John F. Kennedy was often regarded as one of the best U.S. Presidents ever for how he handled the Cuban Missile Crisis and other issues of the early 60s. He tragically never got to finish his first term as he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested the same day for the shooting of Kennedy as well as the shooting of a Dallas police officer. Conspiracy theories about the Kennedy Assassination began as the Warren Commission, a government group assigned to investigate the shooting, determined that there had been one gunman (Oswald) who acted alone.Theory 1: The Soviet Union and/or Cuba
Oswald had an interesting and rather suspicious past. He was a member of the Marines and known for being a skilled shooter but was discharged from the corps after 3 years. He then moved to the Soviet Union and failed at his attempt to gain citizenship but stayed in the country for 2 years. He then moved back to Texas. In September 1963 Oswald traveled to Mexico City where he allegedly tried to get a visa to Cuba and permission to move back to the Soviet Union. Many believe that Cuba would want Kennedy dead as retaliation for the CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. Oswald's trip supports this theory but Castro denied that he had any involvement, stating that the act would have too much of a risk of U.S. retaliation to make sense.
Theory 2: The Grassy Knoll
The Zapruder film of the assassination was not widely viewable until 1975. The footage showed the President's head moving backward, which was counterintuitive to the investigation that found that the shots were fired from a building behind the president. This seemed to support the conspiracy theory that there was another shooter on the grassy knoll in front of the car who had never been caught. A physics investigation in 2018 used the film and a model of the bullet trajectory to disprove this theory and concluded that Kennedy had been hit from the back.
Theory 3: A Group Act?
The Kennedy Assassination was made even more confusing when Oswald was killed 2 days later at point-blank range by Jack Ruby as he was being moved by police. The general explanation was that Oswald was the most hated man in America and someone would try to retaliate. However, some suspected that Ruby was involved in the plot with Oswald and killed him to interfere with the investigation. Ruby died due to cancer complications in 1967.
Theory 4: The Warren Commission
The Warren Commission was assembled by Johnson. After a yearlong investigation, the commission decided that Oswald had been the lone gunman and had acted alone. However, this didn't stop the theories. In the 1970s, a house committee concluded that there was a "high probability" that a second gunman had also fired at Kennedy. Both conclusions continue to be debated to this day, assisted by the fact that the public cannot view the Kennedy autopsy report.
Sources:
https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/jfk-assassination
https://www.britannica.com/event/assassination-of-John-F-Kennedy/Conspiracy-theories
https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/john-f-kennedy
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lee-Harvey-Oswald
https://www.history.com/news/jfk-assassination-grassy-knoll-theory-debunked
https://www.history.com/topics/1960s/warren-commission
After reading all these conspiracy theories, I found it surprising that there are still so many details unknown and disputed by experts about Kennedy’s assassination. After reading a portion of Vincent Bugliosi’s book Reclaiming History, which goes into extreme detail of the assassination, I found out that one reason why there are so many opposing viewpoints on where the bullets were shot from was that Kennedy had an incomplete and inaccurate autopsy. The few pathologists that had access to Kennedy’s body didn’t dissect the back and the neck, which would’ve determined the angles of the bullet tracks and aided in determining the source of the gunfire. However, the decision to not complete all autopsy protocols (which included dissections) was partially influenced by the Kennedy family’s wishes, as they didn’t want anything too invasive and wanted to ensure their privacy. Regardless of the autopsy results and conspiracy theories, Frame 313 of the 486-frame Zapruder film captured the moment the nation was shocked politically and culturally.
ReplyDeleteBugliosi, Vincent. Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (The book is about 1500 pages long, but Bugliosi provides lots of context, goes into extreme detail analyzing the frames of the Zapruder film, and debunks the most common conspiracy theories. I would definitely recommend reading some of the sections if you're interested in the details of Kennedy's assassination)
I think that all of the theories that you stated were really interesting. I never knew that there were so many theories surrounding Kennedy's death. I thought that the third theory, Group Act, was especially interesting as it involved actually another person that would have been involved in the killing of Kennedy. It is interesting how there are still so many other theories like the "military industrial complex" did it, "the mob" did it, and "the CIA" did it. Overall though these theories can never be truly solved.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cnn.com/2018/03/21/us/jfk-assassination-conspiracy-theories-debunked/index.html
Before reading this article I knew of some of the conspiracy theories surrounding President Kennedy's Death and thought that people had just accepted the fact that Oswald had acted alone in this murder. This blog post shows otherwise, and I thought that it was written wonderfully and illustrates many of the theories that people believed. I learned that initially Americans believed in the many conspiracies. At first, only 29% of Americans believed that Oswald had acted alone, 52% believed in conspiracies.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.history.com/news/why-the-public-stopped-believing-the-government-about-jfks-murder