It's difficult to read or critique an article written by someone with such strong confirmation bias and real lack of understanding or scholarship of the issues raised by those who question the official story. BTW, Lincoln WAS killed as part of a conspiracy tied to antagonistic Southern interests, just not underwritten by any official entity.
Let's take just two facts. There was a plot to kill JFK in Chicago in early November. The plot, which involved 4 Latinos in a motel room with high powered rifles and a map of Kennedy's parade route was taken so seriously Kennedy cancelled the trip.
Second there is no chain of evidence of CE399. This becomes more than problematic.
Also many of the forces you display as separate actors had overlapping interests. Kennedy was hated, I mean really hated by many very powerful interest groups for several reasons, primarily as seen being a Quisling in seeking cooling of cold war tensions with the Soviet Union. But for example the mob hated him for his bother's crackdown after, in their eyes, they helped put him in office and for the humiliating treatment of high bosses like Carlos Marcello. In the Church hearings, we found out that the CIA enlisted the mob's help in trying to assassinate Castro. Why would rogue elements working together on this possibly be such a reach?
The issue for me is the incredible obfuscation by authorities of evidence and of the report. The primary crime scene, the car, was cleaned before it could be thoroughly investigated.
Two other example of this concern and there are hundreds. Saundra Spencer was the film developer of the autopsy photos. Under oath to the ARRB she said the official photos now archived were NOT the photos she developed. She even said they were on the wrong paper. Jerol Custer was the x-ray technician at the autopsy. In his deposition under oath to the ARRB, he vividly describes the pandemonium present, how high ranking military officers dictated what could and could not be done, and how a sizable bullet fragment was taken out of Kennedy's back.
None of this is dispositive but even the killing of Tippet by Oswald is disputed. Do you see the problem people have? So much was potentially covered up and actually covered up that there never was real closure forensically about the event. Johnson was nuts to pin it on Oswald and avoid implications of a foreign power. We know that. It was barely a year after the Missile Crisis. There is a lot of smoke here. Your essay is blithe and smug, but your real focus should be why there are conspiracy theories here, for reasons I have barely begun to enumerate, and what that said about official actions and the fracturing of trust in government and official authority, rather than this badly non researched, clumsy dismissal of why those feelings and thoughts emerged. In light of a cascade of government malfeasance by the very entities you cite (Watergate, Iran Contra, Iraq build up, CIA mob ties, etc) those concerns were justified.
It's not that critics of the official story have to provide answers as to how it was done. They were denied a transparent investigation with apparent cover up of probative evidence. BTW, the theory is NOT that the CIA enlisted Oswald to kill JFK. It's that he was possibly a patsy. There was one in place in Chicago.
Couldn’t have said this better…but will add that this kind of commentary simply makes it look like the author is just another shill in sheep’s clothing, doing the bidding of those who continue the cover up.
I would not go that far. There are many people who just have strong feelings that Oswald acted alone. There is significant evidence against him. But there is a kind of derisive arrogance against those concerned differently that for the reasons I cited should not be summarily dismissed. Just look at the route Oswald supposedly took vs his time stamp at work to mail the money order for the rifle (via John Armstrong) , which btw is the wrong size.
And Vincent Bugliosi is not credible as a researcher here. Jim DiEugenio tore him to shreds in his extensive rebuttal to "Reclaiming History."
Irony is that just like the bubble the US live in today that the rest of the world don't exist in (reference to the global understanding that POTUS today is a sociopathic unhinged lunatic), the rest of the world did and always has known Oswald to be a giant Patsy and your own summation regarding timelines of Oswalds movement and even the gun found being a different gun than the only known image of him owning, and witnesses in the same stairwell at the same time (2 ladies) stated that not only did they know Oswald, he never passed them on the day show that something is being covered up. The bullet fragment is also interesting given the magic bullet has no damage at all, that we all know is 100% a physical impossibility.
Mr. Knuttel, thank you for saying exactly what I was thinking. I found disbelief early in the article with the cute comment about not trusting anyone with three first names. James Earl Jones (RIP) was a fine gentleman and actor.
The names referred to as having three first names. Unless there are additional names not listed on this Web page, it appears to me those folks have but two first names with the third name being the surname. Just an observation muttered in text by a passerby.
Good stuff. A lot of complexity is going on that leads to people needing lies. People around us take part in the conspiracy for the most disgusting reasons also.
