SIX MYTHS ABOUT THE JFK ASSASSINATION

[Jefferson Morley in Huffington Post]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jefferson-morley/what-jfk-conspiracy-bashe_b_73722.html

Myth #1 JFK conspiratorial suspicions, like the idea of a gunshot from the so-called grassy knoll, were ginned up after the fact by demagogues like Oliver Stone.

In fact, a significant minority of eyewitnesses at the scene of the crime thought at least one of the gunshots that hit Kennedy came from the knoll, which was actually a grassy embankment bordering a parking lot overlooking the route of JFK's motorcade through downtown Dallas. A survey of eyewitness statements, compiled by conspiracy skeptic John McAdams of Marquette University, found that 42 of 103 bystanders said that the gunfire came from the knoll or from two different directions. .

.Myth #2: JFK conspiracy theories are mostly held by anti-American leftists and credulous liberals.

In September 1964, Warren Commission member Senator Richard Russell, a paleoconservative from Georgia, rejected the so-called single bullet theory and attempted to put a dissent into the commission's final report (only to be slapped down by liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren.) By the late 1960s, conservative figures ranging from former congresswoman Clare Booth Luce to columnist William F. Buckley to Nixon White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman dissented publicly or privately from the Warren report. . .

Myth #3: No reputable historian believes in a JFK conspiracy

I know of four tenured academic historians who have written directly on the JFK assassination in the past five years. . .

Myth #4: Serious people of power in Washington overwhelmingly believe there was no conspiracy.

Hardly. The slain president's own brother Bobby Kennedy was, in the words of journalist David Talbot, "America's first conspiracy theorist."

He and First Lady Jackie Kennedy quickly concluded that JFK was the victim of a major domestic plot. Lyndon Johnson suspected that the assassination resulted from the struggle for power in Cuba. Richard Nixon hounded the CIA for files on "the whole Bay of Pigs thing," which his aides understood to mean Kennedy's assassination. . .

Myth #5. Scientists unequivocally support the lone gunman theory.

A study of the JFK ballistics evidence, published in the Journal of Forensic Science in 2006, concluded that its findings "considerably weaken support for the single-bullet theory." A pair of articles on the medical evidence, published in Neurosurgery in 2004, offered a split decision. . .

Myth #6: There is nothing significant to be found in the new JFK files identified since Oliver Stone's JFK

The long suppressed CIA records made public since the 1990s certainly do not confirm Stone's depiction of the assassination as a virtual coup d'etat by the CIA and the Pentagon but they do raise new questions about the Dallas tragedy. They demonstrate that a handful of top CIA officials had much greater knowledge of Oswald's travels and political activities in the weeks before Kennedy was killed than they ever let on. At least one of these operatives-- an undercover officer named George Joannides--remained quiet about what he knew of Oswald's Cuban contacts to perhaps a criminal extent. . .

When you strip away all the tall tales of JFK's assassination, the unsatisfying and infuriating truth is that we still don't have the full story. And that's no myth.