Who Shot JFK?
by Robin Ramsay
Pocket Essentials, £9.99, ISBN 978-1-84243-232-7
Readers of The Skeptic may feel they have had enough of the Kennedy assassination, but here comes another book to add to the thousand or so published since that day in Dallas. At least this one is blessedly brief, though that is about all that can be said in its favour. Ramsay criticizes others’ ignorance of the assassination, but his own is truly remarkable. He tells us he accepts Oswald’s statement that he was a patsy, and states that there was no eyewitness evidence that he was at the window (there was), that he didn’t have time to get to where a policeman saw him just after the shots were fired (he did), that his rifle was a poor weapon (it wasn’t), that the photographs of him with the rifle were faked (they weren’t), that six or seven shots were fired (the overwhelming evidence is there were only three), that a shot hit the car (no corresponding damage was found), that Kennedy’s backwards movement means he was shot from in front (it doesn’t), that the “magic bullet” which wounded Kennedy and Connally was undamaged (it wasn’t), etc.
He spends lots of time and space on odd theorists whose views are on websites or in books from obscure publishers (I have never heard of most of them in decades of library work), but never mentions Gerald Posner’s excellent Case Closed, which covers many of the points he raises. Ramsay rightly says there is no evidence that Clay Shaw, charged with Kennedy’s murder by Jim Garrison, had anything to do with it, but fails to bring out the full grotesquerie of that shameful episode, grossly distorted in the film JFK. He rubbishes some wild theories, but only to introduce even dafter ideas. For example, he scorns David Lifton’s silly book Best Evidence (Kennedy’s body was tampered with before the autopsy, sufficiently well to fool the pathologists), but then turns to an alternative theory – two corpses! And whose was the other body? Why, J.D. Tippit, the policeman murdered by Oswald soon after the assassination, who is said to have resembled Kennedy (he didn’t). Jack Ruby, who shot Oswald, is credited with a major role in the “conspiracy” and is said to have been a Chicago Mob representative in Dallas, though there is no doubt that he was a dim, sad, mentally unstable born loser with a pathetic “colourful character” act who liked to feel “in” on sensational events, boasted of his “connections” with the police, press, etc., and couldn’t keep his mouth shut. No-one with any sense would ever have entrusted him with anything important. Ramsay blames Kennedy’s successor, Johnson, but, of course, with no concrete evidence. Saying some people wanted Kennedy dead (an unremarkable thing to say about any powerful person) is not the same as saying any of them actually encompassed his death.
Ray Ward
