November 22, 1963 was a gray Friday near the start of northern California's winter rainy season. Like almost every other American over thirty, I can remember exactly what I was doing when I heard the news. I was standing at the bookshelves in my high school library when the librarian announced that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. Kennedy was a charismatic leader, married to a beautiful wife and with two attractive children. If he had blundered at the Bay of Pigs, he had also faced Krushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis and proclaimed "Ich bin ein Berliner" in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. He had spoken out for civil rights and a campaign against poverty, and had committed America to going to the Moon. Now he was dead, and the spirit of optimism with him. America would never be quite the same again.
The next four days quickly evolved from tragic to bizarre. In the midst of the solemnities of a presidential funeral, the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was being taken to court for arraignment. Suddenly a nondescript strip-joint owner, Jack Ruby, lunged from within a crowd of newsmen and shot Oswald at point-blank range. Oswald died within an hour. Lee Harvey Oswald was an unremarkable man until November 22, 1963. He had an average hitch in the Marines; his one unusual adventure was defecting to the Soviet Union in 1959. He married a Russian girl and returned to the U.S. with her in 1961. Oowald aeems to have had no coherent ideology; his defection really seems to have been motivated as much by restlessness as anything else.
Of all the tragic and monstrous events of that November weekend, none seemed more monstrous than that one man, motivated by nothing more than discontent, could traumatize an entire nation. The unreality of the assassination was heightened when another equally scruffy character deprived America forever of the chance to find out for certain why Oswald acted as he did. Better that Kennedy died for a reason, however evil, than that he died for no reason at all. And so the conspiracy theories blossomed: Kennedy was killed by the Russians for embarrassing them in Cuba; he was killed by Cuban agents; he was killed by the Russians for not Communizing America fast enough; he was killed by the radical right; he was killed by a clique of oilmillionaires because he planned to do away with the oil depletion allowance; he was killed by organized crime. When the Warren Commission released its findings that Oswald, acting alone, had killed Kennedy, no one was surprised, and few were convinced.
And the conspiracy theories continue decades later. Every other assassin or would-be assassin to strike a major American figure since 1963 -- Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Bremer, James Earl Ray, Lynette Fromm, Sara Jane Moore, MarkChapman, and John Hinckley, has fitted the same profile as Oswald and Ruby. In every case they were social misfits, with little or no coherent ideology, motivated by a personal desire for attention and a nebulous drive to lash out at someone prominent. Nevertheless, America will not rest until it linksOswald and Ruby with a plot. In 1967, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison announced that he had evidence of a conspiracy. What had at first resembled a sober investigation finally took on a circus atmosphere, culminating in (or sink-ing to) the 1969 trial and acquittal of businessman Clay Shaw. In 1976, the House of Representatives established the House Select Committee on AssassinationR to look into the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations. For thirty months, the Committee gathered information. A first draft of the report prepared on December 13, 1978, stated that there was insufficient evidence of a conspiracy. Then, in a abrupt about-face just before the Committee was to be dissolved, the Committee heard new expert testimony, changed its mind, and announced that there was after all evidence for conspiracies. The final report stated that there was evidence that a second gunman had fired at Kennedy. Four of the twelve members of the Committee dissented. The money spent on the probe was a bargain. For a mere $5.4 million, America heard what it wanted to hear all along: a government committee put the official seal of approval on a Kennedy assassination conspiracy.
But if the committee agreed there might have been a conspiracy, they were unable to come up with a suspect. They explored, and rejected, theories that Kennedy's assassins were hired by Cuba, Cuban exiles, the Soviet Union, organized crime, the Secret Service, FBI or CIA. That leaves little more than the radical right or disgruntled individuals to carry out the assassination.
The new evidence for a conspiracy and a second gunman rests pricipally on acoustic evidence. The Dallas police recorded transmissions that were inadvertently made when a motorcycle patrolman's transmission switch stuck in the "on" position. No shots are audible on these tapes, but they were subjected to intensive analysis by acoustic consultants. The tapes were filtered of extraneous noise, amplified, and the sound waves of several shot-like impuises studied. Reconstructions and test firings showed that some of the impulses matched shots fired from the presumed position of Oswald in the Texas School Book Depository, while one other impulse matched the signature of a test shot fired from a grassy knoll nearby. The "grassyknoll" has been a favorite alternative firing location in conspiracy theories. The committee concluded that at least one shot was fired from the grassy knoll, hence a second gunman, hence a conspiracy (of at least two people).