Overwhelmed by “evidence,” innuendo, and writing with flair. Look for less evidence, but which is indisputable. Apply rigorous logic to known facts. Do not ignore anything, document everything, and trust nothing. Proximity to the truth might only be possible.
What constitutes "indisputable"? NAA was considered inviolable until it was not. If 3/4 of potential evidence was covered up, dismissed , ignored or corrupted, where is the "evidence? What can be "documented"? The frigging car was cleaned before a forensic team could examine it. It has been postulated that Connelly's side wound was from a (the single) tumbling bullet that slammed into him horizontally. The size of the wound "matched that trajectory." Except it didn't. It appeared to because his doctor extended the wound, which was actually much smaller, during examination. Now what? Where is the chain of evidence for CE399? The developer says the pictures in archives were not what she developed. You know, little stuff like that.
My favorite detail about that day is the forecast was for rain. It did slightly drizzle in the morning, it was windy, and the top was on the Presidential limo. But the rain stayed away. It was an unusually warm sunny day for late November. At 11:38am, JFK told the secret service to remove the top so people could see him better.
The conspiracy, obviously, includes the ability to change the weather and use mind control to convince JFK to tell his secret service to take off the roof and stay in the car behind him 🤣
also written in a way that accepts the current status quo by quoting findings, statements and claims as to be fac tual when we now know they are not, so whilst interesting and "mildly" witty at best, still redundant apart from creating a heap of comments, which was the aim I guess.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist at all but both Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald worked for Carlos Marcello. The bar in Dallas where Ruby worked was a Marcello operation, and Oswald did odd jobs for him in New Orleans. Draw your own conclusions...
Oswald also worked for the US govt in some fashion as a plant to get information. For all we know he was the cover up, he may well have been hired to do the shooting, knowing he would never succeed but would be a convenient patsy. Mind you, he was never there so that theory is also redundant.
Absolutely brain dead, reality denying drivel. I'm embarrassed I actually tried to read this overtly anti-historical horseshit. Unfortunately for the writer (and those behind the writer), most people are nowhere near as stupid and incurious as your garbage 'story' assumes.
I think the who did it part is less compelling than the what happened part. Clearly Oswald took some shots, but eyewitnesses and photographic evidence indicate that other shots came from other directions. Even this article indicates that the single bullet theory doesn’t hold up.
We may not know who the other actors were, but it doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to know they existed.
"clearly" is a stretch, one thing we all know is that Oswald was "never" in that building as concluded, as two eye witnesses who were in the stairwell at the exact time have stated, neither was the police officer who saw Oswald.
Keep Your Cutesy Jokester Prose the Hell Away from JFK's Murder
ἢ τῶν ἀθίκτων θίξεται ματᾴζων
“He tampers recklessly with sacred things..".”
—Sophocles’ Oedipus, line 891
This piece plays into the hands of the “so many theories!” ploy, which perpetuates the illusion that we’ll never know, or one guess is as good as another. It protects the responsible parties whose guilt has long since been exposed. And it spares lazy, innocent readers the inconvenience of actually learning what happened by reading a serious book, such as:
--JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass, S.J.;
--Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter Dale Scott;
--History Will Not Absolve Us: Public Denial and Orwellian Control, by Martiz Schotz and Vincent Salandria; or
--JFK's War with the National Security Establishment, by Douglas Horne.
Instead of coming to grips with these studies, Nussenbaum opens with a discredited propagandist: “In his book Reclaiming History, Manson prosecutor and best-selling true crime author Vincent Bugliosi cites 44 different organizations and 214 specific individuals who have been accused of conspiring to assassinate Kennedy…” If you want that number to be higher, accuse every person in China. Now another billion have been “accused.” But don’t worry: “The limits of time, space, and human sanity will sadly constrain me to just ten of the most well-known conspiracy theories, which I will evaluate both for plausibility and—far more importantly—for entertainment value.”
Apparently that last sentence did not strike him as obscene, which I suppose is generational. I was born five years after the murder, but the horror and the pity of it have been part of my consciousness all my life, which is why I’m spending valuable time on this latest, millionth example of a sin that young writers commit.
“The belief that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone is the country’s most widely believed conspiracy theory—if, indeed, it even is a conspiracy theory—sustained across generations and deeply woven into American cultural memory through countless books, movies, and TV shows.”
