I’m watching “American Experience” on PBS, in which, so far, is accusing the right wing of killing JFK. It’s early in the show, so maybe things will even out, but so far they’ve interviewed Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin two of the most far-left, anarchic leftists from the ’60s. They’re saying that it just didn’t seem possible that in right-wing Dallas that a lefty who had lived in Russia had killed Kennedy. Haven’t they heard of the Warren Commission and the numerous other investigations that proved Oswald acted alone? Even Dan Rather is weighing in, implying things are still unknown. I guess these guys believe everything in Chariots of the Gods.
UPDATE: Now they’re discussing why Dan Rather said on Nov. 25, 1963 that JFK’s head went forward when the Zapruder film showed that it went backward. This has been dealt with on the Discovery Channel program “Mythbusters.” When a high-powered bullet goes through a skull, they found in tests, it goes through the head with almost no resistance. But the brain matter exiting from the exit wound creates a force similar to a jet engine, pushing the head in the opposite direction, in JFK’s case, backwards.
UPDATE: Wow! Arlen Specter is debating conspiracy-theory author Mark Lane on a 1966 BBC program. Man, does he look young.
UPDATE: So the entire meltdown of America in the ’60s is a result of Mark Lane sewing the seeds of conspiracy, which made people not believe the Warren Commission Report, which made them not believe LBJ on Vietnam, which led to the Summer of Love. Riiiight.
UPDATE: Now they’re questioning the shooting of three bullets in six seconds. Now, I’ve seen numerous untrained reenactors in numerous documentaries and TV shows do this with ease.
UPDATE: Boy, some of this old TV coverage is fascinating. I was overseas in the service at the time and could only read about the Jim Garrison-Clay Shaw carnival in Time and Newsweek.
UPDATE: Hayden and Gitlin see the JFK, MLK and RFK assassinations as not random, but part of America’s sick power structure trying to destroy the coming “progressive majority.” Riiiight. Gitlin says the assassinations caused them to go ape in Chicago in 1968. Like they needed any encouragement.
UPDATE: Oooooh! They just made a point of showing Richard Nixon with Donald Rumsfeld and John Ehrlichman. Well there’s your connection!
UPDATE: Now we’re on to the Mafia conspiracy. I guess all the right-wing connections are too flimsy. Gary Hart (yes, McGovern’s campaign manager and later a U.S. Senator) points out that JFK had been on the phone almost daily for a month with Judith Exum Campbell, who had connections to Sam Giancanna, the mobster. Now they’re interviewing Oliver Stone. He says the “story is true in its essence and its spirit.” I think that is the same as “fake but accurate.”
UPDATE: Candor from the late Norman Mailer. He says, “Like most conspiratorialists, I wanted there to be a conspiracy,” but he just couldn’t make it hang together. He says Oswald was very bright, if not educated, a self-taught intellectual. Another historian says anyone who thinks he wasn’t bright enough to do this is wrong.
UPDATE: “After 40 years, none of the theories pan out,” says Edward Jay Epstein. Gitlin says people have always wanted to believe in conspiracies. Is he saying that he, Mark Lane, Tom Hayden and all the others were full of horse hockey? A historian who knew Oswald at the time says when he came close to killing Gen. Edwin Walker it was “the Rosetta stone” of the Kennedy assassination. He knew he could pull off the big one. I wonder why she didn’t go to the cops when Oswald told her he’d shot Walker.
UPDATE: So, in the end, it was Oswald all the time. Hayden, Gitlin, Lane, Epstein, all those who questioned the Warren Commission, who wanted right-wing America, the Mafia, LBJ or whomever, to have been involved in a big conspiracy, were simply wrong, and have been all these years. Now I’m trying to figure out why this was aired at all.