SOURCE #1
http://search.proquest.com/pqrl/docview/1491099813/35CA97BF28BE4ABCPQ/5?accountid=14925
I found this source by going to ProQuest and searching JFK assassination. Then I narrowed down my search by only allowing scholarly articles. The source talks about all the common conspiracies that people believe happened that day and it also shows the statistics on how people believe less and less that Oswald acted alone. After about two or so pages about the JFK assassination, the author rambles on about different scientists that were irrelevant to the topic of the assassination. Some of the quotes that I wanted to use from this source to help answer my question are,
- “First there were the usual suspects: the successor in the presidential office Lyndon Johnson, the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, the Illuminati, the Russians, Fidel Castro and/or the militant anti-Castroites. Then of course, came the mafia, the Vatican, the aliens, the Pentagon, followed by Joe DiMaggio (late Marilyn Monroe’s ex-husband), George Bush Sr. (who was seen in Dallas on that day), the New Orleans gay lobby (supposedly associated via Jack Ruby, Oswald’s assassin), Richard Nixon (who held a grudge over losing the 1960 presidential elections), the Ku Klux Klan (enraged by Kennedy’s advocacy of civil rights), Carlos Prio Socarras (Cuban pre-revolutionary president), the local Texas cowboys (for Kennedy had scaled back the oil depletion tax credit), to mention but a few. At one time or another, conspiracy theorists have accused 42 groups, 82 assassins, and 214 people by name of being involved in the assassination.”
- “While in the 1966 Gallup poll 36% of the respondents believed that Oswald acted alone, this “percentage was 11 in both the 1976 and 1983 Gallup polls, and 13% in a 1988 CBS poll.” (Goertzel, 1994: 731) Furthermore, “a national survey by the New York Times (1992) showed that only 10% of Americans believed the official account that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone.” (Ibid.) Half a century later, according to Wikipedia, a 2013 Associated Press poll showed that although the percentage has fallen, more than 59% of those polled still believed that more than one person was involved in the President’s murder.” PAGE 848
- “On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the media is feeding us with a seemingly naive observation that, after half a century, there are still doubts that on that fateful day of November 22nd, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, which was an official finding of the infamous Warren Commission”
These quotes help me answer my question because the first one shows all the various conspiracies and how so many people had bigger band better reasons to kill JFK, while Oswald was just a sociopath. Not to say that Oswald was not involved, I am just showing he did not act alone. The second quote shows how over time, people have slowly started to discredit the Warren Commission and believe they are wrong. Lastly, the third quote is a great quote to summarize my argument.
SOURCE #2
http://search.proquest.com/pqrl/docview/197232459/93AA0036669C4C89PQ/7?accountid=14925
I found this source by searching on ProQuest “Assassination of JFK”. This source is another scholarly journal and it goes over the statistics about how people have over time, have believed that Oswald acted alone less and less. It also talks about all the conspiracies that are the most common and it talks about the distrust of the government because it lied during the Cold War. Lastly, it goes over Oswald’s political life and how he was a Marxist sociopath and was pro- Castro. The quotes I would use to answer my question are:
- ”After the Warren Commission published its findings in September 1964, a Gallup poll indicated that 56 percent of Americans believed the report’s main finding: that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, was President Kennedy’s assassin. Today, however, approximately 90 percent of the public believes there was some kind of conspiracy to kill JFK.”
- “Still, what is markedly different about this phenomenon from previous manifestations of paranoia is that the distrust is so deep and pervasive. Glancing through Who Shot JFK? one can find a conspiracy theory for practically every contingency and political belief: The Mafia did it; Robert Kennedy did; Jackie was upset because her husband had extramarital affairs, so she did it. The KGB, Cubans (both anti-and pro-Castro), the CIA and/or FBI, right-wing Texas oilmen, tsarist Russians, rocket scientist Wernher von Braun–and on the zany list goes. The “friendly fire” theory holds that a Secret Service agent riding in the limousine behind JFK fired the fatal shots, by accident. And apparently the latest trend among conspiracy theorists is to bash one another for believing in the wrong conspiracy”
- ” Because of the Cold War, the CIA and FBI did not inform the Warren Commission about the covert operations to remove Castro. Such information, the agencies reasoned, would not contradict the central conclusion and therefore could be, and was, kept secret. Consequently, the Warren Report depicted Oswald as acting upon inchoate feelings (compounded by marital troubles) but without acute political motives. Twelve years later, however, Senator Frank Church’s select committee on intelligence revealed the extent of anti-Castro plotting and the fact that the CIA and FBI had lied by omission to another arm of government. This shattered whatever trust remained in the official story and ripped the lid off a Pandora’s box of conspiracy theories”
SOURCE #3
I searched on ProQuest “JFK assassination” and Lee Harvey Oswald and found this article:
http://search.proquest.com/pqrl/docview/1441263232/EB1B76EB03D84936PQ/45?accountid=14925
I like this article because it has very good quotes and helps me prove my point that Oswald was not alone. This article goes into great detail about all of the different theories. They talk about, the Grass Knoll, the Parkland Hospital professionals, the umbrella man, the mysterious deaths that followed, the Zaprueder film, communists, the radical right, the CIA, the Cold War, Mafia the single bullet theory, and many more. The Quotes I want to use are:
- A study published in 1993 in the Journal of the American Medical Association examined 46 cases involving fatal gunshot wounds over a five year period. By comparing the post-mortem findings of a board-certified forensic pathologist to the previous assessments made by trauma specialists, the study found that the trauma specialists made errors about the nature of bullet wounds (such as the number of bullets involved and in distinguishing between entrance and exit wounds) in 52 percent of the cases. The study concluded “the odds that a trauma specialist will correctly interpret certain fatal gunshot wounds are no better than the flip of a coin.”
- A Polaroid photograph taken by bystander Mary Ann Moorman captured the grassy knoll at almost precisely the instant of the fatal shot to the President. Researcher David Lifton found a reproduction of the photograph in a book in 1965 and quickly spotted what appeared to be a puff of smoke in the background, “and, just behind it, a human form-someone apparently crouched behind the wall.
- Some of the crime scene photographs had more to offer than blurs and shadows. There were the “three tramps” whose pictures were snapped by newsmen shortly after police officers pulled them from a railroad boxcar behind the grassy knoll. The Warren Commission had never mentioned these characters; surely they could have been up to no good. Once Watergate made national headlines, it was even pointed out that if you looked really hard, two of the three resembled Watergate conspirators Frank Sturgis and E. Howard Hunt
- Then there was the case of the “Umbrella Man,” a mysterious figure glimpsed in several photos, standing at the side of the road with an open umbrella over his head on a perfectly sunny day. Was he a conspirator signaling to gunmen in the surrounding areas, perhaps?
- If there is a single piece of evidence that Warren Commission skeptics have held up as irrefutable proof of a conspiracy, it is what has come to be known as the “head snap”: the moment in the motion picture film captured by bystander Abraham Zapruder when the President is shot in the head and it snaps strongly to his left.
- However, in a move strongly contested by several committee members, the HSCA also endorsed the findings of a computer science professor and his assistant, indicating that a shot had indeed been fired from the grassy knoll.
- While the recording contained no audible sounds of gunfire, the HSCA endorsed the theory that the motorcycle in question was part of the presidential motorcade; and that waveforms of sounds on the tape, as plotted by a computer on a lengthy strip of graph paper, were identical to waveforms of actual test shots fired in Dealey Plaza, three from the Texas School Book Depository and one from the grassy knoll. There was a high probability, the committee concluded, that a conspiracy had killed John F. Kennedy
haleytenelshof 