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ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT KENNEDY.   Term Paper ID:29643 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Examines controversy surrounding the murder of John F. Kennedy.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Examines controversy surrounding the murder of John F. Kennedy. Unresolved issues. Differing assessments of the case. View of the 1964 Warren Commission Report (WCR). Oswald as lone killer versus a conspiracy. Official facts of the JFK shooting. Investigation by New Orleans District Attorney James Garrison; CIA involvement. Investigation and theories of attorney Mark Lane. Paper Introduction: This research examines the controversy surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. The research will set forth issue fronts that emerged at the time of the incident and that have persisted unresolved since that time, and then discuss how and why such dramatically divergent assessments of the assassination have formed, with a view toward identifying which assessment has the most credence. The murder of JFK in Dallas fostered intense national desire to assign blame for the crime and bring those responsible to justice. One view of the assassination was articulated in detail in the 1964 Warren Commission Report (WCR) published pursuant to Executive Order No. 11130 of November 29, 1963, that "all the facts and circumstances surrounding the assassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin" be evaluated. Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Archived at .Both in spite and because of its deficiencies, this is the 8 -poundgorilla of JFK-assassination lore. [vi]Roger Ebert, "Review of JFK," in Cinemania '96 [CD-ROM] (Redmond,Wash.: Microsoft Cinemania, 1996). [xiii]D.B. The essential facts of what came to be called the official story werethat JFK was shot in downtown Dallas's Dealey Plaza from the sixth-floorwindow of the Texas School Book Depository by an employee named Lee HarveyOswald. The WRC concluded that three shots had been fired withinsix seconds and that one hit both JFK and Connally and changed trajectoriesseveral times before emerging on Connally's stretcher at Parkland inpristine condition. [ii]Ibid., passim. Lane's evaluation of a key piece of physical evidence--the rifle foundin the school book depository and three spent cartridges--illustrates alogical disconnect between what the evidence revealed and what the WRCconcluded from it. Among the multiplicity of critics and theorists of the assassinationemerging since 1963, two lines of inquiry have persistently served asbenchmarks against which and resources from which have derived mostcriticisms of the official story. [xvi]Ibid. One was Mark Lane's best-seller Rush toJudgment, an early refutation of WCR conclusions. Kennedy. Elsewhere, Lane says the WCR failed to sufficiently account forconnections asserted by witnesses and documents between Oswald and the USintelligence community or between Ruby, anti-Castro Cubans in Dallas,organized crime, and the FBI (as an informant). New York: Random House, 1993.Programmatic WCR valorization on one hand and a project of rehabilitatingWCR deficiencies by way of reinterpretation on the other. [viii]Max Holland, "The Demon in Jim Garrison," Wilson Quarterly 18(Spring 2 1): 1 . Warren Commission. [xi]Ibid., xii. [xix]Ibid. [xviii]Lane, 366. Hereafter cited as WCR. No serious treatment of the crime canignore it.----------------------- End Notes [i]United States, Warren Commission, Report of the President'sCommission on the Assassination of President John F. Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Cinemania, 1996.Another grudgingly admiring appraisal of Stone's freewheeling manipulationof fact that includes rare (for Ebert) political editorializing against theofficial story of JFK's murder.Holland, Max. It is apparent, however, that Oswald was moved by an overriding hostility to his environment. Kennedy. Oswald, who fled the scene, left behind the murderweapon, a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, from which three bullets had been shot,their cartridge casings scattered near the depository's sixth-floor window.During his 45-minute flight from the depository, Oswald had encountered andshot and killed Dallas Police Officer J.D. [xvii]Posner, xvi. [iii]David S. Kennedy. Coining the phrase "magic bullet" to describe the WCR'sadoption of a theory inconsistent with laws of physics, Lane citedballistics tests that could not replicate on a Mannlicher-Carcano the speedof bolt-action operation and aiming accuracy supposedly accomplished byOswald and the rejection by the Commission of witness statements that shotshad come from the soon-to-be-famous Grassy Knoll at Dealey Plaza, i.e.,that JFK had been hit in a crossfire, hence by more than one shooter.[xii]A 2 1 report of acoustic measurements of real-time police-radio recordingsconcludes that the sounds are Grassy-Knoll-area gunshots, not radiofeedback, as WRC reported.[xiii] Lane, Garrison, and other WCR critics refuted WCR interpretations ofevidence and raised questions about lacunae in the official investigation.To put it another way, one does not have to believe in a particularconspiracy theory, still less in a deliberate cover-up, to take the viewthat the WCR is deeply flawed on its face, that it lacks the logical andevidentiary comprehensiveness it claims for itself, that its veryexplanations fail to explain, that its conclusions do not proceed logicallyfrom its own body of evidence. Warren Commission. Out of these and the many other factors which may have molded the character of Lee Harvey Oswald there emerged a man capable of assassinating President Kennedy.