Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 8, 1992                   TAG: 9203050256
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`EVIDENCE' OF A CONSPIRACY TO KILL JFK JUST ISN'T THERE

A: Yes! We're going to talk once again about Oswald and Kennedy! They're like The Beatles, they never get stale.

Today's topic: What, exactly, is "evidence"? You were no doubt wondering this just recently after having seen Oliver Stone's "JFK," a film which, with all due respect, has about as much historical veracity as the Cyclops episode of "Lost in Space." For those who didn't see it, we'll summarize: Satan rules the world.

Question is: Why is there a permanent gap between the Official Version of assassinations and the more populist versions? Our answer: Official Versions are based on what we do know (evidence), while unofficial, conspiratorial versions are based on what we don't know - on the myriad contradictions and mysteries that pervade these crimes.

Evidence is stuff like this: The gun, the bullets, the bullet holes in the clothing, the autopsy photos and X-rays, the Zapruder film, and (less reliably) the eyewitnesses who saw Oswald. There is abundant evidence that Oswald shot Kennedy.

Evidence is not stuff like this: Hey, chump, how come that bullet did all that zigzagging? Huh? How come?

That is not evidence. That is a question, wrapped around a mystery, inside an enigma.

It's surely possibly that Oswald was in someone's hire when he shot Kennedy. That would not contradict the physical evidence of Dealey Plaza. But there's no evidence of another gunman. What there is, rather, is information that's inexplicable. Fishy stuff. Like, the brain disappeared after the autopsy! Doesn't that mean something? Maybe. But while a brain itself is surely evidence, the fact that a brain is missing isn't necessarily evidence of anything.

Some people thought they heard a gun fired from the infamous "grassy knoll." The problem is, darn the luck, no one saw that gunman. No shell casings were found. And if an invisible gunman did manage to fire a bullet from his invisible gun, the bullet remained invisible, too - it vanished in thin air. Meanwhile, Oswald was actually seen firing a rifle out a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

This is the pattern: Sounds and shadows on one side, warm bodies and physical evidence on the other.

"Oswald's fingerprint is on the stock of the gun! I like those things! And that's what juries like, too, by the way," says Ron Wright, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., medical examiner who weighs evidence for a living.

Conspiracy theories can't be disproved. For one thing, the proof that there's no conspiracy is, by definition, a manufactured artifact of the conspiracy itself. For example, "JFK" shows one fiend pressing a rifle against Oswald's dead hand, for a fake palm print. The movie shows another fiend planting the "magic bullet" on a stretcher. Scary stuff! Except both scenes are entirely invented.

There is one item of real "evidence" for a second gunman: The acoustic analysis of a recording taken by a policeman's dictabelt. A number of experts say it shows, with great probability, that three shots were fired from Oswald's perch and a fourth shot (which missed!) from the grassy knoll. A subsequent panel of experts disagreed with that conclusion. Who's right? Who knows. In the meantime, that's a small nail on which to hang an entire conspiracy theory.

OK, so what about the Zapruder film? Doesn't it show Kennedy's head violently jerking back and to the left? Yes. But that's merely a layman's idea of evidence.

"The concept that a body goes in the direction that a bullet is going is a Hollywood concept," says Dr. Michael Baden, who served as chairman of the Forensic Pathology Panel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s. Baden and his colleagues examined the X-rays and autopsy photos and concluded, with one dissent, that Kennedy was only shot from the rear.

The silliness of "JFK" is that it is argues that our government (the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, Pentagon, Justice Department etc.) is so brilliant, so brutally efficient, that it could perpetrate an assassination of the president and cover it up for three decades. The truth is, had our government tried to shoot Kennedy, it would have blown its own foot off.

Or leaked the story prematurely to Nina Totenberg. Washington Post Writers Group

Joel Achenbach writes for the Style section of The Washington Post.