Waiting for the smoking gun
Source: Irish Independent (Original Article)
After 45 years and with nearly 1,000 books in print on the subject, the “real story” behind the assassination of JFK seems unknowable. Lee Harvey Oswald was charged with the murder 12 hours after Kennedy was pronounced dead. Oswald himself was shot and killed by Jack Ruby less than 36 hours later. Oswald’s murder, the incompetent police work, the chaos, the unlimited list of possible suspects, the tortured explanations like the “magic bullet” produced in the report of the Warren Commission, the official investigation into the assassination, all have served to make falsifiable claims about that event seem beyond reach.
So muddled is the picture that fiction seems better built for the task than
history. Norman Mailer’s
own ruminations on the killing, in Harlot’s Ghost or Oswald’s Tale, seem
more credible and more satisfying than most of the non-fiction accounts. Who
needs facts at this point?
This may help explain the muted reaction so far to The Road to Dallas.
Author David Kaiser is a respected military and political historian,
lecturing at the prestigious Naval
War College. This recently published work, often dense and scholarly,
purports to be the first book about the assassination by a professional
historian who has pored over tens of thousands of pages of recently
declassified material.
So who does Kaiser believed killed Kennedy — a lone gunman or a massive
conspiracy? Both, actually. Kaiser argues, more or less persuasively, that
Kennedy was killed by Oswald, who was no patsy but a paid assassin,
recruited by a nexus of mafia and anti-Castro Cuban militants.
Kennedy’s death was part blowback from failed attempts to kill or overthrow Fidel
Castro, part revenge for the fanatical pursuit of organised crime by Robert
Kennedy. And part the result of two sides of the American intelligence
establishment working at cross purposes — the CIA,
illegally trying to induce BARNEY AND FRIENDS dvd the mafia to carry out an …continue reading