November 22nd, 1963 at half past twelve, while sitting in the back of a convertible limousine next to his wife during a parade in Dallas, John F. Kennedy was shot twice. The first bullet pierced his throat; the second caught a rear portion of his skull, splattering his brains onto the nearest motorcycle policeman. The motorcade had deviated from the previsioned route announced in the Dallas Morning News, so the crowd was sparse, but after a few seconds of confusion, dozens of witnesses rushed to the picket fence atop the little hill (today known as the “grassy knoll”), from which the shots were fired, to the right and front of the limousine at the time of the shots. The policeman to arrive at the fence, Joe Marshall Smith, testified that he was told to back up by a man showing him an identification of the Secret Service (the security service of the President and White House staff). It would be revealed later that there were in fact no Secret Service agents on Deley Plaza.

 

At 1 pm, President Kennedy was pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, but members of the Secret Service prevented the appointed coroner, Earl Rose, from performing the autopsy required by law. Instead, they boarded the body onto the presidential plane Air Force One for an autopsy at the Naval Bethesda Hospital in Washington – an autopsy to be performed by an inexperienced military doctor (James Hulmes), flanked by senior officers and federal agents. The autopsy report would establish that the fatal bullet had entered the back of the skull.

 

Meanwhile, Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested in a Dallas cinema and immediately broadcast on television as the sole assassin. He allegedly fired three shots in less than 6 seconds, with a 1940 military bolt-action rifle (purchased by mail order) from the sixth floor of the School Book Depository, a building that the presidential limousine had passed at the time of shooting. The next day, Oswald would take several opportunities to proclaim his innocence before the cameras: “I did not shoot anybody”, “I'm just a patsy” [ii], describing himself as a pawn, a scapegoat manipulated by the real culprits. November 24th at 11:20 am, in a corridor of the Dallas police department, he was permanently silenced by Jack Ruby, a strip-club owner and former member of the Chicago mob.

 

To allay the suspicions of conspiracy, the Vice President become President, Lyndon Johnson, designated a commission of inquiry on November 29th, spending $10 million and employing 400 people, with unofficial instructions to silence "rumors" of conspiracy and confirm the conclusions of the FBI, culminating in a 16,000 page unreadable document. The Commission was officially chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren (the highest federal magistrate), but was covertly controlled by Allen Dulles, the former CIA director fired by Kennedy in 1961, a man who, at the end of his life, would jeer to journalist Willie Morris: “That little Kennedy… he thought he was a god”[iii]. En masse, the mainstream press would be satisfied with the report of the Warren Commission. None of Kennedy’s friends in the press would denounce the story as a sham ─ not even Benjamin Bradlee, the executive director of the Washington Post, which qualified the report as a “masterpiece of its kind”[iv] (Bradlee would publish his Conversations with Kennedy in 1975).

 

A year later, voters confirmed their confidence in Johnson. America had mourned the young charismatic president who had embodied the nation’s highest ideals and dreamed of ending the Cold War while encouraging the world towards nuclear disarmament. John F. Kennedy would slide nicely into the celebrated cast of America’s most glamorous iconography, alongside Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood’s famous sex symbol.

 

Many have known since the first day that a terrible truth was hidden from them, but the statewide trauma, the diffused feeling of a serious threat to the nation, and the scarcity of dissenting voices in the press, left tongues tied. The testimonies that contradicted the official theory were ignored or suppressed by threat or by violence. The twenty-one members of the hospital staff in Dallas who found two bullet-wounds on the front of Kennedy's body eventually chose to keep quiet. Two doctors, Malcolm Perry and Kemp Clark, who presented these findings in a press conference at the hospital at 3:15, retracted before the Warren Commission. So did Dr. Charles Crenshaw, who would divulge in 1992: "From the damage I saw, there was no doubt in my mind that the bullet had entered his head through the front” – an account negating the Oswald theory, who was behind the president at the time of the shooting. The doctor explains his silence of nearly thirty years in his book JFK: Conspiracy of Silence: “I was as afraid of the men in suits as I was of the men who had assassinated the President. [...] I reasoned that anyone who would go so far as to eliminate the President of the United States would surely not hesitate to kill a doctor”[v]. At the military hospital in Washington control was even more complete, as was explained by the doctor Lieutenant-Colonel Pierre Finck in 1969: “There were Admirals, and when to you are a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Army you just follow orders”. The medical-aid James Jenkins, who was also present, confirmed: “We were all military, we could be controlled. And if we weren’t controlled, we could be punished and that kept us away from the public” [vi].

