For those interested, Mr. Posner’s official web site is here:

http://www.posner.com/

Sounds like I need to add another volume to my overfull shelves of Kennedy books, (only 1/5 of which deal with the assassination, I’m sort of happy to say.)

I’d love to be convinced that Oswald did it — alone — if that is indeed what happened.

And checking for different assessments of this book, this critique called “One Hundred Errors in Gerald Posner’s Case Closed” is mentioned a few times. Here it is:

http://www.assassinationweb.com/ecc.htm

Oh Mr. Oswald did it alone alright even though there might have been conspiracies in the making or abandoned by the time of the assassination. I became convinced just this past week when I saw a marksman using the same model rifle as Oswald used to hit repeatedly a target during an authentic-appearing reenactment. Oswald’s wife admits Oswald practiced a great deal shortly before the assassination, not to mention he was a Marine (who are required to be more highly skilled riflemen than other soldiers) and he was a Marine MARKSMAN at that.

In my home town, where Jim Garrison shamed us all, he is considered by many to be a kook. I fast-forwarded through most of the first 45 minutes of the stinking Stone movie before ejecting it. Garrison’s main witness was a known lunatic.

The moral of Garrison’s story is ambition can make a fool of you.

Oswald qualified as a Sharpshooter (the second ranking after Expert) in the US marines, who gave the best rifle training in the world. His perch in the School Book Depository put him right on top of the motorcade. A friend of mine has been there and he was surprised how close to the street Oswald was, which TV doesn’t show. It was not a difficult shot for a man trained to fire a rifle by the US Marines, a point made by William Manchester (an ex-Marine) in his book. A man standing across the street saw Oswald at the window firing his rifle. Posner brought this out in Case Closed.

I can’t tell you how many times people have told me, “I believe there was a government plot to kill JFK.” When asked, they will VERY often give Stone’s film as the basis for that belief. Oliver Stone, left-wing nihilist, has succeeded in his aim with his 1991 film. The unending drumbeat of the left on this subject has been very effective as Mr. Auster says.

If Oswald hadn’t been killed by Jack Ruby, things would have been better. Oswald would have been tried with the evidence presented, and found guilty. Like MacVeigh, he would probably have found a writer he could tell his story to after being convicted.

Mr. Auster,

Did Posner reply?

David,

Are you sure Oswald was merely a rifle sharpshooter? It is not that hard to shoot expert over the Marine Corps’ known-distance qualification course (I managed to do it five times), and I think it would need an expert to hit at the ranges Oswald presumably did, with a bolt-action rifle and at such brief intervals between rounds.

Mr. Auster’s letter brings up a good point, that the human tragedy of John Kennedy’s murder was obscured by the thick layers of political interpretation that immediately followed it. I paid more attention than usual to Kennedy commemorations this year because of a coincidence in the calendar. I was born 40 years to the day after John Kennedy, which meant that on this 40th anniversary of his death I was the same age, to the day, as he was when killed. Very slightly creepy, and I have now lasted longer than he did. HRS

That’s a fascinating connection noticed by Mr. Auster, that the entrenchment in many ways of what must be called leftist influence which followed on the heels of the Kennedy assassination, lasting full-force about eight, nine, or ten years or so before gradually losing steam and petering out, had to do with the left’s misinterpretation of that tragic event on the deepest level and opportunistically grabbing additional power for themselves in the momentary D.C. disquilibrium and national disequilibrium inevitably left in the assassination’s wake. In other words, had he not been assassinated, we might never have had that destructive leftist surge of the sixties whose consequences we are still suffering today. I had never related the two in my mind before seeing Mr. Auster’s piece just now, and of course it made me think of a similar thing which happened following Lincoln’s assassination: the entrenchment in power of the more extreme South-hating northeastern radicals, men like Massachusetts Senator Thaddeus Stevens (who asked to be buried in a Negro-slave graveyard when he died, to give an example illustrative of his radicalism) who needlessly mistreated the South in ways well-known, which probably altered U.S. history for a century thereafter and are still altering it. In other words, the fact — pointed out by many authors — that but for Lincoln’s assassination the South might not have had to endure some of the unjust and wrong things imposed on it, so this country might not have had to endure “The Sixties,” had Kennedy lived (“The Sixties” and their harmful aftermath which we are still suffering under today — like the man who shot the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 whose act basically “caused” the rest of the twentieth century as we know it, complete with Hitler, Stalin, and the rest, Lee Harvey Oswald could have had no idea of the magnitude of the evil he was unleashing as he pulled that trigger).

