"He told us we could fly to the moon. And we all believed him."- Bill Hampton
November 22, 1963 saw the United States robbed of its leader, a people thrust into mourning, and a nation paralyzed by shock. Only the events of September 11, 2001 can compare to the devastation felt by such a wide array of people on that November afternoon. Within John F. Kennedy had lain the hope of so many for the future of a United States in peril. In 1963 the Cold War was raging, pitting nuclear powers, both with the capability of complete world destruction, against each other. A small regional conflict in a nation few Americans at that time could point to on a map (Vietnam) was raging out of control as their French colonizers were losing ground and a Russian backed Communist take over seemed imminent. China had fallen already to Communist command, as had Korea. The world was just eighteen years out of World War II-- a conflict that had killed millions and bankrupted Europe. And just 500 ish miles off the coast of Florida, The Soviet Union had stationed missiles pointed at key targets in the United States. At home things weren't any cheerier. The Civil Rights movement had started just a decade before with lunch counter sit ins and bus boycotts, throwing light on some of the darkest practices within America. Women were agitating to be taken seriously, to be able to divorce at their will, and to be afforded the same opportunity as their male counterparts. It was in front of this backdrop that the youngest president the nation had ever seen, a man elected in large part for his ability to inspire hope within the throngs of disaffected American youth, was killed in Dallas.
Fifty-one years later, events that took place twenty-two years before I was born prove palpable, even to me. Writing this took a lot of preparation and a lot of thought, not only on what to write, but on how to write this and whether or not I should even attempt. There is nothing that one can write about President John F Kennedy that hasn't been written before, or written better. Still, it seemed inappropriate for someone who works so hard to educate the masses on important issues of history to let this day go by without comment. So the decision was made to write about the events in Dallas on November 22. I chose here to focus on questions surrounding the assassination of Kennedy and the death of Lee Harvey Oswald. I consider it general knowledge that JFK was assassinated and I do not feel the need to write volumes exploring the various conspiracy theories that have cropped up over the last fifty-one years. Further, I also feel highly awkward cracking jokes about the death of such an enigmatic figure, so I will attempt to keep this as light as possible, intriguing and easy to read without the usual cynicism and sarcasm I tend to write with.
It is important to keep in mind that there is very little accepted fact in the case of the John F. Kennedy assassination. A recent Gallup poll found that around 81% of Americans believe that JFK was killed as part of a conspiracy. These conspiracies run the gamut from the at least superficially plausible-- The Soviets, The Cubans, LBJ-- to the outright ridiculous-- aliens. What we know as undisputed fact wouldn't cover half of this page-- on November 22, 1963 at 12:30 pm the 35th president of the United States John F Kennedy was shot in the head and died around half an hour later at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Also injured in the assassination was Dallas Governor John Connally. Arrested for those crimes and the death of Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit was a man police referred to as Lee Harvey Oswald, who was held in police custody for 48 hours until he was shot in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters on November 24 at 11:20 am by a man known as Jack Ruby.
And that's it. That's honestly the sum total of the information most people agree on. And some don't even agree on everything I've laid out above. Everything else is debated, questioned, mulled over by experts in various fields and rejected or accepted based on what they find to be real.
Why?
Well, the short answer is that JFK died under some seriously shady fucking circumstances. The longer answer is that missteps were made, multiple commissions investigated the matter and came to different conclusions, and eyewitness testimony and official findings have a tendency to not really mesh in a way most think they should. My answer is that people don't like thinking that one guy of slightly less than average intelligence brought the greatest country on the planet to its knees in a matter of eight seconds. There's a certain amount of comfort in attributing world altering events to a powerful conspiracy, rather than to one guy that got lucky-- it makes us feel less vulnerable. That's not to say that I think Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy alone, which isn't to say that I think it was a conspiracy either, it doesn't matter what I think. Still more important than why there is so much confusion around the Kennedy assassination are the questions that still remain, unanswered, fifty one years later.
I'm going to do my best to explore these here.
*Note* It is important to remember, before diving too far down the rabbit hole here, that there were multiple commissions that officially investigated the death of the president-- the first, the Warren Commission, was immediately called by Lydon B. Johnson and found that Oswald acted alone in assassinating the president. Two other commissions concluded the same thing, these were the Panel Commission headed by Ramsey Clark and the 1975 Rockefeller Commission. The fourth commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) found in 1979 that Oswald acted as part of a conspiracy. These are the official records that we have. Any findings extraneous to these four commissions is not official, not to say that those findings are not good detective work, but just that they are often not privy to the same amount of information as the official commissions. I will attempt to keep my writing here based as much as possible on the findings of the official commissions-- what we in the business call the official historical record-- and to note, where ever applicable, when I am diverging from these sources. I will also link to these sources at the bottom.
