The Daily Plunge

Reclaiming History, The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, by Vincent Bugliosi, is a thorough debunking of every penny-ante conspiracy theory ever floated, including the doozies offered by Oliver Stone in the propaganda film JFK.

Though Stone’s movie rates its own section in the 1,500-page tome, it is not the focus of Bugliosi’s book. In fact, as Bugliosi writes, “In doing so [writing about the film], the problem I have is this: Am I elevating Oliver Stone’s movie by holding it to be worthy of denigration? Only theoretically… The better question, perhaps, is whether by even bothering to denigrate Stone and his movie, am I thereby diminishing, in however a small way, what I hope to be the stature of this book. I believe so. Serious nonfiction books don’t stoop to the discussion of wild fairy tales, which the movie JFK is.”

Rather, Bugliosi dedicates the bulk of the text to painstakingly detailing the days surrounding the assassination, the physical evidence, the life and times of both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, the conspiracy theories and their players (both those accused of conspiracy and the accusers themselves), the murder trial of Jack Ruby, and other rather copious notes surrounding the assassination.

Bugliosi is ultimately convincing concerning the evidence, and that it points, beyond any doubt, to the fact that Oswald was the lone assassin. Moreover, the evidence also proves that Ruby did not act on the behest of the Mob or any other shadowy group.

Bugliosi began gathering the evidence about 20 years ago, in conjunction with a mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald broadcast on the BBC in which he was asked to be the prosecuting attorney. In the mock trial, Oswald was found guilty after a few hours of deliberation.

Bugliosi, by the way, was the prosecuting attorney in the Charles Manson case, and wrote a book about the trial called Helter Skelter. His prosecutorial and evidence-gathering skills are on full display in Reclaiming History, and the conspiracy theorists are skewered at every turn in what is, somewhat surprisingly, a page-turner.

I could easily, or rather, not so easily, launch into a discourse on the evidence which damns Oswald, and by extension damns those who say he was either a patsy or one of several gunmen at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Not so easily since it is quite difficult to summarize 1,500 pages in the space of a blog.

Therefore, I will not go into any depth here on the preponderance of evidence that does so; however, there are a few points of interest beyond the evidence found in the book that both swayed me from being a semi-conspiracy theorist (meaning that I thought it quite possible that Oswald had accomplices, but not a vast network of powerful co-conspirators) and further convinced me that America’s Left is operating in an entirely different reality wholly separate from objective reality.

First, it should be noted that nowhere does Bugliosi reveal his personal politics, though I gathered from some negative comments he made regarding Ken Starr and other conservatives, along with his positive comments about “mainstream” liberals that he probably leans toward the liberal side of the political spectrum.

In discussing the history of the conspiracy movement, Bugliosi writes, “Although the conspiracy movement throughout the years has had no political agenda, and its adherents run the gamut from members of the Far Left to the Far Right, this was not true at the beginning. Because Oswald was a known Marxist who had defected to Russia and was a pro-Castroite, the belief of many Americans in the wake of the assassination was that Russia, our bitter enemy in the Cold War, was behind the president’s death. It probably was no coincidence, then, that the first four conspiracy books on the assassination were written by old-line Communists or politically active leftists…”

One of the favored outlets for conspiracy schlock was Ramparts magazine, a New Left publication that featured such Leftist luminaries as Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, Seymour Hersh, Abbie Hoffman, Jann Wenner (who would later become Rolling Stone’s publisher), Robert Scheer (formerly at the Los Angeles Times, and now helping lead the Nutroots Left), and Adam Hochschild (founder of Mother Jones), among others.

In 1969, then under the editorial direction of David Horowitz and Peter Collier, Ramparts declared that Warren Commission critics “were doing the job that the Dallas police, the FBI, and the Warren Commission should have done in the first place.”
Fast-forward to 1991 and Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Basically, the film implicates and includes everyone from the military-industrial complex, the Dallas police department, the Secret Service, the CIA, FBI, LBJ, and any other acronymic and non-acronymic organization you can think of.
Based on Jim Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw in New Orleans for conspiracy to murder Kennedy, Stone’s movie follows Garrison’s paranoid and utterly bankrupt attack on Shaw, dressing it up nicely in everyone’s lovable and earnest everyman, Kevin Costner.

Stone’s agenda, as it is in most of his films, is transparent. For lack of a better label, Stone is basically a Marxist, and is maybe a smidge to the right of Ward Churchill. Once again, I won’t go into the discrepancies, fabrications, and paranoia which fills every second of the movie since Bugliosi does a fine job in his book.

The important thing to draw from JFK is that it is merely a continuation of the Leftist drivel that has been the primary driver behind the conspiracy community since the assassination. So, though I thought Bugliosi did an outstanding job presenting the evidence and casting doubts on each and every facet of every conspiracy theory under the sun, I don’t agree with his assessment that the conspiracy movement has “had no political agenda.”

Of all the conspiracy books and articles written, very few attempt to implicate Right Wing fall guys, such as Castro and the Soviet Union. The majority follow Oliver Stone’s line of thinking, which reveals animus toward institutions that represent, in their eyes, American imperialism, mainly the military, the intelligence agencies, and corporations. The Mafia usually shows up in one form or another, but mostly as a vehicle by which America’s evil institutions chose to do the dirty work. Yes. It’s quite fantastic.
In a nutshell, Oswald was a Marxist, and Marxists have worked diligently to cover up the fact that a fellow Marxist shot the president by claiming there was a cover-up. It’s your typical MoveOn.org bait-and-switch propagandistic scenario.

Next time, I’ll give a somewhat brief rundown of the primary reasons why conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination are bogus beyond belief. Basically, it boils down to the fact that there simply is no evidence. Rather, there are endless rabbit trails and disparate connections based on several degrees of separation that the conspiracy community has conveniently tied together (so and so knew so and so who had an acquaintance who went to Jack Ruby’s nightclub one night, therefore Ruby was a hit man for the Mafia, and so on and so forth.)