Free Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi Page B

come up with anything new for two thousand years. Even the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in Jordan in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds, are mostly pre-Christian in origin. Yet scholarly books interpreting the New Testament are written every year. * And in terms of volume, there’s infinitely less to interpret in the four short Gospels, for example, than in all the vast literature and evidence surrounding the assassination. Reinterpretation of the evidence in the Kennedy assassination will be a never-ending process, and interpretation and analysis are the very heart of this book.
    The supreme irony about the Kennedy assassination is that although belief in a conspiracy knows no ideological or political boundaries, most conspiracy theorists I have met look up to Kennedy and his legacy, and many revere him. How very odd, then, that so many of them have virtually dedicated their lives to exonerating the man who killed their hero. To counter the incontrovertible evidence pointing to the guilt of the person who cold-bloodedly murdered Kennedy, they come up with extraordinary and often ludicrous arguments. They defend Oswald with a protective passion normally reserved only for one’s immediate family. Indeed, in their mind, everyone ( any person or group will do, for them) other than Oswald is responsible for Kennedy’s death. Obviously, the primary motivation of the conspiracy theorists is not to defend Oswald but to attack the Warren Commission, but in the process they go completely overboard in defending Lee Harvey Oswald the person.
    But the very best testament to the validity of the Warren Commission’s findings is that after an unrelenting, close to forty-five-year effort, the Commission’s fiercest critics have not been able to produce any new credible evidence that would in any way justify a different conclusion.
    No Warren Commission critic is more venerated by the conspiracy community than the late, legendary Harold Weisberg. Nor has any been remotely as prolific; Weisberg wrote an astonishing eight books on the case. By common consensus, Weisberg did more research on the assassination and accumulated more documents pertaining to the assassination (sixty file cabinets containing a quarter of a million pages as a result of a great many Freedom of Information Act [FOIA] requests and thirteen separate FOIA lawsuits) 82 than any other human. His farm home in Frederick, Maryland, was a mecca to which nearly all serious conspiracy theorists eventually visited to pay homage and browse through his voluminous Kennedy-assassination basement library. As his friend and fellow researcher James Tague said, “Harold spent over 35 years, often seven days a week, in his quest for the truth in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.” 83 Always believing there was a massive federal effort to “whitewash” (the title of his first book on the assassination in 1965) the facts of Kennedy’s murder for the American public, and to prevent researchers like himself from finding out what really happened, Weisberg writes on the last page of his third book on the assassination ( Oswald in New Orleans ) that for the first time he saw “the shadow of a happy ending.” Till the end, he still believed that there was a conspiracy in the assassination, but candidly acknowledged to me in 1999, after devoting much of his life to the case, that “much as it looks like Oswald was some kind of agent for somebody, I have not found a shred of evidence to support it , and he never had an extra penny, so he had no loot from being an agent.” 84
    The vast conspiracy community, which disbelieves everything in the Warren Report except the page numbers, should (but won’t) be influenced in their thinking by such a dramatic admission from their most esteemed titan, * one who relentlessly, obsessively and, as opposed to most of his peers, honestly put every aspect of the case under a microscope for almost four decades. Instead of spending literally thousands