A question of motive
Why Lee Harvey Oswald, or whomever (I'll get to this in a minute), shot the president tends to be one of the first questions on anyone's mind when they learn of the assassination and, oddly, the one question that may never be satisfactorily answered. Oswald was killed, as previously stated, by Jack Ruby 48 hours (nearly to the hour) after killing Kennedy. He never confessed to the assassination or the murder of J.D. Tippit. These two facts make coming to a perfect answer here difficult. Obviously. To attempt to decipher the answer this question requires looking at Oswald's personal history.
Lee Harvey Oswald was a Communist, ex-United States Marine, Soviet defector, pro-Cuba activist and accused presidential assassin. Most of what we now know about Oswald's life we know from research done and published by the Warren Commission. Oswald's father died shortly before he was born in 1939 leaving his mother, Marguerite, to care for him and his two older brothers. While Marguerite was remarried briefly she was, for most of Oswald's life, a single mother constantly concerned about money. As a teenager, Oswald was diagnosed with anxiety at one point, but there is no further psychiatric record of him, otherwise. Nothing in his background pointed to him as psychotic or deranged in anyway, except for a long history of isolationism and a bad temper. As a teenager, Oswald took a deep interest in Communism. He dropped out of school and joined the US Marine Corp at age seventeen.
Oswald wasn't a particularly memorable or talented Marine. He scored poorly on his marksmanship tests and was court martialed twice-- once for fighting with a superior officer and once for possession of an unauthorized hand gun. He was transferred honorably from the active Marines to the Marine Reserves in 1959 and shortly thereafter defected to the Soviet Union, earning him a dishonorable discharge. These are two points that tend to stick out for conspiracy theorists and anyone looking to make any sense of the JFK assassination. It's odd that a self-described Communist would join the US Marines during the Cold War to begin with, odder still that he would actually defect. But defect he did! In a seriously odd sort of kismet, the Secretary of the Navy that Oswald wrote vociferously to to reverse his dishonorable discharge was John Connally-- the man that would become Governor of Texas and be wounded by the same bullet that wounded Kennedy in November 1963.
The Warren Commission did look into this as a possible motive for the assassination. Oswald's wife, yes he was married, had mentioned at one point in the investigation that she had assumed Oswald was actually attempting to assassinate Governor Connally, not the president. However, with Connally seated in front of Kennedy in the presidential limousine, it would seem an odd choice of timing. Further, while Oswald was never described as particularly smart, it seems like a pretty easily identifiable bad idea to try to assassinate a public figure while said public figure is seated in front of the president in general.
The Soviet connection also tends to be a sticking point with those that tend to question the findings of the Warren Commission. There is a very popular theory that The Soviet Union was behind the killing of JFK and, on a very surface level glance at geopolitics of the day, this theory tends to make at least a little sense. However, Kennedy was actually in the middle of presiding over a descalation and cooling of the Cold War at the time he was shot, with contemporary political scientists actually beginning to predict the end of the Cold War. This does not make a Soviet connection impossible, or even improbable, really, but it is something that these theorists tend to either gloss over or not mention entirely.
So this is the man that shot Kennedy, in a very small nutshell. He was a Communist that used the terms Communist and Marxist interchangably, which would make more than a couple historians I know go completely bat shit. He tended toward violence, but not in any way that had risen any red flags to speak of in his previous history. He had become involved in a very tertiary sense in the Cuban independence movement and had defected to The Soviet Union, then wondered, in a very serious way, why that led to a dishonorable discharge from the US Marines. Oswald was less than smart, but not significantly below average intelligence, he had no signs of delusions or psychosis and, outside of a bit of overconfidence and dislike for most people, didn't seem to stray too far from the "normal" end of the personality spectrum. Until, of course, he assassinated the president.
Oswald claimed he was a patsy for a larger conspiracy in statements to the press after he was arrested and today many believe him.
