The 1963 assassination of President Kennedy partly deforested the planet, so much has been written and printed about it.
The Warren Commission Report itself was a thick tome, running 899 pages, with 26 volumes of supporting documents. It was followed by countless books and articles, most of them speculative.
Conspiracy theories ran the gamut from Castro orchestrating JFK’s murder (he denied it during an interview with journalist Barbara Walters) to it being a CIA operation or Mafia hit. There also have been claims that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn’t the only shooter, or the actual shooter. None of these theories have been substantiated.
The official version is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot Kennedy from a sixth-floor window in the Texas School Book Depository building in Dallas. Oswald was killed in a police station two days later by Jack Ruby, a reputed small-time Dallas gangster who died in prison from ill health a few years later.
Amateur sleuths on conspiracy theory trails tried to establish links between Oswald and Ruby, but the 12,879 previously unseen documents released on Thursday, December 15, 2022, include a CIA memo stating, “the Central Intelligence Agency has no indication that Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald ever knew each other, were associated, or might have been connected in any manner.” (See story here.) The CIA was involved in the investigation partly because Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union and was a Castro sympathizer.
A few redactions in documents from the very extensive JFK assassination archive remain under review, and are slated for release by June 30, 2023, but aren’t expected to change any significant historical findings.
I was in high school when Kennedy was murdered. The principal announced his death over the school P.A. system, classes came to a halt, and several girls started crying. One by one, church bells began ringing all over town, until there was a cacophony of bells. Two days later, I saw Ruby shoot Oswald on live TV (in what people today call “real time”).
Kennedy, a Democrat, wasn’t universally popular, but his vibrant youthfulness and young family captivated the country. The press concealed his health problems and many affairs. He is chiefly remembered today for the Cuban Missile Crisis, but people debated whether he would have kept the U.S. out of Vietnam, and many believed the Vietnam War wouldn’t have happened if he had lived.
In any event, the Kennedy assassination was a turning point in American history. Public mood shifted from optimism to frustration as the Kennedy era, with its promise of economic revitalization and space travel, gave way to the grinding war in Vietnam, Nixon’s deceptions and the Watergate scandal, and the Carter years that brought the Iran hostage crisis, Arab oil embargoes, and 1970s inflation. After Kennedy died, it would be many years before Americans felt good again.
Reality, of course, is more shaded than any mood of the times. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, was despised by America’s youth because of Vietnam, but he orchestrated passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and a large expansion of the social safety net that included Medicare and anti-poverty programs. But any euphoria from those gains were quickly submerged under the 1968 assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, an expansion of the Vietnam War under Nixon, and the scandals that forced him and his vice president from office.
Nixon initiated the “southern strategy” that brought southern racists into the Republican Party. He also made extensive use of “dirty tricks,” and engaged in illegal surveillance of critics and political opponents, setting the stage for the GOP lawlessness of our time. For people who lived through those times, and remember them, it’s tempting to trace the deterioration in U.S. politics back to the day that Kennedy was shot.
I personally have no doubt that Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy. Whatever else Oswald was, he was history-changing.
Return to The-Ave.US Home Page