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JFK Assassination Logic: How to Think about Claims of Conspiracy

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If you're like most people, you've seen some of the movies or documentaries that have been made about the JFK assassination, you've read some articles and perhaps a book or two (or three, or four...) about the subject, and you're perhaps a little bewildered about the variety of claims being made and theories being argued.

One book says Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone; another says this is impossible -- it had to have been a conspiracy. One book says it was the Mafia; a second says it was the CIA; a third says it was Lyndon Johnson; a fourth says it was the Military-Industrial Complex; a fifth says it was all of the above. All of the books have evidence of some sort or another to back up what they say. How can you tell which arguments are most credible? Is it true what some people say, that we can never really know what happened?

Give this book a shot; it's different. It doesn't tell you what to think about the assassination; it explains why there are so many conflicts in the evidence, what the most persistent reasons for confusion are, and how to use simple logic to determine what evidence is most reliable and what arguments are most credible.

John McAdams is one of my heroes. His website is chock full of materials that debunk all sorts of nonsense on the JFK assassination [note: one of my articles is on his website]. Now, he has written a book that is important in two ways: first, he continues to debunk tons of junk; and secondly, he gives us a primer on how to think about the evidence. And, that makes it a book that anybody can use to think about a variety of controversies. So, my advice to anybody getting into the JFK assassination: Buy and read this book first. It may save you from going down the conspiracy path and wasting many years of your life. And, if you know somebody who is into the JFK killing - buy this book as a gift. This is essential reading - and it makes a great gift, too.

My detailed and negative review is at http://ctka.net/reviews/McAdams_Mantik.html

A brief quote is attached below.

David Mantik, MD, PhD

"I was seriously disappointed by this book, not merely because I disagreed with it on so many fundamental issues, but even more so because it fell so far short of its announced goals (of explaining and promoting critical thinking). I was also disenchanted that it so often merely regurgitated second hand data; McAdams appears to have done little research of his own--and none at all at the National Archives and apparently none at the Sixth Floor Museum. Chiefly, however, I was astonished by the central issues that he frequently overlooked. Moreover, not every one of his oversights is easily explained by random chance, and that inevitably raises the ugly specter of evidence suppression. After all, if some of these omissions were deliberate, that is radically different from merely overlooking critical problems."

John McAdams has organized one of the better anti-conspiracy websites on the Internet and one that serious researchers would do well to consult often to see where the actual evidence in this case leads. Using his wealth of information, Dr. McAdams puts together a very readable debunking of many of the most popular conspiracy theories. While his discussion of each one is rather brief his observations are cogent, logical, and easy to follow. This is the real strength of this book. If you are looking for an exhaustive, in-depth analysis of the assassination of President Kennedy, then "Reclaiming History" is the place to start, but if you are already familiar with the arguments--both for Oswald's guilt and for a multiple-gunman conspiracy, this is a good summary to help the reader organize the endless claims students of the assassination are constantly inundated with. Dr. McAdams has a keen ability at pointing out the illogical nature of virtually all conspiracy theories and his use of "signal" versus "noise" helps the reader to separate the wheat from the chaff in Kennedy assassination literature. My only complaint was the short-treatment some topics received, but to a degree this is actually a left-handed compliment of Dr. McAdams work--I was left wanting more. As this book spends more time on the market and more and more reviews start pouring in, one can reasonably expect the conspiracy nuts to begin their character assassination of Dr. McAdams, but they could better spend their seemingly endless spare time by addressing the logical weaknesses he has pointed out in their limitless number of ever-changing theories and multi-tiered scenerios.

A good read and well worth the cost in time and effort.

For many years I believed in a conspiracy that killed John Kennedy. But over time, people and events have been exposed as to what happened to Kennedy in 1963. John Mcadams has put together a nice layout as to why most conspiracies are not what they seem. I'll cover a few areas that I found very interesting.

Many witnesses have changed their stories over the years--Ed Hoffman,Jean Hill or Lee Bowers to name a few. Was this due to a faulty memory, coercion of some sort or just wanting to be part of the big picture we call a conspiracy? It is common for conpiracy theorists to parade a bunch of witnesses, all of whom give testimony supporting a conspiracy, and then ask, could all of these witnesses be wrong? If you pick a random sample from among all the witnessess in Dealy Plaza, it's highly unlikely that they will all be wrong. But if the witnessess were chosen because they support a particular theory, then this leads people to believe all witnessess in Dealy Plaza believe in a second shooter. This is not the case. In fact, Mcadams compares the findings of the House Select Committee on Assassinations vs. Josiah Thompson who wrote, "Six Seconds In Dallas". Shots from the grassy knoll----Thompson 33, HSCA 20. Texas School Book Depository---Thompson 25, HSCA 46. Don't know----Thompson 126, HSCA 76.

The witnessess who believe in the grassy knoll shooter can't even agree on what they believe they saw. So much for eyewitness testimony being 100% accurate.