Well, if the man did not act alone, either others conspired in the murder, or you espouse the absurd notion (briefly mentioned by the desperate House Select Committee on Assassinations in their final, 1979 Report, which called its likelihood “extremely remote”) that there were two “lone gunmen” in Dealey Plaza, unknown to each other. When he interjects “if, indeed, it even is a conspiracy theory,” Nussenbaum can’t mean that multiple actors might somehow not be cooperating; he’s using the term the dumb way, the authoritarian way, where the meaning of “conspiracy theory” always already includes the assumption that the hypothesis is false. Then what was the point of acknowledging that the CIA made it up, if not to avoid falling for their ploy in doing so?
Setting the stage, he tells us:
"What we know for sure happened: Kennedy was riding in an open-top motorcade through Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, with the Secret Service—at Kennedy’s insistence—following in a second car rather than riding with him5. At 12:30 pm, three shots were fired. Kennedy was hit twice, once in the neck and once in the head."
Nope. In the President’s limousine were Secret Service agents William Greer and Roy Kellerman, and evidence (including eyewitness testimony) strongly suggests that Greer slowed the limousine to a complete stop, turned around to watch the victim, and only accelerated once he had seen his head explode. “Kennedy was hit twice” is an irresponsible error if you write it in 1970. In 2025, it’s either a wicked lie or a gross blunder.
The President was absolutely not hit “twice, once in the neck and once in the head.” He had the throat wound of entrance, per Parkland Hospital Dr. Malcolm Perry. He had the fatal head shot in the right front, per Malcolm Kilduff’s immediate press conference, and several doctors. He had the back wound, per the official White House death certificate, signed by Kennedy's physician Admiral George Burkley, which placed the back wound at “about the level of the third thoracic vertebra.” This back wound was deliberately misdescribed by Warren Commission member Gerald Ford as located “at the base of the neck.” In addition, note that the late, eminent forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht argued in The JFK Assassination Dissected that there were two headshots in rapid succession, one from the rear and one from the front.
“In a nearby building, police found a gun owned by Lee Harvey Oswald, a local delinquent…” Officer Roger Craig was hounded into his grave for insisting, with unfailing courage, that when he personally found the rifle in the “sniper’s nest,” it was clearly labelled MAUSER, a German sharpshooting rifle—not the cheap Italian carbine made by Manlicher-Carcano that became the official weapon of Oswald the official lone gunman. Oswald was neither “local” nor a “delinquent.” He was a Russian-speaking, U.S. Marine veteran of a secret U.S. intelligence fake-defector program, who had lived in the USSR, worked at the U-2 spy plane facility in Atsugi, Japan, and at a radio factory in Minsk, and at Jagger-Chiles-Stovall, a U.S. intelligence-linked photography shop in Dallas.
All we hear from Mr. Nussenbaum about Oswald’s Russian years is a passing mention of the defection, in the context of discrediting a hypothesis nobody takes seriously: that the Soviets and/or Castro government were involved. There is indeed evidence for that false hypothesis—because it was fabricated very deliberately by the plotters. Why? For the exact use to which it was quickly put: LBJ wielded it to force reluctant participants like Earl Warren onto the “blue ribbon commission” that usurped the proper channels of judicial due process. See, FBI Director Hoover heard taped wiretaps, and saw surveillance photographs, from the Cuban and Soviet Embassies, dated September and October, in which someone claimed to be “Oswald” who most obviously was not him.
This showed Hoover and Johnson (who already knew it) that others were involved in the setup weeks before the murder happened. It also struck terror into the men LBJ strong-armed onto the Warren Commision, because he told them there was evidence of Oswald’s links to those Communist embassies, but did not tell them the evidence showed an impersonator of Oswald, not the young man himself. This is explained in solidly evidenced detail in a fascinating analysis by U.S. intelligence veteran John Newman, in “Mexico City: A New Analysis.” A book-length treatment is Deep Politics III, by Peter Dale Scott, summarized at Overview: The CIA, The Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico.
I don’t have all day to trace out the falsehoods and sickening vulgarities of this silly, sloppy article. I wish Max Nussenbaum a great writing career, with no further foolishness of this sort.
