Joseph DeMartino
Senior HTF Member
You can watch Bugliosi's talk about his book (recorded for C-SPAN on the seventh floor of the Texas School Book Depository) here.
For those who don't have the time to read his half-million words (plus supplmental material on CD-ROM) there is the ABC News Special Report marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination, Beyond Conspiracy. (Available on DVD.)
This show used the Dale Myers computer recreation of the shooting along with the Zapruder film and a live re-enactment to bury all the "major" points of the conspiracy theorists, the ones that the general public gets from movies like JFK and television trash like The Men Who Killed Kennedy. Bugilosi takes on the thousands of books, pamphlets and websites that have been peddling the conspiracy poison, and refutes them in great detail. The ABC special is a more compact response to the more superficial treatment the case gets in visual media.
Also there's the fact that if you simply present what did happen and lay out all the evidence that supports that clear sequence of events, you really shouldn't have to refute the conspiracy theorist, who simply weave fantasies out of non-facts, and which all required ignoring well-established facts. (90% of books on the shooting spend almost no time at all discussing Oswald and you won't even find the name "Tippet" in the index of the vast majority of them. The policeman's murder and Oswald's obvious guilt would have to be explained, if acknowledged, and that doesn't fit with the "patsy" role that most theories assign to the actual assassin.)
On the more general topic of conspiracy theories, their origins, their historical connections and the ideas and characteristics they share in common, you might find the Daniel Pipes book Conspiracy a terrific resource. (Lots of stuff on the Masons and the Templars, by the way, Dave. ) British humorist Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures with Extremists is another look that looks at conspiracy, albeit in a quirkier way and primarily through encounters with contemporary believers in various conspiracies. (Sometimes believers in several, often contradictory, conspiracy theories.)
Regards,
Joe
For those who don't have the time to read his half-million words (plus supplmental material on CD-ROM) there is the ABC News Special Report marking the 40th anniversary of the assassination, Beyond Conspiracy. (Available on DVD.)
This show used the Dale Myers computer recreation of the shooting along with the Zapruder film and a live re-enactment to bury all the "major" points of the conspiracy theorists, the ones that the general public gets from movies like JFK and television trash like The Men Who Killed Kennedy. Bugilosi takes on the thousands of books, pamphlets and websites that have been peddling the conspiracy poison, and refutes them in great detail. The ABC special is a more compact response to the more superficial treatment the case gets in visual media.
Also there's the fact that if you simply present what did happen and lay out all the evidence that supports that clear sequence of events, you really shouldn't have to refute the conspiracy theorist, who simply weave fantasies out of non-facts, and which all required ignoring well-established facts. (90% of books on the shooting spend almost no time at all discussing Oswald and you won't even find the name "Tippet" in the index of the vast majority of them. The policeman's murder and Oswald's obvious guilt would have to be explained, if acknowledged, and that doesn't fit with the "patsy" role that most theories assign to the actual assassin.)
On the more general topic of conspiracy theories, their origins, their historical connections and the ideas and characteristics they share in common, you might find the Daniel Pipes book Conspiracy a terrific resource. (Lots of stuff on the Masons and the Templars, by the way, Dave. ) British humorist Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures with Extremists is another look that looks at conspiracy, albeit in a quirkier way and primarily through encounters with contemporary believers in various conspiracies. (Sometimes believers in several, often contradictory, conspiracy theories.)
Regards,
Joe