“If rhetoric is the art of persuasion, one might see lying as one of the most sophisticated – though not noble – rhetorical activities. Lying is, after all, persuading someone to believe in something that the speaker knows not to be true.”1
There were only ever two theories about President Kennedy’s assassination:
Oswald alone, or
conspiracy.
Which is it? We know. We know who killed Kennedy—conspirators.
There is only one conspiracy theory, the one to which the Warren Report referred. That one conspiracy was always known. See the Warren Report, Chapter VI - Investigation of Possible Conspiracy, Conclusion, p. 374. They admitted having evidence of the conspiracy. They just lied about it.
The deception started as glib value judgments like “no credible evidence” and “no meaningful evidence” of “a conspiracy” (emphasis added). After that rhetorical origin, the lie evolved into parsing the Warren Commission’s conspiracy theory and calling its different segments different theories. The parsing trick is essential to the conspirators’ propaganda. By using the plural, “theories,” they created the illusion that a simple truth is instead doubtful, a confusing, impenetrable labyrinth. Thinking about the conspiracy became toxic.
Conspiracy deniers’ requirement of evidence identifying the shooters in order to prove conspiracy is another propaganda trick. We have always known Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald and Ruby’s conspiratorial connections. Yet it has made no difference to those same deniers.
Avoiding the question, “Who killed Kennedy?” makes it unanswerable. When someone says, “I don’t know,” it is the propaganda working. It is the gateway to “we don’t know,” and that is the gateway to “we’ll never know.” By cancelling the rational conspiracy explatation, the act of transmogrifying the theory into many theories becomes a form of totalitarian rhetoric called a Thought-terminating Cliché.
The short answer to who the conspirators are is, basically, the same ones who were trying to kill Fidel Castro. It is the same variety of groups with the same leaders and hierarchy. That CIA-led plot is mainstream history ever since the Church Committee reports in 1975-1976.
Nobody parses the CIA-led plot to kill Castro. Nobody talks about that single political-military-industrial-organized-crime-intelligence-media conspiracy as if it were multiple theories. Because they cannot. It is official—period. Resolving the JFK assassination is as simple as making that same plot (which President Nixon called, “the Bay of Pigs thing”) official.
Until then, liars are going to lie. Plausibility is not required. The only requirement is repetition—official repetition. The real labyrinth is the network of rabbit holes (i.e., a warren) invented to deny the conspiracy and frame Lee Harvey Oswald. First-generation Warren Commission critic Vincent J. Salandria, called it a “false mystery.”
Meet the New Liars - Same as the Old Liars
Just in time for the 60th anniversary of the assassination, Secret Service Agent Paul Landis in his book, The Final Witness, claimed to have found an intact bullet on the back seat of the car where Kennedy was shot, sneaked it into Emergency Room One, and secretly put it on Kennedy’s stretcher. Landis’ revelation is one of many versions of the Warren Commission’s biggest lie, the single-bullet fantasy.2
The spin of the articles about Landis in The New York Times3 and Vanity Fair4 was that the bullet Landis allegedly found is Commission Exhibit 399, the infamous “magic bullet” allegedly fired from the alleged murder weapon.
How do we know it is not? No bullet could be fired at Kennedy from that gun. The official explanations by the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee of the gun’s found condition precluded it: “…the ballistic evidence ended up with a bent ammunition clip that was not needed at all, and which renders the rifle useless as the murder weapon.”5
We did not need Paul Landis to tell us the Warren Commission’s single-bullet fantasy is its biggest lie. We did not need this latest version of his story about finding the bullet to know it never had a legal chain of custody. Speculation has long held that while at Parkland Hospital, it fell out of the shallow back wound the autopsy doctors later probed at Bethesda Naval Hospital. That wound was mentioned in a report by FBI agents James Sibert and Francis O’Neill, who observed the autopsy.
Landis’ story is nonsense. To craft it, he collaborated with Lewis Merletti, a former director of the Secret Service, and James Robenalt, a lawyer who “has deeply researched the assassination and helped Mr. Landis process his memories.” Robenalt is also partnered with John Dean on a Watergate Continuing Legal Education course.
Landis’ admission of “finding” CE399 also raised the question of his planting that evidence. The honest medical explanation says the bullet that caused JFK’s shallow back wound could not have fallen out. Renowned forensic pathologist Dr. Cyril Wecht explained that bullets in wounds like that get more embedded, not less, as the tissues swell and encase them. Even if the bullet had managed to come out of the wound, it would have then had to exit the hole it made in Kennedy’s shirt, and then exit the hole it made in Kennedy’s coat, all of which would have to remain perfectly aligned (“in those hectic moments”).
Landis put himself in legal jeopardy. At minimum, he admitted to tampering with evidence, obstruction of justice by evidence tampering, and dereliction of duty. Withholding evidence relevant to a legal proceeding is considered spoliation of evidence.
Those real legal issues have been officially ignored. That is a clue something strange is going on. This was more likely the opening propaganda shot for the 60th anniversary. It is an attempted controlled disclosure based on false-theory disinformation.
Peter Baker wrote in The New York Times, “As it turns out, if his recollections are correct, the much-discussed ‘magic bullet’ may not have been so magic after all.”
Not so. Landis’ legerdemain makes CE399 more magic. Not only did it impossibly slip out of Kennedy’s shallow back wound, it impossibly “lodged in the back of the seat behind where Kennedy was sitting.” Note the shallow piping between the seat cushions in the following picture.
Vanity Fair published Landis’ story the same day as The New York Times. It was by Robenalt, the lawyer who partnered with John Dean. He was more specific about the “improbable” location of the bullet on the seat.