As a youth I was angered at the extensive TV coverage filling all four TV channels the three days with nothing but Kennedy assassination coverage. At school, the principal mustered all to the auditorium/lunchroom where, breaking out in sobs, he informed us of the killing in Texas.
As the decades slithered through time I have read numerous books delving into the assassination. TV was another sources of possibilities. Discussion with others around me were typically futile since none of them read anything, fiction or non-fiction, unless it was pertinent to a hobby or a beloved sport team.
Max Nussenbaum has crafted an awesome assemblage of words conveying a complex topic in a manner both serious and lighthearted at times. His conclusion is logical, yet he does not proclaim to be the penultimate expert about JFK's demise and leaves it to the reader to make their own conclusion. His summation as to the reality of that situation steadily falling into the recent-ancient-history slot was an apt conclusion with logic and rational-thinking backing his claim.
Will We, the People, ever know the entirety of events surrounding the JFK demise? Does anybody except the one aloft holding the rifle know the actuality of the affair? I do not know.
What I can proclaim is that this essay was an enjoyable read and I rate it a full 9,69 on my 10 maximum scale. Never having given a 10 before and with my addled mind withered with age struggling to recall past ratings it is possible that the essay you just read about JFK has received the best rating I have ever bestowed upon a written work appearing upon the Web.
I haven't the time to read all the comments, but this comes closest to my own review of this article. What I haven't found in the article or comments is the ballistics test results that were conducted decades after 1963, which (I thought) validated the single-bullet theory hitting Kennedy first, then traveling to the front seat to wound Connelly. If not ballistics, then the test of time is compelling that Oswald acted alone because no one has come forward in 60-plus years to confess to being the second gunman or knowing something about him/her. Lastly, I visited the (original) Texas Schoolbook Depository building in 1970. The grassy knoll was so small an area, no one could have fired from it without someone in the crowd noticing someone. The distance between the open window in the building where Oswald perched & the limonene is shockingly short. It was much easier to shoot Kennedy's head off than one might think.
but your own use of the ballistics report as evidence also ignores the sniper skill test also performed stating that only a highly skilled expert marksman, using the supposed rifle could have successfully made those shots and even then it took multiple goes to match timelines. Also the so called "magic" bullet has no damage to it at all, yet is hit multiple targets???
I was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Hungary. We thought of Kennedy - America - with sympathy, we only heard about his speech in Berlin decades later. We could follow the tragic events from the beginning - on the one TV channel at the time - of course imbued with the ideology forced on us. It still affects us today: indelible history, albeit with countless unclear questions.
About the 214 number you cite at the start of this article - if you read Reclaiming History, and add up all the potential assassins and conspirators proposed between 1963 and when the book was published in 2007, it is a far higher number - something like 892. An absurd number, and an illustration of how pursuit of conspiracy theories takes us further and further away from the truth in cases such as this.
This kind of statement also suggests a level of naivete that undermines the credibility of the analysis: "So no, the CIA isn’t guilty—at least, not of this particular crime." It is very odd that the author thinks that from a quick, inexpert desktop review he would be able to rule out involvement of a powerful institution that had the capability to conceal its role.
On the other hand, I get the sense - partly from the derisory tone - that the intent behind the piece was decided before much knowledge was acquired. It is also interesting that this article on a highly contentious topic was promoted by the Substack Weekender newsletter despite coming from a very small account: other authors should be so lucky.
Overall, one can only conclude the intention of this piece was to disparage plausible conspiracy theories: that realisation will only compound the conspiratorial views he appears to be concerned with dispelling.
Wow, “an eccentric nightclub owner and Kennedy superfan”? This the most lazy, topical, and inaccurate label that could possibly be applied to Jack Ruby. Even a cursory search of the serious research reveals that he was a mafioso and gun runner with connections to the CIA via anti-Castro exiles. How did this make the Substack digest!? It’s the kind of thing I would expect to read in Time magazine or some other dentist office rag.
It's difficult to read or critique an article written by someone with such strong confirmation bias and real lack of understanding or scholarship of the issues raised by those who question the official story. BTW, Lincoln WAS killed as part of a conspiracy tied to antagonistic Southern interests, just not underwritten by any official entity.
Let's take just two facts. There was a plot to kill JFK in Chicago in early November. The plot, which involved 4 Latinos in a motel room with high powered rifles and a map of Kennedy's parade route was taken so seriously Kennedy cancelled the trip.
