Which JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theory Do You Prefer?

Unless Connally had a death wish, no way did he know in advance that anyone was shooting at that car from anywhere regardless of type of weapon. He was nearly killed!

a reply to: CoriSCapnSkip

I'm not sure he had much choice. JFK and LBJ had a very heated argument about the seating arrangements and Kennedy won out. Johnson wanted Connelly to ride in his car and Yarborough to ride with Kennedy but Kennedy said no way. I always wonder if this was a little insurance in JFK's mind because he might have thought that nobody would want to shoot at him with Connelly so close. Yarborough, however, would have been somewhat of a target himself. Then they'd just have to make sure they didn't hit Jacky. I think Kennedy might have felt a little safer with Connelly in his car.

originally posted by: CoriSCapnSkip
Unless Connally had a death wish, no way did he know in advance that anyone was shooting at that car from anywhere regardless of type of weapon. He was nearly killed!

For me, one of the frustrations of communicating through text is the ease with which a statement intended to be completely benign can strike the reader as rude or abrasive. I am sincere when I say that I only consider this to be a conversation between fellow travelers that just happen to disagree on a given topic. My intention is most certainly not intended to be confrontational.

There is a small (in my opinion extremely small) possibility that Connally had only carried out the role that Johnson had given him. I've seen in multiple sources that Texans referred to Governor Connally as L.B.J. behind his back in a pejorative sense. The acronym stood for "Lyndon's Boy John". It is well documented that Johnson got him his start in politics and he looked up to and respected him.

As I've said, I feel a certain sympathy for many of those swept up in this tragedy. The Major Players cared little for individual lives.

The utterance, "Oh my God! They're going to kill us ALL!!" is, in hindsight, pretty d@mning...

No challenge intended, we've had some good conversations in this thread and I'm asking out of genuine curiosity. IF, you were part of the 'Inner Circle' and aware of the menace that waited in Dealey Plaza, how in the world would you go about explaining a last minute refusal to ride, as Governor of Texas, in a motorcade across town with the President and First Lady that you had so vehemently insisted on? Being 'In The Know' would have had him struggling with what he would do if the assassins carried out their assignment. The entire world would have been wanting to know what he knew and when he knew it. Had the assassins aborted, he would have known too much to be allowed to live...

I've already posted two different sources concerning the attempt to keep him out of that car. You and I could both agree with the statement:

Knowing what was about to happen, no man in his right mind would have voluntarily gotten into that car.

originally posted by: HawkeyeNation
I believe Oswald was ATTEMPTING to kill the president but he did not actually get the job done. I strongly believe he was accidentally shot by one of his very own SS Agents in the car behind him. The damage done to JFK's head was what the bullets the SS was using would have done.

Of course though all the conspiracies that were outlined could still be at play here but as for who actually shot him that is what I believe.

The piece of his skull that was blown out the back of his head
followed physics and landed on the back of the car and jackie
reached for it and picked it up.

So the final killing blow came from a trajectory in front of the car,
and likely from the railroad bridge, perhaps the fence near
the grassy knoll.

Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, the modern American is so easily manipulated by aspects of day to day life that sometimes it literally has to be a bit like stubbing your toe on that chip in your sidewalk you've never noticed to snap out of it and become aware of what you've been blissfully ignorant of for years...

Such is the case of the Kennedy assassination. Over the weekend I had an epiphany that was a bit like the old "V8 Juice" commercial.

My generation is fading away. I shook hands and actually got to share a couple of sentences of support to Bobby Kennedy as he made a stop in my home town during his presidential campaign. In the very near future there won't be many left who can say that.

In these days of hi-tech, the Internet and multimedia on demand there is a tendency to look back at society during the '50s and '60s as being naive and easily bamboozled by politics.

I've mentioned it before, but the two young guys griping about the "old conspiracy geezers like me" really ticked me off.

This weekend I saw them in a whole new light. Unlike my generation, those guys and a lot of others like them feel very little need to pick up a book and read in order to research anything. A poll I read a few years ago had respondents under the age of 45 saying they had read 4 or less books in the last year.

Right there is the meat and potatoes of my unexpected insight...

People talk as if the cover-up is over and there is nothing new to know. Nothing could be further from the truth!! Guys like those two that did the 50th anniversary podcast aren't interested in spending the time to read something like Horne's 1800+ page "Inside The Assassination Records Review Board". Their idea of research is a Google search and a quick look around on YouTube.

That kind of mindset leads to the kind of shallow thinking that leaves the innocent ignorant (in the original sense of the word, which means "lack of knowledge") wide open to something like that video "JFK:The Smoking Gun". I would never have thought to consider myself in those terms had I not read Horne's book, but a student of the assassination finds it nearly impossible to watch something so removed from what happened and then not respond when told, "Look no further, this explains Everything!"

