On January 22, 1999, I spent six hours walking every inch of Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, for as long as I could remember, I obsessively absorbed all the information I could get my hands on about the assassination of the 35th President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
I toured the 6th Floor Museum located in the former School Book Depository Building, as well as a ride in a replica of the Presidential Limousine through the crowded streets of Dallas. Complete with animated narration and synchronized gunshot sound effects blasting over an onboard speaker system while traveling down Elm Street, and passing the infamous Grassy-Knoll. A bit morbid I admit, but it was educational just the same. I was really amazed to see how close everything was there in the plaza, especially where several witnesses had their views along Elm Street.
I thought of Mary Moorman, armed with her Polaroid camera as I stood where she and her friend Jean Hill stood that day on the inside of Elm St. looking directly at President Kennedy with the Grassy-Knoll in the background. Her photo supposedly shows a blurry “Badge Man” standing in the bushes of the Grassy-Knoll. It’s hard to say if it is real or not, but it is interesting if, in fact, it is an actual muzzle blast puffing from the picture. I stood where Bill Newman stood with his wife and small children as the shots rang out. I could picture him forcing his family to hit the turf as total chaos unfolded around them. I stood where Orville Nix recorded his film from the grass near Main Street. And of course, I perched myself on the concrete structure where Abraham Zapruder documented history with his 8 mm Bell & Howell movie camera.
There is no question in my mind that anyone trained in firearms could have assassinated President Kennedy that day. The question is the cover-up. Too many people had to remain silent or be silenced for that matter, for the mystery to continue to this day. I believe Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson was involved; it was well known that he hated his “Harvard Boy” boss. He and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover shared a mutual disdain for Bobby Kennedy. CIA Director Allen Dulles was fired by Kennedy over the “Bay of Pigs” incident. The CIA was its own autonomous entity back then that would never stand for a presidential insurrection of that magnitude. John Kennedy was known to have extra-marital affairs with “ladies” supplied in part by underworld boss Sam Giancana. Yet Attorney General Robert Kennedy continued ferociously to curtail all mob activity. The Industrial Military Complex wanted a war in Vietnam, but Kennedy was reluctant to send further troops and escalate the United States into a war in South-East Asia. Reportedly, LBJ told the Joint Chiefs of Staff in December of 1963: “…Just let me get elected, and then you can have your war…” Was everyone going to wait until 1968 when Kennedy would be term-limited out or was Kennedy an obstacle that needed to go away? LBJ certainly had the motive to remove President Kennedy, as well as all the other groups I mentioned. A note of interest was an Executive Order President Kennedy signed in the summer of 1963 that was basically putting the nails in the coffin of the Federal Reserve. Forty-Seven years after the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Federal Reserve is alive and well.
So in conclusion, do I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? No, I don’t, he could have pulled the trigger but there were far too many people that wanted President Kennedy dead, and too many people within our government that had to sell the lone radical communist sympathizer theory to make it even somewhat palatable to the average, trusting American. The Warren Commission was put into place to comfort a grieving nation. Their mission was not to search for the truth, they actually defined the truth. The Single Bullet Theory holds about as much water as a bucket with no bottom. Wasn’t there a conflict of interest to have former (and disgraced I might add) CIA Director Allen Dulles sitting on a Commission that could potentially uncover any possible smoking guns leading to the CIA or any other government entity? Too many conflicts of information make it impossible to ever resolve this mystery or dissipate the cloud that surrounds it. The waters were deliberately stirred and muddied from John Kennedy’s last breath that November day, that they remain just as murky today.
In his Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961, President Kennedy said: “… the energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world…” How ironic to have his light that briefly flickered so brightly, snuffed out in an instant by the evil cross-hairs of war.