Second there is no chain of evidence of CE399. This becomes more than problematic.
Also many of the forces you display as separate actors had overlapping interests. Kennedy was hated, I mean really hated by many very powerful interest groups for several reasons, primarily as seen being a Quisling in seeking cooling of cold war tensions with the Soviet Union. But for example the mob hated him for his bother's crackdown after, in their eyes, they helped put him in office and for the humiliating treatment of high bosses like Carlos Marcello. In the Church hearings, we found out that the CIA enlisted the mob's help in trying to assassinate Castro. Why would rogue elements working together on this possibly be such a reach?
The issue for me is the incredible obfuscation by authorities of evidence and of the report. The primary crime scene, the car, was cleaned before it could be thoroughly investigated.
Two other example of this concern and there are hundreds. Saundra Spencer was the film developer of the autopsy photos. Under oath to the ARRB she said the official photos now archived were NOT the photos she developed. She even said they were on the wrong paper. Jerol Custer was the x-ray technician at the autopsy. In his deposition under oath to the ARRB, he vividly describes the pandemonium present, how high ranking military officers dictated what could and could not be done, and how a sizable bullet fragment was taken out of Kennedy's back.
None of this is dispositive but even the killing of Tippet by Oswald is disputed. Do you see the problem people have? So much was potentially covered up and actually covered up that there never was real closure forensically about the event. Johnson was nuts to pin it on Oswald and avoid implications of a foreign power. We know that. It was barely a year after the Missile Crisis. There is a lot of smoke here. Your essay is blithe and smug, but your real focus should be why there are conspiracy theories here, for reasons I have barely begun to enumerate, and what that said about official actions and the fracturing of trust in government and official authority, rather than this badly non researched, clumsy dismissal of why those feelings and thoughts emerged. In light of a cascade of government malfeasance by the very entities you cite (Watergate, Iran Contra, Iraq build up, CIA mob ties, etc) those concerns were justified.
It's not that critics of the official story have to provide answers as to how it was done. They were denied a transparent investigation with apparent cover up of probative evidence. BTW, the theory is NOT that the CIA enlisted Oswald to kill JFK. It's that he was possibly a patsy. There was one in place in Chicago.
You are too much like the Warren Commission.
Couldn’t have said this better…but will add that this kind of commentary simply makes it look like the author is just another shill in sheep’s clothing, doing the bidding of those who continue the cover up.
I would not go that far. There are many people who just have strong feelings that Oswald acted alone. There is significant evidence against him. But there is a kind of derisive arrogance against those concerned differently that for the reasons I cited should not be summarily dismissed. Just look at the route Oswald supposedly took vs his time stamp at work to mail the money order for the rifle (via John Armstrong) , which btw is the wrong size.
And Vincent Bugliosi is not credible as a researcher here. Jim DiEugenio tore him to shreds in his extensive rebuttal to "Reclaiming History."
Irony is that just like the bubble the US live in today that the rest of the world don't exist in (reference to the global understanding that POTUS today is a sociopathic unhinged lunatic), the rest of the world did and always has known Oswald to be a giant Patsy and your own summation regarding timelines of Oswalds movement and even the gun found being a different gun than the only known image of him owning, and witnesses in the same stairwell at the same time (2 ladies) stated that not only did they know Oswald, he never passed them on the day show that something is being covered up. The bullet fragment is also interesting given the magic bullet has no damage at all, that we all know is 100% a physical impossibility.
Mr. Knuttel, thank you for saying exactly what I was thinking. I found disbelief early in the article with the cute comment about not trusting anyone with three first names. James Earl Jones (RIP) was a fine gentleman and actor.
The names referred to as having three first names. Unless there are additional names not listed on this Web page, it appears to me those folks have but two first names with the third name being the surname. Just an observation muttered in text by a passerby.
Good stuff. A lot of complexity is going on that leads to people needing lies. People around us take part in the conspiracy for the most disgusting reasons also.
Overwhelmed by “evidence,” innuendo, and writing with flair. Look for less evidence, but which is indisputable. Apply rigorous logic to known facts. Do not ignore anything, document everything, and trust nothing. Proximity to the truth might only be possible.
