In the Sights of Logic E-Book

Peter Engels

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 240

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Sixty years after the Dallas shootings - and despite more and more documents becoming available - a multitude of myths continue to surround the most famous assassination attempt of the 20th century. With his work, the author tries to bring a little more light into the thicket of conspiracy theories and facts, especially for the layperson. The aim should be to be able to form an opinion based on undisputed facts, even without any specialist knowledge and purely on the basis of common sense.

Leseprobe

Content

Preface

I. Introduction

II. The facts at a glance

III. The

Warren Report

IV. Conspiracy

V. The "once twice thrice" of conspiracy theories

VI. The "oblong brown paper bag"

VII. The modified route

VIII. Crossfire at

Dealey Plaza

?

IX. The "Magic Bullet"

X. The third victim

XI. Oswald and his weapons

XII. Ruby vs. Oswald

XIII. The hit list

XIV. Theories put to the test

XV. "

JFK

" – The Movie

XVI. Epilogue

Attachment:

Image descriptions and -sources

Bibliography

Preface

The news of John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas on 22 November 1963 was a shock for people all over the world. And numerous conspiracy theories quickly grew up around who had assassinated the US president and, of course, for what reasons.

Peter Engels meticulously describes the many problems of the most important conspiracy theories and their contradictions. The reasons for their widespread dissemination lie not only in the need to find a "grand explanation" for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The life of the US president, celebrated and revered not only in Germany, could not and could not have been brought to a violent end simply by the act of such an obscure figure as Lee Harvey Oswald, but Kennedy was declared the victim of a great conspiracy.

The many different theories also draw their power from the equally numerous investigative errors, the lack of cooperation from various government agencies in solving the crime and the fact that the official investigation report was supposed to portray Lee Harvey Oswald as a lone perpetrator.

So it was a big conspiracy after all? No. We will probably never be able to answer all the questions and know the whole "truth". But Kennedy's successor Lyndon B. Johnson feared millions of war dead if Cubans or Russians were behind Kennedy's assassination. Would this perhaps be a reason to push the lone perpetrator theory and pursue other clues less? And the CIA and FBI to this day want to conceal their own failures and illegal activities, but hardly any involvement in the president's assassination.

Based on countless facts, "In the Sight of Logic" provides a down-to-earth analysis of the Kennedy assassination in the best sense of the word - of the events and the investigation. Far from conjecture and the usual presentation of possible suspects and their motives, the author concentrates exclusively on the undisputed facts. Not for conspiracy theorists!

Dr. phil. Andreas Etges

(Andreas Etges, born in Duisburg in 1965, studied history, German and journalism in Bochum, Madison (USA) and Bielefeld. He teaches American history at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin. In 2003, he was curator of the special exhibition "John F. Kennedy" at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. In the same year, his book of the same name was published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich. Etges is also a historian at the America Institute of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.)

I. Introduction

It was in the year 1978 that I first stumbled on the topic when watching a documentary feature film. Back then, I was no more than eleven years old. At the time, I couldn't explain why I was so fascinated by the subject that I kept following up on it. It was only many years later that I realized why. More than once my parents asked me rather annoyed why I was so much interested in it. But at the time I could not actually answer this question. In any case, it was surprising for them, since Kennedy had already been dead for almost four years at the time of my birth. And due to this fact, I also missed out on almost everything of the exciting 60s.

Just the year before, we had moved into an apartment building in Kassel. One of the eight rental units was occupied by a single lady and her wire-haired dachshund. I was allowed to walk the dachshund from time to time, and I also looked after the dog in her apartment several times during her absence. One day I came in the bookshelf across the illustrated book of a German publishing house, which had probably been published immediately after the assassination. I don't remember how often I leafed through this book and how often I read the relatively brief history of John F. Kennedy's life. But at some point, I knew the whole text almost by heart. Finally, the said neighbor showed me in addition a folder with newspaper clippings, which she guarded like a treasure. It took a while until I was allowed to borrow both now and then, so that I could study them in detail. Years later she left both to me and both the illustrated book and the folder are still in my possession today.

At some point I even felt the need for the first time to record in writing all the knowledge I had acquired up to that point. I took a simple cardboard folder, labeled it with a label printer and typed many pages on my grandmother's typewriter. I also filed a couple of black and white copies and even worked on this during a vacation trip with my parents.

