by James Logue
NEWS EDITOR
I am of the age where I can vividly remember the events surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. In the 40 years since, I have listened to the debate over whether or not there was a conspiracy to kill the president. I personally have concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Call me crazy. Call me gullible. Call me irresponsible.
I have also concluded after 40 years that conspiracy theorists continue to press their claims simply because there's money in it. Have a theory? Write a book. Sell an article to Newsweek. Have Oliver Stone give the keynote address at your Tupperware party.
Quite simply, if we all accepted the notion that Oswald acted alone, conspiracy theorists wouldn't have had anything to do. Oh, they might have gone off and found conspiracies elsewhere. They might have concluded that we really didn't land on the moon -- it was all done on a soundstage at MGM. Or they may have come up with the bright idea that fluoridation was a communist plot. They may have questioned why we were never told what Gilligan's first name was.
No, they have spent all these years trying to convince the rest of us that JFK was done in by a vast conspiracy.
They would have us believe that the president was killed by Fidel Castro, Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird Johnson, Johnson & Johnson, Masters and Johnson, the FBI, CIA, KGB, CBS, DuMont, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, the Mafia, the government of South Vietnam, Arlene Francis, Mr. Ed, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Topo Gigio, the Thin Man, the Invisible Man, the one-armed man, disgruntled employees, Speedy Alka Seltzer, the starting lineup for the Washington Senators, the John Birch Society, that guy who would spin all those plates on the Ed Sullivan Show, George Wallace, Ethel Merman, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung and Mister Greenjeans.
It just makes no sense. How could all these people assemble in one room and plot out such a horrible crime? The clash of personalities would have stopped the conspiracy in its tracks. And you could never count on Ethel Merman to keep a secret.
That's why I still believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He was a communist, an admirer of Castro and, of course, he wanted to impress Jodie Foster.
