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“Maybe if they had found and interviewed Umbrella Man?”

They didn’t, you’re right. However, apart from the matter of whether Umbrella Man is important (and don’t say he’s important because conspiracy books talk about him; those books are sluts, they’ll talk about anything), you can’t get a hold of everyone. Any useful investigation must ration its time and effort. They managed to take testimony from some 552 people, and if Umbrella Man wasn’t among them, oh, well. That doesn’t make them sloppy, “quick,” or uninterested in alternate theories.

By the way, House Select Committee on Assassinations tracked him down, and it turned out he wasn’t relevant. Which is precisely the sort of thing I’m talking about when I say post-Warren Commission investigations never come up with anything solid. Of course, you could always say HSCA was wrong and he was important. We’ll never know! But at that rate, we’ll never know anything. Not that 2+2 = 4, let alone who killed Kennedy.

“Given the fog and mist, we’ll never know all the details. Just trying to piece together a simple car crash after an hour is difficult, going back that far and expecting people to have recorded or remembered relevant things is impossible”

This line of thinking is the harmful sort of skepticism. The Kennedy assassination is fogged for various reasons, but not because the investigation was faulty. I’m confident that if we viewed it the same way we do regular murders and various other historical events, there’d be no confusion. If we can’t know whether Oswald killed Kennedy alone, we also can’t know, for instance, who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Or whether such a thing as “WWII” ever happened or such a person as “Napoleon” ever existed.

At some point, you have to take things as they are. If all the evidence points one way, you can’t perpetually argue there’s evidence yet to be found, and all the current evidence is false, and everybody was lying. Or, rather, you can, but I can also say Abraham Lincoln never existed, and the man we know by that name was an imposter set up by the International Communist Conspiracy (ICC), and I’d have the evidence to prove it had not historians covered it up for the last 160 years. I’d be just as convincing.