Compassionate Curmudgeon

Repeat something often enough...

I've been reading Vincent Bugliosi's excellent Reclaiming History over the past few days and have found myself engrossed in it.

His central thesis, that Oswald, acting alone, killed JFK and there was no conspiracy, is one that I've subscribed to ever since the Warren Commission Report was released, and over the years I've grown increasingly impatient with the quacks, loonies, and frauds who have been peddling outlandish theories about the assassination.

But there is one idea that is so widely believed that even I have come to embrace it unthinkingly: that the Dallas Police Department displayed uncommon ineptitude during those four days in November, 1963. It turns out that if you repeat something often enough, people start to believe it. (Like the idea that our news media are overwhelmingly liberal, for example, but I digress.)

Following along with Bugliosi as the police investigate the killings of John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit, I can't see that they made any major mistakes. The only thing that comes close, in my opinion, is a police officer's failure to secure the Texas Book Depository building immediately after an eyewitness, who was standing directly across from the window where Oswald fired the shots that killed JFK, comes forward. But even that is understandable in the confusion and chaos of those first few moments.

But overall the Dallas police did an excellent job in those first twelve hours after the shooting.

Here is how Bugliosi puts it on page 182:

The Dallas police have done an incredible, some would even say an impossible job over the just the last eleven and a half hours. In that short span since the president's murder, they have apprehended the man they believe is responsible, and amassed evidence against him that is destined to withstand years of intense scrutiny. Despite the thousands of government man-hours yet to come, the basis of the case against Oswald is collected and assembled by the Dallas police in these first crucial hours. It is a feat the world would soon forget.

Posted by jt at November 22, 2007 05:24 PM