Dallas Morning News: Gary Mack and the evolution of a JFK conspiracy theorist

[William Seger]

69. "Even if the statement in the OP were true..."

"... so what?"

Well, I don't think the point is anything like "Gary Mack believes Oswald shot JFK so you should, too" (even though we are frequently regaled with sentiments like that from the other side of the fence). There is this bit of real insight:

Two decades later, and 15 years after his immersion in conspiracy research, he realized he’d abandoned his journalistic training along the way.

“I had learned the basics — step back and look at all sides. But I’d read all the pro-conspiracy books and was convinced they were probably right,” he said. “When I decided to step back, I realized they weren’t telling me the whole story, just one side of it.”

Maybe it's a "so what" to you, but that story is something I can personally relate to. In the late '60s, I had read a couple of conspiracy theory books and like Mack, I was completely convinced that they were probably right.

Perhaps Mack's "epiphany" was also a big "so what" to you:

And then, in the early 1990s, he had a revelation.

It centered on the story of Ricky Don White, “who thought, based on everything he heard from his mother, that his father, Roscoe White, was the grassy knoll gunman,” Mack said.

But much of the story didn’t add up, said Mack, now 66. So he and Dave Perry, a former claims investigator who applied the techniques of that job in his research, went looking for answers. None of them seemed to back White’s story about his late father, a one-time Dallas police officer, said Mack, who was working for Channel 5 at the time.

“I tipped off our people at the station that this wasn’t going to end well,” he said. “A couple of weeks later, Ricky visited a class at UT-Arlington, and Dave and I went out to hear him. And afterward, we told Ricky, ‘We’ve been checking out your story and your dad didn’t do it. Aren’t you glad?’

“And he said, ‘Well, we think he did.’

“That was my epiphany, so to speak,” Mack said.

The thing that put me on the road to thinking otherwise about CTs was a comment by one skeptic (I don't remember his name) who noted that nothing the conspiracists claimed that appeared to be true was really conclusive of a conspiracy, and nothing that they claimed that would be conclusive of a conspiracy appeared to be true. When I decided to "step back" and re-examine those claims and include the counter-claims and criticisms offered by skeptics, the more I looked, the more that comment rang true.

Today, I don't claim to "know" the "truth" about the assassination, but after my own attempts to be as objective as possible, I am convinced that all the credible evidence says Oswald was the assassin and no credible evidence convincingly implicates anyone else. The difference between that and claiming to know the truth is that my conclusions are completely conditional: Even today I'm willing to consider and evaluate any new evidence (although I will admit to having shorter and shorter patience with being handed abject bullshit instead).

So here's "so what" about Mack's story for me: It's incredibly easy to get sucked in by one-sided, half-truth propaganda, which is precisely what conspiracy hucksters are selling, and once sold on a belief, that belief can become such a part of who we are that it can be very hard if not impossible to shake -- particularly after we've committed to publicly defending that belief. But I know from personal experience that it is possible, and all it takes is some of that open-mindedness that conspiracists claim to possess in such abundance.

And another "so what" for good measure: Whether or not you agree with Gary Mack's conclusions, don't shit on him and his story and then try to tell me how open-minded you are.