Checked the (e)mail today (is there any other kind? Any other kind that counts, anyway) and discovered that the Lincoln-Kennedy mail chain had reached my inbox again. This makes the forth or fifth time I’ve seen this particular bit of fluff since I got on the ‘net back in the 90’s:
First of all, we have to note (in regard to this and subsequent entries) that two similar events taking place 100 years apart is no more of an “amazing coincidence” than if those events had occurred 92 or 105 years apart; it’s only something we take note of and think special because of our non-logical fascination with round numbers.
snopes.com
If you’ve never seen this particularly whacky email chain letter, wander over to Snopes and check out the layman’s idea of a weighty conspiracy theory.
We’ll just dispense with the possibilities concerning the more recent events that could be construed as conspiratorial, or the historical evidence that backs up the possibility that these sorts of conspiracies can occur, and just get right down to it, eh?
Lincoln can be said to have been assassinated by Boothe, because eyewitnesses place him in the private booth with Lincoln when the fatal shot was fired. Many people erroneously believe that he acted alone, but the truth is that this was a part of a plot to remove several members of the United States government, leaving in place a leader that was deemed to be sympathetic to the Southern cause. None of the others were successful in their attempts, so the wider conspiracy remains unknown to the average American.
After watching “Unsolved History: JFK – Beyond the Magic Bullet” (and reading some of the sites I’ve stumbled across today just trying to track down a link to the show) I’m willing to grudge the observation that Kennedy was assassinated by Oswald, but it is far from being a universally accepted fact.
In both cases it’s quite possible that the assassinations were aided by people high up in the administrations themselves. Robert Kennedy long thought that his brother’s assassin was a shooter trained in a program that he was running in another attempt to get rid of Castro. Aided by people high up in the administrations, for reasons that have never been admitted to; reasons that are obvious to anyone who digs into the facts of what the president’s planned before they were killed, and what transpired after they were assassinated.
I’m left wondering whether the last link in the email chain really wanted to start me off on a conspiracy rant, or was it just the salacious Marilyn Monroe bit at the end that motivated yet another person to hit ‘send’? Something else we may just never know.
Postscript
The reason that Andrew Johnson was not assassinated at the same time as Abraham Lincoln was is probably because Andrew Johnson was a known Southern sympathizer. Or it could be that the excuse given by the killer who was assigned to kill him that night was a truthful account. In either case, the South got their way and reconstruction was eventually halted, leading to the predicament that we endure in 2020.
JFK started the Vietnam war. Most of the people who defend him today try to ignore this fact about him, but he was the one that escalated the commitment there after Eisenhower committed us to support the South Vietnamese government and sent in advisors. LBJ simply inherited the bad business from Kennedy. At least LBJ got the voting rights bill passed. It’s just too bad the Republican party turned into a White Supremacy organization and had the legislation gutted by the Supreme Court. The wheel turns round and round.
However, there is no proof that anyone other than Oswald pulled the trigger on the weapon that killed John F. Kennedy. Saying anything more than that is to engage in conspiracy mongering. John F. Kennedy was popular, but controversial, and that made him a prime target for the disaffected. Oswald was just such an individual. It is too bad that the Secret Service was not up to the task of protecting him. We’ll see if they are up to the task of escorting Donald Trump out of the White House on January 20, 2021.
The video for Unsolved History: JFK – Beyond the Magic Bullet and the ABC video The Kennedy Assassination – Beyond Conspiracy narrated by Peter Jennings is unavailable in 2020 other than by purchasing a DVD from second-hand sellers for prices that range between $250-$100, which is outrageous. The video is sporadically available as a streamable video on the internet. This link has the Unsolved History show at the moment. Who knows where it will be next.
I encourage you to pick up a copy of Case Closed. If Posner can’t convince you then no one will.
