Ruminations on the Greatest Mystery Never Solved

The post Ruminations on the Greatest Mystery Never Solved appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

At the recent JFK Lancer conference in Dallas, WhoWhatWhy Editor-in-Chief Russ Baker spoke to a group dedicated to finding out the full truth behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Though supposedly the matter was settled long ago, most Americans don’t believe the Warren Commission’s hasty, FBI-driven verdict. Nor was that verdict acceptable to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (of the 1970s) which concluded that the president had most likely been killed as a result of a conspiracy, though it failed to resolve the particulars.

Yet, all kinds of people keep trying, at their own expense, to solve the mystery.

“There is a tremendous debt owed to this amazing bunch of people who do this stuff selflessly their whole lives … This may be the greatest revelation out of the whole thing if nothing else, the fundamental goodness, decency, and tenacity” of truth-seeking investigators in the U.S. and around the world, Baker said.

The researchers are certainly tenacious, yet 50 years after the assassination, the murder remains unresolved. Baker points out that the research challenges cannot be blamed simply on a conspiratorial cover-up.

The community of researchers itself is plagued by problems such as sloppiness in its own work, too many marginal books being produced (and certainly too many for a relatively small core of enthusiasts), too many feuds, and too much ego among the “stars”  — all of which diminishes the potential and the high-mindedness of the undertaking.

Baker pointed out that sometimes we interpret an anomaly as a sign of conspiracy when, in fact, it may be a symptom of systemic moral failure within our society and institutions.

“We may just be looking at the dysfunction of our entire society to some extent,” he said. “And so that may also be why the Kennedy case seems so surreal, because a lot of the stuff we’re looking at isn’t part of the assassination plot at all; it’s just a society where many institutions and processes and techniques are not functioning properly.”

“[It’s] a society where criminality and cover-your-behind and go-along-to-get-along and fear and cowardice and not willing to take risks and all these other things, following what you’re told.…To do the Kennedy assassination research, you have to sort of strip all this stuff away to see what’s left. And that’s very hard.”

The challenges of JFK research represents, in a sense, a microcosm of the problems journalists face when doing any kind of important, in-depth investigation, Baker noted. The way to move forward is to “not have a dog in the race” — that is, to have no preferred outcome.

Researchers must follow the facts wherever they lead, even when they point to sensitive or disturbing conclusions. According to Baker, the mark of good journalists is a willingness to revise theories, admit their mistakes, and still keep going.

Not coincidentally, these are principles that we here at WhoWhatWhy take seriously.

Please see the above video for Russ’s full talk.

As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, please understand that a few small ones may slip through.

Full Text Transcript:

Announcer : With no further ado, Russ Baker. Thank you Russ.

Audience claps

Russ Baker: It’s great to be here. I was going to talk about research challenges. The first one is when the guy before you says “It’s lunchtime,” and it’s not.

Laughter

I am only half joking because as a relative newcomer to this community, I’ve only been involved with Kennedy stuff for about a decade. I know that’s like yesterday to most of you. I am still grappling with some of the problems that I see with doing Kennedy research. We’re all imperfect and that has a lot to do with it, but I did try to make a list of research challenges of some of the things that I’ve encountered. You may know that I wrote a book called Family of Secrets. I hate to talk about it because it’s been out for so many years now. People keep saying “When are you going to do another book?” I am working on another book and it is just on Kennedy. The Family of Secrets has five chapters on the Kennedy assassination that all came from the question of “Why could George HW Bush not recall where he was on November 22, 1963?”  I think the fact that that issue is not deemed important by many people in this community tells you a lot about our inability to ever move forward or to grasp the larger picture of what has happened to this country. I also think – and by the way I want to congratulate all of you because these presentations are fabulous; the information about the paper bags, the information about the library card, the information about the photos, and so forth. This is all fabulous work but it goes to the point that there’s so much out there that is not resolved. Fifty years later we’re still focusing on very, very microscopic things and try to establish what those things mean. So I started make a list of all of the challenges, all of the research challenges that we face, and I realized that it was like trying to write an encyclopedia or perhaps a medical diagnosis of madness. Speaking of madness, what I’m trying to do with the book that I’m working on is to see if everything, not everything but much, can be assessed and whether it is possible to, with an open mind, look at some of these factors and establish something that would, might not be in dispute. That almost any reasonable-minded person would look at it and say, “Yes, that’s in fact what that is,” and then take those things and see what you’ve got. And see if you could create a coherent story that you could tell to anybody that could be told succinctly, could be shown to people who don’t know anything about this, aren’t interested or think that this is crazy, and say, “Well here are all of these things that just seem to us to be real and credible. Of course I realize that trying to write any sort of book on this subject that makes sense to most people, and is kind of clear, and not too hard to read, on its face sounds absurd to most of us, especially with the granular stuff that we’ve got here that’s so important and still so unresolved. But it does seem to me like worth doing. I have other things to do. I work full time running a news organization I founded called WhoWhatWhy.org, a nonprofit. Some of you may know of it. We’re dedicated to try and to improve journalism and trying to, you know, whether you agree with Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or anything. Everybody seems to be unhappy with journalism and we feel that journalism could be much, much better and more trusted by people across the country of all backgrounds. So that’s my day job so to speak and I do the Kennedy stuff on the side.

