08-04-2014, 08:08 PM
From my book INTO THE NIGHTMARE: MY SEARCH FOR THE KILLERS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND OFFICER J. D. TIPPIT:
So much that we weren't told about the case at the time has since emerged and throws the events of November 22-25 in a highly different light today. At the time the propagation of the official story and the spread of disinformation caused a fair amount of confusion, but even so, public opinion polls, from the beginning, have demonstrated little support for the lone-gunman theory. A Gallup poll conducted a week after the assassination found only 29 percent who felt Oswald "acted on his own"; a majority, 52 percent, believed he was part of a conspiracy. The release of the Warren Report in September 1964 temporarily caused belief in a conspiracy to drop to 31 percent. I was among those whose initial better judgment was shaken by the seeming gravity of the Report's provenance and conclusions. But public doubts soon returned, and the percentage of those believing in a conspiracy kept climbing until they reached 81 percent in a 1976 Gallup poll; twenty-five years later, Gallup found the same percentage. "The American public thinks it was a conspiracy," Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport said in 2003. "Three quarters of Americans in poll after poll, year after year, continue to tell us that they do not believe that one man, Lee Harvey Oswald, did it alone. He was part of a conspiracy." Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the only people in America who still believe in the Warren Report's conclusions are members of the media, mainstream historians, and government officials.
So much that we weren't told about the case at the time has since emerged and throws the events of November 22-25 in a highly different light today. At the time the propagation of the official story and the spread of disinformation caused a fair amount of confusion, but even so, public opinion polls, from the beginning, have demonstrated little support for the lone-gunman theory. A Gallup poll conducted a week after the assassination found only 29 percent who felt Oswald "acted on his own"; a majority, 52 percent, believed he was part of a conspiracy. The release of the Warren Report in September 1964 temporarily caused belief in a conspiracy to drop to 31 percent. I was among those whose initial better judgment was shaken by the seeming gravity of the Report's provenance and conclusions. But public doubts soon returned, and the percentage of those believing in a conspiracy kept climbing until they reached 81 percent in a 1976 Gallup poll; twenty-five years later, Gallup found the same percentage. "The American public thinks it was a conspiracy," Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport said in 2003. "Three quarters of Americans in poll after poll, year after year, continue to tell us that they do not believe that one man, Lee Harvey Oswald, did it alone. He was part of a conspiracy." Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the only people in America who still believe in the Warren Report's conclusions are members of the media, mainstream historians, and government officials.