![]() ![]() In the same vein, do you think that Vincent Bugliosi’s pro-Warren Commission position shows any kind of clear ideological bias, however much he declares that he’s strictly interested in the facts? I know that he’s a self-identified liberal. Now you could say, “Well that’s disprovable because if so many people – something like 75 percent of Americans, according to the polls-believe in conspiracy, then 75 percent of the American population should be fanatical politically, and that’s not the case.” But I’m talking about people who have really thought about the assassination. My sense is that somebody who is very inclined towards conspiracy belief is also predisposed toward an extreme view of politics. But there is definitely a right-wing contingent and another group whose politics are hard to classify. I would say that the preponderance of conspiracy theorists are left-wing. I think there is a certain, for lack of a better term, “political-personality” type that is predisposed towards a belief in conspiracy, and another that more naturally inclines to the “lone-nutter” theory. ![]() The Kennedy assassination has been described as a “political Rorschach test,” suggesting that the way one perceives the shooting and the events surrounding it are as much a statement about the perceiver as the history and context in which they occurred. He spoke with me on April 18th about Lee Harvey Oswald, conspiracy theorists, and his own book on the Kennedy assassination. Thomas Mallon’s latest book is Fellow Travelers. Mallon points out that Bugliosi’s examination of JFK’s death is oddly straightforward: what emerges in Reclaiming History is that, despite countless fantastic claims to the contrary, the government did not lie. Kennedy, a singular account of the event, centering on Ruth Paine, the virtuous Quaker woman who became, quite innocently, enmeshed in the assassination. Mallon-an Atlantic contributing editor and fellow “LN,” fluent in assassination history-is the author of, among other works, Mrs. In the July/August issue of The Atlantic, Thomas Mallon considers Bugliosi’s opus. Bugliosi is, in conspiracy-theorist lingo, a “lone-nutter” (or “LN”)-a disparaging term for those who believe Oswald’s solitary guilt is indisputable and that the “magic-bullet theory” is simply a bullet-trajectory fact. Kennedy, is nothing less than a resounding endorsement of the Warren Commission’s 42-year-old findings. The book, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. However, a recent tome (close to 2,000 pages) written by Vincent Bugliosi, the hard-nosed Manson prosecutor and former Los Angeles County assistant district attorney par excellence, goes decidedly against this grain. Nearly every one of the thousand or so books that have been written on the subject has cried “Conspiracy!” in one form or another. These individuals range vastly in ideology and credibility, and over the past four-plus decades, a raft of writings, theories, and notions have sprung from their many-tented camp. What’s happened since can best be described as a kind of transmogrification: the event, and the events surrounding it, have become endlessly complicated by conspiracy theorists (“CTs,” to use their parlance), who seized on the commission’s report and used its seeming incongruities and omissions as ample fodder for their beliefs. According to the federal Warren Commission, however, the lone gunman was a 24-year-old radical named Lee Harvey Oswald. The president was assassinated by the vice president, the KGB, the Mafia, the Cubans, or the Secret Service, depending on who one asks.
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