by Richard Kirk, American Thinker:

James Joyce once remarked that Rome reminded him of a man who made his living “by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.”  This observation also applies to the commercial exploitation of President Kennedy’s assassination.  After more than half a century no scrap of evidence is immune from being dislodged, mutilated, and reconstructed so as to fit more securely into the imaginative web of an aspiring conspiracy theorist. Did Oswald act alone? Was there a gunman on the grassy knoll?  Did the doctors at Parkland Hospital alter their autopsy report?  Was Kennedy’s body transferred to another coffin? Was the assassination a right-wing military coup d’état “with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings”?

This last theory — concocted by Oliver Stone for the movie JFK — surpassed all previous efforts in combining ideological rigidity, factual manipulation, and commercial exploitation.  The truthfulness of this assessment is open to any reader willing to peruse the writings of Gerald Posner (Case Closed), Brandeis Professor Jacob Cohen (“Yes, Oswald Alone Killed Kennedy,” June, 1992, Commentary) and finally the massive work of lawyer Vincent Bugliosi (Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy).

The sad fact is that the dead president has entered the marketplace as a salable item.  His death is not a question of historical interest but an exploitable commodity that may be packaged with impunity.  Is it really a desire to get at the truth that motivates the never-ending publication of conspiracy books and the periodic production of television specials commemorating that fateful November day?

Why, if the media are really interested in the truth, are most Americans ignorant of even the rudimentary facts about the case?  When, for example, can you remember any prominent member of the Fourth Estate mentioning these critical facts:  Oswald worked at the Texas book depository; eyewitnesses actually saw someone shoot at the motorcade from the sixth floor of the building; a witness 110 feet from the window provided police a description that fit Oswald quite well; no one else was with Oswald at the time of the shooting; Oswald had arranged book cartons to create a shooting blind by the sixth floor window; most aural witnesses heard three shots; Oswald (who didn’t drive and regularly hitched a ride to work) told his coworker that he had some “curtain rods” wrapped in the brown paper he carried with him that morning; that brown paper, three cartridge cases, and a recently fired rifle were all found on the sixth floor of the book depository building; the rifle had been mail-ordered by Oswald a few months earlier; Oswald alone left the building after the assassination and later murdered a police officer in front of several eyewitness; Oswald kept an “Historic Diary” that made clear his radical political views and mental instability; a few months earlier Oswald had attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker, a fervent anti-Communist and former Texas gubernatorial candidate; four years earlier Oswald left the United States for the Soviet Union only to return in 1962; by the time of the Kennedy assassination Oswald, who was separated from his Russian wife, had become a great fan of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

I could go on and on. I mention only a few highlights from the mountain of evidence that convinced three government committees that Oswald alone killed the president. The sad conclusion to which I must come is that most people involved in the mass dissemination of information are not really interested in these facts. That includes the bogus 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations a majority of whom “concluded” (based solely on ridiculously subjective audio evidence from an open police motorcycle microphone) that there were four, not three, shots fired — and thus, a second gunman.

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