I heard the news during freshman math class shortly after 8:30 a.m. on the morning of Nov. 22, 1963. My classmates and I at St. Louis High School in far off Honolulu were at our desks when our teacher interrupted his lesson and said, "Boys, the president has just been shot," and we went on with our studies. A little while later we learned that John F. Kennedy had died, and we were all sent home for the day. Now here we are, 62 years later, and the assassination is once again back in the news:
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) is still searching for a cover-up in the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy — asserting without evidence that an allegedly previously unreleased video could reveal new details of the president’s death, despite the recent declassification of reams of government files on the killing. In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Luna said that she had just been told that NBC has a “never been seen before” video of the shooting that she would be requesting access to. The video, according to Luna, “allegedly” shows presumed gunman Lee Harvey Oswald near Kennedy’s vehicle when the assassination happened.
Oh, please. As author Gerald Posner noted on X: "The Darnell film flap is just one reminder that those who believe that JFK was killed as the result of a vast plot will always look to dismiss any evidence that runs counter to their theories." Although the Warren Commission declared after an extensive investigation that Lee Harvey Oswald, a committed Marxist and a former USMC grunt who had briefly defected to the Soviet Union and then had returned to the United States with a Soviet (and therefore KGB-vetted) bride in tow, had acted alone, their conclusion was challenged by such authors as Mark Lane in Rush to Judgment (1966) and Jim Marrs in Crossfire: the Plot That Killed Kennedy(1989), by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, and filmmaker Oliver Stone in JFK (1991). And in the 60-plus years since the event, "assassination research" has grown to include hundreds of books, thousands and tens of thousands articles and news stories, and has become an industry unto itself.
I myself dove into the JFK pool while researching my first novel, Exchange Alley (1997), published by Warner Books. I visited the pertinent sites in Dallas and New Orleans, attended an assassination-buff conclave in Dallas on the 30th anniversary of the shooting, and even met with Oleg Nechiporenko, the KGB head of station in Mexico City in 1963, who had debriefed Oswald as he tried to get a visa back to the U.S.S.R. via Cuba in September of that year. The novel was a Book-of-the-Month-Club alternate selection, a rare honor for a debut, and Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review (another rare honor):
JFK assassination buffs will enjoy bushwhacking their way through this labyrinthine debut. Young Danish cultural attache Egil Ekdahl--engaged in hawking the KGB's file on Lee Harvey Oswald to the highest bidder--turns up murdered in a particularly grisly fashion, and NYPD Detective Francis X. Byrne is given the joyless task of finding his killer... The final 100 pages of this book offer a series of explosive surprises, from the identity of Ekdahl's killer to the truth about Byrne's own heritage.
There isn't much Walsh doesn't know about the JFK assassination, and the background research for this virtuoso novel feels thorough. Weaving from the worst of the Russian prison camps to Manhattan's elite European demimonde, from Brighton Beach's vicious Russian mobs to Little Italy's complacently murderous families, Walsh orchestrates a gripping tale of the horrors that were set in motion the day a president was murdered.
The various JFK "conspiracy" theories -- the Mafia did it, the CIA did it, the Russians did it, right-wing nuts did it, the Pope and Queen Elizabeth, the Masons, and the Rosicrucians acting in concert did it -- all arise not from evidence but from wishful thinking. Oswald was too puny a figure to have brought down a President. If you freeze the Zapruder film (itself proof of a Zionist conspiracy, of course) or blow up to Godzilla-sized proportions any of the grainy black-and-white photos of the event, you can clearly see the Black Dog Man, the Umbrella Man, Badge Man, and two, three, ten shooters lurking in the bushes or on the Grassy Knoll, emerging from the sewers, and hiding under the freeway overpass.
Except you can't. But that hasn't stopped people from trying; even now, after all the files have essentially been released -- except that one memo from LBJ ordering the hit! -- jaws will continue to flap. My initial impression of the files remains: the FBI reports are neatly typed-up by Irish Catholic Fordham graduates, while the CIA memos were clearly scrawled after drunken three-martini lunches at Duke Zeibert’s, whisky splotches included. If you really want to see how appallingly bad the Agency is, check out the JFK files.
In order to refute the most recent nonsense about the murder, you need look further than the two most important books on the subject. The first, Case Closed (1993) is by Gerald Posner, and really is the last word on the subject. Calm, Posner clinically dismantles and refutes the lunacy behind the "research" and comes to the only rational determination, which is that Oswald read in the newspaper that JFK was visiting Dallas the next day and saw a map of the motorcade route, which would take the presidential limo directly in front of the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald was employed. He took his rifle to work the next day and, just as Kennedy's car slowed nearly to a stop to make the tight left turn from Houston Street onto Elm Street, he sighted in and shot the president in the back: miss, hit, kill.
