFK & UFO
is probably a long shot to be included in any Kennedy assassination bibliographies going forward, we can see that the Thomas book one-ups Marrs: while
Alien Agenda
happens to be written by the same author of
Crossfire
(a book on the Kennedy assassination cited in the previous chapter), the content of those two books is separate; this book, on the other hand, explicitly identifies JFK “conspiracy theorists” with people who believe in UFOs.

Yes, it is true that at least two of the millions of people who claim to believe that the evidence supports a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy also claim to believe in . . . dare I utter the word . . .
aliens
. Ouch again!

So now we know that at least two of the defenders of the thesis of this book are potentially off their rockers. Hardly an auspicious beginning!

Armed with book covers like these, the defenders of the lone assassin thesis feel emboldened to stipulate that what they have to say is the gospel truth, as we learned in this article in the
Digital Journal
on September 11, 2011:
2

[A]ny individual who claims Oswald did not shoot the President
or that the 9/11 attacks were not carried out by fanatics with hijacked commercial aircraft
is prima facie unworthy of belief with regard to any discussion of world affairs
, because the failure to accept the absolutely overwhelming evidence adduced in support of these two propositions is indicative of a totally denialist mentality.

The Wilonsky article pairs JFK assassination researchers with people who believe in aliens, and this uncredited
Digital Journal
article pairs the hypothesis that Kennedy was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy with the unsubstantiated belief (held by some) that the twin towers were not felled by hijacked commercial airliners. In both cases, these articles leverage the inertia of a discredited known A (aliens/no aircraft) to pair with an unknown B (conspiracy), and through the pairing attempt to identify B with A, and thereby drag B through A’s mud.

You have to admit, it’s a pretty successful technique. Who wants Marrs and Thomas on their side? If you don’t — and you can be forgiven for that — your tendency is to want to go to the other side, where all the well-thought-of authorities await your companionship.

Faced with this, we have to ask, why not join the “responsible” crowd, Asch theory be damned?

Yes, for the most part, that “responsible” mass media crowd is in agreement. Say you were going to watch the miniseries
The Kennedys
(which was originally lined up to air on
The History Channel
, and later
Showtime
, but was not shown on either of those networks), available at the time of this writing on
Netflix
. If you hover your mouse over a description of
Episode Seven
, the callout gives you that miniseries’ version of reality — “Lee Harvey Oswald finalizes his assassination plan”:

And, if you decided to watch that episode, over 2/3 of the way through, you would be treated to this image of Oswald loading up:

Not a television watcher? Readers of mass-market books received the same information. At the top of the bestseller lists in 2012 was Stephen King’s book
11/22/63
, whose primary thesis was that Oswald was the lone assassin:

A TV series. A book. But just the iceberg’s tip. Over the years, the following respectable entities have, at one time or another come out in favor of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin of President Kennedy: high school textbooks, college textbooks, at least one Nobel prize winner (Luis Alvarez), a chief judge of the Supreme Court (Earl Warren), the PBS series
Nova
(“Who Shot President Kennedy?”), the PBS series
Frontline
(“Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?”), CBS (“A CBS News Inquiry: The Warren Report”), ABC (“The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy”), the
Discovery Channel
(“JFK: Inside the Target Car”),
Showtime
(“On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald”),
Life
magazine (multiple articles in the 60’s identifying Oswald as the assassin), the
Journal Of The
American Medical Association
(which published a series of articles in 1992 attacking the credibility of Dr. Charles Crenshaw and Gary Shaw (who co-authored a book called
Conspiracy Of Silence
), resulting in a defamation lawsuit settled favorably in Crenshaw and Shaw’s behalf after the JAMA agreed to pay $213,000 [see
Journal of the American Medical Association
, May 24/31 1995, v. 273, No. 20, p. 1632, and
Assassination Science
, p. 19]),
Wikipedia
(article on Lee Harvey Oswald, etc.), and
The New York Times
(articles too numerous to mention, with several examples in this book).

Yes, there are exceptions, such as the Oliver Stone film
JFK
, and a series which appeared on
The History Channel
called
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
, and several others which have appeared over the years, including documentaries by Jesse Ventura, but these have to be seen as mere ripples in a much larger pond, especially when you consider that the most potent evidence of conspiracy was contained in the last three episodes of
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
, episodes which were subsequently banned from distribution (go to
Amazon
to buy the DVDs: you can buy six, but there were originally nine).

But for the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy, additional high-profile Lee-Harvey-Oswald-dunnit works are planned, including a book by Bill O’Reilly, and a movie slated to be made from
Reclaiming History
(the extremely well-documented Bible of the lone assassin position), with Tom Hanks handling the role of executive producer. From an appeal-to-authority standpoint, it looks like those not kowtowing to the party line should, like Marrs, run for the hills.

Now, all of this really looks bad for those who want to challenge the lone assassin position, but if you are an independent thinker, you’re going to be brushing all of this off. Sure, anyone can focus on a lone nut or two who happen to believe in aliens, and ignore the thousands of responsible people — forensic pathologists and investigators and attorneys and radiation oncologists and philosophy professors and physicists and educators — who believe that the evidence does not support the official version of what transpired in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Those individuals look at the
evidence
, and ignore the two dozen+ media outlets who have reported the alternative view as true; as history shows, two dozen media outlets, and even twenty dozen, can be wrong wrong wrong, as we saw with respect to the “weapons of mass destruction” rationale for the Iraq war. Just because people are marching together in lockstep . . .