Reading
my other classmates blogs, I found several people posting their
reactions to the Zapruder film. One blog entry that I found really
interesting was Nikita’s. In hers, she talked about whether there was a
purpose in studying the conspiracies behind the Kennedy assassination.
“Regardless of the what kind of plotting you think led up to the
assassination, doesn't it all add up to the same thing? Won't the
Zapruder film always end in exactly the same way?”.
As
cynical of a view of history it is, and this is something Nikita does
recognize, I certainly see what she is talking about. As I was reading
through Libra,
I, like most readers, already knew what was going to happen. Kennedy
was going to get shot, and that was that. No matter what the real
conspiracy plot is, whether Lee was coordinating the assassination with
anyone else or not, won’t it all end up with Kennedy’s death?
Every
time I see the Zapruder film, I always notice Kennedy’s head jerking,
the blood splattering, Mrs. Kennedy and the Secret Service agent jumping
onto the car. I understand with the "Yes, this is
what it looks like to get shot" idea, but it’s the mystery, along with
the lack of evidence that makes the assassination so intriguing.
I’m
glad Nikita brought this up because it is something that comes up in
the back of my mind whenever I hear about these conspiracy plots about
the Kennedy assassination or any other historical mystery. Yet, it is
our own curiosity and imagination that drives us to learn more about the
assassination, much like Nicholas Branch. I can see where the obsession
comes from. It’s not hard to wonder how many shots were taken? who and
why they did it? The Zapruder film just adds another twist to the JFK
assassination.
I definitely see the tendency to accept the idea that any thorough reconstruction of what happened would be futile--the only relevant fact is that the President was shot, and the world will change in all kinds of demonstrable ways as a consequence. But what energizes the conspiracy theorists, I think, is the idea that a lone gunman is scary and significant in some ways (the fragility of all life, even that of the most powerful and protected; the limitations of security; etc.), the idea that a conspiracy to kill the President was successful *and* successfully covered up, quite likely with the cooperation of the CIA and FBI, and even possibly that the President was *killed* with the cooperation of elements within our own government is of *enormous* consequence to a supposedly free nation. This kind of thing just shouldn't happen. It's not the conspiracy itself that's unnerving, perhaps, as much as the idea that the conspiracy could be so well hidden--it leads to a paranoia that seems quite reasonable, and this leads to possible questions about just about *everything* in history.
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