Authors who believe in a conspiracy love to mis-quote or strip context to mislead readers--case in point,Jack Ruby's plea. He claimed he could not talk in Dallas for fear of his life. Most people assume by this comment that Ruby wants to tell about his part in the conspiracy. The part most conspiracy authors leave out is that Ruby wanted to go to Washington to convince Lyndon Johnson that he was not part of any conspiracy to kill "our beloved President Kennedy". Most conspiracy theorists don't include the whole statement. Why not? Maybe because they need to slant anything and everything to make their theory believable or lead readers to suspect something.

Mysterious deaths is another interesting area. Many people claim that the government is killing witnesses because they have some kind of "dangerous knowledge" about the assassination. As Mcadams points out, if you have a "Cleanup Squad 1" doing the killing, the group would need to recruit "Cleanup Squad 2" to eliminate "Cleanup Squad 1" due to the fact now they have "dangerous or inside knowledge". And on and on it goes. Does not seem very believable.

Many groups have been named in the killing of Kennedy---CIA,FBI,LBJ, Secret Service,Texas oil men,Cubans and so on. With all of these groups or part of them being involved, who was in charge and how did they all get together to pull off the biggest crime of the century? If this was indeed what happened, the plot would have collapsed before it began. The more diverse the story's cast of plotters, the less plausible the plot. And why if there was a conspiracy, would they kill the president in broad daylight in front of hundreds of people and cameras?? Would have been easier and less obvious at night or in a more secluded area.

One final note. I noticed that Gary Mack, the curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealy Plaza gives this book alot of praise. But I remember seeing him in "The Men Who Killed Kennedy" dvd series. Interesting how with time and knowledge, people can change their mind like Gary, who was a conspiracy buff at one time. All one has to do is filter out the noise and read the signal. John Mcadams has a nice website to compliment his book.

John McAdams is a diehard supporter of the Warren Report. I have had numerous exchanges with him over the years, both in person and over the Internet. Neither he nor I have much tolerance for the myths in the case, but he can be quick to vilify anyone who doesn't accept his version of the evidence. He has claimed to be open to new evidence, but I've seen no sign of that over the past 15 years or so. Like Mark Lane in the other direction, he is an advocate, not an investigator.

Martin Shackelford
38 year researcher into the JFK assassination.

John McAdams has been peddling insults and lies about credentialed JFK researchers for years. Now this flimsy, selectively documented book presumes to tell the rest of us peons "how to think." A recurring example of his intellectual dishonesty is to toss all conspiracy theories into the same leaky boat. His chain of logic goes like this: Some people believe theories about the moon landing or 9/11 that are preposterous; therefore, all theories about the JFK assassination are preposterous--except his own, of course.

McAdams knows that his own position is the hardest to defend--it's virtually impossible to prove a negative such as "No one except Oswald was involved in the murder of JFK"--so he doesn't dare participate in an an honest debate about the facts of the Kennedy assassination. Like Vincent Bugliosi in his despicable book "Reclaiming History" McAdams impugns the intelligence, character and sanity of serious investigators whose peer-reviewed evidence he can't refute.

Here are just a few of the inconvenient truths about the Kennedy plot that Prof. McAdams expects his students to shrug off:

--Lee Harvey Oswald was no ordinary Marine. He studied Russian at the corp's elite spy school and had a high security clearance.

--While Oswald was in the USSR, someone in U.S. used the name "Lee Oswald" to buy a fleet of vehicles for anti-Castro rebels.

--When Oswald returned from his USSR "defection," he was not prosecuted and did not lose his top-secret clearance.

--Oswald's income tax returns are still classified as secret documents. (Speculation: He was a paid informant for the FBI, handled by agent James Hosty.)

--Oswald, who is branded as a Marxist by lone-nut propagandists like McAdams, had no known left-wing pals in Dallas or New Orleans. His closest friend in Dallas was George DeMorhenshildt, a wealthy right-wing oilman and associate of George Bush Sr. (Quite an impressive contact for a sociopathic loser!)

--There are three, not two, backyard photos of "Oswald," each with identical shadows and expressions, despite the body's different poses.

--Days before Oswald's arrest, an ex-Marine named Thomas Arthur Vallee was arrested with a rifle on a high-rise parade route in Chicago. Another patsy? Look it up and judge for yourself.

--At least seven Secret Service agents were out drinking until 5 a.m. on the morning of the Kennedy assasination, in abject violation of their rules None were reprimanded.

--Future presidents Richard Nixon and George Bush Sr. were both in Dallas' Dealey Plaza on the morning of the assassination, but they left shortly beforehand. (So was LBJ, of course. And future president Gerald Ford, who was tearfully eulogized by Bush Sr., functioned as J. Edgar Hoover's informant on the Warren Commission.)

--Dallas cops did not announce to the hungry press corps that Oswald's fingerprints were found on the rifle until Nov. 26--after FBI agents visited the murdered Oswald's corpse with a long bag and an ink pad.

--Oswald had no traces of gunpowder residue on his cheek to indicate that he had fired a rifle.

--The most decorated marksman in U.S. history, marine Carlos Hathcock, declared that Oswald's supposed shooting feat--hitting two out of three moving targets in six seconds on a windy day, using a 30-year-old Italian rifle with a badly misaligned scope--was impossible; and no one has ever duplicated it.