What constitutes "indisputable"? NAA was considered inviolable until it was not. If 3/4 of potential evidence was covered up, dismissed , ignored or corrupted, where is the "evidence? What can be "documented"? The frigging car was cleaned before a forensic team could examine it. It has been postulated that Connelly's side wound was from a (the single) tumbling bullet that slammed into him horizontally. The size of the wound "matched that trajectory." Except it didn't. It appeared to because his doctor extended the wound, which was actually much smaller, during examination. Now what? Where is the chain of evidence for CE399? The developer says the pictures in archives were not what she developed. You know, little stuff like that.
My favorite detail about that day is the forecast was for rain. It did slightly drizzle in the morning, it was windy, and the top was on the Presidential limo. But the rain stayed away. It was an unusually warm sunny day for late November. At 11:38am, JFK told the secret service to remove the top so people could see him better.
I love that. I assume that the shooters must have at least considered the possibility of rain?
The conspiracy, obviously, includes the ability to change the weather and use mind control to convince JFK to tell his secret service to take off the roof and stay in the car behind him 🤣
What a great weekend read. Illuminating as well as witty. Thanks for your deep dive on our behalf.
also written in a way that accepts the current status quo by quoting findings, statements and claims as to be fac tual when we now know they are not, so whilst interesting and "mildly" witty at best, still redundant apart from creating a heap of comments, which was the aim I guess.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist at all but both Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald worked for Carlos Marcello. The bar in Dallas where Ruby worked was a Marcello operation, and Oswald did odd jobs for him in New Orleans. Draw your own conclusions...
Oswald also worked for the US govt in some fashion as a plant to get information. For all we know he was the cover up, he may well have been hired to do the shooting, knowing he would never succeed but would be a convenient patsy. Mind you, he was never there so that theory is also redundant.
Absolutely brain dead, reality denying drivel. I'm embarrassed I actually tried to read this overtly anti-historical horseshit. Unfortunately for the writer (and those behind the writer), most people are nowhere near as stupid and incurious as your garbage 'story' assumes.
I think the who did it part is less compelling than the what happened part. Clearly Oswald took some shots, but eyewitnesses and photographic evidence indicate that other shots came from other directions. Even this article indicates that the single bullet theory doesn’t hold up.
We may not know who the other actors were, but it doesn’t take a conspiracy theory to know they existed.
"clearly" is a stretch, one thing we all know is that Oswald was "never" in that building as concluded, as two eye witnesses who were in the stairwell at the exact time have stated, neither was the police officer who saw Oswald.
Here's a fresh Substack post refuting this specific Candy for Breakfast post:
https://jameyhecht.substack.com/p/keep-your-cutesy-jokester-prose-the
Keep Your Cutesy Jokester Prose the Hell Away from JFK's Murder
ἢ τῶν ἀθίκτων θίξεται ματᾴζων
“He tampers recklessly with sacred things..".”
—Sophocles’ Oedipus, line 891
This piece plays into the hands of the “so many theories!” ploy, which perpetuates the illusion that we’ll never know, or one guess is as good as another. It protects the responsible parties whose guilt has long since been exposed. And it spares lazy, innocent readers the inconvenience of actually learning what happened by reading a serious book, such as:
--JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, by James W. Douglass, S.J.;
--Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, by Peter Dale Scott;
--History Will Not Absolve Us: Public Denial and Orwellian Control, by Martiz Schotz and Vincent Salandria; or
--JFK's War with the National Security Establishment, by Douglas Horne.
Instead of coming to grips with these studies, Nussenbaum opens with a discredited propagandist: “In his book Reclaiming History, Manson prosecutor and best-selling true crime author Vincent Bugliosi cites 44 different organizations and 214 specific individuals who have been accused of conspiring to assassinate Kennedy…” If you want that number to be higher, accuse every person in China. Now another billion have been “accused.” But don’t worry: “The limits of time, space, and human sanity will sadly constrain me to just ten of the most well-known conspiracy theories, which I will evaluate both for plausibility and—far more importantly—for entertainment value.”
Apparently that last sentence did not strike him as obscene, which I suppose is generational. I was born five years after the murder, but the horror and the pity of it have been part of my consciousness all my life, which is why I’m spending valuable time on this latest, millionth example of a sin that young writers commit.
“The belief that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone is the country’s most widely believed conspiracy theory—if, indeed, it even is a conspiracy theory—sustained across generations and deeply woven into American cultural memory through countless books, movies, and TV shows.”