 

Most of Kennedy’s friends and relatives also silenced their doubts, even those whom he mockingly called his “Irish mafia” – “The presidency is not a good place to make new friends. I’m going to keep my old friends”, he had once said[viii]. Kenny O’Donnell, who was in the limo directly behind Kennedy, was sure that at least “two shots” were fired “from behind the fence” on the grassy knoll. But he explained (to Tip O’Neill, who reported the conversation in his memoirs, Man of the House, 1987): “I told the FBI what I had heard, but they said it couldn’t have happened that way and that I must have been imagining things. So I testified the way they wanted me to. I just didn’t want to stir up any more pain and trouble for the family”.[ix]

 

Truth, it seems, never dies altogether. Tirelessly over fifty years, a small band of intrepid researchers carried the investigation. Some have dedicated their lives ─ some lost ─ in their search for the truth, gathering a considerable amount of evidence and relevant testimony. Among the investigators of the first critical hour was a young lawyer named Mark Lane: less than one month after the murder, having formed a Citizens Committee of Inquiry to interview eyewitnesses of the crime, Lane challenged the official theory in an article in The Guardian, and later in a book, Rush to Judgment. Earl Warren remembers him: “we had very, very little trouble of any kind, except from one fellow by the name of Mark Lane. And he was the only one that treated the commission with contempt”.[x] Attacks on the government story became more threatening in 1967, when an investigation opened by the New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison lifted a corner of the veil cast over the CIA’s involvement. Garrison was privileged to see Abraham Zapruder’s amateur film confiscated by the FBI on the day of the assassination, whose images show that the fatal shot came from the grassy knoll well in front of the President, not the School Book Depository located behind. Garrison's investigation, however, suffered a smear campaign and the mysterious deaths of his two main suspects and witnesses, Guy Banister and David Ferrie.

 

In 1968, Robert Kennedy, who under his brother’s government held the position of Attorney General, presented his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. Those who mourned John Kennedy found hope in the prospect of seeing Bobby repossess the White House and, from there, reopen the investigation. Although he kept quiet on the subject, his close friends knew that this was his intention. On a campus in March 1968, Bobby announced, “The archive will be available at the appropriate time”.[xi]

 

Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June 6, 1968 in Los Angeles, just after winning the California primaries that made him the favorite for the Democratic nomination. Republican candidate Richard Nixon, who had been beaten by John Kennedy in 1960, would become President without having to face another Kennedy.

 

In the 70s, the Watergate scandal precipitated the formation of a Senate committee called to investigate the illegal activities of the CIA, The Church Committee, and another on the assassination of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Due to legal obstacles, various pressures, and a new wave of deaths among the key witnesses, the reports of these congressional committees resulted only in timid questioning: at least, the HSCA formally established that Oswald was not the only shooter, that there was, therefore, a “probable conspiracy” that the Warren Commission “failed to pursue”, and that the CIA “was deficient in sharing information”. [xii] In 1975, the Zapruder film was broadcast on ABC. In 1991 the Garrison investigation again shook public opinion thanks to Oliver Stone’s hit movie JFK, starring Kevin Costner. The ensuing controversy led to the adoption of President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act intended to declassify the secret archives, and the formation of the U.S. Assassination Records Review Board, which conducted an investigation until 1998, summoning witnesses under oath who had not yet been interviewed. During this time, books, articles and websites continued to chip away at the edifice of established truth. Today, a majority of Americans believe in a State cover-up, despite the ridicule hurled at such “conspiracy theories” by the mainstream media.[xiii] Despite rather paltry efforts to sustain the government’s “lone nut” theory, the truth is available to those who seek.

 

 

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[i] David Talbot, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 242.

 

[ii] As seen in the documentary film JFK: 3 Shots That Changed America produced by The History Channel, 2009.

 

[iii] Willie Morris, New York Days, Little, Brown & Co, 1998, p. 35-6.

 

[iv] Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p. 390.

 

[v] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, Touchsone, 2008, p. 306-9.

 

[vi] Ibid., p. 311, 313.

 

[vii] Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p. 262-3.

 

[viii] Ted Sorensen, Kennedy (1965), Harper Perennial, 2009, p. 36.

 

[ix] Peter Janney, Mary’s Mosaic: the CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p. 239.

 

[x] Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p.258.

 

[xi] Talbot, Brothers, op. cit., p. 358.

 

[xii] Full text on National Archives : www.archives.gov/

 

[xiii] “A 2003 ABC News poll found that 70% of Americans believe Kennedy’s death was the result of a broader plot” (www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1860871_1860876_1861003,00.html).