[vearwhershuh]

Daily reminder that congress looked into the JFK assassination and found:

"Scientific acoustical evidence establishes a high probability that at least two gunmen fired at the President."

and

"The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee was unable to identify the other gunmen or the extent of the conspiracy."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Com...

But then the conspiracy theory meme just kinda mopped everything up, and that was that.

[jccalhoun]

I don't know much about the report but the wikipedia article you linked to says that the acoustical evidence that causes the report to think there might be a second shooter has been found to be suspect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination_... and it also says that they didn't think the conspiracy involved the Soviet Union, Cuba, anti-Castro forces, organized crime, or government agencies. That rules out a lot of the popular theories on who may have had JFK killed.

[api]

I've wondered whether people may be blinded by the big sexy conspiracy theories and not looking at simpler more likely options.

The simplest of course is that Oswald did it, but there is at least some evidence for a second shooter from witnesses as well as perhaps acoustics.

The next simplest then is to propose two. What if Oswald had one accomplice who is still unknown because Ruby shot Oswald before he could rat them out.

Why did Ruby shoot Oswald anyway? To stop him from ratting someone else out? Dunno, but these are questions I'd immediately have asked.

What you do in the face of Ockham's razor is gradually dial up the complexity until you encompass all the evidence. You don't leap from simple lone nut to vast conspiracy, but that is what most do.

If there was more than one person involved, the fact that this has remained so mysterious with so many competing theories for so long argues strongly for a very small number of people. The more people are involved the more likely someone would get caught or confess. Death bed confessions are pretty common.

[AndrewBissell]

The real skill was not in the cover-up (which left a ton of breadcrumbs) but in browbeating the American public into accepting and ignoring it.

Right there in front of everyone's eyes

Greatest magic trick ever under the sun

Perfectly executed, skillfully done

[catalogia]

To be fair, most Americans don't believe the official 'lone gunman' narrative: https://news.gallup.com/poll/165893/majority-believe-jfk-kil...

But what can anybody do about it?

[AndrewBissell]

Not electing the guy who probably helped plot the assassination to the office of POTUS would have been a start. There's a whole lot of daylight between "he wasn't killed by a lone gunman" and actually taking some minimal steps to identify and oppose the people responsible.

[catalogia]

While the majority doubt the lone gunman narrative, I don't think there is any majority consensus beyond that. People have loads of different theories, different ideas for who the perpetrators were or what their motivations might have been. It's easy to say that something should be done, but actually getting that something done is another matter.

[bsder]

> The real skill was not in the cover-up (which left a ton of breadcrumbs) but in browbeating the American public into accepting and ignoring it.

The people most likely to have done this have probably left FAR larger trails of other malfeasance and we choose not go after them anyway.

Look at the gigantic trail of stuff surrounding Trump.

Why have we not purged the ENTIRE New York FBI field office as being compromised?

At this point, the JFK assassination is a nice distraction to make sure the people who might dig up inconvenient modern, relevant malfeasance are left digging somewhere else.

[mirimir]

Right, but who? LBJ and southern conservatives? The Mafia? Castro? And why use a shooter with such obvious Soviet connections?

My best guess is southern conservatives who, among other things, hated him for backing down over Bay of Pigs. So they manipulated Oswald into doing it, as a false flag.

And yeah, maybe that's too obvious. Maybe that's the false flag for something far more subtle.

[lordgrenville]

In Caro's monumental, unfinished biography of LBJ, he basically says that he found no evidence to link him to the assassination, having done decades of incredibly thorough research. But he also describes Johnson as:

- insanely ambitious, and obsessed with becoming President

- devastated at ending up VP, which basically ruled him out from the top job (barring JFK's death)

- insanely secretive (for example, he tracked down and destroyed almost all copies of his college yearbook, which merely showed him as being somewhat disliked/seen as dishonest)

Bearing all of which in mind, I'm partial to this particular conspiracy theory. Though I fully expect that if it's true we'll never know. Johnson was probably unmatched when it comes to pulling off something this audacious and eliminating all evidence.

[AndrewBissell]

"JFK and the Unspeakable" suggests that JFK had signaled his intentions to scale down the Cold War, withdraw from Vietnam, and reign in or disband the CIA after the Bay of Pigs disaster, and was killed by rogue elements in the CIA, probably in concert with military-industrial business interests and organized crime organizations who didn't like the Kennedys shining a light on their own misdeeds either.

There's a reference to this in Scorcese's recent movie "The Irishman": "if they can get a president, they can get a president of a union."