The people that put the computer animation together for the Magic Bullet never bothered to even follow the cover-up trajectory per Arlen Spector!!!!

Every time one of the cable channels trots out one of those shows whether Myth Busters, Jessie Ventura or stuff like the History Channel shows, they are reinforcing the cover-up and in a very subtle way telling you there is nothing new to know.

If someone that knows better speaks up then they're one of those "old conspiracy geezers" that the country is waiting to die off.

Who killed Officer J.D.Tippet?

It's not nearly as cut and dried as the History Channel would like you think...

From Jim Marrs' updated "Crossfire":

Recent work by Texas researchers indicates that the cases now residing in the National Archives and exhibited by the Warren Commission as the shells used in the Tippit slaying could not have been fired by Oswald’s pistol. Oswald’s pistol was originally a Military and Police Smith & Wesson 1905 Model .38-caliber revolver, the largest-selling quality revolver ever produced. The pistol in question, serial number V510210, was converted to a .38 Special Model. This involved cutting off the barrel from its original five inches to two and a quarter inches. The Warren Commission said the pistol also was re-chambered to accept .38 Special ammunition—slightly smaller in diameter but longer than. 38 Standard ammunition.

In the 1980s, Texas researcher and veteran hunter Larry Howard discovered after buying an exact duplicate of Oswald’s .38 revolver that the .38 Special cartridges, when fired in a rechambered weapon, bulge noticeably in the center. Howard told this author:I have checked this with several expert gunsmiths. Since the rechambering cannot change the diameter of the cylinder, but only makes it longer to accept .38 Special ammo, the bullet bulges in the middle when fired. I’ve done it time after time. My wife can notice the bulge. The case looks like it’s pregnant. Studying the shells depicted in the Warren Commission volumes and also in a close-up clear photograph in the November 1983 commemorative issue of Life magazine, it appears to everyone that the shell cases in the National Archives [supposedly the casings found at the scene of Tippit’s death] do not show any bulging at all. This indicates to me and other experts that those cases could not have been fired from the .38 Special that was supposed to belong to Oswald.

The officer that confronted Oswald in the theater testified that he thought he was dead when Oswald stuck the revolver in his stomach and pulled the trigger. Are we supposed to believe the officer wasn't telling the truth? The story about DPO being taught to grab for a gun with their thumb on one side of the hammer and the index finger on the other was added later on. Pinning Tippit on Oswald would have been hard to do had his gun had a bad firing pin...

So someone like me winds up spending many, many hours trying to explain that there ARE no easy answers and just what the assassination cost us as a country. It can feel, at times, like a modern version of Sisyphus.

I need to get back to trying to work on my outline of the major landmarks on the way to Dallas and quit letting myself get bogged down with the small things... I gotta post this first, though. It gave me a good laugh when I first saw it.

originally posted by: wtbengineer
a reply to: CoriSCapnSkip

I'm not sure he had much choice. JFK and LBJ had a very heated argument about the seating arrangements and Kennedy won out. Johnson wanted Connelly to ride in his car and Yarborough to ride with Kennedy but Kennedy said no way. I always wonder if this was a little insurance in JFK's mind because he might have thought that nobody would want to shoot at him with Connelly so close. Yarborough, however, would have been somewhat of a target himself. Then they'd just have to make sure they didn't hit Jacky. I think Kennedy might have felt a little safer with Connelly in his car.

Wanted to reply while this was fresh in my mind...

No way will I ever claim to have been able to get inside JFK's head, but as it was asked earlier in the thread, "Did Kennedy have a death wish?"

Going by what has surfaced in just last few years (I've learned more in the last three years than I did in the previous twenty), that might very well have been part of Kennedy's thinking as far as the motorcade goes. It would be just the kind of "gutsy" move I can imagine him taking if he'd gotten a whiff of something nasty in the air. As he told Mrs. Lincoln (that old caveat, again... I'm paraphrasing from memory), "I can't spend all of my time locked away. If they really want me, they can get me in church."

Had he decided to take what was planned for the motorcade and stand it on its head, it wouldn't have been the first time. We now know that Kennedy had lost trust in the Pentagon and the CIA. Through his own sources he had learned that the feedback he'd been getting about South Vietnam was the exact opposite of the true situation. He already knew that (just like Laos) there was an effort to get him to allow combat troops to get their foot in the door. His response to the reports he was getting of how things were going over there was to turn their own deceit against them. "Well if things are going so well, we can start planning on pulling another 1000 troops out."

I found another good read at THE SECOND BIGGEST LIE

Short excerpt:

THE SECOND BIGGEST LIE
by Michael Morrissey

The biggest lie of our time, after the Warren Report, is the notion that Johnson merely continued or expanded Kennedy's policy in Vietnam after the assassination.