There are many issues. Why does this matter? What does it mean? Whatever do the pieces of it mean? Who did what? What evidence is what? And so forth, awful lot. You might say I’ve been studying all the things that have prevented forward movement and that’s what I’m going to try to talk about today. Certainly the things that prevent forward movement include the obstruction and the cover-up by the establishment. But there are many, many more impediments and I will get to those impediments, but I want to start with just giving you a sense of the problems. How many of you have been inside the National Archives of Maryland? *Pauses* Okay. I don’t consider myself an expert. Malcolm usually comes to these things. He’s not here. Malcolm Blum probably is the expert. I know some of you here are probably pretty good experts, so what I say may be wrong. But I’ve been in there a number of times and my sense was that the national archives don’t really work. That, when you go in there, it’s confusing. I remember asking for guidance, speaking to librarians. In fact, reference librarians who are specifically assigned to the Kennedy collection and quickly discovering how little they knew. Which mortified me and then I would ask them “Well, how do I look this thing up and what does this thing mean?” They didn’t know and they referred me. Again maybe I’m out of date, it’s been a couple years since I’ve been there. They have binders, and then they have computers, some of the stuff that’s in the binders isn’t in the computers and some of the things that are in the computers aren’t in the binders. They tell me you sort of have to look at both and I ask, “How you do that?” Of course, you’re dealing with this vast number of documents. So the problem with the national archives alone is just almost insurmountable. I remember even talking to Malcolm about it and asking him and he very candidly would say he didn’t know about a lot of these things. Just to give you a sense and I’m going to try not to totally depress you here, but we are dealing with some very, very serious structural and systemic issues in trying to move forward. As a journalist, I want to distinguish about that because we’ve also gotten to the point in this country where nobody seems to know what a journalist is. It doesn’t … it seems to mean anybody who has the ability to type something and put it up on the web now is a journalist. But actually journalism, just like being a doctor or a lawyer… anything, is a field. It’s a craft and there are certain things you are supposed to do. One of the things you’re supposed to do is you’re supposed to not have a dog in the fight. You’re not supposed to want some outcome. You’re supposed to want to know what happened. That’s really important. As I have gone about my research, I always was asking: What does anything actually mean? What does this mean? We just saw how terrible all these crazy things about the Dallas Police Department. What does that mean? What does it mean that all those people are wacky, or daft, or incompetent, or stupid, or whatever it is? What does that mean? What does it mean that they’re all carry around guns and messing with the evidence? All this crazy stuff, what does it mean? I don’t know the answer to that and I think we have to figure that out. Some of you may think you know. What does it mean when we look at FBI reports and they routinely misspell the surnames of the witnesses and the suspects? What does that mean? I don’t know. I have been asking for a decade now: What does that mean? Are these people doing that deliberately? Are they lazy? Are they stupid? Are they reckless? I don’t know because the answer is probably all of the above. What do you do with that? Because you can’t even prove a conspiracy, if they’re just a bunch of dumb clucks. We may just be looking at the dysfunction of our entire society –­­­­­­­ to some extent. So that may also be why the Kennedy case seems so surreal because a lot of the stuff we’re looking at isn’t part of the Kennedy assassination plot at all. It’s just a society where many institutions and processes and techniques are not functioning properly. A society where criminality, cover your behind, go along to get along, and fear, and cowardice, and not willing to take risks, and all these other things of following what you’re told. That these are the things and to do the Kennedy assassination research, we have to sort of strip all the stuff away to see what’s left and that is very hard.

So the FBI misspellings. To be fair, I love you all dearly but I mean a lot of the books we put out are full of errors. Talk to my best friends in here, I won’t say their names, but it makes me crazy. You’ve got three different spellings of somebody’s surname on one page. So I cannot say that the FBI is up to no good with misspelling if we’re also doing the same thing.  

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