Tag: Arlen Specter

Who you going to believe on JFK?

Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro, tormenter of empire

On the perennial, perhaps boring, question of a JFK assassination conspiracy, the question may boil down to: who do you believe?

Fidel Castro, leader of Cuba in the 1960s, was a tireless Latin revolutionary. Charles de Gaulle, president of France, was a conservative continental statesman. They both came to the conclusion that President John F. Kennedy had been  assassinated by right-wing enemies within his own government.

Seeds of doubt: Gaeton Fonzi interviews Arlen Specter in 1966


Warren Commission Exhibit 903.
Arlen Specter demonstrates the
single-bullet theory in May 1964.

When young journalist Gaeton Fonzi interviewed former Warren Commission staff lawyer Arlen Specter in 1966, he expected the talented Specter to have ready answers to the questions which were then swirling around the medical aspects of the JFK case. Specter’s “single bullet theory” was under attack in such books as Edward Epstein’s Inquest, and in scholarly articles by Vincent Salandria in a legal journal (see here and here).

Fonzi would later write in his memoir The Last Investigation: “After those interviews with Arlen Specter, my belief in that Government would never be the same.”

The best and the brightest of the Warren Commission

“Almost no one knows — or cares — that the young men who staffed that investigation worked honestly and hard. Most went on to remarkably successful careers reflective of their selection as the best and the brightest to take on the awful task of determining who killed the president. That modern science has repeatedly affirmed their findings does little to abate the continuing doubt.”

–Shanin Specter, son of Arlen, writes about 50 Years With the Single Bullet Theory – The Daily Beast.

Fox News on a Dallas travesty

Has anybody noticed that the conservative Fox News network is more open minded about the JFK assassination story than its liberal competitors?

The embedded player above isn’t working. So click on this sympathetic report on James Tague, a Dallas man who suffered a superficial injury from a gunshot that missed President Kennedy’s limousine on November 22, 1963. Fifty years later, Tague has not been invited to the official ceremony commemorating the anniversary of Kennedy’s death in Dallas.

The liberal media isn’t much interested in Tague’s remarkable story but Fox News is.

Philadelphia University to test the Single Bullet Theory

Philadelphia University has a good idea for commemorating the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination: create a learning experience where people can explore one of the central controversies of the story and decide for themselves. The question is whether the exhibit designers are truly open-minded.

Design students at the north Philadelphia school are building a life-sized, wire-frame of the 1961 Lincoln stretch limo that Kennedy rode in that fateful day in Dallas that will be the centerpiece of an exhibit called “Single Bullet: Arlen Specter and the Warren Commission investigation of the JFK assassination.”

RIP: Arlen Specter and his Single Bullet Theory

The custodians of legacy news organizations and certain historians will say that the late Arlen Specter was right beyond a reasonable doubt in his theorizing about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Unfortunately, the facts say otherwise. In the past decade, improvements in forensic science have undermined Specter’s most famous hypothesis, the venerable Single Bullet Theory.

This is not to criticize the dead. …

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