Was JFK At Fault for His Assassination? America in 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald (2013)
From the day of the assassination, many Americans suspected that a conspiracy, and not a lone gunman, was responsible for President Kennedy’s death. Polls taken from that day through to November 27, 1963 by Gallup showed 52 percent believing “some group or element” was behind the assassination.[148]
Before the Warren Commission issued its report which concluded Oswald acted alone, several books had already been published suggesting a conspiracy was behind the assassination.[149] Within a few months of the assassination, lawyer Mark Lane, who had been hired by Oswald’s mother Marguerite to represent Oswald’s interests before the Warren Commission, had formed his Citizens’ Committee of Inquiry on the assassination and was speaking in the United States and Europe in early 1964, challenging the work of the Warren Commission, even before it had published its findings.[150]
Upon the publication of the Warren Report in September 1964, only a minority 31.6 percent of Americans rejected the conclusion that Oswald had acted alone, with 55.5 percent accepting the Report’s conclusion.[151] But since then, public opinion has consistently shown majorities, often large majorities, believing a conspiracy had been in place.[152] In 1966, Lane’s Rush to Judgment was published, spending six months on The New York Times best-seller list. The book accused the Warren Commission of “being biased towards its conclusions before the facts were known,”[154] and cited evidence found within the 26 volumes of the Warren Report and in his interviews with witnesses which seemed to suggest bullets coming from multiple directions striking the president and hence a conspiracy. The Freedom of Information Act was also passed that year, which had the effect of permitting researchers greater access to once-secret government files, particularly those connected to the Warren Commission.
Many researchers were now investigating the assassination, most of whom believed the Warren Report was at best inaccurate and at worst a lie. In July 1966, in commenting on Edward Jay Epstein’s book Inquest, which focused on the inner workings of the Warren Commission, Richard N. Goodwin became the first of Kennedy’s inner circle to publicly call for a review of the Warren Report. That November, former assistant to the president and Pulitzer-prize winning author Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. called on Congress to initiate a new inquiry. That same month, Life magazine called for a new investigation as did The Saturday Evening Post the following January. The New York Times, in an editorial dated November 25, 1966, did not call for a re-investigation, but said that the Warren Commission and its staff should address “the many puzzling questions that have been raised… There are enough solid doubts of thoughtful persons.”
In 1967, Six Seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson was published. The book was the first to focus on many technical aspects not previously discussed by other authors, such as firearms, bullet trajectories, medical and photographic evidence. Thompson, who was a consultant to Life magazine, had unique access to a first-generation print of the Zapruder film and was the first to suggest that President Kennedy was struck by two near-simultaneous bullets to the head, one from the rear, the other from the right front.
That March, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison announced he would prosecute local businessman Clay Shaw for the murder of President Kennedy, and, galvanized, many Warren Commission critics descended on New Orleans. Public interest in the trial was high, with a Harris poll that May showing nearly two of three Americans saying they were following the investigation. The same poll indicated 66 percent believed there was a conspiracy, compared to 44 percent who believed that in a Harris poll done in February.
Garrison was also notable for being among the first to assert that there were two conspiracies: The first conspiracy being the one which engineered the assassination of the president; the second conspiracy being the deliberate cover-up by the Warren Commission to hide the true facts of the assassination.
Shaw was acquitted in March 1969, and the conspiracy movement was dealt a blow as Garrison’s trial was widely seen as a debacle, with many researchers denouncing Garrison as a fraud and megalomaniac. Further, as conspiracy theorist Robert Anson put it, because of Garrison, “bills in Congress asking for a new investigation were quietly shelved.” Nevertheless, the trial opened new avenues of investigations for the movement, particularly with previously unexplored New Orleans connections and links of others to Oswald.
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