Since November 22 will mark the 30th anniversary of the slaying of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the nation is only weeks away from a media-sponsored wave of nostalgia that could eclipse even 1987's rerun of the summer of love. The cottage industry that endlessly theorizes about the "truth" behind Kennedy's death will battle the stodgy "Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone" establishment on a scale not seen since the 1991 release of the controversial film JFK.
So what's the big deal? Kennedy's murder is important because it branded the consciousness of the Bill Clinton/Oliver Stone generation so deeply that we can expect it to disappear into the realm of historical trivia only when that generation is itself trundled off to the nursing homes. Everyone loves a mystery. Despite volumes of evidence and reams of writing speculating on who really killed the President, only two things are certain. Kennedy was definitely killed in Dallas by a high-powered rifle. His probable assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was definitely killed by Jack Ruby in the Dallas jail two days later.
Lee Harvey Oswald was a riddle wrapped in an enigma shrouded in mystery if ever there was one. Evidence of varying reliability has linked Oswald to virtually every group that had a reason to want Kennedy dead. In the years before Kennedy's death, Oswald worked as a radar operator at U-2 spy plane bases, defected to the Soviet Union and married the niece of a KGB colonel. On returning to the US, Oswald propagandized for Castro's Cuba out of a New Orleans building he shared with an ex--FBI agent trying to overthrow Castro. In the fall of 1963, Oswald moved to Dallas where he had FBI contacts, got a job in a Texas Book Depository and was accused of killing the president.
Questions abound. How did such a singular man just happen to get a job working at one of the best sniping points in Dallas, through which the President's open car motorcade just happened to pass? Why did this lone nut just happen to have ties to violent, subversive groups like the Cuban revolutionaries, the K.G.B. and F.B.I.? Wasn't it convenient that the future Mrs. Onassis was spared the anguish of a trial when Oswald was silenced the next day by Jack Ruby, a dachshund-toting strip-club owner with long-standing ties to the Mafia? And what was Richard Nixon doing in Dallas the morning of November 22?
Official answers to these questions can be found in the report of the Warren Commission set up by President Johnson. The Warren Report, completed in September, 1964, is quite ordered and readable for a government document summarizing such a convoluted event. The report makes it clear that the unstable Oswald did indeed commit the murder alone, out of misguided communist ideals and perverse desire to achieve fame in the only way he could imagine. It's only when one looks into the 26 volumes of evidence taken to research the one-volume report, as well as evidence and leads that were ignored, that problems with the commission's view arise.
Examining the evidence the Warren Report is based upon leads to the conclusion that, at best, the Commission took great liberties in smoothingover contradictions in the information and failed to follow up on evidence suggesting that Oswald had confederates. As evidence came in, the Commission went with what it belie
Famous defects in the Warren report include the Commission's gloss-over of the shots most witnesses reported hearing from in front of the motorcade as "echoes", and that according to the Report, one of Oswald's bullets must have caused seven wounds to Kennedy and Gov. John Connally before being found as good as new on Connally's hospital stretcher. A few more obscure examples follow:
One Phillip Willis took a series of 12 photos of Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot, in the minutes before and after the assassination. Mr. Willis' photos and testimony before the Commission appear in the report. He was not questioned about the eighth photo, a shot of the Book Depository entrance shortly after the shooting. As Willis later pointed out, one of the men in the photo "looks so much like (Jack Ruby), it's pitiful". F.B.I. agents questioning Willis agreed with him that the man bore a powerful resemblance to Ruby. When Willis mentioned this to the Commission, no interest was shown. When the photo was published in the Warren Report, a considerable part of the Ruby lookalike's face had been cropped away.
While the President's autopsy was underway at Bethesda Naval Hospital, federal agents removed the X-rays of the body from custody of the examining doctors. Though the X-rays undoubtedly would have been valuable in determining trajectories of the bullets hitting the President, and thus the shooter's location, they are neither published nor alluded to in the Warren Report. Thoughtfully, the Commission did provide in its report a dental chart made for Jack Ruby's mother 25 years before the assassination, as well as a detailed physical analysis of three of Oswald's pubic hairs.