A question of ability
This question is somehow even more confusing and hard to nail down than
Oswald's poor scores on his marksmanship tests are also a point of contrition that many have with the The Warren Commission. There is a given time range at which Oswald would have had to fire three shots in order to have shot President Kennedy. This time ranges from around 5.3 seconds to around 8.6 seconds (depending on who you ask) to get off three shots and have two hit his target. According to many ballistic experts and armchair detectives and a whole lot of people that just really like guns, this is unrealistic for someone with such poor scores using a relatively complicated and, according to most, shitty piece of machinery. ABC actually commissioned a study into this theory-- if it was even possible for anyone to get this many shots off from that type of gun (an Italian Carcano bolt action rifle). The only person that actually succeeded was an expert CIA marksman, and he only succeeded on his second try. And he didn't have a tree in his way, as Oswald would have on November 22. In contrast, other ballistic experts and gun enthusiasts have attempted to repllicate particular parts of the shooting and have concluded that it is possible for Oswald to have hit Kennedy. The fact that he was actually able to they tend to attribute to something most people are at least vaguely familiar with: luck. The shots, they say, aren't necessarily impossible, just difficult. The odds weren't in Oswald's favor, but that doesn't mean that he couldn't have done it.
The HSCA commission, in contrast to the Warren Commission, came up with entirely different conclusions here. Based on acoustic evidence, that some called "unsubstantiated" at the time, the Warren Commission concluded that there were not three shots fired on that November afternoon, there were at least four, possibly five as later evidence would reveal. This bears some explaining. By the time the HSCA got around to investigating the assassination JFK had been dead for fifteen years. In that time things had been rediscoverd, reinvestigated, questioned and requestioned. One of the things that people had discovered in this time is that one of the motorcycle police escorts on the motorcade route had its radio on and transmitting throughout the assassination. This meant that all of the background noise happening at that time was recorded. Basing this study on the idea that certain events leave what is called an "acoustic signature" on a printout of a sound recording, acoustics experts looked for these signatures left by gun shots. They determined that there were four. Some determined that there were five. Further they were able to determine from which direction the sounds had come, and some, notably shots two, three (the shot that killed Kennedy) and (possibly) five, did not originate from the Texas School Book Depository. This was the basis for the findings of the HSCA that Oswald had acted as part of a conspiracy.
Complicating all of this, is the testimony of Texas Governor John Connally. Remember him? He was the guy sitting in front of Kennedy in the presidential limousine. The guy that was also shot that day (how is a question we will get to later). Connally, it was determined by the Warren Commission, was shot by the second bullet fired by Oswald. A bullet that first passed through JFK's neck. If that sounds ridiculous to you, you aren't alone, keep reading, I'll get there. For now, let's just leave it as "that's what the Commission says". Connally, however, disputed this immediately. Until the day he died (in 1993) Connally stated, unequivocally, that he heard the first shot, then the second. Then he was shot by a third bullet. He admonished the Warren Commission for its finding otherwise, and insisted that they had gotten the whole thing wrong.
This is also what brings us to our next question:
A question of physics and magic bullets.
When the Warren Commission was released to the general public derision started almost immediately about what the Warren Commission called the "single bullet theory". This is the theory that John Connally was shot by the same bullet that wounded Kennedy before the next (ish) bullet killed him. According to the Warren Commission, three shots were fired that day, and only three, one of which missed. The second missed entirely (probably, this is the most consistent finding)1. The third hit Kennedy in the head and killed him.
That first bullet however, had a slightly more eventful journey.
This first bullet, it was understood, had hit Kennedy in the back, exiting out of his throat, hitting the knot in his tie. It then traveled through the seat in front of him, entering the back of Governor Connally, taking out four inches of rib before exiting just below his right nipple. The bullet then pierced Connally's wrist before burying itself in Connally's left thigh. That's quite a journey for a bullet. This bullet was found after Kennedy had been taken from Parkland Hospital on a gurney that was identified as having carried Governor Connally and it is now more commonly referred to as CE (Commission Exhibit) 399. It is slightly collapsed on the back and there is a gouge out of the nose of the bullet, otherwise, it appears completely intact. Common sense dictates that bullets that have traveled through two people, one car seat, seven layers of clothing, two bones and about fifty layers of skin tend to look less pristine. However, there is a fabulous Nova episode that digs into the ballistics of this that does show it is possible for this particular type of bullet (a 6.5 millimeter full metal jacket) to pass through about 36" of wood without any significant damage2. It's great that Nova answers this question. However, nothing in the Kennedy assassination ever really answers anything without begging more questions.
A question of what the hell is a grassy knoll and what in the actual fuck is a Zapruder film.
The Grassy Knoll, for those not familiar with American pop culture, has become something of a legend. It is now a tourism spot in Dallas (seriously). There are bands named after it, there are songs about it, there are people that claim to be the shooter on the grassy knoll.
But what is the grassy knoll?
In simplest terms, it's a hill. Seriously, it's a fucking hill with grass on it. That's it. But it has become a central figure in the JFK assassination. If we were standing behind the presidential limousine at the moment John F Kennedy was shot, the grassy knoll would have been to our right and slightly in front of us. In November 1963 there was a six foot tall picket fence on the back-most part of the grassy knoll.