Transcripts of conversations recorded secretly between Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover on the same taping system that brought down Nixon show that Johnson's primary concern was whether the Soviets had had a hand in his predecessor's demise; he was desperate for Hoover to tell him there were no Russian fingerprints on the Mannlicher-Carcano. The search for a handy culprit was on from the jump, and one of miracles of the modern media -- right up there with convincing the public that the National Socialist German Workers Party was "right-wing" -- was convincing people that a proud Marxist, Castro supporter, and defector to the USSR from New Orleans, who had only months before taken a shot at the famously right-wing general Edwin Walker, was somehow one of those good-ole-boy Texas gun nuts steeped in a culture of racist violence, who hated Kennedy for his stance on civil rights for blacks.
The antidote to this is the brilliant book by James Piereson, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism (2007). Piereson's argument is that the president's senseless murder could only be attributed to a "conspiracy so vast," but one which pointedly did not include any form of leftism or even Marxism (which even then was being embraced as a legitimate field of study on American campuses). The American center-left, says Piereson, was broken by the assassination and effectively pushed decisively into the arms of red-diaper babies' radicalism, as the campus unrest that culminated at Kent State in 1970 almost immediately demonstrated. The JFK Conspiracy theorists, it turns out, are not right-wing lunatics but left-wing nut bags.
Why did Oswald do it? The popular insistence on demanding a motive when means and opportunity are themselves sufficient explanation -- a result of watching too many cop shows and courtroom dramas -- is irrelevant. He just did. Two things can be true: that in his short life Oswald was known to the police in at least two cities, as well as the Marine Corps, the CIA, and the FBI, and at the same time he decided independently to shoot the president.
One possible conclusion: Oswald was a prefiguration of John Hinckley, Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan in order to impress his fantasy girlfriend, Jodie Foster. Oswald's marriage to Marina was troubled, they were separated, he was trying to get her attention and win back her love, and so among the things he left for her as he set out for the School Book Depository that day were his wedding ring and his own, imperfect translation of Yeletsky's aria from Tchaikovsky's opera, The Queen of Spades. It went like this.
I love you, Love you immeasurably. I cannot imagine life without you. I am ready right now to perform a heroic deed / Of unprecedented prowess for your sake. Oh, darling, confide in me!
Listen for yourself:
Cherchez la femme. The desire for a woman is one of the oldest motives for murder known to man, and as good a motive as any. Case closed.
Article tags: Anna Paulina Luna, Gerald Posner, James Piereson, JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, Michael Walsh
It's simple and all laid out in the book "Mortal Error" by Bonar Menninger. The subject of the book is Howard Donahue who participated in the CBS re-enactment of the shooting in order to prove if Oswald could have physically done it. He researched to assassination for a ballistic forensic perspective and came to some not so obvious conclusions. These same conclusions are not covered by the media and have been ignored ever since.
Bobby Kennedy was shot on orders from the Executive Committee of the Penn Central RR. Gravitational attraction of events make that likely.
I used to peddle that theory then people started to believe it!
Plus Lucky Shots do sometimes happen. Gavrilo Princip changed history.
Thanks for publishing my comment. I understand your "recoil" argument, which is convenient, to say the least. However, I will defer to the Physicist who wrote the book "Best Evidence" fifty years ago, who basically said, "I Don't Think So" very clearly.
( love reasoned replies.
When a man is moving forward in one direction, let's say North, and a shot rings out, and his brains and skull goes in the other direction, let's say South, you can sugar coat it all you want, but he was shot from the front. Sheeesh.
Apparently you haven't heard of the recoil effect. "It is therefore found that the observed motions of President Kennedy in the film are physically consistent with a high-speed projectile impact from the rear of the motorcade, these resulting from an instantaneous forward impulse force, followed by delayed rearward recoil and neuromuscular forces." https://jcet.umbc.edu/jcet-news/post/80960/
A number of doctors at Parkland said there was a huge exit wound in the back of the head. They even drew a sketch. Years later, they continued to stand firm that JFK's head which they examined in the hospital clearly showed that the shot hit in the front and exited the back. This is incontrovertible evidence. One doesn't need a theory on who was behind it to conclude that the shot came from the front.
The Zapruder film and dozens of witnesses also said the shot came from the front.
Physics says the shot came from the front.
The difficulty of operating the gun, and Oswald's poor marksmanship argue against the likelihood of his firing three shots and hitting with two in six seconds.
As for who -- LBJ certainly had serious motive -- the Kennedys hated him and wanted him off the ticket. Have you followed up on the allegation that the Kennedys had lots of press people in Texas digging up all the LBJ dirt to use against him at the time of the assassination? And LBJ had a sordid history with using violence for political gain.
As for Posner, he has been called out for repeatedly lying and mischaracterizing evidence in his book. It seems to be a pattern with him.
