The John F. Kennedy Assassination - my perspective 50 years later

                It was the voice of Walter Cronkite that came crackling over the school loudspeakers sometime after 2 PM that day to announce that the President of the United States was dead. I was in 6^th grade math at Ontario Junior High School in Ontario, Ohio. On hearing the news report, our teacher burst out crying and ran out of the room. The rest of us began whispering to each other trying to make sense of what we’d just heard, but for most of us, it had no immediate impact. Two days later, my family had the TV on after coming home from a church service and we saw Lee Oswald get shot live on TV. The events completely baffled me. I couldn’t understand why someone would want to kill the president. Then, who would try to kill his alleged assassin right in front of a room full of policemen? Surely our government officials would get to the bottom of this and give us the truth.

           Yes, there were anomalies, like J. Edgar Hoover immediately claiming Oswald did it alone, before any investigation had been undertaken. (How did he know?) Yes, there were the Parkland doctors and nurses who said the president’s massive wound was on the back of his head, not on the side or front. (Apparently these trained medical experts were ALL wrong and only the Bethesda autopsy team, under the ‘guidance’ of a cabal of high-ranking military officers jamming the autopsy room and overseeing things, got it right.) Yes, the FBI and Secret Service said that all three shots hit their mark, yet they didn't account for the bullet that struck the curb across Dealey Plaza and slightly injured bystander James Tague who was near the triple underpass. (To this day, they still maintain that all three shots hit their mark and none missed.) And yes, there was the CBS report in the summer of 1964 that stated none of the expert riflemen they’d assembled could duplicate Oswald’s shooting, even when allowed all the time they needed for the first shot. (Cronkite claimed even if others couldn’t do it, obviously Mr. Oswald could.) I refused to believe our government would lie to us and mislead us, so I was sure they had solved the murder with the final report from the Warren Commission in September 1964. Its premise was: Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy, and he in turn was gunned down by Jack Ruby who, wonder of wonders on this weekend of wonders, just happened to time it perfectly, was armed, and in the right place in the crowd assembled in the basement of the Dallas Police building just as Oswald was being transferred to the county jail. The government let everyone know that any other scenario was conjured up by sensationalists, kooks, and people with an ax to grind, and their information was just utter nonsense. I had no reason to doubt it. I never even thought the immediate benefactor of the assassination, Lyndon Johnson, could be party to something so heinous. But in my defense, I didn't see the picture below until years later. 

         Johnson turns and winks at Albert Thomas immediately after taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One. Does either man look unhappy with the turn of events?

             It wasn’t until 1988 while working at a radio station in Raleigh, NC that I met someone who told me a completely different version of the assassination and its aftermath. At first, I thought they were crazy…no government could be that underhanded, that deceptive, and that malevolent. They wouldn’t really try to hide the facts of the murder from us and pin the whole thing on an innocent man. This researcher and writer encouraged me to read the books of Harold Weisberg, Mark Lane, and Sylvia Meagher and see what I thought afterward. I already had the Warren Commission Report and had read William Manchester’s The Death of a President so I felt I had all the facts at hand I would need to disprove any of those other authors and their conspiracy theories.

            At last count, I’ve read the works of 42 authors on the Kennedy assassination that cover the entire pro and con spectrum regarding the Warren Commission Report, all 26 volumes of the Warren Commission evidence and testimonies, seen countless TV specials on various aspects of the murder, heard hours of radio interviews with many of the people involved in the event and purchased 16 different video documentaries on the assassination. Without hesitation, I can say the books of Harold Weisberg are, by far, the best on the subject. None of the Warren Commission defenders have been able to find any fault with his investigation. Many have condemned him, by employing ad hominem attacks, but none have been able to refute his conclusions. Mr. Weisberg used the same information that was available to the Warren Commission, only he didn’t have an agenda to find Oswald guilty at all costs. He let the evidence the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Dallas Police Department collected speak for itself. Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t shoot anyone on November 22, 1963, and Oswald was killed to keep his mouth shut. He was exactly what he shouted he was in the Dallas Police Department building...a patsy!

             We’ll never know just who killed John F. Kennedy, but the cover-up in the assassination is still maintained by people within the United States government so there is duplicity on the part of our government officials even to today. If you don’t believe that's possible, take a look at just this one inconsistency. These are from the official JFK Autopsy photographs and X-rays that are housed in the National Archives in Washington DC. The keepers of our national inheritance insist these are authentic:

 

Does the “stare of death” photo of Kennedy coincide with what is shown in the X-ray? How can his face, especially his right brow area and eye, hold their structure and position when the X-ray clearly shows there is no bone remaining behind them with half of the right eye socket missing? How can these possibly be of the same body? If they can botch this up, and they have; what else has the government botched? The Archive information and Warren Commission evidence is rife with thousands of other inconsistencies that Mr. Weisberg has ferreted out, but check into that one first and see what conclusion you reach when you read about what kind of an autopsy was carried out on JFK’s body. It was a travesty.

The incomplete autopsy sheet that was verified and signed by presidential physician Dr. George Berkley who was the only doctor that saw the body at Parkland and Bethesda.

 

            We’ve been lied to for the past 50 years, and we continue to be lied to. One would think a government that had nothing to hide in the Kennedy assassination wouldn’t have locked up various records from the FBI, Secret Service and CIA until September 14, 2038. I’ll be an old man by the time they are released, but I hope to be there when they are. I’m not holding out hope that they haven’t already gutted those files of any useful information, but I’ll be curious to see just what was so important to the government that it had to hide it away from the American people for 75 years. By then, the perpetrators of the crime will have long since died, but I’ll bet there will still be supporters of this injustice.

Announcing Kennedy's death at Parkland Hospital, Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff indicates where the fatal shot hit the president; not where it exited, but where it entered.

            My trust in our government was shattered by the way they handled the JFK assassination. They’ve earned my disgust and condemnation. They’ve earned yours too.