Well, if the man did not act alone, either others conspired in the murder, or you espouse the absurd notion (briefly mentioned by the desperate House Select Committee on Assassinations in their final, 1979 Report, which called its likelihood “extremely remote”) that there were two “lone gunmen” in Dealey Plaza, unknown to each other. When he interjects “if, indeed, it even is a conspiracy theory,” Nussenbaum can’t mean that multiple actors might somehow not be cooperating; he’s using the term the dumb way, the authoritarian way, where the meaning of “conspiracy theory” always already includes the assumption that the hypothesis is false. Then what was the point of acknowledging that the CIA made it up, if not to avoid falling for their ploy in doing so?
Setting the stage, he tells us:
"What we know for sure happened: Kennedy was riding in an open-top motorcade through Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, with the Secret Service—at Kennedy’s insistence—following in a second car rather than riding with him5. At 12:30 pm, three shots were fired. Kennedy was hit twice, once in the neck and once in the head."
Nope. In the President’s limousine were Secret Service agents William Greer and Roy Kellerman, and evidence (including eyewitness testimony) strongly suggests that Greer slowed the limousine to a complete stop, turned around to watch the victim, and only accelerated once he had seen his head explode. “Kennedy was hit twice” is an irresponsible error if you write it in 1970. In 2025, it’s either a wicked lie or a gross blunder.
The President was absolutely not hit “twice, once in the neck and once in the head.” He had the throat wound of entrance, per Parkland Hospital Dr. Malcolm Perry. He had the fatal head shot in the right front, per Malcolm Kilduff’s immediate press conference, and several doctors. He had the back wound, per the official White House death certificate, signed by Kennedy's physician Admiral George Burkley, which placed the back wound at “about the level of the third thoracic vertebra.” This back wound was deliberately misdescribed by Warren Commission member Gerald Ford as located “at the base of the neck.” In addition, note that the late, eminent forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht argued in The JFK Assassination Dissected that there were two headshots in rapid succession, one from the rear and one from the front.
“In a nearby building, police found a gun owned by Lee Harvey Oswald, a local delinquent…” Officer Roger Craig was hounded into his grave for insisting, with unfailing courage, that when he personally found the rifle in the “sniper’s nest,” it was clearly labelled MAUSER, a German sharpshooting rifle—not the cheap Italian carbine made by Manlicher-Carcano that became the official weapon of Oswald the official lone gunman. Oswald was neither “local” nor a “delinquent.” He was a Russian-speaking, U.S. Marine veteran of a secret U.S. intelligence fake-defector program, who had lived in the USSR, worked at the U-2 spy plane facility in Atsugi, Japan, and at a radio factory in Minsk, and at Jagger-Chiles-Stovall, a U.S. intelligence-linked photography shop in Dallas.
All we hear from Mr. Nussenbaum about Oswald’s Russian years is a passing mention of the defection, in the context of discrediting a hypothesis nobody takes seriously: that the Soviets and/or Castro government were involved. There is indeed evidence for that false hypothesis—because it was fabricated very deliberately by the plotters. Why? For the exact use to which it was quickly put: LBJ wielded it to force reluctant participants like Earl Warren onto the “blue ribbon commission” that usurped the proper channels of judicial due process. See, FBI Director Hoover heard taped wiretaps, and saw surveillance photographs, from the Cuban and Soviet Embassies, dated September and October, in which someone claimed to be “Oswald” who most obviously was not him.
This showed Hoover and Johnson (who already knew it) that others were involved in the setup weeks before the murder happened. It also struck terror into the men LBJ strong-armed onto the Warren Commision, because he told them there was evidence of Oswald’s links to those Communist embassies, but did not tell them the evidence showed an impersonator of Oswald, not the young man himself. This is explained in solidly evidenced detail in a fascinating analysis by U.S. intelligence veteran John Newman, in “Mexico City: A New Analysis.” A book-length treatment is Deep Politics III, by Peter Dale Scott, summarized at Overview: The CIA, The Drug Traffic, and Oswald in Mexico.
I don’t have all day to trace out the falsehoods and sickening vulgarities of this silly, sloppy article. I wish Max Nussenbaum a great writing career, with no further foolishness of this sort.
As a youth I was angered at the extensive TV coverage filling all four TV channels the three days with nothing but Kennedy assassination coverage. At school, the principal mustered all to the auditorium/lunchroom where, breaking out in sobs, he informed us of the killing in Texas.
