Like an an alcoholic to a drink, I tuned in to the two latest JFK specials that get trotted out on each anniversary. One from the Discovery Channel and one from the otherwise reliable American Experience PBS program. The former included British sharpshooters and gel filled exploding dummies and the requisite computerized models, 'never before available.'
The latter featured the late Norman Mailer of all people concluding Oswald was, in fact, the lone gunman, after the requisite smear on the misguided Jim Garrison and a nodding recognition to conspiracy researchers such as Mark Lane. I don't know why we didn't have Vincent 'way too many pages' Bugliosi and Gerald 'Mr. presumptive case closed' Posner interviewed before a huge blow up of the Warren Commission members.
Perhaps they will collaborate on a new book, "Hey 73% of Americans, you're wrong, get over it!"
This episode has taken on a quality of quantum physics- truth dependent upon the observer. I'm sorry but 2000 books could not be written about the same non-conspiracy. The Discovery Channel show in particular was insulting in its simplistic attempt to say, well, this is the only possible place the shots could have come from, look at our computer graphics. Maybe a new generation of history illiterates or those simply too young to care will buy it but for anyone who lived through those days 45 years ago and the years since, these two shows may as well have been a re-run of Nixon's "I am not a crook," speech.
Nixon, Richard Milhous, 1969-1974, look him up.
I was eight years old when this happened yet I remember with clarity an adult repeating a news broadcast about evidence being locked up until 2018. Why, my child's mind asked, lock up anything about this, and for so long? Ok, we don't want to end up like Mel Gibson the taxi driver in the film "Conspiracy," or poor Jim Garrison and so 2018 may come and go with yet another media special telling us (a la Peter Jennings, etc.,) that it's all in our poor little heads, but I draw my consolation from the following scenario.
JFK and Galileo meet in heaven. "400 years, it took them 400 years to finally say I was right and they were wrong, Jack."
"I should be so lucky Gally."