So why do we care enough about a hill with grass on it to make it part of pop culture?
Well, to be honest, we probably wouldn't have except that the assassination of the president was filmed5. A dress maker from Dallas named Abraham Zapruder was filming the presidential motorcade as it made its way through Dealey Plaza and just so happened to catch the assassination of president Kennedy. Not released to the public for about a year after the assassination, what is now known as the Zapruder film, like so many other things in this saga, created more questions than it answered. It is from the Zapruder film that we have the timing of the shots that is so central to the case against and for Oswald. It is from the Zapruder film that we know there were three shots. And it is from the Zapruder film that we see the assassination, the moment the president was hit in the head. And this is where the grassy knoll becomes a thing.
In the Zapruder film it appears that the bullet that pierces Kennedy's skull comes from the frontish right of him. This is conjectured because Kennedy appears to fall back and to the left, consistent with a bullet coming from a little ahead of him and to the right. The Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald was, was behind him (ish). To the casual viewer of the film, it appears that the more likely place from which the bullet would have originated was this now famous grassy knoll. Eyewitnesses did claim to see a gentlemen with a gun on the grassy knoll that day. However, no one questioned them as to why they didn't find this odd in the first place, but I digress.
When the HSCA made reference to the grassy knoll in its offical findings, the legendary "shooter on the grassy knoll" became locked in American collective consciousness. The theories on who this mysterious shooter was are too numerable to count here, but again, links at the bottom6.
Regardless, there are those that dismiss this theory. Some believe that the reason the president fell the way he did was in response to involuntary muscle contractions and the strength of particular muscles. This is based on the idea that back muscles are generally stronger than stomach muscles, thus when muscles are contracted the back muscles would throw the person backwards, regardless of the direction of the shot. Take that for what you will.
A question of why Oswald was a suspect to begin with.
After assassinating Kennedy, according to the Warren Commission (we'll get to why this is argued in a bit), Oswald left the school book depository hopped a bus, moving south through the city of Dallas, eventually ending up at a movie theater, where he was later apprehended by police. This journey took around one hour and twenty minutes. Again, according to the Warren Commission, at around one forty-five pm, just over an hour after shooting the president, Oswald was stopped by Dallas Police Office J.D. Tippit, why Tippit stopped Oswald is lost to history and probably always will be but, according to an eyewitness, after a short conversation Oswald pulled a hand gun and shot Tippit. Tippit died at the scene, leaving behind a wife and three children. This is a point where The Warren Commission and eyewitness accounts diverge. The eyewitness accounts place this happening much earlier than one forty-five (closer to one o'clock). Accordingly, there are many that believe that Oswald was either not J.D. Tippit's killer, or JFK's killer, as he would not have had enough time to get from the Depository to 10th Street by one o'clock. Further, the witness testimonies diverge at important points-- some identified Oswald, others did not, some say there were two gunmen, others not, etc.-- which is a serious amount of diversity for only three or four eyewitnesses.
If you believe the Warren Commission, Oswald was arrested five to ten minutes after killing J.D. Tippit at a Dallas movie theater. On the list of weird, kind of stupid things that happened in this timeline, Oswald was actually confronted by police not for the murder of the president, or officer Tippit, it was for sneaking into a movie theater without a ticket. When confronted, Oswald pulled a handgun and struggled with police, nearly killing yet another officer. He was, eventually, apprehended and taken to police headquarters. There he was questioned about the murder of J.D. Tippit and it was discovered that he was an employee of the now infamous School Book Depository who was inexplicably missing at the time. Just before midnight that night the police state that Oswald assassinated Kennedy as part of a Soviet backed conspiracy, a reference that Lyndon Johnson orders removed from all sources in the interest of keeping the international community calm. Cue outrage and conspiracy theories.
Oswald is then kept at police headquarters the remainder of, essentially, his life. He is interrogated for over thirty-six hours and never confesses to either the assassination or the killing of Officer Tippit. Oswald, in his statements, calls himself a patsy and claims that he is being made victim of a vast government conspiracy. On November 24 he is taken from the interrogation room and down to the basement of Police Headquarters, on his way to the county jail. Before he can reach the car he is shot.
Enter: Jack Ruby.
A question of who the hell is Jack Ruby.
