Historian explains the mind of Conspiracy Nuts - CBS 1967

[Ross Lidell]

"Brilliant historian"     This is a joke right?

As HCS said: "... rejecting the ordinary and finding refuge in the extraordinary".

[Steve M. Galbraith]

As HCS said: "... rejecting the ordinary and finding refuge in the extraordinary".

The followup responses to the video show Commager's prescience.

It's been more than half a century since the Warren Commission issued its report. Since then we've had followup investigations by the government directly into the assassination, i.e., the HSCA, and indirectly, e.g., the Church Committee hearings. In addition we've had numerous investigations by major news media such as CBS and PBS, ABC, the Washington Post, et cetera. And other investigations by independent reporters. Add to this the works of people like Robert Caro who has spent more than twenty years studying LBJ's life. Other major figures such as Hoover and agencies like the CIA or SS have been reported on, e.g., Tim Weiner on the CIA. Toss in the tens of millions of pages of government documents that were released.

And all of those subsequent studies and investigations and works support the WC conclusions that Oswald alone killed JFK. Yes, the HSCA said there was "probably" a conspiracy; but that was largely based on now discredited police tapes. And yes, there are still some ancillary questions about how much the CIA was watching Oswald and whether they were delinquent in warning about him, e.g., Joannides and the DRE.

But the response to all of this fifty plus years of study - the assassination is the most studied event in America history -  is, as Commager predicted, dismissal. These are simply, to the conspiracists,  examples of more coverups and evidence of more conspiracies. In conspiracy world there's always a conspiracy going on to prevent the exposure of the original conspiracy. And every investigation that determines there was no conspiracy is responded to by saying the conspiracy continues and ANOTHER investigation is needed.

And one note on the Warren Commission: the claim that Earl Warren (??!) ordered or signed off on a coverup is ridiculous. Who did the coverup? The staffers? And then they stayed quiet for the rest of their lives? Rankin and Redlich and Specter and Liebeler and Belin? Some are still alive: Willens and Slawson. So they continue to this day to cover up what happened? It's just an example of what Commager said: conspiracists only have one response to the evidence that Oswald killed JFK: the evidence that he did is evidence of a conspiracy!

[John Iacoletti]

And all of those subsequent studies and investigations and works support the WC conclusions that Oswald alone killed JFK.

 

[John Tonkovich]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Steele_Commager

--  MWT   

HSC wrote a great deal about Earl Warren - quite the advocate for the Chief Justice. Certainly affected his judgement /bias regarding the Warren report.

Also, Lincoln was killed by a conspiracy. (And that's not a theory.)

I have no "theory", just a skeptical view of the WR.

[Steve M. Galbraith]

What was unthinkable to men like Commager was that the first investigation was not an actual investigation. Earl Warren, they thought, would not put his name on a cover-up. Historians, in general, took at face value the forensic evidence dished up by Specter and the eyewitness evidence dished up by Ball and Belin, without realizing the evidence avoided and the short-cuts taken. To this day, in fact, one encounters those who dismiss any complaint about the forensic evidence or witness evidence as digging through minutiae. And I know this because I have engaged members of the WC staff and supposedly prominent thinkers of the Oswald did-it belief in discussions of the single-bullet theory, where they ran for the hills once I showed them the trajectory was doubtful and that Canning's study for the HSCA was a fraud. And they all told me the same thing--something they picked up from some blow-hard like Commager--that you can not get to the truth by looking closely at the evidence, that you must instead surrender to some general feeling that the evidence points in Oswald's direction. Well...why? Has anyone done a detailed study of criminal cases and discovered how much counter-evidence exists in cases where there is slam-dunk evidence (let's say a video-tape, 10 eyewitnesses, and a confession)? I mean, beyond that most suspects don't get killed before reaching trial, do palm prints on a weapon routinely show up in the record after the suspect's death? And what about eyewitnesses? Do eyewitnesses who refuse to make a positive ID routinely come forward after the suspect's death, and after the FBI has paid a visit to their house? And what about the shirt fibers? Are fibers to a shirt worn when a suspect was arrested routinely found on the presumed murder weapon by the FBI (when they went unnoticed by the officer first inspecting the weapon), and how often does it later come out that the suspect had claimed he'd worn a different shirt at the time of the murder? And that the shirt he'd claimed to have been wearing was in fact collected by the police and studied by the FBI, but inaccurately described in their records so that no one would know this was the shirt he'd said he'd been wearing?

I mean, at what point, when one studies the evidence, should this "general feeling" Oswald acted alone turn to a "general feeling" the case against him was in large part a frame-up? And, perhaps more importantly, in the words of Commager, is there a "psychological force" that prevents one from changing one's "general feeling" once that "feeling" has taken root?

The Warren Commission consisted of seven committee members including Warren, a general counsel (Lee Rankin),  and more than two dozen staffers. Along with this were dozens of assisstants and others who helped conduct the investigation which was largely done by the staffers. And yes, the FBI's agents conducted interviews and studies.

Among the staffers were/are: John Hary Ely who was one of most cited constitutional scholar in American history; Norman Redlich, the chief author of the report who went on to head the NYU law school; Wesley Liebeler who went to to teach law for more than two decades at UCLA. Two of the staffers, David Slawson and Howard Willens are still alive.

If there was a coverup then all of these individuals - including the still living Slawson and Willens - carried it out. And kept quiet about it for the next roughly 50 years. Why? Why would they do this? All of them were corrupt? Evil? Bought off? What?

