DAVID VON PEIN SAID:
Here are some of my hand-picked favorite quotes and excerpts from the book "RECLAIMING HISTORY", written by Vincent Bugliosi, which was published in May of 2007 and is, in my opinion, the best book ever written about the assassination of President Kennedy. Enjoy and savor....
"The conspiracy community regularly seizes on one slip of the tongue, misunderstanding, or slight discrepancy to defeat twenty pieces of solid evidence; accepts one witness of theirs, even if he or she is a provable nut, as being far more credible than ten normal witnesses on the other side; treats rumors, even questions, as the equivalent of proof; leaps from the most minuscule of discoveries to the grandest of conclusions; and insists that the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained." -- Vincent Bugliosi [VB]; Page xliii of “Reclaiming History: The Assassination Of President John F. Kennedy” (W.W. Norton & Co.)(c.2007)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In addition to Oswald's palm print being found on the underside of the Carcano's barrel, we know that Oswald's fingerprints were found within an inch of the trigger of the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building. The evidence is clear and unimpeachable—Lee Harvey Oswald bought, owned, and handled the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle found on the sixth floor. And...it was this weapon that was used to murder John F. Kennedy." -- VB; Page 804
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"With respect to the second shot fired in Dealey Plaza, the "single-bullet theory" is an obvious misnomer. Though in its incipient stages it was but a theory, the indisputable evidence is that it is now a proven fact, a wholly supported conclusion. .... And no sensible mind that is also informed can plausibly make the case that the bullet that struck President Kennedy in the upper right part of his back did not go on to hit Governor Connally." -- VB; Pages 489-490
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The conspiracy alterationists are so incredibly zany that they have now gone beyond their allegation that key frames of the Zapruder film were altered by the conspirators to support their false story of what took place, to claiming that the conspirators altered all manner of people and objects in Dealey Plaza that couldn't possibly have any bearing on the president's murder. .... The alterationists have even claimed that at some point after the assassination, all the curbside lampposts in Dealey Plaza were moved to different locations and/or replaced with poles of different height. .... I know that conspiracy theorists have a sweet tooth for silliness, but is there absolutely nothing that is too silly for their palate?" -- VB; Pages 506-507
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When one removes the Dictabelt "fourth shot" from the HSCA findings, all that is really left is the HSCA's conclusion that Oswald killed Kennedy, and the fact that the committee found no evidence of any person or group having conspired with Oswald, the identical findings of the Warren Commission." -- VB; Page xxii
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Conspiracy theorists have attacked the case against Oswald as being weak because it was "only circumstantial," the implication being that any case based on circumstantial evidence is not solid. .... But nothing could be further from the truth. ....
Not only was there physical circumstantial evidence against Oswald [e.g., guns, bullets, and fingerprints traced to the defendant], but there was an enormous amount of non-physical circumstantial evidence, including the very most powerful in this category: his flight from the murder scene, his resisting arrest, and his telling one provable lie after another upon his apprehension, all showing an unmistakable consciousness of guilt." -- VB; Page 528 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is a simple fact of life that Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists either don't realize or fail to take into consideration, something I learned from my experience as a prosecutor; namely, that in the real world—you know, the world in which when I talk you can hear me, there will be a dawn tomorrow, et cetera—you cannot be innocent and yet still have a prodigious amount of highly incriminating evidence against you. That's just not what happens in life. .... But with Lee Harvey Oswald, everything, everything points towards his guilt." -- VB; Page 952
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Though conspiracy theorists are almost unanimous in believing that the president was shot from the front and his throat wound was an entrance wound, they are strangely silent as to what happened to this bullet after it entered the president's throat. .... It would be virtually impossible for a bullet entering the soft tissue of the neck at a speed of 2,000 feet per second to stop inside the neck and not exit the body." -- VB; Page 416