--The army's top ballistics-and-wounds expert, Dr. Joseph Dolce, said no bullet could cause seven wounds and emerge as pristine as CE #399, the so-called magic bullet.

--More than a dozen experienced emergency-room personnel from Parkland Hospital--doctors and nurses who dealt with gunshot wounds every day--said that JFK's throat wound was caused by a shot from the front.

--Oswald was interrogated by Dallas police for more than 12 hours, yet nothing he said was recorded or even transcribed. Dallas cops claimed that there was not enough space in the interrogation room for a tape recorder or a secretary--for the most important murder investigation in American history!

--Oswald's assassin, Jack Ruby, was demonstratably an anti-Castro gun runner and a longtime mobster who was involved in a murder for Al Capone in 1939.

--Jack Ruby talked to reporter/acquaintance Seth Kantor at Parkland Hospital on Nov. 22, the day the bullet known as CE #399 was found on an unrelated stretcher. (Ruby was also filmed at Dallas PD headquarters that night, where he knew--somehow--and blurted out during a press conference that an obscure fellow named Lee Harvey Oswald was the one-and-only local member of something called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

--The bullet found on a hospital stretcher had no trace of either John Kennedy or John Connally's blood or clothing fibers on it.

--The president's body was illegally whisked from Dallas, at gunpoint, and his autopsy was performed at Bethesda (Md.) Naval Hospital, at gunpoint, by a first-time pathologist--who burned all his notes afterward.

--The president's brain, which would show the entry and exit points of the bullet(s), is missing from the National Archives.

--CIA agent E. Howard Hunt confessed to his son in a deathbed recording that there was a conspiracy to murder JFK.

--And finally: It is the OFFICIAL position of the US government that JFK was killed by a conspiracy, as per the House investigation of 1979, whose report supersedes the shoddy Warren Report.

McAdam's modus operandi--and that of the surrogates who eerily rush to his defense as soon as his name is mentioned--is to pounce on his critics and to sidetrack the conversation into minutia. So now we can expect his minions to say things like "Marina Oswald swore to the Warren Commission that she snapped the backyard photos!" (even though she barely spoke English, was extensively coached and faced being deported if she didn't cooperate) or "Dallas police Lt. J.C. Day claimed that he found Oswald's palmprint on Nov, 22!" (even though the press wasn't alerted for another week and Day didn't photograph the print) and "Several of those Parkland doctors eventually changed their testimony! (even though heroes like Dr. Robert McClelland went to their graves saying that JFK was shot from the front, while chief surgeon Dr. Perry only changed his story after some late-night arm-twisting from numerous feds, including Secret Service agent Elmer Moore.

I could list literally hundreds more facts that don't fit McAdams' thesis. He and his doting defenders might produce seemingly logical answers for, oh, two or three of these questions, and those are the questions on which they will dwell, to the exclusion of the many, many others. They hack at flimsy trees to distract us from a very obvious forest.

But here is the question that McAdams' shoddy, shameful book about "critical thinking" does not address: How much doubt is necessary before a public that's hungry for answers can call their doubt reasonable?

Just one example of the details McAdams must ignore to write his book and to do what he does on his website.:
t
(The Warten Commission never disclosed that Virginia Hale was the wife of a former FBI agent whose son had been married to John Connally's daughter, and the FBI did not disclose that in 1962, that same son was observed burglarizing the apartment of JFK's alleged mistress. Since all of the Hale family related "coincidences" were concealed by the FBI and Warren Commission, McAdams must ignore this. I.B. Hale was employed by Henry Crown,
[...]

After you read about Mr. Crown and about the Hales, make your own decision about the POV McAdams is promoting.)

[...]

Robert Allen Hale was the son of I. B. Hale[1] and Virginia Kingsbery Hale of Fortune Road, Fort Worth, TX. [2][3][4][5] Warren Commission exhibit CE 1891[6] states that Mrs. Virginia Hale of Fortune Road, employed in the Fort Worth office of the Texas Employment Commission, sent Lee Harvey Oswald out on the job to the Leslie Welding Company in July, 1962.

In April, 1959, Robert Allen Hale was cleared by a Florida Coroner's Jury of responsibility related to the shooting death of his teenaged wife of only 44 days, Kathleen Connally Hale, the daughter of the future Texas Governor, John Connally.[7] Kathleen was already pregnant and they eloped to Oklahoma. They moved to Florida and lived in a small apartment for a month when Kathleen was killed by a shotgun blast below her right ear. Kathleen's family family blamed Hale, but John Connally himself thought it might have been a suicide pact that Hale backed out of.

On November 22, 1963, John Connally was in the seat in front of President John F. Kennedy when he was shot and killed in their open-air limousine in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald, according to the Warren Commission.

Prior to living in Alaska, Hale had been involved in another notable incident with the law, also linked to President John F. Kennedy. On August 7, 1962, Hale and his twin brother William were observed by an F.B.I. agent, as they burglarized the Los Angeles apartment of one of John Kennedy's alleged mistresses, Judith Exner.[8][9] .....