Garrison was notable for being among the first to assert that there were two conspiracies: The first conspiracy being the one which engineered the assassination of the president; the second conspiracy being the deliberate cover-up by the
Warren Commission to hide the true facts of the assassination.
Shaw was acquitted in March,
1969, and the conspiracy movement was dealt a blow as Garrison's trial was widely seen as a debacle, with many researchers denouncing Garrison as a fraud and megalomaniac. Further, as conspiracy theorist
Robert Anson put it, because of Garrison, "bills in
Congress asking for a new investigation were quietly shelved."
Nevertheless, the trial opened new avenues of investigations for the movement, particularly with previously unexplored
New Orleans connections and links of others to
Oswald.
The year
1973 saw the release of the film
Executive Action starring
Burt Lancaster, the first
Hollywood depiction of events surrounding the assassination
. In the film, three gunmen shoot
President Kennedy in a conspiracy led by right-wing elements and military/industrial interests. That year also saw the formation of the
Assassination Information Bureau. The influential group spoke to ever-growing audiences at hundreds of colleges throughout the
United States, urging a reopening of the investigation, and was ultimately instrumental in the realization of that goal in
1977.
In
March 1975,
Good Night America broadcast, for the first time, the
Zapruder film, with an audience of millions watching.
Almost immediately, with the film showing a backward snap of President Kennedy's head, indicating to many a shot from the right front and hence a conspiracy, there were new demands for a re-investigation. The findings of the
Rockefeller Commission that year and the
Church Committee the next year added impetus to calls for a new inquiry, which was realized by the
House Select Committee on Assassinations (
HSCA) from 1977 to
1979. That investigation concluded President Kennedy "was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy".
While the HSCA's conclusion was welcomed by many in the conspiracy community, the HSCA's inability to name any players in the conspiracy they identified, and their actions in sealing much of their documentation, left many in the community frustrated.
Numerous books, television shows and articles continued to appear. Writing in
2007,
Vincent Bugliosi said, "close to one thousand books" had been published on the subject of the assassination, of which "over 95 percent" were pro-conspiracy. Some notable books to
1990 were
Anthony Summers'
Conspiracy (later revised and published as Not in Your
Lifetime,
David Lifton's best-selling
Best Evidence, both published in
1980, and
Henry Hurt's
Reasonable Doubt in
1985. The
Summers and Hurt books explore many of the prominent conspiracy theories, while
Lifton argues that President Kennedy's wounds were altered before the autopsy to frame Oswald.
Jim Marrs published
Crossfire in
1989, the same year
High Treason, by
Robert J. Groden and
Harrison Livingstone was published. The latter book argued the autopsy photos were altered to give the appearance that wounds were caused by shots from a single gunman.
By the late 80s, interest in the subject among the general public was waning.[160] One theory for this from writer
Pete Hamill was that by
1988, "an entire generation had come to maturity with no memory at all of the
Kennedy years." In
1991,
Oliver Stone's film
JFK introduced the subject -- and many of the attendant conspiracy theories -- to a new generation of
Americans. The sudden renewed interest in the assassination led to the passage by Congress of the
JFK Records Act in
1992.
The Act created the
Assassination Records Review Board to implement the Act's mandate to release all sealed documents related to the assassination. Thousands of documents were released between
1994 and
1998, providing new material for researchers.
To date, there is no consensus on who, among many players, may have been involved in a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Those often mentioned as being part of a conspiracy include
Jack Ruby, organized crime as an organization or organized crime individuals, the
CIA, the
FBI, the
Secret Service, the
KGB, right-wing groups or right-wing individuals,
President Lyndon Johnson, pro- or anti-Castro
Cubans, the military and/or industrial groups allied with the military.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy
- published: 16 Nov 2013
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