According to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, the Dallas Morning News for November 22 contained a map of the route President Kennedy's motorcade would take through the city that day. According to the map, the President was supposed to stay on Main Street while passing through Dealey Plaza, and would not have passed the Book Depository. In fact, the motorcade turned from Main onto Houston and then to Elm Street. This unplanned sharp turn not only brought the President into his assassin's sights, it also forced his car to slow down to ten miles per hour. Garrison says that a change in a parade route through such a large city would have required the acquiescence of the city police and government. The Mayor of Dallas, Earle Cabell, presumably signed off the change.
There are literally hundreds more oversights like those above contained in the Warren Report. The job of catching them has been done well by authors Mark Lane, Jim Garrison and others. The sheer volume of strange coincidences and connections has led some parties to suggest their own answers to questions posed by the Kennedy case. For every powerful group or figure with something to gain from Kennedy's death, there is a theorist ready to explain how that group arranged the murder. Of course, some of the explanations hold water better than others. The following are theories that have stood the test of time to become the staples of Kennedy assassination lore.
THE CUBANS
This explanation has been offered by columnist Jack Anderson, among others. It has two variants. The fashionable revisionist version tells us that Kennedy was killed by right-wing Cuban exiles in America who felt that the President had sold them out. Kennedy's refusal to allow U.S. forces to participate in the exile army's Bay of Pigs invasion, which was instigated and financed by the CIA, left the exiles easy meat for Castro's air force. Thousands of the emigres were killed or imprisoned by the Castro regime, and those escaping or left in America were quite upset. Also, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis it was widely believed Kennedy guaranteed the Russians that Cuba would be left unmolested in return for a withdrawal of Soviet missiles from the island. Again, the Cuban exiles were not consulted.
Realistic Cuban exiles could see the writing on the wall in 1963 and may have wanted revenge. So these desperate men, no strangers to violence, had Kennedy assassinated, and left Oswald, who was somehow duped into following them, as the patsy. This is probably the weakest theory. While the exiles had the means and reason to kill Kennedy, and little to lose, it seems impossible that they could have escaped the police, covered up their role, and arranged for Ruby to silence Oswald. The Cuban exile community was so riddled with CIA infiltrators in the '60s that any plot would likely have been noticed by U.S. intelligence. The idea of Cuban exiles acting under CIA guidance is rather more interesting, but that's another story.
The more common theory is that Fidel Castro had Kennedy murdered in reprisal for numerous attempts on his own life by the Mafia and Cuban counterrevolutionaries, both of whom were acting at the behest of Kennedy's CIA The Bay of Pigs and Cuban missile crisis only strengthened Castro's belief that he was in a kill-or-be-killed si
Realistic Cuban exiles could see the writing on the wall in 1963 and may have wanted revenge. So these desperate men, no strangers to violence, had Kennedy assassinated, and left Oswald, who was somehow duped into following them, as the patsy. This is probably the weakest theory. While the exiles had the means and reason to kill Kennedy, and little to lose, it seems impossible that they could have escaped the police, covered up their role, and arranged for Ruby to silence Oswald. The Cuban exile community was so riddled with CIA infiltrators in the '60s that any plot would likely have been noticed by U.S. intelligence. The idea of Cuban exiles acting under CIA guidance is rather more interesting, but that's another story.
The more common theory is that Fidel Castro had Kennedy murdered in reprisal for numerous attempts on his own life by the Mafia and Cuban counterrevolutionaries, both of whom were acting at the behest of Kennedy's CIA The Bay of Pigs and Cuban missile crisis only strengthened Castro's belief that he was in a kill-or-be-killed si
THE K.G.B.
Also known as the Reader's Digest Theory, this theory is most favored by right-wing conspiracy theorists. Leon Trotsky Oswald spent two years in Russia, married a K.G.B. colonel's niece, and came back to put an end to the President at a time when the cold war was at its most frigid. How could Soviet intelligence not have had a hand in the
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