Not a word of this is either true or proved to be true. The Parkland doctors made a lot of mistakes under the pressure of chaos, as did the military docs who did the hurried autopsy. There is zero chance the shot came from the front. (Have you ever been to Dealey Plaza?) The shots came from behind. When I asked Nechiporenko why Oswald waited for the car to make the sharp left onto Elm instead of shooting Kennedy from the front, he said Oswald would have been clearly seen by JFK and the Secret Service, so he waited for Kennedy to become defenseless. Oswald was not a poor marksman: in the USMC there are three levels and Oswald was a Sharpshooter (the middle rung) but declined to Marksman before leaving the Corps. In any case, it was an easy shot for a Marine, especially at an essentially stationary target. As for the timing, the six seconds begin with the first shot, so he fired TWO shots, not three, within that time frame. And Gerald Posner is an honorable man and an expert in this field.
Thank you. I read Posner’s book when it came out and stopped caring about all the endless BS and mischaracterizations of reality that the conspiracy enthusiasts keep propounding. When you see how idiotic the “Magic Bullet” theory is, you realized that it’s all like that. You mischaracterize something critical (the order of shots) and then go off on flights of fancy. Unfortunately the Left, as usual, then takes their own propensity for Conspiracy Theory and uses it to distract from their own criminal enterprises now being so conspicuously revealed by the most modest basic audit of government spending by DOGE. Why it’s a giant Conspiracy Theory that we imported 20 million illegals, gave them SSNs and voter registrations and fiated in the highest level of Federal benefits for them. Everything they do is compared to the most unbelievable of the JFK conspiracy theories. Our side needs to avoid throwing critical thinking out with the filthy bathwater.
I think you’re absolutely right! Why isn’t the note to Marina better known? What’s your theory on Jack Ruby’s motive, though?
I, too, was in high school on the day JFK was shot. I also studied the assassination through the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The only thing that makes any sense is that Oswald did it. Remember that the conspiracy theories began within weeks - first from a German Socialist then an American woman who was a leftist and worked for the UN. I've forgotten their names. I think the Soviets were terrified that Johnson would think them involved and started the right-wing conspiracy stuff through these people. And, of course, Jackie and Bobby created the Camelot hoax because they couldn't accept that the killer was a silly little Marxist, as Jackie called Oswald. I've also thought the CIA encouraged Oswald to continue his foolishness, though had nothing to do with the Assassination.
I was a "lone nutter" who thought that Posner's book closed the case on Oswald. Recently, however, I watched
a video series by Mark Groubert that convinced me that not only was there a conspiracy but that Oswald had nothing to do with the assassination. What convinced me was the followng:
A motorcycle policeman and the TSB building manager saw Oswald calmly sitting in the first floor lunchroom drinking a Coke 90 seconds after the last shot was fired. To be in that location he would have had to fire. his third shot, make his way across a crowded floor to the other side of the building, hide his rifle, make his way down five flights of stairs, buy a Coke, and calmly sit down without being winded or sweating. And the stairs were not the usual zig-zag style. At each level you had to exit a door, enter the floor and enter another door to the next level. Two women on the 4th floor left about 30 seconds after the last shot and rushed down the stairs that Oswald would have used. They saw or heard no one on the stairs. Plus a womam who worked near the lunchroom said Oswald asked her for change for the Coke machine shortly before shots were fired. As to Tippett, Oswald would have had to be a world class runner to get from his rooming house to the kill site. Besides spent casings from an automatic pistol were found at the kill site. Oswald owned a revolver.
Nonsense.
Mike, what is the thinking about Jack Ruby? Why did a seemingly random lowdown nightclub owner and whoremonger care enough to kill Oswald, and how did he get access to him with a gun? That’s one thing that never made sense to me. I’d appreciate your insight.
The Carousel Club, owned by Jacob Rubenstein (Jack Ruby), was across the street from the cop shop, and Ruby -- once a slugger for Capone in Chicago -- had regular monetary dealing with the police. Ruby was deteriorating mentally and had taken it into his mind to avenge JFK for reasons known only to himself. He died insane, convinced that a second Holocaust was happening on another floor of the prison.
Zapruder film - my take on the 5-6 frames
A) first two frames show brain matter spewing forward (front of head) from exit wound
b ) third fourth and fifth frames, after the brain matter spews forward, the head then rocks back.
c) no brain matter exits from the back of the head.
I, too, was fascinated by the assassination, and after a lifetime of reading various accounts, I've come around to the Warren Commission's conclusion. There is no much chaff from the conspiracy buffs that it's clear they're concluding whatever they think will sell. Also, I'll mention LEMMiNO's excellent documentary on the events surrounding the assassination on YouTube (https://youtu.be/5u7euN1HTuU?si=tgejQl7ottSJ3338) that arranges the eyewitness accounts in a way to show how chance, not conspiracy, put Oswald on the sixth floor. The only true conspiracy is the FBI and the CIA covering up the mistakes in security that let JFK be killed.