In his book, Paul Landis now says that when Jackie Kennedy stood up to enter Parkland, he looked over and saw that a bullet was improbably sitting on top of the rear seat of the limo, right around the spot where the limo’s detachable roof, which had been removed that day, would have otherwise been affixed to the trunk. Also, amid the blood and gore, Landis remembers, were two bullet fragments on the back seat, next to where Jackie had been sitting.6
Russell Baker’s news site, WhoWhatWhy, reported two previous tellings of Landis’ bullet discovery, one in 1983, and another in 2010. In both, Landis reported it was a fragment, not an intact bullet, that he found on top of the back seat. He turned it over to someone rather than putting it on Kennedy’s stretcher. When reminded of his prior stories, Landis claimed he was misquoted by the Associated Press in the 1983 story. But that did not keep him from repeating it for the 2010 publication of a book by his former Secret Service partner, Clint Hill. Landis claimed he lied on purpose the second time, because he did not trust Hill’s coauthor and new wife, journalist Lisa McCubbin.7
Then there is a bizarre third previous telling of Landis’ story. Secret Service Agent Sam Kinney’s next-door neighbor, Gary Loucks, revealed it in 2013. Loucks told the same story as Landis, except it was Kinney, not Landis, who claimed to find the bullet and moved it to the stretcher.8
On CNN, Jefferson Morley and Farris Rookstool9 partnered to frame this non-debate distraction perfectly. Morley’s view was that Landis’ account compounds the credibility problems of the single-bullet theory, that it is an open question, that a better explanation is needed, and it points out the mistake of keeping the files secret. Rookstool took the position that Landis’ allegations are wrong, suspicious, imply dereliction of duty, and his locations of the bullet are questionable and change nothing.
Rookstool is a conspiracy denier and Warren Commission apologist. Morley is a critic of Rookstool and his ilk. They are the go-to, corporate-media commentator opposites on this topic. Yet, on Paul Landis’ tall tale, they are both correct. The false-conspiracy/false-mystery pseudo debate had begun.
One potential danger of Landis’ false story is that it gives the conspirators incentive to rationalize another fake inquiry, resulting in more possible misdeeds such as exhuming Governor Connally’s body to retrieve and falsify the fragments in it. Because those fragments also allegedly came from CE399.
After all, it will not matter if they admit to a second shooter if it is a second patsy. A false conspiracy could extend the false mystery for at least another 50 years.10
It is folly for us to dig and beg for scraps of truth for another 50 years. We do not need to examine every rock on a mountain to know it is a mountain. When we end the official propaganda of denial of these crimes, we will also end any corrupt justification for hiding their details. As long as the Warren Commission Report is the official lie, there is no massive, official criminality. Stopping that one Big Lie forces everything to change.
ENDNOTES:
Patrick Schultz, “The language of lying,” Digital Writing and Research Lab, The University of Texas at Austin, October 27, 2016. Accessed November 7, 2023. https://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/2016/10/27/the-language-of-lying/
Charles J. Sanders and Mark S. Zaid, “The Declassification of Dealey Plaza: After Thirty Years, A New Disclosure Law At Last May Help To Clarify the Facts of the Kennedy Assassination,” South Texas Law Review, Vol. 34:407, Oct. 1993, pp. 410-12 n.8; later published in “The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992,” (Warren Commission theory critique); DeLloyd J. Guth and David R. Wrone, The Assassination of John F. Kennedy: A Comprehensive Historical and Legal Bibliography, 1963-1979, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980, pp. xxvii-xxx (House Committee theory critique); Gerald Posner, Case Closed, New York: Random House, 1993, p. 317, 326,-35, 474, 477, 478-79 (American Bar Association Mock Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald prosecution theory presented uncritically and without credit to A.B.A. by Posner).
Peter Baker, “J.F.K. Assassination Witness Breaks His Silence,” The New York Times, September 9, 2023. Accessed November 7, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/09/us/politics/jfk-assassination-witness-paul-landis.html
James Robenalt, “A New JFK Assassination Revelation Could Upend the Long-Held ‘Lone Gunman’ Theory,” Vanity Fair, September 9, 2023. Accessed November 7, 2023. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/09/new-jfk-assassination-revelation-upend-lone-gunman
See my essay, "Ten Things That Prove the Ballistic Evidence Was Planted: A summary of points from 'The Gun That Didn’t Smoke,' in my book, The Deep State in the Heart of Texas,” bartholoviews.substack.com.
Robenalt, op. cit.
Russ Baker, “Newest JFK Twist: Agent’s Explosive Story Conflicts With Forgotten Earlier One,” WhoWhatWhy, September 12, 1023. Accessed November 9, 2023. https://whowhatwhy.org/culture/newest-jfk-twist-agents-explosive-story-conflicts-with-forgotten-earlier-one/
Vince Palamara, “For Pat Speer: JFK Secret Service Agent Sam Kinney's neighbor's (Gary Loucks) revelations,” JFK Assassination Debate, The Education Forum, July 1, 2022. Accessed November 9, 2023. https://educationforum.ipbhost.com/topic/27866-for-pat-speer-jfk-secret-service-agent-sam-kinneys-neighbors-gary-loucks-revelations/
See my essay, “Farris Rookstool’s Day Off,” bartholoviews.substack.com.
See this excellent essay on the deep political dynamics of the Paul Landis nonsense, by Ed Curtin.
https://hiddenhistorycenter.org/another-magical-jfk-assassination-pseudo-debate-and-limited-hangout/