This is the one that everyone talks about.
Possibly the closest thing that we have in American history to compare to the legend of King Arthur or Barbarossa or perhaps even to the expulsion from the garden of Eden. The story of a golden age in American history brought to a violent end by the murder of a man of legend. A pivotal point in American and even world history. People are left wondering what might have been.
A whole industry has cropped up around the assassination of President Kennedy in the last fifty years. Books, movies, TV specials, that all claim to know the absolute truth and put forward theories as diverse as they are colorful.
The undisputed facts of the case are:
1. Kennedy was shot twice in Dallas.
2., and that he died.
Beyond that, all else is seemingly up for grabs.
Suspects
It seems everyone had a reason to kill Kennedy. From Fidel Castro, to Cuban right-wing rebels, to the mob, to the CIA, to vice president Johnson, to a group of army generals and wealthy businessmen, to a witch’s curse put on the Kennedy family back in Ireland, and finally to a disgruntled young man who was a failure.
Various sets of “proof” have been put forward by authors, enthusiasts, movie directors all of which seem to solve the case. However all rely on sketchy evidence, wrong assumptions, and sometimes outright lies.
Gerald Posner tackled some of the more popular theories in his book in his tome “Case Closed” in 1995 as a direct answer to the 1991 Oliver Stone movie “JFK”
“JFK” itself concerns the theory set forth by a New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, that a cabal set out to murder the president and that Lee Harvey Oswald was put up as a patsy for the murder.
Garrison himself was known to launch cases against public officials and against corruption in New Orleans always trying to land on the front page of the local papers for the sake of his political career. He ended up prosecuting a local businessman as part of a plot to murder the President. Garrison was only able to produce unreliable witnesses and speculation. The case was decided against Garrison in less than fifteen minutes
In the end the case did have a lasting effect as it brought phrases into pop culture such as “magic bullet” and “lone gunman”. The case would also begin the trend of the general public of doubting and mistrusting the government’s explanations for anything.
Motives
The possible motivations to assassinate the president vary widely and in some cases seem contradictory.
Kennedy had partially left Cuba to Castro. Operations set in motion in the Eisenhower era such as the invasion of Cuba had been abandoned and hundreds of men were left stranded on a tropical beach to face capture and torture. A large expat Cuban community in South Florida became displeased with the president. Something that they definitely expressed in the ballot boxes for the next fifty years. But did they do more?
Castro was no big fan either. Kennedy had initiated “Operation Mongoose” to subvert Castro’s regime. Using CIA backed sabotage teams they blew up bridges, burned sugar cane crops and mined harbors. What made it personal was that Kennedy had his brother Bobby Kennedy run the operation for him. The Cuban intelligence agency (the Dirección General de Inteligencia) is a world-class agency and certainly had the resources to pull off an assassination.
Vice president Johnson himself was not a happy man. A career politician, he had become Kennedy’s running mate out of necessity. A skilled politician, he could get congressional support for any of Kennedy’s policies when necessary but he was looked down upon by most of the Kennedy family and seen as little more than an ill-mannered oaf. It seems that the only one that personally liked Johnson was president Kennedy himself.
The Kennedy clans’ plans were to have John Kennedy get his two terms and then have Bobby continue the dynasty leaving Johnson out in the cold. It would be understandable that the vice president might feel ill-used. But was he capable of organizing such a thing?
The mob wasn’t too happy either. The Kennedy administration had vigorously gone after the mob in the early 60’s and had begun to damage their operations. Another theory speculates that the Kennedy campaign had reneged on campaign promises made to the mob to help him win the white house in 1960. Some have speculated that Kennedy had some particular links to the mob in Chicago and that their support in the 1960 election had put Illinois in Kennedy’s camp for the presidential election.
Other mob motives might tie back into the Cuban angle as the mob was very interested in restoring links to a lucrative per-revolution gambling arrangement in Cuba. Kennedy’s seemingly lax policy on Cuba might have seemed detrimental to their interests.
Lastly it is speculated that a simmering feud between the president’s father Joseph Kennedy and the mob existed from decades past and that this was payback.
The one group most credited is a mix of the CIA, the pentagon, and big business. It is widely speculated that Kennedy intended to withdraw from Vietnam and to restart nuclear arms talks with the soviets. The threat of seeming to be weak against communism and the curtailing of “blank check” military spending would be a threat to these parties.
The most far-fetched theory is that a curse was placed on the Kennedy clan due to an ancestor of Kennedy offending a witch in Ireland. This would take the form of various members of the clan dying violently or ruining their careers.
Lastly we are left with a young man. A man who had been a failure in most things he had done, a man who was almost totally disregarded by life but who craved attention. A man who could do only do one thing well. He could shoot a rifle.
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