Of course, at that time my main focus was still on the assassination, the circumstances of which I found very exciting. It was only a little later that I began to deal with the person as a family man, father and politician. But before that, I came across another book.

At that time, there still existed a branch of the city library which was just a few minutes' walk from my parents' house. Back in the pre-internet age, it was a well-visited place, but in the meantime, it has been closed. I was a regular customer too and regularly picked up my reading material there. The books by Jens K. Holm about the stories and adventures of his teenage "Detective Kim" were my favorites.

But one day I wanted to have a look if I could find something about the Kennedy assassination. As far as I can remember, the selection was rather meager at that time.

In any case, the official investigation report under the title "Warren Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy - The Most Important Results of the Official Investigation" from the Verlag für Wissenschaft und Politik (Publishing House for Science and Politics) immediately caught my eye. On about 300 pages the report summarized the essentials and also contained a few pictures at the end. I devoured this book and borrowed it over and over again. Later I did an internship at the public library where I worked in the department in which slightly damaged books were refurbished for further circulation. This book had also ended up there. Since a picture page had already been torn out, it was finally sorted out and replaced by a newer edition. I took the opportunity and was allowed to have it. It is still on my bookshelf today. At the very back, there is even the original library ticket with the first stamp from 1965.

Due to my youthful naivety, I initially assumed that these were the sole and undisputed facts about the event. It was not until years later that I would learn about all those other theories contradicting these facts. Neither did I know the term "conspiracy theorist" at that time. I’m using this term several times in the further course of this work, though I would like to emphasize that this use is completely non-judgmental. Owed to a lack of alternatives it is simply used to make a distinction between those who believe in the official version and those who hold a dissenting opinion.

Then, in 1992, came the big bang in the form of Oliver Stone and his film "JFK". Of course, I subsequently read Jim Garrison's book "On the trail of the assassins" on which the movie is largely based. The film and book shook my ideal world considerably and caused me to rethink. With little resistance, I let myself be pushed in a completely different direction. Actually, this was not quite typical for me, since I’m more of a person who would like to believe such a high-ranking commission. And perhaps I would have had my first doubts here, too, if I had read the book first and then watched the film. Garrison himself had already distanced himself from the film at an early stage. But the cinematic tricks of a director like Oliver Stone did not fail to have an effect on me in the beginning.

The turn of the millennium brought new insights. The Inter-net age provided an almost infinite amount of information on this topic. Studies were published, some of which came up with completely different results. Now, the latest techniques could be applied. Yet each new result was doubted by the other side. This made things very difficult for an outsider, who was not an expert in any of the relevant fields. Nevertheless, many amateur experts felt called to sell their theses as the ultimate truth. The emphasis is on "sell", because that's what it was mostly about. New books hit the market and thus the motives for some questionable statements of even renowned authors became obvious very quickly. Nothing has changed in this regard up to the present day.

At the same time, in 2008, I began looking for a practical way to deal with the topic myself. At first, I came across a homepage construction kit system, with the help of which even a completely clueless layman like me could take the first steps towards creating a website. The idea was and still is to offer interested people, especially pupils and students, who are working on a project, the possibility to find concise information. It was my goal to structure the Kennedy topic in a straightforward way, so that people can quickly find information even on specific topics, without having to search for a long time. I called the site the "John F. Kennedy Infoportal". In the meantime, I have found myself professional design help and thus raised the homepage to a higher level. But back then I could not imagine the amount of work that was still waiting for me and even today I’m far from completing it.

Due to this homepage, I had the opportunity to exchange opinions with people of other views on several occasions. Furthermore, in the meantime I have visited the crime scene several times and was able to get a picture of various details. I also had the chance to talk with the current curator of "The Sixth Floor Museum" Stephen Fagin. So finally, I felt the need to summarize my own thoughts on the subject. A selection of my findings is included in this book. However, the main focus of this book is to provide an interested layperson with an overview of the essentially undisputed facts and thus enable him to form his own opinion even without specialist knowledge in a subject-relevant area. This is exactly the path I have followed after I gained the insight that even expert statements can contradict themselves; that witness statements can be correct or wrong and that stories no matter how rich in detail are often nevertheless only half the truth, or sometimes even have nothing to do with the truth. I therefore appeal to the "normal, clear sometimes even simple, experience-referred and generally shared understanding of humans and/or their healthy judgment" - here also simply called "common sense".

