Lance, in my experience, you won't encourage the "53 words, max" reader to read and consider the points presented in longer forum posts
if short attention span readers or those prejudiced against you generally don't take kindly to your criticism.
As a former Ed Forum JFK Debate moderator and the 2015 - 2016 comments editor of jfkfacts.org, my main observation is that unsolvable topics like
Pitzer's death are much more popular than issues that are much more likely to be solved by putting in adequate research time and trial and error search strings.
If you're not tribal you tend to be dismissed by both sides. Verifiable facts are of little to no consequence if they conflict with preconceived notions influenced
by much earlier personalities attempting to achieve sufficient notoriety to make a buck off of JFKA. Two who come to mind were Penn Jones and Mark Lane.
Harold Weisberg attempted to straddle the middle, commercially successful book author and long laboring and suffering researcher complaining about his postage
expenses.
My sense that learning anything new is resented as least as often as it is appreciated is strengthened by anecdotal experience. A prime example is my success at finding
things. I'm in the 18th year of my search for JFKA answers and contradictions to "what everybody knows is what actually happened." I receive few enough requests to put my
research abilities to work to accept that most just do not want to know. This supports why "Oswald in the Doorway," an escape from reality much more than it is an
area of serious research, can be such a popular and enduring attention getter, right up there with "Oswald is Innocent!!!!"
A result is one with a common theme of US Crony Capitalism. Discourage asking who potentially had the most to lose if JFK had lived and who did benefit
the most politically or financially because he did not survive his first Presidential term. The answer to the first question was the largest holder of General Dynamics
stock in 1963, Henry Crown, and the two politicians, father and son, who post assassination, 1964 - 2009, "served" a combined 20 years as either VPOTUS or POTUS, despite the brothers Kennedy in possession of so much influence of appearance, position, political, and financial power earlier in November, 1963.
How much has been spent by so few to demonize progressive taxation, the IRS, actual Social Democratic political goals and resulting quality of life comparison, compared to print and electronic media coverage of "Buy, Borrow, Die" income tax avoidance strategy or the result of state legislated abortions being the poorest, least resourced women being almost exclusively the ones trapped in those jurisdictions to experience compulsory full term pregnancy and delivery or back alley abortion methods?
Try this, but read it after the first and second linked topics.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090517015211/http://www.manuscriptservice.com/Pitzer/opinion.html
Thanks, Tom. There is much wisdom in what you say. My "53 word" quip was prompted by a post by one of the Local Gods (in his own mind anyway), which was quickly removed by Duncan, characterizing me as a "pathetic dipshit" who "thinks he's the smartest guy in the room" and writes unreadable "books" that no one cares about.
And that was in response to a post of mine that had nothing to do with the JFKA! (If anyone wants to see what a "book" looks like, try reading Keven Hofeling's 20,000-word AI-generated posts at the Ed Forum. Yes, there is a point at which "this really doesn't belong on an internet forum.")
The problem with internet forums is that they are a hopeless mix of ages, educational levels, psychological quirks, emotional maturity levels, personal hot buttons, etc., etc. I always say it's like standing in the middle of a crowded Walmart and shouting "So, what does everyone think about Bayes theorem anyway?" - and expecting a productive discussion.
In addition, there is also a certain type who is likely to become a forum regular. I used to limit myself to a maximum of 300 posts on any forum precisely to avoid becoming one of "them." I've never accumulated anywhere near as many posts on any forum as I have here. That type - across all forums, even ones dealing with completely mundane, non-controversial subjects - tends to be ultra-assertive and always looking for a fight. He views the forum as his turf, and woe to you if you fail to acquiesce to his dominance. I have a friend who participates on several completely non-controversial (or so you would think) forums like those devoted to photography, and he says they are exactly the same way. Ditto with my experience on golf forums.
Most people just aren't into deep research or thought. Forums like this really are just 95% mental masturbation, little echo chambers to strut your stuff in 20-word (or less) bites and generate 20-word (or less) responses from those who cheer you on or call you a kook. It's just the reality. My participation is truly for an audience of one - me. It's just self-amusement and putting in writing what I think I've learned simply because I enjoy doing it. If someone actually gains something from it, so much the better - but I have no expectations and don't really care.
Now back to Pitzer: Thanks to one of Mark Ulrik's posts at the Ed Forum, I had seen and taken into consideration Allan Eaglesham's work that is still on the Wayback Machine. To his great credit, Eaglesham had the intellectual honesty to disavow "Dangerous Dan" Marvin after first buying into his schtick and to change his verdict on Pitzer from murder to suicide when the evidence demanded it. However, he seemed to have lost interest at that point. Kent Heiner's 2019 update of his excellent little e-book was the latest thinking I could find.
The notion that Pitzer was experiencing some sort of personal crisis at the time of his suicide just doesn't seem likely to me. He was about to retire at age 50 after a 30-year Navy career and take a low-key teaching position with a local junior college with which he'd been previously affiliated. His lady friend in Florida accepted the relationship for what it was and placed no demands on him. He had a 29-year marriage, including one son who was still a teenager, and no huge domestic problems. He left no note for anyone, and the letter to his lady friend written 90 minutes before his death indicated he would see her in a few months. His wife said he was "quite enthused" about his teaching position, and he in fact went into the office that Saturday ostensibly to work on a speech he would be giving at the junior college in a few days.
It's very difficult for me to find the vaguest inkling of a reason for a suicide in the above, which is what causes me to wonder "Could there have been something else? Could it have been related to what Dennis David described?"
By all accounts, including his lady friend and Eaglesham's work that you linked, Pitzer was a perfectionist and a dedicated "company (Navy) man" who took great pride in his work and career. He was about to retire with an unblemished reputation. Could something that threatened that reputation have sent him off the deep end? As I noted, Lifton first went to Liebeler with his body-alteration theory just days before Pitzer's suicide. The Kennedy family announced that the autopsy materials would be released to the National Archives at exactly the same time. Did Pitzer in fact know more about the autopsy than even David suggested and fear that it was all going to come crashing down after he was out of the Navy and no longer even in a position to contribute to damage control? Perhaps not - perhaps such speculation is 110% off-base. But such speculation doesn't seem preposterous to me in the context of a suicide that has no other plausible explanation.
This little exercise has also been useful to me in steering my thinking toward the possibility that perhaps there actually were autopsy-related shenanigans but that these were not related to the assassination per se but were simply in furtherance of what was seen as a patriotic, WW3-avoiding exercise in maintaining the lone nut explanation. This to me is not necessarily "likely" (although there is certainly evidence pointing in this direction) but is 1000% more likely than the Lifton/Horne-type scenarios where a huge, preplanned operation to alter the body was part and parcel of an almost comically complex conspiracy.
Voila, I've written another book!
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