Re: [Marxism] conspiracy

["Alan Bickley" <avb34@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is my first post to this list.

I was about eighty yards from Kennedy's car when he was shot in Dallas,
although I realized that he had been shot only minutes later when I reported
for work at WFAA, the radio and television property of the Dallas Morning
News. Although I had hired on as a disk jockey, I was pressed into duty at
12:35 as a news voice, and for the rest of the day I fed the ABC and NBC
radio networks, ABC television, and stations around the country and the
world the developing story. Walter Cronkite likes to think that he was the
first to announced JFK's death. He was not, as a review of the time stamped
tapes will show.

That having been said, it struck me at about 3:30 that afternoon that the
story that was being spun by the authorities was flawed. Nothing that I saw
or heard in the following days changed my view. By the time Lee Oswald was
killed I had become convinced that he was, as he claimed during a police
station news conference, "a patsy." I subscribe to the theory that Kennedy
was done to death by a conspiracy for the simple reason that two or more
persons "breathing together," which is to say conspiring, fired shots. One
person, acting alone, might decide on Wednesday night to murder a president
and then arise to do the need on Thursday. When two or more persons agree to
an action as weighty as killing a president they take their time, first in
learning to trust each other, then in plotting action and escape. I included
my doubts and speculations in a documentary which was presented on WFAA-AM
one year later.

Much that has been written about the Kennedy assassination is worthless and
sensationalistic, but  the core of unrefuted doubts remains. For what it's
worth, my subscribing to this view crippled my career in broadcasting. I
never was the first to bring it up, but once it became know that I was a
serious skeptic on the JFK killing, managements buried me on overnight
shifts, concocted disciplinary issues, and in various ways connived at
limiting my income and my prospects for advancement. I continued to be
employed, and in fact ended my career with a 24-year run at a CBS owned and
operated AM in a top-three market, but I felt the effects of the blacklist
long after the blacklist in broadcasting and entertainment was supposed to
have ended.

People do conspire. It happens all the time. Raising the cry of "conspiracy
theorist" as a way of shutting down inquiry is intellectually vacuous,
silly, and profoundly unhistorical.

Alan Bickley
Madison, WI



_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism