Culture January 1, 1

Late this winter, a minor media furor rose up around the tirelessly debated question of ultimate culpability for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Dallas district attorney Craig Watkins announced at a press conference that he had discovered a cache of documents and effects deposited in a safe decades ago by one of his predecessors, Henry Wade, that seemed to open new avenues of controversy in the who-shot-JFK industry. One especially sensational find—labeled a potential “smoking gun” in breathless cable-news coverage—was a transcript suggesting that Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby had openly plotted to kill the president on