With no forensic evidence that he had fired a rifle at 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, and in police custody, Lee Harvey Oswald shouted to reporters, “I’m just a patsy!”
Ten months later, the Warren Commission’s conclusion — that acting alone, Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy — was dubious. Even as the commission insisted it was correct, three members disagreed. On the phone with his pal President Lyndon Johnson, Georgia Sen. Richard Russell, a commission member, said, “I don’t believe it.” LBJ replied, “I don’t either.”
Though embraced by attorney Arlen Specter, the commission’s assistant counsel, the “single-bullet theory” — which anchored the commission’s verdict — was nonsense. Reinforced by medical and ballistic evidence, a frame-by-frame analysis of Abraham Zapruder’s 8-mm home movie rebuts Specter’s magic-bullet flimflam and repudiates the commission’s core finding that Oswald was the lone assassin.
So, what really happened? If not Oswald alone, who else? Who decided to have JFK killed, and why? Who orchestrated the assassination? In view of Zapruder’s film — in particular, Frame No. 313, in which JFK’s head rockets back after exploding — who fired the fatal shot? From where? How to account for the ample reports of gunshots, the odor of gun smoke, and smoke itself near the wooden fence on Dealey Plaza’s Grassy Knoll?
Based on acoustical analysis in 1976, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that Kennedy was likely shot in his head by a rifleman from behind the wooden fence on the Grassy Knoll and that at least two gunmen were involved. The Justice Department, however, failed to open another investigation.
Before he was killed in Dallas, Jack Kennedy was beginning to back the United States out of Vietnam, resolve the standoff with Cuba, and reduce the U.S. and Soviet Union’s respective stockpiles of nuclear weapons. He was in backdoor communication with the U.S.S.R.’s Premier Nikita Khrushchev on how to terminate the Cold War. His bold initiatives were challenges to powerful financial and political interests in the U.S.
Speculations about who killed JFK and how and why lead mostly to a collection of dead-end rabbit holes. They variously point to a shadowy cabal in New Orleans, the Central Intelligence Agency, a nebulous right-wing “deep-state” within the U.S. government, Ike’s “military-industrial complex,” the U.S. Secret Service, Cuban expatriates, the Mafia, LBJ, George H.W. Bush, Castro’s government, the Soviets, the Federal Reserve, and the Israelis. Consensus among assassination experts leans toward the CIA conspiring with anti-Castro Cubans.
But we don’t know.
In 2017, a Washington Post reporter observed that “42 groups, 82 assassins, and 214 people” have been named as being involved in JFK’s murder, and 60 years after his violent death, the basic questions — Who? How? Why? — are not settled. Until there are credible answers, suspicion will tarnish our nation’s history and November 22 will remain a sad anniversary.
Gren Whitman
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