Sorry for that bit of disjointedness in my last sentence above — but my meaning was clear, I hope (it must be this super-slow, ancient computer I’ve brought down from my teenager’s bedroom, pending delivery of my new Dell after my old machine finally gave up the ghost — this one’s slower than molasses in January and absolutely maddening to type anything on).

Posner sent me a one-sentence, hand-written note that said something like, “Thanks, I can use some encouragement on those days when I’m being attacked by critics.” He said nothing of substance and didn’t acknowledge any of my points.

Erratum:

Northern radical Thaddeus Stevens (originally from Vermont) was a member of the House from Pennsylvania, not the Senate from Massachusetts ( http://www.bartleby.com/65/st/StvnsT.html ). I was confusing him with his Congressional colleague in the subjugation of the prostrate South by the northern radical faction, Massachusetts Sen. Sumner:

“Sumner in the Senate and Thaddeus Stevens in the House led the radical Republicans in their Reconstruction program for the South. [Sumner] held that the Southern states had ‘committed suicide’ by their secession and thus had lost any rights under the Constitution.” ( http://www.bartleby.com/65/su/Sumner-C.html )

Howard,
It wasn’t a long-distance shot that Oswald made. People who have been at the School Book Depository told me they were surprised how close Oswald was to the motorcade. Posner went into detail in his book about the question of whether Oswald could have fired three shots (one missed) in the time frame. Oswald had practiced with the rifle. William Manchester (a WWII Marine) wrote that the Marines gave Oswald the one skill he ever had. See the 1985 edition of The Death of a President, page 92.

Unlike Mr. Auster, I did watch the ABC network’s program on the Kennedy assassination. Much to my surprise, it was quite reasonable — on the assassination, that is (I was less pleased to see the despicable JFK described as veritable saint.) The program was particularly harsh in dealing with Garrison. On the other hand, members of a community college history department described to me, a few months ago, the effectiveness of Oliver Stone’s live-action cartoon/propaganda in ways exactly paralleling the remarks of David. Since Garrison’s particular conspiracy theory is probably the most exploded of the lot, this is a remarkable testimony to the power of movies.

An exchange with a correspondent:

Correspondent to LA:

People are not comfortable with the fact that it is so easy for one person to do such bad things that it can actually change the course of history. You mean just one bad guy bought a gun by mail order, didn’t have a sophisticated plan and just killed Kennedy on his own and changed everything for a family, for a nation, for a world. How can that be? It must be more complex than that. It means we are all so vulnerable and life is very fragile.

LA to correspondent:

This is an interesting point that has been made many times. But I disagree with it.

It’s true that people were traumatized by the event and sought some larger meaning for it. This pushed them in the direction of the grassy knoll, the Mob, CIA, Vietnam, LBJ, etc. etc., all the way to the evil Stone’s movie, in which the entire U.S. government becomes a huge conspiracy (perfectly covered up with cosmic clockwork precision of course) to kill Kennedy. Even relatively sane and decent people allowed for some element like this in their thinking.

But the truth that they needed, the truth that would give the event the meaning that they could live with, was not some grand conspiracy, but the _actual truth of the event itself_. That came down to two principal things: (1) Oswald, what kind of man he was, what his history was, what were his behaviors leading up to the assassination, how he performed the deed, and so on. And (2) the physical truth of the assassination, of the shots, where they came from, how one bullet could have done so much damage, and so on.

It is the TRUTH of the event that provides its meaning. But the inadequate Warren report and the failure to answer the troubling questions in a satisfactory way, plus all the conspiracy and paranoia mongering, fed the sense that “we need something more, the event is too large not to have a cosmic explanation.” But, as I said, once the factual truth has been established, then one doesn’t need some larger theory as a compensation, and then the ground is cleared for one to experience the awfulness and poignancy and tragedy of Kennedy’s death _as it was_, without all the baggage and questions, and finally be done with it after being haunted by it for a good part of one’s life. But people who are fixated by conspiracy theories never actually experience Kennedy’s death, and so never have the proper mourning for it, and so are never done with it. So they keep picking obsessively at the conspiracy theories, looking in the wrong place for some kind of meaning that can satisfy them.

This was the reason for my gratitude to Posner’s book. It helped me resolve the event for myself, both intellectually and emotionally.

HS wrote: “Are you sure Oswald was merely a rifle sharpshooter? It is not that hard to shoot expert over the Marine Corps’ known-distance qualification course (I managed to do it five times), and I think it would need an expert to hit at the ranges Oswald presumably did, with a bolt-action rifle and at such brief intervals between rounds.”

Actually, it’s not particularly difficult to fire quickly and accurately at 200 yards (or less), which, judging from what David is saying, would be the kind of range Oswald was shooting at. It’s only when you jump to 300 and 500 yards that things get tricky. Typically, it’s performace at those distances that separate the Sharpshooters from the Marksmen and the Experts from the Sharpshooters.

