Kennedy’s assassination —fifty years and still the questions

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In 1979, however, a House Select Committee on Assassination” took up the question of who killed Kennedy once again, agreeing with the Warren Commission that Oswald acted alone, but that the commission’s report and the action of the FBI in investigating the murder were “seriously flawed.” The House committee concluded that at least four shots were fired and that there was a “high probability” that two gunmen fired at the president that day. “The Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the president.”

Those who favor the conspiracy theory and a governmental cover-up argue that there was witness tampering, intimidation and foul play involved in the investigation, that many witnesses to the event suffered strange deaths, that Kennedy’s body was altered before the autopsy, that it was impossible for the murder weapon to have fired the “pristine bullet” that reportedly killed Kennedy and then injured the Texas Governor who was riding in a jump seat in front of him.

There is the Grassy Knoll and the three “tramps” who were arrested there and then disappeared into history.

In 1996, author William Manchester wrote the seminal book on the assassination, “The Death of a President.” It brought together all the reports and conspiracy theories.

Even today, however, authors continue to churn out works about the Kennedy assassination, some factual, others fanciful. All of them are entertaining in their own way.

The History Channel also continues to churn out documentaries about the subject, keeping it alive in ways that books cannot any longer do, studying the shooting and using computer generated reproductions to show how the shooting might have really happened.

In 2003, a Gallup poll indicated that 20 percent of Americans believed that Vice President Lyndon Johnson had a hand in the murder.

Having lived through it, what do I believe?

First of all, three people can’t keep a secret, let alone hundreds. If there had been a wide-ranging conspiracy in 1963, we would have heard about it by now.

I do think, however, that Oswald was a dupe for the Cubans, the CIA and the mob.

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