1. JFK's policy

In late 1962, Kennedy was still fully committed to supporting the Diem regime, though he had some doubts even then. When Senator Mike Mansfield advised withdrawal at that early date:

The President was too disturbed by the Senator's unexpected argument to reply to it. He said to me later when we talked about the discussion, "I got angry with Mike for disagreeing with our policy so completely, and I got angry with myself because I found myself agreeing with him (Kenneth O'Donnell and Dave Powers, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1970, p. 15).

By the spring of 1963, Kennedy had reversed course completely and agreed with Mansfield:

"The President told Mansfield that he had been having serious second thoughts about Mansfield's argument and that he now agreed with the Senator's thinking on the need for a complete military withdrawal from Vietnam.

That kind of mindset leads to the kind of shallow thinking that leaves the innocent ignorant (in the original sense of the word, which means "lack of knowledge") wide open to something like that video "JFK:The Smoking Gun". I would never have thought to consider myself in those terms had I not read Horne's book, but a student of the assassination finds it nearly impossible to watch something so removed from what happened and then not respond when told, "Look no further, this explains Everything!"

The people that put the computer animation together for the Magic Bullet never bothered to even follow the cover-up trajectory per Arlen Spector!!!!

Every time one of the cable channels trots out one of those shows whether Myth Busters, Jessie Ventura or stuff like the History Channel shows, they are reinforcing the cover-up and in a very subtle way telling you there is nothing new to know.

I just can't watch any of those shows all the way through any more. I've noticed this very thing, they all seem to support the cover up to some extent. I get so angry I will yell at the TV and I don't like to get that way. I haven't watched that smoking gun one, is that the one that claims the fatal shot came from Greer? I know I couldn't get through that. I like to try to have an open mind to all possibilities but when they get the basic facts wrong again and again it gets impossible for me to endure.

No way will I ever claim to have been able to get inside JFK's head, but as it was asked earlier in the thread, "Did Kennedy have a death wish?"

I don't claim to be able to get inside Kennedy's head, but what I said earlier about him thinking Connelly might be a little bit of insurance makes sense to me. It fits with why it became such a big deal and erupted into such an argument between him and LBJ. Anyway, it seems like he might have thought having Connelly in his car was an extra ace in his hand.

I don't think you could say that Kennedy had a death wish by any stretch, but he was a realist about the situation. He knew that they could get him if they really wanted to but he also knew that his role in charting this country's future was too important to do anything but stay the course.

I'm currently reading Ambush in Dealey Plaza among other books and I just wanted to mention something that I thought was really important in the case. I've always said that as far as evidence goes, the Parkland doctors testimony is the most important in establishing the direction of the shots. After the body left Texas illegally the chain of evidence was broken.

Reading Ambush made me realize that Clint Hill's testimony before the Warren Commission was also important because he had the best view of the president's head right after the fatal shot was fired and he had this to say "The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car . His brain was exposed. There was blood and bits of brain all over the entire rear portion of the car." You never forget seeing something this grisly. It leaves a lasting impression and I have complete faith that he described the actual state of the wounds in the presidents head at the time of the shooting as best he could. At least as far as the location of the huge avulsive wound goes.

Thanks for that link. I was aware of how JFK's Vietnam policy changed in that year '62-'63. I believe that was part of why he was a marked man, along with a few other things. It seemed like he had a real change of heart that affected his policy decisions that year in a way that turned a lot of powerful and ruthless people against him. I read that losing his child may have had something to do with that change but I don't know.


a reply to: CornShucker

a reply to: wtbengineer

Something else that I recently realized and wanted to throw in here after reading about the shot sequences in several sources (who all disagree about how many total shots were fired) is the timing of the shots that hit Gov. Connelly. It's obvious that he was hit in the back after JFK was hit in the throat by watching the Z film. You can see Kennedy's hand up to his throat well before Connelly reacts. But the thing that I hadn't noticed before was that if you watch Connelly just after the fatal head shot on JFK (instead of keeping your eyes fixed on Kennedy as the average person tends to do), you can see what seems like Connelly reacting to the wrist shot that goes on to hit him in the thigh. It even sort of rolls him over toward the drivers side of the car.

The timing of these shots places the back shot to Connelly about 5.5 seconds before the shot to the wrist, another amazing aspect to the magic bullet, time manipulation.

a reply to: wtbengineer

I have an outline that would probably result in a post many times larger than anything I've written to date, but I just can't bring myself to do it for several reasons.

Doug Horne makes a point in the final pages of his book (I finally finished it...) that really hit me hard. Sometimes you can know something in your gut but it takes an insight from someone else to bring it into focus. For once, I'm not going to obsess about links, authors and book titles or any minutiae, what I have to say can be verified by anyone willing to do a bit more work than typing out a challenge.

