JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy

by John McAdams

The mother of all conspiracy theories is about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Many of its elements have become part of American the single bullet, the grassy knoll shooter, and the mysterious deaths of interested parties. JFK Assassination Logic shows how to approach such conspiracy claims. Studying Lee Harvey OswaldÆs character and personality, for example, doesnÆt help determine whether he alone shot the president, and our opinion of bureaucrats can often cloud our judgments. How people view the JFK assassination can be a model for how to (or perhaps how not to) evaluate other conspiracy theories, including those generally considered dubiousùsuch as President RooseveltÆs foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor, desert staging of the 1969 moon landing, and U.S. government involvement in 9/11ùas well as those based on fact, such as Watergate.John McAdams addresses not only conspiracy theories, but also how to think, reason, and judge the evidence in these cases. How do we evaluate eyewitness testimony? How can there be ôtoo much evidenceö of a conspiracy? How do we determine whether suspicious people are really culpable? By putting the JFK assassination under the microscope, McAdams provides a blueprint for understanding how conspiracy theories arise and how to judge the evidence.This book puts the reader into a mass of contradictory evidence and presents an intriguing puzzle to be solved. The solution, in each case, involves using intellectual tools. Eyewitness testimony, the notion of ôcoincidence,ö selectivity in the use of evidence, how to choose between contradictory pieces of evidence, the need for evidence to fit a coherent theory, how government works, and basic principles of social theorizingùall provide the elements of how to judge not only the JFK conspiracy but all conspiracies.

Genres: True Crime, Nonfiction, History

321 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2011

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

It might be a little provocative (who, me? always!) to say that religion, conspiracy theory and marriage are three examples of how people generally feel a lot happier if the world can be explained and therefore ordered in specific ways. There are big questions out there which will really mess with our minds so we find the baggy sack that best suits our particular brains and cram those questions right in.

(This is why atheism is a hard sell – it’s not an alternative explanation, it’s just a denial of the most popular current explanation. Atheism is not a baggy sack.)

JFK is still, as the blurb here says “the mother of all conspiracy theories”, its perpetual juiciness knows no bounds. What’s very curious is that for one group of people of course it’s obvious there was a conspiracy, and for another group of course it’s obvious there wasn’t, and both take comfort from their point of view because it confirms the way they believe the world works. So we have an impasse.

The lone gunman believers are happy that the whole horrible event can be neatly tied up – it has no terrible implications, it was a one off. The investigations proved that the authorities are basically reasonably honest and use common sense and rules of evidence much like we all do. We can follow their logic.

The conspiracy theorists upend this, tearing away such a smug veil of complacency, and they reveal all the horrible implications, and try to prove by their vast, intricate arguments that the world is much darker and more complex than the lone gunman types had realized, that anyone who thinks Oswald was the only shooter is astoundingly naïve, and that the more you find out, the more you realise that Oswald was almost the only person not involved in the conspiracy. Everyone else was, from LBJ to the most menial member of the Dallas police force.



On the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination, Gallup ran a poll and found that 30% of Americans believe that Oswald was the lone gunman and there was no conspiracy. Curiously, this is the same percentage as Gallup found immediately after the assassination. Belief in a conspiracy started off in late 1963 at around 50% of Americans and now is around 60%. So 10% are don’t-knows.
This tells us that the paranoid view of the way society works is more popular, which of course connects with all the current anti-politician anti-Washington stuff which this year created success for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump (and in Britain for Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit).

I myself do not care for the paranoid tendency and I tend to automatically disbelieve all conspiracy theories until, of course, they turn out to be true, like Watergate, like the abuse of children by the Catholic church, like the way the West was herded into war with Iraq and Afghanistan by a small cabal of American cabinet members, etc.

*

Turning to JFK, one of my favourite books is Libra by Don DeLillo – utterly brilliant, it’s a must read pro-conspiracy novel. And JFK, Oliver Stone’s two and a half hour illustrated lecture on the conspiracy, is also brilliant, and a must see.

But when I turn to books about this thing, then I’m dismayed. I stumble, I fall, like a babe in the woods I’m lost almost immediately.

How can any ordinary citizen even begin to think about whether there was a conspiracy or not? We are not ballistics experts, we do not know autopsy procedures in Texas in 1963, we have no knowledge about how to spot if a photograph has been edited, we know nothing about the Katzenback memoir Roger Craig or Charles Crenshaw or Oswald’s too-quick visa, or 544 Camp Street, or planted memories or how Governor Connolly was situated in the limo. That is, we have no knowledge of these arcane matters until someone – from one side or the other – tells us about them. Then we do know, but only from one direction; in order to get the full picture we would need to check all these matters with the opposite arguer. And who’s gonna do that?
So for the majority of us, we peer over into the ferocious gladiatorial pit of conspiracy theorists wildly taking lumps out of their opponents and each other, and we creep away, leaving them to it. And we come to a vague feeling – yeah, there’s gotta be more to it than just one guy.
Which is fallacious reasoning based on the idea that a large event must have a large cause. The killing of a president surely could not have been accomplished by the creepy nobody Lee Harvey Oswald. If it was, what kind of world are we living in?

But then, if they were all in on it, the Mafia, the CIA, the FBI, then what kind of world are we living in?

In this book John McAdams tries to lay out a lot of the evidence and sort the noise from the signal (as he puts it) - I should mention he’s an anti-conspiracy guy – but like all other writers he leads us into a forest of detail where all we can do is say ok John, if you say so. Some of it is real fun. On pages 188-190 he lays out a table showing all the people who have confessed to being part of the conspiracy. 22 people, of which five named themselves as shooters! I had no idea about all of that.
But really, this is another case of too many trees and way too much forest. This little bear is going to tiptoe back to suburbia and take a couple if aspirin for that headache he feels bubbling up behind the frontal lobes.

[Thicks1 · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is remarkable how much information is out there and how much of that information is misleading or flat out wrong.

[Kimberly]

A thorough explanation that does a good job of staying on the fence. (Though, after reading the book, I know which side the author is on.)

This book is different in that it minutely examines every claim of conspiracy and every major person who claimed it.