JFK assassination: was any consensus ever reached as to who actually did it and why?

http://webpages.charter.net/cmvenuti/images/rubyshot.jpg

my guess is that in his warped and desperate mind he thought he would impress the cubans and soviets by killing kennedy, whose administration was ordering attempts on castro's life. he had unsuccessfully attempted a month earlier in mexico city to get a visa to cuba, and even allegedly offered a representative (at the soviet embassy if i remember correctly) to kill kennedy.

there are several other strands of evidence and counter-evidence though, and it gets really murky and complicated. depending oon who you believe oswald may have even been manipulated by both pro-castro and castro agents for various reasons, which may or may not have been related to the assassination. who knows?

but the evidence suggests oswald mostly likely killed kennedy, whatever his motivations.

From the Onion

http://www.prouty.org/nixon.html

George Bush Sr. was working for the CIA at the time, dealing with cubans, but that's another story.

I love me some conspiracy theories.

Former Texas first lady Connally dies

By Kelley Shannon, Associated Press Writer
September 2, 2006

AUSTIN, Texas -- Nellie Connally, the former Texas first lady who was riding in President Kennedy's limousine when he was assassinated, has died, a family friend said Saturday. The 87-year-old was the last living person who had been part of that fateful Dallas drive.

Connally, the widow of former Gov. John Connally, died late Friday of natural causes at an Austin assisted living center, said Julian Read, who served as the governor's press secretary in the 1960s.

As the limousine carrying the Connallys and the Kennedys wound its way through the friendly crowd in downtown Dallas, Nellie Connally turned to President Kennedy, who was in a seat behind her, and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you."

Almost immediately, she heard the first of what she later concluded were three gunshots in quick succession. A wounded John Connally slumped after the second shot, and, "I never looked back again. I was just trying to take care of him," she said.

She later said the most enduring image of that day was the bloodstained roses.

"It's the image of yellow roses and red roses and blood all over the car ... all over us," she said in a 2003 interview with The Associated Press. "I'll never forget it. ... It was so quick and so short, so potent."

Read said Connally had been sitting at her desk writing thank-you notes when she died.

"She has been extremely active and vital the past few days and weeks," he said. "It's a shock to all of us."

In 2003, she published a photo-filled book -- "From Love Field: Our Final Hours with President John F. Kennedy" -- based on 22 pages of handwritten notes she compiled about a week after the assassination and rediscovered in 1996.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry called Connally "the epitome of graciousness."

"Long before she was propelled into the national spotlight from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, she was a Texas icon," Perry said in a statement.

Connally, formerly Nellie Brill, met her husband at the University of Texas in Austin, and they married on Dec. 21, 1940.

John Connally managed several political campaigns for fellow Texan Lyndon B. Johnson, including his 1964 presidential campaign. Connally was elected Texas governor as a Democrat in 1962 and won re-election twice, serving three two-year terms.

He was treasury secretary in the Nixon administration and ran for president as a Republican in 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected. John Connally died in 1993.

Nellie Connally helped raise money for many charities. In 1989, Richard Nixon, Barbara Walters and Donald Trump turned out for a gala to honor her and raise money for diabetes research.

"I've never known a woman with Nellie's courage, compassion and character," Walters said. "For all her ups and downs, I've never heard a self-pitying word from her."

John and Nellie Connally suffered financial difficulties after he left office. Private business ventures after 1980 were less successful than John Connally's career as a politician and dealmaking Houston lawyer. An oil company in which he invested got into trouble, and $200 million worth of real estate projects went sour, and he ended up filing for bankruptcy.

Nellie Connally served on the Board of Visitors of The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center since 1984, and a fund in her name raised millions for research and patient programs. The Houston hospital's center for breast cancer also is named for Connally, a survivor of the disease for more than 15 years.

About a year ago, Connally moved back to Austin after decades in Houston.

Survivors include her daughter, Sharon Connally Ammann, two sons, John B. Connally III and Mark Connally, eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Funeral services are pending. She is to be buried near her late husband in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin.

