I Was A Teenage Warren Commission Report Dupe

[W. Niederhut]

Folks,

     I'm thinking about writing a new book entitled, "I Was A Teenage Warren Commission Report Dupe."  🤡

     It's the true story of a naive guy who grew up in America in the 1960s and 70s believing that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a lone nut in the Texas School Book Depository, named Lee Harvey Oswald.  This guy actually studied the photos in the 11/29/63 edition of Life magazine when he was a boy, which clearly showed President Kennedy's head moving forward after he was shot from the TSBD by Oswald.  And the boy also believed that Jack Ruby shot Oswald because he was morally indignant about President Kennedy being murdered.

    Then, about 50 years later, the guy finally starts reading some scholarly books about what really happened on 11/22/63, and he realizes that he had been completely duped by the U.S. mainstream media and the Warren Commission Report for half a century.  His wife and siblings are shocked when he tries to tell them that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for U.S. intelligence, and was, apparently, a patsy falsely accused of JFK's murder.   (The guy even had a junior high school friend named Oswald, who was always regarded in the community as a somewhat sinister weirdo.)

    The guy becomes somewhat obsessed with the shocking truth about JFK's murder, and the mainstream media illusions that misrepresented the facts during the ensuing 50 years.

    He starts to question other depictions of American history in the mainstream media-- especially things relating to the Cold War, the CIA, the FBI, and the American military-industrial complex.

    Then, because there are no 12 Step groups for recovering Warren Commission Report Dupes, he joins the Education Forum-- one of the few communities he can find on-line where many people actually seem to know and discuss what happened on 11/22/63, in great detail...

    Any suggestions?  😬

[Cliff Varnell]

10 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

Folks,

     I'm thinking about writing a new book entitled, "I Was A Teenage Warren Commission Report Dupe."  🤡

     It's the true story of a naive guy who grew up in America in the 1960s and 70s believing that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a lone nut in the Texas School Book Depository, named Lee Harvey Oswald.  This guy actually studied the photos in the 11/29/63 edition of Life magazine when he was a boy, which clearly showed President Kennedy's head moving forward after he was shot from the TSBD by Oswald.  And the boy also believed that Jack Ruby shot Oswald because he was morally indignant about President Kennedy being murdered.

    Then, about 50 years later, the guy finally starts reading some scholarly books about what really happened on 11/22/63, and he realizes that he had been completely duped by the U.S. mainstream media and the Warren Commission Report for half a century.  His wife and siblings are shocked when he tries to tell them that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for U.S. intelligence, and was, apparently, a patsy falsely accused of JFK's murder.   (The guy even had a junior high school friend named Oswald, who was always regarded in the community as a somewhat sinister weirdo.)

    The guy becomes somewhat obsessed with the shocking truth about JFK's murder, and the mainstream media illusions that misrepresented the facts during the ensuing 50 years.

    He starts to question other depictions of American history in the mainstream media-- especially things relating to the Cold War, the CIA, the FBI, and the American military-industrial complex.

    Then, because there are no 12 Step groups for recovering Warren Commission Report Dupes, he joins the Education Forum-- one of the few communities he can find on-line where many people actually seem to know and discuss what happened on 11/22/63, in great detail...

    Any suggestions?  😬

Write it as a screenplay and pitch it to Alec Baldwin.😎

Edited December 1, 2018 by Cliff Varnell

[W. Niederhut]

6 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Write it as a screenplay and pitch it to Alec Baldwin.😎

Someone has to play the incredulous wife, who thinks her husband has become a "conspiracy nut." 

Cate Blanchett?  😬

[David Von Pein]

31 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

Someone has to play the incredulous wife, who thinks her husband has become a "conspiracy nut." 

Cate Blanchett?  😬

No. I'm thinking Agnes Moorehead instead.

But since Agnes is no longer with us, perhaps Kathy Bates would be a better choice....

 

Edited December 1, 2018 by David Von Pein

[James DiEugenio]

BTW, is this a true story, or Inspired by a true story.

 

The latter is the new rubric for Holly wood BS

[W. Niederhut]

28 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

BTW, is this a true story, or Inspired by a true story.

 

The latter is the new rubric for Holly wood BS

It's a true story about myself, but I was only joking about writing an autobiographical parody of Litwin's book, I Was a Teenage Conspiracy Freak.

[James DiEugenio]

You mean you bought the WR until 2013?

Edited December 1, 2018 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

You mean you bought the WR until 2013?

     I never really studied the subject in any depth until a few years ago.  My concept of the assassination was derived from the mainstream media-- Life magazine, the Rocky Mountain News, Dan Rather/CBS, then the New York Times (after 1975.)

   I read Don DeLillo's novel, Libra, the year it was published, but, as I recall, I read it with the notion that Oswald was the man who killed JFK.

[James DiEugenio]

Then you really should write that book.

See, Litwin is trying to sell a story that sounds kind of phony to me.  From what I can gather, he is saying that he saw the Geraldo show in 1975, but then flipped with the HSCA report in 1979.

Well, that makes for about four years as a critic of the WC.  Even back in 1979, there was  a rather large sized library to read and digest.  So I find it hard to buy that he did do that in four years.  Secondly, if he could have been swayed by the HSCA technical panels, then he did not analyze them with very much rigor, like getting on the phone and calling people. Further, the declassified docs show just how bad they were e.g. Canning complained about the data he was getting to do his trajectory tests.    And he admitted that if that data was wrong, then his test were wrong.  This makes me suspect that the pretext of his book is just that, one that is simply assumed for political purposes.

But yours would not be.  Which would make it really interesting. 