[xvi] All WCR physical and testimonial evidence thus supports the lone-assassin and lone-assassin-assassin conclusions. "Echo Correlation Analysis and the Acoustic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination Revisited." Science & Justice 41 (2 1): 21-32.Complete with complex and perplexing null hypothesis, this highly technicalarticle describes state-of-the-art instrumentation and tests thatpersuasively dispose of the WCR's dismissal of real-time witness claims forthe existence of Grassy Knoll-area shooter(s).United States. Oswald's background; 3. A raft ofinexcusable errors (the FBI, not the Warren Commission, investigated thecrime) make one almost embarrassed on Posner's behalf for his insistencethat he has refuted critics of a WCR he himself corrects. He starts byciting the WCR's investigatory structure: 1. . "Review of JFK." Cinemania '96. [iv]WCR, Chapter VII. Why will WCRpartisans feel entitled to having it both ways?Thomas, D.B. The other, which providedcontext for the film JFK, was an investigation headed by New OrleansDistrict Attorney James Garrison, who "in all the United States in all theyears since 1963, is the only man who has attempted to bring anyone intocourt in connection with the fishiest political murder of our time."[vi] The disarray into which the Garrison investigation fell was documentedby the acquittal of Clay Shaw, the conspiracy defendant Garrison brought totrial. CD-ROM. One review of the 1991 motionpicture JFK illustrates emergence of something of an assassination cottageindustry when it declares that director Oliver Stone "dust[ed] off anaccretion of well-worn conspiracy theories, most of which have been incirculation since the days following the assassination itself."[v] AnInternet (Google) search of the phrase "JFK assassination" for thisresearch yielded 2 ,4 "hits," or discrete Internet sites, where thephrase occurs. It's impossible to believe the Warren report because the physical evidence makes its key conclusion impossible: One man with one rifle could not physically have caused what happened on November 22, 1963, in Dallas. 1966; New York: Dell, 1975.Systematic if perhaps overzealous critique of WRC methods and credulity ofan either mishandled or misdirected FBI investigation and suppression ofevidence regarding links between criminal principals in the case and USintelligence and law-enforcement apparatus.Lifton, David S. Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Lifton, Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in theAssassination of John F. Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Cinemania, 1996.A grudgingly admiring appraisal of Stone's freewheeling manipulation offact in the service of cinematic vision.Ebert, Roger. . Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1964. Onemedical team attempted, without success, to save his life; Connallysurvived his wound. "Review of JFK." Cinemania '96. The murder of JFK in Dallas fostered intense national desire to assignblame for the crime and bring those responsible to justice. As police ledOswald through the city jail basement and as television cameras rolled, aman later identified as nightclub owner Jack Ruby lunged through the crowdof onlookers in front of Oswald and shot once into his abdomen. [v]CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide, "Review of JFK," in Cinemania '96[CD-ROM] (Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Cinemania, 1996). The whole effect is to raise more questions aboutthe reliability of the WCR than it settles. Oswald's activities on November 22; 2. Edgar Hoover to theWarren Commission's general counsel describing a series of 1959 informantcontacts between Ruby and the FBI's Dallas office.[xi] The letter, saysLane, resides as Commission Document 1 52 in the National Archives but wasnot made part of the WCR. CD-ROM. Rush to Judgment. Lane has a different view that answers the WCR rationale. [vii]Gerald Posner, Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and theAssassination of JFK (New York: Random House, 1993), 441-5 . Arrestedat a theatre and put in the city jail on Friday, November 22, Oswald was tobe transferred to Dallas County Jail on Sunday, November, 24. Tippitt with a handgun. As Ebert's film review of JFK, whilecritical of the film's factitiousness, comments: Well, do you know anyone who believes Lee Harvey Oswald acted all by himself in killing Kennedy? . Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. Ruby's background; 6. The procedures employed to protect President Kennedy.[xviii]Lane then rather sensibly and crucially says "a seventh panel should havebeen set up" to identify the killer.[xix] In other words, the WRC'sconclusions had been reached before investigation and analysis had begun:What logical sense can that make? The research will setforth issue fronts that emerged at the time of the incident and that havepersisted unresolved since that time, and then discuss how and why suchdramatically divergent assessments of the assassination have formed, with aview toward identifying which assessment has the most credence. Garrison's failed prosecution of Shaw was later found to have sufferedfrom a project of CIA disinformation. If one man could not have, then there must have been two. Also shot was Texas Governor John Connally, who was seated in thefront seat of JFK's motorcade convertible, with JFK in the rear seat. "The Demon in Jim Garrison." Wilson Quarterly 18 (Spring 2 1): 1 -17.Latest in a series of articles for WQ that demonize WCR critics while both(a) plaintively valorizing the WCR and (b) suggesting if anybody conspiredagainst JFK, which they didn't, it was the dastardly KGB and/or Castro.Lane, Mark. Archived at . 1966; New York: Dell, 1975.Lifton, David S. Thomas, "Echo Correlation Analysis and the AcousticEvidence in the Kennedy Assassination Revisited," Science & Justice 41(2 1): 21, 31. Oswald's murder in the Dallas police station; 5. Oswald's career in the Marine Corps and his stay in the Soviet Union; 4. Therefore, there was a conspiracy.