| | tiated charges against President Johnson, whose suppression of the truth about Kennedy's murder, according to Garrison, indicated that he too had participated in the plot to kill Kennedy, since he "gained more than any other human from the assassination." The anti-Johnson version of the conspiracy thesis was the ugliest of the many wild and wishful solutions propounded by the left in an attempt not merely to explain events unexplained by the Warren Report but to clear Oswald. The conspiracy theories advanced by the left, inspired by a search for right-wing villains and venomous hatred of Johnson, helped to discredit the case for conspiracy among people who had doubts about the Warren Report but found the ideas of its critics repellent. The popularity of conspiracy theories on the right, which blamed Moscow or Havana, helped to identify them even more closely with political extremism. Still, the gaps in the official explanation could not be concealed by the government or lost in the ideological counterattack mounted by its opponents. Defenders of the Warren Report could never explain, without invoking even more implausible explanations, how Oswald managed to shoot twice in less than a second with a rifle that could not fire two shots in less than 2.25 seconds. Neither the Warren Commission nor subsequent investigations by a panel of pathologists appointed in 1968 by Attorney General Ramsey Clark, by another medical panel appointed in 1975 by Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller, or by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979 explained how Oswald's rifle could have inflicted the massive wounds on Kennedy's head, which seemed to have been caused by exploding bullets fired from a different type of gun. None of these investigations explained how Kennedy's head wounds could have been inflicted by shots fired from behind him. Over the years, the case for a single assassin has grown even weaker than it seemed in the sixties. Important evidence has disappeared under suspicious circumstances, notably the president's brain, while on the other hand, a fresh piece of positive evidence, an acoustical tape of the gunshots made by the Dallas police, proves conclusively, if it is genuine, that shots were fired from the front of the president as well as the rear. It was largely on the strength of this tape that the Select Committee on Assassinations, even though it reaffirmed many of the more dubious suppositions of the Warren Commission, concluded in its final report, in 1979, that Kennedy had probably been murdered by a conspiracy. |