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The very fact that the Warren Commission, by its noncategorical language ("very persuasive evidence"), did not unequivocally rule out the possibility that Kennedy and Connally were struck by separate bullets (in effect, not ruling out the possibility of a conspiracy) is itself extremely powerful evidence that not only didn't the Commission, or any portion thereof, set out to suppress the truth from the American people, but that its conclusion of no evidence of a conspiracy was not, as conspiracy theorists believe, a predetermined conclusion." -- VB; Page 457
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It couldn't have been more obvious within hours after the assassination that Oswald had murdered Kennedy, and within no more than a day or so thereafter that he had acted alone. And this is precisely the conclusion that virtually all local (Dallas), state (Texas), and federal (FBI and Secret Service) law enforcement agencies came to shortly after the assassination. Nothing has ever changed their conclusion or proved it wrong." -- VB; Page 984
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The single most important discovery, and one that establishes with absolute and irrefutable certainty that the autopsy photographs have not been altered, is the fact that many of the photographs, when combined in pairs, produce stereoscopic images." -- VB; Page 223 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If conspirators were to use a fake photograph to frame Oswald, why would they take all these [backyard] photos—thereby increasing the risk, by each photo, of their fakery being detected—when just one photo would accomplish their purpose? .... What reason would the conspirators have for taking multiple photos? Even if it was to ensure that they at least got one good photo, after they got their good photo, why wouldn't they destroy the others?" -- VB; Page 398 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One could safely say that David Lifton took folly to an unprecedented level. And considering the monumental foolishness of his colleagues in the conspiracy community, that's saying something." -- VB; Page 1066
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Very few people are more critical than I. And I expect incompetence wherever I turn, always pleasantly surprised to find its absence. Competence, of course, is all relative, and I find the Warren Commission operated at an appreciably higher level of competence than any investigative body I know of. It is my firm belief that anyone who feels the Warren Commission did not do a good job investigating the murder of Kennedy has never been a part of a murder investigation." -- VB; Page xxxii
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists have succeeded in transforming a case very simple and obvious at its core—Oswald killed Kennedy and acted alone—into its present form of the most complex murder case, by far, in world history.
Refusing to accept the plain truth, and dedicating their existence for over forty years to convincing the American public of the truth of their own charges, the critics have journeyed to the outer margins of their imaginations. Along the way, they have split hairs and then proceeded to split the split hairs, drawn far-fetched and wholly unreasonable inferences from known facts, and literally invented bogus facts from the grist of rumor and speculation.
With over 18,000 pages of small print in the 27 Warren Commission volumes alone, and many millions of pages of FBI and CIA documents, any researcher worth his salt can find a sentence here or there to support any ludicrous conspiracy theory he might have. And that, of course, is precisely what the conspiracy community has done." -- VB; Page xxvi
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Since Kennedy's motorcade route past the Book Depository Building wasn't selected until November 18, and announced in a paper for the first time on the morning of November 19 in the Dallas Morning News, we not only thereby know that Oswald getting a job at the Book Depository Building on October 15 was unrelated to President Kennedy's trip to Dallas and the assassination, but it would seem that any conspiracy involving Oswald as the hit man would have had to be hatched no earlier than November 19, just three days before Kennedy's death (i.e., unless the argument is made—which I have yet to hear even the daffy conspiracy buffs make—that wherever Kennedy went when he came to Dallas, it was Oswald's job to track him down and kill him).