As the decades slithered through time I have read numerous books delving into the assassination. TV was another sources of possibilities. Discussion with others around me were typically futile since none of them read anything, fiction or non-fiction, unless it was pertinent to a hobby or a beloved sport team.
Max Nussenbaum has crafted an awesome assemblage of words conveying a complex topic in a manner both serious and lighthearted at times. His conclusion is logical, yet he does not proclaim to be the penultimate expert about JFK's demise and leaves it to the reader to make their own conclusion. His summation as to the reality of that situation steadily falling into the recent-ancient-history slot was an apt conclusion with logic and rational-thinking backing his claim.
Will We, the People, ever know the entirety of events surrounding the JFK demise? Does anybody except the one aloft holding the rifle know the actuality of the affair? I do not know.
What I can proclaim is that this essay was an enjoyable read and I rate it a full 9,69 on my 10 maximum scale. Never having given a 10 before and with my addled mind withered with age struggling to recall past ratings it is possible that the essay you just read about JFK has received the best rating I have ever bestowed upon a written work appearing upon the Web.
I haven't the time to read all the comments, but this comes closest to my own review of this article. What I haven't found in the article or comments is the ballistics test results that were conducted decades after 1963, which (I thought) validated the single-bullet theory hitting Kennedy first, then traveling to the front seat to wound Connelly. If not ballistics, then the test of time is compelling that Oswald acted alone because no one has come forward in 60-plus years to confess to being the second gunman or knowing something about him/her. Lastly, I visited the (original) Texas Schoolbook Depository building in 1970. The grassy knoll was so small an area, no one could have fired from it without someone in the crowd noticing someone. The distance between the open window in the building where Oswald perched & the limonene is shockingly short. It was much easier to shoot Kennedy's head off than one might think.
but your own use of the ballistics report as evidence also ignores the sniper skill test also performed stating that only a highly skilled expert marksman, using the supposed rifle could have successfully made those shots and even then it took multiple goes to match timelines. Also the so called "magic" bullet has no damage to it at all, yet is hit multiple targets???
I was a 13-year-old schoolboy in Hungary. We thought of Kennedy - America - with sympathy, we only heard about his speech in Berlin decades later. We could follow the tragic events from the beginning - on the one TV channel at the time - of course imbued with the ideology forced on us. It still affects us today: indelible history, albeit with countless unclear questions.
About the 214 number you cite at the start of this article - if you read Reclaiming History, and add up all the potential assassins and conspirators proposed between 1963 and when the book was published in 2007, it is a far higher number - something like 892. An absurd number, and an illustration of how pursuit of conspiracy theories takes us further and further away from the truth in cases such as this.
Interesting read. Thanks
The author of this post might have benefitted from more substantive understanding of conspiracy theories. Here are some crib notes:
https://open.substack.com/pub/politicaleconomist/p/a-brief-note-on-conspiracy-theories
This kind of statement also suggests a level of naivete that undermines the credibility of the analysis: "So no, the CIA isn’t guilty—at least, not of this particular crime." It is very odd that the author thinks that from a quick, inexpert desktop review he would be able to rule out involvement of a powerful institution that had the capability to conceal its role.
On the other hand, I get the sense - partly from the derisory tone - that the intent behind the piece was decided before much knowledge was acquired. It is also interesting that this article on a highly contentious topic was promoted by the Substack Weekender newsletter despite coming from a very small account: other authors should be so lucky.
Overall, one can only conclude the intention of this piece was to disparage plausible conspiracy theories: that realisation will only compound the conspiratorial views he appears to be concerned with dispelling.
Wow, “an eccentric nightclub owner and Kennedy superfan”? This the most lazy, topical, and inaccurate label that could possibly be applied to Jack Ruby. Even a cursory search of the serious research reveals that he was a mafioso and gun runner with connections to the CIA via anti-Castro exiles. How did this make the Substack digest!? It’s the kind of thing I would expect to read in Time magazine or some other dentist office rag.
It's interesting that the Texas Book Repository JFK assassination museum is largely taken up with displays supporting the various conspiracy theories.
Thank you for putting this together. I really enjoyed reading about all of the theories. I learned things I didn't know.
A plausible confession was offered by a mob-connected James Files. Have you examined and evaluated that?