At one point or another, we will not be able to completely avoid dealing with some technically oriented aspects. To complete the chain of arguments, this is unfortunately unavoidable. But I will limit myself only to the absolutely necessary minimum.

Using the opportunity I would like to clear up here also with some mostly luridly represented facts, which find probably predominantly for profit-oriented reasons their way again and again into even newest publications. It is quite understandable that such a complex event can lead to different interpretations and even to the emergence of wildest theories. However, a constructive exchange of opinions only then makes sense if there is a fundamental agreement on the essential facts as a basis. And here it needs a certain correction in some places.

II. The facts at a glance

A lot of time has passed since those days in November 1963. Contemporary witnesses are becoming fewer and fewer, and the circumstances of that fateful day are, of course, hardly present in the media. In 2017, John F. Kennedy would have turned 100 years old and on the occasion of this round birthday, there were several reports and publications. Also, the repeatedly postponed release of the last still unpublished documents revives discussions every now and then.

In this chapter, I would now like to give you a brief and objective overview of the facts concerning the assassination. These are exclusively the undisputed facts - independent of conclusions, interpretations and theories. We will look at some of the details in more depth at a later point.

As part of a campaign tour for the presidential elections the following year, John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie arrived in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. The day before, they had already visited the cities of San Antonio and Houston, spent a night in Fort Worth and were later expected in Austin before returning to Washington in the evening. Together with Governor Connally and his wife, they were driven through downtown in an open car. On their way to the Dallas Trade Mart, where the president was expected to give a speech, they finally passed Dealey Plaza - a sprawling open space on the western edge of downtown surrounded by several multi-story buildings - a few minutes before their scheduled arrival. Then, at exactly 12:30 p.m., several shots were fired, seriously injuring both the president and the governor seated in front of him, and slightly wounding passerby James Tague. Kennedy was hit in his upper body and head.

Within minutes of the shooting, the car reached Parkland Hospital, where doctors however couldn't save the president’s life and finally pronounced him dead at 1:00 pm. Governor Connally survived the shooting.

Based on eyewitness accounts, Dallas police issued a manhunt and eventually arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before 2:00 p.m.

Oswald had been working at the Texas School Book Depository, a warehouse located just off Dealey Plaza, at the time of the assassination. Over the course of the next two days, during which Oswald was subjected to constant interrogation at police headquarters, he was eventually accused of carrying out the assassination with the aid of a rifle fired from the sixth floor of his workplace. The rifle, cartridge cases and other clues had previously been seized by the police at the scene of the crime. Furthermore, Oswald was accused of having shot the patrolman J. D. Tippit with a revolver, which he was still carrying with him at the time of his arrest. Oswald denied both murders and called himself a "patsy".

Then, during his transfer to the county jail, two days after his arrest, Oswald was shot in the police station's underground parking garage by local nightclub owner Jack Ruby and died the same day at Parkland Hospital. Ruby had mingled with the crowd of waiting journalists and, according to his own account, killed Oswald out of respect for the assassinated president as well as to spare Jackie Kennedy the trial. He was sentenced to death for his crime by a Dallas court, but with the help of his attorney, he obtained an appeal hearing and a change of venue to Wichita Falls. Ruby died of lung cancer in 1967 even before the start of the retrial.

In September 1964, a commission of inquiry set up by President Johnson immediately after the assassination and headed by Chief Federal Judge Earl Warren, published its findings. According to the findings, Oswald had acted alone and without outside influence. As a motive, the commission identified several factors, all of which are said to have been related to Oswald's ambivalent character.

Soon after publication, the first critical voices were raised about the results of the investigation. Critics claimed that the commission had investigated in a partial and far from unbiased manner. President Johnson was accused of having influenced the commission in order to quickly present Oswald as the sole culprit. This would prevent foreign policy disputes in case there were indications of the involvement of a foreign government or other group in the assassination.

Although further official and unofficial investigations in the following decades criticized the work of the investigating authorities on various points, especially in their handling of the evidence, they essentially came to the same conclusion as the Warren Commission. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, a parliamentary investigative committee, concluded that it was highly likely that there had been a second shooter from the grassy knoll to the right of the motorcade, but that the second shooter missed his target. Due to the existence of a second shooter, the shooting was thus also a conspiracy.

