Wealth & Money Quote by John Sherman Cooper

Cooper’s sentence is a master class in political skepticism dressed up as courtroom sobriety. The opening clause, “Now, people have said,” immediately downgrades the alternative story to rumor and relay: hearsay stacked on hearsay, a daisy chain of “somebody” that turns eyewitness culture into a blur of pronouns. It’s not just that the claims are weak; the language performs their weakness. By the time we get to “railroad bank,” the listener can practically see the scene where conspiracy narratives like to breed: half-seen figures, evasive angles, the cinematic convenience of an escape route.

Then Cooper pivots to the hard-edged inventory of a prosecutor: “cartridges, any rifle, any pistol.” The repetition of “any” is doing the heavy lifting. It widens the net so far that the absence becomes the argument. If not a cartridge, not a weapon, not even a stray object, what exactly are we supposed to believe happened? The line isn’t merely evidentiary; it’s an attempt to discipline a public imagination that had already begun to outpace official findings in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination.

The subtext is institutional: Cooper is defending the legitimacy of a lone-gunman conclusion without sounding like a blind partisan of the Warren Commission. He acknowledges the ambient noise of alternative accounts, then buries it under a monotone stack of missing facts. The final phrase, “other than the evidence about Oswald,” is carefully narrow. It doesn’t claim omniscience. It claims something politicians rarely offer in moments of national trauma: a limit, and a demand that extraordinary suspicion meet ordinary proof.