On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated during a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. The nation mourned his tragic and senseless death, and witnessed the collapse of the mythical Camelot he and his young family had created. Friends and foes alike demanded answers—nay, the truth—to bring the individual or group responsible to justice.
That has either happened or not happened, depending on who and what you believe.
The Warren Commission's 888-page report identified ex-Marine and Communist sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman. Conspiracy theorists immediately mocked this report as a government plot to mask what happened. They suggested other possibilities, both plausible and insane. The list includes: Jack Ruby (the shady nightclub owner who assassinated Oswald while in police custody), the FBI, CIA, Soviet Union, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, Israel, top Republicans and Democrats, aliens (both illegal and from outer space), unidentified gunmen, and even Chief Justice Earl Warren himself.
Fred Litwin's intriguing book, I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak, details his personal journey away from the grand conspiracy and into reality. His deftness in sweeping JFK conspiracy theorists aside with facts and logic is hard not to admire and appreciate. While not the first to have attempted this, Litwin's book can be deservingly called one of the most powerful on the subject in recent years.
What attracted the retired marketing professional, NorthernBlues Music founder, and former leftist who shifted to conservatism after 9/11 and started the (now-defunct) blog Gay and Right, and the Free Thinking Film Society, to the JFK assassination?
He became entranced when Robert Groden showed clothing manufacturer Abraham Zapruder's stunning, 27-second colorized film in its entirety on Good Night America with Geraldo Rivera on Mar. 6, 1975. “The studio audience gasped at the fatal head shot,” Litwin writes, and “[s]o did I.” Like other Americans who watched that telecast, the then-eighteen year old Litwin was puzzled by the fact JFK's head “moved back, and to the left, in an unmistakable motion.” If Oswald was situated in the building behind the motorcade, how could the President's head have gone backwards after the shot was fired? It didn't make sense, and “could only mean that there was a second gunman and hence a conspiracy.”
This is what many people probably thought after they saw Groden's bootleg copy of the Zapruder film. When they heard social activist Dick Gregory allege “the motorcade route had been changed,” and ask “who had the power to ensure it went right by where Lee Harvey Oswald happened to work?” it would've heightened their suspicions. And when writer/historian Ralph Schoenman made claims about Oswald (“both an FBI and CIA agent, according to Secret Service document 767”) and Ruby (told his psychiatrist “he was part of a plot to kill Kennedy,” and his death from lung cancer in 1967 was “suspicious”), they probably lost their collective minds.
But the biggest conspiracy may turn out to be the belief there was a conspiracy to assassinate JFK in the first place.
Litwin's a-ha moment occurred when he began to look into the autopsy X-rays and photographs. These were “in the possession of the Kennedy family,” but urologist John Lattimer and forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht had separately examined them in 1972. Lattimer “was firmly in the lone-gunman camp and his illustrated articles on the medical evidence were superb.” His experiments of a Mannlicher-Carcano bullet going through a simulated neck “found that the bullet started to tumble after exiting.” Wecht adamantly believed “the head shot was NOTfired from the front,” in contrast to the Warren report. He felt the second movement of JFK's head after being shot “was probably caused by a neuromuscular spasm causing involuntary muscle movement.”
Rivera's three experts weren't so trustworthy. Groden's written about JFK assassination conspiracy theories for years, and claimed that “some of the JFK autopsy photographs have been doctored.” Gregory was a left-wing “loon,” gave lectures at university campuses which “were just plain kooky,” became a 9-11 truther, and never met a JFK—or Martin Luther King Jr.—conspiracy theory he didn't like. Schoenman was a Trotskyist who claimed Oswald had links to military intelligence and the CIA with “no evidence to back it up,” supported left-wing radicals like Che Guevara, and developed an “anti-Israel animus.”
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