Surely no person with an ounce of sense could possibly believe that the CIA, mob, and so on, recruited Oswald to kill Kennedy just three days before the assassination." -- VB; Page 1444
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In a city of more than 700,000 people, what is the probability of one of them being the owner and possessor of the weapons that murdered both Kennedy and Tippit, and yet still be innocent of both murders? Aren't we talking about DNA numbers here, like one out of several billion or trillion? Is there a mathematician in the house?" -- VB; Page 964
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The [Warren] Commission [quoting Arlen Specter]..."chose men of outstanding reputation, like Joe Ball of California, a leader of the California bar for many years...Similar selections were made...from New York and Chicago and Des Moines and New Orleans and Philadelphia and Washington, so that every conceivable pain was taken to select people who were totally independent, WHICH IS HARDLY THE WAY YOU SET OUT TO ORGANIZE A TRUTH-CONCEALING COMMISSION"." -- VB; Page 342
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The notion that major federal agencies of government (or even one such agency) would decide to murder Kennedy because they didn't agree with certain policies of his is sufficiently demented to be excluded at the portals of any respectable mental institution short of an insane asylum." -- VB; Page 987
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Even if [Jack] Ruby was at Parkland, to assume he was there to plant a bullet on Connally's stretcher to frame Oswald for Kennedy's murder, making Ruby a part of the conspiracy to murder Kennedy, is...too ludicrous for words. The philosophy of the zany conspiracy theorists is that if something is theoretically possible (as most things are), then it's not only probable, it happened." -- VB; Page 450 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Since it has been established beyond all doubt that Oswald killed Kennedy, the conspiracy theorists who propound the idea of the CIA being behind Oswald's act are necessarily starting out in a very deep hole before they even take their first breath of air. This is so because Oswald was a Marxist, and a Marxist being in league with U.S. intelligence just doesn't ring true." -- VB; Page 1195
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The whole issue of what stretcher the bullet [Commission Exhibit No. 399] was found on, Connally's or some unknown person's, is a giant nonissue. Since we know that the bullet was fired from Oswald's Carcano rifle, and we know it wasn't found on Kennedy's stretcher, it had to have been found on Connally's stretcher." -- VB; Page 431 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[Mark] Lane...elevated to an art form the technique of quoting part of a witness's testimony to convey a meaning completely opposite to what the whole would convey. A perfect example occurs when he quotes part of Jack Ruby's testimony before the Warren Commission, in which Ruby literally begged Chief Justice Earl Warren to bring him to Washington to give further testimony.
"Ruby made it plain that if the Commission took him from the Dallas County Jail and permitted him to testify in Washington, he could tell more there; it was impossible for him to tell the whole truth so long as he was in jail in Dallas," writes Lane. Lane gives the following excerpt from Ruby's testimony before the Warren Commission:
Ruby: "But you [Warren] are the only one that can save me. I think you can."
Warren: "Yes?"
Ruby: "But by delaying, you lose the chance. And all I want to do is tell the truth, and that is all."
The unmistakable implication that Lane seeks to convey is that if Ruby were questioned in Washington, he would divulge the existence of a conspiracy. Yet the very next words that Ruby uttered after "that is all" were "There was no conspiracy." These four words, which completely rebutted the entire thrust of Lane's contention, were carefully omitted from 'Rush to Judgment'." -- VB; Page 1004
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[Oswald's] attempt, just seven months [before JFK's murder], to kill Major General Edwin A. Walker clearly showed his propensity for murder, at least where his target was political. .... When we couple his capacity for violence with his deep hostility for people and institutions, there can be little question that Oswald was a ticking time bomb, and it was only a matter of time before something like the Kennedy assassination occurred. .... Remarkably, many major books on the assassination by Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists don't even mention Oswald's attempt to murder Walker. Not one word." -- VB; Page 942
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"If, indeed, a fourth shot was fired that day, why did only 6 witnesses hear four shots according to two studies and only 8 witnesses according to another, whereas the vast majority of witnesses heard only three shots? .... If you had to wager your home on who is right, whose opinion would you endorse? Can there really be any question? ....
[And] if a second gunman was firing at the presidential limousine that day from the grassy knoll, why is it that only 4 of [author Josiah] Thompson's 172 witnesses, 4 of the HSCA's 178, and 5 of London Weekend Television's 189 thought they heard bullets being fired from two directions?" -- VB; Page 849
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One...problem that rises to the dignity of a true mystery .... a man's leather wallet [was supposedly found] near the puddle of blood where [Police Officer J.D.] Tippit's body had lain. The wallet, per [FBI agent James] Hosty, was Oswald's. .... If I had to wager, I'd conclude it was Tippit's wallet, and the reason [WFAA-TV cameraman Ron] Reiland stated...that it was Tippit's wallet is that the police had informed him at the scene that it was. .... It makes no sense to me that the Dallas police and detectives, several of whom were Tippit's friends, would keep from the world that his killer's wallet was found near his body."
-- VB; Pages 453 and 456 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The fact was that Jack Ruby never saw a crowd that he didn't want to be a part of. On that fateful Sunday morning, what he saw at City Hall motivated him to take himself, with his hair-trigger temper, with his desire to right any wrong, with his penchant for taking the law into his own hands, into that basement."