There was a documentary, maybe a couple of years ago, that pretty convincingly dealt with every doubt/conspiracy theory including the 'magic bullet' one. IIRC it was to do with the fact that the seats at the back were higher than the seats at the front, and that the front of the car was more narrow at the front. Or something. Anyway, by the end of the documentary I was completely won over to the Oswald-acting-along side.

1. Oswald did it and he was a lone gunman, without any assistance whatsoever.

2. Oswald was a patsy and INSERT CONSPIRACY HERE did it.

Why not

3. Oswald was solely responsible for physically shooting Kennedy, but he was aided/abetted/instructed in doing so by party or parties unknown.

I've always thought that this was the most likely explanation.

That's kinda what I believe too. With the CIA & FBI knowing all about it, but looking the other way.

wasn't like 30 minutes of Stone's JFK spent on this?

This documentary (that I mentioned earlier) looked into that as well, and the gist of it was that there had been so many supergrasses over the past 40 years that it was unthinkable that if the mob had been involved the truth wouldn't have come out by now.

The Summers book is the most plausible; I appreciated how he didn't address every what-about. I told the story about the Silvia Odio incident in the other thread, still the eeriest of the purported Oswald encounters.

while he completely dismisses Oliver Stone and his theories, what's interesting is just what from the film he nails down as factual (such as the time when Oswald met a Cuban exile for a brief moment and later a phone call come to her, telling her things about Oswald she didn't even ask about.)

oh lol this is what I referred to -- I'm friends with her nephew!

i think it's kind of a shame that the jfk conspiracy has become the one conspiracy everybody in america apparently believes in some form or another. what interests me about conspiracy theories is less whether or not they're _true_ and more _why_ people believe them - and most of the time, the answer is "they're racist". in other words i feel like the legitimization of conspiracy theories the jfk conspiracy has enabled also enables racism and bigotry.

the thing i love about the jfk conspiracy theory is that the more you dig into it the less sense anything makes. it's like what happens if you repeat a word, any word, enough times. pharmacy, for instance. just say "pharmacy" enough times over and over and it becomes really strange and bizarre sounding. so that's what i like about it, it's a way to deconstruct the basic assumptions and associations we have about the nature of reality itself. i'm into that kinda shit.

we don't need no gates out there with that swamp! plenty of em gone in there. ain't none of em come out!

just say "pharmacy" enough times over and over and it becomes really strange and bizarre sounding.

specifically it loses meaning-- "semiotic satiation" iirc-- which might seem the opposite of the rabbit-hole disease (which is more like nabokov's "referential mania" in "signs and symbols")-- unless everything meaning the same thing and nothing meaning anything are on some mechanical level identical? (notes towards a horseshoe theory of conspiracy people / anti-conspiracy people.) anyway people in the mongoose/mob complex obviously had something to do w this lol

refs in the summers book to the stone movie are funny because he consistently condemns it in strong terms, laments its influence etc.; meanwhile i was scarcely turning a page without thinking "whoa i always assumed they made that up for the stone movie"

i feel like the legitimization of conspiracy theories the jfk conspiracy has enabled

I don't really know how to measure this but I think the effects of Iraq are far more consequential in terms of public trust or credulousness than the effects of JFK. 'Everything is fake' for me has its roots or at least its liftoff from Iraq. It existed before that, but far less prevalent. There are likely other factors like social media, like people knowing how to hone and weaponise this stuff, but Iraqs erosion of public trust meant the soil in which conspiratorial thinking could be watered reached almost all gardens

refs in the summers book to the stone movie are funny because he consistently condemns it in strong terms, laments its influence etc.; meanwhile i was scarcely turning a page without thinking "whoa i always assumed they made that up for the stone movie"

Haha yeah I mean based on having read that I believe fairly early in the book I thought it would be a takedown of conspiracy theory rather than an open-minded book musing about the possibilities. It does seem he draws the line with the specific named alleged conspirators in that film and the military industrial complex angle, but the other stuff that stone touches on he absolutely is willing to entertain as a likely possibility.

