1963 [updated]

*

I considered embedding the Zapruder film today, but I just can't do it. If you have the stomach to watch it, here's a narrated version of it that includes other film from the heinous moments and sound imposition from two Dictabelt recordings that were made concurrently with the assassination. And here is a close-up (cropped and restored or enhanced) version. Both are upsetting, possibly more so to people who were alive at the time than to people who relate to it mostly as a remote 20th century historical event.

Over the years I've become baffled by the drumbeat of polemic to the effect that only "nuts" believe that there was a conspiracy involved in gunning down President Kennedy in his November 22 motorcade. Acknowledging that we don't have all the facts, and that reasonable people can disagree, it seems incredible to me that anyone could accept uncritically that Oswald was the lone gunman. As the narrator of this clip indicates, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1976 that four shots were fired from two different directions and that, consequently, the crime was an act of conspiracy.

The anti-conspiracy drumbeat has really ramped up over the past 15 years or so. Die-hard proponents of the Lone Gunman Theory must rely on absurd concepts like the "magic bullet" that injured Texas Governor John Connally (in the front seat of the limo) before wounding the President. They also must rely on arcane ideas about intracranial pressure and questionable ballistics analysis (black-box concepts that are not testable by the average person, significantly) to explain why the President's head violently snaps in the opposite direction from where the fatal shot was supposedly fired... and in the same direction as the erstwhile contents of JFK's cranium. They also rely heavily on discrediting the whole idea of conspiracy because many people have advanced absurd ideas about who did it and why. Along these lines, Oliver Stone probably did more to discredit previous legitimate conspiracy investigations than any ten other lunatics. But an idea is not invalidated simply because crazy people talk about it.

If I had more time on my hands I'd consider checking the ages and political affiliations of the most prominent rabid anti-conspiricists. The analysis might turn up nothing, or it might turn up something interesting, I don't know. But I'm just plain stmped about why so many people (a loud crew, but still a minority of the U.S. populace) are so obstinately closed-minded about the idea of a conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States. It was, after all, the U.S. crime of the century.

Update: I apologize to younger readers for glossing over several basic Dealey Plaza details in this post, the absence of which leaves several of my thoughts to appear incomplete. Dealey Plaza, in Dallas, is the general location of the motorcade when the assassination was committed. In the Zapruder home movie, which unintentionally documented this watershed event in U.S. politics, you can see the effects of two shots on the President. The first effect is when he clutches at his throat, with the First Lady and Governor Connally turning to see what is happening. It is commonly, and non-controversially, understood that he was hit in the back of the neck from Lee Oswald's 6th floor perch in the Texas School Book Depository. The second effect is 2 or 3 seconds later, when the right-front portion of the President's head explodes and he falls violently to his left, onto the First Lady. To any observer not previously "educated" to the contrary, it seems very clear from the evidence of one's own eyes that this fatal shot was fired from the front and right of the limousine, from the infamous "grassy knoll" or at the back edge where it abuts a residential district. Conspiracy deniers, and others undoubtedly in good faith, have developed an opaque, complex, and untestable theory about how a bullet fired from above and behind the president might have produced the appearance captured by Zapruder. This theory of dumdum bullet ballistics and intracranial pressure effects is absolutely necessary to explain away the hypothesis (observation, many would say) of a gunshot from across the knoll. Without acceptance of this theory, which seems highly improbable to many, many people, we are forced to conclude that shots were fired from two different directions on that morning. Two people making arrangements to shoot at the same motorcade would constitute a conspiracy.