-- VB; Page 1120
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"An argument frequently heard in the conspiracy community is that Oswald could not have been convicted in a court of law because the "chain of custody [or possession]" of the evidence against him was not strong enough to make the evidence admissible in a court of law. .... The first observation I have to make is that I would think conspiracists...would primarily want to know if Oswald killed Kennedy, not whether he could get off on a legal technicality.
Second, there is no problem with the chain of custody of much of the physical evidence against Oswald, such as the rifle and the two large bullet fragments found in the presidential limousine.
Third, and most important on this issue, courts do not have a practice of allowing into evidence only that for which there is an ironclad and 100 percent clear chain of custody, and this is why I believe that 95 percent of the physical evidence in this case would be admissible.
I can tell you from personal experience that excluding evidence at a trial because the chain of custody is weak is rare, certainly the exception rather than the rule. The typical situation where the chain is not particularly strong is for the trial judge to nevertheless admit the evidence, ruling that the weakness of the chain goes only to "the weight of the evidence [i.e., how much weight or credence the jury will give it], not its admissibility"." -- VB; Page 442 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[Jim] Garrison, of course, smelled a rat in [James] Braden's story and had his investigators pursue the matter. Remarkably and unbelievably for Garrison, he concluded that "after sustained analysis...it was clear that Braden's contribution to the assassination was a large zero." When you can be cleared of conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination by the likes of Jim Garrison, you must be clean."
-- VB; Page 823 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I personally know of no American prosecutor who has ever abused his office's power of subpoena and power to file unwarranted criminal charges against perceived adversaries to the degree that Garrison did in the [Clay] Shaw case." -- VB; Page 1369
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"From all the evidence it clearly appears that the Secret Service sightings on the grassy knoll and behind the Book Depository Building after the shooting are entitled to about the same weight as Oswald's statement in Captain Fritz's office about being confronted by a Secret Service agent in front of the Book Depository Building [as Oswald was leaving the building at 12:33 PM on November 22]."
-- VB; Page 871
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The conspiracy theorists have tried to convert the FBI's attempt (in destroying Oswald's note to Hosty) to avoid the accusation it could have prevented the assassination, and the CIA's attempt to cover up its misdeeds on another matter (plot to kill Castro), into an attempt by both agencies to cover up their participation in [JFK's] assassination. This is the world of non sequiturs and enormous broad jumps in which the conspiracy theorists dwell and for which they are justifiably famous." -- VB; Page 1346
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Perhaps the most famous...of the "other" assassins are the "three tramps". The fact that there never was any evidence at all of their guilt is irrelevant to the conspiracy theorists. To the buffs, there was one big piece of incriminating evidence against the tramps: they weren't Lee Harvey Oswald! And in the balmy and unhinged conspiracy universe, no evidence of guilt is stronger against someone than that he isn't Lee Harvey Oswald." -- VB; Page 929
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The notion that LBJ would actually decide to have Kennedy murdered (or be a party to such a plot by others) is not one that, to my knowledge, any rational and sensible student of the assassination has ever entertained for a moment. But conspiracy theorists are not rational and sensible when it comes to the Kennedy assassination." -- VB; Pages 1274-1275
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"When Oswald got in the cab shortly after getting off the bus for the trip to Oak Cliff, and the cab drove off, the cabdriver [William Whaley], seeing all the police cars crisscrossing everywhere with their sirens screaming, said to Oswald, "I wonder what the hell is the uproar?" The cabdriver said Oswald "never said anything."
