"...Oswald, a lone nut, killed Kennedy and was thereafter killed by another lone nut, Ruby."
On page 1,461, Bugliosi summarizes his conclusion:
Anyone trying to make a case for a a different shooter, more shooters, shadowy figures or organizations behind the killing, has to deal with this one central fact. Beyond more than a reasonable doubt, beyond a rational doubt, it is clear that Oswald shot Kennedy. From that starting point, any conspiracy would have had to been put in place before November 22nd and would have had to have been so vast (including the Secret Service, the FBI, Dallas police and prosecutors, doctors at Parkland Hospital and at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, etc) as to be thoroughly beyond belief. One example: why would any person or group that was able to cover up so much for so long have recruited anyone as unreliable as Oswald and then have allowed him to use an old Italian military rifle, purchased for $15 mail-order, that had a defective scope?"After over forty years of the most prodigiously intensive investigation and examination of a murder case in world history, certain powerful facts exist which cannot be challenged: Not one weapon other than Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano rifle has ever been found and linked in any way to the assassination . Not one bullet other than the three fired from Oswald's rifle has ever been found and linked to the assassination. No person other than Oswald has ever been connected by evidence, in any way, to the assassination. No evidence has ever surfaced linking Oswald to any of the major groups suggested by conspiracy theorists of being behind the assassination. And no evidence has ever been found showing that any person or group framed Oswald for the murder they committed."
I didn't start this book with an open mind. For years, having followed the assassination very superficially through press reports, I believed what so many did, that Kennedy was killed by some combination of the New Orleans mob, anti-Castro Cubans, and the CIA. (After all, didn't the House Assassinations Committee conclude there was a fourth shot, proving the existence of another shooting and therefore a conspiracy?)
My thinking was changed completely by, of all things, watching Oliver Stone's JFK. The movie convinced me, on a gut level, that Oswald acted alone (certainly not Stone's intention.) It was the conversation between the fictionalized Jim Garrison and the fictional X, played by Donald Sutherland, when X explains in great detail the hows and whys of the American military-industrial conspiracy that was behind the shooting. Watching this conversation, it became inconceivable to me that, in the nearly 50 years since Kennedy was shot, someone involved or aware of this massive undertaking would not have spoken out. Either out of pride, guilt, religion, death-bed terror, money, or any combination, someone would have come forward by now. That many people could not have kept this big a secret for this long.
As evident in the passage quoted above, Bugliosi dismisses much of the conspiracy theories as lacking any kind of evidence to support them. He avoids the truism that lack of evidence does not constitute evidence of lack, but his arguments are compelling anyway. Virtually all conspiracy theorists focus on some combination of two points. First, they identify some group (CIA, Hoover, LBJ, Castro, Kruschev, organized crime, etc) that would appear to gain from Kennedy's death. Having apparent motive, they are off and running, even if a more careful reading of the relationships is less convincing about the motive.
The other approach is to focus on some seemingly contradictory fact or testimony that appears to be inconsistent with the findings of the Warren Commission or the House Assassinations Committee. Bugiliosi goes into great detail to explore and debunk these apparent anomalies, finding most to be misreading of the evidence and problems in human perceptions of rapidly occurring and complex events.
Kennedy's death was a seminal event for many people of my generation. Certainly there was no event before or since that drew the universal attention of the world so intensively. It is hard for many of us to believe that something so important, someone so important to so many, could be suddenly struck down by an inconsequential nobody. Yet, that's what happened.