This conclusion was based mainly on the acoustic analysis of a tape recording made by one of the police motorcycles. According to the analysis, it must be assumed that at least four shots were fired. Oswald himself, however, could demonstrably have fired a maximum of three shots. The interpretation of the acoustic analysis later turned out to be demonstrably wrong, however, and it was determined that the recordings did not allow any conclusions to be drawn about the number of shots fired. Consequently, the overall result of the Subcommittee of Inquiry must be regarded as untenable today.

And to this day, the critical voices of conspiracy theorists could not be silenced. Time and again, a multitude of inconsistencies are brought up in connection with the assassination, and over the decades, the list of possible suspects and their motives has been growing constantly. Most notably, the Warren Commission's so-called "single-bullet theory", according to which a single bullet caused seven injuries to Kennedy and Connally, has been a topic of controversy ever since and was one of the central themes of Oliver Stone's 1990s conspiracy thriller "JFK". The movie gave rise to discussion and fed a new generation of assassination theorists. However, large parts of the movie's theories have been scientifically proven wrong, and the "Magic Bullet" is now considered by experts to be a perfectly plausible version. This conclusion is supported by investigations conducted in 2007 by Gary Mack, curator of The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, during which ballistic reconstructions - based on the meanwhile confirmed actual and correct seating positions of the victims in the vehicle - made it possible to reconstruct the trajectories of the bullets.

The official investigation files, part of which are still kept under lock and key today, were supposed to be released to the public in October 2017 at the latest - and thus 22 years earlier than initially planned - according to a resolution passed by Congress in 1992. While former President Donald Trump had also promised the release in advance, some of the files were ultimately withheld for further review following interventions by the intelligence agencies. Hopefully, these files will also be released in the near future. However, according to many experts, it can now be assumed that these are no really relevant documents that relate directly to the course of events, especially since only a fraction of the files is still locked away.

This was a short overview of the main events surrounding the assassination and the state of the investigation. And from this point on, the paths of amateur historians, conspiracy theorists, experts of different disciplines or other interested people go their separate ways. From here on, you can venture in any direction and into sheer unfathomable depths of this topic. You can fight your way through mountains of statements, wade through expert reports on ballistics, acoustics, weapons technology, film & photo technology or many other areas. And even if you do take all this on, it may well happen that you end up being no smarter than you were before. Or you can simply read on and then maybe come to the same conclusion as I did.

III. The Warren Report

The Warren Report (Report of The President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy) was the first book I got my hands on at the end of the 1970s. Before that, I had only repeatedly leafed through an illustrated book from a German publisher. This book roughly contained the course of events of that day in Dallas, but details were completely left out. As I mentioned before, I used to borrow a German-language summary from the public library. I was a mere eleven or twelve years old and for me the written word was plain fact. Especially since the language used was very formal. At the time, no other sources, no Internet and no critical publications existed.

It took a few more years until they were available, but eventually I had to deal with them. Of course, the lecture of these new sources influenced my opinion, and I was fascinated by Stone's "JFK". After watching this movie, I also devoured Garrison's book and the crossfire theory became more and more plausible to me. Though I did not understand everything at that time, my conviction grew that Kennedy had not simply fallen victim to a misguided single perpetrator. Today, I can no longer tell how long this phase lasted. But at some point, it probably bothered me that there were so many different theories about the assassination. Above all, more and more suspects appeared, and I soon wondered how this could be. Every author or other expert seemed to accuse someone else, but they all had equally plausible arguments. I’m generally uncomfortable with such unsolved mysteries, and I was annoyed that I did not have the right answers to the questions of my friends and acquaintances. So, I wanted to delve deeper into the matter and took a closer look at one version after the other. I compared them all with the official account and it quickly became apparent that there is always a lot of criticism of the Warren Report and even more questions are asked. But alternative answers were and still are hard to find.

Much of what is said in my book refers to the Warren Report. The reason for this is obvious: to this day, it is the only officially accepted version. Accordingly, all alternative theses must be measured against it, if they want to convince us at least to some extent. Thus, this work would be incomplete, if I did not also deal with the Warren Report and its history.