Granted, there are people who are very stingy with their words, and this nonresponse by Oswald, by itself, is not conclusive of his guilt. But ask yourself this: If a thousand people were put in Oswald's place in the cab, particularly if they, like Oswald, were at the scene of the assassination in Dealey Plaza and knew what had happened, how many do you suppose wouldn't have said one single word in response to the cabby's question?" -- VB; Pages 959-960
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The twistboard was the latest gadget Jack [Ruby] was selling, and he was very serious about it. His roommate, George Senator, said that in the last few weeks before the assassination, Ruby had been getting up...earlier than normal to visit department stores in Dallas in an effort to promote the board. Just, of course, what you would expect a big mob hit man to be doing in the weeks and days leading up to the biggest day of his mob career, when he would be "silencing" Oswald for them." -- VB; Page 1096
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Warren Commission critics and conspiracy theorists display an astonishing inability to see the vast forest of evidence proving Oswald's guilt because of their penchant for obsessing over the branches, even the leaves of individual trees. And, because virtually all of them have no background in criminal investigation, they look at each leaf (piece of evidence) by itself, hardly ever in relation to, and in the context of, all the other evidence. .... Within a few hours of the assassination, virtually all of Dallas law enforcement already knew Oswald had murdered Kennedy. Indeed, it was obvious to nearly everyone, not just law enforcement. At 4:45 p.m. on the day of the assassination, NBC network news anchorman Bill Ryan reported that "all circumstantial evidence points to the guilt of the suspect Lee Oswald." Exactly what happened was that obvious within hours of the shooting." -- VB; Pages 952-953
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"No evidence plus no common sense equals go home, zipper your mouth up, take a walk, forget about it, get a life. Of course, the hard-core conspiracy theorists, who desperately want to cling to their illusions, are not going to do any of these things. ....
If these conspiracy theorists were to accept the truth, not only would they be invalidating a major part of their past, but many would be forfeiting their future. That's why talking to them about logic and common sense is like talking to a man without ears. The bottom line is that they want there to be a conspiracy and are constitutionally allergic to anything that points away from it." -- VB; Pages 1437-1438
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[Lamar] Waldron started his book with nothing to say, added a whole lot of nothing to it, and ended up with nothing. .... Waldron's book is one of the longest (904 pages) ever written on the assassination and...gives the outward appearance of being a scholarly work. .... So to expose, as I believe I have, the ridiculous nature of a book like this demonstrates, more than with the average conspiracy book, the absolutely utter and total bankruptcy of the conspiracy movement in this country." -- VB; Page 766 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Waiting for the conspiracy theorists to tell the truth is a little like leaving the front-porch light on for Jimmy Hoffa." -- VB; Page xiv
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It's always assumed, of course, that the imposter would impersonate Oswald [in Mexico City] without his knowledge, that he would be someone Oswald did not know. But [HSCA investigator Edwin] Lopez raises the possibility—are you seated?—that maybe the impersonator was "one of his [Oswald's] companions" in Mexico City. To think that our tax money went into the preparation of the Lopez Report." -- VB; Page 1053
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Garrison devotees have apparently never been troubled by the question of why [Clay] Shaw and [David] Ferrie would select Oswald, of all people, as their hit man...or patsy when they had no way of knowing that the president would even come back to New Orleans, where Oswald lived at the time.
Or were they planning to finance Oswald as he traveled, Carcano in his violin case, all around the country stalking Kennedy for a good opportunity to kill him or be the patsy for someone else who would? If the latter, aren't they troubled by the fact that we know, from Oswald's known whereabouts, that he never did travel around the country?" -- VB; Page 847 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Conspiracy theorists rank Oswald's second-floor lunchroom encounter with Dallas police officer Marrion L. Baker near the very top of the list of reasons to believe Oswald didn't kill Kennedy. According to the critics, Oswald couldn't possibly have gotten from the sixth-floor sniper's nest to the second-floor lunchroom in the 90-second time frame estimated by the Warren Commission. .... Once again, however, the critics have exaggerated and misrepresented the circumstances surrounding this encounter in their curious zeal to exonerate Oswald of the crime he so obviously committed." -- VB; Page 837
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"[Oliver Stone] wanted his movie, he wrote with towering arrogance in the January 1992 edition of 'Premiere' [magazine], to "replace the Warren Commission Report." Can you imagine that? A Hollywood producer wants his movie to replace the official and most comprehensive investigation of a crime in history. .... Arrogance thought it already had a bad name. That was before it met Oliver Stone." -- VB; Page 1358