[xiv] Now the FBI's investigation of who killed JFK yielded provocativedetails in the WCR about why. . Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Oswald wasrushed to Parkland, where he died. The 24-year-old Oswald's background explainedmuch: his dysfunctional family and peripatetic childhood, Marxist and pro-Castro activism in Texas and New Orleans, his time as a Marine in Japan inthe 195 s and his 1959 defection to Russia, his return to the US in 1962with his Russian wife Marina, his inability to find steady work, hishostility to the US, his attempt to shoot a retired US Army general, hispublic notoriety in New Orleans in early 1963 as an employee of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee.[xv] In essence, the WCR concluded thatthe whole of Oswald's makeup was greater than and therefore explained thesum of its parts: Many factors were undoubtedly involved in Oswald's motivation for the assassination, and the Commission does not believe that it can ascribe to him any one motive or group of motives. Oneexemplar is a June 9, 1964, letter from FBI Director J. Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK. CD-ROM. "Review of JFK." Cinemania '96. [xiv]Ebert. I don't. This research examines the controversy surrounding the assassinationof President John F. BibliographyCineBooks' Motion Picture Guide. CD-ROM. . 1113 of November29, 1963, that "all the facts and circumstances surrounding theassassination and the subsequent killing of the alleged assassin"[i] beevaluated. Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988), 383. Kennedy (Washington,D.C.: GPO, 1964), archived at . [x]Lane, xxvii. In that regard, Lane says, "We cannot now determine if the verdict ofthe trial jury would have been different if the CIA had shared itsinformation with the prosecutor in New Orleans."[x] He characterizes theCIA's manipulation of the judicial record as obstruction of justice, itselfa crime. 198 ; New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988.Overwritten and derivative, this text has as its raison d'être documentsproving a break in the chain of crime evidence, viz., JFK's body, whichappears to have been subjected to postmortem (but pre-official-autopsy)"plastic surgery" aimed at suppressing crossfire/conspiracy evidence.Posner, Gerald. Posner asserts that theassassination can only be explained rationally with reference to Oswald's"warped motivation"[xvii] and that this overrides any apparent WCRinconsistencies. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. In the wake ofhis investigation, Garrison was popularly and variously viewed as a man ofintegrity or a corrupt and conspiracy-crazed public official.[vii] Garrisonwas indeed indicted (and acquitted) on federal corruption charges. JFKand Connally were transported to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Shaw, Garrison had said, was a CIA contract agent disaffected by thefailed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba meant to depose Castro,which drew him and others into an assassination conspiracy. A 1979 deposition of former CIADirector Richard Helms revealed that the CIA sought to conceal its"innocuous" relationship with Shaw (who in the mid-195 s informally andpublic-spiritedly shared with the CIA information gathered informally inbusiness travel abroad) to avoid misinterpretation andmischaracterization.[viii] In that regard, Holland excoriates OliverStone's use of Helms's deposition as the dramatic-narrative kernel toconstruct a CIA assassination provenance, saying that the "public'scorrosive cynicism toward the federal government" that began with theassassination has its own provenance with Garrison's unjust and publicity-seeking pursuit of Shaw--which by the way, declares Holland, was helpedalong because it was a KGB-front Italian newspaper that initiallyidentified Shaw as a CIA stooge.[ix] It is difficult to see how much more Garrison damaged the Americanpsyche by his investigation than the CIA did by programmatically impedingit. Ruby was immediately arrested and latersentenced to death,[ii] but he died in prison in 1967.[iii] The WCR's mostimportant conclusion was that Oswald acted alone in planning and executingthe assassination and that he killed Tippitt during his attempted flight.Similarly, Ruby, distraught over the event and acting alone, betook himselfand his gun to the city jail basement.[iv] From November 1963 onward there arose in the culture for a host ofreasons questions and speculations about whether, on one hand, Oswald hadbeen the assassin, and on the other, whether, if he was guilty of JFK'smurder, he had been part of a conspiracy. [xii]Ibid., 69ff; 114ff; also see Posner, 7 3ff, et passim. . One view of theassassination was articulated in detail in the 1964 Warren CommissionReport (WCR) published pursuant to Executive Order No. Rush to Judgment. New York: Random House, 1993.Thomas, D.B. "The Demon in Jim Garrison." Wilson Quarterly 18 (Spring 2 1): 1 -17.Lane, Mark. "Echo Correlation Analysis and the Acoustic Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination Revisited." Science & Justice 41 (2 1): 21-32.United States. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1964. Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Cinemania, 1996.Holland, Max. "Review of JFK." Cinemania '96. Another view is that the WCR by no means answered the case, thatan impartial review of the physical evidence dramatically contradicted thereport's conclusions, and that, if Oswald was guilty of the murder at all,he was part of a conspiracy. Kennedy. Redmond, Wash.: Microsoft Cinemania, 1996.Ebert, Roger. 198 ; New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988.Posner, Gerald. [ix]Ibid., 16f. Annotated BibliographyCineBooks' Motion Picture Guide. [xv]WCR, Chapter VII. Documenting the complexityof such connections, as Lane does, is beyond the scope of this report. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.