On November 29, 1963, just a week after the fatal shooting in Dallas, Kennedy's successor in office convened a commission to clarify the exact circumstances of the assassination via Executive Order 11130. Not all of the members chosen by President Lyndon B. Johnson himself were enthusiastic about the establishment of such a commission, and they participated only reluctantly. At this point it was probably already predictable that such a procedure would lead to more controversy than tangible results in the end. Earl Warren, after whom the commission was finally named by the public, had also first to be persuaded to take over the chairmanship. He decided to hire the commission's lawyers from outside the government to avoid undue influence on their work. The Commission consisted of the following gentlemen:

Earl Warren – Chief Justice of the United States. Warren was born in California in 1891, was a law graduate, and was also active in the political arena.

From the year 1925 he was active as district attorney of Alameda County. In this role, he gained a national reputation as a tough, no-nonsense jurist who fought corruption in government and ran his office impartially. Warren strongly supported the autonomy of law enforcement agencies, but also believed that police and prosecutors should act with fairness. Unlike many other local law enforcement officials in the 1920s, Warren vigorously enforced alcohol prohibition. In 1927, he launched a corruption investigation against Sheriff Burton Becker. In 1930, after a trial which some press members called »the most sweeping exposé of graft in the history of the country«, Warren won a conviction against Becker. When one of his own undercover agents admitted that he had perjured himself to get convictions in bootlegging cases, Warren personally took over the prosecution of the agent. Warren's efforts brought him national attention. A 1931 nationwide survey of law enforcement officials found Warren to be »the most intelligent and politically independent district attorney in the United States«.

From 1943-53 he was in office as Republican governor of California and in between, he was even a candidate for the vice presidency in Thomas E. Dewey's election campaign in 1948. The latter, however, lost to Truman. In the following election in 1952, the party decided in favor of Eisenhower who appointed Warren as Chief Justice after his move into the White House.

During the following sixteen years in office, Warren was involved in many controversial and notable legal decisions, first and foremost desegregating schools and strengthening civil rights. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential Supreme Court justices and political leaders in the history of the United States. It was he who administered the oath of office to newly elected President John F. Kennedy on the steps of the Capitol on January 20, 1961. The two got closer after the inauguration. Warren later wrote that »no American in my long life has ever set his sights on a better America or focused his attacks more accurately on the ills and shortcomings of our society than [Kennedy]«.

Warren was personally involved in several aspects of the investigation. He supervised the testimony of Lee Harvey Oswald's widow, Marina Oswald, for four days and was widely criticized for telling the press that while her testimony would be made public, »it might not happen in your lifetime«. He was present at the interview behind closed doors of Jacqueline Kennedy and insisted on attending the testimony of Jack Ruby in Dallas, where he also visited the School Book Depository.

Although Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, Warren eventually resigned in 1968. Fearing that Republican Nixon would win the upcoming election, Warren wanted to give President Johnson the opportunity to appoint a successor while he was still in office.

Allen Welsh Dulles – former director of the CIA. Dulles grew up in a Republican diplomatic family and knew how to use all ways and means available for climbing the ladder. However, his own advantage was always his first priority, so he did not even shy away from a rapprochement with Nazi Germany. He opposed the USA's entry into the war for a long time, until it could no longer be avoided after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Dulles was a member of the foreign intelligence service OSS when it was replaced by the newly founded CIA in 1947. Here he took over as director of special operations in 1950. Dulles transformed the agency, founded as an intelligence service, into a costly military instrument whose covert military operations became the CIA's primary mission. President Eisenhower finally installed him as director in 1953, making him the first civilian at the head. He quickly succeeded in building up a degree of immunity from public inquiry, but as a result he also attracted the attention of the press. Contrary to his convictions and purely out of political concessions, newly elected President Kennedy left Dulles in office for the time being. But Kennedy felt betrayed and misinformed by the CIA after the failed invasion of the Cuban Bay of Pigs in April 1961. He threatened to smash the intelligence agency »into a thousand pieces«. Although he did award Dulles the National Security Medal, he dismissed him and his deputy in November of the same year.

President Johnson eventually appointed Dulles to the Warren Commission. This probably happened with the approval of Robert Kennedy. The intention behind the appointment was probably to ensure that the CIA