Anyone who thinks this happened proves Henry Steele Commager's statement that conspiracists won't accept anything that doesn't show their conspiracy. Not only won't they accept anything else you prove that your response is not that Warren and these others were wrong, not that they erred, not that they were misled but they conspired to cover it up. And then kept quiet for the remainder of their lives. Think about what you're claiming. You think that's remotely possible? Really?

Conspiracies here and conspiracies there - conspiracies everywhere.

[Gary Craig]

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/11/the-kennedy-assassination-47-years-later-what-do-we-really-know/66722/

"...Popular belief in a conspiracy was widespread within a week of Kennedy's murder. Between November 25 and 29, 1963,
University of Chicago pollsters asked more than 1,000 Americans whom they thought was responsible for the president's
death. By then, the chief suspect, Oswald -- a leftist who had lived for a time in Soviet Union -- had been shot dead
while in police custody by Jack Ruby, a local hoodlum with organized crime connections.

While the White House, the FBI, and the Dallas Police Department all affirmed that Oswald had acted alone, 62 percent
of respondents said they believed that more than one person was involved in the assassination. Only 24 percent thought
Oswald had acted alone. Another poll taken in Dallas during the same week found 66 percent of respondents believing that
there had been a plot. There were no JFK conspiracy theories in print at that time..."

==================

"...many senior U.S. officials concluded that there had been a plot but rarely talked about it openly.

Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, publicly endorsed the Warren Commissions conclusion that Oswald acted alone. Privately,
LBJ told many people, ranging from Atlantic contributor Leo Janos to CIA director Richard Helms, that he did not believe the
lone-gunman explanation.

The president's brother Robert and widow Jacqueline also believed that he had been killed by political enemies, according to
historians Aleksandr Fursenko and Tim Naftali. In their 1999 book on the Cuban missile crisis, One Hell of a Gamble: Khrushchev,
Castro, and Kennedy, 1958-1964, they reported that William Walton -- a friend of the First Lady -- went to Moscow on a previously
scheduled trip a week after JFK's murder. Walton carried a message from RFK and Jackie for their friend, Georgi Bolshakov, a
Russian diplomat who had served as a back-channel link between the White House and the Kremlin during the October 1962 crisis:
RFK and Jackie wanted the Soviet leadership to know that "despite Oswald's connections to the communist world, the Kennedys
believed that the president was felled by domestic opponents."

In the Senate, Democrats Richard Russell of Georgia and Russell Long of Louisiana both rejected official accounts of the assassination.
In the executive branch, Joseph Califano, the General Counsel of Army in 1963 and later Secretary of Health Education and Welfare,
concluded that Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy.* In the White House, H.R. Haldeman, chief of staff to President Richard Nixon,
wanted to reopen the JFK investigation in 1969. Nixon wasn't interested.

Suspicion persisted in the upper echelons of the U.S. national security agencies, as well. Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, chief of Pentagon
special operations in 1963 (and later an adviser to Stone), believed that there had been a plot.

Winston Scott, chief of the CIA's station in Mexico City at the time of Kennedy's murder and an ultra-conservative Agency loyalist,
rejected the Warren Commission's findings about a trip that Oswald had taken to Mexico six weeks before the assassination. Scott
concluded in an unpublished memoir that Oswald had, indeed, been just a patsy.

None of these figures was a paranoid fantasist. To the contrary, they constituted a cross section of the American power elite in 1963.
Neither did they talk about a JFK conspiracy for public consumption; they talked about it only reservedly, in confined circles..."

[Gary Craig]

Chief Justice Warren:
"Now I think our job here is essentially one for the evaluation of evidence as distinguished from being one of gathering
evidence, and I believe at the outset at least we can start with the premise that we can rely upon the reports of the
various agencies that have been engaged in investigation of the matter, the FBI, the Secret Service, and others that I may
know about at the present time"

Gerald Ford:
"The FBI, and I use them as an example, undertook a very extensive investigation. I don't recall how many agents, but they had
a massive operation to investigate everything. The commission with this group of lawyers and some additional staff people, then
drew upon this information which was available, and we, if my memory serves me accurately, insisted that the FBI give us
everything they had. Now that is a comprehensive order from the Commission to the Director and to the FBI. I assume and I think
the Commission assumed that that order was so broad that if they had anything it was their obligation to submit it. Now if they
didn't, that is a failure on the part of the agencies, not on the part of the Commission.".

http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/JFK_Assassination

[Gary Craig]

LBJ and Russell September 9,1964:

RUSSELL: No, no, They're trying to prove that the same bullett that hit Kennedy first was the one that hit Connally,
went through him and through his hand, his bone and into his leg... I couldn't hear all the evidence and cross-examine
all of 'em. But I did read the record...I was the only fellow there that...suggested any change whatever in what the
staff got up. This staff business always scares me. I like to put my own views down. But we got you a pretty good report.

LBJ: Well, what difference does it make which bullet got Connally?

RUSSELL: Well, it don't make much difference. But they said that...the commission believes that the same bullet that
hit Kennedy hit Connally. Well I don't believe it.

LBJ: I don't either

RUSSELL: And so I couldn't sign it. And I said that Govenor Connally testified directly to the contrary and I'm not
gonna approve of that. So I finnally made 'em say there was a difference in the commission,in that part of 'em believed
that that wasn't so. And 'course if a fellow was accurate enough to hit Kennedy right in the neck on one shot and knock
his head off in the next one-and he's leaning up against his wife's head-and not even wound her-why, he didn't miss
completely with that third shot. But according to their theory, he not only missed the whole automobile, but he missed
the the street! Well, a man that's a good enough shot to put two bullets right into Kennedy, he didn't miss that whole
automobile.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=4271&relPageId=27