The JFK assassination’s 50th anniversary is upon us, next month. We take a look back at one of the most tragic events in the history of the United States, that many believe, literally changed the course of history. But the killing of the President is also known as “the mother of all conspiracies.” With good reason.
With the opening of the movie Parkland, ahead of the commemorations that are sure to take place in November, interest in the topic has been reignited.
The 35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was shot to death on the streets of Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 by Lee Harvey Oswald. That is the official result of the investigation published on the Warren Report.
The more than murky circumstances surrounding the assassination of the beloved President, have led to many conspiracy theories through the years.
Why was he allowed to ride an open top car with many high rise buildings in the path of the motorcade?
How do you explain the bullet wounds found in the President’s body, which suggest there was more than one shooter?
Why was Lee Harvey Oswald not protected properly while changing prison facilities on the day he was shot by Jack Ruby?
These are just some of the questions surrounding JFK’s assassination.
Even though all the government investigations that were conducted at the time, including one by Kennedy’s own brother, then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, concluded that there was a lone gunman, Oswald, the conspiracy theorists haven’t stopped from drawing their own conclusions.
The theories that suggested there was a larger plot to be rid of Kennedy, started almost immediately after the news were made public and they haven’t stopped to this day.
Fueling the conspiracy angle, in 1979, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) came to the same conclusion the government did, that Oswald fired the fatal shot, but it also indicated that the Warren Report has serious holes in their investigation.
Case and point, the HSCA report determined that at least four shots were fired, making it impossible for it to be only from one sniper. There was a “high probability” that at least two shooters fired at Kennedy, according to the Committee.
In what has been called by many “the mother of all conspiracy theories”, JFK’s assassination investigation was found to have many flaws by independent researchers who cite “inconsistencies, oversights, exclusions of evidence, errors, changing stories, or changes made to witness testimony” presented in the Warren Commission, which only considered evidence provided by the FBI, in what many call an attempt to prove the “lone gunman” theory.
The government official report, the Warren Commission, states that Oswald acted alone, bringing accusations of cover-ups and plots to the forefront.
In 1998 James H. Fetzer, took issue with the “no smoking guns” official approach saying the official conclusions are physically impossible, therefore, a cover-up or conspiracy is probable.
Fetzer states that evidence provided by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) proves there are several problems with the official investigation including bullet trajectories, the murder weapon, inconsistencies between the Warren Commission’s account and the autopsy findings, inconsistencies between the autopsy findings and what was reported by witnesses at the scene of the murder, eyewitness accounts that conflict with x-rays taken of the President’s body, indications that the diagrams and photos of the President’s brain in the National Archives are not actually Kennedy’s, testimony by those who took and processed the autopsy photos that the photos were altered, created, or destroyed; indications that the Zapruder film had been tampered with, allegations that the Warren Commission’s version of events conflicts with news reports from the scene of the murder, an alleged change to the motorcade route which facilitated the assassination, an alleged lax Secret Service and local law enforcement security, and statements by people who claim that they had knowledge of, or participated in, a conspiracy to kill the President.
Through the years there have also been allegations of witness intimidation and in a book by Penn Jones Jr. which was made into the film Executive Action in 1973, there are allegations that a total of 103 people have had “convenient deaths” under suspicious circumstances.
The HSCA concluded that a “statistically improbable number of individuals with some direct or peripheral association with the Kennedy assassination died as a result of that assassination, thereby raising the specter of conspiracy.”
The conflicting reports between the Warren Commission conclusions and other independent investigation have made JFK’s assassination on of the most controversial events in history, but for the United States, it ended an era and brought on many “what ifs”.
With looming conflicts such as the Vietnam War and the Cold War in place, JFK was poised to make the United States a true superpower. Moon exploration and civil rights were front and center at the time of the death of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.
We will never know what the world might have looked like today, because JFK’s assassination happened on November 22, 1963 in the streets of Dallas, Texas.
Do you believe there was a conspiracy in the JFK assassination?