Specifically the mob, Cuban exiles, and Oswald floating like an unmoored buoy among all.

An inspired act of God shoo happen here and put a Texan in the White House!

I don't really know how to measure this but I think the effects of Iraq are far more consequential in terms of public trust or credulousness than the effects of JFK. 'Everything is fake' for me has its roots or at least its liftoff from Iraq. It existed before that, but far less prevalent. There are likely other factors like social media, like people knowing how to hone and weaponise this stuff, but Iraqs erosion of public trust meant the soil in which conspiratorial thinking could be watered reached almost all gardens

― anvil

i think it's different from person to person... for a lot of people iraq brought about that sort of shift in perspective, but for me it wasn't really until trump was elected president that i had that shift.

the complicated thing is that from a liberal perspective, a rejection of that worldview is... differences between us are _immaterial_ to them, i think that's where horseshoe theory comes from. the paradox is that material facts matter just as little to them as they do to any conspiracy-minded person.

i am at the point where i don't just ask myself _why_ people believe in conspiracies, but... whatever the term for it is, there's something in me that asks, you know, what even _is_ a conspiracy?

like, the thread revive about the bilderbergs, i'm looking at the alleged conspiracy and as far as i can tell it's literally just capitalism. is capitalism a conspiracy? i mean, there's an argument to be made!

three days after my egg cracked a lady named cassie labelle made a medium post titled "Being Trans Is Like Believing A Conspiracy Theory About Yourself". and maybe it's my background, i did the subgenius thing in the '90s, but i do have a tendency to look at it in those terms. like there was a coverup, right? some people knew the truth but they were dismissed as being "crazy" and didn't get listened to, and it was incredibly far-reaching, incredibly effective, it affected millions of lives, and one of them was mine. i was both a victim of this and complicit in the perpetuation of this state of affairs.

in some sense maybe the truth-value of a conspiracy theory _is_ relevant. believing a conspiracy theory like... there's a conspiracy theory, mia mulder did a video about it. it's a minor one, but it claims that every celebrity is secretly trans. except for elliot page who the conspiracy theory claims was amab and his "transition" was actually a detransition. anyway you look into it and you can kind of pretty clearly see the anxieties and insecurities that lead the person perpetuating it to believe it. believing something like that, or believing there was a cia conspiracy to kill jfk, to me that's different from saying something like "capitalism is bad", i mean you can't prove that in an absolute sense but there's a lot of evidence for that hypothesis, you know?

in some sense, just like what rumsfeld said about "known unknowns" basically makes sense, the idea of "alternative facts", i think there's a legitimate basis for that. it's a radical rejection of hegemonic narratives, and i've done that just as much as the people who say, i don't know, covid vaccines will turn you trans have done. the only way to differentiate the two is to take the truth-value of our respective beliefs into consideration.

idk. clearly i'm just rambling. hopefully some of that makes sense?

Back in 2002, during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq I heard Glenn Beck talking about how he'd been brought in to the Bush White House to look at evidence about Iraq's involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing. It was right then that I decided that all the talk about WMDs was bullshit, because if they had any actual evidence for that stuff then why would they be fucking around with conspiracy theories?

i think it's different from person to person... for a lot of people iraq brought about that sort of shift in perspective, but for me it wasn't really until trump was elected president that i had that shift

So far, I've lived through the bombing of Cambodia and the end of Vietnam, Iran-Contra, the CIA and cocaine trafficking, gaslighting of cancer victims downwind from nuclear tests, both Gulf Wars and dozens more I can't recall at the moment.. Go ahead, ask me about my perspective shift - worse every year and never once getting better.

like, the thread revive about the bilderbergs, i'm looking at the alleged conspiracy and as far as i can tell it's literally just capitalism. is capitalism a conspiracy? i mean, there's an argument to be made!

C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite to thread!

This guy, Danny Sheehan, seems to know a lot about a lot, and he recently started doing interviews and podcasts since he represents a couple of the whistleblowers that testified to a committee about UFO's and reverse engineered technology (Grusch, Elizondo) etc. Anyway.