There is only one small flaw in all this careful research. No one knvws whose motorcycle was transmitting, where it was, t or even whether there was only one motorcycle transmitting! The officer who is generally believed to have been transmitting at the time, H.B. McLain, was immediately behind Kennedy's motorcade when the shots were fired. He testified that he and evreyone else had their sirens on almost immediately, yet sirens are not evident on the tape until long after the shots. The committee blithely concluded: ~t~phe committee believed that McLain was in error on the point of his use of his sirent'. A carillon bell can be heard faintly on the tapes, yet no such bell is anywhere near the Kennedy assassination site. There is no crowd noise on the tapes. Dhese points are explained in terms of the directional properties of police microphones and their being de8igned to pick up loud 8Ounda. The mike piCked Up faint t echoes of gunshots but not crowd noise, a distant carillon but not nearby police sirens that were all around Officer 4 -4 McLain. Is this pseudoscience? Certainly not on the part of the . acoustic consultants. If we could be sure where and how the transmissions originated the acoustic techniques would be highly conclusive. But as the committee notes: "those who argue the microphone was in Dealey Plaza must explain the sounds that argue that it was not. Similarly, those who contend it was not in Dealey Plaza must explain the sounds that indicate it was." We could hardly ask for a more classic appeal to relativism. The evidence conflicts each side is equally scientific, so pick whichever alternative appeals to you. That, of course, is exactly what many Americans wanted to hear. One of the most vociferous conspiracy buffs has been Mark Lane, who condemned the Warren Commission in Rush to Judgement in 1966, and A Citizen's Dissent in 1968. Lane also argued for a conspiracy in the death of Martin Buther King in a 1977 book, Code Name "Zorro". Lane is unusual in that he had a subsequent opportunity to sniff out a real sinister plot that was unfolding right before his eyes, and failed miserably. Lane was the attorney for Reverend Jim Jones' Peoples' 'Gemple commune, and barely escaped from the 1979 Jonestown holocaust with his life. Since then, Lane ha3 faded into relative obscurity, perhaps the only positive result of k: s: 4 , 1G the grim JonestoWn tragedy. - ~; ~e~! <�> rS $'5 Lane was also the co-author of Executive Action, a fiction--~,' i alized account of a possible conspiracy scenario. Ehe book was ; ; ; 2 * susequently made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster. At firs s ._ =s R glance, the Executive Action scenario looks as if it is based w t on irrefutable statistical evidence. According to an article in the London Times for Bebruary 26, 1972, nineteen material witnesses to the Kennedy assassination had since died. The odds against these individuals all dying in a nine-year span were enormous -- about "one hundred thousand trillion to one". The figure was quoted verbatim in both the book and the ad copy for the movie; the writers were evidently unaware that a British trillion is a million times larger than an American one! In fact, this reasoning reflects one of the commonest statistical fallacies, which crops up both in pseudoscience and in legitimate work where users are often careless with statistics. It makes all the difference in the world whether we calculate the statistics before or after picking out the pattern. The ~ sound approach would be to follow up on all the material witnesses to the Kennedy assasination, determine the number of deaths at various ages and see if any tests were so far out of line with normal actuarial expectations that we could logically claim some thing suspicious was going on. We would have done the statistical analysis first and then looked to see if any of the statistics showed a pattern. What the statistician for the London Times did was pick out a pattern -- nineteen witnesses who died at young ages -- and calculated the odds. Since young people tend to be healthy, those who die will show an unusually high Ancidence of death from violent causes as opposed to illness. By focusing only on the witnesses who died, the statistical pattern shows * what appears to be a striking pattern of violent deaths. In fact, the London Times roster of witnesses was skewed right from the 4-Sstart by including Oswald, Ruby, and J.D. Tippet, the Dallaspolice officer who was killed by Oswald! To consider the fallacy a bit more, let's estimate thenumber of people who were in the crowd in ]')ealey Plaza whenKennedy was shot; 1000 seems a conservative estimate, and anyone of those people can be considered a material witness. Let'salso assume the average age of the witnesses was forty years.Between 1963 and 1972, or nine years, each person would standabout a 4.s per cent chance of clying. We would expect 4Sor so deaths. If we now look at just those people who do die,the odds of those particular people dying are 4.� per centtimes 4Return to Pseudoscience Index
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