A certain subset of the "Haters" that detest those of us that have taken the time to become versed in the massive scope of just how wrong, wrong, wrong everything about the assassination and coverup was, like to level the accusation of a manipulative, dishonest, drug-addicted, sex addict being elevated to the level of near-sainthood when, in fact, if he had lived very little would have changed and he would have been remembered as a mediocre president, at best.

I can only speak for myself, but I reject that implication with every fiber of my being. Occasionally people need to be reminded, a man DIED that day, that man died sitting right next to his wife!!!! Why did he die? Because the movers and shakers in the military machine and the national security establishment wanted him gone and, since he was almost surely going to be re-elected, the American system of government provided no simple way to be rid of him. A vice-president who was looking at impeachment and possible prison time and an FBI director that was facing mandatory retirement surely "greased the skids" on the way to the Plaza.

Anyone who believes the myth of Johnson just continuing the policies Kennedy had started has just passively listened to the "myth" perpetuated by the (willing) media. They are far from blameless, themselves.

One first needs to understand where America was militarily and foreign policy-wise when Kennedy took office.

I was shocked the first time I read of how nonchalant the Eisenhower administration was on the use of nuclear weapons. My brother and I were old enough that I remember his huge popularity. Finding out that it was just considered another weapon and usually was considered toward the top of the list of options repulsed me profoundly!

Maybe it was just the way it was worded, but my first knowledge of the invitation to the WH the night before the inauguration left me with kind of a "Dr. Strangelove" vibe... Here we have the youngest president ever meeting the oldest president ever and talking about what to expect of the office.

Kennedy asked about how decisions were made with respect to nuclear weapons. I don't remember if Eisenhower had it on the floor next to him or someone had to walk over and hand it to him, but Ike opened the briefcase and showed him the "nuke football".

Now, it may just be me, but that doesn't strike me as an answer to a question about decision making. The mind picture that "I" get is more like the 3 year old that just unwrapped the carpenter's hammer he got for Christmas. It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck!

Kennedy came away from the meeting with the impression that Ike's administration viewed the Russians like dangerous zoo animals that could never be tamed, only contained. They were discussed in only very negative ways and it was clear that it was considered pointless to ever attempt to negotiate with them. Kennedy may have successfully hidden how upset he was at what he'd heard, but he got little rest that night.

The next day he made a point of including this statement in his inaugural address, "We must never negotiate from Fear. (after a pause for the crowd, he then continued) But we must never fear to Negotiate!"

He was lied to about Laos, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam. He stood up to the Hawks insisting we bomb and invade Cuba during the missile crisis. America didn't know until the early '90s that there were Russian troops with tactical nukes in place that had been given permission to use them at their discretion. Crude precursors to cruise missiles were in position and armed to wipe Guantanamo off the map in the event of an invasion. They also had some missiles capable of hitting targets fairly far into the mainland, too. Had they successfully forced him to invade WWIII would have started. As it was, we almost caused it by pounding one of the Russian subs with depth charges during the quarantine. What nobody knew was that each sub had ONE nuclear torpedo (15K, if I remember correctly). We have an unknown Russian submariner to thank because the captain needed to surface his diesel powered sub to take on fresh air and had decided that WWIII must have started and he was ready to fire the torpedo. ONE MAN's ability to calm the captain down is all that prevented disaster.

It wasn't until the '90s that we found out that Kennedy had been pressured TWICE before the Cuban Missile Crisis to launch a first-strike/preemptive nuclear assault against Russia! SAIC Curtis LeMay considered Kennedy weak and indecisive and desperately wanted to use nukes on Russia. He was quoted as saying during the missile crisis, "The Bear has always wanted to dip his toes in the Caribbean. I say we take the whole d*mned leg. For that matter, while we're at it we might as well take his testicles, too!"

In the aircraft tapes from that day LeMay was instructed to land at Andrews and ride with the procession. He ignored them and landed at a commercial airport closer to Bethesda. I would imagine he took immense joy in watching the so-called autopsy of a man he had so many bitter arguments with.

I'm gonna close shortly, but I'll say it again, "A man DIED that day!!"

That man had made the firm commitment that not ONE American draftee would be sent to fight and die in the jungles of Vietnam while he was still President. He was true to his word.

Don't Ever let anyone tell you things would have worked out the same. In December, Johnson told the Joint Chiefs, "You get me elected and you can have your war."

I will quote from one book:
Allen Dulles worked with a potential ghostwriter (Harper's Willie Morris) on a piece in defense of the CIA's role in the Bay of Pigs. The article was never published but his collaborator kept all his notes, many of which eventually found print in "The 'Confessions' of Allen Dulles." Morris never forgot how a discussion of Kennedy suddenly turned venomous and Dulles spat out, "That little Kennedy ....he thought he was a god."