Oddly, Ruby's involvement is one of the few places where a majority of people tend to agree on the stated facts, perhaps because he is discussed so little. Jacob Rubenstein, now known as Jack Ruby by most, was a strip club owner, small time mobster and police informant. In an ironic twist, all of the psychological paperwork we expect to find on Oswald and don't, we do find on Ruby. He was institutionalized as a child, his mother was diagnosed with "psychoneurosis" (whatever the hell that means) and was also institutionalized. As far as Jack's involvement with the mafia, his connections are tenuous. Some say that he was very well connected, having worked for Al Capone even at some point, however there is no evidence for this. Not that one would really expect to find evidence for this, the mafia didn't tend to keep detailed records easily accesible, but it seems as though his connections were tenuous at best. After a stint in the US Air Force during World War II, Jack moved to Dallas and was promptly arrested on drug charges, though he was released shortly thereafter without charges.
In yet another ironic twist, Jack also had a Cuba connection. He had been invited to Cuba to help supervise some gambling issues at the Havana Tropicana under Lewis McWillie, a man that would go on to assist heavily in a coup to overthrow Fidel Castro. These strange moments of alignment are what tend to give conspiracy theories root, or at least some measure of legitimacy.
On November 24, 1963, Jack Ruby waited outside police headquarters to get
For his part, Jack Ruby was not also killed in prison. He initially confessed to the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, stating his motive as trying to spare Jackie Kennedy the rigors of a trial. Later, towards the end of the Warren Commission's investigation, Jack contacted Earl Warren (for whom the commission was named after, if you didn't catch that). He told Justice Warren that he felt like his life was endanger at the Texas State Prison that he was in and, further, if Warren would secure him a transfer to anywhere else, he would come clean about his true motives for the murder and tell everything he knew about the Kennedy assassination. As intriguing as this sounds, Warren refused the request and any further information about the death of Oswald or the assassination of Kennedy in general never came out from Jack Ruby, anyway. G. Robert Blakley, the head of the HSCA investigation, closely examined not only the NBC video, but other photos taken at the time that Oswald was being held in police headquarters. He found multiple occasions over the forty-eight hour period where Jack Ruby was present, leading him to conclude that Jack Ruby had acted on behalf of organized crime in the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald.
So. If you made it this far, congrats! And thank you! I'd give you a prize but... Well... I don't have your address to mail you anything.
At any rate, some of the questions outlined above are general knowledge things that anyone should have to hold their own in a Kennedy assassination discussion. Others though, specifically those speaking to the basic parts of the case, are what most investigators or detectives tend to take for granted as being answered through careful consideration. Here they are not fully answered. This is a little odd at first glance, but throw in the fact that the assassination was tape recorded, actually recorded, witnessed in broad daylight by over 100 people, including a couple dozen police officers, and the fact that fifty one years later we are still asking these is bizarre. The questions remain, and probably always will.
But it's important that we focus on what we do know. We know that the United States lost a strong and enigmatic leader that day. That the nation was shaken to its core, and that the events of that day have reverberated through American history ever since.
So, since I know that this can all be very stressful and depressing I will leave you all with this:
1 The Warren Commission did not find out the exact sequence of the bullets fired. The possible sequence of the bullets can be found in Chapter 3 of the Warren Commission's Report. The Warren Commission's findings can be found at: http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/chapter-1.html
2 The Nova special mentioned here is through PBS and is called "Cold Case JFK". Available on Netflix.
3 Donaghue's findings are laid out very well in the documentary "JFK Smoking Gun". Also, available on Netflix.
4 There is a great resource for new research that makes the Single/Magic Bullet Theory appear more plausible at least on its surface. This research can be found at:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/sbt.htm
http://www.livescience.com/41369-single-bullet-theory-jfk-assassination.html
As well as in various documentaries including the two mentioned above, as well as PBS's "JFK Like No Other".
5 The Zapruder Film's important part can be found at the following link, however, I do warn you guys that it is pretty graphic, so be careful with little humans and those with squeamish stomachs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7rLYh52fPE
6 Grassy knoll shooter theories and information can be found at:
http://www.jfkmurdersolved.com/knoll.htm
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/hoffmanx.htm
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/organ3.htm
http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/21-jfk-cops-who-heard-a-grassy-knoll-shot/
The HSCA Report can be found at the National Archives: http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/
For more information on conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination the following links prove pretty intriguing:
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/john-kennedy-assassination-confession-mafia/2014/11/20/id/608736/
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2013/11/21/john-kennedy-conspiracy-theories-assasination/3661891/
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1860871_1860876_1861003,00.html
For a general overview of the assassination:
http://22november1963.org/
http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/November-22-1963-Death-of-the-President.aspx
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/biographies/oswald/twenty-four-years/#8
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