It was one those events that rocked and shocked the entire world. Well before my time, but I do remember being told that everyone remembers where they were the day JFK was shot.
John F Kennedy was the 35th president of the United States. On Friday November 22 1963, while travelling in an open-top car, he was assassinated, in front of his wife who was sat beside him.
Everyone “knows” who shot and killed JFK…
The official narrative, the one the world is told to believe, is that Kennedy was shot and killed by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald.
I for one, alongside millions of Americans, do not believe it.
Kennedy was in Texas, ahead of the upcoming presidential election. He was trying to win over the voters in a state he really needed to win. He flew in on Air Force One, then was whisked by car to Dallas.
Interesting to note that several newspapers had already published the route his car would take in advance. A security nightmare.
Kennedy had already been warned previously by an Arkansas senator about how dangerous Dallas was. He said: “I wouldn’t go there. Don’t you go.”
Even the president’s own secret service, who had only days before driven the actual route, said due to the surrounding high-rise buildings and threat from snipers, that those in the presidential motorcade would be “sitting ducks”.
That statement from the very people whose sole job is to protect the president surely begs the question – why was this advice not heeded? Why was the route not changed?
It’s worth noting that since the earlier rain had stopped, the president’s car roof had been taken off. Had it still been raining, the roof of the car would have undoubtedly been on and possibly Kennedy would have survived the shooting, or it may never have even taken place.
Sat in the back of an open Lincoln with his wife, the motorcade turns into Elm Street Dallas. Kennedy is smiling away and waving at the crowds.
Suddenly the president clutches his throat. Something has gone terribly wrong. He’s been shot. Seconds later, another bullet hits his head.
Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone man with Marxist sympathies, is soon captured by the police and taken into custody.
On November 24 while in custody and being led through the basement of the police station, Oswald was approached and shot in the stomach by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner. Oswald was rushed to the same hospital where Kennedy had died only two days earlier. Oswald died later the same day he was shot by Ruby.
Ruby claimed that he shot Oswald because he had been distraught over Kennedy’s death. Others claim this was all planned in order to stop Oswald from speaking out and telling “the truth”.
In fact, G Robert Blakey, the chief counsel on the House Select Committee on Assassinations, said in later years: “The most plausible explanation for the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby was that Ruby had stalked him on behalf of organised crime, trying to reach him on at least three occasions in the 48 hours before he silenced him forever.”
Oswald himself claimed that he was the fall guy. It would seem due to his own assassination by Ruby that if he was the fall guy and had more to say over Kennedy’s death, he’d take it to the grave.
Did Oswald shoot Kennedy? And if he did, did he act alone?
It’s highly unlikely, and pinning all the blame on Oswald seems a very “convenient outcome”, to a very messy affair.
As well as movies and books, countless articles have been written on the Kennedy assassination. Numerous interviews given by those who were there, and have their own take on it.
Some of the theories are plausible, others not so. I’ve also watched documentaries on the subject, and while some are far fetched to say the least, others really do make you think. Few of them, it seems, believe that the killing of JFK was all down to loner Lee Harvey Oswald.
So, who did it? Who’s been getting the blame for decades?
It was the CIA that killed Kennedy. An inside job. Angered that Kennedy was toning down the Cold War rhetoric, they took him out.
It was the KGB. Khrushchev had recently been forced to remove nuclear weapons from Cuba. They wanted revenge, and add in the fact that Oswald used to live in Minsk and had a Russian wife.
It was the Cubans. In revenge for the numerous times the Americas had tried and failed to kill Castro.
It was the mafia. Castro had not been removed from power in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs incident, and this hugely affected the mob’s business interests on the island. Also, JFK’s brother Bobby, who was the US Attorney General at the time, was clamping down hard on organised crime. The mafia were not best pleased.
It was Lydon B Johnson, Kennedy’s vice-president. Johnson was sworn in as president near immediately after Kennedy was killed. On Air Force One later that day, after the event, Kennedy’s secretary apparently drew up a list of possible suspects for the assassination. Johnson’s name was right at the top.
If we go along with the premise that the official narrative is wrong, then what really happened? No one knows. Or, no one is telling or admitting.
I accept, that even with a double page spread, I’ve barely scratched the surface of this tragic yet fascinating episode in world history. If you’re at all interested in reading more in depth, you’ll find a plethora of stuff out there. For example…
Using his cine camera, local man Abraham Zapruder filmed live 26 seconds of Kennedy’s motorcade moving along Elm Street in Dallas. Contained in this footage was the actual moment that two bullets kit Kennedy and ended his life.
The angle of the devastating headshot led many to believe that the theory of a lone gunman was no longer credible. There simply had to be, they say, a second assassin somewhere close by.
The official Warren commission in 1964 concluded that Oswald had indeed acted alone. They also said that Ruby, who himself had connections to the mob, acted alone when he then killed Oswald.
Are you buying all this?
Oswald, a loner, a depressed man, a Marxist, an amateur, somehow managed to kill the US president all on his own? Expert shots apparently fired from different angles?
I don’t buy it. Neither do millions of Americans.
In 2017, swathes of official long-blocked files on the JFK assassination were released by the US government. They revealed that Oswald had meet with a KGB officer in Mexico two months before JFK’s death. And a memo from FBI director J Edgar Hoover said that the agency had received a telephone call warning of a threat to Oswald’s life after he had been arrested for the shooting of Kennedy.
But not all the files were released. Hundreds were kept back, in case they “harmed national security”.
This, of course, only adds fuel to the fire over who really killed JFK.
Who did kill Kennedy?
I do not know. But I do not believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. It’s all just far too convenient.
I doubt we will ever be told the truth regarding who killed JFK.
And that only begs one question.
A one-word question…
Why?
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