[W. Niederhut]

3 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Then you really should write that book.

See, Litwin is trying to sell a story that sounds kind of phony to me.  From what I can gather, he is saying that he saw the Geraldo show in 1975, but then flipped with the HSCA report in 1979.

Well, that makes for about four years as a critic of the WC.  Even back in 1979, there was  a rather large sized library to read and digest.  So I find it hard to buy that he did do that in four years.  Secondly, if he could have been swayed by the HSCA technical panels, then he did not analyze them with very much rigor, like getting on the phone and calling people. Further, the declassified docs show just how bad they were e.g. Canning complained about the data he was getting to do his trajectory tests.    And he admitted that if that data was wrong, then his test were wrong.  This makes me suspect that the pretext of his book is just that, one that is simply assumed for political purposes.

But yours would not be.  Which would make it really interesting. 

Jim,

     I recently listened to your interview at Who What Why with Jefferson Morley and Russ Baker.  It was interesting to hear about how the three of you got interested in the JFK assassination at very different times in history.   Russ Baker mentioned that, unlike you, he started seriously questioning the mainstream media narrative about JFK's murder only recently in his life -- while working on his Family of Secrets history of the Bush family.  That helped me feel somewhat less naive, because, for most of the past 50 years, I never seriously questioned, or studied, the Warren Commission Report narrative.

    A few years ago, I saw a new patient in my psychiatric practice who was obsessed with the history of the JFK assassination.   His wife was worried that he had been spending all of his time reading "conspiracy theory" books about the JFK assassination.  At first, I thought the guy was suffering from a delusional disorder-- what Emil Kraeplin used to call "systematized paranoia."  So, I started looking into the literature he mentioned, and I even went back and watched Oliver Stone's JFK movie again.  (I had seen the film when it came out in the 90s, but I had the impression that it was "fictional," and that Oliver Stone was a "flake."  Probably something I read in the New York Times or Newsweek, etc.)  This time, I paid attention.  When I read somewhere that "Mr. X" was based on a guy named L. Fletcher Prouty, I read Prouty's book on JFK, the CIA, and Vietnam.  It was a shocker for me.  There were some on-line articles here and there about Prouty being a loony conspiracy theorist, an "anti-Semite," a Joint Chiefs "errand boy," etc.-- but I was really astonished to read his account of the week JFK was murdered, and the many anomalies regarding security procedures for the motorcade, destruction of evidence, etc.

   Like many people, including my patient, I started down the rabbit hole of trying to learn more about CIA history, psychological ops, Mockingbird, etc.  I began to realize that my patient was NOT delusional at all, but was, understandably, upset and angry about the way the nation had been manipulated, and the escalation of the Vietnam War after 11/22/63.  Without saying too much about this private case, I should mention that he had been a student at Kent State when the Ohio National Guard shot those student war protesters, etc.

    So, that is how I got interested in understanding the vast "untold history" of JFK's murder and the Vietnam War.  In a nutshell, I was a teenage Warren Commission Report dupe.

[W. Tracy Parnell]

4 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

From what I can gather, he is saying that he saw the Geraldo show in 1975, but then flipped with the HSCA report in 1979.

No, you need to get your facts right if you want to start a "Litwin Watch." He changed his mind in the nineties after returning to the case following the Stone movie hubbub. What changed his mind was a careful study of the HSCA supporting volumes and Paul Hoch's newsletters.

[Ron Ecker]

I was a WC dupe for years. I trusted the government, which is stupid to start with. I remember when Rush to Judgment came out. I didn't bother reading it because Time Magazine gave it a bad review. That was good enough for me. I think it was my brother who introduced me to Crossfire, and I came across Best Evidence in the library where I worked. Reading is a wonderful thing.

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

What a story WN.  I mean really.  And it is so much more believable than Litwin's.

Plus its much more relevant to the real world.

You really should write a book on it.  A great subject. If you decide to do it, let me know.  I will be glad to help and even see if I can get you a publisher.

[W. Niederhut]

1 hour ago, Ron Ecker said:

I was a WC dupe for years. I trusted the government, which is stupid to start with. I remember when Rush to Judgment came out. I didn't bother reading it because Time Magazine gave it a bad review. That was good enough for me. I think it was my brother who introduced me to Crossfire, and I came across Best Evidence in the library where I worked. Reading is a wonderful thing.

 

 

Yes, and it's interesting to think about how our a priori assumptions about reality influence our perceptions of reality.

I used to trust the New York Times implicitly, and I used to think Oliver Stone was a "flaky" historian.

Now I'm somewhat skeptical about the NYT, on occasion, and I think Oliver Stone is a genius.

[James DiEugenio]

 The thing about Stone is that he came to prominence in the wrong era.

In the Afterword to The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, I wrote about what had happened to the film industry of late.  Back in the sixties and early seventies Stone would not have been exceptional in what he was doing.  I mean when you had movies like Little Big Man, The Conversation, Medium Cool, Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch etc,. then Stone would not have seemed so much a dissenter.  But Stone came to prominence in the eighties, the Age of Reagan. So to make movies like Salvador at that time?

Plus, as Susan Sontag wrote in 1995, the American movie industry has become artistically irrelevant compared to what it was. So much so that she never wrote another essay after that on the subject. Though that piece created a mini controversy, I pretty much agreed with it.  I mean when comic books and Star Wars make up the main staple of the menu, I mean please.  Give me Easy Rider any day of the week. What makes that ironic is the Oscars now expanded to go up to ten nominees for Best Picture.  Is that funny?  

So Oliver is pretty much out there on his own.

Edited December 1, 2018 by James DiEugenio