It just gets better each week! This conspiracy theory is unfolding like the layers of an onion. Week 8 – if you haven’t read the previous chapters, you can look them up under Conspiracy Theory Wednesday in my categories.
THE WARREN COMMISSION
On November 29, 1963, Chief Justice Earl Warren tearfully accepted chairmanship of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. At the Commission’s first meeting, ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles set the tone for their investigation handing out copies of a book claiming presidential assassinations are always loners. Ha leads, the Commission took depositions from 552 witnesses, consistently highlighting testimony that supported the lone assassin theory. While important evidence such as Kennedy’s autopsy X-rays, were not included in the report, dental X-rays of Jack Ruby’s mother’s teeth were. In September 1964, the Commission concluded that both Oswald and Ruby were lone assassins.
This fixation with squelching rumors of conspiracy resulted in the Commission’s endearing Magic Bullet Theory. Knowing that Oswald could not have fired four times in the allotted time span, and having to account for Kennedy’s head wound as well as a bystander’s injuries, the Commission contradicted its own ballistic experts by concluding that Exhibit 399, a bullet found on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital in near pristine condition, had entered Kennedy’s upper back, exited his neck, and gone on to break Governor John Connally’s rib, shatter his wrist bone and lodge in his thigh.
Ironically, the Warren Commission’s insistence on lone assassins led to periodic re-examinations of evidence withheld from and suppressed by the Commission, and gave rise to a legion of “conspiracy theories” involving various shadowy figures presumed to have masterminded Kennedy’s murder.


Wow, really interesting about Dulles’ fixation on loners. Especially since there is fairly good evidence that a conspiracy (of his cabinet – led by Seward) was responsible for the Lincoln assassination, and Warren Harding’s death (the undertaker who embalmed him said there was clear evidence of cyanide poisoning), and Garfield, and Zachary Taylor. In fact we tend to run our federal government like the wild west – just kill them if they refuse to toe the line. I find it hard to believe that Dulles, with his Ivy League education and years of intelligence experience, wasn’t aware of some of these other conspiracies. I write about my own close encounter with US intelligence in my recent memoir THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE (I currently live in exile in New Zealand).