I shot Sharpshooter twice and Expert twice, and both times my Sharpshooter scores were due to screw-ups on my part (i.e. not setting my dope correctly) at the 500-yard distance. Once your rifle is set properly, the aiming and firing part just isn’t that difficult. (Of course, I wasn’t using a manual bolt-action rifle, either. That would undoubtedly slow things down quite a bit…)

Just a couple thoughts on this from someone who doesn’t claim to know the whos and hows.

“Conspiracy” has become a ‘buzzword’ used to conjure up all manner of wiley intrigues. But my trusty Webster’s 7th reminds that it denotes simply an agreement by 2 or more individuals (toward a presumably unlawful end.)

I have a copy of the Final Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which concludes, “on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. 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.”

It is of course difficult to prove a negative — in this case, that Mr. Oswald had not shared this plan with an ‘enabler’ or had no assistance. And it wouldn’t take much to fall under the definition of ‘conspiracy.’

Mr. Auster takes a certain repose in having the ‘case closed,’ but a question is raised in my mind about this, which I thought about alot when reading a David Horowitz commentary on Daniel Ellsberg’s treachery in releasing top secret documents. The Pentagon Papers revealed some serious deception in government. Was it better that the public knew the truth? Mr. Horowitz contended that it was not, and I tend to agree.

The question swirls around, in that considering what Mr. Auster explains in how settling on this one conclusion has helped in coming to terms with the Kennedy assassination and to focus on other, very significant, issues about how it affected our nation, one could likewise say that EVEN IF the Warren Report weren’t true, it were better if the public believed it — especially as compared to focusing on theories that are obviously whacko. (Of course, now we can choose to distrust the Warren Report or a House Committee report…)

But if the conclusion weren’t correct, and we all believed it, it might have effects that are preferable, but somewhere on the objectivity track lies a different kind of tragedy. The role of ‘common mythology’ versus potentially divisive and painful realities. I’m not explaining this well, but hopefully my meaning is clear enough.

I hope Joel is not thinking that the main significance for me of getting at the truth of the assassination—and perhaps my motive as well—was therapeutic. No, the main significance was getting at the truth, getting at explanations that worked and that answered the outstanding questions about the assassination. The therapeutic aspect I described was a secondary consequence of that.

Let us not forget that Oswald was a C-O-M-M-U-N-I-S-T. That this bare undeniable fact can be generally ignored is a matter of no small significance. It suggests that part of what is behind all the conspiracy theorizing is an effort, perhaps rooted in guilt, to sublimate the truth about this great marching militant atheism that haunts virtually every corner of the Left with its mountains of corpses.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north231.html

It is amazing how little these cardinal facts about Oswald are known, that he defected to the USSR, gave up his U.S. citizenship, became a Soviet citizen, lived there for a couple of years, then appararently got tired of the whole thing and came back to the U.S. (According to Posner’s account, the Russians never quite trusted Oswald for obvious reasons and kept close watch over him.)

How many people have a similar history? A tiny handful at most. And one of them ends up killing a president. Yet from the start this was billed as a “right-wing” assassination, mainly by leftist conspiracy mongers.

Mr. Auster wrote: “The therapeutic aspect I described was a secondary consequence of that.”

No indeed, your motives are not in question here. ;-) I happen to regard this secondary issue of great importance, especially in view of the rest of the disastrous Sixties. In a marginal way, it just recalled other questions that I haven’t reconciled about the tension that exists in a free society between the need for truth and the need for secrecy that at times need to be cloaked in untruths, as Sir Winston noted.

I’m surprised to hear that Oswald’s history is not as well known as I thought. I had considered this common knowledge, typically mentioned in most documentaries. What I don’t think is well understood by this current generation is just how serious was the decades-long conflict we were in with Communism. That lack of understanding clouds the ability to clearly interpret the significance of things like Oswald’s history.

I don’t mean to say that people don’t actually know that Oswald had been a defector to the Soviets. I mean that knowledge of this fact and its extraordinary nature seems to be recessive. That’s just my impression.

It doesn’t seem to me to be accurate to picture Oswald as a Communist; he was a leftwing crank subjectively loyal to the Red side, but that is not the same thing. That point is not so much ignored as unimportant, at least in the later waves of conspiracy thinking, because the usual approach is to picture him as a “fall guy” picked to hide the actual rightist origin of the assassination conspiracy. I think it should be noted that is not the only one. I myself have long thought that JFK was the victim of the Mafia, while others have suggested that Castro might have been retaliating for the plots against him. I have not read the Posner book recommended by Mr. Auster, and will have to reconsider my ideas.