He talks about a whole lot more than that. Here's a long interview about one conspiracy after another (the nazi regime being encouraged by the US and Hitler getting out of hand by nationalising industry, for instance) - and here he is (starting at 1h36m and lasting until 2h12m approximately) with a long explanation about JFK and why. Some names you will notice: Nixon, Brown Brothers Harriman, Dulles, Operation 40, S-Force, Traficante, Morales. LBJ and GHW Bush were briefed about JFK's assassination shortly before it was going down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SQXAPCdmPE

I'm not saying it's all true, I have no way of telling, obviously, but it may be of interest to people who spent some time with these stories in the past.

he rambles on a bit but here's the story again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAWxmJ00Y4I

A lot of crazy white hair in that video

he's 79 - I won't have that much hair by then, already don't :(

The other guy too

They're like hair twins

by other guy I mean Jim Garrison

So?

I think the assessment is that there was nothing new here; Oswald was associated with the CIA and KGB but he was kind of a fuck up and did this on his own. Sounds like there may have been some cover up scramble by the CIA to obfuscate his connection. All of which has been known for a long time.

They're pickin' gnat shit outta peppa!

lol

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/books/review/john-f-kennedy-assassination-conspiracy-theory.html

headline: "J.F.K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?
Why the newly released documents won’t put out the fire."

An asteroid killed JFK. All the sciences know it.

ride Johnny ride

He didn’t aspirate his vax.

I heard his head just did that

Ya got the right ta-ta but the wrong ho-ho.

Was talking to one of the guys in the tennis club I just joined...He moved to Stratford eight years ago from Texas after meeting his wife. He was born in Dallas in '62, so I had to ask about the assassination, of course. His dad was a cop who was part of the motorcade, about 100 yards behind JFK's car.

whoa!

"The past is never dead, it's not even past"

he really dropped the ball

i'm friends with some of the Zapruder family (ones too young to have been present in 1972)

What happened in '72?

the 9th anniversary of the kennedy assassination also I cannot type

he really dropped the ball

I am, as they say, laughing out loud--wish I'd had the nerve to say that (or that it wasn't our first conversation).

Still, at least he got to see it.

Not often you get to see a head explode. Especially a Kennedy head.

can worms do that?

Dallas cop in ‘62 might have been spotting for the Grassy Knoll boys.

OR: (hear me out)-
clemenza has found the real shooter

I am now part of the conspiracy, and so are all you...I should mention that his dad was convinced there was more than one shooter.

SEE

I, too, say there was more than one problem when I fail to prevent a world changing problem at work

lmao

or when i CAUSED the problem…

"it could have been anyone"

I may have mentioned it before, but one-man public domain content machine Greg Goebel had an incredibly thorough microsite about the JFK assassination, which appears to now only be available via the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20131123221428/http://www.vectorsite.net/twjfk.html

Oswald comes across as a massive dick who had a troubled but not overly awful childhood, and was then given opportunity after opportunity to better himself, but screwed it up time and time again. He comes across as the type of smirking, self-satisfied "I'll show them how smart I am" person who was competent enough to shoot JFK, lucky enough to briefly get away with it, but not smart enough for any kind of long-term planning. Nowadays he would probably have a Youtube channel, except that he didn't appear to have the self-discipline to actually knuckle down and pump out content.

Goebel also covers the conspiracy theories that appeared afterwards, none of which come across as convincing. It strikes me that arranging to clandestinely get rid of JKF by having him shot in public, in a way that might not have worked, was bad planning. It would have been simpler to pay a gunman to shoot JFK, and then arrange for that man to be shot while resisting arrest. Or to lure JFK into a giant freezer with Jolly Rancher candies, which would have the advantage of removing JFK from the picture but also leaving open the possibility of reviving him if the Communists didn't play ball.

Goebel's conclusion was that people would just stop caring, and over time no-one would remember JFK or the conspiracy theories, which is fair enough.