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Oliver Stone, in his movie 'JFK', never saw fit to present for his audience's consideration one single piece of evidence that Oswald killed Kennedy! So a murder case (the Kennedy assassination) where there is an almost unprecedented amount of evidence of guilt against the killer (Oswald) is presented to millions of moviegoers as one where there wasn't one piece of evidence at all. There oughta be a law against things like this." -- VB; Page 1386
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"My God. RFK somehow finds out that Humes and Boswell, as part of an apparent conspiracy to cover up the assassination of his brother, used a brain other than his brother's to conduct their examination. So he [RFK] goes out and finds, seizes, and then gets rid of his brother's substitute brain [instead of taking the proper action to prosecute these criminal autopsists to the fullest extent of the law]. Is there any end to this silliness?" -- VB; Page 443
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"With respect to the Kennedy assassination, once you establish and know that Oswald is guilty, as has been done, then you also necessarily know that there is an answer (whether the answer is known or not) compatible with this conclusion for the endless alleged discrepancies, inconsistencies, and questions the conspiracy theorists have raised through the years about Oswald's guilt." -- VB; Page 953
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"One can see why [Perry] Russo needed truth serum and hypnosis to recall hearing three people plot to murder President Kennedy four years earlier. Without truth serum and hypnosis, a plot to murder the president of the United States just wasn't important enough for someone like him to remember." -- VB; Page 1374
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"On July 17 [1967]...the pathetic [Dean] Andrews called a press conference and not only confessed again that "Clay Shaw ain't Clay Bertrand," but finally admitted that Clay Bertrand "never existed," saying he made the whole story up to get attention for himself." -- VB; Page 1394
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Although it would not be too easy to have any less credibility than Mrs. [Jean] Hill, conspiracy buffs, in their desperation, have elevated her to an iconic stature, Hill being one of the very brightest stars in the conspiracy theory constellation. .... [Hill's] Dealey Plaza observations are cited and accepted without criticism in virtually all the major conspiracy books on the assassination." -- VB; Page 877
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"From the first moment that I heard that [Arlen] Specter had come up with the single-bullet theory, it made very little sense to me since the theory was so obvious that a child could author it. .... Since [the members of the Warren Commission staff] all knew that the bullet, fired from Kennedy's right rear, had passed through soft tissue in Kennedy's body on a straight line, and that Connally was seated to the president's left front, the bullet, after emerging from Kennedy's body, would have had to go on and hit Connally for the simple reason it had nowhere else to go. How could it be that among many bright lawyers earnestly focusing their minds on this issue, only Specter saw it? ....
When I asked [Norman Redlich on September 6, 2005] if, indeed, Arlen Specter was the sole author of the single-bullet theory, his exact words were, "No, we all came to this conclusion simultaneously." When I asked him whom he meant by "we," he said, "Arlen, myself, Howard Willens, David Belin, and Mel Eisenberg"." -- VB; Pages 302-303 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The dreadful illogic and superficiality of the conspiracy theorists' modus operandi has inevitably resulted in the following situation: Though they have dedicated their existence to trying to poke holes in the Warren Commission's findings, they have failed abysmally to tell us (if the Warren Commission was wrong) what actually did happen.
In other words, other than blithely tossing out names, they have failed to offer any credible evidence of who, if not Oswald, killed Kennedy. Nor have they offered any credible evidence at all of who the conspirators behind the assassination were.
So after more than forty years, if we were to rely on these silly people, we'd have an assassination without an assassin (since, they assure us, Oswald didn't kill Kennedy), and a conspiracy without conspirators. Not a simple achievement." -- VB; Page 982
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The vast majority of the witnesses on the various mysterious-death lists of the conspiracy theorists (e.g., Jim Marrs's book 'Crossfire' lists 104 witnesses) weren't connected with the case in any known way whatsoever, and had absolutely nothing of any known value to say about the case. .... But of those who did have a connection—such as Roger Craig, Earlene Roberts, Lee Bowers, and Buddy Walthers—all of them, without exception, had already told their story, most of them on the public record, so what could possibly be achieved by killing them? .... The only thing mysterious is how anyone with an I.Q. above room temperature could possibly buy into such ["Mysterious Deaths"] nonsense."
-- VB; Pages 1018 and 1020
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Even if we were to assume the total invalidity of the polygraph test given to Ruby, his willingness—in fact, his insistence—that he be given one is strong circumstantial evidence of his innocent state of mind and the truthfulness about everything he said.
Lay people, including Ruby, for the most part believe that lie detector tests can detect lies. It is a considerable stretch to believe that if Ruby were guilty of being involved in a conspiracy, he would insist on taking a polygraph test, supremely confident he could conceal his guilt and pass the test." -- VB; Page 645 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Instead of referring to [Clay] Shaw (or "the defendant") a great number of times as he tried to connect him to the conspiracy and murder, as any prosecutor would do if he believed the person he was prosecuting was guilty, unbelievably Garrison only referred to Shaw once in his entire summation [to the jury], and then not to say that the evidence showed he was guilty. Not once did Garrison tell the jury he had proved Shaw's guilt or that the evidence pointed toward Shaw's guilt. ....
[A] benefit to Garrison of only charging Shaw with conspiracy [instead of both conspiracy and murder itself] is that under Louisiana law...when conspiracy alone is alleged, only 9 out of 12 jurors must concur to render a guilty verdict. So Garrison only needed nine jurors to convict Shaw. He couldn't even get one."
-- VB; Page 1380
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Remarkably, even sensible, intelligent people, such as HSCA chief counsel Robert Blakey, who personally believes [Carlos] Marcello was behind Kennedy's assassination, unthinkingly invoke the buffs' A-B-C reasoning to support their position [i.e., if A knows B and B knows C, then A is meaningfully connected to C, which of course is a non sequitur]. ....
Although common sense alone should tell conspiracy theorists that knowing someone or even being friendly with him is no evidence of a connection to his criminal activity, that you have to show the two were involved with each other in the same enterprise, there is another fascinating phenomenon that the conspiracy theorists must be aware of but seem determined not to acknowledge. I'm referring to the curious but undeniable reality that virtually any two people chosen at random can be connected to each other by the interposition of a very small number of mutual friends or acquaintances. ....
Also, there is no credible evidence that Ferrie was ever a boyhood friend of Oswald's or was with Oswald in the summer of 1963. But even if these assertions were true, so what? They certainly don't add up to a conspiracy to commit murder." -- VB; Pages 980-982
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"She [Julia Mercer] said, "A man was sitting under the wheel of the car and slouched over the wheel." (I defy any student of the English language to explain, from these words, the position the man was in.) .... But why presidential assassins...would deliberately draw attention to themselves by parking illegally and blocking traffic on a busy street in the presence of three Dallas police officers as well as lay witnesses like Miss Mercer is not known. Of course, conspiracy theorists never let common sense get in the way of their hallucinatory theories." -- VB; Pages 883-884
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Apparently, Kennedy's assassin, instead of trying to hide in the trunk of a car in the railroad yard parking lot or trying to escape from behind the picket fence after shooting Kennedy, had much more important things to do—mainly, climb over the fence (at which point he'd be in plain view of everyone on Elm Street) so he could beat up on that louse Gordon Arnold and take his film." -- VB; Page 888
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"A favorite theme of conspiracy theorists [is that] documents and photographs [have been] "buried" in the National Archives or in the Warren Commission's 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits. If we're to believe the theorists, it apparently never crossed the minds of the alleged conspirators who killed Kennedy to simply get rid of the evidence that could convict them. Unlike nearly all ordinary conspirators, Kennedy's killers intentionally and knowingly left evidence behind in the archives and the Warren Commission volumes that could expose them — evidence that only the conspiracists are smart and industrious enough to uncover." -- VB; Page 418 of Endnotes
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It is...remarkable that these conspiracy theorists aren't troubled in the least by their inability to present any evidence that Oswald was set up and framed. For them, the mere belief or speculation that he was is a more-than-adequate substitute for evidence." -- VB; Page 952
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The bottom line is that evidence of Oswald's innocence in the Kennedy assassination is about as rare as hundred-dollar bills on the floor of a flophouse." -- VB; Page 844
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I can tell the readers of this book that if anyone in the future maintains to them that Oswald was just a patsy and did not kill Kennedy, that person is either unaware of the evidence against Oswald or simply a very silly person. .... Any denial of Oswald's guilt is not worthy of serious discussion." -- VB; Page 969
